Video game designers often rhapsodize about Core Loops, those small, quickly repeatable moments of coolness that can keep players glued to the controller past the point of thumb-trauma. 2014’s John Wick made this phenomenon into a spectator sport, devising a seemingly infinite (and distressingly satisfying) variety of ways for Keanu Reeves to inflict grievous bodily harm on a steady stream of henchmen. John Wick: Chapter 2 somehow managed to further refine the formula, ramping up the action scenes to the verge of head-popping nirvana, while also adding new wrinkles to the agreeably odd surrounding mythology. (This is a universe in which literally Every Second Person You See is an assassin.) They were both just about perfect, in a Red Meat/Reptile Brain way.
Read More “Implosion Round: ‘John Wick: Chapter 3’ Pushes it to the Limit”Tag: Halle Berry
Review: Bulworth
[Originally written for Mr. Showbiz, May 15, 1998]
Set the wayback machine to 1998. Parallax View presents reviews of films released 20 years ago, written by our contributors for various papers and websites. Most of these have not been available for years.
It’s the 1996 primary season, and if the populace is unaroused, U.S. senator Jay Bulworth (longtime Democratic activist Warren Beatty) is downright unhinged. His marriage is a charade, his brain long since pickled by rhetoric, his soul in fealty to fat-cat lobbyists. His effort to pour his old liberal wine into a new conservative bottle may get him reelected, but will that help him live with himself? Not really. After taking out $10 million in life insurance for the sake of his daughter, he applies to a shady sort named Vinnie to arrange a “special research project”—a contract on … Jay Bulworth!