TRIPLE 9 (2016)

Atlanta, Georgia.  Five crooked cops are in cahoots with a Russian mafia family.  As always, in these types of movies, things soon spiral out of control and people start turning on each other.  In this case, the mafia family has the upper hand on the crooked cops and they instruct them to steal a certain safety security box from a bank.  They do (rather sloppily), but instead of paying them, the mafia orders the crooked cops to do a second (even more dangerous) job.  This doesn't sit well with the crooked cops and tensions rise.  At the same time, one of the crooked cops is given a new partner (an actual honest cop!) and detective Woody Harrelson is put on the case to solve the original bank robbery.  Other stuff happens as well.

During the first part of TRIPLE 9 I was digging it, but then things bogged down and by the end I just didn't care anymore.  The biggest problem is there's too damn much going on and I never knew who the main characters was...if there even was one.  Both Chiwetel Ejiofor and Casey Affleck turn in solid performances, but unfortunately there was so many other people with equal screen time it was impossible for me to get fully invested in their characters.  Also, I wish that the characters at least looked different.  The crooked cop gang consisted of two blacks, one Latino and two white brothers.  At the same time, the new partner Casey Affleck is white and his character looked similar to crooked crew member Aaron Paul, so I kept getting them mixed up and the two black guys in the crooked cop crew Chiwetel Ejiofor and Anthony Mackie were always wearing the same type of clothes and sometimes even masks(!) and once again I kept getting confused as to who the hell was who.  Maybe I'm just an ignorant fuck, but I really wish the characters had been more distinct.

Promising story that never pans out, muted colours, three entertaining action scenes, quick glimpses of grittiness that do nothing more than tease, solid acting by an overpopulated cast, lame cock tease during that exploding car scene (I wanted to actually see the car explode, not some lame off-in-the-distance explosion like a helicopter exploding behind the hill on "Airwolf"), weak nudity, cool looking Mexican gang bangers, zombies ahead, nice camerawork, mediocre direction.

Worth watching, but it's nowhere near as awesome as it could have been if the filmmakers had streamlined the story/cast and upped the gritty drama. If you need me, I'll be in my room watching "True Detective" season 1, episode 4.

PARNELL (1937)

This sixth pairing of Clark Gable and Myrna Loy finds them portraying real life 19th century Irish politician Charles Stewart Parnell and his wife Katharine O'Shea.  Before watching the film, I'd never even heard of Charles Parnell and afterwards I still didn't know much and cared even less, but I did look him up on Wikipedia and from just the few minutes I spent on there, it seems like this film was wildly inaccurate.  Example: In the film they only had a brief courtship and a very short marriage before his early death, but in reality they had three children together while she was still married to another man!!!

Historical inaccuracies aside, PARNELL is still a snoozer.  I love Gable and Loy, but watching them here was a chore.  Neither have anything to work with and as a result the entire film is just lifeless scene after lifeless scene...Gable gives a lame speech, Loy and Gable talking, more talking, politic rivals dislike Gable, Billie Burke talks and it make me daydream about THE WIZARD OF OZ, Donald Meek shows up and I start daydreaming about YOU CAN'T TAKE IT WITH YOU, more talking, Gable and Loy eat potatoes, Gable and Loy love each other, Gable goes on trial, more talking, The End.

As far as the filmmaking qualities go PARNELL looked good and the acting was passable, but the story was just terrible!  Zero ups or downs, boring characters, dull romance.  Ugh, PARNELL is simply a nothing movie.  Skip it.