"KEEP BUSTIN'."

Posts Tagged ‘Zahn McClarnon’

Mekko

Wednesday, November 22nd, 2023

I take any chance I can to tell people about the show Reservation Dogs. If you get Hulu it’s on there – just 3 seasons, a total of 28 half hour episodes, not heavy on continuity, not a huge time commitment. In a way it’s comparable to my other favorite recent show, Atlanta, in that it’s just this incredible cast where every character is really hilarious to me in a different way, and also because the writers and directors are narratively playful and free. They’re willing to leave their teenage protagonists to do an episode all about the elders, then later one all about the elders when they were teenagers, then an episode where one of today’s teenagers meets a weirdo recluse who we start to realize was one of the kids in that flashback episode who has become estranged from the others. Things like that. But also it’s a very potent show about friendship and dealing with loss, so it’s the funniest show that I always find myself trying not to cry at.

They ended it this year and I already miss it, so it’s a good time for me to track down the handful of indie movies creator Sterlin Harjo did in the pre-Rez Dogs part of his career. I previously reviewed his debut feature FOUR SHEETS TO THE WIND, sort of a romance. Now I’ve skipped to his third one, MEKKO (2015), which Wikipedia describes as a thriller. That wouldn’t have occurred to me but yeah, I guess it makes sense to call it that. Mostly it’s just a slice of life following this big quiet guy named Mekko (Rod Rondeaux, MEEK’S CUTOFF, HOSTILES, THE BALLAD OF BUSTER SCRUGGS) getting out of prison after 19 years and trying to survive on the streets of Tulsa. (read the rest of this shit…)

Doctor Sleep

Monday, November 11th, 2019

As a young man I read a bunch of Stephen King. He was my favorite until I decided Clive Barker was more interesting – I don’t know if I was right. The point is I’m just another movie-watching asshole and can’t pretend to be a King scholar. I haven’t read The Shining (1977) or its 2013 sequel Doctor Sleep. I have, of course, seen Stanley Kubrick’s THE SHINING, and like everyone except King and the Razzies voters I think it’s a masterpiece. (I also just realized it’s the first horror movie I remember seeing.)

It almost seemed like a suicide mission for writer/director/editor Mike Flanagan (OCULUS, HUSH, GERALD’S GAME) to make a movie out of Doctor Sleep. How do you even make a sequel to one of the most unfuckwithable horror movies ever made – a fucking Stanley Kubrick movie – let alone try to please the author who famously hated the movie’s take on his very personal story about alcoholism? He tried to bridge the movie with the books, and I think he pulled it off! (read the rest of this shit…)

Braven

Tuesday, April 10th, 2018

Jason Momoa is… BRAVEN.

BRAVEN is the story of Joe Braven (Jason Momoa, BULLET TO THE HEAD), a nice, rugged logger guy who lives with his family in some snowy area in Newfoundland (or at least that’s where it’s filmed). I really didn’t know what the movie was going to be about, so when he wished a brotherly goodbye and safe driving to his co-worker buddy Weston (Brendan Fletcher, FREDDY VS. JASON) I thought Weston would never come back. And then when his wife Stephanie (Jill Wagner, Blade: The Series) had to leave and repeatedly talked about what she was going to do with him when she got home, I worried she would never come back. And then when he made his daughter Charlotte (Sasha Rossof) go to bed and wait until tomorrow to give her bracelet to grandpa (Stephen Lang, BAND OF THE HAND, DON’T BREATHE), I thought oh shit, Pops is not gonna make it through the night.

Well, I guess none of this is foreshadowing, they’ll all be okay. For a bit. And then they’ll all be in trouble. (read the rest of this shit…)

Bone Tomahawk

Tuesday, January 5th, 2016

tn_bonetomahawkBefore THE HATEFUL EIGHT, Kurt Russell first teamed with his crazy mustache on a different ensemble western with bursts of outrageously brutal violence. BONE TOMAHAWK is kinda like a John Wayne movie that happens to bump into CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST for a minute. But don’t get too excited about that high mash up concept. For the most part it’s a straight up western, for people who enjoy westerns. It’s just that it’s got a scene or two that might make a few of those guys spit out their coffee.

In the opening scene two murderous bandits, Buddy (Sid Haig) and Purvis (David Arquette), trespass on some kind of skull-decorated burial ground that Indiana Jones might be able to tell them about. They were just talking about what’s proper to do with the Bibles of the travelers they murdered on the road, but they do not show the same concern for this particular culture. Anyway, they get into some trouble, you could say.

Purvis escapes and makes it into the town of Bright Hope, where he is not welcome, and quickly ends up shot and arrested by Sheriff Franklin Hunt (Russell). But during the night some kind of savages attack the jail, tearing one man apart and abducting Purvis, a deputy (Evan Jonigkeit, Toad from X-MEN: DAYS OF FUTURE PAST), and a local doctor (Lili Simmons, who I guess is on Banshee, but I honestly thought she was Katherine Heigl). She was at the jail to attend to Purvis’s bullet, and yes, for the record she drops the slug into a metal canister. Anyway she’s in the wrong place at the wrong time, she gets abducted. Most of the movie is about the rescue party traveling to cannibal territory to try to get them all back. (read the rest of this shit…)