Posts Tagged ‘Willem Dafoe’

Streets of Fire

Wednesday, September 22nd, 2010

tn_streetsoffireYou guys ever heard of this one?

Okay, you were right, STREETS OF FIRE is pretty cool. I was a little skeptical because the poster calls it “A Rock & Roll Fable,” which is not really one of my top kinds of fables. I’m more of a free jazz fable type of guy, I like SPACE IS THE PLACE. Also I got some prejudices against the ’80s rock and the retro ’50s style fetishes. Luckily the singer gets kidnapped for most of the movie, so the long onstage performances are only at the beginning and end. It’s not a rock musical or anything. (more…)

9 people like this post.

eXistenZ

Wednesday, June 9th, 2010

tn_existenzYou guys’ll have to forgive me. I’m not a “gamer” or “gamey” or whatever, so I don’t know how much of Dave Cronenberg’s video game exposee eXistenZ is 100% factual and how much is very, very slightly, almost imperceptibly exaggerated for dramatic purposes.

Maybe you can help me out: the “gamepod” controllers are little lumps of flesh, like mutated breasts. They plug a tentacle into a “bioport” on your spine, but if yours is installed wrong (which it turns out can happen if you let Willem Dafoe install yours at the gas station) it can overload your game pod and it will have to be repaired, which is a surgical procedure. The pods are actually genetically modified amphibians. (more…)

5 people like this post.

Daybreakers

Tuesday, May 11th, 2010

tn_daybreakersMan, DAYBREAKERS was not what I expected. I heard some good things (all of it from commenters here) and I had high hopes for a dumb-but-fun B movie. But I’d also seen pictures of Willem Dafoe with a crossbow so I thought maybe it had a pretty cool concept of a world populated by civilized vampires, but that it would then go into a familiar vampire hunting drill that hopefully wouldn’t pale too bad in comparison to BLADE and VAMPIRES.

But it’s not that type of movie at all. The crossbow is strictly for self defense. I was even wrong about who the main character in the movie would be. (more…)

6 people like this post.

The Loveless

Thursday, April 8th, 2010

tn_lovelessThe Oscars this year performed a courageous service: they taught the world who Kathryn Bigelow was. Or at least that she’s a woman, she won the Oscar, she directed THE HURT LOCKER, and that business about her ex-husband, whatsisdick. So now she’s pretty close to a household name, she’s not just that legendary female director of action movies who for a short time had the filmatic chops to match or better her testacled counterparts. Now she’s reborn with a great movie at the top of her IMDB profile and a place in history.

Don’t get me wrong, she still directed POINT BREAK. But there’s more to her than we paid attention to before. So in honor of that I decided it was time to go back and watch the ones I haven’t seen before. (more…)

Antichrist

Thursday, November 19th, 2009

tn_antichrist(warning: spoilers reign)

On one hand I don’t want to just dismiss this movie outright, because it’s at least unique and it has a bunch of weird shit that might tap into somebody’s nightmares and really creep them out. On the other hand it’s about Willem Dafoe talking gently to Charlotte Gainsbourg and asking her how she feels about things and then every once in a while he sees a deer in the woods and gets scared and then toward the end she bashes his balls with a block of wood and jerks him off until he bleeds and attaches a mill-stone to his leg and then he scurries around naked in the woods and hides in a little burrow like a wounded badger and tries to beat a crow to death but it gets away.

In my opinion I don’t know WIFN director Lars Von Trier was going for with this fuckin thing, or if there even was something specific that he was going for, or if he even is aware that there are people that watch these things and try to get something out of them. I don’t know if there’s a way to ask him that without it being awkward, but if it ever comes up please see what you can find out. (more…)

4 people like this post.

xXx: State of the Union

Friday, April 29th, 2005

When Rob Cohen, the director of the original XXX first talked about a sequel, it was still gonna star Vin Diesel. And I read some interview where he said one of the ideas he had took place in Washington DC, and it would have a scene where Vin rode a mountain bike up the capital dome.

Well it’s a low down shame we didn’t get to see that but otherwise XXX2 (which ended up being made with Ice Cube instead of Diesel and Lee Tamahori instead of Cohen) is more fun than the first one in almost every way. I’m not saying it’s a good action movie or even a great bad movie, but as an honest individual who tells it like it is I gotta cop to enjoying the fuckin thing.

It’s almost like they read my mind, or at least my review of the first one. They dumped the whole “action sports” angle completely and even make a joke or two about it. They got less of the standard action (skiing, motorcycles) and more of the over-the-top (flying boats, cars, tanks, trains, etc.). They made it more American – no fuckin dreary, snowy european villas, no boring greasy haired euro-trash villains, no shitty German heavy metal music. This one’s in Washington DC and the villain is Willem Dafoe as the secretary of defense. In my review of the first one I pointed out that the NSA has a “break a few eggs to make an omelette” philosophy while Vin Diesel’s was “never leave a man behind.” This time they shifted it so that the good guys are the people within the government who want peace and getting along and saving innocent lives, the bad guys are the warmongers who don’t mind killing people to get their way. Ice Cube’s character is tied to Sam Jackson’s big cheese Augustus Gibbons with an Above-the-Lawian backstory where Dafoe was their general who was burning down civilian homes, and they were the guys who went in and tried to save the civilians.

One positive I didn’t ask for in my review: there’s way more Sam Jackson in this one. (more…)

3 people like this post.

Spider-Man

Saturday, January 1st, 2005

Spider-man, Spider-man. Sam Raimi, Spider-Man. Bruce Campbell cameos. Spider-man. Spider-man. That is a song I Wrote.

Anyway. This is a picture by Mr. Sam Raimi only it is based on the popular children’s comic strip, “SPIDER-MAN”. If I remember right what that was about was a nerdy kid who gets bit by a magic spider so he puts on a red and blue bodysuit and swings around on webs saving people. This works on account of he now has magic spider powers to climb up buildings, make wisecracks, etc. My internet research indicates that the webs actually did not shoot out of his wrists, as any logical person might assume, in fact they were shot by mechanical laser watches or some stupid shit that Peter Parker invented and this apparently is the building block on which all Marvel Comics are built and should never be altered if Sam Raimi doesn’t want to face a fate similar to that of Salman Rushdie (i.e. years of fear and hiding, followed by a cameo in Bridget Jones’s Diary).

There is a dash between Spider and Man apparently, you gotta be careful with that one on the internet. Again, Salman Rushdie.

Other than changing the web lasers this one appears to be very faithful to the juvenile picture books it is based on and that is where the charm is. It seems to me that most of these funny books are based around outlandish costumes, and at the same time the outlandish costumes cause the biggest dilemmas when adapting to the legitimate artistic medium of Film. I mean do you really want to have a guy wearing that kind of shit or not, that is the big question. In the case of Super-Man they said yes, he’ll wear the exact same thing that he wears in the drawings. And America loved it.

But that was the 1970s or 80s, a simpler time. Then there was Viet-Nam. Well, Viet-Nam had already happened but then there was a series of movies about Viet-Nam. So America was changed forever. I don’t know. (more…)

Once Upon a Time in Mexico

Friday, September 12th, 2003

When last we saw the Mariachi, he had killed his drug dealer brother to avenge his lover’s death and the career-ending injury of his hand. He had found a new love (Carolina) and had indirectly caused the shooting of a little boy he had given guitar lessons to. He decided to give up violence, but only a little bit, so he kept his guitar case full of weapons “just in case.”

When we see him again in ONCE UPON A TIME IN MEXICO he has become even more mythical than before. Instead of having to send Steve Buscemi to bars to make up stories about him, the bartenders themselves tell the stories. His hand has healed so he can play guitar better than ever, in fact he likes to just walk around playing guitar even when people are trying to kill him. Robert Rodriguez knows how to make a hand made guitar look like the most beautiful thing in the world, so it’s good that the Mariachi is hiding out in a town of guitar makers who like him to test their creations.

In DESPERADO, Mr. Rodriguez really fucked around with the conventions of sequels and action storytelling. He put a large gap between DESPERADO and EL MARIACHI where we the viewers had to imagine how this guy went from a regular dude to Antonio fucking Banderas, how Steve Buscemi became like a brother to him, and how he picked up these other badass mariachi friends who will give their lives for him and fire rockets out of their guitar cases.

And remember how Rodriguez made a subplot about one of the villain’s henchmen? You see this babyfaced guy’s initiation into the family, where he proves himself by spinkicking a guy AFTER having his leg broken. You feel a connection to this guy and you know that you’re following him for a reason… but you’re wrong! He just gets an unspectacular death by bullet like any nameless, faceless thug. You never know what to expect. (more…)