Category: Thriller

TRANSSIBERIAN (2008)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

Director: Brad Anderson
Cast: Woody Harrelson, Emily Mortimer, Ben Kingsley, Eduardo Noriega, Kate Mara
My Rating: 9/10
Rotten Tomatometer: 93% Certified Fresh

PLOT: An American couple takes a trans-Siberian train ride across Russia, but things take an odd turn when they meet another mysterious young couple.


One of the reasons I like writing about movies is that it gives me the opportunity to talk up great movies that I’ve discovered off the beaten track.  Movies like the stunning stop-motion film Mary and Max (2009), or Sunrise (1927), hands-down the greatest silent film I’m ever likely to see, or Wild Tales (2014), an Argentinian anthology film that plays like The Twilight Zone crossed with Quentin Tarantino.

Or Transsiberian, a virtually unknown film from 2008 that is one of the finest examples of Hitchcockian suspense in the modern era.  It was an international co-production of – get this – Germany, the UK, Spain, and Lithuania.  It was co-written and directed by Brad Anderson, a man who’s directed a LOT of episodes of various television shows, and so has a good sense of efficiency and economy in his style and pacing.  It has yet another stunning Ben Kingsley performance as a Russian narcotics detective.  And it turns the screws on the heroine of the story in such a way that you can tell exactly why she’s doing what she’s doing, when every good instinct says she should be doing the exact opposite.

After a brief prologue involving a police investigation in Vladivostok, we meet Roy and Jessie (Woody Harrelson and Emily Mortimer), a married couple traveling home from China after a faith-based missions trip.  They decide to take a 6-day train trip across the Russian continent because Roy feels it would be nice to take an adventure…plus, he LOVES trains.  He’s one of those enthusiasts who don’t realize when they’re boring you with talk of gauges and coal-burners and cow-catchers. (Sheldon Cooper would have loved this guy.)  Jessie seems like a nice woman, but she seems to be keeping this adventure at arm’s length; you can tell she’d rather be flying coach than spending six days in a double-berth cabin.  I empathized with her right away.  They make a good couple, even though he wants kids and she doesn’t, she smokes and he’d like her to quit, he drinks and she doesn’t, et cetera.  Pretty normal.

A little while into their trip, Roy and Jessie meet the couple they’re sharing a cabin with, Abby and Carlos (Kate Mara and Eduardo Noriega).  Abby seems much younger than Carlos, but Jessie lets that slide, especially because Carlos seems to take an immediate interest in Jessie, and he doesn’t seem too concerned about hiding it.  Abby seems annoyed, but says nothing.  Roy is too jazzed about being on trains and interacting with the locals to really notice.  Carlos also seems to be pretty cagey about the souvenirs he’s carrying around in his suitcase.

At one of their scheduled stops, both couples leave the train to stretch their legs.  When the train leaves for the next leg, Jessie suddenly realizes something: Roy’s not on the train.  She didn’t see him get back on.  In fact, no one can recall seeing Roy re-board the train.  The movie plays a little by making us think one thing has happened, when it may or may not have…we can’t be sure.

And then, in true Hitchcock fashion, things start to spiral into one unexpected development after another, until the movie becomes about something entirely different than what you thought it was going to be.  Without getting into too many other details, Jessie finds herself trapped in a lie that she absolutely cannot back out of, no matter how much she wants to, because doing so would cause more harm than good.  Even when she’s presented with a life or death situation, she still can’t go back on it, and the story is constructed so tightly that it’s never for a moment unclear on her motivations.  You always see the “why” to her actions.

This other level to the movie is what separates it from the pack and places it in a higher weight class.  The screenplay is a masterpiece of suspense.  There’s a scene involving her camera that had me yelling, “Oh, NO!” at the screen…and I’ve SEEN the movie before.  You won’t believe the amount of suspense that will be generated with a slightly-open camera bag, or the fact that there’s never a garbage can around when you need one, or just the absence of a train stewardess.

This movie stands apart in its genre because the characters behave EXACTLY as they should, with perfect logic, and it never feels forced.  The bad guys are never too stupid, and the good guys are never too smart.  (They get pretty lucky a couple of times, but what are you gonna do?)  I don’t think I’m giving anything away by saying that, by the end, some characters are happy and others are not quite so much, but I don’t think you’ll be able to guess who will last that long.

This is a treasure of a film to be sought out and…uh, treasured.

UNITED 93 (2006)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

Director: Paul Greengrass
Cast: Ben Sliney, Khalid Abdalla, Corey Johnson
My Rating: 10/10
Rotten Tomatometer: 90% Certified Fresh

PLOT: A real-time account of the events on United Flight 93, one of the planes hijacked on September 11th, 2001, and of the chaos on the ground as the FAA and the military grasped what was happening.


There are a handful of movies that can still make me cry when watching them, even on repeat viewings, and even then it doesn’t always happen.  Fearless, directed by Peter Weir, is one of them.  The finale of Edward Scissorhands still has the power to choke me up.  The transition from black-and-white to color at the end of Schindler’s List can still bring a lump to my throat given the right circumstances.

But only one movie has made me shed real tears every single time I watch it, and I’ve seen it now at least four times.  I used to watch it every time September 11th came around, as a sort of (morbid?) remembrance of that terrible day.  I haven’t done so the last couple of years simply because the emotional reaction I have to the movie and the events it depicts is just too much to deal with.

Paul Greengrass’ United 93 is unlike any other film about 9/11 that I’ve ever seen.  Many people praised Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center when it came out, but I found that movie too pumped up with melodrama and forced situations.  United 93, on the other hand, takes a documentary approach and simply follows the passengers and crew boarding their flight, like any other, on their way to a date with destiny that nobody saw coming.

Intercut with the flight itself are scenes on the ground, in various air traffic control centers, and the FAA itself.  One of the masterstrokes of the film was to cast Ben Sliney as himself.  Ben Sliney, for those who don’t remember, was the FAA Operations Manager on 9/11.  In fact, it was his first day on the job in that new position that very morning.  It was his decision, after seeing the carnage in NYC and the Pentagon, to take the unprecedented step of grounding ALL air traffic over the United States.

The movie’s effectiveness comes partly from the re-enactments of the ground controllers, trying to make sense of garbled messages coming from first one, then two, then three flights, something about people taking control – and then seeing those flights disappear from radar coverage.  And then someone in the tower sees smoke coming from downtown New York…  Those scenes, more than any documentary I’ve seen, really bring back the memories of that morning for me, the disbelief and utter shock of seeing that building burning and smoking.  And then the second plane hits…

But the movie’s real power is with the flight that ultimately didn’t hit a significant target, crashing instead in a field in Pennsylvania.  (There has been some speculation about its intended target, but the truth is we’ll never know.)  The scenes aboard United 93 have been pieced together using recorded phone conversations from passengers, flight deck recordings, and data on the plane’s flight path.  There’s no way to know how accurate some of these events are, but the point of the movie is that it feels 100% real.  The fear on the face of the hijackers, the fear of the passengers, the slow realization that this flight is headed to another target, and their gradual determination to do something about it.

Watching those scenes, with the knowledge that this flight will eventually crash with total loss of life, is an unbearably sad experience.  The final few minutes of the film, as the passengers rush their attackers and frantically try to break down the cockpit door, fills me with dread.  I find myself thinking, unreasonably, “Maybe this time they’ll get to the cockpit in time…maybe THIS time they’ll get the one pilot among the passengers behind the wheel this time…”  But no.

So WHY, oh, WHY do I give this movie a “10” when it’s such an immensely tragic experience?

Because this movie does not feel like a cheap attempt to cash in on a national tragedy.  Instead, it feels more like a memorial to those brave souls who did everything they could to keep themselves alive, to keep their attackers from fulfilling their evil deeds.  As much as any soldiers who gave their lives attacking a beach head, these everyday civilians deserve our gratitude, and they should be acknowledged as genuine heroes.  I believe United 93 treats them as such.

RUNNING SCARED (2006)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

Director: Wayne Kramer
Cast: Paul Walker, Cameron Bright, Vera Farmiga, Chazz Palminteri
My Rating: 8/10
Rotten Tomatometer: 41%

PLOT: A low-ranking thug (Walker) is entrusted by his boss to dispose of a gun that killed corrupt cops, but things spiral out of control when the gun somehow winds up in the hands of his neighbor’s son (Bright).


So…okay.

First of all, this is most assuredly NOT a remake of the quintessentially ‘80s comedy thriller of the same name, starring Billy Crystal and Gregory Hines, who, although they were very funny, were two of the most unconvincing street cops since…ever.

No.  This is one of the most twisted, sordid, blood-soaked retelling of a Grimms-esque fairy tale I’ve ever seen.  Like someone kidnapped Quentin Tarantino and force-fed him only moonshine and methamphetamines for a week, then told him to sit down and re-write the story of Hansel and Gretel, but to make it take place in modern-day lower-middle-class New Jersey, and don’t forget the guns, Russian thugs, and brief, um, cunning linguistics.

Yeah.  It’s that kind of movie.

I haven’t read the negative reviews of this film, so I couldn’t tell you what turned so many people OFF.  I can only report what turned me ON.

A big part of it is the energetic storytelling at work: lots of digitally enhanced camera tricks, the occasional rewind, tilting the camera when you really didn’t have to, sudden speed-ups…very stylistic.  Tony Scott did a bit of the same thing in Domino, released a few months earlier, and Oliver Stone sort of pioneered this kind of thing with the wildly weird Natural Born Killers.  So it’s not like I haven’t seen this before, but it really works with this lurid material.

Which brings me to another big part of why I like this movie: the story.  On the surface, it’s your standard kid-in-peril, race-against-time thriller.  Paul Walker absolutely, positively HAS to get his hands on the dirty gun that Cameron Bright manages to steal and go into hiding with.

But tilt your head and squint your eyes, and you can see the whole thing is basically a guns-blood-and-broads version of a classic fairy tale, where a young innocent traverses the unforgiving countryside while being pursued by deadly forces.  On the way, he meets up with various colorful characters, who aren’t all bad, but they’re certainly not all good.

In this case, instead of trolls and ogres, our innocent character encounters, not necessarily in this order: the Russian mafia, a hooker with a heart of gold, her vengeful pimp, a creepy homeless guy, crooked cops, his own abusive father, and, in the movie’s squirmiest moment, a creepy married couple who show an inordinate amount of compassion for, and interest in, this lost child, and who seem to have the most nefarious motives of anyone else in the film.

And that’s just the “B” story.

The “A” story revolves around Paul Walker’s character trying to retrieve the gun Bright has stolen.  He bounces around like a pinball with his own son in tow, spewing profanity like it’s going out of style, beating up lesser thugs, lying to superior thugs, always just one step behind Bright who is sure Walker is going to kill him.

I dunno, for me, the dynamic camerawork and the shocking subject matter all worked.  It’s a fun, trippy ride, with just desserts getting served all around.  I’m sure people have an issue with the ending, but what would they have preferred when it comes to a popcorn movie like this?

After all, how do MOST fairy tales end?

JOHN WICK: CHAPTER 3 – PARABELLUM (2019)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

Director: Chad Stahelski
Cast: Keanu Reeves, Halle Berry, Ian McShane, Laurence Fishburne, Anjelica Huston
My Rating: 9/10
Rotten Tomatometer: 89% Certified Fresh

PLOT: Picking up precisely where John Wick 2 left off, legendary assassin John Wick (Reeves) must fend off wave after wave of bounty hunters intent on collecting the $14 million bounty on his head.


You gotta love how John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum starts.  About 30 seconds of opening credits, and then bang, the action picks up exactly where John Wick: Chapter 2 ended.  Wick is on the run through New York City, trying to find safe haven for himself (and his dog, aptly named “Dog”) before he becomes “excommunicado”.  At that point, a global network of assassins will make him their target and kill him.

Well…they’ll TRY to kill him.

Let’s be blunt: you’re either a fan of the John Wick franchise, or you’re not.  These films are not for the casual moviegoer.  There’s just enough story to hang the fight scenes on, no more.  Everything we need to know about the John Wick character, we’ve gleaned from the first two films, and even that is minimal.  There’s no subtext, no neo-modern, meta-textual considerations to be discussed in terms of the screenplay.  The movie has but one purpose: to show off spectacularly choreographed fight scenes in which the good guy obliterates a crapload of bad guys.

I think I read somewhere there are eleven separate fight scenes in the film.  As such, the filmmakers were careful to make the fight scenes as distinctive as possible, especially when it comes to the weapons that are used.  Among these weapons are (let me see if I can remember them all): fists, knives, swords, axes, pistols, shotguns, machine guns, several thick books, a chisel, a couple of pissed-off attack dogs, and a belt.

Watching this movie was exhilarating for me.  The action scenes tapped into that teenaged part of me that used to love watching Enter the Dragon or The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.  I mean, I still love those movies, but for some reason, during Parabellum, I was positively giddy.  There was a sense that the filmmakers were attempting to provide us with the ULTIMATE action movie, the zenith, the ne plus ultra.  And I’ve gotta say, the last time an action movie gave me those kinds of vibes was The Matrix Reloaded during the freeway car chase.

There’s not much more to say about the movie.  Like I said, it has one purpose, and it does it extremely well.  If you love great fight scenes, congratulations, Christmas came early.

AVENGERS: ENDGAME (2019)

By Miguel E. Rodriguez

Directors: Anthony Russo & Joe Russo
Cast: Robert Downey Jr., Chris Evans, Mark Ruffalo, Chris Hemsworth, Scarlett Johansson, Jeremy Renner, Don Cheadle, etcetera, etcetera…
My Rating: 10/10
Rotten Tomatometer: 96% Certified Fresh

PLOT: After the devastating events of Avengers: Infinity War, the universe is in ruins. With help from some of their remaining allies, the Avengers assemble once more to try to undo Thanos’ actions.


I have tried several different drafts of this review, and I simply am unable to write a decent review without necessarily revealing spoilers.

So…

DO NOT READ ANY FURTHER IF YOU HAVE ANY INTENTION OF SEEING AVENGERS: ENDGAME IN THE FUTURE.  SPOILER ALERT!!!

SPOILER ALERT!!!

SPOILER ALERT!!!

You have been warned.

For starters, Avengers: Endgame is not my favorite movie in the MCU.  (That title still goes to the incredibly complex, endlessly debatable Captain America: Winter Soldier, the superhero movie for people who hate superhero movies.)  BUT…Endgame contains my single favorite moment in the entire franchise.  It occurs during the climactic battle, and it involves…hardware.  YOU know what I’m talking about.

That aside, while Endgame is a more-than-worthy sendoff for the 11-year-long story arc, and is Hollywood spectacle at its best, I gotta be honest and say that the 3-hour running time was starting to get to me around about the 2-hour mark.  Yes, the plot threads all had to be woven together to bring everything to a head for the ultimate showdown, and I wouldn’t dream of eliminating anything that I saw, but it just was feeling a little slow.

Other than that…it gets all A’s across the board.

  • ACTION – I haven’t seen CGI action on this scale since the Battle of the Pelennor Fields in The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King.  Or Avengers: Infinity War, take your pick.  I can only imagine the headaches and nervous breakdowns experienced by the hordes of CGI artists who painstakingly created the outstanding battle scenes.  They were incredibly dense, but I was never unable to see any of the key moments involving key characters.  Nothing was too dark or murky.  It was an event.
  • HUMOR – In spite of the heaviness of the proceedings, the filmmakers never lost sight of their origins: COMIC books.  From the first appearance of Thor in residence at New Asgard, to Stark’s never-ending supply of dry one-liners, to Hulk’s selfie in the diner, the audience is always kept from falling into major depression, even after some really, REALLY dark moments in the story.
  • CLOSURE – The film ends the way it does because it HAD to.  Some of the original actors are just getting too old to do it anymore, folks, that’s just the way it is.  Hugh Jackman hung up his claws on Wolverine because he was getting too old to get into that kind of shape anymore.  And some other actors are just ready to move on.  It’s time.  Regardless, though, the way that certain characters were granted their own particular curtain call…it was IMMENSELY satisfying, not a bit gratuitous, and even noble for everyone involved.  I wasn’t moved to tears myself, but there were audible sniffles in the movie theater.

(I did also REALLY like the abandoned New York cityscapes after we jump ahead in the timeline a little bit.  I’ve always LOVED the concepts of modern edifices and cities left to ruin after abandonment.  That’s one of the reasons I really love I Am Legend.  BUT I DIGRESS.)

So, yes, it’s worth the hype.  They got it right.  It is a fitting final chapter to one of the most amazing cinematic achievements in history.  It IS a little long, but I can get over that.

And I am stoked to see what comes next.

SHAZAM! (2019)

By Miguel E. Rodriguez

Director: David F. Sandberg
Cast: Zachary Levi, Mark Strong, Asher Angel, Adam Brody, Djimon Hounsou
My Rating: 9/10
Rotten Tomatometer: 91% Certified Fresh

PLOT: Fourteen-year-old Billy Batson’s life is changed forever when he is tapped to be the recipient of all the powers of a god by an aging wizard.


What’s that, you say?  The trailers for Shazam! look like something that should have gone straight to video?  Looks kinda stupid?  Like something along the lines of 2011’s abysmal Green Lantern crossed with Sky High?

Well, you’re not wrong in terms of the trailer.  However, like all the best trailers, it only shows you what it WANTS to show you, and keeps the best stuff hidden until you pay your admission fee.  And what the trailers DON’T show you is the heart, appeal, and just plain fun of Shazam!  It’s the DC Extended Universe’s answer to Guardians of the Galaxy.

Plug the director’s name, David F. Sandberg, into IMDb, and you discover that his biggest credits to date are the Lights Out movie (a one-trick horror pony) and Annabelle: Creation, unseen by me, but which intuition tells me was not exactly a superhero movie.  So he would not seem to be the ideal candidate to helm a movie that tries to bring some constantly-requested fun into DC’s dark universe of films.  But whatever Sandberg learned on those other movies was worth learning, because he has created a comic-book movie that’s just about as much fun as Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse.  Like someone remade Big where the little kid turns into Superman instead of Tom Hanks.

The beginning of the film is pretty standard comic-book stuff.  The origins of a key character, background on young Billy Batson (played by Asher Angel, a young actor who is the spitting image of Arya Stark on Game of Thrones, has anyone seen the two of them in the same room together, just saying), and his introduction into a foster home unique in the world of comic-book films, at least to my knowledge.  Billy’s new foster home is a melting pot of cultures, from Asian to (I think) Samoan, with siblings ranging in age from about 9 to 18.  There was something kinda cool about it, but not distracting.  Just…unique.

When Billy miraculously gains his powers (in a scene that is distinctly Potter-esque, what with wizards, lightning bolts, and orphans), one of his foster siblings, Freddy, becomes his manager, owing to the fact that he’s an expert on superheroes, particularly Superman and Batman, although he can also be seen wearing a t-shirt with the Atlantean logo on it…nice touch.   The scenes where Freddy and Billy attempt to determine the extent of Billy’s new powers are worth the price of admission.  And they have a certain logic.  If a bullet shot from a gun bounces off your brand-new super-suit, AND your body has completely transformed, how do you know if your HEAD is bulletproof or not?  Speaking for myself, I’d just use my super-speed and get out of the way, but that’s not really definitive enough for our heroes.

Anyway.  The movie uses a lot of comedy and just enough super-villainy to get us through the story without bogging us down in the deep dark psyche of the villain.  And it builds to one of the most inspired climaxes I’ve seen in a comic book movie in a really long time.  I don’t want to give too much away, but I will say this: just remember that throne room.

Don’t let the kitschy nature of the trailers scare you away.  This is a great, FUN movie.

US (2019)

By Miguel E. Rodriguez

Director: Jordan Peele
Cast: Lupita Nyong’o, Winston Duke, Elizabeth Moss
My Rating: 9/10
Rotten Tomatometer: 94% Certified Fresh

PLOT: A family’s beach vacation turns sinister when a group of doppelgängers begins to terrorize them.


[SPOILER, SPOILER, MOST CERTAIN SPOILERS TO FOLLOW]

It’s abundantly clear after two films (with hopefully many more to come) that Jordan Peele was and is an enormous fan of The Twilight Zone, that legendary TV show that presented tales of strange and the weird situations that very often turned into legitimate horror stories.  For me, that’s what Us is: a feature-length episode of The Twilight Zone, with everything amped up to 11, including the ambitious nature of the ending which, I think, bit off a little more than it could chew.

However, the ending is not what makes this film special, it’s how we get there.  And the events leading up to the end of the film make for one of the most unsettling movie experiences I’ve ever had.

I cannot stress the creepy nature of this story enough.  A family’s beach vacation is interrupted when intruders invade their home, and the intruders turn out to be…their doubles.  Doppelgängers.  Virtually identical except for disturbing aspects, like an additional scar or a perpetual smile or a cloth mask.  When these “others” faced their victims inside the house, I was indescribably terrified.  I found myself asking, what would I do in this situation?  If I found myself sitting across from an exact duplicate of me, a duplicate who never spoke but just stared and smiled and made weird clicking noises instead of talking?

I’d s**t myself, that’s what I’d do.

The story takes some interesting twists and turns, and it doesn’t follow traditional genre convention when it comes to who lives and who dies.  Whenever I expected one thing to happen, the movie neatly sidestepped my expectations ingeniously.

There’s also unexpected comedy, especially when someone tries to use their automated personal assistant at a crucial moment.  Think of all the times Siri has misinterpreted your questions.  Yeah.  It’s one of THOSE moments.

The movie is an amalgam of the best moments of Rod Serling, M. Night Shyamalan, Alfred Hitchcock, John Carpenter, and even a little Spielberg here and there with the comedy moments.  It’s clear that director Jordan Peele has digested the best films from these directors and crafted his own take on the horror/suspense genre, using those masters as a guide.  (I’m referring to Shyamalan’s EARLIER films when I call him a master, because they WERE masterful…not his later stuff, which is…not great.)

I, for one, found myself sucked into the story, hook, line, and sinker.  It did become clear, however, that the underlying reason for the existence of these doppelgängers was, inevitably, going to be a LITTLE disappointing.  Science experiment gone awry?  Space aliens?  Results of a newly-emerging virus?  As the movie entered its final stages and the meaning behind the doubles’ existence was revealed, I did find myself a little disappointed.  Like when someone shows you how a stunning magic trick was accomplished with a simple fake thumb.

Would it have been more interesting to leave the existence of these doubles unexplained?  To make it a TRUE Twilight Zone episode and leave the audience with a mystery instead of a true resolution?  I think it would have been more interesting that way, so instead of shaking my head at the almost banal nature of the doppelgängers, I would have left intrigued.  After all, John Carpenter never explained how Michael Meyers vanished after being shot several times at point blank range.  But it was CREEPY, brother.

So, there you go.  I loved it, the ending was a little disappointing, but not disappointing enough to kill the movie for me.  The journey was more important than the final destination, in my book.

16 BLOCKS (2006)

By Miguel E. Rodriguez

Director: Richard Donner
Cast: Bruce Willis, Mos Def (a.k.a. Yasiin Bey), David Morse
My Rating: 7/10
Rotten Tomatometer: 56%

PLOT: An aging alcoholic cop (Willis) is assigned the task of escorting a witness (Mos Def) from police custody to a courthouse 16 blocks away. However, chaotic forces are at work to prevent them from making it in one piece.


“Genre film.”  To some people, these may be considered dirty words.  They conjure up painful memories of poor-to-middling films like Red Heat, Beastmaster, Con Air, Deep Impact, Cliffhanger, ad infinitum.

However, let us not forget that people who were just trying to make a simple genre film also gave us Star Wars and Jaws and Casablanca.

With 16 Blocks, veteran director Richard Donner (Lethal Weapon, Superman) takes a familiar story – gently re-using elements from 3:10 to Yuma, if you ask me – and delivers a respectable genre film: solid, if somewhat predictable, entertainment.  Call it a compromise between Casablanca and Commando.

If Bruce Willis had not been cast, this movie would probably not have been made.  With genre films, you want archetypes, actors who embody the characters without having to say a word if they don’t have to.  That’s our Bruce.  When you first see him on screen, nursing a hangover, eyes half-closed, trudging wearily step by step, you don’t need a lot of plot exposition.  We’re there.

Where this movie mildly elevates its formula is in the casting of Mos Def as Eddie Bunker, the federal witness whom Willis is tasked with protecting.  I’m speculating here, but I’m guessing that Mos Def was probably no one’s first choice for the role.  On the page, the script is crying out for a comedian: Chris Rock, maybe even Eddie Murphy, or Dave Chappelle.  Instead, the producers went with the “hot hand”, Mos Def, a former hip-hop artist, riding high on high-profile roles in several recent hits.  Despite his modest popularity, he is still not the obvious choice.

But make no mistake: Mos Def is what makes this movie work.  His Eddie Bunker character has this amazing, indescribable accent, somewhere between the nasal whining of a Beastie boy and Billy Ray Valentine from Trading Places.  His job is to be as annoying as possible to his minder, and he succeeds.  But he is also somehow able to make Eddie likable and even relatable.  He claims he’s in prison by mistake (of course), but he has plans to open a bakery when he gets out…because he learned to bake in prison.  I love that, I don’t know why.

The film hurls this odd couple from one situation to the next as it unspools almost in real time.  In the course of all this hurling, they encounter that most reliable of screen clichés: bad guys who can’t shoot straight while the good guys are nearly perfect marksmen.  Predictable.  Not to mention the bad guy who monologues just a LITTLE too long, the ability for the good guy to somehow out-think the bad guys even with a monster hangover, the good guy who (gasp!) turns out to be a bad guy…most movie clichés are out in full force here.

But it works.  It’s not Heat, but it’s not The Golden Child either.  It’s fun, a not-quite-guilty pleasure that hits all the buttons on time and on target.  Predictable, yes.  But fun.

KING KONG (2005)

By Miguel E. Rodriguez

Director: Peter Jackson
Cast: Naomi Watts, Jack Black, Adrien Brody, Andy Serkis (as Kong)
My Rating: 10/10
Rotten Tomatometer: 84% Certified Fresh

PLOT: In 1933 New York, an overly ambitious movie director (Black) coerces his cast and crew to travel to the mysterious Skull Island, where they encounter Kong, a giant ape who is immediately smitten with leading lady, Ann Darrow (Watts).


A cheesy screenplay, stupendous visual effects, breathtaking action sequences…James Cameron’s – sorry – Peter Jackson’s epic remake of THE classic monster movie may not have been the movie that anyone was clamoring for, but I, for one, am glad it was made.  To me, it’s one of the great monster movies of all time, and one of the greatest adventures since Jackson’s own epic adaptation of the Lord of the Rings trilogy.

To make things easier for myself, I’m just going to tick off the highlights.

  • The screenplay lacks any semblance of subtlety, but the dialogue is not exactly the point here.  It serves its purpose.  In fact, the best scenes that approach any emotional depth are the virtually wordless interactions between Ann Darrow and Kong.
  • The visual effects are stunning.  Even putting aside the spectacular action sequences, Kong himself is one of the great triumphs of modern CGI wizardry.  Building on the technology used to bring Gollum to life, Kong’s movements and facial expressions are based on the motion capture performance by the man who really pioneered this new branch of acting, Andy Serkis.  To watch Kong expressing, not just red fury, but also puzzlement, melancholy, happiness, even (for the briefest of moments) fear…to watch it happen, and to feel the character come to life, is awe-inspiring.  You look in his eyes, and you see the mind behind them, working things out.
  • The sequence that begins with Ann’s encounter with Skull Island’s version of the T-Rex, and which ends with Kong in single battle with said beastie, is the kind of thing we go to the movies for, or at least the kind of thing we go to these movies for.  It’s pure blockbuster gold, and mostly without any music in the background.  Blu-Ray/DTS bliss.
  • Okay, yes, Adrien Brody would not be the obvious choice for the hero if the movie.  But hey, in the film someone actually says something like, “Real heroes have lousy haircuts and a skin condition.”  Or something like that.  Which makes Brody, by that definition, hero material.
  • True story: the first time seeing the movie in the theater, there were sniffles in the audience as poor Kong expires and falls to his death.  (Did I ruin that for you?  How did you THINK it would end?)
  • The extended cut is not quite as good as the theatrical version.  With the additional animal attacks, the movie would have been just too exhausting in theaters.  (On home video, though, it’s cool to watch.)
  • Now that you’ve seen the remake, find and watch the original.  You’ll be amazed at how much of the original found its way into this new version.

In summary, King Kong is modern thriller moviemaking, with director Peter Jackson in peak form.  Sadly (at least so far), he hasn’t reached this pinnacle again.  But one can hope.

SPIDER-MAN: INTO THE SPIDER-VERSE (2018)

By Miguel E. Rodriguez

Directors: Bob Persichetti, Peter Ramsey, Rodney Rothman
Cast: Shameik Moore, Jake Johnson, Hailee Steinfeld, Mahershala Ali, Lily Tomlin, Kathryn Hahn, Liev Schrieber
My Rating: 10/10
Rotten Tomatometer: 97% Certified Fresh

PLOT: In an alternate New York City, Miles Morales is bitten by a spider that has been strangely affected by scientific experiments being conducted by Kingpin. He soon meets other Spider-People from OTHER alternate realities who were dragged to Miles’ reality by those same experiments…


Right from the opening credits, an intense, fan-boy-level love of the Spider-Man characters (and comic books in general) radiates from the heart of Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse like those little squiggly lines of “spider-sense” that instinctively tells the various spider-people that they are in the presence of other spider-people.  It tells the other fan-boys, fan-girls, and fan-adults that here, at last, is a cartoon comic-book movie worthy of standing with the live-action giants of the MCU, both in terms of visual spectacle and in terms of an extremely solid, well-told story.

When I saw the first trailers for this film, I instantly dismissed it as yet another cinematic screening of a forgettable, straight-to-video animated feature.  The style looked like some kind of mish-mash of CG figures and hand-drawn faces, trying way too hard to be different without actually being effective.  The story was ultra-cheese, the kind of thing that even comic-book writers would find old-hat: a trans-dimensional rift allows Spider-People from different alternate universes to interact with each other at the same time.  And one of them is a literal cartoon pig called Spider-Ham.

Right.

So the movie gets released, and one day I take a peek at the ol’ Rotten Tomatometer, and it’s like at 95 or 96 percent.  And I’m STILL skeptical because the Tomatometer is only really accurate about 80% of the time.  But it continues to get buzz, and everyone on Facebook who sees it posts saying, “WOW, was that a good movie!”  It suddenly becomes the must-see movie of the holiday season.

So.  We saw it today, and just got home.  And WOW, was that a good movie!  It is fulfilling in just about every way a movie can be.  It had loads of humor; it was brilliantly original; it was visually stunning; it had real, EARNED dramatic moments; and it has the best credit-cookie since Ralph Breaks the Internet.

A lot of the film’s impact comes from that stunning visual style, which I initially dismissed.  As much as Sin City and Watchmen before it, Into the Spider-Verse takes great pains to recreate the look and feel of a comic book in as many ways as possible.  Speech panels appear occasionally.  Sound effects are manifested as words: “bap!” and “BOOM” and “bagel!”  (Yes, that is one of the sound effects.)  A lot of backgrounds are made to look as if they’re printed off-kilter, much like some comic books used to be printed back in the stone age.  This non-realistic style allows the filmmakers to create a crazy climax that would be virtually impossible with a live-action film; the CG would look too crazy to take seriously.

Aside from the visuals, there’s also the stunning originality with the screenplay.  For example, given the fact of many (infinite, really) alternate universes, the variations the screenwriters use are truly ingenious, particularly when it comes to the villains.  Kingpin makes an early, ENORMOUS appearance (he looks like the Hulk in a business suit), and he has a henchman that I really should have recognized earlier.  And the cleverness of Doc Ock’s arrival had me shaking my head in admiration.

The storytelling takes the time to let us get to know the inner workings of the main characters, a rarity in a non-Pixar film.  Miles Morales (the focal point of the story) is a high-school kid, loves his Latina mom and African-American dad, doesn’t love his new private school, loves bonding with his ne’er-do-well uncle…these connections are solidified in our minds so when the moment comes when a family member’s life is on the line, you feel it, man.  It’s not just drawings going through the motions.

It’s very hard for me to discuss the humor without giving away some of the best jokes.  You just have to trust me on this one, besides being one of the best comic-book movies of the year, it’s also one of the funniest.  (I LOVED the fake movie posters in Times Square.)

In closing, I can only apologize to the movie gods for completely dismissing this movie on the basis of the trailer.  Ever since that happened to me with Fight Club, I’ve tried to avoid making that kind of snap judgement.