This one’s about the pilots who dump the red stuff on forest fires, and the Tom Cruise of red-stuff-dumpers is former shark expert and Close Encounterer Richard Dreyfus. The Anthony Edwards is John Goodman and the Kelly McGillis is Holly Hunter. Actually, Dreyfus looks kinda like Paul Newman in this one, strutting around in aviators, leather jacket, baseball cap and grey mustache. The point is he thinks he’s awesome, and everybody else agrees. His girl seems to have when are we gonna settle down? type issues, but he makes her happy by buying her a nice dress, something you don’t see around the base much because she’s the only woman there.

There’s a constant wackiness in the movie that’s pretty grating. Goodman does things like drink a Twinkie with a straw or not notice that he shook hands with a guy covered in oil and then find six different ways to unknowingly rub it all over his face. Painfully contrived. The first section reminds me of other movies that glorify the blue collar workers of a specialized type of firefighting – specifically ON DEADLY GROUND and FIRESTORM – except everybody has a wiseass grin on their face. It tries to pull you into their world by sticking you in the middle of all their camaraderie and in-jokes.

But it also gets into some serious stuff. There’s something really true to life about the way the night rolls lazily from good times to serious talk and possible breakup. Hunter can’t live with the fear anymore of her guy dying, putting his life on the line to save trees. And he can’t believe she wants him to quit the one thing he loves, the one thing that makes him awesome, that earned him the right to wear the shades/mustache/hat combo.

I dare somebody to have this airbrushed on the side of their van.

I was glad I managed to watch this forgetting what it was gonna actually be about, so I’ll put a SPOILER WARNING here. I was surprised when Hunter rushed to the runway to tell him she loved him before he took off, and then he tried to tell her he loved her for the first time ever but she didn’t hear him over the engines. I was like oh shit, he’s gonna die? Is this a PSYCHO move, it’s gonna be about somebody else now? Well, not really. After he dies heroically he gets to come back to earth to inspire a young pilot (Brad Johnson). He’s invisible like Patrick Swayze but he speaks to him and plants ideas in his subconscious. He also gets to see his old friends.

Call me an old softie, but some of this emotional shit worked on me a little. It’s a nice idea from both directions – nice to think you might get to stick around and tie up loose threads after you bite it, and nice to think that your deceased loved ones and dead homiez are literally there with you giving you support and inspiration and you just don’t know it.

And then, this being a Spielberg movie, it manages to combine that with a thrilling action climax. Good flying and fire effects and a tense scene where all kinds of emotional business gets to be worked out: the girl getting to be the one to risk herself, the fire fighters getting to heroically save lives instead of just trees, him getting to tell her he loves her and also being able to leave her behind so she can live her own life while he goes off to less earthly ghostly duties like trying to kill Pac-Man or whatever.

Kinda odd that this is such a minor Spielberg – obviously not one of the greats, but not notorious like 1941 or HOOK or anything. Just one of the okay forgotten ones. The reason it’s odd is because it was kind of a dream project for Spielberg. It’s a remake of a 1943 movie called A GUY NAMED JOE which apparently he and Dreyfuss quoted all the time on the set of JAWS, and he put it on the TV in POLTERGEIST.

Spielberg didn’t write it though. Wikipedia says the script was started by Diane Thomas, a waitress who had pitched ROMANCING THE STONE to Michael Douglas one day when he was a customer. She had been promoted to writing the RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK sequel when she died in a car accident in 1985. ALWAYS was finished by Jerry Belson, whose other credits include EVIL ROY SLADE and SMOKEY AND THE BANDIT II.

Spielberg bungles some of the comedy I think, but for the most part he directs the shit out of it and makes it way better than some Joe Johnston or somebody would’ve. He gives the characters gravity with the way he shoots them, he heightens the drama with the scary firefighting sequences.

I like Goodman in this too. He does that thing he did on Roseanne where he’s a goofball most of the time and then all the sudden you start noticing the serious undertones. He’s not only a loyal bud but turns out to be a really caring and supportive friend to Hunter after his buddy’s dead. It’s real sweet. In fact now that I think about it, Holly Hunter and Laurie Metcalf have always kind of reminded me of each other. Probly because of this:

And that’s almost the same relationship Goodman’s Dan had with Metcalf’s Jackie on Roseanne. Except without ever having had a thing for her. He’s such a good friend to her that he encourages her to see another, younger dude. He doesn’t try keep a manly loyalty to the dead guy or anything. He’s realistic about it. Life goes on. Always.

That’s kind of a dumb name. Fits the movie though. Pretty corny. I liked it though.

(I recommend playing those at the same time.)

If 50 Cent is also in there, though, that’s a detracting factor. Not that I think he’ll do that bad of a job, just that he does not have much of a track record for participating in movies that people should spend their time watching. And actually while the presence of Mickey Rourke in a movie can make it interesting or even great, Mickey Rourke + 50 Cent actually reverses Mickey Rourke and turns him into a likely negative. But in this case there is also the Statham/Winstone combo which could easily overpower the force of Rourke/50, especially when you factor in Academy Award nominee Michael Shannon, ’cause he’s in it too.

So I crunched all this data and according to my calculations 50 is not gonna ruin 13. He already did a DTV movie called 12, he probly just stuck around ’til they starting filming 13 and they just let him be in it because he seemed nice and was passing out Vitamin Water to everybody. So they made the movie with him and later I rented it.

But the other thing is it’s a remake of 13 TZAMETI (French for “13 Thirteen”), a movie I didn’t really know anything about but knew everybody said was good. People liked it so much they couldn’t wait to see what that director would do next, provided it was a remake of 13 TZAMETI in English with Jason Statham, Mickey Rourke, Ray Winstone, Ben Gazzara, Michael Shannon and 50 Cent. I don’t usually do this, but I decided to throw caution to the wolves or whatever and watch the remake first.

The movie stars none of those guys I just mentioned. It’s actually Sam Riley, who starred in that movie CONTROL and who looks 3/4 Leonardo Dicaprio, 1/4th James McEvoy. He plays Vince, a meek electrician whose mother has to sell the family home to afford medical bills for dad, who’s laid up in the hospital in a full body cast.

Nobody except dad is really complaining out loud about losing the house. They’re resigned to their fate and willing to make the sacrifice for dad. At least he’s alive, they can be thankful for that. But there’s the obvious, unspoken fact that this is fucked.

So Vince has his ears open when a couple in a house he’s working on talk about something that came in the mail that gives the guy a chance to get a huge pay day for one day’s work. Obviously he could use some mail like that of his own. Then the guy in the house dies of a drug overdose, so our boy takes the letter.

In a way this is kind of the same setup as RED ROCK WEST. We see that he’s a nice, decent, hard working guy, but he’s down on his luck. And there seems to be this opportunity here and the guy it’s meant for is not available so why not take it? He takes the letter and follows the instructions and hopefully he’ll get away with going in this guy’s place.

Hmmm. Maybe should’ve looked into this more. What he’s volunteering for is a way, way underground gambling ring. He’s gonna be in a tournament, basically. If you haven’t heard what the game is that he has to play, my advice is to just rent the original 13 TZAMETI and find out at the same time that he does. But I got a review to write here so I’m gonna explain it.

The contestants are each assigned a number. Vince is #13. They are given a gun and one bullet. The ringmaster/referee guy (Shannon) stands on a ladder instructing them to hold the guns above their heads and spin the chamber. They then point the guns at each other’s heads, like a big organized end-of-RESERVOIR-DOGS. (I believe the person they point their gun at is decided by random drawing). They watch a lightbulb (which for some reason has a spider painted on it) and when the light goes on they pull the trigger. Whoever doesn’t die gets to stick around for the next round.

In between the rounds there’s time for the contestants’ sponsors to place bets and for the contestants to sit and stew and try not to shit their pants. In the second round there are 2 bullets in each chamber, third round 3 bullets, etc. The last guy that survives will get a bunch of money. Hey, thanks for leaving me this great opportunity, dead junkie who needed house repairs.

Winstone plays #6, a crazy player who decides he has a problem with #13. Statham plays #6’s brother, who got him out of the asylum and into this competition. What a great guy. Rourke (with one of those cowboy hats he always wears now) is the only player that seems to be here against his will. He got snatched out of a Mexican prison and forced into this. 50 Cent is his sponsor, working for some mafia or other, and not very friendly to him. These stories come out in brief flashbacks that seem structurally out of place as late as they come in the movie, but they’re okay, they give you a reason to be interested in the fate of a couple other players besides the protagonist.

There are a couple minor details I don’t get about this sport. First of all, why do these guys just wear shitty t-shirts with numbers made out of electrical tape? Isn’t that kinda chintzy? This seems to be a multi-million dollar business, I feel like they could spring for some fuckin uniforms.

Second, aren’t the viewers worried about stray bullets? It seems pretty ballsy to just stand there in the room while this is going on, it’s alot of guns to predict the trajectory of. Or at the very least they oughta be concerned about splatter. You’d think people in the front would have to be planning to get dirty, like at a Gallagher or Gwar concert.

I don’t know man, I don’t mean to be a prude. I know I’m always talking up the early UFC before it was commissioned and had so many rules. But this seems a little too much to me. I’m not sure this is a sport I can really get behind, in my opinion. I personally hope it doesn’t really catch on.

But as a movie gimmick it’s ingenious and sinister. It’s the classic Kumite tournament-to-the-death, two-men-enter-one-man-leaves type deal, except there is no skill involved whatsoever. There is no way our hero can find the misunderstood brilliant master or work hard enough during the training montages or find just the amount of inspiration and eye of the tiger to win or learn a special move that he practices a whole bunch and then you forget about it but in the climax of the final round he finds the perfect opportunity to do it in slow motion. No, there is none of that, there is absolutely nothing he can do to prepare at all.

It’s 100% luck, and the odds are not good. To win this he just has to get really fuckin lucky. And that seems unlikely because the whole reason he got here in the first place was the bad luck that fucked over his family. Also, remember what his number is. Shit.

It’s just so fuckin brutal, but these old rich guys bet on it like it’s horse races. You think they’re cruel to the greyhounds, what about these guys? In one scene a big overweight player (#3 I believe?) is hunched over and he’s sweating up a storm, he’s having a hard time standing up, so his sponsor asks if he can have a chair to sit in. The way he asks it is like “Please, for God’s sake, have some empathy here.” And they give him the chair and it’s like everybody’s proud of the great humanity they’ve shown there, letting the guy sit down before he gets his head blown off for sport. Great job, everybody.

Well, I think you can guess who wins. And then the guy that’s paying for him, Gazzara, talks to him like a proud grandpa. “Well done, young man. Well done,” he says. As if there was anything to do well. And then it becomes a whole new ball game because he actually gets the money, and he realizes he has to somehow get the money to his mother before one of his guys snuffs him, or Statham, or before the cops (who he sees following him) can find the money or prove what he’s been up to.

Well, 13 was good so I had to watch the original, 13 TZAMETI (13 THIRTEEN). It’s a very faithful remake. Some scenes are pretty much word for word (except translated), but some things are added or tweaked. In the original he’s a Georgian immigrant in France, played by the director’s brother. He’s just trying to get money for his family, there is no disaster. He gets involved in pretty much the same way, and has the same rivalry with #6. But there are no flashbacks or explanations of any of the other players. After the tournament, when he’s running from the police and the brother, some of the events are moved around a little, and the remake made it into a little bit more of a close call, I think. But the ending is almost the same.

The better looking movie, without a doubt, is the original. You wouldn’t think so, because it’s lower budget and everything, but the remake is not particularly accomplished visually, and the original has very nice black and white cinematography. That gives it a pretty timeless look. For me anyway it also benefits from not having any recognizable faces in the cast. As much as I like the cast in the remake they create a movie star sized distance between you and the horror of what’s going on. In the original it’s a bunch of guys who don’t really look like actors, speaking a language I don’t understand, pulling me into this mysterious, horrible world.

On the other hand the beauty of the black and white creates a layer of distance itself, turning this dirty, sick place into a pretty art project. And for such a fucked up concept it sure is bloodless. I mean I’m glad the remake didn’t go full-on gory but if they didn’t have blood when they should’ve I sure didn’t notice. In this one I noticed. It kept striking me that a whole bunch of people are getting their heads blown off and we’re not seeing or hearing any blood or brain matter. Makes it kind of antiseptic.

There’s a little moment where #3, the big guy, sits and plays piano between rounds. I don’t remember that being in the remake. It’s a nice touch. He probly took lessons all through childhood, he enjoys the feel of the keys under his fingers, likes impressing people with his skills, maybe making people smile or something. Well, this’ll probly be the last time for that. Might as well take a minute to do this one last time.

One thing I thought was improved in the remake, though, was his motivation for entering. I like that neither one of them puts too fine of a point on his desperation. He keeps it inside. But I think the remake had the more fitting depiction of what would cause that desperation. In the original I think the idea is he’s an immigrant so he doesn’t have alot of money. For an American version it’s very fitting that he needs the money for health care, and for the story it’s fitting that it’s bad luck that pushed him into this competition of luck.

Our boy Fred in the comments recently interviewed Mickey Rourke and he asked him about 13. “It’s a piece of crap,” Mickey told him. “If you don’t believe me, call up Jason and Ray.” Well, I can see why those guys might think that. They’re all playing roles that are smaller and less fleshed out than they usually do. I mean, it’s pretty clear that they’re the names the producers put in there to sell the movie, and they probly added a little bit to their characters to try to justify it. Actually Statham’s role is a pretty good small one, he gets to be kind of ambiguous and a villain even in a character that’s not that different from alot of his heroes. He shouldn’t be mad.

Okay, there was no real reason to remake it, but they did fine with it. I recommend checking out one or more of these 13s.

The tone is completely serious, but all in fun. It’s not trying to punish you, like a Rob Zombie movie, but it is trying to make you wince and feel sympathy pain. That’s why the opening scene is (SPOILER) an old man crying and apologizing as he chisels out his maid’s front teeth. After that you know the movie is boss so you better just shut the fuck up and do what it says.

It’s a refreshingly small scale story about a couple (Guy Pearce and Katie Holmes) restoring an old house and not realizing that some murderous little ghoulies live underneath it and feel they need to come out for human sacrifice and snacking on the teeth of children. These guys have a unique look, kind of a Nosferatu-faced ratman. They’re li’l wufs.

The handling of the creatures is A+. They do a great job of showing them in glimpses, scurrying by quickly as just a little bit of the flashlight catches them. The first time a character comes face to face with one they’re both screaming in terror like E.T. and Elliot. You think you saw it clearly but it goes by so fast you’re not sure if you remember it right. When you eventually do get a better look at them they live up to the anticipation and you feel like you’re not supposed to be seeing them, you walked in on some crazy shit you weren’t supposed to know was going on.

In the ’80s they’d do POV shots and offscreen jibber jabber to save on the pain in the ass of shooting the Ghoulie puppets. Here they get to do it as a deliberate artistic choice. The technical execution of the creatures is just as flawless as their suspense-building presentation. I assume it’s pretty much all digital because they’re too spindly and move too well to be puppets. But they don’t have any of the sins of modern digital effects. They don’t jump around all the time or other stupid things filmatists tend to overdo to show off. They scurry around like real rodents. Actually they looked so good that I bet somebody at Warner Brothers or wherever will see it and decide it’s time to remake GREMLINS.

But what makes this a solid horror movie is that you’re not just bored waiting around for the part where you see the monsters. All three leads are really good: you have Pearce as the well-meaning but self-involved architect, and you’ve got Holmes as his girlfriend/interior designer, and a girl named Bailee Madison as his young daughter, who’s pretty much the lead. She seems much more like a real kid than a spunky child actor. She’s depressed and pouty but not whiny. You feel bad for her being dumped in a strange place with the dad she’s never lived with. She looks so young and cherubic and doesn’t talk that much but then knows how to throw out exactly the comment that will cut an adult down to her size. She unleashes the monsters out of a combination of innocent curiosity, bitter mischief and maybe slight craziness. I mean, she’s lonely, why not look into these strange voices whispering to her through the vents? Maybe she’ll find some company. Anyway, her living situation turns out to be worse than she thought.

I know everybody hates Katie Holmes now because she’s married to a famous actor who is weird and practices a heathen space religion. But when she was a young teen star she seemed pretty promising. I remember she used to be on that show Dawson Creek, it was on that same “WB” channel that showed other shows such as Felicity I believe might’ve been what one of them was called, I’m really not sure. Dawson Creek was created by the writer of SCREAM and was the stuff that bothered you in the SCREAM movies and nothing that you liked and done as a weekly high school soap opera for several years. From what I saw it was not my bag but I always thought Katie Holmes was pretty good and should probly leave before she became too associated with it. But it really didn’t seem to hurt her or her co-star Michele Williams who not only went on to be nominated for an Academy Award but also was in HALLOWEEN H20.

Anyway Holmes took a break for a few years after the Batman movie, which to be honest she wasn’t that great in. But it’s nice to see her back. At first I thought “Isn’t Katie Holmes a little young to be with Guy Pearce?” and then I thought “Oh yeah, her real husband is older than her too” and then it turns out she’s supposed to be younger, and this is a point of contention between Pearce and his ex-wife. The main relationship in the movie is between the girlfriend Kim and the little girl Sally. Sally resents Kim, Kim desperately wants to be accepted by Sally, and also sees how badly she needs a connection with someone that her real parents don’t give her.

There’s a part in the movie where Sally has to kind of resemble Kim, and it was so convincing I questioned whether that was Holmes’s daughter playing Sally. Holmes must’ve trained her to do that weird crooked sad-smile she does. Unless they did it with computers.

It’s nice of Kim to worry about Sally’s emotional well-being, but she’s gonna have to figure out to also worry about her physical safety, because there really are mean, furry little ancient beings out to get her. Yeah, if we knew about them and had our wits about us it would be pretty easy to grab the little guys and twist their heads off. Also we might consider capturing them and putting little doll clothes on them and forcing them to pose for funny pictures and what not. But nobody believes Sally and she has no control over where she lives so there’s not much she can do.

And as long as the adults don’t figure it out the wufs have the element of surprise on their side. Nixey milks the “creepy things we don’t realize are about to touch us” factor with lots of POV shots from inside the vents or from low angles near vulnerable bare feet on cold floors or dangling off the end of beds. Or long sharp objects that reach out and just about poke an unaware Pearce before he moves away. I think I had some wimps in my audience but I could hear and feel them being creeped out, squirming, gasping and (this was probly going too far) screaming. One of those cases where I see the movie lead them around on a leash and have them completely under its control for 90 minutes and then at the end they laugh and claim it was dumb.

I don’t want to take any credit away from this Nixey guy, who clearly did a good job, but there’s definitely alot of Del Toro in here: the fascination with old mystics, dark fairy tales, evil tooth fairies, old sketches of monsters, creepy old houses, even a labyrinth. And like CRONOS or PAN’S LABYRINTH the main character is an independent, inquisitive little girl who understands things the adults don’t but is far from invulnerable to physical and emotional torment. It kind of reminds me of when Spielberg used to produce movies like GREMLINS and POLTERGEIST. Del Toro is not the director but he’s not just putting his name on it, his voice definitely comes through. And by that I mean that he is one of the voices of the li’l wufs.

I don’t think I’ve seen the TV movie this is based on, but I know it has a reputation for haunting the nightmares of kids that saw it, kind of like that evil doll in TRILOGY OF TERROR did. This remake isn’t gonna be on network TV and nobody should bring their kids to it, but you know some of them are gonna see it some way or other, and man is it not gonna be pretty. It’s almost like it’s designed to reinforce everything terrible their imagination tells them about their house at night.

This is a real good mainstream horror movie. It could never pass for PG-13, it never sissies out, it’s upsetting what happens to some characters, but it’s good clean fun for anybody that enjoys monsters fucking up people’s lives. (Also, 100% rape free, friends.) I’m not gonna claim it’s some new classic or anything but I think plenty of people will dig it out once every fifth or sixth Halloween and enjoy it. I will also say unequivocally that it is the best “little bastard” horror movie I’ve seen in a long god damn time although I have not seen all of the recent Full Moon releases or THE SMURFS.

I bet Brion James would've played that viking if he was still alive.

PATHFINDER is the remake of that little Norwegian movie I just reviewed. The remake is directed by Marcus Nispel, the director of the remake of TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE and the remake of FRIDAY THE 13TH and a TV remake of FRANKENSTEIN and the remake of CONAN THE BARBARIAN coming out tomorrow. As is his tradition he is not very familiar with the movie he’s remaking, so on the commentary track he calls it “a short film from Scandinavia or, from… the ’80s, I think.”

But this one’s not about the Sami people of Finnmark being invaded by the Tchudes, it’s about Native Americans being invaded by vikings. The idea is that vikings could’ve set up shop here centuries before Columbus, and this is the legend of why they didn’t.

It’s so different from the original movie that at first I questioned whether it was even actually a remake. But there’s definitely enough there that it’s gotta be: both open with text about this being a legend, then a prophecy about seeing a white animal (reindeer in old one, horse in new one). Both are about a guy who was away from his village when everybody got slaughtered by invaders. In both he goes to a nearby village and the invaders follow him there (although in the new one the villagers find him and he tries to warn them away, so he’s not to blame for leading the enemy there). In the old one he criticizes the villagers for fleeing, in the new one he warns them that they better because their wooden spears and stone arrows don’t have a chance against the viking swords and armor. In both there’s a girl from the other village who he has his eye on (in this one he’s older and she’s played by Moon Bloodgood, so he fucks her) and somebody who questions his decision to stay and fight because it’s about vengeance for what happened to his village. In both he tricks some of the invaders into falling off a cliff. Most importantly both have a “pathfinder” who appears to him almost like a ghost to share wisdom with him.

One of the biggest changes is that the protagonist (Karl Urban, the guy from everything) has a whole backstory. When he was a kid he was left behind by a viking ship, so he was raised by Native Americans who named him “Ghost” (the term “cracker” hadn’t been invented yet) and thought he would grow up to be a monster like the “Dragon Men” he was abandoned by. Now he’s trained in the Native hunting and fighting methods but also remembers viking shit from when he was a kid and practices with the sword they found him with. So he’s like one of the original mixed martial artists. Or the Daywalker of Native American viking slayers.

Seriously man, Karl Urban is in alot of movies. He’s in some LORDS OF THE RINGSes, one of the BOURNEs, that movie DOOM, that movie RED. I just saw PRIEST, he was in that. He was in CHRONICLES OF RIDDICK. It wasn’t until STAR TREK that I started remembering what he looked like. Here I think he has more charisma than in some of those and he’s pretty tough looking in a very physical and under-dressed role. But he’s not all the way there to great screen presence. He’s still working on that. So he’s somewhere in between the typical fantasy hero weenie and the good ones like Conan. Probly closer to the good ones. Probly higher up than a Kevin Sorbo level.

The leader of the vikings is played by the great Clancy Brown of HIGHLANDER fame, but you wouldn’t know it because his face is almost entirely hidden under helmet, shadow and beard, and he doesn’t speak English, only subtitled vikingese. The vikings are by far the most ridiculous elaboration on the original tale, and the one that takes the most advantage of Nispel’s particular tastes and talents. These aren’t just dudes in furs and horned helmets, these are fucking monsters. They’re huge and they’re covered in 250 pounds of complicated shit, their helmets look like they’re from outer space and some of them even have electronically lowered voices like Freddy Krueger in part 1. I’m pretty sure they’re all lifted from paintings by that guy that did the cartoon FIRE AND ICE. I mean, look at these fuckin guys:

I gotta respect the exaggeration and detail on those beasts. And you can see why the Natives think they’re dragon men (if you can believe they know what a dragon is). It’s kind of like you’re seeing them through their eyes. These roided out viking assholes storm in and start chopping and bashing everybody in sight, they look like they just escaped from the Gwar dimension and, as a nice, sweet, irony-flavored dipping sauce, they consider the peaceful Natives to be “savages.”

I love that touch, but I don’t spot much more thoughtfulness if it’s going on anywhere in here. I don’t think they’re trying to say anything. These type of stories can be read alot of contradictory ways. On one hand you gotta kinda resent that it’s always a white guy as the hero. We can’t just have a Native American character as the hero who stops the invasion, it’s gotta be the one white guy who lives there. And oh, boo hoo, poor white man having such a hard time being a minority, they don’t understand him, what a terrible tragedy. On the other hand, it’s a story about people of different races getting along and learning from each other (and stopping the assholes who don’t want to do that). Also there’s one big change from the ending of the original that acknowledges the contribution of the woman. So that’s good.

Ghost puts up a much more involved fight than Aigin did in the original. He sets an ambush with a bunch of clever and brutal traps. There are plenty of cool action beats, and it’s not too visually confusing for me. But Nispel is not that good of a director so the action scenes have no build to them, they just feel like a montage of the different tricks he played throughout a more sustained battle. It’s like: Ghost jumps out and stabs a guy. Ghost is in a tree and swings down. Ghost is hidden in mud and comes out. Ghost sets off a trap that shoots a bunch of spikes at a guy. Just him doing everything in a row until after a while the script calls for the tide to turn so then the vikings get to do something right. It’s all the story elements just laid out in list form instead of told to you as a story. Which, to be fair, is better than most action scenes these days.

Nispel also seems to have a problem with digital color correction abuse. I’ve been noticing this in a bunch of movies lately – why do they think it’s a good idea to suck most of the colors out so that it almost looks black and white, but not as good as it would look if it was shot in black and white? Alot of this movie is just dreary gray. It seems like it would look so much better if they put some color in the sky or something. But when there is color it’s a really beautiful looking movie. The cinematographer is Daniel Pearl, same guy that did THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE, both the original masterpiece and crappy remake. It would be cool if he did the original version of this too, but I guess that would be asking too much for him to travel back in time and get work in Norway. He was busy that year doing ISLAND OF THE ALIVE, A RETURN TO SALEM’S LOT and AMAZON WOMEN ON THE MOON.

Anyway, Nispel’s directorial weaknesses keep this from being very memorable, but I do think it’s a pretty good mythic warrior type of story in a totally different way than the original. It’s kind of hilarious that they turned that particular movie into this one, but I also don’t really find it offensive in the same way I find some of his other remakes. Obviously that’s mostly because I don’t have the same attachment to the original, but I also think what he’s trying to do is so different from the original that it feels like a separate movie. With TEXAS CHAIN SAW he’s still making a horror movie, but just doing it in a way stupider and more obvious way than the original, in a way that suggests that he doesn’t have any clue what was great in the old movie and doesn’t know he’s doing a shitty job. With this one he obviously wanted to make a big pulpy viking movie and the producers happened to have this other movie he’d never heard of to use as the basic story skeleton. So it helped him more than anything, giving his movie a better structure than it probly would’ve had.

There’s a reason why I watched this movie now. Nispel has that CONAN THE BARBARIAN movie coming out tomorrow. I’ve been seeing ads for it and thinking yeah, it’s not gonna be good like the John Milius one, but it looks like the kind of thing I might enjoy. Except I hate that fuckin director, I hate all his movies that I’ve seen, so I know I’m gonna hate this. I decided I would watch PATHFINDER and then if it was as terrible as everybody said then I would be cured of my desire to go see his CONAN.

Trouble is PATHFINDER wasn’t terrible. It was okay. I sort of enjoyed it. Maybe if the script is any good he might do okay with CONAN? Okay, so it’s, I’ll give CONAN a shot theatrically. That means I gotta decide how many Ds to see it in. I looked it up on IMDb, looks like it was not shot with 3D cameras, it was fake 3D-ified after the fact, a process I’ve sworn off after its mixed success in PIRANHA 3D, its unimpressive use in GREEN HORNET and its downright shitty obstruction of HARRY POTTER.

So regular-D it is. Tomorrow before work I’ll just go and–

Ah, shit. They only have it in 3D downtown. Geez, Hollywood. Do you see how much effort I’m going through just to want to see your movies? You really make a principled moviegoer jump through alot of hoops.

to be continued?

chapter 10

released July 27, 2001

Well, so far this summer of 2001 we’ve been having hasn’t been too hot. But at least we got that new Tim Burton movie coming out, right? I don’t know why they gotta remake PLANET OF THE APES but it’s a great cast and that guy knows what he’s doing, I’m sure he’ll do something interesting with it.

Nope. 10 years later I’m not sure I need to explain why the PLANET OF THE APES remake is no good. I don’t remember there being an argument about it at the time, or ever encountering anybody that liked it in the decade since. It was a bad idea, it was not good, let’s all pretend it never happened. The end.

But I’m doing this thing so let’s do it.
I got one nice thing I can say: the makeup by Rick Baker is really good, at least on the male apes. Tim Roth’s villainous chimpanzee general and Paul Giamatti’s sleazy orangutan salesman (man, Clyde would hate that asshole) look so real, but allow the actors to express through them. Michael Clarke Duncan is a gorilla warrior, and somehow his eyes make him recognizable (okay, the voice helps).

Luckily there are only a couple of female ape characters. They look ridiculous. On a real ape you don’t really see recognizable “female” characteristics on their face, but for some reason in the movie they thought that was important. So instead of giving them realistic animal faces like on the males they make them closer to human and give them thin, painted-on type eyebrows, the kind that don’t even grow naturally on humans. The hair on the top of their heads is fashionably styled and they seem to be wearing lipstick and mascara. Which I guess makes sense for an advanced race of apes, but they don’t look like males with makeup on, they look much closer to human.

Are they trying to make them look attractive? Kind of attractive? I’m not sure. I don’t think anyone could really say what they were trying to do. They had a release date to meet, no time to think this shit through.

The original PLANET OF THE APES of course holds up as a stone cold classic, and the makeup was a breakthrough at the time. But that’s the only thing that made it a classic that carried over to the new version. The original, written by Rod Serling, had a great story, a human finding himself in a crazy world where he’s considered such a low life form that everybody flips out when he talks and thinks it must be some kind of a hoax. And he has to go to court.

The remake ditches that whole setup. Mark Wahlberg plays a U.S. Air Force space pilot in the near future whose little space pod deal gets sucked into a space storm and he crash lands on the Planet of the Apes. He finds himself in some woods with some humans (dressed like cavemen) and they all get chased and rounded up by gorilla warriors wearing armor, and sold to Giamatti.

For maybe 10 minutes the humans don’t talk, and Wahlberg doesn’t talk to them. Then it turns out they do talk. Huh.

Bonham Carter’s character is the daughter of a senator (David Warner) and she’s some kind of an ape-liberal who’s a human rights activist, but not in a cool way. She sneaks into the place where the humans are gonna be branded like cattle, then hops and swings around and knocks the brand away and then says a bunch of righteous stuff. Although I am a liberal and although I appreciate people who stand up for what they believe in and although I am a human I still found her annoying. It’s a real bummer. Gonna turn me into an apepublican.

She’s kind of dumb too in my opinion because she makes a big deal about being an atheist, and making it clear that she doesn’t believe in it when she explains the ape prophecies and shit to Wahlberg, but when one of the apes jokes about “next thing she’s gonna be telling us the humans have souls” she says “Of course they do!” Oh yeah, scientist through and through… until spirituality is convenient for shocking dad’s friends at the dinner table.

Although none of the other characters are as annoying as hers none of them have much to offer. Wahlberg is just gung-ho soldier guy going through the motions that have to happen for the plot, doesn’t ever show any personality. Estella Warren, the model seen earlier in the summer in DRIVEN, plays a human girl, and that’s pretty much the extent of her characterization. A former synchronized swimmer, Warren does not get to do any water dancing like in DRIVEN, but does have some extensive underwater shots. So that’s good.

Kris Kristofferson plays her dad, doesn’t do anything either. Roth gets really into moving like a chimp, and has at least four or five parts where he gets to bash somebody over and over again like he’s trying to break open an oyster with a rock. But his character is less than one-dimensional. He’s openly evil. His eyebrows are always slanted villainously, even when his face is translated into statue form, and his voice always sounds like he’s threatening to destroy the world, even when conversing with polite company at the dinner table.

And what the hell is he trying to do, anyway? If people are just like animals why is he so concerned about them? From the beginning he fixates on Wahlberg. It’s like if Donald Rumsfeld suspected that a really smart dog he came across was gonna ruin American society and spent 24 hours a day brooding about it, even talking to other human adults about it. But it’s not played like it’s supposed to be silly or funny, the movie just acts like it’s reasonable.

I guess if I had to choose a best character it would be Duncan’s, because he just kind of tries to do his job and then at the end has a change of heart and tries to do the right thing. Too late though, he already killed a good gorilla. It’s nice that he wants to bury humans and apes in unmarked graves so they’ll be mourned equally, but it’s kinda too little too late in my opinion. (SPOILER. I just ruined it. Better not see the movie now. Sorry about that everybody.)

One thing they intentionally did to make it different from the good PLANET OF THE APES was to have the actors move like animals. They hunch over, swing around, pound their chests, that kinda shit. I’m fine with that. What I don’t like is their magic jumping powers. I guess some monkeys can leap, but I can’t get with Tim Roth constantly jumping 15-20 feet in the air, especially since it’s clearly just him being slowly lifted up on a cable. It looks dumb every time it happens.

But you can ignore all the above complaints, none of them really matter that much in the face of the terrible script by William Broyles Jr. (FLAGS OF OUR FATHERS), Lawrence Konner (SUPERMAN IV, THE BEVERLY HILLBILLIES, THE SORCERER’S APPRENTICE) and Mark Rosenthal (same as last guy). It just has no purpose to it. Here’s the plot: he crashes, he gets caught, they escape (well, more like just leave), they travel, there is a battle, then it’s the end part.

There’s not really a plan, he’s just kind of making it up as he goes along, maybe as a commentary on the script. He’s just trying to go back to where he crashed, thinking his people will rescue him there. There’s not some dangerous path or series of obstacles to get through, there’s not some items he has to get, there’s not some plot or scheme he has to stop, there’s not a character he has to convince of something, or a piece of information he has to learn, or training he needs to have, or even something to avenge. He’s just trying to go from the city to the other place. And yet there’s no beautiful simplicity there. It’s big and sloppy and crowded. It’s a textbook example of the project developed over years and years and instead of getting it perfect they just give up at some point and choose a release date and start filming with the stitched together remains of 25 different unrelated, not good enough scripts.

There are approximately two parts of the movie that are semi-interesting. One is the special guest appearance by Charlton Heston as the villain’s father-on-his-deathbed. He reveals to his son the secret of the gun – they found one in the ancient ruins or somewhere, and he explains how it’s this powerful device that changes everything. It’s weird because it’s Heston’s pro-gun politics, and the movie seems to not just endorse them but go a little overboard, treating the invention of the gun like the most important thing that ever happened. That wouldn’t be that surprising in a John Milius movie, but Tim Burton doesn’t strike me as the gun lover type. He’s barely even had them in his movies before.

I think the way they deal with it though is the scene where Roth gets the gun but he fires it inside a plexiglass room where it just ricochets around. It doesn’t hit him in the ass or anything but it turns out not to help him as advertised.

The climax is kind of amusing, when Wahlberg’s not-human chimp from back on the space ship predictably shows up through the time portal or whatever and is interpreted as the prophesized return of the ape god Semus. The mob of angry apes all bow to him, so it’s just a great “fuck you” when Wahlberg walks over and the monkey holds his hand. YOU SEE THIS, APE MEN? YOUR GOD HOLDS MY HAND LIKE A LITTLE BOY!

I’m kinda surprised that they let the human approach Semus, they don’t seem to care at all. But maybe they figure their god can’t be hurt. And maybe that explains why nobody gets mad at Tim Roth for punching their god.

Also I get a kick out of how his space ship has become thousands-of-years-old ruins, but some of the machinery still works and he can just chip a layer of rock off of the monitors.

The very end of the movie is the most absurd and crazy part, so of course that’s the part I like best… and the part most people point to as the reason why the movie is bad. As if the two hours of boring bullshit before it would’ve been improved by not ending on a strange and unexpected note. It ends with Wahlberg crashing back in what appears to be present day Washington DC, but then it turns out to be Present Day Washington DC of the Apes, and he’s surrounded by ape cops, media, tourists, etc.

I guess the part that bothered people is the way this switch is revealed, when he looks at the Lincoln Monument and it’s now the General Thade Monument. This is a timeline where somehow Tim-Roth-chimp saved the planet and is a great hero of the past. How did this happen? I do not know. Would it be better if I understood the specifics of how Thade travelled through time, what he did to save the planet and why the space-time-continuum would cause a great ape hero to be memorialized in the same way that our timeline’s Great Emancipator was? In my opinion fuck no, you silly people. Anyway if you hate Aperaham Lincoln you support slavery.

Ten years of distance didn’t help this one at all. I guess it didn’t look as ugly as I remembered it. I remember really hating the ape village back in 2001, everything is so close together and sound-stagey looking I thought it looked like a Universal Studios stunt show. Didn’t really bother me this time, maybe because we’re so used to everything being CGI now that you don’t see big sets like that as much. Otherwise nothing improved.

But you know I am a positive individual so I’m proud to say that I thought of another nice thing to say about the movie that I actually didn’t pick up on ten years ago. I realized this time that the good guy gorilla that helps the humans is played by renowned b-movie villain Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa. Who would’ve ever thought mean old Shang Tsung would put up with several hours a day in the makeup chair? It really is good to see him play a good guy, even if you gotta really look close to tell it’s him.

2001-2011 connections: This movie prevented PLANET OF THE APES from being revived until this summer, when it finally got a chance to be a liability to the unrelated rebootquel RISE OF THE PLANET OF THE APES.

legacy: See above

datedness: Paul Giamatti says “Can’t we all just get along?” in part of it. That was already an old reference when it came out, now I bet the youths don’t even know what the fuck it is. Which is kind of sad as far as knowledge of modern history but positive as far as corny jokes.

Visual-effects-wise it’s up-to-date, because the space ship stuff looks good and the monkeys are all done without the computers and therefore don’t look obsolete.

The weird detail in this one is that for some reason they keep making references to horses and making her show them her teeth. They must’ve seen ZOO I guess. That movie’s like SCARFACE to a redneck rapist.

One of the other rapists, the guy who plays a harmonica, I didn’t realize was Rodney Eastman, the nice mute kid Joey from NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREETs 3-4. I noticed he gets a songwriting credit for the harmonica playing. I hope that gets him some extra bucks, not because of this movie, but because he’s Joey. He had so much trouble with naked ladies that turn into Freddy that you just want him to do well in life, you know?

I wouldn’t say Butler is terrible, but she’s much better as a spooky avenger than a normal person. Some of it’s not her fault – she’s got some awkward moments, some of them due to weird staging and timing. I think Camille Keaton benefited from a strange type of long-necked, aristocratic beauty that made her interesting to look at, this girl is more normal Hollywood good looking. And in order to get some of the plot going she has to be a total klutz. She knocks over a bucket of water at the gas station, spills wine all over her clothes, drops her cell phone in the toilet, breaks a glass when scared by a bird. With some actresses that might make her seem like a lovable relatable person, but here it just makes her seem like an idiot.

This new version is modernized in a clever way, but not in the way I wish it was. They chose to do it by making the I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE for this horror era: instead of a slasher movie it’s a torture movie. Instead of getting her revenge through gruesome kills it’s through sicko torture devices. Instead of luring them in by acting the way their misogynistic minds wish she would and then, say, castrating them with shears, she abducts them, torments them for a while, and then castrates them. Unlike the SAW movies though it’s pretty open about asking you to enjoy the sadism. There’s no question about whether or not they deserve it. In SAW it’s sanctimonious moralizing through torture, in I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE it’s punishment.

The only major change I noticed in the structure is that she disappears for a month after the attack. The rapists assume she’s dead, and the movie switches to their perspective, so we don’t know what happened either. Is she gonna come back as a ghost in this one? You don’t really know.

What’s not really updated though is the gender politics or the subtlety of the characterization. The original dealt in broad stereotypes – redneck rapists vs. feminist writer. Feminism was still a pretty new concept to some people in 1978, Zarchi must’ve felt he had to make his points bluntly. The new one doesn’t try to find a modern equivalent to say something about the state of gender relations in 2010. She’s just a writer (not for Bust Magazine or anything) and they’re just yahoos.

Their acting isn’t as over-the-top as in the first one (especially the retarded guy), but not subtle enough to be much more believable. To make this real insidious it’s gotta seem like real guys, assholes who don’t believe they’re assholes, who maybe even hold back their more deviant behavior in front of their friends until they can’t restrain themselves anymore. If this is gonna make a point it’s gotta seem like alot of men have the potential to do this type of shit, not that this is the anomaly that becomes a horror movie.

But these characters pretty much know they’re the bad guys, and even delight a little bit in being evil. I think it throws things off that he has to murder a man to hide the crime. And it seemed to me like they cut out or played down all the sexist excuses, where they try to blame it on her. Instead they try to cover their tracks like serial killers. This should be just assholes who mistakenly think they can get away with victimizing a woman. This shouldn’t be a horror movie massacre, it should be the misogynistic underbelly of America.

And they’re those fake movie rednecks with the unnatural dialogue calling everybody “boy” all the time. I don’t believe them, they don’t sound natural. I’m a fan of class tension in a horror movie, and the anti-tourism sentiment in the maniac community. It works in everything from TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE to WOLF CREEK to STORM WARNING, but here it just seems forced. I don’t believe them bitterly calling her “that city girl” and “stuck up city bitch.” If these guys were real they wouldn’t hate the city. They’d dream of the girls at the Mardis Gras parade. They’d drive into Baton Rouge or New Orleans to see a WWE Raw or a UFC Fight Night, or maybe the Foo Fighters or somebody. I just checked, Ice Cube is playing Baton Rouge in March. If they were still alive (SPOILER) maybe they’d go to that show. They’d probly think about moving there too. They’re too young to want to spend their lives working at that gas station out in the middle of nowhere. This just doesn’t ring true to me.

And now that I think about it the whole idea of I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE is a little quaint in the age of Lisbeth Salander. In THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO she got her violent revenge in the first act of the movie. And she’s a computer genius and mystery solver. Jennifer Hills doesn’t really compare.

But you know, it’s not garbage. Considering director Steven R. Monroe’s previous works include SASQUATCH MOUNTAIN and ICE TWISTERS it’s alot better than I thought it would be.

I like how you see all the tools and chemicals and things she’s gonna use later when she’s checking out the storage shed on the property. Like, you see a pair of shears covered in cobwebs. It almost had a double meaning for me. It works as setup but also made me wonder if these are the shears she used in the original, and now a new visitor is sort of echoing horrible events from the past. I think the original took place in Connecticut, so that wouldn’t make sense. But I think in the original her name was Jennifer Hill and in this one Jennifer Hills. It’s plural, like ALIENS to ALIEN. It could be a sequel, right? I guess not.

Anyway, it has its moments. She certainly finds a novel way to assrape a guy. But there are subtle things I like about it too. Like when they show up to intimidate her and make her show them her breasts she says, “We’re even now, right?” The one guy is mad that she embarrassed him, now he’s embarrassed her (by molesting her, basically) and she’s willing to call that even. But he chooses not to accept that as even. He will regret it.

The best thing about the movie is the added layer of irony with this sheriff having a nice pregnant wife and a daughter he calls his “little angel” who just got into a gifted program. Her name is Chastity, which fits in with his hatred of alleged “whores.” But I appreciate the disturbing observation that people like this want to do shit to adult women that they would stay up at night worrying would happen to their own daughter. And his family has no idea there’s anything wrong with him.

Also, while being tormented, he starts yelling things like “Help me Jesus!” and “I’m a God fearin’ person!” Ain’t that rich? And he keeps calling her “ma’am,” as opposed to his earlier preference of “big city whore.”

Meir Zarchi, writer/director of the original, is credited as producer on this one, and he went and supported it at some film festivals and stuff. I noticed that on the credits they say it’s based on DAY OF THE WOMAN, his original title. It’s funny, I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE is one of the greatest exploitation titles ever, you’d think a guy would be happy to be associated with something so legendary. But at the same time the movie is so notorious he has to use his original title just because it gives more of a hint that he was on the woman’s side.  No, seriously guys. “I” is Jennifer, she’s the one spitting on graves, that’s the part you’re supposed to enjoy.

Well, I wish the new movie itself was good enough to help him rehabilitate his image there, but oh well. I’ve definitely seen alot worse. In my opinion I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE 2010 does not spit on the grave of I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE 1978. It has a healthy respect for its grave but does not go out of its way to deliver flowers or perform any maintenance such as cleaning the grave or pulling weeds around it.
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note: I can’t vouch for the new blu-ray and dvd of the 1978 version (and can’t say I’m planning to find out how it plays in HD) but I’m happy to see they included Joe Bob Briggs’s excellent commentary track from the earlier release

So please imagine I wrote a brilliant, in some ways moving and definitely mind-expanding and film criticism re-inventing review about how it was a very original and well made movie, I liked how the kids talked like kids and it didn’t really feel like any movie I’d seen before, pretty good, etc. Way to go, Swedes.

This American version is directed by Matt Reeves, best known as the co-creator of that TV show ‘Felicity,’ although in a little piece of trivia I should mention that he also directed the movie CLOVERFIELD. It stars Kodi-Smit McPhee (the kid from THE ROAD) as the boy now called Owen, Chloe Grace Moretz (Hit Girl from KICKASS) as the (SPOILER?) vampire now called Abby, Richard Jenkins as the serial killer guy who takes care of her like a dad, and Elias Koteas (looking like Stanley Tucci in THE LOVELY BONES) as the cop.

So this is the story of skinny, awkward, clothes-too-big 12 year old Owen, a kid in snowy Los Alamos, New Mexico. His parents are in the middle of a divorce and he doesn’t seem to have anybody to spend time with, he just plays by himself in the courtyard of his apartments. At school there’s some pricks who bully him real bad, and unlike Katherine Heigl’s character in the Matt Reeves-scripted UNDER SIEGE 2: DARK TERRITORY he doesn’t have an elite soldier uncle who taught him some self defense moves. He’s helpless, he even wets his pants when they’re beating on him.

So in his free time he fantasizes about getting his revenge. It’s actually pretty disturbing when he wears a Halloween mask and talks to them in the mirror or when he repeatedly stabs a tree with his little pocket knife, because there’s nothing Hollywood about it, it’s exactly like what an angry little kid would do, nothing exaggerated to make it more cool or more whimsical.

Then he meets this girl who moved in, says she can’t be his friend, but over time they sort of do become friends. He teaches her about Ms. Pac-Man and Now ‘n Laters. Even more than Oskar in the original this kid is shockingly realistic. Not idealized at all. He’s almost uncomfortably true to life. They don’t give him funny quips or smart, mature things to talk about all the time. His interests are things like sharing his love for Now ‘n Later candies and making sure Abby likes the way they taste also. He’s 12 years old.

But what he doesn’t realize is that Abby’s a vampire and her “dad” is going out at night with a garbage bag over his head murdering people so he can feed her their blood. There’s one really spectacular suspense scene where Jenkins is laying in the back seat of a car driven by some teens, passing for a junk pile, waiting to attack. And this leads to a really cleverly shot car crash scene shown from inside the car.

Like any kid that age Owen doesn’t know what the fuck is going on, so when weird things happen like his friend pukes up any food she eats or she somehow appears at his not-ground-level window it just seems like yet another thing in the huge adult world out there that he doesn’t understand. So when he asks her about it and her answer doesn’t make sense he doesn’t push the issue, he just plays along like she must know what she’s talking about. Don’t let on that you’re a kid and you don’t get it.

The camerawork and lighting and what not is really phenomenal in this thing. Small amounts of light reflecting off snow in this dreary neighborhood at night… just a really strong sense of atmosphere. Gotta give some credit to the original for inspiring it of course, but they did a great job here. This is actually the first in a new line of movies considered to be released by Hammer Studios, and that’s kind of weird but I think it really is worthy of the name.

You know what man, the Swedish version was really good, I agree with the world on that. But I guess it didn’t hit me as hard as everybody else. To be honest I got annoyed with hearing buddies of mine say it was the best vampire movie ever made and hyperbolic shit like that. You ever heard of a vampire by the name of Dracula? I think he would disagree on that.

The truth is I don’t remember LET THE RIGHT ONE IN in too many specifics. From what I can remember I think this one is very similar to the first version, except I remember something about CGI cats that wasn’t repeated here. They definitely staged the climactic swimming pool massacre about the same, though, with the kid held underwater and suddenly body parts and blood start falling in and he (and we) don’t see exactly what happens. If I was more familiar with that version this would be more of a problem because it would probly feel like too much of a rehash, but because of my situation it didn’t bother me.

The kid really makes the movie. I’m not gonna say he’s better than the Swedish kid, because that kid was great too. But Kodi Smit-McPhee is perfect. He’s so skinny and boyish. He doesn’t seem like a movie version of a kid that would be picked on in school, he seems like a kid that would be picked on in school. And he’s so isolated. We only hear his dad over the phone and his mom is always shot with her head out of frame or partially blocked or from behind, like Charlie Brown’s teacher or the adults in E.T. besides Dee Wallace or Peter Coyote. So he’s left so alone with nobody to help him with his problems but this neighbor girl who is actually not a girl at all but a hundred year old mass murdering hermaphroditic monster. But one that’s nice to him.

I’m not really sure what to make of this relationship. It’s not the murdering so much as the age difference that bothers me. When he’s grown I don’t care, he can have a gal that’s way older than him if he wants. But he’s a scrawny little kid. Abby is an adult, what’s she doing agreeing to “go steady” with this little boy?

In fact I sort of have to wonder how other people view this story (either version). I know the terms “love story” and “beautiful” tend to come up alot. The kid is obviously very relatable to some people, and there’s some wish fulfillment in his violent revenge on the bullies, but then it just perpetrates the cycle of violence until his vampire boyfriend brutally murders them. People don’t really consider this story romantic, do they? Yes, it’s sweet that this lonely kid found a companion and a protector, but now this kid is complicit in mass murder and it seems like he’s just replacing Richard Jenkins, consigned to a life of travelling around murdering people to feed their blood to this beast that never ages. I mean, if somebody chooses to live that life I guess that’s their decision, but I don’t think a 12 year old boy is ready to make that kind of commitment. I mean, he has to really live first, he has to get the wisdom and the experience and what not. Who knows if he’s even gotten to see RETURN OF THE JEDI yet. Or RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK. I don’t think he has, or he’d be playing ewok out there, not stab-the-tree.

Anyway, I just think he should be able to go to high school and date girls and stuff before he dedicates his life to being an assistant vampire.

So, do we agree on that? This is a tragic, fucked up story, that’s why it’s interesting. It’s not a sweet love  story, right?

Stephen KIng called this the best American horror movie in 20 years. How about the best Americanized horror movie since THE RING? I think that would be a fair compliment that doesn’t go overboard.

There is almost a whole subgenre now of unwanted but surprisingly decent remakes. And LET ME IN is pretty much the most accomplished movie of this type so far. Good job, Matt Reeves. I don’t know why you’d do this particular job, but good job.

On the other hand, alot of Bronson’s movies are (by design) pretty formulaic, they’re all about taking the type of basic situations you’d want to see Charles Bronson in and then putting Charles Bronson in them. Therefore if you do have a new action icon to star in some movies, these are the types of movies you might want to try to put him in. And Jason Statham isn’t a bad candidate, in my opinion.
Statham is some weird hybrid of different types of action icons. He has Bruce Willis’s hairline and working man features. But he also tends to wear expensive suits, or pretty boy shit that’s tapered to emphasize his physique. (He wears a high-necked sweater in this thing that no other Expendable could get away with.) Like the Van Damme generation he has martial arts skills (although he doesn’t use them here). With his weirdly sloped shoulders he even has a more regular-sized version of The Rock’s cartoonish super hero body. His face can sell tough, world-weary, street smart, heartless bastard exterior, actually-he’s-a-sweetheart interior. Doesn’t seem to have alot of range, but can always pull off this one type of character.

If there’s gonna be a new Bronson obviously it’s gotta be Danny Trejo, but I do believe Statham is the closest thing we have to a consistent modern international action icon outside of Asia. He dips his toes into other types of roles, but he really seems like his main interest is action movies, and he keeps them coming every year.

You know I hate the fuckin CRANK movies, and I only really liked part 2 of the TRANSPORTER series, but I have to give him respect. He has created a persona and style in those movies plus DEATH RACE, THE EXPENDABLES and very slightly more respectable studio movies like THE ITALIAN JOB and THE BANK JOB. So now just like there’s something you expect from “a Charles Bronson movie” you have an idea what to expect from “a Jason Statham movie.” And THE MECHANIC (remake) is a pretty good version of a Jason Statham movie, the kind that’s more on the serious side and not cartoony trying to be goofy all the time.

So I’m not offended by it. I just think it would be smarter to make a ripoff of THE MECHANIC that’s about the same basic thing instead of taking the title and forcing us to compare them. I mean, the opening assassination scene in this remake is pretty cool, so it’s too bad I have to compare it against the way better 16 minute dialogue-free opening of the original.

It’s actually a more faithful remake than many these days, including DEATH RACE. They use the same basic situation and character names. The protagonist is still Arthur Bishop, an elite assassin for an international organization, who lives a friendless and isolated life because of his dedication to his craft. As in the original he has a nice house and listens to classical music on vinyl (and man, he has a nice turntable). He still kills his boss, Harry McKenna (Donald Sutherland instead of Keenan Wynn) and then meets the boss’s douchebag son Steve (Ben Foster from HOSTAGE and 3:10 TO YUMA instead of Jan Michael Vincent – an improvement, despite bad facial hair) and takes him on as an apprentice, getting himself in trouble with the organization. The training and killings are different, but that’s the fun of it. You want to see some new shit, right?

I’m not clear how the writing worked on this one. They credit the original writer Lewis John Carlino as if he co-wrote it, not a “based on a previous screenplay by” credit. They also credit Richard Wenk, the writer-director of VAMP, that weird new wave vampire movie starring Grace Jones. The director is Simon West, who did CON AIR, so until I had a whim and went to see it this morning I really wasn’t planning to. CON AIR was one of the first movies that I hated for having indecipherable camerawork and editing, and I’ve never heard anybody claim his movies got better after that.

Well, I’m not sure if he’s improving or not, it’s been so long since I’ve seen CON AIR it probly seems tame compared to the gibberish it paved the way for. But he sure hasn’t picked up a crisp and clear new style. Any of the kinetic action scenes – fights or chases – are garbled post-action, too many edits and not clear enough camera work, like you’d expect from a pioneer of forever-ruining-the cinematic-language-of-action-films. Not the worst ever, but not excusable. Not completely useless, but hardly very useful.

Luckily, in between action scenes the style is pretty calm and straightforward. The movie survives because most of it’s not about that – it’s about these two characters, their inevitably doomed friendship, and the clever plans they put in place to kill people. And it has several little emotional moments that worked for me – between Bishop and McKenna when the shit goes down, between Bishop and Steve when Steve is opening up about his father’s death, between Bishop and a really beautiful prostitute (you know how they have those in movies) during the awkward morning after. Also, the things Steve does that reveal how fucked up he is are pretty effective. Foster is good at playing a dude who goes too far.

I did miss the original’s signs that Bishop was an emotional wreck because of what he does. Bronson’s Bishop took anti-depressants and always carried around a ball of wax that he would squeeze when he was stressed out. It doesn’t have to be the same thing, but I think Statham could stand a little of that vulnerability. Gives you character. Also there’s a distressing lack of motorcycle chases and lip-reading in this one.

But I did feel a little bit of an emotional attachment to the characters by the end, so the best part to me was the tension and sadness between them as they sat in a truck together, neither acknowledging that one is about to try to kill the other. The script does a good job of waiting until the end for Steve to give a couple lines about his emotional state (he has anger in him that he’s able to purge by doing these assassinations) and Foster delivers it well enough to work. I don’t think I saw it this way in the original, but I like how Steve going back to Bishop’s house at the end sort of signals that Bishop became a father to him. He complained that his real father wasn’t there for him and that he didn’t inherit anything from him. But he tries to inherit Bishop’s house, car, and musical tastes. Not the greatest son in the world, I guess.

One difference from the original (if I remember right) is that they actually call him a “mechanic,” and make up an explanation for using that term. And I guess you could say he’s literally a mechanic since he has an old car he’s fixing up. Another difference is that this is produced by Millennium Films, so it has a port of call New Orleans to take advantage of post-Katrina tax incentives.

THE MECHANIC is pretty solid. Don’t take that too lightly, because “pretty solid” is better than most action movies these days. Still, early in the movie I felt the possibility that it could be something more.

Let me explain to you how this movie gained my trust and then betrayed me. Early in the movie Bishop goes to meet with his boss, a guy with a wedding band, and between me and you I’m guessing he’s not the nice family man he outwardly appears to be. That’s just a theory. The boss keeps Bishop waiting as he stays in his limo talking to his teenage daughter on the phone. Bishop stands with a bodyguard, a big guy with a Super Bowl-type ring that says “World Champion” on it.

“Nice ring. I’d like to get one like that,” Arthur says.

“You can’t,” the bodyguard says arrogantly. “Unless you’re a world champion.”

To me, this is a potentially great action movie moment because of what it tells you and what it makes you ask. What it tells you is that Bishop’s boss is hard to get at. He has a big bodyguard who doesn’t seem to like Bishop and who has an elite skill of some kind, so elite that he is actually the world champion of it. And the fact that the movie is telling you this also tells you that Bishop is gonna have to get at his boss at some point, and he’s gonna have to get through the champ.

What it makes you ask is, obviously, what is this guy the world champion of? Probly not boxing, because they got a belt for that. Maybe a specific martial art, judo or kenpo karate or something. Or greco-roman wrestling. I’m definitely thinking it’s a fighting sport.

It doesn’t matter what the answer is (unless it turns out to be kayaking or something). This information, and this question, make an action movie promise. They say hello audience, I would like you to know that toward the end of this movie Jason Statham is gonna have to pit his skills against a world champion fighter. It will be a difficult and awesome fight, but somehow he will win. And it is definitely very possible that after defeating the champ he will take his ring. He said he wanted one, after all, and if he beat him wouldn’t that sort of make him the world champion? Not officially, but off the books at least?

I like when a movie makes a promise like this. I keep it in my head, anticipating it. At some point I forget about it, until something reminds me, and I think “oh yeah, the championship! This is gonna be great!” In this case it’s in a montage where Bishop is on his computer doing his research and making his plans. He types in something and a full screen photo of the ring from earlier pops up. Obviously he’s looking him up. Maybe finding out what his skills are, and his weaknesses. Past injuries or something like that.

Well, nope. It turns out he’s just finding out where the champ lives. They go shoot him in the knee and then threaten his wife and daughters to get him to talk. There is no fight. They never say what sport he played. I guess he was just the world champion of having something you can use against him.

I’m not gonna say it ruined the movie for me. By this point I’d already enjoyed it. But it’s one example of the difference between a not-bad movie and a really good one. Know your badass momentum, filmatists. Make a promise and then either deliver on it or sneak up behind me and deliver something better. Don’t imply awesome and then replace it with pretty cool.

Maybe in part 2, though.

“Of course not, Jaden. You know we don’t do sequels in this family. Except for the Matrix.”

“That’s not true, dad. You did Men in Black 2 and Bad Boys 2 and you might do Independence Day 2.”

“Exactly! Y’knowhumseen? Ha ha ha!” (charming smile)

“Well, maybe you can get me in a remake. Mr. Bay does remakes all the time.”

“I’ll tell you what, J. You be good, Big Willie style, and I’ll produce a remake for you. What do you want to remake, you want to remake Good Burger or something?”

“Transporter 2!”

“No no no, too violent, J. Rated PG only.”

“But dad, even Spider-man is PG-13! I’m not a baby!”

“Son, do you want to do a remake or not?”

“Fine fine fine. But can Jason Statham be in it?”

“No, he’s rated R. How ’bout Jackie Chan? Do some kung fu?”

“Dad, I’m not a baby! I’m not remaking the Tuxedo!”

“How ’bout the Karate Kid? I’ll buy the Karate Kid, you and Jackie Chan.”

“I thought you said kung fu?”

“Yeah, the Karate Kid! You’ll do kung fu!”

“Karate is from Japan, dad. Kung fu is from China. Didn’t you get tutored at all when you were a kid?”

“Don’t get smart with me, son. Do you want to be the Karate Kid or do you want to go to your rooms?”

“Ah, man. Do I even need to say it?”

“Say what?”

“You know, dad.”

“No I don’t. What do you need to say?”

“Well, it was the title of a Grammy winning song by the forgotten novelty rappers Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince.”

“Go to your rooms. Now!”

“Yes sir.”

“And to think I was gonna try to get the PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS guy to direct you again. Nuh uh. I’m calling the guy who did PINK PANTHER 2.”

–

THE KARATE KID remake is a weird one. It uses the classic story of a skinny kid raised by a single mother moving to a new city, getting in a fight because of a girl, getting the reluctant help of the apartment maintenance man to learn martial arts through chores, then entering a tournament and pulling an upset on the bullies despite a leg injury. So I guess that’s enough the same that you gotta call it KARATE KID and not NO RETREAT, NO SURRENDER.

At the same time they made some pretty huge adjustments that change the whole thing. Mainly it’s that instead of moving to California he has to move all the way to China. That changes everything. It’s not just that he doesn’t know anybody at the school, he doesn’t even know the language, doesn’t understand the culture, could easily insult people by accident and get himself into trouble. And since it’s Jackie Chan he doesn’t learn karate, he learns kung fu. In one part I think he was watching a karate instructional video, but I think they cut out the part from the trailer where the bullies called him The Karate Kid. So as far as I could tell there’s no explanation for the title. I didn’t think they would be that lazy about it.

The other big change is the age. Will Smith’s son Jaden plays Dre, he’s a couple years younger than Daniel-San. Not a big change, you would think, until you watch the movie and see how a little thing like that shifts the whole context. Now they’re not in high school, they’re at a pre-sex age, so the bully being so possessive of the girl seems weirder. I suspect racism. The “no mercy” teacher seems even more irresonsible because he’s dealing with younger kids, and the almost UFC level of fighting in the tournament seems insane. No way is a kids tournament gonna allow elbows to the head! And the Miyagi character, Mr. Han, still works on repairing an old car, but he can’t give it to his student like in the original, because he’s not old enough to drive, and anyway most people don’t drive cars here, so I doubt it would have any of the beginning-of-manhood and courting-the-ladies significance that it had in California.

Chan is good as Mr. Han, and it’s really cool to see him doing a little acting and not just mugging. He’s a little harsh to the kid and has some emotional scenes. Of course, he’s not as great of a character as Mr. Miyagi with his froggy voice. But I like that it’s a different approach, hiring a real martial artist who you really would want to learn from. And he gets to fight. Against kids, though.

Yeah, there’s no skeleton costumes, but Dre does splash them with water and gets chased down, and Mr. Han intervenes. But in the original Miyagi is a little old man and the bullies are big broad-shouldered jock dudes, he’s the underdog in that fight. With Jackie Chan vs. kids you don’t got the same dynamic. He does a trademark Jackie Chan make-them-hit-each-other technique, but still.

Smith is really charismatic, less whiny than Daniel-San, more relatable I think. But I noticed he jokes exactly like his dad, and I’m not sure we need Will Smith 2.0, at least not the “funny” Will Smith. I like serious Will Smith better.

In the tournament I was impressed at first that it seemed like he really knew how to fight a little. In the original it didn’t seem like Daniel had learned jack shit, and I couldn’t believe he was allowed to compete with those guys. The remake has almost the reverse problem: he’s too good. What? I know there was some montages, but when did he learn all this shit? He does a flip and kicks the guy on the top of his head!

It’s an interesting depiction of China, not like you usually see in movies. He lives in an urban neighborhood with a nice park nearby where people hang out. There’s an American white kid in his building (playing the part of the neighbor who, in the original, invited him to the beach party and then disappeared).

Taraji P. Henson of course is lovable as the mom, as always. When she’s surprised to hear that the maintenance man is teaching kung fu Dre says “It’s China. Everybody knows kung fu.” Which is okay for him to say because earlier his white friend threw him a basketball and said “You play, right?” (the answer turns out to be yes, but not very well. Take that, stereotypes!)

Unlike the original movie this one then goes into some mystical kung fu business. When you learn karate you just go out onto a beach to practice, but with kung fu you go up a mountain to watch magical kung fu warriors including a woman staring down a cobra. (I like when Dre tries to do that trick on his mom.) I guess going from the semi-real world to martial arts movie fantasyland is to carry us into the highly exaggerated and choreographed tournament scenes.

The villains aren’t as funny as the goofballs in the original, but I kind of like them. The bully kid does a surprisingly good “I feel bad about this” expression when his master asks him to fight dirty in the tournament. The master seems realer and scarier than the old one, less laughable, partly because he never speaks English in the movie. On the other hand the original had the generational conflict between the senseis, Mr. Miyagi was a WWII veteran and Kreese or whatever his name was was in Vietnam, and this seemed to inform their philosophical differences and hatred of each other. It’s similar to the tension between Stallone and Dennehy in FIRST BLOOD, although mostly that’s in the book and only barely implied in the movie.

I know some people who love the original KARATE KID – they probly shouldn’t watch this. For me it wasn’t too bad, pretty likable, in some ways better than the original, but not in the most important area which is the relationship and chemistry between student and teacher. They’re both good, but they can’t match whatever the fuck it was in that original movie. For some reason they got that to work, and you can’t really repeat it.

The director is Harold Zwart, who also did AGENT CODY BANKS and THE PINK PANTHER REMAKE 2. I thought he was just some cheesy Hollywood hack, but I looked him up and I guess he’s an import from the Netherlands. He’s an artist. He did LONG FLAT BALLS 1 & 2, fer cryin out loud. But seriously friends. He does better than I expected. Honestly with a resume like that I was picturing more of a Rob-Schneider-vehicle level of directational skills. Actually it’s a slickly put together thing with nice photography and acting. And as at modernized tribute to the original it has the absolutely most horrible Disney channel type garbagey pop music soundtrack available by modern technology. It even has the little boy from Twitter on the end credits, with Jaden Smith pretending to rap in part of it. As a side note, I would like to plead with all parents to throw away your televisions, radios and computers until your children reach their mid-twenties. It’s just not worth the risk.

There are already plans for KARATE KID 2, and I hope those plans involve going full-on ridiculous and hiring a serious action director. Treat it like a BEST OF THE BEST sequel. Maybe Dre’s white friend gets murdered by Triads, and he has to go undercover in order to get access to kill the top guy. Or his mom gets kidnapped to force him to enter and win the Kumite. I’m not sure if it should be an all kid Kumite or if it should be all adults who for some reason are fighting a little boy to the death, and nobody ever says anything about it. Or another possibility is he and Mr. Han have to sneak into a building under siege to rescue hostages, and Han uses his knowledge of maintenance to get around.

There are alot of ways this could work. Let’s not blow this opportunity, Hollywood. This could be the next UNDISPUTED II.

In my review of the original LONG WEEKEND I linked to an interview with De Roche where he mentioned a more elaborate ending they failed to pull off:

“A large slab of the script was omitted because of the difficulty of working with animals. I wrote an enormously complicated sequence for near the end where the animals give Peter a second chance. They want him to wise up, and he is at the point of doing so when he hears a truck in the distance. He dashes off to the highway, and the animals decide there is no hope. Poetically, they leave it to another man to kill him.”

So I was looking for that, but if they did it, I didn’t get it. It didn’t seem like the animals were trying to give him another chance. There was a snake in a tree. I think an owl hooted at him. There were no subtitles, it’s hard to know what he meant.

Anyway, Jim Caviezel (playing Australian) is Peter in this version, Claudia Karvan (DAYBREAKERS) is Marcia, only I guess she’s called Carla. That’s one of the major departures from the original. Updated for the 2000s. Who the fuck is named Marcia? That’s not something this generation can relate to. The dog is still named Cricket, but it’s a different breed. A nice twist.

Like PSYCHO the modernization is minimal. There is a mobile phone at the beginning, but no texting. Instead of $3,000 he spent $10,000 on the camping equipment. And there’s a part where they talk about Gnarls Barkley. Nah, I’m just fucking with you on that last one. The closest thing to a dated reference is when Peter’s hunting ducks he starts doing a Christopher Walken impression for a little bit. That was a good reason to update it because when the original was filmed they didn’t know anybody knew who the fuck Christopher Walken was. I mean he had been in ANNIE HALL, but I’m not sure most people would get the reference. By the time LONG WEEKEND came out here THE DEER HUNTER had been out for a year, but there was no way they could’ve known. So in the remake they were able to fix that.

I don’t know man, I don’t really get why they made this movie, but I don’t got nothing against it. Even watching it a few days after the original it was pretty entertaining. But I’m the guy who kind of likes watching the PSYCHO remake, so what the fuck do I know? It’s interesting to me to see two different sets of actors doing the exact same shit. It shows how great the script is that it can be done with different people in a different style and an entirely different era and still work. The characters still work, the situation still works, the abortion and nature themes are still relevant, it’s still funny when he points out that he just got attacked by an eagle.

I think Caviezel might be a little more sympathetic in the role than the O.G. Peter, but he’s still an asshole. One part that struck me is when they’ve seen this black shape in the water threatening him while he surfs, so he gets out the rifle and shoots it, and later Carla says it could’ve killed him. He says no, it was “probly just a dolphin.” And it doesn’t bother him that he might’ve shot a fucking dolphin! It’s like don’t worry dear, everything is okay, I just shot a dolphin, that’s all. Murdered an intelligent, endangered animal capable of communication and using tools. Don’t be so upset.

Maybe that is a dated line, or maybe it’s a good example of why the koalas and spiders and shit want to give this prick the business.

And the second time around I really noticed that geez, this guy is way too angry about her spilling sugar. So what if the ants get into it? This is not something an adult should be yelling at another adult about. That wasn’t the last sugar in the world, dude. Calm down.

I realized this time that the husband disrespects nature by shooting, chopping, littering, running over, etc., but the wife disrespects it just by not liking it. She doesn’t enjoy the beauty at all, she locks herself in the tent. When she does lay out there it’s face down to get a tan on her back. She says “this place is horrible” and calls it “this awful place” and I don’t think it’s just because all the animals hate her. She just doesn’t like the outdoors. Or eagle’s eggs.

Cricket didn’t turn on them in this one. That was a little disappointing. If anything I think that aspect should’ve been played up more. It’s a major betrayal when man’s best friend conspires with snakes and eagles. Taking away that blow makes it feel a little soft. But they make up for it by giving Peter a more gruesome death, I guess.

In the U.S. this was dumped straight to DVD with the title NATURE’S GRAVE, and what is that supposed to mean? It doesn’t sound like Nature is creating a grave for you. NATURE’S has an apostrophe, it’s possessive. Here lies Nature. This is the grave where Nature is buried. But by definition if you bury Nature aren’t you covering Nature in dirt, and isn’t dirt already Nature? Well, maybe it’s buried in jelly bellies. Or those plastic balls the kids play in at Chuck E. Cheese. I don’t know.

I do know that this does not look like a cover designed by professionals:

It’s weird because Jim Caviezel is always known for having played Jesus, people even just refer to him as Jesus instead of Jim. And like the fucking Romans the Hollywood decision makers won’t give the guy a fucking break. I’m not gonna cry over this one, but despite the chronically literal-minded knuckleheads on IMDb messageboards (yeah, I know, don’t read ‘em. But they’re just sitting there. Sometimes you get curious) I feel like some people would enjoy this movie if they knew to give it a chance. It really didn’t need to be mocked and beaten and forced to wear a crown of thorns like that fuckin cover.

I guess HIGHWAYMEN and OUTLANDER weren’t treated as badly, but those are legitimately good movies he stars in that they failed to get people to see. They forgot to tell people how unusual HIGHWAYMEN was, or that OUTLANDER is a movie that exists and that you could watch.

Maybe there really is a McCarthy style blacklist against conservatives in Hollywood, like the AIRPLANE! guy said when he made that horrible piece of shit movie. I didn’t know it but I’m reading up on Caviezel here, it turns out he doesn’t believe in doing sex scenes, and did an ad against stem cell research (rebutting an ad by Michael J. Fox – like an anti-Marty McFly dis record), and donated money to notorious gay-hating douchebag former Senator Rick Santorum.

That last one is hard to forgive. On the other hand I kind of feel sorry for him because he got struck by lightning, and because a crazy guy threw a bike at him and made him crash his Harley. Plus he adopted two Chinese orphans who have brain tumors, so he can’t be that bad. After you hear that it’s hard to really hate him, unless you’re an animal or a tree or something. So I doubt somebody said “this prick gave money to Rick Santorum, just wait til’ you see how shitty we made the DVD cover!”

Anyway, it’s okay. I think he works good as an under-the-radar actor.  I feel like I got my money’s worth out of this one, but I don’t think I can recommend it to most people. If you haven’t seen the original you should see it, and if you have seen it you’ve already seen it. The slick digital photography here looks really good and I guess it was filmed in a part of Australia where a feature has never been shot before. But the original was even more beautiful, and I prefer that grainy ’70s film look. And let’s be honest, so do you.

The movie is dedicated to the memory of Colin Eggleston, director of the original. If you’re paying attention you’ll also notice a hotel called The Eggleston Hotel. So, wait a minute. Carla, when she correctly suggested that they should stay at the hotel instead of sleep in the car, wanted to go back to Eggleston. As if she’s saying to go back to the original version, instead of the remake. Hmmmm.

Maybe the real purpose of this movie is to sharpen Jamie Blanks’s directational teeth. It’s good practice for him, studying how the classics are put together. He does a good job, he works with these actors and gets some nice footage of nature and what not. And I guess if there’s anybody out there that has a fetish for women masturbating in tents who get interrupted by the cry of a sea cow, well, now there are two movies for you to work with there. Merry Christmas.