Reviews: T, as in "tough titties"

TAKEN

TAKEN has finally hit American shores many months after everybody else in the world already saw it and emailed me about it. As reported, it is a Luc Besson-produced version of a Seagal-type scenario: ex–CIA badass's daughter gets kidnapped in Paris, he goes and gets her back. An old favorite. The hook is that this badass is not played by a Seagal, or even a Statham. It's Liam Neeson (SCHINDLER'S LIST).

Okay, so admittedly action is not completely new for Neeson. He was a swordsman in both BATMAN BEGINS and PHANTOM MENACE. A long time ago he was Darkman. He even co-starred in a (not very good) Patrick Swayze action picture called NEXT OF KIN. (The one where not-famous-yet Ben Stiller plays a mobster's douchebag son.) But mostly he's moved beyond that, and I think most people consider him a Serious Actor. You know - MICHAEL COLLINS, KINSEY, GANGS OF NEW YORK, Spielberg's choice to play Lincoln. And here he is playing a role that the first Ain't It Cool review complained could've been played by Jean-Claude Van Damme. But of course you and I agree that's why it's so cool. We want to see a Van Damme movie but with Liam Neeson. Or how about a Michael Dudikoff with Frank Langella? Or a Bolo Yeung with Daniel Day Lewis? A Cynthia Rothrock with Susan Sarandon?

In TAKEN Liam Neeson gets to do all the badass ex-CIA shit that was so sorely lacking in ETHAN FROME and LES MISERABLES. Lots of quick, blunt chops to dispatch foes, appearing out of nowhere to beat people up, outsmarting and outfighting police and organized crime to find out things he's not supposed to know and get into places he's not supposed to be, working his way through the chain to find his daughter. As a bonus he thwarts a knife attack on a pop star.

But let's be honest, this character Bryan Mills is a bad motherfucker in need of a better movie. For starters, the story takes unnecessarily long to get going. It's not a dealbreaker but it's kind of weird for a lean 93 minute movie to start out so leisurely. It's possible that writers Besson and Robert Mark Kamen think they're doing something more than a kidnapped daughter movie and are trying to go a little deeper into the characters than you expect, but if so they blew it. I like the whole idea of Bryan trying to reconnect with his estranged daughter on her birthday and being upstaged by her rich stepdad (who buys her a horse). But alot of time is spent on setting up the daughter while still making her seem like an annoying brat. She loves crappy pop music, wears an ugly sequined jacket and spends most of her screen time hopping up and down and squealing in excitement over various expensive gifts. And she seems completely unaware of her status as the priveleged stepdaughter of the super-rich. She hugs her two fathers and tells them she loves them a few times throughout the movie, always because they bought her a gift or gave her permission to do something. At the end of course Bryan gets a hug for singlehandedly rescuing her from a syndicate of Albanian kidnappers who drugged her and sold her into sex slavery, but even then he has to introduce her to a celebrity to feel like he won her over. She learns nothing. If that's the best you can do with her personality that's fine, just make the setup short and sweet and assume we understand that the dude loves her because she's his daughter. Sometimes simple is better.

Also, I don't mind this that much, but I should mention it has some of the typical goofball Luc Besson shit. For example the movie opens with him going into a Radio Shack and talking to the manager who knows him because he has come in and looked at the karaoke machine so many times. I was convinced the only reason to include this was if this guy was gonna turn into his Q, providing the latest in Radio Shack brand surveillance technology, but of course nothing becomes of it. There really is no reason to include this, it's just how Luc Besson rolls.

Maybe the funniest thing in the movie is that Bryan is seemingly a paranoid, overprotective father, he knows about all the horrible things that happen in this world so he can't stand to let his daughter be out there on her own, and only under duress does he give her permission to go to Europe. And then sure enough, two minutes after she arrives at the house where she's staying a group of kidnappers bust down the door and grab her and her friend to drug and sell into sex slavery. You see that, Famke Jansen? You should listen to your ex-husband. He knows what he's talking about.

I do have a problem with all the action being shot Bourne style. It's cool to see Neeson kicking ass, but you really don't see most of it because the camera is shaking around so much. You gotta assume this is partly to cover up that Liam Neeson is not Bruce Lee, but then they do the same thing in the car chase, so maybe not. Like the Bourne movies you can understand some of what's going on and they are still pretty cool scenes, but not exactly classics. (and not as good as the best Bourne scenes.) Director Pierre Morel previously did BANLIEU 13/DISTRICT B13 and it's not like I expect Neeson to jump through windows and run up walls, but that movie showed that Morell could craft amazing action scenes. Ironically, shaking the camera around so you can't see anything is supposed to make it seem more real, but check out this incredible 3 minute chase scene where the camera doesn't shake around because the stunts are real.

I don't know man, I know I sound like a broken record here but this was only a couple years ago and he was allowed to shoot an action scene as if he had intentionally planned it out and wanted to get the best angles to tell the story. It's no longer in style to show effort or planning I guess, you gotta pretend you just got out of bed, you're still in your bathrobe and are too groggy to hold the camera steady and that's why the audience will not quite see the badass shit that is probaly going on nearby.

Is this the end of an era? Besson productions were never completely trustworthy, but they were at least known for good action scenes. The TAXI series (not the Jimmy Fallon one), the TRANSPORTER series, and of course it was YAMIKASI and DISTRICT B13 that introduced the world to the French art of parkour, later borrowed for CASINO ROYALE. I hope this is a fluke and not a sign that even Besson is throwing in the towel and adopting the Bourne style. This is certainly not the worst example but for fuck's sake, let's give this style a rest! It's over. QUANTUM OF SOLACE broke the dam, it's not just me complaining about this shit anymore, it's just about everybody. And even if some people like that, I bet you five bucks they won't complain if you start making carefully planned action sequences again. Even the stupidest text messaging little fucker you ever saw will not complain that the shots are too well framed and that he is too aware of what is going on in the scene. Follow my plan and nobody loses.

For those reasons TAKEN is not as good as it ought to be, but I do think it's worth watching and I hope they make a series of these, like THE TRANSPORTER. I guess they should've called it THE PREVENTER though, because if it's TAKEN 2 somebody's gonna have to get kidnapped again. My guess: the daughter becomes a famous singer and gets kidnapped for ransom. Or maybe the ex-wife gets it this time. Whatever would happen I hope Bryan would call on his security buddies who come over to barbecue with him. That seemed like classic action movie setup, showing us the elite team he will have help him at the end, but then they never do. You feel bad for them.

Now let's have one starring Ralph Fiennes as an ex-Navy SEAL who goes to Afghanistan to hunt down drug traffickers after his niece ODs on heroin.

THE TAKING OF PELHAM ONE TWO THREE

The first and most important thing that must be said of THE TAKING OF PELHAM ONE TWO THREE is that it has one of the most badass theme songs ever, and without even leaning on the crutch of wah wah guitar. A deep ominous BA-DUMP-BUMP-BUMP alternates with tension building horns and violins or something in a higher pitch... well, I'm dancing about architecture here but trust me, this theme song WILL kick your ass. The score is by David Shire, who strangely has done mostly TV movies but recently did ZODIAC. But it has that catchiness and strutting quality of the best Lalo Schifrin, like ENTER THE DRAGON or something, where after you see the movie you can't help but walking around picturing it as your theme music.

(By the way, if you watch the original theatrical cut of PAYBACK you can tell that the badass music during the opening montage is inspired by this. They did a good job, but not as good.)

And the movie does a pretty good job of living up to the theme song. It's directed by Joseph Sargent who is also mainly a TV guy, but the feel is cinematic. Watching it now I realize this must've been a huge influence on many of the DIE HARD type movies and especially DIE HARD WITH A VENGEANCE. It doesn't have the one guy in over his head and physically fighting the bad guys, but the criminal plot, setting, characters, sense of humor and tone are all very DIE HARD.

A group of men (all wearing matching hats, coats, glasses and mustaches) commandeer a New York subway train. They dump all but one car, keeping the passengers under the watch of some machine guns, and call in to demand $1 million in one hour. If they don't get it they will begin killing one hostage each minute.

The hero is Walter Matthau, head of the transit police, and he spends most of the movie at headquarters talking to the hostage-takers on the radio and trying to figure out how to stop them while trying to follow their instructions enough to keep them from killing anybody. The lead villain is Robert Shaw as Mr. Blue, who we learn is a mercenary but who Matthau just says is "a fruitcake" because of his accent. Come to think of it he's kind of like a Grueber... a cold-hearted, European-accented villain with an air of superiority. He has some great lines like when he's holding a gun on a guy who shot at him and says, "You a cop?" When the guy nods Mr. Blue says "Well done. The mayor will go to your funeral."

And by the way, yes, this is the movie that had thieves code-named after colors before RESERVOIR DOGS.

Like DIE HARD it is not a comedy, but has you laughing all the time. It's a serious movie with a wiseass sense of gallows humor. The situation is never played for laughs, but the dialogue between the transit authorities is constantly funny. They all have that New York attitude so while negotiating with these dangerous men they can't help calling them maniacs or lunatics in the middle of otherwise compliant sentences. They are all quick with insults and with grim jokes about the deep shit they are in. One of Matthau's colleagues is Jerry Stiller, by the way. So these are regular working class type shlubs, not action heroes. If it was made in the '80s instead of 1974 Dennis Franz would be in the movie for sure.

And Matthau is fantastic as a hero who mostly works from behind a desk but who, as soon as he sees a window, runs in there himself and takes care of business. It's believable because Matthau is not exactly a tough guy but he does have some grit, he seems capable.

And as a thriller it's pretty effective. You have the innocent people in close quarters with scary villains, the city workers in control rooms looking at lights, making phone calls, dramatically assessing the situation. And the suspense about what exactly these guys are planning to do. I mean they must have some plan for escaping, right?

Tony Scott is doing a remake now. I'm not sure if I'll be watching that after MAN ON FIRE and DOMINO, I'm afraid I might die from his editing. And I guaran-fucking-tee you they won't match the theme song (I doubt they'll even make an attempt.) But who knows, maybe it will be good and if not at least it will remind people of the original and get them to watch it. It's good stuff.

TAPE

I have to admit, the digital video is starting to look more promising. For a while there I was about to declare it my arch-enemy. It never looked like a real movie. It always looked like crap. But it was winning over directors like Spike Lee, lowering their standards. Either it looked muddy and ugly (like Bamboozled) or like a TV special (like Original Kings of Comedy). Even in the best cases it just looked like cheap film stock (Chuck and Buck) and in the only case where it looked really great (Julien Donkey Boy) it was because they transferred it to film and then back to video and then back to film, or some crazy shit like that that nobody else is gonna bother to try.

I'm still skeptical but I must admit that the technology is improving, making it more acceptable. They're even using digital video for important works like the next Soderbergh film and the third installment in the Mariachi trilogy. I saw an ad for Star Wars Part 2 and although it looked more artifial than part 1, I would never have guessed it was all shot on some super high tech rich guy camcorder.

Tape is a low-profile Richard Linklater movie coming soon to video. It was shot on digital video and it pretty much has the Chuck and Buck look, like it was shot on cheap film stock. So what is important here is not necessarily the look but that much ballyhooed democratization of digital video. You know, how it makes moviemaking more affordable, making it easier for a new guy to break into the industry, or for established filmatists to try risky or non-commercial projects.

I guess the way I look at it, digital video is just like the internet. This web sight pretty much sums up the whole issue of democratizing technology. On the one hand it's pretty cool that a dude like me could have a world wide forum for expression like this. On the other hand, it's pretty sad that a dude like me could have a world wide forum for expression like this. And imagine how much more of this type of crap there is to wade through!

Digital video is the same way. I'm glad Richard Linklater could just do a real quick, minimalistic shoot, adapting a three character, one location play into the most intimate possible movie. All three of the actors (the dude from Gattaca, the dude from Last Days of Disco, and the chick from Pulp Fiction) are pretty good. The story is very theatrical, but compelling, challenging your perceptions and assumptions, pulling some twists, building to an interesting climax without answering questions too neatly. I liked it. I was glad I watched it. I was glad he made it.

I'm glad other people are trying this type of shit too. Soderbergh's got people like David Duchovny and Julia Roberts doing a movie on dv that's mostly improv, with them doing their own makeup and clothes, not having trailers, getting paid less. It's a worthwhile experiment. Most of the Dogma movies turn out interesting. Why not do one with movie stars, and see if it makes them cry like babies? I want to do a Dogma Jean-Claude Van Damme vehicle. For the most part I like this movement.

But this could lead to big trouble. Linklater musta made this one fast - all he needed was three actors, one hotel room and a pre-existing play. He probaly borrowed the camera, the lights, the editing equipment. There are a few simple props and I guess he probaly had to order a pizza or two during filming. But that's about it. No wonder he was able to have another movie come out at around the same time as Waking Life.

This is simple, this is cheap, this is accessible. And that means it is prone to abuse. Imagine what happens when this technology falls into the wrong hands. Imagine the depths of self indulgence and audience discomfort that science can now carry us to.

I am speaking, of course, of Kerwin Smith and/or his wife. What could be worse than having a new Chasing Amy every month? I'll tell you. Smith's wife is working on a documentary on the making of Silent Bob and Jay Attacks which they're hoping will be ready for the Clerks 10th anniversary dvd, already being planned. Smith says the documentary will be four or five hours long!

It can't be long before we see re-enactments of Kerwin Smith's childhood, released theatrically in monthly 8-hour installments.

Good job on Tape, Linklater. But don't let silent bob find out.

thanks rich

TEACHING MRS. TINGLE

Well I don't know if any of you saw this but there was a gal in my guestbook who Wrote that I shouldn't date gals in their late teens and early 20s which I believe she said was disgusting on account of my age. Well the more teen movies I get hoodwinked into seeing by these young gals the more I agree with that sentiment. The latest is an embarassing load of shit by the name of Teaching Ms. Tingle.

Let me give you motherfuckers an analogy here. When I was in the joint there was a talent show they would do sometimes. And alot of times some dumb motherfucker would sign up, "Yeah, I'ma do some tap dancing" or "Yeah man I got a monologue you know, what you didn't know? Yeah I'm an actor bud, gotta monologue here nahmean?"

Then they get up there but they don't tap, they don't act, they just start blurting out shit about "P-DOG IS A PUNK BITCH!" or whatever. They were just using the medium of tapdancing as an excuse to purge all their pent up resentment. And hey bud more power to you if it has therapeutic value and what not but forgive me if I don't consider it a legitimate act. And in my opinion it is an abuse and an insult to the artform of the talent show act.

Well Mrs. Tingle is the same deal. This is not a movie, this a barely veiled vendetta against some teacher the film artists must have had in high school. The chick who made this movie apparently had a mean teacher who flunked her in history or whatever. The plot is a juvenile revenge fantasy that might have made sense at 15, but you would think by the time she grows up and makes it in Hollywood she would have had some type of emotional growth and what not. Sorry lady but i SINCERELY doubt this bitch was exactly the heartless monster you depict her as in the movie. If you are truly better than her you should be able to acknowledge her human qualities at some point in the damn movie. At the end of the movie they treat her like a Freddy or something, pretending to be dead, jumping to life, trying to strangle everybody. I'm sorry to say you are only proving Mrs. Tingle's point that you are a poor Writer.

The thirst for revenge has made these film artists delirious and deranged. I wouldn't be surprised if these motherfuckers thought the story made sense. The heroine Leigh Ann is supposively a good girl pushed over the edge by her teacher's cruelty, but there really is no motivation for her to tie her teacher to a bed, keep her captive and torment her for two days. I mean come on babe, I've done some stupid shit in my life, but if I did that I'd at least know what was coming. These kids act like it made sense at the time, but us poor idiots who rented the movie knew better.

This also works into that old myth that if there's somebody you hate, they're eventually going to have kinky sex with someone or other and you can take pictures and blackmail them. Believe me, I WISH this was true. I have tried and tried but some motherfuckers don't do anything worth photographing. And if they do, they close the blinds.

At the end, you're wondering okay they've had this lady tied up for two days, how are they going to redeem themselves, begin a new Positive lifestyle and get an A?

The answer: Mrs. Tingle is trying to get them out of her house, and accidentally shoots some other student with an arrow in front of the principal, so she gets fired. Leigh Ann goes on to become valedictorian and live happily ever after. Good thing Mrs. Tingle didn't think to mention the whole breaking in/tying up/tormenting/blackmailing thing to the principal or the pigs. They don't seem to know about it so I guess it just didn't come up.

Now I would like to make a personal plea to the gal behind this film. PLEASE lady, I implore you to get some help. I know I know I know maybe you are a tough gal or what not, it is embarassing to go to a therapist. And personally I have not done it either but I happen to know a LOT of motherfuckers, TOUGH motherfuckers, motherfuckers with tattoos and scars, even hooks for hands and these motherfuckers are fearless. They are so fearless that they are not afraid to bite the bullet and say I WILL NOT LET MY PAST BEND OVER MY PRESENT and they sit down and they talk it through with a professional. They break the chain, they do not blame it on others and most of all they do NOT dump on our cultural heritage and our Art of Cinema by unloading a bitter load of shit like Mrs. Tingle into our national theater chains and video stores.

It is time to move on lady. Maybe Mrs. Tingle really was a heartless alien bitch, who knows, but the point is don't punish America's teens and naive filmgoers like myself for her crimes. And if you INSIST on continuing this practice AT LEAST make it a comedy so that it is easier to swallow. I mean give Mrs. Tingle a funny walk or SOMETHING. Work with us here lady.

Look here lady, if you need someone to talk to, hell shoot me an e-mail I don't care. I will be there for you. I just can't have you unloading on my Cinema you understand. I am not hitting on you I'm just trying to show you there are good people in this world, people who can be ther for you, who can support you. there are other options, other outlets. We do NOT want another Teaching Mrs. Tingle on our hands. I think you know that.

I hope you are not offended by my frank honesty however you are definitely a nutcase no offense and I feel that it is important that we be open about our emotional feelings you understand. Good luck and god bless.

P.S. I was wondering how does Mrs. Tingle stay tied to a bed for two days without ever pissing herself thanks

pissing herself thanks

TEAM AMERICA: WORLD POLICE

TEAM AMERICA is pretty much your typical moronic jingoistic action nonsense. The ultimate big budget, small brained hollywood summer action July 4th blockbuster. The movie you saw and couldn't believe anybody liked but somehow everybody liked it and it made a bazillion dollars and the next summer everybody pretended it was somebody else who liked it. It's pretty much that movie, except sarcastic, and done entireley with creepy looking marionettes like on that old TV show THUNDERBIRDS. That might be a comment about the wooden characterization and emotion in big action movies, and the way they treat sometimes respectable actors as props to move around and set up in front of explosions. But more likely it's just because puppets are funny. It's funny to watch them do stuff, because they're puppets.

The first third or so of this movie is the hardest I've laughed in a long time. The opening credits are these overblown 3-D metallic letters that fly at the camera and then blow up, and you know right there that these filmatists know their Jerry Bruckheimer. What's really impressive about the movie is the incredible attention to detail about all the cliches of action movies. They got every shot, every corny line, every montage, every subplot of a dumb action movie. They introduce and reintroduce bad guys exactly the same way they do in the real movies. They use the same angles and lighting and music cues. It's just different because they're these goofy bigheaded dolls and they walk funny.

The guys who made this movie, I forget their names but it's like Jeff and Chet or something like that, people just call them by their first name. They are the guys who did the cartoon SOUTH PARK which is about kids who swear, etc. I seen it once or twice and there is some insightful cultural satire sometimes, and then afterwards everybody just remembers the funny voices and the talking poo and it makes funny of the handicapped. And that's why they like it.

Parts of this movie though make me think these two smartasses are smarter and more disciplined than they seemed before. They must've watched a thousand post-DIE HARD action movies and taken detailed notes. This is not that type of dumb movie where they parody specific scenes from specific movies. It does the right thing, it recreates exactly the types of scenes you see in every one of these movies. They don't just skip to the funny action scenes and then load it with jokes, they do the whole damn story - the introduction of the heroes in loosely related action opening, the older mentor (a Charlton Heston type) tracking down a new hero in his pre-hero life, showing him his destiny, bringing him into the fold. They got the love subplots, the antagonistic men who by the end prove themselves to each other. The hero becoming disillusioned and leaving the team but coming back and having to prove to the team that he didn't turn his back on them. I mean they got the whole damn thing, the whole formula.

The cinematographer is Bill Pope, who according to my sources did THE MATRIX and SPIDER-MAN 2 and he shoots this like he thinks it's one of those. Not a puppet movie. The score is by some guy who did "additional music" for BROKEN ARROW, THE ROCK, ARMAGEDDON, etc., and he does a 100% dead-on imitation of that kind of music. The triumphant anthems, the militaristic drums, the exotic noises to represent the evil foreigners.

The storyline of the movie is the ultimate dumbed down jingoistic Michael Bay perspective of the world. Team America is an elite squad of experts in shiny uniforms who fly star spangled military vehicles around the world to fight terrorists. In this movie, terrorists from Chechnya to Egypt all work together under the supervision of Kim Jong Il, who lives in a big evil palace with a shark tank. When the team goes to obscure exotic locales like Paris and Cairo, titles on the screen tell us what country or region the city is in, and how many miles it is from America. Central America is "south of the real America".

Team America doesn't give a fuck what the world thinks of them. They don't even seem to notice, because their rock theme song tells them they are spreading freedom and I mean, what else could they be doing. So they land their helicopter on cultural artifacts, hurt many civilians in the crossfire and casually destroy the Eiffel Tower, the Louvre, the pyramids and the sphinx without blinking. Because they know they're the good guys. They have so little knowledge or understanding of their enemy that they send the lead hero undercover wearing spotty blackface, a towel on his head, and his usual leather jacket. He doesn't bother to learn their language and neither do the filmatists. And the movie is smart enough not to point any of these things out. They just do it. They don't have to have a character saying, "Hey, but you just blew up the Eiffel Tower, we liked that tower" or "the sphinx is hundreds of years old, it is irreplacable."

I love that this movie is so deadpan. It stays true to the genre it's based on and is pretty light on the out and out gags. At least for a while. But then it starts to lose it, first when it goes into a subplot about liberal Hollywood actors. They go after the usual targets: Michael Moore, Janeane Garafalo, Tim Robbins, Sean Penn etc. Their puppet counterparts say they are anti-war but they scheme with Kim Jong Il. They're not even naively being manipulated by him, they are in cahoots. They capture and torture Team America, have shoot outs with them, and then all die gorey deaths.

I gotta be frankly honest, this part lost me. I'm not sure what Kevin and Chazz are trying to say here. I don't mind if somebody wants to make fun of these actors and their convictions, even if I don't agree with it. But the way they are portrayed is so ridiculous and unrelated to reality that it's hard to figure out what the point is supposed to be. They even make a reoccurring joke of calling them all fags. I guess they hate Michael Moore, so they depict him as a grouchy fat guy eating two hot dogs. (Get it, fat guy.) And then he suicide bombs Team America headquarters? What is that supposed to mean? Most of these characters have nothing to do with the actual person they're making fun of. Fucking Fox News has made more intelligent arguments against them.

I started to wonder if that was the point. Maybe these filmatists actually agree with Alec Baldwin and his henchmen and are looking for laughs by showing a paranoid right wing fantasy where anti-war actors are actually terrorists, the way people who would make a serious "Team America" movie might see them. But that doesn't really make sense either because as much as big Hollywood movies like INDEPENDENCE DAY and ARMAGEDDON can be moronic nationalistic propaganda, they also star Hollywood actors, so they probaly wouldn't depict Hollywood actors as bloodthirsty traitors. Unless there's some subplot in RAMBO 2 that I forgot about.

After the movie I decided to read up and figure out what Matt and Gregg were trying to say with this, and I found an interview where they criticized Janeane Garafalo for going on CROSSFIRE. Well, I think this criticism is bunk. A good criticism would be: Janeane Garafalo is so upset about what's going on in this country that she's not being funny anymore. She is more effective when she's being funny, like John Stewart and that co-host on her radio show and Al Franken.

A bad criticism is: Janeane Garafalo went on Crossfire, but she's a comedian.

I mean, Ronald Reagan was an actor, they still let him be president for 8 years. They let politicians and athletes host Saturday Night Live. Colonel Sanders didn't invent his fried chicken until he was in his 60s. For christ's sake, Jesus was a carpenter. You think they told him, "Jesus, you pompous ass, you're a carpenter. You can't go around healing people and all this shit."

They don't know enough to attack her on her argument, so they go after her occupation. And the thing is, SHE KNOWS it's ridiculous that she's the one who has to go on CNN and say this shit. I remember hearing her talk about it. The simple fact is that at that time, anti-war views would not go on TV unless they came from a celebrity. There were unprecedented marches going on around the world that weren't even mentioned on some of the networks and newspapers until days later. They weren't talking to the 9-11 families against the war, they were talking to the retired generals about military strategy. More than half the country was against going to war but you weren't gonna see that on TV. These "fags" had to weigh their options: either sit back and not say anything or use their platform as a public figure to help get the word out there. Those who chose the second one, maybe you could argue they did damage to the cause. The media sure tried to turn it that way anyway, only bringing celebrities on and then ridiculing them for being celebrities. But the movie portrays it like being openly liberal is a Hollywood vanity thing. They don't remember that before the war started, these people were actually taking a big risk. I mean this wasn't long ago, you guys remember it. You practically had to be wearing an american flag and holding pom poms or your patriotism was questioned. If you said anything you were smeared and ridiculed. Sean Penn lost a film role for traveling to Iraq. The Dixie Chicks (who aren't in the movie) got boycotts and death threats for one line of stage banter.

Some of them didn't even make conscious decisions to be activists, they just were honest when asked about it in interviews. George Clooney admits he's against the war on Charlie Rose, now he has to die a bloody death in your movie? The implication is come on you liberal actors, just shut up and dance for us. I don't mind your politics, as long as it never makes contact with my brain. Politics is a private thing that you can only do while hiding inside your house. If you keep whining and making us feel bad it interferes with our right to play X-Box and watch SOUTH PARK.

These are the type of people who say they are burnt out on political documentaries, they're sick of seeing Michael Moore, they're sick of hearing about the war. Blaming the messenger. Michael Moore is a handy excuse for them not to care, not to be informed, not to do anything. If there was no Michael Moore, they still wouldn't care, be informed, or do anything. But since there is a Michael Moore, it's his fault.

I mean fine SOUTH PARK guys, you hate Michael Moore. He's too confrontational, whatever. But tell me, what the fuck did Samuel L. Jackson and Liv Tyler ever do to you, you gotta portray them as murderers and then give them horrible, gorey deaths? So you hate Sean Penn for being outspoken and rocking the boat and maybe for I AM SAM we can hope. But then anybody else that happens to be to the left of Joseph Lieberman, they gotta be ridiculed and mutilated on the big screen?

I mean what could ANYBODY have against Samuel L. Jackson? He's Samuel L. Jackson, man! Everybody loves him, but he must've said something against the war or something so these guys gotta show his head get cut in half.

And I also gotta wonder, if poor Liv Tyler deserves ridicule for (apparently) expressing her views on war, why does one of the guys who made this movie get to be in Michael Moore's movie discussing his views on Columbine? Are there different rules for voice actors than for on screen actors? Is it harder for a cartoon maker guy to be a fag than for George Clooney? I'm not sure I follow this one.

There's also jokes at the expense of the UN and Hans Blix, who threatens to write a harsh letter if Kim Jong Il doesn't give up his weapons. I don't mind these jokes but I just want to take a minute to rant about the UN anyway. See, Americans don't know this, because they are Americans, but the point of the UN is actually to stop wars. Not to fight them. It is Jesse Jackson, not The Punisher. People say the UN is useless because they aren't enough of a threat, they don't have their own army to punish people with. And at the same time they complain that the UN wants to stop us from protecting ourselves, wants to tell us what to do, wants to be one world government etc. So we get to have it both ways, we hate the UN because they are a threat to us AND because they are not enough of a threat to everybody else. We laugh at the idea of blue helmeted troops going into Iraq, and frown at the idea of blue helmeted troops coming onto our soil. They're both laughable wimps and terrifying fascists. I don't get it.

In the end, there is a funny vulgar speech that I guess sums up the filmatists views on these characters. Basically, they say that Team America are dicks and the actors are pussies, and both have their good and bad qualities. I think they are these type of smartass guys who see themselves as being exactly in the middle and everybody interested in politics they think is an extremist, taking it too far, taking it too seriously, trying to push their views on everybody else. I don't think they realize though that they themselves are interested in politics, interested enough to make a couple movies about them anyway. Their puppet movie may or may not be funnier than Michael Moore's movies, but both of them are using humor and entertainment to make a point and in some cases mock specific public figures. Michael Moore's movie is more emotional and their movie has better puppetry. But they are closer to each other than Chris and Tad think.

Anyway, okay, I got some disagreements with what I think these guys are saying. That's not a problem, that's only fair in a political satire. The problem is it starts to lose its dedication to the straightfaced puppetization of Bruckheimer. It starts to cheat and stoop to jokes about vomiting and fucking. I mean sure I laughed at the acrobatic doll sex, but it's so cheap compared to all the smart satire that came before it. And man, if you haven't seen puppets fucking yet then you need to get out more. I mean I haven't seen MAKE MY PUPPETS COME or anything but everybody's seen MEET THE FEEBLES and even here on our shores, we got CRANK YANKERS. And we all remember when Chucky got lucky. Do you remember where you were when you first saw Chucky get lucky? I was in a movie theater. Anyway point is puppet fucking is not new ground fellas, sorry. Plus, you guys kind of blew it by not putting a hundred candles in the room during the sex scene, then at the end you show how the candles are all melted, so you know they been fucking all night. That's how they do it in action movies guys. You know that. Get it together.

And the songs start to cheat too. Like they got a love song about how Ben Affleck and the movie PEARL HARBOR suck. "I miss you more than that movie missed the point." It's a funny song for sure but what happened to actually BEING a Jerry Bruckheimer movie, now all the sudden they gotta come out and explicitly criticize a Jerry Bruckheimer movie. Fine, maybe I'm expecting too much, I'll let this one go. But I can't let it go when Kim Jong Il busts into a musical number. I mean inappropriate musical numbers can be funny but they're turning into such a cliche. Why you gotta suddenly abandon your disciplined focus on action movies and go into a musical again? You were doing so good and then suddenly you gave up and ran for the hills like a coward. "I can't do it, I can't finish this movie with integrity, I gotta turn into a fucking Leslie Nielsen movie where they make fun of any and every movie anybody might've ever seen before."

I'm being harsh, it's not that bad, but it's sad to see them get it so right and come so far and then just blow it before the end.

Still, this is a funny fucking movie. I forgive its flaws and sins and love it for its good deeds and works. These guys may be immature punks, but they convinced a studio to make a big action movie starring THUNDERBIRDS dolls, and that is truly a great achievement. Its strengths outweight its weaknesses, just like Alec Baldwin's performance in MIAMI BLUES outweighs him being the main henchman for a North Korean dictator.

TEENAGE CAVEMAN (2000)
Previously on VERN'S REVIEWS ON THE FILMS OF CINEMA: Vern found out that arthouse pervert Larry Clark (KIDS, ANOTHER DAY IN PARADISE, BULLY) for some reason directed a remake of TEENAGE CAVEMAN for Stan Winston's "CREATURE FEATURE" series of straight-to-cable Samuel Z. Arkoff remakes. With TEENAGE CAVEMAN not yet released, and with Vern not able to find it through other means, Vern watched other mediocre to bad pictures in this series.

First off I really gotta thank my buddy Jeremiah for hooking me up with an early copy of this important picture. I asked for it, and I got it. What more could you ask for, than to ask for it and then get it. Next I will need a dvd of BLADE II. Or hell, BLADE III.

As you probaly already heard (from me) TEENAGE CAVEMAN is a remake of some old Samuel Z. Arkoff movie, but this time around the difference is it's directed by LARRY FUCKIN CLARK. Like I said man, the french scientists were onto something with this "auteur theory" they had which shows that various works by the same director can be all of one piece. A director's fighting style is like a fingerprint. For example in Mission Impossible Part 1 when Tom Cruise figures out he's been betrayed and pieces together for the traitor what he supposedly thinks happened, but the images we see are a different version of the events that he is now figuring out is what actually happened, but he doesn't want to let on... well, you fuckin KNOW that movie is directed by Brian De Palma. And when in Mission Impossible Part 2 Thandie Newton consorts against the bad guy with Tom Cruise, but then Tom Cruise takes his mask off because he's actually the bad guy being consorted against and not Tom Cruise, but underneath the mask there are tears running down his face because his heart has been broken... well in that case you know it's John Woo that directed it. And if David Fincher does end up directing Mission Impossible part 3, well I'm sure he'll leave some clues too. Auteurs get sloppy. Because they want to be caught.

Well Larry Clark marked his territory all over this picture so for my fellow Larry Clark fans and for the french I would highly recommend it, even though it's not that great.

What you got here is pretty much what you expect from Larry Clark pictures. You got teenagers forming cliques outside of parental influence, gettin drunk, having big orgies, murdering people, etc. You got an adult who pretends to be a moralist but who uses his status to force sex on young girls, and then gets stabbed in the eye with a crucifix. You got lots of crying and screaming shit like "I HATE YOU I HATE YOU I FUCKIN HATE YOU YOU FUCKER FUCK YOU!!!" You got a murder with little motive ("It was an accident. The sun got in my eyes. Besides, he's an asshole. Fuck 'im.").

And you got the shaky handheld camera, the washed out colors, the probaly improvised conversations. You even got some of the casting of young, unknown, natural looking actors with an untrained rawness and a willingness to take their clothes off. And they really look young, so it's at least as creepy as it is sexy.

The only thing that makes it different from other Larry Clark pictures, really, is that these teens are in a postapocalyptic warrior tribe and then they have an orgy with super beings that makes them "hulk up" or whatever the comic strips call it, and turn into these lumpy toxic avenger type dudes. And then there is decapitation and punching through people and people explodin and shit. So that is a little different.

The combination of the two is ridiculous and makes the picture very enjoyable. However it is definitely not on the level of a BULLY, which I said was not on the level of a ANOTHER DAY IN PARADISE back when I first reviewed it, but it seems better and better the more time passes.

Some of the dialogue in TEENAGE CAVEMAN is painful, and not in that great "I can't sympathize with a single one of these fuckers" type of way of BULLY. More in the usual bad movie way, where these futuristic characters make references to things they couldn't possibly know about, like when the villain seems amazed that solar power is the way to go and "The treehuggers were right!"

Maybe you can blame it all on the villain. This guy has one of the most obnoxious performances I've seen since I got out nearly three years ago. He sings and yells, using words he doesn't seem to understand. He is constantly moving through a library of phoney accents. He seems to be doing a heavy handed imitation of Brad Pitt in showoff mode (Twelve Monkeys, Fight Club, etc.) Or maybe he's tryin to be one of those over the top fruity villains from the Batman movies. He wears shiny pants and puts his bangs in a pony tail and that's supposed to mean he's crazy and evil. (At the end the good guy shows up in a blouse and silver pants with the bang pony tail and tells the tribe he's taking the children. He might be saving them or he might be going to molest them.)

And just wait til you see this guy get drunk. I'm not an actor, and never would be, but even I know there's nothin worse than a bad actor playing drunk. At least he doesn't hiccup, I guess. Or see a spaceship fly by and then rub his eyes and look at the bottle like, "I need to stop drinkin this shit!"

The protagonist's not great but at least he doesn't ham it up. I thought he was the spoiled little bitch from AMERICAN PIE PART 1 who complained that he was ONLY getting blowjobs from Tara Reid and not the "real" sex that all high school boys should be having. Wrong actor. Turns out he's actually some guy from "O" and "SKATEBOARD KID 2" but in this movie HE TOO is getting blowjobs but considers himself a virgin. Jesus, kids today (and in the future)!

Anyway, anyone who enjoys a Larry Clark picture will get a kick out of this one. It's not as high of quality as his other three pictures, but it's really not toned down. And you get to find out what Larry does when he gets his hands on a realistic severed head prop. Next I wanna see Harmony Korine work with Stan Winston. Maybe they could do a Michael Jackson video or something.

TELL THEM WHO YOU ARE

This is a documentary about the legendary cinematographer Haskell Wexler, only it's directed by his son Mark, so instead of being about Wexler's career and genius, it's more about daddy doesn't love me enough. The son rebelling against the father and then trying to make up before he kicks it (he's in his '80s).

The opening scene won me over right off the bat. Haskell is in a big store room in front of all kinds of camera equipment, talking about what he does. From behind the camera, Mark asks him to tell where he is.

Now, we the audience aren't retards. We know he's in some sort of room where he keeps his camera equipment, because he's standing in front of a bunch of camera equipment. Mark is a grown man and has directed documentaries before, but he clearly doesn't know about "cinema verite," also known as "direct cinema" or "good documentaries." Haskell tries to explain that he shouldn't have to say where he is, the audience will know where he is by watching what he's talking about, seeing his surroundings, watching what happens. But Mark isn't having it. He keeps asking Haskell where he is, and Haskell flips out. Immediately I knew I liked the guy.

I wasn't so sure about Mark, though. After this great opening, you are hyperaware of the cornball techniques Mark uses for his documentary. The old first person narration bit, lots of photos altered to look 3-D, etc. It's like he's purposely trying to use bullshit documentary techniques just to torture his dad. He doesn't seem like he has the kind of charisma that makes you accept one of these documentaries about the act of making a documentary either. And then you find out he's some kind of a republican.

Haskell of course is a well known liberal. He directed MEDIUM COOL (about and filmed at the '68 democratic convention). Also one I never heard of before this documentary was one called LATINO, about and filmed during the war in Nicaragua (wonder if it's as good as Alex Cox's WALKER?) He started out doing documentaries about the civil rights movement, and even late in his career he was cinematographer for political movies like Michael Moore's CANADIAN BACON and John Sayles's SILVER CITY. And remember when Jane Fonda and Tom Hayden went to Vietnam? Did you know that was for a documentary Wexler directed called INTRODUCTION TO THE ENEMY?

So what does his son do to give dad a heart attack? Smoking weed probaly wouldn't work. So when he was a kid he started hanging out with cops and FBI agents and admiring authority figures. In his adult life he hangs out with presidents to do a documentary about Air Force One. During the movie he gives Haskell a birthday present: a framed photo of himself with George Bush Sr., the filthy loins from which sprang the worst calamity to ever face our nation. We see later that he has a picture with Bill Clinton, but he still chose the Bush photo to give his dad. It seems like he must be teasing but if so it's the most deadpan delivery you ever saw.

So although the movie tells us a little about Haskell's career, it is more about the father-son relationship. In fact, Haskell asks for this on camera. (The movie shows quick clips of a bunch of "Haskell's career" stuff he shot and dumped - hopefully some of that will be on the DVD.) Still, Haskell worries that his son will make him look bad, and refuses to sign the release form until he sees the movie.

And the movie does make him look bad, in a way. It is clear that even though he is right about documentaries, and right about politics, he doesn't know how to be nice to his son. He cheated on his wives, he was a pain in the ass on film sets, he even got fired from ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO'S NEST. And now he claims the FBI forced Milos Forman to fire him from that movie for doing a documentary about the Weather Underground, a claim that even Haskell's closest friends think is ridiculous.

So you got the father who is a genius but is a pain in the ass, and you got the son who is probaly a nice guy but maybe not so much of a bright bulb. (Actually I think he is smarter than he lets on, considering how good the documentary turned out.) Well here they are making this movie together. Haskell is very interested in how it's gonna turn out, offering suggestions (Mark doesn't like this), sometimes even shooting parts of it.

Throughout the movie they push each other's buttons and eventually have some bonding moments. As Mark interviews his dad's famous friends (Albert Maysles, Jane Fonda, George Lucas, others) they not only tell stories about Haskell's career (always referring to him as "your dad") but kind of butt in and offer advice as friends of the family. There is also kind of a subplot about Conrad Hall Sr. and Jr., both famous cinematographers. The fathers and sons were close friends, and each son saw the other's dad as a father figure. So when Conrad Sr. dies during the course of this documentary, it emphasizes Haskell's mortality. He's in great shape for a dude in his '80s but he's gonna have to die some day, at least according to most scientists. I'm not gonna take one stand or another though 'cause this is the Bush years, science is not allowed. For all we know Haskell could live forever using magic jesus blood.

See how I had to get a political thing in there for no reason? That is apparently how Haskell is. They say he rants about politics every day. He really doesn't seem annoying about it in the movie but I could see if you were his son and you were actually PROUD to have your picture taken with Bush - smiling, no middle fingers up, etc. - that it could be pretty annoying to be around this guy.

By the way, another tangent. Couple years back I was very proud when I got an opportunity to flip Dick Cheney off to his face. I was standing on the corner with just a couple protesters, one lane of traffic away from his limo. I was actually able to make eye contact as I waved both birds and yelled FUUUUUUCKKK YOUUUUU with a proud, American voice. Since that historic day I have been pushing for the city of Seattle to erect a statue of me on that corner, or at least a commemorative plaque. However, my deed has now been far surpassed by Dr. Ben Marble, apparentle the gentleman in Gulfport who, while Cheney was being interviewed about how nice all the local "folks" had been while he surveyed the hurricane devastation, yelled "GO FUCK YOURSELF CHENEY!" several times. The reporter actually asked Cheney if he got alot of that and he claimed it was the first time he'd heard it. It was pretty much the greatest thing I ever saw. Good job doctor.

Oh yeah, but I was reviewing that movie I think. If you love motion pictures, you will probaly be interested in the subject of Haskell Wexler. But this truly isn't a film buff movie like, say, Z CHANNEL. The appeal really is the last ditch attempt at a connection between father and son. So like the best wrestling documentary, the subject is universal. You don't have to be into wrestling. I guess if you're gonna watch a documentary about a cinematographer you're probaly gonna be a film buff though, no matter what. Unless you trick somebody into watching it somehow. I'm not sure how but let me know if it works.

As the movie goes on, there is less and less narration, and more of what Haskell wants: inobtrusive footage of fascinating moments that speak for themselves. There's some real touching shit in this movie. Especially when you find out what happened to Mark's mother. You get sad, and you get sweet. Not overly sweet. Maybe not even enough sweet. You might cry. But this is a great movie.

I ain't watching the Air Force One documentary, though. sorry dude.

THE TERMINATOR

Summer, 2007. 1:52 AM. Mindless, soul-less, visually indecipherable and crassly commercial garbage such as TRANSFORMERS has invaded America's movie screens disguised as "good ol' summer popcorn entertainment." Labelled a madman for his harsh condemnation of TRANSFORMERS, Vern began to search for proof that a better, more powerful type of summer blockbuster once existed...

I'm obviously a zealot when it comes to this TRANSFORMERS shit. Most people either like the movie or aren't as offended by it as I am. But my contention that they used to make actual smart/good versions of this type of moronic horse shit has met with some sympathy. I was happy that even the morning radio guy Adam Corolla brought up TERMINATOR 2 when discussing TRANSFORMERS on his show. He agreed with his staff that the movie was "fun" but said, "Still... it's no Terminator."

T2 was one of many classic "popcorn movies" I brought up in my TRANSFORMERS review, and it occurred to me that I haven't actually watched that movie in years. It's been even longer since I saw THE TERMINATOR and I've never seen part 3 at all. At the time our country's values were being terminated by Republicans and I was not in the mood for a movie starring Governor Schwarzenegger.

So I started by watching THE TERMINATOR, aka T1 or THE T. This of course is not a big summer blockbuster like TRANSFORMERS, this is the low budget b-movie breakthrough, the calling card that got James Cameron the job on ALIENS. So I guess the equivalent in Michael Bay's career would be that classic early work, 1990's Playboy Video Centerfold: Kerri Kendall.

If you haven't seen THE T or don't remember, this is basically the story of two naked guys from the future fighting in Los Angeles. They arrive with a blast of lightning and a flash of male nudity. It's pretty much like being born, except instead of a mother there is electricity and instead of a hospital or a manger there is an alley or truck depot and there is no umbilical cord and they are adults. Upon further review I guess it's not like being born, it's more like being a pervert in reverse - instead of opening up an overcoat to reveal their sausage, they steal overcoats to cover it.

Representing evil and technology we have Schwarzenegger as the Terminator (R-CA) and on the other side we have human Michael Biehn (PLANET TERROR). The Terminator is a super-robot with human skin sent from the future to assassinate Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton) before she gives birth to the leader of the post-apocalyptic human resistance against machines.

The role of the Terminator almost went to the great Lance Henriksen (HARD TARGET), which could've been great, but giving it to Schwarzenegger was of course a stroke of genius. His ridiculous muscles are some machine's idea of the ultimate man, and his stiff talking is in line with being a robot. He actually does a very good physical performance, limiting his movements and expressions to seem more machine-like and cold. Like it or not you gotta give him credit as an actor in this one. There are plenty of musclemen who couldn't have done it as well. That said, he is basically Jason Voorhees in this movie. Except he has to make his face into a mask instead of wearing one.

It's nice to watch these two pull themselves up by their bootstraps. They show up with nothing but their swingin dicks so they gotta find clothes, then weapons, then the target. I wonder if maybe this was a mistake, maybe the Terminator should've skipped the clothing part to get that extra jumpstart on Michael Biehn. I mean, he doesn't give a shit what people think of him, he's a Terminator. Of course, a public nudity rap could've slowed him down more than having to steal clothes. I'm sure he was programmed with all the relevant information and chose the most prudent approach. I shouldn't second guess the computer.

The Terminator of course doesn't believe in gun control, so he goes into a pawn shop and protests the 15 day waiting period on the handguns by blowing the clerk away. (Pretty rude, man. I'm sure he could've managed with the shotgun and uzi.) He doesn't know for sure what Sarah Connor looks like so he goes through the phone book and starts murdering everybody with that name. So it's a good "oh shit" moment when our Sarah Connor sees on the news that two people with her name have been killed. I mean even if that was a coincidence you'd still have to feel jinxed if your name was Sarah Connor.

Of course now days when you think of James Cameron you think of giant budgets, "I'm the king of the world!" hubris, digital 3-D technology and obsessive deep sea diving. But in those days he was just some dude who did effects for Roger Corman. This was his second movie as a director (first was PIRANHA II, or P2) and it still had a b-movie feel. He even had Dick Miller as the pawn shop clerk. But you also see the beginning of alot of James Cameron trademarks, like the way the movie keeps seeming like it's over and then some more shit happens. (In this case the Terminator gets blown up but then returns as a clunky stop motion metal skeleton.) And there's all kinds of James Cameron Players in here. Bill Paxton (Hudson in ALIENS, guy who pisses himself in TRUE LIES, submarine explorer in TITANIC and GHOSTS OF THE ABYSS) is a punk rocker killed in the beginning. Lance Henriksen (Bishop in ALIENS) is one of the officers investigating the murders. Michael Biehn (Hicks in ALIENS) is the hero. Linda Hamilton (Cameron's future ex-wife) is the heroine.

This is a good movie that still works, but to me it doesn't work like it used to. It's a good story and has some tension and does well with its low budget, especially in those post-apocalyptic battle scenes, which seem like something out of a nightmare even if they are obviously crammed into one little sound stage. But part of that enjoyment comes from nostalgia and from knowing what these characters and concepts grew into. If I could travel back to 1984 first I would find some clothes and then I would enjoy the movie but I'm not sure I could convince my 1984 self that Cameron would go on to become a legendary action director. The movie showed potential but it didn't prove anything. If this was all he'd made it would be a good movie but I don't think anybody would think he was a great director.

(THE) T(ERMINATOR) 2(: JUDGMENT DAY)

But holy jesus T2 ups the ante. I think ALIENS is even better but still, this is one of the all time great sequels. By the time of this movie John Connor, the future resistance leader, is a juvenile delinquent in a foster home. Sarah Connor is in a mental hospital (same thing Cameron tried to do to Rambo in his script for FIRST BLOOD PART 2). The machines of the future have sent another Terminator back to kill John, but this time it's a more advanced model that can change form and the twist is that the original Schwarzenegger model of Terminator has been reprogrammed to protect John. They say it's the same T-101 model, but I figure it's a T-101.1 because this time it has eyebrows.

I feel kind of stupid explaining what this movie is about, as if somebody doesn't know, but I've got to assume alot of people these days haven't seen it. Otherwise how do we explain this consensus that big sci-fi movies are supposed to be muddled and stupid? If you would like more details about the plot email me. Arnold Schwarzenegger plays the Terminator, a type of robot, or "cybernetic organism." Don't worry, I'll explain in the email.

Visually the sequel is less gloomy than the original, there's more sunlight and of course it's less confined because they have a big ass budget. Instead of a chase through a small dance club they have chases all over Los Angeles with just about every wheeled vehicle other than a unicycle or a 3-wheeled ice cream truck.

And since the Terminator is a good guy this time they get some humor and sweetness out of him. But I think the T-1000 is an even scarier villain than the OG Terminator was. Robert Patrick's dead eyes convince you completely that he has no sympathy or even understanding of the evil he's doing. To him killing a human is a casual activity like shutting a door or buttoning a shirt. In the scene where he's disguised as John Connor's stepmother and talking to him on the phone he could've thought of a more peaceful way to deal with the stepfather than to impale him through the mouth while he's drinking milk, but why would he bother? He's the T-1000.

And this time the future nuclear war feels like more of a threat. By 1991 we weren't really as scared of that shit as we used to be, but T2 illustrated it better than THE DAY AFTER or any movie like that. The opening credits roll out over the surreal image of a burning playground. Later Sarah Connor has a dream where we see kids on a playground burned alive by the bombs.

A weird thing that never occurred to me before about this movie is that it's basically a more violent and paranoid version of E.T. Instead of a kid who plays with Star Wars dolls and gets in trouble at school for rescuing frogs from dissection you got a kid who hacks into ATM machines and has a criminal record. Instead of befriending a lovable alien from space this kid befriends a deadly killing machine from the future. The kid in E.T. is troubled because his parents are divorced, but the kid in T2 is troubled because his dad hasn't been born yet and his mom tried to blow up a computer factory, got shot and arrested and put in a mental hospital. In both they teach the alien/killing machine how to act more human and the friendship helps fill the hole left by their shattered family life.

In E.T. they ride bikes over the moon, in T2 they ride motorcycles in the L.A. storm drains and get chased by a semi. E.T.'s finger lights up and he heals Elliot's cuts, Terminator cuts the skin off his hand and pulls the bullets out of mom. In E.T. Spielberg later made the movie non-violent by replacing the guns with walkie talkies, in T2 the Terminator obeys his command not to kill by shooting hundreds of cops in the legs. E.T. dies, but the power of a little boy's dream or some shit helps him to come back. The Terminator dies, but the LED light in his eye starts blinking again, his CPU kicks in long enough to find an alternate power source and start going again. Instead of saying "I'll be right here" and pointing at the boy's head, the Terminator says "there's another chip" and points at his own head. Instead of flying off to space, he is lowered into molten metal.

Hell, even the titles are almost the same if they only would've left "The" in the title like in the original "THE TERMINATOR." It would be 9 syllables: THE TERMINATOR 2: JUDGMENT DAY = E.T. THE EXTRA-TERRESTRIAL, and then both are abbreviated to two syllables, two characters: T2 = E.T.

They are the same. T2 is E.T. And E.T. is the New Testament. So T2 is the New Testament.

Okay, the New Testament is arguably more influential in western culture than T2 is. But let's stick with the E.T. comparison. What struck me most watching this movie again after all these years was that, like E.T., it had heart. Maybe not glowing quite as bright as that little alien bastard's did, but it's there. It's got tension and suspense, it's got spectacle and groundbreaking special effects, it's got tons of great action scenes, it's got a whole ensemble of iconic badass characters. Alot of "summer event movies" these days can't pull off a single one of those things, let alone having the genuine sweetness you get by the end of this movie. Schwarzenegger is great at moving like a robot, fighting like a robot, and struggling to understand like a robot. And by the end I believed that he really did learn why people cry. Sarah Connnor's narration about the Terminator being better than any of the father figures John had had is too corny, I could do without that. But the friendship between the kid and the robot seems genuine. Maybe it's because I grew attached to him myself, rooting for his dead machinery to kick back into gear, feeling elated when he comes up on the conveyor belt ready to fire an explosive into the ol' mercury man. And then sad again when he points out that all traces of him have to be destroyed in order to prevent Skynet from ever existing. It's like when your dog dies or something. Fun's over, time to face mortality.

But an even more effective emotional part of the movie is the sad reality of John's relationship with his mother. After he and the Terminator successfully rescue her from the mental hospital she scolds him for taking the risk, angrily saying that she doesn't need his help. She doesn't even throw in a "but thank you" or anything like that, and he's crushed. Near the end his mom seems to be calling out to him for help, but then another version of his mom sneaks up behind with a shotgun. It could very well be that the one with the gun is the T-1000 trying to trick him, but he assumes it's not. Because he knows his mom would never ask for help, would never reach out to him or show her emotions. It's easier for him to picture her as the one with the shotgun. It never really struck me before how god damn tragic that moment is.

In the end Sarah Connor gains faith because if a machine can learn the value of human life then maybe we can too. And what are today's heartless, soul-less blockbusters like THE TRANSFORMERS if not machines? Maybe they too will some day learn the value of human life.

One complaint: at the end, when the Terminator is all smashed up and bloodied, he says "I need a vacation." I thought maybe I missed something where somebody else said that phrase and the Terminator learned it from them. But then I looked it up and it turns out it was an ad-libbed reference to fucking KINDERGARTEN COP. Come on fellas, it makes no sense for the robot to make up his own jokes. Show some discipline.

But the fact that that joke seems so out of place shows one of the things that's great about the movie: it has conviction. It really means it. It has some humor in it but it takes its story and characters seriously. When Sarah Connor tries to explain the coming nuclear war and the robots from the future to her doctors it's chilling because we know it's true and we also understand why it convinces them that she's insane.

But think about it. If they never made a sequel to THE TERMINATOR until 2007 would they have had that same seriousness? I don't think so, I think they'd have some jokes about her explaining that a robot came from the future and everybody laughs. "Oh yeah and what about Bigfoot, where does he fit in?" And I would complain about all the lame jokes and everybody would say "what did you expect prickface, it's about robots from the future, it's a sequel to an '80s Arnold Schwarzenegger movie, it's not supposed to be HENRY V!"

Also I'm glad they didn't have a flashback to the roommate who always listens to headphones rocking out to a band called "Tryanglz". That was one part in the first one that was corny so I'm glad they just left that in the past.

TERMINATOR 3: RISE OF THE MACHINES

By the time they got around to doing a part 3 a couple years ago James Cameron had quit directing to become a deep sea explorer, so they had to get some guy who directed the Kurt Russell movie BREAKDOWN. I never thought somebody besides James Cameron should make a TERMINATOR movie, and I was probaly right. This just isn't the same thing. But it's still pretty damn enjoyable. So I forgive them.

There is a little different feel to it. It doesn't look as real as T2, it looks more art directed. It was made in the digital age, the one ushered in by T2 in the first place, so it's got all kinds of digital effects and as great as they are none of them have a fraction of the kick that that original T-1000 did back then, because we've seen all this shit by now. But what are you gonna do?

The main problem I have with the movie is the jokes. Right at the beginning we get naked T-101 going for his traditional steal-clothes-from-somebody-at-a-bar and they turn it into parody by having him steal his leather from a gay stripper. In fact, a stereotypically gay stripper who teaches him to say "talk to the hand." Who knows what kind of wackiness will ensue? Instead of making him menacing or tough as he walks out of that bar they play "Macho Man" and have him put on Elton John sunglasses. Wocka wocka. Later there's a terrible scene where the doctor who Sarah Connor beat up when escaping the insane asylum coincidentally is there to help the police and sees the Terminator again and gets scared. There's maybe 5-7 of these types of jokes in the movie, not an onslaught. But still, that's 5-7 too many lame jokes that ruin the mood.

[Thank God they cut out the "Sgt. Candy" scene that's on disc 2 of the DVD. This asinine deleted scene/rejected Mad TV skit shows a Skynet promotional film where Schwarzenegger plays a "funny" hick character who was the model for the Terminator robots, which is a terrible idea in the first place. But then they have a joke where Schwarzenegger has somebody else's voice and somebody else has Schwarzenegger's voice. Get it? Funny voices! God damn that is pretty much the stupidest shit anybody ever came up with. How in the fuck did the same people who made this pretty good movie think it was worth actually spending the money to shoot that bullshit?]

And there's a couple points where the movie calls the audience stupid. Let me ask you guys something - we're intelligent people, right? We know that if we haven't seen the other movies or forgot what happened, they are readily available on the DVD format for review. Or you could look them up on this "internet" they have now. But the movie thinks we're lazy so they have this new character played by Claire Danes who the premise has to be explained to. The director, Jonathan Not James Cameron Mostow, says on the DVD extras that you need this character in order for the audience to understand what's going on. Which means he thinks the audience hasn't seen TERMINATOR 1 or 2.

In fact, even John Connor (now played by Nick Stahl from BULLY) doesn't remember what happened in T2. For some reason he thinks this Terminator is the same one from before, even though he destroyed that one! It's like if Elliot was reunited with E.T. ten years later and said "where the fuck have you been?" John might not notice this Terminator is different, but I did. This one talks more, explains too much, and even raises his voice in panic. And there's one scene where he looks like Andrew "Dice" Clay from the back.

So those are some of the things the movie got wrong, but thankfully there's plenty that it got right. For example there are some damn good action scenes. Even more than before the fights between Terminators are super powered fights where they throw and hit each other great distances, crash through walls and destroy all kinds of property. There's a great chase scene with a crane truck knocking over buildings and Terminators jumping from vehicle to vehicle like in MATRIX RELOADED. My favorite part of the movie is a knock down, drag out Terminator fight in the tradition of that great fight in BLADE 2 where he gets his head knocked through a pole. Here the Terminators destroy every part of a bathroom, swinging each other through walls, throwing toilets at each other, etc. Terminator stomps on Girl Terminator's face and it doesn't budge, but the back of her head breaks through the pavement.

The action is pretty comic booky and I complained about those jokes, but there's still a real dark undertone to the movie. There's even a scene that shows nuclear war not from the nightmarish on the ground perspective of T2, but from a distance, and from above, where it looks strangely beautiful. The Judgment Day that they prevented in T2 still looms, in fact, it's supposed to happen later today. So even when they prevent inevitable doom, doom is inevitable. The way the story wraps up is surprising and sets up for what could be some interesting and different sequels.

So TERMINATOR 3 is one entry in a long line of part 3s that are not as good, but are enjoyable if you can accept a reasonable lowering of excellence. There's basically two approaches to a good part 3: either it's in 3-D, or it's fun but you have to forgive alot more than in the first two. This one's not in 3-D. At least you don't have to wear special glasses, I guess.

TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE: THE NEXT GENERATION

Well in a serious bid to not hate the upcoming TEXAS CHAIN SAW remake prequel, I decided to mentally condition myself by rewatching the two bad sequels, parts 3-4. But I don't know, maybe I'm getting soft in my old age, maybe the remake lowered the bar, maybe it's some kind of Stockholm Syndrome deal, but this week I found out I really don't hate these two movies like I used to. They're not good sequels, no, but I was able to appreciate them a little more after all these years. The little fuckers are starting to grow on me.

I also realized the secret behind the failure of the sequels. Every one of them is basically a loose remake, but without all the elements that were in place to make the first one work. You can't catch lightning in a bottle 4 times unless you're really good with a bottle, and not even Tobe Hooper is that good with a bottle anymore. The sequels are all closer to the original than the actual remake is. They change the reason why the victims are in town, they have a different lineup for the family (and a different person playing Leatherface), and they add some new twists here and there. But they're all basically some people come to town, get stuck at the house, they're tormented in crazy ways, there's the dinner scene, they escape, they battle, they get away. I think the reason part 2 is the only one that works is because it has more of the pieces in place: Tobe Hooper is still there so it has a more artistic execution than the others. Jim Siedow is still there as the cook and he's better than all the other characters. Bill Moseley as Chop Top is new, but he's a way better Hitchhiker substitue than all the characters in the other sequels. Leatherface doesn't look as good as in the first one, but he looks much better than the other two (three including the remake). At the same time, part 2 has more drastic new twists than the other two: an underground amusement park instead of a house, Dennis Hopper as a protagonist as psychotic as the Sawyer family, a social satire/black comedy tone with ridiculously over-the-top gore that gives it its own feel entirely different from the original. The others don't go as far to stand out.

I don't know if it's possible to make a good CHAIN SAW sequel after part 2, but if it is I'm guessing it would take the ALIENS/DEVIL'S REJECTS approach of taking the characters and putting them in an entirely different genre. Not just doing a loose remake, but having an entirely different type of story that happens to be in the same world. But that's not what NEXT GENERATION is. It's another remake. The only way you can tell it takes place after the original is because of the opening crawl about the first chain saw massacre and "two other minor incidents."

NEXT GENERATION (originally titled RETURN OF THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE, which is still the title on the end credits) I guess would be the third minor incident. But at least it doesn't have the Hollywood feel of part 3. It's low budget, shot in Texas, directed by the original's co-writer Kim Henkel, and the (not particularly good) score is by Wayne Bell, sound effects guy and co-compsoser on the original. It actually has the most famous cast of any Chain Saw movie (Renee Zelweger is in the Sally slot, Matthew McConaghey is the hitchhiker type/lead tormentor) but this was their last pre-fame movie.

But if Henkel was trying to go back to the rawness of the original he kind of blew it. The opening immediately puts you in the mind of bad '80s slasher movies, because it has twenty-somethings playing teens going to the prom. There is actually some pretty funny dialogue to establish what an asshole one of the guys is (he blames his girlfriend for him making out with another girl, and says that if he doesn't have sex he will get prostate cancer) but this is dialogue for a B-movie, not for a CHAIN SAW movie. You haven't even seen Leatherface but you're ready to root for him because the other option is rooting for the funny-asshole boyfriend, the funny-airhead girlfriend and Renee Zelweger's boyfriend who's not in the movie long enough for you to remember anything about his character. Zelweger herself does fine (I remembered her being terrible, but my memory was being unfair) but even her character is given cartoony horn-rim glasses and a corny backstory to show that she's a nerd who needs to come out of her shell. It's like those movies where the ugly duckling takes the glasses off and becomes the most popular girl in school, except in this case she takes her glasses off and escapes Leatherface.

And Leatherface, I'm afraid, is another problem. At least Henkel gets that it's not all about Leatherface, he's just the enforcer for the family. But this is by far the worst Leatherface in any Chain Saw movie. The guy doesn't even look tall, just chubby, and the mask is terrible. It looks like just some schlubby dude with a home made Leatherface Halloween costume. Toward the end of the movie they emphasize his gender confusion, which in itself is not a terrible idea. Alot of people don't catch that he's wearing a woman's face with makeup at the end of the original. Here nobody's gonna miss it - you not only see him putting on lipstick, but he has cleavage under his dress. Look man, I'm an enlightened guy, I don't got a problem with transgendered cannibal movies. The trouble is I can't buy how good Leatherface is at making himself up. He does way too good of a job here. So instead of Leatherface it looks like Divine chasing after her at the end.

McConaghey is decent at over-the-top menace. His part is a little more creative than Viggo's in part 3, but still a little too traditional-evil. The craziest touch to his character is that he has some kind of cyborg attachment to his leg that sometimes gets out of control. Kind of a funny idea but never seems believable, especially with the sci-fi robot sound effects they use whenever he walks. The other guy, W.E., is apparently supposed to be the cook, and at one time he's referred to as an old man, but he looks about 35-40. He constantly quotes Ulysses S. Grant, Voltaire, Machiavelli, etc. Another funny idea but made cartoonish because he doesn't say much of anything else.

Probaly the thing that made me hate the movie so much the one time I saw it before was the HALLOWEEN 5 style twist that the family are actually part of some weird conspiracy. Something to do with Illuminati types who control the world. At one point a dude in a suit and tie shows up to scold McConaghey. At the end, he picks up Zelweger in a limo and brings her to the hospital. The only explanation he gives is something about "showing people what true horror is." This is probaly meant also as a dual meaning, that Henkel is showing people what true horror is, which is a little overconfident. I don't know, if some weird conspiracy of rich people was behind maniacs in some other movie it might be a cool idea, but in a sequel to TEXAS CHAIN SAW it implies things about the original that are just plain stupid. So I'm against it. Nice try Henkel, but we're not buying it.

But since I already knew that was coming, this time I was able to better appreciate the goofy touches here and there. There's a funny scene where Leatherface stands behind Renee and keeps touching her hair. There's a female member of the family now who brags about her breast implants, and complains about an implant allegedly in her head that could cause her to explode. She has a pretty good scene where she picks up pizzas with Renee in the trunk. A cop almost sees what she has in the trunk, but she flirts with him to get away.

And there's a chase that's better than any in part 3, where Renee runs upstairs, jumps through a window (GLIMMER MAN style), runs across the roof. Leatherface goes onto the roof too and starts sawing at the chimney, dropping bricks down onto her. The best part is that she leaps off the roof, grabs onto a wire and starts shimmying across. I never seen that in a movie before.

I gotta admit, I kind of hate Renee Zelweger. I always see her on awards shows, she wins an award and she has that phony "Me? You're giving me yet another fucking award? This is such a surprise that I may faint and cry at the same time, I can't believe award number thirty seven for little ol' me." Plus, that first BRIDGET JONES movie bugged the shit out of me. That Colin Firth guy is a fuckin grouch through the whole movie and then at the end oh no, turns out it was all a misunderstanding, he's actually a sweetheart who just happened to have a pinecone up his ass for the entire movie. And Renee Zelweger is supposed to be British? And fat? I don't get it. So I kind of hate her, but I have a new respect after seeing that wire move again. Good job on that one Zelweger. And this was years before the Yamakasi were doing that "parkour" shit.

In the original the hitchhiker got run over by a semi, and Henkel's twist on that is enjoyably weird: a small prop plane (connected to the Illuminati dudes?) swoops down and hits McConaghey with its propellor. (Or with something - he's not as bloody as you'd think if it was the propellor that hit him.) This is pretty random and unexplained. I like it.

And I gotta tell you, there's one little moment that probaly didn't even register with me when I saw this years ago, but now it struck me as brilliance. When Renee is seated for her traditional Texas Chain Saw dinner, this time they have a whole bunch of dead people propped up in chairs to enjoy the meal. But later in the scene one of them, a weird old guy with long hair on the sides, bald on top, gets up and wanders away, confused. I thought he was dead because he wasn't moving, but really he was just old. Maybe a family member, maybe a derelict, I got no idea. That's good stuff.

So I don't know, maybe this means my bar has been properly lowered for viewing the sequel, but I don't hate RETURN OF THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE anymore. I forgive it. Leatherface sucks and that Illuminati business is bullshit, but that's water under the endless bridge that Chop Top and Leatherface drive across when they're sawing the football fans up in the beginning of part 2. I don't want to fight anymore, let's be friends. We'll team up against the remake.

TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE (the fuckin remake)

NOTE: This review ran on The Ain't It Cool News back in 2004, but something fucked up the formatting there so here is a more readable version. You can still read the original talkbacks here.

Vern massacres the TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE!

Hey folks, Harry here... Well let's see... Mr Beaks and I both liked THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE, but Quint and now Vern didn't like it... with Vern more or less striking with out and out hatred and venom. This is exactly what will happen to you if you carry the original in the theater with you. So, if you're expecting the experience of the first film... I suggest renting the first film. If you want to see a "STUDIO VERSION" of this story, then check this film out, but I only suggest going if you're open to that.

Meanwhile... here ya go, for all you monkeys that have been saying that TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE was 100% based on Ed Gein... take a look at this LINK!!! See, we've got crazy psycho killers from Travis County!!!

Harold & the boys,

I bet Harry and some of the others out there agree with me that Mr. Tobe Hooper's THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE is not only a great horror picture, but one of the all time greats of American independent Cinema. A real hall of famer. Well if so you'll remember that crazy old drunk in the cemetery at the beginning. "You laugh at an old man." The kids are asking around about which bodies got dug up and the old man tries to warn them away from this godforsaken shit hole out there in Harryland.

Well today I am that old man leaning up against the tombstone, warning you against the worst type of dumb movie: the kind of dumb movie that is a remake of perfect movie.

When I first heard Michael Bay was producing a remake of 'SAW I just about had a heart attack. Even back when Tobe Hooper wanted to do one I thought that was a bad idea. But this sounded like the worst possible combination of bad filmatist and good movie. Then I heard that Daniel Pearl was returning as cinematographer, and that crazy drill sergeant fuck with the big eyebrows, R. Lee Ermey, was in it. I started think damn, I almost want to see this movie. Then all the reviews started to appear on, you know, popular Austin-based movie web sights that will remain nameless to protect their reputations. These were positive reviews, sometimes by smart people, often people claiming to be fans of the original masterpiece. And I started to get more curious. What if they really did it? What if they overcame the odds and made a good or okay remake, like THE THING or THE FLY or THE BLOB or even NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD 1990? Hell, I was dead set against THE RING AMERICAN STYLE but I ended up liking it alot.

Well, this ain't fuckin that. This ain't even on the level of PLANET OF THE APES.

(Attention people who read movie reviews before seeing the movie and then are surprised that the review discussed things that happened in the movie. Don't read this one.*)

I won't exaggerate. This isn't as bad as it could've been. It doesn't have that supercrack editing style you think of when you sadly find yourself thinking about Michael Bay. In some ways it's better than TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE: THE NEXT GENERATION. The acting is better and the ending's not quite that dumb. This one's more like part 3. There are a couple of sicko lines and ideas that you like intellectually, but it feels contrived, like it's trying to be a CHAIN SAW movie, not like it actually IS one.

I guess the premise here is that the original masterpiece is a fictionalized account of an actual event, and this moronic remake is the real deal. Trouble is the real TCSM feels real, and the remake feels like any other phoney baloney movie. These are horror movie characters who do the type of stupid shit that horror movie characters do. They don't just make a couple mistakes and run into trouble. They repeatedly wander around in and break into scary looking places where they obviously shouldn't go, especially after just watching a girl rant about someone trying to kill her and then blow her own head off.

They open up things and fuck with strangers and run right into spooky, foggy abandoned slaughterhouses while being chased. They trust people they obviously shouldn't. They are very gullible about proper police procedures. They see dead bodies and almost get sick, but never actually do get sick. They have to pee but the bathroom's too gross, so apparently they hold it for the rest of the movie. They pick up jars of pee and look at them but never realize hey, that's a jar of pee. They get punished for smoking pot and making out, like teens always do in all those '70s horror movies EXCEPT Texas Chain Saw Massacre.

This is a movie where if you hide in a closet, 5 squeaky rats will appear out of nowhere to give away your location. Where a small meat cleaver can easily cut through bone. Where a girl can be terrorized all day long and keep her shirt tied up to expose her cute little belly button the whole time. But don't worry, babies won't be harmed and inbred kids will turn out to be nice in the end.

I always liked how the original started out on a sweltering day, continued into the night, and ended with the sun coming up again in the morning. It felt like you were really in that ordeal all night. This one starts on a hot day with Michael Bay style fetishistic shots of kids covered in a glistening layer of sweat, and ends on a pouring down rain Dark and Stormy Night like you see in the movies. One of those Texas summer floods, I guess.

This is also the type of movie where Jessica Biel backs up against a wall and Leatherface's arms tear through the wood behind her and grab her. I guess they must be setting up a LEATHERFACE VS. JASON because Jason's gonna be pissed when he sees Leatherface ripping off his shit. (Does Jason go to movies? I guess maybe not.)

I mean, this isn't 'SAW, this is just a movie. They try to copy some of the ambient score of the original, but still when there's an emotional moment or something your typical orchestra music pipes in to tell you how to feel. Thanks.

If Michael Bay and that guy who was fired from END OF DAYS really are fans of 'SAW, well... they sure have a funny way of showing it. Actually, what I should say is they must not've seen it since they were kids. We all heard how Bay said this would be less gorey than the (not gorey at all) original, and of course it turns out to be far gorier. (Don't see it for that, though, it's nowhere near as disgusting as part 2.) But more importantly, most of the elements that make the real movie so great are left out of the remake and not replaced with anything that could make up for losing them. You don't just put Leatherface and some body parts in a movie and have yourself a Texas Chain Saw picture. Have you even seen the movie?

Okay, here's a quiz then. Who's the best character in TCSM?

Well duh, the hitchhiker. But there's no hitchhiker in the remake, not an Edwin Neal type anyway.

What is the best scene in TCSM?

Well, if it's not the hitchhiker, obviously it's the dinner scene. Not in the remake at all.

Can you believe that? It's like remaking STAR WARS without that round space station thing blowin up at the end. Or NORTH BY NORTHWEST without the cropduster.

There's also no Grandpa. No creepy news report on the radio. No graveyard scene. No graverobbing at all. No speech about the slaughterhouse ("That was better. They died better that way.") No onscreen meat eating. Not a lot of bones, just a couple attached to dolls by a little boy. There's no Cook. R. Lee Ermey plays a similar role, but doesn't get as much screen time as Jim Siedow did.

There are no scenes where family members yell at each other. In fact, hardly any interaction between the family members at all. TCSM isn't about Leatherface, it's about a family of maniacs, but this remake keeps them all separate until a little part at the end, like you don't assume they're in it together. R. Lee, the only memorable new character, doesn't even interact with Leatherface.

They do have the metal door slamming, and the butt shot of course, and Leatherface cutting his leg. They kind of got the saw twirling at the end. And they definitely remembered the meat hook. They keep going back to it like, oh, I know what'll get 'em. The meat hook. Let's go back to the meat hook again.

Leatherface is okay. He mostly looks better than the last two sequels. Just to be safe they keep him in the shadows most of the movie, so he kind of looks like the real Leatherface from some angles. You know, like how Will Smith really looked like Ali when they showed him from the back.

But then he has this one mask that's got evil eyes on it, you know, like a creased brow. I guess Leatherface must've cut off an evil guy's face when he was making evil eyes at him. I bet that guy deserved to get his face cut off, he looked pretty evil, man.

Oh yeah, but get this. He takes the mask off! He really does. He has a messed up face with no nose, and later they say he had a rare skin disease and everyone picked on him so that's why he wears people's faces. I don't know if it was a Michael Jackson reference or not. But I do know for sure it was, you know, totally fuckin stupid. This screening was attended by a whole new generation of dumb horror fans (like you saw at the friday the 13th sequels in the '80s) who yell YEEEAAAH!!! for every act of violence against any character. But even some of these guys groaned when the mask came off. I talked to one guy who said that turned him against the movie.

There are a couple good ideas in the movie. There's a part where a gal has to help an amputee up after he falls dumping his piss bottle down the john. That's an uncomfortable situation you don't see in movies alot. Also R. Lee Ermey has a couple good lines and a scene where he forces a guy to sit in a blood spot where the girl killed herself and put the same gun in his mouth. Instead of a girl on a meathook its a dude that already got one leg cut off, and he sticks around for a while and tries to pull himself off. I was thinking okay, maybe he'll escape and hop around on one foot for a while, that might be funny. But no, he stays hooked. I wasn't really rooting for the guy anyway because who gives a shit about that character. It's almost like they don't want you to like most of the cast, because all but two of them want to just dump the suicide girl's body on the side of the road before they even talk to the police. Not that the kids in the original were your best friends (especially Franklin) but they didn't go out of their way to make them all into selfish assholes.

It was cool that they got John Laroquette to do the narration again, but I didn't like what they did with it. The narration starts out the same as in the real 'SAW but over crime scene shots supposedly taken by the police. He talks about the police files as if this whole movie is taken from what's written in the files. Then of course by the end of the movie you know that the police didn't find out that any of this stuff happened, so what's the deal with the police files?

At the end they pin the murders on some name like "Thomas Newton, also known as... LEATHERFACE!" But come on, Laroquette. How do you know that? Nobody called him Leatherface in the whole movie. To WHO is he also known as Leatherface? Just us?

And one more thing Laroquette. Didn't you think that deal with the SPOOOOOKY scratched up black and white footage was lame? It's supposed to be police taking footage of the crime scene. I did like how they showed scratches and a clump of hair on the wall, and you had to wait to see where that came from. The dumb part is they go back to the footage again at the very end of the movie. Suddenly, Leatherface pops up and grabs the cop and they freeze on a blurry frame of the Leatherface mask. The only known image of him, blah blah blah.

Yeah, that's exactly what we need. Remake a 30 year old classic and end it with a lift from the fucking BLAIR WITCH PROJECT.

Why did you let them do it, Laroquette? You fuckin blew it, dude.

Listen up all you fuckers out there who might some day make a TEXAS CHAIN SAW movie. There are many reasons why part 2 is the only chainsaw sequel that anybody likes very much. And it has nothing to do with Leatherface. Forget about fucking Leatherface! Part 2 has a different Leatherface, with a mask by Tom Savini. He's a little more retarded and sexually confused, so you kind of feel sorry for him. But they have Jim Siedow back as the cook, and they let him loose. "This town loves prime meat." The hitchhiker died in part 1, but they brought in his brother Chop Top (back from Vietnam) played brilliantly by Bill Moseley. This is a very funny, completely insane character who talks about music while he picks pieces of skin off his head wound with a coat hanger and snacks on them. "Leatherface, you bitch hog, you ruined my Sonny Bono wig!" These are the characters that make a 'Saw picture. Matthew McConaghey didn't cut it, and not even Viggo Mortensen did. R. Lee almost cuts it but he's only a cook, he needs a hitchhiker or a Chop Top at his side.

Come to think of it R. Lee doesn't have as much dimension to his character as the cook did. That guy was brutal like R. Lee but he seemed kind of conflicted about it. He ties up Sally and puts her in a bag, and as he drives her to the house he keeps apologizing and jabbing her with a broom handle. Then he complains about his electric bill. R. Lee's character is funny-scary-sick, but he's still not as interesting.

I know some of you kids in the talkbacks will say who cares, I want to see Jessica Biel's titties. Well if that's the case read Maxim, asshole. You don't even have to be 18 to buy it I don't think. If you like softcore porn of actresses from tv shows, then fine. What's next, remake TAXI DRIVER with the gal from Alias? Have some fuckin respect. Remake a Shannon Tweed movie or something.

Please, I know you kids have seen the positive reviews on the internet, but don't listen to that shit. If the internet gave a good review of jumping off a bridge, would you do it?

This looks like shit, it walks like shit and it is in fact, you know... walking shit, I guess. If you feel like watching THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE, it just got re-released on dvd. Check it out. This remake is not the same thing. When Jessica Biel cried, "I just want to go home," I thought - "You and me both, lady."

New Line, it's not too late to shelve this fucker. Let's pretend this never happened. All will be forgiven.

By the way, I know Michael Bay also wants to remake OMEGA MAN, and that other asshole is doing DAWN OF THE DEAD. Tell you what, I'll save you the trouble of having to figure out all my favorite movies so you can piss all over them. Here's a list of some movies I like:

Once Upon a Time in the West, El Topo, Blade, Ghost Dog, Die Hard, When We Were Kings, Petey Wheatstraw, Rope, Sonatine, Mad Max, The Getaway, Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, Dirty Harry, Vampire Lovers, The King of Comedy, Mr. Majestyck, Fight Club.

So there you go, have at it frat boy. Re-imagine the shit out of 'em. Introduce them to a new generation 'til they can't see straight. Make them "less gorey" and "emphasize the thriller aspects." They won't know what hit 'em!

And after that you can lick my plate, dog dick.

thanks bud,
Vern

p.s. Oh yeah but I guess you did a pretty strong performance as the cut off head Harry. good work buddy.

*At this preview screening they actually searched each person with a metal detector at the door, causing a huge bottleneck which blocked the top of a jampacked escalator. If people hadn't jumped out of the way repeatedly it would've been one of those horrible freak accidents like when 20 kids jump on a waterslide all at once. I figure if New Line Cinema thinks it's okay to risk maiming a bunch of teenage horror fans just so a bootleg of their shitty movie won't get out 2 days early, then it's okay for me to give away every last surprise in the movie.

THERE WILL BE BLOOD

First of all, don't get your hopes up. There won't be that much blood. I was very disappointed.

Second of all, Paul Thomas "the 'Thomas' means I didn't direct MORTAL KOMBAT" Anderson's THERE WILL BE BLOOD has the feeling of greatness. It has the smell of greatness, the texture of it. It flirts with greatness. I'm pretty sure it even left the club with greatness last night but there is no way yet for us to know if it got lucky with greatness. We can only catch up with it later and ask it. If it turns out later that it was only faking it I'll have to admit it had me fooled. Here's why.

It has an epic feel, an epic length, a supreme filmatic confidence. It has long stretches with no dialogue, because it don't give a fuck. It knows what it wants. If it wants to show an emotional reunion scene from all the way across a field it fucking will. It has authentic period detail. A classy, tension-building score. Nothing noticably digital. Hubris. Oil. Madness. Mustaches.

Whether or not it's great, it reminds you of greatness. It'll make you think of CITIZEN KANE sometimes if you know how to think of CITIZEN KANE as a movie about a specific thing and not just as the official best movie ever made. It reminded me of THE GODFATHER a couple times. Mostly it reminded me of Stanley Kubrick. Not in some specific similarity but just in the way it made me feel, like watching FULL METAL JACKET or EYES WIDE SHUT the first time. Not being sure where it was going, whether it was almost over or just beginning, but every big leap or twist always felt natural, like I was in good hands, this guy knows what he's doing. When it was over I felt like I would probaly have to see it again or go up into the mountains and meditate for a month before I'd know exactly what it was supposed to be about. But I knew it was pretty fuckin good. A pleasure to be horrified by.

(NOTE: this review contains some vague spoilers. I'm trying not to be too specific but I do discuss crucial scenes including the last one, and you really oughta see this one totally fresh anyway. Have some restraint, don't fuck it up for yourself buddy)

In the first section I was impressed, but not bowled over. It was obviously epic, obviously good filmmaking. I could understand the acclaim. But it seemed like I would go away saying yeah, it was good, but I didn't love it. It didn't really connect with me. But then all the sudden it did in a definitely-classic scene where an oil well strikes with Plainview's son* on top of it. The scene is epic, as the camera rotates around the panicked father carrying the injured son as oil sprays behind them. It's terrifying, with its creepy score by some dude from Radiohead and sound design that puts you in the head of the little boy. It's poignant in the way the greedy oil man protects his son and completely ignores that he's just hit the motherlode. And then it's tragic when he abandons this traumatized kid to fight a breaking fire, finally acknowledges his fortune and starts to laugh. And from that point on the movie is riveting.

Just so the movie doesn't think it's hot shit, though, I might as well harp on the couple minor problems I did have with it, both having to do with Paul Dano. He plays a preacher named Eli who has a cruel rivalry with Plainview and forces him to give money to his church, making the church dependent on oil. Minor Problem #1: there's some business with Dano playing twin brothers. It's not clearly explained and seems kind of silly for this movie. There are themes there with Eli being jealous of his brother, but if that's a crucial part of the movie maybe it should've been explained better.

Minor Problem #2 is at the point in the movie when it skips ahead 16 years. All the sudden Plainview's boy H.W. is a grown man, looks at least 30. Plainview is grey and weak and living as a crazy man in a mansion like late Howard Hughes or late Citizen Kane. Times have changed, but Paul Dano hasn't. He doesn't look a day older! He looks only a couple years older than that amount of time skipped over. Somehow the little boy lapped him.

I have to assume this was a conscious choice, it's not like Paul T. Anderson didn't know he was doing this. And I understand not switching actors like they did with the son, because the last scene is a confrontation between the two characters and it just wouldn't work if we were getting used to a new guy playing the character. And you gotta kind of admire them for not giving him a beard or a receding hairline or some rubber wrinkles. They knew that wasn't gonna fool anybody so they didn't insult our intelligence with that. But I don't know man. I looked it up. Paul Dano is 23 and looks young enough that he still plays high school kids. I had a hard time taking this leap. Am I supposed to figure the Lord kept him young? Or that he's from the same planet as Natalie Portman in the Star Wars movies so the little boy she babysits grows up to be her hunky husband and she just changes dresses? Maybe he has a kidney problem like Gary Coleman. I don't know, it's kind of freaky. The way people came up with theories about MAGNOLIA, I figure it won't be long before someone tells me that last part is all an opium dream or takes place in purgatory or it's a vision reflected in the piece of silver he finds in the opening scene or there's a tiny world inside his mustache or who knows.

But who cares, the greatness-odor on the movie overwhelms those quibbles and suffocates them. Dan D. Lewis gives an amazing performance that he will get an Oscar for, which is kind of too bad because it means Viggo will not win this year. And as talented as Viggo is it's gonna be hard for him to ever top that butt naked eye stabbing scene, so that's too bad. But Lewis is great, sometimes going way over-the-top, but Al Pacino in SCARFACE over-the-top, not Nicolas Cage for the past ten years over-the-top. Also great is the weird little kid who plays his son. And this is unusual but even the baby who plays his son as a baby gives a standout performance. I talked to somebody else who noticed this so I know I'm not crazy. I don't think it was a puppet or a little person in a costume, I think it was a real baby.

And like I said, I don't think after one viewing I really have a full understanding of the movie so I will just say that what seems most important to me and what I like most is these two relationships that Plainview has, the one with his son and the one with the incredible ageless preacher. The way he treats his son is powerful to me because it's ambiguous and that makes it seem more genuine. The guy is a terrible father and a huge asshole. But there are times when it's clear that his love is genuine. He just gets distracted by all this competitive businessman shit and it makes him fuck up. He tells cruel lies and half truths, he avoids talking about the boy's mother or makes up a story. To be honest I was too thick to follow the true background of the boy, which is explained in the dialogue-free opening, so it was kind of a surprise twist at the end for me. But I love the way the asshole shell of this guy occasionally cracks and there's a softy hiding underneath.

If you've seen the movie you know the excellent baptism scene. It's so funny because of the way he only half-way plays along with this religious talk he obviously doesn't believe, and because of the way Eli uses the situation to avenge him for the beatdown earlier. (By the way, it is pretty funny to watch Daniel-Day Lewis with a huge mustache beating the shit out of the kid from LITTLE MISS SUNSHINE. That was a good scene too now that I think of it.) But also the scene is kind of a punch in the gut because you see how it obviously gets to him to be talking about abandoning his son. And right after that H.W. has returned from whatever school he was shipped off to. Obviously Plainview didn't just feel guilty in the moment. It made him realize the mistake he had made with his boy and try to correct it. But too late, looks like he already blew it.

The movie ends dealing with his relationship with Eli. So that might be a sign that Eli is a more important person in his life, which would be another sign that he's a crappy father. Despite the weird aging problem this is an intense and unpredictable emotional and physical duel. This is some crazy shit. They've spent their lives hating each other, exploiting each other, beating each other up, tricking each other, lying to themselves and to everyone else. Eli is a huckster but also really believes in God and can't understand why God lets him be such an ass. Plainview hates Eli's bullshit, but is just as full of shit himself, and must know it, and might hate himself for it. And he hates religion, but he sort of found it during that baptism scene, and he hates Eli all the more for it. But he's been battling this kid for decades and he finally pulls out all his cards and as far as he's concerned he has check mate. (I just mixed a card playing and a chess metaphor. I was gonna try to do checkers too but it wasn't working.)

To me it kind of seems like in defeating Eli he has also defeated himself, because it's hard to imagine anything happy happening to him ever again after the movie ends. So it's an ambiguous ending just like KING KONG VS. GODZILLA or FREDDY VS. JASON. Some people will say there are two endings, one where Plainview wins and one where Eli wins. But it's an urban legend.

There's no question in my mind that this movie will be studied and discussed for many years. What the ultimate conclusions will be, I do not know. I'm guessing "pretty fuckin good" will be one of them. Even if everybody later decides it's a big bore and the depiction of the oil industry is inaccurate and the baby's performance was digitally enhanced, I hope there will at least be some acclaim for the Radiohead dude for doing the score. That thing is spectacular. I would like to see some horror movies with that kind of sound. Good shit.

(This is one of the only reviews of the movie that will end in the word "shit." Maybe there's one that says it's "the shit," I'm not sure. But definitely not "it's shit." That would just be inaccurate.)

*by the way this is about an oil tycoon named Plainview, his little son, some preacher, relationships, and that type of shit

THEY LIVE

THEY LIVE is one of my favorite movies ever. It is probaly the very best version of a rare type of movie I love: the badass action movie that also works as a political statement. BILLY JACK may be more political, but it seems so self important and it has no sense of humor. THEY LIVE is kind of saying the same thing THE MATRIX is saying about a society brainwashed by media and advertising, but it's saying more than that. It's about the America of the Reagan years, when everything was geared to help the rich at the expense of the working class. Which for some reason seems awfully familiar today. Huh. Weird.

"Rowdy" Roddy Piper plays Nada, a drifter who walks into town with tools and a sleeping bag on his back. (Hey, what happens to that sleeping bag? I think it disappears.) This is a hero who not only doesn't drive a sports car, but doesn't have a car at all. Or a house. Or a job, at first. The plants are closing, the jobs are drying up, that's why he's on the move. But he happens to get a construction job, where he meets Frank (Keith motherfuckin David from THE THING) and finds out about a homeless encampment near a church where some nice people serve food for the homeless.

The first section of the movie doesn't have alot of dialogue. It's all about watching. Nada watches people watching TV - an old lady in an apartment, a dude standing outside an electronics shop, even homeless people who have a TV set up outside. We can see that Nada is a little creeped out by the vapid commercials and their hypnotic effect on people. And then they get pissed off when, every once in a while, some weird old man cuts into the broadcast desperately telling people to "wake up." And then everybody gets a headache.

Nada also starts watching the church, because he notices something odd going on. He watches a helicopter watching the church. He sneaks in and sees that it's not a real church. The choir he hears from outside is a reel-to-reel tape and there's some kind of rebels hatching a plan in there. He even bumps into a secret panel in the wall and sees a box inside, but he gets found out by an elderly blind priest, so he leaves.

All this watching is actually very cinematic. I like the good ol' non-verbal storytelling. And of course the director is John Carpenter and he knows how to pull this shit off. It's got a bluesy take on the usual John Carpenter driving electronic score, so it creates a real powerful mood. The movie's actually a little stiff when they have dialogue explaining things, but the story is so perfect that I don't care.

One night an army of riot cops come raid the church. Not just that, they bulldoze the entire homeless camp and beat everybody up, including the elderly, blind priest. This might seem over-the-top to some people, but not to me. If you've been around WTO or any big police riot like that you know this movie is accurate. Except there is less chanting in the movie version. It might make you lose respect for Keith David's character if he kept chanting, "This is what democracy looks like! This is what democracy looks like!"

The next day, Nada goes into the church, opens up the secret panel, steals the box, brings it to an alley... and finds out it's just a box of sunglasses. Shit.

But you guys know what happens next. It turns out that the sunglasses were created by the rebels, they somehow break through a hypnotic signal that has brainwashed the world. So as Nada walks around he sees the truth: billboards and magazines that say things like "OBEY" and "CONSUME" and "MARRY AND REPRODUCE" in plain black letters on plain white backgrounds. Money that says "THIS IS YOUR GOD." And some people, many of them coincidentally with ties or fur coats, have ugly skeletal alien faces. Because the ruling class are aliens, keeping us "asleep" with our competition and greed so we won't notice they're infiltrating our world and slowly changing our climate to theirs. (I wonder if Al Gore likes THEY LIVE? Maybe if he said that in 2000 he would've won by enough to stay president.)

The section of the movie where Nada walks around with his sunglasses and sees what's going on is undeniably classic. Especially when he tells off some rich alien ladies in a high end grocery store, and all the aliens start talking into their Rolexes. "I've got one that can see." Nada ends up killing two alien cops, stealing their shotgun and shooting up a bank, which is where he says his most famous line, "I have come here to chew bubble gum and kick ass. And I'm all out of bubble gum." Apparently John Carpenter gave Piper free reign to ad lib dialogue, and he made that one up. There's lots of funny lines like that. My favorite line actually I always remembered completely wrong. I thought he said, "It fuckin figures" when he saw all the rich people were aliens. But he actually says the equally perfect, "It figures it would be something like this."

It's perfect because it's true, it does figure. The details of the alien takeover all fit the world as we know it. Alot of rich people are our alien controllers. We see two guys talking, the alien got a big promotion and the human didn't. Who's an alien and who's not always seems to fall along class lines. The assistants aren't aliens, the waiters aren't, the people of color aren't. Some cops are aliens but most of them aren't, they just work for the man anyway. Alot of humans benefit from the takeover too - as they sellout, they find themselves getting raises and promotions. There are even humans who know about the aliens and still sellout, and in addition to getting money and power they're honored at a fancy banquet in the aliens' underground tunnel system.

And you know one give away that they're not on our side? They got these fancy watches that work as walkie talkies and as teleporters. You always thought why can't I have one of those fancy rich people watches? Because I can't afford it. But actually it's because you're not a they live. In the '80s those watches were a big thing for yuppies and shit, now in the 2000s it's mostly rappers that are they lives, such as P-Diddy is definitely a they live and he hands out watches to people at awards shows to secretly honor their collaboration with the they lives.

Once Nada finds out the secret, the movie is less about watching and more about shooting. There's alot of shooting in this movie. But the greatest and most distinctive action scene in the movie is the famous alley fight between Nada and Frank. Nada wants Frank to put on the sunglasses to see the truth, but Frank doesn't want to. He has a wife and kid, he just wants to mind his own business, stay out of it. So the result is an amazing 5 1/2 minute wrestling match on concrete. There is some bodyslamming, alot of punching, a whole lot of kicking and kneeing in the balls. I mean they just beat the shit out of each other, and these are our heroes. This scene is both legendary and infamous because it goes on for so long, and most people (including people who like it) seem to think it is completely gratuitous. I disagree. I think it's a perfect symbol for the distance somebody will go to not see the trouble in the world. I don't like politics. I just mind my own business. All Frank has to do is look, but he must know instinctively that it is a seditious act, it will change his life. Once Nada gets those glasses on him, Frank can't look away. He's on the team, and the two of them set out to see what they can do to take the planet back.

Actually first they limp to a hotel room, all bloody, and check in together. I wonder what the hell the hotel clerk thinks is going on?

I mean, THEY LIVE has everything. The brilliant Twilight Zone type premise. The dead-on social/political satire. The catchy soundtrack. The hilarious tough guy oneliners. The wrestling. The shooting. The cool alien monsters in ties, making speeches. The violent rebellion against the oppressors. The badass kamikaze conclusion. Keith David. Roddy Piper. Everything. That right there was a list of everything.

Piper is clearly not as good of an actor as Kurt Russell, but he's perfect as this particular John Carpenter hero. He seems believable as a homeless construction worker. And even though I think he has a bit of a Canadian accent, you believe him when he says he believes in America. When he puts the glasses on and finds out what's happening to America, he knows he has to fix it. This is a movie about real partriotism.

Unfortunately for patriotism though, the Americans really fucked up on releasing THEY LIVE on DVD. There's a German version with a commentary track by Carpenter and Piper (in English, of course). The region 1 version went out of print for a while so I assumed they'd put the commentary on when it came out again. But when the "special edition" finally came out there was nothing extra. (It figures it would be something like that.) If you can get a hold of it, and if you enjoy Carpenter's commentaries as much as I do, this is as good as the other ones.

The most interesting thing to me is when Piper explains the effect this movie had on his wrestling career. He was at the WWF of course, where he was the Joker to Hulk Hogan's Batman. But he wanted to do this movie. Vince McMahon didn't want him to do it because he always wanted to control all aspects of his wrestlers' careers, and this was an offer coming from the outside. Apparently they told Piper just to forget about it, don't do the movie, and the WWF will find a bigger movie for him to do instead. But Piper said yeah, you can get me a bigger movie, but it won't be directed by John Carpenter. He quit the WWF to work with John Carpenter. So I like the guy! Just for that, I might try watching HELL COMES TO FROGTOWN again. I haven't seen that since the days of USA Up All Night.

My only complaint about THEY LIVE: the title is not so hot. I know, it comes from the graffiti that says "They live, we sleep." They're living their real lives which is to fuck with us and put us in a dreamworld. Just like those god damn machines in THE MATRIX. So it makes sense, but it just sounds kind of awkward. I mean you can't really make a THEY LIVE 2 or a THEY LIVE AGAIN, it just sounds bad.

Oh well. Still one of the best movies ever. And every time I watch it it's better than I remember it being. And I like to think it's just because it's a great movie, not because it's getting more and more relevant by the day.
THIEF

My Dear readers,

You ever have one of those days where you wrote a real good review of Thief, but then you fucked up when you were uploading it, and lost the file, and have to rewrite the whole god damn thing, or at least as much as you remember, before it completely fades from your deteriorating mind? I have. And I don't like it. Fuck you, Michael Mann. Fuck you and fuck me also, forever.

--Vern

Thief is a picture by the talented pretentious jackass Michael Mann, where James Caan plays a real good safecracker named Frank. Frank's spent alot of time in the joint, and he has some ideas for how he wants to turn things around. He has a collage that he uses as a blueprint for the rest of his life: he wants a wife and kids, get rich, live happily ever after, die on the outside, etc.

He's not looking for one last score per se, but maybe two or three last scores. Or yeah, one would be even better. He's always been real independent, working with James Belushi and a couple other people he trusts, but now he decides to accept an offer from a kingpin named Leo, so's to settle down with his mistress, be happy on the beach, etc.

(that paragraph was way better the first time I wrote it. Believe me.)

This guy Leo is gonna case his jobs for him, buy his equipment, look out for him. Seems real great. And when he makes a big scene at the adoption office and that whole thing doesn't work out, Leo even buys a kid for him on the black market. So everything seems good, right? But this is one of them Faustian/record label type deals. It's like DMX. The Def Jam label made DMX lots of fame and money, but then he realized they were pimping him, they were making millions off of him and giving him pennies. He still owes them 4 records though so he says fuck it. I'm never recording again.

Frank finds himself in a similar situation to DMX's, but the way he handles it is more aggressive, and involves bombs, fire and guns. I'm not saying DMX should do that, but it would make a good movie. With Lance Henriksen as Russell Simmons.

With a movie like this, usually you want it to be either lean and mean, or slim and trim. But Michael Mann understands that concept about as much as sea lions understand typing. So instead you got lots of meandering around, long conversations about life and relationships, unneccessary symbolism. Like, do we really need to see Frank crumple up his collage and leave it on the street? No, because we already saw him bburn down his fuckin car lot. That was enough to tell us he's abandoning his dream and saying, fuck it. We don't need the fuckin poetry too, Michael Mann. You're laying it on too thick. As is your way.

Also I should mention the score is by Tangerine Dream. So sometimes you feel like maybe you're not watching a crime movie, maybe you're in yoga class.

I mean the thing is too long too. If there's a weird shot like neon lights reflecting off the hood of a car or something, you bet your ass it's gonna go on for 5-10 seconds longer than you want it too. And if there's a great scene where James Caan does a great monologue about how he survived a gang bang in prison, obviously it's gonna be 2 or 3 times longer than it should be to be really effective. But oh well, this is Michael Mann, king of the god damn world. He does it how he wants.

Okay maybe I'm a little more angry this time through the review, I just want to get some damn sleep. Because this was actually a good movie. And some of the best parts were those little Michael Mann tangents. Like the scene where he breaks into Leo's house to kill him, sees the big man and his bodyguard sitting in chairs in the living room, staring at nothing. The bodyguard says, "You want some milk?" and he says, "No, I'm okay." It's there so the bodyguard can leave Leo alone, but it's great because it shows how mundane life can be, even for the big crime boss.

The movie is very authentic. They got good technical advisors, real thieves that loaned them the tools so they could break open safes for real. Then they played dirty cops in the movie. Dennis Farina is in here too I guess, he was a cop first and then this was where he became an actor. I'm not sure where he is in there, though.

James Caan is the best thing about the movie, he's real tough. You gotta love the way he says, "I am the last guy in the world you wanna fuck with." And he tells the big man, "My money in 24 hours, or you will wear your ass for a hat." I bet you wish you could talk to your boss like that. And your boss wouldn't kill you, either.

I wouldn't recommend anybody else make a crime picture in this manner, but in this one isolated incident, it mostly works. This picture will always serve as a great inspiration to people of all walks of life, such as artists, musicians or filmatists, who want to tell the studios, labels or corporations to lay the fuck off, unless they want to wear their ass for a hat.

THIRD WORLD COP
Have you ever wondered what it would be like to see your usual american cop movie, except made by and for Jamaicans? Well today's your lucky day motherfucker your dream has come true.

This is the story of Capone, a cop who is very cool and apparently plays by his own rules. He is so cool that he never once wears a uniform in the movie but does wear a Kangol hat. He even starts out the movie by fuckin, and then some guys come in and try to shoot him, so he says, "this is real bad timing" and kills one of em. He is alot like Shaft 2000 edition except that he never quits the force to become the black private dick who's a sex machine etc. etc. At the beginning his secretary tells him, "Your methods of justice, they work... but they are not always right."

It doesn't really sink in though so he has to learn it throughout the movie, which is about him being shipped back to his home town of Kingston to take on a hook handed don who happens to have his old childhood pal Ratty as his right hand man. Wouldn't you fuckin know it, fuckin coincidences never work in your favor. I mean that's how this shit always happens isn't it? Arrest your childhood buddy, jesus.

Anyway the cool part of this movie is that Capone is a good guy who eventually realizes that he goes too far in shooting the bad guys, while Ratty is a bad guy who uses his drug money to help the kids and the community and start "football" (really it's soccer) teams. So it's that whole John Woo deal - the good and the evil, the yin and the yang, the peanut butter and the jelly. All mixed up. Nobody knows who is who. Then they team up to fight the bad guy and you know the drill.

This is the highest grossing movie ever in Jamaica. And of course, that doesn't mean jack shit but at least they're jamaicans not americans, who knows maybe they go to see good ones. I'm just a Writer not an anthropologist how the fuck should I know.

Like a big american movie it has an all star soundtrack and cameos by different musicians and what not. But instead of the rapping music they have reggae, which is what jamaicans I guess listen to. Who woulda thought?

One thing I enjoyed was the subtitles. It's in english but there are heavy accents and some slang or patois or what not so sometimes you need subtitles. But then sometimes they'll subtitle something that even a halfwit would be able to figure out on his own. It is funny.

The thing that really makes this movie stand out at all is just the unique flavor of a cop movie that takes place in Jamaica which as the title indicates seems to be some kind of third world type country. Everybody (except the criminals) are real poor. The streets are all run down and the police department's computer system is behind the times, they don't even have most of their files computerized. Capone is low tech all the way, he doesn't use any of this mission impossible computery futuristic garbage. Just the old two pistol punch and a technique he lifted right out of Bugs Bunny (dressing up as a girl to spy on the bad guys). Everywhere you look is poverty, even the police department (or maybe the producers of the film) can't afford uniforms and cars so Capone just drives around in a normal car wearing normal clothes and you just have to know he's a pig in order to know he's a pig. In fact, everybody is so poor that the god damned movie is shot on video. Imagine that, highest grossing movie ever and it's on a damn video tape.

Now I don't know what the problem is with video tape. I don't know how I know to tell the difference between video and film. I don't know why one would be better than the other. But all I know is, a movie that is on video is not a real movie. Watch it, and you will think the same thing. It just ain't right.

Let me ask you something. Die Hard. Video or film? This is a rhetorical question. The answer is film. What about The Getaway? Bullitt? The Wild Bunch? The Good the Bad and the Ugly? Thunderbolt and Lightfoot? Ghost Dog? Fight Club? X-Men? There is one thing all of these have in common, and it is film. Real movies are on film. Remember that next time, Jamaicans. Not video. Film.

But aside from that it is pretty professional and what not. Hell I don't regret watching it. It's not that bad. But it would be about twice as not as bad if it was on film.

Sorry Jamaicans. Just tellin it like it is.

THE THOMAS CROWN AFFAIR

This movie stars Steve McQueen as a bank robber, which automatically makes it worth seeing. And this is a good movie. But to be honest it doesn't live up to its reputation or its potential. I know that Steve McQueen, like me, was someone who often could be spotted out and about striving for excellence. So I don't think he would have a problem with me holding him to a high standard of achievement.

The first thing you'll notice about the movie is that it's very stylish. The opening and various other scenes use split-screen up the wazoo, splitting the screen into something like six different little boxes to show the different people intersecting for a heist. The cinematographer is Haskell Wexler (see TELL THEM WHO YOU ARE above for more on him) so despite all the showoffery in the editing alot of the footage is very handheld, documentary looking, like you're there. Alot of the scenes are just dialogue-free footage of Steve McQueen as Thomas Crown fucking around. For example he flies in a glider or drives around really fast in a dune buggy. The dune buggy footage is pretty spectular, it seems like he's about to flip over at any moment and you can't help but notice he's got no roll bars above his head.

After the opening heist, the rest of the movie is about a hot insurance investigator (Faye Dunaway) tracking down the mastermind Thomas Crown and seducing him, toying with him, falling in love with him and finally realizing maybe she doesn't want to bust him. It reminded me a little bit of OUT OF SIGHT and the whole romance between bank robber and federal marshall.

My biggest problem with the movie is that Steve is not playing a badass. He's playing Thomas Crown. Thomas Crown is some rich fuck from Boston, an upper class businessman type. Highly educated, never worked a day in his fucking life. I don't mind Steve McQueen stretching and getting to wear nice suits, in fact I think he does a good job playing this suave and charming type. But the character just doesn't have what we as Americans look for in a Steve McQueen character, or in any anti-hero. He doesn't even take any part in the heist, he just tells other people to do it and then picks up the money afterwards. Then he goofs around on a beach and chases pussy for most of the movie. If he ran from the cops or punched a guy at any point in the movie, I already forgot about it.

There's a commentary track with director Norman Jewison on the dvd, and he says that Thomas Crown is some kind of anti-establishment type fighting the man by stealing money from instituations. But I didn't get that out of the movie. He seems more like part of the establishment seeing as how he tells other people what to do then takes the money and lives like a king. You gotta feel more for the hardworking lower rung individuals in the Thomas Crown robbery organization. You got Yaphet Kotto in there for a little bit. You got a fat guy driving the money away in a station wagon, he gets some good scenes with his family after the heist.

But it's still a watchable movie with some good touches. My favorite is the scene where Thomas Crown gets all the money from the robbery, then he sits down in his office and just starts laughing. Another part I liked is when the insurance agents call in Thomas Crown and the getaway driver at the same time and spy on them in the waiting room through a two-way mirror. Since Crown went great lengths to hide his identity from his guys, they don't show any sign of knowing each other. That part kind of reminded me of DAY OF THE WOLVES.

Anyway, THE GETAWAY is more my speed for Steve McQueen bank robbery movies. Do what you want, though.

THE THOMAS CROWN AFFAIR REMAKE

The original THOMAS CROWN AFFAIR is not one of my favorite Steve McQueen pictures. It's stylish and well-made, I can see the appeal of it. But first of all, as much fun as he may have had doing it, McQueen was not meant to play that kind of upper crust character. And secondly, as cool as you want him to be because he's played by Steve McQueen, Thomas Crown is not a very cool character. He's The Man. A rich guy who has other people do his work and then takes credit for it. Just because he picks up the money out of the garbage can after all the real work is done he gets to call it his Affair? There's no justice in that movie.

John McTiernan's loose remake takes care of those problems, while introducing other ones. While I'm much more fond of Steve McQueen, Pierce Brosnan is a way better choice to play this character. He's smooth, he's handsome, he looks kind of like Fred MacMurray but more girly, he has an accent. And there's no way to imagine him working with his hands or having dirt on him or his hair unkempt. He IS Thomas Crown.

And in this version Crown is more than just the mastermind, he also does the stealing himself. In this one he's an art thief, and the art he steals is his own, almost. He owns a museum, but his company has been forced into a merger. On the very day he signs the contract a team of European mercenaries busts in to steal Crown's favorite Monet from the gallery. But we soon realize that the mercenaries have been anonymously hired by Crown himself. He doublecrosses them, gets the painting himself and leaves them to take the blame.

And then the story itself is like the original: Renee Russo is an insurance investigator who quickly figures out that Crown did it and tries to prove it. Meanwhile they are courting each other, toying with each other, possibly in love and not sure where their or each other's loyalties lie. A cat and mouse game, if the cat and mouse were fucking each other in about ten different positions and pouring liquor on each other and shit.
One problem I had is that Renee Russo is really annoying. Yes, it's nice to see a female sex symbol out of her twenties, and offering the brief nudity and what not. I'm all for that. But her whole soda-swilling eccentric intense intimidating woman of power shtick is obnoxious. She's just not cool. I bet Thomas Crown could find somebody more appealing to fly around to different islands with.

By the way, Faye Dunaway (love interest in the original) plays Crown's therapist.

Another problem is the music. Whatsisdick of ROCKY fame did the score and it starts out real classy, with piano tinkering and a nice use of Nina Simone music. Then when the robbery starts it turns into a DTV Wesley Snipes vehicle or something, cheesy drum machines and guitars that are supposed to sound cool but for crying out loud NOBODY on earth thinks that type of music is cool. Nobody! Not children, not animals, nobody. Stop it, composers. You know what I'm talking about. Don't make me play it back to you. Because I will do it.

I also missed the team element of the original. Sure, I complained about Crown taking all the credit, but I liked the team. A good heist movie usually has a team of people with different tasks and specialties to pull off the caper, so you have a bunch of interesting supporting characters. In this one he ditches the team before we even know their names. It becomes a one-man show except when he needs accomplices, and then they are either his company's employees or nameless, personality-less people he presumably paid off to do certain tasks. The most likable character in this movie is actually the cop that's after him, making this probaly the only movie in cinema history where Denis Leary is the most sympathetic character. I do think Thomas Crown is a good character, but since the whole movie is pretty much on his shoulders it's hard to not start resenting him after a while. The guy is so rich and his idea of an entertaining movie is rubbing his lifestyle in your face. He's so rich and we don't see him work for it. The motive for his crimes is boredom. The only reason we like him is because he has some clever tricks and likes to fuck with people.

One time I called John McClane the working man's James Bond. Well here we have DIE HARD's John McT directing a guy who played James Bond. And this character is the total opposite of McClane. McClane is working class, Crown is super rich. McClane is a cop, Crown is a criminal. McClane is thrust into these fights by circumstance and would rather not be there, Crown instigates the fight himself and strings his adversaries along to entertain himself. McClane loses his wife, Crown gets the girl. McClane blows shit up and jumps off things, Crown rolls under a gate and puts a painting in his briefcase. McClane ends the movie covered in dirt and blood, Crown is not only clean but wearing a bowler hat.

So it's very much no DIE HARD but it's not too bad a movie. It's well shot and put together by McT. They have some nods to the original like the scenes of Crown just driving around in vehicles for fun. He has a plane again, and a boat sits in for the duny buggy. There's also a cheesy Sting version of "Windmills of Your Mind" on the end credits. But I missed the split screen from the original heist scene. Still, they did a good job of taking the cat-fucking-mouse kernel of the original and turning it into a new story. And it's refreshing to see a "fun" movie aimed squarely at adults. We like that shit too, you know. Hollywood seems to forget that sometimes.

So we'll put this one in the "pretty good" column for McT, to balance out for ROLLERBALL and keep him in the game. The reason I finally watched it is because Paul Verhoeven is supposed to be doing the sequel. So we'll see what happens with two world class filmatists on one series. Will it be closed to Friedkin/Frankenheimer/FRENCH CONNECTION or De Palma/Woo/MISSION:IMPOSSIBLE? Or something alot weirder and more perverted? My guess is C, but only time will tell.

THOU SHALT NOT KILL... EXCEPT

This is a mid-'80s Vietnam vet action picture directed by Josh Becker who later did RUNNING TIME. This is one of those less successful movies done by the EVIL DEAD crew, mostly childhood and college friends of Sam Raimi and Bruce Campbell who all did super-8 movies together. So Bruce was one of the Writers, Scott Spiegel (who directed FROM DUSK TILL DAWN 2) decorated the sets and Sam Raimi plays the Charles Manson-like leader of a Charles Manson-like cult. Also you got Ted Raimi in there with chains and he gets killed and blood pours out of his mouth.

The plot's actually not bad, kind of a less socially relevant FIRST BLOOD type scenario. It starts out with a particular battle in Vietnam which goes badly. Because, you know, it was the Vietnam war. Then we pick up later when members of the platoon - one injured, one feeling guilty that it was his fault, two others like beer and underage women alot - are getting back together at a campground out in the middle of nowhere where the injured dude is living for brooding and solitude type purposes. They hang out together, shoot guns, drink and puke. But then wouldn't you know it this dude loses his dog Whiskey out in the woods, they go looking for him and they happen to discover this group of homicidal hippies torturing and killing campers. Playing darts with them, etc. Also they kidnapped his high school sweetheart and, worse (judging by the reaction shot and swelling orchestral score by Joseph Lo Duca) killed Whiskey. So they go get the guns, and the rest of the movie is a whole lotta killin.

Well not surprisingly the movie is pretty bad. Lots of cliche action/Vietnam dialogue and no actors that are able to deliver it convincingly. Also I kinda of wonder about this Josh Becker because way back in '84 he was writing this movie about a guy who still has a thing for this girl he knew when she was in high school (and he was presumably just graduated). Then more than 15 years later in RUNNING TIME Bruce falls for this girl from his high school. All this fuckin prom-related trauma in movies - it's time to move on, fellas.

But honestly, I kinda enjoyed this movie and was impressed by many aspects. For such a low budget it has a surprisingly good period feel. Also the tone is pretty raw and gritty and if it was made with better actors and a little more production value you could have a pretty good '70s type picture here. You got the horrors of Vietnam, the TEXAS CHAIN SAW/HILLS HAVE EYES type villains, and the team of Badasses outnumbered but kicking ass.

One note: it's a cliche to say that it's a cliche that the black guy dies first in movies. Well in this one the black guy doesn't die but he's the only one who gets seriously injured. This is humorous because he's a big tough scary dude and every other actor in the entire picture is a skinny little pansy. Oh well.

Also of note: on the commentary track they say that the aforementioned actor was a Mr. T impersonator and had to have a specially made wig to fill in the bald spots on his mowhawk.

THE THREE BURIALS OF MELQUIADES ESTRADA

This movie is directed by and starring Mr. Tommy Lee Jones (UNDER SIEGE) and it's a western, even though it takes place today. It might be the first western with cell phones. As far as I could tell there were only two literal burials of Melquiades Estrada depicted in the movie so I figure the other one is some kind of metaphor.

Tommy plays Pete, a Texas ranch hand with unspecified past, and his best friend Melquiades is played by a guy named Julio Cesar Cedillo. He's not in the movie as much as Pete though, because he's dead. The movie opens with some good ol' boys driving around with guns and they see a coyote chewing on something, and they shoot it. Then when they go to gather up the sweet, sweet coyote meat they notice that what the coyote was chewing on was The One Dead Body of Melquiades Estrada.

Poor Melquiades - dead and the cops don't seem to give a shit. We don't know it at first but it's pretty easy to figure out that the culprit was this asshole border guard named Mike Norton (Barry Pepper from THE 25TH HOUR). He's a scary Timothy Mcveigh looking motherfucker who obviously doesn't get much joy out of life but does like to throw in a little of the unneccessary roughness when chasing illegal immigrants. This guy is a real asshole and you expect him to be over the top evil. But the shooting is an accident, a misunderstanding.

Doesn't matter though. Pete is pretty pissed off about his best friend being dead, and even moreso when the sherriff, Dwight Yoakam, doesn't notify him and just has Estrada quickie-buried with a little cross that says "Melquiades, Mexico" on it in sharpie. See, Melquiades once made Pete promise to have him buried in his home town. So Pete finds out Mike is responsible, kidnaps him at gunpoint, forces him to dig up Melquiades and then they head on horseback to Mexico to find the home town and bury him. And that's what most of the movie is about.

So no, it's not a remake of THREE WEDDINGS AND A FUNERAL. Similar, maybe. I haven't seen that one.

Although the story is pretty basic there's alot of subtle little things that break from your usual hollywood expectations. For example, Mike doesn't even bother to plead his innocence until long after he's been kidnapped, and even then it's kind of a half-assed "for what it's worth" kind of thing. I think maybe part of him agrees that he deserves this punishment. As much of an asshole as he is, he feels bad about killing the guy. (That said, when it happened he just said, "Hey man, you all right?" He didn't run up and check his pulse.) Another thing is, you expect Dwight Yoakam to be the heavy for the whole thing, that he's gonna chase them to the end, maybe begrudgingly gain a respect for his foe and turn the other way as he escapes or something like that. Instead of that you just hear second hand that he didn't want to deal with this shit and went to Sea World. (I'm not shitting you, that really happens in the movie.)

Also there's some clever moments, like a great scene where Mike and his wife are home not really talking to each other and a soap opera on the tv communicates through bad dialogue what they probaly oughta be saying. And a blind man who listens to Mexican radio even though he doesn't understand Spanish, and some Mexican guys who watch American soap operas even though they don't understand English. But mostly it's real simple and subtle, organic, down to earth. Everybody compares it to Peckinpah. Stylistically it's not much like Peckinpah, but the tone is similar - very grim and quiet with some dark humor. And the subject matter obviously has gotta remind you a little bit of BRING ME THE HEAD OF ALFREDO GARCIA. It gets pretty damn gruesome too with that body. It decomposes. It attracts ants. We're not talking WEEKEND AT BERNIES here. We're not even talking WEEKEND AT BERNIE'S 2.

Remember that movie STAND BY ME, it was about how some kids bond and learn about life by journeying to go look at a dead body. This movie is about guys who bond and learn about life by journeying WITH a dead body.

Melissa Leo, who I didn't recognize from HOMICIDE: LIFE ON THE STREET, is also in the cast, and a couple other people. In a way you could compare this movie to CRASH (not the perverted Cronenberg one but the newer, sillier one) because it uses some farfetched coincidences and has a redemption theme. But this is more my speed because it's a pure, solid, brooding tough guy movie. There's a couple tricks in the beginning, skipping around in time (it's written by the guy who wrote AMORES PERROS and 21 GRAMS). But it boils down to the simple story of crazy as fuck Tommy Lee Jones dragging pissed off, beaten to a pulp scumbag Barry Pepper to Mexico to bury a body.

I don't know if this is one of those "I'm gonna direct a movie just this once" type dream projects or if Tommy Lee Jones is seriously becoming a director now. But I hope it's the second one. This is good old fashioned nuts and bolts meat and potatos type of filmatism, none of this fancyboy showoff shit. We need at least a couple of these type of guys to still be alive if we're not gonna damage our brains forever. Tommy Lee's a good man, he doesn't need to pimp himself out in shitty hollywood movies when he could be making movies like this. I bet you ten bucks Tommy Lee got more satisfaction and pride out of this one then he did MAN OF THE HOUSE.

Thank you Tommy Lee for the first true badass Cinema of 2006.

THREE FACES OF EVE

See All About Eve

THREE THE HARD WAY

During my extensive studies into Badass Cinema one thing I have learned is that today's films are far less likely to be centered around the power of a Badass. Of course there are exceptions, with fine films like The Limey and Payback, however both were intentional throwbacks to the decade known as "the '70s" when Badass Cinema was on top the way movies about comedians dressed up as women and/or fat people are now.

Even in the '80s, when superstars like Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Steven Seagal were still making movies that were released in theaters, the pictures were often more based around the explosions and the different models of helicopters and airplanes that were shown than around the pure power of the Badass attitude.

Well Three the Hard Way is not a very good picture, and not necessarily what the cinematists of today should be striving for. However it can be a breath of fresh air for a man to sit back and watch a picture like this that is based completely on the concept of having Jim Brown, Jim Kelly and Fred Williamson all be buddies. There is some kind of plot about white supremists poisoning the water supply in three major cities to kill all the black people, and they also kidnapped Jim Brown's girlfriend. But these three the hard way are able to handle it with only a little bit of help from Jim Kelly's karate teacher. If I remember correctly there are NO cops in this picture which is a beautiful sight in my opinion.

Now these are a couple of cool motherfuckers. Jim Brown and Fred really have the builds, and Jim of course has the mustache. Jim "Blackbelt Jones" Kelly has the karate skills and a lower more menacing version of Bruce Lee's battle cry. These guys are not cops or soldiers, hell I don't even know if they are even ex-cons. They're just three bad motherfuckers that know how to drive around and shoot and blow up cars and throw grenades and etc. There are also three pretty gals on red white and blue motorcycles who know how to torture the white dude.

Now I gotta be honest this is not one of the best works and in fact Gordon Parks Jr. oughta be ashamed of himself for this shoddy garbagey type of filmmaking. If it was senior that would be one thing, but Jr. if I remember correctly is responsible for Superfly which has a whole lot more depth than this cop show shit. This picture could have used a lot of trimming, I can't believe how long they feel like showing Fred Williamson riding around in a boat or the three gals riding their motorcycles (and you don't even know who the fuck they are or why the black gal is obviously a white man judging from the hair hanging out of the back of her helmet in one shot).

But there is a lot of cars blowing up which I must admit is done well and all the white guys make funny sounds when they get thrown off of dams and etc. My favorite part was when Jim Brown was on top of a dump truck overhearing the whites' genocidal plans. He heard what he needed to hear and then he opened the passenger door and tossed the motherfucker out. Then he jumps off but the driver doesn't know, so he starts shooting at the ceiling and gets so distracted that he doesn't watch where he's driving and the dump truck goes off a jump and into a billboard and blows up.

Well okay I guess you had to be there but the point is I don't really regret watching this piece of shit.

THRILLER: A CRUEL PICTURE

In Sweden back in the '70s there was some crazy shit going on, just like they had in the woods there in the 1800s. Take for example the case of Frigga (Christina Lindberg), the subject of this cruel picture. She's just an innocent farmgirl who keeps running into some filthy scumbags. In the opening scene she is a little girl being spun around by an old man who you assume is her grandpa or something. Then the guy keels over and blood pours out of his mouth. I don't understand why, but this somehow symbolizes that the guy raped her. Don't get me wrong, I am very, very glad that they chose to depict that through symbolism instead of showing it, but I got no clue what that's all about. It's a Swede thing.

The trauma of that opening scene causes her to be mute and, the neighbors say, not quite right in the head. She is seeing a special doctor for her troubles but one day she misses the bus and gets picked up by a sleazy hipster asshole who takes her to dinner and hits on her.
At first it seems kind of satirical because he keeps hitting on her and doesn't seem to notice that she never talks. Even when he asks her direct questions he doesn't notice that she doesn't answer. But then the guy brings her to his apartment and drugs her drink. As soon as she passes out he makes a weird phone call to a doctor, pre-reminiscent of the phone call in PULP FICTION when the guy catches Bruce and Ving and is gonna have his special redneck way with them.

Well, due to having recently seen LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT, CHAOS, I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE and VIRGIN SPRING I was pretty fuckin worried about what was gonna happen here, but luckily what happens is horrible but not graphic. Yet. They're not gonna rape her, instead they shoot her up with all kinds of high quality heroin for several days, to get her addicted. And then they force her into prositution. I guess it's a sick genre if I'm saying this isn't that bad compared to other movies of this type. But it is a little less hard to watch than those other ones.

Except - and this is a pretty big one - all the sudden out of the blue they start throwing in these close up hardcore penetration shots whenever she's getting used by these johns. You'd think maybe this would be to add realism but because the hardcore shots are always closeups you assume it's not even the same people. It seems tacked on. And I don't know about you but for me personally it did not add anything to the movie to have to watch some droopy balls bouncing up and down on a girl's butthole. The only thing admirable I guess is that it makes it one of these subversive, not-at-all-sexy pseudo-porn movies like BROWN BUNNY. If you went to a porno theater to see this one you would be horribly disappointed.

If you know that the American title is THEY CALL HER ONE EYE, you might be wondering why they call her One Eye. I mean that is a pretty weird thing to call somebody, unless they have only one eye. Well, the first time a john comes in to take advantage of poor Frigga, she gives him a badass cat scratch to the face. Her pimp/kidnapper of course doesn't like the merchandise damaging the customers so he pokes out her eye with a scalpel, and this is shown in graphic detail. I don't know how they made such a realistic eye but since the girl is not blinking it doesn't look all that real. So it makes you wince, but you can admire it on a technical level.

So she's mute, she's got one eye, she's addicted to heroin and she's a sex slave. One would not think life could get much worse for poor Frigga, but one would be wrong. 'Cause then that fuckin pimp writes a mean letter, supposedly from her, to her parents. She sneaks out and tries to go visit them but they're dead - maybe murdered by that fucking pimp, but everybody believes they committed suicide because of the letter. Either way, Frigga is not pleased, in my opinion.

So that's when the badass revenge comes into play. The girls are able to leave the house - they'll always be back because they need their H. Frigga starts managing her outside time very effectively, taking lessons in karate, stunt driving, guns and military combat. Also she wears alot of cool outfits that make her practically a super hero. At one point she's got boots, a white fur coat, a short red dress and a matching red eyepatch. If the girl was around now she'd probaly have everybody wanting to wear different colors of eyepatches to be cool. (In fact, she was the inspiration for the character Elle Driver in KILL BILL.)

And then one day, of course, Frigga launches her one woman, one eye revenge campaign, going after each and every motherfucker who has abused her, from a sadistic lesbian john to the pimp himself. As far as I know Sweden doesn't have a huge legacy of action cinema, so some of the karate and car explosions and stuff are a little stiff. But it's alot of fun to see this cool eyepatch girl running around with a shotgun and a stolen police car. I don't think there's any reference to "an eye for an eye," maybe because she doesn't actually take the guy's eye, but she shows them some serious Old Testament.

Other than the hardcore porn inserts this is actually a classier and more upbeat picture than those other ones I mentioned (with the exception of VIRGIN SPRING). The forced heroin, the eyepatch, the karate and other things give it kind of a comic book quality that makes it less serious and more fun. The colors are beautiful. And this is combined with a sort of experimental art film pretentiousness that makes it even cooler. Alot of the action scenes are done in extreme slow motion, so slow it looks like they're floating around on the moon. There are some slo-mo shots of blood spraying out of mouths where it looks like a red ribbon blowing in the wind. It's like prehistoric bullet time. And there's an experimental electronic soundtrack that adds to the weird feel of the whole thing.

I don't usually say this, but if somebody smart was doing it I would LOVE to see a remake of this. Of course, you'd want to go with the catchier American title THEY CALL HER ONE EYE. Maybe have the first section a little more realistic, they get her addicted to heroin like any teenage hooker, show her relationships with some of the other hookers who are portrayed naturalistically. So at first it's sort of grounded in reality but then during the revenge portion it would turn completely crazy. The real reason to do a remake though would be to set up the sequel, THEY STILL CALL HER ONE EYE or ONE EYE'S WAR or whatever you want to call it. Right from the beginning she's a notorious, almost mythical outlaw, so badass she still drives the stolen police car (now souped up, obviously). Since the first film she has been on a bloody, cross-country murder spree, assassinating pimps, rescuing young hookers and training them to fight, so she has a volunteer army of young female badasses. The opening could be a MISSION:IMPOSSIBLE type break-in to the Player of the Year Ball. Then when she makes some kind of signal all the hoes pull weapons out of their hair, their stilletos, g-strings, etc. and kill all the famous pimps. But then the main story of the movie is about them taking on some kind of rich people sex slavery ring in Washington DC.

There could be a whole series of these things. Come on Hollywood. The future is in anti-pimp remakes of '70s Swedish hardcore exploitation. You can use my sequel idea if you want it, but I get to write the novelization.

THUNDERBOLT AND LIGHTFOOT

A lot of people ask me Vern why is Bruce your favorite actor in Badass Cinema. Well I may have given that impression due to my enthusiasm in some of my Die Hard pieces however the truth is he is only my favorite in the young generation of Badasses creating films from the '80s and on. My favorite Badass of ALL TIME would be harder to quantify when you got motherfuckers like Steve McQueen, Charles Bronson, Lee Van Cleef and all these guys vying for the title. But if somebody put a gun in my mouth and forced me to decide right now I do believe I'd have to go with Clint.

One thing that's so cool about Clint is he's one of these stoic motherfuckers. I mean the dude never talks when he doesn't need to or at least really wants to. And he's not formulaic about the oneliners either. If he has a good one he'll say it but he's not gonna throw one out there just to fill space.

This motherfucker just LOOKS so much like a Badass. He doesn't have to say anything to prove it, he just has to look at you, or hell he could look at the ground. But he's got it in the way he narrows his eyes. I think I got a pretty good look myself but to be frankly honest I have a hard time doing the stoic thing even when I try. I mean it's harder than it looks, specially for an opinionated motherfucker such as myself here. You always find some reason to shoot your mouth off. The secret is to hold it in and that's not always something I'm good at.

Anyway in this piece by director/writer Michael Cimino Clint is teamed up with a young dude who is FAR from stoic, Lloyd Bridges's kid Jeff who plays Lightfoot. This is a young kid who steals cars for fun and he's always smiling, always joking. His youthful enthusiasm inspires Clint to re-attempt an old caper he and his war buddies did, where they used a cannon to bust through a safe at an armory.

I really liked this picture, partly because of the performancing by Clint and Jeff, but also because of the little freako touches that make this stand out from your average heist picture. Take for example the opening scene, the way these two motherfuckers hook up. What happens is Clint is hiding out in a small town where he has taken on a job as a preacher. But his old partner comes in and tries to shoot him down right in the middle of a sermon. He hauls ass out of the church and across a field, and tries to wave down a white thunderbird which just happens to be the one our man Lightfoot stole about five minutes ago. Lightfoot burns out onto the field, mows down the gunman that's trying to kill Clint, and doesn't even stop - but Clint grabs onto the side of the car and eventually climbs in the window. And that's how they become buds.

My other favorite scene is the one where they are hitchiking and get picked up by a crazy hillbilly with a caged raccoon in the passenger seat. As soon as he picks them up he starts driving off road, doing donuts and then intentionally rolls the car. He gets out and opens the trunk and dozens of bunny rabbits start hopping out! And he pulls out a shotgun and starts shooting them. He's not one of the top people to get a ride with, in my opinion.

This scene got me thinking, it's too bad you don't getta do good hitchiking scenes anymore, unless it's a period piece. Because hardly nobody hitchikes anymore except a few hippies in college towns. It's just not as believable anymore to put one of these disastrous hitchiking experiences in your picture.

So yeah, there's some crazy shit in this movie. Like Jeff has to dress up as a lady to fluster a security guard, just like in the bugs bunny cartoons. And there's a cameo by catherine bach who played Daisy duke, remember that gal? But actually the craziest shit in the whole movie was during the commercial, I changed it to this show jerry springer and there's a guy who tells his girlfriend, "I have another lover, my stuffed panda Yogi." And the girlfriend tears the panda in half and the guy says "Yogi, no!" and then gets down on his hands and knees, putting the stuffing back in and saying, "You're gonna be all right, Yogi. You're gonna be all right."

Anyway, the characters are great, the build up to and actual execution of the heist are very suspenseful, and there's only one or two pieces of bad comic relief at the beginning. This is a good one guys don't miss it.

THURSDAY

This poor bastard Skip Woods. How was he supposed to know? He stumbles across this winning formula of late '90s independent quirky crime drama, and it just so happens that another individual, somebody named Quentin Tarantino, has already done it.

You gotta feel sorry for Skip. How was he supposed to know that Tarantino loved to take larger than life movie archetypes and show the mundane parts of their lives? Like this opening scene where three criminals who obviously don't realize how annoying they are (Aaron Ekchart, Paulina Porezkova, James LeGros) stop in a convenience store after a big score to get coffee, and argue over the price until they end up killing the clerk and then have to pretend to work there when a cop comes in. And how could Skip have known that when he has the cop ask, for no reason, whether Eckhart prefers Picard or Kirk... that it JUST MIGHT look like he was some fuckin idiot jackass blatantly and embarassingly trying to copy the most superficial elements of Tarantino's formula?

I mean let's face it, Tarantino is not the only person who enjoys wacky intertitles to divide his stories into chapters. Or scenes where people are duct taped to chairs being casually tortured. Or criminals who casually use racial slurs and deliver random trivia about the Roman empire or porno films. Or people in the suburbs trying to clean up huge bloody messes before their wives get home. Or criminals stopping to tell each other colorful stories. Or all the other shit that this movie does that happens to be exactly what was done way better in Tarantino's movies. I mean, Tarantino doesn't have a copyright on the exact rhythm and tone of the speech Dennis Hopper famously delivers to Christopher Walken in TRUE ROMANCE, so why is it so wrong for Skip to COMPLETELY INNOCENTLY AND INDEPENDENTLY come up with a seemingly asinine and clueless dipshit retread of that speech for Thomas Jane to deliver? I mean he put his own spin on it anyway. For some reason an angry, heavily armed black drug dealer is willing to sit back passively as Jane gets in his face with a blatantly racist and personally insulting speech questioning the size of his dick. This unbelievable element adds a kind of poorly thought out and/or magic realism vibe to it that makes it COMPLETELY different from Tarantino. I mean come on. Skip Woods is an original.

I mean, just because there's a character named "Ballpean" with a crazy injury backstory that reminds you alot of the guy you hear about Marcellus throwing out the window in PULP FICTION does not mean that Skip Woods ever saw or heard about PULP FICTION. THURSDAY came out in 1998, a mere four years after PULP FICTION. I mean what are the chances that he even saw it, he probaly was busy learning the craft of generic, cheap looking filmmaking and was not really able to pay attention to hugely popular, award winning and influential cultural phenomenons. More likely than not, he never heard of Tarantino and wouldn't have been interested in those movies if he had.

Or another possibility I guess is that this movie is a derivative, badly made piece of shit. Could be either one.

I kind of had a good idea it wasn't gonna be good but who knows, "guy finds suitcase full of heroin" is the type of story hook I can enjoy, and when I realized STANDER himself, Detective John Punisher, etc. was the star, I decided to try. Unfortunately, nobody is good in this movie. Jane overacts and they make him into kind of a dork. He even has a ponytail in the flashbacks. I know, I know, Steven Seagal. But he wears it better than Tom does. Poor Tom. But I guess the sacrifice was worth it. You gotta understand what it's like to be punished before you can become the punisher.

Mickey Rourke is the only guy that doesn't seem worse than usual, but he's only in it for a couple minutes near the end. There was one or two, actually one, joke that I kind of liked. And they got a pretty good setup where the wife could come home and find a bunch of dead bodies and blood and dudes duct taped to the ceiling and shit like that, that kind of incidents-accumulating-until-you-lose-track-of-how-ridiculous-it's-gotten thing can be fun. But it never happens. He gets it all cleaned up.

And I have to point out that these characters are fucking idiots. I know people do stupid shit during a crime but this one really takes the cake. Number one. If you just jacked suitcases full of heroin and money, don't stop for coffee. You can fucking wait. Take care of business first. If you insist on walking around like a jackass with a suitcase full of heroin needlessly endangering yourself for no other reason than for Skip Woods to try to make Tarantino dialogue, for god's sake don't randomly kill an innocent woman. You're just calling attention to yourself. William Forsythe did a thing kind of like that in OUT FOR JUSTICE, but 1. he didn't have a suitcase full of heroin on him 2. he just smoked a bunch of crack like 30 seconds earlier which, in my opinion, may have lowered his inhibitions, and most importantly 3. he had a death wish and was HOPING it would bring all kinds of hell down on him. Those are good reasons. "I need coffee" is not a good reason you stupid Skip Woodsian imbeciles.

Number two. If you go stay at your friend's house and you have a suitcase full of heroin, one idea I have is, don't leave the suitcase just sitting in plain sight on a bed with the door open. I know, hindsight is 20/20. Now that we're already in this endless quicksand pit of violence we have to blindly go along and support the troops because otherwise how are we going to save the heroin and reform all of the criminals and corrupt cops that are trying to get it and teach their children how to read. BUT, in my opinion, it is possible that SOME people might have known beforehand that leaving a suitcase full of heroin on the bed was dumb. Arguably.

The good news here is that you probaly haven't seen this movie if you're in the US, because it's out of print on VHS and not on DVD. I actually watched an imported Russian dvd. Sorry Russia, we didn't know you guys were gonna get stuck with this shit. We totally forgive you guys for killing Apollo Creed and all that. Please don't take THURSDAY as an increase in hostilities.
I seriously hated this fucking movie. I have never seen a more blatant and squirm inducing Tarantino ripoff. I mean, who the fuck did this Skip Woods guy think he was fooling? He thought maybe people wouldn't notice? After he got the dumb-man's-Quentin-Tarantino thing out of his blood, though, obviously he went on to better things, and he will forever be known as the dude who wrote SWORDFISH, that one movie where I fast forwarded to the part with Halle Berry's boobs.
TIMECODE
Well, I got this new technique for reviewing movies early like the official, legitimate type critics. It doesn't work with movies in theaters but only for the stuff that's coming soon to home video and digital versatile disc. It's called borrow screeners from Jerry the porn man.

Unfortunately this might turn out to be more pain than it's worth if Timecode is any indication of the kind of garbage they are releasing now to the home video market. This is not really so much a movie as it is a gimmick with credits.

A revolution in filmmaking! A part of cinematic history! The first new millennial cinema for the new century of 2000 millennium! etc. This is what the critics have said. Two years from now, they won't remember for sure if Timecode was this movie or something Jean Claude Van Damme did about defusing bombs. And neither will I. But as long as it's fresh on my mind I better put this one down for the record.

The gimmick is, this movie is four movies in one - and one movie in four! It's all done in one continuous take, no edits, with four different cameras. And then the screen is split and shows all four cameras at the same time. So it's a continuous shot like Rope and Running Time, and it's a split screen like everything Brian De Palma has ever done, and it's on digital video like Blair Witch Project and The Celebration and everything college kids do these days, and it has parts where the different cameras intersect at one spot, like that one music video with the japanese girls. What Timecode adds to these tired old ideas is the fresh new spin of making it boring. It is alot like watching the security monitors at your favorite convenience store, only with porn jazz playing quietly in the background.

The story is about a bunch of Hollywood fuckwads who are all having affairs. But you don't know at first who is lovers and who is not and every time they start kissing, you are supposed to be surprised and thrilled. There is one gal who breaks up with her man, but he is having an affair with Salma Hayek, he also may be having affairs with at least two other people, and he is at a breaking point. The one good moment in this picture(s) is when he is having a bullshit hollywood conversation on the phone about some movie and trying not to let the guy he's talking to realize he is crying his eyes out.

I guess the idea behind this movie is that if you follow somebody continously for 97 minutes then you will find out the hidden truths and blah blah blah. It's supposed to be a scrutinizing type look into the dark secrets of Hollywood relational whatever, etc. The trouble is, it doesn't have that ring of truth to it. Which is a fancy way of saying the acting sucks my fat cock. Salma Hayek embarrassingly hams up several of her scenes and all of the actors have long periods where they are obviously just stalling waiting for some other actor to enter the scene. Even when Salma Hayek is just sitting in a waiting room she is overacting. And Jean Tripplehorn spends most of the movie sitting in a limo chewing gum and smoking cigarettes. Her character is the obsessive super villain girlfriend of Salma Hayek who has Salma bugged and spends all day sitting in the limo listening to her on headphones. Which in my opinion is not a good way to create a realistic slice of life.

Another weak part of this movie is the lower left hand corner. I mean what is up with that fucking corner anyway. It is obviously not pulling its weight. I wasn't even sure if there was ANYTHING gonna happen in the lower left hand corner. Matter of fact did anything happen? I don't even remember. What a weak ass corner in my opinion. Not that the upper right hand corner was anything hot but at least it had some kind of confrontation or something after about half an hour of some gal apparently talking to a psychiatrist or something.

Nothing against the gimmick. Nice try boys. But you're gonna have to try harder than that. I mean motherfuckers have been doing live television for half a century. And live theater for who the fuck knows how long. And one thing those individuals know is you gotta come up with some kind of exciting thing to happen at least once in the program. Earthquakes don't count unless a building falls down and crushes a character we either love or hate. Get it together Mike Figgis let's see some hustle here buddy.

TO LIVE AND DIE IN L.A.
I always knew the title to this one, because of that song by Wang Chung. But I never knew what exactly it was about. Turns out it's loosely based on a novel by this guy Gerald Petievich. He was in the Secret Service, and the book was inspired by some of his experiences. So it's supposed to be about the weirdness of that job, where one day you're protecting the president of the United States and the next day you're working for the treasury department so you're just chasing some dude with counterfeit twenties.

This movie has the thumbprints of great filmatism smeared all over it. It has the kind of opening I'm a sucker for, the kind that throws you in the middle of something, sets the tone, then goes into the opening credits. Like a preamble or an overture. The main character Richard Chance (William Petersen) is on security detail for a Reagan speech (you just hear Reagan's voice off screen, they don't have Martin Sheen or anybody playing him). The guys are just kind of killing time when he notices something odd that leads him to the roof, where he finds an Islamic suicide bomber. (oh, shit.) He's not able to talk him down but his partner climbs up the side of the roof and yanks the guy by the leg so that he explodes in mid-air, like a big balloon full of blood and chunks of meat. Then the two sit on the edge of the building to think about what has just happened. Chance says, "Let's go get drunk and play cards" and it cuts into a stylish opening montage showing various images from the movie and that represent L.A.

One sign of greatness: the title is printed in a font so big the title has to be split up to fit on the screen. This generally means the movie is gonna be awesome. I'm sure some shitty movies have figured that out and use big fonts to fake everybody out but as a general rule title filling entire screen = good movie.

More reasons it's great: It has a compelling lead who you haven't seen in many movies. (I kept wondering why I haven't seen this guy in other stuff before I figured out he was the dude from CSI, only young and McConaghey-esque.) It has the confidence to abandon the plot to focus in on details, like the long montage illustrating step-by-step the process of counterfeiting bills. It has some knock-you-on-your-ass-and-then-help-you-half-way-up-but-then-say-'psyche'-and-drop-you-back-on-your-ass-and-then-a-car-drives-by-and-splashes-a-puddle-on-you action setpieces. I think maybe the big car chase even tops director William Friedkin's own THE FRENCH CONNECTION with its escalating mayhem, thrilling car POV shots and the way it's both an exciting action scene and a major turning point for the characters. I didn't know that the L.A. river basin was done before T2, or that wrong-way-on-the-freeway was done before RONIN.

And it's unpredictable. You don't necessarily know where it's gonna go. Things don't unfold exactly how they're supposed to. For example, Willem Dafoe is this scary villain, but every time he gives somebody a beatdown he almost gets the tables turned on him first. He's not untouchable. He gets his ass beat. The hero is vulnerable too, and flawed. But not a total fuckup. He's heroic enough that you think he's gonna learn a lesson and stop treating his girlfriend/informant so shitty. But let's just say he might not. He has a dark side.

All of the actors are really good in this movie, most of them early in their careers, too. John Turturro for example had only played a few small roles before he stole the show here as a guy they nab with counterfeit money, and might get taken out before he can snitch. There's also a good part for Steve James, the guy that played Michael Dudikoff's sidekick Curtis "Before 50 Cent" Jackson in the AMERICAN NINJA movies.

On the DVD there's a deleted scene that Friedkin says he doesn't remember why he cut, and he wishes he could put it back in the movie but the only footage of it is a crappy video. The scene would've been near the end of the movie. Chance's partner Vukovich (John Pankow) is about to go to the big climactic showdown. But first he goes to some apartment building. You're not sure what he's doing. He knocks on a door and a woman we've never seen in the movie comes out. It becomes apparent from the conversation that this is his wife, but they're separated. And he tells her he wants to patch things up. But it's late at night, he seems crazy, he knows she doesn't want him there, so she tries to get him to leave, and they get into an argument.

It's a great scene and it's not in the movie, but it would've fit right in there. That's the kind of movie we're dealing with, a movie that does have an exciting, dangerous showdown, but first wants to take a little detour about a character's life. What's wrong with it, what he wants to fix about it. And at the same time it shows you just how scared he is because obviously he wouldn't be doing this if he wasn't thinking he could die.

Friedkin reminds me alot of Michael Mann. Both of them are these macho guys directing macho guy movies, making buddies with cops and criminals who they use as technical advisers, bragging about their adventures on their commentary tracks. On THIEF Michael Mann hired a real safecracker so he could show how a safe is really cracked, on this one Friedkin hired a real counterfeiter so he could show how money is really counterfeited. According to IMDb trivia, Mann even tried to sue Friedkin over this movie, claiming it was a ripoff of MIAMI VICE. (He lost, then he dranka mojito.)

But Friedkin is less pretentious and makes movies with a quicker pace. He's more interested and skilled at putting thrills in his movies. And he seems slightly less full of himself. Very slightly. TO LIVE AND DIE IN L.A. was not a big hit but seeing it now I think it was very influential. I'll be damned if little twentysomething Shane Black didn't have this movie on the brain when he wrote the first LETHAL WEAPON. It even has the partner about to retire who says "I'm too old for this shit." And it has a slick style that I think sort of mutated into the Tony Scott pre-midlife crisis style. Hell, maybe even the midlife crisis Tony Scott style, because every time they show a title on the screen it uses a different font. That's the 1985 version of flying subtitles and attack of the Avid farts. But it's kind of cool.

By the way, Friedkin found William Petersen in theater, but he had done one movie role before: he played a bartender in THIEF.

You know, people have been recommending this one to me for years, and there was at least one close call before. I went to the video store with the intent of renting it. I had the box in my hand. I ran into a buddy who's into shit like this and I asked him, "You said this one was good right?" And of course he said it was, and while talking it up he mentioned that the soundtrack was by Wang Chung. I didn't know it was gonna be that kind of party, so I put it back.

But I'm here to tell you that even for those of us who don't necessarily wanna have fun tonight, and who most certainly do not want to Wang Chung tonight, this is a good picture. I don't generally like something to be dated to the '80s, and especially musically. But this one captures the era well, coming across more like a great period piece or time capsule than like somehting that's dated. And the soundtrack fits that real well. They only sing on the opening title track and the rest of it they just sit there and keyboard away and it works real good for the mood. And I don't think this could be intended but the associations I have with that kind of cheesy '80s white people keyboard music perfectly captures the heart and soul of the setting and the topic of counterfeiting. It's slick and electronic (fake), it's trying to be hip, it probaly has a ponytail and sunglasses on.

Matter of fact, I can't really say this captures the essence of that side of L.A., because I've never lived there, but based on the times I've been there this really does a good job of capturing how it all looks to me. At any rate it's a very solid and original crime/action/police procedural type movie. Everybody have fun tonight.

TODAY YOU DIE

It goes without saying that TODAY YOU DIE is Steven Seagal's greatest movie title since at least OUT FOR A KILL. So I won't bother to say it. Isn't it awesome though? The movie itself is worth the time of any Seagalogist, but at least on my first viewing here it's not one of the more crucial ones. It's more competent than most straight to video movies (especially Seagal's, lately) but not legitimately great. So, without anything really special or truly ludicrous, it ends up kind of forgettable. But it has its moments.

SUBMERGED flirted with being Seagal's first monster movie (they cut out the CGI mutants before finishing the movie) and this one threatens to be a rare supernatural storyline. I won't say his first because he did have some voodoo and shaolin magic in BELLY OF THE BEAST. There were also voodoo curses used by the villains in MARKED FOR DEATH, but it came off more like some cold mafia threat type shit than actual working magic. Anyway the opening scene here is a tarot card reading. I expected the card reader to say "Today you die," but no dice. In fact, she had a surprisingly honest explanation of the DEATH card, which she said can mean different things. You gotta admire a straight shooting tarot card reader.

Then we get some nightmares. Seagal's young, beautiful girlfriend and/or wife Jada is some kind of psychic who's having dreams of him holding a gun and having some kind of vague trouble. He consoles her and offers to do some dream interpretation later. (Unfortunately we never get to see this.)

It turns out Jada's worries aren't that farfetched because Seagal is a professional Robin Hood. He rapels into a drug dealer's mansion and cracks the safe. When some hoods try to interfere, he explains that he gives the money to the poor. Of course this is followed by some broken wrists, some broken furniture, etc. And it will surprise nobody that this is one of those drug dealer mansions decorated with many antique Japanese swords, which end up being used. That's why you're supposed to lock up your swords, dope dealers. Come on.

Seagal promises Jada that he's gonna stop doing this shit, go straight. It's tough though, because he likes to help people. You can see how much it pains him when he passes a children's hospital with "GOING OUT OF BUSINESS" plastered onto the sign.

No problem though. A guy named Max (Kevin Tigue) gives him a job driving an armored car in Vegas - not telling him he's actually the getaway driver for a very ridiculous robbery. I mean these fucks really blow it. Apparently the armored car service is a fake, but somehow they are credentialed and manage to pick up $20 million from some marks. For that they deserve nothing but kudos, because it takes skill and balls to pull off something like that. Now all they have left to do is drive away. But right when they're about to pull out, Seagal's partner Bruno whips out a piece and blows away the guards, giving himself away! It's not played like a Mr. Blonde style psycho move either, but as the actual plan. I mean I could quibble about the idea of hiring an unwitting getaway driver. That just doesn't seem like good planning. But shooting people for no reason just as you are leaving undetected - I mean, somebody should've realized this particular part of the plan was counterproductive.

Anyway, like RESERVOIR DOGS the cops are right there. Seagal goes ahead and makes a drive for it, ditching the pigs just long enough to leave his partner Bruno unconscious, hide the money somewhere and pass out.

At this point the movie takes a HALF PAST DEAD detour and becomes a prison movie for a little while. It's not a futuristic prison though, a little more standard, with rapper-turned-actor Treach as his buddy instead of rapper-turned actor Ja Rule. Playing the character "Ice Kool," I would have to rate Treach as Seagal's second best rapper sidekick to date, above Ja Rule but below DMX. Treach is the star of one of the better straight to video movies I've seen, LOVE AND A BULLET. He's charismatic and his line readings are probaly smoother than DMX's in EXIT WOUNDS but I still think DMX has some powerful movie star presence that has not been fully taken advantage of and that other rapper-turned-actors shouldn't bother to compete with. Still, good job Treach. I would say "kudos" but I already used that word earlier and I have to wonder what in hell I was thinking using the word "kudos" in the first place. What the fuck is a kudo anyway?

While in the joint, the police are trying to find out where the money is, but he pretends not to remember. For some reason, everyone including the police think that Max is dead. We didn't see this, but supposedly he got shot by someone for not having the money Seagal stole. In the one really beautifully dumb moment of the movie, one of the cops describes Max as a "low life freak who dabbles in black magic." This is the only indication in the whole movie that Max is anything other than a standard Vegas kingpin type. The black magic is never mentioned again*. My only theory is that maybe Max was originally going to be resurrected from the dead in some Dracula type ritual. That would've been cool, but they end up just saying he wasn't really dead. I guess that's more economical storytelling.

Anyway Bruno shows up in prison and they fight. Seagal comes out of that one better than Bruno does. Meanwhile, Ice Kool is the leader of a small black gang in this joint and when Seagal tips him off about the Hispanic gang's plans, he earns a place in the Ice Kool escape plan (some guy picks them up in a fake police helicopter). It's not just a favor for a favor though, Seagal promises to "remember" where the money is because he'd "be happy to share."

I liked this aspect - Seagal really is a Robin Hood type, he's not greedy at all. He genuinely does not have any hesitation about splitting his score with somebody who had no part in it. You don't usually see that kind of charity in movies. Also there's a dose of Seagal loyalty. They need to split up but Ice worries he's just gonna ditch him and not give him the money. Seagal tells him sincerely, "Listen man, you did me right, I'ma do you right."

Another thing that's unique about this movie, he has a better relationship with his wife (?) than usual. He's constantly calling her to let her know what he's up to. Even while escaping from the cops. Maybe he's starting to realize how lucky he is to always have a beautiful woman half his age, and he wants to show his gratitude.

Treach gets most of the good lines, such as "Same shit, different toilet." He also gets the title line: "Oh, you ran out of gas? Ah, hell no, today you die motherfucker! Little bitch." At the end he funds the children's hospital's "GRAND RE-OPENING" and has a conversation with a nun** where he keeps saying things like "Feel me?," "Ya heard?," and "belie' dat."

Seagal has some funny moments though. He knocks on the front door at Max's place and the security guy asks "Who are you?" He says, "Uh... Girl Scouts of America." Okay, doesn't sound good, but I liked his delivery. I wouldn't say the same for his attempts at ebonics, though. Ice tells him he's a cold motherfucker and he says, "Ice cool, ya'all."

With a title like TODAY YOU DIE, I wish it was a little more ridiculous. But you gotta commend Seagal for expending some elbow grease. Although he's being sued by the producers for allegedly fucking up this movie (not showing up, rewriting the script without permission, etc.) it definitely seems like his heart is more in it than his last couple, uh, efforts. There is a reasonable level of action (several fights, a car chase, some fairly spectacular flaming police car flips). The movie strays a little bit from the usual formula (not even one mention of the CIA!). Also I didn't notice any parts dubbed by other actors. Maybe that Lightning Bolt energy drink really does work!

I do have to scold the DVD producers though for not close captioning the sucker. I like to hear every line, and the way Seagal slurs some of his words that's just not a possibility. So thanks alot, assholes. Today you suck.

*That would've been funny but I have to correct this. I must've fallen asleep the first time I watched this because in the final showdown with Max, he makes a vague speech that makes it clear he has some kind of deal with magic, even though it doesn't amount to anything. It was funnier the first time I watched it, too bad I paid more attention the second time.

**actually he says that to a woman at a Swiss bank, not to a nun. Man, I need some Lightning Bolt.

My apologies to Steven Seagal and all readers for these errors

TOOLBOX MURDERS (remake)

The original TOOLBOX MURDERS was made because of TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE. You can't really say it's a ripoff, because the movies don't have much in common. But on the DVD, the producer explains that he read in Variety or somewhere about the amount of money TEXAS CHAIN SAW had made so he rented a print of it and hired a screenwriter to watch the movie and make something like that.

So it's weird that 24 years later poor Tobe Hooper, director of TEXAS CHAIN SAW, wound up doing a remake of TOOLBOX MURDERS. But just like before, his movie doesn't have much connection with the movie that inspired it. There's a guy in a ski mask killing people with tools in an apartment building, but everything else is different.

And honestly that's for the best. The original has an amazing opening. Basically, some maniac in a black ski mask is massacring people in an apartment building with drills and hammers and shit. The camera goes through and shows you these people going through the routines of their daily lives as the guy comes through and butchers them. You just catch a little bit of a conversation or you hear their radio playing or something, you don't get some phony movie explanation of what their character is about, so it has a horrible voyeuristic feel to it like you're sneaking around right behind this nutbag.

This goes on for a while but eventually it has to come to an end and the plot has to begin, and that's when the movie falls apart and it just kind of feels like some TV movie mystery. I think Cameron Mitchell turned out to be the murderer but I don't remember why. He had some reason.

Hooper catches a little bit of that voyeuristic feel in his opening, showing the regular after work activities of somebody who seems like she'll be the main character but who is actually the first victim. The real main character is Angela Bettis from the movie MAY, who is just moving into the building today with her husband. He'll be out of the picture most of the movie because he's a doctor and has to work all the time.

The apartment is old and kind of shitty, full of weird people who Angela always hears yelling at each other through the thin walls. Early on she hears some freaky shit across the hallway and actually calls the police, but it turns out to be two actors rehearsing a scene. So after that she has trouble getting anyone to believe her about the weird shit she witnesses in the building. There is in fact a guy in a ski mask killing people with tools, but nobody really knows this until the end of the movie, because nobody sees a body. The murders are not as graphic as in the original, in fact it's almost a letdown how much you don't see, but there's one really sick and clever murder I gotta mention. Angela hears her next door neighbor get attacked and actually convinces the police to check her apartment, but they don't see anyone inside. As they leave the camera pulls up to reveal her neighbor artfully nailgunned above the door, between the wall and the ceiling. Even bunches of her hair are nailed into the ceiling to put her in an eery pose. And then you realize that she's still alive. But you never hear from her again in the movie.

Like the original the movie goes from brutal slasher to mystery, but instead of some old bullshit about the identity of the slasher this mystery is all about the history of this weird building. She slowly discovers its secrets, noticing that the 04 room on each floor is missing and that there's actually a whole secret section in the middle of the building. Also, each floor has an occult symbol built into the wall, and the entire thing is part of some evil spell. Also, forgive me if I am getting too far ahead here, but the killer is a weird mutilated dude who was born inside a coffin and therefore has an unorthodox view of life and death.

While there's talk of black magic and spells there's never any mystical powers or magic beams or anything, which is nice. It's up to you to figure out whether the magic actually works or not. Maybe they're doing a spell and nothing's happening but either way there's a whole lot of dead bodies hidden in this place. The Apartment Building of 1,000 Corpses.

It's kind of weird that I finally got around to watching this now, right after seeing THE BLACK DAHLIA, because there's a reference to that crime in this movie (Elizabeth Short supposedly lived in this building, and an old man says he moved in in 1947, which gets you wondering if he was the one who killed her). The idea is that alot of people from all over the country come to L.A. to try to get into movies, and some of them disappear into this building. So there's alot of L.A. history stuff, old movie stars and Aleister Crowley types involved in the building's past. Plus the weird mutilated coffin-born ski mask Tool Time massacre guy.

Some people will probaly think the killer is laughable, because he's a pretty over-the-top character who is only offhandedly explained near the end. But I liked how they did it, instead of following the standard slasher formula of explaining the killer's backstory they just throw it at you in one sentence and otherwise leave him to be a mysterious, freaky sonofabitch. Obviously this character is not on the level of the original Leatherface, but I'll still compare. Leatherface was cool because he comes out with that hammer and you got no clue where the fuck this guy came from. Now days horror is so wrong-headed that they not only gotta give Leatherface a backstory, they gotta make an entire movie explaining who he is and why he's not cool anymore. For this one Hooper takes another unorthodox approach. He keeps the guy in a ski mask for most of the movie so that we'll assume he's a character we've seen unmasked and at the end we'll find out who it is. But no! Instead Hooper just has an old man blurt out that it's some weirdo born from his mom's corpse when she was already in a coffin, and his birth was healthy and normal compared to what he's been up to ever since. That's all the explanation you get. Deal with that, viewers.

This is not that memorable of a horror movie, but it's the kind of thing you might catch on cable and get really involved in. It is definitely much, much better than your average DTV horror movie, and more importantly, it's the best thing Tobe Hooper has done in years. I mean I've seen that CROCODILE movie, it's a miracle I could even get through it. Not so with TOOLBOX MURDERS. I thought it was pretty good. Well done. I would even watch a sequel.

Of course, I'm not saying it's anywhere near the quality of CHAIN SAW or CHAIN SAW 2. Or the first half of LIFE FORCE. Maybe it's on the level of THE FUNHOUSE. Maybe. But there is exactly 1 (one) little bizarre touch that shows you my man Tobe still has some of that crazy madman genius in him. While moving a table, Angela damages the wall in the corner of her apartment. When she's examining the hole she made, she notices a weird little box is hidden inside the wall. She takes it out and opens it and finds some old teeth with gold fillings inside.

When she shows what she found to the apartment manager he plays it down, says it's part of the character of the building. He gives it to Ned, the scary maintenance man who you're obviously supposed to think is the killer, and tells him to destroy it. Later, Ned takes one of the teeth out, puts it in his mouth and sucks on it. Because that's the type of guy he is. The type of guy who sucks on an old tooth that somebody found hidden inside a wall. You don't see that in a movie every day.

EL TOPO
The wind whistles in the distance as a scary cowboy in black rides through the desert. And for some reason he's holding an umbrella. As he gets closer and steps off the horse we see he has a little boy with him too, naked except for a hat and a pair of mocassins. He hands the boy a teddy bear.

"Son, you are 7 years old. Today you are a man. Bury your first toy and the photo of your mother."

The boy does as the man says. In the foreground we see the half-buried portrait of the friendly looking mother poking out of the sand as this crazy duo rides off toward the horizon. The opening credits tell us we're watching EL TOPO. And that opening is the most normal and straight forward part of the movie.

What I'm trying to say is, John Wayne isn't in this one, Kevin Costner isn't even in this one. This is not your father's western. Unless your father is a pervert who enjoys peyote, which he probaly is, so actually this probaly is your father's western. Whatever the case, I'm sure it's stretching it to even call it a western. There are hats, horses, guns, bandits, etc., but... remember when I reviewed David Cronenberg's CRASH, I said it was like the Shannon Tweed movie that would only show on Videodrome? This is in that same universe, you switch the channel to some twisted mutant version of AMC in the middle of the afternoon and this is the western they're showing.

In case you haven't heard it yet, I have good news for you fans of director Alejandro Jodorowsky (or eltopians as I call you). As you know, after John Lennon called EL TOPO a masterpiece Klein financed HOLY MOUNTAIN and ended up owning both. But he and Jodorowsky had some kind of falling out, so Klein never released the movies on video, while Jodorowsky called Klein a "gangster" and gave prints to pirates to get them out there. I figured we'd never see these on legit DVDs unless one of them died. They probaly should've settled this a long time ago with a knife fight at Stonehenge or on top of a pyramid or something. But there must've been something in the tarot, because the two have finally called a truce in their blood feud. They will be releasing EL TOPO, THE HOLY MOUNTAIN and FANDO Y LIS as a box set through Anchor Bay next May. They're gonna be packed with extras too, there's even deleted scenes on HOLY MOUNTAIN! I don't know about bloopers. The price isn't too bad either, fifty bucks for three movies. I already have FANDO from when it came out a while ago (looks like the same extras), but the other two are easily worth $25 to me.

While we wait for that some new prints of EL TOPO and HOLY MOUNTAIN are slowly crawling around the country. Matt A. was kind enough to email and remind me they were hitting Seattle's Grand Illusion theater this month, so I'm not gonna miss it. The Grand Illusion is a tiny theater run by volunteers. The walls are covered in red velvet and the ceiling has shiny dark brown tiles like giant chocolate squares. The screen is so small if I stood up next to it and spread my arms out I could probaly touch both sides, but it's almost more fitting to see EL TOPO in a weird little place like this. The pseudo-mystical quality of this movie combined with its near-disappearance makes it seem almost religious. I had to see light shining through this film.

In his email Matt made an argument for El Topo (played by Jodorowsky himself) being a badass. I can understand that because this guy definitely has a cool outfit, kills alot of people and wins at least 5 highly competitive duels. In fact he's so bad that a pen full of bunnies dies just from being near him. And he's got the attitude. When his girlfriend tells him she won't love him unless he kills the 4 masters of the desert, he agrees to it without skipping a beat. He doesn't sleep on it, he doesn't ask for a half an hour to run some errands before he goes, he doesn't even take a breath, already he has accepted and is leaving on this mission of killing four people. "In order to find the masters we must travel the desert in a spiral."

But as I concluded way back in VERN TELL'S IT LIKE IT IS #27 when somebody else suggested EL TOPO for my international badass studies program, "He is not a Badass in my opinion. He is some kind of skinny yoga dude." Despite the satanic black outfit there is something just not convincing in his face, he looks a little too hippie, a little too goofy. That's why it makes perfect sense when, by the end of the movie, he has transformed like a butterfly into a shaven-head street performer, literally a clown. At the end his now grown up son wears his black outfit from the beginning and looks much more convincing in it.

Not to take anything away from the movie though, because I really think this is a masterpiece. (ooh, daring statement there, agreeing with the dude from the Beatles. Way to go out on a limb, Vern.) It is so full of little weird details that it's almost hypnotic. Like there's one scene where people are talking, and it's a fairly standard shot, and then all the sudden I notice there's a spotted owl nailed to a table in the background, and its head is perfectly tilted to the side like Jesus on the cross. I don't know what that means, but holy shit.

The violence makes you think Peckinpah, the killing-the-masters storyline makes you think Shaw Brothers, but the world of the movie is some surreal nightmare symbolic version of the real world, a little bit Fellini, a little bit Burroughs. At the beginning he comes across the scene of a massacre - somebody impaled on a pole, dozens of dead kids and disemboweled animals laying around a knocked over wagon. He goes looking for the perpetrators and finds 3 pervert bandits. We know they're perverts because one guy's sucking on a shoe, another guy makes a crude picture of a naked girl on the ground with (pebbles? berries? grubs?), then mounts it and starts eating its face. I never seen Gene Hackman pull that one in a western.

(By the way, one of these three freakos is the guy who directed LIKE WATER FOR CHOCOLATE. I think he's the shoesucker, but I'm not sure.)

These degenerates lead my man Topo to a colonel who has a woman as a slave, and this is where we start to see Jodorowsky's obsessions that will lead to HOLY MOUNTAIN, the craziest movie I've ever seen. There is a long scene showing this fat colonel's poor servant systematically making him up, putting on his clothes, applying his wig, etc. By the end of this process he's got this elaborate getup and he goes outside to offer the "leftovers" of his woman to some assholes he calls his "dogs." (But he calls them that in a degrading sort of way, not in a DMX sort of way.) That's when El Topo shows up.

In punishing this colonel, El Topo shoots off his wig, strips off his clothes, cuts off his balls, basically undoes everything the servant did to him. He shows how a guy like this is nothing underneath, he's just a rapist with some fancy clothes and makeup to make him seem important, and once all that's gone the guy just shoots himself.

Alot of villains in westerns will have a stable of women they mistreat. But the dogs up the ante and have four kidnapped priests they use as playthings. Obviously you feel bad for these dudes, but it's a little bit of an attack on the church too because despite being men of the cloth they sport pervy smiles while watching the violent retribution taken against their attackers.

The movie continues in this western-from-Hell direction for what could be feature length, but after El Topo kills the four masters it suddenly takes... well, not a left turn, I would have to say an illegal U-turn. El Topo gets shot, some kids and disabled folks appear out of nowhere and carry him away on a stretcher made of branches and leaves. It almost seems Biblical. Suddenly, El Topo wakes up a generation later, buried in a cave, sporting makeup and a goofy poof of blonde hair. (woulda been cool if this sort of thing happened in one of the YOUNG GUNS pictures.)

El Topo meets a pretty young dwarf who explains that her people are stuck in this cave because it's too hard to climb to the exit, and most of them are deformed from all the incest. So he realizes that it's his purpose in life to go to the nearby town, earn some money and use it to build a tunnel and rescue the cavedwellers. For some reason it never occurred to me until watching it this time that that's why he's El Topo, the Mole, because he digs a tunnel. (Duh.)

This last part of the movie is the angriest and most surreal part. The movie leaves El Topo for a little bit to show what life is like in this town, which I don't think has a name but does have a pyramid with an eye on it for its flag. Hideous old ladies in fur coats buy slaves, brand them, get pampered by them, then falsely accuse them of rape and clap politely as they are executed. Despite this lifestyle the hypocritical bitches call themselves the Women's Decency League, and they inspect the nearby establishments for signs of immorality. Little do they know their husbands have secret sex clubs in the cellar. The women are shipped in in crates.

By this time El Topo has completely abandoned his violence, his outfit, his hair, his previous personality, which shows where Jodorowsky's mind is at. This movie is about enlightenment. Maybe the violence earlier was a fun time at the movies, but this is obviously supposed to be an improvement in his life when instead of killing people he spends his time making people laugh, earning money and working hard to help the outcasts. The ending is completely fucked up and horrible, yet optimistic (like DAWN OF THE DEAD or the New Testament). I like to think the next generation has a shot. His son is dressed just like he was at the beginning, but he already shows signs of being more enlightened than his father was, like when he tears all the flags down from his church, leaving his religion pure. Unlike the rest of his congregation, he really believes (you will have to see the movie to understand how this can be explained through the religious use of Russian roulette). And at the end of the movie he sets off with El Topo's dwarf girlfriend who is not only the mother he never had, but the mother he buried in the desert. He doesn't have his teddy bear, so there is some ambiguity, but I still got high hopes.

Actually I am cheating a little there because I got an inside track on what happens next. Years ago I actually got the chance to read a script to SONS OF EL TOPO, the probaly-will-never-happen sequel that Jodorowsky was trying to make in the '90s. I didn't get to keep a copy, I had to give it back, so no I can't loan it to you. I was really excited to see it as a movie, but I didn't expect the script to be a good read. Jodorowsky's movies are so crazy and visual, they're not really about plot and dialogue, and who knows how much comes up on the set and never was on the page. Plus, sequels are never as good as the original, and the guy hadn't made a movie in years and years, and to make matters worse I was told it was translated from French into English (and French isn't his first language)!

But you know what? It was fucking spectacular. The movie, at least at that time, would've been about El Topo's two sons, Abel and Cain. I can't remember if it makes it clear whether this is the grown up son and the baby son who are at the end of the first movie, or if there is another son closer to the baby's age. El Topo's wife has just died (I also can't remember if this is the little person he met in the cave) and the sons have to bring her to bury on an island next to El Topo. (I'm not sure if his grave was moved after the first movie or if that place is now an island. [okay, there is alot I don't remember here, sorry].)

The thing is, El Topo's grave is surrounded by all kinds of treasures and riches, and all the bandits want to steal it. But they have learned from experience that if they set foot on the island there will be earthquakes and volcanic eruptions and shit. It's not worth it.

But now his wife is dead, and his wife was a saint. And as everybody knows, if you have the flesh of a saint with you, you can step on the island safely. So that's why transporting the body is a big deal. Because she's a saint her body smells like flowers, so all the bandits in the land follow the scent and try to steal the body. At one point they actually get it and tear it up into tiny pieces so they can all get on the island.

But Abel and Cain, who of course hate each other, work together to try to protect the body and their father's grave. At the beginning of the movie Abel is completely evil and Cain is virtuous, but they slowly trade roles over the course of the movie. Also one of them, Cain I think, has a badass pet hawk.

That's about all I remember, but man it was good. Jodo's getting old, but this script definitely showed he still had it, at least back then. It was full of his kind of bizarre ideas and creepy twists on universal themes, but also built masterfully to an exciting climax. I thought the guy had left our plane and just sits around reading tarot cards all day, but writing this script he knew what the fuck he was doing. I hope he gets a shot at making another movie, whether it's SONS OF EL TOPO or something else. (I always thought it would be funny if he sold out and made a MISSION IMPOSSIBLE or something, but there's no time for that anymore.)

As for this new print of EL TOPO, it looks great. I mean there were still specks here and there, the telltale signs of a real movie on real film. It was not some flawless work of digital alchemy, turning poop to gold like in the opening scene of HOLY MOUNTAIN. But it looks way brighter and clearer than I've ever seen before, and it was subtitled, which was nice even though I like the English dubbed version I'm more used to. Also, no blurring of the pubic hair like in the Japanese VHS release. I don't know if the DVD will look like this or better, but it's at least going to be the best version ever available. I can't wait to see what HOLY MOUNTAIN looks like. I'm getting kind of enlightened just thinking about it.

TORQUE
and the rise of the American Furious Movement

TORQUE is the most spectacularly ridiculous movie I've seen in a while, making even 2 FAST, 2 FURIOUS seem pretty reasonable and down to earth. The movie opens with a shot of a tortoise standing between two street race cars at a starting line. The cars take off down a dusty road at impossible speeds. Suddenly, reflected in one car's rear-view mirror, is some dude on a motorcycle. He has a hard time passing the cars but once he does he does a big wheelie and leaves them in the dust. A street sign spins uncontrollably in the wake of the motorcycle creating the illusion that it says "CARS SUCK." And from there we cut to the opening credits.

You hear that, FAST AND THE FURIOUS? The gauntlet has been thrown down. Cars suck, motorcycles rule. Or own. Or whatever it's called now. In case FAST AND THE FURIOUS came into the movie late though, because it was out in the lobby text messaging somebody, there is a part later on where the hero says, "I live life a quarter mile at a time," and his girlfriend says, "That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard." These movies may start some kind of deadly motorcycles vs. cars feud, but they're both from the same producer, Neal H. Moritz.

The hero is named Ford, but Ice Cube (as Trey, the leader of Inglewood's black motorcycle gang The Reapers) prefers to call him "the white boy" or "Dawson's Creek." I'm not sure what they were thinking having the blandest possible white man as the hero and asking the audience to root against Ice Cube, but that's what they did. Martin Henderson, the Kiwi former soap star who plays Ford, makes Paul Walker seem like fuckin Al Pacino. He wears a Ramones t-shirt as some sort of a vague hint that he has a personality. Cube does all right, scowling and being pissed off all the time, though he doesn't seem as tough when he's wearing a leather biker jacket with sponsorship logos on it. He does have a dog named Dojo who he refers to by name alot.

The real villain though is Henry James. Unless I missed something big, this is not the same Henry James who wrote The Turn of the Screw. This one is some racist white asshole with crazily shaved hair who leads a biker gang called The Hellions. He's played by Matt Schulze, the same asshole who sold Steven Seagal's penpal into white slavery in OUT OF REACH. He's trying to get back two motorcycles filled with crystal meth that he loaned to Ford. Unfortunately the motorcycles don't run in this condition. I was hoping the crystal meth in the gas tank would turn them into super powered motorcycles, because this is the kind of movie where that would fit in.

Stylistically TORQUE is the most in-your-face of all the FAST AND THE FURIOUS type movies so far, which is saying alot. It's like a weird crossbreeding of Sergio Leone ripoff and Pepsi commercial, full of dramatic close-ups and wide shots, weird angles and POVs, and the highest amount of reflection shots I've ever seen. You'll be amazed how many times Kahn chooses to shoot the scene reflected in a mirror, a watch, a muffler or a knife. They also have the same type of digital shots they did in FAST AND THE FURIOUS where the camera goes inside the car and shows the machinery, but in Kahn's version the camera also goes through the internal organs of the drivers, coming out their brains. Also there's a weird psychedelic touch where it comes out an exhaust pipe that also appears to be a human eye. (Kahn claims on the commentary track that he didn't get the x-ray engine idea from FAST AND THE FURIOUS, but from a Volkswagen commercial done by the same guy who did the FX for this movie.)

Nothing in the movie is minimalistic. If there's a conversation out in the middle of the desert, there's gonna be about 50 windmills in the background. If the hero has to pull a Polaroid off the wall of a cafe, the entire wall is gonna be covered in Polaroids. If Ford faces off with the Reapers, their entire gang is going to surround him in a perfect circle. Everywhere the movie goes there are little gags or visual gimmicks: a bike tears through a puff of smoke, the wake of a bike causes a pedestrian's skirt to blow up revealing her garters, a wall that a guy gets pinned against already has a "Yikes!" word balloon written next to his mouth, etc. When the bad guys have to meet, instead of going to some strip club or something they meet in the parking lot of a 99 cents store.

I say it's like a Pepsi commercial because it's so full of show-offy visuals and so empty of substance that it feels more like an ad than like a real movie. But while it SEEMS like a Pepsi commercial, it also happens to BE one. At one point Faison Love (in an apparently improvised line) asks a guy to get him a Diet Pepsi. Later, we see another character drinking Diet Pepsi. Near the climax there's a great motorcycle duel between the two female leads, where they drive at each other and attempt to kung fu each other with their tires, as well as doing flips and jumping on top of each other and other impossible, awesome feats. The whole time they are doing this fight there is a giant wall with a Pepsi logo behind one character, and a Mountain Dew wall behind the other. According to the commentary track this was meant to be a joke where one had a Pepsi logo behind her and the other had a Coke logo, but they couldn't get the rights to Coke. So it became a voluntary placement of enormous Pepsico logos.

In one chase, Ford and Trey both jump their motorcycles onto the top of a moving train. At first I thought this was dumb because after you've seen Michelle Yeoh do that for real in SUPERCOP you gotta wonder what the point is of a computer animated fake version. But then they take it to the next level when they treat the whole scene just like a foot chase on a train, even though they're on motorcycles. Ford drops down between two cars, enters, and the chase continues INSIDE the train. Then they somehow manage to get back to the top of the train and jump off onto the tracks, continuing straight ahead FOLLOWED BY A SPEEDING TRAIN.

The action climax elevates the action to that of a super hero movie, with a motorcycle chase that is supposed to be 200mph and seems to be at least 3 times the speed of whatever the world record is for motorcycles. Apparently it's a real motorcycle that uses a a jet engine but the chase is all digital and looks like how Superman would drive a motorcycle. The movie takes place in a world where there are jumps around in random places so thankfully there is a chance for Ford to do a flip in the middle of downtown L.A. In THE FRENCH CONNECTION or BULLIT you're not gonna have the guy doing a flip in the middle of the chase. So you see, this is a pretty different type of a movie.

When director Rob Cohen made THE FAST AND THE FURIOUS in 2001, he tried to cash in on what he saw as an untapped trend of "underground street racing." He probably thought it would connect not just because people liked Vin Diesel in the movie, but because there was some huge subculture of rich kids with expensive neon colored supercars who were dying to have their lifestyles validated on the big screen. What he achieved instead was a hit movie that spun-off an entire subgenre of flashy vehicle-related movies, and arguably even a movement. I will call it The Furious Movement. Like the French New Wave, they represent a youthful iconoclasm, but only in their filmatic style. They are not fighting against conservative values, as much as we might like them to. Instead they are validating the apathy of the empty-headed, materialistic dumbass cell phone moron generation they hope to sell tickets to. Young people who know their peers are dying in Iraq so they would like to watch an awesome shiny motorcycle doing a wheelie while a chick wiggles her ass around and the soundtrack goes boom-bip-CHUNKA-CHUNKA-CHUNKA.

Okay, so that sounds like an indictment of the Furious Movement, but actually I'm not sure most of the people watching are as stupid as some might imagine. However they were intended, they are always enjoyed on a tongue-in-cheek level that makes them worthwhile cinematic endeavours, in my opinion.

While the subject matter of the Furious Movement comes from Cohen's movie, the style comes from another source: the red-headed music video director turned CHARLIE'S ANGELS auteur known only as McG. With CHARLIE'S ANGELS and especially its sequel FULL THROTTLE, McG created an over-the-top-silly pop culture smorgasbord crammed with show offy visual gimmicks, TV opening credits style montages, gravity and physics defying artificial stunts and visual references to pretty much every aspect of pop culture that has ever existed or ever will.

In addition to being the pioneer, McG is the wisest of the Furious directors. He's the one that seems most conscious of what he's doing, the most capable of getting his sense of humor across and the most in control of the mess he's throwing on screen. He's like a guy spinning plates in the middle of a tornado. Somehow he keeps those fuckers from falling off. It could be argued that he is an inspiration for the movement and not a full-fledged member, since the car and motorcycle stunts in his movies are incidental and not the whole reason for the "plot." But next year he's scheduled to release the toy car adaptation HOT WHEELS which I fully expect to be the 2001 or the GODFATHER of Furious films. We'll see.

While I consider McG's work the most respectable of the bunch, there's something to be said for the arguably dumber, seemingly more serious, and definitely less competent vehicle-related movies. Cohen's original FAST AND THE FURIOUS treats the subject seriously, and doesn't seem to know how corny it is. John Singleton's sequel, 2 FAST 2 FURIOUS, is a more representative example of the genre full of cars jumping off of bridges, high speed reverse driving on the freeway, reckless disregard for property and logic - Singleton even put hydraulics on the Universal Studios logo at the beginning. Justin Lin's FAST AND THE FURIOUS: TOKYO DRIFT takes a similar approach but puts it in Tokyo, filtering it with Japanese pop culture instead of American.

BIKER BOYZ is another movie obviously inspired by FAST AND THE FURIOUS, but it takes a more serious approach to bike gangs and is smarter than the title implies, with a real performance by Laurence Fishburne. CRADLE 2 THE GRAVE has a closer connection to the movement. It continues in the style of director Andrzej Bartkowiak's earlier movies, but with an even more ridiculous plot and featuring a scene where DMX rides a stolen four-wheeler across rooftops while being chased by an entire team of professional motocross racers, in uniform.

TORQUE has elements of all these movies, with a sense of humor and style closer to the McG pictures but characters that fit into the FAST AND THE FURIOUS universe, with just a drop or two of THE WARRIORS. All these movies fantasize about a non-existent subculture as imagined by crazy marketing executives who haven't spoken to anyone not wearing a tie in at least 15-20 years, but have seen them on TV. In Pepsi ads. In these movies all the races come together, they share the same ridiculous style of clothes and are willing to listen to each other's crappy music. Just like in TOKYO DRIFT, a Kid Rock song shows up here. (Come on Neal Moritz, I know you own that shit and you're trying to get your money's worth, but there is a point where you have to realize that it would be more valuable to our culture to bury it in a vault and piss on it than to ever make an innocent human being have to hear it again.) Everybody listens to hip hop but Ice Cube and the Reapers also hang out at the same shitty rock club where everybody else hangs out. There are no boundaries, man.

I could understand why somebody might not understand my enthusiasm for TORQUE. It shares the same empty-brain, lack of humanity and consumerist obsessions that I rail against in, say, Michael Bay. But this Joseph Kahn (and his second unit director Gary Davis, who probaly deserves just as much credit) are not trying to make a serious action movie. And they're not trying to make you take them seriously as filmatists. They're deliberately pushing the conventions of action movies into utter ludicrousness to make you smile, and that I'm down with. I know everybody else hates McG so you probaly should ignore me on this. But I'm gonna challenge you anyway. If you watch the beginning of this movie, you will not be able to stop watching. I said CHARLIE'S ANGELS FULL THROTTLE was Jalapeno Cool Ranch Charlie's Angels, well this is Code Red Fast and the Furious. It's a smooth running 80 minutes of goofy, brightly colored zooming, flipping and exploding.

The lead character is completely boring and somehow it doesn't matter a god damn bit because of the movie around him. If they managed to make this same movie with a great character in the lead like a Snake Plissken or a Blade or something, it would almost be too dangerous. I don't know if I would be able to survive. I would be begging for parts 2-10. I would probaly cry at the end and have to go take a long walk along the waterfront to contemplate God and what He meant for us on this journey. And maybe stop for a Pepsi but I'd like to think I'm not that much of a sucker.

THE TOWN THAT DREADED SUNDOWN

This is the true story of a series of murders in Texarkana shortly after World War II. So it could also be called THE TOWN THAT COMBINED THE NAMES OF TEXAS AND ARKANSAS INTO ONE NAME AND THAT ALSO DREADED SUNDOWN. That doesn't have the same rhythm to it though, I think they made the right decision.

This is a weird movie. It starts clunkily with corny narration about "the story you are about to see," and the narrator pops up throughout the movie as if it's an educational film. The actors in the small roles are obviously not actors, some of them are terrible. The filmatism is what you would call "crude and workmanlike" or maybe "serviceable" - although of course it's a faded, full frame out of print VHS so maybe some day if they give it the Blue Underground or Dark Sky treatment it will turn out to be a fuckin masterpiece of photographical genius.

Anyway, I immediately thought of THE LEGEND OF BOGGY CREEK (which takes the same narrator, low budget, bad acting approach to a true story about alleged sasquatch sightings) but I didn't realize until I looked it up afterwards that it's the same director, Charles B. Pierce. I guess the spooky true story business is a good way to pay the bills.

The reason why the town dreads sundown is some guy they call The Phantom, but he is not Billy Zane wearing a purple suit and riding a horse in the jungle, he's a dude with a mask exactly like Jason in FRIDAY THE 13TH PART 2 (white bag with eyeholes torn in it) who kills kids on lover's lane, or in one case shows up at somebody's house and shoots them through the window. He's a total freak, because the first woman he attacked he bit all over her body. Another girl he killed by blowing her trombone at her. There are many scenes of him breathing heavily so his mask sucks in and out. Who knows what the hell is going on inside there. The guy is a pervert though. This asshole even attacks Mary Ann from GILLIGAN'S ISLAND. What the fuck did Mary Ann ever do to you, you sonofabitch?

I think this is almost a horror movie, but really it's true crime so it focuses on Ben Johnson as "the most famous ranger in the history of Texas" who takes over the case and tries everything he can and even seems to almost get lucky a couple of times. So it's about all this police work, so for long stretches it kind of feels like a WALKING TALL movie. And there's some really bad comic relief with a wacky deputy who has to dress up as a girl as bait, etc. And I think that business actually helps because it really catches you off guard when it goes into the scenes where the Phantom is after somebody, because I think those scenes are genuinely scary. The mask looks so creepy, and the guy plays him as such a weirdo, and there is that morbid feeling that comes from knowing that this is based on a real guy, and not knowing who he was or why he was doing this shit. I kept being tempted to check the internet to find out who the Phantom Killer really was. And I was just watching the movie, imagine those people dealing with the real guy. Who the fuck is that? Must've been maddening.

I think it's even creepier having seen ZODIAC, because these two movies have alot in common. They both start with an unknown guy attacking a couple at a lover's lane. They both follow the investigators, the theories, the hysteria throughout the city, the false leads, the person who tells the terrifying story of riding with some guy who they think is the killer. When a date comes on the screen you get a sinking feeling because, shit, if there's a date that means it's historic and if it's historic somebody must've died. And of course (QUADRUPLE SPOILER - spoiler for THE TOWN THAT DREADED SUNDOWN, ZODIAC and the two real life cases that inspired the movies) at the end they seem like they're gonna get him and then you find out they never knew who it was or what happened to him. God damn it. So it leaves you thinking, shit, there's more than one of these unknown masked killer assholes out there?

THE TOWN THAT DREADED SUNDOWN is rated PG, but that doesn't mean it's tame. It actually means this is '70s PG and somebody needs to put this fucker out on DVD so the rating can get updated. It's not real gorey but it sure is intense when that perv in the mask shows up, or when the cops are just one step behind him. I liked this one. The movie, not the real case.

TRAINING DAY
I saw this movie in the same context that many will: I said, Denzel finally won an oscar, and it was for that? So I went out and rented it.

In the theaters I had avoided this picture on account of it looked like crap. I saw the trailer and it shoulda said "FROM THE DIRECTOR OF THE REPLACEMENT KILLERS, AND THE PLOT OF THE CORRUPTER." You know - naive white rookie (Mark Wahlberg/Ethan Hawke) partners with cynical veteran of the streets (Chow Yun Fat/Denzel Washington) who shows him the seedy underbelly of his (black/Chinese) community where there is no choice but to dip into the dark side, the grey area, get around the red tape, walk the line between cop and criminal, blah blah blah, and now he has gone too far, but will the white partner be able to survive?

So Denzel gets the oscar, we rent it anyway. Against our instincts. And the movie isn't all that bad. At first.

It's true, Mr. Washington really does do a good job. He plays the classic abusive friend. Like when you were in grade school and your friend was gonna do some stupid shit, like steal some beer or light something on fire or leave a pile of shit in somebody's house or whatever. And you don't want him to do it but, you know, you go along with it because you don't want him to think you're a puss. "Yeah, no you're right. Yeah, it would be funny to take a shit in their house."

So you go along with it and he just starts doing stupider and stupider things. And when you question him he laughs at you. That's what Denzel does, he hears Ethan scoff at the idea of a narcotics cop smoking a joint on duty and he just starts laughing at him. And nobody likes to be laughed at.

And the things he does just get crazier and crazier until Ethan Hawke finally has to draw the line. And then suddenly Denzel turns all sweet, he lowers his voice and he tries to make a legitimate argument for why he does the things he does, and BAM, he has Ethan reluctantly in the fold again.

Ethan Hawke is pretty good too. I just saw him in TAPE which I liked too. He's kind of a wirey weaselly guy, but he's likable in my opinion. I'm not sure what movie people know him from or why they hate him so much. I guess it's the whole "why don't I get Uma Thurman for myself" thing. Yeah, I saw that poster from the Avengers too.

Also by the way, Ethan Hawke is the lead and Denzel Washington is the supporting actor, despite the categories of their oscar nominations.

The other thing worthwhile about TRAINING DAY is that it captures a different kind of corrupt cop that you really haven't seen in movies before. When most of us think of corrupt cops we think of the white ones that beat up black motorists, or at least pull them over for no reason, or who mistake things like wallets or empty hands for guns. Or who shot a guy dead in seattle last month because he had a "sword" (actually a large knife). I know this isn't usually covered in rock-paper�scissors but cops should know that gun beats knife. They don't need to shoot the dude, just spray him with a hose and ram him with a ladder like they did to a guy with a sword downtown a couple years ago.

Anyway believe it or not there actually are black corrupt cops and alot of them are kinda like Denzel, driving around with his hydraulics listening to the Dr. Dre instrumentals album, smoking blunts and stealing money and basically acting like a gangster. I know this because of the great Rolling Stone article last year called "WHO SHOT BIGGIE SMALLS?" which is soon to be a book and hopefully a movie. It's basically a modern day LA CONFIDENTIAL, but way better. It's about the scandalous Rampart district CRASH unit, the guys who were killing gangsters, planting guns on them, and then giving each other plaques and tattoos to commemorate their kills. The article has pictures of them posing like old time gangsters. These guys were working for the notorious Death Row Records, making more money from that than from their salaries as police. Two of them were convicted of robbing a bank. Which, I mean, I can't be too judgmental about that given my history, but they're cops! There must be some kind of rule against that.

TRAINING DAY doesn't give you much of a look into that world, but maybe a quick glance. The problem is some of it comes off kinda silly, like a Larry Clark cop movie. Oh man, he's making Ethan Hawke smoke PCP at gunpoint, and interfering with traffic! It's ten minutes into his shift, he's driving, and he's on his third beer! How outrageous will it get? He might as well have clothespins on his nipples.

I forgave most of that and I was with the movie until about the last 20-30 minutes, when Denzel abandoned Ethan Hawke with some Mexican "esses." This is when the movie goes over the line from mildly-accurate police thriller to ridiculous white fantasy. It feeds into that great white nightmare - the white man left in hostile territory. Omega Man. Planet of the Apes. Behind Enemy Lines. Enemy Mine. Deliverance. The story goes that if a white guy finds himself surrounded by another race, he will first be taunted, then he will be beaten and/or killed. In this case the characters are paid off by Denzel, but they are still ridiculously malicious about it. They pretend to be his friend, then ask if he's ever had his shit packed, and throw him down in the bathtub where you saw him for his oscar clip.

And it gets sillier. Ethan is a good white man, but how can he convince them before he gets his shit packed? Coincidentally, he saved their little cousin from being raped earlier today. Thank goodness he happened to have her Hello Kitty wallet in her back pocket, and the "esses" found it, and they called the cousin, and she told them what happened, and they believed her! Now they have that special bond that happens between whites and minority tough guys in movies (SEE: BULWORTH.)

Before this scene, the movie went for a fairly realistic tone, but it is entirely abandoned for the finale. Next we get a shoot out with a kid in the middle, and the kid never gets upset. Then we have the climactic showdown surrounded by the residents of an entire black neighborhood, who stand by as some kind of silent greek chorus. They don't say a damn thing! Not until they get to the surprise reveal that they are on the white man's side. And then they give him the ultimate trans-racial gift: the ethnic term of endearment. A black gang member pulls a gun on Denzel and tells Ethan, "Why don't you bounce on outta here, homey. We got your back." Because Ethan is "down."

(SEE: BULWORTH; HALLE BERRY TELLS WARREN BEATTY "YOU MY NIGGA.")

And of course everything gets wrapped up with multiple instances of the ol' ironic repeated dialogue, where the good guy ironically repeats something that the bad guy said earlier in the movie, only in a different context, AND where the bad guy repeats something that he said casually earlier, but now he says it while coughing up blood because he just got shot.

I must admit I liked THE CORRUPTER a little better, although the chemistry between Wahlberg and Chow Yun Fat may not be as strong. Chow Yun Fat's character was a little more three dimensional, not really a good guy or a bad guy. Unethical but capable of redemption. Not necessarily wrong. He got to run the gamut in the acting department (much better than he did in TRAINING DAY director Antoine Fuqua's THE REPLACEMENT KILLERS) but I don't think he ever hammed it up so bad there was spit flying out of his mouth, ala Denzel. Also if I remember right there was a pretty good car chase in there somewhere. And everybody loves a pretty good car chase.

By the way, Denzel's oscar clip shoulda been him saying, "You shot me in the ass!" That woulda made it all worthwhile.

THE TRANSPORTER

Somebody has to talk to these fuckers that make the crime movies. I mean for crying out loud use some common sense. I am calling for a 75 year moratorium on movies where a criminal quotes "rules" during the course of the job. For example in this glorified Van Damme movie about a guy who "transports" "packages" our hero quotes rules about 20 times in the first 15 minutes. "Never open the package. Rule #1." "No names. Rule #2." This is supposed to show that he has a very strict policy of professionalism and always follows "the rules" and this adventure we are about to chronicle is caused by his mistakenly seeing a hot asian gal and breaking one of the rules.

Jesus man, even if this made any sense it has been done way too many times already. But think about it. If somebody you knew, whether they were a criminal or a window washer, constantly talked about "the rules", you would never want to hang out with this fuckin nitwit, would you? You're washing the window and the fucker says, "Rule #1. No streaks." What an annoying dude. Get him away from me.

If these 3 rules he keeps quoting were so important they wouldn't need to be fuckin SAID OUT LOUD all the time, they would just be an obvious part of the job. And not only that, but why would he have to rank them? If it's important not to tell your name to your client then why is that less important than not opening the package? Shouldn't these all be important enough to be taboos and not have to be numbered? If they are unimportant enough that you can maybe get away with breaking #3 easier than #1, then why is he so worried about #3 anyway? Maybe it shouldn't even be a rule, just a word of advice or something, I don't know.

Look man, it was cute in RESERVOIR DOGS when Steve Buscemi talked about "being a professional" robbing banks. But nobody really talks like that and if they did they'd get their fuckin nose broke especially after 100 moronic Tarantino ripoffs and LOCK STOCK ripoffs and straight to video rapper vehicles. Nobody in the world of crime or in the world of watching movies ever wants to hear that shit ever again, unless they are watching RESERVOIR DOGS on a dvd or arguably a video type format. SO LISTEN UP FUCKERS. No more. Ever.

(NOTE: I should point out that a criminal with a code of honor is a separate issue, because it is a legitimate dramatic construct and not just a cute gimmick. However this still gotta be done right like GHOST DOG or Beat Takeshi's movies, and should usually be left unstated and illustrated through the actions of the particular badass.)

Aside from that there are many other just straight up dumb ideas in this movie that don't make alot of sense. The worst is when The Transporter suddenly says, "It's quiet." The girl says, "I thought you liked it quiet?" and he says, "Too quiet," and suddenly a missile blows up part of his house.

What the fuck man? He lives up on a mountain. How could it be too quiet? It's your house, man. It doesn't get quieter before a missile shoots your house. I haven't had a missile shoot my house but I can't think of any reason why if a missile did shoot my house, why it would get quiet first. Do missiles kill all the birds or something? I don't get it.

Then there is the matter of how underneath his house he has water, which protects him from the explosion, and he has two sets of scuba gear, and they go underwater and swim to someone else's house, where they don't even check for occupants before they start fuckin. Oh well I'll let that one go, artistic license and what not.

Okay so now that I've criticized the shit out of this movie let me say a few nice and/or descriptive things about it. It stars Jason Statham who apparently was in SNATCH but I wouldn't remember because all I remember about SNATCH was how much I didn't like it. Mr. Statham makes a pretty decent action hero if you can accept the notion that all criminals like to swing around and kick each other when they get mad at each other. He takes a job delivering a kidnap victim but then he screws her, there is love, etc. So he ends up fighting the kidnappers and trying to save a truckload of slaves.

This is one of those movies made in the spirit of international cooperation. There's a bunch of english dudes and americans and French, it's co-directed by Corey Yuen and a French dude (er, a Freedom dude I guess is what they're called now) and written by France's own Luc Besson. What we all have in common is we like to watch a bunch of guys kicking and shooting each other, I guess is the idea.

There are some good moments and crazy ideas for action scenes. My favorite part was an Oh Shit It's On moment near the beginning where the Transporter is transporting a package that's actually a bomb intended to kill him. He happens to get out of the car and survive the explosion. Cut to the doorbell ringing at the house he just came from, he kicks the door down, comes in and starts beating the shit out of the guys that gave him the package. Good stuff. Later it gets really ridiculous when he gets in a fight inside the cab of a semi, chases an airplane on foot, even dumps oil on himself so he can slide around on the ground while fighting. After enough scenes like that you gotta be a little more forgiving of the generic story and characters and dialogue.

TRANSPORTER 2

One day not too long ago I was sitting in a theater waiting to watch some movie, the identity of which has by now dissolved into the fountain of time. (that's not a real saying, I just made it up. My audience deserves new sayings, not the same old shit they've heard before and understand.) And suddenly there was a trailer for a sequel that probaly nobody, and definitely not me, asked for. The movie of course was THE TRANSPORTER 2 in case you forgot which review you're reading here. There was kicking, jumping, cars flipping, things exloding, a half naked lingerie wearing sexy nurse assassin with makeup smeared down her eyes Tammy Faye Baker style, that sort of thing. There was this ridiculous shot where The Transporter jumps his BMW from one parking garage into another and skids out right on the edge of the thing. All that flash and bang got me excited and I realized that somehow, even though I kind of hated THE TRANSPORTER, I wanted to see the sequel. I can't remember ever being excited about a sequel to a movie I didn't like. But like Jesus and the correctional system said, you gotta give a guy a second chance.

Well I am happy to report now that I've finally seen the thing that The Transporter series is full rehabilitated and ready to rejoin society. This is a real dumb movie, completely ridiculous, and pretty god damned great. It's credited as directed by the guy who did UNLEASHED/DANNY THE DOG, with action direction by Corey Yuen. (The original was credited to director Corey Yuen and second unit director UNLEASHED guy.) The producer and co-writer is Luc Besson, who used to be an admired director but now mainly just produces ridiculous movies like this. I think it's kind of his specialty to come up with silly and absurd action concepts and then do them with a straight face, which is what makes this one fun. It used to be a Hong Kong style but now it's pretty much the domain of Besson.

Jason Statham plays Frank somethingorother, the Transporter of the title. He is a guy who looks cool in a white shirt and black suit and tie, and is good at driving expensive cars, as well as kickboxing. He starts out driving a BMW in this one which makes you wonder what would happen if he fought Clive Owen's THE HIRE character. I think we got a new alien vs. the predators type deal in the making here, and at the same time advertising cars. Maybe they could each be advertising a different car and whichever car sells more is the one who wins. And then they fight Freddy.

Anyway in the first one Frank Transporter had to deliver a "package" and he kept saying stupid shit like "rule number one: never open the package." Well in this one Frank is doing a favor for somebody (never explained) so instead of doing highly illegal shit he's driving some rich asshole (Matthew Modine)'s kid to school. Also the wife is played by some super model who obviously has the hots for him. The bad news is that Frank is still constantly listing different rules for different things. The good news is he just uses them to lecture the little kid so it's more pathetic than annoying.

Normally driving kids to school would be a waste of Frank Transporter's talents, but fortunately this kid happens to be the son of some drug czar dude and therefore is kidnapped by colorful terrorists working for south american drug lords. They're just trying to inject him with a poison that will infect all the drug czars at an upcoming conference, but Frank interupts them so they take the kid and ask for a ransom as well as infecting him with the plague.

Well Transporter rule number 236 of section 42C (third paragraph of page 283 in the Revised Transportational Ethics Manual) is to always keep your word, and as luck would have it Frank accidentally promised the little crumb crusher that he wouldn't allow anyone, including doctors and/or mercenaries dressed as doctors, to harm him. That is why he spends the rest of the movie fighting dudes, climbing things, jumping off things, etc.

The main villain is just some dude with an accent, but the best villain is the dude's girlfriend Lola. She's kind of a punky tough looking babe who we first meet in her underwear dancing and listening to headphones. This shows that she is a free spirited young lady, which explains why she spends most of the movie wearing underwear or lingerie in public. Later she is briefly disguised as a nurse but she pulls open her dress to reveal her guns. The main question raised by that exciting trailer I mentioned earlier was "Why does the deadly lingerie nurse assassin have her makeup all smeared?" I thought maybe she is a tragic character who cries whenever she has to kill people while dressed as a half naked nurse. Or better yet, maybe the makeup is already smeared at the beginning and they never even say why. That would be cool. Well it turns out that movies like this involve alot of exploding and catching on fire, which means that sometimes the sprinklers go off.

Lola has a couple good moments. At one point she is surrounded by cops and she holds up her guns like she's gonna fight them. We don't see what happens but shortly after she catches up with the Transporter, and she's driving a cop car. (You see how that works, your imagination fills in the blanks. the power of the human mind.) Later she fights him in her boyfriend's apartment and does some aerial acrobatics from the beaded curtains. Unfortunately she ends up getting thrown into a wall of spikes and dying. Tip to bad guys or, really, anyone: don't have a wall of spikes in your apartment. I know it looks cool but if you think about it it could also be dangerous. Interior decorators please heed this warning, or Lola's death truly was in vain.

(Also, the guy doesn't seem to know that his girlfriend is skewered back at the apartment. Maybe it's best that he'll never survive his inevitable climactic kickboxing fight with Frank Transporter. It would be sad to see him come home and find her impaled on the wall spikes. I mean how could he not blame himself too, unless it was her idea to have wall spikes. I suppose it does seem more like something she would be into. But we don't really know for sure.)

If there's one character in this movie that's cooler than Lola, it would have to be our hero Frank Transporter. This is one cool motherfucker. In the opening scene he's besieged by a gang of carjackers and he protests the BMW is brand new and he doesn't want them to scratch it. They want to fight him and he stops them to say that his suit was just dry cleaned, and he takes off the jacket before beating them all silly. Later in the movie when he gets dragged across black paint and has a sleeve torn off you feel bad for him. Because this dry cleaning backstory has already been established. That's what I call some fuckin WRITING.

Frank's main mode of transportation is cars, and there are some intense high speed driving scenes. It does go into cheesy CGI at times but most of the stunts are real and supposedly Statham did alot of it himself, including driving. Although the car garage jump is hilarious, the best car related feat by far is when he is forced at gunpoint to get in the BMW, and he sees reflected in a puddle that there is a bomb underneath the car. So he jumps it off a pile of junk and flips it just right so that the bomb on the undercarriage hooks onto a crane and detaches.

In another scene he actually drives above an alley, straddling two separate buildings. And that's right, you guessed correctly, there is a wino in the alley who sees this, then looks at his bottle and decides to quit drinking. Man, you can't even count how many movie characters have been cured of drink by flying saucers, giant monsters or crazy stunts. Lucky motherfuckers had it easy. They skipped over 11 whole steps.

The Transporter is also good at other stuff besides cars though. He is a topnotch pedestrian - in one scene he jumps straight up as two cars collide beneath him. In another one he chases a man on foot, then steals a jet ski and jumps it onto a street and then climbs into a bus. That's three modes of travel in one chase. The climax takes place in an airplane that spins out of control, so Frank and Other Guy fight while tumbling around inside a spinning jet.

Mr. Yuen did a great job choreographing these fights. This guy has worked on some mediocre American movies here and there (like THE ONE and BULLETPROOF MONK) but if you go through his filmography it's like the damn phone book. He played Uncle Po in HERO. He was in HELL'Z WIND STAFF and THE FATAL FLYING GUILLOTINE. He choreographed FONG SAI YUK and ZU WARRIORS OF THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN and directed MY FATHER IS A HERO. And the ridiculous NO RETREAT, NO SURRENDER, where Van Damme played an evil Russian. This guy is a legend and you can see his fingerprints all over this movie. Like Jackie Chan these guys manage to work all kinds of objects into the fight as improvised weapons. There are some pretty spectacular moves using firehoses, for example. My favorite one though is when they're fighting in a doctor's office and a dude throws a skeleton at The Transporter. That might be a first.

One thing that could be improved I think is the dialogue. Although it has all the ridiculous action you ask for, there was only one really funny line. I'm not sure if it was supposed to be funny, but that's irrelevant as far as I'm concerned. It happens when Frank manages to hang onto the landing gear of the villain's private jet as it takes off and then make his way onboard. They have an exchange something like this:

FRANK TRANSPORTER: I'm afraid that your flight's been cancelled.

VILLAIN: I'm afraid that you've been cancelled.

That's a great line, but there's not anything else to match it. Also, I feel kind of weird about bringing this up, but... have you ever noticed-- I mean... I'm a bit uncomfortable because I think Frank may have a problem with, you know, black people. In the opening scene when a white girl and a gang of black men try to steal his car, he makes some comment to the white girl about the company she keeps. I thought that was weird but since the guys were in fact carjacking him, maybe I can take what he said at face value and not read more into it. I decided to give him the benefit of the doubt and assume that it was not a racial comment. You know, maybe he's completely color blind, he didn't even know they were black. It didn't even occur to him that it might be interpreted that way. Who knows.

But then later there's a scene where he's fighting one of these colorful black villains they got in Besson movies, and he puts his fists in watermelons and then punches the guy. And I swear I didn't imagine this, it was really a scene in the movie. It's a low down shame because it's a pretty fuckin badass move but for god's sake why does he have to use watermelons as weapons against a black man? I can understand if it was honey melons or maybe some larger melon. Or a pumpkin. Or if he was fighting a white guy. There are many ways that it would've been a socially acceptable badass move. But after the comment in the parking garage and then this I can't help but be suspicious of the guy. If he's not racist he sure has a knack for getting himself in some uncomfortable situations that make him look bad. What is this, CURB YOUR ENTHUSIASM?

I think Frank is okay with the gays, though. In fact, the director said in an interview that although it's not stated, they decided the character is gay. Like BLACKJACK, there's alot of things that could be read different ways. For example, he tells the wife he can't get it on with her "because of who I am" which could either mean because he's The Transporter or because he's A Gay Man. And the inspector from part 1 comes to visit him which could either mean the movie needs comic relief or it could mean they are lovers now.

If you assume that he is in fact gay it makes more sense what's going on with Lola, taking her clothes off in front of him and licking his face and what not, being aggressively sexual towards him to throw him off his game.

The weird thing about this gay business, though, is that he had sex with a woman in part 1. And because he wanted to, not as part of some sham marriage. Gay rule #1: don't have sex with a woman. Of course, he always breaks his own rules.

Overall I'm pretty sure that TRANSPORTER 2 is way better than part 1. But I do have to acknowledge the possibility that I just wasn't being fair to part 1 or wasn't ready to be seduced by its soon-to-be-gay charms. Because when I look back over my review of part 1 I'm criticizing it for being dumb, but then here I am praising this one to high heaven for the same thing. But my feeling about part 2 is that it has a higher volume of ridiculous action and a lower percentage of gratuitous plot. It probaly helps that it's only 80 minutes so probaly 10 or 15 minutes shorter than the first one. A brisker pace and a tighter package for easy consumption.

TRAPPED IN THE CLOSET chapters 1-22

This may surprise you, but I'm not a fan of musicals. For example I went and saw that SWEENEY TODD movie. Sure, they cut necks real good in that movie, there are waterfalls of blood and anybody is gonna appreciate that. The look of the movie is real nice (except for the CGI opening credits, that was a bad move), John Depp and Sasha B. Cohen both did a great job, Hans Grueber is a prick as usual, and the story's not too bad. I enjoy cannibalism movies - we all do. But still, I was pretty bored. There was nothing really wrong with it, but I think PLANET OF THE APES is the only Tim Burton picture I enjoyed less. People always criticize that weirdo because they don't believe his fantastical characters or they think he's a bad storyteller and too indulgent in his stylistic fetishes and what not. But take less of a story, less developed characters, less style, but make them sing and all the sudden a bunch of critics say it's the best movie of the year. And the singing isn't even that good. If it was Stevie Wonder or Prince or somebody I could understand but it's Johnny Depp, he just learned how to sing for this movie. You motherfuckers are crazy.

Which brings me to R. Kelly, the creator of a musical that I did like for some reason. This guy is the only pop star who's as crazy as Michael Jackson, but unlike Michael he takes on the appearance of a normal human, so he's able to get away with it so far. I feel weird comparing him to Michael because I don't like his music like I like Michael's, he's not as original and he definitely can't dance like that. But after you see this you can't help but compare it because these days they hardly even make music videos and this guy is single-mindedly pursuing something so ambitious and strange. This is R. Kelly's "Thriller." Although honestly the people who like it treat it more like SHOWGIRLS.

If you're not familiar with TRAPPED IN THE CLOSET, it's basically a continuing soap opera written by, starring, and performed by R. Kelly, in the form of an endless R&B video. He plays the main character and there are a bunch of actors but he performs all of the dialogue and description in song and the other characters lip synch their lines. Later on he starts playing multiple characters like Eddie Murphy. Each "chapter" is maybe 4 or 5 minutes, like a music video, then it gets to some plot twist or cliffhanger or both, fades out and fades back in for the next chapter.

It's kind of grown into a cult phenomenon but I'm not lying, I was an early adopter on this one. I saw some of these on BET when they were brand new and I was pretty captivated, because what the fuck? This guy - I can maybe understand making a video of himself peeing in an underage girl's mouth. Okay, I get it. But this? Singing soap opera? And alot of it doesn't even rhyme? This is fuckin nuts. And then I saw him on that video music awards show, I think I wrote about it at the time, how he did a lip synch playing all the characters and taking on different postures to play a woman or a gay guy, etc. I couldn't believe it. I kept trying to explain this thing to people but most white people think they're not supposed to watch B.E.T., so they didn't know what the fuck I was talking about.

Then the first 12 chapters came out on DVD, then another 10, and recently they came out on one DVD called "The Big Package." Somebody gave it to me for Christmas and I've already watched it twice. Until this I'd never seen all of them or watched them in order, and holy shit. I was kind of blown away. It makes alot more sense when you sit down and watch the whole thing. And there's something kind of brilliant about it.

The story begins with R. Kelly (playing a character we later find out is named Sylvester) in the titular state of confinement. He flashes back to explain that he woke up in the bed of this woman he met in a club. He's married and didn't mean to fall asleep there so he wanted to leave immediately, but the woman's husband Reverend Rufus just got home and she convinced him to hide in the closet. Kelly has some pretty good facial expressions, he's definitely into the acting but he overdoes it sometimes. For example he's trapped in a closet and he starts pacing back and forth.

But then Sylvester's cell phone rings, giving him away. After some snooping around because he's not very good at locating the source of a sound Rufus is about to open the closet, Sylvester pulls out a gun, and it fades to black.

Oh shit, what's gonna happen? Will he get out of there? Will he have to shoot a reverend? And most of all, why did he pull out a gun? (And was he sleeping on that gun?) On the video commentary Kelly explains that he only pulled out the Baretta because it rhymed with "dresser." (Well, not exactly true, I know a thing or two about rhyming and one of those things I know is that those two words don't rhyme.)

Well, when Rufus discovers that his wife's having an affair he not only gets upset, he decides to hurt her by making a phone call and saying that he has to reveal his "shocking secret." Sylvester has the gun and every reason to just get the hell out of there, but he doesn't. And I don't know if this was on purpose but I think this is one of the brilliant touches because the main character in this story is in suspense trying to find out what the plot twist is. He has to find out this gossip of some dude he never even met before. And then he's shocked (much more than the viewer is) when the secret turns out to be Rufus's male lover Chuck.

Then he still stays and gets upset at the argument that ensues, and fires his gun into the ceiling. Not cool.

As each chapter unfolds, the web of scandal seems to spread wider and become more complex. Sylvester had this affair with Cathy, whose husband is having an affair with Chuck. Sylvester's wife is having an affair with this cop (played by a guy from THE WIRE), the cop comes home and his wife Bridget is having an affair too. That one's the funniest because the plot involves an allergy to cherries and a midget hiding in a cabinet. Sylvester's not in the scene, but R. Kelly is, playing The Narrator. He smokes a cigar and narrates from inside the kitchen pantry. There's a classic moment where he comes out of the pantry and says:

"Now pause the movie" (the scene freezes)

"'Cause what I'm about to say to ya'll is so damn twisted.
Not only is there a man in his cabinet, but the man... is a MIDGET!"

(echo: MIDGET... MIDGET... MIDGET...)

There are a whole bunch of reasons why this scene is funny, but my favorite is that The Narrator gives this look like he's completely surprised and taken aback when the word midget comes out of his mouth, like even he didn't know it until the exact moment he said it. (He loses his omniscient powers when he's not trapped in some sort of storage compartment.)

And by the way, who else was gonna be inside that cabinet? A little kid? I wasn't exactly expecting a Harlem Globetrotter to climb out of there.

These ridiculous plot twists (not usually as surprising as Kelly seems to think they are) are part of why it's fun to watch, but there's alot more complexity to it. And there's something kind of hypnotic about the way it's one god damn song for 90 minutes straight. He's trying to top THE UMBRELLAS OF CHERBOURG for most use of one song in a musical. If he ever gets to 3 hours he's gonna be a Bollywood musical. In fact, with the exception of a scene where they go to church and it turns into a gospel song, the entire feature length series so far is one song.

But he pulls it off. The music for it is cleverly constructed. Most of it is this kind of slow, sleazy bass with weird popping sounds for drums. Then toward the end there are violins to make it sound more cinematic and tense, as it gets to the cliffhanger. Then each new chapter begins with this tense rumbling drum, like a drum roll. As if to say "Oh shit. Here we go." It works every time.

But since he's doing the same song for 90 minutes Kelly seems to get bored of it and starts finding new ways to do it. In one chapter all the sudden there's a guitar player added. He starts adding new characters and singing their lines with different accents and voices. For Bridget he does a southern drawl. Then he introduces Nosy Neighbor Rosey and her husband Randolph (played by Kelly in a Tyler Perry style wig and fat suit). For Randolph he sings like the dad in FRIDAY. And a mafia guy. And a preacher who leads the gospel choir in another style. And you really know he's bored when he introduces Pimp Lucius, a squeaky-voiced stuttering pimp.

He also starts experimenting with the sound design, I like that alot. He'll have distortion on a line of dialogue that comes from a telephone, or have it muffled if it's coming from outside of the room, or in one part he has Twon's voice fade out as he closes his car window. He starts fucking around, using his voice for a police siren, telephone ringing (even though there were phone sound effects in earlier chapters). He curses all throughout, but in one chapter in the middle all the curses are bleeped out by a sample of his own voice doing a buzz sound.

Also look for weird inconsistencies in the point of view. At first it's Sylvester speaking in first person. Later it changes to this omniscient Narrator, but you're not sure if he realized he did that. He'll sing about Sylvester in the third person and then say "I" a couple lines later. Weird. And in chapter 1 he said the woman he woke up to "wasn't you," so he seems to be talking to his wife Gwendoline, but later he couldn't be.

The thing that surprised me though is the complexity of the themes and motifs and what not. Kelly paints a picture of this whole world of selfish, impulsive people who can't restrain themselves. Everybody is having an affair. Some of them risk giving themselves away by doing ridiculously stupid things: "the police" answers the phone in his married lover's house. The midget Big Man eats a whole piece of cherry pie even though his lover is allergic to it and she made it for her husband and told him on the phone that it was waiting for him. Sylvester can't stop listening to secrets, can't stop pulling his gun on people, keeps threatening to shoot people for stupid reasons. Twon keeps wanting to shoot people even though he's on house arrest and is already pushing it. The cop smokes on the job and at his lover's house. Randolph drinks gin at church. Pimp Lucius goes to church with his hos even though he doesn't want to be saved. Rufus has an 8x10 of his gay lover on his desk at church. Twan gets drunk and blasts Rick James while on a drug run. etc.

Lots of weird things repeat themselves. I think four characters end up hiding in closets or closet-like areas. At least two extra-marital lovers are leaving and then turn around and come back. Two characters hear a sound in their home but are poor at locating the source of the sound and have to look around for it.

Kelly seems to have a little bit to learn about diversity. He's trying to be understanding about gays, and they aren't portrayed as being very limp-wristed or anything. But the other characters act like hearing about gayness is the craziest shit they've ever heard of other than seeing a midget. And of course one of them turns out (it seems so far, at least) to have AIDS. In a later chapter a woman and her butch, protective co-worker kiss, revealing to Twan and Sylvester that they're gay, and revealing to the audience that you weren't supposed to realize they were gay when you first saw them, even though you did, because you're not stupid. Sylvester points a gun at them but says "You're lucky I like that shit." To be fair, he also scolds Twan for asking "Are you gonna let them get away with that shit?" Sylvester says, "What? Kissing?"

The portrayal of midgets is alot worse. Not only does Kelly act like their very existence is the weirdest, most "twisted" thing he ever heard of, but Big Man is a scaredy asthmatic who shits his pants and faints in fear, and then there are alot of jokes about the smell of the shit in his pants. On the positive side he is "blessed" and is a popular male dancer.

The visual style of TRAPPED IN THE CLOSET is also pretty cool, very old school. Most chapters are on one set, like a play. When they drive the background is greenscreened in, not like 300 but like an old Hitchcock movie. Especially in the second set of chapters they seem to decide they're making a film noir, so Sylvester goes to meet a mysterious woman in a smokey diner. Also there's something weirdly hypnotic about chapter 22, a series of phone calls with the heads of the callers contained in circles, floating around on the screen and bumping into each other like a screen saver.

If you need a good companion piece to TRAPPED IN THE CLOSET man have I got a treat for you: REAL TALK. Short film of the year. Long time reader Timmy from "The Whitest Kids You Know" comedy group tipped me off to this 3 minute wonder. This is the one and only thing that I have watched over and over again on Youtube. It's kind of like a rawer, no budget TRAPPED IN THE CLOSET, just a handheld video camera in a studio. The concept of the song is that R. Kelly gets an angry phone call from his girl, they get in a heated argument in the form of singing, and you only hear his side of the conversation. Then before the song is over some dudes in the background get in a fight. It shares many details with TRAPPED IN THE CLOSET including extra-marital shenanigans going on in a club, the VIP section, smokin and drinkin and kickin it, people holding their cell phones out in front of their face and yelling into them, and the adjective "bogus."

TRUE LIES

In James Cameron's idea of a romantic comedy Schwarzenegger plays Harry Tasker, an agent for the "Omega Sector" secret spy agency who protect America from terrorism and are led by Charlton Heston with an eyepatch. He has one eye on the enemy, the other eye on infinity. Or something. The opening shows that Harry is willing to blow shit up but is more of a suave James Bond type than the usual Schwarzenegger character. He gets his way through trickery, wears a tux and even does a tango with Tia Carrera. (Remember when she was supposed to be a big deal?) He just happens to be a muscleman under that tux but nobody seems to notice in the movie, it's not really relevant to the character.

Harry spends alot of his time being followed in a van by his woman-hating loyal manservant Tom Arnold (before he sidekicked for Jet Li or Steven Seagal) and his GGWATBOADSINR (good guy who appears to be of Arab descent so it's not racist) Academy Award nominee for GOOD NIGHT AND GOOD LUCK Grant Heslov. But when he's not trying to stop terrorists from getting nuclear weapons he faces the much bigger problem of relating to his wife Helen (Jamie Lee "I cut off Michael Meyers's head" Curtis) who thinks he's a boring computer salesman.

That's the comedic part of the movie is that it's more about the wacky home life than the spy shit. Harry always blows it and gets home late for work when an extended action sequence comes up, so his wife and kid (Eliza Dushku) think he's a dirtbag. But we know he's really a charmer because of the way he always apologizes to everybody as he rides a horse through a crowded hotel chasing a dude on a motorcycle.

The real gimmick sets in when Tasker accidentally catches his wife on the phone with some guy named Simon, who turns out to be Bill Paxton as a sleazy used car salesman who has convinced her he's a secret agent and needs her help. Harry thinks she's cheating on him so he uses our tax dollars to fund an elaborate stakeout (with helicopters). This is actually where the movie gets dicey and the reason why I hated it when I first saw it years ago. Tasker is a likable hero but he is a neglectful husband. You forgive him for that and you understand his anger (I laughed when his tight grip shattered a lens on his binoculars) but he crosses the line when he locks his poor wife up in an interrogation room and makes her think she's been captured for aiding a spy and humiliates her in front of Tom Arnold. In my opinion that is no way to treat a woman. Take Tom Arnold out of the equation and it's still questionable but definitely with him in there it's over the line.

Harry realizes his wife wants adventure in her boring life so his way of adding spice to the marriage is to trick her into thinking she is being forced to pose as a hooker and do a striptease for some guy. The some guy is actually Tasker himself, but she doesn't know this due to a magical face-covering shadow that unneccessarily stretches the credibility of the movie like it was made of taffy. (Couldn't they just tell her the guy likes to wear a lucha libre mask or something? I'm sure there's people that get off on that shit.)

Well I'm no expert but in my opinion this was a poor way to jumpstart the marriage. If they hadn't both been kidnapped by actual terrorists right at the moment where it went sour I think he would've been looking at a divorce.

I used to think this movie was real racist because of its depiction of Middle Eastern terrorists. But my colleague in geocities badass theory Ryan Kenner has a good point that if it wasn't Middle Eastern terrorists it would be Russian mafia or Triads or some other action movie stereotype. And of course there really are terrorists from that region who would like to use a nuclear weapon on the US, it's not completely made up, we especially know that now. So I didn't find it as offensive all these years later. But I still think it's hilarious to see the filmatists and fans of the movie dance around logic to prove that it's not offensive. They went out of their way not to reference religion in the dialogue so it wouldn't be seen as anti-Muslim, and I've seen posts on IMDb where somebody says that people are crazy for thinking the terrorists are supposed to be Muslims because they never say they are Muslims or mention Allah at all. To which I have to say - Dude, they're called Crimson Jihad. Also, we live in the real world and have seen terrorists from that part of the world and it's pretty easy to guess what religion they claim. But since they don't specifically mention Islam we're supposed to assume these guys are non-denominational Arab terrorists? Are you for real?

The worst part involving these characters is the scene where some wacky terrorists die and it's played as a joke. I have no problem with bad guy deaths getting laughs in action movies, but the way it's done in this part is just stupid. You gotta do it with a straight face, they do it nudging your ribs and saying "Eh? Eh? Ya git it?" They have these cartoon middle eastern atheist terrorists accidentally fire a rocket launcher backwards and blow up their own truck, and then they make funny faces and get upset. They eventually end up dangling from a blown up bridge and they think they are balanced but a pelican lands on their truck and knocks it over. I know this movie is a comedy but you can't treat it mostly serious and then all the sudden near the end have one scene that turns into Wile E. Coyote. Since they are such bumbling idiots and you're supposed to laugh at their deaths it's easy to think of it as racially degrading like those funny WWII Japanese guys with the buck teeth. But really it's more offensive as a misjudged tonal shift. Like alot of action directors James Cameron is better at staging chase scenes than telling jokes.

Another TRUE LIES joke: they scare Bill Paxton so bad he wets his pants. Get it, he's a sissy. And he pees. They liked that one so much they did it twice.

But this movie is really not as bad as I used to think it was. It was sad to see the guy behind such strong female characters as ALIENS Ripley and T2 Sarah Connor do a movie where the women get knocked around and manipulated and called "bitch" and everybody's supposed to high five each other when Tom Arnold says "Women. Can't live with 'em, can't kill 'em." But sadly after the advent of Michael Bay the hatred in this movie seems fairly tame. And as an action movie it actually works. Schwarzenegger is really good and likable. I really like his apologizing and the way his oneliners seem to be sincere more often than sarcastic. Like when he knocks two dobermans' heads together and says "stay" I don't think he's trying to be funny.

And it's a really big spectacle back when spectacles were still expected to have thrills. My favorite action scene is the horse vs. motorcycle through a hotel chase, which I suspect was the inspiration for the part in ADAPTATION where he says, "the cop's after them on a motorcycle and it's like a battle between motors and horses, like technology vs. horse." There's also a very good public restroom brawl which I'm sure partially inspired such later classic bathroom fights as the one in MERCENARY FOR JUSTICE and the one in TERMINATOR 3. I'm glad these kind of bathroom fights always happen in nice establishments (here I believe it's a Marriott hotel) because if it was some normal place where they don't clean the bathroom every two minutes it would be pretty disgusting. And I have never seen a cinematic bathroom fight where they wash their hands before they leave.

The battle on the bridge is pretty impressive too, especially the actual shot looking down on Jamie Lee Curtis as she dangles from the helicopter. She really did it so all that stuff you see below her, that's really below her. The magic of actually doing shit, there's something you don't see in enough action movies these days.

And of course the most famous is when Tasker flies a Harrier jet in and attacks terrorists in a skyscraper. This probaly inspired the most ridiculous scene in LIVE FREE OR DIE HARD but for this one it wasn't CGI, they used some actual Harriers as well as a life sized model of one on a crane. If TRUE LIES has left a negative legacy it is this - the introduction of the military-industrial-action-movie complex. T2 was a huge fucking movie with its truck chase and its groundbreaking liquid metal CGI, so the way Cameron chose to top himself was to get ahold of this advanced military vehicle that had never been in a movie before. To get a Harrier you have to win over the military and then to top TRUE LIES you have to win over the military even more and get them to give you something even more elusive and powerful than a Harrier, and this sort of thing still happens. Michael Bay for example got the military involved in TRANSFORMERS, said in interviews that it would be "a great recruiting tool," and was able to use some stupid jet that had never been seen in a movie before, it had only been seen by poor people right before they died. Similarly, Schwarzenegger in real life saw the stupid Hummer cars that the military was using to roll over and die in in the desert. He got them to give him one and paved the way for civilian Hummers, rapper Hummers, Hummer limos and the flip-off-a-Hummer movement.

So TRUE LIES is by far the weakest of the James Cameron action movies, and the most harmful to the progression of the genre. I read somewhere that he got a divorce right before he did this one, and maybe it was a bad idea to take all his anger out in a romantic comedy. Maybe a horror movie next time, bud. And there will be a next time. But I would still have to say this movie is worth watching. It's a real good Schwarzenegger role, some great action scenes and as silly as it is it's action on a scale you don't see very often. For the first time I'm actually wishing they would make that sequel.

TRUE ROMANCE

Recently while trying to catch up with all of the Bruce Willis movies I missed while I was in the joint, I came across a little picture by the name of Pulp Fiction. This was from a young Cinema Artist by the name of Quentin Tarantino and as I watched I felt very strongly - and still feel to this day - that this is the beginning of a great career. You are going to be hearing a LOT from this motherfucker in a few years, mark my words.

Well naturally I looked up the rest of his films and found that he had Written but not directed this one, True Romance. I already saw it last year but I rented it again which, in my opinion you haven't really seen a movie unless you've seen it twice. Or at least once but preferably twice.

True Romance is no Pulp Fiction and now that I know who this dude Tarantino is it seems like he was a little too self indulgent on the scriptwriting. See, the main character is Clarence but he might as well be called Quentin. He's a cocky dude that works at a comics shop, loves kung fu and blaxploitation movies, won't shut up about his pop culture related theories, his favorite old time movie stars and Elvis Presley. And the fantasy of the movie is that if a dude like this could only have his friends hire an adorable hooker to spend his birthday with him, he'd fall in love and transform overnight into a badmotherfucker.

And I'm not saying this guy is the biggest pansy on the face of the earth but he's not all that impressive either. To make matters worse he wears Elvis sunglasses and a hawaiian shirt. Now I don't know maybe the connotations of hawaiian shirts have changed since my day but in my opinion you don't make a guy into a Badass by dressing him up like weird al yankovic. I mean MAYBE a Ving Rhames or a Tommy Tiny Lister could pull off a yankovic look but a modestly built white boy like Clarence doesn't really stand a chance.

There are some inspired type touches, though, like the coke dealer who realizes he's been betrayed and yells, "I treated you like a son and you stab me in the heart!?" But he's not a mafia don or anything, he's this weasely, short armed Hollywood producer yelling at his yuppie assistant, one of these dudes who ties a sweater around his neck. That character is played by that obnoxious foreigner from Perfect strangers and he's really funny here. Also, Clarence kills the pimp because Elvis tells him to. Now don't get excited I checked the credits and it's not actually Elvis playing the part but I do believe you're supposed to make the connection.

I also liked this part where Clarence shows Alabama a scene in Spiderman #1 where an evil nazi throws a dude's ring into the ocean, and since the dude got it from his lady he jumps overboard to get it. Clarence says it's romantic and he seems sincere and Alabama seems pretty touched and it's this nice notion that a guy with a big heart can find romance in even the most unexpected parts of our culture.

Of course, no fucking way this gal is really gonna go in for that in real life, she's writing this guy off as a loser the second she walks into the comics shop but hey, a tarantino can dream can't he?

The cinematic artsmanship of this particular piece is much slicker and cheesier than the Tarantino works. The music is less carefully selected and there is more of a commercialistic type feel to it. It doesn't feel as raw and minimalistic, its more hollywood business as usual. And it doesn't have much of a redemption/honor among thieves theme as a pulp fiction for example, or a reservoir dogs.

But there is enough interesting touches to make it worth your time, and a great cast - you got Samuel L. Die Hard With a Vengeance Jackson in a two line cameo. You got Christopher Walken vs. Dennis Hopper (playing a nice guy for once, although he is a security guard and former cop for which I deduct a few points, though it is important to the plot). You got Gary the Fifth Element Oldman apparently, doesn't really seem like him but according to the credits thats him playing Drexl the white pimp who says his mom is cherokee and has dreadlocks. No trace of his actual Andy Griffith type accent we know so well from fifth element. And of course 1999 Outlaw Award Winner for Fight Club Brad Pitt is in there in a supporting role as a stoner roommate laying on the couch.

Just promise me though guys that if you go out and rent this movie you won't be getting any Clarence Yankovic type aspirations. Believe me just 'cause your lady's pimp is a real prick doesn't mean you should go kill the guy. Number one it's immoral and number two you're gonna make an ass of yourself. I mean as a general rule of thumb, anyone who is that into spiderman cannot handle himself in a street fight. Batman MAYBE, unlikely, but possible. Spiderman, no fucking way. I promise you it will not go down the way it was in the movie and even if it did there would be no cocaine in the suitcase, sorry. Most pimps especially these days are low on the food chain, they do not operate that kind of operation and even if they did they just wouldn't have that amount of cocaine all in one item of luggage. I mean in my experience anyway your mileage may vary.