I’m always watching more recent movies, and I’m always writing about them!

I’ve been watching a lot of movies since the day I was born, and now I’m going to write about them! I don’t know why I’ve been watching more “recent” movies as opposed to older ones, but that’s just how it is sometimes! And I’ve been in an action-movie mood recently, so there are a bunch of them below. Sorry-not-sorry!

Blood Simple (1984). The first Coen brothers movie is pretty interesting but not quite great. It’s raw, obviously, but cleverly done, and you can see why these dudes have become two of the pre-eminent filmmakers of our time. Still, it’s a bit of a mess, as a lot of noir films are, because logic tends to go out the window a bit. For one thing, police in the small Texas town where the action occurs don’t seem to exist. There seem to be plenty of times when someone – anyone! – would have called them, but they never show. Second, a character is killed fairly early on (yes, I’m not spoiling an almost 40-year-old movie!), but no one seems to notice, even though his job seems to necessitate someone noticing. Third, the person who kills him seems to be quite fastidious, yet leaves a crucial clue behind. Fourth, nobody actually talks to each other to find out what they know, which, in the case of John Getz and Frances McDormand, playing the lovers who are trying to get away from McDormand’s weaselly and chilling husband, Dan Hedaya, is a horrible mistake. Fifth, late in the movie someone knows he’s in danger, yet he takes a silly risk in McDormand’s apartment. Still, this is a pretty cool noir, with the four-and-a-half leads – Getz, McDormand, Hedaya, M. Emmet Walsh, and Samm-Art Williams in a slightly more minor role – doing an excellent job with the twisty material. As with every Coen movie, it’s shot superbly, full of darkness and grit and beautiful compositions and unsettling angles. It’s not a great movie, but it’s a very good one, and it shows what the Coens are capable of, which of course came to fruition as they became more skilled.

Cobra (1986). This is a garbage action movie, but it’s fun nevertheless, and it doesn’t quite make it to 90 minutes, so it doesn’t take up too much of your time! Stallone and Brigitte Nielsen (along with Stallone’s partner, Reni Santoni – Poppie from Seinfeld! – who is an anomaly in these kinds of movies as he’s the hero cop’s partner but he doesn’t die) are on the run from an army of killers, and Stallone has to, you know, kill them all. It’s ridiculous, sure, but still a fascinating time capsule movie – it’s from Golan-Globus, so it’s packed with high-protein, right-wing red meat (Nielsen asks Sly why all the psychos aren’t locked up, and Sly tells her the “judges” always let them out, because screw the law!) and it’s a 1980s cop action movie, so Sly’s bosses, exemplified by Andrew Robinson (best known as the killer in Dirty Harry, which Santoni was also in), are always busting his chops. There are a lot of unanswered questions in this movie, and I imagine a lot was left on the cutting-room floor. Why are Sly’s bosses so down on him when he says there’s more than one killer when he’s just come from a high-speed chase through Los Angeles during which at least four people tried to kill him and Nielsen? Why don’t they believe him when he tells them a cop is dirty when they can’t explain why Nielsen’s protection at the hospital was mysteriously called away? What does this “army of killers” want, anyway? They talk about fixing the world, but they just kill random people and never seem to have a manifesto of any sort. Why are they so gung-ho to kill Nielsen? She saw the main killer dude (played by archetypal Eighties asshole dude Brian Thompson) briefly on a dark street, but she didn’t see the other two killers, nor was Thompson doing anything suspicious except looking menacing, which might be a crime in the Golan-Globus universe? They can’t tie him to a murder, just put him at the same place as a murder, and the sketch based on Nielsen’s description isn’t great, and the army has someone on the inside of the police department anyway, so why on Earth do they go hell-for-leather after Nielsen when it seems they want to keep their existence a secret? And why does the LAPD have a squad that is basically an assassination squad, at least that’s what it sounds like it is? It’s ridiculous, as I noted, but whatever. Sly doesn’t take his sunglasses off until 17 minutes into the movie and I don’t think he ever takes his cool leather gloves off, and I love the revelation of his first name (Sly seems to have a decent sense of humor, which is nice), and lots of 1980s scumbags get killed, just like Ronnie Reagan would have wanted!

Next of Kin (1989). Patrick Swayze presumably had some cachet after Dirty Dancing, which came out in 1987, and so he made … Road House and this movie? Really, Patrick? I mean, Road House is a classic, but it is junk, after all, and this movie doesn’t even rise to the level of “ridiculous classic” that Road House does, so Swayze needed to go back to romance with Ghost, his next movie, which seemed to put him back in a comfort zone, but then he followed that with … Point Break? Dang, you just couldn’t pin Patrick down, could you? Anyway, this is a dumb movie, with Swayze playing a Chicago cop who moved to the big city from the Kentucky backwoods. His brother, played by Bill Paxton, is killed early in the movie by stereotypical Italian gangsters led by Adam Baldwin (who’s very Italian, after all), and when Swayze takes him home, his other brother, played with unrelenting down-homeness by Liam Neeson, accuses him of selling out because he won’t kill the bad guys himself, instead relying on the cops to take them down. Neeson heads up to Chicago to do some of his own killing, so Swayze has to stop him and also try to take down the bad guys. It’s goofy, but such is life. Swayze is Swayze (he was never the best actor, and he basically plays variations of the same character, which is not a bad character, so it’s not bad here), Neeson is fine, Baldwin is actually fairly menacing, Helen Hunt is there as Swayze’s wife, Ben Stiller (!!!), who was 23/24 at the time, plays the head gangster’s son and looks about 12 years old, and the head gangster is played by Andreas Katsulas, who’s probably best known as the one-armed man Harrison Ford is trying to find in The Fugitive. Anyway, it’s a weird clash of stereotypes, with the rednecks versus the wops, and it’s dopey fun. A nice Sunday afternoon movie!

Sliver (1993). I wrote about seeing this in the theater back in 1993 and hating it, and it happened to be on recently, so I wanted to check in with it to make sure it still sucked. Yep, still does. The set-up isn’t bad – Sharon Stone moves into a high-rise at Madison Avenue between East 35th and 36th streets in Manhattan, where she snags an apartment that is empty because the previous tenant – whom Stone resembles quite a bit – “committed suicide” – we know it’s murder, but no one else does. She meets William Baldwin and likes the cut of his jib; Tom Berenger, who is aggressively horny; Polly Walker, who lives down the hall from her and is some kind of high-class prostitute; and Keene Curtis, who knew the former tenant a bit and knows a bit about what’s going in the building. Soon, bodies start dropping, Stone is in a weird sexual relationship with Baldwin, and Berenger is telling her things she doesn’t believe about what’s going on in the building. It’s not a bad set-up, and throughout the movie, we find out that the entire building is wired with cameras, so it becomes a semi-interesting examination of voyeurism and how it’s part of our culture – this is long before reality television, so it’s a bit ahead of the curve in that regard. The problem is that Stone, while a good actor, doesn’t have much to work with early on, so when she becomes interesting, it’s almost too late. Baldwin is not a good actor, so his relationship with Stone is just weird, plus he’s creepy, and not in a “guys in movies before ‘woke-ness’ were just generally creepy” way, but in a “damn, dude, you’re really creepy way,” and he can’t pull it off (he’s supposed to be a bit weird, but charismatic, and he doesn’t get the second part). In fact, movies like this are fun to watch just for the horrible attitudes of the men – Stone is a successful book editor, but everyone treats like a dim-witted woman – even Martin Landau as her boss, who respects her work, thinks she’s just looking for a husband. It’s interesting, because no one in 1993 was probably viewing this movie in that way, but these days, it’s a lot more obvious. Anyway, it’s still a bad movie. Skip it and just watch Basic Instinct again!

Jade (1995). Speaking of this kind of movie, I do appreciate the so-called “erotic thriller” trend of the 1990s, of which Sliver is an example, as is this, because they were standalone movies that actually acknowledged that people had sex and sometimes it was a bit kinky. They often trended to the “bad” side of quality, and sadly, Jade is does not buck this, but at least they were made, damn it! This is a Friedkin movie, and you never really know what you’re going to get with Friedkin, and it’s nominally a Joe Eszterhas script, although apparently Friedkin rewrote a great deal of it, to the point where the studio had to pay Eszterhas a “shut up and go away” fee to get him to stop bad-mouthing it. One wonders how terrible the original script was if this is “better.” It’s also the movie that almost torpedoed David Caruso’s career, as he ditched the star-making NYPD Blue to make Kiss of Death and then this, both of which did so poorly at the box office that Caruso considered quitting acting (leaving television was not the best career move on his part). In this movie, Caruso plays a district attorney investigating the death of a wealthy art dealer, and he finds out the dude was probably blackmailing the governor of California (played with foul-mouthed brio by Richard Crenna), so that’s a motive. The dead guy had a private house where he allowed men to have sex with hookers, and one woman in particular, nicknamed “Jade,” seems to be a favorite of some of the men. Chazz Palminteri plays a defense lawyer, and his wife, Linda Fiorentino, plays a psychiatrist who knew the dead man vaguely, so she becomes part of the investigation. It doesn’t help that Caruso is old friends with both of them and was once in love with Fiorentino. The story is fairly banal – it’s pretty obvious what’s going on, and the sex stuff is kind of tame, and Caruso seems oddly bad at his job, because it seems like he knows who the killer is very early on but does nothing about it. Caruso is dull, Palminteri is fine, and Fiorentino, as usual, is the best person in the movie, because Fiorentino, who was woefully misused in Hollywood, is often the best person in the movie she’s in. She smolders throughout, and while her part is a bit condescending and a bit lifeless, she does as much as she can with it (take all this with a grain of salt, as I stan hard for Fiorentino). There’s not much to recommend it, but I’ve wanted to check it out for a while, so I did. Check that off my list!

Phantoms (1998). I mean, the only reason to watch this is so you can agree or disagree with this:

Phantoms is actually a not-bad horror movie, although it suffers from budgetary problems – the effects aren’t great, so a lot of the movie is dark to cover that up. It’s silly, and it feels like the filmmakers had some things they wanted to get into the movie – Rose McGowan seems to get really spiritual late in the movie, which doesn’t make a lot of sense, and Liev Schreiber is supposed to be the really creepy dude who messes things up for the other humans before being dispatched horribly (see: Paul Reiser in Aliens), but while he is dispatched horribly, it’s fairly early, so he doesn’t really get to be too, too creepy. And 8-time Oscar nominee Peter O’Toole is there (he was not nominated for this movie). It’s dumb fun. Affleck isn’t really the bomb, though, unfortunately. Oh well.

Cellular (2004). I love watching movies that are so “of their time,” as Sliver is and as this one is. This could almost have only been made around this time, when cell phones were relatively new but not as ubiquitous or powerful as they are today. This is a fun thriller, as Kim Basinger is kidnapped by thugs led by … Jason Statham? Stath, no!!!!! She’s thrown in an attic and the Stath destroys the phone, but she manages to piece together some wires and call a cell, which belongs to a baby-faced Chris Evans. He doesn’t believe she’s been kidnapped at first, of course, but eventually believes her, and spends the movie trying to stay one step ahead of the bad guys and figure out what they want (they want Basinger’s husband, but I won’t tell you why). It’s a bit ridiculous, of course – the phone Evans is using wouldn’t stay charged as long as it does – but it’s a fun, tense thriller. Basinger isn’t a passive victim, and Evans isn’t an ass-kicker, as Stath kicks his ass pretty well at one point, but he’s smart enough to stay ahead of the bad guys. William H. Macy and Noah Emmerich are cops trying to figure everything out, and Jessica Biel shows up to look hot, basically. The movie adds a good dose of humor, as Evans goes to extraordinary lengths to stay on the line, and it’s about 90 minutes long, so things just fly by. It’s a decent thriller, and sometimes, that’s just what you need!

Freaky (2020). This movie is a lot better than it has any right to be, mostly because of Vince Vaughn and Kathryn Newton, the two leads. It’s “Freaky Friday,” but it’s a (fairly funny) horror movie – Vaughn plays a typical horror movie killer who uses an ancient Aztec knife to try to kill Newton, but magic and lightning make them switch bodies. Newton goes to school and begins killing people, of course, while Vaughn has to convince her two best friends who she is and figure out how to switch back. Vaughn as a teenaged girl is excellent, and Newton as the evil killer is brilliant. The movie does get a bit gory (there’s nothing wrong with that, it’s just a warning that it is, after all, a horror movie), and it’s clever how the director and writer chooses the victims (you’ll understand when you see the movie). Newton’s family is a bit fractured, as well, and part of the movie is her realizing that and trying to fix it. It’s just a fun, fairly clever spin on both horror movies and identity-switching stories. Plus, it has Alan Ruck! Who doesn’t love Alan Ruck?

Nobody (2021). This is kind of an undercooked John Wick (the filmmakers were involved in that movie, and they’re not shy about the comparisons), although it’s still pretty decent. Bob Odenkirk is a regular dude with a regular family who, of course, turns out to be an amazing killing machine. His “re-emergence” makes even less sense than Keanu’s in John Wick, but he plays Hutch as older than Wick (Odenkirk is about two years older than Keanu) and as someone whose skills have atrophied just a bit more, so during the fight on the bus, for instance, that kind of sets the whole plot in motion, he gets his ass kicked a bit more than you’d think (see below). It’s a bit funnier than John Wick, as if the creators were aware that John Wick took itself a bit too seriously, so this movie has a Russian gangster who likes singing pop songs on stage, a very funny scene in the hospital after Odenkirk beats up the Russian goons, and Christopher Lloyd having a blast as Odenkirk’s dad. Connie Nielsen doesn’t have much to do as Odenkirk’s wife, which is weird because she knows about his past, so perhaps she could help him? I don’t know. This is basically an excuse for mayhem, and Odenkirk does a pretty excellent job showing a man who has tried very hard to suppress the violent parts of his life but is having trouble with it. It’s a very good acting job in the middle of a cartoon. But it’s a fun cartoon, so check it out!

Bullet Train (2022). I love goofy action movies like this, which is a Guy Ritchie movie that Guy Ritchie didn’t direct – it has the large, slightly odd cast, the humor sprinkled in with the over-the-top violence, and it has a Rube Goldberg-esque plot that makes sense as long as you don’t poke at it too much. David Leitch, the director, has carved himself a nice little career aping Ritchie, beginning with John Wick (which he produced and “directed” – he’s uncredited, but I guess he did a lot of the work) and moving on to Atomic Blonde, Deadpool 2, and Fast and Furious Presents: Hobbs and Shaw, and this is just another nice notch on his belt. Brad Pitt’s job – exactly what his profession is remains murky – is to get on a train going from Tokyo to Kyoto and get a briefcase, which happens to be full of cash. Who hires him and why is best left unexamined! Of course, there are other people on the train after the briefcase for any number of reasons, and they’re all very violent about their intentions. Pitt is not averse to violence, but something in his recent past has left him more open to non-violent solutions, and it’s very funny seeing him try to talk his way out of some of the bad places in which he finds himself. The cast is stacked – Joey King plays an innocent-looking young lady who, naturally, is a stone-cold killer; Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Brian Tyree Henry play “brothers” who are a very effective killing team; Bad Bunny and Zazie Beetz are secondary killers who don’t get much screen time but have a fun time while they’re there; Hiroyuki Sanada is an old man whose son, Andrew Koji, is on the train and in some distress; and Michael Shannon shows up late in the movie to do wildly fun Michael Shannon things. The cameos are very fun, and the humor is fine, and the violence is fine. As usual with movies set in claustrophobic places, the actual dimensions of the train seem far too large to allow the action (trains and planes are always too wide in movies – if filmmakers made them actual size, it would be fun to see them try to fight), but that’s the way it is. It’s a ridiculous movie, but it zips right along, and it’s fun to watch. Nothing wrong with that!

See How They Run (2022). I wanted to see this in the theater, but it didn’t last long and it appeared on HBO pretty quickly, so I watched it at home. The new movie age is weird, y’all. Anyway, this is a murder mystery set in 1953 London, and it revolves around Agatha Christie’s play The Mousetrap, which is celebrating its 100th performance. Someone gets killed at the after-party, and Sam Rockwell of Scotland Yard and his faithful constable, Saoirse Ronan, are on the case! It’s not exactly a comedy, although it’s fairly light, and it’s pretty entertaining although a bit forgettable. Rockwell said he played Inspector Stoppard as Clouseau if Clouseau were competent, and you can see that. Ronan is adorably spunky, enthusiastic about the job and smart as a whip, although she jumps to conclusions constantly while Rockwell takes his time. The cast is solid – Harris Dickinson as arrogant Richard Attenborough does a nice job, Adrien Brody as the smarmy American director trying to get the play made into a movie is a highlight, and David Oyelowo is quite good as the playwright who’s been hired to do the screenplay. Ruth Wilson, who’s a terrific actor, doesn’t have a lot to do, unfortunately. The movie is a bit metatextual, in a not terribly subtle but still very funny way, and it even cleaves well to history, as the issue at hand – getting a movie made of The Mousetrap – is an actual legal wrangle that still holds, it seems. It’s a fun movie, with good performances. Not a bad way to spend 90 or so minutes!

Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery (2022). I liked Knives Out, but not as much as some people, but enough to see the sequel, which I saw in the movie theater on Thanksgiving even though it’s out on Netflix now (I really like seeing movies in the theater, and after years of not doing it as much because of other things, I’m trying to get back into it). I liked this quite a bit more than Knives Out, frankly, so there’s that. Craig is terrific, of course, and it’s interesting because we get a tiny bit of insight into his character that we didn’t get in the first movie. He craves the excitement of a case, and as this movie is set during the early days of COVID, he’s stuck at home and going a bit crazy. He’s gay, which I guess was kind of an open secret but is confirmed here, and that’s interesting. He’s brilliant, of course, but he’s also dismissive of those who aren’t as brilliant as he is (not that he’s not a nice guy, but he wants a challenge and gets grumpy when he doesn’t get it). He’s fine, but like the first movie, the female lead steals the show, as Janelle Monáe is excellent in a role that requires quite a bit from her. She’s playing the ex-partner of tech billionaire Edward Norton, and she shows up at his private island for a weekend to which she was definitely invited but at which no one expected her, given the fact that the “ex” in ex-partner was very contentious. Norton is smarmy, naturally (he’s always been good at smarmy), but he’s not just a cartoon, which is nice. He’s good, but the rest of the talented cast doesn’t have the meaty roles that the two/three leads do, so while they’re fun to watch, they’re not quite as compelling. It’s a good cast, though – Kathyrn Hahn, Leslie Odom Jr., Kate Hudson, and Dave Bautista are Norton’s buddies, and Jessica Henwick and Madelyn Cline are there as Hudson’s assistant and Bautista’s girlfriend, respectively. All the characters have secrets, of course, and Rian Johnson gives them some interesting personality quirks, but they’re not as well done as the main characters. The mystery is a doozy, though, which is why it’s better than Knives Out, where the mystery was the weak part of the movie. This time, it’s fairly clever, and it allows Johnson to skewer rich people a bit more than in Knives Out, which was more specifically about the family. The satire is easy, of course, but still fun. It’s a bit too long, but not annoyingly so, and the many cameos are really, really fun (one late in the movie while Craig and Monáe are chatting is inspired because it’s so unexpected). And Johnson really should have made a short film completely from Derol’s perspective, because that would be awesome (if you see the movie, you’ll know what I mean). Anyway, it’s on Netflix, so there’s no reason for you not to watch it. You don’t have to leave your couch!

Have you seen any good movies recently? Have you seen any of these? Let’s talk about them!