"CATCH YOU FUCKERS AT A BAD TIME?"

Den of Thieves

Have you ever seen a sprawling, nearly 2-hour-plus epic about a gang of bank robbers in Los Angeles, the special police unit trying to bust them, the parallels between the groups that make them as bad as each other and give them a macho bond, the chance public encounters they have in neutral spaces before the robbery, and the absurdly high capacity shootouts they have in broad daylight among the public… but that is only heavily influenced by Michael Mann, not actually directed by him? Oh yeah, it sounds like you saw DEN OF THIEVES too. It was okay though, right?

The thieves are led by ex-Marine Ray Merrimen (Pablo Schreiber, 13 HOURS) – who looks a little like a Christian Bale character, but feels more like Bodhi in the POINT BREAK remake – with goons including Evan Jones (Cheddar Bob from 8 MILE), 50 Cent (Young Caesar from GET RICH OR DIE TRYIN’) and O’Shea Jackson Jr. (Ice Cube from STRAIGHT OUTTA COMPTON).

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April 26th, 2018 | 15 Comments »

Jane Got a Gun

JANE GOT A GUN is a straight forward modern western, and a pretty good one. It doesn’t reinvent the genre, or have a new twist on it, other than to star Natalie Portman (STAR WARS I, II, III), who also produced it and fought to bring it back to life after the original director famously left on the first day of production.

I can see why she cared about it so much. It’s a good role for her, one she must’ve done alot of preparation for. She’s a much more natural western heroine than I pictured. Jane Hammond lives in a little house on a remote patch of land with a young daughter (Maisie McMaster). One day her husband Bill (Noah Emmerich, WINDTALKERS), who everybody calls “Ham,” comes home dying of a bullet wound. She does exactly what all movie people do in that situation – give him a bottle of liquor, pull the slug out with tongs, and most importantly DROP THE SLUG INTO A METAL BOWL – then chews him out, puts on a hat and a coat and goes out to take care of business.

Okay, I’m making that sound a little more badass than it is, because Jane’s no-fuckin-around demeanor makes it seem that way. She’s not going to get revenge or nothing, she’s actually going to drop the kid off at a friend’s house and then go beg her drunk ex-boyfriend to protect her from the Bishop Boys, the guys who shot Ham and who he says are coming for him. And for her. (read the rest of this shit…)

April 24th, 2018 | 7 Comments »

You Were Never Really Here

YOU WERE NEVER REALLY HERE is the latest example of what I call “Arthouse Badass” – movies with subject matter and tropes from our beloved crime/action/tough guy movies, but with more interest in formal experimentation and subverting expectations or cliches than in delivering on traditional money shots. It’s based on a novella by Jonathan Ames that sounds like a pretty straightforward action kinda thing, but it’s written and directed by Lynne Ramsay (WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN). Joaquin Phoenix (U TURN) stars as a scary dude who, in the opening scene, has just killed some sex traffickers or somebody and is making an escape. But there will be little emphasis on how badass he is and alot on how damaged and haunted and sad he is.

Like Riggs he regularly contemplates suicide (holding a knife over his mouth, pulling a plastic bag over his head, peering over bridges and onto train tracks). Like Rambo he’s covered in scars and sees flashes of war crimes and other traumas, and at one point breaks down crying about the people he’s killed. Like Leon the professional, Creasy the man on fire, The Equalizer, Logan, Statham in SAFE or Seagal in OUT OF REACH he finds some kind of life’s purpose in protecting a little girl.

But he’s not cool. He’s a husky, baggy-pants-and-pullover-hoodie guy, with a belly and greasy unbrushed hair and a bushy, graying beard, and he mumbles and lays around lazily eating jellybeans, and the last thing he does in the movie is loudly slurp up the dregs of a melted milkshake. He looks more Jack Black than John Wick, more Devin Faraci than Chow Yun Fat, more George R.R. Martin than Lee Marvin, more guitar tech for Ratt than elite operative. (read the rest of this shit…)

April 23rd, 2018 | 14 Comments »

Paradox

Remember the great Donnie Yen/Sammo Hung movie SPL, or KILL ZONE as the Weinsteins retitled it in the U.S.? If not, do you at least remember SPL 2/KILL ZONE 2, the even greater Wu Jing/Tony Jaa movie that knocked our asses and hearts into the stratosphere a couple years ago? Well, PARADOX was made as SPL 3. That’s why I got antsy and ordered an import from YesAsia before I read that Well Go is putting it out in the U.S. on May 8th.

Once again it’s not a normal followup, but a thematic sequel, or a spiritual sequel, or a sequel in name only, or a remix. Some of the connective tissue cast-and-crew-wise is that it’s directed by Wilson Yip (who directed the first SPL and produced the second), it’s produced by Cheang Pou-soi (who directed part 2), it stars Louis Koo (who played the crime boss who needs a transplant in part 2), it has a “special appearance” by Tony Jaa (who was the co-lead of part 2), Ken Lo (part 2) is in it too, and the action director is Sammo Hung (choreographer and co-star of part 1).

Also the cool American cover has a wolf on it, which must be a reference to the weird metaphorical encounter at the end of the last one. I do believe this one is wolf-free. (read the rest of this shit…)

April 19th, 2018 | 14 Comments »

A Quiet Place

A QUIET PLACE is a really effective monster movie that goes a long way just on the strong execution of a simple, cool premise. 89 days ago as of the opening scene, civilization as we know it ended under the sharp teeth of some GREAT WALL-esque man-eating monsters. They’re blind, but they have great hearing and they run fast, so they’ll zip in and munch on anybody who makes any kind of noise. That could be some librarian’s bedtime story to keep the kids in line, but it feels a little more like THE ROAD or something.

We follow a family who have already developed methods to survive in this dangerous new reality. They live on an isolated farm, they speak in sign language. Their daughter (Millicent Simmonds, WONDERSTRUCK) is deaf, so she’s good at being silent, but of course she doesn’t necessarily hear if there’s a monster behind her or someone else is making a sound that’s gonna attract one. They’ve developed warning systems involving lights, torches that seem to communicate with other survivors (though we never see them) and various emergency backup plans. When they need to go into town to scavenge they walk barefoot on trails of sand (I wonder where they got all that from?) It shows just how serious this is, and how much work they have to put into it, and also it’s a cool visual. (read the rest of this shit…)

April 18th, 2018 | 42 Comments »

Molly’s Game

MOLLY’S GAME is the directivational debut of playwright/The West Wing creator/screenwriter Aaron Sorkin (MONEYBALL, STEVE JOBS), and man is it ever Sorkiny. It revolves around the legal defense of a woman who ran an illegal poker ring, so there is law, legal strategy, business procedure and poker all out there needing to be explained and waxed poetic about by fast-talking geniuses constantly on the verge of dropping an anecdote about the 1942 Olympics or the Warren G. Harding administration or some shit that at first sounds like they got sidetracked with trivia but turns out to be a deft analogy to drive home the point they’re trying to make. And the protagonist Molly Bloom (Jessica Chastain, MAMA) narrates the shit out of it and skips around in time, talks about her childhood and her Olympic skiing accident and what not. It looks good and the performances are excellent but yeah, dude, a writer’s writerly writer definitely wrote this writing here.

Sorkin seems like a guy who obsesses over some story he read about in a magazine a while back and he won’t fucking shut up about how fascinating it is and you’re like “Okay Aaron, young Hollywood intern stumbles into running high stakes poker game, sounds great Aaron anyway I gotta get going,” but then when he makes the movie you realize he was right, it really was a compelling story when presented exactly as he knew how to present it. (read the rest of this shit…)

April 17th, 2018 | 6 Comments »

Proud Mary

Mary (Taraji P. Henson, SMOKIN’ ACES, THE KARATE KID, Felicity episodes 7 and 14) is some kind of hitwoman for a Boston crime family, though you’d think she was a high class international assassin judging by her well-maintained secret fold-out arsenal and array of flashy blonde disguise wigs. One day after killing a bookie she sees his young son in the next room playing video games with headphones on. She should kill him – not in my opinion, but in her profession’s – instead she leaves him be.

A year later the kid, Danny (Jahi Di’Allo Winston, “Young Ralph Tresvant,” THE NEW EDITION STORY), has been through some foster homes and run away and become a hardened drug runner for an abusive Russian scumbag called Uncle (Xander Berkeley, L.A. TAKEDOWN, CANDYMAN). Without mentioning “Hey, I’m the one that murdered your dad” or even “I am a dangerous criminal,” Mary rescues Danny, brings him to her apartment and goes to tell off Uncle – who she ends up killing. And that’s a big mistake because her boss Benny (Danny Glover, PREDATOR 2) sends the whole crew to find and kill whoever took out Uncle. (read the rest of this shit…)

April 16th, 2018 | 5 Comments »

Ready Player One

Steven Spielberg’s shiny, digitally new movie READY PLAYER ONE is about a virtual reality treasure hunt for people who are obsessed with ’80s and ’90s pop culture references even though it’s the year 2045. Which is not as far-fetched as it sounds at first. The hero of the story drives the car from BACK TO THE FUTURE, the #1 hit movie of sixty years prior, so it’s just the same as the teens you see now who model their lives on SOUTH PACIFIC.

Wade Watts (Tye Sheridan, THE TREE OF LIFE, MUD, X-MEN: APOCALYPSE) is a nice young man and first person narrator living in a futuristic trailer park, and I guess poverty ain’t that bad because everyone spends their days playing around in this virtual reality video game called OASIS.

Wade is part of a subculture called “gunters” who know about old Atari 2600 games and Robert Zemeckis and everything because they study the journals of the late Oasis inventor Halliday (Mark Rylance, BLITZ), and he was obsessed with that shit. The gunters need to understand all that to win the puzzle contest he left behind as a sort of a last-willy-wonka-and-testament to award his majority share of the company to some random nerd he never met who can solve some riddles. Also they gotta be good at video games, because the first challenge involves a giant car race. Wade drives the DeLorean, his friend Aech (pronounced ‘H’) (spoiler – it’s not a boy, it’s Lena Waithe from Master of None) drives Bigfoot, a famous girl he has a crush on and just met named Artemis (Olivia Cooke, OUIJA) drives the red motorcycle from AKIRA (weirdly the only reference the characters feel they have to explain to the audience). (read the rest of this shit…)

April 12th, 2018 | 52 Comments »

Slaughter

“Badass, huh? Well I hope you’re better with that knife than you were with that big black car. ‘Cause I’ma jam it up your ass.”

Jim Brown was a black action star before blaxploitation. He’d already done more than ten movies by the time SHAFT and SUPER FLY hit. He’d done westerns, he’d been one of the DIRTY DOZEN, he’d even played a version of Richard Stark’s Parker character in THE SPLIT. But I’ve always associated him with the blaxploitation era – I mean, he ended up in I’M GONNA GIT YOU SUCKA and ORIGINAL GANGSTAS, didn’t he? – and that all started in 1972 with the movie SLAUGHTER, in which Jim Brown is SLAUGHTER.

In the opening scene a dressed-up older couple get into their Mercedes and it explodes. They were Slaughter’s parents. Dad “had underworld connections.” Slaughter was “a Green Beret hero.” He gets the name of a responsible party: Renaldi. Tries to confront him at an airport, ends up in a car vs. small plane chase, apparently screws up an investigation by the U.S. Treasury.

So Chief Inspector A.W. Price (Cameron Mitchell, ACTION U.S.A.) takes him into a room, calls him the n-word, makes him sign a confession, gets put into a headlock, and puts him on a secret mission to Mexico with two partners to take down the man responsible for blowing up his daddy.

One thing that’s funny about this mission: both of his partners surprise him, and both almost get killed by him. Kim (Marlene Clark, BEWARE! THE BLOB, GANJA & HESS), at first posing as a reporter for “Black Is Magazine,” hides in his bathroom and gets the whole room shot up. Harry (Don Gordon, BULLITT, THE EXORCIST III), waits in his hotel room and as soon as he says “Hi!” gets punched through some furniture, against a wall, out a window into a swimming pool and then gets punched a couple more times while in the swimming pool. (read the rest of this shit…)

April 11th, 2018 | 10 Comments »

Braven

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…)

April 10th, 2018 | 12 Comments »

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