Steven Seagal heads to prison, RoboCop cleans up Detroit, and a possessed Plymouth Fury goes on a killing spree. This week's Tubi Tuesday brings together three very different movies, plus a little thrift-store misfortune and some glorious WCW WrestleCrap.
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Tubi is free, loaded with hidden gems, and beats paying Netflix prices every month. Here are three films worth your time this week on Tubi.
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Walk All Over Me is a different side of Leelee Sobieski than most of her fans have seen. A scrappy Canadian crime comedy with a loose plot, genuine laughs, and great chemistry between its two leads. Better than its reputation suggests.
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I’ve seen plenty of movies which required its audience to turn off their brain. ‘Backfire’ (2017) is one of a select few that also requires them to turn off their souls. Note: their brains should still be turned off as well. I had moderate hopes for a mid-level shoot em' up based on a promising premise that hooked me in the Netflix description and made me decide to give this film a shot. Two urban thugs attempt to rob and then gun down a couple out on a date night. The couple turns out to have…
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Two beach bums, one with a military past, and both in an open three way relationship with a hot blonde named Ophelia, start a homegrown marijuana business that becomes very successful. Said business attracts the wrong kind of attention from a very powerful Mexican drug cartel. So, together with the aid of a dirty DEA agent played by John Travolta, the trio will go to war against said Cartel, lead by Salma Hayeck. Also, Benicio Del Toro licks and occasionally rapes people. Ew. Oliver Stone, a…
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‘Security’ is a movie that aims low and stays on target. Antonio Banderas, far removed from his days as the guitar case gunslinger in Desperado, plays a two dimensional archetype—a former soldier, struggling to find work to see his family who are forced to live two states away. The soldier finds work as an overnight security guard in a mall, where he joins a crew of early 20-something stereotypes—the douche, the dork, the nerd, and the drunk chick who quickly defer to his general badassery when…
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What an unnerving film—and just in time for Halloween too. ‘Black Mass’ is an interesting exercise in genre bending/blending. There are really two films playing simultaneously. The first is the historical account of real life gangster James “Whitey” Bulger—a sociopathic killer who used his political connections to reign over South Boston (Southie) for several decades. This offers nothing new to the well-trodden ‘gangster’ genre and plays like Martin Scorsese on Quaaludes. The second movie is not…
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Kill Bill Volume 2 is kind of the yin to Kill Bill Volume 1’s yang (or vice versa). Unlike the first film which was pretty much one action sequence after another with brief moments to set up the next ones, this movie stops occasionally to let the characters---even the villains have their moments of reverence to make their just desserts that much more meaningful/conflicted when they come about. Michael Madsen here has his second best role next only to his work in Reservoir Dogs as a trailer park…
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Here is a movie that lives or dies on style alone. The story is as simple as it gets, and makes no pretense about existing as anything other than a device to bring us gobs and gobs of sword play and one liners. Uma Thurman is one pissed off Bride on a mission to skewer all the dirty SOBs who murdered her groom and left her for dead at the altar. There were so many aforementioned SOBs it turns out, that this process takes two movies to complete said revenge. We even have the classic set up of the…
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Gangs of New York represents the kind of old school cinematic excess such as Ben Hur and the Ten Commandments, with massive sets and thousands of extras, but with a modern arsenal of special effects to give it a little extra oomph. Daniel Day Lewis plays Bill the Butcher, the old school gangster kingpin of New York in the 1860s. Lewis plays Bill as a shrewd politician, and brutal schemer. His performance, like in most of his films, is the movie. Leonardo Decaprio plays the son of the man who…
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Cop Land is a film that could have easily been a long mini-series with all its got going on in the plot. Garrison, New Jersey in this movie is a town populated entirely by NY city cops. It’s a nice quiet little community, as you would expect, and mortgages are quite reasonable; plus it sure as hell beats living in the same dump they all have to work in. This is so thanks to “Uncle Ray” the boss of the town--- a mobbed up cop played by Harvey Keitel. In a town populated by cops, the actual police…
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I was a little younger when I first saw this movie, and I did not fully appreciate it to the extent I do now. I was watching it expecting a satisfying formulaic action movie, and of course, if you watch No Country For Old Men expecting that, you are going to walk out pissed. In a way though I am glad I had the original experience with the film because now I can look back on how my emotions were so expertly towed with without my being as aware of the manipulation as I would be now. This is far…
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I literally cannot fathom how it took me so long to finally getting around to seeing this. Clint Eastwood has been on my Mt. Rushmore of actors since I was a fetus, and Jeff Bridges is also on that list. This movie sees them in different points of their career, Bridges is a young cocky little hippy named Lightfoot who opens the movie by stealing a car, and Eastwood is an old bank robber in hiding who opens the movie as the pastor of a church, before literally being run out of the congregation by…
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The Untouchables is a near perfect mix of cinematic ingredients. Even though it was filmed in the late 80s this is not a modern gangster movie like Goodfellas, or even the Godfather. This is basically a “Hayes Code” era film that somehow escaped in a time machine and wound up where it did. That said it is beautiful movie, wonderfully shot by Brian De Palma, with a classic score by Ennio Morricone (and with period music by Duke Ellington); and then you add in the dialogue from David “F*** You”…
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Jason Statham is just getting out of prison and is bound for vengeance against Ray Liotta, who plays the big bad mob guy who screwed him over back in the day. While in prison Statham’s character befriends two geniuses who teach him how to win at virtually any kind of confidence game in existence. While in pursuit of said vengeance though, Statham’s character winds up at the mercy of two mysterious strangers (yeah, you probably figured who they were too by now) who hold the key to helping him get…
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Johnny Depp will star as Boston mobster James “Whitey” Bulger in the upcoming movie “Black Mass” this month. I am quite anxious to see it. So with that in mind I went back and watched Johnny Depp’s other famous gangster movie in which he played real life undercover agent “Donnie Brasco” who infiltrated a crew in one of the five families during the 1970s. This is one of my favorite “gangster” movies, for one because it seems to be a little more self aware (without going over the top) than your…
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This movie is to Goodfellas kind of what El Dorado was to Rio Bravo or Rio Lobo (Rio Lobo would be more the Departed in this comparison though I guess). An indirect remake with many of the same actors in a different setting. When the premise is as good as Goodfellas, who’s gonna complain? Joe Pesci gets to play perhaps his most memorable and most stereotypical Joe Pesci character ever, crushing skulls in vice grips and stabbing folks who smartoff in the neck with their own ink pens and whatnot…
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On the list of adjectives one might use to describe Tom Hanks, “badass” is probably way down on the list. However, Hanks manages to portray one quite convincingly here in mob enforcer Tom Sullivan. This was Sam Mendes’ first movie after his critical darling American Beauty. It is a visually captivating film, both in the set stylings as well as the way Mendes captures movement. I totally forgot that Daniel Craig was in this film as the bad guy who sets the events of this movie together. Mendes…
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Foxcatcher is a meticulously crafted, well researched, and fantastically acted film. That said, I found it to be kind of a dull and ponderous movie, although this is the kind of thing you don’t watch for entertainment as much as for the experience. Steve Carrel plays John DuPont, a spoiled billionaire by birth opens up the wrestling program that gives this movie its’ name. When Dupont invites noted Olympic wrestler Mark Schultz (Channing Tatum) to move up to his sprawling private kingdom and…
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Seeing a younger Bogart in the prime of his forceful personality and screen presence is really something to behold. People forget the guy was already in his 40s when he got his first big break in the early 40s. This movie captures him in his physical prime in his mid 30s playing a desperate gangster trapped in a roadside diner awaiting his final reckoning with the authorities. Also at the diner is a young waitress, Bette Davis, a teenage girl stuck in a boring hole in the wall place with only…
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