This movie is a USA Original Picture on the USA cable network. Now you may be thinking that means its not a real movie, why is vern writing about it, it doesn't matter. Well hear me out bud. I think it does matter. Yes, I think it does matter and I am going to tell you why. Because, my friend, this is a USA Original PIcture. And what that means, in my opinion, is that they are gonna rerun this movie forever. I mean what do you think their gonna play late at night, or early in the afternoon, or at 8:00 am or pm, when they need two hours to fill. Are they gonna play Teen Wolf? Just One of the Guys? X-Man?
No. No no and no. They are gonna play Cabin By the Lake, because it's a USA original picture. And that is two hours where they could have been playing a chuck norris movie or what have you. Maybe even van damme. So this IS important. you want this picture to be good because, let's face it, these are the ones that count.
Well the picture does start out pretty good, with this Judd Nelson playing a screenwriter who's on the phone with his agent, jumping all over his balls saying "where's the script, why isn't it finished, what are you doing." And he says, "What am I doing? Well, I kidnapped a girl, I have her chained up so I can find out about her motivation, I can drown her if you want, ha ha ha." And the nice thing is, he's not joking. This ain't foreshadowing, folks. He already has a secret soundproof room where he keeps his victims and then he chains them up and sinks them to the bottom of the lake and goes down there and plays dress up with them and calls it "tending my garden." What he is in my opinion is some kind of sick fuck. But it's nice that we don't get some long boring setup about how this dude gets pushed to the edge of insanity and finally decides to begin kidnapping girls to improve his characterization. No, just cut straight to the nutball.
There is some black humor. Judd hangs out with his buddies and makes jokes about how his script is real "deep" and that kind of thing. They don't get it though, you had to be there. But then the movie turns real serious. The first twist is that his last girl gets away only about 45 minutes in. And she wants more than anything to catch this guy, and also to face here fear of water and also to have sex with the deputy. So these special effects guys make a dummy of her with a camera in the eyeball and videotape Judd "gardening." But then they don't catch him and then he kidnaps the girl again and then she doesn't know how to escape again and they still have to catch him.
There is alot of scenes where she's locked up and tormented and staring at herself in a mirror. And this cop is trying to track down the killer. It is real serious, kind of reminds me of that show millennium that they show whenever I turn to FX.
But then suddenly in the last half hour, Judd's agent and the director of his movie show up at his house, and they both do "funny" type overacting and the music is all "boop boop, funnyfunnyfunny, laughity laugh laugh funny." I don't really get the joke though in my opinion.
I also didn't really buy the whole story. Like the cops didn't do very good investigating. THey didn't even look at the spot where the escaped girl crashed her car and was abducted, and worse than that, they didn't watch the video they took of Judd returning to the bodies! Cops in my experience are never that dumb, believe me I wish they were. I mean I've never done serial killing and never will, but I would HOPE they have motherfuckers after the killers who are AT LEAST as bad as these fuckers who always bust you for property crimes and etc.
But what can you do man. The good thing about this movie is it does bring to light an important topic i think alot of people didn't know about. I mean personally at least i had no idea this kind of thing was going on behind the scenes in hollywood, it is a real eye opener in my opinion. I sure HOPE the dude who wrote this was investigated in case it is semiautobiographical, as a Writer I know that many works are semiautobiographical in alot of cases.
Anyway I just want to say, speaking for myself only, that i think killing people for inspiration in your work is not right. As a Writer I would even go so far as to say it should be against the Writer's code. Especially the way this dude did it, because it didn't seem like he even really got anything from the killing. I mean, his script sucked anyway and he even said so himself. And I noticed he wrote it in past tense which judging from what I've read is not really proper screenwriting format. Anyway judd if you want inspiration go for one of these pretty young muses or what not, consensual only please, don't kidnap somebody or kill them. You just LOOK at a pretty young gal is what your supposed to do for inspiration, or maybe go take a walk, go bowling, mow the lawn whatever, take your mind off it. The idea will come to you bud, I promise. What your doing, it's just not cool man. I know that Writing is an Art and it is the most important part of my life, but even I know it's not worth it. You have to draw the line somewhere and this is where I'm drawing it, pal. I don't care how dedicated you are, drowning girls is NOT a legitimate writing technique.
Okay i'm gonna get down off my soap box now. Anyway the picture wasn't too bad a way to spend two hours but, to be frankly honest, it wasn't too good a way either.
Nobody was kidnapped in the Writing of this essay
This movie surprised me. Everything about it is classier than I expected. From his reputation you'd think this Candyman guy is just a B-list Jason or Freddy type. But it turns out he's more a classic movie monster like Dracula or the Phantom of the Opera. And his movie has more subtext than all of Freddy and Jason's pictures put together, including JASON X. Hell, throw in a couple Child's Plays too. And one or two Halloweens. And one Silent Night Deadly Night. No Texas Chainsaws though, that would tip the scale.
You know why we have to deal with Jason? Because of some horny counselors not doing their job. Freddy, because of some overzealous parents who took the law into their own hands. Dr. Phibes because some doctors fucked up a heart operation. But we got Candyman because of a bigger reason: America's history of racist oppression. This is the only slasher/ghost movie I know of that deals with the legacy of slavery and racism (only BLACULA comes close).
Candyman (who is never given another name) was the son of a slave who was an inventor of a machine used in the mass production of shoes (the shoe gin, I'd call it). Anyway that's Candyman's dad, but Candyman (who wears really nice shoes, come to think of it) was a talented portrait artist who fell in love with one of his rich white lady subjects, and for that he got lynched. Actually, not just lynched - they cut his hand off and rubbed honeycomb all over his face. Which explains why now, in ghost form, he has a hook jammed into his bloody stump and a beehive in his ribcage. Then they burned him and spread his ashes over what would become Cabrini Green, the notorious Chicago housing projects.
So Candyman haunts Cabrini Green, and race and class issues haunt the whole movie. The main character is some white lady (Virginia Madsen), who's working on a thesis about urban legends when she hears the story of Candyman murdering somebody in Cabrini Green. She decides it will make her thesis more interesting to go find out about this murder. And the whole movie has the tension of the upper class white woman going sticking her nose in other people's business. It makes you uncomfortable to see her bothering (and in some cases endangering) the black cleaning staff at the college, some poor single mother in the projects, and a little kid. And it seems like they're supposed to be impressed that she's working on a thesis. Good job, white lady.
The movie draws a parallel between "the bad part of town" and the haunted house from old movies. Her best friend played by Kasi Lemmons (director of EVE'S BAYOU) says "I won't even drive past there." But together they go to the scary projects (filmed on location), walk past the gangbangers and drug dealers (played by the actual residents) and explore the abandoned, graffitied apartment where a strange murder took place. These ladies figure Candyman is an urban legend like the other ones they've studied, but Candyman begs to differ. The fact that Madsen is casting doubt on his existence forces him to "shed innocent blood." Because if people stop worrying about him existing then by some kind of supernatural technicality that means he won't exist anymore.
The famous thing is like the old "Bloody Mary" urban legend: look into the mirror and say "Candyman" 5 times and he'll appear. This isn't as big of a part of the movie as I expected. But I like how Candyman enters the world through the mirror and Virginia Madsen enters the apartments through the mirror. She discovers that one flaw in the cheap construction of the projects is that you can remove the medicine cabinet and climb into the bathroom of the apartment next to you. Writer/director Bernard Rose says that came from a real murder that happened in some projects. I don't know if it really happened or if it happened to his uncle's friend.
According to my math this movie came before the URBAN LEGEND movies, making it URBAN LEGEND 0: CANDYMAN. It has the various spooky touches based on urban legends, the college professor giving a lecture on urban legends, etc. Everything except the suckiness.
There's alot of things that make this movie stand out, like the score by Philip Glass, the creepy use of live bees, and the real fancy coat Candyman wears. But my favorite thing is that crazy shit happens that you assume has to be a dream, and then it's not. About halfway through the movie the white lady sees Candyman for the first time - he walks up to her in a parking garage, of all places. And then all the sudden she wakes up laying in a puddle of blood in the bathroom of the single mother she bothered in Cabrini Green. The mother is screaming in the other room and on the floor there's a bloody meat cleaver and the severed head of the lady's dog. Virginia picks up the meat cleaver and goes to investigate. She finds out the mother is screaming because there's blood everywhere and her baby is gone. When she sees Virginia obviously she assumes she killed the baby and she jumps on her. You'd think it couldn't get much worse then this but then Virginia fucks up by hitting the poor lady with the meat cleaver.
Even this far into the mayhem I was thinking this would turn out to be a dream or a delusion, but before I knew it she was at the police station covered in blood, crying and begging for a shower while she gets strip searched. Her cheating college professor husband shows up, horrified, and you have to laugh picturing some poor bastard cop having to explain to this prick how his wife ended up in jail.
So it really doesn't follow the standard formula of this type of movie at all, and it gets kind of surreal. There's some pretty brutal and gorey death scenes but it doesn't have the kind of tension of a chase movie like TEXAS CHAIN SAW or HALLOWEEN. In fact Virginia Madsen never runs from him because when she sees him she gets hypnotized (they say they really hypnotized her in these scenes, no shit!) and then he does weird shit like open his mouth and bees fly out (he really put bees in his mouth!). So maybe it's a little slower than a Freddy or a Jason, but it's a good trade.
My one complaint is that you don't really know why people call him Candyman. There's one part where she finds a bunch of Halloween candy with razor blades in his lair, but if he was fucking with trick or treaters they must've cut that subplot out. We never see him carrying a bunch of candy in his pockets or anything. And I doubt he eats alot of candy because he's pretty slim. Unless maybe he eats it but the bees in his rib cage digest it for him. Anyway, a guy with a huge bloody hook hand with a million bees crawling all over him and flying out of his mouth, I don't think anybody's gonna fixate on a subtle detail like he has a pile of candy on the floor. They're gonna call him Hookman or Hiveman or something. Candyman - that's just poor nicknaming. The only logical explanation I can think of is if his real name is Steve Candyman or something like that. But if that's the case they should've mentioned it.
CANDYMAN in: FAREWELL TO THE FLESH and CANDYMAN in: DAY OF THE DEAD
Last week I watched this CANDYMAN movie. The review is above but maybe somebody is too lazy to read it so I'll just say it was surprisingly good and classy for a slasher movie about a guy with bees in his stomach that likes to gut people with a gorey hook hand. Anyway I decided as a completist and foolish optimist I should give these two other Candyman adventures a shot. Maybe lightning strikes three times, you know.
Well truth be told, number 2 is not all that bad. It's just not all that good either. This one is directed by Bill Condon, who went on to do GODS AND MONSTERS and KINSEY and write some musicals. So it's not just a random hack, although nobody knew it at the time because this was 1995, it was before they had time travel. Anyway it treats the material as seriously as the first one does, but it's less dreamy and more literal. The setting is moved to New Orleans which we find out is Candyman's birthplace.
Unless I missed it, they never gave Candyman a name in the first one. But the same professor who told us his story in part 1 reappears here for a (unexpectedly short) book tour promoting a book about Candyman. And he explains that he was a painter named Daniel Robataille. Throughout the movie we see flashbacks showing exactly what happened to him, how he got the name Candyman (not actually a very convincing answer to that one, actually), where the mirror thing came from, and more.
This follows the standard pattern of slasher movie sequels, you always find out more backstory on the killer. In HALLOWEEN 2 we find out Laurie was actually Michael's sister, and in the later ones we find out he is part of some secret druid conspiracy or some stupid bullshit like that. In FRIDAY THE 13TH PART 2 we find out that the son of the killer in part 1 comes back from the dead and then in later installments we found out that he is a retard and kids made fun of him. In TEXAS CHAIN SAW 2 we find out the family is called the Sawyers and they like to enter chili contests. Which is fine, but then in part 4 we find out they are hired to kill by a secret conspiracy of limo riding millionaire thrillseekers, possibly associates of the druids from Halloween. In NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET 2 I don't think we found out much but later on we learned about Freddy's mom being a nun raped by insane asylum inmates and how his dad was Alice Cooper and he beat him and also he had a daughter. In HELLRAISER 3 we see Pinhead when he was human and find out that it was alot like NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET. In BONES 2 we find out that Jimmy Bones was the first black president, not in this dimension but in an alternate dimension where there is a sequel to BONES.
The problem is, alot of these characters are scary in the first place partly because of the mystery surrounding them. Our minds can fill in the details about how they became who they are and why they are killing. Sometimes it's good to have a backstory (like in CANDYMAN) but you don't have to give us the whole fuckin encyclopedia entry. And it was nice that in the first one it was an urban legend. You have to assume it is probaly true based on what we are seeing, but that's up to interpretation, like a poem.
Sequel directors gotta understand that sometimes less is more. Why do they always have to add in so much new information? Instead of a sequel where we find out MORE about the killer, why can't we have one where we find out LESS?
Okay, so that's not possible. But otherwise it would be a good point, in my opinion.
By the way I got a theory about why he comes out of the mirror when you say "Candyman." See, it's the same thing as Blacula. In BLACULA, he is an African prince on a diplomatic meeting to try to convince Count Dracula to stop with this slavery bullshit. But Dracula obviously is a racist asshole so he bites the prince and taunts him by calling him "Blacula." So that's not his real name, his real name is Mamuwalde, and only racist assholes would call him Blacula. Well, Candyman is the same thing, his name is Daniel Robataille (not "Steve Candyman" like I suggested in my review of part 1). So maybe you could call him Dan or Danny, I don't know, you'd have to ask him. But definitely Daniel or Mr. Robataille. You call him one of those things but you DO NOT CALL HIM CANDYMAN.
Why? Because in part 2 you find out the person who nicknamed him "Candyman" was a little white kid who called him that because his fellow white bigots were wiping honey on him while they were lynching him. Also you find out they gave him a mirror to look at himself just as he died and that's how his soul got trapped in a mirror. So obviously, if you're gonna be going around calling him mean names in the mirror he's gonna get pissed off and come hook you. You or I would do the same thing if and when we are put in the same situation.
Also I got a theory that you're not supposed to watch part 2 right after part 1, because if you do you remember that at the end of part 1 Oscar nominee Virginia Madsen joined Candyman in the candyworld to become a part of the legend, etc. Apparently Candyman and Candywoman had some kind of a falling out between part 1 and 2 and now have separate legends, the female version of which is not ever mentioned again except in this review.
The good thing about part 2 is the attempt to continue the serious racial themes in another equally appropriate setting. Alot of America woke up to the racial and class disparity in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, but the Candyman trilogy already knew about it. The lead character Annie is played by Kelly Rowan who is kind of a Virginia Madsen type, but not in the same league. The New Orleans setting connects closer to slavery than the first one, with Annie's family owning the plantation house where Daniel R. was born. And it is her family's denial of their past that drives the murders this time.
There's also a random bit I liked where Annie's husband gets all freaked out because some black dudes are standing next to his car. He stays far away but says "Come on, guys!" and beeps his car alarm. That's a good one, playing off of white people fears, just like the first one played off of fear of housing projects. But the scares are more standard than in part 1, like there really is a spooky old house instead of the modern equivalent. (On the commentary track, Condon humbly admits that this and taking things like the mirror more literally might disappoint some people.)
In part 1 I thought there was alot of tension with the white lady grad student coming in interviewing poor black people for her thesis, and stupidly causing the shit to hit the fan. They try to get a little of that tension in part 2 but the deck is stacked, Annie is more of a heroic white lady because she is a teacher, and a good one. She's not DANGEROUS MINDS level but she shares the same interests. So they lost that quality.
They do have the same type of score, in fact most of it is the same exact score. At first I wondered how they got Philip Glass to do a slasher sequel, then I realized it was because they still had the tapes. (It turns out he did record one new theme just for the sequel.)
I guess the movie is just like the white lady heroine - pretty smart, well intentioned, but kind of bland. We've seen Candyman before but done better, so it's hard to get too involved in this one. If you watch it though I recommend making it to the end because the secret you end up finding out and the way Annie solves the problem really is unusual and a smart continuation of what was going on in part 1.
I can't really say that about the cheesy, straight to video part 3 though. The one major thing missing from part 3 that I really liked in the other two - and in horror movies in general - is redeeming qualities. Now maybe they were trying to mix things up a little, make it really stand out and not just be a rehash, but still, I think they should've had redeeming qualities. To me, personally, redeeming qualities are an important hallmark of the Candyman series and are crucial for this kind of movie to work.
The settings of Candyman movies are always very important. The first one is so much about Chicago and the Cabrini Green housing projects, and the second one is very much a movie about New Orleans, its racial makeup and its history. Part 3 follows in this tradition, bringing the story to L.A. and making everything in it phoney, like L.A. The first shot in the movie is a closeup of a female eye, 'cause that was the movie poster so you gotta do it. Then the second shot is a crotch shot of Playboy Playmate Donna D'Errico laying in bed wearing panties and a tight t-shirt. And then she sits up to show off her giant fake boobs. I guess they figured that was the one thing missing from the Candyman mythology was blond girls with giant tits walking around in their panties. The other two were good about casting strong women who could convincingly play academics and teachers. But in L.A. you gotta have a former Baywatch star married to a member of Motley Crue. It's all about fake boobs, fake blondes, and even fake bees in one scene. Because bad CGI is so much creepier than a real person covered in real bees.
D'Errico plays Caroline, the daughter of Annie that is introduced at the very end of part 2. She is grown up now, has boobs, etc. She's an artist and now owns the paintings of Daniel R. which she manages to get displayed in a small, hip gallery. Unfortunately the owner finds out that Daniel R. is "Candyman" and exploits the whole thing and gets poor Caroline to say his name 5 times in a mirror so that he will come out and haunt her. And sure enough, he comes after her. In an homage to CANDYMAN 2, they completely betray the spirit and originality of the ending of the previous installment.
It's good that Caroline is trying to stand up for the good name of Daniel R., but he doesn't make too good of a case for himself. He's pretty indiscriminate in his killings. So much so that he commits the ultimate horror sequel sin: he makes you sick of seeing him. He repeats his "be my victim" line from part 1 several times and makes so many long speeches that you start noticing how corny he is trying to talk in a low voice like that. It's almost like it's some poser doing a Candyman imitation instead of the real Daniel R.
I can't blame him for phoning it in though when the world around him is not cutting the mustard. The first two tried to find gothic horror in the realities of urban life, this movie doesn't have a single frame that has any connection at all to real life. Every character is a movie type: the openly racist corrupt cop, the aspiring actress best friend, the mystical healer that knows magical shit about Candyman, the girl who used to be on Baywatch, etc. And because it's a straight to video budget it all looks fake. When you have a low budget, it is not possible to go outside with a camera and film real stuff that's there. It is much cheaper to build a big phoney looking set and hire bad actors to ruin everything.
When you're dealing with an angry ghost covered in bees, you don't have to be "believable." But you should try. It helps when the characters seem like people you've met and not people you've only seen on TV shows. The bad guy cop is especially bad, and then he re-uses the part 1 line about tearing somebody "from groin to gullet." Now, I'm not 100% sure what a gullet is, but I do know that this knucklehead would never use that word either. I mean come on.
To be fair, maybe this doesn't feel realistic because it's in the future, and the future will feel fake. Let me explain. Part 2 came out in 1995 and seems to take place in the present day. At the end of the movie Annie is pregnant, then it skips ahead to when she has her daughter Caroline. In part 3 Caroline has grown into D'Errico, who at the time of the movie was 27. So according to my calculations that means part 3 takes place in 2023 or later. Unfortunately there does not seem to be any new futuristic technology that will help in fighting off Candyman, or if there is she is too stupid to use it.
The most ridiculous thing though is at the end when there turns out to be a gang or cult of goth Candyman worshippers. They seem like villains in a Troma movie. I know that there are very few good part 3s in the world of horror, but this evil goth gang business really seems like part 6 or 7 territory. There is absolutely no excuse for these characters.
And I gotta be honest, at this point I'm really starting to wonder what Candyman's deal is. He was so brutalized by these racist assholes, but then he spends his time fucking up the lives of his own descendants. If he was gonna get revenge on all white people, or on kids who bother him by calling his name during sleepovers, or on people who are mean to bees, I would understand that. But he doesn't seem to really care about those issues. I would like to see Candyman either be more socially conscious or more efficient in avenging people that deserve it. A good start for part 4 would be for him to avenge the makers of part 3.
In the type of acting tour de la force that everybody loves unless they're some kind of a dick, Philip Seymour Hoffman plays Truman Capote, the famous writer and weirdo. Although the use of only his last name as the movie's title seems to imply that it will tell the entire story of his life and maybe even the entire story of the life of everybody with the last name Capote, this is actually not a full on biography. The story is narrowed down to the 4 or 5 years when he was working on his famous book IN COLD BLOOD, starring Robert Blake.
The movie starts out with a young girl discovering the dead bodies of a family murdered in a farmhouse. And before you know it Capote and his research assistant Harper Lee (author of the book TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD, starring Gregory Peck) are nosing around asking everybody questions. So at first I thought this was gonna be kind of a LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMEN thing with famous authors going around solving crimes. I bet the Marquis De Sade did these murders. Or Edgar Alan Poe.
Actually no, it's the making of IN COLD BLOOD and the uncomfortable relationships and questions it brings up. At first Capote comes into this town and you think everybody's gonna hate him. Even if he wasn't such an eccentric sissy, he's sticking his nose where it doesn't belong. You can't help but feel a little queasy when he goes to the school and tries to talk to the poor girl that found the dead bodies, like he's her buddy. But before you know it the girl's giving him her diaries, he's eating dinner at the chief of police's house, and everybody in town wants to hear his stories about Humphrey Bogart and Marilyn Monroe. It's uncomfortable because you know Capote is just using these people to get information for his New Yorker article (which later grows into a book).
Then it gets worse when they catch the killers. He weasels his way into getting access to their cells, and immediately becomes enamored with one of them, Perry. The way the movie portrays it he falls in love with this guy. And he starts to help them out. He finds them a better lawyer, ends up getting them all these appeals. He brings them books and has long deep conversations with them. Well, mostly this guy Perry. The other guy seems kind of amused that Truman is so obviously attached to Perry, and later kind of resentful.
The main hook of the movie is that ultimately Truman betrays these guys, because he realizes that unless they die he can't finish the book. And it's hard to decide what's more disturbing, that he gets so close to these killers or that he starts lying to them. But for me the most uncomfortable scene is much earlier on, when Truman brings in his pal Richard Avedon to take photos of the killers. Truman talks about how he's a famous fashion photographer, and they get them to show their tattoos and shit. I mean it's like they're taking a picture of Tupac for the cover of Rolling Stone. And all these small town cops are standing around watching this and you have to wonder how they feel about it. That's how effective the scene is, it actually got me sympathizing with cops.
The amazing thing about Hoffman and about the movie is that somehow they make you not hate this guy. But you have every reason to think he's a scumbag. He comes into this little town, exploits people's misery, upsets the community by getting too close to the killers, then even betrays the killers and lies to them as he bids them farewell. Add to that the fact that Hoffman is mimicking Capote's annoying voice and mannerisms, flaunting his rich boy lifestyle and constantly name dropping all the movie stars and writers he knows... I mean I really ought to hate this fucker. But I don't. I don't exactly love the guy. But I kind of feel sorry for him at the end. That there's some of that movie magic you always hear about.
They also do a good job with the killers. In the movie IN COLD BLOOD they're so scary but here they just sit around in a jail cell feeling sorry for themselves. Being buddies with Capote makes them seem harmless, but even when they're executed they don't let you forget what they did, showing some really brutal flashbacks of the murders. In that sense it reminded me of DEAD MAN WALKING, adding humanity to killers without glossing over their crimes.
I think this is a real smart approach to a biography type movie. In something like FRIDA they have to take so many shortcuts, trying to sum up a couple years in one scene or a long held philosophy in a dinner conversation. Here they stick to one part of Capote's life but they make a convincing argument that this experience sums up what you need to know about his life. You learn how what happened before led to this and what happened after was because of this.
I know it's tempting to make every life into a big epic but more storytellers ought to consider this approach. For example, Skander Halim should consider rewriting his whole script about my life so the climax is me flipping off Dick Cheney on the corner by the Westin. I mean really where do you go after that.
Anyway, that there's some advice for you writers, and you'll like this movie because it's about writing. Seeing him there typing made me want to go home and write a book, to be honest with you. But not the same kind of book. Usually a movie about writers is about writer's block, but this one makes you think maybe he'd be better off sitting in a room staring at the walls with a head in a box and John Goodman is on fire with an ax or whatever happened in that one movie. I learned alot of important lessons about writing and I will think very seriously about the ethics of the relationship next time I have an accused killer helping me out with a movie review if that happens for some reason. That would be weird.
One thing I want to mention, I seen ads for this movie and they talk about how critics love it and how great Philip Seymour Hoffman is, and then they don't have him saying a god damn word. It's like those ads for American releases of Hong Kong movies where there's no dialogue because they don't want you to think about it either being dubbed or subtitled. 'Cause either one is a turnoff for somebody. Here, they don't want you to know that Truman Capote in the movie talks like the real Truman Capote.
Anyway, I might as well end with one of my patented incorrect early Oscar predictions. I'm thinking P.S. Hoffman wins this sucker. Not just because this is a good performance, but because he's a beloved character actor who doesn't get too many chances for a lead role, let alone mouth watering oscar snacks like this. So this is the career award. And unlike David Strathairn in GOOD NIGHT AND GOOD LUCK, Hoffman gets to cry in this movie. Academy voters love crying and if Hoffman can prove he's not gay they'll love that too, because they always think a straight man playing a gay man is some kind of impossible challenge. Remember, Greg Kinnear got a nomination one time for that reason.
I don't see how this prediction could go wrong, but then I walked out of THE AVIATOR convinced that Leon Del Caprio was guaranteed an oscar. So don't bet money on this one. But I'm right. This time for sure.
Geez, I shouldn't have put off seeing this movie so long considering it really is my beat. This is kind of a miracle actually. This is the rare DTV movie that could've passed for a low budget theatrical movie. The only thing really holding it back is being a prequel with a different star from the original, which is a real good reason not to release it in theaters. Going straight to video lowers the expectations and makes it only half count as a sequel or prequel, which gives it a better shot at working. And for me it did. Even if you don't go for it I think you will be awed by its competence. This is definitely a landmark in DTV sequelization.
I love the original CARLITO'S WAY, but I haven't seen it in years, so that probaly helps. I never knew this but DePalma's movie was based on the second book in a series. The book was called After Hours, but they didn't want it confused with the Scorsese movie of the same name so they called it CARLITO'S WAY, after the first book in the series. RISE TO POWER is actually adapted from the book Carlito's Way, according to legend. (I haven't read the books so who knows.)
Like in DePalma's movie, this one starts out with Carlito Brigante fresh out of prison, but he goes right back into crime, he doesn't make any effort to stay out of it. The story is about the heroin trade in New York some time in the late '60s or early '70s or so. Control of the city is split between black gangs in Harlem, Puerto Rican gangs in spanish Harlem and Italians in some other part, I don't know. The genius of Carlito's operation is that he works a triumvirate with his two former cellmates, the Italian Rocco (Michael Kelly, DAWN OF THE DEAD remake) and Earl (Mario Van Peebles, everything). Each of them deals with the hotshots in one of the territories, so Carlito deals with the Puerto Ricans, Earl with the blacks and Rocco with the eye-talians. Strangely, you don't see Carlito's deals as much as you see the other two. Earl has to negotiate with the oppulent priss Hollywood Nicky (Sean Combs, "anything can happen") who runs Harlem and Rocco has to deal with some standard mafia types, and both of them give alot more trouble than Carlito's buddy Colorado (Casper Martinez, CARLITO'S ANGELS).
I should mention that poor Rocco doesn't even get pictured on the cover. What the fuck. I understand you gotta put Puffy Diddy on there and you gotta put Luis Guzman, but this is one of the main characters, he goes on there too.
Anyway it's kind of a SCARFACE type of story but with less struggle. Carlito is actually portrayed as a nice sensitive guy and alot of it is about him falling in love with a coat check girl. And of course he can't die at the end so you don't get the tragic going out with a bang ending that these type of stories usually have. But I thought it was a pretty good (mostly unoriginal) crime story and it kept me involved. And they do a good job getting a period feel on a low budget. I think the music goes a long way toward creating the atmosphere. The score itself (done by the same guy as the original, I think) is cheesy but they did a good job choosing songs by Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes, the Delfonics, the Dramatics and people like that. None of the same obvious songs you hear in every movie to tell you the time period. No Superfly in this one.
The weak link in this movie, unfortunately, is Jay Hernandez playing Carlito. I didn't care so much for this chump in HOSTEL and taking on Carlito Brigante is a pretty big task. I understand it's gonna be hard to replace Al Pacino no matter what your budget is. And for Jay Hernandez, Jay Hernandez does a damn good job. I was able to put up with him for most of the movie. I got past it. But you can definitely see him struggling. Maybe it was a deliberate choice to make Carlito not as confident when he's younger, but it's kind of a shame at times. The movie would be alot better if they could find a guy that had more of a presence, who takes charge of every scene without saying anything. I didn't really buy that this particular guy could lead a criminal empire.
You also got Sean Puff Diddy Combs of MTV Movie Awards hosting fame as Hollywood Nicky. This is a perfect character for a jackass like that to play. The premise of the character is that he wears fancy white suits, drinks out of a gold tea set in his vintage Rolls Royce, and that kind of bullshit. So he is basically playing himself. His acting is not really terrible or good. He doesn't really pull off the menace but he's not laughable. He's probaly better than you should expect from DTV, at least.
Luis Guzman is also in here, playing a different character than he played in the original CARLITO'S WAY. It's hard for me to believe there could be two people in the world who look like Luis Guzman, but oh well. He's got a couple funny lines here and it's always good to see him in a movie, good or bad.
By far the best thing about this movie: Mario Van Peebles. I have given him alot of shit over the years for how many DTV movies he appears in, but I would like to take this opportunity to take it all back. He is fucking great in this movie, he elevates it with his performance. Remember how cool he was playing his pops in the otherwise overrated BADAASSSSS!? That's what he's doing here, wearing the badass '70s collars and hats, smoking a cigar and scowling. I actually wish the movie was EARL'S WAY: WHO GIVES A SHIT ABOUT CARLITO. He oughta keep the beard, man. He looks fuckin tough. I almost could've forgot I was watching Mario Van Peebles and start thinking it was Fred the Hammer Williamson.
The camerawork and storytelling and whatnot is obviously not gonna be like DePalma, but I thought it was pretty good. Simple and unpretentious, no MTV shit. The director is called Michael Scott Bregman. He's wet behind the ears as far as directing but he produced the original CARLITO'S WAY and two TV shows starring Luis Guzman. He was even an editing assistant on SCARFACE. Apparently he's friends with Edwin Torres, the tough guy judge who wrote the books, so that probaly has something to do with how he ended up doing these movies. Anyway, he gets the Surprisingly Good For DTV award, at least.
I think this movie could be important in the evolution of DTV movies, not as much because its one of the best as because of the push they gave it. It had the most advertising I've seen for a DTV movie and I'm just guessing, but I bet it paid off. Of course, it's a unique case because of the specific kind of following of the original. It's one of those movies that every famous rapper has on DVD if you see them on Cribs. I'm sure they're trying to figure out how to do prequels to SCARFACE and THE WARRIORS too but this one was easier to pull off.
So I kind of wondered if it was even fair to compare other DTV movies to something like this, but I checked IMDb and it looks like the budget isn't huge or anything, it was $9 million. My long time favorite DTV sequel FROM DUSK TILL DAWN 2 apparently cost $5 million. But that was shot in South Africa which I'm sure is alot cheaper than New York. RISE TO POWER is probaly above average budget for this kind of thing. HOUSE OF THE DEAD 2 apparently was $6 million, FRANKENFISH was $3 million. IMDb doesn't have figures for the WILD THINGS or CRUEL INTENTIONS sequels, or for BOA VS. PYTHON. But the action pictures are alot higher. Wesley Snipes's UNSTOPPABLE was $15 million, S. Seagal's OUT FOR A KILL was $20 million.
RISE TO POWER proves that it is technically possible to treat a DTV movie more seriously and make something of a higher quality. You know, that perfect three little bears "just right" level of quality higher than something you would watch on TV but lower than something you would see in a theater. Theoretically. I guess the question for the ghouls with the money is whether it's more profitable to make a little more expensive movie that some people watch and enjoy or a cheaper one that makes profit on a technicality because it's stocked at Blockbustert. I guess we'll see what happens.
CARNY
A little while back I saw a real good documentary called DERBY which on the surface was about a guy trying to become a professional roller derby artist but really was about how he was cheating on his wife and there was a dude with no shirt on reading playboys, and other weird stuff. I don't know how to describe it man read that review if that's what you're interested in. get off my fuckin back, jack.
Anyway there's a reason I bring this up, it has to do with this review also. The director of that picture was Robert Kaylor, who according to amazon.com presents the internet movie database only did three other movies, and of those three this here CARNY is the only one in print. So I watched it.
And it's a pretty good one. It stars Gary Busey, Robbie Robertson and Jodie Foster, in one of those young, good lookin, kill the president for me type of roles she could do in 1980. She plays your typical young, abused gal tired of her small town and she even has the line "I swear if I had the money I'd get on a bus and get out of here" and of course this means she's gonna run off and join the fuckin circus. Or carnival or whatever.
Busey, everybody's favorite horse toothed nutjob, plays "the Bozo", a clown in the dunk tank who spews abusive comments out a loudspeaker in a Popeye voice, pissing everybody off so they'll pay for more balls to throw at him. Robertson is his partner Patch, a tough guy who sells the baseballs but also walks around and oversees all the other games and cons going on in the show.
And I mean you pretty much know what you're gonna get from the beginning. Both the guys are gonna end up havin sex with Jodie Foster and that might be trouble. Some town rednecks are gonna get pissed when they see they've been had, and violence will erupt. The local criminals will have it in for the carnies because they won't give them as much as a payoff as they want, and the carnies will have to play a carny trick on them. You know the drill.
But what makes it work is the detail, the atmosphere and this Robbie Robertson fellow. Robertson I guess is a musician, from some band called The Band. I'm not familiar with whatever he plays. But in this movie I'd swear he was one of your lesser known Badass actors. He looks like a cross between Peter Coyote and Huge Ackman. He's droopy eyed and quiet and he's got a real presence, he walks around and he knows his carny shit and he pulls a knife when necessary. He's kind of a Warren Oates type. Which works out because the movie has a bit of a Monte Hellman feel. The Monte Hellman from COCKFIGHTER, not the one from SILENT NIGHT DEADLY NIGHT PART 3.
Robertson produced the movie and gets part of the story credit and did some of the music. I'm guessin he was real into the carny lifestyle and the whole thing was his pet project. Maybe he even saw DERBY and hired Robert Kaylor, I don't know. Anyway it's one of those pictures where you can tell they did alot of research, took alot of notes and tried to fit it all in there. So you get alot of carny slang and con game inside info and secret languages and whatnot. You got some real circus freaks and some standing up for their right to make a living, etc. And you get the whole seedy underbelly of the carnival type deal, the corruption, the way Patch has to try to smooth things out with the locals and the crime bosses. He's one of the quiet, peacemaking type of badasses.
The movie doesn't end up quite as dark as it first seems like it will, and you don't feel like you've seen a great story here. But I think it's worthwhile especially for Mr. Robertson's performance. Too bad him and Robert Kaylor didn't seem to do anything else of note. Unless you count twiddlin around on a guitar in a Martin Scorsese movie. La la look at me. He's like Steven Seagal, he's trying to spread himself too thin. Next thing you know he'll be selling mystical oils on the internet. Stick to the movies, Robertson. That's you're true calling.
As you know I'm not one for the cartoons but somehow I ended up seeing this new one called CARS. What CARS is about is cars. However they are not any ordinary type of car like you've ever seen before, they are living cars. And when I say that I am not even talking about a Knight Rider or Herbie the Love Bug type of scenario here, I am talking about an entire society devoid of human life, but dominated by living, feeling cars with weird eyeballs on their windshields. They can make gestures and they can use their tires sort of like hands, and they have jobs, etc. Even the insects of this world are cars, but there are regular non-car plants.
These cars have not only created a civilization, but their civilization has been around long enough that the good old days are gone. The story is about Lightning McQueen, who is apparently not named after Steve McQueen despite his brave service to the cause of cars in LE MANS and BULLITT. Thanks alot, assholes. Lightning is a hotshot race car, basically a NASCAR star without a driver. Because he's a stubborn egotistical asswipe of a car he fucks up and blows his huge lead making the big race a three way tie. One of the other racers is played by Michael Keaton but he looks like the Burt Reynolds of cars. Anyway Lightning has to go to California for another race and because he's a celebrity he doesn't even bother to drive there himself, he goes inside his friend, a Mack truck played by Cliff from Cheers. Basically, he is inside his friend's ass, but you can't completely blame him because the inside of his friend's ass looks like some kind of luxury apartment.
But then Lightning gets lost and ends up stranded in a small town along Route 66 where he learns valuable car lessons and helps revive a dying way of car life, etc.
This movie maybe isn't quite as effective as the other movies by these TOY STORY people, but it does work. And part of the appeal is the incredible attention to detail, even in the filmatism. For the parts about car races they take on the frinetic tics of sports broadcasting, with flashy camera moves and onscreen graphics and with car commentators and corporate sponsors. There is an entire audience of thousands of cars. Then when it gets out on the road it slows down and there is actual atmosphere. Somehow they really capture the feel of driving out on the highway at night. And when they get to the town, I think it's called Radiator Springs, there are these quiet establishing shots with a yellow traffic light slightly buzzing as it blinks on and off. Even the sound effects are perfect. They had to figure out the sound of tires rolling around as cars "walk" along having a conversation.
And the computery animation is far beyond what we've seen before - the different kinds of lighting, the reflective (or rusty) surfaces of the cars. And the world around them looks like reality. I mean, there were previews for 4 or 5 other computer animated movies before the movie, all of them about talking animals, but not cars. Animation-wise, CARS looks like it's about 10 years ahead of those other ones.
So I think whether or not you should see this movie all depends on whether the premise freaks you out in a good way or a bad way. It's cuter than POLAR EXPRESS but in some ways weirder. I mean a world of cars? It's kind of a freaky premise and it brings up questions here and there, questions that are not answered in the movie. I mean the main thing I wondered was how do cars reproduce? Do they mate, or do they just build other cars? They gotta reproduce somehow because the founder of the town is an antique Henry Ford type deal (you see him in statue form) so there are definitely generations of cars. And thank God, because we want car society to go on bravely into the future.
If cars have parents, do they look like their parents? Or is it just kind of random? Could a bus screw an ice cream truck and pop out a Lightning McQueen? If Lightning and his Porsche girlfriend have a baby what will it look like, half race car and half Porsche? Do they start out small, and if so, why didn't we see any baby cars like that in the movie?
And if you think about it
it gets deeper than that because you have to wonder, is a race car born a
race car or does he make a lifestyle choice and then grow into a race car?
I guess he's probaly born that way but what if he doesn't like to race? Doesn't
being born a certain type of car seem like sort of a curse? Isn't there something
inherently depressing about a world where your entire way of life is predetermined
upon birth? What if Mater (played by unfunny fake redneck "Larry the
Cable Guy") didn't WANT to fucking tow cars? What if he wanted to be
a fire truck? Too bad, he's a tow truck, he's fucked.
Unless maybe he could get customized, but I don't know what car society's
view is of that sort of thing. If a ride gets pimped, is that the same as
plastic surgery, or is it a natural process? Does it mean you're a sellout,
or an individualist?
I know your job isn't your whole life, a tow truck can have hobbies outside of towing. But work definitely seems important to these cars. Most of them seem to own their own businesses. They definitely have a whole car economy going, I'm just not sure how it works exactly. We know they sell tires and gas to each other, and money is mentioned. But we never see any money. If they really have money, where do they keep it, in their glove compartments? Does the money have a picture of a car on it? How do they hold it with those big round tires? Obviously they don't have debit cards, 'cause how the fuck are they gonna type in their PIN numbers?
You know what would really suck? Being a train. There's a living train in this movie. I hope that guy can get off the tracks, otherwise he's got the rawest deal of anybody. Being a train must be like knowing for sure you're gonna work for KFC for the rest of your life.
You have to wonder how exactly this civilization is gonna progress. They don't like to drive everywhere themselves, but other than that one truck's ass they don't seem to have any other form of transportation. Maybe the train's ass, but I'm not sure if he's hollow. In the future will cars begin to build other cars to drive in? They already built a road-fixing machine, so clearly it's not out of the question for cars to build and operate machines. Would living cars driving inanimate cars cause an ethics debate? Or would it just be creepy?
Where does their gas come from? Does it come from dinosaur fossils like ours did? What type of cars were the dinosaurs of car world? What does a car fossil look like? Are their chassis on display in museums?
Have cars gone to space yet? I guess there must be living space shuttles. Will they ever discover life on other planets, and if so will the life be cars? Maybe just microscopic spore cars on Mars?
Because the founder of the town is no longer there, we know that cars can die. But do they die of old age or do they only die in wrecks? Do they feel pain? How far can a mechanic ethically go in saving an ailing car? How many parts can be replaced before a car is no longer himself? In other words, what part holds a car's soul?
And hell, as long as we're talking about the car soul we might as well hit on religion. Is there such a thing in car world? An all powerful being who built the cars? Is there a car Jesus? Maybe the Tucker Torpedo? Are there different religions and hell, do they have wars? I guess there must be tanks off somewhere fighting wars. So it's kind of like our army, there's a whole class doomed to military service and all the Suburbans and Volvos and everybody get to stay home and not worry about it.
I'm assuming there's war in car world because I'm assuming there's religion and if there's car religion there's car war. But when will it end? How can you have peace when you have members of your society born as tanks and bomber jets and shit? Isn't it kind of a self fulfilling prophecy? And if you stop war, isn't it unfair to these individuals, to erase their whole purpose in life? They were born that way. Who are we to judge what they do?
Other than those few questions everything is pretty much answered, not a bad talking car movie at all, I would recommend it.
CATWOMAN
Well I picked this one up 'cause there was alot of hype, it just won a bunch of awards recently and they were making a big deal about Halle Berry showing up and making a tearful speech. Somebody warned me though, turns out "the razzies" are some kind of sarcastic or ironical type award where they give it to the WORST movies, or at least the ones that are not really the worst but that got a bad time in the media and they probaly haven't even watched them but they pretend it's the worst and everybody has a good time pretending that they have seen it and that they were surprised how bad it was.
So I realized this was actually a notorious movie, a legendarily bad movie, and I started to worry. What if I like this one? What if I'm the one guy? You know how I am, I tell it like it is. I say what's what. I kind of liked The Punisher and I shouted it to and from the god damn roof tops. To this day I would die for the two Charlie's Angels movies, or if not die, then at least admit that I enjoyed both of them alot. What if this is actually a misunderstood work of camp genius? Am I really ready to go to bat for Halle Berry wearing a big leather football with ears on top of her head?
The expectations killed this movie though because it's not misunderstood and it's not bad in any kind of interesting way. It's just your usual unimaginative movie but one with the unusual topic of a gal dressing up as a cat and getting super powers.
The plot is this. Halle Berry is an awkward shy person working in the art department at a makeup company run by Sharon Stone and her openly evil husband, played by some guy with an evil British accent. They are about to unveil their new product Beauline, an amazing new anti-aging cream. It actually "reverses the process of aging," but also has the side effect of rotting your face away like a zombie or turning your skin into super powered rock skin. Unfortunately, the former side effect is only shown in tests and the latter only on Sharon Stone, and then she doesn't really use it for much.
Anyway Halle accidentally discovers the problems with the product so they dump her in a giant machine that spews her out with the toxic sewage and kills her. Fortunately, a magic CGI Egyptian cat named Midnight has been following her, so it finds her body in the mud, breathes magic Egyptian cat breath into her, resurrecting her as a new magic cat person who adopts all of the qualities and abilities of real cats: flying, using whips, doing Brazilian martial arts, hissing, and eating sushi really fast.
To be completely
fair, the scene where she's revived is actually a pretty good little chunk
of filmatism though, in my opinion. I would normally be against a computerized
cat (read my review of Garfield for more on this topic) but this one
is put to good use because it allows for some very dramatic photographing.
The camera flies around and ends up right in front of and beneath the cat
as it ritualistically marches up and mounts the corpse and does magic mummy
CPR. Alot of people don't know this but in addition to water and dogs, cats
are also afraid of movie cameras. There is no way you could rig a camera to
do that shot with a real cat. The only way you could do it is animation, like
this, or getting a real cat to wear one of those Polar Express motion
control suits and adding the camera moves in later. Or, I guess if you were
doing that anyway you could dump the real cat and just have Tom Hanks play
the cat. But this was better.
Anyway,
the lighting and the camera movement and the music and the genuine trained
cats that circle in all make for a pretty weird, nightmarish scene and as
Halle woke up caked in mud hearing seagulls flying overhead I realized this
was gonna be pretty much the only part in the movie that seems like it's directed
by Pitof. Despite assumptions people have made, Pitof is not some hack MTV
director, he is simply a French special effects genius who was born cursed
with a blank last name, like Prince or Yoda. He worked miracles on The
City of the Lost Children (remember that computerized flea?) and his first
movie as a director was Vidocq, a very stylized, all digital super
hero/detective movie that is more like what you wish this was: a clever, stylish
and thrilling, if completely empty and substanceless, summer "popcorn movie"
type of deal.
There's
also a part where the cat shows her how to escape a jail cell by squeezing
between the bars. That was pretty cool.
Now, I did
my research for this one, I talked to a couple of topnotch nerd insiders who
have not only seen the Batman movies, but remember them. According to my guys,
Catwoman is sort of a spinoff of Batman part 2, which introduced Michelle
Pfeiffer as Catwoman. And apparently in that movie Michelle also was a timid
low on the totem pole worker (or "mousy secretary" they all said) at a corporation
who discovered insidious plans and was murdered by the boss and then was revived
by cats (not CGI though) who circled around her and bit at her. There is some
disagreement but the majority believe that Michelle Pfeiffer Catwoman was
not literally brought back to life by those cats, but just awoken from unconsciousness,
and that the cat powers and "nine lives" she gets after that are more her
little gimmick and not meant to be taken literally. In this new version though
she might as well be bit by a radioactive cat because she keeps turning into
a computerized Halle Berry and soaring above the city like Spiderman. And
we find out that there have been many catpowered catwomen throughought history,
who wore cat masks and hated dogs, etc. No mention of Michelle Pfeiffer but
it would seem this must be related somehow. Also my guys want me to mention
that there is no mention of Batman, Gotham City, Superman or even Popeye or
Tom and Jerry.
The script, credited to a whole bunch of people and probaly based on a bunch
of rejected scripts developed over the past ten years, doesn't spend much
time being clever or smart. Underneath the polished photography and decent
production values, this has the feel of a straight to video sequel plot. Just
a rehash of the cartoon feminist themes from Batman part 2, but with a different
Catwoman, a different corporate villain and a handsome cop (Benjamin Bratt)
in place of Batman. It still all feels very familiar and once again you're
wondering how the fuck a guy could date Halle Berry and then see her with
a mask only covering her nose and hair, and not have any idea it's the same
girl.
There are lots of annoying cliches here, like the "funny" slightly overweight best friend who encourages Halle and lusts after any man that makes the mistake of standing within ten miles of her. Also the "funny" cartoonishly gay friend at work, you're gonna love him. And the old "she's an artist but she is stuck in this commercial job and how will she ever be a real artist like she always dreamed" plot, although they must've cut most of that out in the twenty-seventh draft because it is completely abandoned after the beginning and in fact I don't think you even see her ever doing any art other than in the deleted scenes on the DVD.
There's another deleted scene on the DVD where she gets chased by a bunch of evil dogs (probaly the yin to the yang of the magic Egyptian cat brigade) through a junkyard labyrinth. The scene reminded me alot of a scene in that old Renny Harlin classic NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET PART 4 THE DREAM MASTER. And strangely enough, one of the stars of that movie, Brooke Theiss, has a bit part as "ferris wheel mom." Which only goes to prove my theory that all modern cinema was birthed from the womb of the Freddy pictures.
But there was one little touch I thought was worth commending. It happens when she's doing internet research on catwomen, as happens in all modern movies of every genre. This movie has the usual computery blips and bleeps when they use computers, but I liked that at least when she does her research, she doesn't IMMEDIATELY find exactly the information she needs. First she clicks on a page of old ladies who take pictures of their cats dressed up in clothes. That was a good touch.
Just once I want to see a movie where a dude is researching mysterious supernatural happenings or whatever on the internet, but the search engine brings up some similarly titled porn sites, and he ends up wasting two hours looking at porn and jerking off, then figuring out what he needed to figure out. Some day, maybe. Until then, we just have CATWOMAN.
CECIL B. DEMENTED
For the first time in the one (1) year since I got out, I feel like someone has heard me as I shouted to the sky my feelings about the Cinema. Or at least came up with the same ideas seperately. Mr. John Waters is the filmatist in question and this gentleman has created one of the greatest movies EVER about the movies to come out in the last year at least from the ones I have seen. Which is not many but still. This is a must-see picture for Cinema Outlaws like you and me because it takes all of our arguments and wads them all up into a big ball and then molds them into the shape of an entertaining movie.
It is kind of weird seeing a John Waters picture around the same time you see one about GG Allin. John Waters if I remember correctly had a friend who dressed up like a woman and ate poodle shit. That in my opinion is pushing the envelope further than GG Allin since Allin was only eating his own shit. When it is your own shit you got a pretty good idea what's in it, you are able to control it. With a poodle, who the fuck knows what that poodle is shitting out. I mean jesus dogs do some pretty sick shit. Like one time I saw a dog in this rat infested junkyard, well forget it this is maybe not the best tangent to go on I don't really want to think about all this shit eating.
Well thankfully there is no shit eating in Cecil B. Demented. This is not a grossout movie. It is a movie about Art.
The story is about a young individual by the name of Sinclair, who has renamed himself Cecil B. Demented and brought together a radical group of "cinema terrorists" to kidnap the famous starlet Honey Whitlock and force her to star in their cinema verite movie... which is about her going around committing acts of cinematic terrorism. So Honey attacks a theater showing Patch Adams and quite reasonably ends up agreeing with Cecil's radical ideas, Patty Hearst style. (Patty Hearst also has a small role in the picture, passing the torch to Honey I guess.)
There are some real cute characters in this picture, like the naive satanist girl who drinks goat urine. Not sure I'd want to make out with her after that but the gal is cute. There is also a porn star and a bearded lady. All of them have tattoos of their favorite directors representing a specific aspect of their crew. For example, the one with the Sam Peckinpah tattoo represents how much they will drink while they are filming.
I think it is great that these individuals are dedicated enough to their favorite directors that they symbolically burn the spirit of their ouvres right onto their flesh. I wonder who I would get a tattoo of. I wanna say Clint but that might confuse people since you first think of him as an actor before a director. Peckinpah is not fucking bad, in my opinion. I mean the man directed the Getaway and The Wild Bunch for crying out fucking loud. There is also something to be said for a Leone, I would definitely keep a Leone in mind.
Anyway back in the 60s there were young people who believed in things. They wanted to stop the war and get the civil rights and what not. Today there are very few political issues for young people to fight against, other than police brutality, racial profiling, domestic violence, multinational corporations exploiting people and the environment, etc. Because of this lack of direction for the generation there is only one common passion that brings them all together. cable tv.
Through the miracle of the cartoon network there are now many generations sharing the vision of the thundercats. Though this cartoon was originally designed to peddle toys to the young boys of the mid to late 80s, the miracle of cable television has allowed it to survive, where even without thundercat toys the young children can learn from the adventures of Lion-O and his sword of omens.
Children and young individuals in their twenties are more media savvy than ever. Although these young retards couldn't tell you Jack Kerouac from Andy Capp they still have a shared love for watching movies over and over again. And that is what unites them as a generation.
Cecil B. Demented is about the individuals in the cartoon network generation who have taken their love one step further into the realm of the Artist and the connoseur. They have discovered the masters, from some german named Fassbinder to the great William Castle. They are sick and fucking tired of the older generation and the fellow cable children who are happy to settle for less. And they're not gonna take it no more. I gotta tell ya man it is a beautiful sight to see the youngsters finally fighting for what's right. This is a war worth fighting, the one against Patch Adams.
This picture takes everything we believe about the importance of the Cinematic artform and takes it too far. These are individuals who are willing to die or set themselves on fire to make a movie. They are shot at by police and teamsters and perform dangerous stunts and abandon their families and even remain abstinent, all in the name of Outlaw Cinema. Hell, I don't know if I would go that far but I'm really fucking glad there are people who would. I am very excited about this new movement which I feel is less pretentious and has more potential than Dogme 95. Hopefully a new generation of filmmakers will use Cecil as their symbol to destroy the memory of Patch Adams forever and retake the screens.
Oh jesus I wanted to like this movie. I am a big fan of the artists, and shit if this one isn't made by some kind of artist. I guess the dude is a mtv music video director named Tarsem. At first I thought "Holy shit Tarsem is directing now? I thought he was dead." Then I remembered I was thinking of Sabu. Tarsem is a different guy.
Anyway this movie is about as pretty as I've ever seen when Tarsem lets loose. There are fantasy world imageries of magic horses and deserts and sailboats and the virgin Mary and weird doll people and little skeleton horses and evil clowns tying a dude's intestines to a music box and etc. These don't look like any movie I've seen before, they are bright and weird and perfectly designed like some kind of psychedelic painting, the ones made by a real master artist not just some hippie that paints mushrooms and mad hatters and hangs them up at the local cafe. I'm talking the real deal.
I mean this movie is great to hang on your wall but it's not great to sit and watch. Who the fuck cares how pretty it is when all the movie is is a bad episode of Millennium. What it's about is Eccentric Serial Killer (Vincent D'Onofrio) does Weird Torture Ritual to Young Girls (see Cabin By the Lake review above for similar serial killer shenanigans), gets caught exactly as he has a seizure and goes into a coma. So Jennifer Lopez and Vince Vaughn use virtualistic reality type machines to go into his dream world and try to get him to admit where he has his last victim locked up. But then they just figure it out anyway without his help and then she stabs him and there is a bunch of weird ass shit that happens and then the movie ends and as far as anybody can remember, there wasn't really much of a story.
The pacing in this movie is not exactly strong. This is one of the movies where the good guy starts killing the bad guy and you think, "Oh, this must be the end part."
The characterization is also nothing to write home about. There is a couple lines of dialogue where they explain what tragic event in their past caused them to do the job they are doing now. But that's about it. Jennifer Lopez is supposed to be this great psychologist or something but you can't stop staring at her lips. I'm pretty sure the lipstick companies helped fund this movie, there is really no other explanation for how distracting the lipstick is. Jennifer really knows how to act but in this one she is just being a model. It works great for the fantasy world where she is more of a painting than a person, but in the real life scenes I would like her to do some kind of talking and emoting in between modelling.
It's really kind of sad that the movie Seven has now become a whole genre. I thought that movie was pretty fucking creepy. Good job David Fincher. But I don't want to see the dark shadowy but also hip and stylish but also unexpectedly gruesome serial killer movie of the month. enough with the serial killers hollywood, we get the idea. they are creepy and weird and when you go to the house there is a weird collage on the wall. You have to go out into the sunny desert to find where their hideout is. enough already.
LE CERCLE ROUGE
Right now a thing is going on where alot of Americans hate the French. I'm not talking about any Americans I ever met or saw in person, even from a distance, but I am talking about people I saw on TV. They can do alot with computers now but I think these were real people. It's hard to explain this feud, it's like you know, why did Andre the Giant turn evil against Hulk Hogan? I don't fuckin remember, man. But this one can be traced back to an incident where those fuckin French, man, they were telling us we shouldn't invade Iraq, that they didn't pose a threat to us and it would be illegal to invade, etc.
So we were like oh yeah well what about those weapons of mass destruction that they have stockpiled over there, what about that Mr. auteur theory with the beret and all that? And they were like I'm not wearing a beret. And we were like okay, Mr. I love Jerry Lewis. And they were like, what are you talking about, that's an urban legend, plus Jerry Lewis is an American who had a long and fruitful career in America, and still lives there. Not to mention Carrot Top, Jeff Foxworthy, Gallagher, Sinbad, Jay Leno, the Police Academy series, the traditional american sitcom, etc. And we were like fuck you man. And they were like seriously though guys I don't think they pose a threat to you, and you will be stuck in this shit for years to come. And we were like yeah right Frenchie, we'll get back to you in a couple years and you better fucking apologize then.
Well now it's a couple years later and they won't apologize, because they were obviously right from the beginning and it would be ludicrous for them to apologize for trying to stop us from making a huge mistake that we will be paying for for decades. Still, they felt bad, so they pretty much did the most pro-American thing possible: they had Culture Minister Renaud
Donnedieu de Vabres honor none other than
Mr. Bruce John McClane himself Willis as an officer in the Order of Arts and
Letters. This is one of France's highest honors for cultural achievement, almost
on par with our outlaw awards and Badass Laureate status. One previous recipient
was free jazz pioneer Ornette Coleman. Also Robert Redford. So you see, Americans
and Frenches are brothers.So as a representative of the United States - and that is not an official status yet but hopefully at some point it will be granted to me by Officer Bruce Willis of the Order of Arts and Letters - I figured it was time for a powerful gesture of brotherhood, understanding and all that sort of crap. So I decided to dip into some of the classic French crime pictures I'd never gotten around to. Somebody recommended a couple heist movies to me, RIFIFI and TOPKAPI by Mssr. Jules Dassin. One problem: Dassin turned out to be an American, run out of America by the blacklist and still overcoming all obstacles to make a badass fuckin crime movie in France (RIFIFI), which almost makes him double American. And then the other problem, TOPKAPI wasn't even French, or very good. It turns great at the end with a heist scene that was definitely the inspiration for that quiet break-in in MISSION:IMPOSSIBLE:THE MOVIE. But the rest is a dopey cornball comedy. It was a year after CHARADE and it seems like they were going for that kind of lighthearted romp, but they got no Cary Grant and instead of charming Audrey Hepburn they got fuckin Melina Mercouri. I don't want to be mean but I gotta be honest, if this lady had been time-warped to the '90s, they woulda put her on a "My Mom Dresses Like a Hoochie" episode of Ricki Lake. She's 44 trying to act 22 but can't hide the age in her face or her gravelly smoker's voice. Anyway, long story short, four long paragraphs into this fuckin thing, I finally watched an actual French movie, and a good one: Jean-Pierre Melville's LE CERCLE ROUGE.
LE CERCLE ROUGE means THE RED CIRCLE, or I guess THE CIRCLE RED if you're gonna be an asshole about it. What does THE RED CIRCLE mean? Well, something about buddhism I guess. Forget it man, just go with it. Anyway the story follows an ensemble of individuals including
1) convict who jumps out the window of a train while being transported (bravo)
2) bad motherfuckin Alain Delon with a mustache and a scowl
3) prison guard trying to catch escaped guy
4) others
Basically, the criminals of the story come together by coincidence and plan a big jewelry store heist. Also there are some other crimes committed, they fight over money with some other crooks, etc. Meanwhile, as you saw in #3 above, the guy is trying to catch them.
Like RIFIFI, there's a lot of build up before the actual heist, and then when it happens it's real quiet and professional and shows the whole process in detail. Very involved. One aspect of how they pull it off (using some pretty spectacular marksmanship) seemed completely phoney to me, but it was cool enough to be acceptable. Apparently Melville was supposed to adapt the book that became RIFIFI before Dassin did, and then avoided heist movies for years because Dassin did such a good job. Here I wouldn't say he tops RIFIFI but he makes a worthy successor, anyway.
One thing I like, the movie really doesn't take sides. The crooks and the cop are shown with equal emphasis and respect. It really doesn't seem like the movie is rooting for one team or other. It's just showing what happens when they go head to head. Here it is, you can watch. I heard John Woo loves this movie, which makes sense because in his old good movies he used to make, he had the same approach to the ol' "good guys and bad guys" nonsense. Turns out Woo is planning a remake of LE CERCLE ROUGE as his next movie. Bad idea if you ask me but I'm not scared because I remember when Woo was gonna do a thief movie with Chow Yun Fat, then a movie where Chow Yun Fat is building the train tracks, then he was gonna do karate turtles and then He-Man and then a gangster musical starring Huge Ackman and then The Rock driving a magic spy car. And now LE CERCLE ROUGE. You know what John Woo it's one thing to SAY you're gonna make a movie and it's quite another thing to make one, so you don't scare me motherfucker. You can "remake" LE CERCLE ROUGE all you want as long as you don't actually ever film or release it.
(seriously though bud if you're gonna do it DON'T FUCK IT UP. Here is a handy chart to tape to the side of the camera for reference: BULLET IN THE HEAD = good, WINDTALKERS = time to go back to being a dance instructor.)
Anyway, the real revelation for me in this picture, but not for alot of you I bet, is this Alain Delon. See I've heard of the motherfucker and I know he's in lots more famous movies than this, it's just I never actually watched any of them until now. And now I see what the fuss is about. It's almost hard to believe that a man speaking the language of romance could be so god damn Lee Marvin.
I'm not saying he looks like Lee Marvin. He's young and handsome and has that scruffy hair with the long bangs that young musicians have again now. But he's got a dead-eye stare and a constant scowl that signal not to fuck with him. One extra on this DVD, he's on a talk show with Melville. And he politely answers any question that's asked of him but I swear he never cracks a smile. This guy doesn't play. He's as intense sitting in a chair talking about acting as he is busting into a jewelry store.
I feel that in my opinion LE CERCLE ROUGE lives up to the strict collection of criterion that makes up the Criterion Collection. This is not an ARMAGEDDON type situation in other words. So have at it boys. And like Bruce said, Vive le France, motherfucker!
CHERRY FALLS
Well there might be some individuals out there wondering, wouldn't it be cool if you took a director like the dude who did Romper Stomper, and had him do a slasher movie. Well those individuals it turns out are wrong. Sorry boys.
Cherry Falls is the story of a killer in a small town who kills only virgins. In a small town called Cherry Falls.
You know what I mean? Virgins. In Cherry Falls.
I'll let that one sink in. Anyway this one is a bit different from the current crop of teen slasher type pictures. It is made by australians, for one. The tone is a little darker and less jokey. Most of the actors look like they are really high school aged instead of in their mid to late twenties. And instead of not killing virgins, the killer kills ONLY virgins. So of course the gimmick is that the kids decide to have a big orgy so they can all a) not get killed b) get laid.
Unfortunately not much of interest is made of this premise. And it's not THAT different from your urban legend the final cut or your scream 3 or your I know what they did for the summer, etc. Just like those pictures it is all leading up to some stupid surprise ending where it turns out one of the characters you thought you could trust is actually the killer. what I'm getting at is that Jay Mohr is not just a teacher, he is also a guy who dresses up as his mom to kill virgins.
There aren't any real knock you in the balls scares or chases or gorey type material. Even the sexuality of the picture is very unthreatening. This is the only orgy I've ever seen where everybody stays in their underwear.
I will say two things for this picture. First of all, I liked the young gal Britney Murphy who starred in it. She has the old non traditional type of beauty. She seems a little crazy, she makes her boyfriend bite her toes, etc. I like that in a young gal.
Number two, there is one scene where the killer shows up at the orgy, and all the kids run away scared, and so many of them are piling down the stairs that they get stuck.
If there was even one other thing in the movie as great as that, I would have no choice but to recommend this picture. but no dice folks. Sorry. I know you never heard of it, well don't hear of it. not worth it friends. they don't send 'em straight to video for nothing it turns out.
thanks
CHILDREN OF MEN
There was a time a couple years ago when it seemed like every day the headlines were just trying to out-crazy the day before. Planes falling out of the sky, anthrax in the mail, snipers on the loose, hurricanes, that lady releasing doves for each charge Michael Jackson was acquitted of... you wouldn't have been surprised to get the morning paper and read that killer bees had swarmed Congress, rabid baboons were loose on the Space Shuttle and the Olsen twins had torched themselves outside of the "Today Show" window to protest censorship of rap music and video games. There are no baboons in CHILDREN OF MEN (there is a deer walking through a building, come to think of it) but this is a movie that perfectly captures that knot in your stomach, that feeling of madness, where the world has gone so crazy you keep bouncing between complete desensitized detachment and wanting to cry at the slightest provocation.
Technically this is a sci-fi movie, but it doesn't feel like it. It feels so fuckin real. Most dystopia movies are stylized in some way to make them look cool. This one goes for reality. The only futuristic technology you see is for mundane things like video games and animated bus ads. It looks great (like all of director Alfonso Cuaron's movies) but not like a beautiful painting, more like a good documentary, and mostly shot handheld. There are 4 or 5 classic sequences here that I have no idea how they could've possibly been done. Like, there's a scene where Clive Owen, the hero, runs through a war zone surrounded by total fuckin mayhem. In what appears to be one continuous handheld shot he runs between buildings, up stairs, through hallways evading hundreds of gunshots, seeing tanks blow up buildings, having emotional moments with other characters. And not a moment of it looked artificial to me. The only thing in the whole movie that struck me as a special effect was, of all things, a baby. And that was a good special effect. But the rest looked like reality.
I don't know, maybe it's not a mainstream crowdpleaser. I'm pretty sure I heard a lady say "This is stupid" near the end, during one of many incredibly intense moments. I can't understand how a movie that grabs you by the collar and shakes you like this could bore normal people. I understood it with SOLARIS. But sadly that maybe happening because this is that type of sci-fi without lasers, spaceships or kung fu. And in case you're wondering it's not a sequel or remake of Schwarzenegger's JUNIOR. Not sure what the title means exactly but this is the story of a world in about 20 years where all women are infertile and the youngest person in the world (18 year old "Baby Diego") has just been stabbed to death. With no hope for the future the whole world has gone to shit, civil wars and bombings and who knows what. We see on TV propaganda that all the great cities of the world have somehow fallen, but England claims to stand strong. It's fucked up though - Clive almost gets blown up going for his morning coffee. I guess this must be pretty common because later he goes home from work early not using the excuse "I would've been dead if I had stopped for napkins" but "Baby Diego's death is affecting me more than I realized."
Clive doesn't really give a shit, so he needs a nudge to go on an adventure. He gets kidnapped by his ex-wife (Julianne Moore), leader of a group of militants called The Fishes. She needs his help to transport a young refugee woman who, we learn later in the movie (if we haven't seen the previews or read this review) has somehow become pregnant. So they need to bring her to a group that may or may not exist who may or may not help, while other factions fight over the baby.
This may not be a movie for the lady who said it was stupid, but if you're reading this you're probaly into movies and I would say this is a must see. It's hard to explain how much this movie impressed me except to say that there's never been one quite like it. I mean holy shit. Even if you don't like the story of this movie for some reason, you will see some masterfully constructed scenes, the kind of pure moviemaking that doesn't come along every year. I mentioned that one scene, there's another one about sneaking away from a farm at dawn. Again, there is a long sequence of complicated stunts that are done in one continuous shot, and yet somehow this is done with the sky just starting to turn light. It's not the kind of light that stays around long enough for you to do 150 takes of a scene. But it looks like the real sky. How the fuck did they make this movie? I knew this Alfonso Cuaron was good, I knew he could make a pretty movie. Everybody knows that. But this? All the sudden he's a master. He has taken the limitations of the medium by the neck and told them to go fuck themselves. And their mama too.
Most of the people I've talked to who have seen it seem to think it's the movie of the year or the best movie in years. But I've seen some bad reviews. I'm sure there are legitimate criticisms, but most of what I've seen is of the "they never explain why such and such happens" variety. As if it is some requirement of good storytelling that every god damn thing has to be spelled out for you. As if it's not allowed to let the audience think about things. I guess these are the same people driven crazy by MISSION:IMPOSSIBLE:3 purposely not explaining what exactly the weapon they were all fighting over does. It was lame for them to miss out on a fun movie like that for such a stupid reason, but to miss out on this one is a low down shame. This one's gonna be around for a long time though. Maybe they'll figure it out in a couple years.
These people are also bothered that the movie is obviously relevant to the world we live in, but you have to digest it and interpret it for yourself. It's not just "war is bad" or "I am against racism" or "in a world where feelings are against the law, only one man can do kung fu using guns." But that's one reason why the movie is smart. It's kind of like an impression of the fucked up times we're living in now, a natural extension of today's world. But there's not some direct symbolic parallel like "oh, this represents Bush, this represents Tony Blair" or some shit like that. Instead it's just the kind of world that we know can happen now that we've seen Abu Ghraib, Gitmo, Homeland Security, Iraq, terrorist watch lists, etc.
And come to think of it, there's no "Big Brother" character. The whole world is oppressing you, you don't need a Big Brother.
But the best thing about the movie is that it's fucking intense. It's more like war journalism than a 1984 type of story. Somebody told me this reminded her of THE PIANIST, which is a good comparison. It's a similar kind of relentless brutality and series of harrowing escapes. Usually in a movie the heroes will be in these action situations and you have to suspend your disbelief that they manage to not get shot, to not get hit by the flying car or whatever. Here it just seems like pure random luck. He's not a warrior, he's potential collateral damage. But he happened to turn the right way to miss the bullets. The guy that was going to shoot him happened to get shot at and turn to fire back.
It's not what most people would call an action movie. But in a weird way the movie I kept thinking of was MAD MAX. Because this has some of the most intense chase scenes I've ever seen. To be honest, I was not 100% into the movie in the early part, but suddenly there is a scene where the protagonists are driving along a wooded road and they see a flaming car rolling across the intersection in front of them. For a second you think it's the type of random disaster that happens in a world like this. They have to slam on their brakes and back up to avoid the fire. But then you see people running through the trees screaming, throwing rocks and molotov cocktails at the car. It's a fucking ambush. And it gets worse from there.
I don't know why this movie isn't getting all that much attention, but believe me, it will. People will study this movie. Movies will copy this movie. The world, hopefully, will not turn into this movie. But it's definitely one for the books.
CHOCOLATE
This heart-rending melodrama from Thailand tells the courageous story of Zen
(newcomer Yanin Vismistananda), an autistic girl who finds out her mother
has been suffering from cancer but hasn't done anything about it because she
can't afford proper medical treatment. With the help of an orphaned street
urchin, and despite her many mental obstacles (she is easily distracted by
small round objects, she can barely speak, she is afraid of flies), Zen goes
around the city struggling to collect enough money to save her dying mother.
Harrowing, huh? But you know come to think of it I should've mentioned that
this is from the director of ONG BAK, so the way she collects money is by
picking fights with gangsters, battling 15 or 25 guys at a time, doing flips,
hopping over and under various furniture and pipes, hitting people with her
feet, hands, knees, elbows or head, swordfighting, throwing people off buildings,
etc. See, her mom used to be a gangster and all these assholes owe her money,
and Zen wants to collect. And it just so happens that one of the things she
is fascinated with is the movie ONG BAK. She has focused much of her mental
energy on observing muay thai in that movie and in the kickboxing school she
lives next to, and has somewhat superhuman hearing and reflexes. It's just
a lucky combination I guess. So look out.
Speaking of lucky, it's lucky that these are genuinely bad people and not
just friends who borrowed money and forgot to pay it back, because I don't
think Zen understands that they're bad people. She has no concept of good
or evil. She's just trying to collect the money and they're not handing it
over like she thinks they should, so violence ensues like in the movies she
sees. I guess CHOCOLATE argues that violence in the media does influence
people, and can help treat cancer.
I looked it up - Vismistananda is about 24 years old. But she looks 13 or
14, which makes all her moves and stunts even more surprising. I thought they
had a real child actor and I kept looking for a stunt double. The story follows
in the tradition of BORN
TO FIGHT by being a surprising bummer in contrast to the main attraction,
which is of course the long, meticulously choreographed, American-action-movie-embarrassing
classic fight scene showstoppers. A 20 minute stretch of one great action
sequence after another is immediately followed by a long scene of the poor
autistic girl holding her dead mother and crying "Mommy! Mommy!"
over and over again, like she doesn't understand that she's not gonna wake
up. You go from a crack-level action movie high straight into a brick wall.
But the buzz was so good you gotta forgive it. It's a Thai thing, we wouldn't
understand.
Another thing that might be lost in the translation is the title - I know
she eats some candy but I'm not sure why the title would be CHOCOLATE. But
then I don't understand what TOM YUNG-GOONG has to do with soup either. Maybe
Thai action movies have flavors.
I'm so thankful, because while Jackie Chan is stuck making shitty Hollywood
movies that seem to waste the talents he still has at his age, these guys
are bringing back that feeling we used to get watching Jackie's better movies,
that feeling that we can't believe we just saw that, that a human
body actually did that. There are plenty of Jackie-esque moves: in
one of the earlier fights a guy runs up behind her and she happens to bend
over to pick up her dolly, ducking her attacker's kick, then casually kicking
behind her and taking him out. And there's lots of fighting with props, including
a whole bunch of great moves involving a chair. I have noticed that any movie
where a martial artist kicks a chair and it stays upright but skids across
the floor tends to be a pretty good one. So keep that in mind, filmatists.
Like many martial arts movies you most likely won't care about the plot as
much as the filmatists seem to. (The movie even opens with a dedication to
special needs children.) But there is an extremely favorable action-to-non-action
ratio and I was impressed by the way each fight seems to one-up the last.
What starts out seeming like just a pretty good movie only gets better and
better as it goes along. The last half hour or so is pretty much one fight
scene after another, going through hand-to-hand, guns and swords. When Zen
faces another disabled martial artist (a dude in an Adidas track suit whose
twitches are incorporated into his fighting style) it seems like a pretty
natural climax. But that scene is long forgotten by the time Zen leaps out
onto the side of a building to chase the villain and whack-a-mole his men
as they pop out of the windows trying to kill her.
I saw somebody refer to this as "the Donkey Kong fight," which makes
sense because they hop around between different levels of ledges on the side
of this building. She kicks heads through windows, dangles from wobbly signs,
lassos people around the neck with wires, uses people as a human bridge. The
thing I can't get enough of is that human pinball the thing, where the thugs
get knocked down, bouncing off multiple ledges and garbage dumpsters, hitting
the street hard, and all in one shot. Admittedly they already did this from
moving trucks in BORN TO FIGHT. This one is obviously on a specially
designed set and some of the shots might include wire removal and stuff. But
still, seeing a stuntman fall off a building and ricochet off of 4 or 5 different
hard surfaces on the way down is pretty incredible. It's a long sequence,
and I watched it 3 times. It's an instant classic. You don't get an instant
classic everyday.
There's an old cliche that story, characters and filmatic competence are not
required in an action movie, that you just want to see shit blow up and guys
shooting and punching and maybe some boobs. Of course anybody who would say
that is not very observant. If that was the case all the Andy Sidaris and
Golan and Globus movies would be equal to or better than DIE HARD. To me the
very best are the ones with the full package, where I really do care about
the story and characters and there also happens to be breathtaking action
sequences.
For some people CHOCOLATE might pull that off. It does have this sentimental
idea and a hell of an underdog character with a simple, righteous mission.
For me though the whole concept was pretty laughable and clearly wasn't meant
to be, so I wouldn't go that far. Still, I enjoyed the hell out of it. It's
in that other category of unforgettable action movies that may be weak in
some departments but go so far beyond the call of duty in the planning and
execution of the action sequences that they deserve some kind of medal and
maybe a scholarship named after them. They become undeniable. Whether the
story works on you or not, you would have to be dead not to be impressed by
the inventive and dangerous work of the choreographers and stunt people here.
That type of excellence doesn't happen in most action movies, but it pops
up sometimes in various periods of Hong Kong cinema, the parkour movies from
France and now this wave of Thai movies. The fight on the building belongs
in the pantheon of great movie fights. Especially in a time when sloppy and
indecipherable action sequences are fashionable it's exciting to see action
with this much of a visceral thrill, that forces you to say "holy shit!"
over and over again, even if you're not the type of person to talk to yourself.
Also I think this movie will be a great inspiration for autistic martial artists
around the world much like THE CRIPPLED MASTERS was for amputees in the '70s
or ONG BAK was for the girl in this movie.
2/10/09
CHOPPER came out in 2000 and in the 8 years since I don't think I've seen too many characters or performances as good as Eric Bana playing Mark Brandon Read, whose friends call him Chopper and he calls himself Uncle Chop Chop. I never heard of him before the movie but he's a real Australian criminal who became a celebrity writing his memoirs while he was locked up. And the movie's based on some of those.
It's kind of a weird movie.
It threw me at first because it doesn't have much of a structure and it's
kind of a small story. Maybe I was expecting some kind of crime epic or something,
but instead a bunch of stuff happens and then it ends. I prefer a tight story
but it still had me. It was so captivating I ended up watching it again the
next day.
And the reason is this character of Chopper. He's so funny and likable and
yet clearly a dangerous psychopath. Maybe you can forgive him killing criminals,
but then he punches his girlfriend. And when her mom intervenes he headbutts
her! I mean come on. You don't disrespect someone's mama, and in my opinion
headbutting is a sign of disresepect.
Chopper is a scary lookin
dude. He's big, covered in shitty tattoos, he's got some fake teeth in the
front and after a certain point in the movie his ears are fucked up. Because
he had a guy cut them off in pirson. Long story. But his real talents are
mental, he knows how to fuck with people. Like when he visits the house of
Jimmy, his old friend who betrayed and stabbed him in prison. And he scares
the shit out of him by being too friendly, too jokey. "Wife and kids,
eh? The sort of thing that could be used against a fella," he laughs
as if it could really be just a couple buddies teasing each other.
His relationship with the police is funny too. He goes to them and tells them
he's going to help clean the scum off the streets. When they tell him repeatedly
that they can't endorse something like that he laughs and agrees in a sarcastic
voice as if they're wink wink nudge nudging him. Later he thinks a guy is
after him, kills the guy, then decides he was wrong. So he goes to the police
with a cover story about shooting him in self defense. But they already picked
up a guy so they think Chopper's lying. He should take it as a lucky break
but he's too proud. He gets indignant: "I've never been so insulted in
all my life!" - and tries to prove to them he did it.
The other thing that's funny about Chopper as portrayed in the movie is that he's this cut throat motherfucker but then whenever he gets somebody he immediately feels bad about it. Always apologizing. Sometimes it's really funny, like when he shoots a guy but ends up accompanying him to the hospital. Other times it's kind of creepy, like when he viciously shanks a guy in prison, then is immediately washed over with this look of profound regret. And offers him a cigarette. And tells him everything will be alright. But then when the screws show up he tells them "Looks like he did himself a mischief." Kind of schizophrenic.
I wouldn't say the tone of the movie was schizophrenic though. There are many, many laughs in the movie but they mostly come from the funny things Chopper says. The tone of the movie is still serious, and in the end you get the idea that his bluster is all kind of for show. When it comes down to it he's still locked by himself in a little cell.
And Bana is so incredible in the role he should forever be Eric "Chopper" Bana. He's so funny, so scary and so convincing in his turmoil, which is all shown in his face. He would never admit it. I'm always excited to see Bana in a movie and it's because of this one. Going back and watching it again after being used to the Bana of HULK and MUNICH is amazing - at first it doesn't even look like the same guy.
It's incredible that such a Guinness Book performance would be his first movie role. But what's even more incredible is that in Australia at the time he was known for sketch comedy and the real Chopper chose him for the role. How the fuck did he know? Maybe he should be a casting agent.
The director is Andrew Dominik who went on to do THE ASSASSINATION OF JESSE JAMES BY THE ETC. ETC. years later. I was surprised to see him get so much acclaim on his second movie, but this one's got some good directing. There are some gimmicks like a scene where all the characters narrate in rhyme or a time lapse shot of a crime scene investigation from the POV of the corpse. But it never feels hyperactive or anything.
I thought so at the time and I know for sure now - this is one for the pantheon. Required viewing for afficionados of the badass cinema.
4/24/08
CHRISTINE
I don't know if you remember this movie, it's about a haunted car. In other words, it's based on a Stephen King book. And that also means it's a 50's car that plays old Little Richard songs and crap while it kills people. I know the filmatists today are bad, they gotta put references to all the TV shows and movies from their childhood, but Stephen King is the original. This guy has been cannibalizing his childhood for decades. And also he's been making up stories about inanimate objects killing people. Killer laundry machines and shit like that. Remember in the TV movie version of THE SHINING, there was a haunted fire hose that killed a guy? It's alot like that only a car.
Actually, it's a better movie than I remember it being when I saw it back in the '80s, and I'm going to give most of the credit to Mr. John Carpenter. I'm not saying this is HALLOWEEN or THEY LIVE but it's a good straightforward haunted car movie. The movie stars Keith Gordon (the kid from HOME MOVIES and DRESSED TO KILL) as a nerdy kid whose jock buddy tells him he needs to get laid now that he's a senior and who gets his ass kicked in metal shop. They stab his sack lunch to death with a switchblade and he suffers the humiliation of everybody seeing that his mom packed him yogurt.
So what he does, he finds this old piece of shit car that he buys from a crazy old coot in a shack (Roberts Blossom, who was fucking brilliant in DERANGED). The old man doesn't tell him that his brother just died in the car but he does tell him it's named Christine. And that's what the kid always calls it, "Christine," not "my car." And everybody acts like that's normal, for some reason.
His parents don't approve of the car so he gets a space in a garage inside a junkyard and starts fixing Christine up. This was before the invention of Pimp My Ride, so he puts the elbow grease in himself and he gets the job done. As he does it he becomes less nerdy, more manly, wears darker clothes, slicks his hair back, even starts wearing his collar up like he thinks he's in the '50s. Suddenly he has a girlfriend and he has the balls to call his dad "motherfucker" but nobody can really stand him because he's obsessed with the fucking car. I mean Christine.
But worse than that though, the car is going around running people over, causing people to choke and shit like that. The car is jealous of the girlfriend. Christine goes after anybody that wants to harm her man, but you don't really know if he's inside there or if the car is going out on joyrides by itself. Like if Knight Rider came back messed up after the war and went on a killing spree. And the kid gets crazier too. I think this is the only movie where a guy gets possessed by a car. Also there's a scene at the end where a bulldozer sodomizes the car. John Carpenter even says so on the commentary track. I think that is a historic cinematic first and last.
Somehow it's actually kind of creepy that after he gives her life, Christine can repair herself. She gets totally destroyed several times and then fixes herself. There's even a scene where she's driving around on fire and it's a pretty amazing image. When she gets totalled, she repairs herself. They did this by crushing the car with hydraulics and then running the film backwards. I guarantee you they'd do this now with computers, but this is so much better because you know it's real metal, it's a real car. It's great.
There's some silly crap in here, I mean aside from the haunted car business. Like Harry Dean Stanton is a cop investigating the murders, and he suspects Keith Gordon. But he asks him questions like "how did you get the parts to repair the car? How did you get this color of paint that they don't make anymore? Do you have the receipts?" Like he knows it's a magic car and he's trying to get him to admit it. Come on cop, you can't prove it's a magic car, just lay off.
The depiction of high school is not all that realistic, but it's kind of like DePalma did in CARRIE, and maybe this is a compliment to Stephen King's story too: it kind of puts adults in a teenage perspective while watching the movie. Everything is heightened. The guy that picks on Keith Gordon is this muscular giant with huge sideburns. He looks like John Travolta mixed with He-Man. And I think when you're that age, that's exactly what the older kids in school look like to you. John Travolta mixed with He-Man.
But what's best about this movie is the way it shows men's obsession with cars. Getting a car is how this kid becomes cool, how he becomes a man, how he gets a girlfriend. It's how he becomes independent from his parents. When the bullies want to get him back, they don't beat him up, they beat up his car. He leaves his girlfriend for his car. He fondles his car like it's his girlfriend. The car is the most important thing to him, he and his car become one.
One word of caution, this movie has the song "Bad to the Bone" on the opening credits. I used to be pretty sure that was one of the worst songs ever made. But watching this now, I realized that I was wrong. See, for this movie it works, the words fit, the attitude fits. For this movie, it almost seems like a respectable white rock guy doing a blues song. This was before it was in every other bad movie as a way to say that a guy is tough or, you know, bad to the bone. Or in every movie about a dog. Because get it, dogs eat bones, at least in cartoons. So I realized it's not really the song's fault. It's the way the song has been abused. It's like the flag. You see the flag on enough ads and pickup trucks and lapels, you start to think you don't like the flag. But actually you just don't like these assholes who think they own the flag. The flag itself is fine, and what it stands for to you is great. Those guys are just using it wrong. "Bad to the Bone" is the same way, it's okay in this movie. Not to say it's as good as the flag though. I am NOT dissing Betsy Ross, she did a great job. I'm just saying don't worry, it's not that bad in this movie. But you can put it on mute if you got a problem with it. thanks.
THE CHRONICLES OF RIDDICK
I don't know if you ever saw PITCH BLACK. It was a low budget ALIENS type movie about a bunch of space-people who get stranded on a planet where nasty monsters come out and eat everybody at night. And then if I remember right there is an eclipse, so it's gonna be a long fuckin night. So they're pretty much fucked except luckily they have this dude Riddick on board. He is a prisoner actually, a scary mass killer type, but he has surgically altered glowing eyes so he can see in the dark. So with him being good at killing and seeing in the dark, he is a good guy to let loose in this situation. So the murderer becomes some sort of a part time hero when faced with alien monsters, he saves some lives and possibly leaves his old self behind.
Personally I thought the movie wasn't so hot. It starts out good but the aliens just aren't all that convincing or scary and I lost interest after a while. But this Riddick character, played by the then unknown Vin Diesel, was a cool idea and memorably played by Mr. Diesel. The great Keith David is in there too playing a preacher named Imam, but I guess not as memorably, since I forgot he was in it until I saw him in this sequel.
I don't know what the deal is with the title. It seems to refer to the whole series, like STAR WARS. They even re-released PITCH BLACK as THE CHRONICLES OF RIDDICK: PITCH BLACK so I guess this one should be considered THE CHRONICLES OF RIDDICK: THE CHRONICLES OF RIDDICK. Anyway, what they did here is pretty admirable. Instead of making a traditional sequel where the same characters face the same monsters again, or different characters face the same monsters, or the same characters face the same monsters plus a thrilling new variation on the same monsters where they are much bigger or smaller or can take over human bodies or fly spaceships or something... instead, they took the main characters and put them into a completely different type of story, an epic fantasy type deal with multiple planets and races and armies and prophesies and all that sort of crap. And at the center of it all is Riddick, the notorious killer who Judi Dench (long story) wants to save the galaxy or whatever.
In the opening scene, Riddick is rocking a John Walker Lind and a head full of dreads, running from bounty hunters. He traces the bounty back to Keith David on the Keith David planet, shaves his head and ends up trying to stop an invasion by the evil Necromongers, a race of uptight death obsessed religious fanatics who fly to different planets in giant religious statues and try to force their beliefs and fashion on everybody. This brings him on a big adventures fighting against armies, busting his old friend Jack (who passed for a boy in PITCH BLACK but now is some Denise Richards type babe) out of an underground prison and facing down the king of the Necromongers.
This is not a great sci-fi movie for the history books like ALIEN or something. A guy told me, "I'm sick of half-assed sci-fi movies," but I was quick to tell him that actually this one is more like 2/3 assed. It didn't knock my socks off but you know, I could feel my socks getting loose at some points. I gotta admit I enjoyed it. I liked the basic story of it, the idea behind the bad guy's culture, and the idea of the mass murderer chosen one. I liked the way the necromongers space ships look like gothic statues, and their armor has knives built into the back like they've all been stabbed. I liked the ALIEN RESURRECTION type bounty hunter that keeps failing to outsmart Riddick. But most of all, I cannot lie, I liked Riddick. This growly voiced muscle bound dude with an iconic look (shaved head, dark goggles, glowing eyes), who can apparently get out of any tight situation with a couple of knives and/or a rope. He gets alot more to do than he did in PITCH BLACK, and only once does he face monsters. (When this happens he doesn't react the same way as in the first picture. His response is more like what DMX would do if a bunch of dogs ran after him.)
I do have some complaints though. Riddick is a cool character, but he could be cooler. He needs some better lines. The dialogue in this movie is just plain dumb. They try to make him super cool and on top of things like Blade, but they don't give him a "motherfuckers always tryin to ice skate uphill" type line. They don't even give him a "Just out for a Sunday stroll. I guess it's not Sunday" (Steven Seagal, FIRE DOWN BELOW.) The guy needs to talk more clever. And while we're on the subject of talking, he should do less of it. He has such a great voice, I think we would appreciate it more if he would shut up more. Be like Clint Eastwood. Omit needless words. Make it count.
I think also it might've been a good idea to earn this one an R-rating, not a PG-13. For all the talk about Riddick being a bad guy, he doesn't do a whole lot of bad stuff. I guess Hollywood are the experts on what makes money, but I'm pretty sure kids were able to see the TERMINATOR movies, the ALIEN movies, the PREDATOR movies, and, uh, PITCH BLACK, all of which were R-rated. I don't know what they're worried about they have to keep it PG-13. Whoever is the executive responsible for keeping this thing kiddie safe, I want them to face the music. I wanna see heads roll for there not being any heads rolling in this movie. I like heads in movies, they are good when they roll.
I guess it is a motif in Mr. Diesel's work, though, that he's always a fake bad guy. In XXX he is a menace to society turned secret agent who reluctantly saves the world. In THE FAST AND THE FUCKING FURIOUS he is a criminal who ends up convincing the good guy cop to let him go, because he's so cool. And in PITCH BLACK he's a killer turned monster killer. But he never really does anything too bad in any of these movies. He's not Parker. He's not a total bastard. He's never all that threatening but the movies tell you he's a bad guy, and then proceed to make him a good guy. In this one luckily he doesn't repeat the mistake of XXX and sell out at the end. I won't give away what happens but I think even some people who don't like this movie would watch a sequel just to find out what happens next.
And the bottom line is I had fun watching this guy. I like how ridiculously cocky he is. There is a part where out of the blue he starts narrating in his growly Vin Diesel voice and explains his plan, and it makes it hard not to root for this goofball with the glowing eyes. If he will narrate to you like that, then you almost owe him something. Give him a chance.
Now as most of you know, I have a theory that alot of the best popular movies reflect the politics of their era, whether intentionally or not. Everything from PLANET OF THE APES to MINORITY REPORT, to X-MEN 2 and even the STAR WARS prequels have themes that strongly parallel what was going on in the world at the time of their release. Unfortunately I think CHRONICLES OF RIDDICK has the exact wrong politics for our time. The premise is that in dire times, you don't send good to fight evil, you send "a different type of evil." Yeah, tell that to Rambo III, helping out the mujahadeen. If you think about our old buddy Osama bin Laden, our old buddy Saddam Hussein, the tremendous success of the butt pyramids in Abu Ghraib, etc., it is pretty clear that our country has worn out the tired notion of "it takes evil to fight evil."
It's still cool in movies though so have at it Riddick. Next time let's see you earn that evil label though. Let's have a little more HIGH PLAINS DRIFTER and a little less XXX.
CHUCK AND BUCK
As you know my favorite type of picture is the Badass picture. But not all pictures can be Badass pictures, that is just a sad fact of life that sooner or later each and every one of us must face. So if I was gonna make a list of the other types of pictures I like, and in what order, somewhere on there would be the ol' sad 'n funny. The picture that is so sad it's funny or at least it's sad and at the same time a little funny but maybe a little more sad than funny, really.
Anyway this one Chuck and Buck is one of those pictures. What it's about is this poor schmuck named Buck who is I believe 27 years old but he lives with his mom in a room full of toys and sucks on lollipops all day. Then one day his mom dies and at the funeral he sees, for the first time in years, his childhood best friend Chuck. He tries to hang out with the dude but it's really uncomfortable because Chuck is grown up now and some kind of record industry bigshot living in LA but Buck is like some kind of retard and all he wants to do is have sleepovers and talk about the stupid shit that happened to them when they were like 8.
Now if that's all it was, hell that wouldn't be a movie. But wait. There's more. Buck becomes obsessed with Chuck. But Chuck won't return his phone calls. So he moves to LA and spies on Chuck at work and writes a play about their childhood and puts it on at the children's theater across the street. Chuck tries to be cool about all this but what's he supposed to do when his childhood buddy starts coming over all the time and putting the moves on him whenever his wife isn't around. jesus.
What I like about this picture is that both of the actors play the characters just right. I guess neither of them have acted before, Buck was a writer for some tv show (and wrote the movie) and the other dude I guess produced american pie and wrote one of the fatty professor movies. You wouldn't know it though. He plays his role very straight and he's kind of a serious, low voiced guy who looks like he could be the dad of the guy on the tv show Roswell. But that would make him tom hanks so he must not be. Anyway he plays the part very realistically, not exaggerated for humor or nothing, so it makes it very easy to imagine yourself in the same uncomfortable situation.
the movie would sink if Buck didn't work, though. But this dude cuts the mustard. At first I didn't think I was gonna like the movie because his childlike tendencies are a little too exaggerated, the way he has children's toys in his room and never stops sucking on the lollies. But as it goes on you get more used to him and his patheticness brings some of the laffs. He has no social skills. He drones in a whiny, effeminate type voice about all kinds of boring shit about his childhood but he doesn't seem to realize nobody else is interested in it. To him a good party story is, "Yeah we were best friends, and my name was Buck and he went by Chuck instead of Charlie, so they called us Chuck and Buck. Ha ha ha."
He's a pathetic loser and a stalker but he has a sweetness and an innocence so you start to sort of care about the motherfucker especially as the childhood secrets start coming out and it gets a little more creepy and icky and what not.
There are two other characters who are really funny in the movie. One of them is the lady who agrees against her better judgment to direct Buck's shitty play. The other is the moron who he chooses to star in the play just because he looks vaguely like chuck.
This is a pretty good movie, I really liked it even though it was so fucking depressing. But it ends a little upbeat in my opinion. Anyway I will definitely watch this one again if they ever decide to do it for real, on film.
CIRCLE OF IRON
What if I were to tell you that there was a movie based on a story by Bruce Lee (sort of based on his zen philosophy), starring David Carradine (in multiple roles) but also featuring Christopher Lee, Roddy McDowall and Eli Wallach? And maybe I would also say it takes place in a fantasy world and Carradine plays a flute that he also uses for a weapon, and let's say that my man James Coburn - well, he's not in it as an actor, but being a student of Bruce Lee maybe he helped write the story. And then the screenplay was written by Sterling Silophant who wrote THE TOWERING INFERNO and crap like that. But then the director was some guy named Richard Moore who only directed that one movie. But he was cinematographer for THE STONE KILLER with Charles Bronson. But also ANNIE.
Well let's take the gloves off, you can forget about "what if" and come down to the world of reality because I'm about to tell you that I just saw EXACTLY THAT movie described above. (see above.) CIRCLE OF IRON starts out with a corny statement about Bruce Lee before going into a MORTAL KOMBAT type competition where half naked white dudes with mustaches do karate against each other as some type of a test. See, they are fighting for the right to go on a quest to kill some dude named Zetan and steal his book. (I know that sounds like a waste of time, but it's a pretty rare book though, one of those magic books that tells you all the secrets.) We figure out quickly that our guy is the shirtless guy, Cord the seeker. This is the first sign of trouble when you realize the main character is just some long haired soap opera dude with no presence or charisma of any kind. And not necessarily the greatest martial artist you ever seen, either. He's interchangeable with any of those long haired white dude types from the '70s and '80s. He could be the dude from BEASTMASTER or ALIEN NATION tv series or anything, but it turns out he's from DALLAS and YOUNG AND THE RESTLESS.
But anyway Cord is the outsider who doesn't follow the rules, and he loses the match, but decides to go on the quest anyway. He's gonna have to go past a couple more trials to get to Zetan, but fortunately he has one of those wise blind dudes (Carradine) to help him. He has a cane with a jingle bell on it, but its also his flute and his staff. When he swings it at motherfuckers you hear the wind blowing through it and the bell jingling. And then he says wise little sayings all the time.
Cord has to meet different dudes and learn different lessons to defeat them, and all of the dudes turn out to be played by David Carradine. He even plays a monkey who does monkey kung fu against Cord. (I figured Roddy McDowall would be in this scene, but I don't think he was. On the other hand, I don't know what scene he was in.)
The different trials do not just involve fighting. He also has to pass tests like the old there is a naked chick, what do you do test. There is a whole abstinence/castration theme first introduced in my favorite scene where he comes across Eli Wallach sitting in a big metal jug of oil in the middle of the desert because he's trying to burn his dick off. 'Cause he can't control himself. Cord looks into the jug and says, "Your legs look like seeweed," and Eli says, "I hope so!"
I don't know what the story is behind this picture. I bet Bruce wanted to play the multiple roles, which would've been cool, but unfortunately he either died or just was replaced by Carradine, just like on KUNG FU. I thought that was cool in KILL BILL VOLUME 2 when you finally meet Bill and you think, this guy actually seems pretty nice and plus he was in DEATH RACE 2000, why does she want to kill him? And then you remember oh yeah, he massacred her wedding party, and also he took KUNG FU from Bruce Lee.
So he's a thief, but he's still cool in this movie. You just have to accept that he's gonna be David Carradine cool, not Bruce Lee cool. And the rest of the movie is not as cool as him. The whole mideival fantasy deal is a little too KRULL in my opinion, and the fights are a tease. David does some good moves but he doesn't fight enough for it to really be a martial arts movie, like Bruce would've made. Also I gotta point out, the title CIRCLE OF IRON doesn't mean jack shit. I mean there's a guy who wears a circle of iron at the beginning but it's not important at all. Might as well call it SHIRTLESS since that's what the main character wears in the same scene.
I wasn't making that up thought about Eli Wallach burning his dick off, and the weird touches like that make it enjoyable. Also there's a couple good sunset shots and pretty good music.
It woulda been better if James Coburn starred in it though, I want to see him do some kung fu.
That's all I have to say about CIRCLE OF IRON, sorry.
CITY OF INDUSTRY
Here's a small time crime picture for you, never got much attention as a child but grew up to be a pretty good movie. It starts out with Timothy Hutton stealing a car (very believable hotwire scene here with actual hammering of the dashboard, not just pulling some wires out) then going to pick up his partner for a job. They eventually get together their crew for a jewel heist, it consists of Timothy Hutton, his older brother Roy Egan (Harvey Keitel), Jorge (some guy I thought I recognized, but turns out he was only in a handful of movies before he died) and an obnoxious hotshot jackass named Skip, sort of a Stephen Dorff type (Stephen Dorff).
There is a pretty strong Richard Stark feel to this for a while as they prepare their heist. No funny stuff, no fancy talk, just straight business and some primal percussion type soundtrack shit to get your heart beating. Everything goes smooth actually until after the heist when this fucker Skip decides to shoot everybody, burn down the motor home and take off with the boodle. Fucking asshole! So the rest of the movie is about Roy trying to find and kill Skip, Skip trying to have Roy killed before he finds him. Very simple. That's what I like.
One thing weird about this movie, the two main characters are named Roy and Skip. You don't get that too often. Usually one would be John, then maybe the other one would have a fancy name like Esteban or Molochai or whatever, but not Roy and Skip. That's pretty unusual.
I said earlier Skip was kind of a Stephen Dorff type. That's because he's kind of the same character, Deacon Frost, that this guy played in the classic Wesley Snipes picture BLADE. Deacon Frost was the young spikey haired showboat who thought he was better than all the other vampires, listened to lots of techno music and scared all the old timers with his young edgy mixed blood vampire methods. This is the same thing here, he thinks he's hot shit, he plays loud, bad music while he's driving and he stirs up trouble with all the pros like Roy and his crew. Also he has bleached blonde hair. This was 1997 though, one year before Blade, so Stephen Dorff didn't know yet about how motherfuckers always trying to ice skate uphill.
I also said before this has kind of a Richard Stark feel, but you can't quite say Roy is like Parker. Because there's one part after his brother dies where he sits in a hotel room doing that patented Harvey Keitel crying that sounds like a dog freaking out from 4th of July fireworks. Running around shitting on the carpet and everything. Parker doesn't get emotional like that. That's for Keitel and Keitel only.
But otherwise it's the same kind of deal because Roy is ruthlessly hunting this fuck down. And there's even a scene like in The Hunter/Point Blank/Payback where he goes and finds a junkie passed out girlfriend, except it's not his wife, it's his brother's girl. And he tells her very matter of factly that her man's dead, just so he can ask her about Skip.
Also I gotta say he is very Parker-like in the scene where he goes to a bar and pretends to know Skip, ends up beating the bartender bloody with a telephone.
This has nothing to do with that, but there's a funny part where he gets in a scuffle and he drops his hotel key, big plastic keychain and all. Then he apparently doesn't notice and they use the key to track him. If I understand it right, he did this on purpose to lure them to a different room so he could take care of them. (I think.) But what's funny is, the bad guys actually send some chumps to the room to try to kill him. Didn't it occur to them hey, if we have his key, then maybe he's not in there? Or does he carry two keys?
Oh well. It's gritty and simple and paints an ugly grey picture of Los Angeles you don't see too often. There's some good moments, like a small part for Michael Jai White (guy who was cut out of Kill Bill). Also for Charlie's Angels fans, they show Lucy Liu's boobs. She was in Payback too, by the way, which brings us back to Richard Stark.
But where the movie strays a little from the Richard Stark feel, and also where it loses its momentum in my opinion, is when it brings Famke Jannsen into the story. She plays Jorge's widow, who tries to help Roy find Skip, but only for money so she can put her kids through college. She does fine and she's beautiful and all but I think her character was a mistake on the part of whoever wrote this thing (see imdb for details). Because everybody else in the story is completely a part of the underworld. They understand robbing and killing, that's their thing. Those are the type of characters that are interesting, that's why people enjoy crime stories. But her character is a straight person, she hates what Jorge did, resents all criminals, etc. She's supposed to be sympathetic, someone the audience can relate to.
And to that I say, fuck that. Right when the momentum starts going, we got Roy tracking Skip, going in for the kill - suddenly we stop for long conversations in Famke Jannsen's backyard. And we have to start worrying more about kids without a dad than about revenge and diamonds.
It's not too late. The movie is not ruined. It still goes to a satisfying conclusion, but I think that little sidestep softens the blow. It's what makes this picture pretty good instead of pretty damn good.
Pretty good is still pretty good though. This one's worth seeing.
CLASS
OF 1984
CLASS OF 1984 is an earlier picture by COMMANDO's Mark L. Lester. It starts
out shitty with a terrible song by Alice Cooper and your usual '80s horse
shit about cities being overrun with maniac punk rocker delinquent savages.
In this case the problem is at a high school where new music teacher Mr. Norris
(Perry King) is surprised to find metal detectors, switchblades, gang fights
and students who lick their middle fingers and say "sit on this, motherfucker."
His new friend, science teacher Roddy McDowall, has learned to get used to
it, and carries a piece in his briefcase.
But Mr. Norris can't just get used to it. These hoodlums are always interfering
with his class, and they sell drugs to one student who flips out and climbs
up the flagpole and lets go. And later wiseass trumpet player Michael J. Fox
(in his first movie role, and looking about 14 years-old) gets stabbed, something
that rarely happened on Family Ties, in the BACK TO THE FUTURE or
TEEN WOLF sagas, or in any of those TV movies about summer camp. Plus they
start threatening Norris outside of school, showing up at his house in Halloween
costumes and spraying him in the face with fake blood. Which is a metaphor
for real blood, if I know my teens.
Even though it's kind of funny the whole way through I have to admit I wasn't
into it at first. Lester obviously believed this shit and claims on the extras
that he was prophetic about violence in schools. Because a gang of CLOCKWORK
ORANGE dudes with face paint meeting in the bathroom to audition new hookers
for their prostitution ring is TOTALLY the same thing as Columbine.
But when was the last time you had trouble with a punk rocker, anyway? I mean
sometimes they smell bad, but mostly they either beg for change or eat food
without meat or dairy. No harm done. Even in the '80s I don't remember them
being a problem. These type of movies are laughable because they're such a
paranoid delusion based on old people's fear of young people doing things
they don't understand, like wearing facepaint and listening to a different
type of shitty music than adults listen to. And the punk rockers in these
movies are always so goofy. You can't believe Dick Van Patten's half brother
Timothy would be their leader, even if he talks about himself in the third
person and likes to seig heil. His name is Stegman and he says things like
"I am the future!" and "Life is pain. Pain is everything."
But as the movie gets more over-the-top it gets better and better. Stegman
beats himself up in the bathroom and frames Mr. Norris for it. Mr. Norris
tries to talk to Stegman's mom but she won't talk to him, then on his way
out Stegman threatens him over the intercom. So he steals Stegman's car and
rams the shit out of it. King is real convincing as a sensitive bearded teacher
type so it's great when he suddenly starts going overboard.
And then the war just keeps escalating. Rabbits are crucified. Students are
quizzed at gun point. McDowall
tries to run them all over (remember when they used to spank people in school?
well how do you feel about running kids over?) but his car flips and blows
up. And by the way, that's one thing sorely missing in digital age movies
- cars flipping over and blowing up. It's a cliche but it takes work to do.
You need a stunt driver doing dangerous work, a pyrotechnician doing dangerous
work, somebody to build a hidden ramp, and obviously you need to destroy a
car. It's a ritualistic sacrifice to placate the audience. A sign of respect.
It's because nobody performs these sacrifice rituals anymore that audiences
are growing angry. And movies will feel our wrath.
Throughout the movie Norris has two goals: to somehow stop these creeps from
fucking everybody over, and to actually teach his class of non-creeps to play
music. These two things come together to create the third act where Norris
is Pushed Too Far on the night of his big concert in the gym. This might be
a good place to skip a chapter, because Stegman and his boys (and one girl,
who is kind of hot by the way, but don't tell her I said that she'd probaly
bite my nose off) break into Norris's house and rape his pregnant wife DEATH
WISH 1-2 style (thankfully not as graphic). Then the girl presents photographic
evidence of the crime to him just as he's about to begin conducting the symphony.
And does the always useful penis-'n-vagina-in-'n-out hand gesture.
Now both the characters
and the movie have gone too far. Of course, when that happens you have no
choice but to go Roddy McDowall on that ass. He runs off, but one of his students
takes over conducting. So the movie delivers both a symphony of music and
a symphony of REVENGE.
Norris takes on Stegman's gang in a fight that makes its way through the woodshop
and the auto shop. So it is possible that arms will be sawed off, motherfuckers
will be set on fire, cars will fall on top of people, etc. I won't give away
whether or not these things do happen but I think you will be pleased, unless
you hate movies that are awesome.
During this section of the movie I thought wow, this is a way better movie
than I realized earlier on. The craziness that it was building up to makes
up for any lackluster stretches earlier on. And the end, where the violent
revenge makes its way into the gym in the middle of the concert, is the kind
of perfect climax you always want in these types of movies but usually don't
get.
I am so proud of CLASS OF 1984. It grew up so fast. I'm going to buy it a copy of Oh, the Places You'll Go!
5/17/08
Director Mark L. Lester
returns in 1990 for an ambitiously ridiculous sequel to CLASS OF 1984. Instead
of taking some character or setting from that movie and continuing with it
he takes the same sort of story and puts it in a futuristic sci-fi world.
So instead of a paranoid vision of violence in schools a couple years from
now it's a purposely ridiculous paranoid vision of cyborg teachers taking
on violence in schools.
The first one took a while to warm up, but CLASS OF 1999 is at maximum awesome
levels straight out of the gate. You can't help but laugh as the movie apes
ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK and then ROBOCOP and then a little TERMINATOR. The ESCAPE
FROM NEW YORK part is that the hero is a juvenile delinquent who they let
out of prison to go-- well, not on a mission. To high school. And it's in
a walled off zone where the kids are so out of control the government has
decided not to enforce law there.
But the Department of Educational Defense has hired a military contractor
(this is where ROBOCOP comes in) to implement an experimental program of robotic
teacher enforcers. They were combat robots but were reprogrammed to teach.
And one of them is Pam Grier. Other notable cast members include Malcolm McDowell,
Stacy Keach (with freaky contact lenses) and Joshua John Miller, that freaky
kid vampire from NEAR DARK who was also in RIVER'S EDGE.
The opening is great because they explain this sci-fi premise and it's so
absurd but straight-faced that you gotta appreciate it. And then it gets even
better because the kid and his brothers are driving to school and there is
a shoot out and, yes, a car flip. And the school is walled off with barbed
wire and there's an armored school bus. Good shit.
I guess after working with some nice kids like Michael J. Fox Lester stopped
being as scared of the youth. So this time he actually sides with them. Yes,
teen gang warfare is out of control, and of course there is a futuristic drug
called Turbo or Oktane or Maxxx or MegaKrak or something like that, but the
kids are the good guys because the robot teachers are reverting to their military
programming and somebody needs to stop them. So that makes it more like a
typical teen movie than the first one, which was from an adult point of view.
But it's a typical teen movie where they're battling evil cyborgs, so there's lots of funny shit in here. For example when a classroom gets out of control one of the roboteachers puts a kid over his knee and gives him a high speed robotic spanking.
The climax is not as exciting as the first movie but then they totally rip off THE TERMINATOR and have a seemingly destroyed robot come out of the flames with most of his skin burned off. But instead of stop motion they use animatronic puppets. They don't look quite real but that makes it way creepier. They're not supposed to be real humans anyway. I was really impressed by those effects.
The movie also has some extra appeal for me because it was filmed in Seattle. If you live around here you may recognize Lincoln High School, which is in Wallingford.
Personally I think 1984 is a more solid movie, but 1999 is much more absurd, the JASON X to 1984's any other FRIDAY THE 13TH. So I would not blame any of you if you like this one more. I think it's also time to acknowledge that Mark L. Lester is a director who deserves some type of respect. You don't do these two movies and COMMANDO on accident.
There's apparently a third movie in the series (with the incorrect title CLASS OF 1999 II) but it's not by Lester and not on DVD in the US. I tried to rent an import of it but despite how it was labelled the movie on it was actually just CLASS OF 1999.
5/18/08
CLIFFHANGER
Long ago, before the rogue Finn Renny Harlin's Samson locks were shorn, he was not the director of DEEP BLUE SEA. He was the director of DIE HARD 2. Or DIE HARDER as everybody thought it was called then. (This was before the internet, so I couldn't explain to them that it was called DIE HARD 2.) Well, CLIFFHANGER is another movie from that o.g. Renny Harlin, or Renny Harlin Classic. And from where I stand this may be his finest McClane-free picture.
Of course, I'm coming late to the party. I missed this one when it came out in 1993 but I was planning on seeing it, so I saw it this week in 2007. So the rest of the world has had 14 years to know what I'm about to tell you: some guys robbing money from a treasury plane drop the money in the mountains, call a rescue team to try to steal their helicopter, and wind up having to deal with ace mountain climber Sylvester Stallone.
I wasn't convinced during the opening. I know it's a pretty famous action scene as far as '90s action movies go, and the fact that it's mostly real mountain climbing done by the real actors is undeniably impressive. But I couldn't take all the casual weizenheimer talk as Stallone comes to rescue Michael Rooker and his date from a mountain peak. Even though the girl is supposed to be a novice she's joking and flirting with Stallone and not showing any fear, which makes it hard to take the whole thing seriously. Especially since they're up on a mountain where you'd figure it would be hard to talk to each other at such low volumes. Then the big scene with Stallone trying to grab the girl's hand when she's falling doesn't look like it's in those same real mountains so it kind of took me out of it.
But the movie gets better, this is a decent take on DIE HARD ON A MOUNTAIN. Stallone's hero role makes sense: the bad guys have his friend Michael Rooker hostage to use as a guide. If they find the money they will kill Michael Rooker, so Stallone has to keep them from finding the money. It's great to see Rooker (HENRY: PORTRAIT OF A SERIAL KILLER himself) playing a straight ahead good guy. He blames Stallone for the death of his girlfriend, but he is completely loyal to him and risks himself to save his former friend. DIE HARD is a more cynical movie where certain characters will betray anybody to save their own ass. So it had me expecting that Rooker would be the bad guy, or would help them because of his anger at Stallone, or would be tempted to. But no, you got heroism all over the place. I liked it.
There are certain levels of action movie quality. There are shitty action movies like, I don't know, THE MARINE. There are masterpieces like DIE HARD and HARD BOILED. In the high-middle area are slick, formulaic but well-executed studio movies like UNDER SIEGE, UNDER SIEGE 2, and SPEED. CLIFFHANGER is somewhere in that area. A little lower altitude I think, but close.
Slickness might not be enough to make it memorable though, so you gotta have a couple crazy touches here and there that people will remember. And that's where Renny comes in. One classic moment is the climax of a prolonged battle inside a cave. Stallone powerlifts a dude above his head and impales him on a stalactite. I trust I don't need to explain any further. Obviously if you haven't seen this yet you're sold, I should probaly just end the review here.
And yet I go on. My other favorite part is when Stallone uses a guy as a sled. He slides down the mountain on this dude and then he pulls out his ice axe. And you're thinking holy shit, he's already sledding on the guy, now he's gonna go ax murderer on him? While still sledding? Well, that's not what happens, he uses the ax to hook into the ground so he doesn't launch off the cliff with the sled-man. Good trick though, not only does he send him over a ledge, he makes him think he's gonna get an ax to the face first. That guy must've shit his pants twice, once from the ax and a second time from the plummet.
Another highlight is John Lithgow doing a ridiculous Arrogant British Villain accent. He's definitely no Hans Grueber, but he's good for a laugh here and there.
The movie did test my good will at the end. It has a DIE HARD WITH A VENGEANCE style stretch where Stallone's character is home free but unneccessarily goes after the bad guys. I mean, this is a regular mountain climber guy, this is not a cop or anything. His friend is free, Lithgow has released his girlfriend in exchange for the money. All he has to do is be safe, give him the money and everything's okay. Instead he plays a trick where he throws the money into the helicopter blades. Why does he care? It's just money. It's not babies. It's not money that belongs to babies. It's from the treasury. Who gives a shit? Just give the asshole the money and live your life with your girlfriend in the mountains. I don't have to say "don't be a hero" because you already ARE a hero. Just give him the money.
But no, Stallone is too god damned stubborn to give this guy the money. I hate to say it but he kind of gets what he deserves when his trick backfires and he ends up down the side of the mountain wrestling John Lithgow on top of a helicopter somehow suspended by a wire. You reap what you sow, dude and in this case you're reaping a suspended helicopter wrestling match. I'm glad you're safe but that was pretty stupid there at the end. Quit trying to show off, hotshot.
CLOVERFIELD is a new movie about a giant monster named Cloverfield who comes out of the water and attacks New York City. Cloverfield knows he has a sissy name that's way too close to that asshole cat Garfield. He wants it to have a more rebellious ring to it, like [Holden] Caulfield, or at least semi-respectable, like Seinfeld before he started advertising BEE MOVIE. So to prove he's not fucking around and to establish dominance one of the first things Cloverfield does on his visit to the big city is rip the head off the Statue of Liberty and throw it across Manhattan. If he was trying to bowl it was a gutterball but, poor bowler or not that shit is threatening to a human like you or me. Let's face it, he has a size advantage. That is the main thing going on between Cloverfield and us. More weight, more reach. Not really a fair fight.
Since we don't actually witness the incident (except for where the head lands) it's hard to really know for sure what Cloverfield's motive is. It's easy to jump to conclusions that he's making a statement about the loss of liberty in America post 9-11, or perhaps he is some sort of rabid anti-American and is threatening our liberty. He should realize that it is very insensitive in the post 9-11 world to not only attack landmarks in Manhattan but to make people think of being beheaded. I don't care if the fucker's from space, if you're visiting some place you gotta do research on the local customs and not just be a big asshole like that. So he's either very anti-american or just a prick. Or maybe he hates women. My guess though is he thought the statue looked at him funny. Or he saw that torch and thought she was armed and just acted on reflex. After all, it is New York. Okay, I have gone through alot of theories here but I'm sticking with that last one, the Amadou Diallo theory. If anybody finds evidence to back me up on one of those stupid "viral marketing" websights everybody got all caught up in please let me know.
The truth is we don't really know alot about Cloverfield. He comes from the sea. He is not careful about damaging buildings. I heard he eats people. He has some bad hygiene, because giant poisonous spiders flake off of him. Worst dandruff ever. The movie really isn't about Cloverfield though as much as it's about some urban professional youths who are having a party that gets interupted by Cloverfield's out of control behavior. As you know this is a movie like CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST or MAN BITES DOG or THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT or THE LAST BROADCAST or GUINEA PIG or THE LAST HORROR MOVIE or the first part of BEHIND THE MASK or the last part of SNUFF or various parts of FACES OF DEATH or MY LITTLE EYE or REAL TIME: SIEGE AT LUCAS STREET MARKET or REDACTED or THE POUGHKEEPSIE TAPES or DIARY OF THE DEAD or WAITING FOR GUFFMAN where it pretends to be actual footage of a real event. There's a going away party for a guy named Rob, and his brother's girlfriend wants to make a video for him to remember them by. Then they keep taping during the monster attack "because people will want to know," and you are watching their tape, which was found in Central Park.
I'm sure this is a premise that a million people thought of before: "what if somebody had a camcorder there when Godzilla attacked?" But these type of movies are usually low budget independents and that's why they're doing the fake documentary gimmick. This one is only low by studio standards, so it's kind of cool that somebody put the money into it to show what it would be like to just capture a glimpse of giant tail or tentacle as you're running down a rumbling city street. The effects look pretty real and it definitely gives you a different angle on the standard giant monster story. (A low angle.)
I was impressed by the way it sets up the characters. The one you like best is the one you see the least, the guy behind the camera for most of the movie. How many movies have a memorable off screen character? He's immediately set up as kind of a dumb funny guy, providing comic relief from behind the camera, and they establish his personality so you believe he might keep taping through alot of this. Of course, we've seen enough amateur video of disasters we almost don't need an explanation for that. CNN calls them "iReporters" I think. And there's a scene where everybody takes out their phones and starts snapping pictures of the Statue of Liberty's severed head, which rings very true. But they don't try to force feed you some point about modern technology and voyeurism or the way the camera lens acts as a protective layer to distance these guys from the horror in front of them or that by capturing a soul (taking a photo) we are taking away its power or some shit like that. It's all there if you want to read it but they feel no need to get out the highlighters.
But wait a minute. This giant monster movie is really about PEOPLE? In most of the Godzilla type movies that's the last thing you want to see is a bunch of fuckin people. There are way too many scenes of scientists standing around in lab coats discussing things. This goes all the way back to the first GODZILLA. That had a good tragic character at the center but still, you're always waiting for the monster to eat a train or something. GODZILLA FINAL WARS is the only one I know of that has a memorable human character, because they have some guy from Ultimate Fighting who has a big mustache and tries to fight Godzilla with a sword. Would've been cool if that guy was invited to Rob's party. Things would've turned out better.
Anyway, the natural answer would be to have less people and more monsters, but this movie's answer is to make the people a little more relatable. Alot of people are excited because the movie is produced by J.J. Abrams, who does TV shows that people besides me like to watch and enjoy, etc. And of course everybody knows that director Matt Reeves can be trusted, as he is the co-writer of UNDER SIEGE 2: DARK TERRITORY. But what people don't mention is that those two were also the creators of the late '90s TV show FELICITY which was also about young people in New York City who have relationships and somewhat naturalistic acting and like to make home videos and are involved in clever gimmicks and do impulsive things because they think they're in love and have fancy apartments and wear nice sweaters. From what I understand. I don't know much about the show, apparently something about a young girl named Felicity Porter (Keri Russel) who upon graduating high school impulsively decides to ditch her plans and move to New York City to go to the same school as a boy she barely knows but has a crush on. Then it expands to be about the developing relationships between a group of her roommates, classmates and co-workers as she learns life lessons and struggles with her affection for two boyfriends who are opposites and decides to study art instead of medicine and then in one episode they're all tiny and trapped inside a box and it's shot TWILIGHT ZONE style. I don't know, you'd have to ask somebody more familiar with it but someone who has seen it might argue that CLOVERFIELD is a natural extension of the type of style those guys did on FELICITY but expanded into the world of giant monster attacks. I think maybe I heard somebody argue that or something, I'm not sure.
But even if you can't relate to these youths with their crushes and feelings and what not, at least you can relate to their size. Because like I said, they are human-sized, just like you. I can't emphasize this enough. They are smaller than Cloverfield. This might be a broad generalization but in my experience all humans are small compared to Cloverfield and it's pretty awe inspiring to be in their shoes looking up at that motherfucker. For the record, I have no idea what Cloverfield looks like, the clearest shot of him is looking up at him from below his neck, like a nipple's eye view. If I had to guess I'd say he looked like that monster Luke Skywalker killed in RETURN OF THE JEDI fucked some weird albino bat or something.
I went to a midnight show with a huge crowd of nerds. One pissed off guy yelled "BULLSHIT!" at the end, which I thought was funny. All I can figure is he was frustrated that it is exactly what the premise tells you and no more. You don't ever know where the monster came from or if it for sure got stopped or the usual sort of things you see in the ten thousand regular giant monster movies available for you on home video. You don't know what the president said or the guys in the war room and there was never a part where an animal just barely escaped death. Yeah, those kind of movies can be fun but the strength of this one is that it's not that type of movie. You have a limited perspective, a limited knowledge, just like you would if you were at Rob's party when the shit went down.
So I thought they did a good job and it's well put together, complete with awkward in-camera edits and what not. The characters are more likable than the ones in BLAIR WITCH PROJECT because they whine less, they show care for each other and they have more of a gallows sense of humor. And you glimpse some pretty harrowing monster destruction, so it works on an amusement park ride level.
I also think it has a heart to it. Everybody knows the original GODZILLA was about the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, so it's not surprising that this movie is clearly coming from a post 9-11 perspective. (sorry, that's the third time I've used that term. But I swear it was relevant.) If somebody used this gimmick before 2001 maybe it would've been more about what other awesome things the monster could do besides disrespecting Lady Liberty. Remember INDEPENDENCE DAY, everybody was all excited about blowing up landmarks?
That's not the mentality of CLOVERFIELD, it's more interested in showing the emotions we all went through on 9-11. It's about friends wanting to appreciate the time they have together, wanting to make sure the people they love know that they are loved, wanting to go back for the person who was left behind, wanting to go with their friend to go back for the person who was left behind even though they know it's a stupid thing to do. But it's what they need to do. These are all responses to any disaster but to many Americans they are things you thought about more after knowing about 9-11, so they're things that become more necessary in a movie like this than they were before. Before Will Smith could've just went in and started shit talking Cloverfield, calling him ugly. But who knows if he's ugly or not for his species, we don't even know what his peers would look like if he had any, or which one would be considered ugly by their standards of beauty. So that would be kind of racist. Come on Will Smith, this is 2008. Not trying to be "PC" or anything but jesus, don't be such an asshole.
So this is a really intense experience, in fact people were so involved in the movie that they started to throw up! I've never seen anything like it. Nah, I'm just fucking with you. I didn't notice any puking in the theater, but there was quite a bit outside the exit. It may or may not have been caused by the motion sickness from watching a camera shake around for 70 minutes. I noticed they carefully placed little camera-stays-still intermissions every couple scenes. I hate shakycam because it takes the geography out of action scenes, but I didn't think it would be a problem here since obviously I know going in that it's the whole reason for the movie. It makes it seem like a real video but in a weird way it kind of made the movie less intense for me, it's kind of distancing. Because it puts you in the position of watching a video of an event, not experiencing the event. If you were "Hud," the character with the camera, you would see much more than what's in the viewfinder. You wouldn't be as disoriented as you are watching this movie.
So it's strange because I liked the "realism" of CLOVERFIELD but on a gut level I was much more affected by the more artificial, more Hollywood approach of Spielberg's WAR OF THE WORLDS. It's a similar perspective - you only see what Tom Cruise and his family see, so the tripods are usually across a field and you don't cut away to some big meeting in the war room. And the information you learn is from news reports or people they run into. You might hear some information passed on by a soldier on the ground, but you won't see the top guy giving the command. So it has that limited perspective but it's still shot like a movie, you get the benefit of seeing things more clearly and being less nauseous. And without pretending not to be a movie, it subliminally gives you a feeling of reality. It creates reality instead of dressing up like reality. For me it's still the champion of PG-13 intensity.
Another good comparison
might be CHILDREN OF MEN, which created a feeling of realism with those seemingly-continuous
handheld shots, but didn't pretend to be a documentary. For me CLOVERFIELD
never got anywhere near the tenseness of those scenes, but it did have some
good ones. My favorite is when they're on a street pretty close to the monster
and all the sudden a bunch of soldiers run up and just start firing bullets
and missiles at the fucker (because they are racist like Will Smith) and Rob
and friends are standing right there, in danger from both sides. Total chaos.
If CLOVERFIELD is a hit it'll be interesting to see if they try to do a sequel. Obviously you want to see Cloverfield fight one of his fellow monsters, even if it does kind of promote stereotypes about monsters. I don't know, maybe if they do that then the Will Smiths of the world win, and nobody wants that. But the real dilemma is not how many monsters, but what type of camera. The FELICITY/CLOVERFIELD team faces the same problem as the BLAIR WITCH sequel people. Either they do another camcorder-POV and the novelty has worn thin, or they do it regular style and they've ditched what was unique about the original.
I think they did leave a couple little ways they could connect it. There's some kind of muffled voice at the end of the credits that I couldn't hear over everybody shushing each other, but it might be some kind of hint. The first scene is in an apartment and they talk about a girl's dad not being home - so the sequel could be about her dad. My guess is they'll call it HAMMERDOWN and do like a pro-shot documentary or news crew account of the fight against the monster, which will turn out to survive and then at least one other monster will crawl out of the sea to fight it. And more and more shit will just keep hitting the fan. Still only one fan but just a huge amount of shit hitting it. Then at the end there's a twist where either Predator or Freddy comes out. Or I guess Jason since it would be hard to get Freddy on camera, unless the whole thing turns out to be a dream, which might be too weird of a twist.
Or maybe it will be a prequel about setting up the decorations for Rob's party.
COBRA
COBRA is not a great Stallone movie, but Stallone does play a cop named Marion "THE COBRA" Cobretti, and in this crazy world that's gotta count for something. In the opening scene a ranting maniac goes into a super market, kills a bunch of people and takes the rest hostage. The police are helpless so they "call in the Cobra."
Cobretti struts in wearing sunglasses and chewing on a matchstick. You'd think he'd want to have the full power of vision at his disposal in a situation like this, but he chooses fashion instead - not a great character trait for a human being, but acceptable for an action movie hero. If you want to get picky Dirty Harry probaly should've put down his hot dog to foil that bank robbery, but he didn't, and we admire him for that.
Speaking of Dirty Harry, Cobretti wishes he was Dirty Harry. This movie is a total ripoff of that one. But visually Cobretti reminds me of another action movie icon: HARD BOILED's Tequila, with his sunglasses and toothpick. That must be why when I first heard of Chow Yun Fat they said he was "the Stallone of Hong Kong." People still remembered COBRA back then, I guess. They look kind of the same, but Cobretti has a picture of a cobra on the pearl handle of his gun, while Tequila doesn't have a picture of tequila. Tequila is still a better character in a way better movie, but Cobretti's cobra insignia just edges him into the realm of acceptability. Congratulations, Cobretti.
The movie is stylishly directed by George Pan Cosmatos, same guy who did RAMBO a year earlier. He uses what was probaly called "MTV style" back then, lots of quick flashes edited to the rhythm of music (hey, what's that robot? Hey, there's that robot again. Why is there a robot?) but unlike modern asshole editors he respects the audience enough to build to a shot that explains what the quick flashes were all about (oh, I see, there is a fashion shoot in front of a robot). The opening is completely badass, with the Cobra firing an animated bullet into the camera, which explodes into the title of the movie. Meanwhile a psychopath rides a motorcycle silhouetted on a bright red sky, and this is intercut with shots of a bunch of crazy musclemen in a sewer doing some sort of workout or ritual involving axes. This was in those days of '85-'87 when movies like POLICE ACADEMY 2 and DRAGNET worried that some weird gang of punk rocker cultists would terrorize urban areas (at least those movies are comedies, though, this is a serious movie).
When I saw the motorcycle I first thought it was Cobra and when I saw the sewer I thought this was gonna be Stallone's PUNISHER. But nope, he's a Dirty Harry wannabe, a tough envelope-pushing cop constantly frustrated by all these bureaucrats and regulations that are so hung up on all this "accountability" and "checks and balances" and "system of American justice" and what not. You know how they are. The sergeant is played by Dirty Harry's partner Reni Santoni and the pain in the ass pansy boss is Andrew Robinson, who was Scorpio in DIRTY HARRY. So the killer that we gotta break the rules to catch is now the guy telling us not to break the rules. THE SYSTEM IS BROKEN! CALL IN THE COBRA!
But Cobra doesn't have just one Scorpio to catch, he has "the Night Slasher" which is actually the collaborative work of those ax maniacs in the sewer, crazed bodybuilding enthusiasts like Brian Thompson trying to bring a "new world" of mayhem and chaos. Demon Dave could be a member. Brigitte Nielsen (looking more like Kelly LeBrock than the Grace Jones type I remember her as) plays a super model who witnesses a killing and becomes their target. So the Cobra ends up protecting her, and various action happens.
Cobretti drives an old Mercury with a license plate that says some variation of "AWESOME" on it, which was probaly pretty awesome at the time. There's a pretty good car chase, one of those ones where they're going up and down little hills and start to get air, and at one point the Cobramobile actually catches so much air it scrapes across a hanging sign and shoots sparks everywhere.
Another good part is when Cobretti impales the villain on a hook, Leatherface style, and rolls him into a smelting plant. So there's plenty of good stuff here, but it doesn't add anything very new to the DIRTY HARRY formula, and it's definitely not as good as DIRTY HARRY, so it doesn't really overcome the paranoid politics. When Cobra comes out of the super market and a prickish reporter starts asking him pesky questions about what gives him the right to just kill people instead of using the ol' due process, the movie is pushing it. We already had that conversation in the '70s, Cobretti. Why don't you go watch MAGNUM FORCE.
Notes: Before Eddie Murphy was cast in BEVERLY HILLS COP it was gonna be Stallone, and he was rewriting the script. That didn't work out so he used some of those ideas for COBRA. Also, COBRA was based on a book originally called A RUNNING DUCK that was later made into the movie FAIR GAME starring Billy Baldwin and Cindy Crawford.
Well when you want a good sports movie you go to Monte Hellman, the fellow who also did the great racing movie Two Lane Black Top and Silent Night, Deadly Night 3. Now I know some of you from the title, you're gonna say, "Oh, Vern's reviewing a gay porno" but no, it's about chickens.
I don't know if you are familiar with cockfighting, cock is a term for rooster and what they do, they put two roosters in a circle and have them fight each other. Sometimes they put little metal hooks on their legs to make them more deadly. You know, it is basically like the dog fights we have up here but this is what they do in the south, because chickens are more readily available I guess.
I know what you're thinking, chickens are pussies compared to dogs. But they're not. I mean you should see these fuckers fight. The feathers on the back of their neck stick up like a cobra and they just start tearing into each other. I mean it's creepin me out.
You probaly remember the actor Warren Oates, from Alfredo Garcia. He's not the guy from the singing group Hall and Oates, he is an actor. Well here he plays an individual so dedicated to his sport of cockfighting that he has taken a vow of silence. In a flashback you find out that he lost one of the big derbies because he was shooting his mouth off about how great his rooster was, until Harry Dean Stanton challenged him to an off-the-record match in a hotel room. Of course, his bird was killed and he missed his big chance to win the Cockfighter of the Year medal which all young boys dream of getting when they grow up. So from that point on he stops talking in order to protect his career.
So the movie is kind of like any other sports movie, except with cockfighting. Warren takes on a new partner, he buys and trains new birds, he enters big matches. He has his old arch rival harry Dean Stanton stirring up trouble and marrying his old girlfriend. There is one guy who tries to cheat but they catch him and beat him up. There is an armed robbery.
Now if I understood correctly, cockfighting becomes illegal at one point of the movie, that must be why they decide to have their tournament in a hotel room. And I don't know about you but I think it is kind of sleazy to see chickens fighting in a hotel room. Then there is a pile of dead chickens in the bath tub. I don't know man I don't think that's what god intended for the hotel room. But what are you gonna do I guess.
I wonder how they filmed this anyway though, because these are obviously real chickens killing each other. Also warren cuts the head off one with an ax and I think that was real.
Basically, this is a short, simple film but it works because it's a sport that has rarely been given a quality treatment on the silver screen. Monte Hellman is a good independent type director and he has created easily one of the best cockfighting movies. It explores the universal themes like what do you do when you love a women but you also love a sport, in this case cockfighting, and the woman wants you to choose? What I mean is, this is a good movie because it is just like other movies except with chickens fighting each other.
To be honest though I have to say that I have a problem with cockfighting. I don't want to sound like a prude or "political correct" but I'm not sure these guys who make the chickens fight each other to the death should really be glamourized. I mean all they do is hold them at the beginning, it is the chickens who should be getting the credit for this great sport.
UPDATE June 2006
I saw and reviewed this movie several years ago but since then I've become a big fan of Charles Willeford, who wrote the book that COCKFIGHTER is based on. There are two other movies based on Willeford novels, MIAMI BLUES and THE WOMAN CHASER. I like both of those movies, but COCKFIGHTER is the ultimate Willeford movie for the following reasons.
1. It's the only one made while he was still alive
2. As long as he was around, he decided to write the movie
3. Since he was on set and the actor who played Ed Middleton (the wise referee with the mustache) was fired, Willeford ended up a co-star in the movie.
Willeford led an interesting life. He was an orphan, a hobo, a war hero, a pulp writer, an actor (during this one movie only), later a writing professor. As far as I've read, he was not a cockfighter, but I have my suspicions. He is not a great actor but he is passable as Middleton partly because he is obviously an interesting character. He doesn't look or sound like a typical guy you'd see in movies.
I still think COCKFIGHTER is a good movie, but like most movies based on books, if you read the book you'll see how much the movie is lacking. One thing that makes it different is that the entire book is told in the point of view of Frank Mansfield. He has taken a vow of silence, he doesn't talk. He does a little bit of narration in the movie but that's not the same as seeing the whole story from his POV so you know what he's thinking all throughout. So it's pretty different.
The movie follows the story of the book pretty much except they understandably dropped a subplot about Frank playing guitar. After he loses the trailer in the bet with Burke (Harry Dean Stanton in the movie) he needs to build up enough money to buy some chickens and return in the next season. So he gets a gig playing guitar at a club, and through that he meets a rich lady who figures into the way the book ends. There's also a smaller subplot about an old pharmacist friend who's trying to market a commercial drug called Licarbo. So it's not all about chickens killing each other.
But, speaking of chickens killing each other, that stuff's a whole lot more interesting in the book too. At least for me, because I am not all that into sports so I don't really know what's going on in these fights in the movie. But in the book he explains in detail how the matches work, what sort of strategy he's using, what he feeds the chickens and why, how he nurses certain injuries, why it's illegal for Junior (Steve Railsback in the movie) to touch his chicken's balls, etc. The information in the book is so detailed and so clearly authentic that you have to wonder how exactly Willeford came about this knowledge.
The ending in the movie is good, but the way it pans out in the book is even better. I'm gonna turn this into Oprah's book club here for a second so if you haven't read the book yet you should go finish it right now, then immediately come back and read the rest here. Okay, good. There is such a tragic irony to what happens at the end that it's so much more powerful than the little laugh in the movie. Instead of a nameless rooster, Frank's bird is Icky (short for Icarus), a beautiful bird he's been conditioning all throughout the book and considering his top bird. Just like in the movie, Icky wins by dying with his beak biting the other bird, who's also dead. But Frank is surprised to find his eyes watering up. He is actually upset to lose Icky. Just then he sees his fiancee running away and he not only chases after her, but he yells out her name. So within a minute or two here he has had two major changes to his character: he's felt emotional about the death of a chicken, and he's broken his vow of silence because of his love for this woman. Even more dramatic, he knows he could be minutes away from his goal of becoming Cockfighter of the Year. If he just holds onto the vow for another few minutes he might be able to end it. Instead, at the last minute, he breaks the vow for his woman.
He has these two major breakthroughs but what makes it tragic is that she doesn't even notice, she chews him out for being heartless and never picks up on the significance of these two things.
If you haven't read the book, check this out. You already know what it's about, right? Cockfighting. Here's the quote that opens the book:
"What matters is not the idea a man holds, but the depth at which he holds it." --Ezra Pound
If that is as beautiful to me as it is to you, you gotta get this book.
Anyway, that's all for my update here. Now I gotta track down the book Willeford wrote about the making of the movie.
CODE OF SILENCE
In 1985, a couple years before director Andrew Davis introduced the world to Steven Seagal in the classic ABOVE THE LAW, he did another, similar movie, sort of a rough draft, starring Chuck Norris.
They have the same setting (Chicago), the same villain (Henry Silva) and alot of the same supporting actors playing cops and criminals. They have the same type of cheesy '80s scores by David M. Frank. (Get ready for cheesy slap bass and the whitest horn section you ever heard.) ABOVE THE LAW is about CIA corruption (inspired by the Iran-Contra affair) but CODE OF SILENCE sticks with corrupt cops.
Norris plays Eddie Cusack, a Chicago sergeant on a stakeout disguised as a garbage man. His partner is the great Dennis Farina (who, like alot of the actors in Andrew Davis's movies, is a former cop in real life). Elsewhere on the scene, in a cemetery waiting for their cue, are two partners: a young overacting guy who has to piss, and a crazy old drunk leaning up against a grave swigging booze. Which means he's a fuckup. In case you didn't pick up on that though, he makes an "I am a bad guy" comment about how the young guy should just piss on the graves. "If someone was smart, they'd rip out all these graves and plant tomatoes. These people are no good. They're dead!"
So that's how you know he's bad, he's racist against dead people.
Sure enough, during the bust ol' boozey here kills an innocent kid, but luckily he carries a small, plantable gun in his sock for just such an occasion.
So that's where the code of silence comes in. Everybody knows this guy is a fuckup who hates dead people, and the young guy who has to piss (actually he doesn't have to piss through the entire movie, so I gotta assume that at some point he got a chance to pee off screen) knows he planted the gun. But cops have this special cop brotherhood or whatever so nobody says anything and they all sign a petition in support of him. Except Sergeant Eddie Cusack, who refuses to interupt his karate practice to sign something he doesn't believe in. Good for him, but it gets him in dutch with the other cops.
Also he testifies against the guy so then they really turn on him, even though he's in the middle of this shit with the Colombian drug lords. He doesn't get suspended or anything but the other kids won't play with him, so he has to go out as a lone wolf without a cub or a McQuade.
Andrew Davis is good at directing this type of thing. He got better with ABOVE THE LAW and UNDER SIEGE and then believe it or not got nominated for a best director Oscar for THE FUGITIVE. Then he pissed away his credibility on crap like CHAIN REACTION and STEAL BIG, STEAL LITTLE and was pretty much forgotten until he did that kid movie HOLES. That one was pretty popular but who knows if that had anything to do with his talent, kids like any stupid crap if it's advertised on The Disney Channel all day. Sorry kids, I love ya, but you know it's true. You suck.
Anyway what I'm trying to say is that although this is not great, it is above average as far as cheesy '80s cop movies go. The setting is kind of gritty and real, some of the supporting cops seem authentic, some of the karate scenes are pretty good. But not great. There's a cool stunt where he runs across the top of an el train and it looks like he really did it, it doesn't look like phoney heroics. Henry Silva is a little scarier in ABOVE THE LAW but of course you gotta give him credit just for having that face. Have you looked at that guy before? Holy shit that guy has a scary face.
And Norris is decent, pretty charismatic as far as those bearded white martial arts guys from the '70s go. I mean I sure like him better than the guy in CIRCLE OF IRON. Which reminds me of something about Chuck Norris. This guy fought Bruce Lee in RETURN OF THE DRAGON. And he's probaly still hurtin from gettin that handful of chest hair pulled out. He has a fire burning in his soul and you don't want to be on the receiving end of it. That's what you gotta think whenever he faces off some ordinary street punks in an alley. What on earth are you guys thinking? If this guy could hold off Bruce Lee for a while you guys sure as fuck don't have a chance. I don't care how many bad movies he's done, you boys are in for it.
The thing that makes this movie memorable though is the most ridiculous element, a police robot that is introduced in a demonstration somewhat reminiscent of the ED-29 or whatever scene from ROBOCOP, which came out 2 years later. (Hmmmmm. Was ROBOCOP inspired by a Chuck Norris movie? It might've been.) When Cusack is stuck fighting the drug lords without backup, he decides to steal the robot and use it. So it's kind of like that movie TOP DOG where his partner is a dog, only instead of a dog in this one it's a robot.
When I say police robot, by the way, I'm not talking about C3PO or nothin. It doesn't talk. It's more like those robots they use to check if a guy is dead inside a house after a long shootout, only this one is bigger and has all kinds of guns and cannons on it. It's probaly a good thing these gadgets didn't catch on with other police departments, they seem to have a pretty big potential for collateral damage. Which this movie is against obviously, since it all stems from this kid getting killed by accident. By the way, Andrew Davis also directed the movie COLLATERAL DAMAGE. I haven't seen that one but since it doesn't have a robot in it, what's the point? Don't insult my intelligence by doing a movie without a robot when I've already seen you do one WITH a robot.
That's all I got on this one. The end.
COMMANDO
COMMANDO is a rare commodity - a Schwarzenegger picture on a low enough budget to feel like the early Seagal and Van Damme pictures. The good ones, though. Schwarzenegger plays John Matrix, the perfect name for an ex-special forces muscleman who lives in a cabin out in the woods with his daughter Alyssa Milano. (Who is the boss, anyway? I never did figure that out.) She doesn't want him going on dangerous missions anymore so he stays home and spends his days chopping wood and feeding deer with her. Luckily, before he gets too bored with this Snow White lifestyle some other soldiers he used to be knee dip in the shit with kidnap his daughter as a way to force him to assassinate some South American leader or other. So he gets to go to war. And to be honest he looks more comfortable running around with camoflauge paint on then he does feeding a deer. We all have our little things we're good at, you know.
If the deer feeding scene or Joel Silver's name on the credits didn't tip you off that this is gonna be a good one then the plane scene will. Matrix and one of the bad guys get on a commercial flight headed for the assassination. John Matrix - pretending to be way more high-maintenance than you would expect from a guy named John Matrix - asks a flight attendant for a pillow and blanket (no sleep mask though) and inquires how long the flight will be (about 11 hours). When no one is looking he snaps his captor's neck, poses him with the pillow and blanket like he's asleep, sneaks into the cargo hold and climbs out onto the landing gear just as the jet is taking flight. He jumps off as soon as he's over swampland, lands safely and sets the timer on his watch for 11 hours. Ladies and gentlemen, COMMANDO.
So of course Matrix has to kill a bunch of guys to get to his daughter - the sweet simplicity of classical action movie structure. Nobody ever mentions Matrix's giant muscles, which as usual he must've been born with since we never see him pumping iron. But because of his He-Man build he does alot of things a normal sized commando couldn't do believably such as tear a seat out of a car, carry a huge log on his shoulder supported by one hand, carry a guy around by his ankle, pick up a phone booth with a guy in it and throw it, and push over a car that's on its side. (Well, I guess that last one anybody could do, but they would be scared to do it.) Also he swings on some kind of streamer and jumps on top of an elevator. And later when he gets arrested Rae Dawn Chong rescues him by firing a rocket at the truck he's in, so it blows up and he doesn't. Because he's John Matrix.
There are several notable bad guys here. There's Dan Hedaya with a bad South American accent. There's Bill Duke, always menacing even when he's a good guy. Here he's trying to kill Matrix (later they'll be teammates in PREDATOR). But the main guy is Vernon Wells, best known as Wez from ROAD WARRIOR/MAD MAX 2. He's kind of a mid-level villain, but he does wear a chain mail vest, which you don't see every day. And he has the line, "John, I'm not going to shoot you between the eyes. I'm going to shoot you between the balls."
The fights are real good super powered type fights where they punch each other through the air and throw each other through walls. There is one of those traditional smash-through-hotel-wall-and-scare-people-having-sex type fights. At the end Matrix impales Vernon Wells with a big pipe and somehow steam comes out of the pipe so he says (SPOILER) "Let off some steam." The very next shot is little Alyssa Milano smiling as if she enjoyed it. At first I thought this was just bad editing, but then I remembered that despite her not wanting her dad to go on missions she did tell a bad guy that being returned to her father would be "not as nice as watching him smash your face in." So she is kind of a messed up little girl - she's worried about her dad being put in danger but she loves to watch him horribly mutilate people, it is one of her primary interests along with deer-feeding.
I don't remember if I saw this one in the '80s or not, but now I understand why it's one of the more famous Schwarzenegger pictures. The director is just some dude who did CLASS OF 1984 and FIRESTARTER, so it's no great directorial work like PREDATOR or something. But it doesn't fuck around. The kidnapping happens early on, then he immediately pulls that great plane escape and there is never too long in between those types of crazy action sequences. There's also alot of funny dialogue both of the clever and the corny varieties. I'm gonna have to give some credit to screenwriter Steven De Souza and producer Joel Silver, since they also did DIE HARD. Back then those guys knew how to make an entertaining action picture.
By the way, my friend Mr. Armageddon (the guy mentioned in the TRANSFORMERS review) tells me that the fictional South American country Val Verde is also where the dictator is from in DIE HARD 2. IMDb trivia says it's also mentioned in PREDATOR. And that John Matrix kills 81 people in the movie. Jeez, I must've missed some of those, I better watch this again.
COLLATERAL
First off I gotta say, Michael Mann is what you call overrated. What did he do, fucking Miami Vice - some asshole who forgot to shave fighting drug dealers in a pink shirt and no socks - we're supposed to give the guy a fucking medal? I mean yeah it seemed like a pretty good tv show at the time but it's not the fucking Parthenon. You belong to the city, you belong to the night. Let's be a little more humble there, Michael Mann.
(To be honest I'm not sure what the Parthenon is, but what I mean is something good enough to last the ages and always stand as a proud beacon of achievement, etc. i.e. not Everybody Loves Raymond or even Miami Vice.)
And you think his tv shows are overblown and pretentious, just watch his movies. I guess I liked Ali more than most (by which I mean sort of), but there's something about this fucking guy. He did a good job trying to do the impossible (having an actor play Muhammad Ali). But anybody else woulda known not to try, because it's impossible. Not Michael Mann. He probaly thinks he did it.
And I know every male under the age of 35 has a hard on for that movie Heat, but I don't know. Maybe I should watch it again. All I remember is a couple amazing shootouts and 3 hours of nothing. Remember when Natalie Portman killed herself? What was that about? Maybe you guys are right. I'll give it another shot. But I'm saying this to give you my general impression of Michael Mann: talented, but not as talented as many would have you believe. And full of himself. His movies give the impression that they think they are more Important than they actually are.
That's why this is a better kind of Michael Mann movie for my money because what this is, instead of a Hollywood movie masquerading as Important Art, you got a regular old Hollywood movie done very artfully. In Hollywood, you know they got all these ideas for movies like, what if terrorists took over a [you name it], or what if a guy gets trapped in a phone booth by a sniper, or what if there was a serial killer who was obsessed with the Civil War, or what if a guy had a live shark in the trunk of his car and if he doesn't win the solar car race before the timer goes off his daughter will be fed to bears, or whatever. Maybe that last one needs a little work. But this one is about what if a hitman forced a taxi driver to drive him around to kill a bunch of people. The driver is played by Jamie Foxx and the hitman is played by Tom Cruise, a very different role for him because one he is the bad guy and two he has grey hair. He also knows a little bit about jazz.
Jamie is just driving his cab, he's having a good day so far but then luck kicks him in the stones by having him pick up this nutbag who offers him a stack of Ben Franklins to drive him to five "appointments." He wouldn't have had to know anything was up except during appointment numero uno the client dies, falls through a second story window and lands on the cab. Cat's out of the bag so Tom Cruise becomes a little more forceful.
Jamie Foxx himself is not nearly as unlucky as his character. I don't know what it is, this guy used to be doing Booty Call and dressing up as a woman on tv and doing all kinds of stupid shit, now all the sudden everybody loves him, and with good reason. I saw that movie Ray and it was pretty good. I mean it's pretty much exactly what you expect from that type of biography movie (even has the corny text at the end telling how many albums and Grammies Ray Charles got) except that this guy Foxx is so damn good. You could argue that he's a comedian and all he's doing is an impression, but I don't know. I kept catching myself forgetting it was Jamie Foxx and just thinking I was watching the real Ray Charles. The real Ray Charles making a record with Booger from Revenge of the Nerds. You talk about lucky, did you see Jamie Foxx on the Golden Globes? They had fucking Prince introducing the clips from Ray. Prince. Jamie Foxx (who was an R&B singer before he stooped to standup comedy) looked like he was about to die and go to heaven and have a big orgy with all the angels.
Well he's good in this one too, a less showy role as a charismatic but somewhat timid guy who has to deal with being a hostage forced into taking part in murders. And actually that brings me to the Mannly portion of the movie. It is a theme throughout the movie that Jamie Foxx is too much of a sissy. He has to GROW SOME BALLS and TAKE A STAND and BE A FUCKING MAN YOU LIMP WRISTED PUSSY. That's the message of the movie, as delivered by the heartless serial murderer who helps him find his true self. The same way E.T. flew down from space to teach Elliott how to be good, Tom Cruise took Jamie Foxx hostage to teach him to be more of a go-getter in life.
(And Michael Mann really does know how to go after what he wants. He wants to be treated as a serious artist, so he has an amazingly humorless and pretentious commentary track on the DVD. He alternates between narrating the movie shot by shot and going into way too much detail about the backstories of the characters, like he thinks they're real people. He goes on at length about how Tom Cruise knows about jazz music from his dad, but his dad didn't actually share his love of jazz music with his son because they weren't close, so Tom Cruise actually resented jazz music but at the same time he learned about it inadvertently by being exposed to it, blah blah blah.)
That whole Straw Dogs grow some balls theme is macho cliche garbage, but you get that in other action movies. The one scene that is unbearably pretentious is the one where a wolf suddenly walks across the street and gives them the evil wolf eye. And before you can even savor the moment of embarassing art school symbolism, it starts playing some cheesy rock song. (Don't worry, not "Hungry Like the Wolf" or anything. Something more modern.)
But despite all that, I liked this movie. It's a good simple gimmick. Two opposite guys in this car together. They go to different destinations (an office building, a jazz bar, a night club, etc.) where they face loud music and physical threats, but in between it's this intimate, quiet movie, two guys in a car talking, surrounded by Los Angeles at night. At least some of it is shot on the high definition digital electronical video type deal, and if I haven't already I would like to take this opportunity to congratulate the scientists for making this hi-def-dig-vid crap into a viable medium. I used to hate digital video and had to include a warning on any review of a movie shot on it. Now it's so good that sometimes, like on this one, it looks better than if it was film. Well played, scientists. Well played.
Like Leon D. Caprio, I'm neutral on Tom the Cruiser. Not sure what the big deal is on this guy, but he can be pretty good sometimes, especially for a short guy playing regular sized characters (also known as the reverse hobbit). I liked him in this one. He's just a real intense asshole killer guy, and he's got a couple good moves, especially in this scene where he has to kill a guy in the middle of a crowded dance club. It's no Blade but it's a good murder in a dance club scene by any other standards.
The movie has a real heightened feel to it, somewhere between an ordinary real life cab ride and the worst night you never had. Only in the end does it start to feel more like a normal action/thriller type deal, with repeated dialogue and lessons learned and of course a chase on a subway. (All movies take place in either New York or Los Angeles and if somebody's gonna get chased, which they are, they're gonna jump on a subway.) But that's okay. It already has enough momentum going at that point that it can just put it into neutral and coast into the end credits.
that last part by the way is just a general automobile metaphor, it is not supposed to be some kind of this-movie-as-taxi-cab metaphor. due to my Committment to Excellence in 2005 I'm not allowed to pull that kind of hack critic horse shit. If that was the case it would've been like "the fare has already been paid, plus tip, so Mann turns the meter off." Oh jesus, how can those people look themselves in the mirror after writing that shit? Man I swear I read a review of The Life Aquatic with Bill Murray, I was underlining all the boating analogies, and there was like 12 or 13 of the motherfuckers. Like, it's covered in the rust of whimsy and the barnacles of quirk, it sails into port with Bill Murray on the starboard side and Willem Dafoe swabbing the deck with a parrot of humor, an eyepatch of comradery and a peg leg of sorrow, 'cause his leg was bit off by the great white whale of meticulously detailed art design. I'm getting off track here though, the point is, something about Collateral. Not sure what the point was I was gonna make but I'm glad I saw the movie Collateral, it was pretty good.
COMPULSION and ROPE
Both of these pictures are real good pictures that happen to be inspired by the Leopold and Loeb murder case. Who those two are is two rich kids who thought they were smarter than everyone else and above the law and decided to kill one of their cousins and destroy the body with acid just for the thrill of it.
Rope is Alfred Hitchcock's picture which started the real time gimmick where you try to make the movie look like it was all done in one shot. The movie is actually done in 8 shots because you can't put that much film on a camera I mean gimme a break, it's too much. So they shoot until the roll of film is about to run out and then they zoom into the back of a guy's jacket and then zoom out from the jacket on the next roll of film and you pretend it's continuous.
But the gimmick really works to creat a day-in-the-life feel and a sense of holy shit what's gonna happen tension. And this is a great movie, all taking place in the apartment of these two pricks who, at the very beginning, have just killed their buddy and locked him in a big chest. But these two like to rub it in so what they've done, they've invited the dead guy's parents, girlfriend and buddies over for a dinner party, and they set up the food on top of the chest that the body is in. They want the thrill of really pushing their luck and boy do they get it. I mean these fuckers are sick, especially the one guy, I think he probaly has a boner the whole time to be frankly honest.
Right away the guests start worrying about where is the dead guy, because he's supposed to be there. And I mean he is there, but they don't know it, and they don't know he's the dead guy. To him he is just some alive guy I guess. The tension comes when they keep asking the Rich Boy Killers if they've talked to alive guy that day or what not. And as the guests get too close to the chest, or as the Rich Boys get nervous or too cocky and say real suspicious shit.
Jimmy Stewart is in this one, his first picture with Hitchcock. ANd he plays the boys's teacher who like them likes to talk shit about how murdering stupid people is justified. They invited him for a challenge, because they knew he knew them better than anyone else and was more likely to piece together what was going on. Well even THIS prick might think the Rich Boys have gone too far, and you can tell he suspects something fishy and then you watch as he gets closer and the Rich Boys get more nervous and, you know what I'm saying. It's great acting, great filmatics, lots of tension and suspense this is one of my favorites from Mr. Al Hitchcock.
Compulsion is more closely based on the Leopold and Loeb case but the characterizationing is extremely similar - one taller guy who takes charge, one creepy younger guy who is more nervous but thinks he's better than the other guy. And the acting is maybe even better than in Rope. In this one we skip right over the actual murder and then watch them as they frantically cover their tracks. You see it was supposed to be the perfect crime but this dipshit, he left his glasses at the crime scene (same thing happened in the real case). I mean you see what I'm sayin guys, it's the Universe. No matter HOW perfect your perfect crime is you ALWAYS ALWAYS ALWAYS do some stupid shit that gets you caught, like tell your alibi wrong or leave your birth certificate folded up in the dead guy's backpocket or shake a cop's hand when you have blood on your hand or who know's what. I mean every fucking time. I wish it wasn't so but it just is and that's why crime don't pay unfortunately. Hate to break it to you.
Anyway these rich pricks don't get enough attention from their daddies and they are the smart kids that don't really fit in and what not. The problem is they get that smart kid disease that they think they got more smarts than everyone else and that turns into everyone else is inferior. These guys are really into Nietszche's Superman philosophy and they think emotion is for the weak. (can you believe this bullshit?) They want to prove they are Superman by committing horrible crimes with complete emotional detachment like Superman would do if he turned evil I guess, I don't know how it works exactly. If you look at it though it is surprisingly similar to those kids that shoot up high schools these days, this homicidal-disaffected-picked-on-rich-smart-kids thing is not exactly new.
So you don't really like these kids AT ALL but it is interesting and suspenseful to watch their crime get less and less perfect as the police and the media investigate and as they make more mistakes in their coverup. One kid is more remorseful than the other, and when he is talked into doing an attempted rape "emotionally detached" he just ends up crying. But even then the guy can't see the error of his ways, in fact he seems even more proud of his murder because he wants to prove that he is Superman and not some weakling.
Well they're not Superman, or if they are then they must have run into some kryptonite. Because eventually of course the kids get caught and the surprise is then it turns into a 100% different but equally great movie. Now it is a courtroom drama starring Orson Welles as a famous defense attorney stuck with the hopeless case of the rich boy killers. What he ends up doing, he admits they did it and that they are couple of fucking scumwad pricks, but says that they should get life in prison because executing them is exactly the kind of cold, calculated, pre-meditated thrill kill bullshit that these fucknuts did. I mean jesus GROW UP people is basically what he tells the court, but in a 10-15 minute monologue. Maybe it sounds corny but it is very well written and acted. I happen to think Orson Welles is an underrated talent, I mean he did some good pictures in his time look em up. But anyway I don't want to get political here but as a Positive individual I gotta say the guy is obviously right, I mean knock it off people jesus.
Anyway, here's two good movies for you, but it seems like THREE good movies. Even those of you who are too chickenshit to watch old black and white movies, here are a couple good ones to start you off, they have a real modern sensibility in my opinion and I think you will like them both unless you're some kind of a pussy or whatever, then okay you don't have to like them I will accept that you big pussy.
CONFESSIONS OF A DANGEROUS MIND
Well geez, it's not too often you get this with a movie writer, but apparently this Charlie Kaufman guy can do no wrong. Between the brilliant BEING JOHN MALKOVICH and ADAPTATION and the underrated HUMAN NATURE and now this... I mean really, what more could you ask for from a writer? There is no other non-director writer working who has been so consistently inventive and surprising and at the same time so personal. In fact there are few who have ever worked who could be in this same category. These are all movies made by skilled directors but it is always the writer's voice that comes through.
You hear that, motherfuckers, the WRITER.
This is Kaufman's most straight forward and normal picture so far, but that's not saying all that much. It's adapted from Chuck Barris' autobiographical novel, and the gimmick of course is that in the novel he claims to have been a CIA hitman while he was hosting the Gong Show, which seems pretty dubious. Also he talks about the genesis of The Gong Show, the Dating Game, the Newlywed Game, etc.
What surprised me about the movie is that Kaufman and director George Clooney (the guy from OUT OF SIGHT) adapt as if they take the novel completely at face value. It tells the story of his CIA intrigue completely deadpan, to the point that there are scenes where his murders come back to haunt him and he sees the audience of the Gong Show as a bunch of corpses. It is really a pretty serious biopic of this guy, but also faithful to the spirit of his works. There are funny gimmicks like a love montage set to a Gong Show contestant very badly singing an Elvis song. You'd think that would come across as a funny joke but to me it just worked as drama. The relationship in the montage is actually pretty sweet and given that it's Chuck Barris it's only fitting that it would be set to the tune of this bad singing.
It goes back and forth from gaudy, artificial game show sets to gloomy eastern european locations where he sneaks around in a fedora and trench coat and shoots people with a silenced revolver.
There are a few funny parts but really I didn't see this as a comedy. It is not nearly as funny as Kaufman's other pictures, but it is definitely as depressing. In fact the story opens with Barris standing naked in front of a tv in a hotel room, his hair and beard grown out John Walker Lindh style. Just standing there. When his girlfriend (the little girl from E.T.) tracks him to the hotel he has a brief, emotional conversation with her through the peephole and then tells her he has to go because he's busy. Already Drew Barrymore's hurt seems convincing enough that it's more of a sad note than a funny one.
The theme of the movie is looking back on your life and seeing what you've accomplished. The way the movie Barris tells it, his goal in life was mainly looking for pussy, and now he regrets it. His work in television seems to be all about status. We don't as much see his creation of something as we see his trying to take advantage of being the creator. We don't see him writing a hit song but we see him bragging to Maggie Gyllenhall that he wrote it and then screwing her. His early career is about moving up through the ranks to impress the women. Hey look, I work at NBC. Hey look, I'm in management now. Hey look, I created a TV show.
I think this is a pretty insightful story because really, the young people today still think that way. If you created or hosted a tv show, you must be a success, right? Every week they unveil a new reality series where people (just like the contestants on Barris' game shows) humiliate themselves - now a days not to win a refrigerator or a trip, but just to simply be on tv. They will eat ox testacles or backstab their friend or have sex with a stranger or take a lie detector test about their sexual preference or have a british guy tell them they have no talent or live in a house with Corey Feldman, and I'm sure they get paid for it but do you really think they would do it only for the money? I haven't done the research on this myself but a friend told me that there is a neighborhood somewhere in L.A. with a large population of former reality tv show stars. People from The Real World or Survivor or what have you who go thinking that now that their face has been on tv they can get a job as an actor or a director. (He wants there to be a reality tv show about this neighborhood. We'll see if it ever happens.)
Everybody tries to pawn whatever small fame they can find into whatever slightly larger fame they can possibly muster. If they had a web sight that became a fad they would try to turn it into a book or a tv show (hey, I'm not judging, I want a book too). Because if they have a book, they're a success, right? I HAD A BOOK. Even if it ends up in the bargain bin and nobody wants it. Five years from now do you still really want to brag that you did Jump the Shark or Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon or you made up the dancing baby or you got laid on Elimidate or you starred in The Jeff Foxworthy Show? I HAD A TV SHOW. Even if it sucked, I had a TV show.
Seriously, think about it. Would you rather have your own tv show that is popular for a short period of time, and then is hated or forgotten... or would you rather work at a hardware store for your whole life? Is it worth it to be MC Hammer in the early '90s, even if you then have to be MC Hammer in 2003? This is sort of the question the movie asks. In the movie Barris thinks TV is what it's all about until he has actually created several very successful tv shows, and then is widely blamed for destroying television and american culture. There is one funny scene where a sexy woman at a party recognizes him as the host of the Gong Show. At first he thinks she's seducing him, but she actually lures him into a scolding about his tv show.
What separates Chuck Barris from the others, according to this movie, is that he is aware of what he has done, and hates himself for it. I saw Clooney talking about the movie on Charlie Rose, and they compared Barris to Jerry Springer. Clooney thinks that Springer completely sold out, going from an idealistic democrat to a guy hosting a show where the lower classes pretend to have sex with stuffed animals and then yell at each other and pull each other's hair. Barris' show (which, for the record, I kind of liked) was much more playful, but he was painfully aware of the criticism that he was exploiting his contestants' humilation or that he was lowering the bar for entertainment, and I don't think he felt good about living his life just being Creator of the Gong Show.
Maybe that's why he decided to claim that he was a CIA hitman, but in the movie it only serves as a parallel to his tv career. Again, working for the CIA is all about status for him. They try to serve him up some patriotic bullshit but he sees right through it. Still, he laughs at the idea of being a "secret agent" and takes the job. And like being creator of the Gong Show, it haunts him forever.
Maybe part of why it works is because these filmatists know what they're talking about. Clooney himself must've faced this same internal dilemma a few years ago. Here he was a big success, a movie star, his name on the top of the marquee. He was playing an american icon, he was making millions of dollars, his movie made millions of dollars. And yet it was BATMAN & ROBIN, widely considered one of the worst movies of all time. Is it really worth being the star of BATMAN & ROBIN just to be a millionaire movie star? Well after that Clooney made a conscious decision to only do movies he really believed in, instead of ones that paid well or would be theoretically good for his career. So since then he's made OUT OF SIGHT, OCEAN'S 11, SOLARIS, O BROTHER WHERE ART THOU, another one with the Coen brothers that doesn't come out yet. And he produced FAR FROM HEAVEN and directed this. Not fuckin bad. And now he's GEORGE FUCKIN CLOONEY, not Batman, not the guy from ER, not the creator of The Gong Show. He knew what to do.
As for Charlie Kaufman, this is very personal to him because he hates himself.
Some guy named Sam Rockwell plays Barris and he's great. I guess he was the villain besides Crispin Glover in CHARLIE'S ANGELS, and I remember thinking he was bland in that. But as Barris he's just spectacular, he does a great impression of the man's hosting style and then carries those mannerisms wider into a full on portrait of his life. It's as much of a transformation as Jim Carrey in MAN ON THE MOON but we have the advantage of not being familiar with Rockwell, so he just becomes Chuck Barris to the audience, not a guy imitating Chuck Barris.
Clooney is also very impressive as a first time director. Most actors turned directors have a hard time with the visuals, or aren't very ambitious with them, or make very pedestrian use of the filmatic language. Even a pretty good one, like say Ed Harris' POLLOCK, is going to be kind of more like a play, with good acting. Clooney surprises you though. His work with Steve Soderbergh has obviously rubbed off on him, judging from some tricky non-linear editing, some nice lighting, washed out colors and great uses of sound and lack of sound. But he also has a very clever and playful approach to transitions, lots of scenes where the camera closes in on one thing and comes out another or travels through time in one shot or goes around the corner while Barris is talking on the phone to reveal the office on the other end of the phone temporarily located inside Barris' living room. Clooney said on Charlie Rose that he was fascinated with the game show sets like the one he played on as a kid which would fold down into the ground and transform into another set for another show later on in the afternoon. The transitions in this movie must be his visual equivalent of those sets.
I think this movie will do a couple things. First of all, it will give Chuck Barris some of the type of recognition that he has always wished for. Already many of the reviews are speaking more respectfully of his game shows or more often praising the ahead-of-his-time type cleverness of his fictionalized autobiography. I think this is sort of the ED WOOD effect. Before that movie came out, the director Ed Wood was constantly ridiculed. Because of those fuckers the Medved brothers, he became the official worst director of all time and people would sneer at his lack of talent.
The movie ED WOOD popularized the argument that his movies, while very bad on a technical level, were at least brave personal statements, especially in the case of GLEN OR GLENDA. Even now, you're not going to have somebody doing an obvious autobiographical story about crossdressing that's not going to camp it up. Ed Wood could not hide behind outlandish makeup and costumes. He could not sing "I Will Survive" or talk about how much loves Judy Garland or any of that shit. I'm not saying these drag queens today have it easy or that people don't pick on them, but there are straight women all across america who just LOVE drag queens, they are so fun they love them. These are the women who adore PRISCILLA QUEEN OF THE DESERT, HEDWIG AND THE ANGRY INCH, etc. These women would still think Ed Wood was a weirdo though because he was not about showing off. He just wanted to come home from work and have a beer and if he was more comfortable doing that in a dress, blond wig and angora sweater then what the fuck business was that of yours? He wanted people to understand that and he made a movie about it and it also had Bela Lugosi in it playing some kind of weird God/voodoo witch doctor.
I mean seriously, if somebody did that today they would be ridiculed but imagine the balls it took to do it in the '50s, and cast himself in the lead! It's incredible. ED WOOD the movie put those bad movies in an emotional context that was so appealing that many people have allowed the fiction to overcome the reality and now actually respect Mr. Wood and his movies on a number of levels that maybe he doesn't even deserve to be respected on. But good for him. And this same thing seems to already be happening to Mr. Barris. Suddenly he is an innovator and a provacateur and has the soul of a poet. He's not just the creator of the Gong Show, he's the game show host who claimed he killed 32 people.
Also the movie treats the CIA story so seriously that I think alot more people will believe it now than before, or at least be confused by it, which is always a good thing.
yep it's a good one
CONNORS' WAR
CONNORS' WAR is a straight to video picture most of you never heard of, starring Treach (from Seagal's TODAY YOU DIE) and Nia Peeples (from Seagal's HALF PAST DEAD) written by some guy who wrote HALF PAST DEAD 2 (not Seagal's).
Treach plays Connors, a dude from a notorious secret government agency of super badass loose cannon killers and problem solver type individuals. There's a PGFDTV (pretty good for direct to video) opening where some terrorist individuals have the first lady hostage in a fancy hotel. When the secret service arrives on the scene (they should've been with the first lady in the first place - I blame their incompetence for this movie even happening) they are told by the police that Sgt. Mandela is already working on it. It would be funny if the movie tried to name a guy Mandela, but this is actually a joke played by Brooks, the head of this secret agency. He sits smiling in the lobby and bragging that his team is already inside. His team, it turns out, is Connors dressed as a waiter.
Being a one-man counterterrorism team is pretty badass, but Connors must want to do some extra showing off because for some reason he goes in there without any weapons. He only uses knives and guns that he manages to swipe from inside. He saves the first lady but, as often happens in these sorts of scenarios, the fuckin secret service won't listen to him, they storm the room and set off explosives and he gets blinded.
Skip ahead to two years later, now Connors is a grumpy blind dude whose houseboat is a mess and his only friend is a disabled old hippie who he is mean to even though this guy brings him food. Connors is still training, for example he runs really fast down the dock and tries to stop right at the end without falling in the water. Good job, Connors.
But suddenly Brooks shows up. It turns out there is an experimental treatment which could restore Connors' eye sight. If he was a good friend, or if he was worthy of his Mandela alias, Brooks would help Connors get the eye treatment to get his life back together and repair the damage done by his heroic act of live-saving. Instead, Brooks tells him he will get him the treatment IF he does a mission for him that night. Yeah, thanks alot Brooks.
The eye treatment involves injecting a solution into his eyes meant to mimic the mirror-like surface that causes cats' eyes to glow. The treatment sort of works in waves, giving Connors a blurry fish-eyed vision and super night vision like Riddick. Also by the way he's an ex-con who was coerced into working for a secret government agency just like another Vin Diesel character, Triple X.
So then Connors goes on this mission where he breaks into a government compound and blows out the backup power supply, then he sneaks around in the dark and nobody can see him. The movie is directed by a guy who knows a thing or two about sneaking around in the dark, Nick Castle, who played Michael Meyers in the original HALLOWEEN. This is nothing new, the guy's been directing for years. His best known are probaly THE LAST STARFIGHTER and THE BOY WHO COULD FLY, although he also did crap like MAJOR PAYNE and DENNIS THE MENACE. The dude is not exactly Kubrick, or even Kubrick's cousin, or even a guy who once delivered a pizza to Kubrick's cousin and said "are you by chance related to Stanley Kubrick?" and the guy said "yeah" and he said "that's cool." He's not that guy but he IS Michael Myers. And you know what man, regardless of who is the best slasher, we can say definitively that Leatherface didn't direct a movie. Chucky didn't direct a movie. Jason didn't direct a movie. Freddy directed 976-EVIL, but did that have a member of Naughty By Nature in it? I'm not sure because I don't know who the fuck is in Naughty By Nature other than Treach, but I'm guessing no. Better luck next time, Freddy. You blew it.
The main thing keeping this from being a great DTV movie is that there isn't a whole lot of action in it. If I remember right Treach did some pretty good action in LOVE AND A BULLET, but here he gets one minor fight, a couple gun shots, some sneaking around in the dark. He stabs a guy once, but that's in the opening, you forgot about that by the end. He crashes a car through a fence in one part. Nothing too spectacular.
The other problem is the title. Connors really doesn't have a war. That's okay, because one man having a war, whether it really happens in the movie or not, is always a good corny action concept. However, my problem is with the name Connors. I mean, if it was just Connor, that would make sense. CONNOR'S WAR. That's what I thought it was and that's what IMDb still lists it as. But it's not Connor, it's ConnorS, with an S. So it's CONNORS' WAR. As in, CONNORS'S WAR. It just doesn't have the same ring to it when the apostrophe gets moved over one slot. I don't care if it's playing in theaters or not, I demand a tasteful placement of all apostrophes.
However, I have to repeat my belief
that Treach is a pretty good DTV star. His personality isn't very convincing
as a government agent, but he's charismatic. This one also has a pretty good
story. There's nothing original about it but it's a fun time, the intermittently
blind badass getting doublecrossed by his mentor and having to stop him without
selling out to the man. I liked the story enough that I was able to watch
it in one sitting with minimal distraction, which is the test you must past
to qualify for a BTADTV (better than average direct to video).
I also have to note that it has a few quirky touches that made me like it.
I will attribute these touches to the directorial vision of Michael Meyers.
First of all, Connors' friendship with the disabled hippie is pretty cool
because it's just there for flavor, it has no purpose in the plot other than
to have a hippie van to loan to Connors. The hippie never gets held hostage
and he never sees Connor do some crazy stunt and then have some wacky reaction
like "Man I gotta stop smoking this weed!" or nothin like that.
In fact, there's no reason why he has to be disabled and I don't think they
ever comment on it either. Their friendship is kind of sweet.
My favorite touch was the ending of the movie. There's a nice little scene at the end where Connors and his new female friend (he makes the moves on her but they never really become a couple) sit under a sunset discussing the outcome of the movie. We find out that nothing went right: they both lost their jobs, they didn't really tie up the loose ends, and Connors is blind again. Of course, he ends up revealing that he made out with a bunch of money, but I still like that he's still blind and didn't completely clean up his mess. It's not really the ending you expect. Unless you read this review already. Spoiler.
So I kind of enjoyed this, but I can't really recommend it to other people, since they have better things to do, lives to live, journeys to mount, dreams to chase. If you don't, though, it's not that bad. You could do worse.
CRADLE 2 THE GRAVE
From the same director, producer and cast as Romeo Must Die and Exit Wounds comes another exciting pile of disparate elements squooshed together into the same basic shape as an action movie. It's really more of a booger sculpture than a movie, but for a booger sculpture, it's not that bad, I guess.
Joel Silver originally announced this as Untitled DMX Project, supposedly a remake of Fritz Lang's M. If that was the case, then I guess Tom Arnold (our generation's Peter Lorre) would've been playing a perverted child killer whose killing spree had caused the police to clamp down so hard that organized crime would be pretty much put out of business. So the leaders of rival gangs (DMX, Jet Li, Mark Dacascos) would pool their resources to catch Tom Arnold so everything could go back to normal.
I knew Silver was trying to put one over on us though 'cause I remembered when Romeo Must Die was supposed to be a "hip hop/kung fu adaptation of Romeo and Juliet" and when Exit Wounds was supposed to be an adaptation of John Westermann's novel Exit Wounds. It's all hype. When people hear something like "they're doing a remake of M starring DMX," they get riled up, and this guarantees that they will later see the movie when it comes out as Cradle 2 the Grave and turns out to be about diamond thieves who steal diamonds that are actually magic plutonium weapons and their daughter gets kidnapped so they have to team up with a Taiwanese intelligence agent to do various stunts and kung fu to save the daughter.
(?)
No, I guess actually come to think of it I'm not sure what they were thinking comparing this to a movie it has no relation to in any way. Or calling it Cradle 2 the Grave, which only relates to the plot in the same way that "Grape Nuts" describes that nasty cereal that doesn't have grapes or nuts in it at all. But these guys are professionals, they must know what they're doing.
If not, I'll tell them what they're doing. The approach to these movies is this: we don't have a good story or characters, but we know what audiences want. They want Jet Li. They want DMX, on the screen and on the soundtrack. They want the end credits from Exit Wounds. They want a bunch of fire. Going off jumps. Stuff crashing. There should be high tech equipment. Ultimate fighting. Motocross. A hot chick stripping to her underwear (but no further. This is America, fer crying out loud).
Some of these elements do in fact work. DMX rarely appears in a halfway decent movie, so he has a lot of practice at being better than the movie. He is as magnetic and charming as usual, and this time he doesn't believe in guns and just wants to save his daughter so he can hug her and talk about angels. Jet Li does a lot of good kicking and jumping around and climbing down buildings and shit. But I'm not sure I like the way the Americans always doll him up, giving him spikey hair and sunglasses, trying to make him look that kind of cool. Jet Li is kind of a timeless figure. When you try to hip him up and dress him in all black (but not a kung fu tunic) you emphasize that he's this little babyfaced dude with a squeaky voice. He seems like he's trying to overcompensate for something, which is ridiculous. Jet Li doesn't need to compensate at all.
The screenwriters are in fact overcompensating though, figuring if they can pile enough complications onto the storyline then everybody will get confused and forget how dumb the movie is. At one point in the movie, Jet Li is in a cage, swinging an angry bald kung fu midget at 20 kickboxers and Ultimate Fighting Champions, while Tom Arnold scans the crowd trying to find a particular guy wearing a particular ring, and this keeps cutting to Anthony Anderson and friends trying to get a limo to a particular parking garage in Chinatown so they can meet up with DMX, who is driving an ATV/quadracer/4-wheeler/whatever you call those god damned things across rooftops, being chased not only by police but by the angry professional motocross racers who he stole the thing from. And meanwhile DMX's daughter is taped up in a motorhome inside a building where "international scumbags" will later meet to see a demonstration of the new powerful artificial plutonium weapons, and until then she is watching her dad get chased on TV.
And that pretty much sums up what this god damn movie is like. Except I want to say one other thing. At the end, Jet Li takes some kind of atomic weapon and shoves it down Mark Dacascos's throat, forcing him to swallow it. There are then shots from inside his throat. And on the outside, he starts to glow from his neck, mouth and eyes, and his face melts like at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark. I just want to say, that was really dangerous Jet Li, you should probaly go see your doctor, you don't know what kind of effect that could have on you being right next to that shit. It's unhealthy.
Honestly, this movie was more entertaining than some less retarded but equally unimaginative action movies. But it's still a low down shame to think how much effort goes into an enterprise like this. Why not take all that elbow grease, bottle it up, and save it for a real movie? I know DMX is ready for one. Or if you can't handle that, you could probaly take this budget and make 7-10 really hilarious straight to video Seagal movies.
CRANK
No, this is not the one where Adam Sandler has a magic remote control that he uses to conquer the world, that's CLICK. This is CRANK, this is the one where Jason Statham (the Transporter himself) is a hitman who gets injected by high concept poison. It's gonna kill him, but he figures out that it won't finish until his adrenaline rate goes down. So he tries to run around, have sex, do coke and get in shootouts until he is able to get revenge on the poisoner. So it's SPEED in a guy, with a side order of revenge.
An inventive thrill ride full of imagination and wit that keeps you constantly involved as it builds to an unbelievable climax... would be a good way to do this movie. Instead they went the DOMINO route of "if you throw every stupid show-offy technique you ever saw in a commercial at the screen, technically it counts as entertainment." I think I know what they were thinking: he has to keep his adrenaline up, so the movie has to keep its adrenaline up too. But it's flawed logic. THE JERK is about a moron, but the movie doesn't have to be moronic. I don't think SPEED had cameras flying around constantly to convince you that it's about speed. If you show a guy in hospital gown zooming around on a motorcycle pursued by police, that is by definition somewhat exciting. But when you throw in unnecessary zooms and split screen and do a jokey flashback on one side and then freeze on a guy's goofy expression and then switch it to black and white and then zoom into Statham's chest to show an x-ray of his heart beating (a nod to the Furious Movement) AND you gotta throw in "exciting" guitar music made by a guy who used to be in Tangerine Dream who is now trying to rock out, it seems like you're overcompensating. It isn't exciting anymore, it's just annoying. To me it's another movie that has no build or rhythm at all, just the same frantic shit for 87 minutes straight.
The responsible parties are two rookie directors who are small time actors and did effects on BIKER BOYZ. My guess is that one directed the movie and then the other one directed it again and then they edited the two versions together using a coin toss or dice to figure out which shot to use where. It's not nearly as bad as DOMINO, that's one nice thing I can say. I guess the difference is that it has that cool premise and it sticks to it. It's a simple, fairly streamlined story. I guess I can see how somebody might be interested to see him get his revenge if they could watch the movie without their mind wandering off to somewhere more peaceful.
On the other hand, I think they do kind of fumble the whole adrenaline rush concept by making him so casual about everything. When he drives through the mall chased by cops in the beginning, he is talking on the phone and doesn't seem to be even paying attention to the high speed car chase he's involved in. That might be a funny way to show that he's seen everything, but doesn't that sort of contradict the idea that he's doing all this to terrify himself into staying alive? He sure doesn't seem like he's got any adrenaline flowing. Which is it? Unphased tough guy or adrenaline rush? You can't choose both.
The only other positive
thing I can say (this is for you, Thumper's mom) is that it occasionally has
a funny gimmick or over-the-top idea. The opening scene seems promising as
he wakes up disoriented, finds a DVD that says "FUCK YOU" on it
in Sharpie, puts it in and watches his enemy inject his unconscious body with
the poison. In the part where he drives through the mall (not as good as in
THE BLUES BROTHERS, by the way) I like that he somehow manages to get his
car sideways onto the escalator. But then he stands on top of it and jumps
off at the top of the escalator, which is kind of disappointing. I'm pretty
sure the Transporter would've been able to get the car off the escalator and
continue. Oh well.
Remember how I pointed out that the Transporter seems to have some weird racial
issues? Maybe it's Jason Statham himself because he does it again, in this
one he announces that he's gonna "kick some black ass" in order
to provoke a bunch of guys so he can keep his energy up. But he has bigger
problems in the woman department. He has this nice girlfriend played by Amy
Smart (the dangerous babe on SMITH if you saw that show before it was cancelled)
who doesn't even know he's a hitman. Again, he needs to keep his adrenaline
pumping so he decides he wants to have sex with her on a crowded block in
Chinatown. I don't know, maybe she's shy, so she says no. So he rapes her.
But the way they go from "our hero is raping his nice girlfriend in public"
to "this is a fun time at the movies" is they show that she starts
enjoying it and getting into it. I thought that old saw died with the westerns
but no, here it is again, a great fantasy for any of you sickos out there:
if you rape her good enough you'll win her over. Wonderful. This scene is
supposed to be the comic highlight - you can tell because they have all these
shots of the crowd watching as he screws her doggystyle, and then a tour bus
of school girls pulls up to enjoy the show. And in case you, like the character
played by Amy Smart, have already forgiven him for raping her - he decides
to push it further by pulling out his phone and making a call during the sex.
Which is, in my opinion, rude.
That reminds me of something completely unrelated to CRANK that I want to
get off my chest. I've probaly written about cell phone etiquette before.
I'm kind of a caveman or a luddovite or whatever on this issue. I personally
am not a cell phone guy. Usually I figure if it is important enough to call
somebody, it is important enough to either be indoors or find a damn payphone.
And I don't like the idea of walking around anywhere in the world and if somebody
calls you you gotta decide whether to answer it or not. That's what leaving
the house is for. You don't have to worry about that shit until you get home.
And you never have to worry about your fuckin "minutes." But I'm
not blamin you people, I completely understand why you want your phones, it
is very convenient. And I will understand even better some day if I fall through
a sinkhole or get trapped under a collapsing viaduct. I will reach for my
hip and think "Where the fuck is my cell phone side-holster?" before
realizing "Oh, that's right, I have never owned a cell phone." And
then I will sit there for however long it is that man can live without water,
considering whether or not it was worth it.
So you guys are probaly smart to carry those horrible things, in an emergency
you can always call for help or download the latest jamz from the Black Eye
Peas. But since you're the ones playing with them I believe the burden is
on you to institute a worldwide acceptance of common sense cell phone etiquette
rules. I mean for God's sake, it goes without saying that you shouldn't make
a phone call while doggystyling Amy Smart in front of a crowded square and
a bus full of tourists as Mr. Statham does in this picture. How is it gonna
be special for Amy Smart, or for the tourists, if you don't even have your
mind on it? Multi-tasking may be valued in your office (or in this case hitman)
job but there are some situations where your focus should be on interacting
with other human beings (in this case Amy Smart and a hundred or so others)
and not on showing off how many "tasks" you can stack up at once.
True story: a few weeks ago I was walking down a sidewalk and had to go around
a young hipster couple passionately making out in an intentionally obstructive
fashion. I saw them from half a block away, but it was only as I maneuvered
around them that I noticed the dude was listening to his voicemails while
he kissed her. Of course, this is not as bad as making a phone call during
public sex, but it shows that the attitude does exist, these assholes really
are that far gone. I guarantee you this guy I saw has the willingness and
the ability to execute that type of bullshit. The threat is imminent.
Of course, the more common problem is assholes going into a bank or a 7-11
or what have you and expecting the poor clerk to be able to make a transaction
with them while they are talking to somebody else about fixing the heater
in the pool or who's gonna pick up the wine to have for dinner. It used to
be they just looked down on the workers serving them or treated them like
shit, now they are trying to avoid even talking to them or acknowledging their
existence on this plane. As far as this guy's concerned he just paid a magic
cash register for his Slurpee. He didn't even see the guy he gave the money
to.
And the problem is even worse now with this type of phone that's getting more
and more popular, and this is the real reason I wanted to go off on this tangent.
As Jerry Seinfeld would say, what the holy fuckballs is up with those phones
that attach to your ear? I don't know what it's called but it's a little silver
headset type phone that actually ATTACHES into your ear AND YOU ACTUALLY KEEP
IT THERE ALL DAY. I'm sorry but I have to use capitals to convey how fuckin
nuts this is, italics doesn't cut it. I call these "Lobot phones"
because that's what a nerd told me is the name of the guy in Star Wars who
works for Billy Dee Williams and he has a cyborg attachment thing around his
head. Lobot is Billy Dee's manager or something and he thinks he's pretty
fuckin cool walkin around doing whatever you do with that cyborg head thing
all day, and this is the same way for you weirdos with your Lobot phones.
It used to be if you had a pager you looked important, then if you had a phone,
now that is commonplace so if you want to look important you gotta have a
phone ATTACHED TO YOUR FUCKIN HEAD. I sincerely hope that the next step is
to get them surgically implanted, because maybe when your hair products drip
into it and you get infected you will learn your lesson.
I mean seriously, have you ever considered the logic behind the Lobot phone?
By wearing a Lobot phone you are announcing to the world that you spend more
of your time on the phone than off, so it's just more convenient to have it
in your ear all day. Or that the discomfort and looking like a fuckin jackass
factors are overcome by the huge convenience of not having to take the phone
out of your pocket to answer it. With a regular phone you have to pull it
out of your pocket, you have to put it back into your pocket when you're done.
Way too much of a hassle. Better to have a phone in your ear all day.
I saw a guy at a concert wearing a Lobot phone. Really? You're expecting a
call during the show? What? I can't hear your. There's loud music. I'll
have to call you back. Don't worry, I have a phone attached to my head, it
will be easy.
And when you walk around in public with these things, down the sidewalks we
pay for with our taxes, into the businesses where we expect to not have to
deal with cyborgs, it can cause problems. Of course there is the now-familiar
problem of hearing someone talking and having to determine whether they are
talking to you, talking to themselves, or making a phone call. These are pretty
noticeable, they look fuckin ridiculous, so when you see them on somebody
you might assume they are making a phone call even if they're not. They try
to talk to you and you ignore them because you think they're talking to their
friend on the phone, then when you realize they are talking to you you try
to get them to repeat what they were saying but by that time they actually
are making a phone call. And then you realize they were trying to warn you
you are about to fall into a sinkhole but they are distracted by their phone
call so they forget and leave you there to die in the sinkhole without a cellphone
or even an iPod to jam out to some new tracks or files or whatever. And you
can take pictures because you have a digital camera but you can't send the
pictures to anybody because you would have to hook it up to a computer first
and attach them to an email, but you can't hook it up to a computer because
there is not a computer there, you are in a sinkhole.
And speaking of being left to die in a hole, I believe I was talking about
the movie CRANK. If he hadn't raped her maybe it would be funnier later when
she gives him a blowjob while he's in a high speed car chase, busting off
shots out the window. Beat that, Tommy Lee. I don't know, this type of scene
would be very impressive in a genuine hardcore porno, but in this context
it just seems kind of sleazy. Then she stops abruptly without, you know, finishing.
Just so you know how hilarious this is they have the sound of a needle scraping
off of a record. Kids today might not know what that sound is, but it's from
an old technology called the comedy machine.
I appreciate some of the crazy fantasy ideas in the movie, but because they're
trying so hard to be over-the-top they end up not making the minimum amount
of sense that would make the ideas work. For example, in a climactic confrontation
with his enemies Statham points a finger at them instead of a gun, and they
laugh. But when he twitches his thumb and mouths bang the guy he's pointing
at gets a bullet in the head, and everybody freaks out. What is this, a magic
finger gun? No, it turns out it was THE GANG OF TEN OR TWELVE TRIADS STANDING
TWO FEET BEHIND HIM HOLDING REAL GUNS! If only they had seen ten or twelve
guys standing behind him they wouldn't have let their guard down.
That didn't work, but I was somewhat won over by the even more ridiculous
ending where he pulls his enemy off a helicopter. He's gonna die anyway so
he doesn't mind falling. But to make it more personal, he doesn't let the
guy just plummet to his death - he strangles him in mid-air! The effects during
this part almost look like H.R. Puffinstuff. After the strangling he realizes
he's got some time before he hits the ground so he takes out his cell phone
(here is another reason why it would be good to have one) and leaves a loving
answering machine message for Amy Smart. This makes no sense on any level
except story and character, and that's why for once it works. I liked it.
Then there's another little touch at the end I liked. Nothing great but I
can't give it away in case you actually watch this movie. You gotta have some
kind of cheese at the end of this maze.
FULL DISCLOSURE: I hope you don't think I'm making a habit of this, but in
fairness I gotta admit I watched this late at night and I fell asleep a couple
times. From discussing it with other people I now know that I missed one really
offensive part (accusing an innocent Arab cabdriver of being al Quaeda so
that people will attack him) and one apparently cool part (something about
him being able to see the subtitles on the screen).
Since I recently watched that movie CRASH that Roger Ebert said was the best movie of 2005, I decided to finally go back and watch the original David Cronenberg version, which in my opinion is pretty fucking different.
This is the courageous story of a movie producer (James Spader) and his wife (Debora Kara Unger from STANDER and PAYBACK and THE GAME) and all the people they like to fuck from behind (various). The movie opens with Ms. Unger in an a hangar rubbing her nipple against an airplane while some dude licks her ass. And you can imagine where it would go from there (perverted car crashes, etc.). Very predictable, standard stuff.
Okay, if I must spell it out for you: The plot really kicks in when Spader causes a car accident that badly injures himself and Holly Hunter, and kills her husband. They later meet up at the junkyard where their wrecked cars are kept, and have sex in a car while (we find out later) Elias Koteas takes pictures.
The only way to accurately describe this movie is as a late night Cinemax movie gone horribly, disastrously wrong. Maybe this is the Shannon Tweed movie you'd watch on Videodrome.
Elias Koteas's character Vaughn is sort of the leader of a weird subculture of people sexually obsessed with car crashes. Both James Spader and Holly Hunter met him while rehabilitating in the hospital, because he came in and took photos of their injuries. Later they go around together and find highway accidents and lecherously photograph them.
My favorite scene in the movie is the introduction to this subculture. Spader and Hunter sit with a small crowd on some bleachers while Vaughn and two professional stuntmen recreate the car crash that killed James Dean. Then the cops show up (actually Department of Transportation, Vaughn says) and everybody runs off. This whole scene just has this great dreamlike feeling of that weird perverted thing you stumbled across that you probaly aren't supposed to know about, like that time I found a web sight of photoshopped giantess pictures, or that other time I found the web sight of dudes riding around in canoes wearing diapers. What makes it even better though is Spader doesn't look all that horrified by it, it's more like he's watching a school play or something. Everybody claps politely after the crash, even though they're not sure yet if everybody is okay.
There's not as much dialogue as in most movies, and what's there is usually in half whispered monotones. The score is spacy, minimalistic guitar strumming. Some people will read this as artiness but for me it only emphasises the Cinemax feel. I like Cronenberg alot and his freakiness is a big part of his appeal. But I gotta be honest, I didn't enjoy watching this one too much. The uncovering of the subculture is great, but after the Jayne Mansfield crash it seems like there's no more plot to propel anything. It really does have a porno structure because most of the movie is just stringing together the different combinations of characters having sex with each other and the crazy, disgusting shit that happens. (At least in the NC-17 version I saw. I'm sure the R-rated version is probaly a light comedy about an auto race or competition among used car salesmen or something like that).
So you get a scene where Spader fucks Rosanna Arquette's leg wound. And you get a scene where Spader and Vaughn get "prophetic tattoos" of a steering wheel and a hood ornament, then they fuck in a car and lick each other's bloody tattoos. That kind of thing. There's one scene that's more like a normal sex scene between Spader and Unger, but if you're gonna jerk off to that one you'll probaly have to put it on mute because the whole time Unger keeps asking questions about Elias Koteas, like "Have you seen his penis?" and "What do you think his anus looks like?" It's possible that she's just really terrible at pillow talk but I think something more was going on here.
Okay I'll just say it, I don't get this movie. I mean I like that it exists but I don't really understand what it's supposed to be about. But I bet it's something. Way to go Cronenberg, I imagine you probaly did a good job on this one.
CRASH (2005)
Unfortunately this is not the pervy Cronenberg movie I've never gotten around to seeing about the people getting off on car crashes. This is the race relations movie directed by Paul Haggis, writer of Clint's MILLION DOLLAR BABY. I gotta be honest, my reason for seeing this was not that I thought I would like it, but that I was just real damn curious. Because it got so many rave reviews, and Roger Ebert chose it as the best of the year, but every single person I knew who had seen it said it was corny, overwrought bullshit.
I hate to be a centrist but I think it falls somewhere in the middle. It seems well intentioned. It's trying to point out different kinds of subconscious racism, it's trying to show that people are complicated, racists maybe have a chance of being redeemed, people who don't think they are racists might end up shooting a black dude, etc. It's one of those movies where there's a bunch of different characters tangentally connected by coincidence and you find out as the story unfolds what they have to do with each other, which can be fun. And there's some good little moments and whatnot. One of the best scenes actually involves a cop trying to save somebody from a flipped car before it blows up. In other words, a scene you can see in every single episode of CHiPs. But this is better directed so it's pretty intense. Also Tony Danza has a cameo.
Other than Tony Danza there's a good cast and lots of good acting. Terence Howard is always good, Thandie Newton is good, Don Cheadle is real good which is getting kind of old in my opinion. Come on Don, let's see one movie where your acting sucks. You're repeating yourself too much. Larenz Tate from MENACE II SOCIETY is in there, I like him. The biggest surprise is Ludacris. I didn't think he was all that great in the much better HUSTLE & FLOW, but here he really impressed me. Also his character is pretty funny. In his first scene he does a long monologue about racism and how the white woman (Sandra Bullock) that he passed on the street was obviously scared of him and why do white people fear black men and etc., then he pulls out a gun and carjacks Sandra Bullock. And he continues to preach throughout the movie while committing crimes.
So I guess I can see what people like about the movie but it really didn't work for me. Some people can't get into KING KONG because they say the dinosaurs look fake. This is the same thing, it's hard to get involved in the characters when they live in this silly alternate universe where every single encounter you have in your day will lead to people openly expressing their racism. I mean okay, I believe that if you work with Tony Danza, he's gonna be a racist asshole. Come on Tony Danza, I don't care if you wrote letters to Tupac while he was in the can, you need to cool it dude.
The thing is, alot of racism is subtle. But CRASH doesn't have room for subtle. It's not enough to be a racist cop who pulls over black people for no reason and molests them, you also gotta bring up affirmative action and use the term "you people" while dealing with health care troubles. And rich white ladies have to yell racist things in front of their Hispanic maids and repair men. An argument between a white guy and a Persian guy takes 30 seconds to escalate into yelling about 9-11. And Ludacris keeps using the word "chinaman." That's only a few of the incidents. Most of these things have a basis in reality but when you pile them all up it becomes laughable. I mean DO THE RIGHT THING works because the shit is boiling up all day long before it explodes. CRASH is one of those long ass strings of firecrackers.
So you gotta wonder. I'm sure Paul Haggis hopes that, in a best case scenario, his movie will make people think about their own prejudices and try to change. But who the fuck is gonna relate to Sandra Bullock's horrible bitch character? Nobody is gonna watch her and think, "Oh geez, I yelled the exact same thing about Mexicans in front of my Latin American help! Could it be that I too am a racist and don't know it? I must mend my ways."
And the situations just get more and more preposterous. I don't think it's supposed to be funny when Ludacris opens the back of the stolen van he's been driving around and discovers it's full of smuggled Asian slaves. Not only is it, uh, ludicrous that he didn't notice this before, but it's just such an outlandish situation to find yourself in that the movie oughta have an "oh shit, is this really happening?" kind of humor about it. Maybe that's the problem, the movie is so deadly serious most of the time. That horrible new age score doesn't help.
Not all of it is that bad though. I kind of like the storyline of the Persian guy. He gets in a big argument with the guy repairing his lock, who says he needs to replace the door but he thinks the guy's trying to rip him off. The next day his whole store is wrecked with "RAG HEAD" spraypainted on the wall and the insurance won't cover it because he should've fixed the fucking door. He was the one being an asshole in the first place but the punishment is so harsh you have to feel bad for him. And one of the stories that intersects with that one made me laugh out loud (maybe on purpose) with its ridiculously obvious foreshadowing. Let's just say that a little girl believes she is wearing an invisible bullet proof cloak. Completely ridiculous, but her dad is a likable enough character that it creates some dread and suspense there.
One of the threads in the movie is about a road rage incident where a long haired white cop shoots a black man that turns out to also be a cop. It looks like the black cop was a criminal and started the incident in a coke rage, but the DA wants to blame the white guy to avoid controversy. This is clearly based on the real life incident that sparked off the whole mess that became the Rampart police corruption scandal in L.A. That story kicked off the epic Rolling Stone story "Who Killed Biggie Smalls?" which later became the book LAbyrinth. I remember reading it and thinking "This should be a movie, it would be like a modern day, true life LA CONFIDENTIAL." When I thought that though, just to be clear, I did not intend for the cast to include Brendan Fraser, Sandra Bullock and Tony Danza. So maybe we could do another one, please.
The only way to really end this review is with a list. But don't study it unless you either have seen the movie already or don't give either 2 (two) shits or 1 (one) flying fuck.
VERN'S INCOMPLETE CRASH RACISM / REDEMPTION SCORE CARD
DON CHEADLE - Seems cool but calls his El Salvadoran girlfriend Mexican, then makes admittedly clever racist joke. Not redeemed, his mom blames him for his brother's death and doesn't give him the respect he deserves.
MATT DILLON - Blatantly racist/perverted cop who likes to bring up affirmative action, pull over black people for no reason and molest Thandie Newton. Then he saves Thandie from an exploding car and stares thoughtfully into the distance during a musical montage.
SANDRA BULLOCK - Horrible yuppie bitch who treats her Hispanic maid like shit, calls the repairman a gangbanger and is upset that she didn't follow her anti-black instincts before getting carjacked by Ludacris. She believes her prejudices are actually a type of Spidey Sense. Then she slips on her ass and this teaches her to love Hispanics.
BRENDAN FRASER - D.A. who only cares about seeming non-racist to black voters. Not a very good actor by the way, is one thing I've noticed over the years.
LUDACRIS - Very conscious of racism against blacks, but uses the term "Chinaman" about 75 times. I don't know if this is an L.A. thing or what. Who the fuck says "Chinaman"? Fortunately the Asian guy he ran over and dumped on the sidewalk turns out to be a human trafficker, so Ludacris redeems himself by deciding not to sell them to a guy that wants to buy them from him for fifty bucks each. This same exact thing happened in THE TOXIC AVENGER only it was an old lady that he dry cleaned to death and she turned out to run a white slavery ring.
TERENCE HOWARD - Not really a racist but a black man who puts up with too much shit from racist white people. So then at the end he flips out and won't even be nice to the one non-racist white person.
LARENZ TATE - Makes fun of country music
RYAN PHILIPPE - Seems like the nicest guy in the movie, then shoots an unarmed black man. (Sure he was a carjacker but he doesn't find that out during the movie so it doesn't count. If he found out the truth like Ludacris did he would be off the hook.)
PERSIAN GUY - Incorrectly blames Hispanic guy for his problems, but is redeemed when he almost kills a little girl but doesn't and decides she's an angel. You know, the kind of thing we can all relate to.
HISPANIC GUY - I think maybe you were supposed to think he was racist in his dealings with the Persian guy, but I gotta disagree. He was just trying to fix the lock. This guy gets the rawest deal of anybody who is not killed in the movie. He never hurts anybody, never steals a car, never crashes a car, and is ridiculously nice to his little daughter. And what does he get? An angry customer stalking him and almost killing his daughter. The lock company oughta be paying this guy alot more.
TONY DANZA - This fucker still thinks he's the fucking boss, so he wants the black actors to "talk black" in his movie. You never see him again so there's no chance for him to be redeemed or to die. Maybe he slipped on his ass in a deleted scene, it's hard to say.