Dear Friends,
Last year we all heard Clint Eastwood, who I still consider the greatest living human, was directing this World War II movie produced by Steven Spielberg. Not really my genre, but with Clint directing obviously I was looking forward to it. Things got more interesting during filming when he announced that he realized the story of Iwo Jima needed to be told from the Japanese perspective too, so he was doing another movie straight after FLAGS OF OUR FATHERS, originally titled RED SUN, BLACK SAND. And that sounded more interesting to me. Way to be ambitious, Clint.
But when FLAGS OF OUR FATHERS came out it was underwhelming enough that, to be honest, I lost some of my interest in LETTERS FROM IWO JIMA. That first movie’s not terrible, and I really like what it was about – the complicated feelings of some guys who are declared war heroes for bullshit reasons and have to go along with it in order to raise war bonds and help out their fellow soldiers who are still fighting. But the way the story was told was just not Clint enough. Usually when he directs the stories are pretty spare, pretty bare, and the emotions are raw. The score of FLAGS was about the only thing that was the usual laid back Clint. He had to jump between the present day with the son of one of the flag raisers interviewing the survivors, the actual battle of Iwo Jima, and the war bonds tour after the battle, and then all of those are jumbled up so they’re in even less order than it sounds like. (read the rest of this shit…)
I don’t know if you ever do this, maybe this means I had a bad childhood or somethin, but every once in a while I see a weird old VHS box in the action section at the video store and I say “what the fuck is THIS?” and even though it looks like shit I have to rent it just to take a peek at some weird corner of the action cinema universe that I had not previously charted. I’m an explorer, is what I’m saying. The latest example of this is CRAZED COP starring a guy named Ivan Rogers. I will be impressed if any of you know who this guy is, because I asked around and only got blank looks.
CONNORS’ WAR is a straight to video picture most of you never heard of, starring Treach (from Seagal’s TODAY YOU DIE) and Nia Peeples (from Seagal’s HALF PAST DEAD) written by some guy who wrote HALF PAST DEAD 2 (not Seagal’s).
Long ago, before the rogue Finn Renny Harlin’s Samson locks were shorn, he was not the director of DEEP BLUE SEA. He was the director of DIE HARD 2. Or DIE HARDER as everybody thought it was called then. (This was before the internet, so I couldn’t explain to them that it was called DIE HARD 2.) Well, CLIFFHANGER is another movie from that o.g. Renny Harlin, or Renny Harlin Classic. And from where I stand this may be his finest McClane-free picture.
A couple weeks ago I saw a theater marquee that said APOCALYPTO and ROCKY BALBOA on it. And I thought damn, Mad Max and Rambo are both directing movies now. Tryin to join the ranks of the Badass Laureates like Clint and Takeshi. While my man Seagal is busy revolutionizing the world of DTV self expression, these guys are going in a more societally accepted direction. Of these two action hero directors, Crazy Fuckin’ Mel obviously gets the medal for ambition because he made an epic about a culture rarely portrayed on film, in a language never spoken on film. He’s moving forward. Stallone is moving backwards but that’s okay, he’s taking care of some personal business. He’s putting a cap on the ROCKY series. And doing a fine job of it in my opinion.
SPOILER ALERT !!
MEL GIBSON’S APOCALYPTO
Hey, everyone. ”Moriarty” here.
There was a time a couple years ago when it seemed like every day the headlines were just trying to out-crazy the day before. Planes falling out of the sky, anthrax in the mail, snipers on the loose, hurricanes, that lady releasing doves for each charge Michael Jackson was acquitted of… you wouldn’t have been surprised to get the morning paper and read that killer bees had swarmed Congress, rabid baboons were loose on the Space Shuttle and the Olsen twins had torched themselves outside of the “Today Show” window to protest censorship of rap music and video games. There are no baboons in CHILDREN OF MEN (there is a deer walking through a building, come to think of it) but this is a movie that perfectly captures that knot in your stomach, that feeling of madness, where the world has gone so crazy you keep bouncing between complete desensitized detachment and wanting to cry at the slightest provocation.
