Would you believe this was my first time seeing SCHINDLER’S LIST? It’s getting toward 20 years old and I remembered I hadn’t gotten around to seeing it yet. It’s kind of a heavy decision to make one day: hey, I got 3 hours before I gotta leave for work, maybe I should watch SCHINDLER’S LIST? Never had the urge I guess.

But recently I did just that and I gotta admit it didn’t bum me out as much as I expect, because it left me high on how good the movie was. It’s a great movie, and all the more impressive to watch right after HOOK. Spielberg must’ve felt real guilty about that one to follow it up with the JURASSIC PARK/SCHINDLER’S LIST one-two punch. And after years of avoidance I gotta say SCHINDLER’S LIST is not what I expected. Of course it’s really emotional, but it’s not at all a chore to watch. Is it bad to say that this is an entertaining movie?

It begins with Spielberg’s mastery of imagery. A candle dissolves into what looks like a smokestack – a horrific sight in a WWII movie, but as the camera pulls out – phew, it’s just a steam train. But oh shit, wait – trains are usually bad too! In this case it’s bad, but not as bad as I feared for a second there. It’s Polish Jews arriving at the Warsaw ghetto. The beginning of the horror. They don’t realize yet how bad it’s gonna get. (Later they even have discussions about it, and there are varying levels of optimism.)

Next we see a man getting ready for a night on the town. No face, just glamorous closeups of him putting on his watch and jewelry, his cufflinks, money clip, lighter. This is some suave motherfucker. Then the last thing you see is his swastika pin. Ah shit, cinema tricked us into thinking this guy was cool! Now we feel like assholes.

But of course it’s Liam DARKMAN Neeson as Oskar Schindler, future list-writer, current player, schmoozer and businessman. As the movie and war begin he’s hatching a scheme to buy a pot and pan factory and use it to become the king of black market goods. He finds a brilliant Jewish accountant (Ben Kingsley) and convinces him to use his connections in the community to find investors and employees. In a way it kind of feels like a crime movie like GOODFELLAS, AMERICAN GANGSTER, KILL THE IRISHMAN or anything where you watch a charismatic outside-of-the-box-thinker ingeniously build an empire. Obviously the difference is he never feels like a bad guy or an anti-hero. He’s a criminal against the fuckin Nazi regime. He’s dealing in goods that are only black market because the place got invaded. It’s nice suits and stuff. ‘Cause he likes that stuff. Same thing Diddy would do.

So he’s a good guy, but he’s not exactly Superman or Robin Hood because the only reason he’s sheltering Jews is he thinks it’s “good for business.” Just a convenient part of his money-making scheme, more like a paying-illegal-immigrants-under-the-table type of deal than an intentional good deed. His accountant Stern (Ben Kingsley) is the one that starts claiming old amputees as essential workers to save their lives. But hey, the boss man doesn’t stop him. So he’s a good guy.

Man, what about that scene where Stern doesn’t have his work permit with him and gets put on a train, and Schindler has to threaten the soldiers in charge with getting them fired, then run along the side of the train yelling for Stern until he finds him? It’s an intense struggle to rescue an important man that’s ultimately gonna save hundreds of lives, but at the same time it’s so cold-hearted and uncomfortable – he’s looking past all these people who are gonna be put to their death, searching for the other guy to save. Sorry folks, just looking for my accountant.

Of course this and other experiences lead to a gradual awakening and eventually his activities do become completely about saving lives at great risk to himself. It’s not a business anymore, it’s a front. He even turns it into an ammunition factory for the war effort and then intentionally makes defective ammo. Straight up sabotage. He’s brilliant at justifying his actions with logic that will make sense to Nazis. For example he claims he needs children in his factory because their tiny fingers are the best way to polish the inside of .45 shells. Nazis are assholes, they must love child labor so he’s throwing it out there for them.

And in some sense he is Superman, because there’s something unrelatable about his specific type of heroism. Schindler is not an Everyman. We’re not in his position of power, and even if we were we can’t imagine ourselves ever encountering an evil on the level of the Holocaust. Still, what he does is relevant to any time, ’cause there’s always gonna be business people that could grow a conscience and some balls and use their resources and connections to try to do the right thing and make the world a better place. In some cases it might even be like Schindler at the beginning, it might be “good for business.” There could be profits in getting us off fossil fuels, in letting gay people have weddings, whatever. Or even if there’s not, still you can “Go home to your families as men, not murderers” for doing what you knew in your heart was right.

Ralph Fiennes as the Nazi commandant Goeth is a hell of character too. He’s an evil fucking bastard – some mornings he likes to go out on the porch shirtless and pick off random prisoners with a sniper rifle – but like Verhoeven did later in BLACK BOOK Spielberg dares to give him the monster a few human qualities. His lust for a Jewish woman makes him fantasize about running off with her after the war, and that in turn makes him stand up for Schindler when he gets in trouble for kissing a Jewish woman. It almost seems like they’re building a real friendship, but of course it’s more of a working relationship. Schindler’s gotta butter this guy up to get what he needs out of him, just like buying drinks for the officers in the opening scene. He’s gotta become sort of buddies so he can spray the train cars with hoses (to get much needed water to the prisoners) and make Goeth think it’s a funny, cruel trick. Ha ha, let’s spray ‘em with hoses.

This guy is one of history’s biggest monsters, but in his mind he’s just a hard-working joe who never catches a break. In one amazing scene he complains to Schindler about what a pain in the ass it was to build a concentration camp. I mean, have you ever worked with barbed wire? You don’t really think about how hard it is to string that shit up. It’s hard to imagine somebody being so oblivious to whine about something like that, but of course if somebody was gonna do it it would be the fuckin Nazis. Something felt really horribly true about that scene. I believed that he probly really felt that way.

SCHINDLER’S LIST is obviously a story about an exceptionally heroic operation, but I think it’s comforting just to know there were some people in Germany and Poland who tried to do something, didn’t just go along with the program. The Bad Germans, maybe you’d call them. I read that Adi Dassler of Adidas did a little bit of that, giving jobs in his factory to Jews in order to shield them. Obviously not on the same level as Schindler, but I wonder how widespread that was? It’s nice if alot of places were doing it. I mean, what do we sacrifice these days to try to make the world better? Maybe drive a Prius?

There are a hundred little details in the filmmaking that work brilliantly. In the opening, as hundreds of Jews are brought to the ghetto on trains, he starts to focus in on a bureaucrat’s preparations of pen and ink, so he can put their names on a list. Of course this is later reflected with the preparations of the titular list to save as many of them as possible. Another great early scene – one that feels very loose for Spielberg – has a bunch of Jews standing around talking about life in the ghetto, offering different opinions of it, because none of them really realize how bad it’s gonna get. I swear it’s like a Spike Lee scene, like Mother Sister or Da Mayor talking to Martin Lawrence and the other kids in DO THE RIGHT THING.

I don’t know specifically why Spielberg went with the black and white, but it’s perfect. When people use it now black and white can be very stylized, another step away from reality, and a way to emphasize shadows and contrasts, create a dreamy film noir type of atmosphere. That’s not what this is at all. This looks raw and real, like a newsreel maybe. Spielberg tried out more stripped down documentary type of camerawork, but not the kind where it shakes around and looks like crap. I guess he didn’t use cranes or steadicams and did almost half of it with handheld cameras, so it looks different from his other movies. I think subconsciously it feels a little more “real,” but without sacrificing his usual clear visual storytelling and energetic cuts.

Some day if somebody wants to humiliate me they could confront me with all the movies I have publicly admitted to crying at part of. And alright you assholes, you can add this one to the list. I gotta admit I was unprepared for the little epilogue at the end where real life surviving “Schindler Jews” visit his grave. I thought I was through the woods with my manhood intact and that fucker snuck up on me. It could’ve ended with the ol’ onscreen text telling you how many lives Schindler saved, but it takes the next step and makes you actually see real live people who would not exist if not for the events depicted in the movie. I mean, I thought Neeson was really good in DARKMAN too, but it didn’t end with actual saved lives.

Nothing against DARKMAN, I also like DARKMAN. Part 3 is pretty good too. SCHINDLER’S LIST is not very much like the DARKMANs in my opinion but I still recommend it highly.

That holds the movie back, but it’s not fatal, because it’s really more about the characters and the mood and a bunch of men out in the cold thinking about death. THE GREY is the story of a group of workers in Alaska who survive a plane crash out in the snowy asshole of the earth and then try to stumble back to safety. While being hunted by wolves. That’s about it.

For what it’s worth this is my new favorite movie by Carnahan. Keep in mind I thought NARC was good but not as great as everybody else said at the time, I really liked parts of SMOKIN’ ACES but thought other parts were terrible, and I probly only enjoyed THE A-TEAM at all because I’m such a kind and forgiving individual. But this one has an unironic macho-ness and a heart-on-its-sleeve quality that I think is very Carnahan and very appealing. It opens with a long first-person narration from Liam Neeson that involves both a love letter to a wife he lost and a poem he likes to recite gravely. And the poem comes up a couple more times in the movie. Also he ignores a ROAD HOUSE sized bar brawl while having a drink, almost commits suicide and holds his hand against a wolf he shot to calm it as it bleeds to death. All in the first 5 or 10 minutes. So I liked this movie.

Neeson was one of the highlights of THE A-TEAM, and he must’ve really liked working with Carnahan because this is not one he could do for the paycheck. It has to have been very personal to him, playing a mourning, suicidal man dealing with death so soon after he lost his wife in real life. It almost makes it uncomfortable, like they’re exploiting his tragedy for a movie, but I think he knows what he’s doing. It’s not like they tricked him into signing on, so it must’ve been meaningful to him.

I’m sure this wasn’t a hugely expensive movie, and there’s an occasional phony background shot, but you can tell it was mostly shot on location. The frozen, windy hellhole that it takes place in feels very real, not artificial. Unlike 30 DAYS OF NIGHT I really felt like these poor fuckers were freezing their toes off every day and that they had gone through the ringer by the end. You see their breath alot and I’m pretty sure it’s not CGI.

That reality is established early on with the little rough edges that make it look more like a place and less like a movie setting. I love the bar he goes to, which is huge and brightly lit like a school gym. You can see why he keeps his parka on inside. But that’s the best place they have to go to out there. And the bumpy plane ride goes on for a long time before it crashes, I can’t remember another turbulence scene that felt that authentic. The actual crash sequence is so terrifying that you just know some motherfucker is gonna make sure it becomes in-flight entertainment.

Well, before long Neeson and several other plane crash survivors are scavenging clothes, alcohol, weapons and flammable liquids from the wreckage and trying to figure out how to not freeze to death. I thought it was funny that Neeson immediately takes charge, and at first nobody questions it. It’s almost like they realize that he’s the lead in the movie. But honestly I think it makes sense and fits the themes, because that’s the type of guy he is, a natural leader. I mean, the first time he sees a wolf out there he calls it a motherfucker and runs straight at it. So he demands respect. If he started telling you what to do you’d probly think “this guy seems to know what he’s doing” too. And of course as the movie becomes more about wolves you realize that he’s the alpha-male leading the pack. And thankfully this is never said out loud by any of the characters.

I also laughed when he started spitting out facts about wolves, that they hunt in a 30 mile radius from their den or something like that. But I have to admit that was unfair, I just didn’t realize that the earlier scene where he shot a wolf was establishing that shooting wolves is his job. He is an expert so that’s why he knows that stuff. It would be funnier if he was just a guy who knew alot of random facts about wildlife. Maybe he reads alot of National Geographic.

Their battle with the wolves is pretty simple. They know the wolves are picking them off one by one, and they hope to do the same thing back. But mostly they just try to head for civilization without getting eaten. They don’t try to build a brick house or anything.

Most of the movie is what happens in between the confrontations with beasts. At its best it evokes my favorite scene in JAWS, the long scene of bonding on the boat that leads to Quint’s famous U.S.S. Indianapolis story. Of course it’s not as good as that scene and the rest of the movie is not as good as the rest of JAWS, but it’s still admirable. It’s a bunch of assholes that don’t know each other real well going through hell together, eventually feeling close enough to talk about their lives and fears, and to laugh a little bit.

I didn’t recognize any of these guys besides Neeson, which was cool. They seemed like genuine guys that would be on that plane. I honestly had no idea until the credits that the guy with the glasses who I really liked was Dermot Mulroney. And Diaz, the ex-con guy, is Frank Grillo, Joel Edgerton’s classical music loving trainer in WARRIOR.

This is about as pure a Liam Neeson vehicle as you could get, merging his genre past and present with his dramatic chops. He gets to be tougher and wiser and braver than everybody else, but also sensitive. He gets to cry macho. He shows you to be hopeful even when you’re obviously fucked. If Grandma had seen this that wolf probly never would’ve been able to steal her clothes.

I don’t know if this movie is gonna go over very well. I heard some people laughing at it at the screening I went to. Maybe Carnahan’s brand of rugged poetic survivalism would’ve worked better with some actual wolf fights. Spoonful of sugar and all that. I sure wouldn’t have complained. But THE GREY has a bleakness and a manliness and a sincerity that works for me, and probly a few others.

BONUS END SPOILER: in case you saw the movie and didn’t stay after the credits, there is a little bit after them. But it seemed to me (and I think intentionally) just as ambiguous about the fate of the two combatants as the part before the credits. Kind of a cute way to tell your audience to go fuck itself. It’s like if after the credits on THE THING they made it seem like they were gonna tell you which one was the Thing and then they just faded to black again.

I’m sure THE A-TEAM TV show probly made it all around the world, but if you never heard of it here’s the premise: an elite special forces team is framed for war crimes, they bust the fuck out of the joint and travel around in a van using their skills to help people who’re in trouble, all the while being chased by military assholes and repeatedly failing to clear their name until the last episode. Each one has a specialty: Hannibal (George Peppard) is a colonel so he’s real smart and masterminds everything, also smokes cigars. B.A. (First name Mister, middle name period, last name T) is just a Bad-Ass so he grabs people and/or punches them. Face (Dirk Benedict from “Battlestar Galactica”) is a charming ladies man so he uses his smooth talking and powers of disguise to sneak into places. And Mad Murdoch (Dwight Schultz) is crazy, so he does crazy stuff. Also flies helicopters. Together they usually do some welding to build some sort of jerry-rigged cannon or some shit and there’s a montage where they pull off their plan and they’re all happy. Come to think of it it’s almost exactly like SCOOBY-DOO but with way less snacking.

For the movie of course they went the origin story route, so in this one they’re trying to clear their name after some combination of mercenaries, CIA and/or army got them blamed for the theft of some counterfeiting plates as they’re about to leave Iraq. The story is kind of a more smart-assed version of a MISSION:IMPOSSIBLE movie. The complicated tricks they play are very A-TEAM, but I’m not sure we need the DTV Seagal-style convoluted series of double-crosses. I guess they heard “special forces” and thought “overly complicated spy movie.”

(And my buddy Mr. Armageddon pointed out that it’s simply not believable that the A-Team was in Iraq. If they were then why did it take so long to find Saddam, and to know there weren’t weapons, and to get the fuck out of there? Just as 9-11 wouldn’t have happened in a world with a Superman, Iraq wouldn’t have happened in a world with the A-Team.)

But the cast is real good at recapturing these characters. Liam Neeson as Hannibal gets a great introduction where he escapes from being tied up to a chair (something Wesley Snipes has failed to do in three different movies, so maybe it’s best he didn’t get to play B.A.). Bradley Cooper (MIDNIGHT MEAT TRAIN) actually seems genetically engineered and trained for his entire life to play Face. It’s ridiculous how exactly his smugness matches Benedict’s.

UFC fighter (and MIDNIGHT MEAT TRAIN scene stealer) Quinton “Rampage” Jackson has the most difficult job – how the fuck do you replace Mr. T? You can’t just imitate him and you sure as hell can’t not be anything like him. It’s a delicate job and they did it with surprising grace. They keep the fear of flying, ditch the gold chains and feather earrings, give the mohawk a meaning. Rampage’s B.A. smiles more than T’s. He has a little more humor and sense of fun, is slightly less stubborn (he can be easily won over by Murdoch’s cooking) but sort of has the same lovable big teddy bear personality as T. He gets an enjoyably corny supblot about renouncing violence and mohawks, and he gets to whine when people make him want to shoot them.

The only thing I really didn’t like about B.A. was when he did a Li’l Jon/CHAPPELLE’S SHOW seven god damn years ago “yay-eahhh.” Might as well have a reference to the Macarena. But apparently Carnahan thought it was funny because he replayed the damn thing on the end credits.

DISTRICT 9’s Sharlto Copley is fine as Murdoch, but does not transcend the role of Murdoch. Like Schultz he’s funny some of the time, but trying to be funny all the time. I kind of liked him but I wish we could’ve seen John Singleton’s idea of Woody Harrelson as Murdoch. That might’ve been something.

It’s a good team, good chemistry, but something’s weird about the rhythm. Some of the jokes seem timed a little wrong, emphasizing the wrong beat or stepping on the funny lines. It felt to me like a funnier movie was right there, it was just mixed up a little. And Carnahan throws in alot of unneeded non-linear editing, jumping back and forth between planning and execution when simple straightforwardness would work better. He’s like a guitarist who takes three or four too many solos. For example they have Face playing a shell game with some cups as he explains a plan, then he’s doing the same moves with a crane and three shipping containers. And just as I’m enjoying the absurdity it cuts back to him moving the cups, as if we’re too stupid to remember that this is what was shown to us about 45 seconds ago and to realize that there is a connection between the two activities. Even though Face even said out loud “This was much easier with cups.” We didn’t need that and you think we need more than that? Thanks for the confidence, Joe.

Most of the action is middle of the road too. There’s a couple high speed nail biters, but most of it’s a little shakier and choppier than it should be. Definitely not as bad as the modern standard, but also not as good as it would once have been expected to be. Rampage only fights a couple of times and his MMA skills are not really taken advantage of. You would assume he was a WWE guy because he pretty much just does one body slam and a wire-assisted power kick.

Jessica Biel is getting hotter and pulling off tough better than she used to, so I liked her as the officer on their trail (and ex-girlfriend of Face). And I really liked Patrick Wilson as the douchey CIA agent who enjoys himself as much as the A-Team do.

I gotta admit, my favorite parts are all of the stupidest shit. I love that when Hannibal and B.A. meet they can bond over Army Rangers tattoos moments after Hannibal shot B.A. And that, since the screenwriters remember that Hannibal used to say “I love it when a plan comes together,” they have him constantly talking about the act of planning and what constitutes a plan and etc., like that’s his only interest. Plans. And I gotta give points to an expensive studio movie where the heroes playing a trick using ketchup as fake blood, like little kids would do. I’m not as sure about Hannibal quoting Gandhi to convince B.A. to renounce his renouncing of violence, but at least it brings the mohawk back.

One thing I don’t like about these types of movie adaptations is that they tell the beginning of the story and never get to the good part. To me the cool thing about the A-Team is not that they cleared their name in the last episode (SPOILER), it’s that before that they travelled around on the lam and were these legendary underground heroes, risking exposure to help people by using their elite skills. This movie isn’t doing too well at the box office, so I’m not holding my breath for episode 2. But I hope if they do one it’s about B.A. trying to stop the children’s center from getting shut down. And they damn well better get into his love of milk.

[ratings]

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But with this review we gotta transport ourselves back to the early 1990 when Raimi was an underdog, a cult director who had done two drive-in masterpieces and one disowned comedy, and here he was trying to break into the post-BATMAN studio game with a movie that was big budget for him but small compared to the movies it was gonna be held up against. It’s kind of like a comic book movie: a super hero origin story, with music by Danny Elfman, and with ‘man’ in the hero’s name. It’s also kind of a horror movie: he’s a mad scientist and a burnt up Phantom of the Opera type freak whose scarring turns him crazy and murderous. But mostly I think it’s like an action movie: it has R-rated violence, he’s getting revenge one-by-one on the criminals who wronged him, there’s explosions and stunts, and one of the screenwriters is Chuck Pfarrer, the ex-Navy SEAL who wrote NAVY SEALS and HARD TARGET.

Future Academy Award nominee Liam Neeson plays Dr. Peyton Westlake, a scientist working on a liquid skin substitute for burn victims. When his girlfriend (future Academy Award winner Frances McDormand) discovers proof that her sleazy boss (Logie award winner Colin Friels) is making bribes Westlake gets caught in the crossfire and a gang of criminals blows up his lab with him inside. Everybody thinks he’s dead but his burnt near-corpse winds up a John Doe in a hospital where the doctors take the liberty of giving him an experimental surgery that severes his nerve endings so he won’t feel the burns. The only negative side effects are that he has lost the sense of touch and that he has very sensitive emotions that can cause him to fly into a blind rage with an adrenaline rush that gives him the strength of ten men. Otherwise everything is fine.

Well, I guess the world’s worst ever living burn victim is lucky that he also happens to be the world’s foremost authority on replacement skin. But not that lucky, because he never perfected the formula, the skin melts after 99 minutes in sunlight. At this point, Westlake has a decision to make. He could tell the doctors look, I remember who I am, I’m Dr. Peyton Westlake. I happen to be an expert in liquid skin. Maybe you could help me to perfect it. If not well, let’s see what we can do here. Put me in rehab, help me to heal. Get me a psychiatrist because the healing on the inside will be even harder. Please, contact my girlfriend. I just proposed to her. She thinks I’m dead.

That would be hard work but you would think that’s what you’d have to do. But Westlake is stubborn. Instead he escapes the hospital ODB style, carts his damaged lab equipment to a condemned building and sets up shop. Later he’ll make himself a mask of what he used to look like and go to his girlfriend and not tell her about his burns. But first to get his confidence up he’ll stalk the thugs who attacked him, disguise himself as them and play elaborate tricks to set them up against each other.

When not disguised Darkman has an iconic phantom kind of look – bandaged face, black hat and trenchcoat. And Neeson does a great job bringing the freak out. With the fake Liam Neeson face he’s sensitive and wounded, in the lab out of disguise he loses it, grunting to himself and his cat, sarcastically dancing like the freak he thinks some imaginary oppressor sees him as. I guess he’s kind of like the Hulk, whoes super power is that he has a short fuse. But Darkman’s catchphrase would be “you wouldn’t like me when my feelings are hurt.”

When he does lose it Raimi lets loose with the visuals he was known for back then. Darkman’s world explodes into a psychedelic collage of flames, smoke, the firing of his own synapses and abstract, traumatic imagery, both real and imagined. Then he can toss people around or break the fingers of an unfriendly but otherwise innocent carnival worker. But to tell you the truth the super strength and lack of pain are not that big a part of what Darkman does. He gets more use out of his masks and his deviousness. And he has the balls to impersonate major crime figures while only knowing how to mimic a few phrases in their voices. And there are always unforeseen complications. He keeps coming mask-to-face with the people he’s disguised as, sometimes on accident, sometimes to fuck with their minds, once in a revolving door so nobody knows which is which.

There’s a great action movie type opening, throwing you into the world of two hardnosed crime bosses having a confrontation that turns into a tribute to the HARD BOILED warehouse shootout and involves a machine gun hidden inside a dude’s wooden leg. It’s quite an introduction for the secondary (but most memorable) villain, Larry Drake as Robert G. Durant. That guy was best known for playing a retarded guy on LA Law, so it was pretty cool to see him playing this arrogant asshole who cuts off fingers with a cigar cutter and collects them in carefully sorted display cases.

When the action comes up it’s good shit. There’s lots of jumping across roofs and fire escapes. In my opinion Dr. Westlake was not only a pioneer in skin replacement technology but also in parkour. The showstopping chase with Darkman hanging from a cable attached to a helicopter keeps switching distractingly to greenscreen-type closeups, but still, these days you watch those other shots and you can’t help but be awed. Holy shit, they really did that! Now they’d have some showoffy digital shot with the camera flying through or around the artificial action, but in 1990 they just filmed a real guy hanging off a real helicopter. And there’s a great part where Durant starts busting off explosive shells trying to hit Darkman and doesn’t give a shit that they’re blowing up cars on the highway below. Darkman doesn’t care too much about collateral damage either judging by his decision to hook the helicopter to some poor schmuck’s semi. Luckily the guy doesn’t seem to notice. He doesn’t even slow down when the chopper crashes and explodes.

Let me describe a shot that sort of sums up what was cool about Raimi back then. Darkman and his girl’s boss face off high above the city in the girders of an incomplete skyscraper. The bad guy mentions how many stories they are up, and the camera does a high-speed pan down the (miniature model) structure, all the way down to the ground – where it shows a cluster of rebar spikes sticking out of the ground ready to impale whoever falls. It looks cool and it’s totally excessive because who gives a shit if you get impaled, you just fell down like a hundred stories and probaly bounced off at least 75 different metal girders. Raimi knows the rebar is unnecessary and he knows that we know it’s unnecessary, but we all have an unspoken agree that it should still be shown. Because that’s how we like it.

DARKMAN has just the right balance of cartoonish over-the-topness and serious melodrama to make the phony bits part of the fun. For example I don’t mind accepting that he can scan any flat photograph to make a 3-D model of somebody’s head, and somehow finds the right clothes to wear with the disguises. If you or I were Darkman we would probaly figure out how to do those things too. This is a great movie of its type. It mixes so many of the best types of stories and gimmicks – the tragic monster, the super hero, the master of disguise, the avenger – into such a unique combination. It’s loaded with clever ideas and imaginative visuals, it has an energetic pace, it even has good acting. I like those SPIDER-MAN movies, I even enjoyed part 3 (sorry everybody), but DARKMAN is way more my speed.

[ratings]

Okay, so admittedly action is not completely new for Neeson. He was a swordsman in both BATMAN BEGINS and PHANTOM MENACE. A long time ago he was Darkman. He even co-starred in a (not very good) Patrick Swayze action picture called NEXT OF KIN. (The one where not-famous-yet Ben Stiller plays a mobster’s douchebag son.) But mostly he’s moved beyond that, and I think most people consider him a Serious Actor. You know – MICHAEL COLLINS, KINSEY, GANGS OF NEW YORK, Spielberg’s choice to play Lincoln. And here he is playing a role that the first Ain’t It Cool review complained could’ve been played by Jean-Claude Van Damme. But of course you and I agree that’s why it’s so cool. We want to see a Van Damme movie but with Liam Neeson. Or how about a Michael Dudikoff with Frank Langella? Or a Bolo Yeung with Daniel Day Lewis? A Cynthia Rothrock with Susan Sarandon?

In TAKEN Liam Neeson gets to do all the badass ex-CIA shit that was so sorely lacking in ETHAN FROME and LES MISERABLES. Lots of quick, blunt chops to dispatch foes, appearing out of nowhere to beat people up, outsmarting and outfighting police and organized crime to find out things he’s not supposed to know and get into places he’s not supposed to be, working his way through the chain to find his daughter. As a bonus he thwarts a knife attack on a pop star.

But let’s be honest, this character Bryan Mills is a bad motherfucker in need of a better movie. For starters, the story takes unnecessarily long to get going. It’s not a dealbreaker but it’s kind of weird for a lean 93 minute movie to start out so leisurely. It’s possible that writers Besson and Robert Mark Kamen think they’re doing something more than a kidnapped daughter movie and are trying to go a little deeper into the characters than you expect, but if so they blew it. I like the whole idea of Bryan trying to reconnect with his estranged daughter on her birthday and being upstaged by her rich stepdad (who buys her a horse). But alot of time is spent on setting up the daughter while still making her seem like an annoying brat. She loves crappy pop music, wears an ugly sequined jacket and spends most of her screen time hopping up and down and squealing in excitement over various expensive gifts. And she seems completely unaware of her status as the priveleged stepdaughter of the super-rich. She hugs her two fathers and tells them she loves them a few times throughout the movie, always because they bought her a gift or gave her permission to do something. At the end of course Bryan gets a hug for singlehandedly rescuing her from a syndicate of Albanian kidnappers who drugged her and sold her into sex slavery, but even then he has to introduce her to a celebrity to feel like he won her over. She learns nothing. If that’s the best you can do with her personality that’s fine, just make the setup short and sweet and assume we understand that the dude loves her because she’s his daughter. Sometimes simple is better.

Also, I don’t mind this that much, but I should mention it has some of the typical goofball Luc Besson shit. For example the movie opens with him going into a Radio Shack and talking to the manager who knows him because he has come in and looked at the karaoke machine so many times. I was convinced the only reason to include this was if this guy was gonna turn into his Q, providing the latest in Radio Shack brand surveillance technology, but of course nothing becomes of it. There really is no reason to include this, it’s just how Luc Besson rolls.

Maybe the funniest thing in the movie is that Bryan is seemingly a paranoid, overprotective father, he knows about all the horrible things that happen in this world so he can’t stand to let his daughter be out there on her own, and only under duress does he give her permission to go to Europe. And then sure enough, two minutes after she arrives at the house where she’s staying a group of kidnappers bust down the door and grab her and her friend to drug and sell into sex slavery. You see that, Famke Jansen? You should listen to your ex-husband. He knows what he’s talking about.

I do have a problem with all the action being shot Bourne style. It’s cool to see Neeson kicking ass, but you really don’t see most of it because the camera is shaking around so much. You gotta assume this is partly to cover up that Liam Neeson is not Bruce Lee, but then they do the same thing in the car chase, so maybe not. Like the Bourne movies you can understand some of what’s going on and they are still pretty cool scenes, but not exactly classics. (and not as good as the best Bourne scenes.) Director Pierre Morel previously did BANLIEU 13/DISTRICT B13 and it’s not like I expect Neeson to jump through windows and run up walls, but that movie showed that Morell could craft amazing action scenes. Ironically, shaking the camera around so you can’t see anything is supposed to make it seem more real, but check out this incredible 3 minute chase scene where the camera doesn’t shake around because the stunts are real.

I don’t know man, I know I sound like a broken record here but this was only a couple years ago and he was allowed to shoot an action scene as if he had intentionally planned it out and wanted to get the best angles to tell the story. It’s no longer in style to show effort or planning I guess, you gotta pretend you just got out of bed, you’re still in your bathrobe and are too groggy to hold the camera steady and that’s why the audience will not quite see the badass shit that is probaly going on nearby.

Is this the end of an era? Besson productions were never completely trustworthy, but they were at least known for good action scenes. The TAXI series (not the Jimmy Fallon one), the TRANSPORTER series, and of course it was YAMIKASI and DISTRICT B13 that introduced the world to the French art of parkour, later borrowed for CASINO ROYALE. I hope this is a fluke and not a sign that even Besson is throwing in the towel and adopting the Bourne style. This is certainly not the worst example but for fuck’s sake, let’s give this style a rest! It’s over. QUANTUM OF SOLACE broke the dam, it’s not just me complaining about this shit anymore, it’s just about everybody. And even if some people like that, I bet you five bucks they won’t complain if you start making carefully planned action sequences again. Even the stupidest text messaging little fucker you ever saw will not complain that the shots are too well framed and that he is too aware of what is going on in the scene. Follow my plan and nobody loses.

For those reasons TAKEN is not as good as it ought to be, but I do think it’s worth watching and I hope they make a series of these, like THE TRANSPORTER. I guess they should’ve called it THE PREVENTER though, because if it’s TAKEN 2 somebody’s gonna have to get kidnapped again. My guess: the daughter becomes a famous singer and gets kidnapped for ransom. Or maybe the ex-wife gets it this time. Whatever would happen I hope Bryan would call on his security buddies who come over to barbecue with him. That seemed like classic action movie setup, showing us the elite team he will have help him at the end, but then they never do. You feel bad for them.

Now let’s have one starring Ralph Fiennes as an ex-Navy SEAL who goes to Afghanistan to hunt down drug traffickers after his niece ODs on heroin.

[ratings]

STORY #1 starring Batman

You know how RAMBO 2 tried to help our nation get over Vietnam? Well this one is trying to help us get over Joel Schumacher. The idea of BATMAN BEGINS is to pretend none of that other shit ever happened and start over. And they do a good job taking a 98.9% different approach.

One thing they figured out, if you want a good comic strip type movie you gotta hire a great maniac to play the super hero. Take for example Eric Bana, who gave one of the best performances of whichever decade that was in CHOPPER. Absolutely brilliant as a lovable psychotic murderer who cuts his own ears off, so they cast him as (The [Incredible]) Hulk. Same thing with Christian Bale here, many of us are most familiar with him as a sadistic yuppie with perfect abs running around naked with a chain saw, biting women on the ass, etc. So he’s perfect for Batman.

This one’s pretty different from AMERICAN PSYCHO. His character (name’s Bruce Wayne I believe) is another rich guy but he wants to make the world a better place and that kind of crap. Not shoot women with nail guns. But at first we don’t know that, we first meet him as an american con in a hellish Chinese prison. He’s a bad motherfucker we know because 1. he’s probaly gonna turn out to be Batman I bet and 2. he purposely goes to Chinese prison to practice on criminals. Good stuff. (spoiler note: unfortunately we do not get to see some sort of badass escape from Chinese prison, a forgivable offense but also the first sign that this is not a perfect movie sent down from the Heavens like the internet would have you believe. Let’s have realistic hopes here, fellas.)

This is a smart idea to start out weird like this because everybody, even me, knows that Bruce Wayne’s parents were killed by a mugger or the Joker or Green Goblin or somebody like that, and that’s why he decided to dress up as a bat and get good at climbing ropes. So it’s nice to start out with something unusual before rehashing that material again. This does tell that old yarn again but what they do is they make it more in depth, more grounded in a halfway real world (not entirely real, let’s not exaggerate). They make you really like Bruce’s dad and get sad when he (spoiler) gets killed. And they show how and why Bruce Wayne builds the whole Batman operation from the ground up: how he learned to fight, how he got a cool cave, where his equipment comes from, how he avoids arousing suspicion when ordering strange items from overseas, who helps him cover his tracks, even why he has those little spikes on his gloves. And why he decides hey, you know what would be cool, I should go with a bat motif.

Like in the other movies, Batman wears an asinine armored scuba outfit with point ears, but they use a couple good tricks to make it forgivable. Number one, they don’t show it as often. There’s one part where he’s in silhouette and he looks really cool. It’s kind of like remember that movie ALI, I thought Will Smith really looked alot like Mohammed Ali when you either squinted enough or when they showed him from the back. This is the same way, he almost looks cool when they’re not showing him.

Number two, they show him building the suit, so you can understand why it looks so stupid. Just the body part alone cost $300,000 dollars. What’s he gonna do, start over because it doesn’t make him look cool? Bruce Wayne isn’t that petty. If they’re real friends they’ll judge him on who he is, not on his clothes. And think about this Batman, you look EXTREMELY fucking cool compared to Daredevil. (That little pep talk works on all super hero movies except Daredevil.)

And the third trick about the costume is, alot of the movie isn’t about wearing the costume, it’s about leading up to the costume. Travelling around the world training, fighting crime without a costume, pretending to be a drunk playboy. They make Bruce Wayne into more of a character, more of a methodical guy instead of just the weirdo who stares out the window and/or makes speeches about duality.

Not that there aren’t speeches. I liked how much the movie focused on story and character instead of the usual “comic book movie” stuff, but there’s a section there where it gets a little bogged down by too much dialogue of characters exchanging their views about justice. I wanted to say, “Hey, David S. Goyer who wrote this script, you know one of the reasons your character Blade is so cool? Because he knows when to shut the fuck up, which is most of the time.” David S. Goyer wasn’t there though and anyway before I got a chance to say it the movie really kicked in.

One thing I liked is how much they try to make it seem real. They shoot it more like a crime drama, not some gothic fairy tale. And most of the gadgets seem like semi-plausible experimental military type technology. Even the grappling hooks he uses they make seem sort of real, because they sound like equipment you kids use for your rock climbing or Road Rules. Also Gotham seems like a real city some of the time. Later on though, especially when the action gets big and out of control, they end up with some of the cheesy soundstage feel. Also the crime ridden areas of Gotham remind you of those ’80s New-York-is-hell movies like THE WARRIORS or CHAINS or a couple of the Michael Jackson videos. At least they don’t have dudes with mowhawks pulling switchblades on people.

The cast is great, especially Bale (SHAFT), Liam Neeson (DARKMAN) and Michael Caine (ON DEADLY GROUND). Katie Holmes is pretty good except she can’t pull off a couple chunks of exposition they gave her and they made her lecture Bruce Wayne enough that you wonder why he bothers with her. Nothing too bad though. As for the villains, the emphasis is much more on Batman getting things in place than on villains, but they’re good ones without much of a trace of that histrionic post-Jack-Nicholson-as-the-Joker comic book movie villainy we’ve seen from Tommy Lee Jones in that one movie, Arnold Schwarzenegger in that other movie, Colin Farrel in a different movie where his super power is flicking deadly peanuts and paper clips at people, or the other guys like that in the other movies.

A warning for action movie fans though: the action is this movie’s one major weakness. Its KRYPTONITE if you will. (little comic book reference for you guys, I bet some of you hardcores will get that one. [if not it's from superman I believe, don't quote me on that it might be spiderman but I think superman though]). In a movie that pretty much starts out with a dude going up to Shaolin Temple and asking to be trained, you want to see some good fights. To be fair, I just watched 8 DIAGRAM POLE FIGHTER so my standards are temporarily high. But most of the action here is shot in a very Bruckheimery/GLADIATOR style where the camera is too close and shaky for anybody to really have any idea what is going on, except that it involves Batman in some way I believe, and possibly that guy who he is fighting. This is frustrating because Goyer definitely sets up what could’ve been some great fights, including more than one where our guy has to take on multiple ninjas with swords.

Hint to Christopher Nolan: in a ninja fight, there should be some shots that show their arms and legs. So you can see what they are doing. In my opinion. I’ll send you some ninja movies if you don’t understand what I’m talking about. Like I always say, think Bruce Lee in ENTER THE DRAGON, not John Saxon.

Honestly though, unlike hugely popular best picture winner that I didn’t like GLADIATOR, the badly shot action scenes didn’t ruin the movie for me. Because I really liked the story and characters, and never was waiting for another fight. I was thinking you know, I’m really enjoying this movie, I’m surprised how seriously it’s treating the story, how it expects you to care about character drama instead of guys in colorful costumes climbing around on giant statues and crap like that. Which means of course that most people will hate it and say it’s boring, like (The [Incredible]) Hulk. That’s what I was guessing but when the movie ended there was a huge, enthusiastic applause and people walking out with big smiles like they’d been smoking weed all day, which they hadn’t, because they were waiting in line for this screening. I’m not a psychic as far as I know, I have never touched an object associated with a crime and gotten visions to help solve the mystery. But my impression was that this was an honest to Christ applause, they really were excited about this movie. As far as I saw Batman was not in the audience so they weren’t just being polite. So hopefully alot of you will like it.

If not, there’s always life.

STORY #2 starring me

Okay, so BATMAN BEGINS was story #1 today, story #2 has no connection or similarity to story #1 at all except that it also concerns a Great American Icon. In this case, me. I don’t want to sound like I’m full of hot air, I know most of you won’t give a rat’s tail end about this, but for anybody that does it’s time to go public with the information that some young Hollywood hipster from Canada is trying to make a movie out of my web sight, life’s journey, etc. The script writer is named Skander Halim, and when he first approached me for this “option” business a couple years ago he told me he was a story editor for a TV show but “don’t watch it, it’s about a farting alien.” I felt sorry for the kid so I played along. I got ten bucks and a pack of Newports so it was a pretty good deal. Also his people sent me a script of his called PRETTY PERSUASION. Pretty good script I thought although yes, Skander, I saw HEATHERS too. Let’s move on with our lives now.

I’m still sure a movie about me is only a little more likely to happen than CATWOMAN RELOADED. But the twist I never saw coming is that his PRETTY PERVERSION script was turned into an actual movie, and a genuinely good one in my opinion. I saw it at the Seattle International type Film Festival last week. I’m not gonna review it obviously because I have a commitment to excellence so I watch out for the ol’ conflicts of interest there. But this sleazy and perverted, er I mean bold and uncompromising black comedy actually turned out great. It has a few elements I seen in WILD THINGS and yes, HEATHERS but it puts them together in a really smart, original and confident way. I laughed alot and only squirmed when I was supposed to. Like the part where James Woods gets caught jerkin off on the couch. Seeing triumphant scenes like this on the screen I realized it was a whole lot smarter than I caught on when I read the thing. I’m slow I guess.

My solemn vow not to review the movie almost seemed unneccessary because watching it I knew I genuinely liked it, not in a “that’s pretty good for some guy who actually reads my crappy web sight” kind of way. In my opinion. So if you can confirm that it is good from some objective third party or parties, please fly to New York or LA on August 12th to enjoy it in its limited release before it spreads like wildfire and becomes this generation’s DIE HARD. Or at least SPEED. Sorry there is no nudity but there is some cunnilingus so Harry will like it.

The movie Mr. Halim wrote about me is of course called VERN TELL’S IT LIKE IT IS and it is sort of a phoney baloney hollywood version of how I came to be and the great impact I had on the world through reviewing films on my TV show. (Don’t ask me, I didn’t write it.) He told me it was like a hard-R version of Pee Wee’s Baadasssss Song or whatever that first Pee Wee Herman picture was called. To be frankly honest it is not the sort of gritty and philosophical masterpiece that I would have written if I for some reason wanted to make a movie about myself. But I didn’t and his script made me laugh so I hope they will make it and share my laughter with the world. Also because I would get paid.

According to some rag called the Hollywood Reporter, Halim is about to direct a ghost movie he wrote. But if he is an honorable man of his word like you or I, he’s also working hard trying to get the story of yours truly into the right hands. Personally I think it’s his life long dream project, like GANGS OF NEW YORK, only with more prison, uh, scuffles. (I should mention by the way there are many unpleasant incidents in this script that are 100% fabrications. I don’t do shit like that anymore don’t believe the hype people.) It’s alot of lewd humor but also satire about internet film critics, high vs. low culture, and who knows what else, I only read it once. But I remember there was alot of stuff in there for people who really love the films of Cinema. Remember when you first started posting about how much such and such movie sucked, you did it because you mostly LOVED movies. That’s who this movie is for in my opinion, the old you. Also for ladies.

My role in the movie is to write lots of harsh notes to Halim which he will probaly ignore. I am trying to get him to change the title to BOILED HARD which promises all the action of HARD BOILED but with all the explosions of DIE HARD. Even if he doesn’t listen to me though I got some of me in there because the script faithfully adapts some stories from my columns and quotes some of my reviews. The other horse shit in there hopefully I’ll clear up in the novelization.

I’m hoping this will be the first movie in Hollywood history adapted from a geocities web sight. Then maybe those fucks’ll give me some more data transfer without making me pay $4.95 a month or whatever. And before you say anything, yes, Hulk Hogan should play Vern. Actually Roddy Piper would be better in my opinion. I sent this guy a list that started with Nick Nolte and ended with DMX. I’m just praying I don’t get Leslie Nielsen.

Anyway sorry for the self indulgence, but now it is off my chest and I am a free man. I don’t have enough money to fight crime though so don’t give me any shit about what I do with my life. I’m talking to you, Katie Holmes.

Originally published at Aint-It-Cool-News: http://www.aintitcool.com/display.cgi?id=20410

[ratings]