Watch enough of these films and you begin to see man-shapes moving behind their curtains. After ninety minutes of alright-if-exceedingly-cheap Horror Movie you begin to notice odd things…besides the walking corpses. Characters appearing and disappearing with no real logic or explanation; the consistent jump-cutting away from gorier shots which, up until this point, the film’s been not-at-all-coy about; a half-assed, utterly pointless non-ending, because no one had the balls to do like The Blob did back in the day, and have their “The End” title card morph into a giant question mark. These are the signs of a film that’s Missing Something. About thirty minutes worth, as it turned out.
These are the scars of a bad test screening and mandated-from-above reedits, the kind honest directors live to regret in their old age. Paul Anderson is something else, and what else should we expect from the man who gave us Mortal Kombat and Resident Evil: They Picked Me After George Quit? {More}
As you’ve no doubt guessed by now, my personal political views fall somewhere to the left of Mikhail Bakunin. So, as you’d expect, I experienced quite the nerdgasam back in the year 2000 when (through a convoluted story line tonight’s film rightly jettisons without the slightest nod) Lex Luthor became President of the D.C. Universe’s United States. Finally, I said to no one in particular, given that at the time I had no friends, someone in comics understands the f-ed up mess we’re in.
World War II films and I have an understanding: I don’t watch them and they can go on propping up whatever brand of historical whitewashing is popular at moment. Rare is the film that consciously sets out to subvert the usual tropes of their perpetually John Wayne genre, or the deification of Tom Brokaw’s “Greatest” Generation. Whenever such a film emerges from the vacuous, exploitative, corporatist, Hollywood hive it is duly acknowledged by critics, nodded at by the Academy Awards…and promptly forgotten about. Case in point:
What’s that you say? A blatantly-cliched, Designated Romance has achieved undeserved popularity through canny advertising and a near-religious fandom of desperate, everyday Americans who don’t know Romance from their own house cats? And you’re actually surprised by this? Am I the only one who’s wondered how large a structure one could build from all the VHS copies of Titanic everyone bought in 1998, watched once…and never bothered with again? The only one who’s noticed that to read Twilight is to read your girlfriend’s old high school diary with all the proper names replaced by “Edward” and all the sex expunged?
Of all the U.K. comic book writers ‘ported over during the 1980s, Mark Millar stands as an all-time champion of sorts, never missing a chance to destroy the goodwill he’s managed to build up with his audience. Kick-Ass, the book, is a perfect example of this, as well as everything wrong with modern comics in general and Millar’s comics in particular. A cynical, revisionist nightmare disguised as a superhero story, starring yet another morosely-unsympathetic protagonist who sublimates his own misanthropy, misogyny, and angst by dressing up in a silly costume and beating others bloody.
You know what annoys me? Westerns. Because they’re all – in some way, shape, or form – based on The Virginian, an overwrought “novel” about a horrible dick protagonist who drawls and lynches his way across a version of the American West about as historically accurate as Naomi Novik’s Temeraire novels. The dragon, in this case, being a white-hatted cowboy who can rope a steer, woo a woman, civilize the wilderness at the point of a gun, and do it all from the back of a horse before breakfast. While drunk.
Robert Rodriquez earned the deserved love of millions by sacrificing his own precious bodily fluids to make his first film, back in ’92 (when we were still trapped in a room without a view). Ever since, he’s become a one-man production studio, which is apparently all you need to do to win the label of “outlaw” in modern, mainstream Hollywood circles. Rodriquez is now the Quentin Tarantino of Spanish-flavored gangster films: rich and powerful enough to do more-or-less whatever he wants to do, so long as “whatever he wants” involves flogging the corpse of El mariachi. Or From Dusk Till Dawn. Or Spy Kids.
The day I discovered NOVA’s