released April 27, 2001
DRIVEN is a weird footnote in the overlapping filmographies of Sylvester Stallone and Renny Harlin. It’s no CLIFFHANGER, and it’s not trying to be. If anything maybe it wants to be the ROCKY V of Formula 1 race car driving. Or whatever type of race cars they’re driving in this one. They’re not NASCAR I can tell.
Okay, stop the presses, I just looked it up (it turns out I’m on the internet right now). I guess Formula 1 is very secretive like the Masons so Stallone couldn’t get enough info on them and switched the movie to be about “ChampCar” racing. I guess that’s why they didn’t make a big deal of what type of racing it was in the movie, ’cause nobody was gonna get excited about something called “ChampCar.”
(read the rest of this shit…)
Somebody was making fun of me the other day for always saying the full name “Stone Cold Steve Austin,” even though he’s just credited as “Steve Austin” these days. But you know what man, it’s like saying “Sir Laurence Olivier” or “President Barack Obama” or “Screen Actor’s Guild Award Winner Chris ‘Ludacris’ Bridges.” I am a gentleman and I show respect when appropriate. And anyway he’s not the Six Million Dollar Man, and he’s not an amazing undercover biker movie starring Brian Bosworth, he’s obviously a combination of the two. Just calling him “Steve Austin” or “Stone Cold” would be incomplete and inaccurate. You can’t just say “butter” when you mean “peanut butter,” it’s a completely different meaning.
Yes, it’s true, this is a movie about Mickey Rourke and Bill Murray fighting over Megan Fox because she has wings. Mickey plays a jazz trumpeter (the serious type who always wears colorful suits, a fedora and pointy shoes) who gets in trouble because he accidentally slept with the wife of a gangster named Happy (Murray). So he gets beat up and left in the desert.
SOMEWHERE is a quiet, simple little thing, like a haiku or a bowl of strawberries. In a movie I usually like to see things like plot, momentum, music, etc., but this isn’t that kind of party. It’s Sofia Coppola trying out a new minimalistic style kind of like what seems to be her own personality: soft spoken and shy, but showing a subtle wit. Some of you would fucking hate it. I liked it though. 
This year’s 
STAND BY ME is Stephen King’s latest chiller, a spooky tale of kids going on a long walk singing TV show themes. Okay, I guess it’s more of a coming of age drama type deal, and it came out in 1986, and I don’t generally use the term “chiller.” This opening paragraph could use some work actually.
My man Clint’s new directorial work HEREAFTER hit the home video this week, and it’s some creepy timing. The movie opens with vacationing TV reporter Cecile de France (from 
At first I wasn’t even gonna see 127 HOURS, ’cause what’s the point of doing another one if Nolte and Murphy don’t come back? Those movies were all about the chemistry of those two guys. It doesn’t make alot of sense to replace them with a different character. But it was a bold move to not make it a buddy movie, or a cop movie, and base it on a true story about a guy who went hiking and got his arm stuck under a rock. Alot of people will say that’s just a rehash of parts 1 and 2, but I would argue that there are subtle differences. 
The 2011 Oscars are on in a couple hours. I know it’s supposed to be cool for movie fans to say they don’t care about the Oscars because it’s all meaningless and etc., but FREDDY VS. JASON was meaningless too and I still wanted to see who would win. Of course that one was ambiguous, I say Freddy won because of the wink but Jason got to do that cool strut holding the severed head. So I’m calling a best director/best picture split tonight.
THE FIGHTER is another movie about the working class struggle of the underdog boxer, this one based on a true story, developed for years by Darren Aranofsky, finally directed by David O. Russell when Mark Wahlberg realized he’d been in boxing training for 3 or 4 years now and it would be good to start filming at some point. Those are both kinda weird directors for a normal boxing movie, but this is pretty normal, it’s not some radical reinvention of the genre. What makes it fresh though is the focus on the whole family. It’s equally about the fighter, Micky Ward (Wahlberg, BOOGIE NIGHTS) and his half- brother Dickie Eklund (Christian Bale, AMERICAN PSYCHO) and their place in the town of Lowell, Massachusetts.
