Wind River This was the last one I needed to see of Taylor Sheridan’s Frontier Trilogy. This movie was dark as hell and really gave an interesting perspective of life on a native reservation. The last 30 minutes had some of the most anxiety-inducing scenes I’ve ever experienced from a movie. It’s not quite the polished masterpiece as the first Sicario, but it’s still an amazing film. I definitely enjoyed it more than Hell or High Water. I’m not going to review more than that due to spoilers because everyone should see it. 9/10
All three of those movies are fucking great, standouts in an era when not a lot of great movies get produced. I didn’t realize Sheridan played Police Chief Hale on seasons 1-3 of Sons Of Anarchy. He was my favourite character until they killed him off.
I've been really into heist movies lately. Here are two that I've watched: Heist Gene Hackman runs an aging team that pulls off elaborate heists. The entire movie revolves around the setup and execution of his last job, which is stealing gold from an airplane. I had never heard of it, but I liked this movie. Every small detail is explored by the heist team and the entire thing seems plausible. It's definitely the kind of movie you don't see anymore, which is a movie for grown-ups. It's doesn't have a ton of action, but it was still a fun watch. I would have liked the movie to explore the relationship between Hackman and Danny Devito a bit more to have it make a bit more sense, though. Also, points off for having a movie take place in Boston and Logan Airport and having the setting look nothing like either. 7/10 Inside Man This movie is pretty wild. It's entirely about a bank robbery in progress and the cops trying to uncover the identity of the participants. It was really tightly wound and it's pretty suspenseful. The two things that kind of stuck out for me as negatives were: 1) there is no way in hell the police and SWAT teams would allow someone like Jodie Foster's character into the bank, and Spoiler: spoiler 2) it doesn't quite make sense how exactly the heist team knew about the Nazi diamonds. I know they had that historian on their team, but how could they ever possibly know about the safe deposit box ahead of time? Aside from that it, it was a really fun watch. Mostly because Clive Owen carries the hell out of it. 8.5/10
One of the things I liked most about Heist was the script. Some of the language and phrases they used were very cool.
That’s exactly why I couldn’t stand it. David Mamet’s dialogue has the ability to drive me up the wall sometimes, and every time Danny DeVito so much as speaks in that movie it makes me cringe. Everybody seems so preoccupied with being as “cool” as possible, it’s the bad reverb of Tarantino’s effect on movies in the 90’s. Some people like the movie a lot, but I couldn’t stand it. Even with that peerless cast.
I haven't seen many of Tarantino’s movies. Maybe that's why I thought the dialogue in Heist was original.
Mamet was different before the mid-90’s. He wrote Lakeboat, American Buffalo, House Of Games and Glengarry Glen Ross which were landmark plays and good movies. Then after Resevoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction this wave of hip, low budget 90’s serio-coms (all featuring Eric Stoltz in the cast) were just getting cranked out where the plot for every film basically involves every character trying to out-cool each other. It spawned cringey Tarantino crime ripoffs like Things To Do In Denver When You’re Dead and Playing God… then Mamet tried to follow suit with these films of extremely hard-boiled characters who all talk like they’re in a prison cafeteria. Also in a peculiar move, Mamet has cast his own wife — multiple times— as a female lead who betrays the hero in the last act of his films. People can like his later movies or not, but I think Mamet is much better writing for the stage.
Cop Land This movie should be considered a classic, but it’s not for some reason. Awesome cast, interesting story and just a really good crime flick. It’s also Stallone’s best acting outside of Rocky and it cratered his career in the 90s. Ray Liotta carries the shit out of the rest of it by going full act 3 of Goodfellas for the whole movie. The weak link, as with anything he’s in, was Michael Rappaport, but it’s basically an afterthought. It probably could have dove a bit deeper into the corruption aspect of the plot, but it’s just really good. 9/10
Never forgot the line, "in this world there's pinball people, and there's videogame people". So applicable in so many different contexts.
Dragged Across Concrete WTF. What a strange final product. It showed up on Netflix, and I read the description and was like, well that sounds interesting. I like Vince Vaughn, I'm fairly indifferent on Mel Gibson. But, there was Don Johnson briefly. And the slow pacing and short-burst dialogue actually worked with the gritty tone. Ultimately it's a very average movie. But, if you've ever wanted to know what happens when movies with great soundtracks have absolutely horrible soundtracks instead, this is exhibit A. Every time a song would start, I was like, uh, what? After about the third terrible song during a slow burn moment, I thought, this sounds like the Director/Producer couldn't get clearance for songs they wanted, so they just wrote their own placeholder music. "We'll figure it out later." But, they never did. I watched the credits and EVERY FUCKING SONG - LIKE 8 OF THEM - was written by the Director. Awful. Like, terrible. How do these people get financing from people to make movies? It was distributed by Lionsgate for fuck's sake. In 2018. This wasn't a Covid charity project. smh
A Face in the Crowd An older movie about a random guy that becomes a political charlatan through excessive media exposure. By far Andy Griffith's best work of his entire career (sorry Matlock) and pretty prescient as far as predicting how things would turn out today. Worth checking out. 8.5 / 10