When I read that The Old Way was Nicolas Cage’s first western, I thought, “How could that be?!” But I guess it is. Despite middling reviews, I wanted to see Nic Cage deliver some one-liners in the old west. He plays Colton Briggs, a former gunslinger who found love and settled down as a farmer, and is raising a daughter. However, his past comes back to haunt him when a young man, left orphaned after Briggs killed his father 20 years ago, has come for his revenge. He kills Briggs’ wife, and Briggs is ready to pick up his old guns and teach his daughter a lesson on justice. Should have listened to the reviewers on this one. Cage fooled me with a couple really good movies lately (Pig and The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent), and I forgot that he is prone to “taking a paycheck” from time to time. He definitely did here, because in every scene it looks like he is just mailing it in. The rest of the cast is either doing the same, or frankly aren’t any good, and the plot/story is contrived and silly. Fooled me once Cage, I won’t be so easily tricked again! ★
Going back a couple years for 2018’s Searching, because I heard good things about its quasi-sequel, Missing (2023). There’s been a handful of films that almost entirely take place in front of a computer screen, but I don’t remember one that has been done better. It stars John Cho (most famous for the Harold and Kumar films, but he’s done some good indie flicks too) as David Kim, a single father raising Margot after his wife died of cancer. On Thursday evening, Margot is at a study group late, and tries to call home a couple times around 11pm, but David is already sleeping and misses the calls. The next morning, she appears to have already left for school when David is up and around, so he shoots her a text and goes to work. After a day at work, when Margot has never replies to his increasingly frantic texts and calls. When he calls the school, he learns she never showed up. He tracks down her study group through her social media, and learn that she left there at 9pm. A father’s worst fears are realized, and David calls the cops and files a missing person’s report. A good detective, Rosemary Vick (Debra Messing) gets the case, and begins to help find Margot, all while David sticks to the computer, hunting for clues. His search will take him on a roller coaster ride, into private details of a daughter that he finds he knows very little about. This movie is a wild ride, and like I said earlier, all shown footage is from a computer screen. We only see the actors during the (frequent) FaceTime calls, and otherwise it is online searches. It may not sound compelling, but it definitely is. I got caught up in the emotional highs when David uncovered a new lead, and the rock-bottom lows whenever a clue fizzled out. Great, fun film. ★★★★
Missing is called a “spiritual sequel.” It takes place in the same “world” and in fact opens with a news story recounting the end of the previous film, but this film then stands on its own. This time, we get a search for a missing person from the daughter’s perspective. June is 18 years old and stays home while her single mother Grace heads off to Cartagena with her boyfriend, Kevin. June throws a big party in their absence, but when she’s supposed to meet them at the airport the next day, they don’t get off the flight. June tries to get the American embassy in Colombia to help, but initially doesn’t get anywhere with them, so she hires a local man to do some street running, hunting down clues to their last day in the city. Along the way, plenty of secrets regarding Kevin’s, and even her own mother Grace’s, past are dug up, adding to the mystery. Like the first film, all is told from behind a computer, though we do see the main actor, Storm Reid as June, very often; since it’s a newer film, she’s got that computer cam on nonstop. The movie was decent in the first half, but runs off the rails by the end. There were some great twists in Searching, but the writers tried to outdo themselves on the sequel, and there’s too many implausible turns this time around. By the last scene, I just wanted it to be over. ★★
Last Film Show is supposed to be an endearing story about a boy’s love for cinema. Maybe it turns into that, but I gave up 40 minutes into this extremely boring, seemingly going-nowhere film out of India. Samay is a young boy who has hasn’t been to the movies because his parents think it below them (though his dad is a working class man, he is of the Brahmin caste, and thinks his family is above such things). That changes when the local theater is showing a religious film that appeals to the dad, who takes the family on the trip. Samay is smitten immediately, and finds ways to sneak into the theater as often as possible to watch anything they are showing. Samay befriends the movie projectionist, trading his mother’s good cooking for a chance to change reels and learn about the trade. As charming as it all sounds, this movie crawls at a snail’s pace, and I couldn’t stick around any longer to see how the rest transpired. I’m sure it’s great (it was nominated for an Oscar), but my normally high level of patience couldn’t take any more. ½
Another international film, 1982 (out of Lebanon) is so much better. Taking place over a single day as summer approaches in the eponymous year, Wissam is a third grader whose world is about to change. The school year is winding down and the students are taking their final exams, but all Wissam can think about is the crush he has on Joanna, a girl in his class who lives in traditionally Muslim West Beirut; she must pass through checkpoints every day just to go to school. As Wissam is obsessed with trying to get her attention in the cute pre-teenager way that boys and girls do when they don’t know any better, the world around him is falling apart. The adults (teachers, parents) can only talk about the increasing tensions in the area, and we hear the constant sonic booms of planes flying overhead. When Israel does invade in the afternoon, and real fighting breaks out in the skies above Lebanon between Israel and Syria, only then do the children start to realize what is happening. The shattering of their innocence is the real story, but even so, we root for Wissan to keep up his pursuit of Joanna and hold on to his childhood as long as he can. Tremendous film, with a continuing and ever-increasing sense of impending doom as it progresses. ★★★½
- TV series recently watched: Severance (season 1), The Bad Batch (season 2), Luther (series 1), Its Always Sunny (seasons 10-12),
- Book currently reading: Dragons of Summer Flame by Weis & Hickman
Jons Movie Takes 