A good example is in the Maysles brothers documentary CHRISTO IN PARIS, where people stand on top of “The Pont Neuf Wrapped” arguing about whether or not it’s art. Watching the movie we can see that the fucking thing is beautiful, and these people are engaged in a discussion provoked by it. They are being thought provoked, it has caused them to think, to question their beliefs about art. But they don’t count that as art, so obviously they got a different definition of art than I do.

So why argue it? It’s like me debating Mr. Majestyk about what color Arnold’s suit is in RED HEAT when I’m color blind. To me the thing is bright blue but to him it’s green so it makes sense that James Belushi calls him Gumby. We just gotta acknowledge each other’s differing sight and let it go.

If you don’t like video games don’t play them, if you think they have the potential to move people then don’t worry about it. If somebody ever makes a video game as good as THE GODFATHER (movie, not video game) I’m sure it will be self evident.

So the real question is, is STREET FIGHTER: THE MOVIE art? And the answer, in my opinion, is blue.

STREET FIGHTER: THE MOVIE is one of the Jean-Claude Van Damme pictures I never saw before now. It’s written and directed by Steven E. de Souza, often called “the writer of DIE HARD” even though he was one of many on that one. Really he’s more “the writer of KNOCK OFF,” but I can respect that too I guess. Credited as “based on the video game Street Fighter 2,” this movie is the story of a heavily armed junta led by a dictator named Bison (Raul Julia in his last role) who take a bunch of people hostage in a fictional Asian country called Shadaloo and demand $20 billion ransom. I know, at first I thought Shadaloo was a real country too, it sounds so real and natural. But I looked and I couldn’t find it on any maps.

At first I figured this guy Bison was so cruel just because he was born with such a stupid name, but when he announced that he wanted to conquer the world and rename it “Bisonopolis” I realized that he doesn’t have that kind of self awareness. He’s just an asshole.

Van Damme plays Colonel Guile, who leads a UN type group of soldiers in on a peacemaking/hostage-saving mission. His hair looks blonde in some scenes, so it’s a complete physical transformation like DeNiro in RAGING BULL. Like in UNIVERSAL SOLDIER, Van Damme teams with a female TV news reporter (Ming-Na from THE JOY LUCK CLUB), but she turns out to be Chun Li, a martial artist who secretly wants revenge on Bison for killing her father.

This is one of those weird movies of the ’80s and ’90s that try to be bold and stylized, with larger than life characters, special effects and scoring, but nothing ever really clicks. It’s on the screen and at this point it’s way too late to question whether or not anybody wants to see famous actors dressed up as, say, The Flintstones. Movies like this are more enjoyable watching it from a distance as a curiosity, trying to picture who they were making it for. The one really good part in this one is when Chun Li reveals herself to Bison only to find that he doesn’t remember the incident she’s talk about at all. And he has the great line that one of you quoted in some comments recently: “For you, the day Bison graced your village was the most important day of your life. But for me… it was Tuesday.”

That movie poster is pretty accurate. I think Bison stays in the one room for pretty much the whole movie, basically waiting for everybody else to show up. I guess they spent alot of money on all those TV monitors, they wanted to get some mileage out of them. I’m not sure which one, but one of Bison’s flunkies is named “Dee Jay” I guess. He kept yelling out “Deeee Jaaaaaayy!” and I kept expecting him to say “rewind that!” or “Drop that beat!” or something.

There’s an ensemble of other characters, like Byron Mann (BELLY OF THE BEAST, A DANGEROUS MAN) as Ryu, the singer Kylie Minogue as Beret Lady, Wes Studi as an arms dealer, the guy who played the terrible remake Leatherface as a mohawk guy, some guy that has a metal mask and Wolverine type claws, and various others as etc. Lots of guys who must mean something to people who played the game, but are just confusing and unexplained to the rest of us.

From what I understand the game is about fighting. The title is not supposed to be a metaphor, I don’t think. That’s weird because the movie doesn’t have any street fighting of any kind and very little off-road fighting for that matter. There’s some kind of underground fight tournament that some characters are supposed to be in at the beginning, but then they leave before the games begin. In my opinion it’s a bad idea to call a movie “Street Fighter” and then have a bunch of non-fighting leading up to Van Damme fighting Raul Julia. We all miss Raul Julia but I think most of us would agree that he was more respected for his acting than for his screen fighting skills.

Bison’s plan (besides waiting around making megalomaniacal speeches until he gets $20 billion) is to force a kidnapped scientist to use a magic science machine to turn Van Damme’s best friend into a green troll monster with orange hair, because obviously if you got one of those you can build Bisonopolis. He’s supposed to be Bison’s “perfect soldier,” so if you watch Van Damme movies you know that the ultimate soldier is either a dead guy (UNIVERSAL SOLDIER) or a green guy (this one). The only thing that could beat them would be a dead green guy, like a Frankenstein or something.

The plot is too plodding and messy for me to remember much about it. I do think it’s Van Damme’s only movie with two separate parts where it pretends he’s dead (one when he fakes his death for some reason, one when the others leave him behind in an exploding building and then figure it’s okay to just say he’s dead without really knowing).

Most movies like this tend to go way too big in their climax, some noisy business with missiles that are gonna blow up a major city or something like that. This one actually goes too small: the big surprise is that Bison uses magnets to fly around his room a little bit. Not that impressive, in my opinion.

Of course it’s too bad this was Julia’s last role, but at least he gets to ham it up and have fun. He has all the funny lines and he goes after them with guns blazing, he’s clearly the most entertaining part of the movie and arguably the only entertaining part. Van Damme’s actually the one whose talents are being wasted. He doesn’t get to fight or even do stunts nearly as much as in his other movies of the time period (this was the same year as HARD TARGET) and de Souza obviously wrote the script with more of a talker in mind. In my opinion Van Damme was not ready for the rousing “who wants to go home, and who wants to go with me?” speech that inspires all the peacemakers to refuse orders to make peace.

I can understand how this would be a beloved crappy movie to somebody who played the video game at the pizza parlor when he was 12 and went and saw the movie with all his friends or whatever. It’s a unique style of terrible and good for some laughs. But as an actual action movie or Van Damme picture it’s fucking OUT OF ORDER.

You see, like when a video machine game is broken. PLAY AT OWN RISK.

[ratings]

I’ll start by laying out the three basic schools of thought about why HUDSON HAWK crashed and burned.

1. The McClane Factor. Audiences had originally loved Bruce as David Addison on MOONLIGHTING. Nobody expected DIE HARD to be so good. But it re-invented action and it re-invented Bruce. Sure, they still had a taste for David Addison, but they hungered for John McClane, especially right here in 1991. Moonlighting was over, DIE HARD 2 had just happened, Comedy Bruce had been shed to reveal Action Bruce fully grown beneath… then all the sudden he comes out with this. It’s like, all due respect to the black eye mask, but right after you see THE BIG BOSS or FIST OF FURY for the first time you’re not anxious for Bruce Lee to go back to playing Kato.

HUDSON HAWK is way more MOONLIGHTING than DIE HARD. His character is the opposite of John McClane in many ways. McClane is a cop, Hawk is a cat burglar. McClane is a working stiff, Hawk loves cappucino. McClane wears an undershirt and no shoes, Hawk a fancy black overcoat and hat. McClane makes smartass comments to leaven his seemingly doomed situation, when Hawk makes them it emphasizes his fearlessnes. McClane is having trouble keeping his marriage together, Hawk is so smooth he scores a hot nun. If you went into this movie hoping to see a character kind of like John McClane you would feel a little like Karl hanging from a chain.

2. The media was out to get Bruce. This seems to be Bruce’s theory. Some of the critics and other media establishment individuals weren’t onboard the Nakatomi Express yet. They looked down their noses at DIE HARD, especially after there was a sequel. They thought it was low culture, dumb violence for dumb people. So they wanted Bruce to fall on his ass, and this obviously self-indulgent pet project with a cocky attitude and shameless silliness was too juicy a target to pass up. It was panned viciously and that may have contributed to its financial failure.

3. It wasn’t very good.

Which of these is the real reason? I have always believed it was a Neopolitan ice cream style striped-combo of the three. But after my latest viewing I put less emphasis on the third one. I think I’ve seen it three times now, and each time liked it better than before. Admittedly it started at a pretty low level of liking, but this time was the best so far. It doesn’t all work, but if you’re in the right mood it’s funny and unusual.

Bruce plays Eddie something, aka the Hudson Hawk, or I thought that’s what they said but at some point they seem to switch to Hudson Hawk being his actual name. Anyway he’s a very talented cat burglar just out of the joint, relaxing and discussing a straight career path with his brother and co-bar owner Tommy Five-Tone (Danny Aiello) when some crooks called the Mario Brothers (no relation) force them to do a museum heist. This turns out to be a setup by nefarious CIA man James Coburn and a team of younger agents (he calls them “the MTV-IA”) code-named after candy bars.

In the movie’s most perfectly surreal moment he’s just survived a harrowing high speed gurney-roll through freeway traffic when David Caruso rappels down from who knows where and holds out a card that says, “MY NAME IS KIT KAT. THIS IS NOT A DREAM.” Next thing you know the Hawk is poisoned, packed in styrofoam shipping peanuts and flown to Rome where he’s forced to steal Leonardo Da Vinci’s codex from the Vatican. In the process he falls for a pretty girl (Andie McDowell) who’s trying to keep the Vatican’s artifacts safe, and he turns out to be embroiled in an evil plot to rebuild a hidden Da Vinci invention that creates gold (not because they want to be rich but because they want to destroy the world economy).

Jesus, I gotta add theory #4, that the movie failed because these were the fucking movie posters they made:

That stupid one on the left I remember as the poster but also I found this one on the right, which says:

Shy.
Sensitive.
Law-abiding.
Polite.
Respectful.
–I don’t think so.

For Christ’s sake, man. I know somebody probly worked hard at least on the typography there on one of them, and everybody has bills to pay. Don’t want to make anybody feel bad, but come on. Let’s have some pride in our work, fellas. I personally believe you could’ve done better. just my 2 cents.

The screenplay was credited to two writers, Steven E. de Souza (the E is for Excellence [nah, just kidding, it's so he doesn't get confused with all the other Steven de Souzas]) and Daniel Waters. De Souza is famous for being one of the writers of DIE HARD, and his credits also include 48 HOURS, COMMANDO and RICOCHET. But also THE FLINSTONES, BEVERLY HILLS COP 2-3, STREET FIGHTER (also director), JUDGE DREDD, and as much as I love it I gotta say KNOCK OFF. Waters meanwhile is known as the visionary writer of HEATHERS, but also had a streak of big studio movies: THE ADVENTURES OF FORD FAIRLANE, then this, BATMAN RETURNS and DEMOLITION MAN. My guess is that de Souza wrote the thing up based on Bruce and his friend Robert Kraft’s story notes, then Waters probly went in and rewrote all the dialogue.

The weak side of it is the summer event movie side of it. It has that early ’90s mediocre studio fantasy adventure feel, with effects by ILM (for a Da Vinci flying machine and exploding gold machine) and a score working itself up too much trying to sound epic and thrilling no matter what’s on screen. If this was supposed to work on multiple levels I don’t think the fantasy adventure level quite succeeded. Bruce does too much swinging around and falling with comical looks on his face for the action to have any weight to it, and Richard E. Grant and Sandra Bernhard are too campy and over the top as the villains to be taken seriously at all.

I mean I’m just saying I doubt anybody’s watching this thing excited to get to the flying machine sequence.

But as a comedy it’s much more successful because it’s jam-packed with goofy little touches (a bomb shooting onto a thug’s head, Caruso painted silver and disguised as a statue) and a Shane Blackian amount of quips. Everybody always has a smartass comment to rattle off to everybody else’s smartass comment. They’re even making clever quips when they claim that they can’t make clever quips. At one point Coburn says, “I wish I could come up with this glib repartee the way you guys can. But I can’t, so I’ll just paralyze you.”

And glib is just the right word for it. Everybody jokes to cover any fear of death they may have. When they’ve been paralyzed and shown a shocking USA Today cover story Hawk and Tommy try to get them to turn to section B to check the Mets score.

I’m sure some of you will quote your favorite lines in the comments. Here’s a couple of mine:

Asked how much time he did Hawk says, “Put it this way. I never saw E.T.”

Richard E. Grant The butler guy slashes the mobster and says, “So much for his cut.” Then, “Forgive my dry British humor.”

The moronic Butterfinger thinks he’s in France (he’s in Italy) and announces, “Ah, to be in Par-ee and in love!”

Also, one of the most ridiculous one-liners ever, after somebody gets beheaded: “I guess you won’t be going to that hat  convention in July!”

(why July? Hudson Hawk really has a detailed idea of this imaginary hat convention. I’m surprised he didn’t say where it happens and how much it costs for a VIP badge.)

I like the candy bar agents, a colorful bunch of characters. The standout is Butterfinger, a huge, dumb oaf with a Boz-like haircut. When part of a plan is going awry he asks, “You want me to rape him?” so they distract him with his copy of One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish. When he’s shot he calls Coburn “coach.” Then there’s the mute Kit Kat. As he falls over dead thankfully he has a card prepared that says, “I ALWAYS LIKED YOU.”

If you’re like me, the main thing you remember about this movie is the heist sequence at the beginning, where Hawk and Tommy sing “Would You Like To Swing On a Star” to themselves while sneaking around the museum, because they have the lengths of songs memorized and use them to time their movements. Of course this makes no sense at all, and Tommy even points it out (”You know they invented something while you were inside – it’s called ‘the watch’”). But if you just go with it it makes for a fun little musical number. Aiello actually isn’t a bad singer and Bruce does better than on RETURN OF BRUNO.

This actually has a bit of that Bruno in it, because it’s Bruce indulging his white bluesman sensibilities, showing off what songs he loves and thinking he looks real fuckin cool adjusting that hat all the time.

What I didn’t know until I watched the DVD extra “The Story of Hudson Hawk” is that this movie comes entirely out of Bruce’s music-playing. It’s actually a really good half hour featurette of Bruce and co-story writer/music supervisor Robert Kraft. Kraft is at the piano for the whole interview and plays and sings the theme song much more appealingly than Dr. John did on the end credits. They explain that they met in 1979 when Kraft’s band was performing in a club. Bruce was in the audience and was presumptuous enough to pull out a harmonica and start playing with them. You’d think this would get Bruce beat up, but instead they became friends. Later Kraft wrote the song, Bruce vowed it would be a movie some day, many years passed and then somehow he turned out to be right.

So for Bruce fans this is a must-see, because it shows you so much of Bruce’s personality. It captures his wiseass side, his musical persona, a little bit of his action side, his Jersey pride and his friendship with Kraft. It shows that as much as we love Action Bruce it’s not a bad idea to invite Comedy Bruce out every once in a while. This movie has really grown on me over the years, from “not very good” to “actually has some funny parts” to “for the most part I like this!”

a couple notes:

1. I don’t know why they’re making such a big deal about Willis and Stallone working together on THE EXPENDABLES, because they already worked together on this one. Well, Frank Stallone, anyway.

2. This was not the first time Bruce collaborated with Kraft on a movie. Kraft wrote a song for LOOK WHO’S TALKING TOO.

3. IMDb’s database recommends that if I like HUDSON HAWK I may also like Jodorowsky’s HOLY MOUNTAIN and BLUE STREAK starring Martin Lawrence.

[ratings]

You know how it is with me, every time I get a screener for some shitty straight to video movie I get this idea somewhere in my brain… what if this is it? What if this is THE ONE? The one I’ve been looking for all these years? Well today we’re here to discuss BLAST, which is not the one. But it is one of those rare surprisingly competent ones. Destined for a Not As Bad As You Would Think award from the Direct to Video Academy of Well Who Are We Kidding There Is No Art Or Science In These Things.

Basically BLAST is DIE HARD on an oil rig. Or maybe UNDER SIEGE on an oil rig, but not ON DEADLY GROUND. Anyway the important thing is instead of Bruce or Seagal, we got wisecrackin Eddie Griffin. You know, from MY BABY’S DADDY. Now look, I wouldn’t watch 99% of the shit this guy has made. But I do think he can be funny. I’m more of a POOTIE TANG man, but I liked him in UNDERCOVER BROTHER. And his standup movie/family documentary DYSFUNKTIONAL FAMILY was funny. Here, he has a couple good smartass lines, but mostly plays the action hero.

That’s what had me excited about the movie because Eddie Griffin’s a little guy, nobody’s gonna be threatened by this man. And the box calls his character Lamont “Dix” Dixon a “former Navy Seal.” Turns out they meant to say that at one point he jokes that he is a former Navy Seal, then says, “No, that’s Steven Seagal.” You gotta wonder. Did the marketing people know that Dix is not a former Navy Seal, but have some kind of marketing rule that says movies about former Navy Seals are profitable? Or did they think ha ha ha, Eddie Griffin as a Navy Seal, that’s hilarious, people are gonna want to rent that as a joke? Or did they just not watch the movie, and guessed what it was about based on the cover art? Any of these are possible.

Anyway, Dix is a tug boat captain who’s towing the oil rig when it gets taken over by mercenaries (”Vinnie Jones, SWORDFISH”) pretending to be eco-terrorists. But in the tradition of Darren McCord (SUDDEN DEATH) and Forrest Taft (ON DEADLY GROUND), Dix gets his terrorist fighting skills from his past as a fireman. A Navy fireman, to be fair, putting out fires in Desert Storm. And he got to swing around on ropes alot, he says.

We know Dix is a firefighter because he keeps having flashbacks to explain why he has a kid. See, his friend died in a fire and he had to adopt one of them white kids that wears a backwards cap. The kid has a high pitched voice and I’m pretty sure that at least a couple times he was dubbed by an adult woman like on the old Godzilla pictures. He wears regular length shorts though. Also I’m gonna go ahead and give away that at the end he helps save the day flying on some kind of paraglider contraption that he got for Christmas.

Yes, like DIE HARD, this one takes place at Christmas. I’m gonna let it slide though because it was written by Steven E. De Souza, who had a hand in the first two DIE HARDs, and because it’s based on a German TV movie that took place at Christmas. Maybe that’s why they refer to Father Christmas at some point. If you were wondering where Eddie Griffin movies come from, apparently they are remakes of German TV movies.

Unlike the John McClane model, Eddie Griffin doesn’t work entirely alone in this one. Halfway through he teams up with a bumbling ex-hacker (they actually call him a “cyberthief”) played by Breckin Meyer. On the outside they got Vivica A. Fox with the FBI, sitting in one of those command rooms looking up stuff on computers and explaining stuff.

Vinnie Jones is a generic ruthless bad guy, not really getting to show his sense of humor. His main henchman is the great Tommy “Tiny” Lister (you know, Deebo) but he’s mainly just in a couple scenes. And I don’t understand why he yells “Trick or treat!” when he fires a grenade. It’s Christmas, man, you’re gettin your holiday traditions mixed up. You gotta say like “God rest you merry gentlemen, motherfucker!” Something like that.

Also, they didn’t do this in the original Die Hards but post-Matrix, they always gotta have a hot chick that wears black and does karate and flips and shit. Think of the chick with the blue makeup in HALF PAST DEAD for example. It’s very important to have a girl terrorist in this one because her job is to have all the fight scenes with Breckin Meyer. At one point she’s fighting this guy and she’s doing handsprings and cartwheels and shit. And I thought lady, you’re fighting Breckin Meyer. You don’t gotta dazzle him with acrobatics to get him off balance. This guy couldn’t even get Garfield to stop picking on him. That fuckin cat treats him like garbage, insults him to his face all day long, he comes home from work and makes the cat lasagna. People with regular, friendly cats don’t even do that kind of shit. This guy is a pushover. But somehow he beats her so I guess maybe she was right to be doing flips. Sorry lady, you know what you’re doing I’ll cut out the backseat driving.

It’s really great that they were able to get De Souza to write this one, because that way it’s not just another DIE HARD ripoff. Instead, it’s just another DIE HARD retread. By now De Souza could probaly be handcuffed in the trunk of a car and could use his mouth and jumper cables to scratch this one into the paint. In proper screenplay format, too. Without spelling errors. He knows what he’s doing and he puts all the standard detail and twists for this type of plot, and he and director Anthony Hickox make it seem a little closer to a theatrical movie than most DTV stuff these days. It’s definitely alot better than Seagal’s latest SUBMERGED, which also had Vinnie Jones and was directed by Hickox. I don’t know if it was the Breckin Meyer factor or what but this one is more competent.

One complaint, I could use more crazy shit. De Souza knows how to dish it out, we know this because he wrote KNOCK OFF, the movie that capped off Jean-Claude Van Damme’s brief surrealist period. If you haven’t seen that one, it involves terrorists putting bombs in the rivets of jeans. And Van Damme pulls Rob Schneider around in a rickshaw while Schneider whips his ass with an eel. Kind of hard to explain. This is more like a regular human being movie, but it has a couple good touches like the paraglider I mentioned. Also, you know that type of scene where terrorists take over and suddenly the janitorial staff or whoever turns out to be in on it, and they pull out hidden weapons? In this one, most of the guns are hidden inside Christmas presents, but there’s one turncoat that’s a cook, and he pulls a gun out of a pot of spaghetti. And it’s got spaghetti hanging all over it while he shoots. I wonder how long he was stirring that damn spaghetti waiting to pull the gun out?

My favorite unexplained touch: escape pods. I swear to Christ, there is a scene where the bad guys say “Get out the escape pods,” and they open up these big crates and they got two rockets in there. Nothing ever comes of this and I actually had to rewind it to prove to myself that I was not crazy, they really did have escape pods. And I was right.

One thing that’s weird, the head of the oil company turns out to be in on it, and he text messages Vinnie Jones with updates on everything the feds are doing. Also he tries to run off with a briefcase full of money, or something. But at the end Vivica Fox laughs and decides to let him go, and he gets to make a speech about how he’s shutting down the oil rig because sometimes environmental concerns must trump economic concerns. It’s true to life, because this guy is a total scumbag crook, involved in the murders of innocent people for money, and they let him get away with it. It would make a good ironic ending but the music leads me to believe it is not supposed to be ironic, it is supposed to be a regular happy type ending. I don’t get it.

Anyway, the main appeal to this movie, if any, is Eddie Griffin. I don’t think the little guy should start doing action movies, but he does a good job with the role he’s been handed. He has a couple wisecracks that actually made me laugh, but mostly he wears a nice black turtleneck and grimaces like he’s Wesley Snipes. He even has a scene where he has to cry over the little white kid. And of course, he gets to do slow motion grenade kicking, swinging on a chain shooting like Chow Yun Fat, and that kind of crap. It’s pretty good.

The “explosive fun and non-stop action!” hits stores THIS TUESDAY. So be prepared. Trick or treat.

that’s all I got today,

Vern

(Originally published at http://www.aintitcool.com/display.cgi?id=20764)

[ratings]

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