The 12th Annual Slip-Me-A-Mickey Awards (2025)

THE 12th ANNUAL SLIP-ME-A-MICKEY AWARDS

The Slip-Me-A-Mickey™® awards are the final award of the interminably long awards season. The Slip-Me-A-Mickey™®, or as some lovingly call them, The Mockeys™®, are a robust tribute to the absolute worst that film and entertainment has to offer for the year.

Again, the qualifying rules are simple, I just had to have seen the film for it to be eligible. This means that at one point I had an interest in the film and put the effort in to see it, which may explain why I am so angry about it being awful. So, any vitriol I may spew during this awards presentation shouldn't be taken personally by the people mentioned, it is really anger at myself for getting duped into watching.

The prizes are also pretty simple. The winners/losers receive nothing but my temporary scorn. If you are a winner/loser don't fret, because this year’s Slip-Me-A-Mickey™® loser/winner could always be next year’s Mickey™® winner!! Remember…you are only as good as your last film!!

Now…onto the awards!

WORST FILM OF THE YEAR –

Caught Stealing – I’m old enough to remember when Darren Aronofsky was the cool kid on the cinephile block…oh how the mighty have fallen. Caught Stealing is the most idiotic, moronic, and laziest film imaginable. So stupid as to be offensive. Darren Aronofsky should be banned from making any more movies after this criminally dreadful film.

Alto Knights – I’m also old enough to remember when Barry Levinson was an important filmmaker. I’m very old. Levinson’s attempt at a mob epic is a staggeringly incoherent exercise that is shocking in its ineptitude.

Jay Kelly – Director Noah Baumbach and stars George Clooney and Adam Sandler are a Murderer’s Row of putrid and pedestrian performers…and for proof of that you need look no further than the saccharine shitbag of a movie that is Jay Kelly.

After the Hunt – Luca Guadagnino is a critical darling addicted to all things queer…in After the Hunt he once again shows himself to be a philosophically trite and painfully limited filmmaker. A tremendously putrid waste of time.

Song Sung Blue – The most batshit, tone-deaf, bizarro movie experience I had in 2025. An alarmingly awful movie that features some of the cheesiest supporting turns in recent memory.

And the Slip-Me-A-Mickey award goes to…

CAUGHT STEALING: As much as all these movies suck…most of them have at least one little thing about them that is a tiny bit redeeming. For example, Alto-Knights is awful but DeNiro is ok playing dual roles (and does it considerably better than Best Actor Oscar winner Michael B. Jordan). After the Hunt is atrocious but Julia Roberts does a pretty good job in it. Song Sung Blue is so bad it is amusing. Jay Kelly is terrible but ultimately it is a harmless little George Clooney attempt (and fail) at being charming and relevant again. But Caught Stealing? Caught Stealing has absolutely nothing redeeming about it. All of it is absolutely awful…which is a great asset when it comes to this category. So..congrats Caught Stealing!!

WORST PERFORMANCE OF THE YEAR –

Michael B. Jordan – Sinners: Mr. Jordan just won a Best Actor Oscar for a performance that is so amateurish and underwhelming it would make not just Sly Stallone, but Frank Stallone, blush. Jordan plays twins but is completely incapable of differentiating between the two of them – so much so that he has to wear different color hats so that we…and he…can know which one is which. Add in Jordan’s acting style – nothing but posing and preening, and his vocal style – mush mouth akin to talking with two Snickers bars in his mouth…and you’re left with a truly terrible, two-bit performance.

Adam Sandler – Jay Kelly: Adam Sandler’s career strategy is to be awful in as many shitty movies as he can and then give the most minimal of effort in an allegedly less shitty movie and have critics slobber all over him for his dramatic abilities. Don’t be fooled. Adam Sandler sucks. He is a shitty actor….and his soft talking, “aww shucks”, acting technique in Jay Kelly is an embarrassment to anyone who has the slightest bit of knowledge about the craft of acting. Dear Adam – please go away forever. Dear Adam Sandler apologists – you will burn in hell forever.

Ayo Edebiri – After the Hunt: Ayo Edebiri is so abysmal in After the Hunt it felt like she had never acted before and was thrown before the cameras with no preparation or notice – like a Make-A-Wish kid having their dying wish to be in a movie come true. As wooden and dead-eyed a performance as you will ever see. Truly remarkable for how awful it was.

Idris Elba – A House of Dynamite: Idris Elba is great…but he was definitely not great in A House of Dynamite as the President of the U.S.A. Elba was like a fish out of water…literally. He could barely walk like a human being…and his speaking wasn’t much better either. I would be relieved if I read that Elba was strung out on heroin and LSD while he shot this movie…but unfortunately that wasn’t the case.

Anthony Ramos – A House of Dynamite: This dude starred in Hamilton on Broadway and has been so fucking terrible in every single thing he’s done since then it is actually shocking to behold. In A House of Dynamite, he puts on a masterclass in awful acting…so much so that if it were a stage play I wouldn’t throw tomatoes at him, I’d throw rocks…sharp rocks.

And the Slip-Me-A-Mickey award goes to…

AYO EDEBIRI – AFTER THE HUNT: Ms. Edebiri is a big tv star on the show The Bear…but I simply can’t bear to watch her be such a shitty actor in After the Hunt. She’s such a bad actress she should not only stay away from doing movies…she should stay away from even watching them.

Worst Scene of the Year –

JAY KELLY - A CHRISTMAS CAROL-STYLE FLASHBACKS: When the character Jay Kelly starts walking through his past and is watching his young self (played by a different actor) go through critical moments in his life, I wanted to kill myself…but not before killing Noah Baumbach who wrote this shit and George Clooney who’s terrible acting in it. An all-time embarrassing piece of cinematic detritus.

MOST OVERRATED FILM OF THE YEAR –

Sinners – Ah yes…Sinners…a second-rate vampire movie that dipshits and dopes adore but that is so amateurish it pains to even recount. This film was slathered over by every numbnuts know-nothing ignorant of cinema…it is like every online asshole’s favorite movie ever. As I so astutely observed in my review of this nothing burger – this is the type of movie that dumb people think is deep and stupid people think is smart. Critics and many “fans” loved it because they were afraid to tell the truth about its artistic mundanity out of fear of being called “racist”. Yawn.

One Battle After Another – As a “film bros” and a PT Anderson fan, it pained me to see other film bros and PTA fans get a giant boner over this middling mess of a movie. This movie was so over-hyped and underwhelming it gave me the bends. Stop with the slurping already – this ain’t no masterpiece…it is bottom-tier PTA, plain and simple. Deal with it.

Marty Supreme – I diverge from the Film Bros community when it comes to the Safdie Brothers…they love them, I can do without them. Josh Safdie wrote and directed this grating and annoying and seemingly endless film…and he did it very, very poorly. A toxic and odious odyssey of Jewish arrogance and self-loathing that goes down like a matzo ball of shit and makes you want to retch….but critics loved it! Yuck.

And the Slip-Me-A-Mickey award goes to…

SINNERS – Sinners is such a second-rate piece of moviemaking it makes my colon twinge just at the thought of rewatching it. Pedestrian and puerile through and through…it is embarrassing that this movie was both a big hit and shameful that it received more Oscar nominations than any other film in Academy Award history. It is unquestionably the most overrated film of the year.

SPECIAL ACHIEVEMENT IN CINEMATIC MALPRACTICE –

James Gunn, Spike Lee, Guillermo del Toro, Steven Soderberg: These are the Four Horsemen of the Shit-pocalypse who have taken a shit all over either their careers, their films or their audiences.

James Gunn got handed the reigns of the DC universe and promptly took a shit all over it with the truly awful Superman. The fact that we have at least a whole decade of Gunn taking shits all over the already shat upon DC universe does not fill me with any semblance of joy.

Spike Lee is such a spent creative force he did a remake of Akira Kurosawa’s masterpiece High and Low – and to show how creative Spike is he titled it Highest 2 Lowest…yawn. To top it all off Highest 2 Lowest isn’t just an embarrassment of a title, it is an embarrassment of a movie.

The great Guillermo del Toro got to make his dream film – Frankenstein…and promptly made one of his very worst movies…and absolute muddled mess. Now he will never get to make his dream project again.

And finally, Steven Soderberg had all the pieces in place to finally return to form and actually make a great and meaningful movie once again…and dropped the ball entirely. Black Bag, starring the great Cate Blanchet and Michael Fassbender, was so forgettable you forget it exists even while you’re watching it.

These four heavy hitters should be ashamed of themselves for their shoddy work on these shitty movies.

POS ALL-STARS –

BLAKE LIVELY AND JUSTIN BALDONI AND ANYONE WHO CARES OR HAS AN OPINION ABOUT BLAKE LIVELY AND JUSTIN BALDONI – I have no idea what this entire story is about, but the fact that anyone gives a shit about these two twats irritates the living shit out of me. I want Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni to be locked in a septic tank together for the rest of their lives. I want anyone who cares about the Blake Lively – Justin Baldoni story to be boiled alive in a vat of elephant excrement.

BILL MAHER – Little Bill loves to fellate all things Israel and Military/Intelligence Industrial Complex. He is such a Zio-whore and so blind to his own hypocrisy and ignorance he has devolved from being hate-watchable to simply unwatchable. On the bright side…he has never been less relevant!!

JAKE PAUL/LOGAN PAUL – I don’t give two shits about who or what these two shitsticks are. I just want them to go away. If you want to be some asshole influencer who makes a trillion dollars off of dumbass Youtube viewers…go ahead. But once you cross over into my life…and things I am interested in…like boxing…then we have a problem. I’m glad Jake Paul got his jaw broken in two places by Anthony Joshua…I only wish I was the one doing the jaw-breaking. Fingers crossed someone cracks Logan Paul’s skull open soon.

POS HALL OF FAME –

PRINCE ANDREW – Imagine being born into endless wealth and privilege and never having to work a single day in your life and instead of being grateful and living a life of charity and good will…you decide to be a sexual predator who fucks young girls simply because you can.

Prince Andrew is the worst in a family full of worsts…quite an accomplishment.

Jeffrey Epstein’s dear friend Andrew, is like the rest of his in-bred, arrogant, parasitic, useless family, a predator to the core who loves to prey upon the poor and the weak. He despises those beneath him, both literally and figuratively.

He preyed upon the girls provided by Epstein not because he couldn’t get laid in the real world, but because he wanted to force a young girl to suffer for his pleasure. He wanted her to be uncomfortable…to be subservient to him…because that is how he is wired.

Truth is his whole filthy fucking family is wired like that. These royal vermin should be stripped on their titles, their lands, their wealth and their limbs…like William Wallace…drawn and quartered in the public square. That won’t happen, of course, because the rules don’t apply to people like Prince Andrew or the rest of his cohorts in the elite Epstein Class. They get to dance between the raindrops while we drown in the deluge of their depravity and destruction.

The best-case scenario for the Epstein class regarding Prince Andrew is what happened to his friend Jeffery Epstein…happens to him too. He is “suicided” and quickly thrown in the bin of forgotten history so that his story goes away as quickly as possible.

Worst case scenario for Andrew is that they lock him in a room with me for fifteen minutes. Now that would be entertaining!

And thus ends the 12th Annual Slip-Me-A-Mickey™® Awards!!! To the winners/losers…don't take it personally…and God knows I hope I don't see you again next year!! To you dear reader…thanks for tuning in and we'll see you again next year!!

©2026

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 151 - Song Sung Blue

On this episode, Barry and I harmonize while singing the blues over the absolutely insane Hugh Jackman and Kate Hudson film, Song Sung Blue. Topics discussed include how this movie is totally bananas, how mind-blowing it is to watch, and how on earth did Kate Hudson get nominated for a Best Actress Oscar for this performance?

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 151 - Song Sung Blue

Thanks for listening!

©2026

Song Sung Blue: A Review - A Bizarre and Bewildering Bio-Pic

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 2 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT/SEE IT. This is one of the strangest stories and movies I’ve seen in a while. It isn’t the slightest bit good, but it could be something worth watching just to see the absolute insanity of it all.

Song Sung Blue, starring Kate Hudson and Hugh Jackman, is a bio-pic that chronicles the tumultuous life and times of Mike and Claire Sardina, a duo who back in the 1990s performed as Lightning and Thunder – a Neil Diamond tribute band.

The film, which is written and directed by Craig Brewer and is based on the Greg Kohs book of the same name, hit theatres on Christmas Day and is now available to stream on Peacock…which is where I just watched it.

I don’t know how else to say this but…Song Sung Blue is one of the most batshit crazy movies I’ve seen in a long time. What makes it all the more insane is that it is actually a true story.

I went into Song Sung Blue expecting a sort of light-hearted, feel-good, little love story or rom-com type of movie featuring Jackman and Hudson doing their usual charming movie star turns, getting some laughs, and singing some Neil Diamond songs – a decent enough formula.

The film certainly seems like just that exact thing through the first hour of its two-hour and twelve-minute runtime. Then, literally out of nowhere, things go absolutely apeshit. And when I say absolutely apeshit…I mean…ABSOLUTELY APESHIT.

I will not give any spoilers about this movie at all because that wouldn’t be fair to readers and also you wouldn’t believe me if I told you anyway. Let’s just say that Song Sung Blue is definitely not a romance or a rom-com or a feel-good sing-song fun time. No, Song Sung Blue is definitely a drama…a bad, hackneyed drama, but a drama nonetheless.

Apparently, the Mike and Claire Sardina story – which is essentially a modern version of the Book of Job chronicling the plagues through which these two poor people must suffer, is somewhat well-known, but it wasn’t well-known to me, and frankly, it is so insanely crazy that it feels fake…like something conjured in the mind of a psychologically-twisted soap opera writer who is very drunk and also on copious amounts of psychedelics.

Writer/director Craig Brewer struggles mightily to make this outrageous story feel the least bit real. It’s shot like a bad Hallmark channel movie, and it features some of the most bizarre scenes and sequences you’ve ever seen in your life. The one overriding characteristic of the film is that it is drowned under a gigantic tsunami of schmaltz.

There’s a bevy of paper-thin, cardboard cutout characters that do not in any way resemble human beings, who all have hearts of gold and soft-smiles. There’s a cavalcade of ludicrous situations made all the more ludicrous by the ham-fisted way in which they are executed. There’s also a hospital sequence that, like much of the rest of the film, feels like an SNL skit that was cut from the show because it was too over-the-top, unintentionally funny and also it made no sense.

Kate Hudson has been nominated for a Best Actress Oscar for her work as Claire – Thunder to Mike’s Lightning. Hudson does all the things she thinks she’s supposed to do…wears frumpy clothes, talks with a Midwestern accent, and all the rest…but what she doesn’t do is even try to hide the fact that she is trying really hard to act. Everything she does seems fake and completely devoid of any genuine humanity. It is all posing and preening and seems like someone not particularly good at acting trying really hard to actually act and signal to you that she’s acting.

Hudson, who has in her life been married to two prominent singers – Chris Robinson (of The Black Crows) and Matt Bellamy (of Muse), has fancied herself a singer in recent years and even put out an album in 2024. It seems like she took this role so she’d have a chance to sing on screen…no shame in that I suppose…but it all feels so forced and not organic and more than a little performative in a self-conscious, cutesy way.  

Hugh Jackman, always one to want to break into song and/or dance, does his usual Hugh Jackman stuff as Mike. He pushes way too hard and overacts a helluva lot, and it all feels like a sort-of-gay, theatre-muffin Wolverine is now the lead singer of a Neil Diamond tribute band.

Jackman’s singing, which is not something I think is generally very good, actually fits this character as he is not supposed to be all that great…so mission accomplished. But the more complicated emotional acting stuff needed from Jackman is not nearly as successful.

There are a cornucopia of supporting turns by the likes of Michael Imperioli – as a Buddy Holly impersonator, and Jim Belushi as a bus driver, and Fisher Stevens as a dentist, that are all rather cringe-worthy in their vacuity….so there’s that.

The strangest thing about this movie is how it tackles some rather enormous dramatic material in the most thoughtless and frivolous of ways. It is such a tonally deaf and emotionally obtuse movie that it frankly feels kind of offensive towards the real people it is dramatizing and their sizable real-life suffering.

Maybe I am either over or under-thinking the whole thing. Maybe making a schmaltzy, saccharine and slightly unhinged movie about two slightly unhinged people who make a life out of singing the saccharine and schmaltzy anthems of Neil Diamond is the point of all this. If so, then…I guess they did their job. But unfortunately, the movie just doesn’t work except in having you continually shaking your head and dropping your jaw in disbelief at what just happened on the screen.

I was thinking that this might be the type of movie that certain segments of the population might seek out and enjoy. Older audiences who are Neil Diamond fans might seek it out. And Hugh Jackman and Kate Hudson fans as well. But I can’t help but think that they would have the same expectations that I did going in and really be shocked, and probably disappointed, at what they find.

Those who go into the film knowing it is a drama might receive it a bit better, but only people who like a rather broad and basic type of drama will truly enjoy it – and I don’t say that as a negative judgement on those people, just in an attempt to properly categorize the film.

The bottom line is that I don’t think this is a good film…but it might be a fun film to watch just to see how batshit it really is – just know that going in and it will make the viewing experience more worthwhile. So, if you want to spend a little over two hours laughing at the poorly rendered misery of two very unfortunate real-people…then Song Sung Blue might be for you.

©2026