"KEEP BUSTIN'."

Posts Tagged ‘Anne Heche’

I Know What You Did Last Summer

Monday, July 3rd, 2023

I KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST SUMMER is a major pillar in the late ‘90s streak of newfangled glossy studio teen slasher movies. It was released less than a year after SCREAM, two months before SCREAM 2, and three months before Dawson’s Creek started airing, so it was the first real test of whether or not SCREAM was a fluke for screenwriter Kevin Williamson. He’d already been hired and written this loose adaptation of the 1973 young adult suspense novel by Lois Duncan before SCREAM, but when that was a hit all the sudden it became a priority. Williamson was still involved, seeming to have a hand in choosing the director and cast, according to interviews.

Set on two consecutive 4th of July holidays in the small fishing town of Southport, North Carolina, it’s the story of fresh high school graduates Julie James (Jennifer Love Hewitt, CAN’T HARDLY WAIT), Ray Bronson (Freddie Prinze Jr., DELGO), Barry Cox (Ryan Phillippe, 54) and Helen Shivers (Sarah Michelle Gellar, SOUTHLAND TALES) accidentally running over someone late at night while driving home from drinking on the beach. Worried about their lives being ruined by manslaughter charges, they decide that rather than report it they should dump the body in the water and swear to never speak of it again. As kids do. (read the rest of this shit…)

Six Days Seven Nights

Tuesday, June 26th, 2018

June 12, 1998

Ivan Reitman’s SIX DAYS SEVEN NIGHTS is a kind of low concept romance/adventure that I don’t think you’d see today, and didn’t generally see twenty years ago. It’s basically just a woman and a man who don’t initially like each other getting trapped on an island together, and then starting to like each other after a bit of survival shenanigans.

There’s more romantic-comedy trappings than adventure ones. Robin Monroe (Anne Heche, PSYCHO) is a hard working assistant editor for the fashion magazine Dazzle who’s in a long term relationship with Frank (David Schwimmer, WOLF). He’s a sweet but immediately off-putting guy who makes grand romantic gestures like surprising her with a sudden six-day-seven-night (you see, that’s the title, SIX DAYS SEVEN NIGHTS) vacation to the South Pacific, where he proposes and she says yes.

But she also meets Quinn Harris (Harrison Ford, THE EXPENDABLES 3), a grizzled, hard-drinking pilot of the small plane who gets them from a larger island to their final destination of Makatea after their more lush charter falls through. On the island he drunkenly hits on her at the bar, forgetting that he was the one who just got her there, and Ford does a good bleary-eyed horny dude. Robin is polite but unimpressed, in contrast to Frank, who could not for the life of him hide his boner for Quinn’s busty and flirtatious co-pilot/sort of girlfriend Angelica (Jacqueline Obradors, UNSTOPPABLE, BAD ASSES). (read the rest of this shit…)

Wild Card

Friday, February 6th, 2015

tn_wildcard“I can take care of things. That’s all you need to know.”

In WILD CARD, Jason Statham plays Nick Wild (seriously), a legendary special ops badass who now works as an all purpose “security consultant” for hire. That’s not going well for him, though. He shares his office with a lawyer (Jason Alexander from THE BURNING) on the strip mall outskirts of Vegas, most of his friends seem to be prostitutes, hotel maids, gangsters or casino employees, and he gets such glamourous gigs as getting fake beat up by Vinnie from Doogie Howser to impress a Sofia Vergara. It’s hard to bask in your own greatness when you’re such a fucking loser. So in that sense this is less like THE TRANSPORTER and more like REDEMPTION (where he starts out as a homeless crackhead).

He gets a couple “Just how badass is he?” speeches, but one of them is by himself, and ends with “And I lie alot.” As cool as this guy is – his name is Nick Wild, for God’s sake! – everybody knows he’s a fuckup, and this is underlined by casual comments about the mediocre value of his life. When a friend wants him to get involved in something dangerous and he asks “What if they kill me?” she says “I’ll be miserable for days.” Not years, not months, days. Later a gangster wants to hear his side of the story before killing him just because if he was innocent of what he was accused of “I would feel dreadful.”

If some of this sounds familiar that’s because it’s a remake of HEAT. Not the one by Michael Mann, the 1986 one with Burt Reynolds and based on the book by William Goldman. It counts as a remake though because they re-used Goldman’s old script with just a few tweaks, like Van Sant did with PSYCHO. (In fact, Anne Heche is even in this. But not Vince Vaughn) They changed his name from Nick Escalante and added references to his Britishness. He says “mum” in one part. And I noticed big changes in the action parts (I missed a trick Burt did to light a guy on fire, and a scene where he torments a guy in the dark). But mostly, from what I could remember, it’s scene-for-scene the same. (read the rest of this shit…)

If These Walls Could Talk 2

Wednesday, October 11th, 2000

Sometimes at my age a fella has to admit he’s not exactly up on things. Not exactly with it. Specially when it seems like every other weekend I’m writing a review for a sequel to some movie where I never even saw the first one. Hell I never even HEARD of the first one half the time how the fuck I’m supposed to seen it already. Cut me some slack buddy.

But I picked up the dvd for this one because of a certain powerful force – the force of young Chloe Sevigny’s eyes staring out at me from the cover. I think most of you know how I feel about this gal, ever since I first spied her in the Last Days of Disco picture where her eyes were able to cut through seven layers of postmodern bullshit spewing out of the mouths of the pretentious yuppies in the movie. This girl is a hell of an actor but the main thing I’m talking about here is the presence. She has the presence of a real movie star. In my opinion. So I’ll see any movie she’s in even if it has her with her hair slicked back, wearing a tie, like in this one. (read the rest of this shit…)