Some great movies up today, so let’s dig right in! To Leslie is one of those films that allows its lead, in this case Andrea Riseborough, to really show off their talent. The movie begins with a home video-esque clip showing an early-30s Leslie being interviewed by the local news, for having won $190k in the lottery. She’s celebrating, promising to finally buy a house, get her son a guitar to further his musical enjoyment, etc. In the next scene, 6 years later, she is being evicted from an extended stay motel for failure to pay. She’s alone, and for awhile we don’t know what happened to her son James. We quickly learn that Leslie squandered all that money, leaving her estranged from her son and her family and friends from back home. First she goes to her son James’s apartment. He lets her crash on the couch with the promise that she won’t drink, but that only lasts a day. James puts her on a bus to return to their hometown to stay with her old friend Nancy and Nancy’s boyfriend Dutch, but there is obvious animosity between Leslie and Nancy, and that too only lasts a short time. Broke and with nowhere to go, Leslie finds a savior in a man named Sweeney, who runs a local motel. He sees her and her struggles, and offers her a job cleaning rooms, with a room to sleep in at night. Slowly Leslie starts taking the needed steps to put her life back together. Great supporting cast including Allison Janney, Owen Teague, and Stephen Root, but Riseborough is the star, holding the film together with, at first, her antics and world-is-against-me attitude, and later, with her climb (sometimes kicking and screaming) back to life. Very powerful film about the spiral of alcoholism, a woman’s rock bottom, and the faith to not give up, even when you have nothing left but the breath in your body. ★★★★
I’m late to the Luther series. A buddy at work told me I needed to watch it, so I finally did over the last 6 months or so. Not a long series, just 20 episodes released in a handful of seasons over the last 10 years. It stars Idris Elba as the titular character, a British detective with a penchant for bending, or outright breaking, the law in order to get his crook and save innocent lives. I won’t get into the show, watch if you like (I do recommend it), but I do have to spoil the end of the show for where the film starts; you’ve been warned. At the end of the last episode, Luther has been arrested, as his crimes have caught up with him. In the film, which starts just before that arrest, Luther is called to a kidnapping. He promises the young man’s mother that he’ll find her son, but the villain, David Robey (a wonderfully devilish Andy Serkis) knows Luther’s skill at finding the bad guy. He is the man who gets Luther’s past spread across the news, leading to Luther’s arrest shown in the show. With Luther in jail, Robey sets out to enact his scheme. There’s a lot of kidnapping and murder on the docket, with Robey holding many people beholden to him through blackmail, some of whom are in the police department. But Luther still has friends on the outside, people who know that the police will need him if they are to stop the killings, so he is helped to escape. Luther must evade the police and Robey’s underlings if he is to take the circle down. Pretty decent action/detective flick, though I thought Robey’s big reveal in the end, why he was doing all this, was a bit of a letdown. Fans of the Luther show will have plenty to enjoy. ★★★
Call Me Chihiro is a charming film out of Japan. Chihiro is a bubbly, seemingly always happy young woman who works the counter at a bento stand. When it gets out that she’s a former sex worker, she becomes very popular, especially with the male laborers who work in the area. Her outgoing personality finds friends easily, but she seeks out those who are outcasts like herself: a homeless man, a shy teen girl, another teen whose home life sucks, and a boy in the neighborhood with a single mom who is never home. The film is made up of Chihiro’s and these other characters’ days, moving around the city and in and out of each other’s circles. Readers of my blog know that I’m big on plot, and sometimes these “nothing really happens” kinds of movies don’t connect with me, but this one is special. Chihiro’s effervescent personality is cheerful to everyone she encounters, but she is lonely and oftentimes sad on the inside, which you don’t really pick up on right away. Chihiro admits early in the movie that she isn’t a person who will find love, and at the time it seems like an offhand remark, but you learn as the movie goes along that she really believes it. Funny, heartwarming, but also very poignant. ★★★★½
I enjoyed the first Extraction film a couple years ago; it didn’t try to do too much, but delivered plenty of action and was entertaining. Sequels always feel the need to ramp it up to another level, not always with positive results, but the Extraction sequel surpasses the original in every way. At the end of the first, Tyler Rake was successful in his mission but left for dead, and the new movie picks up there. Barely alive, Rake is rescued by teammates Nik and Yaz, and after he recoups, he is approached by a stranger (another Idris Elba sighting!) for a new mission: to rescue a woman and her 2 kids from a prison in Georgia (the country). The woman, Ketevan, is Rake’s ex-wife’s sister, and she’s in prison because she’s married to a crime boss currently in the same lockup. The boss, Davit, is only in jail because the Americans want him and George is trying to pacify, but Davit’s family runs the country. So by going in and rescuing Ketevan and the kids, Rake is pissing off a family with connections across the country. Strap in and get ready to see Chris Hemsworth kick some ass. The first film had very little real plot, but there’s more to develop here, and more emotional heft too, and while that’s all well and good, the action is even better too. The fighting will go from the prison yard to a train to the streets to the top of a high rise skyscraper, and never lets up. Action film lovers rejoice. ★★★★½
Ever feel like you watched a completely different movie than what everyone else is talking about? That’s how I feel about They Cloned Tyrone, a film which seems universally liked (6.6 on IMDB, 3.6/5 on the notoriously tough Letterboxd). A satire and a throwback to classic blaxploitation films, it follows a man named Fontaine (John Boyega), a drug dealer in a rough-and-tumble urban city. When one of his underlings comes in short one day and blames a user who is late on paying, Fontaine goes to get his money. The user, Slick Charles (Jamie Foxx), is a larger-than-life character who likes to act tough, but he quickly hands over what money he has when threatened with violence. Fontaine doesn’t get far with it; in the parking lot of the motel, he is gunned down by a rival dealer. Funny thing is, the next day, Fontaine wakes up in his bed with no memory of the prior day’s events. When he goes back to Slick for his money again, Slick can’t believe his eyes. Together, and along with one of Slick’s “ho’s” (Teyonah Parris as Yo-Yo), they start doing a little digging around town. What they find is right out of a sci-fi film: experimental drugs being fed through the fried chicken to its inhabitants, a whole network of surveillance from hidden cameras, brainwashing, and, of course, cloning, all projects being run by a group of white scientists in a hidden lab that runs underneath the entire city. Some of it works, but a lot of it doesn’t, and I found that there was too much “down time,” especially in the first half of the film. By the time it really started to pick up in the second half, I had already checked out, and honestly became a little lost in all the twists and turns. Or maybe the heavy satire was just lost on me (though I think I have a pretty good idea of what the filmmakers were trying to do). ★½
- TV series recently watched: Stargirl (season 3), The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon (season 1)
- Book currently reading: Lords of the Sith by Paul Kemp
Jons Movie Takes 