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dir: Antoine Fuqua
Look at my shiny muscles. Go on, you know you want to.
It feels a bit wrong reviewing a film called Shooter considering what just happened in the States a little while ago at Virginia Tech, where 32 people lost their lives at the hands of a crazed, but utterly calm gunman. However, in this courageous ‘reviewer’ caper, you have to occasionally suck it up, as they say, and get on with the job. Be a trooper, soldier on through, above and beyond the call of duty.

Because as awful as that mass slaying must be for all those people who lost loved ones, and for those who lost people they kind of didn’t mind, and for those people who had people who they couldn’t stand cruelly and violently taken from them: it’s just as hard on those of us who have to hear about it.

It’s at moments like these that entertainment becomes most crucial: It’s time to laugh again. So why shouldn’t people go and see a film where a cool, calm guy with a gun kills a shitload of people?

I can’t think of a single reason why not. This is a proudly American film about an American hero taking on the corrupt American system in the only way an American (at least on film, certainly not in reality) deals with conflict: by shooting lots of people. The Way of the Gun indeed.

dir: John McTiernan
Natty dread
1987

Maybe I’m misremembering the reality here, but was Predator an action classic back in the day when it came out? I was still a teenager in the heady last days of the 80s when this would have shown up on tv, heavily censored, of course. I seem to remember that it was big amongst teenager boys, big like acne and premature ejaculation. I mean, we didn’t have broadband internet access or iPods to keep ourselves occupied with back then, and the closest we came to god was watching Arnie chew his way through scenery and co-workers in his wonderful moofies.

This was back when the 11th Commandment was still “Thou Shalt Watch Every Arnold Schwarzenegger Movie”, and it held for at least a little while longer. Sure, he’s the goddamn Governor of California now, but back then he could be relied on to keep teenage boys in thrall.

For reasons I can’t explain, because they’re inexplicable, of course, I felt compelled to pick up a DVD of Predator yesterday and watched it last night (10/4/2007). Twice, the second time with the director’s commentary on. I usually never listen to commentaries, because generally they either have nothing to say that I want to hear, or else-wise they ruin the experience of watching a film I love by telling me something I didn’t want to know but can’t forget. But since I watched it through, and was convinced of one particular
fact so strongly I couldn’t sleep without confirmation, I wanted to watch it with the commentary on to confirm my supposition. And also, I listened to the commentary because I hoped the director would have the balls to say what a nightmare it was working with this bunch of retards. Especially Arnie.

In vain, all is in vain.

Predator was a minor hit back in the day, at least according to Box Office Mojo, and spawned one direct and one indirect sequel. It was a pretty big deal for Arnie, who starred and pretty much owned the film, despite the roster of big men and big personalities on screen. It solidified his claim as a genuine
cinematic presence, a big man with big muscles and a lot of charisma.

dir: George Miller
He looks a bit Jewish himself, dont you think?
1979

Some works of art are classics because they have a universal, timeless quality that transcends era, class, eyesight, and anything else you can think of, in order to be beloved by many throughout the ages. Others are classics only because people have been saying they’re classics for long enough to fool the world itself.

Mad Max is a classic because people have been calling it such for so long that no-one remembers just how amateurish and cheap it truly was. In the mouths and fingertips of many, Mad Max put Australian flicks on the international map and launched several careers in the movies, not least of which being Mel “the Jews are out to get me” Gibson. Sure, it did kickstart Gibson’s career, and the production juggernaut that was Byron Kennedy / George Miller.
But the flick is pretty crap. An enjoyable crappy flick on some levels, but a crappy flick nonetheless.

After the passing of nearly 30 years, the flick doesn’t really stand the test of time. It is a product of its time, certainly, but it really just a ripoff of plenty of other American flicks of the era. The 1970s threw up a fair few flicks where the main point of the story (not the least of which being Dirty Harry) would be some lone figure standing against the tide of criminal barbarism that threatened to engulf society.

It’s not a very different concept from the rugged individualist cowboy mentality of a much earlier time in American history, but it is enhanced by the under siege mentality of middle class people being threatened by the hordes of the great unwashed common to the era. And revenge, sweet revenge; that dish best served icy cold also rears its petulant head.

dir: Louis Leterrier
Is it my body odour knocking you guys out? I swear, my mom bought me deoderant
Again, I got suckered in by a goddamn tv commercial. I don't know how the marketing people keep doing it to me, but when it comes to sub-standard martial arts / gun-fu orientated films, they know just what to put in to get me interested, and there on opening day. I'm ashamed of myself.

This is a dumb film. Dumb as a box full of hammers. Dumber than a locker room full of football players. But is it big dumb fun?

The other thing that burns me about being suckered in by the trailer was the fact that there are scenes in the trailer that have been edited out of the film. And that there are obvious overdubs and cuts presumably to lower the MPAA rating as well, which is funny, though they never stooped so low as to do the "melonfarmer" substitute that I adore so much.

When the film works (which is for 30 minutes of its overall length), it's on fire. The fight scenes and various action scenes are well choreographed and Jason Statham looks suitably professionally hard when he is belting three shades of fuck out of the various bad guys. I need me some of the chewable steroids they've been feeding this guy, because he looks like a lean, corded, vicious machine. He also seems pretty good in the action sequences in terms of looking believable as a fighter.

I was almost going to say that this film represents a departure for Jason Statham in that he doesn't really get or need to display any acting chops in this dumb film, but then I remembered that his last four films have been dunderheaded action vehicles. He is obviously hoping to become a bit of an action icon, which
is all right by me. We need a new generation of steroid heads to replace aging icons like the odious Van Damme and the Austrian lunkhead Arnold. If Jason Statham be the man, then I don't mind, because he is a decent actor as it is, and would be able to carry the dramatic elements of a role as long as they weren't
written by a crack addicted monkey. Which in this case they apparently were.

dir: Lee Tamahori
Bang Bang, you sexy middle-aged man
There. That feeling you had in your chest. Hadn't you noticed it before? Did you think it was just that you're getting really unfit and unhealthy? Or that maybe you had tuberculosis? No, that wasn't it.

That's it. Breath out. See, what happened was, you were waiting with bated breath for my next movie review.

And what will it be: a review of Harry Potter and The Chamber of Secrets, where I kept getting funny looks from the parents who'd brought their kids along, who were wondering what a 30 year old man was doing watching a kiddies film sans kiddies? Will it be a review from an advanced screening of The Two Towers, where 700 nerds were on the verge of premature ejaculation for nearly 3 hours?

No, it's a review of the 20th sequel to a very, very tired franchise which like its title suggests, will not die any time soon.

It doesn't take a genius or an audience member from the Jerry Springer show to grasp the attraction behind the Bond phenomena: International jet setting British superspy gets to save the world on a regular basis, kills people that piss him off, fucks every woman that crosses his path within minutes of meeting them,
plays with the most supercool gadgets, and gets to cheat death every ten minutes always with an awful pun at his disposal to mark the occasion. Best of all he doesn't have to ever see again eiither of the two obligatory woman he shags per film, as one of them generally turns evil necessitating the added bonus of
getting to kill one of them. Talk about a fear of commitment.

dir: Paul Hunter
Chow may be a god, but even he cannot save this heap of shit. Even when glowing blue.
People have different definitions of what a B movie is. People have different definitions of what a decent Friday night is as well, but that's another story. I've always known what a B movie is, but I had difficulty articulating it clearly. The IMDB defines the B Movie thusly:

"a low-budget, second tier movie, frequently the 2nd movie in a double-feature billing. B-films were cheaper for studios because they did not involve the most highly paid actors or costly sets, and were popular with theatre owners because they were less expensive to bring into their theatres while still able to draw revenue"

But the phrase 'B movie' has altogether different connotations for me as well. B movies can be cool, there's the odd B movie cult classic out there, but generally I like to think of generic B movies as being, as we used to say at the orphanage in between coughing up blood from consumption and fighting over rat meat, "shitehouse". As most films are mediocre at best, and downright awful at worst, you have to wonder how it's possible to have an entire other stratum of film which is worse than the vast majority of product that's out there simply by budget and definition.

Surely budget isn't the only decider. There must be some other dark arts at work. Personally, I think that there are certain actors and stories that can, regardless of and often in spite of the budget, be held up as the paragon, the quintessence, the nadir of B movies.

Bulletproof Monk is a stupid film with a laughable plot, bad acting, an overdose of cliche and a lack of innovation or original thought so profound that you'll think that you've been transported back in time
to the 80s. Remember the days of The Last Dragon, Double Dragon, anything with Dragon or Ninja in the title or with bad actors and worse fighting? This film remembers the love we have for those days, and brings it all back up in a manner reminiscent of watching a cat weakly throwing up its cookies all over your favourite rug. Which, in the words of The Dude from The Big Lebowski "Really tied the room together, man."

dir: Clark Johnson
What utter rot
S.W.A.T. is a pointless film rendered more pointless by being a big screen version of a television series no-one needed to see again. If they’re going to remake this crap, then they need to do a remake of The A Team (which they are doing, I believe), Who’s the Boss and Touched By an Angel as well. Why the hell not? Where’s that Cheers movie everyone’s been dying for? What about Shatner making a comeback in T.J. Hooker? How about another version of Dragnet? Or Hart to Hart, with Robert Wagner and Stefanie Powers? The Love Boat; now that’s begging to be remade on the big screen. The list is endless. As is the amount of talentless people willing to hitch their wagon onto an unoriginal idea since they lack the ability to think up anything for themselves.

So from pointless origins we get a pointless film. The dialogue is surreal, in that not a single conversation occurring during the movie sounds like it could occur between any people apart from actors on the set of a crappy movie. None of the actors are believable, because the director has no idea what to do with them, or how to advise them to act. The story is so idiot simple that even a studio executive could understand it, which means the rest of us are incredulous as to why millions of dollars were devoted to telling such a nothing story. The last half of the film has no dialogue that doesn’t involve the purely functional “we are going here, they are going there, we must catch them" type crap.

dir: Sam Raimi
This is how hard it is to get a seat on the train these days
This is what big budget film making is all about. This is what sequels
are all about. Out of what I would call humble origins comes a story
writ large across the silver screen which makes most other examples of
high concept big budget type films look like the abject crap that they
are. There is no need to check one's heart, brain, balls or ovaries at
the door. Sam Raimi has made the absolute best film of his career, and
that's no small achievement when you've got an oeuvre that runs the
gamut from Evil Dead to A Simple Plan.

dir: Jean Francois Richet
Howdy pardner
I wouldn’t have thought that a remake of a John Carpenter classic could have worked, but it has. Let’s face it, it’s a good thing that Carpenter himself wasn’t involved, because everything he’s touched in the last decade has turned to shit. Although, now that I think of it, he did already remake Assault on Precinct 13. Except he called it Ghosts of Mars, and we all know how well that turned out.

This is good stuff, though. It’s never going to have as many fans as the 70s classic, and I’m sure many people are going to avoid it like it’s a stinky nappy in a swimming pool just because it’s a remake. But they’d be missing out on a decent B movie if they did.

This isn’t a life-changing experience; it isn’t visual poetry or Dostoevsky debating the Dalai Lama and Deborah Harry whilst covered in baby oil and wrestling at the same time. It’s an action movie where a bunch of people are trying to kill another bunch of people, and the ones that are going to survive are the ones who want it the most. It doesn’t wuss out on the violence, and maintains a relentless, dark tone throughout.

Dir: James McTeigue
Bloody revolutionaries, always thinking they know better than our benevolent totalitarian masters
You don’t get many films these days trumpeting the joys of anarchy. Especially not multi-million dollar movies produced by the Wachowski Brothers and based on an Alan Moore graphic novel.

And there’s a reason for that. Even in this day and age where the diversity of opinion and opportunities to voice one’s worthless opinions seem countless, it’s still essentially an illusion. Every side of politics, regardless of one’s upbringing or experiences at university, preaches change, justice or better ways, but all want their version of the status quo upheld.

dir: Bryan Singer
Looking down on the rest of us... who does he think he is?
Superman Returns is a re-jigging of an ancient franchise with the express intention of making more money from something old in lieu of inventing anything exciting and new. And, just like an episode of the Love Boat, there is the need to preserve the familiar (Superman’s powers, origins, and squareness, Lois Lane, Metropolis, Lex Luthor, kryptonite) whilst including enough new stuff to not make the producers look like the lazy, intellectually bankrupt cretins that they are.

Perhaps I speak too harshly of people I’ve never met. Perhaps you believe I should give one of the producers, Jon Peters, the benefit of the doubt. He was, after all, Barbra Streisand’s hairdresser before he became a producer. Not only that, he is rumoured to be an illiterate and violent man too stupid to know how dumb his ideas are. As such, he was uniquely qualified to produce such masterpieces as the first re-jigged Batman, that awful infected haemorrhoid of a movie Wild Wild West, and Bonfire of the Vanities.

At least they had Bryan Singer, director of the first two X-Men films and The Usual Suspects at the helm of this flick, to try to redeem a project over a decade in the making and destined for mediocrity.

Superman Returns pretends Superman III and IV were never made, as do the rest of us, and also pretends only five years have elapsed since the 70s. In those five years, Superman (Brandon Routh, playing Christopher Reeve more than the Caped Crusader) has been searching the cosmos for the remnants of his home planet, to no avail. Upon his return to Earth, he finds Metropolis has not remained frozen in time, breathlessly awaiting his return.

The love of his life, Lois Lane (Kate Bosworth) has squeezed out a child, and become engaged to her editor’s nephew, Richard White (James Marsden). Not only that, but in a fit of pique, angered by Superman’s abandonment, she has won the prestigious (only to journalists) Pulitzer for writing an article about how the world doesn’t need Superman. Talk about your passive-aggressive revenge. It reminds me of a character in Neal Stephenson’s novel Cryptonomicon, who, unhappy with her partner’s beard, writes a PhD thesis about how pathetic men with beards are.

Superman has returned at the same time as super genius super criminal Lex Luthor (Kevin Spacey) is let out of jail. In some of the film’s first moments, we see an ancient old crone on her death bed, telling someone how wonderful he is as she is signing her last will and testament giving him her vast fortune. She specifically thanks the unseen man for giving her pleasure she could previously only dream of. Luthor really earned that money, I can tell you.