Archive for the ‘Crime’ Category

Death Proof (DVD)

Tuesday, September 18th, 2007

For me GRINDHOUSE was one of the great theatrical experiences of 2007. A rare modern instance of filmatists trying to put on a real show, and giving you more than your money’s worth. Two movies for the price of one, plus fake trailers – an affordable night or afternoon out. Yeah, I read about how it failed to make money for the Weinsteins, but guess what? That’s what happens when you spend decades buying other people’s movies so you can cut them, dub them, retitle them, sit them on a shelf for years, and then only allow them to be rented at Blockbuster. When you spend that long doing that many cruel and unusual things eventually your bi-yearly good deed will fail for you too. Because you are an asshole.

So in that sense GRINDHOUSE is even better than you realize at first glance. It’s a good time at the movies AND it lost money for some assholes. Two birds with one stone, in the form of two movies.

Down to business: I was one of the people who thought Rodriguez’s PLANET TERROR was kind of a fun fake movie but Tarantino’s DEATH PROOF was a good actual movie. I liked it. So that’s where I’m coming from reviewing the new DEATH PROOF dvd out today. A guy who bought the dvd because he likes the movie.

That’s right, the DEATH PROOF dvd. As opposed to the GRINDHOUSE dvd that would contain the original double feature as shown to packed houses on the outer edges of the United States. You may say wait a minute, why are these bloodsuckers releasing the two movies on dvd separately? No longer a double feature? Without even including the trailers? And as if we are so stupid that we don’t know they’re gonna release it as a double feature later? (more…)

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Shoot ‘Em Up

Wednesday, September 5th, 2007

We all know HARDBOILED is one of the greatest action movies of all time. This has been discussed, voted and agreed upon officially. But for all the time dedicated to honoring that movie, not much has been set aside for the HARDBOILED poster. Remember the first time you saw that, before you saw the movie? What more did you need to see? That simple, perfect, iconic image of Chow Yun Fat (whether you knew who he was then or not) holding a gun in one hand and a baby in the other – that should’ve been enough. It doesn’t tell you everything about HARDBOILED, but it tells you alot. The theory of badass juxtaposition at its most basic symbolic level – one man holding life and death. Good and evil. Innocence and violence. Machine and flesh. Yin and yang.

More importantly, the guy is holding a baby in one hand and a gun in the other. Forget what it means. Concentrate on what it is.

Well, that’s also what SHOOT ‘EM UP is. An entire movie based on the feelings you get looking at that poster. This one has Clive Owen instead of Chow Yun Fat (a worthy successor) and it’s a different baby (they tried to get the HARDBOILED baby but he wanted too much money). The movie has obvious references to Leone and Looney Tunes, and lots of bad puns like a Schwarzenegger movie, its influences are all over the place. But clearly the main one is John Woo, and specifically HARDBOILED. If director Michael Davis (writer of PREHYSTERIA 3) was a baby, John Woo would be carrying him during the shootout. But since he’s only a baby he doesn’t know what the fuck is going on. So the movie is John Woo not in substance or even in style, but in the simple fact that it’s a whole movie about a bad motherfucker carrying a baby while running around, shooting hundreds of people, sliding, swinging, rolling, dropping, flying, falling, catapulting, and, you know, carrying on. While shooting. (more…)

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The Warriors

Friday, August 24th, 2007

I gotta be honest. As good as THE WARRIORS is it’s not quite the amazing masterpiece I like to remember it as. What makes it good is mostly on the surface: the different gangs and their gimmicks, the bleak rawness of everything from the cinematography to the John Carpenter-ish analog keyboard music, and the dead seriousness of all the characters in the face of this exaggerated world where thugs patrol the streets in baseball uniforms and gangs seem to outnumber law abiding citizens by a thousand to one.

This is all more than enough to make it some kind of minor classic, but my memory was being pretty charitable to the storytelling. I always loved the mythological simplicity of it: Cyrus calls a meeting to try to unite all the gangs, some prick assassinates Cyrus and blames The Warriors, now these 9 guys have to cross New York on foot to get back home before the other gangs kill them. It’s a good old fashioned odyssey or a guantlet or whatever.

But watching it this time I don’t think Walter Hill keeps the momentum of that journey from point A to point B. Or the simplicity. He splits up the group. They don’t even realize at first that everyone’s after them. And half of them keeping getting distracted by the eternal search for pussy. This is pretty funny when they try to hook up with the girl gang called the Lizzies and they don’t seem to notice the obvious fact that the Lizzies are not, you know, into guys. If only that homophobic prick Ajax was there, he calls everybody “faggot” all the time so maybe he would’ve picked up on it. Anyway, there’s some meandering, it doesn’t really build like it could, when they get to the beach on Coney Island to face off with their enemies maybe you should feel more like they’ve been through Hell and back.

But I’m kind of nitpicking. I like the whole tone of this movie. Everybody looks so serious all the time. Warriors rarely smile. They’re macho like Spartans, they have a code they stick to stubbornly. Like the scene where they have to go through Orphan turf but there’s a whole political negotiation first. And it’s decided that all they have to do is take off their vests, they can’t go through in uniform. But they refuse. They’d rather fight and maybe die than take off their colors. It’s not clear if they’d be allowed to just turn them inside out like they made kids do with their Spuds Mackenzie shirts in the ’80s. And if it had been the Baseball Furies or the mime gang would they have had to clean off their face paint? (more…)

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Yojimbo, Fistful of Dollars and Last Man Standing

Thursday, August 9th, 2007

YOJIMBO
and
FISTFUL OF DOLLARS
and – why the hell not -
LAST MAN STANDING

I’ve been doing alot of themed movie-watching lately and I don’t want that to grow stale, so I decided to mix things up a little. Three movies starring my favorite badasses, but from different years and different countries. Just a real variety of material here. YOJIMBO is about this bad motherfucker who wanders into a small town torn apart by two warring gangs, and he goes back and forth working for them, plays them against each other, rescues a woman from them then gets beaten up real bad but escapes and hides out and then tricks them some more and also I forgot to mention there’s alot of good jokes about the town coffin maker getting business from his activities. FISTFUL OF DOLLARS, on the other hand, is about this bad motherfucker who wa– hey, wait a minute!

Nah, I’m just fucking with you. Actually I thought it would be a good experiment to watch YOJIMBO and its two remakes all in the same day. See what happens. This is kind of a miracle of badass cinema we have right here. Three of the greatest badass icons – Toshiro Mifune, Clint Eastwood and Bruce Willis – all starring in the same story. Plus you got the directors: Akira Kurosawa, Sergio Leone, and Walter Hill ain’t in their league but he’s no slouch either.

You know, I’ve seen YOJIMBO before and I liked it, but it wasn’t until watching it this time that I really realized what was right in front of my nose: this is WITHOUT A DOUBT ONE OF THE MOST BADASS MOVIES OF ALL TIME (or WADOOTMBMOAT). And definitely one of the most badass characters. I mean I always think of Clint Eastwood as the very top of the badass totem pole, but you gotta take into account that the role that started that persona was based on Mifune in this movie. So he’s the grandaddy of it all. (more…)

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Robocop Trilogy

Friday, August 3rd, 2007

ROBOCOP

Since my recent viewing of the TERMINATOR trilogy was a smashing success I decided to look for some other ’80s-’90s sci-fi/action robot trilogy to watch, and I came up with ROBOCOP. I’d seen the first one a million (1,000,000) times and never seen the sequels, but I had a pretty good idea it was not gonna be pretty. And it wasn’t.

To me the real trilogy is not ROBOCOP 1-3, it’s ROBOCOP, TOTAL RECALL and then STARSHIP TROOPERS, Paul Verhoeven’s three ultraviolent, FX heavy studio sci-fi action satires. ROBOCOP started off that trilogy with a bang, and even including those other Verhoeven classics there’s really nothing quite like this one. Its unique approach is established at the very beginning when it opens with a TV newsbreak (co-anchored by Leeza Gibbons) that’s a weird hybrid of news from the ’80s and from today. We learn alot from the TVs in this movie: the world is in chaos, with wars and rebel attacks a regular part of life, deadly fires caused by a laser misfire of “The Star Wars Global Peace Platform” in space, but there’s a nuclear war themed game you can buy and a really good artificial heart (is a surgery ad really that different from the prescription drug ads we already have?) and a popular comedy where a dude always says “I’ll buy that for a dollar!” and everybody laughs. They really capture the feel of the ’80s and the 2000s, that it’s a crazy fuckin nightmare but everybody’s used to it and doesn’t care. This movie predicted everything but Paris Hilton. They weren’t too far off predicting what police cars would look like (those things looked futuristic in 1987, now they just look the wrong color) and there’s even a DVD in this movie when the villain, Clarence Boddicker, storms into a penthouse, pulls out what at that time appeared to be a CD, and plays a video from it.

In fact I think it’s mainly the details of this world that make the movie work so well. The movie seems more dated than some of the other classics of the era, some of it is a little cheesy and although I still like the stop motion animation of the ED-209 that was so cool at the time I’m sure kids now would laugh at it. But as much as the ideas of the future come out of the ’80s they still seem believable. I mean, I bet these corporate executives really do have stock tickers above their urinals. And the guy making a speech in front of a bank of monitors showing animated corporate logos and footage of war planes doesn’t seem that exaggerated anymore. (more…)

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Blue Steel

Thursday, July 12th, 2007

This is a suspense thriller from Kathryn Bigelow, the director of POINT BREAK and NEAR DARK, and one of the few women directors to get much of a chance in these types of movies. This one stars Jamie Lee Curtis as a just-graduated cop who, on her first ever patrol, has to shoot a guy holding up a grocery store.

Now first of all I gotta ask – why are there so many grocery store robberies in these movies? A reader named Jared pointed it out too because I recently reviewed STONE COLD and COBRA, both of which open with the hero going in to foil a grocery store robbery/shootout. Now this one too (and the last book I read, SIDESWIPE by Charles Willeford, also revolves around a grocery store robbery/shootout, although it’s at the end instead of the beginning, because it’s literature). The result here is the exact opposite of those other movies though: instead of a rebel cop who plays by his own rules she’s a straightlaced rookie who tries to do it by the book. Instead of having no consequences the incident could end her career. Talk about a double standard.

Anyway, I don’t remember a wave of grocery store shootouts in the ’80s or early ’90s, but apparently that fear was in the air.

I also gotta point out that when you got Tom Sizemore and Ron Silver both in the same grocery store at the same time, you KNOW you got a fuckin problem. You can’t trust either one of these assholes separately, but together? Jesus Jamie Lee, better get your blue steel ready.

The story unfolds brilliantly because it takes its time telling you what’s going on. (I’m gonna give some of it away though, they never foresaw that would happen, suckers). Jamie has to shoot Sizemore. Silver is one of the witnesses, cowering on the ground. Sizemore’s gun lands next to him and he stares at it, and eventually takes it when nobody’s looking. (more…)

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Cobra

Wednesday, July 11th, 2007

COBRA is not a great Stallone movie, but Stallone does play a cop named Marion “THE COBRA” Cobretti, and in this crazy world that’s gotta count for something. In the opening scene a ranting maniac goes into a super market, kills a bunch of people and takes the rest hostage. The police are helpless so they “call in the Cobra.”

Cobretti struts in wearing sunglasses and chewing on a matchstick. You’d think he’d want to have the full power of vision at his disposal in a situation like this, but he chooses fashion instead – not a great character trait for a human being, but acceptable for an action movie hero. If you want to get picky Dirty Harry probaly should’ve put down his hot dog to foil that bank robbery, but he didn’t, and we admire him for that.

Speaking of Dirty Harry, Cobretti wishes he was Dirty Harry. This movie is a total ripoff of that one. But visually Cobretti reminds me of another action movie icon: HARD BOILED’s Tequila, with his sunglasses and toothpick. That must be why when I first heard of Chow Yun Fat they said he was “the Stallone of Hong Kong.” People still remembered COBRA back then, I guess. They look kind of the same, but Cobretti has a picture of a cobra on the pearl handle of his gun, while Tequila doesn’t have a picture of tequila. Tequila is still a better character in a way better movie, but Cobretti’s cobra insignia just edges him into the realm of acceptability. Congratulations, Cobretti.

The movie is stylishly directed by George Pan Cosmatos, same guy who did RAMBO a year earlier. He uses what was probaly called “MTV style” back then, lots of quick flashes edited to the rhythm of music (hey, what’s that robot? Hey, there’s that robot again. Why is there a robot?) but unlike modern asshole editors he respects the audience enough to build to a shot that explains what the quick flashes were all about (oh, I see, there is a fashion shoot in front of a robot). The opening is completely badass, with the Cobra firing an animated bullet into the camera, which explodes into the title of the movie. Meanwhile a psychopath rides a motorcycle silhouetted on a bright red sky, and this is intercut with shots of a bunch of crazy musclemen in a sewer doing some sort of workout or ritual involving axes. This was in those days of ‘85-’87 when movies like POLICE ACADEMY 2 and DRAGNET worried that some weird gang of punk rocker cultists would terrorize urban areas (at least those movies are comedies, though, this is a serious movie). (more…)

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The Glove

Saturday, June 23rd, 2007

Like I mentioned in my review of WHO CAN KILL A CHILD? that should be running on The Ain’t It Cool News soon, I’m on the mailing list for this Dark Sky DVD label. So I get all these nicely packaged Italian horror obscurities and what not, and to be honest I haven’t watched most of them yet. I loan them to my horror watcher friends and hope they’ll tell me I got a must-see there. But that doesn’t usually happen.

For the batch that comes out this week though I found time to watch them and I was impressed. The one I had the highest hopes for was WHO CAN KILL A CHILD? which is a creepy sun-drenched Spanish horror movie in the vein of VILLAGE OF THE DAMNED. But I already heard that one was good before, so a more impressive find is THE GLOVE, the b-picture in their latest “DRIVE-IN DOUBLE FEATURE” along with SEARCH AND DESTROY.

They’ve been doing this series for a while with basically the same concept as G’HOUSE, they put two old drive-in appropriate movies together as a double feature and they include vintage theater promos and trailers. SEARCH AND DESTROY seemed pretty cool, I didn’t really get into it but I’ll have to go back and pay more attention next time. THE GLOVE, though – this one is a winner.

The movie opens with a black on red graphic of the titular glove, accompanied by a theme song all about this glove and how fearsome it is. Then we see a sleazy prison guard leaving work with his mistress. Suddenly he’s ambushed by THE GLOVE, which happens to be worn by Rosey Grier.

I’d never talked to anybody who knew of this movie before, but I’d admired the VHS cover. If you’ve seen that you sort of know what the Glove looks like, but the cover exaggerates it. On there he looks like some comic book super villain, a guy who could beat Darth Vader in a bar brawl. And he’s got two gloves – in the movie he only has one, like Michael. In that painting it has spikes on it, his chest guard looks like samurai armour and the helmet makes him look like a robot. In the movie it’s riot gear, it’s not from outer space. But it is Rosey Grier wearing it, so it’s pretty menacing. (more…)

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Ocean’s Thirteen

Thursday, June 14th, 2007

It seemed like most of the world hated OCEAN’S 12. I always figured it was because it was too strange, but people say it was just too self-indulgent, they get mad watching all those guys having fun together and being cool. Which is weird because if that’s the case I’m not sure why they liked the first one. I mean what else are they supposed to do? Not have fun and wear cheap suits?

Anyway I felt lucky they were making a part 13, like they were doing it just for me and the elite few who still give a shit. But I was mistaken – actually they were making this for the other guys to make up for part 12. This is the same shit but dialed back a little, so they are having a little less fun and are not quite as cool because Matt Damon wears a fake nose in one part. It’s Steve Soderbergh’s most mainstream movie since ERIN BROCKOVICH, but not even as satisfying as that since it’s sequel number two and there’s no surprise factor at all. And you get a little sick of all their con man lingo and code words. For example, faking an earthquake is “an Irwin Allen.” I’m not sure what the name would be for making a fun but forgettable part 3, since most part 3s are widely hated except for Lord of the Rings or if it’s in 3-D. And they are in the problem of being a part 3 only I asked for (see the end of OCEAN’S 12 review above).

I guess the mainstream have forgiven them though, or are willing to give them a second chance at a sequel, because this theater was crowded. I don’t know if I’ve ever mentioned this before, but because of my negative past I live with a curse – I am doomed to always have the most annoying person in the theater sitting directly behind me. It doesn’t even matter if it’s an empty theater, this guy will walk in during the previews, scope the place out and decide that the perfect seat is directly behind me. In this case he was a middle aged dude with his adult son, a guy who doesn’t see very many movies. Throughout the movie he asked his son questions such as “What did he say?” and “I don’t get it” and “Who’s that guy?” and “I don’t get it – is he supposed to be gay?” But at the end he seemed happy with it. So congratulations people, you have your Oceans back. (more…)

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Stone Cold (DVD)

Tuesday, June 12th, 2007

Ladies and gentlemen, the day has come. The eagle has landed. Brian Bosworth’s 1991 film debut STONE COLD is finally available on Region 1 DVD. We’re through the looking glass, people.

As a DVD this is kind of a bust. There isn’t even a trailer on the thing. They did spring for interactive menus, that’s about it. They even labeled the disc wrong, the widescreen is actually on the standard side and vice versa. The movie is about a biker gang, but the cover seems designed to make it look like a current DTV espionage thriller – there’s not a single motorcycle pictured on the front or back.

But you know what, even that can’t stop STONE COLD. I’ve been recommending this movie to people for a while now but it was only on VHS so it got tricky. As of this week they will find it in finer movie stores and gas stations for around ten or fifteen bucks. What a year for DVD, man. First HOLY MOUNTAIN, now STONE COLD.

Let me be clear: this is a cheesy action movie. This is not a legit classic like DIE HARD. This is more along the lines of a ROADHOUSE, a really ridiculous movie where you start out watching it because it’s goofy but by the end, whether you have the balls to admit it or not, you know deep down in your soul that the movie kicked your ass. You pointed at it, you laughed at it, but it turned the tables and defeated you fair and square. If you have any sense of sportsmanship you will admit that this movie is awesome. Even if it was kicked off of its college team for using steroids. (more…)

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