A couple years ago Shane Black, the hot shot wunderkind enfant terrible wave of the future 22 year old millionaire kid who wrote LETHAL WEAPON and a couple other movies, then got burnt out and disappeared for years, suddenly resurfaced as the writer-director of this well-received if not smash hit smart-alecky mystery comedy. I heard alot of good things about it so one Wednesday afternoon I checked the movie times and went downtown to see it. Unfortunately this was the day that movie about 50 Cent came out and all the showings of KISS KISS BANG BANG had been dropped without the movie times being updated online. I was so hurt that I didn’t watch the movie until just the other day.
Fortunately this one lives up to the word-of-the-mouth. This summer everybody’s excited about Robert Downey Jr.’s funny turn and ad-libs in IRON MAN, but it must’ve been less surprising to people who saw this one. Not only is Downey the star, he is the narrator who possesses the powers of someone recording a DVD commentary. He can skip around, make jokes, apologize for bad narration, complain about movie conventions (specifically comparing one scene to a shot in THE HUNT FOR RED OCTOBER). (read the rest of this shit…)
I saw this movie years ago and like anybody I loved it. But watching it again recently I was surprised to find that it was better than I remembered. UNFORGIVEN is a GFM (Great Fucking Movie) for many different reasons, most of them you know, but I’ll try to point out a few of them.
Take one part THE MATRIX, one part FIGHT CLUB, two parts THE MATRIX, one part EQUILIBRIUM (one part THE MATRIX, one part straight to video), and one part THE MATRIX, but not as good, and you have the new motion picture WANTED. James Macavoy (the British Zach Braff) plays an unhappy office drone who out of the blue has his world turned upside down when a super hot asskicking gun babe in leather tells him he’s destined to be a super warrior and whisks him off to a secret organization of gun-obsessed rebels who teach him how to bend reality, do super gun tricks and martial arts in various showoffy camera-rotating slo-mo special effects action sequences, killing enemies without feeling bad because they have complete faith in the righteousness of their mission.
Here’s a movie not directed by Clint Eastwood (it’s Wolfgang Peterson, the DAS BOOT guy) but like alot of his directorial works of the past 20 years it deals with him getting old. Clint plays a Secret Service agent named Frank Horrigan. He’s still working but he’s washed up – he was there when JFK got shot and is still haunted by his failure. After that he became a huge asshole, he started drinking and his wife and daughter left. But this is Clint we’re talking about so we still like him, and also he plays jazz piano.
In the third Dirty Harry picture Inspector Callahan has become some sort of an enforcer, a guy who travels around enforcing things. Alot of people tend to dismiss the series after MAGNUM FORCE, and it’s true that this one isn’t as good as the two before it, but I gotta admit I like it.
Listen up Hulkamaniacs –
Okay, you guys were right. I’ve been defending M. Night Shyamalan as a talented director based on how he moved the camera around in THE SIXTH SENSE and UNBREAKABLE. I didn’t like SIGNS as much, but alot of it worked. I didn’t see THE VILLAGE, which may have strengthened my argument through the ancient technique of “denial.” And LADY IN THE WATER was a hilarious disaster, which means he’s at least interesting even when he’s embarrassing himself and all of his ancestors and descendants and anyone who has ever known him or seen one of his movies.
DIRTY HARRY is probaly a better movie overall, but as far as sequels go I think MAGNUM FORCE is a work of genius, because it does two things.
Man, I’ve watched DIRTY HARRY so many times since I’ve been writing about movies, and it is clearly one of the classics of Badass Cinema (the Loose Canon, I recently decided it should be called. Get it it is a pun I believe.) But I just figured out that I never wrote a review of it. Weird.
