Entertainment
Michael Keaton's 2000s, R-Rated Comedy Thriller Is An Early Version Of His Most Important Film
By Robert Scucci
| Published
2014’s Birdman is one of my favorite Michael Keaton films for a number of reasons. The one-shot aesthetic allows for clever continuity tricks, and the self-referential meta humor about a washed up superhero actor trying to be taken seriously on stage instead of on the silver screen makes it a satisfying watch on every level. Keaton’s ability to toe the line as a man on the verge of a mental health crisis while taking on his most ambitious project is deadpan, darkly hilarious, and suicidally beautiful. Its ambiguous ending also makes it the perfect movie for repeat watches, since there are always pieces of subtext that slip by the first time, only to click into place later.
When I first stumbled upon 2005’s Game 6 on Tubi, I was enthralled by the synopsis because it reads like a proto version of Birdman, but with a much leaner and more grounded premise. Leaning into more conventional dramatic territory, it ends up being a solid watch on its own, while also feeling like a raw early draft of the kind of character Keaton would fully realize nearly a decade later.
If you reluctantly go into Game 6 expecting a second-rate Birdman, you’ll be relieved to find that both films stay firmly in their own lane. They share thematic DNA, but each has its own tone and personality, which makes them equally valid entries in Michael Keaton’s filmography rather than competing echoes of the same idea.
Not Riggan, But Rather Rogan
Michael Keaton plays Nicky Rogan in Game 6, a cynical but highly successful playwright living in New York City. Everyone in his inner circle insists that his new play will be his best work yet, largely because he’s leaning into more serious and less playful subject matter. The expectation is that this shift will cement his legacy as one of the leading playwrights of his generation. While his professional life appears to be riding high, the rest of his world is slowly falling apart. His marriage is collapsing under the weight of resentment and exhaustion with his soon-to-be ex-wife Lillian (Catherine O’Hara), and his relationship with his young adult daughter Laurel (Ari Graynor) is strained on its best day.
Family dynamics in Game 6 aside, Nicky is dealing with two additional problems that send him spiraling.
First, and most pressing, his best friend Elliot (Griffin Dunne) warns him that a potentially scathing review from notorious drama critic Steven Schwimmer (Robert Downey Jr.) could ruin his career. Elliot is a shell of his former self, having never recovered from a brutal review Schwimmer once wrote about him, and he blames that single piece of criticism for permanently derailing his reputation. Nicky becomes increasingly anxious that his own play will suffer a similar fate, especially since his lead actor Peter Redmond (Harris Yulin) is battling a brain parasite that causes him to forget his lines during rehearsals.
While Nicky should be focused entirely on getting his play through opening night without disaster, something else gnaws at him even more deeply than the fear of professional failure. It’s Game 6 of the World Series, and the Boston Red Sox are one win away from winning the championship. To anyone willing to listen, Nicky frames his entire outlook on life through his relationship with the Red Sox. By all logic, they should always win, yet somehow they always find a way to blow it at the last possible moment. That mindset defines him, despite the fact that his own career has been objectively successful up to this point.
In an attempt to make peace with himself and take pause before his play receives its first major reviews, Nicky skips his own premiere so he can watch the game and take stock of his life. His divorce is imminent, his professional reputation feels compromised, and the future he worked so hard to build suddenly feels uncertain. Egged on repeatedly by Elliot, he even begins to entertain the question of whether killing Schwimmer would somehow offer relief from the damage a single cruel voice can inflict on his legacy.
A Perfect Companion Piece To Birdman
Where Birdman places its emphasis on Riggan’s psychological collapse as the pressure of opening night mounts, Game 6 takes a more restrained and dramatic approach to similar material. Both films wrestle with the idea of legacy, but Game 6 focuses on a man who has already found success and is terrified that it might vanish without warning. Nicky is the human embodiment of the Boston Red Sox mentality. Successful until the moment he drops the ball, with that ever-present fear poisoning his ability to enjoy what he’s already earned.
Birdman centers on a former movie star attempting to reinvent himself on Broadway, pouring everything he has into a stage adaptation of Raymond Carver’s “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love” while his personal life disintegrates. Game 6, on the other hand, follows a man who could comfortably retire tomorrow and still be remembered as a success, yet stands to lose everything that actually matters to him outside of his career. Both films examine insecurity through these very specific circumstances, but they take radically different stylistic paths as they play out. Game 6 plays its story straight, while Birdman unfolds like a fever dream.
The ideal way to experience Game 6, currently streaming for free on Tubi, is before revisiting Birdman. Watching them back to back highlights how the same actor can explore similar thematic ground from completely different angles. Together, they form an unintentional double feature that deepens appreciation for Keaton’s work, and Game 6 in particular feels like the missing link in his career that hints at his later masterpiece.
Entertainment
This Microsoft Office 2021 and Windows 11 Pro bundle drops to under $50
TL;DR: A lifetime license for Microsoft Office Professional 2021 bundled with Windows 11 Pro is on sale for $44.97 (reg. $418.99) through Feb. 22 at 11:59 p.m. PT.
$44.97
$418.99
Save $374.02
Microsoft Office remains a fundamental software for work and school, but subscription fees aren’t for everyone. For those who prefer a one-and-done approach, this bundle pairs a lifetime license for Microsoft Office Professional 2021 with Windows 11 Pro for $44.97 (reg. $418.99) through Feb. 22 at 11:59 p.m. PT.
Office 2021 Professional delivers the core suite that remains central to many daily routines: Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, OneNote, Publisher, Access, and Teams. These are full desktop versions, which are ideal for those who want offline access and a traditional layout. The familiar ribbon interface streamlines document creation and analysis, offering customization for layouts, fonts, and formatting. For those who don’t need cloud-first tools, Office 2021’s setup is a practical advantage.
Mashable Deals
The bundle’s other half is Windows 11 Pro, Microsoft’s current professional-grade operating system. Along with a streamlined design, it offers productivity and security features like BitLocker encryption, Windows Sandbox, Hyper-V virtualization, and advanced account controls. Copilot, Microsoft’s AI assistant, is also integrated — ready to summarize web pages, generate drafts, answer questions, or change settings from the taskbar.
This is a one-time purchase, not a Microsoft 365 subscription, so it does not include ongoing feature updates or cloud storage perks. Hardware requirements are modest — 4GB of RAM and 64GB of storage — but users should still check compatibility before upgrading.
Mashable Deals
This deal is well-suited for professionals, students, or small-business owners who prefer to own their software and skip subscription extras. If you fall into that group, $44.97 is a stellar price for securing both Office tools and Windows 11 Pro with no recurring fees. For those weighing their options, this bundle offers value and simplicity in one purchase. Get it today at this low price until Feb. 22 at 11:59 p.m. PT.
StackSocial prices subject to change.
Entertainment
The Iconic, R-Rated 90s Video Game That's Screaming For A Film Adaptation
By Robert Scucci
| Published
If you grew up in the 90s playing first-person shooters on MS-DOS, you probably have fond memories of sneaking in sessions of Duke Nukem 3D. While we never had gaming consoles in my household, my parents had no qualms about me playing PC games like Doom, Quake, and Wolfenstein. For reasons I will never fully understand, Super Mario Bros. was forbidden fare, but blasting space demons and zombies with rocket launchers and mowing down Nazis with machine guns was considered a perfectly acceptable way to spend a rainy afternoon.
I think the real reason was that my parents did not want to spend money on a console when we already had a perfectly good computer sitting in the family room. In retrospect, I kind of respect that decision. It meant I had access to adventure puzzle games like The Seventh Guest and Myst, along with the above-mentioned shooters that were absolutely not meant for kids my age.
In 1996, Duke Nukem 3D was everywhere, and I remember watching my dad get hooked on it one weekend in his office. I could hear explosions and laughter through the door, which naturally made me curious. That was my introduction to a game that was wildly inappropriate for a kid, but I was lucky enough to have parents who let me watch R-rated action movies as long as we talked about why certain behaviors on screen were not meant to be copied in real life.
That brings me to the real heart of this article. Why, in the year 2026, do we still not have a Duke Nukem movie? The property feels tailor-made for an R-rated action comedy. It is violent, self-aware, and ridiculous. There are strippers and aliens, pigs dressed as cops, lizard troopers, and catchphrases pulled straight from films like Aliens, Dirty Harry, They Live, Jaws, and Pulp Fiction. Duke Nukem 3D is routinely cited as one of the greatest video games ever made, and the franchise reportedly generated well over a billion dollars by the early 2000s. A faithful adaptation would go absolutely gangbusters.
A Simple Yet Effective Action Hero
A movie based on the Duke Nukem character would not be difficult to pull off because the story is intentionally lean. Duke arrives in Los Angeles aboard his space cruiser, ready for a much-needed vacation. His ship gets shot down by aliens who have invaded and taken over the city, and he is understandably irritated about having to clean up their mess. Armed with his Mighty Foot and an arsenal that includes shotguns, triple-barrelled chain guns, grenade launchers, and pipe bombs, Duke tears through Assault Troopers, Pig Cops, Battlelord Sentries, and Enforcers.
What truly sets Duke Nukem 3D apart from its contemporaries is how interactive the environments are. Duke crawls through air vents, blows apart buildings by hitting detonation switches that are just laying around willy-nilly, kicks fire hydrants and drinks from water fountains to power up, and even tips strippers for a quick show before getting back to work. It is juvenile, excessive, and completely unapologetic. When Duke says he is here to kick ass and chew bubblegum, a quote attributed to Roddy Piper in They Live!, he means it.
The amount of controversy the game attracted from special interest groups over its content is exactly why Duke Nukem would thrive as an R-rated action comedy today. With the right creative team attached, the tone does not need to be reinvented or overhauled at all.
Attempts Have Been Made
There has never been a shortage of interest in bringing Duke Nukem to the big screen. As early as 2001, when the franchise was riding high, Threshold Entertainment attempted to get a feature film off the ground, but it never made it out of development. Another effort surfaced in 2008 from Max Payne producer Scott Faye, though that version stalled just as quickly.
The closest we came to a Duke Nukem movie was in 2018, when Paramount Pictures and Platinum Dunes were having discussions with John Cena to take on the lead role. It was a near-perfect casting choice, but the rights were in transition at the time, and the project was quietly shelved.
The most recent development came in 2022, when Legendary Entertainment announced that it had acquired the rights to produce a Duke Nukem film, with Cobra Kai creators Josh Heald and Jon Hurwitz attached. Since then, updates have been scarce, which unfortunately feels par for the course for this franchise.
If it takes another five years for anything concrete to happen, so be it. I just hope Cena is still able to step into the role. Projects like Ricky Stanicky have already proven that his comedic timing is a perfect match for a character like Duke Nukem. The image of him kicking a fire hydrant for health before tossing a pipe bomb into a movie theater and getting frisky with the ladies deserves to exist outside of my imagination.
What this movie needs is simple. Enemies that respawn endlessly, one-liners delivered without restraint, and waves of identical henchmen getting obliterated as Duke reluctantly fights his way back to vacation. This does not need to be high art. It needs to be an ultra-violent alien invasion, solved by the coolest video game character to ever appear on a computer screen.
Entertainment
Keanu Reeves' Sci-Fi Stoner Comedy Is Secretly The Best Sequel Ever
By Chris Snellgrove
| Published
Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure proved to be a breakout smash, appealing to sci-fi fans with its time-traveling plot and appealing to general audiences with its affable stoner comedy. The movie (the first big role for former John Wick icon Keanu Reeves) soon got a sequel, one that broke all the rules and subverted all of our expectations. You can now stream this underrated film for free on Tubi and discover for yourself why Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey (1991) might secretly be the best sequel ever made.
The premise of Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey is that the titular duo are inexplicably responsible for creating a future utopia, but a bad guy who wants to stop the party sends robot duplicates to kill our heroes in the present day. These bad bots actually succeed, throwing Bill and Ted to their doom before these would-be rock stars can win a local Battle of the Bands. But these two meatheads won’t let a little thing like death keep them down, and once they run into a new frenemy in the afterlife, they realize that their bogus journey is just beginning.
Sci-Fi’s Slacker Dream Team Returns
Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey has a tight cast of excellent performers, including George Carlin (best known outside this franchise for Dogma) as a groovy mentor from the day after tomorrow. The Grim Reaper is played to hilarious perfection, by William Sadler (best known for Shawshank Redemption), while Alex Winter (best known Adulthood) plays one half of the titular time-trippers. The other is played by Keanu Reeves, who transformed the notoriety of this franchise into headlining roles in action masterpieces like The Matrix and John Wick.
Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey wasn’t so bogus for audiences: against a budget of $20 million, this film earned $38 million. This was less than the original movie, and Bogus Journey was considered a minor failure until it earned a cult following on home video and streaming. That cult following helped this movie get a sequel, and 2020 (the pandemic? Talk about a bogus journey!) saw the release of the long-awaited Bill and Ted Face the Music.
Declared DOA By The Critics
When Bill& Ted’s Bogus Journey came out, many reviewers decided this sequel was totally heinous. On Rotten Tomatoes, it has a 56 percent rating, with critics acknowledging that this follow-up film had the same sense of humor as the groundbreaking first film and the same cast giving the script everything they had. They just felt like this second trip to the well delivered diminished returns compared to their original romp through time and space.
However, the movie impressed certain reviewers more than others, including legendary film critic Roger Ebert. In his review, Ebert said that Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey is “the kind of movie where you start out snickering in spite of yourself, and end up actually admiring the originality that went into creating this hallucinatory slapstick.” This is a solid take, and the movie is filled with so many deliciously stupid punchlines that it’s easy to forget how smart the setup to these jokes really is.
A Sequel That Raises The Stakes
I’ll actually go one better than the late, great Ebert and say that Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey is secretly the best sequel ever made. It would have been insanely easy to just give us a lame retread of the first film, with our not-so-dynamic duo traveling to more time periods and teaming up with more historical figures. Instead, the sequel zigs wherever you expect it to zag, sending our boys to Heaven and Hell in sequences that further our understanding of these characters in unexpectedly complex ways.
It helps that Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey adds fun new characters, including both the evil robots and the Grim Reaper. William Sadler is always game for genre work, and he turns his Reaper into the best kind of comic figure: a man who takes himself way too seriously. Watching him get his butt kicked in board games is hilarious, and by the end of the movie, he proves himself to be the ultimate third wheel of Wild Stallyns, a band that might just save the world.
A Hauntingly Good Sequel
Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey will appeal to sci-fi fans looking for something more lighthearted to watch, but it also has undeniable mass appeal thanks to its witty writing, rapid-fire jokes, and affable cast. It’s the kind of movie you can put on at a party, and people can vibe out with between conversations. But it’s also the kind of movie you can watch on your own to enjoy its surprising depth, sophistication, and craft.
Will you agree that Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey is the best sequel ever made, or would you like to send this ‘90s classic on a one-way trip to the past? The only way to find out is to stream this quirky comedy for free on Tubi. If nothing else, this is the perfect way to see how future action icon Keanu Reeves got his start!
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