Review – Da 5 Bloods (2020)

by Armando Vanegas

Contemplative and uncompromising, Spike Lee’s latest movie, Da 5 Bloods, offers a look at four black Vietnam vets and long time friends who return to Vietnam to retrieve both the U.S. gold they hid during a mission and the body of a fellow fallen soldier, Stormin’ Norman. Things get complicated when one of the vets, played by Delroy Lindo, goes his own way and manages to complicate things for the crew. It also doesn’t help that his son, played by Jonathan Majors, has shown up to get a share of the gold.

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Review – Patriot Season 1 & 2

by Armando Vanegas

Amazon has a streaming service called Prime Video or Amazon Prime Video or Amazon Prime or whatever they’re calling it now. I don’t know if you know that. How else would you know that? Unless you read your monthly bank statement that says they took money from you if you ever bought a subscription to them. On the one hand, Amazon is wonderful for purchasing products of all kinds. On the other, they really gotta do some work in promoting their streaming service because it has some great content. It was just blind luck that I came across Patriot, a brilliantly surreal and hilarious spy comedy from Steven Conrad, the writer of the Will Smith drama The Pursuit of Happyness (probably the furthest removed from his style), the similarly surreal Nicolas Cage dramedy The Weather Man, and the just as surreal John C. Reilly/Seann William Scott buddy dramedy, The Promotion. Even though I liked those aforementioned movies, I didn’t know what to expect as the trailer didn’t exactly grab me. Neither did the trailers for their other shows. I just wanted to try some Amazon programming and this was the one that seemed relatively interesting to me. What the show accomplishes by the end should make it a must see for people wanting something weirder and more out there in their TV choices.

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