Guy Ritchie's The Covenant

 

Director Guy Ritchie is an accomplished film maker with more than a dozen features on his filmography, but this is the first one to put his name in the title. The usual reason is given for why that has occurred, another film project has a claim to the title and the studio is trying to avoid confusion. That has happened before, e.g. "Lee Daniel's The Butler" and "Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio". I am going to suggest a better reason, this is Ritchie's best film and one that he should be most proud of. Like John Hancock signing the Declaration of Independence in a large flourish, Ritchie signifies a personal statement with his name in the title.

I made his film "The Gentlemen" my favorite of the Covid limited movie year 2020. I have enjoyed and admired most of the English gangster films he has produced. I consider him a reliable director when it comes to comedic action and silly violence. I can now say that his skills in regard to action are not limited to the light adventure styles we have been accustomed to. "The Covenant" is a serious war film with hard action sequences that are played realistically without the cinematic stylings that are so frequent in today's films. Just a few weeks ago, he released a film "Operation Fortune: Ruse de guerre", that I thought was a bit of a let down from his previous output. My guess is, he was more focused on this project than the piece of action entertainment that came to us earlier this year. The reality of this picture makes the suspense work so much better than the artifice of those earlier pictures. 

"The Covenant" is a fictional story about a non-fictional war, and it is focused on characters we know to exist in reality in some form or another. Actor Jake Gyllenhaal plays Army Sgt. John Kinley, a soldier tasked with locating Taliban Weapons in Afghanistan. His unit is assigned a new interpreter, Ahmed, played by Iraqi born actor Dar Salim.  For the first act of the film, the men form a tentative professional relationship in which Ahmed repeatedly demonstrates his worth not only for his language skills but for his understanding of the culture and physical environment the conflict is located in. There are plenty of tense moments in this section, as the threats from the Taliban are everywhere, frequently buried in the everyday life of the people of Afghanistan, who seem to despair of both the U.S. presence and that of the radical Muslim movement. Ahmed sometimes takes the initiative, when he is really expected to defer to the Americans, but Sgt. Kinley recognizes, slowly, that his interpreter is a valuable part of their team. 

A frighteningly realistic combat sequence makes the transition between the first and second acts, and it is tough to imagine because it does not go well for the American unit, several of whom we have met and listened to in conversations that are fraternal in nature with one another.  Kinley and Ahmed find themselves fleeing from a vast force of Taliban fighters, while they are more than 70 miles from the base of operations. This act is where Gyllenhaal and Salim earn their acting stripes, as the two men fight their way through the mountainous terrain, trying to avoid capture that would surely lead to torture and death.  I have no military training myself, but I was convinced that the two actors were operating very much in the manner that real soldiers would. They are cautious when necessary and forceful when required to be. The overwhelming odds make it inevitable that something bad is going to trip them up at some point. When the inevitable happens, they still manage to forge on, and the heroic cleverness of Ahmed, plus his familiarity with the people and terrain, allow them to dance around capture on their journey. Salim takes the lead role for much of this portion of the film, and although he is a savior figure, his character never comes across as a condescending stereotype. 

It is the third act of the film that should shame the U.S. and it carries the real weight of the movie. The people of Afghanistan have suffered under the Taliban, but imagine what it must be like for those people who cooperated with U.S. forces. They live under a shroud of doom, and Ahmed is simply a symbol of the larger issue of U.S. obligation to it's partners in this enterprise. Bureaucracy, indifference, and logistics probably have accounted for hundreds of deaths since the U.S. left the arena. This story may be fictional, but the scenarios are real, and they are haunting. Ritchie's film strips off the veil and shows us how damaging our failures to these allies is. Without taking a political position, the film still makes a valid point about our moral shortcomings in this conflict. The third act concludes with a suspense filled  action sequence, which is thrilling, but the epilogue to the story should depress anyone with a sense of right and wrong. 

Personally, I was moved by the story and outraged by the reality. The film is suspenseful from beginning to end. The tension that I felt in my stomach during the whole story, never seemed to let up, and that sort of engagement is what I treasure in a film. So when you take the two lead performances, and put them together with the realistically staged action sequences, and then layer a dollop of moral outrage on top of it, I think you get one of the best films of the year. If I were not opposed to totalitarianism, I'd say it should be required viewing for everyone who cares about what this country does in the rest of the world. I don't know that there is a solution to the issues in Afghanistan that will satisfy all the relevant parties, but I do know that what we have done in getting out of that part of the world, did not work in a way that anyone should be proud of.  

Sisu

 

Somewhere along the path of film history, we crossed a line. What was once horrifying to us became familiar. The things we might have dreaded to see became the things we longed to see. Images that once made us cringe became images capable of sparking laughter. I'm not sure it is a bad thing that this evolution has taken place, but I can say that I have evolved with the rest of the film community, to the point where I can take delight in the gruesome mayhem that takes place in a film like "SISU". This is a movie that revels in the brutality it shows on screen. We root for the Nazis to get the treatment they so richly deserve in the films set up. The hero has to say nothing, and we are still on his side.

When I was ten years old, my big brother took me to see "Bullitt" with Steve McQueen. Everybody remembers the car chase, including me, but at the time, the scene that most impacted my young psyche was the murder of the witness using a shotgun, close up. The body slamming the wall and then slipping down with blood stains on the wall was my first exposure to real screen violence that was not the old western shoot'em up with guys clutching their stomachs and falling to the ground. This was real, and it was traumatic. Even though "The Wild Bunch" came out the next year, I did not see it until 1971, and the violence there was balletic, terrifying and in slow motion. A few years later, I saw an Italian Western called "Cutthroats Nine" and the violence there was also over the top and disturbing. Between 1975 and and the end of the century, we started accepting extreme violence as being humorous. Horror movies may have started that trend, I know that "Evil Dead II" made light of chainsawing people in a way that was vastly different than that scene in "Scarface" in the bathroom. As video games became more widely played and the visuals became more extreme, it seems that we started accepting dismemberment as equally funny as a Three Stooges poke in the eye. The over the top nature of the violence makes it more palpable. When a bad pun or a smart ass comment from the hero goes along with the visual, it is easy to laugh off. "Sisu" features violence that when similar images appeared in "Saving Private Ryan", they provoked gasps and weeping, here they provoke guffaws.  

I suppose what I am trying to do is justify my glee at the movie I saw last night. When body parts explode across the screen, and people are disemboweled, why am I laughing?  The answer must be that I have gotten use to some of it, and the film makers have found a tone in depicting it that says it is safe to do so. A landmine blowing someone to pieces should not be funny, but when it is Nazis, who are war criminals, and the soldiers who get exploded were being used as human mine sweepers, our expectations are different. Then, on top of that, add a stylized moment like a foot, spinning through the air and landing at the feet of the next soldier, suddenly things are not grim, they are amusing.  All of this is in way of saying, I was immensely amused by "Sisu". The hero, Aatami, has no dialogue except for the very last lines of the film. He is stoically determined to achieve his objective, which is sort of what the title of the film is based on. The IMDB summary puts it this way: "what sisu means: a white-knuckled form of courage and unimaginable determination in the face of overwhelming odds."  You have a sense of what is coming.

The stylized violence of the John Wick films, is similar to what you get here, but there are important differences. John Wick is mostly efficient and detached, his martial arts style of killing is almost like watching dancing. Aatami, is not as graceful but he is just as efficient. His killing is brutal but not poetic at all. When he is stabbing someone, it is forceful, repeated and draws a lot of blood which covers him as he continues to fight for what is right. The pickaxe that he carries is like an emblem of the kind of brutality we are going to see. This is not Keanu in a bullet proof suit using elegant handguns, this is a commando, weathered by the climate and years of war, pushing himself past human limits. Of course some moments are not particularly believable, but that will not diminish the satisfaction we get as he presses on. 

"Sisu" is set in Finland, and the actors are all from that region. Jorma Tommila plays the lead, and the only thing I saw him in before this was "Rare Exports". I know there was at least one other cast member from that film as well. Be assured, most of those characters not played by Tommila, will not be back for a sequel. The pieces of the soldiers that screwed with Aatami, are strewn all over the tundra of Lapland. The music score is just as bruising and powerful as the film's hero is. I was intimidated just hearing the notes. I saw this in a Dolby Theater, and the sound design was terrific. The director,   Jalmari Helander, was also responsible for "Rare Exports", a film that does have some of the same tone as this.

So following in the long line of "Evil Dead Bruce Campbell Versions", most of the films of Guy Ritchie and Matthew Vaughn, and Quentin Tarantino's list of bloody revenge films, "Sisui" delivers the violent, brutal humor, that we have been conditioning ourselves to accept. I'm certainly glad I did accept it, although I may still worry a bit about humanity in general. 

KAMAD Throwback Thursdays 1975: The Passenger

Throwback Thursday #TBT

Throwback Thursday on the KAMAD site will be a regular occurrence in the next year. As a motivational project, to make sure I am working on something, even in a week where I don't see a new film in a theater, I am going to post on movies from 1975. Along with 1984, this is one of my favorite years for movies and it is full of bittersweet memories as well. 1975 was my Senior Year in High School and my Freshman Year in College. The greatest film of the last 60 years came out in 1975, as well as dozens of great and not so great cinematic endeavors. Most of the films in this weekly series will have been seen in a theater in 1975, but there are several that I only caught up with later. I hope you all enjoy. 

The Passenger

This film is one of my blind spots from 1975. I badly wanted to see it, but it played in limited engagements on the other side of town and I never made it over there to see it. I remember as a 17 year old kid, looking at the Calendar Section of the L.A. Times, wanting to catch up with this highly praised arthouse film, featuring Jack Nicolson. This came out the same year as "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest", even though it had been filmed two years before the release. 

I always thought it was some kind of thriller, but it turns out to be very different in tone than I was expecting. There is almost no violence in the film, except for two brief moments. One of those moments, disturbingly, is not a fictional killing, but was a filmed execution of a bank robber in the African country of Chad. It is shown as part of a documentary that Nicholson's character is supposed to be working on. The other moment of violence involves a single karate style kick to the head of a minor character in the film. There are two pivotal deaths in the story but both occur off screen, and they are not designed to create suspense and tension, that isn't really what the film is about.

As I was watching the first half hour of the movie, I was worried about the pace of the film and the ambiguity of the events being shown. Eventually, most of the uncertainty about characters and their actions gets explained more clearly as the film moves on. The pace also starts to pick up when there is more dialogue. Nicholson plays a journalist, working on a story about conflict and civil war in Africa. In the 1970s, that seems to have been a constant problem, and it doesn't look like the world has changed that much in the intervening years. His character is David Locke, and he is struggling to connect with the fighters in the conflict, but does not seem to be getting anywhere. The metaphor of spinning your wheels is also visualized literally when his Land Rover gets stuck in the sand. Later, in some flashbacks, we see that his homelife is similarly stuck in the mud, and we get a sense that maybe he is looking for a new life. When a fellow resident at his hotel dies, Locke takes over his identity, a man named David Robertson. This changes his life, but maybe not for the better.

Audiences will have to fill in the blanks and suspend a great deal of disbelief, to accept that Nicholson is able to follow through on some of his new identity's plans.  As I was watching, it seemed strange that the man who was so feckless in Africa, was able to bluff his way through with some dangerous types early in the film. It also turns out that his wife, who thinks he is dead, is a lot more determined than he imagined she would ever be. Without credit cards, or cell phone GPS data, she is able to track down Robertson across Europe. Spain must be a small country because they practically trip over one another in the lobby of a hotel, completely by accident. 

Jack plays a disaffected man, seeking a new life, but he is still playing at someone else's life, and getting close to being burned by doing so. I suppose it is karma that brings him together with a similarly disaffected architecture student played by Maria Schneider. They don't quite fully commit to each other, but at times, their mutual presence gives each of them a few moments of pleasure in life that they are seemingly missing the rest of the time. Languid conversations in the car, hotel restaurant, or wherever they happen to be, make up the majority of the story in the second half of the film. There are a few chase scenes, but they are not shot like a thriller, so much as they just move us to the next obstacle. 

All of the film is a set up for a seven minute shot at the end of the movie, where events play out in front of us and behind where we can see. Almost everyone is in a long shot, and it looks to have been done as a single continuous take. One of the things that is very noticeable in the film making, is the absence of  a music score. All the events take place in a vert real world environment, that is not accentuated by movie techniques.    Michelangelo Antonioni is the director, the only other film of his that I know I have seen is "Blow Up" and I think that movie does the same sort of thing. 

One of the reasons that I had not caught up with the film was that for a number of years it was out of circulation. Nicholson himself acquired the home exhibition rights, and it was not until 2005, that the film became available, except for a very limited VHS release in the 80s.  Antonioni was unhappy with several of the cuts he was required to make to bring the film in at a reasonable runtime. The leisurely pace of that opening section might have been a place to trim, and then maybe he could have kept scenes he thought were worthy later in the picture.

I would have preferred to have this film as physical media, but one of the reasons that it is this week's entry on the Throwback Thursday project is that I wanted to include it in my Lambcast Show this coming weekend, and the out of print discs that I could buy, could not be here in time for that show. So this is the first film that I have purchased, rather than simply renting, on a streaming platform. I hope it does not disappear when whoever now controls the video rights, decides to alter the arrangement. I don't know how much I might have appreciated the film in 1975. Probably I would have admired it, but not completely understood it. That is not too dissimilar from my current reaction, but I do think I can make a little more sense of it now that I am older. 

Evil Dead Rise

 

A couple of weeks ago, I went to a screening of Evil Dead 2. I of course had a blast, seeing this original gateway drug for me into this franchise. Ever since I immersed myself in this world back in the early 90s, I have been a fan of every iteration. I went back and saw the original film, I have practically memorized "Army of Darkness", and frankly, I loved the reboot from 2012, which is apparently not a popular opinion among the deadites around the world. Too bad, I stand by my opinion that "Evil Dead 2013" was a terrific horror film. So I was not too worried about this film, even though I was not overly impressed by the trailer.

My hopes were frankly buoyed by the fact that the screenings on Friday were largely sold out. This bodes well for the box office and future visits with the deadites.  I can safely say the film is not a disaster, and there is much horror to enjoy here, but I will caution that it does feel a bit lesser than the movies that came before it. There is no humor in the film, so it will not compare to "ED2" or "Army". "Evil Dead Rise" fits in the pocket with the original film and the reboot. Pretty much this is a straight horror film. The main conceit of the story is to take the film to an urban environment rather than keeping us in the woods. I don't think that is a spoiler, in spite of the fake out we are given at the start of this movie.

As it is a horror film, we must concede that there will be some well worn tropes trotted out to make the movie work. The first of these is the location. The apartment complex shown is supposed to be in Southern California, but it is not one that was built in the last 90 years. There is no sunny open air courtyard, the stairs are located inside of the building's walls rather than in the open. The garage is enclosed rather than being a carport style with ventilation to the out of doors. It feels like a building from NYC or Chicago, that has been planted in SoCal for no particular reason. It is 13 stories high, and oh yea, it is condemned to be taken down in a month. This dilapidated structure is also serviced by an elevator that most of us would not get into on a bet. You can expect a lot of mysterious horror in an elevator like that, and it shows up.

The second trope is that an innocent will launch the threat of the Dead, by ignoring every warning, becoming fascinated by the "Book of the Dead". Somehow, a recording will be played and the forbidden words will release the evil contained within. That's right, someone in a horror film behaves stupidly as a way to get the plot going. If you are a fan of these films, you will also be expecting chainsaws and shotguns. Do not despair, they will show up and they will be used. There is also a lot of blood, a lot. Most of it appears to be a practical effect rather than CGI, but there are shots in the film where in spite of Director Lee Cronin's word, CGI does take over. The make up effects are sound for the most part, but the eyes have to have been done with CGI and that may remind you of too many episodes of "Supernatural".

The cast is game, and I liked the testy relationship of the family members before all hell breaks loose. They are played by Australian actors doing good American accents for the most part. The opening sequence consists of call backs to the original Evil Dead, and then when we get to the climax, there are a whole bunch of references to "ED2: Dead by Dawn" (and a pretty obvious one to "the Shining".). There is a clever moment of name dropping when you see the pizza joint label on the boxes of pizza the kids bring home, but I'm not sure that it will make up for the absence of the Delta 88.  

"Evil Dead Rise" deserves to be seen in a theater, the sound mix is awesome, some of the set pieces just need the space, and it is a wham bang momentum builder that slowly revs up and then launches into fast mode. The idea that this would be a streamer was a terrible one, and with it's success with moviegoers as opposed to movie watchers, there is a good chance we will get to be frightened again down the road. 

I dressed for the theater today

 

Renfield

 

The best thing that "Renfield" has going for it, is the demented, ham fisted performance by Nicolas Cage as Dracula. He is the antagonist in the story and is mostly a secondary lead to Nicholas Hoult as the titular character. Hoult is great too, but it is the make-up heavy visage of the Count that you will remember if you see this film. From the very beginning, when Cage and Hoult are digitally inserted into the original 1931 version of the film, I was hooked into the story, regardless of where it ultimately was going. 

This is decidedly a comedy rather than a horror film. There is not really a sense of dread so much as an expectation of violence. So it is also an action film, although one with an unconventional premise. Renfield has decided to break his codependency with the count, and try to make up for a lot of horrible things that he has done. Making amends is complicated when you are for the most part, a contributor to the longest murder spree in history. The conflicted servant seems like a decent guy, despite enabling a monster for almost a century. That we can relate to the character is the gift of Hoult, who manages to convey a puppy dog like sincerity, even when dragging dead bodies across the floor to his master. 

In trying to flesh out the story, the film makers have borrowed a subplot from the long forgotten, "Innocent Blood" from 1992. That story mixed vampires with mobsters and "Renfield" does the same thing to create more confrontations for Hoult's character and a threat for Dracula to expand on. It also justifies the addition of Awkwafina to the cast, as a smart mouthed cop who both backs up Renfield and pursues him as a suspect. There is also a romantic element to her presence, which is mostly discrete but makes the film more conventional than it needs to be.

Cage gets a mouthful of fangs to emote through, and that is fun to watch. Dracula in the story has been repeatedly stopped by good guys and it doesn't end with his death so much as a fall in fortunes that takes a while to recover from. This feels like it is borrowed from "Interview with the Vampire", as Lestat had to lay in a hole in the ground for a long time before being revived. The decrepit make up effects here are stellar and the incremental improvements are faithful to the story. So the technical elements of the film are top notch.

The action sequences are reminiscent of a thousand recent films in which the fights are staged with wire work, CGI and physics defying visual movements. There are also copious amounts of CGi blood and dismembered body parts. That is the stuff that is used for the extreme humor that a movie such as this is designed to take advantage of. The use of a persons limbs as projectiles that another person will be impaled on is both disturbing and amusing. I suspect that if you are inclined to see this film, those will be the kinds of moments that you are looking for, congratulations, you will find plenty of them.

"Renfield" is not going to set the movie world on fire, but it does entertain in the lane that it is driving in. There are a lot of gruesome laughs to be had and a fun performance from Nic Cage. So I can't think of a reason to skip it, even if in the long run it is not a substantial film. The idea for the concept is what makes this worthwhile, but it is not a very deep idea in the first place. Dwight Frye has nothing to worry about. 

The TSA Trays at the Airport in L.A.

Air (2023)

 

Well you know that you have something solid, when your immediate thought is, "This is the movie I will be comparing everything else to for the rest of the year". It's already April and we have a contender for the best film of 2023. It stars Matt Damon and was directed by Ben Affleck, yea, those guys. They did not write the movie but their presence certainly gives it the vibe of their collaboration from twenty-five years ago. This is a drama, set in 1984 and it focuses on the greatest basketball player of all time with him being a practically invisible character for the story. The plot focuses on a business deal and that hardly sounds like the subject that would make a movie compelling. Also, we know the outcome before the film even starts. So how does this end up working?

First of all, you have intrigue that most of us were unaware of. Getting Michael Jordon to commit to a shoe company that had negligible impact on basketball in the time was an arduous task. The competitors were better prepared and financially able to fulfill the athletes wishes, his agent was aggressively dismissive of Nike's attempt to set up a meeting, and Michaels parents were naturally suspicious of everyone as he is making the leap to the pros. Phil Knight to founder of Nike was a successful shoe innovator but his athletic apparel di not have any cache with the basketball community at the time. What Nike did have was Sonny Vaccaro, a basketball scout for talent in the endorsement industry, who had a deeper understanding of the game than his rivals, and a better instinct about Jordan than anybody outside of his family. 

Damon plays Sonny as a driven gambler with good instincts and a dogged personality.  He is also not an athlete or user of Nike products. He is a middle aged guy working in a rapidly changing environment, but he is never put off by the obstacles in front of him. Damon gives him the conflicting auras of passion and hopelessness.  Fortunately, he is also better able to articulate his vision than any one else. There are two great spots where he has to be persuasive, primarily on the spot. In a sequence where Sonny talks with his friend Basketball coach George Raveling, he learns that Martin Luther King Jr. extemporized the second half of the "I have a Dream Speech", and learned the lessons that you have to read the audience. When we get to the pitch that he makes to the Jordans, he does basically what King did, listen to his audience and speak to their inspirations and aspirations. 

Of course the characters in the film have to be interesting to hold our attention. Vaccaro is a gas, flippantly joking about Nike's dismal reputation in the basketball field, while simultaneously projecting the conviction of his visions. Jason Bateman plays Rob Strasser, the marketing executive at Nike who wants Vaccaro to succeed but doubts his gambler's instincts. His realization that Springsteen's  "Born in the U.S.A." is not quite the world affirming anthem he thought it was is very amusing. The two of them are great exchanging criticism, life lessons and gallows humor. Affleck plays The founder, Phil Knight, who has delusions of eastern insight, moderating his business sense.  Chris Tucker is another executive with a story to tell and a personality to match Sonny when it comes to speaking enthusiastically. Once again, Viola Davis shows off her thespian chops as the gracious but steel minded mother of Michael Jordon. The phone call she has with Sonny, trying to close the deal with a set of unprecedented demands, is another standout sequence in the film.

Those of us who remember those days will recognize the production design and soundtrack of the era. There is great fidelity to the times and the sense of the world. The story is a salute to the vibrancy of an entrepreneurial attitude and the power of capitalism, combined with the right vision and direction. Everting ultimately depended on Vaccaro being right about Jordon, and we know how that turned out. This movie almost does the same thing, we'll see how it all comes out eventually.    

KAMAD Throwback Thursdays 1975: Mitchell

 Throwback Thursday #TBT

Throwback Thursday on the KAMAD site will be a regular occurrence in the next year. As a motivational project, to make sure I am working on something, even in a week where I don't see a new film in a theater, I am going to post on movies from 1975. Along with 1984, this is one of my favorite years for movies and it is full of bittersweet memories as well. 1975 was my Senior Year in High School and my Freshman Year in College. The greatest film of the last 60 years came out in 1975, as well as dozens of great and not so great cinematic endeavors. Most of the films in this weekly series will have been seen in a theater in 1975, but there are several that I only caught up with later. I hope you all enjoy. 

Mitchell

It's going to happen a few times more this year, you will get a Throwback Thursday 1975 post on a film that I have never seen before. In addition to revisiting the films of my youth, this project will plug a few holes in the watchlist I have of 1975 films. I don't remember hearing about this film back when it came out, but over the last few years there have been occasional references to it that encouraged me to toss it on the pile. That is an appropriate euphemism because this movie has thew lowest rating on IMDB for any film I have ever written about myself, a 2.7 out of 10. There are a lot of people who don't like this movie very much. 

The low rating is probably a result of the film being the subject of a Mystery Science Theater 3000 episode back in 1993. The star of Mitchell, Joe Don Baker, took exception to the treatment given to the film by the writers and threatened to "kick their ass". I suspect that fans of this show followed up after another Baker film was mauled by the parody show, by visiting IMDB to kick Baker's ass. The movie is not very good, but it is certainly not deserving of this dismal score. Having never watched MST3K, I am going to stay out of this particular fight and just talk about the movie I watched. That may still be influenced by the TV show because the version of the movie that is available for streaming, seems to be the one edited for the show without the riff track. 

"Mitchell" is a very typical cop movie from the era. A loner detective is doggedly pursing criminals that he refuses to ignore. This cop has integrity but he is also a bit of a slob and definitely not cooperative with his higher ups. There are two crimes being investigated here, one is a self defense killing that Detective Mitchell believes was actually a murder, and then there is the drug case he has been assigned to that no one wants because it involves other agencies and politically connected mafioso types. John Saxon is the sly businessman who used a burglary as cover for shooting a guy for kicks. Martin Balsam is the mid-level crime syndicate guy who doesn't want to cooperate with the family on a drug heist, but also doesn't want Mitchell to nail him. 

If there is a mystery here, it is in how these two cases get connected to one another. I did not think that was clear at all. Eventually it seems that Balsam and Saxon have some business arrangement but it never becomes clear what that is. Their connection does lead to the one cool action sequence in the film, where dune buggy racers are being used to hunt down the cop and try to kill him. It is not a perfect scene but it is believable, unlike the later action scene where Mitchell uses a helicopter, dangling a large compressed gas tank, to attack a yacht and then repel down to the boat for the final confrontation. This must have been the scene that inspired the movie to be selected by the MST3K team, because it is preposterous, despite being a lot of fun.

Linda Evans plays a high priced hooker who shows up at Mitchell's door and takes him to bed, without telling him who is paying her. Their relationship never seems straight, but we are supposed to get the impression that she actually starts to go for him. Baker is not exactly matinee idol material, and his character sleeps on a fold up couch in a crummy apartment, so where the attraction comes from is never credible. She gets paid a lot of money and he will never have any. It is a little amusing that he does bust her over some minor drug possession charges and she keeps showing up anyway. 

Like a lot of 70s films, there are more car chases than needed. The cop also kills a lot of people and there is never a lot of follow up, so it does sometimes feel like we are watching a TV movie rather than a feature, but remember, it is a low budget, drive-n feature, so don't expect much and don't ask too many questions. The one element of the show that has some verisimilitude, is the physical threat from Balsam's character's henchmen. Joe Don Baker is a big dude, so how could someone be intimidating and a real threat to him? By casting Rams Defensive back Merlin Olsen, who was 6'5". Olsen had made three films before this and this was his last feature before he transitioned to television both as commentator and actor. He may not have been much of a thespian, but he looked like he could take Baker, and that's about all that was expected of him. 

Joe Don Baker is one of my favorite character actors of the 1970s. He was in "Junior Bonner", "Walking Tall", "Charlie Varrick", "The Outfit" and "Golden Needles, all right before this film. He continued to work but never had a streak like that again. "Mitchell" seems to be the period at the end of those hard scrabble character parts that I loved so much in that era. There is another 1975 film that he made, "Framed", that I have not seen, so maybe I will catch up with that one later this year as well. 

Evil Dead 2: Dead by Dawn

 

This film was my gateway drug into the "Evil Dead" Franchise. I saw it originally on a VHS copy, but ultimately added the laserdisc to my collection of films.

Who would not want this blood red beauty in among all the other film flotsam that makes up your collection?  I have subsequently seen it on the big screen a couple of times, but it has been a long while and when Alamo Drafthouse decides to throw a watch party, you know I am not going to turn down an invitation. 

"Dead by Dawn", which is the subtitle, is such an odd sequel because it is basically a reboot of the story, not a continuation. With more money and a chance to add some humor, Sam Rami took his horror masterpiece and turned it into his horror/comedy masterpiece. There is still the requisite gore but it is matched by irony, slapstick and farce with this entry. Bruce Campbell is not only the hero, he is the chump. Tossed about like a rag doll, muttering to himself, and screaming at his own hand.   

The movie is loaded with clever shots of the interior and exterior of the isolated cabin in the woods. This is in fact the franchise that basically invented the cabin in the woods horror trope. Maybe "Night of the Living Dead" featured an isolated cabin first, but "The Evil Dead" made it the origin point of the horror rather than the last stand . Evil Dead 2, begins the long history of horror films where attractive young people end up in an isolated spot and have to battle evil. The supernatural kind of evil.

In addition to the wild camera style of the director, there is an audio ambiance about the film that is also fairly distinctive. The deadites in the woods make noises like sick car engines as they converge upon the structure. The walls of the cabin creak and groan, like another character in the story. Inanimate objects that suddenly seem to be alive also make themselves known through sound. Once the chainsaw starts and the shotgun comes out, there is an assault on your audio senses that really adds to the discomfort and horror we are watching. 

While there are jump cut scares, they are usually accompanied by a great makeup or lighting effect, so they are not just getting a scare out of our surprise.  When Ed gets possessed, his sudden transformation is startlingly revealed, but the jump is as much due to the face appliances as his sudden appearance in the frame. We know some views from the cabin looking out are going to be suddenly filled with evil Ash, but we still respond as our minds and our bodies command.

As a "watch party", the audience was given greater freedom than is usually available at an Alamo Screening. Shouting out lines in unison with the characters was encouraged, and we came equipped with foam hand chainsaws, a mini necronomicom and a gummy eyeball to pop in our mouths at the right moment. The theater was packed on a Monday night for this forty year old horror classic. We all thought it was

             "Groovy".

Spinning Gold

 

One of the things I remember vividly from growing up in the 1970s were the record labels of my favorite artists. In the 60s, Capitol Records or Motown would have been the most important to me, but in the 70s, was was enthralled by two bands, each of which was on a rebel, independent label, and both of those labels were lead by bigger than life characters. 

Robert Stigwood led the RSO Label and parodied himself in the movie he backed with his biggest band, "The Bee Gees" in Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band. 

Real fans got the joke because we paid attention to the labels. Casablanca Records was also a player, taking big risks, like releasing four Kiss Solo Albums at once, and sticking with artists that were taking a while to break. "Spinning Gold" is a biographical film of Casablanca's creator, Neil Bogart. His story is as outrageous as any of the biopics of artists that you may have seen in the last few years, but as an executive, he had different reponsibilites and different opportunities to screw it up or hit it out of the park. He did both on a regular basis, in the cocaine fueled music industry located in New York and Hollywood.

The film comes from a son, Timothy Scott Bogart, who wrote the screenplay and directed this movie about his father's career. There are still warts in the story that get told, but the movie has a quality to it that treats the subject with kid gloves anyway. Neil Bogart as played by Broadway star Jeremy Jordan, warns us that the story is all true, at least from the perspective of the person narrating it. This attempts to give license to some big claims about his contribution to the creatives and not just the business part of their successes. Of course there is also a basis for the ability to make those claims because Bogart was not just an executive, he was a musician, performer, producer as well. 

From the opening of the film, the stage based musical styling of the storytelling is apparent. This will probably work as a Broadway Jukebox Musical, more effectively than as a drama for the screen. There are well over a dozen musical sequences, some of which are complete presentations of the work done by artists like Donna Summer, The Isley Brothers, Bill Withers and Kiss. The actors portraying these artists seem to have been chosen for their musical ability rather than their resemblance to the singers and bands. This allows the film to have some credibility as an entertainment but it leaves the drama to the same tropes that you will find in a dozen other films of this ilk. 

Although littered with flashbacks and flash forward segments, the story is still narratively a rags to riches to ruin and then redemption arc. I did like every time the stakes were rising that we got a talley of the debt the label was accumulating. As a Kiss fan, I think the story shifts the rescue of the label a little more to Donna Summer's single than the breakthrough that the band finally achieved with it's live album. Still there are legitimate moments in the film story that come from reality. Kiss did have a financial standoff with Bogart at a critical juncture in the labels history. Bogart did back them, but the relationship was not always a positive one, although in the long run everybody made up, because success solves a lot of wounds.                

The film is also a nice historical look at the music trends of the era. 70's soul,  disco and hard rock are all evolving and this movie attempts to depict some important moments in those movements. Regardless of the accuracy of the story, and it is mostly on target. the craziness in the film never works the way it should. The drama feels manufactured and the staging is inconsistent. Sometimes we get a great musical moment but it is followed by a flat musical sequence or a dramatic moment that is overplayed by the script. 

Overall I can recommend this to fans of the music and the label, but regular movie goers are likely to yawn with a been there, done that attitude. You can enjoy the music, and the label history, but the clips of the real Neil Bogart in the credits talking to Merv Griffin or being interviewed by some other show business program, suggest he was a much more interesting character than was created in this film. There is a Kiss Biopic coming from Netflix down the road, It will be interesting to compare the version of Bogart that they come up with to the one in this film. 

Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves

 

Keep your popcorn full and your soda handy, this will be the Saturday Matinee pleaser that you have been looking for. If Ray Harryhausen were to make a movie based on the game "Dungeons and Dragons", this might have been it. As it is, we are forty years past his prime and the technology has changed, but the sense of adventure and fun is pretty much the same. In terms of style the only real difference is the snarky commentary offered by the characters as they go through the adventure, otherwise, this could be "Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger" or "Jason and the Argonauts". 

From a family perspective, there is little reason to worry about taking your kids to this. It is fantasy scary, but not gory or violent like so many contemporary adventure films. Chris Pine is a noble scoundrel who fits in the mold of Han Solo or Jack Sparrow. He may not always have the right reason for doing the right thing, but it usually balances out in the end. Michelle Rodriguez is the badass warrior that you expect her to be, she is fast and furious in dispatching the soldiers that stand in her way, and you know she will have a heart of gold in the end. Once upon a time Hugh Grant might have had the Chris Pine role, but now, in his maturity, he is regularly playing villains and having a blast doing so. The only thing that parents might be concerned about is that the word "S#@t gets dropped three times. That's it as far as vulgarity. Otherwise I can't account for the PG-13 rating rather than simply PG, except I am sure the producers don't want to position this as a kids film, but it is family friendly. 

If you played the game, maybe you will be in on some of the references and understand the magic items that come into the story. There are also multiple cultures referred to and creatures of all sorts that are both dangerous and friendly. I never played once, but I could follow everything that was going on. Maybe a gamer would be more satisfied, but I doubt it. I also appreciated the humorous references to elves, dwarves and what could be hobbits in the film. Those may be part of the game, or maybe they are quick parody references to LOTR tropes, but they were fun and welcome whenever they popped in. 

Chloe Colman is a young actress who has appeared in three movies I've seen in the last three months. In addition to this film, she is one of the Avatar Children, she travels to ancient Earth in "65", so she has been busy. Justin Smith transplants the same character he played in the last two Jurassic Park movies, into a struggling wizard in this story. Ineffectual characters that over achieve is a recurring theme in this movie. Of course they are balanced out by characters like Rodriguez' Holga and Regé-Jean Page's Xenk, an amalgam of Aragon/Legolas and Gandalf, dolled up as a dreamy warrior. 

This movie is full of ironic escapes, dashing confrontations and conventional conflicts. It is all put together in a fast paced fantasy that should keep you entertained for an afternoon or evening. There is a lot of humor, both in story points and in character development. The effects look good enough for the film, and there are plenty of turns in the story to keep you engaged in spite of the well worn game structure of obstacle, solution, complication, completion and then new obstacle. Does any of it mean anything? No. Does it need to? No, It just needs to keep us entertained for 2 hours and it does so quite well. 

KAMAD Throwback Thursdays 1975 "The Great Waldo Pepper"

 

Throwback Thursday #TBT

Throwback Thursday on the KAMAD site will be a regular occurrence in the next year. As a motivational project, to make sure I am working on something, even in a week where I don't see a new film in a theater, I am going to post on movies from 1975. Along with 1984, this is one of my favorite years for movies and it is full of bittersweet memories as well. 1975 was my Senior Year in High School and my Freshman Year in College. The greatest film of the last 60 years came out in 1975, as well as dozens of great and not so great cinematic endeavors. Most of the films in this weekly series will have been seen in a theater in 1975, but there are several that I only caught up with later. I hope you all enjoy. 

The Great Waldo Pepper

It was almost impossible for me to believe, but it turns out I have not written about this film before. I could have sworn that I'd done a post on it for the original project in 2010. As I looked back and could not find it, I realized that the movie opened in March of that year, which was outside of the parameters' of that original summer project. My vivid memory of seeing the film is something I will discuss at the end of this post, but the movie itself deserves quite a bit of attention. 

This film comes from Writer, Producer, Director, George Roy Hill. His previous film was "The Sting" for which he won the Academy Award. He co-wrote the screenplay with William Goldman, who wrote the screenplay for Hill's earlier film, "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid". Both of those films also featured actor Robert Redford as the star. At this point, Hill was a successful film maker, but critics suggested that he did not have much style. "The Great Waldo Pepper" represents an opportunity to do a film based on a subject he was completely fluent in, flying. Hill was a fan of barnstorming pilots from the 1930s and got his own license to fly when he was sixteen. We was also a flying veteran of  both WWII and Korea. The story idea for this film came from him, and he frequently was flying the planes in the show as he was directing the flying sequences in this movie.

Waldo Pepper is a charismatic pilot, making a living as a barnstorming flyer. He lands his plane in a farm field in Nebraska, and for five dollars, gives local a chance to experience flying themselves. Set in 1926, it is a different world than the one we live in. Aviation is barely twenty years old, WWI is less than a decade in the past, and commercial aviation is on the horizon. Pepper is a combination of Charles Lindbergh and P.T. Barnum, being both a good pilot and a good storyteller. The fact that some of his best stories are not his own comes out pretty early, but it does not undermine the investment that we make in him as a character. In the first part of the film, he bests, gets outed by and partners up with another flyer played by Bo Svenson. This was a break for Svenson who would go on to star in several movies and tv shows after this. He was replacing Paul Newman, who declined Hill's offer to star in this picture along side Redford once more. For the rest of the story Axel Olsson and Waldo Pepper, trade off which of them is going to be most injured. 

As good natured as the relationship between the two pilots becomes, there is some serious tragedy in the story as well.  Death is a real possibility for the stunt flyers and it comes with legal consequences and survivor's guilt. It may be that the reason the film was not more successful, is that it has an aura of sadness that hangs over it, including the conclusion of the film. Hill was able to pull this off with "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid", but it does not quite work here. The tone is elegiac with the era of bi-planes coming to a close and air travel becoming a shared experience. The opening of the film suggests that this will be the way the film ends as well, with a nostalgic and sad look at the chapter we are closing. 

I was hooked from the very beginning of the movie, as the huckstering Waldo Pepper, gets a young boy to be his gas runner on the promise of a free ride. There is a teasing moment when it comes time to pay up, and that shows Waldo can be a bit of a cad but will come through in the end. I love the fact that the kid not only gets the ride, but that he brings his dog with him, that's the kind of childhood most of us would love to remember, even if we did not live through the depression. The following scene, when Waldo enthralls the kids family over dinner with a war story of aerial combat was hypnotically told, with the kind of details that seem like they must have come from first hand experience. We later learn that it wasn't Waldo's own story, but it should have been.

There is a cute sequence where Waldo picks up a girl at a movie by adopting the perspective of the screen character they are watching, and suggesting his actions before they come up on screen. Either Waldo is a hero like the Valentino-like character, or he has seen the movie before and he is exploiting the naivete of the girl. She is played by Susan Sarandon who is making her second appearance on the Throwback Thursday 1975 project, after having starred in "The Rocky Horror Picture Show". I've admitted it before, in my post on "Bull Durham", I have a little crush on Susan Sarandon. She has beautiful big eyes and a voice that a hummingbird could gather nectar from. She is an innocent who gets caught up in the idea of the fame of the aerial act the partners are planning for the flying circus that they join. You can certainly understand how the owner of the circus would encourage her to bring a little sex to the show. On of the reasons that this film may have under-performed on it's initial release could very well be Sarandon's character's story arc.

If there is one very strong element to the film, it is the authenticity of the flying sequences. The actors are really in the planes as they are flying. The stunts are being performed for the camera, they are not special effects. As far as I could see, there was only one process shot used in the flying sequences, it was very brief, and it was to show how the propeller of a plane was eating the tail of another plane. Everything else is authentic. There were not a lot of quick cuts and frantic editing, most of the scenes were shot complete with very little cutting except between perspectives. 

A surprise about the film, and probably not a good one, was the relative lack of music on the score. There are some piano themes, that reflect the era, provided by the great Henry Mancini, but their presence in the film is sparse. George Roy Hill was a music lover who preferred Bach and understood music well. It is puzzling that the emotional beats of the film lack a musical track to set them off. Maybe the goal was to let the flight stunts speak for themselves, but audiences react to music and I think some opportunities are missed. It is puzzling since "The Sting" used the music cues so well and his later film "Slap Shot" is filled with contemporary music prompts. 

Redford is great in the film. He has a natural likability that seems to fit with that era. He worked perfectly for movies set in that time period, including "The Natural" and "The Sting". In fact, it looks to me like Redford liked the era so well because he looks good in the newsboy style hats that were part of his costume. Edward Hermann had appeared in a film with Redford, right before this one, "The Great Gatsby" and here he is an old friend who understands aeronautics but even better, has a sister that is Waldo's sometime lover, played by Margo Kidder, pre Superman. Marking his third appearance in the Thursday Throwback 1975 series is actor Geoffrey Lewis, who has been in "Lucky Lady" and "Smile" so far. This will not be his last film on the project either. He plays Waldo's old Platoon commander and the Civil Aviation Authority official who is forced to crack down on the antics of his old friend. 

I said at the beginning, that I had a memory to share. Let me give you a little trigger warning, it is a tough memory connected to a tragedy in my life.

In April of 1975, my older brother, Chris, died at the age of 24. My parents were of course devastated. My Mother went into a period of almost agoraphobic mourning. She was unwilling to leave the house and she stopped working with my Father in the magic act they had been doing since before they were married. We were all in a pretty fragile state when my father decided we all needed to get out together as a family. "The Great Waldo Pepper" was playing at the Garfield Theater, about a half mile down the street from where we lived. We all went to see it, probably in late May or Early June. My younger brother, Mom , Dad and I all sat together in the dark and did a little healing by spending some time together out of the house. We went across the street to  The Pizza Pub, and had a late dinner after the movie. My Mom was not cured, and we did not stop mourning, but we all drew a collective breath that evening, and we knew we could get on with life. A film can have a powerful effect on people for reasons that may have nothing to do with it's qualities. That is one reason I love the movies and a reason that I remember this film fondly. 

I joined my friend Todd Liebenow for a discussion of this film on his podcast the Forgotten Filmcast.

It's Forever Strictly Personal: A Book Review

 

Well it has happened, my fellow film blogger Eric Friedman has completed a trilogy of books that discuss both movies and his life. You might ask yourself why you should be interested in an autobiography of someone you have never heard of . That is an understandable question, and there are times in the current volume when frankly, it might be a question that you would answer negatively. This seems to me, to be the most personal chapter in Eric's life, and unless you were a close friend you might believe it is a bit voyeuristic to look in on his life. There is a continuing vein of personal pain in some of the stories he writes. A broken heart does not mend easily, and some of the phases that you might go through are not pleasant and may not reflect well on you. The reality is that the author is being honest about his life and when the movies reveal part of his sense of abandonment or clinginess, he does not hesitate to show us the warts and all picture. 

This entry in his series of "Strictly Personal" books, focuses on the films of the 1990s, particularly 92 to 99. In his personal biography, this is the era right after he has finished college and is searching for a job in a field that sounds like it is his fallback career. Eric Friedman has the ambition that a lot of film fans do, of actually being part of the industry, and in his case, doing so by screenwriting. In his entry on "The Player" from 1992, he strongly identifies with the frustrated writer who has been told once too often, "I'll get back to you", never to hear from the person again. This seems like the right film to connect to this frustration because the writer dies, the executive gets away with murder, and the story in the film gets swallowed up by the production machine and does not resemble what was written in the first place. These are the kinds of stories that you will find throughout the book. There are parallels to the author's life in the films that he is writing about. If there is one thing that could have enhanced these chapters when they come up, it would be some details about the pitches Eric made when he had the chance, or maybe some pages from one of the screenplays that he wrote. Those would give us a greater sense of how his career aspirations connected with the industry elements he encountered.  

Just as often however, the focus of Eric's movie stories is not on a potential screenwriting career, but on those personal demons we all face. Sometimes we indulge in a little schadenfreude, when someone who disappoints us, gets disappointed in return. He freely admits that he has carried a torch for someone, long after the relationship was over. It feels at times that he is writing his own version of a Woody Allen screenplay when he repeatedly makes an effort to keep that relationship going, frequently by connecting through a movie. At times he recognizes that the object of affection does not relate to the film the same way he does, but he only sees the red flags later. Twenty-five plus years after some of these events, this journey of self discovery is likely to be more honest and accurate than if it had been written at the time. I did enjoy reading about those moments when a film was an escape from his own thoughts. Richard Kimble, searching for a one armed man becomes a block on his internal monologue, at least for two hours, and I'm sure film fans can relate to that. 

The book is organized around the films of an individual year, and the discussion of the films he has chosen to write about, is often connected to an event in his life. In his previous volume "It's Still Strictly Personal", the dominating life subject was the on again off again marriage of his parents. In this edition of his life, the issues hang on his employment, heartbreak, and especially his love affair with a house at the beach. When his home was essentially denied to him by a coastal erosion problem, he sought an alternative that led to some great summers but not a meaningful relationship. He uses the Kenneth Branagh version of "Hamlet" as a reference point to the turmoil in his life, and the satisfaction of returning to the beach house is punctuated by his adoration of the film. Ironically, a completely different issue intrudes on his happiness, and it gets compounded by betrayal inside of his own family. Damn that Shakespeare was a good writer. 

Like many books that reflect on film, and like way too many reviews I read on line, a large amount of energy is expended on recapping the story for us. Sometimes this is necessary because a film may be esoteric or unfamiliar to the reader. I can get behind a two page reworking of "Lost Highway", a film I saw once and it was strange to begin with. I don't know that as many people will need the recap of "The Matrix" or "Goldeneye". Of the seventy or so films he writes about, I'd seen all except a dozen or so. When the plot or the performances is relevant to a point that he is making about his life, the recaps feel useful. It's probably the fact that some of the films are so familiar to me that makes the occasional long summary feel unnecessary. Of course your mileage may vary, so maybe it won't be an issue for you. 

Be warned that the titles of his book series is honest and upfront disclosure. These are his opinions and he does not hold back. While acknowledging that different people may experience films through their own perspective, his expression of his own opinion is often hyperbolic. I myself find his dismissal of Cuba Gooding Jr. in "Jerry Maguire" to be a bit flip and a bit egocentric on his own opinion, but that's me. I would probably take him to task for his defense of "The Phantom Menace", but not with the venom that he sometimes releases on a poor film that was just sitting there. It is part of his style to go big, and in the right context, that feels appropriate. Readers who have experienced the films he is writing about and have had a different opinion, the climate for an understanding disagreement is not always favorable. 

There are plenty of reasons to self disclose in an interpersonal relationship. You want to gain the trust of your partner, you want to influence them in a decision they are making, or maybe you are simply reciprocating a disclosure they have made. When writing a book, which could be read by people with whom you have no existing relationship, the reasons are going to be different. I think Eric gains a bit of catharsis by sharing a movie experience and how that played out in his life, especially his romantic life. Get the Carens out of your psyche and move on. Writing a book like this can also be an invitation to build on a relationship. So, if Eric wants people to continue to read his blog or other books, screenplays or essays that he generates, having shared his life with us will help us appreciate his other material. Revealing the personal is usually done in a proper time and sequence. Although the films in this book stand alone from the previous decades of his life, the personal stories are more interdependent. As such I would suggest reading "It's Strictly Personal" first, as a way of working up to the intimacy of this volume. The second book is a deeper dive into the personal, so "It's Still Strictly Personal" would be a proper next step. If you start with this third biographical enterprise, be prepared for some frank personal details that might be awkward out of context. I've been reading Eric's blog page for years and both of the earlier books went down smoothly. I was happy to have this third volume, but being prepared probably helped me react to it more positively. 

Eric Friedmann can be proud of his accomplishment with this book. He has faced some of his weaknesses and overcome them with the help of a good movie. He generates some interesting thoughts on favorite directors like Woody Allen, David Lynch and Stanley Kubrick. Without hesitation he speaks his mind on the films and the people in his life. It may not always be comfortable, but it is always interesting, and of course, it is always Personal. 

Eric was a Guest on the Lambcast Two Years ago, and you can hear our conversation at the link below. I hope to talk to him about his third book in the not too distant future. 

Speed Racer (2008)

 

If ever the phrase "eye candy" was appropriate, this would be the movie to apply it to. This is a cotton candy, lollypop version of a cartoon, that assaults you with color and and motion. There are visual gags in every frame and it would be easy to be overwhelmed by the images. If you have seen those notifications about flashing lights and rapid images before some streaming show or movie, none of them compare with the bombardment that you will experience here. 

When this movie arrived in theaters in May of 2008, it should have been a big hit. It came from the Wachowski Brothers, who had made the visually stunning "The Matrix" just a decade before, and it featured state of the art photography with special cameras to create clear images at multiple depths in the frame. There is an innovative style that is clever and very funny, and the film is based on a well known anime that spans decades of fans from the 1960s up to the Cartoon Network of the day. Instead, it tanked at the box office and was critically dismissed as being incoherent and headache inducing. 

The film has however been embraced by the gamers, anime fanboys and computer nerds of the world. It seems to have gained cult status and I would say that it's original style and sense of humor was misunderstood and it has become clear that people are catching on.  The camera is in constant motion in the races, which look like they are filmed as a video game with real people in the place of gaming avatars. The cartoon nature of the film is exaggerated as the colors pop off the screen and the acting of the characters gets more and more outrageous. In addition to the racing sequences, there are fight scenes that feature kung fu, WWF style wrestling and machine guns. Oh Yea, there is a kid with a chimp as a companion, inserting himself in situations that are comic book ridiculous and also a lot of fun. 

The look of the movie could be seen as an evolutionary step in film design. With computers, the early special effects of "Tron" and "The Last Starfighter" have given way to something much more complicated and reflective of imagination rather than replicating real world environments. The color palate of the film feels like a step taken from Warren Beatty's 1990 Dick Tracy, with singular colors contrasted with darker or more complex backgrounds. 

The costumes accentuate those contrasts and make the characters stand out. Also, the images of the characters, especially the villain, scroll across other scenes as they speak, suggesting constant activity, there is rarely a static moment in the film. The layering of scenes on top of one another makes the artifice even more noticeable. Of course gravity, physics and common sense are not part of the movie, it is a cartoon presented as live action, and it looks cartoony. 

There are a bucketload of familiar faces in the film, John Goodman, Christina Ricci, Susan Sarandon, Matthew Fox, and Hirouki Sanada, who I just saw in John Wick 4 and Bullet Train in the last year. Emile Hirsh stars as Speed and he has the right look and a little bit of charm to carry it off. In the late 2010s he was the next big thing. He still works and is in several movies I have blogged about, but he is not as prominent as he once was. Maybe this film's failure to launch cooled off his career a bit. That would be too bad because he was the right fit and the movie deserves to be re-evaluated. 

We went to see this at an Alamo Drafthouse screening, and it would be easy to tell who the audience was that made this film a cult object of affection. Sorry for the stereotypes, but if you get an image in your head of gamers and anime fans, in their 30s, that is probably accurate. Our screening was packed, and 80% of those in attendance looked like they had just put down their controllers and Mountain Dew, for a few minutes to enjoy this film. Everyone was laughing and clapping at the film, we all had a wonderfull time, the eye strain was completely worth it. 

 

John Wick 4

 

Much like the title character, the film of John Wick 4 is bulletproof. No one is going to care that the physics in this film are nearly as wack as those in the "Fast and Furious" franchise. No one is going to care that hundreds of people dancing at a club will ignore multiple murders among them on the dance floor and keep dancing, until it is time for the lead character to make his escape. No one is going to wonder why every law enforcement agency in the world is ignoring the greatest serial killer on a spree in history. We want to see the damage that John Wick can do with a gun, a sword, hell even nunchucks. Let the mayhem commence and pass the popcorn. 

The original John Wick was a revenge story, centered around the theft of a car and the murder of a puppy. It had the advantages of being fresh, bloody and reminding us why we enjoyed Keanu Reeves in the first place. John Wick Chapter Two is a Universe building, action sequel that indulges our fetishes' for cars and guns and lots of hand to hand death.   John Wick Chapter Three Parabellum does the best job of taking characters and giving them something to do, and giving us interesting characters, who are both opposed to Wick and allied with him. John Wick 4 extends the choregraphed mayhem effectively, but falls flat on creating new characters, with one major exception. In my ranking, this would be the weakest entry of the films, but that does not mean it is unworthy, it simply means that you need to keep a little perspective. 

Of the things that this film has going for it, the first would be the incredible stunt team. There are four or five sequences, where the technical level of excellence just keeps climbing. I thought that they had peaked with the scene at the Arc de Triomphe roundabout. The cars move in a ballet of collision and surprise. [Once again, the fact that anyone, much less our lead who has multiple hits, survives one of these moments is irrelevant]. Yet right behind that fantastic sequence is the best fight sequence of the film, and maybe the second best in the series. The stairs at the  Sacré-Cœur’s church are many and high, and John has to get by dozens of assailants, at least twice. Sure there is going to be plenty of CGI enhancement, but it looks so much more like a practical shoot than some other moments in the film, and that sells it even more. 

There are three significant new characters introduced in the film. The Marquis played by Bill Skarsgård, is an effete antagonist who is never very interesting and never feels threatening. Donnie Yen, a martial arts film legend, is on the other hand, compelling in almost every scene he is in, even when he is simply having something to eat while everyone else is getting their asses handed to the. Shamier Anderson is a character called a tracker, but he refers to himself as nobody. "Nobody" as a character idea is ok, but there is so much ambiguity about him that we never care that much about the resolution of his story, his dog on the other hand is awesome. 

The late Lance Reddick gets a nice tribute slide before the film plays, and his character is only in the movie for a brief amount of time. Lawrence Fishburne is in the movie because his character was in two previous movies and that's about it. Hiroyuki Sanada, another martial arts star, plays a part very similar to his character in "Bullet Train". I am always happy to see Clancy Brown in a movie, "Rawhide" is a welcome sight to this Blue Blaze Irregular. If the characters had gotten half the detail that is given to imagined culture of "The Table", the nearly three hours that this film takes up might be a little more reasonable. We have to go down a rabbit hole of crime families, rituals, rivals, and "ancient ways", just to get to the third act. And still most of this is rushed by so there can be another action sequence. John Wick 4 sometimes feels like a better version of "Shoot 'Em Up". It is better, but after a modestly paced openings few minutes, everyone can see the roller coaster highs and drops that are coming. 

I know this sounds like I am down on the film. This is a terrific action piece that will satisfy fans of the series, and I think the story arc is sufficiently closed for us. Keanu continues to generate good will with these movies, it just doesn't feel fresh to me, and after having had three previous servings of the main course, it might have been nice to have a different entrée, rather than just putting a better sauce of the one we have already had. 

TCM Film Festival Dreams 2023

You always have to make some hard choices at a festival, because you can't see everything. Amanda has a different agenda than me on Friday Morning, but otherwise, we will see most of these together. House of Wax may fall by the wayside if Allison can come down to the hotel on Friday night for late dinner. You will get plenty of updates here when the Festival begins.