Posts Tagged ‘Benicio Del Toro’

The Hunted (2003)

Saturday, December 8th, 2007

Not to be confused with THE HUNTED (starring Christopher Lambert) or BENJI THE HUNTED (starring Benji)

Early in William Friedkin’s THE HUNTED we are introduced to its hero, L.T. Bonham (Steven Seagal), an expert in tracking, knife fighting and wilderness survival who used to train special ops soldiers in these skills. As he learned that the guys he was training were being sent to assassinate people for purely political purposes he grew disillusioned and quit. So now he’s in the BC wilderness where we see him track an injured wolf through the snowy woods, get the trap off of his paw, chew up a root and rub it on the wound as a homeopathic healing agent. Then he tracks the responsible poacher down at a tavern, bangs his head against a table and tells him never to do it again.

Oh wait, did I say Steven Seagal? Actually L.T. Bonham is played by Tommy Lee Jones. I was surprised how much of this movie reminded me of Seagal, though. The story is about a special ops badass (Seagal– er, I mean Benicio Del Toro) who comes back from Kosovo totally wacked out and kills some guys, and Tommy Lee Jones (UNDER SIEGE) is the guy who trained him so he has to help catch him. So I thought it was gonna be like FIRST BLOOD meets THE FUGITIVE. Not Steven Seagal meets Steven Seagal.

Unlike FIRST BLOOD there’s not alot of build to this guy snapping, not alot of pushing him too far. There aren’t circumstances back home that make him go crazy, it just happens because Kosovo was so bad. Friedkin pretty much depicts Kosovo as Hell, the whole place lit orange from flames. It’s kind of a surreal opening because it starts with Johnny Cash’s voice reciting a poem about God and Abraham. And it throws you off balance when some action movie starts out narrated by Johnny Cash. He could be the voice of God, or of the movie’s narrator, or of Uncle Jesse from DUKES OF HAZZARD. Whatever he is he’s a weird person to welcome you to an action movie. But he’s Johnny Cash, so you trust him. (more…)

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Posted in Action, Drama, Reviews, Thriller | 1 Comment »

Sin City

Friday, April 1st, 2005

There’s alot of comic strip books turned into movies but usually they Hollywood em up alot. They change the story and the super hero clothes and turn brits into americans and alot of the fans are fundamentalists so they get pretty upset. Batman doesn’t have nipples because bats don’t have nipples, Super-man isn’t supposed to wear that shade of blue it is actually a different shade of blue, that kind of thing.

So what Robert Rodriguez did for this comic strip SIN CITY, he actually brought in the writer/cartoonist from the comic, made him co-director, and apparently pretty much used the comic as storyboards and script. He used his cool digital movie cameras and convinced a great cast to come in and fuck around in front of green screens and used computers for almost all the backgrounds. According to my team of expert nerds, there are scenes and lines from the funny pages that they cut out here and there and they mixed things together a little bit at the beginning in order to combine three stories into one. But for the most part the shots are based on the drawings and everything written on the page is said out loud in the movie. An obsessive level of faithfulness never thought possible even by Harry Knowles himself. Maybe the most faithful movie adaptation of anything ever, including plays, novels and trading cards.

So what this is is a very ballsy and ridiculous experiment, like Gus Van Sant’s PSYCHO. Like most experiments in science, it’s a big failure. But you gotta fuck up in order to invent cancer or whatever. I’m glad these guys did it anyway even though it really doesn’t work.

Based on my detailed research beforehand, I was a little skeptical going in, and I think my hunch was right. See, the comic strip is drawn in stark black and white in order to look like film noir. But then the movie is done with high tech digital effects and makeup in order to look like the comic. Not like film noir. You see the problem here? It’s like a snake eating its tail, or I guess probaly a tail shitting out a snake’s head. The whole concept don’t make sense. (more…)

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Posted in Action, Bruce, Comic strips/Super heroes, Crime, Reviews, Thriller | 1 Comment »

The Way of the Gun

Saturday, January 1st, 2005

You know what, I got me a new theory. Look out people. If this theory pans out its gonna be in the textbook for Badass Cinematical studies for now on. It is about the difference between ’70s Badass filmmakers and ’90s Badass filmmakers.

The difference is, the ’90s boys went to college. Or read alot of books. Studied alot of movies. The ’70s boys traveled the world, drank alot of whiskie, got in fights and drag races. The ’70s boys had a natural knack for the poetry of Badass Cinematics, while the ’90s boys had a great knowledge of technique and equipment and approaches to witty dialogue. Now obviously there are many exceptions to this rule, but it is a good sweeping generalization to ponder. The ’70s masters like Peckinpah and Leone and Siegel and Mr. Eastwood had an effortless feel to their films, like it was just something that came out of their pores. The ’90s ones, even the really good ones, usually seem like they put a whole fucking lot of thought into it. Drew alot of schematics and diagrams. And figured out how to do it just right.

Of course, some of the best have a little of both. Mr. Quentin Tarantino for example is world reknowned for having sat on his ass watching hundreds of bad ’70s movies on video in order to learn his skills. However in my opinion his movies have more of that ’70s feel than anyone else. The quiet realism and the authentic swagger that is key to a successful Badass picture. At the same time, Tarantino’s pictures are much more talkative and postmodern, with characters jabbering on dissecting and psychoanalyzing and reinterpreting the icons of past television and music. “Like a Virgin” and Get Christie Love and the Fantastic Four. Obsessing over hit that may not even EXIST in the world that Clint Eastwood usually lives in. (although there are jazz records.) (more…)

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Posted in Action, Crime, Drama, Reviews, Thriller | 5 Comments »

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

Saturday, January 1st, 2005

This is a movie where Ichabod from Sleepy Hollow teams up with a fat Mexican dude named Benicio Del Toro, and these two drive to Las Vegas on 700 different types of drugs to cover a motorcycle race for a magazine. I believe Bill Murray played this same Ichabod character back in the ’80s based on the real guy, Hunter S. Thompson who wrote the book.

Now as you know I’m sober as the Pope during Lent, but I can still appreciate a good drug movie at least as long as it’s this good. The filmatist behind this one, Terry Gilliam, creates a nightmare Las Vegas world where hallucinations of dripping floors and cocktail drinking lizards and nippled buffaloes becomes reality. And the real trip is in the last act of the picture when suddenly Ichabod wakes up in the most trashed hotel room of all time – it looks like a junkyard on top of a lagoon – and tries to remember what happened. All the sudden he has an alligator tail and he’s dictating to a tape recorder duct taped to his mouth. I mean I think we can all relate to that type of morning in my opinion.

The reason this picture works is because of the two actors, Ichabod and Benicio, who are both funny and crazy but likable. Well, at least Ichabod is likable. My favorite scene is when Benicio pulls a knife on some people in an elevator and later declares that the woman fell in love with him, he could tell by the eye contact. “It’s serious, man.” I mean these are two crazy motherfuckers, you can’t believe the shit they are doing, and it seems like they just don’t know how to be any other way. I like the part where Ichabod walks into a police convention and the movie does an x-ray number on his suitcase to remind us that it is filled with every illegal drug ever invented. (more…)

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Posted in Comedy/Laffs, Drama, Fantasy/Swords, Reviews | 47 Comments »