Category: Movies

Just to be safe let me warn you that this review contains spoilers for Cloud and for some reason Light Sleeper.

Often I cackle at great movies. 

There is the laugh/whoop I let out when a a director and his stunt team pull off an amazing action set piece. Think John Woo or the first Die Hard or some of the better sections of Tom Cruise’s filmography. 

Or the bit of testosterone fueled joy when a cowboy says something incredibly bad ass to a villain. 

“Fill your hands you son of a bitch!” Comes to mind. 

Or just a moment when a hero, or sorta hero, delivers righteous vengeance to the scum who deserve what’s coming.

During Light Sleeper I shouted at the screen, “Now go kill that last bastard.” And was well satisfied when that revenge fantasy played out like I’d hoped. 

When I got to the climax of Cloud I let out a completely satisfied dark cackle. Here was a great joke told at the gallows. Or more accurately a joke told at the gates of hell. 

Masaki Suda plays a reseller who is really good at what he does and very oblivious to anyone he might hurt, anyone in his life and anything at all other than profit. 

Writer Director Kiyoshi Kurosawa clearly got taken at some point because he is creatively taking revenge on the whole enterprise. I am reminded that the Coen Brothers wrote Fargo and made one of their sleaziest characters a used car salesman after a bad experience at a dealership.

The flick starts very slow and I was worried I had stumbled, again, into Evil Does Not Exist territory where the entire flick is very dull and then something happens and then that’s it. 

Thankfully, after a half a movie of set up and hints of troubles to come Cloud takes off spectacularly with a tense kidnapping and a unique showdown. 

One of the big innovations of Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai was that most of the samurai and bandits fought like they had not been well trained or been in battle before. They fight like they really do not want to get cut. 

And during a lengthy shoot out in a warehouse (the kind of thing any movie fan has seen a million times before) Kiyoshi wrings a ton of interesting, funny and strange moments by recognizing that almost none of his characters have ever been in a gun fight before. 

There is a moment during a dangerous thing happens when Masaki, who should be running for his life, calling the cops or checking on his loved ones, stops to check his sales.

At that moment I cackled and said, “You are so dead.” 

Instead, Kurosawa gives him a fate worse than death. If you have ever tried to buy a Christmas present or a concert ticket, couldn’t and wanted to strangle a scalper then this movie is for you. 

One of the year’s best.

There is a deep temptation here, to deal with this movie in a review, to make a joke. 

This is how Americans in my generation deal with this level of sincerity. After all this is a movie about a guy who was so committed to his beliefs that he killed himself over them. 

As I consider my joke I’m thinking of screenwriter William Goldman who wrote that he regretted the ending of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. 

The movie famously has one of the greatest endings in cinema as Butch and Sundance face down the entire Bolivian Army and go out to certain death with their guns firing and with their cowboy boots still on. 

Thats’s the western version of the samurai decision to commit seppuko. In the movies American men kill themselves for their beliefs too but they always take some evil bastards with them. 

So what was Goldman’s problem with the ending he wrote that everyone else thought was perfect? There were too many lines between Butch and Sundance in their final moments, too many quips. He wrote in Adventures in the Screen Trade that he wished he had just let them go out without all the verbal turns. 

That is not a problem the writer and director Paul Schrader has ever encountered. If you told me Schrader had ever heard a joke, much less laughed at one, I’m not sure I would believe you. 

Mishima is both deeply outside of Schraders normal fare and also well within his normal themes. 

The true story of one of Japan’s most famous writers who is deeply committed to a set of beliefs about Japanese society and ultimately determines that he must follow those beliefs into death. 

Schrader and his brother Leonard and Leonard’s wife Chieko wrote the screenplay. It infuses Mishima’s stories and philosophy into the movie while also giving us glimpse of elements that Mishima probably didn’t want us to see. It’s visually inventive and it has a unique (for Schrader) story structure.

Schrader wrote Taxi Driver (1976), wrote and directed American Gigolo (1980), Light Sleeper (1992). Taken together they’re the God’s Loneliest Man trilogy. I previously joked that he invented the male loneliness epidemic. Schrader’s next trilogy Man in a Room consisted of First Reformed (2017), The Card Counter (2021) and Master Gardner (2023).

I think they’re all fantastic but they should also come with warning labels. Schrader movies are an acquired taste that delve deeply into depression and suicide. I think as a writer he only considered redemption for any of his protagonists recently.

I need to watch Mishima a couple of more times to really take it all in. I got lost a few times as the movie weaves between real life and Mishima’s stories and what was happening in the final sequence. Elements of that final section are sprinkled throughout the movie. Some of my issue was just the chaos of watching it at home and getting pulled away from time to time.

But some of it is that the material is dense and meant to be closely examined. It’s like that sometimes when you deal with a masterpiece. 

Anyway, here’s my little joke. 

Two samurai watch as a third commit seppuku. As he screams and blood splatters and dies the first samurai leans over to the second. 

“What was his problem?” he asks. 

“Yeah,” the second one replies. “He was too committed to the bit.”

I don’t know what to make of this.

It seems to exist as a way for Sheen to announce that he’s fine now and for him to praise his father who never stopped trying to save him.

There are plenty of drug stories (including one I don’t quite believe about him rescuing a damsel in distress). But there’s nothing really about his work. 

The people around Charlie all get to have their say but Heidi Fleiss is the only one who seems to tell the whole truth. Sean Penn seems a little too enamored with Charlie’s exploits.

My dad was a serious alcoholic and I see a little too much of my mom in Denise Richards who stays a caretaker long after she probably should have done what was best for herself. 

The documentary leaves us with a new revelation about Sheen’s sexual exploits that isn’t as shocking as everyone in the documentary seems to think it is. And with the idea that after decades of addiction that Sheen is now a good father. 

I am reminded of an old Lewis Grizzard joke about a preacher who called the faithful to confess in front everyone all their sins. 

“Tell it all brother, tell it all,” he exhorts. 

And then when one guy tells one sin too many he replies, “Damn brother I don’t believe I would have told that.”

I think this is one of the great films of the year. 

Writer/Director Tony Tost takes a stab at writing about all the things he clearly loves, country and western music, crime thrillers, social issues, cowboys, native Americans and Robert Altman films. 

It features the one of the most evil households I’ve ever seen on film and Sydney Sweeney singing the praises of some of the great women of country music. 

Also, there’s a delusion kid with a bow and arrow. 

If you follow Tost online you will not be surprised by his interests but it’s still a joy to watch a flick that focuses on a part of America that isn’t New York or Los Angeles. I honestly hope I never have to sit through another movie about how wonderful or horrible it is to be in the film industry. 

The opening snatched me up and as it settled into the narrative found a nice balance between talking about Tost’s themes and winding through a twisty crime story. 

The violence, when it happened, actually knocked my audience around. Something in the way it was filmed or blocked or just that it was surprising. It wasn’t gory, and it wasn’t out of left field. I think it was just that Tost put the work in to make you care about everyone in the narrative even the smaller players. So when something hurts almost any of them it’s like you are punched in the face. 

To be fair there were a few people around who were only cannon fodder. But that was for late in the game and no movie has time to set up random bad guy number three. 

Sydney Sweeney is out on a ledge with a unique acting challenge. She succeeds but it ain’t easy. Halsey nailed it. We don’t spend enough time with Zahn Mclarnon but as always he excels. 

Paul Walter Hauser gets one of those Paul Walter Hauser roles where he’s a sweet but very dumb guy just trying to be loved. I hope someone gives him a meaty part as a rocket scientist in some future movie or television show. Give the guy a chance to show his range. But he’s very good in this and at this.

I hope Tost gets to do a lot more movies mainly because there are few if any filmmakers who are willing to look at these parts of America with love instead of contempt. 

Finally, I don’t know how much of this came from Tost’s childhood but if you pulled out his family album I would not be surprised to find young Tony in a photo wearing a wampum headband and carrying a bow and arrow.

Clearly, The New York tourism board should just fund every Spike Lee movie. 

Lee’s Big Apple is a beautiful, impossible, fantasy. The city is his greatest love and I’m sorry to anyone else in his life but it ain’t even close. 

Highest 2 Lowest is a remake of Akira Kurasawa’s High and Low. That flick was based on the book King’s Ransom by Evans Hunter under the pen name Ed McBain. 

Given all these influences you might think that the movie would take on the flavor of someone or something else like spoiled milk too long in a refrigerator. But, this is a Spike Lee Joint and it is unmistakably a Spike Lee joint. 

So yes, there will be talk of Black excellence and opinions on the world at the current moment. This isn’t Lee from Bamboozled or Jungle Fever as he is mostly in the mood to entertain you. The only people he knocks around are fans of the Boston sports teams. 

And how great is it that Lee takes a bit of time, and some of Apple’s money, to kick fans of the Red Sox and Celtics in the face? 

I hate the Yankees! The only good days in baseball are when the Yankees lose. The only good years are when they don’t win the series. May they never have good things. And I still loved this. 

So while Spike’s enemies are not my enemies I appreciate his level of disrespect. Let your sports hate fuel you man. 

I don’t know yet where I rank this in the Spike Lee filmography. The man made films that are actually life changing, and turned an entire culture in his direction a couple of times. This is not Malcolm X or Do The Right Thing. But it’s up there with Inside Man as a thrilling film that mostly wants to entertain you. 

There are some folks here who can’t act or maybe just shouldn’t share the screen with Denzel Washington but they are mostly minor players. I didn’t let it get me down. There are actors who have been doing this thing for decades and couldn’t share the screen with Washington. There’s only a few people in the world who can get near him. And most of them have Oscars and usually star in films written specifically for them. 

A$AP Rocky delivers the goods and is a worthy foe for Washington. Their scenes together are electric. The old lion can roar, we knew that, but the young lion prowled the stage with confidence and charm. 

The money drop sequence, which gives us the cops, the crooks, enthusiastic New York sports fans, a Puerto Rico Day festival, a complicated plan involving the subway, and a collection of mopeds is a high point not just in this movie but in all of Lee’s amazing filmography. 

You can almost hear him cackling in the background and saying, “Y’all wrote me off? Well here I am mother (expletive deleted).” 

There is a conversation out here amongst the knuckleheads I see online that the first hour of this movie is not good. 

It seems clear that one of the points Lee makes in the story is absolutely correct: TikTok, cell phones and AI is destroying a generation . It’s annihilating your brains. 

Summaries are not stories. Plot points are not stories. Aura moments are not stories. 

Stories take time. Lee uses his time to introduce the players, explain how the kidnapping mix-up will happen and reinforce how the unique characteristics of Washington’s character (the best ears in the music business) and Jeffery Wright’s character’s connections to an unseen criminal underworld will help them in the climax. 

The green headband switch is something that used to happen in the movies all the time but almost never does anymore because no one wants to risk the TikTok audience tuning out and turning on their phones. If you were looking at your second screen while it was happening you missed it. 

If something like that is explained at all in other movies it’s done in dialogue. Lee does it properly and gives you everything you need. 

Also, in the first hour of this movie you get to see Washington, the greatest actor of his generation, play a wealthy man facing an internal conflict. 

Let me just say, Washington with a meaty role talking his way through a decent conflict is more thrilling than any train fights or shoot outs. 

Those moments are why we have movies. Anyone can do the money drop sequence (though hardly anyone can touch Spike Lee’s version of it) but Washington is one of one. Anytime we get him doing something like this it’s a joy and a treasure. 

Do I praise Lee and Washington too much? Yeah, well, I think you praise them too little.

Not being a film historian I just want to tell you how it appeared to me but I cannot swear by the veracity of what follows. 

In the 1970s Burt Reynolds was one of the biggest stars in the world and capped off a hit and miss run with one of the biggest box office hits of all time with Smokey and the Bandit in 1977. 

You might think, given his star power, that Burt would use his influence to make some great movies. 

Instead, we got Cannonball Run, two Smokey sequels and eventually a pretty good (for its time) sitcom Evening Shade. 

Speaking about this period frequent co-star Ossie Davis said Burt just wanted to make movies with his friends. 

And that’s where Adams Sandler’s career has been, mostly, since he had a string of hits at the box office in the 1990s. Outside of the really rare flick Sandler is content to let Netflix pay for his vacations to interesting foreign countries and cut checks to his friends for cameos that mostly don’t do anything for whichever movie he happens to be making. 

For the last 20 years for me at least it’s been notable when Sandler makes something decent (Murder Mystery, Hustle) instead of an unwatchable mess (Hubie Halloween).

Uncut Gems is a heckuva flick but it belongs in an entirely different conversation about Sandler’s career. 

With Happy Gilmore 2 everybody in the first one who is still alive gets to come back (no, I mean everyone). 

There are jokes that work – John Daly made me snort a bunch, and jokes that don’t – just about anything with the evil golf league. 

More of it works than I expected. I imagine my nostalgia for that period in Sandler’s career, and the corresponding period in my own life, carried me along. 

It’s a little like a high school reunion. You notice how old your classmates have become but given how far along in the cycle you are you can just be happy most everyone is still here. 

Sandler made some astonishingly funny movies. Hardly anyone is getting close to The Wedding Singer and 50 First Dates. And he’s also made a ton of dreck. 

This is somewhere in the middle. If you have no affection for Happy Gilmore you should skip it. Even if you do remember Gilmore fondly this is nowhere near that comedy classic.  

But, if you do decide to watch this, if you ever get down on it, just look up every time Verne Lundquist comes on screen. 

That guy was having a blast.

I think there are three ways to look at this film.

The first is that it is a masterpiece. Certainly that’s what the majority of critics and other creatives think about it. the New York Times ranked it number two on their list of 100 best movies of this century.

That’s one of the reasons why I watched it. Or watched it again. There is a possibility that I watched a DVD of this 20 some years ago and simply forgot everything about it.

The second interpretation is that this is an emperor has no clothes moment. Where all of the critics and movie makers are wrong and this is a bad movie that the culture has decided is good simply to go along. We as a society are never so smart that we are more than 5 seconds away from Tulip Mania.

The culture loves something until we all decide it was bad and we never loved it at all. We have always been at war with Eastasia! Mulholland Drive is a masterpiece!

There is almost no performer, writer or director who doesn’t get dragged down eventually. It’s just that a precious few are able to rise back up.

So this could be a bad movie and everyone else is wrong.

The third option is that I am a stupid person. And you, out there reading this, you who also did not like the flick, you too could be unintelligent. Never discount the possibility that you are a dumb-dumb.

There is a particular comic book writer that everybody likes. No I’m not going to name him. But his thing was to take really obscure references and thrown them in his comics. And like, if I have to be familiar with a particular panel of a Batman comic from 1955 in order to understand and enjoy your 2015 Batman comic I feel like the fault for my lack of enjoyment is on you and not me.

It’s possible that I am an idiot but it is also possible that you wrote a bad Batman comic.

Here’s how I feel right now about Mulholland Drive.

I feel like there is no actual answer, no interpretation and no correct way to understand this film. 

And that’s not because I’m too dumb to understand it. Though, again, that’s certainly possible. But because Lynch is having a go at us. He’s off camera laughing at us as we try to interpret his dream journal. 

He’s hinting at an answer that isn’t there because it can’t be there because he doesn’t know either. 

I can imagine him saying, “it’s just some scenes I thought would be weird or interesting and I filmed them and edited them somewhere close to the run time of a finished film.” 

When I was done with it those French guys put it out in the world. 

What does it mean? It’s sound and fury suckers. You figure out what it means. 

If you believe IMDB someone gave David Lynch close to 20 million in 1999 money to make this film. And that’s certainly a triumph but it’s not an artistic triumph in my mind. It’s a triumph in the same way that DB Cooper got away with all that money when after he hijacked that airplane.

In a decade or two I’ll watch Mullholland Drive again. We’ll see how I feel then.

The thing about Jesse Armstrong is that he is very interested in the worst people in the world. 

The problem with that is that in order to watch his movie, Mountainhead, or his show Succession, you have to spend time with the worst people in the world. 

And I see these people all the time in the news stories about them even when I don’t read their interviews or care about their lives or political opinions. I love social media too much and so I am forced to live with an algorithm that feeds me garbage. 

It pays off because the crackerjack writing pays off. But it’s hard to get to the laughs when I desperately want to smack everyone all the time. 

Succession only worked for me when they got to the second season. Because it takes time to get comfortable watching the horrors masquerading as human beings. 

You have a lot less time, of course, to get comfortable with this group of homunculi. But when it finally gets going it’s sharp and funny and suitably evil. 

I guess I give it a mild recommendation. If you are missing this particular brand of Succession themed entertainment here is a movie you might enjoy. 

When Succession got hot and I discussed it every week with my buddy I took to writing down the best lines during the show so I could share them with him. (I have a terrible memory sometimes) 

Anyway, here’s the best stuff. It’s spoilery so you have been warned. 

“Let’s just call Dave and say, ‘Hey Dave, we’re thinking of killing a guy.’l

“It’s your house dude. You’re the host.”

“He can’t cut us he can only shave us.”

“I might not be able to enjoy a sauna.”

“The petroleum insurance policy.”

James Gunn’s vision of Superman is a guy who is constantly knocked around but keeps getting back up. It never slows down and never quite hits the points it wants to make because it won’t slow down long enough to make them. 

It’s a little nervous or maybe I was nervous watching it but it mostly works out and I feel I will grow more comfortable with it the more I see it. 

I think what affects this version of Superman, more than anything else, is that Gunn is in competition with every other version of Superman. And that’s not just dealing with the legacy of Snyder and the bros but also with three popular television series adaptations since the 1990s, an animated universe that is widely considered the best representation of all of these characters and a mountain of comics that Gunn mixes and matches as he sees fit. 

Gunn eliminates the origin story (he figures you know it) in favor of a Superman who has already been active for a few years and has a new relationship with Lois and several friendly super co-workers.

It’s an unusual way to reboot Superman and an unusual way to make the first big statement in a new version of the DC movie and television franchise. 

If you have been following Gunn online then it should not come as a surprise that this Superman is faithful to the spirit of the comics. 

That’s such a loaded thing but the best way to explain it is that Raimi’s Spider-Man movies always felt like they were ripped from the pages of Stan Lee Steve Ditko and John Romita’s first 100 issues or so of The Amazing Spider-Man. 

The same for Batman: The Animated Series which hewed close to Batman comics from the Dennis O’Neil, Neal Adams and a host of others from the 1970s and 1980s. 

This Superman comes from the Silver Age and comics that were either homaging the Silver Age or responding to it. 

But if I handed you any of the really good Superman comics from the last 40 years or so they would look and feel a lot like this. 

Superman is a good guy in a science fictiony future city who tries to help people and deals with his love life, super villians and annoying problems like social media, his dog and the US Government. 

Lex Luthor hates him because of what he represents and uses all of his money, power and genius to not only try to kill him but to show the world that he is a danger to humanity. 

Nicholas Hoult was the real deal before he was cast as Luthor but he hits nothing but dingers all the way through the movie. Watch his face as things explode around him in the Fortress of Solitude. 

Gene Hackman’s Luthor was a comedy villian in the Donner Superman, a character that Superman almost always outsmarted. Here, Luthor really could kill Superman and really wants to and is a solid, dangerous, deranged villian. 

David Corenswet and Rachel Brosnahan get a few fleeting scenes as Clark and Lois. Skyler Gisando’s Jimmy Olsen is a treat and Wendell Pierce’s Perry White is just a background character. He’s fun though, for a moment or two. 

The other superheroes all get one scene to shine except for Mr. Terrific who is almost a costar and a killer character. 

One final thing, if you ever asked me at any point what makes Superman, Superman I would have told you it was not his powers or his Kryptonian origins. It was that he was raised by kindly Americans who told him that anyone with power has a duty to help people who need it. 

He’s a creation of people who saw themselves and their country as a force for good in the world. 

He’s not a God, he’s just an American who understands that his highest calling is to do right by other people. 

By the end of this movie I was certain James Gunn agreed with me. 

This is probably the only movie I will see twice in theaters this year. I’m already looking forward to going back. 

Brad Pitt plays a former F1 driver whose entire life is a washout and now lives in a van and goes from town to town trying to win various types of races. 

It’s not about the money, he says when anyone offers him any money to drive. 

Well what’s it about then? They ask. 

And when they do that Pitt gives them a laconic movie star smile. 

So, Pitt’s not playing a human being in this flick — he’s a myth. An old gunslinger who’s trying to prove to himself and the world that he’s still the fastest guy in the west. 

While everyone else presumably walks through doors to get to the F1 team center Pitt will just appear on racetracks and do a cowboy walk toward his crew in jeans, boots and his pack on his back. 

Is it ridiculous? My god yes. But Director Joseph Kosinski’s has a great reason to do it this way. That reason? 

The cowboy walk looks cool as hell. 

If anybody else did this you would laugh your ass off. But when Brad Pitt does it … I believe. 

Damson Idris does a great job as The Kid who has lessons to learn from the old cowboy. Kerry Condon is too good an actress to be playing The Girl but she’s here anyway and she does a fine job with it. 

Javier Bardem is the Town Marshall (team owner) who needs the gunslinger’s help. The movie spends a little time with a slimy bad guy and no time at all with the other drivers who are just minor obstacles on the way to Pitt’s final glory. 

As a movie this is all fine. If you see it on your iPad in a month you will wonder what anyone thought was good about it. As an IMAX spectacle it rumbles and it’s glorious. 

I saw it at 10 p.m. on a summer night in Panama City Beach with a crowd of high school and college kids who all knew each other and took up the last four rows. 

They yelled all through the trailers but if they talked through the movie I couldn’t hear them over the sound of squealing tires and crushed metal and a thumping rock soundtrack. 

When it was over I couldn’t help but hear them celebrating as we walked out. 

My ultimate review is the same as one of them who turned to his pal and said, “That movie was peak, bro.”