Musings from Brian J. Noggle

After watching the later Monte Walsh (from 2005), I picked this film from the Tom Selleck boxed set I bought in June because I have already seen Last Stand at Saber River–I already have it around here somewhere on DVD, which I’ll have to find and donate somewhere once I re-watch it to get the whole box set off of the video cabinet.

This is Louis L’Amour’s Crossfire Trail, so it’s based on a L’Amour book. In 2001, presumably that meant something on a movie. Probably not so much any more.

In it, a dying man on a ship asks Tom Selleck, playing Rafe Covington, to take care of his family and ranch. When the dying man finishes dying, Covington beats the captain of the ship, and he and two other shipmates leave the ship on the California coast with their wages, a packet from the dead man, and not the money they could have stolen from the captain while he was incapacitated. They part ways as the Irishman wants to go to Montana to work in the gold mines, and the youngster and Covington ride to the Wyoming ranch of the dead man. They visit the ranch and find that the widow has moved to town, so they set about restoring it. Covington town and earn the ire of a local badman who claims to have witnessed the dead man dying a year before in a Sioux attack–and Covington calls him a liar. A former ranch hand, played by Wilford Brimley, accompanies Covington back to the ranch, but before they get there, they help a Sioux woman, the daughter of Chief Red Cloud, who is fleeing from a trio of bad men who kidnapped her.

So the main conflicts are not only with the bad men, but also the local businessman, played by Mark Harmon, who wants the ranch and its 40,000 acres and petroleum as well as the widow (played by Virginia Madsen–I guess I can’t call watching this part of a Virginia Madsen kick as I last saw her in Sideways and Highlander 2: The Quickening two years ago). Covington is attracted to the widow as well, and she comes to appreciate him as well before the bang-bang shootout finish.

To be honest, I liked this film better than Monte Walsh because the central conflicts arose early instead of just some scenes of cowboying and some conflict arising in the second half.

As far as Brandman/Selleckverse, we have Barry Corbin in this film as well. Although Robert B. Parker does not have a writing credit, his son Daniel has a small role in it. And, to be honest, the big baddie Beau Dorn was played by Brad Johnson, whom I mistook for William Eads, the big baddie from Monte Walsh. They looked close enough dressed in black and in shadow that I thought this was a Lee Van Cleef situation, where the same actor played two different characters (in For a Few Dollars More and The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly). But no.

So I have one left from the boxed set, and I’ll get to it soon, undoubtedly. And I’ll probably be mindful from here on out (meaning the Nixa book sale in August, which will feature racks of DVDs) to extend my Selleck collection. A boxed set of Blue Bloods? Maybe if it’s season one, although it would take me a while to get through it.

So I bought a three-pack boxed set of Tom Sellect television movie westerns at the Lutherans for Life garage sale in June, and apparently I have decided to wade into them now as I’m three hundred pages into Shōgun and am through five discs of The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr.. Because I’m all about living in the past, donchaknow?

At any rate, this was the leftmost in the box set, so I started here. Tom Selleck plays Monte Walsh, a cowboy when the frontier was closing. After a hard winter, most of the ranches in their corner of the West are out of business, and a large corporation is buying them out which creates hard times for cowboys. Some catch on with a corporate outfit, but when later cuts come, one of the crew turn to a life of crime including killing a colleague, leading Monte Walsh to have to track him down whilst thinking about what he will do when he, too, is let go. Maybe settle down with a saloon girls he’s sweet on? Nah, she dies. A lot of them die. It’s actually a pretty dark movie in terms of body count (it’s a remake of a 1970 Lee Marvin movie, which was undoubtedly true to its dark story). An unnecessary epilogue has Walsh returning to town and seeing that it has changed, and the colleagues who remain in town see that he has not.

To be honest, it’s more of a slice of cowboy life of the period; bits include roping, riding, and dealing with a cook who smells terribly–the cowboys forcibly bathe him–, breaking a bronco, getting insight into the life available as part of a wild west show, and so on. The actual gunplay and whatnot seems a bit tacked on at the end, as though it was not really the film that they wanted to make.

The film is a Michael Brandman production, and Robert B. Parker gets a partial writing credit on it. So it features what I might start calling the Selleckverse, or maybe Brandmanverse. William Devane is in it (he’s also in Thin Ice) as is William Sanderson (Daryl from Newhart all those many years ago–he’s been in so very much before and since, but he’ll always be Daryl to me).

It’s a serviceable film which I enjoyed more than Open Range–which I haven’t reported on because I have yet to complete watching it. Maybe its nature as a television movie limited the ponderous self-indulgence that bigger screen Western pictures seem to have. Also, I could watch Tom Selleck in anything (I did watch Her Alibi, after all, and I did see Three Men and a Baby over and over again because it was on Showtime in my trailer park days). He has and still does portray heroes one can try to emulate.

Strangely enough, this film came out within months of The Expendables (the original) in 2010, and it spawned a sequel as well. So it’s easy to compare and contrast them: Both assemble superteams of Boomer action(ish) actors showing that they still have it. This film, though, features Bruce Willis, Morgan Freeman, John Malkovich, and Helen Mirren as the good guys and Richard Dreyfuss as the bad guy. So these are more serious actors than you get in the Expendables films, but to the same result.

Also, let it be noted that fifteen years later, we still have Boomers as action heroes because the Generation X actors are too pretty, and, c’mon, man, Shia Le Beouf? You want to make an actor with that name into an action hero we can aspire to be? Shia? Le Beouf?

Bruce Willis plays Frank Moses, who lives a lonely life whose only outlet is tearing up government checks and then calling the help line, where he talks to Sarah Ross (no relation to Barney Ross–or is there?), an analyst who helps him but who has gotten to talk to Frank about other things as well. When a black ops hit team tries to take out Frank, he takes them out instead and heads to Kansas City, Missouri, to protect Sarah, whom Frank knows will be in danger. But she’s a little reluctant, so he kidnaps her and takes her to New Orleans where he can get some information from a colleague, Joe, who’s in a nursing home (Freeman). Joe finds that a reporter in New York was working on a story was recently killed, but she had a list of CIA agents working on a mission in Guatemala in 1981…. So Frank gathers his friends, including a former Soviet agent and a British sniper, and they find a plot that goes all the way to the vice president who wants to be the president–if he can get clean from his past.

So it’s got some set pieces, some reverses, nice flourishes. Definitely a touch headier than The Expendables and its sequels. Willis was still Willis in the film. Amusing, and I’ll have to keep an eye out for the second in the series.

The film had Mary-Louise Parker as Sarah, the younger woman who flirted with Frank over the phone and then came to like-like him.

Continue reading “Movie Report: RED (2010)” →

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.