Hello, my dear friends. I hope you had a great week and are ready to enjoy the weekend. I have a few Pop Culture suggestions for you so you don’t have to spend your free time looking for something to watch. This week I share some thoughts about two films. BULLET TRAIN, which is only available in cinemas, has an amazing cast and some fun moments but falls apart in the end. The other one is PREY. This is a surprisingly good prequel of the PREDATOR and is available for streaming on Hulu. I also talk about one of my favorite TV shows, RESERVATION DOGS which is back for its second season and you can also watch it on Hulu. And as always there is a playlist with 5 songs I enjoyed last week.
QUICK THOUGHTS
RESERVATION DOGS’ second season is as good and entertaining as its debut one. The show is a delightful, and razor-sharp comedy with a world-built and cinematic quality that transforms each shot into a beautiful painting. I really enjoy the series’ combination of heartfelt tenderness and weirdness. The show was co-created by Taika Waititi, who is known for having a weird but awesome sense of humor and also for having made two Thor movies. One that was pretty good and one that was pretty bad. But with this series Waititi and his partner, Sterlin Harjo really created something special. RESERVATION DOGS totally lives up to its lofty reputation as "a breakthrough in Indigenous portrayal on television.” In my opinion, this is a show that everybody needs to watch and I’m pretty sure you guys will like it.
BULLET TRAIN is directed by David Leitch (DEADPOOL 2) and Stars Brad Pitt, Joey King, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Brian Tyree Henry, Andrew Koji, Hiroyuki Sanada, Michael Shannon, Benito A Martínez Ocasio, and Sandra Bullock. Pitt plays Ladybug, an unlucky assassin determined to do his job peacefully after one too many gigs gone off the rails. BULLET TRAIN has its moments. The tone is over the top for sure, and it is more of an action film with some comical characters as opposed to a pure comedy flick. The great assemble cast carries much of the film through a very generic plot. But Pitt is the one who holds the whole thing together with his easygoing demeanor. The movie has two very entertaining acts. That is when the story is playing catch up to itself, the problems appear to never end, and the cast of outrageously over-the-top cartoonish criminals keeps expanding. However, when the flick hit its third act everything fell apart and BULLET TRAIN got very messy and borderline unwatchable. I suggest you wait until the movie gets its VOD or streaming release to watch it.
PREY
PREY which takes place 300 years ago in the Comanche Nation, tells the story of a teenage woman named Naru, a strong and accomplished warrior. When danger approaches her camp, she goes out to defend her people since she was bred in the shadow of some of the most renowned hunters that roam the Great Plains. She follows and eventually engages a highly developed alien predator with better-evolved weaponry than she had ever encountered before.
The PREDATOR franchise has long ago run out of ideas and presumably audience as well. After 35 years and six terrible films, it is had to justify watching another one. However, this entry adds an unexpected yet delightfully restrained element to the series by providing fans with a coming-of-age perspective on a well-known storyline. And t is not fueled by nostalgia like many of the remakes and reboots that we have seen lately.
So yeah, I had very low exceptions for PREY but it turns out to be much more interesting than I anticipated. The movie doesn’t overstay its welcome with a well-paced 90 minutes run. And even though it isn’t overly long the movie still managed to have some good character development. Additionally, it recreates the fear and savagery of being pursued by the most powerful entity in the universe. The film's visuals are full of lush, bright green fields, mountain landscapes, and forest lands. And the VFX is pretty solid for a streaming movie.
Overall, PREY is a Predator movie done right—a rare action thriller that raises the stakes without sacrificing dramatic tension.
TOP 5 SONGS
These were the 5 songs on heavy rotation in my house last week. You can listen to them on Spotify and YouTube.