Author: S. Brady Calhoun

Some great movies understand their characters and story so well they can get the job done with speed and joy. 

Blackberry never takes a breath, moving from one crisis to the next and then to the end like an express train trying to make up time. But it’s a movie that understands what it wants to do, hits the target, and then bows out perfectly. 

Sometimes it is a very good sign when your director is also one of the screenwriters. This feels like a script where everything, from the opening moments to the final seconds was both well thought out and carefully considered. 

It’s also a movie and a script that killed all the distractions and blind alleys that can bog down a story. 

For instance, the main characters are always at work, they are always moving from one challenge to the next and the elements of the downfall of Research in Motion are seeded in the opening moments. 

We never see any wives, girlfriends or anything close to a personal conflict for the entire flick.

Instead, we get the spectacular Glenn Howerton, of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, playing corporate rage monster, Jim Basillie. The Harvard educated (just ask him!) executive spotted a way to the top by hitching himself to an engineer who was about to invent the future of cell phones. 

Jay Baruchel plays the meek man, Mike Lazaridus, who had the talent but maybe not the ambition or the cunning to turn RIM into the corporate behemoth that created the Blackberry. 

Writer/Director Matt Johnson plays the goofy best friend who tried to protect Baruchel and stand up and speak for him even years after he should know Baruchel doesn’t need the help. 

So this is a classic case of watching a scrappy company come together, overcome obstacles and rise to the top of the corporate heap. And then, spoilers, flame out.

Again, it’s hard to explain just how good this movie is at showing how the characters have changed or stayed the same over time. You know everything you need to about Lazaridus in the latter days by seeing his new hairstyle. And the movie is smart enough not to gild the lily. 

No one ever says, “you’ve changed man,” but we know it. 

What’s especially fun though, is watching this group of guys who thought they were killers react to the asteroid that was the iPhone. 

Laziridus has nothing but denial and hubris. I loved watching him fume to Verizon about being the guy who invented the whole category and that he knows what’s best. 

Basillie is already checked out, trying to maneuver a deal with the National Hockey League, and the movie gives you a choice in a private plane that shows just how distracted the Co-CEO was. 

It’s rare that something comes along that just kills everyone else in the product category. But the iPhone was to computer and phone and camera salesman what the automobile was to horseman. The end of all things. 

The screenplay suggests that in the beginning Laziridus was the kind of engineer who would never accept crummy work. He was actually offended by the phrase ‘good enough.’

In its last days, BlackBerry’s mantra among the engineers was, ‘good enough, let’s ship this.’ The movie even calls back an issue from the opening scene to show just how far the company fell.

The secret of movies like these is not whether or not they are true (a movie can’t compress the complexities of any true story much less a true story that takes place over a decade) but whether it feels true. 

Despite a few scenes with Basille late in the flick that I didn’t buy the rest of this felt like the gospel. 

From The Creation to Armageddon.

As Okja unfolded I kept thinking of the comics I read in my youth. American comics were always bigger than superheroes with plenty of crime, autobiography and horror out there to please genre fans. 

This reminded me of manga. That’s not a perfect analogy as there are all kinds of comics from Japan in an infinite number of styles. But there are sensibilities that tend come from particulars parts of the world given their creators and audiences. England and France tend toward strange science fiction and fantasy. The manga I drifted toward was either giant robots or samurai epics

But Okja has that Manga sensibility with their slice of life and childhood adventure work. It’s in the rhythm of it, the colors and the outlandish characters. 

Director and writer Bong Joon-ho is joined by Jon Ronson to tell a story about a mountain girl, Mika (Ahn Seo-hyun) who raises and loves a superpig. 

The pig is bound for a slaughterhouse but Mika won’t accept that and a high adventure ensues as she tries to rescue her friend. 

It’s a wild, scary and ridiculous story. Okja is the kind of movie that lets Tilda Swinton play both her familiar pathetic insecure corporate ceo and, later, she gets to be pure capitalist evil. 

Paul Dano is a very calm animal rights terrorist who might be lying to himself about his commitment to nonviolence. 

And Jake Gyllenhaal is a tv personality / mad scientist in a role that reminded me of Nic Cage at his wildest. One more scene with him in this flick would have been too much but he takes every chance he gets to drive the acting to an 11. 

Bong Joon-ho long ago earned his stripes as a director. I love telling the kids that I watched his first breakthrough movie, Memories of Murder, on DVD 20 years ago. 

And his adaptation of an actual manga, Snowpiercer, is another fave. 

There was a lot to like here but what I enjoyed the most was how sly this movie is. Watch how the animal rights activists introduce themselves. 

And when all his corporate characters need to watch something on a computer screen Bong recreates the famous Pete Souza photograph of the White House situation room from the night special forces took down Osama Bin Laden. 

A lesser director would have really drawn attention to it. But Bong does it and moves on. If you caught it you will cackle. But if you blink you might miss it. 

And he also uses his powers to move you. In one scene a group of characters are leaving a building. As they do we can hear what’s happening behind them again and again and again. 

Bong’s work fell off the map for me until he resurfaced in America with the brilliant Parasite and rightfully won an Oscar for best picture. That left this, Mother and The Host in a blind spot for me.

I probably need to quit procrastinating. Everything this guy makes is somewhere close to perfect.

This may be the most metal movie ever made. 

I want a van with The Kurgan killing Ramirez painted on one side and the final sword fight under the neon red Silverado sign on the other. 

That would be most awesome. 

Ok. let’s back up and talk about all the ways this movie is a heavy metal song brought to life. 

With a mix of present day scenes and flashbacks, the first half of the movie introduces us to Connor MacLeod, born in the highlands of Scotland in 1518 and he is still alive. 

Connor is presented as a mystery and a dangerous, deadly man. He’s is played in a sort of grimy glory by Christopher Lambert. That sense of danger is missing in most of the sequels and the TV show. But the movie really does suggest that an immortal warrior might cut off your head if you push him too far. 

There’s a scene where he has enough of some cops questioning him and tosses them around in a holding cell. Everybody in the station cheers. 

Anyway, the movie shifts to the past and every one of these scenes are magic. 

1) Connor dies in battle (killed by the flick’s big bad looking like a Frank Frazetta painting come to life) but he’s immortal so he comes back to life. 

2) The people in his village won’t have none of this obvious devilment in their town and they want to burn him alive but a town elder takes pity on him and settles for banishing him. And how amazing is it that the movie recognizes that anyone who is different is either going to get killed by small town folk or at the very least run out of town. 

3) Connor starts a small farm and marries a woman and lives away from people and enjoys his young marriage. He lives forever, she grows old and he loves her to her last day. It’s incredibly romantic in a movie that is mostly concerns with sweaty guys trying to decapitate each other. 

4) Sean (by God) Connery shows up wearing the most ostentatious outfit you have ever seen and announces that he is Juan Sánchez-Villalobos Ramírez and is the Chief Metallurgist to King Charles V of Spain. 

Ok this is taking too long. Let’s skip to the chorus. Short version Sean Connery mentors Connor, explains that they are both immortals and that there are rules. 

If your head comes away from your body you are dead. When you die there is a quickening which involves a bunch of lightning and screaming about power and is as sexual as it sounds. 

And eventually there will be a gathering of immortals in which everyone will have to fight and only one will remain. He will be given unlimited power. The movie is never too clear on how this part works even when it explains it in the final few minutes of the film. 

In the end, There Can Be Only One. 

So let’s point out a couple of things. 

First this movie does all of this, explains the rules, has plots involving multiple characters in the past and the present and hits nearly every moment in one hour and 50 minutes. 

And it just absolutely wails. No false notes, nothing that stands out as wrong even as I’m watching it decades later. 

Like, the movie takes the time to show you what happens when an immortal gets drunk and loses a duel … and then gets back up and loses again. 

It takes time to at least suggest that Connor is a good guy down through the ages. In a deleted scene that is in the movie depending on which version you watch he saves a little girl from The Nazi’s. In 1985 she’s his friend and working as his secretary. 

It probably shouldn’t necessarily spend as much time with the cops who are trying to arrest Connor for murder as it does. Buttttt, the movie just stops for a beat and has a guy at a newspaper stand just absolutely destroy them in one of the funniest 60 seconds I think I have seen this year. 

(I always forget that moment and it always makes me cackle when it shows up.) 

A lot of this would be cut out of a modern movie. There are all these shaggy subplots that wouldn’t make it today. They don’t really add much but they don’t hurt the movie either. Such is the power of a good idea mixed with a good cast. And don’t forget, it’s a movie that gives you an amazing tagline built into the script. 

How many times have two guys shouted “There can be only one!” at each other over the last 40 years. A line that must be up there with “Hello, my name is Inigo Montoya,” and “I’m gonna make him an offer he can’t refuse,” in the diologue Mount Rushmore. 

And then there’s the Kurgan. You know how most modern movies spend a lot of time explaining how the villian has “very important reasons” for doing whatever it is they are doing. To the point where people will say, actually I think the hero was wrong. 

Highlander will have none of that. Thank you very much. According to Ramírez The Kurgan comes from a tribe of Russians who threw babies to hungry dogs for fun. 

FOR FUN! 

Every time you see him in the movie you will absolutely believe that is true. This guy makes nuns cry and runs over pedestrians for a laugh. 

In the past he’s a monstrous death dealer. In the present he wears a leather jacket and is basically what your mom was scared of during that childhood vacation in New York City. 

Also, the film is from the 1980s so NYC is presented as the ninth circle of hell. 

Anyway, the Kurgan is evil. The Kurgan is crazy. If the Kurgan is the last man standing when all the other immortals are dead it will doom humanity to an eternity of darkness. You know, for reasons. 

And the Kurgan gets to be crazy and loud and obnoxious to Connor in a church (immortals don’t fight each other on Holy ground). 

And every bit of it works so well because by the end of this thing you just know Connor is gonna end this guy. 

The final fight fulfills the movies promise. The soundtrack is all by Queen. It’s Epic. 

Anyway, this is a nearly perfect movie. 

I’m sure they must have made a bajillion sequels, even though the movie’s plot demands that you can’t really make a sequel. 

But I’m sure the sequels were great. I mean given how much of this is picture perfect, how well thought out all the rules are … well there’s just no way they can screw this up. 

Right?

Exceptional filmmaking from Director Danny Boyle that does a lot of things very well. 

Before we get there let’s note that the book was written by Vikas Swarup, the script came from Simon Beaufoy and the movie credits a co-director Loveleen Tandan

First it shows the horrible conditions of India’s slums. Then it makes a game show one of the most tense things you have ever seen. 

And it handles a flash back story deftly while also keeping a pair of star crossed lovers apart so that we will be thrilled when they finally kiss. 

This is a movie that gives itself a highlight reel at the end showing all the things the main character overcame to get his sweet fairy tale ending. That shouldn’t work, and it completely does. 

Honestly, the only director who ever did ending montages successfully (meaning I didn’t throw things at the screen) was Sylvester Stallone in the Rocky flicks. 

As Slumdog Millionaire hit its second hour I thought it dragged a bit and then Jamal (Dev Patel) answered a question in a unique way and I was back in it. After it happened the movie just sailed all the way home to its happy ending. Then they give us a dance number too. 

Boyle broke through with Trainspotting (it came out when I was in high school) and really made good with 28 Days Later. 

He’s now in the sequel era of a four decade career making another Trainspotting in 2017 and planning a third sequel that will begin it’s own trilogy for 28 Days Later.

I certainly don’t begrudge him any of that. Very few filmmakers can turn down sequels especially if there seems to be a willing audience for the work. 

Still, I would take another one of these too. I hope there is a great book out there that Danny is just now picking up off the stands.

This one is going to be spoilerrific.

Subtitle: A boy needs his mother. 

There is so much to enjoy about this … well I was going to call it a crime film but the central unsolved mystery of the movie is whether a crime was or was not committed. 

The movie opens with two women talking and then we hear music played at an impressively obnoxious level. Sandra’s husband apparently is a heel. 

No matter, a few moments later and with no witnesses he will take an impressive header out of the top level. He’ll be dead and his wife (played by Sandra Huller) will be the prime suspect. 

The only thing approaching a witness is the couple’s blind son and his dog. 

There are a dozen different ways to handle such material. Sandra could be a femme fatale, there could be a grizzled detective, or you could do it as a farce or a black comedy. 

Director/Writer Justine Triet joined by writer Arthur Harari mostly plays it straight. 

Or realistic? 

Maybe I just mean it avoids the rainy emotional cliches. No detectives under street lights and very little emotional histrionics. 

What we get instead is what I often found when I covered murder investigations and trials while working as a reporter. A group of people doing their jobs. 

Whatever emotions they might have about the thing long since whittled away and replaced with a sense of obligation and service. This is just work. 

Now, prosecutors, defense attorneys and detectives all have egos and they want to win. Watch the prosecutor (avocat general) played by Antoine Reinartz and you see a man who’s pride is on the line. 

Are the facts important? Sure but the prosecutor, like any good lawyer, uses the facts as just part of the story he’s telling.

Sean Arlaud is a handsome, swashbuckling defense attorney but he’s still (mostly) strictly professional. There was apparently a scene where Arlaud romanced his clieng but that was wisely cut out.

The realism extends to conversations Arlaud has with Huller that were word for word what I have heard relayed by defense attorneys. 

Huller gives Arlaud an explanation about how her husband fell out of the window. Perhaps she knows it’s a lie, perhaps she is lying to herself. 

Either way Arlaud bloodlessly deals with the situation. 

“The jury will not believe that. … I do not believe that.”

In other words, if even I, your lawyer, won’t believe this story you must stop saying it. 

And so she does. 

The movie works through the investigation and the case methodically. It dispenses with emotions for much of it’s run time and then grabs the viewer with a riveting, tension filled fight between the victim and his wife the day before his death. 

It’s a perfect scene delivered at just the right moment to propel the movie toward the finish line. 

We must also give credit to 15-year-old Milo Graner who is tasked with playing a boy who must grieve for his father while suspecting his mother of murder. Then he must realistically be the witness upon which the entire case turns late in the movie. 

And he must do it all while playing a blind child. 

A ridiculously high bar that he gracefully vaulted. 

It probably helped my enjoyment of this movie that I am not at all familiar with the French judicial process. Apparently, everyone just questions the defendant during the trial and everyone is allowed to give little speeches about the case. 

Even if that’s not true it mostly passed muster as an enjoyable fiction. 

There was one false note for me and it was the prosecutor being allowed to prowl around the courtroom. The defense never moves but the prosecutor is constantly asking questions from various places. 

At one point I laughed (surely not the directors intention) because the prosecutor was asking questions directly behind the witness. 

Why would he be there? I’m certain it was because the shot looked cool. 

The movie also loses points with me because passages the defendant wrote in her novels become of interest during the proceedings. 

Unlikely and cliched. 

And you will either find the ending satisfying or you won’t.

We get the outcome of the trial but not an answer to the murder.

The character knows if she did it or not but at the end of the day she is the only one who knows. Murder is like that sometimes. We have evidence, we have suspiciouns and we may even get a conviction but first there must be a leap of faith into — not what is true but rather — what is most plausible.

Regardless, Anatomy of a Fall  is riveting and I’m currently running around telling everyone I know to watch it. 

It made me flashback to one particular case I covered. A young man was accused of beating his girlfriend’s little boy to death. 

The man had an IQ somewhere just above mental disability and when the cops showed up he gave them a story and even reenacted it for them. 

He said he had dropped the baby on some stairs as he was walking into a trailer. So the cops handed him a doll and had him reenact it for them while they videotaped his actions. 

And then, in a silent courtroom we all watched him walk up those steps and then toss the doll off his shoulders like a sack of trash. 

I gasped. Loud. 

I was mortified at myself but my brain just reacted. 

“He dropped that baby!”

Our suspect in the real world eventually had a good lawyer who pointed the jury towards a key piece of evidence that suggested it was the girlfriend who abused and killed her child. 

But by then it didn’t matter. Without a lawyer the man had told two or three stories about the baby’s death. 

His lawyer said he confessed because he loved his girlfriend and was willing to go to prison forever for her. 

But it was a story the jury just wouldn’t believe.

An adrenaline shot to the heart with world class filmmaking in service to an excellent high concept and two actors who set the screeen on fire. 

Kim Mu-yeol plays the hottest, hot shot arrogant, young cop you have ever seen. Johnny Utah with real swagger. 

Ma Dong-seok (Credited as Don Lee in Eternals) plays the smoothest, toughest gangster in Korea.

After the gangster is attacked by a serial killer the two men team up (kinda) to catch him. 

First of all, what a great high concept right? You know someone in Hollywood is remaking this right now. 

Second, there was about a half dozen ways to play this kind of movie and writer/director Lee Won-tae picks a perfect lane for it. It’s funny, but not too much, action packed and kinda serious when it needs to be. 

There are no scenes of sad detectives ruminating over the darkness in their souls. Leave that stuff to Se7en and Silence of the Lambs. 

This movie takes place in glorious over the top movie land where the Police Lt. is constantly screaming at his subordinates, the gangster is the toughest guy (who looks amazing in sunglasses) you have ever met, and the serial killer is an insane weasel who just keeps slipping away.

It’s not parody and it’s not comedy (although it is funny sometimes) it’s just set in a world that is more hyper realized than our boring dumb reality. 

Kill Bill is the movie the people in Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction go watch when they go to the movies. It’s the movie world Hot Fuzz is lovingly making fun of.

It’s a world of this flick where two guys can take on a dozen gangsters with knives and bats and the two guys win. Why do they win? 

Cause their cause is righteous and the script calls for it my dude. 

I thought this thing looked great for most of it but a car chase near the end soured me a bit. I’ve never been one of those everything should be shot on film guys, but that car chase, at least, made me yearn for the old days.

However, most of it is a high neon digital sheen that is perfect for this kind of cops and crooks flick. 

Also, whoever picked out the music for this is a champ. 

The movie had the best set up for its main characters I have seen in a while. The serial killer does his thing, of course. But the minute the cop walks into the movie and through some lowlifes you know you are in good hands. 

The same goes for the intro for The Gangster who is presented in a scene that tells you everything you need to know in seconds and with a visual pop. 

One of my favorite parts of the Gangster story is that as the leader he is constantly being frustrated by subordinates who either too fiercely want to protect him or those who want to antagonize him in hopes of ultimately replacing him. 

Ma Dong-seok gives his Eternals co-star Brian Tyree-Henry a run for his money for best ‘I am so annoyed with these idiots’ face in the business. 

There is solid work among the other actors and actresses as well and the movie has just enough narrative twists to keep the fun train (to steal a phrase from the great screenwriter John Rogers) running. 

The final 20 minutes requests that you go with it but there is a moment where I knew how it was going to end a short while before the ending came. 

But, and this is vital, it doesn’t matter that I guessed the final bit because I enjoyed every second of it. 

Readers, when we got to that ending, I cheered.

Let’s start with the positives. 

It looks good. 

Allison Janney makes a meal out of her part and made me once again wish that Hollywood would find a solid role for her somewhere. 

Country music singer Sturgill Simpson continues his streak of popping up in interesting places. Between this, his role in Killers of the Flower Moon, and  fellow country music singer Jason Isbell’s large part in KOTF it was quite the year for twangy guys who write killer songs. 

However, and we’ve got lots of spoilers here, I have a list of all the times The Creator made me throw up my hands in frustration at the proceedings. 

1. Not the filmmakers fault (they usually don’t control the marketing) but everyone who watched one trailer for this knew John David Washington and the kid end up hanging out together in this movie. That rendered the first 30 minutes of this thing inert. I kept yelling at the screen, “get on with it already.”

Sorry, but it’s hard to watch a half dozen scenes setting up a reveal and a payoff you have seen in a trailer a dozen times before the flick came out.

2. The movie has a spiritual golden robot child who can change the world. Did we also have to give her dialogue like this? 

What do you want Alphie?
For all robots to be free.
We don’t have that in the fridge. How about ice cream?

2. When the American sci fi tanks roll on a Vietnam village. I don’t care if America is cast as the bad guy in a war movie. Great War movies can do it both ways. But making all the robots Asian in yet another allegory for Vietnam, a conflict so old that it only immediately affected people who are now either dead or near death, seems past cliche. 

3. Then they go to Robot Tibet. 

4. At one point as the main characters are escaping the evil Americans they get on a commercial flight to the moon colonies. I’m pretty sure that at no juncture in this movie did anyone set up moon colonies. It’s so entirely out of left field that I chortled once again. 

5. While trying to go to the moon colonies a robot asks our heroes, What is the purpose of your visit?” 
To which our Robot Child Savior replies, “For Freedom.” 

6.  Everytime Allison Janney is awesome and I realize she could have been in a better film.

7. Ok without explaining the reasons there is a final kiss in this movie with our protagonist and his lady love. It’s supposed to be a sweet moment. 

But if you are gonna give your main guy a kiss before he heroically blows up why don’t you get him out of his clunky space suit first?

Poor John David Washington has his head surrounded by bulky plastic and is trying to have the final tender moment of his life and I’m screaming at the screen, “Take that junk off first!” 

Geez.

8. It also upsets me that this is all we have for Ken Watanabe to do. 

9. There are several types of robots in this movie including fully robot looking robots, half human looking robots and at least one fully human looking robot. 

Ok, so why the differences? The movie doesn’t answer that question. My guess is they look the way they look because the creators of The Creator thought it looked cool. That ain’t enough guys. 

10. They do a gag with a bomb that attaches itself to someone and blows up a few seconds later twice. Then they do two other slow timer bomb things. Including a gag where a dog returns it to the bad guys. 

On the one hand one of those is needed to set up something important at the end. But the other two? 

This movie is overflowing with bombs.

A solid sci-fi movie and a decent update of Frankenstein and The Stepford Wives. 

The movie has something to say about what the technocrats have done to put us all in a permanent surveillance state. 

It also presents a strong statement about how certain kind of men treat women.  

On the one hand, it’s hard not to notice that this movie was made with a low budget. But the actors make it work and the flick pushes forward with scenes that keep you engaged without spectacle or violence. 

If you called this Black Mirror the movie you would not be wrong. But it would also be one of the best episodes. 

Ex Machina has a vibe that reminded me of early M. Night Shyamalan including twist(s) at the end. I’m not sure what happens counts as a twist as the movie is pointing toward its ending with surgical precision all the way through. But the ending works and pays off everything else we have seen. 

On the one hand there is probably one turn too many in the last 10 minutes but on the other hand none of that bothered me in the moment. It only nagged at me later like bug in the software. 

There are dozens of little Easter eggs offering separate comments about issues in the movie in the movie. That includes items in the dialogue, paintings on the walls and even some of the computer code we see. The paintings and the computer code are probably going to fly past the average viewer (like me) but it shows how much thought went into everything. How much care everyone took as they collectively built their film. 

I’m behind, obviously, on Writer/Director Alex Garland. I didn’t know till now that he wrote 28 Days Later and Dredd which are both spectacular flicks. I think this is the best thing I’ve seen of his career as a writer/director. 

Annihilation is good but it drags despite its special effects. And I gave up on Devs after the first episode. 

So far, this remains the film I would hand to people and say, “Here’s an interesting creator to check out, if you are really struck by this you’ll want to jump on his other stuff.” 

I might give Devs another shot.