October 21, 2025

Think Fast: Movies That Move Like Action Films But Aren't

An under-the-radar movie about an iconic music moment and revisiting edge-of-your-seat non-traditional action films.

Apologies for the longer than usual silence. As many of you know, life has been lifey lately, but I was able to get back into a few things this past week. Including a very cool new under-the-radar movie I want to tell you about. 

You might not know her name, but Vera Brandes pulled off one of the most action-packed stunts in music history. 

I honestly had no idea who she was before my friend Mike invited me to see a movie about her. I’ve known Mike for nearly four decades—yikes!—and when he suggests we see something, I’ve learned to just go along with it. I mean, this is a guy who in 1991 said, “Hey, I’ve got two comp tickets to Blue Note next week, wanna come?” And it turned out to be the Charlie Watts Quintet performing music inspired by his 1964 children’s book art school project, Ode to a High Flying Bird, about jazz musician Charlie Parker. 

To answer your questions: just Keith. And 20 year-old Amanda accidentally bumped right into him, but he was gracious about it. 

Anyway, I didn’t write this as an excuse to tell that story, but as a way of saying you should watch something Mike told me to, and a few other great movies it reminded me of. 

Last Saturday, after an afternoon of joining fellow Brooklynites in saying “No Faux King Way!”, I went to Manhattan to join Mike and his daughter Jerusha to catch a screening of Köln 75, a movie about how pianist Keith Jarrett’s legendary performance at Cologne Opera House almost didn’t happen. 

The movie does not center on Jarrett, the improvisational pianist who many consider to be an unrivaled musical genius. His whole schtick is that he plays without a plan. There’s no program. Completely made up on the spot. No two performances alike. You never know what he’s going to do, and it’s typically an intense, emotional, and transportive performance. Despite occasional outbursts accusing audience members of breaking his concentration by coughing etc., people eat it up. 

But the film, directed by Ido Fluk, is about Vera Brandes (brilliantly depicted both as a teen by Mala Emde and adult by Susanne Wolf), who started hanging out in Cologne, Germany jazz clubs at the age of 15. In 1975, when she was only 18, she was leading a double life, convincing people she was much older than she was and booking shows for Ronnie Scott and other jazz musicians out of a secret flat while still technically living with her parents.

After seeing Jarrett (played by John Magaro) perform, she made up her mind to book him a local gig, and for some reason, to make it happen at a venue no one outside of classical music had ever played. She had never even met the guy and had no prior connection to the opera house. She was just a champion schmoozer. It was stunt booking beyond her years. 

I’m spoiling nothing by telling you the concert happened. The recording from the Köln show is one of the best-selling albums of all time. However, the insane behind-the-scenes machinations were practically Apollo 13 mission control level berserk (Ok, without a major aerospace disaster or anyone in danger of falling from the sky to their deaths, but still pretty nuts). 

The Köln concert lead up was fraught with problems, the least of which was actually Jarrett’s ego (though it played heavily into it). What follows is the story about that day and evening, with pacing that is on par with the best of any action movie. And it’s mostly a true story (Brandes herself took part in a post-screening Q & A at IFC Center), with a few creative flourishes, such as a devoted music journalist charmingly played by Michael Chernus, who gets involved with Brandes’ “Scooby gang” of cohorts who help pull it off. 

It should be noted that Jarrett, who is now 80, has distanced himself from both the real concert and the film about it, so the rights to his performance were not secured. However, unlike other movies with this issue, the other music in the movie is superbly framed around it—like this song from the German band CAN. 

Seeing this movie reminded me of a few others that deal with subjects outside of the conventional car-chase-blow-shit-up-real-good type of action movie. 

Grand Theft Parsons

Another wild based-on-a-true story of a musician, this 2003 flick directed by David Caffrey takes place immediately after country-rock musician Gram Parson’s 1973 death from a drug overdose in Joshua Tree, California. His road manager and best friend, Phil Kaufman, played by Johnny Knoxville, finds out Parson’s family wants to take his body back to Louisiana for a traditional Christian burial. But before he died, Parsons and Kaufman made a mutual pact: if anything happened to the other, the survivor has the deceased cremated and the ashes spread in Joshua Tree.

So Kaufman decides to steal his body from the airport before his stepfather can claim it. 

Roadtrip ensues. 

Grand Theft Parsons is another movie where the real life outcome is known (in this case very loosely, but still), yet the journey and well supporting characters (Michael Shannon, Christina Applegate, Marley Shelton, among others) still make it feel entertaining, tense, and exhilarating. 

While the City Sleeps

It can be argued that movies like All the President’s Men and the Post make stories about journalists racing to publish vital (and real!) news-breaking stories feel as heart-pumping as a runaway train sequence. 

However, before either of these films (or a government scandal of Nixonian magnitude), the news editors and reporters who were depicted as fictional characters broke stories and actually solved crimes. 

While the City Sleeps from 1956 is a film noir directed by Fritz Lang about a conservative media mogul, Walter Kyne, (Vincent Price!) who is desperate to sell papers. When The Lipstick Killer—all his victims wear lipstick—terrorizes New York City, Kyne pits competing paper editors and writers against each other to break the story. The incentive is not only to crack the case, but to get a promotion. The narrative tension shifts from the conventions of a murder mystery to the pressures of maintaining relevance in the news world.

Sound familiar? 

Also starring Dana Andrews, Ida Lupino (a one-liner goddess), Rhonda Fleming, George Sanders, Howard Duff, and Sally Forrest. 

Big Night

Co-directed by Campbell Scott and Stanley Tucci, 1996’s Big Night is set in the 1950s and tells the story of two Italian immigrant brothers played by Tucci (Secondo) and Tony Shalhoub (Primo, a purist chef) who own a restaurant called Paradise on the Jersey Shore. Secondo just wants to keep it open, even if that means resorting to Americanized red sauce expectations to compete with a rival restaurant. Primo thinks he can convert the masses if only they had a taste of what he’s capable of. 

So with the help of Phyllis, Secondo’s devoted, but hapless girlfriend (Minnie Driver) they hatch this scheme to get the crooner Louis Prima to dine at the restaurant while he’s on tour. They invite everyone they know to dine for free, blowing their whole wad, as they plan a complicated menu built around timpano—an exquisite, delicate layered pasta dish that is extraordinarily pesky to execute correctly. It’s served by inverting it from its baking vessel onto a platter. One mistake and the whole thing goes from divino to disastro. 

Will they get everyone to come? Will Louis Prima show up? Will the timpano come out in one piece? What happens to the restaurant if the night is a failure? 

I contend there would be no The Bear without Big Night. 

My Favorite Year

From a nostalgic distance, this 1982 film starring Peter O’Toole as an aging, alcoholic, womanizing, yet still dashing Erol Flynn type named Alan Swann feels like a mushy star vehicle. But at its heart, My Favorite Year is about the complicated risks of live television (the movie takes place surrounding a variety TV show in 1954).

Benjy Stone (Mark Linn-Baker) finds out that his childhood idol is booked as the week’s guest, and it’s his job to make sure the guy is not only upright, but able to fake his way through a skit. The babysitting gig soon turns into pure chaos. 

Ultimately, it’s a sweet story about mentorship, but it’s still a nail biter. 

American Fiction

This 2023 satirical drama directed by Cord Jefferson follows writer Thelonius “Monk” Ellison (Jeffrey Wright), a Black writer and academic who struggles with following up a semi-successful novel. Though he has hardcore fans, he’s been accused of being “not Black enough” by critics and would-be publishers. He then writes what he considers to be an absurd parody (the title of the book gives away some of the plot, but it’s hilarious) under the pseudonym Stagg R. Leigh, but to see it through, he has to completely assume Leigh’s identity as an escaped criminal literary savant. 

The clueless publisher eats it up. So how does Monk continue living this double life, dealing with issues of racial conformity and exploitation? What happens when he’s found out? The battles Monk is fighting in American Fiction are intellectual and moral rather than physical, but they carry the same tension and stakes as a thriller. From the moment he writes his fake novel, Monk sets in motion a chain of escalating consequences. 

Although honestly, any story, truth or fiction, dealing with the publishing world these days can feel like a thriller.

More in due time (thank you for your support, Schudowners!)

Amanda

What are your favorite not action but still action movies? Please feel free to comment!