Category: Movies

This is an 1992 John Woo film from Hong Kong action genre. To be honest, I’m not that familiar with the genre, and I’m not enough of a poseur to get into it to impress others. I will pick them up here and there when I can find them for a buck or two, but as I mentioned when I bought this film in February, that’s becoming rare as DVD prices are starting to creep up.

At any rate, the film deals with a police inspector, “Tequila,” played by Chow Yun-fat, who is working to take down a big gangster and arms dealer in the city. He encounters an up-and-coming hardman who is manipulated into killing his boss and joining up with another up-and-coming mob boss. This fellow, played by Tony Leung Chiu-wai, turns out to be an undercover agent, and they work together to take down the arms dealer who hides his weapon cache in a hospital. Which leads to numerous almost cartoonish action sequences, although they were filmed with practical effects and not green-screened and then CGIed to death.

So it was an alright film, something I would expect to have seen on cable, and not a spectacle that it would have been in 1992 in Hong Kong, perhaps.

Speaking of spectacles, the film features a brief appearance by Hoi Shan-Lai as a librarian at the scene of a hit:

I am not sure of the actual translation, but I believe that is Mandarin for Velma.

She did not appear in many films, so I didn’t see many pictures of her on the Internet to make this a full beneath-the-fold feature.

ADDENDUM: I did not draw into stark relief something that I wanted to point out with this review: This film was produced in a free Hong Kong, and that might account for some of the thematic difference between this film and mainland Chinese and Hong Kong films after the handover–Kung Fu Yoga, Shanghai Knights (Hero, and Legend of the Fist come to mind. In this film, the bad guys are not Westerners trying to steal Chinese artifacts or treasure. This film has less propaganda in it and more universal themes where the protagonists and antagonists happen to be Chinese in extraction. I wonder if those kinds of films get made in China or Hong Kong today. They certainly haven’t hit the dollar DVD market in Springfield, Missouri, if they have.

Unfortunately, my beautiful wife was put off on watching films with me after The Green Hornet, so she missed the chance to see a superhero movie based on a DC property.

This film stars Josh Brolin as Jonah Hex, a former member of the Confederate army who has become a bounty hunter who can talk to the dead. After defying his commander (John Malkovich) who wanted Hex to kill a church full of innocents, he is forced to kill the commander’s son, his personal friend. In revenge, the commander kills Hex’s wife and son and forces Hex to watch them die. Years later, Hex is still protecting the innocent in his rough manner when he’s engaged by President Grant to find the commander, presumed dead, and to prevent him from assembling a super weapon that can re-ignite the Civil War–or perhaps win it quickly for the South.

Ya know, it’s not a bad film. The main character is sympathetic. The story is fanciful, but it’s a decent action film. The CGI effects are cartoonish, and the color palette is pretty dark. But I liked it okay.

I don’t have the DVD on the desk because I passed it onto my son, who has played a lot of Red Dead Redemption 2. I think he would like it. So I recommended it to my boy, and I’ll recommend it to you if you can find it on DVD for a couple of bucks. It’s the kind of film I would have watched over and over again in the trailer back in the day were the day not 25 years before this film was made.

This might be the first Seth Rogen film I’ve seen. But, no. Apparently, I saw him in Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy, You, Me, and Dupree, Donnie Darko, The 40-Year-Old Virgin, and the video for Lonely Island’s “Like a Boss”. In most of those, he only had a small role, though, so technically, this is the first Seth Rogen above the title film I’ve seen. And I’m pleased to say between this and my recent viewing of The Hangover, I have cemented the difference between Rogen and Zach Galifanakis in my own mind. For what that’s worth.

I watched the film with my beautiful wife who joined me because the one kind of film she will watch with me is superhero films, but I’m afraid she mistakenly thought the Green Hornet was a DC property (it’s not–the character got a start in radio serials and films originally and has appeared in comics by Harvey, Dell Comics, NOW, and most recently Dynamite). Perhaps she thought I was popping in The Green Lantern which we have in the video cabinet as well. But it was an inadvertant bit of trickery that roped her into watching a film that wasn’t very good.

It’s an origin story, of course, which puts its own spin on the character. Seth Rogen plays a playboy wastrel whose father runs the big local paper in the city. When the father is killed, he inherits the paper. A family friend is the DA, and he wants favorable coverage from the paper. Meanwhile, the heir befriends the chauffeur Kato, and whilst decapitating the statue of the father, they foil a robbery/rape attempt and decide to fight crime. Later they decide to pose as criminals themselves who are taking over the city from an old school European mobster whose mobbery lacks flash. So you get the basics of the story with a modern comedy twist.

Which, unfortunately, doesn’t work. Rogen’s Reid is unlikeable–perhaps that was his goal, but one does not identify or empathize with him. The story itself is kind of stock, without much fresh in it.

So I did not like it much, and, unfortunately, the experience will lead my wife to think twice about sitting down to watch a movie with me again anytime in the near future.

There was a brief moment, gentle reader, when the stars of 1990s and early 2000s screwball comedies transitioned into more adult-themed comedies. Whereas films like Happy Gilmore, Wedding Crashers, and Starsky and Hutch dominated the box office, their stars (Adam Sandler, Ben Stiller, Vince Vaughn) kind of grew up a little and made comedies that dealt with adult concerns: families, marriages, and that sort of thing (see also Grown-Ups). This film fits into that mold.

In it, four close friends and their spouses and children are celebrating a child’s birthday when one couple, Jason and Cynthia (Jason Bateman and Kristen Bell) announce that after the stress of trying to have a baby, are considering divorce. As a last ditch effort to save their marriage, they want to go to an exclusive couples retreat on a resort island, and they want their friends to come along as well so they can get a group rate. The other couples reluctantly agree, thinking that they can lie on the beach whilst Jason and Cynthia go through the therapy exercises, but they discover that everyone must participate. So they do under the tutelage of a hippy-dippy psychologist played by Jean Reno. And each couple confronts their own relationship faults brought to light by the therapy.

So, it is a comedy, but it touches on real relationships and how they can stagnate.

The film lacks the “we all take drugs and do something crazy” motif that you find in modern comedies because that’s not what adults do.

I wonder if the impulse to the adult comedy, or at least in the wide cinematic release adult comedy, faded around that time, or if they just moved to streaming platforms in recent years with smaller niche audiences. Maybe a little of both, but this movie and Grown-Ups had heart which most R-rated comedies lack.

Two of the wives are played by Kristen Bell and Kristin Davis, whom I recognized. But Vincent Vaughn’s Dave is married to Ronnie, played by Malin Akerman, and I was not familiar with her at all.

Continue reading “Movie Report: Couples Retreat (2009)” →

This is a Rob Schneider film. So if you know what that means, you know what you’re getting: Rob Schneider acting whacky in absurd situations. Which did not prove to be a particular winning formula at the box office–well, winning enough to get a Deuce Bigelow sequel, but not winning enough that most people know what a Rob Schneider film is like. Unlike, say, an Adam Sandler film, which most people will know involves a man-boy of some sort thrust into a position of adult responsibility and having to grow up. Everyone has seen at least one, although that one is probably not Little Nicky.

At any rate, Schneider plays a civilian employee of the police force who keeps trying to get into the police academy via a physical competition/obstacle course race, and every year he fails (and wets his pants, this being a Rob Schneider movie and all). But after an automobile accident in the wilderness leaves him close to death, a strange doctor heals him with the help of animal parts. The animal parts give him strength and abilities, but also tend to give him animal impulses that he struggles with (this being a Rob Schneider film and all). So he gets to become a police officer after an incident, and he woos a nature lover/animal shelter operator played by Colleen Haskell, a participant in the original Survivor who had a brief pop culture moment which was mostly starring in this film. But The Animal starts having blackout incidents that coincide with animal mutilations in the area which leads him to worry that perhaps he should be return to the scientist and live there away from others he can hurt.

It was amusing in that Rob Schneider film way–I even liked Deuce Bigelow: Male Gigolo. But it’s not for all tastes, for sure.

The film also had John C. McGinley as a police sargeant antagonist. McGinley has had a long career playing similar types (as well as one of the Bobs in Office Space against type). I’ve seen him here and there enough to recognize him, but for some reason, I sometimes confuse him with Tony Goodwyn. Maybe it’s because they’re often in those second banana roles or antagonist roles. I dunno. But there it is.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to check the video library to see if I actually own Deuce Bigelow or if I have to remember to watch for it.

This film comes from the 1990s, when the movie industry let Joe Pesci star in comedies (such as My Cousin Vinny). I mean, you could consider this an ensemble cast as it includes Dyan Cannon, George Hamilton, David Spade, and Todd Louiso (who was also in High Fidelity, so apparently I am on a Todd Louiso kick like my recent Wesley Snipes and Sandra Bullock kicks, but accidentally).

This film combines comedy with Pesci’s mob roles as he plays Tommy, a transporter who is commissioned to take the severed heads of 8 members of a gang from the east coast to the west coast as proof that a hit occurred. On the flight (in the 20th century, I suppose one could suspend disbelief that a man could carry on a duffel bag with heads in it), his duffel is mixed up with that of a college student on his way to go on vacation with his long-distance girlfriend’s parents. Hijinks ensue when he takes the duffel bag to a Mexican resort and discovers its contents. So the guy tries to keep anyone from discovering the grisly remains, to keep from getting arrested, and to dispose of them while Tommy tries to find where the kid has gone and to get them back.

So it had amusing moments, but underwhelmed me a bit.

But if you’re a Todd Louiso completeist, you must see it.

I picked this film up not long after I watched The Art of War with Wesley Snipes a couple of weeks ago. Like that film, this DVD was a little deeper in the archives–meaning I did not buy it this year–but I figured that I would not be quite so primed to watch a Snipes film, especially an obscure Snipes film, as I would be right after another Snipes film. Well, this is the third in relatively short succession as I did watch Demolition Man recently even though I did not report on it–because when I ordered it, it came as part of a four-pack of Sylvester Stallone films, and I didn’t move it to the review staging area because the set has three more films in it. Sorry, I have let you down.

Also, I guess this means that I am on a Sylvester Stallone kick since I also recently watched The Expendables. But that’s neither here nor there.

So: Wesley Snipes plays Painter, a spotter who identifies targets for precision bombing. He proves how good he is in an exercise, but he has a dark past: He mistakenly “painted” the wrong target, leading to his support team getting killed. He’s drawn into a mission to identify a decommissioned nuclear plant in Chechnya before terrorists can re-start the nuclear reaction and blow it up, creating devastation and killing hundreds of thousands. However, it becomes clear that some sort of double-cross has occurred, and it’s the American missiles that will destroy the already reactivated power plant. So it’s a race against time to rescue what scientists he and his team can and to rectify the errors–and he’s not sure whom he can trust from above.

So a better film than The Art of War, although in 2005, the Russians, or certain hardline elements of the Russians, were the bad guys, some where good guys I guess? Then, as now, the internal politics and policy goals of a foreign people are difficult to ascertain. The movie itself plays a lot like a good direct to cable movie or a B movie would have been back in the day. Better than, say, Hell Comes To Frogtown or Warlords, with a bigger budget, but the Internet says they recycled some film from higher budget spectacles outside the generic military-in-the-industrial-facility scenes.

Still, not bad.

Also, it has an older (but younger than I am now) Emma Samms as a, um, psychologist/handler/love interest for the Wesley Snipes character.

Continue reading “Movie Report: The Marksman (2005)” →

This film is based on a Philip K. Dick story, so you know that it deals with messed-up memories. Not to be too meta, I’d seen this film before–whether I’d rented it from the video store or recorded it on a DVR and watched it, I am not sure–I do know (or do I?) that it’s not in my current watched video library which I am getting familiar with as I am now actually dusting it semi-weekly instead of once every six months unless the DVD is behind others, as the video library at Nogglestead is also doublestacked (or because someone did not want me to see the film again). So I picked it up in February and watched it in late March.

And, gentle reader, in keeping with the spirit of it, I had forgotten the plot of the movie. Or had it been erased from my memory, by whom, and why?

At any rate, I will post it here so that I do not forget again as long as they let me keep this site active. Ben Affleck plays an engineer, Jennings, who does work for high tech firms under strict non-disclosure agreements which involve having his memory wiped for the period of the contract. He can only work eight weeks at a time, and as his friend Shorty (Paul Giamatti) wipes his mind after his latest job, Shorty notes that it’s getting harder to do and that it’s getting risky. But a long-time acquaintance and billionaire offers Jennings a job that will make him millions but will last two years. So he agrees, and only moments seem to pass for Jennings, but he’s done what they’ve asked, and he’s released from the secure facility. He checks the value of his stock options, which have grown to a value of $90 million dollars. When he goes to cash out, though, he finds that he himself had only a couple of weeks before surrendered his options and apparently replaced the personal belongings he brought with him to the facility with seemingly innocuous items.

So he has to figure out what’s going on. Clearly, a conspiracy of sorts, as he is hunted by Federal law enforcement for treason and by others who want him dead.

I won’t spoil it for you, gentle reader who is likely me in a decade or so when I have forgotten the details of the film. It’s a pretty good bit of paranoid fiction. Ben Affleck is not Harrison Ford or Arnold Schwarzenneggar, but he does a good job here. The film also features Uma Thurman as the love interest, so clearly I am on an Uma Thurman kick (having also recently watched My Super Ex-Girlfriend). But, as with that previous post, I am not posting pictures of Ms. Thurman, insisting instead that you refer to Kim du Toit’s post which is fading into the history of the Internet already.

I bought this film as part of my February buying spree, which means it was part of my March binge. Which is a couple of movies a week, so I am not sure that that counts as a binge in 2023.

I just read the book–in this case, “just” means almost two years ago. So I will steal the book’s plot summary as the film is pretty true to the book:

So. The story of the book is that the protagonist, a 35-year-old record store owner named Rob Fleming gets dumped by his long-time live-in girlfriend for the guy who formerly lived upstairs from them (and the two move in together elsewhere), which triggers Rob’s reflection on his relationships and his life which seems to have stalled. Prone to making a list, Rob lists his top five heartbreaks of all time and gets in touch with those women and moons over Laura, whom he met while he was DJing at a defunct club. She has gone onto become an attorney at a big law firm in London, which creates a gulf between them in Rob’s mind, and he’s starting to get a little bitter.

That’s the size of it, except the location is changed to Chicago.

In the film, Rob (John Cusack) breaks the fourth wall a bunch to talk directly to the audience, which actually works to capture some of the first person narration of the book. The film also wraps up and closes pretty quickly after the funeral, when Rob and his most recent girlfriend reconcile–the end part of the book where Rob dotes a little on the reporter for the local alt paper goes on a bit much, and his future with Laura, the girlfriend with whom he reconciles, is left more in doubt. In the film, as I said, this is minimized, and it looks like Rob has actually grown up and changed, whereas the book left that in doubt.

The film resonated with me, perhaps more than it did when I first watched it. Rob’s kind of at a loose end, getting older and not really accomplishing much these days aside from sticking in his rut and then bolting from relationships. It’s been a while since I have had a project that I spent time on–I’ve started to think that the things I start or try are pretty much doomed to failure as I tend to get to a certain point with them, encounter some difficulty, and then set them aside and the tide of life washes over them, and suddenly six months or six years have passed.

I’m fortunate, though, that I’m still married and I don’t have to deal with that particular angst of dating and finding someone. I just need to remember I have her more.

So a better film than a book, strangely. Perhaps a bit anachronistic to the younger people, although who knows? It certainly did not seem anachronistic to me because I lived it contemporaneously.It also has nice casting, including Jack Black as one of Rob’s employees and Tim Robbins as the pony-tailed martial artist and Zen master neighbor that Laura shacks up with.

And one of the parts of the film is Rob reaching out to women who broke his heart–although he relearns that he was often the dumper and not the dumped. The film casts many lovely actresses as Rob’s former girlfriends.

Continue reading “Movie Report: High Fidelity (2000)” →

I bought this movie during a spree in February, and I wasted no time in watching it. It’s a bonus pack with the film on DVD and on Blu-Ray, which worked nicely for me, for although I have both, only the DVD is hooked into the sound system and the Blu-Ray only plays through our nearly 20-year-old television (which we will keep for as long as we can because it is not a smart device). So I played the DVD version of it.

Basically, it’s kind of like The Avengers in that you have a number of action stars, Stallone, Statham, Li, Lungren, Terry Crews (who I have seen mostly in commercials, honestly), and some other guys (cameo by Schwarzeneggar, Mickey Rourke in a supporting role) are mercenaries. In the initial action sequence, one is a little too violent and gets expelled from the group. They pick up another assignment, to take out a dictator on a Caribbean or South American island who is just a front for a rogue CIA operative’s drug operation. Some action sequences, some betrayal by the discarded merc, and finis.

Statham and Stallone have the meatiest parts. I think Jet Li was a little underused, but he’s a martial artist in a world of firearms, so I suppose that’s to be expected. Overall, about as good as you would expect, which is not bad if you’re into actioners with blockbuster budgets.

The one thing I would have stuck a sticky note on were this a book, though, was Tool’s speech, where Mickey Rourke as a tattoo artist who supports but does not go on missions, describes how he lost his soul:

Gentle reader, that is the plot of Albert Camus’ The Fall, in a nutshell. And either Stallone or the other writer on the film David Callaham knew it. Given that Wikipedia sez that Callaham’s screenplay was only a starting point for the film, one must infer that Stallone has read The Fall.

A quick Internet search indicates that nobody else has recognized this as the source of the side story meant to burnish the development of the main character (who goes back to the island to save the girl before the splash), one must also infer that the Venn Diagram of people who watch movies like The Expendables and people who like Camus books is a picture of me.

Thanks for stopping by, and know that although I am not a genius like Dolph Lundgren (well, I once scored Trailer Park Genius on an IQ test), I am well-read. And a fan of actioners, big budget or not.

This is a Luke Wilson film, as opposed to an Owen Wilson film. So you’ll have an everyman protagonist thrust into a bit of a situation, and he’ll play it pretty straight throughout.

In this case, Wilson plays Matt, a project manager who has not been lucky in love until he meets and is encouraged to ask out a mousy librarian type by his womanizing friend. She rebuffs him, but when someone snatches her purse, he chases after the fellow and gets into more trouble than he bargained for. Then, the tables are turned on his attackers. The woman, art historian Jenny Johnson, is the secret identity of superhero G-Girl, and she’s touched that he tried to defend her. So she goes out with him, they start dating, and she reveals her secret. Then she meets his co-worker Hannah, with whom Matt is really comfortable, and Jenny becomes jealous. When Matt breaks up with her, she lashes out in a series of humorous situations that only a superhero can provide. So Matt teams up with G-Girl’s nemesis, Professor Bedlam, to strip her of her powers, but all’s well that ends well with a comedic ending.

The arc of the story is a little more balanced than the title would have you believe–she is only his ex-girlfriend for the final bit of the film, so the movie relies on other situations for the humor, which is just as well. The quick bits of her revenge would make for a long night if they comprised the whole thing.

At any rate, the movie runs about an hour and a half, which means that it’s fortunately not padded out. So an amusing thing to watch, and not something I’ll avoid rewatching in the future.

I know, I know, gentle reader: As I post these notices mostly so I have future reference as to films I’ve watched and what I thought about them when I did watch them.

You, on the other hand, are here for the pictures of the actresses in the movies. However, I am too lazy to work that up today, so you’ll just have to go to Kim du Toit’s blog as he just posted pictures of Uma Thurman last month.

Last month already? How long has this DVD sat on my desk awaiting a couple paragraphs of brain dump?

I remember seeing ads or trailers for this film, but I am not sure if it was contemporaneous advertisements for it in 1987 or if the trailer preceded one of my favorite comedies from that era, which meant I saw it over and over again. So I bought this DVD earlier this month, and because I have liked Cheech in some of his later work (Nash Bridges and Lost, so it’s not recent later work), and because I was in the mood for a comedy one night, I popped it in.

The film follows the story of Rudy, a Los Angeles resident, who is supposed to go pick up his “cousin” from Mexico at a factory. Due to plot contrivances (which are not unnecessarily unrealistic plot contrivances), he mistakenly leaves his wallet at home when he goes, and while he’s there, he’s swept up in an INS raid and gets deported. With no ID and no money, he has to figure out a way to get back home. Which relies not only on the grifts of an ex-pat American running a club (a pre-Home Alone Daniel Stern, but the affection of a Mexican woman (played by an American of Southwest Asian Indian-Venezuelian descent). Eventually, he is able to cross the border when he storms it with a vast crowd of Mexicans. My DVD must have skipped a scene or two, as he pops up in a parade, and he and other main characters in the movie try to blend in to escape the authorities.

Ya know, times have changed. Although sympathetic with the main character, a couple of pieces of the movie don’t ring quite so innocent in 2023. One is the storming of the border by the numerous Mexicans. Another is that one of the grifts that Rudy participates in is helping some non-Mexican immigrants from Asia to act Mexican-American so when they illegally cross the border, they can fit in. Ay, carumba! the blogger said, stealing from a culture–not so much the Latinx culture but the 1990s catchphrase of Bart Simpson.

The biggest difference is not so much the political questions of today–those sticking bits from the preceding paragraph–but the loss in the shared humanity that made these stories approachable and consumable in the 1980s and 1990s. I mean, when I rewatched Friday last October, I also hearkened back to a time when the art made me sympathize with the plight of the characters even though I was not of that particular race.

I mean, I liked The Triplets’ “Light a Candle” which is all about illegal immigration:

But, now, it’s a political hot button (and a far greater problem), and I’m having trouble seeing it as a human interest story or a bit of shared humanity.

Because the professionals, the grievance industry, the politicians, and the people making “art” today would prefer to divide us.

Man, the future of back then sucks. I hope the future of today is better, but I’m not betting on it.

At any rate, the film was amusing. And notable for being a whole film based on a novelty parody of “Born in the U.S.A.” Which is better than most films based on video games and board games.

As I just read a translation of The Art of War, of course I jumped right on watching this film even though I didn’t pick it up on my latest DVD buying binge. Actually, it ended up atop the cabinets by the media center because last week, as my boys were out of town, I organized the media center by throwing all of the video game controllers, cords, and games into their cabinet and also tried to match discs with their cases for the most part before giving up when I was almost done. In condensing the unwatched films from the top of the cabinet to the interior, it moved them around a bit so some from the cabinet are now atop the cabinet and more visible when I’m in the mood for a film. Kind of like I did to my library 7 years ago(?!)–which means I should give that a go again this year and rediscover half my books.

At any rate, on to my thoughts on this film. Hominy crickets, but this film, released in 2000, might be the very 1990s movie ever.

I mean, Snipes plays a black bag covert ops guy for the United Nations whose first exploit is to jam up a North Korean general in Hong Kong who is dealing in sophisticated military equipment and underage prostitutes. When the Canadian Secretary-General of the UN, played by Donald Sutherland, learns that someone is trying to saboutage a US-China free trade agreement, he reluctantly brings Snipes’s character in to investigate and to protect the Chinese ambassador (James Hong). When the ambassador is assassinated, Snipes is framed for it and has to hunt down the real conspirators aided only by a translator who claims he’s innocent (played by Marie Matiko).

I mean, it’s got the UN as the ultimate power broker here, using its covert operations branch to manipulate China and the US into a better tomorrow. I mean, of course the bad guys are ultimately westerners who want to hold China down (and, presumably, to loot China’s cultural treasures as in every martial arts movie I’ve seen recently). But this is strictly Hollywood’s play: The actors are mostly American, and most are not Chinese, even the Asian characters. We’ve got Koreans playing Japanese, Americans of Japanese descent playing Chinese characters, and so on. I mean, even James Hong is an American of Chinese descent from Minneapolis. Weird.

And listen to the big speech by the ultimate bad guy:

Eleanor Hooks, the bad guy: The Art of War teaches win by destroying your enemy from within. Ironic, isn’t it, that a 2000-year-old strategy would be turned against the very people who created it? Better us doing it to them than them doing it to us.

Julia, the translator caught up in the middle of this: What are you talking about?

Hooks: I’m talking about 20 years of China fucking America from within, and nobody noticing. Well, now, they’re going to notice.

Julia: You. You’re behind all this.

Hooks: With just enough help from David Chan to keep everyone guessing. David Chan most of all.

Julia: I don’t understand.

Hooks: Of course, you don’t, my dear. Because you, like most people, never stop to look at the big picture. I’ve been looking at the big picture every day for 20 years, and I’ve tried to look forward, and you know what I see? I see China maintaining a stranglehold on freedom, influencing our political process with illegal campaign contributions, stealing our most secret military technology and selling it to our enemies, weakening us from the inside. Like a virus. This trade deal is an invitation to finish the job. I intend to cancel that invitation. I intend to return America to Americans.

Geez Louise, considering that the bad guy was looking at the situation in 2000, think of how it is now, a quarter century later. I’m more sympathetic to the bad guys than the good guys from the U.N.

But the ultimate bad guy is not a MAGA Republican:

Julia: Who do you think you’re representing?

Hooks: The people who have steered this nation for decades behind the scenes, the people who protect democracy from itself.

Julia: For a woman obsessed with Chinese conspiracies, you sound frighteningly like the government you’re trying to stop.

The ultimate bad guy wants to save the day for the deep state.

Twenty years later, things are the same. But different.

Enough of that, though. Marie Matiko plays Julia, the translator in over her head. Continue reading “On The Art of War (2000)” →

I bought this DVD last weekend, and it was the first of the new films I watched.

I got the paperback book when I was in middle school or early high school, and it was years before I actually saw the movie. And probably decades passed since I watched it again (this time). Or maybe this was the third time I’d seen it. Over the years.

My oldest has become a Chevy Chase fan (we watched National Lampoon’s Vacation and Fletch Forever last year), so it was an easy sell for him. Even though he said, “Who is that other guy?” Dan Ackroyd, from Saturday Night Live (forty-some years ago), Ghostbusters (almost forty years ago), Dragnet! (almost forty years ago)…. (The next day, my beautiful wife would point out that he was also Elwood Blues.)

As you might recall, gentle reader, if you’re an old man, that this film centers on two nincompoops, one a Lothario smooth-talker from the State Department (Chase) and the other a tech whiz civilian employee of the Department of Defense (Ackroyd), who are chosen to become operatives–well, they’re chosen to be expendable decoys for the real operatives whose mission is at risk because of a leak that has gotten other operatives killed. So we get training montages with Bernie Casey as the military commander. Then, they’re air-dropped in Pakistan to a remote area, where they avoid being killed by Pashtuns by pretending to be doctors, where they meet Donna Dixon and a bunch of real doctors; when an operation fails to save the kin of the clan chieftain (before they begin to operate), they have to escape, and they do–to the chagrin of their controllers. But they bumble their way across the Soviet border to continue being a decoy, until they begin helping the lone survivor of the actual agent team to–launch a nuclear missile, it turns out, in a live-fire test of an anti-missile system.

So they have to save the day.

It’s chock full of 80s tropes, paced like a late 20th century comedy with some sexual humor but it’s not terribly crass, and it has a good heart although it pokes fun at the idea of missile defense (making sure we understand that Reagan was president). It has Chevy Chase playing a Chevy Chase character and Dan Ackroyd playing a Dan Ackroyd character, so it might not stand out that much from their respective ouevres. But it was Vanessa Angel’s first film, so it is notable in that regard. Continue reading “Movie Report: Spies Like Us (1985)” →

I picked up this film on one of my more-recent (within three years, “recently” could mean) trips to the antique malls or something. As you know, gentle reader, I am picking up DVDs and VHS cassettes at a bit of an accelerated pace as I’ve come to recognize that they’ll soon be obsolete and absent in the wild, or more likely, expensive. As this film was atop the stereo and other cabinet by the entertainment center, I know that I picked it up recently (the ones in the stereo cabinet repurposed to my to-watch shelves in the early part of the century are old acquisitions). And at Nogglestead, we have a bit of a LIFO (last in, first out) policy on books and other media. Well, I do. Because when I acquire it, I am eager to watch it, but that eagerness fades as time passes (which is why we have entire sets of television series in the stereo cabinet). Just so you understand why I am watching this “new” film which I bought sometime in the past couple of years even though it’s only fourteen years old now.

At any rate, this 2009 film comes from what historians might consider the last gasp of cinematic comedy (except they won’t, as historians after the next dark age will not have DVD players or thousand-year-old streaming accounts). I mean, the film comes from the same vein of R-rated comedies as Horrible Bosses (2011), Ted (2012), or Hot Tub Time Machine 2 (2015, but the original was 2010). Crass films relying on a lot of drug/alcohol humor, but able to make fun of different stereotypes and whatnot in a way I’m not sure they can any more.

The whole premise of this film relies on a drink-and-drug-filled evening. The morning after a bachelor party, three friends awaken to find the groom-to-be is missing, and they have a baby in the closet and a lion in the bathroom. The film follows them as they work backwards to try to find the groom so they can get him to the wedding on time. In doing so, they find that one of them has married an escort/stripper and that they’ve stolen Mike Tyson’s pet lion–and Tyson and his bodyguard insist they return it somehow.

So it’s a bit like a drunken comic Memento in that they’re working their way through the night in reverse. It’s an interesting structure and pretty novel, so I enjoyed the film more than I did the others mentioned above–and all of them spawned quick sequels, which is better, I suppose, than waiting a decade or more to try to resuscitate old characters like Ron Burgundy or Derek Zoolander.

The film also stars Heather Graham, whom you know I rather like, gentle reader, as we were born in the same hospital a year apart. We looked at her when I watched License to Drive in 2021. So let’s look at Rachael Harris. Continue reading “Movie Report: The Hangover (2009)” →

Wow, this film is twenty years old, which makes it an old movie by now. Which means it’s about time for me to watch it. I mean, it’s not like a black and white film, which it might well have been if it had been a movie twenty years old when I was born. But its humor is that of another time, when you could make fun of stereotypes and whatnot.

At any rate, Sandra Bullock plays a tomboy FBI agent whose compassion during a raid leads to an FBI agent getting shot and puts her in the doghouse with her boss played by Ernie Hudson. When the team gets a tip that a serial bomber might target the Miss United States pageant, they decide to send someone undercover–and Agent Gracie Hart is the only one of the team who might look good in a swimsuit. So she goes undercover, getting a crash course in behaving like a lady from a pageant tutor played by Michael Caine, and she learns that the pretty women whom she’d mocked for performing in pageants have heart and intelligence and they’re all similar.

You know, the kind of lesson we used to get from movies and whatnot.

At any rate, a product of a different time, and a pleasant viewing experience. My beautiful wife, who had already seen the film, watched it with me, and that’s kind of rare these days as our taste in movies has diverged a bit as, strangely, she prefers more modern blockbuster sorts of films.

Also, it starred Sandra Bullock.

Continue reading “On Miss Congeniality (2000)” →

A couple of weeks ago, one of the blogs I read mentioned this film (not the Ace of Spade HQ movie thread which mentioned Clint Eastwood only this weekend). Sorry, but I read so many blogs that if I don’t post on something right away and instead, if it sticks a little nugget in my brain triggering a thought days later, it’s lost in the torrents of time. So sorry for no hat tip, other blogger. But when I saw you mention it, when it came time for a film at Nogglestead, I tried to tempt a young man to watch a film with me, offering Who Framed Roger Rabbit? or Fast and Furious, but when the boy demurred, I settled on this film which I bought sometime in antiquity. I know that not because it’s a videocassette–I buy them all the time inexpensively–but because it was in the movie cabinet and not atop it.

So I watched it.

The story details how two convicts, Kevin Costner and the other guy, break out of a Texas prison and go on the run. They end up with a hostage, a boy whose home the other guy invades instead of stealing a car, and Costner prevents the fellow from raping the mother before they get away. The boy and the fugitive bond a bit as the boy’s family is strict and the fugitive was abandoned at a young age, and he grew up in bordellos but did not grow up to be Brahms. Clint Eastwood leads a Texas state team of law enforcement in pursuit in a new mobile command trailer that has all the latest gear–and steaks and tots in the freezer. So we see the fugitive and the boy bond, but although we get some sympathy for the fugitive, he eventually goes a bit off the rails and is stopped when the boy defends another father from the fugitive. Which leads to a long climax/denouement and ending. And a closing that matches the opening shot which frames the whole thing for some reason.

So I guess the deeper story is the fugitive bonding with the boy, making some of the same mistakes he would have expected his father to make (trysting with a waitress at a roadhouse, for example, telling the boy to wait in the car) to his trying to rectify his father’s sins (making a father tell his son that he loves him presumably before the fugitive before the he is setting up to kill the father). But it doesn’t work for me, maybe because I’m a father busy making different mistakes than my own father (he was the type to tryst with waitresses), and I don’t have to project or empathize with the fugitive as much as many men without fathers might.

At any rate, not a bad film, but probably not something I’ll rewatch unless I’m on a complete Clint Eastwood retrospective. Which might happen in the next thirty years.

I ordered this a year or so back when I thought maybe the boys would enjoy Jackie Chan films. A year later, I have discovered that they really didn’t, or maybe they just aren’t interested in watching films with their father these days. So I watched this film, which I thought I’d seen before during the middle 1990s, when a member of my gaming group introduced us to Jackie Chan with some of his old films. But as I watched this film, it was very unfamiliar. I learned that the film I had seen when this film was fresh was Drunken Master from 1978, and this is The Legend of the Drunken Master, a sequel sixteen years later capitalizing on Jackie Chan’s new international fame.

This film starts with Wong (Jackie Chan, not named not Jackie in this film) is on the train with his father and brother, bringing ginseng back for a neighbor, when a fight breaks out, and Jackie battles with someone who he thinks is trying to steal the ginseng. When he successfully returns with an ornate box in which they were carrying the root, it turns out that another man was carrying the imperial seal in a similar box. Hijinks ensue when Wong uses a root from his father’s prized bonsai tree in the stead of the ginseng when it’s presented to the neighbor and when his stepmother takes out a loan on her jewels to try to buy real ginseng before the neighbor ingests the bonsai root. At the bottom, though, the plot is about the Westerners trying to steal the Imperial Seal (which was also the MacGuffin in Shanghai Knights–and as far as the plot of the film being the Westerners stealing China’s heritage, that’s awful prevalent).

So it’s fairly standard Jackie Chan fare, especially the post-popularity Jackie Chan fare, which all has a similar feel and vibe to it. Which is okay until you start thinking about why so many of these films have Westerners as the bad guys. The West is almost 100 years past the inscrutible Oriental as the stereotypical villain (well, all right, sixty years after Dr. No), and we’re the benighted culture according to, well, popular culture.

The film also has another common trope from Chinese films: The young wife. Wong’s father’s new wife is played by Anita Mui, who would have been Wong’s stepmother even though the actress was almost ten years younger than Jackie Chan.

Continue reading “On Legend of the Drunken Master (1994)” →