Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem (2023)

I hadn't seen any big-screen TMNT outing since the abortive Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III more than 30 years ago. The latest entry got my attention mainly when the first trailer met with very mixed reactions, presumably because it emphasized the teenage aspect at the expense of coolness. Nonetheless, reviews of the actual movie have been positive overall, and I was willing to take a chance on an alternate version for a new generation.

After rogue scientist Baxter Stockman (Giancarlo Esposito) accidentally spills mutagenic ooze into a New York sewer, four anthro-reptilian brothers spend their first 15 years enjoying human culture in secret, albeit not as stealthily as adoptive anthro-rat Splinter (Jackie Chan) would like. When they unwittingly cause aspiring high school journalist April O'Neil (Ayo Edebiri) to lose her moped to a thief, they finally use their ninja training for good and gain a human ally. She and they both want to gain popularity by foiling serial robber Superfly (Ice Cube), but that gets complicated when they discover that he and his closest minions are fellow mutants out to create more mutants. Can the turtles hope to take them on? Do they even want to fight their likeliest comrades to protect humans, some of whom, under a shady project leader (Maya Rudolph), have nasty plans for the turtles?

Friday (1995)

Another movie starring a rapper already. It is the source of several memes and quotes I've known -- more than I realized, in fact. "Bye, Felicia" may be the most overrated line ever, but I still hoped to get something worthwhile out of the viewing.

In South Central L.A., Craig (Ice Cube) has just been fired, supposedly for an offense he didn't commit. Before he starts looking for work, his buddy Smokey (Chris Tucker) encourages him to relax for a day, partly with weed. This is a mistake, not least because Smokey, an ostensible dealer, has been using up his merchandise, and supplier Big Worm (Faizon Love) threatens to kill them both if he doesn't get $200 compensation in a matter of hours.

21 Jump Street (2012)

This stops streaming on Netflix today, hence my prioritization. All I knew going in was that it's a buddy cop action comedy based loosely on a same-name TV series -- a dramatic one, oddly enough. That didn't work well for Dragnet, but the movie and show of 21JS have the same moderately high IMDb rating. Hey, the central premise does sound ripe for laughs.

In an unspecified modern U.S. city, wimpy geek Morton Schmidt (Jonah Hill) and book-dumb jock Greg Jenko (Channing Tatum) become unlikely friends as twenty-something cops. After an abortive drug bust, they are assigned to the titular address, where Captain Dickson (Ice Cube) orders them to pose as high school students to trace the source of a dangerous new drug among the students. Since the duo don't study enough in advance, they accidentally swap aliases, so Schmidt takes an acting class and runs track while Jenko has to learn AP chemistry. This works out better than you'd think, but they have trouble coordinating with each other, and Dickson is losing what little patience he had with them.