"CATCH YOU FUCKERS AT A BAD TIME?"

Posts Tagged ‘Stephen Rea’

The Musketeer

Monday, January 18th, 2021

I have very little familiarity with Alexandre Dumas’s The Three Musketeers, or even any of its many famous film adaptations. I think I mainly know the characters from the cartoons on The Banana Splits. So this review is not coming from the perspective of a true Muskie or Musketmaniac. Instead, I come to THE MUSKETEER (2001) as a fan of two movements in ‘90s/2000s cinema that improbably collided in this movie. Those movements are:

1) The Old Timey Adventure movie – contemporary filmmaking based on old (arguably even obsolete) characters, attempting to evoke a nostalgic movie serial type tone

see also: THE MASK OF ZORRO, THE PHANTOM, THE LONE RANGER

2) Hong Kong Outreach Cinema – that wave of films where geniuses of Hong Kong action cinema were recruited to spruce up Hollywood movies

see also: THE BIG HIT, LETHAL WEAPON 4, THE MATRIX, INVINCIBLE, BRIDE OF CHUCKY (read the rest of this shit…)

Stuck

Wednesday, September 3rd, 2008

I like where Stuart Gordon is coming from. Always thought of as a horror director because of REANIMATOR and FROM BEYOND, now he’s just this low profile indie director, doing his own thing, making little movies with playwrights and obscure writers, usually with gore and dark undertones but not really horror anymore. Not that he has disowned the genre – he’s still trying to do another REANIMATOR sequel.

And this new one, STUCK, is an interesting idea. It’s inspired by that horrible case you may remember reading about a few years ago where a nurse’s aide was driving under the influence, ran over a homeless guy, and parked the car in her garage with him still stuck in the windshield. She left him there to die (it was originally reported as taking two days, which is how it’s portrayed in the movie, but from what I’ve read it was actually 2 hours). (read the rest of this shit…)

V for Vendetta

Friday, March 17th, 2006

V FOR VENDETTA is a big exciting futuristic comic book movie, produced and written by the Wachowskis, starring Hugo Weaving and Natalie Portman, playing in Imax in some towns, but not here. It’s a movie nerds are pretty excited for, but the talk is less about is he wearing the right cape, are his powers depicted in exactly the way I personally imagined them, etc., and more about the politics. Because although it features a guy in a cape and mask who fights bad guys in dark alleys, the story is more of a 1984 type deal than a spiderman. Apparently the comic strip book was written in England in the 1980s in response to the Margaret Thatcher administration.

I saw a review in Entertainment Weekly that talked about references to Bush and Bill O’Reilly and Abu Ghraib and what not, but I figure this is more like STAR WARS prequels: it’s about all the assholes throughout history, and the leaders we have now just so happen to be members. It’s like I always say, if your government is strikingly similar to the dystopian sci-fi stories of the past then you got a problem there, in my opinion. (read the rest of this shit…)