Category: Movies

Not only is it purportedly the President’s favorite movie, but Big Trouble in Little China attains legendary status because it combines the prodigious talents of Al Heong and James Hong….not to mention Gerald Okamura, best known for his turn as the master in 9 1/2 Ninjas (which is unbelievably not yet on DVD!)

Face it, the movie depicts the lampooned American hero, out of his depth and slightly inept in the face of the world, but with a good heart and good reflexes, he manages to save the day. Conservatism at its best. You hear Rush Limbaugh doing his radio show tongue in cheek, lightly mocking himself….you hear Al Franken doing that? Perhaps I would, if I listened.

I watched this movie over and over on Showtime when I was in high school, and over and over on VHS taped from Showtime when I was in college. As a matter of fact, for my Scriptwriting class, when our group was assigned to create the pitch for a television series, I dominated the group into producing Tales from the Pork Chop Express. And now I have shared it with la luz de mi vida.

And she said it was okay.

James Lileks follows in my footsteps and watches the movie This Gun for Hire.

Veronica Lake was sompthin, ainna?

Heather and I just watched The Last Samurai, which many have taken at its face value as an anti-Western message. Well, if you want to look at it that way, take whatever lesson you want from it. I, on the other hand, prefer to take these messages away from it:

• 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.

I could write a paper on either of them. The benefit of an English degree, donchaknow.

Friends, I ask you to let me break this news to my beautiful wife when she returns from Buffalo tomorrow. I don’t want her to hear it on the news, and I don’t want someone else to mention it in an offhand e-mail or phone conversation. I know what it will mean to her, and I want to tell her in a safe place for her, where she’s surrounded by cats.

When we saw Spiderman 2 last week, I got out all of my comic books, four boxes’ worth, and showed them to her, and she showed me her smaller collection, which included a bunch of DC stuff and one fairly complete set of a single Marvel title. Dazzler. That mutant chick must have served as some role model for my wife as she grew up, and undoubtedly Heather will feel some deep connection to Dazzler, perhaps even a sense of protectiveness to Dazzler and what Dazzler meant to her.

So I just want to be there to comfort my beautiful wife, to hold her if she needs it, and to have some Puffs with lotion nearby, when I tell her that Jessica Simpson will play Dazzler in the next X-Men movie.

Intermittent Pseudo-Bachelorhood, Day 2, wherein our hero watches Beat the Devil (1953) because it’s got Humphrey Bogart in it and he got it as a Christmas gift from his wonderful mother-in-law (hi, ML!). Upon reviewing this black and white piece filmed in Italy, which modern DVD technicians have not spent any time at all restoring, our hero muses that only 11 years passed between John Huston blowing a lot of budget in Europe on froo froo drinks for Truman Capote, the screenwriter, and another seminal film shot in Italia: A Fistful of Dollars.

I mean, jeez, man, the shift from black and white to color was huge, man, but that’s not all that changed. I mean, look at story pacing and film making conventions and see how they change in that decade and a tenth.

By way of comparison, look at how slowly things evolve after that. For example, the differences between Dirty Harry (1971) and The Dead Pool (1988). Minor. Between Dirty Harry and any of the others in its ilk. Sure, more stuff explodes now, and studios spend more money on fake-looking CGI, but you know, you could watch something from the 1960s and something from 2003 and not feel too out of place.

Crap, I think I had a point when I started this post. I forget it now. Perhaps it was merely to confirm to our hero’s wonderful mother-in-law that her Christmas gifts are going to good use–filling those awful, empty hours until her daughter returns.

Oh, yeah, and memo to Hollywood. Explain this to me: Beat the Devil is available on DVD, and The African Queen is not. What are you people doing out there? Hello?

Alternate Title: Embrace Your Mythology, America!

So let me get this straight, again: In The Magnificent Seven, Americans ride in to save a Mexican villiage from bandits, who happen to also be Mexican, and they ride out with fewer than the advertised seven. What propoganda! Forty-some years later, “sophisticated” Americans would appreciate no such venture.

Meanwhile, leftists diminish the sacrifice contained within this American myth by saying that:

• White men oppressed red men
  Of course, ignore the fact that some white men and one partially brown man (Bernardo) saved brown men (and women and children) from oppression from other brown men.

• Americans fight for their own interests
  Well, these seven Americans got twenty dollars, a low sum by the standards indicated within the film, to protect oppressed Mexican farmers.

• Americans always win, and their heroes never run out of bullets.
  I know it’s out of fashion, but let’s run the numbers through this little bit of reality we call arithematic. Seven gunslingers, including those portraued by Charles Bronson, Robert Vaughn, James Coburn, Steve McQueen, and Yul Brenner ride in. Three ride almost out, but one decides he likes a Mexican babe and stays. Frankly, a less than fifty percent survival ratio is pretty low, even for realism circa the late 1800s that a Western embraces. Particularly that 22.2% returns to America, after defending the foreigners.

Pah, you all can guess what point I am trying to make. I am no Edith Hamilton or Joseph Campbell, but I understand the power of the stories we tell each other about our common heritage, and brothers, Abu Ghraib ain’t it.

P.S. In the arithematic of American mythology, the The Dirty Dozen (-11) and The Magnificent Seven (-4) do not yield the same actor in the role of survivor. Just in case you damn kids watched one, I wanted to inspire you to watch the other.

Alternate Title: When Was Hollywood Ever the Friend of Capitalism?

So let me get this straight: In This Gun For Hire, which “introduces” Alan Ladd and co-stars Veronica Lake, the “good guy” is an product of child abuse, and the “bad guy” is an old white guy who’s selling poison gas chemicals to the Japanese.

Hey, I appreciate the film as a story, but the theme indicates that Hollywood was not always in favor of capitalism. Remember that heyday of propoganda around World War II? A by-product of the future history, wherein the box office victors, which is to say the American people select those movies which represented John Wayne and company whipping the Axis, represent the remembered movies, and other films which presented a “nuanced” vision of America find themselves, 52 years later, represented by a single copy in Best Buy snapped up by an Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake fan. Undoubtedly, this Best Buy store sighed in relief and ordered an extra copy of The Transporter to cover the shelf space.

P.S. Note to studios: Alan Ladd. Veronica Lake. Raymond Chandler. For the love of all that is holy, release The Blue Dahlia on DVD.

Wouldn’t this be a more appropriate entry for Farenheit 9/11?

Click for full size

Spiderman 2 review:

Now this is what a superhero movie should be. “Spider-Man 2” believes in its story in the same way serious comic readers believe, when the adventures on the page express their own dreams and wishes. It’s not camp and it’s not nostalgia, it’s not wall-to-wall special effects and it’s not pickled in angst. It’s simply and poignantly a realization that being Spider-Man is a burden that Peter Parker is not entirely willing to bear.

He gives it 4 asterisks, which I assume is good. Unless they’re less than ampersands.

From a CNN review of the movie White Chicks:

From 1986’s “Soul Man” to last month’s “Soul Plane,” racial stereotypes have been the backbone of comedies good and bad. Makeup-induced transformations are nothing new, either, whether in 1964’s “Black Like Me” or Murphy’s phlegmy turn as an old Jewish man in 1988’s “Coming To America.”

Although Black Like Me was made into a movie, it was not a comedy; as a matter of fact, it was a “based on a true story” thing, based on John Griffith’s book of the same name. It wasn’t humor.

To include it in a list of comedy movies denigrates what Griffith did and the sacrifices he made to experience the south as a black man–ultimately, his treatments to darken his skin might have contributed to his death later.

Ah, the beauty of blogging: I can focus on a throw-away line with an intense lens to show its flaws. It’s just a throwaway line, but much of what people retain from reviews and other articles are the throwaway lines, which often Gestalt into an incomplete and inaccurate picture.

Joe Williams, of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, wrecks his brain on Farenheit 9/11:

I wracked my brain for a clever way to introduce this fiercely entertaining documentary. But instead I’ll begin with a straightforward appeal to see this film – and do it quickly.

Before most Americans get a chance to judge the film for themselves, they will be overwhelmed by counterspin and noisy attacks against Michael Moore, the director of this openly partisan document. But the smart-alecky fellow, who has often offended his own supporters by wielding his camera like a squirt gun, has his own ammunition ready.

Because the consumer will be overwhelmed by counterspin to the “documentary” before he or she can see the movie, Williams launches some preemptive spin. Because the message of the movie is more important than its artistry, beauty, or truth.

Everybody’s a critic, except for Joe Williams.

I told my beautiful wife that The Terminal was based on a true story. Here’s the Snopes account of Merhan Karimi Nasseri, resident of France’s Charles de Gaulle airport.

The worst part of the movie 13 Going on 30, which I only attended because I love my beautiful wife very much and she’s a great Jennifer Garner fan, is that they got 1987 so very wrong.

For those of you who don’t know, which I pray is most of you, the main character is 13 in 1987 who wishes she were 30. The plot is bang! She is 30, and it’s 2004, and she doesn’t remember anything between now and then. Now that we have that pesky plot out of the way, I can lay into what was really wrong.

Take, for example, the three musical touchstones from the 1980s that reappear throughout the movie:

• “Love is a Battlefield” by Pat Benatar. The 13 year old in 1987 knows this song by heart. This song was released in 1983 on Live From Earth. It was a very big deal back then, but by 1987, it wasn’t popular.
• “Thriller” by Michael Jackson. Again, since this album was released in 1982, when the main character would have been 8 years old. By 1987, Bad had been released, redefining Michael Jackson as “tougher” or something. Regardless, the youth of 1987 thought Michael Jackson was gay, werd, and no one would have thought to imitate the dance from the video, which was not getting that much airplay on MTV in 1987.
• Worst of all, the main character has a crush on Rick Springfield, and she apparently kisses her middle school love interest to the song “Jessie’s Girl”, which came from 1981’s Working Class Dog and didn’t get airplay that a person born in 1974 would have remembered until the 1980s stations started cropping up around the turn of the century.

Those are just the musical misfires in the movie. In 1987, at her thirteenth birthday party, her best friend builds her a dollhouse which contains a stereo and all the record albums she could ever want. Jeez, Louise, record albums? As a dream of a middle schooler in 1987? Audio cassettes had supplanted records by then. Memo to other inept writers: Betamax was gone by then, but laser discs were still struggling along.

Please, spare me the constant Rick Springfield crush notes. In 1987, a girl would more likely have a crush on Jon Bon Jovi or George Michael or Prince.

Even the subtleties of this faux 1987 grate. The love interest shows up in a Trans Am, with long hair over his ears. Teased long hair, okay; mullet, possible. Short, gelled spikes? That was cool in 1987. But the heartthrob wears hair about five years out of style.

I wouldn’t be so agitated by it if they had not specifically set it, within the first minutes of the movie, in 1987. Sure, as we get older, time periods expand so that what’s hip in a particular year is not as important as whether we like the artist or not. Quick, Matchbox 20 had their first hit….Oh, sometime in the mid-to-late 1990s, wot? But when you’re 13 (or 15, as I was in 1987), each individual year and the particulars of fashion are very important, and their impressed into our psyches.

Which is why the authenticity of this movie really did not impress me. It’s obvious that some older writers reached into the grab-bag of the i980s and came out with a couple handfuls of things they might have remembered. Hey, it’s all good retro stuff, huh? Unfortunately, they risked offending, yes, offending a major set of Generation X who lived those years at that age. Or maybe just me.

As some of you might remember, I was not too impressed with the movie Donnie Darko.

Now, I see that the director’s cut is coming:

“Donnie Darko,” a cult drama starring Jake Gyllenhaal as a disturbed teenager, is getting a new theatrical release, featuring 20 minutes of never-before-seen footage.

Perhaps it’s the twenty minutes of sense that were cut from the initial release.

Okay, all you cinema aficianados who proclaimed that Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill Vol. 1 was some sort of masterpiece of poetic violence or whatever rationalizations you offer for chic senseless gore and slashery. He’s making screeches about a Vol. 3:

“The star will be Vernita Green’s (Vivica A. Fox’s) daughter, Nikki (Ambrosia Kelley). I’ve already got the whole mythology: Sofie Fatale (Julie Dreyfus) will get all of Bill’s money. She’ll raise Nikki, who’ll take on The Bride,” he says. “Nikki deserves her revenge every bit as much as The Bride deserved hers. I might even shoot a couple of scenes for it now so I can get the actresses while they’re this age.”

For those of you who might be less in the know than me, The Bride is the “heroine” character of volumes 1 and 2. She’s left for dead and spends almost four hours chasing down the assassin leader who wanted to kill her on her wedding day. That’s Bill.

As part of The Bride’s vengeance, she kills Vernita Green, a sub-assassin. While the daughter’s home or something. Ultimately, I think the story goes, The Bride will kill Bill.

But in Vol 3., The Bride would be the legitimate target for vengeance, and the audience’s sympathy should shift to another innocent bystander whose life was hurt, and the senseless violence would go on and on like the mad god Azathoth, dancing to the music of the universe. I see the cheap political metaphors, brother.

There’s your damn mythos, Tarantino. You’re a postmodern punk without a sense of morals outside the beauty of violence, or perhaps just your own “genius” in a world of sickophantic cynical “intellectuals” and “academics.”

(Thanks, Drudge, for the link.)

Coming soon to a theater near you: John Woo’s Metroid.

Man, I hope it’s as good as Wing Commander.

(Link seen on Fark.)

Have you ever had this happen to you?

This afternoon, I was thinking that The Toxic Avenger was named Melvin before he became the title character. When suddenly, the absurd nature of the musing pulled the emergency brake on my train of thought, and it went off the tracks. Maybe it was already careering too fast around a bend when I saw it.

Why the heck was I thinking about a movie I have not seen?

I couldn’t retrace my thoughts nor make sense of it. Some of you know I am prone to spitting out random trivia seemingly unrelated to what we’re talking about. Perhaps you’ll feel better to know I do it to myself, too.

Sorry for the late start, dear reader, but tonight my beautiful wife and I watched a movie together. We watched Charlie’s Angels Full Throttle. Yeeks. It was not like watching a video game, it was like watching the demo mode teaser for a video game. In love with its own mojo, and utterly incapable of any suspense or viewer buy-in.

So of course I had to rinse the taste out of my mouth, and I did so successfully with Ronin. Ahhhhh. Jean Reno. Robert DeNiro. Masculinity and stoicism recharged.

Speaking of which, IMDb indicates that Reno has a house in Paris and a house in Los Angeles, and that he actually lives in France part of the year. I don’t know what sort of Persephone relationship he has with France, but can’t we liberate him somehow and make him an American citizen? He deserves it. The dude is tough.