Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves | Creed III | 65 | Shazam! Fury of the Gods | John Wick: Chapter 4
Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, 19 March 2023, Century Olympia (Amazon Prime Early Screening)
#DungeonsAndDragonsMovie is a ROMP, y'all. I cannot WAIT to see the explosion of Edgin/Xenk (AKA Chris Pine's character/Rege-Jean Page's character) fic that is going to happen after #DungeonsAndDragonsMovie's opening. (Uh, I got to see an early screening of #DungeonsAndDragonsMovie and I was still thinking about it several hours later, everybody, this movie is so fun.)
And while it is helpful to have some understanding of the game, Dungeons and Dragons, you don't need gameplay experience to enjoy the film--I think we're all steeped well enough in fantasy-world heists to get what's going on. You just won't get the same weird thrill up your spine when, like, the Gel Cube o' Doom pops up. (I have not played D&D myself, but I've listened to a fair amount of podcasts about it. Though weirdly enough, NOT Critical Role.)
If you've seen the trailer, you get the gist of it: A group of thieves-with-hearts-of-gold (natch) helped the wrong person, and the film is sort of built around trying to fix the problem. That is not, however, where it starts! So, um, Chris Pine plays Edgin Darvis, a bard who is also the ringleader of this group o' thieves. There's tragic backstory about how he started out a Good Guy, but then his wife died and he turned to thievery to support his daughter. In a delightful turn, his platonic co-parent is barbarian Holga (Michelle Rodriguez), who entered the picture while he was still in mourning. They are not romantically invovled at all! It's great!
And then a heist goes wrong. Edgin and Holga end up in prison for two years. While they're locked up, one of their former partners, Forge (Hugh Grant) keeps an eye on Kira. He also, suspiciously, becomes Lord of Neverwinter, with the wizard they'd done the aforementioned heist for, Sofina, at his side.
Yeah, Sofina is evil. Also, Forge would rather not have his ol' thievin' pals interfere in his current grift, so there's all sorts of chicanery happening. Basically, Edgin and Holga are trying to get Kira back from her nefarious erstwhile guardian, but they need some magical doodads to get the evidence they need. Enter their other former partner, Simon the Wizard with Low Self-Esteem, and in the couple of side quests they run, they also gather up Doric the Freedom Fighting Druid and Yendar the Incredibly Pretentious Paladin. They are all DELIGHTFUL.
Anyway, this leads to a whole big heist that coincides with the onset of
THIS MOVIE IS SO FUN. I'm 100% going to see it again. Probably tomorrow, even.
Creed III, 25 March 2023, Century Olympia
Honestly a bit disappointed #Creed3 didn't end with an intense and long overdue hug. That's how boxing works, right? (Really excellent film with some great directorial choices.) Also, I'm not going to do any speculation on the Jonathan Majors arrest at this point in time, so! Things about the movie! Did you know Michael B Jordan actually directed? He did some great stuff here, and also made sure he looked frickin' GLOSSY in every single shot, not that it's difficult. I mean, look at this man.
In the main timeline of the film, Adonis Creed has retired from boxing. He's got a successful gym, but he's more of a promoter than a trainer. He's got a bunch of lucrative business things happening, he's got a star boxer under his wing, his wife is a producing superstar, and his adorable daughter is adorable. Everything's going great!
Then an old friend, Dame, shows up at the gym. He's just gotten out of prison after eighteen years--from a sentence that resulted after he jumped into a fight that Donny started. As you can imagine, Adonis has a lot of feelings about this--particularly when Dame states he wants to get back into boxing again, while he's still in his (relative) prime.
Dame isn't a great dude--he went into that originating fight strapped, and some of the choices he makes in the film are pretty gross--but it's hard not to sympathize with his core conflict. He was on his way to being a boxing superstar when he got dragged into prison, while Donny got swooped into a Bel Air mansion and all the privileges that came along with it. Maybe--Dame states, Donny worries, and we're supposed to wonder--if Dame hadn't had one bad break, he would have the life Donny has now.
So that's the question, then: Does Adonis deserve the life he has? Because, as we're also supposed to know and as Bianca says outright, Adonis is a good man. But, I legit murmured while I was watching in the theatre, he could have been a better one.
Oh, I mentioned the adorable daughter Amara, right? Mila Davis-Kent, who is actually Deaf, plays Amara with ferocious delight. She's quite lovely! It's seems like it's fairly well-done representation of/for the Deaf community, and I'm glad it's included in explicit and implicit ways.
65, 26 March 2023, Century Olympia
NGL, it’s kind of cool that #65MillionYearsAgo feels kind of like an indie two-hander. Like, clearly it's a pandemic-era film, because it's literally just Mills (Adam Driver) and Koa (Ariana Greenblatt) for most of the film. (There's also inserts of Chloe Coleman as Mills' daughter, which is startling mostly because she's also the daughter in Dungeons and Dragons, which is a helluva coincidence.)
Mills takes a long-haul exploratory mission piloting a cryo-ship, but they crash on a planet. It's Earth! It's 65 million years ago! There are dinosaurs everywhere! A GIGANTIC COMET IS ABOUT TO HIT. I admire the simplicity of this adventure and the special effects are GREAT.
In terms of the emotional core, remember how I mentioned Mills had a daughter? Yeah, she's sick. That's why he took the long-haul job--so he could pay for her treatments. As for Koa, well, she does not speak the same language as Mills and he doesn't know how to convey, like, all of her family is dead in the crash.
You see where this is going.
Anyway, here is a video of Adam Driver asking NASA about asteroids.
Shazam! Fury of the Gods, 27 March 2023, Century Olympia
Y'all, #ShazamFuryOfTheGods is really fun and has an excellent thematic and emotional throughline. (It has the same weird comedic/horror atonalities of the first movie, so that's probably a feature rather than a bug.) I'm actually kind of sad it's getting such a bad rap--it seems like a lot of this might be fallout from the whole rearrangement of the DC film universe?
ANYWAY. As you might remember from the first film, Billy Batson is a foster kid who was granted superpowers by a wizard because he was, I don't know, pure of heart or something. In the battle to defeat some dude in a weird Succession battle of wills (I AM NOT WRONG), he brings in all his foster siblings to the superhero game. It's sweet!
As the second film opens, the foster family (except for the amiably oblivious parents) are still fighting crime, but sloppily. The news has granted them the moniker "the Philly Fiascos," which, geez, that's kind of harsh? What other city gets a whole team of superheroes? Why so salty, Philadelphia?
Meanwhile, the kids are growing up, and Billy's got some feelings about aging out of the foster system. See, he's worried he's about to lose out on another family, and so he's trying very, very hard to get everybody to get along when, if you have ever had siblings, you know that is NOT a thing siblings do for long stretches of uninterrupted time.
Teenagers gonna teenage, is what I'm saying.
Also, at one point, Freddy offers to introduce new girl Anne to "the hot one" out of their group of superheroes and she immediately asks if he means Mary and I'm like, yeah. That checks out.
Anyway, it turns out, in breaking the power-granting staff in the first film, Billy accidentally let loose some angry goddesses who would like to siphon back the superhero power the foster family has been wielding. The angry goddesses run the gamut from "indignant" to "vengeful." They seem to take turns who is having which emotion.
So yeah, I enjoyed this film! It's got WAY TOO MUCH happening, but it also has evil unicorns as part of a ridiculously fun Skittles commercial, so who am I to complain?
John Wick: Chapter 4, 31 March 2023, Century Olympia
I think we can all agree the real heroes of #JohnWick4 are the club kids in Berlin. Because what do you do when an assassin fight breaks out in the middle of a club? YOU KEEP DANCING, hell YEAH you do.
So when last we saw John Wick, he was shot and fell off a roof. But he's all better now! Unfortunately, because Winston (Ian McShane) did not actually kill him, the High Table decides it's time to explode the NYC Continental. (How do they do this? They bring Winston a full-ass HOURGLASS. They just…had that handy, I guess?)
Anyway, some French asshole called the Marquis (Bill Skarsgard) has promised the High Table to solve their John Wick problem, and he mostly does this by killing everybody that has ever been friendly with the dude. Which is…a choice. In addition to putting out narratively-convenient bounties on Wick (it starts at $20 million and goes nowhere but up), he also employs two extremely good hunters. Caine (Donnie Yen), a blind assassin who is friends with Wick, only takes the job because his daughter is threatened.
Shamier Anderson is credited as playing "Tracker," but in the film, calls himself, "Mister Nobody." (The Marquis rightly mocks him for the pretentious moniker, but then again, this is coming from a dude calling himself the Marquis.) Nobody will only kill Wick for the right price--a LOT--but he is happy to pick off the competition until his fee is met. Also, he is a fellow dog lover, so obviously we are supposed to read him as a Good Guy.
Multiple people ask John, "Where does this end?" And while John mostly just wants the High Table dead at this point--who could blame him, honestly--he seems to be mostly falling back on his knee-jerk sense of self-preservation and extreme competency. What do you want, John Wick? It's especially poignant when he's put in contrast with his avowed friends--Caine and his daughter, as well as the manager of the Osaka Continental, Shimazu, and his daughter, Akira.
The setpieces kick off in Osaka, as the Marquis sees fit to frickin' deconsecrate the Osaka sanctuary, like, DUDE. And we get to see Caine in action--there's a scene in the kitchen where he uses motion-sensor doorbells, it's amazing.
After that, we go to Berlin, because if John gets reinstated with his former clan, he can properly challenge the Marquis to a duel and Settle All This according to the old rules or whatever.
So we have a weirdly tense card scene. (And a dude in a fat suit. Why? WHY.) And the club scene! CLUB KIDS, WTF, have you no cares but TO DANCE? And once that's done, it's off to Paris to negotiate terms of the duel.
Once John gets those terms negotiated, there's a brief interlude where he meets up with
Then, with hours to go until the duel at dawn, the Marquis ups and ups and ups the bounty on John, and so we see him fight in various locations throughout Paris. There's a great battle on the street between the cafes where I marveled on how they were using cars as both obstacles and weapons, and then THEY DROVE TO THE ARC DE TRIOMPHE. I cannot even imagine how complicated all of that was to plan, to rehearse, to shoot. Holy shit, that scene.
That wasn't even my favorite scene! Wait until you get to the Dragon's Breath apartment shoot-out! My jaw was legit dropped for a full minute.
And then poor John has to climb the 300 steps to the Sacre Couer Dome for his duel at dawn, and it does not go well for him, as you can imagine.
THIS MOVIE. MY GOD.
And that's all for March! I've got one week of Spring break left, so expect my April movie post to be PACKED.
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