Reaction Shots

           A couple of weeks back - doesn’t really matter which couple of weeks since this is being read long after - I sat and enjoyed, for the most part, “Bullet Train.” Later that same day, I tossed a coin (didn’t) and wound up watching “The Gray Man” which had its moments. Both share the pedigree of recent actioners - quippy dialog, not unconvoluted motivations, plot twists that are difficult to care about, charming actors, and high body counts (at some point, I wanted to say out loud, “Yeah, I get it!” But thought better of that). One is a more self-aware trifle, the other is the first in a series of Jason Bourne wannabes. Both are calculated amusements and one succeeds better as far as tired formulae go. To wit, a fair amount of “Bullet Train” is a genuine gas. Watching Brad Pitt, Bryan Tyree Henry, Aaron-Taylor Johnson, Joey King, and others square off (sometimes repeatedly) is a lotta fun. Zak Olkewicz’s script based off Kotaro Isaka’s novel is more Guy Ritchie than Tarantin

Lately, I’ve been looking at a couple of directors who are well known to the broader public as genre-bound eccentrics but whose atypical works are often overlooked. People conveniently forget that David Lynch also directed “The Straight Story” and “The Elephant Man”. While the latter feels more of a piece with his darker material, it’s also one of his more linear constructions and is an outright tearjerker. Cronenberg is Mr. Bodyhorror to most, but seeing him only as such is reductive; the argument could made that, the recent “Crimes of the Future” excepted, he has not made a “weird/sci-“ movie since “eXistenZ” over twenty years ago. Likewise, George Miller is more than Mad Max (and don’t misunderstand: these are excellent films and “Mad Max: the Road Warrior” and “Mad Max: Fury Road” are stone masterpieces.   However, it is a shock to a number of people when you mention that he also helmed “Witches of Eastwick”, “Lorenzo’s Oil”, “Babe: a Pig in the City” and the two “Happy Feet” movi