Tag: movies

#REVIEW: Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves (2023)

On By Luther M. SilerIn movies, ReviewsLeave a comment

This was one of the most purely fun movies I’ve seen in a while.

I had an epic Labor Day weekend, y’all. Got two projects done around the house that needed doing. Read two and a half entire books. Took naps. And, wonder of wonders, last night my wife and I watched a movie.

This movie has been out for a while, and I’m far from convinced that my opinion matters at this point, but I think if you’ve ever played D&D in your life you probably owe it to yourself to give this a watch. If you never played D&D or are otherwise unfamiliar with the fantasy genre in general, I’m not sure how well it will hit with you– the interesting thing to me is that the harder the movie leaned into the Forgotten Realms setting, the less I liked it. For some reason, references to Baldur’s Gate kept tossing me out of the movie, and Elminster himself makes an appearance that just felt weirdly inappropriate. It’s rare that I think something should have been more generic, but at least for me this movie could have been pulled out of the Realms and dropped into its own setting and I would have been fine with it.

That’s my only complaint, though. Everything else I have to say is positive. The cast is excellent across the board; I’ve never had any particular feelings about Chris Pine one way or another but he’s perfectly cast as a bard, and Michelle Rodriguez’s barbarian character is a lot of fun as well. Everyone is really pretty and I feel like the director had a goal with the cast to push back a little bit on the idea that fantasy fiction has to be white– there are a ton of racially-ambiguous brown people in this movie, and Pine’s Ed is in an interracial marriage, and their daughter Kira, played by Chloe Coleman, is freaking adorable. Hugh Grant is perfectly cast as a slimy con man, the villain is creepy as fuck, and in general the group dynamics make you feel like everyone had a lot of fun making this movie. The movie isn’t precisely a comedy but where it’s funny it’s funny, and the action sequences were genuinely awesome. There’s a bit at about the 1/3 mark where Rodriguez’ Holga character wins a fight with a paving stone she pries out of the road at her feet, and her fights are always full of improvised weaponry and creativity. They’re amazing, and there’s never any question about what’s going on. I wasn’t expecting action this well-shot from this movie, and it was great to see. Bigger action directors should learn from it, honestly.

Plus? Owlbears. Gelatinous Cubes. Freakin’ displacer beasts. A fat dragon. If they’d found a place to stuff a Hook Horror into the movie they’d have hit nearly all of my favorite D&D monsters. If you thought for even a minute that you might enjoy this, give it a watch while it’s on Netflix. Thumbs way up.

Choose your own review

On By Luther M. SilerIn movies, Reading, Reviews2 Comments

I had a shingles shot yesterday, because I’m old now, and my doctor warned me that the shingles shot has a higher than average chance of kicking the ass of the person it’s administered to. I wouldn’t say the shot has kicked my ass, but I’m definitely not in the mood for anything today and more than a little dumber than usual. So I’m not writing a real post tonight, but I will tell you that I’ve finished two books and watched two movies in the last few days that, under other circumstances, I might review. If you’re especially interested in my opinion on any of these, let me know, and I’ll move it up in the queue.

(There’s no queue. But if anybody wants a review of any of these, you’ll get it.)

Three of these will be at least mostly positive. One, and you can probably guess which one, will very much not, and since you already know I hated it, I’ll just give you actual reasons.

Let’s start an argument

On By Luther M. SilerIn Geek, movies6 Comments

Or, “In which I choose violence at 8:52 AM”

I will die on this hill: that’s Battle Cat. I was not aware that I had strong, nay, immutable opinions about something as ridiculous as He-Man until the other day, when I said something about Battle Cat being in the trailer and my wife, who, for the record, was not a boy in the 1980s, tried to tell me that was Cringer.

Her argument? Battle Cat wears armor. Cringer does not. That cat is not wearing armor, therefore it is not Battle Cat. Quod erat motherfuckin’ demonstrandum.

The intellectual in me wants to make this post about ontology and how we construct identity and how we construct our categories and definitions. The ‘80s kid in me started screaming bullshit right away, and now that I’ve seen other people spreading this nonsense it’s time to fight about it.

It is true that that cat is not wearing armor. It is also true that that cat is holding his head high and his tail straight, and while he is standing behind the people in the image, I’d argue that that’s an issue of shot composition and not hiding. His bearing and stature conveys nobility. That is not Cringer.

A similar shot, from just a couple of moments later. Again, look at his eyes. This cat isn’t afraid of Goddamned anything. Also worth pointing out— he’s huge. Cringer grows during his transformation. That cat is absolutely big enough to ride, saddle or not.

And the coup de grâce:

Cringer ain’t never had that look on his face not once in his whole life. I don’t care about a helmet. That is Battle Cat, and if you think otherwise you are wrong and he’s going to bite your face off if you try and tell him otherwise.

That is all.

On legendary talents: RIP, Rob Reiner

On By Luther M. SilerIn moviesLeave a comment

I have never seen “The Wolf of Wall Street”. And yet, somehow, this is one of my favorite scenes in all of film, and I have most of it memorized. And it is damn near entirely due to Rob Reiner’s performance. My understanding is that most of the sequence was improvised, and Reiner is utterly breaking everyone in the room. The only one who can keep up with him is Jonah Hill, who is obviously cracking– you will never convince me that the laughing is acting– and the needling he’s directing towards Reiner just keeps winding him up more and more. DiCaprio is trying his damnedest to play the straight man in the scene, and he can’t hold it together either. I love every second of this scene, and I love it in a way that made me love Rob Reiner as an actor.

I don’t talk about it much, and I haven’t watched it in quite some time, but Stand by Me was one of my favorite movies as a kid. I was 10 when it came out, just a bit younger than the characters and a touch younger still than the actors playing them, but I’m willing to believe if I put it on right now I could still do a significant amount of the dialogue along with the movie.

The line “Suck my fat one, you cheap dime-store hood” (and River’s underrated “Whoever toldja you had a fat one, Lachance?” a few moments later) is going to be stuck in my head until I die. I’ve probably seen the film a couple dozen times.

And then there’s The Princess Bride, a movie that I have seen even more times than I’ve seen Stand by Me, an absolutely fucking immortal movie.(*)

I wish it was more common to realize the effect that a stranger has had on your life before they pass away, particularly when someone passes away in as tragic and hideous a way as Rob and Michele Reiner did. I’m generally not especially pressed by the idea of meeting celebrities (although I did meet Mandy Patinkin once, speaking of Princess Bride, and yes, I made him say The Line) but damn, the chance to tell Rob Reiner thank you is an opportunity I’m deeply saddened to have missed.

May his memory be a blessing.

(*) There is talk about doing a remake of this movie, which I thought was a horrendous idea until today, when I suddenly realized how to do it right: you must cast Fred Savage in the role of the parent reading the book, and he’s reading it to his own son or daughter(**) as they’re home sick, and you make it very clear that Savage is playing the same character as an adult. This neatly provides for new casting as well as any updates or changes the new director might decide to make to the story– it’s someone new hearing it, and we’re seeing their imagination and their interpretation, not Savage’s.

(**) Not to be too gender essentialist about it, but I kind of love the idea of a girl rolling her eyes at the fight scenes the same way The Grandson does at the kissing.

#REVIEW: A House of Dynamite (2025)

On By Luther M. SilerIn movies, ReviewsLeave a comment

Two movies? In two days? Madness!

You may recall that last year I read a book called Nuclear War: A Scenario. I called it the scariest book I had ever read, and while I absolutely cannot say that I enjoyed it, it ended up at a pretty high position on my Best Books of the Year list at the end of the year.

Kathryn Bigelow’s A House of Dynamite is, technically, not a film adaptation of Nuclear War: A Scenario, or at least, if it is, it never claims it. That said, it may as well be: a single nuclear missile is launched from an unknown source (in NWAS, it’s immediately attributed to North Korea) toward what is eventually determined to be Chicago. The movie tells the story of the seventeen minutes between the detection of the launch and the impact of the missile three times from the perspective of three different groups of characters in the American government, all ending as the president makes his decision about what the US’s plan of retaliation will be. That decision is described by one character as “surrender or suicide,” and it’s not clear that there is really a whole lot of daylight between those two scenarios.

You might think that watching the same twenty minutes three times (the film’s runtime is just under two hours, so there’s not exactly a clock ticking in the corner for the entire movie) might be repetitive enough to drain some of the tension out of the film. For me, at least, it absolutely wasn’t, and the fact that you hear some of the same conversations three times over the course of the movie didn’t cut the drama at all. This might be partially attributable to my age– I think us ’80s kids are going to get hit harder by this movie than the generations before or after us, as the threat of dying by nuclear annihilation was something that was hanging over our heads for our entire childhood and we’ve internalized that very differently than people who didn’t go through that. But I had to go outside and mow the lawn after watching this movie just to burn off excess nervous energy, and I think it’s gonna have me fucked up for the rest of the day if not for longer than that.

I don’t have a ton to say about the technical aspects of the movie. The music is very effective, quietly echoing Jaws in the worst imaginable way and again plucking at the strings of the ’80s kids. The acting is as good as it needs to be with no really standout performances; the only actor in the film I was previously familiar with was Idris Elba, who plays the President as someone who never really thought he’d have to make the decisions he is faced with and allows just a trace of “Why me?” to come through his performance. Angel Reese has a cameo; I guess I’ve heard of her, but the movie’s not going to live or die on her playing herself for a couple of minutes.

Much like Nuclear War: A Scenario, I can’t really recommend this movie so much as say it’s very effective at what it wants to do and it’s up to you whether you want that in your brain or not. I wouldn’t spend a lot of time reading reviews; they’re very mixed, and I’m guessing that the film’s ending is primarily responsible for that. I’m not spoiling anything; for me, it ended in the best way it could, but clearly a whole lot of other people disagreed.

I think I’ll go mow the lawn again.

(ALSO: If you’re a Movie Person, please follow me on Letterboxd. I need people over there.)

#REVIEW: The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (2018)

On By Luther M. SilerIn movies, ReviewsLeave a comment

In case it hasn’t been clear, or, like a normal person, you aren’t obsessed with my media consumption, I decided recently that I was tired of complaining about how I don’t watch movies any more, and instead I was going to watch more movies. And because nothing in my life can’t be mined for blog content, I might as well review them too. I missed last week, but this weekend’s movie (or today’s, at least; maybe I’ll make up for last week tomorrow) was The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, written and directed by the Coens.

I only know this movie exists because of TikTok, which has served up numerous snippets of Tim Blake Nelson’s titular Buster Scruggs, a white-garbed, polysyllabic desperado with a penchant for murderous improvisation and bursting into song at the slightest provocation. What I didn’t realize was that this movie is actually six unrelated vignettes, all set in the Old West, with the framing device of a book of short stories called The Ballad of Buster Scruggs.

Sadly, the book itself is fictional; each vignette begins and ends with a slow pan into the first or last page of the story, and what text that’s there aroused my attention and would surely have acquired my money had the book actually existed to be bought.

The stories themselves range from the comic and musical (Scruggs) to what really feels like supernatural horror (The Mortal Remains) to a couple that are more firmly reality-based and tend toward the dark and depressing. The second, Near Algodones, is the only near-miss of the bunch; James Franco’s bank robber character is not terribly interesting, and while the visual of a deranged bank teller protecting himself from gunshots with armor made from cast-iron pans is hilarious, the story is slight enough that I couldn’t remember it just now and had to look for a list of the vignettes to get myself to six.

As it turned out, I had already unknowingly seen Scruggs nearly in its entirety on TikTok, and I was a little worried after Algodones, but the last four vignettes are uniformly fascinating and well worth the cost of a subscription to Netflix and two hours out of my Saturday. If you like Westerns or the Coens’ previous output, it’s well worth your time.

Some Sunday odds and ends

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reviews2 Comments

Had an enormous traffic spike the last couple of days– yesterday was the highest traffic day in years, possibly since the Syrian refugees post hit a couple hundred thousand views ten years ago. And other than the fact that most of them were from America (with a much smaller but still weird four-day pop from Chile, of all places) I don’t know anything about any of the visitors.

It was probably a bot– I’ve also been getting a lot of traffic from China lately– but I thought bot visits didn’t count? I wish I could get more detail on my views.

Today? Dead quiet.

We are finally, after fourteen years of living in this house, replacing the hideous curtains in our bedroom and the gross miniblinds in our living room. I found this behind the hardware for the curtains and I would like a word with whoever built this place. I just wanna talk.

I’m not doing a full review of it, but this is a really good book. My only problem is that Hastings has a weird habit of drawing attention to the race of any American who isn’t white when it isn’t necessary– there was an actual chapter about race relations among American troops, and I’ll cut some slack on that one, but just for example, referring to the youngest soldier to die in Vietnam as “a black kid” in a weirdly flippant way really stuck out. My only problem is that now I want to read twelve other books on Vietnam that he mentioned (sidenote: are there any histories of the war written in English by Vietnamese scholars?) and my backlog is bad enough already.

This image from my email is not exactly inaccurate, but I feel like maybe Amazon is still having some tech problems.

After over a year of threatening to watch it, my wife and I finally sat down to watch John Wick 4 last night, and I will forever refer to it as The Dumb John Wick. I’ve seen all of them now, and I never really loved the series, but this one takes everything that was sorta ridiculous about the first three movies and turns those up to 12, while also not adding anything of real value to the series, ignoring the cliffhanger ending of 3, and being way, way, way too long. Is there a lore reason why there are literally no cops at all in the John Wick universe, for example? Blech.

You might not be able to tell, but this picture was taken outside the window as I was removing the curtains earlier today. At 6:30. I fucking hate daylight savings time. Hate. Can we please be a society just for a little while and get rid of this bullshit? Please?

And finally, as of tonight I’ve read just over 2600 pages on my new Kindle, which means that I’ve managed to adopt the thing into my lifestyle successfully … and the battery is still at 16%, which is bloody impressive.

#REVIEW: Legend (2015)

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There’s a clip from this movie that I used to see on TikTok all the time, where Tom Hardy, playing 1960’s London crime boss Reggie Kray, talks shit to a bunch of rival gangsters who plan on “knocking the granny out of him” while Tom Hardy, playing 1960’s London crime boss Ronnie Kray, throws a fit that he’s not about to be involved in a gunfight, storms out, then sneaks back into the room behind everyone with a hammer in each hand. That’s where the clip ends. It’s a good clip.

I have planned to spend two hours of my weekend watching this movie for approximately nineteen straight weekends. I finally watched it this morning.

Let’s get this out of the way real quick:

Legend is the story of the Kray twins, notorious and apparently real Cockney gangsters from 1960’s London who worked out of the East End. Reggie is the levelheaded one; Ronnie is literally a dangerous psychopath who spends most of the movie off of his meds. Reggie falls in love with Emily Browning’s Frances early in the movie; Frances provides narration throughout the film, and their love story, such as it is, is the driving force behind the actual plot. She knows who she’s dating (and, eventually, marrying) and wants Reggie to go straight; Ronnie very much does not want that.

This is one of those movies that’s more about the actors than it is the plot, and … God damn, I had never really gotten Tom Hardy before, but he’s absolutely amazing in this. Ten years of development in movie effects means that Michael B. Jordan’s Smokestack twins look a little more seamless when they’re both facing the camera and talking to each other– you can tell some compositing is happening when both of their faces are in the same shot– but the distinction between the two characters is tremendous. Hardy’s wearing some prosthetics as Ronnie; his nose is broken, he’s a little heavier, and there’s something going on with his lips that I was never able to quite nail down, but what really distinguishes the two is the aura of utter malice that Ronnie radiates every single second he’s on screen. Neither of these men are nice guys, mind you, which the movie goes to great pains to remind you a few times– you are pushed away from identifying with either of them– but Reg is a scorpion and Ronnie is a pissed-off pit bull with a frayed piece of twine holding him back. Their voices are also slightly different– I have no idea what Hardy’s natural accent actually sounds like, but there’s a point in the movie where Reg does an imitation of his brother for a sentence or two and it feels like an impersonation rather than Hardy just briefly switching accents. It’s a tremendous, understated bit of acting and it was one of my favorite moments in the film.

But let’s talk about Emily Browning for a moment. I think this is the only thing I’ve ever seen her in, and she’s meant to be the stand-in for the audience– and, again, is also the narrator throughout the movie. You know from the jump that things aren’t going to end well, but unless you’re already familiar with the Krays you won’t know exactly how. Browning’s chemistry with Hardy as Reg is absolutely off the charts; their first scene together, where Reg asks Frankie out for the first time, is one of the sexiest things I’ve ever seen on-screen, and the two of them barely touch each other. The tension is crackling between the two of them; I was surprised there weren’t literal sparks. Similarly, she and Ronnie never trust each other at all; during their first encounter, he explains that he’s a homosexual but that he doesn’t “receive,” and that’s about as comfortable conversation as they’re going to have at any point in the movie.

I mean, stuff happens in the movie, but it’s ultimately about the relationships between these three characters, and how Reggie is torn between loyalty to his brother and loyalty to his wife. That’s what drives all of the conflicts in the movie; there’s a subplot about a cop chasing the two of them that doesn’t amount to much and a couple of court scenes, but everything revolves around them. Frankie’s brother works for Reggie. Frankie’s mom loathes Reggie, showing up in black to their wedding and prompting one of Ronnie’s most terrifying moments, and Reggie’s mom, who dotes on Ronnie throughout the film, doesn’t like Frankie much either. There’s a scene between the two of them where Frankie makes her a cup of tea and Violet rejects it, which is apparently the British equivalent of killing someone’s dog.

I know it came out ten years ago, but if you haven’t seen it, definitely check it out.