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Movie time. Watched two films recently. The fourth John Wick installment, and One Battle After Another. Mr. Wick has now killed approximately 439 people in those four movies. Someone calculated that’s a kill roughly every 1 minute and 11 seconds on average. I found it less entertaining this time around. Plus, he’s taken an astonishing number of falls to little affect. I guess the Baba Jaga is immune to the laws of physics.
Lots of things puzzled me about the second movie. And I’m hard pressed to understand why it won best picture even though I didn’t see any of its competitors. It felt a tad disjointed with lots of caricatures, long time jumps, villains who were there just to be villains, and good guys who did the same. I guess it sums up the mystery of communication, as the receiver I didn’t get whatever the movie was trying to tell me. And I’m pretty good at suspending belief, because I really like science fiction. The only character I cared for was the one played by Benicio del Toro. I wanted to know his story.
This is probably why I never made it as a film critic, a role I briefly played for the Houston Chronicle, while I interned for them for two summers in the 70s. I was a fill-in for their regular critic. I reviewed movies he didn’t want to see or didn’t have time for. I’d go see a film and I either liked it, or I didn’t and sometimes it was hard to write eight inches of prose to explain why. I wanted a story that took me in, made sense, and was fun to watch. Neither of these really filled that bill. And one long, no cut action sequence is just a long, no cut action sequence.