"Ballerina" Has A John Wick Problem
#323: "Ballerina," "Good Night, and Good Luck," Alfred Hitchcock, "Better Man"
Edition 323:
Hey movie lovers!
This week: Can Ana de Armas do a good enough John Wick impersonation? Plus, Clooney takes to the Broadway stage and Hitchcock comes to Netflix. Oh, and yeah I finally saw the CGI monkey movie. In this week’s “Trailer Watch,” here comes the wave of 2000s nostalgia.
Ballerina
It’s amazing how movie studios, developing projects completely independent of each other with totally different timelines, fall into certain trends at exactly the same time. When I point this out in the newsletter, I know I can sound like a broken record, but I think it underscores an important big picture takeaway.
You may remember my takeaway from Mission: Impossible being “the disease of more,” pleading that big movies cannot require THAT MUCH movie. To quote my fav Joan Didion quoting Yeats, “the center cannot hold.”
Well an interesting test case in this philosophy has come just two weeks later, with Lionsgate attempting to spin-off their big John Wick franchise with a side story starring Ana de Armas.
This is a franchise I greatly admire, both because of its genre redefining action filmmaking, Keanu Reaves incredible “gun fu” skills, and the fact that all of those movies know exactly what they are and don’t try to be anything else. It’s fun and non-stop action, not getting too bogged down in the coherence of the plot. In John Wick 4, Reaves speaks just 380 words across 2hr48min.
Those movies had continued to scale up and up and up, to unsustainable proportions, so Ballerina was an attempt to lower the temperature with a smaller budget and smaller ambition.
It’s exploring a different corner of the Wick universe (like the TV show “The Continental”), with de Armas playing a ballerina-turned-assassin named Eve who is certainly a badass but definitely is not on the same level as the “Baba Yaga” (Wick’s nickname, which in Russian folklore means boogeyman). If Wick is in this universe like Michael Jordan, then Eve is like Charles Barkley.
This movie was filmed from November 2022 to February 2023, but evidently Lionsgate decided somewhere along the way that they couldn’t successfully launch a movie in theaters led by a Charles Barkley.
To echo my previous sentiment, it wasn’t enough movie. A lower temperature doesn’t put buts in seats. So reportedly they went back and had extensive rewrites and reshoots to get a lot more John Wick into the movie.
The decision of more, bigger, buzzier causes a problem within this movie that, in my opinion, sinks the entire project. Any time Wick is on screen, he is instantly the most important and interesting thing in the movie. When he’s not on screen, he’s all anyone talks about (“It’s suicide if we go up there,” one bad guy says, “It’s John Wick.”).
When Eve and Wick eventually fight, it’s no contest. He manhandles her. And now that he’s been introduced, the movie is asking audiences to care about someone who you’ve now established is not as interesting or important as someone else around the periphery. That’s tough ask.
That’s not to say there’s not some cool action sequences, including creative kills using ice skates, dinner plates, grenade sandwiches, and probably the most extensive flamethrower work ever put in a movie.
De Armas isn’t Reaves when it comes to gun fu, but her athleticism is certainly on display in this movie and she handles the action stuff admirably.
And the movie spotlights it. The first half is cumbersome and familiar (isn’t it always daddy issues?), but in its second half, Ballerina brings the same fight-first sensibility as the Wick movies that I appreciate. Nearly every scene that’s supposed to be a “serious conversation” gets promptly interrupted by a gunfight. Classic armory scene where they’re explaining the guns? Boom a wall blows up. Reuniting with your long lost sister? Oops two grenades just came through the window. The villain explaining his devious master plan? Bullet to the face.
The beauty of that in the Wick movies is that it makes the movie feel light on its feet (as opposed to the enormous weight of blockbusterdom). But tacking Wick onto this movie weighs it down by requiring audiences to do their homework on previous installments, rewarding franchise fans with a scene that appeared in John Wick 3 from a different angle (Eve’s perspective). And, to state the obvious, the gluing and pasting between two differing scripts and shoots cannot help but feel cumbersome and disjointed.
So again I repeat myself — movies must get simpler, shorter, cheaper and more fun. You’ve got Ana de Armas kicking butt and taking names, I promise we’ll still be interested!
Something New
Good Night, and Good Luck (CNN): In case you didn’t see, I wrote a story for Forbes about Hollywood A-listers doing Broadway shows, centered around the incredible commercial success of George Clooney in Good Night, and Good Luck, which is based on a 2005 movie he wrote and directed (it’s currently not streaming but available on VOD). For the first time in Broadway history, CNN broadcasted one of the final performances live.
The show’s story, about 1950s news anchor Edward R. Murrow standing up to senator Joseph McCarthy’s communist scare campaign, could not be more resonant in this combative Trump-era media environment. In that way, the show feels almost as much like a political pep rally as a narrative (in a world where a free and objective media has become politically polarizing), but I had a slightly different take on the material.
The most resonant line to me was when a producer implores Murrow not to take on this advocacy journalism because “what happens when the next guy does this and he’s not Edward R. Murrow.” In that way, Murrow is somewhat guilty of opening pandora’s box to the infotainment opinion debate shows that now dominate the airwaves.
I found the show to be effective and imaginative in how it staged the TV studio, but the 20-camera setup robs an at-home viewer of the two things that I think make the show special on Broadway: 1) the multi-level, multi-room set propels a viewer through a ton of scenes of people in rooms talking, while cuts of a camera to different rooms feels like any old TV show, and more importantly, 2) viewers don’t get the magic and electricity of being in the same room as George Clooney…which is the reason for the sky-high ticket prices far more than the quality of the show.
Since the replay of this show isn’t immediately available for streaming, I do recommend the original movie, which will still resonate in much the same way.
Something Old
Alfred Hitchcock!! (Netflix): Gone are the days where the oldest movies on Netflix are from the 1990s! The Big Red Machine has added a handful of titles from the great Alfred Hitchcock, one of the greatest directors of all time and somebody whose classics have been mostly ignored by people around my age and younger. To that demographic I will give this sales pitch — Hitchcock was the Christopher Nolan of his day, a master of spectacle and mystery whose work more than stands the test of time.
If you’ve never seen Rear Window, Vertigo, Psycho, The Man Who Knew Too Much or The Birds, they are all must-sees for any aspiring cinephile (personally I’d recommend them in the order I just listed them…though my favorite Hitchcock movie continues to be North By Northwest, currently streaming on Tubi).
Something To Stream
Better Man (Paramount+): Of all the music biopics that have come out in recent years, and the many more to come, this was a unique one for me personally because it walks through the life of a pop star I had never even heard of — Robbie Williams. Apparently I’m a little too young for his 1990s British boy band Take That and subsequent tabloid sensation, so rather than watch it wondering what kind of slant would be put on the events I already knew, it was more about whether or not this movie could make me care about someone I couldn’t pick out of a police lineup.
I wouldn’t be able to pick him out of police lineup after the movie either, because of course, Williams’ character is portrayed throughout the entirety of the movie as a CGI monkey. The metaphor is a little too on-the-nose, if you ask me, and although the CGI animation was pretty good, in my opinion the stunt didn’t do enough to justify itself or distract from what is a very paint-by-numbers, daddy issues pop star plot.
It’s really well shot and staged, by director Michael Gracey (The Greatest Showman), and maybe ultimately the movie didn’t hit as hard for me as many others because I didn’t find myself loving Williams’ music — which I went into the movie a complete blank slate on. It’s definitely not the worst of this genre (Back to Black) or the best (Amadeus) but sits comfortably in the middle.
Trailer Watch: Freakier Friday
If you hadn’t noticed, studios have now moved on from the 90s to begin pillaging the early 2000s for nostalgia bait they can re-sell to audiences. And with the resurgence of Lindsay Lohan as a Netflix rom-com star (oof) and Jamie Lee Curtis as an Oscar winner (wow) this property makes too much sense.
But if your question is…are we sure these two are relevant enough to young audiences to lead a movie for teens?…the filmmakers seem to agree with you, since they made the plot of this movie the two of them switching bodies with actual teenagers. LOL. All I can think of is, “How do you do, fellow kids.”