John Woo’s The Good The Bad and The Ugly. Or Apocalypse Now. Or his Once Upon a Time in Saigon if you like. 

Couple of thoughts. 

You know how that gun fight at the end of Scarface is the greatest thing you have ever seen? Woo does like three or four of those per movie. At least he did when he was on his near 30 year hot streak that began in 1986 in Hong Kong. 

This one was on my list for a long time but I could only watch it now that Woo and the films of his Hong Kong contemporaries have been rereleased in America. 

You can see all of them and more great stuff on the streamers. Don’t miss out. 

I didn’t think much of the first hour but everything from the POW sequence onward is some of the most insane moviemaking you have ever seen. 

Even the story, usually Woo’s weakest work (for me at least), got to me towards the end. Or at least it wound up getting somewhere I cared about after too much dithering with side characters and storylines. 

It definitely hurts that Chow Yun Fat did not choose to be in this. You will recognize which character he was supposed to play immediately after he shows up. It’s not subtle. But there is a reason why Chow Yun Fat was the man and lots of other people never got there. 

Finally, if you ever see an explosion go off near someone in a John Woo picture and wondered, how did he make it look so real? The answer is that it was a real explosion that was probably set off way too close to a real actor or their stunt double. 

And there are a lot of guys out there with the scars to prove it.

Benoit Blanc is an American original. 

Sherlock Holmes by way of the American South. Poirot with charm. Columbo with style and wit. 

His adventures force him to face off with venal representations of the worst our country has to offer. In his first outing he confronted different forms of racism, his second had him railing against the lords of big tech and here he takes on the “whitewashed tombs” of hypocritical Christians. 

In each film Writer/Director Rian Johnson makes his particular points, but he does it with humor and joy. These aren’t sermons, they’re somewhere between Looney Tunes and the good parts of Murder She Wrote. 

So this is a perfect Benoit Blanc movie. Which is not the same as a perfect movie. Can there ever be such a thing? What it is is the best example of what I (and I suspect most of you) want out of Benoit Blanc murder mystery movie. 

Someone references Scooby Doo in this movie and it was not out of place. Just part of the fun. 

In another section someone asks, “Did I see you on The View?” 

And check out how Glenn Close keeps appearing out of thin air. 

Delightful. 

My mom (who lives for tv detectives and fictional crime novels) loved it. Your mom (if that is her thing) will too. 

The secret, if there is one, is that Daniel Craig’s performance as Blanc constantly suggests that he is a rascal. A hunter searching for “Wicked Wolves’ who lives for the thrill of the chase. Or a fox in the henhouse. 

Or put another way, he’s Bugs Bunny with Foghorn Leghorn’s accent. 

If you can see this in a packed theater listen to the audience when Blanc makes his appearance midway through the flick. It wasn’t quite a cheer but everyone in the room settled in knowing that all would soon be right in the world. 

The other secret of these movies is stunt casting. Look, if you can hand off parts of your mystery to Kerry Washington, Josh Brolin, Andrew Scott and Glenn (freakin) Close 80 or 90 percent of the hard work is already done. 

I have been a fan of Ryan Johnson since 2005’s Brick. He is a sharp writer and an inventive director. In a better world The Mouse would have handed him the Star Wars franchise and let him run with it. 

Instead, he’s got a franchise of his own and, having finished a huge contract with Netflix he can take it off in a new direction. 

There is a temptation here though, that must be resisted, as Frodo resisted the one ring and the characters in Wake Up Dead Man should have resisted this flick’s Macguffin. 

There will be those who say they want Blanc’s backstory. His first case. The tragedy that made him a detective. The section of the novel titled Who I Am and How I Came to Be. 

That way lies damnation. 

Never explain him. Never show why he is famous for being a detective. Can you name any real life famous modern detectives? I suspect not. 

Never give away the mystery, never play an ace when a two will do. It is almost always ruinous.

The audience will examine the clues and search for answers and meaning with no help from the author. 

The joy is in the hunt and finding meaning in our own way.

Springsteen Deliver Me from Nowhere is not a movie for everyone. I read the book and it is a slog. 

And before I even watched this thing I had my argument all worked out. That it is Michael Mann’s Ali all over again. That the creatives had picked the worst time in the famous person’s life and depicted that instead of giving us all the good times we really wanted. 

Making a movie about the most famous and entertaining boxer of all time and choose the three years where he doesn’t box because he is being persecuted by the federal government is a hard ask for an audience. 

Ali doesn’t work for me but this does. Would I have been thrilled with the usual assortment of music movie riffs where we see Springsteen leaving his poor background and becoming a superstar? A movie where his then girlfriend says something to him about an olympic athlete being a born runner and then it hard cuts to Springsteen writing Born to Run? You bet. Sign me up! 

But Springsteen would probably never authorize that movie. That’s too easy. Instead, we get a film where he is already a star and is going through an existential crisis as he creates one of the greatest albums of all time. 

I give it five stars with an asterisk. 

Here is a litmus test though for if it might be for you. 

Do you think The Boss is one of the greatest musicians of the 20th Century? 

Do you think Nebraska is his best album? 

Do you have all of his songs memorized and most of the lore behind each album and song catalogued in your head? 

Will you be satisfied with a movie where there is precious little conflict and is instead filled with tone poems that give you visual cues and signposts for various things that happen in the lyrics on Nebraska? 

Can you handle a movie that, just like its inspiration, isn’t designed to be a crowd pleaser? 

I mean seriously, which movie can you think of that gives you a relationship just to show it fall apart and in falling apart makes the titular hero of the piece look like a schmuck? There are certainly plenty of those kinds of movies but I doubt any of them made any money. 

My dad served in Southeast Asia during the Vietnam era. It was always important (to him at least) to note that he had not served in country in Vietnam. 

However, wherever the hell he was over there he managed to survive two helicopter crashes and come back alive. 

He married my mom, got a job at a factory, had me and ignored his PTSD for 40 years through a combination of Jesus and Bourbon. 

I’m not saying Bruce Springsteen has been singing about me and my father and our lives for his entire career. But I will say that I recognize all the people in his songs even if I have never set foot in New Jersey in my life. 

There is a song on Nebraska called Used Cars about a husband and a wife buying a new to them family vehicle. The song hints at a dark and troubled marriage. Something I watched myself in my own seat in the car as a child. 

“Now mister the day the lottery I win
I ain’t ever gonna ride in no used car again.”

There are certainly other joys here than personal connections. Watching Springsteen’s band and studio guys react to a rendition of the rocking version of Born in the USA is wonderful. Everybody hears it and understands how much money they are all going to make. 

Watching the horrified reactions to the Nebraska songs and Springsteen’s decision to put them out as is when any other artist would write them off as unreleasable demos is also a fine running joke. 

I’m not sure the movie conveys how much of Nebraska was also a smart marketing move. Springsteen knew what he had with Born in the USA and the rest of the songs on that album. 

He knew what that path would entail. From then on it wouldn’t just be stardom but superstardom. The kind of place where the President of the United States mentions you in his speeches as what is right with America and completely misinterprets your song. 

But if he released Born in the USA then it was probably it for him as an artist. When he did eventually release it, it basically took Bruce a decade to make something as creatively (though not commercially) successful as either Nebraska or Born in the USA. That was the very Nebraska-like Ghost of Tom Joad. 

Releasing Nebraska allowed Springsteen to take the different step before superstardom hit him like a freight train. He would always be thought of as a serious artist who made and released music that had something important to say to his audience. Springsteen was surrounded by a bevy of heartland rockers. Some of them were straight up imitators and some were real artists chasing their own sound and vision. 

But there is only one Springsteen and Nebraska is a big reason why he broke through amongst the critics and fans and isn’t considered just one of those guys. 

The Boss continues to make albums that range from good to great and recently released five albums that he had made but never unleashed. Critics, astonished, have said that many of these albums are as good or better than what was officially released over the decades. 

Springsteen’s response is simple. They didn’t convey what he wanted to say as an artist at the time. 

Nothing counts so much as your integrity. If you won’t keep your word (or in this case your bond with your audience) nothing else matters. 

Although the romantic side of the movie doesn’t have a happy ending Springsteen does make peace with his turmoil over his father. 

My father and I fought like hell towards the end of his life. But we did reach a mutual understanding. 

He called me crying and happy after my mom told him we were going to have a second child. I had planned to surprise him but my dad, forever the wheedler, had coaxed it out of her. 

The last conversation I had with him ended when he told me how excited he was for this second grandchild and that he loved me. I told him I loved him too. A few days later he he was gone. 

How did I feel about that? About him going before the baby got here but at least that our last words were of affirmation and love? 

“Struck me kinda funny
Funny yeah, indeed
How at the end of every hard-earned day
People find some reason to believe.”

Gather round children and I shall tell you of the before times. 

For you see we also did not do our homework. But with no Chat GPT to guide us we were forced to cheat in other ways. Some purchased Cliff notes – which presented some problems. There is a Cosby episode about it and you should check it out. 

The rest of us watched the movie. To Kill a Mockingbird is a classic book. The movie is also a classic and if you were so inclined as to skip the book, well, the movie hits all the highlights. 

And so it went. Francis Ford Coppola gave us Bram Stoker’s Dracula in 1992. It’s both a masterpiece and faithful enough to get you a B. 

Franco Zeffirelli gave us The Taming of The Shrew and Romeo and Juliet. I don’t know if you are allowed to watch Romeo and Juliet now because of the (redacted) but I’m pretty certain my English teacher showed it to us in high school. Times have changed my friends. 

Guillermo Del Toro’s Frankenstein belongs in this category. Sadly, the fact that you could safely show this to a room full of ninth graders without getting in trouble is not necessarily a compliment. 

Before I criticize it though let’s talk about what is great. The cast, the set design and a lot of the story. 

Mia Goth is the truth. Christoph Waltz, Charles Dance, and David Bradley get to bring their particular gifts to the screen. Waltz is the greatest movie character actor of his generation and he takes another wonderful turn here even if the story gives him almost nothing to work with. 

Oscar Isaac is really good when he is allowed to ham it up and be a villain. But he doesn’t get those opportunities enough. He and Waltz really should have been let loose to see who could cook the most bacon on screen and neither got it until their final moments together. 

I will say, during that scene, Isaac simply saying the word “No,” sent me into a fit of laughter. A brief glimpse of what might have been. 

Goth is notable for taking a character that is cut from most tellings of Mary Shelley’s story and making her into something interesting and human. Jacob Elordi has a thankless task of being a monster but he’s a gamer and I think he mostly pulled it off. 

So what’s bad about it? 

Ultimately, this movie is like a sports car that never gets on the track. Del Toro revs the engine more than once and you feel like it might squall the tires and take off. (Ed. Note: No I don’t mean squeal. In the south some of us say squall.) 

I noticed the music and didn’t like it. That’s never a good sign. I kept noticing that Netflix sheen that they do where everything looks 4k shiny but also bland as hell. 

There are several moments where blood and other colors should pop on screen and instead it looks dull. I don’t know if that was a censorship thing (so that this could be played in classrooms), my theater, or a Netflix thing but it sucks. 

Also, you watch this and you can see why in 1931 Director James Whale and writers Peggy Webling and John L. Balderston set fire to most of Mary Shelley’s book and did their own thing. And why everyone mostly agrees that the sequel, Bride of Frankenstein (1935), is the superior movie. 

Del Toro made classics before his work with Mike Mignola on Mignola’s Hellboy adaptation made him a big deal. I remain interested in what he does because it’s usually incredibly unique and because I have an affinity for that comic. Del Toro made a masterpieces with the first Hellboy and a really good movie with the sequel. 

I hold out hope that whatever happened there will get mended and Del Toro will get a chance to make the final flick in what should have been a Hellboy trilogy. 

However, I will also accept a big production of H.P. Lovecraft’s At the Mountain of Madness. 

I haven’t read that classic either but I’m betting Del Toro can get his swing back.

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.”