Tag Archives: Thriller

Yeah

29 May 2023 By in Movies Tags: , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

John Wick Chapter 4

Theaters:  6 March 2023 (London)

Streaming:  23 May 2023

Runtime:  169 minutes

Genre:  Action – Crime – Suspense – Thriller

els:  9.5/10

IMDB:  8.1/10

Rotten Tomatoes Critics:  94/100

Rotten Tomatoes Audience:  93/100

Metacritic Metascore:  78/100

Metacritic User Score:  8.4/10

Awards: —

Directed by: Chad Stahelski 

Written by:  Shay Hatten, Michael Finch, Derek Kolstad (creator of characters)

Music by: Tyler Bates – Joel J. Richard

Cast:  Keanu Reeves – Ian McShane – Donnie Yen – Hiroyuki Sanada – Bill Skarsgard

Film Locations: France – Germany – Japan – Jordan – USA

Budget:  $100 million

Worldwide Box Office:  $430 million

Nobody give me trouble ’cause they know I got it made
I’m bad, I’m nationwide
Well I’m bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, I’m nationwide

ZZ Top – I’m Bad, I’m Nationwide – 1979 – Deguello Album

John Wick wants his freedom back. He skips the nationwide bit, goes worldwide in Chapter 4 against the High Table and he’s bad, sooo bad as in he’s really good, and the movie is good; all is good. Make that better than good. Better than the previous three, which were also really good. Do yourself a favor and watch.

The core team is back for Chapter 4. Chad Stahelski directs again as he did in the first three Wick movies. Stahelski, a former stunt coordinator and stuntman, co-founder of design company 87Eleven, debuted as a director in the first John Wick garnering several Best First Feature awards. He is producing the upcoming Ballerina, a John Wick spinoff set in a time between John Wick Chapter 3 – Parabellum and John Wick Chapter 4.

Shay Hattan returns as screenwriter as he was in Chapter 3. Although only 29 years old or 30 depending on who you ask, Hattan has already established himself as a force in Hollywood. His upcoming writing projects include Ballerina and Rebel Moon, a sci-fi, space action movie.

Tyler Bates and Joel J. Richard served up the music for all four movies. Bates has also worked on the two Guardians of the Galaxy movies, Deadpool 2, Fast and Furious: Hobbs and Shaw. In his past life he wrote, produced, and played guitar for the band Marilyn Manson. Richard’s efforts beyond the Wick movies are mostly confined to movie shorts and tv series which include The Andromeda Strain and Quantico.

Reeves, Reddick, and McShane keep it fun and tite. Reeves is John Wick. It is his role, and it will be a long time before they find someone else to play the role, if ever. Wick will endure — as long as Disney never buys the rights to the franchise.

Just for fun Reeves as John Wick spoke 511 words in the first movie which ran for 101 minutes. Normal speech is 100-130 words per minute. 380 words in the second movie with a duration of 122 minutes. An unknown number in the third movie and 380 words again in Chapter 4 which came in at 169 minutes. If Reeves and Eastwood ever team up, they could do an entire movie without saying a word.

Ian McShane was an excellent choice as the manager of The Continental. British suave, debonair, unflappable but the years are taking their toll. He will be 81 in September of 2023.

Lance Reddick died on 17 March 2023 at the age of sixty. Much too short of a time on this planet, much too soon to leave. RIP.

Fishburne contines in his role as the Bowery King but only in a few quick scenes well into this movie plus the closing scene. His first scene in Chapter 4 where he delivers a ‘I am God’ speech is perplexing. This scene could have been pared down by two thirds without any loss of continuity or meaning.

Long live John Wick. If spinoffs are the answer, I’ll take ’em and it will be good.

Lawyer Stories Three

6 August 2022 By in Books Fiction Tags: , , , , , Leave a comment

Sparring Partners

By John Grisham

Published by Doubleday

Copyright: © 2022

A trilogy of quick read novellas, although the form is closer to that of short stories; few characters with limited development and abrupt, into the concrete wall endings, detailing new tales of old friends and old tales of corrupt and feeble lawyers all wrapped around a common theme of dysfunctional families.

Digressing a bit, estimates for the number of books ever written, from Gilgamesh and the Book of Genesis, 3500-4000 years ago to the present day exceed 100,000,000 to maybe 150,000,000 with a couple million new titles added every year. I insert this tidbit of data into the discussion because I seldom read anything current in fiction for the simple reason that the catalogue of available books is unimaginably vast, hopelessly unreadable quantities with literature quality spanning parsecs of space and ink. Books of fiction that remain in print for 25-30 years and longer commonly have survived because a large audience has voted favorably on the work. Waiting for others to pass judgement relieves me of the painful task choosing good reads.

Returning to Grisham’s Sparring Partners, as I was hopping around Texas spending uneventful nights alone in uninteresting hotels, I went looking for a quick read from a known author in a shop selling mainly current best sellers. From the cover of this book the publishers state that Grisham has an unbroken string of 47 best sellers, a decent record for believing that the Sparring Partners would provide a fair bit of entertainment, possible reading enjoyment. The jury is still out but reverting to reading old books seems prudent.

Played

16 April 2018 By in Movies Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Funeral in BerlinM Funeral 1966

Theaters:  December 1966

Streaming:  August 2001

Rated:  NR

Runtime:  102 minutes

Genre:  Action – Classic – Drama – Mystery – Suspense – Thriller

els:  6.5/10

IMDB:  6.9/10

Amazon:  4.1/5 stars

Rotten Tomatoes Critics:  5.9/10

Rotten Tomatoes Audience:  3.5/5

Metacritic Metascore:  NA/100

Metacritic User Score:  NA/10

Awards:

Directed by:  Guy Hamilton

Written by:  Evan Jones (screenplay), Len Deighton (book)

Music by:  Konrad Elfers

Cast:  Michael Caine, Paul Hubschmid, Oscar Homolka, Eva Renzi

Film Locations:  Germany, UK

Budget:  $

Worldwide Box Office:  $

Harry Palmer (Caine), an expendable British spy, is sent to East Germany to bring in  a Russian intelligence colonel, Stok, (Homolka) who is tired of his no-win job providing security for the Berlin Wall and wants to defect to the west. Palmer, a born cynic and an insolent one at that, doesn’t believe the Russian’s story, doesn’t accept that he is seduced, willingly, by a glamorous model, Steel, (Renzi) because of his charm and great looks, and he doesn’t trust his West German contact, Mr. Smooth and Rich, British agent Johnny Vulkan (Hubschmid).  With no good options Palmer just carries on and sees where his strolls at midnight take him.

Funeral in Berlin, written in 1964, is the 3rd spy novel in Len Deighton’s Unnamed Hero series and 2nd one that was made into a movie starring Caine. This book was preceded by The Ipcress File in 1962 and Horse Under Water in 1963.  The 4th book in series was Billion-Dollar Brain published in 1966.  All the books were made into movies except Horse Under Water which was scheduled to be the 4th movie with Caine but was canceled when Billion-Dollar Brain fared poorly with the critics and the box office.

Deighton, part of the popular triumvirate of British spy novelists along with Ian Fleming and John le Carré, wrote his first spy novel, The Ipcress File while living in Dordogne, France, an expat community of Brits, socialists and communists. All 3 not necessarily being the same person. The book was an instant success and it was quickly adapted into a movie of the same name in 1965 which also met with critical success.  His books were hailed for their realistic detail to bureaucratic bumbling and pettiness, germane to all large departments and agencies the world over.

Evan Jones, born to banana farmers in Jamaica, studied in Jamaica and the U.S., taught in the U.S., then moved to England to write for television and film.  Evan Jones loosely followed Deighton’s book when writing the screenplay.  In the book the defector is a Soviet scientist who has been granted approval to leave by the Russian security guru Colonel Stok.

Guy Hamilton, director of 4 James Bond movies, has a deserved reputation for injecting high-brow humor into his action movies and he does not let his viewers down with his, and Evan Jones’, interpretation of the Funeral in Berlin. The action is low-tech with tight scenes of suspense interspersed with Caine’s acerbic cracks at the establishment. Hamilton’s efforts are better than what Ken Russell accomplished in Billion-Dollar Brain but significantly inferior to Sid Furie’s The Ipcress File.

Michael Caine and Oscar Homolka are brilliant in the movie. They play off each others morbid sense of humor and dial the thriller down to a level of fun and games in a world of known mostly for deadly results.

The L.A. Times reported in 2007 that Howard Hughes in a codeine induced haze watched Funeral in Berlin, in the buff, 3 times in row.  Regardless of Hughes critique this is a good movie, not a great movie, but Michael Caine makes it fun to watch.

Slow Sadness

12 April 2018 By in Movies Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Touch of EvilM Touch 1958

Theaters:  February 1958

Streaming:  October 2000

Rated:  NR

Runtime:  95 minutes

Genre:  Classics – Crime – Drama –  Film Noir – Mystery – Suspense – Thriller

els:  8.5/10

IMDB:  8.1/10

Amazon:  4.4/5 stars

Rotten Tomatoes Critics:  8.9/10

Rotten Tomatoes Audience:  4.2/5

Metacritic Metascore:  NA/100

Metacritic User Score:  NA/10

Awards:

Directed by:  Orson Welles

Written by:  Orson Welles (screenplay), Whit Masterson: aka Robert Wade and Bill Miller (book)

Music by:  Henry Mancini

Cast:  Orson Welles, Charlton Heston, Janet Leigh, Marlene Dietrich, Zsa Zsa Gabor

Film Locations:  US

Budget:  $829,000

Worldwide Box Office:  $2,247,465

A man runs through a parking lot in a small Mexican town along the US border carrying a small package, placing it in the trunk of convertible moments before the owner and driver, Rudy Linnekar (Jeffery Green) and his young girlfriend Zita (Joi Lansing) arrive.  With the bomb ticking in the trunk of the car, Linnekar slowly drives through the town, filled with tourists and locals enjoying the cool night, heading for the nearby US border and home.  As they are driving, they pass the strolling newly married couple of Mike Vargas (Heston), a Mexican drug cop, and his American wife Susie (Leigh). The car crosses the border into the US and explodes.

Captain Quinlan (Welles), an obese cop with a bum leg, walking with the aid of a cane, arrives to take over the investigation of bombing. He quickly surmises that Sanchez (Victor Millan), who is secretly married to Rudy Linnekar’s daughter Marcia (Joanna Cook Moore), is the prime suspect.  Quinlan’s partner Pete Menzies (Joseph Calleia) plants incriminating evidence in Sanchez’s apartment and he is arrested. Vargas knows that the evidence against Sanchez was planted and begins to investigate the bombing and Quinlan, while letting his wife spend her honeymoon alone in some cheap deserted hotel in the dry scrublands of the American southwest.

Welles loosely based the movie’s screenplay on a 1956 Red Badge Mystery serial novel, Badge of Evil by Whit Masterson. The crime novel slowly solves the mystery of who killed Rudy Linnekar by blowing up his house with dynamite. The murder is investigated by police officers Hank Quinlan and Leron McCoy along with an assistant district attorney.  The 2 cops quickly make an arrest of Ernest Farnum, who soon commits suicide, even though incriminating dynamite was found in the apartment of Linnekar’s future son-in-law Delmont Shayon.

Whit Masterson is a pseudonym for 2 authors: Robert Allison “Bob” Wade and H. Bill Miller.  The pair, good friends since the age of 12, wrote more than 30 novels in their lifetimes with at least 6 adapted for movies.  Two other well received movies adapted from their books, in addition to this movie, were the 1942 All Through the Night with Humphrey Bogart, and The Yellow Canary starring Pat Boone.

Orson Welles, director, writer, actor, producer, and occasional illusionist was born an entertainer.  Shakespeare and presenting visual interpretations of the classic books were his passions. His colossal talent spanned the stage, radio, and movies, bequeathing an artistic ensemble to the world that increases in stature every year. In 1938, Welles produced, directed, and acted in Caesar, an updated version of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. The play was a monumental success. In the same year he narrated Mercury Theater’s adaptation of  H. G. Wells’, The War of Worlds, bringing him instant fame or at least infamy. In 1941 Welles, wrote, produced, directed, and acted in his greatest gift to movie goers everywhere: Citizen Kane.  A critical success on opening but financially not too great, held back by the Hearst’s family distaste and advertising boycott of the movie. Its impact on the public, though, has increased over time and by 2017 it was considered the greatest film ever made. He is also considered the 2nd greatest director of all time, with only Hitchcock ranking above him.

A Touch of Evil was Welles’ last Hollywood movie and one of the last in the film-noir genre, at least in the era of Hitchcock, Wilder, and Huston.  It ranks as one of his finest. Filmed in black and white, his use of upward shots, long sequences, and garish, crowded scenes gives the movie a dark and sinister look, foretelling from the beginning an ending of bleakness and sorrow.

Welles and Dietrich steal the show.  They are the 800 pound gorillas among the lesser greats of Heston, Leigh, and Cotton.  Heston’s acting is worthy of his name and this movie but casting him as a Mexican is a head scratcher.  Every time he appears in a scene you have to think about why he is portraying someone he clearly isn’t.

A Touch of Evil expresses the shadows of our lives that we all try to suppress, not by standing in the light but hiding them in our dark lonely places. Quinlan always getting his man regardless the cost, Vargas forsaking his wife to play the good cop, crime bosses sinking lower, night watchmen to afraid to do the right thing.  A tale of crossroads, with the right and left forks leading to the same forlorn scene of heartache and grief.

This is a movie you need to add to your “Must Watch in My Lifetime” list.  It is a great film-noir movie consistently ranking as one of the top 100 movies of all time.

Innocence Lost

8 April 2018 By in Movies Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

The Third Man M Third 1950

Theaters:  September 1949

Streaming:  November 1999

Rated:  NR

Runtime:  93-108 minutes

Genre:  Classic – Crime – Drama – Film Noir – Mystery – Suspense – Thriller

els:  8.5/10

IMDB:  8.2/10

Amazon:  4.2/5 stars

Rotten Tomatoes Critics:  9.3/10

Rotten Tomatoes Audience:  4.3/5

Metacritic Metascore:  NA/100

Metacritic User Score:  NA/10

Awards: 1 Oscar

Directed by:  Carol Reed

Written by:  Graham Greene (screenplay and book)

Music by:  Anton Karas

Cast:  Joseph Cotton, Trevor Howard, Orson Wells, Alida Valli

Film Locations:  Austria, UK

Budget:  $

Worldwide Box Office:  $618,173

Holly Martins (Cotton), an American writer of 3rd rate westerns, broke and drunk more often than not, is invited to post-WWII Vienna by his old friend Harry Limes (Welles). Martins arrives in Vienna in time to witness Limes’ funeral.  Martins begins to ask around about the death of his friend and slowly becomes suspicious that the official account of his death, a traffic accident, is cover for a murder. Martins, an innocent fool, sets out to discover the truth about his friend’s death, stumbling through a city filled with experienced cynics, thugs, and kriminelle.

Nazi Germany annexed Austria, known as Anschluss Oesterreichs, in March 1938 with significant support of the Austrian public.  In 1943 the Allied powers; Britain, France, US, and the USSR, agreed to nullify the German annexation and have it revert back to an independent country at the end of the war.  The Allies, in 1945, divided Austria and Vienna into 4 sectors with each sector controlled by one of the 4 powers.  This arrangement was to last until 1955 when the country agreed to maintain eternal neutrality. The allied powers initially stationed 260,000 troops in the country after 1945, which was entirely paid for by the Austrian people. The cost of the occupation coupled with the war-destroyed industries and poor harvests lead to wide-spread hunger, lack of heating for homes and businesses, and unemployment.  The post-war years of 1945-46, with little in the way of an Austrian police force, saw crime spiral out of control with Soviet troops responsible for 90% of all reported crimes. The underground economy flourished with little or no regulation or oversight.

Graham Greene, considered as the greatest English writer of the 20th century and with the publication of his 1940 novel, The Power and the Glory, cemented his reputation as one of the best writers of his generation. Early in life he joined the communist party and a few years later converted to Catholicism. He initially wrote a short novel for The Third Man, not intending to publish it, but to provide background for the screenplay. The novella was eventually published under the same name as the movie, The Third Man in 1950. The book is not very good, basically because it is in an unfinished state. Ignore the book and watch the movie.  Greene, in 1948, personally researched the book and screenplay by exploring the streets, nightclubs, and sewers of Vienna along with immersing himself into the clandestine black-markets within the city.

MU Zither 2018A pedestrian movie filmed in Vienna would require a musical score relying heavily on orchestral waltzes with dance scenes showing gay Venetians circling the glossy dance floors of resplendent Viennese palaces. Well this movie isn’t pedestrian by any means; no waltzes, no orchestras, and no palaces make an appearance.  The entire score is delivered by a single instrument; the Zither, a multi-stringed, wooden instrument played either in an upright position or laid flat on one’s lap. The movie opens with the Anton Karas playing  an instrumental on a Zither. It is initially foreign and harsh to the ear but as the movie progresses you warm to its sound and melody, eventually succumbing to its hypnotic effects, realizing in the end that no other musical approach or sound would have worked.

Carol Reed took Greene’s ok screenplay and transformed it into the greatest British film ever made.  The black and white scenes of mountainous mounds of Viennese bombed rubble, the back-lit monstrous shadows, tilted horizons that change the normal perspective to an austere strangeness fitting of the black undertones of the movie; effects that add to the downbeat story of innocence lost in the harsh glare of a crooked reality.   The movie begins and ends with a funeral, letting you know that the only happiness you will find in post-war Vienna comes with death: death of desire, death of devotion, death of decency.

The acting in this movie is superb. Joseph Cotton’s innocence, Trevor Howard’s natural stoic acceptance of a world gone bad, Alida Valli’s stubborn attachment to love, but its Orson Welles that stands out as the films larger than life anti-hero.  An auteur with only acting credits in this movie, but he still insists on bringing along his own style, ad-libbing his lines when it suited him, inserting one of the most memorable lines in the movie:

You know what the fellow said – in Italy, for 30 years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace – and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.

It doesn’t really matter that it was the German’s who invented cuckoo clocks and the Swiss were content with being bankers, sans the Hapsburgs, and providing mercenaries to the other European powers’ wars.

This is a movie you need to add to your “Must Watch in My Lifetime” list.

Black Water

1 April 2018 By in Movies Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

ChinatownM Chinatown 1974

Theaters:  June 1974

Streaming:  November 1999

Rated:  R

Runtime:  130 minutes

Genre:  Crime – Drama – Film Noir – Mystery – Suspense – Thriller

els:  8.5/10

IMDB:  8.2/10

Amazon:  4.6/5 stars

Rotten Tomatoes Critics:  9.3/10

Rotten Tomatoes Audience:  4.2/5

Metacritic Metascore:  86/100

Metacritic User Score:  8.9/10

Awards: 1 Academy Award and 4 Golden Globes

Directed by:  Roman Polanski

Written by:  Robert Towne

Music by:  Jerry Goldsmith

Cast:  Jack Nicholson, Faye Dunaway, John Huston

Film Locations:  California, US

Budget:  $6,000,000

Worldwide Box Office:  $29,200,000

J.J. “Jake” Gittes (Nicholson), a former L.A. cop, spends his days and occasional nights as a private investigator, hired mainly to catch cheating spouses in the act of, well, cheating. An elderly woman hires Jake to find the women her adulterous husband, Hollis Mulwray the chief engineer for L.A. Water and Power, is fooling around with.  Jake photographs Mulwray in the embrace of a young woman and the next day the pictures are on the front page of the newspaper. Mulwray is found dead by drowning in a city reservoir the same day. The wife of Mulwray (Dunaway), who it turns out, is not the women who hired Jake the day before, sues him for publishing the pictures. Jake realizes soon enough that he was set up and Mulwray was murdered. He is determined to find out why.

The movie’s story, set in 1937, is a mixed-up, mashed-up telling of the L.A. water wars in the early 1900s. By the end of the 19th century L.A.’s growth was outstripping its water supply and the city fathers, politicians, started looking for alternate sources that would quench the city’s ever-growing thirst.  They found it 250 miles northeast of L.A. in Owens Valley, a high valley nestled between the Sierras to the west and the beginnings of the Basin and Range region to the east, containing a very nice, thirst quenching river.  The voters in L.A. approved 2 bond measures in 1905 and 1907, totaling $26 million dollars, to build a 233 mile long aqueduct from the Owen River to the L.A.’s Lower San Fernando Reservoir,  which was later renamed the Lower Van Normans Reservoir.  The city along with numerous investors negotiated the water rights from the farmers in the valley, some say swindled, and the aqueduct was built by L.A. Power and Water between 1908 and 1913. The project was supervised by William Mulholland (Hollis Mulwray in the movie), who along with the mayor, Fred Eaton, acquired the water rights to the valley by purchasing the land for a fraction they paid to other land owners outside of Owens Valley.  They told the owners that they only wanted a small part of the rights but by 1928 the city owed 90% of the water. The water diversion to L.A. effectively destroyed farming in Owens Valley and by 1924 Owens Lake, which was fed by the river, dried up to a throat-choking plain of dust. That same year farmers in the valley dynamited some of the diversion gates, allowing the water to return to its natural course, at least for a short while. It was an ineffective revolt and by 1927 the farmers were mostly bankrupt and defeated.

Robert Towne wrote the script for Chinatown, winning an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay and a Golden Globe for Best Screenplay, using the L.A. water wars and Raymond Chandler as inspiration.  He originally envisioned the story to be a trilogy, all starring Jack Nicholson.  The second part, The Two Jakes, involving shady oil deals within the city, was directed by and starred Nicholson. The movie did poorly causing everyone to lose interest in the third movie. Roman Polanski had an uncredited part in the Chinatown screenplay, shortening it and changing the ending.

Roman Polanski, celebrated director and rapist, directed Chinatown, winning a Golden Globe for Best Director by creating a beautiful film noir that elevates the genre to heights not seen since the 1941 The Maltese Falcon or the 1958 Touch of Evil.  His homage to the genre even includes 1940 style rolling credits; a charming touch. While his Rosemary’s Baby was horror within your mind, Chinatown was in your face with political cynicism and sexual debauchery.

Jack Nicholson, winner of two Academy awards for Best Actor and nominated for 10 others including Chinatown, provides the glue that takes this picture from good to great. His role of an aggressively suave, former gum-shoe, propelled him to the heights of a true legend in Hollywood. A couple of pointless points: Nicholson was in a serious, sometimes, relationship with John Huston’s daughter, Angelica, during the filming of this movie and he also lived on Mulholland Drive, see above, in Beverly Hills.

This is another movie that should be on your “Must See in My Lifetime” list.  A true masterpiece of writing, directing, music, and acting.

Teutonic Woe

30 March 2018 By in Movies Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

M Dark 2014The Dark Valley

Theaters:  February 2014

Streaming:  January 2015

Rated:  NR

Runtime:  115 minutes

Genre:  Action – Drama – Mystery – Thriller

els:  5.5/10

IMDB:  7.1/10

Amazon:  3.9/5 stars

Rotten Tomatoes Critics:  NR/10

Rotten Tomatoes Audience:  3.6/5

Metacritic Metascore:  NA/100

Metacritic User Score:  NA/10

Awards:

Directed by:  Andreas Prochaska

Written by: Martin Ambrosch and Andreas Prochaska, (screenplay); Thomas Willmann(book)

Music by:  Matthias Weber

Cast:  Sam Riley, Tobias Moretti, Paula Beer

Film Locations:  Val Senales, Trentino-Alto Adige, Italy

Budget:  $ NA

Worldwide Box Office:  $ NA

Near the close of the 19th century Greider (Riley) slowly rides his horse up into a mountain valley in the Alps, a valley of steep slopes and fir trees, shadowed by two grim, coarse looking fellows with rifles strung across their backs. As he enters a small mountain village, he approaches a group of men, the towns overlords, and asks for lodging for the winter.  He is told to go away.  Greider offers gold, lots of it, the rulers have their price and relent, allowing him to stay at the house of an old widow and her soon-to-be married daughter. The town and the stranger have secrets, mean nasty secrets; all which slowly seep out of the frozen, village grounds into the somber, cursed lives of the anti-chosen.

The movie is based on a novel written by the German author Thomas Willmann: Das Finstere Tal.  The movie is a fairly honest representation of the book except Greider in the book is a painter, in the movie he is a photographer.

Andreas Prochaska, director and writer, relatively unknown outside of Austrian-German cinematic circles, has produced a German western which, I believe he did it on purpose and is unashamed of it to boot.  This is genre that I didn’t know existed but once seen comes across exactly as you would expect; a slow, thorough, mechanistic, unemotional progression through a plot until the inevitable brings a conclusion.

This is a dark and grim movie, a movie on Valium.  No one is allowed to smile in this movie. No one is allowed to speak faster than a largo beat of a metronome. No one is happy in this movie and likely they don’t know the meaning of word.  This is, first a drama, secondly a thriller, and finally a movie about perseverance and revenge. What this movie lacks is originality, except the part about it being a German western but that’s closer to original sin than original, and vibrancy.

Bad Luck Explained

24 March 2018 By in Movies Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Accident Man  M Accident 2018

Theaters:  NA

Streaming:  February 2018

Rated:  R

Runtime:  105 minutes

Genre:  Action – Crime – Mystery – Suspense – Thriller

els:  6.0/10

IMDB:  6.1/10

Amazon:  3.8/5 stars

Rotten Tomatoes Critics:  NA/10

Rotten Tomatoes Audience:  3.6/5

Metacritic Metascore:  NA/100

Metacritic User Score:  NA/10

Awards:

Directed by:  Jesse V. Johnson

Written by:  Scott Adkins and Stu Small (screenplay), Pat Mills and Tony Skinner (comic)

Music by:  Sean Murray

Cast:  Scott Adkins, Ray Stevenson, David Paymer, Ashley Greene

Film Locations:  London, England

Budget:  $ NA Low-Budget Indie

Worldwide Box Office:  $ NA

Mike Fallon (Adkins) has a nice life concocting natural death for others.  Fallon is a successful contract killer that goes to great lengths to make sure his murders are not judged murders, just someone having a bad hair day or another wrong place, wrong time accident. Death is a good business so life is good until his ex-girlfriend is murdered. Piecing together the story of her death he begins to realize that his mates in the causality business may have had a hand in her demise. Fallon sets out to even the score with judo chops and bullets flying non-stop.

The movie is based on a series of comics by Pat Mills and Tony Skinner, published in 1991 in the magazine, Toxic!  The series was collected into a graphic novel, The Complete Accident Man in 2014 by Titan.

Jesse V. Johnson, stuntman in the 2012 The Amazing Spider-Man and director and writer of the incredibly bad The Last Sentinel, puts together a story and cast to produce a decent action film with few plot holes but at the same time producing nothing spectacular. Everything is a bit off.  Great martial arts scenes but it doesn’t flow together or congeal into an exciting whole.

In the end this movie is all Scott Adkins.  He produces, he writes, he acts, he fights.  It all works to a certain degree but fails to grab you, or emotionally tie you to the film.  I wouldn’t mind a sequel but hopefully with a larger budget to ratchet everything up a notch. An ok movie with some original scenes but nothing terribly memorable.

Into the Woods

16 March 2018 By in Movies Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Braven M Braven 2018

Theaters:  February 2018

Streaming:  February 2018

Rated:  R

Runtime:  93-94 minutes

Genre:  Action – Adventure – Drama – Thriller

els:  6.0/10

IMDB:  6.4/10

Amazon:  3.5/5 stars

Rotten Tomatoes Critics: 5.8/10

Rotten Tomatoes Audience:  4.0/5

Metacritic Metascore:  60/100

Metacritic User Score:  7.8/10

Awards: NA

Directed by: Lin Oeding

Written by: Mike Nilon, Thomas Pa’a Sibbett

Music by:  NA

Cast: Jason Momoa, Garrett Dillahunt, Stephan Lang, Zahn McClarnon, Jill Wagner, Sasha Rossof

Film Locations: Newfoundland, Canada

Budget: $NA Low-Budget Indie

Worldwide Box Office: $125,000

Joe Braven (Momoa) owns and operates a logging company from a small town in the forests of Canada, living a quiet life with his wife Stephanie (Wagner), their young daughter Charlotte (Rossof), and Joe’s father Linden (Lang), who suffers from dementia. One of Joe’s log haulers, Weston (Brendan Fletcher), agrees to transport drugs hidden in a hollowed out log for a ruthless syndicate of drug dealers.  During transport of the logs, and drugs, on a dark and snowy night, Weston crashes the truck, spilling the logs all over the deserted mountain road.  They move the drugs to Joe’s nearby, empty cabin before the sheriff shows up to assist with the truck accident.

Joe and his wife are having an increasingly difficult time caring for Linden and the doctors suggest they consider alternatives for his care. Stephanie suggests that Joe take Linden up to the cabin for a one-on-one discussion about possible elder-care options.  As they ride up to the cabin, Charlotte sneaks along as a stowaway.  After arriving at the cabin Joe and Linden discover the drugs, and Charlotte, both unexpected.  They immediately realize that whoever planted the drugs will be coming back for them and because of Charlotte they need to urgently leave the area. In the meantime the drug syndicate is rapidly converging on the cabin to retrieve the drugs and eliminate any witnesses. The action quickly escalates to a no-holds-barred display of death and destruction by all means available.

This is Lin Oeding’s first movie directing and he does an admirable job putting together a coherent, compelling story on a limited budget.  He initially takes a long, slow, meandering ride developing the plot that has the audience tapping their toes and checking their watches, waiting for a movie that is billed as an action movie to produce some action. When Oeding finally gets all the preliminaries out-of-the-way, he injects an overdose of adrenaline into the scenes, producing a wild ride of novel, engaging, and thrilling action against a contrasting backdrop of snow-covered mountain beauty. The story is familiar but the execution is pleasantly different.  As a freshman effort, Oeding gets the job done with few complaints from the viewers but it’s his biography that generates as much interest, for me at least, as the movie.  He’s a martial arts fighter with an impressive record of 16-1-2, has performed stunts in the 2010 Inception, was the stunt coordinator for the 2014 The Equalizer, and the 2015 Straight outta Compton, performed fight scenes with just about everyone including Dwayne Johnson, Tom Cruise, and Vin Diesel, competed in bare-knuckle, pay-per-view fighting and is a 1989 Nintendo’s semi-finalist world champion as well as a world-class Tetris player.  What does this guy do to relax?

Mike Nilon and Thomas Pa’a Sibbett have put together a screenplay that has few holes and lots of original action.  My only complaint is when Charlotte is rescued by the local sheriff they immediately drive her back to the very hot kill-zone. This is Nilon’s first attempt at writing and in the past, has used his energy in producing movies such as the 2014 Left Behind fantasy drama. This is also Sibbett’s first writing credit, known previously for consulting on the 2017 short, I am Because You Are.

Joseph Jason Namakaeha Momoa of the 10th season Baywatch fame, provides a believable character in Joe Braven, executing the sparse dialogue but intense action scenes with a smoothness that belies his hulking mass.  With Jason as the proletarian workhorse, Garrett Dillahunt plays the impatient thoroughbred, chomping to complete the task and move on.  He nails the psychopath persona with egotistical aplomb and a general’s overly assured command of his inferiors.

Braven is an easy movie to settle into, once you get past the opening drudgery. It provides entertainment without any preachy philosophy getting in the way.  The movie is well worth the 90 plus minutes.  Grab the popcorn and enjoy.

Boiler Maker Redemption

20 February 2018 By in Movies Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Small Town Crime (Theaters-NA; Streaming-January 2018) Rated: R  —  Runtime: 91-92 M Small Town 2018minutes

Genre: Crime-Drama-Mystery-Suspense-Thriller

els – 7.0/10

IMDB – 6.6/10

Amazon – 4.0/5 stars

Rotten Tomatoes Critics – 7.0/10

Rotten Tomatoes Audience – 3.9/5

Metacritic Metascore – 68/100

Metacritic User Score – NA/10

Awards: None

Directed by: Eshom Nelms, Ian Nelms

Written by: Eshom Nelms, Ian Nelms

Music by: Chris Westlake

Cast: John Hawkes, Octavia Spencer, Robert Forster, Anthony Anderson

Film Locations:  Utah

Budget: $NA

Worldwide Box Office: $NA

Mike Kendall (John Hawkes) is a big-time drunk and a small-town ex-cop.  A small-town ex-cop because he is a big-time drunk. Riding shotgun, too drunk to drive, with his uniformed partner; occurring immediately before he becomes an ex-cop, in the wee hours of night, they pull over a car and the driver shoots and kills Mike’s partner.  Mike, because he was drunk, is thrown off the force and he sinks further into the bottle but truly believing the police will forgive, forget and hire him back.

Coming around from his nightly bender, Mike finds a badly bloodied girl by the side of the road. He rushes her to the hospital but she soon dies and the death is ruled a homicide.  Seeking redemption, Mike sets out to solve the murder, dragging his family, bartenders, hookers, pimps, grandfathers, and assorted none-too friendly cops along for his burlesque, but borderline professional investigation, into multiple gruesome murders.

The Nelms brothers have woven a fateful crime story worthy of the Cohen brothers’ The Big Lebowski or Fargo. Less comedic than Lebowski and less dramatic than Fargo but all three display the same irreverent contempt for criminals and their slapdash, albeit, serious and consequential, escapades.  The Nelms’ writing and directing are reminiscent of Dragnet’s Friday, just the facts — ma’am.  Watching the movie you wish they would develop some of the more interesting sub-plot lines but in the end the movie does just fine without the added knowledge or clutter.

The acting is superb.  John Hawks is masterful in delivery but he really pulls you in and along with his bumbling style and looks.  His appearance and his face are one with a character that has been on a multi-year drunk.  Gaunt and not too pretty he somehow succeeds in getting you to cheer for him no matter how much his bum nature comes into full gnarly view.

A fun movie, not too serious but captivating just the same.  A worthy addition to pulp fiction and film noir. Escapism with a style all its own.

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