Posts Tagged ‘Jan de Bont’
Monday, June 10th, 2024
June 10, 1994
So far my study of summer ’94 hasn’t found much excitement in the big blockbuster type movies. THE FLINTSTONES got all the hype but the ones I’ve been most invested in were quirky things by well known directors – SERIAL MOM, CROOKLYN, EVEN COWGIRLS GET THE BLUES. Now finally we come to a straight ahead action spectacle that truly delivered at the time and still holds up today.
SPEED came out 30 years ago as I post this, and it’s a classic. It feels like a very traditional studio crowdpleaser, but also not quite like anything else before or since. Twentieth Century Fox figured out what they had on their hands and moved it up from August to June, but no one else was sure at first if Keanu Reeves would be accepted as an action hero outside of POINT BREAK, or even if people would want to see him with short hair. So for many it was a surprise how big it became (5th highest grossing movie of 1994). (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Alan Ruck, Andrzej Bartkowiak, Beth Grant, Dennis Hopper, Glenn Plummer, Graham Yost, Jan de Bont, Jeff Daniels, Joe Morton, Joss Whedon, Keanu Reeves, Sandra Bullock
Posted in Reviews, Action | 62 Comments »
Thursday, August 10th, 2023
August 12, 1983
I’ve written about CUJO before, but that was 15 years ago. Since there aren’t that many horror movies in this summer of ’83, it seemed worth revisiting now. Cujo the book was formative to me because I read it when I was in third grade. It might’ve been my first Stephen King book, maybe even my first horror book besides Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark and Alfred Hitchcock short story collections. The part I remember vividly, of course, is something about Donna’s sex life with Steve. That seemed grown up and mysterious. The dog attacking people just seemed cool.
The movie wasn’t as important to me, and though I saw it on VHS at some point it wasn’t until rewatching it for that 2008 review that I realized it’s a real gem. It’s a movie everyone knows about but I’m not sure it’s held in as high of regard as I think it deserves. It’s a simple movie with very strong execution, and some of the elements involved (killer dog, tiny kid, limited location) are of a high enough degree of difficulty that there aren’t many other movies to directly compare it to. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Billy Jacoby, Charles Bernstein, Christopher Stone, Daniel Hugh-Kelly, Danny Pintauro, Dee Wallace, Ed Lauter, Jan de Bont, Kaiulani Lee, killer animals, killer dog, Lewis Teague, Robert Elross, Stephen King
Posted in Reviews, Horror | 21 Comments »
Friday, June 10th, 2022
At first I wasn’t sure I needed to revisit LETHAL WEAPON 3 for this series, because I already wrote a perfectly good review of it (and the other three) back in 2014. But it’s clearly the kick off to the real deal summer movie season of ’92 if you look at the box office charts for its opening weekend, May 15, 1992. It took #1 of course, but everything else on the charts had been out fora while: BASIC INSTINCT in its ninth week, BEETHOVEN in its seventh week, WHITE MEN CAN’T JUMP in its eighth week, THE PLAYER in its sixth week, WAYNE’S WORLD in its fourteenth week, etc.
More importantly, I decided it was necessary for comparison. There will be three other big tentpole type sequels this summer, one of them being PATRIOT GAMES (which I’ve also reviewed, but probly won’t revisit) and the other two being, you know… weird. In contrast, this one wants to be exactly what you would imagine a third LETHAL WEAPON to be, no real surprises. As Desson Howe wrote in his review in the Washington Post, “If there’s an original moment in this movie, producer Joel Silver and director Richard Donner sincerely apologize… essentially, they guarantee you the same product you consumed twice before.” (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Danny Glover, Jan de Bont, Jeffrey Boam, Joe Pesci, Joel Silver, Mary Ellen Trainor, Mel Gibson, Renee Russo, Richard Donner, Robert Mark Kamen, Steve Kahan, Sting, Stuart Wilson
Posted in Action, Reviews | 33 Comments »
Tuesday, September 15th, 2020
Wow, THE JEWEL OF THE NILE came out less than two years after ROMANCING THE STONE, which was expected to be a flop, so it’s not like they had a head start. Fast turnaround. Robert Zemeckis was off making BACK TO THE FUTURE and Diane Thomas was writing scripts for Spielberg (and wanted to be paid well) so producer/star Michael Douglas hired director Lewis Teague (ALLIGATOR) and writers Mark Rosenthal & Lawrence Konner (THE LEGEND OF BILLIE JEAN, later SUPERMAN IV, SOMETIMES THEY COME BACK, STAR TREK VI, MERCURY RISING and the bad PLANET OF THE APES).
The story starts six months later, with Joan and Jack sailing around the world on the boat he bought with the proceeds from part 1’s stolen jewel. (I thought he bought it for her as a gift, but I guess not.) This time she’s having trouble writing her books because her life is too much romance and adventure. She’s actually bored of all the exotic locales and beautiful sunsets and sits in the boat with her typewriter writing a garbage pirate adventure which she now imagines starring herself and Jack but also gets thrown off and accidentally turns the pirates into punks? I don’t know if that represents a typo or a failed artistic flourish or what. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Avner Eisenberg, Billy Ocean, Danny DeVito, Glenn Randall Jr., Jan de Bont, juggling, Kathleen Turner, Lawrence Konner, Lewis Teague, Mark Rosenthal, Michael Douglas, Paul David Magid, Spiros Focas
Posted in Action, Reviews, Romance | 19 Comments »
Monday, July 21st, 2014
I never watched SPEED 2 before. When I decided the day had come I actually got excited about it for a minute. Wait, so there’s a studio blockbuster in the DIE HARD or UNDER SIEGE type of subgenre that I haven’t seen? What was I waiting for? I mean, I know it was almost unanimously hated, and that it was an early example of the PG-13-sequel-to-R-rated-action-movie, but when has that stopped me before? I am an individual with an open mind and an open heart. I am ready to welcome SPEED 2 into the hospitality of my mental space.
I thought. But the mob was right on this one. SPEED 2 is pretty sucky. It’s the SPEED 2 of SPEED sequels.
(read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Die Hard on a ____, Glenn Plummer, Jan de Bont, Jason Patric, Joe Morton, Sandra Bullock, Willem Dafoe
Posted in Action, Reviews | 35 Comments »
Thursday, July 17th, 2014
Do you guys know about SPEED? It’s like GRAND PIANO with a bus! An L.A. public bus that requires the very precise driving of not going below 50 mph or it will blow up. Even if it went through a school zone it could not slow down to avoid crunching the little ones under its wheels. That’s fucked up! I mean they don’t run into that problem in the movie but jesus, bad guy mastermind, think of the children.
It’s no mystery to us, this is the work of bomber-for-ransom Dennis Hopper (TICKER), who in a pre-bus sequence tries a similar job on an elevator full of Patrick Bateman types, but is foiled by Jeff Daniels (BLOOD WORK) and his young gum-chewing sidekick Keanu Reeves (MAN OF TAI CHI). This was after POINT BREAK but before THE MATRIX, so Keanu as the lead in a big action movie was still a new notion to the world. But what are you gonna do, the Jeff Daniels character gets shot and taken off the streets, it’s just not in the cards for it to be a kickass Jeff Daniels vehicle. I’m sorry.
(read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Alan Ruck, Dennis Hopper, Die Hard on a ____, Glenn Plummer, Graham Yost, Jan de Bont, Jeff Daniels, Joe Morton, Joss Whedon, Keanu Reeves, Sandra Bullock
Posted in Action, Reviews | 39 Comments »
Wednesday, August 14th, 2013
As you know I am a scholar of the Big Summer Popcorn Movie, or whatever you want to call it. And I not only like to review the new ones but I like to look back at the old ones and figure out what’s what. We’re getting to the end of the summer movie season (which I consider to be May through August) but now that I’ve finished The Super-Kumite I think it’s time to start a new summer movie project. Fuck you, September. You don’t scare me.
This is what I’m gonna do. For each summer from 2003 until last year I’m gonna pick two movies to review: one that I never saw before, one that I’m revisiting. And as you can see I’m starting with THE CRADLE OF LIFE as the one I never saw before.
release date: July 25, 2003
It turns out I dig these LARA CROFT TOMB RAIDER movies. Maybe if I’d seen them at the time, on the big screen, as if they were gonna compete with the A-list summer blockbuster type movies, I would’ve been more critical of them. But ignoring them for ten years and then deciding to watch them out of curiosity really pays off I think. Sometimes you gotta let these things age in the cellar for a while. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: adventure, Angelina Jolie, Cieran Hinds, Gerard Butler, Jan de Bont, Simon Yam
Posted in Action, Reviews, Videogame | 44 Comments »
