aka CHAMPION OF DEATH or FIGHTING KARATE-ULTIMATE TRUTH FIST
KARATE BULLFIGHTER is the first in a trilogy starring the great Sonny Chiba as his real life mentor Masutatsu Oyama. Apparently it's based on a comic book called The Fanatical Karate Generation. Despite all the crazy titles this movie is really sort of a fictionalized biography of a visionary karate instructor who causes an outrage by rejecting the notions of the time. He pisses everybody off by saying that modern karate is just "a dance" and lamenting that he wasted his time by training for 3 years. He does win a big trophy in a tournament that supposedly means he's the best karate man in Japan, but when a guy compliments him he gets all pissed off and throws it down some stairs.
It's a real interesting story but let's be honest, you're not gonna watch it for an interesting story. You're gonna watch it because it's called Karate Bullfighter. This is because in the first half of the movie Sonny is practicing karate on the beach when suddenly he hears that a mad bull is loose. He figures maybe he should help so he saves a little girl from being gored and then wrestles the bull. He literally grabs the bull by the horns, then figuratively goes for the jugular by literally karate chopping the bull in the head until a beautiful shower of samurai movie/Dawn of the Dead style bright red blood sprays out. This is actually kind of creepy because they have a real bull for alot of shots and it looks like they somehow forced his mouth shut so he couldn't bite. (Some of it is also clearly a fake bull.)
Anyway he kills a bull with his bare hands, and when word gets out his karate rivals talk shit and say he must've cheated somehow, drugging th bull or something. You figure he's gonna try to prove it by fighting another bull in front of everybody, but no. The title just comes from that one scene. Still, the rivals cracks cause Sonny's one and only student to go completely crazy and beat the shit out of them, putting them in the hospital. As you know from Mr. Miyagi, Chuck Norris and other wise individuals, karate is supposed to be for self defense. You're not supposed to go beat the hell out of dudes for talking shit. So the fact that Sonny taught this asshole reflects poorly on him and reinforces the idea that he teaches evil karate. And he feels real bad about it and tries to make amends.
But things get worse. Upset about the whole thing he goes and gets real drunk and it just so happens that while he's in the bar some gangsters come in and try to extort the club owner. So Sonny fights them and accidentally kills one of them.
In some movies that would just be an awesome action scene but in this one it has consequences. Sonny feels terrible about killing a guy, especially after he meets the guy's wife and son. When he goes to their house to try to do work for them as an apology, the kid yells at him and throws shit at his head. But he still tills some crops for them and eventually wins them over.
So it's got a cool anti-hero trying to redeem himself kinda thing going on but unfortunately it also has one thing I got a problem with in a lot of Japanese movies: the ol' rape scene. When he was in the war he saved a girl from some American assholes. And now, years later, he sees this same girl speaking English and talking to a Yankee, and he assumes she's a prostitute. This pisses him off so bad that he rapes her. Later he finds out it's all a big misunderstanding and he apologizes, and after a while they fall in love. But I'm sorry man, no dice. It's not a normal mistake to make. Maybe if you're gonna cut your dick off or something we will consider forgiving you but even then I gotta wonder what your fuckin problem is. Jesus man be a fuckin gentleman. And the lady, I'm glad she at least rejects him for a while but jesus. Have some self respect.If you can get past that problem, it is otherwise a fun movie with some good karate and the powerful presence of Mr. Sonny Chiba. It's alot better than you probaly imagine, you actually get involved in the story instead of just waiting for the next fight scene or chopping a Coke bottle scene. My favorite part besides the bullfight is at the end when he's sneaking around in a field fighting a whole gang of his rivals. Some hotshot comes at him all fancy, swinging nunchakas all over the place. Sonny's response is to chuck a little rock really hard at the dude's head and knock him out. It's a classic move. I wonder if that's where Indiana Jones got the idea to shoot that sword guy? I don't know but if he had hit him in the head with a rock it would've been even better.
The second in Sonny Chiba's Oyama trilogy is even better than the first one. First of all, no rape scene. Second of all, he becomes more of a classical badass who gets to show off different facets of his badass powers. There's alot of scenes where he's in a situation that would make most people nervous - like when a powerful gangster tries to hire him - and he just gives off a Just Don't Give A Fuck vibe, sometimes even munching on food instead of paying attention to people (always a favorite of mine since Dirty Harry foiled a robbery while eating a hot dog).
Oyama takes the job with the gangster, which is a great chance for him to wear shades, a white suit and a long white coat over his shoulder, and scare everybody without saying a word.
The plot has a kind of episodic feel to it that makes him seem more like a Lone Wolf and Cub type of character, a badass that travels around helping people and getting into scuffles. First he runs into a street hustler pretending to be him - Oyama, world famous karate master - to sell homeopathic fitness aids. This pisses him off and he humiliates the dude. But the hustler buys him a drink as an apology and, getting a glimpse into the guy's life, he grows sort of fond of him. The guy is engaged to a waitress who believes he's the real Oyama, and that especially touches him. (But not enough for him to intervene when the imposter has to fight a bunch of karate masters because everyone thinks he can take them.)
But then the waitress gets killed by an asshole gangster, and when her imposter fiancee tries to get revenge, he gets killed too. Now the story takes a completely different direction as Oyama travels to the countryside to bury the couple's urns at the foot of a mountain. I thought he was gonna meet up with that kid whose father he killed in the first one but instead he gets a different surrogate nephew. The son of an abusive alcoholic, this kid steals Oyama's bag, not knowing it has urns in it. Following the kid to his house, Oyama discovers the deadbeat dad mistreating his son and almost beats him up. But when he sees the kid's love for even such an asshole of a father, he gets all soft.
So they become buddies and go fishing together, and the father straightens up a little and gets a job cutting down trees. And then he gets injured on the job, which is where the bear comes in. In the first one, Oyama fought a bull because it was loose and on a rampage. I was expecting a "How can the same shit happen to the same guy twice?" type of scenario with the bear but instead they make it plausible, everybody's heard about Oyama's bullfight so they pay him to fight a bear, and he needs the money to help the injured dad.
The bearfight is the one aspect that I thought was inferior to the original. It's clearly a dude in a bear suit, even if they hide him behind branches constantly. There is never a real bear on screen. And still the moves Oyama does don't seem that deadly. The bullfight was much better.
What makes these movies so much fun is a good balance of story and asskicking. I really like these characters and want things to turn out well for them. And there are some sad parts in this one that are real effective. But then it's always exciting when a fight breaks out. Oyama is the kind of guy who can just be walking down the street and suddenly a bunch of dudes will jump out and announce they are going to kill him. His karate rivals are not very professional about their disagreements, in my opinion. Also, for some reason both movies have a scene where he has to fight a tall African-American soldier.
There aren't any moves as original as the rock throwing in part 1, but there's a good eyepoking for you. Also the first fight has a very modern and flashy technique where it cuts to a shot of an x-ray to show that he's breaking a guy's bone.
All around, one of the best bear fighting movies you will see, even if the bear fight is the low point.
The third and final entry in the Oyama trilogy starts out in pretty much the most badass way possible. A narrator explains that at this point in his life, Oyama liked to go around to different dojos and make challenges to prove the power of his karate.
So he struts into this dojo wearing his karate clothes, but also with his white gangster coat draped over his shoulders for extra style points. When the students ask who the hell he is he explains that he's come to challenge their sensei.
I think this sensei is the same guy he's been feuding with all throughout the series. At any rate, the guy pretty much tells Oyama that he's an asshole for going around picking fights, because that's against the whole idea of karate. And it's a good point. Still, the sensei agrees to a fight, sort of. He'll fight Oyama, but first Oyama will have to fight 100 of his students. Ha ha ha.
Of course he doesn't expect Oyama to accept. But he does. "As long as you are number 101."
And the great thing is you really get to see him fight all these guys. I mean, I didn't count if it was actually 100 guys, but it's definitely up there. Of course, for artistic purposes, he defeats most of them in one or two blows. But they all gang up on him and he takes them down one by one. After a while they resort to dirty tricks, they dump a bunch of oil on the ground TRANSPORTER 1 style and put sand on their feet so they can stand up but Oyama can't. (This trick was also used in COCKFIGHTER, the guy who has his chickens fight on a slick linoleum floor and coats their feet with rosin.)
So you think maybe this will end the fight until he can come back later for revenge. But that would be underestimating Oyama. He falls down but he starts grabbing people by the legs and wrestling them to the ground. Then he basically just creates a pile of karate guys and stands on them, because they're not slippery.
And he does other tricks - climbing on the wall, tying their black belts around his feet, etc. Until finally the sensei grows some balls and decides to take him on. And the fight ends with the sensei leaning against a wall with blood dripping out of one eye. The students all try to stand up but their muscles are shaky, and they run away in fear as Oyama walks by them shouting, "You got it? That's Oyama karate!"
And that's just the first scene.
Some people might be disappointed because in KARATE FOR LIFE he doesn't fight an animal. Obviously there's alot of different paths they could've chosen, KARATE GORILLA FIGHTER being an obvious one. Or they could go a little more abstract and make it KARATE KILLER BEE FIGHTER. Or KARATE WHALE RIDER. But instead they went with KARATE WRESTLER FIGHTER. We don't see Oyama get drunk as much in this one but in the opening he and his posse have run up a huge bill at the bar and have no money to pay for it. Then a rich dude comes in and starts literally shoving a bunch of money in their faces saying "Recognize that? It's money." He convinces Oyama to fly out to Okinawa for a wrestling gig. They got Japan's best wrestler and Japan's best judo fighter, and the three of them will be the Yamashita Brothers. The judo guy won't give Oyama the time of day and wants to turn down the offer, but the promoter convinces them that since the match is for American GIs it will humiliate all of Japan if they back out.
So alot of the movie is about wrestling and how Oyama is supposed to lose but every time he gets in the ring he's too stubborn to throw the fight. So the the gangster promoters want to kill him and through all this danger he and the judo guy become buddies. So in this movie he befriends a judo master, a wrestler, a hot alcoholic suicidal girl with tuberculosis, her brother, and a gang of Hiroshima orphan pickpockets. Once again there is tragedy and he has to transport a body to a grave, but this time it's super badass because he's buried the body and dramatic music plays and suddenly the judo master just walks up and without saying anything they go to where they have to go to beat up the wrestling promoters (I think) and the sensei from the beginning, who now has an eyepatch. And there's a fight in a maze of mirrors which was probaly the inspiration for the scene in ENTER THE DRAGON, even if this one came out four years later. Sonny Chiba probaly had been planning it for five years is my guess.
This movie is a whole hell of alot of fun but I'm not prepared to say it's better than the other two. In some ways it seems like they have further perfected the formula at this point, but on the other hand they don't get as much emotion out of his relationship with the kids as in the other two. And there's one major misstep I think: the first time he gets in the wrestling ring he's all scared and he runs around in a panic until his partner tells him it's okay to use karate. I don't mind a character being scared (John McClane is scared shitless all throughout his trilogy) but this scene just doesn't seem to match the character. The Oyama we know, even if he thought he was gonna get his ass beat, he would stand there and take it. He wouldn't run around in circles and hop out of the ring and shit. It's like he's possessed by the ghost of a sissy. Other than that one scene though, I enjoyed the movie.
At the end Oyama practices karate on the beach, which I've noticed is something he enjoys, and the last line of the movie is "There is no end to my way of karate." So the trilogy is over but the karate lives on in the world around us, in the air we breathe, and most of all in our hearts.
KICKBOXERKICKBOXER is a much better version of BLOODSPORT. It's another late '80s/Cannon Films/Jean-Claude Van Damme/Belgian-American competing in dangerous Asian fighting competition movie. This one starts with Van Damme as Kurt Sloan, goofy kid brother sidekick to United States Kickboxing Champion of the World Eric "The Eliminator" Sloan, whose hair and mustache might have influenced Danny McBride's look in THE FOOT FIST WAY, I'm guessing.
The Eliminator is the best... in the United States. But he's arrogant and ignorant. When asked by a reporter about kickboxing's origins in Thailand he asks Kurt to book him a flight to Taiwan (Kurt has to correct him and bring him to Bangkok). The Eliminator thinks taking on the Thai champion will be a piece of cake, or a bowl of sticky rice or whatever. But Kurt knows it's trouble as soon as he sees the opponent, Tong Po. This guy is a crazy-eyed maniac with a braided ponytail down to his ass who practices by kicking a column in his dressing room, cracking it.
Kurt looks around and sees that this is totally different here. They fight different, using elbows and knees. But the Eliminator doesn't think he even has to pay attention to where he is, because he's THE BEST! That's why this movie won me over quick, it has this subtext about this guy being sort of a tourist in the world of kickboxing, not respecting or understanding or even taking a quick glance at where it comes form. And just going into a foreign country this arrogant asshole not bothering to understand the culture, assuming he's the best and not even doing any fuckin homework. I mean somebody clearly should've made Rumsfeld watch KICKBOXER in around 2001, could've saved us alot of trouble.
Kurt is the wiser one, he pays attention, but big brother won't listen so he gets his ass whooped and can't walk after an elbow to the spine. The crew at the arena don't exactly give him VIP treatment. They carry him out on a stretcher, set him down in the street and lock the gate.
Luckily Tong Po also kicked Kurt out of the ring and literally into the lap of an American ex-special forces dude named Winston Taylor (Haskell V. Anderson III) who he guilts into giving him a ride to the hospital and being his Steve James for the rest of the movie.
But Kurt is pretty pissed off so he decides he has to find a crazy dude to train him in muay thai, become a successful fighter, get a match with Tong Po and then like kick him in the balls or at least call him a weiner or something. His teacher is Xian Chow (Dennis Chan), who comes up with some excellent training sequences. Kurt practices kicking underwater, breaks his leg kicking a tree to death, runs from a dog with meat strapped to his thigh, and gets a coconut dropped on his belly from a real high tree to test his abdominal fortitude.
But the best test by far is when Tzian takes him to a bar, gets him really drunk and tells him to dance to the jukebox with some ladies. This leads to a bunch of locals attacking him, so he drunkenly fends them off. This is a somewhat legendary scene I think because it's been sent to me more than once as incentive to watch these early Van Dammes. The fight is good but I think they chose the clip for Van Damme's enthusiastic dancing.
Apparently Xian is telling those guys that Kurt insulted them, but I think it would make sense that they wanted to beat him up just for dancing like that.
Tong Po is the Chong Li of the movie, or the Ivan Drago. There's also a crime boss behind him named Freddy Li (Steve Lee) and he has a nice Just How Evil Is He? moment when he's sitting in the crowd during the final fight and a little blood squirts on him, so he tastes it and smiles perversely. They don't show if he has a boner or not but I'm guessing yes, for sure, definitely.
Tong Po is a great villain too. He doesn't really have a fleshed out personality or anything but he just looks like such a monster that he seems like a formidable opponent. Being so one-dimensional fits completely with the theme, these guys got no idea who this is, he might as well be an alien. I wondered who this was and to my surprise the credits credit Tong Po as being played by "Himself." What!? Tong Po is a real guy? Some famous martial artist and he doesn't mind being portrayed in the movie like that?
Well, as tempting as it might be to believe that dude is out there somewhere, there's nobody named Tong Po. He's actually played by Michel Qissi, a martial artist who grew up with Van Damme. He was his personal trainer for BLOODSPORT and for this one they made him up to look Asian and called him Tong Po. His probaly not as evil as you would think, and apparently he's standing next to Van Damme in that notorious clip from BREAKIN' where they were both extras.
Still I'd be careful, some day he could get a bump on the head and start thinking he's Tong Po, and it could be trouble.
Anyway, the fight with Tong Po is good, and has the memorable gimmick of their fists being wrapped in hemp, dipped in resin and then covered in broken glass. (Somehow this doesn't cause as much damage as it sounds like it would.) But the filmatists are smart enough to know that a fight in a circle of torches is a little drab as far as action movie climaxes go, so they intercut it with another scene where the supporting cast has to kick ass - Xian and Taylor rescue Eric from kidnappers. And Eric gets to do a few Eliminator moves with his arms even though he's in a wheelchair. Also Xian's dog gets stabbed, that's pretty fucked up. It's also a missed opportunity because in the beginning it's mentioned that Kurt might want to become a veterinarian. There could've been a scene where he practices veterinary medicine on the dog, but nope.
Despite that major oversight I recommend KICKBOXER to all viewers who think they might enjoy a movie called KICKBOXER.
11/30/08
This latest work from the great Takeshi Kitano, new on the video this week, is not his most popular. Apparently there are alot of individuals out there who hated this movie. Because this time Takeshi is not playing a violent cop or a gangster. He's just some dude. And the movie is about how he has to take care of an adorable little boy.
Now I know what you're thinkin. Cop and a Half. Three Men and a Baby. The one where Chuck Norris is a cop and his partner is a dog. All this type of garbage. And it's true, that is the type of basic storyline we're talking about here.
But that is what is so important about this work, is that it shows you can take the tough guy and little kid formula, and do it Takeshi style, and it comes out as a great comedy. Not as crap.
Takeshi is, like our own Mr. Clint Eastwood, one of the great Badass Laureates. He has a stoic type personality and he is a master of the deadpan expression. He plays characters who go way overboard and convinces you with his eyes that he doesn't see anything wrong with it. And what brings him into the Laureate category is that he directs his own pictures, and that his directifying style happens to be exactly the best one to showcase his Badass persona.
In a typical tough guy and kid picture, there might be a similar scene to the one where Takeshi goes back and beats the living shit out of a trucker for not giving him and the kid a ride. MAYBE. But there would be wacky music playing or "Bad to the Bone" or some shit like that. The trucker would start screaming like a baby and wiggling around goin "Oh no!" and eventually "Mommy!" and maybe he'd piss his pants and you'd think, "He's not gonna be hurt that bad but boy is it fun to watch this fella squirm! Ha ha!"
Not here. Takeshi does it in one uninterupted shot, no music, from across the street. Like a police video or something. And he just starts beating on the dude with a stick. The sheer brutality of it is where the laffs come in.
But the movie's not all that violent. Takeshi's character is basically a juvenile delinquent in an adult body. His wife convinces him to take her friend's grand kid on a trip to see his mother. So he takes the kid to bet on bicycle races. This doesn't work out so instead of trying to come up with a legitimate plan for traveling, he comes up with a bunch of dumb schemes. Like, what if we pop somebody's tire, then we could help them change their tire, and they would offer us a ride.
The key to Takeshi is that he'll do stupid shit like this, or blatantly stealing right in front of somebody, or assfucking some dude out of the blue in Boiling Point, and then you'll look at him and he just sits there with this blank expression on his face that says, "What?"
The Takeshi approach could pump some new blood into any number of dumb comedy premises. Think of any one of these comedies that Arnold Schwarzenegger does every couple of years. Like he is pregnant or he has a short twin brother or he has to train an ostrich to defuse a bomb and etc. etc. Arnold has no fucking clue how to make that funny. Takeshi can do it in his sleep. And then wake up with a new idea for a gangster movie that came to him in a dream.
Please my young friends out there who have not yet seen the pictures of Beat Takeshi. I promise you. You will fall in love with the Takeshi style if you give it a chance. It is a very understated style, very slow and quiet. And that's why it works so well. It's not flashy or action packed and there's not alot of talking. It's all in the air. His persona never gets old and his directation is only getting better. There is no one else like Takeshi. But let's leave this guy in Japan, all right americans. He's doin good over there.
KILL BILL VOLUME 2
(another unused one for the ain't it cool news.)
Harry and associates,
I am writing to inform you of an exciting new picture called KILL BILL VOLUME 2. Please forgive me if you already know about this one or have covered it already. Or if you have travelled to China to visit the set. I don't usually read your sight except when my reviews are on it.
Just jerkin your chain bud but seriously here's the deal. This has been coming on for a while but after seeing this movie I think today is the day. I would like to officially endorse the works of Mr. Tarantino as an important chapter in the history of Badass Cinema. VOLUME 2 is a very satisfying conclusion to that exciting saga of revenge we began oh those several months ago with The Bride.
VOLUME 2 is really different from VOLUME 1 though. It seemed like that one was more about fighting than talking, and this one is the other way around. In fact there's so much sitting around talking in the opening scenes that it looks like they had to move the opening credits to the end, afraid that people would be bored by endless driving followed by endless talking. But this one goes much deeper into the characters, revealing all the goods about the relationship between the Bride and Bill (who, remember, you didn't even get to SEE in the first one - now he's all over the place). The Bride becomes a little deeper of a character and you even get to feel some amount of sympathy for Bill. It's a much sweeter film.
But it's still totally brutal. One thing I loved in VOLUME 1 was the scene where the Bride woke up from her coma, realized her baby was gone, and just started to bawl. The audience is having a great time and then Tarantino intentionally bums them out and makes them watch Ms. Thurman's extended, uncomfortably realistic trauma. I can't think of another movie that plays so well with a combination of goofy kung fu type fun and raw emotion. Tarantino and the audience have so much fun with the violence and then every once in a while he just slaps you upside the head with the real life consequences of it, like the scene with Vernita Green's daughter. I mean shit I love the CHARLIES ANGELS pictures but this is like the "deep" version of that. On crack. Times ten. From beyond the grave.
Well, VOLUME 2 is like the sequel to that crying scene. There were times when I thought jesus Tarantino, do you really have to put this poor gal through even more horror? How many times can we see her face bloodied or her eyes red from crying? Can't she kick an ass or two first before she gets shotgunned, drugged and buried alive? But once again Mr. Tarantino proves that he knows what he's doing, just you wait. To me the most satisfying moment in the movie - and for christ's sake don't be reading this shit if you don't want it given away - is after she's been buried alive and it moves on to the next chapter, "The Cruel Tutelage of Pai Mei." We leave the Bride gasping for air six feet deep and flash back to her as a young gal wearing Keds being dumped with a bearded old school kung fu mentor for years of horrible training. I thought all right, this is a cliffhanger, we're gonna have to wait to find out how the hell she survives that. And then you kind of forget about the grave until it comes back to it and you realize exactly how she's gonna escape, and you have no choice but to smile like a retard. Absolutely perfect Badass filmatism.
If you are not familiar with volume 1, what this story is about is a badass killer who is ruthlessly shot on her wedding day, along with her unborn child. She is in a coma for 4 years, then boldly overcomes her atrophied muscles to escape the hospital, goes off to train with swords and then goes down the list of the people who shot her and avenges them one by one.
I know what you're thinking. What do you mean 'HER'? The character of Mason Storm is clearly a MAN, played by Steven Seagal, and he was in a coma for 7 years, not 4. And his child who was supposedly dead but is not actually dead was already born. Actually, you're thinking of HARD TO KILL, another fine film on this same topic of coma revenge. (Where's that dude who did "WHO DO YOU THINK YOU'RE FOOLING?" when you need him?)
Anyway, there is a classic fight scene or two (on a much more intimate scale than the House of Blues scene in volume 1) but most of this movie seems to be going for the spaghetti western type feel. Lots of wide shots, extreme closeups of faces and dusty settings. The music is less upbeat, mostly bits of Ennio Morricone scores or more often Robert Rodriguez imitating Ennio Morricone scores. If you loved the RZA's score for GHOST DOG as much as I did I am sorry to report that once again it is unclear how he got the composer credit. Except I did notice one great scene with what sounded like RZA beats, and there is an instrumental on the end credits.
The whole cast is great and as always Tarantino is a master at finding actors you either haven't seen before or don't remember when you've seen them, that just seem like the perfect guy for that scene. I was most impressed by the dude who played Michael Madsen (FREE WILLY)'s boss at the strip club. Where does he find these guys?
(Hey, wasn't the dude from SPAWN supposed to be in this movie? Where'd he go?)
But the most important part of the picture is of course Uma Thurman. I really don't think anybody else could've done this movie. She's just a once in a lifetime combination of surface and substance. Obviously she is gorgeous and her long limbs help her look great in all the physical stuff she pulls off so perfectly - the tiger crane kung fu, the menacing strut, the zombie-like stumbling around covered in dirt and blood. But then she also has to do all the "real acting" shit. It's a classic character and performance. If she can get an oscar nomination for PULP FICTION and not for this then I guess there must've raised the bar or something.
But like I said before, I am happy to welcome Mr. Tarantino into the pantheon. I don't care if the guy yammers on too long in his interviews or whatever it is people don't like about him. I don't care if you used to like him but then everybody else liked him so then you decided you didn't like him and took his pinup out of your locker. Kids, all that shit is only relevant in the talkbacks. In the actual world of Badass Cinema what matters is what's projected up on the screen there. It's not his encyclopedic knowledge of crime/action/kung fu/western etc. that makes him great (thanks for the homage to MR. MAJESTYK though, that was nice). Behind all that is an extreme confidence that he can take the audience wherever the fuck he wants to, and the skills to back that up.
When I reviewed Mr. Kubrick's 2001 recently I tried to describe that feeling you rarely get in movies where you feel you are in the hands of a true master who ignores all Hollywood formula and common sense, and just KNOWS he can take you in one cut from primitive ape men playing with bones to a space station thousands of years later. No, I'm not saying Tarantino is the new Kubrick, but he gives me that same great feeling. He KNOWS he can skip around in the timeline at his leisure, and you will follow. He KNOWS he can balance gruesome violence, goofy humor, campy '70s homage and the serious story of losing a child. That he can put the crying scene in the same movie with O Ren decapitating the yakuza boss for laughs. I appreciate that this guy takes his time to get things right, instead of making a movie every year just to be working.
I gotta say it friends. He is one of the great living filmatists. For sure. You don't make RESERVOIR DOGS, PULP FICTION, JACKIE BROWN and now this unless you know what the fuck you're doing. He is one of the few (besides occasionally Mr. Soderbergh) treating crime, martial arts and action pictures as both crowdpleasing fun and serious Art with a capital A. I mean even in the '70s you didn't see that all the time, although obviously alot of Peckinpah's movies qualify, and of course POINT BLANK.
Oh jesus can you imagine if he had done a movie with Lee Marvin? Or Charles Bronson or Steve McQueen? Holy shit.
Anyway I approve of this guy and I can't wait to go see this movie again.
thanks Harry,
Vern
http://www.geocites.com/outlawvern
THE KILLER
but not the John Woo one though
this one is 1972, aka L'INSOLENT
Sometimes in a man's life a man finds an oversized vhs box with a weird painting of Henry Silva jumping out at him holding a gun. If you're not familiar with Mr. Silva, he is the scary mafia don in GHOST DOG, the scary crooked CIA guy in Seagal's ABOVE THE LAW, etc. He's one of those guys, if he shows up in a movie, you know he's a fuckin bad guy. Because you have eyes. That's all you need to figure this guy out.
So I was surprised to find out that when he was younger he didn't look quite as scary. I mean sure, he looks like a bad guy, but that whole thing improved with age. In this one he almost looks like Chevy Chase, if his head grew bigger literally instead of figuratively. Or maybe he is like the evil android of Wayne Newton. I don't know. Still, he's a cold motherfucker and from beginning to end he doesn't have a kind thought or a moment of hesitation. He's got his eye on the prize, the prize being to get all the money and fuck everybody else over without a look back. Because he's Henry Silva.
Point is its a low budget crime movie, some sort of French-American co-production taking place in France with a mostly french cast, but some of the actors (including Silva) are speaking english, others are obviously redubbed. This is by no means a great movie but it's a good one if you can find it.
The picture starts out with Silva living the American dream: he wakes up in his cell, hits his two cellmates over the head with a pipe, builds a grappling hook out of a stool and sheet, and uses wet sheets to bend the bars apart so he can climb out (long story).
Then the second he's out - because he's not me or you, he's Henry Silva - the bastard is back at it, stealing a gas station attendant's clothes, wallet and motorcycyle, meeting with some rich dudes at a club, setting up an armored car heist. Eventually this turns out to be a scam he's playing on them (fake gold, etc.) and they get him back by paying him with marked bills. And that's when he becomes the Killer, or the Insolent, when he's sick of fucking around, he decides to go to their club, kidnap one of their dancers, sleep with her (don't worry, it's consensual since this is French, not Italian), firebomb some cars, go out with a bang, etc. It's nothing original but let's be honest, it's the type of stuff we want to see in a movie like this.
I think I might've actually seen part of this on TV one time, but maybe not. There's a scene in here where they go to pick up one of their drivers at his day job, a sideshow act where a bunch of stunt motorcycle drivers drive around inside a big cylinder. Did I see this before or is there a better known movie that shows that? I can't remember. It's a pretty impressive scene unless it's a ripoff of some other movie that I'm remembering.
Anyway, you already know this, but beware of Henry Silva. You can't trust that fucking guy. No way.
KING OF NEW YORK
In this movie Christopher Walken plays Frank White who is the King of New York. He is not literally a king but actually some sort of crime boss of New York. He's fresh out of the joint and unlike certain heroic individuals who choose to turn their life around and follow a path of Positivity, making the world a better place through art and culture, he decides to be king of new york. But he says he's gonna build a hospital so that makes it okay.
The director is Abel Ferrara, an asshole director who I sort of like. I mean I never met the guy obviously but he's one of those greaseballs like Vincent Gallo where, before you even see an interview with the guy, you just get the feeling he's an asshole. In his movie DRILLER KILLER I didn't even realize he was the star (he used a pseudonym) and I kept thinking this star really thinks he's hot shit, it's not just the character. What a fuckin asshole. But then I listened to the commentary track and heard Ferrara say the same exact thing about himself. So I had to like him.
Plus, some assholes are talented and I think Ferrara is, at least sometimes. He makes gritty, raw movies, alot of them bad, some of them good. His commentary tracks are always funny and even on a movie like this, maybe the best he'll ever make, he makes fun of it like it's some corny slasher movie. Here he makes a crime saga but he doesn't have Hollywood germs tainting his blood so he makes it serious and brutal and unformulaic. You could argue that he's one of these pretentious New York underground art type assholes, and that that's not necessarily better than being a corny Hollywood asshole. True, but I prefer the New York asshole for making KING OF NEW YORK. Especially a macho guy like Ferrara.
Here he has about the best cast you could ever hope for: Walken, Larry (not yet Laurence) Fishburne, my man Wesley Snipes, David Caruso, Steve Buscemi (small part), Victor Argo, Roger Guinveur Smith (Smiley from DO THE RIGHT THING), Giancarlo Esposito. Also I don't know if you know this guy Paul Calderon, I like him alot but he's not all that well known. He almost played Jules in PULP FICTION but, you know, some other guy got it. (He ended up with a bit part as the bartender Paul: "My name is Paul, and this is between y'all.") He was also Raymond Cruz in OUT OF SIGHT, a character who doesn't do much but he's in other Elmore Leonard books so you can imagine Paul Calderon having all kinds of adventures outside of the movie. Anyway, Calderon is good and he's in KING OF NEW YORK.
The violence starts before Frank is even home, when his gang starts rearranging the crime landscape of New York to prepare for his arrival. Sort of their version of making a big banner that says "WELCOME HOME FRANK." There's a couple of classic scenes in this movie and one of them is right at the beginning, Fishburne, Buscemi and some other guys come in to buy a bunch of cocaine from one of Frank's rivals. I won't give away the gag but it turns out they're actually there to gun everybody down, and one guy even yells "Room service motherfucker!" as he kicks the door down.
Another scene I liked, Frank is in the subway feelin his attorney's tit, and three of those black subway toughs you see in all these movies try to mug him at knifepoint. Frank pulls his jacket open to show that he has a gun. Gun beats knife. As the muggers start to back away in terror he pulls out a fat ass roll and tosses it to them, tells them to come by the Plaza Hotel, he has a job for them. (Sure enough, you see them later as some of his thugs.)
The movie is not only from the anti-hero point of view though, you also got a group of cops after him. These guys are assholes but obviously they're right to be trying to stop him. Of course, you bust somebody from Frank's gang the prick's out on bail in an hour, so these cops start to get frustrated. That's when Dave Caruso and my man Wesley Snipes decide to go vigilante and take care of it themselves. This is where the main theme of the movie really comes in, blurring the line between cops and gangsters. Frank points out that all the people he's been killing are scumbags - he actually singled out criminals who he thought were too vicious or amoral. And meanwhile he's having these charity events, trying to build a community hospital. (The hospital is never built so who knows if it's for real or not.) So Frank's question is, how big of a difference is there between cops who can't stop crime unless they break the law and criminals who do get results and help the community? In his point of view anyway.
I don't think the movie is saying that Frank is right, but there's definitely some connection between the good guys and the bad guys. Even when the cops talk about how badly they want to take him down, they always refer to him as "Frank."
It's not one of those two and a half hour epics but it has sort of a heavy epic kind of feeling to it. I like how most of the main characters are horrible bastards and noble at the same time. My very favorite scene is the one where Larry Fishburne is ordering food and doesn't like how the cashier is treating some poor kids messing with the video games. He graciously gives the kids and their grandma money and tells the cashier off. Then right in the middle of being your hero, the cops rush in and bust him right in front of the kids. It's alot of emotions for one scene.
When people talk about KING OF NEW YORK they usually talk about Christopher Walken. I guess Biggie Smalls was obsessed with the character and was even checked into a hotel as Frank White when he died. Walken of course is great but this is more of an ensemble than I expected. Frank White is a bad motherfucker but I think it's the whole complicated set of characters and alliances and betrayals and the believable New York underworld that makes it interesting.
A couple years ago Shane Black, the hot shot wunderkind enfant terrible wave of the future 22 year old millionaire kid who wrote LETHAL WEAPON and a couple other movies, then got burnt out and disappeared for years, suddenly resurfaced as the writer-director of this well-received if not smash hit smart-alecky mystery comedy. I heard alot of good things about it so one Wednesday afternoon I checked the movie times and went downtown to see it. Unfortunately this was the day that movie about 50 Cent came out and all the showings of KISS KISS BANG BANG had been dropped without the movie times being updated online. I was so hurt that I didn't watch the movie until just the other day.
Fortunately this one lives up to the word-of-the-mouth. This summer everybody's excited about Robert Downey Jr.'s funny turn and ad-libs in IRON MAN, but it must've been less surprising to people who saw this one. Not only is Downey the star, he is the narrator who possesses the powers of someone recording a DVD commentary. He can skip around, make jokes, apologize for bad narration, complain about movie conventions (specifically comparing one scene to a shot in THE HUNT FOR RED OCTOBER).
Yes, the movie is covered in meta. You got that all powerful narration, you also got a character obsessed with an old pulp detective series called Johnnie Gossamer, so the mystery elements of the story of course mirrors the types of things that would have happened in those books if they were real books. But also a movie adaptation of the books figures heavily into the plot. All of this could easily be annoying, but I guess Downey and Black are just good enough at it for it to come across more as genuine wit than as smarmy hipsters trying to show off.But I guess to be fair they are showing off. The movie is extremely writerly. If you're familiar with Shane Black you know the conversations are gonna go at lightning speed and all the characters are gonna have insults and smartass responses that you yourself would never come up with until a week later. Val Kilmer gets to call Robert Downey Jr. an idiot in many different ways. Like:
"Jesus. Look up 'idiot' in the dictionary. You know what you'll find?"
"A picture of me?"
"No! The definition of the word idiot, which you fucking are!"Stylized dialogue like that can be distracting, but here I don't think it is. They pull it off and it's a big part of the movie's appeal.
The story unfolds in that seemingly random way that alot of my favorite pulp writers' stories do. Lots of goofy little things happen in just the right sequence that happens to bring together a bunch of characters and a bunch of guns. At first Downey's character seems to be a bigshot actor, but then we find out he's just some dude who was running from the cops and happened to run into a casting session. His actual guilt over getting his friend shot by police is mistaken for a raw improvised performance and next thing you know he's poolside at a big Hollywood party. The female lead Michelle Monaghan (the gal from MISSION IMPOSSIBLE: 3 who looks kind of like Liv Tyler) is at the party for similarly random reasons involving the accidental shooting of a drunk TV star dressed as a cyborg. In this movie things don't happen for normal reasons.
I like the way the story pays tribute to noir but doesn't follow it as stringently as you keep naively thinking it's going to. There are alot of good laughs that come from seeming to use a normal movie convention and then actually not. For example the heroine stumbles onto the clue that solves the whole mystery, so the heroes go chasing after her knowing she's getting herself into danger. But later they learn that she is actually at home because she decided her theory was stupid and forgot about it.
In a way I think maybe Black's hiatus helped rejuvenate him. It put him back in the just-don't-give-a-fuck mentality of a guy in his early 20s who doesn't know what he's doing. For me the biggest laugh in the movie involves a bodily mutilation that really has no important purpose in the story but just is something that could easily happen if people are slamming doors during emotional conversations. He must've been watching some movie with a door slamming argument and thought "You know what I'm gonna do in my next movie?" Either or that or he was writing the argument, jokingly thought of doing this, and then realized "Why the fuck not?" The motto of every great writer, from Mark Twain to the guy who did Choose Your Own Adventure.Black definitely cuts it as a director. The performances are all good, it looks nice and slick, it's well-paced, nice uses of music, the bits of action work well. I definitely wouldn't guess this was a writer-turned-first-time-director deal. So Black and Downey both came through when it counted, but I also gotta take my metaphorical hat off to Val Kilmer as the toughest character in the movie, "Gay" Perry. He's a private investigator working for the producer of the movie. He's supposed to help Downey prepare for his role but ends up being his partner and savior when he gets into trouble. Perry also happens to be openly gay and is too self-assured and capable for anybody to successfully give him shit about it.
In some movies Kilmer doesn't come across too well - he can seem like kind of a weirdo who thinks he's smarter and more interesting than he actually is. Not this one though. In this one he's alot like his character in SPARTAN. Not as much of an asshole, but it's another guy who always knows what to do at the drop of a hat (another metaphorical hat, but not necessarily the same one I tipped in the last paragraph), can always figure out what people are trying to pull on him and knows how to fight his way out even if it involves firing a small gun from inside his underwear (long story).
I would love to see sequels to this. Not because there's anything about the plot that should be followed up on, but just because I would like to see those two characters come back and get involved in other cases. Well, that ain't gonna happen, so I'll settle for Black sticking around for a while as writer-director.
7/12/08
KNOCK OFF
In the second of Hong Kong director Tsui Hark's surrealist double feature with collaborator Jean-Claude Van Damme (the first was DOUBLE TEAM), the eel really hits the ass. You probaly haven't heard that saying before, because I just made it up, but it means "shit gets real weird" and it comes from the scene where Van Damme is pulling Rob Schneider in a rickshaw and Schneider starts whipping him with an eel while yelling "Move that beautiful ass!" That's something most of us will only see in a handful of movies and TV shows within our lifetimes.
This time Van Damme plays the head of a Hong Kong fashion exports corporation who gets mixed up in a CIA/Russian mafia/Triad/terrorist plot because he sells inferior knockoff jeans that have a lower quality denim as well as high powered miniature explosives in the buttons. One of the very first exploding jeans movies. If that doesn't tell you this is one of the weirder Van Damme pictures how about these tidbits: Rob Schneider plays his partner, there is a shot from the POV of Van Damme's foot going into a shoe, it takes place in a world where fire is green. Or at least the fire that comes from these bombs. That's some remarkable technology there - not only is it small, it changes the color of fire. I wonder what color air is in this world?
I was pretty excited last year when I read about the bootlegger mall in China where they were gonna have an "Adidos" store. The real Adidas store in Seattle went out of business, it would be nice if we could get an Adidos in there. I thought maybe it would be cool to have an Adidos track suit. I should start doing some sport so I could be sponsored by Adidos. Maybe I will start the Adidos Parkour Squad.
KNOCK OFF doesn't have Adidos, but Van Damme does wear some "Pumma" running shoes that break apart in closeup during the rickshaw race. His friend Eddie, who sort of gets him into this mess, is targeted for assassination, but they first kill a knock off Eddie - a double he used to cheat in the rickshaw race. Van Damme is a knock off, pretending to be a respectable business man when really he's "the knock off king of Hong Kong." Schneider is a knock off because he's actually an undercover CIA officer (weird - out of the two I would've figured the muscular kickboxer was the CIA guy). Lela Rochon is also a CIA officer knock off of an executive for the V-Six Jeans Corporation. Paul Sorvino (yes, Paul Sorvino is in this movie) is also not who he appears to be. Even the movie itself is a knock off of a Hollywood movie, because it's got this cast and a script by DIE HARD's Steven E. De Souza, but it's all weird and shot Hong Kong style - dreary grey skies, faded film and a good chunk of it clearly shot without sound and dubbed in later.
The movie also takes place during Hong Kong's switchover from British colonial rule, so I'm tempted to think it's saying that old Hong Kong was a knock off of real China, or the Hong Kong film industry under Chinese rule was gonna be a knock off of the film industry that Tsui and so many great movies had come out of. But really whatever it does or does not symbolize it's a historical reminder of why the hell Tsui would be making a movie like this. All the big Hong Kong directors were terrified about what would happen to their industry and careers under a new government, so they were taking Hollywood/Van Damme jobs to prepare themselves in case it got real bad there and they had to leave. It was like setting up a hideout.
I can't find it now but I could swear Moriarty wrote something one time about Steven E. De Souza and how he supposedly wrote KNOCK OFF because he was so sick of producers trying to hire him to write DIE HARD knock offs that he wanted to write a script that would just destroy that type of movie forever. I'm not sure how that works exactly, did he picture the bigwigs saying, "You know what, we got this idea about 'Die Hard in a bookmobile,' but De Souza already did 'Die Hard in your jeans,' so let's just move on to something else"? I don't know man, I'm not sure that was such an airtight plan, and I don't think it worked. If he really wanted to kill the DIE HARD style of action movie he shoulda just wrote THE MATRIX.
The action is pretty good, lots of fighting, the nice rickshaw chase, and some cool slipping-around-on-wet-floors fights before THE TRANSPORTER. Rochon even seems to do a few of her own stunts. I'm sorry to report that Sorvino doesn't do any kung fu, but he does have a pretty funny (SPOILER) death - he seems to get blown up, but in the epilogue we learn that he's alive, and then Van Damme and Schneider blow him up on accident without even realizing it. Maybe that's how De Souza meant to kill DIE HARD. Hans Grueber fell 34 stories in slow motion looking McClane in the face, Sorvino dies on his own without his killer even being nearby.If you're looking for a great example of Hong Kong cinema, or just a really well made action movie, then KNOCK OFF is the one for you. To not choose. But if you want the downright weirdest ones made in the '90s it's pretty much this and DOUBLE TEAM.
3/21/09
Now days people are always going ape shit over a movie that they think is too amoral. Rosie O'Donnel busted a few veins over 1999 Outlaw Award Winner for Best Picture since I got out of prison Fight Club, and this American Psycho deal is already getting people up in arms. They think that your average joe on the street is some kind of retard who can't see somebody do something in a movie and make their own judgment of whether or not it's the right thing to do. At the same time these pricks are all cock of the walk, thinking they're immune to the might powers of the Cinema. They saw fight club and THEY didn't go out and blow up a building but GOD SAVE US if any of those subhuman cavepeople who DON'T have their own tv shows or politician husbands ever see the movie. We'll all be in for it.
Somebody told me that when Payback came out, the slogan was "Get ready to root for the bad guy," as if that was some new technique. These motherfuckers don't remember that it's okay to make a movie about a guy you wouldn't necessarily want to leave alone with your daughter. Everbody has to be a damn boyscout unless they're a cop, and then it's okay for them to torture people and play by their own rules because they're a "good guy."
Well watching this British classic Konga on American Movie Classics reminded me that it's not only okay to have a real prick as the main character, it used to be pretty normal. Ever heard of a motherfucker by the name of Vincent Price? That dude did a whole slew of movies where he's killing people, turning em into wax dummies, using them for magic tricks, reciting shakespeare at em. All his best characters were grade A nutcases and he wasn't the super villain that spiderman or x-man swings in and defeats, he was the main character who you liked to watch even if you didn't like his personality. And sometimes you DID like his personality but you still didn't find motherfuckers going out waxing people after they left the theater.
In this movie Michael Gough (Alfred from the Batman pictures they say) plays a dude with pretty much no redeemable qualities. The movie kind of acts like he is on a noble scientific quest but eventually goes too far. But it's funny because the guy is a prick from frame 1. This asshole is a scientist who has been missing in a jungle for a while, he comes back with a pet monkey named Konga and new tricks he learned from a witch doctor. He grows giant venus fly traps which he mutates to be carnivorous, and before long he turns cute little Konga into a 7 or 8 foot ape monster hypnotized to do his bidding.
Of course right away he sends Konga to strangle the dean who's trying to shut down his experiments. And the funny thing is that he justifies it to himself and to his assistant/lover by explaining that he had to kill SOMEBODY in order to prove that he had total control over Konga. He couldn't just make him do tricks or something. I think this is a deliberate satirical attack on these type of power mad fucks, whether in science or in business or politics or what not, who can justify to themselves even the foulest of deeds. It reminds me of a guy having an affair with his wife's sister and he says, "Well, it's not like it's just some stranger... at least you're a part of the family. And you're feeling depressed, so I'm sure your sister would want me to cheer you up any way I can... I mean what we're doing really isn't wrong when it comes down to it." That kind of shit always makes sense when you have a boner. And it's the same way with this professor, he's got a boner for power and glory.
The other thing that's funny right in the same scene is the assistant doesn't agree with the whole murder business, but she agrees to keep quiet if he'll marry her. He agrees right away because it's a good front for covering up his caper and she doesn't even seem offended by the lack of romance.
But this guy is more than just a science prick, he's also a dirty old lech. He has a blond student with a tight sweater and he says, "I can't believe how much you've grown," which in a 50's movie is code for "I like your tits". He hits on her throughout the movie and yeah I hit on young girls as well but then I'm not a teacher and in the teacher-student relationship that kind of horndog routine is inappropriate. At the climax of the movie the assistant sees the professor forcing the blond to make out with him in his greenhouse of giant flytraps, and she decides to turn Konga on him. But she gives Konga the wrong formula and it turns him giant like King Kong who has a similar name but only by coincidence in my opinion.
I really like the way this ape monster looks. He has buggy eyes and real sharp teeth. I mean yeah he's a guy in a costume but it's one of the better ape costumes in my opinion even if it doesn't look real.
The tragic last shot shows the scientists and little monkey Konga laying dead in the street, Big Ben chiming ominously above. It makes you sad for the monkey and you don't give a rat's ass about the scientist. It is the dead monkey who is the real loss even if he's not the main character. And I'm pretty sure I will feel the same way about the monkey or whoever in American Psycho so just take a chill pill pal. That is what Cinema is about is telling stories and exploring the lives of people and giant animals you maybe wouldn't get a chance to hang out with ordinarily.