From the director that brought you BEATDOWN and the letters that brought you STEP UP comes SETUP, Bruce Willis’s first DTV action movie. (I’m not gonna count ASSASSINATION OF A HIGH SCHOOL PRESIDENT). So I raise a glass to you, Bruce, on this historic occasion. They might’ve meant it to be a theatrical release, but if so they should’ve told that to the guy writing the script (Mike Behrman, GHOST RIDER: INSIDE THE ACTION). Doesn’t seem like he was expecting that level of scrutiny.
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Posts Tagged ‘James Remar’
Setup
Thursday, September 29th, 2011
The Phantom
Thursday, September 23rd, 2010
You know what movie gets a bad rap, or unfairly ignored? Well, you probly already guessed it’s gonna be the one I wrote the title of above and then there’s a picture of it to the left. Maybe this is not the best format for a guessing game of this type, now that I think about it. If that’s your answer then you are correct, THE PHANTOM from 1996 starring Billy Zane gets a bad rap or is unfairly ignored.
I’m sure in its darkest moments THE PHANTOM believes that nobody understands it, but it doesn’t care. It knows what it is. It’s comfortable with itself. I mean, I don’t know how you guys feel about slamming evil, but THE PHANTOM is all about slamming evil according to the American poster, and I think it does a good job of making the slamming of evil entertaining. (more…)
Mortal Kombat Annihilation
Thursday, July 15th, 2010
MORTAL KOMBAT ANNIHILATION is an asinine sequel by any standards, but as long as you don’t hold the MORTAL KOMBAT legacy too close to your heart it’s pretty fuckin funny.
In the first one it seemed like they tried hard to mold the vibe of the game into a new type of martial arts movie for the early digital era. In this one I really thought the video game creators must’ve got a big head and forced every bullshit video game concept they could think of onto the poor bastards who had to try to turn it into a passable story. (more…)
Psycho (remake)
Monday, November 9th, 2009
In Gus Van Sant’s 1998 remake of PSYCHO they tried to recreate Hitchcock’s filmatism, they had Joseph Stefano only slightly re-word his old script, they re-recorded Bernard Herrman’s score and made it sound basically the same. So the success or failure of this version mostly falls to the one element Hitchcock claimed to not give two shits about: the actors.
That’s trouble though because it was easy to predict that nobody could withstand comparison to Anthony Perkins as Norman Bates. It’s interesting to see someone else try to put a different spin on it, but I doubt you could find anyone who prefers Vince Vaughn or even thinks he comes a close second. I’m not sure who the miraculous casting choice who would work as Norman even though he’s not Anthony Perkins would be, but Vaughn ain’t the guy. (more…)
Quiet Cool
Thursday, March 5th, 2009
James Remar is a New York City cop. Not the kind in a uniform, the cool kind. We know he plays by his own rules because he wakes up in a messy apartment face down next to a pizza box with a couple of uneaten slices still left. Can you believe that? He just let two slices dry out overnight. This is a guy who just doesn’t give a fuck! It’s like the saying goes, “Never face an enemy who does not fear wasting pizza.”
We also know he’s a rugged individualist because he drives a motorcycle, movie code for “he’s a rugged individualist.” In the opening he sees a dude on rollerskates swipe a lady’s purse and he chases him down, driving his motorcycle into a subway car, doing a wheely, using the stairs from the subway entrance as a ramp to jump over some pedestrians, finally grabbing the rollerthief, dragging him at high speed and tossing him into some water. And it’s hard to swim with rollerskates on.
(By the way, I swear I saw this exact same thing happen on CHiPs one time. Were rollerpursesnatchers really a serious problem? I don’t remember.) (more…)
The Warriors
Friday, August 24th, 2007I 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…)
2 Fast 2 Furious
Friday, July 7th, 2006I recently saw and enjoyed THE FAST AND THE FURIOUS PRESENTS TOKYO DRIFT, part 3 in the FAST AND THE FURIOUS saga. And it reminded me that it was time I got around to seeing part 2. This one is closer to a straightup sequel. They couldn’t get Vin Diesel to return so instead they just follow Paul Walker’s character.
I know that probaly all of you have seen that first movie over a thousand times and have it memorized backwards, forwards and sideways, but in case there is one person out there who may not be familiar with the story, I want to help that one person out. In the first movie, Paul Walker is a new street racer in town who befriends Vin Diesel, who is the charismatic leader of a team of racers, but is also leading a gang of armed robbers or a chop shop or arms dealers or kidnappers or something. And a ways into the movie you find out that Paul is actually an undercover cop trying to bust Vin. But throughout the movie they have a special sort of male bonding – the type that happens between an undercover cop and his mark, or between two dudes obsessed with cars – so at the end Paul purposely lets Vin escape.
At the beginning of part 2 we learn that Paul is in Miami, where he is the king of underground street racing. And he’s a fugitive because of letting Vin go. I guess he travelled around helping people and racing cars, like the A-Team with a car instead of a van. But after the spectacular opening race he gets caught by the pigs. It turns out the FBI has a plan for him: if he will go undercover as a driver for this drug kingpin guy, he can get a full pardon. The guy they offer as a partner doesn’t know shit about cars, so he convinces them instead to let him use his childhood friend who now hates him because he blames him for his jail time, Tyrese. Tyrese is not a cop and they would also have to give him a pardon, so it is a good deal I guess, somehow. (more…)
Drugstore Cowboy
Saturday, January 1st, 2005If you want a good picture about junkies this is it. This is not a western like you may think it is the story of Matt Dillon, his lady and another couple who travel the Pacific Northwest region knocking down drugstores to score various pharmaceuticals. As someone who has known these type of people I can GUARANTEE you they do not have prescriptions for these items. They are addicts.
What I like about this one in my opinion is that it is an anti drug movie that doesn’t stack the deck. It makes it clear that drugs are fun when you are doing them, they make the world happy and the cowboy lifestyle as they call it is exciting. So then after being honest it goes on to deal with the negative side.
Most movies would depict these folks as scum but here they are real people, and this is how they live. They are a family and the picture even starts with clips from their home movies. This is also a Mary Poppins type deal where the head of the household is a bit too into his job. He is so dependant on medicinal pleasure that he loses all sense of priorities – he doesn’t even want to get laid. His lady is taking her top off and he gets nervous and starts rattling on about a hospital he wants to rob. And that’s when you know this guy is a fucking addict.
They aren’t only addicted to the drugs, but also to the hunt. And the robbery scenes are thrilling to watch. This dude also plays some clever tricks, and it’s real funny when he gets the cops that have him on surveillance to think his neighbor is an accomplice, and gets his neighbor to think the cops are peeping toms. The cops watch the neighbor with binoculars and they have typical hot-shit-movie-cop dialogue: “I wonder what’s in the bag?” “The only thing I know for sure is that it’s not his god damned lunch.”
But it is. (more…)
