As much as I like Marko Zaror, I thought DEFENDOR was a much better take on the “regular person becomes super hero” genre than MIRAGEMAN. To be fair, Woody Harrelson is not as good of a martial artist as Zaror, and is not as Chilean either. But he is good in this movie.
You know, it seems kind of stupid to call Woody Harrelson “underappreciated” when he just got nominated for an Oscar last year. But I think he kind of is, and partly because he doesn’t get too many starring roles these days. In this one he did, but the movie hardly played theaters, and some of you probly never heard of it until now. (read the rest of this shit…)
I was thinking the other day: I wonder if super hero movies are the westerns of our time? A genre that’ll dominate for a while and then after a generation or two of being done to death it’s put off into storage, except for special occasions, like the fancy silverware. If so then I think we’re a little early with all these super hero deconstructions, these different versions of “what would really happen if somebody tried to be a super hero?” WATCHMEN and the upcoming KICKASS are the expensive, fantastical versions of that kind of idea and then there’s this slew of low budget indie ones like SPECIAL, DEFENDOR and MIRAGEMAN.
It might be hard for some of you youths to believe, but there was a time when our boy Bruce
My new review collection 
BROOKLYN’S FINEST is a good not great cops and crooks movie from the director of REPLACEMENT KILLERS, Antoine Fuqua. I think it’s better than I’d heard, and I’ll tell you why, but obviously the most significant thing about it is that it has returned one of America’s greatest resources, Wesley Snipes, to his rightful home on the big screen. You guys know I love DTV, but Wesley is too powerful for DTV. He’s not as good in those. I would’ve felt like an asshole if I missed a chance to see him projected again, so I went and saw it. And by the way, I’m the only person in Seattle who did that yesterday. It’s down to one show at one theater and I was the one guy who showed up that day. 
I am – Hercules!!
There are plenty of things wrong with the 2009 DTV crime movie THE BUTCHER. It’s made entirely of cliches. The filmatism is sometimes awkward and crude. It’s longer and more repetitive than necessary. There’s not much of a sense of danger, because the hero keeps getting in shootouts where all he does is hit everybody while they miss him. He keeps leaving his girl in the car, defenseless, and nobody ever notices her. And the things that are bad aren’t funny-bad.
The life cycle of urban slang:
Let’s say you are an adult male, single. You’re unhappy with your advertising job, but you are a home owner, and you also own a whole bunch of instruments and recording equipment for pursuing your true passion of songwriting. You even have a very good connection – a college friend who runs a huge record label and who’s willing to listen to your demos. Only problem is your music is corny and old-fashioned, and he’s looking for terrible and new-fashioned. Also, you’re lonely because you were Afraid Of Commitment so your model-looking girlfriend left you. Then one day you steal an entire basket of muffins for no reason, and your hearing, eyesight and powers of observation are so off-the-charts terrible that you do not notice three large, talking anthropomorphized chipmunks loudly hanging from and climbing into your basket while you’re carrying it. So they hide in your house and eat a bunch of your food and for some reason you keep not hearing them even though they’re talking at normal volume in the same room as you. But you finally notice them so one of them farts in your face, they break a jar over your head and think they killed you so they discuss disposing of your body.
FLAMING STAR is a Don Siegel western about a mixed-race family – a white man, his white son, his Native American wife, and their son together, Pacer. They all get it from both sides but especially Pacer, who has one foot in each world. The whites won’t even speak to him after a Kiowa massacre of a white family, and at the same time he’s being pressured by the new chief to turn his back on the white man and become a Kiowa warrior. Not like the chief gives two shits about him, he just wants him for the propaganda value, to be able to show somebody who turned their back on the white man. But Pacer doesn’t want to do it and thinks they’ll kill him when he says no.
