Tag: Movies

Why KING OF KILLERS deserves to be hunted down by Betty Gilpin

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I adore cheesy action movies, and BOSS LEVEL with Frank Grillo is amazing and perfect and wonderful.

So when I saw the trailer for KING OF KILLERS, sure, it’s on Netflix, I’m not blowing three hours of my life and $50 on tickets and popcorn to see the thing. Let’s give it a go.

Here’s the trailer. Push the buttons.

Not gonna win any Oscars but fun trash, right? Which is what we all need sometimes. I don’t come home from work looking to have my brain challenged, my world-view changed, and my body drained of tears after watching a three-hour masterpiece of pain and misery.

Here’s the problem: you don’t see a glimpse of Frank Grillo until way, way into the film. What you get instead is a dude who looks enough like Grillo to confuse you, and this man is obviously the hero.

Which is a big, big problem.

First, the whole setup of the movie is Grillo vs everyone, and the narrative questions are simple: will Grillo live or die? If he dies, by who’s hand, and why? If everyone else dies, are they paying for their sins?

Second, there’s no way the audience is getting all this time with the Grillo-ish character for him to die first, or ever. This main character also gets the most cliched motivations possible: his wife dies in a shootout when she’s at one of his jobs randomly, and he only takes the new job vs. Grillo because his daughter is in the hospital and needs expensive care.

A half hour or whatever into this thing, a room full of killers finally gets introduced to their client and their target: Grillo, who wants the challenge of taking on the best.

The only actor I recognize in the room is Georges St. Pierre, an amazing UFC champ and a good action-movie choice. Like in this clip, which has a special bonus: Frank Grillo!

And here we get the third fatal storytelling mistake: each assassin randomly goes to face Grillo, and one of the first to head out and die is…the best actor, George St. Pierre.

Does he get a beautiful fight scene? No. He displays zero hand-to-hand skills and uses a shotgun for some reason. The poor man dies like a chump. You could’ve hired any random actor to play this bit, and it’s a waste.

You can guess how the rest goes. The other killers die while the main character lives in the end, gets his money, and saves his daughter.

No surprises. 0/10, do not recommend. HOWEVER: this movie contrasts directly and completely with the brilliant movie THE HUNT starring Betty Gilpin, who is a natural treasure and also star of AMERICAN PRIMEVAL, which is freaking amazing, go watch it.

The audience is constantly surprised in THE HUNT from the start. Just when you think oh, this is the main character, and follow them around for a bit with the other characters in the background, that character dies and gets replaced by another. And another. We finally wind up with Betty Gilpin’s character as the focus, and she keeps on surprising us–with her actions, her dialogue, and her backstory.

My acid test for a movie isn’t, “Did I enjoy that?” It’s “Would I happily watch it again, and again, or would you have to hand me a paper bag stuffed with purple euros to sit through that sucker once more?”

I have watched THE HUNT many times and would see it again tonight. You could not pay me enough to watch KING OF KILLERS again.

Also: here’s the trailer for AMERICAN PRIMEVAL, which is raw and brutal and seven separate flavors of awesomesauce.

Why the movie RUN LOLA RUN is a freaking masterpiece

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Listen, I know you have seven different subscriptions to Netflix and Hulu and all that, yet struggle to find things of real value to watch and maybe binge the last season of Great British Bakeoff once again because the new season hasn’t dropped yet.

I have been there. Am plowing through clips of Justified on the youtube because I don’t have whatever subscription is necessary to watch entire episodes of that thing. And yes, all these subs are costing us the same or more as the old cable bundles we hate. Say hello to the new boss, same as the old boss.

HOWEVER: There is hope in the form of great movies, little gems hiding in the vast archives of places like Netflix, and this is about one such glittery diamond with subtitles and a rocking soundtrack. It’s getting remastered and re-released on its 25th anniversary or whatever.

Here, watch the trailer.

Somehow, I never saw this movie until yesterday, which is tragic. Who will pay for my therapy?

I’m going to lay out all the reason you need to fire up the interwebs and watch this thing.

Reason No. 1: A great story

It’s common to find movies with one cool idea that they (a) completely pound to death like it’s a SNL skit, or (b) abandon halfway through because they don’t know how to stick the landing. We also run into (c) action movies and superhero blockbusters that flop because they shoeved seven different screenwriters in the kitchen and the studio edits turned it into a lifeless $350 million mess.

RUN LOLA RUN has a beautiful story that’s surprising and interesting. You want to know what happens times three, because that’s how many times the story loops back.

Reason No. 2: Re-watchable like hell

My acid test of whether a movie or novel is good cannot be simpler. Would I watch it again, or read it again?

Then I have an even more acidic test, like the blood of those monsters in Alien that can eat through deck after deck of a starship: would I pay money to watch it again, or read it again, or would you have to pay ME a pile of monies to suffer through it?

I would pay monies to watch RUN LOLA RUN again.

Time-loop movies like this are rare but not unique. You can certainly do them wrong. However, this one is like GROUNDHOG DAY and EDGE OF TOMORROW in how repeated viewings reward you with new little details.

Reason No. 3: You do NOT have to pay monies to watch it again

I cannot tell you the number of times I’ve paid an insane amount to rent a new-ish movie online, only to regret that choice about 10 minutes into the stinker.

Sure, you may not have HBO Max or Disney+, but I bet $20 you have Netflix, and this sucker is free on there. Don’t need to rent it, buy it, lease it, or whisper sweet words to it whenever you want to fire this thing up again. Make some popcorn and go wild.

Reason No. 4: It’s in German, with subtitles, and you WILL NOT CARE

Remember when you watched black-and-white French existentialist movies, maybe in college after taking your first philosophy classes? Subtitles can be a pain, especially when people talk fast.

This movie does subtitles exactly right, and nobody really talks too fast, or gets into silly complicated pretentious nonsense about the malleability of reality and the illusion of choice and the artificial construct of laws when they are simply an exercise of the monopoly on force.

RUN LOLA RUN gets into cool ideas and conflicts by showing you them. You could turn the subtitles off, listen to the German dialogue, and still figure out 99 percent of the movie. (Note: I lived in the Germany as a pookie, and the Holland, and took German both as a pookie and in HS, and yes, it’s a complex and interesting language, and yes, I’m impressed that you know what schadenfreude is, but you will not need any of that to enjoy this movie, and I’ve forgotten all my German except the buying of things and the swearing.)

Reason No. 5: Reality shows are probably more scripted than this movie, which is pure and good

Reality shows are not real. Even the ones that are somewhat connected to reality and not the script wishes of producers are so heavily edited that it’s a deceptive depiction of what actually happened. Back to the Great British Bakeoff–do you really think the footage they show five seconds before “time’s up” was shot five seconds before the deadline. Bahahahaha!

RUN LOLA RUN does not cheat, like Chrisopher Nolan in THE DARK KNIGHT RISES and MEMENTO and every other movie he does that is not historical Oscar bait.

RUN LOLA RUN is gritty and pure and has no CGI green screen nonsense, no artificial sweeteners, and no silly tricks. It does what it says on the tin. Go watch it.

Three giant holes in REBEL MOON

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Yes, you could write about 17 massive problems with this film, or 99 reasons I will never get these two hours of my life back.

HOWEVER: I want to focus on three actual storytelling lessons.

For educational purposes and such.

But hey, we will still make fun of this stinker.

HOLE NUMBER ONE: Our rebel heroine

Zack Snyder wants this to be Star Wars, so let’s get into the structural trouble at the crumbling foundation of this passion project.

Luke Skywalker starts out as a farmer, an orphan. So does this character.

After that, nothing is the same.

Luke has a secret Jedi pedigree, but he isn’t secretly a master warrior. It takes him three freaking movies, and a ton of training from two different mentors, to improve and improve before he starts kicking butt. Luke has to suffer and sacrifice.

He nearly dies a zillion times and gets his hand lopped off by Vader in the second film. He would have failed and died in the third film, except Daddy Vader switches sides.

Luke also learns a number of cool skills, and it takes time for him to master them. Fighting with a lightsaber. Force pull or whatever. Force jumping. All kinds of force stuff. It works as storytelling. You buy into it.

REBEL MOON makes the opposite choice. Our heroine randomly takes out an entire squad of baddies. Afterward, we get a flashback explaining how she’s a super warrior. Uh, no.

Yes, it’s a cool fight scene. There’s simply no setup to this payoff.

Then she kills the bad guy in the first movie, her first try, only for him to get un-Palpatined in a Bantha tank or whatever.

No mentor, no practicing, no suffering, no losses, no growth. This heroine starts out as a badass and ends the movie as a badass. That makes for a flat, boring arc.

HOLE NUMBER TWO: Our lame villain

This movie is trying to be Star Wars, which features maybe the most iconic villain of all time, the towering and powerful Darth Vader.

And they go with a skinny man with a British accent, a thing for tentacle porn, and the worst haircut in the galaxy.

Darth Vader wielded a scary red lightsaber and force-choked generals who annoyed him.

This villain has a walking stick. OMGWTFBBQ.

HOLE NUMBER THREE: Seven million sidekicks

Yes, this movie copies Star Wars, but it’s also trying to copy Seven Samurai, so we have all kinds of extra characters taking up all kinds of screen time.

None of them are essential. Seriously.

What we needed was a mentor, an Obi-Wan figure, to help our heroine learn and grow. Because she’s already amazing, there’s no room for that.

Therefore we get random characters who add nothing. A farmer who follows her on the journey. A rebel leader who only shows up and dies in order for her to assume that role. Bare Chested Beastmaster, a rogue spaceship pilot, a samurai woman with glowing red These Are Not Lightsabers, and so forth.

All forgettable and unnecessary. The one you could argue for needing is Rogue Spaceship Pilot, who is not Hans Solo but more of a Lando because he betrays them to the Empire or whatever.

The only side character who resonated, and should not get ripped from the script, is the robot voiced by Anthony Hopkins–and this character gets built up in the beginning, abandoned, and cameo’d at the end.

Honestly, the easiest way to fix the structural problems is to strip away all the side characters.

Send a real farmer girl, with no skills, with Anthony Hopkins as her Robot Obi-wan.

Have him teach her to fight, and hide, and sabotage the bad guys. Have her suffer and lose and learn.

Give her and the robot interesting weapons and powers other than “she just kicks ass.”

BOTTOM LINE

Huge budget. All kinds of special effects and possibilities. It all goes to waste because the heroine, villain, and story don’t work. 0/10, spend the sequel money on SHIMMER LAKE PART 2: GIVE THIS TOWN A BATH.

Beyoncé and Taylor Swift reinvent music economics with concert movies

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The business of music–and movies, books, plays, and all other art–has always been rather upside down when it comes to artists getting a decent share of the monies so they can, I don’t know, pay the rent.

And it’s no secret that musicians have had a rough time lately, just like other creative types, with people no longer paying cash monies to download mp3’s after they stopped swiping their debit cards for CD’s and cassette tapes and eight-tracks and vinyl. Yes, some hipster types still buy vinyl. Just not nearly not enough to support bands.

So musicians, big or small, rely on selling tickets to live shows along with T-shirts and other merch. If they are famous, and lucky, they get decent money from streaming sites.

Might be a musical revolution

Beyoncé and Taylor Swift are both going in a different, smarter direction with concert movies.

Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour Movie snagged $128 million million in it’s opening weekend. Not week, weekend. AMC alone said it got $100 million in advance ticket sales. This thing will break all kinds of records.

Beyoncé might go on and break the new records. It could get huge.

Why this is brilliant economics and marketing

Concert movies or documentaries aren’t completely new. The size and impact of these two movies, though, will shake up everything.

What’s hilarious is I doubt the expenses are that high. If you’re already putting on a concert, with lights and roadies and backup singers and musicians and dancers–it is not that much extra cost to hire professionals to film during the show and behind the scenes. It’s not much more money to hire a director and editors to go through all that footage to shape the best movie.

Shooting a movie from scratch, now, costs a mountain of cash. A single Marvel movie can run $200 million to $300 million. Or almost double, if you add in marketing. Nobody understands Hollywood accounting, not even Hollywood.

One music video can run up millions on the tab, since you’re also starting from scratch and need dancers, sets, and days to shoot it.

The numbers aren’t all in yet. But I would bet every dollar in my pocket, and yours, that the return on investment for Taylor’s movie and Beyoncé’s film will both be absolutely bonkers.

These two mega-movies will also boost the health of AMC’s stock, causing millions of redditors to lose their minds, refinance their mortgage to buy more stock, and get divorced when their spouse does not understand why their life’s savings got lost on some kind of NASA-related quest to “go to the moon.” Pro-tip: do not do this.

Will this be a trend? Yes, yes, and yes

So yes, this can and should start a trend.

I am only a casual fan of Taylor and Beyoncé, and would never spend a day & night driving to Seattle or Portland to shell out $300 or $500 to see a live concert plus more cash for a hotel because I would not make it home until oh-dark-thirty along with dinner and breakfast and all the things.

Yet I would happily, happily spend $19.89 (symbolic and funny, very nice, Taylor) to pop down to a local theater and watch the concert movie. Absolutely.

And the same would be true for at least 50 other bands, big or small, that I adore.

Can it scale down to smaller bands?

Absolutely. Medium-popular bands could easily spend a lot less and still come out with a cool concert movie.

Even local bands could pull this off. A band in my backyard keeps cranking out great music videos on a shoestring. Love them.

I’d much rather pay to watch a concert movie in a theater than wait around for a band to get close enough for me to drive or fly and see them.

Honestly, I’ve seen fewer and fewer movies in theaters lately after coming down with Superhero Movie Fatigue.

It would be seven separate flavors of awesomesauce to see a hot trend of new concert movies coming to our theaters, week after week. Bring it. I will buy popcorn.

Why real fights are far cheaper—and far better–than fake CGI cray-cray

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Yes, every movie and TV show can now afford to use CGI, which they do. Way too much.

And you can’t watch a Marvel or DC movie without noticing how every frame is packed to the gills with CGI: fake set, fake hero suits, fake explosions, and fake fights.

The fake fights are what kill me.

Every action film and superhero movie is required to end in a final brawl, hero vs. villain. Usually at night and in the rain. Hey, I don’t make the laws.

Here’s the thing: these fights are the absolute climax of these movies. If you nail them, the whole movie works. Screw them up and the audience remembers forever.

I loved the hell out of BLACK PANTHER, but couldn’t buy the cartoonish final fight, which made me feel nothing.

The scene right after, with real human actors doing this thing called acting, generated tons of emotion.

This is an old problem. Way back, THE MATRIX looked revolutionary, and every fight felt real. In the horrible sequels, they poured all kinds of money and effort and CGI into fights that should have been epic yet looked like cut-scenes from a video game.

Here is an old-fashioned final battle that completely avoids CGI and completely works. It also avoids the modern problem of blurry action with a camera that never stops moving. You can see the whole fight and it’s glorious.

And I’ll end with the best fight from a Marvel movie, one that’s very real and human that makes you think Sebastian Stan is the baddest man on the planet.

VERDICT: Save a few million and step away from the CGI, directors. Hire fight choreographers and film real fights with real human beings. Because that’s how you generate real human emotions.

Go the to theater and see EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE ALL AT ONCE, then see it again

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Listen: I am not an easy mark, or the kind of fanboy who’s read all the comics and would love a three-hour Marvel movie that got super deep into what kind of shopping list Deadpool would have and whether he’d buy organic fruits to be ironic or not.

Nor do I embrace the easy nihilism that everything sucks, though we all go through that phase.

I can like things, love them, hate them, or be completely ambivalent. I AM MULTITUDES.

Yet some movies are like your true love. You just know it. There is no doubt, no caveats, no wishy washy bullshit whatsoever.

EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE ALL AT ONCE is one of those movies.

Here, watch the trailer and we’ll talk smack.

This movie will surprise you, make you laugh, surprise you more, make you cry, and do the impossible trick of making you want to see it again.

Seriously, there is a short list of movies I’d happily watch again & again. Bet you have a short list, too.

This one makes that list.

Some interesting bits without throwing 583 spoilers at you:

  • It’s directed by the Daniels (two men both with the first name Daniel) and my only regret is they couldn’t get Daniel Ratcliffe in here to go full Daniel.
  • The budget was only $25 million, which I did not believe at first.
  • You’ll recognize the male lead’s voice from THE GOONIES and INDIANA JONES AND THE TEMPLE OF DOOM.
  • Damn near everybody in this movie deserves Best Actor nominations, they did not hold back, they owned this thing.
  • Bagels with everything are the bomb.

I want to say, up front, that giving the Daniels a budget of $250 million would not have improved the movie. The special effects were great when they wanted them to be great and entertainingly cheesy when called for. One of the best scenes features two rocks, I kid you not.

Also, a budget of $250 million would mean studio execs and preview audience nonsense killing half of the insane and absurd parts that makes this movie stick with you so much.

So: go see this thing at theaters while you can. Bring a friend or three and share a giant tub of popcorn, which seems like a great deal because it’s only 50 cents more than the itty bitty Medium bag of poporn, though that’s an economic illusion due to the overpriced and bullshit nature of that Medium popcorn.

You’ll be able to see the Dr. Strange movie later, and the Thor movie, and all the other comic book movies that cost more than the Gross Domestic Product of Paraguay to create.

See this movie in a theater while it’s still around. Maybe you’ll simply like it. My bet, though, is that you’ll love it, and we need to support indie movies that take big risks like this.

Why was FREE GUY fun but unfulfilling?

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Yes, my name is Guy, and I watched FREE GUY the second day it hit theaters, as required by Guy Law.

Is it worth watching in a theater? Sure. This is a fun summer movie. But that’s not the most interesting question.

The acid test for a movie, even a summer action film or comedy, is simple: Would I watch it again?

And listen, we can make that test far more accurate and meaningful. Here’s how:

  1. How much would I pay to watch it again, and again?
    versus
  2. How much would you need to PAY ME to watch the thing one more time?

There are plenty of films that are worth watching once and never again. The movies that are rewatchable are golden nuggets of cinema worth treasuring forever.

Here are two examples, both somewhat similar to FREE GUY:

BOSS LEVEL is worth watching again and again, because I have literally watched it five-point-seven bazillion times.

Why is it worth two hours of your life, repeatedly? Because it mixes action with comedy so well, and has moments–like the sword training and fight scene–that never get old.

Similarly, THE EDGE OF TOMORROW is a movie that you can watch again and again. The more you hate Tom Cruise as an actor, the more you like this movie, seeing how you get to watch him die a ton of times in a war zone before he redeems himself. Also, Emily Blunt is a total badass in this thing.

FREE GUY is thankfully an original script and not a movie based on an actual video game or ancient board game like BATTLESHIP, which they actually got Liam Neeson to do a movie about, for the love of all that is holy.

Yet despite being fun, there’s something missing when you walk out of that theater after watching FREE GUY.

Here’s what I think that missing thing is: you can’t buy the ending, no matter how much bubblegum ice cream they pile on it.

Spoilers galore from here out.

So the key relationship is between Guy and Millie, with Guy not realizing he’s in a video game and Millie looking like a supermodel inside and outside the game.

In the end, they do NOT get together, because Guy is just an AI with a pretty digital face, so Guy becomes single and Millie gets together with…Annoying Tech Dweeb.

Listen, this doesn’t work on a number of levels. The audience WANTS Guy and Millie to get together for real. They do not, in any part of their popcorn-munching bodies, want Millie to hook up with Annoying Tech Dweeb.

Honestly, real-life Millie is beautiful enough to get pretty much any man she wants. It’s not believable that she settles for a man she ignored for years despite his blatant crush on her.

How could we fix the ending and the movie?

First, we don’t need three Tech Gurus — Annoying Tech Dweeb, his sidekick, and Millie are all coders.

You need one coder in this movie, and that’s Millie, so we can safely axe the other two characters. I mean, put a gun to my head and I cannot remember either one of their names. THAT IS A SIGN, RYAN REYNOLDS AND SCREENWRITING PEOPLE.

The other stakes were whether Millie and Annoying Tech Dweeb won their intellectual property battle with Korg, and listen, I didn’t not care about that at all.

Second, there’s only one true romantic question built up in this movie, and that’s whether Millie and Guy get together.

Third, how do we give the audience what they want–Millie and Guy actually getting together–in a way they don’t expect?

Here’s how: you go MATRIX or TRON LEGACY.

The MATRIX path has Neo take the right pill (I don’t know if it’s red or blue and do not care, sorry) and enter the Matrix so he can hang out with Trinity.

If he stayed in what he saw as the real world, there’d be no future with her. Zero. None. Nada.

The TRON LEGACY option means going the opposite route and taking somebody (Olivia Wilde!) from the digital world to the real world.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pzqwmPYjAiA

So let’s pick one of those options: you make Guy a real Guy or bring Millie into the digital world.

Turning the digital Ryan Reynolds into a real-life Ryan is the easy and expected choice. The more surprising and deep thing would be making the stakes more real for Millie and going digital for her.

Give her a ticking clock–a deadly cancer, say–and have her desperately needing the servers and such to upload her consciousness into FREE CITY to survive.

High stakes now, right? And that would be an ending that stuck with audiences.

What went right, and wrong, with WELCOME TO SUDDEN DEATH?

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Michael Jai White is one of the best action movie stars, period. I put him up there with Jason Statham and Scott Adkins.

His fight scenes are always inventive, and he’s simply fun to watch whether it’s a straight thriller like BLOOD AND BONE or a comedy like BLACK DYNAMITE.

So what felt off about WELCOME TO SUDDEN DEATH, which is a sort-of sequel to a Jean Claude Van Damme movie with the same premise: DIE HARD in a sports arena.

Check out the trailer before the customary smack talking begins.

The Good

There are good fight scenes in this movie, and Michael Jai White is totally likeable in here, as usual. There’s also good comic relief his cowardly sidekick, another arena employee who is super reluctant to take on a bunch of professional bad guys.

The Bad

Something seems off through the whole movie.

It looks fake–too well-lit, too in-focus. Maybe they shot it with some kind of cutting-edge 4k camera and we’re used to some film grain. Dunno. Worth thinking about, seeing how I remember they had the same sort of problem with THE HOBBIT movies being shot in 60 fps or whatever.

Compare that first trailer to a scene from probably the best Michael Jai White movie of all time, BLOOD AND BONE.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B7bnlfy8zEQ

Notice how the camera moves, how it puts certain characters in focus while blurring the background, and how things don’t seem perfect without being clunky?

It just feels more real. Like you’re somebody in the crowd watching the action.

The Ugly

The other thing that bugged me was the villain, who was a little too jittery and on-the-nose with his dialogue to be truly scary. One of his minions, a fighter with a shaved head who said hardly anything, actually was super scary. Make that guy your baddie and we’ve got a better movie.

VERDICT

But hey, things to quibble with in a movie during the global zombie apocalypse are far less important than the only question that matters: Should you fire up the Series of Tubes and watch it?

Yes. Anything starring Michael Jai White is basically (a) Watchable, (b) A Popcorn Fest, or (c) So Knowingly Bad It Circles Back to Good.

It’s a cheesy action movie, not two hours of a black-and-white French existentialism flick that you talk about with your bestie until the sun comes up at Denny’s and the waitress gets sick of you drinking endless coffee and ordering your fifth side of fries because it’s been five hours and she knows you’re a starving college student or starving artist/writer type and the tip is going to be a joke.

Fire it up and watch this thing. Then watch BLOOD AND BONE for the first time, or the second, before closing your eyes later this week and picking a Michael Jai White movie totally at random, as required by law.

Fire up the Netflix and watch Chadwick Boseman in MESSAGE FROM THE KING

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chadwick boseman

This is not one of his more famous roles–it’s kind of an obscure movie. A hidden treasure. And because this week is where we pay tribute to the King, there’s no better way than to talk up movies he made that people may not know about. Especially this one.

Here’s the trailer, then we’ll chat.

What makes this so good?

I mean, Chadwick Boseman could have gone grocery shopping in Safeway with a short list, and I’d still watch 40 minutes of film about him talking to the woman at the seafood counter about sea scallops and clams.

MESSAGE FROM THE KING isn’t a big-budget movie. I doubt there’s a single frame of CGI in this film. More and more, I appreciate films that rock without an ounce of CGI.

What makes this so special isn’t just Boseman’s acting, which is always stellar. I like how this thriller sets up our hero as being badly outnumbered and outgunned, in a foreign land, and still winning–not because he’s faster and tougher than the bad guys, which is the typical path of any action movie. On occasion, they’ll mix it up and have the hero win by being more brutal and bloodthirsty. You know, DEATH WISH or DIRTY HARRY style.

This movie shows our hero do clever thing after clever thing. And yes, he gets into fights, but he does it smart. In the final confrontation, instead of taking on all the bad guys on a rainy rooftop, outnumbered 10-to-1, minimum, he uses the greed of the villains against them. It’s so well done.

Chadwick Boseman was an amazing talent and it still hits me that he’s gone.

Note: If you like the accent he used when playing Black Panther, his character in this movie is from South Africa, and he does the accent so damn well I freaked out when seeing him speak at the MTV Awards show, kinda like hearing Christian Bale’s natural Welsh accent for the first time and your brain is completely befuddled.

It’s worth watching the clip for what he does during his acceptance speech for Best Hero–what a decent, honorable, good-hearted man.

VERDICT

Fire up Netflix, watch this film, and raise your glass in Boseman’s memory.

HEIST is a master class in tying character arcs to plot twists

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As a public service, I’ve watched 99.9 percent of everything on Netflix, Amazon Prime, and Whatever Blu-Rays are Inside that Shoebox I Found in Yonder Cupboard.

HEIST is what I saw last night, and (1) yes, it’s worth sending radiation at dried corn kernels for you to snack on while watching this thing, and (2) there are interesting storytelling techniques we’re going to talk smack about here on this website blog WordPress thing.

Because I care about you, this is the trailer:

So yes, you’ve got Negan (whoa!), Drax the Destroyer (double-whoa!!), and Robert-Freaking-DeNiro (you lie!!!) in the same movie? Plus Gina Carano? NO WAY.

Way.

Here’s the thing that I want to talk about: each of these characters has a distinct arc, one that not only works by itself, but is a vital part of the twists and reversals that serve as the V-8 engine of this story.

  • Negan is the hero with a deadline, an Army vet and card dealer who needs to find $400,000 by 7 p.m. on Friday for his daughter’s cancer treatment.
  • Drax the Destroyer is the casino security guard with the idea of robbing the place, and the one running the job.
  • Robert DeNiro is the cut-throat businessman who owns the casino and is (a) estranged from his daughter, his only family, and (b) dying of cancer.
  • Gina Carano is the cop chasing Negan and Drax in their getaway bus.

That’s right, a getaway bus. Remember SPEED, with Neo stuck on a bus that can’t go less than 55 or the bus and all its passengers go boom? This movie isn’t a straight ripoff. Being stuck on the bus, though, with the cops surrounding you, is a great premise. They run out of diesel once, and have to work around that. The cops shoot out a tire. There are just all sorts of great problems presented by being stuck on that bus.

But I want to talk about the intersection of the character arcs and story beats.

Negan improves the plans of Drax, who’s running the job, and he’s clearly smarter than the hothead Drax.

So it makes storytelling sense that instead of letting Drax kill a hostage–the bus driver–Negan shoots Drax instead.

Then it’s the bus driver who has the idea of how to get Negan off the bus while leading the bad detective (in the pay of Robert DeNiro) to chase the bus somewhere else.

To get the money off the bus, Negan uses a fake pregnant “hostage”–his sister–and makes sure she’s the first hostage released. Clever.

And when DeNiro spares Negan, shooting his hotheaded protege before he can kill the card dealer who stole his money, you believe it, because DeNiro has been questioning his path the whole movie, and this makes sense. He’s trying to do right by the world now.

Finally, you believe Gina’s police officer character looking the other way at the end, and letting Negan save his daughter, because it’s not a sudden change of heart. They’ve set this up with scene after scene where Negan and Gina both try to do the right thing, regardless of the personal cost, while Drax tries to MURDER DEATH KILL everything in sight.

There isn’t a lot of Christopher Nolan cheating going on here, storywise. The setups are all there if you look for them, or remember. I just enjoy how the character and story beats mesh so well, and when the revelations all hit at the end, it makes you impressed with Negan’s cleverness and selflessness and happy about DeNiro’s final acts and Gina’s compassion.

All of this is nice contrast to most action movies, where evil and bloody things happen to just about any character at any time, except for the hero, because everyone but the hero is basically a bad guy who’s gonna die or a sidekick type who’s also gonna die. I mean, come on. White Bearded Mentor Who’s Kinda Like Obiwan Crossed with Mr. Miyagi? Dead by the end of Act 1. Hot girlfriend, sweet wife, or cute little daughter? Kidnapped by the end of Act 2. Sidekick who’s there mostly for tech support and comic relief? Impaled on a swordfish at the beginning of Act. 3. Femme Fatale with a thing for the hero? Fed to the sharks with lasers right before the rooftop battle with the Final Boss.

VERDICT

HEIST is clever and entertaining movie that reminds me a lot of SHIMMER LAKE (a perfect movie, go watch it, DO IT NOW) in that you’re cheering on a good man doing wrong things for the right reasons. It’s free on Netflix so fire it up.