Last Wick Best Wick?

The question I hear a lot is: Is John Wick: Chapter 4 (2023) the best of the series? I may answer that later. I will start with a quick synopsis, quicker than usual, because who needs it?

It starts with Wick (Keanu Reeves) in the desert, killing the Elder of the High Table. As he is told repeatedly, this will not change anything for him. Sure, but the Elder will be dead. That has to count for something. 

The (new?) Marquis, Bill Skarsgaard, shows up at the NY Continental, and excommunicates Ian McShane. Also, he kills concierge Lance Reddick as a lesson to McShane, and blows up the hotel. Reeves, after being helped by the Hobo King Laurence Fishburne, heads to the Osaka Continental, run by Hiroyuki Sanada and his daughter Rina Sawayama. Again the Marquis' men show up, lead by blind assassin Donnie Yen. Sanada gets killed and the hotel gets blown up, but Reeves escapes. 

Killing the Marquis isn't going to solve Wick's problems, but if he makes it a duel, it might. But he needs to be sponsored by a family, and he burned those bridges. He asks to come back in, and they will allow if he kills Scott Adkins, a sort of goofy Russian (German?) with steel teeth. Mission accomplished.

Skarsgaard accepts the challenge. The time and place are set - Paris, the Sacre Coeur, dawn. Now, Reeves just has to get there in time (against every assassin in Paris) and defeat Skarsgaard's champion, Donnie Yen, Reeves' old friend.

As usual, there are some amazing fights. The battle in the Osaka Continental takes place in a sort of exhibition hall. When Reeves crashes through a glass case of swords, you might see a resemblance to the case of knives in Wick 3. There's a big gun battle using incendiary shotgun shells that's ridiculously fun. 

And speaking of ridiculous, Reeves has to fight his way up the hundreds of steps to Sacre Coeur at the top of Montmartre. He gets up and is tossed down again and again, like the stairway fight in Wick 2, times 10. 

So the fights hold up - as good or better than the other movies in the series. But the rest of the movie is based on the formalistic rules of the assassin underworld - they make it all about the rules. That's fine, but I don't think it's the "lore", the world building that we care about. Can't say it bogs things down much, though. It does allow for a nice final battle - one on one pistol duel.

So I'd say for now, not the best in the series. For me, probably John Wick 3: Parabellum. But we'll have to watch them all again to see. That will be in preparation for Wick 5 - which we fully expect even though Reeves is killed in the end (SPOILER - or is it?).

Sadly, we won't see Lance Reddick as the concierge as he has passed on. Since we didn't watch The Wire, we were late in becoming his fans. We will miss him.

Gentlemen, I Abhor You! What is a Viy?

I mentioned Viy (1967) a few posts back. Ms. Spenser was intrigued, but there was no other way to watch except to buy it. So we did.

It is set in old Czarist Russia. Seminary school is letting out for a holiday. and a rowdy group of young students head out into the countryside. As darkness falls, they become lost, until they finally find  farmhouse and beg the old woman there for food or a place to sleep. She won't feed them (or give them vodka), but will let them sleep - but they will have to sleep separately. One of them, Leonid Kuravlyov, beds down in the stables. The old woman appears and tries to seduce him, but he resists. So she gets up on his back and starts riding him around. When they start flying, he realizes that she is a witch. On landing, he grabs a stick and beats her. She cries that he is killing her, and transforms into a beautiful young woman. He takes off back to the seminary.

At the seminary, the rector tells him that a rich merchants daughter is ill and has asked for Kuravlyov by name to come pray over her. When he arrives, he discovers that the daughter has died, but her last request was for him to pray over her body for three nights. When he sees the body, he realizes that she is the witch.

He tries to get out of the vigil, but the merchant is unyielding. If he parays for three night, he will be rewarded. If not, he will be tortured - to death. So he begins.

The first night, he starts to pray a bit, then takes a bit of snuff, just to help stay awake. His sneeze wakes up the corpse, who sits up in her coffin. He hurriedly draws a chalk circle, which she can't penetrate. She can seem to see him either. She only goes back to her coffin when the cock crows.

The next night is pretty much the same, but he has had more than a few drinks, and his circle drawing is a little wobbly. He spends the whole next day drinking, and is nearly legless when he starts the last night of prayer. This time, the witch calls up monsters and demons to torment him, but they are all stopped by the circle. Until she calls on Viy, the greatest demon of all.

In the epilog at the seminary, Kuravlyov's friends wonder whatever became of him.

This summary sounds like a good scary movie, but I left out the "best" part: It was partly directed by Alexsandr Ptushko, of the MST3K romps, The Day the Earth Froze, The Sword and the Dragon, and The Golden Voyage of Sinbad. So the special effects and the demons and monsters are all either crude or charmingly childish, depending on your disposition. Due to this, and the levels of drunkenness attained by the protagonist, make this more goofy than scary. 

But we love the Ptushko movies, both as riff-fodder and in themselves. So we're happy with this purchase.

The Roar of the Gangs

Ms. Spenser requested The Roaring Twenties (1939), and I am always happy to watch James Cagney and Humphrey Bogart directed by Raoul Walsh. 

It starts in a shell hole in WWI. Cagney dives in and lands on Bogart. After they get sorted, Jeffrey Lynn jumps in as well. We see that Bogart is a bastard,  Lynn a nice college boy, and Cagney just a plain-spoken good Joe. 

Back in the states, Cagney finds that he can't get his old job back, so he starts hanging out with his old taxi driving buddy Frank McHugh. He even looks up the gorgeous dame who was his penpal during the war and finds out that she is in high school - he hightails it, saying he'll be back in two or three years. 

He does some delivery work from the McHugh's cab, unwittingly becoming a bootlegger. He gets busted delivering to a speakeasy hostess named Panama (Gladys George), and calls on his old pal Lynn, now a lawyer, to help out. He gets George off, but not Cagney. Cagney now decides to be a bootlegger for real. He uses Lynn as his mouthpiece and buys taxis as a front. 

He's doing pretty well when he notices his old penpal, Priscilla Lane, dancing in a chorus line. He takes her to her home to the wilds of Long Island, and though she tries to be standoffish, he overwhelms her with charm. When he finally lets her go at the door, he says he'll call her. She replies, "In two or three years?" he responds, "More like two or three hours." I don't remember where, but I think someone called this the most romantic scene in all cinema. 

He decides to take her to Panama's place and make her a star. She's not really cut out for the life, but he's crazy about her. He doesn't notice that George is crazy about him, and that Lane seems to click pretty well with decent guy Lynn. Then he hijacks a load of good liquor from a rival bootlegger, and runs into Bogart. Instead of fighting, Bogart offers to team up with Cagney. Although he doesn't trust him, he goes along.

Then Black Tuesday hits, and he loses everything. I guess you can see where this is going.

I thought I had seen this, but I was probably thinking of Bullets or Ballots. But I did recognize the "More like two or three hours" scene. Maybe a couple of others as well - did I see this in college, maybe? Anyway, it's a great one - great writing, snappy delivery, and an ending that I think has been borrowed over and over. For example, when Belmondo is shot at the end of A bout de souffle, he keeps running, staggering for a long time before dying. like Cagney here (SPOILER). 

All in all, a gangster classic. 

Neptune Crossing

Here's a weird one: Neptune Frost (2021). Afro-futurist surreal semi-musical  - I guess.

It starts in the coltan mines of Burundi. Miners with handtools work under guards with automatic weapons. One miner, called Tekno, lifts up a rock to worship the power that it holds, and is struck down and killed by a guard. His brother grieves for him and runs away from the mine that night. This brother is known as Matalusa (AKA Martyr Loser). 

At a funeral, a young man grieves for his grandmother. He is comforted by a pastor that night, and when the pastor tries to get intimate, he knocks him down and steals his money. He runs away - and at the river goes through a ritual and becomes a woman. She is Neptune Frost.

The two make their way through the country, guided by fate and visions, to a hidden commune where people greet each other "Unanimous Goldmine". There is no power there, but Neptune has magical hacker powers, and will bring this community to new places.

This is all accompanied by music, a mix of African and hip-hop. Possibly why Lin-Manuel Miranda co-produced. Honestly, I found the music only mildly interesting - YMMV. There are also mystical trash costumes - bicycle wheel halo generator hats, coats made of keycaps, etc. I found this to be very cool. 

I can't say this was a complete joy to watch, but it was intensely involving, full of intriguing details. The director Saul Williams is a poet, musician, artist and all around Afro-futurist. A lot of potential here. 

Geezer Pleaser

A movie about Philip Marlowe (2023), starring Liam Neeson and directed by Neil Jordan? Of course, I wanted to see this.

It takes place in a sunny but tobacco-colored LA in 1939. Beautiful, wealthy Diane Kruger wants Marlowe, Neeson. to find her lover, a studio hanger-on who has disappeared. Neeson heads out to his bungalow, which he finds empty. A curmudgeonly neighbor, who doesn't trust anyone, tells him everything he knows, including about a couple of "beaners" in a hot car with a Tijuana paint job have been looking for him too.

It doesn't take Neeson long to find out that the lover was killed by a hit-and-run outside the fancy Curbana (which I heard as Cubana, but I had subtitles on) club. His head was crushed beyond identification. So he visits Kruger at home at her mother's mansion. She is faded movie star Jessica Lange who hangs out with studio mogul Mitchell Mullen. 

He heads for the Curbana Club and meets it's manager, a sleazy Danny Huston. He learns a lot, and has lunch with Lange, who seems to be competing with her daughter. And so on.

There's a lot more to this story, but I'm not sure much is that interesting. There is a legit mystery, and it plays out the way a mystery is supposed to. But what we're really interested in is:

• How neo-noir is the atmosphere?
• How much meta-, self-consciousness is there?

F or the first, I'd say it's great. It's a bit more 70s/80s than 40s/50s (more neo than noir?), but still fine. Neeson has a tired hangdog look that has just the right amount of Bogart. For the second, I would have started out saying, not at all - Jordan didn't seem to be winking at us. Of course, the neighbor who doesn't trust anyone but spills his guts to a stranger, a private dick at that, seemed a little silly. Well, it gets sillier. The final scene involves a burning props warehouse where you can spot a Maltese falcon. And in case you miss it, Neeson catalogs the contents of the warehouse as including "the ark of the Covenant, the Maltese Falcon..." OK, Jordan's winking at us. My theory is that he started out straight and got bored, and started camping it up. 

So, as an affectionate (semi-) sendup of noirs, this didn't really work. Just too serious. As a serious movie, it didn't quite work either - too campy or formulaic. But as a geezer pleaser, I (a geezer) think it does work. Geezer pleasers appeal to grampy on the recliner, snoozing away an afternoon with a scotch and water. They (we) want rugged older men, hot women, young and old, light jazz on the soundtrack, some action and a plot that doesn't require much brain power. 

Or is that just me?

Quantum of Soul Ice

I guess I can understand why Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania (2023) gets a lot of flack. But I don't care - I kind of liked it.

It starts with Paul Rudd as Scott Lang living the good life. He's recognized as a super-hero all over town, he's living with the Wasp, Evangeline Lilly. His teenaged daughter Cassie, Kathryn Newton, is getting in trouble doing underground action for victims of the Snap, but hey, it's good trouble. At a family dinner, Cassie mentions that she has been sending signals into the quantum realm to map it's structure, which freaks Janet van Dyne, Michelle Pfeiffer, out. She disconnects, but it's too late. A return message sucks them all into the realm.

Rudd and Newton get captured by a civilizations in revolt against their overlords. Here, we get a lot of father/daughter bonding. Lilly, Pfeiffer and Michael Douglas wind up in a futuristic city. Pfeiffer, it turns out, didn't tell her family and friends much about what she ran into down there. In fact, she is still doing a lot of "no time to explain", while there clearly is time. Turns out that she had a whole life in there - including being politcally active. She takes them to a decadent bar, where they meet her old friend and ex-political activist Bill Murray. Long story short: She found a guy named Kang, John Majors, who she thinks is marooned in the QR. She doesn't realize that his last name is "the Conqueror".

And now Majors' henchman is Corey Stall, thought killed in the first Ant-Man. Majors revived him and made him into a Mechanical Organism Designed Only for Killing - yes, he's M.O.D.O.K. We only watched one or two episodes of the TV series, but M.O.D.O.K is always going to be Patton Oswalt for us. The movie does lean into the ridiculousness of a giant head in a robot suit with tiny arms and legs.

Some of the issues with this whole movie: 

1. Pfeiffer not telling anyone about her experiences in the realm. Fine if she's only been out a few days, but I don't think that's the case. Why wasn't she debriefed? 
2. CGI mess: The quantum realm is a fantastic CGI landscape. We want more reality.
3. Tone: The seriousness of the threat clashes with the silliness of the Ant-Man francise.
4. Setting up for other movies: Majors' Kang is going to be the big bad, the Thanos, for the next MCEU "phase". This interrupts the flow of the present movie.

I hope that covers most of the complaints, other than the more basic "Just not a good movie, due to acting, writing, direction, etc". I kind of agree with most of them, especially number 1. But I like the CGI art direction, I like the goofy tone of the Ant-Man series, and I don't think Kang derailed a better movie from taking place. And I especially enjoyed the awkwardness of Pfeiffer and Majors plainly having had a "thing" when she thought she was stuck permanently. I guess that's why she wasn't talking about her time in the realm.

There are some questions about Majors behavior off-screen. I liked him in the role, but I'm sure Kang can be recast if he turns out to be toxic. Of course, if enough people are turned off or just bored of MCEU movies, maybe the franchise will peter out and it won't be a problem. But I'm not ready to give up.

Dreams and Fantasies

Ms. Spenser was out of town this weekend, bur I didn't load up on "guy flicks" like Practical Magic. Instead, I went with another genre she doesn't care for: Chinese action fantasy. This made a good tie-in with D&D. There was one little problem - I slept through most of them. 

From Netflix, I got Iron Mask (2020), featuring Jackie (some) and Arnold Schwarzenegger (very little). It starts with three men in a dungeon (Tower of London?). They are Jackie Chan, a man in an iron mask (Yuri Kolokolnikov) and a cartographer (Jason Flemyng). Each is shackled to a different wall, with their arm chains connect. So when Chan scratches his head, it pulls Flemyng's arm out straight. Theur Jailer is Arnold, with a villainous beard.

They all escape, of course. Flemyng goes on a mappng expedition in Eastern Russia, ruled by what turns out to be a fake Peter the Great. Chan goes to China. The guy in the mask turns out to be the real Peter. That's about all I remember. 

This movie is actually the sequel to a Russian movie called Viy (2014), which I have never heard of. Based on the same Gogol story as the 1967 movie which I have heard of - in fact, this inspired me to order the DVD for the 1967 movie from Movies Unlimited.

I followed this up with The Knight of Shadows (2019), a Jackie Chan DVD from the library. In this one, Jackie is a demon hunter, but the demons he collects tend to be cute little ones who help him in his quests. There is a dragon. I think. This sort of looks like a kid's movie, with computer game CGI. But fun.

Another one from the library, The Thousand Faces of Dunjia (2018) might be the most confusing - or maybe the one I watched while sleepiest. A dunjia is some sort of ultimate weapon, protected by a mystical sphere, or maybe a warrior clan called something like cimenu. The heads clans need it to protect the world from some extraterrestrial beings. One such turns into a naive, naked human woman, who likes to hug the lead warrior. 

OK, I can't tell you much about what happens in these movies. But it's not because I didn't enjoy them. They were fun to watch, full of action and fantastic scenes. They are great to watch while drowsing because of the quality dreams they inspire, but I'd watch these again awake, even the Russo-Chinese one. There's not really much Arnold in it - and I think him and Jackie fight! Might have dreamed that part.

Crawling from the Wreckage

Did Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves (2023) save movies again? Or is it a silly action comedy just like all the rest? Yes.

It starts with our protagonists in an arctic prison. Bard Chris Pine and barbarian Michelle Rodriguez are going up before the parole board after serving two years. Pine is hoping that judge Jarnathan will be sympathetic, but he's late to the hearing. So he tells the story of how he became a thief - nice way to get some exposition in. Basically, he was a member of the harpers' guild, with a wife and daughter. When the wife is killed by a Red Wizard, he goes a little nuts. He meets Rodriguez in a bar, and she takes to the daughter, Chloe Coleman. So they hang out, do some stealing - including stealing an invisibility amulet for Coleman. There's a big heist for the Tablet of Reawakening - a one shot spell that Pine can use to get his wife back.

So they gather a team that includes a minor wizard, Justice Smith, and conman Hugh Grant. Grant brings in powerful wizard Sofina, Daisy Head. Long story short, they get caught, although everyone else gets out. And here they are at their parole hearing. When Jarnathan finally shows up, they use him to escape (not noticing that their paroles had been granted).

They quickly find out that Grant has conned his way into being steward of a large kingdom, and that he is acting as Coleman's guardian. Sinister Head is the power behind the throne. He is pleased to see his old friends, but he isn't giving up the Tablet. And he's been telling Coleman that her dad left her for money, so he's not giving her up either.

Now Pine is going to rob Grant to get the Tablet. He gets the old gang back together, and adds Sofia Lillis, a druid. Smith recommended her, not because she is very powerful, but because she's cute, and she has shot him down at least once. 

The heist is on. This movie is full of ridiculous fights, magic, clever ruses, double crosses, and the odd dragon (in a dungeon). To give you some idea of the tone, the dungeon crawl is very Peter Jackson mines of Moria, but the dragon is very fat - can't really fit through the tunnels. There's a lot of quippage, and Pine being untrustworthy and sincere at the same time. I kept forgetting he was a Chris, and not a Ryan, with all the quips and stuff.

All in all, both funny, silly, and exciting. The amount of meta-material which would have required some knowledge of D&D was limited. Or at least, I didn't catch it - I was too much of a nerd for D&D. I had a great time. But I should warn you that I watched some more of this kind of fantasy-action-comedy, and it got real silly.

Curses Foiled Again

Speaking of guy movies: I queued up Practical Magic (1998). First, I love Sandra Bullock out of proportion to the way I feel about most of her movies. Second, Griffin Dunne directing a script from Akiva Goldsman, among others? Interesting.

It is the story of two sisters. They come from a long line of witches in the New England town (based on Martha's Vineyard? Shot in Washington). The first of the line was abandoned with child, and set a curse so that none of her descendants would be happy in love. Two little girls lost both parents to the curse, and move into the ancestral home with their two witch aunts, Stockard Channing and Dianne Wiest.

The little girls are taunted by the neighbor kids as being witches 0- and the parents join in too. They grow up to be Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman. Bullock as a child makes a spell so that she'll only fall in love with her true love, who will have a list of unlikely qualities, including different color eyes. That way, she'll never fall in love, but if she does, it will break the curse. Kidman, however, is ready for love. As a teenager, she runs away with her boyfriend, and just finds a new one before the curse takes hold.

But Bullock does find a man to love, Mark Feuerstein. They have a lovely life, two young daughters, and boom - the curse. He is hilariously killed by a truck, after dodging a whole peleton of bike racers. Bullock takes the kids and moves back in with the aunts. She also finds out that the aunts gave her a little magical push to fall in love, and now forbids the aunts to teach her kids magic.

Meanwhile, Kidman has met up with Jimmy Angel (Goran Visnjic), a sexy and dangerous mobster. When he hits her, she calls Bullock, who gets her out of the situation. When Visnjic tries to stop them, they manage to dose him with belladonna in his vodka - which kills him. For some reason, they load his body into his car trunk and take him back home.

Next, for some reason, they decide to use magic to resurrect him, even though they know he'll come back evil (eviler). When he does, they kill him again and bury him by the porch. OK, they are terrible murderers, but I guess that's OK.

It's OK until:

1. He isn't staying dead - when the aunts and sisters have a margarita party, they realize that the tequila has belladonna in it. Where did it come from?
2. Aidan Quinn shows up. He's investigating Jimmy Angel, who is wanted for murdering women, and the sisters have his car in their yard - and his maybe re-animated corpse in their garden.
3. Aidan Quinn has different colored eyes.

There's an odd pacing issue here - the movie sort of starts here, the rest was setup. But that's a lot of stuff for just setup. But in some ways, it's a fun hangout movie, so that doesn't really matter. The aunts are cool, the kids are spunky, the old house is cozy, what's not to like.

I'll also spoil part of the ending which I liked. When they realize that Visnjic's corpse is too powerful for the sisters to cope with, they call on the neighbors who called them witches. They form them into a coven, with brooms and all, and the women all love it. I think this is pretty realistic. The community wouldn't shun the witches outside of a few Christian fanatics - they'd treat it like a diet craze or yoga practice, and attend the workshop. 

But overall, this was kind of a mess. The pacing issues aren't helped by a tone issue - there's a pretty serious body count for a rom-com, and a lot of the kills are silly. How are you supposed when the father of Bullock's kids gets killed for laughs?

Still, Bullock, Kidman, Channing and Wiesz were fun to watch. The margarita scene was apparently improvised in a drunken state, and that's the kind of thing you just want to see more of.

Edited to add: I semi-related news, we also watched Moloch (2022), a movie we got from the library. It's supposed folk horror from the Netherlands. It's something about corpses preserved in the bogs, and a series of child sacrifices. Atmospheric, but didn't connect with us. I can barely remember a thing about it. So that's that.

Shaz-ayum!

You know, I didn't think Shazam! Fury of the Gods (2023) was all that bad. It wasn't good, of course, but I actually didn't mind it.

It starts with Helen Mirren and Lucy Liu (both slumming it something fierce) stealing a broken magic stick from the museum on the Acropolis. They have fancy magic powers - mainly, they can whisper in someone's ear and turn them to stone. They take this stick to Djimon Hounsou, who we thought died in the last one. Nope, just imprisoned by the gals. They force him to repair the stick and now they have the power of Shazam!

Meanwhile the Shazam gang is saving people who are stuck on a collapsing bridge. They get everyone off, but can't prevent the collapse. For this, they are ridiculed by Philadelphia - called the Philly Fiasco. Typical Philly. 

You get an idea of the group's dynamic when they are chilling in their extradimensional clubhouse, filled with doors to random dimensions. Zach Levi wants them to work together as a team, fighting crime, but they all have their own interests. Anyway, even in their super-forms, they are still just kids. In particular, Adam Brody, who can't use his legs in kid form (Jack Dylan Grazer) wants to spend more time by himself being super.

In school, Grazer meets cute new girl Rachel Zegler. He tries to keep her from getting menaced by some bullies, so they pound him. As a kid, his super-power is the keep quipping even as he's being beaten up. After they hang out together a bit, he decides to show her his Brody form. And it turns out that she is a sister of Mirren and Liu. They appear and use the staff to steal his powers.

Liu wants to get the power to destroy the world. Mirren is willing to go along. Zegler is against it. But Liu has a dragon, so she's going to be hard to stop. 

There's a lot going on in this movie. For one thing, there are 5-7 Shazamers - I can't count because they aren't all really distinctive. The big issue is maybe Levi's imposter syndrome - except he really is an imposter. He's not that smart. The other is Brody, who clearly doesn't want to live in his weak body - although I think they de-emphasize to avoid disability-shaming or insensitivity. Other than them, there's chubby Jovan Armand, who comes out as gay when everyone is revealing their super-identities to their foster parents (then sort of disappears from the movie). But Faithe Herman, the nerdy little Black girl, has some of the best beats. When the bad guys release a bunch of Harryhausen-inspired Greek monsters, she fights them by releasing a bunch killer unicorns. She gets them out of hiding with Skittles - "Taste the rainbow, motherf..."

Scenes like this were fun to watch. The theme of the bad guys stealing the kids power was sort of interesting, although not much came of it. Levi does save the day with a clever plan, which he repeats - "I can't believe you fell for that twice!" OK, it doesn't really hold together. Also, Asher Angel, who plays Billy Batson when not Shazamed, is not very compelling. They mostly stick to Levi. 

So, I'd say my favorite film in the series is Black Adam. But I didn't hate this.