Month: January 2020

Mob Men

The Gentlemen – 2020 – R

Just for fun stop by the snack bar and forego the popcorn for a giant salted pretzel to eat in sync with this movie’s spiraling twists, turns and twirls. Mickey (Matthew McConaughey), an American in London offers to sell his thriving British underground marijuana farms to fellow American billionaire, sleazy Matthew (Jeremy Strong, Succession) and blissfully exercise early retirement to fully enjoy Rosalind, Mickey’s stiletto-heeled wife (Michelle Dockery, Downton Abbey) who runs an auto-repair garage staffed exclusively by women. But the lucrative drug trafficking opportunity is chumming the River Thames luring all manner of hungry fresh water sharks to the city. Taking the bait is Chinese gangster “Lord George“ (Tom Wu) but his underboss “Dry Eye” (Henry Golding, Crazy Rich Asians), strutting his independence and representing the up and coming Asian gangsta youth movement, shoots a different plan to Lord George. Crooked private investigator/paparazzi reporter Fletcher (Hugh Grant) is cheerily dedicating his telephoto lens and camouflage expertise to blackmail Mickey’s #1 henchman Ray (Charlie Hunnam, Sons of Anarchy) by selling the unfolding, exclusive, murdering mob and dope tale to tabloid owner “Big Dave” (Eddie Marsan, Vice) who is determined to enact revenge on Mickey who publicly snubbed diminutive Big Dave at a highfalutin London party. Whew! There you have it. Full circle. Mickey to Matthew to Lord George to Dry Eye to Fletcher to Ray to Big Dave back to Mickey. Well, not quite. There is “Coach” (Colin Farrell), neighborhood legend boxing coach who winds up owing three favors to Mickey because Coach’s stable of brawling, YouTube viral-seeking karate kids overstepped their gym boundaries into Mickey’s business. Coach not only pays off his debt but throws in one machine gun rescue as a bonus fourth favor. Then there’s the Russian connection with former KGB czar daddy who takes exception to Aslan (Danny Griffin), his heir-apparent son face-planting the London sidewalk from two stories up, winding up in a body bag in Ray’s home freezer. On the heels of Aslan’s fall from fame is the demise of anorexic Laura (Eliot Sumner), daughter of Lord Pressfield (Samuel West). Lord Pressfield is an estate beneficiary of Matthew’s enterprise, a literal “overlord.” His income is cut off because of tangling with the karate kid gang but Mickey, trying to make amends, promises to rescue Laura who gets mixed up with Aslan and it’s a big heroin mess. Follow the Moscow Mule to the White Widow Super Cheese weed. Cannabis chaos.

The entire movie is framed as a conversation between manic Fletcher and deliberate Ray. Fletcher pitches to Ray, typed up as a screen play at a $20 million price tag, the damning, blackmailing evidence he’s clandestinely gathered. Ok? Got it? If it’s any comfort, it took me so long to diagnose the movie-within-a-movie format that I missed important clues flying by in the fast and furious dialogue. Fletcher talked way too fast and Ray way too slow. The British slang went over my head. I like to think of myself as able to cope with the circuitous but this movie took such a scenic route that I wished for an occasional linear respite. For all I know the movie-within-the-movie was the movie. Confused? Me, too. Maybe buy two pretzels.

Ducks, Dubs & Duds

Dolittle – 2020 – PG

When my granddaughter was four years old we went to see How to Train Your Dragon (2010) and about five minutes in she leaned over and whispered in my ear, “Nana, I think this is a boy movie.” Well, ditto to Dolittle. It’s definitely a children’s film and has everything a small fry audience, especially packed with boys, enjoys: farts, poop, burps, spit, vomit and gorilla mooning. How about this for a crowd pleaser, “Something smells wrong, and that’s coming from a guy who loves the smell of butts,” blurts Dolittle’s scruffy dog. But brace yourself for this spoiler: Dolittle diagnoses a female dragon with constipation, so to unclog her system he reaches up her rear and pulls a bunch of eclectic junk out, from human bones to a giant leek to bagpipes. Anal animation. Sigh. Can you imagine a Dr. Dolittle-themed birthday party? It puts a new spin on that childhood rite of passage “playing doctor.”

Then there’s Robert Downey Junior who stayed in character by simply playing himself. His irascible, unkempt, unappealing self. By the end of the film he’s graduated from unkempt to merely disheveled. A little of RDJ goes a long way and Dolittle is a lot! And please no Scottish brogue ever again. Fingernails across a chalkboard preferable. Stick with Ironman.

The film was shelved in 2019 and then pushed back into production, infused with millions more until it maxed out at a bloated, obscene $175 million budget. Universal execs said no más and a hot mess is what we get. Besides banal toilet humor and RDJ’s Scottish For Dummies delivery, we get dialogue so poorly dubbed that it doesn’t match the menagerie‘s mouths, bad technical post-production lip-sync, bird beak speak that looks like an amateur hour tape delay…$175 million…how does that even happen?

Dolittle lived up to it’s title, doing little for my entertainment value but then I’m old and female. For me it was like watching a 100 minute Aflac commercial. In the space of two months we inherit Cats and Dolittle as the new Hollywood standard, the metric to measure flops, fiascos and failures. The stuff of memories. Go see Dolittle just so someday we can all look back and say, “By god, we were there.”

Good Old Boys

Bad Boys for Life – 2020 – R


It’s been 25 years since 1995’s Bad Boys narcotic detectives Mike Lowrey (Will Smith) and Marcus Burnett (Martin Lawrence) went heroin hunting in a black 964-generation Porsche 911. In 2003’s Bad Boys II the Miami duo drive a silver Ferrari 550 Maranello chasing down ecstasy traffickers. The 2020 Bad Boys for Life race around town in a blue Porsche 911 Carrera 4S on the trail of the Mexican cartel. Notice a trend? Good guy detectives Mike and Marcus racing hot cars chasing bad guys. A simple formula that has grossed over $420 million for the Bad Boys franchise.

What changed between Bad Boys I, II and III is obvious: age. The two daring, raucous, adrenaline fueled partners are now middle-aged, older but not that much wiser alpha males. Marcus, a new grandfather retires from the force while Mike, a dedicated badass who prefers to rage, rage against the dying of the light, is critically injured in a drive-by revenge hit. He eventually recovers and pressures Marcus into coming out of retirement, teaming up “one last time” to track down the would be assassin.

Explosions, fires, gangland killings, car chases, helicopter rescues, helicopter crashes, automotive carnage, motorcycle wheelies and sidecar splits, pit bulls, drones, bombs, bullets and rocket launchers, all spike the body count of death and destruction.  Add in cartel killing machine Armando Aretas (Jacob Scipio) and his revenge hungry, Mike-hating mother Isabel Aretas (Kate del Castillo), a Mexican “witch” who lights candles on a Mexico City rooftop in the name of the cult saint Nuestra Señora de la Santa Muerte (Our Lady of Holy Death), and game on. The “Mike-hating” part is what ratchets the story into more engaging territory than cops, cars and crack. 

Mike and Marcus are fearless and fun, wily and witty, bantering and bickering from Miami to Mexico and back. Beyond the loyalty of police force brotherhood these two old friends genuinely care for each other and it shows. Keep counting. There will be a Bad Boys 4. The only question is what kind of car will they drive, Ford or Ferrari? 

Justice for Some

Just Mercy – 2019 – PG13

Exactly four years ago to the day of seeing this film, I sat in awe of Bryan Stevenson, death row attorney & author of Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption, listening to him speak at a local university. Stevenson, born in Delaware and raised in Philadelphia graduated from Harvard Law School and as part of a class on race and poverty served an internship where he met death row inmates, learning firsthand how elusive justice can be for men of color. He was also deeply influenced by his affiliation with the African Methodist Church where members shouldered the community responsibility of helping each other with “standing up after having fallen down.” These experiences formed his unwavering belief that “each person in our society is more than the worst thing they’ve ever done.” Bryan would be that helping hand. An activist was born. 

One week after hearing Stevenson I closed my Sunday sermon with his quote, “The true measure of our character is how we treat the poor, the disfavored, the accused, the incarcerated, and the condemned.” The film version of the book drives this point home. Bryan Stevenson (Michael B. Jordan, Black Panther, Creed) fights to free Walter McMillian (Jamie Foxx, Django Unchained) father of nine, who with zero credible evidence, was convicted of the 1987 murder of Ronda Morrison, an 18-year-old white woman shot in broad daylight at the Monroeville, Alabama dry-cleaning shop where she worked. The state’s case rested almost exclusively on the testimony of habitual criminal Ralph Myers (Tim Blake Nelson, Oh Brother Where Art Thou?) who benefited from a quid pro quo reduced sentence immediately. The sheriff, district attorney and courts, pressed to calm public hysteria by quickly solving the crime used racially-motivated fear, coercion, intimidation and evidence suppression to railroad McMillian onto Alabama’s Death Row. In fact they housed him in a Death Row cell a year before his trial! A trial that lasted one day. When McMillan offered his alibi that dozens of (black) witnesses were with him at a church fish fry 11 miles away at the time of the murder, newly elected Sheriff Tom Tate responded, “I don’t give a damn what you say or what you do. I don’t give a damn what your people say either. I’m going to put twelve people on a jury who are going to find your goddamn black ass guilty.” And they did.

Admittedly the film plods along excruciatingly slow, perhaps exactly what writer-director Destin Daniel Cretton wanted, mirroring our protracted, ponderous, snarled judicial system. A system that grinds at an evidentiary snail’s pace yet producing questionable justice at the finish line. “Brutal.” “Draining.” “Exhausting.” Comments from my movie-mates at the end of Just Mercy.  This movie makes you earn it.

Walter sat in his claustrophobic death row cell for six years enduring State persecution as both victim and victor. Victimized by intractable societal racism Walter understands his lot in life, disturbingly so, “You don’t know what you’re into down here in Alabama, when you’re guilty from the moment you’re born.” Yet he defies institutional bars and chains by claiming a freedom of spirit, a life giving approach we witness in Walter’s interaction with Herbert Richardson (Rob Morgan, The Last Black Man in San Francisco) a PTSD plagued Vietnam veteran facing death for planting a bomb that killed a neighbor. On the eve of Herbert’s execution, Walter calms him by describing a forest scene, “Now close your eyes, get away from all this. No more walls, no more guards, no more wars to fight, just you, out in the open, fresh air on your face…Look at them pine trees that been growin’ since way before we was born, and gonna keep on growin’ way after we gone. They been through all the same shit we been through and more, but they still dancing in the breeze.” The body may be held captive to unprincipled bondage but by exercising his unalienable right to break free in mind and spirit, Walter escapes.

Attorney Bryan Stevenson, fresh out of school, gasps and glares and grinds his teeth as he personally experiences the cruel subjugation of the powerful over the powerless. A Harvard degree doesn’t spare him from being strip searched or belittled or dismissed, “boy.” He does on occasion fire up and fight back but even then his rage is meted out in restrained and measured doses. Even when you know the ending, it’s hard to watch.

Which pretty much sums up Just Mercy: hard to watch. But watch you must. Weather the unfolding story of prejudicial justice, a tragic oxymoron. Stomach the indictment of the death penalty. I’d wager I wasn’t the only one in the theater with their eyes closed when the jolt of electricity ripped through Herbert Richardson. Just Mercy slowly burns, simmers and finally ignites—demanding action, a call to arms, a catalyst for change, a rally for reforming the criminal justice system that has comfortably settled in as a pipeline to prison for the poor, the undereducated and communities of color. I find it troubling that many of the negative critical reviews of Just Mercy wave off the theme of racism as been there, done that old news. Really? Our current ruthless reality suggests otherwise. Credible arguments have been made that incarceration is simply the repackaging of slavery. Mull that over. The most liberating scene in the film is between Bryan and Walter after a shocking, incredulous court decision is delivered, denying Walter a retrial even in the face of the sole state witness adamantly and courageously recanting his perjured testimony. Bryan, shaken at the turn of events, goes to visit Walter who, despite his return to death row, surprises a humbled Bryan with the gift of redemption, “These fools gone do what they gone do, but if they take me to that chair tonight, I’m a go out smilin’. Cause I got my truth back. You gave me that. You gave it to my family. And nobody can take that from us again. “

What is your truth? 

Sea Murk

Underwater- 2020 – PG13

I love anything ocean. During my teen years growing up a block from the beach in Santa Cruz, my best friend was the niece of Lloyd Bridges so I spent a fair amount of time hanging out with the Bridges family including Beau and Jeff. I still name drop at any sighting of the Bridges brothers. “Hey, I played tennis with Beau!” “There’s Jeff Bridges! I went to the Boardwalk with him.” Indeed, I was a huge Sea Hunt fan forever dreaming of my own scuba dive escapades—which never happened—turns out I don’t really like swimming in deep waters. So I get to take those daring plunges vicariously through film! But poor, ill-conceived Underwater, a project that sat mercifully on the shelf for three years, makes nary a ripple of watery adventure as it is finally released into the cold doldrum seas of January.

You barely get situated with your popcorn and drink before catastrophe hits research station Kepler 822 operating at the bottom of the Mariana Trench, the deepest sea depression in the world, seven miles underwater. A massive earthquake (or maybe marauding sea monsters) rock the station followed by a BA-BOOM explosion leaving slim pickings for the surviving crew, Norah (Kristen Stewart), an engineer who mostly runs around barefoot in skimpy underwear; weepy “we’re all going to die” biologist Emily (Jessica Henwick) and her stand and deliver boyfriend Liam (John Gallagher Jr.) who sadly fails to stand or deliver instead winding up on his back dragged across the ocean floor by now heroic but still weeping Emily; goofball, wisecracking Paul  (T.J. Miller) who for no apparent reason carries a stuffed bunny under his shirt; golly gee whiz Rodrigo (Mamoudou Athie), oops, first to lose his head, literally. Sorry no professor and Mary Ann but there is a skipper too, hapless, unfortunate Captain “no one is going to die” Lucien (Vincent Cassel) under whose command almost everyone dies. Of the seven characters that’s pretty much all you need to know. Good thing because that’s all we learn before the “my, what big teeth you have” alien creatures of the deep dine, slime and swallow most of the subterranean six (subtracting long gone headless Rod) as they attempt a deep sea hike to the safety of Roebuck Station, a mile away.

Once I suspended even a modicum of belief, I still had to contend with indecipherable, gurgling dialogue— an oceanic Tower of Babel—plus a scatter gun barrage of terrified, wide-eyed, gaping faces grimacing and gasping behind cracked, clunky deep sea diving helmets. I seriously never knew who was where doing what. The filmmakers didn’t even see fit to provide a clear full frontal of the slimy sea monsters rather substituting a cinematic hide and seek version of “Where’s Waldo?” It was like my head was submerged in a 5 gallon aquarium, the starter kit pump running amok creating a fishbowl whirlpool of swirling sand and floundering, bewildered fish. Or like taking a peripheral vision test at my optometrist’s office where I annually stress over pushing a button every time a light flashes on the screen. Flash! Norah’s eyes. Flash! Emily’s eyes. Or Norah‘s? Flash! A tentacle. Flash! A monster. Or was it the captain? Flash! Flash! Flash! Arggghhhhh!

There was a faint storyline of “we’ve taken too much and now the sea is taking back” environmental politics. But in addition to that one line you had to digest the rest through newspaper clippings shoehorned amongst the ending credits. Flash! Flash! Practice your speed reading. Oh, and lest I forget, revive your childhood Sunday School memories of “Jonah and the Whale” in preparation for perhaps the most ridiculous shot in all of horrible horror films: please give it up for “Norah and the Leviathan.”

I will spare you more details—well, there really isn’t much more to say except [Spoiler Alert] two escape pods float to the surface with a duo of crew members intact. That’s it, no more hints. You too will need to forfeit 95 minutes of your life to discover who survived. Be forewarned. It took me a solid stretch of time in a mental decompression chamber to escape the bad movie bends. Instead of weathering Underwater, you may wish to invest your leisure minutes lobbying Hulu for a Sea Hunt marathon. Now that would be a splash!

Racing the Clock

1917 – 2019 – R

Starting on April 6, 1917 (the day the US joined the Great War although never referenced) and ending the next morning, two baby faced British soldiers, Lance Corporal William Schofield (George MacKay) and Lance Corporal Tom Blake (Dean-Charles Chapman) have 12 hours to maneuver through enemy lines of the Western Front. Their mission is to deliver a “call off the attack” message in order to save 1,600 troops who are unknowingly marching into a German ambush that will result in the complete slaughter of the Devonshire Regiment that includes Lt. Joseph Blake (Richard Madden, Robb Stark from GoT), Tom’s big brother.

If you feel you are running, jumping and zig-zagging right behind Schofield and Blake through northern France’s war zone of trenches, barbed wire, bayonets, snipers, booby traps, ash, mud, rats, bloated horse carcasses, rotting human corpses—“follow the stench”—bombed out fiery ruins of abandoned French villages, mortar and mayhem, you can thank the cinematography technique that shot the terrifying no man’s land dash to look like it was filmed in a single linear take. Action! It’s a wrap! No cuts. At least that’s how the 119 minutes feel start to finish. We don’t see or hear anything that Blake or Schofield don’t see or hear. They are not so much a duo as a trio, I was with them. When a foraging rat lumbers into the trip wire, I cringed anticipating the explosion. When a downed German fighter plane cartwheels towards the two young Brits, I ducked. When Schofield runs for his life plunging over a sheer drop into the river rapids below, I braced for impact. I stood and watched the eerily breathtaking beauty of the wartime night illuminated by bombs and flames. Think Apocalypse Now. The film was shot in Scotland, the landscape stunning, my senses satiated by a dramatic range of scenes, the gore of combat carnage to the beauty of cows and countryside. After the first fifteen minutes I was unabashedly in love with this movie. 

1917 is defined, not by blood and battles but by bravery and brotherhood. The relationship between buddies Blake and Schofield was close enough for an engaging balance of humor and hubris to emerge that never felt forced or contrived. Yet I never warmed up to the characters. But this may be precisely the cool response the filmmaker sought. Blake and Schofield‘s friendship was situational, a camaraderie spawning from the killing fields of war where guarding a requisite emotional distance is as essential to foot soldiers as combat gear. I felt that distance. So when the inevitable strikes, “It’s better not to dwell on it,” advice given by Captain Smith (Mark Strong) to Corporal Schofield in a moment of dazed trauma, I could pick myself up and keep moving. No grieving, no lingering, the 12-hour clock is winding down. In fact I was so invested in the mission that it frustrated me when the two corporals kept making ill advised decisions when confronted by their German counterparts, predictably crushing carpe diem under the shadow of death. I even eschewed the tender moments, a pail of milk, cherry blossoms, an orphaned child, a haunting Wayfaring Stranger solo—scenes that were clearly drawn up to infiltrate a symbolic flavor of humanity into the chaos and destruction—but the poignant minutes lingered a tad too long for my liking, slowing the urgency of the mission. I was channeling Winston Churchill, “If you’re going through hell, keep going.” Don’t stop! Hold that baby later! You’ve got to get the message to Colonel Mackenzie (Benedict Cumberbatch)! Now! Towards the end I kept wondering if those sentimental diversions cost lives.

Still, nothing veered me away from absolutely loving this movie. Don’t wait for Netflix or Amazon. This is the type of movie that demands the big screen. You will learn from the ending credits that the film is dedicated to Lance Corporal Alfred H. Mendes—the director’s grandfather “who told us the stories.” Mendes at the age of 20 volunteered for a terrifying World War I solo mission through no man’s land to locate three British companies separated from their battalion. It was this mission through the muddy Flanders fields of Belgium that served as inspiration for 1917. In honoring his grandfather, Mendes crafted an epic war drama. I predict more honors: Oscar goes to 1917 for Best Picture.