Author: S. Brady Calhoun

Have you ever seen The Simpsons bit about The Fireworks Factory? 

Basically everyone on a field trip is forced to slog through the most boring factories in the world while one of the kids laments, “When are we going to get to the fireworks factory?”

Movie lovers, this whole damn flick is the fireworks factory. 

The set up (a large SWAT team is ambushed in a building full of criminals out to kill them) has just enough story to let you enjoy the action scenes and care about the handful of characters you are supposed to care about. It does this quickly and with a sharpshooter’s precision. 

Within, 10 minutes or so, everyone is introduced and the stakes are explained. And then BOOM.  

Boom, boom, boom. 

Director and writer Garett Evans sets the movie in one building and the tight script allows us focus on the things that matter (insane action scenes) without blowing the budget.

While most of this is ridiculous it’s the best kind of movie ridiculous. This is a movie that leaves realism back at the station. But you won’t stop and think about how all this is implausible because your adrenaline will be pumping and you will be gripping your chair. 

One example of ridiculous. A bad guy with a gun does a stand off with a good guy with a knife. The bad guy doesn’t pull the trigger. Instead, he brings him at gunpoint into a room and puts the gun down and gives a speech about how he prefers to kill with his bare hands. 

Real life don’t work the way. But in a great movie, that bit of business not only works but it feels like everyone involved just called their shot.

The fight, as you might imagine, is glorious and brutal. 

Anyway, I felt about this the way I felt when I discovered John Woo’s The Killers and Hard Boiled. Which is, I want to watch everything else this guy made and I can’t believe action cinema can be this good.

This is a classic bit of crime cinema that hits all its marks and makes all the right moves. I enjoyed it, at least once the plot kicked in and the stakes kept getting ever higher.

Mark Rylance plays Leonard Burling, an English tailor who has set up shop in Chicago in the 1950s. Burling calls himself a cutter (he makes suits, he doesn’t just sew buttons) and never lets us forget that he was trained on the famous Savile Row.

His clients are gangsters who he seems happy enough to serve and he has an employee, young Mable Shaun (Zoey Deutch), who he watches with just a bit too much interest.

And then, bad things begin to happen and Leonard will spend a very long night navigating and negotiating with killers who, for their own reasons, need him alive. Well, they need him alive until they no longer need him.

I thought the first 20 minutes of this was a tough road, I knew it was setting itself up and getting all the pieces on the board for its eventual game but there was a decent moment there when I thought of turning it off.

I’m glad I didn’t because the rest of the movie is a thrilling crime chess match as Leonard attempts to get everything he wants out of a group of people who are either too stupid or too trusting to see what’s really going on.

There are about five solid twists in the game and enough is left to chance that when one character states that everything was part of the master plan I scoffed. Perhaps some of this went to plan but a lot of it seemed like a coat of many colors — pieces and plots come along and they get added to the plan but there was no way to predict each move on the way.

In other words, there may have been one or two twists too many, but each was good for a jolt and the action and the tension simmering.

Crime movies come in and out of fashion. This one reminded me of three other great films, A History of Violence, Eastern Promises, and Miller’s Crossing. Each one has characters playing their own game for their own reasons and each pays off spectacularly.

You can add this to the canon.

At one point a character in The Outfit considers the concept of perfection.

It’s at the finishings that you must come to terms with the idea that perfection is a necessary goal, precisely because it is unattainable. If you don’t aim for perfection, you cannot make anything great. And yet true perfection is impossible.

– The Outfit

Is writer/director Graham Moore talking about his own movie here?

It’s certainly not perfect. And again, some of the twists require characters to do just the right thing for the plan to fall into place and for the audience and the protagonist to walk out satisfied. Occasionally, you can feel the screenwriter’s thumb on the proceedings.

You can also get a sense of the budget as nearly every scene is in the tailor’s shop. My guess is they’ll be teaching this one in film schools as a lesson in how to make a stylish thriller with not that much money.

Regardless, when the final hand is played, and our tailor rolls up his sleeves to get to work, you’ll see that everything really does fit.

Irwin M. Fletcher has an answer for everything and is unflappable in the face of danger.

When he comes back from a trip and finds a woman murdered in his rental he calls the police non-emergency line.

“Send the homicide guys,” he says. “They love this stuff.”

Fletch, as he prefers to be called, tells everyone that he used to be an investigative reporter of some renown. Chevy Chase made two movies playing the title character and everyone mostly seems to agree that they were Chevy Chase movies more than they were the Fletch of the Gregory Mcdonald books.

Jon Hamm plays the title character in this outing and he’s smugly perfect as a guy working very hard and looking like he’s not doing much at all.

Each little scene is a nice slice of comedy and mystery that winds its way to a satisfying, low-stakes, ending. There is also a solid running gag and a clever turn of phrase in nearly every scene.

I think the only special effects in the thing involve actual fireworks. It’s not a movie that needs special effects

It’s a fun cross between a hang-out movie and a character study. If only all the characters in your life were as fun, sexy, and witty as these folks.

Extra credit should go to Marcia Gay Harden who got laughs from me every time she said the title character’s name in her outrageously fake Italian accent: “Flessh.”

Clearly, it’s no secret of what’s on her mind.

Hamm plays Fletch with the confidence that Idris Elba once showed when he guest starred on The Office. In a line, I still quote today (it’s not true for me but I still like to say it) Elba announced, “I’m aware of my effect on women.”

The movie has several mysteries in the air at once and gives us two competent, annoyed police detectives, who try to follow Fletch around and work to solve the murder.

As someone who spent decades watching cops and courts work I can confirm that most of what happens in this movie would not happen in real life. At one point, one of the characters is arrested and charged with murder and then released on bail. Please just know that if you are ever arrested and charged with murder you will not get bail. They will keep you in jail until the trial.

But the movie couldn’t get to its ending if that little bit of reality was injected into the plot. And honestly, I was having so much fun by then that I didn’t mind.

Mysteries have made a comeback, of sorts, in the cinema. We have Kenneth Branagh playing Hercule Poirot and Writer/Director Ryan Johnson’s Benoit Blanc flicks.

I think the world could use a couple more of these snarky-yet-charming features. If any fictional character could con his way back onto the screen it’s Fletch.

An easygoing movie based on a true story about a kid who needs a father and a kindly uncle who steps in to teach him how to be a man. 

It’s not overly ambitious but it hits every pitch and understands what it’s like to grow up poor, with an absent alcoholic father. 

I connected with it given that I too was a kid who wanted to grow up to be a writer who had an alcoholic father. 

In my case, the father played the dual role of also being the parent who demanded I go to college and supported my dream of being a writer. 

People are big and they contain multitudes. 

But there is a scene late in the movie where the alcoholic father is being mildly abusive and I have seen that one play out in real life. 

Given my own past, I strongly connected with this. It might not hit you as hard. 

Ben Affleck is really good here. And everyone else is game. George Clooney directs it with confidence though it probably won’t win any awards for style. 

Not too long, doesn’t ask too much of you, and nearly every scene works on its own terms. The movie equivalent of seeing your minor league team win a close one on a nice summer night.

Bullet Train is no The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (1974) but it is worlds better than The Taking of Pelham 123 (2009).

Which is to say that it’s on the same level of Snowpiercer (2013) and way better than the Snowpiercer tv show.

Ultimately, it’s a movie that wants to please you and never wants you to take too much of its movie violence or its super killers on a train action plot too seriously.

Brad Pitt plays an assassin who describes himself as having monumental bad luck and talks like he just finished three or four self-help books. As an actor, it’s clear that he’s having a lot of fun bumming around and pretending to be Jackie Chan.

Pitt delivering “That’s a shit deal,” made me cackle.

Brian Tyree Henry once again owns every scene, this time as a hitman who is obsessed with Thomas the Train. Why? Cause it’s a story on a train and the Thomas mythos is flexible enough for the plot and the actors to give you a giggle. One killer calling another killer “a Diesel” as a way to describe the depths of their evil will either make you smile or it won’t.

Everyone else gets to show up for a scene or two, play kill or be killed, and get off the train.

Director David Leitch and screenwriter Zak Olkeqicz keep everything rolling along so that you won’t think about all the ways none of this makes sense. One of my favorite running bits is that the movie just switches tracks every few minutes or so to explain some bit of backstory that you are going to need to understand the next action sequence.

It might be too much digression, and I can’t argue that it might have taken the joke exactly one water bottle too far. But there is a decent, over-the-top revenge story here too.

Bullet Train is based on a novel by Kōtarō Isaka but when I saw it was based on a book I assumed it would be a Manga because Bullet Train has the colorful look and feel of a Japanese comic. Ignore the fact that most Manga is in black and white and go with me here.

It looks good, though there is perhaps a bit too much neon because that’s how the movies color code modern Japan.

One of my favorite little movie trivia things is that there are two Quentin Tarantino movie universes. There is the “real world” (Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction) and there is the “movie world” (Kill Bill, Inglorious Basterds). The movie world is made up of films that Tarantino’s other characters would go watch on a Friday night at the cinema.

And Bullet Train is a movie Tarantino’s characters would enjoy and then dissect over coffee and pie.

Mr. Brown: Let me tell you what Bullet Train is about.

Mr. White: Is that the one with Mathau?

Mr. Brown: That’s Pelham 123.

Mr. Blonde: Robert Shaw is perfect in that.

Mr. White: Best bad guy outside of Lee Marvin.

Mr. Brown: That’s not what we’re talking about.

Mr. White: What were we talking about?

Mr. Blonde: I was telling you about Bullet Train.

Mr. White: The Brad Pitt thing?

Mr. Blonde: Yeah.

Mr. White: I seen it. I give it a B.

This movie has the wrong title. 

This isn’t ELVIS but instead, Col. Tom Parker Presents: Elvis. 

The flick opens with 10 minutes of what I can only describe as Director Baz Lurhmann doing a Luhrmann.

Crazy moving cameras, twisty shots, breaking up the screen into multiple images to give you a sense of several things happening at the same time. If you are familiar with Lurhmann you know what this is like. 

I think it worked in Moulin Rouge. 

But I almost didn’t make it to the other side this in Elvis. The crazy camera moves nearly gave me motion sickness. 

Thankfully the whole thing calms down and Lurhmann seems content to mostly tell you a straitforward story about Elvis Presley. 

But here we have our second problem. This straightforward story is told from the perspective of Parker, Elvis’ manager who exploited him, stole from him and possibly caused his death by hooking him up with a quack doctor who gave him the pills that led to his death at 44. 

Of all the characters to tell this story he’s not the one I want to hear from. And then Tom Hanks decided to do the whole thing in a weird accent that I presume is meant to be Dutch but is a cross between a fantasy Italian immigrant and Jar Jar Binks. 

“He’s got ta doa the songa about Santi Claas,” is a line a co-worker keeps saying to me. 

Anyway, in real life, Parker apparently spoke with a southern accent. All I can think is that Hanks still has scars from playing Foghorn Leghorn in one of the worst Coen Brothers movies and didn’t want to do that again. 

Since this is a movie and not a documentary I don’t know why Hanks just didn’t do it in his normal voice. Maybe he thought no one would believe the villain was a villain if he sounded like normal Hanks? 

Aside from villain voice, I have only a few other small complaints. Please join me while I list them in no particular order. 

Luhrmann depicts the musical influences that created Elvis by having him literally running from a juke joint to a church revival as a child. And I know it’s movie symbolism but it just made me throw up my hands and yell, “nonsense” to the heavens. 

Another moment is when Elvis has a creative meeting about leaving Hollywood and refocusing on his music career under the decaying Hollywood sign. 

“See, he’s leaving Hollywood! Get it!” 

Ugh. 

Finally, I know Elvis wasn’t a songwriter but the movie skips all of those scenes where the young artist perfects their music, writes their songs, gets ready for the big fight, etc. 

Instead of Ray Charles writing a tune or Johnny Cash baring his soul in the studio we get Elvis on stage being told the girls are losing it because he is shaking his hips. 

That’s a big part of the story. I can’t deny it. His motion below the ocean was scandalous at the time and a white guy doing “black music” in the way Elvis did it scared every racist adult in the country.

But, I dunno man, he was also one of the greatest singers and bandleaders of all time. Was there nothing there we could also showcase? 

There’s one small moment where he and the band are preparing for the Vegas shows and it hits some familiar sounds and that gave me chills. 

But the tragedy of this movie is that may be the only moment like that in a two-and-a-half-hour flick. Instead, there is a ton of focus on Tom Parker.

Elvis affectionately calls him the Snowman because he is the master of The Snow Job. Which the movie explains is when a carnival barker makes a bunch of money and the audience leaves happy even if they were kinda, sorta, conned. 

And yeah, Elvis had more than a few snow jobs in his career. The movie claims that Parker sold both “I love Elvis” and “I hate Elvis” buttons. And it shows a ton of Elvis merchandise that Parker apparently got going. 

At times the movie and Elvis praise Parker for his deal-making skills. Elvis clearly never lacked for anything even if Parker was taking half of the proceeds most of the time. 

And the movie shows that Elvis, for whatever reason, couldn’t break away from Parker and be adult enough to take control of his finances and his health. 

Elvis fans like to blame Parker for some of the bad creative and life choices Elvis made.

This movie suggests that Elvis would have spoken up against segregation and institutional racism if Parker had not been around. Elvis wanted to be James Dean but Parker put him in the silly sing-along flicks. 

And it seems his greatest sin, according to Luhrmann, was keeping Elvis out of A Star is Born. I have to agree that might have been great. It also might have been a bomb with Elvis instead of Kris Kristofferson. Nobody knows anything. 

One of the biggest conflicts is Elvis’ desire to go on an international tour. But Parker blocks it with a Vegas residency that lasts years. The movie tells us that Parker can’t get a passport and that’s why he shuts the tour down. 

But all I could think was, “This is a grown man with a family who can’t tell his manager he’s going to do what he wants?” 

It might be true but it isn’t where I wanted to spend my time. 

Anyway, Austin Butler is amazing as The King. Despite all my gripes, the movie races along with a decent and fun bio-story and the songs are all classics. 

This movie isn’t a snow job but it should have been a masterpiece. Sadly, this is a long residency in Vegas instead of an International Tour.

Consider the doomed man. The man who is fated for tragedy. The man who is the protagonist, though not a hero – never a hero – of the noir story. 

Director Guillermo del Toro knows just such a man. Having found him in a book by William Lindsay Gresham. The great director also has a personal connection to this man, who becomes, eventually, a medium who preys upon the grief of the wealthy. 

Del Toro apparently had an encounter with mediums when his father was kidnapped. The director kicked two of them out of his mother’s house. But he had a first-hand look at the pain those who prey on love and grief can create. 

In a way, this movie is about a director taking vengeance on a certain type of person. It reminded me of how Fargo was created in part because the Coen Brothers didn’t like a used car salesmen. 

Nightmare Alley also has a murderer’s row of great actors. Bradley Cooper is the lead. Cate Blanchett is the femme fatale. Willam Dafoe plays the wily ringmaster, and Richard Jenkins is a powerful madman. Rooney Mara is the ingenue and David Strathairn is the washed-up keeper of a deeper magic. 

I really could spend a lot of this review talking about how great this cast is but for the record Strathairn really stands out and Mary Steenburgen moves mountains with just a few looks in a bit part. 

It’s visually stunning but it’s visually stunning in a way that suggests what you are watching doesn’t take place in what you or I would recognize as objective reality. We are in the land of fable and myth and film noir. It’s a little too perfect and at times it’s like it crosses the uncanny valley for me. 

Sometimes they attacked the Coen Brothers too because their films could recreate the exact look of the genre they were working in. 

I can see how some might view that as a great musician playing someone else’s hits. But if the music moves you then where is the harm? 

The look of Nightmare Alley is perfect so if it was a bit too perfect at times it’s still mostly perfect. 

Another thought about the works of another great director as it relates to Nightmare Alley. Quentin Tarantino has two movie universes. One that takes place in ‘the real world’ and the other that takes place in movie fantasy land. For instance, Kill Bill is the movie that the characters in Pulp Fiction watch when they go the movies. 

We aren’t meant, I think, to mistake any of this for the real world. And when you watch it in that way it works on its own terms and in its own way. 

I do have a few bones I must chew on. A line late in the movie about sex as the main couple falls apart rings hollow. 

There were few, if any surprises, a scene early in the movie tells you everything you need to know about how the movie will end. 

On the one hand, that’s fantastic storytelling but on the other hand, maybe I didn’t need my hand held this much. 

Cooper is great but the movie never bothers to answer why we should care about him or explain how a woman could ever believe she should marry him. I suppose that it helps that he’s one of the most handsome men in the world. 

I did enjoy that every step along the way characters keep telling Stan that if he follows a dark path it will lead to a dark end. Perhaps I would have cared more if he had at least tried to avoid his fate at some point. Perhaps I would have felt some sympathy for him when he eventually reached the long, dark night. 

But it plays out like fate and if Stan ever stopped to question his role in the destruction of his own life it’s not on screen. 

It was something that bugged me when my head hit the pillow an hour or two after watching Nightmare Alley. I always find it a good sign when a movie is still running through the corners of my mind hours, days or weeks later. It could be a bad thing if it leaves you with questions that should have been answered that remain unknown. 

But as I drifted off I felt like I got it. What bothered me was that Stanton Carlisle gets what he wants or what he says he wants out of life midway through the movie. He has a woman who loves him. He has a successful career that he has built. He has money, if not wealth, he’s clearly doing better than most of his contemporaries. 

Why then does he risk his whole life doing something that multiple characters have warned him will lead to destruction? 

It’s a question that has been on my mind a lot these days as I watch some people basically self-immolate for what seems to me to be no reason.

Here’s the answer I think the movie gives. This story takes place after Stanton Carlisle committed a great crime. The crime is suggested early and then presented in its entirety near the end. 

And so when I thought about what Stanton wanted I thought about this crime and it hit me. 

What Stanton Carlisle wants most in the world is to be punished. 

And in film noir one truth is absolute: Evil men must pay for their sins. 

The final shot of the film is a close-up of Stanton Carlisle as the door closes on his life. A wave of powerful emotion rolls over him and Bradley Cooper is magnificent at making you live in this moment with him. And I can’t tell you what to see in his face. 

But I can tell you what I saw the moment judgment was handed down.

It looked like relief.

The most fun I’ve ever had watching a Michael Bay movie was when I turned on the infamous commentary track from Ben Affleck for Armageddon.

If you have never heard it I urge you to track it down. Affleck spends the entire running time making fun of the premise of the movie and his own performance.

I asked Michael why it was easier to train oil drillers to become astronauts than it was to train astronauts to become oil drillers, and he told me to shut the f**k up.

Ben Affleck

The second most fun I have ever had at a Michael Bay movie was when I was in high school and saw The Rock for the first time. The Rock was about as good as American action cinema got in the 1990s. You’ve got Nic Cage just starting to ascend as a movie hero, Sean Connery playing Bond (it’s not Bond for legal reasons but it’s Bond), and Ed Harris as a complex and interesting villain.

That’s gonna put Ambulance at number three, maybe. The Transformers movies aren’t for me and I remember liking Bad Boys but not enough that I ever want to watch it again.

I didn’t have a lot of hopes for Ambulance. I grew up and Michael Bay never did. My plan for Bay over the last 20 years or so was just to avoid him. He is a great action director but he is not interested in the things that I am interested in and his movies do not seem like they are ever going to be about the things that will entertain me.

You should not go into a restaurant in a desert and order seafood. Nor should you ask Michael Bay to suddenly wake up one day and become Tarantino, or Fincher, or Nolan.

But, after I got past a weak set up this turned into a good time. Ambulance is two things: Its Heat but only the cool bank robbery and chase scenes and it’s Grand Theft Auto: The Movie.

Danny Sharp (Jake Gyllenhaal) is a coked-out criminal genius who has a major bank score planned and primed. His brother Will Sharp (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) is a soldier who got out of the crime business but needs a big score to pay for his wife’s surgery. It might have been his daughter’s surgery. I wasn’t paying that much attention.

If you can get over the ridiculous setup of Will coincidentally arriving at his brother’s house on the very day of the heist. Or past the idea that someone like Will would go along with this at all, then the rest of the movie is a money machine.

Gyllenhaal screaming “This is Cashmere!” after he gets blasted with a fire extinguisher? Money.

Garret Dillahunt as a no-nonsense LAPD captain who calls off a chase because his beloved dog might be in one of the cars and in danger? Money.

Eiza Gonzalez as the the most beautiful and competent paramedic in the world? Money.

The two leads singing the 1979 Christopher Cross hit Sailing during the chase? Cash on the barrelhead!

All of that plus repeated shoutouts to the best crime video game of our lifetime. That includes — at one point — avoiding the cops by having the ambulance quickly spray-painted under a bridge.

Sometimes you go to a restaurant and take a chance on something different. Isn’t it nice when that works out and you leave the table full and satisfied?

In The Banshees of Insherin writer/director Martin McDonagh creates a devastating portrait of a civil war where nearly all the most vicious wounds are created when the characters are cruel to each other.

The movie begins when Colm (Brendan Gleeson) tells Padriac (Colin Farrell) that he doesn’t want to be friends anymore. Padriac lives with his sister and is clearly a little slow. He has a friend named Dominic (Barry Keoghan) who is a little slower than he is. And his sister Siobhan (Kerry Condon) is a woman of grace and intelligence but is perhaps, too emotionally slow, to realize quickly enough how badly the war with Padriac and Colm will end.

To our graves we’re taking this. To one of our graves, anyways.

Pádraic Súilleabháin

Colm and Padriac are drinking buddies on a little island on the coast of Ireland in 1923. Their country is in the midst of a civil war. They are so close they can hear the shooting sometimes and the explosions. But there is no battle scene in this movie, except for the battle going on in the hearts of the men at war with each other.

Padriac is hurt by Colm but also selfish and unwilling to believe his longtime friend is really serious about his wish to end their relationship. That Colm is deadly serious — and the extremes to which he goes to make his point clear — drives the movie and its characters to their end.

McDonagh began as a playwright and he builds a castle here, line by line, brick by brick, that he then pays off in the second half of the film. The whole enterprise becomes thrilling when all the choices and consequences and throwaway lines in the first half of the movie began firing at the viewer during the second half.

Look at this I found. A stick with a hook. What would you use it for, I wonder. To hook things that are the length of a stick away?

Dominic Kearney

It’s like a boomerang, things went flying past the audience in the first part and then they come home, lit afire, and nail down the movie’s themes and motives.

One of the wonders of Banshees is that while there is shocking violence in it it’s never as powerful as the language. There is a moment where one character tells another he will burn his house down. And that conversation, that turn, is harsher than what actually happens next.

You used to be nice. Or did you never used to be? Oh, God. Maybe you never used to be.

Pádraic Súilleabháin

The movie doesn’t include a ton of subplots, nor does it need them, but a fumbling attempt at love by Dominic just absolutely broke my heart. Some of us get to have love and families and the lives we wanted or chose. But for many people, those things are just out of reach and usually through no fault of their own. They have their dreams and that’s all they will ever be, just dreams.

All of this feels Shakespearean and there seems to be dark magic just at the edge of the characters’ lives. There is an old woman in this and she seems to just sort of appear out of the mist from time to time. She reminded me of one of the three weird sisters in the Scottish play.

Pádraic hides from her behind the stone fences when he sees her coming. Two other characters call her a ghoul. At one point she announces that death is coming. Then she adds that it could be two deaths.

Then later she leads a man to a body. Why she chose that man, to recover that body, is deeply telling.

The Banshees of Insherin is dark, cruel, funny, and ice cold. I’m convinced it’s the best movie of 2022.