Movie Review: War

This film, which managed to bestir my interest just a bit because of the casting of Jet Li and Jason Statham side by side, predictably disappointed, but not in the way I expected. I anticipated a poorly written slapped together plot that would provide an excuse for cool action sequences. Instead, I got a cool premise ruined by truly awful directing choices. No, the script isn't Chinatown, but think Face Off or even Infernal Affairs, except clumsily written (or well written and later dismembered by director re-writes). Whatever happened, this didn't come off right. I lay the blame on director Philip Atwell, who needs to be away from feature film sets like pedophiles need to be away from your local Elementary. War is a music video that happens to have a storyline and real actors thrown in to it, but their performances and the sequence of events set forth in the script is subsumed beneath pointless stylism and soulless montages. It was amazing to watch the climactic scene of the film, which could have at least been dramatic if not brilliant if handled by a competent director. There's a highly emotional, high stakes moment between two characters but we couldn't care if we wanted to, because the editing and shot choice are incredibly awful. Atwell is clueless. You can't polish a turd script, but you can sure has hell throw a lot of shit on somebody's shine. Atwell needs to be windexed.

Did I mention the action sequences sucked, too?

Movie Review: The King of Kong

I attended a special preview screening of the upcoming documentary The King of Kong. It turned out to be the best documentary I've seen since Herzog's Grizzly Man, which deserved an Academy Award. The film casts an eye on the culture of hardcore players of old classic arcade games, such as Pac Man, Q-Bert, and the eponymous Donkey Kong. The Donkey Kong game, which I think I may have played one on occasion and given up, is extremely difficult. That doesn't faze Steve Wiebe or Billy Mitchell, who play the game obsessively and obtain ridiculously high scores. A bitter feud develops between them over who can achieve the official, verified highest score in Donkey Kong. The two men and those surrounding them are extremely well drawn, with perhaps some unfair bias against Mitchell. Wiebe comes off as a heroic prototypical underdog against a dastardly, cheating foe, and Mitchell plays the villain. This is hardly much of a stretch though, as Mitchell is incredibly arrogant and believes himself to be some sort of rock star on the virtue of being good at old school games. Wiebe's young daughter innocently comments at one point that "some people destroy themselves" to get Guinness World Records, and immediately after this truth comes from the mouth of a babe the film cuts to a shot of Mitchell. That makes things rather clear, in case there was any ambiguity about how the filmmaker feels about Mitchell.

Issues of bias and art vs. truth aside, this is a highly entertaining and fascinating film. This could have easily been a rather pedestrian documentary, but the director walked right in to the middle of a great drama, and he seized the moment in grand style. Check it out, it's undoubtedly the best film of the summer.

Madness on the Roadway

Chicago, Illinois, 7:03 PM, July 8th, 2007.

I was on the highway. I was exiting I-94 to get on I-290 / Congress Parkway. There was a strange slowdown and traffic that was baffling me, I assumed there was an accident ahead. Going up the ramp, I was confronted by a strange sight: a completely naked, barefoot black man standing in front of a car in front of me, running in circles with his arms in the air, apparently talking to himself. His shoes and pants laid in the left lane, run over by multiple cars. The Lexus up front hastily swerved around him, avoiding him. At this point he seemed to calm down, walking to the side of the road, turning his bare ass to the oncoming traffic. I passed him by without further incident. He had large testicles. He was in his late twenties or thirties, with the beginnings of a beard and a Mona Lisa smile.

I thought to myself: what motivated this man? Crack? PCP? Ether? Was this Fear and Loathing in the Loop? Perhaps it was a sexual fetish, though an erection wasn't evident. I think a good theory is drugs in combination with a preexisting mental disorder.

After passing him by, the plot thickened. I saw a cheap car with two large black women milling around it, and a 10 year old inside, his hands pressed against the windows and his eyes goldfish wide. The woman flagged me down, and seemed surprised when I actually stopped. I suspected a proposition for money (in other words, this was some sort of scam), but I like to hear this sort of thing anyway. It was as I predicted. She claimed that she was out of gas and needed money to obtain some, and that she was stranded and no one would stop (untrue, I had seen at least two cars slow down). This story struck me as immediately false. For one thing, they weren't anywhere near a gas station, so money by itself would hardly help them. If they did need money, it must be assumed they had enough gas to get to the station and spend it. So why were they on an on-ramp? I could think of no other reason than to set a dramatic scene. If the situation were dire, they would either call the authorities or ask to siphon some gas from my tank, that would be the sensible solution. But they didn't. I said no, I didn't have any cash, (basically true, I only had a couple dollars) and continued on my way.

Here's what baffles me: were these two incidents linked? The reason I might think so is that normally, people would be cruising along that ramp at a pretty good clip, and would be unable to stop for a distressed family even if they wanted to. Perhaps it was opportunism on their part, seeing that the naked man had slowed down the flow of traffic? Or maybe it was a coordinated plot? This seems bizarre. We need money, so lets stop on on ramp and try to scam people out of it. But wait! We need a way to slow down traffic! Let's have Bob get naked and run around in front of cars, to force them to move more slowly! I've seen my share of set piece scams in the city involving groups, most notoriously a high stakes shell game on the train were a part of the group would bet and "win" money from the shell player. My friend and I witnessed a yuppie Loyola student fall prey to this con game, and I later found out that that very friend, a rather naive individual from New Hampshire, had earlier fallen prey to these men. A sucker is born every minute, cons such as these are definitely profitable. After forking over some cash for the "gas", perhaps I would have been pressured to give more for something else. If this were such a scam, it takes the prize for Most Bizarre.

I'm going to check chicagocrime.org in future weeks to see if this guy got picked up for indecent exposure, and I will update you if so.

Why I Need a Gun

I went to the local downtown Rock and Roll McDonalds, and on the way back in my car, I'm driving along happy as can be on your typical downtown Chicago one way street (Clark, if anyone wants to know) . Some guy is going slowly up the street the wrong way, like he has no idea where he is. As I went past him (my window was open) I said to him nicely "You're going the wrong way". Just to let him know. I forgot about him completely and stopped at the light.

I looked in the rear view mirror a few seconds later and this motherfucker is going in reverse at 20 mph towards me, and pulled up along side my car. He's a white asshole in a muscle shirt looking slightly dazed, but also rather pissed. He's working himself up. "You say something to me, motherfucker?" He repeats himself and starts taking off his seatbelt, acting like he's going to get out of his car and kick my ass. I just stare at him like, wtf. My only real concern was that he might have a gun, if he was going to climb out of his car I'd just run the light and that'd be that. At that moment a cop in a squad car shines his maglight on the guy, the cops had been cruising around McDonalds. Lucky break, I guess. I kind of wish the guy had stepped out of the car and done some crazy shit and the cops had spotted it, and inflicted upon him the white version of the Rodney King beating. Oh well. I continued on, as the light has changed. The sad thing is if I had had a gun and pulled it, I'd probably be in a police station right now. Cook County sucks.

Not only that, but this is the second time this has happened in the last month or so. Again, I was on a late night food run to an Indian place, and this project dweller tried to scare me out of my wallet in the parking lot by acting like he was going to attack me. I told him to step away and he left. People are fucking nuts.

This is why everyone should be well armed. I'm telling you, there are animals out there. These guys were all talk, but if they hadn't been, I might have had to actually wrestle around with them and exchange punches and shit. And who knows what weaponry they had in their possession. Secondly they threatened, which is as far as I'm concerned enough justification to put them in the ground after issuing a stern warning to back the fuck off and go about their business. These people should be removed from the gene pool anyway. So listen you fucking liberal democrat hippies: I need some cold steel! I'm surrounded by lunatics!

Movie Review: Transformers

Yesterday I drove out to Skokie, Illinois to meet up with a commited Transformers geek. A full 2 hours before the movie, we were milling around outside of the sparsely populated multiplex. He was brimming over with excitement, he had awaited this movie for four years. I'd heard of it only a few months ago. When I heard director Michael Bay (the man that gave you the massive turd known as Pearl Harbor) was attached, my response was actually cautiously positive. If there was one movie that Bay could do properly, I thought, it was Transformers. The trademark of the Transformers series is gigantic robots saying preposterous things and battling it out in a fast, hyper kinetic style. For this sort of material, the directing style of a film like Pearl Harbor was actually suitable.

I proved to be correct. This movie is about everything you'd expect, utterly predictable, but in an enjoyable fashion. The robots look awesome, and come on to the stage with the proper dramatic gravitas. The two main characters, a teenage couple played by the convincingly earnest Shia LaBeof (whose movie character also has a preposterous name, Sam Witwicky... one questions whether this was the reason he was cast) and the ungodly hot Megan Fox, are likable enough to root for, though their romance is far too soulless and by the numbers. Bay knows what the audience bays for, and devotes an entire to scene to Fox's body, which is sculpted like a greek goddess and shot by Bay like the opening sequence of a porn flick. You half expect some cheap synthesized music to kick in and LaBeof to copulate with her on the hood of his anthropomorphic car.

The plot concerns the warring robotic factions of the Autobots and Decepticons, and their struggle to obtain this bigass cube called the Allspark, which apparently has incredible blah fucking power blah blah fucking blah. We follow the teenagers as they discover the nature of the transformers, and then run around frantically while finding the time to make eyes at each other. There's also a plotline with the military fighting the Transformers, which was idiotic at best, and seemed to exist solely so that Michael Bay and the propaganda wing of the US military could hang out. It seems totally unnecessary to the film, and had me squirming impatiently in my seat. Does every Bay film have to have situation rooms filmed with techs spouting jargon and positioning fleets? I was half expecting the Empire of Japan to reconstitute itself and throw in with the Decepticons. In my opinion, the military stuff should have been mostly thrown out and replaced with development of the transformer characters. Why is Megatron an asshole? What's the deal with Starscream? Other than Bumblebee and Prime, we get no sense of who the Transformers are and what their conflict is about, other than some dull explication spouted out by Prime. You can tell that Bay and the screenwriters just thought "well, they're robots", but that's missing the entire point of the show, which is primarily about the awesomeness of being a gigantic fucking robot, and what kind of people they are.

Though yawn inducing, the military shit does pay off in the closing battle sequence, where humans, Autobots, and Decepticons engage in a massive battle in the downtown of some anonymous city. The fights are really cool, but shot Michael Bay style, which has its drawbacks. At some points it can be hard to tell who's fighting who and what exactly they're doing, and just becomes massive metal bodies slamming against eachother with the panache of a gay porn video. Not that that doesn't have its points, right?

To sum it up: it's fun, but don't expect too much. It's about exactly what you would expect watching the trailer, nothing more and nothing less. It's about the best that Michael Bay can do: make a mediocre film and let the CGI guys push it in to "good" territory.

Mark Buehrle owns your face 4 sirius

Movie Review: Grindhouse

Go see it. Immediately. Do not walk to the movie theater, run. Run while the crowds are still there, because that makes the film so much more fun, as the two directors have put these features together to bait the crowd and elicit a reaction. This is a must see movie. I don't think I've ever had more fun at a movie theater that I had attending this one. Rodriguez's PLANET TERROR is a hilariously corny zombie film full of hot girls, absurd dialogue, and gratuitous violence. On a certain level it actually seems to be more Tarantino than the later Tarantino film, its all about being deliberately bad. Think of it as a sort of "Scary Movie" for the exploitation films of the 70s, except way, way better. Despite the deliberate badness, you're still pulled in and engaged. It could have easily gone over the edge in to poor taste, but Rodriguez maintains the balancing act and delivers a great film.

All compliments to PLANET TERROR, but DEATH PROOF is the better film of the two, and may even be Tarantino's best film (I said it). One word that sums up Death Proof: pure joy. It's like the adult cinematic equivalent of banging together the toy cars I loved as a kid. If you love car chases as I do, you will love every frame of the climactic scene. Kurt Russell is brilliant as "Stuntman Mike", every moment he has on screen is riveting. He's cashing in on the imagine he's built in every other film he has ever done coming in to this one, and topping them all in what is undoubtedly his best performance. The way the film ends is nothing short of brilliant, I pumped my fist in the air like I was at the ballpark, and yelled a lot.

The trailers in between the films are great, I hear "Machete" is already being seriously considered for production. That would be a great choice, because it was the best trailer of the bunch and would be a great film.

I could go on and on about these movies, but my reviews are always spoiler free, so that's all I'm gonna say.