But that’s stupid. This one’s about “the good war” and still makes it look like something to avoid at all costs. The famous Omaha Beach invasion sequence near the beginning is a total bloodbath, soldiers pouring off the boats into waves of machine gun bullets. They might as well just be jumping from a diving board directly into a giant fan, it seems like.

Just like everybody always said, this is an extremely well made movie. But I also shoulda known it was important for me to watch as one of the key originators of our current low point in action filmatism. Much like JAWS accidentally unleashed decades of expensive summer movies this great sequence convinced a thousand lesser directors that if the camera isn’t steady the action is automatically more thrilling. Spielberg and director of photography Janusz Kaminski (COOL AS ICE [seriously, look it up]) shot the battle like a combat photographer, putting our point of view on shaky ground right in the thick of it. Bullets and shrapnel whiz by our ears, things explode all around us, at least once blood gets on the lens, acknowledging that we are watching this through a camera.

But of course this is Steven Spielberg, he’s a professional. He has pride. He’s not gonna just whip the thing around at random and pretend he was filming something good. Even while intentionally creating chaos he’s secretly being careful, maintaining the audience’s sense of geography. We feel like we need to stay on our toes to know what’s going on, but we do know what’s going on. The soldiers repeatedly use and discuss the meaning of the word “fubar,” so it’s only right that the style be called fubar style. But when Spielberg uses it it’s not beyond all recognition. It’s only when other people use it.

It’s also telling that even after the huge popularity of this scene Spielberg didn’t keep using the handheld style. For example WAR HORSE has big battle scenes (SPOILER) and they use the more traditionally Spielbergian smooth crane shots. He obviously considered it to be the right way to shoot this particular movie, not every action scene made for now on. I think there was a bit of a misunderstanding there, I hope it gets cleared up.

As great as the scene is I have to think I missed out on some of its power by seeing it all these years later after many imitators and hearing all about it. At the time it was considered so shocking they sent out warnings to the theaters, and there were reports of veterans not being able to handle it because they’d never seen their experience depicted as accurately (or as horrifyingly?) on screen. There are guts spilling and way too many people dying and shit, but I guess I’m desensitized.

What I really like about this sequence is the look on the face of Tom Hanks as everything goes south. It could’ve been some grizzled Tom Berenger type, and it would’ve made alot of sense, but putting Hanks in the role changes it. He’s not a traditional movie warrior, he has vulnerability. It makes sense when he says he’s a school teacher back at home. He’s a professional, he’s good at his job, he stays quiet until something needs to be said, and they all respect him for it. But also when he gets on that beach and sees human bodies exploding all around him – his men, that he led there – he looks horrified. He’s Tom Hanks, not Rambo.

Man, this cast is a real who-was-about-to-be-who of late ’90s Hollywood. I knew Vin Diesel was gonna be in there in his first not-directed-by-himself role – didn’t know what a big part it was, though. Matt Damon fresh off of GOOD WILL HUNTING. Paul Giamatti the year after he blew up in PRIVATE PARTS (he mainly did movies with “Private” in the title). Giovanni Ribisi before, uh, THE OTHER SISTER. Tom Sizemore before DTV and sex tapes. Did you know the wrong Private Ryan they find first is that guy Nathan Fillion that the internet loves? And I noticed Max Martini from REDBELT. And of course Jeremy Davies from Justified, Barry Pepper from THREE BURIALS OF MELQUIADES ESTRADA, Ed Burns, Adam Goldberg, Dennis Farina, Leland Orser (the guy who freaks out in ALIEN RESURRECTION), Harve Presnell, Bryan Cranston… even Ted Danson? Shit man, everybody’s in this movie. Unless they’re a woman, then they’re pretty much for sure not in it. Sorry ladies.

They put together a good group of characters and put them in an interesting situation. First we see the worst nightmare of combat, a total massacre. Then we find out how back home this poor woman has lost all but one of her sons. We see concern about this old lady somehow make its way through the bureaucracy to the top and become a mission: go find this Private Ryan dude and get him the fuck out of there in one piece for the sake of his poor mother. I mean they signed up for it and everything but we don’t want that on our consciences.

It’s a nice idea: war is hell, save this guy’s ass, this family has sacrificed enough, cut them a small break. But when the idea is actually put into motion it brings up alot of questions. What about these guys on the mission, what if a bunch of them die trying to save one guy? What about their mothers? And of course when they actually find him what do you think he’s gonna do, is he gonna want to go home? No, he’s there to fight. If his brothers have all died for the cause he has all the more reason to stubbornly keep going. So nobody’s exactly happy with this situation. There is some complaining, some arguing, some learning, some intense sniper attacks reminiscent of FULL METAL JACKET.

To me Davies has the most tragic character. He’s the one that hasn’t been burned by war yet. He holds onto his pre-war values. He has a sense of honor. Instead of killing an enemy soldier he lets him go, with the idea that his threat has been neutralized and it’s better to save a human life, and what if the tables were turned, what would he want to happen to himself. But then that’s the guy that ends up shooting Hanks. So this kid’s whole code is crushed. The lesson he learns is the same one that Diesel learned too late: don’t do “the decent thing” (in his case trying to carry a little girl to safety). So at the end this guy’s a total mess, his decency proven unsuitable for the world. He’s the one I want to see in the graveyard at the end, because what the hell happened to that poor guy?

You know, I I used to always confuse Jeremy Davies with Henry Thomas. It would’ve been kinda cool to see Elliott show up in other Spielberg pictures. Maybe Thomas turned it down so they decided to hire a lookalike and he turned out to be good. I don’t know that to be true but maybe I’ll go ahead and submit it to IMDB trivia.

Another missed opportunity for a Spielberg self-homage is when they talk about the same plane li’l Christian Bale was so excited about in EMPIRE OF THE SUN. “They’re Tankbusters, sir. P-51s.” Would it have killed ‘im to say “Cadillac of the Sky”?

I know some people think the wraparound scenes of elderly Private Ryan visiting the cemetery are corny, but it seemed to me like they make the movie’s point. Without those scenes it’s another story of things that happened a long time ago, removed from our lives. With them it connects “the war” to our everyday lives back home, the grey faded film stock to a sunny afternoon. It shows us how everybody that survives a war is a person with a life and a family.

SAVING PRIVATE RYAN is all about the horrible math of war: Miller tells himself that every man that dies under his command is being traded for more lives saved. And they worry that the Germans they don’t kill could go on to kill other Americans. Ryan is left his whole life worrying about whether he lived a life that justified that equation. And that also asks those of us who aren’t veterans to live lives that justify all those sacrifices. Shit, I gotta get going.

Man of the hour Nic Cage plays Frank Pierce, who doesn’t get enough sleep and thinks he sees the ghosts of everyone he’s failed to save. He has a hard time feeling like a hero since most of the calls he gets are DOA or false alarms. He’s always doing CPR on dead babies or begging the hellishly overcrowded hospital to take in a vegetable. He’s so tired of bum-out cardiac arrests (”COME ON, PEOPLE!” he scolds) that he’s happy dealing with the notoriously foul-smelling drunk Mr. O, who calls in every time he’s wasted. The one time Frank does succeed in resuscitating a guy he feels guilty about it and imagines the man telling him to let him die.

The story takes place over just a couple days as Cage gets through shifts partnered with John Goodman (more interested in getting food than taking calls), Ving Rhames (does religious sermons during CPR, calls everybody “young man,” sexually harasses a dispatcher voiced by Queen Latifah) or Tom Sizemore (total nutbag who beats up a patient and chases him around trying to “catch him” for fun. Seems pretty true to life). Frank also runs into some colorful characters like a suicidal lunatic (Mark Anthony of THE SUBSTITUTE) who he convinces to come in by telling him he’ll kill him back at the hospital, and Cliff Curtis (LIVE FREE OR DIE HARD) as a drug dealer who ends up impaled on a fence 16 stories up admiring the beauty of the sparks as the first responders try to saw him off. You know how that is.

Alot of it plays as very, very black comedy. You gotta laugh at the sight of Nic Cage in the passenger seat wearing an oxygen mask and explaining the cocktail of vitamins and adrenalin he’s cooked up to self-medicate with. Or when they flip the ambulance and crawl out laughing and Cage just leaves on foot, saying he quits. Every day he shows up late and tries to convince his boss to fire him for it, but no such luck.

Adding to the feverish feel is a bag of Scorsese tricks – sped up shots, closeups of Cage’s face as he flies down the streets, shots of city lights that make youre eyes glaze over just like his. There are some disturbing hallucinations (everybody on a block turning to look at him with the face of the homeless girl he failed to save; a snow scene shot with everybody moving backwards and then played in reverse). It’s show-offy but feels comprehensible and controlled, like a Jackson Pollock to Tony Scott’s monkey throwing feces.

It's no Vampire's Kiss, but there are definitely a few moments of the mega-acting

What’s more, the subject matter is genuinely upsetting. The pulse checking, the shooting up, the dying babies, the shocking of dead bodies, the fact that you can understand why EMTs would be like this but then it’s terrifying to think that’s who you’re counting on. None of this is exactly baby ducks and cupcakes, in my opinion. This movie will fuck you up. I can’t help but think about it as I look out at my window where the EMT’s are checking on the drunk who always passes out on the same corner of the same parking lot. One of their long time customers – that can’t be a peaceful life. I wonder if we should start tipping those guys? You know, just as a nice gesture. Thanks for knowing CPR, guys, sorry about the night terrors.

When Latifah’s voice isn’t the dispatcher it’s Scorsese’s voice. And there’s something fitting about the director sending his characters on missions from inside the movie. (I wonder what would happen if the dispatcher went to a bar and got a drink from Mr. Woo who was in HARD BOILED?) Hearing Scorsese’s own voice reading jokey dialogue reminds you that this is an unusual Scorsese movie. But he’s not, you know, radioing it in. It’s a couple long nights in hell, and at the end you want to cry and take a nap.

[ratings]

Okay, you got me, this is actually late 2009 when I’m writing this, and that was a made up science fiction scenario that did not end up happening in ‘99. I would remember if it had. Isn’t that weird? In less then two months we’ll be at the 10th anniversary not of this movie, but of the future it takes place in. So it’s ironic that it’s about people stuck on re-living old experiences, and meanwhile we’re watching it comparing it to the actual New Year’s Eve 1999 we experienced.

Funny, I don’t remember it being so dystopian. It was an intense time here in Seattle though, because the WTO craziness had just happened on November 30th. Then on  December 14th a border guard in Port Angeles noticed that a guy seemed real nervous, so she searched his car and found a trunk full of explosives. This made the authorities take intelligence about terrorist attacks at New Year’s celebrations more seriously, and the mayor chose to cancel ours, which was widely considered an overreaction. It did turn out the guy was planning to blow up LAX, not the Space Needle, but after 9-11 the threat seems more serious than it did at the time. He turned out to be a valuable intelligence source about al Qaeda and proof that a terrorist can be interrogated without torture and convicted without military tribunals.

But at the time we were more concerned with the so-called “Y2K Problem.” Remember, everybody was worried the computers were gonna crash at midnight and everything would go to hell? You heard about it so much you couldn’t help at least be slightly nervous. I remember the street lights on the block I was at went off right at midnight. Everybody kind of gasped and then they went back on. I thought I would’ve written about it at the time but all I could find was this column I prepared in advance.

No mention of “the Y2K Problem” in STRANGE DAYS, so either they hadn’t heard about it yet or they saw that one for the paranoid horse shit it was. Either way, well played.

James Cameron produced this one and co-wrote it with Jay Cocks (GANGS OF NEW YORK). The director is Kathryn Bigelow, her next after POINT BREAK. It’s their version of

one of those “cyberpunk” stories they had in the ’90s, with the big city and different low lifes using illegal sci-fi technology and there’s a badass female bodyguard and they end up having to fight the power. The lead is Lenny Nero, a rare case of Ralph Fiennes playing a streetwise American. He buys and sells the brain recordings I explained earlier, so he’s sort of a sleazy drug dealer with a corny rap* and way too proud of his expensive ties and fake Rolexes.

Like a cyberpunk story it’s like a noir story. Lenny is supposed to be an ethical low life (he refuses to deal in “blackjack clips” where people die) but he’s stalker-like in his obsession with Faith (Juliette Lewis), his ex-girlfriend who’s now a rock singer and moll to sleazy record label owner (Michael Wincott). Through a prostitute friend they all find themselves mixed up in a plot involving police corruption, assassination and a serial rapist.

Angela Basset’s first IMDB credit is as a prostitute, but she went on to play Betty Shabazz (twice – in MALCOLM X and PANTHER), Rosa Parks, Tina Turner, plus the mothers of the Jacksons and Notorious B.I.G. as well as authoritative fictional characters like the CIA director on ALIAS. And she was in CRITTERS 4. She’s definitely the best part of the movie playing Mace, Lenny’s driver, bodyguard and unconditional friend. She does a bit of her trademark emotional yelling theatrics for the Oscar clip, but it’s also her chance to beat people to death and drive a burning car off a dock into water and then escape. Especially after WHAT’S LOVE GOT TO DO WITH IT she had a reputation as a strong woman, but this is the only one I’ve seen where she fits the Sarah Connor definition.

Bigelow has directed some great action sequences in her time, and in this one some of them are done as continuous POV shots. It kind of shows that good action chops are in the blood, because she’s able to capture the chaos of one person running through a robbery in a continuous shot without ever making it confusing. Somehow all these shakycam directors today can’t make their scenes half as clear even without the limitations of making it look like it’s shot from one character’s eyes.

But it’s not all fun and thrills. The technological gimmick is also used in really upsetting ways, because there’s a rape scene done from the POV of the rapist. To make it even more harsh Lenny watches it and shows it to other people. Everybody sitting around feeling what it was like for a guy to rape their friend. They’re pretty subtle about how sick it is, which is nice. They don’t rub it in too much.

For some reason this “virtual reality” nonsense fascinated everybody in the ’90s. So they take a pretty neat gimmick and find believable ways for it to be used and abused. It makes sense that if this technology existed it would be on the black market and people would do crazy shit so they could sell the experiences and other people would spend their lives trying to live other people’s. But a sci-fi movie of this type is better when it seems to say something about where we’re going, and I’m not sure this one does. I guess Lenny reliving his old sexual encounters makes sense at the dawn of the home sex tape era. But I don’t think being obsessed with living your old experiences turned out to be a consequence of the technology that was developing in the ’90s. If anything the problem is that people ended up to in the boring present, always moving on to the next little clip on Youtube and telling Facebook and Twitter what TV show they’re watching.

I think this is a pretty good movie though, smarter than average, well directed and acted with some interesting ideas, and makes a pretty good time capsule of what people were thinking about in the ’90s. But it’s not on the level of Bigelow or Cameron’s best, and I think my problem is mainly with the ending. The mystery is solved, we find out what this is all about, and tension comes to a head. The heroes know an explosive secret, they’ve got to make people believe the truth, but there’s corruption everywhere and people are going to kill them for knowing.

Meanwhile, it’s New Year’s Eve and tens of thousands of people are in the street partying in that one way that Prince always encouraged people to party. If the secret gets out this could turn into a race riot – in fact, even without the secret getting out a couple of corrupt cops start beating Mace, a pretty, unarmed black woman, right in the middle of the crowd. The cops also have a shootout where they hit several innocent bystanders. It’s not even a situation where it could get ugly, it’s already ugly, it’s just that it seems pretty definite that it’s about to get way uglier.

So that’s a hell of a corner they’ve painted themselves into. How do they resolve it?

By giving the evidence to the police commissioner. Turns out he’s clean as a whistle, so he arrests the bad guys. The end. For a movie where most everything gets messy, that sure is an unbelievably clean solution to all their problems.

But there’s an aspect to the end that I do really like. For the whole movie Lenny is obsessed with Faith, who keeps telling him she doesn’t love him anymore. But there are signs that she really does and is just playing along with her sleazy boyfriend in order to protect Lenny. It seems like he’ll get her in the end. Instead, he realizes she’s bad news and finally recognizes that his badass black bodyguard is the right one for him! You want it to happen, but you don’t expect it to. She’s smarter, she’s classier, she’s tougher… but she’s black, so you wouldn’t think it would happen. (The only question though is why she can’t do better than Lenny. I’m pretty sure she could.)

Cameron wrote it when the Rodney King riots were still fresh on the mind, so racial tensions play a part. It all centers around the murder of a political rapper called Jeriko 1. Cameron, who had young John Connor wear a Public Enemy t-shirt in T2, obviously had respect for political rappers. But based on what we see this guy is pretty wack. He’s not even really rapping, more of an angry harangue that happens to rhyme, like the non-rapper guy from X-Clan or maybe a failed audition for the Last Poets. He’s not in it much so they could’ve gotten a real rapper to play him, but instead they got Glen Plummer (THE SUBSTITUTE, SHOWGIRLS). And then when he gets pulled over by the cops he’s a total dipshit, yelling stupid things at them before they even do anything. Not that KRS-One is perfect or anything, but he’s sure more charismatic than this asshole. This guy is not likable enough to be the sort of prophet of the people we’re supposed to accept him as.

It got me thinking – that heavy political hip hop was pretty big in the late ’80s, early ’90s, but for it to peak in ‘99 was a bad prediction. In fact, when STRANGE DAYS came out we’d already been through the “G-Funk era” with Snoop and Dre, and were seeing the beginning of Wu-Tang dominance. Some of the classic albums of ‘95 include the solo debuts of ODB, GZA and Raekwon, plus Mobb Deep’s “The Infamous,” all sounding at least as hard and dark as Jeriko 1, but not trying to bring politics to the people. That was kind of a thing of the past, for better or worse.

By the time of the real 1999 there was alot more respectable “positive rap” like “Things Fall Apart” by The Roots and “Black On Both Sides” by Mos Def, but little in the way of militant revolutionary poets. Meanwhile, Dr. Dre returned to prominence with “The Chronic 2001″ and “The Slim Shady LP.” That was the start of Eminem’s fame, before he always complained about it, and he was really smokin with his guest appearances around then. So maybe if he was on a song somebody would’ve listened to Jeriko 1’s album. Otherwise, I don’t buy it.

But ignoring some big details the movie seems weirdly prophetic when you consider Tupac was killed less than a year after it came out. He wasn’t generally thought of as a political figure, but was definitely an icon and hero to many people, and even talked about being a political leader. Michael Wincott is the Suge Knight of the movie – both are powerful, dangerous owners of record labels who were worried by rumors that their artists planned to leave them. In the movie he wasn’t involved, though, and corrupt police killed the rapper spontaneously. In real life, according to the most popular theories, Knight hired corrupt police officers to take part in the murder. We’ll never know what really happened, though, because nobody was plugged into a SQUID device to record it.

All of that is a long way of saying that Cameron, Cocks and Bigelow were doing some exploring of black-white relations during the rise of mainstream hip hop. They weren’t all that right about where things going, but at least they were looking. In the end, though, Lenny and Mace doesn’t feel to me like Bigelow and friends saying “Can’t we all just get along?” It’s more like, of course you’d choose this amazing woman over that skinny, skanky girl. What kind of fool wouldn’t choose Mace?

I’m giving this one to the women. Angela Bassett and Kathryn Bigelow for the win.

[ratings]

I actually saw an ad for it that week and I gotta admit I was a little intrigued. You just saw some dude falling down a fire escape and maybe a car flipping or something, and I thought maybe it was some gritty low budget late ’70s early ’80s style down and dirty revenge thriller. I mean there were no stars in it, it looked like the main character was that sleazeball Tom Sizemore (actually it’s Cole Hauser, some guy who looks kind of like Christian Bale but sounds kind of like Willem Dafoe). The only way they tried to make it sound like a Real Hollywood Movie was to brag that it was produced by Mel Gibson. (the guy from MAD MAX.)

It turns out Mel Gibson is some kind of paranoid freak. I heard something about how he thinks the jews are out to kill jesus, now he thinks the paparazzi are out to put his son in a coma and the only way he can stop them is with a little frontier justice with a wink wink and a nudge nudge from the cops. The cops love Mel Gibson because they agree that they would do anything, ANYTHING to protect their family, and so would he, and also because they enjoyed the LETHAL WEAPONS series of films. This movie presents a very interesting idea for America, home of the moral values: the idea that it would be okay for Mel Gibson to commit a series of murders to avenge a non-fatal car accident.

That’s what I assume this is about anyway because this is an obviously autobiographical work about some dude named Bo Laramie (Cole Hauser, mentioned him earlier I believe) who suddenly becomes a big star in the movie ADRENALINE FORCE and now sleazy photographers take pictures of his son at soccer practice. I mean he’s just a regular guy with a family, just like you or me, only women love him the world over and every day he flosses his god damn teeth with more money than our entire family will see in generations. Other than that though he is a regular guy so we should relate to him.

Well wouldn’t you fuckin know it, the paparazzi not only fuck with him and get him mad enough to punch them out, they also start endangering the life of him and his family. There is a high speed chase that is filmed like a drive-by shooting – two cars full of photographers (wearing headsets!) drive by and shower his car in camera flashes, blinding him, tearing him apart, causing him to crash. (Don’t worry though, this movie is not hardcore. It is not dark. There is not alot at stake. The wife is fine after a day in the hospital and the son is in one of those comas that you come out of at the end of a movie. This is not THE PUNISHER.)

(Why do they even bother using comas in movies, anyway? You know the fuckin kid is not gonna die. If the kid was gonna die in the movie he woulda died in the wreck. We know this. But they act like we don’t know this. They act like putting him in a coma is gonna tear us apart. We’re not stupid, movie. We know the kid is fine, and he’s even still gonna have the same spiky hairdo when he wakes up. That’s how comas work in movies.)

So nobody died, but still, the whole car crash thing was a pain in the ass, so this guy’s gotta get his revenge, he’s gotta get his payback. Which reminds me of the reason why I watched this movie in the first place. See, the director is a guy named Paul Abascal, who according to the IMDB web sight is the director of many fine television programs (America’s Most Wanted, Nash Bridges) and documentaries ( Mel Gibson’s Video Diary 2: Lethal Weapon 3 ).

Now let’s flash back exactly 5 years from this very night. Or at least, from this year. That was the year Mel Gibson starred in the Outlaw Award winning picture PAYBACK. PAYBACK was directed by Brian Helgeland, based on Richard Stark’s first Parker novel. So it was about a bad motherfuckin criminal who gets crossed, comes back, and kills many people to get his money back. Unfortunately after it was done, Mel Gibson started getting cold feet. Now you have to remember, Mel Gibson is a very religious guy, and at that time he was no longer Mad Max. He did not believe in doing good movies anymore, that’s just not what Mel Gibson is about. So he was understandably nervous about releasing a pretty good movie like PAYBACK. He wanted to change the movie to make the Parker character “more heroic.” The story was that Helgeland said “fuck you Mel Gibson, I’m done with this movie” or something along those lines so Mel Gibson wanted to take over as director and reshoot a bunch of it. But he was the producer of the movie, and the director’s guild rules don’t let a producer take over as director. So supposedly he got his hairstylist to “direct” the movie. And then he just called the shots for anything not hair related.

But now is where I’m gonna BLOW YOUR FUCKIN MIND. What if Mel Gibson’s hairstylist really DID direct the movie? What if Mel Gibson’s hairstylist was no ordinary hairstylist, what if he was also the veteran director of such action packed television programs as Viper and The Sentinel and Night Man?

The reason I ask you these questions is because according to IMDB, Paul Abascal IS Mel Gibson’s hairstylist. He did the first 3 LETHAL WEAPONS anyway, which are the ones where MG had the most hair if I remember right. Abascal is NOT the credited hairstylist for PAYBACK, but the two who are credited are women, and therefore could not be the male hairdresser that was supposedly Mel Gibson’s stooge director for the movie.

Shit man, i’m gonna come right out and say it. PAUL ABASCAL DIRECTED THE LAST PART OF PAYBACK WHERE HE GETS HIS TOES CRUSHED BY A HAMMER, ETC. And the scenes with Kris Kristofferson. I can’t prove it, I can’t back it up, but I know it in my heart. And that’s why I watched PAPARAZZI.

Which brings us back to Cole Hauser getting payback on the paparazzi. It happens slowly. He tries a little court prescribed anger management. But the more these sleazoids fuck with him, the more he has to get that revenge. First by half-accident, then by complicated scheming, he starts to kill the fuckers involved in the car accident that did not kill his family.

The complicated scheming coulda been more clever in my opinion. The most fanciest one relies on one detail so ridiculous it could’ve fit into SEED OF CHUCKY. In order to pull off this caper he has to make a 911 call without being traced. So as he’s driving along he looks to the passenger seat, where there is a cell phone with “DISPOSABLE CELL PHONE” written on it in large black letters. In case that is not enough, it is sitting next to the DISPOSABLE CELL PHONE instruction booklet! I didn’t pause it but I bet the small print said “not for revenge purposes.” (I googled “disposable cell phone” to find out if there is such a thing, and apparently there is. They are not made by the Acme Corporation, but by some people whose logo is a cartoon kangaroo and they have the message “Congratulations President Bush: We Support You and Our Troops” at the top. Just the type of class and complex understanding of the world you’d expect from a company that sells a disposable cell phone. [update: my bud Josh R. points out that these companies are well aware that their products are favorites among drug dealers. More of those famous Bush supporter moral values.])

He did do another trick that was kind of cool. To leave his home undetected, he orders a pizza, then hides in the pizza man’s trunk. (Don’t ask me how he opened the trunk.) The cool part is the way they reveal he is inside. The car backs up toward the camera until you see his eyes through the slit of the not-quite-closed trunk.

Okay, well I thought it was kind of cool anyway. You didn’t, but I did.

This story obviously means alot to Mel Gibson. We should probaly check the police files, see if any tabloid photographers went missing during the filming of LETHAL WEAPON 2. Seriously, somebody should look into this. The movie does an okay job of depicting the world of the celebrity. Everywhere this guy goes there are camera flashes that KCHOOOOSSSSSHHHHH like he is being sprayed with lasergun fire. Everybody calls him “Bo,” like they are his buddy. Everyone from the cameramen he punches out to the cop (Dennis Farina, of course) investigating him.

And it’s kind of nice how it’s a world of celebrities where NOBODY is a real celebrity. Just Cole Hauser. At least, they do that for a while. But then they pussy out, they gotta throw a couple celebrity cameos in there to throw you off. Matthew McConaughey appears as himself, just comes on and shakes Bo’s hand. But for some reason Chris Rock, a much bigger star in real life, has to play “Pizza Delivery Guy.” Way to go Mel Gibson’s production company.

I guess Mel Gibson has a cameo too, but I must’ve been taking a piss during that scene or something, I totally missed it. There’s a picture on the box for the screener, it shows Mel Gibson holding a pile of scripts and lowering his glasses on his nose. My guess is he plays an agent. I got a strong feeling about this, I really bet his cameo sticks it to the Hollywood agents. ‘Cause that’s something all of us can relate to. Fuckin agents man, ha ha ha you gotta laugh just thinking about their antics.

In some ways it’s disappointing how competent this movie is. Not good or great but not as ridiculous as I wish. But there are some funny parts though. The biggest mistake in this movie is trying to exaggerate how sleazy the paparazzi are. I mean come on, America hates paparazzi more than they hate terrorists. Still, they gotta sleaze ‘em up, so they cast Tom Sizemore and Daniel Baldwin. Sizemore actually has a line where he says to himself, “Laramie, I will destroy your life and eat your soul, and I can’t wait to do it.” I forget if this is before or after frantically shuffling through the bag of Bo Laramie garbage he paid two mexicans to bring him. Unfortunately Daniel Baldwin (a good sleazeball character in both VAMPIRES and KING OF THE ANTS) doesn’t have much to do other than one speech where he says, “Celebrities getting approval over paparazzi’s photos – that’s bullshit! The public wants raw and real, and that’s what we give them. Let me tell you something my friends: we’re the last of the real hunters.”

After the photographers cause Bo’s traffic accident, they only hesitate for a moment before they all go back and take pictures of the unconscious bodies. That was actually kind of a disturbing scene because as low as it is, I thought it was kind of believable.

But still, I wish it wasn’t such a phoney depiction. It would actually be interesting to see how these guys do their job, how they justify it to themselves, what their parents think of them, etc. I know that’s asking for a different movie, but what I’m suggesting here is that these guys are actually more interesting than the bland Regular Guy Family Man/Action Hero. And they didn’t quite kill his family, and he’s not all that good at getting revenge, but still he murders a bunch of people and gets away with it and the movie seems to be arguing that he did the right thing and justice has been served. Because he is Bo. He is Mel. And if Mel says don’t take a picture, you don’t take a picture. If you do, you will be beat to death with a baseball bat.

I mean look, I said it before, paparazzi are by definition horrible people. But does that mean they deserve to die? This is taking the “red tape” shit a little too far when you justify executing people who invade your privacy.

Anyway, there is a moral to this movie: paparazzi, don’t take pictures of Mel Gibson’s son. Mel Gibson highly determined to strike paparazzi targets. You’ve been warned.

[ratings]