Action Archives - Page 32 of 51 - FILM FREAK CENTRAL

Man on Fire (2004) – Blu-ray Disc

January 11, 20082000s, 2008, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Directors: Tony Scott, Drama, Mexico, Switzerland, Thriller, UK

*½/**** Image A+ Sound A+
starring Denzel Washington, Dakota Fanning, Marc Anthony, Radha Mitchell
screenplay by Brian Helgeland, based on the novel by A.J. Quinnell
directed by Tony Scott

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. What used to be the province of the Times Square grindhouse and drive-in movie theatres is now star-vehicle blockbuster fodder, making the revenge sub-genre’s subversive qualities and carefully cultivated atmosphere of frustrated rage suddenly a reflection of the demons plaguing mainstream culture. Though certainly more substantive than the hit-and-run remake of Walking Tall, Tony Scott’s Man on Fire falls far below the redemptive qualities of Kill Bill, Vol. 2, offering the world the logical end result of a nation operating under the twin godheads of fear and Old Testament vengeance: a slickefied, iconographic, racist, sexist, huckster version of the grimy, low rent, pleasantly exploitative The Punisher.

The Adventures of Young Indiana Jones: Volume One (1992-1993/1996-1999) – DVD

January 8, 20081990s, 2008, Action, Adventure, Authors: Ian Pugh, DVD, Family, Mystery, Television

Image B Sound B Extras B
“My First Adventure,” “Passion for Life,” “The Perils of Cupid,” “Travels with Father,” “Journeys of Radiance,” “Spring Break Adventure,” “Love’s Sweet Song”

by Ian Pugh It’s important to understand that Indiana Jones didn’t make history cool, but even more important to understand that history didn’t make Indy cool, either. “The Adventures of Young Indiana Jones” (formerly known as “The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles” and henceforth “Young Indy”) purports to portray the daring archaeologist’s early years as he travels around the world with his father (Lloyd Owen), meeting famous figures and going to great pains to teach the young’ns in the audience a thing or two about the artists and revolutionaries of the early twentieth century. Because the attempt to educate binds itself to a down-to-earth approach, the series completely ignores the fact that Indy’s franchise appeal lies in a careful collision of the mundane and the fantastic, of reality and fantasy. It’s one thing to demythologize the romantic violence often attributed to the Old West, but quite another to try to demythologize something so immersed in theology and the supernatural that to abandon them is to lose something inextricably vital to the concept. Imagine if Raiders of the Lost Ark had ended with the Ark of the Covenant revealed to be an ornate box full of dust, sans the wrath of God, and you’ll understand the basic problems that plague “Young Indy”.

Con Air (1997) [Unrated Extended Edition] – DVD|Blu-ray Disc

January 7, 20081990s, 2008, Action, Authors: Alex Jackson, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, DVD, Nicolas Cage, Thriller

***½/****
DVD – Image A- Sound A-
BD – Image C+ Sound A- Extras D+
starring Nicolas Cage, John Cusack, John Malkovich, Steve Buscemi
screenplay by Scott Rosenberg
directed by Simon West

by Alex Jackson The plot is simplicity itself: Cameron Poe (Nicolas Cage) has just completed his training as an Army Ranger; he goes to a local bar to celebrate with his pregnant wife (Monica Potter), gets assaulted by some thugs, kills one in the ensuing fight, and is convicted of manslaughter. Eight years later, his sentence is up and he hitches a prison flight that happens to be transferring a number of the country’s most dangerous and renowned criminals, including Cyrus “the Virus” Grissom (John Malkovich), a brilliant psychopath who murders people just because he can; Nathan “Diamond Dog” Jones (Ving Rhames), a black militant who wrote a book in prison that is now being made into a feature film with Denzel in talks for the lead; William “Billy Bedlam” Bedford (Nick Chinlund), who slayed his wife’s parents, brothers, and dog when he discovered the missus in bed with another man; and Johnny 23 (Danny Trejo), a serial rapist with 23 heart tattoos on his arm. (“One for each of my bitches,” he explains.) Cyrus leads a revolt on the plane, killing or capturing all of the guards and hijacking the flight. But like Alan Rickman in Die Hard, Tommy Lee Jones in Under Siege, or Powers Boothe in Sudden Death, he has no idea that one of the hostages he’s holding is a classically-trained ass-kicker!

Underdog (2007) – Blu-ray Disc

January 3, 20082000s, 2007, 2008, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Disney, Family, Sci-Fi, Superhero, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/**** Image A Sound A Extras B-
starring Jim Belushi, Peter Dinklage, John Slattery, Patrick Warburton
screenplay by Adam Rifkin and Joe Piscatella & Craig A. Williams
directed by Frederik Du Chau

by Bill Chambers Whereas the gigantic Underdog balloon that hovers over New York City during the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade is at least conceptually interesting (American commerce’s idea of a Stalin statue), Underdog, Disney’s charmless live-action resurrection of the beloved super-mutt, has no subtext, just a bunch of mercenary actors and technicians who can barely disguise their contempt for the film’s screenplay, which lazily embellishes the extraordinary-pet genre with scatology while weaving a maddeningly derelict patchwork of recycled tropes like the grieving widower/orphan, the unattainable hottie, and the disgraced cop. It’s fair to say I hate Underdog, but I hate it because it doesn’t even have the will to finish what it starts. Only two things about it are kind of fascinating, and only then from a largely extratextual standpoint. The first is that in taking the title character out of the cartoon realm, the digitally-manipulated slapstick pratfalls and clumsy landings look grotesquely painful for the beagle(s) playing Underdog. They should’ve gone the Scooby-Doo route and fashioned a 3-D likeness of the 2-D prototype, since the sight of man’s best friend hurtling through panes of glass really has no intrinsic comic value.

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (2007) – Blu-ray Disc

December 10, 2007****/****, 2000s, 2007, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Family, Fantasy, FFC Must-Own, Mystery, UK

****/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras B+
starring Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint, Emma Watson, Helena Bonham Carter
screenplay by Michael Goldenberg, based on the novel by J.K. Rowling
directed by David Yates

by Walter Chaw It’s a blasted earth, this green that holds Hogwarts now, and during a scene where our hero wizard is being tortured into forgetfulness for his own good, director David Yates cues a blanket of forgetful snow to fall. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (hereafter Harry Potter 5) is, like its title suggests, a startling return to form for the series after Alfonso Cuarón’s exceptional Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban was followed by the insipid contribution of rom-com specialist Mike Newell. Gratifyingly complex and deliciously Freudian, a moment where Harry loses the last of his family–mirroring a moment in the third film where, on the banks of a lake, he almost loses himself–is preceded by an identical progression from the third film in which he’s mistaken for his own father. Alas, this time, Harry’s not able to affect positive change in the guise of his dad; it’s the boy becoming the man, frustrated and folded into a world of dread and doom. As drawn in the film, Potter’s universe is like Potter’s Field, a place where strangers and orphans are buried on the eve of war and a child’s unavoidable matriculation into corruption. Harry Potter 5 is dark as pitch: unsettling, unsettled, unresolved, and utterly remarkable.

Beowulf (2007)

November 16, 20072000s, 2007, Action, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: Robert Zemeckis, Fantasy, Theatrical Release, UK

**½/****
screenplay by Neil Gaiman & Roger Avary
directed by Robert Zemeckis

by Walter Chaw The Old English epic gets what feels like its twentieth adaptation in the last couple of years alone with Robert Zemeckis’s Polar Express-ized–which is to say, digitally rotoscoped to distraction and peopled with pixel phantoms that look like dead-eyed Toussaud versions of the actors voicing them–Beowulf. Not that there aren’t a few pretty cool moments (especially in IMAX 3D, the six-story screen doing wonders for the masturbatory shazam interludes), but the whole thing is decidedly unthrilling and so technologically interesting that it overwhelms any connection we might otherwise have with the story. I spent a lot of energy admiring the whiz-bang and almost none giving much of a shit about anything else. What won me over at the end is that it’s completely ballsy in its anti-Christian tactic, suggesting a few weeks before The Golden Compass debuts that the general sea change against the evangelicals, if not predicted by the cinema, is at least reflected by it. A scene where a bishop played by John Malkovich is carried on a cross from his dragon-levelled church, hissing about “sins of the fathers,” is almost as tricky as another where good king Beowulf (Ray Winstone) announces that the “Christ God” has done away with all heroes, replacing them with “fear and shame.” I prefer my heresy in the subtler vintage minted by stuff like Matthew Robbins’s Dragonslayer, but what the hell: if Hollywood’s going to fire a shot across the Conservative bow, I’d rather they do it this way than with something like Lions for Lambs. Also cool is the casting of Crispin Glover as evil troll Grendel.

RoboCop (1987) [20th Anniversary Collector’s Edition] – DVD

November 14, 20071980s, 2007, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, DVD, Satire, Sci-Fi, Thriller

***½/**** Image B+ Sound B- Extras A+
starring Peter Weller, Nancy Allen, Daniel O’Herlihy, Ronny Cox
screenplay by Edward Neumeier & Michael Miner
directed by Paul Verhoeven

by Walter Chaw I feel like I must’ve seen RoboCop, one of the key films slotted into my moviegoing sweet spot, at least two dozen times one summer on a shitty bootleg I made by hooking two VCRs together–the now-defunct Orion being one of those companies that apparently never adopted Macrovision to discourage such a thing. I watched it in regular rotation with the big movies of 1986¹ (Aliens, Big Trouble in Little China, Highlander, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Manhunter, Cronenberg’s The Fly², Blue Velvet) and 1987 (Predator, The Untouchables, Evil Dead II, Angel Heart, Innerspace, Near Dark, The Hidden, Full Metal Jacket, The Princess Bride, Hellraiser, Raising Arizona, The Living Daylights, The Big Easy, and Lethal Weapon). Those years in which I went from 13 to 14 in a haze of hormonal delirium (9½ Weeks, No Way Out, and Fatal Attraction are in my onanistic hall of fame), I consumed more film than I ever would again until fashioning movie-watching into a pastime resembling a career. I developed the ability to distinguish between popular movies and movies I was supposed to like (Manon of the Spring–the medicine of it going down smoother thanks to the not-shy Emmanuelle Béart) and began keeping journals of my adventures at the cineplex (Union Square Six, Green Mountain Six, Westland Two, Lakeside Two, Cinderella Drive-In–all gone now), carefully stapling my ticket stubs to the page as some tithe to my flickering, twilit devotionals. Movies were the angel/devil at war on my shoulders: morality and venality; virtue and hedonism; good and evil; Apollo and Dionysus; the sun and the moon. I ebbed and flowed with them. It would be another five years before I fully understood the import of cinema in articulating a good portion of my worldview–not to mention almost all of the strategies with which I deconstructed other mediums. I was lulled by the popular opinion of my generation that movies were not worthwhile objects of devotion, and so I channelled my attention in formal education into poetry and literature–but the space between mattress-and-box-spring was always stuffed with this secret totem.

Spider-Man 3 (2007) – Blu-ray Disc

October 28, 20072000s, 2007, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Sam Raimi, Sci-Fi, Spider-Man, Superhero

***½/**** Image A+ Sound A+ Extras A-
starring Tobey Maguire, Kirsten Dunst, James Franco, Thomas Haden Church
screenplay by Sam Raimi & Ivan Raimi and Alvin Sargent
directed by Sam Raimi

by Walter Chaw It’s hard for me at this point to look at the Spider-Man franchise literally. Literally, after all, it’s riddled with inconsistencies, plot holes the size of Buicks, abrupt shifts in tone, important subplots given short shrift, and on and on. But as iconography, as allegory (who can forget the timeliness of the first film’s 9/11 parable?), as an essentially self-aware product of our image-ravenous culture, it achieves a kind of spectral, magical grace. Though I prefer the personal evolution of the second picture (and the third Harry Potter film for the same reasons), the trying-on and jettisoning of father figures along the path of boy-into-man, there are moments in Spider-Man 3 so supremely well-crafted as visual poetry, so gloriously tangled and knotty, that they batter defenses raised against another Iraq War tale of unimaginable losses and the cold comfort of vengeance. The whole of the film is a case of rolling with the punches, really, of choosing early whether to hang with director Sam Raimi’s sense of broad slapstick melodrama and greeting-card symbolism or reject it as incoherent, populist mugging. If you accept its roundhouse swings and Evil Dead-era zooms at face value, though, it has for you in return a moment where something struggles to be born, but can only finish its nascence with the help of an image of its sick daughter; a breathless action sequence that revolves around the recovery of a sentimental artifact; and, as a bonus, a “Three Stooges” bit where old pal Bruce Campbell plays an unctuous, over-eager maître d’.

Face/Off (1997) [2-Disc Special Collector’s Edition] – DVD

October 26, 20071990s, 2007, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Directors: John Woo, DVD, Nicolas Cage, Sci-Fi, Thriller

***½/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring John Travolta, Nicolas Cage, Joan Allen, Gina Gershon
screenplay by Mike Webb & Michael Colleary
directed by John Woo

by Walter Chaw Arriving right smack dab in the latter half of a decade in American cinema that saw digital “reality” supplant filmic “reality” (and appearing the same year as James Cameron’s Forrest Gump: Titanic), Hong Kong legend John Woo’s high-camp Face/Off directly (and presciently) addresses issues of identity theft, terrorism, and the digital corruption of reality and indirectly addresses Woo’s émigré influence on the modern action film. It’s a key picture in a ten-year cycle obsessed with mercurial personality shifts–with sliding effortlessly in and out of various personae according to expediency and whim. (Michael Tolkin’s awesome Deep Cover being the pinnacle of this trend.) Gauge the state of the nation from its most democratic entertainment; for his part, Woo–struggling to translate the heroic bloodshed of his HK work for western audiences and revealing himself in the process to be a starfucker with questionable taste in Hollywood stars (Christian Slater? John Travolta? Nicolas Cage? Seriously?)–went the self-parodic route with Face/Off (is that Joe Bob Briggs as a lobotomizer in a futuristic supermax, by gum?), wisely un-harnessing Cage’s and Travolta’s intimidating inner hams in turn to roam free-range through the picture’s exuberantly ridiculous tableaux.

The Monster Squad (1987) [Two-Disc 20th Anniversary Edition] – DVD

October 18, 20071980s, 2007, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, DVD, Horror, Teen, Vampire, Werewolf

**/**** Image B- Sound B+ Extras A
starring André Gower, Duncan Regehr, Stephen Macht, Tom Noonan
screenplay by Shane Black & Fred Dekker
directed by Fred Dekker

by Bill Chambers Since I caught myself mouthing a portion of the dialogue while revisiting it for the first time in almost two decades, I think it’s fair to say I internalized The Monster Squad through multiple viewings in my misspent youth. Still, as that TriStar horse sprouted wings, I realized I had no tactile memory of the film, no real recollection of what it felt like–and the answer is: it feels like 80 minutes, give or take. It’s pabulum, albeit pabulum with a pedigree. The latest nostalgia trap to get a nerd baptism (an AICN-sponsored reunion screening at Austin’s Alamo Drafthouse is more or less single-handedly responsible for the picture’s splashy DVD release), it’s at least better than the movie to which it’s most often compared, the Steven Spielberg-produced The Goonies, if only because it’s a good half-hour shorter and, by extension, comparatively unpretentious. Beneath its own Spielbergian façade, The Monster Squad works like those old horror hosts used to by sanctioning the classic monsters for a younger generation, whereas The Goonies aims only to erect a shrine to itself.

Heroes: Season 1 (2006-2007) + Superman: Doomsday (2007) – DVDs

October 7, 20072000s, 2007, Action, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Ian Pugh, Drama, DVD, Sci-Fi, Superhero

HEROES: SEASON 1
Image A Sound A Extras C
“Genesis,” “Don’t Look Back,” “One Giant Leap,” “Collision,” “Hiros,” “Better Halves,” “Nothing to Hide,” “Seven Minutes to Midnight,” “Six Months Ago,” “Fallout,” “Godsend,” “The Fix,” “Distractions,” “Run!,” “Unexpected,” “Company Man,” “Parasite,” “.07%,” “Five Years Gone,” “The Hard Part,” “Landslide,” “How to Stop an Exploding Man”

Superman/Doomsday
*½/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras C
screenplay by Duane Capizzi
directed by Bruce Timm, Lauren Montgomery & Brandon Vietti

by Ian Pugh “Heroes” is perhaps best described as a network-television attempt to recast Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’s seminal Watchmen for the mainstream market. It actively reworks that masterpiece’s major plot points for mass consumption, yes, but more to the point, it tries to bring superheroes into real-life situations–all the while harbouring, very much unlike Watchmen, an uneducated contempt for comic books. Offering lame turn-arounds and mocking references to superhero clichés without any apparent knowledge of comics published after 1960, “Heroes” believes that the medium is, now and forever, uniformly steeped in silly costumes, fatuous storylines, and unambiguous divisions between good and evil. This contrarian attitude towards its perceived progenitors leads it to pawn off its own superficial characters, scenarios, and rambling diatribes about fate and destiny as infinitely superior and more complex alternatives. The fact that the final episode of the first season gives us a slightly-tinkered version of Evil Dead II‘s hilariously downbeat ending should leave no doubt as to the essential falseness of “Heroes” and its pretense of originality: the desire to move what is seen as a cartoonish enterprise into a more mature arena has already been explored countless times by countless artists over the last few decades, often from within the medium itself.

Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea (1961) [Global Warming Edition] – DVD

October 1, 20071960s, 2007, Action, Adventure, Authors: Alex Jackson, DVD, Fantasy

**/**** Image B Sound A Extras B
starring Walter Pidgeon, Joan Fontaine, Barbara Eden, Peter Lorre
screenplay by Irwin Allen and Charles Bennett
directed by Irwin Allen

by Alex Jackson Take a gander at the sleeve for Fox’s “Global Warming Edition” of Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea. The title is contained in a downward arrow in drippy, bright-red lettering. It’s guiding us towards the main action, a gleaming submarine and lime-green scuba divers fighting off a one-eyed, giant red squid. Dig the curvy brushstrokes, the action lines around the charging submarine, and the flecks of paint signifying bubbles. The cast, meanwhile, is in the top-left corner: there’s Walter Pidgeon with a Vincent Price moustache, Joan Fontaine with a face of granite, a gasping Barbara Eden, and behind them all, Peter Lorre pointing up at God knows what. Doesn’t it just get your juices flowin’? If I were browsing the video store and happened upon this, I’d be tempted to purchase it sight-unseen, and I’d like to think it’s rare that a DVD’s mere packaging could encourage me to do that.

300 (2007) [Two-Disc Special Edition] – DVD|Blu-ray Disc

September 24, 20072000s, 2007, Action, Australia, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Bulgaria, Canada, Drama, DVD, War

*/****
DVD – Image B+ Sound A Extras B
BD – Image A Sound A+ Extras B
starring Gerard Butler, Lena Headey, David Wenham, Dominic West
screenplay by Zack Snyder & Kurt Johnstad and Michael B. Gordon, based on the graphic novel by Frank Miller
directed by Zack Snyder

by Walter Chaw There’s an idea in the ancient world about a “beautiful death,” achievable for the warrior only in mortal, one-on-one wartime combat–an idea that may have contributed to the length of the Trojan siege, and an idea vocalized by one of the captains serving under Spartan King Leonides (Gerard Butler) in Zack Snyder’s 300. Based on Frank Miller’s graphic novel of the same name, the film betrays a lot of the same macho aesthetic as Robert Rodriguez’s adaptation of Miller’s Sin City–but rather than content itself with the literally bestial terms of glory in the masculine psyche, it makes a play for allegory and equivocal morality (of all things) in the valorization of Sparta and the romanticization of a crushing military defeat. It’s not that Leonides is seen martyred in the end in a tableau explicitly meant to evoke the passion of St. Sebastian, but that he goes out pining for his wife like a lovesick hamster, thus completing 300‘s devolution from remorseless Spartan militarism into gushy democratic idealism and all manner of liberal maladies. There’s little profit in establishing the rules of this universe as uncompromising and brutal (it opens on a field of infant skulls–victims of a Spartan culling ritual of its own kind) if its intentions split time between justifying, in non-chest-beating terms, the decision to pit three-hundred against thousands while denying the Spartans their individual moments of “beautiful death” in favour of some collective date with pyrrhic immortality. History suggests that the Spartans, having exhausted their arms, died scratching and clawing with their bare hands; 300 suggests they died calling for their mothers and wives.

Eat My Dust (1976) [Roger Corman: Supercharged Edition] – DVD

September 24, 20071970s, 2007, Action, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, DVD, Romance

***½/**** Image B- Sound B Extras C+
starring Ron Howard, Christopher Norris, Brad David, Kathy O’Dare
written and directed by Charles B. Griffith

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover In one sense, Eat My Dust fails completely at its stated goal–that is, to be a raucous car-chase comedy with squares goosed at every turn. Not that cops don’t crash their rides and girls don’t swoon at reckless drivers, but the movie isn’t really interested in setting up the very obvious payoffs required by the genre. Director Charles B. Griffith, a long-time writer for the Roger Corman factory, is more interested in the ambiance of a racetrack, the genial nature of teenagers, and an easygoing feeling of freedom quite opposed to the hyped-up version in which these things usually traffic. True, Griffith fumbles for his vision more often than he nails it, and he fluffs every joke and action scene from his own, hopelessly standard screenplay. But for a teen flick starring Ron Howard, Eat My Dust has plenty to keep you diverted and even mildly surprised–if not enough that it sticks to your bones.

Deadwood: The Complete Third Season (2006) + Rome: The Complete First Season (2005) – DVDs

September 8, 20072000s, 2005, 2006, 2007, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, DVD, Television, Western

DEADWOOD: THE COMPLETE THIRD SEASON
Image A Sound A Extras A+
"Tell Your God to Ready for Blood," "I Am Not The Fine Man You Take Me For," "True Colors," "Full Faith And Credit," "A Two-Headed Beast," "A Rich Find," "Unauthorized Cinnamon," "Leviathan Smiles," "Amateur Night," "A Constant Throb," "The Catbird Seat," "Tell Him Something Pretty"

ROME: THE COMPLETE FIRST SEASON
Image A Sound A Extras C
"The Stolen Eagle," "How Titus Pullo Brought Down the Republic," "An Owl in a Thornbush," "Stealing From Saturn," "The Ram Has Touched The Wall," "Egeria," "Pharsalus," "Caesarion," "Utica," "Triumph," "The Spoils," "Kalends of February"

by Walter Chaw HBO is the watermark for televised drama, no question. With "The Sopranos"–which began like high-concept and ended like avant-garde–as their flagship, they've progressed through the psychic devastation of "Six Feet Under" (was there ever a final episode of any series so steeped in existential terror?), the insouciance of "Entourage", the social nihilism of "Curb Your Enthusiasm", and the repugnant popular deviance of "Sex in the City", only to find as their bedrock circa 2007 something so slight (if so brilliant) as "Flight of the Conchords". Two contenders for that crown, "Rome" and "Deadwood", alas received their walking papers, victims of too high a budget, too heavy a burden of viewer investment (can I confess that I didn't like "Deadwood" until I started it from the first episode?), and too niche a viewership. I hesitate to compare even the extraordinarily-similar-feeling "Rome" to the channel's short-lived (equally short-lived, in fact: two seasons) "Carnivàle", but I do wonder whether "Deadwood" and "Rome" weren't nixed because they weren't interested in seducing new lovers and may have seemed, from the outside, like so much dry coming and going, talking of Michelangelo.

3:10 to Yuma (2007)

September 7, 20072000s, 2007, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, Theatrical Release, Western

***/****
starring Russell Crowe, Christian Bale, Peter Fonda, Gretchen Mol
screenplay by Halsted Welles and Michael Brandt & Derek Haas, based on the short story by Elmore Leonard
directed by James Mangold

by Walter Chaw The distance–chronologically, ideologically–between the release of James Mangold’s 3:10 to Yuma and Andrew Dominick’s looming The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford strikes me as identical to the space that connects Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch with Peter Fonda’s The Hired Hand. The exhaustion in our popular culture feels the same; the nihilism feels the same; the fatalism with which a lot of us look at our political prospects (the incumbents are bums, the insurgents are morons) feels the same. You compare Peckinpah’s criminal heroes, burnt by the sun into animated saddle bags, motivated by gold and orgies to go to their doom in blasted, godless places south of some metaphorical border, to Fonda’s retinue of burnt-out, disillusioned, disenfranchised yippies and graceless lugs, and you’re able to crystallize somehow a picture of how, even in the space of a single administration, the coarse diving bell of our basest natures is collapsed by too much terrible knowledge. (Compare Fonda in his own film to Fonda’s wonderful cameo in this one–the dream is dead, indeed.) You can only fall back on how natural it is to be a bastard for so long before philosophical reflection rears its ugly head. The internal progression of Arthur Penn’s Bonnie & Clyde provides the template of this motion all by itself: The midpoint of that film, as Bonnie visits her mother on a soft-focus, sepia-smeared dirt farm, represents the generational gulf, sure, but also the turning point between the innocent bloodshed of that picture’s celebratory first half and the strive towards domestic “normalcy” of its doomed second. I wonder if what lingers (and what initially so offended) about Bonnie & Clyde wasn’t the gore and the sex but instead the suggestion that the way things are, just the act of growing old murders the spirit.

The Warriors (1979) [Ultimate Director’s Cut] + A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints (2006) – DVDs

September 4, 20071970s, 2000s, 2006, 2007, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, DVD, Thriller

THE WARRIORS
***½/**** Image A Sound B Extras C
starring Michael Beck, James Remar, David Patrick Kelly, Deborah Van Valkenburgh
screenplay by David Shaber and Walter Hill, based on the novel by Sol Yurick
directed by Walter Hill

A GUIDE TO RECOGNIZING YOUR SAINTS
**½/**** Image A Sound A Extras B+
starring Robert Downey Jr., Shia LaBeouf, Chazz Palminteri, Rosario Dawson
written and directed by Dito Montiel

by Walter Chaw Walter Hill’s The Warriors adapts a Sol Yurick novel that was, in turn, inspired by Greek soldier Xenophon’s Anabasis, the account of a mercenary army stranded in the heart of Mesopotamia circa 400 B.C. that fought its way north to the coast of the Black Sea and then to safety. Accordingly, The Warriors is about the titular New York street gang–based in Coney Island, naturally–fighting its way through enemy territory from The Bronx back to the coast. That they’ve ventured so far from home has to do with a giant gathering of the city’s gangs to a rally/riot called by charismatic kingpin Cyrus (Roger Hill) in the hope of uniting the Big Apple’s diverse miscreants under a common flag. Shades of Abbie Hoffman’s Chicago Democratic Convention Yippie movement if you squint hard enough, but closer to the truth to locate the shard of revolution eternally sharpened against the promise that if all the minorities were to rise up collectively, they’d be the majority. Luckily for the majority, much of the minority is what it is because of its total inability to stand behind a common cause. Sure enough, once Cyrus is assassinated and the Warriors blamed, our heroes face a midnight odyssey through badlands patrolled by harlequin-painted baseball goons, Amazon/succubi, and overalls-wearing neo-hillbillies.

Cult Camp Classics, Vol. 3: Terrorized Travelers – DVD

August 30, 20071950s, 1960s, 1970s, 2007, Action, Adventure, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Disaster Movie, Drama, DVD, Romance, Thriller

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover

SKYJACKED (1972)
**½/**** Image A- Sound A-
starring Charlton Heston, Yvette Mimieux, James Brolin, Jeanne Crain
screenplay by Stanley R. Greenberg, based on the novel Hijacked by David Harper
directed by John Guillermin

Skyjacked is the inevitable result of people pretending to be casual and relaxed while actually being stiff and formal. The actors would desperately like you to believe that they just happened to be on a jumbo jet when it was, by sheer chance, hijacked by a crazed veteran–but who are they fooling? As everybody is cruelly slotted into a stereotypical role (and forced to spout inane pleasantries no thinking person would utter), the artificiality of the proceedings is about as plain as the nose on Chuck Heston’s face. Pulse-pounding excitement–which would have required people in whom we could invest–is not on the menu. In fact, the whole thing seems remarkably tranquil as a bunch of slumming character actors cash easy paychecks.

Prison Break: Season One (2005-2006) – DVD

August 27, 20072000s, 2005, 2007, Action, Authors: Ian Pugh, Crime, Drama, Mystery, Television, Thriller

Image B+ Sound B Extras C
“Pilot,” “Allen,” “Cell Test,” “Cute Poison,” “English, Fitz or Percy,” “Riots, Drills and the Devil (Part 1),” “Riots Drills and the Devil (Part 2),” “The Old Head,” “Tweener,” “Sleight of Hand,” “And Then There Were 7,” “Odd Man Out,” “End of the Tunnel,” “The Rat,” “By the Skin & the Teeth,” “Brother’s Keeper,” “J-Cat,” “Bluff,” “The Key,” “Tonight,” “Go,” “Flight”

by Ian Pugh The elements that make “Prison Break” compulsively watchable are almost painfully easy to locate and describe, but the taut dialogue, compelling characters, and claustrophobic environment–which together bring a renewed vigour to a genre mired in bravado and uneasy partnerships–also make it something of a chore to sift through the supposed complexities that serve as the show’s pretext. Begin with the bare essentials that probably constituted the pitch: wrongfully convicted of the murder of the Vice President’s brother, death row inmate Lincoln Burrows (Dominic Purcell) has quickly burned out his appeals and has less than a month before he’s to be executed at Fox River Penitentiary. But there may be hope yet: Lincoln’s brother, Michael Scofield (Wentworth Miller), is a structural engineer by trade, and in fact designed Fox River. Intentionally botching a bank robbery, Michael enters the prison sporting an elaborate body tattoo that hides a complete map of the prison grounds–in addition to a series of codes and ciphers that detail what Michael will have to do and with whom he must ally himself in order to bust his brother out.

The Guns of Navarone (1961) [2-Disc DVD Set] – DVD

August 10, 20071960s, 2007, Action, Adventure, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Drama, DVD, UK, War

*½/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B
starring Gregory Peck, David Niven, Anthony Quinn, James Darren
screenplay by Carl Foreman, based on the novel by Alistair MacLean
directed by J. Lee Thompson

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover My brother Oliver is fond of citing movies where you actually root for the Nazis. Not because you like what they stand for, of course, but because the cinematic alternative suddenly seems much worse: fact of the matter is those fucking Von Trapps will simply not shut up in The Sound of Music, while anyone who would voluntarily off Jon Bon Jovi, as the Nazis do in U-571, can’t possibly be ALL bad. To this very short list we may add the inexplicably popular guy-movie staple The Guns of Navarone. Supposedly trading on the selfless heroism of a commando unit behind enemy lines, the film has such a hair up its ass about the virtue of grim determination that it manages to bore you into an early grave within the first five minutes. Nearly three hours of watching Gregory Peck and his group of he-men bicker over ethics and strategy would make any thinking adult pray for some kind of violent deliverance. Nazis, Italian Fascists, the Mormon Tabernacle Choir–I’m not choosy about who shoots these jerks dead, just as long as somebody does it.