Posts Tagged ‘Samuel L. Jackson’
Sunday, February 16th, 2014
Many remakes, even good ones, remove or weaken the meaning or subtext of the originals. The classic example is Zack Snyder’s DAWN OF THE DEAD (by this same production company, Strike Entertainment), which is a fun action movie version of Romero’s masterpiece, but doesn’t have much time for the questions about our voluntary enslavement to consumerism and materialism. How do we keep our humanity in the face of this apocalypse? Did we have it in the first place? Who gives a shit. Zombies!
Another one is LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT. A surprisingly good remake, in many ways more artful than the original, but with its last act tweaks and audience-pleasing ending it completely ditches the thing that makes Wes Craven’s version worth stomaching: its angry illustration of the dehumanizing effect that revenge has on those who commit it. According to the last scene of the remake fuck all that, sadistic revenge is funny and cool.
ROBOCOP 2014’s goals and tone are very different from Mr. Verhoeven’s 1987 classic, but it’s the rare remake that’s arguably even more directly political than the movie it’s based on. Most would say, and I agree, that Verhoeven’s (or really Neumeier and Miner’s) message about privatization and corporate greed is more powerful because of its hilarious bluntness. It was the sarcastic cop movie that Lee Iacoca and Ronald Reagan’s America was asking for, a movie where amoral corporate assholes run the police force for profit, turn a dead body into a cyborg cop, then unleash him to do high caliber battle with savage DEATH WISH style supercreeps and get mixed up in a feud within the company, reconnect with his old self and turn on them. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Abbie Cornish, Ed Neumeier, Gary Oldman, good remakes, Jackie Earle Haley, Jennifer Ehle, Joel Kinnaman, Jose Padilha, Joshua Zetumer, Michael K. Williams, Michael Keaton, Michael Miner, remakes, robots, Samuel L. Jackson
Posted in Action, Reviews, Science Fiction and Space Shit | 91 Comments »
Tuesday, December 17th, 2013
Before I talk about the remake of OLDBOY it’s important that I say I liked the original but only saw it one time 8 years ago. Here’s what I wrote about it then.
In the remake directed by Spike Lee and written by Mark Protosevich (THE CELL, I AM LEGEND), Josh Brolin (THRASHIN’) plays a Nick Nolte character named Joe Doucett. He’s an alcoholic, sexually harassing deadbeat dad and advertising asshole who after a long night of drinking, puking and crying in 1993 meets a woman who takes him to a hotel and when he wakes up he realizes she’s not there and there are no windows or doorknobs. One of those hotel conundrums, you know. And this was before Yelp and shit like that so he couldn’t even give them a bad review. Turns out this is not a normal hotel in that you can’t leave. Someone, for some reason, has locked him in this weird prison. Every day they stick a plate of dumplings and a bottle of vodka through a hatch in the door, but they don’t tell him why he’s here.
(read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: American remake, J.J. Perry, James Brolin, Mark Protosevich, Michael Imperioli, remakes, revenge, Samuel L. Jackson, Sharlto Copley, Spike Lee
Posted in Action, Reviews, Thriller | 49 Comments »
Monday, April 8th, 2013
Somehow I’ve gone all these years and never reviewed a JURASSIC PARK movie. Somewhere in a notebook I think I have a partly written review of THE LOST WORLD from the last time I watched it, and I could’ve sworn I reviewed part 3 back when it came out, but no. Nothing. Until now. So hold onto your butts… IN 3-D!
JURASSIC PARK would be a hard one to find a new angle on. It’s been around for 20 years, widely seen since day 1, broadly enjoyable and rightfully appreciated. In the rankings of Spielberg’s summer blockbuster movies I’d have to put it way below big daddy JAWS, because the characters are less nuanced, their actions are less believable, the quiet moments aren’t as deep, the emphasis is more on spectacle (if only because the special effects worked this time), the whole feel is more artificial. But just holding it up against these type of movies in general it places pretty fuckin high on the totem pole.
(read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: converted to 3D, dinosaurs, Jeff Goldblum, Laura Dern, Michael Crichton, Sam Neill, Samuel L. Jackson, Steven Spielberg, summer movies
Posted in Reviews, Science Fiction and Space Shit | 145 Comments »
Thursday, December 27th, 2012
A couple weeks ago the studio “lifted the embargo” as they say, and all the online critics unchained their DJANGO reviews even though non-critics wouldn’t see the thing until Christmas. I think that’s a silly ritual because I wasn’t gonna read that shit! This is the new Quentin Tarantino movie, you go in fresh. I already know I want to see any movie he makes, I don’t gotta read everything about it first. In case you’re different I’ve tried to mark the biggest spoilers in this review, but as usual I recommend seeing the movie first.
DJANGO UNCHAINED is the most straight forward movie Tarantino has ever made. It follows one main character from first scene to last, doesn’t cut away to another story or even jump around in time other than some very traditional flashbacks. There are alot of long conversation scenes, but it’s generally pretty clear what they have to do with the main plot of the freed slave Django (Jamie Foxx, STEALTH) becoming a bounty hunter and trying to rescue his wife (Kerry Washington) from a plantation. And that’s not a misleading description, that’s really the movie, a racially charged western (or “Southern,” Tarantino likes to say) in the tradition of those CHARLEY movies I just reviewed.
So in a way it feels uneventful for a Tarantino movie, the first time he made one that was pretty much what I expected from the commercials. On first viewing it seems low in my rankings of the QT filmography, but that doesn’t say much. Tarantino sure knows how to entertain, and I happen to love this genre of badass black cowboys out for frontier justice against practitioners of the slave trade. For his first straight up genre picture that’s a good genre to pick. I love this movie. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: blaxploitation, Christoph Waltz, Don Johnson, Franco Nero, James Remar, Jamie Foxx, Kerry Washington, Leonardo DiCaprio, Michael Parks, neo spaghetti western, Quentin Tarantino, Samuel L. Jackson, slavery, Tom Wopat
Posted in Reviews, Western | 227 Comments »
Sunday, November 18th, 2012
Samuel L. Jackson, these days maybe he doesn’t get the greatest roles. I mean it’s cool that David Hasselhoff handpicked him as his replacement when he passed on Dr. Fury or whatever in the Marvel Comics Books movies, but that’s a supporting player. You don’t see him carrying too many movies anymore. That’s why I had some hopes for this lower budget crime picture produced by IFC and given a very limited theatrical release, probly less screens than he has lines in THE AVENGERS.
(read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Gil Bellows, Luke Kirby, Ruth Negga, Samuel L. Jackson
Posted in Crime, Reviews | 13 Comments »
Saturday, May 5th, 2012
spoilerish
As much as I enjoyed Uma Thurman and the teddy bear costumes in the original AVENGERS, this one is an improvement. It’s a fun super hero movie with lots of colorful super-characters like in the X-MEN pictures, but with more of a disaster-movie-level of spectacle. Instead of just fighting 1-3 supervillains they’re fighting an alien invasion. As you know this teams up characters from IRON MAN 1-2, THE INCREDIBLE HULK (2008) (arguably), CAPTAIN AMERICA and THOR under the direction and writing of Joss Whedon (SERENITY, Buffy the Vampire, all that). If they had had some guy from Doctor Who in there and based it on a video game or anime it would’ve had the monopoly on all of the existing nerd audiences. But also it’s fun for all of us.
(read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Chris Evans, Chris Hemsworth, Gwyneth Paltrow, Harry Dean Stanton, Jeremy Renner, Joss Whedon, Mark Ruffalo, Marvel Comics, Robert Downey Jr., Samuel L. Jackson, Scarlett Johansson
Posted in Comic strips/Super heroes, Reviews | 451 Comments »
Tuesday, November 29th, 2011
JUICE is an early ’90s “hood movie” about four young friends in New York who fall into some stupid shit. Tired of getting picked on by the Puerto Rican kids and the cops and not having money, they decide to get a gun (just one between them) and rob a little mini-mart where the guy is an asshole and yells at them sometimes. It’s not exactly The Thomas Crown Affair they’re trying to pull off, but they’re amateurs so they fuck up this small time crime and have to deal with the aftermath. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Doctor Dre, Ed Lover, Ernest Dickerson, Fab 5 Freddy, Hank Shocklee, hip hop, Omar Epps, Queen Latifah, Samuel L. Jackson, Tupac Shakur
Posted in Crime, Drama, Reviews | 38 Comments »
Monday, June 14th, 2010
FRESH (1994) is a real underseen gem of the 1990s, a low budget crime drama about a 12 year old drug courier (Sean Nelson). His aunt calls him Michael, everybody else calls him Fresh. It opens with him going to an apartment where a lady tries to talk up her daughter Marisol to him like she wants to hook them up because she thinks he’s such a smart kid. It seems like he could be there for innocent kid business like meeting a friend to walk to school or getting paid for his paper route, but you quickly realize he’s picking up a brick of heroin and she’s trying to rip him off. He’s smarter than she assumes and he doesn’t take any of her shit, and this is the key to the character throughout the whole movie.
Also did I mention he’s 12. It’s kind of like Doogie Howser. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Boaz Yakin, Giancarlo Esposito, Samuel L. Jackson
Posted in Crime, Reviews | 20 Comments »
Saturday, May 8th, 2010
I never reviewed IRON MAN, because I just didn’t feel like I had anything new to say about it. I enjoyed it just like everybody else did, for the same reasons, and every websight I read had examined the shit out of it, so I just let it go.
Now part 2 is out and I almost did the same thing (tradition is very important to me) but as I was thinking about writing up an explanation of why I wasn’t writing up the movie I realized I did have a couple things to say, so what the hell. Review time. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Jon Favreau, Mickey Rourke, Robert Downey Jr., Sam Rockwell, Samuel L. Jackson, Scarlett Johansson
Posted in Comic strips/Super heroes, Reviews | 105 Comments »
Friday, February 26th, 2010
I was looking through my notebook tonight and I found a review of THE LONG KISS GOOD NIGHT that I apparently never posted. It’s kind of like finding a dime under the couch.
It was actually Christmas time when I watched it. I had forgotten that’s when it took place, although I should’ve guessed, because it’s written by Shane Black. You write what you know, and the only thing Shane Black knows is what wiseass cops say together during the yuletide season. So I meant to post it to celebrate Christmas, but I guess instead we’ll post it to celebrate the recent news that Black is supposed to direct another movie (DOC SAVAGE). (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Christmas, Craig Bierko, Geena Davis, Renny Harlin, Samuel L. Jackson, Shane Black
Posted in Action, Comedy/Laffs, Reviews | 128 Comments »
