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The post Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation appeared first on The Life and Art of Vern.]]>
It has been a tradition in the series to have a respectable actor in a position of authority over Ethan Hunt (Cruise) and his Impossible Mission Force team. In part 1, Jon Voight played the boss and mentor. In part 2, Anthony Hopkins sent Hunt on his missions. In part 3 there was Laurence Fishburne to question his actions, and in part ghost Tom Wilkinson was "the Secretary." Now in part 5, MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE – ROGUE NATION (M:I-RN), we have the most involved of all of these characters, Alec Baldwin as CIA director Alan Hunley. He gets the entire IMF agency disbanded and tries to capture or kill Hunt, who is still in the field trying to finish his last mission.
What I'm getting at is that Alec Baldwin's famous narrator voice gets to deliver a very good Just How Badass Is He? speech for Ethan Hunt, which includes the appropriately hyperbolic phrase "he is the manifestation of destiny." That's one of the many advantages of having Christopher McQuarrie aboard as director and co-writer. The man made JACK REACHER. He loves a good Just How Badass Is He? speech.
The series has mostly avoided continuity, which fits well with their different-director-each-time tradition. In this installment, though, there's discussion of the Kremlin break-in in GHOST PROTOCOL and even the CIA headquarters break-in from part 1. Hunley says it happened toward the beginning of his career with the CIA. This is a huge missed opportunity to digitally composite footage of young Alec Baldwin into that scene. Hunt has disappeared into the vent with the NOC list, the puking computer tech comes in and sees the knife stuck in his desk, and then Baldwin circa-HEAVEN'S PRISONERS comes in and says "Excuse me, I'm new here, do you know which way the bathroom is?" Or whatever a new guy would ask. I think it would've been a really cool scene, you guys.
By part 3 it seemed like Luther Stickell (Ving Rhames) would be the only supporting player to return in sequels. But Simon Pegg's comedic cameo as Benji in part 3 grew into a full-fledged team member in parts 4 and 5, and part 4's William Brandt (Jeremy Renner) – introduced to take over the series from Cruise, was the story going around at the time – now makes a really good side man, the guy in the suit who placates the bosses and then steps into the field when necessary. Renner also has a good comedic rapport with the others, especially Rhames, it turns out.
One thing that has been a bummer: never any returning women, other than Hunt's non-agent wife (Michelle Monaghan), who was seen in 3 and 4 but he had to abandon her for safety purposes. Thandie Newton was very capable in 2, but she was a civilian. Maggie Q was badass in 3 and Paula Patton in 4, and she was present at the end when Hunt declared that "the only thing on that mission that worked was this team." So I hope they at least asked her. Luckily, ROGUE NATION introduces the most formidable female of the series so far, and the one with by far the best name: Ilsa Faust (played by Swedish actress I never heard of before Rebecca Ferguson).
Ilsa is a stranger who Hunt first sees while he's hung up shirtless in a torture dungeon. One of those meet cute scenes. She works for The Syndicate, "an evil IMF" who nobody else believes exists even though Hunt was told about them in his mission message at they end of GHOST PROTOCOL and they abducted him right out of a record shop that's an IMF front (the "your mission if you choose to accept it" message is hidden on a jazz record that he has to play in a listening booth – pretty cool). Ilsa helps him escape, but stays behind, and he (and we) spend most of the movie torn as to whether to have faith in her because she helped him or assume she's gaining his (and our) trust for a future betrayal. I mean, what does her name mean? Is she involved in a Faustian bargain, or is she Faust? We don't know.
Whichever side she's on she's a total badass, clever and daring, able to defeat and disarm large men using awesome moves, even while wearing a fancy gown.
So Hunt is out there tracking the Syndicate, and when he fails to stop, say, an assassination, the CIA sees that he was there, and blames him. So it's similar to the first movie in that he's left without the resources of his agency, and hunted by his own government for crimes he didn't commit. But because of the events of the previous four movies, this time he has loyal friends that he knows he can trust to help him. He doesn't have to go to a list of other disavowed agents and risk working with a Jean Reno or a Dougray Scott. Ensemble teamwork is one quality that has thankfully increased as the series continues. Hunt is still the focus, but he's not alone on a cliff. For most of the movie he has Benji, Brandt, Luther or a combination of them on his headset helping him, or else he's the one helping them.
Hunt and his team are usually one step behind The Syndicate, and three ahead of the CIA. There are many clever tricks. At least one I figured out ahead of time, but it was fun anyway.
McQuarrie previously wrote for Cruise on VALKYRIE and EDGE OF TOMORROW, and directed him in JACK REACHER. I can't say the action is quite as squeaky clean as in REACHER, but it's not too far off, and there's way more of it. The ad campaign was based around the incredible stunt sequence where Cruise hangs onto the side of a plane as it lifts off, clearly done for real. It's a huge one-upping of part 1's climactic Chunnel sequence, where he gets blown around on top of a train, but using green-screening effects that don't hold up too well to the scrutiny of the modern eye. Surprisingly, this now-spoiled highlight is only the opening scene. And there are other maybe less death-defying but probly even cooler set pieces. (Of course Cruise has the airplane stunt under his credit at the end. I would've requested that too if I was him.)
I like the chase and fight that take place backstage at the Vienna Opera House. There's a fist fight recklessly jumping from two planks hanging high above the stage, all nicely framed at least from the waist up, sometimes head to toe, no confusing closeup bullshit. But that's immediately topped by a suspense scene where Hunt spots multiple gunmen seemingly with their sights set on a head of state in a balcony, and has to decide what to do. It's all set to the music of the opera, with sheet music showing us the rapidly approaching note on which they're supposed to fire. It's the DePalma-iest MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE scene since DePalma's MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE.
And there are car chases. And an excellent motorcycle chase that seems heavily George Lucas inspired. In case George Miller takes another decade to do his next movie it's good to know we got some guys who can capture speed and momentum on film. Also I'm glad Tom Cruise didn't burn his fuckin knees off. He's leaning down low on those turns.
And then there's another homage to the first one when the team has to once again get past an impossible security system to steal a computer file. About this scene I originally wrote: Cruise must've really gone underwater, but it seemed more artificial to me than, say, the submerged kitchen scene in JOSS WHEDON'S ALIEN RESURRECTION. Yet it completely works with Hunt having to perform a simple task but while holding his breath and, it turns out, dodging a giant spinning thing. Meanwhile, we keep seeing Benji's part of the caper, which we know is about to end in his death if Hunt doesn't finish what he's doing.
I almost feel like I owe Cruise an apology for that after hearing the Q&A Podcast about ROGUE NATION. Turns out it's more real than I thought. He did a ridiculous amount of training to be able to hold his breathe for over 3 1/2 minutes for the scene. They even shot it as a "oner" before realizing that it worked better as a team effort. Makes me want to see it again, but I suppose it's a compliment that I thought it was a great scene even when I assumed it was mostly a bunch of computery business.
There's a specific thing that happens in this scene that I want to discuss, because it's when I knew the movie really had me. But it's a spoilerSPOILERspoiler, so kindly skip to the next paragraph if you haven't seen it yet. When Hunt failed to open the hatch and started to drown I realized… oh shit, Ilsa Motherfuckin Faust knows he's in trouble, she's gonna zoom in and rescue him! And of course she does, but I didn't see it coming that she would show up in her underwear, like some teen that ends up at a lake party without a swimming suit. I'm not the type to complain about a beautiful woman in her underwear, but what I love about it is that it shows this was not plan B. They did not prepare for this possiblity, but she comes through anyway. She does what it takes. That's when she steals the movie. I was also thinking it answered the question of whether to trust her or not, but then of course…
This is a very entertaining movie, and I hope it gets McQuarrie in the directing chair more. It's the kind of movie I like best in the summer, where it takes itself seriously, but also has a bunch of laughs. And there's some strong "oh shit, how is he gonna get out of this?" tension. I wouldn't say it matches the level of mastery that DePalma got to, that perfect balance of artful cinema and popcorn fun. This is nitpicking, but a couple times I thought it was just slightly off… like, the almost perfect lead-in to the title sequence felt like it was missing one shot, or one beat? Maybe that's just me.
There's an awful lot of fighting that goes on without the people nearby noticing it. Sometimes you just gotta suspend the ol' disbelief, like in the great fight in the scaffolding, in which it seems like all the grunting and clanging would've been noticed by someone. Other times it kind of says something that nobody pays attention to them. When the team sits down at an outdoor restaurant and there are guns pointed and a bomb vest that's counting down from three minutes, there are innocent diners just a few feet away, minding their own business and not eavesdropping. Like I pointed out in my recent revisit of DIE HARD WITH A VENGEANCE, these background bystanders raise the stakes, and also introduce this scary idea that the IMF are just barely stopping catastrophes right under our noses, and we have no idea. The world you live in is just a sugar-coated topping.
It got out during filming that they had to stop filming for a week to try to rework the ending. According to the Hollywood Reporter, "McQuarrie was given the extra time to work out a new and improved finale with a writer friend whose identity remains a mystery and who will neither be paid nor credited." At this time I am prepared to admit that yes, I was the unnamed, unpaid, uncredited writer. To be honest though the lack of credit is fair, because all I did was try to sell McQuarrie on my young-Alec-Baldwin-trying-to-find-the-CIA-bathroom flashback idea, so eventually he asked me to leave.
(Actually it turns out McQuarrie said on that podcast that it was Dylan Kussman, an actor known for WILD THINGS 2. And DEAD POET'S SOCIETY. He was also in WAY OF THE GUN, X-MEN 2 and JACK REACHER, all McQuarrie-connected.)
That story sounded like bad news for the movie, but in retrospect it must've been a good idea, because I think this has a really good ending, and it's such a companion to the opening that they must've reworked that too when they figured it out. The leader of the Syndicate, Solomon Lane, is played by Sean Harris, who I didn't recognize from playing one of the assholes in PROMETHEUS because I swear they modeled his look after the police sketch of the Zodiac killer. He's not a Hunt doppelganger who should have a fight with him like the villain of part 2, he's a nerd with a gun, and we know how that sort of thing usually goes. They chase him into, like, a factory or something, he keeps shooting and shouting out taunts, eventually he plummets to his death or some crap.
They skip all that and do something much more simple, but also more effective. They outsmart him, they defeat him, and the whole team is present, posing, not flinching as he takes his last shots, and as he realizes he's lost. It's beautiful.
You know what I say? Mission acco– actually somebody already used that one I bet. How bout "this is one MISSION I'M POSSIBLy gonna see again at some point!" Nah, that's obvious too. Anyway point is I liked it though.
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The post R.I.P. Rowdy Roddy Piper appeared first on The Life and Art of Vern.]]>
I know some of you are serious wrestling fans to this day. That's not me. But I'm one of the millions who was obsessed with WWF wrestling in the 1980s. It was a time when pro wrestling stopped being seen as a lowbrow fringe activity and was allowed to intersect with all parts of culture. Andy Warhol went to a Wrestlemania. Cindy Lauper and Alice Cooper became wrestling managers. A more experienced manager, Captain Lou Albano, played Lauper's father in a video. Wrestlers released terrible albums, which I bought on vinyl. On Saturday mornings there was a cartoon called Hulk Hogan's Rock-n-Wrestling, and every fourth Saturday Night NBC showed wrestling in place of SNL. When one of these Saturday Night's Main Events took place in Seattle I was there. I was thrilled to see Andre the Giant in person (although he didn't wrestle) and Brian Bosworth in the crowd. I was [undisclosed] years old and witnessing these larger than life individuals – cartoons of good, evil and awesome sculpted out of muscle and fat and encased in colorful spandex – was like catching a glimpse of the Greek gods.
Like anybody, I went through a number of favorite wrestlers during that period, and Piper was only one of them. But he always stood out. Physically he was a little closer to an everyman than the sculpted mr. wonderfuls he fought, but mentally he was superior. He had a Bugs Bunny quality to him. Both as the iconic lead villain and the "well, he's so popular, let's make him a good guy" his thing was to fuck with people. As far as I know he was the inventor of the weird wrestling tradition of giving wrestlers "shows" within the wrestling broadcast. For "Piper's Pit" he would have a stage set up in the arena and do a little talk show interviewing wrestlers. Sometimes you'd look forward to that more than the bouts (although of course the show could very well end with something being broken over somebody's head).
But I think you can guess the reason he stayed meaningful for me decades later: he's the one that transcended the world of wrestling to star in one of my all time favorite movies, THEY LIVE. I didn't know it at the time, but it was a risky move for him. He had to quit the WWF. Vince McMahon (who I didn't even know was the boss at the time, I thought he was just the square announcer who Jesse Ventura got to show up every week) only wanted his wrestlers in movies he produced, like NO HOLDS BARRED starring Hulk Hogan. He told Piper not to take the low budget THEY LIVE, that he could guarantee him a role in a much bigger movie. Piper supposedly said "yeah, but it wouldn't be directed by John Carpenter."
THEY LIVE is possibly the very best example of two of my deeply held filmatic ideals. One, it's a pulpy, awesome genre movie that works as pure entertainment, but also as a biting statement about the world of 1988 (and, sadly, 2015). Two, and more relevant to our subject here today, it's a movie that showcases the unique qualities of a wrestler in a role that could've gone to an actor and wouldn't have been as good.
I get in this argument all the time about movies, whether it stars Van Damme or Seagal, or Gina Carano, or a wrestler or MMA fighter. Yes, acting is an art and a craft that can be thrilling and moving in ways maybe unattainable to these men and women. On the other hand, they have a physical presence and abilities that are entertaining to see on screen and that cannot be simulated by those actors. This is why I will watch any of the WWE Productions that star wrestlers, even though I've never heard of most of them. And why I was immediately captivated by The Rock's movies even though his wrestling superstardom was way after my time.
Even The Rock doesn't have a movie under his belt that's as great as THEY LIVE, and as indebted to the unique skills of its wrestler star. I'm sure Carpenter could've made the movie with Kurt Russell, and it would've been great, but it wouldn't have been as great. Piper famously ad-libbed much of the dialogue, including the beloved bubble gum line. As a big-mouthed wrestler from the days when interviews were as important as matches that sort of shit talk was his life's work.
And then of course the legendary alley fight scene with Keith David had to be designed for a wrestler. At the time some people thought Carpenter had lost his mind. A (belated) review in the May 1989 issue of Cinefantastique Magazine says that he "pitches his baby to the groundlings" with that scene, that "his wrestling fan's dementia here impedes the filmmaker's instinct for knowing just when enough is enough." I'm glad that these days most people seem to see that the surprising length of the fight is exactly what's beautiful about it. That's how hard Frank fights to not put on the sunglasses, because these are the lengths we will go not to have to see what's going on right under our noses.
And besides, what the hell is wrong with a long fight scene? You got A.D.D. or somethin?
Carpenter knew what he was doing when he cast Piper. As he told Entertainment Weekly when the Shout Factory Blu-Ray came out, "To me, Roddy just had a weathered face and looked like he'd been working all his life. He wasn't a Hollywood star. He had some scars on his face and I thought he would be convincing walking into town with a backpack on his back looking for work."
I don't usually go in for this type of merchandise based nostalgia, but maybe this will give you an idea of the place Piper holds in my life. I'd been drinking from my favorite Roddy Piper pint glass all morning when I found out the news. I own a beautiful Thai poster of THEY LIVE which is near the top of my list of things to get framed if I ever get a chunk of money from a book or something. More crucially, I have a poster from when it was released on VHS, and six or seven years ago I went to a horror convention specifically to have it signed by Piper.
It was a pathetic affair, a poorly planned and promoted event at a hotel by the freeway, where I saw iconic horror stars like Betsy Palmer sitting at tables looking lonely. I had a good conversation with Lou Perryman from TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE 2, who has also since passed away. I saw Danielle Harris, and considered trying to talk to her about MARKED FOR DEATH, decided I'd feel like a creepy older dude. (I thought she was younger than she actually was.) Anyway, my goal was to see Roddy.
But when I got there he was the only guest not at his table. A guy I knew who had a table selling art said he'd been there for a little bit, but had left. It was early, a sunny afternoon, but when he showed up again he smelled of liquor and was slurring a little.
A few of us lined up. The guy in front of me had the same poster I had. "Where'd you get this?" Roddy asked.
"Ebay," the guy said. I was proud that mine had been obtained legitimately from a video store in the '80s and had been cherished since. I gave my $25 to Piper's son, who is now an MMA fighter, and Piper signed the poster and asked how I was doing. I told him about a recent major life event, which made him say "Oh, God bless you." So I consider myself to have been blessed by Roddy Piper. I'm not Catholic, so it's better than the Pope.
Before Jonathan Lethem beat me to it I was planning a short book about THEY LIVE. I had done a little research, including reading Piper's autobiography. Like any wrestler's stories you gotta take it all with a grain of salt, but also like any wrestler it's clear he took many hits in life, both inside the ring and out.
This one is getting to me more than most celebrity deaths, not just because he means alot to me, but because it's not just nostalgia. I felt like he was still a part of my life. Though I don't watch wrestling, I'm fascinated by wrestlers, and like to listen to the podcasts that interview guys I remember from the old days. My favorite of those is Piper's Pit. When I first discovered it existed it took me a bit to get used to Roddy's sometimes unintelligible rambling, and his habit of repeating stories, like what his bagpipe entrance music comes from. Once I got accustomed to it it started to seem endearing.
What was great about his show is that he'd talk to these guys he had long histories with, and there was a genuine sense of old friends who had been through it all together, and had become brothers. They could laugh about the crazy shit and the close calls, reminisce about old buddies and good times. They had a shared language, but they were letting us in on it.
And what was especially great about it was how important it was to him to tell people he appreciated them. "Ah, I love ya!" was one of his most commonly used phrases. I didn't listen weekly, but enough to hear how much he loved so many of the guys he came up with, how much he worshipped "Judo" Gene Labell, how honored he was by Ronda Rousey calling to ask if she could call herself "Rowdy" Ronda, and especially how proud he was of his son Colt, who he'd brought with him to that convention. In his Q&A he'd called Colt his best friend, and deferred to him for facts he couldn't remember (such as his official title on whichever GI JOE movie was coming out then, trainer or advisor to something). And he teased him about being into MMA instead of wrestling, saying he didn't understand the appeal. Years later on his podcast you could tell he was worried when he talked about Colt having to deal with other fighters being extra hard on Roddy Piper's son to make a name for themselves, and beaming when he talked about him winning Fight of the Night.
Of course, my favorite episode was the one with John Carpenter. As you can imagine it was a great conversation about filming THEY LIVE, with immense mutual admiration and pride in what they'd created. But the surprise is the touching end of the interview, which made me tear up like the end of BABE or something. Carpenter's wife and producer Sandy King was there off mic, and Piper insisted on bringing her in so he could apologize to both of them. He said he'd been a jerk to them during the filming of the movie, which they seemed to disagree with. But it was important to him to tell them he was sorry for whatever it was.
So let's take heart in that. He seemed like a guy who had made alot of mistakes in life, but was really trying to make up for them, and set things straight with everyone he knew. And it bothered him how many of his friends had died too young from what he called "the sickness," the various mental and physical tolls of the life they'd lived in the ring and on the road. So he was always making sure to tell his people how much he appreciated them. For such a heel he sure seemed like a sweetheart.
So here's to you, Rowdy. We appreciated you too. Thanks for the blessing.
The post R.I.P. Rowdy Roddy Piper appeared first on The Life and Art of Vern.]]>
The post Any AMERICAN SHAOLIN fans? appeared first on The Life and Art of Vern.]]>
I haven't actually found it yet, so I haven't seen it, but I bring it up because this guy Anatolij contacted me about it. He's such a fan of the movie that he's trying to start a record company just to put out the soundtrack. These are the types of dreams I believe in, so I'm doing my part to spread the word. I think he's just looking for people to put on a mailing list to prove there is interest in a soundtrack and, more importantly I imagine, a Blu-Ray.
Anatolij also writes, "Apart from the AMERICAN SHAOLIN soundtrack, I want to make a community of cool soundtrack fans, who are interested in supporting other underrated unreleased soundtracks. There are some fans who have soundtrack wishes, and I think it would be pretty cool to have a good support base. A CD costs not a lot, and if you can support a release with that, that's a great thing."
So check out Spirit Touch Records and spread the word if you know people who would be interested.
The post Any AMERICAN SHAOLIN fans? appeared first on The Life and Art of Vern.]]>
The post The Net appeared first on The Life and Art of Vern.]]>
In THE NET, Sandra Bullock (DEMOLITION MAN) plays Angela Bennett, a loner computer expert who becomes The Beta Tester Who Knew Too Much when a colleague stumbles across a backdoor being used to enter major databases and sends her a disk to take a look at.
Bullock spends alot of the movie saying out loud what she's pretending to type. Angela mostly stays indoors, and most of her friends are either software company people in other parts of the country that she talks to over the phone, or people in "Cyberchat." This being 1995, with dial up modems and floppy disks, that was still a pretty new idea, as was her ordering a pizza online (which I would still never do myself in this futuristic age). Of course it's a movie that plays up the exoticism of computers and the internet, and heavily bullshits it up. The backdoor creates a rapid burst of screens of information that computers back then couldn't have handled and that have no possible use except movie flashiness. A virus is instantly identifiable because it turns what's on the screen into little shapes as it quickly destroys the system. Call it the Photoshop Mosaic Filter Virus. So it's a goofy mix of dated technology and not-feasible-at-that-time.
While on an overdue vacation in Cancun, Angela meets Jack Devlin (Jeremy Northam), suave British hunk who happens to also be on the beach with his laptop, have the same favorite cocktail, share the interests listed on her online profiles and fit her recent chat room description of her ideal man. Hmmmmm.
After her purse is stolen and she and Jack have non-cyber-sex on his yacht she figures out that he's trying to kill her (shouldn't have left the gun with the silencer sitting there) and that he has the disk that had been in her purse. She barely gets away with the disk and her life, but by the time she gets back to the States her whole existence has been fucked with via modem. She loses her bank accounts, she's been moved out of her home and forced into the new identity of "Ruth Marx," who is wanted on prostitution and drug charges, according to police records when they look her up. Since she lives online and her Mom has Alzheimer's there's almost no one who can identify her.
Well, there's one. She goes to her ex-boyfriend Dr. Alan Champion (Dennis Miller, TALES FROM THE CRYPT BORDELLO OF BLOOD). Even pre-9-11-right-wingening, if Dennis Miller is the only person you can trust then you got a fuckin problem. His sleaziness is inherent not only in his being excited to go to a hotel room with his panicked ex, but in his past as her shrink. But as he does what he can for her even though he's skeptical about what she's telling him, he's pretty likable. It's actually kinda sweet. (He does not help identify her to people denying who don't believe her, though.)
The villains are a hacker group. Not quite DIE HARD villains like Timothy Olyphant, but not any more believable. In person they act like secret agents, taking on different personas and using guns, so you assume they're feds. I guess they must be ex-CIA or something. Their whole trick is that they make the security software that has a monopoly on everybody's computers, Gatekeeper, and it lets them in. And the billionaire CEO guy is the mastermind, so maybe this movie predicts John McAfee, the commercial anti-virus software baron who was accused of being involved in a murder, but now that I read about it it sounds like maybe that guy got set up or something. This guy in the movie is a definite scumbag. But you'd think after they ground all the planes at LAX, shut down the stock market and other major disruptions, these organizations would start looking for new software. It seems pretty clear that Gatekeeper ain't cuttin it.
At one point there's a foot chase between Angela and Jack, and they run through some sort of march for affordable health care that's going on, and everybody's holding candles. And I thought holy shit, this is like the climax of BLACKHAT, which is a foot chase through a parade that also has everybody carry candles.
The movies don't end up being very similar, but it's an interesting comparison because BLACKHAT is a more researched and based-in-reality version of computer crime, but also much more effective as a thriller, an action movie and photographs to look at, but I don't remember THE NET getting the kind of shit BLACKHAT did. However, I checked Rotten Tomatoes and they have it at only 2% higher than BLACKHAT's 34%, so I guess it wasn't rewarded that much for its mediocrity.
There's one pretty cool action moment: in a car driven by someone who she figures out is an impostor FBI agent, she grabs and yanks on the wheel, and unbuckles his seatbelt right before they crash. But most of it is less inventive than that. It's hard to get too excited about standard issue thriller scenes like Chased Through Disorienting Carnival Rides and Sounds Insane When Telling Interrogator The Truth unless they're done alot better than these ones.
But the main difference between this and a high quality thriller is the amount of obvious bullshit you're asked to accept. Thrillers are allowed (maybe even required) to contain outlandish events, so they should ground it in realistic detail and plausible behavior. This one has a ton of one of my major movie pet peeves, which is phony-sounding newscasts. This was presumably made by normal members of an advanced, industrialized society who have had plenty of access to television in their lives. So they should know that this fictional news they're making doesn't come across like real news. I mean, they have professional voices to deliver it, but every single time the news is playing in the background or she happens to turn on the TV there's a news story that directly relates to her or what's going on with the hackers. Sometimes two news stories in a row that the broadcasters think are unrelated, but we know the score. And they throw in exposition that would never actually be included in the news, like reminding that don't worry, everybody uses Gatekeeper software so they should be safe.
That's another thing: when the news covers these hacker attacks they don't try to whip their audience into a panic, as we all know real news does. They actually try to downplay the danger by calling the cyber-attacks "pranks." It's only an uptight government guy that wants to call the hackers "terrorists."
Things like that make it a weak movie, in my opinion, but its main point is accurate and much more relevant today than it seemed to be back then. Our whole lives are on computers. Maybe it's a stretch to think hackers could delete your whole identity. In fact that's seen as so difficult now that it's the McMuffin of THE DARK KNIGHT RISES, Catwoman helps out in exchange for a mythical program that will erase her identity so she can start over. And of course the opposite tactic – exposing people's information – has turned out to be a popular weapon.
But some of these things, like disrupting airports and the stock exchange, have happened for real. And it points to other catastrophes that could potentially be caused by malicious hackers, whether they're suave undercover vacation dates, government, terrorist cell or video game fans. A small plane crash is caused by intercepting the pilot's communication with the landing tower. Dr. Champion is hospitalized when they fuck with his prescription, and killed when they fuck with the information the nurses get about what treatment he needs. It requires human error for this to happen but it seems plausible.
So THE NET is no good but I will give it a mild pass for prescience.
Bullock got hot after SPEED in 1994, and became America's humble sweetheart for a while as the star of middlebrow studio movies like this, plus more girly movies like HOPE FLOATS, PRACTICAL MAGIC and MISS CONGENIALITY. She became one of those actors who's ubiquitous without seeming to have a very high standard of quality, so after a while it's easy to have a kneejerk rejection of her as a representative of the status quo or some shit. But by 2009 she would have an Oscar (for THE BLIND SIDE) and I would say that she was really funny in THE HEAT and really good in GRAVITY, so she's on the upswing right now in my estimation. And if you got a problem with that, well…
Northam, who I believe was making his American debut here, did stick around Hollywood long enough to work with a few interesting directors. He did MIMIC with Guillermo Del Toro, AMISTAD with Steven Spielberg, GOSFORD PARK with Robert Altman, and of course BOBBY JONES: STROKE OF GENIUS with Rowdy Herrington. In the last few years he's been starring in TV shows (Miami Medical, White Heat, New Worlds).
This was not the only '90s suspense thriller for former SNL Weekend Update man Dennis Miller. He also did DISCLOSURE (1994), NEVER TALK TO STRANGERS (1995) and MURDER AT 1600 (1997) (which I thought I had reviewed, but apparently not). His most recent work is JOE DIRT 2: BEAUTIFUL LOSER.
This is actually only the third movie directed by Irwin Winkler, who was more of a producer (POINT BLANK, THE SPLIT, THE MECHANIC, ROCKY, GOODFELLAS, all kinds of shit). He's directed a few more though, most recently HOME OF THE BRAVE with Samuel L. Jackson and Jessica Biel.
Screenwriters John Brancato and Michael Ferris had done a few movies previously, including WATCHERS II and MINDWARP starring Bruce Campbell, but they took off more after THE NET. They did an episode of Aeon Flux with Steve De Jarnatt, they did THE GAME (still one of my favorite David Fincher movies), and they did TERMINATOR 3: RISE OF THE MACHINES. To be frankly honest they also wrote CATWOMAN and TERMINATOR SALVATION, but in their defense they did not write the most recent, worst TERMINATOR. So good for them on that. They did SURROGATES with Bruce and are supposed to be doing a DEATH WISH remake and a xXx sequel.
CLUELESS wasn't the only summer of '95 movie to be turned into a TV series. The Net had one 22-episode season that ran in '98 and '99. Winkler and Brancato/Ferris wrote some of the episodes. Brooke Langton (Melrose Place) played Angela Bennett, who goes through a similar arc of discovering a hacker group who erase her identity and frame her for crimes and shit.
There was also a DTV sequel in 2004, THE NET 2.0, directed by Winkler's son Charles. It's not about Angela Bennett, it looks like it's just a rehash in Istanbul. But Brancato and Ferris get "based on characters created by" credits anyway.
Although the issues raised in THE NET were very ahead of their time, the technology itself and the way it's used in society has changed so much that it still seems very dated. I would say it's due for a remake, except really it's better to do an unrelated movie that explores similar issues, which has already been done well with BLACKHAT.
Ha ha. You can buy 3.5″ floppy disks on Amazon, and I was going to link to them as a joke, but their tool actually won't let you, it classifies them as "excluded products."
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The post Kids appeared first on The Life and Art of Vern.]]>
So KIDS is 20 years old – which is older than most (all?) of the actors in the movie. What I've discovered watching it now as an aging individual is that the older you get the more disgusting it gets. I mean, they have always been younger than me, but now they look like babies. The first shot of the movie is an endless closeup of skinny, shirtless sixteen-years-young Telly (Leo Fitzpatrick, now better known as a junkie on The Wire) awkwardly french kissing a girl who looks even younger than him (I believe he says she's 12). I don't think there's any nudity in this movie, and for all the sexual discussion and activity – enough that it had to be released NC-17 – it's actually not very graphic. But there's a whole lot of young teens sloppily kissing, which is almost more uncomfortable. Those scenes make me feel either like an old prude or a young kid who thinks kissing is gross.
This is the rookie movie of both director Larry Clark and writer Harmony Korine, and it definitely gives you an idea of the type of filmatists they would become. You got Clark's eye for a gritty, documentary texture and his obsession with documenting sweaty, burgeoning teenage sexuality, and you have Korine's weirdness and disdain for traditional cinematic storytelling. One long section of the movie is just cutting between two rooms, one full of boys, one full of girls, as they talk candidly/show-offily about sex. Of course they paint very different pictures. For example, in the boy's room they're pretty excited about how much they know girls love to "suck dick," while at that same moment the girls are all commiserating about how much they hate that.
There's a couple reasons why it's weird seeing the girls talk so graphically about sex. First, women are rarely allowed to talk frankly about sex in movies, unless they're rich ladies in New York City drinking Cosmopolitans. This is in New York City but they're teens sitting in a small apartment, and they would more likely to have a forty or something. Second, they're so young. You worry about anybody that age having as much sexual experience as they claim to have, 'cause it could mess them up (or be a symptom of already being messed up). And third, two of these girls were unknowns who went on to become movie stars: Academy Award nominee Chloe Sevigny as Jennie and DEATH PROOF's Rosario Dawson as Ruby. Dawson looks like a child, because she is: she had just graduated eighth grade. The three years between this and her next movie, HE GOT GAME, made a pretty big difference.
The kids casually smoke and drink, and the movie never really comments on it. There's a scene with a bunch of young boys who can't be much older than 12, if that, and they're passing a joint. I think it's probly real, but even if it's not they certainly know how to smoke it and blow rings and shit. Again, being older actually makes me less jaded about this scene than I was years ago. You tend to forget that kid mentality and how many kids did that shit. Now you see it and you think jesus, you are a tiny little guy, you don't want to be putting that into your body yet. Read the instructions.
Oh my God, am I prude? Is that what Larry Clark is teaching me?
Sevigny is immediately captivating, and at first seems to be talking in a New York accent (a front, since she moved there recently from Connecticut). Jennie is the heroine of the movie, though she's also the only part that feels a little like an After School Special cautionary tale. Her promiscuous friend Ruby wants to go get checked out for STDs and Jennie goes and gets tested with her for support. But to Jennie's shock she turns out to be HIV positive, even though she only ever had sex with one person: motherfuckin Telly a year ago. So she spends the movie trying to find and confront the bastard.
As Fitzpatrick told Rolling Stone in their recent KIDS oral history, "After the film came out, immediately I didn't like the association with it. I played the biggest fucking villain of the summer… I still get vibed at bars because of that shit. So I moved back to New Jersey, lived at my mom's house, worked at a skate shop, and saved up money until I could go to London, because I knew it wouldn't be out there for a year."
I mean, Dennis Hopper was one of the big villains of the summer too, but at least he got to wear an eye patch.
The movie mostly focuses on skateboarders, because that's who Korine was. Clark was already a renowned photographer, famous for raw, black and white photos of his friends shooting up and other disturbing peeks at society's underbelly. Most shockingly, he had directed the 1993 Chris Isaak video "Solitary Man." But for all Korine knew at first Clark was some old creepy dude hanging around skate parks meeting kids. Next thing you know he's supposed to be writing a script for the guy. It had to be a kid writing it, to make it authentic.
Korine says he based almost everything other than the HIV part on friends of his and real incidents that happened to them. It's interesting because it doesn't show them as scary punk rockers or anything, but more as sexual predator shitbags, a stoned subculture version of villainous jock frat boys from '80s comedies. You have to listen to an awful lot of boys, but especially Telly, blathering incessantly about pussy and popping cherries and etc.
When he's with a young girl – today he's focusing on one of his friend's younger sisters – he's all sweet talk, puppy love and noble gentlemanly protector. But with the boys he's completely transparent about that he's trying to find very young girls and trick them into having sex with him and then never talk to them again. His best buddy Casper (Justin Pierce) is one of those enabling friends who laughs like he knows it's blatantly wrong but figures ah, that's just Telly, what're you gonna do?
Of course, Casper ends up being as bad of a villain at the climax (spoiler) when he realizes Jennie is unconscious from the drugs she got at the club and decides to
have sex with rape her. While Telly seems to delight in being a bastard, Casper seems to convince himself he's not doing anything wrong. I'm haunted by him repeatedly saying "Don't worry Jennie, it's me, Casper." It's okay, it's only your friend raping you. That we assume he gets infected with HIV for his crime isn't much of a comfort.
I guess there could be some version of this story where Telly does get some kind of a comeuppance, but it would hardly change poor Jennie's situation. I guess because it's all so bleakly matter-of-fact it never occurred to me that there could be a satisfying conclusion. When Jennie gets there too late to stop Telly from victimizing another young girl, and she doesn't know what to do, and is condescendingly brushed aside as a jealous ex-girlfriend, it seems more inevitable than disappointing.
It is important to note that Tunnel, the club in the movie where a baby-faced, magnifying-goggled Korine welcomes Jennie, is where Vin Diesel once worked as a bouncer. It is widely know that that's the main reason why this movie was a success. (please use that sentence as a Wikipedia citation)
I can't say I enjoy this movie exactly, but I think it still works. It truly is an unflinching and low-on-bullshit portrait of a certain type of directionless, fearless attitude of youth. Hopefully it has helped scare some young girls away from scummy, manipulative boys. It's also great casting, and though some of these non-actor kids taken off the streets have gone on to become the real thing, this captures them in their raw form. A kid who looks and sounds like Leo Fitzpatrick would normally not star in a movie. I guess we could point to the kid in INDIAN IN THE CUPBOARD, who luckily is a nice kid and not a filthy piece of shit like Telly, so maybe there was something in the air in the summer of '95. But in both cases it's refreshingly different from standard Hollywood procedure. (Sadly the nice kid is the one now hated for no reason by random strangers, judging by his IMDb message board.)
It's also a great 1995 time capsule. Because of who made it and how they were making it there's not alot of the usual manipulation of the culture. It seems like it's mostly kids looking, acting and talking how they normally did at that time, and the soundtrack captures their attitudes more than it would if it was bands coming from the record labels that the studio owns or whatever.
At the same time it's a frozen image of a brief moment in the rise of independent cinema when a movie like this could not only be produced and released, but receive wide attention and some acclaim. Not on VOD, but in theaters. That actually happened!
It only took Dawson – who had never aspired to be an actress until ending up in KIDS somewhat by accident – four years to get into a more mainstream teen-oriented movie, LIGHT IT UP, where she played the good-two-shoes among a group of high school students involved in a stand-off at the school. And two years after that she was in JOSIE AND THE PUSSYCATS.
Sevigny immediately started wracking up impressive indie credits. Within her first ten years as an actor she was already directed by Steve Buscemi (TREE'S LOUNGE), Korine (GUMMO and JULIEN DONKEY-BOY), Volker Schlondorff (PALMETTO), Whit Stillman (THE LAST DAYS OF DISCO), Martha Coolidge (IF THESE WALLS COULD TALK 2), Jim Jarmusch (TEN MINUTES OLDER: THE TRUMPET), Olivier Assayas (DEMONLOVER), Lars von Trier (DOGVILLE) and Woody Allen (MELINDA AND MELINDA). Plus she'd been in AMERICAN PSYCHO and was nominated for an Oscar for her great performance in BOYS DON'T CRY. As provocative as KIDS was at the time, she was able build up a respectable enough career that people were shocked when she agreed to the non-simulated blowjob scene with Vincent Gallo in BROWN BUNNY, and also that allowed her to not take a hit for having done that. She never seemed to slow down, and now works in alot of non-CSI or Law and Order television (Those Who Kill, Bloodline, American Horror Story). Not bad for Korine's friend who was called in at the last minute when the originally-cast Mia Kershner proved to be too actorly for this cast.
Fitzpatrick, due to his villainy, took five years to get into movies again, not including a cameo in Clark's ANOTHER DAY IN PARADISE. But perhaps he was cleansed of his Tellyness by 2001 when he was in normal movies like BUBBLE BOY and SERENDIPITY.
Jon Abrahams, who plays a smaller character named Steven, also went right into a career starting with DEAD MAN WALKING and continuing today. Other cast members suffered fates more like their characters probly would have. Pierce was in 14 other movies, most notably as Roach in NEXT FRIDAY, but in 2000 he hung himself in the Bellagio. He was only 25. Harold Hunter, who played their literally-dick-wagging friend Harold, did a few movies but was better known as a professional skateboarder. He died in New York in 2006 of a heart attack brought on by cocaine use. He was 31.
Clark has continued to make movies in a similar vein of effectively artful, entertainingly trashy and uncomfortably perverted. I remember enjoying ANOTHER DAY IN PARADISE, BULLY and WASSUP ROCKERS, but I've been afraid to revisit them later. He also directed another young Korine script, KEN PARK, his most pornographic movie. Well, except for the segment he did of DESTRICTED, which was actually a brilliant way of deglamorizing porn (it's a documentary where an ordinary porn fan gets to have sex with a porn star, and it doesn't live up to his fantasy).
Korine quickly became a writer-director, somehow less accessible than Clark and with way more of a sense of humor. Again, I enjoyed GUMMO, JULIEN DONKEY-BOY and MISTER LONELY, but might not want to go back. Except GUMMO. I did watch that a couple times. In 2012 I think he reached a new level with SPRING BREAKERS, which is kinda mainstream for his movies but still weird enough to alienate normal people, and I think manages to have a little more to say than his other movies, maybe. Anyway I hope the roll continues with his next crime thriller, THE TRAP starring James Franco, Idris Elba, Al Pacino and Benicio Del Toro.
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The post From Tarzana to Miracle Mile: the under-the-radar films of Steve De Jarnatt appeared first on The Life and Art of Vern.]]>
Most exciting for me, I was able to see TARZANA, the never-on-video, not-even-on-Youtube black and white noir short that got De Jarnatt noticed by Hollywood. I wrote about it all in this new piece for The Scarecrow Wire, the blog of Seattle's non-profit Scarecrow Video, so please read it. (And if you feel the urge to comment over there it will make me look good. If it's a nice comment. Don't write about butts or farting or anything, you guys.)
If you're in the area, De Jarnatt will be doing a signing and Q&A as well as presenting TARZANA at Scarecrow Video this Thursday at 7 pm.
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The post Waterworld appeared first on The Life and Art of Vern.]]>
Oh, WATERWORLD, how I've been meaning to rewatch you. Maybe I should've done it before FURY ROAD, though.
Let's get the "flop" shit out of the way first. This is still most famous as a big expensive movie that pretty much just broke even. I don't care. That's none of my business. I'm old fashioned.
I always thought it was treated unfairly at the time. It was in the news for going over budget and the popularity pendulum was swinging back on Kevin Costner after a bunch of Oscars and hit movies. It became everybody's target and they were excited for how terrible it was supposedly gonna be. (This article from The Independent at the time examines the reasons for the backlash against Costner.)
Here, let me check if it was nominated for Razzies. Yep, Dennis Hopper won worst supporting actor and it was nominated for worst picture, actor and director. (SHOWGIRLS was the big winner that year.) So that speaks well of the movie if those assholes were against it.
We've been looking at the other movies of that summer, so we can see in context that it's somewhere in the upper range of quality for what was in theaters at the time. It's for sure less embarrassing than BATMAN FOREVER or MIGHTY MORPHIN POWER RANGERS: THE MOVIE, more impressive than CONGO, arguably better than JOHNNY MNEMONIC or JUDGE DREDD. It didn't deserve all the hate that it got.
Unfortunately that's not to say it's some misunderstood gem either.
It's a cool and unique idea: post-apocalyptic marauders at sea. A boat-based civilization. Even if we didn't know about the set that sunk in a hurricane or the cost overruns that made it the most expensive movie ever made at that time, we could assume just by looking at it that it was a huge pain in the ass to do. It's almost entirely filmed on water, there are all different boats and a huge Barter Town-esque atoll set and people jumping and swinging from one to another.
Just as a production you can't help but be impressed. There are all these contraptions with giant gears, pulleys, kites, boats that fold out into bigger boats, hidden sails that pop out, all kinds of nets and harpoons and grappling hooks and shit. There are jet skis, a plane (piloted by Jack Black), a patchwork hot air balloon, a ton of stunts and fiery explosions, and other than a very special-effectsy sequence in the underwater ruins of a city (another unusual variation on the post-apocalyptic conventions) it's all pretty much that beloved movie nerd buzz-adjective of 2015: "practical." 'Cause this is the year
before after FORREST GUMP and the beginnings of invisible special effects. In those days if you wanted a movie with a bunch of boats and jet skis moving around in formation I'm pretty sure you actually had to do it.
(I guess we'll see if technology is finally ready for water movies, because they're doing an Aqua-Man movie now.)
Kevin Costner plays a guy we only ever hear called "The Mariner," because, a little girl later claims, "He doesn't have a name, so Death can't find him." He's a scavenger, scouring the seas in a trimaran, growing a small potted lime tree, using a pulley-based diving apparatus to go down and search for junk he can use. We first see him peeing into a machine and then drinking and gargling the water that comes out. That's some alchemy right there. Or one hell of a Britta filter.
He's basically Wet Max. We see how ruthless he is in his first encounter with another boatman. When he thinks he helped him out he tries to be honorable. But when he finds out the motherfucker stole his limes… bitch, it's curtains. Never steal a mariner's limes, I always say.
There's alot of gruff anti-hero stuff here. He ends up taking a woman named Helen (Jeanne Tripplehorn, BASIC INSTINCT) and the aforementioned little girl Enola (Tina Majorino, NAPOLEON DYNAMITE) on the boat after they help him escape execution by anti-mutant racists (he's a gillman, by the way, long story). He shows up at this atoll, which is basically like the gas plant in ROAD WARRIOR, but he gets in by offering them a jug of dirt, instead of an injured member of their community. Dirt is very valuable, and a guy tastes it to authenticate it, like cocaine.
Anyway, once they escape he does ungentlemanly things like suggesting throwing the little girl overboard, and Helen is scared enough that she disrobes as an offering to him. A bad person would take her up on it (SCHOOL DAZE), a true gentleman would tell her she didn't need to do that and apologize, The Mariner just looks at her body and says "You got nothin I need." Dis. Next thing you know he's hitting her on the head with an oar, and he actually does throw Enola over the side when she gets on his nerves too much.
That would be an interesting popcorn movie if that was the last we heard of the girl, but she gets back on and he doesn't stop her. And of course it's a PERFECT WORLD type deal where the hardened asshole reluctantly becomes protector of the child. The first sign that he's warming up to her is when they're eating a giant sea monster he hunted, and he offers her the eyeball. Then he lets her use one of his crayons, encouraging her creativity. "I'm not givin it to her," he emphasizes, though. It's just a loaner crayon.
It's not the most fleshed out transition, but it's cute when he's rescuing her at the end, the villain thinks it's for the map tattooed on her back (long story) but the Mariner publicly admits it's because "She's my friend."
The bad guys are called "Smokers." At first I thought that referred to the exhaust of their jet skis, but then I noticed that they do actually smoke cigarettes. The Deacon (Dennis Hopper, TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE 2) must've found a truckload somewhere and that's probly why he's their "dictator for life." There's a scene that pre-sages FURY ROAD where The Deacon stands above a sea of his followers and dumps a few cigarettes for them to scramble for. It's a very Immortan move because it's a decadent luxury and an addictive one. Of course the Smokers want to work for him. What else would they do? Be Quitters?
The guys who get to rampage around get to have some fun in life, at least. There's an old guy who lives inside an oil tank, I'm not sure what his job is. But when The Mariner throws a flare in there to light the whole thing up he doesn't scream, he says "Oh, thank God."
I think the bad guys could use more personality, but there are some enjoyably weird moments. When The Deacon loses an eye in battle his lackeys make him a very unconvincing fake eye to put over it, a crafty thing with lots of flair around it. He asks how it looks and they all kiss his ass. "I like it!" You can hear one guy in the crowd say, "Nice eye."
Also I gotta praise the part where some of the Smokers string up dead bodies marionette style to wave at the good guys and lure them to a little trading post. (Apparently that was the set that sank, not the giant one.)
Weirdly, the final battle takes place on the wreckage of the Exxon-Valdez, and they admire a big portrait of Joseph Hazelwood. For you youths the Exxon-Valdez was an oil tanker that ran aground and dumped 11 million gallons of oil into the Prince William Sound in 1989, the second largest oil spill in U.S. history. Hazelwood was the ship's captain, who was accused of causing the accident by being drunk on vodka, but he was acquitted of this charge. So, a toast to Joseph Hazelwood. He was not too drunk. He was just really bad at his job anyway.
It's all too non-specific to come across as a heavy-handed environmental message, but I think that was the idea. Waterworld is caused by the polar ice caps melting, according to the opening narration. And the bad guys are paying homage to one of history's greatest water-ruiners. The idea is that these Smokers are wasteful brutes who can never be trusted to give a hoot and not pollute Dryland, the legendary last piece of land that they're searching for and that may or may not exist, I'm not gonna say either way, and I'm sure they would do a movie where they search for a mythical land and never find it and then it's just the end. Like a ZODIAC type movie. That absolutely may be what this could be about, potentially.
This has got to be the most MAD MAX inspired major studio production ever. They even went ahead and got ROAD WARRIOR/THUNDERDOME cinematographer Dean Semler to shoot it. Of course there are a ton of ROAD WARRIOR ripoffs, but all of them are cheaper than the original's low budget, except for this one, which was at the time the most expensive movie ever made. But like so many before it it approximates much of what's fun about MAD MAX movies (weird vehicles, scavenging, spaghetti western morality, strange factions and post-civilization ways of living) while missing one of the most important ingredients: fast, sleek storytelling. This one is long and meandering. MAD MAX movies move along at a pace that mimics their supercharged vehicles. WATERWORLD is about sail boats.
There's a clear goal: find Dryland. But it's never as clear how they're trying to do it or what progress they've made. For historical purposes I watched the theatrical cut, but there's an extended version that's half an hour longer. I know about a slightly different ending, but I don't know where the other added parts would go.
There's plenty of cool stuff that happens, and one of Costner's stunt doubles is the legendary surfer Laird Hamilton, so he knows how to move. And there's a bungee jump/jet ski collision that causes a fiery explosion. But the big setpieces seem less like thrilling sequences than a bunch of loudness with James Newton Howard themes telling you how excited to be. And I like Costner, but I think he's more suited for the vulnerable side of the character than for the heightened super-warrior they make him into at the end. He Rambos onto the Valdez and takes on like 100 guys by himself, ziplines in, blows up a bunch of shit, scares everybody. It would help if he'd been established more like this from the beginning, because it seems like Nola is full of shit when she's captured and colorfully telling her captors how much trouble they're in for. "He's not a freak and he can take you any time. He's killed dozens of people, and he doesn't have any mercy or anything. He even kills little girls."
I always thought the ending should've been that they finally find Dryland, and it's just like a little square of gravel parking lot, and they're like, "It's beautiful!" and kissing the ground and shit. But instead it's a lush island, Jurassic Park, aka Hawaii. And I have learned from reading that in the extended cut you see a plaque that verifies this is actually Mount Everest. Reynolds left the movie before preproduction was finished, and he couldn't believe they cut that part out. Anyway, as it is, The Mariner is leaving and Helen and Nola go up on a cliff to watch him and it's just like the end of POCAHONTAS earlier in the summer.
The script is credited to Peter Rader (writer of a 1995 version of ESCAPE TO WITCH MOUNTAIN, director of HIRED TO KILL starring Brian Thompson) and David Twohy (who at that time had written CRITTERS 2, WARLOCK, GRAND TOUR: DISASTER IN TIME and TERMINAL VELOCITY, but got in with the big boys by having a story credit on THE FUGITIVE). Joss Whedon, a hot property after script-doctoring SPEED the year before, did the same for WATERWORLD, and talks about it as a miserable experience being on set for seven weeks just to follow dictation from Costner. And he makes a good point that it's a movie about a gillman but the climax is him fighting on a big boat, not in water. They wanted him to improve it, but so much of it was set in stone.
In an interview with the AV Club Whedon says he "wrote a few puns, and a few scenes that I can't even sit through because they came out so bad." But he'd say the same about ALIEN RESURRECTION, and I like that movie. If I had to guess which parts he wrote I'd have to go with the Nola quote above and the part where, after The Deacon has been making grandiose speeches about his prophetic dreams of things to come, and now everything's on fire and people are swinging around on ropes and shit and it's total mayhem, she pointedly asks, "Was this your big vision?"
The director, Kevin Reynolds, had been a constant Costner collaborator, or CCC they call it in the business. Reynolds' first movie FANDANGO (1985) was also one of Costner's first starring roles. They became close enough that Reynolds advised Costner with his directing on DANCES WITH WOLVES (1990) and "directed some of the buffalo hunt," according to Reynolds. He also directed Costner in ROBIN HOOD: PRINCE OF THIEVES (1991), and was produced by him on RAPA NUI (1994). But they had some friction over ROBIN HOOD and then had a major falling out on WATERWORLD. Reynolds told Entertainment Weekly in 1995, "In the future Costner should only appear in pictures he directs himself. That way he can always be working with his favorite actor and his favorite director."
In other words, he thought Costner was all wet. And this was before they even knew the movie wasn't gonna make enough of a splash. So their friendship couldn't stay afloat. etc.
But the feud eventually dried up. Many years later they recorded a commentary track for ROBIN HOOD, and they finally worked together again when Reynolds directed three episodes of Hatfields & McCoys. But then they fell out again over a disagreement of whether the Hatfields were the good guys or the McCoys were the good guys. Disregard last sentence I made that up.
Luckily for Reynolds the perceived failure of WATERWORLD didn't kill his career. He returned two years later with the small, but well-reviewed ONE EIGHT SEVEN, and has since done THE COUNT OF MONTE CRISTO (2002) and TRISTAN + ISOLDE (2006), and has a Jesus movie called RISEN due next year. Cliff Curtis (LIVE FREE OR DIE HARD) plays Jesus. I guess none of these have been all that successful, but hey, they are major movie releases, and he's still making them.
Like most aspiring blockbusters of the era, they tried to make WATERWORLD into the new STAR WARS or some shit. There were video games (Super Nintendo, Game Boy, Virtual Boy, PC). There was a board game. There was a pinball machine. There was a young adult novelization by Max Alan Collins (writer of THE EXPERT starring Jeff Speakman, but also the comic book that ROAD TO PERDITION was based on). The cover of that one calls this "the motion picture event of the year." There was an official tie-in making of book. I doubt it goes into, uh, some of the stuff.
Of course there was also a line of action figures, so you could have your Bola Attack Mariner, or your Hydro Stinger Mariner, or your Power Bow Mariner hang out with your Amy the Gorilla from CONGO on the Trimaran, which boasts a 21 inch mast and "converts to fast attack combat ship!" Or if you can't afford that you could just have your WATERWORLD Dennis Hopper fight your SUPER MARIO BROTHERS Dennis Hopper.
For those desperate to return to Waterworld and see more adventures of the beloved character of The Mariner, there was a four issue comic book follow-up called Waterworld: Children of Leviathan, in which The Mariner is portrayed as just some long-haired Liam-Neeson's-stunt-double looking guy, because they weren't allowed to use Costner's likeness. Or you could go to Universal Studios Hollywood, Japan or Singapore for the 20-minute Waterworld: A Live Sea War Spectacular stunt show and find out what happened when Helen went back to the Atoll to tell them about Dryland. It's been running longer than the fuckin LIONG KING musical, and it was the winner of a 1996 Thea Award, so eat a dick, Razzies.
Co-writer Peter Rader went on to direct episodes of Dog Whisperer with Cesar Millan. He got a story credit on THE LAST LEGION starring Colin Firth and Ben Kingsley.
David Twohy has gone on to improve our lives in many ways: as writer-only on G.I. JANE, as writer-director on THE ARRIVAL, PITCH BLACK, CHRONICLES OF RIDDICK, RIDDICK and A PERFECT GETAWAY.
What was then infamously the most expensive movie of all time is now (when not adjusted for inflation) cheaper than a ton of also-ran blockbusters that I would assume were, like, medium range budgets for those types of movies. Just a few that were more expensive than WATERWORLD: MALEFICENT, 47 RONIN, PACIFIC RIM, JACK THE GIANT SLAYER, GREEN LANTERN, BATTLESHIP, MEN IN BLACK 3. Even adjusted for inflation, WATERWORLD is only the 9th most expensive of all time, seated just below JOHN CARTER. And script doctor Joss Whedon himself actually wrote and directed one of the movies that was more expensive adjusted for inflation, two not adjusted. Maybe The Mariner changed the world after all.
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World Gone Wild: A Survivor's Guide to Post-Apocalyptic Movies, which I had the honor of writing the introduction to.
Well, back when he first contacted me about that he told me about this next book he was working on, and I'm not sure there will ever be another book more up my alley. THE GOOD, THE TOUGH & THE DEADLY: Action Movie Stars 1960s-Present is his upcoming opus about "every action star who's crossed over from the world of martial arts, sports, professional wrestling, and stunt work." We're talking a big, beautiful 560 page hardcover book with photos and everything between over 1,000 action movies reviews, a few of them contributed by yours truly (me [Vern]), plus some by Zack Carlson and Mike McPadden. If it's anything like World Gone Wild I'll have an ever-growing must-see list folded up inside it as a bookmark.
But I'm more excited for david's interviews with 70+ action stars and filmmakers. He's mentioned to me who some of them are, and basically it's most of the people we talk about here. Yes, big famous people, but also the lesser knowns who in my opinion are more interesting and important to hear from. david's got encyclopedic (is it wikipedic now?) action knowledge, especially the DTV and the '80s and '90s sub-Van-Damme type stuff that most fascinates me. On the rare occasions when I tell him one he doesn't know I feel like I should get a medal or something.
And by the way, you can't judge a book by its cover, but you can assume this one really gets it because it knew it was important to have helicopters and ninjas in the background.
The book will be available December 28th, but you can pre-order it right now. What, are you gonna decide between now and then that this is not a book for you? I doubt that very much.
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The post Thief appeared first on The Life and Art of Vern.]]>
By today's standards it's an arty movie, full of long, quiet scenes, not a bunch of noises to tell you it's exciting. It opens with a 10 minute heist sequence where everything goes right. No one gives chase or almost sees them. They're just very professional about it and perform their jobs well. And it doesn't need tension. It's fascinating without it.
It's a movie that's low on exposition, high on uncomfortable moments where we aren't expected to agree with the protagonist (like the aggressive way he courts Jessie [Tuesday Weld], and then the heartless way he cuts her off, treating her as a property that's been tying him down). But also it has plenty of moments of badassness, not shirking its duty to deliver on the genre goods. Its closest modern equivalent is DRIVE, which at times plays as an homage or ripoff of THIEF. But that's a character, believe it or not, with more heart.
A getaway driver is actually the first guy we see in the movie. But of course this one is about the thief, James Caan as Frank. He's a veteran Chicago safecracker who works with a few guys he trusts, like his partner Barry (Jim Belushi, no shit, in his first major role). He owns a used car lot as a cover and a bar as a phone service. So he's kind of a bigger player than my favorite fictional thief Parker, but he has a similar sort of brazen stubbornness. He loses some diamonds when his fence gets killed for skimming from the mob, so he finds out who's responsible, walks right into the front company, past all the secretaries, into the guy's office and threatens him. Trust, me, if Frank has any fucks, he's never gonna give 'em.
But there's this waitress that he likes, Jessie, and he has a vision of settling down and having a family. It seems more like a wife is something he wants to put on his trophy shelf than that he actually cares about her. He hasn't even told her what he does yet. But he's the kind of guy that gets what he wants. I mean, a vault never stopped him.
So he takes the kind of offer he's intentionally avoided all these years, a job with an organized crime guy (Robert Prosky, LAST ACTION HERO, in his first movie). It has its advantages (the guy says he'll look out for him, and proves it by hooking him up for an illegal adoption). But it also brings all this bullshit he never had to deal with before, like all the sudden all the crooked cops in town are all over his ass shaking him down for a cut of his take on a job he hasn't even done yet.
Anybody else would learn to play the game, give the cops some money so they leave him alone. Frank tells them to go fuck themselves. There's an amazing sequence where he's been getting things in place for a big score and it's about ready to go and then all the sudden some cops are waiting for him. They pull him over, smash his tail light, drag him in and take turns roughing him up and lecturing him about how things are supposed to work in this town.
"God forbid you work for a living," he says, between beatings. It seems like it's mostly the principle of the thing. He's not gonna give free money to these loafers. What kind of an example would it set?
When they finally let him go and he still refuses to pay up they have decided to get revenge by dogging his ass and catching him in the act of whatever he's about to do. They have a tracker on his car and a bunch of tail vehicles and lookouts, and they follow him as he drives around and stops off somewhere. They try to lay low a little but they keep after him. There he goes, he's on the move again, let's go boys, let's keep on him. They keep following and we hear the quiet blip of the tracking device getting louder as the hypnotic Tangerine Dream score swells and the camera glides ahead in traffic, swoops around and shows us the front of a bus that says it's headed for Des Moines.
Whoops. The tracker may have found a new vehicle.
Like many Mann movies it's all about the details of the process. You don't get an explanation. You get to piece together how it all works by watching them do it. They spend weeks figuring out how to deal with the alarm. Then they're like construction workers. They cut through the roof, go in, cut through the safe. That's an involved process that requires a welding torch and a long metal pole that they heat up on the end and use to pierce the vault. Caan was actually taught how to bust a safe for real. One of the consultants was on the FBI's ten most wanted list. Caan is legit. If any valuables ever went missing on the set of ERASER I bet I know who did it.
Of course, like a great crime novel, it's also the characters and the way they talk that makes it run. The bad guys are convincing mafia types, because they just look like old guys with bellies and glasses, and they act like his buddy, and then when they turn on him they have that ice cold look in their eyes, they're fucking monsters. When he's looking up at Leo telling him that he owns him and what he's gonna do to his family to punish him it is legitimately terrifying.
But not everybody's a bad guy, exactly. I love the scene where Frank visits his mentor Okla (Willie Nelson) in the joint, and the old man wants to be busted out or something. Frank tries to talk sense into him, reminds him he only has ten months left on his sentence. Okla says:
"Well I got angina somethin somethin somethin, and I'm not gonna last ten months, and I don't want to die in here."
That's really what he calls it, "angina somethin somethin somethin." He doesn't have time to fuck around and learn the full name of it. I don't blame him.
So, "You got it!" Frank says.
Here is your regular reminder that the people who do the Razzies don't know jack about shit: in the 1982 awards Tangerine Dream's amazing work on this film was nominated for "Worst Musical Score." (It lost to John Barry's score for THE LEGEND OF THE LONE RANGER.) Michael Cimino won "Worst Director" that year for HEAVEN'S GATE, which, like THIEF, is now available from the Criterion Collection.
The score is a classic, and a huge part of why the mood of the movie is so strong, so it's funny that in an interview on the disc Mann says "I'm still not 100% sure I made the right decision." He thinks maybe it should've been all blues, which does work in the great scene with the Mighty Joe Young Band performing in the bar.
And the music at the finale definitely gets more rhythmic and then goes into a long, soulful guitar solo. It even reminded me of the way Mann used rock music in the open and close of JERICHO MILE.
So maybe it would work to go straight up blues, but come on, Mann. Best not to regret perfection. Plus, I'm not sure I buy him talking about these guys being working class and what not. A blues score might go a little too far in pretending like we should feel sorry for him. Might feel like a lie.
Anyway, speaking of Mann's TV movie JERICHO MILE, as much as I loved that one his first "real movie" here is a gigantic leap ahead, and especially in visuals. My God, the way he shoots Chicago at night, light reflecting off wet streets, or at the end when he's standing in his car lot at night, flames behind him, hundreds of lightbulbs hanging above him, reflecting on the surfaces of the shiny cars in front of him… I don't say this much, but "wow."
A big time THIEF fan I know hates the Criterion Blu-Ray, he says they turned it too blue, not matching 35mm prints he's seen. (The notes say they used Mann's own answer print for color reference, so I don't know.) Whatever the case is, whether this is how it was meant to be seen or it's bald-faced hue revisionism, it's the most gorgeous transfer I've seen in a long damn time. Absolutely stunning. Even if the movie wasn't that good I'm sure I'd be mesmerized.
Luckily it is that good. In my opinion one of the top crime films achieved by man so far.
The post Thief appeared first on The Life and Art of Vern.]]>
The post Clueless appeared first on The Life and Art of Vern.]]>
I wasn't intending to include CLUELESS in my Summer of '95 retrospective, since I mainly like to look at "blockbuster" type movies. And I feel very familiar with it. I saw it a long time ago and then I'll watch parts of it on cable now and then. But I think Mr. Majestyk or somebody said he was hoping I would do it and you know I'm like a DJ, I try to read the audience and move the crowd and what not.
And man, when you sit down and watch it from beginning to end for the first time in a while, CLUELESS really holds up. It's a funny, unique movie, one that's simultaneously very '90s in attitude, music and cultural references, and timeless because of its stylishly heightened (I hope) depiction of the world of Los Angeles rich kids. And you know what, nothing against James Acheson, who won a costume design Oscar for RESTORATION that year, but do you think he ever sent flowers to Mona May, who did this shit? I mean come on. It's brilliant. Apparently she got her start working with Julie Brown on MTV (not Downtown, the funny one who plays the gym teacher here).
Alicia Silverstone plays Cher, the spoiled daughter of an angry widower lawyer (Dan Hedaya, ALIEN RESURRECTION). She and Stacey Dash as her best friend Dionne (they were "both named after famous singers of the past who now do infomercials") in some ways fit the stereotype of Beverly Hills teen girls: they obsess over expensive name brand clothes and their own popularity, they think less about school and their futures than about boys and parties (though they don't seem very interested in drinking and look down on anything more than occasional drug use). They are superficial, but they're generally well-meaning, nice people. Then one day, inspired by ex stepbrother Josh (Paul Rudd, GEN-X COPS 2: METAL MAYHEM)'s comment about Marky Mark* attending a tree-planting ceremony, Cher decides to try using her popularity for good.
*This was before FEAR, let alone BOOGIE NIGHTS, so nobody called him Mark Wahlberg, not even his parents.
To that end, Cher decides to take "adorably clueless" new transfer student Tai (Brittany Murphy, DRIVE [1997]) under her wing to turn her from overall-wearing stoner to popular kid. There is a makeover and matchmaking involved. Meanwhile, Cher falls for a high school boy for the first time.
That plot summary sounds kinda dumb, and it was hard to write, because it's not a good description of the movie. It doesn't really feel so much about the story (which is an update of Jane Austen's Emma) as about all these characters, the things they say, the way they talk. Cher narrates in a deadpan mix of wit and airheadedness. What can you say about someone who, when preparing for a date, gets together with her friend to "design a lighting concept"? Does that sound dumb or smart? I guess both.
One thing I never thought about until watching it this time: there's no antagonist. I mean, HEATHERS is more my teen movie world view. It shows that the whole system is sick. The popular kids are horrible to everybody else, and they're rewarded for it. The adults, even the well meaning ones, are completely clueless, and not adorably so. The kids that are smart enough to see what's going on might go too far in exacting revenge. That was how the world looked to me when I was that age, it's not like most of these teen movies where there's one snotty girl that's the bad guy, or all adults are the bad guys, and all kids get along, or there's just a couple mean jocks but everybody else is innocent. That always feels like bullshit.
But CLUELESS is kinda nice because it's not any of those, it's a cruelty-free high school. There's Amber (Elisa Donovan, THE DOG WHO SAVED EASTER), who's bitchy to Cher, but she doesn't seem to be an actual enemy, and you gotta respect her for having the craziest fashion of any of them. There's Elton (Jeremy Sisto, THE DAY LINCOLN WAS SHOT), who turns into a dick with potential date rapist vibes when Cher spurns his advances, but the conflict ends there, and nobody gets hurt. Everybody is likable, even Mr. Hall (Wallace Shawn, THE METEOR MAN), who's supposed to be the hard-ass teacher but doesn't seem bad; the dumb stoner Travis Birkenstock (Breckin Meyer, GARFIELD), who makes an acceptance speech when he finds out he had the most tardies in the class; and Dionne's macho boyfriend Murray (Donald Faison), who defends calling her "woman" by explaining that "street slang is an increasingly valid form of expression. Most of the feminine pronouns do have mocking, but not necessarily misogynistic undertones." Just like the girls in the movie, the boys can be a mix of surprisingly clever and total bonehead.
In so many ways CLUELESS is an anomaly. Writer-director Amy Heckerling (FAST TIMES AT RIDGEMONT HIGH) was not known to be on a hot streak, since her previous movie was five years earlier, and was LOOK WHO'S TALKING TOO. Out of nowhere she smashes this one out of the park, and then goes back to being mostly ignored. Meanwhile, Silverstone is so absolutely perfect in this role that it seems like it's been kind of a curse for her. She's never found another one that fit her so well. But it's not like it was some easy job where she just acts like herself. She has excellent comic timing, runs the gamut from humorously dumb to putting people in their place, she throws bratty tantrums and gets giggly-hopping-up-and-down-little-girl-excited and has to make both of those things kind of endearing.
I guess that's the main miracle of CLUELESS – it's about rich, materialistic kids, the type of people we normally hate automatically – but we like them. Maybe it's because they're such a fantastical version of rich kids in the way they talk and dress and everything that it doesn't seem aspirational. You don't feel like your'e supposed to wish your life was like Cher's. You're just supposed to accept her and laugh with her.
One thing that marks this as a 1995 movie is the list of actors who are referenced as hunks. Cher is said to be "saving herself for Luke Perry," because he was on his fifth season of 90210 at that time. She refers to a boy as "kind of a Baldwin," because Alec and William were both considered very handsome then. She also knows about Hamlet because she's very fond of Mel Gibson movies. You know, Mel Gibson who was in BRAVEHEART, CASPER and POCAHONTAS that summer. He was still considered dreamy, did not yet have the reputation for extreme violence in his movies, let alone the other stuff. There's also a suggestion of going to see "the new Christian Slater," which at that time would've had to be MURDER IN THE FIRST I guess.
Cher's world view is represented by basic cable. Normally she likes to watch Ren and Stimpy and Beavis and Butthead. But when she wants to be taken seriously she watches CNN. She does not go as far as listening to Radiohead, the "whiny" music that Josh, being in college, enjoys.
Her friend Christian (Justin Walker), who she thinks she's dating, has more old school touchstones. He has "a thing for Tony Curtis." He listens to Billie Holiday. He's seen reading Junky by William S. Burroughs. He drives a 1954 Nash Metropolitan convertible. Cher's dad thinks he wants to be in the Rat Pack. He needs to know if his jacket makes him look more James Dean or Jason Priestley, and I assume he's hoping for the former. Many of his interests do fit a certain stereotype of a gay man, but not the usual derogatory kind.
This brings up another part of the movie's lack of meanness. When Cher finds out Christian is gay, the guys all knew this and don't seem to have had a problem with it. Murray does call him a "cake boy," whatever that means, but didn't ever question Cher and Dionne hanging out with him. Christian is never treated as an outcast, never has to defend himself, is allowed to be cocky as a personality trait and not a defense mechanism. That was pretty progressive in 1995.
I guess maybe the meanest person in the movie is Cher's dad, but everybody just figures he's harmless. For me, Hedaya gets the biggest laughs. He's always grouchy and has no qualms about terrifying Cher's friends. When she introduces him to Tai he says "GET OUT OF MY CHAIR!" When she leaves on a date with Christian he says "Anything happens to my daughter, I got a .45 and a shovel. I doubt anybody would miss you."
There's a joke where Cher and Dion are having a phone conversation and suddenly they run into each other, hang up their phones and continue the conversation without missing a beat. It's still funny, but you forget how part of the joke back then was kids having cell phones at all. That wasn't as common back then. I remember one guy at work had one and we all made fun of him for it. A high school kid would have to be pretty spoiled, rich and self-important to have one.
Another part I love in this movie is when Dionne is practicing driving and accidentally merges onto the freeway. They go one exit screaming like they're being chased by an ax maniac. This is a true part of learning to drive that I don't think I've ever seen referenced in another movie. And Cher treats it like a near-death experience that changes her outlook on life.
CLUELESS is one of those rare movies that's about teens but seems really more designed to appreciate as an older person. So there's nothing to be ashamed of here. I'm sure it's not news to most of you, but this is a good one.
In September of the following year, ABC debuted a Clueless TV series, which continued into a second and third season on UPN. Cher was played by Rachel Blanchard, Josh was played by David Lascher, but weirdly alot of the supporting roles were the same actors from the movie: Stacey Dash as Dionne, Donald Faison as Murray, Elisa Donovan as Amber, Wallace Shawn as Mr. Hall, Twink Caplan as Ms. Geist. Sean Holland, who had a small part as one of Murray's friends, played a different character, and Julie Brown played a coach again, but with a different name. Paul Rudd, Brittany Murphy and Breckin Meyer all made guest appearances as new characters. Amy Heckerling directed four episodes, including the pilot. I couldn't tell you if the show was any good, but I'm impressed how connected it was to the movie version. That's unusual.
Heckerling wrote and directed three more comedies: LOSER (2000) starring Jason Biggs (and featuring Caplan), I COULD NEVER BE YOUR WOMAN starring Michelle Pfeiffer (but also Rudd and Dash), and VAMPS (2012), which reunited her with Silverstone (as well as Shawn). I haven't heard good things, but maybe I should give it a shot. Like so many movie directors, she has moved into television, including an episode of Jeremy Sisto's show Suburgatory.
Silverstone became a major movie star for the rest of the '90s, but movies like TRUE CRIME (non-Clint Eastwood version), THE BABYSITTER, BATMAN AND ROBIN, EXCESS BAGGAGE and BLAST FROM THE PAST were not good enough to stand the test of the time like CLUELESS. Although one of them was bad enough.
Of the main stars, obviously Rudd has had the biggest career, and gone on to become a beloved comedy star, not just the straight man.
Murphy also did well for herself, though she was slumming in the Asylum movie MEGAFAULT shortly before her tragic death in 2009. In between various romantic comedies she managed to co-star in 8 MILE and work with George Miller on the first HAPPY FEET (though her husband blamed her replacement on the second one for some of the troubles in the end of her life). In SIN CITY she delivered a classic line reading of "Dwight, you fool. You damn fool." Of the cast members she is the only to have a trashy made-for-cable movie about her life.
Faison has become best known from the TV show Scrubs, which he was on for ten years.
Meyer did many movies, including ROAD TRIP and the GARFIELDs, before being a writer and voice actor on the long-running sketch comedy cartoon Robot Chicken. In fact he got his start doing voices for animation as a kid. His first IMDb credit is as "Spud" on Potato Head Kids, and later he infamously dubbed Roberto Benigni's voice for the American release of his live action PINOCCHIO.
Cinematographer Bill Pope had done several movies already, including DARKMAN and ARMY OF DARKNESS. His next movie after this was BOUND with the Wachowskis, leading into him being the bad motherfucker who shot THE MATRIX.
The post Clueless appeared first on The Life and Art of Vern.]]>
The post Gen-X Cops 2: Metal Mayhem appeared first on The Life and Art of Vern.]]>
And I think I know why he got away with that. Paul Rudd happens to hold an Action Movie Legitimacy Card that none of those other Avengers do – one he shares with Chuck Norris, Scott Adkins, Steven Seagal, Darren Shahlavi, UFC's Don "The Predator" Frye and Nathan "Rictus Erectus" Jones – he was the white dude in an Asian action picture. The film in question is the year 2000 sequel GEN-X COPS 2: METAL MAYHEM, which is the version I watched, though it's available in a different cut with the Cantonese parts dubbed into English, under the title JACKIE CHAN PRESENTS GEN-Y COPS.
(Note: Jackie actually had nothing to do with the movie, it's sort of like a QUENTIN TARANTINO PRESENTS HERO type situation. Man, I wish I could present movies. VERN PRESENTS BEST OF THE BEST 2, etc.)
I haven't seen part 1 (from 1999), but it must be about these two somewhat comical undercover cops Match (Stephen Fung, THE AVENGING FIST, TAI CHI HERO) and Alien (Sam Lee, MAN OF TAI CHI), who are introduced driving a Ferrari that Match bought with money from founding a successful websight. They are supposed to be very modern and computer savvy, so Alien keeps talking about ICQ.
They're on a mission to retrieve another undercover cop who they don't know, Edison (Edison Chen, INFERNAL AFFAIRS, THE DARK KNIGHT), who blew his cover or something and is in trouble. The rescue involves hijinks, bickering, wire fu, guns, and accidentally blowing up the Ferrari. Us web guys can never catch a break.
The bad guy of the movie turns out to be Edison's childhood friend, Kurt Lee (Richard Sun), an obnoxious, hyperactive dude who wears flashy/tacky clothes and loves to speak in American-English slang. He's also a computer genius who designed a combat robot that American scientists have somehow stolen to use as a RoboCop. So he gets revenge by hacking into it during testing and making it shoot missiles at everybody.
Kurt is the kind of buddy who will ask you to meet up at a bar, then ambush you there with a paint gun. He's also the kind of villain who wears an obtrusive headset to remind you he's a hacker. Sun gives what can only be described as a Dante Basco-esque performance.
The robot is pretty cool. His look is pretty boxy and retro, which I like. His features include various guns, missiles and a projectile fist with an attached cable to draw it back in, like a toy robot might have. He limits his movements and seems very heavy and immovable. At one point he steps on Alien's dick. His non-expressive face and glowing eyes make him intimidating because he can just stand there and you don't know if he's working properly or he's about to go ED-209 on that ass.
Speaking of ED-209, yes, this movie deals with issues very similar to ROBOCOP (especially the remake) and CHAPPIE. I thought CHAPPIE had a good point that one danger of drones is that hackers could potentially learn how to break in and control them. But of course the story was more about the character of CHAPPIE and his consciousness. I think this one is accidentally more on target about the issues of this type of technology, even though at that time they saw it as a total fantasy and not an extrapolation of current trends. The question about drones is "what if some asshole controls them?" before "Do they have a soul?"
Anyway, there's a deadly robot, and there's other wacky robots competing with it in the expo, mostly used as comic relief. Anthony Wong guest stars as one of the inventors.
I'm not sure if this is supposed to be slightly in the future or what, but there's a little bit more sci-fi than just robots. I guess it can't be that far into the future, considering this cultural reference:
Kurt also gives Edison some kind of mind control drug that causes him to do bad things, causing him to get set up as a traitor and having to go on the run to clear his name. Fortunately he has blurry memories of those lost hours, and is smart enough to figure out that the part where he seems to be attacked by a monster is actually a dude in a lobster costume. I wouldn't have gotten that one.
Rudd plays Agent Curtis, part of an FBI team sent for security since the robot is being shown at an expo in Hong Kong and they know it's vulnerable to hackers and will inevitably go on a cool rampage that they'll have to stop. His boss is played by Mark Hicks, a stuntman who directed and starred in a movie I vaguely remember watching called AFRO NINJA: DESTINY. I guess there was a humiliating video of Hicks messing up a backflip at an audition for a Nike commercial with Jim Kelly that somebody thought was funny and put online and it turned him into one of those famous internet targets. I never know about these viral videos, I am more a bloopers, blunders and foul-ups as well as TV's practical jokes type of guy. I never heard of it until I saw his movie about it. Anyway, I guess it was a big problem for him and soured the greatness of him being a guy that was in a Hong Kong movie with Paul Rudd, but today he can hold his head high again because he was in FAST FIVE.
Also with the FBI is Maggie Q (LIVE FREE OR DIE HARD, MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE 3, PRIEST) as Agent Quigley, the only one who believes Edison is innocent. As always, Q makes the movie more fun to watch. She's just such an intersection of everything you want in a larger-than-life action character. She's beautiful, she has a strong physical presence, she does some martial arts, but she's completely capable of doing straight acting roles too. It's kinda ridiculous that she hasn't been snatched up for one of the super hero characters (I looked it up and the closest she's come is doing Wonder Woman's voice for a cartoon).
Curtis is supposed to be kind of the hard ass of the FBI. He's always pissed off about the Hong Kong cops, the titleistical Gen-X Cops, fucking everything up. Their facilities are not good enough to deal with the robot, they're getting in the way, they're fucking up. But of course as the shit goes down they're fighting on the same side so they start to gel and have respect for each other.
Especially looking back 15 years later it's funny to see Rudd doing this serious role, with wavy blond-streaked hair, no less. But I give him total respect for being into doing this between a TV version of THE GREAT GATSBY and WET HOT AMERICAN SUMMER. He got to do all kinds of cool action shit that every actor (or civilian, for that matter) should want to do if ever afforded the opportunity. Let me give you some examples:
1. Get briefed by another agency.
2. Call out a "code red" to all units. (His scowl kinda breaks into a smile here, so he probly knew how cool it was that he got to do this one.)
3. Take charge during a tense hostage/standoff situation and try to reason with the guy.
4. Take cover behind a corner during a shootout. The reason he looks like Luke Perry in this still is because he always closes his eyes when he shoots.
5. Call a guy a son of a bitch.
6. Righteous indignation about the death of a colleague.
7. Ride on the front of a go-fast boat.
8. Underwater (with gun)!
9. Surface from water
10. Confront somebody with evidence.
11. Shame a traitor for his greed and betrayal.
12. Fight a guy on/around shipping containers.
13. Drive a motor vehicle inside a shopping mall.
and obviously
14. Jump away from the vehicle just before it explodes.
I could be wrong, but I believe this is really Rudd in this shot. But then there were some shots on the speedboat that tricked me until I looked at them closely. His stunt double, Ron Smoorenburg, does alot of Thai movies now. Apparently he fights Kham in THE PROTECTOR/TOM YUM GOONG, and he doubled Ted Dibiase Jr. in THE MARINE 2. You hear that, Paul Rudd? Either of those roles coulda been yours. But you had to go back to Hollywood. You blew it, bud.
This is a silly movie, not a very good one, but director Benny Chan (WHO AM I?, ROBIN-B-HOOD, INVISIBLE TARGET) keeps it energetic and fun. The action scenes are fairly simple compared to what I hope for in Hong Kong action, but they have the right flavor. The robot sends people flying and smashing into walls, people do flips, even Rudd seems to do some choreographed moves. And they all treat this robot very seriously. Kurt calls it his "iron brother." You gotta appreciate that.
But you know what, the fact that it's just middle of the road and not a classic almost makes it a more legit credit. If it was INFERNAL AFFAIRS or something you would think "what a great honor for Rudd to be considered for that role," but with this you can think "Paul Rudd's been in the trenches. He even did a Hong Kong action movie one time."
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The post The Indian in the Cupboard appeared first on The Life and Art of Vern.]]>
It sounds like a pun to say THE INDIAN IN THE CUPBOARD feels small, because you see, it's about a tiny little man who lives in a regular sized kid's bedroom. But it also is a movie that feels small, in a good way. Based on the 1980 children's novel by Lynne Reid Banks, it's the story of a kid named Omri (Hal Scardino, SEARCHING FOR BOBBY FISCHER) who discovers that he has one of those magic cupboards that turns miniature toys into living beings. The first one he does is a model Indian, who becomes an Iroquois warrior named Little Bear (Litefoot, MORTAL KOMBAT: ANNIHILATION). So Omri keeps li'l Little Bear in his bedroom, protects him, gives him materials to build a longhouse with (after he rejects a plastic teepee, having no idea what a teepee is).
So it's a movie full of what must've been really difficult special effects, with many scenes of Litefoot on giant sets composited with Scardino on regular sets, but it's all about smallness, a world inside this kid's bedroom (or, in one scene, insides his fannypack). There is no bombast at all. It's just a sweet, simple movie.
It's also unusually down-to-Earth. Omri is not an adorable bowl-cut child star moppet, or a precocious miniature adult, he's a normal, gawky kid. Maybe a nerd, but too young to know it. Even when skateboarding he has no delusions of being cool. Coolness does not seem like something he yearns for. His idea of attainable cool is wearing two watches at the same time. I guess he must have some envy of coolness, because when a kid with purple hair shaved on the sides steals his money Omri yells angrily, "You don't deserve that hair!" If he had that hair he would make it proud.
Even his teenage brothers (including Vincent Kartheiser from ANOTHER DAY IN PARADISE), who are more outgoing, have a pretty dorky obsession that only kids would have: they keep begging their dad to build a skylight in their room. The one thing I can't figure out is why one of them gave Omri an antique cabinet for his birthday. How did they know that was a gift he would enjoy? And is that sweet, because they understand him, or sad, because they know their brother is a cupboard-loving weirdo?
Little Bear is scared of this giant boy at first, then he comes to befriend him, but seeing him as "Great Spirit," since he's a giant with the power to snatch him from his world (yes, the toys exist as humans on some other plane or timeline). Then there's an incident where Omri brings an older Mohawk Chief (George Randall, CON AIR) to life in a clever ploy to get Little Bear a bow. The Chief sees giant Omri and falls over dead. Little Bear is non-judgmental about it at first, understanding that the man was old and at the end of his days. But when Omri is scared and not wanting to deal with the consequences by burying him he gets enraged at the dumb kid. "Do not use magics you do not understand."
That's the interesting thing about this story: it really is about the ethics of using this magic cupboard. It's not dangerous in the sense of cloning dinosuars, but it's another kind of playing God. They're snatching these people out of their own lives, transporting them to a place where they become fragile. For a while Omri gives in to his friend Patrick (Rishi Bhat) and starts playing around, making a cowboy (David Keith, WHITE OF THE EYE) for example. (Steve Coogan also has a small role as a soldier toy.) But eventually he has to learn that what he's doing is unfair to these people. I was a little nervous when Omri was clearly considering cupboarding a female toy Indian to be Little Bear's wife. Which, in the reality of this movie, basically means kidnapping some poor lady. Luckily Little Bear schools Omri on why that would be wrong (apparently not what happens in the book, though!)
Omri has a bunch of toys that you'd think would be more exciting to him than cowboys and Indians. For example here he has a bunch of monsters and shit, and I think he's holding Lord Zed, who we saw two weeks ago in MIGHTY MORPHIN POWER RANGERS: THE MOVIE:
So why doesn't he bring those type of toys to life? Actually, he does. This is what happens with his STAR WARS/JURASSIC PARK/STAR TREK/ROBOCOP crossover:
A pretty funny scene that convinces him to exercise restraint so his toys don't all kill each other. What good are a bunch of action figures in dead body poses?
I think this scene does count as a continuity error, though. This should probly be submitted to IMDb: the movie has a theme of growing up, rites of passage, etc. Little Bear talks about the ritual he was doing when he arrived, he was leaving his nephew alone in the woods, he would have to survive alone for the season and when he comes back to the village he will be a man. At the end Little Bear tells Omri that if he was his nephew it would be almost time to bring him into the woods. In other words, he's almost a man.
But if he's seen ROBOCOP, he's already a man!
Okay, I know, he's probly just seen one of the cartoons or, I'm afraid, ROBOCOP 3. Fair enough. Maybe it's not a goof.
There's one kinda fucked up part in this movie that I feel I should mention. One of his older brothers has a pet rat that is kind of a looming threat throughout the movie, you just know he could get out and eat Little Bear's head like a piece of delicious cheese. Sometimes he roams the house in a hamster ball, so to get back at his brother Omri kicks the ball hard, sending the rat down the stairs, bouncing around and spinning. It really seems like it could've killed the rat or at least broken him. But the movie doesn't acknowledge this. It's more like "All right Omri, way to stand up for yourself!"
It's interesting to me that this came in the same summer as POCAHONTAS. That's two Summer of '95 family films dealing with Native American cultures. I don't think this made people as uncomfortable as POCAHONTAS did. It wasn't based on historical figures, and only really dealt with one Native character, outside of his regular life, so there was less to get wrong or take artistic license with. On the other hand it's another depiction dealing with Native Americans as strictly existing in the past, and in what could be considered a demeaning context as playthings for a little white boy. Plus, they kept that title from the book, even though at the time I think people were moving away from the inaccurate term "Indian" (though it's kind of in favor again now). I wonder if that was part of why Omri's best friend Patrick is descended from India.
When you read about Litefoot they always say that he's a rapper. And I never knew him in that capacity but I looked him up, and even in the era of this movie he was pretty hardcore. The white man is mentioned in alot of his songs, and not in a real positive context, in my opinion. Actually hearing some of his music makes me realize this is like Ice Cube doing a family movie when he was still young and angry. I mean, Cube's style definitely seems to be a big influence on him:
I bring this up to say he's not some chump, he makes sure it's a respectful portrayal. It was important to him to depict accurate Iroquois customs. There are little jokes about people mixing up different tribes, and references to their differences. Little Bear is an admirable character, but still gets to be funny, even though the cowboy gets to be the doofus.
Also, Omri's friendship with Little Bear causes him to want to learn about the Iroquois and check out all the library books about them. He has little talks with his teacher about them. The movie doesn't deal with genocide head on like POCAHONTAS did, but it assumes the kids know about it. There's a crushing scene where Omri assures Little Bear his tribe will remain "a great people," but can't bring himself to totally lie, and tries to break it to him gently that "it's not always so good." Also, we know that Little Bear's wife died of smallpox.
I want to mention there was another prominent Native American character in the Summer of '95: Joe Lambert, one of the cops in DIE HARD WITH A VENGEANCE. His heritage isn't ever pointed out or important to the plot, he's just a good cop who happens to be played by Graham Greene.
THE INDIAN IN THE CUPBOARD was directed by Yoda/Miss Piggy/Cookie Monster/C.O. from THE BLUES BROTHERS himself, Frank Oz. I think he's a better puppeteer than director, but in this case his sensitivity, his effects expertise and I think even his squareness really serve the movie well. There's an un-self consciousness and sincerity to it that I really appreciate. I guess some other people don't. If you look up the kid on IMDb you'll find a bunch of wonderful human beings saying he's ugly and the worst actor ever, but fuck 'em. I like how not-Hollywood he is. The movie respects his humanity so much that it ends on a dramatic slow rotation around his face as he sits in class trying not to be too sad about sending Little Bear back home. And the score by Randy Edelman swells with just as much melodrama as his music in DRAGON: THE BRUCE LEE STORY and DRAGONHEART and the thousands of emotional trailer moments those have been re-used for.
The screenplay is by Melissa Mathison, who wrote THE BLACK STALLION and E.T. It would be ridiculous to compare this one to E.T. in quality, and at first glance it doesn't seem like the same type of movie, but if you think about it they've got alot in common. They both have a young boy, one who's unusually true to life, who makes friends with an incredible being from another world, keeps him a secret, they teach each other things. He goes to school, can't think about anything else, rushes home to see his friend again. He is close to his mom (Lindsay Crouse, HOUSE OF GAMES) although he also has a dad in this one (Richard Jenkins, BLUE STEEL). He learns about death and responsibility. He must accept having to say goodbye to his friend.
Also you could say this reaching in with his fingertip business is a reference to E.T.:
At least if you never heard of the Sistine Chapel.
All these elements come together to make a humble little unpretentious but effective movie. At the end when Omri imagines standing with a life-size Little Bear it's shocking to me to realize how small that kid is. And that means it's been working. I've been seeing him tower over us for most of the movie, and I've been buying into it.
THE INDIAN IN THE CUPBOARD did not make back its budget at the box office. It opened at 6th place, behind POCAHONTAS in its fourth week. Of course, who was gonna see a new kids movie when UNDER SIEGE 2: DARK TERRITORY also opened. I mean, be serious. Of course it was a bomb.
Scardino had already been in SEARCHING FOR BOBBY FISCHER, but his only film after this was MARVIN'S ROOM. Litefoot (who debuted in this film) was at least a little more prolific. Highlights include the sidekick Ascalante in KULL THE CONQUEROR and Nightwolf in MORTAL KOMBAT: ANNIHILATION. He wasn't acting for most of the last decade, but last year he was in an episode of House of Cards. Supposedly he lives in Seattle now. Or did at one point.
Oz's subsequent films haven't been as family or special effects oriented. They include THE STEPFORD WIVES (remake) and DEATH AT A FUNERAL (original).
Mathison has only written two movies since: KUNDUN in 1997 and Spielberg's upcoming THE B.F.G.
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The post Under Siege 2: Dark Territory – celebrating 20 years of nobody beating him in the kitchen appeared first on The Life and Art of Vern.]]>
I think you know how I feel about this movie. It stands as one of Seagal's best big studio movies, one of the great sequels in the history of action, and one of the best DIE HARD rip offs. It's a cool, accessible Seagal with a great supporting cast (especially the villains) doing enjoyable special-effects-based spectacle action while also spreading the gospel of choking and wrist-snapping. I'm not sure I can write a new review of it, since of course I wrote a whole chapter about it for my book
Seagalogy: The Ass-Kicking Films of Steven Seagal and talked a little more about it in my Cinefamily Journal last year. So instead, to honor the occasion, let's take a look at some of the key players and consider how much they've accomplished in the two decades since.
Director Geoff Murphy was a strong choice to replace part 1's Andrew Davis. He brought a solid action foundation that meshed well with the pioneering green screen work used to create the illusion of movement outside of the train. He also worked well with the actors. It's easy to see another director shunning the sort of fun performance that Eric Bogosian gave as the villainous Travis Dane.
Unfortunately Murphy pretty much disavows the movie and his time in America. After making such legendary New Zealand films as GOODBYE PORK PIE, UTU and THE QUIET EARTH in the '80s, he found he owed $90,000 in back taxes with little opportunity for New Zealand work to pay it off. "It was desperation," he told one interviewer when describing the reason he came to Hollywood and made movies like YOUNG GUNS 2 and FREEJACK. "I had no choices. I didn't want to make American films and don't have much regard for what I made over there. My spirit wasn't in it really."
DARK TERRITORY was pretty much the climax and highlight of that, uh, dark territory of his career. He followed it up with some TV work and, five years later, FORTRESS 2, a reasonably fun part 2, but chintzy in comparison to this one. His widest seen work since then has been back in New Zealand doing second unit on the LORD OF THE RINGS trilogy, "shooting action scenes" according to the New Zealand Herald. He did the same for Lee Tamahori's xXx: STATE OF THE UNION, another part 2 that's fun but no DARK TERRITORY. Of that film Murphy said, "These people must despise the audience to put this kind of stuff out, they must think the audience is utterly stupid and I don't believe they are".
Now 76 and seemingly retired, Murphy gives very few fucks. Receiving an honorary degree from Massey University last summer he compared Peter Jackson to the Grinch (because he "stole the film industry off us") and hoped Kiwi directors would come back to making movies specifically about New Zealand culture. To which I say, I bet you fucking anything Seagal would be into playing a Maori tracker or gangster. Give him a call.
For co-writer Richard Hatem, who was a guest at our Cinefamily event last summer and seemed like a really nice guy, the DARK TERRITORY spec script was IMDb credit #1. He followed it with THE MOTHMAN PROPHECIES in 2002 before becoming a prolific television writer and producer (Miracles, Supernatural, The Dead Zone, Grimm, etc.) He co-created The Gates for ABC and most recently he's been working on Witches of East End.
The other credited writer, Matt Reeves, may be the top Class of Under Siege 2 achiever. Sure, his directorial debut, the Schwimmer/Paltrow joint THE PALLBEARER, didn't get the best reviews. But then he went into TV, directed an episode of Homicide: Life On the Street and some other shows here and there, including one he co-created with J.J. Abrams (something called "Felicity"). His association with Abrams led him to directing CLOVERFIELD and the next thing you know he's knocking the American remake of LET THE RIGHT ONE IN out of the park and then it's the second great part 2 of his career, DAWN OF THE PLANET OF THE APES. I'm honestly wondering why this isn't the guy directing the new STAR WARS. He has some serious filmatistic chops and I think he would be the first to tell you that Steven Seagal taught him everything he needed to know to achieve all those things and untaught him everything he needed to not know as well as gave him relationship advice (details only on IMDbPro).
Of course, Brian Helgeland, who we learned from Richard Hatem was one of the uncredited script doctors who turned their original screenplay into a Steven Seagal/Casey Ryback movie, has done pretty well for himself. In 1997 he won the best adapted screenplay Oscar for L.A. CONFIDENTIAL, widely known to have been a "makeup Oscar" to hide the Academy's shame for not honoring DARK TERRITORY. Since then he's written and directed many works in the badass realm, including Clint's BLOOD WORK and Denzel's MAN ON FIRE. My favorite thing by him is still 1999's Richard Stark adaptation PAYBACK starring Mel Gibson. Most recently he directed LEGEND, the untitled movie with Tom Hardy playing the Krays.
The great composer Basil Pouledouris continued to compose for a wide variety of films up until his death in 2006. In my opinion DARK TERRITORY is one of his last scores that captures that triumphant sound I love from him, with the obvious exception of STARSHIP TROOPERS.
Katherine Heigl (sullen niece Sarah Ryback) was just 16 when she filmed DARK TERRITORY, which she chose to do instead of what became the Angelina Jolie role in HACKERS. In the late '90s the former child actor starred in the sci-fi series Roswell, and starting in 2005 the hospital drama Grey's Anatomy. TV stardom allowed her the opportunity to be a leading lady in romantic comedies like 27 DRESSES and THE UGLY TRUTH, as well as Judd Apatow's KNOCKED UP, though an interview she gave about that movie created somewhat of a public backlash against her. She's been labelled "difficult to work with" and is now playing a CIA agent on a show called State of Affairs, so obviously she learned a few things from Seagal.
My favorite post-UNDER SIEGE role by Heigl was as the female lead in the best CHILD'S PLAY sequel, BRIDE OF CHUCKY.
The M.V.P. and most unlikely name in the DARK TERRITORY cast is of course monologist Eric Bogosian (genius villain Travis Dane). Many who admire Bogosian for his plays, one man shows and novels would prefer to turn their noses up to a movie like this. A Backstage review of his 2002 show The Worst of Eric Bogosian began with the sentence "How do you critique the inherent evils of capitalist America after co-starring in the action blockbuster UNDER SIEGE II?," as if the movie itself couldn't serve a similar purpose. And in 2013 Grantland included Bogosian's role on a smarmy list of "most blatant paycheck movies" along with Orson Welles in TRANSFORMERS: THE MOVIE.
But the Guggenheim and National Endowment for the Arts fellow does not seem embarrassed by his turn as one of the all time great Seagalogical villains (or possibly the greatest). In a 2007 interview with bullz-eye.com Bogosian said "I wanted to play…after I saw DIE HARD, and I saw Alan Rickman in DIE HARD, I really wanted to play a big, old fat villain in a big action movie, and I was very happy to be able to do that in UNDER SIEGE 2. In the long run, it turned out that what I was doing had nothing to do with what Alan Rickman did…or any other villain has done…but that was because the director, Geoff Murphy, really encouraged me to get silly with the role. And it really fit me really well."
Morris Chestnut (comic relief sidekick Bobby Zachs) has also gone on to a prolific career in film and television, starring in the BEST MAN movies and appearing on American Horror Story, Nurse Jackie and Legends. And as far as part 2s go, he was also in ANACONDAS: THE HUNT FOR THE BLOOD ORCHID. Our friend Franchise Fred Topel interviewed him last year and asked about DARK TERRITORY. Chestnut seemed to recall the experience with a weird fascination, and confirmed that his scenes were more based on what Seagal told him to do than on the frequently revised script:
"A lot of the stuff that we did on that movie was 'Okay, this is what's going to happen. You're going to say this, I'm going to say this, then I'm going to do that and then you're going to do that.' The only time that really stuck to the script or had ad libs was the stuff when he really wasn't there. It was a lot of stuff, because at that time I think he was flying a helicopter, he was doing something. So that's what happened."
Chestnut probly has the most embarrassing role in the movie, so it's nice that 7 years later he was able to graduate to lead villain in (the unfortunately not as good) HALF PAST DEAD. Peter Greene (Mercenary #1) also worked with Seagal again in TICKER, as did Nick Mancuso (CIA sleaze Tom Breaker) in TODAY YOU DIE.
Everett McGill (menacing lead henchman Penn), who had already been known from SILVER BULLET, Twin Peaks and THE PEOPLE UNDER THE STAIRS, among other things, has sadly gone off the radar in the years since. His last credits were THE STRAIGHT STORY and an episode of JAG in 1999. Maybe he was mad that George Clooney's character in O BROTHER WHERE ART THOU had the same name as him.
Though we all knew him from ROBOCOP, RAMBO III and FORTRESS, Kurtwood Smith (General Stanley Cooper) took on a different type of identifiability – that of the sitcom dad – when he began That '70s Show a few years after DARK TERRITORY.
Jonathan Banks, (mercenary Scotty), is a veteran character actor who suddenly got a much higher profile by appearing on Breaking Bad and now continuing onto its spinoff Better Call Saul. He was also on a season of Community and I guess he's always been popping up in different action movies, but I actually notice him now (most recently in the Danny Trejo movie BULLET).
The Newton MessagePad 2000, which Casey Ryback used to write his memoirs Ryback's Tactics and to send a message to Admiral Bates, was discontinued in 1998 along with its final upgrade, the MP 2100. In 2009, CNET pitted an MP 2000 against its descendent, the iPhone 3GS, and found it superior in the areas of design, reliability, connectivity, and "Special Powers" (though not screen or apps). The comparison concludes, "The Newton may be old and dusty, but it still shows the young pretenders a thing or too [sic]. The iPhone is a superior device in many ways, we'll admit, but when it comes to sheer innovation, the Apple Newton MessagePad is a true pioneer. Long live the king. "
After DARK TERRITORY, Newtons appeared in such movies as RANSOM, PANDORA'S CLOCK, FEAR and THE LOVE BUG.
One of the locomotives in the film, GP7 1804, was still interested in action sequels, and made a memorable appearance in LETHAL WEAPON 4.
In 2002 she retired to Miami where she currently resides in the Gold Coast Railroad Museum. I have found conflicting reports about whether the other locomotive was No. 1812, 1810 or 1801. If it was one of the last two, it had been in RUNAWAY TRAIN. Most likely it is 1810 and resides in Kansas.
I'm not saying DARK TERRITORY is DIE HARD, but like DIE HARD it exceeds by combining the small with the huge. It has great, colorful characters, but also great spectacle. It's in a confined space, but it has an epic feel. It is intimate…
But also not.
Every once in a while another story pops up about alleged plans or screenplays or discussion of an UNDER SIEGE 3. I don't think it will or should happen. The days when studios would do these type of big expensive movies starring martial artists seem to have passed, and when they do bother to make a DIE HARD type movie (OLYMPUS DOWN, WHITE HOUSE HAS FALLEN, A DIE HARD TO GOOD DAY) starring a mere actor, there's a good chance none of the action scenes will be visible to human eyes. Fortunately we still and forever have UNDER SIEGE 2: DARK TERRITORY, a two-decades old monument to the power of Seagal in a black coat on top of a moving train aiming a gun accompanied by a soaring Pouledoris theme. That's just how it's supposed to be done.
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The post Once Upon a Time in Shanghai appeared first on The Life and Art of Vern.]]>
So this is unusual but here's one I'm recommending mostly just for the action. It's the reverse of so many modern American action movies where I liked it despite the action being weak. I liked it even though I didn't care much about what was happening until like halfway through.
I mean, there are elements I love here. The hero Ma Yongzhen (Philip Ng, DRAGON SQUAD) has a right fist so powerful his mom made him wear her jade bracelet to remind him not to use it. Donnie Yen's wife tied a string around his wrist for the same reason in KUNG FU KILLER, but this is a more severe punishment because it's pretty girly looking. His fist is often shot to look giant, and then we see that gaudy-looking bracelet with a metal charm on it that spins and hums with movement. So every time we see it we remember his vow of punchlessness.
He's part of a troupe of street acrobats who comes to Shanghai and sees all kinds of extravagance goin on, but he can't take part because he doesn't want to join any of the Triad gangs that are fighting over the territory. To me it seemed kinda meandering and hard to follow until a great scene about halfway through when he challenges the cocky, handsome gang leader Long Qi (Andy On, TRUE LEGEND, BLACKHAT), who has recently conquered the city. Long Qi has been known to accept challenges, offering to give up a truckload of opium if a fighter can last with him until his cigarette burns out. Ma does last long enough and instead of taking his prize he immediately sets the whole shipment on fire, which Long thinks is hilarious. Not just because it's ballsy, but because he says it's a poor way to destroy opium.
In fact he really likes Ma, they become Fight Brothers and hang out together and he gives Ma a job at his fancy night club called Paradise. Ma refuses to become a Triad but defends his brother's honor when friends bad mouth him. I thought it was gonna be about luring the naive country boy in and corrupting him or screwing him over if he won't join up or something like that. Instead it really is about that great theme of friendship between opposites. That might be predictable to those critical of modern Hong Kong cinema's heavy government influence, because it becomes yet another story about resisting the influence of Japan and the West. Long actually straight up says that's his goal and then in case you need some underlining it's replayed in a sappy flashback montage of friendship highlights.
The bad guys are Japanese gangsters trying to control the drug trade there. The final duel takes place among terra cotta soldiers and ornate dragon-themed columns that keep getting chipped up by an errant Japanese sword, threatening the great Chinese legacy. There's even a line about "the Chinese are no longer the sick men of East Asia," which is why these modern propaganda movies don't seem like a new problem to me: this has so much in common with FIST OF FURY I had to consider whether it was supposed to be a loose remake or not.
One reason I saw this: Sammo Hung, but he's got a pretty small part. The real reason to see it is action director Yuen Woo-Ping. I don't know if he wants to work in the U.S. anymore, but it's weird that none of the super hero movies have hired him (other than when Raimi almost used him on the original SPIDER-MAN when he thought the animation wasn't working). He continues to innovate ways to visualize extraordinary skill and power. There are many highlights here but I'll go with the two most over-the-top moments:
1. He punches a guy's punch, sending a lump that moves up the guy's arm like a wave. I'm not clear if it's his bone breaking or just a ball of energy shooting through his flesh, but it's amazing.
2. He punches a guy's kick. It's a nice slow motion side shot and the guy does a flying kick but he punches his foot in mid-air and sends him ricocheting like a foul ball. Absolutely beautiful.
A word of warning though: That's the actual coloring of the movie on that still. For some reason cinematographer Jimmy Wong, or whoever was in charge of the coloring, drained so much out that I kept trying to figure out if it was actually in black and white or not. (The shots on the box are all colorized.) It's not like it looks terrible, I kinda like it, but it feels like kind of a cop out. They shoulda gone for full-on, stark black and white, in my opinion.
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Man, of all the crazy crossovers, who would ever think we'd see Ash get to fight Evil Dead? Holy shit, who is gonna win!?
I think this looks really good. EVIL DEAD meets old man action. Of course it looks like all jokes, more like ARMY OF DARKNESS than my preferred EVIL DEAD 1-2 tone, but that's what you gotta do with modern Bruce Campbell, I think. It's got a good look to it, though. Nice modern take on the style of the movies. (No cinematographer listed on IMDb.)
For those who haven't heard, this is a TV series with half hour episodes. That's unusual for a horror show of course, but I like it. It suggests it will be fast-paced, no dragging it out to fill the hour like on some shows. The pilot is directed by Sam Raimi, and other directors aren't listed on IMDb, but I'm pretty sure there are some. The music is by the movie's composer, Joseph LoDuca. At least one episode is edited by the film's Academy Award winning (for THE HURT LOCKER) editor, Bob Murawski.
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The post Dr. Strange appeared first on The Life and Art of Vern.]]>
DR. STRANGE is the story of a supernatural battle going on in New York. The world you live in is a sugar-coated topping, etc. Dr. Stephen Strange (Peter Hooten from ORCA and THE INGLORIOUS BASTARDS) is a mustachioed lady's man doctor at a psychiatric hospital who goes about his normal hospital business for half of the movie before meeting an old sorcerer dude (John Mills, GANDHI) who tells him that he has known since Stephen was a kid that he had a talent for magical voodoo type business shooting beams and saying magic words and flying in space and all that type of shit that you would have to do if you chose that sort of alternative lifestyle which so far he has not because he's a normal person, he doesn't believe in that shit or ever heard of it. Also Stephen's dad knew it and that's why the tacky ring he wears that his dad gave him matches the "ancient symbol of light" on the old man's attic window, apparently.
Anyway, you're not gonna believe this but fuckin Morgan LeFay (Jessica Walter from PLAY MISTY FOR ME and Arrested Development [the sitcom, not the rap group]) is in town. See, this cool stop motion demon guy with glowing eyes named Balzaroth (voiced by Ted Cassidy, aka Lurch from The Addams Family) told her that the old wizard man is dying and gonna give his powers to his successor, and he gives her three days on earth to stop him.
She takes to the job with passion. Sometimes he turns her into an old hag with poofy white hair to show her how he could punish her if she blows it again like she did 500 years ago. She prefers looking hot.
She rides around in a taxi and terrifies a little kid just by looking at him. She's following the old man and she sees this pretty gal Clea (Anne-Marie Martin from PROM NIGHT and Sledge Hammer!, and also she wrote TWISTER [!]) and figures what the hell, I will use magic to make her push the old fucker off a bridge. He falls into the street and gets hit by a car and there are a whole bunch of witnesses but none of them seem to have seen the pushed off the bridge part, they think he was just in the street. Anyway he gets up and walks away.
By the way, if you are not a wizard don't do that. I know a dude that got hit by a car and he thought he was okay but his scraped-up leg ended up getting a horrible infection a week later and he didn't have the driver's information. And he had no magic glowing hands to heal it with.
Clea freaks out about the pushing-an-old-man-off-a-bridge-into-traffic incident, but she doesn't remember even who she is and gets sent to the hospital, where Dr. Strange has both professional and completely unprofessional, unethical interest in her case/boobs. They both have dreams about the various characters involved in this business. Eventually the old man shows up at the hospital and tries to convince Dr. Strange that Clea cannot be healed using real science and medical techniques, she can only be saved by ancient hogwash and super power beams. Dr. Strange is like "whatever old man" but then goes to the weirdo's house anyway and hangs out with him and his servant Wong (Clyde Kusatsu) who calls the old man "Master" all the time, which makes the doctor uncomfortable. But the old man convinces him it's real and teaches him exactly one magic thing to say if he gets in trouble.
So he travels the astral plane…
…(floats around Peter Pan style in front of kaleidoscopes while Space Mountain type music plays) and finds Clea and saves her even though an evil knight on a horse tries to stop him. So he's now a successful wizard doctor.
Clea gets discharged from the hospital, and the doctor plans to make a discharge into her. Or at least he goes to her apartment. But then Morgan LeFay appears out of the mirror and puts Clea to sleep, so Strange goes into a magic dimensional plane of existence realms with LeFay and then lands on a small, fake looking (but cool) outer space set with her and it's kinda weird because he was on the date with the one girl and now all the sudden he's gonna fuck a notorious magic lady from the King Arthur days. Not to slut shame him but come on Dr. Strange. Etiquette.
She's all over him and then she's like "hey by the way, no reason I mention this but take off the magic power ring that you just found out gives you the magic and everything" and he's like "nah, the old man has to take it off" and she's all "the guy is dead, just take it off" and he goes "you take it off" and she goes "no, I can't take it off, you gotta take it off though" and suddenly he's like oh shit, I think possibly she is trying to trick me and next thing you know they're shooting lasers out of hands at faces, starting fires and glowing yellow, red, etc.
Basically, this is a pretty slow, boring TV pilot that wasn't good enough to continue with as a series, so voila, it counts as a movie. Stan Lee is quoted as saying it could've done well but had the bad luck of playing at the same time as Roots. I think this is false because I can't find any evidence that Roots really played the same day, and if it did it was a re-run, having originally aired nearly 2 years before DR. STRANGE. At any rate, this didn't become a series like the other Marvel creations such as The Incredible Hulk, Spider-man or The Astonishing Love Boat.
There is no way I can claim this is good, but it does have a bunch of cool things in it that I would like to see them build off if in the actual theatrical motion picture extravaganza they are currently making. I have to admit, I have never been a fan of magic battles and beam shooting, but this did make me think "well, maybe it could be cool in the new one." There's a weird appeal to this, maybe because being made in the late '70s means it has alot of psychedelic style. There's a reoccurring keyboard theme that's kinda Goblin-esque, plus an orchestra that gets all freaked out and some fuzzy guitar solos and stuff. The composer, Paul Chihara, got his start on DEATH RACE 2000.
Here's the demon guy I liked:
You never really see him clearer than that, he's always in a haze and doesn't move much, but he definitely appears to be an animated character, and every once in a while he has nostrils that also light up, or extra eyes on the top of his head. I don't know how much this looks like the drawings in the comics, but it sure looks cool. I hope they get some good designers and make some great monster guys like this for the new movie. I think they would translate really well to modern effects. I think the director, Scott Derrickson, will do a good job with the creepy atmosphere, but judging by the monster he has in the SINISTER series, who recently played one of the smaller stages at the Gathering of the Juggalos, I don't consider it a done deal yet.
The opening of this one sets the tone well. It's a big chunk of red text over black, beginning with "THERE IS A BARRIER THAT SEPARATES THE KNOWN FROM THE UNKNOWN. BEYOND THIS THRESHOLD LIES A BATTLEGROUND WHERE FORCES OF GOOD AND EVIL ARE IN ETERNAL CONFLICT," with a creepy orchestral drone. Real bombastic shit. Throw you right into the satanic underbelly of the Marvel universe.
Also I like this disco-era lothario being the hero. And Morgan gives him a crazy cape and necklace straight out of the comic book. He changes into a still tacky, but sadly more tasteful and super hero-y version at the end. But that's okay because the adventures never continued anyway. I can imagine that if they had he would've been in the more pimped out version.
At the end he has alot of magic shit to learn, he's "like a baby with a loaded gun," but he agrees to choose humanity over himself. That's partly because he doesn't have to give up love, because "the universe is love." That's almost some BARBARELLA shit right there. Then a glowing white cube grows up out of the floor. "Let the transmutation begin." You know how it is when the transmutation begins. You get a cube and a different costume.
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The post Absolution appeared first on The Life and Art of Vern.]]>
ABSOLUTION is the latest from Steven Seagal, and his first to go straight to VOD before going to video this week. I guess it also played a couple theaters, although I have not heard any reports of anyone seeing it in one. I think this is more a sign of changing markets than of this particular movie's quality. It's not markedly different or better than his other recent works.
In ABSOLUTION Seagal faces a villain known only as "The Boss," but I don't think it's supposed to be Bruce Springsteen. Either that, or there's alot I didn't know about Bruce Springsteen. Vinnie Jones (SUBMERGED, GUTSHOT STRAIGHT) draws upon his experience in BRADLEY COOPER'S MIDNIGHT MEAT TRAIN to play this tweed-wearing kingpin who works out of a professorial type office with globes and bookshelves and stuff, but his hobby is video taping himself in a fetish mask torturing and murdering prostitutes in a kitchen in the back of his 24-hour dance spot Club One.
Two things happen here. First, John (Seagal) and his life-debt partner of three years Chi (Byron Mann, BELLY OF THE BEAST, A DANGEROUS MAN, True Justice) have done a murder-for-hire on a whore-loving, coke-snorting gangster called "The Afghani," (a very good douchebag performance by Sergiu Costache, who's actually Romanian) and are killing time before extraction by having some Johnnie Walker at the Danube Blues Club. Second, one of The Boss's victims (Nadia, played by Adina Stetcu) escapes him, runs through the Club One dance floor, onto the streets, into the Danube, and literally into John's lap, begging for help as The Boss's underlings try to drag her away.
John is more reluctant to get involved in this bar squabble than, say, Forrest Taft. He just stares at her coldly… but then one of the thugs makes the mistake of touching him, and he breaks that sucker's wrist before even bothering to stand up out of his chair.
But after he and Chi beat up all those guys they try to take off and ditch Nadia. She gets in John's car and he keeps telling her to get out. When he finally gives in and brings her to the safe house he apologizes to Chi for "breaking protocol," and laments how stupid a thing it was to do instead of trying to defend his actions at all. He's not trying to be a hero. At that point he still plans to give her some money and drop her off somewhere, kinda how the mom in A.I. tried to dump off her robot child in the woods.
It's narratively unnecessary that the guy they killed wasn't actually the terrorism funder they were told he was, or that the hit was actually for The Boss. John decides to help Nadia regardless of any of that stuff, because he hears about The Boss killing her sister in front of her and decides that avenging her could be good for his karma. "I wanna find this guy," John says. "I wanna find him and I wanna kill him. I need to do that for my own absolution."
You see, and the movie is called ABSOLUTION. You see.
As is Seagal's habit since he started the True Justice TV show, he delegates some of the workload to younger co-stars. It's cool to see him reunited with Mann, who has been playing funny supporting sleazebags for him, but this harkens back to BELLY OF THE BEAST, where they were very loyal partners. Here they call each other brothers, and Mann gets to do a bunch of martial arts since Chi is an experienced fighter and operator. It's also a role where he gets to be fashionable and stand around posing. VOD/DTV action may be the last place where you're allowed to make smoking look cool.
John also calls upon a younger Russian friend named Sergei (Dominte Cosmin) who is also kind of a brother to him, or at least a cousin or pal. "Trust him," he tells Chi. "I've trusted him many times." I appreciate that in this movie we really can take his word for it, there's not gonna be a surprise betrayal. Because of brotherhood/honor, etc. Anyway, I don't like Sergei as much as Chi, but he gives Seagal an excuse to speak Russian, which I'm sure helped keep him in good spirits.
In a way I think the conflict is really about the contrast between these two club locations. The Danube is where John and Chi belong because it's homier, more intimate, has live musicians, tables to sit at and contemplate and what not. Club One is warehouse sized with walls of TV screens and shitty techno dance music. (I did some research and this is a real club in Bucharest. DMX played there in March. DMX from EXIT WOUNDS.)
Both clubs are frequented by some of the same prostitutes. We know because Chi makes small talk with one at the Danube and then runs into her at Club One, "just hanging out," she says. But he has to tell her to leave because he sees gunmen coming for him. Doesn't matter how bad it is for business in their own club, they will shoot you right there on the dance floor. You can't "just hang out" there. That's more of a Danube thing.
And we learn from the epilogue (SPOILER) that "just hanging out" is the life goal of John and Chi. John ends up listening to records with Nadia, watching her dance. Weirdly – kind of pathetically, really – the last shot of the movie is Chi leaving the "Massage Salon," where it has been established he enjoys special services. So the happy ending is he gets a happy ending.
ABSOLUTION is the third in the Alexander trilogy, a series of movies where Seagal arguably plays the same character. You don't need to have seen the other two to understand it – in fact, I would argue that having seen the other two made it harder for me to understand it. In FORCE OF EXECUTION (the most interesting of the three) Seagal plays Mr. Alexander, an honorable gangster who "used to work for the guvmint" but they tried to have him killed so he and his young partner had to chop up a bunch of feds. Now he wants to end the gang war and "go up in the mountains of Thailand, where I learned my original bad habits." In A GOOD MAN he's Alexander, who two years ago was a special ops guy killing terrorists in Dagestan, but now lives quietly as a handyman for an apartment building in Eastern Europe. Oh yeah, and in his spare time he chops up Chinese gangsters as the vigilante serial killer Gwai Lo.
In ABSOLUTION he's only called John, and doesn't necessarily seem to have the same back story as either one of those, but the credits call him "John Alexander," and director Keoni Waxman refers to "the Alexander series" on the commentary track. So I like to think this really is the same Alexander we've seen before, and he's just a dude who has gone through alot of shit in his life. In a way it sort of literalizes the feeling you get from most of Seagal's filmography that he's basically playing the same character, just with some of the details changed. And in these backstories there have always been blurry lines between ex-military, ex-CIA, ex black-ops, ex-assassin and life-long freelancer.
Alexander always has a goatee (like an evil twin, has been my going theory) and muses in narration about what a bad person he is and whether or not he can be a good person at some point later. Otherwise, there's less continuity than even the MAD MAX series. He always lives in a different place, goes by a different name, is atoning for a different flashback, has different close people in his life. In FORCE OF EXECUTION he has an adult daughter and a protege who's almost like a son to him, but they're not mentioned in the other two movies. In this one he has memories of a wife who died in a hospital of cancer or whatever. This seems to be a defining trauma for him, though it didn't come up in the other two movies.
One good thing about the Alexander movies that can't be said of all Seagal DTV: they each introduce a supporting player with surprising presence who threatens to steal the movie. In FORCE OF EXECUTION it was Bren Foster, the young partner who handled alot of the fighting. In A GOOD MAN it was Victor Webster, who seems at first like an interesting antagonist but ends up on Seagal's side. In this one it's Josh Barnett as top henchman Colt. He's a big guy, so it's not surprising he's from UFC, but he impressed me long before his one fight scene at the end. He's dryly funny going through the motions of his job while clearly annoyed by the people he works for.
Barnett is also on a commentary track with director Waxman and producer Binh Dang. The weirdest piece of trivia we learn from him is that in real life he's best friends with A GOOD MAN's Victor Webster, and in one scene he's wearing an ID badge with Webster's photo on it. He's clearly a smart and funny guy, so I hope to see him in more movies soon. Maybe Webster will bring him along for the next SCORPION KING.
Here was a part I liked in this one. Check out this painting hanging on his wall:
I have to admit I was disappointed to hear them on the commentary track praising the production designer for how fast she painted it. I had assumed this was something Seagal really had hanging in his home. Anyway, I hope some serious collector of Seagalogical artifacts gets a hold of it and it becomes his or her pride and joy. Some lucky sonofabitch probly has it hanging next to the Holy Grail of framed Steven Seagal movie props, the Storm family portrait from HARD TO KILL.
Like always, and especially these days, Seagal mumbles alot and seems to improvise most of his dialogue, and there are some nuggets there. In the philosophy department we have a little lecture about how "Real warriors, they don't really say much. They just do what they gotta do."
And he just has a funny, matter-of-fact way of talking about violence. At one point they seem to be defeated, and Chi has been abducted, and Nadia asks what they're going to do. John responds, "We're gonna follow them, we're gonna get Chi back, and then we're gonna probly have to do some bad things to some of the people there." Which, of course, they do. When it's time for him to leave and have a showdown with The Boss he explains the situation to his friends and then says, "I'll be right back." I know the dude from SCREAM says you're not supposed to say that in a horror movie, but in an action movie it's pretty badass.
Not surprisingly Seagal sticks to his two current action mainstays: sneaking around corners aiming guns, and swatting people around with his monstrous aikido hands. I'm a big fan of that second one. Maybe the most notable thing he does, though, is the ol' not-reacting-to-a-fiery-explosion-right-behind-him move, which he really hasn't done as many times as you'd expect for a man of his history in asskicking.
There's also a great stunt where he blows up an apartment and a burning dude flies out the window and lands on a parked car.
But his action highlight is the climax, when he finally faces The Boss. In one sense it's a universal action scenario: the bad guy runs out of bullets, so the good guy chooses to put his gun down and have a fist fight. But from that moment on it's a Seagal specialty, because it's a completely one-sided fight. Since Jones is a rugged looking guy and we've seen him in plenty of movie fights, including as a super villain, and also since he's playing this sadist, it's a good character moment to see him confidently put his dukes up and then just be immediately and totally dominated.
He doesn't even get one punch in. Alexander literally picks him up and wipes the bar with him. He bashes his head through glasses, bumps it repeatedly against the counter, breaks him through tables and other furniture, damaging the stupid club he owns. Eventually Alexander says "Get up and fight, bitch!"
But The Boss says, "No. No more." Not like he's scared, but calmly, like he's a man of reason, he wants to stop this madness and work something out. So Alexander kicks him through a glass barricade, over the balcony, onto a metal pole. I hope they weren't triplets. Now that he's impaled a torturer guy, Mr. John Alexander is absolved of his sins I guess?
If you're not interested in the Seagalogical themes and weirdness, I can't really recommend any of the Alexander series. If you are, but only enough to dip one toe in, I would go with FORCE OF EXECUTION, since it has Ving Rhames as the bad guy and Danny Trejo doing weird naturopathic medicine involving scorpion stings. In this period of Seagalogy, where he's not playing the traditional riffs as cleanly as he once did, I feel like he could use more show-offy flourishes like that. Still, as you can see by my review, there is plenty here for academics to dig into. The mystery of Alexander continues.
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The post First Knight appeared first on The Life and Art of Vern.]]>
FIRST KNIGHT is a movie I never would've watched without an excuse like this series, but it's not bad. Directed by AIRPLANE!'s Jerry Zucker (
his followup to NAKED GUN 2 1/2, but not his first serious movie, having already done GHOST), it's basically a love triangle between King Arthur (Sean Connery), Sir Lancelot (Richard Gere) and Guinevere (Julia Ormond). Connery and Gere play two different types of handsome while Ormond makes the movie with a more human, layered portrayal.
The story begins with Lancelot, a dreamy, long-haired drifter going from town to town showing off in sword-fighting demos. His path happens to cross young Queen Guinevere's when her caravan is ambushed on the way to Camelot to marry King Arthur. So he rescues her.
Before he disappears he plants a kiss on her, and she's got that BRIDGES OF MADISON COUNTY look of suppressed lust on her face, but she tells him to cool it, she's engaged. And when she gets to Camelot we see that she's not just being chaste, she really does love Arthur. Yeah, it's an arranged marriage, and he's old enough to be her ancestor, but in his defense he does give her a sincere opportunity to back out, pledging to defend her kingdom of Lyonnesse regardless of marital arrangements. You want him to be a sleazy old bastard so you can root for her to kick him to the medieval equivalent of a curb, but he keeps being a gentleman, god damn it. She tells him she's not gonna back out, she really wants to marry him, and she seems to know what she's doing.
But Lancelot comes a courtin'. He impresses Arthur so much with an unpadded conquest of The Gauntlet (basically an American Ninja Warrior obstacle course, except with way more axes swinging at your head) that the King brings him into the castle and considers putting him on the Round Table. So Lancelot's around and keeps making eyes at Guinevere, who keeps thinking up excuses to get him out of there before she, you know, trips and lands on his dick, or who knows what.
There's this whole plot unfolding about an impending war between Camelot and ex-Round Tabler Malagant (Ben Cross, UNDISPUTED II: LAST MAN STANDING), who kidnaps Guinevere, so Lancelot has to rescue her again. (Kind of like a second date.) The story is secondarily about this conflict and primarily about the sexual tension between Guinevere and Lancelot. Or actually kissing tension. It's kinda cool how much lusty passion they squeeze out of one withheld kiss. No boning at all.
It's interesting that this came out the same summer as BRAVEHEART. There are definitely similarities. Both have an aimless warrior who finds purpose in a war against the troops of a dishonorable imperialist. In both he takes part in large scale battles with horses, swords and arrows, playing clever strategic tricks. In both he's irresistible to women, and he fucks the king's lady. Or kisses her at least. I guess in that respect it's more like POCAHONTAS.
But this king is on his side, so it complicates thing. Then at the end it switches up and the king becomes the braveheart, because he's the one that goes out in a blaze of proud, manly, stubborn glory in the public square. All he has to do is swallow his pride and bow to Malagant. Instead he's like "Okay yeah, no problem bud, I am a good bower, let me get ready, do a few bowing stretches here. Okay I am ready to bow to you now, here I go. Actually give me one more moment. In fact, let's do a count down here actually. Three. Two. One. Begin bowing sequence. Preparing bow. Here goes the bow. I am now PSYCHE I AM NOT BOWING I AM STANDING UP AND WAVING MY SWORD DEFIANTLY TO TELL EVERYONE TO–" [instantly run through by like three swords]
It was bad luck coming out a little after BRAVEHEART, because the battles aren't as brutal or engaging. A few of those guys look like they have no business swinging a sword, to be honest. Lancelot was much more fun swashing buckles and doing derring to show off to civilians than putting on a helmet and running into a mob of guys who look just like him. But Zucker's camerawork is pretty energetic and there are some beautiful shots of moonlight reflecting off the armor of an army approaching on horseback.
The character of William Wallace was proud to act like a brute, but these guys see themselves as civilized fancy lads. While BRAVEHEART is about protecting the homeland, FIRST KNIGHT is about protecting ideals. Arthur loves Camelot not just because it's beautiful at night, and because he built it, but because it really stands for something he believes in. The Round Table, where everybody comes and lays their swords down on the table, and nobody is at the head, is no bullshit. And he goes around telling people, including Lancelot, that he loves them. And he's a hugger! So when his rage over his protege kissing his woman causes him to betray those ideals, and put on a public treason trial over the passive-aggressive objections of the other knights, it's genuinely disappointing. Man, just because you pulled a sword out of a rock one time you think you get everything you want.
The stakes seem high. Luckily he quickly falls into "what have I done?" mode and thinks about the future of Camelot.
Gere is very charismatic as Lancelot at the beginning, but I think as the movie focuses on him less he has a hard time keeping it up. Then there's a part where he hides behind a bush and cries, and for a second it seems like it's because he can't get the girl, and you feel like telling him to man up. But then you realize it's because he's remembering his family getting killed. I guess that's okay. Even though Batman wouldn't cry like that.
Connery is really good as well. I think I've confessed this before, but I don't have the same love affair with Connery that the world does, especially in this era. When he's supposed to be wacky, like in INDIANA JONES AND THE HILARIOUS RELATIONSHIP HE HAS WITH HIS OLD MAN he's like nails on a chalkboard to me, or a bomb on a lead-lined refrigerator. But here he's charming and inspirational. A rugged man who cleans up well. I wonder if Guinevere ever considered a PAINT YOUR WAGON type marriage scenario?
Ormond really is the highlight. Her Guinevere is glorified as an ideal queen, introduced playing games with kids but stopping to take charge when informed of an emergency. (Draw your own 9-11 parallels.) She's not a fighter, but frequently goes into danger with the men. But it's her vulnerability that makes her interesting, and all of it is in her eyes. In scene after scene Ormond conveys many conflicting emotions without saying a word. It's hard to imagine someone else making such a perfect corner on this love triangle.
FIRST KNIGHT did okay. It opened against SPECIES, which came in above it at the weekend box office, and below the previous week's APOLLO 13. But of those three only SPECIES got three sequels, so who's laughing now, knights and astronauts? Not you.
Director Jerry Zucker, of course, started out making spoof movies like THE KENTUCKY FRIED MOVIE and AIRPLANE! with his brother David. Remember how David came out as conservative, made that terrible movie AN AMERICAN CAROL and complained about how hard it was for right wingers in Hollywood? That's funny, because in the last 20 years he got to direct that, BASEKETBALL, MY BOSS'S DAUGHTER, three SCARY MOVIE movies and a TV movie called H.U.D. Jerry has only done 2001's RAT RACE. He has been a producer on a few things though, including MY BEST FRIEND'S WEDDING and, weirdly, FAIR GAME, the movie about the outing of CIA agent Valerie Plame.
Screenwriter William Nicholson, who had been known for SHADOWLANDS, has worked on many classy period pieces since, including GLADIATOR, ELIZABETH: THE GOLDEN AGE, THE MISERABLES, MANDELA: LONG WALK TO FREEDOM and UNBROKEN. Meanwhile his co-story-providers Lorne Cameron & David Hoselton, who had gotten their start on LIKE FATHER LIKE SON, found their way into animation, working on BROTHER BEAR, OVER THE HEDGE and in Hoselton's case THE NUT JOB.
Connery is primarily known today for turning down THE MATRIX and LORD OF THE RINGS and winning a 1999 Outlaw Award for Inspirational Catch By An Old Dude for his dalliance with Catherine Zeta Jones in ENTRAPMENT (age difference: 39 years), an achievement which unfortunately dwarfed this fine movie where he married a lady only 35 years his junior.
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The post Battle Beyond the Stars appeared first on The Life and Art of Vern.]]>
Admittedly, it doesn't seem like BATTLE BEYOND THE STARS takes place further away from here than any of the STAR WARSes. In fact, it is for sure closer, because people have heard of the planet Earth, and one guy is from there. His name is Cowboy, but not the pioneering rapper from the Furious Five who coined the term "hip hop." He's actually George Peppard a couple years before The A-Team and he wears a cowboy hat, plaid shirt and insulated silver space pants. He always shows off that he likes westerns and exotic Earth liquor. Obviously he's the Han Solo character, and he's entertaining, but most of his scenes are alone in his ship, so there's a Chewbacca-sized hole next to him.
Coming three years after STAR WARS this was Roger Corman's attempt at a knockoff, and unlike most of the other posers he was smart enough to take a look at Lucas's influences and model the story after samurai movies – in this case SEVEN SAMURAI. Of course, this doesn't hold a candle to either STAR WARS or SEVEN SAMURAI in my opinion. In fact it is a pretty bad movie. But it's interesting. It's less remembered for its story and characters than for its trivia-ready credits: John Sayles wrote the screenplay (it came out the same year as his directorial debut RETURN OF THE SECAUCUS 7), James Cameron did some of the effects (the year before his directorial debut, PIRANHA II: THE SPAWNING), the late James Horner did the exciting score (six years before working with Cameron on ALIENS), all of which contribute to it being a little better than you might expect.
The title is partly accurate. It is in fact a smaller conflict than STAR WARS. It's about the fate of Akir (homage), a planet of bland, passive farmers facing an ultimatum from the Zod-like planetary conqueror Sador, played by ENTER THE DRAGON's John Saxon with facepaint and robes added to his customary manly combover. Basically he pulls a The Humungus, he roars in with a bunch of freaky looking mutant thugs and threatens everybody and then basically says well anyway think about it guys I'll be back later and if you don't submit it's curtains for you motherfuckers. The unlikely hero who is the only one who wants to fight back is Shad (Richard Thomas from The Waltons). The planet's last guy who knew how to kill people is old and can barely see so he loans his ship to this dumb kid to defy the planet's deeply held philosophy of non-violence by flying into space to recruit a crew of mercenaries to defend them.
Like Luke Skywalker before him, Shad is kind of a whiny, naive kid eager to prove his manhood, but in my opinion he's way, way less likable. All he really does is a few laser dogfights aided by his ship's talking computer Nell (Lynn Carlin, also from The Waltons), but he acts so fuckin serious about it. The part where he really lost my sympathy is when he rejected help from the Valkyrie St. Exmin (Sybil Danning). She proves her skills by out-maneuvering him and then he turns down her help, insults her ship and condescends to her way of life. She follows and helps anyway even though he clearly doesn't deserve the time of day from her, and still the motherfucker lectures her about how this is serious and he's lost people in this war. What a sexist prick. If he ever apologized to her for being a dick and totally wrong for the whole movie I don't remember it, so I must not have accepted it.
He obviously prefers a more passive girl, because he wasn't so put off by Nanelia (Darlanne Fluegel, EYES OF LAURA MARS, TO LIVE AND DIE IN L.A., SCANNER COP, DARKMAN III), the girl on the android repair space station whose father tried to hook her up with him like a fuckin horse breeder. He doesn't go for it though and she ends up helping him on his mission.
Luckily Sayles puts a bunch of enjoyable ideas in here. I like the scene where Shad makes an offer to the legendary killer Gelt (Robert Vaughn). Gelt explains how much money he has and Shad apologizes for wasting his time, but he explains that no, the money doesn't matter, he's such a pariah for all the killing he's done, just the offer of shelter is a good deal for him. And then he has to fly along with them anonymously.
Another good one is the scene where his ship gets damaged and doesn't remember who she is, is confused why her original owner isn't there. It's actually a little sad.
As far as STAR WARS ripoffs go this does have alot to offer. There's some lizard men and mutant guys and stuff, lots of different types of armor, a good exciting adventure score, and outstanding space ship miniatures. On the other hand, it feels like it's trying to follow the STAR WARS lead while being stuck in a more campy, stage-bound type of sci-fi from an earlier era. Lots of sets of caverns, all white backgrounds, magic crystals and all that type of bullshit. There are just too many boring people in robes and silver jumpsuits and shit. The one creation that's most surprising in a post-STAR WARS movie is Nestor, the three beings who share one brain. They're dudes in robes and white facepaint with a third eye painted on their heads. And are we not supposed to notice the line where their faces meet their fake oversized brains? I don't think it's just 'cause I watched it on Blu-Ray, I feel like this is pretty noticeable.
Those guys are way too corny for 1980, but they do get a good part where a mad scientist on Sador's payroll grafts one of their arms onto him to replace the one he's missing. But the Nestor brothers are able to control it and make him try to strangle himself.
There's this romantic notion that's very popular among movie fans now that "old school" and "practical" is always better. And overall I like this attitude, but also I feel like people don't always know what they're talking about when they say it. STAR WARS is what they're talking about for "practical effects," but of course at the time it was very much new school. They blew everybody away with all new effects technology. BATTLE BEYOND THE STARS is a great illustration of how important those cutting edge advancements were, because this model work seems like it's as good as STAR WARS's as far as building detailed ships, but it's always the same straight on shots of them. They didn't have the motion control camera technology that Industrial Light and/or Magic had to animate the models while the camera moves around them. And that really makes these space battles seem stiff and dull and lacking in energy by comparison.
His ship kinda looks like it has boobs though, and they don't have that in STAR WARS. That might keep some people interested I guess. I don't know.
BATTLE BEYOND THE STARS is better as a curiosity than an actual movie, but I like curiosities. You gotta respect a blatant ripoff that has this much effort and talent put into it.
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The post Mighty Morphin Power Rangers: The Movie appeared first on The Life and Art of Vern.]]>
MIGHTY MORPHIN POWER RANGERS: THE MOVIE is easily the crappiest movie in my Summer of '95 retrospective so far. Maybe less offensive than BATMAN FOREVER, since it doesn't seem to be made by professionals who should know any better, but it's really something. I know it's an extension of a cheesy kids TV show made up partly of stock footage from Japanese shows, but it's amazing that a soundtrack album and a little bad CGI was enough to get this into theaters alongside real movies. APOLLO 13 and
JUDGE DREDD came out the same day. Watching it 20 years later POWER RANGERS does not seem like it belongs in the company of either, and the dark, low quality transfer on the DVD isn't helping things. It didn't get completely killed at the box office, though. That weekend it came in below APOLLO 13, POCAHONTAS and BATMAN FOREVER, but above JUDGE DREDD.
Like APOLLO 13 this is the story of an elite team of squares chosen to put on uniforms and helmets and fly into space. The Power Rangers are five teenagers chosen by a giant face in a glass tube named Zordon (Nicholas Bell, DARK CITY) to "transform into a superhuman fighting force" and defend the Australian-looking city of Angel Grove, California. That means morphing into masked and color-coded martial arts super heroes and piloting robotic dinosaurs called Zords that combine into a bigger, humanoid robot called Megazord to fight giant monsters. In their spare time the Power Rangers like to skydive, rollerblade and act as role models to local children who don't know they're the Power Rangers because it's a secret identity, although that is never relevant to the story. As far as we see, none of them have parents, schools, jobs, homes or alone time.
Usually I guess they fight a sorceress lady and a skinless HELLRAISER type guy who have a pigman and an apeman with golden wings as their lackeys, but today some construction workers accidentally dig up an ancient egg that hatches into "Ivan Ooze" (Paul Freeman, DOUBLE TEAM, HOT FUZZ), a blue wizard dude who cackles and puns, shrinks those bad guys into a snowglobe and hatches an ingenious plot to hand out jars of purple slime that brainwash all of the local adults into digging up his two giant robot insects that are buried in the dirt because that way he can take over the world but first he has to go to the "command center for [Zordon's] never-ending struggle against evil" and smash a bunch of stuff so that the Rangers become Powerless and Zordon's tube breaks and he's an old alien guy laying on a bunch of crystals slowly dying. Therefore a robot beams the now regular teens to a planet where they will have to obtain "The Great Power" in order to save Zordon and be able to turn into Power Rangers again. Obviously.
This sounds like an inexcusable suicide mission to send some unarmed kids on, because many people have tried before and all have failed. The ground is strewn with the skeletons of giants who tried before them and failed. The middle of the movie is a pretty dull quest on this planet of rocks and woods. There's a lady named Dulcea (Gabrielle Fitzpatrick, Snowy River: The McGregor Saga) who looks like the Barbarian Queen, but otherwise the only lifeforms are a dinosaur skeleton that comes to life, statues that come to life, and birdmen sent by Ivan Ooze, all of whom they have to fight and kick into walls and things so they explode.
The quest earns them new animal symbols and ninja costumes. There's an actual kind of funny joke where they're told their new animals in a ceremony (wolf, falcon, etc.) but one guy is sad because "I'm a frog." (I don't want to be Mr. Pink.) Later they're fighting in giant robots of their animals and he seems okay having his make a "ribbet" sound, so that's nice.
The martial arts scenes are kinda fun, but could use more variety. The gag where they kick a guy and he goes flying on a wire and slams into something and explodes into slime is the best effect in the movie, so they do it over and over again. Still, it's fun how much they flip around and travel from point A to B using handsprings. Even though they can basically fly they like to use grappling guns and swing around like Batman. And they do moves like that thing where you jump up and just run on a guy in the air, a whole bunch of kicks in one. You guys do that move too, right? I love that move.
Credited second unit directors are Gary Hymes (action choreographer for HOOK), Jeff Pruitt (fight choreographer for MARTIAL OUTLAW) and Jeff Imada (John Carpenter's favorite stunt guy) for the "ooze fight."
It wouldn't be fair to complain about all the cheesiness in the movie as if it's not part of the appeal. For example, the bland interchangeability of the characters is pretty funny. They are ethnically diverse and they wear different colored uniforms, but otherwise the only difference I notice is that the Pink Ranger (Amy Jo Johnson, who it says here was also on the tv show Felicity playing some sort of troubled roommate who is a guitarist/singer-songwriter and searching for her birth mother or something like that, who knows) gets more emotional about everything. Also they have just enough of two painfully broad "comic" relief characters to make things weird – they forget to put on their parachutes and almost jump and the Rangers laugh about this near-tragedy. Those goofballs. Almost died horribly and caused this skydiving company to be sued out of existence. Ha ha ha.
And I gotta approve the use of animatronic monster dudes just hanging around. There's a pigman with a monocle. Coulda used one of those in BATMAN FOREVER for sure.
That kind of stuff was pretty goofy and out-of-date for movies of the time, but it holds up much better than the stuff they did to try to play with the big boys. The decision that really doesn't withstand the test of time, among other tests, was to replace the show's lo-fi robot costumes with computer animation which, at least at their budget, was not yet up to snuff to handle giant robots. The "Mega Ninja Zord" vs. Giant Ivan Ooze scene beats even the MUMMY RETURNS Scorpion King scene for hilariously terrible digital effects released in theaters. It's hard to even remember a time when animation this crude was played on TV.
So you get a laugh, but not the cool robot action they were probly going for. Hats off, though, for trying to make what I believe is the first digital giant robot effects (beating MARS ATTACKS! by a year) and for the deadpan use of an "Emergency Only" button that makes their robot knee the other robot in the balls. And it works! I guess Ivan shouldn't have built his with that testicular pain simulator.
So, other than the embarrassing computer animation what distinguishes this from episodes of the TV show? Well, the score is by Graeme Revell (DEAD CALM, HARD TARGET, THE CROW, STRANGE DAYS) and music supervisor is Happy Walters (JUDGMENT NIGHT), who put together a soundtrack featuring The Red Hot Chili Peppers, Devo and Van Halen, I guess maybe to help the parents survive through the movie. But the catchiest song is pretty obnoxious, it's "Trouble" by a group called Shampoo and it sounds kinda like a fake-bratty cheerleader chant.
The Ranger costumes look very similar to on the show, but they're armourized, they're not just spandex. The Yellow Ranger has headlights on top of hers ("Activate power beam!") which I assume is a movie thing, but I could be wrong.
THE MOVIE director Bryan Spicer had come from TV (Parker Lewis Can't Lose, SeaQuest DSV) but he followed this with McHALE'S NAVY and FOR RICHER OR POORER. And then obviously he returned immediately to TV where he has been extremely prolific. Just a few of the shows he's directed for: The X-Files, The Lone Gunmen, Dark Angel, C.S.I., 24, Prison Break, Heroes, Human Target, V, etc.
Co-writer Arne Olsen had written RED SCORPION and COP AND 1/2, his subsequent works have included ALL DOGS GO TO HEAVEN 2 and GRIZZLY RAGE. The other writer, John Kamps, has gone a little more respectable with THE BORROWERS, ZATHURA, GHOST TOWN and PREMIUM RUSH.
Of the Rangers in the movie, Pink Ranger Amy Jo Johnson has had the most high profile career. She was the lead in many TV movies including the Lois Duncan adaptation KILLING MR. GRIFFIN and the Olympic gymnast eating disorder story PERFECT BODY before being in the casts of Felicity (50 episodes), The Division (22 episodes) and Flashpoint (75 episodes). Last year she was on 8 episodes of Covert Affairs.
But Black Ranger Johnny Yong Bosch has been the most prolific, racking up 159 acting credits on IMDb, mostly as a voice artist for anime and video games (he even plays Kaneda in the dub of AKIRA). In 2005 he co-directed a DTV horror movie called DEVON'S GHOST: LEGEND OF THE BLOODY BOY, co-written by Yellow Ranger Karan Ashley. And he's also in a few cheap-ass action movies:
White Ranger Jason David Frank has a couple of those under his belt too. The one I need to see is the one where he plays stuntman John Stewart in FALL GUY: THE JOHN STEWART STORY, written, directed and produced by John Stewart (ACTION U.S.A.). I don't usually spend twenty-some-bucks on a blind buy I expect to be cheesy, but I just ordered it after watching this trailer:
In 2010 Frank began competing in mixed martial arts, going undefeated in 4 amateur fights and 1 pro. From what I have read none of his opponents exploded into slime when he beat them.
MIGHTY MORPHIN POWER RANGERS: THE MOVIE seems to have been a successful outreach for the afternoon kids show which started in 1993. The movie made $66 million, which is not a huge amount of money, but if it wasn't profitable then somebody got fuckin ripped off because none of that money is onscreen. It was followed by the 1997 sequel TURBO: A POWER RANGERS MOVIE which was even more like a TV show and should probly be called TURBO: THE LAST POWER RANGERS MOVIE because it made less than $10 million worldwide.
Actually, Lionsgate is working on a new rebootening or adaptification of some kind, from the director of PROJECT ALMANAC (Jonathan Liebesman's cousin). Meanwhile, Wikipedia informs me that the TV show has stayed on the air this entire time! After three years under the original title they started a tradition of revamping with a new name and robots and stuff each season (Power Rangers Operation Overdrive, Power Rangers Jungle Fury, etc.). They only took a break in 2010 to play re-edited versions of the original episodes. This year it's called Power Rangers Dino Charge.
appendix: Joseph Kahn's POWER/RANGERS
Earlier this year director Joseph Kahn (TORQUE) released this completely unauthorized 14-minute Power Rangers short that looks much more slick and cinematic than the actual MIGHTY MORPHIN POWER RANGERS: THE MOVIE. That caused some initial legal troubles because of the official reboot in the works.
We've all seen (or purposely not seen) fan films before, but this is of a different breed. Producer Adi Shankar (THE GREY, DREDD, A WALK AMONG THE TOMBSTONES) is the kind of guy who does what many nerds think they would do if they had a bunch of money: spend it on the kind of movies they want to see, money be damned. So he started what he calls his "Bootleg Universe" where he gets real directors and actors to do weird shorts based on characters he doesn't have the rights to.
The previous best known example was THE PUNISHER: DIRTY LAUNDRY directed by Phil Joanou (THREE O'CLOCK HIGH, GRIDIRON GANG):
I know that one is popular, but I'm not a fan. Thomas Jane already did my favorite Punisher movie. He gives a great badass performance in what is basically an '80s action/revenge movie with some extra absurdity and over-the-topness to honor its comic book origins. I disagree that it's an improvement to put him in this fake-gritty bullshit as a white avenger beating digital blood out of the all black "fuckin animals" and "savages" as Ron Perlman's character calls them. I prefer him fighting the guitar playing assassin and the oaf with the striped shirt who nearly takes down the apartment building wrestling him.
POWER/RANGERS has an even more aggressive poser-grittiness, but in this case I believe it's a joke. Following in the footsteps of the stories that followed in the footsteps of '80s super hero revisionist stories like The Dark Knight Returns and Watchmen, Kahn and co-writers James Van Der Beek (!) and Dutch Southern move the light-hearted adventures to a dystopian future where Power Rangers are physically and psychologically scarred from their battles, they turn on each other, they become murderers, they die, they curse, and dude it is sooo fucked up man. They make the point that recruiting teens to fight monsters is basically enlisting child soldiers.
It's a great looking short, a very detailed, fully-realized world, the opposite of the real movie. There's a cool fight scene in the middle between the Black Ranger (Gichi Gamba, TORQUE, THICK AS THIEVES) and gangsters/soldiers/something led by Will Yun Lee (THE WOLVERINE). Even though he's wearing the Power Rangers uniform (now with fake rubber muscles) it's a fight that seems more inspired by THE RAID, with the Ranger stealing people's guns and knives and using them against them. (Choreographers: Don Theerathada, Daniel "Danimal" Hernandez.) Maybe the coolest bit is when he takes a couple bullets to the helmet. It jerks his head a little but he keeps going.
But I think there's a joke that some fans (who said that this is what a Power Rangers movie should be like) don't get: this deliberately removes most of what is appealing about Power Rangers. I mean wasn't it a show about people who do kung fu poses and shout commands as they get into robotic animals and dinosaurs that combine into a bigger robot to fight giant monsters? Yes, it was, and none of that shit is in the short. The only robots are glimpsed briefly from the distance, blurry and shakycam, in an opening flashback. Most of this movie is about the star of Dawson's Creek acting tough, shouting exposition and knocking furniture over in a futuristic interrogation room.
And what about colorful villains? Not gritty enough. As soon as they bring back Rita (apparently played by an actress who played her on some of the shows, but not the movie) they cut to the credits. "People love these silly Power Rangers. How can we do it without all the silly stuff?"
It's such an effective parody of the "gritty reboot" that people seemed to actually like it. Which hopefully will influence the actual reboot they're doing, because that could be some funny shit.
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