John Wick: Chapter 2 (Chad Stahelski, 2017)

Cast: Keanu Reeves, Riccardo Scamarcio, Ian McShane, Ruby Rose, Common, Claudia Gerini, Lance Reddick, Laurence Fishburne, Tobias Segal, John Leguizamo, Bridget Moynahan, Franco Nero, Peter Stormare. Screenplay: Derek Kolstad. Cinematography: Don Laustsen. Production design: Kevin Kavanaugh. Film editing: Evan Schiff. Music: Tyler Bates, Joel J. Richard. 

"You've got a beautiful house, John," the villain (Riccardo Scamarcio) says to the hero (Keanu Reeves), and we silently think the rest: "Too bad if something happened to it." It does, of course, and we are back in the world of John Wick. Grimly stoic as usual, the protagonist takes a licking and keeps on John Wicking.  Wickworld is a place with its own peculiar laws, one in which extremely violent things happen, from automobile demolition derbies to shootouts in the subway, and no authorities seem to intervene and passersby often don't even take notice. The choreographed violence becomes tolerable -- it's part ballet and part animated cartoon. In the extended fight between Wick and Cassian (Common), there's no sound but gunshots, blows landing, and combatants grunting, a kind of percussive duet that's as rhythmically compelling as Gene Krupa's drum solo on Benny Goodman's "Sing, Sing, Sing." 

John Wick (Chad Stahelski, 2014)

Cast: Keanu Reeves, Michael Nyqvist, Alfie Allen, Willem Dafoe, Dean Winters, Adrienne Palicki, Ian McShane, Lance Reddick, John Leguizamo. Screenplay: Derek Kolstad. Cinematography: Jonathan Sela. Production design: Dan Leigh. Film editing: Elisabet Ronaldsdóttir. Music: Tyler Bates, Joel J. Richard. 

Keanu Reeves reminds me of Gregory Peck, another handsome movie star of limited acting range who succeeded by being eminently likable. Just as Peck was miscast as the demonic Captain Ahab of John Huston's Moby Dick (1956), Reeves struggled to play the villainous Don John in Kenneth Branagh's Much Ado About Nothing (1993) -- something about both performers seems to draw a sympathetic response from the audience. That something is certainly needed in John Wick, with Reeves playing a remorseless hit man, though the actor is so innately likable that the filmmakers didn't really need to kill Wick's puppy to elicit audience sympathy. Shoot-'em-up thrillers are so common these days that adding another franchise to the action genre seems like overkill. But what makes John Wick work is screenwriter Derek Kolstad's ability to craft a believable alternate world in which the character can seem plausible. Director Chad Stahelski (and his co-director David Leitch, who was denied that credit by the Directors Guild) manage to create an ambience that evokes both French gangster movies and Hong Kong martial arts films -- Jean-Pierre Melville meets Tsui Hark -- while retaining a peculiarly American love of artillery and automobiles. 

My Own Private Idaho (Gus Van Sant, 1991)

 

My Own Private Idaho (Gus Van Sant, 1991)

Cast: River Phoenix, Keanu Reeves, James Russo, William Richert, Rodney Harvey, Chiara Caselli, Michael Parker, Jessica Makinson, Flea, Grace Zabriskie, Udo Kier, Tom Troupe, Sally Curtice. Screenplay: Gus Van Sant, based on plays by William Shakespeare. Cinematography: John J. Campbell, Eric Alan Edwards. Production design: David Brisbin. Film editing: Curtiss Clayton. Music: Bill Stafford. 

When is a cult film not a cult film? The term is bandied about so often, that I have to protest when people use it about My Own Private Idaho, which seems to me to transcend the label. To my mind, a cult film is one that reaches an enthusiastic audience despite its apparent limitations as a serious work of film art. They Live, for example, John Carpenter’s 1988 movie, is a cult film because it’s part of a genre, the horror/sci-fi flick, looked down on by “serious” critics, made on a shoestring, with some really awful acting and cheesy production values, but carrying a potent subtext that continues to be appreciated by audiences years after others in its subgenre have been forgotten. What lifts My Own Private Idaho above cult level is its wit and intelligence, which should have been obvious from the start, and the sheer brilliance with which its director and actors carry off its audaciously ironic vision of what lesser filmmakers would have treated with message-movie earnestness: The lives of street hustlers. Gus Van Sant’s decision to work in an analogy with the coterie surrounding Falstaff in Shakespeare's Henry IV, Parts I and II, and Henry V is a stroke of genius. (Shakespeare is credited – tongue-in-cheek, I think – with “additional dialogue,” even though most of the borrowings are paraphrased into contemporary English.) But it’s only the most obvious of the film’s surprises, which multiply with every viewing. My Own Private Idaho will also continuously engender a sense of loss, from what may be River Phoenix’s finest performance, as the narcoleptic lost boy, hopelessly in love with Keanu Reeves’s controlled and conniving Scott, a character that makes its own wry comment on Shakespeare’s Prince Hal.

Point Break (Kathryn Bigelow, 1991)

Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze in Point Break

Cast: Keanu Reeves, Patrick Swayze, Lori Petty, Gary Busey, John C. McGinley, James Le Gros, John Philbin, Bojesse Christopher, Julian Reyes, Daniel Beer, Chris Pedersen, Vincent Klyn, Anthony Kiedis, Dave Olson, Lee Tergesen. Screenplay: Rich King, W. Peter Iliff. Cinematography: Donald Peterman. Production design: Peter Jamison. Film editing: Howard E. Smith. Music: Mark Isham. 

Point Break is so kinetic a movie, so crammed with stunts and fights and chases, that it almost seems like a parody of an action flick. Just when you wonder how the movie can top its surfing sequences, it throws in a skydiving episode. When you're expecting another car chase, you get an exhilarating, not to say exhausting, foot chase. I have to wonder if what makes Kathryn Bigelow such a successful action director is that, as a woman, she has a special point of view on what testosterone-driven action looks like. The dialogue is loaded with machismo: "Young, dumb, and full of cum." "It's basic dog psychology: If you scare them and get them peeing down their leg, they submit." Skydiving is "Sex with gods. You can't beat that!... One hundred percent pure adrenaline." "Why be a servant to the law when you can be its master?" "You gonna jump or jerk off?" After a fight: "This is stimulating, but we're out of here." It's the one female character of any consequence in the movie, Lori Petty's Tyler, who sardonically quits a scene by commenting, "Okay, too much testosterone around here for me." Bigelow's objectification of male display is what gives the movie its subversive quality.   

 

John Wick: Chapter 3 -- Parabellum (Chad Stahelski, 2019)

Mark Dacascos and Keanu Reeves in John Wick: Chapter 3 -- Parabellum

Cast: Keanu Reeves, Halle Berry, Ian McShane, Laurence Fishburne, Mark Dacascos, Asia Kate Dillon, Lance Reddick, Anjelica Huston, Saïd Taghmaoui, Jerome Flynn, Tobias Segal, Randall Duk Kim. Screenplay: Derek Kolstad, Shay Hatten, Chris Collins, Marc Abrams. Cinematography: Dan Laustsen. Production design: Kevin Kavanaugh. Film editing: Evan Schiff. Music: Tyler Bates, Joel J. Richard.

I'll admit that I haven't seen the first two John Wick movies, for much the same reason that I've never watched any of the Taken or Fast and Furious movies: Who needs another action movie franchise? But the films have gotten enough positive response, and I like Keanu Reeves enough, that I gave in and watched the latest in the series. I wasn't disappointed: It's full of well-choreographed fight scenes that are almost balletic (not to mention ballistic) in character. The sets and cinematography are handsome. Reeves doesn't disappoint, Halle Berry is terrific, and I liked seeing old favorites like Ian McShane, Laurence Fishburne, and Anjelica Huston. It was nice to see Mark Dacascos, whom I knew only as the Chairman on Iron Chef America, in his martial arts element. On the whole, I'd say it's on a par with the best of the James Bond and Mission: Impossible movies. Will I watch another John Wick movie if one comes my way? Probably. But let me say it again: Who needs another action movie franchise?

Dangerous Liaisons (Stephen Frears, 1988)

Michelle Pfeiffer and John Malkovich in Dangerous Liaisons

Cast: Glenn Close, John Malkovich, Michelle Pfeiffer, Swoosie Kurtz, Keanu Reeves, Mildred Natwick, Uma Thurman, Peter Capaldi. Screenplay: Christopher Hampton, based on his play and a novel by Choderlos de Laclos. Cinematography: Philippe Rousselot. Production design: Stuart Craig. Film editing: Mick Audsley. Music: George Fenton. 

"Wicked" is a word that has lost a good deal of its pejorative quality, and not just in Boston where it became slang meaning "excellent." There's an attractive quality to wickedness that's lacking in words like "evil." Which is not to say that the wicked pair of the Marquise de Marteuil (Glenn Close) and the Vicomte de Valmont (John Malkovich) aren't reprehensible, but that they fascinate us with their sly wit and determined pursuit of their aims. Close in particular makes the marquise so delicious that there's a considerable shock when she self-destructs upon the failure of her plans, and perhaps the audience even has a glimmer of pity for her final comeuppance. The choice of Malkovich to play Valmont was controversial: He's an actor known for eccentric roles, not the type for a suave seducer. And yet he gives Valmont a snake-like fascination -- so snaky that at one point he even hisses at Swoosie Kurtz's Madame de Volanges -- that makes his conquests of Uma Thurman's Cécile and Michelle Pfeiffer's Madame de Tourvel plausible. He also brings out the vulnerable side of Valmont, so that we find it credible that this implacably rakish figure could find himself undone by this conquest of Madame de Tourvel. But then again, who wouldn't find themselves undone by Michelle Pfeiffer, then at the early peak of her career? In casting Dangerous Liaisons, Stephen Frears followed the lead of Milos Forman, who cast Amadeus (1984) with American actors instead of the British ones usually called on for costume dramas set in Europe, a move that shocked some critics -- especially the British. (The exception in Dangerous Liaisons is Peter Capaldi as Valmont's henchman Azolan, and his Scottish accent stands out oddly.) The irony here is that Forman was at work on his own version of the Choderlos de Laclos novel, called Valmont (1989), which was doomed by being released a year after Frears's film. Dangerous Liaisons won Oscars for Christopher Hampton's screenplay, Stuart Craig's art direction and Gérard James's set decoration, and for James Acheson's costumes. Close and Pfeiffer were nominees, as was George Fenton for a score that blended nicely with excerpts from Vivaldi, Handel, Bach, and Gluck.

River's Edge (Tim Hunter, 1986)

Cast: Crispin Glover, Keanu Reeves, Ione Skye, Daniel Roebuck, Dennis Hopper, Joshua John Miller, Roxana Zal, Josh Richman, Phillip Brock, Tom Bower, Constance Forsland, Leo Rossi, Jim Metzler. Screenplay: Neal Jimenez. Cinematography: Frederick Elmes. Production design: John Muto. Film editing: Howard E. Smith, Sonya Sones. Music: Jürgen Knieper.

I'm a faithful watcher of credits, even though today they're sometimes as long as the movie itself. I think if those people devoted their time to making the movie, they deserve a little of my time watching their names scroll by. Not really. The actual reason for watching the credits is that sometimes they reveal tidbits of fascinating information, such as this one for River's Edge: "trainer: Mr. Glover." I have to wonder what Crispin Glover's trainer did: It's not a particularly challenging role physically, so I have to assume it had something to do with keeping the actor from going further over the top than he does in his mannered and eccentric performance as Layne, an adolescent pothead who gets caught up in the aftermath of the murder of a teenage girl. River's Edge was something of a shocker in its day, variously interpreted as an indictment of American society's failure to provide a clear direction for bored and alienated youth, or as a critique of parenting or the school system, or just as a horror story masked as a true crime movie. The screenplay by Neal Jimenez has its roots in two news stories about teenagers in different parts of California who knew about the murder of one of their schoolmates but covered it up. It's not just the teens who get their share of blame: The adults include negligent parents, a half-crazed loner, an ineffective teacher, bullying cops, and the usual gaggle of reporters. That the half-crazed loner is played by Dennis Hopper links River's Edge with another and more celebrated movie of 1986: David Lynch's Blue Velvet. There are moments in Tim Hunter's film, especially when Hopper's character is clinging to his beloved inflatable sex doll, that rival Lynch's. Lynch, however, would probably not have been so tender as Jimenez and Hunter are to the lovers played by Keanu Reeves and Ione Skye, who lend a romantic John Hughes note to the film that dulls its edge.