Every year, it seems that there’s some giant hit of a movie that I can’t stand. A couple of years ago, it was Mad Max: Fury Road. A few years before that, it was Spring Breakers. The Bad Batch feels like some horribly mutated love child of those two films, and it has plenty to dislike about it.

The movie is set in some desert wasteland that was carved out of Texas. It’s populated with criminals, illegal aliens, and people who have just been deemed unlikely to contribute to civilized society. Those people are called “bad batchers”, and Arlen (aka bad batcher 5040, played by Suki Waterhouse) seems to be in that latter category. She’s tattooed with her identifier and tossed out into the middle of nowhere with nothing but the clothes on her back and a gallon of water.

Almost immediately, she’s attacked by a couple of cannibals, who for some inexplicable reason are called “bridge people” despite living in an airplane graveyard with no bridge in sight. They capture her, tie her down, and amputate one of her arms and one of her legs for food (perhaps over an extended period of time rather than all at once; the movie isn’t clear about that). Before they can perform any more surgery, she escapes and manages to drag herself away. This time, she’s picked up by a nomadic loner who deposits her at the gates of Comfort, a kind of permanent Burning Man that many of the bad batchers have set up. After a little recuperation and an artificial leg, Arlen sets back out into the desert, seemingly intent on revenge.

I realize that my description might make it sound like things happen in the movie, but that’s mostly an illusion because The Bad Batch is the most utterly boring and completely uneventful film I’ve seen in quite a while. It’s like they took the world of Fury Road, removed any shred of action from it, and plopped in a Spring Breakers-esque drug-fueled rave in the middle of it for no good reason. Everything progresses at an excruciating pace, and it mostly leaves you guessing about what’s going on. There is absolutely no excuse for its two-hour runtime, although maybe a 70-minute version could be tolerable.

I suppose that it’s worth mentioning the other notable people in the film. Jason Momoa and Jayda Fink play a father-daughter pair who are the other major characters in the movie and comprise the only semblance of a plot in the second half of the film. Keanu Reeves is the movie’s James Franco. Jim Carrey is virtually unrecognizable as the desert wanderer, and Giovanni Ribisi is all too recognizable in his role as the village idiot and least necessary character in the film.

Even reading this, it’s hard to reconcile the fact that things actually do happen in the movie with the fact that it is one of the most boring films ever made. Perhaps a much shorter version would have condensed its essence into something worthwhile, but in its current form, it’s just an utter waste of time and energy trying to keep your eyes open.

Syria is in the Middle East, surrounded by Turkey, Iraq, Jordan, Israel, and Lebanon, so it’s not stranger to conflict. In 2011, civil war broke out when citizens rebelled against President Bashar al-Assad. Years of violence ensued, with the government engaging in frequent bombing runs, assisted by Russian military forces. Far from surgical strikes intended to take out strategic targets, they seem to have been very haphazard, affecting civilians as much or even more than people actively involved in the rebellion. They seem to have no problem with taking out hospitals or residential areas.

All of this bombing caused a lot of destruction. Buildings collapsed, often with people inside. A group of men who call themselves The White Helmets have taken it upon themselves to become a search and rescue squadron. They go to bombing sites to excavate rubble, hoping to find survivors. Sometimes they get lucky, but more often than not, they only dig out dead bodies, and those are often not intact. This is dangerous work, not only because the bombed-out buildings are jagged and unstable, but also because the Syrian and Russian forces seem to delight in targeting areas where people group together.

If you have any doubts about the depths of human assholery, this documentary will put them to rest. You’ll see far too many dead children, including infants, being pulled out from beneath collapsed buildings. You’ll see Aleppo, Syria’s largest city, repeatedly lit up with bomb strikes, including what are called barrel bombs and certainly appear to be just barrels full of explosive material dropped out of planes and helicopters. You’ll see people (again, often children) suffering from malnutrition and lack of medication as supply lines have been cut off. You’ll hear of the futility of trying to escape, as nearby countries like Turkey close their borders. And you’ll see a complete lack of any kind of outside assistance as the people suffer under what appears to be a brutal, oppressive regime directly aided by Russian military forces.

But it’s not entirely horrific. You’ll repeatedly see these men putting their lives on the line, working hard and sustaining injuries, to help their fellow citizens. You’ll see people emerge alive after being dug out from the rubble, and children reunited with their parents. You’ll see the comradery of the rescuers in the moments of downtime, and the way that people pull together in times of crisis. The film feels a bit slow at times, but in retrospect, those moments are just as vital to the documentary, allowing you to get a better sense of who these people are, and giving you a break from all of the awful things being shown.

Last Men in Aleppo is a very difficult documentary to watch. You’re not going to have a good time, and you’re going to see things that you don’t want to see. But it is an important film because things like this need to be brought to light in the hope of making the world a less terrible place.

In 2008, the U.S. economy was in danger of collapsing. Some of the largest financial institutions, including Morgan Stanley, JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, and Citi, were found to have been engaging the in the illegal and dangerous practice of bundling a bunch of high-risk mortgage loans together and billing them as great investments. This helped make a few number of people a lot of money, but when the bottom fell out, the government ended up giving them billions of dollars and a slap on the risk because they were “too big to fail.”

The Abacus Federal Savings Bank was founded by Thomas Sung, who immigrated to New York City as a teenager and grew up to become a successful lawyer. He noticed that other banks were happy to accept deposits from Chinese people, but weren’t so welcoming when they came asking for loans. Abacus catered to New York’s Chinatown population and did well enough that they were able to open six branches. That’s certainly respectable, but with something like 2600 larger banks in the country, the government saw them as decidedly not too big to fail.

The problems started when Abacus learned that one of their loan officers had been accepting bribes and skimming money from customers. They fired him immediately and reported the infractions to the appropriate organizations, who decided to jump at the opportunity to have a scapegoat for the whole credit default swap scandal. Members of the Sung family, along with a few other bank employees, were arrested and charged with several serious crimes. At best, they’d have to spend millions of dollars in legal fees to defend themselves. At worst, they faced fines and prison time.

It’s a fascinating documentary, even if you’re not particularly interested in finance. It’s certainly a one-sided presentation, and we’re given less than ninety minutes to look at a trial that lasted for months, but it certainly seems like a David and Goliath-type battle in which the government was desperate to point to at least one bank that they had actually punished instead of bailed out. The filmmakers aredefensepushing you to believe in the bankers’ innocence, and the segments in which government representatives argue to the contrary seem like they have been hand-picked to sound weak.

I was also frustrated by the substantial amount of time spent on tangents not directly related to discussing guilt or innocence. The biggest offender here is the defence argument that no one was hurt by the loans in question, and that even if some of the loans had been obtained with false information, all of the clients had faithfully repaid those loans. This seems irrelevant and counterproductive, since arguing that there were no adverse consequences to an illegal activity has a very different connotation than arguing that they had no involvement in that activity. Nonetheless, this argument was made in court, and it’s appropriate for the documentary to have included it, but it felt like they dwelled on it too much.

On the other hand, the film does a good job of making you feel close to the Sung family and sympathizing with and relating to them. It’s far from impartial, but it is informative and entertaining, and it’s worth checking out if you get the chance.

The 1932 version of The Mummy, starring Boris Karloff, is phenomenal. It’s one of the best monster movies ever made. There have been many mummy-related films since then, but I haven’t seen any that come close to the original. The 2017 version should be ashamed of itself for even thinking that it’s fit to share the same title.

A long, long time ago, an Egyptian princess named Ahmanet (Sofia Boutella) wanted to summon Set, the god of death. She was caught, mummified while she was still alive, and entombed in Mesopotamia (now Iraq), far away from Egypt. In modern times, Nick (Tom Cruise) and Chris (Jake Johnson) are soldiers who are involved in a black market operation to find antiquities and sell them on the black market. They come across Ahmanet’s tomb, but their commanding officer (Courtney B. Vance) gets to them before they can loot the grave. He brings in Jenny (Annabelle Wallis), an expert on Egyptian culture to help with the excavation, which Nick screws up by releasing the magical chains that kept the mummy in check. And now Ahmanet wants to kill Nick and use his body as the vessel for Set’s return. Also featuring Russell Crowe as Jekyll and Hyde, because apparently, the movie wasn’t quite terrible enough when it just stuck to the mummy storyline.

It’s pretty appalling how stupid this movie is. There are so many things that don’t make any sense or that are completely contrary to anything resembling logic. Some of these are explained away by magic and destiny and Egyptian gods and stuff, but I guess most of the time, we’re just supposed to go along with it without asking any questions. We don’t need to know why these delicate, centuries-old items are so well preserved and so durable. We don’t need to know why there are zombies in a mummy movie. We don’t need to know why Nick can fire an automatic rifle but seems terrified of holding a pistol. We don’t need to know why Nick goes from annoyed at Jenny to utterly in love with her at the drop of a hat.

The film is also annoyingly schizophrenic. Sometimes it wants to be Indiana Jones. Sometimes it wants to be The Da Vinci Code. Sometimes, it wants to be a monster movie, although it can’t even manage to stick to one kind of monster, and it definitely doesn’t do “mummy” very well.  Sometimes, it wants to be a superhero movie, and by the end, it definitely feels like it’s an origin story for some kind of analog to X-Men or The Avengers or The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. The only thing that’s really consistent throughout the movie is just how bad it is.

The British seem to live for bureaucracy. Their fondness for queueing is known far and wide, and if things like Yes Minister, In the Loop and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy are to be believed, they also love rules and paperwork. But apparently even the British have their limits, and I, Daniel Blake is a terrific and terrifying look at them.

Daniel (Dave Johns) used to be a carpenter, but then he had a heart attack that forced him to stop working for a while. He had been getting the British equivalent of workers’ compensation until some government stooge decided that he was healthy enough to work, despite multiple doctors saying that was very much not the case. So now he’s in a bureaucratic nightmare where he can’t work, doesn’t have any income, has exhausted his savings, and he has fallen through the cracks of a system staffed by people very intent on following the rules to the letter and that actually punishes people who try to use reason and compassion.

But Daniel isn’t alone. During one of his many trips to the Department of Not Helping People, he encounters Katie (Hayley Squires). She’s new to the area, a single mom with two children (Daisy and Dylan, played by Briana Shann and Dylan McKiernan), and she’s also having trouble keeping her head above water. She can’t find a job and can’t get any help. She managed to get a run-down apartment but can’t afford electricity, and soon she won’t even be able to buy food. Daniel befriends her, and he’s able to help her fix up the apartment, show her some tricks for making do without all of the essentials, and take care of her kids while she goes out looking for work. But things aren’t getting brighter for either of them.

This is one of the most anxiety-inducing films I’ve seen in quite a while. It’s not quite as over the top as something like Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, but it feels just as bleak and even more realistic and relatable, and it’s easier to connect with the characters on a deeper level. It’s pure drama without any humor or suspense to lighten the mood, and while there’s plenty of stupidity to go around, it’s not played for laughs. It’s got a message, and I expect that message gets through just as well to us Americans as it does to the British.

And to make the film even more horrific, there are several scenes in which Daniel, very much a pencil and paper guy, needs to use a computer and can’t figure it out, so he turns to others for help. I’ve been lucky enough in my life to have never had serious concern about where my next meal would come from, but I’ve been on the receiving end of many clueless people asking for technical assistance while being firmly committed to remaining clueless. These scenes got my heart rate up even more than anything else in the film, which is really saying something.

I, Daniel Blake is phenomenal, but I’m honestly not sure I’d recommend watching it if the subject matter hits too close to home. You can tell yourself that a horror film is only a movie, but if you’ve got some of these real-life concerns going into the film, they’ll probably just get amplified by watching it. Maybe immediately following it with something light, stupid, and fun will take the edge off.

A catfight is a fight between two women. It’s natural to think of a catfight as mainly scratching, slapping, hair pulling, and yelling. It’s not as common to think of it as a knock-down, drag-out brawl in the style of the Roddy Piper/Keith David fight in They Live. And yet that’s what Catfight provides. Multiple times.

Veronica (Sandra Oh) has led a pampered existence and hasn’t really done much with her life. She dropped out of college and married a businessman (Damian Young), and now they pay a servant (Myra Lucretia Taylor) to take care of them. One night, when Veronica is at a party celebrating a new contract that her husband’s company was just awarded, she runs into an old college acquaintance, Ashley (Anne Heche). Ashley is a struggling artist who’s helping her girlfriend Lisa (Alicia Silverstone) cater the party. Veronica and Ashley start talking in a stairwell, but it soon comes to blows. The fight gets brutal and ends with Veronica getting knocked out.

When she wakes up, Veronica is in a hospital bed. She’s been there for two years, during which time the world has completely changed out from under her. Her husband and son are both dead, and she’s flat broke. Meanwhile, Ashley’s art has taken off, and she and Lisa are expecting a baby. Now Veronica wants revenge.

It’s difficult to succinctly describe this movie, but I suppose that it’s part While You Were Sleeping, part Arrested Development, and part Itchy & Scratchy cartoon. It’s very funny at times, especially during wars of words and of fists, but some of the most lowbrow stuff (and especially an Idiocracy-evoking recurring gag with a farting character on a late night comedy show) is too cringe worthy to be effective.

But what I liked most about the film is its ability to play with the elements that it’s already provided and remix them in a way that’s both familiar and fresh. Given that the stairwell fight happens pretty early into the film, and given its substantial consequences on Veronica’s life, it’s not too hard to predict that there might be a second. And if you liked the first one, then you’ll probably like the second one even more because it’s just bigger all the way around.

Catfight is definitely not perfect. It feels like a low-budget indie film with the foley too loud and the fighting not very realistic. But it is entertaining, unexpected, and it feels like it achieves exactly what it wants to.

A mimosa is either a type of flowery legume that resides in tropical climates or a drink comprised of champagne and orange juice. I’m not sure how either term applies to an Arabic film that takes place in the mountains with very sparse vegetation.

An old Sheikh is nearing the end of his life. He wants to be buried near his ancestors, but there’s a mountain range between here and there. They could go around the mountains, but that would take longer, and he wants to get there soon, so he pushes for the caravan to take the rough and dangerous trip through the mountains. It doesn’t matter much to him since he’s being carried and he probably won’t survive the trip anyway. And he doesn’t. He dies pretty early into the trip, and most of the caravan decides to turn abandon their journey. They entrust two men, Ahmed and Saïd, to carry the body the rest of the way, and everyone else goes home. And Ahmed and Saïd are only in it because they’re getting paid, and they would’ve just buried the body in the mountains if not for Shakib, a young, inexperienced, naïve, and quite possibly mentally handicapped holy man who has been sent to accompany the body. So they push on through the mountains.

It’s a pretty film, even when the visuals are mostly craggy rocks and weathered people. It’s slowly paced, but that’s completely appropriate for their trek, and at only 96 minutes, it usually doesn’t feel like it’s too long. It’s presented in three chapters, each of which seems to be named in accordance with a prayer position, but I’m not sure those chapter names necessarily line up with the content. It takes some unexpected turns, which mostly make it all the more endearing. Unfortunately, the final scene of the final chapter, which doesn’t seem to have much relation to the rest of the film and doesn’t seem to clarify or add anything to it, feels unnecessary and unnecessarily cryptic. It doesn’t go so far as to ruin the experience, but it left me with an odd feeling of confusion that did detract a bit from the rest of the experience.

 

Magnificent Obsession (1954; first-time watch) — Millionaire playboy Bob Merrick (Rock Hudson) is showing off his high-speed boat for a girl when he gets into an accident that nearly kills him. Fortunately, Dr. Phillips lives across the lake, and he has a resuscitator at his house that the police are able to take and use to save Merrick’s life. Unfortunately, the reason that Dr. Phillips has the resuscitator is that he’s also in need of it, and he dies as a result of an attack that he suffers when it’s being used on Merrick. When Merrick learns of this, he wants to help the widow, Helen Phillips (Jane Wyman), but his attempts are at first rejected, and later even have more dire consequences. So Merrick devotes his life to secretly helping Helen. The movie often feels cheesy and exaggerated, but it’s also thoroughly wonderful and highly effective at making you feel things.

The Host (2006; rewatch) — A careless order from an arrogant and stupid American soldier inadvertently leads to the creation of a monster that lives in Seoul’s Han River. Hyun-seo is captured by the monster and believed to be dead, but she’s able to use the last bit of juice in a dying cell phone to call her father Gang-du and tell him she’s still alive and in some kind of sewer somewhere. Amid mass panic, quarantine, and military hubris, Gang-du and his other deeply flawed family members search do their best to find her before it’s too late. It’s one of the monster movies (in fact, one of the best movies period, horror or otherwise) since Jaws.

Risk (2016; first-time watch) — A documentary that focuses on WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, a flawed and often unpleasant individual whose brusk personality and allegations of misdeeds may deter people from using the important online service that he provides. It’s from director Laura Poitras, but it’s a far cry from her previous film, Citizenfour. Full review at https://nawilson.com/2017/05/04/risk/.

Roar (1981; rewatch) — Hank (Noel Marshall) is a scientist studying big cats. He’s been away from his family (played by Marshall’s real-life family, including Tippi Hedren, Melanie Griffith, and John and Jerry Marshall) for a while, and now they’re coming to visit him. His work keeps him from getting to the airport on time to meet them when their plane lands, so they take a bus to Hank’s cabin and arrive while he’s out. Instead, they’re welcomed by a lot of lions, tigers, leopards, panthers, elephants, and all kinds of other creatures. It’s basically a feature-length animal attack with real humans in real danger from real animals, and just about everyone involved was seriously injured. There’s a whole lot of stupidity on screen, but it works because it’s utterly engrossing.

All That Heaven Allows (1955; rewatch) — Cary Scott (Jane Wyman) is a wealthy widow in a small town with a lot of gossip and a strong class system. Ron Kirby (Rock Hudson) is a gardener who takes life as it comes, isn’t concerned with money or status, and who doesn’t have much aspiration beyond starting a tree farm. When they fall in love, it becomes the talk of the town and Cary is shunned by her friends, acquaintances, and even her children (Kay Talbot and William Reynolds). The film is very much a soap opera with a very “tempest in a teacup” feel to it, but it’s the kind of thing that Douglas Sirk does so well.

By the Time It Gets Dark (2016; first-time watch) — An unbearable slog of a movie comprised of largely unrelated vignettes, many of which feature people engaged in mundane tasks where neither the activity nor the setting is particularly interesting. It’s intentionally cryptic, overly artsy, and devoid of any entertainment value.

The Curse of Frankenstein (1957; first-time watch) — Orphaned as a child with a considerable family fortune, Victor Frankenstein (Peter Cushing) is obsessed with studying and reversing death. With the help of his tutor-turned-assistant Paul Krempe (Robert Urquhart), Victor is able to restore life to a dead dog. Then he sets his sights on not only restoring life to a human but also constructing his own superhuman from the best parts. This Hammer film focuses much more on the doctor than his creation, but Christopher Lee’s portrayal of the creature is completely enthralling and not merely a derivative of Karloff’s monster from the Universal films.

Truck Turner (1974; rewatch) — Mac “Truck” Turner (Isaac Hayes) is a bounty hunter who’s got a reputation as a real badass, and for good reason: he does the jobs that no one else can do. He’s hired to track down Gator (Paul Harris), a pimp who has skipped out on his bail, and Gator ends up dead. Gator’s top woman (Nichelle Nichols) puts out a hit on Turner, and Blue (Yaphet Kotto) thinks that he’s up to the task. It’s a tight, gritty, and fun movie with a soundtrack by Hayes and appearances from Scatman Crothers and Dick Miller.

House on Haunted Hill (1959; rewatch) — A wealthy man (Vincent Price) offers a group of people $10,000 each if they can survive the night in a haunted house. There have already been several murders in the house, and he’s hoping that the trend will continue. It’s a William Castle classic, and while this 16mm screening lacked the “emergo” gimmick of its original theatrical release (in which things would happen in the theater that correspond to things happening on screen), but it’s still a fun watch with just the movie.

The Last Man on Earth (1964; rewatch) — Dr. Morgan (Vincent Price) is the last man on earth, but he’s not completely alone. He’s the sole survivor of a worldwide plague that killed most people but turned others into vampires. They only come out at night, so he does all of his hunting and gathering during the day and then holes up at night to wait out the inevitable assault from the (fortunately weak and stupid) creatures. It spends too much time in a flashback that depicts how things got to be this way, but it is nonetheless the best adaptation of the story that has been filmed a few other times.

Snatched (2017; first-time watch) — After being dumped by her boyfriend, Emily (Amy Schumer) drags her mom Linda (Goldie Hawn) on a trip to Ecuador. They’re kidnapped and spend the rest of the film trying to escape, and trying to pad the runtime out to 90 minutes. Hilarity does not ensue. Full review at https://nawilson.com/2017/05/13/snatched/.

Stop Making Sense (1984; rewatch) — Jonathan Demme presents this concert performance by David Byrne and the Talking Heads. It feels like it may be too long by a song or two, but that’s probably because I’m not really very familiar with the Talking Heads beyond their best-known songs (like Psycho Killer, Burning Down the House, Once in a Lifetime, and Take Me to the River, which are all included), and I’m sure their real fans feel differently. But even when I didn’t recognize the songs, it’s still a highly energetic concert with a lot going on. Byrne, in particular, goes non-stop, except for a one-song break near the end where the Tom Tom Club (basically Talking Heads minus Byrne) does their most well-known hit, Genius of Love.

Something Wild (1986; rewatch) — Charlie (Jeff Daniels) draws Lulu’s (Melanie Griffith) attention when she sees him skip out on his bill at a diner. She offers to give him a lift to his job but ends up taking him a few states away to her high school reunion. He’s having a good time, despite a trip full of bad choices, until an old acquaintance shows up. It’s a fun film full of music, cameo appearances, and a breakout performance by Ray Liotta. A Jonathan Demme memorial screening.

Ghost (1990; rewatch) — Sam (Patrick Swayze) is killed while being mugged by a stranger, but his ghost remains on earth because he has unfinished business. His girlfriend Molly (Demi Moore) is in danger from the murderer, but the only human Sam can interact with is the fake psychic Oda Mae Brown (Whoopi Goldberg). It’s a fairly crappy film that doesn’t deserve the awards and nominations that it received, but very much deserves the mocking that Master Pancake Theater delivered.

Hounds of Love (2016; first-time watch) — Vicki is a high school student who has just been kidnapped by John and Evelyn. They intend to use her for their own sexual gratification, then kill her and hide the body, like they’ve done before. It’s a highly uncomfortable movie, with a lot of intensity and some great cinematography. It’s not always easy to watch but is definitely worth seeing. Full review at https://nawilson.com/2017/05/14/hounds-of-love/.

Clue (1985; rewatch) — A number of strangers are invited to a dinner party under mysterious circumstances. Each of them is being blackmailed, and the person blackmailing them has also been invited. He hopes to convince them to kill whoever organized the event, but he ends up dead in a moment of confusion, and then others die. Locked inside the house, the guests fear for their lives and have no idea who the killer is. It’s a hilarious comedy that holds up extremely well, and each member of the all-star cast is at the top of their game.

Contamination (1980; first-time watch) — An abandoned ship is found to be full of mysterious green eggs. When they get near a heat source, those eggs “hatch” and spray their contents all over everything. If anyone gets sprayed on, then their insides will burst, and they, too, will spray their contents all over everything. It turns out that there’s a plot to use these eggs to do a lot of damage, and a government agent, a local police officer, and a former astronaut team up to try to solve the case and save the world. It’s an Alien ripoff with some fun moments, especially at the beginning and the end, but it can be a bit slow in the middle.

The Martian (2015; rewatch) — A sudden, powerful dust storm forces a group of Mars explorers to make an emergency evacuation. But during that storm, a communications satellite was destroyed and hit Mark Watney (Matt Damon), sending him flying. Assuming he was dead, the others had no choice but to take off without him, but he wasn’t dead, and now he’s alone on Mars with a shelter and provisions intended to support the crew for a month. He’s got no way to communicate with anyone, and even if he could, there’s no chance of a rescue for hundreds of days. It’s a great sci-fi comedy, and University of Texas astrophysicist Dr. Rachael Livermore was on hand to discuss how accurate the science was.

The God of Cookery (1996; rewatch) — Stephen Chow (played by Stephen Chow) is the God of Cookery, a well-known and revered chef. But he’s actually a fraud, and when someone exposes him as such, he decides to become a true chef and legitimately reclaim the title that he previously held. It’s a very goofy comedy, like many Stephen Chow films, and it’s also very good, like many Stephen Chow films.

Alien: Covenant (2017; first-time watch) — The crew of a spaceship transporting passengers to colonize a new planet is unexpectedly awoken by a neutrino blast and finds themselves near a previously unknown planet that seems to be broadcasting some kind of signal. They go to investigate and have a bad experience, just like you will if you see this awful movie. Full review at https://nawilson.com/2017/05/19/alien-covenant/.

High Sierra (1941; first-time watch) — Roy Earle (Humphrey Bogart) has just gotten out of jail, and he’s called to California for a heist. He’s going to help rob the safe of a posh resort hotel during its busy season. He’s paired up with a couple of inexperienced accomplices, and one of them brings Marie (Ida Lupino) for companionship while they plan. She’s immediately smitten with Roy, but he’s got feelings for a young girl, Velma (played by Joan Leslie; her grandfather was played by Henry Travers) that he met on the drive out. It’s a very good film with an ending that’s probably the best they could do given the restrictions of the Hollywood production code, and several scenes were stolen by Bogart’s own dog in the role of Pard.

The Killers (1946; first-time watch) — Swede (Burt Lancaster) is a retired fighter who is assassinated by a couple of killers. Jim (Edmund O’Brien) is an insurance investigator who is looking into the circumstances behind the murder and finds himself onto something much bigger. It’s kind of a Double Indemnity meets Citizen Kane, although it’s not quite on par with either of those films. Lancaster and Ava Gardner are billed as its stars, but they’re really not in it all that much, and O’Brien does most of the heavy lifting, along with a police detective played by Sam Levene.

The Asphalt Jungle (1950; rewatch) — A criminal mastermind (Sam Jaffe) has just been released from prison, and he has an idea for a jewel heist that he’s been holding onto since before he went in. He’s sure it’ll still work, but he needs a bit of money (Louis Calhern) and muscle (Sterling Hayden) to help pull it off. They pull off the job, but things don’t go exactly as planned, and then there’s a double cross. It’s a very good film, and one of Marilyn Monroe’s earliest appearances.

Criss Cross (1949; first-time watch) — Steve (Burt Lancaster) works for an armored car company. He’s got an idea to pull off a robbery, but he needs help. He gets it from Silm (Dan Duryea), who just happens to be dating Anna (Yvonne De Carlo), Steve’s ex-wife. There’s animosity between them, which leads to plotting against each other. It’s got the same writer, director, and lead actor as The Killers, and they’re about equally good.

Armored Car Robbery (1590; first-time watch) — Purvis (William Talman) has a plan to rob an armored car near the end of its run when it’s full of cash. It’s a great plan, and he’s very careful, but he has to use an inexperienced crew to pull it off. And that inexperience turns out to be deadly when things start to go wrong. It’s an incredible 67-minute film with no fat and a great story.

Kansas City Confidential (1952; first-time watch) — A former police chief (Preston Foster) resents being forced out of his job, and he puts together a plan to rob an armored car, get himself rich, and get rid of some nasty criminals (played by Jack Elam, Lee Van Cleef, and Neville Brand) in the process. He’s careful to wear a mask when he meets each of them, and they all wear masks whenever they’re together, so only he knows their identities, and they don’t know each other. The job goes off without a hitch, and they manage to frame an ex-con who’s now a delivery driver (John Payne) for a flower shop. The police eventually have to let him go for lack of evidence but still think that he did it, so it’s up to the driver to find the real culprits so that he can save himself. It’s a highly original and very clever story that keeps you on your toes even though you’re in on everything that’s happening.

Violent Saturday (1955; first-time watch) — Three men (Stephen McNally, Lee Marvin, and J. Carrol Naish) plan to rob a bank in a small mining town and make their escape to a nearby Amish farm (run by Ernest Borgnine), where they can hide out and switch vehicles. They find themselves in the midst of a great deal of drama, including competition between the mining company boss (Richard Egan) and his second in command (Victor Mature), between the bank manager (Tommy Noonan) and a nurse (Virginia Leith), and a prim librarian (Sylvia Sidney) in financial difficulty. It’s an intricate soap-opera-esque melodrama meant to compete with the excellent films of Douglas Sirk, and it does an admirable job of it.

The Killing (1956; rewatch) — A group of men (including Sterling Hayden, Jay C. Flippen, Ted de Corsia, Joe Sawyer, and Elisha Cook, Jr.) plot to rob the cash-laden counting room at a horseracing track, with the help of distractions caused by a sharpshooter (Timothy Carey) and a chess-loving wrestler (Kola Kwariani). The heist goes off almost perfectly, but things get complicated when the wife of one of the conspirators gets involved. It’s an early film by Stanley Kubrick, and it’s just as much a masterpiece as many of his later works.

Rififi (1955; rewatch) — A couple of Frenchmen and a couple of Italians band together to rob a jewelry store with an unbeatable, state-of-the-art alarm system and while operating under a tight schedule. The robbers are skilled, and they’ve spent a lot of time planning, but they’ve got some rivals who’d love to take them down. It’s the French answer to The Asphalt Jungle, and it probably surpasses its American inspiration.

Cash on Demand (1961; rewatch) — Harry (Peter Cushing) is the manager at a small-town British bank. His branch gets an unexpected Christmastime visit from Colonel Hepburn (André Morell), who claims to be from the bank’s insurance company and wants to check up on their security procedures. But behind closed doors, he reveals to Harry that he’s actually a bank robber and that he’s holding Harry’s wife and child hostage. If Harry is to ever see his family again, he must help Hepburn to clean out the vault without anyone else being any the wiser. It’s a Christmas-themed noir from Hammer Films, and it’s terrific.

The Tarnished Angels (1957; first-time watch) — Roger (Robert Stack) was an ace pilot during the war, and since then has been making the rounds doing stunt flying and competing in dangerous races at low altitudes on tight courses around large pylons. He’s got a top-notch mechanic named Jiggs (Jack Carson), a son named Jack (Christopher Olsen), and a wife named LaVerne (Dorothy Malone), in descending order of importance to him. While competing in New Orleans, a newspaper reporter (Rock Hudson) smells a story and starts hanging around with them, and becomes increasingly concerned about what he finds.

Pulp Fiction (1994; rewatch) — Marsellus (Ving Rhames) is a mob boss. Mia (Uma Thurman) is his wife. Jules and Vincent (Samuel L. Jackson and John Travolta) are his muscle. The Wolf (Harvey Keitel) cleans up his messes. Butch (Bruce Willis) is an aging boxer that he’s paying to take a dive. All of these stories are intertwined, but also have their own subplots with other stars, like Tim Roth and Amanda Plummer, Frank Whaley and Phil LaMarr, Eric Stoltz and Rosanna Arquette, Christopher Walken, Steve Buscemi, and Quentin Tarantino. It’s a masterpiece of cinema that draws a lot of inspiration from a lot of sources to tell a nonlinear story that seems to get better each time you watch it.

Tender Mercies (1983; first-time watch) — Mac Sledge (Robert Duvall) used to be a famous singer/songwriter, married to famous singer Dixie (Betty Buckley). Then his drinking got out of control, and he lost his wife and his musical career. It took several more years for him to hit rock bottom, but when that finally happened, it was at a tiny, rural Texas hotel owned by Rosa Lee (Tess Harper). She took pity on Mac and hired him to help out around the hotel. He began to get his life back together, began to explore his musical options, and began to explore the possibility of life with Rosa Lee. It’s a simple film, but everything about it works, and it doesn’t always go where you’d expect.

The Sword and the Claw (aka Lionman aka Kiliç Aslan; 1975; first-time watch) — King Solomon is killed in a coup, but his very pregnant wife escapes for long enough to give birth to a son. She dies in childbirth, and the boy is raised by lions. When he’s grown, he has super strength and a deadly grip, and he gets involved in the fight to recover the throne. On the one hand, it’s a typical Turkish film, with really low production values, the best kind of awful dubbing, and a soundtrack lifted from Spartacus. But on the other, it takes some legitimately interesting turns and does much more than the bare minimum with its plot. It may not be great art, but it’s highly entertaining.

Baby Driver (2017; first-time watch) — Baby (Ansel Elgort) is a getaway driver, and he’s really good at it. He’s working for Doc (Kevin Spacey) as a way to repay him for stealing his car. Baby has almost got the debt paid off, but Doc isn’t so keen on him leaving. It’s an action film pumped full of music that has an amazing opening sequence, but then never seems to achieve anything close to that level of excitement again. It feels like it’s going to be an expertly choreographed dance action movie, but then they abandon the dancing. It should’ve been good, and its opening shows what might have been, but it ends up being no better than just okay. Full review at https://nawilson.com/2017/05/26/baby-driver/.

Divorce Italian Style (1961; first-time watch) — Ferdinando (Marcello Mastroianni) is married to Rosalia (Daniela Rocca). It’s not a happy marriage, and he really wants to get with his 16-year-old cousin, Angela (Stefania Sandrelli). But this is Italy, and divorce is illegal. Ferdinando decides that his only way out is to kill Rosalia, but he doesn’t want to go to jail for too long. To get the lightest sentence possible, he’ll have to catch her cheating on him, which means that he’ll have to find a way to make her cheat on him. It’s both ridiculous and hilarious, and it’s an intelligent comedy with jokes that run the gamut from highbrow to lowbrow. And speaking of brows, Rosalia only has one, and it goes well with her mustache.

Teenage Gang Debs (1966; first-time watch) — Terry (Diane Conti) is a very assertive and very manipulative girl who’s just moved from Manhattan to Brooklyn. She’s fallen in with a local gang, the Rebels, and she goes right after the president, Johnny (John Batis), ousting his current girl. But she soon decides that she doesn’t like him, so she goes to Nino (Joey Naudic) and convinces him to drop his girl and take out Johnny so he can become the new president. At that point, it’s pretty obvious who’s really calling the shots, and it’s pretty obvious how the movie is going to end. But even with the predictable plot and the excessive amount of padding required to reach even a 75-minute runtime, it’s a highly enjoyable movie. Much of that is actually due to the padding, which includes a lot of 60s dancing, especially a karate dance to song called “The Black Belt” that enumerates the levels needed to reach martial arts mastery.

Rio Bravo (1959; rewatch) — Joe Burdette (Claude Akins) shot and killed an unarmed man. Sherrif John Chance (John Wayne) was there, took him into custody, and is waiting for the marshall to arrive so that Joe can face judgment. But Joe’s older brother Nathan (John Russell) is a wealthy man who is willing to pay anything to make sure that doesn’t happen, so Chance and his deputies (played by Dean Martin, Ricky Nelson, and Walter Brennan) have a real challenge on their hands. It’s a masterful Howard Hawks western that’s both funny and tense, and there’s no wonder why it’s one of the best westerns of all time.

A Hero Never Dies (1998; rewatch) — Mr. Fong and Mr. Yam are the heads of warring gangs, which means that their top men (Jack and Martin) are also at war. But Fong and Yam don’t care about their underlings beyond how they affect their own image, and after they become partners, Jack, Martin, and the rest are all left with their lives ruined and wanting revenge. It’s a typically great Johnnie To film with a lot of bullets and a strong sense of honor and duty.

Bomb City (2017; first-time watch) — In 1999, Amarillo, Texas had jocks and punks, and they often didn’t get along. Eventually, this came to a head, and an altercation ensued that would change the lives of several people involved. It’s part narrative and part courtroom drama, based on a true story, and provides a clever way of revealing information in a nonlinear form that doesn’t spoil the outcome if you’re not already familiar with the story. Full review at https://nawilson.com/2017/05/29/bomb-city/.

Crocodile Fury (1988; first-time watch) — An Asian village is plagued by crocodile attacks. But these aren’t any ordinary crocodiles. An evil man has trapped the spirits of innocent people in them (as evidenced by their occasional ability to turn human), and their nature is to attack. It’s up to a sorceress and her magical hopping vampire assistants to try to figure out how to defeat the crocodiles. It’s a rare ninja-less Godfrey Ho film (albeit under the pseudonym of Thomas Tang) that’s often amazing, but it could nonetheless benefit from some editing to tighten things up.

Imitation of Life (1959; first-time watch) — Lora (Lana Turner) is a widowed aspiring actress who has just moved to New York with her daughter young daughter, Susie. Annie (Juanita Moore) is a widowed black woman who finds herself homeless with her young daughter, Sarah Jane. Circumstance puts them together, and Annie becomes Lora’s servant and primary caretaker for their children while Lora’s star begins to rise. Lora and Susie treat Annie very well, and better even than her own daughter, who is light-skinned and wants desperately to pass for white. There’s very little in the movie that is a surprise to the viewer, and yet Sirk pulls it off so masterfully that it’s still totally effective when it happens.

Escape from New York (1981; rewatch) — New York City has been turned into a prison. The President (Donald Pleasence) is on his way to an international summit when his plane is hijacked and crashed into New York so that he can be used as a bargaining chip to help the prisoners (including Isaac Hayes, Harry Dean Stanton, and Adrienne Barbeau) escape. He’s carrying time-sensitive information that is vital to the survival of the world, and the powers that be (including Tom Atkins and Lee Van Cleef) decide to send in war hero turned bank robber Snake Plissken (Kurt Russell) to rescue the President. It’s a classic action film that remains fun to watch even while it’s riddled with logic flaws.

The Sugarland Express (1974; first-time watch) — Lou Jean (Goldie Hawn) and her husband Clovis (William Atherton) both have criminal records, and Clovis is currently finishing up the tail end of his sentence in a minimum security facility. Lou Jean has lost custody of her baby, so she helps break Clovis out so that they can go take their baby back. They’re soon stopped by a police officer (Michael Sacks), but they take him hostage and lead a swarm of police and onlookers on a low-speed chase across the state. It’s Spielberg’s first theatrical film, and it’s like he foresaw the infamous OJ Simpson car chase, or maybe it’s a little of Smokey and the Bandit meets The Legend of Billie Jean. At any rate, it’s mostly a very lighthearted film, but it effortlessly becomes serious when the need arises.

Sleepaway Camp III: Teenage Wasteland (1989; rewatch) — Herman (Michael Pollard) and Lilly (Sandra Dorsey) have started up a new camp, Camp New Horizons, on the site of the old Sleepaway Camp. They’re trying an experiment where they’ll mix kids affluent and underprivileged kids together. Somehow, Angela found out who one of the campers was in advance, killed her, and took her place. And now she’s going to embark on yet another killing spree. It’s a good premise and a significant step up from Unhappy Campers (the second film of the series), but it’s not the most believable film, and it can’t hold a candle to the original Sleepaway Camp.

Cutter’s Way (1981; rewatch) — While driving home one night, Richard Bone (Jeff Bridges) had car trouble and found himself broken down in an alley. Before he can get out, another car shows up, and its driver dumps something in the trash and moves on. It’s a dead body, and Bone soon realizes that the driver who dumped the body was local oil baron J.J. Cord (Stephen Elliott). Bone’s constantly drunk and highly annoying injured war veteran friend Alex Cutter (John Heard) tries to help come up with a plan to take down Cord. It’s a dark film about troubled people, but it’s a very good film.

Showgirls (1995; rewatch) — Nomi Malone (Elizabeth Berkley) has just arrived in Las Vegas to make it as a dancer. She starts as a stripper, but her roommate Molly (Gina Ravera) works as a seamstress for a big hotel’s burlesque show and introduces Nomi to Cristal Connors (Gina Gershon), the star of the show. She gets Nomi an audition to dance in the show, and her star begins to rise. Also featuring Kyle MacLachlan, Glenn Plummer, Robert Davi, this movie features some truly horrible writing, acting, and dancing, along with some very unsexy sex, but it can be undeniably fun to watch.

Amarillo, Texas is America’s primary location for creating and dismantling nuclear weapons. That has earned it the name Bomb City, but bombs aren’t the only form of destruction to come out of the city. Bomb City is also a movie based on true events that happened in Amarillo in 1999.

From watching the movie, you would think that Amarillo is primarily populated by three groups of people: punks, jocks, and cops. All of them are assholes. All of them are unpleasant. None of them have much respect for the law. But where the jocks and the cops start from a position of violence and aggression, the punks are more hesitant and only seem to become violent if pushed into it. But that’s not necessarily obvious from the surface: their attire and appearance are definitely unconventional, their lyrics can be hostile, and their concerts often resemble some kind of full-contact sport.

But these punks are more into art than aggression. They’ve started the Dynamite Museum, a project to create and erect fake street signs with unusual messages, like “Road Does Not End”, “Choose Wisely”, or “Et tu, Brute!”. It’s unlikely that they’ve obtained official permission to erect the signs, and their artwork sometimes spills out into other avenues, like spray-painting the sides of buildings, but ultimately, they’re just trying to express themselves, and other people don’t like it. The police seem to treat them a lot more harshly than the jocks, and the jocks take a lot of pleasure in antagonizing them, verbally and physically. Eventually, this comes to a head, and there’s a confrontation that is the focus of the film.

All of these scenes are intermingled with a courtroom drama, in which we catch glimpses of a trial. It hints of what is to come, but it’s careful about how it reveals this information, so if you’re not familiar with the original story (and I wasn’t), you won’t necessarily know who’s on trial, why, and for what until the time that information is revealed in the narrative. It’s a rather clever way of presenting the information in a nonlinear fashion while still preserving some of the mystery for those who don’t already know about the real events that inspired the film. And while you certainly come away with an impression of those involved, your opinions of them may evolve over the course of the film.

Overall, the film seems very well made. It’s a relatively short 95 minutes, but even so, it does feel like it dawdles a bit on tangents that aren’t particularly essential to the storyline or understanding the main characters. The acting is good, and there are some impressive effects. A credit at the end states that some of the content may have been fabricated and some of the characters may be composites of multiple people, so there is room to question its accuracy, but it doesn’t appear to be obviously pushing an agenda, so if its goal is to manipulate audience opinion, it’s at least able to accomplish it with a fair amount of subtlety. While I don’t love everything about the movie, I admire what the filmmakers were able to pull off, and it’s well worth seeing if you get the chance.

 

There is no doubt that Edgar Wright is an impressive filmmaker. Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz, and Scott Pilgrim vs. the World are great, and even though it took a couple of watches, I’ve come to like The World’s End more than I did after my first watch. Maybe his newest film, Baby Driver, will be in that category, but I’m not so sure.

Baby (Ansel Elgort) is a getaway driver, and he’s really good at it. Doc (Kevin Spacey) is a criminal mastermind who caught Baby trying to steal his car, and now Baby is working for him until he’s paid off his debt. Doc doesn’t like using the same crew multiple times, but he sticks with Baby as his getaway driver, and he hasn’t been let down yet. Now, Baby has just about paid off his debt and wants to go legitimate. He also wants to spend time with his new girlfriend, Deborah (Lily James). But that’s not what Doc wants.

The movie has an amazing opening sequence. It’s The Driver (or Drive if you haven’t seen the 1978 Walter Hill film) meets La La Land. It’s an intense, fast-paced, tightly-cut getaway expertly set to music, and it seems like the whole movie is going to be some kind of action dance movie. Baby has chronic tinnitus from a car accident he was in as a child, so he’s constantly playing music to drown out the ringing in his ears, and everything he does is in time with the music. But the movie seems to abandon that concept pretty quickly, and we’re left with a film that has a lot of music in it, but the characters aren’t choreographed so much, and there’s just a lot of walking and talking and not so much driving. One might even say that the movie actually gets pretty boring at times while we’re waiting for any kind of action that might live up to what we’ve come to expect from the opening sequence.

There are a couple more chase scenes in the film, but they don’t come close to what we got in the opening sequence. There’s one where he’s driving a pickup truck that just feels weird because it just turns into a shootout without a lot of context for who the other guy is (I guess he’s just one of those “good guy with a gun” types you hear so much about, but it feels really unnatural). It does feel like it’s going to get good at the very end of the movie, but that really fizzles, too, and then we’re left with a fairly unnecessary epilogue that doesn’t seem to serve much purpose.

The film is also surprisingly light on comedy for an Edgar Wright movie. There are a couple of funny moments (although apparently one of the funniest is spoiled in the trailer; I can’t confirm because I never, ever watch movie trailers), but most of the time it just doesn’t make much attempt at comedy. This is disappointing because the long stretches without action really need something to punch them up.

I definitely wouldn’t call Baby Driver bad. It’s fine. It just doesn’t live up to its incredible opening sequence, and it doesn’t live up to what we’ve come to expect from Edgar Wright. So when you see this, it’s probably not a bad idea to go in with lower expectations.