Long before Kathryn Bigelow swept the country into a state of frenzied Hurt Lockermania there were other women directors paving their own roads, carving out their own niches, laying their own tracks, mapping out their own nature trails, and other metaphors. One such director was Shirley Clarke.
(That’s not her to the left, that’s a goofy lady that’s in the movie.)
I first heard of Clarke when I saw ORNETTE: MADE IN AMERICA, a very strange experimental documentary about free jazz pioneer Ornette Coleman. It’s a mixture of interviews, re-enactments and performances in strange settings. Ornette talks about his life, his work, goes off on tangents about self-castration, geodesic domes, you know the drill. Or maybe not. I guess Clarke was not your everyday director. And not just compared to Penny Marshall or Nancy Meyers. Compared to everybody. (read the rest of this shit…)
The Oscars this year performed a courageous service: they taught the world who Kathryn Bigelow was. Or at least that she’s a woman, she won the Oscar, she directed THE HURT LOCKER, and that business about her ex-husband, whatsisdick. So now she’s pretty close to a household name, she’s not just that legendary female director of action movies who for a short time had the filmatic chops to match or better her testacled counterparts. Now she’s reborn with a great movie at the top of her IMDB profile and a place in history.
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.
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:
