Category: Movies

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What Can We Learn From the Batman V Superman Trailer?

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Well about eight million trailers came out over the weekend, and they were all pretty good, but I am going to discuss the Batman V Superman trailer for a little bit.  You can watch it again here to refresh your memory.  It was a pretty nuts trailer, and it was a teaser in the truest sense.  It showed a bunch of stuff without giving away any plot, or did it?

First off people have gone a little crazy for Superman.  I mean look at the picture above.  He is hanging out with The Warriors for some reason, and people keep kneeling down in front of him.  He clearly has some fans.  While they were showing people loving Superman, what people were saying about him was quite different.  People are unsure of him, and they don’t trust him.  The best line came from Jesse Eisenberg’s Lex Luthor, “Devils don’t come from Hell beneath us, they come from the sky.”

I am guessing Luthor’s little speech is for Batman.  Batman doesn’t trust people with a lot of power (though he and Superman do become best friends), so Luthor is playing on Batman’s paranoia and letting Batman do all his heavy lifting.  It is a good plan.  They didn’t show it (they did show Superman working with the military though), but I am guessing Superman is getting similar speeches from the military about Batman.  Except more along the lines of, “can we trust someone who works on their own without any oversight?”  The military is big on oversight.

Finally we get the line that had twitter all a buzz.  Batman’s quote, “Tell me, do you bleed?”  I am glad Bruce spent some of his money on a voice modulator.  That should save him quite a bit on throat lozenges.  I am guessing after that they do what superheroes do best, they fight until they become friends.  Which is the real question I have with this movie.  How long is the fighting until they are friends going to take?  Will it be like the first hour, and then they will figure out that they were duped.  Then they will team up to take down Lex and tell the military to get their own hitman?  That would leave an hour for the rest of the Justice League, or will that take two hours and the Justice League stuff will be like fifteen minutes.  It is hard to say, but it will be a long ten months to find out.

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John Wick, Shmee’s Take!

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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.

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The True Cost Of Going Clear!

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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.