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The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson

The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson

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Avg: 6.9 (8 Ratings)
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TV Show

Host Johnny Carson performs comedy routines and chats with various celebrities.

Ellen: The Ellen DeGeneres Show

Ellen: The Ellen DeGeneres Show

User: 8
Avg: 7.5 (23 Ratings)
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TV Show

A mix of celebrity interviews, musical performers, audience participation games, and segments...

     
Playing with Fire (2019)
Playing with Fire (2019)
2019 | Comedy
The movie Playing With fire starring John Cena and directed by Andy Fickman was a delight to watch.

Filled with clean family-friendly humor, and touching moments, it is a great film for the whole family to watch together.

It tells the story of a no nonsense smoke jumper named Jake Carson, and how he learns that relationships and family provide support and “keep you going” when life gets tough.

 

The cast was hilarious!

Especially Keegan Michael-Key who kept the audience laughing with his perfect timing.

John Cena shone in his role of Jake Carson.

 

While they kept the audience laughing, they also brought a lot of heartfelt moments.

One of my favorite moments was when they were planning a surprise birthday party for one of the 3 kids they were watching because they were survivors of a forest fire.
  
40x40

Heathere' (25 KP) rated Busted Jukebox Volume 2 by Shovels & Rope in Music

Mar 17, 2018 (Updated Mar 17, 2018)  
Busted Jukebox Volume 2 by Shovels & Rope
Busted Jukebox Volume 2 by Shovels & Rope
2017 | Alternative, Folk, Indie
9
7.5 (2 Ratings)
Album Rating
*Surprising choice of cover songs *They make each song unique *You might discover an artist or band you weren't aware of (0 more)
You might miss the vocals of husband and wife Michael Trent and Cary Ann Hearst but they do sing (0 more)
Shovels & Rope-Cover Songs
I don't usually like cover songs. I feel that if you are going to do a cover of someone's song, you should make it 'your own'. I love that Shovels & Rope made each track unique and had so many great singers help them out.

Tracks:
~Cleanup Hitter (feat. Brandi Carlile)
  -original artist: Bill Carson

~Joey (feat. Nicole Atkins)
  -original artist: Concrete Blonde

~Do You Love Me Now (feat. Rhett Miller)
  -original artist: The Breeders

~Blue Eyes Crying In The Rain (feat. John Moreland)
  -original artist: Willie Nelson

~Untitled 1 (feat. Matthew Logan Vasquez)
  -original artist: Sigur Rós

~The Air That I Breathe (feat. Indianola)
  -original artist: The Hollies

~I’m Your Man (feat. John Fullbright)
  -original artist: Leonard Cohen
~Death Or Glory (feat. Hayes Carll)
  -original artist: The Clash
~Epic (feat. Lera Lynn)
  -original artist: Faith No More
~You Never Can Tell
  -original artist: Chuck Berry

My favorite track is 'Blue Eyes Crying In The Rain'. I heard this song when I asked my Amazon Alexa to shuffle songs by Shovels & Rope. I put the song on repeat and purchased the album without hearing any of the other songs and I picked up Busted Jukebox Volume 1, as well. I'm a fan of Shovels & Rope and was surprised that I hadn't heard of these albums.


Blue Eyes Crying In The Rain, is a Willie Nelson song and this version, featuring John Moreland, is absolutely beautiful. My father, a Willie Nelson fan would have approved of this version. It's a song that makes it very hard to hold back the tears. If I'm being honest, I haven't been able to that, yet.


The most surprising track is Epic, a Faith No More song. It is so different from the original and I really like the different flow that Lera Lynn gave it. The song in it's cover form has given a slightly different meaning to the lyrics. The original was powerful and in your face while this version is powerful and haunting.


Other songs are originally by


I am so happy that I stumbled upon this and I can't wait to see what this amazing duo will bring us next!
  
Playing with Fire (2019)
Playing with Fire (2019)
2019 | Comedy
Seeing the trailer for this I was mildly excited, this sort of daft family humour holds a place in my heart and it looked like I was going to get another film to add to the "pick me up" watchlist. But oh my, everything about this experience rubbed me the wrong way.

Jake Carson runs a rugged group of smokejumpers that swoop into action and stop fires from taking hold. On their latest callout they find a cabin about to be engulfed by flames and trapped inside are three children in need of help.

Following the rules, Jake calls Child Protective Services, but being so remote they won't be able to get to them quickly. It's now their duty to keep the three of them safe until they arrive. Four grown men, three kids... what could possibly go wrong?

Where to start? How about that humour I was looking forward to? Or perhaps the severe lack of it. Over the whole runtime I laughed more at the end credits that I did at the whole film. Keegan-Michael Key is by far the funniest thing about the film, but it still isn't a perfect part. Key's way of sliding into scenes and just taking over was excellent, it made me smile, but when these moments started he was funny with just the right amount of over the top but the script would quite often throw him over that fine line and it became tiresome.

John Cena generally isn't bad when it comes to comedy offerings, but in Playing With Fire he's very stiff even for the by-the-books character he's playing. It felt like Jake had been made too straight-laced, he needs to make the transition from uptight to more relaxed but they could have brought it down just one step and it would have been something a lot easier to watch.

Brianna Hildebrand plays the oldest of the rescued children, Brynn. She gives a solid performance and probably has the best character overall, no frustrating quirks, nothing over the top. While she manages to make a good show of it being up against the over the top nature of everything else means it gets lost in the background.

While there might be a twist on the sort of story it doesn't feel new in any respects. I'm feeling rather let down with the whole thing but thankfully we're not short of other films that do this exact thing.

Originally posted on: https://emmaatthemovies.blogspot.com/2020/01/playing-with-fire-movie-review.html
  
Instant Family (2019)
Instant Family (2019)
2019 | Comedy, Drama
Enjoyable and harmless comedy laced with a degree of sentimentality.
The Plot
Pete (Mark Wahlberg) and Ellie (Rose Byrne) are focused and business-oriented home designers. They’ve talked about having kids “sometime in the future” but the years – as years are want to do – are motoring away from them. Pete is concerned that if they have their own kids now then he will end up being an “old dad” (cue very funny, black-comedy, flashback). This leads them into contact with the State’s fostering service – led by Karen (Octavia Spencer) and Sharon (Tig Notaro) – and they progress into foster training. This introduces into their ‘perfect adult lives’ 15-year old Lizzy (Isabela Moner) and her younger siblings Juan (Gustavo Quiroz) and Lita (Julianna Gamiz). As these guys come from a troubled background Pete and Ellie find they have their work cut out. Who will crack first?

The turns
You’ve got to admire Mark Wahlberg as an actor. In the same vein as Steve Carell, he seems to be able to flex from dramatic (in his case, tough-guy action roles) to comedy without a blink. He’s nowhere near the calibre of actor as Carell, but he brings to all his roles a sense of menace – derived no doubt from his torrid criminal background in younger days. (His wiki page makes your eyes water: there’s a great biopic screenplay waiting to be written there! ) It must have made the kid actor who plays Charlie (Carson Holmes) actually soil himself at a key point in the film!

Wahlberg and the excellent Rose Byrne make a believable driven-couple, and Byrne has such a range of expressive faces that she can’t help but make you laugh.

Of the child actors, Nickelodeon star Isabella Moner shines with genuine brilliance, both in terms of her acting as the fiercely loyal Lizzy but also in terms of her musical ability (she sings the impressive end-title song). With Hollywood in ‘post-La-La-Showman: Here we go again’ mode, this is a talented young lady I predict might be in big demand over the next few years.

Top of my list of the most stupid “where the hell have I seen her before bang-my-head-against-the-cinema-wall” moments is the actress playing Ellie’s mother Jan. She is OF COURSE Julie Hagerty, air-hostess supreme from “Airplane!”.

Also good value, and topping my list of “I know her from lots of films but don’t know her name” is Margo Martindale* as Pete’s exuberant and easily bought mother Sandy. (*Must write this out 100 times before her picture appears in the Picturehouse Harbour Lights film quiz!).

A well-crafty script with some wayward characters
The script by director Sean (“Daddy’s Home”) Anders and John Morris zips along at a fine pace, albeit in a wholly predictable direction. It helps that I struggle the think of many films about the adoption process itself. Sure there have been lots of movies about children that have been adopted – Manchester By The Sea and Lion being two recent examples – but the only film I can immediately think of (and not in a good way) with foster care at its heart was the Katherine Heigl comedy from a few years ago “Life as we know it”. So this is good movie territory to mine.

There are some fine running jokes, notably young Juan’s penchant for constantly getting injured. However, the script also lapses as did Anders’ “Daddy’s Home 2” from last year – into moments of slushy sentimentality. (My dear departed Dad always used to affect an exaggerated snore at such points, and I could hear him in my head at regular intervals during the film!). I would have preferred a harder and blacker edge to the comedy: something that last year’s excellent “Game Night” pulled off so well.

There are also a couple of characters in the film that were poorly scripted and which just didn’t work. While Octavia Spencer was fine (channelling an almost identical version of her wisecracking and sardonic character from “The Shape of Water“), I just had no idea what her colleague Sharon (Tig Notaro) was supposed to be. The tone was all over the place. Similarly, who should pop up on a balcony in an unexpected cameo but the great Joan Cusack. And very funny she is too for the 10 second interruption. But the writers having got her there just couldn’t leave alone and we get a plain embarrassing extended interruption that strikes a duff note in the flow of the film.

Summary
The film is amusing and harmless without taxing many brain cells. Most notably unlike many so-called American ‘comedies’ it did actually make me laugh at multiple points. I should also point out that my wife absolutely loved it, rating it a strong 4* going on 5*.

But the really cute thing is that…
…the film is “inspired by a true family”: namely Anders’ own. He and his wife fostered three kids out of the US foster service, so the script is undoubtedly loosely based on their own experiences, which give it an extra impact for some of Peter and Ellie’s lines. In an essay for TIME (source: bustle.com) Anders wrote:

My wife Beth and I had been talking for years about whether we should have kids,” he wrote. “For the longest time we just felt like we couldn’t afford it. Then I sold a couple of scripts and was feeling like I might have a career, but we were in our 40s and worried we had left it too long. We knew kids would make our life bigger, so one day I joked, ‘Why don’t we just adopt a five-year-old and it will be like we got started five years ago?'”

It gives you a completely different perspective on the film knowing this. My wife after the film was saying “I’m not sure how accurately it portrays the fostering process”. But it clearly does.