Tag: Lupita Nyong’o

Quick Thoughts: ‘Dragged Across Concrete’ – ‘Triple Threat’ – ‘Us’

There’s a line in this film where someone says, “I’m in until I’m not,” and that more or less sums up my feelings on Craig Zahler’s Dragged Across Concrete. Much like the recent Destroyer, there’s a lot to love (literally a lot, as Concrete clocks in at over two-and-a-half hours), but it doesn’t quite stick the landing, which holds it back from being truly special.

Still, it’s got the best performance from Mel Gibson in quite some time, Vince Vaughn is nearly flawless as Gibson’s fellow detective, Tory Kittles shows off some range, and the rest of the cast is well up to the challenge.

Story-wise, it’s like a far bleaker Jackie Brown, but creatively I’d also compare it to Sorry to Bother You, in the sense of putting a lot of detail into a fictional world, and that both movies’ auteurs directed the films, wrote the screenplays, and co-wrote the music (though the reality of Sorry to Bother You is far more heightened).

I’ve not seen Craig Zahler’s other films, Bone Tomahawk and Brawl in Cell Block 99, but I knew going in that he has a propensity for grisly violence, which Concrete eventually gets to and will undoubtedly turn some people away, but in all honesty it wasn’t as much as I expected.

All-in-all, not a must-see theatrically, and not for everyone, but it’s a good slow-burn crime drama, if that’s your thing.

Rating: ★★★½ (out of five)



People generally see martial arts movies to see martial arts, and from that perspective you can’t say Triple Threat doesn’t deliver.

I mean, when you’ve got a film starring Tony Jaa (Ong-Bak), Iko Uwais (The Raid), and Tiger Chen (part of the Kung-Fu team from The Matrix trilogy), you know you’re going to see some high-quality (and high-flying) fight choreography, and that alone is worth the rental fee. In particular, I enjoyed how they handled strength relative to size, which a lot of other martial arts movies treat with videogame physics, but Triple Threat somehow made it feel more grounded.

Unfortunately, there’s not much else to latch onto in terms of the story or acting, which holds the movie back in terms of comparisons to other offerings in the genre, but hey, it’s a movie by fight fans for fight fans, so I’m not going to sit here and hate on it too much.

Rating: ★★★☆☆



I have to confess, I missed out on the zeitgeist of Jordan Peele’s previous offering, Get Out. I caught up with it eventually at home and wasn’t that impressed, but I felt a little guilty about judging it without getting the full experience, so I made sure I went to see Us opening night in a packed theater.

And, well, I still wasn’t that impressed.

I’ll admit that perhaps Peele uses a cinematic language that I just don’t understand, but my problem with Get Out was that it tried to combine concepts that just didn’t work together for me, and I have a similar issue with Us (though I can’t really get into it without spoilers).

Now, I will say that there is a lot of cleverness in the screenplay in terms of set-ups and pay-offs, I can’t not praise the film for that, but it’s all more for little things, and I just couldn’t find the ultimate point of what the movie was going for, which is frustrating.

One last thing I’ll say though is that if you do decide to see Us, do your best to not have any preconceived notions about it in your mind, because I did (thanks Twitter…), and I would say that also hampered my experience.

Rating: ★★½ (out of five)

Movie Review – ‘Black Panther’ – Rising Like Olympus

Directed by Ryan Coogler
Written by Ryan Coogler & Joe Robert Cole, based on the comics by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby
Cast: Chadwick Boseman, Michael B. Jordan, Lupita Nyong’o, Danai Gurira, Martin Freeman, Daniel Kaluuya, Letitia Wright, Winston Duke, Sterling K. Brown, Angela Bassett, Forest Whitaker, Andy Serkis, Florence Kasumba, John Kani, David S. Lee, Nabiyah Be, Isaach De Bankolé, Connie Chiume, Dorothy Steel, Danny Sapani, Atandwa Kani, Ashton Tyler, Denzel Whitaker, Seth Carr, Alexis Rhee
Soundtrack: Ludwig Göransson

I don’t know if anybody had the vision in 1998 that in twenty years time Marvel would be eighteen movies deep into a run of who-knows-how-many dozens of connected films grossing billions-upon-billions of dollars at the box office, but I do know that it all started with Blade.

That’s right.  The financial success of Blade was enough to convince Marvel that this whole movie thing was worth getting into (after some, shall we say, false starts in the 80s and early 90s).  Ten years later, bing-bang-boom, we’ve got Iron Man, and the Marvel Cinematic Universe is off to the races.  Ten years on from there, enter Black Panther.  In a way, you could say it’s all come full circle.

But enough about that.  Is the movie any good?

Yes, very much so.

Black Panther is decidedly among the better MCU films thus far, is refreshingly story-driven, and has the most stand-alone feel of its peers since the original Guardians of the Galaxy in 2014.

More than that though, it’s got a lot of meat to it.

For one thing, the basic story is downright Shakespearean (King dies, Prince ascends the throne, and so on and so forth), but the film also delves into such real-world issues as the African vs. African-American experience, political isolationism, and violent vs. non-violent revolution, all naturally worked into the script without feeling like they were tacked on by some committee.

Of course, Black Panther is also a superhero movie, and a pretty good one at that.  I wouldn’t call it entirely perfect (some of the visuals felt a little lacking, and a few creative choices felt a bit off), but I liked that it was something of an origin story without starting all the way back at square one, and I particularly enjoyed the array of enjoyable characters (unlike some other movie).

If I have a couple of nitpicks, for one, it bums me out that seemingly everybody can put on an effective accent except for Chadwick Boseman as the titular character (although Forest Whitaker for some reason decided to sound like an Afrikaner…weird), and, second, I felt like Michael B. Jordan’s performance was a little too “I’m from the streets!”  I thought a little subtlety could have gone a long way there, but, like I said, these are nitpicks.

Overall, I have to hand it to Ryan Coogler for making yet another quality film that’s undoubtedly part of a larger franchise but also has enough legs to stand on its own, and credit to Marvel for letting him do it his way.  I was feeling pretty superhero-fatigued heading in, and I was worried there wouldn’t be enough to overcome that, but, in that respect, the movie triumphed.

Hail to the King, baby.

Rating: ★★★★☆

P.S.
Of course stingers, duh.

P.P.S.
As usual, thanks to Alamo Drafthouse for the glass.