Sunday, September 11, 2005

Movie Review: Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever

Movie: Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever
Director: Wych Kaosayanda
Starring: Antonio Banderas, Lucy Liu


I’ve never seen this movie all at once, but did see the last hour all together. Arguably I should see the whole thing as one unit to properly appreciate it as a piece of art. If you think that, let me know. I’m sure we can get you some help.
Before damning this movie, let me say a word about Lucy Lui. She is a babe. She is hotter than the top of an old-fashioned metal hood over a V-8 engine after a long high-speed run through a cloudless desert mid-day in July. Hollywood is full of hot babes, but Lucy Lui is also a true bad-ass.
Her glance can blast through more bad-guys than the Governator with an armload of impossibly heavy rapid-fire weapons blowing hot exploding lead everywhere. You can’t coach that. Hollywood has been searching for a bad-ass leading lady for some time now, yet Lucy Lui is just sitting there. She’s proven her mettle in Charlie’s Angels, Payback, and Kill Bill. She can be more steely-eyed than Jack Nicholson. But a lot better looking, and she can move convincingly.
Angelina Jolie? Halle Berry? Hot babes, even convincingly athletic. But neither is a true bad-ass. Lucy Liu, talk to your agent. However, she’s got to get into a real movie. Ecks v. Sever is bad action porn. No erotic tension, no sensual build-up, just things blowing up, guns being fired, and cars flipping. As in bad porn, there are no consequences to any of this action. Lucy Lui is able to mow down hundreds of men with bullets and bombs, yet never really hurts anyone who isn’t truly bad.
Even in all this wreckage, she looks good. Of course she never changes clothes, looking stylish and conspicuous, when perhaps she should be blending in. Still, who cares?
I think Antonio Banderas is in this movie too. He matters little, however. He is supposed to be a counterpoint to her badness, but is more of a sidelight. The plot is so numbingly awful that it was hard to figure out where he might fit, but he’s running around shooting things too. And blowing stuff up. The amount of stuff that gets blown up doesn’t relate at all to any tactical considerations. It’s like if the bass-player in your band suddenly decided he wanted to hear a whole lot more of himself. The special effects guys here have obviously watched a lot of movies where not enough stuff blew up. Let’s hope they’re happy now.

Thursday, September 08, 2005

Bob Denver finally gets rescued from this mortal coil

Before it became popular to celebrate old sitcoms because of their simplicity and nostalgia value, before beer commercials were replaying the Ginger/Mary Ann debate, I understood that Giligan's Island was THE perfect sitcom.
Structurally, there is no escape. Why do characters stay together in sit-coms in spite of all the horrible things they do to each other? Because the writers insist they are "friends." We buy this because we want to believe there is some holy level of friendship in which all is forgiven. In real life, people move on. Not on Gilligan's Island, though. Nobody can leave. Better still, there is no reason for anyone to evolve. Characters are frozen solidly into the architypes they arrived on the Island with. Often this is true in real life. We are plunged into a new group, typed quickly, and we stick with those characteristics the new group has assigned us.
Also, failure is programmed in. The narrative arc of every episode is an absolute, uncomprimising attempt to escape the island. Which, in every single case, fails. There are no intermediate goals which, if achieved, would cause the show to move forward. Nobody gets promoted, pregnant, married, moves to California, or runs into the ex. It's impossible. So, from show to show, everything stays the same.
I can't really say how good or bad an actor Bob Denver really is. I don't know if I've ever seen Dobie Gillis, and can't remember him in anything else. But he was, completely and totally, Gilligan. A perfect character on the perfect sitcom.

Thursday, September 01, 2005

A Sound of Thunder: Commentary and Review

Movie: A Sound of Thunder
Basis: Short story by the same name, written by Ray Bradbury
Director: Peter Hyams
Cast: Edward Burns, Ben Kingsley, Catherine McCormack

Movie-making technology is moving very rapidly. It seems like just yesterday that Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow proved that you could create a whole amazing world in the background while uncomfortable actors posed woodenly in front of it. Now we can not only place wooden actors in front of an animated background that is almost, but not quite as good as a mid-level video game, we have also mastered compression technology. In fact, this movie takes the scripts of at least ten bad sci-fi movies and smashes them all into one.
Sadly, they claim that the resulting piece of dreck is based on a classic science fiction story by one of the original masters of the genre, Ray Bradbury. I read that story, many years ago, and this is NOT that story. Actually, the story itself isn't any great shakes, more of a thought piece than a dramatic event. Still, it is protected by the "classic" label and we won't assail it here.
The idea is that, if time travel were possible, a very small change in the past could create massive changes in the present. That idea may have seemed intriguing when the story was first written, but we've all seen Back to the Future and we get the point. This movie takes that premise and makes a mish-mash of it. The changes supposedly produced by the smashing of a butterfly are ridiculous, altering the laws of physics, biology, evolution, and narrative structure. The only thing that is preserved is the order in which characters get killed off. (Cannon fodder, Weak bad guy, Good black guy, Real bad guy, attractive but flawed girl, with Perky Girl and Hero sticking to the end).
I love bad movies almost as much I like really great ones. But seriously, I'm amazed this one was released. The events follow along randomly, filling the space between the two basic plot points of the original story and the Hollywood-dictated redemption and ending.