Classic Movie Review Enter the Dragon

Enter the Dragon (1973) 

Directed by Robert Clouse 

Written by Michael Allin 

Starring Bruce Lee, John Saxon, Jim Kelly 

Release Date August 19th, 1973 

Published August 19th, 1973 

This week’s classic on the Everyone’s a Critic Movie Review Podcast is Enter the Dragon, the final film in the all too short career of the legendary Bruce Lee. I have had little exposure to kung fu movies in my nearly 20 years as a film critic. Aside from some 80s cheese like The Last Dragon or the work of Jackie Chan, I have mostly ignored the genre having written it off based mostly on the stereotypes built from years of Bruce Lee knock-offs and cash-ins that soured more than just me on the idea of kung fu movies as anything other than the sad side of the B-movie genre.

Watching Enter the Dragon for the first time sadly is no revelation for me. While I came away with a great deal of respect for why fans took so much to Bruce Lee as a performer, I found the film not all that special. Lee’s magnetism goes a long way to making the otherwise predictable, bordering on silly story worth watching but the screen time spent waiting for Lee to start kicking butt is quite tedious and I found myself drifting.

In Enter the Dragon Bruce Lee stars as a martial arts master, also named Lee, who is recruited by a shady intelligence organization to attend a martial arts tournament run by the kind of super-villain that only exists in martial arts movies, Mr. Han played by former Drunken Master star Shih Kien. Mr. Han owns his own island in the Pacific and despite the best efforts of this intelligence agency they aren’t sure if he is amassing weapons or not.

The agency needs Lee to participate in a deadly martial arts tournament hosted by Han on his island and find out if there are indeed illegal weapons that would allow international military to attack the island. Lee agrees to the mission and then finds out that the mission has a personal component for him. We meet Lee’s father and he informs Lee and us that Lee’s sister was murdered by Han’s thugs in a seemingly random killing.

Find my full length review at Geeks.Media 

Movie Review Logan Lucky

Logan Lucky (2017) 

Directed by Steven Soderbergh 

Written by Rebecca Blunt 

Starring Channing Tatum, Adam Driver, Katie Holmes, Riley Keough, Daniel Craig, Hilary Swank, Katherine Waterston, Sebastian Stan 

Release Date August 18th, 2017 

Published August 17th, 2017 

Being a fan of the American history podcast The Dollop allows me to watch a movie like Logan Lucky and never for a moment find the story implausible. Take a listen to them tell the remarkable true story titled Jet-Pack Madness and you will find within it a story every bit as brilliant as a Coen Brothers comedy. Everything in Logan Lucky feels completely plausible when you compare it to such historic silliness as what transpired with the Jet-Pack or the L.A Freeway Shootout or The Human Taco.

The Dollop has nothing to do with Logan Lucky but I could not help thinking of how Dave Anthony and Gareth Reynolds would tell this story if it were true. I imagine it would be just as good as the movie Steven Soderbergh has made, a crazy story of crime, family, pride, NASCAR, and the South. That Logan Lucky is also a heist movie is nearly incidental, as if these characters existing as they do might make for a good enough story but that they happen to pulling off a multi-million dollar NASCAR-themed heist certainly makes things even more colorful.

The Logan family is cursed or at least that is what little brother Clyde Logan (Adam Driver) believes and he would be happy to regale you with his tragic family background while he pours beer at a West Virginia bar called Duck-Tape. Older brother Jimmy (Channing Tatum) doesn’t buy into the curse, though Clyde’s point is understandable, he’s just back from losing an arm in Iraq while Jimmy lost a scholarship to play Quarterback at LSU when he blew out his knee and just as we meet him, Jimmy is fired from his job working construction underneath the famed Charlotte Motor Speedway.

Nevertheless, Jimmy doesn’t buy into Clyde’s curse talk, especially since he’s decided to pull off a multi-million-dollar vault heist and doesn't need the bad juju on his mind right now. Having been fired from his job where he operated an earth mover beneath the famed North Carolina race track, Jimmy has found out where all the money from the stadium concessions goes and how it gets there. The only thing standing in his way is the vault but Jimmy happens to know a guy who can help, if they can get him out of prison.\

Find my full length review at Geeks.Media 

Movie Review The Hitman's Bodyguard

The Hitman's Bodyguard (2017) 

Directed by Patrick Hughes 

Written by Tom O'Connor 

Starring Ryan Reynolds, Samuel L. Jackson, Salma Hayek, Gary Oldman, Richard E. Grant 

Release Date August 18th, 2017 

Published August 17th, 2017

The Hitman’s Bodyguard is a very divisive film. Not because it has any challenging themes but rather because it is both a laugh riot and quite a bad movie. At once, The Hitman’s Bodyguard is very, quite intentionally, funny and quite poorly directed. I call the film divisive not because audiences will either love or loathe the film in equal measure but rather because I am divided personally by the fact that I repeatedly laughed quite loud during the film and by the fact that the film’s green screen effects, storytelling, and casting are so shoddy that at times I physically wretched.

Ryan Reynolds and Samuel L. Jackson co-star in The Hitman’s Bodyguard, with Jackson as the hitman and Reynolds as the bodyguard (the too clever by half poster parodies the Whitney Houston-Kevin Costner movie). Jackson is the world’s most wanted hitman, Darius Kincaid. He’s been captured by Interpol after they arrested his wife, Sonia (Salma Hayek) and threatened to hold her in prison until he turned himself and testified against world renowned terrorist and Belarussian dictator Vladislav Dukovich (Gary Oldman, so bored of this role he can barely keep his terrible makeup job from falling off from his obvious, repeated eye-rolling).

When Interpol is compromised by the single most obvious mole in history, played by Joachim De Almeida, who might as well walk around with TRAITOR tattooed to his forehead, Agent Amelia Roussel (Elodie Yung) calls in her ex-boyfriend, Michael Bryce (Reynolds) to take Darius to court. Naturally, this court happens to be all the way across Europe and the two mismatched pals must road trip through Vlad’s terrorist gang to get to their destination.

Yeah, this plot is terrible, ludicrously, painfully obvious and extremely played out. The Hitman’s Bodyguard is forced, clichéd, and predictable to the point of torture for anyone who’s seen more than one movie in their lifetime. Director Patrick Hughes then makes matters worse by topping his bad plot with even worse direction, including special effects that make the rear-projection in Saturday Night Live skits look great by comparison.

Find my full length review at Geeks.Media 

Classic Movie Review The Big Easy

The Big Easy (1987) 

Directed by Jim McBride 

Written by Daniel Petrie Jr. 

Starring Dennis Quaid, Ellen Barkin, Ned Beatty 

Release Date August 21st, 1987 

Published August 21st, 2017 

This week in 1987 The Big Easy starring Dennis Quaid and Ellen Barkin and directed by Jim McBride was released nationwide following a brief run on the awards circuit in late 1986. The film tells the story of a corrupt New Orleans Police Detective named Remy McSwain, played by Quaid, who’s about to learn that corruption doesn’t really pay. Ellen Barkin is a District Attorney tasked with investigating Remy’s corruption and that of his fellow New Orleans brothers in Blue.

Director Jim McBride is best remembered for his 1982 remake of Jean Luc Godard’s iconic Breathless, with Richard Gere in the Jean Paul Belmondo role, Valerie Kaprisky in the Jean Seberg role and Las Vegas standing in for Paris. McBride, it seems, had a longstanding fascination with the French New Wave as not only did he remake Breathless, but in The Big Easy he tells the kind of American crime story that directors like Godard, Truffaut and Melville cite as their earliest influences.

Does that make The Big Easy good? Eh, it gives it a perspective, I guess. The problem with The Big Easy isn’t necessarily the movie, it’s time. Time has not been kind to movies in the crime genre. In the last 30 years’ dozens of films have trod upon similar ground, enough to make The Big Easy feel like just another copycat. That McBride may have been attempting an homage to his French New Wave influences is nice, but the only thing French about The Big Easy is its locational relation to the French Quarter.

Mr. McBride directs The Big Easy not like the dispassionate French crime stories but rather exactly like the old 40’s Hollywood pictures that the New Wave ate up. When the New Wave remade those pictures their French-ness made the stories feel fresh and innovative. In 1987 when McBride crafted his crime movie homage his only innovation was R-Rated sex and violence. Nothing about The Big Easy feels fresh anymore as a zillion other pictures have come along and were better at portraying corruption, sex, and violence.

Find my full length review at Geeks.Media 

Classic Movie Review Bob Le Flambeur

Bob Le Flambeur (1956) 

Directed by Jean Pierre Melville 

Written by Jean Pierre Melville, August Le Breton 

Starring Roger Duchesne, Isabelle Corey, Daniel Cauchy, Guy Decombie 

Release Date August 24th, 1956 

The classic on this week’s Everyone’s a Critic Movie Review Podcast is, arguably, the very first film of the French New Wave, Bob Le Flambeur, translated as Bob the Gambler. Bob Le Flambeur is a classic American style heist film seen through the lens of a French admirer of American movies, Jean Pierre Melville. It is Melville’s French sensibility, the way he focuses not on the heist but on the atmosphere of a heist that separates Bob Le Flambeur from American heist movies which had and have turned safe-cracking and men smoking in back rooms leaning over complex drawings into classic film tropes.

Bob Le Flambeur stars Roger Duchesne as the calm, cool and collected, Bob Mantagne. Bob is a well-known and respected former gangster turned well-known and slightly less respected gambler. I shouldn’t put gambler second on Bob’s résumé, as betting seems to Bob as breathing is to the rest of us. As he recounts in the story, Bob was born with an Ace in his palm. Gambling is Bob’s only skill after he lost several years of his life behind bars after blowing a bank heist that killed a friend.

That friend’s son, Paolo (Daniel Cauchy), is now like an apprentice to Bob; a young hustler soaking up Bob’s aura while Bob works to keep the kid from making the mistakes that got his father killed. One of those mistakes would be teaming up with Marc, a pimp with an eye toward building a gangster portfolio by pulling one high-end job. Paolo is narrowly rescued from being at Marc’s side when he’s arrested for beating one of his working girls. Here the film shifts focus from Bob to impart important plot information that I will leave unmentioned here.

The scene is also a further introduction to Inspector Ledru (Guy Decomble) who happens to consider Bob a good friend despite his gangster past. Ledru is the key figure in the dramatic structure of Bob Le Flambeur and the most notably filmic character, a rarity in what is otherwise a less than straight-forward adaptation of the American style gangster movie. Ledru is a requirement of the plot and his arc is significant to the emotional underpinnings of what is otherwise an exercise in cool, French homage.

Find my full length review at Geeks.Media 

Movie Review Paulina

Paulina (2015) 

Directed by Santiago Mitre 

Written by Santiago Mitre 

Starring Dolores Fonzi, Oscar Martinez, Esteban Lamothe

Release Date June 18th, 2015 

Director Santiago Mitre’s Paulina is a sharp and uncompromising story about a sharp and uncompromising character. The Paulina at the center of Paulina is portrayed by actress Dolores Fonzi whose inscrutable face and dispassionate voice crafts a performance that some will find off-putting but that I found to be endlessly fascinating, more so than the weighty issues the film employs Paulina to scrutinize.

Paulina is a success in her field in the Argentine judiciary, on her way toward becoming a lawyer, possibly someday a judge, when she informs her father (Oscar Martinez) that she is giving up her position and her education to teach at a rural school. Paulina’s decision is a fateful one as moving to the rural province outside the Argentine capital of Buenos Aires will not come easily. The scene of Paulina informing her father of her decision is one of incredible power that also happens to be the very first scene of the film.

In one unbroken take, that mostly sticks with Paulina’s enigmatic face as she moves through her father’s home, father and daughter debate the pros and cons, snipe at each other willfully and debate the politics of the region, all in the span of a 5 to 10-minute take. It’s a scene remarkable in its audacity as much as in its scripting. The dialogue is as fiery and passionate even as Paulina herself is self-possessed. Paulina argues her point with fervent words while her face rarely indicates the meaning of the words.

Find my full length review at Geeks.Media 

Movie Review Challengers

Challengers (2024) 

Directed by Luca Guadagnino 

Written by Justin Kuritzkes 

Starring Zendaya, Mike Faist, Josh O'Connor 

Release Date April 26th, 2024

Published April 26th, 2024 

Sexuality is non-binary. Full stop. Sexuality is a spectrum on which we all exist. The notion of straight or gay as a binary dynamic of sexuality is outdated to the point of being silly. That's not to say that people's desires, what turns them on, can't be just one thing that happens to adhere to the notion of straight or gay, it's merely an acknowledgment that sexuality for anyone can be a fluid concept depending on circumstance. This opening paragraph is triggering a lot of straight men, I can feel the discomfort as they click away in anger. 

Challengers is a rare film that explores the idea of sexuality as a spectrum. The three protagonists of Challengers, two men and a woman, have a brief, exploratory experience that gets at the heart of how circumstantial sexual preference can be. The film also reframes what sex can be in an orgasmic final showdown that reveals these three characters true desires in a fast paced, eye-catching, and breathtaking final few minutes. Director Luca Guadagnino appears to be making the case that anything can be sex its if the circumstances align. 

Challengers stars Zendaya as Tashi Duncan, a tennis prodigy caught up in a love triangle with a pair of fellow prodigies. Art Donaldson (Mike Faist) and Patrick Zweig (Josh O'Connor) have been friends since their early teen years spent at a tennis academy. Both are gifted players in very different ways. Art is methodical and well practiced, Patrick gets by on brut strength and determination, along with an unusual serve. The two young men compliment each other and when each falls for Tashi, it becomes not unlike a tennis match filled with strategic points and breaks. 

But Tashi is no mere ball at play among these two players. She's their coach, teaching them both the game. Literally, she becomes Art's Coach as his career advances while Patrick seeks her as a Coach later in his career. The film shifts through time effortlessly layering in the story to build toward that remarkable final act tennis match where Art and Patrick are playing the game of their lives with Tashi acting as mastermind and the prize for the winner while losing herself in the excitement of tennis. 

For Tashi, life is tennis. Her relationship with Patrick falls apart when he refuses to talk about tennis while the two are becoming intimate. Her relationship and eventual marriage to Art is tethered in part to his success on the tennis court and she's not afraid to tell him that if he can't maintain his high standard of play, she will lose interest and leave him. This constant pressure from Tashi has made Art one of the most successful players in tennis, a grand slam winner, and a favorite for the upcoming U.S Open. 

Find my full length review at Geeks.Media