Nobody (2021)

  I have been waiting to see this movie since it was announced.  I finally convinced Tyler that he wanted to watch it too.  

Hutch Mansell (Bob Odenkirk) is the victim of a home invasion.  Rather than be macho, he allows the pair of thieves to leave, earning him the disgust of his teenaged son (Gage Munroe), his douchebag neighbor (Paul Essiembre), his father-in-law (Micheal Ironsides), and condescending brother-in-law (Billy MacLellan).  Hutch does feel the sting and when his daughter (Paisley Cadorath) announces that the thieves have stolen her pink kitty-cat bracelet, Hutch has had enough.  He tracks them down and finds... that they are just ordinary desperate people who don't deserve to die (and also they don't have the bracelet).    But the carload of drunk Russians who board his bus and harass a random girl definitely deserve some vented rage!  Oh, but one Russian has a brother, Yulien (Alexey Serebryakov), who must now restore honor to the family by sending wave after wave of goons to take out the seemingly mild-mannered Hutch.  

Now, this is a John Wick clone!  But slightly weaker since Hutch was 100% spoiling for a fight, not tragically raining hellfire despite deep-seated reluctance.  He went looking for trouble and he fucking found it.  And we absolutely should unpack the toxic masculinity depicted here and what it says about men in our society because there is a lot.  But also, this is a really fun movie that answers the question "Can Christopher Lloyd still be adorably badass in his 90s?" with a resounding YES.  Plus, where else are you going to find Doc Brown chilling with RZA from Wu-Tang Clan?  Nowhere.  Problematic?  Sure.  Also fun?  Yes.  These are not mutually exclusive.  I don't know that it's stylish enough to carry a Wick-like franchise, but I'm not mad at it.  It's currently only streaming for an additional fee but I'm sure it'll come to one of the services in the next couple of months.

The Birdcage (1996)

Like I said, yesterday was a busy day.  I got to introduce two of my friends to two of my favorite horror movies: The Babadook and Hereditary.  It is one of my keenest joys in life to pick out horror movies for people who don't like/haven't been exposed to horror.  I'm pleased to say it was a total success.  Not only did they let me expose them to four hours of shrieking dread, they even stuck around and watched The Birdcage afterwards.  And that's what this post is for!  

Armand (Robin Williams) and Albert (Nathan Lane) have a comfortable, if familiar, life as the owner and star of South Beach's hottest gay club.  Then, Armand's son Val (Dan Futterman) shows up unexpectedly and announces he's engaged to the daughter (Calista Flockhart) of an extremely conservative "Family Values" senator (Gene Hackman).  The senator is suffering some blowback after his campaign partner is found dead in arms of an underaged prostitute, and is looking to capitalize on his daughter's Traditional White Wedding as a way to get back into the public's good graces.  Val asks his father to fake being in a straight relationship with his birth mother (Christine Baranski) long enough to impress the senator.  Hijinks ensue.

Asking someone to hide a huge part of their lives is an objectively shitty thing to do.  It doesn't matter why you're asking.  Val is a spoiled 20-year-old frat boy who causes a lot of unnecessary drama and heartache for everyone who loves him.  He is the antagonist of this film, not Senator Keeley.  The senator is just kind of an asshole.  

Robin Williams is always phenomenal.  Nathan Lane should have won an Oscar.  The cast did win a SAG award, which is fine I guess.  Anyway, this movie is damn near 30 years old and it still holds up remarkably well.  Which is depressing in its own way.  Whatever, it's a classic.  We're not going to think too hard about it this early in the day.

The Most Dangerous Man in America (2009)

 Boy, it was a week of anti-government movies.  First, Fred Hampton, and now Daniel Ellsberg.  Of those two names, Hampton was more familiar to me.  I vaguely knew what the Pentagon Papers were because of trailers for The Post, which I still haven't seen (currently #95 on my list!).

In the 1960s, Daniel Ellsberg worked as a civilian in the Pentagon, spearheading the strategic involvement of the U.S. in Vietnam.  Nominally, this was in response to the Gulf of Tonkin incident where North Vietnamese troops fired torpedos at a U.S. Navy ship.  Ellsberg was one of the very few people to know that this was a fabrication.  He grew more and more uncomfortable watching President Johnson and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara lie outright to the American people while escalating a war halfway around the globe.  The bombing got worse under Nixon.  Ellsberg decided to do something about it.  Secretly, he started making photocopies of the 7000 page report McNamara had commissioned from the RAND Corp that detailed every lie being told, and then began leaking it to the press.

This is as far as I got yesterday before I had to go Be Social, which took up the rest of my day and evening.  More on that in the next post.

I had something in mind about how I was going to talk about whistleblowers and defining what is "good" for the country as a whole, but now I've forgotten what I was going to say.  Stealing government papers (generally) = bad.  Sending people to die in a foreign war for some mythical democracy brownie points = way worse.  Stealing papers detailing said governmental lies and distributing them to the public to raise awareness of how the government is screwing its people = not bad, pretty fucking important actually.  Hope that clears things up.

Judas and the Black Messiah (2021)

  I watched this late on Monday in an effort to get it in last week.  We can see how that worked out.  

Bill O'Neal (LaKeith Stanfield) is a petty car thief with no ties to any gangs or political groups in Chicago.  This makes him perfect as an undercover narc for the FBI to infiltrate the local Black Panthers and look for evidence to sabotage Chairman Fred Hampton (Daniel Kaluuya).  Bill performs his duty even as the lines begin to blur between right and wrong.

This was one of the big ones from last year's (this year's?) Oscars that I missed, but I knew if I waited, it would come back on HBO Max.  I wish I could say that I liked it more.  It's an important story and needed to be told.  It just felt very lean, like there was more and they chose not to tell it.  Bill is very one-note; we don't get to see a lot of character from him until the very end.  A shame, because Stanfield is a wonderfully subtle actor and could have done a lot more if he'd been given the opportunity.

Kaluuya absolutely deserved that Oscar.  He was magnetic as Hampton and easily the best part of the movie.  Dominique Fishback also deserves a shout-out for her quiet but powerful Deborah.  Excellent work. 

It's currently streaming on HBO Max and it is worth watching if you don't know anything about Fred Hampton or the Black Panthers.  

Gunpowder Milkshake (2021)

  Tyler picked this one.  He loves Karen Gillan.

After a hit gone bad, assassin Sam (Karen Gillan) must protect an orphaned girl (Chloe Coleman) while fending off a legion of other assassins.  She is aided by the mother that abandoned her (Lena Headey) and three kickass librarians (Carla Gugino, Angela Bassett, and Michelle Yeoh).

People have been calling this a John Wick clone and I would have to disagree.  I'm happy people loved the Wick series.  I love the Wick series.  But shoot-em-up action films existed before them and will continue to exist after them.  If anything, Gunpowder Milkshake reminded me of Kill Bill more than John Wick.  

Now, the real question: should you watch this movie?  Do you like shoot-em-ups?  Do you like seeing angry women take down rooms full of generic dudes?  Are you not overburdened by squeamishness?  Do you want to see Angela Bassett smash people's faces in with a pair of hammers?  If the answer to one or more of those questions is YES, please feel free to see this movie.  I found it to be a fun, fast adventure with a good soundtrack that didn't overstay its welcome.  It's currently streaming on Netflix.

Tomorrow When the War Began (2010)

  It's Red Dawn, but Australian.  That's it.  That's the movie.

Eight teens take a camping trip in the Outback before graduating from high school and accidentally miss the invasion of their town.  With very little resources and no help incoming, the eight kids must band together to defend themselves and free everyone they know.

Okay, but is it a good Red Dawn knock-off?  That's for you to say.  It doesn't feel as interminable as the original but it definitely smacks of jingoistic fearmongering.  There's something really gross about "unspecified foreigners are coming to take your way of life and only violence can save you" especially coming from a country that itself invaded and tried to eradicate the native population, but I'm not a think tank member with a PoliSci degree so what do I know?

Still think they're missing out on making it a comedy, but it's currently streaming on Tubi.

Persepolis (2007)

Tried to watch the rom-com This Means War, where Tom Hardy and Chris Pine try to out-do each other in wooing Reese Witherspoon.  I made it 30 minutes and DNF'd.  Life is too short to watch movies that make me want to claw out my eyes.  No, I'm not going to finish it just to hate on it.  Sometimes I can, but not this time.  Into the scrap heap with it.

  This was much more my speed.  

Marjane (Chiara Mastroianni) is a bright, happy seven-year-old growing up in Tehran.  She likes pop music and Bruce Lee.  Her Uncle Anoush (François Jerosme) is finally released from the Shah's prison and is eagerly anticipating a revolution.  But when it comes, nothing will ever be the same.  Marjane watches as religious extremism takes over her country.  By the time she is thirteen, she must be sent away to school in Vienna for her own safety.  She is adrift from friends, family, any support structure, an outcast trying to learn what it is to be an adult.  

This autobiographical cartoon is stark and poignant, but also funny and sweet.  It focuses less on the geopolitical impact of the Iranian Revolution than on the human cost, which is extraordinarily high.  I'm not big on coming-of-age tales and I could not have cared less about the details of every failed relationship she had, but this film is important enough to overlook these trivialities.  It's currently streaming on the Criterion Channel and would make a decent double feature with Argo.

Black Widow (2021)

  Spoiler free, not that there were any huge revelations to be had.  I mean, we all saw Endgame.

After Civil War, Natasha Romanoff (Scarlett Johansson) is a fugitive.  She is hiding out in Norway when she is attacked by a mysterious, skull-masked assassin, later called Taskmaster (Andy Lister*).  Taskmaster isn't after the Black Widow, however, but a box of vials sent to her by her estranged sister Yelena (Florence Pugh).  Natasha returns to Budapest to find her sister, which leads her down a dark path into her past.

This movie was long overdue, made even more so by delays from Covid.  It was never going to live up to all the hype, but I'm happy to report that it's still a really fun movie.  A lot of reviews are rightfully praising Pugh for scene-stealing but a lot of that is because the character of Natasha Romanoff was written to be extremely serious.  Johansson has to play the straight man for the runtime of her movie, barely cracking a smile, while Pugh, Rachel Wiesz, and David Harbour (in particular) get to be hilarious.  It works, but it does feel like she got further short-changed.  

This movie was going to be my litmus test for whether or not I felt comfortable going to a theater yet.  I considered it.  I'm fully vaccinated, I've been in stores again, restaurants, and work.  But I also just didn't feel like leaving my house on a Friday night.  So I watched the premiere of a Marvel movie at home on my couch on Disney+.  I do not like paying $30 for what is essentially a movie rental, but I invited a few friends over and then it was basically like what I would have paid for theater tickets.  I'm not saying it's going to be my new go-to, or that this is the death of theaters, but it was super nice to sit on my couch with friends and watch a brand-new movie.  There is no price to high to be able to fast-forward through the credits to get to the post- scene.

*Okay, so the Taskmaster reveal could conceivably be a spoiler, so I've left it with the head stunt double, who probably did the majority of the screen work since the character is masked like 95% of the movie.

All Superheroes Must Die (2011)

Bonus post for the holiday weekend!  It's Saw for superheroes.  Cool concept, poor execution.

Four superheroes, Charge (Jason Trost), Cutthroat (Lucas Till), Shadow (Sophie Merkley), and The Wall (Lee Valmassy) wake up in an unfamiliar town.  Their powers are gone and they've clearly had their ass kicked.  It's discovered that their old nemesis Rickshaw (James Remar) has kidnapped them and rigged the town full of innocent civilians to blow if they don't participate in his little games, designed to murder them one by one.  The four not-so-super-anymore heroes have to save the townspeople while also dealing with their own baggage about working together again.

Jason Trost wrote, directed, and starred in this film and whoo boy is that obvious from the first minute.  His is the only superhero that has a fight scene, a love scene, a confrontation with the villain, and any semblance of competence.  Lucas Till is the name and/or face you'll recognize who clearly was trying to help his buddy out.  The budget was estimated around $20,000 so James Remar is probably in this pro bono.  The low-fi aspects of it aren't terrible and in the right hands, this could have been the next Chronicle.  But Trost cannot write a single character other than himself and it lets the entire film down.  I ended up fast forwarding in ten second chunks just to get through the last half hour.  Avoid.

Tangerines (2013)

  This is a war movie so it's depressing AF.  You've been warned.

Ivo (Lembik Ulfsak) and Margus (Elmo Nüganen) are tangerine farmers?  orchardists?  whatever, they grow tangerines but the harvest is being impacted by the sudden civil war between Georgians and Abkhazians.  Ivo pulls two men, one Georgian, one Chechen mercenary fighting for the Abkhazians from the wreckage of a firefight and nurses them both back to health, hoping to mend more than just broken bones and lacerations.

Tangerines actually comes really close to experiencing what it's like to be in a war.  There is a lot of really boring sameness and then suddenly an RPG gets fired at your car and now you're being shot at.  It's shitty enough when you're a soldier, but I can't imagine how much worse it is for a regular person just trying to pick some goddamn tangerines.

It's not a bad film but it is slow-paced and like I said, depressing.  Your mileage may vary.  It's currently streaming on Tubi and on Kanopy.

Too Late to Die Young (2018)

  Teenagers are the worst creatures on the planet.  Right under executives and fire ants.  

Sixteen-year-old Sofia (Demian Hernández) dreams of an exciting life, not living with her dad in some boring commune with all his like-minded friends.  She wants to move in with her mom, a touring musician, smoke cigarettes, and date older boys.  

This was very clearly meant to capture a moment in Chilean history, specifically being a teenager in 1990. This is not something I can relate to, but that's okay.  My main issue with this film is that Sofia is unlikeable.  Which, again, most teenagers are.  It is an insufferable time for them as well as the people around them.  Maybe if you related to the character, this could be funny or charming, but not for me.  It's currently streaming on the Criterion Channel.

 

Silence (2016)

  I want to state for the record that I am not anti-religion, nor am I anti-Catholic.  I frequently enjoy Martin Scorsese movies and this would make a good companion piece to The Last Temptation of Christ.  But I cannot ignore the elephant in the room here.

Two Portuguese priests (Andrew Garfield and Adam Driver) are dismayed to hear reports that their mentor (Liam Neeson) has apostatized (that means turned his back on the faith, as opposed to a heretic or non-believer) during a wave of Christian persecution in Japan.  They decide to smuggle themselves into the country and find the truth.

Now.  All systems that exploit workers to benefit a ruling class are bad.  Feudalism exploits peasants and keeps them in poverty with no hope of escape.  But the sheer, bald-faced irony of the Catholics complaining about persecution and torture for their beliefs after the centuries they spent persecuting and torturing others for not believing was a little rich for me.  This is set in 1640.  What was happening in Europe in 1640?  Well, there were about five wars going on, colonization of the Americas was kicking off which included genocide and forced conversion of indigenous tribes, England was gearing up for a full Protestant Revolution with accompanying crackdowns against minority groups like Quakers and Baptists, Galileo was under house arrest for saying the Earth revolved around the Sun, Jews still weren't welcome anywhere, and witch-hunts were commonplace affairs.  The Roman Inquisition lasted until 1848.  Now tell me again how the Japanese were mean to you.

One of the really nice things the movie does is show that you can beat a man, you can break a man, but you can never really know what's in his heart.  There are some beautiful meditations on the nature of faith in the face of trial, sophistry on messages, and of course gorgeous cinematography.  It's currently streaming on Hulu, if that's your bag.