Sonny Boy (Michael Griffin) is a young man who lives in a metal shed, raised by a small town crime lord named Slue (Paul L. Smith, Bluto from POPEYE) and his lady Pearl (David Carradine – I think he’s playing a transvestite but maybe it’s gender-blind casting). Pearl has been protective of Sonny Boy ever since he was a baby. But obviously not protective enough, since they cut his tongue out (as a birthday present, they say), torture him with fire to give him tough skin, and train him to bite the necks of their enemies.
(read the rest of this shit…)
Archive for the ‘Reviews’ Category
Sonny Boy
Tuesday, September 4th, 2012Samsara
Monday, September 3rd, 2012
You know how some of these prestige pictures, especially around Oscar season, you’re waiting for the release date and then you find out it’s “New York and L.A.,” and if you’re anywhere else you gotta wait another couple weeks or a month or something? Well, for its first week SAMSARA was only playing two theaters: the Landmark Sunshine in New York and the Cinerama in Seattle. TAKE THAT LOS ANGELES. YOU CHUMPS HAD TO WAIT A WEEK.
I thought Cinerama got the exclusive because they’re one of the few places that can project 70 mm, which is what this was filmed in (Panavision Super 70 if you want to know the name brand) but then it ended up being released only in digital computer file form anyway, by request of the filmatists. “SCREENED IN 4K” they call it. I would complain except it looked great, so I’m sure they knew what they were doing. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tougher Than Leather
Thursday, August 30th, 2012
TOUGHER THAN LEATHER is a unique specimen – a time capsule movie vehicle for a musical act at their height, but a legit act with street credibility that they did not lose by being in a movie. This is not the Fat Boys or Meth and Red making a comedy. It’s Run DMC in a gritty action movie made independently by the same people they made their records with. Maybe a good comparison would be Isaac Hayes in TRUCK TURNER or Jimmy Cliff in THE HARDER THEY COME, except they weren’t playing themselves.
(read the rest of this shit…)
Starship Troopers: Invasion
Wednesday, August 29th, 2012
Remember how they made two DTV sequels to STARSHIP TROOPERS? Now there’s a new one, but I think the world will be sharply divided over whether we consider this part 4 or not. It does continue the futuristic bug war star trooping of Captain Carmen Ibanez (originally Denise Richards, now Luci Christian), master psychic Carl “It’s afraid!” Jenkins (originally Neil Patrick Harris, now Justin Doran) and Johnny Rico (now promoted to General). But one thing they did different, they gave it to the Japanese animation director Shinji Aramaki (APPLESEED) to computer it up. Now instead of deliberately white bread humans it’s creepy Real Doll type animated characters sort of along the lines of FINAL FANTASY and those types of computer animated pictures.
(read the rest of this shit…)
The Dragon From Russia
Tuesday, August 28th, 2012
Researching my review for CRYING FREEMAN I found out there was this five-years-older adaptation of the same comic. This one’s actually a Hong Kong action movie for real, but it’s not the moody John Woo type that influenced the 1995 version. This is the frenetic wire-fu style that was also big at that time.
(read the rest of this shit…)
Crying Freeman
Monday, August 27th, 2012
CRYING FREEMAN (1995) is a pretty cool movie that I went back to hoping it would be better than I realized before. I did a brief write-up of it in a column years ago, but I’m not gonna link to it right now because most of the column is angry rants about what was going on in the news at the time and it makes me cringe. Based on a Japanese comic book (or “Japomic Book”) by Kazuo Koike, the same writer as Lone Wolf and Cub, CRYING FREEMAN is a moody, serious assassin movie with Yakuza, mind control, a witch, romance and tragedy. It takes place in 4 different countries (U.S., Canada, China, Japan) with the most convincing, of course, being the part that takes place in Vancouver, B.C.
(read the rest of this shit…)
Past Midnight
Thursday, August 23rd, 2012
Do you guys know about this one? How come I never knew about it? Not that PAST MIDNIGHT – a 1991 thriller starring Natasha Richardson, Rutger Hauer and Clancy Brown that went straight to video in ’93 – is very good, but it holds an important enough place in cinematic history that I figure I should’ve heard of it before.
On his commentary track for TRUE ROMANCE, Quentin Tarantino talks about the time before he sold that script and directed RESERVOIR DOGS. He mentions a job at the production company CineTel, where he says he would do punch ups on scripts “which were really page 1 rewrites.” I don’t know if he’s exaggerating that part or not, but I’m sure it’s true that he rewrote a line here or there. So did any of those ever end up getting produced?
Yes, at least one did, and it is PAST MIDNIGHT, Tarantino’s first film credit besides production assistant on Dolph Lundgren’s MAXIMUM POTENTIAL workout video. Associate producer Catalaine Knell thought his contributions to the script were important enough that she shared her credit with him.
(read the rest of this shit…)
The Tall Man
Tuesday, August 21st, 2012
Remember the excitement we had when we came across MARTYRS, written and directed by Pascal Laugier? A genuinely unpredictable, unformulaic horror movie. One that was brutal and unpleasant enough that I was hesitant about recommending it to people, but great enough that it’s become pretty much universally respected as the must-see horror movie of recent years. Probly of the decade. The pinnacle of modern euro-horror, the most respectable extreme-horror.
When there’s somebody who made something that unusual, that pure, obviously Hollywood knows what to do: string ‘im up. Bring him to the U.S., make him speak English, put him on a HELLRAISER remake. Waste his time in idiotic meetings, showing him that he’s not allowed to do whatever he wants. He must compromise. Show him who’s boss.
So he quit HELLRAISER. But he still made an English language movie starring Jessica Biel. I heard a long time ago that it wasn’t that good, I forget if it was at a film festival or somebody saw a test screening or what. But I believed it. It sounded about right. He was making HARD BOILED, we don’t want to see his BROKEN ARROW.
But the reports were wrong! This is more like his FACE/OFF. (read the rest of this shit…)
Breathless (1983)
Tuesday, August 21st, 2012
I gotta confess coming to this one from a place of cinematic ignorance. I’ve seen the original Godard movie, but I don’t remember jack shit about it. I thought it was pretty good, I believe. That’s about all I got. Still, I’m sure less people could tell you anything about the remake than everything about the original. So this makes me smart.
(read the rest of this shit…)
True Romance
Monday, August 20th, 2012
TRUE ROMANCE is an entertaining, uniquely textured crime movie, a celebration of youthful love, kitsch, Asian exploitation cinema, and great character actors. At the time it seemed like a new feel, especially coming from Tony Scott. Now it’s more notable as a record of young, undisciplined Quentin Tarantino manning the word processor. (Roger Avary was hired to restructure the original non-linear story and write an ending where the hero doesn’t die – yeah, that sounds like young QT all right.)
(read the rest of this shit…)
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