Review // THE WAGES OF FEAR - More like THE WAGES OF AWESOME, am I right?

For some silly reason I didn't actually think I'd be seeing any more movies that would crack my "all-time greatest" list of personal faves. That's not to say that I actually thought I'd watched up all the best movies of all time, or that no great movies were forthcoming--far from it. It's just that almost all of my "all-time greatest" are movies I watched when I was younger, movies that came along in my formative years and helped shape my tastes and sensibilities. You know, stuff like American Ninja. And then The Wages of Fear comes along and shakes me out of this delusion.

The Wages of Fear is insanely cool. It's maybe the ultimate mans-man movie, and surely the best thriller about the blue collar experience that ever was (as far as I know, and we just established that there is plenty I don't--which reminds me, I need to see Paul Schraders Blue Collar). It's also incredibly powerful, politically salient (even now), philosophically provocative (like only a French movie could be) and emotionally devastating. This 2 1/2 hour anti-epic is so breathlessly plotted around the slightest bumps and jiggles of a treacherous journey for two trucks laden with nitroglycerin, that its sharply focused dynamic between man and commerce never snags on any preachy corners. In fact, its message of capitalism's nihilism and wanton destruction is not mere subtext, its built right into every tense moment. These are men who are grappling with the dollar value of their lives while their fragile mortality rides shotgun along a bumpy road of doom. It's also a kickass action movie, and easily one of the best movies about driving ever made.

The film begins in Las Piedras, a South American one-horse town that has become a prison with invisible walls for the international workers who languish there. They came to Las Piedras ahead of a boom, anticipating steady work and big money from the vampiric companies that looked to sink their fangs into the land. But opportunity dried up unexpectedly, and the corporations pulled out of the town. In the centre of the town, a massive tower construction has been left half-started, shards of metal and scaffolding reaching up to the sky like some apocalyptic sculpture of abandoned hope. The workers--who come from France, Germany, Italy, America etc.--are now stranded. With almost no steady employment to speak of, these men can't afford the air fare back home, and with their work visa's reaching expiration, some of them face prison as illegal aliens. Bored, hot and despairing, these men pick up odd jobs between naps and spend the chump change on booze at the local cantina, run by a man who doesn't bother to disguise his disgust for them.

There is only one game in town, The Southern Oil Company (SOC), who operate nearby and have oil pipelines and mining camps scattered across hundreds of miles. However, the skilled, high-paying positions are filled internally and they only hire local natives for the back-breaking dangerous work, paying them peanuts and flexing their influence in the region by ignoring human rights and exploiting the land and its people. SOC's business hits a considerable snag though when one of their oil fields catches fire, creating a continuously burning bonfire of profits. Company man, O'Brien, a coarse and calculating American, comes up with a plan to stop the fires and clot the money hemorrhage. A nitroglycerin detonation will cap the mine and stop the fire, but the nitroglycerin supply is at SOC headquarters while the burning oil field is three hundred miles away. This problem sets the central hook of The Wages of Fear into deadly, nail-biting motion. With no special equipment to transport the volatile nitroglycerin, and no time to secure any extra safety measures, the explosives must be driven in regular hauling trucks(2 trucks and 4 drivers) across 300 miles of rough rural roads. The slightest bounce or jiggle could set off the payload and obliterate anyone unlucky enough to be in its vicinity, like the drivers of the trucks for instance. It's a suicide mission and O'Brian and the SOC know it, so they offer a whopping $2,000 dollars payday for each man and advertise to the jobless inhabitants of Las Piedras. Most of the international workers are just desperate enough to see this as their ticket home.

This amazing set-up doesn't come into play until almost an hour into the film. Until then, director Henri-Georges Clouzot explores the mood of Las Piedras and develops the characters to a degree that you feel comfortable with them--you know them, or at least you think you do. The pace and structure of this film could only have been achieved in 1955. I'm not saying the first hour is slow or uninteresting, because it's not, in fact it's integral to the success of the film. But such a trick could never be pulled off in the modern studio system. If The Wages of Fear were remade today (oh fuck! I just jinxed it) it would be directed by Brett Ratner and star Ashton Kutcher and Samuel L. Jackson, the trucks would start rolling by the 15 minute mark and the audience wouldn't know these characters well enough to give half a fuck whether they get liquefied by explosives or not. But the time you spend in Las Piedras--with its socio-economic conflicts seasoning the cultural melting pot-- is vital to the emotional investment in the journey that gets undertaken by the four drivers.

The drivers are selected by competition, a test to see who has skill behind the wheel and who can stay cool under pressure. Mario is a Corsican with a swagger and charm that seem at odds with his near destitution. He is a man who makes the best of a bad situation, whistling and singing as he hops over the muddy potholes of Las Piedras' dirt roads. He's dating the gorgeous Linda (Clouzot's real life wife), the cantina's indentured servant, and sharing her with the cantina's owner. Luigi (yes there is a Mario and Luigi) is his boisterous Italian roommate, a cement mixer who dreams of home and of pretty girls and family meals. He finds out that his terrible cough is due to cement in his lungs, hardening inside his body. He has maybe 3 months to live. Luigi needs to see his homeland again and $2000 would make his dying wish come true. Bimba is a terse, solemn Dutchman. His father was killed by the Nazi's and he has never forgotten that in order to rob death of its tragedy, you must meet it with dignity. And finally there is Jo, a Parisian gangster on the lam who emptied his pockets at the airport and wound up with a one-way ticket to Las Piedras. Frenchmen Mario and Jo are partnered up in one truck, while Luigi and Bimba drive the other.

Like I said, the first hour is devoted to developing these four characters, specifically the relationship between the ageing-gangster Jo and the younger Mario, who has been taken in by Jo's tough-guy posturing. This relationship is paid special attention, so that when their character dynamic switches abruptly, it has significant impact on the story, as well as the films philosophical outlook. Jo is determined to get one of the driving positions on this treacherous journey, he needs to fill his pockets back up and get himself started somewhere else, and he convinces Mario that this is their ticket to the big time. However, Mario is accepted and Jo isn't, which prompts him to takes matters into his own hands. Whether Jo murders the man who took the driving spot he coveted is not explicitly confirmed, but it sure is implied, and in a pinch, the SOC takes him on as their 4th driver.

But when the trucks start rolling along the road, Jo becomes jittery and weak-kneed almost immediately, a far cry from the blustery tough guy who pulls a gun on Luigi in the cantina, just to show him who's boss. What happens to Jo's character throughout the journey is a fascinating and unexpected transformation. It's almost as if he quite suddenly realizes that all his bravado and bullying have no effect on the volatile explosives they are transporting and he is robbed of his power. Jo is used to puffing his chest out, employing his gangster tricks in order to maintain the upper hand. But the nitroglycerin will not cower before him like men do, it will not flinch or look away, or care how big of a man he acts. As this sinks in, Jo becomes withdrawn, terrified and existential, and Mario, his driving partner grows disgusted by his cowardice. Watching Jo devolve from man-of-action to frail and despairing is Clouzot's way of addressing the effects of industry and commerce on the soul of a man. The job, in this case an almost surrealistically dangerous one, robs a man of his vitality, it uses him up until he is a husk. The actor playing Jo, Charles Vanel even seems to age and stoop before our eyes. In the beginning he walks straight-backed, filling out a flashy white suit, his eyes willing to meet and match any who look his way. But by the end, Jo reveals himself to be a weathered soul at the end of his journey. He runs from danger and blubbers in his shame. He is no longer to be feared or admired as he once was.

Jo is the weak link among the four drivers, but when the journey begins and the trucks begin jostling and swaying off the hopelessly pitted roads, he begins to look like the only sane one in the bunch. Not only must they prevent the nitroglycerin from igniting from contact, but anytime spent idling under the intense South American heat could also cause the loads to detonate--to say the odds are against them is a massive understatement. Facing danger by moving ahead or danger from stopping is a damned-if-you-do-damned-if-you-don't dilemma, and is what drives the absolutely intense action set pieces of the film. Part of the genius of the film is how much suspense is brought to the scenes by the viewers themselves. I found myself holding my breath whenever the trucks were on screen. If the men stopped in the road to puzzle out an obstacle I would think, "GET MOVING! LOOK AT THE SUN!" The other interesting element that emerges is the unavoidable adversarial relationship between the two trucks. There is so much explosives loaded onto each that if one blew within a close proximity to the other than it would set off a chain reaction detonation. In order to mitigate this, the drivers are ordered to travel separated by a significant distance. But when setbacks arise and one truck spots the other, the drivers eyes fill with terror. There is an absolutely amazing sequence involving a notorious stretch of road known to the locals as "the Washboard" where one truck cannot speed up and one cannot slow down and they are heading for a collision course with each other.

There are many ingenious sequences like this involving the perils of the roads, the failures of the vehicles and the strained psyche's of the men, adding up to a relentless gauntlet run. This is a film that works on so many levels and I think, for so many different kinds of viewers that its staggering. It's one of the only films I can think of that can be thoroughly enjoyed by both film snobs and grease monkeys. Manly-men gear heads can debate the veracity of using dried brush to gain wheel traction on mud-slicked wood planks, while erudite film historians discuss Clouzot's camera placement (Mario jumping straight down a the camera is a great shot!) and cultural theorists will puzzle out the films radical politics. Everyone is happy.

The Wages of Fear rules. Hard.

Now I'll have to go back and re-watch William Friedkin's remake, Sorcerer. Dammit!

Review // A SERIOUS MAN - A Serious Comedy

I went into the Coen Brothers newest, A Serious Man, with expectations of a broad, ethnic comedy trimmed with period absurdity and their trademark pitch black wit. This is really the first time the brothers have taken on both their faith and their mid-western background, so I had expectations of a 60's psychedelic culture clash on the plains. And certainly there is that quality to the film. But what I didn't expect was for A Serious Man to also be so somber and spiritually despairing. I should have expected to have my expectations subverted by the Coen Brothers though, as their movies are some of the last original works being created in a Hollywood where business synergy has completely replaced the notion of legacy. And The Brothers have made a career out of subverting expectation and zagging when everyone else zigs. For two men, they have a singular, cohesive voice that they have applied to wildly diverse stories over their three decade career. Whether it's a Texas noir, an art deco screwball comedy homage, or a live-action white trash Looney Toons cartoon--you always know your watching a Coen Brothers movie. They are of the few cinematic visionaries left in the industry and the rare artists that seem unbound by the rules and contrivances of screenwriting and studio filmmaking. The Coen's have enough clout at this point to be left alone to tell any kind of story they want and they rarely, if ever disappoint. At least not me.

It's funny that the Coen's have turned into such oblique, almost philosophical filmmakers with a tendency toward multiplex bafflement, because they started their careers accused by many of being flashy, visual sensationalists--architects of worlds where nothing dwelt beneath the sight gags. I don't think this was actually the case, just that critics weren't quite prepared for their force of vision and unique tilt of perspective. Its taken a collection of films to clearly communicate their intent and define them for audiences, and yet with each new film, the Coen's still manage to shake off viewers who prefer uncomplicated narratives, and hate when anything is left unsaid. I'll never forget the gasps and groans of irritation that erupted from some of the audience members in the final moments of No Country For Old Men--they actually believed the film had no ending and they left the theatre disgruntled.

With no recognizable stars, a story about faith and Jewish identity and a title that denotes, well, seriousness, A Serious Man would've alienated another wave of multiplexers if they had taken any notice of it at all, which judging from its box office numbers, they didn't. But once again, the Coen's have delivered a rich, thoughtful and even disturbing story, staged with their characteristic visual sumptuousness and dark sense of humour.

A Serious Man deals with a storm, both figurative and literal, that encloses the life of mild-mannered physics professor and family man Larry Gopnick, threatening to smite him with an almost divine fury. From the moment we meet him, it's as if ominous clouds of dark portend have begun to form over his head and as the film goes on these clouds churn more violently, building to a lightning strike from the heavens. At work, Larry finds out that his bid for a tenure position at his school may or may not be threatened by anonymous letters disparaging him to the board. A failing student may also be trying to bribe him into receiving a passing grade, leaving an envelope stuffed with cash on his desk. At home, his wife Judith informs him that she requires a ritual divorce, a get, so that she may remarry Sy Abelman, an incredibly smooth, but older, rotund man from their community. Larry is positively blindsided by this revelation from Judith. He's barely able to comprehend her words as she lays it out so abruptly and irritably, as if their marital problems were as obvious to him as they are to her, when clearly they are not.

Larry's complete and utter shock reveals the internal drift that has taken place in his mind, with routine carrying him far away from his family and from his own vitality. Instead of recognizing his wife's displeasure, catching it before it metastasized into a full-blown love affair with Sy, Larry loses himself in life's daily minutia. He frets over the invasion of his invisible property line by his goy neighbour, a man who can barely contain his seething hatred for Larry, and perhaps all Jews. The property line, identifying it and protecting it, becomes a silly obsession for Larry, a way of defending against the encroaching hate of those who would cast a disparaging eye toward his people. Even as his life is crumbing around him, and he becomes pressed in the legal vice of divorce proceedings, he continues to fight this wholly unimportant battle, currying no more favour with the gods who seem insistent on his punishment. In fact, when all else looks bleak, his lawyers inform him that their real estate expert has discovered a breakthrough in his property line dispute, but just before this ancient man can explain it to Larry, he keels over and dies from a heart attack. These are the final exit signs on Larry's destiny road, but he isn't reading them.

There are other signs Larry hasn't been paying attention to either. He stands idly by, watching his older brother Arthur slip into an abyss of mathematical obsession and isolation, failing to see his mental illnesses and even his homosexuality. His teenaged children become so accustomed to their fathers distance that they barely notice or care when he moves out of the house and into a Jolly Roger down the road. Almost every aspect of Larry's life has been allowed to sour or or slip through his fingers. Fate, or destiny, or god himself seems to be conspiring to grind him into a fine dust with cruel circumstance. And when the storm clouds of Larry's mind manifest themselves as a terrifying cyclone sweeping across the flat plain toward destruction, its clear that his loved ones, his family line, will also be paying his divine tab.

A Serious Man re-frames the age-old question of why do bad things happen to good people, instead asking how do good people remain good when so much bad befalls them? The Coens don't exactly answer either question, but for a time Larry fights admirably against the misfortune that seems to shadow his every step. He tries to keep up the pretense of a scholar, a family man and a member of the community. But you get the feeling that these are merely ideas Larry clings to while getting swept down river, before he hits the real white water and they no longer keep him aloft. Near the end, when Larry gets a bill for 3,000 dollars from his lawyer--this after his wife cleans out their joint account leaving him broke--he finally dips into the envelope of bribe money that has been sitting in his desk. In his ledger, Larry erases his students F grade and replaces it with a C-.

What's so rewarding about A Serious Man is the way that the Coens engage the viewer, making Larry's descent into misfortune and ruin an exercise in personal reflection and philosophical puzzling. Watching Larry get put through wringer is likely to raise questions about your own journey through life, and whether the path your on is the right one, or whether you even chose a path to begin with. I am continually haunted by the scene where Larry confronts his F student over the bribe, pounding his desk angrily insisting that every action has a consequence. Does that mean that Larry has invited trouble into his life? Is he the engineer of his own downfall? Has he angered the gods? Or do bad things just happen to good people?

A major clue to puzzle over is the opening prologue of the film, which is a made-up Jewish folktale set in what looks to be the 1800's. A man returns home during a snowstorm, informing his wife that an acquaintance of hers just helped him during a spot of trouble and that he has invited him over for soup. The wife insists that the man her husband speaks of died three years ago and that he has invited a ghost over for dinner, a spirit that has escaped from hell and that will now attach itself to them. When the man arrives he is pleasant and doesn't present any outwards signs of being a ghost, laughing off the wife's theory. But the wife is so sure that she proves her point by stabbing him in the heart. With the tool sticking out of his chest, the man gets up slowly and walks back out into the snow storm, leaving the question of his being a mystery. The husband cries, "we're ruined".

I am not entirely sure what bearing this opening has on Larry's story, but the initial meaning I took from it is that these are Larry's ancestors, and they have taken on a curse that will reverberate through the ages. That seems a little obvious and simplistic though. It may also be that these people, who lived in slower, more simple times, were tuned into both their spirituality and superstition, and were able to contextualize their misfortune and appropriately brace for impact. But we no longer have such clarity or conviction. Our culture and pace of living have made us passive viewers instead of participants in our own lives. The difference between the driver choosing the route and the passenger watching the scenery blur together out the window. The price of inaction can be high, as is the case with the husband who watches while his wife stabs their guest, and as is the case with Larry Gopnick.

Another rich moment that left me questioning and puzzling is a funny exchange between Larry and a Columbia House record club representative who is continually pestering him over the phone. The representative explains that after receiving his initial 12 free records, he was then sent his first monthly selection, which became his to purchase when he did nothing. The record is Abaraxas by Santana. Larry is baffled. What Santana Abraxas record? Who joined Columbia House records club (his son Danny of course)? The disembodied voice over the phone keeps insisting that he received the Santana Abraxas record because he did nothing and a confused Larry keeps yelling into the phone, "But I did nothing! I didn't do anything!" Larry's inaction is precisely his problem and after looking up the meaning of Abaraxas it turns out this record was not simply chosen by the Coen's as a knowing period detail. "Abaraxas" is an ancient Greek word for divine emanation. Larry did nothing and received a divine emanation. And not the kind of divine emanation you want.

A Serious Man, like almost all of the Coen's movies, bears re-watching. There is so much detail to process, both visual and thematic, that I can hardly say that I have a complete handle on it or that I know with certainty what's it actually trying to say. Some have described it as a mean, manipulative, joyless descent into hell, but I think the film has far more feeling and humanity than the Coen's ever get credit for. It's rare that I think about a movie afterward as much as I've been thinking about A Serious Man. But I love that it has provoked so much thought and introspection. I think it's a great film that will only get better.

Review // THE TAKING OF PELHAM 123 - Making movies from the hair down

I'll get this out of the way first: I really don't like the Scott brothers, Tony and Ridley.

I think they make paper-thin, overly-stylized movies for Baby Boomers who've allowed their attention spans to be whittled down by their children's MTV-consumption. They make junky movies that aren't quite junky enough to be truly fun. Ridley Scott is just Michael Bay with Oscars. Tony is just Michael Bay with slightly less imagination. If I had to choose between the two bald, British brothers though, I'd probably pick Tony. Tony Scott at least has an inkling that he's just making movies where cars blowup and then flip 7 times in the air before hitting the ground and blowing up again. I think. Ridley Scott on the other hand is a curmudgeonly A-list prick who puts on airs and thinks he's making prestige pictures, when really he's just making Tony Scott movies with better casts and more money.

In order to clearly gauge the level of pretension of either brother, one must only look as far as their 1-2 punch combo of Ridley's 1985 Legend and Tony's 1986 Top Gun. Both directors snatched up the rising, red-hot Tom Cruise as their lead and made him the dreamboat centre of gooey junk food confections. Top Gun is a retarded gung-homo-erotic cheese fest. Legend is a humorless, self-serious fairytale that plays like a feature-length Coco Chanel perfume ad, complete with slow-motion unicorns bathed in flower pedals raining from the sky. Tony's film shoots for popcorn. Ridley's film shoots for poetry.

I added a new word to the Urban Dictionary.

Word: "Ridleyed"

Definition: to make something overblown, pretentious and clearly begging for praise.

Example: "Mark really Ridleyed that Power Point presentation, eh? Did you see the sun flares he added to the pie graph? And the Middle-Eastern choir music when he revealed the company earnings? What an asshole".

But Ridley Scott made Blade Runner and Alien, surely I like those right? To be honest, neither of those movies made much of an impression on me, both as a child when I first saw them (and arguably should've been more susceptible to their images) and even upon repeat viewings. They just leave me cold.

Tony Scott, much like his brother, also indulges in a completely overblown style, but it usually results in unintentional laughs as opposed to groans and yawns as with Ridley. Revenge with Kevin Costner is a hot-blooded riot. As is Days of Thunder, The Fan and especially Man on Fire. On the plus side, Tony Scott is responsible for The Last Boy Scout and True Romance, although I would probably attribute the success of both of these movies to their scripts by Shane Black and Quentin Tarantino respectively.

With all this Scott brothers background, I carried a considerable amount of baggage into my viewing of The Taking of Pelham 123, a movie I only saw because Swazz Perkins lent me his Blu Ray rental for a night. When I first heard about this remake, it didn't immediately cause the usual violent eye-rolling, partly because its one of the few recent remakes that kinda makes sense, and partly because I don't have any particular affinity for the original film. This isn't like remaking a 2 year-old foreign film or rebooting a comic book origin story that the studio already fucked up the first time. There is an entire generation that has probably never seen or even heard of The Taking of Pelham 123 and it's set up is open-ended enough to bear a reinterpretation. I saw the original a couple of years ago and like I said, it didn't do much for me. There were things I liked about it, Robert Shaw's steely, unwavering villainy for example. But its pacing hasn't survived the ensuing decades. It probably killed in 1974, but I just happened to grow up with the movies that were influenced by it, like Die Hard, so my chances of really taking Pelham to heart were already blown.

I expected Tony Scott to take Pelham's premise--criminal's pull an unlikely heist by holding a subway car hostage--and caffeinate it until it became a manic, jittering blur of jumpcuts and explosions. In fact, on the Special Features (which ended up as the most entertaining thing on the disc) one of the producers describes their approach as "The Taking of Pelham 123 on steroids". So I was a little surprised that this Pelham remake hued so closely to the original and seemed almost bereft of Tony Scott's usual ADD hallmarks. Don't get me wrong, there is plenty hyper-styling, extreme colour filters and slice-and-dice editing. But compared to past Scott films like Domino and Man on Fire, Pelham seems almost muted by comparison.

Probably the most noticeable update the Pelham remake introduces is a generous use of the word "fuck". One of the first lines of dialogue in the movie is somebody saying "Crunchy-fucking fucknuts" which gives you an idea of the level of wit we're dealing with here. From then on, the word "motherfucker" practically becomes a character in the movie. Travolta's bad guy Ryder probably says "motherfucker" 100 times over the course of the movie, and each time he spits it's unconvincing and cringe-worthy. At the same time, "motherfucker" is all Travolta has to cling to as an actor because there's nothing else to this character. In fact, if I had to describe the character of Ryder I would say he is a man who says "motherfucker". A lot. There's nothing else about him that sticks with you. Except maybe his positively ridiculous facial hair and close-cropped head. Travolta's hair, as I came to learn later, is a crucial key to understanding the mind of director Tony Scott. More on that later.

Pelham quickly, but blandly stages its premise. Travolta and his crew hijack a train, making it look pretty damn easy, but not interesting or coherent. Scott doesn't give the audience the thrill of watching a clockwork heist come to fruition. Travolta pretty much just sticks a gun in somebody's face and they have the train. The pictures ingredients soon settle and we're left with Denzel on one side of a radio, Travolta on the other, and a subway car full of hostages. At this point the movie takes on an almost Disaster-movie feel, with a bunch of random strangers collected in a confined space awaiting their fate. Scott briefly flirts with the idea of giving his hostages identities, setting up the typical archetypes in a Business Man, Kid, Tough Guy etc, but he quickly abandons this direction and the hostage characters never end up amounting to anything, just bodies on the line. It's an odd choice given that there's more tension playing out on Denzel's hostage-free side of the radio than there is in the subway car, and that really shouldn't be.

Denzel plays a transit official, an everyman with grey stubbly hair, a worker bee hunched over a computer terminal. He hides his bulk under a baggy shirt and coat. Glasses tell us he's not the principled tough guy he usually plays, just principled. Denzel's acting gameplan here seems to be to pretend that he's not the most righteous human to ever walk the earth, which is as close to Denzel playing against type as we get these days. The dynamic between Denzel and Travolta is explored over the radio, with the two men acting to a disembodied voice. This doesn't take off like it did in Die Hard or the original version, but it is used effectively in one scene, probably the only smart moment in the film. Denzel's character is accused of taking a bribe from a Japanese subway manufacturer. Travolta asks Denzel to cop to it, with the police and his bosses standing around him in the room listening. When Denzel insists that he is innocent, Travolta grabs a young hostage and holds a gun to his head, demanding that he confess to the crime or the innocent kid dies. It's a tense moment and when its over, Denzel's character has been changed in the audiences eyes and the dynamic between him and Travolta momentarily altered. It's a good scene, but like most of the things in this Pelham, it doesn't really go anywhere.

Speaking of things that don't go anywhere, the great James Gandolfini continues to prove that he will probably never again receive a character as rounded and interesting as his Tony Soprano. His voice work in Where The Wild Things Are is as close as he's come. Here he plays the mayor of New York. In the original film, the mayor is a sleazy, self-serving, incompetent asshole. However, Gandolfini's role has been watered down, made more sympathetic for seemingly no purpose or gain to the picture. It's an odd decision, especially since Travolta's character keeps referencing the "motherfuckers" of the city's establishment who he feels threw him under the bus. A truly sleazy mayor would have provided a powder keg of emotions for Travolta's crazed terrorist to play off of, and even more tension once the mayor enters into the negotiations. Instead, Gandolfini's mayor exists only to make a not-at-all startling revelation about who Travolta might've been before becoming a terrorist. It's like the filmmakers didn't have the courage to make Gandolfini unlikable, or perhaps thought turning him into a Hardy Boy for one scene somehow gave him depth. All this despite the fact that politicians have always been one of cinema's most worked-in punching bags. This oversight is just another in a list of missed opportunities that writer Brian Helgeland delivers to Tony Scott to then gussy up and overshoot.

Aside from Travolta's insane miscasting as the murderous villain, Pelham is unfortunately just mediocre, not astoundingly, hilariously bad like I was hoping. But then I watched the Special Features (Harry was still sucking on his bottle so I thought "why not?"). The two featurettes I watched ended up giving me even more insight into the broken process of Tony Scott. In a feature called From the Top Down, we are introduced to Scott's personal hair dresser and on-set hair stylist, Danny Moulding. Moulding is a young douchy Ed Hardy-wear type who spins his scissors and combs like they're six guns or like he's Tom Cruise from Cocktail. He calls himself and "artist" and explains how Scott confers with him on how to visualize his characters... through their hair. The process is that Scott brings a huge amount of character research and information to Moulding and together they decide what the characters will look like from the hair down. The funniest part is that Moulding has almost no hair, sporting cropped, manicured fuzz all over his face and head. Scott has no hair either and both his leads, Denzel and Travolta have their hair clipped down to the same fuzz that Moulding and Scott sport. It seems like Scott subconsciously styled his characters after himself and his young, "hip" Yesman hairdresser was there to fluff his ego. The fact that designing his characters hair is presented as such a crucial step in Scott's directorial process is incredibly telling.

The other Making Of feature offers the rather funny detail about just how much research Tony Scott does before undertaking a film. The producers and actors talk endlessly of Scott's black binders full of his exhaustive research into every aspect of the films world. He even employs a full-time researcher who flies all over the world interviewing subjects and gathering data to ground the movies in reality. Why? Why does Scott feel the need to labour over the reality of his films when he's clearly more interested in exaggeration with hyper-stylized atmospheres and gravity-defying car wrecks? Despite all this supposed research, why do Scott's films feel so contrived, airless and unreal? Who are they trying to kid? Themselves obviously. Scott endlessly researches subway cars and hostage negotiation and puzzles over character haircuts instead of taking a hard look at his script. It's why his Pelham remake has already been forgotten.

Review // GRAVEYARD SHIFT - A Perfect Movie?

Ok, probably not a perfect movie. But a perfect giant man-eating rat/bat movie? I think it just might be.





"The new horror from the mind of Stephen King"

Ha! Most Stephen King concepts by the time they get filmed end up feeling like the kind of fever dreams people have when doubled over on a toilet with diarrhea (The Dreamcatcher even features an alien that possesses its victims by crawling up their ass while they shit, best movie ever btw). At best, his idea process seems like he just looks around his everyday life and then attaches the word "evil" to mundane objects or situations. Christine is about an evil car. Maximum Overdrive is about evil trucks. Cujo is about an evil dog. 1408 is about an evil hotel room. The Mist is about evil mist. In one particular scene in Maximum Overdrive a coke machine begins shooting out pop cans like bullets and braining people. King probably didn't have to root around in his imagination too long before pulling out the story nuggets for Graveyard Shift. "A giant rat eating people in a basement. Done. Where's my money? I'm going to use it to dig a second pool and then... wait... The Pool! A pool that's evil! Damn it, why can't I stop thinking of book ideas? I'm cursed!"

What stayed with me about Graveyard Shift when I first saw it way back in 1990 (I also had the carboard standee in my bedroom, which I liberated from Major Video's garbage) is the grotty, grimy atmosphere of its subterranean, rat-infested house of horrors. These sets, the forgotten lower levels of the films near-ancient small-town cotton factory, was the star of the show, and while this aspect of the film didn't quite live up to my childhood memories, they are still pretty icky and effective. A great place to stage a survival battle between blue collar wage slaves and a giant, ravenous, pissed off rat/bat creature.

The cotton factory has fallen on hard times and is in disrepair. They also have a terrible rat infestation. One particular rat, a gigantic one with wings is eating employees, although nobody really catches onto this until its too late. Safety inspectors are threatening to shut down production unless the neglected lower level sub-basement, ground zero for the rat infestation, is cleaned and brought up to code. A team of reluctant factory employees are promised overtime pay if they forsake their long weekend and help in this task. This sub-basement, covered in mold, caked in dust and brimming with rats, is a great set. It looks like about the worst place to spend a long weekend. When workers find a secret compartment leading to an even more disgusting and horrible sub-sub basement, all hell breaks loose, with the giant rat picking them off one by one. The sub-sub basement is basically a tomb, crossed with a lions den, crossed with an ancient mine, and it too is a great set.

The other thing Graveyard Shift has going for it are great character actors hamming it up good. Steven Macht, who was the dad in Monster Squad, plays the insanely creepy factory owner and the films other villain, besides the giant rat/bat. With a hilarious Stephen King-movie-Main accent and a badass wife beater, Macht shoots for full crazy and earns his characters death-by-eating admirably. Andrew Divoff, now featured on Lost and who played about a hundred henchmen roles in the 80's-90's, has a small, funny role as a bullying factory worker who gets reduced to hysterics at the sight of the rat/bat. But the cake gets taken by Brad fucking Dourif as a Vietnam vet turned pest exterminator with a major case of PST. He goes to war with the cotton factory's rat population and occasionally flashes back to his days in 'Nam. He has a fucking amazing monologue where he explains to bland hero David Andrews exactly why he is so personally invested in his war against rodents. Dourif takes this ridiculous piece of writing and elevates it into a bad-movie masterwork. As he swigs whiskey, he describes being a POW and the Vietnamese torture tactics involving hungry rats devouring his comrades. He rages and screams and tears stream out of the corners of his eyes. It's A-MAZING, and I'd love to link the scene here but Youtubers seem to be massively sleeping on on some of Dourif's finest work.

Review // TIMECOP - A rip in time, a tear on my cheek

It's impossible to understate how addicted to 80's action movies I was throughout my childhood. I worshipped at an alter of a four-armed Arnold Schwarzenegger holding Jean Claude Van Damme, Steven Seagal, Dolph Lundgren and Chuck Norris in his enormous hands. I wrote a fanzine to Arnold and made protest buttons when his movies were rated R. After Bloodsport, I had every Jean Claude Van Damme movie on reserve from my video store before they had left the theatres. I was obsessed.

And then the 90's rolled around and I continued to follow my heroes through their declines, eventually abandoning Seagal and Van Damme when they ran their careers aground on the straight-to-dvd rocks. But the importance of those early films has never diminished. Bloodsport was my entry point into Kung-Fu movies and helped me later find Bruce Lee, Jet Li and Jackie Chan. Cyborg helped develop my love of trash cinema and Double Impact made my mid-week twelfth birthday a special night (it came to VHS on the same day as my birthday and I insisted on watching it alone, like a solemn coming-of-age ceremony). Action movies were my singular focus growing up and after Arnold, Van Damme was one of the most important figures in that equation.

And so it was that in 1994, on a winters night alone in my house in the middle of nowhere Ontario, I clung to Van Damme's Timecop as I weathered the toughest emotional storm of my life at that time: a messy break-up with a girlfriend. Said girlfriend and I were on-again-off-again at this point and the situation was becoming an intolerable roller coaster ride, a repeating cycle of catch-and-release that was turning me into part basket-case, part crazy person. On that particular wintry '94 night, we were in a limbo state between on-off, I didn't know whether I was being caught again or still in release. She was supposed to call me to "talk". With the portable phone set on the coffee table in plain sight, and ringer volume on high, I popped in the Timecop VHS to kill time before the expected call.

Timecop begins in the 1863, with a mysterious stranger blocking the road and holding up a group of Confederate soldiers transporting gold bullion by horse-drawn carriage. This stranger is played by Canadian Callum Keith Rennie, the first of many Canadian character actors revealing that the movies Washington is actually Vancouver. The stranger produces dual laser-y futuristic machine guns and blows all the soldiers away. Cool! If your movie is about time-travel and takes place in the future, it's always a good idea to start off in the distant past and then mix in your future elements. It's a no-brainer moment, and also the point where Timecop's brains peak--right before the credits.

We are then introduced to the star-crossed lovers that ground Timecop's action in emotional turmoil. Mia Sara of Ferris Bueller, Legend and pretty much nothing else, is looking at watches and clocks in the window of a mall shop (subtle visual time themes!) when Van Damme appears behind her and they engage in some creepy stranger role-playing, before revealing that they are husband and wife. They are being shadowed by some unseen thugs. The movie then cuts to the couple doing some candle-lit sensual fucking, filling Van Damme's "for de ladies" quotient which he insisted on for most of his films. The splits and ball-punching was for the guys, the shots of his ass were always "for de ladies".

In these early scenes between Sara and Van Damme, I began to have emotional stirrings prompted by my current love trials. As I watched the phone not ringing out of the corner of my eye, I became far more invested in Timecop's love story than hack-director Peter Hyams probably envisioned. Watching it again many years later, these scenes are rote and unintentionally funny. In 1994, they had me tied in knots.

With the un-ringing phone taunting me from the coffee table, I went into Mia Sara's death scene in a heightened state. The thugs that were shadowing the couple in the mall, end up following them back to their home and subduing Van Damme while blowing up his house with his wife in it. As Van Damme screamed in anguish as the flames consuming his love, I... fucking cried. I fucking cried. Jesus. Crying in Timecop is something that has stayed with me all these years, an anecdote I willingly offer up as evidence of my status as a pussy. It was a salty, tear-streaked watershed moment where I realized that my powers of empathy and sensitivity extended even to Jean Claude Van Damme action movies. In short, I was a pussy and I just had to embrace it, and once I did (with the help of Timecop) my high school years in a small town improved exponentially. I realized I was never going to fully fit into a hockey-obsessed community where squawking your tires on the main drag was a guys right of passage--so I didn't even try.

I blazed my own path in high school, abandoning the just-keep-my-head-down strategy of grade 9 and 10, for a full on peacock-ing that earned me friends and enemies in equal measure. I wore three-piece polyester thrift store suits to school and I refused to get my drivers license until I was nearly 19. When country dudes, with No Fear sweatshirts and tattoos of the Looney Tunes Tasmanian Devil biting through a hockey stick, called me a "fag" it was like getting a compliment, I knew I was on the right track. I ended up leaving high school adjusted, laid and happy, instead of bitter, scarred and emotionally unprepared. Thanks Timecop!

Anyway, Van Damme's wife dies and then the movie flashes forward ten years later to 2004, where cars are covered in garish retro-future plastic panelling and drive themselves, and TV's are flat and cover most of the wall (at least they got some things right). Van Damme has become a Timecop for the TEC (Time Enforcement Commission) chasing time-manipulating bad guys through history. When he's not enforcing, er time, he's drinking himself to sleep in front of home movies of his wife, who he is still mourning intensely ten years later. His job puts his wife and her death at his fingertips. He could go back any time and prevent it from happening, but he knows that altering time in any way can have disastrous effects on the future. And so he suffers, and throws himself into his work, busting the criminals that are doing the very thing he has vowed not to do.

Time travel in the film is achieved by riding in a future-y looking sled, shot really fast along a track at some big geometrical statue thingy before disappearing in a crappy CGI ripple effect. It's pretty funny. The other concept that the film hammers home many times is that the same matter cannot occupy the same space at the same time, so going back in time and giving yourself a high-five would result in a horrific, highly scientific death. Van Damme eventually runs afoul of Ron Silver, an oily, grasping politician. Silver is using time travel and his knowledge of economic history to make millions in order to, get this, fund his presidential campaign. That's it. He's not trying to engineer a new world order, he just needs cash to become president. Presumably all the usual sleazy avenues for presidential campaign funding have been closed down in 2004. Van Damme also learns that his wife's death in the past is the result of his investigation into Silver's dealings in the future. Well, his "investigation" really consists of a suspect telling him Silver is dirty and then Silver pretty much admitting to it. Armed with this knowledge, Van Damme breaks his strict no-fucking-with-time rule in order to save his wife and bring down the evil Silver.

Timecop is hilarious and preposterous and inept and another great slice of cheese from Van Damme. But on that winter's night in '94, Van Damme's anguished pining for love mirrored my own desire for closure with the girl that kept dragging me through an emotional obstacle course. The girl and I broke up proper a little while later and I ended up getting all the messy, immature relationship weirdness out of my system early in my teens, which was a blessing. The phone never did ring that night, but Timecop diverted and consoled and brought my feelings into focus. Because of that hilarious, bizarre viewing, I have never returned to Timecop until now. Watching it again, I've tried hard to recognize any of the moments or emotional cues that motivated me to cry or feel anything the way I did when I first watched it, but I can't. Now, it's just a fun, bad movie. If I could ride a time traveling sled through a portal back to 1994, I wouldn't shake my younger self and slap him across the face yelling, "your crying in a fucking Van Damme movie, snap out of it!". And not only because if I touched my younger self I would be breaking the same-matter-space rule and we would be converted into a pile of CGI goo like Ron Silver at the end of the movie. No, instead I would tell myself, "go on, get it out of your system, let the tears flow like Van Damme's mullet from the back of his head." Timecop helped me realize who I am --a man capable of crying during Timecop-- and I'm not ashamed of it. Some dudes become irreparably broken when relationships dissolve. The pressure to "stay tough" and lock their emotions away ends up backfiring and they become stalkers of ex-girlfriends or they open fire on a crowd with a machine gun. If only every guy could just watch Timecop, have a good cry and move on.

Review // HARD TARGET - My Momma Took One

Holy shit! This is a stone cold 90's classic! I haven't seen it in probably ten years, and while I fondly remembered it, I wasn't quite prepared for how well it would hold up and how thoroughly it would kick my ass... in slow motion... with doves flapping their wings.

Apparently I'm going soft, because Danny Onions circa 1993 was hyped-as-shit about Hard Target. I was a pretty big Van Damme fan and was also one of those westerners that eagerly sought out the films of John Woo, long before he became the buzzed-about saviour of the Hollywood action film (which of course didn't happen)--so Hard Target was basically manna from heaven. I waited with baited breath for this movie, and when I finally saw the trailer ( I believe it might have even been on the Jurassic Park VHS) I lost my shit.

It was this trailer:

When I eventually got to see it, many excruciating months later on video because of its R rating, I was not disappointed. It mixed the cheese of a regular Van Damme outing with Woo's slow-motion ballet of carnage and that was about all I was hoping for. Many years later, seeing Hard Target again, I would say it plays even better than it did then. Is it Van Damme's best movie? I think it is. Although, if a Van Damme doesn't do the splits in a Van Damme movie, is it still a Van Damme movie? That's a philosophical question that I'll leave for another time.

Hard Target is a man-hunting-man movie set in the seedy side of New Orleans, and eventually the bayou. Rich assholes are paying evil mercenaries Lance Henrikson and Arnold Vosloo for the pleasure of hunting men for sport. Henrikson and Vosloo carefully select ex-army vets with combat training as their targets, you know, to make it sporting. These are men who have fallen on hard times, they live on the streets, will do just about anything to put some cash in their pocket and nobody will miss them when they're gone. To make them semi-willing, Henrikson offers the men 10,000 cash in order to tempt them into gambling with their lives.

Their dirty little enterprise hits a snag when a woman, played by Yancy Butler, comes to town looking for her long-lost father, who turns out to be one of their recent kills. This woman hires a local transient to help her navigate the dangerous New Orleans streets in her search for answers. This down-on-his-luck local is named Chance Boudrex and is played obviously by Jean Claude Fucking Van Damme, with greasy hair extensions. When Yancy Butler asks him why his name is Chance, he garbles the amazing line, "My momma took one". Their search for answers naturally puts them in the crosshairs of Henrikson and Vosloo and the movie transitions to full on slow-motion action mayhem.

The first thing that struck me about Hard Target (re-struck?) is just how much meat is on the bones of its story. Let's face it, nobody would mistake it for a deep parable about class warfare, but there is surprisingly more going on than the usual brain-dead actioner. I just reviewed Gamer, a depressingly awful man-hunting-man movie, and Hard Target tops it in every conceivable way, including the action. But it actually takes it's time setting up the story and world, doling out the action sparingly in the first 45 minutes in favour of answering any niggling questions and filling in the sketchier details of its premise.

Compared to the absolute shit I've been watching lately, I was totally impressed with Hard Target's tight script and plotting. It even takes the time to delve into the humanity of those being hunted, something that Gamer doesn't bother to do, even with its main character. The idea of rich pricks hunting and killing homeless men is obviously monstrous, but the film actually makes the effort to rise above the exploitation plot by forcing us to look at the city through the eyes of the homeless population. When Butler's character finds flyer's for a strip club among her fathers things she is confused, but Boudreux and another homeless man quickly explain that he passed them out for money, then breaking eye contact, they admit that they too have had to do the same. These are proud men, war heroes who have been forgotten by the world and reduced to acts of survival. It's a surprisingly genuine moment. There is a certain level of respect for the audience at work here, despite the fact that the genre doesn't even necessarily call for it. Watching it in 2010, after story-less fluff like Gamer and Zombieland, it feels downright old school and solid.

The above-average story and plotting is surprising. The fact that the action kicks ass is not. While this doesn't rank among John Woo's best films, Hard Target still displays his visual invention and flare, and was still miles ahead of most Western action fare of the time. However, when watching Hard Target, its impossible not to think that Woo was somehow hamstrung by Hollywood's more conservative attitudes and styles, and therefore wasn't able to be quite as balletic and gonzo as he was in his HK films. I mean, Woo's other Hard movie, Hard Boiled featured his muse Chow Yun Fat killing the fuck out of dudes with a shotgun, while holding a infant to his chest. Then he jumps out of an exploding building clutching the baby. It's nuts. Western audiences pre-Matrix weren't very receptive to the gun-fu and wire-work of HK genre films and preferred a more heavy-footed, semi-realistic approach to onscreen violence. HK films had it right though. They took movie violence and translated it into exactly what it was: macho mythology. Handguns had a thousand bullets and combatants often took to the air to settle their disputes in visually poetic combat. Audiences embrace action movies and screen violence not because they are bloodthirsty sociopaths (for the most part), but because we have an affinity for stories of daring and danger. It's deep-seated and probably genetically hard-coded. HK films recognized this and simply juiced up the daring and danger until it took on symphonic and lyrical proportions.

Still, the action in Hard Target is pretty dazzling, and most importantly, crystal clear in its execution. I can't help but feel that if Woo had been able to successfully translate his style to Hollywood, we would be seeing far less of the shaky-cam and strobe editing that define the modern action movie. A Woo action scene upholds spacial clarity and allows the viewer to bask in the kinetic energy of a kick or a spray of hot lead. I still can't understand why the Paul Greengrass/Ridley Scott brand of action direction has such a vice-like grip over Hollywood. Audiences have payed to go see an action movie, why then do these directors go out of their way to make it almost impossible to see any of the action? Woo plays with films speeds, relying heavily on slow motion and freeze frames so that you can process every hit and marvel at every carefully executed stunt. He is a very giving director.

If it seems like I'm making Hard Target out to be some kind of masterpiece, I don't mean to. It's not a masterpiece. It just fucking delivers on its promise and I'm so accustomed to the decline of genre entertainment that that actually surprises me nowadays. Hard Target is more hilarious than genuinely thrilling. Between Van Damme's greasy mullet whipping through the air in slow-motion and Wilford Brimley's forced Cajun manimal musings, Hard Target just might be a masterpiece of another kind--a bad movie masterpiece. And the best part is there's no doubts as to what kind of movie the filmmakers were engaged in. It's not an unintentional bad movie, its an expertly crafted joke. Woo probably took one look at the mullet-ed Van Damme in his Canadian tuxedo and got his translator to announce "Let's have him surf a motorcycle straight into a truck, which he dives over and blows up with a handgun". When Van Damme punches a fucking snake in the face you know that Woo is in on the joke and not the butt of it.

The entire cast is equally up to the task of crafting a symphony of cheese. When Van Damme tells Wilford Brimley, his backwater Cajun Uncle, that men are coming to kill him, Brimley attempts his best Creole patois and says "I know, I can smell dem". That line destroyed me. Lance Henrikson is a gravel-voiced god among b-movie character actors and his evil Emil Fouchon ranks with some his best villain roles. How evil is Fouchon? He plays a mournful piano suite in a room draped with white linen as his henchmen lays out the ground rules of the hunt to a rich client. He's piano-suite evil! As the chase for Van Damme goes on, Fouchon becomes more and more irritated and begins beating and killing the very men that are paying him small fortunes for the pleasure of the hunt. Fouchon literally becomes inflamed with irritation as his coat catches fire from one of Van Damme's amazingly accurate shotgun blasts to a gas can. Arnold Vosloo, who is only possibly remembered as the villain from the first Mummy movie, is great as the South African violence-junkie mercenary in Fouchon's employ, and helps give the movie a nice one-two villain punch.

Yancy Butler, who was moderately famous for about 15 seconds in the early 90's, seems to be the only one taking things seriously in the movie, which is fine for her character. When looking at her attractive, feline face, I wondered why she didn't become more famous or have a better career. She looks quite a bit like Angelina Jolie. 

Why couldn't Butler have had the kind of career Jolie had? What's the difference between Yancy Butler and Angelina Jolie really? About 5 pounds of eyebrow, 12 pounds of heartthrob common-law goatee, 12 children, and a DUI arrest, I guess. 

Van Damme is the draw here of course, and like I said earlier, Hard Target is one of his best, if not his best movie. He smartly was able to convince Universal studios to bring on Woo as a director, and the result is a typically poor performance blown up to mythical proportions. Woo treats him as his Man With No Name, or rather his Man With Hilarious Name, and between his slow-motion camera caresses and Graham Revelle's Ry-Cooder-y slide guitar score that announce him, Van Damme kicks his way through the movie like a classic Hollywood badass. Van Damme's opening fight scene is even staged like a western dust-up in the town square. For once Van Damme's French-ness is actually suited to his role as a backwoods Cajun, and while his line-garbling accent is no better here than it ever was, the character of Chance Boudreux is less ill-fitting than most of his other roles. Still, I wish he had done the splits at least one in Hard Target, than it would've been the total package. 

Hard Target kicks fucking ass. I don't have the lists in front of me, but it's either gotta rank somewhere as one of the best action movies of the 90's, or one of the funniest comedies.

Review // GAMER - Fear for the future

This is a rant, sorry.

Gamer, like Crank and Crank 2 from the same "filmmakers" Mark Neveldine & Brian Taylor, looks to get a reaction from the viewer, and unfortunately I fell for this trap HARD. I had a strong reaction to Gamer, perhaps the strongest emotions I've had for a film since... fuck, probably Crank 2 actually.

Gamer is a racist, deeply misogynistic torture session that adopts the worst filmmaking techniques of the digital age and mercilessly abuses them in an effort to simultaneously bore and repulse with its artless, pornographic evocation of a violent dystopia. And I'm not talking about the violent dystopia amateurishly depicted in the movie, I'm talking about the dystopia we are living where people like Neveldine/Taylor are given 50 million dollars to attempt to dismantle the very idea of entertainment. This is the worst, most depressing "movie" I've seen since...fuck, probably Crank 2 actually.

Gamer's story and setting is unabashedly lifted entirely from The Running Man. Not altered or inspired-by, just stolen shamelessly and then botched. The man-hunting-man movie did not begin with The Running Man by any means, and goes back as far as 1932's The Most Dangerous Game, but The Running Man is just the one most X'ers remember. Neveldine/Taylor don't bother to add anything new, except for a lazy, half-assed videogame angle that is underdeveloped and nonsensical.

Gerard Butler, who seems to be on a singular quest to burn his career to the ground, is a soldier, or a death-row inmate, I didn't really get which. He is controlled via nano-techno-gobbly-gook by a snotty telegenic teenager in a real-world death-match game called Slayer. This teen, who lazes around in a goofy technological womb of wraparound screen/walls, spends his days looking at tits and killing human beings with his Butler-avatar. Also Butler, who's name is both Kane and Tillman for some reason, has a family that he loves. There's your motivation folks. Also, like The Running Man, there is a resistance who think that humans killing humans for sport is not very nice. Duh.

Gamer's lame videogame condemnation plot already feels tacky, hysterical and dated, but it also makes little sense. Kane/Tillman is an international superstar, revered as an athlete for his killings in the game Slayer. But he's being completely controlled by the teenager, so I don't understand why Kane is this mega-celebrity. That would be like awarding Master Chief the trophy at a Halo tournament even though it was some kid who actually shot his way through the competition. The plot and world do not bear scrutiny.

This whole world-gone-mad-with-nano-violence has been engineered by billionaire asshole Castle, played unfortunately by the talented Micheal C. Hall. Besides the game of Slayer, he has also created Society, a Second Life-style social game where humans control other humans for sex and debauchery. Gerard Bulter's wife is a Society avatar played by poor model/actress Amber Valletta, and she is the grist in Neveldine/Taylor's degradation grind. Valletta spends the entire movie wearing a futuristic prostitute wardrobe and getting manipulated into creepy sexual trysts by her controller, a morbidly obese shut-in who slathers his belly in syrup while masturbating and shoveling down fistfuls of waffles. There is an extended, agonizingly protracted shot of Valletta's crotch in Silver panties as it is being roughly fondled by a character by the name of Rick Rape. She shouldn't just fire her agent, she should sue him.

Also in for the abuse is actress Kyra Sedgwick as a completely underwritten, unneeded stock opportunistic reporter. I watch a lot of movies and I never see Sedgwick in anything. Let's face it, she's married to Kevin Bacon and he doesn't have his own six-degrees-of-separation game for nothing. Bacon's been in a lot of movies and has done okay. But he's also one of the Hollywood actors who got fleeced out of millions by scam artist Bernie Madoff. Is Sedgwick looking to improve the Bacon family's cashflow with the dirty money earned from Gamer? I can't see another good reason for participating in this mess.

Gamer's awfulness is apparent from the first five minutes, but things get exponentially shittier when each of the three L's appear. The three L's are hopeless actors John Leguizamo, Ludacris and Allison Lohman. A movie can be immediately dismissed if either Leguizamo or Ludacris are in the cast. John Leguizamo has been making shitty movies since time immemorial, with Spawn and The Pest immediately coming to mind. But Ludacris is in the Oscar-winning Crash, you say? I rest my case. Lohman is a cute pixie-ish actress that apart from Drag Me To Hell, has a really spotty resume and doesn't fare well at all with her role here as a delivery system for some awful techno-babble exposition that the writers (also N/T) have lazily added for the few morons who will actually try to connect the dots.

Check out some examples of their writing:
-When one of the Humanz finally meets Butler, who has taken on a celebrity status, he says "Kane... you're great."
-The camera glides over the cityscape and we see a stenciled graffitti tag that reads: Slayer is bad TV.
-NT's only attempt at world-building is to add misogyny to the common lexicon by having people say things like "We're cunt hair close" and "the chances are cock-hard solid" and when Sedgwick's character gets a little excited about the possibility of an exclusive interview with Ken Castle her boss says "Stop menstruating, just tell me we fucking have it"  

I originally watched Crank because critics called it the "best action movie since Die Hard". It's not. Crank has the action coreoghraphy of a post-Reservoir Dogs student film. Crank 2 doesn't fair much better, with the sight of a floating horse cock its only lasting image, not any bursts of kinetic action flare. The action scenes in Gamer seem as if they were directed by someone who saw Saving Private Ryan and said "god, my brain can like, totally comprehend how all these old-timey fags are dying, it's soooo boring! Speed things uuuup!" Along with ADD editing and copious shaky-cam, N/T literally add strobe lights to some scenes just in case your eyes were somehow still able to make out anything on the screen.

The fact that the visuals are torture and the anemic story is a piece of shit that offers no motivation for enduring Neveldine/Taylor's abuse is hardly surprising when considering Gamer's overall contempt for the viewer. But it is indicative of their intent.  It may seem like N/T are trying to invade Hollywood and change the game with truly off-the-wall creations, but they are really just trying to see that the bar for genre movies plummets to the shallow depths of their imagination. I could almost respect N/T if they were truly avant-garde (as some have labeled them) and dispensed with the lame story beats and tacked on character motivation, filling the time with blood geysers and whatever else they get pumped about. But they end up just playing by all the same rules that they purport to break.  And that is perhaps what is most insidious about their brand of genre entertainment. It's the same old thing, only far more obnoxious. They basically make Joel Silver pictures minus anything resembling wit. Fair Game is more avant-garde in its awful-ness than Gamer. 

Certain movies are critic-proof, made as a deliberate "fuck-you" to good taste. The movies of John Waters and the Jackass films come to mind. They act as an exploration into the nature of entertainment and reveal truths about our caveman selves that have not been erased in the modern age. People getting hurt is funny. People making poops is funny. But the Jackass and Water's movies, while profane and debauched, have a sweetness to them, an innocence even, that makes them charming even while they are covering the lens in vomit. The "movies" of Neveldine/Taylor also strive for a critic-proof excess, but are so relentlessly mean and ugly that they end up saying more about the makers and less about the watchers. This is especially true since both Crank 2 and Gamer have underperformed badly at the box office, proving that while the world can be an ugly place, audiences are not fully prepared to turn it into the irredeemable shithole that Neveldine/Taylor wish it to be.

I love exploitation movies and I love trash, but I just can't abide Neveldine/Taylor's brand of of it, which reeks of Red Bull and Jaggermeister. They make trash for dudes who pop their collars and douse themselves in Axe Body Spray. It's just not cool trash. One could derive a certain amount of enjoyment out of their stylistic excesses, if the implications weren't so unsettling. A shot where spattered blood, glowing under the blacklights of a rave, is used as lubrication for a faux-sapphic display of skank could be hilarious if it didn't ride through your brain like a horsemen of the apocalypse.

Some will call this satire, that N/T are critiquing the Internets digital reshaping of our culture, but I don't buy it. I purposely watched the director interviews on this and the Crank 2 discs because I wanted to see what these guys had to say for themselves. They do not come off as satirists, I'm sorry. They are capital "D" dudes who aren't commenting on or critiquing the cruelty and machismo of the 80's action movies they grew up with. They are simply trying to frantically one-up them.



Do they sound like knowing satirists?

With this latest movie, Neveldine and Taylor have truly put bro's before ho's and created a masterpiece for assholes. The retarded Sci and illiterate Fi of Gamer doesn't posit a world where technology-fuelled machismo has been taken to its logical conclusion, but a world where Neveldine/Taylor movies have been taken to their logical conclusion. Read like that, Gamer is a truly chilling cautionary tale.

Review // TOMBOY - A dream girl for gear heads

This is another one from the Too Cool For School Collection. I've lost count of how many of these I've watched. They're starting to blur together into a smear of boobs, bad ADR, drum machines beats and more boobs. I'm not complaining.

This collection of shit films, which I initially derided after only seeing one movie, has since proved pretty damn reliable. Tomboy is yet another gem, not quite as terrible as the others, that has me regretting my pre-adolescent reliance on the Porky's series for my boobs shots. Defunct Crown International, the b-movie house that is responsible for the treats in this collection (or abominations, however you want to see it) seemed to have a simple mandate that they followed religiously: fulfill the torrid fantasies of teenaged boys. Coach is about fucking your hot gym teacher. My Tutor is about fucking your hot French tutor. And the particular fantasy realized in Tomboy is that of the hot girl who doesn't know she's hot and who likes cars and racing and cool shit. And you see her boobs a bunch of times.



Betsy Russell plays Tommy the Tomboy and despite her stilted, awkward acting, she is a fairly charming character that keeps you watching. She is a mechanic that constantly blows peoples minds with her chickness, eliciting "b-b-but you're a girl!" responses from the guys that cross her path. She's into race cars and rebuilding engines and doesn't much care for the fancy clothes or girly stuff that her friend Seville is into. Seville is a girly-girl wannabe dancer and her lascivious dance routines are some of the funniest moments in the movie. In fact, Seville is so girly and Tommy such a tomboy that you wonder what at all they have in common and why they're such good friends.

There's a sweetness about Tommy that makes you want to see her win the big race and get the guy. The guy in question is Randy Starr, a race car driving local celebrity. Tommy has his poster hanging over her work bench and she stares at it dreamily. When Ryan shows up at the shop one day with his drunken silver-spoon promoter (played by Eric Douglas, Michael's sleazier younger brother, wait, maybe not sleazier) sparks fly between him and Tommy. She worships his skills on the tracks, but acts as if she's uninterested in men romantically. This doesn't last long before Tommy and Randy become lovey-dovey in a series of hilarious montages that show them dirt-biking, wrestling and sliding down water slides.

There isn't much conflict in the movie until late in the story when Tommy and Randy get challenged to race each other to see who has the better car and who is the better driver. Of course, Tommy beats Randy

Apparently Russell was in the 80's trash flick Avenging Angel which I continuously passed over in my youth. In it she plays a former prostitute who is pulled back to the streets to take vengeance on a gang. I have to see this movie because I can't even imagine Besty Russell as a badass wielding a switchblade. Actually, fuck it, I don't have to imagine it thanks to Youtube.



Yeah, gotta see that.

The weird thing I couldn't figure out about Tomboy is who exactly this movie was directed at. The two main characters are girls, which usually suggests a female-driven picture. Their struggles to get taken seriously, their attempts at finding love and their eventual triumphs over adversity and narrow-minded attitudes all suggest this was meant to be an empowering movie for teenaged girls. Except both Tommy and Seville are constantly taking their clothes off, Seville in particular. At one point in the middle of a party, for no apparent reason she strips down to her panties and does a skanky dance with a room full of middle-aged businessmen cheering her on. Like I said, I was confused about the tone slightly. This would be like the girls of The Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants occasionally taking showers together while talking about their strong emotional bonds.

The constant stream of boobs and the fact that Tommy seems like a character straight of a wet dream steer me toward thinking this movie was directed at boys exclusively, like the rest of the Crown International pictures I've seen. Ultimately, I can't really call it either way. Maybe its a weird hybrid picture that's intended to make girls feel like they can do anything while simultaneously giving boys boners.