Archive for the ‘Action’ Category
Sunday, February 2nd, 2014
The Super Bowl is on Sunday. I noticed because here in Seattle people are losing their shit. Every single person I’ve run into in the last month has been a life long die hard dyed in the wool cradle to the grave never forget Seahawk maniac, judging by their shirts, hats, coats and conversations. At the grocery stores they have “12th Man” cupcakes, cakes, microbrews, wines, they have “Beast Cut” deals on meat, that type of shit. The local news had a story about a guy who “created an internet sensation” by putting a jersey on his cat. There’s more blue and green flying than there were flags after 9-11, and an hour doesn’t go by outside of my apartment without people yelling stupid chants at each other, or at nobody. (In fact I hear some right now.)
Yesterday a homeless drunk with an eyepatch gave me a fist bump because “yeeaaaah, that’s the look. That’s the look of a Seahawk,” then told me about “the best defense in the league” and something something Peyton Manning. Basically, these crazy fuckers are gonna burn my building down if I don’t try to exploit, or I mean support the team in some ridiculous way. But I’m sorry friends, I am an honest individual, I cannot tell a lie, I just can’t fake something like being excited that we finally have a local men’s team doing well at something. It’s not a sport I normally watch and it would be real fuckin covenient to start now, wouldn’t it? So the best I can offer is to review 2001’s MACH 2 starring the greatest Seahawk of all time (movie-acting-wise), Brian Bosworth.
(read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Andrew Stevens, Brian Bosworth, Charles Cyphers, Cliff Robertson, David Hedison, Die Hard on a ____, football, Fred Olen Ray, Michael Dorn, Shannon Whirry, Steve Latshaw
Posted in Action, Reviews | 56 Comments »
Wednesday, January 29th, 2014
ROYAL WARRIORS is a pretty good 1986 Michelle Yeoh vehicle directed by David Chung (cinematographer of ONCE UPON A TIME IN CHINA) with action choreography by Hoi Mang (YES, MADAM!, NO RETREAT NO SURRENDER).
Michelle, called Michelle Khan at the time, plays Michelle Yip, who at the beginning is visiting Japan and enjoying one of those things where Japanese youths dress up rockabilly style and dance in the street. She happens to be in the way watching a guy play barrels as drums when some gangsters come by chasing a fleeing kid. So when she sees what’s happening she goes after them, stickfighting, climbing on statues and kung fu-ing them before she whips out her badge and we learn that she’s a Hong Kong cop. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: David Chung, Hiroyuki Sanada, Hong Kong action, Michael Wong, Michelle Yeoh
Posted in Action, Martial Arts, Reviews | 42 Comments »
Monday, January 27th, 2014
ANGEL III: THE FINAL CHAPTER, the third and last of the four ANGEL movies, finds Molly “Angel” Stewart far from her roots. She is no longer played by Donna Wilkes or Betsy Russell, now she’s played by Mitzi Kapture (Silk Stalkings, Baywatch, The Young & the Restless). She’s not a prostitute or a lawyer or runner anymore, now she’s a photographer helping out the police (we see her go along on a gambling bust to take pictures of people running away) and in her spare time trying to work on a photography book about street kids. Most drastic of all she doesn’t live in Hollywood anymore, she lives in New York. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Emile Beaucard, final chapters, Kin Shriner, Mark Blankfield, Maud Adams, Mitzi Kapture, Richard Roundtree, Tawny Fere, Tom DeSimone
Posted in Action, Crime, Reviews | 25 Comments »
Thursday, January 23rd, 2014
AVENGING ANGEL takes place 4 years after ANGEL. Lieutenant Andrews (now played by Robert F. Lyons) has become Angel (now played by Betsy Russell from DELTA HEAT and SAW III-VII)’s guardian and paid her way to leave the streets of Hollywood for a college somewhere a few hours away, where she’s studying law and excelling at track and field. She goes by Molly again and has a preppie boyfriend named Terry (Richard DeHaven, NIGHT OF THE CREEPS) who doesn’t know about her past as a gun-toting teenage prostitute.
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Tags: Barry Pearl, Betsy Russell, Ossie Davis, revenge, Richard DeHaven, Robert F. Lyons, Robert Vincent O'Neill, Rory Calhoun, Steven M. Porter, Susan Tyrrell
Posted in Action, Crime, Reviews | 12 Comments »
Monday, January 13th, 2014
LETHAL WEAPON 4 is a family affair. In part 1 we just had suicidal widower Riggs becoming friends with ol’ Murtaugh and his family. We still have them, but also their friend Leo (added in part 2) and Riggs’s girlfriend Lorna (added in part 3) who now he’s thinking about marrying and they live together so now he has two trailers next to each other instead of the one. And he still has his dog from part 1 plus the dog guard he stole from the bad guys and rehabilitated in part 3. And Lorna is pregnant and Murtaugh’s daughter Rianne is also pregnant and also Chris Rock is in this one and also a Chinese family called the Hongs. There’s even four new writers on this one. The cast just keeps getting bigger, like how in a long running sitcom like The Cosby Show or Roseanne they have a bunch of new grandkids and spouses and shit added on by the end.
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Tags: Danny Glover, Jet Li, Joe Pesci, Joel Silver, Mel Gibson, Renee Russo, Richard Donner
Posted in Action, Reviews | 163 Comments »
Wednesday, January 8th, 2014
LETHAL WEAPON 3 is the third one in the series in my opinion so it brings with it certain baggage, but also certain strengths. On the negative side, it feels more concerned with satisfying sequel expectations than with actually telling a good story. Even more than the other two it feels more like a list of ideas strung together than a story. Oh, we gotta bring Leo back, he should be bleach blond and act all Hollywood and stuff, that would be funny. And Murtaugh should be trying to sell his house and they try to not mention to prospective buyers that a bunch of deadly battles took place there! Oh yeah, Leo could be the real estate agent. That’s it! And Murtaugh should be retiring soon so he’s all worried he’s gonna get shot, ’cause he realizes how it works in movies! But then it’s Leo that gets shot, he’s okay but he gets all high and mighty about it, saying he got shot in the line of duty. You know how Leo is. Murtaugh should bond with a son this time, not just Rianne. Something about guns in the black community. Oh, and explosions. Bigger than before. One of those “the red wire or the green wire?” scenes could be fun. Who should be Riggs’s new girl? How ’bout a girl cop? You think she’s uptight, ’cause she’s internal affairs, but then she knows how to kickbox!
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Tags: Danny Glover, Jeffrey Boam, Joe Pesci, Mel Gibson, Nick Chinlund, Renee Russo, Richard Donner, Robert Mark Kamen
Posted in Action, Reviews | 45 Comments »
Monday, January 6th, 2014
“I’m really too old for this shit.”
Is it wrong that I almost like LETHAL WEAPON 2 better than part 1? I know it’s kinda formulaic and Shane Black left part way through and everything but to me it’s a really enjoyable follow-up with some great gimmicks.
It states its action-with-a-comedic-edge intent from the opening logo when it plays the Looney Tunes music with the dramatic metal title lettering. Credits forged in steel. Then it opens mid-high-speed car chase with Riggs cackling like a madman, i.e. like Riggs. We get to have our cake and eat our cake also because he hasn’t wanted to commit suicide since the end of part 1, but he’s still a nut. To underline that point we get to see him wearing a straitjacket at the police station. He takes a bet that he can’t escape from one, and is crazy enough to intentionally dislocate his shoulder to pull it off. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Danny Glover, Darlene Love, Dean Norris, Jeffrey Boam, Jenette Goldstein, Joe Pesci, Joss Ackland, Mel Gibson, Patsy Kensit, Richard Donner, Shane Black, South Africa, Traci Wolfe
Posted in Action, Reviews | 60 Comments »
Tuesday, December 31st, 2013
NINJA II: SHADOW OF A TEAR is the kind of action movie I always want more of: a pretty simple story about a badass in a personal conflict, stubbornly entrenched in the distinct values of a warrior subculture, with some absurdity but no joking around, and designed to deliver a whole bunch of great fight scenes done by real martial artists with lots of long takes, the camera always carefully composed and steady, moving in ways that always emphasize action and never obscure it. In other words it’s the long-awaited new Isaac Florentine/Scott Adkins joint. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: DTV, DTV sequels, Isaac Florentine, Kane Kosugi, ninjas, revenge, Scott Adkins, Tim Man, Vithaya Pansringarm, white ninjas
Posted in Action, Reviews | 68 Comments »
Tuesday, December 24th, 2013
First of all, I would like to extend my deepest and most profound apologies for the first time I wrote about LETHAL WEAPON and fixated on Mel Gibson’s Swayze-esque hair and David Sanborn’s Smooth Cop Jazz saxophone. I know my comments hurt alot of people and put alot of negativity into the world, and that is something I simply never wish to do. I would especially like to apologize to Gibson’s hair stylist Paul Abascal, who not only did hair on many Swayze, Stallone and Willis (?) classics, but also went on to direct PAPARAZZI and the reshoots of PAYBACK. I know now it was a different time and place that cannot be held to a newer era’s standards of taste and style. In the years since that review I have changed alot, I have learned, I have grown as a man, as a critic and as a spiritual being. I have looked at pictures of JCVD in HARD TARGET and realized Mel’s mullet coulda been worse. So to get ready for Christmas I decided I was ready to try LETHAL WEAPON again.
It’s hard to separate LETHAL WEAPON from the litter of movies it spawned. In the sequels Murtaugh (Danny Glover, PREDATOR 2) and Riggs (Mel Gibson, MAD god damn MAX) are great buddies and there’s wisecracking and everything and I mix it up in my mind with the cliches of interracial buddy movies. But really the first LETHAL WEAPON is not about race and it’s pre-buddy. It’s about the formation of their buddyship. It’s about this regular working family man cop who, on the day after his 50th birthday, is forced to be partners with a younger crazy guy. Like, not just a loose cannon, a guy that we’ve actually seen wake up in his trailer, put a gun in his mouth and start crying and almost pull the trigger. While watching Bugs Bunny cartoons. He’s been suicidal since the death of his wife in a car accident, even has a special hollow point set aside for the job. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Al Leong, Christmas, Danny Glover, Gary Busey, Joel Silver, Mel Gibson, Richard Donner, Shane Black, Tom Atkins
Posted in Action, Reviews | 134 Comments »
Wednesday, December 18th, 2013
“I think the streets are clean for a while. I’m a dinosau’. Ain’t nobody around like me no more, so…”
Steven Seagal’s new one FORCE OF EXECUTION isn’t really a movie I would recommend to most people, mainly because they would ask what “force of execution” means and I would have no idea what to say. I guess it means the same thing as “reservoir dogs,” but just doesn’t sound as cool or poetic.
However, as a dedicated Seagalogist (in fact, one of the West Coast’s most respected, if I do say so myself) I found plenty of things interesting about this one. In fact, I watched it without reading anything about it and it kept confounding my expectations for a Seagal picture. In the opening scene Seagal’s character Mr. Alexander has a guy tied to a chair and he’s threatening him, saying “You broke the code, Sasha,” and stuff like that. He gives him a knife and tells him to slit his own throat as punishment for being “a rat.” When the guy tries to defend himself Mr. Alexander beats him to death and complains about getting blood on his suit. I mean, Seagal characters are always kinda over the line, but they don’t usually capture a traitor, torture and kill him. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Bren Foster, Danny Trejo, DTV, Keoni Waxman, Richard Beattie, Seagalogy, Steven Seagal, Ving Rhames
Posted in Action, Reviews | 36 Comments »
