Category: Movies

I bought this film in April at an estate sale. I’d watched the first one two years ago (already?) and thought it was a serviceable action film with just a hint of Albert Camus in it.

This film goes in a slightly different direction. After an intro small mission that saw Stallone’s team rescue a Chinese billionaire as well as Arnold Schwarzenneggar’s Trench who was there to rescue him first, a CIA operative named Church, played by Bruce Willis in a role where he might not have been all there already, tasks them with taking a computer whiz (Yu Nan or Nan Yu depending upon where she is credited) to recover a MacGuffin from a crashed plane. They get t the plane and extract the MacGuffin only to be ambushed by another group looking for it led by Jean-Claude Van Damme. Van Damme’s character, Vilain, kills the youngest member of the team, so the Expendables go on a hunt for the bad guys. The MacGuffin was a hard drive with the map showing where in an old Soviet mine the Soviets buried several tons of weapons-grade plutonium. Vilain and his criminal gang have been working local villagers to death in the mine to find it, and as they are about to make off with it, Barney Ross and company arrive to thwart them.

So the team includes Jason Statham, Terry Crews, Randy Couture, Dolph Lundgren, Liam Hemsworth (briefly), and Jet Li (in spots). But some of the meta-fun in it is the appearance of other action stars (when the Expendables are pinned down by the criminal gang, including a tank, a deus ex Chuck Norris takes out the tank and the bad guys before walking out of the smoke, delivering a Chuck Norris fact, and then disappearing around the corner because he works alone). The characters call back to other movies and exchange each others’ tag lines from those movies. So it’s amusing for the memberberries, but pretty much a direct-to-cable plot otherwise.

It did, feature Yu Nan. Or Nan Yu. But we’ll get to that later.

The third film came out two years later (four years after the first). I mention this in passing because two other Expendables films came out after 2023, which is another ten years on the stars ages. As they were streamed. I guess they might have gotten home media release, but they’re probably not out there in vast quantities for me to stumble upon for a dollar. Or who knows? I picked this up in May after picking up the second in April. So perhaps I’ll find the later films at my next garage sale.

This film begins with the rescue of a former member of the Expendables, played by Wesley Snipes, who has been held in a dictator’s prison for eight years. Instead of taking him home, they go to Africa to prevent a shipment of weapons from reaching a warlord. They discover that the arms dealer behind the deal is a guy named Stonebanks who was supposed to be dead–by Barney Ross’s hands. So their new CIA handler, played by Harrison Ford, directs them to find him. Ross (Stallone) basically fires his current team and recruits, with Kelsey Grammer’s help, a new team comprised of Ronda Rousey and some other guys who will look kinda familiar if you’ve seen recent action movies (I haven’t, much). The new team gets captured, and Ross is going to go it alone to rescue them when his old team and one of the fellows he didn’t recruit for the new team, a comic relief motormouth played by Antonio Banderas, join him. Which leads them to a former Soviet base in some -istan where the whole -istan army is waiting for them.

Again, a different turn, a bit of a direct-to-cable (or direct-to-streaming these days) plot with lots of callbacks (When asked why he was in the dictator’s prison, Wesley Snipes’ character says, “Tax evasion.” As we all remember, Snipes did two years and change on an income tax charge.) and meta humor. I guess some people were disappointed that they dialed the gore down a little to get a PG-13 rating, but it is what it is. An amusing passage of time.

But you’ve really only read this far for the actress, ainna?
Continue reading “Movie Report: The Expendables 2 (2012) / The Expendables 3 (2014)” →

As my evening contract’s project is moving into abeyance, I had time for a double feature one night last week. So after watching Thin Ice, I popped in this recently acquired Jackie Chan film. I’d tell you what a great Jackie Chan fan I am, but I guess I’ve only watched a handful of his films since I started writing down my thoughts on them. I watched Shanghai Noon last November; Legend of the Drunken Master in January 2023; Jackie Chan’s First Strike! in November 2022; Shanghai Nights in March 2023 (I know, I saw this series backwards, but I also acquired them out-of-order); Kung Fu Yoga in May 2021; and Rush Hour in January 2021. However, I did watch several of them this century (Supercop? Operation Condor? Rumble in the Bronx for sure), and I did actually see several of them circa 1996 when one of the members of our D&D group screened a couple on VHS. So I’ve known who he was even before or as he was breaking big in the American market. Martial art movie hipster, moi? Maybe.

At any rate: In this film, Jackie Chan plays some sort of commando (named Jackie, which is why I like writing movie reports for his films–the actor and the character names are the same, so I don’t worry about where to cut over in the movie report) on a mission to kidnap/rescue some scientists. After the rescue succeeds, his cross-national (mercenary?) team is double-crossed, and only Jackie survives, although with amnesia. Some natives find him and help him recuperate, although they think his name is WhoAmI. When he is better, he visits the helicopter wreckage containing the bodies of his team members (people dressed like you, the natives told him). He spots a rally race in the distance and departs his native friends. He finds and helps a brother-and-sister driving team and leads them to victory in the race, amazing everyone–he is dressed in native garb, and the herbs he used to help with a snack bite have numbed his mouth so he cannot talk to humorous effect.

The race ends in J-berg, Seffrica, and he is spotted by a reporter who wants to interview him in depth. And by shady psuedo-military operatives and a CIA leader. They’re on his tail, and he works to recover his memory and to find out what the operatives want with the scientists and the material they are studying–a part of a meteorite with great destructive power. Action takes place in South Africa and then shifts to Rotterdam as presumably both locations kicked in funding for the privilege.

Wikipedia tells me this is the second film that Chan scripted and shot in English, and to be honest, early in it, I was wondering if it was dubbed–I guess the audio syncing is just off a bit, or I’m just a knob. The film has a lot of Jackie Chan humor in it, but it is only about halfway through that we get the trademark Chan comic fighting stunts.

Still, amusing. Probably in the middle of his work both temporally and quality wise.

Being the Internet was in its infancy at this time, we do not have any Christine vs. Yuki arguments in the Wayback machine, but we could.

Michelle Ferre played Christine, the reporter who turns out to be a good ally.	Mirai Yamamoto played Yuki, the rally driver who accompanies Jackie in Africa.

Hard to say, but I favor Christine slightly.

Since I just bought a Jesse Stone book (Colorblind), I popped in this film which I bought on DVD in May. It doesn’t look like it’s based on a novel nor has been made into a novel. So there’s parts of the Spenserverse that are not in print. Well, aside from Spenser: For Hire and A Man Called Hawk. But I really have moved on from Parkerania collecting since Stranger in Paradise, a Parker Jesse Stone book, inverted the whole idea of a moral code amongst the characters.

However, I guess I still dabble based on what Parker once meant to me.

But I digress: In this film, Stone (played by Tom Selleck) is on thin ice with the town council because he’s acting as a lawman and not just a source of revenue writing tickets for the town’s coffers. And because his busts are sometimes violent (see also the preceding television movies). The film starts with Stone and Healy on not-a-stakeout in Boston where Healy is being coy about what they’re doing. An unknown gunman shoots them in their car, leaving Healy near death but only grazing Stone. So Stone makes it a priority to discover why Healy was watching that address. Healy eventually claims that it was to watch a nephew who was having a tryst with his saxophone teacher, but Stone eventually uncovers a pimp running a string of underage prostitutes. In Boston, which is not Paradise, which does not please the town council.

The second strand is a woman who comes to Paradise because she received a letter that said, “Your child is loved.” Her newborn had been reported as dead seven years earlier, but the mother maintained that the decomposing body with her baby’s hospital wristband was not actually her child. The letter had been postmarked Paradise, Massachussetts, two years earlier (her now ex-husband had not shown her the letter then), and she hopes that the Paradise police can investigate. Stone demurs, but Rose (the white Rose), takes up the investigation and eventually uncovers the who, but a tragedy will likely not lead to complete satisfaction for the real mother. Spoiler alert: The kidnapped child fell through thin ice two years ago and died. The movie ends with Stone on the bus to New Mexico to talk with the real mother about what she wants to do, I guess. Probably prosecute, but that’s not shown.

So: A decent television movie with the two-plot structure that seems to permeate a lot of series books. The movie also handles some series business with Stone and Jenn, his ex, along with working things out with his shrink (played by William Devane, last seen at Nogglestead in Payback). We also get interactions with Gino Fish (played by William Sadler, last seen at Nogglestead in Die Hard 2 last Christmas) who obliquely helps Stone. So it’s definitely written with an eye to long-standing fans of the films and/or books.

I’ll probably pick up others in the set as I come across them cheaply. As much because I like Tom Selleck as I like Parker/Stone/Brandman.

Of the Hanks/Ryan romantic comedies which also include Sleepless in Seattle and You’ve Got Mail. As I noted in the report on the former film, this is the first of their team-ups; the others were 1993 and 1998.

And this film feels like an 80s film for sure (more like The Burbs or The Money Pit than a 1990s film). It starts out with Hanks’ character, a functionary who manages the advertising catalog library for a medical device company coming to work. It’s quite a brutal little bit, trying to get a little Metropolis or Kafka feel with dim, flickering lighting and a boss on the phone repeating himself over and over. He has to take a long lunch to go to the doctor, who tells him he has six months to live, and he will be symptom free until he dies. Joe Banks, that is, Tom Hanks, is a bit of a hypochindriac who knew it. He goes to his job, quits, tells off his boss, and asks his coworker, played by Meg Ryan, out. She’s impressed by his new fire and intensity, but when he reveals he has six months to live, she cannot handle it and leaves.

The next day, an industrialist played by Lloyd Bridges approaches Joe. He knows about Joe’s lonely life and diagnosis, so he has a proposition: On a remote Pacific island, the tribe has a tradition of sacrificing a volunteer every hundred years to propitiate the god in a volcano, and he (the industrialist) needs a mineral from the island. He hopes to trade Joe to the natives as a sacrifice and convinces Joe to go along with it since he is doomed anyway. Live like a king for a month or so of his remaining time and then jump into a volcano.

So the film is a five paragraph essay with five bits or movements, essentially. The aforementioned first bit. The second bit is a shopping spree in Manhattan outfitting himself in nice clothing and apparel for the voyage, including a very high-end set of steamer trunks. During this bit, he is counseled by his driver played by Ossie Davis who asks Banks who he really is. In the third bit, he goes to L.A. and is met by the industrialist’s shallow and vapid daughter who is an artist (played by Meg Ryan) and writes poetry but mostly lives off of her father’s money. They spend the evening together, but not the night together. She takes him to the small yacht (it’s a sailboat–was that a “yacht” in 1990? We expect more from yachts in 2025) where the industrialist’s other daughter (played by Meg Ryan) is to sail with him to the island. The fourth bit is their voyage where Banks and the good daughter get to know one another and fall in love, which happens despite a typhoon that sinks the vessel and leaves them adrift on a raft made from the steamer trunks. The final act is their arrival on the island, his decision to go through with it, and the coup de grâce ex machina where Banks and Ryan3 are spit from the volcano as it erupts, destroying the island and leaving them adrift on the steamers again. And finis!

So, yeah, it feels like an 80s movie. I mean, it’s not bad, but I cannot imagine it’s on a list of personal favorites for many people, either, unless they have special memories involved with watching it, such as going on a first date with it or something. But as for me, it’s one more to lose in the library and maybe watch again if it comes up in blogversations.

Man, this film (and its sequel Any Which Way You Can) loomed large in my youth. Perhaps it was on HBO, and we saw it when staying with our friends who had HBO. Maybe it had made its way freshly to network television when I was ten years old and was in heavy rotation there. But it was part of the 1970s and early 1980s ape sidekick schtick, and maybe other things along the line blurred with this film. But forty-some years later, I still say, “Right turn, Clyde” sometimes (although that’s from the sequel, not this film).

At any rate: Eastwood plays Philo, a truck driver who does underground bare-knuckle boxing for extra cash, and he’s pretty good at it. He falls for a blonde country singer (Sondra Locke, whose character is not raped in this film) named Lynn with whom he thinks he has something going. But she disappears, presumably on her way back to Denver where she hopes to open a club of her own. But she’s traveling with her boyfriend; they have an open relationship of some sort, but he blasts Philo’s truck with a shotgun before they leave. Philo also runs afoul of a local biker gang after beating two of its members and then embarrassing others. Or the opposite order. And he beats up a police detective in the honky tonk who also plots revenge. So when Philo decides to follow Lynn east from L.A., his best friend Clint and Clyde come along, and the other parties have to find out who he is and where he’s going which lead to some humorous encounters with a trailer park manager and Ma, whose subplot is that she’s foul-mouthed and keeps failing to get a driver’s license.

When he gets to Colorado, he discovers that the woman and her “boyfriend” pick up men in bars and bowling alleys all the time for some sort of hustle, and she’s not really into Philo (is she?). He leaves her in Colorado. And Clint sets up a fight with Tank Murdock, a legendary bare-knuckle brawler who has lost a step or three. Clint starts making short work of him, but he hears how the Tank fans turn on the older, more portly fellow, so he takes a dive to keep the man’s reputation alive and so that he does not have to start carrying the burden of being the man who beat Tank Murdock.

So, that’s it. The protagonist does not win the fight at the end, and he does not get the girl–who might not be worth getting anyway (although I guess, from reading the synopsis, the sequel reverses this a bit). But it’s an ending of a nominal comedy that has a lot of pathos if you look at it in a certain light. As the group makes their way back to L.A., though, they pass the pathetic remnants of the biker gang and the defeated police detective, so I guess Philo overcomes some adversity. Perhaps the only thing that has changed is his perspective on women he meets in honky tonks and the glory and profitability of winning.

So as the film was moving into its dénouement, my beautiful wife passed through the room and said “Clint Eastwood and a chimpanzee.” I corrected her, of course, but she later said she was familiar with pair from her childhood even though she had not seen the films. They were really, really big at the end of the Jimmy Carter presidency, and they’re almost forgotten now. Perhaps overshadowed by what Clint Eastwood has done or a shift in the zeitgeist. But if I see Any Which Way You Can for fifty cents or a buck, I’m picking it up.

I picked this video up recently and was in the mood to watch something but not a full movie, so I popped it in. I’ve made no secret that I’ve been a fan of Cosby–see my book reports for his books (Love and Marriage twice, once in and once in ; Cosbyology in 2010; and Fatherhood in 2011). I might have one or more of his records around here, but, if I do, I don’t recall listening to them (although I do buy and listen to comedy records, I don’t spin them a bunch as they, like poetry records, require attention). And I see I also have his video Bill Cosby, Himself, an earlier special which I also bought earlier (2024) but have not watched yet (although the book report for Cosbyology indicates that I watched it in 2010 somehow.

So, with all that background and additional self-linkage out of the way….

All of the aforementioned books and videos come from the great Cosby burst of the 1980s, when he was the king of television with The Cosby Show. Thematically, it overlaps with some of the books. Cosby riffs on growing older, his body making different noises, and how his body responds to running these days (personified pain). He does a number on marriage and defense mechanisms therein, and how his marriage evolved over time so his wife has a bit more co-equal role in it, at least as far as winning arguments goes.

The video is just over an hour long, and I guess I’d rather read Cosby than watch him in any long form. I’m kind of that way with videos, too, and I really don’t like podcasts for information intake. But books on tape are all right if I’m driving; I don’t want to listen to them in my spare time at home.

At any rate, it’s all right. And a videocassette with the Kodak logo on it? You cannot be any more 1987 than that.

But you don’t need to find a copy of your own as it’s presently on YouTube in its entirety. For now.

When I picked this DVD up last month at an estate sale, I said that my beautiful wife and I saw it in the theaters. Not so, gentle reader, as the barest Internet research would have led me to this post from 2004, “Lessons from The Last Samurai“, where I clearly indicate that we watched the film at home. Twenty years ago. We must have seen it on cable as I don’t think we have it already–although perhaps I should look more closely when dusting or, heaven forfend, organize something.

At any rate: Tom Cruise plays Algren, a calvary veteran who fought against a variety of Indians in the west but who is haunted by some of the things he did in the military, particularly punitive raids on Indian villages. The film starts with him, drunk, doing a presentation for Winchester Rifles at a fair. His old commanding officer finds him and has an offer for him: Come to Japan and help to train the westernizing army there. He does, but when the poorly trained and inexperienced conscripts are pressured into a battle with samurai and break and flee before them, Algren with a death wish makes a valiant stand, and instead of killing him, the warlord in charge of the samurai take him prisoner to learn what they can from him. Algren starts to appreciate the idyllic ways of the peaceful village where the samurai and their families live, but that all comes to a head when the new restored emperor is weak and lets the business interests of Japan attack the samurai with Algren’s former commanding officer leading the other side.

It’s a nice little period action film, pretty to look at, and it romanticizes the samurai way of life, but thematically, of course it does–stories like this always romanticize the past.

Here’s what I said in 2004, lessons from the film:

• An all-volunteer army is better than a conscript army. Ergo, it’s against the mock draft proposal being floated around by those who want us to fear the militarization of the Republican police state.
• Apparently, Sun Tzu was not translated into Nihongo until sometime after 1877. I mean, when you’ve got 500 men with swords and bows against two regiments with cannons and machine guns, Sun Tzu would have pointed out that narrow mountain passes that completely block in winter might present better terrain to your strengths than open fields.

In the 20 years since, I’ve read Japanese culture and history intermittently, and I appreciated some of the things that the film got correct. In the obligatory sepukku scene at the beginning, the samurai leader allows the Japanese general to commit suicide and, as they were friends, acts as the one who decapitates him after the seppukku (I was surprised to learn that happened when I read Hagakure: The Book of the Samurai). When the samurai come to Tokyo for a parley, guards harrass one and take his topknot. Which was a thing. And the samurai charging machine guns sort of happened in the Battle of Nagashino (although far earlier than the Meiji restoration).

And, yeah, the life in Japan prior to the Meiji restoration was not as pastoral as depicted in the film. But it’s a movie, not a history book, and I liked it well enough to maybe watch it again. Maybe in 20 years.

This sequel to the 1993 Harrison Ford film The Fugitive came out five years later with Tommy Lee Jones reprising his Academy Award-winning turn as a United States Marshal on the hunt for a fugitive. I am not sure if we saw the film in the theaters–I maintained we did, but I’ve been mistaken before (and since, as you will see). I do know I saw The Fugitive at least once in the theater–the Marquette Theater on campus, after which my campus crush who was walking out with our group spun and said to me, “You liked Gerard!” As though then as now that would come as a surprise.

At any rate, this film centers on a plot where some someones are in a parking garage shooting at each other in the darkness. Then, Gerard and team take down a fugitive whilst Tommy Lee Jones is in a chicken costume. Then, a car accident involving a tow truck driven by Wesley Snipes leads authorities to discover he is wanted for the two murders shown choppily before the titles. He’s being sent back to New York on a plane containing Gerard and the fugitive that he captured. An assassin tries to kill Snipes with a zip gun which Snipes thwarts, but the bullet punctures a window and causes the plane to crash. Much like after the train derailment in The Fugitive, this puts Snipes on the run to clear his name.

This time, though, Gerard’s team gets an outsider, a member of the something something government something something, played by Robert Downey, Jr. Snipes (I guess his character’s name, after all the aliases drop, is Sheridan) was a state department “kite”–an asset that they can cut loose, something something secrets to the Chinese…. Wait, what? The Chinese were bad guys? How old is this film?

At any rate, as it would happen, it works out in the end. The U.S. Marshals find out who is really selling secrets to the Chinese, Gerard reconnects with his team after seeking revenge for the death of one of his team, and Snipes’s character walks a free man with his Starbucks barrista girlfriend played by Irène Jacob.

To be honest, I liked The Fugitive better. I don’t know why, but the Gerard-out-for-revenge bit kind of diminishes the character a bit.

Did someone say Irène Jacob? If so, hopefully they pronounced it correctly. I would not; I’m not sure what that accent mark does to an e.

Continue reading “Movie Report: U.S. Marshals (1998)” →

I must be on an Emily Mortimer kick, as I just saw her in The Pink Panther, and Facebook immediately informed me of her upcoming turn as a director. And she stars in this film, based on the Penelope Fitzgerald book in in 2021 (and picked up the DVD in 2023). This will likely end my Emily Mortimer kick, such as it is, because most of her work is on smaller English films or television.

Okay, so, to recap the plot: In the late 1950s, a war widow wants to open a book shop in an old building that has stood vacant for seven years, but a wealthy woman has planned to use it as an arts centre but never acted on it until the the widow opens the book shop. The wealthy woman then uses a variety of means to drive the woman from the building and eventually succeeds.

I seem to remember the sale of Lolita was a bigger deal in the short book, but perhaps I am mistaken. It could have followed the book pretty closely as the book itself was 123 pages.

It’s a very British film: slowly paced, focusing on the slightly quirky characters of the village. It’s a period piece, set in the 1950s, and it has an extra bit of distance for those of us across the pond. It’s interesting to look at, but it’s not the kind of thing that I seek out. So not my bag.

I think I’ve been seeing a lot of talk on the Internet about the movie recently, but it might have only been the post on the Librarian of Celaeno’s substack last October which prompted me to watch the film right away (for Nogglestead variations of immediacy) after having bought the first two films last August (before LoC’s post, actually). I was kind of hoping to watch it on a movie night with my boys, as the first film’s cultural references still echo today, but maybe that’s amongst us Uncs and not among the actual kids. Oh, but no: As it stands, they both have jobs now, and at the same fast food restaurant, so they often work on alternating nights. And when I proffered the opportunity to watch the film to my oldest, he demurred as he generally does these days–I guess forty-year-old two-hour-long action movies are a little slow compared to the scrolling of the modern Internet. So I’ll be watching films alone mostly from here on out, and here on out began a while ago.

I won’t bore you with too much about Predator: It’s almost archetypal for an action flick of the era, with big unapologetic Americans fighting South or Central American bad guys until they discover they’re fighting something else: an alien that hunts men. You know, “The Most Dangerous Game” but with that twist. It’s a solid piece from its time, and it holds up well, although I cannot tell you what (My) Kids These Days would think of it since they did not partake (the older said he has been frightened by seeing the chest bursting scene when he viewed it on some other kid’s device at the dojo when he was much younger, and I had to point out that Xenomorphs from Alien are different from the Predators, although their paths have crossed cinematically from time to time).

I’d seen that film a time or two in the past. But apart from a scene towards the end that I caught on cable at some point or another, I had never seen Predator 2, but I had seen commentary on it that it was not as good as the first. But it’s a little like comparing Alien to Aliens. The moviemakers and writers took the story in a different direction instead of trying to do Die Hard, but in an airport! On a boat! On a bus! with it.

Predator 2 is set seven years in the future–the film came out in 1990, but it is set in 1997–and downtown Los Angeles is sweltering under a heat wave and it’s a battleground between the Colombians and the Jamaican posses (Jamaican posses as baddies were very big in 1990, recent evidence suggests). When Danny Glover, playing a detective named Harrigan in the police department, and his team pursue some gang-bangers into their drug house, they find the heavily armed men have been killed by someone…or something… else. And Glover’s detective is reprimanded for not following orders. A team of Feds, led by Gary Busey, is investigating the killings with their own agenda. Basically, they know it’s an alien with advanced technology they want for the US Government. Harrigan and his team investigate, trail Busey’s team, and Bill Paxton gets killed by a Predator, completing his trifecta. It leads to a confrontation between the Predator, Busey’s team, and Harrigan in a slaughterhouse (which I’d scene part of some years ago). Then it’s Harrigan and the Predator in a chase scene, hand-to-hand combat on a large Predator ship, and…. finis? No, of course not.

Basically, a couple minutes in, I wondered if this was an off-label Lethal Weapon movie. Not only does Danny Glover play a cop just a couple of “I’m getting too old for this shit”s short of Roger Murtaugh, but Steve Kahan, who played Lieutenant Murphy, appears as a uniformed police officer early in the movie, and of course, Gary Busey played Mr. Joshua in the first Lethal Weapon. So part of the game within the game was watching for others like maybe Mary Ellen Trainor. But no such luck.

As I mentioned, the film is part of its time in having Jamaican Posses as the new urban gang antagonist.

And it was reminiscient of Highlander 2 in a sequel to a film set in the 1980s is set into a darker future which did not come to pass; 1997 (Predator 2) and 2024 (Highlander 2) have come and gone without being as bleak as predicted. Maybe that would be lesson to learn about the future from now about which we sometimes feel bleak.

At any rate, I don’t think Predator 2 was bad. It just wasn’t the first, and that would have been hard to top.

Not long after watching The Pink Panther, I thought I’d watch the second Steve Martin Pink Panther movie which I was sure I had. So I got myself into the mood for it, and then I looked for it and I could not find it. Well. When I want to watch a particular movie, if I find we don’t have it (or, sometimes, we do have it and I cannot find it), well, my movie watching for the evening is done, and I fall back to reading or something. So it was only another night that I popped in this film for some reason. I don’t know where I picked it up–or if I picked it up at all–this might have been something my wife grabbed, or I might have bought it a long time ago indeed as it was wrapped in cellaphane and had a Best Buy price tag on it.

So, to briefly lay out the plot: Daniel Day-Lewis plays Hawkeye/The Deerslayer/Leatherstocking/Natty Bumpo, a frontiersman who is friends with Chingachgook and Uncas, a father/son pair who are the last of their tribe. But I get ahead of myself.

During the French and Indian War (where, unlike other wars, the French and Indians are on the same side against the English), a Colonel in the British army sends his daughters to a distant fort for safety. They’re lead into an ambush by a treacherous Indian played by the Sphinx from Mystery Men (Wes Studi, whom I could have sworn I’d recently seen in something else). Hawkeye and the Mohicans rescue the daughters (and another British officer) and lead them to their destination which turns out to be a fort under French seige whose letter seeking reinforcements and warning the colonel not to send his daughters was carried by the treacherous Indian and never delivered, obviously. The Colonel had promised the American militia that they would be released to defend their homes from marauding Indians, but the commander of the fort alters the deal. Hawkeye helps them to escape the fort but is smitten with Cora, the oldest daughter, so he remains to face justice for what he’s done. That’s hanging, by the way–it’s a bold strategy, Cotton. But the fort surrenders and the British are allowed to leave, but the Huron fall upon the leaving train and slaughter it but treacherous Magua (Studi) ambush that, too, and steal away the women and the British officer. Whom Hawkeye and the Mohicans try to rescue, but end up having to settle for revenge.

I read the book in college (and have picked up a couple more in the series since then), and I’ve got to say that the book really gives short shrift to the Mohicans and instead focuses on the spectacle and sweep of the film. It’s more historically accurate than the later (both in release and in time period) The Patriot, but the story keeps the protagonist at a bit of a distance, perhaps because of how much had to be trimmed to make it into a single film and not a trilogy.

I must have seen this on home video in the 1990s, and I can probably go another twenty or thirty years before seeing it again. Maybe if I have grandchildren who are into history. I do have another Daniel Day-Lewis film, There Will Be Blood, atop the movie cabinets, so maybe I will see that soon (wherein “soon” might be the next five years).

Oh, and the film soundtrack/score: My beautiful wife loves it. But I dunno. The parts used in the film, which generally is the first number of seconds or minute from each piece/movement, basically sound the same. Maybe it’s a motif or theme repeated, but the whole movements or pieces vary enough to make it listenable as a whole. But I was not impressed.

Well, I am possibly on a Steve Martin “kick” since I’ve had watched three of his movies in the last year (Shopgirl, The Man with Two Brains, and The Out-of-Towners). And since I also just watched a Peter Sellers Pink Panther movie (The Return of the Pink Panther), it was inevitable that I would eventually come to watch this film. As it so happens, I bought it last year about this time–since the Lutherans for Life Sale is next weekend, almost to the date. And since I have watched four films over the last three weeks, I should definitely go to that sale and buy a dozen more.

At any rate, after a big soccer match, someone kills the French soccer coach (played briefly by Jason Statham) who owns and wears the Pink Panther, a diamond that’s the source of French pride and good luck for the soccer team. The chief inspector, played by Kevin Kline, wants to bring into the investigation the most incompetent gendarme in the country to “lead” the investigation–that is, to be the focus of the media attention while Kline and his team work behind the scenes to solve the crime. He (Kline’s character named Dreyfus) selects Clouseau and has a loyal Parisian police officer (played by Jean Reno who had the only real French accent for the film) to keep an eye on the suspects which includes the American pop star fiancee of the coach (played by Beyonce).

So we get a set of fish-out-of-water bit of slapstick with set pieces where Clouseau bumbles about Paris, he makes outlandish mistakes, but with the help of his assistant played by Emily Mortimer, they dramatically make the correct arrest at a big party held at the Presidential mansion before Dreyfus can mistakenly arrest a Chinese official whom his team believes is the real killer.

You know, from his writings (such as Pure Drivel and Shopgirl) and some of his movies such as Bowfinger and the aforementioned Shopgirl, one might get the sense that Martin is a thinking man’s humorist, and he does have that capacity. But he’s also made a career on being a wild and crazy guy, and his biggest films have been more slapstick than Twain.

At any rate, an amusing enough film, and I laughed at a couple of things. One turn from the Sellers films: Instead of his man attacking him to keep him fresh, Martin’s Clouseau says he’s going to keep Reno’s character on his toes by attacking him unexpectedly, and he does this several times in the film and Reno’s character offhandedly deflects it.

So the film includes Emily Mortimer…. Continue reading “Movie Report: The Pink Panther (2006)” →

After picking this film up at an estate sale, I popped it right in. After all, the dumb comedies move to the head of the line here at Nogglestead on evenings when a modern action film seems too heady. And its only because I’m familiar with the film makers (I watched Epic Movie last year), a couple of Zucker/Abrahams/Zucker knock-offs, that I chose this over the National Lampoon-badged film with Paris Hilton. Which I will probably watch by-and-by.

At any rate, this is basically a spoof of 300 with side bits poking fun at contemporaneous things like American Idol, America’s Top Model, and other reality shows. It’s got some off-color humor to it, a bit of making fun of the homosexual tropes of the buff men in leather, and whatnot. Amusing in spots but it is what it is.

It has Kevin Sorbo several years past his Hercules days (and Kull the Conqueror) playing the lieutenant and Carmen Electra playing the wife of Leonidas. You spot some other people whom you think you should know, or I did, but I didn’t know them. And the collection of people portraying other famous people were so spot-on that I thought Paris Hilton actually appeared in the film making light of herself. But it was Nicole Parker instead.

I know, I know: Usually when I mention an actress by name, I post photos. But I’m too lazy today to go hunting for photos.

So: Here I am, at Rotarian or Knights of Columbus age, watching dumb comedies. I don’t know if that’s keeping me eternally youthful–doubtful–or if it means I’m a man-child who needs to grow up. Probably the latter.

In a story about Barry Diller’s new autobiography, the New York Post provides illustrations.

Ay, who needs AI to garble things up when we have humans who can hallucinate things for free?

(For the uninitiated and the young amongst us, note that the image is from Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F, a 2024 Netflix thing, not the first film. Or a real movie, actually.)

I cannot remember if I saw this film originally in the theaters–it came out right as I was finishing college, so I might have been fairly broke that summer or I might have been blowing my college graduation gifts at the time. However, this was not my first viewing of the film, although it had been some time. I’ve kind of thought about it since, and it’s one of those “Don’t we have that?” films where my beautiful wife is surprised that we don’t actually have a film in our library. But if we’ve watched it in the thirty years since its release (!), it could have been on cable or as a rental as we’ve had a television package for most of that time.

On Devil’s Night in Detroit, a group of thugs working for the local crime boss kill a woman who is protesting evictions in their building and her boyfriend. One year later, he claws his way from the grave and, guided by a crow, seeks vengeance on the gang and ultimately kills not only the gang but also the boss behind their actions and a lot of extra local crime figures to boot. So think a Goth Mack Bolan or a Gothier Frank Castle who is undead and whose wounds heal instantly. Oh, and the only people who know who he is are a tween skater girl whose mother is a junkie in the local gang’s orbit who knew Eric and Shelly and a local good cop, played by Ernie Hudson, who encounters the undead Draven on the job.

You know, it holds up well because it’s a simple movie with practical effects and heavily stylized film making. It’s almost black-and-white ate times (the source comic book was black and white), and even when it’s clearly color it uses chiascurro and darkness to great effect. A heavily Goth aesthetic, but it was 1994.

I have to wonder if it weren’t for The Crow, would there have been a Blade or The Matrix, both of which have a very similar look and industrial soundtrack?

Oh, yeah, and as a reminder: Brandon Lee, who played Eric Draven, died during the production of the film when he was accidentally shot with a prop gun. What would the 1990s have been with him as an action film star?

The film also had Bai Ling, but I just posted a photo of her in 2017. So let’s look at Sofia Shinas, who played Eric’s fiancée. Continue reading “Movie Report: The Crow (1994)” →

You know, I’ve seen ads in newspapers and online notifications for years about Jeff Dunham performances, probably both in St. Louis and Springfield and maybe reviews on the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel Web site back in the day, but I had not actually seen him perform in television appearances or Web snippets before. Which is odd, because I knew something about his ventriloquist act and maybe I’ve seen snippets somewhere. I knew a couple of the dummies and their names, but I know a lot more about them now.

So: It’s a ventriloquist act. He does a couple of non-dummy jokes before getting the first one out of the box. It’s Walter, the curmudgeon, who has an acid tongue and a nasty attitude. We also get to see Bubba J., the hick that looks like Howdy Doody; Peanut, which was Dunham’s first dummy; and José Jalapeño on a Stick. We get some bits where Peanut and José Jalapeño argue a bit. Dunham interacts with the audience and has Walter answer written questions submitted to them by audience members before the show. It’s probably not as much improv as having canned jokes and selecting questions to fit the gags.

Still, the program is almost twenty years old, and one wonders how his act has changed to fit the zeitgeist these days. His humor, although not especially crass, does touch on the differences between the sexes and other more taboo in 2024 subjects. He did not have Achmed the Dead Terrorist in this show, though, so I guess his act has been ever-evolving.

Amusing in a few spots and, to be honest, since it was my first exposure to Dunham (I think), it was more novel to me than, say, Gallagher whom I saw over and over again in the 1980s or any of the members of the Blue Collar Comedy Tour and better than an R-rated comedy from the later half of the first quarter of the 21st century.

If I find another special of his for another fifty cents, I’ll buy it.