Outlaw Johnny Black / * (PG-13)

 Film review by Andrew D. Wells

Outlaw Johnny Black: Michael Jai White

Jessie Lee: Anika Noni Rose

Bessie Lee: Erica Ash

Reverend Percy: Byron Minns

Brett Clayton: Chris Browning

Tom Sheally: Barry Bostwick

Bill Bassett: Randy Couture

U.S. Marshall Cove: Kevin Chapman

Samuel Goldwyn Films presents a film directed by Michael Jai White. Written by White and Byron Minns. Running time: 130 min. Rated PG-13 (for violence, strong language and some sexual material).

When is a spoof not a spoof? When does a serious movie become a spoof of itself? These are questions the filmmakers of the new western spoof Outlaw Johnny Black have clearly never asked themselves and probably never even occurred to them as possible problems in their dreams to make a blaxsploitation-style western genre spoof. 

The fact is Outlaw Johnny Black is a bad movie. It doesn’t really matter whether it is a spoof or not. It doesn’t matter what genre it is. It doesn’t matter who made it or that it is focused on black matters. This is a movie with jokes in it that aren’t funny. It has a plot that doesn’t make any sense despite its clichéd details and simple intentions. Its characters are inconsistent and too broadly drawn. It is offensive in a way that fails to serve its comedic purposes. It is sloppily made and lazy in its execution. It has a couple of chuckles in it, but for the most part fails its audience in every way.

Made in the style of a Sergio Leone spaghetti western with heavy 70s blaxploitation influences, the story follows Johnny Black, an outlaw on a mission of revenge to kill Brett Clayton, who murdered Black’s father in front of him when he was a child. Right away the movie runs into awkwardness with its slow pacing which seems to be setting up some sort of joke about anticipation in the western genre, but the joke never seems to pay off. 

The awkwardness continues when Black’s better nature distracts him from his personal mission of revenge to rescue some young indigenous people from roughnecks. For some reason, one of these “indians” is played by a clearly caucasian actor. I feel like this is supposed to be some commentary joke on Hollywood’s past reputation for casting non-native actors to play native roles, but what the joke is isn’t exactly clear. Plus, there are many more offenses derived from Native American culture to come. Perhaps I’m just not in tune enough with the cultural comedy here, but I fail to see how this depiction of one culture is not just as offensive as the depiction of African American culture that is being frequently criticized by this same movie.

Still in the opening moments of this movie we get an example of another problem with the movie’s comedic take. At the end of a scene in which Black brutally beats and murders the men abusing the Native Americans, the town’s sheriff approaches Black and he shoots the hat off of the sheriff’s head. The sheriff is so surprised by this that he has a heart attack and dies. Black is then arrested for killing the sheriff, no mention of the 5 to 6 other men he killed. White as Black keeps bringing it up that he “killed a hat,” making his arrest and subsequent sentencing of death wrongful. No one else seems to care, but White as the screenwriter seems to think this notion of him killing a hat and having to die for it is hilarious. At least I assume he does, since he has his own character repeat this notion several times until he’s eventually rescued at his hanging by the two Natives he saved. Does dying by a heart attack in a gunfight make that death funny?

The spoof elements butt heads with the serious narrative as Black makes his escape. White uses a trope of the western genre here of being lost without water in the wilderness. Again it seems as if he’s setting up a joke about this particular trope that never pays off. Once he does find water, his horse collapses just as he gets some water in a bucket to give to the poor animal. As he tries to revive the animal, the horse literally kicks the bucket out of his hand. Ha. Ha. Is that the joke all that set up was for? Really?! A joke I might’ve made in kindergarten? Sure, Mel Brooks made a living off of those jokes. Even the horse’s leg that kicks out is clearly fake, like a Mel Brooks movie, but nothing else here is anything like the Brooks genius. What is White thinking? Then… Then!!! His hero goes off wandering in the desert again for another eternity. He just had water! He just had a creek! He just had vegetation and fire wood! What the hell?!

Black eventually crosses paths with the Reverend Percy, played by White’s co-writer Byron Minns. This introduction is one of the few genuine scenes in the film. They don’t make the chlichéd mistake of making them either instant friends nor heated enemies that you know will eventually become friends. They have their differences, but seem willing to respect each other’s positions with the understanding that they won’t be in each other’s lives forever. Percy is on his way to his new parish and fledgling love, Bessie. It is therefore unfortunate, when he appears to be killed by natives the next morning. Black, however, doesn’t miss his opportunity to go further into hiding by assuming Percy’s identity and taking his position at the parish in Hope Springs. 

You know they’re not going to use such a clichéd and on point name as Hope Springs in a spoof and not have some fun with it. Nope! Not these guys. There were plenty of points where they could’ve mentioned someone’s hope springing to the call. Too obvious, I guess. Yes, far too obvious to try and make the audience laugh with a spoof.

Turns out Percy isn’t dead. His bible blocked the arrow. Check cliché. No joke. Turns out there’s a cattle baron trying to take over the church land in Percy’s new parish. Check cliché. Beyond a narrow eye placement, the land barron is given absolutely nothing funny to do. And here’s the thing, this land barron is played by Barry Bostwick, the star of easily two of the most cult goofy bad movies around, The Rocky Horror Picture Show and Megaforce. You really can’t find a way in a spoof to make his character funny? They have the gaul to reference Mongo’s horse punching scene with one of their many Native American offenses, but they can’t summon the past of Brad Majors - A Hero?

The offenses and missed opportunities in this movie are so numerous that I could spend pages upon pages exploring them and asking “Why?” I’ll only mention one more, however, the “score”. I place the word score in quotation marks because all of the music cues are culled from other sources. Michael Breardon is credited as “head composer”, a title I can’t ever recall seeing before. Perhaps he composed some of the less obvious cues, but the ones you notice are themes and jingles you’ve heard many places before. Commercials, tv shows, the circus; they’re all so familiar, it once again seems obvious that they will be used for some sort of comedic purposes, and once again never are. I’m surprised the Benny Hill theme, Yakety Sax, wasn’t used here somewhere, but that might’ve been too easy to make funny.

I went into Outlaw Johnny Black expecting to be rewarded for surviving the past few years of oppression and horrible news, pandemics and overall negativity. I came out feeling like I’d just re-lived it all. At 2 hours and 10 minutes it felt like the movie took several days to sit through. Oppenheimer felt like a fairly short tik tok video comparatively. I didn’t expect it to be great. Knowing that, it’s even more disappointing how improbably bad it was. I just wanted to laugh. Sometimes even that is too much to ask. You just wouldn’t think so in a spoof.

22 Albums for 2022

 

Here’s the sad thing. I had this list finished on December 13th. Yeah, I could’ve posted this any time over the past three months, and I’ve just been sitting on it. At first it was because my life was immensely busy. I had a birthday, then my daughter’s birthday, then Christmas, then my son’s wedding, then New Years. After that the excuses begin to peter out. I just never got around to it. Part of it was that I’ve been working on my favorite movies list too and that got drawn out through procrastination as well. But when it came to the music, it was pretty simple. 

How simple, you ask? Well, in the past I’ve often complicated the process by measuring what an album is achieving vs. its listenability vs. the musicianship vs. some indiscernible quality about it that makes it an artistic accomplishment vs. how much I chose to listen to it. Well, this year I just went with the last category there. Which albums did I keep returning to over and over throughout the year? Sometimes that means the later releases in each year get short shrift because I just don’t have enough time with them, but this year I think I did a pretty good job sticking with what was really hitting with me at any given time. 

Certainly this means there were plenty of great albums that I listened to during the year that did not make the list that would have if I’d included more spots and considered more factors. New albums by Jana Horn, Empath, Sonic Youth, Camp Cope, Kurt Vile, High Pulp, MJ Lenderman, Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever, Envy Of None, Painted Shield, Wilco, Angel Olsen, Tim Heidecker, Horsegirl, S.G. Goodman, Black Country New Road, Graham Hunt, Soccer Mommy, Garcia Peoples, Young Guv, Chat Pile, The Berries, Momma, Eli Winter, Kuedo, Sharon Van Etten, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Bill Orcutt, and Smut all could’ve been considered for this list. You see how complicated it could get? But none of those were albums I seemed to return to as much as these 11 albums. Here they are in release order.

Bliss Fields - Slowly, However

January 14

Many Hats

Tangerine Dream - Raum

February 25

Kscope

Wet Leg - s/t

April 8

Domino Recording Co.

Sunflower Bean - Headful of Sugar

May 5

Mom+Pop

The Smile - A Light For Attracting Attention

May13

XL Recordings

Craig Finn - A Legacy of Rentals

May 20

Thirty Tigers

Michael Rault - s/t

June 10

Wick Records

Klaus Schulze - Deus Arrakis

July 1

SPV Recordings

Charlie Reed - Eddy

July 21

Earth Libraries

Shabason & Krgovich - At Scaramouche

October 7

Ideé Fixe Records

Blinker The Star - Love Oblast

November 10

Blinker The Star

As always I also include my favorite scores of the year in a separate list. Film scores have really been starting to explore a vast amount of non-traditional approaches of late, and I can’t think of a better time to be into film scores. The fact that Disasterpeace, John Carpenter, Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, Blanck Mass, and Nick Cave and Warren Ellis all had multiple scores each released this year, like they were all Hans Zimmer or Michael Giacchino, tells you how diverse film and television scores are becoming these days. You might also notice a score from a film released in 2005, which never received a multiple medium release until this year, hence why it is included. Here are my 11 favorites…

Boy Harsher - The Runner

January 22

NUDE CLUB

Michael Giacchino - The Batman

February 24

WaterTower Music

Blanck Mass - Ted K

March 18

Sacred Bones Records

Richard Thompson - Music From Grizzly Man

May 6

No Quarter Records

John Carpenter, Cody Carpenter, Daniel Davies - Firestarter

May 13

Back Lot Music

Howard Shore - Crimes of the Future

June 10

Mercury Classics

Disasterpiece - Bodies Bodies Bodies

August 10

A24 Music

John Carpenter, Cody Carpenter, Daniel Davies - Halloween Ends

October 14

Sacred Bones Records

Ludwig Goransson - Black Panther: Wakanda Forever

November 11

Marvel Music

John Williams - The Fablemans

November 11

Sony Classical

Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross - Bones and All

November 18

The Null Corporation

The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent / *** (R)

 

Nick Cage: Nicolas Cage

Javi Gutierrez: Pedro Pascal

Vivian: Tiffany Haddish

Olivia: Sharon Horgan

Lucas Gutierrez: Paco León

Richard Fink: Neil Patrick Harris

Addy Cage: Lily Sheen

Gabriella: Alessandra Mastronardi

Carlos: Jacob Scipio

Martin: Ike Barinholtz

Nicky: Nicolas Kim Coppola

Lionsgate presents a film directed by Tom Gormican. Written by Gormican & Kevin Etten. Running time: 107 min. Rated R (for language throughout, some sexual references, drug use and violence).

Oh, how we love Nicolas Cage. He’s an actor about which I’ve never heard anyone say, “I hate that guy.” And I’ve heard people say that about many a great actor. We love him when he’s good, and we love him even more when he’s bad. We love his great movies, like Raising Arizona, Moonstruck, and his Oscar-winning performance in Leaving Las Vegas. We love him in over-the-top action films, like The Rock, Con Air, and Face/Off. We even like him in movies that we hate, like The Wicker Man, Drive Angry, and (count them) two whole Ghost Rider movies. This is probably because Cage has the ability to let all self-consciousness go as the role requires, which makes him the perfect subject for The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent.

You might go into this movie thinking it was written specifically for Cage. Maybe it was. I don’t know. However, the filmmakers really could’ve chosen any aging Hollywood star who seems to have his best roles behind him. It is no surprise, though, that it was Cage who was willing to put himself out there as the subject of a film in which he plays a version of himself named Nick that is so desperate for a gig that he agrees to make a birthday appearance at an eccentric European billionaire’s party for $1 million. What Nick is unaware of is that despite the fact that Javi is a superfan of his, he is also suspected by the CIA to be the head of a major crime cartel. On his way to the gig, a CIA agent, Vivian, recruits Cage to help them gather intel and locate the kidnapped daughter of a politician being manipulated by the cartel.

With Cage perfectly cast in the lead role, it’s no surprise that he is surrounded by an amazing supporting cast. Hot of his success in quirky roles in Wonder Woman 1984 and the Disney+ television series The Mandalorian, Pedro Pascal plays the rather strange Javi in such a way it is hard to tell whether the CIA has mistakenly identified him as a vicious crime lord or he is just good at separating his fanatic love of all things Cage from his criminal calling. Tiffany Hadish and Ike Barinholtz are given the task of representing America’s possibly faulty world police as the CIA agents in charge of the rescue operation. Using Cage to achieve their goals is a questionable approach to say the least and the two squeeze a great deal of comedy out of that premise, but unfortunately, are under-utilized in the film’s plot as a whole. I definitely would’ve liked to have seen much more of both of these actors. 

British actress Sharon Horgan, who has had a great deal of success as a comedienne in her home country in television shows like Catastrophe and The Increasingly Poor Decisions of Todd Margaret, plays Cage’s ex-wife, Olivia, who along with their daughter inadvertently gets mixed up in the strange plot that he finds himself. Olivia is fed up with Cage’s inability to be present as a father to their daughter, Addy (Lily Sheen). There is no correlation between Olivia and Addy and any of Cage’s real life family, but Horgan does a wonderful job balancing the scales of the ridiculousness of Cage’s life as a famous actor and helping to ground this heightened world with a sense of reality to make the audience believe these characters are real. Finally, Neil Patrick Harris is Cage’s aptly-named talent agent, Richard Fink. Although Harris plays the constantly pivoting character perfectly, I do wonder whether Fink might’ve been served better with a less famous actor in the role. I kept expecting that Harris was also playing a version of himself, rather than someone who wasn’t famous.

Cage even gets the chance to provide two versions of himself to the audience as he is often visited by a younger version of himself, seemingly modeled after his role in David Lynch’s Wild At Heart. The younger Cage goads the “real” Cage to take more risks and grab life by the balls, the way he’s rumored to have in his younger years in Hollywood. This is where the audience really gets to enjoy that over-the-top flair that Cage so often uses in some of his more questionable projects, like Vampire’s Kiss and Deadfall. 

The success of the movie really falls on the shoulders of both Cage and Pascal, however, as their budding friendship is key to both the plot of the film and its comedy. There is a wonderful scene when they’re being chased through a beautiful Tuscan village by men with guns not long after they’ve dropped some acid together. In a moment of respite, paranoia begins to set in with Pascal as he begins to think just about any random person on the street could be someone who wants to kill them. Cage is starting to get into his own eccentric groove at this point and the way their two performances compliment and conflict with each other is just comedic perfection.

I am unfamiliar with writer and director Tom Gormican’s previous film That Awkward Moment, but I did watch the television show he created, Ghosted. He seems to specialize in putting opposing characters into serious situations that he approaches from a comedic point of view. That is certainly the realm in which this film is operating but with a particularly meta bent due to the fact that Cage is playing a version of himself. What this film is particularly adept at is navigating the real conflicts and self-interests involved in such an endeavor. Cage is constantly conflicted because he feels he must work but his recent output has been artistically negligible. He wants to be a good dad, but is out of touch with any aspects of what that entails. And he wants to be a real life hero and help the CIA but has found what he feels to be a genuine friend in Javi. Surprisingly, this isn’t the one of the most Nicolas Cagey Nicolas Cage movies you’ll ever see, but it is one that knows exactly what it is and uses that knowledge to make it a better Nicolas Cage movie than a great deal of them out there.

The Bad Guys / *** (PG)

 

Featuring the voices of:

Wolf: Sam Rockwell

Snake: Marc Maron

Tarantula: Awkwafina

Shark: Craig Robinson

Piranha: Anthony Ramos

Professor Marmalade: Richard Ayoade

Diane Foxington: Zazie Beetz

Police Chief Misty Luggins: Alex Borstein

Tiffany Fluffit: Lilly Singh

Universal Pictures and DreamWorks Animation present a film directed by Pierre Perifel. Written by Etan Cohen and additional material by Yoni Brenner and Hilary Winston. Based on the books by Aaron Blabey. Running time: 100 min. Rated PG (for action and rude humor).

There’s this thing about acting. When you’re young, you want to play the hero, or more specifically the troubled hero. You want a challenge. You want to portray anguish. Even when you do want to play the “bad guy,” you want to play him from a perspective where he thinks he’s the good guy. But as you get older, and you’ve had your acting challenges. When you’ve challenged yourself and overcome those challenges. When you’ve pushed your skill and art to the edge. When you’ve hurt inside for a role. When you’ve done all that; well then, you just want to play the bad guy. You just want to chew some scenery and be bad. I suppose that’s kind of where the inspiration for a series of children’s books that focuses on the bad guys comes from.

Aaron Blabey started out as an actor. It wasn’t until much later in life that he found his calling as a children’s book writer with a project that was influenced by his own film favorites Reservoir Dogs and movies like Steven Soderbergh’s Ocean’s trilogy. That book series is The Bad Guys, which focuses on a group of criminal friends who struggle with their own desires to be good. He has yet to finish the twenty book series, but it provides him with all those acting desires; and the new Dreamworks Animation movie The Bad Guys is the culmination of those original acting dreams for Blabey.

The first feature from veteran animator Pierre Periful, The Bad Guys is essentially a buddy movie. We’re first introduced to Wolf and Snake, voiced respectively by Sam Rockwell and Marc Maron, having a birthday breakfast for Snake in a diner. Through genre appropriate narration by Wolf, we are invited into his criminal world. He introduces us to Sanke, the safecracker; Tarantula, the hacker; Shark, the unlikely master of disguise; and Piranha, the muscle. 

Wolf and Snake leave the diner, walk across the street and rob a bank. After the intros, the audience is treated to an extended chase sequence with cinematic stylization out of Edgar Wright’s Baby Driver. After evading the cops, the crew gets down to planning their next score. During the preparation for this heist, Wolf inadvertently saves the life of an old woman and comes out of it actually feeling good about doing good. The heist goes bad, however, and when the team is caught by the overzealous Police Chief Misty Mullins, Wolf hatches a plan to enter a second chance program run by Professor Marmalade to turn good. While he tells the team it’s just another con job to stay out of prison, Wolf secretly is beginning to enjoy acting good. Mayor Diane Foxington is skeptical of Wolf’s motives, but approves of the rehabilitation anyway.

The animation is spectacular. Perifel and his production designers use a 3-D animation that is highly stylized. Looking something between 3D painting and the sketch style of Blabey’s books, the animation sculpts much of the film’s outsider attitude. It also captures that California feeling of the golden sunny haze that embodies the movies of Michael Bay, Dominic Sena and John Woo. Yet the characters also have traditional 2D animation for the eyes, somehow blending perfectly with the Californian vibe and very original look of the rest of the images.

Ultimately, the story is about a rift in the friendship between Wolf and Snake, as Snake lives to be a criminal, while Wolf might be finding he likes the idea of being a good guy a little too much for Snake’s liking. This buddy story is not without its twists and turns, with a heist plot and a couple of misdirections that are sophisticated for a kids movie and could easily work for adult fare. Many of the characters aren’t exactly what they seem, and for however much these guys like being bad, there are deeper levels to who they are than the stereotypes they seem to embody at first. It’s really a great film for introducing kids to the multiple layers of drama that make for the best storytelling.

My youngest son recently finished a reading challenge where The Bad Guys books provided the majority of his reading hours. Ironically, the kids who reached their goals were then allowed to throw pies in the faces of their school’s Principal (his mother, btw) and Resource Officer. There’s nothing like throwing a pie in the face of your school’s police officer and your very own mother to make you feel like one of the bad guys.

The Bad Guys is currently playing exclusively in theaters.

The Northman / ***½ (R)

 

Amleth: Alexander Skarsgård

Queen Gudrún: Nicole Kidman

Fjölnir the Brotherless: Claes Bang

King Aurvandil War-Raven: Ethan Hawke

Olga of the Birch Forest: Anya Taylor-Joy

Thórir The Proud: Gustav Lindh

Gunnar: Elliott Rose

Heimir the Fool: Willem Defoe

Seeress: Björk

Focus Features and New Regency Productions present a film directed by Robert Eggers. Written by Sjón & Robert Eggers. Running time: 136 min. Rated R (for strong bloody violence, strong sexual content and nudity).

To call Robert Eggers’s new Viking movie “bombastic” and “over the top” might be missing the point, and it is certainly missing the idea of what should be expected from a Viking movie. Eggers, who already has quite a reputation in Hollywood for producing intellectually challenging and visually stunning movies, offers us only his third feature with The Northman. The Northman may be the most authentic Viking movie ever made. Based on a well known Scandinavian folk tale, which also inspired some of the plot points of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, it is a raw experience to say the least. It is filled with anger and violence and the raw visceral nature of man. It’s not surprising the same are calling it a little much. Perhaps we have become a sensitive lot.

His previous movies have notoriously been produced with an incredible attention to the authentic details that mark the periods which they depict. 2015’s The Witch used only props and sets that were constructed using the methods of its 1600s New England setting, while The Lighthouse (2019) was filmed using camera lenses from its 1890s time period. Both were also rumored to have been made under strenuous conditions for their casts and crews. Considering those facts, we can probably call ourselves lucky not to have endured what must’ve been months of near torture to produce this bloody, monsterous affair.

The Northman tells the story of Amleth, an Icelandic prince in the 10th Century, during the landnamsöld (age of land-taking)–the time Iceland was first settled. The boy adores his father, who upon his return from a campaign of conquering and acquiring riches is murdered by his own brother, Fjölnir. The boy escapes and swears vengeance for his father, rescue for his mother and death for his uncle. Years later, as an enforcer for another ruler, Amleth learns of the sale of slaves from his tribe’s latest conquest to Fjölnir and disguises himself as one of the slaves to be shipped to his uncle’s reduced kingdom of a mere shepherding community to enact his vengeance.

It’s a powerful story of betrayal and vengeance, and Eggers brings all the grandiloquence and passion necessary for revenge into every aspect of the filmgoing experience, from the culturally referential and thundering score by Robert Carolan and Sebastian Gainsborough to the enlarged continent of body muscle that star Alexander Skarsgård must’ve ‘roided out to achieve. Everything in this movie is massive. The Icelandic setting makes for a beyond tormenting landscape, as unforgiving as these Viking marauders are on their missions of conquest. Although we don’t witness the conquest the king returns from at the start of the film, it is obvious they have devastated the people who are now enslaved by them and stolen all the riches their civilization had hoarded. As we are introduced to Amleth as an adult we witness one of these raids, in which Almeth is employed as a first wave enforcer–or wolf–a personality he seems to embody at his core, one of extreme brutality and entirely lacking in empathy. 

Amleth's methods of revenge are even more extreme in their implementation. Eggers’ lead for his first film, Anya Taylor-Joy, rejoins his company to act as an accomplice to Amleth’s vengeance–both having lost what was dear to them because of the same man’s actions. The two slaughter their tormentors in truly horrific ways, through poisoning and dismemberment, ultimately leading to a showdown between Amleth and Fjölnir at the base of an erupting volcano.

Despite the visceral and testosterone driven nature of the action, Eggers incorporates many of his signature themes of the supernatural and witchcraft. Willem Dafoe and Björk each show up in intense shaman roles, providing some of the film’s more psychedelic visuals and tripped out performances. Taylor-Joy seems to have graduated her character from The Witch to the seasoned trickstress. Amleth also sees visions that foretell of his revenge on his uncle and of his progenies’ rise to power. He sees his own journey to Valhọll, “hall of the slain”, riding on the wings of the Valkyrie. It’s all very visually stunning.

In press interviews leading up to the release of The Northman, Eggers said that Skarsgård had approached him to do a Viking film. While it had been a lifelong dream of the Swedish actor’s, it surprisingly hadn’t been one for Eggers. Clearly Skarsgård recruited the right director to fulfill his dream. While it is melodramatic and overblown, it also feels incredibly authentic for what it is trying to depict. It certainly isn’t a movie for everyone. It does play like the fulfillment of a dream–or perhaps a nightmare.

The Northman is currently playing exclusively in theaters.