Posts Tagged ‘South Africa’
Monday, April 22nd, 2024
FIVE FINGERS FOR MARSEILLES is a very cool 2017 South African movie. I thought it was gonna be a straight-up African western, but it turns out it’s a modern day African western. It’s set in a small town that European colonists named Marseilles. The Africans who originally lived there were forced up the hill, and since most of them worked on the new railway they just called their town Railway.
The title refers to a group of kids who fancy themselves the protectors of the town. It’s weird, though, because there seem to be six of them. The boys are Zulu (the leader), Tau a.k.a. Lion (“Ruthless, the fastest. Sometimes the meanest.”), Pockets (the rich one), Cockroach and Pastor. But also there’s Lerato, who they consider “their heart and soul,” so I sure hope she counts as one of the five and it’s Cockroach or someone who’s just an affiliate, not a full-fledged Finger, like Killah Priest for Wu-Tang. Seems like the heart and soul should get all the privileges of membership.
(read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: contemporary western, Dean Fourie, Hamilton Dhlamini, Jerry Mofokeng, Michael Matthews, Sean Drummond, Sesotho, South Africa, Vuyo Dabula, Xhosa, Zethu Dlomo
Posted in Reviews, Action, Western | 1 Comment »
Friday, September 4th, 2020
MESSAGE FROM THE KING is Chadwick Boseman’s 2016 (pre-BLACK PANTHER) action(ish) vehicle, released straight to Netflix. I always meant to watch it – I’m sorry it took me a tragedy to get to it. It’s pretty good.
It follows the classic noir tradition of the outsider who comes into town because a loved one went missing or died, starts asking around, spying on people, finds out what happened, and goes after the people responsible. I tend to like that story format – in fact, I kind of played off of it in my book Niketown, now that I think about it.
The specific version of this type of story that MESSAGE FROM THE KING reminds me of most is THE LIMEY. That’s both a compliment (I love THE LIMEY and movies like it) and bad news (unsurprisingly it’s not as good as THE LIMEY), but I couldn’t avoid the comparison. Instead of British he’s South African, instead of a daughter it’s his sister, and instead of her being involved with an older music producer it’s an older movie producer. But it’s a similar thing of a guy from another culture going around to rich people parties, barging into front businesses, angering macho thugs who don’t know who he is and underestimate him, playing dumb but exploding into a few sudden bursts of brutal violence. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Alfred Molina, Chadwick Boseman, Dale Dickey, Fabrice du Welz, Jake Weary, Joe Seo, Luke Evans, Natalie Martinez, Netflix, Oliver Butcher, Sibongile Miambo, South Africa, Stephen Cornwell, Teresa Palmer, Tom Felton, Wade Allen
Posted in Action, Crime, Reviews | 4 Comments »
Wednesday, July 17th, 2019
I already wrote about LETHAL WEAPON 2 along with the rest of the LETHAL WEAPON series back in 2014. I’m still happy with that review. It covers much of what’s relevant about the movie, and even features a scan from my beloved Summer 1989 Warner Brothers Catalog (as seen in the BATMAN review). But I didn’t think I should skip over the movie in this series because it’s such a crucial piece of what I’m talking about here. So the earlier review still stands, but here’s a partially overlapping supplemental look at LETHAL WEAPON 2 focusing on its place in the action movies of summer ’89.
LETHAL WEAPON (1987) was of course a quintessential ’80s action movie, the Platonic ideal of a buddy cop picture, and one of the originators of the idea of Mel Gibson and producer Joel Silver (ROAD HOUSE) as action kings. But part 2 is more my idea of what “a LETHAL WEAPON movie” is like because it invented how to sequelize that movie and make it about the continuing adventures of that now-established friendship. It takes what was already seen as heightened and makes it bigger, sexier, funnier, lethal-er (apparently it’s the biggest body count in the series at 33), creating a template (and new character in Leo Getz, played by Joe Pesci a year before GOODFELLAS) that would be used for two more sequels in the ’90s. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Charlie Picerni, Danny Glover, Joe Pesci, Joss Ackland, Mel Gibson, Michael Kamen, Mike Rodgers, Paul Abascal, Richard Donner, Shane Black, South Africa, Summer of '89, Warren Murphy
Posted in Action, Reviews | 87 Comments »
Monday, May 13th, 2019
“He’s a butcher. A madman. His charm and intelligence make him more dangerous than a cobra.”
Life is cheap in the world of KICKBOXER. Every time the hero doesn’t do a sequel, he gets unceremoniously murdered. It happened to Kurt Sloane (by way of a lookalike) in KICKBOXER 2, and now it happens to David Sloane (through the medium of silhouetted double) in KICKBOXER 5. David (offscreen) refuses to join a new South African kickboxing league, and they have him beaten to death. At least he manages to break the leg of one of his attackers (Tony Caprari, TARZAN AND THE LOST CITY), who will be on crutches for the rest of the movie.
Also worth very little in this series: subtitles. Maybe THE ROAD HOME has legitimate interpretations, and THE ART OF WAR could apply to pretty much anything, but THE AGGRESSOR was a headscratcher and THE REDEMPTION has no practical plot application. Maybe that’s where the American distributors got the idea to rename THE RAID.
But if we follow my usual rule of going by what it says on the opening titles, it’s just THE REDEMPTION, no KICKBOXER in the title at all. And for what it’s worth, the fake David Sloane smashes that title with a flying kick. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Geoff Meed, Greg Latter, James Ryan, John Hussey, Kristine Peterson, Mark Dacascos, South Africa
Posted in Action, Martial Arts, Reviews | 41 Comments »
Wednesday, May 4th, 2016
BLACK COBRA was another one of my blind rentals, and I wouldn’t say it’s a surprise gem, but it’s definitely more interesting than I bargained for. The last thing I rented without knowing anything about it was BILLY BOY, which turned out to be a shitty South African movie about white people, filmed during apartheid, so it’s a cool coincidence that this is a competent (if sorta home made) one with a black South African hero after apartheid. And the first fight scene is against a group of white South Africans trying to treat him like it’s the old days.
T.J. Storm sounds like the name of a fictional action hero that a kid in a movie idolizes, but that’s the handle of the martial arts champ and stuntman who plays Sizwe Biko, a guy who “won a couple of titles” and whose father is a jailed hero of the South African revolution. (Whether or not they’re related to Steven Biko is never mentioned.) His father wouldn’t confess his crimes to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, so he was never let out, and now they’re conspiring to kill him in prison. Sizwe learns that he could get him out by bribing a certain judge, so he digs up the family’s secret diamond stash and takes them to L.A. to fence.
(read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa, DTV, South Africa, T.J. Storm
Posted in Action, Martial Arts, Reviews | 15 Comments »
Thursday, April 7th, 2016
Sometimes you’re watching a movie and you’re not really getting anything out of it, but you power through it just so you can say you watched some weird thing that nobody ever heard of. Or at least that’s what I do sometimes. Maybe that explains some things.
The culprit this time was BILLY BOY, a 1978 low rent South African boxing drama. I watched it because I’m on a long term quest to go alphabetically through every movie in this section at Scarecrow Video that’s English language martial arts movies like BLOODSPORT and ENTER THE NINJA and stuff like that. If you are familiar with alphabetical order at all you can see I have a long way to go. I’m still on the first shelf. Anyway, I suspect this one was put in there by mistake but I didn’t want to skip it because what if it was some amazing undiscovered treasure?
It wasn’t.
Duane Bobick stars as amateur boxer Billy Boy Lamont. His father (Willie van Rensburg, also the screenwriter) is a former fighter who is suddenly paralyzed, and Billy Boy can’t find any work to pay for his treatments, so he says he has to fight. Of course his mom (Trix Pienaar, THE COLOR OF FREEDOM) is against it (like Phylicia Rashad in CREED) and also he somehow knows that he’ll get a bunch of money for it. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: boxing, Duane Bobick, Kim Braden, South Africa, Tim Spring, Tullio Moneta
Posted in Reviews, Sport | 6 Comments »
Thursday, June 25th, 2015
CHAPPIE is a slight but sweet sci-fi story from South Africa’s Neill Blomkamp. It’s like a meaner SHORT CIRCUIT or an unexpectedly good Asylum knockoff of the remake of ROBOCOP. The Johannesburg police are very happy with their new police robot “Scouts,” invented by cubicle-bound corporate employee Deon Wilson (Dev Patel from SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE), and have flatly, perhaps rudely rejected The Moose, a human-operated ED-209 lookalike pushed by jealous ex-soldier Vincent Moore (Hugh Jackman). But Deon isn’t really invested in that feud – he’s invented an A.I. program which the boss (Sigourney Weaver) won’t even let him continue with, and that’s all he really cares about right now.
Meanwhile the weirdo South African electronical rap group Die Antwoord are involved in a drug deal gone bad and busted up by Scouts. A scary gangster named Hippo (Brandon Auret, who played mercenaries in both of Blomkamp’s other movies) who has a crazy hairdo that would make any David Ayer character teary eyed with envy, says they owe him a ridiculous amount of money, so they decide they have no choice but to quickly pull off the heist of a lifetime so he doesn’t kill them. That leads to the hair-brained idea of kidnapping Deon to get “the remote” that they assume he has for clicking the power off on the city’s law enforcement. For some reason he doesn’t really have one, go figure. So as a compromise he installs his A.I. program in a damaged police robot for them to teach how to be “the illest gangster” and use robot powers such as jump high and metal punch to help them pull off their robbery. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Dev Patel, Die Antwoord, Hugh Jackman, Jose Pablo Cantillo, Neill Blomkamp, robots, Sharlto Copley, Sigourney Weaver, South Africa
Posted in Reviews, Science Fiction and Space Shit | 29 Comments »
Monday, January 6th, 2014
“I’m really too old for this shit.”
Is it wrong that I almost like LETHAL WEAPON 2 better than part 1? I know it’s kinda formulaic and Shane Black left part way through and everything but to me it’s a really enjoyable follow-up with some great gimmicks.
It states its action-with-a-comedic-edge intent from the opening logo when it plays the Looney Tunes music with the dramatic metal title lettering. Credits forged in steel. Then it opens mid-high-speed car chase with Riggs cackling like a madman, i.e. like Riggs. We get to have our cake and eat our cake also because he hasn’t wanted to commit suicide since the end of part 1, but he’s still a nut. To underline that point we get to see him wearing a straitjacket at the police station. He takes a bet that he can’t escape from one, and is crazy enough to intentionally dislocate his shoulder to pull it off. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Danny Glover, Darlene Love, Dean Norris, Jeffrey Boam, Jenette Goldstein, Joe Pesci, Joss Ackland, Mel Gibson, Patsy Kensit, Richard Donner, Shane Black, South Africa, Traci Wolfe
Posted in Action, Reviews | 60 Comments »
Thursday, January 24th, 2013
DEATH RACE 3 is of course the sequel to the DTV prequel to Paul W.S. Anderson’s theatrical sort-of remake of Paul Bartel and Roger Corman’s DEATH RACE 2000. To gage my response you will need to see my scorecard: I consider DEATH RACE 2000 a classic, DEATH RACE a surprisingly solid b-movie, DEATH RACE 2 a pretty enjoyable DTV prequel to that type of movie. And part 3 rates about the same as part 2.
It’s all the same people: Luke Goss (BLADE II, HELLBOY 2) returns as the pre-Statham Frankenstein, masked hero of the newly invented car racing to-the-death prison circuit. Tanit Phoenix is still his sexy girl navigator, Danny Trejo is still his mechanic, Ving Rhames still Weyland, the warden/CEO of Terminal Island, and from the movie we have Fred Koehler as the somewhat autistic Lists and Robin “Liu Kang” Shou in his traditional P.W.S. Anderson supporting player role as fellow racer 14K. Part 2’s director Roel Reine (of PISTOL WHIPPED and THE MARINE 2 fame) and writer Tony Giglio (story by Anderson) also return.
(read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Danny Trejo, Dougray Scott, DTV prequel sequels, Fred Koehler, Luke Goss, Paul W.S. Anderson, Robin Shou, Roel Reine, South Africa, Tanit Phoenix, Tony Giglio, Ving Rhames
Posted in Action, Reviews, Science Fiction and Space Shit | 21 Comments »
Sunday, January 3rd, 2010
So Mandela (Morgan Freeman) has just been elected president of South Africa. The headlines ask, “He can get elected – but can he run a country?” Mandela says it’s a legitimate question.
Apartheid ended a few years earlier, but the white Afrikaners still aren’t ready for this. In his first day as president he has to make a speech explaining to the white people in his office that no, contrary to rumors they are not fired. Whatever they did in the past is in the past. If they don’t want to work with him then fine, pack your shit (paraphrase), but otherwise he needs you so stay and do what’s right for the country.
The mistrust goes both ways. Mandela’s head of security (Tony Kgoroge) knows this is gonna be a tough job, but when he asks for more men Mandela gives him a bunch of white South African cops, the enemy of the African National Congress. He has every reason to believe these scary motherfuckers could plan an assassination themselves, but Mandela wants them for their symbolic value. If he goes around with an integrated security team then that says something. What else can he do, really? Somebody’s gotta put their toes in the water. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Clint Eastwood, Matt Damon, Morgan Freeman, South Africa
Posted in Drama, Reviews, Sport | 46 Comments »
