Posts Tagged ‘Wachowskis’

Ninja Assassin

Saturday, December 5th, 2009

tn_ninjaassassinI’ve finally seen NINJA ASSASSIN, produced by the Wachowskis, directed by James McTeigue, their second unit director and the director of V FOR VENDETTA. The bad news is it’s not the instant classic or genre reviver I figured it would be when I first heard they were making it, the good news is it’s not the unwatchable trash most of the reviews have told me it was. The Scott Adkins movie NINJA could top it (I just ordered a Thai DVD of it) but that’s okay, I still had a fun time at the movies. Here is the ticket stub:

ninja_ass

Get it? Ass. (more…)

Unlike

Tags: , , , ,
Posted in Martial Arts, Reviews | 124 Comments »

Assassins

Wednesday, June 3rd, 2009

tn_assassinsASSASSINS: the word with two asses

Stallone, Banderas, Julianne Moore, Richard Donner. Not a bad roster, but I never heard anything good about this 1995 studio action picture. I’ve had it on my list for a while anyway because the script is credited to Andy & Larry Wachowski and Brian Helgeland. How do you go too wrong with that? Whoever’s script got ditched they were rewritten by somebody good. Either the MATRIX guys or the PAYBACK guy.

Well, overall the movie’s only okay, decent, watchable. Some nice touches, but fairly forgettable. But I gotta say, the first half hour or so approaches greatness. My favorite scene is actually right at the beginning. Stallone is leading another guy out into the woods at gunpoint, obviously to put him down like Old Yeller. Their faces are glum, like this is an inevitable conclusion they’ve dreaded for a long time. Both are wearing nice suits and ties, Stallone is wearing knee-high rubber boots.

Suddenly they get to a marsh. The guy’s shoe sticks in the mud. He laughs. “You know, when I saw you I wasn’t scared, but I did wonder why you were wearing those. Now I know.” (more…)

Only 1 person likes this post. Kinda sad.
Unlike

Tags: , , , , ,
Posted in Action, Reviews | 45 Comments »

Speed Racer

Wednesday, May 14th, 2008

If the old Speed Racer cartoon had a baby with a Hot Wheels commercial in the back of a candy store and fed it magic mushrooms every day for breakfast, then when it turned 18 that baby would legally become this movie. What I mean is it’s clearly the product of its upbringing: silly cartoon plot, Skittles color palette, cartoon physics, monkey wearing clothes, etc. But it wants to become a man, so it rebels. It confuses little kids and their parents with a complex non-linear structure intercutting a present day race with backstory and a flashback race and overlapping past and present races within one shot. And instead of trying to stop some evil plot to destroy the world like you’re supposed to do in this type of movie, SPEED RACER helps an investigative body stop a corrupt corporation from manipulating the stock market by fixing races. (It does not mention the tax disputes from PHANTOM MENACE.)

The result is a movie that people want to beat up. The Wachowski Brothers until now have only directed 4 movies, 3 of them THE MATRIX and the other one just to prove to the studio they could direct THE MATRIX, so this is almost like their sophomore slump. It’s an absurdly ridiculous and/or ridiculously absurd, kind of alienating and weird Wachowski version of a kiddie movie that already seems destined to lose the studio a ton of money and either force the Wachowskis to try something smaller or safer or to go away and not direct for ten years. Also I kind of liked it.

The story is pretty much the same as the old cartoon from what I remember. A young guy who actually has the first name Speed and last name Racer is a race car driver, his brother Rex was killed in a previous race and also there’s a mysterious masked race car driver named Racer X who appeared shortly after Rex died and helps Speed in a very brotherly way but who knows maybe it’s a coincidence. I don’t remember thinking of the cartoon being in some future world or alternate history but it was some place where everybody was involved in dangerous car race intrigue and what not, and same here. In fact at one point there’s a historical photo of a model-T type car in a race, so this seems to be a country founded on burnt rubber. (more…)

2 people like this post.
Unlike

Tags:
Posted in Family, Reviews | 4 Comments »

The Invasion

Wednesday, August 15th, 2007

INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS. First there was the book. Then the movie by Don Siegel. Then the ’70s version by Philip Kaufman. Then the ’90s one that everybody hated if they heard of it but personally I thought it was okay by Abel Ferrara. Now we got yet another version, this one directed by Oliver Hirschbiegel, a German guy known here for DAS EXPERIMENT and DOWNFALL. But then after he was done they, uh, snatched it from him, and producer Joel Silver had the Wachowskis write some new scenes which were apparently shot by the V FOR VENDETTA dude.

So you kind of know right away that this is not gonna be a masterpiece. Either Hirschbeigel’s movie sucked – in which case they’re not gonna be able to fix it just by adding some Wachowski here and there – or maybe the movie was good and Joel Silver just didn’t get it, in which case, fuck. I guess the best thing you can wish for is an ISLAND OF DR. MOREAU where it’s completely crazy anyway and the turmoil probaly added to the magic. (But even in that case the director was replaced after a few days, not after the movie was already done.)

What we get is not a best or worst case scenario, it’s in between. The movie is not good. But it’s pretty fun. They get some mileage from all the things that make the body snatcher concept so creepy: emotionless people walking around like zombies, mindless hordes that you can’t hide from, not always knowing at a glance who’s on your team, knowing you or your loved ones could be next. This version of the story centers on a psychiatrist played by Nicole Kidman, her best friend/doctor played by Daniel Craig, and her son, played by some kid with a bowl cut. Also the great Jeffrey Wright is in there in a generic role as a scientist friend. Unless he is really that CIA agent he played in CASINO ROYALE and he is trailing Bond who is undercover as a doctor while investigating this invasion. If that is the case they should’ve spelled it out more clearly, I didn’t get it. (more…)

Unlike

Tags: , , , ,
Posted in Horror, Reviews, Science Fiction and Space Shit, Thriller | No Comments »

V for Vendetta

Friday, March 17th, 2006

V FOR VENDETTA is a big exciting futuristic comic book movie, produced and written by the Wachowskis, starring Hugo Weaving and Natalie Portman, playing in Imax in some towns, but not here. It’s a movie nerds are pretty excited for, but the talk is less about is he wearing the right cape, are his powers depicted in exactly the way I personally imagined them, etc., and more about the politics. Because although it features a guy in a cape and mask who fights bad guys in dark alleys, the story is more of a 1984 type deal than a spiderman. Apparently the comic strip book was written in England in the 1980s in response to the Margaret Thatcher administration.

I saw a review in Entertainment Weekly that talked about references to Bush and Bill O’Reilly and Abu Ghraib and what not, but I figure this is more like STAR WARS prequels: it’s about all the assholes throughout history, and the leaders we have now just so happen to be members. It’s like I always say, if your government is strikingly similar to the dystopian sci-fi stories of the past then you got a problem there, in my opinion.

Hugo Weaving is the main character V, a revolutionary in a Guy Fawkes mask who spins knives around and is waging a bombing campaign against the totalitarian british government. He goes on TV and announces that he’ll be blowing up the Parliament in one year and if you agree with him that the government is a bunch of assholes, you should be there to show your support.

Natalie Portman plays Evey, an assistant at a TV station who V rescues from rapist government agents when she’s out after curfew. This puts her in league with “the terrorist” as far as the government’s concerned, so she ends up forced to hang out with him and hear his side of things. (more…)

2 people like this post.
Unlike

Tags: , , , , , ,
Posted in Action, Comic strips/Super heroes, Reviews | No Comments »

Bound

Saturday, January 1st, 2005

Well I saw this picture a long time ago, but now with all of America waiting anxiously for THE MATRIX PART 2: RETURN OF THE MATRIX and THE MATRIX PART 3: BEYOND MATRIXDOME, I thought it would be a good time to go back and take another look at the Wachowski brothers first picture, this stylish neo-noir with a side of lesbians.

It’s funny to think that these guys have now done 3 MATRIX movies in a row, and the only other movie was this one, which they made only to prove to the studio that they could direct THE MATRIX. At the time nobody knew what the fuck the Matrix was so they just thought they were trying to be like the Coen Brothers when they made their first movie BLOOD SIMPLE or the Dahl brothers when they made their first movie RED ROCK WEST but really they were just being the Matrix Brothers doing a demo reel.

This movie really is a throwback, a very retro femme fatale/rip off the husband film noir type deal, with modern camera trickery and language, and the one twist that the Fred Macmurray character is a gal. Gina Gershon (from FACE/OFF) plays Corky, the most unconvincing butch lesbian in the history of Cinema. She’s supposed to be tough because she wears an undershirt covered in grease, and she works on her truck alot. She’s an ex-con (tell me about it) who meets a mafia money launderer’s trophy wife (academy award winner Jennifer Tilly, from BRIDE OF CHUCKY). They want each other pretty bad, next thing you know Corky’s getting fisted and they come up with a plot to rip off Jennifer’s husband for millions of dollars. (more…)

Only 1 person likes this post. Kinda sad.
Unlike

Tags: , , ,
Posted in Crime, Drama, Reviews, Thriller | No Comments »

The Matrix Reloaded

Saturday, January 1st, 2005

This might bother some of you but I just want to say it up front: put me in the camp of people who say the original MATRIX really is “the shit” as the kids say when they mean that it is not shit but actually the opposite of shit, which is I guess in this case THE MATRIX. Because what these boys the Wachowski Brothers did was an extremely well executed twilight zone concept for the post William Gibson days which also happened to be the perfect vehicle to combine over the top Hong Kong martial arts traditions with american actors and computer effects AND an appropriate metaphor for our times.

I love the idea that somebody like Jackie Chan or Michael Jordan who has extraordinary physical skills could actually just be a smart dude who figured out loopholes in the laws of reality. If you can understand the program well enough you can cheat and do things that a person isn’t supposed to be able to do. In the old shaw brothers movies it was just magic or shaolin wisdom but here we put those same spectacular moves in a sci-fi context and we get a whole different spin where even some jackass like Keanu Reeves can fly through the air and be so convincing that most of American can watch him as the iconic badass Neo and not even think of him as Keanu anymore.

It would be hard to exaggerate the influence THE MATRIX has had on movies in the past couple years, unless you said that all movies made after 1999 were word for word re-creations of THE MATRIX. It has been a big influence, not just on the clothes they wear and the wires they swing around on, but even the very concept of how much stuntwork an actor can be expected to do. If Keanu Reeves can do kung fu training for months and do most of his own fighting then what the fuck is Steven Seagal’s excuse? Maybe that’s why he went back to straight to video. Because the Wachowskis convinced their cast to do it and they were crazy enough to be convinced, now Charlies Angels can do it and Kill Bill can do it. Because it’s been proven possible. And people know who Yuen Wo Ping is enough to hire his brother to do Charlie’s Angels. And then of course there’s all the people copying the “bullet time” freeze framing effect which had been done before but was popularized and made easier and more flexible by the technology invented for THE MATRIX. I know that’s just a gimmick but in couple decades that will be known as one of the cliches of this era of film just like wah wah guitars are for ’70s film. It’s like what was the first movie to do a freeze frame or a split screen? It’s trivial but it’s a big effect. (more…)

Unlike

Tags: , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Action, Reviews, Science Fiction and Space Shit | 2 Comments »