Thoughts on Judgment Night

   Last week I watched Judgment Night on Criterion, a 1993 action film that is much better known for its great soundtrack that is full of rap and metal/rock collaborations, like an Ice T and Slayer song, or a Cypress Hill and Sonic Youth song. I didn’t know what the movie was about, thinking it was a sci-fi action movie. It’s more of a thriller, and is really well-shot with night scenes nearly the whole movie, and there is some really good tension in long sequences.

    The basic plot is that Emilio Estevez is a suburban family man in the North Shore suburbs of Chicago who is going into the city with his friends and brother to see a boxing match, and there’s all this weird tension where his friends still act immature and want to get into fights, and tell Estevez that he’s “gone soft” because he has a family and doesn’t want to get into reckless fights. The guys end up driving off the expressway to get out of traffic to get to the fight, only to end up in some desolate rough area, where they accidentally witness a gang-related shooting, done by Denis Leary’s crime boss character, and spend the whole movie trying to escape Denis Leary and his crew (one of them played by Everlast, who was in House of Pain at the time and was on the soundtrack), sneaking into a train yard and a housing projects building and empty streets and alleys.

    It works pretty well, even if I felt like the movie was trying to have some kind of arc with Emilio having been a rough punk and having to tap into his violent side to survive, and it didn’t seem fleshed out. But Denis Leary was fun as the bad guy, even if it felt like he was the same character he was playing in Demolition Man that same year, same pissed-off underground leader guy who hates rich people.

    Michael DeLorenzo had a small part as the guy who gets killed early on, and is called “the kid,” even though he was in his mid-30s at the time.

    Between this and Very Bad Things, I thought “Nobody should ever invite Jeremy Piven on a guys’ night out, because he will be the catalyst for things going wrong.”

Thoughts on Weapons

     Yesterday, I went to the Alamo Drafthouse in Manhattan with a friend to see Weapons, a 2025 horror/mystery film written and directed by Zach Cregger, who also directed Barbarian (2022) and was a part of the Canadian comedy troupe The Whitest Kids You Know. The film is told in vignettes from different characters' perspective in a nonlinear narrative, allowing the audience to get pieces of the story from different angles and to uncover the mystery with the final narrative.

    The story is initially narrated by an unnamed child, talking about an incident two years prior in the town of Maybrook, PA, where seventeen children from Justine Gandy (Julia Garner)'s elementary school classroom all inexplicably ran away from their homes at the same time at 2:17 AM, and went missing, and only one student, Alex (Cary Christopher) remained in her classroom the next day. 

    The missing kids cause panic with their distraught parents, as a month has passed by with no sign of the kids, and though a police investigation cleared Justine of any foul play, the parents, led by Archer (Josh Brolin) as their representative, blame her, thinking she's withholding information and wondering why it was only her class that disappeared. Someone defaces her car with "WITCH" written in red paint, she gets threatening phone calls, and people ring her doorbell or pound on the door to scare her. Justine is a vulnerable person with a messy personal life, like a history of alcoholism, seduces her ex-boyfriend Paul (Alden Ehrenreich), and is chastised by her principal Marcus (Benedict Wong) about her past history with getting too close to students and crossing boundaries, urging her to stay away from Alex and not to bother him about the trauma they're going through.

    Justine keeps investigating on her own, sneaking around Alex's house, which has newspapers covering the windows, and knows that something weird is happening there, but can't get anyone to take her seriously. Then, when the narrative shifts, it goes to Archer, who has been sleeping in his son Matthew's bed, having nightmares about him being missing, and is obsessed with analyzing the Ring camera video of Matthew running away, and pressing another couple of a missing classmate to see their Ring camera video, and trying to connect the dots of where the children were running to. The narrative shifts to Paul and his complicated personal life, as well as starting out like a nice guy but being an awful cop with a short temper, who clearly has a history of bad behavior according to the police chief (Toby Huss), and to James (Austin Abrams), a homeless drug addict and burglar who is a scummy person, but also figures out the potential whereabouts of the children but can't get anyone to take him seriously because of his criminal background.

    The story switches through narratives until the final one focuses on Alex, and unveils the mystery, and I didn't like that the story, which had been an interesting mystery and character study of several people, with illusions to real-life tragedies like the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary shooting (the missing children, PTSD of the parents, and trauma of the suburban town reflected a lot of the feelings and experiences after the tragedy), it went more into a cliche of a villain that felt based in sexist and ageist stereotypes. It felt like trying to be "scary" in a stereotypical way, and the reveal felt like it came from a fairy-tale setting that didn't really fit in with the realism of the rest of the story, and I didn't get why the villain was the way they were, aside from saying "they're just evil." The performer as the character was very good, but I didn't really like the direction that felt more like the movie was trying to put in a more typical horror third act that didn't really work for me. Although the finale did some hilarious moments of slapstick violence that did make me laugh, and culminates in some really insane imagery.

    One of my favorite elements of the movie were POV shots that would track a character's path in a one take shot, like when Justine goes to the liquor store early on and the film follows her path from the parking lot through the store. Those scenes worked well in an immersive way that I really liked.

    Julia Garner was great in this, in playing a schoolteacher with a complex history that made her relatable, and I especially liked Austin Abrams' performance as James, a guy who would be on the phone trying to get money out of his sister while talking about his new job, while trying car doors to see which one is open to rob. He took a dirtbag character and made him more sympathetic as a guy who figures out what may have happened to the children, and I thought he was a standout in the film.

    This was a pretty good movie to watch, and I liked that the pre-show reel at Alamo Drafthouse had clips like a skit about the signature run from Naruto (as the children's running mimics that run with airplane arms), skits from The Whitest Kids You Know, old trailers of Children of the Damned, and offbeat clips of children performing in choirs and bands, like dressed in red while dancing to DMX's "Ruff Ryders Anthem" or singing about poop and butts and farts in Spanish. I'm glad that my friend and I saw it together, as we both like horror films, and discussed the film more afterwards.

Thoughts on She Rides Shotgun

    At an AMC Theatre in NYC yesterday, I went to see She Rides Shotgun, a 2025 crime thriller directed by Nick Rowland, co-written by Ben Collins and Luke Piotrowski, based on the 2017 novel of the same name by Jordan Harper. 

    The film stars Taron Egerton as a ex-con named Nate who formed an alliance with an Aryan white supremacist gang while in prison, only for him to have betrayed the gang in some vague way, and now the gang is out to kill his family. The gang killed his ex-wife and her new husband, and before they can get to his nine-year old daughter, Polly (Ana Sophia Heger), when she's waiting to be picked up after school, Nate pulls up in a car with a broken window and makes her get in the car. She has barely seen her father through her young life, so she hardly knows him, but is at first enjoying the time together in a motel room, where he's teaching her how to swing a bat to hit someone in the knees and back of the head, and changing her hair to disguise her identity. Both things she's seeing as play, while it hints more as his nervousness about being on the run. When she sees a news report about what happened to her mother and that she is a missing child, she freaks and runs and finds a phone to call the cops, then quickly learns how that was the wrong thing to do, as she and Nate are on the run not just from the Aryan gang members, but from corrupt cops who are part of the gang (identifiable by a blue lightning tattoo) as well.

    The film has a lot of really good tension in it, and I liked how the film was only hinting at Nate's backstory, where he doesn't want to seem like a monster to his daughter, but that he likely isn't a good guy, and may not be that much better than the gang, just more of a lowlife dirtbag than a violent white supremacist. He fights to protect his daughter, even when he keeps putting her in danger with other killers and corrupt types while on the lam, and she witnesses a lot of trauma throughout the film, which the film's final shot, while moving and touching, insinuates will stick with her long after she's "saved." 

    Ana Sophia Heger gives an excellent performance as Polly, handling a lot of rough subject matter in this film while often acting without words, her round eyes seeing a lot of shadiness and violence well beyond her years, and picking up quickly on how to defend herself, and seeing her dad more as a scared person beyond his tattooed and shredded physique. She and Egerton's scenes work well together as a father and daughter who barely know each other, and trying to rely on one another while the clock is ticking.

    Taron Egerton is almost 36, and has grown out of the young ingenue roles he played in The Kingsman: Secret Service films, and is really good in playing the vulnerability of Nate, a guy whose moral compass is gray, and who can't convince himself that he isn't a monster. When he sees the effect of his violence on Polly, he worries that he is going to ruin her and turn her into being like him, and is remorseful, not wanting her innocence to be tainted by his ugliness, though by the end of the film it's too late for that.

    A supporting character role that deserves recognition is Rob Yang as Detective John Park, a cop who is not part of the gang, and is tracking the story and figures out that Nate is not responsible for the murders and is being chased by the gang. He is a morally grey character, using blackmail to get what he wants, but isn't as corrupt as other cops, knowing how to game the system to help people, and often comes off like the smartest person around. Yang carries a lot of quiet magnetism in his role, and is really great in this film.

    The veteran character actor John Carroll Lynch appears as Houser, a corrupt cop who is one of the leaders of the Aryan gang, and controls the drug trade and strings up people to torture them for information, killing them afterwards. Lynch in this role is deeply psychotic and intimidating, a long way from when he's played warmer, more cuddlier characters in films like Fargo.

    I liked how intense this film was, and how it kept its emotional core about the father-daughter relationship, often people about them trying to trust each other and building a family connection, which helped keep the film more ground among all the other gun battles and car chases going on. I'm glad I checked out this thriller, it feels like a modest sleeper hit.

Thoughts on The Phoenician Scheme

   At the Angelika Film Center this week on Tuesday, I went to see The Phoenician Scheme, a 2025 espionage black comedy written and directed by Wes Anderson, starring an ensemble cast featuring Benicio Del Toro, Mia Threapleton, Michael Cera, Riz Ahmed, Tom Hanks, Bryan Cranston, Benedict Cumberbatch, Jeffrey Wright, Stephen Park, Mathieu Almaric, Scarlett Johansson, Richard Ayoade, Rupert Friend, Hope Davis, Willem Dafoe, F. Murray Abraham, Charlotte Gainsbourg, and Bill Murray. 

    The film takes place in 1950, where the arms dealer and industrialist Anatole "Zsa Zsa" Korda (del Toro) keeps narrowly avoiding death after a series of assassination attempts and controversies, as well as being criticized for his unethical business practices, shown through surviving a plane crash and in a newspaper montage. After he is briefly in the afterlife, while unconscious, where he faces a divine court before coming back to life, he knows that he will die for real someday soon, so he tracks down his estranged daughter, a Catholic novice, Sister Liesl (Mia Threapleton), and wants her to be the sole heir to his estate. Liesl is wary of her father, since he sent her away to live in a convent when she was 5, and she believes that he killed her mother, which he denies. 

    The title refers to his plans to stake his fortune on overhauling the infrastructure of Phoenicia with slave labor, and an government agent, Excalibur (Rupert Friend) wants to drive up the price of building materials, which would bankrupt Korda.

    The film takes a lot of turns of Korda going to various associates and conspiring in his scheme to get money and build contacts, while denying that he killed Liesl's mother and finding out the truth about what happened to her. He also has a personal assistant, Bjorn (Michael Cera), a Norwegian entomologist. 

    I had trouble completely following this film, and I was in it more for liking the cast and Wes Anderson's trademark storybook look to his films than being invested in the plot. I had to read more in the Wikipedia plot summary to understand a lot that just went over my head, either if the characters spoke too quickly or I wasn't paying close attention. I did like some fun parts of it, like a scene with Michael Cera that is an equivalent to the "hot girl takes off her glasses" trope but with a nerdy guy, letting Michael Cera play against type for a little bit, and a goofy fight scene between Benicio del Toro and Benedict Cumberbatch where I liked the physical comedy in it. The opening title sequence, which plays as an overhead shot as del Toro is in a tub as attendants take care of him and the cast credits run on the screen, was nice to watch the whole scene play out for the length of the opening credits.

    This isn't as memorable as other Wes Anderson films, as I much preferred The Royal Tenenbaums and The Grand Budapest Hotel, but it's far from his worst, which was The Darjeeling Limited for me (aside from the moving sequence with Irrfan Kahn). I would think this would be a two and a half star film at best.

Thoughts on Summertime

     On Criterion, I watched Summertime, a 1955 romantic comedy-drama, directed by David Lean and co-written by Lean and H.E. Bates, based on the play The Time of the Cuckoo by Arthur Laurents. The film stars Katharine Hepburn as Jane, a middle-aged "spinster" secretary from Akron, Ohio, who takes a trip to Venice, Italy, after having saved for it for many years. She's amazed by the gorgeous sights of the city, and staying in a home run by a glamourous widow, Signora Fiorini (Isa Miranda) who rents out the rooms as a pensione. She meets other American tourists, both are pairs of couples, and she feels lonely when surrounded by couples in Venice, wanting her own romance and not to feel so alone. Throughout her trip, she is often pestered by a barefoot Italian street kid, Mauro (Gaetano Autiero), who hustles her for money in exchange for small trinkets and helping her find her way around Venice. Mauro yells like he's a middle-aged Italian man in a little boy's body.

    Jane often wanders around Venice, filming the sights with her mini-camera, taking pictures, and wearing fitted light dresses. On her trip, she meets Renato (Rossano Brazzi), an Italian antiques dealer who had noticed her sitting alone in the Piazza San Marco, and they spark up a romance, while Jane knows that this will be fleeting and end when she returns home.

    I really enjoyed this film a lot. I had heard of it before, but confused the plot with Hepburn's 1957 film Desk Set, thinking she was playing a librarian visiting Venice in Summertime, instead of playing a librarian in Desk Set. There's some wonderful quiet scenes when the camera just lingers on Jane as she walks around in a quiet place by herself, like hanging around after her new friends have left, and just sitting in her solitude and embracing the quiet, and Katharine Hepburn does some devastatingly good physical acting in those moments. The film really feels like a solo emotional journey for a female character, and I could see it inspiring more contemporary films like Under the Tuscan Sun (2003), with the depiction of Diane Lane's character as a new resident in Tuscany and finding fleeting romance and making friends with charming locals.

    I wasn't as into the romance part of the film with Jane and Renato, mostly seeing Renato as taking advantage of her as an American tourist and trying to give her a fantasy of a romance with an Italian man rather than something more real. I much preferred the scenes with Jane and Signora Fiorini, where I felt they had more warm chemistry with each other, and while a 1950s mainstream film was not going to outright depict a lesbian relationship, I felt there was more interesting potential in that unexplored story than with a man who seemed to be putting on airs to impress Jane.

    One of my favorite lines in the film was in the finale, when Jane's trip is coming to an end and she's sad that her romance with Renato has reached its conclusion. She says how when she was younger, she would stay at parties too long because she didn't know when to go, but now with him, and being grown up, she knows when to leave. It was very mature and poignant and showed a lot of her character's growth throughout the film and her journey.

    This was a really lovely and interesting movie, and I've found lately that I've watched more David Lean films, but not his major epics like Lawrence of Arabia or Doctor Zhivago, but more his smaller character-driven films like Brief Encounter, Hobson's Choice, and Summertime. They've been interesting to watch, and I'm happy I checked this one out.

    

Thoughts on Leningrad Cowboys Go America

     On Criterion, I watched the 1989 Finnish road movie Leningrad Cowboys Go America, written and directed by Aki Kaurismäki, about a fictional band called the Leningrad Cowboys, who were from the Siberian tundra and had exaggerated pompadour/mullet hairstyles (also called a quiff, from the 1950s British Teddy Boy movement), long Winklepicker shoes. They're trying to make it as a working band, playing their version of polka with guitars and horns. Their manager Vladimir (Matti Pellonpää) is trying to promote them, but they keep getting shuffled around to different countries and markets. A Russian man tells them to go to America, that "they'll buy anything" there. They head to New York City, followed by Igor (Kari Kyösti Väänänen), the mute village idiot who they don't invite along but he stows away anyway. They bring along their band member who had frozen outside while practicing music, and carry him in a coffin with them and tie the box to the top of their used Cadillac limousine.

    In New York City, they go to CBGB's, and the manager takes a listen, then tells them to go to Mexico to play at a wedding, and to change their music, that Americans like rock music. So the band goes on the road to drive from New York to Mexico, playing bar gigs along the way, and learning to adapt to the U.S. and local tastes. When they encounter a rough biker crowd at one bar, they switch to playing "Born to Be Wild" to win them over. At a bar on the Mexican border, they play "Tequila" to please the Mexican audience. They add rockabilly riffs to their music, blending in with their retro 1950s hairstyles. 

    It's a quirky and unusual movie, and the director Jim Jarmusch has a cameo as a car salesman from whom they buy the limousine, and Jarmusch's films seem like a clear influence on how Kaurismäki sees America, like with his 1980s films Down by Law and Stranger Than Paradise. The film has title cards marking the days and locations of the band's road trip, and at one point, they get arrested for a minor crime, and spend five days in jail, and the sequence is a montage of them in the jail cell banging beer cans and making music with them, with "third day" and "fifth day" punctuating in-between, until the cops just let them go, likely just to get rid of them.

    I've seen a couple of Kaurismäki's films, like Le Havre (2011) and Fallen Leaves (2023). He's a really interesting and funny filmmaker, with a deadpan sense of humor, finding humor in mundane yet offbeat moments. I had heard of this film from the podcast Critically Acclaimed Network, where the hosts, William Bibbiani and Witney Seibold, who are film critics, did an episode listing their Top Ten lists of favorite road trip movies, and one of them included Leningrad Cowboys Go America, and it sounded weird and funny and interesting to me. This stood out as a droll and standout film of the late 1980s, which got a sequel in 1994, Leningrad Cowboys Meet Moses. I'm glad that I checked out this odd film.