What I’ve Caught Up With, June 2024 Part 2:
Film: The Gentlemen (2019)
Guy Ritchie films are fun, and I don’t mind saying that. Sure, they’re violent and convoluted, but all of that is part of the fun, too. The Gentlemen is about a marijuana kingpin (Matthew McConaughey) wanting to get out of the business and looking for a buyer. The first 90 minutes or so is told in a sort of flashback by a sleazy journalist (Hugh Grant) to the pot kingpin’s second (Charlie Hunnam). Violence, double-crosses, and banter abound. The cast includes Henry Golding, Colin Farrell, Michelle Dockery, and Jeremy Strong. While not as fun as Snatch, it’s an entertaining ride from opening credits to the close.
Film: Devil in a Blue Dress (1995)
Sooner or later, everyone makes a film noir. Devil in a Blue Dress is very much a noir, albeit one made in 1995. Unemployed worker Ezekiel (Denzel Washington) gets hired by a man named Albright (Tom Sizemore) to find a woman named Daphne (Jennifer Beals). Daphne is the girlfriend of mayoral candidate Todd Carter (Terry Kinney), but has a penchant for straying. There’s double-crosses, dirty cops, and murder a-plenty to keep us going to the end. Washington is good as always, and Beals makes a very good ingenue, but it’s Don Cheadle who makes the biggest splash as Ezekiel’s friend Mouse. I love a good noir, and this is one that has all the pieces, and they all fit together well. This would have been a great series.
Film: The Young Victoria (2009)
It's easy to forget just how compelling Emily Blunt can be, but The Young Victoria is a good reminder. This is a film filled with a solid cast, top-to-bottom, including Rupert Friend as Albert, who would eventually become Victoria’s royal consort and the father to her nine children. Much of this is about the politics of Victoria’s early reign, the mistakes and the maneuverings, and the petty squabbles, but at heart, it remains a rather sweet romance between Victoria and Albert. For being about who gets to control the queen of England, I didn’t find myself bored at all. The solid cast—Mark Strong, Miranda Richardson, Paul Bettany, Jim Broadbent, and more—doesn’t hurt, either.
Film: This Much I Know to Be True (2022)
Anyone who knows me knows my deep and abiding love of Warren Zevon. Nick Cave has a lot of similarities with Zevon—on the scale of songwriters telling stories about a broken world, Zevon and Tom Waits are going to fight for most pessimistic, but Cave feels the most optimistic, finding beauty in the brokenness, although there are hints of darkness along the lines of Johnny Cash. This Much I Know to Be True is a concert film created during the pandemic when Cave was unable to connect with his audience in any other way. His music is haunting and beautiful, sad and emotional, and this ranks as a concert film that should not be missed. For Cave fans, this is his Stop Making Sense.
Film: Grizzly Man (2005)
Werner Herzog took 100 hours of footage from Timothy Treadwell, a man concerned with the conservation of bears, and cut it down to just under two hours to tell the story of Treadwell’s life. Treadwell could easily be dismissed as a kook, and while he survived for 13 years in the Alaskan wilderness living among grizzly bears, he was also ultimately killed by a bear, as was his girlfriend Amie Huguenard. Herzog handles this with dignity, not outing Treadwell as dangerous or disturbed, but treating him with respect. Grizzly Man is not an easy watch because it’s evident a few minutes in what happened to Treadwell. Knowing how he ends gives a poignancy to the rest of the film. Herzog is attracted to this kind of story, and this is one of his more interesting films.
Film: The Other Dream Team (2012)
I don’t care at all about sports, but I do like a good sports movie. Sports inherently bring out the best and the worst in people. In truth, though, The Other Dream Team has a backdrop of sports. This is really a political movie. In 1988, the gold-winning Soviet basketball team had four Lithuanian players starting for it. Between the Seoul Olympics and the Barcelona Olympics in 1992, Lithuania became an independent nation, and those players who had spent time under Russian colors got to play under their own flag on an international stage, and faced off against the unified Soviet team for the bronze medal game. Basketball is clearly important here, but it’s a sideshow for the politics and the fight for freedom. It’s a hell of a story.
Film: Spy (2015)
When I worked in the video game industry, I wrote the hint books for No One Lives Forever and its sequel. I say this because Spy is similar to those games in a lot of ways. The games featured a female spy who was underestimated in field. In this case, Melissa McCarthy works as the eyes and ears of a super spy (Jude Law). When he’s killed, she takes his place in the field as someone who is completely unknown. What we’ll get, like those computer games, is a serious situation with a lot of comedy shenanigans surrounding it. It works relatively well, and the cast is surprisingly deep. McCarthy is good when she has good material, and this is better than I expected.