Keanu (2016)

Movie nerds can spot fellow movie nerds from across the room. Key and Peele don’t just parody specific movies (see: their Gremlins 2 sketch), but sometimes entire types of movies (see: their funhouse villain sketch). Any comedy team who casts character-actors like Clint Howard, while paying rapt attention to lighting and cinematography, is speaking my language. I’m sure Keanu is only one of many worthwhile films that will result from this partnership.

Rell (Jordan Peele) has just been dumped by his girlfriend. When we first see him, he’s moping beside a bong and a couple of posters for New Jack City and Heat. His best friend Clarence (Keegan-Michael Key) is a suburbanite who drives around in a mini-van while listening to George Michael on repeat. Clarence is on his way to cheer Rell up, but it turns out he doesn’t need to anymore. Rell has adopted a stray kitten he calls Keanu and all is well in the world.

What Rell and Clarence don’t know is Keanu has just escaped a shootout at a Mexican cartel operation. The two super-assassins responsible for the shootout are also played by Key and Peele in heavy makeup and wigs. The bad guys also want the kitten, but when a local gang tries to trash the house of a dumb drug dealer (Will Forte), they accidentally target Rell’s house next door. The leader of the gang, played by Method Man, takes a liking to the kitty, too. So when Rell and Clarence go to get Keanu back, the gang mistakes them for the aforementioned assassins and… well, this certainly sounds like a routine comedy, doesn’t it?

And it is a routine comedy, but not the low-effort kind. This is the kind of movie Richard Pryor and Gene Wilder could have starred in thirty years ago: a simple vehicle for complex talent. Each time the movie starts to lose its footing on the slippery slope of situation comedy, they completely save it with their antics. There’s an unlikely and somewhat contrived scene in which the boys must perform a wall-flip in order to prove they’re the assassins. In most comedies, the flip itself would be the joke. The joke here is Clarence’s face when he somehow nails it. It’s not about what happens, but how it happens.

So do you like Key and Peele’s TV show? If you do, you’ll like Keanu. It’s pretty rare for sketch performers to make the leap to the silver screen so well. Most comedians probably just see it as a promotion, but Key and Peele have been grooming themselves for film for years. Yeah, it’s absurd to believe a street gang could ever mistake these two for legendary assassin, but I’m willing to suspend my disbelief for gags as good as these.

Alien 3: The Assembly Cut is a very different movie

For years I’ve heard about the so-called Assembly Cut of Alien 3, but didn’t expect much from it. I wouldn’t say I hated Alien 3 (although I would say that of Alien Resurrection), I just think Aliens’ version of Ripley is possibly my favorite movie character in history. I don’t know why I find her so endearing, I just do. I get chills whenever I merely think about her saying, “Get away from her, you bitch!” But in Alien 3 she just seems… off.

Those who claim Alien 3 was only disappointing because its critics were expecting more Aliens are mistaken. A lot of us loved the first sequel because it was so different from the original, not just because it was an action picture. Right out of the gate, Alien 3 makes the mistake of treading the same water as the original. It’s also important to remember Alien clones were a dime a dozen those days; the whole “we’re trapped in a spaceship/military complex/prison with an alien” thing was already severely played out by ’92. It was understandable audiences expected something different from a series which had yet to repeat itself.

Thankfully, the first forty minutes of The Assembly Cut feel like a completely different animal than the theatrical cut. In this edit, Ripley washes up on a beach after her escape pod crash lands on the penal colony known as Fury 161. Charles Dance’s character, whose best scenes are restored in this version, is out for a stroll on the beach when he discovers Ripley’s unconscious body. Many will oppose the idea that Ripley hops in bed with the first guy she sees, but I’ll be damned if it isn’t completely believable. It’s not, “We want you to believe these characters are suddenly in love,” but more like, “Sometimes, lonely adults have sex.”

Although there were so many lame alien clones at the time, The Assembly Cut makes it clear Fincher could have made the first truly skilled knock-off. Unfortunately, the special effects suck as bad as they did in ’92 and Ripley’s reaction to learning of Newt’s death still underwhelms. I was hoping the heavy-handed crucifixion imagery at the end of the movie was gone, and although that shot is improved in a way, it’s still stupid and pretentious. Other than that, The Assembly Cut is a decent end to the trilogy.

There are various other improvements I won’t spoil. I’ll just point out the alien’s entrance is much spookier than the one we initially got.

The Nice Guys (2016)

Look, kids. This is what summer blockbusters used to look like. I like Captain America movies as much as the next guy, but this is the film I was most hyped to see this year. If you’re wondering how Shane Black’s latest buddy action film stacks up to his previous underrated classic, Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang, I’ll save you the suspense: it’s probably even better.

The Nice Guys was supposed to open later this year, but Warner Bros. moved it forward to give its original date to Central Intelligence, which appears to be another soulless comedy for Dwayne Johnson and Kevin Hart. Now The Nice Guys is opening against Neighbors 2 and The Angry Birds Movie, further proof that studio executives have no fucking clue what they’re doing. In promos, you can tell producer Joel Silver and the cast of the film are understandably bitter about the idiotic scheduling.

Ryan Gosling plays Holland March, a shitty private detective who has rare bouts of intuition. Like Saul Goodman, his client list consists of confused elderly people. Russell Crowe plays Jackson Healy, a guy who beats people up for money and he’s just been hired to kick Holland’s ass. Soon they’ll discover they have overlapping cases, at which point they team up and scour 1970s Los Angeles for leads. Holland’s impressionable young daughter, who’s at least a little smarter than her dad, tags along for the ride. She’s not incidental to the plot, either.

My favorite supporting characters are Keith David and Beau Knapp’s henchmen. These nuts would have stolen the show if not for the perfectly cast leads. David is just one of those guys I love seeing in movies and his presence here makes it all the more legitimate as a throwback film. Knapp, who I’m not entirely familiar with, plays a presumably coked-up idiot who has a hilariously evil laugh.

Gosling and Crowe make a brilliant team. I really miss the mid-budget action-comedy. This is exactly what going to the movie theater was like when I was kid.

The VVitch (2016)

I love movies about witches, whether there’s an actual witch or it’s just hysteria. The latter is typically more terrifying than the former, but The VVitch gives us the best of both worlds. Patient and irresistibly atmospheric, it layers on the horrors experienced by a Christian family who have been outcast from their New England community.

Katherine, (Kate Dickie from Game of Thrones), is the mother of five children who spends the entirety of the movie grieving. Dickie’s acting is subtle for the most part and believably grand when necessary. William (Ralph Ineson, also from Game of Thrones) is the father of the family; he’s responsible for the sin which got his family exiled to the wilderness in the first place. The film wisely keeps his criminal indiscretion vague so we won’t pass judgment on him too early. Whereas his wife sobs herself to sleep, William stoically chops wood to cope with their hardships.

Their children include a newborn baby, creepy twins who spend their days playing with a goat, and Thomasin (Anya Taylor-Joy) who doesn’t seem to be aware her younger brother Caleb is developing feelings for her now that she’s becoming a woman. Because their father is a lousy hunter, Caleb and Thomasin secretly decide to hunt on their own despite the trouble they’ll get into when they return. It’s then that they stumble upon the witch’s hut in the woods. At this point, I wouldn’t dream of telling you what happens next.

The best thing about The VVitch, which already has plenty to like, is its unpredictability. I suspect first time director Robert Eggers felt himself veering dangerously off course while writing the script, but instead of correcting himself, he said “eh, let’s see where this goes” and barreled right off the intended path. I can’t imagine we’ll see a better horror film this year.

Midnight Movie: Bloodsport (1988)

Bloodsport kind of has an identity crisis. It’s not so bad it’s good (cheesy montages and poor dubbing notwithstanding), but it’s almost good enough to be… well, good. It wasn’t Jean Claude Van Damme’s first movie, but it’s probably the one which put him on the map. Van Damme plays a U.S. Army Captain who goes AWOL to participate in the underground kumite (“koo-muh-tay”), a tournament in which thirty martial artists gather in Hong Kong to face off until there’s only one left. One character describes it as “cockfighting with humans.”

Along the way, he meets Donald Gibb (Ogre from Revenge of the Nerds) who provides so-so comic relief until the film’s villain smashes his skull in. At that point, the stakes have been raised and Van Damme’s character not only has to fight for his own honor, but for… oh, who cares? If you haven’t seen Bloodsport, all you want to know is: Is the fighting any good? Sort of. Sometimes Van Damme’s moves are so plodding, I wonder why the director employs slow motion at all.

There’s a curious lack of blood for a movie that has “Blood” right there in its title. Still, the film’s extremely watchable, I guess because it’s so rarely boring. Cannon was good at making cheap movies look expensive. Consider the fact this was made for around four million dollars, adjusted for inflation, and a modern studio wouldn’t get this kind of production value for anything less than fifty million or so.

The character Van Damme plays in Bloodsport was a real guy who was full of shit when he convinced the filmmakers to tell his story. That doesn’t matter at all.