"L" is for The Last Stand

 Of the three "aging action stars" releasing a movie in the early days of 2013, I was honestly not expecting that I would prefer Arnold Schwarzenegger's The Last Stand to a Walter Hill movie or a new Die Hard. Even a bad Die Hard looked like it would be more fun than jokes about old Ah-nuld and Johnny Knoxville playing some kind of spaz in his pajamas who likes shooting guns. Luckily for you and for me, things don't always work out the way we expect, and I'll be damned if I didn't have more fun watching The Last Stand than the other two movies combined.

 Maybe my reticence for the movie came from the trailer, but I also didn't have the benefit of being familiar with any of Jee-woon Kim's catalog coming in. I know, I really need to see I Saw the Devil and The Good, the Bad, and the Weird, but I haven't. People even tell me that A Tale of Two Sisters is way better than The Uninvited, which I also haven't seen, but I'm a busy guy, you know? The Cap'n wishes that he had time to sit down and watch everything that his friends highly recommended, but dammit, Terror at Blood Fart Lake isn't going to watch itself!

 Anyway, so I didn't have the proper perspective coming in for Kim's American language debut, so I just went with the ads I saw on TV and they looked pretty stupid. I like stupid, but if I'm going to have my stupid it doesn't need the Terminator with sidekicks. And I like Johnny Knoxville. He is far and by the preferable counterpoint to male action lead to Sung Kang in this instance. But I'll get to that. So unlike Park Chan-Wook's Stoker, I was not adequately enthused. My mistake.

 The Last Stand is a refreshingly unpretentious action movie from a director who clearly enjoys the Arnold films of days of yore. It is, at time, surprising in how earnest the story is and how it mostly avoids winking at the audience (unlike, say, Terminator 3). Arnold plays Ray Owens, a small town Sheriff near the U.S. / Mexico border who enjoys his quiet life. He had his wild years in California - which we hear about in a modified "how bad is this dude" speech - but now he enjoys being able to chide Sonny Ladham (Predator) for parking in a fire zone. It's all in good fun because everybody's leaving town for the big high school championship football game or something.

 Meanwhile, Mexican Cartel leader Gabriel Cortez (Eduardo Noriega) is being transferred from one prison to another in Las Vegas, when he gives Agent John Bannister (Forest Whitaker) the slip in a spectacular way, taking along Bannister's partner Agent Ellen Richards (Genesis Rodriguez) as a prisoner. His men stole a prototype super-racing etc (sorry, I'm not a car guy, so I honestly don't remember) and have set up a moving battering ram of vehicles to get Cortez from Las Vegas to the border before he can be recaptured. When all else fails, Bannister realizes that Cortez is heading right for Summerton Junction, the sleepy little town I mentioned before.

 Ray and his deputies (Luis Guzman, Jaime Alexander, and Zach Gilford0 are investigating the disappearance of local grouch Mr. Parsons (Harry Dean Stanton), which the audience knows is tied to the sketchy activity of Burrell (Peter Stormare). Now, I always enjoy seeing Peter Stormare play a sleazy bad guy in action movies (even in Bad Boys 2!) but he's extra fun in The Last Stand because, for no apparent reason, he intermingles his own accent with a corny "Southern" accent. It's just goofy enough not to be annoying.

 Burrell and some of Cortez's other men are up to something in anticipation of their boss' arrival, and Ray can tell right away that these scumbags are trouble. It just turns out he's out-gunned, and they even kill one of his deputies (hint: not Guzman or Alexander. It's the "rookie" the team - I guess he was "too young for this shit"), so now we've got revenge on top of doing the right thing. Good luck, Cortez.

 Ray turns to local goofball Lewis Dinkum (Knoxville) who, when not wearing pajamas and Kyle's hat from South Park, is the curator of the local guns and ammunition museum (a.k.a. his barn). Lewis agrees to help arm the police force and to help fortify the town before Cortez can get there on the provision that he be deputized. Also he gives his guns names and I would normally hate this character but Johnny Knoxville plays this kind of amiable idiot so well that I didn't mind so much.

 But let's talk about Arnold, who hasn't been a leading man since Terminator 3 and hasn't been in any movies not called "The Expendables" since becoming the Governator. The trailer uses every "old man" joke in the movie, so that was a relief, but Schwarzenegger takes well to the "elder statesman" role. It's not to say he can't still throw down with the young bucks (the last fight pretty much disproves that concern), but I can believe this guy saying "I need a vacation" after the ass-kicking he absorbs more than a T-800.

 I was really worried that Arnold had become the parody of himself he was playing in The Expendables 2, but Ray Owens is an actual character who reacts in the only way that makes sense for his situation. This guy has principles, and Arnold's stoic, stubborn defiance of the baddies was a nice throwback. Sure, it's High Noon without subtext, but it's not corny in the ways I feared it might be and the action is pretty good. There's a decent car chase near the end of the film and it's not an aggressively dumb action movie. More of a pleasantly dumb action movie. I guess that's why people who like shaky-can action rejected it, which is unfortunate. The Last Stand doesn't really merit immediate dismissal, and I suspect it will have a long life playing on cable during weekends.

 So anyway, The Last Stand is better than A Good Day to Die Hard and more enjoyable than Bullet to the Head. What does that say about the movie? More than you'd expect from that comparison, but let's not get crazy and start elevating it up to the very best of what Ah-nuld has to offer. This is more upper middle territory, like better than Eraser (a lot better) but not quite Running Man. You'll enjoy it, but not enough to bring everybody over to watch it again right away.

Blogorium Review: Cosmopolis

 David Cronenberg's Cosmopolis is a difficult movie to like. I don't mean that it's not an interesting film or that there isn't a great deal of thematic and visual material to merit watching again. That's not really the issue at hand. However, at every opportunity, Cronenberg makes decisions to remove the audience's ability to engage with the characters, the narrative, and even the dialogue. It's as though we're meant to appreciate Cosmopolis as an exercise in alienating the audience.

  From the get go, something is amiss with Eric Packer (Robert Pattinson)'s day: the young hotshot entrepreneur / trader wants a haircut, but the city of New York seems to be conspiring against his wishes. His chief of security, Torval (Kevin Durand) warns him that getting anywhere is going to be impossible because the President is in town and traffic has slowed to a crawl, but Packer wants what he wants (although he's more fond of using the royal "we" when referring to his wishes). so they set out in his state-of-the-art limousine. Over the course of the day, he travel slowly enough to skip out and have three meals with his newlywed bride, Elise Shifrin (Sarah Gadon), a poet and heiress. Along the way, he also picks up various business advisers: Shiner (Jay Baruchel), Michael Chin (Philip Nozuka), Jane Melman (Emily Hampshire), and "philosophical consultant" Vija Kinsky (Samantha Morton), as well as entertain art dealer / mistress Didi Fancher (Juliette Binoche). Eric even manages to discuss business while undergoing his daily physical exam.

  The film is constructed of a series of vignettes as Eric waxes the philosophic about aging, trading, art, protests, wealth, and the "credible" threat to his life Torval has been monitoring all day. As his life begins to collapse - a result of bad business deals, dissolving relationships, and the death of his spiritual mentor, Brutha Fez (K'Naan) - Packer becomes more unpredictable, more unhinged, and his placid veneer cracks to reveal the nihilist underneath. It's not until nearly the end that any of this is evident, as Robert Pattinson's Eric Packer is a blank slate, concerned more with the intellectual than the physical  - a theme that appears throughout Cronenberg's filmography, most notably in Crash, Dead Ringers, and more recently, A Dangerous Method. Accordingly, I hesitate to take the easy path of blaming the actor, mostly associated with the Twilight series, for the distant and unlikable protagonist of the film.

  A co-worker of mine described the film as an "existential meditation on the 1%" and that's not far off from what Cronenberg, adapting his screenplay from Don DeLillo's novel of the same name, seems to be attempting. It's hard to relate to anything that happens to Eric Packer at any point in the film, even if cultural anecdotes like a "Pastry Assassin" (Mathieu Amalric) who "pies" him is something we're familiar with in passing. To keep us off guard, Cronenberg and cinematographer Peter Suschitzky also place the camera uncomfortably close to the actors in Cosmopolis (think of a film like Repulsion as a good basis of comparison), giving the film a heightened sense of reality. We're physically close but emotionally and philosophically at a distance from the characters at all times. The most that happens in Cosmopolis occurs in the final scenes between Packer and Benno Levin (Paul Giamatti), and even that manages to detach us as the film heads towards its inevitable conclusion.

  On the other hand, I left Cosmopolis with a great appreciation of what Cronenberg, the cast, editor Ronald Sanders, and the score by Howard Shore (partially performed by the band Metric) accomplished. Cosmopolis is not an easy film to engage in, but it has a wealth of interesting concepts. I'm interested in seeing the film again for asymmetrical imagery, to examine the deliberately artificial first scene in the limo between Pattinson and Baruchel, and to draw the threads together in the seemingly episodic narrative.

  While I could appreciate A Dangerous Method, I felt that the idea of separating and internalizing the salacious sexual content removed any point of engagement in the film beyond a strictly intellectual level. Cosmopolis, while intellectually divorcing itself from the audience for most of the story, nevertheless manages to connect on a visceral level, even as it denies viewers basic expectations (including the final shot - no pun intended). On the other hand, it is often funny in a way absent from all but the most vicious of black comedies. I can't think of another film that generates the kind of uncomfortable laughter during a prostate exam that Cosmopolis does.

 The visceral reactions aren't always positive: during every showing of Cosmopolis' three week run, there was at least one walk out, if not more. One disgusted viewer explained that the film was "over the moment it started" and I can't say it's an unfair reaction. Cosmopolis is a demanding film that promises nothing and pays off only scant rewards the first time around. When I say it's not a film for everyone, that's not a value judgment on audiences. It's just a fact. You're going to have to do a lot of heavy lifting while watching Cosmopolis, and I can't guarantee that what you come out with is going to seem worth it. But if your ears perk up when you hear "Cronenberg" and "DeLillo" together, or how Robert Pattinson fits into the equation, it may just be worth the challenge.

Blogorium Review: Fast Five

 Will wonders never cease? It turns out that Fast Five is even better than Fast & Furious, a movie I was pleasantly surprised with. The racing shenanigans are further toned down, mostly replaced with some clever (if absurd) chase scenes, more action, and the structure of a heist film. Oh, and there's the ace up Fast Five's sleeve: Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, who injects an adrenaline rush into an already testosterone laden explosion fest.

 After breaking Dominic Toretto (Vin Diesel) out of prison, Brian O'Conner (Paul Walker) and Mia Toretto (Jordana Brewster) are on the run from the law. They meet up with Dom and old partner in crime Vince (Matt Schulze) in Rio de Janeiro, where Vince has an offer from some quick cash on a car heist. Things go wrong when Zizi (Michael Irby), an associate of Rio crime lord Hernan Reyes (Joaquim de Almeida) betrays them and kills federal agents aboard the train being robbed. Now Brian, Dom, and Mia have Reyes' men on their tail, as well as Rio officer Elena Neves (Elsa Pataky) and DSS Special Agent Luke Hobbs (Johnson). The clock is ticking, and they need to settle the score in Rio before Hobbs tracks them down - but they can't do it alone. To steal $100 million from Reyes, they'll need a team...

 If you somehow haven't heard anything about Fast Five, the most critically well received and highest grossing of the series to date, Dwayne Johnson isn't the only attraction for audiences. The team that Dom and Brian assemble includes cast members from every previous film in the series: Roman Pearce (Tyrese Gibson) and Tej Parker (Chris "Ludacris" Bridges) from 2 Fast 2 Furious; Han Lue (Sung Kang) from The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift; Gisele Harabo (Gal Gadot), Tego Leo (Tejo Calderon) and Don Omar (Don Omar) from Fast & Furious, and the aforementioned Vince (Schulze) from The Fast and the Furious. Each member of the team has a specific function in the heist, and their interaction provides a much needed comic relief between car chases and fight scenes. Brewster and Gadot, in particular, have more to do than be concerned window dressing for the manly men than they did in Fast & Furious.

  While Fast & Furious was very much Vin Diesel's show, rightfully so considering he was returning to the series, Fast Five's appeal belongs as much to Dwayne Johnson as it does to the original bad boy. Johnson has the better entrance, the better lines, and the better chase scene. His team is more lethal, better organized, and nearly take down the "heroes" on more than one occasion during the film, and they handle a late ambush without hesitation.

 Johnson is almost cartoonishly muscular in the film, just barely squeezing into the five-sizes-too-small t-shirts, a contrast to Diesel's loosely fitting t-shirts and wife-beaters. Their fight scene doesn't disappoint: from the moment that Hobbs destroys Dom's car and then slams his head into what's left of it, it's clear they're evenly matched and the ensuing brawl does justice to both larger-than-life action stars. It makes sense, considering that Diesel and Johnson of them have been away from the genre for a while (both, at times, with Disney, in The Pacifier and The Tooth Fairy respectively).

 As heists go, I'll give Fast Five credit for not trying to reinvent the wheel or out-think themselves. There's only one piece of misdirection, and I have to admit that because of where it happens in the climactic chase scene, I didn't catch it immediately. Most of the film is setting up a heist that never happens, as the heat comes down on our heroes too soon and they have no choice but to resort to brute force, leading to a wild (and probably impossible) pursuit between Reyes' crooked cops, Dom, Brian, and a bank safe through downtown Rio. The property damage and implied fatalities go by so quickly that all you can do is laugh at how ridiculous and audacious the set-piece is, one the closes with a bridge chase that puts Bad Boys 2 to shame.

 Returning director Justin Lin has another factor working for him: the ability to convey geography, spatial relationships, and a logical flow to action sequences. That shouldn't be so much to ask for, but so many "action" films are obsessed with rapid cuts and disjointed edits that make the flow of chases and fights impossible to keep up with. Even The Expendables wasted what should have been a great fight between Dolph Lundgren and Jet Li with incomprehensible cuts and tight closeups. While Lin's Fast Five showdown between Hobbs and Toretto has some of these problems, he handles all of the vehicular action with great aplomb, giving a sense of momentum while never sacrificing coherency to look "cool."

 The Cap'n may have been exaggerating the lack of racing in the film, although it's limited to one street racing scene involving stolen police cars and the final moment in the film, a Rocky III-ending-like culmination of Brian's obsession with beating Toretto in a one-on-one race. The cars themselves move into the background, less as objects of fascination for the guys (and gals), and become tools to pull of the kind of robbery no one should be able to organize. Combined with Fast & Furious, this appears to be the direction the series is headed in, where cars are the secondary factor in action set-pieces, which is fine with me. The post-credits setup for Fast Six (or whatever they call it) implies that Johnson will be back, along with a surprise cameo and another returning cast member. If Fast Five is any indication, I might actually enjoy where the series goes, if not where it originated.

Blogorium Review: Fast & Furious

 Well, color me surprised. For the last ten years, I'd given at best a disinterested gaze in the direction of The Fast and the Furious and its sequels; they seemed like stupid "street racing" movies with fast cars that had (as Clint Eastwood so eloquently put it in Gran Torino) "faggy spoilers" and stupid paint jobs. I was a Vin Diesel fan from Pitch Black (and later, xXx), but that wasn't enough to overcome the charisma vacuum that was Paul Walker, and I really could care less about neon green, nitro-injected, tricked out cars tearing down city streets.

 See, while I do play video games, racing games are my least favorite. I never play them - not even Spy Hunter. I don't like Gran Turismo, I don't like Need for Speed or Midnight Club, and I'm not even that big into Mario Kart. Burnout was the first racing game I could get into, and only until it stopped being important that you could be bad at racing. When I ran out of demolition derby challenges, I lost interest quickly.

 Street racing never really appealed to me in any form or fashion, and generally reminded me of the mouth breathers in high school that needed everybody to know how cool they were with their loud muffler kits and off the line peeling out. So yeah, you could say I didn't want to have anything to do with The Fast and the Furious, 2 Fast 2 Furious, or The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift. Hell, I didn't really care about Diesel's return to the series in Fast & Furious - so what?

 I mean, look at that poster: see the tagline? New Model. Original Parts? Are you kidding me with that garbage? Why would I want to watch these movies if it's all about macho car racing and jargon about kits and injection systems and everything else I just don't care about? Couldn't I just watch Bullitt or The French Connection, movies with actual stories? Or hell, if not, why not one of the Transporter films? Those have Jason Statham in them, and we all know that's a plus.

 But then something crazy happened: Fast Five. Normally, I wouldn't care about the fifth movie in a series I already wasn't going to see, but returning director Justin Lin and Universal had an ace up their sleeve: Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson. If you know Cap'n Howdy, then you know I've seen almost every Dwayne Johnson movie not aimed at children: The Scorpion King, The Rundown, Walking Tall, Doom, Gridiron Gang, Southland Tales, and his cameos in Reno 911!: Miami and The Other Guys. Hell, I even saw Faster, and hated it, but was happy to see Johnson in a movie not released by Walt Disney.

 When someone adds The Rock as Vin Diesel's adversary, I'll pay attention. It didn't hurt that Fast Five was getting better than I thought was possible word of mouth from critics, and that it was being likened less to a racing movie than to a testosterone laden Ocean's Eleven. So I decided that it would be a good idea to check it out. That just meant deciding whether I needed to watch the other four movies first.

 I settled on watching Fast & Furious instead, as it directly leads into Fast Five, and because I'd picked up enough from the internet to understand who the characters were and their relationships. Brian O'Conner (Walker) is an FBI agent on the trail of a mysterious drug lord named Braga. Dominic Toretto (Diesel) is a muscle car enthusiast and thief who has too much heat on him and needs to lay low. When Dom's girlfriend Letty (Michelle Rodriguez) is killed by Braga's sidekick Fenix (Laz Alonso), he comes looking for revenge, and crosses paths with O'Conner, who infiltrated his gang years ago but didn't arrest him. O'Conner also hooked up with Mia (Jordana Brewster), Toretto's sister, so that's a sore spot between the two. Brian's FBI team, led by Penning (Jack Conley), Trinh (Liza Lapira), and Stasiak (Shea Whigham) are trying to bring down Braga, but also want Toretto, and Brian is torn between his loyalty to the agency and his respect for Dom.

 There's only one "street racing" scene in Fast & Furious, and it actually serves the plot in such a way that I can't really complain about it. Dom and Brian are called in by Braga's right hand man Campos (John Ortiz) for a race to test their skills as drug runners, along with a few other soon-to-be dead guys with quickly sketched out personalities. The race, along with most of the other car chases and stunts in the film, are well shot and structured by Lin and editors Fred Raskin and Christian Wagner, and for the most part are practical instead of heavy on cgi trickery. The exception to that are a series of tunnel shots that I'm not sure would be possible practically, so I'll give that a pass. Overall I have to say I was much more impressed than I thought I would be - Fast & Furious may not be Bullitt or The French Connection as car chases go, but it's certainly up there with The Italian Job and probably better than the Transporter films.

 I guess it's easy to poke fun at overly macho films and say that two guys who respect each other are actually looking for a shot to jump the other one's bone, but I didn't get that vibe from Fast & Furious. If I understand it correctly, 2 Fast 2 Furious is ludicrously homoerotic, but Fast & Furious seems more about Brian and Dom trying to navigate their status as "cop and criminal" and which is which at times. I didn't ever get the impression that just because Brian is obsessed with beating Toretto in a race that he wanted to kiss him or anything, but I'm sure somebody will be happy to correct me for missing that subtext. Riggs and Murtaugh were hot for each other too, and Thunderbolt and Lightfoot I guess. Guys can't be friends any more, since Freudian analysis slithered its way out of classrooms and into "guy movie" breakdowns.

 Anyway, so Vin Diesel was the Vin Diesel I remember from Pitch Black - the stoic guy who doesn't need help and comes through in the clutch, and while I don't think I've ever seen a Paul Walker movie before*, I didn't find him to be a personality-less bore like the Sam Worthingtons or the Channing Tatum's of current action movie. He didn't exactly stand out or anything, but he's good at the "serious face while driving" kind of acting that this movie required, so that's cool. Jordana Brewster and Michelle Rodriguez don't really get to do a lot in this movie, but I guess they were fine for not having seen the first movie. I guess I should mention Sung Kang, who appears at the beginning of the film as Han, a character that died in The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift, making this a prequel. I mention this because he figures prominently into Fast Five, along with Ludacris and Tyrese Gibson (from 2 Fast 2 Furious).

 So I have to say that I was pleasantly surprised by Fast & Furious and am looking forward to seeing Fast Five now. I can't promise that I'm going to watch the first three movies (that's asking a little much if you ask me), but then again I didn't really picture myself seeing, let alone enjoying, Fast & Furious two years ago. I guess you can teach and old dog new tricks, unless the trick insists on interpreting every case of male bonding through a homoerotic lens - I'm looking at you, Frodo and Samwise. You're not fooling anybody...



Post-Script: For the point of clarification, I'm not trying to imply that there's no such thing as male bonding in film that does include sexual overtones, or that I really care when that is the case. By including a semi-anti-gay slur at the outset of the review (which is actually what Clint Eastwood uses to describe the spoilers he hates on cars) and voicing my frustration at this "if two guys are friends in a movie, they must be gay" trend that started out as a subversion of "guy movies," for reasons I'm not really sure need to exist (is it supposed to rattle the security of hyper-aggressive, macho guys? To push them out of their "comfort zone" and imply that their movies have an agenda contradictory to their own?). It's not that the notion isn't worth exploring, but to apply it to everything, including Back to the Future, doesn't actually help make the case - it undermines the concept by stretching the analysis to fit when it makes no sense. At a certain point it becomes almost as much fun as digging for Freudian overtones in every single horror movie, even when the evidence is flimsy at best. I do think that you can actually just be two guys (or two girls) that respect each other and work together to find a common goal without secretly being into each other, and ignoring that for the sake of making a point about "macho" movies undermines when it actually is the subtext. So yeah, that's about it. Please correct the Cap'n if you need to.


 * Strike that - I've seen Joy Ride, which I liked, and Pleasantville, which I guess I forgot he was in.