"KEEP BUSTIN'."

Posts Tagged ‘Zazie Beetz’

Dead Pigs

Wednesday, June 28th, 2023

DEAD PIGS is a little movie that premiered at Sundance in 2018, and didn’t come to home video in the U.S. until a few years later, but I knew about it because it’s the feature debut of director Cathy Yan, and got her the job of directing BIRDS OF PREY (AND THE FANTABULOUS EMANCIPATION OF ONE HARLEY QUINN).

Yan is American, born in China, raised in Virginia, went to high school in Hong Kong, then went to Princeton and a couple other American schools. Before she started making short films she was a reporter for the L.A. Times and the Wall Street Journal working out of New York, Hong Kong, and Beijing. With a background like that it makes sense that her debut would be a truly international movie: American producers, Chinese financiers, presented by Chinese director Jia Zhangke (ASH IS THE PUREST WHITE), filmed in Shanghai with a bilingual crew, with mostly Mandarin dialogue but also some English, post production done in New York. (read the rest of this shit…)

Geostorm

Tuesday, January 31st, 2023

I guess time flies, because I’ve kind of wanted to see GEOSTORM since it came out, and I didn’t realize that was more than five years ago. It’s the theatrical feature directing debut of Dean Devlin, former writing/producing partner of Roland Emmerich. Devlin wrote the script with Paul Guyot (two season 2 episodes of something called “Felicity”; also Chow Yun Fat’s assistant on THE REPLACEMENT KILLERS).

In my household Mrs. Vern is the fan of disaster movies. The best ones make her giggle. She loves the broad stereotypes, the corny speeches, the cataclysmic destruction, and especially the montages where different countries set aside their differences to save the world together. Unlike me she likes INDEPENDENCE DAY, but she’s not one of the people who considers it to be an actual well made blockbuster movie. She just finds it a little more hilarious and alot less annoying than I do. So she’s the reason we saw and got a kick out of 10,000 B.C. and 2012 in the theater and MOONFALL on video. I skipped THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW and she still gets excited and explains to me what’s happening when we come across it on cable. So although I would like to take credit for reviewing this as part of some post-PLANE Gerard Butler study, it’s really because she spontaneously decided the time had come to watch it, and I agreed it was a good idea.

Butler plays Jake Lawson, the chief architect of a web of climate-controlling satellites built through international cooperation in the futuristic year of 2019. Nicknamed Dutch Boy (a term I really got sick of hearing), the system successfully neutralizes climate-change-exacerbated weather events. (read the rest of this shit…)

Bullet Train

Wednesday, August 10th, 2022

David Leitch’s BULLET TRAIN has plenty going for it. It has a strong ensemble of actors playing colorful characters, like a quippy modernized Murder on the Orient Express, except in this one everybody’s trying to murder each other and/or escape, it’s not so much of a whodunit. It’s a fun idea, it looks good, the action scenes are really well executed, with the actors really putting in the work, as we’ve come to expect from 87North (formerly 87Eleven) productions.

But to me the movie is a disappointment. For the last year or two I knew it was the big 87North movie with the crazy-good cast headed up by Brad Pitt fighting each other on a train, and I just took it for granted it was gonna be top of the line. On the surface it is – it’s colorful, has a sense of style, and mostly avoids that everything-is-green-screen feeling of so many modern movies. It even has a good soundtrack of (until Rare Earth on the end credits) non-obvious songs, from Shuggie Otis to Pussy Riot to a really strong use of “Holding Out For a Hero.” Strong because it’s not the original Bonnie Tyler version from FOOTLOOSE, but a Japanese cover made by Miki Asakura in 1984 as the theme for a show called School Wars (now remixed with some MORTAL KOMBAT-y dance music flourishes). (read the rest of this shit…)

The Harder They Fall

Thursday, December 9th, 2021

THE HARDER THEY FALL (no relation to THE HARDER THEY COME) is one of the better movies I’ve seen this year, and definitely one of the better made-for-Netflix ones. It’s a western with an all-Black, all-star cast, and the opening title card says, “While the events in this story are fictional… These. People. Existed.”

That hand clap emoji type cadence makes me think they’re talking to doofuses who don’t know basic history and/or Mario Van Peebles’ POSSE and think there weren’t Black people in the Old West. But also They. Existed. in the sense that most of the main characters are based on – or at least named after – actual historical figures. But writer/director Jeymes Samuel and co-writer Boaz Yakin (THE PUNISHER [1989], THE ROOKIE, FRESH, FROM DUSK TILL DAWN 2, PRINCE OF PERSIA, SAFE) have no qualms about putting together people who never would’ve crossed paths, giving them totally new origin stories, killing them young in a gunfight even if they died of old age. But think of it as a LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMAN type team-up fantasy. It’s a good western story.

Jonathan Majors (HOSTILES, DA 5 BLOODS) ably stars as Nat Love, the legendary outlaw whose tragic backstory opens the film. He’s a kid (Chase Dillon from The Underground Railroad) at the dinner table with his parents when Rufus Buck (Idris Elba, PROM NIGHT) and another guy come in, blast them away with golden pistols for some unexplained debt, and carve a cross into little Nat’s forehead. So, like Harmonica in ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST or Ellen in THE QUICK AND THE DEAD, this kid’s got a pretty good revenge mission to get to when he grows up. (read the rest of this shit…)

Joker

Tuesday, October 8th, 2019

I think my favorite movie by director Todd Phillips (ROAD TRIP, STARSKY & HUTCH) is still his 1993 student film HATED: GG ALLIN & THE MURDER JUNKIES. It’s a documentary about an infamously transgressive punk singer skipping parole to do a tour where he kind of plays music, but the shows usually end soon after he shoves someone’s banana up his ass or smashes a woman’s nose with a beer bottle or shits on stage and throws it in the crowd. Phillips was clearly aware of the absurdity of his subject, but also in awe of someone living their life as a human middle finger. The director’s new film, JOKER, won the Golden Lion at the 76th Venice International Film Festival, and shows an evolution in his film craft, but not necessarily in his world view.

Let’s take a moment to consider that when BATMAN & ROBIN came out there is no way in hell any of us could’ve guessed that in 22 years one of our generation’s most respected actors would star in a super-fucked-up hard-R ‘70s period piece Scorsese knockoff character study vaguely based on (and officially branded as) an iconic Batman villain. Much less that it would be controversial only for reasons other than “it’s too scary for kids.” It’s a crazy world we’re living in. Almost like… the Joker. Oh my god. (read the rest of this shit…)