Three Movies in Four Days Part 2

Tags

action movie, Angelica Huston, crime drama, dogs, film, Halle Berry, John Wick, Keanu Reeves, movie music, movie review, Nicole Kidman

John Wick 3 (no spoilers)

OK, so I’m just going to get it out of my system. We all have our favorites and Keanu Reeves has been one of mine since I first saw him as dopy Ted. Then came the conflicted Neo, and later my all-time fave movie of his, Destination Wedding.  He flings himself into all sorts of career risks and all of them work in his favor. Because Reeves in person is so laid-back and gentlemanly, it’s easy to overlook his history, unless an avid fan. (Passivity is not in the lexicon or personality of anyone who yearned to play pro hockey.) The eclectic range of genres in his film history is all over the place. He personifies my personal adage of: If you can do comedy well, you can do anything. He swings from courtly aristocrat (Dangerous Liaisons) to deranged avenger (JW2) without a misstep.

Anyway, I liked JW3. I wasn’t too impressed with 2, as you can tell, but 3 has incorporated some very creative and outré enhancements to a genre I don’t usually pay to see. And it has Reeves in it, so off I went to the cinema, especially after seeing The Impossible Dream trailer.

What stood out:

Halle Berry. You have to see to believe the kick-ass-ness. And her dogs.

Next, fight scenes with numerous opponents attacking separately. What we are usually served is a situation where the hero/heroine is surrounded by assailants coming at them one at a time. Not in this flick. It’s all pile on the rabbit, if you remember that old Bugs Bunny cartoon.

Angelica Huston as a Russian mafia queen

Xbox addicts are going to mainline this puppy. Their fingers will twitch through all the shoot-em ups. I loved the unique use of music for the finale shoot-out underscored by Vivaldi. Classical music, for me, allowed for suspension of belief and enhancement of the choreography needed for sustained violence. After a while,  constant glass breakage and auto weapon discharge sags into over-the-top sensory overload.

Much of what occurs in films of this genre has to be taken with a sense of humor or a chunk of salt. I mean, how many times can you get kicked in the head, ribs and chest and still function?

Worry about the story arc started to nag about halfway through. I know what I hoped to see and started to lose confidence in the plotline. The worries got resolved by the film’s end when I understood the reason for the red herrings.

Thumbs are up for JW3.

On CD: Destroyer

Nicole Kidman does a tour de force in this grim odyssey of a cop’s relentless pursuit of a stone cold criminal in order to expiate her mistakes of past and present. Kidman is remarkable and believable, almost unrecognizable. She would have benefited from a less heavy-handed makeup artist. That was overdone, and I think unfair to Kidman, and because of that bit of distraction, stole from her ability to relate all that the character was and going through, without slathering on the makeup with a density more appropriate for stage than screen. Kidman’s work in this film is a revelation. I got lost in her, not the story.

Next up: Rocketman

M.L Rigdon (aka Julia Donner)

Follow on Twitter @RigdonML

Blog: https://historyfanforever.wordpress.com/

Website http://www.MLRigdon.com

https://www.bookbub.com/authors/julia-donner

https://www.facebook.com/Julia-Donner-697165363688218/timeline

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How to Hide a Body

Tags

construction, cozy, decorating, dogs, flipping, Foodie, heartthrob, houses, murder, mystery, pug, Viking, writing

It’s a pleasure to have the wonderful Judi Lynn visit my blog. When we met (long ago), she was writing mystery, then urban fantasy, then was offered a contract with Kensington to write a series of romances, which she doubted she could do. Hah! For them, and us, she wrote a marvelous series about Mill Pond, peopled by characters so real you wanted them as your forever friends, characters so alive that they made you laugh and cry, allowed you worry about their problems and rejoice in their triumphs. And oye, the food! (Ms. Lynn’s a kitchen goddess after all.)

The Mill Pond series was followed by a request to write cozy mysteries, just what Judi loves. To look at her, one would never think that someone so jolly and generous could think up so many unique ways to murder people. But then, you’ve never seen the bathroom wall she painted with splotches of red paint. And in this new cozy mystery series, she gives us Ansel. (Insert sigh here.) I love Prosper from her urban fantasy works, but her quiet Norseman, oh my… You only have a few days left to wait to meet him and to find out how the corpse ended up in the attic. It’s on presale now!

You can find The Body in the Attic here:  http://www.kensingtonbooks.com/book.aspx/37036

Thank you, M. L. Rover, for inviting me to your blog.  I’m a huge fan of yours, when you write as Julia Donner or as M. L. Rigdon, so it’s an honor being here today.  Thanks for letting me talk about the first mystery I wrote for Lyrical Underground, THE BODY IN THE ATTIC.

1. Why mysteries?

I fell in love with mysteries when I discovered Agatha Christie in my high school years.  In between reading Jane Austen and English Lit assignments in college, I got hooked on Hercule Poirot and Jane Marple. I liked Sherlock Holmes, but not as much as Nancy Pickard’s Jenny Cain and Carolyn Hart’s Death on Demand series. Those led me to Martha Grimes, Elizabeth George, and many, many others.  In cozy mysteries, the gore is minimal, the characters are part of a tight knit community, and the killers always get their just rewards—one way or another.  Unlike real life, evil doesn’t go unpunished.  And it’s fun to match wits with the detective.  Can you catch the writer’s clues and distinguish them from the red herrings?  It’s like solving a jigsaw puzzle.  Lots of fun.

2. Why have your heroine be a fixer-upper?

When my husband and I got married, we bought a bungalow that had great bones, but everything in it was too small or dated.  We were young and had no idea how much work it would take to update everything.  When I turned on the faucet in the kitchen and John turned on a faucet in the bathroom to brush his teeth, the water got confused and stopped moving completely.  We had to replace lead pipes with copper ones.  When we invited my family over for supper and put the leaf in our table, we couldn’t open the refrigerator door until we all stood up and moved the table sideways to make room.  Eventually, we ended up adding on to the kitchen, adding a dormer for a second bedroom upstairs, and finishing the basement into a playroom for the kids. Little did we know when we bought the house.  But to this day, we love the place.   We still have a fondness for old houses and go on house walks in old neighborhoods. Not that we’d ever do this again. If we HAD to move for some reason, we’d buy something newer that was move-in ready.  But I wanted Jazzi and her cousin to restore old houses to make them beautiful again.  It hurts me to see a lovely old house that’s neglected.

3. What do you like to read besides mysteries?

I don’t like to read the same author or even the same kinds of books back to back.  Eventually, I need a change of pace.  So I might read two cozies and then read an urban fantasy. I wrote urban fantasies for a while as Judith Post and discovered Ilona Andrews and Patricia Briggs, among others. Then I might pick up a Regency romance—like you write as Julia Donner—and then a romantic suspense or something bracing like Mark Lawrence’s Jorg series.  I like to mix up the genres I read now and then.

4. Why are family and cooking so important in your books?

My family is small, but close.  And I love to cook and entertain.  I get bored cooking the same things over and over, so I subscribe to different cooking magazines and buy way too many cookbooks.  My sisters don’t like to cook, so it’s fun to invite them and my cousin over for supper.  They don’t like it if I get too fancy.  They like roasts and Italian sausage sandwiches.  When it gets chilly outside, two of their favorites are chili or beef and noodles.  My friends have more sophisticated palates, and I can experiment more.  I can make bouillabaisse or chowders, Thai noodle salads, and Chicken Seville.   It’s fun, and it keeps me out of trouble.

5. Is there a romantic interest in your books?

Be still my heart. Ansel Herstad is a contractor who works with Jazzi and her cousin, Jerod.  Jazzi calls him a Norseman.  He grew up on his family’s dairy farm in Wisconsin.  He’s six-five with blond hair and blue eyes and lots and lots of muscles. But he doesn’t realize what a hunk he is.  I wanted to people Jazzi’s world with lots of GOOD men.  My husband worked at a tiny hamburger drive-in all through high school, and to this day, he’s still friends with the guys he worked with.  When one of those men marries a woman, she becomes part of their group.  And after knowing them for years, these guys are the best.  My daughter’s single, and she swears it’s no walk in the park to meet a good guy these days, but they’re out there (probably already taken).  And I wanted them to part of Jazzi’s world.

 

Judi Lynn’s blog:  https://writingmusings.com/

Webpage:  https://www.judithpostswritingmusings.com/

Facebook author page: https://www.facebook.com/JudiLynnwrites/?eid=ARBEkp5jfrUGMBkV9_9i-tpSF_CQs0fg9igDATo5gwcN17HXalHG084-lLxN-mKrXptUaUHZz2EZ_w7X

Goodreads:  https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/5023544.Judith_Post

BookBub:  https://www.bookbub.com/authors/judith-post

 

Thank you Judi Lynn/Judith Post for the interview! And here’s a link to some of her urban fantasy and myth genres:

https://www.amazon.com/Blood-Battles-Fallen-Angels-Book-ebook/dp/B00C3L8BNM/ref=sr_1_4?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1542027708&sr=1-4&keywords=Judith+Post

 

GOING TO THE DOGS

Tags

attitude, dogs, film, movie, pets, review, robot, snark, stereotype, teen

But with another kind of inference. If you’re a dog lover, one of the following films is for you—the other, avoid.

So, Alpha. It starts off slow and doesn’t take off until the wolves enter. There are a few content issues that make no sense, holes you could drive the proverbial truck through, but the most glaring is how the men trudge off for days and days to hunt bison. History and logic say that people are nomadic or prefer to live near food sources. At any rate, who would want to trudge miles and miles, get the meat and skins, then schlepp them all the way home for days and days. The visuals are lovely, the costuming, strange. The men’s leather coats looked like WWII bomber jackets. I can suspend reality but that was a bit jarring. The best part was the wolf-bonding thing and the interesting bit where the wolf teaches the boy how to hunt as a team. Wolves do have that down to a science. The best part was the surprise ending that made me tear up. If you love dogs, you’ll like this film, especially if you’re overloaded with vacuous digital mayhem.

Then we come to AXL. What a mess. If I hadn’t planned on doing a “dog” blog thingie, I would have gotten up and walked out. Oye, the stereotyping is criminal. The storyline is idiotic, as if written by a ten-year-old. I take that back. Make it younger. The poor dog robot changes size about ten times and every trite and overused idea that can be crammed into a story is there, including making teens look like idiots. I was young and dumb, but these kids are like the ones in the commercial hiding in a shed with the dangling chainsaws. And I resent that the young protagonist thought it was OK to rip off an ATM just because computer wonder dog AXL programmed it to spew money. My grandson would have immediately reported the problem and turned in the cash. I guess that’s what irked me most, the way teens were trashed, the military to look asinine, and the bad guy of Middle Eastern descent. The only positive about movie is that actors got paid (presumably) and kept their SAG membership active.

In Alpha, there is much to be admired in the young man struggling to survive and get home to his parents. There is much to despise in a film like AXL that insults our youth and audience intelligence. I see the fun in B-type movie genres, but AXL is cruel and unusual.

Sorry this was kind of crabby and I miss my dogs and horses. And have been reading Dorothy Parker poems and quotes.

M.L Rigdon (aka Julia Donner)

Follow on Twitter @RigdonML

Blog: https://historyfanforever.wordpress.com/

Website http://www.MLRigdon.com

https://www.bookbub.com/authors/julia-donner

https://www.facebook.com/Julia-Donner-697165363688218/timeline