Archive for the ‘Reviews’ Category
Thursday, March 23rd, 2006
DESERT HEAT aka COYOTE MOON or INFERNO
When I reviewed Jean-Claude Van Damme’s SECOND IN COMMAND on The Ain’t It Cool News recently I made a shocking admission: I haven’t seen a whole Van Damme movie since 1998’s KNOCK OFF. I understand if that means I lose credibility in some of your eyes, but I gotta be open and honest with you people. I’m one of them straight shooters, in my opinion. So I gotta admit it: I learn more and more about Steven Seagal every day, but when it comes to Van Damme I’m a straight up amateur. And I want to become a more well rounded person so I asked for some advice on the best movies from Van Damme’s post-theatrical days. Two people made convincing cases for COYOTE MOON, or DESERT HEAT as it’s called here in the states, so that was my first stop. (one guy described the plot, the other guy a threesome scene.)
DESERT HEAT is a weird-ass DTV movie from John G. Avildsen, the Oscar winning director of ROCKY. I’m not gonna bother to cross-reference but until somebody tells me otherwise I’m gonna assume Avildsen is the only owner of a Best Director Oscar statue who has ever directed a Van Damme movie. And for some reason, I don’t know why but he decided to play down his involvement in this picture and credit himself as Danny Mulroon. And then later it also says his name. Make up your mind Avildsen – are you ashamed or not? Keep your story straight.
Anyway the movie starts with a Seagalian quote about the coyote’s place in Native American legend, as Van Damme chases and surpasses a coyote on a motorcyle. He parks his vintage Indian motorcycle in the middle of the desert, swigs some whiskey and waves a gun around. Suddenly, a vision of the great Danny Trejo (playing a Native American) appears to him and tries to talk him out of killing himself.
It’s funny to see J.C. play drunk talking to a ghost, especially when he starts firing his gun randomly in the air. Somehow the bullets hit the truck of some sleeveless musclebound porn movie style cowboys named the Hogan brothers. They are one of two gangs that terrorizes the small town, somehow squeezing a criminal empire out of a town that seems to consist of one cafe, one bar, a hotel and some dirt. (more…)
Tags: Danny Trejo, Jaime Pressly, JCVD, John G. Avildsen, Larry Drake, Pat Morita, Vincent Schiavelli
Posted in Action, Reviews | No Comments »
Monday, March 20th, 2006
FORMULA 51 aka THE 51st STATE
Here’s a movie I always meant to see just because it was directed by Ronny Yu (BRIDE OF CHUCKY), but I skipped it because I never heard a single good word about it. Until the day Paul wrote to disagree with my MUNICH review and then, possibly to avenge me for the review, recommended I watch this one.
Okay, so the movie’s not terrible, it has it’s moments of inspiration, but to me it was a big mess and a little on the cheesy side. When it was over I realized that a better score would’ve gone a long way toward making it more acceptable. Ronny Yu does the whole thing in a goofy, frinetic style and then the cheeseball dance music done by some guy named “Headrillaz” makes it seem like some out of touch commercial trying to be cool.
If I describe what the movie’s about though, it might sound cool. Samuel L. Jackson plays Elmo McElroy, rogue pharmacologist. Batman started when his parents were killed in an alley, and Elmo McElroy started on graduation day 1971 when he was pulled over smoking a joint while still in his graduation robe and lost his right to practice medicine. Skip forward to the 2000s when he works for an overacting Meat Loaf as “the Lizard,” who always refers to himself in the third person and somehow passes as a feared crime boss. He’s supposed to meat with The Lizard and various other kingpins to demonstrate his new super drug POS 51, but instead he sets up a fancy Rube Goldberg contraption to blow them up. (There’s a nice shot of Meat Loaf laying in a giant pile of dolls, maybe a reference to BRIDE OF CHUCKY.)
Elmo heads to England where he meets Robert Carlyle, who is supposed to take him to a chemist and the boss who wants to buy his formula. On the same plane with him is Emily Mortimer as the Lizard’s hired gun Dakota, and this is probaly the first and last time Emily Mortimer will ever play a sexy assassin. At the airport is the villain from MONEY TALKS as a cop trying to catch Elmo. (more…)
Tags: Emily Mortimer, Meat Loaf, Robert Carlyle, Ronny Yu, Samuel L. Jackson
Posted in Action, Comedy/Laffs, Reviews | No Comments »
Friday, March 17th, 2006
V FOR VENDETTA is a big exciting futuristic comic book movie, produced and written by the Wachowskis, starring Hugo Weaving and Natalie Portman, playing in Imax in some towns, but not here. It’s a movie nerds are pretty excited for, but the talk is less about is he wearing the right cape, are his powers depicted in exactly the way I personally imagined them, etc., and more about the politics. Because although it features a guy in a cape and mask who fights bad guys in dark alleys, the story is more of a 1984 type deal than a spiderman. Apparently the comic strip book was written in England in the 1980s in response to the Margaret Thatcher administration.
I saw a review in Entertainment Weekly that talked about references to Bush and Bill O’Reilly and Abu Ghraib and what not, but I figure this is more like STAR WARS prequels: it’s about all the assholes throughout history, and the leaders we have now just so happen to be members. It’s like I always say, if your government is strikingly similar to the dystopian sci-fi stories of the past then you got a problem there, in my opinion.
Hugo Weaving is the main character V, a revolutionary in a Guy Fawkes mask who spins knives around and is waging a bombing campaign against the totalitarian british government. He goes on TV and announces that he’ll be blowing up the Parliament in one year and if you agree with him that the government is a bunch of assholes, you should be there to show your support.
Natalie Portman plays Evey, an assistant at a TV station who V rescues from rapist government agents when she’s out after curfew. This puts her in league with “the terrorist” as far as the government’s concerned, so she ends up forced to hang out with him and hear his side of things. (more…)
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Tags: Hugo Weaving, James McTeigue, John Hurt, Natalie Portman, Stephen Fry, Stephen Rea, Wachowskis
Posted in Action, Comic strips/Super heroes, Reviews | No Comments »
Friday, March 17th, 2006
PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS is actually a pretty good drama/shameless inspirational tale based on an actual guy who was profiled on 20/20 one time. Will Smith stars as Chris Gardner, a dude who, while completely broke, struggles through a highly competitive, unpaid stock broker trainee program. There are 20 people in the program and only one will be chosen to stay at the firm, the others are shit out of luck. I won’t give away whether he ends up getting the job at the end. Who knows? Anything could happen.
Anyway the hook is that he’s also a single father, and when I said he was completely broke I wasn’t exaggerating. He gets kicked out of his apartment, gets arrested for not paying parking tickets, gets kicked out of a hotel, and there’s not always room at the homeless shelter so he even ends up sleeping in a public bathroom at one point. So the drama comes in how this guy can find shelter for his son, wash his clothes in a sink, then get to the firm on a bus, carrying all of his belongings, and then be the best stock broker trainee in the place. At one point he’s on a break, he gets hit by a car and loses a shoe and then has to go back in and play it cool wearing only one shoe. (I had a similar incident once so it was exciting to be able to identify so closely with the adventures on screen.)
The story would be hard to take if it was completely made up, but since apparently it really happened* it makes for a thrilling story to watch him overcome the odds, and the test screening audience actually applauded his victories. Luckily he doesn’t give too many adorable up-by-the-bootstraps platitudes either. There’s a couple points where I thought it got a little corny though. I hope they cut out the part where he tells his son not to play basketball then suddenly scolds him to “Never let anyone tell you you can’t do something – not even me.” But most of it’s not that bad.
[* Yeah right, like HOSTEL really happened too, huh? I'm giving movies a benefit of the doubt here that they have not earned. But I read up on it and at least according to various media accounts, Chris Gardner did go through adventures fairly similar to what's depicted in the movie.] (more…)
Tags: Gabriele Muccino, Jaden Smith, Steve Conrad, Thandie Newton, Will Smith
Posted in Drama, Reviews | No Comments »
Wednesday, March 15th, 2006
Here’s a weird fuckin movie written and directed by William Peter Blatty, the guy who wrote the novel of THE EXORCIST. I’ve been hearing the title for years so I know it has a cult following, but I think they had trouble selling it because all they could figure was “from the creator of THE EXORCIST” but it’s not like that movie at all. It starts out as a goofy comedy and turns into a sad essay about God, or something. I don’t really understand the meaning of the title, but it has something to do with a protein molecules and the existence of God. It’s mentioned in a dream scene where an astronaut finds a giant crucifix on the moon.
But now I’m making it sound stranger than it actually is. All I can figure to describe it is “ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO’S NEST meets ROLLING THUNDER.”
The story takes place in an old castle “in the Pacific Northwest of the United States.” Which is funny because I’m pretty sure the Native Americans who lived here first didn’t build castles. And we don’t have Mideival Times restaraunt here so it can’t be that either. Anyway this castle is being used by the military as an experimental mental facility for mentally ill (or possibly faking) Vietnam vets. Neville Brand is an angry drill sergeant type but he pretty much just lets them have the run of the place, going around dressed as pirates and Superman and crap. One guy is busy casting a dog version of Hamlet (which perhaps could be an influence on Ang Lee’s racoon version). Robert Loggia does a blackface routine. One guy has a funny hat. etc.
There’s some funny lines in her but I have to admit I’m not entirely on the movie’s wavelength. This is in the SHOCK CORRIDOR kind of vein where each insane person has some gimmick or is wacky and cute. There’s all kinds of random dialogue like “the man on the moon fucked my sister!” and people do wacky things like read the miranda rights to a boar’s head on the wall or show up at 3 in the morning dressed in beach gear and dump a bucket of wet sand on the colonel’s desk. Sometimes it’s funny but I feel like it’s kind of forced and because so much of the dialogue has no meaning I found myself starting to tune out what people were saying. (more…)
Tags: Joe Spinell, Moses Gunn, Neville Brand, Robert Loggia, Stacy Keach, Tom Atkins, William Peter Blatty
Posted in Comedy/Laffs, Drama, Reviews, Thriller | 1 Comment »
Monday, March 13th, 2006
Boys -
Most people around here know by now that I’m partial to the Steven Seagal pictures. And with The Steven Seagal Blues Band (who I think oughta be called “Steven Seagal and the Hard to Kill”) coming to Seattle in a couple months I probaly oughta be putting my Seagalogy studies into overdrive to prepare. But my New Year’s resolution for 2006 is STRIVING FOR EXCELLENCE, and I intend to strive all year long. So I’m not gonna stick with what I know, I’m gonna start trying out new things, becoming a more well rounded individual. With that in mind I recently watched Dolph Lundgren’s directorial debut (Read it here!) as well as Jean-Claude Van Damme’s upcoming May 2nd release SECOND IN COMMAND.
Because of my intense deliberations on Seagal, I’m sorry to say that my Van Damme knowledge is out of date. In fact, the most recent Van Damme picture I’ve managed to watch all the way through was KNOCK OFF. That played in theaters, if that gives you an idea of how long ago we’re talking. So it was interesting to see what Jean-Claude is doing in the DTV medium.
In SECOND IN COMMAND, Van Damme plays the new military attache to the US ambassador in a country called Moldavia or Muldovia or something like that. Let’s just call it Syriana. It’s supposed to be a peaceful country, but he’s literally just off the plane, gets dropped off at the hotel for a quickie with his girlfriend when he hears gunshots in the lobby. I always thought because of DIE HARD’s ingenious detail that Bruce has to fight with no shoes on, it should be tradition for action heroes to get stuck in various stages of undress. This was a perfect setup for Jean-Claude to have to fight communist hardliners while wearing only a hotel bathrobe or towel, but I guess they’re saving that for if there’s ever a SUDDEN DEATH 2. (Which there oughta be.) (more…)
Tags: DTV, JCVD, Simon Fellows
Posted in Action, Reviews | 1 Comment »
Sunday, March 12th, 2006
It pains me to deliver this news, but Bruce’s new one is not too hot. It’s not terrible, it’s mediocre, which of course is usually worse.
The premise of the movie is that Bruce is a washed up, alcoholic cop who’s been up all night and before he can go home he has to deliver a witness sixteen blocks from the jail to the courthouse. He really looks like he could use a nap, but that never comes up in the movie. It would be cool if there was a suspenseful scene about whether or not he could take a nap without getting shot.
But despite the tiredness, this doesn’t sound like a hard mission. Right away you’re figuring geez, sixteen blocks is all? This is gonna be a short movie. You figure maybe 2 minutes to walk a block (that’s probaly being conservative), plus a couple minutes to get him signed in, it’s not gonna be longer than 40 minutes. You start thinking maybe there should’ve been a discount on the movie tickets. BUT THERE’S A CATCH. He drives him the 16 blocks instead of walking, and the traffic is bad. So it’s alot slower than walking. Also, he stops at the liquor store, so that causes a little delay. And also the witness is gonna bust open a huge police corruption scandal so all the cops are trying to kill him and Bruce’s character Detective Jack Moseley decides to do something right for a change and get this guy to his destination. Remember, he was a cab driver in THE FIFTH ELEMENT and maybe he has a little of that work ethic still in his sense memory. Anyway, because of shootouts and hiding and what not it takes longer than expected and it seems like they end up travelling alot more than 16 blocks overall. (they should probaly tell you in the corner how many blocks they are from the courthouse, kind of like EIGHT BELOW keeps telling you how many days the hero dogs have been alone in the snow.) (more…)
Only 1 person likes this post. Kinda sad.
Tags: Bruce, David Morse, David Zayas, Mos Def, Richard Donner
Posted in Bruce, Reviews, Thriller | 5 Comments »
Sunday, March 12th, 2006
A film by Dolph Lundgren
As you know, I’m a fan of these movies where an action star decides to take matters into their own hands and just direct the damn thing themselves. Participants include Bruce Lee, Tom Laughlin, Jackie Chan, Stephen Chow, Jean-Claude Van Damme, Steven Seagal, Sylvester Stallone and most successfully Clint Eastwood and Takeshi Kitano. THE DEFENDER is the first picture directed by Dolph Lundgren (he has also made a second one, THE MECHANIK).
One thing Dolph already blew before you even watch this one is that generic title. I don’t think this is based on the old video game Defender, so there’s no excuse. It sounds like the american title for a Jet Li movie, and probaly is. On the positive side, he actually is a defender in this movie. He defends stuff. Specifically, he is the head of security for the presidential security adviser. So he’s defending her.
As far as stunt casting goes Dolph gets a few points because in this movie, Jerry Springer plays the president of the United States. That’s not quite as ridiculous as some people might think, actually, if they don’t know that before he was a host of staged talk shows he was the mayor of Cincinatti. But it’s still funny to see, and near the end he does a speech about the meaning of America that could pass for “Jerry’s Final Thought.” Dolph previously co-starred with Montel Williams in THE PEACEKEEPER so this might actually be a Lundgrenics trademark. I would like to see him take on that crazy witch lady Sally Jesse Raphael in one of his future works. Maybe Sally Jesse and Montel are abusing troubled teens at a brainwashing camp out in the desert somewhere, and Dolph has to go undercover as a teen junkie (or as a square dad) in order to bust em out. At some point Sally Jesse would get thrown off a cliff and you’d see her falling Hans Grueber style, and she would cackle all the way down. (more…)
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Tags: Dolph, Jerry Springer
Posted in Action, Reviews | 1 Comment »
Thursday, March 9th, 2006
DAVE CHAPPELLE’S BLOCK PARTY is the happiest, warmest, most joyful movie I’ve seen in a long god damn time. And not in a stupid way. The problems of the world are not ignored. There’s some light-hearted jokes about race issues, there’s a mention or two of the war, there’s some militant rap lyrics and a brief sermon by Fred Hampton Jr. All things I’m in favor of discussing. But mostly what this movie is is a whole bunch of people coming together to laugh and make beautiful music and have a good time together. In that sense it turns out it is kind of like WATTSTAX, the movie they mentioned as a model when they were filming this. I made fun of my ain’t it cool colleague Quint for writing that the trailer gives off a Wattstax vibe as if he came to that conclusion on his own. But there is a faint whiff of that vibe in the final movie I guess, if you’re really making a close examination of its vibes.
I saw this movie in what I consider a JASON X set up: the same big auditorium where I saw JASON X, mostly empty with only a few people peppered throughout, but sharing their love for the movie across the empty rows. At the end of the movie people clapped, like it was a live performance. I can’t remember the last time I saw that at a regular multiplex showing like this. (more…)
Only 1 person likes this post. Kinda sad.
Tags: Dave Chappelle, hip hop, Michel Gondry, Mos Def, music documentaries, standup
Posted in Comedy/Laffs, Documentary, Reviews | No Comments »
Saturday, February 25th, 2006
This movie is directed by and starring Mr. Tommy Lee Jones (UNDER SIEGE) and it’s a western, even though it takes place today. It might be the first western with cell phones. As far as I could tell there were only two literal burials of Melquiades Estrada depicted in the movie so I figure the other one is some kind of metaphor.
Tommy plays Pete, a Texas ranch hand with unspecified past, and his best friend Melquiades is played by a guy named Julio Cesar Cedillo. He’s not in the movie as much as Pete though, because he’s dead. The movie opens with some good ol’ boys driving around with guns and they see a coyote chewing on something, and they shoot it. Then when they go to gather up the sweet, sweet coyote meat they notice that what the coyote was chewing on was The One Dead Body of Melquiades Estrada.
Poor Melquiades – dead and the cops don’t seem to give a shit. We don’t know it at first but it’s pretty easy to figure out that the culprit was this asshole border guard named Mike Norton (Barry Pepper from THE 25TH HOUR). He’s a scary Timothy Mcveigh looking motherfucker who obviously doesn’t get much joy out of life but does like to throw in a little of the unneccessary roughness when chasing illegal immigrants. This guy is a real asshole and you expect him to be over the top evil. But the shooting is an accident, a misunderstanding.
Doesn’t matter though. Pete is pretty pissed off about his best friend being dead, and even moreso when the sherriff, Dwight Yoakam, doesn’t notify him and just has Estrada quickie-buried with a little cross that says “Melquiades, Mexico” on it in sharpie. See, Melquiades once made Pete promise to have him buried in his home town. So Pete finds out Mike is responsible, kidnaps him at gunpoint, forces him to dig up Melquiades and then they head on horseback to Mexico to find the home town and bury him. And that’s what most of the movie is about.
So no, it’s not a remake of THREE WEDDINGS AND A FUNERAL. Similar, maybe. I haven’t seen that one. (more…)
Only 1 person likes this post. Kinda sad.
Tags: Barry Pepper, Dwight Yoakam, January Jones, Levon Helm, Melissa Leo, Tommy Lee Jones
Posted in Crime, Drama, Reviews | No Comments »
