Am I Racist? (2024)

I have not seen Matt Walsh's first documentary, What Is a Woman?, partly because it requires a Daily Wire subscription and partly because I feel like I know enough from ads. Possibly everyone's opinion of it depends entirely on whether they already agreed with him on the issue. Meanwhile, his second doc, AIR?, is doing quite well at the box office for a non-Hollywood effort and has high marks on both IMDb and Rotten Tomatoes, tho pro critics were slow to begin reviewing it. Since at least one theater stopped running it due to backlash, I decided not to wait long.

This time, Walsh acts like a cross between Michael Moore and Sacha Baron Cohen, only conservative. He goes on an "antiracist journey" that includes reading bestselling books on the subject, getting an online DEI certificate, meeting with self-styled experts as well as regular folk off the street, and eventually giving his own course that purports to make white people less racist -- until he "realizes" that such efforts appear to help nothing but the teachers' finances.

Marcel the Shell with Shoes On (2021)

I liked the three short Marcel web videos from the early 2010s, but the announcement of this movie caught me by surprise. The shorts mostly consisted of monologues with almost no plot and rarely a second character on screen. How could the makers fill 90 minutes? When I saw that the answer was streaming on Netflix, I immediately opted to find out.

Marcel (Jenny Slate) is a walnut-sized seashell with one eye, a mouth, two stubby legs, humanlike language capacity, and a childlike demeanor. He's been living with grandmother Connie (Isabella Rossellini) at an Airbnb, unnoticed by humans until amateur documentarian Dean Fleischer Camp (as himself, more or less) moves in, discovers him, and persuades him to star in the aforementioned YouTube series. After gaining a fandom, Marcel hopes anew to find the rest of his large family, who were accidentally packed up when prior tenant Mark (Thomas Mann) left in a hurry. Imagine his dismay to learn how large the world is and how unhelpful most fans are.

Surf's Up (2007)

I wasn't sure I would ever get around to watching this. It was clearly riding the wave of success from March of the Penguins and especially Happy Feet, and the ad I saw didn't suggest much of a plot. But now SU actually has slightly higher IMDb and Rotten Tomatoes ratings than HF. Besides, I wanted something short from my Netflix list, and this runs 85 minutes.

Teen penguin Cody (Shia Laboeuf) has been the only surfer in an otherwise busy, disapproving Antarctic community when he gets the chance to enter Pen-Gu Island's 10th annual contest in memory of his idol. He soon finds himself in a practice face-off with longtime champion Tank (Diedrich Bader), the sports flick's requisite jerk. The resulting wipeout leaves Cody in critical condition, and Lani (Zooey Deschanel), the lifeguard on whom he has an instant crush, desperately takes him to a hideaway in the island's rainforest, where her washed-up, largely apathetic uncle (Jeff Bridges), who goes by "Geek," can look after him. Once Cody's on his feet, he and Geek have a lot to teach each other in the three days before the contest, which includes a region of deadly rocks.

What We Do in the Shadows (2014)

I wasn't sure I could still enjoy mockumentaries, as the last one I did was A Mighty Wind in 2003. Sacha Baron Cohen struck me as largely tasteless, and shows like The Office and Parks and Recreation turned me off in no time -- something about the combination of social awkwardness and shaky cameras, I guess. Was it them, or had I changed? Regardless, a focus on vampires promised something different.

Netflix describes the theme as three vampire housemates, but for most of the movie, four or five share the house. These five are all men who somehow wound up in Wellington, New Zealand. Don't ask me why they agreed to be filmed when they otherwise try to keep their vampirism a secret. By agreement, the cameramen carry crosses just in case, but vampires aren't the only supernatural danger to turn up....