7 stars

dir: Chad Stahelski

2023

Please, no more. That’s enough, thanks.

I have had ample sufficiency. John Wick has, by now - by film’s end - killed everyone that can be killed. There’s no one left. Each film has had an exponential increase in the amount of people he has to kill, and now, well, he’s done. We’re done.

I watched more people die in this flick than died in the entirety of Saving Private Ryan, and that was a WWII movie, in case you forgot, that starts with the invasion by the allied forces of the beaches of Normandy.

But there are deaths, and then there are deaths. Very few of the deaths in this flick matter, except when it’s characters you know or actors you recognise, and you forget them seconds after they happen, because they’re only happening to literally faceless goons.

And yet the mountains of corpses left in his wake…

So if we care at all, we care that the man of the title gets to have his way. He never sought all these people out – they come after him, and he has to defend himself. He only kills those trying to kill him. It’s just that everyone wants to kill him, mostly due to the bounty on his head of several million.

What is money, anyway? It has a siren call that none of these faceless goons can resist, even if Wick’s unkillability is well known. Presumably the assassin characters in this flick that are part of this strange world know that literally thousands of people have tried to kill Wick in the last 3 movies and failed, all mostly having been shot in the face or head, and yet they still keep dreaming the impossible dream and thinking “maybe I’ll be the one to defy fate and the gods”.

And the bounty keeps going up and up. It’s really beyond absurd. “I wasn’t prepared to go after the unkillable super assassin for only $10mill, but I’ll sure as heck give it a go for $15mill!”

dir: Johnathan Goldstein & John Francis Daley

2023

Nerds. They have infected everything, everywhere, all at once.

So open, out and proud, no longer hiding in the shadows. They even get to make movies these days.

Seeing a fantasy movie with the title Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves would have delighted me once upon a time, because I lived and breathed this nonsense as a teenager. But then an actual movie came along called Dungeons & Dragons back in 2000, and it made most of us realise that we were never going to get what we either wanted or needed, just lame generic fantasy-ish stuff with all the signposts and references, and none of the appeal, with terrible acting to boot. I mean, Jeremy Irons, you’re in a class of your own.

Not long after that, though, the Lord of the Rings movies came along, with vast budgets and vast running times, and the masses liked them, and the nerds thought “maybe they aren’t going to turn all of our beloved childhood stuff into absolute shit”. But it wasn’t just nerds – it was normal people too going along to see the flicks that made them a success. If only nerds went along, it barely would have registered, but the cinemas would have smelled pretty awful.

And now. Now everyone thinks they can make Dungeons & Dragons happen again, I suspect only because of the success of Stranger Things, in which the venerable roleplaying game keeps being played and keeps being mentioned. Other than that I can’t figure out what the impetus was to inflict this “property” onto the world again.

I don’t really think it can happen, because everything from D&D now just looks like a generic fantasy setting, and we’ve had plenty of movies and tv / streaming series set in generic fantasy settings. Now of course it’s just easier to lift directly from the LotRs movies when it comes to what cities should look like, or rampaging hordes of creatures that live underground, but we’ve had no shortage of fantasy franchise crap over the years.

dir: Siddharth Anand

2023

I have been on something of an Indian film kick lately, and I think I’m pretty much at the end of it, for now. I know nothing about this franchise, or about anything surrounding these flicks, other than the “real” world stuff around them, and as such I am as uninterested in watching nationalistic propaganda that is pro-India as I am to watch any nationalistic bullshit that’s pro any country. Also, this is India’s biggest box office flick of the year, and the second biggest flick in Hindi of all time. So someone went to see it, lots of patriotic someones.

Your countries and their governments are all equally worthless and self-serving, in my eyes, so fuck all y’all.

But within a certain context, I can allow for that kind of bullshit, when it suits the setting and a narrative – in other contexts it can be almost inspiring - hence my enjoyment for the equally implausible Indian film R R R that came out last year and wowed audiences. It worked because the Indian heroes (yay!) were fighting the colonialist and cruel British (boo!).

Here, the heroes are conspicuously Hindu Indian, and the villains are kinda Pakistani Muslims, and former Indian heroes turned villains who renounce their homeland. And they’re fighting over Kashmir, so…

Agents who die in service of their country in this movie yell “Jai Hind!” before they die, which doesn’t translate to but means “Long Live India!” The villain routinely mocks the hero for loving “Mother India”, which he feels isn’t worthy of that love. In the flick’s creepiest and least comprehensible scene, the villainous Jim (John Abraham) tells the hero that he never thought of India as his mother, and more of as a lover, and I was like “the fuck is this idiot talking about? What weird nationalistic incest bullshit is he peddling?”

dir: Steven Spielberg

2022

It’s kinda funny that the most successful director of all time has been kvetching and nervy about making a film about his own life for over two decades.

Most directors might incorporate autobiographical elements into their screenplays, especially someone who’s made as many films as Spielberg, thus obviating the need to maybe have to do their own biopics, but, really, there probably isn’t anyone that should have to talk Senor Spielbergo out of anything.

Both Spielberg, and Spielbergo, his non-union Mexican equivalent, have done enough for both cinema in general and the film industry specifically. He should get the chance to shine whatever light he wants on his own origin story. It’s only fair.

It doesn’t necessarily make it that interesting for viewers. For all his achievements, his life story isn’t interesting, perhaps not as interesting as his achievements. It’s, like, the average stuff of life, told with Technicolor brightness and bland, shiny perfection.

But he’s a person, he grew up, he experienced stuff. He had parents. He has sisters. Things happened.

He, being Sammy (Gabriel LaBelle) in this version, became obsessed with cinema after watching a train crash when his parents took him to see The Greatest Show on Earth. As a nervous, fearful child, recording a toy train crashing over and over again allowed him to feel in control for the first time in his life.

How do I know this? Because Sammy’s mum Mitzi (Michelle Williams) specifically sets it out for us, telling her husband (Paul Dano) that it must be the case like the dime store psychologist that she is.

Sammy is off and away, obsessed with movies and movie-making now, to the detriment of any other human relationships around him, but other people aren’t as film obsessed. They’re more fixated on life and love and … that’s about it.

The dad is completely dismissive of his son’s hobby, as he calls it, and it becomes, at least for me, a hilarious illustration of certain parents and their expectations, and how they can never be satisfied.

In real life his dad was called Arnold, but in the flick he’s called Burt Fabelman. You can imagine in life that even later on once his son conquered the world of cinema, if he ever introduced himself to people, and they would ask if he was related to Steven Spielberg, and he replied in the affirmative, you can imagine people going berserk with praise.

And then you can imagine Burt / Arnold muttering, “yeah, but still he’s no doctor.”