Archive for the ‘Action’ Category
Monday, January 22nd, 2007
A couple weeks ago I saw a theater marquee that said APOCALYPTO and ROCKY BALBOA on it. And I thought damn, Mad Max and Rambo are both directing movies now. Tryin to join the ranks of the Badass Laureates like Clint and Takeshi. While my man Seagal is busy revolutionizing the world of DTV self expression, these guys are going in a more societally accepted direction. Of these two action hero directors, Crazy Fuckin’ Mel obviously gets the medal for ambition because he made an epic about a culture rarely portrayed on film, in a language never spoken on film. He’s moving forward. Stallone is moving backwards but that’s okay, he’s taking care of some personal business. He’s putting a cap on the ROCKY series. And doing a fine job of it in my opinion.
It turns out I did the right thing preparing for this movie. I watched the original ROCKY for the first time in more than a decade. I meant to watch the sequels again too but didn’t get around to it. Well it turns out ROCKY BALBOA is a direct sequel to ROCKY. Forget about what happens in the middle, that still happened but this is all about revisiting what happened in part 1. This is what becomes of that young guy we saw 30 years ago, with the mumbling and the bad jokes, the deep hunger for achievement and the funny hat. It’s almost like those 7 UP documentaries, or BEFORE SUNRISE/BEFORE SUNSET, or maybe HALLOWEEN H20. With punching. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: boxing, Burt Young, Sylvester Stallone
Posted in Action, Reviews, Sport | No Comments »
Tuesday, January 9th, 2007
MEL GIBSON’S APOCALYPTO
by Mel Gibson
not anti-semitic
APOCALYPTO opens with a wild pig being chased through the jungle. Eventually the group of hunters on his ass lure him into a trap that impales him on a set of wooden spikes. Victorious, the hunters step through the leaves and reveal themselves to the camera. They’re Mayan so they’re half naked, covered in ritualistic scars and tattoos, piercings through their noses and chins. We’ve seen guys like this in movies before, they’re called “savages.” I just saw a more fantastical version in the “300” trailer before this movie. You see these type of guys, they might as well be bloodthirsty aliens, you just can’t relate. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Mel Gibson
Posted in Action, Reviews | 4 Comments »
Friday, January 5th, 2007
Hey, everyone. ”Moriarty” here.
Only Vern could write this review.
This is why we love him.
All throughout human history, Man and Woman have faced dangers and struggles which they could not hope to overcome. Even in the modern world, we often find ourselves feeling helpless and inadequate in the face of forces beyond our understanding. There are things we simply cannot control, things we must grimly accept as realities of contemporary living. Hurricanes. Tsunamis. Diseases. Wars. Remakes. Sequels. DTV sequels to remakes. Some of them starring Kevin Sorbo from TV’s HERCULES THE LEGENDARY JOURNEYS. In this case we are facing WALKING TALL: THE PAYBACK, which fits into the last 3 or 4 categories.
But I am here to bring a message of hope. I have seen the WALKING TALL remake sequel. And I believe we will survive, probaly. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: DTV, DTV sequels
Posted in Action, AICN, Reviews | 2 Comments »
Thursday, December 14th, 2006
ATTACK FORCE is Steven Seagal’s latest, where he takes on a bunch of sexy people given super powers by an experimental military drug. But until recently it was listed on IMDb as HARVESTER, where he takes on a bunch of aliens. After I savaged the last one, SHADOW MAN, I got a nice email from Seagal’s co-writer Joe Halpin, who I found very humble and down to earth. Having his ear for a minute I didn’t want to be rude and bury him in an avalanche of questions, but I couldn’t resist asking if this HARVESTER movie would really end up being about aliens, or if they would chicken out like they did with the “biological mutants” that ended up not being in SUBMERGED.
His answer: “Who knows.” He explained that they had shot it both ways. It could be about aliens, it could be about European mobsters, the studio and Seagal would have to come to an agreement in post-production. This of course brings up alot more questions (the main one being “Shouldn’t you decide on the premise before shooting the movie?”) but it also gives a huge amount of insight into how Seagal’s DTV movies end up the way they do. I mean, if they don’t even know who he’s fighting until after they’re done, no wonder they end up with these weird overdubbed lines, randomly dropped story threads, etc. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: DTV, Seagalogy
Posted in Action, Horror, Reviews, Science Fiction and Space Shit, Seagal, Thriller | 12 Comments »
Thursday, December 14th, 2006
I meant to see APOCALYPTO this week but I was too god damn sick to haul my ass to the theater. So I figured what the hell, it’s December, I’m Vern – might as well revisit LETHAL WEAPON. Haven’t seen that one since the ’80s. One of my buddies swears by it.
Well, it was interesting to watch this movie again, and I had fun, but I can’t say it has aged too well. I know it’s not fair to compare everything to DIE HARD, but LETHAL WEAPON is no DIE HARD. Bruce knew to keep the hair conservative, it will be timeless, no problem. His hair in that movie is so not dated that today, when the LIVE FREE OR DIE HARD teaser debuted online, everybody was pissed that he didn’t have the old hair do. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Mel Gibson, Shane Black
Posted in Action, Crime, Reviews, Thriller | 19 Comments »
Thursday, December 7th, 2006
SPOILER ALERT !!
Hey, everyone. ”Moriarty” here.
Carnahan fans have been waiting a while now for his follow-up to NARC, and it seems crazy that it’s almost here.
If you’re a fan, you might want to hop over to CHUD, where Devin Faraci has been fielding questions that Carnahan’s been answering on his very own blog.
In the meantime, let’s see what our own Vern has to say about this film that I’m eagerly looking forward to:
You know what this movie is, it’s a remake of BOBBY. Almost the whole movie takes place in and around this hotel. And you got your huge all-star cast of characters with their various intersecting stories going on. But instead of them all living their lives and making corny speeches not knowing Bobby Kennedy is about to be assassinated, they are all trying to sneak into the hotel to kill Jeremy Piven. And instead of tons of stock footage of Kennedy speeches there is all kinds of fighting and guns. So it’s a reflection of our times. Or a very loose remake. A reimagining. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Andy Garcia, Ben Affleck, Jeremy Piven, Joe Carnahan, Peter Berg, Ray Liotta, Ryan Reynolds, Wayne Newton
Posted in Action, AICN, Comedy/Laffs, Crime, Reviews | 3 Comments »
Monday, November 27th, 2006
No, this is not the one where Adam Sandler has a magic remote control that he uses to conquer the world, that’s CLICK. This is CRANK, this is the one where Jason Statham (the Transporter himself) is a hitman who gets injected by high concept poison. It’s gonna kill him, but he figures out that it won’t finish until his adrenaline rate goes down. So he tries to run around, have sex, do coke and get in shootouts until he is able to get revenge on the poisoner. So it’s SPEED in a guy, with a side order of revenge.
An inventive thrill ride full of imagination and wit that keeps you constantly involved as it builds to an unbelievable climax… would be a good way to do this movie. Instead they went the DOMINO route of “if you throw every stupid show-offy technique you ever saw in a commercial at the screen, technically it counts as entertainment.” I think I know what they were thinking: he has to keep his adrenaline up, so the movie has to keep its adrenaline up too. But it’s flawed logic. THE JERK is about a moron, but the movie doesn’t have to be moronic. I don’t think SPEED had cameras flying around constantly to convince you that it’s about speed. If you show a guy in hospital gown zooming around on a motorcycle pursued by police, that is by definition somewhat exciting. But when you throw in unnecessary zooms and split screen and do a jokey flashback on one side and then freeze on a guy’s goofy expression and then switch it to black and white and then zoom into Statham’s chest to show an x-ray of his heart beating (a nod to the Furious Movement) AND you gotta throw in “exciting” guitar music made by a guy who used to be in Tangerine Dream who is now trying to rock out, it seems like you’re overcompensating. It isn’t exciting anymore, it’s just annoying. To me it’s another movie that has no build or rhythm at all, just the same frantic shit for 87 minutes straight. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Amy Smart, Jason Statham, Neveldine/Taylor
Posted in Action, Comedy/Laffs, Crime, Reviews | 4 Comments »
Monday, November 27th, 2006
This is a movie that’s not on video as far as I know. In order to see it you either gotta travel through time, or you gotta deal with those seemy individuals who sail the seven seas putting the stuntmen out of work. Or at least the non-copyright holding movie transferers at 5minutestolive.com.
MR. NO LEGS is a badly acted low budget movie about two cops (one with mustache) investigating the death of one cop (the one with the mustache)’s sister. They don’t know what we the audience know, that she was accidentally killed by her no-good-drug-dealing boyfriend who they will not be able to bring to justice because his sloppiness earned his face an intimate date with a shotgun shell, chaperoned by the gang’s toughest enforcer, Lou.
That does not sound exciting, but what if I were to tell you that Lou HAS NO LEGS? And in fact, I had to check IMDb to find out his name was Lou because he is mostly referred to as “No Legs”? What would you do then, smart guy? You would watch the movie is what you would do. (read the rest of this shit…)
Posted in Action, Reviews | 1 Comment »
Friday, November 17th, 2006
Ahoy, squirts! Quint here to quickly introduce Vern’s review of CASINO ROYALE… and his admission of the huge mancrush he has for Daniel Craig. I saw the movie last night myself and you can add my name onto the “loved it” lists… Eva Green is the pretty and Daniel Craig could kill Cancer. Good stuff… but you didn’t click on this headline to hear me talk. Here’s the main man, Vern!
Fellas –
I liked CASINO ROYALE too. (review ends here if you’re one of those dicks who always complains that my reviews are too long) (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: 007, Daniel Craig, Martin Campbell
Posted in Action, AICN, Reviews, Thriller | 58 Comments »
Tuesday, October 24th, 2006
I really don’t have a problem with America’s team captain, Paul Walker. Alot of people seem to hate this guy, but I think he’s pretty good at playing these straight laced hunky characters in movies like THE FAST AND THE FURIOUS and EIGHT BELOW. But I gotta admit, when I saw the trailer for RUNNING SCARED I thought it looked like the worst shit ever. Paul Walker doing an accent, playing a mob guy? I wasn’t buying it. It didn’t help that the trailer ended with mobsters trying to hit a glowing hockey puck into Walker’s mouth. Like it’s not enough to hit the guy in the face, they gotta make it visually appealing and EXTREME.
But there are two things that the trailer didn’t get across. One, that Paul Walker actually does a pretty good job playing this type of character. I was hoping that Clint’s FLAGS OF OUR FATHERS would be the movie that shows Walker is a little better than people thought, but his part in that one turned out to be minimal. Instead it was this one that makes you think huh, maybe he could play other types of characters. Hard to say. The second thing the trailer didn’t get across about RUNNING SCARED is that it’s a crazed, ridiculous movie where the day-glo hockey rink fits right in. And I guess the third thing is that Billy Crystal and Gregory Hines are not in this one, it’s Paul Walker. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Cameron Bright, Johnny Messner, Paul Walker, Vera Farmiga, Wayne Kramer
Posted in Action, Crime, Drama, Reviews, Thriller | 8 Comments »
