"KEEP BUSTIN'."

Posts Tagged ‘Taylor Sheridan’

Tom Clancy’s Without Remorse

Wednesday, May 5th, 2021

TOM CLANCY is simply WITHOUT REMORSE is a new loosely-based-on-a-Tom-Clancy-book action movie starring Michael B. Jordan (RED TAILS) as John Kelly, the character who I guess is later played by Willem Dafoe in CLEAR AND PRESENT DANGER and Liev Schreiber in THE SUM OF ALL FEARS. It was meant to be a major theatrical release, but after, you know – all this – Amazon bought it, so you gotta watch it on Prime. But you should do that if you can. This is a good one.

I am absolutely not a Tom Clancy guy, not even in movie form. One reason this is more my shit: less military hardware. It’s a more Seagal-ian premise: Navy SEAL’s wife is murdered, he goes out to avenge those responsible whether the agency will help him or not. In the book I guess that meant he killed a bunch of drug dealers, here it’s reimagined as a conspiracy related to a mission he went on, and I think it makes a statement against nationalism and even militarism. Kelly is very matter-of-fact about the violence upon his family being an extension of the violence he committed for the government. Of course, the film’s main objective is just to work as a military thriller, but it also seems cognizant that this stuff shouldn’t be thoughtlessly glorified, and I appreciate that. (Maybe it should be called NOT WITHOUT SOME REMORSE.) (read the rest of this shit…)

Sicario: Day of the Soldado

Monday, July 2nd, 2018

SICARIO: DAY OF THE SOLDADO, like its predecessor SICARIO, is a bleak, uncomfortable peek into a hellish world of violence depicted near our southern border. Cartels go about their business with savage brutality. U.S. agencies blur and push and blatantly leap across every legal or moral line they ever heard of. The Americans hire a Mexican lawyer turned killer to do the dirty stuff because he wants revenge on those who murdered his family. But they also seem pretty okay with doing the dirty stuff themselves.

Criminals, cops and soldiers all ride on the backs of humvees or pickup trucks or in helicopters, some of them caravanning across the border with impunity, wrapped in armor, strapped with high capacity rifles, hiding behind their sunglasses and gritting their teeth until something pops off and then they pound hundreds of rounds through glass, metal and meat, leaving the wreckage of vehicles and their inhabitants to bake under the hot sun on the pavement or in the dirt. (read the rest of this shit…)

Wind River

Wednesday, November 15th, 2017

WIND RIVER, new on video this week, is a thriller written and directed by Taylor Sheridan, who’s on the radar now because he wrote SICARIO and HELL OR HIGH WATER. Jeremy Renner (Catwoman: The Game) plays Cory Lambert, a hunter for the Fish and Wildlife Service in Wyoming. When he drives out to the Wind River Indian Reservation to find what wild animal killed some livestock and spend some time with his son Casey (Teo Briones) he finds a dead woman in the snow. He knows her, her name is Natalie (Kelsey Asbille, THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN). She’s a good friend’s daughter. When they ask him to help show around FBI Agent Jane Banner (Elizabeth Olsen, OLDBOY) he ends up unofficially joining the investigation with her and tribal sheriff Ben (Graham Greene, DIE HARD WITH A VENGEANCE).

It’s a quiet, broody modern western type of a movie with matter-of-fact badassness in the dialogue and bursts of violence, tonally comparable to the aforementioned Sheridan joints, THE THREE BURIALS OF MELQUIADAS ESTRADA, NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN, stuff like that. But unlike any of those the wide-open landscapes are covered in snow. It’s not sweaty, it’s frost-bitten. (read the rest of this shit…)

Hell or High Water

Thursday, September 8th, 2016

tn_hellorhighwaterHELL OR HIGH WATER is one of these contemporary westerns, sort of a NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN fan film about two brothers robbing banks and two old Texas Rangers trying to catch them. It starts from the perspective of Toby (Chris Pine, SMOKIN’ ACES) and Tanner (Ben Foster, X-MEN 3) driving through barren stretches of country highway robbing banks in tiny, impoverished towns from Texas to Oklahoma, in between being brothers, annoying each other, talking around painful shit from their pasts, etc.

They did not cast against type. Tanner is the Mr. Blonde, yelling at and pistol whipping bank employees, causing scenes, screwing a hooker in the same hotel room while his poor brother lays wincing and facing the wall. I think this guy’s gonna be trouble. And Toby is the thief with a heart of gold, or at least the one who looks humanely through his ski mask with big blue sympathetic eyes and isn’t a jerk when a waitress (Katy Mixon from East Bound and Down) has a nice talk with him. (read the rest of this shit…)