Director Justin Lin returns for his fourth and final installment, and I hope they gave him a hell of a gold watch. When he came along there was this one really enjoyable POINT BREAK ripoff and one ridiculous sequel and he had to follow up without the original cast or characters. The series was left for dead. But he did a great job with TOKYO DRIFT, then reunited Vin Diesel and Paul Walker for FAST AND FURIOUS, then brought back almost the entire team and added The Rock for FAST FIVE. With FURIOUS SIX he takes everything he learned from those movies and supercharges the engine and adds spoilers and shit. Having the whole team (minus Don Omar and Tego Calderon, plus Michelle Rodriguez) together isn’t a novelty the second time around, so to make up for that he kicks the action sequences into ridiculous new extremes. Which is saying alot in a FAST AND FURIOUS – have you seen these movies?

But that’s not at the expense of the characters and themes of the series. I know some people think that’s dumb, I got buddies who came aboard for TOKYO DRIFT and don’t like the later ones as much because they expect you to be interested in Brian and Mia’s marriage and that Vince is back and stuff like that. Well, I am interested. To me half the appeal of these movies is their sincerity about codes of honor and brotherhood and finding the good in people. All the talk about “this is what we do” and “this is what I am” and “this is what we’re about.” Diesel family values. The other half of the appeal is cars jumping off bridges, people jumping from one car to another, cars driving backwards real fast, etc.

I watched the trailer over and over again so that gave away alot, including the great premise that The Rock’s character Hobbs (the Interpol-or-whatever cop who was after them in FAST FIVE) gets Torreto and his team to agree to chase down another infamous crew of fast-car-driving thieves led by Shaw (Luke Evans, the Welsh Joseph Gordon-Levitt) who are trying to steal dangerous military technology to sell to the highest bidder. What’s in it for “the team” (as Toretto calls them at least once)? #1, full pardons for the many crimes that have kept them exiled in beautiful exotic locations. #2, a chance to find Letty (Michelle Rodriguez), who we thought died in part 4 but was revealed to be still alive during the credits of part 5.

I love these type of DIRTY DOZEN/Snake Plissken bad-guys-that-are-really-good-guys-working-for-the-good-guys scenarios, including the mission-giving scene where they all stand around a table and the boss man lays out the plan. This is a great character for The Rock, such a charismatic actor who has been in need of a great character. Hobbs is always at 100% intensity and has a ton of great lines because he speaks almost entirely in macho team leader or inspirational coach type phrasing. In must be impossible to talk to that guy without instinctively puffing your chest out.

I like that the bad guys are a more sophisticated version of what Toretto’s crew were in their hijacking days, even down to the grappling hooks. They’re from an infamous “vehicular warfare” military unit and drive cars that look like a cross between Mad Max and Formula 1. They have a similar racial and gender makeup to Toretto’s crew, and it’s pointed out that they’re like evil twins (a bodybuilder named Kim Kold is the counterpart to Hobbs, Joe Taslim from THE RAID the counterpart to Han, etc.). But philosophically they’re explicit opposites of the Toretto team, who always talk about family and having each other’s back, who forgive Letty even after she shoots them, while Shaw talks about his people as parts that need to be replaced when they don’t work and kills a guy who failed him. The Fast and Furiosophy is to find the good in people (and let them go if you’re a cop), to understand and forgive and make bros with the other side. There’s no bonding with these assholes, though. They will not be fight brothers.

The biggest addition to the cast is former MMA and Muay Thai champ Gina Carano as Hobbs’s new partner Riley. Of course it’s not the showcase for her that HAYWIRE was, but she’s not wasted. She gets to beat up several people and do painful looking submission holds and takedowns. One downside: after the crystal clear action filmatics of HAYWIRE it’s easy to notice they’re shooting her fights too close up. The hand-to-hand here is generally shot that way, the one problem I had with the movie. Still, I found it mostly pretty clear, with some great moves including a flying headbutt and a Rock/Diesel tag team wrestling move.

There’s a pretty long talky section in the middle of the movie. I like it but it feels a little leaden compared to FAST FIVE. That’s forgotten instantly when you get to the chase scene where the bad guys are driving a tank the wrong way on a freeway and intentionally flattening innocent commuters, some of them getting out of their cars and fleeing in terror. This and the even more outrageous climax are the most exhilarating American action I’ve seen on screen in a long god damn time. If you want something that is physically possible then never, ever watch this movie, but if you want to see the FAST AND FURIOUS staples of driving fast, crashing hard and telling somebody else to take the wheel so you can climb out and jump off taken about as far over-the-top as imaginable by humans, then this is your movie. (This is our movie.)

There’s a pretty cool “previously on THE FAST AND THE FURIOUS” montage for the opening credits where you get to see their hairstyles and shit change over the years. But it’s interesting to think how much other things have changed. The music and the macho-love attitude have stayed intact, but the gaudy neon colors and show-offy digital camera moves of 2001 are pretty much left in the dust. The series was started to exploit a street racing culture based around Japanese cars painted in bright colors with fluorescent lights on them and shit. Part 2 had a girl in a pink car with an anime self-portrait on a dashboard screen. Now the series prefers American muscle cars in dark colors, and only Brian maintains a loyalty to imports. (Dom and Brian fight for the baby’s loyalties by giving him toys of their cars from part 1! I can’t help but dream of a rebootmaquel with the baby grown up in a post-apocalyptic future.)

Remember how they used to always do the shots where the camera moves through the driver’s seat or even the engine and rotates around as the surrounding blur outside the windows? The races were special effects sequences. Now, with Lin’s style (and improved digital technology, no doubt) they are way crazier but have a more organic look to them. The action scenes are incredibly complex, cutting between multiple characters and vehicles, communicating story and location over long stretches, and integrating live stunts with effects so that you don’t really think about which is which.

There are moments in the opening and closing of this movie that really sum up what I love about the series. In the opening, Dom and Brian (still wearing Pumas) seem to be having that race they always want to have, but it turns out they’re racing back to the house because Mia (Brian’s wife, Dom’s sister, played by Jordana Brewster) has just given birth. They get to the house and they’re assured that everything is all right and as Brian is about to go inside Dom says, “Brian.” And Brian turns to hear what Dom has to say about how when he enters this room his whole life is going to change and they’ll leave behind their outlaw ways.

But why did he stop to listen to that when his wife is in there with their first child!? Because in THE FAST AND THE FURIOUS the only thing that’s more important than brotherhood is listening to whatever Dom has to say. Think of how far we’ve come: in part 1 Brian was an undercover cop trying to put Dom behind bars. Now they’re so close their conversation takes precedence over the miracle of birth.

The other moment I want to discuss is the beautiful visual punchline to the epic action climax. I don’t want to ruin it so skip this and the next paragraph if you haven’t seen it yet. The last part of the movie is a really long sequence involving cars chasing a plane down a runway. It goes on for so long this runway might as well be the trench on the Death Star. I mean, I don’t know how fast they’re driving or how long the scene goes on, but 15 miles would probly be a conservative estimate of how far they travel, and the runway just keeps going.

After the plane has been blown up the cars are skidded out and there’s a wall of flaming wreckage and our heroes stand dramatically surveying the damage and contemplating what they’ve done. The camera slowly pans around to show all the debris and then you see it… yep, right there, right after where they stopped. It’s the end of the runway.

It’s a transcendent moment because it shows us the different levels the movie can work on at the same time. This is a dramatic moment. Crazy shit has gone down. One of the good guys has just died, the fate of another is still in question. And right in the middle of this there’s this little acknowledgment that yes, the action scene we just did is completely ridiculous, and we don’t care, because it’s more important to us to be awesome than to make sense. The audience laughed but I don’t think at the expense of the drama going on. It’s powerful and it’s hilarious and one doesn’t void the other.

Tell me this: what other part six is there that’s anywhere near this good? I can think of only one contender but you wouldn’t agree with me because it’s REVENGE OF THE SITH. How many part 6′s are gonna be widely considered better than their part 1s?

With this installment THE FAST AND THE FURIOUS officially surpasses DEATH WISH as the longest running series where I like every installment. I have some concerns about the next one. It’s ridiculous to rush an installment to be done next summer, and although I’m curious to see what James DEATH SENTENCE Wan will do with the series I can’t have faith in it like i did the guy who continually upped the ante for four movies in a row. But it looks like Lin might’ve wanted to end on this one anyway. It comes full circle in two different ways: it brings the whole family back to the very picnic table where they started in the first movie 12 years ago, and it closes the loop on the much-discussed-at-least-by-people-like-me-TOKYO-DRIFT-Han’s-death timeline. At the same time it sets up an exciting storyline for the next one (thanks for spoiling that months ahead of time, internet.)

If the next one’s not as good that’s okay, just turn it off when the credits start and this one makes a perfect ending. And really, it’s hard to imagine how Lin could go any bigger than this one. Might as well quit while he’s way ahead (he used NOS).

POST-REVIEW SUPER SPOILER SECTION: I wasn’t the only one in the audience who was audibly disappointed by Riley’s betrayal. We liked having her on OUr team! I loved watching the giant guy and the little lady running around together. Would’ve been down for a spin-off. It was funny that she screamed when she went out the plane. I don’t believe that Gina Carano would ever scream.

Well, I didn’t get my wish that they’d say Han pulled a Tim Dog in TOKYO DRIFT. I was almost convinced I was gonna get it, too, because toward the end of the movie Tyrese and Ludacris tell him they’ve got his back if he needs anything. Made me hope that was gonna be them getting out of the car and they’d pull him out of the wreck. No, he still dies, but now it was murder and not a racing accident. It’s interesting that this reconfigures the whole end of TOKYO DRIFT. Originally it seemed like Vin Diesel just rolled into town looking for some street racing challenges. Now we know that he was called there by Han’s murderer. He’s there for revenge. And doesn’t this logically mean that Lucas Black should be in the next movie, at least at the beginning? I hope so.

POSSIBLE PART 7 SPOILER: according to Wikipedia the villain we see here will be Shaw’s brother. FAST AND FURIOUS WITH A VENGEANCE. I was a little disappointed to read that, actually, because I liked the idea of some guy having a problem with Dom and he has to figure out why. I’m sure there are people who are mad at him all over the world. On the other hand, a connection to Shaw would be a good excuse to bring back Riley with a grappling hook scar on her chest.

Take a look.

For those who read electronic fake books instead of human ones there is a bonus, apparently the ebook includes Thorpe’s recently unearthed 11-page handwritten treatment for the book. So that’s probly pretty cool.

For a pretty in-depth book-to-movie comparison I wrote many years ago click here.

Party’s over, though. Trekkos want their shit back. I’ve heard complaints from fans about the new ones not being truly in the spirit of the old movies and syndicated tv series. I mean it seems weird to be mad at the filmatists for having fun things happen instead of just people having long conversations in one room while looking at a screen with a picture of space and then walking down a hallway and then going back to the first room, but I do think they’re probly semi-legitimate grievances. STAR TREK did carve out its own niche where it’s different from the other shows, and is about explorers and talking and philosophy or whatever. So maybe some of the new movies shouldn’t be about fighting an evil warlord. And if you guys all agree you want to go back to the approach they had for the previous 20 years then I’m fine going back to only watching one every six or seven years and then saying “Yeah, that was fine I guess. James Cromwell is always good.”

But STAR TREK INTO DARKNESS aka STAR TREK 2: THE [SPOILER] OF [SPOILER] is still pretty balanced. This time the Star Trek girl and I were able to have equally strong feelings about it being okay. I guess with the characters and world already established we’ve gotten some of the fun stuff out of the way, now we’re just left with a plot about a villain trying to do something villainous and some twists and reversals on famous things from previous Star Trek. Fun, but kinda empty. There’s an obvious war on terror allegory in there (Star Trek thinks we should’ve tried to capture bin Laden instead of shoot him I think?), but it doesn’t feel too heavy… until the end credits when they dedicate the film to post 9-11 veterans. A little much, there. Might be a little bit of the “EMPIRE STRIKES BACK is the dark one so that’s how you do a good part 2″ syndrome.

The story still focuses heavily on Star Fleet Captain and #1 Beastie Boys fan James Ti Kirk (Chris Pine, SMOKIN’ ACES), who’s still struggling between a great respect for and friendship with Spock (Zachary Quinto) and being annoyed as fuck at his by-the-book-to-a-fault, emotionless Vulcan ways. The big conflict in the beginning is that Kirk breaks the rules to save Spock from a space volcano and Spock repays him by filing a completely honest report that gets his ass fired. I hope part 3 is more of a mismatched buddies movie, preferably a remake of LETHAL WEAPON.

Then there is a bombing, real life Harry Potter character Benedict Cumberbatch is the suspect, he runs off to a predominantly Klingon neighborhood to hide out (Space Afghanistan), and the Star Gang are given a mission by Peter Weller (DRAGON EYES) to blow him up. Which might be a bad idea because of morals, starting wars, etc.

[I'M JUST GONNA SPOIL SHIT FROM THIS POINT ON] I think we all guessed this but yeah, Cumberbatch’s character eventually introduces himself as Khan.They tried to not advertise it since it’s not revealed for the first third of the movie, and more power to them. But if there’s two things the internet will not tolerate it’s 1) surprises 2) spoilers.

I want to point out that he never says his full name, nor does he put it in writing. For all we know he’s a totally different Khan than we’re thinking of, which would explain why he looks and sounds and acts and dresses like a totally different guy. In my opinion there is an 80% chance that it is actually some dude named Con, short for Conrad, and he just happens to have almost the same backstory as the other more imposing character Khan played by Ricardo Montalban in the original part 2. I mean I’m sure Khan wishes he could do kung fu and space parkour like Con, but then he wouldn’t get to wear that cool jacket and have long hair, so he’s not gonna cry about it.

On the other hand, this guy does have alot of wrath. I noticed he was pretty wrathful. But if we’re gonna go along with this conspiracy theory that it’s the same Khan Noonein Singh character then we should consider a few things. According to the backstory, Khan ruled the earth from 1992-1996 and then was frozen. That means he has not had a chance to see THE MATRIX, it’s only a coincidence that he dresses like Neo in this one. If he went to the movies in the months before he got frozen we can guess he probly saw INDEPENDENCE DAY, maybe TWISTER or MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE, perhaps FARGO. Actually he does seem more like a guy that would see FARGO then some of the big blockbusters. Maybe SLING BLADE too. Maybe TRAINSPOTTING.

But it’s hard to say. His last movie could’ve been SPACE JAM. Last CD purchased could’ve been All Eyez On Me.

Do you think it would be embarrassing if they took him out of cryo-freeze and he was wearing a Spice Girls t-shirt? I don’t think so. I think it would humanize him.

Swear to God, I dozed off and missed this part. what is my problem

Anyway, the first movie had young Kirk listen to “Sabotage” by the Beastie Boys, in this one it’s “Body Movin’ (Fat Boy Slim remix)” during a threesome with twin sisters who have tails. (not kidding.) So it would be interesting if these two got into a conversation about that. Of course Khan would only know up through Ill Communication, but that’s their best stuff anyway. He would be able to describe to Kirk what it was like having those albums as contemporary music instead of oldies.

Despite being very white and not in any way Montalbanesque, Cumberbatch is pretty decent casting because he does project an arrogant intelligence and has a good dragony voice. Come to think of it he’s more like Hans Grueber than Khan. But he’s a good version of a pretty standard villain. I prefer Eric Bana in the first one, he was much stranger.

For a time they do find kind a way to be surprising, they have this evil terrorist explain the full context of what’s going on and all the sudden he doesn’t seem as bad. And he has special abilities and shared goals and they actually work together. But it’s not a Riddick situation, it turns out he can’t be trusted and it goes back to the standard bad guy battle that you expect. I would’ve liked it better if in this timeline the ultimate villain was more of a loose cannon good guy. At least it would’ve been something different. Going back to what was expected is kind of a waste. I hope for the next one they just come up with a new story instead of trying to comment on a previous one.

Anyway, it should be called STAR TREK 2: THE BRIEF COOPERATION OF KHAN. Or CON.

As far as the criticisms about Abrams turning what was formerly peaceful, thoughtful science nerd sci-fi into violent action, I don’t think it’s entirely fair because that’s in fact what this story is all about. Weller is using the Kryptonian fate of Vulcan as an excuse to rattle sabers, he’s trying to militarize Star Fleet and purposely start a war with the Klingons. He’s the bad guy. Kirk, meanwhile, learns the lesson of not listening to assholes like that. He takes the mission for revenge purposes (or wrath) but Scotty (still Simon Pegg) tries to talk him out of even having torpedoes on the ship and then resigns because of it. A conscientious objector. And not as a joke, he turns out to be 100% correct and also saves the day by not being aboard the ship because he resigned.

On the other hand, it is true that in the climax Spock fills in for an indisposed Kirk by abandoning his logical, emotionless ways to run around with a laser gun and kick ass. So that sort of betrays the larger message of the movie that problems should be solved with intellect and careful consideration. And although they perfectly set it up for the next one to be about exploring and not about military conflicts you can imagine that fans of the first two might be thrown off by that.

It was good to see this cast again, including Bruce Greenwood as Kirk’s tough lovin’ mentor. It’s kind of weird though that they keep talking about “do you remember when I convinced you to join? it was in a bar just like this” and stuff like that. Guys, this is not part 7, you don’t have to remind us of the beginning. This is only the second one. We can rewatch the first one. You don’t have to give us so much “previously on Star Trek” business.

I do think Bones (Karl Urban, DREDD), Sulu (John Cho) and Uhura (Zoe Saldana, COLOMBIANA) get a little short changed in this one, they could use a little more to do. Uhura at least gets a cool scene where she negotiates with Klingons in their own language, something she picked up while signing autographs at conventions, no doubt.

Oh yeah, and Chekov (Anton Yelchin, li’l Michael Biehn from TERMINATOR SALVATION). I forgot to even list him, he was in this one so little.

I know what you’re thinking. You don’t care about any of this. What you care about is where was Tyler Perry? That’s what I want to know too. I don’t think his character is in this one. A little trivia: apparently the alien sitting in front of the holding cell was played by Heather Langenkamp from A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET. Also Amanda Foreman is in there somewhere, she previously worked with Abrams on a television show called “Felicity” according to research that I did. I don’t think she’s the one with the hip blond haircut though, I don’t know who that was.

In conclusion, I enjoyed this movie, but it’s not as fun as the first one. If the next one’s not any better I think we can write this series off. And if STAR WARS isn’t a whole hell of alot better I got some villagers on call and I’m buying them all pitchforks.

viewing format: Real Imax, fake 3D. There’s really not an organic way to watch this since some of it was shot Imax, but none of it was shot 3D, and you can’t watch it in 2D Imax. The 3D is more noticeable than many conversions, but sometimes gives them bizarre head shapes and stuff. The worst part is the opening action scene which has lots of whip pans and shakiness that probly read fine in 2D but in fake 3D left my eyeballs spinning like a cartoon car crash.

The cast includes Reed Diamond from Homicide: Life On the Street, the younger sister that was added later on in Growing Pains, two people from the LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT remake, and nobody else you ever heard of except for like ten or fifteen people that starred in Joss Whedon’s TV shows. A couple of them got intrusive applause when they showed up on screen or after their scenes were over, and to be fair at least nobody in the audience was dressed up like Firefly characters, but come on people, it’s called self control, and it can be yours. I believe in you.

MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING is a romantical comedy about a couple of parties and weddings at Joss Whedon’s house. There’s this one guy Benedick (Alexis Denisof), instead of just changing his name to Benedict like anybody else would do he decides to keep the name but then overcompensate by strutting around arrogantly all the time. And this Beatrice (Amy Acker) thinks he’s an asshole and always gives him a bunch of shit about it, but really it’s like kids throwing rocks at each other, it turns out she actually has a thing for assholes.

There’s some comedy about how they overhear each other or other characters talking about them having special feelings for each other, they hide and comedically eavesdrop either in the background or foreground of the shot. There is some slapstick, falling down stairs and what not. Since I saw it with a SIFF audience as well as 3,000 people who worship these actors from TV shows there was an uncomfortably overblown amount of laughing and cheering for a very modest and slight movie like this. You might even say it’s much a– nah, I can’t do it. But I can’t hold that against the movie, it is well done and should be amusing enough under regular circumstances.

It’s a simple and appealing approach. It takes place in the modern day, but with the original language intact. The actors use their regular American accents and modern film emoting, which helps a nitwit like me to follow the archaic language I think. There’s alot of room for the actors to add in their own humor with facial expressions and contemporary tones that fit with the scenes. Or like for example Nathan Fillion (DRACULA 2000), playing his character Dogberry as an oafish TV-style police detective, makes it clear at the end of a scene that he locked his keys in his car. But it’s all visual, they don’t have to add any new dialogue or anything.

In a way this is a weird thing for Whedon to do because he’s usually more of a writer than a director. He gets to play with the staging but not the story or the dialogue, which would usually be his bread and butter. There’s a slight cheap-video-y quality to the photography here (and to some of the music, credited to Whedon, who is no Clint Eastwood). He’s certainly not trying to expand his visual chops, and not trying to cinema-tize the text like my favorite Shakespearist Julie Taymor would. But on the other hand this project shows off his ability to find these talented, mostly unsung actors, get them to work well together, shine a spotlight on their innate charm and humor, and in this case give the two leads to actors he likes who are usually confined to television. Denisof and Acker are very likable, which is crucial because the love relationship is way too superficial to truly get invested in it. With the wrong actors it would be easy to hate these two. (I do think Denisof goes a little too far with the comedic mugging in a couple scenes, but only a little.)

Seriously, Reed Diamond is really good in this in the role of Don Pedro. I doubt anybody else is gonna single him out, so I’ll be the one to do it. You know, if you watched Homicide he was Mike Kellerman, the kind of dickish guy who was always on the verge of going too far. He’s not usually a show-offy actor or a leading man type, including here. The whole cast are good at this, but I particularly liked his way of delivering Shakespeare’s dialogue to sound like perfectly natural, modern speech, creating a character through the voice and gestures that somehow overshadows the words. (Clark Gregg is another standout in this category, but I know he’s hot shit right now because he tricked Captain America into thinking he was dead, so he’ll get the credit he deserves for it.)

Whedon and Shakespeare must’ve had this script laying around for a while because some of the content is kinda dated in my opinion. It’s all about these men negotiating for marriages, there’s a woman who gets called out as an alleged-ho at her own wedding, and faints on the spot, almost dies of Amidala disease. The love stories are really more like childish crushes, they don’t even know each other and pretend to hate each other but then declare passionate love and get married one day later and it’s meant to be accepted as actual true love. I’m not saying that Shakespeare should’ve done better, I’m saying that some of it is not a perfect fit for this modern and down-to-earth context, that’s why for me this stuff works better with Taymor’s crazy puppets and giant wolf heads and motorcycle armies and shit. But it’s no big deal. It’s a cute movie.

As far as movies filmed at somebody’s house I’d definitely rank this above PARANORMAL ACTIVITY.

By the way, SIFF is (probly like film festivals in general) notorious for awkward post-film Q&As with ridiculous questions from asskissers, self-promoters, occasional ax-grinders and other weirdos. That combined with this fawning crowd of Whedomaniacs could’ve been off the charts, so hats off to SIFF for having a reasonably competent moderator to interview the director and cast rather than taking questions from the crowd. I usually believe in democracy but I’m willing to make an exception here. I know, slippery slope and all that, but I’m comfortable with this choice.

Anyway, it’s the only fun a young man has these days and the cops even interfere with that. Ruin everything.

The boys are about to get involved in some weird shit. There’s some sinister business going on nearby. A burly guy named Ryu and a teenage girl are on the run with a little boy whose face is wrinkled like an old man. Riot cops are chasing them with dogs. This happens in the middle of a traffic jam. Ryu has to shoot the dogs right in front of people. He’s part of an underground group trying to liberate these kids from government experiments. When Kaneda and friends get swept up as suspects in a bombing, Tetsuo ends up in the program himself, undergoing treatments that unleash astonishing brain powers.

Kaneda’s real young but he’s our badass hero. Kind of a futuristic James Dean who color-coordinates his leather jacket with his motorcycle (both bright red). His bike has corporate logos on it, including Canon for some reason. I don’t know if those were on there when he stole it or if even the rebellious gangsters of the future worship the gods of capital. Or have sponsors.

Whatever the deal is with that, Kaneda teams up with the rebels, hoping they can find his old friend. Meanwhile Tetsuo sits confused in his hospital bed, suffering from crazy hallucinations and psychic messages from more of the creepy old-faced kids, one of whom looks exactly like Louie Anderson. I believe this was originally made as a spin-off of the cartoon Life With Louie.

As a side note, it’s weird that one of the things comedians used to do when they were really successful was have a cartoon show about themselves as kids. I believe Roseanne Barr also had one, and Damon Wayans, and Bill Cosby, and John Candy if that counts. The comedy landscape is pretty different now but I wouldn’t rule out Life With Louis C.K.

AKIRA has alot of action, including but not limited to a chase on a GI JOE-esque flying snowmobile type vehicle Kaneda hijacks in a sewer tunnel. We always figured there were mutant alligators down there but we didn’t know about the cool vehicles.

The movie slowly reveals bits of this history, that Old Tokyo was blown up by this psychic kid named Akira, now worshipped by the cult and the basis of this scientific study that Tetsuo is mixed up in. What nobody seems to understand yet is that Tetsuo is powerful too, and growing, maybe to be more powerful than Akira ever was. Which would be bad. I mean maybe he could use the powers to clean up the city, pimp out motorcycles and protect dogs from being shot, but he doesn’t really have that kind of personality. He’s an immature little punk with an inferiority complex because he was picked on as a kid and even resents the kid who protected him (Kaneda). They have that childhood bond but Kaneda doesn’t mind putting Tetsuo in his place, and Tetsuo’s not gonna accept the putting now that he has super powers that make Carrie White seem like, you know, an ordinary non-raging-telekinetic-powered person. So when he gets out, which he does immediately, everybody’s in fuckin trouble.

I guess this must be the inspiration for that movie CHRONICLE, where a bitter little asshole kid gets powers and instead of using it to blow girls skirts up or even ruin the prom he goes out into town to just stand there and create a whirlwind of destruction, basically whipping his psychic dick out and slapping everybody in the face with it repeatedly. Doing helicopters with it. By this point the military have pushed aside the dumb politicians behind these experiments, maybe the most positive portrayal of a military coup I’ve seen on film. (I’m not familiar enough with the Louie cartoon to know if that’s a theme they explore alot.)

So it’s Tetsuo facing off against bombs and satellites, plus the psychic old people kids, plus his best friend Kaneda has the balls to go right up to him and call him out on being a dick. The animation here is especially great. He gets an arm blown off and telekinetically weaves garbage into veins and muscle tissue to create a new one. He gets out of control and starts pulsating and throbbing, inflating into a giant, vaguely baby-shaped pile of mutated organs, growing around his friends, suffocating them. Don’t do that, kids.

From what I understand this is one of the landmarks of the Japanese anime animation cartoons which is not just for kids anymore, etc. Makes sense ’cause I’ve never seen anything like it. The story is very dense and I don’t really understand alot of it, but the filmatists make up for it with a fully realized dystopian world, hyper-detailed animation, chaotic atmosphere and highly imaginative psychedelic imagery. Worth watching even for those of us who will never wear a cape or carry an oversized sword into a convention center.

…

UPDATE: I have some love for the people in capes with the oversized swords doing their thing. I shouldn’t have ended on that note, ’cause it sounds negative. I just mean I’m not an anime guy and I thought it was worth watching, so you might too.

Do you know about a female pro-wrestler from the ’80s called Magnificent Mimi, and if so did you know she wrote, produced and starred in a series of low budget action movies in the ’90s, and if so did you know that one of them was from the director of FORBIDDEN ZONE and SHRUNKEN HEADS? I didn’t know any of these things until recently. Mimi will be popping up again in a major series of reviews I’ve been working on that I’ll hopefully be ready to unveil next week. Until then read my review of STREETS OF RAGE over on Daily Grindhouse.

Moore is a contributor to many websights and magazines, most importantly Fangoria (because I subscribe to that) and he has an awesome-sounding book coming out next year called WORLD GONE WILD: A SURVIVOR’S GUIDE TO POST-APOCALYPTIC MOVIES, where he reviews more than 800 post-apocalypse movies and interviews many of their creators. His second book will be even more up our alley because it’s all about action stars. And I know he’s going all out for that because he told me he interviewed Lorenzo Lamas and asked him about NIGHT OF THE WARRIOR.

Here he talks Jesse V. Johnson, who discusses working with everyone from Steve Austin to Steven Spielberg. It’s a nice talk that’s very frank about what it’s like making low budget movies for video or the SyFy channel.

Thank you David for the interview and the rest of you I hope you enjoy it.

“Making it Personal”
An interview with Jesse V. Johnson

by david j. moore

   So few directors working in the direct-to-video market are giving it their best when tasked with helming actioners starring the likes of Jean-Claude Van Damme, Steven Seagal, or “Stone Cold” Steve Austin. Very few notable exceptions are Ernie Barbarash, Isaac Florentine, and Jesse V. Johnson, and what these guys are doing is taking their jobs seriously; they make it personal and they care about what they’re directing.

Director Jesse V. Johnson (photo by david j. moore)

   Johnson, the nephew of the infamous stuntman Vic Armstrong, has been in the movie business for several decades, working as a stuntman and stunt coordinator on big films like Charlie’s Angels, Mission Impossible III, and The Amazing Spiderman. He began his journey as a director when he directed the low budget direct-to-video film Pit Fighter, which co-starred Scott (Ninja) Adkins. Other impressive titles on Johnson’s resume as a director are Alien Agent with Mark Dacascos and Darren Shahlavi, The Last Sentinel with Don “The Dragon” Wilson, The Fifth Commandment with Rick Yune, and this year’s The Package, starring Steve Austin and Dolph Lundgren. Clearly, Johnson is building an impressive list of action films, all starring some of the best in the business.

You told me earlier that you tend to get your directing assignments because the star of the film requests you as the director. Was that the case on The Last Sentinel?

The Last Sentinel

Yeah, particularly on that one. I was called in. They had a director and they had a script, they’d actually been on preproduction on it. Don Wilson, who was the lead actor had found the money. I’d never quite gotten to the bottom of what happened, but basically he’d had a falling out with the director. The guy just walked. They had financing and they had Don. I was working on Beowulf at the time. I drove over there and listened to him and got him talking about himself, which is pretty easy to do with Don … he’d talk about the fight game and get very excited and animated. I’d written the script for The Last Sentinel a few years earlier for a friend of mine, Dominiquie Vandenberg [Pit Fighter], but we’d never been able to finance it. It looked like something that would have worked. It was about a guy who didn’t speak a lot, had a lot of shooting, martial arts, action in it.

That movie was released at the tail end of Don Wilson’s reign in the B-movie world. He really hasn’t done much since then. I thought it was a really great way to go out.

 I worked really, really hard with him. We tried to surround him with as many solid actors as possible. I think the biggest problem with it – and I think she’s wonderful – but Katie Sackoff … I think people were so expecting the film to be a Katie Sackoff movie.

Well, yeah, she’s on the cover of the DVD.

 It’s an innate sense of disappointment when you’re actually watching a movie about this quiet character [played by Wilson] who doesn’t say an awful lot. It’s actually a different kind of movie. I remember the awful disappointment in the VHS days when the movie was a completely different movie than the cover suggested. I watched how The Last Sentinel was received, and I was quite upset by it, really. If it had been anyone other than Katie, I think it would have been a better-received film.

You say you worked very hard on the film. Explain that.

 It was really about planning everything we could. Creating those drone costumes way ahead of time, getting the guys to rehearse … every movie requires an awfully large commitment as a director or a writer. You commit yourself to it. It becomes a reality. It’s a very strange place to go. With that film, it was particularly difficult. There were so many elements … we were trying to compete with bigger films, which was a huge mistake. At the time, I thought I was invincible. I thought I could do it.

You’ve worked on some huge movies as a stunt coordinator. You already mentioned Beowulf. How was it to transition from bigger films to this low budget action movie?

 We don’t really approach anything too differently. Obviously, people are being paid a lot more on those bigger ones, but you don’t ever try to water it down. You approach it with the same level of professionalism. Rehearsal time. It’s really a mental mindset. You commit to something even if it’s a slightly smaller scale. You’re not gonna have fifty guys, you’re gonna have five. You try to make it as good as possible. I’m very lucky in that I can go backwards and forwards between the two types. When I did The Package, I was coming off The Master and Lincoln, which I helped put together the big battle scene at the beginning. I did Thor with Kenneth Branagh. I’ve had the opportunity to work with some of the best directors, not only alive, but in the history of filmmaking. I’m able to watch them and their techniques, and then apply them to my kind of movies. The economy at that level is incredible. When you’re talking about Spielberg, you’re talking about one take and move on, but there’s an awful lot of rehearsal time and preparation. You’re talking about someone who’s at the very top of their game, but there’s no sense of waste or no sense of them throwing money at things to fix them. That’s the wonderful thing you come away with. You’re also talking about incredible humility that these guys have at that level. Yes, the budgets are different, but you don’t change your mindset when you’re making a movie.

You said earlier, “My kind of movie.” What is your kind of movie?

 I’m not sure I can define that because it changes from film to film. At the moment, what I’m desperately trying to do is to take a film that has action in it, and make it personal, and make it important to me, to make it resonate with an audience to a degree where they don’t notice the budget. It’s taken me six or seven pictures to learn that craft.

When do you think you’d finally found your niche or your style as a filmmaker?

 I’m still learning.

After The Last Sentinel, you did Pit Fighter.

 Yes. Then I did The Fifth Commandment.

I liked The Fifth Commandment. Rick Yune did a solid job in that. He wrote it and produced it as well, right?

The Fifth Commandment

It was certainly his baby. I worked enormously hard on it. We stepped off the plane in Thailand, myself, the AD and Rick, and there was a huge Thai crew that was assigned to us. We tried to make as good a film as possible. Rick was the boss, and also the lead actor, which, at the time, I wasn’t really equipped mentally to deal with. It’s good to know whom you’re serving. He asked me to make my kind of movie, and then would change his mind beforehand.

Rick Yune is the kind of guy who should have been given more starring film projects, but he had to go and do it himself.

 He’s a force of nature. What he should really do is direct a film himself. He should get an AD to trust him, and a stunt coordinator to work with him, perhaps a second unit director who can guide him because he has such a clear idea of what he wants. He could probably do that. We had a blast doing it. I felt there were elements in the story that should have been strengthened before we shot, but at the end of the day it was probably a journeyman production for me.

Are the films you’ve directed designed to be released directly to video? I saw The Package in a theater, but it was the only theater showing it. I was super excited to see it on a big screen.

 In my mind, they’re all destined for the movie theater. You cannot go out and aim to make a direct-to-DVD movie. You can’t do that. If you start honing yourself back and second-guessing … there are some people who work that way, but not me. I go out there and I make the best damn movie I possibly can. The best performances, the best camera angles, the best action. I do everything it takes, and I take it very personally. You are held back by your cost sometimes because it’s very expensive to release a movie in theaters. If you have a cast that has made movies theatrically and has failed theatrically, or if you have direct-to-DVD names, no one is going to release it theatrically. You know that going in. The moment we signed Eric Roberts for The Butcher, which was an enormously personal script that was actually one of my favorite pieces of material, the moment the producer signed Eric, I knew that 90% of my contacts that were waiting to see that film were not going to be interested any more. No matter how good a job I did, no matter how much of a statement I’d made, they wouldn’t come to the screening because of the casting. That’s a difficult place to find yourself. You cry a little bit about it and you go home. Eric is a cool actor, but the only way we were going to go theatrical was by not putting him on the poster or mentioning him anywhere, but of course they put him all over it. That’s how it goes. I love Eric, but he’ll say yes to anything with a paycheck. He will admit to it, so I don’t mind saying that. It just makes it extraordinarily difficult to get a good release.

You’ve worked with a lot of action guys who’ve made movies in the theatrical release world, but whose stars have fallen and now exclusively make movies for video. Talk about that.

 There’s a myriad of reasons why they make these movies. They have bills that need to be paid. Divorces, and trials and tribulations they go through. They say yes to a script that’s terrible, which they know is terrible, and it’s an ever-decreasing circle. There’s very few who manage to buck that. Steve [Austin] is doing really well at the moment. He’s being very careful about what he says yes to. The next three films he has to act in, he’s also producing, which gives him creative control. We’re talking about a script at the moment. He has an enormous amount of influence over it. This is exactly how you reinvent yourself, by taking control of these things. We were working on a fifteen day schedule on The Package …

You only had fifteen days for that one? Wow! You had a bunch of great action guys in that one: Jerry Trimble, Darren Shahlavi, Lundgren, and Austin. Talk about working with these guys.

 I’ve known Darren since England some 20 years ago. We have a long past together. We worked on Alien Agent together. What I like about Darren is that he’s a guy who’s continually honing his craft. He works like a madman five days a week at the gym learning these techniques. That’s how you survive, that’s how you create yourself. Darren is all of that. He’s also working on his acting. To me, his performance in The Package was so head and shoulders above what he did for me in Alien Agent, which I thought was good at the time. That just confirms that he’s someone to watch. Jerry Trimble is the same way. I’ve probably done four or five films with Jerry. I’ve worked with him as a stuntman in probably eight or nine movies. He’s just a phenomenal human being with a broad scope of knowledge of humanity. This is a guy who’s lived more lives than more people can hope to live. From “The Golden Boy” to being in Roger Corman pictures, to motivational speaker, and now working as a Hollywood stuntman. Most people would be happy to have one of those. I love him. I think he’s fantastic.

It’s so cool that you put him in front of the camera in a big way in The Package. He hadn’t done an action-type role in years.

 He’s great, he’s terrific.

The Package

Talk about the personas of some of the guys you’ve worked with. They carry with them their reputations from their glory days as action stars.

I come from a stunt background where I’ve dealt with a lot of champions, fight guys, motorcycle guys, guys who are at the very top of their game. You talk to a champion a little differently than with how you talk to a normal human being. They love being treated like normal people right up to the moment where you actually treat them like a normal human being. There’s a certain amount of deference, but also a sense of simpatico in that they know what I’ve done before as well, so I can at least pretend that I can come close to what they’ve done. They’re type “A” personalities. It takes a certain amount of energy to deal with them. If you engage these guys and look them in the eyes and talk to them … with Steve [Austin], I’d watched his earlier movies and I honestly couldn’t get through most of them, and so when I sat with him on the set [of The Package], he’d been really working on the character, and I sat with him quietly, and I asked him, “What was the deal with the other movies? Because what you’re doing here is acting, and when I watched your other movies I didn’t see the Steve I’m seeing here.” He said, “Yes, you’ve got no idea. They didn’t even talk to me. They put me in a position where the tape was on the floor and then kind of walked off and left me to do my thing.” The only thing that he could work out was that perhaps they were intimidated or scared by him. The movies were incomprehensible.

He’s untapped potential as far as I’m concerned.

 That’s exactly what I felt, and it made me happy when I thought about it a little more. He’s got incredible charm and an incredible sense of humor. It’s very rangy, it’s very distinct to south Texas, and he’s a little nervous of it when he’s around people who are ostensibly more educated or whatever. In actual fact, he’s twice as smart as they are, and once you bring that out, it’s a very sharp wit and very interesting. Most of the cool lines in The Package weren’t in the script. The lines that Steve gave were improv – he came up with those on set. They’re wonderful. No one knows Steve like Steve does. If you’re brave enough to kind of talk to him and engage him and find a common ground with him and a character and make him aware of that, you get a pretty cool performance. I’m really looking forward to working with him again. I think we can really do some stuff together. His first professional fight, he got paid forty bucks. I mean, these guys beat the shit out of each other. Pound for pound. They’re performing like gladiators. Ground-pounding and smacking. It’s not your grandma’s sport. He would also engage the audience. He would play the bad guy. Those guys know how to perform. If you can tap into that and bring it into the forefront, you’re gonna have something really good. As you said, he’s got so much untapped potential.

Talk about Alien Agent with Mark Dacascos.

Alien Agent

I did two for SyFy: The Last Sentinel and Alien Agent. There were certain things that were required of them like monsters … I dunno … I would love to work with Mark again. I worked my balls off on that script. The only thing they let me touch was the action. They would not let me touch the dialogue. There’s way too much dialogue in it. You don’t need action stars talking about their inner self. Especially with someone who’s as good an actor as Mark Dacascos is. He can do that page of dialogue with a look over and a look back, and the audience feels it. We had a very overwritten script in terms of dialogue. The producer on set literally made sure that all of the dialogue was being said as it was written. If we deviated from that, there were glances and “Well, this isn’t what you were signed on for …” I rewrote the action, and I think we had some fun action in it. But action without story is nothing. It’s pornography. It’s action for the sake of action; it’s the worst thing in the whole world. When you talk to film buffs and talk about the best action sequences, they’ll say Shane for the gunfight, and all of those films were an hour and fifteen minutes of character development and then an action scene. You feel the jeopardy that they’re in. You feel the excitement when they overcome. That’s why that action scene worked so beautifully. Anyway, I loved working with Mark and I loved working with Billy Zane in Alien Agent. We worked very hard together on a very short schedule. The films were not personal for me at this point. They didn’t get personal until The Butcher, which if there is ever a film I would like to go back and remake, it would be The Butcher. We did that film in such a hurry. I sat down with Eric Roberts and we went through the script with a red pencil and took out huge chunks of the movie because we didn’t have the time to do it all, which was very sad for me. That was my homage to the 70′s action movies like Point Blank.

Have you gotten any feedback from the fans of some of the action stars you’ve worked with?

 I’ve gotten an enormous amount of feedback. I open a Facebook page, and I literally have to take all of my personal stuff off because the page becomes a sounding board for my movies.

2013 has been a really bad year for action stars and their movies. Big action guys like Stallone, Schwarzenegger, and Statham have all had flops this year. Why do you think that is?

 It’s not just this year. You’re talking about an audience who at one time had nothing else but VHS action movies or DVDs to have a look at, but there are now beautifully designed and wonderfully animated videogames, and you’re competing with these things. And the audience has stopped going to movie theaters. There’s no need. Why should someone pay to see someone blow things up when you can be immersed in a first-person shooter at home? Especially if the movie’s story is not that good. The big and dumb movies are done. At one point, these guys filled theaters. But now their audience is playing videogames. The only way you’re going to get them back into the theater … it’s not that they don’t like movie theaters – they’ll go wherever it’s good. The only way to get them back in is to raise the level and the quality of the movie. There has to be some level of involvement with the action that makes the film that much more exciting. That’s my theory why movie theaters are being taken over by the Twilight-type movies. Pictures like The Package are a hell of a lot of fun. It’s made money for the guys who produced it, so it’s found its market. But it’s an ever- decreasing circle.

Is there anything else you want to add about any of your movies?

 Well, I hope people enjoyed The Package. In terms of it being a complete movie, I really do enjoy it. If anyone wants to know me through my work, I highly recommend watching it. But the next one is going to be even better.

I didn’t post about this while I was out of town, so if you missed it:

I accidentally discovered a doozy of an only-on-VHS-Vietnam-vet-ex-boxing-champion-with-metal-hand-bones-sent-on-secret-mission-to-Hawaii-to-kill-Henry-Silva movie called FISTS OF STEEL. Not the best movie I’ve seen for this column so far, but definitely the craziest. Details on Daily Grindhouse.

[by the way since the movie's been out a week or more in most countries this review is written in the spirit of HEAVY SPOILERS]

IRON MAN THREE takes the modern super hero movie and shakes it up a little bit, weirdly enough to be interesting and fun, but not well enough to be great. Directed and co-written by Shane Black, the writer of LETHAL WEAPON and THE LAST BOYSCOUT, it’s an odd mix of the ongoing Iron Man story and the unmistakable Shane Black style.

I know the script is originally written by Drew Pearce, but it’s got Black all over it: burnt out, mentally disturbed protagonist, conversational and self-aware first-person narration, most characters have witty responses to most situations, little moppet hardened by messy parental situation, constantly sets up movie conventions only to deflate them, and yes, it follows LETHAL WEAPON, THE LONG KISS GOOD NIGHT and KISS KISS BANG BANG in taking place at Christmas. Coincidentally it even has a crazy white guy and straight laced black guy buddy team.
I like that, but it’s messy. IRON MAN grounded its super hero adventure in some kind of a real world, then lightened the mood with Downey’s smartass responses. It’s not dour like a Batman movie, it’s alot of laughs, but the story is serious. In THREE Tony Stark is still constantly making wisecracks (even in serious moments like the one where he thinks he just let the woman he loves die but then finds out she’s alive), and on top of that you add Black’s many comical detours, even using the villains for silly comedy scenes, kind of a no-no in modern (or even good) super hero movies, which I’m sure is why he did it, but still.

It even opens in jokiness with a 1999 flashback scene where Jon Favreau (returning as Stark’s head of security Happy) has a wig and bolo tie like Vincent Vega, and Guy Pearce plays awkward nerd in the style of Chop Top in TEXAS CHAINSAW 2. Also the song played during this scene was pants-pissingly funny to a bunch of people in the theater, so look out for that one, people who are familiar with whatever song that is.

Structurally it’s a mess that wanders around more than it builds (for example there’s the long middle section where he has no Iron Man suit and is investigating a crime with the help of a little boy) and it surpasses my threshold for things-that-don’t-seem-to-make-sense-to-me: if he had an army of Iron Men hidden underground the whole time why did he spend 2/3 of the movie sad that he had no Iron Man suits? How did the press not know that Tony Stark lived in the awesome Malibu cliffside mansion until he gave out his address? I get that he wouldn’t ask for SHIELD’s help, but why does Colonel Rhodes find out vital information about the country’s #1 enemy and just try to handle it himself? Was I supposed to understand that Pepper actually wanted Tony to stop being Iron Man, and why is she so happy about him doing so moments after she told him she understood why he wanted the suits?

This brings up an issue with the ending: it does that thing where it acts like it’s a happy ending that he’s gonna stop being Iron Man. But we want him to be Iron Man! That’s why we came to see IRON MAN THREE. It’s kind of a mini-version of the problem with THE INCREDIBLE HULK (somewhat addressed in THE AVENGERS) that it was a story where the hero’s goal was to not be the Hulk while the audience’s goal was to see him be the Hulk.

Of course THE DARK KNIGHT RISES also used the hanging up the cape bit, but I think Bruce Wayne earned it. He was being Batman out of a deep pain and tried to quit already in part 2, so I felt happy for the poor bastard, this was what he wanted. But in IRON MAN they deliberately went the unheard of route of having the hero reveal his secret identity to the world and revel in his well-earned fame. He loves being Iron Man. Why are we suddenly acting like that’s a problem?

Those are all nitpicks, hopefully they won’t bother you guys, but for me they started to add up to something.

Luckily it’s also full of good ideas and moments: Tony’s implants that summon the separate armor pieces to his body, the subsequent surprise (and relationship moment) of directing the armor not to himself but to Pepper when they’re both trapped in an exploding building, the time when he can only get a couple pieces to come and has to make do fighting with one Iron Man hand, the image of Tony dragging a broken suit through the snow, Rhody and Tony both using their wits and skills to kick ass without armor, Rhody getting his armor painted red white and blue and being repeatedly sent to home-invade innocent people in Pakistan, the villain being a genius inventor and military contractor peer of Tony’s, Pepper getting to kill the villain, Tony having some form of PTSD from the fantastical events of THE AVENGERS. There’s even a little meta thing going with Favreau’s character no longer being Stark’s bodyguard but being attached and trying to look out for him, reflecting his switch from director on IRON MAN 1-2 to executive producer on THREE and THE AVENGERS.

Like inside Tony’s brain there’s alot of shit going on in this movie, flying in all different directions. Unlike inside his brain he doesn’t find the time to fully develop them into sleek, working machines.

I’m glad it has the Black humor. There are plenty of funny lines and turns of events. And it wouldn’t be a Shane Black movie if there weren’t a couple lines that sound like they must’ve been witty but I don’t know what they mean.

Unfortunately I think the constant cheekiness works against itself. You can only see Tony’s awesome super hero moment deflated by wacky screw-up so many times before you stop expecting him to just have an awesome super hero moment. And you can’t laugh as much at Rhody as Iron Patriot taking a comedy phone call in the middle of a Pakistan mission as if we’d first seen one where nothing wacky happened. Plenty of this stuff is still funny, but it becomes predictable unpredictableness. And I’m afraid Downey is the same for much of the movie, he makes little quips and we’re supposed to be charmed by him but it’s like how Jack Spade was starting to wear a little thin by the third PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN movie. It’s less effective now that we all see it coming.

On the other hand, stepping out of the Marvel movie expectations is a wise move. I think I liked IRON MAN 2 more than most, but it definitely suffered from demands to tie in with upcoming movies. This one goes in the opposite direction, refusing to build the larger movieverse, even giving it problems to deal with like Tony blowing up his entire arsenal and promising his girlfriend he won’t do that shit anymore. Whoops, might have to address that in the next one.

It also sort of disavows what I understand is a major Marvel character, which is ballsy. But I mean, I said the same thing about Spider-man’s evil dance number in part 3, and look where that got the Spider-man series. I can admire how well Black handles the “Tony Stark hangs out with a little boy” section of the movie while also thinking “are we already at the Tony Stark hangs out with a little boy stage in the Marvel movies?”

But it’s not like it doesn’t deliver some of the super hero goods too. The action set pieces that you see parts of in the trailer are all good and, from what I remember, more exciting than most of the comparable scenes in the last two chapters. In fact, I think it’s fair to say that the IRON MAN movies have a strong first 2/3 and get weaker in the last third where they’re about CGI metal man fights. THREE in my opinion reverses the trend, having a stronger climax than setup.

The action movie veteran in Black can’t help but to find many clever variations to the action: what if Tony had only part of the suit? What if his suit wasn’t working? What if he had no suit at all but made his own weapons from items purchased at an ordinary hardware store? What if he had the suit but was fighting against a guy with the power to melt metal with his hands? etc.

I enjoyed watching IRON MAN THREE, and I respect it, but I can’t claim it’s a very good movie. I’ll be surprised if it holds up very well, but at least it’ll stand out a little from the other ones, and hopefully give Black that “I directed a movie that made like a billion dollars so now I get to do whatever I want” shine for a little bit.

p.s. I watched it in 2D because the Marvel ones are always fake 3D. I’ve heard the 3D version looks shitty and I believe it because it’s another one that climaxes with a bunch of CGI robots flying around at night.

I think this is Michael Mann’s version of a RED DAWN type teen action movie. It’s hoods vs. kingpins in Miami, great cast, show-offy camera moves and editing, moody atmosphere, restrained dialogue. And as the cover brags, it has a high grade ’80s pop soundtrack – “Broken Wings” by Mr. Mister, “Let’s Go Crazy” by Prince, a bunch of songs by some band called The Reds that also played on MANHUNTER – even a title song by Bob Dylan, somehow.

I’d had this recommended to me by many people over the years, and it’s always a good sign when RZA references a movie in his lyrics. I knew what it was, and that I should see it, but clearly I didn’t understand just how great it was gonna be, or I would’ve gotten started earlier. Now I can only speculate what those extra years with BAND OF THE HAND in my life would’ve been like.

It opens in mayhem: an energetically cut series of elaborate tracking shots introducing our hoods: two guys fighting in the middle of a big rumble, a guy in a shiny Paisley jacket selling a briefcase full of coke, a punk kid with a Walkman coming home to the trailer park and shooting his abusive dad. They get busted, cut to mug shots. It’s what was called “MTV style” back then, before that was a bad thing, and it’s a style that holds up, it still gets my blood pumping.

They’re all minors charged as adults, and suddenly they get yanked out of juvi with no explanation, get handcuffed in the back of a truck, taken out on a swamp boat and dumped off in the water near a small island. They wander to land and find Joe (Stephen Lang, Colonel Quaritch from AVATAR), a quiet, head-banded dude (read: Native American) who gives them minimal camping supplies and less explanation. He burns their files, giving them a new start, and tells them “Learn to live… or die. That straight enough for you?”

They complain and they fight each other but this happens less and less as they survive a storm, hunt a wild boar, get growled at by a bear and a panther. Some of them hate each other and get in scuffles, they argue with Joe and are very stubborn, and then all the sudden they start respecting each other and become brothers. I’m such a sucker for this kind of thing. When two guys are fighting over a compass, “Crazy,” who has not spoken a word for the entire movie, starts yelling at them. Soon they’re helping each other out.

“Crazy” is their nickname for J.L., I guess he would be the Mad Murdoch of the crew. He’s a small guy who’s completely confident in his spikey punk haircuts and sunglasses, he doesn’t give a shit that he doesn’t fit in. Also because he’s a little psycho he has spent time learning how to build explosives. I know that’s a little more uncomfortable to think about right now but even in the movie it was to show that he was a maniac. His experience with Joe on the island just helps him channel that crazy so that he’ll use it against somebody more harmful to society than his school building.

The actor is named John Cameron Mitchell, I bet he went on to do some real badass shit, probly lifted some weights and did some AMERICAN NINJA movies or something, let me look him up here… oh, actually he starred in and directed HEDWIG AND THE ANGRY INCH, and then directed SHORTBUS and RABBIT HOLE. So he went a different route. But hopefully if he ever gets shit from any homophobes he stares them down and they remember he was in BAND OF THE HAND and then they start crying and run away.

It’s great, largely non-verbal storytelling and real good acting by these guys. I especially like the expressions on Carlos (Daniele Quinn), who looks like a young James Coburn with a little Adam Yauch mixed in. One day Joe sends the band on a tracking mission, and after days of hiking and going in circles they hear music and come to a big party with a band playing. You just watch their faces as they play it cool. They’ve been isolated in the wilderness for who knows how long, they’re dressed in rags, like savages, holding spears, and all the sudden they walk into a crowd of people having fun. They just casually take some fried chicken off the table, go over and watch the band, nod their heads, don’t even say anything. I’m not sure if they realize at first that this is their graduation. At least from the island. They’re not out of the program yet.

I knew from what I’d heard about the movie that they’d end up fighting drug dealers, so I actually thought Joe was training them as some kind of off-the-books Dirty Dozen black ops vigilante crew. In fact he’s just trying to help them. Removing them from their situations (and society), teaching them to work together to survive, to rely on their skills, to have self worth. I wonder if people who send their kids to those boot camps think it’s gonna be like this?

The program moves to an abandoned house in Miami, which they fix up and paint neon graffiti colors. (This being 1986 it made me wonder if all the gaudy colors of early ’90s pop culture came out of Miami.) But chasing the crackheads out causes a conflict with local drug dealer Larry Fishburne, who works for kingpin James Remar, who Carlos got busted working for, and who currently has his girl Lauren Holly as sort of a kept woman. I like seeing young, brash Fishburne, pre-BOYZ N THE HOOD and still willing to rock a fancy haircut with stripes. And Remar being the top villain is great since he was, of course, a Warrior, and the Band of the Hand are kind of like the more positive Warriors. He’s a real slimy motherfucker, best demonstrated by the scene where he asks Holly how old she is, she says 16 and he says “Good” and to go upstairs and take her clothes off. (Plus he has some kind of voodoo shrine up there or something?)

This will eventually lead to a violent confrontation, in my opinion. While the Wolverines of RED DAWN took up guerilla warfare against the invading Russian army, these guys are only taking on a Miami coke empire. So it’s down to earth and believable? No, by any non-RED DAWN standard they’re up against impossible odds, so it’s tense. The best thing about Remar’s compound is the huge turret gun. Paul Calderon (PISTOL WHIPPED) gets inside and you just see him through the crack from outside. He gets sniped and suddenly somebody else takes his place. This thing is powerful and they’re willing to shoot their own fancy cars to bits trying to get the Band. John Cameron Mitchell gets the most badass maneuver in the whole movie when he runs across the roof and tosses one of his bombs inside the turret.

This is a classic, and finally available on DVD as of last year. Don’t make the same mistake I did and fuck around not seeing it. You won’t regret not regretting it.

In DEATH RACE they made it a car race but with guns and bombs, played by convicts competing for a pardon. The original circa-2000 Death Race was a much more extravagant sport, and not disreputable at all. It’s a national pastime overseen by the president himself. The drivers and their female navigators drive across the country not only trying to kill each other but also trying to run over pedestrians, with a point system worked out by age group. Although Frankenstein (David Carradine) is the good guy he’s not above tearing through the sidewalk in front of a hospital to rack up points on high scoring senior citizens.

Another major plot element missing from the remake (but finally coming up in part 3) is the rebel underground who protest the Death Race. Some of them make a game out of it, laying in the street to duck under the cars, or playing matador with the car that has bull horns on the hood. Others go as far as trying to kidnap Frankenstein, the Michael Jordan of the sport.

Frankenstein looks a little like Darth Vader. He wears black and a space age helmet with a black rubber mask revealing a bit of his burnt up eye and mouth. (This turns out to be a put on.)

Sylvester Stallone plays the lead heavy, Machine Gune joe Veterbo. He has a retro 1940s gangster sense of style and drives a car with a giant knife on the front. (Frankenstein’s ride is shaped like some kind of snake or lizard.) It’s fun to see Stallone play a villain. Joe is a real scumbag. His most telling moment is when he’s got Frankenstein’s navigator alone and he’s threatening to kill her but then Frankenstein comes in and he’s like “Oh, hey Frankenstein, I’m glad you came in here” and tries to play it like he caught her betraying him. A total weasel.

He’s also really funny. He drives up as two guys are hanging a “Welcome Frankenstein” banner, gets jealous and runs one of them over. The guy survives so Joe turns around ready to run him down again, but then he considers letting him go. He decides to ask the other banner hanger, who votes for him to kill the guy! Shit is harsh in the futuristic year of 2000. No loyalty among working class brothers.

One thing that’s great about this movie, it has the perfect ending for the story. A pulpy movie like this gains alot by building to a really satisfying conclusion. According to the interviews on the disc the ending was kind of an afterthought somebody suggested after they were already filming, but it seems like the punchline they’re building up to from the beginning.

The director is Paul Bartel, who wasn’t your typical exploitation director. He came up in Roger Corman’s company, but his thing was social satire, EATING RAOUL being his most famous one. So he took this drive-in subject matter and turned it into a comedy about a bloodthirsty society with reporters breathlessly narrating the action and glorifying murderers as celebrities. But don’t worry, he got plenty of boobs and blood splattering in there. There’s a ton of great car action, these cool looking novelty vehicles moving at high speeds, crashing into each other, chasing after pedestrians, blowing up and all that shit. Bartel left that to the professionals of the second unit, a wise decision. One of the two 2nd unit directors was Lewis Teague, who went on to direct ALLIGATOR and CUJO. On one hand it seems like something an auteur shouldn’t do, leave an important chunk of their movie up to somebody else, on the other hand maybe we’d avoid post-action if more of the modern directors did this. Hey, you guys seem more interested than me in doing a professional job of filming action scenes that an audience can make heads or tails of. Want a go at it while I do something else?

I really recommend this on blu-ray. It just looks beautiful, capturing the colors and film grain way better than any version I’ve seen before. And it’s funny because it makes the matte paintings and props look even faker than before. For example you can see the brush strokes on the silver paint on the giant knife on the front of Machine Gun Joe’s car. Wait a minute, that’s not real metal? I like it though.

It’s kinda too bad, after enjoying the DEATH RACE movies for what they are this one reminds me how much fun they could be if they were more faithful to the type of gimmicks used in the original. Makes me want to see a DEATH RACE part 4 that skips past the Jason Statham events and has a cross country Death Race with updated takes on the original cars. It’s never too late to bring it back to the ol’ Y2K.

I do have two reviews set to post for Monday and Tuesday, and should also have a new column on Daily Grindhouse one of those days. I could play it cool and pretend everything is normal, in case I need an alibi. “No, I couldn’t have been fighting in the Kumite, see, I posted reviews on those days.” But what if some horrible thing happens in the news and it looks like I’m insensitive for just posting reviews like everything is normal? That’s why I want you to know it’s pre-programmed. If a megasnake attacks or something don’t be offended by my just posting a review. But don’t you think if I let a megasnake stop me from posting two reviews of cult movies then the megasnake has won? fuck a megasnake.

thanks guys, have a good week and we’ll talk soon

That sounds like something you might do in a really fun movie, but this is actually pretty dour. I complained about FREAKY DEAKY being too jokey, this one goes hard in the other direction, almost no humor. Or maybe it just seems that way ’cause it uses thriller music instead of something funky like alot of the Elmore Leonard pictures do. I have to admit I haven’t read this one so I don’t know if they blew it on capturing the tone, but as a movie I think it works. This one was a good surprise.

Does this poster look more like Leon the Professional or Desperado?

Mickey Rourke (DOUBLE TEAM) plays Armand “Black Bird” Degas, half-Native American hitman for the Toronto mafia. Joseph Gordon Levitt (GI JOE: THE RISE OF COBRA) plays Richie Nix, hopped up loose cannon idiot bank robber, with Elvis-loving, doll-collecting, ex-prison employee Rosario Dawson (DEATH PROOF) as his girlfriend. Thomas Jane (DEEP BLUE SEA) plays Wayne, an ironworker who’s getting demoted at work and looking for a new job at the same time as he’s trying to move out of his house because his real estate agent wife Carmen (Diane Lane, JUDGE DREDD) wants to separate. These characters will all come together through the age honored Elmore Leonard methods: odd coincidences and stupid mistakes.

Wayne’s not the only one having problems at the workplace. Black Bird retired after his little brother got killed on the job, but he gets pushed into one last one. When he kills the hooker who witnesses it the boss says she worked for him, refuses to pay and wants to kill him for it. Isn’t that some bullshit? Oughta be a union. While he’s on the run Black Bird ends up partnering with Nix in trying to extort a guy that works with Carmen at the real estate office, and they mistake Wayne for the guy because he happens to be in the office at the time looking for a job. (Shouldn’t have worn a tie, it turns out.) Next thing you know the estranged couple are working together trying to evade these maniacs who want to kill them just for having seen their faces.

Rourke does an accent that’s not my favorite, but the role takes advantage of most of his great qualities other than craziness and dog-owning. He’s scary and stoic, he quietly burns while yammering younger partner runs off at the mouth or goes too far, making Carmen take her clothes off, for example. Black Bird is too evil to be an anti-hero, but he’s serious about his code of honor. He stands up to the kid when he’s being an asshole to his girl. In a very authentic moment of denial she tries to ignore their argument, timidly averting her eyes and continuing to pleasantly talk about the pictures in her photo album. Pretend everything’s okay and everybody will go along with it, right?

Levitt is the one guy who gets to go mega, a fun performance in the period when he was using indie crime movies (THE LOOKOUT, SHADOWBOXER, HAVOC, BRICK) to show off his skills and transition from sitcom kid to actor taken seriously. The movie’s one big laugh for me is when he’s manically trashing a guy’s office and he grabs onto the antlers of a mounted deer head, pulls himself upside down and pushes his feet against the wall to pry the thing off. That’s something I bet had never been put on film before. It’s like a cartoon but I think he really did it.

It’s also a pretty good role for Jane. It uses his ruggedness, some of his anger, but mostly his aura of likability. He’s trying to give Carmen her distance but also wants to save his marriage, and is trying to be good to her. I’m sure it’s more involved in the book, but I like how the whole caper is a backdrop to their relationship. Just as they’re packing up to move away from each other they’re forced to go into witness protection and move into a new place together. Carmen’s understandable paranoia when alone causes them to spend more time together in ways they probly didn’t when they were together and didn’t know anything was wrong yet. The way police (and of course killers) treat her makes him stand up for her, angrily protest what they’re doing to “my wife!”

All these different sides of the story come together when he comes to her unexpectedly at the climax. It’s the emotional climax because of what it means for their relationship and it’s the suspense climax because the shit is going down and he has a much-needed gun in his truck.

They seem to have caught this cast all at the right times in their careers, and that especially goes for Lane, who’s had sort of a resurgence as a beautiful woman who doesn’t hide that she’s older than 22. She’s in an emotionally vulnerable spot but radiates intelligence. You can see why Wayne wants to patch things up but also why she might want to move on.

It’s funny, I was really anticipating this movie before it came out. That cast doing Elmore Leonard? Sign me up. But my signature was a lie. It got shelved, and that seemed like a bad sign even though we all know the Weinsteins have a long history of just throwing a dart into the movies they own and choosing one to randomly hide away and not release just to confuse and frustrate people. That’s one of their biggest passions besides getting Oscars, and I think they literally have a shelf in their office of the movies they own, on display. They only release one when they need more room on the shelf. By the time KILLSHOT finally got rotated onto video I heard bad things and I got spooked.

After FREAKY DEAKY though I figured what the hell, might as well get KILLSHOT over with too, find out what the deal was. Turns out I like it more than anybody. Maybe if I knew the book I’d be singing a different tune, but I think this captures the grim side of Leonard really well. It has a good set of characters, great cast, likable but flawed protagonists, scary and sometimes stupid villains who are compelling enough to carry long stretches of the story on their own. A nice, messy crime story that builds up until it falls over and explodes. And it’s got this grown up relationship drama at the center. I don’t know if they belong together, but I want them to figure it out.

I’m not saying this is OUT OF SIGHT or JACKIE BROWN level Leonard adaptation, but it’s better than most, solid and distinct and its mood and characters lingered in my mind long afterwards.

Despite being a Thai production it’s about a Korean family who train and perform Tae Kwon Do. The father has alot of resentment about a loss at the Olympics long ago, just as he had to abandon his dream in order to raise a family. Because of this he puts alot of pressure on his family to train hard, especially his older son, who would rather pursue his dream of STEP UP style dancing. Dad doesn’t even want him to go to a big audition to be a dancer for “Dream Entertainment.” The poor kid has to make a deal to master the impossible “Tornado Kick” to even be allowed to pursue dancing at all.

Meanwhile there’s this valuable antique dagger that’s gonna be on display in Bangkok at the same place as a TKD expo where the family are doing a demonstration. I was kind of confused about their demonstration, because things get all messed up and there are goofy cartoon sound effects and the audience laughs. I thought that meant it was part of the routine, they do this corny comedy deal while demonstrating their skills. But then the family are all bummed out afterwards as if they actually did screw up. So maybe they’re not trying to be funny and somebody in the sound department should’ve been fired.

Anyway while they’re in the building the older brother and sister happen to interfere with an attempt to steal the dagger, and the thieves come after the family for revenge.

The whole family are really good screen martial artists, except I guess little toddler son Typhoon, but even he does a few moves, including some testicular damage. The family alone would be a good enough cast to carry the movie, but Pinkaew ups the ante by sending the kids to hide out in the country with dad’s best friend Uncle Mum, played by Phetthai Vongkumlao, a.k.a. Dirty Balls from ONG BAK. And Uncle Dirty Balls has a niece, and it’s non other than this century’s top female onscreen asskicker so far, Jija Yanin, star of CHOCOLATE and RAGING PHOENIX. Also, Mum is an animal trainer, so an elephant steals their potato chips, a monkey steals Typhoon’s handheld video game, etc. You know, for the kids.

It’s a small movie, more of an excuse to set up fights than a story. Reminds me of some of the lesser but not terrible Jackie Chan movies – simple and cheap but very fun to watch anyway. The bad guys kidnap Typhoon to force the family to steal the dagger for them. Then there’s fighting and animal hijinks at the Bangkok Zoo. It satisfyingly fulfills expectations (do you think Typhoon’s bomb disarming video game will come into play at all, or… Hmmm…) and formula (the Tornado Kick – which I guess is the title character – works as the climactic special move of both fighting movies and dancing movies). And the family-learning-to-get-along cliches feel sincere, wholesome but not treacly.

The fighting is good and plentiful. The guy who plays the older brother is not necessarily on the level of a Tony Jaa or a Jija, but he does pretty good with some enjoyable gimmicks:

1) fighting a bunch of guys while on the phone with Typhoon. He’s doing flips with the phone tucked between his head and shoulder, talking about food to keep little brother distracted

2) working his dancing into his fighting in order to get better. He figures out if he plays a certain cheesy K-pop love song and dances to it he can use that rhythm to improve his fight moves and kick ass. During the climax a monkey gives him a crucial assist by playing the song on the stolen handheld video game. So that’s a rare combination of fight, dance and monkey comedy.

There’s some fake looking CGI, for example hungry gators that make the ones in ERASER seem great, and I know there are alot of anti-digital purists out there so I’m sure some people will hate that about THE KICK. But I thought the goofy jokes made it worth it: the squid thrown on a guy’s face, Uncle Dirty Balls sucking gas off a stove, breathing fire, then coughing up smoke. Good ideas worth computing in my opinion.

I definitely wouldn’t put this up with the Thai action classics (BORN TO FIGHT, ONG BAK, TOM YUM GOONG, CHOCOLATE) but it’s a very enjoyable throwaway for those of us who love great martial arts on screen.

Now I’m a little concerned because it seems like WWE Films is trying to get out of the making-WWE-films business. First they started picking up non-wrestling, independent features to distribute (THE DAY), then they put out two wide theatrical releases, DEAD MAN DOWN and THE CALL, that star Oscar nominees/winners instead of wrestlers. I mean I want to see both movies – they’re from pretty interesting directors, the first looks good and the other looks funny-bad – but I don’t like it. Yeah, so what if Cartoon Network has live action shows and MTV doesn’t play M anymore? Other people will make movies starring Halle Berry, I promise you. WWE should only have her in a buddy cop movie with The Undertaker.

But at least they’re keeping the THE MARINE franchise alive. It’s an anthology series, no connecting characters or events, different directors. Each tells a story of an off-duty United States Marine having to rescue a loved one from hostage takers. The first marine was John Cena, the DTV sequels are lesser known wrestlers Ted DiBiase Jr. and now Mike “The Miz” Mizanin, who doesn’t look as cartoonish as most wrestlers because he was a guy that was on The Real World and said he wanted to be a wrestler, then was on a WWE reality competition and got to do it for real. He ended up with this role because the first guy they cast, Randy Orton, was dishonorably discharged from the real Marines and they complained about him representing them in this important film. That might be why the movie opens with a little asskissing Marines recruiting video type montage as The Miz narrates about getting out of fictional small town Bridgeton, WA to embark on exciting military adventures.

His character Jake Carter is returning home for the first time in 14 months, I think he said. His best friend (Jared Keeso) is the police chief now, his sisters live in a house together, the youngest one he’s worried about because she doesn’t have a job and he disapproves of her boyfriend. Happy-to-see-their-brother quickly becomes annoyed-with-his-meddling, and Chief Best Buddy isn’t so happy when Jake gets in a bar fight that should’ve put him in jail. Pretty soon he’s gonna be wishing he’d get deployed again.

Oh wait, but this is a MARINE movie. So meanwhile about a 40 minute drive away in Seattle, a gang of masked thieves led by Pope (the great Neil McDonough) are robbing a bank. And then Pope guilts the bank manager about foreclosing on houses and burns all the money right in front of him. He’s burning it in a make-a-statement-about-greed way, I think, not in a Heath-Ledge-Joker-fementing-chaos type of way. It turns out these guys are real terrorists, or “not your usual extremist” as one FBI agent says of Pope, but I guess technically they could still be considered bank robbers. They do steal the money by forcibly removing it from its vault. What they choose to do with it after it’s in their possession is irrelevant. I don’t think it’s like shoplifting rules where if you didn’t carry it out of the building it doesn’t count. If it is they could always throw the you-broke-it-you-bought-it doctrine at ‘em.

Anyway, they hide out in the ruins of an old ferry (I’m sure inspired by The Kalakala) where they are preparing for a bomb attack somewhere in Seattle, but a squabble leads to a shooting leads to them kidnapping Jake’s little sister and her boyfriend because they saw the whole thing while hanging out in a nearby junkyard. So Jake and the FBI try to get them back.

Darren Shahlavi (IP MAN 2) plays a member of the gang, so he gets to do one of his traditional henchman-who-clearly-has-more-fighting-skills-than-the-others-although-he-doesn’t-really-get-a-good-enough-showcase-for-them roles. At least his character stood out a little in THE PACKAGE.

Pope’s weaselly henchman is played by Michael Eklund, who I recognized from Seagal’s True Justice show and from Stone Cold’s movies HUNT TO KILL and TACTICAL FORCE. I guess there’s alot of low budget action work to be had if you hang around Vancouver. Yeah, it’s filmed in Canada, but admittedly it does look like parts of Washington. Besides the ferry another accurate local touch is that his sister complains about property taxes. On the other hand somebody pronounces pecan pie “pee-can” instead of “pih-con.” They do pass the test of pronouncing the city of Spokane correctly (it’s spoe-can, not spoe-cane).

I notice they mention a cedar mill. Wood mills were a big part of fake rural Washington in the The Rock version of WALKING TALL, which also had the WWE name on it, and also had Neil McDonough as the bad guy. Weird.

It’s interesting that this bad guy really does care, it’s not just a front for stealing money like in a DIE HARD movie. In the book Nothing Lasts Forever the villains were true believers. DIE HARD changed that and terrorists-who-are-actually-thieves became the standard used in DIE HARD 3-5, UNDER SIEGE 1-2, etc. AIR FORCE ONE and THE MARINE 2 and 3 are different, their villains really are trying to make a statement about a cause they believe in.

I started to wonder if this one is telling us that good guys are soldiers who don’t question orders and bad guys point out greed and corruption. But that doesn’t really fit,because he doesn’t like the FBI’s plan to raid the ferry with his sister on it, he tries to fight them and later sneaks off to infiltrate-and-extract in his own way. I think they’re just trying to make it contemporary by mentioning a bunch of issues you hear about alot these days. Instead of any kind of “just how evil is he?” scene we get the FBI describing his doctorate in philosophy, his parents having their home foreclosed, his sister being dropped from her insurance when she had ovarian cancer. Hopefully we can all sympathize with this, although not with his teaming up with a militia and planning a bombing “to make them listen.”

Jake Carter doesn’t get a “just how badass is he?” though. They figure it’s enough to know he’s a Marine. The Marine, I mean.

I like that he gains respect for his sister’s boyfriend when he tells him to run to safety and he stays to try to help save the sister. I guess it’s that cliche of marines believing in “never leave a man behind.” Another example of the kinda macho bonding that I love is where the chief arrests him and seems to be against him, but then secretly lets him loose. “You’ll get alot of heat for this.” “Yeah.”

I love it, but at the end it doesn’t seem like he does get any heat for it, just as The Marine doesn’t get any heat for killing a bunch of guys.

Part 2 came from a fairly accomplished DTV director, this one is by Scott Wiper who did the terrible post-action WWE Films debut THE CONDEMNED. This is a big improvement, at least. He co-wrote it with Declan O’Brien, director of WRONG TURN 3-5 as well as SHARKTOPUS. Together this superteam came up with a reasonably entertaining movie, but it’s strangely small time. Pope’s plan seems elaborate as it’s unfolding, but it turns out just to be about setting off one car bomb. We don’t even ever find out where the building was that he was gonna try to blow up. The climax is just The Marine driving the car really fast, rolling it and climbing out before it blows up. It’s a job that requires some mettle but not necessarily marine training. Before the car driving though there is a good job for The Marine, a shot that’s too risky for the cop to take but he knows he can take it because he’s The Marine.

Miz is passable but unremarkable and honestly doesn’t do that much action-wise. He gets involved in the battle surprisingly late in the game. He does have that one bar fight I guess, and he impales a guy in one part. And does some intense faces while steering. And he drives a motorcycle. At the end he’s covered in more dirt and blood than John McClane at the end of DIE HARD, although he didn’t go through as much.

I’m happy to say this is watchable, sorry to say that I’ve already mostly forgotten it. Looking forward to part 4 though.

Like anybody, when I heard that one of my all time favorite but past his album recording prime rappers Snoop Dogg was changing his name to Snoop Lion and doing a reggae record, I shook my head and laughed. Ah, what will he think of next? But I saw the trailer for this Vice-produced documentary about Snoop going to Jamaica to record the album and suddenly I had to take the whole idea more seriously. The movie looked good enough that I would’ve gone to see it in a theater if it had played here. Instead here it is on DVD in time to promote the album of the same name, which came out Tuesday.

And holy shit you guys, this is a great documentary. I watched it last weekend and it overshadowed all the other things I’ve been watching lately, most of which I liked. I loved it so much I decided to invent this new medal just to make sure you guys will know I’m not fuckin around. This is an acclaimed documentary now, otherwise it wouldn’t have won a prestigious medal like this. If you love Snoop Dogg, or are even open to the idea of Snoop Dogg, you gotta see this. Regardless of how anybody feels about the album this is a great document of a man trying to find himself, of a historic bridging of musical cultures and generations, of the process of songwriting, of an awesome trip to Jamaica.

I think Snoop’s been trying to find himself for a while now. Remember he quit smoking weed at one point? Well, that didn’t stick. Maybe it’s just the version you buy in Washington and Colorado, but this movie depicts a huge amount of weed smoking, preparation and discussion. Snoop proudly shares his “California herb” as a peace offering. His cousin Daz gets blown out of his mind on pure ganja out in what he calls “the jungle,” which probly doesn’t happen to him too often. They smoke in alleys, in studios, in resorts, on boats, in Rastafarian church services. When he goes and meets Bunny Wailer (who appears to spontaneously give him the Snoop Lion name, making it more legitimate in my opinion, it’s like being knighted when a Wailer renames you) he tells him it would be an honor to smoke with him. I’m not into that, but in this movie it’s kind of charming how much joy they get out of it. Sometimes it genuinely seems like an act of spirituality.

Snoop meets up with the producer Diplo (a pretty boy American white dude, but a good dance music producer known for the group Major Lazer) at Bob Marley’s Tuff Gong studio. Later they set up shop at a secluded resort with a studio (let’s face it, Snoop can afford some luxury). Snoop didn’t even bring his Playstation, he’s very focused on recording. But also he goes on these trips to meet people and learn about Jamaica. He goes to Trenchtown and gets a tour from the Marley family. He hangs out with some dudes on a block, ends up going to their studio to record a song with them. They go up on the roof and there’s a mob of people around the building trying to see him, and it intercuts with his first video, “Who Am I? (What’s My Name?),” where he performs on the roof of a place called V.I.P. Records in his neighborhood in Long Beach.

(I was thinking I should try to go to that store some time if it’s still there, but I checked and they moved to a smaller store last year and went entirely out of business in February. Eat a dick, progress.)

Periodically Snoop opens up about his life – his childhood, his trial, the night Tupac died, his friendship with Nate Dogg, why he liked Suge, leaving Death Row Records for No Limit. And they got the music and video clearances to properly illustrate it all. It paints a vivid picture of why he wants to change his life to peace and love, it also shows many parallels between how he grew up and how things are for the people he meets in Jamaica, showing why he relates to them and why they seem to love him even though he’s this superstar with an endless supply of fly Adidas track suits walking around smiling and yelling “Jah! Rastafari!” every once in a while.

You can’t help but question it. There’s something touristy about what he’s doing. You can’t deny that he’s doing a fake Jamaican patois sometimes. (Not nearly as much as Seagal would.) And you wonder what percentage of his interest in Jamaican culture is marijuana-related. But Snoop is such a powerfully charismatic figure, so likable and laid back and adaptable to the situations, it’s easy to forgive any of that. And you can see that he’s listening and absorbing and learning, and making friends. Who can fault him for that?

One of the many highlights is the scene where he visits a school for troubled boys. He goes into the music class and improvises a song while they play. The boys look very shy and it’s not clear how aware they are of who he is, but they can’t help but smile at this goofball dancing around and singing about them. And it sounds good!

Of course you hear most of the songs from the album. It’s a movie full of throbbing bass and lots of dancing and happiness. I have to admit to unconscious white person head nodding and shit. A couple of the songs from the album are immediately catchy, and even the ones that aren’t you see the circumstances leading up to writing them, and it makes you appreciate them more. For example there’s a part where we see Daz get a text telling him his nephew has died. His ritual of blasting old soul records and smoking for the next few days inspires the singer Angela Hunte to write a song about mourning called “Ashtrays and Heartbreaks.” The context makes me appreciate the song more (but also makes it even more wrong that Miley Cyrus sings the lead vocal on the finished version).

I like the album, I’ve been listening to it alot since Tuesday. Even the most hardened cynic will have to admit it’s better than some other Snoop projects such as Doggy’s Angels. I’m sure before long I’ll mostly cut down to a couple songs where the music moves me the most, like “Lighters Up” and “La La La.” But for now I enjoy listening to the album all the way through and I think the movie helps me to see it more as a sincere expression than the silly gimmick I would’ve assumed. I’m open to Snoop singing about not giving up on your dreams and shit. Hey, I have dreams. Snoop’s talking to me! Thanks for the encouragement, Snoop.

By far my favorite song on the album is “Fruit Juice,” an energetic ode to fruits and berries. He’s chanting and singing about fruit with as much excitement as he ever talked about the chronic. I’ve listened to it over and over again and I don’t detect any irony or secret meanings in this, I think it’s literally just about what he says: “Natural berries are so very good for the system / Some tart, some sweet, me just con’t resist ‘em.”

The movie supports this, showing him recording the song after a particularly profound experience eating a grapefruit freshly picked off a tree with Rastafarians in the Blue Mountains. That’s what’s great about this movie. Snoop has lived through so much, seen so much, and he just doesn’t give a shit what anybody thinks about him anymore. He doesn’t have to act hard. He wants to love everybody. He loves life and people and yes, grapefruit.

Be sure to watch the deleted scenes. There’s one where he leaves Jamaica for 48 hours to perform at Muhammad Ali’s 70th birthday celebration in Vegas. He interrupts a conversation between Diddy and LL to tell them he loves them, hugs James Gandolfini, and is thrilled to see the champ enjoying his music. Then it’s back on the private jet to Jamaica. Maybe they cut that to give more of a sense of getting away from American life, being isolated in what seems like a whole different world. As you can see in the trailer below it’s gorgeously photographed and shows all kinds of really incredible locations and people, so there’s a strong sense of place, even though it will periodically leave for flashbacks about gangsta rap history, a powerful section at Nate Dogg’s funeral shortly before the trip, or Louis Farrakhan in his home in Chicago talking about meeting with Snoop after Biggie’s death and getting all the rappers together to end their beefs.

At the end Snoop is back to North America (Ontario, Canada), where’s he’s ritualistically handed his gaudy four-finger ring mic and steps out in front of a huge crowd of ecstatic fans and… starts chanting about Jah? I love this ending because I’m left really torn about it. As someone who just went on this movie journey I want Snoop to stay true to his dream of making music about “love, peace and struggle,” and if that means he wants to sing reggae songs then he should do it. But as a Snoop Dogg fan I want to see him do “Murder Was the Case” and “Deep Cover” and “The Next Episode.”

The movie has taken me from “ha ha, he’s doing a reggae album” to “go for it Snoop Lion!” but now the vacation’s over, he’s not standing on the balcony looking out at the water, he’s back home on a stage in front of thousands of people who don’t know what he’s just gone through, and the whole dream is in danger of dissipating like smoke. I’ve seen him perform a few times, he knows how to give the crowd what they want, and I’m pretty sure they don’t want him to come out and do an all reggae show. It’s hard to imagine him not coming out with a hip hop album in a couple years under the name Snoop Dogg and talking about gangsta shit again. Acting like this peace and love thing was just a phase, like when he stopped smoking. And that might be the best plan for his music, but what about for his soul?

Down here we still got drone robots that fly around the wreckage trying to kill off the surviving space-insurgents, and Jack is one of the drone repairmen. By night he stays in a nice little house up on a platform, by day he flies around in his dragonfly shaped bubbleship tracking the drones and fixing them. He seems to like the alone time, but it’s not an I AM LEGEND situation, he does enjoy the company of his partner (wife?) Victoria (Andrea Riseborough) back at home and his boss Sally (Melissa Leo) via satellite from the space station they’ll be going to in a couple weeks before they finally get to go live on Titan with the cool kids.

It’s a well realized post-apocalyptic world, with only a few remnants of civilization poking out from a world well along in the process of returning to its natural state. He flies over mountains, deserts, valleys, forests, he explores caves. In his ship there’s alot of fancy touch screen business and radio lingo nonsense. It gets more fun to watch his job when he lands near a downed drone and gets out the tools. His ship is cleverly designed to contain all the parts and equipment he needs in the most compact way possible. Especially cool is when he pulls out a suit-case-sized piece that unfolds into a working motorcycle. I want one of those things! Could probly wear it on a backpack.

And there’s sort of an organic feeling to this I noticed. It’s all very sleek and shiny surfaced but more like a brand new computer than like something that would be created by a computer. After seeing it I read that they had a concept car company build the bubbleship for real and had it on a crane. So that’s why it looks real – it kinda is.

I like these drones, big flying metal spheres with scanners and guns attached. Like many machines they seem to take on a personality as he deals with them. They’re creepy because they don’t communicate. They don’t have faces but they scan his face and pause to compute before they decide whether or not they’re supposed to shoot him. Or sometimes he gets in a predicament like there’s a stray dog there, is it gonna shoot the dog? It’s kind of like being friends with ED-209. You don’t think he’s gonna kill you, but you don’t know for 100%. And once they’ve made their decision they turn on their jets and fly away like Superman, leaving you in their wake.

Of course this is more than a robot repair procedural, some other shit is gonna happen. There’s this business about memories Jack has of a beautiful woman (Olga Kurylenko). And if you saw the trailer or the poster or the cast list you know Morgan Freeman is gonna show up wearing goggles at some point. (Based on how far into the movie this happens it would’ve been nice if they kept it under wraps, but oh well.)

It’s kind of hard to discuss the things I thought were most interesting about the movie without discussing it as a whole, so if you’re staying spoiler free I’ll just say that this is a pretty good movie, not incredibly original but a well-executed take on a type of story I like, with some subtext that I enjoyed. And with that I bid you a fond adieu. From here on out I’m assuming everybody’s seen the movie, it’s SPOILERS all day.

In the opening I thought it was a little heavy on the narration. He explains all about the war and Titan and everything and I kept thinking it would be better if we just saw him go about his routine and these details sort of revealed themselves as we went along, if they became relevant. So it was a nice surprise that actually he’s been lied to and the narration had to be narration because he was just repeating some bullshit to us. Good trick.

I also thought it was funny that a random dude in the future still had to have an awesome name like Jack Harper. But it turns out actually he’s a hotshot astronaut, so he earned the name Jack Harper. And let’s face it, it’s pretty cool to be Jack Harper. I mean, he experiences some hiccups here, but mostly he has a good time.

In the beginning I almost envied his cool job. He gets to fly around in a slick, comfortable looking spaceship, he has all the good equipment, he gets to see beautiful landscapes, sit on top of a mountain, visit historical sites (I’m not sure I buy that he knows all about the final plays of the last Super Bowl, but maybe he’s a nerd), gather mementos that he keeps at his private hangout. Yeah, he gets attacked sometimes but he’s good at his job, he doesn’t seem real scared or anything. This week I also watched HAPPY PEOPLE: A YEAR IN THE TAIGA, a Werner Herzog documentary about indigenous trappers in the middle of Siberia, and it gave me kind of a similar feeling. Despite all the things wrong with the job it just seems like a nice life being out there kind of on your own, knowing what to do and having some time to do it, not having to punch a clock or anything. A simple life.

But unlike the happy people Jack goes home to a sweet pad with a swimming pool and a wife-like co-worker with an accent and possibly CGI enhanced ass. Their relationship isn’t the strongest, which becomes especially obvious when he brings home Julia (Kurylenko), a fuckin super model in a metal canister, planning to keep her. Even not knowing that he dreams about this lady (or that she’s his wife) Victoria seems jealous, and he seems clueless about how she feels.

Still, it’s just him and these two ladies and a wide open planet. A pretty good life.

But I started to wonder why Victoria had to stay at home the whole time. She seems to be his partner but alot of what she’s doing is just reading things off of screens and moving files around on a touch screen that could probly be handled fine by Sally on the other end. And she’s all business, she doesn’t respond to romantic gestures from Jack like bringing her flowers or wanting to bring her to his special place on the surface.

This is it, the hollow American dream, the nice home with the top of the line kitchen appliances, the stay at home wife. After he steps in a trap, shoots at some attackers, gets his climbing cable cut and motorcycle stolen he gets home at dusk, limping a little bit, tired. Tough day at the office. He’s even holding a metal case like a briefcase or a working man’s lunchbox. I bet there’s a Thermos of coffee in there.

He works dutifully at his job, he enjoys his luxurious life, he dreams of the day in the near future when he gets to go to the colony, he’s nostalgic for the past, he yearns for something more. He’s like somebody working for a big corporation that maybe makes weapons that end up in some unsavory places overseas, or a citizen of a country with some questionable foreign policy that he doesn’t ever ask questions about. He doesn’t know that he’s actually working for The Man (or in this case The non-huMan), or that his work is really oppressing and killing his fellow man. He says “I never hurt anyone!” because as far as he knows that’s true. When he finds out the truth he comes home and tries to tell Victoria and she runs into the other room saying “I don’t want to know!” She wants to wait for hubby to come home in his cool spaceship and have sex in the pool. She doesn’t want to feel bad about it.

Whatever goes on with Morgan Freeman and the band of survivors is sketched a little lighter than Jack Harper’s world. I didn’t really understand what was up with the Predator outfits – they said it hides that they’re human so the drones don’t shoot them. Does that mean that’s really what the Scavengers look like, or that the drones consider them animals and don’t bother with them? But the drone does try to shoot that dog, doesn’t it? I’m not sure how that works.

One narrative weakness is that Jack is so far behind the audience in figuring out what’s going on. The casting of Morgan Freeman might be to blame. If they wanted us to think that those guys aren’t to be trusted they should’ve chosen pretty much anybody besides Morgan Freeman. We trust that guy. When he says you gotta help us get into this thing and blow it up we know that he knows something we don’t. We don’t think he’s the bad guy.

It was cool to see Zoe Bell there. Remember how she was standing there in a couple scenes. She didn’t say anything but at least she was photographed clearly, unlike in GAMER.

One nice touch: the robot shooting at people in the hallway full of great works of art (and the Liberty Bell). It’s cool because it’s a sci-fi-ification of an action trope I enjoy (gunfire destroying symbols of culture and wisdom such as books and statues) but also because they never feel the need to point out in dialogue that Freeman’s people have tried to preserve important artifacts of Earth culture, they just have it there for you to notice.

Then there’s the deal with the clones. Imagine how square you feel when you realize there’s a bunch of guys out there with your exact same job, same house, same damn wife. I like how they used the clones, that it acknowledges that if she can’t be with the real Jack she could still share her love with one of his clones. I’m sure she’d rather be with the first one, but she’s not gonna turn her nose up at a clone.

For it to work as a sweet ending though you gotta be confident in them being meant to be together. I mean, just because they were married before the invasion doesn’t mean they gotta be together forever. Alot has changed, many marriages have broken down over less. And o.g. Jack seemed pretty into it in that flashback when Victoria number one brushed close to him in the space shuttle.

But if he’s really the love of her life then it’s sweet that she was able to overcome his death by having a spare. You gotta wonder about what happens later though. I’m assuming there are other Jack Harper clones all over the world fixing up drones. They all must have Julia in their memory too. I know it took three years for #52 to find her, but eventually some of the other guys oughta start showing up, right? They got alot of time on their hands now that the drones are all broken. OBLIVION 2 could be about a new war between the Jacks building new drones out of the old parts to fight for their Julia.

This is of course movie #2 for director Joseph Kosinski, who also co-wrote (with the writer of that shitty Joel Schumacher/Nicolas Cage joint TRESPASS) and came up with the idea. It says it’s based on his graphic novel, but that’s a book that’s never been published, so who cares. It seems Kosinski is a good craftsman if not a genius. He knows how to make things look real nice and has a unique sense of design. It makes sense that the sleek equipment here comes out of the same mind as the stuff in TRON LEGACY. Also I like his taste in music. It’s not as great as the more computery Daft Punk score to LEGACY, but it’s got kind of a similar feel and it’s from somebody called M.8.3 with Joseph Trapanese.

This is alot less ridiculous than TRON LEGACY, but if I had to pick one I personally prefer TRON because it’s so much more extreme in the visuals, the music, the action, the biodigital jazz. I don’t know why man, I was really skeptical about that movie because the whole concept of TRON is so absurd, but I ended up digging it more than all the troniacs who were excited for it. So far I don’t see signs that Kosinski is a great director, but there’s proof that he’s a skilled and entertaining one. Sign me up for the next one.

1. Stone Cold Steve Austin, possible heir to the DTV throne, co-starring with all the other icons of the DTV Action Era. This is his Dolph Lundgren movie. Previously he did his Michael Jai White movie TACTICAL FORCE, his Danny Trejo movie RECOIL and his Steven Seagal movie MAXIMUM CONVICTION. He’s still got to do a Van Damme, an Adkins and a Cuba Gooding Jr.

2. Dolph doing colorful supporting roles where he gets to goof around more. He also stole the show in ONE IN THE CHAMBER and THE EXPENDABLESes and I haven’t seen STASH HOUSE or SMALL APARTMENTS but I bet it’s true of those too. Maybe all these roles where he gets to experiment more will bring something new to him next time he’s the leading man again.

Austin is the star here, playing Tommy, loyal enforcer to the gangster Big Doug (Eric Keenleyside). He’d like to get out, and his wife thinks he could just be a bouncer, but after Afghanistan he feels like he’s only good at violence, plus he’s working off the debt of his little brother Eddie (Lochlyn Munro), who stole from Big Doug and is now in the joint. But now Tommy is offered an important job that would pay off the family debt. He just has to deliver “the package” to “the German” (Dolph). I don’t want to give anything away but in my opinion I get the feeling there might be more to this gig than he’s told.

See the thing is there are a couple different bosses vying for power here. The other guy finds out that Tommy is bringing something valuable to the German, so he sends a crew of ex-military contractors to intercept it. They’re led by Darren Shahlavi (who played Twister, the asshole British fighter in IP MAN 2), they are heavily armed and very professional, but they still get shown up as chumps after they kill Tommy’s partner, flip his car and shoot at him in a small town grocery and feed store. The best part is how he K.O.s Shahlavi by slamming him against a shelf, and the fucker wakes up when it’s over and chews out all the others like it’s their fault. Hey man, I was unconscious the whole time, so it can’t be my fault.

One of the guys in this scene is so big he gets away with calling Stone Cold “little girl.”

The inclusion of military contractors leads to an interesting bit of politics. The woman on the team, who really has it out for Tommy (he killed her fiancee in the feed store, boo hoo) is said to have been a former U.S. intelligence operative who interrogated al Quaeda suspects. She brags about how sadistic she is. Off the top of my head I can’t think of another action movie that uses our reputation for post 9-11 human rights abuses as a bad guy bonafide. That might even be a little bit subversive.

When one lesser known white guy screen martial artist fails it’s time to call in another one. Former PKA and PKC kickboxing champion of the world Jerry Trimble (TERMINATOR WOMAN) is the man they send in after Shahlavi. It’s cool to see him again, fitting nicely into the veteran-mob-guy role but also getting to fight. There are some obvious stunt double shots but you can see him getting in poses and stuff. He fights Tommy with the action movie atmosphere double whammy of light snow at night and sparks from a welding torch. After a while I started to wonder why those guys keep welding on top of that platform and never seem to notice there’s guys fighting beneath them. Just minding their own business, I guess.

Meanwhile people are trying to kill Dolph too, and he’s not having it. He disagrees. In one scene he’s set up to be shot to pieces by a bunch of guys with machine guns. He picks up a small steak knife from a table, kills all of them, washes the knife in the sink. Also in this scene his arms burst through a wall to strangle a guy, clearly a Jason Voorhees move. In another scene he has a bunch of mob enforcers tied up and wounded and he decides for some reason to give them a cooking show style demonstration of how to make a healthy smoothie.

Austin is a good example of this type of actor I like who has pretty much no range at all, but a very likable action hero persona and screen presence. You watch his movies for the tiny variations. The unique angle here is his relationship with his boss, who you assume is really out to screw him. His wife implies as much, asking why he keeps a gun under the table if they’re partners. But in fact parties’ claims of respect and loyalty to each other are genuine.

Well, I guess Big Doug does betray him in the way that Lando betrayed Han. But, like Lando, he tries to make up for it with his later actions. I like when Tommy calls Doug to try to get out of the job, Doug sort of shuts him down but instead of getting mad Tommy agrees to do what he wants and just says, “Thanks Doug.” That’s a Stone Cold thing, a kind of matter of fact acceptance of the way shit is, instead of whining or yelling at somebody.

Lando and Han are from “STAR WARS” by the way.

Tommy has other moments of vulnerability besides trying to get out of the job. There’s a scene where he’s waiting for a doctor, looks at himself shirtless in the mirror and says “Still here, old man. Still here.” He’s a survivor, but he seems to think his luck will run out eventually. Before calling Doug to try to get out of the job he calls his wife. He pretends it’s to say hi but you know it’s to hear her voice one more time in case he gets his ass killed real soon.

In a more standard Stone Cold moment he calls Shahlavi “sunshine.” And he trades a Mercedes for a big pickup truck. I mean, this is a guy who is not gonna feel comfortable driving anything that is not a big pickup truck.

His “just how badass is his?” moment is when he’s tied to a chair, headbutts the boss man one time and kills him. “Killed him with one hit,” says one of the mercs. “I never seen anything like it, chief!”

This one starts in fake Seattle, but he’s traveling to The German in Vancouver, so parts of it are the rare Vancouver-as-Vancouver. One question: how is he hitchhiking and suddenly he’s in Canada? Do they really let you bring a hitchhiker over the border with you?

The director is stuntman Jesse V. Johnson. I enjoyed his aging-hitman-Eric-Roberts movie THE BUTCHER, although it could’ve used a whole lot of streamlining. THE PACKAGE is much tighter though some of the scenes with his wife and stuff seem too long and slow. I wish the whole movie was as confident as the opening sequence where footage of bowling alley machinery gives way to a mini-story about Tommy coming to collect money from an obnoxious bowler. My two favorite touches in this scene: the way they communicate which friend sold him out and the manager who pulls a shotgun on him and won’t let him leave, saying it’s because he has his shoes.

Every once in a while there’s a good laugh, always intentional. When Austin and Lundgren finally meet up Lundgren says, “Hello, Tommy.”

“Hey, The German,” he replies.

Writer Derek Kolstad also did ONE IN THE CHAMBER, which is arguably slightly more inspired, but they’re both pretty solid. Jesse V. Johnson trivia: the same year he made this he did stunts in LINCOLN and THE MASTER.