the movie show

If these dogs are barking don't bother coming in

2011-10-06T16:14:00.000-07:00

Straw Dogs [*1/2]

In the forty years that separate Sam Peckinpah and Rod Lurie’s versions of Straw Dogs I wondered if the same views and values would stand the test of time, much less cultures, and as it turns out they feel equally primitive in both contexts. The film(s) are a whole sticky wicket of problems and provocations, and if the films don’t need to be remade at least there is a legitimate conversation piece. Those things don‘t happen often enough.

Before I delve into everything, I would like to state that the movie is reasonably well made, this isn’t a project you embark on if you feel dispassionate in any way about the material. From a technical standpoint it is competent and need not be discussed any further in that regard. The movie, however, lives or dies on how one reacts to it and the film can, and will, evoke a lot of uncomfortable thoughts and may even provide some much needed gravity and perspective to the casual misogyny most of us will be extremely guilty of going in.

An official plot synopsis and other information is required before diving into the muckety muck of the film proper: David and Amy Sumner (James Marsden and Kate Bosworth) are a successful Hollywood couple, she’s an actress he’s a screenwriter, who have returned to her hometown of Blackwater, Mississippi to get the family home in order. First welcomed with open arms, tensions gradually begin to mount between the Sumners and the locals (more specifically a few of her old friends/gawkers: Alexander Skarsgard, Rhys Coiro, Billy Lush, Drew Powell) before one unspeakable crime begets another. This all culminates in a stand-off in which David must protect his house and family from Skarsgard and co while also harboring the town’s local idiot/ potential pedophile, Jeremy Niles.

A few major events that are discussed in the essay include: the rape of Amy, behaviors of the coach’s daughter and her relationship to the mentally challenged Jeremy Niles (Dominic Purcell), the arrival of Skarsgard and company looking to claim Niles after the coach’s fifteen-year-old daughter goes missing and the Sumners decision to protect him, and the general milquetoast-ness of David.

To put it mildly, both versions of the film hate women. At least women, for sure, but probably all females. In fact, the one thing that both version of “Straw Dogs” manage to successfully convey is a disdain for women that I’m not sure most cavemen would endorse.* The movie hates women so much that it bends over backwards to let us know that girls are not women (although biologically speaking a fifteen-year-old girl would have matured to the point of womanhood), but that all women regardless of age are provocateurs (which is something we will come back to); a troubling and contradictory stance that is worth trying to wrap your head around. However, the important thing to remember at the moment is that girls are not women especially if they have a daddy to remind everybody of that fact (a crazy, terrifying nutter of a dad played by James Woods, no less). The daddy also has four twenty-something year-old yes men (Skarsgard and co.) who, by the by, don’t have a problem raping one female (Bosworth) while they rush to the defense of another (coach’s little girl). This “girl” also happens to be their old coach’s daughter, so maybe they don’t rape her out of respect or fear for her father. They don’t respect or fear the husband (James Marsden) of the woman they do rape so maybe it is that simple. Someone has to assert dominance for the animals to learn their place. With all of that said, one could make the simple argument that the reason the men don’t rape the girl is because they are not pedophiles. It is a fact, these men are not pedophiles, but the girl is, biologically speaking, a woman. And the movie will go on to make a very arbitrary distinction between girl and woman since the movie has a very specific idea of how it wants you to feel about females. In addition to the men not fearing or respecting the husband they also have a desire to destroy the woman. Not just because it is in their nature to do and because she is a woman and they hate them, but because she has chosen an outsider as her lover. The coach’s daughter whom these men so “valiantly defend” in the film’s climax has also chosen an outsider, a mentally challenged man (Dominic Purcell), whom she is friendly with and who, much to the chagrin of the locals, calls her his girlfriend (and may himself be a pervert, though this is never shown). This girl, coach’s daughter, may be being friendly because she sees him as a relatively harmless fellow, but the movie never affords us that knowledge, so because of the film’s disdain for women and the view that they are provocateurs, we have no choice but to assume that the movie’s goal is for us to hate women. Writing this I can’t help but equate the mentally challenged man to an outsider, which means that the young girl has effectively chosen an outsider (he was born mentally handicapped), but he’s not an outsider by choice so the onus of the mistake lies with him and not with her. Or that’s what we the audience is left to assume. There are moments when things get all Frankensteinian up in this bitch (moreso when the angry mob goes hunting after the big dumb lug with a gun in lieu of torches) when the retarded guy accidentally kills coach’s daughter as he tries to quiet her. This happens so that her Coach wouldn’t be drawn into a room in which he saw a mentally challenged older man with his daughter. She dies, perhaps, by accident but also because the movie needs her to, to prove on some level that a woman cannot go unpunished for choosing the outsider. The girl cannot suffer the same fate as the wife because she’s a girl but she must suffer because she is a female. It bears noting that what happens to the daughter is probably meant to show another distinction between deserving what you get and not deserving it. I have only had conversations with four people about the film and two have compared the film’s treatment of women to Muslims and two more have said that Bosworth’s character brought her rape on herself when she flashes the men who have been ogling her body. Sure, it might be a provocative thing to do (flashing men you know are looking at you and making you uncomfortable), but it doesn’t justify rape. The whole argument that she brought it on herself would mean that the two men who said this would literally have to be ok with someone saying “I’m going to go rape this woman” (and since I know them to be decent people who wouldn’t partake in such an activity) and they would have to say: “take your time. I brought a book to read, I’ll be out in the truck waiting.” It’s a terrible thing to say that someone asked to be raped and to say she brought it on herself is a pretty lousy justification or defense of any action. Although, I suppose the idea of he/she brought it upon his/herself works strictly as a series of actions and reactions and only in certain contexts: she was looking and smelling good so it’s her fault I went and introduced myself/ we talked and danced/ now we’re married. Her fault for being sexy. At the end of the day it’s just mean to say that someone deserves something bad and it undercuts one’s basic humanity to say as much.

Another problem that the film suffers is that Amy Sumner is raped, but her husband David’s final stand against the men who performed the crime has nothing to do with the fact that they raped her. The men violated the sanctity of his home, sure, but the sanctity of his wife seems to be important only because she is in his home, but not because she is his wife. In fact, were it not for a slight deviation from the original film, Amy’s rape would go unmentioned to her husband in the film proper. And I don’t believe there are any looks telling enough between the two of them that suggest that she has communicated her rape to him in code or with a glance. While she was being raped, David was out hunting, and being abandoned by the men he will later fight, and he comes home stewing that the men left him in the woods and remains completely oblivious to the distraught looks of his wife. This moment in the woods, occurring alongside his wife’s rape, is also the one in which the milquetoast learns how to shoot straight and become a man. Giving the movie a direct correlation to empowerment through rape, not that it wasn’t obvious already, but it appears to send a mixed message when one considers that David’s wife’s rape gives him a heretofore unknown strength (that he later uses against the same men) and allows him to secretly avenge a rape he didn‘t know about; when it‘s really kind of obvious that the reason she never tells David is because he honestly can‘t be bothered to defend his wife in any previous context in the movie. When this Amy (who unlike the original film’s Amy, is no longer still turned on by bad boy aggression) reports to her husband concerns that the men have killed the family cat and that they were ogling her body as she worked up a sweat while running, David’s solution is to pussyfoot around the former issue and to take the men’s side in the latter. And while I initially couldn’t blame him for his reaction to the men ogling her it just seemed to underscore how much of a shit he doesn’t give about her concerns. This movie validates David’s flippancy when Amy goes to take a shower and exposes herself to the men who are going to look anyway by painting her as, you guessed it, a provocateur. I suppose that by ultimately allowing Amy to be the avenger of her own rape the filmmakers have at least elevated her person somewhat. Amy and David have a marriage that paints her as a not terribly bright, but not idiotic girl, who engages in some good humored and kind of flirty passive aggression with a too serious minded husband. In the original, Amy was world’s more attractive and world’s dumber than her husband, but in making the ‘11 Sumners a more plausible and attractive couple Amy gets elevated to a step above a come dumpster (the fact that she doesn‘t enjoy being forcibly taken by her ex-boyfriend in this incarnation also helps to elevate her status). However, it negates one of the chief reasons I thought casting Skarsgard for the role was a novel idea**). Let’s hear it for progress. But again, this development paints David in a worse light because he’s not avenging his wife, he’s protecting his home and he’s been spurred on this path because he is protecting another outsider (the mentally challenged man). If there is a logic to be found in Sumner’s actions it is the idea that protecting our own only applies to houses that transfer ownership, people that are outcasts like oneself and things that can’t get tainted (read: raped) by the other. One could argue that David fighting back against the home invaders is him stopping a raping and pillaging that he could not prevent before, but the gesture is meaningless when the damage has been done already and when your own wife won‘t tell you that she has been attacked. He’s not really a hero for any reason that matters, he’s like the men who come to his house looking for blood-- so full of moral outrage that the only thing that is really getting accomplished is that their anger is making hypocrites out of all of them.

At the end of the day, one cannot help but feel about Straw Dogs the way Straw Dogs wants them to feel about women-- it is a provocateur, it probably wants us to hate it, but it’ll settle for any reaction as long as it gets one.

* In my section of the Bible Belt, saying that a caveman wouldn’t endorse the films views on women got this reaction from a married couple: kind of like Muslims. Muslims being cavemen in this scenario. Also, since the rednecks in the film are churchgoing types it allows them an easy platform for unjustifiable indignation, but the audience seems pretty unwilling to acknowledge the hypocrisy of their observations. As it regards Muslims v Christianity. I’m sure the film will lend itself to a religious interpretation, but lacking the ability to analyze in that way, the people remain, on a level of basic human decency, irredeemable assholes. Being Muslims or anything like it doesn’t matter for me.

** Casting Skarsgard as the rapist ex-boyfriend seemed to make a lot of sense if you got the impression that the movie was being “True Blood”ed (a show which features Skarsgard as an oft-shirtless vampire that ladies swoon over) up and that they were really playing up the hot, sweaty, sexy angle. I am also under a completely unsubstantiated belief that any “True Blood” loving female with a rape fantasy has one that stars Skarsgard, whose Southern accent is great, by the way.

Days, Nights and Years of Fright

2011-08-30T20:00:00.000-07:00

Fright Night [****] and The Devil's Double [***1/2]

This “Fright Night” is not interested in replacing the 1985 version in your memories, but it is as dedicated to being a movie that deserves to be called “Fright Night” as one could rightly hope any movie bearing the title would be. It has a sense of escalation to replace the slow burning atmosphere of the original but it remains largely the story of a kid obsessed with a neighbor who is no good for the people he loves. And he needs the help of an expert to prove it. Enter reason number one why both “Fright Night”s will remain alongside one another rather than one supplanting the other: some of you may prefer the more traditionally garbed/portrayed Peter Vincent (portrayed by Roddy McDowell) to the new Criss Angel style potty mouthed version. I get someone preferring the old version, but Vincent’s newer, crushing backstory invests the character with a level of depth that is both blindsiding and stupefying. David Tennant makes the character vulgar, hilarious and tragic. In fact, every character from “Fright Night” 2011 seems to locate the one thing that makes them tick and has at least one devastating moment that brings it to the foreground. Three viewings later a moment in which a central character meets his demise becomes exponentially more poignant. The death, a fiery and bloody one that results in ashes and forgiveness, is capped off with the proclamation: “it’s okay Charlie.” A couple of my friends insist the line is really “f--k you Charlie!” They are wrong, but the fact that the moment holds equal power either way, speaks to the movie’s utter insistence that humans are ultimately forged by the way that they hold on to traumas and the impossible grace with which they cast them off in the final moments.

If finding the humanity of a character is at the crux of what makes “Fright Night” work so well then consider that as a link to director Lee Tamahori’s “The Devil’s Double” in which Dominic Cooper plays both Uday Hussein and his double Latif Yahia. There are moments in the film in which Uday tries to make Yahia execute someone for paltry reasons. Yahia might not object to having to do this were it not for the fact that, in doing so, he wants what every human needs: motivation. Hussein never obliges Yahia, he just does it himself in vivid sprays of crimson and power. And again we find another link to “Fright Night” as we have a creature so unburdened by conscience and driven entirely by bloodlust, yet, like Jerry in the “Fright Night” remake, he is capable of a façade of extreme friendliness that is so unsettling precisely because we know the monster that lurks underneath. Cooper, like Farrell, gets to play two extremes but unlike Farrell he gets to play it with a little self parody, adopting a high pitch whine and knocking things around as Hussein while as Yahia he combs his hair to the side and remains calmer, more collected. Farrell has the same sort of sultriness no matter if he is being creepy or friendly. At least until he goes into full-on vampire mode. It might be worth noting that Farrell and Cooper hail from Ireland and Britain respectively and I can’t help but wonder if their being neither American or Iraqi performers (as the roles call for) allows them to more easily highlight the inherent monstrousness of these particular cultures that they play monsters of. It might not be a relevant question for Colin Farrell's character, who could literally be anyone but is ultimately an American monster, but once I raise the question I can't ignore it (even when I can't answer it).

Dominic Cooper who plays Uday Hussein portrayed Howard Stark in “Captain America” a genius inventor and father to Tony Stark, another genius who is arrogant and also Iron Man. Does that level of arrogance and power that Cooper is cinematically responsible for make him a more appropriate choice to play Hussein? I think it does. While we're at it, the film practices American excess by being evocative of "Scarface" in addition to being a biopic and an espionage picture.

At the end of the day, both films despite large mostly non-American casts feel utterly truthful because they can happen in our streets and in our countries. The monsters are heightened to a fever pitch, but the need to rule by fear and the desire to simply survive are utterly relatable feelings. Such mad displays of power and struggles against it are also rarely this entertaining.

The Roommate: with choice blurbs

2011-05-24T17:10:00.000-07:00

The Roommate [zero]

I thought it would be easier to make a fake poster with insulting pull quotes rather than be self consciously asshole-y and, consequently, unamusing in a review. I don't know exactly how one deed cancels out the other, but my photo shop skills are as shitty as the movie so we're in pretty good company with one another.

Plundered Booty

2011-05-22T11:38:00.000-07:00

Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides [**]

It seems, given the box office receipts, that not nearly as many people are/were clamoring for a fourth installment as was expected. $90 million is nothing to sneeze at, but perhaps it foreshadows the diminishing returns that a sequel laden summer should eventually suggest. However, money making acumen aside, the fourth film has taken a refreshingly simplistic approach in its storytelling: now we have three disparate groups (Spaniards, Barbossa leading the Navy, and pirates) looking to reach the same goal (the Fountain of Youth) for their own ends. A mermaid's tear is also needed to enact the life expanding properties of the fountain and a golden chalice. It's no more complicated than that despite a couple of betrayals which are necessitated less by plot demands than the weaselly nature of being a pirate.

Johnny Depp as per usual goes big as Captain Jack Sparrow, but he plays the role with such ease and old hat non-chalance it's hard to tell if he's still being game or just sleepwalking through the role. All of that said, no one seems particularly committed. No one is bad, but the revenge that Barbossa seeks has lost all weight while the threat that Ian McShane's Blackbeard should imply is diminished to about five minutes worth of CGI trickery and a couple of lightly evil deeds. It's a peculiar waste of McShane's charisma, but also a waste of a lot of other opportunities: a zombified crew and a ship that does Blackbeard's bidding when he touches his magical scabbard are curiously under-utilized. Blackbeard also has a daughter who seems to ground and humanize him in a way that voids him of any menace. Her entrance which obscures her face in shadow is a reliable cliche meant to mask that she is a woman, but also underscores how woefully ordinary the whole affair is. It's a fourth adventure, but it isn't big, game changing or anything like that. It is designed simply to be one of the forgettable adventures in a pirate's life. When reflecting upon this year's later Jack Sparrow might say: "Did I ever tell you about the killer mermaids and the Fountain of Youth? Well, it happened once and then life went on."

It's a fine two hour diversion and considering how little of our time and money the franchise deserves after parts two and three it's nice to see them cut the clutter and try to get back to the basics of telling a story that doesn't rely on exposition. However, they accidentally diminish the fun of the spectacle by not giving us enough and ignoring some of the more intriguing elements they've left in play. I can't help but wonder if this is a way of testing the waters to see if there is life left in the franchise. Are there are plans to truly blow us out of the water with a fifth installment? I can see them trying to figure out what audiences really want and cutting the fat, I doubt they'll succeed but as far as part fours go they've totally succeeded at making a quick buck while improving on the efficiency of a franchise in the slightest of ways. I didn't hate the movie so maybe it doesn't secretly hate me and want my money. Maybe it wants to please me and is just too exhausted with its own part fourness to care? I guess I'll just have to wait until the next wholly unnecessary sequel to figure out if complacency is the deliberate modus operandi of every number four.

Alienation Nation

2011-03-18T20:09:00.001-07:00

Paul [**]

For me the films of Simon Pegg and Nick Frost have always been something of a comedy event. I didn't know who they were the first time I went to see Shaun of the Dead, but I learned to make them synonymous with people who understood why we liked certain kinds of movies, people who respected and crafted those kinds of movies and as people who did it while making us laugh unabashedly, unashamedly. It was, and maybe can be again, wonderful. But it is not this time.

I have to admit I was excited for collaborator Edgar Wright not to be a part of this film because Greg Mottola has made some pretty excellent, unshowy comedies and I was still reeling from how flashy and empty (and unappreciative of its audience) Scott Pilgrim v The World appeared to be. I wanted something that was going to be more sincere, funny, honest and less flashy. I thought Mottola was going to nail this film. I didn't get what I wanted in any case. Without the injection of energy and crafty editing that Wright would have brought to the project the action that kicks in around the last half hour feels a little still born. There's no exclamation marks on the jokes, which is okay, I don't need that. I understand that it is not necessarily part of Mottola's arsenal to be over-the-top and high energy but it really might have benefited from such things. I think the magic of Simon Pegg might be lost outside of Hollywood blockbusters and I think the magic of Pegg and cohort Nick Frost is certainly lacking without Edgar Wright. The three of them are like Dr. Pepper when mixed together and without one of the ingredients you have a Mr. Pibb type beverage that no insistence from the masses is ever going to make taste the same. It's okay when that's what you want, but it isn't necessarily what you were expecting.

Don't get me wrong I don't mean to insist that Mottola is the Mr. Pibb of directors, but I must insist that Wright-Frost-Pegg never not collaborate together again and if a Greg Mottola kind of movie, with funny jokes and thoughtful characterization is going to peak its head out of the veil of coulda/shoulda/woulda that Paul wears over it's oddly shaped little green head then it is probably better that Mottola have the room to be himself.

Paul for anyone who didn't see the preview is about two comic book/sci-fi aficianados who are touring the country's UFO sights post Comic Con when they pick up an alien and end up with homophobic rednecks and government agents on their tail. They also kidnap a woman who runs an RV park only to have her gun toting father also head out after them.

The film's two nice surprises are that a gun toting secret agent played by Jason Bateman is not exactly who he appears to be, in the best possible sense. That he also resurrects a long dormant grade school phrase ("motherfucking titty sucking two ball bitch") is one of the film's two unmitigated pleasures. The other is that Paul in all his miracle working tendencies cures a woman of blindness in one eye, which her father later hails as a miracle from God, and gives the woman (a devout Creationist) a moment's pause. It's a shrewd moment that allows for the most important and successful element of science fiction to be acknowledged: that faith and what science teaches us be allowed to intermingle; possibly to challenge or even reaffirm our beliefs. I think the fact that an otherworldly being participates in this moment says more about the possibility of a God than not but the movie is quick to rebuff any notions of a higher power. That moment is also where the film finds a problem that I think speaks to the relative lack of success of this general enterprise. This close mindedness about its subject, that no other Pegg-Frost collaboration has had, seems to hinder their ability to embrace the totality of their story, transcend it and create a lasting work that can stand alongside whatever they're loving and lampooning.

In the past, Pegg and Frost are able to understand the appeal of Michael Bay films and zombie films without saying they are ridiculous. In fact, the two of them go hog wild celebrating the films without ever uttering the r word, but they can't for a moment acknowledge the possible lynchpin of science fiction. Even if only to say that man's ambition is what drives him to be closer to God, but they don't even say that, they just find a target to give the middle finger to. It's not the most troubling thing in the world, but it is definitely coming from two guys who should know better.

fighting and settling

2011-03-05T18:29:00.000-08:00

The Adjustment Bureau [***], The Green Hornet and Take Me Home Tonight [**1/2]

Since the world probably would have exploded had Ben Affleck and Matt Damon released competing films on the same day audiences had to wait six months to see the Matt Damon starrer The Adjustment Bureau and, to be honest, had it come to pass it would have been a pretty depressing double header. Not because both films share an optimistic and downbeat quality, but because Affleck's film is on a whole different plateau of goodness while Damon's primary goal (for me, at least) is to wash the taste of Green Zone out of the collective American mouth. I will say that both Damon and Affleck have stellar chemistry with their leading ladies, but Affleck could have brought the heat with anyone (luckily it was the lovely Rebecca Hall) while Damon's not inconsiderable conviction is entirely dependent on how radiant Emily Blunt is. I'm not saying another actress couldn't have done this part, but I'm saying I don't want to imagine it. Blunt is the ray of sunshine that Damon spies when he surfaces for air against the dim tide of the fate controlling Adjustment Bureau.

On a slightly less enthusiastic note, but an enthusiastic one just the same, I found Michael Gondry's take on The Green Hornet to be a surprisingly fun film. It occasionally strains under the obviousness of shots that seemed tailored to the wholly unnecessary 3-D, but having seen it in two glorious dimensions I'm lucky to have had the experience in "presentable vision."

The movie strikes me in just the right way early on with a pretty amusing James Franco cameo where he latches on to the insecurities of a crime boss and trashes his legacy before being put out to pasture. But Franco and Waltz do it so gamely, with much relish that it is hard not to welcome the movie with open arms from that point on. Jay Chou, who was not welcome news to me following a Stephen Chow departure before the project even lifted off, manages to acquit himself nicely as an ass kicker. Having only been previously exposed to him in The Treasure Hunter and ever-so-briefly in the excellent True Legend, I wasn't convinced he was the right replacement ass kicker for the job, but he does fine and I appreciated the near instant chemistry he had with Rogen. I also appreciated a great brawl between friends that destroys everything in the room a la Commando and Rogen and Franco's own Pineapple Express.

The action also surprises with a certain level of clarity, destructiveness and a well executed boxing the heroes in for certain doom moment.

The vulgar 80s set introspective life after college romp makes a return with Take Me Home Tonight, a film that lacks the heart of Adventureland and the confidence wrecking comedy that can be wrought on characters by family members that She's Out of My League brought to the table, but it has drugs and boobs and a fat guy. These elements don't always converge to make an ideal comedy, but I always admire films that deal with issues of aimlessness because I can very much relate to the pussy in flux aspect of the protagonist. I can't say that I get triumph in one hundred minutes, but I take comfort in the message: love thyself, take a risk, etc.

I find it even more refreshing when a movie is honest enough to tell me that if I went for the things I wanted years ago I would not have gotten them, but maybe now I might get some of them. It's not exactly saying that it's never too late to chase after your dreams, but if you get loaded enough on drugs or booze or life experience you might just grow the stones to get some version of the life you wanted.

Relationshits

2011-01-23T10:32:00.000-08:00

No Strings Attached [**] and I Spit On Your Grave (2010) [***]

More often than not women dictate the terms of a relationship. Usually because they're sexier and we'll heed to their every beck and call, but also because we men are usually the dumber and more primitive half of the coupling. These films, No Strings Attached and I Spit on Your Grave [2010], are two instances where I think women lose complete control, but also monogamy rears its head and stakes a claim pretty loudly on the modern relationship type landscape.

First, we have director Ivan Reitman's No Strings Attached which allows Natalie Portman a rare opportunity to flex comic muscles and allows for the third film in a row in which Ashton Kutcher really owns as a leading man. He's likable without seeming bland or putzy and he has a couple of killer lines. My favorite line comes a few scenes after we discover that his perpetually stoned father is dating one of his former girlfriends: "I can't date you either. You're not my dad's type."

The plot such as it is involves summer camp acquaintances who reunite some twenty-odd years later to rekindle (or kindle, depending on your view of their first meeting as pre-teens and college students, respectively) a relationship. It starts out as blissful, consequenceless sex but soon feelings enter the mix and while Kutcher submits to the feelings immediately Portman does not and thus the typical complications of romantic comedy ensues.

Along the way there are a few laughs to be had, but not a great many. We often get to watch likable people being the best they can be in a movie that isn't terribly interested in letting people be the best versions of themselves that they can be.

I like that the movie plays up Kutcher's nice guy image but never makes him feel weak for wanting what he wants. The movie, in fact, respects the kind of guy he is so much that fate intervenes in any attempt to undermine his values. Kutcher isn't one hundred percent sold on the notion of monogamy at first, but from the beginning his attempt at casual sex ends in a drunken, crying sex-free stupor and his 'no strings attached' relationship with Portman is still defined by his exclusivity to her.

Portman's character is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a raging slut but she is unpleasant in the character's initial scenes and remains resistant to the pull of love in such a way that it becomes hard to root for them as a couple. There is a moment where Portman not only insists on abandoning their Valentine's Day date, but needs to be taken home by the very man she is dumping.

As I knew the film would ultimately end with their coupling and I couldn't get behind them as a couple, I had to remove myself emotionally from the rest of the proceedings. I don't like not being emotionally involved in romantic comedies, particularly the more vulgar ones, because they distill emotions more honestly and despite all the character woes they give an honest treatment to things like fear of commitment or what have you. "No Strings Attached" finds a way to make a selfless devotion to one person feel like a bad choice.

There is little doubt that writer Jennifer Hills (Sarah Butler) has had men wrapped around her finger before. That's not to say that Jennifer is a tease or deliberately manipulates men, but she's definitely so pretty that considering it a foregone conclusion is not so out of line. She's definitely sweet and cute and a welcome breath of sexiness for the backwater area she is calling home as she writes her next book. But the men in that area are just forward enough and unkempt enough that they can come across as unnerving; what causes panic in Jennifer is something the locals call an uppity city bitch-ness. A kind punishable by verbal abuse and, eventually, rape. It seems to be a pretty frank resentment of the way women consciously (or not) hold sway over men.

While the men in the film certainly seek to usurp her power (though it is not explicitly the power of a sexual being but rather the power of a "city bitch") and in so doing the film becomes a rallying cry against the unfair amount of power females yield in relationships both real and imagined, it's strongest argument actually becomes one in favor of monogamy.

BIG SPOILER AHEAD

One of Jennifer's assailants is the town sheriff, who happens to be married and skips out on church to attend to some business involving the debasement of a visiting local writer. As the film's only married and committed character he later receives a punishment (that a lesser director might have decided to heap on the female victim with as much detail) akin to the rape he committed earlier in the film. He's actually the only character to receive a rape in kind and while he wasn't the only character to rape her he is the one to get the most literal sin turned against the sinner type punishment. It's no accident that. If monogamy is against our basic biology then why are we capable of higher thought? If one doesn't endeavor to evolve what's the point of giving them capacity to make choices? It seems like an awful waste of a brain if you ask me. I guess the question goes both ways, if we're so evolved why do we do such animalistic things? If we are given the tools to reason then I suppose we have to decide these things for ourselves. But I think both movies suggest that we have evolved past animal urges or that maybe the animal urge is to restore monogamy. It's an interesting discussion point no matter how wrong I probably am.

That being said, the I Spit On Your Grave remake is worth discussing for other reasons.

I like that the film shows restraint in graphically depicting the abuses heaped on Jennifer Hills. A lot of times they degrade her with insults and treat her less than human, but they don't go for ripping the clothes off right away. When her attackers mock her writing it seems like a bigger, more devastating exposure than anything they can do to her body because what they choose to read aloud is like pulling a secret out of her. Butler, I think, plays these violations very well.

For something that falls in the torture porn vein the murders aren't terribly graphic in the way they would be if the film were from Alexander Aja or any of the Saw filmmakers, but they have a very precise way of getting to the point and being very literal. The filmmaker has his eyes pried open with fish hooks, the sheriff receives a rape in kind, the mentally handicapped guy is the recipient of failed strangulation, another is drowned, etc. I like to think that the on the nose quality of the murders comes from the fact that the heroine is a writer so she makes things literal, brings them full circle and even relies on various and sundry cliches like sneaking up on people and knocking them out with lug wrenches or baseball bats. I want to believe that her job allows her to tap into creative impulses and the familiar. It's easier believing these things come from a creative reservoir she has as a writer than being the terrible things that everyone has simmering just below their own surface. It probably isn't true, she's as guilty of having an animal just below her skin as the rest of us, but if we can believe for a second that she learned this because of her job and not because we all have an evil nature then we can believe we've evolved past an animal state, we can believe in monogamy and even that what we suffer doesn't truly destroy us. It pushes us through to hope.

Blood Simple

2010-11-30T12:09:00.000-08:00

I Saw the Devil [****]

I don't know why but the casting of two of Korea's premiere villainous actors Lee Byung-Hun and Choi Min-Sik as the respective hero and villain of Kim Ji-Woon's I Saw the Devil strikes me as utterly genius. I think it's rare for a movie to have a hero so dangerous you feel sorry for the villain, but that's exactly the case with I Saw the Devil. Don't misunderstand me, though, the villain doesn't deserve sympathy but I don't want to be on the wrong side of the line when Lee Byung-Hun's Korean Intelligence Officer with revenge on his mind is my number one adversary. Having prior experience with Lee's brand of villainy makes it easier to cut through the formalities of having the hero realize that operating outside of the law is the swiftest road to justice. All of our experience with movies tell us that's what he'll do, but all our experiences with him as an actor tell us that the bad guy(s) is(are) going to regret it.

The villain of the piece, however, is Choi Min-Sik and if ever there was a force capable of absorbing all that Byung-Hun can dish out it's him. Min-Sik has experience as a hero in Park Chan Wook's Old Boy but his hangdog, weather beaten face suggests a man who has spent his life falling short, being bad and getting back up to do it all over again. For all of his masochistic tendencies, we wonder how it is that Min-Sik can keep going. For ninety minutes of the film's one-hundred forty-five minute running time, Byung-Hun mercilessly engages Min-Sik in brutal fights and cat and mouse games and each time he emerges the victor. Min-Sik has endured more brutality than we believed to be humanly possible, but between each fight he brutalizes an innocent and seems to be completely rejuvenated. It is the chief reason that for as impossibly outmatched as Min-sik is he can't gain our sympathy even though we wonder if he'll be able to stand another punch.

When Min-Sik's character is first introduced in the film he is playing the good samaritan to a pregnant woman (we'll quickly learn the woman is the wife of our hero) who has already insisted that help is on the way. This causes her husband concern, but he figures that if he stays on the phone and comforts her it'll ease her mind and make up for the fact that he can't just skip out of work to help her. The introduction is also worth noting because Min-Sik is glimpsed only in shadows. First, we see his cold, unforgiving eyes and then his emotionless face and I'll admit that my first thought was that a mold of Min-Sik's face would make for an ideal Michael Meyers mask. Truthfully, Min-Sik's character more closely resembles the kind of character you'd end up with if Michael Meyers and Scorpio from Dirty Harry had a baby.

If Min-Sik is analogous to an unstoppable force of evil like Meyers then Lee Byung-Hun is the Wrath of God. This brings us to an interesting point. I Saw the Devil is clearly a reference to the most vile form of evil one can imagine, so why bring God into this? First, the old testament is all about vengeance. Second, if you go to enough sermons in a year you'll hear more than your fair share of talk about smiting enemies and, believe me, Byung-Hun is one of the best smiters of Ye Olde Motherfuckers that the movies have to offer. Plus, God is the Devil's opposite. I'm not treading new ground here, but I'm getting to the point that our natural inclinations towards vengeance cause us, at times, to see the Devil within ourselves more clearly than we see God.

It also works on another level because the hero and villain stand for different things but mirror each other in a lot of ways. Both have broken families; the hero's shattered by the villain obviously, but in his crusade the hero is certainly working on estranging his would be in-laws (at one point they ask him to stop, but he's not finished yet because he wants to make the guy suffer). The villain has a mother who can't stop loving and wanting to help her son, but his father thinks he's good for nothing. They both get a real charge from preying upon those that are weaker than them and in that way, Min-Sik and Byung-Hun are most alike. In their initial confrontation Min-Sik displays a level of arrogance that awakens the worst in Byung-Hun, but I would be loathe to say whether or not Byung-Hun's dogged pursuit constitutes an arrogance on his part or just righteous fury. A better question might be whether or not those two things are the same.

For all of the myriad ways that the film's title can be interpreted and how it informs the movie's content I like to imagine that the title, though never spoken in the film, is derived from the following scene: when Byung-hun confront his first suspect he chokes him with a phone cord, ties him to a chair, interrogates him then causes great trauma to his genitals. The suspect, utterly terrified, turns himself in to the police for all of his (unrelated) crimes and when they interrogate him he mumbles and the film doesn't bother to translate it. I like to imagine this guy told them that he saw the devil. But it works on a lot of levels because it's rich and layered and can encapsulate a whole mess of feelings and events. The title, for the first time in a long time, is not to be taken lightly.

I highly recommend this movie not only for it's expert cat and mouse games, but the stark, bloody poetry of the ending and the way it holds a mirror up to us so we can see the toll that revenge takes on us. Make no mistake the movie is too bold and bloody to preach, but it recognizes that we're only human.

Five Reasons you should buy Isaac Florentine's Ninja on Blu-Ray

2010-11-22T09:50:00.000-08:00

Ninja [***]

I wrote a review for Isaac Florentine's Ninja about a year ago and it was done in a jokey, snarky, disdainful way. I liked it, but I wasn't quite being fair to it. I decided to give it a little more reverence since I bought it on Blu-Ray. The original review isn't going anywhere but I want what there is to appreciate about it to be brought to light.

1) Isaac Florentine, director of the two Undisputed sequels, numerous episodes of Power Rangers, is a fan of coherent action sequences that display the martial prowess of star Scott Adkins. It utilizes slow motion to great effect as well, there are numerous shots of Adkins doing a backflip and kicking some poor sap right on his noggin in mid-backflip. Slow motion is a tool I've noticed being employed to show people with the bulk of Adkins (and Chilean martial artist Marko Zaror) do something we might normally see a smaller martial artist do. Florentine doesn't believe in wasting the talents of his stunt team so we get clear, concise shots in every location.

2) The editing builds up the mayhem very precisely. From thirty-nine minutes on the action sequences gradually escalate from a subway train smackdown that culminates with one fighter being thrown through a window and obliterated by a train on the opposite track to a police station invasion in which a ninja cuts the power in a police station, and cuts a vicious swath through the police to get to his prey. The hero and villain even briefly find themselves on the same side as they take on the film's extraneous villains.

3) Scott Adkins shirtless in 1080p. This one is mainly for the ladies and some guys I suppose. Adkins is totally ripped, it's not a long shirtless scene but it's very Van Damme-ian in that it is as unnecessary as his splits in everything. Unlike the Undisputed sequels shirtless fighting is not the norm here, but the camera does like its star. On the flipside of the coin female lead Mika Hijii is tied up by the villain using some Japanese bondage knots if you're into that (Gyaku ebi or Reverse Shrimp Tie it looks like). She's also tied up using blue rope which denotes a serious crime.

4) The subway fight allows Mika Hijii to show off some of her fancy martial arts moves, but with a refreshing degree of plausibility. When Hijii gains the upper hand in a fight she only keeps it for about thirty seconds. Sometimes she's lucky enough to dispatch one bad guy but then another pops up to knock the wind out of her. If you're the type of viewer who prefers a woman to struggle admirably while still adhering to the general truism that women are smaller than men and their hits less powerful then Ninja has exactly what you're looking for as it doesn't get to carried away on the issue of women's competence. She's tough, but humble-able and always down for a good tying up.

5) Ninja is a comforting throwback to the action movies we spent our youth watching on HBO. It may not have the nostalgia factor of casting childhood ninja stalwart Sho Kosugi as the villain, but it does exude a competency in action scenes and a complete go-for-broke spirit without sacrificing any of the sheen of a bigger, budget film. Well, except the bad CGI during the film's rooftop fight. The villain also does a really nifty hang-glide/parachute type move that reminds me of Batman. It's awesome.

For eight dollars on Blu, Ninja is definitely worth the investment.

Harry Potter: The Beginning of the End

2010-11-21T15:06:00.001-08:00

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1 [****]

I admit it, I'm a blasphemer. I never read the Harry Potter books so my impressions may lack the necessary gravity. I like not being burdened with fan baggage and expectation. I like being surprised. I'm sure you Potters get surprised in different ways. When the results are like this I'm pretty sure we all win.

The more oppressive the atmosphere is the better I like the series. The movie drops us deep into the proverbial shit as Harry is spirited away by an army of friends-cum-impostors looking to protect him from an attack by Voldemort. The plan is to break off into groups disguised as Harry (with the exception of Mad-Eye Moody and Hagrid who go as themselves) in the hopes of splitting up and fooling Voldemort's search party of assassins, but of course they already know what's going on and Voldemort makes an unsuccessful attempt on the real Harry's life.

Harry soon decides that the risks being taken by his protectors is too much. He tries to go it alone, but Ron and Hermione aren't hearing that bullshit and decides to accompany him on wherever his journey takes him. He goes undercover in the Ministry, they destroy a horcrux, escape from a prison and other shit. It's pretty exciting and dark, slightly funny, too. The comedy is mostly just nervous titters to lift the mood a little.

I think it's really important to address the film in terms of performance. My choice might not be the most popular one in a large crowd of Pottery aficianados, but I saw it by myself so my choice was one hundred percent unanimous. Rupert Grint.

As the character with the big destiny weighing on his shoulders, Harry still comes across less developed than the others because in this film he's still young (16) and still being tracked. Everyone that he loves and cherishes has to protect him willingly and get him to safety. He's at the mercy of his destiny and if we never got the sense before that Harry has been powerlessly waiting for that defining moment in his life, we feel that pressure now as the film opens. We also feel it in the fleeting moments when he dances with Hermione. Is the dance to relieve the stress of the mission, say thanks, just to do something? It's all three but when Harry isn't making forward progress in his mission I can see how he might come across as inert.

Hermione is the unquestionably loyal friend, who gets the film's most loaded moments. She casts herself out of her family with a memory erasing spell and devotes herself to Harry's mission. She suffers having the words "mudblood" etched into her skin and suffers all manner of persecution. Hermione's always been a really lovable character who has suffered far too much for the inauspiciousness of her birth and I credit Watson with that, but here she suffers in silence. The moments are loaded, yes, but I wanted her to convey outwardly how she felt instead of being the logical Spock-type. She's not bad, but not exactly doing enough with her anguish for me.

Ron Weaselly has taken all the pent-up frustration of being the lovable goofball and in one nice moment he rails against feeling like a third-wheel in the Harry-Hermione crusade against Voldemort and gives it to Harry with both barrels. He doesn't believe that Harry understands what it is that those who love him are giving up. Ron is caught up in someone else's destiny-- he has a family to lose and he wonders, as anybody would, whether or not it's worth getting caught up in. Ron, of course, is loyal but he does the human thing and assesses the risk. He stares into the darkness and asks if the light that comes when the darkness passes will be enough. Stoicism is overrated. But Ron proves loyalty never will be.

Speaking of loyalty, my favorite most heroic house elf is back. Dobby. Or Harry Potter's Yoda. From the first moment I saw Dobby in Chamber of Secrets I was smitten. Dobby came into my life when I really needed him. It was November 2002 and just a few months earlier Yoda had become a green ball of fury in Star Wars Episode II and it was ridiculous and unbecoming. Dobby had similar giant ears and a propensity for fending off the bad guys with magical arts, but he was subtle and powerful. His English, better. What happens to him is the most wrenching moment of cinema this year. Sorry Kick Ass.

So far, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows is shaping up to be everything you want the encroaching darkness and the fight of your life to be. Makes me wish I'd read the books, but allows me to appreciate the baited breath a little more. And a little differently.

Screeching fault

2010-11-14T10:47:00.001-08:00

Unstoppable [**]

Unstoppable is the kind of movie I feel bad for not liking. The bare bones plot moves with forward momentum from frame one and the charisma of stars Denzel Washington and Chris Pine should go a long way towards making the film critic proof, but as I am wont to do I get hung up on a sequence of events so idiotic that it is probably fairly accurate and, thus, infuriating.

Be warned, here there be spoilers:

The film opens with two rail yard workers tasked with moving a thirty-nine car train from one section of track to the other, a simple enough job, but they're running a little behind. Rather than take time to connect the disconnected air brakes (that one guy said was pretty important not to overlook) they decide to move the train while leaving it in the idle position. They also have to give the train enough power that it creeps along at about ten miles an hour. In a perfect world the train would've remained in the idle position, but doesn't. When the engineer disembarks from the train to flip a switch, ghost like, the gears inside shift from idle to throttle, the engineer completely unaware of this, struts toward the switch. As the train picks up speed, one engineer races the train until he falls. Meanwhile, the guy standing the next to him, presumably unable to switch a flip or outrun the hundred pounds heavier guy, stands there and does nothing. I can only assume the fear of being sat on looms large. I don't know if it's supposed to soften the blows of their idiocy more when we realize these characters are played by Ethan Suplee of My Name is Earl and Chasing Amy fame and T.J. Miller of She's Out of My League, but I'll tell you that their incompetence is not charming if it's not a comedy.

More jaw dropping than their flat out stupidity and negligence is the idea that I'm asked to believe these guys don't know the content of the trains they're moving. I'm sure that training manuals and previous mistakes have underscored the importance of not cutting corners, but often times it still happens. I'm okay with someone choosing to do a piss poor job, but asking me to believe they remain completely ignorant of this day's thousands of pounds of explosive chemicals seems kind of insulting to me. I have a summer job that allows me to be massive amounts of lazy, but when someone tells me that we're being audited I try to bring my A-game. Explosive chemicals are A-game needing shit, too. I was pretty flummoxed by this, I can only accept laziness as the cause of this. I don't believe people would have been allowed to remain ignorant.

Spoilers pretty much end here.

Did I also mention that the guy in charge of all rail yard operations and the station master were all unaware of what was on that train? Maybe it's weird that they don't know about their cargo, but Denzel Washington's character seems to know everything about what he's hauling that day, the length of his train and everything else. I'm sure the other workers from the beginning weren't conductors or engineers, but clearly everyone on every level can make a costly mistake and they have to know that sometimes the consequences of those mistakes vary. In some ways I can sympathize with the CEOs, that the movie shows, who don't want to get screwed because of the negligence of a couple of idiots, but I also think it's their fault for keeping employees poorly apprised of shipping manifests and cargo read-outs. If this isn't the kind of thing that would normally happen, if these guys would know what was on their train then I blame the movie for resisting the temptation of giving us a human villain. It makes everyone look stupider, even if, only accidentally.

It's a shame too that this is such a persistent hang up because I think Chris Pine and Denzel Washington do some quality first-day-of-work-together bonding Yet my petty grievances are getting in the way of enjoying it. Chris Pine plays Will Colson, a kid from a well connected family whose part of the rail company's ongoing initiative to hire young turks to replace overpaid old timers. Denzel is one of the old-timers who we discover is not just a guy who loves doing the right thing, but a guy who is going to do something completely stupid and heroic because they're already going to push him out the door and he wants to exit in style. As the two of them embark on this impossible mission they bond over their marriages and Denzel tells Pine how much he likes him by saying how much he is annoyed by him. To be fair, Pine is a little cocky, but it's not hard to see that beneath that he's a guy who wants to do the right thing.

Kevin Corrigan and Rosario Dawson are not bad as a Railway Safety Inspector and the Station Master who are both incredibly quick on their toes and seem like exactly the kind of bureaucracy you want to deal with in such a dire situation. Their effectiveness stems from a reasonable level of concern and interest in the safety of people. In contrast, anyone concerned with the company's bottom line, as a result of this situation, is more prone to cook up an extravagant and stupid situational response. An effort to transport a Marine onto the runaway train ends with him being thrown through the locomotive's windshield in front of a television news chopper. It's fairly evocative of Bruce Willis' great line from Die Hard ("I'm not the one who just got butt-fucked on national television, DeWayne.") because, well, it just happened.

One of the things that Unstoppable does is filter every bad response through the prism of television news. I don't know if it was done on purpose, but it only makes the situation worse, we get to watch the trouble escalate, but a lot of times we get to watch people as they watch the situation escalate. I'm not talking about the good guys behind the scenes who aren't on the news but regular folks. Being removed from the action like that makes the story less intense, but also shows how disconnected people are from the decisions they make. Weirdly, though, it doesn't flatter the movie. Both the film's audience and the movie's audience get to see the wrong decisions play out on the news while the people actually coming up with the plan and doing it don't get seen at all or through news cameras that make them look like more idiots making bad decisions.

I guess what I'm saying in as long winded a way as possible is that the movie is more interested in screw-ups than heroics. Not even the fact that it's heroes are screw-ups, but it's interested in what people do wrong more than right. Again, I'm not talking about characters who have something to attone for but people who take unnecessary risks and/or are stupid. Even when the movie tries to take the time to explain the heroic decision by Pine and Washington it can't help but look like another misguided idea.

Perhaps it's unfair to get hung up on the actions of a guy who sets the plot in motion. Had this mistake not happened there wouldn't be a story here but this was neglect, not an accident. It's a big deal that no one actually reprimands the guy whose fault it is onscreen. Relegating his fate to a punch line in the end credits character post-script speaks poorly of the comically incompetent light the movie puts the character in and everyone else in the movie by association, except Washington and Kevin Corrigan (Corrigan deserves credit for actually making the plan Denzel proposes in the trailer a workable one).

One day I'm sure I'll get over this. You know how I get about mole hills.

All Hallow's Eve

2010-11-01T16:54:00.000-07:00

Saw 3D [*], Paranormal Activity 2 [***]

This Halloween weekend I partook of a horrifying double feature. Last year, a short lived rivalry began between the Saw franchise and a "we didn't know it then but we do now" upstart young franchise called Paranormal Activity. The latter was the superior film last year and this year the competition yielded the same results.

After seven films the Saw franchise has finally managed to wear out its welcome, although it started to show serious fatigue with the fifth entry. Paranormal Activity, on the other hand, shows no real signs of fatigue. The scare ratio is about the same and the characters come across in equal portions of sympathetic and likable, but doubtful or sympathetic, likable and eventually terrified. If anybody seems like they're being an asshole it's not because we need a character to root against but because they think the leap people around them are making is a little ridiculous and they'd be right if it weren't so horrifyingly true.

For me the most effective aspects of Paranormal Activity have to do with the complete lack of reverence men have for the spiritual world and how this complete disregard for the things that go bump in the night seems to drive everything to a fever pitch. You can say it's about a demon looking for a soul until you're blue in the face but you still can't ignore the fact that its about man's ignorance and superiority if they think that certain handshake agreements don't exist between the worlds as well. Remember, a handshake or a promise (a word handshake) is the reason this started to begin with so of course they honor them.

All of this being said, both films are dependent on their predecessors to deepen or worsen (here's looking at you Saw 3D) the franchise's mythology. Paranormal expounds on something hinted at in the first film and while it contains some slightly redundant exposition it is ultimately comprised of new and satisfying information. Saw 3D asks us to believe in the mother of all fail safes in the form of an answer to an oft-asked question about the film(s) that no one really cares about the answer to. That being said, Saw 3D's efforts to bring the film's full circle goes so far over the rails into lunacy that it actually ends up being a little endearing. That's not to say that the film is actually good, but its wide eyed optimism and stupidity can't be ignored. Doesn't mean you have to like it.

Depth of Love

2010-10-12T18:32:00.000-07:00

Ocean Heaven [***1/2]

Following the rather stunning one-two punch of Jackie Chan's performances in The Shinjuku Incident and The Karate Kid that proved there was more to Chan than just being an adept physical performer, Jet Li follows up his turn in The Expendables with Ocean Heaven, as the cancer stricken single father of an autistic son. Like Chan and Shinjuku, Ocean eschews his typical gifts, but allows Li to deliver a strong and nuanced character that packs a punch in its own right.

If this premise sounds like it is designed specifically to tug at your heart strings and make you cry then chances are it probably will. If you take a gander at the poster above you can see Jet Li's face, he looks like a man with a depth of patience and understanding and you can practically see his halo as he smiles through the pain of his cancer. Li doesn't disappoint, he really embodies that saintly fellow of eternal patience. I suppose it's worth noting that he looks like a dude whose ass you could kick but don't want to because his smile is so adorable.

The movie is not about cheap sentiment despite a premise with an inherent minimum handkerchief limit. It takes the time to address some real concerns that Wang has. His son, Dafu, is twenty-one and severely autistic. I'll admit that because of TV's Parenthood and the movie Adam I was expecting a high functioning Asperger's Syndrome afflictee because I, somehow, forgot for a moment that other kinds of autism existed. If only The Shield were still around to remind me of such things (because, apparently, I learn nothing from actual life experience). Without his father's guidance Dafu has no way of taking care of himself so Wang spends his free time at work calling orphanages, mental care facilities, nursing homes and schools for the disabled wondering what exactly can be done. Dafu has the burden of being both too old and too young for the state to take care of him. Dafu's apparent unteachableness is magnified in numerous situations and you begin to feel, like Wang, exhausted.

Who knew that knowing you were dying had so much politics involved?

I imagine it's tough knowing you're going to die soon without really having a clear sense, in spite of preparation, of any sort of emotional or financial straits you may leave your family in. It's probably worse for anyone to whom the concept of death may be ungraspable and I think that Jet Li and the screenwriter have given these questions due consideration and created a very honest movie about death. It's so honest I don't know whether to cry or get my affairs in order. I honestly feel like I don't have time for the former.

Honestly, as good as Jet Li is and he's good enough to be considered for a Hong Kong film award, he is eclipsed by Zhang Wen who plays Dafu. Dafu appears to never be paying attention to his father, content to let everything be done for him while he pays attention to his few obsessions: swimming, dolphins, juggling, hide and seek and a girl. In a role with very little dialogue, Wen is able to convey his feelings with a series of finger twitches and a particular way of walking. Those gestures mean he is content or evened out while any shifts into anger can still be portrayed with screaming or crying jags. Wen never displays any sense of an actor playing a part, he lives and breathes the character and gives the character a sense of understanding we might not have thought possible. I don't mean to sound like those with certain severe forms of autism are incapable of higher thought, but until the film's final twenty minutes I didn't know if he'd ever understand the gravity of his situation. He seems to have gotten it, though. And not only gotten it but understood the magnitude all along. I like to think that Dafu's initial refusal to listen was an attempt to hold on to his father because if he doesn't understand then who will take care of him? You can't take him away, right? It wouldn't be fair.

The best thing about Ocean Heaven is that it never stops exploring or probing its deeper questions. The movie could've milked you for tears or taken you on a bullshit series of misadventures, but the movie isn't eager to throw caution to the wind. It addresses questions of legacy when it isn't dealing with the red tape of dying on a time table. The rare moments in the film when Dafu and Wang find themselves separated allows us to see the unconscious influence they've exerted over each other all these years. Wang stands in his son's favorite hiding place one night as if he expects, like Dafu does, that the other will materialize out of thin air. My favorite, of course, is the triumph represented by the moment when Dafu finally moves his stuffed dog from atop the television without having to be told.

Ocean Heaven is a simple story told with remarkable care and precision. It's not just about what it means to be a parent or a son, but about what we carry with us when one leg of the journey is over and the next one begins.

Mass. affection

2010-09-20T14:00:00.000-07:00

The Town [****]

There are two Ben Afflecks on display in The Town, one is the poised visual stylist who in the space of two films manages to stand shoulder to shoulder with some of cinema's heavyweights. The other is the actor whose own rise and potential fall is echoed in that of his character, former hockey player and bank robbery mastermind Doug MacRay. MacRay like Affleck was raised in a single parent home, like Affleck enjoyed notoriety (Affleck as a screenwriter and actor, once upon a time, MacRay as a hockey player who blew two chances and now leads the fated life of a Townie-- a born and bred criminal) and through the love of a good woman and divine providence comes to a point where redemption seems the next obvious step. Affleck is enjoying his second life as an actor and receiving well deserved praise for his proficiency with a camera. He has also settled into the role of family man with a wife and two daughters, but both Affleck and his fictional counterpart play their roles with a tentativeness. As men who have had it all before and know what it's like to lose it all.

In many ways the ease with which Affleck has settled into being a director, a legitimately great one at that, has a way of calling attention to itself. If we can evoke comparisons to Michael Mann (The Town is Heat in Boston, after all) from a narrative standpoint and in the crisp, concise way he shoots action, for those reasons we can also draw upon Sam Peckinpah too. Martin Scorsese and Clint Eastwood for how quickly he established himself as a force to be reckoned with then we must acknowledge a debt to everything that has come before. Affleck the director can shoulder that burden, but Affleck the actor turns the film into a naked, emotional plea from an artist.

Most of The Town is spent with Affleck's character getting to know the woman he and his crew kidnapped during a bank robbery. She didn't see their faces, but knows one small detail that can send them all down the river. So post kidnapping he befriends her to assess the risk (which is fairly big as evidenced by the above sentence) and begins to fall in love with her. During one of their dates he cracks a joke about how all of his TV watching gives him insight into the mechanics of crime fighting. It's not the joke that matters so much that it's the first time Affleck has cracked a joke on film in seven years. His old charm and charisma begin to shine through, but it's self conscious, a tentative baby step towards the easygoing, confident Affleck of yore. The man is probably more loved now than he's ever been but now that you see his face it's probably easier to hold him accountable for the sins of the past so you don't let the smile linger too long, you remember that it's all a house of cards.

You might be wondering, how does his tentativeness translate into a plea? Well it's the first time he's joked on film in seven years and it's on a date. Saying the wrong thing could send everything crashing down, but he can't unsay it. It's out there to be accepted or rejected. The film's final image also offers up Doug MacRay as a character on the cusp of redemption. Affleck the director has a way with actors (including himself) and in the coda of his film he makes peace with who he was, but knows that what his audience thinks of him matters so he leaves it to his audience to unify the two halves.

But the part of Affleck that is liked and respected continues to flourish. Ben Affleck elicits flawless performances from everyone in his ensemble. Jon Hamm, Jeremy Renner, Affleck and Rebecca Hall are all expectedly terrific. I also like the return of working class grit embodied by Slaine Jenkins as getaway driver Albert Maglone and Titus Welliver as a Charlestown bred FBI agent. His action scenes as previously stated are terrific. Crisp, concise, intelligible. Jeremy Renner's last stand with the police is evocative of Steve McQueen's shootout with the police in Sam Peckinpah's The Getaway. He's not anywhere near as stoic as McQueen or calculating but he goes for broke in a fairly hopeless situation and it's a thrilling sight.

When you get right down to it, The Town, more than being an exceptional acting showcase or action picture stripped down to it's bare essentials is a love letter. Ben Affleck has a way of framing his fair city in a way that gives it character, but also as the place that defines him as a performer and an individual.

If every city is drowning and all of it's inhabitants are just waiting to be saved Affleck is the benevolent God who will do so. Consider scenes from both of his directorial efforts: in "Gone Baby Gone" hero Patrick Kenzie has reunited a young girl with her drug addled mother and an uncertain future. By the letter of the law he has done the right thing and by the burden of Catholic guilt he has done the thing that lets him sleep at night. In his heart of hearts is it the right thing? Probably not, but it's an acceptable risk. Another hero is willing to make the same trade off with a similarly lifestyled mother in The Town and it speaks to Affleck's unconditional acceptance of the denizens of Boston and their myriad flaws.

One of the most haunting images in The Town is an establishing shot of the prison that houses Doug MacRay's father. It's desolate, lonely and cold reminding us that we live in a city of ghosts, but that ghosts are the sum of our experience. That being said the coda of The Town offers us the chance to reconcile with the ghosts of our past and anyone who hasn't taken the opportunity to forgive Affleck the sins of 2003 would do well to offer him the grace he affords his characters.

Something Something Button Mash

2010-09-14T11:15:00.000-07:00

Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World [*]

I have to admit upfront that the previews for Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World does pretty close to nothing for me. Michael Cera despite his infinite sameness can be charming, Edgar Wright because of his ability to understand our base, simple desires and affections and validate them with excellent motion pictures and a few actors gamely hamming it up could've/should've been the wild cards that make this film better than it looks. It doesn't work. Edgar Wright brings nothing short of his usual visual coherence and crisp editing to the film, but aside from one genuinely satisfying, pulse quickening sequence Wright is powerless despite what he brings to the table.

This might be the first Edgar Wright film to feel paced exactly like an evening with Michael Cera. It doesn't really move so much as mope, the narrative never gains any moment even as the stakes grow and the climax approaches. The film remains so evenly keeled and unenthusiastic. Speaking of which, a bored looking Mary Elizabeth Winstead plays pink haired Ramona Flowers. Scott's unrequited crush/ love interest/ Amazon delivery girl that literally travels through Scott's empty headspace that motivates him. Sure he'll fight for Ramona, but he'll also string along an immensely sweet and more likable seventeen year old girl with whom he is in a sexless non-relationship. But Scott only fights to be with Ramona (read: in Ramona), his struggles don't actually include any self improvement, at least, not in the way the film leads you to believe there will be.

So then comes a series of less than exciting battles against exes that employs the usual video game tropes of sixty-four hit combos, extra lives and people exploding into coins. Although to be fair, the one truly inspired set-piece involves Scott being "controlled" (gotta love the wordplay) by Ramona when he expresses his reluctance to fight her ex-girlfriend because, well, he doesn't hit girls. It's the only moment in which Scott displays a genuine awareness and concern for anyone not himself. I'm also a sucker for the other person as weapon and an inversion of the chivalrous idea of a man not hitting a woman and child (at the insistence of another woman of course).

The arched eyebrows and over enunciation of Chris Evans as action star Lucas Lee culminate in the movie's biggest missed opportunity and anti-climax (he rail grinds to his own doom) while Brandon Routh's super powered Vegan sub-plot offers up a delightful pair of cameos, but all inspiration remains but a blip on the map of Scott Pilgrim's world.

I've begun to consider the possibility, as I write this review, that the Scott Pilgrim source material is not meant to be affectionate in any way, I don't know how or why you pick video game loving, garage band hipster geeks as your target of derision(comic book lovers and film lovers, too, if we're considering all mediums the story is presented in). According to the IMDb page it is sometimes referred to as Scott Pilgrim's Precious Little Life which I have to take as derogatory. It says to me poor Scott Pilgrim, sharing a house and bed with his gay roomie, has a seventeen-year-old girl fawning all over him, is in a band called "Sex Bob-Omb" (also deeply sarcastic) and no means of visible income or support, man life is rough for this poor sap. I think the reason Scott's sister is always yelling at him is because he's a bum that life always seems to work out for and he's only motivated to fight for someone's vagina meanwhile she's ALWAYS working. I also think after the excellence of Up In The Air, Anna Kendrick is not so secretly frustrated with going back to being that one girl with a small part in a bad movie played by a one note actor.

I also can't help but wonder if Edgar Wright's participation is some sort of a warning that he's done with the clever/affectionate geek out shit. I know he has respect for genre films, video games (as evidenced by his UK series Spaced) and comic books and that he approached the film with the utmost professionalism, but it has also been eleven years since Spaced and from what I can tell everybody in all of Wright's other work may have had arrested development and simple pleasures but they were adults with jobs who tried so they deserved a little bit of a fantastical respite when life got too much for them to bear. Scott Pilgrim is five years out of high school, unemployed and sees life through the prism of a video game which puts him well within the realm of needing to grow the hell up.

As someone who is probably in the minority in disliking this film I'd like to point out something to its champions: the film's Universal logo is down in the 8-bit graphic style smacking anybody with an affection for video games square in the nostalgia bone. But I believe it betrays the integrity of that love by having Scott initially lose to the final boss and before activiating his extra life for a do-over all of Scott's mistakes are explicitly spelled out and he is told what lessons he needs to learn. Part of the sense of accomplishment, appeal and fun of those games was the earned ending. We made our own mistakes, figured them out for ourselves and corrected them. What happens to Scott Pilgrim is tantamount to having a cheat code for life and, maybe even, the simplest and most undemanding existence of all.

What I'm saying in the most explicit way possible is that you have all been mocked. Anybody who has dared to take an interest in the story no matter the medium has been mocked. If you don't believe you're being made fun of then understand that you are at least encouraging the most dishonest movie of the year to spread more poison.

The Cutting Kind

2010-09-08T15:54:00.000-07:00

Machete [***1/2]

Robert Rodriguez's Machete comes dangerously close to being the first wholly successful competitor in the recent throwback sweepstakes that has beset cinema since mid-August. First, Stallone took the can't lose premise and casting of The Expendables and made a mediocre disjointed mess. Next, Alexandre Aja's Piranha 3-D saddled us with its most boring characters for the biggest chunk of its running time then almost made up for it with a full-on blood bath and great Christopher Lloyd appearances. Sure there were boobs (and good ones), but that doesn't make up for the wealth of Jerry O'Connell the movie gives us. Then along comes Robert Rodriguez's finally feature-length Machete. The first theatrical trailer didn't quite have the trash appeal of the original, but I was hoping for the best and largely it delivers.

The plot such as it is concerns Danny Trejo as the titular ex-Federale betrayed by his boss and displaced to America after a drug lord murders his wife. He becomes the patsy of a conservative senator's advisor (Jeff Fahey) in an attempt to assassinate said senator so that his chances at election rise exponentially and his border closing initiative can begin. The initiative stands to greatly benefit the aforementioned drug lord (Steven Seagal) and this betrayal greatly benefits Machete because it puts everybody who needs Machete's blade up their ass right in his path.

Machete ends up becoming allied with an ICE agent (Jessica Alba) and a mysterious woman named She (like Che (Michelle Rodriguez)) to help him fight his war. Machete is a big bad ass who really doesn't need help with the physical stuff but the scope of betrayal necessitates that he make friends whether he likes it or not. She runs a group called the Network that helps illegals find jobs, feeds them when they have no work and helps them escape from hitmen in a crowded hospital.

Danny Trejo has been around since the days of Desperado and with his first starring role it's nice to see that Trejo really has talent and charisma rather than just a look that Rodriguez finds gives his films character. He's a really authentic part of the Rodriguez verse, he's got pretty good deadpan comic timing and when he says the classic "you just fucked with the wrong Mexican" line you believe it. The guy's wife was killed right in front of him, bosses, beautiful ladies and politicians betray him and now he's used somebody's guts as a rope. I'd say the entire ordeal is starting to wear on him. He's also pretty good with machetes, blows people's brains out with relative ease too. He's pretty much who I want Antonio Banderas to grow up to be. Most of the other questionable casting actually works out pretty well. Big gambles were made on Jessica Alba and Lindsay Lohan and they actually pay off. Lohan's character is saddled with a lot of the same real life baggage she has (i.e. someone in serious need of rehab with a possibly perverted father and skanky mother) and while I won't say it makes her performance raw or honest I think it made it easier for her to come to work prepared. Jessica Alba might be too pretty to be plausible but ever since she got her face pummeled in by Casey Affleck I'm more willing to give her and her work a chance. I think one of these days somebody is honestly going to figure out what purpose she best serves in a movie and give her the right role.

Sadly, though, Machete still performs a major misstep. As the film goes on and gains momentum it isn't simply about revenge it becomes a film about the immigration issue. As Machete pursues his quest for revenge the myth of himself grows and he starts to represent the downtrodden masses caught between the worlds of their nightmares and their dreams. Machete's allies take up arms alongside him and this leads to an all-out actual war. Machete's personal revenge is given short shrift and the movie's politics take center stage. I don't have any grievances with what the film has to say on the issue of immigration. When Lindsay Lohan's character comes gunning for DeNiro's uber-conservative senator and then, upon achieving her goal, literally shoots the guns from the hand of every man fighting to help along the movie's climax I appreciated what was being said: another war isn't going to solve this problem. On the other hand, in a damning way, I think it was also being suggested that without a personal stake in the fight we should just walk away. Perhaps leaving the border fence question as an eternally debatable one is better than turning it into an avoidable tragedy.

The issue seems too big for this particular movie, not that the movie doesn't have the right to address it, but the importance of this particular discussion is too much for the movie to bear. On the one hand I look like I don't care about the larger themes of the film, but I do. I also wanted the satisfaction of a revenge film and I don't quite get that. It's a double edged sword this film.

However, if we're going to get the two promised Machete sequels I'll take him in whatever strength we get him: avenger, superman, folk hero. But whatever evolution he undergoes I hope the ending of this film serves as a reminder that every transition can only bear so much weight on its shoulders.

To the limit

2010-09-05T12:26:00.000-07:00

The American [***]

Control director Anton Corbijn's second picture as director, The American evokes memories of yet another picture about control, the aptly titled Limits of Control by Jim Jarmusch. Both are films that unfold at a speed roughly the pace of a Sunday drive (that probably sounds like a negative when phrased in such a way, but it is actually a pretty high compliment), both films feature a leading man whose expressionless face could bore holes through stone, they love espresso and often find themselves in the company of a beautiful naked woman (although only the hero of Jarmusch's film has the capacity to resist urges of any kind). What makes both films smashing successes is the way the hero is often left alone with his own thoughts. As a hitman how often do you contemplate, in your loneliness, your own death? Do you ever wonder if the only other guy who knows where you are is conspiring against you? That's how a movie in which nothing much happens is able to pull you in. It gives you time to think about the aforementioned questions, but also given the right actor you can see past the stone-pokerfacedness and watch those introspective gears turn. It's a way of knowing that we're asking ourselves the right question as an audience.

Admittedly, The American is a fairly typical George Clooney role. An equal in tone and pacing to Michael Clayton in which his character, a consummate and unflappable bad ass in his chosen profession, who comes to the late in the game realization that he's been working for the wrong side all along. And if he has always known that fact, and let's assume that he is smart enough to be aware of this, the movie is usually about the final job in a line of work that threatens to destroy his soul entirely.

Clooney has always had an understated world weariness to him and he uses it to great effect here as he typically does. I like best the smaller moments that let us see the constantly engaged hitman's brain in action. When visiting a local mechanic he quickly scans the shed for the parts he'll need to build a sound suppressor for a rifle. It's a deftly edited sequence that shows a man quick on his feet, a contrast to the slightly frazzled trigger man we see in the film's opening. Editing aside, Clooney brings a keen sense of awareness to the proceedings. He's constantly calling his boss and delaying the job because he's starting to grapple, perhaps for the first time ever, with an inability to detach himself from his work. If his work is to be in Italy he will, of course, fall in love with someone. He also becomes friends with a priest, both are ways of passively and aggressively searching for an avenue out of his life of crime.

The American is not a typically breathlessly paced Hollywood thriller but a slow burner that examines the consequences of a certain kind of life with a certain amount of speed and care. It is also another worthy addition to the typical George Clooney character pantheon.

The Patriot Act(ion)

2010-08-28T19:00:00.000-07:00

Yuen Woo-Ping's True Legend is a certifiably grand entertainment that traffics in ridiculously over-the-top fights, unrequited love and hate, vengeance and patriotism. In short, it's everything I've come to expect from every martial arts movie I've seen since Donnie Yen's phenomenal starring vehicleIp Man. Vincent Zhao essays the lead role of Su, a fearless warrior who wants to settle into family life and teach wushu, so he refuses a promotion. This means good things for two colleagues, Ma and Yuan, but Yuan resents Su for always being given the things he turns down. Yuan's jealousy comes to a head when he loses the woman he loves to Su. He murders their adoptive father and, using the five venom fist, vanquishes Su into what should be a lonely, watery grave.

However, the woman he did this for forsakes her child and plunges in after Su. This really angers Yuan who has to put up with Su's little brat in the hopes that the kid's mother will one day come to reclaim him. Maybe in the meantime he can come up with a better plan to woo Mommy or, assuming they didn't have such things at the time, invent a foundation that will make him look not so deathly gray.

At this point, I should comment on a couple of the film's really nifty touches: the villain has a super lightweight armor fused to his skin and his deathly gray pallor comes from the poisons injected in him by various scorpions and spiders. He sticks his hands into a box full of them, much like Tong Po did with glass in Kickboxer or Charlie Sheen did with caramel and gummy bears in Hot Shots Part Deux! The second things is that when Su begins rehabilitating his hair is grown long and he's punching a tree to build up his strength. The heart warms at this unexpected homage to Hard to Kill and why shouldn't it? Because if there's one thing Su proves by the end of his crazy journey it's that he's hard to kill.

Another point of Su's rehab is his training with the Old Sage (Gordon Liu) and the God of Wushu (Jay Chou). The sage cackles maniacally and strokes his long white beard while the God of Wushu handily deflects Su's every strike and knocks him from countless precipices. The "training sequence" and a showdown with another drunken boxer compromise the two worst sequences of the film. The training is full of horrendous computer generated images of mountains that make the film look like a sub Monkey King adventure film. The sequence with the other drunken boxer isn't too bad, but it's marred by what looks like breakdancing moves and a desire to speed the competitors up via CG so that it looks like they're trying to drill holes into the floor. They're pretty ugly mistakes in a film that doesn't make many at all.

Besides the above mentioned sequences the fights in the film are pretty exceptional. The first being Su's showdown with Venom Fist Master, Yuan, which is the kind of righteously angry battle you should expect from a guy whose come to claim his wife and son from his most mortal enemy. There's a particularly impressive sequence in a snake pit where both men make exceptional use of the confined space, doing the splits to hold themselves in place while just wailing on each other or shimmying past each other to avoid attacking snakes. A real person couldn't get that much mileage out of confined spaces, but it seems like a surprisingly normal and plausible person in a confined space type of fight for a wuxia movie.

The film has a third act that's entirely different from what I expected. Su's showdown with Yuan happens with about forty minutes left in the film and when it's over there's a whole other direction for the film's last half hour. It moves in a cycle of Fall, Revenge, Redemption and Redemption is inarguably the most crowd pleasing-est part.

Haunted by the failure to save his wife Su is a raging drunk and a beggar. In one scene his son barters to buy a sweet potato and when he goes to split it with his father (they don't show what I'm about to tell you in its entirety) it seems like the guy eats the whole potato when his kid's back is turned. But he receives charity from Ma, one of his fortunate buddies from the beginning, who is the head of the Wushu federation. Su decides to pay Ma back by defending the country's honor in a free for all against fighters of other disciplines. But Ma failed to defend his country's honor first, so it's more like he's getting a redemptive revenge to make up for not saving his wife, which is slightly less honorable, but not much because the stakes are higher than they were previously. Su fights a trio of wrestlers played by mammoth seven footers. The mammoth seven footers angle is typical of films like Jet Li's Fearless in that they are non-Asian, but that isn't always the case. However, the specimen in films meant to please the crowd is always ostensibly physically superior. With the exception of Ip Man it's hard to know for sure if the hero will survive if their opponent is non-Asian. I guess you can gauge whether it is truly the country's honor at stake or personal honor to determine the hero surviving, but this is usually a metaphor for national Chinese honor all the same.*

The finale is brutal, with wrestling moves like tombstones and power bombs contributing to the requisite head trauma induced by a small guy being attached to wires and doing impossible things to impossibly big guys who beat him impossibly bad before realizing his spirit and body cannot be broken. It's a tense fight because people fighting for their country's honor in exhibition matches tend to receive Apollo Creed inRocky IV levels of brokenness. And the film's final fight gloriously milks that tension and patriotism. The tension is also sold by the bond Su shares with his on-screen son who shows a genuine concern for his father and can cry like nobody's business. The scene where he declares that he won't leave his father despite it being his best option is genuinely touching. He was pretty much abandoned by one parent once before and his other parent is a mess because of what happened to the other parent. This kid knows his parents love each other and him, but he openly and directly suffers as a result of it twice. But he is wonderful and selfless about it. It gives the excitement of the fights an extra layer of emotional resonance.

Despite an unfortunate act two setback, True Legend is thrilling and appropriately warmhearted with only a couple of regrettable details to be found. On that note, I'll leave you with a final detail to ponder. On the set of Kill Bill it was rumored that David Carradine and Woo-Ping were not big fans of one another. I don't know if that's true or if they share a stubborn old martial artists animosity that results in the occasional blow up that seems like a big deal to everyone but them, but Woo-Ping has dedicated this film to Carradine's memory and cast him as an unabashedly cartoonish asshole of a villain who dopes up his wrestlers to ensure the destruction of the "Chinaman." Is this a fun tribute to your a-hole buddy or a final middle finger? I don't know. But I like it.

Note: Objections to my use of the phrase Chinese honor are expected. Sometimes I also say things like "not rape, but date rape." It's not a distinction I make for any reason other than it was an accident and I said it in later conversations almost reflexively. It is, however, a hilarious language gaffe.

Three And Out

2010-08-24T10:36:00.000-07:00

Brooklyn's Finest [***1/2]

Brooklyn's Finest tells three different stories involving a police officer at a cross roads: First, we have Sal (Ethan Hawke) a morally compromised cop who may or may not have been a bad guy before his wife's sickness and ever expanding family caused the sudden need to move to a bigger place. A need that can only be met with cold, hard (and ultimately dirty) cash. Next is Doogan (Richard Gere), a hair's breadth away from retirement who wakes every morning and puts an unloaded gun in his mouth and squeezes the trigger. Doogan is reluctantly assigned as a training officer his final week on the job and we see that his style of policing (for the most part) matches his one foot out the door approach to life. Finally, we have Tango (Don Cheadle) an undercover detective working as a drug kingpin in a particularly violent Brooklyn apartment complex. He's close to getting the desk job that he always wanted, but his last assignment requires betraying his only real friend in the life, Casanova Philips (Wesley Snipes), who saved his life during his job related stint in prison. The three stories never really connect on a deeper level, characters cameo in each other's stories in mostly superficial ways, but they all end up in the same crime ridden apartment complex on a fateful night and pretty much remain strangers.

Director Antoine Fuqua is no stranger to stories of police corruption, he and Hawke navigated similar terrain in 2001's Training Day, where Hawke's character only dabbled in ways of villainy. Here Hawke is a full-on bad guy with a badge, not necessarily a bad man in general, but in close proximity to drug money he is the worst morally compromised sort. He's got a pregnant, sick wife, the doctor keeps telling him to move out of his mold infested house and just when you think you've met his entire brood there comes another child. Six including the twins his wife is carrying. No wonder Sal is seen in a church not asking for forgiveness, but chastising God for his dire straits and asking for help. If your God won't let you have birth control maybe he owes it to you to help get a bigger house.

Ethan Hawke is always good at playing The Guy with a Choice, sometimes like in Daybreakers there's a clear right way to go and there's no moralizing to it while in other film's he's just a born criminal (Before The Devil Knows You're Dead, What Doesn't Kill You), but Brooklyn's Finest gives Hawke the fertile middle ground that allows him to justifiably seethe with righteous anger and kick himself for saving a friend instead of taking the money and running.

I've always liked the films of Antoine Fuqua they're swift and entertaining and occasionally they deliver larger than life characters, but until this film there hasn't actually been a legitimately great dramatic moment in any of his previous works. Gere's Doogan lives a burnout's life. Other younger cops harass him and call him a coward, his only friends are apparently fish and the prostitute he visits on a weekly basis. Doogan's proposition to the prostitute to run away with him (wherein he serenades her with "Sea of Love") is a sweet emotionally naked moment for Doogan and it really backfires on him. Or does it? He makes the proposal to her because she buys him a watch as a retirement present, she rejects him and it's sad. Maybe he even contemplates killing himself, but he bought his fishing gear already. He knows he's a born loner, but maybe he needs to see if he has a chance of retiring with someone at his side. So he tried it, and the thought of suicide that he entertains every morning, is faux suicide. Doogan's way of saying, it could be worse, now let's get going. It's like having back pain and taking twelve Aleve in the morning just to get up. You're old, you're broken but you're not dead.

Until this third viewing I never realized that Doogan could just be being overdramatic at being a man defeated by life. He's done with the job, sure, but his last week is also threatening to get pretty interesting and he doesn't want that either. He's so uninterested in accolades or work that he refuses to fabricate a story that could save a rookie's career and earn him a citation, but more importantly he's ready to go home.

It's nice to see, if also brutal and horrifying, that before he can walk into the sunset Doogan has to go renegade to save a missing girl. The sense of purpose infused within Doogan in the film's final moments is a lot like reading George Pelecanos' novel "The Night Gardener" without the bitter irony of what happened to the ex-cop in that book. In general, I think Brooklyn's Finest is capable of doling out humanity and irony and valiant violence in a way that is evocative of Pelecanos.

Don Cheadle and Ethan Hawke's stories come the closest to fully intersecting, but the character played by Cheadle is never mentioned by Hawke even though it is his lackeys that Hawke and other cops are constantly busting and/or murdering. Cheadle's character struggles with the idea of whether or not to descend fully into his street persona and he confides this much in his boss (Will Patton), but what keeps him from doing exactly that is his loyalty to Philips' moreso than the job. He doesn't have anything to prove to fellow gangster Red (Michael K. Williams) by not wanting to beat a snitch to death, but any indulgence of his undercover persona makes Philip's harder to help out and it's Tango's desire to have it both ways that fuels the story. I like the chemistry between Cheadle and Snipes, a roof top scene between the two is similarly evocative of the final scene between Stringer Bell and Avon Barksdale. Men on top of an empire, the betrayal of one, by another, inevitable. You get a sense of their history in the way they interact with each other and talk about their hopes and dreams and even plan a final score. Had it gone that far, the scene of confession between Cheadle and Snipes probably would've been heartbreaking.

What the film does give us, introspection from another action stalwart of a bygone era, is pretty good stuff. This might be the last time a movie allows Wesley Snipes to be this good. I'd like to be wrong, though. Cheadle is really good, too, wielding the righteous anger and calling Ellen Barkin a dude. The situation is tense and the choice yet another unenviable one. Somehow this feels like the weakest section of the film, maybe because it traffics too much in familiarity from a pop culture standpoint with vets from TVs The Wire and Brotherhood but also countless other films. It's tough to say, after all, the Gere segment did elicit a Pelecanos' comparison. Maybe, and probably, it's as simple as "I can't betray him he's my friend" isn't as compelling as "I will buy my family's new house with your blood" and "all I'm trying to do is live my life unnoticed and I can't" are much more compelling dilemmas to be faced with.

Neither Vital Nor Necessary

2010-08-21T15:51:00.000-07:00

The Expendables [**]

Of course it was too good to be true. All these stalwarts of action in one place. Stallone working once again under the Millenium Films/ Nu Image banner that brought the glorious bloodbath Rambo to the masses a couple of years ago. Everything about this film should ostensibly speak to the action lover in all of us, but it doesn't really, except, as a roster of names, a wish in one hand and a pile of shit in the other.

The Expendables such as it is, is the story of a team of freelance mercenaries led by Barney Ross (Stallone leading et al) hired by Bruce Willis to take down the General (David Zayas) who overthrew the government of a fictitious Latin American country. A lengthy bit of surveillance and one action scene later Barney and his best buddy Lee (Jason Statham) discover that the real target is a former company man (Eric Roberts) who has teamed with the general to profit from the country's drug trade. We also learn that Barney and his men are more expendable than even the fact that Stallone has a tattoo that says 'expendable' implies.

In the action department, the film is a more miss than hit affair. Perhaps we should've known that we were going to be letdown in the first action scene. After Terry Crews' Hale Cesar blows a Somali pirate in half the film switches to night vision so the rest of the Somali pirates can be decimated in shades of pink and yellow, robbing me of the blood I have so rightly come to expect from films under this banner and from Stallone's brand of choreographed chaos. If this only happened once perhaps I could forgive it, but every action scene boasts a failing of one sort or another. Except a great car chase where Stallone and Jet Li are pursued by gunmen. It's exciting in a way that none of the one on one duals are. Perhaps the idea of having so many good fighters in one place is such a daunting task that the only sensible thing to do is to give the best tiny understated action scene to the prettiest guy in the cast, Jason Statham. Everyone from this film except Couture and Crews has been in a better action film at some point or another during their careers. I'll be fair here and say The Expendables is undoubtedly crushed by the weight of expectations, but it's not like the film only misses the mark by a little sometimes.

The one element of Stallone's pictures that remains present and accounted for since Rocky Balboa is the introspective nature of the lifelong bruiser who realizes he has one last good fight left in him. Perhaps, The Expendables lacks the finality of this realization (as evidenced by sequel talk after the film's strong opening weekend), but is certainly capable of observing finality in some way. Rourke delivers a stunning monologue about his final moments in the mercenary life while the camera zooms in on Stallone who looks haunted and saddened but for unfathomable reasons hasn't been broken yet. To be fair, if this were Stallone's monologue I think it would close the book on this character as well, but he's not ignorant to the way a certain kind of life wears on you and he feels the need to address it. So he gives moments such as this to his most seasoned heroes (Rourke, Lundgren) and they wear the moments that break them so very well. It should also be noted that David Zayas of Dexter fame plays the General and he looks so incapable of doing bad without a heavy heart that he endears in surprising ways.

I could probably say a little more about the failings of The Exepndables, how any attempt at humor falls as hard and unceremoniously as mythical figures often do, how if this film were a steak then Dolph Lundgren is the steak sauce it could use a little more of, but instead I'll take the performances of Rourke and Lundgren as an acknowledgment that sometimes when the war is over we're only left with shadows of our former selves.

The Killer (Performance) Inside of Him

2010-08-20T19:27:00.000-07:00

The Killer Inside Me [***1/2]

In reality Casey Affleck is probably as nice and charming as the day is long (recent accusations of sexual harassment not withstanding) and one of my favorite performances of his is as the titular, amiable loser Lonesome Jim, but he's more famous for roles like Patrick Kenzie in Gone Baby Gone and Robert Ford, the coward, from The Assassination of Jesse James ad nauseum. In both of those film's Affleck is compelled to draw his gun because no one takes him quite seriously enough. Compared to other cowboys and other tough talking Bostonians he's tall, lanky, polite and slight so it's easy to misjudge him. It's also dangerous. Michael Winterbottom's The Killer Inside Me is the first film of his career to effectively exploit that aspect of his screen persona.

Affleck plays Lou Ford, the polite, amiable, and closeted psychopath of a deputy sheriff to a small Texas town. In voiceover, Ford extols the virtues of being well mannered and folksy while he drives to the edge of town to encourage a suspected prostitute (Jessica Alba) to get out of town. The exchange is brief and polite up to the point where the prostitute strikes the sheriff. Repeatedly. He strikes her back, too. Delivering the same kind of "justice" Ned received in Unforgiven but only to the meat of her buttocks. Eventually, this little fracas leads to rough sex and a plot to swindle the dipshit son of the richest man in town out of ten thousand dollars.

Such plotting awakens in Lou the desire to settle old scores and as with all plotting of this nature things go horribly, horribly wrong. The reason film's like this work is not in seeing how it all goes wrong, although that certainly helps, it's in watching the man caught in the eye of the storm fray and fall apart at the seams. Casey Affleck does his fraying and falling apart with a perfect poker face. He listens, he attacks only the weakest people and only at their most vulnerable moments. Because of his position and his trustworthy face he enjoys the benefits of being a silver tongued devil. The viewer only gets to see the madness take root through use of flashback. Lou kills a girl as a teenager and his stepbrother takes the fall, his propensity for tenderizing female backside is given an origin story and his dalliances with the prostitute from the beginning also occupy a place in his mind. The flashbacks pop up a couple of times throughout the film showing that Lou's vices have taken root and festered like a virus. The dormant monster begins to consume him.

There are some other nice touches to Affleck's performance. He's a real charmer, but like I said before he's a good talker. He can make anything that comes out of his mouth sound pretty believable, so naturally he's pretty good with '50s style hard boiled dialogue like this movie has. Then again Affleck is a good everyman type so it stands to reason that he can slide into the role like a chameleon and pull it off. One of the nice little touches Affleck brings to his character is that when he assaults his two female victims he either dons gloves or takes off his dress shirt. It's either vanity regarding his hands and his clothing or it's something that you shed from yourself or burrow into to distance yourself from the crime. It's either smarm or the only sign that Ford is losing it and can't keep a safe distance from his own worst nature.

It must also be said that the entire cast of The Killer Inside Me is game, but the best moments belong to Affleck and Elias Koteas as a suspiciously well informed union man who knows the information he supplied Ford is part of the reason the son of the town's construction magnate is dead. Most everyone in town is smarter than they look, but some are burdened with a gender or an age curse that makes them blind to who Ford really is and what he's capable of, only Koteas' character has the audacity to come at him full throttle time and time again.

I suspect that The Killer Inside Me would be a really good film no matter who was in it, but with Affleck in the lead role it becomes yet another case of the difficulty in imaging that the actor can exist without the character or vice versa. Casey Affleck rises to the occasion and sears himself into our memory yet again.

Note: In regards to Casey Affleck's alleged sexual harassment I say the fact that he asked the plaintiff her age before asking her if she thought it was about time she got pregnant clearly speaks to his concern for her unfulfilled wish of being a mother. Had he simply asked her if she wanted to get pregnant without asking her age then it would be crass and unacceptable.

The Blank Identity

2010-08-20T01:15:00.000-07:00

Salt [**]

If there's one thing the Philip Noyce directed- Angelina Jolie starring vehicle Salt can't be faulted for it's wasting time getting down to business. The film opens with Jolie being tortured (off-screen) in North Korea and her husband and some of her CIA fellows arriving in tow to spring her. Next thing you know it's a year later and Salt is preparing to celebrate her anniversary with her husband until some Russian ex-pat shows up and tells her she's a Russian spy who is supposed to assassinate the visiting Russian president at our vice president's funeral. Call it the worst anniversary ever.

Salt is essentially a feature length chase scene in which Jolie spends fifty minutes running away from the CIA proclaiming that she isn't a Russian spy whilst doing all the things a suspected Russian spy does in between bouts of pleading for her co-workers to find her husband. Then she tells the Russians that she's actually pretty fucking American (by murdering all of her handlers) and spends the next portion of the movie running towards them. To be fair they have another traitor in their midst just not Salt. Salt, it should be noted, is and always was an American but she spent some time under Russian interpolation when her parents died there and she was taken in to be trained as the perfect spy in the "mythical" KA program.

For a movie so boldly concerned with the identity and loyalties of a single spy, am I with the Russians or Americans? Did my time in a Korean prison break me in a way Dolph Lundgren from Rocky IV never could? Salt never manages to distinguish itself in any discernible way. The film was written for Tom Cruise but when he jumped ship it became a vehicle for Angelina Jolie. It's also the one film Jolie's been in that never manages to objectify or sexualize her in any way. It was admirable when I thought it was done on purpose, but less so when I discovered they'd just traded one star in for another. Perhaps you could play the "this movie needs a star" card, but really it doesn't. The charisma of Liev Schreiber and Chiwetel Ejiofor is dialed down a great deal, although in the spirit of honesty they are character actors with leading men looks who can't help being badasses, but in this film they just need to be faces. Andre Braugher's inclusion in a blink and you miss it role speaks as much to the idea that we need those who can blend in more than we need stars as the scenes in which Jolie is buried under latex so that she goes unrecognized at the start of the film's climax. What I'm trying to say is, in this case, the star makes not one iota of difference because they bring no sense of identity to the role even though they bring movie star baggage with them. This casting switcheroo effectively kills the tension and negates the crux of the film.

The action scenes in the film are not bad. I'm a sucker for a good car jump and the climax has a well staged close quarters shootout and the shaky cam doesn't take away much at all from the coherence of the action but it happens to someone we never know at all. When you're movie begs the question "Who is Salt?" Make sure the answer matters.

Royal Shit

2010-08-17T19:07:00.001-07:00

Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time [1/2*]

Prince of Persia directed by Mike Newell and costing a couple hundred million dollars threatens for a couple of minutes not to be as bad as I was expecting. To be fair it gets down to business pretty quickly, but it ebbs and flows pretty often. Exciting for about two minutes then boring for about five or so. It stretches just under two hours to the point where it feels about four hours. The film's length and the dearth of excitement are just where the problems begin.

I like swords and I like looking at Gemma Arterton, but if there's two things in this world that don't work in the same movie it's her and swords (see also: Clash of the Titans). Arterton also serves the same purpose here that she did in Titans to infuriate me with her prettiness and to be a gift bestowed on humanity by the gods. In Titans she was an immortal, here she's just been spared by the Gods to be the protector of a magical dagger that allows its holder to travel back in time. I'll expound more on the dagger thing momentarily, but I guess what I'm trying to say is if you can see Gemma Arterton in The Disappearance of Alice Creed you should. She can hold her own as an actress, she's given stuff to do and you finally have a reason to look at her that doesn't require you to sit through the interminable for a change.

Speaking of interminable, the plot of Sands of Time involves Young Dasdan (Jake Gyllenhall) being plucked from the streets as a resourceful young beggar by the king and growing up to be loved and a great warrior. Dasdan grows up to lead the attack on an ancient peaceful neighboring Persian city called Alamut (also resided over by Arterton's Tamina). Alamut is alleged to be providing weapons to enemies of Persia and are set to be overtaken by the Persians. Dasdan comes to realize after a lengthy battle, the bestowing of Tamina to his person and the subsequent assassination of his father that the reason he was sent to Alamut was for a dagger (a dagger that holds magical sand in the hourglass on its handle and allows the possessor to travel back in time thirty seconds whenever they push a button) and the ruse to get him there was a lie. Dasdan teams up with Tamina to get rid of the dagger before his power mad uncle (Ben Kingsley) can get a hold of it and change the course of his life as the less favored son. Also, Dasdan is on the run for "killing" his father (spoiler: not him). Lots of bloodless battles are fought, times is traveled back in so that our hero can erase his own surprising ineptitude (near death by snakes, girl, brother).

I'll give you a moment to pick your jaw up from the floor while you process that Dasdan has been manipulated by someone he trusts, sent on a wild goose chase for weapons that don't exist and essentially Matt Damon-ed all to hell in this movie. That's right people, Green Zone has been re-imagined as a swashbuckling summer fantasy no one will think twice about going to see. They literally didn't think twice as the film only made ninety million dollars in America.

Fear not, Prince of Persia still manages to be as bracingly irrelevant as Green Zone but with a few added bonuses: Arterton as stated before does a rehash of her Clash of the Titans schtick, there's time travel in it and Ben Kingsley as the treacherous brother. Also, none of these are good things and at least two of them are things from movies that came out earlier this year that no one gives a shit about and they've been crammed into another that no one gives a shit about. And when I say "no one" I mean me, but I'll gladly have anyone who feels the same as my company.

I'm glad that I don't have a family I'd have had to take to see this piffle. Its an extravagant waste of money that's safe, bloodless, boobless and almost certainly a predator that stalks your family for easy prey with its attendant Disney and Jerry Bruckheimer logos. I'm saying that families looking to be entertained are an infinitely stupider unit than the individual looking to be entertained and as such Bruckheimer and Disney continue the trend of forsaking them every step of the way. Perhaps, I'm just so mad because no one else will be and they should. You paid to see specific elements of it at least once this year and now you're just paying to be insulted and duped.

As they say in the soaps, like sands through the hourglass, these are the wastes of our lives.

Nothing better than a lack of a clever headline

2010-05-02T19:26:00.001-07:00

Kick Ass [****]

I find in “Stardust” director Matthew Vaughn’s frankly excellent “Kick Ass” a cinematic cousin to Jody Hill’s “Observe and Report” and not because they indulge in some pretty awesome violence that is, in at least two instances, a gut punch in its shocking-ness but also because both films exist in a world that is a little south of reality where the unhinged are not only not particularly well reigned in but that they’re the self-appointed guardians of our virtue. To be fair, the crazy dedication that Rogen and Cage display in their respective films is rooted in failure (one is too unhinged to be a cop, the other a disgraced former one) and it brings a touching vulnerability to the cracked personas that choose, and frankly it is a crazy choice, to don a costume and mete out justice with no regard for rules or the comfort of standing on the right side of the line. You might wonder if I think that all cops and good Samaritans are crazy and I don’t but there are obvious breaks in the realities of these two characters so it makes it kind of sad, kind of scary and dangerous and shocking. If you’re wondering whether I think Batman is crazy, I guess I do, but he’s also more popular and rooted in popular culture in a way that is undeniable. The folks of “Kick Ass” can, in my estimation, have the benefit of being treated like regular people despite their arsenal because one guy gets beat up a lot and when Big Daddy, Hit Girl and Kick Ass aren’t wearing their costumes they are infinitely more normal than a millionaire playboy with a death wish and advanced research and development on his side.

“Kick Ass” is on the one hand an origin story for our title character, but it begins in media res for our father-daughter duo and their paths eventually converge when Kick Ass, who is performing heroics by request via My Space, decides to take on the junkie/drug dealers harassing his love interest/fag hag (she thinks Kick Ass’ alter ego is gay and this mission is clandestine) and Hit Girl shows up to save him because he’s overzealous and undertough. Dave Lizewski/Kick Ass (Aaron Johnson) decides on a whim that he wants to be a superhero and invests in a yellow and green scuba suit, practices pithy one-liners and pulling out a pair of sticks that suggest he means business and then finally standing up for the downtrodden and beaten upon. Ass’ first foray into hero-dom is met with only a marginal degree of ass beating and a maximum degree of internet phenomenery, but his second attempt, this time against the thieves that regularly rob him and a friend ends with a knife to the gut and a nice little roll over the hood of a car. If you felt inclined to believe this would be the end of KA’s heroic jaunts no one would blame you, but the resultant steel pins and extensive surgeries make him feel tougher and more Wolverine-esque so he has a psychotic break and says “I’m doing it again.”

Big Daddy and Hit Girl (Nicolas Cage, Chloe Grace Moretz) are a father-daughter team who have made it their mission to eliminate the crime boss who wrecked Daddy’s life when he refused to join his payroll, and as I said before their interests eventually converge with Kick Ass, they’re a more deadly and experienced team. Their relationship as regular people is both touching and hilariously vulgar: she swears like a sailor and her father dotes on her, but he gets really confused when she acts her age and talks about puppies and stuff. She’s only kidding though, she probably thinks that being a girl is for fags anyway. The relationship between Hit Girl and Big Daddy is part of the reason the stakes in the film feel so high, they love each other and can function normally, but there’s a crazy and overwhelming compulsion to fight a war that already took away everything you had once before and is likely to do it again. Kick Ass also has a similar relationship to his own father and Mark Strong’s villain has a relationship with his son and they all suggest unconditional love but espouse different degrees of communication: Hit Girl and Big Daddy share everything they’re a team, the villain shields his son from what he does for most of the movie and Kick Ass’ father notices his son has blossomed out of his shell but their routine is predicated on extended silences at the dinner table followed by the occasional uber-mundane observation. That the mothers are peripheral characters in the film, when they are present at all, speaks to the idea that without a feminine guiding voice we are truly lost souls and perhaps even that the city itself is the mother that birthed us and it must be protected at all costs. I guess when one finds their self on the villainous side of the equation, we must acknowledge that the mother was ineffectual and as she abandoned us we abandon our desire to be good.

This, of course, leaves us with Hit Girl who is the film’s lone female character of import. Roger Ebert was morally outraged, in his review of Kick Ass a few weeks ago, at the site of a child murdering bad guys and also being subsequently beaten herself during the film’s final showdown. For starters, she doesn’t get beaten that bad. I just want to say that even in all seriousness there are worse acts of violence perpetrated on children in movies and on TV every day. Hit Girl also, at least, for about two thirds of the film exists on a different plane than the other characters. She’s bonding with her dad, she’s not inundated with the same trauma as he is. She’s been interpolated by him, yes, but she’s like a preternaturally gifted athlete. The carnage around her is CGI blood, she’s an awesome and amusing site. She’s played with warmth and humor and spunk. While I’m not one to shit on someone’s opinion (particularly because in a bonafide verbal confrontation they’d clean my proverbial clock,maybe even my verbal, biological and evolutionary ones too, who knows?) I am calling bullshit on Mr. Ebert here. However, there is a moment when the film begins to perform a disservice to the character.

As the third act of “Kick Ass” begins a shocking event transpires that changes Hit Girl’s relationship to the film. Gone should be the goofy soundtrack choices that tell you “look this little girl is whooping people’s asses isn’t this funny” but after giving her a seriously great take no prisoners moment set to Ennio Morricone’s theme to “The Good, The Bad and The Ugly,” argue for its overuse taking the piss out of a moment if you want to but that doesn’t negate how perfect a soundtrack choice it is (one of two in the film), it fails to treat the character with the gravity afforded Big Daddy and Kick Ass. I don’t like the movie any less for this flaw but I wish it had done right by the character in those moments.

Fittingly enough, as our flaws and damages contribute to our want and need to be a hero this slight misstep only magnifies the excellence of everything else that surrounds it. “Kick Ass” is seriously ballsy and unforgettable and I think summer is going to have to work overtime this year.

Caught: a novel by Harlan Coben

2010-03-26T09:40:00.000-07:00

This is the story of Dan Mercer, social worker, ex-husband, godfather and friend to children everywhere, who entered a red door one night and lost everything. It is also the story of Wendy Tynes, widow, MILF and tabloid reporter whose expose on child predators may have destroyed the life of an innocent man. It is also the story of Haley McWaid, a bright, happy teen reeling from a few of life's big disappointments...and missing. In the world of Harlan Coben it's never a question of will any of these lives intersect, but how and when they do what ugly truths will be revealed when all the surfaces get stripped away. What long sought redemptions will be granted? What shattered hope will be pieced back together? The last two questions are almost always the biggest tools in Harlan Coben's kit and he tackles them always in the same predictably unpredictable framework.

Early on in the novel, we learn in quick succession, two very important facts: First, Tynes was made a widow by a drunk driver named Ariana Nasbro. Nasbro has also been writing letters to the family seeking, if not forgiveness, then a chance to clear the air. Secondly, Dan Mercer was the victim of a set-up. He has evidence to prove it and wants to meet with Tynes. For the record, Dan has already been cleared by the court of law but the court of public opinion doesn't look to kindly on Dan's alleged dalliances with underage girls captured on a To Catch A Predator style tabloid show hosted by Tynes. Nasbro's appeals to Wendy are part of the novel's recurrence of characters seeking vindication from those whose lives they've most irreparably damaged. It's also around this point of the review where the tap dancing begins because the information divulged so far doesn't begin to cover every element of the story.

Around page 60, Frank Tremont, a retired federal agent and father to one of the alleged victims of Dan Mercer, offers up a philosophical quandary and real world solution that begins and ends with the death of Dan Mercer. However, he introduces a wild card in the form of Ariana Nasbro and the redemption/forgiveness theme of the novel is brought front and center with tinges of "given the opportunity I'd kill you where you stand" rhetoric for good measure since redemption, and it never is especially in a Harlan Coben novel, isn't always such a cut and dried topic of discussion.

Within the next seventeen pages Coben will throw one of his most effective early novel haymakers. Not to say he doesn't have any doozies saved up for later, but to stagger the reader so effectively so early on is a bit of a departure from his formula. Halfway sure, ninety percent definitely, but one fifth of the way through a novel it lends it one of the most stifling airs of waiting for the other shoe to drop that has ever beset a Harlan Coben novel. In light of this departure it should be noted that this novel lacks a deranged, silent, face breaking, pressure point manipulating psychopath of any sort that have populated Coben's earlier works (unless you count Windsor Horne Lockwood III's appearance, but no mention of his martial arts prowess or psychotic tendencies are made only his haughty superiority and propensity for one night stands). Coben is all about subtle tweaks to his formula and finding effective ways to still dole out his surprises, but the omission of a psychopath seems to suggest that, in this case, all expert manipulation of the body (from feeling gutshot at a haymaker, to the small smile that creeps on your face at a joke or the prospect of closure/redemption/forgiveness) will be done by an eternal optimist and not his id (facebreaking psychos). Even still it manages to be one of the most oppressive and damning books in Coben's catalogue if only for all the indignities to his name any one character has to suffer. It also contains the second worst betrayal to any character's memory in all of Coben.

"Caught" is typical Coben, which is to say good Coben. It reveals the man to be as much a fighter as a novelist. He staggers you early with a punch and when it's well placed you feel it for a long time afterward. You survive, but you're different than you were before. Any good fight will leave you a little winded, why not a good book?

Father's vengeance, lethal weapon

2010-02-01T17:56:00.000-08:00

Edge of Darkness [***]

After eight years out of the limelight of carrying a motion picture (he directed two and then spewed a bunch of anti-Semetic rhetoric), Mel Gibson returns to the lead role essaying fold as Tom Craven, a bereaved father looking for his daughter’s killer and trying to divine the circumstances of her murder (up to and including whether or not he or she was the intended target). As Craven, Gibson manages to be likable, angry and hangdog all at once. More than that, Gibson manages the nifty paradox of looking grizzled and no worse for wear simultaneously.

I like to use the words satisfying and violent in conjunction with one another, and “Edge of Darkness” is both satisfying and violent but not exactly satisfying violent (my favorite way to pair the words). We see in Gibson’s Tom Craven, a man who looks tormented by his duty. He’s not so stoic and expressionless that you can’t feel the revenge weighing on his soul, he’d rather be anywhere but there and when he has to involve one of his daughter’s friends in his investigation it pains him. Not only because it will get more people killed, but because the stranger before him just highlights the gulf between him and his daughter. It’s not that they weren’t on good terms, but life got in the way and death is the most painful reminder of that.

Working for the bad guys is a cleaner type (think Michael Clayton with a gun, but not quite a hitman) played by Ray Winstone, who is as weary of the necessary evils his job asks of him as Gibson is. They share a common trait symptomatic of their regret and a grudging mutual respect that allows for a full understanding of lines that can be towed and crossed. The truth is, Winstone and Gibson’s character are enough alike that to highlight all their similarities would make this a piece worthy of the words “spoiler alert.”

Being based on a BBC miniseries like last year’s “State of Play” one can’t help but wonder if William Monaghan’s script is as adept at streamlining the story as that film was, but it has a thought in its head about the toll revenge takes on us, our fatherly regrets and whether or not life is worth it once all the blood dries up. As much as I appreciated the ensemble of “Play” and the way the film allows the distinct imprint of each of its three screenwriters to be felt I think time will allow “Edge of Darkness” to be the more enduring picture. Martin Campbell is a solid director with a keen eye for action staging. He doesn’t make big setpieces like he did with “Casino Royale,” but the brutal bursts of action here remind us not only that “Royale” is, at least, eighty percent as good as it is because of him, but that his prowess with immediacy and coherence reminds me of David Cronenberg or Martin Brest. It’s also the kind of short, clipped action that an angry fellow past middle age would engage in and not the sort of thing that screams I have a license to kill. Another reason is how even the sound design allows us to empathize with Craven. The loudest and most startling acts of violence are perpetrated on women in this film and perhaps it’s a coincidence but the way that they take both Craven and the audience by surprise only amplifies our horror and awakens in us and him our natural inclination to protect and/or avenge the fairer sex.

Typically January is regarded as the cinematic doldrums along with August and September but “Edge of Darkness” and the pedigree that comes with it proves that just because your hero might be too old for this shit doesn’t mean he can’t do it well.

The best and worst films of 2009

2010-01-06T13:19:00.000-08:00

In the films of 2009 we find a common thread in that the stories are journeys that will fundamentally alter who the characters are as people as they undertake them. As with the ending of the year, we have to ask how much of the old will remain and how much will be jettisoned in the hopes that someone or something greater will emerge. That depends on the person, I guess, but that the journey changes you remains true nevertheless.

Anti-Christ: Some of the most fruitful conversations I've had about any movie this year have been on Lars Von Trier's thoughtful and shocking mediation on the nature of guilt, evil and one fantastic mister fox. Normally, I find Von Trier's on the wrong side of the love/hate equation but with this one chaos reigns firmly in his corner.

Funny People: I hope you like your somber dramedies with a hearty injection of beef, er, dick jokes because well there's a lot of them. At two and a half hours "Funny People" never feels too long but it certainly feels lived in. A good thing, too, because the film stuck in my craw while being the furthest from my memory, but thankfully a second viewing didn't disappoint. The movie seems to seethe with a lot of anger at the fact that the guy who constantly made you laugh feels like he's not going to make a lasting impression that means anything, but both Apatow and Sandler have done just that. As a reflection of his celebrity persona and what it means at the end of the day Sandler and Apatow have created the comedy-drama equivalent of "Unforgiven." "Funny People" is poignant, funny and maybe even a little sticky.

Bad Lieutenant Port of Call New Orleans: Just one of two absolutely batshit crazy films on this list, Werner Herzog and Nicolas Cage team up for the story of a drug addicted cop in post-Katrina New Orleans whose crazy ass personal life keeps getting in the way of him doing his job. It also happens to be the most life affirming film on the list because Herzog paints the city as a place full of lost souls crying out between desperation and agony to be saved, and in order to be saved you just have to want it and providence will provide.

Brothers: Boasting perhaps my favorite ensemble acting of any film on this list, Jim Sheridan's quiet and absorbing film is the story of a family in turmoil reeling from the presumed death and sudden reappearance of a brother, husband and son from war. It doesn't make judgments about who Sam Cahill is when he returns, but it milks every drop of tension it can out of the fact that he has changed. Arguably, the most daunting material of the film goes to Bailee Madison as the eldest daughter of Maguire and Natalie Portman, who is given the unenviable task of not only realizing that her father is still alive but wishing him dead all the same.

Private Eye: Having seen this film the most of any film on this list I can say that Dae-Min Park's "Private Eye" is the most compulsively watchable film I've seen in a long time and I find it to be a more satisfying experience than "Sherlock Holmes" which simply left me cold. The mystery is dark and contemporary despite an early 1900s setting and the team of Jeong-Min Hwang and Deok-Hwan Ryu as the private eye and the doctor are irresistible from their vast height differences down to their baby faced handsomeness.

District 9: Wikus Van der Merwe (Sharlto Copley) is not the most likable guy in the world, but it's the compassion of everyone around him that makes him worth following-- the wife who humanizes him and the father/son aliens who become his reluctant allies. We see Wikus evolve from a clueless bureaucrat to someone who revels too fully in the horrors perpetrated in the government's name and finally to someone understanding what it means just to survive. It's not a full-on redemption but it's a clearly defined character arc that lends the story suspense and immediacy. Also, lots and lots of shit gets blown up real good. I know I sold this short somehow, but trust me you'll love it.

Moon: Duncan Jones film is a sparse and beautiful story about something that shouldn't be but is. To say much more is to ruin the joy of the experience, but if you already like Sam Rockwell now then those feelings will probably double or triple.

Up In The Air: It isn't often that consummate professionals like George Clooney and Vera Farmiga get a movie stolen right out from under them, but that's pretty much what Anna Kendrick does as the protege of Ryan Bingham's (Clooney) professional downsizer. She wants to revolutionize and depersonalize his business while he wants to show her the humanity of it and along the way she challenges the compacted nature of his life and relationships. When the film ends we get a sense of where Clooney and his fellow traveler sex companion (Farmiga) are headed because they're older and more of their history seems written and certain. Kendrick, on the other hand, is just coming out of her shell, younger, more open and less certain of what fate has in store for her and I can't stop thinking about how she'll end up. Not a lot of characters can earn that level of love and compassion up front. It's rare and altogether special.

Thirst: Park Chan Wook's story of unhinged (blood)lust and passion is the craziest film on the list featuring ghost that haunt during sex, a woman trying to communicate using just her eyes and an index finger, repressed retarded mama's boys and lots and lots of fucking is a perfect distillation of everything romantic, dangerous and disturbing about vampire love. It's also not afraid of the red stuff, being honest about desire and what truly happens when you step into the sun. If you don't find this film immediately you're missing out on one of the very best experience that world cinema currently has to offer.

Star Trek: Perhaps you'll call this a cop out, but it was an explosive way to start off the summer and had the perfect opening. I don't know if the beginning makes Kirk a tragic figure, but I like how it provides a parallel to Kirk's rise to hero and also explains his brash, devil may care attitude. Big budget spectacle aside the film lives and dies by performances and Chris Pine and Karl Urban just make me happy that the movie exists. I'm not as big a "Star Trek" geek as some, but the movie worked for me on every level and the fact that that opening still retains such power speaks volumes about the movie's longevity for me. I'm also not a stickler for canon and mythos but I'm happy that it stuck to the most basic principle demanded of it-- to entertain me, it upped the ante by making me care.

Honorable mention:
An Education
Adventureland
Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs
The Road
Fantastic Mr. Fox

And now the worst

I'll keep this short and sweet, suffice it to say every year we see our fair share of epic fails and clunkers.

Old Dogs: No clearer example of a paycheck movie can be found this year. It's the kind of thing famous people resort to when dignity is less important to them than paying for their latest round of botox.

The Boondock Saints II: All Saints Day: Spontaneous eruptions of laughter in the screening I attended proved there are at least thirty people in the world that I am smarter than. I also didn't pay so I'm willing to take that statement to the bank. Everybody's favorite bickering Irish assassins are back and someone's trying to frame them for murder. There's hell to pay or if you're an audience member there are just certain hells you pay for.

Ninja Assassin: Heavy on the interminable action scenes and CGI gore, but light on anything that resembles tension, talent or craft. "Ninja Assassin" is a glossy little snore that so bad they "ass"ed it twice.

Play the Game: Maybe someone finds this piece of piffle to be charming, but it isn't me. It's the most uninspired, unintelligent romantic comedy to come around in ages and it has Andy Griffith exclaiming, "I have an erection!" Not me, I have an anti-boner.

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen and G-Force: Both are big, loud and stupid films about annoying heroes and killer kitchen appliances. Both feature a connection to Jerry Bruckheimer (the latter produced by him, the former directed by his former minion) and both were embraced by the young and the brain dead and made someone incredible rich. Did I also mention the kitchen appliances on the attack sequence in both films? If you're going to have to take your children to movies like this one day then I'd recommend you get your respective ectomies now

two from Nu Image: "Command Performance" and "Ninja"

2009-11-25T09:26:00.000-08:00

Command Perfromance [**1/2]

As far as “Die Hard” riffs go this is a pretty good one. It falls behind the sequels and just a notch under “Under Siege,” but it is miles better than “Sudden Death,” the other “’Die Hard’ in an arena” picture. I’m sure there are a couple of others I’m forgetting but I think you know where I;m going with this by now. This one stars Van Damme’s sometime mortal enemy Dolph Lundgren as Joe, an ex-biker from California-cum- Russian rock band drummer who finds his unique talent for asskickery called upon when terrorists seize the concert his band is playing at and take the Russian president and his tween pop superstar/slut worshipping daughters hostage. It’s up to Joe and a green presidential bodyguard to save the day after military men and bodyguards are slaughtered by the dozens as they try to affect an extraction and are thwarted.

The most significant difference between this film and “Die Hard” (formula wise, at least, because we all know that the film is a pale if entertaining shadow of the grand daddy of them all) is the reversal of villainous intent. The hostile takeover is normally disguised as the means to get political prisoners rescued when in reality it is just a smokescreen for a heist of some sort. Here they demand money so that they have a time frame in which to work, but their intent is to exact revenge for a failed military coup some seventeen years ago that laid the groundwork for the current president’s ascension to power. Even this reversal transcends the political and is ultimately personal to the villain.

Dolph Lundgren has a keen visual eye, his action scenes are astonishlingly competent and bloody if a little too dependent on CGI blood spray. He does, however make nice use of musical instruments as weapons with which to exact bloody justice. I can’t recall ever having seen someone get stabbed with drumsticks and a broken guitar in the same film before. Lundgren even has a penchant for blue filters much like “The Rock” era Michael Bay. Also, Lundgren’s dedication to delivering satisfying violence is underscored by the fact that he brutally murders two bad guys in front of little girls and equips a third with the means to brutally murder another. That’s probably not satisfying to thei children and their impending therapy bills, but I liked it. It’s take no prisoners like.

Unfortunately, “Command Performance” begins to fall apart in the final twenty minutes. It’s not a precipitous fall from grace, but the acting in international productions is rarely particularly good, but the worst offenders are given even more to do towards the end. Screaming awful are the performances by the ladies who play pop superstar Venus and the president’s duaghters, respectively as is Dolph Lundgren’s attempt at coining a memorable catchphrase: “Rock and Load” is pretty pathetic. But as the mortal peril and desire for vengeance of the girl’s increases, so naturally does the pitch of their grating voices. The film also tries to do something punny, (a risky gambit when you don’t know thing one about Lundgren’s sense of humor (i.e. if he has one, how Russian is it, is it worse…Swedish. See “Kenny Begins” to get a gander at Swedish humor) ) but its most amusing moment comes from its dedication to stoicism. Agent Capiska, the aforementioned green bodyguard, explains to his superiors who is helping him on the inside, he says, “an American drummer” and then there is brief pause before he responds “I’m being completely serious.”

“Command Performance” isn’t all bad, it certainly commits to delivering on all your “Die Hard” clone expectations and reasonably tries to deliver on what fans of Dolph Lundgren’s recent output might expect but towards the end it overreaches…looking for a mile when you give it an inch. It plays some of the notes right, but it can be pretty rough. Next time, I want a showstopper.

Ninja [***]

Some of the clips of the film released beforehand didn’t instill within me a sense of hope, but luckily the vehicle as a whole is a cheesy, grand, gloriously violent and fun ride. I never thought that Scott Adkins had yet lived up to his potential as the second coming of anything, he was always kind of there until “Undisputed II” then he becomes really easy to take notice of, but then he gets relegated to third to die in the surprisingly awesome “The Tournament” but Ninja is finally the Scott Adkins vehicle, I suppose it also helps that he is front and center as a good guy for a change.

Adkins is Casey, the western anomaly known as the title character of an Eastern artform, I guess what I’m saying is he’s Ninja. Casey was raised by ninjas and trained in their ancient and deadly arts for twenty-some odd years along the way gaining favor with the master while another pupil named Masazuka (Tsuyoshi Ihara) became the also ran in the arts and the master’s eyes. Over the years, Masazuka’s resentment builds and during a battle to decide who will become the new sensei Masazuka takes the battle too far and tries to kill Casey. He is expelled and begins to ply his trade as an assassin.

Masazuka works for an oil corporation taking out their competition. The corporation is also prone to secret meetings where they wear hoods and brand people. They are their own fraternity of killers apparently so why they need Masazuka’s help is really anyone’s guess. I suppose being a ninja has its advantages when it comes to invisibility and all. Somehow Masazuka manages to time a target’s death so that it becomes the spectacular end to a press conference.

Masazuka still not quite over what happened to him at the orphanage vows not only revenge but to take back everything he believes he is owed which includes the school he was expelled from and a feudal Ninja suit called the Yoroi Bitsu. The Bitsu is going on display in a museum and Casey and a few others have been deemed the protectors so Masazuka leaves a trail of bodies on his way to New York and even enlists his old employers to try and kill Casey and his former teacher’s daughter (Mika Hijii).

The action scenes are pretty stellar to a one, my favorite seqeunce starts out in a coffee shop where the proprietor sells them out to assassins and the brawl spills over into the streets with guys leaning out of SUVs firing guns and then the action shifts to a subway car where some guy gets thrown through a window and nailed by another passing train. Another favorite is the brawl in the professor’s house which highlights not only how terrible shots all of the bad guys are but just how much Scott Adkins loves kicking people in the face and flipping them over.

The fights in the film are always pretty epic and chaotic, the good citizens and law enforcement finally learn not to intervene and during the final brawl which pits our hero and villain against the fraternity of would be assassins on a city street, the police circle overhead in a chopper and issue a stern verbal warning to stop and then no cops show up until it’s over. Adkins and Ihara make a great yin and yang, Adkins is stoic and heroic and even when forced to fight and kill it is clean and not done in a fashion that suggests he enjoys it. Ihara while also quiet and stoic suggests with all manner of carnage he leaves in his wake a cackling maniac who enjoys killing with great relish. They’re a good hero/villain combo.

Nu Image Entertainment who also produced the recent Dolph Lundgren vehicle “Command Performance” is dedicated to delivering the kinds of movies I spent my formative years watchig on HBO, the kind that cultivated the cheesy action junkie in me and I admire their dedeication to the art. I’m not sure how I feel about their loyalty to CG blood but I have less of a proeblem with it when used in cojunction with the blue filters their action extravaganzas have begun to favor as of late. Also, Nu Image is harvesting some of the better direct-to-video action craftsmen around. Always a pleasure to look at and easy to follow to boot. So much for hiding in the shadows ninja.

Three "the Dragon" way: reviews of the "Ring of Fire" saga

2009-11-23T10:33:00.000-08:00

Ring of Fire [***]

Because I’m dedicated to the work of Don “the Dragon” Wilson I tracked down his other franchise work “Ring of Fire” which has more of a meandering quality to it and also seems to be pretty heavily influenced by the works of one William Shakespeare. The film opens with a number of brief fights all pitting American fighters against Asians. By and large, the Americans win most of the fights but the Asians have one really good fighter who is a heavy drinker. The guy he beats up happens to be dating a girl named Julie (Maria Ford, gorgeous and bearing a strong resemblance to Jenny Wade of “Feast” fame) who after some casual and accidental racism develops a crush on Jimmy Woo (Don D. Wilson), a doctor who sometimes moonlights as a waiter in a Chinese restaurant when the work clothes he wears get him mistaken for a waiter. I especially liked how when he finally spoke Julie complimented him on his English and he said “you too.” In all fairness, she’s blonde and he’s Chinese so perhaps these are easy mistakes to make.

The Chinese and the Venice beach bums have firmly drawn turf and battle lines, that occasionally get crossed when the Venice beachers pants a Chinese guy and he retaliates with a golden shower. Then they retaliate with a group beating and then things escalate into a street brawl in Chinatown, but before anyone gets too seriously hurt the cops show up and the Woo’s and Julie’s brother and boyfriend make plans to settle things in the ring. It’s kind of nice to see two warring ethnic groups take their troubles to the ring because those fights appear to make the war more civil.
Also, there’s a detective who likes to nose around the hospital and accuse Woo’s family of being gangsters and drug dealers but there isn’t any indication that this is anything more than good old fashioned xenophobia (which it turns out can get you killed). That detective should also accuse his family of being cooks because he would at least be right about that.

Turns out I was wrong about when they make the deal in Chinatown to finish the war in the ring, it turns out to be a ring of fire where they fight Thai style to the death. Not a regular kickboxing ring where beefs get squashed with no fatalities.

The most interesting thing about the movie is the way that Don “the Dragon” Wilson is used. Being handsome finally pays off for him because he gets to be the romantic lead and they play the opposite sides of the track, warring families romance for all that it’s worth. When he finally does fight, he’s pretty much an unstoppable machine like David Sloan in “Kickboxer 3 and 4” Also, he has tow motives for finally stepping into the ring at the end, but it feels like he is less motivated by the one that should matter more.

Julie, sadly, can be a bit of a bitch…call it a plot contrivance if you want but the woman is only half as enlightened as she thinks she is and this is after she learns the ways of “the Dragon” in bed. She breaks up with Don at his cousin’s funeral and talks about how she used him to make Chuck (her jackass boyfriend) jealous, it’s the kind of thing that can almost negate a kind of sweet romance, see also the beginning of “The Karate Kid Part II” where we learn that whore Ali cheated on Daniel. We know up front that Julie is being kind of whore-ish but she keeps things chaste until she makes a final decision so it doesn’t have the same lasting impact. For my money, watching Don D. get hurt and betrayed is like watching that shit happen to family. No bueno.

I recommend this movie, it’s not a work of art but there is better care taken in telling the story than I initially realized (I believe I erroneously called it meandering at the outset of the review). It has more plot (and no surprise twists) than the average “Bloodfist” film and it has a little something to say about race relations and knowing when to fight. In that regard it’s a lot like the excellent “Bloodfist III.” It’s also the better interracial couple martial arts movie, less stylized and also a hell of a lot less chaste than “Romeo Must Die.” Surprisingly, most of the acting is actually pretty good too.

Ring of Fire II [***1/2]

Without needing to take the time to establish warring cultures and develop relationships “Ring of Fire II” hits the ground running and opens like all the best action films do: with the hero in a place about to get robbed. Julie (Maria Ford, looking even more bangin’ as a redhead) is all smiles because Jimmy just proposed to her and now they’re deciding what kind of honeymoon they’d like to take. Outside a group of thugs are getting ready to rob the place and inside Julie is talking about wanting to go someplace exciting, not knowing that the jewelry store they’re in is about to get hella awesome. So the thugs bust in and start smashing class cases, an employee trips the alarm and with what little time they have left they start snatching up rings, but one man picks the wrong ring. He wants Don D.’s wife’s ring, she says no and he slaps her, Don D. puts him through a window and Julie gets non-fatally shot. Say what you will, but Julie has a fantastic gift for dulling even the deadliest weapons. Except for Don, he’s a weapon she’s going to need.

Since this is a sequel most everyone is back including Brad (the ex-boyfriend), her brother and all of Johnny’s cousins (not the dead one though) and they all seem to have miraculously squashed their beef. That’s what you do though when mortal enemies have peaceful relatives that fraternize with each other, you backburner shit. Or you grow the fuck up. You have to give the people that matter to the people that matter to you a fair shake and also we’re the sum of our experiences so if it wasn’t for all that stuff that went down in part one nobody would care about each other.

The bad guys rather quickly (even in movie time) come looking to settle up with Johnny, his girlfriend gets kidnapped and the main villain Kalin has gone “underground” where a bizarre subculture of gangs exist and Johnny must fight his way through them “The Warriors” style to get to his girl. The gangs wear outrageous shit like hockey masks and a fight with them is lit entirely by swinging flashlights (it’s not a well lit fight but it’s not nearly as aesthetically ugly as one would think) another guy wears shoulder pads with bizarre decorations on them (as far as I could tell he might’ve fancied himself a samurai), but the lead gang looks like a six member version of Kiss without the face paint, but also with a dash of the leather daddy from the Village People and a shade of whatever it is that Dolph Lundgren’s get-up in “Masters of the Universe” was.

The action, choreographed by Art Camacho, is the best that has ever been in a Don D. Wilson movie, the group fights are generally pretty solid. Eric Lee’s Kwong gets the best fight when he takes on the shoulder pad gang after being spearated from all of his friends and even the second best when he fights an overly muscular Asian woman that he gropes, humbles and probably even beds in a span of five minutes. I think a small dose of the credit should go to the screenwriters who keep all the good guy separated for most of the movie so that each character has their moment to shine. Camacho does utilize the distinct characteristics of his three main fighters, Wilson is pure determination and rage, Kwong’s fights take advantage of how unimposing he is physically by arming him with weapons and then having him disarm his opponents with both humor and unexpected agility. Ian Jacklin as Kalin conducts cage fights while waiting for Woo to fight his way to him and the setting matches his raw animal brutality. Nice work on all fronts.

Outside of the martial arts, the exploding automobiles are done to glorious excess because just when you think they’ve exploded all that they possibly can the audience is graced with another glorious burst of flame.

An aside: in their determination to be as excellent as “Bloodfist III” we get the great Sy Richardson from “Colors” and “Repo Man” as Don D’s escort through the underground. Is he a better sidekick than Richard Roundtree? The answer to that determines which movie is the true champion of Don D’s filmography.

This film is a pretty unexpected departure from the first one and I have to admit that I pretty much loved it. How can you not, when was the last time you didn’t like a movie that took place underground and with bizarre subterranean sub-cultures. Yeah, I didn’t think you’d be able to answer.

Ring of Fire 3: Lion Strike [***]

Unlike with the “Bloodfist” sequels they didn’t bother to arbitrarily attach the words “Ring of Fire” and then a number to the title “Lion Strike” which is weird because it wouldn’t be arbitrary in this case, it would, in fact, be necessary because this is the third time that Don D. Wilson has played Dr. Johnny Wu. Even weirder than not doing the necessary number thing is the fact that Johnny Wu isn’t married and has a kid and the detective who was always accusing his family of being criminals is suddenly treating him like a stand-up guy and not someone he is always leery of. Is there some other Chinese Dr. Wu who knows martial arts and the same detective that I am unaware of? (Actually, it turns out this movie does take place in a distant future and Julie died in a car accident not too long after giving birth to their son) I like this new Johnny Wu, though. The brand new Wu takes on a gang of gun-toting doctors and nurses who have infiltrated the hospital where he works to break some mobster out of police custody. Wu and some other martial arts doctor (played by Timothy D. Baker of “Bloodfist II” and “No Retreat No Surrender” fame) are sparring on the roof when the shit hits the fan, they go inside to check on the old man and karate doc two gets shot. Wu springs into action throwing sidekicks and roundhouse kicks, shooting people in the legs and the head. He takes out seven people in one stretch outruns an old man shooting at him with a machine gun from a helicopter and dangles off the side of a building with one arm while he shoots at the chopper until it explodes in mid-air. As much as I miss the old crew after spending two movies to establish the bonds of love and brotherhood he had with his wife and family in the first two films I appreciate how much they’ve done in the action department to make up for those choices.

After the spectacular opening, the plot such as it is involves various mafia type organizations the world over coming together over black market nuclear weapons. Shortly after this partnership is established the mafioso is robbed of money and animportant diskette containing sales data of black market weaponry (one of that gang is played by Michael Jai White, but he doesn’t live long enough to do anything spectacular). A chase ensues and when the good doctor Wu finds himself saving the only surviving robber their bags are accidentally switched leaving the doctor with sensitive information he is unaware of.

Wu takes a weekend vacation with his son to a cabin in the woods where they plan to fish and bond and stuff when Wu meets cute with the park ranger lady (Bobbie Philips) after saving her from being harassed by a gang of punks. The scene is clearly meant to establish some of her skills as ex-Army, but I like the moxie the film shows in being able to throw characters into extra unrelated to the plot action sequences. Anywho, after this fight Ranger lady comes to dinner and the mafia finally figure out where Johnny is. They get to have a nice peaceful date, though before they get interrupted.

The rest of the movie is spent with Wu and female park ranger running around the woods disarming bad guys and kicking the shit out of them and setting the occasional booby trap.

I have to admit that the movie is well paced and acted but lacks the bizarre heights of invention of the second film, the stamp of Richard W. Munchkin (co-writer and director of the two previous films) is sorely missed because I think he really could’ve taken this film to some wonderful new heights. That being said the “Ring of Fire” legacy remains largely untarnished, I miss the old gang but Wu’s kid kind of makes up for all of that. When his dad and the park ranger get into a fight right in front of them he mimics them by beating up on a bag of groceries simultaneously. He also wakes up aqnd does a fist pump when he sees them kissing because he thinks it means he’s getting a new mom. Truth is, it doesn’t mean shit other than that they kissed. But Dr. Wu is nothing if not a forward guy, so maybe his son just has it in him to make those ridiculous leaps where every little gesture means a house in the suburbs with mom, dad, two point four kids and a dog. The bad guys aren’t the only ones thinking nuclear except this kid is just thinking about families. The kid is also pretty well adjusted for someone whose house was just shot up and who was kidnapped after the old man babysitting him was murdered.

I liked it though, the whole franchise was pretty soild. It didn’t last long enough to wear out its welcome and it works as both entertaining action pictures and a testament to Don D. Wilson’s charisma.

Fists of blood, heart of Dragon: reviews of the "Bloodfist" saga

2009-11-13T16:33:00.000-08:00

Bloodfist [*]
I think “Bloodfist” is a better effort than director Terrence H. Winkless’ own “Rage and Honor,” which is pretty deficient on both rage and honor, because it has both blood and fists. However, the film still fails to live up to any expectations you may want to impose on it by virtue of its title: I think it would be nifty if this movie were about lesbian kickboxers because a bloodfist sounds both painful and sexy at the same time, but it’s only about regular kickboxers and martial artists. Lame.

Don “the Dragon” Wilson plays a guy named Jake whose brother was killed in Manila not long after killing his opponent in a martial arts tournament. Jake goes to Manila to claim the body (which has already been cremated) and he meets up with an old friend who looks like the Todd from “Scrubs” and has a real gift for making me think that he was semi-retarded for the first half of the movie. He also meets an old trainer named Kwong (Joe Mari Avellan) whose brother died in the tourney and they become friends. He looks like Sammo Hung, but his English is great so he isn’t really in the business of spitting out platitudes instead to get them to spar seriously he tells Todd that Jake fucked his sister all afternoon. He’s a classy guy.

Jake will find his brother’s killer by entering a martial arts tournament and having the killer revealed to him in time. A move that begs the question(s): How many tournaments and how often do they have them in Manila? Would you be pissed if the guy who killed your brother was actually a guy that you beat with one punch? It doesn’t happen but wouldn’t it be a real motherfucker of an anti-climax? The front-runner is a guy named Chin Woo (Chris Aguilar) who hails from the mean streets of Vietnam, kills everyone he fights and eats flies when they have the audacity to come near him. He’s like a less imposing version of Bolo from “Bloodsport” and he even has a scene where he stomps on some guy’s face to finish him off then pulls his bandana off and screams in triumph.

The tournament aspect of “Bloodfist” is pretty lackluster, none of the fights are fun, people just flail about until someone gets hit. Winkless has a gift for misusing people with natural abilities, for example, the most engaging thing about Billy Blanks is his Afro-mullet.

There are some small touches I like here and there, though. Experienced fighters pulling their punches and running a con on people in a public place usually to gain information but sometimes to steal money off a poker table seems like it is falling out of fashion and somebody needs to bring it back, stat. I also like some of the slow motion Winkless employs in the film— a woman doing rooftop aerobics in slow motion and during the climax when Jake’s buddy Hal reveals who the villain is in a slo-motion “NOOOOO!” voice but he explains everything about the guy.

I don’t hate “Bloodfist” but I think that Terrence H. Winkless lack of understanding of the words awesome and engaging certainly makes him the kind of martial arts filmmaker that can put a damper on the kind of sublime highs a movie like this can normally reach if your mind is open.

Bloodfist 2 [*1/2]
“Bloodfist 2” opens with Jake Raye (Don “the Dragon” Wilson, playing the same character again for the first and last time in the series history) accidentally killing his latest opponent in the ring (upon delivery of the fatal blow an announcer says, “he won’t be getting up from that anytime soon.” Hilarious, no?) and retiring from the sport of kickboxing for good. Two years later, an old pal calls him up begging for help in the Philipines saying he’s in trouble from a guy who promised to set him up with some fights. He needs help getting out of town so naturally Jake hops a plane instead of wiring him some money.

Naturally, we learn that a few other choice fighters from different disciplines have also been lured to the Philipines through invites to non-existent martial arts tournaments or calls from old friends only to be blindsided by weapon wielding thugs and forced at gunpoint onto a boat that will take them to an island paradise overseen by a businessman named Su (Joe Marí Avellan, one of two returning bad guys from the original film, both of whom play new characters).

The idea when we get there is that, Su is trying to sell a designer steroid and he needs the world’s best fighters to get their asses handed to them by his own personal handpicked rogues gallery. A gallery that includes fighter number one (Cris Aguilar, the original “Bloodfist”’s Chin Woo), guy who gets elbow dropped repeatedly and guy who gets kicked in face. Also, Jake escapes immediately after arriving on the island so he gets to sneak around and beat people up while the other fighters actually have to do a little more of that fighting for their lives business.

While I wish the “Bloodfist” films would just drop the pretense of tournaments altogether I think this is a pretty marked improvement over the first film while still failing to live up to its potential. I like how closely Jake follows behind the guards when sneaking around that it looks a little cartoonish, I also like how even for a badass hero he is capable of falling for some pretty simple tricks like running full speed through a doorway and getting hit by boards (he falls for that gem twice). I’m also beginning to see how if Jake Raye ever got lured to the Philipines for a third time he might not make it home alive.

Still, it’s nice to see all the varying disciplines on display. I personally thought the Greco Roman wrestler guy was amazing, his fighting style was the very definition of economical but he still spoke volumes when he moved. He also looked kind of squirrelly so to see him be so tough and serious was really cool. I also liked seeing Tim Baker (the father from “No Retreat, No Surrender”) not only get to do some serious ass kicking but to not come across like a pansy and an awful actor in the same breath. His IMDb bio calls him a standout member of the Japan Karate Association’s U.S. National Team and I’m inclined to believe it since he was the first person to figure out how to beat the super steroid guys and it usually entails hitting them from behind and moving way, way faster and also hitting their legs.

The tournament fighting scenes are perhaps the least cool, the final scene where everyone fights the guards outside the compound despite their tournament injuries is a better display of their skills and teamwork. A drill sargeant character fights with only one hand and gives a limping chase to the weaselly scientist who created the drug to begin with.

The first two “Bloodfist” films aren’t quite what they could’ve been, only a little in the way of fighting is memorable and they aren’t exactly inundating me with the intentional or unintentional laughs that I wanted, even the two bad guys from part one who return in this one miss the opportunity to do anything memorable the second go ‘round.

Perhaps the the third film…the only one I’ve seen more than once will hold up to the scrutiny of my fond memories.

Bloodfist III [***1/2]
“Bloodfist III: Forced to Fight” opens with some rather poignant sounding music and the image of Don “the Dragon” Wilson practicing his martial arts then it cuts to his character, Bolan taking some brutal revenge on the leader of the black prison gang for raping and murdering his only friend. An event that transpires while the warden is giving the press a tour of his state of the art correctional facility. This being an election year and all, the warden hands his dirty work off to his successor to keep things under wraps, which means there are plenty of prison fights but the reporter who saw the murder is simply going to be the reporter who saw the murder, nothing more.

After the death of Luther, the prison gang leader, his business partner Blue (Gregory McKinney) makes it his mission to take Bolan out while the white gang wants to make him an ally because he’s a good fighter and another gang still is divided by racial solidarity (most members are black, some Italian) but united by their love for TV gameshows and cook-outs. Bolan is simply trying to do his time, but people want him to take a side because they believe you can’t survive without choosing one but everybody is constantly throwing his mixed blood parentage in his face and letting him know that he isn’t welcome. So they’re constantly pushing him into corners and forcing him to fight. It’s so lopsided an affair that his best friend is dead, his only other friend is a pedophile people call Diddler (even Bolan calls him Diddler like it’s a term of endearment after Diddler is able to help save his life; he doesn’t seem to have a clue what the guy has done or maybe he doesn’t want to ask).

Director Oley Sassone gives us the creepy image of a little girl spinning around in circles during visitor’s day but filtered through Diddler’s vision we hear the tinkling of a music box and she’s wearing a blue dress and bathed in an ethereal glow. Oley doesn’t beat you over the head with this image, but he does allow this glimpse into Diddler’s psyche to stand in stark contrast to how we feel about the character as the film progresses. Most of what works about the film is derived from perception whether it’s about characters or situation.

Bolan has a cellmate named Samuel Stark (Richard Roundtree) who offers counsel to inmates and tries to tow the line with his cook out loving buddies but he causes a lot of headaches for the interim warden and when Blue and white gang leader Wheelhouse form a working relationship, Stark quickly makes an enemy out of the both of them. Stark is also seen as a distaff civil rights figure, urging people to use non-violent ways to affect change and ultimately receives a shiv to the gut for his troubles. He does, however, get a rousing moment where he talks about how our environments condition us to believe things are a certain way (i.e. Bolan is a racist for killing Luther and Luther can’t be bad news for the brothers simply because he is a brother) and that things will always be that way if we don’t bother to question them. It’s nice to see everybody on the same page and wanting to make it out of prison for a change. But that’s the power of Richard Roundtree, people listen to him and if there were women in this movie they’d probably fall all over him.

Either way, after the mediocrity of the first two films it’s nice to see some kick ass action scenes and be privy to an actual plot. I like how the title can be interpreted on multiple levels: you have no allies and everyone backs you into a corner so you’re forced to fight, you believe in certain things so you’re forced to fight and you want to do right by your friends so you’re forced to fight. “Bloodfist III” has a surprising level of social conscience, it rolls at a clip and there’s even a pretty funny scene where Wheelhouse accuses Blue and Luther of swapping spit which angers Blue a great deal. How dare you accuse Blue of swapping spit with a known butt-fucker. The audacity.

Either way, this is a good one, I recommend it highly.

Bloodfist IV [**]
So “Bloodfist IV: Die Trying” is devoid of some of the loftier goals that the third installment may or may not have been purposefully trying to achieve. It’s just about a crazy day in the life of a repo man named Danny Holt who gets beaten up by a red headed man in a bathrobe to start his day. Actually, he wins but he takes a pretty embarassing ass whoopin’. Then he goes on to repossess the wrong car that gets his co-workers and his daughter’s babysitter murdered and he comes thisclose to setting off an international incident...when a box of chocolates hiding nuclear weapons triggers ends up in his possession.

There are no two ways about it, “Bloodfist IV” is ridiculous and has a bigger scale than the other films, but it lacks an urgency of pace. It still manages the occasional surprise such as Holt finding a woman in the closet with her throat slit and the woman standing in front of him turns out to be a knife wielding assassin and not the replacement babysitter I thought she was. The knife wielding assassiness is played by Cat Sassoon, daughter of hair stylist/beauty product magnate Vidal and sister of third film director Oley, she’s not a bad fighter but the film sadly robs us of a chick fight between her and Holt’s reluctant ally, a lovable schoolteacher with a penchant for nicotine gum. Also, James Tolkan from “Back to the Future” makes an appearance as an FBI agent and Liz Torres from “Gilmore Girls” plays a cop, who in an amusing character touch, is always having her dinner delivered to crime scenes. The first time this joke plays out it works to the movie’s advantage because you see a cop exit a car with a pizza box and you think to yourself no wonder fake cops got to show up first, these motherfuckers stopped to get lunch. See for yourself, it all checks out.

It also bears mentioning that the action in “Bloodfist IV” also takes place on Holt’s daughter’s birthday so you know this is kind of a shitty party for her, but maybe not for him since he gets to be involved in everything. Gary Daniels (of “Bloodmoon” fame) and his awesome mullet get to be in the second fight of the movie and I have to admit that if you can start your day off kicking Gary Daniels’ ass then the FBI, LAPD, CIA and all these other unsavory characters that get mixed up in this business might want to consider fucking with some other blue collar joe. Maybe it’s a measure of how classy a guy Don “the Dragon” Wilson or maybe it’s a complete accident but its nice that when he fights a guy like Daniels or Billy Blanks it always ends with a double kick to the head, perhaps a declaration that he respects them and considers them to be on equal footing but also a warning that he must win anyway because it’s his movie. Whatever his reasons are I like to think that they are altruistic.

At this point, I’d be remiss not to say something about Don “the Dragon” Wilson as a performer. He’s handsome in a Dean Cain kind of way, he sounds like Michael Biehn and he’s perfectly believable as your average joe and while I certainly wouldn’t mind laughing a little more during these films I really respect his self-seriousness, why do we feel the need to keep ourselves at an ironic distance from the things that happen around us. Earnestness hasn’t gone out of fashion, Wilson is proof of that. Also, you can afford to ask Wilson to stretch a little emotive muscle—he can yell if you need him to, he’s not one of those guys like his part two cohort Timothy Baker who sounds like a complete pussy if you ask him to speak in anything above a whisper. So kudos to Don “the Dragon” Wilson for being that much more. True story: they call him “the Dragon” because he kicks hot fire.

UPDATE: Actually maybe earnestness has gone out of fashion, I’ll check and see when Wilson’s last movie was.

Bloodfist V [**1/2]
I remember when John Cusack called kickboxing the sport of the future during 1989’s “Say Anything” and then I remember him getting kicked in the face by his sparring partner Don “the Dragon” Wilson when he got distracted by the sight of his love interest Ione Skye. It is with those words in mind that I look four years into the future at 1993s “Bloodfist V: Human Target.”

I don’t think the choreography of the films showcases Wilson’s dynamism as a martial artist, but I think the films more or less live or die by some of their other elements: Wilson as a likeable, trustworthy everyman, the gradually mounting evidence that the less people there are in the cast with martial arts credentials listed under their names the better the acting might actually be and, of course, that the films aren’t unterested in taking up more than 80 or 90 minutes of your time at a stretch. These aren’t lofty goals exactly but they’re entirely achievable and you take the good with the bad. “Bloodfist V” is one of the good ones, just behind part three.

This time out the Dragon sports long hair (in the prologue) and is felled by a bullet to the head, but like Seagal he is hard to kill and wakes up a few weeks later with some serious amnesia (and a haircut) with no memory of who he once was. A woman (Denice Duff) comes in claiming to be his wife, he gets released and then the Asian assassins start coming out of the woodwork… the answers to who the Dragon is aren’t coming as easily; he’s got the name Mike Stanton but not much else to work with. The woman, a hooker (and more) offers to help him in his quest to figure out who he is. Gradually we learn Stanton was trying to prevent the sale of plutonium stolen from decomissioned nukes, he was working undercover for a Chinese gangster and, well, shit hit the fan.

Naturally, there’s a twist to the proceedings where peripheral characters like the pimp in leather gloves and the Asian assassins have much bigger roles. We even get Don Stark (Bob from “That 70s Show” as a good guy NSA agent) and Steve James to turn in great supporting work. Having never seen parts four through eight before reviewing them I can’t help but wonder if the scale is going to continue to grow to nearly global proportions. The first three films definitely had an intimacy to the character’s dilemma but now the personal shit for each of Wilson’s characters seems like it has global consequences for everyone.

Hands down, Denice Duff gets my vote as the best supporting female in the series so far. She’s cute sure but she’s also very forward and I admired that about her. It might not be the epitome of class to say “if your wife doesn’t come home soon I may just have to move in here” to a guy suffering from amnesia (whose wife may be dead for all anyone knows) but we could all do a lot worse fresh from a coma. After four sequels I still don’t understand why females who barely know Don “the Dragon” Wilson insist on following him through the fires of hell. He’s tough and handsome, but it doesn’t make them deadly and sexy. At least, he’s a gentleman and tries to warn them away. Still, Duff’s character brings the warmth and humor to the good guy equation that usually gets left out by Wilson’s dedication to stoicism.

There’s not really a hell of a lot to say about “Bloodfist V: Human Target” other than that it does it’s job, does it well and leaves me very little to complain about.

Bloodfist VI [*1/2]
Handily negating my belief that the less martial arts credentials you introduce at the beginning of a “Bloodfist” film the better it actually gets in terms of acting is the silly and tired sixth entry into the series, which by this point is a franchise in name only, a sort of “Die Hard” clone that doesn’t really die all that hard.

This time out DDW plays Corrigan, a former special forces bad ass turned military courier who must stop a Muslim terrorist faction from launching nuclear weapons after they take over a launch facility. This event naturally turns Corrigan into our John McClane, the right guy in the right place at the wrong time. It’s also all literally true because Corrigan got lost on his way to the base so he showed up ninety minutes later than he should’ve but never too late to be a hero. Corrigan also stops to bandage the leg of an injured bunny so you know he’s for real with the hero stuff.

When the bad guys invade they do so under the guise of lost tourists who then proceed to slaughter the people standing guard at the gate. One of them even wears an old man mask and lures one of the guards into the camper before shooting him in the throat. This man is not technically the man in charge, but balances of power shift when you kill the man who hired you. So as the film rolls toward the climax we see creative differences that reveal a motive: have a hell-bent Muslim who wants to blow up the western world and a former engineer/MIT grad who dresses like someone from pro-wrestling’s Nation of Domination simply wants to sieze the missiles long enough to negotiate himself a gorgeous sum of money and run off with it.

It also isn’t the film’s only double cross as Cat Sassoon of “Bloodfist IV” and “my brother directed “Bloodfist III” fame plays a secret terrorist who is sleeping with one of the men in charge of the launch keys the terrorist need to sieze to make their plan work. Cat Sassoon, once again, isn’t particularly well used as the makers of “Bloodfist” don’t understand female villains because the words “cat fight” aren’t a part of their vocabulary.

“Bloodfist VI” should be more fun to make fun of and more fun in general because it’s a “Die Hard” clone, the acting is pretty consistently awful across the board (DDW even has a guy he comically repeatedly kicks in the balls before discovering this man also has a glass jaw). And there is a blatantly ridiculously sexist general who doesn’t like the idea that a woman has come up with a plan better than blowing up the nuclear base our hero has infiltrated to fight the bad guys and stop nuclear armageddon. This is also the first of the “Bloodfist” films to feature breasts.

The movie doesn’t revel in its absurdity as much as the others or something, it’s difficult to pinpoint but maybe coming off the unexpected high of part five you occasionally get a little spoiled and someone has to pay the price. I’m not saying it’s better than I make it out to be but I’m definitely sad that part six turned out to be so underwhelming for me.

Bloodfist VII [**]
At this point, clearly the series has got to be wearing a little thin, but at least they manage to inject some class into the proceedings with the casting of Stephen Williams as a police captain leading the chase for a wrongfully accused Don “the Dragon” Wilson (really, is there any other kind?), er, Jim Trudell… ex-special forces bad-ass (again I ask, is there really any other kind?) and accidental cop killer.

The beginning of part seven starts out strong when a couple of guys try to punk Trudell and make him pay a cover charge, he waxes nostalgic about his first drink then brings them to their knees. He goes inside and we see a stage wrapped up in chicken wire. My mind began to wander and I began thinking about how cool a “Road House” type movie with Don “the Dragon” Wilson would be (no offense Patrick). The guys from outside eventually come back in looking for a fight which Trudell gives to them, but not before he sort of cozies up next to a girl (who leaves with him after the fight) who spends the (sexless) night with him then steals his car before he wakes up.

For a while this is a nice reversal of the formula because in films past any girl who gets into a car with handsome Don usually ends up a big part of his misadventures. The last females to cross Don’s path that never got into a car with him were villains and while Stephanie (the girl from the bar, real name: Jillian McWhirter) seems villainous at first she just wants to handle things her own way. Besides would you buy this movie as “WoManhunt”?

So when Jim wakes up and finds Beamer keys on his nightstand he goes back to the bar, gets in the car, finds her registration and drives to Stephanie’s home address where a dirty cop lies in wait. A struggle ensues and Jim accidentally kills the guy (one of the more pathetic cop kills I’ve ever seen, by the way) and he has both dirty and legit cops on his trail as a result.

The dirty cops are involved in a luxury car theft ring and they all came up in the same precinct house, a fact that real good cops like Stephen Williams put together when they aren’t busy trying to figure out who the hell cop killer/marathon runner/bad-ass Jim Trudell really is. Stephanie Williams is also witness to a murder committed by the dirty cops and despite being relocated by the FBI the cops managed to find her.

The film’s fights are relatively mediocre without being terrible, but I’ve said time and time again that the “Bloodfist” films rarely, if ever, get to showcase the strength of Wilson as a martial artist, his stoic hero bit is still as conistently good as it ever was or will be. Not many people can claim to trust someone based on instinct, wake up with their car stolen and still not take some time out to bitch about it. I guess the end proves him right, but neither the audience nor the character has the benefit of knowing that fact before the end.

“Bloodfist VII” starts off stronger than it ends: playing off memories, tweaking the formula just a little bit and even managing a nicely written conversation. It’s only too bad that it couldn’t be kept up.

Bloodfist VIII [zero]
After having courted near disaster at least three times before in franchise history, the folks at Bloodfist, Inc. have finally managed to consummate their relationship because this thing well and truly leaves you feeling fucked.

“Bloodfist VIII: Hard Way Out” starts off with some somber jazz and to the nostalgic feeling viewer this could symbolize the end of a journey, we know (especially all these years later) that there won’t be another sequel in name only to the Bloodfist franchise unless those “Bloodfist 2050” things I keep seeing on torrents have anything to do with these films. Even better would be if “Bloodfist 2050” was finally a realization of my lesbian kickboxer dreams, but I doubt it. Either way, the somber jazz reveals itself to be foreshadowing that we are about to have a wholly depressing experience.

It doesn’t start out in the worst possible way, in fact, it starts out in a grocery store (consider “Stone Cold,” “Alien Raiders” and “Hard to Kill” as examples of how this is a great way to start a movie), some guy pulls a gun and a patron tries to be a hero—most times it’s the main character but this time it’s just some unlucky son of a bitch who gets his neck broken. Maybe the grocery store victim being who he is sets the tone of the movie all wrong or maybe I’m just looking to rationalize the film’s precipitous fall from grace, but it never gets better than this. So this killer is in town to complete a job that should’ve been finished years ago and our buddy Don D. Wilson’s number is about to come up.

Don D. Wilson is (true to form) a former CIA/special ops bad ass turned high school math teacher whose past comes back to haunt him when Italian assassins come out of the woodwork looking for payback for a political assassination. They start by killing off his team then come looking for him. After a home invasion sequence, Cowan/MacReady seeks a little help from old friends in the CIA. Another surprise ambush later, the action switches to Ireland where Mac, his son and an old contact named Danielle (Jillian McWhirter of “Bloodfist VII”) start looking for answers with the help of an old rich Irish friend.

I don’t have to tell you that there is a double cross afoot because every “Bloodfist” has them except part three which is all the better for it. I also, don’t have to tell you who does it because the people who look precisely like slick, oily untrustworthy sons of bitches are exactly the ones who do it. By this point in the movie I think MacReady and the assassin from the beginning Carlo Gianini (for all the subtlety of that name I’d call him Gepetto) could’ve teamed up because if there’s one thing worse than being a political assassin it’s being a bad friend. Instead, Gianini dies in a fight that could politely be called anti-climactic. I’m also a big fan of political assassination double crosses where the people that hire you betray you, but since all the offending action takes place off-screen it really has no effect on my Achilles heel. Also, Alan Simpson is just a plain bad writer. Where the hell was Rob Kerchner (writer since part four) that he couldn’t be around to at least let the franchise limp away with a little dignity?

Don “the Dragon” Wilson as charismatic as he is, can only do so much with one note when no one else around him is even trying. John Patrick White is beyond dreadful as Wilson’s son Chris, he comes across as a whiner but also inexplicably has the ability to create dangerous weapons using everyday household appliances, he’s like MacGyver and the Anarchist Cookbook, but with a vagina. There’s even a couple of one scene wonders who deliver their lines with the same degree of conviction and professional training as the guy from “Sudden Death” who says, “You’ll what… burn my toast?” then laughs maniacally.

The action scenes are also worse than perfunctory, no flair, no fun. Choreography has never been the strong suit of this particular franchise ut this whole affair is so devoid of anything worthwhile that not even the lish greens of Ireland can mask how big a hack job this is. I can’t believe my loyalty gets rewarded like this.

Bloodfist 2050 aka Bloodfist IX aka Bloodfist: The Don “the Dragon” Wilson-less Experience [**1/2]
The first “Bloodfist” film without Don “the Dragon” Wilson and the last one ever made to boot is basically a rehash of the first film (right down to the mentor/villain double whammy) except set in a post apocalyptic Los Angeles where the only spot in the entire city that looks anything like civilization as we know it is the hero’s apartment.

Opening with a firefight, a few explosions and then a car chase where all the vehicles look like something out of “Mad Max,” the film seems to boast the aesthetics of an early 80s actioneer right down to the quality of the film stock and even how Los Angeles looks a little something John Carpenter might have cooked up in his “Escape from New York” heyday or “The Warriors.” Maybe the intention whether the film turned out good or bad was to honor these films. I guess it works pretty well, it’s definitely a fun kind of bad. It certainly made enough appeals to my “Bloodfist,” “Warriors” and “Escape from New York” loving side, there’s set design that works really well, a couple of good fights and even an absence of a great villain.

So our hero is Alex Danko (Matt Mullins), a kid from out of town who after an epic skirmish decides to visit his brother in bombed out Los Angeles (some of the exterior shots look like a fire ravaged shoebox diorama) only to find that he’s a pit fighter recently killed outside of a strip club by a mysterious black clad figure. Under the tutelage of a homicide cop/ pit fighter enthusiast named Marino (Joe Sabatino) snd his brother’s best buddy Rabid Randy (Glenn Meadows), Alex trains and infiltrates the circuit while theories are tossed around, but no really solid investigative work is done. It is all based on his brother’s prowess in the ring, his esteem among fellow fighters and the general bad ass nature of the now most dangerous fighter in the sport, the Great Ahmed Khan (Monsour Del Rosario).

The fights outside of the ring in “Bloodfist 2050” are more of the kind of prowess demonstrating spectacle we’ve grown accustomed to as our martial arts films get more spectacular. Weapons are brandished, lots of flipping and kicking in mid-air occurs but the tournament fights are more of (but not entirely comprised of) the “I kick and then you kick and I kick and then you kick” variety of choreography that was prevalent through the “Bloodfist” series and American martial arts films in general. Still it is easily the best work in the entire series.

In furthering their belief that the only thing you can do to the first “Bloodfist” film is improve it, the filmmakers have decided to make a visit to the strip club mandatory after every two action scenes, so we get some vital and necessary breasts, but we also get to address the elephant in the room: which is that Matt Mullins, a five time world martial arts champion, looks like he could be the lead in a softcore skin flick. Another genre I think the filmmakers intended to pay their respects to with this film. Mullins certainly has the physical prowess, but he plays the role just stoic enough that it’s difficult to say if his acting is better than or just barely good enough to land him a softcore role.

Also, whether we acknowledge it or not the filmmakers are teaching us valubale lessons about judging things by what they appear to be. Ahmed Khan is an intimidating fighter and he brutally murdered somebody, but he gets taken out easily by the hero… too easily to be the bad guy. The MC (perennial “Bloodfist” favorite Joe Marí Avellan) looks like an untrustworthy guy who strokes his cheek out of what looks like worry and diabolical scheming, but he also hates illegal gambling and appears to have been a fan of our hero’s brother. So we learned that these two scary dudes are actually stand-up individuals who sometimes do their jobs to excess. We also learn that the best place to leave your car in L.A. is with a blind man that carries a giant stick and most of all, just because you’re a martial arts film doesn’t mean you can’t also have some pretty decent simulated sex.

I’m also glad they stopped it here, because this was just different enough that I don’t know if I could ever let it go back to being the same thing.

We're just doing our jobs

2009-11-09T16:06:00.000-08:00

Coweb [***]
Xin Xin Xiong better known as Clubfoot from “Once Upon A Time in China” and more infamously known as the action choreographer of the flat-out dreadful “The Musketeer” gives us a pretty servicable action thriller that handily dispatches about ninety minutes of our time.

“Coweb” stars Luxia Jiang as Nie YiYi, one time runner of a successful martial arts school now working as a security guard at a shopping mall who gets recruited by a childhood friend to be the bodyguard of Mr. He, a wealthy businessman and his wife, only to have them kidnapped on her watch and she must endure a rapidly escalating series of public fights to get them back.

The twist is, each one of these fights is captured by a security camera and broadcast on the internet for your betting pleasure. She gets text messages sending her to each fights location and then, bam, we have action. Most of the fights are pretty lengthy but only two of them are particularly great—a fight in a restaurant and kitchen with a hulking wrestler showcases Jiang’s gracefulness and limber form but what really elevates that particular fight are the camera angles Xiong employs in the dining area, sometimes shooting at the floor so we see the action upside down. It’s not meant to sound unappealing because it really works in context and it also goes a long way towards forgiving the man for “The Musketeer.”

Another old standby is the fight on a rickety bamboo structure, it takes lots of precision and care, but it’s also a great source of tension and a great place to take risks. It goes a long way to establishing your hero’s dedication along with establishing a “you are there” immediacy not every fight is fully capable of conveying.

I know I just extolled the virtues of Jiang’s graceful and limber form because she really does navigate that kitchen countertop quite well, but she’s not as instantaneously bad-ass as the girl from “Chocolate” who seems ridiculously untouchable, Jiang seems to have to work at all of her battles, she’s scrappy but not because she’s sloppy but because these fights really work her over. She never strikes me as invincible but as wholly capable of rising to the occasion and even above it.

The long and the short of it is that this film works on the levels that matter most, the action. I look forward to seeing Jiang work her magic in another film and I wouldn’t even be opposed to Xin Xin Xiong directing it. That’s got to mean something, doesn’t it?

The Limits of Control [***]

The hitman (Isaach de Banchole) arrives at the airport, he is told in Spanish, French and English that his assignment is to wait at a café for a man with a violin, he will be given further instructions by that man. His routine is always the same: wait, sip two espressos and then someone will show up. He doesn’t speak much, sometimes he eats after waiting, sometimes he soaks up culture at the museum, but there isn’t a museum everywhere so mostly he just sists and waits. There is always an exchange of matchboxes and usually a coded message inside waiting to be read and eaten. The first contact always has a musical instrument no matter the city, the naked woman (Paz de la Huerta) is always around sometimes overtly sometimes covertly, the second contact is always a woman. There are those little details that are controlled and then there is the hitman’s routine of exercising and espresso, his abstaining from sex. The Limits of Control are pretty strong and absolute.

Perhaps the strongest limit of control is the performance by Isaach de Banchole he remains expressionless, his movements are economical and he wastes no time with talking. He betrays absolutely nothing, remains celebate, his eyes only flash anything when a woman catches his eye but even then it’s only a brief glimmer before he settles back into character…until the moment that he doesn’t. When asked by his target at the end of the film how he got inside his fortress he responds, “I used my imagination.” Since Jarmusch doesn’t show us how exactly this happened we too have no choice but to use our imaginations and we can imagine the carnage isn’t pretty. When the target inquires whether or not our hitman is there for revenge he says that revenge is pointless, but we both know he has made a discovery that would piss him off plenty going in to the finale. “The Limits of Control” pretty much lives and dies by this performance and maybe even this moment. It’s a wonderful thing.

Jim Jarmusch’s film pays off in numerous ways: every locale is practically postcard ready thanks to the gorgeous eye of Christopher Doyle (he of the gorgeously shot “My Blueberry Nights”), there are numerous cameos from wonderful actors, the occasional philisophical musing and the naked (occasionally transparent raincoat clad) form of Paz de la Huerta. It’s all a very Jim Jarmusch-y kind of hitman story…people talk, he listens, language barriers and non-sexual relationships with women ensue but mostly it’s about adherence to your rules. If you have the discipline this film will reward you.

Fantastic Fest review: Merantau

2009-10-20T23:39:00.000-07:00

Merantau [****]

There’s not much to say about Indonesian martial arts film “Merantau” that isn’t complementary. For being the region’s first martial arts film in over fifteen years it seems like a triumphant return to form, the action choreography is, in a word, stellar and the film itself is, well, gorgeous. At least, the best looking movie I’ve seen since “My Blueberry Nights.”

The plot of “Merantau” is standard stuff, it concerns the merantau (coming of age journey, like a walkabout) of a young man named Yuda (Iko Uwais) who goes from rural Sumatra to Jakarta hoping to land a job teaching Silat (the martial art showcased in the film), but when the address he’d been given turns out to be under construction he spends his time wandering the streets and sleeping at construction sites. Everything changes when he chases a young pickpocket down an alley and subsequently saves the young pickpocket’s sister from a beating by a club boss which leads to a series of confrontations and the reveal of bigger villains in a tall, imposing Eurotrash slave trader and his twin brother.

The film’s main villains played by Mads Koudal and Alex Abbad, are like so much else in the film a study in opposites. Mads Koudal’s Rutgar is ferocious, but somehow calm, cool and collected all at once. When he picks a shard of glass out of his face, he uses it to cut Johni (Alex Abbad), the other villain, just below the eye and that small wound seems to affect him almost as much as being bent like a pretzel during his first encounter with Yuda. Johni is reminiscent of a smug, wimpy, less attractive version of Zachary Levi unless you put him up against a woman and then he’s king bad ass. Putting Rutgar beside Johni one begins to wonder how a man can be in the slave trade doing business with such a dangerous man and still be a huge pansy. Another henchman sees in Yuda a reflection of himself, young and idealistic once but now making ends meet as a thug. He’s an intriguing enough character that I wish I knew more about what led him to choose a less virtuous path, but like so much of the movie what it does give me is enough.

I don’t need to tell you that the fights on rickety bamboo structures, inside night clubs and on a pedestrian overpass are glorious, but it must be said that they are appropriately scaled. Not every single action scene is bigger than the next, some only build to a certain point and end without excessive escalation, something you don’t see happen when it’s time to showcase the next great martial art and its heir apparent (I’m looking at you, Tony Jaa). One fight even acknowledges a fact that I’ve been made aware of numerous times in my Harlan Coben reading, that three guys could take one well trained guy on because nobody attacks one at a time. It doesn’t stop the hero from engaging in impossible fisticuffs later but it is refreshing to see that fight end on that note.

The thing that really sets “Merantau” apart from other martial arts films is the baggage that it gives characters. An early exchange between Yuda and his mother suggests a burden was placed on his older brother that he couldn’t bear, while the pickpocket’s older sister Astri inherits the role of parent and protector when she and her brother are abandoned by the family, even the villain bears the burden of his brother’s scars. “Merantau” is about the shadows that loom large over us and how we struggle through our actions to cast them away, it’s that sentiment (and “Merantau” is pretty much slathered in sentimentality) that makes this the most affecting martial arts picture in some time in a way that goes beyond technical excellence. It truly manages to be moving by the end. I loved it.

Fantastic Fest review: The Legend is Alive

2009-10-03T00:05:00.000-07:00

The Legend is Alive [**]

With a title like “The Legend is Alive” a certain expectation is built in automatically such as the promise of things happening that are, in the words of Barney Stinson, "legendary" (or super exciting for the uninitiated) and punching and kicking people on a grand scale should ensue (also because we've seen the trailer). Nevermind that after “The Rebel” the presence of Dustin Tri Nguyen inundates viewers with the prospect of the thrills so prevalent in that film (a cunning, furious, ruthless martial arts epic), but also that the story we see, if we buy into, will move us to our core and be something we carry in our hearts forever. Like with “A Man Who was Superman” it presents us a simple situation we must take as the gospel of the film.

Bruce Lee (Dustin Tri Nguyen) is a mentally handicapped boy who lives with his mother, a martial arts instructor, and he believes his shadow is his father. The children make fun of him and with that his mother eventually tells him his father is the martial arts legend Bruce Lee and he is dead and buried in America. When his mother dies, Bruce tries desperately to find a way to America to spread his mother’s ashes to be with the real Bruce Lee and he befriends a girl who, in the old traditional martial arts standby, is kidnapped and forced into prostitution and Bruce tries to help her. He’s a great martial artist, an idiot savant with a deadly temper, but he’s trying to honor his mother’s wishes not to use martial arts to hurt people, but he can’t reason himself into fighting these men—he tries asking, but it doesn’t work. Things get ugly…eventually.

Half of “The Legend is Alive” could have been the traditional martial arts picture viewers were expecting. It could have sated the appetites of people whose expectations went unfulfilled while still being the artsy introspective story of a guy trying to honor his mother. I was behind the film’s central lie that you have to believe for it to work, I loved the relationship between Bruce and his mother and I think Dustin Nguyen’s full retard performance was a thing of beauty. So much of this film works because I love the emotional component brought to the story, but the film’s martial artsistry figures heavily into the advertising and the expectation so as a viewer I can’t forgive myself or the film for being ashamed of the fact that it should be an epic ass kicker for the last forty-five minutes. The film does everything it can to foster this belief in us about Bruce then when it gives us the truth of the lie it wants us to do so without giving us the satisfying emotional or physical payoff we've earned. Bruce’s mother would’ve wanted him to help, but he’s mentally challenged so maybe he shouldn’t just go in half-cocked…it’s a cheat giving us a damned if you do, damned if you don’t type situation. We are firmly supplanted in a scenario where nobody wins, I could forgive it everything for being about a retarded guy and say all is forgiven, but the Thai’s gave me “full retard” action with “Chocolate” and I think her mom would’ve told her not to if she could’ve and if her mother did then she didn’t listen. She fucked people up from start to finish. Maybe I’m just spoiled, but then again Bruce Lee is supposed to be the goddamn legend and he is alive. It takes about seventy-seven minutes to show it but it finally happens.

When you consider this film is supposed to be a film dedicated to mothers you have to ask yourself: are mothers opposed to things for them that kick ass? I bet when Quentin Tarantino crafts a movie with a strong heroine he is probably thinking of his mother and I bet his mom isn’t thinking “this movie would be better if these bitches weren’t so bad ass.” I bet that writer/director Luu Huynh’s mother (assuming she is still alive) said I wouldn’t have minded if he kicked the bad guy’s butts more or sooner. Nobody would’ve minded the fighting, but bending over backwards not to be honest with yourself is kind of a problem.

Sadly, the legend is a lie.

Family ties easily severed

2009-07-21T02:08:00.001-07:00

Mikey *1/2

I remember watching me some “Mikey” at the tender age of eleven and some details about the film have always stuck with me, electrocutions and bow and arrows and Brian Bonsall from “Family Ties” playing the titular pint sized psychopath. The movie also has some pretty hot looking women in it too which wasn’t something I really noticed on my first go around at 11, but is something that helps tremendously when the movies admirably “getting down to brass tacks” opening slows down a little so we can see Mikey Trenton’s slow burning adolescent psychopath get all heated up for another round of mayhem. Brian Bonsall really elevates things with some foreboding moments here and there where his good manners and eager to please demeanor barely mask the maniac underneath. An IMDb search reveals that Brian Bonsall beat up his girlfriend a couple of years ago and skipped out on a Colorado court date regarding the same and to be honest, I’m not surprised because he’s so good in this role and he looks like a majorly smug little prick, so I guess way to stick with what you know.

Going back to the beginning for a moment, Mikey starts a fire in the basement while his baby sister watches then Mom shows up to slap some sense into Mikey and spirit his little sister away. Mikey talks about how much he hates his mom and his family then he gets mad at his little sister and steals her doll and throws it in the pool. When she steps on the diving board to retrieve the doll Mikey jumps on it so she falls in then he watches her drown, he then goes upstairs and tosses a blow dryer in his mother’s bath then the next shot cuts to him pouring marbles on the kitchen floor while waiting to pounce dear old dad. The payoff for dad’s death scene is great because it leads to a priceless line of dialogue from the detective on the case of Mikey’s family’s mysterious deaths, when the cop sees the father’s bashed in skull and the broken plate glass door he says: “well the door didn’t do that to his head.” The answer is a stunningly obvious “no shit!” but also indicative of the sense of cheesy fun that is missing from the film to make it truly memorable.

In fact, I wish the detective had been a bigger part of the story because it is the only time the movie seems to actively acknowledge how much disbelief we have to suspend in order for the idea of a murderous nine year old to work. It can be done and it can work, but if this guy can be hear to feed off our own misgivings it might make us more apt to enjoy it instead of saying that Mikey is being too ridiculously cold and calculating for a nine-year-old. His first murders seem like a temper tantrum gone awry, I mean he’s smart but it feels different when you don’t see it building up in him the entire time. Some of his calculating moves are kind of amusing, like when he calls a neighbor (Josie Bissett) and puts the phone next to a TV playing one of his filmed murderous rampages, it distracts her long enough that he can go over and kill her boyfriend. I also like how she is set up as the final girl but a simple shove and a “go home Mikey” is actually effective enough to get him to leave. I’ve never seen a less tense final showdown and it’s mainly because I’ve never seen a killer outright give up on someone before. Maybe he really loves her.

Mikey does still manage to take plenty of motherfuckers out though and he even gets tossed around like a rag doll a little bit so you get to see some funny and ultimately ineffective womanhandling of a child. I think "Mikey" has some missed opportunities in that he never imperils other children of his own age. He’s got a buddy that he gets cross with a few times and he never even tries to kill him, but he does steal his pet frog and murder his cat and sneak into his sister’s bedroom. Truthfully, I think killing women is Mikey’s big turn on, killing the men is probably just a necessary evil. In fact, if we were gauging Mikey’s victims by the people who show disdain and disinterest in him first then his body count would only consist of women.

“Mikey” probably isn’t as good as you remember it, but if the fact of it’s existence has ever stuck in your craw then if you’re like me you’re bound to end up watching it again and at least it has some pretty bitches in it that help alleviate the unkindness of time and memory to the movie.

On a more somber note, Mark Venturini, the actor who played the detective died in 1996 and he only had a handful of TV guest spots to his credit so if you ever see this thank him for making it that much more enjoyable. RIP, sir.

You want this blood? Don't take this "Blood"

2009-07-20T00:38:00.001-07:00

Blood: The Last Vampire (2009) [zero]

It’s been a while since I’ve engaged in such an egregious waste of bandwidth that it seems only fair and proper to tell you about it. The movie is a shitfest called “Blood: The Last Vampire” and it’s about a hundreds of years old immortal Japanese schoolgirl named Saya (Gianna, but not the one with naked pictures on the internet---she’s too top heavy for even some obviously CGI’ed stunts) who hunts demons for some mysterious government agency that goes in and cleans up after her when she dispatches ghouls. They also leave containers of blood in the fridge for her. The latest stop on her journey involves a high school on a military base where she kills some snooty blonde bitch and her fat friend while some general’s daughter witnesses it and becomes embroiled in the demon huntresses quest when she goes to confront her fencing/martial arts teacher for leaving her to the wolves. Her teacher and everyone in the bar turns into demons and then for the second time our little Japanese friend saves her ass before we discover she’s looking for a demon named Onegin who killed her guardian. Also, (spoiler) it turns out the demon is her mother, but this aspect is never milked for any grand tragedy.

If you can imagine a movie like this being awesome then I’d really like to see your version because what I saw wasn’t awesome in the least. It is perhaps the most pedestrian route you could take with a premise like this. There were moments that reminded me of “Versus” and “Underworld: Evolution” and while those films certainly vary in quality from pretty damn good to braindead kind of fun, it only succeeded in making me wish that I were watching either of those films instead. It also, made me sad that so few movies get to live up to their title. When I see a movie called “Blood: The Last Vampire” I want a film that feels definitive, like the last word in vampire movies with killer showdowns and martial arts fights but what you get from director Chris Nahon is a film that lacks any real energy, has a few cheap retreads like the confrontation with the winged creature on the mountainside road (the aforementioned “Underworld: Evolution” rip-off) and the samurai showdown in the forest (“Versus”) that somehow incorporates a childhood flashback that makes the scene hilarious. I liked the high energy of Chris Nahon’s “Kiss of the Dragon” with Jet Li, but I think a crucial missing ingredient to multi-national crossover success is the Luc Besson/ Robert Mark Kamen factor. Usually the two of them are only credited as screenwriters but perhaps they have more creative control than we imagine, even a misfire on par with “Transporter 2” has some energy and boasts production values that make it easier to label as something other than some sort of SyFy Channel product that accidentally got a somewhat small theatrical showing. “Blood: The Last Vampire” certainly boasts some incredible TV movie quality demon effects.

Also, the acting is not very good. Gianna’s english is terrible and there are plenty of other so-so performances and lots of older dudes that look like they’ve played politicians in crappy DTV stuff, but no one tries to do one single interesting thing with their characters. Maybe Chris Nahon doesn’t know English and the cast couldn’t communicate with him so nobody could spitball ideas to make things better so people kind of did their own thing and hoped all the elements gelled together in the final product, I don’t know for sure but if that is the approach they took then it cretainly didn’t work. And if they thought they had something good and just rolled with it then that too was a fail. This is not a good movie, I would not recommend that you see it on cable nor do I even feel the urge to recommend it for the completist who must see every Asian schoolgirl uniform available. I think perhaps it could cure your insomnia, but that’s about it.

One is about money in the bank...the other one is

2009-04-20T20:45:00.000-07:00

The International [**]/ State of Play (2009) [****]

Watching “State of Play” and “The International” on the same weekend is an instructive lesson in how to make the most of your premise and well…how to not. That’s not to say that the lesser film “The International” is awful just that at the end of the day it is bracingly irrelevant. In a time, when financial institutions fail us left and right and insurance companies like AIG are performing suspect business practices the movie doesn’t do much to stoke the fires of righteous indignation.

Louis Salinger (Clive Owen) is an Interpol agent perilously close to nailing a bank CEO for funding/funnelling funds for terrorist activites and, this could be something I missed but the key difference between this film and “State of Play” is that the money may be going directly to terror cells whereas “State of Play”’s intrigue involves the privatization of the military and whether or not a Congressman’s aide’s murder has anything to do with his crusade against a private contractor.

Louis works with a Manhattan DA named Eleanor Whitman (Naomi Watts) to help bring the bank down after an investigative colleague dies after meeting with an informant poised to give the details that will blow the case wide open. Most of the pieces are already in play and the film wastes very little time in tying up its loose ends which includes political assassination and assassin assassination. The latter act taking place in the Guggenheim in a dizzying but breathtaking action setpiece that merits the consideration of Tom Tykwer to helm a 007 picture. Even better is the satisfying bloodiness of the sequence, a necessity since the film otherwise fails to work the audience up into a lather.

It’s a nicely helmed, nicely paced and even nicely acted, Watts and Owen never fail to captivate and even Owen and Brotherhood’s Brian F. O’Bryne make a nice odd couple buddy cop/avengers act. But the problem is that I keep using the word nice and rarely using words like breathtaking or satisfying. That action scene though could give some good speakers a workout and if you’ve got about ten minutes to kill that shootout really is a thing of beauty. Escapism so relevant it’s irrelevant.

“State of Play” directed by Kevin McDonald is the kind of muscular picture you should rightly hope for when you’ve got so damn many talented individuals working on any one thing.

As I’ve said before, a Congressman’s aide is murdered, he’s persecuting a private military firm and his reaction to his aide’s death is just emotional enough that people are starting to see a story in the reaction. The congressman is Stephen Collins (Ben Affleck), the new hero on the hill until this latest tragedy and his greatest ally is former college roommate Cal McCaffrey (Russell Crowe) who despite angling for a story seeks the truth more than a headline. Along the way, Cal alternately butts heads with and molds into a bonafide journalist a gossip blogger named Della (Rachel McAdams).

Starting with a youth taking a fatal bullet and another passerby being hospitalized, the questions pile up when secrets about the aide are discovered and a couple more too convenient bodies show up. Maybe you’ll be playing the guessing game, but you might just be riveted by the cast: Helen Mirren is great as a no-nonsense ball busting editor, Russell Crowe does what seems like his millionth effortless and commanding performance in a row while the less seasoned but not untalented Rachel McAdams and tv stalwart Michael Jace of “The Shield” mange to hold their own and make distinct impressions just the same. Last working as the director of 2007s “Gone Baby Gone,” Ben Affleck brings the effortless charisma I admire him for to the role of an impassioned, compassionate man burdened by too damn many mistakes. It’s the kind of role that suits him better than a starring vehicle, though I’ll confess to having missed him only once theatrically since 1997s “Good Will Hunting,” and makes me wonder for how much longer the cinematic atonement of Ben Affleck must continue.

Having seen the first two hours of the British mini, the first hour of “State of Play” is a faithful approximation of the original and with five hours left of the British version I can only imagine and will probably later attest that the 2009 film is a model of efficiency that doesn’t waste a breath in telling its story. Adding to the unqualified success of the film is the screenwriting efforts of Billy Ray, Tony Gilroy and Matthew Michael Carnahan the respective writers of “Shattered Glass,” “Michael Clayton” and “The Kingdom.” It’s quite easy to feel their stamps on the final product as Ray brings an understanding of the tension inherent in newsroom dynamics while Gilroy’s “Michael Clayton” leaves you feeling a little hollowed out at the hard fought victories that don’t make you feel any better at the end. Carnahan has played the politics game in “Lions for Lambs” and to a lesser extent in “The Kingdom” but the film’s final moments are of the breathless what’s going to happen next nature of “The Kingdom.” It’s a beautiful convergence of screenwriters and for that matter actors, directors and editors.

Uncomfortable stirrings from within and without

2009-04-15T12:07:00.001-07:00

Adventureland [****]

Almost always favoring the subtle chuckle over the huge guffaw, Greg Mottola’s “Adventureland” finds itself in the company of recent excellent films “Superbad” and “Nick and Norah’s Inifinite Playlist” about how we wear our insecurities on our sleeves and, at least, in the case of the latter how often we let our hearts fail us. Choosing instead to be merely okay rather than take the plunge that fulfills our heart’s desires.

James (Jesse Eisenberg) is a recent college graduate who finds his life’s path pre-grad school altered ever so slightly when his father’s demotion forces him to get a summer job at an amusement park populated by archetypes such as the slutty chick (Margarita Levia as Lisa P), the Russian author obssessed nerd (Martin Starr), the damaged girl attracted to all the wrong guys (Kristen Stewart, finally, ideally cast as Em), the married handyman (Ryan Reynolds) who is having an affair with the object of the hero’s burgeoning attraction, the douche, the married couple that manage the park (Bill Hader and Kristen Wiig) and, most importantly, the guy who punches people in the cock (Matt Bush). Anyone who has ever had a job before can recognize these archetypes, but anyone who has ever lived and breathed a job will appreciate the humanity that writer/director Mottola infuses each of these characters with. It’s helpful to recognize a type from a mile away, but to be reminded what it’s like to stand on the precipice of the twilight of youth and the spring of an uncertain adulthood is another thing altogether that not many writers/directors seem capable of capturing as we get older, more cynical and further removed from the wonderful, unobtainable simplicity of life that we once knew.

A couple of moments each involving our hero’s interaction with rivals to affection: Lisa P, who oozes sex but is rumored to be as pure as the virgin snow, reveals her greatest weakness to be her concern for her injured father and Connell, the married handyman who sees Em on the sly, offers advice on conversational dos and donts of first dates to James who is currently seeing Em. Shows not only a reverence for the memories of the time, anyone with a personality or name is impossible to paint as a villain, but understands that sometimes not every flaw is everyone’s problem. In some circles our greatest failings might be our inability to keep a secret or our zippers zipped. One thing the film does and maybe more so in the case of Connell than anyone else is compartmentalize. Lisa P sees Em as the villain in the Connell situation, a homewrecker while everybody else seems to be in silent agreement that Connell can’t be blamed because men are hardwired to fuck. Perhaps these concessions are made because nobody wants Connell to be the villain—he’s a nice guy. In fact, they’re all nice people.

Connell is one of the film’s two outright appeals to nostalgia. Proof that you can grow older, have responsibilities but keep that kick ass job of no particular importance and swim in a sea of meaningless sex…until it comes crashing around you. Then there’s Frigo the guy who punches people in the dick. He’s always doing it and sometimes even more immature things than that. He’s the guy who hasn’t made it to the “D” section of the dictionary so he doesn’t know what the word delusional means, but he hasn’t even realized things are changing enough that they can be missed. Either way, his dick punches facilitate a stirring within you that you don’t always feel but when it comes about it’s intense and when it’s gone all you want is to feel it again. That’s right, dick punches as a metaphor for the pangs of nostalgia deal with it.

Greg Motolla’s “Adventureland” is the first truly great purely 2009 release. It understands a few things about longing and the unattainable. Understands even more the pure invaluability of memories and what a good bit of regression does for those who really need it.

Observe and Report [***]

“Observe and Report” is a lot like the dick puncher in “Adventureland” that shit isn’t right but what it evokes is an honest to goodness uncomfortable stirring within you. Ronnie Barnhardt (Seth Rogen) is a deeply delusional security guard at a shopping mall who finds the exploits of a local mall flasher to be his ticket to the big time. In this case, big time means a lot of things: he’ll catch the pervert, win the respect of the local cops and become one, win the heart of the sluttiest girl in the mall (Anna Farris) and all will be right with the world. Ronnie’s got two problems, though: himself and the detective (Ray Liotta) assigned to the case who doesn’t appreciate Ronnie’s impeding his investigation every step of the way.

“Observe and Report,” like most recent comedies, exists in a world just south of reality where a guy can blow a pervert away in the climactic showdown while his boss looks on approvingly and tosses him the keys to the kingdom as the guy lays in a heap on the floor. People do heroin on the clock and skateboarding punks are beaten within an inch of their lives by overzealous security. You should try your best not to be surprised when I tell you there is a scene where security guards wax hopeful about being able to carry guns instead of tazers as they fetishistically polish phallus like guns. Note also that they are cracker jack shots who go for the head, heart and genitals always.

The laughs in the film aren’t the fast and furious kind you come to expect from the Apatow gang, but the kind of laughter you elicit because you don’t really know how else to react. It’s your deepest darkest fantasies brought to vivid, ugly life but it’s honest and for ninety minutes we get to forget about the crippling burdens of social contracts and we can laugh at the horror of swinging dicks in a mall, delusional psychos in a superhero drama (trauma?) of their own making. Still, the film isn’t without an irresistible romantic impulse upon discovering that the wheelchair bound coffee girl in the food court has been ridiculed to the brink by her boss, Ronnie threatens him with death and it’s a fantastic example of the one thing in the movie that is far from dead: chivalry. Ronnie is a loving son and a gallant protector, but it’s the kind of chivalry you don’t want to be on the wrong side of. Maybe I was wrong about the social contracts being burdensome perhaps we’ve just run out of reasons to uphold them or people crazy enough to do it.

For the children and because of them...

2009-03-28T14:22:00.000-07:00

The Children (2008) [*]

How the hell is is that one does not like movies about killer children? Who can resist those mischievous grins when they're party to some real balls to the wall trouble like murder. Does anybody remember when Brian Bonsall of "Family Ties" took it to the house as a bow and arrow brandishing, throw a radio in the pool/hot tub certified psychopath? Maybe it's because I was a kid, but it was terrifying then and even now I have a cousin who looks eerily similar to the kid from "The Omen" remake and I dread the moments when he yanks my facial hair. Remember "The Children of the Corn" or Leif Garrett in "Devil Times Five"? Well take all those memories and hold on to them a little tighter because the Brits are about to fuck all those memories in the ass with "The Children."

Running only a scant 76 minutes, but paced and executed like it lasts as many years is set in the British countryside during Christmas and involves two families getting together, lots of screaming ass little bastards (home schooled, spoiled and nurtured in a frankly faggotty "no hitting zone"), almost as many stupid adults and one poorly reasoned explanation for why the kids are suddenly bloodthristy killers. I'll try and explain.

A little girl named Leah is sick, she's hanging out with her cousins and they cough on shit and share toys, people scream and another little girl coughs and wipes her findings on the pillow next to her, the camera zooms in on the stain and we see microbes or bacteria swimming all about. There's also the magical 99.6 on your radio dial which may or may not be a trigger for these children to start killing and then there's a scene where Leah slams a toy down repeatedly and stabs it while we cut to another child doing the very same thing to her own mother. Psychic link, radio trigger, mysterious disease? Why not all of them? It'll be more chilling if we don't explain it.

Also, everytime one of these kids runs around screaming, their parents come running to check on their children. A particularly stupid moment involves a kid named Paulie (the annoying, ugly William Howes) screaming on the monkey bars. His mom runs over to help him and as she reaches out to grab him, he keeps backing up and she keeps following him. He kicks her and she gets tangled up in the jungle gym and breaks her leg. Have any of these people for a second ever used their brain and said, "I don't want to deal with you when you're like this and just walked away?" It's a simple trick, if a kid feels like they're in danger of you ignoring them they'll change their strategy and/or behave. They might be old enough to kill you, but they're still young enough they don't want to be alienated from you yet. I can't vouch that these tricks will work on psychotic children, but they have obviously never been ignored before and it might shock the shit out of them.

Dinner table misbehavior is part of an elaborate scheme to get one of the adults alone outside and onto a sled so they can place a wagon just so that he can get his scalp ripped off by the gardening tool sticking out of the side as he sleds past. It's not exactly as visceral a moment as it could be, but Paul Hyett's F/X are a pleasant surprise-- child impalings, a skin flap that oozes blood when lifted and a nice broken leg are the highlights. Sadly, the film is edited to within an inch of it's life. Cutting away at the wrong time or providing pay offs a few scenes past their prime effectiveness.

Not every horror film can be a winner, but few waste their premise as soundly as "The Children."

Last House on the Left (2009) [***]

Another Wes Craven film hits it big in the remake sweepstakes. "The Last House on the Left" is the story of a vacationing family pushed to the limits over the course of a single day and night when they come face to face with a murderous gang seeking shelter from a storm only to walk smack into the middle of another one.

Krug (Garrett Dillahunt) is freed from police custody when his girlfriend and brother crash into the vehicle transporting him. The coppers are brutally put out of their misery and then the action cuts to the next day when the aforementioned vacationing family The Collingwood's (pa Tony Goldwyn, ma Monica Potter and daughter Sara Paxton) who after a hectic few months are looking forward to some peace and quiet out in the middle of nowhere.

Sensing that her parents haven't had much time alone together Mari (Paxton) offers to get lost with her friend Paige (Martha MacIsaac) who unwisely opts to buy some weed from a shoplifter in the store she works at, unwisely opts to stay at his motel room and get stoned and unwisely opts to get bled like a stuck pig (against her will) when we find out the dealer's father is our opening credits psychopath Krug.

"The Last House on the Left" resorts to pulling no punches early on, the early murder of the police officers is brutal and in a recurring bit Krug teases his victims with comforting images; as he strangles one cop, he dangles a photo of his children in front of him and when he kills Paige he insists that Megan offer her comfort as she dies because "her friend needs her." Dillahunt whom you might know from "Deadwood" or "Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles" is good at conveying a sort of robotic menace (I mean that as a compliment). He knows only to perform an act, every word seems calculated to lead to a certain end. Words, he understands, are a trigger and can lead to violence. Any sort of physical reaction or movement is designed to inflict pain and/or fulfill what would be a biological imperative in a normal person but is, in him, rote memorization learned from watching people interact.

When I watch films about civilized people getting righteously Medieval on the asses of their oppressors like "The Hills Have Eyes" or "Hostel" it seems like every moment is calculated to get the audience standing up and cheering by the time the hero fights back ("The Hills Have Eyes" screening I attended three years ago, elicited some cheers when Doug vanquished his first mutant baddie, come to think of it people liked it when the dog killed some of those the mutants as well) or at the very least feeling a catharsis of some sort. "The Last House on the Left" elicits what could arguably be called the correct response for a movie like this. The villains are not mutated creatures or businessmen who pay to torture but a regular roving band of psychopaths and an innocent(ish) kid. We witness things that make us want to want these people dead, but we feel hollow and nasty at the end just the same. No vindication only shame.

There are times when we die right alongside Mari spoiler! After her frank and brutal rape at the hands of Krug and watching her friend bleed to death the soundtrack is pierced only by silence, an intense disquiet haunts the audience as Mari summons the courage to run, she strikes Krug with a rock and she's off end spoiler! We see Mari taking broad strokes as she hits the water, successfully escaping, and the power of the image of the ocean as a symbol of woman, rebirth is not lost upon us then the bullet hits her in the back. We know this doesn't kill her from the trailers, but Iliadis' ability to dash our hopes so completely, to destroy the power of a symbol and never offer the proper victim a chance to fight back can't be denied. To that end, how effectively this picture utilizes cruelty is actually a plus.

Another way in which Iliadis' picture succeeds is in how it makes us feel complicit not just as people watching, but by having the Collingwood's execute a man together. Everything they do is not quiet enough to kill him; they have to improvise and when they fail to drown him in the sink they turn on the garbage disposal to mangle his hands and finally bury a hammer in his skull. Who knew it would take so much effort to kill a man? The implicit suggestion is that our darkest impulses are best left in the farthest corners of ourselves and to expose them with others, whatever the circumstance, is to expose the most shameful parts of ourselves.

Feast III: The Happy Finish [***]

2009-02-06T21:35:00.000-08:00

After a lackluster second entry the gang that brought us “Feast” is back in top form with the third chapter of the trilogy-- a relatively brief entry that hits the ground running and made me realize “Feast II” was the breather and connective tissue we needed for an admittedly bizarre and kick ass sequel/possible finale. A few of the things set up in part two pay dividends in this entry—such as alien hybrids and pipes through the head—but a lot of the unexpected rears it’s head.

Doing their level best to survive the onslaught that started at the end of the last film our motley gang nails a few beasts then hole up in the town jail they tried unsuccessfully to occupy in the previous film. Therein they meet a survivalist named Shitkicker (John Allen Nelson, sublime) before things turn ugly and they vow to take the fight to the creatures. The gang befriends and escape to the sewers with a prophet named Short Bus Gus, who may or may not be able to control and communicate with the aliens.

In order to avoid spoiling a few truly great surprises I’ll tell you that a bizarre subculture exists down there in addition to the monsters and leave it at that, but I will tell you that the humor while keeping with the grand tradition of being “so not right” is actually funny again. My least favorite joke from the second film where a guy named Greg Swank sacrifices a baby to save himself has a long, irony laden and pretty damn funny pay-off where Greg lives through most of this film with a pipe sticking through his head and he’s disoriented, all his dialogue is unintelligible and subtitled and he thinks the surviving midget luchador from the last film is the baby he killed and this is his shot at redemption.

When I saw “Feast” in 2005 I admired the scene where a soldier was allowed to drink for free at the bar because the bartender was a World War II vet and respected what he did, it was a nice touch that felt pretty wholesome and American. The movie also had a kid getting eaten, old people getting interrogated and blown up and it was just good gruesome fun that embraced being an old fashioned bloody ass, bloody entertaining piece of joy. It also had some pathos to it, as one woman fights to survive to care for another’s child, two brothers band together to live, people had their reasons for wanting to survive and some did. It’s not easy to see that current going through the films but it is there.

Writers Patrick Melton and Marcus Dunstan like to keep you on your toes with some truly bizarre and unpredictable shit, but one of the surprising things they do is offer up a sense of fairness and balance. Things don’t always end happily for everyone as wars don’t always let heroes choose to die in a manner that befits them, but they see to it that those who deserve it and act selfishly find a way to meet their doom with unusually healthy doses of irony and agony.

About the only real negative I can say about the film is there is an extended strobe-lit sequence that stands in for the jarring shaky cam work of the first as far as bad directorial choices go and it’s frankly pretty damn irritating. That being said, I can pretty much eat the rest of this shit up.

2009-02-04T17:14:00.000-08:00

Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist [***1/2]

We’ve all been there before: admonishing never again until the next time. Nick (Michael Cera) is making an ill advised phone call to his ex-girlfriend Triss explaing why he isn’t at school, his reasons are multiple, flimsy and he’s making one last mix CD for her. It’s desperate but standard until you see him against the wall as he makes his afternoon phone call, his cheek nestled against a picture of his ex on a collage that adorns his wall. The viewer won’t know it at the time, but the journey of “Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist” will be better than its trailer lets on. I like Michael Cera and Kat Dennings, I think this movie is miles better than “Charlie Bartlett” and I think this film like “Superbad” deftly handles teenage insecurity, so the question is: why the fuck didn’t I see this thing until tonight? Sadly, I don’t have an answer.

A movie about two strangers who kiss, fight, search for one’s drunken friend who has run off under the mistaken impression that she has been kidnapped amidst an all night quest to find a band’s secret show seems like it would be some light fluffy fun (and it can be), but it never is just any of those things. Cera and Dennings as the titular Nick and Norah are warm and endearing characters, loveable and always at the ready with a quip but fully capable of revealing more depth. They aren’t over written and precious, they don’t have to keep up with the script it fits them.

The comedy of “Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist” is a mask and there are numerous telling moments in the film: such as the one where Nick has his cheek pressed against a picture of his girlfriend or the moments when after parting ways with Nick, Norah calls a friend named Tal (Jay Baruchel),who is a prick, but makes her feel good because he appreciates her sometimes or the moment when Norah asks how two people who can’t stand each other stay together for so long and Nick offers to call his parents to find out. This isn’t a romantic comedy about two people finding out they are perfect for each other, regardless of the fact that that happens to be true, it’s a story about how often our heart fails us and how we settle for being okay sometimes. The drunken escapades of Norah’s friend Caroline (Ari Graynor) suggest that obliviousness is a preferable alternative to throwing yourself out there for someone to trample on and Nick’s homosexual bandmates, who have brought a fellow named Lethario along for the ride, suggest as “Superbad” did before that there’s no love more uncomplex than man love.

“Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist” is a film that understands how big a role heartbreak, the folly of youth and settling for not being alone plays in our romantic lives, better than that I think it also understands what courage is. It takes lots of balls to put yourself out there and that fear that may send you into a retreat never goes away (the film’s final moments are a perfect example of this). The lucky ones among us just make an effort not to shit on or get shat upon.

The New Year...in style

2009-01-03T15:02:00.000-08:00

Ip Man ***1/2

I remember watching “Iron Monkey” for the first time about six years ago and there was a kid in the movie named Wong Fei Hung who would be portrayed in countless films as China’s greatest patriot and champion, but in that particular film he was only a peripheral character and also a child but the eventualities of what he would do and become loomed large; I get a similar feeling from Ip Man, a martial arts biopic about the man who taught Bruce Lee Wing Chun, this film takes place in the years before Man taught Lee or even had his own martial arts studio. It ends with a climactic battle with a Japanese general some thirteen years before Lee was a student of Ip Man, but the shadow of Lee looms large especially if it’s all you know about Man going into the film and makes one yearn for the second half of Man’s life to be committed to film because “Ip Man” leaves off in exactly the right place. And I also want to know if they can find someone so perfectly suited to play Bruce Lee as Yen is to play Ip Man.

For all intents and purposes Ip Man’s story plays like the Chinese “Cinderella Man” or “Rocky IV” as a man fights for national and personal pride, to feed his family and goes up against a villain who seems monstrous but in his heart of hearts is fighting for at least one of the same reasons as the hero but is only portrayed as monstrous to amp up the tension. To be fair, Ivan Drago is probably the most unsympathetic of the villains while the real Max Baer felt bad for killing those men. General Sanpo is almost a fair balance of the other two, he believes in the sanctity of the martial arts battles and frowns upon another soldier killing a man who after losing a fight attempts to take the rice he was promised regardless of the fight’s outcome, but he still enjoys asserting Japanese dominance and at one point won’t accept the surrender of opponents. His smaller, mousier comrades are actually all bigger pricks than him despite the fact that his concept of a fair fight could use a little tweaking.

The film has a lot of strengths, the fight scenes by Sammo Hung are all pretty exceptionally well choreographed and also while not generally regarded as a plus the fights are relatively brief which works when you’re fighting for pride more than showmanship. However, unless Ip Man is one of the participants the showier pricks tend to win the battles. I guess you wouldn’t be much of a symbol of hope, a legend or a savior if you didn’t have to rescue people though.

The key element to the success of “Ip Man” is Donnie Yen, who plays Ip Man with lots of dignity and, when it rears its head, a controlled sense of fury. Man’s poise and fury comes from his never stated but possibly unconscious desire to assert Wing Chun as a man’s martial art. He never looses his cool when an opponent calls him a bitch for practicing a woman’s martial art (Wing Chun was invented by a woman), but he swiftly confidently kicks lots of ass and in a tongue-in-cheek moment uses a feather duster while an opponent uses the obviously showier sword. Man’s wife also yells at him to be the aggressor lest all the antiques in the house get broken. Whatever the case may be, Yen takes every opponent, every hardship in stride and adds a third trophy to his case of bad ass martial arts dudes after “Sha Po Long” and “Flashpoint.”

If you like inspirational sports films (which you do if you’re human), biopics and ass kicking of a pretty high order then “Ip Man” will probably make your vagina tingle.

Dexter and violence

2008-12-07T12:30:00.000-08:00

All aboard the "Dexter" train...

Well I finally got on board the "Dexter" train and so far the shit has been a ride. I declared at some point during the first episode that I hated Doakes then sometime during the second episode I declared that I hated LaGuerta (or maybe Laguerta) even more. Then around episode three I decided that Doakes' story took an interesting turn and I thought he was on the precipice of being likeable and that he routinely fucked that up for himself. Three more episodes later he has stepped farther from the edge but can't seem to make the leap. LaGuerta, on the other hand, hasn't done much for herself. Telling Tucci's family (Tucci, by the way is a victim of Dexter's latest playmate-- The Ice Truck Killer, who has been amputating the guy's body parts and recreating photos from Dexter's family album. The photos are actually a trail to where Tucci can be found) he was alive was something I thought was going to blow up in her face for sure. I'm glad it didn't though, not for the character's sake, but because I like the show's humanity. There's not much more satisfying than watching what I think will be a soulless demon who sates his murderous impulses by killing other demons trying to achieve humanity in a way that will be much more than the facsimile of such that he's managed to produce so far.

I think the show is fantastically acted (even by the characters I hate). Michael C. Hall is magnetic and Julie Benz etches a believable portrait of a woman hiding behind a constant mask of smiles. I don't know if that mask of smiles will fail her in a big way or even what and when Dexter will reveal to her, but I find her nervousness and trepidation endearing. James Remar and Michael C. Hall's chemistry and code is the glue that hold's the show together and Remar even gets my favorite moment of the show thus far. When Dexter steps out of his apartment and it starts to rain and the rain turns to blood and Harry says, "Storm's coming." If moments like that don't get your engine revving then you might not be human. It's also kick ass and reliable foreshadowing. Props.

Also, how'd you like Scott William Winters of "Good Will Hunting" fame as the brother-in-law of a slain cop who looked to be setting up Doakes for a fall? I liked them apples. Of course, by apples I mean the whole goddamn thing.

Action....

I watched "Punisher: War Zone" this weekend and found it to be gloriously over-the-top but, in truth, I appreciated the manic overacting by Dominic West and Doug Hutchinson a little bit more than I appreciated the violence. Nick Santoro (a writer for "Prison Break") was one of the co-writers of this thing and despite knowing this film is based on a certain run of the comic book series, Santoro's touch which is a "Prison Break"ian staple can be felt in the undying loyalty between Loony Bin Jim (Hutchinson) and his scar faced brother Jigsaw (West) who manage to love each other unconditionally whilst simultaneously hating everything else in the world... Speaking of "Prison Break," Robert "T-Bag" Knepper plays the lead villain in "Transporter 3" which is, putting it mildly, something of a still birth. It's not bad enough to make me yearn for "Transporter 2" but it's enough to make me wish I hadn't been so fond of the first film.

just more about the movies

2008-11-12T14:54:00.000-08:00

So I managed not to update this thing with all deliberate speed so I suppose I owe an apology to the one reader I have out there. So here's to you reader: My bad.

Eden Lake [**1/2]

First thing right off the bat I'm not entirely sure this three star rating is what I want to go with. Don't get me wrong it left me feeling nasty and every once in a while a horror film doing so as unrelentingly as this one (and as cynically) is just what the doctor ordered but I can't help but feel a little dissatisfied all the same. The pretty gorgeous Kelly Reilly plays Jenny, one half a couple looking for a quite weekend getaway at a quarry- that's about to become lake front property for an exclusive neighborhood- who gets harassed by a gaggle of youths to the degree where a misunderstanding results in her boyfriend Steve (Michael Fassbender) killing their dog in self-defense and the ringleader of the youths leading a murderous charge against them.

I know I gave "Red" a serious amount of grief for being about the consequences of a dog's murder, but the crucial difference is this: the kid with the dead dog is already a nutjob this just gave him a reason to kill and exert his evil influence on his peers. A sane person wouldn't be so aggrieved by their beloved dog's passing that this kind of rage would be justifiable, at least not in my factpinion. Anywho the kid/s want to kill the couple, they get away but a debilitating accident puts them right back in the hands of the evil little fuckers. The film is best viewed as a combination of "Them" (the French film that "The Strangers" bears a pretty close resemblance to) and the moment in any horror movie where you stumble into a gas station looking for help and you realize you would have been better off picking any gas station but the one you chose.

There is some first rate bastardliness going on in this film: the ringleader pressures his friends to help torture Steve while they have him bound in barb wire and he films them on his video phone so that no one can make an attempt to grow a conscience. He browbeats people until they puke and cry. He even sets a kid who just wants to be one of them on fire. I haven't really hated a British maniac this much since Stephen Wight played a still meaner variation on this character, who shanks people and pisses on them (sadly, not at the same time) in the equally aggressive but ultimately more satisfying "Wilderness."

Steve, to be honest, is kind of a pushover. He's a pretty cut guy who looks like he could take care of himself but he is too much of a buttow down yuppie type who would rather scoff than get righteously medieval on someone. Truthfully, it sucks to be in this situation because neither of the characters get to embrace their inner animal appropriately and it's the means to a very cynical end. An end that is in the moment more satisfying than it is upon reflection.

If it sounds like I'm dancing around spoilers it's because I am. It's hard to get to the heart of the dissatisfaction without spelling it out pretty blatantly but if the words "proper comeuppance" will do enough for you in this context then there you go.

The work of make-up effects guru Paul Hyett ("The Descent," "The Cottage," "The Killing Gene") is pretty great if in short supply. A spike through the foot is dealt with in a painful and memorable way. Nothing else in the film has the wince-ability of that moment, but it's always a treat seeing the man's work in any way.

"Eden Lake" is certifiably cynical and doesn't cheat to get there. It seems like it plays out honestly in terms of how average joes might fare in a horrific situation such as this, but it doesn't sate the bloodlust properly and for that it's hard to call "Eden Lake" a paradise.

The horror...the horror!

2008-10-17T15:43:00.000-07:00

I've seen a handful of horror movies recently and I haven't written on this blog since the first post so I guess it's high time I hit this bitch up with a little more flavor, so I'm going to talksies about them. It is also, I recently discovered, October and people like being scared this month more than any other so it seems appropo.

Feast 2: Sloppy Seconds [2008] **

I've been waiting for the "Feast"sequel for about a year and it was announced to be filming just before the writer's strike began last October so it was pretty much the only good news for about ninety days and now a year later I can officially say that it wasn't really all that great of news to begin with.

The meat of the picture (Ha! I said meat) concerns a gang of biker chicks led by the twin sister of Harley Mom (Diane Goldner) from the first film, looking for Bozo (Balthazar Getty) because he blew Harley Mom and one of the monsters to hell with a homemade bomb. We know this because Bartender is briefly tortured into giving Biker Queen (that's her name) the goods on Bozo. He omits, and possibly on purpose because everybody thought he died of a heart attack so they left him, the fact that Harley was as good as dead because the monster had severed one of her legs. Or maybe Sis just doesn't give a damn and would have buried her proper but all she can find is a damn hand. So Biker Queen, Bartender and her cohorts head into a neighboring town looking for Bozo.

Bozo's Trans-Am is gone and they eventually stumble upon a small group holed up in an apartment, guns are drawn and people are killed then out stumbles Honey Pie (Jenny Wade, bloody, beautiful and long suffering), the abandoner from part one, who is beaten viciously by Bartender and thrown out a window. She finds refuge in a convenience store for most of the movie, separated from the eventual group of survivors that includes the biker gang, bartender, a used car salesman named Slasher (Carl Anthony Payne), his adulterous wife and the salesman puttin' the meat to her, a couple of Lucha Libres and their grandma who spends most of the film rotting after getting sprayed with acid during the monster autopsy.

"Feast 2" is a pretty big departure from what I would do with a sequel and, you know, it's not that I'm jealous that I didn't get to write the thing I can just tell you that mine would have been better in every way with the possible exception that I wouldn't have had keen sense enough to add people vomiting ad nauseum, nor would I have had a monster dick spray semen during an autopsy for about a minute straight. The discharge of body fluids is about the only thing in the movie that subscribes to the more is more approach of filmmaking.

I think they're might be the same amount of blood, its a hell of a lot less funny and more characters are standing at the end. The monsters are slower and suckier and the reprisal of the dead kid joke from the first one, applied for shock and legitimately raising the stakes for one of our heroines in the original, is applied to an even more unpopular target (read: cuter and smaller) and felt pretty firmly like a "f-ck you" to me for coinciding with the moment I thought that the film had more affection for it's characters than the original. I never thought the kid's death felt cheap in the first one and none of the little people slams like calling them "pygmy motherf-ckers" feel wrong. Beating the shit out of a woman who abandoned you and your friends to die and then biting off her ear doesn't feel wrong and neither does an alien having sex with a cat on-screen but this other thing kind of makes me feel like less of a person.

The monster attacks are a little more coherent this time around and I don't know whether to attribute that entirely to John Gulager realizing that shaky cam monster attacks are a pretty surefire way to disengage and disorient your audience or if the movie is just so damn bright you can't help but notice things when they happen. There is, towards the end, pretty copious use of CGI and blood and I can see the legitimacy of marrying the two here and there like when a freak accident unrelated to a monster attack befalls a character, but when you have human and monster interaction with CGI thrown in when the monsters are clearly rubber suits then you don't really succeed at doing anything other than reminding us that what we're watching is an inferior product that isn't as engaged with delivering the goods as the first film was.

All that being said, "Feast 2" is kind of less of everything but discharge. It is, after all, only half of a movie in the grand scheme of things.

Red [2008] **

I've been a pretty big fan of the last two Jack Ketchum adaptations given the cinematic treatment, the terrifically disturbing and unforgiving "The Girl Next Door" and "The Lost" about a frighteningly charismatic psychopath in the vein of Charles Manson, if "Girl" is pefect and "The Lost" is a little long in the tooth it bears wondering how exactly "Red" could go off the rails. Like it's precursors "Red" seems firmly rooted in the nostalgia of by-gone eras, tinted in nostalgia or filmed exclusively on lazy Sunday afternoons, it has the crucial atmosphere of a Jack Ketchum story translated to film going for it, it is also a somewhat slow moving character study with many pretty damn good performances. So where does it go wrong and how?

"Red" is not a story of evil in the same way as "Lost" or "Girl Next Door" it is about a man actively seeking justice for a wrong that has been committed against him. I wish I could tell you that the problem is that the movie is about a hero instead of a villain, but the villain gets some pretty decent face time and he's a pretty big son of a bitch (not in size, but in attitude). The question really is sanity. There are psychos and schadenfreudes abound in the filmed adaptations of Ketchum's work and I can't really complain about that but the hero of "Red" is Avery Ludlow (Brian Cox), a widower whose dog gets murdered by a couple of punk kids that want to rob him. For Avery this is like losing his family all over again, his dog Red is the only reminder of his once idyllic life and to a very small extent I can see how a dog is one's lifeline to the world. Man's best friend and all that but everytime I see a dog lover in real life I still see a sane person. Ketchum doesn't seem to feel the same way and it's a problem.

Avery finds out who the kids at the lake are and he pays a visit to their respective families, hoping for an apology from the offenders and maybe even for their parents to impress upon them the wrongness of their actions, but the boys' denial of the events is enough for their parents who dismiss Avery as a crazy old man. The law isn't offering Avery much comfort as killing animals carries a punishment so paltry that Avery prefers the apology. In an effort to obtain the apology, a reporter (Kim Dickens) does a human interest piece on the local news, but it becomes clear that nobody gives a damn about Red except for Avery and a couple of sympathetic locals who by comparison don't care nearly enough. The apathy drives Avery batshit and he wants to get all "old testament" on their asses. This is where "Red" runs into all of it's problems-- hoping for anything more than an apology is too much and the way the situation escalates into a final shootout is beyond belief. The old man probably would have been arrested for his persistent stalking or a judge would order the boy to pay a fine long before it came to the point of throwing bricks through the old man's window or burning down his store became the order of the day. Also, as much as the local gun dealer loves his dog, who saved him, when he accidentally shot off his own foot, something tells me that were his dog brutally murdered he wouldn't kill the people who did it. Maybe he's got a family at home unlike Avery that can help him along in his grief or maybe he is just a rational person. Anger is one thing, being a psycho is quite another and even still I can't reconcile getting hell bent over a dog.

"Red" is probably just fine as a read. It works on paper as a cathartic exercise to purge yourself of the anger you feel towards the brutal murder of your dog, but turning it into a film throws into sharp relief how crazy the notion of being an avenging angel for a murder dog is. The premise is noble and I'd like to say that I understand it, but I don't. People laugh when they hear the synopsis for the film but it isn't funny it's tragic yet there's no denying that it can't work as a film because it's too irrational for anyone with sense to comprehend regardless of their sympathies.

That said, the performances are terrific pretty much all around with Cox and Kim Dickens as the reporter forging a pretty believable relationship rooted in how noble she finds his cause, but also in how much she likes the sad haunted old man. Kyle Gallner plays the younger brother of the film's sociopathic murderer and he brings a much needed degree of sympathy to the bad teens who wronged Avery. Noel Fisher plays the son of a bitch ring leader pretty well.

For a movie I don't have overwhelmingly negative things to say anything about from a craft standpoint it might be too much of an overtly dick move to drop two stars on the film, but a lot of what happens doesn't feel right. It would never get this far regardless of the emotions of the people involved so sympathy be damned I'm just not with you on this one.

Dance of the Dead [2008] ****

There's a pretty astonishing moment about midway through the unapologetically awesome "Dance of the Dead" that redefines what you might realistically expect from a movie about the kids who couldn't get dates to the Prom (or didn't quite make it there) showing up with their gym teacher to kick some zombie ass and save what's left of the townspeople from impending flesh eating doom. After taking refuge in a funeral parlor and fighting their way into the morgue the group's resident badass/school bully is besieged by a cadaver sprung to life and suffers a fatal bite to the jugular. With his dying breath he asks Steven (Chandler Darby) to make him a promise to "kill them all." As much as they hated him everyone is shocked, saddened and feeling pessimistic about their situation without him. In the midst of their mourning he wakes up and everyone beats him to death. In this moment, the film finds an honest gravity to the faux life or death importance we give certain situations (getting a date to the prom, getting "the girl") or the sometimes morbid fantasy of taking the school bully down a peg. It isn't the first time the film does it either, but the less said about those moments here the more surprises the film will ultimately have.

It's probably worth noting at this point that I think "Dance of the Dead" is perfect. Every character archetype is represented in a way that feels like reverence. There is no smugness on behalf of the characters or the filmmakers, moments of humanity are allowed to float to the surface and comedic and serious tones are perfectly balanced. Chandler Darby as Steven, the unlikely boyfriend of student council president/ prom queen hopeful Lindsey (the lovable Greyson Chadwick), has an attitude that is best described as not giving a fuck. He gets dressed down by his asshole chemistry teacher, gets head butted by the school bully for insinuating that his sister would be his prom date, gets dumped the day of the prom and still, in the midst of zombie fighting, talks about Mr. Badass' predilection for farm animals. I'd like to call him this film's Bruce Campbell where it not so screamingly obvious he is Judd Nelson. On a similar note, the school bully is this film's "Some Kind of Wonderful" Elias Koteas first scene skinhead. And Greyson Chadwick is hot now unlike a certain Molly Ringwald who didn't get hot until 40.

Is it fair to put "Dance of the Dead" in the shadow of John Hughes? No, but it is fair to say this kicks John Hughes' ass in every way. If any American movie can use a song on it's soundtrack as expertly as this film utilizes Shadows of the Night during it's climactic prom showdown I'll show you a movie that I might just have to (in the words of Tracy Jordan from "30 Rock") take behind the middle school and get pregnant.
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This isn't the end of the horror reviews by any stretch of the imagination. We've still got some time in October and I love horror so you should expect these kinds of writing with some frequency. Thanks for stopping by.