Wanderings and … wonderings.

Pip: Welcome to Wanderings and … wonderings. — where the watch history is eclectic and the verdicts are not gentle.

Mara: Ben Gould has been revisiting some films that range from star-powered spectacles to stylized provocations to outright prestige disasters. Today we're covering all of that territory.

Pip: Let's start with the movies that exist mainly to remind you how famous their stars are.

Overblown Star Vehicles

Mara: The question here is simple: what happens when a film's entire reason for existing is its cast's celebrity?

Pip: The review of Mr. and Mrs. Smith doesn't leave much room for interpretation — "its purpose is to show the audience how successful and beautiful the two leads are."

Mara: Which means the film has nothing else going on. No story worth following, no reason to keep watching beyond the faces on screen.

Pip: Junior gets the same treatment — described as one of the flattest movies around, with a pregnancy premise that apparently never locates a single actual joke. Arnie carrying a child: funnier in the poster than in the runtime.

Mara: And that's the pattern — spectacle over substance, star power filling the space where a film should be. Which leads us somewhere even louder.

Stylized Chaos And Excess

Pip: Natural Born Killers is a film that wants to condemn media violence — and the review calls it out for doing the opposite.

Mara: Directly: it "appears to aim to be a condemnation of mass media and its obsession with lurid violence, yet luxuriates in the mayhem committed by our murderous couple."

Pip: So the critique eats itself. The style is the problem it's pretending to diagnose.

Mara: It's placed among Oliver Stone's worst — though not quite at the bottom, which Alexander apparently still occupies. The excess here isn't thrilling; it's just noise. And noise, it turns out, can also wear a prestige budget.

Scathing Takes On Prestige Flops

Pip: The Bonfire of the Vanities is a film with a famous source, a famous director, and a famous cast — and the review's verdict is that none of that saved it.

Mara: The line that lands hardest: "I thought Brian De Palma was meant to engulf daft, badly scripted projects with his patented style; whatever happened, the movie is that of visual neglect, as anonymous as the work of the next hack."

Pip: That's a significant charge. De Palma's whole reputation rests on style overwhelming material — and here the style apparently didn't show up either.

Mara: The review asks whether it was satire, whether it was meant to be funny, whether there was any underlying point at all. It finds no answers. Tom Hanks is specifically named as awful. The final word is simply "Rubbish."

Pip: There's something almost impressive about a film that fails to be anything — not even coherently bad. Just absent.

Mara: It's the prestige flop in its purest form: the reputation, the budget, the talent on paper, and then nothing on screen that justifies any of it.

Pip: Bad movies, it turns out, fail in remarkably consistent ways — vanity, incoherence, or just not turning up.

Mara: More films, more verdicts. We'll be back with whatever's next on the watchlist.

It’s not funny, not clever, and has but one reason to exist, and that is Steve Stifler in a mullet.

Shite.

Bye for now.

Pip: Welcome to Wanderings and … wonderings. — where one person’s film opinions arrive with the confidence of a final verdict and the brevity of a Post-it note.

Mara: Ben Gould has been watching, and he has thoughts — on a casino sleazeball who owns every scene he touches, a poker film that apparently tests the limits of human endurance, and a long-delayed comedy sequel coasting on goodwill. Let’s start with the gambling and crime films.

Lester Diamond, Rounders, and the Luck of the Draw

Pip: The question here is what makes a crime film actually work — and whether it’s the world, the story, or just one memorably repellent human being on screen for ten minutes.

Mara: The post on Lester Diamond makes the case plainly: “James Woods is a treat and we should be grateful to him.”

Pip: That’s the whole argument, really. A supporting character with a fraction of the screen time walks away with the film’s most lasting impression. The pimp outlasts the plot.

Mara: The post describes Woods as “effortlessly creating one of the sleaziest, slimiest characters ever put on celluloid” — a mere ten minutes that apparently cements an acting legacy. That’s a strong claim, but the writing doesn’t hedge it.

Pip: Ten minutes of screen time, a lifetime of residual disgust. Some actors just know how to leave a stain.

Mara: The Rounders post lands at the opposite end of the spectrum entirely. Where Casino delivers Lester Diamond, Rounders delivers — according to the post — repetition, a tedious voice-over, and poker somehow rendered inert.

Pip: The review calls it “a boring waste of boring time.” The word boring appears so many times it starts to feel like a formal critical methodology.

Mara: Seven times, by my count. The post also singles out Matt Damon’s performance, notes that Ed Norton’s arrival promises relief and doesn’t deliver it, and ends with the line “I hated this fucking boring slog.” No ambiguity there.

Pip: So: one film gives you James Woods chewing scenery for ten glorious minutes. The other gives you two hours of poker and a voice-over. The casino wins. Speaking of things coasting on past glory —

The Unnecessary Sequel Nobody Asked For (But Here We Are)

Pip: Happy Gilmore 2 is the kind of film that exists because enough time passed and someone said yes. The post calls it “the type of entirely unnecessary sequel you’d expect after a 30-year hiatus.”

Mara: The verdict is measured: “It’s okay for what it is — hit and miss, breezy enough for an hour but far too draining once the physical comedy reaches breaking point in its repetition.” The post also notes a John Daly cameo, which prompted genuine surprise that he is still alive.

Pip: Ten minutes of screen time, a sequel nobody needed, and a poker film that broke a man’s spirit. The range is impressive.

Mara: Same territory next time — what sticks, what doesn’t, and why it matters.

Pip: Welcome to Wanderings and … wonderings. — where the ellipsis does a lot of heavy lifting and today, so does one very specific grievance about a Martin Scorsese film.

Mara: Ben Gould takes us deep into a movie that promised everything and delivered something far more complicated — and far more frustrating. Let's start with what went wrong in 1860s New York.

Gangs of New York: A Film That Had No Business Being This Annoying

Pip: The premise here is simple: a movie with every ingredient for greatness — Scorsese, Day-Lewis, New York, crime, religion — somehow managed to squander the lot. The question is how, exactly, and why it still stings decades later.

Mara: The post opens with a confession of anticipation turned sour, and this line captures it precisely: "This is the only Scorsese film in which he appears overwhelmed by the material, which I find completely baffling as it's about New York, crime, and religion, his cinema oeuvre."

Pip: That's the sting of it — this wasn't alien territory for Scorsese. If he loses the thread here, it isn't because the subject defeated him, it's because something in the execution went genuinely sideways.

Mara: The specific complaints stack up fast. The visual style is described as "pointlessly and relentlessly weird," depicting 1860s New York as "something out of a comic book." The editing is jarring — baroque costuming, lurching pacing, a U2 song over the closing shot.

Pip: A U2 song. Over the Twin Towers. In a period film. That's not a closing statement, that's a hostage situation.

Mara: Cameron Diaz and Leonardo DiCaprio both take hits for their accents, with DiCaprio described as "evidently awed by the full-method Daniel Day-Lewis." And then — perhaps most surprisingly — Day-Lewis himself doesn't escape. His performance is called "just comedy, nothing else."

Pip: Calling Daniel Day-Lewis's work in a Scorsese film the weakest link takes a certain confidence.

Mara: The post lands on a recurring-disappointment metaphor that sums up the whole relationship with the film: "The only parallel I can think of is when you open the fridge expecting a different result from when you opened it 30 minutes prior." It closes, simply, with "Shite."

Pip: Economical. The film spent three hours; the verdict took five letters.

Mara: Strong feelings, clearly held for a long time — there's something almost affectionate in how much this film still irritates.

Pip: That's the thing about movies that almost worked. They haunt you. More wanderings next time.