John Wick has a new dog, and he’s going to murder everyone. What more could you want?
That could honestly be the premise for many action movies, but “John Wick: Chapter 2” sets the pace for a generation of action movies to come. It’s slick, stylized and profound, embracing more thoughtful and polished gun-fu excitement than just raw adrenaline or machismo. Chad Stahelski has doubled down on the sheer surprise and success of the original “John Wick” that seemed to revive Keanu Reeves from the action hero graveyard. Both films will likely live on as action movie classics.
When we last left John Wick (Reeves), he had murdered everyone. Some thugs broke into his home, stole his car and killed his dog. Not smart. The sequel opens with a more conventional Bond movie spree, with Wick tying up the loose ends of the original film. Now he’s back in his home with a new dog, thinking he’s finally retired and out of the game. But news of his return leads an old partner, Santino D’Antonio (Riccardo Scamarcio) to claim payment on a marker John once gave him. John is to kill Santino’s crime lord sister, and when he does, John seeks to prevent Santino from rising to power. Continue reading “John Wick: Chapter 2”
“The Lego Batman Movie” went from “Everything is Awesome” to “Aren’t I Awesome?” The idea that “if you can’t be yourself, be Batman” works great in a meme, but it only sustains about 30 minutes of inanity in this film. The movie’s one punch line is, “I’m Batman.” Now watch me try on a mariachi themed bat suit, or admire my Bat Kayak and Shark Repellent.
I can imagine a sleazy, slick talking huckster pitching the idea for “The Founder” now: Let’s make a movie about a capitalizing asshole who stole an idea from two entrepreneurial brothers, but let’s wrap it in a sunny package and sell it as a story for the whole family! We’ll remind people how hard work and financial loopholes can help you build an empire on the backs of somebody’s namesake, and we’ll call it a crowd-pleaser. Do you want fries with that too?
“I Don’t Feel At Home In This World Anymore” is reading my mind. Not quite a year back my apartment was robbed. Someone walked into my living room while I was asleep one room over and grabbed my phone, wallet and guitar, then walked out. The cops were quick to point out that there was no sign of forced entry, so I must have left my door unlocked that evening. And I also didn’t have renters insurance. Tough luck, be more careful.
The ending of Jordan Peele’s horror-comedy-hybrid “Get Out” seems almost designed to terrify white people. It looks like something out of a Tarantino movie, not to mention a prejudiced housewife’s worst nightmare. You wonder how they got away with it.
There have been plenty of movies that involve the premise, “How far will you go to protect your family/daughter/son/children, etc?” Many of them may even be provocative stories of fatherhood or motherhood. But in some cases, the child in question vanishes from the picture; they’re used only as a plot device to advance the motivations of the character.
Here’s how I know The Edge of Seventeen is destined to be a teenage classic: director Kelly Fremon Craig isn’t trying to be John Hughes or Wes Anderson. She isn’t trying to shove what it’s like to be a millennial today down our throats. Her film is hardly nostalgic for some golden age of culture. No one in her movie is a caricature or a stereotype. And her main character isn’t obscenely quirky and trying to be Juno.
Perhaps no one other than fashion designer Tom Ford (A Single Man) could’ve nailed the beautiful, perverse, bizarre blend of high and low art he attains in Nocturnal Animals. Equal parts alluring and sickening, sexy and bleak, lush and trashy, Ford’s film within a film is deliciously silly pulp, but also stylishly deep and smart in its examination of psychology and privilege.
In just 80 minutes and with absolutely no dialogue at all, the incredibly beautiful animated fable The Red Turtle runs the gamut of the life experience and evokes the presence of God watching over our existence. It’s breathtaking.
It’s hard to be cynical about a movie as crowd pleasing as Ted Melfi’s “Hidden Figures.” This is an underserved story about the African American women who made a major, untold contribution to the space race, and it’s finding an audience.