published in Paste Magazine
Beyond slavery (and Cvil Rights), the mistreatment of Native Americans and a woman’s right to vote, the Vietnam War might be the most ignominious stain on American history. Sure, the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, same-sex equality and wealth disparity might make that list, too, in time, but Vietnam—a.k.a. the living-room war—fervently consumed the American conscience for over a decade. It was something new, too. The two Great Wars had us justly battling tyranny, championing the oppressed and righting wrongs on the road to freedom. Korea was something else, something more complex, something that appeared to be in the same arena of righteous and yet, it was really a Cold War bellwether delineating the fractious ideological divide between democracy and communism. Tough lessons were learned from that war, but Vietnam, in an era of burgeoning liberalism, free love and racial integration in the wake of Ozzie and Harrietidealism—and further inflamed by the mandatory enlistment for the draft—touched off a cascade of social unrest and activism that caused the United States to reconsider its foreign policy, something that has rippled forward to the wars that confront the U.S. currently. Continue reading
That premise might sound silly, and it’s hard not to think of Putin and the Russia of the moment, though there’s never any mention of the notorious president (the film’s based on Bill Granger’s 1986 book “There Are No Spies,” which clung to Cold War fumes). That aside, as a straight-up spy thriller, “The November Man” does offer fierce and feverishly paced rewards. The rub is that Devereaux happens to have loved the double agent in question (with whom he has a 12-year-old daughter – and a cafe on Lake Geneva – that none of the folks running the machine know of) and that causes his handlers some concern, so they assign Devereaux’s former protégé, a young can-do field operative by the name of Mason (a hunky yet generic Luke Bracey) the task of cleaning up the stink Devereaux is stirring up in Belgrade. 
Like its predecessor, “A Dame to Kill For” is broken into four segments. Interestingly, the character of Dwight, which was played by Clive Owen in 2005, is played here by Josh Brolin and Miho, the lethal blade-wielding assassin from Old Town originally played by Devon Aoki is updated by Jamie Chung (“Sucker Punch”). The other players remain, including Mickey Rourke as Marv, the pulp-prose-spouting strong man with an iron jaw, Jessica Alba as the troubled object of desire, Nancy, and Powers Boothe as the corrupt and ruthless Senator Roark, whose family seeded Sin City (Basin City, but the “Ba” is X-ed out) with the pillars of ill repute back in the day to draw a dollar from those settling out west. The use of Rodriguez’s rich black and white photog helps mask some of those nine years in between.
Old-school old guys schooling buff newbies with plenty of tongue-in-cheek ha-has was the way of the first films. “Expendables 3” starts off that way, somewhere in a Baltic/Eastern Bloc country with Barney Ross (Stallone), the series quarterback of a covert military ops group, springing an old colleague (Wesley Snipes) amid great, witty barbs about “tax evasion” and “blades.” Then it’s onto Mogadishu, where Barney and crew go on a routine mission to stop an arms trade and get their asses handed to them. The fly in the ointment, and adding to the heavy list of new names, is Mel Gibson as Conrad Stonebanks, who’s as bad-assed as the whole Expendables crew and arguably the dark side of Gibson’s already certifiable Riggs persona from the “Lethal Weapon” franchise.
“Storm” is a humble effort with the budget of “Sharknado” and the big-screen aspirations of “Twister.” Even bolstered by a meaty budget, that 1996 film was no masterpiece, but it had masterful thespians Helen Hunt and Philip Seymour Hoffman in the cast, and flying cows. It also had well regarded cinematographer Jan de Bont (he shot “Die Hard” and “Basic Instinct”) taking the reins (his prior effort was “Speed”), which in a way ties us back to “Storm”: Director Steven Quale has toiled as second unit director on James Cameron projects. He might not quite have his hands around sculpting a full-bodied drama just yet, but the one thing he clearly does know are FX. The rendering of the massive twisters – one a flaming tornado – is vivid and viscerally done. As far as character and plot, that’s pretty much the eternal overcast sky while sitting in a steel-plated storm-chasing vehicle hoping for lightning and mayhem to strike.
For What it's Worth 