THE MACHINIST

Not sure if anybody else has noticed this, but this guy Christian Bale is a good actor in my opinion. AMERICAN PSYCHO would have to be up there with Eric Bana in CHOPPER as one of my favorite maniac performances of the last 2-7 years. (Now they're playing Batman and the Incredible Hulk. They shoulda got the guy from DAHMER for Superman.) Mr. Bale was also pretty good in SHAFT 2K and REIGN OF FIRE, where I wouldn't've even known it was the same guy if I didn't know how to read and recognize names.

Well here in the machinist he gives another great performance but this time with a special nauseating gimmick: the guy lost a bunch of weight for the movie. He looks like a fuckin skeleton with a pair of pantyhose pulled over it. You know how DeNiro and Del Toro ate a bunch of donuts for RAGIN BULL and FEAR AND LOATHING and that was supposed to be so brave? Well Christian says FUCK THAT, eats nothin but grass and grapeskins for like three months or something, turns his muscles into fuckin corn husks. When I heard about it I figured he gets skinnier over the course of the movie, but no, he looks like this from the beginning. That's the character.

At first it's pretty shocking because he walks around with no shirt on and, in my opinion, that is not something you want to look at. You feel like if somebody bumped into him on accident in the hallway they might snap his head right off the neck. But put clothes on the motherfucker and it seems more acceptable, he's just a skinny, wirey, unhealthy dude. He even has relationships with women. They try to get him to eat more food but they don't vomit when they see him naked. Later on as things go badly for him in the movie he starts to look worse, and you're not really sure how much of it is makeup. Like, his right eye is so sunken in you can see the outline of the eyesocket. Which I am against. Keep your pants up, keep your shirt on, and keep your eyesockets covered, is what it says in the bible I believe. No shirt, no shoes, no eyefat, no service.

Okay so you knew about all this weight loss shit, what you probaly don't know is what this movie is about. They don't tell you that kind of thing, that's the kind of thing you gotta learn by watching it or by reading my review. Well old Boney here is a machinist at a factory that makes some sort of item, I believe. Cars maybe, or machines. Not sure what it is. And he's real skinny. Also he hasn't slept in a year. He meets a weird bald dude named Ivan, who one day distracts him on the job - Bones slips up and causes an industrial accident which costs Michael Ironside his arm. (homage to Starship Troopers.) When he mentions he was distracted by Ivan, everybody is like, who the fuck is Ivan? There's no Ivan here. THE CALL IS COMING FROM INSIDE THE HOUSE.

And a bunch of other, creepier shit happens too. As each day passes in the movie you know it's another day where old Jack Skeleton hasn't slept. So he starts to get more paranoid, thinks everybody's out to get him, and keeps finding cryptic post-it notes on the fridge. It's one of those deals where he doesn't really know what's real and he doesn't remember things, so the audience doesn't know what's real and they don't know what it is that he doesn't remember.

Also did I mention that the opening scene is a flash-forward where he rolls a body off a cliff. Shoulda probaly mentioned that. So you know either's he's gonna be a killer or somebody really is after him. And he gets further and further away from reality so you can't trust him to figure it out.

I'm probaly making the whole thing sound stupid, but I thought it was real effective. The thing about this type of thriller usually is until the end of the movie you are able to be bowled over by the spooky shit because of the mystery, the fear of the unknown and all that business. The moment of truth is when it gets to the ending. Then you have a solution and a reason and an explanation and then all the sudden sometimes it's not so scary or believable anymore.

And as you could feel this thing was getting to an explanation, I was sure that was what was gonna happen. I figured any ending they can come up with is not gonna live up to the beginning and middle, it's just gonna ruin everything.

To my surprise, the solution solid. It ties everything together. It makes you understand what's going on but it turns out to be much better than anything I was expecting. And not something I remember seeing a movie about. This is a smart, subtle movie that puts you in the shoes of a skinny freak that you normally probaly wouldn't want to spend your time with.

The filmatists are: director - Brad Anderson, writer - Scott Kosar. The writer previously wrote the indefensible remake of TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE. Fucker. The director is innocent except by association. Together though they did good on this one. Next they are remaking George Romero's THE CRAZIES, which is one that could stand a remake. Great idea but not one of George's best efforts, in my opinion. And this seems like a good team to remake it, judging from THE MACHINIST. On the other hand, some commercial director and the guy who wrote SCOOBY DOO actually did a pretty good job remaking the perfect untouchable masterpiece DAWN OF THE DEAD, so all bets are off. They could totally fuckin blow it on this one, who knows. good luck though gentlemen. I'm behind you. Don't fuck up though. Seriously. No pressure though.

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MAD MAX BEYOND THUNDERDOME

BEYOND THUNDERDOME has always been the red-headed stepchild of the MAD MAX series. Everybody loves ROAD WARRIOR, on account of it being one of the best movies everybody has ever seen. So if Miller just rehashed it but added a new Joe Pesci character or something then everybody probaly woulda been happy. Instead he expanded on the universe, he took the story in another entirely new direction and alot of people still aren't ready to follow.

I haven't seen this movie in years and I actually remembered it being more different than it really is. In fact, I was thinking there weren't even cars in this one. I just remembered planes and pig shit and that song by Tina Turner. I thought it wasn't as good as the other two but that it got a bum rap. Seeing it again - well, okay, it's my third favorite, and there is a section in the middle that I had a problem with, but it needs to be said that this is a great fucking movie.

When you think of Mad Max you think of fast cars. Max lost his Interceptor in part 2 but you know he's gotta get himself a new ride, right? In the opening scene he is traveling through the desert but either his engine doesn't work or he's out of gas because his customized truck is being pulled by camels. Before we even know it's him though a pilot (Bruce Spence, not playing the gyro pilot from ROAD WARRIOR as far as I can tell, that's just what pilots always look like in the desert) flies down low, knocks him off the car, then jumps in and steals it from him. So we're just a couple shots into the new movie and Mad Max is a pedestrian. And he's gonna stay that way until the climax.

Also Max has a pet monkey. And long hair like Braveheart.

Max follows his vehicle and monkey into a gated post-apocalyptic community called Barter Town. This is like the city where Lord Humungus would go to bars if he was into that type of thing. It's an incredibly detailed society full of crazy individuals with mowhawks and feathered headdresses and armor made out of junk. This part sort of reminds me of STAR WARS in the way it shows you this fully inhabited world. Tina Turner is the boss (actually, the "Auntie"), she lives in an elevated house, and the place is run on methane that comes from pig shit shoveled by slaves in a subterranean pig farm. (Not one of the better vocations, in my opinion.) They won't let Max in to get his car because he has nothing to barter, but then they find out he's a badass so Auntie hires him to off somebody. And he goes undercover as a pig shit shoveler to scope out the target, a retarded giant named Blaster who works in conjunction with a dwarf named Master who runs the pig shit factory and therefore thinks he's the cock of the walk.

This of course leads to the famous Thunderdome of the title. You know, it's like that one Tupac video. It's a cage where Max fights Blaster while suspended from ropes, they swing around and can grab different weapons from the dome. The only rule is "two men enter, one man leaves." There are crowds who chant this and lustily watch the violence, but it's not just gladiators to them, it's The People's Court. This is Auntie's system of law.

The way the crowd mindlessly chants the laws is pretty good satire. They keep chanting "two men enter, one man leaves!" until Auntie convinces them that Max can't leave because of another law, "bust a deal and face the wheel," so then they start chanting that. At that point Max has to spin a wheel of fortune which chooses his punishment as "gulag," so then they start chanting "Gulag! Gulag!" The whole thing reminded me of a stupid thing that came up recently where this 19 year old girl was busted for recording 20 seconds of TRANSFORMERS on her digital camera. A theater employee saw her doing it and told the manager, who instead of telling her to stop called the police, who instead of saying "fuck you, we have jobs to do" arrested the girl, and then Regal Cinemas instead of trying to do something positive for humanity such as finding a way to stop having so much god damn advertising at movies decided to press charges against the girl. ANd she said she was making a clip to show her little brother to get him excited to come see the horrible movie. (He'll have to get a ride from someone else; she's banned from the theater for life.)

When I read that story it made me mad to think some girl could get fined $2,500 and get a year in jail just because she did a dumb, harmless thing in front of some schmucks with no souls who work for a corporate monolith run by evil robots. But what made it worse was when for some reason I read themovieblog.com, where John Campea's story "Girl Could Go To Jail For Recording Transformers - Should She?" actually I swear to God begins with the sentence "This is a tough one."

NO IT'S NOT A FUCKING TOUGH ONE. Anybody with a human soul or an ounce of common sense does not have to struggle with whether or not a dumb 19 year old girl should get jail time for a blurry 20 second recording of a movie. (Even if it is one of the most evil movies ever made.) And then the worst part is that most of the people in the comments seemed to agree that she should at least get a hefty fine. Because "stealing is stealing" and "the law is the law."

"BUST A DEAL AND FACE THE WHEEL! BUST A DEAL AND FACE THE WHEEL!" The chanting at the Thunderdome is dead on. There are plenty of people in this pre-apocalyptic wasteland who do not use things like personal morals or ethics. They don't want to have to take time to think things through in a thoughtful manner. They want to have a simple, catchy phrase that turns all situations into easy black or white, yes or no type problems. And preferably something bad will happen to somebody at the end, such as a fine, jail time or GULAG! GULAG! GULAG!

I know I got way off topic here and this part will seem dated when people read this review down the line. But consider it the end credits song. The Tina Turner songs on the opening and closing credits were clearly made in the '80s, the rest of the movie is pretty timeless.

Anyway Max gets the gulag, so they tie him up and send him out in the desert on a horse. And because it's MAD MAX they put a big paper mache cartoon head on him. I think Rob Zombie is the only other director who would do a scene like that. But Miller was there first.

Post-thunderdome is the part that turned alot of people against the movie. Passed out in the middle of the wasteland Max is rescued by a tribe of children who believe he's their savior, "Captain Walker." I think these kids were refugees that the real Captain Walker was bringing somewhere on a jet, but it crashed. He must've been the only surviving adult, so he went to get help, but never came back. The kids have a good thing going at a hidden oasis and have survived by hunting for meat and furs. But they've built up this religious belief about Captain Walker and an oral storytelling tradition where they "tell the tell" every night so the history won't die.

The other two MAD MAXes, especially part 2, were much more about showing than talking. This section of the movie though is all about words and telling stories. The kids have a fucked up language because they don't have grownups to correct their grammar. So they talk about "the pocksy clips" that turned the world into a wasteland. They're in awe of "the video" and "the sonic" (a record player) and one kid has an old talking Bugs Bunny doll that still works, which is kind of like having a super rare Ferrari or something.

But even this part is about visual storytelling. Notice that as the storyteller "tells the tell" she has a pole with a big rectangle, like a movie screen, that she uses to frame cave drawings and other things she wants the audience to look at. Then they make Max look into a Viewmaster.

My only problem with the movie is the section where Max takes the kids into the pig shit farm, and they swing around on ropes and fight some guys. Some of that stuff is cool but what really kills it is the music. The score is by a new guy, Maurice Jarre instead of Brian May.

By the way, I always thought the score for MAD MAX was made by the dude from Queen until I looked it up just now and learned that it's a different Brian May. Just like there's that guy George S. Clinton that scored MORTAL KOMBAT, he's not the same George Clinton. But at least he has the courtesy of a middle initial. The guy from Queen should have to use a middle initial. He's been coasting off MAD MAX for decades now and he didn't even have anything to do with it. Asshole.

Anyway Maurice Jarre does fine for most of the movie, but he's a little more traditional than Australian film composer Brian May. And in this particular section of the movie he goes way overboard with trying to make the kids' activities seem triumphant and majestic and shit. If he would've just kept his pants on everything would be fine but with him trying to tell us how fun and adventurous it is for kids to fight slavedrivers in a pool of pigshit the whole thing just comes across too cheesy. I know some of you guys have that same problem with the Ewoks, but to me that's different. Because when Ewoks knock multi-million dollar government war machines over with rocks and logs it has a clear thematic purpose, it's kind of the whole point of the story. Asskicking lost boys does not have the same depth to it.

This by the way is an early case of PG-13 sequel to rated-R series, like ROBOCOP 3 and LIVE FREE OR DIE HARD. But it didn't even occur to me until I noticed the rating on IMDb. I guess it helps that you have the same director and you also have him intentionally not rehashing the type of story from the other ones. So it's not somebody watering down the old formula. It's a different thing entirely.

Anyway, the kids on ropes part of the movie is over fast and then we get on to the more ROAD WARRIOR part where Max and friends are on a jet-powered truck on train tracks being chased by Tina Turner and her posse in awesome souped-up dune buggies that show the advances in roll bar technology that have taken place in the years since part 2. Eventually they meet up with that pilot from the opening scene and Max says "You!"

And you think "A ha! So it is the gyro pilot! He recognizes him!"

and then "Wait, no, he just remembers it's the prick who stole his car!"

and then finally

"Oh, I guess he just meant 'You there! I'm talking to you! The guy with the funny hat. Yeah, you.'"

This is part of the playfulness of the movie and what confused people who wanted something more normal. If you pay attention I'm pretty sure they never refer to Max as Max in this movie. Even when he is introduced in the Thunderdome they call him "The Man With No Name." So that's the one part where it is openly acknowledged that they are trying to go a little Leone with these movies. Bruce Spence is part of that Dollars Trilogy tradition, where Lee Van Cleef is in part 2 and 3 but as different characters. Although Bruce Spence is obviously more of an Eli Wallach. At the end of ROAD WARRIOR they tell you that the gyro pilot became the leader of the Northern Tribe and that they never saw Max again, so they couldn't really put that character in this movie. But I'm sure George Miller wanted to work with him again so what the hell, there's another pilot that looks like Bruce Spence. And then he plays with you by having Max almost seem to recognize him.

One thing that's weird, George Miller actually co-directed this one with some dude named George Ogilvie. Apparently he was a theater director who Miller had co-directed with on a mini-series and they liked it so much they decided to do it on this movie too. Supposedly Miller concentrated on the stunts and action while Ogilvie was in charge of the performances. Probaly it was really a scam so Miller wouldn't have to deal with all these crowds of mud-covered kids and pigs. "Hey Ogilvie, shoot this part where the kids swing on ropes. I'll be in Thunderdome with the grown-ups."

The thing is, if you compare this to his other movies, even the pig and penguin movies, it's clear this is the work of the same mind. So it's not like he's letting Ogilvie take over. He's just freeing himself up to concentrate on the part where the car goes flying through the air and crashes through another car or whatever.

I'm praying they end up making that MAD MAX 4 that got cancelled because of the Iraq war (good one, Bush) but if not there's something nice about the way this wraps things up. In the first one there is still some society, but it's turning into the wild west, and Max loses his family and humanity. In the second one it's post-apocalypes, the whole world has gone to shit and he's this amoral wanderer, but he ultimately does something good to help some people. Now in this third one "civilization" is coming back but it's not exactly rebuilding, it's a new and even more corrupt alternate society. But he helps these children, because he believes the children are the future, teach them well and etc. etc.

It's kind of ironic and sad though because the kids actually start out in sort of a paradise, but because of their religious beliefs or folk tales or whatever you want to call Captain Walker they end up moving into the bombed out ruins of Sydney! I'm sure it's kind of cool to explore but that's no place to live. Who knows what they're breathing in there. Not to mention the radioactivity. They had some natural beauty and they traded it for the rotting remains of the man-made world.

At the end Max is on his own again, perfectly open to having another adventure, perhaps called FURY ROAD. But despite the magic of parenting he's doing worse than he was at the beginning of the movie. Tina Turner has kind of a bonding moment with him, or at least a "what the hell, I'm not gonna kill you" moment. So we last see Max out in the desert, a legendary hero, a messiah, a survivor... a guy with no car.

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MADE IN U.S.A.

How's this for a weird eight-legged-pig-fetus-in-a-jar of a movie: Jean-Luc Godard experimental noodling based on a Richard Stark novel! I knew it existed thanks to our friends at the Movie Database of the Internet, but I never figured I'd see it. Then I discovered a PAL CODE 2 triple feature Godard set that includes it along with PRENOM CARMEN (First Name: Carmen) and PIERROT LE FOU (Parrot Kung Fu I guess).

Now first of all I gotta admit upfront, I couldn't make ass or tits of this picture. I didn't get it. I know about that wave the french had over there. As in, I know they had it. I seen a couple of your Truffauts and I saw SEVEN DEADLY SINS once but that's about it. So if you want to talk to somebody who knows what the fuck they're talkin about when it comes to Monsieur Godard, I ain't the one. Ask the cinemasters. There's a couple good reviews of this on IMDb by people who know their Godards, so you can go to them for a perspective if that's what you need.

However I do have one thing on those fuckers*: I read the book. The book is The Jugger, the sixth Parker novel. If you're just joining us, Parker is a bad motherfucker who does robberies, institutional jobs, almost always in teams. He is good at planning and his specialty is improvising to solve problems when things go sour, which they always do. He gets crossed all the time but he comes out on top, partly because he is completely ruthless and emotionless. He sets his mind on getting back some money or protecting his identity, you better look out. (except at the end of this book, where he actually blows it!)

The most famous Parker novel is the first one, The Hunter, because it was the basis for POINT BLANK with Lee Marvin and PAYBACK with Mel Gibson. The Jugger isn't as well known and in fact Richard Stark (through his associate Donald E. Westlake) sort of disowned it in an interview once, saying that Parker would never go out of his way to help an old man like he does in this book. Except actually he doesn't, Westlake is remembering the book wrong**.

So here's what the book is about: Parker gets a letter from Joe Sheer, an old associate, saying he needs help. The letter worries Parker, not because he cares what happens to the guy, but because he knows nobody in their right mind would expect Parker to come help them. He's afraid the old man might be senile and risk blowing Parker's "Charles Willis" name he's been using for a while. So he goes to find out whether or not he'll have to kill the guy.

When he gets there it turns out Joe is already dead, and there are various interested parties circling around because they believe he has money from old robberies stashed in or around his house somewhere. Parker doesn't believe there could be much money left, but he plays along to find out who knows what about Joe's past so he knows who he has to kill. Along the way various people do get killed, not all of them by Parker.


In MADE IN U.S.A. Anna Karina plays the Parker character, Paula. This is the only time anybody's had a gal playing Parker, and I'm not against that. I even liked the part where she asked a guy which pair of shoes she should wear and then whacked him on the temple with the heel of one of her pumps.

The trouble is, having a name that starts with "Pa" is about the only thing she has in common with Parker. She is not even close to a bad motherfucker. She doesn't look comfortable holding a gun. She is not menacing to anyone. And she does a lot of things Parker would NEVER do, including but not limited to:

1. talk about falling in love
2. cry
3. talk about politics (a lot)
4. philosophize about various crap
5. hang around a hotel room with some asshole in a striped shirt writing a novel and some gal strumming a guitar
6. write/recite poems
7. lay on a bed talking to nobody about her journey of self discovery or something
8. etc.

some words that appear in this movie but not in Parker novels: fascism, communism, socialism, the Left, the Right.

I mean for crying out loud, Richard Stark must've been rolling in Donald Westlake's closet when this one first unspooled. I haven't read all the Parker novels yet but I'm pretty god damn sure there's not one where he plays a game of "warm and cold" with somebody. This movie is full of cutesy crap like that, little word games and goofs like the actors face the camera and say the same lines at the same time or they narrate what they're saying instead of just saying it ("blah blah blah," I replied.)

The weird thing is, this really is based on The Jugger. There's definitely a chunk of the plot intact. Instead of an old jugger being dead it's Paula's old lover. But the opening scene is pretty similar, with a guy named Typhus standing in for the book's Tiftus. And the guy they got is the perfect French version of the weird little dude described in the book. The situation's real different because these people aren't bank robbers (everybody seems to be war veterans or political revolutionaries), Paula is not trying to protect her alias, and there's no money. Instead she's just trying to find out who killed the guy and why. But you got the pair of cops (at least I think they're cops), one crooked. One she teams up with, the other she is interrogated by. You got a doctor. You got the mysterious other party who kills Typhus/Tiftus and she has to find out why. You got her blamed for Tiftus's murder, and you got her and the cop giving each other fake confession letters as collateral so they can trust each other.

So there are many elements taken from the book, it's just that there is not one fluid oz. of the essence of the character, world or tone of the book. Otherwise though, spot on I guess, in a way, sort of. Except totally different.


I mean obviously Godard doesn't give two shits about the character of Parker. That's not a surprise so we'll accept that. Paula has nothing in common with the character who is the whole point of any of these novels, which leaves no reason to make this movie. Okay fine, we'll roll with that I guess. But it's still weird this movie exists because everything about it is the opposite of Richard Stark. Stark is tough and gritty, Godard shows pretty ladies in colorful dresses and nicely shot scenes with bold primary colors (especially the ol' red white and blue). Stark is lean and mean and light on dialogue, Godard is slow and meandering and has people jabbering pretty much non-stop, except when occasionally they just move their mouths and no sound comes out. It's a cinch to call Stark unpretentious, but definitely not Godard. The movie occasionally cuts to closeups of bullets piercing the word "LIBERTE," if that gives you an idea. The art of Stark's writing is how straight forward and clear it is, but Godard's movie is called incoherent and incomprehensible even by his admirers.

Stark's novels usually steer clear of pop culture and political references, while the movie has constant references to Walt Disney, Humphrey Bogart, Nixon, Kennedy, communism, fascism. You could probaly argue that there's some mild satire in some of the books, like the way the crime syndicate known as The Outfit is run like a corporation. But if there's any political or social commentary in there, and I'm not saying it is, it's hidden in the story there. The characters sure as shit aren't saying it out loud like they are in every other scene of MADE IN U.S.A. There's even a couple long takes of a reel-to-reel playing some dude's political speech.

All the political yammering must be native to France at the time, but the movie is supposed to take place in a French speaking Atlantic City, and Godard loads the movie with obvious symbols of Americana. Lots of pop art and pulp paintings of cowboys and billboards and crap. It reminds me of some American that goes to Chinatown and buys a bunch of bootleg anime memorabilia but doesn't know who the characters are or what the writing says. Or people that think Australians ride to work in the pouch of a kangaroo, throwing boomerangs at koalas that try to mug them. Sorry bud, but no way nobody's gonna believe this was really made in U.S.A. It's clear the guy is fascinated with America and at the same time has no idea what the fuck it is.


I gotta say though. There is one part where Paula finds a "corpse" at a military hospital, and it's portrayed by a bandaged skeleton with eyeballs. Not from the book really but always worth putting in a movie. That was the best part I think. Don't remember much else.


Even if this one was easy to find (like if you're in Europe), I would have to say it's only for Godard maniacs and Parker completists. But the first group will be the only ones who might enjoy it. You know when somebody makes a painting or a song or something, shows it to their mom and all ma can say is, "It's... interesting." I think that's what MADE IN U.S.A. is. Interesting. Just not in the sense that you are interested while you are watching it.

*UPDATE: actually, I forgot that there is a Parker-centric review of this movie on the web sight THE VIOLENT WORLD OF PARKER .

**Also, Andrew Miller wrote to inform me that in the original printing of The Jugger, Parker actually did go just to help Joe. But Stark always regretted it so it was rewritten at some point for the reprints.

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MAGNOLIA

This is a good picture by a Cinema Artist who knows what the fuck he's doing but still it's almost too much for ol' Vern and I'm gonna tell you why. But hold on there bud I'll get to that in a minute.

The movie starts out with the song "One is the Loneliest Number" and maybe it's just me but I don't think it's a coincidence that every one of the motherfuckers in this movie is lonely as hell. You got the divorced cop who drives around talking to himself about his job pretending he's on COPS. You got the young coke snorting gal who sleeps with older dudes like myself and enstranges from her parents. You got her dad, the game show host dying of cancer; you got the TV brainiac kid that hates answering questions, the former brainiac that wants braces for god knows why, the old man on his deathbed, his emotionally unstable young wife, his nurse... I mean I could go on all day but you might as well just see the thing and make a list of all the characters yourself. I mean hell I know I'm Writing a review here but you can't expect miracles out of me jesus.

Like I said the dude making this movie knows his shit when it comes to the Art of Cinema. This is one of those intoxicating type filmmaking movies where you just get drunk off how great it all is. The casting is all perfect, even the minor characters like two guys that own a furniture store. You always feel like you're seeing a scene you've never seen before, even if it's something as typical as a pig interogating somebody or a lady picking up pills at the pharmacy. All of the acting is fucking spectacular and there's a lot of good characters. Now I can't believe I'm saying this but one of my favorites was this cop. I mean the guy's an idiot, as well as a cop, but after a while you start to feel sorry for the dude. I mean he falls down in the mud and loses his gun and suddenly everyone on the force acts like he wet his pants or something.

You know come to think of it there IS a scene where a kid wets his pants. On live TV. And the other kids notice and start cussing at him. At the same time the host is just losing it because of cancer, talking gibberish, sweating like a pig, giving away the answers as he stares death in the face and then he falls on his ass. This scene is so damn sad even a hardened, hardcore motherfucker like myself might - MIGHT - theoretically start misting up in the eyes a little. And the thing that's unusual about it is that it doesn't even have anything to do with caring about the characters. It's just that two unrelated, situations happening at the same time on the same show, on live TV, and the situations are SO damn pathetic they make a man cry no matter who it happens to.

And that's just the beginning. This is a movie that starts out funny and gets sad real quick, and then stays sad for a couple hours straight. And when I say sad I mean SAD. I mean we got two people dying. We got three couples dealing with fucked up relationships, three people dealing with their parents being assholes, we got a murder, we got a drug problem, we got a couple of suicide attempts, we got all kinds of shit.

And there are real good scenes. There's a funny one where the cop comes over to tell the cokehead to turn her music down. He's attracted to her so he tries to think of any excuse to stay and chat. Meanwhile she's shaking from withdrawal and dying to get rid of him. So they end up going out on a date. Even the funny scenes are sad. And remember you got like five or six different stories here and every single one of them is sad. There is not one story about a funny baker or a talking dog. Just sad and more sad.

Maybe the saddest story is about the old man dying who wants to see his son who hates him for abandoning him and whose young wife he doesn't know loves him and regrets that she cheated on him and is just about at the breaking point. And then there's the old man's nurse who we only see on the job but we see how hard it must be on the brain to be a sensitive, Positive type dude whose whole job is to be there when a guy dies.

Yes, this story is sad and I think it's also pretty unethical. Like many great Cinema Artists whoever the motherfucker is who made this movie has in my opinion violated human rights in his quest for perfectionistics. I mean I could be wrong but I'm pretty sure they took this poor old guy out of a nursing home somewheres and filmed what he did. In fact I'm surprised they cut out the parts where he begged them to let him go because that would have made the movie even sadder as impossible as that may seem. If I am wrong and this was actually just an actor then I apologize and I also would like to say that this motherfucker BETTER get a damn Oscar because he is VERY convincing. If I am right though and he is just a kidnapped invalid then hell give him an Oscar anyway for the ordeal he had to go through for these Hollywood pricks.

Anyway, when you're watching ten different sad as hell storylines all at once it is fun for a while but then it gets to be too much. You're sad and you're sad and you're sad and then suddenly you just reach sadness overload and it's hard to be sad anymore. You got people crying and yelling and dying left and right, I mean tragedy and mirth is just squirting all over the screen, but you say, "Eh, who cares at this point. I've had too much." But the sad keeps on coming.

I mean maybe that's your thing. Maybe you like to cry. I don't know you, for all I know you LOVE to have your eyes all red and itchy, snot dripping down your face, headache for the rest of the night. You like to stare into the pathetic dirty bottom of the human soul. It's your thing.

But to me, you can only have so much sad in a movie. And I mean you can have a lot of it, but this movie crosses the line in my opinion. I think you gotta vary the emotions around a little bit for the maximum effect. It's like in porn. I love the woman riding on top position, titties bouncing around and all. But if that's the only position in the whole movie then forget it. You gotta try something else at some point. Missionary, 69, missisippi guard dog of course. Emotion is the same thing in my opinion.

But late in the movie something happens, I mean I'm talking the most freaky ass twist I've seen in god knows how long, and the picture is saved. This is something I've never seen before but I'm sure glad I finally did. It lightens things up and it gives the characters a chance to go wait a minute dude, this is too much sadness, let's have a little happiness and/or redemption here and there.

Well I don't know how to end this review really but I've been working real hard this week so cut me some slack jack. the end.

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MAGNUM FORCE

DIRTY HARRY is probaly a better movie overall, but as far as sequels go I think MAGNUM FORCE is a work of genius, because it does two things.

ONE:

It does a good job of following the template of the original and delivering alot of what people liked about that one, for example the classic hot dog/bank robbery scene is replaced by a scene where he goes to get a hamburger at an airport cafe and ends up stopping a hijacking. You gotta love when he butts into the security pow wow at the airport, they tell him what's going on, he asks "Can I make a suggestion?" and it cuts to him walking toward the plane wearing a pilot's uniform. Classic!

I like to think Harry is still out there somewhere stopping crimes during lunch. On the other hand he deserves some peace, so I hope there is at least time to swallow his food first. The still chewing the food angle is what makes it so awesome, but I am not greedy. Harry Callahan has earned the right to finish his lunch.

The action in MAGNUM FORCE is real good. I especially like the motorcycle chase. There are lots of clever ideas like the big shooting competition which seems like it's just there to show off the guns and have the cool visuals of shooting the wooden targets, but turns out to be an important element of Harry's detective work that causes him to solve the case. And there are lots of funny lines and good character moments, like the way Harry seems so enamored of these guys who we already know are probaly the bad guys, and wants to put him on his team when he gets back to homicide.

This is also the one where Harry gets hit on by an old friend's wife, gets a booty call from a neighbor he just met and reveals that he values marksmanship over sexual preference. ("Tell you something. If the rest of you could shoot like them, I wouldn't care if the whole damn department was queer.") So maybe that's some goofy sequel shit, I don't know. I think it's entertaining.

TWO:

So it's able to pass as a "more of the same" sequel but at its heart it's actually a rebuttal of DIRTY HARRY, or at least a devil's advocate kind of "yeah, but what about this" question. At the beginning it pulls you in by showing, like in the first one, how the system doesn't work. Some smarmy organized crime figures are acquitted of killing cops, everybody knows they're guilty but they get away with it, there are crowds outside practically rioting they're so pissed. Later there's a scene where one of Harry's older colleagues freaks out and rants about how "hoods" can get away with killing cops but cops could never get away with killing "hoods." (So far, all of this is the exact opposite of how it seems to work now - it's cops that seem to always get off despite overwhelming evidence against them. But this is the '70s and Dirtyharryland.)

But as these mobsters get off scott free and arrogantly drive off into freedom a cop pulls them over and is kind of harassing them. And you're kind of thinking ha ha, stick it to these bastards any way you can. And then the cop pulls out a gun and executes them. And you think oh, uh, I'm not with this cop. I just met him. Well, it's getting pretty late, gotta work in the morning. See ya!

So now we realize what different territory we're in for the sequel. The bad guys are not serial killers, they're traffic cops who decide to start executing criminals so they can't beat the system. With Scorpio there was no grey area, you cannot sympathize with that guy. With these guys you have to think "well, they want the same thing Harry wants." And you don't have to stretch it as much to see how alike they are. But only Harry can or will stop these guys.

That's the beauty of it. The first one seemed to argue that cops should be able to break the rules to stop the bad guys. This one shows that, wait a minute, maybe that isn't such a good idea. We know Harry, he's our buddy. We can trust Harry to do it. But can we also trust Robert Urich, and Tim Matheson, and some of their other chums? Where do we draw the line?

These themes are brilliantly summed up in the badass opening credits. A new, even funkier Lalo Schifrin song plays as the credits roll out next to Harry's hand holding his .44 in front of a bright red background. At the end of the credits we hear that "do you feel lucky" speech from the first one, but at the end as he asks the question the gun turns toward the camera. The first time I saw it I was thinking it looked so cool and then when it pointed at the camera I thought whoah, this is kind of uncomfortable, and then I realized what was going on. I was the punk. I thought that speech was funny when I was with Harry, hovering over that dude laying on the ground. But what about when the gun is pointed at me? Do I feel lucky?

Man, I love that opening. It turns the first one on its ass, in a good way, while also looking like some funky James Bond type of shit. And it's made all the more interesting by the fact that one of the writers was John Milius, noted Hollywood right winger, writer/director of RED DAWN. I could never figure out how he got involved in this one, and I was dying to hear his commentary on the new DVD. Sure enough he talks proudly about the way MAGNUM FORCE questions the politics of DIRTY HARRY. He seems to agree with the blowing away of criminals (even when done by the bad guys) but knew that asking where the line is drawn was important, or at least good drama.

Interestingly he doesn't say anything about turning the gun on the audience during the credits and making them into the punk. So it makes me wonder if really it was just supposed to look cool and nobody thought about that. Or maybe that part belonged to co-writer Michael Cimino. (I guess he finished the script after Milius left to direct DILLINGER, but he's never mentioned on the commentary or any of the extras.)

I think I've heard somebody say that this sequel was made to appease people like Pauline Kael who said the first one was fascist. But even if so that's not a safe way to do it. Since the first one was so popular it was pretty risky to challenge its ideas. Here is an example of a guy who even to this day is confused by the idea of the vigilante cops being the bad guys.

At the end Harry's philosophy is maybe spelled out a little to clearly, but I still dig it. "Briggs, I hate the god damn system," he says. "But until someone comes along with changes that make sense, I'll stick with it."

 

So to me MAGNUM FORCE is up there with the best sequels. A sequel can be great by delivering on just one of those things - recreating what was great about the original, or trying a new direction that you didn't expect. It's rare that a movie succeeds at both. So good job MAGNUM FORCE.

6/12/08

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MALCOLM X

The first actor you see in MALCOLM X is not Denzel Washington, or even a kid playing a young Denzel Washington. It's Spike Lee getting his shoes shined, then strutting across the street in a zoot suit. As if to say, "Yep, after a long fight to be hired by the producers, struggling to shoot the movie, fighting the studio for the 3 hour running time, gathering donations from black celebrities for completion funds, here I am. Playing Malcolm X's best friend Shorty. Welcome to my movie." The audacity makes me laugh, but oh well, it works.

This is by far Lee's most Serious and Important film, but there's some fun to be had early on. In his youth Malcolm went to dances, tried to look good and pick up women, and Lee couldn't resist an epic lindy hop sequence that's incredible to watch. Hard to believe people used to know how to dance like that. I wonder how many people landed on their heads?

But Malcolm is headed toward an inner struggle and that's symbolized in that first scene with Spike in the zoot suit. He's actually strutting across the street to the barber shop where he's about to put lye on Malcolm's red hair to straighten it out. Malcolm loves the look ("looks white, don't it?") but it burns his head and he tries to rinse it off before it's ready. Later in the movie he'll be straightening his hair and discover the sink's not working and be forced to dunk his head in the toilet. This was in the book so it apparently really happened to Malcolm but it's the perfect poetic way of making the point about trying to be someone he's not.

He has a black girlfriend, but prefers the white one, uses her as his moll and accomplice when he falls in with criminals, becomes a numbers runner, has a falling out, and starts robbing houses. When he goes to prison he says it's not as much for robbing houses as for having sex with a white woman.

The beauty of this story as a movie is that so far it's a gangster movie. We've seen his youthful innocence, flashbacks to his troubled past, his love of flash and oppulence, his moments of madness when even his friends get uncomfortable with him going too far. We've seen him earn the respect of West Indian Archie (Delroy Lindo) who teaches him where to tuck a gun, to always sit facing the door, and not to write anything down on paper. We've seen Archie get mad at him and turn from father figure to scary villain. We've seen Malcolm get busted.

But now he goes to prison, becomes a Muslim and changes his life. He reads the entire dictionary, studies the Bible and Koran, annoys the shit out of the priests who volunteer at the prison by asking pointed questions about the race of Biblical figures. Maybe at this point it's academic wankery, but he's definitely putting his intelligence to better use than crime. This is the part we never got to in SCARFACE.

Now it becomes a different movie and he becomes a different person. I realized watching it this time that although he's a better person I wouldn't want to hang out with him anymore. The guy is so serious now. His whole life is about preaching the word of The Honorable Elijah Muhammed. Can you imagine what a stick in the mud this guy would be? "So who you rooting for in the big game this weekend Malcolm?" "The Honorable Elijah Muhammed teaches us not to waste our mind on frivolous games" and blah blah blah blah. Plus, his views on women make me kind of uncomfortable. Even as Betty (Angela Bassett) is earning his respect he tells here he's "hard on the women" like it's a cute little quirk he has. I would feel guilty hanging out with him, because shit, if he has a free moment he should be spending it with Betty.

Well, it's okay because Malcolm wouldn't want to hang out with me either, because he learns that all whites are devils. You could argue that he does have a sense of humor, but his idea of a joke is to pour cream in his coffee and say that's the only thing he likes integrated. Ha ha, a little segregationist humor for ya there. When he says that I get the feeling he uses that joke alot. Like, every day with his morning coffee. It's part of the routine.

At the same time as Malcolm is uncomfortably anti-white it also paints a clear picture of the power he had, and the rise from a street preacher to having a small segregation, then a slightly bigger one, then an entourage. Then he starts using the Fruit of Islam for protest - you don't want to release a black man you beat up who needs medical attention? Fine, we'll wait outside your headquarters. Just an army of disciplined black men in suits and bow ties, standing in rigid lines like soldiers. Don't mind us.

Next thing you know he's speaking to giant crowds. The historical detail is very convincing, and this was a year or two before they started using computers to enhance the size of crowds. The photography is fantastic, so afterwards cinematographer Ernest Dickerson said fuck it, for now on I'm a director, I do movies like DEMON KNIGHT and BONES.

Because of the constant seriousness it's hard for Lee to use some of his usual stylistic experimentation. You don't have people talking to the camera or goofy things like that (well, until the last scene). But he does do the classic Spike Lee shot of an actor (Denzel) "walking" by actually standing on the same platform the camera is moving on. It works great because it's Malcolm walking toward the ballroom where he will be assassinated, seemingly knowing his fate but being carried toward it. This is at the end of a perfect montage set to Sam Cooke's "A Change Is Coming." It's such a fitting song with its lyrics about a man with humble beginnings, and the strings on that song are already so cinematic.

I don't know much about the Nation of Islam, but this might be about the only American movie I've seen where the Muslims seem real. Usually they seem like a Hollywood depiction of a type of outsider to our culture. In this movie I feel like I'm the outsider, seeing what goes on in these mosques. There's even a sort of magic realist scene where we see Malcolm's vision of a glowing Elijah Muhammed appearing in his cell. Never saw that in a movie before. The most impressive part of the movie is Malcolm's pilgrimage to Mecca, where they were allowed to shoot inside holy places never allowed to be shot by westerners before or since. You can't fake that shit. It looks incredible. I don't think Denzel is a Muslim - I wonder how he felt going there? I wonder if he was tempted to convert?

But this story kind of works as a cautionary tale about organized religion. Elijah Muhammed, who he says he would die for, treats him exactly like the criminal West Indian Archie did. He helps Malcolm out, really likes him, helps him become somebody, but when Malcolm gets too big he gets jealous and considers him a threat. It's still unclear who exactly was involved in the assassination of Malcolm X, and the movie doesn't tell you who they are. But the three people who did time for it were in the Nation of Islam, and one of them didn't claim innocence. Personally I don't think churches should do that.

But between his falling out and his death Malcolm finds his own way. His pilgrimage to Mecca opens his eyes to different races living together peacefully. There is a very powerful quote from one of his letters that I think sums up alot of racial issues we still have today. Basically he says that black people have every right to be angry at white people, but that they need to work past that and get along. I think the second part would be easier if some of us whiteys would be less defensive about the first part. No, we didn't ourselves own slaves, but I bet if my ancestors had been the slaves and my people were still feeling the effects of it I would probaly have a chip on my shoulder about it. How hard is that to sypmathize with?

I guess that's part of why Malcolm X's story is so interesting. He went through different stages. The final post-pilgrimage Malcolm X is the one I like the best, but you have to understand the earlier ones before you can get to that point. You have his childhood as the smartest kid in an all white school, but being called the N word and told he can never be a lawyer like he wants to. Without that you can't get to the hyper-intelligent but strongly anti-white religious leader. And from there you go to the more enlightened Malcolm who apologized to other black leaders and wanted to work with them, and no longer shunned the help of white people who agreed with the cause.


The weird thing about MALCOLM X is that it's a very carefully constructed portrait of the times of Malcolm X (mainly the '40s through '60s), but at the same time it reminds you of where we were at in 1992 when it came out. The opening credits - re-enacted Malcolm speech heard over an American flag that burns until only an X remains - are intercut with the tape of the Rodney King beating. That was fresh on people's minds, this was about 7 months after the riots. The closing scene of the movie features Nelson Mandela, who had only been released from prison about 2 year earlier, and it seemed incredible to see him in a movie. Of course, it's not like he's doing cameos in Adam Sandler movies these days or hosting Saturday Night Live. It would still be quite a coup to get him in your movie. But at this time it still seemed miraculous that he had been freed. FREE MANDELA! had been such a cause for so long. Seeing it now I just think of what it was like to see it back then.

Before the movie came out it was incredibly controversial. It was weird how scared some white people were. They thought DO THE RIGHT THING would cause riots and I don't know what they thought this would do. Were they thinking the jig was up? I think these type of issues could benefit from a more laidback common sense approach. Look at it reasonably. Have you ever been called a white devil by the Nation of Islam before? Most of us haven't. They are not exactly franchising around the country. Go ahead and be pissed off about it, but don't take it too seriously. How much stock do we want to put in people that call somebody "devils" anyway? People with funny names to call each other are usually destined to remain on the fringe. I'm not gonna lose sleep over that shit.

This year some right wingers tried to bring us back to 1992 when they smeared Obama for his association with Jeremiah Wright. There was that youtube video that cut from Wright to Malcolm X (obviously meant as a bad thing). But guess what? It didn't work. Nobody cared. Obama responded by making a speech about race, and his willingness to speak to Americans as grownups was a big turning point in convincing people that he was presidential. Credit Obama's political aikido, but the scary black man card doesn't work anymore. I think this is a sign that things have changed since MALCOLM X. Maybe even partly because of MALCOLM X.

On the other hand, Malcolm X himself doesn't seem like as big of a deal now as he did then. When this movie came out it was a phenomenon. You cannot imagine how many black men wore hats with Xs on them. This was an event. Maybe I'm just talking to the wrong people, but it seems like these days Malcolm X doesn't come up nearly as much as he used to.

(To be fair, MALCOLM X opened in third place at the box office, behind HOME ALONE 2: LOST IN NEW YORK and BRAM STOKER'S DRACULA. So even then he wasn't exactly the number one thing on Americans' minds. Only #3.)

For all these reasons I think MALCOLM X remains an interesting movie and an important cultural landmark in our country. It holds up well. If I had to pick the best Spike Lee movie, I'd go with DO THE RIGHT THING. But this is definitely a topnotch movie that transcends many of the weaknesses of the biopic. It adds to people's understanding of history, says something about both the time it took place and the time it was made, and even works as a compelling story divorced of that context. But Denzel is like 4 inches shorter than Malcolm X was. What the fuck is up with that?

11/28/08

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MALONE

Friends, I don't know if any of you are with me on this one, but just humor me for a minute and pour one on the curb for the video store. There are still plenty of them holding on and struggling, but the vultures are circling. More and more people prefer the instant gratification of download on demand or the not even close to instant gratification of ordering movies on a fucking websight and then waiting around for them to show up at some later date in your mailbox and then you will leave them sitting on your coffee table for two weeks and then remember that you got it and then watch part of it and send it back. But in my day, and still to this day, there was another part of the equation, the browsing. The hunt.

And it is only through this forgotten activity that you can have an experience like this one. You're looking through the action section, trying to decide what you should watch:

I've seen alot of these. Not interested in a lot of these. Why is that one in the action section? I guess I'm not sure what section you would put it in. Oh, I forgot they did a remake of ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13. That wasn't very good. MR. AND MRS. SMITH? I never did see that one. Looked kind of good. Everybody said it was bad though. But there was that shot in the trailer, she was rapelling down the building and she had garters on, maybe I should--

Wait a minute, what's this VHS box? Let me pull this one out and look at--

HOLY SHIT! How are you gonna find that shit on On Demand? How are you gonna hold that in your hand? You won't find it on Netflix, because they don't carry VHS, and MALONE only comes on VHS. DVD can't hold Malone.

There are alot of good covers but I'm not sure if you can technically get better than this. Look at that shit! It's Burt Reynolds. He's blasting a shotgun. He has blood on him. He looks pissed. He exists in an environment made solely of earth and explosion. Mostly explosion. And his name is Malone! It's everything you need, and nothing you don't need. Simplicity and excess wrapped into one easy to swallow pill. Visual poetry.

Then I read the back of the box and it said he was ex-CIA and that it took place in "the Pacific Northwest." I should've remembered that "Pacific Northwest" always means rural Oregon, and not Seattle. But still it was a worthwhile rental.

The movie is from 1987 and is clearly pre-DIE HARD. It might be the last moment in history when you could make a movie with Burt Reynolds drifting into a small town being a badass and fucking people up with his fists but without karate of any kind. He's just passing through but, as often happens, his car breaks down and the small gas station he comes to will need a few days to get the parts needed to fix it. They are very polite in The Pacific Northwest so they let him stay in their guest room. It's a widower and his teenage daughter, and there is lots of uncomfortable sexual tension between Burt and the girl. At one point she comes in wearing just a shirt and talks to him, it seems like she's gonna make a pass but she just hugs him. And he accepts. Not cool, Burt. Get out of there. We know she's under age because she says she's younger than his 1969 Mustang.

Anyway I shouldn't be calling him Burt, because he's Malone.

"I'm Paul Barlow, and this is my daughter Jo."
"Malone."
"You got a first name?"
"Yeah."

We learn right away that some rich asshole named Delaney (Cliff Robertson) is trying to buy the gas station from Barlow, but he won't give it up. Delaney has bought most of the town, has local drunks working for him, controls the police department, is widely feared, and even is connected with congressmen and the CIA. He's basically pulling the exact same deal as Ben Gazzara in ROAD HOUSE except he's also like the bad guys in AVENGING FORCE - the reason he's buying the land is for a compound for his white supremacist militia! I didn't see that coming.

But to Malone this is all about a gas station. The fat guy from Sanford and Son tries to pick on the girl because here dad won't sell the station, so Malone kicks him in the crotch. Almost everything in this movie is completely generic, so I must give credit to the handling of the crotch injury. After the fight scene a doctor summarizes the injuries, saying "his genitals are still swollen," meaning there may be permanent damage. This is great, because many genitals are kicked in movies, but rarely are there any consequences discussed. This is a sobering reminder of what a sensitive region the crotch is.

Anyway, the fat guy's drunk brother (Tracy Walter) wants revenge for his brother's swollen genitals, so he shoots up the barbershop and Malone kills him in self defense. So Delaney gets fed up and gets the CIA to send an assassin. But the assassin is Malone's old girlfriend, so she won't do it. (I forgot to mention that in the first scene Malone was in the CIA and left in disgust, etc.) So they kill the girlfriend. So Malone goes to the compound and kills everybody and blows the place up, the end. (SPOILER)

There aren't really very good action sequences or anything but Reynolds is genuinely cool as a stoic tough guy and it's interesting to see this precursor to ROAD HOUSE and to various Seagal movies. Sorry, I'm genuinely making an effort not to mention Seagal in every god damn review I write, but believe me, this has all kinds of Seagal tropes just a year before ABOVE THE LAW. Check out this badass dialogue to imply his mysterious blackops past:

"When were you in Vietnam?"
"1961."
"Isn't that a little early?"
"Not for what I was supposed to be doing."

Then there's the PATRIOT-style militia, the UNDER SIEGE-like score by David Newman, and many of the same "outsider coming into small town" cliches used in FIRE DOWN BELOW. So I'm not stretching it, I swear.

What I liked best about the movie was one weird touch that I honestly can't figure out if it's intentional or not. See, the bad guys are these white supremacists, and it has absolutely no effect on the plot whatsoever. All the villainous things they do have to do with bullying people off of their land - they might as well be Ben Gazarra trying to control the town, or Kris Kristofferson trying to get away with dumping toxic waste in the river. Their idiology is never put into action. They never even use the N word. There are no minorities in the movie at all, so they never mistreat anybody due to bigotry or anything. Malone never gets self righteous with them or tells them off, and until Delaney gives him a big speech about "the pure race" and patriots and traitors I'm not sure if he even knows that's what those guys are into.

The reason it's so cool is because he has such delusions of grandeur. He thinks Malone came into town to assassinate him. No, seriously dude. His car broke down. A fat guy made lewd comments to a girl in front of him. It escalated from there. He didn't come here to kill you, you just fucked up and crossed the wrong guy. (Malone.)

At the end when he makes that speech he's so proud of himself, he's gonna be a martyr for the cause, he talks about his network and how someone will just replace him and the movement will go on. I wanted Malone to say, "Look asshole, I don't care about your cause. I'm killing you because you killed my girlfriend. This is not a martyr's death. This is more like a domestic squabble."

Well, Malone doesn't tell him, he lets him die thinking he's hot shit, but oh well.

Does the movie live up to the cover? Not at all. That's not even a screen shot. There is one explosion that big, so I appreciate that. It's weird though because it's based on a book called SHOTGUN, and the cover shows him with that shotgun, but I don't think he ever uses one. Anyway, the movie MALONE is not as badass as that cover is. But the character Malone is. So I feel it is a victory for me, for Burt Reynolds, and for the lost art of browsing the video store.

6/4/08

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THE MAN FROM HONG KONG

Two years after ENTER THE DRAGON, Brian Trenchard-Smith brought Australia their own Hong Kong co-production of a martial arts extravaganza. Jimmy Wang Yu (the One-Armed Swordsman himself) plays Inspector Fang, the man of the title, and he is a hell of a man. You wouldn't know it by looking at him actually, he looks like kind of a dweeb, but throughout the course of the movie he will prove it. He is The Man from Hong Kong.

An Australian cop undercover as a tourist busts 22-year-old Sammo Hung (also the fight choreographer) during a drug deal. Inspector Hung is called in from Hong Kong to extradite Sammo. The two cops in charge of the case (including Hugh Keays-Byrne, Toecutter from MAD MAX) want Fang following Australian law, not trying to pull any shit, but they make the mistake of leaving him alone in the interrogation room with Sammo. This leads to a full-on close quarters kung fu battle. Not cool. But he gets a lead out of it.

The Australians want Fang to get his ass out of Australia quick, but for some reason he's intent on using his unorthodox ways and what not to climb his way up the totem pole to rich Australian kung fu expert, playboy, criminal mastermind and expert party-thrower George Lazenby. In one scene he does the William Tell routine with a lady friend, which is movie code for "hey man this guy is decadent." Another sign of his decadence: he has an open fireplace in the middle of a room in his mansion. No sides on it, just a fire right there. Before the Man From Hong Kong is through with him I think he regrets that sort of flamboyant interior design. It's like that evil nurse chick in TRANSPORTER 2 having spikes on the wall in her living room. You evil fuckers gotta start thinking these things through better, it's just not safe to live like that if somebody's gonna come fight you in your place of residence. Also if you have kids would be another reason to avoid the spikes or open flames. And put those little plugs on all the electrical outlets.

Anyway, maybe decadence rubs Fang the wrong way or something, so he'll stop at nothing to take out Lazenby. He basically spends most of the movie chasing people and then beating the hell out of them.

I probaly shouldn't have brought up ENTER THE DRAGON, because this isn't as slick as that one. Like most kung fu movies of the era it's pretty crude, the story is silly and Fang's dialogue is pretty laughable ("Hey - don't give me any SHIT!"). There's also about four too many white characters making comments about the color yellow and one too many where a white lady pulls the sides of her eyes out as a cute comment about Asians.

But what makes this movie great is that it has about twelve times more action than most action movies. Okay, so the hang-gliding scenes may go on a little too long. But it's a movie with foot chases, climbing up the sides of buildings, motorcycle jumps, various vehicles going off ledges, a van that blows up three times, a chain fight on top of an elevator, a skyscraper rapelling scene, and more. During the car chase Lazenby's car drives right through a house and keeps going, so Fang has to catch up with him and ram his car so hard it splits in half like a fortune cookie. (that's not some racial comment, fortune cookie just fits what happens better than, say, wishbone or something.)

You get used to movies where you're waiting for a fight or a chase to happen, and when it does you get excited but it's over before you know it. THE MAN FROM HONG KONG does not believe in that type of bullshit. THE MAN FROM HONG KONG believes in fight after stunt after chase after long-ass fight. I knew I had rented well early on when Fang chased a suspect through the streets, caught up with him in the kitchen of a Chinese restaurant, had a long fight involving various cooking utensils and ingredients, then moved to the restaurant where they proceeded to destroy many dinners, tables, chairs and dishes as well as their own clothes. His opponent actually splits the ass of his jeans and you can see that he's wearing yellow underwear. And that is long before the fight is over.

That's my favorite fight but it's only one of many. There's also the "kung fu demonstration" at Lazenby's backyard barbecue where he ends up fighting all of the henchmen and destroying all of the snacks and only has to leave when a bow and arrow gets involved. Or the scene where he sneaks into a martial arts academy at night but for some reason every member of the dojo is there and he has to fight all of them at the same time. They should actually have to pay him for lessons because they get a real workout and get a chance to try out every weapon they have on hand.

I mean, this guy beats up a whole lot of people. At one point one of the cops complains that Australia has a small population and that Fang is working through all of them.

But he's got some Shaft in him too. The movie takes place over a few days but he meets, falls in love with and beds two different Australian ladies. One of them gets blown up, the other one teaches him how to hang glide.

There are plenty of more artful martial arts movies out there, and where it is more convincing that everybody is hitting each other every time. This doesn't compare to, say, the best Shaw Brothers movies. But the story of an arrogant asshole tearing his way through Australia with no regard for the law, ethics, strategy, manners or common sense is pretty hilarious, and the action is so relentless and down and dirty that you gotta love it.

4/12/09

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MAN ON FIRE

I gotta question I was wondering about. If you had to choose one Scott brother that was better (or not as bad), which would it be, Ridley or Tony? On one hand, Tony has never made a truly great movie like ALIEN or, you know, BLADE RUNNER is a good one too in my opinion. Both by Ridley. Tony's got nothing on that level. But on the other hand, Tony has a couple okay movies: TRUE ROMANCE and CRIMSON TIDE are both pretty okay. I'm looking on IMDB here and-- okay wait a minute, Tony Scott did TOP GUN? I forgot about that one. Never mind. I guess I choose Ridley. Congratulations on this great achievement, Ridley. I remember you seemed pretty pissed off that you didn't get the best director Oscar for that corny gladiator movie you made. Maybe this great honor will cheer you up. Way to go, champ.

So I guess that makes Tony the underdog here, and he had one this year called MAN ON FIRE that seemed to show some promise as a film of Badass Cinema. Academy Award Winner Denzel Washington ("You shot me in the ass!") plays an alcoholic ex-CIA killer guy who's hard up for work so he becomes a bodyguard for a little girl in South America. People get kidnapped there more often than they don't get kidnapped, so next thing you know she gets stolen and this motherfucker stops at nothing to get her back and/or torture, maim and murder the people responsible. And I don't know if you ever saw the poster for this one but it was real good. No collage or nothing, just one giant picture of Denzel wearing a suit and sunglasses, looking real tough. Behind him you see nothing but fire and smoke, and he's standing half way in front of this little girl, holding out one hand in front of her, and she's wearing a private school uniform and hugging a teddy bear. (You know, for emphasis.) It's like Chow Yun Fat with the baby on the HARD BOILED poster, only 9 years later.

So far so good, right? Well I haven't even got to the good part, which is screenplay by Brian Helgeland. Not to rub it in Ridley's face, but Brian is an actual Academy Award Winner for LA CONFIDENTIAL (he was also nominated for MYSTIC RIVER, but like Ridley Scott, he went home that night with the empty hand of shame). I thought LA CONFIDENTIAL was pretty good but it didn't give me the same boner it gave everybody else, so that doesn't mean a whole lot to me. The important thing to me is that he's the writer/director for Outlaw Award Winner PAYBACK, and he wrote BLOOD WORK which is more my speed of Clint Eastwood movie than MYSTIC RIVER was. Helgeland's thing is gritty adaptations of gritty novels, which is what this one is too.

Denzel is exactly as good as you would expect in this role, making the guy intense and scary even though there's a tangent where he becomes the girl's swim coach in order to show the humanity, etc. Before that he's kind of mean to the girl and tells her not to talk to him and he doesn't even like birds but I mean it goes without saying that he has a special bodyguard bond with his peppy little rich girl charge and this is why he will later go around shooting cars with a rocket launcher, chopping off fingers and literally putting C-4 up a guy's ass. Which is kind of pervy, in my opinion, but as we know from Abu Ghraib, these intelligence people are into the butt stuff, I guess. I don't want to be judgmental about CIA traditions so I won't say anything.

Mickey Rourke and Christopher Walken (playing a good guy!) have small roles and there is a good little moment early on where Denzel asks Walken out of the blue, "Do you think God will forgive us for what we've done?" They agree that He won't and then continue with their small talk. My other favorite part of the movie is another conversation Denzel has with the girl's dad before he's hired, when he candidly admits that his drinking affects him and that the level of protection will be "on par with the pay." That was a real good scene.

Also the cinematography is real nice.

What I have done here though is I have listed the good things. It's like Thomas Jefferson or Thumper or somebody once said, if you can't say something nice, forget it. Unfortunately I do not think this movie achieves on the same level that Ridley has achieved in his competition with Tony. It is real slow, taking more than an hour to even get to the kidnapping. I guess it works to make you feel like you know the girl before she gets kidnapped, but I'm not sure it's worth the wait. And I know they were trying to make a dark movie here but still I gotta say it, this movie is just too gloomy and humorless to be enjoyed. I don't mind that there are no jokes or oneliners but jesus man, give me something other than brooding, random flashes and the occasional sadism.

If you think about it, The Man On Fire is very similar to the Parker character Mel Gibson played in PAYBACK. Both of them are mostly emotionless, cold-blooded killers who are wronged and spend the movie violently and single-mindedly righting that wrong. I mean really, just righting the shit out of it. But the difference is, Parker (actually they call him Porter in the movie) is fun to watch. He's not joking around, he's very serious, but there's joy in the clever ways he accomplishes his goals and humor in the way his scumbag adversaries respond to his success. The "oh shit" looks they get on their faces when he shows up at their place of business.

By the way, did I imagine it or did Denzel really say, "Revenge is a meal best served cold!" as he knocked a car off a cliff? I'm pretty sure this really happened in the movie. I wonder if that was Denzel's plan all along to start doing glorified Brian Bosworth movies as soon as he got another Oscar. This is not gonna make me sound real smart, but I honestly think THE PUNISHER is a better ex-government badass turned alcoholic sadistic revenge killer movie. True, the Punisher had that corny narration about "not revenge - punishment," but at least he made that up himself. The Man On Fire just repeats a cliche, and gets the wording wrong! Come on man, if that's all you got, be a stoic killer. You don't gotta say shit. You're ruining it.

Another major problem in this movie though is the way it's edited and shot. This is one of those movies where it's EXTREME CLOSE UP, cut to shaky blurry handheld footage of traffic, cut to EXTREME CLOSEUP THROUGH WINDOW WITH REFLECTIONS IN WINDOW, freeze frame, speed up, slo mo, cut to nonsensical flashback of swimming lessons, EXTREME CLOSEUP, cut to OTHER EXTREME CLOSEUP, freeze frame again, cut to short clip of KOOYANISQATSI, etc. It's also what I call a whooshy movie, where edits and camera movements seem to create sound. The camera moves and you hear a WHOOSH or the sound of traffic zooming by or a metal garage door slamming shut. And a man can only take so much of that nonsense. This movie is groundbreaking because it's the first as far as I know to go one step beyond and let this annoying sugar high filmatic technique leak into the medium of subtitles.

Obviously, taking place in South America, there is some Spanish dialogue in this movie. And when you got Spanish dialogue in an English movie, usually you gotta translate it for us uneducated Americans, so you write the translation in the lower center area of the screen in easy to read letters, preferably yellow or white with black outlines in case of a scene taking place at a ski resort (I'm looking at you, VHS edition of Roger Vadim's DANGEROUS LIASIONS).

But no! That's not what Tony Scott wants! Tony Scott doesn't play that shit! Tony Scott still probaly gets christmas cards from Jerry Bruckheimer, I'm sure he has the occasional social drinking with Michael Bay, they may or may not snort lines of cocaine off the hood of a gold plated humvee halfway submerged in a champagne jacuzzi surrounded by giant american flags and stacks of Playboy and Maxim magazines taller than most NBA players. I mean I'm just speculating here, I don't have any inside info on this. So what Tony Scott does, he has subtitles that are supposed to just LOOK COOL instead of actually be readable. They roll out and spin around and slide across the screen. They show up on the top or on the side or sometimes the characters walk in front of them and they disappear. WHOOSH!

This type of horseplay might conceivably work in a movie like CHARLIE'S ANGELS but it does not work in a serious movie with no sense of humor. At first I thought maybe some young film students raised on MTV, Sugar Smacks and Visa commercials had taken over the movie in postproduction, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized that this assault on cinematic language was built into the shots, it had to have been premeditated. Admittedly, it is done slightly more artistically than in the Michael Bay movies, and there are a few scenes where it is used to intentionally disorient the audience and put them in the mind frame of the character. But not usually. For most of the movie, it's the equivalent of Tony Scott wearing an earring and baggy pants. No, I'm not that old. What do you mean, old? I'm young and edgy. Look at my blond streaks. I'm one of these new young wunderkinds they got, I'm reinventing the filmatic language for my generation. Look out old people, little Tony Scott is coming and his movie is WHOOSHY! It's gonna whooshy the starch right out of your collar!

Which reminds me there's a part where Denzel goes to a "rave" and to fit in he wears a bandana on his head. That shit was hilarious.

Otherwise, this movie is a disappointment.

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THE MANSON FAMILY

About a month ago I saw this movie DEADBEAT AT DAWN, a sleazy, gorey student film about lowlife THE WARRIORS style gang members stabbing each other and robbing armored cars and spinning nunchucks in the cemetery. The director and star was Jim Van Bebber, who seemed a little bit too into shock value but I thought he was still likable. His movie is corny and amateurish as hell but it has alot of conviction. This guy is swinging on ropes and jumping off bridges and piling on the hideous gore effects like nobody's business. It's one of those things where you don't really love the movie but the guy's obvious dedication to getting it done sort of elevates it. It's about the journey, man.

Usually a guy like this, they go on to make bigger and better movies and become well known and respected, or more likely they go on to make slicker but much worse movies and then their career fizzles out and you forget you ever thought they had any potential. It's hard to say where Van Bebber is headed though because since he finished DEADBEAT in 1988 he never bothered to sell out to Hollywood or get stuck signing deals that never amount to anything. Since then he has spent almost his entire career on one other movie, CHARLIE'S FAMILY. Another raw, fiercely independent, ten thousand miles away from Hollywood kind of low budget movie. This time it's about the Manson family, it has some of the same cast but Van Bebber plays family member Bobby instead of the lead.

According to my intense research (well, the trivia on imdb) CHARLIE'S FAMILY played some film festivals as a work-in-progress in 1997, but was only really finished in 2003 when that cool DVD company Blue Underground helped him out. So it's coming to some American theaters this year, but I just saw it on some Czechoslovakian type DVD.

So here's the deal. This movie, now imaginatively titled THE MANSON FAMILY, is another interesting/frustrating mixed bag. What I really liked is the same thing as DEADBEAT: it's just raw and sleazy as hell. Alot of this movie looks like it was actually filmed in the '60s and just discovered under somebody's floorboards. I know NATURAL BORN KILLERS did that thing where they went nuts with the different filmstocks and what not, but here it seems authentic and logical. The scenes of the family are muddy old film, the interviews from the time are scratched and grimy (for real, not some phoney computer effect). There are fake interviews with a guy 25 years later, which you see as a distorted video with a TV show logo partially cropped on the bottom edge, like would sometimes happen in a real documentary. Attention to detail is good.

This Van Bebber has really learned how to use music and sound. There are some creepy uses of classical music, hippie music and actual Charles Manson songs. And subtle-enough trip outs with sounds of squealing pigs, electric static, dripping water and what have you.

Alot of the camera angles and editing are effectively disorienting. Sometimes it feels like one long dizzying psychedelic sequence. At the end, the film melts onscreen, which I don't know about you but I've seen this trick before. But then Van Bebber leaves the screen white and buzzing for almost a full minute. (In a theater, I wonder how many people wait to be sure that it's supposed to be that way.) Then the credits roll upwards, and are formatted backwards. It leaves you feeling like you just woke up for work but you set your alarm for pm instead of am and then you slept through the entire day.

There are times when the movie really seems to suck you into the madness of the family. It doesn't feel cleaned up or held back like a TV movie. There are many graphic orgy scenes, they drink the blood of a dog and the murder scenes are pretty appalling, showing every god damn stab these freakos made. Just stabbing these people over and over and over again. And most of the acting is pretty convincing, although sometimes there is a Troma feel. Van Bebber himself is actually the best actor, playing tough guy Bobby, both in the past and 25 years later, with a different mustache.


So I liked all that but the problem is, the way this story is told just doesn't work. I don't understand why you would do it this way. I don't care if you're a rebel independent filmmaker, if you just told this story straightforward, it would be way more interesting. Instead it's a series of fake interviews, with actors playing the family members 25 years later. And then it goes to re-enactments of what they're talking about. But I'm not talking fake interview followed by long flashback segment which occasionally comes back to fake interview. I'm talking, the entire fucking movie is narrated by fake interviews. It's a fake documentary. More of the story is told through talking than through footage. This would be forgivable if it was a real documentary because it's not like they brought camera crews on their murder spree. But in this case, why are we wasting our time with fake interviews? We know they're not real. Why not just stick with the re-enactments? Especially for the first half I felt like they were using excerpts from the actual MANSON FAMILY movie I want to see to pad out a fake documentary.

Even worse, there is this whole wraparound story about a TV producer, supposedly the guy who did the fake interviews. And there are scenes of him and one of his co-workers sitting in an editing room talking about "Charlie." Meanwhile, there are also scenes of a bunch of tattooed naked kids in a basement somewhere shooting up and doing rituals to prepare for the thrilling conclusion of the movie, when they come murder the TV producer.

I'm sure things get confused when you spend 16 years making the same god damn movie, but at some point I wish Van Bebber would've realized that he was overcomplicating this thing, it was getting too muddled and stupid. I mean if it's a true story (which this is, I'm pretty sure) you either a) make a documentary about it or b) don't make a fucking fake documentary about it. Because that's just stupid. He put all this effort into making it the most accurate movie version of the events, but then the whole time you're watching it you never think "this is real" because you know those aren't real interviews. By using this format they pull you out of the reality of the story and force you to notice how not real it actually is. It would feel a whole lot more authentic if it was just honest about being a movie and not pretending to be reality.

And for christ's sake, stop wrapping around everything. Wraparounds are only for emergencies. There is no need to have this story be the background to another, less interesting story. You spend 16 years trying to make us believe in your re-creation of the Manson family and then you have to throw in fictional punk rock murderers that you know we know are not real? And then you put us in the uncomfortable position of trying to decide whether you think you are making a bold statement about the media's exploitation of serial killers for the first time since MAN BITES DOG, SERIAL MOM, NATURAL BORN KILLERS and the rest of them?

I got mixed feelings about movies like this, that are about real crimes. I mean, I don't know, if it was somebody you knew that got killed, it would be pretty horrible for there to be a movie like this. But on the other hand I think there are alot of really powerful/successful/pretty good movies that fall into that category, like DERANGED, ED GEIN, HENRY: PORTRAIT OF A SERIAL KILLER, etc.

The only reason I bring it up is because I saw an article where Van Bebber said "We don't show Tate getting stabbed in the belly... mainly out of my profound respect for her husband, Roman Polanski." And that was a nice gesture and everything but I still would urge Roman Polanski, if he is reading this, not to watch the movie. I mean I know it's been a while but I figure this would probaly still bring up some bad emotions to see your young innocent pregnant wife begging for her life, etc. It is a pretty good movie in some ways but really not worth it in the specific case of relatives of the murder victims. So please stay away guys, thanks. By the way THE PIANIST was really fucking good, I knew you were gonna get that oscar too, I shoulda put money on it.

Blue Underground makes some good DVDs, so I'm sure the American version will have a commentary track, which I would like to hear. I have some questions like, did you plan this as a fake documentary from the beginning, or did you just get lost along the way? And what's the deal with the names? Is there some rights issue why they don't use anybody's full names? Or was it an artistical type consideration? I mean I can see why you might feel bad using the victims' names (I think Sharon Tate is called "blond woman" or "mother" or something like that on the credits) but it's kind of weird because they changed the name from CHARLIE'S FAMILY but in the movie everybody, even journalists, only refer to him as Charlie. I don't think you ever even hear the word "Manson" in the movie, just in the title.

Still, it's good that the title refers to the family and not just Manson. Because that's sort of the emphasis on the movie is how yeah, this guy had some kind of effect on them, but it's their own fucking fault. They're the ones who did all this shit, not just him by remote control.

So the bottom line is this. I think this thing is a miss, but I still give it a "good game" for effort. I want to see the next Van Bebber movie, and hopefully it will be in less than ten years. If you have good taste, you might want to skip this one, because it is in poor taste. It doesn't make a joke out of these crimes (like DERANGED did) but it's very graphic which makes it either de-glamourized or sensationalistic, I'm not sure. But at least they didn't say how the family had planned to skin Frank Sinatra alive while listening to his own music and then make purses out of his skin and sell them to hippie shops. I just read that while researching this review, that's fucked up man. I'm not a huge Frank Sinatra fan but I'm glad they didn't get to do that to him.

It would've been cool though if they had a scene where Manson tries out for the Monkees. But like I said this is more about the family so there's no room for that.

THE PRESTIGE and MARIE ANTOINETTE double feature

This week was one of those ones that start coming up toward the end of the year where there's just too many movies you want to see all coming out on the same day. And me being an obsessive motherfucker I try to tackle them all at once. We got three reliable directors all hitting the same day here. #1 priority for me was Clint's FLAGS OF OUR FATHERS, but I already saw that at an early screening. So that left Chris Nolan's THE PRESTIGE and Sofia Coppola's MARIE ANTOINETTE. So I watched them both in a row, liked both, also fell asleep during both. (You gotta go to sleep the night before one of these double-headers, it turns out.)

To be honest I wasn't even gonna review MARIE because, let's face it, I am not a girl. This is not only a girl movie but a long, arty, low on plot girl movie. I think some of you cinemasters are gonna love the shit out of it but alot of my readers would probaly never be able to sit through it. Still, I've read so many reviews that clearly didn't fucking GET this movie that I decided I had to comment.

Ms. Coppola's take on Marie Antoinette is not your typical stuffy historical drama costume movie. She tries to emphasize that Marie was a teenager (14) when she became French royalty, so this movie is about giggly teen girls hanging out like they're having a slumber party or something. If you saw the trailer you know that some (but not all) of the movie is set to '80s synthesizer pop music that white people used to listen to due to the brain damage caused by the popularity of cocaine at the time. Also, since the movie is in English anyway and nobody's speaking French, she decided to dump the artificiality of everybody faking French accents, so you got Rip Torn and people in there talking how they normally would. But wearing wigs. Other than that though they're trying to be fairly accurate to the times and like most of these types of pictures they get some beautiful imagery that seems inspired by old paintings.

Now, I said this was a girl movie, and therefore I'm not gonna relate to it as much as I would, say, a movie starring a WWE wrestler I never heard of. However, I don't mean that in a bad way and let me just say I don't go for this horse shit where any movie from a woman's perspective is written off as a "chick flick." Just because it rhymes doesn't mean it's fair. There just aren't enough lady directors in business and I for one am glad that Coppola makes feminine movies, instead of just trying to copy what the dudes are doing. She would never have directed POINT BREAK, in my opinion. She clearly has her own voice.

So she has a completely different perspective on this story than anybody else would do. Most people think of Marie Antoinette as that rich bitch who said "let them eat cake" and got her head cut off like she fuckin deserved. Not Sofia. I don't want to say she shows Marie as a victim, but she definitely shows her as one part of a ridiculous system that she can't be expected to control. The movie starts with her riding in a carriage with some of her girlfriends and her portable dog prop. You can't help but think of Paris Hilton. When Marie gets to her destination they explain that she is being given to a dude she's never met as a symbolic gesture of friendship between Austria and France. She is naive enough that she seems okay with it, admiring a portrait of her future husband saying that he has "kind eyes." But she seems surprised when they explain that she has to leave behind everything of Austria, including her clothes, her friends, and even her dog. They strip her naked and re-dress her in different, more French clothes.

Now all the sudden she's married to this dumpy chump (Jason Schwartzman from RUSHMORE, also Coppola's cousin I think). After the wedding the King (Rip Torn) and various religious leaders and their entourage accompany the barely legal newlyweds to the matrimonial fuck palace to do some kind of ritual and heavily imply that it's time to get it on and squirt out an heir as soon as possible. But of course, as history tells us, King Louie couldn't get it up for 7 years. Apparently he didn't see that part in SPIDER-MAN where her shirt got all wet in the rain. So Marie has to put up with her own mother and various mother figures and gossips openly scorning her talents as an automatic baby manufacturing machine. There are scenes where she walks somewhere in a fancy dress and you hear various women talking shit about her, and sometimes you don't even see them at all, they are just offscreen voices like the people saying "Holy fuck!" and "Forrest's here, that fire is as good as out!" in ON DEADLY GROUND.

So there's all this pressure and humiliation, but on the other hand they're also pampering her to ridiculous extremes. When she wakes up every morning there's a whole posse there staring at her, ready to pick her up and ritualistically put her clothes on for her. It doesn't make it clear but I'm sure they must wipe her ass for her too. Then a candle light vigil marches the wipings ten miles so they can set them adrift at sea in a carved ivory coffin.

The meals she eats every day look like they took a team of designers and sculptors weeks to create. To make her a sympathetic character Sofia has her say "This is ridiculous!" She's uncomfortable with this stuff but after a while she says fuck it and starts indulging herself. There's a montage of her and her friends eating fancy desserts and drinking champagne, set to the song "I Want Candy." This is also the name of the movie's production company and I think it's sort of the general idea of the movie.

The genius of the movie is that it focuses on wanting candy and not on the French Revolution. This is also the part that seems to have flown over a few heads. For some reason some of these jokers in the critical establishment have decided that if somebody makes a movie called MARIE ANTOINETTE, even if the logo is pink and designed to look like it was cut out of a magazine and glued onto a notebook, it has to be a serious attempt at an A-Z history Channel retelling of Antoinette's life and the beginning of the French Revolution from all perspectives. But that's what libraries and wikipedias are for. If you know the basics of the story (or read it on wikipedia before going to the movie, not to mention any names but some people may have done that) you can see what's going on. This isn't an overview of history, it's from the I Want Candy POV. When Marie hears that there is a bread shortage and the peasants are starving, she doesn't say "let them eat cake." She does decide to stop buying diamonds. It's a pathetic gesture but obviously sincere. But she makes this decision from the grounds of her fancy garden and made-to-order private rich lady village. She never sees a starving peasant, and neither do you. At the end you don't see the people who storm the castle, you just hear them. Some critics of the movie apparently think Coppola is stupid and did this by accident. They have described the movie as "shallow" as if having a shallow character makes the movie shallow. (By that logic, THE MARINE is muscular.)

I'm sure everybody else has compared Marie of this movie to modern Rich Ho Celebrities like Paris Hilton. Marie is famous here in the states for supposedly thinking peasants without bread can still eat cake, just like Jessica Simpson is famous for thinking Chicken of the Sea is chicken. Our modern pop culture is inundated with these rich daughters who are born into fame and fortune. The dumber, less talented and more fashionable the better. Have you ever seen those shows on MTV about the rich girls having multi-million dollar sweet sixteen parties? Or did you hear that some guy hired 50 Cent to play his daughter's bat mitzvah? That shit makes me sick because they act like that's something to aspire to. Even though there is no way to aspire to being born rich. I think there really are teenage girls today who want to live that life. MARIE ANTOINETTE doesn't argue that anyone should. You know the revolution is coming eventually to piss on the parade. It just doesn't entirely blame Marie for enjoying the parade while she can. She didn't start it.

I'm sure fifteen other critics must've already pointed out that in today's world Marie would definitely have a reality show and a sex tape. (In fact, the real life Marie Antoinette was depicted in outrageous sex acts in Tiajuana bible type tracts, so she almost did have a sex tape.) These girls are given this world of luxury that they have done nothing to earn, their agents and entourages convince them that they deserve it, and they indulge it left and right without a clue that other people in the world are suffering. But Ms. Coppola makes us realize that it's not entirely their fault. If we don't want our daughters to be stupid then we shouldn't make them stupid. If you want her to be down to earth don't sell her off to the royal family when she's 14 and feed her sugary edible art pieces. Don't give her her own TV show and album and put her on the cover of magazines and then act like you're mad when she continues to make an idiot of herself. The whole fuckin system is insane. But then they grab Marie and cut off her head and for hundreds of years people act like all of it was her fault. Don't worry, we got the bitch who did it.

I wouldn't want to compare somebody as smart and talented as Sofia Coppola to Paris Hilton, but it's obvious why she can sympathize with these girls. I mean do the math, her dad directed THE GODFATHER. I'm sure she had her share of candy growing up. And the gossip Marie puts up with in the movie is tame compared to what Sofia still gets when people talk about her performance in GODFATHER III. Like it's her fault Winona Ryder quit and her dad decided to put her in. I didn't pick up on this until it was pointed out by somebody else but you also got Dario Argento's daughter in the movie, John Boorman's daughter, John Huston's son, Bill Nighy's daughter, and Schwartzman is Talia Shire's son. Marianne Faithfull is in there and apparently she's the daughter of a baroness. And obviously Kirsten Dunst can relate to this lifestyle a little bit since she's been a celebrity since she kissed Tom Cruise (or was it Brad Pitt?) in a movie at the age of 12.

I don't think Coppola's letting Marie off the hook. She definitely has some of that Condoleeza-shopping-for-shoes-during-Katrina vibe about her. One of the taglines for the movie is "The party that started a revolution." But Coppola relates to her too, she's sympathetic, and since when has it been wrong for a director to care about her characters? In real life I'd want to be with those peasants storming the castle, so when Coppola made me feel bad for Marie Antoinette I knew she had made a good movie.

The more masculine movie I saw this weekend was THE PRESTIGE, aka BATMAN VS. WOLVERINE. This one has Christian Bale and Huge Ackman as stubborn, competitive assholes in the world of old timey magicianery. Basically these two fucks hate each other and are always trying to steal each other's audiences, secrets, women, etc. And they do magic tricks.

I don't want to give away too much of the plot because 1) you want to be surprised and 2) I dozed off in the beginning so I would probaly say something wrong and embarrass myself. But it starts out with Ackman on stage doing his magic, and Christian Bale is chosen as a volunteer from the audience. He sneaks backstage only to find Ackman drowning in a container of water. He goes to jail, accused of murdering Ackman by sabotaging his trick. It doesn't really seem like he did it, but he might have, we don't know.

Then, like FLAGS OF OUR FATHERS, the whole thing gets unnecessarily complicated, skipping around from the beginning to the end to the middle to the mid-middle to the late-beginning to the next-to-last part and then back under to the middle before it twists around to another part in the middle. Unlike FLAGS though the structure works pretty good, you stay involved and the puzzle-pieces kind of set up obviously matches the subject matter. The magicians are trying to figure out how each other's tricks are done, deciphering each other's journals, spying on each other, the court is trying to figure out how the trick is done to find out how the murder was done, and the audience is trying to figure out how the story fits together. Then David Bowie shows up as Nikola Tesla and builds some machines. A warning, he does not sing in the movie, it is not a musical. Also no puppets.

The characters in the movie keep talking about the structure of a magic trick. "The Prestige" is apparently magician hipster lingo for "the part at the end where the bird that disappeared reappears." (I bet Penn Jillette talks about that shit all the time. The prestige this, the prestige that. Shut up dude. We don't want to hear about the aristocrats ever again, either. Less talk more trick, buddy.) The movie is obviously supposed to be sort of a magic trick too, using the ol' "slight of hand" or the magic of cinema to trick you and jerk you around and make you accept some completely ludicrous events that happen in the end (but that are strangely similar to other easier to accept tricks earlier in the movie, when you go back and think it over).

I never even saw a trailer for this movie and I have to say, it was nice to see it without really knowing what to expect at all. So I don't want to really say anything about the plot. But I gotta say one thing. There is all kinds of crazy impossible shit that happens in this movie, but the ONE thing I had a hard time accepting was a little one where they find a double for Huge Ackman to use in his act. There just happens to be a drunk guy they find (played by Huge Ackman) who looks exactly like Huge Ackman. This is based on a book and in a book it might work because you can imagine that there are two guys who look alot alike and they dress them up to look the same. I mean, there is such a thing as stunt doubles after all. And there was that guy Tony Jaa bumped into in THE PROTECTOR that I thought was Jackie Chan but apparently was just a lookalike. So we know this is possible. But when you have Huge Ackman playing a guy who looks like Huge Ackman it becomes a joke, like Eddie Murphy playing a bunch of different fat people in one movie. There are other things that happen in the movie that are MUCH more far-fetched, but in the context of the movie, more believable.

The cast is good of course. Christian Bale has got to be one of the top actors working now. This is no AMERICAN PSYCHO as far as being a great role for him, but it's a good one. The Alfred to his Batman, Michael Caine (ON DEADLY GROUND) is also in there, though he's working for Wolverine. Andy Serkis (Gollum, King Kong) is in there as David Bowie's assistant, slightly overacting but I think it's just because he's not weighed down by the motion capture suit he normally wears. He doesn't know his own strength.

Like I mentioned before I dozed off during this movie, through no fault of the movie. I woke up and all the sudden Scarlett Johansen was in it. I think she might have snuck in from some other movie because once again she's the hot young mistress who gets betrayed and turns bitchy and yells at the dude. This time with a British accent though. Due to my brief sleep breaks I couldn't really tell you how Scarlett came into the story. I also missed exactly why Christian and Huge hated each other so much (besides comic book politics) and when somebody explained it to me afterwards I thought shit, that makes a whole lot more sense. But I think the version I saw where this wasn't explained was a little more challenging, a little less Hollywood, and it still made a good story.

One thing they did not cover is tigers, they do not have tigers like Sigfried and Roy do. But it makes you question, if there is this sort of competition, this violent east coast/west coast magician feud going on, how do we know that tiger that ate Roy wasn't in on it? Maybe David Blaine paid him off. That is the dirty secret of street magic, that guy comes from the street so even though he can levitate he has a violent background. 'Cause in the world of street magic you gotta do what you gotta do to survive. And I mean that's some dirty Godfather, Scarface type shit to send a fucking white tiger after a guy. The day a white tiger eats your throat out is the day you've fucked with the wrong guys. Admittedly, Sigfried and Roy probaly have a higher chance of being attacked by tigers than regular citizens due to the circles they run in, but still, what are the chances? It had to be David Blaine. Or what about that Criss Angel Mindfreak dude? I don't know what the fuck his problem is, I just seen ads for him in magazines. But mindfreak or not I don't trust any weirdo who names himself "Criss Angel." At least spell Chris correctly if you don't want us to suspect you of this shit.

Anyway it's a pretty good one, I would like to see it again while awake some time to see if it holds up.

THE MARINE

The second ever film under the prestigious WWE Films banner is sort of a half-assed COMMANDO rip-off starring John Cena. Yeah, I never heard of him either but apparently he is or was the heavyweight champion, he has a rap album and his championship belt has a rotating thing on it like those asinine spinning rims that rappers use to dispose of some of their disposable income. But he doesn't do anything that cool/asinine in this movie. Basically, imagine a bland clean cut muscleman with no personality, and the PG-13 action movie that would be built around him.

The movie starts out with promising ridiculousness. First you got the WWE Films logo, which is still misleadingly classy with an orchestra tuning up, and still does not even explode or bleed or anything that you would expect it to do. But it does rotate into the opening titles which involve Mr. Cena in full marine uniform doing a salute while standing on top of a giant flag. So far so good. Then it goes to the prologue where John Cena (as the fictional character John Triton) is in Iraq, sneaking around an "al Quaeda compound, 100 miles outside of Tikrit." (Bush hasn't convinced the world that there's a connection between 9-11 and the Iraq fiasco, but maybe he's convinced the WWE.)

Of course, John has to save some marines from some terrorists, and they tell him over the walkie talkie to wait but he says "There's no time!" Alot of movies called THE MARINE would try to have, like, some sort of military advisor or something, but for this one it looks like they tried to make sure nobody working on the movie even knew that the military was a real existing institution, they thought it was some kind of heroic myth like jedis or herculeses. So this Triton guy actually runs through one wall of the barn/compound the way football teams run through those paper banners. He fires off a few hundred bullets, then things start blowing up and catching on fire and he does a bunch of fancy kicks and punches to save the hostages. I think I counted five explosions just in the brief scene of them leaving the compound.

Then Triton's superior explains to him that although he is a good and loyal marine, he has to be discharged because he "disobeyed a direct order." That's right, we are supposed to believe that during the Iraq war they would actually kick a guy out for doing a good job. As if we don't know they're hiring 65 year olds with bum knees. No way the modern military is kicking a guy out unless he's gay and knows Arabic.

And we know he's not gay because he comes home to his wife for a chaste PG-13 underwear hugging scene, where it is revealed that the very next day he's starting a new job as a security guard with his wacky fat friend. This isn't ROLLING THUNDER. From the point of view of the movie, being away from your model wife for years fighting an insane war is actually a really fun job. When you get home your only regret is that you want to be a marine and will "go crazy" if you spend some time relaxing with your wife. You gotta go right into a new job with one of your buddies. Wait a minute, is he supposed to be gay?

The security guard part is a long section that has nothing to do with the plot of the movie, but establishes that Triton doesn't know what to do in a world where he can't be a marine, and also allows him to throw a guy through a window. (Sadly, it's a ground level window.)

The actual plot begins when Robert Patrick of T2 and various crap fame strongarms some diamonds. The robbery scene is okay but achieves excellence when for no reason the Comic Relief Black Guy fires some kind of magic gun that causes a police car to explode into the largest, flamiest car explosion ever created and bounce up into the air and then fall back down in slow motion while the characters walk in front of it as if they don't notice that a fuckin atomic bomb just went off ten feet behind them. Meanwhile, fired-after-one-day-security-guard Triton and his beard/wife go on a trip and stop at the same gas station where Patrick and his crew have a run-in with a cop in a souped up Fast and Furious cop car. So the gas station is blown up, the wife becomes a hostage and Triton is in hot pursuit using the police car.

The car chase is the best sequence in the movie. They drive real fast, crash into each other, the car loses pieces one at a time and eventually he drives off a cliff, and that's when it gets real good. As the car launches into the air and spins in slow motion, we get shots of the various bad guys firing their guns at it. I love that even though the car is already flying off a cliff they look like they are very intent on shooting it, like it's really important to them. Their hard work pays off because, still spinning, the car catches on fire. But the movie isn't over yet. Triton falls out of the car while it spins and flames and falls and gets shot. Since Mr. Patrick and friends are presumably not seeing this in slow motion like we are, they think he's still inside. Also, they don't get to see it from 4 or 5 different angles like we do so they really don't get to appreciate its full awesomeness.

Unfortunately, almost all of the awesomeness contained within this movie was already seen in the trailer. After the car flip, Triton must spend at least half an hour of screen time just tracking the bad guys through a swamp. I guess you could argue that this is good, because Patrick has more screen presence in his socks than Cena has in his entire bulging frame. Cena doesn't have the calculated outrageousness of a Brian Bosworth or a Dennis Rodman, he doesn't have the grit of a Roddy Piper, and he sure as fuck doesn't have the charisma of the Rock. He is cast only for his muscles, which is actually counterproductive because they're too big, they make it hard to take him seriously as a regular guy or even a marine. They would actually be a liability to him, I think. How's he gonna fight a war (or guard a building) when he has to spend all day on those machines Ivan Drago used in ROCKY IV?

Anyway, even when Cena is off screen you still got problems because the movie is as bland as he is. I'm sure somebody could come up with some exceptions, but as a general rule I don't think a non-martial arts action movie can get away with being PG-13. Because then all you got is explosions. There is no bleeding. No broken bones. No stabbings. No use of the word "motherfucker." There's one scene where a dead body (a bad guy - only bad guys die in this movie, and since they aren't even fighting the good guy in most of the movie they have to kill each other) is thrown to some alligators. So to establish that it gets eaten, there is a one second shot of alligators eating an empty pair of jeans. Now, I know with every fiber of my being that the good people of WWE Films are very aware that their audience would rather see an alligator bite a guy's head off than an alligator snap at an empty pair of jeans. Lets be honest with ourselves here. But they want a PG-13 so they give us the shaft. I guess they could have a legitimate commercial point there. Instead of the seven people at the showing I went to there might've been four if it was rated-R. The three guys who felt it was necessary to sit directly behind me in a giant empty theater and say "Daaaaaaammmn!" every time somebody got hit on the head with an object would've had to wait two months for the (probaly unrated) DVD to come out.

To fill time before the action climax (rated PG-13 for some more explosions and scenes of mild punching) they also make the huge mistake of trying to be funny. Hollywood, can we please have a 75 year hiatus on DELIVERANCE jokes? For fuck's sake that one's been used more than "women going to the bathroom in groups" at this point. But they seem under the impression that they just discovered America. They not only draw out the "male rape is hilarious" joke but have the score slide into "Dueling Banjos." By the way, the score (by Don Davis, who did a great job on the MATRIX pictures) is mostly terrible, always trying to make things seem exciting with cheesy drum machines and at one point even doing wacky "isn't this part funny?" music. But he does deliver a rare laugh by including an Irish-tinged love theme kind of like TITANIC.

I think the movie would be alot more enjoyable if it was treated seriously. Even the intentionally absurd shit like TRANSPORTER 2 has to be done with a straight face. Action heroes are both cooler and funnier if they seem to be sincere. When the bad guy keeps making jokes about how he's afraid of rock candy it kind of throws the whole thing off. Unless it is treated as a serious thing, like how Dolph is afraid of the color white in BLACKJACK. But here it's definitely supposed to be funny, and that makes it not funny, and kind of uncomfortable.

In the end (SPOILER) [HUGE SPOILER COMING UP] (HOLY SHIT BE CAREFUL PEOPLE I'M GIVING IT AWAY HERE) (THIS IS YOUR LAST CHANCE) (TURN BACK NOW) [ABANDON ALL HOPE] (SPOILER) (SPOILER) (SPOILER) (REPEAT) he saves his wife, the end. You don't find out if he found a way to be happy without being a marine. In fact, you are left with the idea that his wife better get kidnapped every day so he has something to do with his life. But they just leave you hanging. Now, I'm not saying that anybody gives a shit what happens to this stupid character. But it shows the dishonesty of the movie. This thing spends a good 30-40 minutes pretending like it's about a loyal marine having to find happiness when he's kicked out of the marines for being too great and awesome. You have to sit through all that shit to get to the explosions. But then at the end it just says "ah, who gives a shit, go to the credits." So clearly they knew all along that nobody gave a shit. But they had to pad the trailer out to feature length so they made us sit through that bullshit.

As expected, the movie puts an admirable amount of emphasis on the artistry of fiery explosions. But otherwise it is not a memorable return to the old school action style of the '80s and early '90s or a clever new re-invention of the genre. It mostly just goes through the motions. The first WWE Films picture, SEE NO EVIL, was a whole hell of alot more fun. It was more consistently retarded and at the same time more clever. The R-rating allowed for lots of humorously over-the-top deaths and mutilations, and its big dumb muscleman (playing a retarded, sexually repressed, emotionally abused religious fanatic serial killer and accomplished eyeball collector) was better cast than this one. Its director (famous porn auteur Gregory Dark) seemed genuinely interested in showing things you haven't seen before (in the context of a generic slasher movie plot) and the crazy, tasteless, knuckleheaded tone of the whole thing seemed perfectly fit to be the signature style of WWE Films. In comparison, this one is underwhelming. There is one little touch in a similar spirit in Robert Patrick's last appearance in the movie, but it's poorly timed and doesn't go far enough.

Some of you probaly don't understand why I would be genuinely excited for this movie, but I know some of you were just as excited as I was. Well, I'm sorry to say that I was real disappointed. This is a movie that can be distilled into a perfect trailer, but in its full length it's a bore. They probaly should've just made the trailer and left it at that.

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MARY POPPINS

You know how politicians are always saying lately that we don't need to just worry about helping the people on Wall Street, we need to help the people on Main Street? Well one time I was at Disneyland, walking down Main Street when suddenly Mary Poppins rushed by with an entourage of kids trying to get her autograph. Not the real Mary Poppins, (because she is a fictional character in my opinion) and not Julie Andrews, but the Disneyland Mary Poppins. And I was surprised to find myself thinking you know what, Mary Poppins is kind of hot. Nobody wants to get to an age where you start to think a nanny from an old Disney movie is kind of hot, but it happens to the best of us.

And it was kind of like a door opened up there full of new possibilities, because then I realized actually back then Julie Andrews was kind of hot too, not just modern day Disneyland Mary Poppins. And she had those little hats and a talking umbrella and shit. I know alot of men are intimidated by women who are more capable than them, but I would not be against dating somebody who can fly and sit on a cloud. I don't know what her capacity is for carrying other people and putting them on clouds and all that, I guess that would have to be addressed. But it's pretty cool that she can do that. I would call that a point in her favor.

Well I apologize if this information shatters any illusions about what a hardcase I am, but recently I watched the movie Walt Disney's Mary Poppins showing at a local theater. Long story. But that was kind of a revelation too because I never really gave it much thought before, but I realized this is a pretty fuckin good movie as far as that type of thing goes.

If you haven't seen it before or don't remember it too well, Andrews plays Mary Poppins, magical nanny riding carousel horses etc.

There's a famous scene where Mary interacts with animated penguins and what not, but even apart from that this is the Disney live actionmovie that's most integrated with their world of animation. Everything in the movie from Mary's costumes to the house with sails and a cannon on top to the stylized London cityscape looks like it was designed and manufactured by Disney artists. No half assing it. And then it's got those catchy songs, and they go off into magical worlds inside a chalk painting, they do a dance number on the roof, they get covered in ash but not in a WAR OF THE WORLDS type of way. So it's easy to see why everybody is charmed by this movie.

But what I noticed this time is there's more going on than that. Even taking out the fantasy elements, the whole idea of this movie is alien to me. I don't know about you, but I never knew anybody that had a nanny. I don't live in a place where people hire other people to raise their kids for them. The parents in this movie are sympathetic, but they're stupid. The dad, obviously, is too obsessed with his job at the bank, he is not good to his family and has to learn his lesson.

(See, you thought that first sentence where I mentioned Main Street/Wall Street made no sense, but now you go back and it turns out I was making this Disneyland reference but then also I was laying the groundwork to start talking about the themes of the movie and see we got this banker, that's where the Wall Street comes in, and there's this whole thing going on with the gap between the classes... go ahead and take a minute for it to sink in there, I don't want anybody minds to explode from how deep it is. So ease into it please.)

The mom is cool because she's really into the women's suffrage movement, she comes home and sings a song to her maids to get them riled up about women's rights and how they must fight to create a better world for their daughters. But then as soon as she hears her husband she puts all the paraphernalia away and warns everybody to shut up. "You know how Mr. Banks feels about the movement." She reminds me of people today who are really excited about the environment or stopping the war or something and their hearts are in the right place but it's really more of a hobby and a series of bumperstickers than something they're going to put themselves on the line for.

We never hear Mary comment on the women's suffrage movement, and it's almost like she doesn't need it because she's such a strong and self assured woman, she clearly does what she wants and takes absolutely no shit from anybody, knowing exactly how to manipulate her boss to get what she wants with minimal confrontation. On the other hand she can't vote, so she should probaly use her magic powers to improve Mrs. Banks's rallies or something.

But the movie is more about class than about gender. Little Jane and Michael are these rich kids but they hate being nannied, they like to run off late at night, it's how they cry out for attention. And the interesting thing is that all their friends are the servants and the working class - the maids, the chimney sweeps, the street performer, the beat cop. Bert changes jobs every day which makes him adventurous but also suggests things aren't easy for some people as they are for the Banks family. He's always hustling for a buck and making the world happier, like with his sidewalk drawings, but he's never gonna own a house and a nanny and an army of maids. When he does his one-man-band gig in the park the rich people stand around, delighted, and then when he holds out his hat they won't make eye contact and they suddenly have to go polish their money or something.

But the lives of the working class are like a thrilling adventure to the children. While the bankers sit in their heavily staffed homes worrying about work, the chimney sweeps are having a huge dance party on their roofs, enjoying an incredible view of London that the bosses will never get to see. Maybe there's a sense of tourism there, these kids hang out with the workers but go home to a comfy bed. But the chimney sweeps also get Mary's endorsement. She's of the servant class like they are but she literally lives on a cloud and seems to control her own destiny (and has some pretty nice dresses) so she could probaly be out on the town with some handsome rich fuck if she wanted. Instead she's on the roof with them or in the park with Bert.

The other thing going on is there's this whole sad undercurrent to the movie. As much as it's about fun and songs and better parenting and what not, there's also an element or two of tragedy and unrequited love and shit. Because first of all, Bert is clearly infatuated with Mary Poppins. We got no idea where he knows her from or how long it's been since he's seen her, because she lives the lifestyle of a nomad, a drifter or a cloudsitter. But when she shows up he's so fuckin happy, and he sings this song "Jolly Holiday" about how much he likes being with her. You don't sing about holding somebody's hand and how your heart "starts beatin' like a big brass band" if you're not enamored of the lady. And in case you don't get the picture he starts listing off all the other gals he's been with and how they're not as good as Mary - I count twenty names.

And why not? Mary is a fun lady. You're telling me you wouldn't want to hang around with her? This is not an ENCHANTED situation where she talks to birds and doesn't know better. Mary Poppins can talk to birds AND fit into modern society. She can make a carousel horse go rogue, she can make a plume of chimney smoke into stairs. That's what she does when she's on the job, taking care of kids. But she also enjoys rum. Who knows what she does in a 21 and over type situation. So of course Bert wants to have as many jolly holidays with her as he can get.

But Mary tries to play it like she thinks they're just friends, she praises Bert for not wanting to "press his advantage." And she's not blind, she fuckin knows the poor guy is crazy for her. But she doesn't tell him "I don't like you that way," she just kind of feigns ignorance.

I'm not trying to accuse Mary Poppins of being a tease. For a minute I did think this was pretty cold for her to string him along like they're on this date when clearly he has strong feelings and she pretends not to notice. But maybe there's a good reason for this when you consider the other tragic part of the movie. For some reason Mary has resigned herself to this life of traveling around helping families. She becomes closer to these kids than they are to their own parents, then as soon as there's an improvement she leaves. And she acts like she doesn't care but there's one shot where she's looking out the window as the dad is finally shaping up with the kids and she looks like she's holding back tears. But not "that'll do pig" type happy emotional tears. She loves these kids and wants to stay but her own happiness is not the priority for her. She sacrifices herself to go around helping these rich people.

Who knows how long she's been flying around doing this, making a difference, and probaly breaking the hearts of Berts all around the world. I'm sure she could list off twenty dudes too. But since she knows she has to leave maybe it's for the best. Maybe she even loves Bert back, but she can't tell him that and then fly away. She doesn't want to be a deadbeat.

I wonder what made Mary Poppins this way? Did she have shitty parents who didn't pay attention to her in a cloud mansion somewhere? So she's like Batman, she has to dedicate her life to a mad crusade to prevent this from happening to other kids? I don't know. But she feels strongly about it. No wonder when the day is gray and ordinary Mary makes the sun shine bright. I mean I don't know what value there is in this but I saw the movie and it hit me pretty hard, I was thinking about it so I thought I would mention these things.

Nah, I don't really like it though, that was all a big joke. right guys? who likes that kind of crap anyway. Not us right guys

12/8/08

First of all I gotta thank my man with a plan Jeremiah for sending me a screener of this movie. Unfortunately Jeremiah is no longer able to send me free porno dvds, but he has more than made up for that unfortunate situation by sending me this very enjoyable obscurity in Badass Cinema.

Now some of you may know, but I sure didn't, that Tom Laughlin made one non-Billy Jack movie after the success of BILLY JACK. And it was this. He wrote it under a pseudonym and apparently the director is his son Frank. It's a western, but with much of the cornball liberal action movie tone I loved about the BILLY JACK pictures. It is about to come out on video and I think dvd for the first time ever.

Now first of all let me say that I checked the reviews on IMDB (a sight I defeated roundly in the Cinemarati Best Film-Related Web Sight 2001 competition I might add) and they all seem to hate it. But fuck those bastards. If you like the Billy Jack movies, which you do, you oughta like this.

What really makes it stand out from other westerns is a great scenario with a sense of moral outrage but also a good motivation for the villains. And since it's a Tom Laughlin picture it touches on that whole genocide thing that generally is swept under the rug or given a whitewash in westerns.

Laughlin plays Finley, who is alot like Billy Jack - he even wears a similar hat in the opening scene. He's got the same quiet approach to asskicking, the same I'm-a-pacifist-but-I-guess-if-you're-gonna-be-that-way Badass persona. And I think what makes these two characters great action heroes is that they genuinely have a strong sense of morality even when the odds are against them. There are alot of heroes who really believe they are doing the right thing, but generally they have most of the police force or the army or at least the common man on their side. Or maybe he's framed so he has to prove his innocence and then you know at the end everybody will understand that he's the good guy.

Finley doesn't have that luxury. He's basically a conscientous objector, a guy who won't go along with everybody else because he knows he couldn't live with himself. He is the one guy who takes a stand against something his people are doing that he knows is wrong. He's that one cop who tries to stop all the other guys when they're beating up on black people or wto protesters. Or he's like Hugh Thompson, the american soldier who was given a medal 30 fuckin years later for stopping short the Mai Lai Massacre (article - interview). I know that story meant alot to Tom Laughlin because he mentions it on the commentary track for one of the Billy Jack movies, and of course there was the whole flashback that showed Billy Jack in the same kind of situation.

Well MASTER GUNFIGHTER puts Finley in a similar moral quandary type deal on the California coast in 1836. His brother-in-law and close pal Paulo (played by Ron O'Neal, who you know as Priest from SUPERFLY) is a Spanish don who might lose his land because he's being taxed to death by the american government. So he comes up with a clever plan to steal a shipment of american gold that they will use to pay the taxes. Good plan, right, and Finley's not necessarily against it. But the only way to hide this caper from the feds is to massacre the small native american fishing village where the robbery takes place. Finley finds out too late, fails to stop it, and decides to leave the hacienda in shame, abandoning his wife to be a travelling gunfighter. So he gets framed for the robbery.

No big deal for a master gunfighter, but then it gets back to Finley that the caper was so successful, they're gonna do it again, and ANOTHER massacre is gonna have to take place. So he has no choice, as a highly moral action hero, but to come back and see what he can do to stop it.

One area of improvement over the BILLY JACK trilogy is in the villain department. Those movies had hissable white racist villains, but Paulo is a more complex and charismatic one. Complex because he has a good motivation. He really is being screwed by the american government and he is pretty justified in his plan to steal the gold. And even in the massacre department, he rationalizes just like real people do, claiming that more people will die from his hacienda if he doesn't do it then will die from the village if he does. In his eyes, he is not a bad guy. He does not cackle or get glee from opposing Finley. In fact he tries to pay him off, and gives him chances to get away. He really doesn't want to kill him, just like Finley or Billy Jack really don't want to have to beat up all these rapists and racists they're always getting into showdowns with.

And then of course the charisma comes from Ron O'Neal. It's great to see Priest in a role like this, with a decent Spanish accent and a real aristocratic air. I liked the dude.

It should also be noted that there is a weird multi-cultural theme to the movie. Of course you got the spanish dons, a few americans (including Finley) and the native villagers. You've got an african-american fellow whose hair and sideburns look suspiciously 1970s. But I guess things do go in circles, maybe Afro Sheen was popular for a while in the 1830s and then came back in the 1970s, I don't know. Anyway he's a pretty interesting character whose motives aren't always transparent and he fits right in. Where it gets weird is the asian influence. It is mentioned offhand that Finley trained in asia, so not only is he a master gunfighter with a rare 12-shooter gun, but he's also a master of the samurai swordfighting style. In fact, although he is technically a master gunfighter, he uses his sword alot more often, including in the climactic battle. So it's like if RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK was called MASTER ROCK DODGER.

And then there's some other dude, I didn't really catch what relation he was to Finley, but he's a white dude who has samurai hair and a Sam Neill mustache. That dude made me kind of uncomfortable. But I guess it's cool.

In some ways the filmatism is not as rough as in the Billy Jack pictures. I mean its not on the level of Sergio Leone, but they seem to know what they're doing. The setting makes for very different western scenery. Almost the whole thing takes place along the beach, with huge waves splashing in the background and light shimmering on the surface of the water. One scene is in a lush forest. There are no cactuses. The score is by good ol' Lalo Shifrin, and it's pretty nice.

I think Tom Laughlin's performance is a little less convincing. It gets heavy handed because he expresses his outrage verbally a few too many times. If I were not retired from drinking, the drinking game for this one would be to drink a shot every time he says the phrase "women and children" with his eyes about to well up. I don't mind it but a more powerful approach was in FIRST BLOOD when it was all hidden down there in the subtext, left unspoken until one long emotional outburst at the climax. Especially for a stoic character, he points out the injustice with words a few too many times.

And he looks a little chunkier. Or maybe it's just the beard.

Also I could've done without the narration at the beginning explaining that it is a mixture of legend, historical fact, and historical interpretation. We coulda figured that out.

But overall it's not as corny as Billy Jack's movie. There's some guitar strumming but it's organic to the plot and time period. No hippie singing. His daughter and wife are not on screen and have no songs on the soundtrack, because there ARE no songs on the soundtrack.

This is definitely a very unique twist on the western and I'm very glad they are bringing it to light now. If you are interested in this type of picture I think you will enjoy it.

MATCH POINT

MATCH POINT is the new Woody Allen picture. The title refers to tennis but to me it sounds like just some generic name of a place title like GOSFORD PARK or PACIFIC HEIGHTS or LAND OF THE DEAD. If it was up to me it would be called KEEP YOUR DICK IN YOUR PANTS. You know, like, "This winter, director Woody Allen invites you to... Keep Your Dick In Your Pants."

This is the first Woody Allen movie in a long time that doesn't seem exactly like every other Woody Allen movie. It takes place in London with a mostly british cast. Jonathan Rhys somebody (a guy from TITUS) plays a guy named Chris. He's a former pro tennis player who's kind of a cheapskate, always trying to bum shit off of people. So one day he's taking advantage of a rich tennis student's generosity when he falls for the guy's sister (Emily Mortimer). And then as soon as that's rolling he falls even harder for the guy's fiancee (Scarlett Johansen [hubba hubba]). He wants Scarlett bad and tries to make a pass at her but it doesn't work out. So what the hell, he marries Emily. He gets a good job out of it and her parents pay for him to have a nice apartment and shit. And she wants some babies, now.

So then he's playing tennis with the brother-in-law and the brother-in-law lets it slip that he decided to break up with Scarlett. Ah, shit. Next thing you know Chris tracks her down and starts having an affair with her. The movie is kind of like FATAL ATTRACTION in reverse. The married guy is pretty much stalking her at first. She's not crazy, except in the sense that she's screwin this chump. She does have to spend alot of the movie yelling and upset, but you can't blame her. She's the victim in this not some psychotic bitch like you'd expect in one of these affair movies.

I got a special inside tip from my man Laremy, he told me a while back that this one was terrible. I usually agree with Laremy but not on this one. It took me a little bit to warm up to it because the lead character is such an unlikable prick. And it's not AMERICAN PSYCHO or nothing, you're not sure, maybe you really are supposed to identify with this guy. But there's literally no reason to like him, and every reason to hate him. Jesus, even down to him playing tennis. Who the fuck plays tennis? Anyway he's not an anti-hero. He's not a maniac. He's just a fuckin scumbag.

The best trick is how the movie forces you to follow this dickhead through his horrible series of chump moves, and then finally in the last chapter it pulls away from him and tells you okay everybody, now it is okay to root against the motherfucker. Hope he gets caught. Hope he gets killed. Whatever you want. They got you all ready to applaud if he slips up and ends up getting shot or executed or something.

Because it's not jokey like most of the Woody Allen pictures (not that I've seen too many of them, but I've heard tales) people are saying it's completely serious. And I mean, it is serious, but there's alot of dark humor in it. Some of it's funny in the same way LOLITA is, where you have to laugh at this dude for chasing the pussy like it's catnip and doing a poor job of hiding it. Lots of uncomfortable laughs like the scene where he awkwardly convinces his wife to cancel a romantic evening at home so they can go out with her brother and Scarlett. The guy is just hopeless.

There's also alot of subtle touches about the lifestyles of these rich fucks. Like for example, the whole movie Emily Mortimer is trying to have a baby. At the very end she finally does and the only time you see the baby it's being carried by some Hispanic servant or nanny you've never seen in the movie before. It's like she just needed it as an accessory. Also, she owns an art gallery but all the art in it sucks. And nobody ever says anything.

I'm not sure what to say about Scarlett Johansen. I don't know what happened but at some point in the last couple years I think we as Americans became dirty old men. At least you can figure out why the guy lusts after her, that's the one thing you can see eye to eye with him on. Wasn't she a little girl not too long ago? Jesus man. Anyway she is mostly good. Maybe one or two parts she didn't seem up to the dialogue. The Jonathan Rhys-guy, he is perfect for playing a cold and unlikable prick. I mean this guy is not exactly a charmer. Even on the Golden Globes last week, accepting an award for playing Elvis in a tv movie, he seemed like a total dick. Come on man, they're giving you a trophy, be nice. How the fuck is a guy gonna play Elvis and also seem totally unlikable? I mean, what is he so pissed off about? Only thing I can figure is he could hear me yelling "You're no Kurt Russel!" at the TV. But come on dude, I never even seen Kurt Russel's Elvis movie. I'm just giving him respect for the other John Carpenter movies. You're just jealous because you never get to wear an eyepatch and he's got to wear it in 3 or more movies.

THE MATRIX RELOADED

This might bother some of you but I just want to say it up front: put me in the camp of people who say the original MATRIX really is "the shit" as the kids say when they mean that it is not shit but actually the opposite of shit, which is I guess in this case THE MATRIX. Because what these boys the Wachowski Brothers did was an extremely well executed twilight zone concept for the post William Gibson days which also happened to be the perfect vehicle to combine over the top Hong Kong martial arts traditions with american actors and computer effects AND an appropriate metaphor for our times.

I love the idea that somebody like Jackie Chan or Michael Jordan who has extraordinary physical skills could actually just be a smart dude who figured out loopholes in the laws of reality. If you can understand the program well enough you can cheat and do things that a person isn't supposed to be able to do. In the old shaw brothers movies it was just magic or shaolin wisdom but here we put those same spectacular moves in a sci-fi context and we get a whole different spin where even some jackass like Keanu Reeves can fly through the air and be so convincing that most of American can watch him as the iconic badass Neo and not even think of him as Keanu anymore.

It would be hard to exaggerate the influence THE MATRIX has had on movies in the past couple years, unless you said that all movies made after 1999 were word for word re-creations of THE MATRIX. It has been a big influence, not just on the clothes they wear and the wires they swing around on, but even the very concept of how much stuntwork an actor can be expected to do. If Keanu Reeves can do kung fu training for months and do most of his own fighting then what the fuck is Steven Seagal's excuse? Maybe that's why he went back to straight to video. Because the Wachowskis convinced their cast to do it and they were crazy enough to be convinced, now Charlies Angels can do it and Kill Bill can do it. Because it's been proven possible. And people know who Yuen Wo Ping is enough to hire his brother to do Charlie's Angels. And then of course there's all the people copying the "bullet time" freeze framing effect which had been done before but was popularized and made easier and more flexible by the technology invented for THE MATRIX. I know that's just a gimmick but in couple decades that will be known as one of the cliches of this era of film just like wah wah guitars are for '70s film. It's like what was the first movie to do a freeze frame or a split screen? It's trivial but it's a big effect.

Most people wouldn't deny the kung fu stuff was cool, but what gets controversial is when you start talking about whether the movie is deep or not. Look man, nobody's trying to tell you to throw away your philosophy books and replace them with a Matrix dvd. What they're saying is that it's a completely effective kung fu/sci-fi movie that also has some substance under the surface if you're into that type of crap. The symbolism of the matrix itself is pretty obvious although seldom explored in any of the ten billion articles I've seen about the movie. The dude in Entertainment Weekly thought it was supposed to be about the optimism of upstart computer companies in the late '90s and so is no longer relevant. What? Morpheus says from the beginning that you see the matrix every time you go to work or to church or turn on the tv. The matrix is the system, the matrix is the man, the matrix is the fairy tale they want you to believe. Those bleak office cubicles and threatening authority figures in ties are still out in force. I think right now the matrix is the world many Americans live in where Bush was elected and has always been very popular and America is loved and admired all around the world except by people who are jealous of our freedom, and the Iraqis are happy that we knocked down their statue leaving freedom and democracy in its place, and the troops are home safe and there is no such thing as Gulf War syndrome and al Quaeda is on the run and there are no questions left to be answered about 9-11 and Fox news is fair and balanced and there is no greater honor or higher achievement than winning on American Idol. Unfortunately unplugging these people and showing them the real world is going to be just as hard as in the movie.

It's a damn good metaphor and that's why even the rapper Chuck D from the group Public Enemy loves the Matrix. He uses the matrix metaphor in his lyrics and I only mention that because I haven't heard Gil Scott Heron use it yet but if he did I would be quoting him.

Don't get me wrong, I've never worn a trenchcoat in my life but let's face it people I love the god damn MATRIX.

So that brings me to THE MATRIX RELOADED which I come to with high expectations but I still loved the fucking thing. It doesn't have the sneak attack advantage of coming out of nowhere and it has the usual disadvantages of being a sequel. They have to try to recreate what people loved about the first one without rehashing it, and bring the story in new directions without leaving too many people behind. They have to introduce interesting new characters without stealing screen time from the old favorites. They also decided to add new lofty concepts on top of the old ones and by definition the whole thing gets a little unwieldy but I am happy to say that it is still standing at the end. They also up the ante on the action so high that the idea of people finding it underwhelming (which is how my personal buddy Harry Knowles described it) is absurd to me.

I mean look, in the real life matrix that is the entertainment media, people aren't always rewarded for their courage and innovation, in fact it's usually the opposite.

EXHIBIT A: Eddie Murphy just did a fucking MR. MOM movie called DADDY DAY CARE and his career is officially "back on track." By all accounts it's the exact same edge free, low laugh, nothing new, worthless unwatchable putrid garbage that ruined his career, but it happened to sell enough tickets on the first day so hooray he's our hero now, welcome back Eddie we missed you.

EXHIBIT B: reality tv, reality tv movies, game show tv, star search tv, etc.

It's not like the Wachowski brothers had to try. They could've whipped out a generic rehash sequel in a year and a half, or they could've taken time off to direct an adaptation of an old tv show or comic book character. Instead they've spent what, 4 years doing a 5 hour epic that they've convinced the studio to release in 2 parts against all conventional wisdom?

You really don't HAVE to go to those lengths to get what the studios want out of audiences these days. You can have Eddie Murphy babysit a bunch of kids. You can have a rapping kangaroo. You can have Cuba Gooding Jr. go sledding with some dogs. There are many movies about meteors and flying saucers and giant iguanas and mummies that make millions of dollars for their studios without bothering with any innovation or cleverness or entertainment value. Nope, just blow some shit up and throw in Mathew Broderick or somebody equally recognizable. That counts. Technically, it is a big expensive movie. I saw ads for it and everything. Here is my money thank you for doing business with me I will never think about you again.

Instead of just putting those characters on the screen giving us more of the same they seem to have sat down and made a list of the most ridiculous, unfilmable action ideas they could come up with, then figure out how to do them.

I mean can you imagine Roland Emmerich or somebody going into Warner Brothers and saying, "Look, this will cost a whole hell of a lot of money, and the technology hasn't been invented yet, and we're gonna need to build a 2 mile loop of freeway to film on, and also we're gonna film one 5 hour movie and split it into 2 parts that you can release in the same year, but..."

I mean you've seen the thing. (And if not you better stop reading smartass, this review is not for you.) It opens with a slow motion shootout between two people free falling from an office building! There's a scene where Larry Fishburne stands in the middle of freeway traffic and attacks an SUV with a sword! There's a kung fu/sword fight ON TOP OF A SEMI speeding down the freeway. And of course there's an extremely well thought-out fight between Neo and hundreds of Agent Smiths. And those are just the more show-offy scenes. (When you think of the effects you think of the fighting and Neo's Superman flying. You kind of forget that they also created this whole underground city and post-apocalyptic wasteland and battling hovercraft and robotic squids.)

These are the types of things you've always wanted to see but never thought a movie would be bold enough to do. The fight between Keanu Reeves and Hugo Weavings is really great because it throws out that martial arts convention where all the ninjas stand around in a circle and come at their foe one-at-a-time. No, Hugo Weavings attack all at once and even pigpile on Neo. He has to figure out ways to take them out a bunch at a time - swinging a metal pole, swinging a Hugo Weaving, etc. There is also this whole progression where first Neo tests them to find out how much of a threat they are. Hugo Weavings are cocky at first but then they start losing, and they keep bringing in more and more reinforcements. Neo keeps going for it but eventually he realizes that this particular battle is unwinnable and flies away Superman style. The non-flying Hugo Weavings kind of scratch their heads so to speak and walk away because they may be Hugo Weavings but they sure can't fly.

I guess because of the lack of imagination some people have today that I should probaly mention that the mindboggling, unprecedented special effects work in this scene is not 100% flawlessly photorealistic. This may be shocking and horrifying to the mind of the internet nerd, but there are definitely shots where the Hugo Weavings look phoney like the characters in the video games that these same horrified nerds will go home and play afterwards.

Hey man, I wish the scene was absolutely perfect, but instead it is merely absolutely incredible with a couple shots you have to forgive. Oh well, live with it assholes. That's what happens in movies, they have to fake stuff. That's what movies are, in my opinion: fake.

Anyway, about the flying. Remember Neo flew in the very last shot of THE MATRIX and now we get to see what he does with that skill. It's great to hear somebody tell him "they're 500 miles north" as if it's hopeless, and Neo just says, "Okay" and starts flying. The best touch is that he does a little tai chi move before he takes off that is so powerful it causes ripples in the ground. As he flies around gusts of wind blast debris to the side. He looks so damn cool, you can just picture whoever's making the new Superman picture sitting there watching it thinking, "Shit."

Also did  I mention there is a kung fu fight on top of a moving semi? All this choreographed by Mr. Yuen Wo Ping?

But don't let me make this out like it's ONLY a big knock your socks off your feet and into your pocket asskicking spectacle. Although it is definitely that. It also gives us more about the world of the Matrix and begins a story of the final battle between man and machine. The Wachowskis are not afraid to challenge the audience and honestly it's a fuckin workout trying to follow everything these characters are talking about. Especially during the scene with The Architect where I don't think you're even supposed to understand what they're talking about exactly until maybe after we see part 3.

And remember, the kung fu and camera rotating wasn't the only thing people liked about THE MATRIX, it was also the twilight zone reality bending concepts. The Wachowskis aren't letting up, they are willing to tell their audience wait a minute assholes... not so fast. Maybe all that shit you THOUGHT you understood from the first one was actually not true... what if there was more to the story that we didn't know yet? Pulling the carpet out from under you again and then kicking you in the ass and running off. Which is the job of all sequels.

I don't know if that asskicking and running off part is why, but I saw this movie and I really liked it and I think the rest of the audience did too, but afterwards I discovered that some of our friends who consider themselves the movie nerds of the internet... well, they just hated it. Reading the talkbacks by the newsies on The Ain't It Cool News, I noticed that they have all their own terminology for the different scenes. There's some scene they call "the burly brawl" which comes I guess from what the producers of the movie nicknamed it while filming. That's a pretty good indication of the weird place movie fandom has come to where the day the movie is released you are expected to know the insider nickname for a particular scene and you can still believe you went in with a fresh perspective.

But there's also a scene they all complain about called "the rave" which apparently is some computer nerd slang for "the part where all the people in Zion dance." I had completely forgotten about this scene already when I found out it was a point of contention and I was utterly confused why such a minor and inoffensive scene would be the one they keep complaining about. Until I made the connection... oh that's right, these are nerds we're talking about. Now I don't want to insult your nerd culture, I understand that the wallflower ethos goes back to the days of the First Poindexter but come on you fuckin pansies, you can't hate a movie just based on the fact that YOU ARE AFRAID TO DANCE IN PUBLIC. This is a movie about a war between machines and humans and one of the things that makes machines different from humans is THEY'RE NOT INTO DANCING. I'm sorry if it makes you uncomfortable to see people dancing and enjoying themselves for 1 or 2 minutes, but whose side are you on, anyway? Are you man or machine? I haven't seen part 3 yet but do you think Agent Smith will have a dance number at the end? No. The "rave" is a good scene, you fuckers. End of story.

Anyway it's this section of the movie that shows you what's left of humanity and what they're fighting for and also questions their fight. I like the conversation between Neo and some guy who points out the irony of the rebels' reliance on machines in their fight against machines for relying on humans. And I especially like Morpheus's speech to the gathered masses of Zion. He usually talks slow, quiet and deliberate, very similar to the agents themselves. But here Laurence Fishburne gets to use his Shakespearean side to project his voice through a huge cave like he really wants everybody to hear it. The guy is ferocious. You can see why he is a respected leader (although, you find out, maybe not as respected as he seemed in the first one).

(By the way, Laurence Fishburne who plays Morpheus was in OTHELLO, Harold Perrineau who plays Link was in ROMEO + JULIET, Harry Lennix who plays Commander whatsisname was in TITUS and Keanu Reeves who plays Neo was in MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING. Shit, even Aliyaah who was supposed to play Zee and Jet Li who turned down the role of Seriph were in ROMEO MUST DIE. I think the wachowski brothers just watched a bunch of Shakespeare movies to do their casting.)

Alot of what makes it so great is in the attention to detail. I like how even though Neo is the One, Morpheus is still the commander so he always walks in front flanked by Trinity and Neo like they're his bodyguards. Whenever they're in the Matrix they stand there with their sunglasses, faces completely blank like the agents. It's very comic booky and it's also funny because the machines always talk about their expressions. "You look surprised to see me." "It is interesting to watch your reactions." Just like a fucking machine to not recognize the lack of emotion on Neo's face.

Also Cornel West has a cameo!

And maybe what makes it work best as a sequel - at least at this point - is that it's SUCH a cliffhanger. I was thinking the cliffhanger would be whether or not Neo saves Trinity. Instead he already saved her but now he has taken the path that according to The Architect will lead to the destruction of Zion and "a cataclysmic system crash" that will kill everyone connected to the matrix. So how's he gonna unpaint himself from THAT corner? (We should note that the Architect also predicted that he would not save Trinity, that there was nothing he could do, AND that Neo would never see the Architect again. So I think we can assume that that smarmy computerized bastard will be getting a serious ass kicking after or before or during the saving of the world.)

And maybe people don't like this kind of thing these days but I think I will enjoy 6 months of going through all the unsanswered questions and trying to figure out what will happen. Was the Architect really telling the truth? Have they really destroyed Zion and recreated it 5 times (I wouldn't be surprised. It would be just like a fuckin machine to treat genocide as a computer program - build Zion, destroy Zion, go to 10). Also, is The Oracle on our side or not? Is she really the Mother of the Matrix that the Architect referred to as Neo suspected? I don't think so but then who is? Is it somebody we never saw before, or is it Persephone or - shit - Trinity? If the Oracle isn't on our side does that mean Neo will have to fight Seriph again? Why did Persephone mention silver bullets and will the brother that she didn't kill be back again? Will we see the twins again? Are the agents in on the Architect's plan or could they be unwittingly fighting against it? Is Hugo Weaving's new power part of the plan or is he another anomaly? And how the fuck can a computer program come into a person's real body or, for that matter, how can Neo have power over machines in the real world? Or is it really that what we thought was the real world is actually another level of the matrix?

And most of all, how many of those badass "mech" robot suits we saw a glimpse of will be used in the final battle? I hope they do kung fu in a robot suit! That'll win over Harry Knowles.

MAX PAYNE is the story of the conveniently named Max Payne (Mark Wahlberg), a burnt out shell of a man working as "a glorified file clerk" in the dark caverns of the cold case department of the such and such police department. (IMDb says New York, I thought it was supposed to be one of those New York-like nameless Every-Cities, but whatever.) But actually he doesn't work, he just spends his days gloomily trying to find out who killed his wife and baby an unspecified time period ago. (Long enough ago that his wife's co-workers don't recognize him.)

Everybody describes Max as this scary guy - they think he never sleeps, and at one point a guy compares interaction to him with kids holding their breath as they walk past a graveyard. But Wahlberg is in his regular grimacing badass mode. He's cool but the way they talk about him he should be a walking mess of a man, not just a sculpted tough guy who doesn't smile. Oh well.

There's a good scene early on where three junkies try to jump Max in a public restroom and are disturbed to find that he knows their names and what they've been doing all day. "You're following us?" one of them says. "No, I'm following you," he says. Ass kicking ensues. Another nice touch in this scene: he takes the guy's gun but instead of firing it at him he throws it in the sink and pulls out his own, more powerful gun.

But as the mystery begins to unfold we start to see musclemen with ritualistic tattoos and shadowy demons chasing after people. In the end it turns out to have a reasonable explanation but at the time you worry this is some kind of CONSTANTINE type deal. Unfortunately the character and action scenes are only about halfway there and the mystery isn't involving enough to fill the gap.

This is one of those movies where at the end there's a credit sequence that seems like it was designed to go at the beginning. As the names appear, flames noisily spray across the screen, things explode into sparks, bullets fly past. The title of the movie racks itself and ejects a bullet casing. I always enjoy credits that explode or bleed, but isn't that a little dishonest for a movie that was originally released PG-13? Anyway, I'm glad they saved it for the end because this way I was able to be surprised and laugh every time an unexpected actor showed up: Mila Kunis from FORGETTING SARAH MARSHALL as a tough Russian mafia girl (not sure if wearing sunglasses is enough to make that convincing), BATMAN AND ROBIN's Chris O'Donnel as a corporate drone, Screen Actor's Guild award winner Chris "Ludacris" Bridges as a police detective, Beau Bridges as a character named "B.B." which I will go ahead and assume stands for "Beau Bridges" and that this is a 100% factual re-creation of events from his actual life. Bridges is a nice old friend of Max's, so I'll let you guess whether he will die horribly for helping Max or whether he will turn out to be the bad guy.

In the interest of fairness I want to mention that I was impressed by O'Donnel's performance. He did a great job of portraying the nervous paranoia of a guy who has to decide between helping Max Payne and staying alive. One of the better moments in the movie is when he's in his office trying to appear helpful to Max Payne, everything seems to be going okay and then Max goes over and locks the door. Gulp.

The trailer for the movie kind of looked like a John Woo homage, so I was semi-interested until I found out about the PG-13. It turns out it's not much of a shootout movie anyway, although it has its share of moments where it gets silent as Wahlberg falls backwards or a bullet fires in very, very, very slow motion. But it's not so much a John Woo tribute as Woo filtered through the Matrix and probaly into the video game this was based on.

The city has a stylized look, sometimes looking almost black and white and always snowing (I think the only time you see sunlight is in flashbacks and visions of the afterlife). It reminded me of SIN CITY although thankfully it didn't have that phony green screen look. But it made me wonder if SIN CITY and THE SPIRIT have killed the stylized city for now. Especially after the 1989 BATMAN there were so many movies that took place in a heightened, heavily art designed city that looked somewhere between reality and a cartoon. I used to enjoy that sort of look, and it's not like they do a bad job on this one, but I think maybe it just doesn't cut it anymore. Or maybe I'm getting too old.

The snow in the movie doesn't look very real, it's the fake snow that's too light so it floats in all directions instead of just down. This is of course a small complaint but there's a scene where Mila Kunis knocks on a door and a feather that is part of the fake snow bounces off the door and floats off, casting a large, distinctly-feather shaped shadow on the door. A goof like that is not really the sign of a bad movie but the fact that I rewound it three times and found it more interesting than what was actually going on probaly is.

In that same vein, I got a chuckle in a part where gunmen signal each other before kicking a door in, and the one guy gestures four times. Who goes on the count of 4? How did the other guy know not to go on 3?

If you do watch this movie - which I don't really recommend unless you're bored and it's on cable, on a plane or your friend left it at your apartment - I suggest watching until the end of the credits. There they have a nod to one of my all time favorite badass maneuvers, the Unspoken Agreement of Revenge. This would've been a cool way to set up the sequel if, you know, there had been a reason to make one.

As part of my striving for excellence I'm trying to strengthen my background in the filmatic arts. I'm always trying to catch up on the Badass Cinema that I've missed, but it's also important to watch some of the regular folk movies that are considered classics. MCCABE AND MRS. MILLER is no THE GODFATHER or nothin but if you talk to film buffs alot of times they have a boner for Robert Altman, and this is one of the movies they all mention. Before POPEYE.

I was honestly able to watch it without having a clue what it was even about, which is always good. It turns out it's kind of a hippie western. Not in a psychedelic EL TOPO kind of way but in the way that

1) alot of the cowboys seem like these hairy hippie types and

2) they got some guy (Leonard Cohen) strumming a guitar and singing '70s style folk songs on the soundtrack every five minutes. Like it's HAROLD AND MAUDE or something.

The style is the usual Altman style, alot of the dialogue seems improvised and very naturalistic and the people talk over each other and mumble sometimes. There's one scene where Warren Beatty sits and burps and mumbles to himself for about 3 or 4 minutes, I betchya that scene was improv.

The movie takes place in the Old Pacific Northwest and basically is the story of It's Hard Out West For a Pimp. It's funny because at one point McCabe (Beatty) puts on a giant fur coat and he's wearing a bowler hat and I said, "ha ha, he looks like a pimp." And it was the same scene where you find out that yes, in fact, he is buying some hoes which he is using to set up a brothel.

It's a different kind of setting for a western, real dirty and lived in, with more vegetation and cold and not just some generic saloon out in the dust. It looks like a real town and it's definitely not on a soundstage. There's even snow for the climax of the movie although it's kind of distracting because it's obviously fake, superimposed over the footage. Every time they change camera angles the snow is still floating toward the right side of the screen. Which, in my opinion, is scientifically inaccurate. This movie is not designed for climatologists or precipitation theorists.

The Mrs. Miller in the title is Julie Christie, some lady who comes down from Seattle with some hoes of a much higher quality, and shows rich boy McCabe with his giant fur coat how to invest his money to make a much better whorehouse than his pathetic little tents. She knows her shit and helps him to create a high quality independent establishment. Unfortunately, big business in the form of the Sears company wants to buy the land to use for mining, and tries to buy McCabe out. Even though they're Sears, just imagine they're Wal-Mart, that is the type of situation we're talking about here. McCabe turns them down so they send a tall dude to kill him. He's not a fighter, he's a business man, so he tries to charm the guy and make a deal with him and when that fails, the last 20 or 30 minutes of the movie is mostly a quiet chase through the snow.

People say this is not a western, but fuck that. It's in the old west, they got cowboy hats, they got guns, they got horses, there's a shootout, there's whores. And opium, always a plus. So it's a western. Of course it really stands out from other westerns because of the different style of acting, the music and the beautiful photography. There's also alot of little funny bits with the supporting characters, like a guy who talks about whether or not to shave off his beard and another guy who turns out to be the whorehouse's best customer. Most of these old boys have the mentality of little kids, so they talk about some pretty hilarious, stupid shit and not just standard old west business.

Not a bad movie in my opinion.

In the movie McQ, John Wayne plays McQ, a cop trying to find out who killed his partner and why. I'm not sure if McQ is short for McQuaid or McQueen, or if it is his real name like McG. Actually, they usually just call him Lon.

McQ was made in 1974, the director was John Sturges, the style seems to be DIRTY HARRY. Except John Wayne was actually offered the real DIRTY HARRY after Frank Sinatra dropped out. He turned it down because he didn't want Sinatra's leftovers. Instead, he would prefer to do a rip-off of Sinatra's leftovers.

Actually, it's not like DIRTY HARRY. It's a little more like MAGNUM FORCE because it turns out the other cops are dirty and there's a coverup. But still it's not the same type of movie, because instead of the liberal West Coast port city of San Francisco it takes place in my beloved liberal West Coast port city of Seattle. And instead of a funky Lalo Schifrin score it's a funky Elmer Bernstein score. So it's totally different.

McQ himself is definitely a little like Harry Callahan, he hates bullshit and gets a kick out of breaking rules. There's a scene where a hippie at the police station calls him "pig" and dares him to shoot him. McQ seems like he's just gonna ignore it but suddenly he kicks the guy in the leg making him buckle over in pain. When another cop asks what happened he says "he bumped into a chair" and walks away, leaving the cop to wonder where this invisible chair is that the guy bumped into. Somehow in movies we can laugh at police brutality. But only in real movies, not home movies.

Maybe I shouldn't call them hippies, they're more like yippies, radical political guys that 25 years later would've been at the WTO protests. The cops in this movie call them "militants." They seem like pricks and I'm pretty sure McQ hates them but actually they didn't do anything, the dirty cops are using them as a scapegoat for their own crimes. So even though I bet McQ is a republican the movie isn't necessarily. Kind of like MAGNUM FORCE again.

And just because it's John Wayne, McQ comes off very different from Harry Callahan. He's in his late '60s, somehow not retired, so he just seems more old fashioned and a little more of a teddy bear. He's divorced and lives in a houseboat beneath the Aurora Bridge, but he still sees his daughter (who appears to be much older than she's playing, and dubbed over by a different actress - a weirdly shitty touch in an otherwise well-made movie). McQ has such a good relationship with his ex that he is able to borrow $5,000 from her new husband, no questions asked. Then he uses it to bribe a pimp named Rosie (Roger E. Moseley) at the Supersonics game. (Unfortunately they don't show him at a real game, just in the concessions area at what was then The Coliseum, now Corporate Sponsor Arena.)

McQ is a tenacious bastard though. You know how in these post-Harry cop movies you always expect the "hand over your gun and your badge" scene? Here when they tell him he's stuck at a desk he instead hands over his gun and badge and they beg him to reconsider. He "goes into business as a private eye" only to take on himself as his first client. That's his way of continuing to investigate the case he was kicked off of.

Now that I think about it, this guy's methods are just as out-of-line as Dirty Harry's, but because he's John Wayne it seems like you're not supposed to notice he's dirty. Just like you weren't supposed to notice he shouldn't've been killing all those Indians. But I can't deny it's fun to watch his Unorthodox Methods. He ambushes a druggie on the street to steal dope from him, then uses it to bribe one of his partner's old snitches. When he sees a hood going into a bathroom he goes in and beats the hell out of him. The guy's bodyguards hear the scuffle too late, they run over to the door as McQ comes out saying "He's taking a shower," and then they find their boss laying in one of those trough urinals. The shit he's doing is wrong, but he's up against other cops doing a massive cocaine scheme and murdering other cops to cover their tracks, so in this situation McQ is the good cop, they are the bad cop.

If you like this kind of movie, and I know I do, this is pretty good. But I'm not gonna lie to you. It's not great. It's pretty slow. It's no DIRTY HARRY. It does pick up for some good chase scenes. For the climax there is a high speed car chase on a beach over on the coast somewhere. I don't think I've seen a chase like this before - there are no people around, no fruit carts or gas trucks, just two cars hauling ass across sand, splashing salt water all over each other and having to use their windshield wipers alot.

Of course, this movie has an extra appeal to me that's not gonna affect most of you, because it's cool to see all this Seattle scenery in a John Wayne cop movie. I don't think they ever show the Space Needle or even mention that they are in Seattle, but there are many recognizable spots. For somebody from Seattle it's a novelty to watch a car chase and see the yellow restroom-style tiles of the Mercer Exit tunnel.

When that guy Skander Halim wrote a comedy script about me a while back I was kind of insulted by the way he portrayed Seattle in some parts. It seemed like he didn't think it was a real city, to him it's just some yuppie paradise where everybody is obsessed with foofy coffee drinks. Now I admit, a whole lot of people here do drink their fancy coffee, you do see alot of that. I've been to other places where coffee is fuel for the working man, a brown sludge harvested from the earth by the Dunkin Donuts corporation, best drunk from the lid of a thermos. Here we have an organic espresso shop/stand/bar every couple blocks, not to mention the corporate chains, the Starbuckses within Starbuckses and Seattle's Best Coffees (owned by Starbucks) and Tully's. But no Dunkin Donuts. Here nobody remembers Working Man's Coffee. You'd have to say "I'd like an Americano" instead of "one coffee, two sugars."

Well I don't think McQ would ask for an Americano, and he wouldn't know the difference between tall and grande, he would just want size medium. And there are many of us like that in Seattle. But Seattle has rubbed off on McQ, you can see it. He lives on a boat, he must love the sea and nature and shit, and doesn't give a shit if the other cops think his lifestyle is weird. And where else but laid back Seattle would The Duke be on such good terms with his ex-wife and her husband? He's not trying to fit some formula he's just trying to get through life. If McQ is happy living by himself on a boat and letting bygones be bygones you can't tell him what to do. This is Seattle.

I tried to tell Skander Seattle is like any other city, yeah there is the yuppie part but then there's the rest of it, there's the pawn shops and the stairways that smell like piss and the grey industrial areas and the drug dealers at the bus stops. Today in one bus trip I heard a fifteen minute uninterupted yelling tantrum, saw a flying kick knock over a young man's groceries, watched a brief police chase of the kicker, and heard an argument where a mentally ill woman accused a guy of devil worship because he rolled his eyes at her. And none of them were holding lattes.

I think I told Skander to watch STREETWISE and AMERICAN HEART. If I had known about this movie though I would've told him to watch this. If John Wayne can be a cop in Seattle, and beat up a dude and leave him in a urinal trough, then we must not all be sissies.

I always meant to watch McQ because of the Seattle setting, and yesterday I watched it on a whim, not even realizing that it would've been Wayne's 100th birthday. Geez, if only he had lived, he could've come over and watched it with me on his 100th birthday. That would've been something.

ME AND YOU AND EVERYONE WE KNOW

Here on earth there are certain individuals blessed or cursed with a special knack for observing shit, noticing shit and looking at shit in different ways than you or I would. Picking up on things other people don't or explaining things in ways nobody else would've thought of. This skill, this Gift, this power, can come in many forms and be used for many different things. You could become a philosopher or a great leader, like Jesus or Martin Luther King, Jr. Alot of people, if they had it real strong, would become an artist. Andy Warhol is the obvious best example. Unfortunately, most people born with The Gift use their power for evil: standup comedy mostly. Also some of them become characters in Richard Linklater's non-studio movies.

Miranda July, who wrote and directed and starred in this picture, apparently uses The Gift for performance art. Or video installations. Or something like that, I guess. But also for this movie. It's one of those movies where you can tell she had a journal full of random ideas and then figured out how to string them all together. Alot of times a movie like that can be really good, because it feels so packed full of inspiration. AMELIE was a movie like that, where a million little Jeunet ideas were glued all over the top of a love story. In this one the ideas are less integrated, it's more like a list of the ideas in movie form.

Like for example two almost-strangers who are attracted to each other are walking down a block to their cars. Their cars are in different places so they're gonna separate at the end of the block, that's the end of their relationship. So the guy points out that the "Ice Land" sign up ahead is the middle of the block, and represents the point where they realize their relationship is doomed. They flirt back and forth about whether that means they have six months together, or years before they get a divorce. Finally she says that the end of the block represents when they die of old age together. And they split up. (When they see each other shortly after she refers to it as the afterlife.)

So yeah, I'm afraid it's that kind of shit. Words like quirky, the Sundance Film Insitute, etc. will come up. But guess what motherfucker? I think it works. The saving grace is that it always keeps a sense of humor. There are really no wrenching emotional moments or nothin. Most of the little things that happen are kind of funny. Like, a dude is packing up his things because he's separating from his wife. He's staring out the window at a bird in a tree. Then his wife hands him a painting of a very similar bird in a tree. Well, I guess you had to be there. Also there's a part where a 6 year old kid pretends to be an adult in a chat room and starts talking about pooping.

(That was kind of weird how I said "guess what motherfucker?" at the beginning of that last paragraph. Seems kind of hostile but you know I gotta maintain some kind of masculinity while giving a positive review to a cute movie like this. asswipe.)

There are lots of goofy little ideas. Nothing gutbustingly hilarious but lots of amusing ideas. There's an incident where a goldfish in a bag is spotted on top of a car, but they can't say anything or the driver will stop and cause the bag to fall off and pop. There's a little girl who collects kitchen appliances for when she gets married. Kids who draw pictures on their computers using punctuation. Discussions about random cute things like the way shoe salesmen will touch your shoe but never your foot. Yeah, I bet this movie would annoy the shit out of some people. I thought it would be me too, but somehow I was spared.

It helps that none of the characters are really portrayed as cool or hip. They're all kind of dorks. The main dude is a just divorced shoe salesman with two kids. The other main character is Miranda July herself (think Zoe Deschanel with a little less va-va-VOOM). I should warn you that her character is some kind of video artist whose work you or I would never know how to appreciate. But they play it smart. I'm not sure she's supposed to be a genius. She lives alone in what appears to be a single room apartment, talking to herself. And her job is driving elderly people around. Smartest move: she is rejected by the head of the modern art museum, a pretentious snobby woman like we would generally assume Miranda would be. They got the old joke where she sees a hamburger wrapper on the ground and doesn't know for sure if it's part of an art piece. But she notes that it's very realistic. Also they have an upcoming exhibit at the museum described as "pictures of emails."

The plot - obviously it is crucial to know what the plot is in a picture like this - is about the two main characters circling around the idea of dating each other. And then there are subplots about the kids, all of which are great actors. There is some real uncomfortable scenes where the kids are curious about sexuality. There's no titillation though and no tits or pubes. Larry Clark was not available. It's played real innocent, actually. More cute than sleazy, somehow.

While doing the intense research and preparation necessary to write a high class review like this, I happened to look on the imdb message boards. Always a mistake. Turns out some people think it's child porn. Other people think it's a work of genius and "artsy." Other people think it's boring pretentious plotless garbage, "the worst movie I've ever seen." Both sides bring up Garden State, both as a positive and negative. Nobody told me that's the yardstick you compare all movies to now. Some of the people obviously don't enjoy movies that are lower budget or somewhat unorthodox, but they take it personally because they are afraid that people who do like those movies think they are dumb and don't appreciate art. So then they assume that the people who do like the movies are snobs who only like it because they think it is supposed to be art but really they don't like it. And then the people who actually do like the movie, although they are not like that, assume that the people who don't like the movie only don't like it because it is not a big science fiction movie with explosions. Star Wars part 3 was mentioned specifically.

I just want to say, I kind of liked the movie, I don't give a rat's ass if somebody thinks I'm smart or not, I liked star wars 3 better though. One thing I noticed in Star Wars 3 is during the big light saber battle on the lava planet at the end, there was some other guys there. You know, Obi Wan and Anakin are fighting on these lava platforms, and Anakin jumps up and does a flip and Obi Wan cuts off both legs and the one non-robotic arm in one swing. But what I noticed is, right before that happened they showed some weird alien or robot type guys on one of the platforms. They're kind of hard to see but they're there, they are workers on the lava planet. Their job is to stir the lava or something, I don't know. I don't know that much about the lava industry.

Anyway my point is, these two guys are just doing their job and they musta saw the whole thing happen.

"Oh shit, did you see that?"

"See what?"
"Those dudes, those jedis that were having a duel. He just chopped both the guy's legs off!"

"Are you serious?"

"Yeah, look at that. I think he got one of his arms too!"

"Oh shit, now he's on fire! His hair is burned off!"

"Oh jesus man, we better-- I mean we can't just leave him there."

So then they float over there and they're kind of afraid to do anything. One of them kind of timidly creeps up and he's gonna poke Anakin with a stick or something. Then he panics. "Yeah, he's breathing, he's okay!" And they run off.

And then 2 years later Darth Vader comes in and steals all the lava for the Empire and these two don't even make the connection.

You see that? You see what I just did? I observed shit is what I did. That's what Miranda July does, only she observes shit from life, not movies. So I guess what I did was more like the fuckin clerks guy. Damn. Still, I could make a movie about it, or a video installation or something. But instead I made it into a movie review. 'Cause that's my thing.

MEAN GUNS

A while back I reviewed this sci-fi action movie called EQUILIBRIUM and I complained about the cliche of using techno music in all the action scenes. I asked why somebody didn't try out some different styles of music on some action scenes. A while later a guy named Jonathan Lee wrote to inform me of a movie called MEAN GUNS where they did just that, they used mambo music during all the action (and other parts of the movie).

The only recognizable stars are Ice-T and Christopher Lambert, and then there's a bunch of other people. Mario Van Peebles was not available. Anyway, "The Syndicate" has recently bought a prison somehow, and the day before the grand opening Ice-T calls a bunch of criminals there for big meeting, like THE WARRIORS.

But it's actually a trap. Once the suckers come inside they are handed a card telling them how they betrayed the Syndicate. The punishment is that they're all gonna be locked in here to kill each other. Once there are only 3 traitors alive, they will supposedly get $3.3 million each and get to leave.

So some guys come in and dump big garbage bins full of guns and ammo into the middle and the game begins.

This all sounds pretty cool, but there's a pretty big catch. The director is Albert Pyun. I haven't written about this guy much, because I try to avoid him as much as possible. Pyun is a master at making movies that are terrible and yet completely boring. He did the NEMESIS series, some KICKBOXER sequels, CAPTAIN AMERICA, DOLLMAN. He did one called URBAN MENACE which is kind of like a soap opera interspersed with clips of Snoop Dogg walking around acting spooky. (Rehearsal tapes for BONES?) The best movie I've ever seen by Albert Pyun is the Seagal picture TICKER, which is one of Seagal's least interesting pictures. (It is historically important though as the first Seagal picture with a director's commentary track, and he does seem like an okay guy on the track.)

So it's one of these movies that looks incredibly cheap and muddy, where half of the cast are not even convincing as actors, let alone criminals. Ladies wearing leather jackets and sunglasses so you're supposed to think they're tough. Lots of painfully generic criminal talk like

"How did you get into the business?"

"It's what I always wanted to do. And what I didn't know, the government taught me."

There's even one of those conversations where Christopher Lambert talks about how the first time he killed someone "it felt like... freedom" and then after that he didn't feel anything.

And most of the action (and story) has no momentum or style to it at all, it's just a bunch of corny looking dudes walking around in hallways firing guns and then you get to find out who shoots better based on who falls over dead. One of the main guys likes to make obvious quotes and allusions, like talking about the 3 Bears or saying "oh what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive." He has an accent so I guess he's supposed to be wise or philosophical or something, but come on. To be fair, I could swear another guy makes a reference to Sam Shepard which I guess you don't get in every Christopher Lambert movie.

For a while it doesn't seem like they're even trying to strategize, just wandering around shooting. Then there's a big scene where Lambert forcefully convinces 3 other people that they can all work together, even though only 3 people can survive. They'll do better with a team of 4, and if all of them survive at the end they'll cross that bridge when they get to it (I think Lambert says "burn that bridge" though).

So it seems momentarily like they're being smart, but then you realize that one of the 4 is afraid to fire a gun, and they keep coming up against groups bigger than 4, so obviously everybody else figured out this strategy long before Lambert did.

Then their big move is to announce over the intercom for everyone to meet in a certain place in 15 minutes. And then they sit casually there for 15 minutes like they know for sure no one will show up early. And when they do show up, all 30 or 40 of them, the whole plan is just to stand there in the middle of the room and shoot at everybody. They don't even hide around a corner or anything. And it works. That's the kind of halfway thought through screenplay we're dealing with here.

Toward the end they start bringing in a backstory about a little girl that may or may not be Lambert's daughter, who actually is sitting in a car in the outdoor part of the prison. To the movie's credit, they do attempt to have some grey area in the characters where they are sort of bad and good at the same time. Not that anybody cares.

Lambert is pretty annoying in the movie. We know he's a tough guy because he's always amused by everything. That's his whole performance. Ice-T does pretty good with the opening monologue. He looks like a bulldog with platinum teeth. But then he spends the rest of the movie sitting in front of a fancy chess set in some mysterious evil room somewhere. Probaly one of those roles that's filmed in one or two days.

There's really only one memorable action moment. A gal picks up a briefcase that she thinks is the money, but is actually a bomb. She skips around the corner and suddenly there's a pop and a poof of smoke. Then she runs back into view and her hair is on fire. And then she somehow bangs her head through a locker and hangs there dead. It's pretty funny shit.

There's a big missed opportunity here because at the end there are piles of dead bodies all over the prison, and nobody to clean them up. And we know from the beginning of the movie that the city is going to have a ribbon cutting ceremony the next day. So it's a shame that we don't get to see what happens when the mayor shows up with the scissors.

But Jonathan's right, there is a mambo soundtrack and it does give the movie a different feel. It would've been alot worse with techno. There's also some spanish/spaghetti western type guitars at times, particularly in a couple scenes modelled after showdowns in old westerns. I hope they paid the music people a few bucks because without the score there would be no energy or drama in the movie at all.

So the moral of the story is avoid Albert Pyun. But even he knows to try some different styles of music on the action scenes. So let's do some experimenting, Hollywood.

Vinnie Jones was the highlight of LOCK, STOCK, AND ETC. ETC., playing the shotgun carrying thug who brings his son with him on the job (SEE: theory of badass juxtaposition; Vern, author). He had a very convincing tough guy, take no shit presence, and I've enjoyed seeing him in motion pictures since then, even though most of the british crime pictures that have come my way have been self conscious garbage trying to imitate that earlier picture. I know alot of you liked SNATCH but, I mean, jesus people. Let's have some standards, is all I'm saying, in my opinion.

According to the british, Mr. Jones was already a famous soccer player known for grabbing a guy in the nutsack during a game. Not in a loving and consensual way either, from what I understand. I guess that's how people knew he was tough even though he was running around in little shorts bouncing a rubber ball on his head.

If you think about it too, it's not often that an athlete can make that transition to acting. At least on the big screen, I don't know about theater. If you think about all the american athletes that have become actors, it's not pretty. I enjoyed Dennis Rodman in DOUBLE TEAM but that was surrealism, so it didn't require full acting chops. His acting was slightly improved in SIMON SEZ and still not something most people would want to have to watch. Michael Jordan wasn't completely embarassing in SPACE JAM, but he was playing himself, and mostly just played basketball or said a sentence or two while looking at a guy holding up his hand saying "This is Bugs Bunny standing here". Notice he hasn't acted since. Also, to be considered a real actor one must achieve a level higher than "wasn't completely embarassing." Shaquille O'Neal was probaly the worst, remember that genie movie he did for Taco Bell? The only decent one I can think of is the kid who starred in HE GOT GAME. Unless you count Roddy Piper.

Anyway, with Vinnie Jones being a legitimate movie star, and a genuine soccer player, it was only a matter of time before the producer of LOCK, STOCK, BLAH BLAH BLAH cast him in a british remake of THE LONGEST YARD substituting "football" for football and advertising it in the states as this year's "this year's full monty".

I know alot of my readers are from europe or new zealand, so there are a few things I need to explain to you about america. Number one, sorry about that whole "george bush" thing. We didn't vote for him, though. Number two, the correct term is "soccer". Football is another sport, where Burt Reynolds has a bunch of padding on, and he slams into other guys while they throw a ball around. Number three, nobody here watches soccer, except for young guys who are trying to prove their individuality while still being able to sit around watching sports on tv.

But number four, most importantly, you gotta understand that in america, it is not acceptable to remake a picture like THE LONGEST YARD. Because it is already a perfect picture, for what it is. You cannot match Burt Reynold's cockiness, or even his mustache, even though he shaves it off when he goes down. THE LONGEST YARD is a universal story. The hot shot who sells out and blows it, but regains the respect of himself and others by leading convicts to a sports victory. It is about failure, it is about ethics, it is about honor, loyalty, team work, and redemption. But most of all it is about every american's fantasy to get away with beating the shit out of a screw. The triumph of good over evil. THE LONGEST YARD is the perfect sports movie, because it is really a prison movie, and who wants to see a fuckin sports movie anyway. THE LONGEST YARD is one of our national treasures, it is our TITANIC, our STAR WARS, our MALTESE FALCON. What DR. WHO and all that other crap you guys watch, what that means to you, THE LONGEST YARD means to us.

Just kiddin brits, nobody really remembers THE LONGEST YARD, but I saw it on cable once and I thought it was pretty good. If you haven't seen it, you could probaly enjoy MEAN MACHINE, which follows the story pretty closely and has the same kind of broad humor and stick-it-to-the-man audience manipulation. I gotta say the obvious though, the original is better. The opening car chase is WAY better. Less slick, more mayhem. Burt Reynolds is slimier but he goes through more of a character evolution. Vinnie seems like a stand up dude right from the beginning. Burt has to prove himself. Vinnie, you never really believe he's gonna sell out the cons to cut down his sentence. With Burt, you can suspend your disbelief for a second there. I mean that dude's a slimeball. So it seems like there's more at stake. Also, I like the wacky american stock characters of the original better than the wacky british stock characters of the new one. Maybe because I'm so patriotic. Either way it's pretty silly though. This one has "the governor" instead of the warden. He's played by Dildano from Barbarella, and his character is basically the same as the dean with a stick up his ass in every college movie made in the '80s. I can't remember but the warden in THE LONGEST YARD was probaly the same.

Obviously, though, the americans win with the exploding lightbulb scene.

Burt and his movie were better, but Vinnie is a good replacement, especially because of them soccer skills. If one thing is better in this movie it may be the game because our lead, Mr. Jones, is clearly really kickin the ball around (I don't believe he grabs any nuts, though). Watching this made me think soccer wasn't that bad of a sport. Not as many interuptions as real football, and more personal without all the gear. I'm still not sure why it's so popular over there that the only movie Terry Gilliam's been able to finish since FEAR AND LOATHING OF LAS VEGAS was a nike commercial about soccer. But I did figure out one thing: it's called football because you're always hitting the ball with your foot, unlike in real football, where kicking is only a small part of the game. Maybe those english know what they're talking about.

MEN IN BLACK

Anybody seen this movie. its probaly pretty old but - I just got out so I haven't seen that many movies, but i just saw men in black at a girl's house and it wasn't that bad. personally i thought it was pretty stupid but there was some funny shit at times. she liked it i think i will ask her if i see her again (probly well, wink).

a couple a comments - number one, the black guy is okay i guess, but i don't think he would last long inside. number two, i guess it was pretty funny at times. the woman, whatserfuck, she looked pretty good.

sorry if this has already been cover - first timer here

--vern

THE MESSENGER: THE STORY OF JOAN OF ARC

Damn, this week must be some type of religious holiday because every fucking movie seems to be about religion. Dogma: religion. Messenger: religion. I haven't seen the dog movie however i have seen messenger so here is my review.

First off let me say that I am not an expert on religion although I found and accepted the lord jesus christ while i was in the can and have since turned my life around to become a Positive Writer and critic of Cinema as well as to overcome the shit out of alcoholism. I am not a catholic or anything, so I don't know a whole lot about saints and popes and all this type of shit. I never really got into all the technical stuff beyond praying, positivity, etc.

Point is, I liked this messenger movie. Now I'm not saying its perfect. In fact if I were to give it a 10, it would be on a scale of 1-15 with 1 being Halloween Curse of Michael Meyers and 15 being, of course, Bruce Willis's Die Hard. I think Messenger will be very controversial and for one reason. You see, a lot of dudes don't like to see a pretty young gal who has an opinion, let alone a pretty young gal who has an opinion that she is a messenger from god who is going to lead an army and crown a new king and all this.

The pretty young gal of course is Joan of Arc, or Jean of Arc as she's called in this movie if I may nitpick. Now this gal is really the heart of the picture and whether or not you enjoy the movie is based on what you think about her. Maybe this gal that plays Jean of Arc is a little too into it sometimes, but for the most part I liked the way she did it. She seems like a total loon just like the real Joan of Arc must have, whether or not she was. She is pretty and delicate but also tough and often covered in blood. Although later on she looks like Eddie whatsisdick, the kid from Terminator part 2.

What I like is that she is really crazed, her eyes bugging out, a tenuous grip on the realities of war and clinging onto her banner instead of a sword. She's a warrior and a good leader and stategist but also kind of a prude, slapping motherfuckers for swearing the lords name in vein, panicking if the soldiers don't get confessed every time they cut a dude's head off. There is more jokes in this movie than you might expect.

The opening scene is the best part of the movie, with a young Jean of Arc running around skipping in the meadows yelling, "It's wonderful! It's wonderful!" I have been around the block a few times so personally I wasn't too surprised when suddenly the village is set on fire, everybody gets killed and raped and eaten by wolves. This is a pretty good way to introduce the story.

Needless to say, Jean of Arc isn't thinking its all that wonderful anymore and next thing you know shes a legendary badass with messages from god who gets to lead the army against those fucking english. You might say she's a perky young gal, 'cause when she gets killed with an arrow, she pulls the fucker out, gets back up and goes and starts taunting the motherfuckers that did it to her. She wakes up her army and tells them to just up and storm the castle, then she's so cocky she struts in there wearing a sweater instead of armor, and doesn't even draw her sword until she's in the middle of the fucking mayhem. After the deed is done she's soaked from head to toe in other motherfuckers blood and she goes, whoah... wait a minute... this is fucked up, man.

Now at this point in the movie I'm thinking yes, God really fucked this gal over bad in my opinion. He tells her to go to war, then he tells her why the fuck you did that, lady? And the poor gal doesn't know what to do and then they set her on fire.

For Jean of Arc, its not for sure what failed her. Maybe God failed her, setting her up as the fall guy (or martyr). Maybe organized religion failed her (my opinion) by setting her on fire for following her own idea of religion instead of some guy with a fancy hat. Or maybe the gal was schizophrenic and just happened to be really good at what she did, but her luck ran out after a while. This movie made me really wonder what the real Joan was like, and what she really did. I'm not sure what all these dudes were trying to say with the movie but it made me give it some thought as well as entertaining me for about three or four hours.

MIAMI VICE

MIAMI VICE is the movie version of the old TV show from the '80s about Crocket and Tubbs. It's written and directed by Michael Mann, executive producer of the TV show, now know as the humorless, pretentious, talented jackass behind COLLATERAL, HEAT, etc.

Remember that show? We, as a nation, stopped wearing socks when that show came on. We stopped shaving. We started wearing pastel shirts under white Armani jackets. We drove Ferraris and had pet alligators. We listened to Phil Collins and Glenn Frey and all that shit. Our hearts pumped to the rhythm of Jan Hammer's awesome electronic drum pads. It was who we were as Americans. At least that's what I keep reading in reviews of this movie. Actually, it is partly true, everybody loved that show and people did try to dress up as the characters. Like you Star Wars freakos only it was considered legit. Everybody from little kids to old men in walkers was wearing those ridiculous white suits and sunglasses. Pretending to be an actor on TV pretending to be a cop pretending to be a drug dealer. It was a fun time and it might be fun to make a movie that transports us back to those days.

As you've probaly heard by now, Michael Mann is no fun, so he moved it to 2006 and didn't put any nostalgic nods or references to the show, except for an absolutely horrible rock n roll version of "I Can Feel It Comin In the Air Tonight" on the end credits. So if you're nostalgic for "the Miami Vice look" and what not you're gonna have to go rent the DVDs. If you're nostalgic for Cheech Marin, that's Nash Bridges you're thinking of, I think that show's still on so you're in luck. MIAMI VICE is not a period piece, so it doesn't have alot of the superficial shit we remember from the show. But it is a modern equivalent I think, with the same kind of gritty realism, gloomy mood and atmosphere they were going for back then. I don't think it's as different from the TV show as everyone is making it out to be, but it is VERY different from Nash Bridges. So if that's what you're looking for, you're gonna be disappointed.

Academy Award winner Jamie Foxx plays Philip Michael Thomas, overrated Colin Farrell plays Don Johnson, and Edward James Olmos is nowhere to be seen. But you get used to this pretty easy and the movie is just as dark, serious and moody as the show was, if I remember right. But now it's the 2000s so they got some more technology, it's shot on grainy handheld digital like it's a documentary, and for some reason they call the speedboats "go fast boats."

And before you ask, I don' t think they ever show Crocket's feet, so it's hard to tell if he's wearing socks or not.

The story is just about one case that Sonny and Rico stumble across by accident. If you don't remember from the show, they're undercover narcs so they go meet with some guy and try to sell him a huge load of dope, meanwhile trying to figure out this guy's connection to a white supremacist gang led by the great Tom Towles (HENRY: PORTRAIT OF A SERIAL KILLER) who recently killed some feds on a drug sting gone bad. So the whole movie has this feel of impending doom because some feds just got executed trying to make a sale to these guys, and Crocket and Tubbs have volunteered to go do the same god damn thing.

The movie is pretty long and has alot of scenes where characters stare off in different directions. I like that it keeps it simple and kind of minimalistic. They don't try to explain everything that's happening. When they start out their operation there's a great scene where they brazenly jack a huge load of dope, then it just cuts to them driving around the next day and never explains what they're up to. You'll just have to wait to find out later.

They don't try to explain much about the characters either. Alot of times in a movie they think they're required by law to explain everybody's backstory and have them come to some revelation about their life during the course of the movie, but not this one. One event causes Rico to refer to "this bullshit line of work," but they don't waste any more than that exploring that idea. Sonny may be getting in too deep with the undercover shit, Rico asks him once or twice if this is the case and otherwise you just have to judge by his actions and not by some speech he's gonna make about it. Because he's not gonna make one, thank God.

There is one scene where Sonny is with Gong Li and unless I misunderstood something, he tells her that his dad listened to the Allman Brothers and Lynyrd Skynyrd. This, to me, is hilarious, because as I've pointed out before, Mann goes into an insane monologue about Tom Cruise's character's off-screen dad's love for jazz music on the commentary track for COLLATERAL. Michael Mann is kind of a weird guy and apparently that's one of his obsessions, he for some reason thinks that to give depth to a character you have to figure out what type of music the character's dad listened to. All you aspiring filmatists out there take note, that's the secret. For example, John McClane's dad probaly listened to Chuck Berry or somebody. That's why he's such a great cinema icon. James Bond's dad I'm guessing listened to field recordings from Moroccan villages. Luke Skywalker's dad didn't listen to music ever in the prequels. What the fuck? That's probaly why nerds hate the prequels. Plus, Darth Vader doesn't even have a father, so how the fuck would George Lucas know what music his father listens to? He doesn't. What a stupid character.

Gong Li plays the drug kingpin's girl Isabella, who Sonny either falls for or screws as a way of getting at the big man, you're not sure at first. Her English isn't too hot so she can't really hide the fact that her dialogue is kind of clunky. But when the acting is non-verbal she's really good. There's a scene where she's screwing Sonny and you see tear streaks by her eyes and I think that says more about her character than the dialogue says, although I'm not sure exactly what it says. Or maybe it just means Colin Farrell is the man.

Speaking of which, he does a pretty good job as Sonny Crocket. I don't remember Don Johnson being a gravelly-voiced hick, which is sort of how Farrell plays him. But it works. He's more macho than slick. Sometimes his hair gets fucked up real bad, which is not something Don Johnson would've allowed to happen, I don't think. There's one shot that is 100% about the fact that his mullet looks funny when he rides in a "go-fast-boat." Also, he includes a mustache with his 5 o'clock shadow, a 2006 twist to the old classic.

Jamie Foxx is real good as Rico, mixing a little Jamie Foxx swagger with the quiet sensitivity of my man P.M. Thomas. Also he can fly a plane. Rico gets the one joke in the movie, which I gotta assume Jamie Foxx improvised and then he must've convinced Michael Mann that his character's actions came from a song his father used to listen to. Otherwise I can't think of any reason why Michael Mann would leave a funny part in a movie. But you know what, I appreciate the seriousness. Better to have one joke and one laugh than to have lots of jokes and no laughs.

Although you don't get to know any of them very well, Crocket and Tubbs have a good team behind them. Tubbs has a girlfriend (Naomie Harris from PIRATES OF THE CARRIBEAN 2) who you know right away is gonna get into trouble (otherwise why would he have a girlfriend?) but what I love is that she's not a damsel in distress, she's a fellow cop. The way they introduce her is completely badass and not in an obvious way. They have her yelling at one of their informants to get him to cooperate with their operation, and she's very intimidating. So later when the bad guys come after her you actually give a shit, because you like her from earlier.

You've seen these undercover stories a million times, but usually they're more Hollywooded up than this one. This has a realistic procedural type feel. There's no plot to end the world. This might not even be the biggest case these guys have worked. It might not change theire lives forever. They are just some cops doing their job. Sometimes the cops talk shop and they use all this lingo and I don't know what the fuck they're talking about. But I just go with it and it works out.

There's not really action scenes. There's a couple explosions and gunfights. There's one shootout that looks and sounds completely real, and it's hard to follow what exactly is going on. In an action movie that would be a dealbreaker but in this movie it works because it feels like the confusion of battle. The excitement doesn't come from a guy doing a flip or jumping a motorcycle onto a boat, it comes from the tension of these two guys facing off against guys who don't trust them and will kill them if they find out they're cops. And they gotta somehow get the guys to buy their drugs and also get out of there alive.

When the movie goes off to be about Sonny and Gong Li getting together it's a little less interesting, but it adds a little emotion to the end and I guess you probaly need something in there between the tense moments to get it to work.

It seems like the general consensus on this one is "it's not enough like the TV show." Apparently even Jay Leno said this in his capacity as substitute for ailing Roger Ebert. But honestly man... fuck the TV show. Are you telling me you have watched it at any point in the last 15 years? Or that you will ever watch it again before you die? Or that you remember it in detail? For 96%-97% of you I'm guessing no. I admit I was skeptical when I found out it wasn't a period piece. But this is better. This is a serious, no bullshit cop movie with all kinds of tension and atmosphere. And the un-Hollywood approach on a miraculous Hollywood budget makes it stand out as a very unique movie. Not that I'm disavowing movies where cars go off of jumps, but it's nice that they can still make a movie like this for grown ups with some amount of patience and brains still intact.

Hell, I would almost go as far as to say I loved this movie. It's definitely not for everybody, not a crowdpleaser, but it is a high quality movie. Good job Michael Mann. But don't get a bigger head about it, you fuckin egomaniac. Just to bring you down a notch here's a few complaints about the movie, although none of them has any substance.

1. Mojitos. What the fuck is this shit with mojitos lately. Everywhere you turn some motherfucker has to talk about mojitos this, mojitos that, I love mojitos. It would be one thing if mojitos was a brand new invention that has recently been spread to the masses, like Gogurt. But that drink is old, it's like if all the sudden out of the blue everybody has to show off that they love peanut butter sandwiches. So when there's a whole scene about Sonny and Gong Li going to Cuba to drink mojitos ("I'm a fiend for mojitos." "Do you like your mojito?" "It's a good mojito," etc.) that's just too much. How much did Bacardi pay you for that shit?* Or do you own a mint farm?

2. Music in clubs is loud. But for some reason this movie has two different scenes where they're in clubs and they have quiet conversations over music. I know that sounds dumb but since the movie opens in a club it was really distracting to me, I couldn't get pulled into the movie like I should've. Was it the Twin Peaks movie where people had to yell over loud music and they subtitled it? I don't expect them to do that every time but if you're shooting it like it's a documentary you gotta have semi-realism in the sound design too.

3. What the fuck is so wrong with the theme song you gotta leave it out of this bitch. Come on Michael Mann, you know that theme song was awesome. Thank you for leaving out Don Henley and Glenn Frey, though. If you had put "You Belong To the City" in there this review might not have been so positive. I gotta end on a negative note though so let me just say that the music in general is weak here. You go into these rockin Chris Cornell songs every once in a while and I'm just guessin but I don't think anybody is gonna be as affected by those as we all were by that cheeseball Phil Collins song back in the day. I mean, I fuckin hate Phil Collins, but you gotta admit that song establishes a strong mood. You coulda done better with the music bud. You blew it. Be humble.

*UPDATE: I was half kidding about that but it turns out my paranoia was dead-on. Matt Lynch from Collider pointed out to me that the MIAMI VICE trailer debuted on the Bacardi web sight. And sure enough, a basic knowledge of modern googling technology can quickly bring up other tie-ins between the movie and the booze. Now, I got a kneejerk reaction to some of this consumerism stuff but honestly I am less militant about product placement than most people. For example I thought the corporate sponsor jokes in TALLADEGA NIGHTS were completely legitimate as satire. But this mojito thing is bullshit, a blatant attempt to force a fad drink into the popular consciousness on behalf of a corporate sponsor. Crockett, you should be ashamed of yourself. You are in this shit too deep. I want your badge and your gun on my desk in the morning. And put on some god damn socks.

Some day I gotta come up with a name for this certain style of movie I like, a movie that is really fuckin dumb, but in a good way. It manages to be so spectacular, almost innovative in its level of stupidity that it is what the young people now and in the '80s called "awesome." I'm not talking a dumb comedy like HOW HIGH, I'm talking about a movie that as far as anyone knows is supposed to be serious. One really good example is DEEP BLUE SEA, Renny Harlin's movie about super intelligent sharks. That takes the genre to its highest levels because there are so many things that play with the audience's expectations that it is undeniably clever, almost brilliant. And at the same time, so fuckin dumb. A movie where a girl has to take her scuba suit off and stand on top of it so as not to get electrocuted. Because of the super intelligent sharks. That's the best, when it's so smart and so dumb that you can't even tell which is which anymore.

Well this is not that good but it is another dumb movie by the same director. I think maybe the pressure of doing a sequel to DIE HARD was too much for Renny Harlin to take, it damaged his brain and he's been mushy ever since. MINDHUNTERS isn't as good as DEEP BLUE SEA but it's worthwhile if you're into that type of stupid shit, like I am. It has Val Kilmer, Christian Slater and of course DEEP BLUE SEA's LL Cool J in the cast but it sat on the shelf for a couple years. It actually came out on DVD in Russia a long time before it came out in american theaters. So maybe the Russians could tell me what to call this genre.

Here's the premise: a group of hotshot students trying to become FBI profilers must face their final test - they are sent to a remote island to track a fictional serial killer. But then somebody starts killing them for real one by one in elaborate show offy ways.

Even the very premise of this movie makes no god damn sense. How could anybody learn anything about profiling from a hypothetical killer? All that means is the teacher (Val Kilmer, ISLAND OF DR. MOREAU) made up a story and the students guessed it right. Maybe it would have some value if he could base it on a real killer, but then if these were really the top students they would probaly know about all the famous cases, wouldn't they?

Then even if there was some value to it, how exactly would they have done this exercise on the island if they hadn't been rudely interupted by a real killer? The island has a fake town of empty buildings filled with mannequins covered in worms and maggots. What are they supposed to do, interview the mannequins to see if they saw any suspicious mannequins in the area? Narrow it down to a few suspects and then interview their neighbor and relative mannequins? Maybe they could do an autopsy of the dead mannequin they find hanging up on hooks. This guy thinks he's Jack the Ripper. The victim's internal organs have all been removed, she's completely hollowed out. Either that or because it's a mannequin it already was hollow. I'm not sure.

Of course the teacher, Val Kilmer, is an eccentric genius or something. Alot of the old guard there don't believe in his methods. Alot of them think he's crazy. The reason we know this is because of the part at the beginning where he says, "Alot of the old guard here don't believe in my methods. Alot of them think I'm crazy." I'm guessing somebody read the script and pointed out that the method of testing made no god damn sense so they went back and added that line. Just like the part where they point out that "foreign nationals" aren't allowed in the FBI, so Val Kilmer has to half explain that the british guy is "American on the inside." It would be too hard to rewrite it so he's an american, so they just threw that line in there and started filming. No time for rewrites, the Russian video market awaits!

You already know you're in for some serious stupid bullshit in the opening scene when the two leads, some lady and Christian Slater, are doing an investigation and they stumble across the home of a serial killer. Movies like to fetishize serial killers and give them these stupid gimmicks and forced atmosphere that makes it all real hard to swallow. This particular killer lays it on extra thick. Inside the house you got:

1. maybe a dozen rotted, dead animals hanging from the ceiling on strings attracting flies

2. a ballerina music box playing a lullaby

3. a birthday cake with a slice cut out and lit candles!

Number three was the winner for me, I was ready to love the movie at this point. I think maybe it was some kind of reference to the slasher movie HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO ME, but more likely just some random shit that makes no sense. What definitely makes no sense is that all this was not even real, it was an exercise set up by Val Kilmer. No wonder the old guard don't like him if he's going around hanging dead cats on strings and shit. I mean what exactly possessed him to whip up a birthday cake for this one? What convinced him that was the crowning touch needed for his students? As soon as their car pulled up did he run and light the candles and if so, did he then run away giggling?

Probaly the biggest laugh in the movie comes early on, when Christian Slater becomes the first guy to bite it. He is the victim of a trail of dominos that sets off a contraption like the one Pee Wee Herman used to make his breakfast. I recently saw FINAL DESTINATION 2, so this is the second movie I've seen in a row where it seems like the heroes are being haunted by the ghost of Rube Goldberg. Anyway, Christian Slater gets sprayed by some kind of liquid nitrogen and in about 5 seconds his legs turn to solid ice and break off. He falls apart and shatters on the ground. I rewound it twice.

The movie could definitely be improved by more ridiculous shit like that, but there's a good amount to go around. LL kicks holes in the walls and climbs around to avoid a water/electricity booby trap. Val Kilmer gets hung up by hooks HELLRAISER style, and then controlled like a marionette. At the end there's a gunfight underwater. At one point it seems like they ran out of good deaths so they just have a bunch of spears fly out of who knows where and impale a guy.

LL gets both the best bad line and the best good line, and I'm gonna tell you both of them.

1. "Eenie, meenie, miney, moe. Who's the next motherfucker to go?"

2. "I guess we found out his weakness. Bullets."

It's a good thing nobody gives a shit about the ending to MINDHUNTERS, because I'm about to give some of it away. LL gives more support to my theory that rappers cannot be killed in horror movies or thrillers (the one exception being Redman in SEED OF CHUCKY). In DEEP BLUE SEA, LL seemed destined to be the first guy to go, and yet he ended up escaping the sharks about five times more than any white person in the movie, and making it to the end. In HALLOWEEN H20 he was shot and appeared to be dead but showed up alive to save the day at the end. In HALLOWEEN RESURRECTION, LL's fellow rapper-actor Busta Rhymes is stabbed and appears to be dead but shows up alive to save the day in the end. And in MINDHUNTERS, LL is hit on the head with a fire extinguisher and appears to be dead but shows up alive to save the day at the end. Don't call it a comeback. The new ground that's broken here is there's a climactic scene where the audience is supposed to think LL is the killer. I feel that it is cheating though because the way they convince the audience is by having LL chase after the main woman and say menacing things to her, acting evil. When he turns out not to be evil, he never explains why he was being such a weirdo earlier, and nobody asks.

This is not a prime example of the enjoyable stupid bullshit genre, it's only a decent one. But we could have another one on the level of DEEP BLUE SEA coming our way before we know it. Renny Harlin is currently planning a movie about werewolves on the moon.

Like PLANET OF THE APES, INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS and soon STAR WARS PART 2, MINORITY REPORT is a sci-fi picture that will mainly be discussed in context with the politics of the time. (the time being now. because it came out today.)

Again like the Yoda picture, it has been in the planning stages long enough that director Steven Spielberg (JAWS) and co-writer Scott Frank (I only remember him because he did OUT OF SIGHT. who knows who the other writer is) couldn't have known how timely it would turn out to be. The movie takes place in Washington DC, 2056, where Tom Cruise is an agent in the flagship "Pre-Crime Deparment" - cops who use three water-submerged psychic "precogs" to track crimes of passion that haven't even happened yet.

So the most timely question the picture asks is - can you really bust somebody for something they haven't even done yet? Is it okay to lock somebody up forever, with no trial, because you think they were GOING to do something? I mean, what if you're wrong? And one thing I liked about the picture is that it doesn't stack the deck. Of course you get an ominous feeling about the very idea of "Pre-Crime", but you can see why the people go along with the system. As you see little Mr. Cruise at a day on the job, controlling windows of digitized precognitions like an orchestra conductor, you understand why he enjoys and believes in his job, even before you find out his backstory. And since the system has brought the murder rate down to zero without anyone knowing about any mistakes, it's not an easy black or white question. So it's a fair analogy to our current "lock people up if John Ashcroft says he has secret evidence about them" methods of "terrorism" "prevention", or even the rising controversy about our country's love of a good execution despite case after case after case after case after case of executed and almost executed individuals proven to be innocent.

These issues are so embedded into the premise that you almost wish they were explored more. But it's more of a straight ahead suspense thriller that touches on these issues than it is an actual political treatise. My guess is that while MINORITY REPORT is getting all the political discussion right off the bat, STAR WARS will be more interesting down the road when we find that the Bush regime has slowly dismantled our system and become the Empire piece by piece, in such a way that at least the Jar Jars of the world didn't see it coming. But we'll see.

The real moral dilemma in MINORITY REPORT (which doesn't apply as much to our times) is if you stopped them from committing a crime of passion, do they really need to be locked up? Now that they've passed that angry hey joe moment, maybe everything is cool now. You gave them a second chance, right? Nope, they just lock 'em up. In a matrix style coma chamber, not a prison. Which, I mean who knows how that's gonna affect the culture at large, when you take away the subculture that creates many of the trends, such as wearing your pants hanging low, or saying that you made somebody your bitch.

Well the high concept type premise here is that the precogs have a vision of Tom killing somebody he never even heard of before. Does this prove the system is flawed? Is he being setup, and why? Or is this really his destiny, and he doesn't know it? If he didn't know about this vision and try to find out about it, would it still have happened? Or if he wasn't going to find out about the vision, like if he was an ice cream man instead of a Pre-Crime investigator, would they have never had the vision in the first place? Well shit we could ask questions like this all day, and all we'd have is a live action version of Waking Life. What Tom does is run like hell and hope he can figure out which questions to ask and how to answer them before his buddies catch up with him and lock him up. Also he will have to have his eyeballs removed because everywhere you go these days your eyes get scanned to ID you.

The world of MINORITY REPORT is very detailed and clever, kind of like the underrated A.I. - THE EXTRA-TERRESTRIAL. All the technology, from the computer screens to the transportation is very believably designed. The best touch is personalized holographic advertisements that talk to you as you walk by them: "John Atherton - couldn't you use a Guinness?" You think pop-up windows are annoying? When you drive down the freeway you fly through a 3-D hologram of Aquafina, and when you walk into The Gap a virtual saleswoman remembers your last purchase. It's all so horrible and obviously inevitable that it makes me glad I won't be around in 2056.

But is this movie a criticism of current commercialism based on its logical extension? Or will the advertisers get the idea from this movie and do it, even though they never woulda thought of it on their own? What if you went back in time and your mom got a crush on you, and you had to go back to the future? It's enough to blow your fuckin mind, man.

Anyway it's a very believable idea and it works for the mystery-suspense storyline because a fugitive especially doesn't want to hear his name repeated from every direction everywhere he goes. Most of the movie is smartly thought out and designed. The cops have very interesting vehicles and equipment such as a "sick stick" stun gun/billy club which causes its victim to vomit. The Writers have figured out exactly how this Pre–Crime system would work and what would be needed to enforce it.

The movie has a great look to it, too, always overcast and a bit bleached out. But not over-the-top gothic gloomy like BLADE RUNNER and never wacky and CAPTAIN EOish like that middle section of AI. Some of the shots of the city and traffic look pretty much how life would look in this world. I especially like the shots of the hovering snail-shell shaped police cars. They even have real, non computer generated type cars with great futuristic designs, driving around on normal streets like they did in Truffaut's FARENHEIT 451.

Isn't that cool how I just drop Truffaut in there. Also did you notice how I used the word "flagship" at the beginning. That was awesome.

Some of the supporting characters are a little less realistic, sometimes resorting to lame comedy cliches like the sleazy virtual reality parlor manager who worries that the precogs can sense thoughts he had about his cousin, or the underground nurse who doesn't wash her hands after going to the bathroom. (Yeah, but does she have a baboon as an assistant and perform surgery with a rusty can and a toilet plunger, like Dr. Benway in Naked Lunch?) And of course there is a BLADE RUNNER style eccentric creator to all this, an old lady who lives in a greenhouse of deadly genetically modified plants. My favorite Jurassic Park style standard-issue movie character was Wally, the hippieish science nerd who sits by the pool taking care of the Precogs, talking to them lovingly like they're his pets. The first time you see him he's wearing shorts and a hawaiian shirt and you get the idea that he's basically a guy who works at Sea World. These three poor bastards have to dream of murder all day to keep the world running, but he thinks he takes real good care of them. They're his dolphins, jumping through hoops for him.

I also liked Samantha Morton as the most talented of the Precogs, who he dresses up in pinstriped slacks and tries to take out into society. Luckily this does not lead to crazy fish out of water misunderstandings. But she does act a little Milla Jovovichy and it would probaly be weird taking her to the mall, as Tom does. Anyway it is nice to see Samantha Morton trying a different type of role. Unlike in SWEET AND LOWDOWN, she can talk. And unlike JESUS' SON, she acts weird because she has been raised by a dolphin trainer, not because she is really high. You know now that I think about it this IS the same type of role she always plays god damn it. But it works.

The only times I really thought the movie was clumsy was in the action scenes. I don't mind the occasional obvious blue screen or digitally removed cable. But it's like Spielberg doesn't have faith that anybody will enjoy this much hyped new "Dark Spielberg" style. He has to puncuate every action scene with wacky jokes, like a chase through an apartment building where a jetpack flame broils some burgers and other unexpected dinner time antics. Or another chase through an apartment building where husband and wife fight, then stop to have their eyes scanned by robotic spiders, then start fighting again. It's just like The Lockhorns, only with robotic spiders!

I mean usually I like a movie that doesn't take itself too seriously, and at least he's trying new territory for him, like some Evil Dead style slapstick when little Tom drops his eyeballs in a sloped hallway. But for this movie it's all wrong, throwing off the rhythm of the chases, destroying the tension. Steven, we need some fuckin tension over here man. Remember Duel? Remember Jaws? Let's erase 20 whatever years of filmmaking and get back to the basics there bud. thanks.

There are also a few of the ol' "plot holes" that internet movie geeks think make a movie devoid of all merit. For example it seemed pretty stupid that the Pre-Crime unit would not cut off Tom Cruise's security clearance once he was on the lam. But in today's world it is easier to accept this kind of shit. Because you wouldn't think suicide pilots who killed 3,000 people would get their visas renewed six months later, either. But they did. And for that matter you wouldn't think they woulda been able to be suicide pilots in the first place after the CIA knew they were terrorists, they lived in the country under their own names with listed phone numbers, the FBI was investigating people they were connected to for suspicious behavior in flight schools like the ones they attended, and the white house was warned about impending terrorist action by the CIA, Israel, Russia, England, Germany, James Woods and everybody else. You see, modern society is full of plot holes. MINORITY REPORT is a product of our society.

And now for the overall comparison to AI. This is a more consistent use of the Dark Spielberg style. It does not have a long chunk that doesn't work like that one section of AI, the one with Chris Rock in it. On the other hand its highs are not as high. It does not get quite as creepy as AI did in those first scenes with the family, or reach as boldly as AI did in those last scenes after the second ice age. And by the way buddy they were obviously robots and not aliens, that's why they had tvs in their chests. Pay attention. TV in chest = robot, not alien. Or it could be a teletubby, I guess. But teletubbies are more like robots than aliens in my opinion, because they have tvs in their chests, like robots. Also they have antennas, like robots do, or aliens do also. Now you're confusing me. Leave me alone.

Anyway I would say MINORITY REPORT is a pretty good one. Good story with mostly great execution. Remember that talking bear in AI that was cool also. the end

MIRACLE AT ST. ANNA

According to the Rotten Tomatoes, Spike Lee's new World War II epic has a 27% organic and plump rating (or whatever). In other words it has a lower approval rating than George Bush. Also, by the way, lower than CHRONICLES OF RIDDICK or DAREDEVIL.

I don't think that's fair. This movie is WAY better than George Bush. The other thing that's been unfair is how all the pre-release coverage was about Lee's alleged feud with Clint Eastwood. The movie is about the Buffalo Soldiers (or "experimental colored brigade" as a white commanding officer calls them in the movie) so some reporter got Lee to say something about there not being enough brothers on the wall in FLAGS OF OUR FATHERS. Then somebody told Clint that Spike said some shit and got Clint to say some shit back and then the two quotes were taken out of context and repeated, so in the IMDb headlines and in the imaginations of movie fans around the world it turned into a battle between Spike and Clint instead of a movie that can stand on its own.

In my opinion Spike is a very talented and unique filmatist who makes a legitimate (but debatable) point about Clint, and Clint is also a very talented filmatist who doesn't need anybody standing up for him or feeling sorry for him because, not sure if you noticed this but HE'S CLINT FUCKING EASTWOOD. He can handle it on his own. And besides, nobody cared when Larry Clark actually did intentionally attack Clint with an unfair portrayal as a racist gun nut in WASSUP ROCKERS. I guess outspoken black man vs. Clint is more sensational than weird pervert vs. Clint.

Anyway, if we gotta reduce it to that battle I'll say this: MIRACLE AT ST. ANNA is better than FLAGS OF OUR FATHERS, but not as good as LETTERS FROM IWO JIMA. So Spike and Clint both win. Let's all be friends now. (You too, Larry Clark. Looking forward to your weirdly perverted WWII epic.)

The story starts with a weird mystery: it's 1983, a guy is trying to buy stamps at the post office in New York City, the old man behind the counter pulls out a Luger and shoots the guy. Searching his house, the cops find a bag in his closet containing the head of an Italian statue that turns out to be worth millions of dollars. But the old man won't talk, so what the fuck is going on here? 'Cause he didn't find this thing at the Goodwill.

We then flash back to WWII where the old man, who is actually not an old man at that age and is named Hector, is in one of the African-American regiments in fascist Italy. His group advances farther than their racist white captain believes possible, so he decides they're lying and bombs the sector they're in. Then they get separated even further when one of them saves a little orphan boy who's hiding out in an abandoned house. So they get stranded in a small village. Then it almost turns into a SONATINE kind of thing where they wait it out, although they also have a mission of catching a German for questioning.

I like most of Spike Lee's movies, and the ones I don't like I still think have interesting things about them. But to me his biggest problem is his lack of focus. He always tries to do too many things at once. The best example I got is HE GOT GAME - it's an underrated one but I think it would be way better if they cut out the entire subplot about Milla Jovovich's hooker character, I don't know why that was in there. You know what they say: kill your babies. Just take your babies, even if they are Milla Jovovich, and just suffocate those babies with a pillow or something, until the babies die. You know come to think of it I'm not sure I like that metaphor, that's kind of a fucked up metaphor. Anyway, cut out some scenes sometimes, is what it means.

ST. ANNA is kind of a different one for Lee because this story (adapted by this guy James McBride from his own novel) actually is an epic, so it needs to have all that ambition that sometimes overstuffs his other movies. It tackles a bunch of different things, but pretty much all of them tie together by the end. It's a WWII story with 1983 police mystery wraparound, it also flashes back to the soldiers during training to show how their treatment by white Americans is different than by white Italians. It's about American soldiers on a mission, their conflict with their racist superiors, their relationships with the Italian villagers, their partnership with the partisan rebels. It's about one soldier latching onto the kid like a pet, and the statue head like a lucky charm. It even has a bit of the old magical realism in there. I guess I'm in that elite 27%, I thought this was a real interesting story.

But it starts off a little iffy. The opening is old Hector watching John Wayne in THE LONGEST DAY on TV and complaining "We fought that war too." That seems a little on-the-nose for Lee at this age, I think we get it just by watching this story, we don't need to have it pointed out in the opening scene. Then when we join the Buffalo Soldiers in battle the emphasis at first is more on buffoonery than heroism, the soldiers all arguing with each other and at first the dim-witted gentle giant character Train has various stupid misunderstandings played for cheap laughs, like a cartoonish Lenny from OF MICE AND MEN. And maybe I'm dumb or maybe the storytelling isn't quite as clear as it could be - it took me a while to remember the names of the four leads and I had a few questions afterwards about basic story elements I was supposed to pick up on but didn't.

So a few things were maybe too subtle for me, but on the other hand I gotta say that there are a couple of what I would consider Paul Haggis moments. There's a flashback sequence where the soldiers remember being discriminated against in a diner. After the racist incident there's a shot of the diner owner's son watching the whole thing. There has already been a pretty heavy handed discussion about how hatred is passed on from parent to child and allegedly can't be removed after it sets in. So the shot of the kid is meaningful... and then the dad says something like, "This is a good lesson for you, son. You have to treat them like animals."

Come on Spike, we already GOT it. But now that you underline, highlight it and add three exclamation points you insulted us.

(It's also kind of goofy that some of the members of the platoon have died in combat, but it is the exact lineup of surviving soldiers who were there for this incident. Nobody missing, nobody extra. Oh well.)

And I didn't really mind this, but it should be noted that there are some heartfelt conversations that come out of the blue. Spike Lee characters are open about their feelings so they will sit down to confront their friends about their prejudices or hypocritical values. Combined with Terence Blanchard's scoring that can come off pretty corny sometimes.

But shit, I liked this movie. It combines several different types of stories, several different cultures, so it doesn't feel like any other WWII movie I've seen. The racism toward the soldiers is not the main topic, but it's interesting to see how they deal with their feelings risking their lives for a country that treats them as subhuman, even giving German POWs more rights than them. They have to confront Nazi propaganda that tries to exploit those feelings, communicate with people speaking different languages, fighting with different motives. And there are mysteries within mysteries - who is this "sleeping man"? Where did this little boy come from? Who the fuck is Arturo? Who is the traitor? And it's kind of nice to see the pieces of the puzzle mostly fall into place and reveal themselves. Spike Lee is willing and able to do a 3 hour movie that ends inconclusively, but going from the novel he was able to bring things together in a satisfying climax.

I don't give a fuck if he has a big mouth, or if white people can't get over the racial politics of the past, that doesn't change how good his movies are. There's this myth that Spike Lee's movies are always about race and that he hates white people. First of all, if you look over his filmography you'll see that a good 3/4 or more of his movies aren't primarily about race. But secondly, why the fuck would it matter? Shouldn't he make movies about the issues that are important to him, that affect his life, that he has something to say about? Isn't that what art is? It's such a dumb argument that it's hard not to see a little denial or even outright racism behind it.

In this case we have a movie where race is an important component of what the story is about. But half of the characters are white and the story at the heart of the movie is about a good-hearted black soldier saving the life of a little white boy. In fact he denies an argument that the kid isn't worth saving because he's grown up around hate and will never learn better. Why would a guy who supposedly hates whites so much and thinks they're inherently racist waste his time telling this story? Making that argument is so clearly out of line and divorced from reality that I can't help but assume there are some kind of weird racial issues going on in the minds of the people who can't get over this shit.

And besides, if Spike Lee hates white people then what's he gonna do, deny you a job? Make your ancestors slaves? In my experience anti-white racism is such a minor problem in this country that I have to be suspicious of people who are sensitive to it. If you live in an all black or hispanic neighborhood and get beat up every day then I'll consider your concerns, but your average white American who lives among primarily whites but still gets worked up about alleged secret subliminal anti–white statements in seemingly harmless Spike Lee movies - let's just say I can't sympathize with you, bud.

Anyway, forget all that shit. Spike Lee is a great, if sometimes sloppy, director, and nobody else would've or could've made this movie. As long as he keeps making them I'll keep watching.

10/1/08

I like this "Mission Impossible" series. The first one, by Brian DePalma, is the best, a real tight and stylish twisty thriller with amazingly tense suspense scenes and cinematic tricks and surprises. And the occasional show offy special effects action scene. The perfect combination of Brian DePalma and summer event movie.

The second one, by John Woo, is a horrible piece of shit that finally made America realize what they had done to John Woo. But if you don't hold it to the standards of "being a good movie" it's pretty fucking funny. The amazing motorcycle chest bump scene comes to mind. In the John Woo filmography I consider this in the same dumb-action category as HARD TARGET and BLACKJACK.

And it was cool that they seemed to be going for an auteur approach like the ALIEN series before the fucking Predators decided to come in and ruin everything. Each installment has a new approach and feel from a different talented director. Even if hiring John Woo turned out to be a big bust they were gonna go for another beloved director with a solid vision, Mr. Dave Fincher of ALIEN 3 and FIGHT CLUB 1 fame. He worked on it for a long time and then left to pursue his other hobby of developing movies that never get made.

Then they tried some other plans and it's been kind of laying around somewhere and now it finally makes it to the theaters with the directing and co-writing prowess of none other than J.J. FUCKING ABRAMS.

Which is some guy from TV, apparently. If you look him up he doesn't exactly have a John Woo or Brian DePalma type track record. He never directed for real movies before and he's written alot of worthless horrible garbage including but not limited to ARMAGEDDON, GONE FISHIN' starring Joe Pesci and Danny Glover, some Jim Belushi movie, and worst of all, ARMAGEDDON.

But it was the TV that got him the job because he created that show called Alias that I never watched but got sick of hearing about long ago, as well as another show called Lost that I also never watched but also got sick of hearing about long ago. For some reason I got a subscription to Entertainment Weekly and I have noticed a pattern that if fucking Lost isn't on the cover then it's gonna be fuckin American Idol. Okay, I get it. You guys are 22 and get a good salary for writing little wiseass blurbs so all you do is watch TV all day.

But I am willing to give J.J. Abrams a chance for ONE and only one reason. That reason is NOT that he created Felicity and gave its star Keri Russell an important role in this movie as well as a cameo for supporting player Greg Grunberg who played Felicity's crazy friend Sean, the inventor of Smoothaise. That is the kind of thing that might be exciting for someone who watched Felicity but as I've explained several times over the years I really barely even heard of that show, don't know much about it. No, the one reason I'm willing to give him a chance is because I'm a nice guy.

(begin actual review here)

Right from the bell you can see that this Abrams is trying some new tricks for the series, not just copying the other two as you might expect some TV chump to do. To show you what the stakes are, the movie starts at the most "oh shit, he's totally fucked" moment in the story, where you really can't imagine how Tom Cruise's character Ethan Hunte is going to get out of this mess. The villain played by Academy Award Winner P.S. Hoffman has both Ethan and his wife kidnapped and extensively strapped to chairs, and he's about to execute the wife if Ethan doesn't give him what he wants. And Ethan doesn't seem to have any way of giving him what he wants. And also Ethan apparently has "an explosive charge" in his head. An unneccessary touch but one I can get behind.

Then, of course, it skips back to show us how he got painted into this corner, and also why it matters. We see him at his engagement party with friends and family, and see how much he loves this girl played by Michelle Monaghan (a Liv Tyler elfen supermodel type). Apparently he's semi-retired, he doesn't go on Impossible Missions anymore, he just does Impossible Training. And keeps that stuff completely secret even from his special lady friend.

But then Billy Crudup (in a rare non-'70s-greaseball role) convinces him to go on just this one last Impossible Mission because his best student, Agent Felicity, has been captured. There's a funny joke where he shows up at the airport on a motorcycle wearing the same kind of corny leather and sunglasses getup from part 2. In that movie it was supposed to make him awesome, in this one it's just what he wears when commuting.

For the mission he works with a team that includes Ving Rhames as Luther (computer expert from the other two), Jonathan Rhys Meyers (the prick from MATCH POINT) and some lady. This is one thing I really liked about the movie, all of the missions involve teamwork, and his team sticks with him the whole time. I mean they definitely have teams in the other two but since Tom Cruise is the star and producer the story always ends up being about him and especially in part 2 it became The Tom Cruise Show. Tom Cruise with his sunglasses climbing a cliff and swinging on a rope and riding a motorcycle. That's fine but the tv show was all about a team of specialists working together to trick some motherfucker. These aren't the greatest tricks ever but I'm glad they're at least leaning a little more on that concept for part 3.

Anyway when they rescue Agent Felicity of course they find out about bad things and there's hints of other bad things and eventually they're going after this weapons dealer played by P.S. Hoffman, who is after something called "The Rabbit's Foot" which we remember as what he asked Ethan for in the opening scene that happens later. So that's a little of the old DePalma spirit there, letting us know what's gonna happen but then we have to wait for it in sloooooooow fucking mooooootion. Even when he's making a plan for how to steal the Rabbit's Foot we know that whatever he's gonna steal does not seem to satisfy P.S. Hoffman by the time he gets it to him. People are always so proud if they get ahead of a movie, so this one just gives part of it to you in the opening scene. There you go, assholes. A scene from later on in the movie. Take it.

But slow motion is not the best way to describe the movie as a whole because if anything it's too fast paced. The story is always turning in different directions and leading to big faceoffs and action moments. You probaly saw that great shot in the trailer where a missile goes off and Ethan bounces off the side of a car. That's from a pretty awesome paramilitary attack on a bridge. There's definitely some big stuff in here that Abrams never could've done in his TV shows. Especially Felicity because that kind of thing just doesn't happen to a young girl coming of age in college. I guess Roger Ebert said it's one of those movies where the action is so constant that it gets boring, but I didn't feel that way at all. My only problem was that I had to piss and I had trouble finding a quiet dialogue scene to leave during. So take that into consideration of you are one of these people who drinks liquids.

Anyway let's get to the point. Abrams did a good job. He is not on the level of DePalma in any way, but he sort of has the same basic philosophy: squeeze as much excitement and tension as possible out of traditional suspense thriller techniques, then at the same time pull some clever little twists and tricks playing off of people's expectations for this type of suspense thriller. For example, you don't see the villain on screen as much as you see most action movie villains. For a major break in that they lead up to for a long time, the camera stays outside of the building and waits for Ethan to come back out instead of showing you what happens inside. The Rabbit's Foot is a McMuffin or a Pulp Fiction Briefcase, you never find out what it is. This way we get to avoid yet another big speech about all the horrible destruction that it would cause if the bad guys won, even though you know they won't. Do we really need a guy making a dramatic speech in front of a big screen with a computer simulation? Most directors of this type of movie say yes, Abrams says no. (The closest thing to a speech like that is Simon Pegg from SHAUN OF THE DEAD explaining what he hopes it's not, based on no evidence, sort of played for laughs.)

Already I've seen people online complaining that you don't find out what The Rabbit Foot is and you don't see how Ethan steals it. As if it was some kind of mistake. They just ran out of budget and couldn't film the scene. Or they forgot to film it. I just can't relate to these people who get upset and confused every time a movie tries some small thing to be a tiny bit different. Their movie watching licenses should probaly be suspended.

Okay if it's such a problem here you go. Imagine this little speech is in the movie, it will straighten things out.

TOM CRUISE
What the hell are we dealing with here? This isn't an actual rabbit is it?

LAURENCE FISHBURNE
I'm afraid it's not an actual rabbit's foot, and it sure as hell doesn't bring good luck. The Rabbit's Foot is a biological weapon, the baddest of the bad. You want to know how bad this thing is? So bad nobody will take credit for it. IMF, CIA, NSA, KGB, WWE... the deepest, darkest, black bag, black ops, off the record undercover top secret spooks in the world won't even put their names on this. Because some day they'll have to face God.

TOM CRUISE
What does it do?

LAURENCE FISHBURNE
I'll tell you what it does. It makes your worst nightmares look like a day at the circus, or a dog show. The Easter bunny brings you eggs, this one brings you torment and horror. It wipes out the planet in less time than it takes to zip up your pants. Or unzip. Either one. Even diluted times a thousand, one drop of this stuff could turn an entire ocean into acid. On land, one thimbleful, or an amount the size of a baby kangaroo, could wipe out an area twice the size of Antarctica.

TOM CRUISE
But Antarctica is the largest continent, there isn't an area twice the size of Antarctica.

LAURENCE FISHBURNE
And there especially won't be if Davion gets the Rabbit's Foot. Millions will die. Their lungs will melt inside their chests and start dripping out their assholes. They'll start puking up shit that looks like marshmallow creme. Their skin will fall off their bodies in one piece and their muscles will start to shrivel and when they look in the mirror and see skeletons they'll still be alive and screaming for 5-10 more minutes.

Birds and deer will go crazy and start attacking cars. Swarms of ants will be attracted to anything metal. Bees will gather at the northernmost point of every city and start stinging each other. World leaders will rip off each other's clothes and start fucking in the streets. A nightmare that will make World War 2 look like a particulary tame bat mitzvah or maybe a church picnic of some kind, on a really nice day with good sandwiches and everything. Something like that. What I'm saying is this thing is bad.

TOM CRUISE
Thank you. Now that I understand specifically what it does instead of leaving it up to my imagination, this situation is much more dramatic in my opinion.

LAURENCE FISHBURNE
Ethan, wait. There's one more thing.

TOM CRUISE
What?

LAURENCE FISHBURNE
Good luck. You're gonna need it.

TOM CRUISE
Thanks.

LAURENCE FISHBURNE
Also I've always loved you, but we can talk about that later I guess.

TOM CRUISE
Later dude.

See, insert this scene into the movie and maybe you guys can enjoy it a little more, but personally I don't think it's necessary to know what it does. Because you got a good idea it's gonna kill people. It's not gonna provide anti-aging, full-spectrum sun protection while conditioning your skin with rich emollients.

P.S. Hoffman is a great villain. He's obviously one of our best actors (we own actors so they are "ours") and I have no doubt that he could be a good scenery chewing overacting super villain in an UNDER SIEGE 3 or something like that. But what he does is more novel, he's actually pretty scary. He could be like a notorious terrorist leader or something, it doesn't really matter if he can do karate or knows how to use a gun, the important thing is his position in the organization. He's secure in the knowledge that he's one of the most powerful and dangerous people in the world. Even when he's captured he just looks at Ethan with utter contempt and disgust, like he's a little kid in Insane Clown Posse makeup who he caught writing "fart" on the side of his car. Completely immobile, he still threatens Ethan and his family and makes it not seem hollow. He could squash him like a bug but he'd rather pull his legs and wings off. Then drag him to his own family reunion and cut his dick off in front of all his great aunts and second cousins.

Laurence Fishburne is also pretty intimidating in a supporting role as one of the bosses at IMF. Michelle Monaghan doesn't have a whole lot to do but she makes lovey dovey eyes at Tom Cruise that are incredibly convincing, and that goes a long way to making the stakes more personal. All the supporting cast is at least pretty good.

And Tom Cruise is fine in his usual Tom Cruise way. Now, you might have heard one or two things on TV lately about how Tom Cruise is part of some weird scientist club and he kidnapped a teenage girl from TV and started jumping on the couch, waving a sonar machine around, or whatever. If you are interested in that kind of craziness you gotta drop it in order to watch this movie, because this is not a freak show. It's a mission impossible picture. I would love it if he just went fuckin Dr. Moreau nuts, but this is not that guy, this is just old Movie Hero Tom Cruise.

For direction, I would give Abrams a B or B-, but with a 1 for effort and full marks for attendance. I'm not surprised he's a TV director because he's got alot of this disorienting shaky cam and at times (not all times) the action scenes are hard to follow in that way that many modern action movies are hard to follow. For example there's a frenzied scene in a helicopter where I can understand a little disorientation but I at least oughta be able to figure out which character it is who almost fell out. For the most part though the action is pretty exciting. He does better than alot of veteran big screen filmatists do these days, including one of the guys who made Tom Cruise such a big star (yes Tony Scott I'm looking your way motherfucker.)

If I have one major complaint for Mr. Abrams it's dude, why you gotta torture Agent Felicity like that? What did she ever do to you? Obviously this does not affect a guy like me who has not watched Felicity or even heard of it but I'm sure alot of people who did watch that show will be pretty upset when you put her in the movie and then fuckin kill the shit out of her before she gets the chance to even really walk. When they first show her she's tied to a chair so sick she looks like a zombie. She gets an adrenaline shot that allows her to catch a gun and bust off a bunch of shots with a badass look on her face. A great moment. But soon after she gets dizzy and dies and we even see her dead body laying there with the eyes all rotted and rolling back into her head. Couldn't she have gone on an Impossible Mission first? A couple flashback shots of her spinning a stick don't count.

I mean I know the show got less popular after she cut her hair but that's AMERICA'S fucking problem, not Felicity's. At the time, slavery seemed okay to alot of white people, but we see things differently now. The same will happen with Felicity's hair cut. So don't take it out on her.

Also, looking back on the whole story after you get to the end, I'm not sure if it makes any god damn sense. I'm not sure when certain affiliations were made or why certain people would allow certain things to happen if they were in on it with the bad guys. Then again these Impossible Mission people are really into complicated plans so maybe it makes sense and it's just over my head. You can't comprehend what the Impossible Mission Force is thinking if you're in a Possible Mission Force type of mindframe.

Other than that though this is an accomplished Hollywood summer event type picture. Maybe not a transcendent one like DePalma's but at least a real well made and fun one, which is probaly more than anybody should expect from a part 3. Especially when the part 2 wasn't too hot.

NOTE: The end credits have a really horrible song by Kanye West where he keeps rappin and singin about "impossible" stuff. He was still right about George Bush, though. Anyway if you can make it through that song he also has a pretty cool remix of the classic Lalo (ABOMINABLE) Schifrin theme song.

After a storm wrecks Tom Jane's painting, his window, his boathouse, and his asshole neighbor's Mercedes he takes his son and the neighbor (the great Andre Braugher of TV's HOMICIDE: LIFE ON THE STREET) to the Food House grocery store. The place is chaotic with everybody stocking up in case of more storm and you can imagine how much worse it gets when The Mist traps everybody inside. By the way, even though this is Stephen King the grocery store is not possessed, not even the mist is possessed, it's just mist that happens to surround monsters, which may or may not be possessed. I'm not really sure if monsters can be possessed or not, I have not considered this before.

There's kind of a microcosm thing going on here. The story shows how people turn on each other due to fear. At first they band together and they trust the authority of the guys in uniform (strangely I'm talking about the guys with the Food House aprons, not the three uniformed soldiers who happen to be there). But as things get crazier tensions rise, they argue, they split into teams. Working class don't trust college boys. Locals don't trust out of town vacationers. Out-of-towners think locals are talking shit about them. The biggest split is religious when Marcia Gay Harden believes these are the end times, starts preaching, develops a flock.

This is a good movie but not a perfect one, and this religious part is the most not-perfect part. Leave it to the one Oscar winner in the cast to stink up the joint with overacting. I guess she's subtle compared to Piper Laurie as Carrie White's mother, but not by much. Luckily I expected worse based on the trailers so it didn't ruin it for me. But I think this "crazy religious lady who thinks she's a prophet" cliche should've been left in the book. It would be way scarier with some rewrites and re-acts so she's not completely nuts, she's not cruel or evil, she just has extreme religious views that endanger the people who don't agree.

There are other bumps here and there - Jane goes from telling people not to go outside to wanting to go outside himself a little fast, his son has some corny dialogue, the feisty old lady using hairspray as a blowtorch is a little too much - but overall this is a solid, well told horror story. There's nothing shockingly original about it, but there are many points when it avoids the obvious turns. For example, Jane and some other guys are in the back room when some tentacles reach in from outside. They try to tell the others about it but nobody believes them and at first they won't even come back to look at the piece of tentacle Jane hacked off with a fire axe. When they finally convince somebody to go back there it could be an "I swear, it was right here!" moment but instead the tentacle is right where they left it and they even poke it with a stick and make it wiggle. Yep, it's a tentacle.

The craziness of the Mist escalates and the people witness various strange and scary creatures. Giant bugs may or may not be involved. The creatures are well designed and look pretty real. There are some good scares and few cheap ones.

This is a great setup for a Romero style horror movie – a good location, lots of character tension, good monsters and a device to keep them out of sight and mysterious. It's rare these days that a movie takes a good, simple premise like that and follows through with it, but this one does. And they have a secret weapon in Tom Jane. He is the protective father, the take charge hero, the nice guy talking common sense, the macho guy ready to take a risk, all wrapped up in one guy. Director Frank Darabont (co-writer of ELM STREET 3) said he wanted to give Jane a role that really took advantage of his talents. I guess he must not know about STANDER. But this is a good role for Jane.

Although the theme of how fear divides people obviously applies well to post 9-11 type America, this movie feels timeless. There's nothing tying it to modern pop culture or current film trends. Except for the digital effects it almost could've been made any time from the '70s until now. In fact it's so old school that on the DVD Darabont includes a black-and-white version of the movie - I'll have to try that out next time I watch it.

"The ending" seems to be controversial partly because it's different from the book. I can see the complaints, there are other directions it could go which could be interesting. But man, the way it ends is such a punch in the balls I had to kind of admire it. You like Tom Jane and wish things could work out for him, but it looks bad for him. Then his fate turns out worse than you could have guessed. Film buffs usually have a kneejerk reaction against happy endings (for example I can't talk about Spielberg's WAR OF THE WORLDS without somebody saying the whole movie is worthless because the son survived at the end). It's funny for once to see people mad because an ending is too darked and fucked up. You don't get that too often.

In the Stephen King movie hierarchy, well, this is not a masterpiece like CARRIE or THE SHINING. But it's on the tier just beneath those, the good solid movies destined to maybe be a little underrated and forgotten but definitely be pulled out every couple of years and enjoyed.

I think it was my colleague in Badass Studies, Mr. Jeff McCloud, who first recommended MR. MAJESTYK to me a year or two ago. When he said that Charles Bronson played a watermelon farmer in it, I knew it was my type of movie. What better way to fulfill the criteria of the THEORY OF BADASS JUXTAPOSITION than to grow a field of watermelons? I mean I guess maybe if they were flowers it would seem more sensitive, but this business of a dude growing watermelons is definitely not the obvious choice for a Badass. Which is why it's such a good choice.

So I was an idiot to put off watching the movie as long as I did. What really did it was I was lookin through a used book store (seriously, I read books) when I saw the book MR. MAJESTYK by none other than Elmore Leonard. I pulled it out. The dude on the front was definitely not Charlse Bronson. But I read the back, and sure enough, it was about a badass watermelon farmer.

Well shit man, you should've mentioned it was Elmore Leonard. If the movie is an indication, this is one of his leaner ones, with less of the clever dialogue and irony, and more of the ass kickin. The filmatism is that raw '70s type, where it sometimes feels less epic and more like CHiPs, but not usually. (To be fair the video is full framed and could use a little of the remastering, and that always makes '70s movies seem like TV.) There is a pretty great theme song that lets you know right off that the movie means business, just like a Dirty Harry movie or the better Robert Clouse karate pictures.

Of course it is Charles Bronson who is gonna make or break a picture like this, and let's face it he's obviously gonna make it. The role is perfect for him - a quiet, righteous working class farmer motherfucker who stands up for the people but only because he wants them to pick his watermelons. He's down with the mexican immigrants, and this is the one major weakness of the picture because being the '70s, you got a lot of mexicans in here who look suspiciously non-mexican. What was it about our cinematic past, man, that these filmatists thought they could only hire white actors? We always laugh at the idea of shakespeare or kabuki having men play the women but then everywhere you look in our old movies you see white dudes playin indians, mexicans, chinese, etc. I mean when Spike Lee made DO THE RIGHT THING, he didn't paint a black dude white to play Sal. No, he actually went out and found Danny Aiello, a genuine italian american type actor. Because it would look ridiculous to have Ossie Davis pretending to be Sal. That is why he plays da Mayor instead. I mean it's obvious. Were casting directors insane back then?

Especially for a picture like MR. MAJESTYK that pretends to be a little bit progressive in race and class type issues it is kinda sad that they couldn't look long enough to find actual mexicans to play all the mexicans. But oh well, I'll get over it.

I should probaly mention, the plot is not only about the watermelon industry. It is more about complications thereof. The trouble begins when Mr. Majestyk drives up with his picking crew, ready to pick the melons. But there are a bunch of winos out there already pickin em. Turns out an obnoxious white dude is trying to pull a swindle on him, bringing a crew of winos together to pick the melons for cheap, so that Majestyk will pay him. Majestyk feels bad for the winos but he's already promised the work to this crew he brought in, and he's not about to screw them, even to save a little money. So he tries to chase the white bastard away. And then it gets messy. There is a shotgun involved, to name one example. But it's innocent, and nobody gets killed.

This bullshit gets reported to the police, though, and Majestyk has to spend some time in jail while things are straightened out. This completely screws him because if he doesn't get those watermelons picked right away the whole crop will be wasted.

As luck would have it, he gets transferred in the same bus with a notorious mafia hitman who's trying to escape. So what he does, he helps the hitman escape, then tries to trap him for the police, so he can make a deal and get back to the watermelon farm. The guy is all over the news, but Majestyk isn't impressed. He figures he can handle him. Things don't work out as planned though so now he has to worry about the white dude, the mafia, AND father time and his impending attack on the freshness of the watermelons.

Well I don't want to give anything away man but the watermelons end up gettin it. And I mean gettin it bad. The mafia blows the shit out of those watermelons. God damn it, man, you feel bad for Mr. Majestyk.

And the watermelons really are the key to this movie. Majestyk has one easy goal. And he looks straight ahead to it. He doesn't let a stupid thing like a mafia hit list distract him. It reminded me alot of Parker, actually, his simple minded, goal oriented ass kicking. No matter how complicated things are he always keeps his eyes on the prize.

Because of this great, streamlined Badass plot I think this is definitely up there with the top Charles Bronson pictures. Thank you everyone who recommended it to me. I'll spread the word too.

This is a movie that's not on video as far as I know. In order to see it you either gotta travel through time, or you gotta deal with those seemy individuals who sail the seven seas putting the stuntmen out of work. Or at least the non-copyright holding movie transferers at 5minutestolive.com.

MR. NO LEGS is a badly acted low budget movie about two cops (one with mustache) investigating the death of one cop (the one with the mustache)'s sister. They don't know what we the audience know, that she was accidentally killed by her no-good-drug-dealing boyfriend who they will not be able to bring to justice because his sloppiness earned his face an intimate date with a shotgun shell, chaperoned by the gang's toughest enforcer, Lou.

That does not sound exciting, but what if I were to tell you that Lou HAS NO LEGS? And in fact, I had to check IMDb to find out his name was Lou because he is mostly referred to as "No Legs"? What would you do then, smart guy? You would watch the movie is what you would do.

So he has no legs, but how does he get around, you're wondering. Well he has a wheelchair just like any other guy with no legs, but it is a pretty good wheelchair because it has shotguns built into the armrests. It also has good places to keep his throwing stars. Now, at first I thought the whole power of No Legs was confined to the wheelchair. I mean anybody is tougher with two shotguns at their disposal, no matter how many legs they got. So while his awesome wheelchair may be empowering to some disabled arms enthusiasts, it is not enough to make this guy remarkable. He just has good taste in wheelchairs. Without the chair who is he? He gets driven around by his right hand man, Rance "without my sperm there would be no live action Grinch movie" Howard. I figured that was his weakness, if Rance is driving him around and they get stopped by some rivals, he can't get to his chair from the backseat and he's fucked.

Well, that's what I thought, but that's because I was underestimating No Legs. This guy is actually skilled in the martial arts. He is real good at punches and blocks and he can lift himself up with his hands. Many people probaly believe that having no legs is an advantage in the sense that you can focus on your handwork and never have to worry about stupid kicks. But No Legs doesn't go for that bullshit. He uses his stump area to ram a guy more than once. Bruce Lee can probaly kick a guy better, but can he kick a guy while having no legs? I don't think so. No Legs is good in his slo-mo fight. I would not say that he is necessarily a crippled master, because he can't spin a stick or anything. But he's better than me.

The guy who plays No Legs is named Ron Slinker, and apparently he wasn't in any other movies. He was a good find though because he really does seem like a tough, ornery bastard who wouldn't let the loss of his legs keep him down. I mean look at the guy on that poster, he looks like he would bite your nose off if it came to it. In the movie we don't get the whole story about what happened to his legs, but it sounds like they got cut off as a punishment for fucking up. Can you imagine that? If you're in the mafia and they send a message to you by cutting your legs off, would you want to stay in the game? If so, would you be able to pull it off, without losing any of your job responsibilities? I don't think you would. But No Legs did.

This is kind of a freaky movie, there is some unusual shit that occurs. For example, there is an interracial catfight in a bar started by a racist white bitch. During the fight, both a midget and a drag queen are able to break bottles over people's heads. Afterwards No Legs stabs the white bitch to death with broken glass, and we find out that she's the mustache cop's best informant. 'Cause the good guys are a bunch of racists I guess.

The movie was directed by Ricou Browning, who played the Creature From the Black Lagoon in some of the sequels, and was apparently an Olympic swimmer. He has all the directing skill you would expect from an Olympic athlete who competed in any other event than directing movies. He actually specialized in aquatic movies, directing underwater sequences and what not. His first directing job was on Flipper. I don't think he had his land legs back when he directed this one so it's kind of goofy. But in a good way.

The only real problem with this movie is that No Legs is not the main character. In fact, I bet the movie wasn't supposed to be about him at all, they only changed the title and marketing after they realized he was the best part of the movie. At the script stage he probaly just seemed like a colorful henchman, like the guy with the exploding hockey puck in THE RUNNING MAN. But you know how America feels about disabled people triumphing over impossible odds. You can't help but root for this guy. For a while it seems like he's an anti-hero, as he gets pissed at his boss for saying he's gonna end up on the sidewalk with a tin cup full of pencils and decides to take over the gang. But it gets more and more about the cops and then 2/3 of the way through the movie No Legs gets killed. Then the last part is an endless car chase for a dirty cop. No Legs is secondary in everything but the title and the poster. And, come to think of it, our hearts.

Well here's another American classic from AMC, the british version of The Mummy. Chris Lee plays the mummy and Pete Cushing plays the British archaeologist who gets bit on the ass by the mummy's curse. I mean I don't mean the mummy bites him on the ass or anything, that never happens. But after Pete, Pete Sr. and Uncle Joe unearth the princess Ananka in Egypt (best line: "There's something evil in there Uncle Joe, I felt it. Oh well, let's get it open.") this angry Egyptian follows their British asses home and starts reading scrolls at em. Next thing of course the mummy's come back from the dead and the Egyptian is commanding him to kill the party of three who fucked with the princess's tomb.

This isn't that good of a setup though, really. I mean you got one stiff, stumbling mummy, three potential victims, two of them old, one of them bedridden, the young one with a gimpy leg, and you know the mummy's never gonna get Pete anyway. So I mean how much can possibly happen here? This is so little to work with that they have to spend about 10-15 minutes in the middle with Pete narrating a little educational film about ancient Egyptian burial rituals.

I'm not saying the movie is terrible, and I can't blame this Hammer studio for wanting to do a mummy movie to seem like a classic. But watching this made me realize something. The Universal mummy movie isn't all that hot either. Boris Karloff looks like gangbusters in his mummy makeup at the beginning, but then he's just an Egyptian priest for the rest of the movie and it's pretty good but it's dull compared to Dracula, Frankenstein or Invisible Man. So I don't want to sound racist but I think mummies in general are a big load of shit.

I mean think about vampires. They got the basic mummy characteristics: back from the dead, live in a tomb, don't mind getting shot. BUT, they can think for themselves, walk at a reasonable speed, talk, wear capes, turn into bats, suck blood, hypnotize people. I mean WHAT the fuck is a mummy thinking, all he can do is lumber around and strangle people. It's like the difference between Flash and Superman. Superman can do everything Flash can do plus fly, shoot beams out of his eyes, time travel, all kinds of shit. Just ask Kalspirit.

Plus vampires got the whole romance deal, the attraction to blood, the deadly but sexy thing. They kill to live, to stay young. And Frankensteins have the playing god, creating life theme and the whole misunderstood innocent brute kills by accident deal. But this Chris Lee mummy? He just does what he's told and all he's told is to get revenge for these three going in some lady's tomb. I mean it's like "Hey you kids, get offa my lawn!" That's not classic horror, sorry bud.

This mummy is nothing but a remote control zombie. But he's some kind of rich boy priss of a zombie, lives in a big palace crypt with gold and treasures and servants and what not. American zombies are the real deal, they just live in a little hole in the ground, they work their asses off to bring home the brains and although they may be mindless zombies they at least don't have some dumbass in a fez telling them what's what. They stumble wherever the fuck they wanna stumble as long as there's not some torch or something there scaring them.

That said, Hammer's The Mummy does get a little more interesting late in the game when you start realizing what an imperialist prick this archaeologist Pete is. He hears the Egyptian is living nearby and you know what this fucker says? "But what's an Egyptian doing here?" Can you believe that? Like, "There goes the neighborhood." Next thing you know he's gonna be telling us oh no, no, I don't have nothing against Egyptians, in fact I have three Egyptian friends.

Well Pete goes to this Egyptian's place to "welcome him to the neighborhood." They get to talking shop and the Egyptian mentions the idea that maybe stealing corpses from graves and putting them on display in museums is a tiny bit of desecration. You know, in a way, if you think about it. But Pete not only disagrees but starts talking shit about ancient Egyptian religion, saying that you have to be an imbecile to believe in it. Even though he's seen the mummy with his own damn eyes!

I mean this Pete is just unbelievable. This is the same white supremist attitude that asshole Count Dracula had when he bit Mamuwalde and cursed him with the name Blacula. So even though the mummy isn't a monster you can relate to like a vampire or a frankenstein, you start siding with the Egyptian just cause this British Pete is such a dick.

I really think mummies are all style and no substance. The Egyptian rituals and bandages and what not are real cool, but they're just gussying up a monster with no soul. So I mean if you're THAT into scrolls and sarcophagi then go ahead and watch this, but REALLY people, I think we can do better than a fucking mummy.

PROLOGUE: Long ago, a brave warrior (Jet Li) and a graceful dancer turned actress (Michelle Yeoh) did the movie TAI CHI MASTER together. Then both went to Hollywood and did Lethal Weapon and James Bond and shit. But they had not forgotten each other. They were gonna star in CROUCHING TIGER, HIDDEN DRAGON together. But Jet backed out for the incredibly classy reason that he had promised his wife to take the year off from movies and be with her while she was pregnant. Years later, they had another chance to do a movie together in Ronny Yu's FEARLESS - but Michelle's scenes got cut out of the theatrical version. So it was this last summer, 15 years later, that the two were finally reunited on the big screen. BUT IT WAS IN THE FUCKING MUMMY 3! How's that for a Tales From the Crypt type twist ending?

Okay, I should get a couple disclaimers out of the way. First of all, mummies are not one of my favorite monsters. Off the top of my head the only mummy movie I can think of that I like is BUBBA HO-TEP, but that didn't really need to be a mummy to be good. It just needed to be a slow moving monster so an elderly Elvis could be a fair match for it. If it was about a giant space slug or mutant sloth it could also be good if it had the same characterization of a sad, lonely Elvis Presley. The Universal MUMMY with Boris Karloff is a great monster at the beginning, then he disappears and it's just Karloff in a fez for the rest of the movie. It's no DRACULA, I'll tell you that. And as you can see above I didn't think the Hammer version was that great either.

As for the MUMMY that started this series, I hated the fuckin thing. I remember it as having no sense of build or rhythm at all, it was all clatter and mayhem and stupidity. In RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK they have scenes where he's at school teaching, right? But when Stephen Sommers rips off RAIDERS he's worried that your attention span is too short for a story to develop so in an early scene in a library the love interest character played by Rachel Weiss for no reason at all clutzily destroys the entire library Jar Jar style. I hated his style enough that I decided not to watch Sommers movies anymore, so I skipped out on part 2. I only watch non-Sommers spin-offs such as THE SCORPION KING (which was much more fun).

So when I found out Rob Cohen (DRAGON: THE BRUCE LEE STORY, DRAGONHEART, THE FAST DRAGON THE FURIOUS, etc.) was taking over I thought I would go see it. He also makes crappy, stupid movies, but it's a style of crappy stupid movie that is more watchable for me. It's kind of like after Arizona finally started celebrating Martin Luther King Day you didn't have to boycott it anymore, same thing here, without Stephen Sommers I was excited to watch a stupid MUMMY movie with poor Jet Li and Michelle Yeoh in the cast.

But then when it came time to put my money where my mouth was I couldn't do it, because we actually had a good movie summer. Usually I'd have fun seeing a crappy movie in August (I paid to see Rob Cohen's STEALTH, for example, and didn't regret it) but this year I really felt like if I was gonna go to a theater I might as well just see DARK KNIGHT again. It seemed almost unethical to go see something I knew was crap when there was one that good still playing.

But now THE MUMMY TOMB OF THE DRAGON EMPEROR A FILM BY ROB COHEN comes to the DVD and I'll be damned, this is actually a legitimately great adventure movie! Brendan Fraser returns as the globetrotting hero Rick O'Connell, a gun tot-- nah, just jerkin your chain, this is a piece of shit, but I kind of enjoyed some of it. Details to follow.

Jet is the wicked emperor who conquered China and built the Great Wall and could shoot fireballs (not sure if this is historically accurate). Michelle is a witch who brought him to a secret place to find spells that would help him defeat his last enemy, Death. Basically the whole trouble in this movie stems from the emperor's best friend General Ming violating the ancient Bros Before Hoes covenant. The emperor said "Let no man touch her - she is mine" but then General Ming fell in love with her and impregnated her, so the Emperor had him drawn and quartered. Luckily, the witch pulled a Jamie Kennedy style practical joke where she did the wrong spell and instead of giving him eternal life she cursed him and his army to become terra cotta warriors.

Once all that's explained it skips to the 20th century and we soon come to the sad realization that this movie still stars Brendan Fraser. Now, I feel bad saying this, because the guy seems pretty nice. But I must be honest. I fucking hate Brendan Fraser. How does this guy star in movies? He has all these old timey hardass lines but they don't sound at all believable coming out of his mouth. He has jokes and he delivers them wrong, so they don't make sense. He has a son in the movie who looks like he's at most ten years younger than him. He's not believable as being that age or as being a father in general, or a war veteran. Basically, every aspect of the character does not fit the actor. I don't get it. He must have some charisma, people like him, but I don't see it. To be fair I'm a little color blind, his charisma might be a shade of green that I have trouble with or something.

Did you see the trailer? I did, about ten thousand times. One thing that bugged the shit out of me is when the crazy pilot says "I'd tell you to put your seatbelts on, but I couldn't afford to get any!" Fraser looks disgusted, laughs sarcastically and then sarcastically says "Why am I laughing?"

It doesn't make any sense! Clearly Fraser is supposed to be charmed by the crazy pilot and laugh along with him, then realize that his life is in danger and ask himself "Why am I laughing?" But it doesn't make any sense for the laugh to be sarcastic, or the line, for that matter. What I don't understand though is how Fraser does the scene wrong, then it ends up in the trailer, and then ends up in the movie. There was plenty of time to fix it. Shit, you should've told me you didn't have time, I would've figured out some way to fix it for you just for the betterment of mankind.

The early scenes that introduce Fraser's character Rick and his wife Evey in retired boredom are extremely painful. It's the type of "humor" where adults act like annoying little kids and that's supposed to count as comedy. They also have not one but two "jokes" where music is playing and then it skids to a stop to denote wackiness (I wonder why they didn't go for the needle scraping off the record routine?)

Making things worse is the fact that Rachel Weiss knew when to call it quits so they replace her with poor Maria Bello, trying her best at an English accent. Bello is a great actress who comes across like an idiot in this moronic horse shit. But hey, let's consider her paycheck on this one a reward for A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE.

Anyway, their dashing adventurer son has skipped out of college to dig up the titular tomb, meanwhile his parents are tricked into delivering some magic crystal deal to the same place and this resurrects the emperor who walks around, then turns into a three headed dragon and flies around, then turns back into a man and never thinks to do the dragon trick again, which in my opinion is very, very poor strategy on his part. His plan is to revive his army at the magic pool of whatever and such and then who knows, all kinds of evil and what not, etc., would potentially, you know. You can imagine. That is what is at stake here. All that kind of stuff.

Luckily Michelle Yeoh is alive. Why is she still alive? I will let her character explain with actual dialogue from the movie:

"I would have died too by his hand, if the yeti had not found me and brought me to this pool."

Yes, that is correct, that is why this movie is worth watching, because Michelle Yeoh plays a witch who clashed with an evil emperor in ancient China but luckily a yeti found her and brought her to a magic pool so she lived into the post WWII period when the emperor was brought back to life and then she killed him again.

Of course, when she says that line in the movie it's not a complete surprise, because there was already a part earlier when her daughter (also immortal) is in trouble so she yells a bunch of words and then some CGI yetis show up and help her. You may have heard about the scene where they kick a guy through the air and then celebrate a field goal. What made me happy was that after the battle they stay in the movie and help them up the mountain. It's like THE WIZARD OF OZ, they just pick up different weird characters along the way and nobody questions it. (Unfortunately after a while the yetis disappear and never come back. But hopefully they will get a spinoff prequel like the Scorpion King.)

Here's another line of dialogue that made me laugh:

"Hey, mom - sorry I blamed you guys for raising the emperor."

I wish they would stick to the heartfelt lines, they're way funnier than the smartass ones. The movie's pretty fun whenever it's not trying to be fun.

Like the first MUMMY movie and probaly the second one that I boycotted this one has constant show-offy special effects sequences, some better than others. The yetis, unfortunately, look like video game characters. But I did think the emperor mummy guy was sort of cool. He's like a video game character also because of the fireballs, but I like how he's a clunky clay man whose face sometimes breaks to reveal a ZOMBI style rotted face beneath. Since he can grow back the clay parts he actually breaks off a chunk of his head in one scene and throws it as a weapon. I can respect that. Also Michelle Yeoh resurrects all the people who died making the Great Wall and uses them as an army. I thought those guys looked cool although I didn't understand why some of them still had faces - I was under the impression that the Great Wall had been built quite some time ago. Haven't checked wikipedia yet though.

Jet Li and his special effects team make a pretty good villain, but you can't help but think they're wasting this guy. Of course he gets to fight a little bit, but not as much as he would in pretty much any other movie he's ever made. Michelle doesn't do much either, they do have a short sword fight where she spins around a couple times. But really this is all lead-up to the showdown movie fans have been begging for for years: ladies and gentlemen, the long awaited duel between Jet Li, 15 time gold medal winning champion of Beijing Wushu Team, and the legendary Brendan Fraser, of MONKEY BONE and MRS. WINTERBOURNE. Li started out fighting in the Fanzi Eagle Claw style, Fraser I believe started out in ENCINO MAN.

This brings up an interesting question. Not just "how am I supposed to believe Brendan Fraser defeating Jet Li in hand-to-hand combat?" but "how am I supposed to root for Brendan Fraser against Jet Li?" They try every trick in the book, including making Jet completely fucking evil, putting Michelle Yeoh on the Fraser team, even giving him yetis. Still it takes effort to side with him. Maybe they should've made it a tie.

Now that I've seen the movie I will not stand for any of that "ironically the INDIANA JONES ripoff was better than the INDIANA JONES sequel" business. I understand there are harsh feelings because you didn't get what you wanted out of that one, but if you're gonna claim this garbage is better you're clearly too emotional to make a serious argument. But that's okay, maybe this stupid movie will cheer you up. For those who get a kick out of watching the stupidest shit Hollywood can waste money on, this one gives way more bang for your buck than a 10,000 BC, and the pacing is not quite as pan-banging-against-your-head as part 1. So I didn't regret it. On the other hand, DARK KNIGHT is on DVD. I could've been watching that.

Or volunteering at a food bank. I'm sorry, everybody.

12/12/08

MUNICH and SWORD OF GIDEON

You know, MUNICH is almost the movie I was hoping SYRIANA would be. SYRIANA has alot to say about the complicated way the world works, but it doesn't get you excited about it. You're probaly not gonna be sitting on the edge of your seat. More likely you'll be scratching your chin saying, "Interesting, interesting." I'd rather see a movie that can be complex and political without sacrificing in the awesome department. A good balance of substance and badass. And that's what this is.

Okay so maybe MUNICH isn't as true to life as SYRIANA (in fact, some people think the real guy it's based on made up the whole story and never worked for Mossad) but it sure is a more entertaining movie. Eric Bana (winner of the secret, recently declassified 2001 lead badass outlaw award for CHOPPER) plays Avner, a small time Israeli agent personally chosen by the prime minister to lead a team of assassins to kill 11 people believed to be involved in the planning of the massacre of the Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics.

I read a quote from Steve Spielberg (who, incidentally, is the director of this movie) that got me real excited. He talked about a scene where Bana's character has a conversation with a PLO terrorist, and he said "Without that scene it's just a Charles Bronson movie." I thought Oh shit, a Charles Bronson movie with one extra scene? I'm there!

Really it's not a Charles Bronson movie though, and not just because Charles Bronson isn't in it. I mean I'm sure he would've been if he could've, but that's not the point. The point is that the dialogue actually specifically says that Avner is not Charles Bronson, he's pretty much a regular guy, not a hot shot agent who could be suspected of this type of business.

Other than the exclusion of Charles Bronson, the cast in this movie is dead-on perfect. Avner leads a team of five, so this is an ensemble. There are not overly familiar faces, unless you count Geoffrey Rush, who disappears into his role anyway. One guy I thought was from STANDER, but he wasn't. Another guy I couldn't figure out where I recognized him from, turned out to be the director of LA HAINE who also is in AMELIE. Daniel Craig is in there, and since I haven't seen LAYER CAKE or travelled into the future to see him as James Bond, this will probaly always be how I think of the dude. This right here is a Best Supporting Badass role if I've ever seen one. Looking at him, it's hard to believe he is actually alive and looking like that in 2006. He looks like a face that would only exist in the '70s, by 2006 this face should be dead or bloated. And he's a great character who doesn't second guess the revenge as much as everybody else, but he's not crazy or anything. He's just a bad motherfucker. He almost steals the movie.

And Bana gives his best performance since CHOPPER. I don't think he'll ever get to play a character as good as Chopper again, because really, there aren't any characters as good as Chopper. But this shows some of his other acting chops, and he doesn't have to be emotionally reserved like he was in the Hulk. Did you know this guy started out as a standup comedian? In Australia he even had a comedy show called The Eric Bana Show. I haven't seen it so I am just gonna guess that it is the Aussie version of The Steve Harvey Show. Anyway, for a comedian the motherfucker sure knows how to brood. He is one of our best brooders.

What's great is the movie really works as a thriller. You got these bad lookin motherfuckers sneaking around spying, planting bombs, trying not to blow up the wrong people, trying not to get caught since they don't officially work for Mossad. So you've got your badass revenge, and if they were getting revenge for some fictional crime it would be pretty enjoyable. But obviously Munich really happened (whether or not Avner did) so there's another dimension to this. From the very beginning they make you feel uncomfortable about this vengeance. Every name they cross off the list just escalates the Israel-Palestine violence, so they might as well just keep adding to the list. And even if that wasn't the case, being the ones to perform these covert executions takes a big mental toll on the killers. Except for Daniel Craig, he seems to kind of enjoy it, but he's one of a kind.

Some people would expect Spielberg to make a movie only sympathetic towards the Israelis in this situation. And obviously you can relate to what they feel they have to do. But outside of the actual Munich massacre scenes, you never see anybody that seems like a villain. The people on Avner's to-kill list just seem like ordinary people, people with families, people with desks and ties. And they don't even know what the people did. For all we know the Mossad had their information wrong, or put them on the list for other reasons.

The movie is already intense from the brief opening titles, which has the screen filled with the names of cities - New York, Amsterdam, London... all cities where terrorist attacks have taken place - which fade away leaving only Munich. So I'm pretty sure Spielberg is talking about more than just Munich specifically. It's almost as if this is both a great thriller and also ABOUT something. Hmmmm.

Actually, a good example of the movie's thoughtful side is right in the beginning, where they explain the Munich massacre through re-enactments and actual news coverage. There's news footage where it's incorrectly reported that the Israelis have all survived and all of the terrorists have been killed. And Spielberg shows an old Arab lady sobbing at this news. It's just one little shot but it reminds us that we have to look at things from different angles to understand who we're dealing with in this world. That shows you right there that it's a more complicated problem than just killing a list of terrorists. Unless that old lady is on the list, I'm not sure.

MUNICH is definitely one of my favorite movies of last year. I saw it this year but it's one of those ones they just squeaked out right before the end of the year in a couple cities so that it would technically be considered last year. Alot of people have made a big deal about how it hasn't gotten the usual Oscar push, not alot of advertising and sending out screeners and crap, and after a Time Magazine cover story Spielberg didn't do anymore interviews or publicity. And this might be the reason why it hasn't won alot of the critics awards that generally pave the path to Oscarland. But personally I think Spielberg is playing it smart. He has probaly heard rumors that I am trying to figure out a way to revive the Outlaw Awards after several years of hibernation. MUNICH is definitely one of the contenders for many categories and it's a good idea not to spoil that momentum with a bunch of silly fuckin Oscars.

Anyway, I like what the movie says about vengeance, about the endless cycle of violence, and all that business. If it wins a whole bunch of awards, it deserves them. But not just because it's one of them Important movies. It has something that in movies is even more important than Importance. It's entertaining. Who would've thought that the year's best badass picture would be directed by Steve Spielberg, of all people? You could make an argument for A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE, which is probaly my favorite movie of the year, but then who would've expected David Cronenberg to be the guy either? I'm not sure which is the better movie but I think this is the more Badass. There are scenes in MUNICH where Avner and his team are walking down the street, carrying grocery bags and briefcases and those types of things, the things that are supposed to show that they are just five ordinary indivuals who happen to be walking down the sidewalk at the same time doing regular and not secret things. The grocery bag says "I'm taking home my groceries" but the look on his face says "I'm gonna kill a motherfucker and after that I got a long list of other motherfuckers that I'm also gonna kill." That shot right there, that's badass cinema. That's what it's all about.

After seeing MUNICH I found out about SWORD OF GIDEON, a 1986 TV movie based on the same book, VENGEANCE. I guess MUNICH pretty much makes SWORD OF GIDEON obsolete, because it's a better cast and better filmatism. It's more suspenseful, more thoughtful and more cinematic. But SWORD OF GIDEON is still pretty good.

This version stars Steven Bauer, who is actually Cuban. According to Hollywood logic, it's too phoney to have an american play the lead Israeli, but you can hire an Australian or a Cuban. More exotic. Anyway, we all thank Steven Bauer for his service to our country. And by that I mean SCARFACE. But let's be honest, he's no Eric Bana. He's not as convincing in this role. I'm sure he's a smart guy, but his face doesn't tell us that. I feel like an asshole for even thinking this, but there were times when the boyish look on his face reminded me of Freddy Prinze Jr. I wasn't always believing he was on top of things as a master secret agent oughta be.

And the rest of the team can't match the one in MUNICH, but they're pretty good. Instead of a meek guy for the bombmaker, they got Michael York. The document guy, Hans, is Robert Joy (he played the slow-witted, half-burnt sharpshooter in LAND OF THE DEAD. Perhaps more importantly he is in the episode of MOONLIGHTING that Bruce Willis did a dvd commentary for). The boss character played by Geoffrey Rush in MUNICH is played by Rod Steiger in this one.

It has about the same running time as MUNICH, clocking in at just under 3 bucks. The storyline is pretty similar, with some variations. Instead of the matress bomb in the hotel there's a car seat bomb in a car. The little girl doesn't come back and answer the phone, but there's similar trouble with a wife or girlfriend triggering the car-seat bomb. The bombmaker doesn't blow himself up, but gets bombed by someone else. The perfume lady is in there, and the zip guns. The whole scene with the Israelis sharing a safehouse with PLO guys was made up for MUNICH, but SWORD OF GIDEON has some things you don't see in the Spielberg version. The team gets bombed one or two more times, we see a little bit of their training, and of Avner's dad. There's a good scene at the New York apartment where it seems like the family is getting firebombed or something, but it turns out a kid hit a baseball through the window.

This version plays more like a straight spy thriller, it doesn't pay as much attention to the morality of the revenge, and doesn't linger on the violence to make you uncomfortable. There are some tense, suspenseful scenes where you're rooting for them to pull off the bombings without getting any civilians. But by the end of course Avner is disillusioned, he decides he's accomplished nothing and he makes a speech that maybe puts a little too fine a point on it.

MUNICH proves that SWORD OF GIDEON could do with a little less explaining. For example, in this version the bombmaker shows Avner the zip gun he built, explains how it is disguised as part of the bike and does a demonstration of how it works, then they use it. In MUNICH they just have it, and they use it, and you understand what it is because they are using it.

I don't want to criticize SWORD OF GIDEON for not being MUNICH, though. I was still able to enjoy the movie even shortly after seeing MUNICH, so I'd say it cuts the mustard. I don't know if the real life Avner is full of shit or not, but even if he is he's inspired a great suspense story that says something about the blunt way we deal with complex problems in the modern world.

I believe there are different levels of slasher movies. There are the masterpiece ones like HALLOWEEN and TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE - ingenious, masterful works of art that happen to be about weirdos on murder sprees. Below that there are the perennial favorites, not necessarily on the same level but that I like to dig out every few years: FRIDAY THE 13TH sequels, SLUMBER PARTY MASSACRE, THE PROWLER, BLACK CHRISTMAS, HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO ME, THE BURNING, SLEEPAWAY CAMP, that kind of stuff. The best in that category are the ones that really master the mechanics of the form. They have great chase scenes, new and innovative forms of fake violence, spooky atmosphere and imagery. And then they usually have an unexpectedly weird touch or two, a few clever surprises, and maybe some laughs (usually unintentional, which is kind of better because I don't like alot of clownin around in my horror).

Since almost all of the best are made in the '70s and '80s I have to admit that part of the appeal is a certain vibe, a nostalgia for that time period and a reaction to whatever modern form of slickness has developed in horror movies since. So I think for me and even moreso for alot of my horror purist buddies the old ones can get away with a level of crappiness that the new ones can't. I got buddies who will go on and on about hating the characters in some modern horror movie and not believe me when I try to tell them that almost all of their favorite slasher movies from the '80s were inhabited by characters who were just as obnoxious, but with different clothes and hair.

Anyway, below that are the ones that get by only on that vibe. You sort of enjoy watching them just for that feeling they give, but they're not actually very good (some of the NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET sequels, most of the HALLOWEEN sequels, THE HILLS HAVE EYES 2, etc.). Or sometimes you only like them because they're bad and you love them for it.

And then the lowest category I guess would be the ones that just aren't enjoyable to watch at all, and that's what you try to avoid, and what you expect from a slasher movie (or horror in general) these days.

Making a slasher movie today you can't really aim for the top category, which is unattainable. And trying to come up with a new twist on slashers is very risky, it tends to lead to embarassing postmodernism (fucking BEHIND THE MASK: THE SQUIRM-INDUCINGLY AWFUL RISE OF SOME SKINNY JACKASS IN A STUPID MASK WHO HAS A GIRL'S NAME) or in a best case scenario a decent slasher comedy like SEVERANCE. I think the best thing to aim for is a FRIDAY THE 13TH 2-3 type movie that accepts its lot in life as a re-enactment of an old formula, and tries to give the audience an enjoyable night at the movies. MY BLOODY VALENTINE 3-D worked for me because, while it is not as good as those two, it definitely aims for that area (in 3-D!) and doesn't land too far off the mark.

In the prologue we learn of a tragic Valentine's Day mining accident with one survivor, who it turns out murdered the other miners with a pick-axe to conserve air. (Wonder if the 7 Dwarfs came to a similar fate?) Now the survivor/murderer is in a coma. But a nurse notices he's out of bed, and we can see that he's standing behind her.

Instead of showing us some violence now, director Patrick Lussier (DRACULA 2000... but he's getting better) cuts to a few minutes later when the police arrive on the scene, and what we see (in 3-D!) is a cornucopia of mayhem - people cut in half, rib cages torn open, body parts laying here and there. The sold out audience of people-who-are-younger-than-me that I saw it with all laughed, and this is exactly the type of attitude you need to enjoy this movie. Next the miner heads for the tunnel where the accident took place, which has already been made over into a teen party spot, so it's less than ten minutes in and we already get our third (first onscreen) massacre, which includes not only a 3-D eyeball-popping in the tradition of the classic FRIDAY THE 13TH 3-D moneyshot, but an even more audacious death involving the chance meeting between a head and the sharp edge of a shovel.

Now we skip ahead 10 years. One of the surviving partiers, some guy from DAWSON'S CREEK who looked too old to be playing somebody that age, now looks to young to be playing the sheriff. For some reason most slasher movies take place in small towns where everybody takes over their parents' job and everybody knows each other. But apparently they don't know each other that well, otherwise they'd know who it is going around in a mask killing everybody. Of course, something kicks off a new set of miner murders and it becomes one of those slasher whodunits with all the red herrings. Did that miner guy actually survive? Or is it this asshole sheriff? Or the great Kevin Tighe (TODAY YOU DIE), who seems nicer than he usually plays, and therefore might be hiding something? Or how about retired cop Tom Atkins (HALLOWEEN III, THE FOG, MANIAC COP, etc.), who gets an actual role and not just a cameo? Or maybe a girl? Or the kid? Or the dog?

The plot and characters are the usual, the important thing is the mechanics are there, and the payoffs. There are plenty of tense chases, people hiding around corners trying to be quiet, trying to block doors long enough to find keys to unlock windows to escape before the pickaxe cuts a large enough hole through the door to reach the doorknob. This miner pretty much sticks to the ax gimmick the whole time, but there are many variations which are especially effective in 3-D. The ax flies at us, it pokes through a window at us, it rests on the ground as our collective head is shoved toward it. The setting is varied - of course there are multiple chases through shadowy mine tunnels, but there are other locations too, most notably a closed grocery store (always a good place for a cat and mouse chase). Lussier was an editor on SCREAM and HALLOWEEN H20, so that may be how he knows how to make these scenes flow.

When it does slow down and people have to talk about different things that will lead to solving the mystery the 3-D helps pass the time. Did you know that windshields look really cool in 3-D? I don't know why. And glass in general - windows, goggles on an evil miner's mask, you name it. But really there's not as much down time as in most slasher movies, so there's no time for 3-D yoyos, joint passings or antenna adjustment. We do get a 3-D shotgun pointed at us and a 3-D tree impales a windshield. One of my aforementioned horror buddies balked at the use of a bullet time style effect, but I thought it was a cool gag and the audience I saw it with gasped at the bullet flying out into the theater like that fuzzy little alien did in CAPTAIN EO. Also of note, there is a domestic disturbance that leads to a naked lady running around in high heels pointing a gun at a trucker played by co-writer Todd Farmer (who I'm guessing deserves alot of credit for this since he wrote the also very fun JASON X).

I do want to emphasize that you must see this in 3-D. It's a gimmick movie and it knows it. At home in standard-D it might be okay but only at a theater in 3-D will it be a great time for all. I still don't buy the idea of 3-D movies being the future, but they are a great way to make moviegoing into an event again.

MY BLOODY VALENTINE 3-D is somewhere in the middle of my slasher movie scale, but it was fun enough to leave me wanting a sequel. (in 3-D only.) And although I didn't give a shit about any of these characters I did kind of like the way the sheriff, an asshole who cheats on his wife with one of her own courtesy clerks, still proves himself repeatedly willing to sacrifice himself for her. I'll be damned, I think that prick learned the true meaning of Valentine's Day. In 3-D.

1/18/09

p.s. I can't tell you where the original MY BLOODY VALENTINE falls on that scale. I couldn't remember if I'd seen it or not, and after seeing this version I don't think I have. Must've been confusing it with THE PROWLER.

No, my father is not a hero, but that is the name of the movie so in my opinion I had no choice but to write it. The truth is my father was an abusive drunk and a loser and he is where I get many of my qualities. Maybe that is why this picture starring Jet Li, 1999 Outlaw Award winner for Black Mask, broke my damn heart. True, it is a karate picture, and there are a couple of really great fighting and shooting action type scenes. However what I loved about this movie was the sentimentality in its story of a young boy. It will make you cry.

More than any other karate picture I have ever seen, this is a sad, sad movie. I mean it will grab you by the nuts and pull your heartstrings. You see, this little boy who is a junior martial arts champion idolizes his father, Jet Li, but he hardly ever sees him. Jet is a caring father and has fun with the boy when he sees him, but he's still a fuck up. He is off getting in spectacular kicking fights and he is always late. He is late for the martial arts tournament, and then after he gets there he gets in a big fight with some criminals. The boy intervenes and gets declared a hero. But then Jet doesn't even make it on time to see him get a plaque presented for his heroism. But still, the boy forgives him right away. Because to him at this age he will always be dad, the hero. He can be hurt by what dad does but he won't realize that his dad is a fuck up.

Isn't that the way it really is? At that age you always want to think the best of your dad. You only see that cool side of him when he is actually good to you. The time he is gone, or the time he is drunk, you are willing to write off. Nah, that was just the alcohol. He's really a cool guy, once every two months.

Well the reason Jet is always gone and so secretive, it turns out he is an undercover cop. Even though his wife is sick and dying, it turns out he's gonna have to leave the mainland for Hong Kong to infiltrate a gang. In order to do this he has to get arrested and then break out of prison, and also kill two dogs! Well needless to say, although word does not spread about the poor dogs, the neighborhood starts spreading some gossip about this boy's dad being a wanted criminal, or outlaw. There is even a scene where the bullies pick on the boy and his friend Fatty, and they are spelling out words with a bunch of ants. Maybe that is some cultural type thing, I don't know WHAT the fuck is up with the ants. But it is sad anyway.

Well the mother dies while Jet is gone and here is this poor kid all alone, so what he does, he goes to Hong Kong and tries to track down his dad, who is undercover in this gang of weapons dealer type individuals. It's hard to explain but it ends up in a situation where Jet has to stand by as the gang he is undercover with beats up his son. And then he pretends to strangle him.

Well shit, this type of karate picture really makes you think about the way we treat each other. Because in this movie, we can see that Jet really cares about his son. But at the same time, WHY THE FUCK doesn't he do what's right for him? How can he stand to watch these motherfuckers throw the kid through a table? And then pretend that he's strangling him and throw the body out with the garbage? Maybe you could argue that it was the only way to save the kid's life. But then why did he have to be late to all the karate tournaments? And why did he HAVE to take this undercover job, even though wife was DYING? WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOU JET LI!? YOU ARE AN EXCELLENT, EVEN SUPERB FIGHTER, HOWEVER I DO NOT AGREE WITH THE WAY YOU TREAT YOUR FAMILY. ASSHOLE.

I think everybody has something that is important to them. For me, it is Writing about Cinema. For you, maybe it is also Writing about Cinema, or painting, or what not. For pretty much all male leads in movies or hour long tv series, it is being a cop or doctor. I think this movie shows better than most the true damage of neglecting your family in favor of being a cop or doctor, because it is shown through the point of view of the little boy. The poor, poor little boy. I can't remember the character's name, but if I had to name him, I would name him Little Vern.

Fortunately, the Cinema has what I like to call "the movie magic." More often than not things end up the way they ought to instead of the way they really would. Sometimes this type of fantasy ruins a movie, but in this case I think it is the proper way to go. It is like in the old Disney picture, The Parent Trap. In that movie, the kids are able to pull a con which proves to the parents they are still in love and stops the divorce. Maybe this is giving unrealistic hopes to the children of America, or maybe it is giving them the comfort they need in the fantasy world of the movie magic.

Well My Father Is a Hero may be giving unrealistic hopes to young chinese martial arts champions whose fathers are neglectful undercover cops, however I think it is something that gives a smile to our hearts and warms us all, and that ain't a bad thing in my opinion. Because after so much sadness, death, neglect and separation, the climax of the film reunites father and son to fight together against the bad guys. The guys like me and my dad, who just didn't give a fuck. And what does every boy dream of if not doing karate with his dad and beating up the bad guys. There is even a part where Jet ties Little Vern to a rope and swings him around so he can kick people. This, my friends, is what Cinema is ABOUT. It is the fucking HEART of Cinema. A truly spectacular fighting sequence which at the same time satisfies the emotional needs of the characters by 1) allowing Jet to reveal his secret life to his son 2) allowing Little Vern to understand that his father really is a hero, as he had always hoped and 3) having a little quality asskicking time for father and son.

Bravisimo! Or whatever.

The very end is pretty corny but this really is a great picture and I'm afraid to say it but the bitch really bowled me over. This one really got to me guys and it's not a pretty sight. I will definitely have alot to think about as far as my past and the way it affects me today, the way I handle my relationships etc. I will try to get back to you in this week's column but if the column comes late or doesn't come at all, don't worry about me folks. I am just changing, just learning, just growing. I am doing what it takes to be a true human being and positive individual. And I will be back soon for sure you can count on it guys. thanks guys I never told you this but I love you all I really, really do.