The Only Living Pickpocket in New York

Plenty of movies have been called a love letter to New York City, but The Only Living Pickpocket in New York might be the one trying the hardest. If you’re just into seeing New York presented with total nostalgia set to smooth jazz, then this film is going to be your thing. Beyond the New York of it all, there’s still plenty here to enjoy, primarily because of John Turturro and the supporting cast. 

Turturro is, you guessed it, a pickpocket in New York, who longs for the old days of plenty of cash and classic watches. Now, it’s all cell phones and credit cards that can be easily canceled. He barely has anything to sell to his fence, the always great Steve Buscemi. When he swipes a USB card from a young gangster, things become life or death if he can’t retrieve the card.

The plot is fine, if not a little cheesy with all the analog vs. digital era stuff. Turturro is great and embodies an old school pickpocket, but the young gangster (Will Price) isn’t menacing, annoying, or compelling enough. I just didn’t believe anything he said. It’s partly performance, but mainly it’s the script. I just don’t believe that even a very young person would talk about technology like he does. 

It's a minor nit in an otherwise enjoyable time. This film doesn’t overstay its welcome coming in under ninety minutes. It could easily fall into an exercise in misery, but writer/director Noah Segan keeps things breezy, 

Turturro is the standout here, though I am a little surprised by the Oscar buzz I’ve been reading about. I’m all for him getting some recognition, but nothing here floored me. It’s an understated performance, and there’s something to be said for that, but I just don’t think this is going to stick with many people this awards season.

That written, it’s still worth checking out, especially if you’re a fan of these actors or of New York in general. Personally, though, I would rather have followed Buscemi around in The Last Skeezy Pawn Shop Fence in New York. 

The Haunted Cop Shop - 88 Films

My journey with 88 Films continues to be more and more obscure, and I’m fine with it. This time, it’s a supernatural comedy, The Haunted Cop Shop, most notable for being written by Wong Kar-wai. I’m no expert on Wong Kar-wai, but I do know that his more famous works don’t deal with vampire ghosts wearing bargain basement costumes attacking bumbling cops. But maybe they should. 

In all honesty, this wasn’t really for me. I’m just too far removed from this era and region of comedy. I imagine it would be similar to showing my kids some of my favorite comedies from the ‘90s when they’re older. They’ll most likely appreciate why people found them funny, but won’t really find them all that funny themselves. (But I’ll try to convince them that Bulletproof is an underrated Adam Sandler movie, anyway.) 

That’s not to say there isn’t plenty to enjoy here. The vampire stuff is silly and fun, and there were a couple moments that really threw me for a loop, like when the two heroes killed a dog and tried to trick people into eating it to break a curse. That might put some viewers off, especially since it’s treated for laughs (and the punishment for killing and cooking their boss’s dog is that they have to act like dogs for a little while). It definitely got my attention. 

And that’s about it. I’ll forever remember The Haunted Cop Shop as the movie Wong Kar-wai wrote with the dog killing. 

Transfer and Special Features

It’s 88 Films, so you know this is the best this film has ever looked, and you know you’re getting the best slipcase on the market. 

There’s also an audio commentary, a visual essay, and some deleted / alternate scenes.

Resident Evil - Padlock Humor

Resident Evil isn’t a film franchise that I get too excited about. I liked the first film okay, but I got tired of the hyper-stylized sequels early on and only recently revisited them to finish the series, and I still haven’t watched 2021’s Welcome to Raccoon City. In other words, the franchise itself was not the draw when this new film was announced; writer/director Zach Cregger was. 

I loved Cregger’s first two films, Barbarian and Weapons, so I knew this new Resident Evil would likely have a few disturbing moments and plenty of humor throughout. Where it differs from his previous work is the pacing. His first two films have flashbacks and disjointed timelines, but Resident Evil is very much a video game movie in that it is always moving forward with clear objectives. 

As a bigger fan of the Resident Evil games than the films, this new movie excited me. But I am not a superfan by any means. I’ve only played a handful of the games. That actually puts me in the sweet spot for this movie because I don’t care that there are no video game characters included in this film, but I know enough of the game to understand a few Easter eggs scattered throughout. Anyone expecting a straight up adaptation of any storyline from any game in the series will be disappointed.

Anyone expecting a straight up horror movie will be disappointed, too. Resident Evil, despite being a part of the zombie genre, is much more a monster movie than a zombie film. Yes, the dead come back to life, but early on we get some gnarly, nightmarish creatures. This leads to plenty of creepy moments, especially since the film takes place entirely at night and features locales like abandoned farms, tunnels, sewers, etc. Everything is there for this to be both a standard horror movie and adaptation, but it’s great because it’s neither of those things.

First, there are enough zombie movies and TV shows already, so even if this was a good one, it would still be a little boring. This is why leaning into the franchise’s more monstrous-type of enemies is a good move. As for the adaptation aspect, that’s been tried before both with the Paul W.S. Anderson series in which they shoe-horned in characters like Leon Kennedy and Ada Wong to mediocre effect. And the attempt to make an extremely faithful adaptation with Welcome to Raccoon City was largely ignored, so why try that again so soon?

But Resident Evil is still a video game movie, which is a genre that has been notoriously tricky to adapt. Video games are inherently silly, and Cregger’s film plays into that. There may not be specific plotlines or characters from the games in this film, but plenty of other video games elements are present. The games have clear boundaries you cannot pass, and the film hilariously portrays that with the use of different padlocks. In a running gag, the main character, Bryan (an excellently bumbling Austin Abrams), tries to shoot padlocks to no effect. This is one of those silly game moments. Often, especially in older games, simple things like locks and fences are nonsensically impossible to get past, so it was nice to see that element in the film. 

More than that, Bryan serves as a surrogate for the gamer audience. He levels up throughout the movie, getting better weapons and getting better at handling increasingly insane situations. From a movie standpoint, he will appear very stupid, and audiences will likely be talking to the screen asking, “Why are you doing that?” But from a game perspective, we know he has to. Being even a casual gamer isn’t a requirement to enjoy this film, but it certainly helped in my case, and I definitely felt seen when Abrams proclaimed, “Yeah! Video games!” after a triumphant moment. 

Because of this, Resident Evil, like most video games, is more about the experience than the plot or character development. The plot isn’t an issue, as simple is sometimes better, especially in a video game adaptation. Bryan is a medical courier who needs to get something to a hospital, and zombies and creatures are in his way. No need for superfluous mythology. As for character, there are little elements, such as Bryan having fears of becoming a parent. But the film doesn’t have time to get too bogged down with it (and there is one gross sequence that amplifies that fear). It’s more important that Bryan is simply likable enough that we want to see him succeed, and Abrams handles that seemingly effortlessly. Sure, Bryan does plenty of stuff the audience might find stupid, but he never becomes one of those horror characters that you want to see bad things happen to. 

There were a lot of ways this film could go wrong, but Zach Cregger found a way to walk that fine line between grisly and funny, which is exactly what a series like Resident Evil needed. 

Random Thoughts (SPOILERS)

When I saw that first padlock, I knew even driving through it wouldn’t break it, and I also knew that the padlock at the hospital could be taken out with a gun. These are things that you just know from playing video games. 

As a fan of Blank Check with Griffin and David, it was great to see Griffin Newman in the lab scene along with Zach Cherry, who has been a guest on the podcast multiple times. They’re currently doing the Resident Evil movies on Patreon, but Newman hadn’t revealed he was in the movie until the most recent episode covering Retribution. The crazy thing for me is that I almost had his part spoiled for me. I was ready to listen to the Retribution episode, but I had another podcast to finish first, so I didn’t get to start it until on the way home from watching this movie. I was minutes away from having that surprise ruined for me. 

As for that ending, I did find it a bit of a missed opportunity. I know Cregger is done with any Whitest Kids U Know stuff after Trevor Moore died, and aside from a tray of hot dogs in Weapons that might or might not be a reference to the show, he hasn’t included any of the remaining cast in his films. But how great would it have been if the rest of the WKUK guys, including Cregger (who did the voice on the intercom), had been the fuck-up scientists on the top floor along with Cherry and Newman. It would have been distracting as fuck, but seeing all those dudes in lab coats fucking up a cure to save the world would have been great.

As I stated above, I’m not a super fan of the games, having only played a handful. But I did still notice some obvious references like the healing sprays in the barn, the typewriter in the farmhouse, the way the alleys were like a closed off maze, and the emphasis on keeping track of ammo. I’m sure there are plenty more, but nothing felt too silly or forced to me, which is the most important thing.

I’ve seen some people compare this to a John Carpenter movie, and I kind of agree. Cregger certainly likes this genre, and he’s talked about not venturing too far out of it. 

As much as I liked Bryan, I was glad he didn’t get the antidote at the end. First off, there just can’t be a happy ending after everything that happened. And how would that have worked, anyway? He had eaten and morphed with five or six people at that point. What happens to them? And how does he live with that if the antidote works? Better to stay a monster.

Bryan’s realization that he wants to have a child with his girlfriend (which he only realizes as he’s conveniently about to transform into a monster) made me worry he was going to be okay at the end of the film, which would have sucked because then this would have turned into some metaphor for growing up and becoming a parent or some shit. Fuck that. I don’t need every horror movie to be a metaphor for shit. Sometimes it can just be a fun horror movie.

That written, there is still plenty of parenthood fear shit going on here, but it’s pretty blatant. I mean, a crazy long-armed monster baby gets a thirty second reveal in a maternity ward that Bryan is forced to enter. That’s not exactly subtext. But I did love that he immediately killed it as if to say, “This isn’t about parenthood. That’s a fucked up monster baby, and it needs to die.”

I always enjoy the title popping up fifteen plus minutes in a movie.

I don’t want to dwell on this, but I saw so much bitching online about this not being like the games enough. I’m sure a lot of it is clickbait garbage, but there are also real people that probably feel this way. To them, I say, “What the fuck?” If you wanted more of the Paul W.S. Anderson shit, then just rewatch those. There’s no need to replicate that. And if you want more of a straightforward adaptation, there’s the Raccoon City movie or all the animated movies. What else was there to try with this series than this? And not to mention, Cregger has said he’s done with it, but you know the studio isn’t. There will be sequels, and the world is not established to allow video game characters to be introduced. And guess what, it’ll probably fucking suck. I just can’t imagine being a fan of this series and being upset with this film when so many other iterations already exist. You always have the option to pick and choose which movies and shows you watch. Maybe skip this one if you just want to see one of the games faithfully recreated.

The Last Boy Scout - Arrow 4K

The Last Boy Scout is getting the 4K treatment from Arrow next week, so I got a chance to check it out, which is timely as the NFL season has begun. This and Any Given Sunday are two movies I enjoy revisiting every season because they expose the dark side of the game. Of course, there’s a lot more to love about The Last Boy Scout (like Kim Coates getting his nose punched into his brain by a hungover Bruce Willis), but the football stuff is exceptionally relevant today.

The master plan of the villain in The Last Boy Scout is to blackmail politicians into legalizing sports gambling. When he kills Damon Wayans’s girlfriend and Bruce Willis’s best friend, they team up to get justice. Along the way there is a lot of violence and wise cracks, along with some football (the opening football scene with Billy Blanks is probably the film’s most famous scene along with the Kim Coates moment). It’s one of those great ‘90s movies we just don’t get anymore that I only love more and more as the years pass. The gambling element hits differently today, though.

Throughout the film, people complain about free agency money ruining football because the players became too greedy. We’re so far beyond the implementation of free agency, and pro sports have become so much bigger since then that this is laughably quaint now. But the gambling plot is unfortunately relevant. Damon Wayans’s character was a superstar who got kicked out of the league for gambling (the physical toll of the game is addressed by his drug addiction, as well). This is just insane by today’s standards as players are allowed to make commercials for gambling, and the NFL in general has completely embraced it.

The only thing that the film is naive about is how gambling became implemented. It didn’t take car bombs, dead strippers, political assassinations and blackmail; simple greed and capitalism took care of it. It all happened thanks to Chris Christie and some Jersey fuckwads worried about the future of Atlantic City (so dead strippers probably were still a part of it). Their lawsuit paved the way for the rest of the states to legalize sports gambling, and that’s why something that used to be handled exclusively by the mob is now being advertised to you multiple times a day by Kevin Hart and LeBron James. Turns out gambling is okay when CEOs and governments can reap the benefits. 

Knowing all this puts a different spin on The Last Boy Scout. It’s just weird to see so much violence perpetuated for something so legal and commonplace in today’s world.

The football stuff is an interesting aspect of the film, but I keep coming back to it for Willis and Wayans. Despite reports of a troubled production in which Willis demanded changes and didn’t get along with Wayans, The Last Boy Scout came out just fine. Willis and Wayans’s characters don’t like each other for most of the film, so their real-life animosity probably helped their performances. I have a soft spot for ‘90s Wayans shit, but Willis is the main draw for me. 

My favorite type of Bruce Willis performance involves self-hatred, hangovers, and smoking, and god damn this movie has that going on. Willis begins the film passed out in his car. Before he drives off, he looks in the mirror and tells himself, “Nobody likes you. Everybody hates you. You’re going to lose. Smile, you fuck.” Writer Shane Black confirms in a new interview for this release that he was in a dark place when he wrote this, and it shows. Willis is at his most depressed in this role, but he’s still somehow likable. This film showcases that quality he had, primarily in the ‘90s, of playing someone you would probably hate in real life but would root for in a movie. The Last Boy Scout pushes that to its limits early on, but Willis grows on you, thanks to the constant shit-talking he gets to do with Wayans. And having a lot of dickhead goons around to kill helps, too. 

So smile, you fucks, and check out this great new release of The Last Boy Scout, and revisit a time when the idea of widespread sports gambling was so abhorrent it was only something an over-the-top villain in ‘90s action movie.

Transfer and Special Features 

Arrow always looks great, and if you check out the workprint footage, you’ll get to see how much better the transfer is compared to that untouched footage.

It’s awesome that they got Shane Black for an interview. It's more of a whole career thing, which is great. But he gets into how it all came together. 

He talks about being depressed while writing it. That tracks, because Willis’s character is so fucking depressing in this.

Originally he was supposed to save his wife, but Willis didn't want to do that again after Die Hard.

Danielle Harris talks about cussing, braces, and having fun filming with Taylor Negron, which sounds like a great time.

She tells a Tarantino story. He's a noted Last Boy Scout fan and in Once Upon a Time… he was going to have her yell a cut line from this film at Brad Pitt. But she couldn't film the scene because she gave birth the day they were supposed to shoot the scene. The line was, “Take a bath in my ass!” She promises to try to get it on screen at some point.

There's a featurette with a French dude who literally wrote a book about Tony Scott, so I suppose he's a good choice to talk about Scott for half an hour.

There’s an Interview after a marathon screening of Shane Black films at the American Cinematheque from a couple years ago. It’s not focused on this film, but still, any fan will find it interesting for all the talk about his other work and Joel Silver.

There is some newly found workprint footage with deleted and alternate scenes. They make it very clear that this wasn’t some drastically different cut, just some editing for length and content. The big differences happened to the script before shooting began.

It's nice that each moment has the workprint version followed by the theatrical, and there are explanations of the differences before each scene.

It's all very minor, though some of the more violent edits would have been nice. But overall, this footage isn’t some bombshell discovery of a director’s cut or anything.

There's also an audio commentary with a couple critics that I'm not going to listen to.

And the original script is also included. Actually, the first two drafts are there. Look, I love this movie, but I also know it isn’t high art. I am not reading one script, much less two to see what changes they made, but it’s nice that it’s there for bigger fans than me.

Random Thoughts 

I’m ashamed to admit I kind of like that “Friday night’s a great night for football” song. And now that the NFL seems willing to play games any day of the week, they could legitimately use this at some point.

I love Tony Scott, but between this and The Fan, it's clear that he never watched professional sports. The football game here and the baseball game in The Fan are inexplicably dark. Even the announcers in this look like they're calling the game while hiding from a slasher in a closet. And no fucking way would the entire audience be allowed to have open umbrellas. 

Billy Blanks, you don't have to do this! Trust me, you'll have plenty of money in a few years from the Tae Bo videos.

“I think I fucked a squirrel to death and don't even remember it.”

This is my favorite kind of Bruce Willis performance: hungover and chain smoking.

Weird that Noble Willingham played an NFL team owner in this and Ace Ventura. I guess he does give off dickhead team owner vibes.

There is way too much banter going on with Wayans right after his girlfriend was killed in front of him. They tack on a little moment with him crying a single tear about it, but that doesn't excuse the constant joking around. I guess we all grieve in different ways.

He was cheating on her, though, so he wasn't exactly boyfriend of the year.

In less than 36 hours, Willis is at the scene of two car explosions and a massive shootout. At what point do they just lock him up as a precaution?

“Apparently there are too many bullets in this gun,” is a pretty fucking cool thing to say before shooting someone.

I mainly wanted to check this out just to see Willis punch Kim Coates's nose into his brain in 4K.

It's hilarious that Willis continues to chainsmoke even as he's held captive. The bad guys just keep giving him cigarettes.

Man, it seems like these guys get caught by the bad guys ten times. Lucky for them these bad guys have a “take them somewhere else and let them talk a lot of shit before you kill them” policy.

I don’t think free agency is hurting pro football as much as shootings happening two games in a row. But Taylor Negron getting shredded by a chopper, and Bruce Willis dancing brings the crowd back immediately, so it's fine.