Sometimes in a man’s life a man’s gotta post brief snippets about different movie news stories so we can discuss them here.
Well, it was fun looking forward to it while it lasted
My buddy who told me this news looked like he was about to tell me somebody had died. Turns out everybody’s okay, but they hired Simon West to direct EXPENDABLES 2. The guy who broke it to me had actually predicted this back when I was talking up John Hyams and those guys.
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My Summer of 2001 10th Anniversary Retrospective will continue shortly, but as requested here’s a brief interlude in the present to deal with some pressing issues.
SUPER 8 is the new picture from writer/director Jay-Jay Abrams (‘Felicity’) that is produced by Steven Spielberg and done in a style that’s a slavish tribute to the classic Spielberg pictures of the ’70s and ’80s. It takes place in ’79 and it’s about a kid whose mom recently died (if it was a real Spielberg movie it would be about divorce), his dad doesn’t really understand him, his friends are making a zombie movie, and also there is a gigantic train crash that unleashes a monster that scares away the dogs, knocks over alot of shit and kidnaps his girl.
released May 25th, 2001
WARNING: contains spoilers for PEARL HARBOR and World War II
After three financially successful action movies in a row (BAD BOYS, THE ROCK, ARMAGEDDON), Michael Bay got a once-in-his-career itch to make An Important Movie. He probly had SAVING PRIVATE RYAN on the brain, and definitely TITANIC.
Ever since James Cameron’s movie broke all box office records studios had been threatening to make asses of themselves by blatantly trying to catch more lightning in that same melodramatic-love-story-during-historic-disaster bottle. Jan de Bont almost did a love-story-on-the-Hindenburg movie, for example. PEARL HARBOR wasn’t as obvious of a copycat as that because 1) it was a love story set against a war movie as much as a disaster and 2) the love song on the end credits was by Faith Hill instead of Celine Dion. Totally different.
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released May 4th, 2001
Okay, now the summer is really starting. Crocodile Dundee, Stallone in a car, those were appetizers. This is the first bonafide Big Ass Summer Movie of ’01, with the advertising and the toys and what not. It opened huge, and eventually made more than $433 million worldwide. I don’t think I know anybody that likes it, though.
THE MUMMY RETURNS is the second one, the one where the mummy returns for a while, then leaves again. Like the first MUMMY it begins with a narrated prologue that’s better than the movie proper because it doesn’t have Brendan Fraser or a bunch of talking in it. This one tells a little bit about the legend of The Scorpion King (The Rock), a guy who led a bunch of warriors in trying to conquer the world, but they all died of heat stroke so he was bit by a scorpion or whatever, and magic. His part is less than 5 minutes, he speaks one line and it’s not in English, and his narrative purpose is to return as a shitty CGI bug monster at the end. Also to set up a prequel spin-off that’s way more entertaining than the mummy movies, in my opinion.
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released April 27, 2001
DRIVEN is a weird footnote in the overlapping filmographies of Sylvester Stallone and Renny Harlin. It’s no CLIFFHANGER, and it’s not trying to be. If anything maybe it wants to be the ROCKY V of Formula 1 race car driving. Or whatever type of race cars they’re driving in this one. They’re not NASCAR I can tell.
Okay, stop the presses, I just looked it up (it turns out I’m on the internet right now). I guess Formula 1 is very secretive like the Masons so Stallone couldn’t get enough info on them and switched the movie to be about “ChampCar” racing. I guess that’s why they didn’t make a big deal of what type of racing it was in the movie, ’cause nobody was gonna get excited about something called “ChampCar.”
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released April 20th, 2001
This is gonna surprise the shit out of you when I tell you this, but CROCODILE DUNDEE IN LOS ANGELES is what they call a fish-out-of-water comedy. The fish is Crocodile Dundee, the water is Australia, the place outside of the water is Los Angeles. Actually Dundee might be more of an amphibian, he’s somewhat familiar with L.A. and is able to show his son and his pal around and teach them some things about the urban American way of life. But also he’s from the outback or whatever so he has lots of misunderstandings that lead to clotheslining people or stabbing things like they do constantly in Australia.
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I don’t know if you guys realize this, but this summer we are celebrating the 10th anniversary of the summer that happened ten years ago. Pretty crazy, huh? Seems impossible to even consider, but I did the math and it all checks out. So I knew I couldn’t just let that go by without acknowledging it.
As you know I have an ongoing fascination with the evolution of the Big Summer Popcorn Movie. I love watching this type of movie, even some of the bad ones, have my opinions about them, wonder if they’ve gotten worse over the years, how they’ve changed or how our standards for them have changed. Last summer my project for exploring that was my study of the movie that gave marine-mammal-style live aquatic birth to the Big Summer Popcorn Movie itself, JAWS. Well, actually I didn’t write about JAWS proper, just all its sequels and some of its rip-offs. (what do you want, people? I do this shit for free.)
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Huh. Turns out Professor X and Magneto started out working with the CIA. You know what that means, don’t you? PHOENIX WAS AN INSIDE JOB.
X-MEN FIRST CLASS is the new X-MEN prequel that I guess they made to save money on the cast and to appeal to today’s young audiences, who despise baldies and cripples. So Professor Xavier, Magneto, Mystique and Beast return played by younger, hair-sporting, wheelchair-free actors to tell the story of what went down with the mutants during the Cuban Missile Crisis and before the founding of Professor Xavier’s Fancy School For Tots Who Shoot Beams.
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I thought I’d seen Ridley Scott’s LEGEND back in the ’80s, but none of this shit seemed familiar so maybe not. I was never into the hobbity shit and to this day I have no clue why Mr. Scott thinks that unicorns are something that should be used in a medium other than wallpaper for a little girl’s room, so it makes sense that I wouldn’t have gotten around to this one before.
But Mr. Scott has made some good ones over the years and a couple of you once tried to convince me it was acceptable for adult men to watch this, plus they got it on a new blu-ray. So today was the day. The day of Legend.
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In the tradition of SNIPER and THE MATRIX RELOADED comes a movie that has the words SNIPER and RELOADED in the title. Actually this is the fourth entry in the SNIPER series and yet another example of the 21st century’s trend of surprised-they-made-this, not-bad, not-great DTV sequels.
Get it, though? For The Matrix it was a computer program or something that was reloaded, for Sniper it’s a gun.
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(NOTE: My ten year contract has passed on the Titan books, so I don't get residuals on them like I do WORM ON A HOOK and NIKETOWN, but I would love for you to read them because I'm proud of them)
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