Archive for the ‘Reviews’ Category
Sunday, February 16th, 2014
Many remakes, even good ones, remove or weaken the meaning or subtext of the originals. The classic example is Zack Snyder’s DAWN OF THE DEAD (by this same production company, Strike Entertainment), which is a fun action movie version of Romero’s masterpiece, but doesn’t have much time for the questions about our voluntary enslavement to consumerism and materialism. How do we keep our humanity in the face of this apocalypse? Did we have it in the first place? Who gives a shit. Zombies!
Another one is LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT. A surprisingly good remake, in many ways more artful than the original, but with its last act tweaks and audience-pleasing ending it completely ditches the thing that makes Wes Craven’s version worth stomaching: its angry illustration of the dehumanizing effect that revenge has on those who commit it. According to the last scene of the remake fuck all that, sadistic revenge is funny and cool.
ROBOCOP 2014’s goals and tone are very different from Mr. Verhoeven’s 1987 classic, but it’s the rare remake that’s arguably even more directly political than the movie it’s based on. Most would say, and I agree, that Verhoeven’s (or really Neumeier and Miner’s) message about privatization and corporate greed is more powerful because of its hilarious bluntness. It was the sarcastic cop movie that Lee Iacoca and Ronald Reagan’s America was asking for, a movie where amoral corporate assholes run the police force for profit, turn a dead body into a cyborg cop, then unleash him to do high caliber battle with savage DEATH WISH style supercreeps and get mixed up in a feud within the company, reconnect with his old self and turn on them. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Abbie Cornish, Ed Neumeier, Gary Oldman, good remakes, Jackie Earle Haley, Jennifer Ehle, Joel Kinnaman, Jose Padilha, Joshua Zetumer, Michael K. Williams, Michael Keaton, Michael Miner, remakes, robots, Samuel L. Jackson
Posted in Action, Reviews, Science Fiction and Space Shit | 91 Comments »
Thursday, February 13th, 2014
In 2001, three years after the previous ROBOCOP tv show (the cartoon ROBOCOP: ALPHA COMMANDO) and 14 years after the original movie, the Canadian company that made the LA FEMME NIKITA tv series and MUTANT X owned the tv rights to ROBOCOP and wanted to squirt something out before they expired. Instead of a traditional tv series they decided on a mini-series of four feature length, but not feature quality movies. Or prime directives, if you will.
I watched the first one, DARK JUSTICE, which has RoboCop (Page Fletcher, who I guess played the title character in the early ’90s tv series The Hitchhiker) returning to action on his tenth birthday.
(read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Maurice Dean Wint, mini-series, Page Fletcher, RoboCop History Week
Posted in Reviews, Science Fiction and Space Shit | 48 Comments »
Wednesday, February 12th, 2014
“I’m not a weapons system. I’m a man.”
In 1998, 11 years after the first ROBOCOP movie, five years after the last ROBOCOP movie, ten years after the first ROBOCOP cartoon and four years after the first live action TV series came the second ROBOCOP cartoon, ROBOCOP: ALPHA COMMANDO. This was cartoon RoboCop reimagined for a very different age of TV animation. After the success of prime time cartoons like The Simpsons and the influence of Batman: The Animated Series, most cartoons were still aimed at children, but the standards for storytelling were a little higher, and many seemed like they were no longer made with utter contempt for the little shitbags they expected to be babysat by the fuckin thing.
(read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: RoboCop History Week
Posted in Cartoons and Shit, Reviews, Science Fiction and Space Shit | 17 Comments »
Tuesday, February 11th, 2014
“The Future of Law Enforcement” is the two-part pilot to the 1994 ROBOCOP live action tv series, sometimes known as ROBOCOP: THE SERIES or ROBOCOP: THE BEGINNING. Orion Pictures licensed the TV rights to a Canadian company called Skyvision (no relation to Skynet) who made one season that started airing about 4 months after ROBOCOP 3 took flight. (get it, because he can fly in part 3.) Despite that proximity it seems to ignore the events of the sequels, for example Murphy’s family doesn’t know he’s RoboCop. Sorry, ROBOCOP 3 – you just left theaters like five minutes ago, and we’ve already disavowed your sorry ass. On Canadian television, even. You blew it, ROBOCOP 3. Admit it.
The script is credited to original ROBOCOP writers Edward Neumeier and Michael Miner, and it definitely has some of their sense of humor in it. I keep reading that it’s adapted from their rejected part 2 script CORPORATE WARS. But as a movie sequel you figure they’d try to make it somehow bigger than the modestly budgeted part 1. And now they have to scale it down for a Canadian syndicated television budget. It definitely would’ve had to have a whole hell of a lot more plot, excitement and things happening to seem like a theatrical movie. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Andrea Roth, Cliff De Young, Ed Neumeier, Lisa Madigan, Michael Miner, Richard Eden, robots
Posted in Reviews, Science Fiction and Space Shit | 38 Comments »
Monday, February 10th, 2014
Look man, I don’t want to take away from Black History Month, which is still ongoing, but circumstances have led to me deciding to declare RoboCop History Week. As a new remake of ROBOCOP approaches it is imperative that we remember all the previous RoboCops who have made their impact on RoboCop history throughout the years.
Of course the most important RoboCop is 1987’s ROBOCOP by Mr. Paul Verhoeven. This is an all time classic. Significantly less important is ROBOCOP 2, a pretty bad movie but with some cool parts and ideas in it. In my opinion its greatest contribution is in demonstrating that maybe Irvin Kerchner is not 100% responsible for THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK being a great sci-fi part 2. It is possible that he couldn’t have done it without the strong hand of a certain writer/producer/creator who perhaps people don’t want to give any credit to because of how he spurned them many years later when they were old and goateed.
On the other hand, ROBOCOP 3 is a piece of shit but it came from a director whose other works are pretty much flawless for what they are. So who knows. These things happen. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: RoboCop History Week, robots
Posted in Cartoons and Shit, Reviews | 55 Comments »
Sunday, February 9th, 2014
It would be cool if Ron Van Clief was to Lee Van Clief as Bruce Li was to Bruce Lee, but actually he’s just another martial artist who capitalized on the success of ENTER THE DRAGON by starring in a bunch of low budget non-period-piece kung fu movies. The unique thing is that Van Clief wasn’t a Bruce Lee clone, he was more following in the footsteps of Jim Kelly.
(Now where’s the guy who got a bunch of movies ’cause he looked like John Saxon?)
Like Bruce Lee’s greatest victim, Chuck Norris, Van Clief had made his name in competitive martial arts and ran many schools before finding his way into movies. The year after ENTER THE DRAGON he starred in his first movie, and it was called BLACK DRAGON. It’s a nice idea because even if we still had the original Dragon we still might enjoy experiencing a Black Dragon. So he doesn’t so much have to pass as a worthy replacement. It’s a different thing. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Bruceploitation, Charles Bonet, Ron Van Clief, UFC
Posted in Action, Martial Arts, Reviews | 5 Comments »
Friday, February 7th, 2014
In North America, February is Black History Month. I mean, it’s debatable how real of a thing it is. Every year we note that black history oughta be taught in other months also, and of course you got the “why is it the shortest month?” jokes. The U.K. musta foreseen that, ’cause they have theirs in October. But really 28 days of Black History Month is 21 more than the original “Negro History Week,” which was celebrated in February because of the birthdays of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln. It was intended to encourage teaching about African-American history in schools, which I guess did not go over great when it started in 1926. But 50 years later an expanded month long version was officially recognized by the government. So suck on that, 1926.
I don’t know what goes on in the schools today, but in the world of grownups it seems like the month isn’t that meaningful to most people. It seems more common to see it used for flimsy, borderline offensive corporate promotions than for any kind of legitimate attempt to fulfill the goal of bringing awareness to aspects of American and world culture that don’t tend to get enough recognition. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Herb Jeffries, race films, singing cowboys, Spencer Williams
Posted in Reviews, Western | 32 Comments »
Tuesday, February 4th, 2014
RUSH is a Ron Howard movie about race car drivers, but it’s better than that sounds. It follows the expected template and visual techniques except that it has two protagonists, two narrators, and really made me bounce back and forth about which one I was rooting for.
The guy most prominently featured on the poster is James Hunt, played by Thor. He’s the long-haired blond rock star of Formula One racing, a charming, dry-witted Brit, a fun guy, great racer and legendary lover of women. If he wasn’t so charismatic he’d be easy to hate because he has it all except the championship, and that he’s confident he’ll get too.
The other guy is Niki Lauda, played by Daniel Brühl, the NATION’S PRIDE Nazi sniper from INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS. He’s kind of Hunt’s opposite. He’s terrible at making friends, and doesn’t see that as a bad thing. He’s blunt and insulting, finds a way to push his way onto a team and doesn’t mind that his own teammates will resent him for it. When those teammates go out of their way to be helpful and welcoming he doesn’t reciprocate. Also he agrees with Hunt saying he looks like a rat.
But he’s brilliant. He’s not just a good driver, he tells the team how to reconfigure the car to make it faster. He explains later that he was blessed with an ass that can detect any problems in a car that he sits in. When he gets on the Ferrari test track he tells them their cars are shit. He’s like the P.L. Travers of racing. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Chris Hemsworth, Daniel Bruhl, Peter Morgan, Ron Howard
Posted in Drama, Reviews | 36 Comments »
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 »
Thursday, January 30th, 2014
In ANGEL 4: UNDERCOVER, the chapter after the final chapter, Angel rises from the streets to invade the corporate world. “Executive by day, hooker by night. From the boardroom to the bedroom.” Cool idea, right? Seems like a very ’80s idea, but it was still the early ’90s, it wasn’t too late to explore those still relevant themes of corruption and cruelty hidden behind mirrored skyscrapers and fancy clothes.
I should specify, that’s what the box of ANGEL 4 is about. The movie itself is a standalone story where she’s not an executive and there’s no boardroom (or bedroom, really) and she doesn’t look like the same lady on the cover and doesn’t become a hooker again. But you know, you gotta let the marketing people express themselves too. They had a story they felt like they were born to tell, and they just had to let it out.
(read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Darlene Vogel, Kerrie Clark, Mark DeCarlo, Patrick Kilpatrick, Roddy McDowall, Sam Phillips, Shane Fraser
Posted in Crime, Reviews | 55 Comments »
