4 Razors

Usagi Yojimbo #25

/ / Comics

Attempting to avoid crowds heading to local festivals, Usagi and Yukichi split off and take a less-traveled path in the first issue of the two-part “Crossroads.” First they pass a group of unsavory characters, but without conflict. Later, they find a group of slaughtered pilgrims and, realizing what has happened, the pair go after the killers. However, when the trail runs cold and the road splits the two warriors must split up as well.

Usagi finds more destruction in the warrior’s wake in their latest victims, but Yukichi finds something quite different, but no less dangerous, in a young girl whos draws him in with her flute playing, luring the young warrior into a trap for her uncle. On the trail of six remorseless killers, has Usagi actually taken the safer path?

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That’ll Do, Nicolas Cage

/ / Home Video
  • Title: Pig
  • IMDb: link

Nicolas Cage stars as former chef turned hermit and truffle hunter who is pulled out of his seclusion when his pig is kidnapped. With the reluctant help of the supplier (Alex Wolff) to whom he was selling his truffles, Rob (Cage) begins a search for his missing pig (who, despite the love Rob obviously has for the pig, doesn’t appear to have a name).

Pig is something like John Wick or Taken with all of the violence taken out (okay, almost all of the violence). The film relies on Cage’s performance and the atmosphere provided from the visuals of cinematographer Patrick Scola in exploring both Rob’s wilderness experience and also the underbelly of big city restaurants. Pig glosses over some nagging plot questions and supplies a not-completely-satisfying ending, but that don’t detract too much from Rob and Amir’s (Wolff) unusual journey.

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MLK/FBI

/ / Home Video
  • Title: MLK/FBI
  • IMDb: link

Director Sam Pollard‘s film examines J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI‘s extensive, and legally ambiguous, investigation into Martin Luther King Jr.‘s life through recently declassified documents, archival footage, and interviews from those involved.

The documentary is a sobering reminder how the broad brush of Communism could justify nearly anything during the height of the Red Scare, even allow Hoover and his minions to wiretap King in hopes of discrediting one of the leaders of the Civil Rights movement based not on his political or civil rights agenda but the man’s private life taking place behind closed doors. With the wiretaps themselves not declassified until at least 2027, the documentary mainly has to speculate what is on those tapes (and their legitimacy), but the range of the FBI’s dirty tricks to discredit a black man who they saw as dangerous to their own interests couldn’t be more clear.

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The Batman & Scooby-Doo Mysteries #10

/ / Comics

When a number of resorts are terrorized by a series of creatures all resembling a sasquatch, Batman enlists the help of Mystery, Inc. and the Question to solve the case. The reason for the attack comes from the land each of the resorts were built on, as General Eiling was making use of the Shaggy Man for his own devious ends in order to put each of the resorts out of business so he could then plunder an old military cache buried deep underground.

Renee, appearing both as herself and the Question, is a fun addition that fits right in with Scooby-Doo and the gang. Unlike the gang’s usual traps, the one Batman sets captures both Shaggy Man and the General without a hitch (although I don’t know if Batman really needed to surf in able to pull that off, but to each his own). 

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Mass

/ / Home Video
  • Title: Mass
  • IMDb: link

Written and directed by Fran Kranz, Mass offers an intimate setting to delve into two families’ pain. Six years after a school shooting, the parents of two children involved agree to meet in the basement of a local church. On one side we have Jason Isaacs and Martha Plimpton as the parents of one of the victims and on the other Reed Birney and Ann Dowd as the parents of the shooter who also took his own life. Both couples are still wracked with pain and seeking answers to a brutal event that changed both families forever.

Mass is a film designed to put its four characters, and the audience, through the wringer as both sides work through their pain attempting to make sense of a senseless crime as the family of the victim and that of the perpetrator discover a shared pain.

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