Posts Tagged ‘Roddy Piper’

Important Book Alert #2: THEY LIVE (DEEP FOCUS #1) by Jonathan Lethem

Saturday, November 27th, 2010

tn_theyliveOne day several years ago I was waiting for a bus near a book store, and in the window there was a book about the philosophy of THE MATRIX. There’s more than one book like that, and I can’t remember which one it was that I saw that day, but it got me thinking: there should be a book like that, except it’s entirely about THEY LIVE.

There’s a long-running series of books called 33 1/3, little pocket-sized book length essays about classic albums. I have one for Stevie Wonder’s Songs In the Key of Life, for example. And I’ve long thought there should be a series like that for movies, and I should write the one about THEY LIVE.

Well, too late, buddy. Soft Skull Press is starting a series just like that, although if I understand correctly they’re all gonna be written by novelists. #2 is on DEATH WISH, #4 is gonna be LETHAL WEAPON. THE STING, HEATHERS and THE BAD NEWS BEARS IN BREAKING TRAINING are also coming up, but it all starts with THEY LIVE by Jonathan Lethem, author of the novels Motherless Brooklyn and The Fortress of Solitude. His approach is very different from what I would’ve done/could still do some day, but it’s an interesting, quick read and makes plenty of points that I hadn’t thought of before, making it a good first book about this particular subject.
(more…)

6 people like this post.
Unlike

Tags: , , ,
Posted in Blog Post (short for weblog) | 61 Comments »

Back In Action

Saturday, April 18th, 2009

tn_roddypiper Yesterday was Roddy Piper’s birthday. I’m celebrating late with the Piper/Billy Blanks picture from 1993, BACK IN ACTION.

Script-wise, I gotta say, this is a half-assed affair. They got the maverick cop (Roddy Piper), the ex-soldier who is back in action on a one man mission of justice (Billy Blanks), standard issue evil druglords, damsel-in-distress sister and also the female reporter love interest always looking for a good story but who ends up trying to help (see also DARKMAN 2, UNIVERSAL SOLDIER). Also some obvious one-liners that I guess I got a laugh from, like when the bad guy thinks (let’s face it, naively) that Piper won’t kill him because of his Miranda rights. Piper stabs him and says “You have the right to remain silent. Forever.”

Other than that there is no effort to put any spice on the usual cliches or put them together in a way that makes sense. And it’s kind of stupid that Billy only thinks he’s on a one man mission of justice. He’s going after these drug dealers who he thinks kidnapped his sister, but actually she’s hiding from them in an apartment with her boyfriend. The filmatism is low rent like an American International Pictures jungle commando movie or something. There are lots of scenes at bars, warehouses and docks.

Piper seems to be trying, doing what he can with a nothing character. I realized during the scene when he looks at his dead partner that movie acting really has nothing to do with wrestling acting. He lets you read his facial expressions but doesn’t project them to the back row. I wonder if he ever fucks up and does wrestling acting on a movie shoot and gets yelled at by the director? And then he breaks a chair over the director’s head? That could explain why there are two directors credited. One had to tag in when the other one got knocked out. (more…)

2 people like this post.
Unlike

Tags: , ,
Posted in Action, Martial Arts, Reviews, Thriller | 12 Comments »

They Live

Wednesday, August 23rd, 2006

THEY LIVE is one of my favorite movies ever. It is probaly the very best version of a rare type of movie I love: the badass action movie that also works as a political statement. BILLY JACK may be more political, but it seems so self important and it has no sense of humor. THEY LIVE is kind of saying the same thing THE MATRIX is saying about a society brainwashed by media and advertising, but it’s saying more than that. It’s about the America of the Reagan years, when everything was geared to help the rich at the expense of the working class. Which for some reason seems awfully familiar today. Huh. Weird.

“Rowdy” Roddy Piper plays Nada, a drifter who walks into town with tools and a sleeping bag on his back. (Hey, what happens to that sleeping bag? I think it disappears.) This is a hero who not only doesn’t drive a sports car, but doesn’t have a car at all. Or a house. Or a job, at first. The plants are closing, the jobs are drying up, that’s why he’s on the move. But he happens to get a construction job, where he meets Frank (Keith motherfuckin David from THE THING) and finds out about a homeless encampment near a church where some nice people serve food for the homeless.

The first section of the movie doesn’t have alot of dialogue. It’s all about watching. Nada watches people watching TV – an old lady in an apartment, a dude standing outside an electronics shop, even homeless people who have a TV set up outside. We can see that Nada is a little creeped out by the vapid commercials and their hypnotic effect on people. And then they get pissed off when, every once in a while, some weird old man cuts into the broadcast desperately telling people to “wake up.” And then everybody gets a headache.

Nada also starts watching the church, because he notices something odd going on. He watches a helicopter watching the church. He sneaks in and sees that it’s not a real church. The choir he hears from outside is a reel-to-reel tape and there’s some kind of rebels hatching a plan in there. He even bumps into a secret panel in the wall and sees a box inside, but he gets found out by an elderly blind priest, so he leaves. (more…)

3 people like this post.
Unlike

Tags: , , ,
Posted in Action, Reviews, Science Fiction and Space Shit | 3 Comments »