Archive for February, 2008

Pistol Whipped

Friday, February 29th, 2008

This April marks (for death) the 20th anniversary of ABOVE THE LAW. Can you believe we’re that old? Two decades since Steven Seagal’s debut, arriving on the action movie scene fully-formed, already a star, already with his iconic look (well, he didn’t have the ponytail quite yet), already with his shadowy CIA past, his intense knowledge of Asian tradition, and his drive to take on the corrupt and throw them through panes of glass.

Alot has stayed the same in those 20 years, but alot has changed. He got bigger. His movies got bigger (UNDER SIEGE), then smaller (THE PATRIOT). He moved from the big screen to the DVD. By my way of thinking he’s gone through three major periods of his career and is now late in the DTV Era.

It’s been years since he’s gotten good reviews or mainstream respect (opening weekend of 2001’s EXIT WOUNDS to be exact), but that hardly matters. I’ve rarely met a Seagal-critic who could even name the movies he was trying to make fun of. What did matter was when Seagal started to disappoint his actual audience. Movies like OUT OF REACH were patched together with obvious voice and stunt doubles subbing for Seagal, SUBMERGED and ATTACK FORCE were sci-fi movies rejiggered to remove the mutants and aliens, leaving their stories muddled and incoherent. The last straw might’ve been last year’s FLIGHT OF FURY, where the producers tricked Seagal into making a movie with a script they’d already used for Michael Dudikoff’s BLACK THUNDER. Worse than that it’s built around Seagal flying jets, even though the audience will never forget he’s sitting in front of a green screen and not flying the jet in that stock footage. Shouldn’t he be throwing guys through windows? (more…)

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Death Wish II

Sunday, February 24th, 2008

For the first DEATH WISH sequel we trade down from Dino DiLaurentiis to Golan and Globus producing. Apparently Menahem Golan almost directed, but Bronson wouldn’t do it unless they got Michael Winner back. I bet he said “why get a loser when you can get a Winner?” Anyway we caught a lucky break there. I guess Winner must’ve broken up with Maria from SESAME STREET by this time so Herbie Hancock was out. Instead he got one of his neighbors to score, a neighbor who happened to be Jimmy Page. I was worried but there’s only guitar soloing on the beginning and end credits, the rest is standard old school score, not cheesy ’80s keyboards and rockin guitars and shit. So I’m not gonna complain.

It’s 1982 now, 8 years later, but they say it’s 4 years later. (The magic of cinema.) Paul Kersey lives in L.A. now. His adventures in Chicago (portrayed in the book Death Sentence) are ignored. He’s still an architect, h has a new girlfriend (Jill Ireland) and he’s moved his daughter to a hospital in California. She’s still so traumatized she doesn’t speak.

His life seems happy but then he has a run-in with some weirdos in the park. They steal his wallet so he chases one of them down and beats him up in an alley. Very satisfying, but too bad his driver’s license was up to date. They go to his house, rape his housekeeper, hit him over the head with a crowbar, kidnap his daughter, then rape his daughter until she kills herself.

One time a guy at the DMV scolded me for not updating my address after I moved, and he said if the police were looking for me they’d go to the old address. I said that was a pretty good case for not updating your address, and DEATH WISH II is another one. If Paul was still carrying around his Illinois driver’s license his daughter and maid would still be alive. And those thugs would be wandering around Chicago trying to find him. (more…)

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A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge

Sunday, February 24th, 2008

Technically Freddy already got his revenge in part 1 by going after the children of the people who burned him alive. In this one he’s just messing with a new kid who moves into the same house. It really is not revenge when you do it to a stranger who never did anything to you before and is not related to anyone who did anything to you before. Not to be pedantic but, come on dude, titles are important. Make ‘em count.

I always thought FREDDY’S REVENGE was the worst of the ELM STREET pictures, a pretty common view. They ended up figuring out the sequel formula in part 3 and they stuck with that for a while so part 2 is now kind of the odd man out when you look back at it.

But watching it again now I realize that’s a good thing. Freddy had not yet become a comedian, so although he’s probaly on screen a little more than in part 1 he’s still pretty scary and mysterious. At the end of part 1 Nancy had dis-believed him out of existence (at least before the shock-ending – we never really know what happened with that) so now his way to come back is through this kid who lives in Nancy’s house (although it sure doesn’t look like the same house) and found her diary (that we never saw her writing in before).

The different twist is that instead of attacking this kid Jesse in his dreams and hurting him for real Jesse has dreams about Freddy attacking other people, then all the sudden realizes that it’s him wearing the glove. Watching it this time I realize this is actually a really clever idea for the sequel because it makes it a different type of psychological horror – the fear of what you could do to others instead of the fear of what others could do to you. He’s afraid that he is murdering people without realizing it. And it’s playing off of his deep felt hatred of people like his asshole gym teacher. Alot of people have some violent anger in them at that age, that’s why you get all these school shootings. So I think it’s a good spin on the concept of the original. (more…)

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Death Wish

Saturday, February 23rd, 2008

After enjoying recent DEATH WISH ripoffs and spinoffs like DEATH SENTENCE and THE BRAVE ONE, I thought it would be a good time to revisit the source, and to see those sequels I never got around to watching. (By the source I mean the first Charles Bronson movie and not the book by Brian Garfield, which is apparently similar but clearly anti-vigilante in the end – that’s why he wrote the sequel Death Sentence, because he was so mad about the DEATH WISH movie.)

Charles Bronson plays Paul Kersey, New York architect, happily married father, “bleeding heart liberal,” Korean War veteran with conscientious objector status. A cool guy. Then one day a gang of hoodlums (including Jeff Goldblum in his first movie role) follow Paul’s wife and daughter home from the grocery store and rape them. Mrs. Kersey dies and the daughter is so traumatized she’s hospitalized in a near catatonic state.

Paul’s annoying son-in-law (who calls him “dad” way too much for comfort) convinces Paul to take an opportunity to go work on a project in Tucson to get away from it all. Hanging out with ranchers he ends up going to the gun range, where he gets a condescending lecture about how the city wouldn’t be so violent if everybody had guns like out here. When he leaves they give him a gun as a gift. So, uh, that might end up being used for something. Who knows?

Of course Kersey ends up in a one man war against crime, going out late at night waiting for people to try to mug him so he can shoot them with his new gun. It makes him feel good. Strangely, he never ends up tracking down or even trying to track down the dudes who attacked his family. Since this was the start of the urban vigilante formula it hadn’t yet occurred to them that that was a good way to make the story satisfying. Or maybe they just knew it was unrealistic. That didn’t become a part of the formula until part 2. (more…)

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The Brave One

Saturday, February 23rd, 2008

I’m not totally sure why she’s The Brave One, but Jodie Foster plays a public radio host who gets attacked in Central Park one night by some assholes. They steal her dog, beat her fiancee to death and leave her in a coma. All of which I’m against. Then she tries to get revenge. Good stuff.

Since the director is Neil Jordan, and especially since it stars Jodie Foster, I kind of thought it was gonna be a pretentious “serious” take on the vigilante genre, maybe even condescending toward it, looking down on these types of movies and trying to do the respectable version of them. But thankfully the movie doesn’t have that feel, and if you check the publicity interviews on the DVD they all check out. Foster states that it is in fact a genre movie, and Neil Jordan drops names like Don Siegel and Sam Fuller. I guess I forgot Joel Silver was the producer, he’s not gonna get all fancy pants on us.

So what’s the twist, besides Charles Bronson is a lady? Well, I’m sure this must’ve been done before but I can’t off the top of my head think of a vigilante movie where the vigilante feels this bad about it. For example in DEATH WISH Charles Bronson’s character Paul Kersey feels so good about shooting people that he spruces up his apartment and listens to happy music and it freaks out his son-in-law who wonders “what do you have to be so high about?” Usually it takes a while to push them but the movie will stack the deck so that the bad guys are so bad and the system is so broken that you gotta applaud the Brave One’s brave activities. Here you definitely get the feeling she might be going too far. One incident in particular, some kids are bullying people on a subway, stealing iPods. One of them does pull a knife on her, but does she really need to kill them? Both of them? And does race play a role in it? It’s obviously meant to remind you of Bernard Goetz, and also of DEATH WISH, where Kersey sits in the same place on a subway, also gets a knife pulled on him by two African-Americans, and also shoots them both. But Kersey doesn’t feel bad about it. The Brave One does and admits that she could’ve just shown them the gun and they would’ve left.

There’s even a scene where she tries to turn herself in, but the police don’t know what she’s babbling about so she leaves. In a big city like New York and all the crazies they must deal with there I thought this was believable and kind of a scary thing to think about. (more…)

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2/22/08

Friday, February 22nd, 2008

Some day soon I’m gonna compile links to all the Seagalogy publicity I’ve done so far, but until then here’s a new one that’s pretty good. I’m promoting both Seagalogy and a showing of URBAN JUSTICE on Spike TV (on Oscar night).

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Michael Clayton

Thursday, February 21st, 2008

Who the fuck is Michael Clayton and why is he so awesome that a movie is named after him? Well to answer your first question, Michael Clayton is a highly effective “fixer” played by George Clooney who cleans up messes for a big law firm, and to answer your second one I guess they figured coming up with some thriller type name like THE FIXER or DEADLY REVELATION or THE BREADWINNER would be corny so they just said I don’t know, fuck it, use the character’s name, I don’t give a shit. And MICHAEL CLAYTON was born.

The thing I cannot stress enough about this movie is that it’s really fuckin good. I wasn’t prepared for that. I heard it was good, I knew it was nominated for best picture, but I don’t know man. Nobody really properly conveyed it to me I guess. I didn’t expect to be blown away by it. But this is just a great thriller, one that works so well and talks down to you so little it’s hard to believe it was made in this day and age.

The movie starts out with Mr. Clayton late one night betting on cards, then getting an emergency call from the firm, one of their biggest clients was involved in a hit and run and Clayton’s boss (Sydney fuckin Pollack) wants him to go help out. Okay, so this is gonna be some thriller involving a rich guy who tries to cover up that he ran over a jogger, right? No, this is really just here to establish Michael Clayton’s character. We’re about 10 or 15 minutes into the movie, I have no idea what the plot is even gonna be about, and I already like this movie because it’s just so tense.

Before long it skips back 4 days to show us the more important mess Michael Clayton is trying to clean up. His friend Arthur (Tom Wilkinson) has spent 6 years defending a pesticide company against a class action lawsuit, but now he’s off his anti-depressants and for some reason he went nuts, took his clothes off in a deposition room, declared his love for one of the plaintiffs and then chased everybody around the parking lot. And some of it was caught on tape. Not quite as damning as the R. Kelly tape, but close. As Michael tries to talk some sense into his crazed buddy it slowly comes out that Arthur now believes he’s on the wrong side and wants to help the plaintiffs. So the pesticide company and their head attorney (Tilda Swinton) might have some problems with that. And some shit might go down, who knows? (more…)

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Birth

Thursday, February 21st, 2008

Imagine you’re Nicole Kidman (well, a character played by Nicole Kidman) and your husband died ten years ago. (Not Tom Cruise or the country singer guy she’s with or whoever, I am talking about a fictional character played by Nicole Kidman). You’re still sort of getting over this but your boyfriend (the head vampire from 30 DAYS OF NIGHT [but not a vampire, just the same actor]) has proposed to you and you think you’re finally ready and you’re gonna make this work.

And then a 10 year old boy (the kid from X-Men 3 [playing a different character {I think I will stop mentioning what other movies they've been in}]) shows up at your apartment and tells you that he’s your dead husband Sean. Hopefully this hasn’t happened to most of you, so just try to imagine what it would be like.

At first you might laugh it off and not want to embarrass the poor kid, he may be emotionally fragile or something. But he keeps showing up and seems to know things. So you go to his parents to tell them to do something about it. And they yell at him but he refuses to say he’ll leave you (Nicole) alone. And then he faints.

So then you feel sorry for him again and invite him over so your family can quiz him and sort of prove to him that he’s not who he says he is. But he keeps passing all the tests.
I mean what the fuck are you gonna do? Is this an uncomfortable situation or what? Aren’t you gonna get creeped out? Not that you are gonna believe this kid is your dead husband reincarnated, but what would possess a kid to pull some shit like this? And how could he do such a good job? I mean jesus. The rational explanation is actually scarier than the supernatural one.

Shit, even if he thought he was your LIVING husband that would be creepy. Or if he thought he was your cousin Jeffrey. Or your former co-worker from when you drove a delivery truck. I don’t care who he thinks he is, a little boy following you around making spurious claims is fucked up. I’m against it. (more…)

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Undisputed II: Last Man Standing

Wednesday, February 20th, 2008

First of all I gotta note that it’s weird this movie exists at all. Walter Hill’s prison/boxing movie UNDISPUTED is not exactly a title that appears in everyone’s home library. It was not a box office hit, it did not catch on huge on video, it does not hold a nostalgic place in anyone’s heart, it did not inspire other movies or hip hop videos or launch a catch phrase. I think I know one guy besides me who saw it, he liked it, I didn’t. He hasn’t seen part 2. I never saw it until now. There’s your audience.

The original got a brief theatrical release, the sequel was straight-to-video. Maybe they could’ve gotten Wesley Snipes to return, since he’s stuck in straight-to-video lately. Instead it stars Michael Jai White – you know, the guy who was cut out of KILL BILL who everybody on the internet thought should’ve replaced Wesley in BLADE: THE SERIES. So that’s cool. Except Wesley’s character is not mentioned – White is playing Ving Rhames’s villain character George “The Iceman” Chambers.

By the way I should also point out that the subtitle on this one is unneccessary and happens to be the title of another Walter Hill film, which is weird. I hope next they’ll do LAST MAN STANDING II: UNDISPUTED starring Lance Henriksen as Christopher Walken’s character from part 1.

Anyway the premise on this one is that Iceman and his sleazy manager are in Russia filming a vodka commercial, because that’s about all they got left. But some dudes attack Iceman in his hotel room and plant a huge bag of cocaine in his Bible. And another huge bag of cocaine elsewhere in his room. Man, they are willing to go all out on this framing. You would think one small bag of coke would do it, but they didn’t want to take any chances I guess. (more…)

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Until Death

Wednesday, February 20th, 2008

It’s always exciting to hear that a Van Damme or a Dolph or a Seagal is taking a risk, so here’s an exciting one. Jean-Claude Van Damme plays a heroin addicted, womanizing, fucked up cop. (He’s not totally dirty though, he won’t take bribes.) Most of the other cops kind of hate him, especially the guy who blames him for the death of his fiancee in an undercover operation. Van Damme’s wife is pregnant from her new man. And his former partner (Stephen Rea, believe it or not) is the crime kingpin he just can’t seem to bust.

Eventually Van Damme gets shot in the head and goes into a coma. When he wakes up he’s sort of born again and tries to make amends. He gives his settlement to a schlub he got kicked off the force. He stops shooting heroin. His wife is taking care of him while he recovers and they start to repair their relationship. If you haven’t figured it out yet this is a genuine drama, not an action movie. He doesn’t do the splits once.

The movie takes place in New Orleans and has some pretty good urban scenery. It has almost nothing in common with the Van Damme/New Orleans classic HARD TARGET, and he doesn’t try to do a Cajun accent. Rea’s character is named Callahan and he’s a former cop, so at first when they were talking about him it was hard for a brain like mine not to think it was a “what if” scenario for Dirty Harry Callahan if he went too far over the edge. But Stephen Rea is no Clint Eastwood so I dropped that idea pretty quick. (more…)

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