LOGAN

Great movie.  GREAT. MOVIE.  Heartbreaking.  Violent.  Hugh Jackman brings his two decades playing the same character to bear to create a fitting send off to Wolverine.  While I only had a decade of my job, I understand his torment as a figure of significance relegated to a shack in the middle of the desert, his only friends an albino and a deranged old man with psychic seizures.

I wish I had adamantium claws.  Would have shot those things out and shredded that goddamn copy machine...

KONG: SKULL ISLAND

While a fun ride, there is something missing in this tale of Kong.  Eliminating any sense of the giant ape's connection with a white blonde woman as a grounding element and constantly reminding us that it's 1973 with a Pandora playlist of Greatest Hits of the 70's in almost every scene, the film is more of a mishmash of ideas.  John C. Reilly represents both the basic humanity missing from the Kong arc and the comic relief.  Decent popcorn movie, overall.

Very satisfying to watch a monster gorilla smash the 'skull crawlers,' though. I used to call the HR department 'skull crawlers.'

JOHN WICK CHAPTER 2

Picking up immediately following the first film, Keanu Reeves reprises the assassin who is simply trying to retire and keep his stuff.  He has a new dog (that was pretty fast) but wants his car back.  He gets embroiled in a plot to fulfill a marker to an asshole and Wick kills everyone.  EVERYONE.  In the end, he violates the one unbreakable rule and is excommunicated from the league.  But Al Swearengen gives him a head start before he is killed by everyone else.

If his car was a silver Prius and I had a dog, it'd be like watching my life unfold (except for the guns and the killing and the fact that the guy seems to never need to use the toilet...)  The idea of wanting to break free but being sucked back into hell reminds me of having to drive to Navy Pier every day and the existential dread that swept over me on days when schools sent their students there...

HACKSAW RIDGE

Based on a true story of the first conscientious objector in WWII.  The second Spiderman is anti-violence and anti-gun and then saves 75 wounded soldiers in one night by himself.  Directed by religious zealot and vehement racist/sexist Mad Max, it's a story of non-violence set among one of the most over-the-top graphically violent movies I've ever seen.

It's like when I was adamantly non-corporate in an increasingly corporate place and the isolation was striking.  I can't save anyone from the shrapnel of agendas, meetings, spreadsheets and deadening cubicle life but I understood what Spidey was going through.

THE LOBSTER

Colin Farrell is sad.  John C. Reilly is sad.  Rachel Weisz is really effing sad.

Farrell signs up for a clinic that requires that you must find love with someone else in the clinic or, after a set amount of time, be surgically changed into an animal.  He chooses a lobster because they live for 100 years and he likes the sea.  John C. Reilly gets his hand shoved in a toaster because he masturbates.  At night, the inmates all go out and hunt those who have managed to escape.

In order to avoid being turned into a lobster, Farrell lies to a brutal sociopathic woman, they become a couple until she tests him by stomping his dog to death to see if he reacts.  The dog was his brother who'd been changed into a dog.

Then he escapes and joins those who have also escaped but they have severe rules and punishments also and the oppressive nature of both the clinic and the rebels starts to feel like a job where he is increasingly isolated and made to feel inadequate so when he wakes up every morning to go to this place - this place of cubicles and forced smiles at chili cook offs and an institutional browbeating to make the bottom line, increase the profit, get in line, conform to the nonsense that he knows is a waste of his time and energy until he wants to scream "NO.  STOP!  I WILL NOT FILL OUT ONE MORE MINDLESS EXCEL FILE, I AM A HUMAN BEING AND I WANT...I WANT..."

NEXT WEEK:
MOANA
GET OUT
THE LEGO BATMAN MOVIE