John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum (Summit, 5.17) “is a case of bigger but not better,” says a regional film critic pally. “The first Wick was a pleasant surprise. The second one (’17) was fine **, but didn’t really improve on the first.

“Now we have the third, which is so over-the-top it’s actually exhausting. Fight scene after fight scene, some truly gross-out moments (a sword rammed into a bad guy’s eye, heads exploding, etc.), and a body count that’s through the roof (must be something like 200 deaths).”

HE thought: John Wick: 200 Deaths isn’t a bad title.

“The film definitely has a sense of humor, and the sf-like elements (everything regarding the super criminal organization The Table) are fun, but overall the film, while entertaining, is also cringe-worthy. While watching it I couldn’t help thinking that if the action weren’t so obviously preposterous, John Wick 3 would deserve an NC-17 rating. And maybe it still does.

“Maybe the R rating points out, once again, how the MPAA goes soft on violence and hard on sex. All I know is, I wouldn’t want any kid of mine to see this film.”

** In HE’s humble opinion John Wick, Chapter 2 was not fine.

After last January’s dismaying Sundance credentials episode, I needed the emotional and psychological boost of my beloved pink-with-yellow-pastille badge, which the Cannes Film Festival press office been gracious enough to dispense for the last seven or eight years.

The feelings of comfort and affirmation that this pass bequeaths cannot and should not be minimized. Pink-with-yellow-dot doesn’t just put a smile on your face — it imprints a smile in your soul. A regular pink pass is fine — it just means having to wait in line for 30 to 40 minutes, and is much better than a dreaded blue or yellow or (God forbid) Cannes market badge. But pink-with-yellow-dot means you can stroll in at the last minute, which allows you to file at your nearby apartment until just before a screening begins.

Who am I if not a pink-with-yellow-pastille guy? What am I? What is the sum total of my decades of filing, reporting and dispensing gut-instinct observations if not this? Life is hard, but it’s a lot less arduous if you’re wearing one of these babies.

Catch 22 producer, co-director and costar George Clooney to The Hollywood Reporter‘s Scott Feinberg: “The studios are less and less telling the kinds of stories that I like to tell. Mid-range or even small budget. You know, Warner Bros. isn’t going to make Good Night, and Good Luck now; they’re not going to make Michael Clayton, quite honestly, now. So [projects like those] are going to end up at Hulu or Netflix or Amazon or Apple or one of those places.”

Has Hollywood Elsewhere seen even a frame of Catch 22 (Hulu, 5.17), much less all six episodes? Nope, and with the Cannes Film Festival beginning later today, there isn’t much time to do so. 100% Rotten Tomatoes score, 75% on Metacritic.

Read more

Doris Day has passed at age 97. Nothing sad or tragic in this — she lived a long, luminous and bountiful life, if not over the last half-century then certainly during her 25-year heyday. Day was semi-hot between 1940, when her big-band singing career began to happen at age 18, and the launch of her film career in 1948. She was huge throughout the ’50s and early ’60s but it all began to wind down around 1965, when her “world’s oldest virgin” routine finally began to get old.

From “Doris Day Is More Or Less Okay,” posted on 1.10.10:

“Day was fairly great in Pillow Talk, Lover Come Back, Young Man With A Horn and Love Me or Leave Me. I remember something tart and tolerable about her performance in Young At Heart, in which she played the love interest of a dark-hearted Frank Sinatra. And she was reasonably “good” in those bizarre comedies of sexual constipation that she made in the early to mid ’60s.

“And yet it’s hard to think of another veteran of ’50s and ’60s cinema who was more of an icon for uptight middle-class values and zero sexuality.

“I know I suddenly liked Day a lot more when I heard that rumor about her having had an affair with Sly Stone — but that story turned out to be bogus. Day did apparently have a fling with L.A. Dodgers base-stealer Maury Wills.”

Day was offered the Mrs. Robinson role in The Graduate, but turned it down for moral reasons. Mistake.

In 2010 director Douglas McGrath (Infamous, Emma) made a case for Day, then 87, receiving a special career-honoring Oscar. McGrath wrote persuasively and with feeling about Day’s special qualities. She committed to her light-comedy roles, held her own with the likes of James Stewart, Kirk Douglas and James Cagney, and deserved a tribute for the same reason that Cary Grant was tributed in 1970 — i.e., because she was iconic.

The only Day performance I had a problem with was her costarring role in Alfred Hitchcock‘s The Man Who Knew Too Much. I adore aspects of this 1956 thriller (the murder in the Marrakech marketplace, the assassination attempt in Albert Hall) but Day’s grating emotionalism makes it a very hard film to watch. She cries, shrieks, trembles, weeps. And when she isn’t losing it, she’s acting pretentiously coy and smug or singing “Que Sera Sera” over and over.

Read more

I caught Joe Berlinger‘s Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile last week. The reason I didn’t feel moved to post anything is that I was impressed as far as it went, but the only element that really got me was Zac Efron‘s icy, understated portrayal of serial killer Ted Bundy.

It’s a straightforward, well-measured, non-emphatic portrait of a fiend, drawn from the point of view of Bundy’s onetime girlfriend Elizabeth Kendall (Lily Collins). The source is Kendall’s book “The Phantom Prince: My Life with Ted Bundy“. Kudos to screenwriter Michael Werwie for pruning it down just so.

I was never bored, irked or irritated, but it’s obviously and necessarily an alienating thing to sit through, and the whole time I was telling myself “this is fairly decent but I can’t say I’m enjoying it, and how could I?”

Efron is fascinating. Before this his best performance was in Me and Orson Welles, but this is much stronger for its subtlety. He’s playing an extremely scary guy without overtly signalling full-monster vibes. Well, he does but with dozens of little darting, brush-flick ways.

What other films contain a top-notch lead performance while otherwise making you wish they would end soon?

Hollywood Elsewhere hasn’t seen Mike Dougherty‘s Fat Godzilla (Warner Bros, 5.19) and I’m pretty much determined to excuse myself until it streams, but I strongly disagree with Steve Weintraub’s praise on principle. More doesn’t mean better. I’ll always prefer a monster film that invests in hints of things to come rather than one that pushes it all in your face.

From my 5.10.14 review of Gareth Edwards‘ Godzilla: “I liked the fact that Edwards tones Godzilla down for most of its running time. Over and over he uses suggestion — visual and aural hints and implications — instead of blatant show-and-tells. He deserves admiration for delaying Godzilla’s first big MCU roar until the two-thirds mark and also holding back on the trademark fire-breathing until the big super-finale, in which San Francisco gets it but good.”

Amidst the general dissatisfaction with last night’s Game of Thrones episode (“The Bells“), an assessment by Giant Bomb associate producer and Brooklyn-based comedian Abby Russell stands out. HE commentariat remarks are hereby requested.

“People like you must create, otherwise you become a menace to society.”

The last trailer for the endlessly bumped Where’d You Go, Bernadette didn’t mention director Richard Linklater. The newbie doesn’t state his name either, but at least it acknowledges it’s “from the director of Boyhood and School of Rock.”

The Annapurna film, which stars Cate Blanchett, Billy Crudup, Emma Nelson, Kristen Wiig, Judy Greer and James Urbaniak and has been described as a “mystery comedy-drama”, opens on August 9th.

Read more

Keanu Reeves answered Stephen Colbert‘s question succinctly and gracefully. Everyone including Colbert approved, but of course KR sidestepped the question. Which struck me as a bit curious given a recollection that Reeves (a) has previously shared heavy-mystical-cat views about the scheme of things (or so I recall) and (b) played Siddartha in a Bertolucci film so he’s been down to the bottom of that well.

HE’s stock reply: “Life is a fountain, and each of us is a drop of water. The fountain shoots us out and we rise gloriously into the air, and then we fall back into the pool and get sucked down and then shoot out again. Okay, some water drops aren’t so glorious but it’s nonetheless a divine, infinite process.”

When the kids were young and asking these kinds of questions I used to say that when we die we become a baby again, except we never remember this. Well, every now and then some claim to.