Friday, July 26, 2019 at 3:34PM 
Remember when Gus Van Sant made Keanu Reeves into a living softcore magazine cover in My Own Private Idaho? Good times.
(Thanks to Canadian filmmaker Bruce La Bruce for this memory jog)
Thursday, June 27, 2019 at 9:39PM I'll be sharing my midyear ballots (such as they are) over the next couple of days but first let's hear from the whole team. Or, some of them - those that volunteeered their little in progress top fives. The team hopes you enjoy these little peeks into our individual film experiences from January through June at the movies (and in some cases, at home).
Chris Feil's midyear top five
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01 Her Smell's redemptive anarchy in five acts
02 Ari Aster's hilarious Midsommar -time sadness
03 Claire Denis' sci-fi descent into the black hole of our biology High Life.
04 The haves-and-have-nots horror of Us.
05 Zhao Tao giving another masterclass in Jia Zhangke's Ash is Purest White.
Paolo Kagaoan's midyear top five
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01 Homecoming: A Film By Beyonce... When Beyonce descended from those steps, Sergei Eisenstein rose back from the dead, burned every copy of Battleship Potemkin, and killed himself.
02 Elizabeth Olsen in Endgame because she reminded me that Thanos is an asshole...
Saturday, June 15, 2019 at 11:29AM six random things that happened on this day in showbiz history (June 15th)...
1960 Billy Wilder's five-time Oscar winner The Apartment had its world premiere on this day in New York City. I just watched it again recently. Shirley Maclaine and Jack Lemmon are perfect in it, don'cha think?
1967 Another premiere, this one for the WW II action drama The Dirty Dozen, an antecedent of a kind to Tarantino's Inglorious Basterds.
1991 Paula Abdul's "Rush Rush" hits #1 (it'll stay there for six weeks). Keanu Reeves does a James Dean thing in the Rebel Without a Cause (1955) themed video. Paula does Natalie of course but no Sal Mineo counterpart? Fail!
Monday, June 10, 2019 at 1:00PM by Lynn Lee
When Speed was first released a quarter century(!) ago, the premise seemed ridiculous: Bomb on bus is triggered to go off if the speed ever drops below 50 mph. A bus in Los Angeles, no less. At rush hour! (Actually, it’s always rush hour in L.A., then as now, which only reinforces the preposterousness of the scenario.) Nevertheless, Speed managed to suspend viewers’ disbelief – and their breaths – with a combo of taut white-knuckle thrills that didn’t require elaborate special effects and light humor that relieved but didn’t distract from the constant tension.
A major hit both critically and commercially, it went on to win two Oscars (for sound mixing and sound editing) and elevate the then up-and-coming Keanu Reeves to full movie star status. Now that Keanu seems to be having another “moment” in his long and eclectic career, it feels like an especially opportune time to revisit the movie that vaulted him on to Hollywood’s A list.
How does it hold up?
Tuesday, May 21, 2019 at 10:00AM By Lynn Lee
“Guns. Lots of guns.”
That line is only one of several of John Wick 3’s nods to its spiritual predecessor, The Matrix, albeit the most overt one. With the right audience, it draws appreciative laughs. It also embodies everything that’s both most effective and most lacking in Keanu Reeves’ latest blockbuster franchise. The action pyrotechnics are dazzling, the callouts to his last blockbuster franchise amusing, but once the last gun stops firing, there’s nothing left. Nothing to feel, think about, or care about, even as the story ends on yet another cliffhanger that practically ensures the next installment we all knew was coming and was sealed by the movie’s gargantuan opening box office haul.
It wasn’t always this way. The first John Wick had a simplicity of premise that made for a sharp and clean, if fundamentally goofy, revenge narrative...
