In Which John Wick Loses His Best Friend

Super Cereal

by DICK CHENEY

John Wick
dir. Chad Stahelski
119 minutes

John Wick's wife Ellen Wick gives him a surprising gift after she dies. She makes sure that he can't travel or go out for any longer than a few hours by sending him an untrained beagle puppy. It is his first dog, and he names her Daisy "of course."

Because he doesn't know any better, he lets the puppy go on the bed and the furniture. I mean, he doesn't even crate train the thing, that is how clueless he is with dogs. He tells the dog he will get her some kibble, but he never actually does it; one gets the sense he's too cool for the vagaries of a pet store. Over time you get the sense that as his wife's illness worsened, she began to resent her husband's superior health. The first meal he gives the dog is cereal for fuck's sake.

I did the same thing to my german shepherd when he got into my quinoa.

Involved in these events is Theon Greyjoy. For some reason he kills John Wick's dog, earning the disapproval of Tina Fey's sleazy ex-boyfriend Dennis from 30 Rock, who plays the consigliere to a powerful crime lord that once employed Wick. "I once saw him kill three men in a bar with a Pilsner," explains Theon Greyjoy's father, the mob boss named Viggo (Michael Nyqvist).

I really wish I could have seen Keanu perform Hamlet, which he did in Manitoba. The gifs that came from that performance would have been astonishing. He almost shaved his head for the part, but he never does anything completely bald, much like how I never do anything completely with hair.

At least someone knows how to write for Theon Greyjoy.

"I keep asking why her," John Wick tells everyone, although he has killed a lot of people, so it seems like an odd question. Director Chad Stahelski rarely commits the cardinal sin of photographing the right, weird side of Keanu Reeves' face.

Wick has a series of restrained scenes with character actors after that. He moves into a New York hotel called the Continental. Everyone notices how John Wick has changed. His eyebrows, for example, are not as robust as they once were. During his downtime Keanu watches short iPhone movies he has recorded of his wife. She's like, "What are you looking at?" and he's like "You."

The Hannukah scene was unexpected but appreciated.

These scenes are a considerable relief because there is only one other woman in John Wick besides his wife, a female assassin named Perkins (Adrienne Palicki). Even though he has killed over 100 people looking for the guy who killed his dog, he lets her live.

But back to John Wick's eyebrows - they have that smoothed back look, like he's been in prison for too long and when he got out, he took the opportunity to dye them. Keanu Reeves is now 50 years old, do you really think that jet black is the natural color of his brows? He should look at maybe knitting them into a greasy weave?

A bunch of men execute her for daring to be a female hitman. This movie was sexist as fuck you guys ._.

It would be prudent to take the idea of a revenge movie in which the person seeking revenge has no visible emotions or enmity to its inevitable extreme. In John Wick 2 the puppy can come back and seek revenge on Theon Greyjoy/Reek, biting unceremoniously at the place where Theon's genitalia used to be. This would probably be a great deal more entertaining than John Wick, kind of like how the second Homeward Bound was better because Sinbad played a vaguely racist-looking dog.

At the end of John Wick the titular character, who we can presume is a homophobe because he has no gay friends, is reunited with a slightly different dog. Sure, it's not the beagle that his wife choose for him as her dying wish, but one bad dog is the same as another. "Let's go home," he says to the dog, by which time everyone else presumably left the theater to avoid watching any more of this piece of shit.

Dick Cheney is the senior contributor to This Recording. He has a lower rating than John Wick on Metacritic, which is a fucking travesty.

"Why didn't I take the blue pill?" etc

"Together" - London Bridges (mp3)

"My Heart" - London Bridges (mp3)

In Which God Generally Likes To Watch

Black Furniture

by JESSICA FERRI

The Devil's Advocate
dir. Taylor Hackford
144 minutes

Are you a really good lawyer or is your dad just the devil? This is the type of question that plagued our minds in the 90s. The Devil's Advocate is a genuinely disturbing film — Keanu Reeves moves his face more in this movie than any other he's made.

Kevin Lomax (Keanu Reeves) is a Florida prosecutor turned defense attorney who has never lost a case in his life. After he gets a pedophile off scot-free (even though he knows he's guilty), the Devil himself takes notice and sends a minion to hire Lomax and bring him and his wife (Charlize Theron) to New York. Because, obviously, if Lucifer went into business he would be a high-powered lawyer in Manhattan. He explains, "the law is everywhere."

The struggle between good and evil is of course, the struggle between the Godless (New York) and the God-obsessed (the South). Speaking with the Southern accents of a middle-school drama class, we know it isn't good when the naive defense attorney takes his peach of a wife to the big city to work for Al Pacino. Lomax's Mama, a bible-beater, begs him not to go. New York, shot with cameras laid flat on the ground or five million feet in the air, does indeed appear threatening. This is pre-Brooklyn New York. There are no locavores. This is pure indulgent, black furniture Manhattan. People eat steaks.

As for Pacino, his pact with the devil must have ended in 1997, because he still looks pretty good in this movie. Good enough for it to be believable that he's surrounded by women that he can turn into lesbians at the drop of a hat. With a mere whisper, he can order the Zebra that is the blow-job-under-the-table-at-a-crowded-restaurant. Did I mention his character's name is John Milton? And his favorite sin is Vanity.

Keanu and Charlize do their part, frenching up against walls — it's the 90s, you know, times were good. Sex drives were up. The Devil's Advocate was Charlize's "breakout" role, and I think you can see why. You get a man off for murder and you go to the local bar in Gainsville, Florida and do some shots with your wife who is hot enough to melt asphalt. If it were 2011, you'd be shaking your head over $2 beers saying, "I'm just lucky to have a job."

But this kind of behavior gets you in trouble. Charlize can't pick out a color for their "classic-eight" on the Upper West Side, and her friends turn out to be demons. One asks, "My boobs: real or fake?" She pleads with Kevin not to leave her alone at the party, but of course he does. When he gets back to the apartment she's got her hair in a towel and she's drinking Red Label. Someone's in the dog house!

Night after night goes by, and Kevin's working on triple-homicide where we're supposed to believe that Coach (Craig T. Nelson) was mean enough to murder his wife, his maid, and his son. Seriously?

One night Charlize dreams about a baby, because she's from the South, so obviously she wants to get pregnant. But then, shit, someone steals her ovaries, and low and behold, John Milton is sticking his hand into some holy water just to watch it sizzle. No one believes that Pacino has raped Charlize or stolen her ovaries, so she totally loses it. (I'd be pissed, too.)

Upon being wheeled into the loony bin, she tells Kevin it was all of that "blood money" they took — all the cases when they knew the defendants were guilty. At this point you think Kevin would have figured it out, but no, his Mama has to show up at the hospital to tell him about a church trip to New York in 1966 where she met a man who quoted scripture to her — "I send you out a sheep among the wolves," what a turn on! — and knocked her up. So Kevin's father is none other than, yeah, you guessed it.

After Charlize offs herself by slitting her own throat in the hospital (a scene in which Keanu Reeves really deserves an Oscar, I'm not sure why he wasn't nominated), The Devil's Advocate moves from a delightful little analogy (If lawyers are Satan, should we question our materialistic value system as Americans?) to full-on camp. Pacino wants Keanu to do it with his sister, which is not a problem. Even though she's thin with breast implants, she has really beautiful red hair. Red, get it? Like the fires of Hades!

Before Kevin sells himself to the devil by having sex with his hot sister, he realizes, thanks to health and unemployment insurance, that he has free will! Since he can't kill his Pops, he turns the gun on himself and blows his brains out, igniting what must be one of the most ridiculous "Noooooooooooooooo!!!!!!!!!!!!!" sequences of all cinema history, with some kind of Lacrimosa playing in the background as Pacino screams until his eyes bug out of his head and it's not special effects he's just really good at it, as all the Devil's dreams turn to ash. Even silicone implants apparently turn to ash. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, etc.

At the end of movies like The Devil's Advocate, no matter how bad things get (bullet through head usually equals death) you can always go back and do-over. We all can't be this horny and this successful without a fall-out, right? If this were a Von Trier film, he would have fucked his sister and then ran out into the moonlit streets of Manhattan, covered in blood, chased down by naked women. But it's the 90s, we need to reset. And so we're back at the beginning. Kevin's got another chance at the case back in Florida — and he does the right thing, gets the hell out of there with Charlize. Unfortunately for Pacino, this film signals his full metamorphosis from Michael Corleone to Mr. "Hoo-ha." Look for it in his monologue at the end:

Jessica Ferri is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Brooklyn. She blogs here, and you can find her website here. She twitters here. She last wrote in these pages about Buffy the Vampire Slayer. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here.

The Cinema of the 1990s at This Recording

Elena Schilder on American Beauty

Elizabeth Gumport on Wild Things

Hanson O'Haver on Airheads

Alex Carnevale on Indecent Proposal

Emma Barrie on While You Were Sleeping

Jessica Ferri on The Devil's Advocate

Durga Chew-Bose on Titanic

Molly Lambert on Basic Instinct

Alex Carnevale on Singles

"Among Angels" - Kate Bush (mp3)

"Wild Man" - Kate Bush (mp3)

"Lake Tahoe" - Kate Bush (mp3)

The new album from Kate Bush, entitled 50 Words for Snow, will be released on November 21st.

In Which Keanu Reeves Breaks Our Head Open Like A Melon

Once ... Twice … Three Times Keanu

by BEN ARFMANN

Preface: I love Keanu Reeves. His cool professionalism, and his compulsive drive to always work (often four films a year) are incredibly easy to admire; the man projects the barest of egos. The two films that made his name, Speed and The Matrix, give him a bad rap. They were the two most providential accidents of casting of the 1990s. In both cases, the filmmakers ended up getting not who they wanted (not by a long shot) but who they needed. Keanu Reeves made both films (amazing concepts, catchy scripts, potential bombs) work.

But he didn’t do it by acting – you can’t call the robotic professionalism of either film acting - he did it by getting out of the way of the material, nailing the required acrobatics, and allowing the film to speak while he was silent.

Keanu Reeves made those movies great, just by getting the work done and keeping his head down. Let’s acknowledge his achievements in those two films without labeling them something they’re not. But even granting him those two mulligans, Keanu Reeves is still a good actor. One of the greats. Let’s talk about three films that prove it. Three characters that he himself dredged up from the creative deep and made into walking, talking pleasures for movie maniacs everywhere. Three times Keanu. Marlon in I Love You to Death.

The funniest fifteen minutes of Keanu’s career. In Bill & Ted, Ted was funny because of the material – the slacker joker persona was buoyed up by a kitchen-sink concept – but Marlon is funny (really funny) just by his nature, which is all Keanu. Paired with the reliably creepy-suave William Hurt, Keanu digs into his chronic lack of expression (the muscle-relaxant face; the line readings telegraphed from Neptune) and makes it work by turning impassivity into a shtick and not a crutch. He was young as hell when he shot this, which probably helped (he was still ashamed of his workaholic tendencies, trying to mask them with a “dude’s dude” persona), as did the presence of River Phoenix on set (all of Keanu’s later day mysticism seems channeled from Phoenix’s effortless embodiment of Youth-and-Good-Times) 

He’s light and flow-y, hitting every beat required by the movie (proving his actor’s awareness) while presenting a fully cogent front of molasses-minded idiocy. The film, as a whole, is cute and keeps your mind from wandering (especially when Phoenix is on screen), but when Keanu and Hurt are in Kevin Kline’s bedroom, admiring a Reggie Jackson bat instead of completing the hit they have been hired for, it’s captivating – you hold your breath so you don’t obscure the jokes with guffaws. The next time you hear someone making a “Whoa. I know Kung Fu” crack, cut them off mid-meme and tell them about this movie.

Donnie Barksdale in The Gift. Sam Raimi is a cinema savant. That’s not what I think, it’s what I know. If you disagree, so-be-it, but at least now you know where this Keanu Recommendation is coming from. He plays a backwater wifebeater in this one, married to Hillary Swank, and threatens the lives of Cate Blanchett and her kids. One caveat with this performance is the unavoidable nature of the whodunit genre: the first time you see it, Keanu will be scary as hell. The second time it’ll be Keanu Reeves with long hair and a little extra turkey waddle under his guff. That said, this is the best trick casting of 2000 (a testament, once again, to Mr. Raimi’s enduring genius). Keanu channels both Gary Oldman’s Lee Harvey Oswald and Rodney Dangerfield’s Ed Wilson (in Natural Born Killers) in this one, creating a character who is sickening exactly because his violence towards women is so mundane. Keanu leers and staggers not with the traditional red-herring menace of the crime drama genre (as though evil were a pleasure he consumed with his morning coffee), but with a very recognizable, very common masculine entitlement complex run amuck. He might remind you of a few fathers and co-workers you know, the ones who reveal, when drunk enough, that they believe all women should have signs reading “whore” in large red typeface dangling from around their shoulders. He’s chilling in this one, and you’ll welcome any punishment that comes his way.

Dr. Perry Lyman in Thumbsucker. This film is dense and attentive, which are usually strong qualities in small pictures, but it’s also a little too proud of its own wisdom for tolerance. Most scenes have some kind of “point” happening just behind the curtain, and didacticism that strong just begs to have the creators’ game turned back on them: “what, exactly, is up with your obsession with sermonizing, director Mike Mills?” But perhaps because the movie is both dense and less-than-amazing, Keanu shakes off the dead scales and dust from around his shoulders and turns out his most relaxed, least mannered performance in years. Low pressure situations do wonders for some people. I haven’t seen him this willing to be slovenly, unfocused and charming since Bogus Journey (his greatest fear, he once said, was that his tombstone would read “he played Ted”; sort of explains all his uptight Christ figure roles). Here he’s a dentist who tries to dispense psychiatric advice along with fillings. The advice is so misguided and his own emotional health so questionable that his role as mentor and spirit guide is impossible to take seriously. Keanu circles around the edges of the set, daring the director and the cameraman to call him back into frame, all while slumping, leaning, and hunching like most 41-year-old men – worn and demoralized by the length and torpor of their lives – do.

He’s a pathetic figure in this one, but he knows it, and he’s trying to change; Reeves takes his own professional drive (always working always working) and transmutes it into his character’s desire to just “get a little more sane, just a little more.” The modest ambition is immensely likable. You want to give him a hug, and when he finally smiles with genuine concern at the film’s protagonist, it produces the single most cathartic and authentic display of affection in an otherwise chilly film. Those are, to my apologist’s eyes, three of the best film performances since the start of Blockbuster Era Hollywood.

Scott in My Own Private Idaho: River makes the movie great, but only because Keanu is able to convincingly break his heart. The final scene is a good bet, but real money plays on the farm house sequence: Keanu perfectly pulls off the deluded love monkey look of a guy stuck in the middle of a sex triangle and loving it.

Johnny Utah in Point Break: The crazy, vigorous prototype for “Jack” in Speed. Director Kathryn Bigelow scooped Reeves up a couple years shy of his thirtieth birthday and managed to get one truly sexy performance out of the young stoner actor before it was too late, and the buddy buddy scenes with Gary Busey should make every comedy cop pair put on screen since 1991 hang their bifurcated head with shame.

Ben Arfmann is a contributor to This Recording. He tumbls hard for your pleasure here.

"When Logics Die" - Soulwax (mp3)

"Funny" - Soulwax (mp3) highly recommended

"Scream" - Soulwax (mp3)