It's still a decent film compared to others. It wasn't horrible on it's own but compared to the other Indy films it was

HACKERS
(First Viewing)

A good look at hackers back in the early days of the Internet. I can only imagine what this film would look like today with the technology some 13 years after this film was made. One of Angelina Jolie's first films and it's her earliest work I've ever seen. Jonny Lee Miller was enjoyable as the film's main star and I wonder why I've haven't seen more of his work?

Went to see indy tonight great film and harrison ford looks about 40 i hope i look that good when i am his age

HOUSE OF THE DEAD
(First Viewing)

I'm giving the Uwe Boll movies a chance since I'm kind of a sucker for a really bad film. This was it but it wasn't enjoyable bad like some grindhouse films. Too much video game images appeared in the film and the transitions between scenes was bad also.

For once, goddamnit, elaborate. Please. Why is it so hard for you to find any type of substance in anything that you type? Honestly man, if you're going to even bother writing about a film, at least give some fucking insight instead of the same hackeneyed garbage. Holy shit man, why are they even worth watching if it's going to be the same shit from you;

"Meh. I liked that other flick he was in."
"Well, I thought the music was ok."
"Umm, I only saw this because x was in it and she's HAWWT."

I mean, yes, I totally realize that you definitely are not any type of scholar, but it's not even because I love The Blues Brothers, it's that I can justify the existence of that love and why it's at least good; you, at best, are bush league.

It's sooo because you love The Blues Brothers

"Let's boogie."

John Carpenter's PRINCE OF DARKNESS (1987) - ***

Ever liked a movie, even though you didn't understand really what was happening a lot of the time?

I guess my biggest criticism against PRINCE OF DARKNESS is that for the first half of the picture, the narrative is moved only by tons and tons of dialogue exposition, a lot of which flies by rather quickly. At this rate, much like with Michael Mann's THE KEEP, I think I have an idea of the grand scheme of things, but I could be wrong for all I know.

2,000 years ago, the slime essence of Satan, aka Ole Scratch, aka Michael Bay, was captured in a canister by Jesus Christ, and kept locked away by a secret brotherhood within the Catholic Church. Just after a Priest (Donald Pleasance) inherits this devil gak, which now resides at an abandoned church in Los Angeles, this cylinder starts leaking and random weirdness occurs like fire ants crawling all over the television to worms sticking to windows, or my favorite, a half-moon orbiting above the sun. Pleasance consults a physics professor (Victor Wong) and his students to study this mysterious goo...

And right there is a cool thing about PRINCE OF DARKNESS. In every other movie where religion and supernatural collide, its always a church wanting science to strike out so that its priests can declare a divine miracle, or science wanting to demystify stigmata or whatever. With DARKNESS, you have a top religious guy discovering something that scares him shitless, and so he gets this top science guy to check into it, and it scares him shitless too. Science and Religion, both bodies of knowledge, are dumbfounded and fail at the feet of the literal existence that is elemental evil.

What I think I dig the most in general about PRINCE OF DARKNESS is that at this point in writer/composer/director John Carpenter's career, after getting his salad tossed around by studio politics on BIG TROUBLE IN LITTLE CHINA, he decided to both go back to low budget basics, and screw with Hollywood on their nickel & dime. Yeah he'll give Universal what looks and sounds like a slasher jump scare movie, hell he gets Pleasance back from his own slasher jump scare classic HALLOWEEN, along with enough gory make-up and nasty gooey insects to fill up the genre quota. Meanwhile, he'll also make something technically more blasphemous at the Church in Rome than THE DA VINCI CODE and THE LAST TEMPTATION OF CHRIST combined. Ironically, unless I'm wrong, DARKNESS is popular in the very Catholic Spain.

Way to go Carp!

I did notice though in watching DARKNESS that it was probably the beginning of the end for Carpenter's creative prowess, considering how he effectively remade his own ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13, except instead of zombie-like street gangs trying to storm a police station, its actual zombies and Alice Cooper laying siege to the church. The guy was practically starting to rip himself off.

DARKNESS is a solid B-horror movie in that while we've been through the tried and worn "stupid people" genre plot dynamics before, it’s got a lot of great neat little moments that rule. Take that bizarre shot when the zombie outside the church calls out the survivors this side of EVIL DEAD, yells "Pray for Death!" and then explodes into beetles. Then there is when the heroes, deprived of the usual weapons (fire-axe, guns) used to combat zombies, have to resort to using bricks to bash their skulls in, or kneeing women in the groin(!) before throwing them out the window. You never see either in such fare.

Now that's creative.

But the cake-icing for DARKNESS though is when the besieged people start having bits & pieces of the same creepy collective dream, a Tachyon pulse-produced video message this side of CLOVERFIELD from the future of 1999, which warns these people repeatedly that they have to stop Satan from resurrecting, and pulling his "daddy" the Anti-God from his inter-dimensional prison. Yet after the climax, when we finally watch the complete dream and finally see Satan emerge from the shadows, its bafflingly fun. Did these folks change the future, or is it a self-fulfilling prophecy in spite of their best efforts?

If anything, seeing Dennis Dun in DARKNESS reminds me of how Hollywood dropped the ball with him. The unofficial badass hero of Carpenter's BIG TROUBLE IN LITTLE CHINA, and unless I'm mistaken, the only Asian-American Action Cinema hero during the 1980s, Dun has a charming presence, in spite of being an asshole when he told that one Chinese woman, "you almost could pass off as Asian." Yeah, you're expecting him to die, but he actually grows on you, especially when he's trapped in the closet. There is a great scene when you have the heroes dig through the wall all night to break him out, but when the zombies finally break down his door, Dun basically claws his way out within minutes in a frenzy of desperation.

In short, the best movie featuring a crucified pigeon ever made.

ALONE IN THE DARK
(First Viewing)

An incredibly weak story, bad CGI, and Tara Reid as an anthropologist being as believable as Denise Richards as a research scientist in THE WORLD IS NOT ENOUGH didn't make this film better than Uwe's previous effort, HOUSE OF THE DEAD. "Hopefully" he can only get better from here, right?

RAMBO
(Second Viewing)

Definitely one of the best action films of the year, along with IRON MAN of course. A lot more brutal and edged than previous RAMBO's. I've been hearing quite a few people say it was better than they expected and it was. It was an entertaining movie.

SEMI-PRO
(Second Viewing)

Will Ferrell does it again with his comedic, golden-self. I wasn't the biggest fan of his last outing, BLADES OF GLORY, so it was good to see him bounce back with a very funny retro basketball story. André Benjamin continues to do some good work as an actor and Woody Harrelson gets down with the roundball again for the first time since 1992's WHITE MEN CAN'T JUMP. Finally, Will Arnett can attach his name to a good comedy

Nothing prepares you for BLOODRAYNE or DUNGEON SIEGE.

And apparently, POSTAL is just as Boll-trademark bad.

INDIANA JONES & THE KINGDOM OF THE CRYSTAL SKULL.


Took the kids to the flicks today to see it.

Great stuff,i think i enjoyed it more than the kids did

The only thing i thought was wrong was the Alien storyline, didn't expect that..

Im going to watch Sex And The City in 10 minutes with the girlfriend, wish me luck..

BLOODRAYNE 1/2
(Second Viewing)

I'm still left scratching my head at how Uwe Boll was able to assemble Sir Ben Kingsley, Michelle Rodriguez, Billy Zane, and Michael Madsen to jump aboard this sinking vessel. The fight scenes came off too choreographed and some of the killing was overdone in an outlandish and sometimes humorous way.

My review is coming, but I enjoyed it too...maybe even more than LAST CRUSADE. Maybe.



I thought it fitted fine with the 1950s, you know that decade of the Monster & Alien "B-Movies"....what I wasn't exactly a fan of was the convulted plotting of the aliens (or inter-dimensional aliens or whatever) to the Mayans, I mean leave that shit to the PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN flicks.

If anything, the one edge that SKULL has over CRUSADE is that instead of fighting more NAzis out in the desert over a Judean-Christian artifact, SKULL tries something fresh with the new time period and pulp trash material...not all of it worked, but I enjoyed it.

What surprised me though I guess was Shia LeBeouf. Hated DISTURBIA and goddamn TRANSFORMERS, and fuck I, ROBOT, but he was fine in INDY IV, so maybe he's not at fault really for those crappy flicks, except only in deciding to do them.

BLOODRAYNE 2: DELIVERANCE
(First Viewing)

Wow, I'm speechless. Uwe Boll find it in himself to "seriously" direct a film without messing it up with his amateurish "tricks." It's almost as if he didn't direct the film himself, yet his name is attached. Also, I felt Natassia Malthe was a better BloodRayne than Kristina Loken. I also liked the western setting than in the previous film.

I managed to wangle out of this dubious pleasure......

It was actully good, i enjoyed, i slowley got into the seris since i met my girlfriend..

IN THE NAME OF THE KING: A DUNGEON SIEGE TALE 1/2
(Second Viewing)

Well, I survived my last Uwe Boll film but barely. This ran a little too long and was basically Uwe Boll's LORD OF THE RINGS flick. I'm still scratching my head at how he ensembles these casts? You'd think by now name actors (such as Jason Statham, Ray Liotta, Burt Reynolds, Matthew Lillard, Leelee Sobieski, John Rhys-Davies, Claire Forlani, and Kristanna Loken) would know better than to sign up for a Uwe Boll film.

THE EYE (2008)
(First Viewing)

Another bad adaptation of an Asian horror film. Again, I gave it the benefit of the doubt but the "psychological" horror flicks just aren't my genre. I wanna see people get cut and slashed up! Blood and gore for me please. This has Jessica Alba in it and a lot of people will see it solely for her but do yourself the favor and avoid this on Tuesday!

STRANGE DAYS
(First Viewing)

A really underrated film that a friend of mine turned me onto. The film was made in 1995 but was suppose to take place in the future, December 30 & 31, 1999. The film stars Ralph Fiennes, an ex-cop who now deals with data-discs containing recorded memories and emotions (which are the new drug). It also stars Juliette Lewis, Angela Bassett, and Tom Sizemore. Definitely one of those sleeper picks that you can leave you more satisfied than you originally thought it would.

VINCE VAUGHN'S WILD WEST COMEDY SHOW 1/2
(First Viewing)

More of a documentary than actual comedy. Some jokes were in the film and it gave each of the four "up-and-coming" comedies an in depth look but I was rather displeased with the overall brush of the tour.

STREETS OF FIRE (1984) - ***

Talk about a movie I've been dreading to review.

The very underrated Walter Hill is one of my favorite filmmakers, whose shot some cool stuff from the Chuck Bronson fight flick HARD TIMES to the great western THE LONG RIDERS, including a darling of mine, the awesome THE WARRIORS. After the box-office success of 48 HRS., Hill was at his career peak and could make any movie he wanted, so he jammed together everything he liked, which included:

"custom cars, kissing in the rain, neon, trains in the night, high-speed pursuit, rumbles, rock stars, motorcycles, jokes in tough situations, leather jackets and questions of honor."

Thus was STREETS OF FIRE, Hill's would-be summer blockbuster, "A Rock & Roll Fable" made for the MTV Generation...and there was Fire alright, as the flick crashed and burned on opening weekend. Afterwards, Hill was just never the same, shooting only a solid gem here and there.

So on one hand, I would like to see some merit in a crippling effort like FIRE, and yet I've had a slight personal grudge for years against this unseen picture. You see, Universal had such high hopes for FIRE, they bolstered its already considerable advertising budget by totally cannibalizing the campaign funds of several smaller studio pictures, like Alex Cox's REPO MAN.

So if you want a chief reason why that cult classic was financially DOA before hitting theatres, blame FIRE.

But I must say, I actually sorta enjoyed STREETS OF FIRE, or at least the idea of it. Within the "Another Time, Another Place" of FIRE, the Hippies and Yuppies of the 1960s and 70s never happened, and the music and culture of the 1950s evolved right through the Reagan Decade. So yes, Studebakers drive under bright neon lights, women in skirts stroll down the sidewalk, and greasers gracing the pompadour haircut watch the latest music videos on TV.

If Hill used the comic book storytelling narrative for THE WARRIORS, then he tried the comic book visual narrative for FIRE. The electric opening concert, the best editing scheme of Hill's entire filmography, uses pulsating quick cuts to resemble the cognitive pastiche of imagery that we absorb from the connecting panels of a comic book page.

When the faceless bikers, masked by darknesss, sulk into the night club as Diane Lane is singing onstage, you just know that these phantoms are nothing but trouble. Then the gargoyle mug of their leader Willem Dafoe slowly fades into the light....It's such a creative groovy sequence, its unfortunate that most of the movie just isn't this cool.

After Dafoe kidnaps Lane, we cut right into a Hill's usual streamlined hard-knuckles plot: Lane's pal telegrams her Ex-juvenile delinquent/ Ex-soldier brother Michael Pare to come back home to town and rescue Lane, his ex-girlfriend. Like Michael Beck in THE WARRIORS, its easy to accuse Pare of wooden acting, but he's only your typical Hill hero: a tough guy that doesn't talk much, not necessarily always likeable, and looks like he can kick your ass.

How I know this? Because when he's alone at a cafe, and some punks walk-in...you know somebody is gonna get thrown through the plate-glass window, and it aint Pare.

I liked how he refuses to save Lane, but he pulls out an old Black & White photograph of her, and Hill dissolves into an effectively nostalgic flashback, or the hero's memory making that image come alive. You buy why Pare changes his mind, even if he charges $10,000 from her manager/beau (Rick Moranis) for the job. Anyway, Pare is pretty solid for the part, just too bad his career went direct to video.

Now the best thing about FIRE that I just totally dig is Amy Madigan, the tough sidekick. Apparently the role was originally written for a man, but Madigan so impressed Hill, he re-wrote the part for her. Now action figure women in such genre movies either work, or simply don't. It's a gimmick that the audience can easily reject, but I tell ya, Madigan sold it for me when she demanded another drink at a tavern, and knocked out the bartender Bill Paxton when he refused. Also, Madigan is married in real-life to Ed Harris, so that's a plus.

Then there is Moranis, who usually back in the 80s either played the nerd (LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS) or the punchline (GHOSTBUSTERS), but he's surprisingly fun as the wise-guy that whines and complains at the hero. He's an asshole, but admittedly he's the only smart person in this story, or at least the one with enough brains to pay others to risk life and limb to retrieve his meal ticket.

But Dafoe man...The only way I can describe Dafoe in FIRE is that, imagine if Charles Manson hadn't gone mad in obsession with The Beatles or "Helter Skelter," but instead with James Dean and wearing latex coveralls without shirts. Dafoe makes so much out as a fun psychotic villainous maniac out of so little given to him, I actually hate Hill for not giving him anymore scenes. Plus, I forgot how (even more) goddamn scary-looking the dude was back then.

In retrospect, I have tons of problems with STREETS OF FIRE. If the opening of FIRE was brilliant, and the overall 1st half is fun pulp action, then the movie just loses most of its momentum in the 2nd half when Pare and troupe return back home, as nothing really happens, or to use pretentious film criticism, the thin story can no longer piggyback on the film's aesthetics.

I really groaned when FIRE teases Pare and Lane possibly getting back together because despite him sharing some deep past feelings for her....that ship has definately sailed.

I mean, yeah Lane is drop-dead gorgeous and most of us men want to bed her, but she seems like a rather boring person. Moranis and Lane do make a better couple ultimately because they share something in common: Her singing career. Most men would probably rather be in Madigan's company, even as just a friend. Besides, she wouldn't force Pare to go see the SEX & THE CITY movie this weekend.

Also, Hill gives conflicting answers to whatever American racial segregation ever ended in this universe. While you have a black Cop (Richard Lawson) try to keep the peace with Dafoe and Pare, you then have Pare's group meet up with a Motown-like music act in the back of a bus, who're pulled over by the police and called a "gang of spades." Maybe its just too provocative of an interesting idea to simply throwaway in a picture like this.

Ah Screw it, I like this movie in spite of itself. Maybe I'm a sucker for flicks where a major violent brawl between bikers and civilians, each side armed to the teeth with bats, chains, knives, and guns, is eminent until its delegated to simply Pare and Dafoe. Maybe I mark at them dueling with sledgehammers(!), and maybe I just like that Moranis gets the girl for once.

But babe, if you don't dig it, I won't hold it against you.

ALIEN VS. PREDATOR
(Second Viewing)

As usual the studio f*cks up two perfectly good properties and its fans at the same time by dolling out this PG-13 sh*t to "appeal to a greater audeince". Well, it looked like it didn't work. Also, one of the Predator's in this film looked like he was on steroids (think of the way Jason Vorhees looked in JASON X). I'm hoping the sequel will be better with more blood and gore but I doubt it (I've heard nothing but bad things about it).

Yeah, I'm with you dude....though I actually thought worse of it.

Paul W.S. Anderson can go FUCK himself.

I'm watching a classic right now. It's been a while since I've seen it and I'm really enjoying it.

I'll give you a hint and you tell me what movie it is.

"A boy's best friend is his mother."

TIS

That would be "Psycho".

I'm watching a ballgame and Law and Order, but did notice that was on.

I also noticed your boy Rocky was on earlier as well.

And that would be "Rocky V" i on the other channel. They show the Rocky movies a lot so I don't feel too torn.


Poor Anthony Perkins. He really is good but he just never overcame Norman Bates hu? Who's the detective Beth, do you know?


TIS

No, I don't know who the detective is.