Category: Home Video

The Paladin already did a great review on John Wick, but since this my site I figure I would let you know what I thought about it.  I know that Keanu Reeves has been busy murdering his career lately, but he finally made the kind of movie that he was born to be in.  An old school action movie with a very green/blue tint that lets him murder a bunch of people.  It at least gives the poor career a brake.

When I say old school, I mean old school.  This movie follows every action movie trope by the letter: John Wick is an amazing assassin who gave it all up for a girl; He has to get back in the game because a mob boss’ son is an idiot who screws with him; There are cool secret assassin hangouts that have ‘rules’; Clubs are places shootouts happen, and women of course are not to be trusted.

I think it works so well because it slavishly devotes itself to those tropes.  Instead of trying to be something new, they did something old, but just really well.  The only thing they changed was that the mob boss’ son killed Wick’s dog and not his wife because … well … the wife was already dead.  She was pre-killed, died from an illness of some sort, and the dog was a posthumous gift from her.  So it was still all about her.  We just didn’t have to see her get needlessly tortured and killed.  I guess that is better?

All the tropes and story clichés would be pointless if the stunt work and action was not good, and it is pretty darn great.  I am not sure that Wick reloads his gun enough, but overall it is pretty top notch.  Solid movie-fu, and over the top gun play make this movie fun to watch.  You can tell the directors, Chad Stahelski and David Leitch, are stunt workers because they framed all the action perfectly.  No shaky blurry action cam here.  You get to see everything.

The actors all play their one dimensional characters well.  That is the bonus of using clichéd writing.  We know how these characters are supposed to act, and the cast delivers on those roles.  With the likes of Keanu Reeves, Willem Dafoe, Michael Nyqvist, and Dean Winters there was never a doubt they knew what they were doing.

John Wick will not win any awards, unless it is a Taurus World Stunt Award (it is up for Best Fight and Best Stunt Coordination), but that doesn’t mean it isn’t a solid movie with some great action.  If you want to see a lot of people get the crap beaten out of them this is a good film to watch.  If you want a story that moves you, not so much.

There has been a lot of buzz lately about the HBO documentary Going Clear by Alex Gibney.  It is based off the book with the same title by Lawrence Wright.  I have watched quite a few horror films in my day, but this documentary about a “religion” truly terrified me.  There is a reason it is one of 2015’s must watch films.

The film presents a brief outline of how Scientology came in to existence, and some background info about its founder L. Ron Hubbard, but the real meaty parts of this film are the first hand accounts of its former members.  Their descriptions of abuse and harassment are gripping and horrifying.  It is hard to believe that these people didn’t leave earlier, but it seems once the church has its grips in you it is hard to get out.

I used to think that Scientology was simply full of harmless weirdoes, but now I know that it is large and dangerous organization that wants to exploit it members for every penny they have, and if they put up any resistance, they are abused and harassed in to submission.  Meanwhile they keep a few key celebrities very happy, so they can put an attractive front on the church.  That way outside people don’t dig too deep, they just see Tom Cruise.  It should be mentioned that the Church of Scientology refutes all this, but it kind of has to.

Now I have to give Alex Gibney a lot of credit, if this movie was purely an information dump it wouldn’t be as good, so his direction keeps this film moving humming along.  It doesn’t drag at all, and that is hard to pull off for a documentary.  Though I am sure that his job was made easier with all the research done by Lawrence Wright.  Wright says in the film that he did not start looking in to Scientology to do an exposé at first, but that he just wanted to see what Scientology was all about.  Once he started to hear the stories and find the truth, he was just blown away.

I don’t watch a lot of documentaries, but movies like Going Clear remind that I should.  The good ones inform and entertain like no other medium can.  I hope this film can loosen the grip that Scientology has on it members, so they can get out of the church’s exploitive system.  Going Clear should be on your short list of films to watch this year.

John Wick. In the post-Matrix Keanu Reeves era it is perhaps his best film. The story is simple, man loses his wife, wife gives man a dog, punk kills dog, man cuts a swath of death and destruction across New York avenging his dog. The concept itself it pretty funny, but in the little time we have with the dog the directors, Chad Stahelski and David Leitch, make you the audience actually love the dog too and you wouldn’t mind taking a baseball bat to the entitle Iosef (Alfie Allen).

More than the excellently scripted fight scenes, dialog that plays to Keanu “Whoa!” Reeve’s strengths, and a plethora of exceptional character actors from Ian McShane to John Leguizamo, the thing that really stood out to me was the style and weight to the world this movie was taking place in. The Continental is this world within a world, a hotel and club for hitmen and assassins with its own rules and currency. You get a sense of John Wick’s deep history in this world as he walks the halls so easily, yet he feels very foreign because he doesn’t really want to be there.

For a brief time John Wick was 100% Fresh at Rotten Tomatoes (it eventually settled at 83%) which should tell you this movie is something special. It’s the revenge movie with heart, style, and substance that doesn’t come around very often. If you missed it in the theaters, like a lot of people did, you can rent it on Amazon or pick it up at a RedBox and join me in my morning for the dog.

Why? Why the dog?!

Horror is one of the trickiest genres to get right.  If the movies are done wrong they are boring or cheesy.  At their worst they are just an excuses to torture naked people, but if they are done well they can be unforgettable.  To help all the filmmakers out there I thought I would share my top five horror movies.

5: Near Dark

If you are in to vampires that sparkle, this movie isn’t for you.  It as about a group of vampires that hunt in the south in stolen cars with blacked out windows.  This movie plays with light perfectly.  It always feels like the sun could be out at any moment to either destroy or save.  Near Dark is shocking and engrossing, and it is no wonder that the director Kathryn Bigelow would go on to win an Oscar.  Oh yeah it has 80s Bill Paxton in it!

4: Let The Right One In

I swear this whole list will not be vampire movies, but Let The Right One In is brilliant.  This movie isn’t exactly scary, but it keeps you in a constant state of unease.  There is something so wonderfully off about this film.  It is haunting to have a story about a vampire that will always be a child, and she just needs someone to play with (and get blood for her).

3: The Devil’s Backbone

Guillermo del Toro treats his horror movies like fairy tales, so they are always so darn whimsical.  That doesn’t mean they don’t deliver on the chills.  It just means they will manage to charm you at the same time.  He also loves to play with the idea that the monsters aren’t always bad.  That is definitely the case in the Devil’s Backbone.  This movie about a Spanish orphanage is scary, but it warns you that the true evil might be someone you don’t expect.

2: The Evil Dead

Sam Raimi’s classic The Evil Dead is not the zany comedies of The Evil Dead 2 and Army of Darkness.  It is a dark, bloody, and disturbing film that pretty much defined the cabin in the woods genre.  Honestly it is only cabin in the woods film you need to see.  It also gave the world Bruce Campbell.  You’re welcome world!

1: The Descent

Full disclosure here: I am afraid of the dark and tight places.  The Descent a movie about spelunking gone wrong features both of those things in great abundance.  For first half of this film I can barely breathe.  It is almost a relief when the mutated monsters show up.  Watch the British version, not the wimpy US one.  The ending is just about perfect.

That is my list!  What movie would you add or take away?

It is time for me to finish reviewing the original Mad Max trilogy with Mad Max 3: Beyond Thunderdome.  This was my favorite of the three movies growing up, but now after watching them all again in their not edited for cable glory, I now see that it is the weakest entry in the series.  Thus far anyway.  It isn’t terrible, but it just lacks the focus of the other films.

The film takes place fifteen years after Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior, and things have almost completely collapsed, but some people are starting to rebuild.  One such place is Barter Town.  A little encampment with electricity, commerce, and some semblance of law and order.  Oh yeah if you have an argument with someone you have to fight to the death in the titular Thunderdome!  So play nice.  This is where Max finds himself after being robbed by a flying bandit.  Later he helps the Lost Boys escape Neverland.

If you are looking at the description above and find the Neverland bit a little jarring, don’t worry it is in the film too.  It is no wonder that I thought that this was two movies growing up.  I used to think there was Thunderdome, and then Beyond Thunderdome.  Not so.  It is just one movie split in two, and the Lost Boys part is not very interesting.  The film takes Max away from the crazy people that the series is known for, and then makes him some sort of messiah for children.  Worse yet it only has one chase scene, and that is at the end of the movie for like ten minutes.  It is still a good chase, but just nothing on the level of The Road Warrior.

They got much better actors this time around, but since the story is worse it didn’t matter much.  They growl and shriek with the best of them, but if they have nothing to work with, there isn’t much they can do.  Even Mel Gibson looks a little lost in this film.  You can see him thinking, “so I don’t drive cars and shoot people?”.  Nope.  Just yell at some kids Mel.

I was pretty hard on this movie, but overall it is still pretty watchable in an 80’s sort of way.  It is just an odd turn from what the other movies are.  This film seemed to follow the Evil Dead sort of trajectory: hard core indie film, better version of the first film, and then new story with crazy self parody.  In Beyond Thunderdome’s case the parody version wasn’t all that funny, and the crazy story wasn’t super interesting.  I still like Thunderdome, but that is probably my nostalgia kicking in.