John Wick 4

John Wick is slowing down. It’s true. Once he dispatches an anonymous minion, they writhe around on the floor for a few seconds before they spring up for round 2, giving John Wick a second to reset and catch his breath. You can’t blame the filmmakers -- the man is 58! So as I predicted, the “gun-fu” has become less fu and more gun. They even brought in a frenemy side-kick, Donnie Yen, to take up some of the kung fu “Wing Chun” slack, but you just never know where this guy stands in the endlessly complicated cabal of assassins and rules and tokens and chits, all being led by a young Skarsgård (it’s impossible to know which one, there are so many). As filmmakers raise the stakes, we enter much more of a superhero/fantasy world. Four-story falls are survivable, entire buildings explode, and the modern-day Samurai code-of-ethics, referred to as “the high table” become more and more murky. It’s not just as simple as a dog anymore (until it is). Several of the brawls are some of the most creative of their kind ever filmed. They seem to go on and on, Sisyphean, exhausting, visceral, and wildly entertaining. This is it: the Citizen Kane of gun-fu, birthed, some would say, by John Woo. As I get older and more cynical, I appreciate more and more when the filmmakers' love of movies and desire to entertain is so obvious. They have served. They will be of service.

John Wick 3

Rewatched this chapter in the action saga to try and remember HOW all the rules of the secret assassin cabal play-out. It’s complicated! Lots of tokens and coins and vouchers and stuff.

The Pink Panther

For the first time as an adult we revisited this, the first appearance of Peter Sellers' Inspector Clouseau from the early 1960s. Very long, highly-choreographed shticky sequences, most of which have to do with 4 different guys trying to get with the same lady. I guess this kind of farce goes all the way back to Shakespeare and Greek theater, but it feels kinda dated and rapey now. The one-named actress who does the heavy lifting here is Capucine, who seems to have been historically under-appreciated. It’s still impeccably timed, but the women aren’t given a lot of agency in these sexy, sexy matters.

The Wrecking Crew

Finished in 2008 but released in 2015, this is a fascinating music doc exploring a subject I know very little about: the session musicians in Los Angeles who, almost anonymously, played on some of the most famous recordings of the 60s and 70s. Sinatra. Elvis. The Beach Boys. The Byrds. The Mamas and the Papas. While it’s not a uniformly tight or technically marvelous doc, the personal anecdotes of the musicians and the loving details about how the rock-n-roll sausage was made is fascinating, enlightening, and highly worthwhile. Learning where the bassline came from in the opening seconds of “These Boots are Made for Walking” sung by Nancy Sinatra is revelatory.

Sharper

Con artist movies are usually built around an ensemble of shady types conning each other. A spectrum of reluctantly shady and unapologetically shady. But for a con artist movie to work, the filmmakers have to con the audience as well. This is a desirable thing for audiences who like “art of the con” stories. But it’s pretty easy to trick an audience with movie magic – you mainly just omit key information. Sharper uses all kinds of filmmaking and storytelling trickery to leave the audience in the dark. Omitted conversations, time jumps, flashbacks, and unreliable narrators twist the movie reality and take the viewer on a mind-bending ride. If you like slick, scam stories, that’s a good thing. But maybe Sharper withholds for a little too long, and you’re often guessing who you should be following and who the protagonist is. Characters you thought were important end up just standing there during key scenes, because their bit’s been played-out already. And plot-wise a lot of this is pretty predictable if you’ve seen The Sting, so it’s the characters that hold it together. It’s a well-made movie, but in terms of satisfaction, it’s a mixed bag.