On AXN. And I can't believe that it actually came out in 1997. That's like a lifetime ago.
Nicolas Cage (considering the movie's release year, fresh off The Rock [1996]) and John Travolta (milking the fame from Pulp Fiction [1994] for all it's worth) star in this action flick under the direction of John Woo. I never went to see it at the movie theatre, even if the thought must've had entertained me, and I think I know why.
First of all, Cage and Travolta, combined even, don't nearly command the amount of box office appeal that does it for me. Also, I wouldn't readily peg them as action movie stars, try as they may. Cage is more of a character actor (he was moving in Moonstruck [1987]), and Travolta will probably forever be remembered as the king of disco (and as the Blues Brothers-suit-wearing hit-man Vincent "our man in Amsterdam" Vega). And secondly, I have yet to warm to Mandarin/ Cantonese movies, which I think are often too flashy for their own good, and therefore annoying, and therefore Woo's name as director came as an added disincentive.
The flashiness literally starts from the get-go when the movie opens with a bright, fuzzy, bubbly image that fades out into a scene where we find Cage's ultimate villain Castor Troy on a hit mission targeting Travolta's ultimate good guy cop-chief Sean Archer, who we see on a merry-go-round with his kid son. Troy misses and the bullet accidentally kills Archer's son instead. Now that's enough drama right there to fuel you to the moon and back, let me tell you that.
Next we see Troy driving in a convertible on a tarmac where a private jet and a welcoming party consisting of his minions are awaiting him. The convertible breaks to a halt and as Troy steps out the movie breaks into slow motion and we see Troy's black overcoat flutter in slow motion like a desperado's in a western would at a climactic face-off. Except, here things have barely taken off, you haven't properly invested yourself emotionally in Troy (and you never will), and in effect it's as if the button on the slo-mo gizmo was hit almost at random (almost, the fluttering does look cool, sorta).
Troy walks to his minions and one of them hands him a wooden box, which apparently contains Troy's indispensable effects: some bric-a-brac, a half-empty pack of Chiclets, and two golden handguns. With all the fuss that's put into the scene you'd think that the Chiclets and the golden handguns will tie the story together nicely somewhere along the line, but Woo is having none of that.
Troy steps into the private jet but before it can take off along comes Archer with the cavalry to intercept. Archer does a lot of grimacing to show that he means business, but he fails of course and he has to watch Troy --who himself does a lot of laughing to show that he's indeed the baddy baddy we think him to be-- fly off into the friendly skies.
In the second act the movie recognizes itself for the silly caper it is as somehow Archer becomes Troy and vice versa through plastic surgery. From there it builds itself up to not one but two face-offs between the two and, yes, a happy ending, but certainly not before Troy (i.e. Archer) manages to escape from a prison taken straight out of a B-movie sci-fi.
This movie has an identity crisis.
(Running time: 138 minutes)
Sunday 29 November 2009
Tuesday 17 November 2009
So I saw '2012'
After having written and directed such films as (the excellent) Independence Day (1996) and (the not-so-excellent) The Day After Tomorrow (2004), disaster-meister Roland Emmerich has really outdone himself this time with 2012 for what we've got here is the The Exorcist of disaster movies. I kid you not.
John Cusack stars in a leading role as struggling novelist Jackson Curtis, and I've come to know that it's always a good sign if Cusack's name is on the marquee. Chiwetel Ejiofor turns in an understated performance in a key role as scientist Adrian Helmsley, underrated screen-stealer Oliver Platt is hard-boiled technocrat Carl Anheuser while Woody Harrelson --always a welcome face on the screen-- as oddball radio ham Charlie Frost and Danny Glover, of Lethal Weapon fame and now with a pronounced (and rather sinister) lisp, as widowed US President Thomas Wilson round off a cast that in my book is a stroke of genius.
It doesn't matter though.
With 2012, Emmerich directs a movie that plays on the doomsday prophesy as foretold by (among others, I understand) the ancient Mayan civilization and that is supposed to take place on 21 December 2012, the day of the Great Alignment. It foretells a period of great change. What kind of change, nobody knows.
Emmerich uses the room that's created by this unknownness to move around creatively and do what he does best: visiting worst-case doom scenarios upon humanity by mixing scientific fact with popular myth. Normally his films are to be taken with a grain of salt and tongue planted in cheek. It's escapism he offers you, so you treat it accordingly.
Not so this time around. Like I said, Emmerich has outdone himself. It doesn't matter whether it's by chance or design, but 2012 tugged a raw chord with yours truly. Admittedly, I went and took in the movie a half-believer and, with the recent disaster events in Indonesia tucked away in the back of my mind, that's all it takes really.
2012 starts in present-day 2009 as we find Helmsley on a scientific mission in India where he discovers that unprecedented violent solar flares are reacting with and heating up the earth's insides. He reports his findings to Anheuser, who sets in motion a top-secret protocol and as time ticks away towards the dreaded point in time in 2012, we witness rich folk making mysterious deals with faceless folk against a backdrop of foreboding natural events. In a separate storyline we find Curtis taking his kids on a camping trip to Yellowstone but only to find their usual spot fenced off by the army. He then chances upon Frost, a gung-ho conspiracist, who fills him in on what's really going on, which he shrugs off but, back in the city, a chain of events of increasing magnitude makes him doubt his own scepticism.
Watching buildings tumbling over and streets splitting open as a result of massive earthquakes is unnerving. So is the sight of places of religious significance, e.g. the Vatican, crumbling to pieces. It lends 2012 a biblical quality, if you will, which makes it eerie.
Emmerich may or may not be aware of this. He slips in his trademark humour and his trademark save-the-dog scene, but that can be interpreted either as him showing pity with a "there, there" on the shoulder, or him being unaware and thinking this to be just another of his disaster movies.
Well, it isn't.
(Running time: 158 minutes)
John Cusack stars in a leading role as struggling novelist Jackson Curtis, and I've come to know that it's always a good sign if Cusack's name is on the marquee. Chiwetel Ejiofor turns in an understated performance in a key role as scientist Adrian Helmsley, underrated screen-stealer Oliver Platt is hard-boiled technocrat Carl Anheuser while Woody Harrelson --always a welcome face on the screen-- as oddball radio ham Charlie Frost and Danny Glover, of Lethal Weapon fame and now with a pronounced (and rather sinister) lisp, as widowed US President Thomas Wilson round off a cast that in my book is a stroke of genius.
It doesn't matter though.
With 2012, Emmerich directs a movie that plays on the doomsday prophesy as foretold by (among others, I understand) the ancient Mayan civilization and that is supposed to take place on 21 December 2012, the day of the Great Alignment. It foretells a period of great change. What kind of change, nobody knows.
Emmerich uses the room that's created by this unknownness to move around creatively and do what he does best: visiting worst-case doom scenarios upon humanity by mixing scientific fact with popular myth. Normally his films are to be taken with a grain of salt and tongue planted in cheek. It's escapism he offers you, so you treat it accordingly.
Not so this time around. Like I said, Emmerich has outdone himself. It doesn't matter whether it's by chance or design, but 2012 tugged a raw chord with yours truly. Admittedly, I went and took in the movie a half-believer and, with the recent disaster events in Indonesia tucked away in the back of my mind, that's all it takes really.
2012 starts in present-day 2009 as we find Helmsley on a scientific mission in India where he discovers that unprecedented violent solar flares are reacting with and heating up the earth's insides. He reports his findings to Anheuser, who sets in motion a top-secret protocol and as time ticks away towards the dreaded point in time in 2012, we witness rich folk making mysterious deals with faceless folk against a backdrop of foreboding natural events. In a separate storyline we find Curtis taking his kids on a camping trip to Yellowstone but only to find their usual spot fenced off by the army. He then chances upon Frost, a gung-ho conspiracist, who fills him in on what's really going on, which he shrugs off but, back in the city, a chain of events of increasing magnitude makes him doubt his own scepticism.
Watching buildings tumbling over and streets splitting open as a result of massive earthquakes is unnerving. So is the sight of places of religious significance, e.g. the Vatican, crumbling to pieces. It lends 2012 a biblical quality, if you will, which makes it eerie.
Emmerich may or may not be aware of this. He slips in his trademark humour and his trademark save-the-dog scene, but that can be interpreted either as him showing pity with a "there, there" on the shoulder, or him being unaware and thinking this to be just another of his disaster movies.
Well, it isn't.
(Running time: 158 minutes)
Saturday 14 November 2009
So I read 'Me Talk Pretty One Day'
It takes guts and a degree of honesty bordering on masochism to open your cupboard and expose your skeletons for everyone to see, and it takes something special to translate these into prose. Like David Sedaris has done in Me Talk Pretty One Day, a collection of autobiographical vignettes that recount his formative years in North Carolina up to his days as an American expat in France.
Sedaris has a keen eye for the absurd and these little things in every day life that, if dismissed and allowed to pass by and float away, are mundane, but if captured and preserved on paper, will reveal kernels of truth of whatever subject you happen to take in. Through well picked accounts, we get to know Sedaris, his mom and dad, and some of his siblings, intimately. These complete strangers become individuals you'd have the feeling you know or at least recognize the type of by the time you've read the book through. You'd grin and give a knowing nod should you chance upon Sedaris in the street.
Everybody has a scrape with fear of being left behind and made an outcast like what Sedaris as a fifth-grader experienced when he had to enrol in his school's speech therapy program to cure his lisp, unsuccessfully though, which made him worry that other students in the program might succeed, "turn their lives around, and leave me stranded." Most of us, as a kid, has probably dealt with dad trying to push his unrealized dream upon you. It's his dream, not yours, but he's dad, after all, and so you give in and give it a go. Sedaris did. Against his will he took guitar lessons, only to freak out his midget guitar teacher.
David Sedaris's dad, Lou, to whom he dedicates his book to, is a (now retired) IBM engineer, a jazz aficionado, a closet painter, and, like in most families, at a loss when it comes to communicating with his offspring. As offspring, you're probably just as stumped. Unless you're a last born and refers to him as "b**ch" and "motherf**ker". It worked for Paul, "my father's best ally and worst nightmare" Sedaris writes about his youngest sibling. Lou is as upright as they come and I can only imagine his prudish embarrassment when being around Paul. But then, unlike his older brother and sisters whom have all moved away and maintain contact by telephone, Paul is always there for Lou, come hell or high water, either to offer a F**k-It Bucket (a bucket filled with candy) or just some words of consolation ("B**ch, I'm here to tell you that it's going to be all right."). Paul was there for his dad when their mother died, a free spirit who would trick her Great Dane into falsely thinking that she was being attacked by Sedaris and then take pictures of him lying on the floor with the dog ripping holes in his sweater. She would also organize the family's annual Miss Emollient Pageant, in which Sedaris would participate in earnest.
Before moving to France, Sedaris lived in New York and got by as a personal assistant to a rich Colombian woman who likes to feign poverty before moving on as part of a moving outfit run by Patrick, an Irish "card-carrying communist", and trucking furniture around with Richie, a six-foot-four convicted murderer, and Ivan, a Russian diagnosed with residual schizophrenia. Through Bonnie, Sedaris, and you and I the reader, get to experience New York as a tourist. An American tourist. "I expect to be treated like an American," Bonnie, a first-timer in the Big Apple and convinced that everyone is out to get her and her hard earned money, proclaims. And experience Americans outside America. In a train in Paris, to be precise, and involving a couple, Martin and Carol, who are convinced that Sedaris is a pickpocket. Sedaris, who moved to France after having made Hugh, a successful fellow New Yorker who owns a house in Normandy, his own ("You will be mine" writes Sedaris) describes Americans as a "loud" people.
David Sedaris is the real deal, hoss, just you see.
Sedaris has a keen eye for the absurd and these little things in every day life that, if dismissed and allowed to pass by and float away, are mundane, but if captured and preserved on paper, will reveal kernels of truth of whatever subject you happen to take in. Through well picked accounts, we get to know Sedaris, his mom and dad, and some of his siblings, intimately. These complete strangers become individuals you'd have the feeling you know or at least recognize the type of by the time you've read the book through. You'd grin and give a knowing nod should you chance upon Sedaris in the street.
Everybody has a scrape with fear of being left behind and made an outcast like what Sedaris as a fifth-grader experienced when he had to enrol in his school's speech therapy program to cure his lisp, unsuccessfully though, which made him worry that other students in the program might succeed, "turn their lives around, and leave me stranded." Most of us, as a kid, has probably dealt with dad trying to push his unrealized dream upon you. It's his dream, not yours, but he's dad, after all, and so you give in and give it a go. Sedaris did. Against his will he took guitar lessons, only to freak out his midget guitar teacher.
David Sedaris's dad, Lou, to whom he dedicates his book to, is a (now retired) IBM engineer, a jazz aficionado, a closet painter, and, like in most families, at a loss when it comes to communicating with his offspring. As offspring, you're probably just as stumped. Unless you're a last born and refers to him as "b**ch" and "motherf**ker". It worked for Paul, "my father's best ally and worst nightmare" Sedaris writes about his youngest sibling. Lou is as upright as they come and I can only imagine his prudish embarrassment when being around Paul. But then, unlike his older brother and sisters whom have all moved away and maintain contact by telephone, Paul is always there for Lou, come hell or high water, either to offer a F**k-It Bucket (a bucket filled with candy) or just some words of consolation ("B**ch, I'm here to tell you that it's going to be all right."). Paul was there for his dad when their mother died, a free spirit who would trick her Great Dane into falsely thinking that she was being attacked by Sedaris and then take pictures of him lying on the floor with the dog ripping holes in his sweater. She would also organize the family's annual Miss Emollient Pageant, in which Sedaris would participate in earnest.
Before moving to France, Sedaris lived in New York and got by as a personal assistant to a rich Colombian woman who likes to feign poverty before moving on as part of a moving outfit run by Patrick, an Irish "card-carrying communist", and trucking furniture around with Richie, a six-foot-four convicted murderer, and Ivan, a Russian diagnosed with residual schizophrenia. Through Bonnie, Sedaris, and you and I the reader, get to experience New York as a tourist. An American tourist. "I expect to be treated like an American," Bonnie, a first-timer in the Big Apple and convinced that everyone is out to get her and her hard earned money, proclaims. And experience Americans outside America. In a train in Paris, to be precise, and involving a couple, Martin and Carol, who are convinced that Sedaris is a pickpocket. Sedaris, who moved to France after having made Hugh, a successful fellow New Yorker who owns a house in Normandy, his own ("You will be mine" writes Sedaris) describes Americans as a "loud" people.
David Sedaris is the real deal, hoss, just you see.
Thursday 5 November 2009
So I saw '9'
Like the Greek muses of yore, the characters in 9 count nine as well. The movie's title might refer to the fact that there are nine of them, or it might refer to the central character who's simply called 9 (voiced by Elijah Wood).
9 is a living jute doll who wears his name on his back not unlike a football jersey. As he opens his eyes for the first time, he finds himself all alone in a room that lies in tatters. He tries to get his bearings and from the relative proportions to other objects we can tell that he's small. He ventures to the window, pushes open the blind, and what is revealed to him leaves him wide-eyed.
Him and me both.
The film has a way of sucking you into the tale, partly because of the sounds and visuals, and partly because you don't know what to expect or what to make of things. When 9 opens his eyes, so do we. Every time he learns something new, we learn something new. We're riding along on his trip on the learning curve. He makes quick progress, though, once he makes acquaintance with 2 (Martin Landau) and later with the rest of the nonet (including Christopher Plummer as 1, John C. Reilly as 5, and Jennifer Connelly as 7).
Along the way, 9 and his new friends have to deal with ferocious creatures, and eventually with the truth behind their existence.
9 is storytelling pure and simple and a small gem to behold.
(Running time: 79 minutes)
9 is a living jute doll who wears his name on his back not unlike a football jersey. As he opens his eyes for the first time, he finds himself all alone in a room that lies in tatters. He tries to get his bearings and from the relative proportions to other objects we can tell that he's small. He ventures to the window, pushes open the blind, and what is revealed to him leaves him wide-eyed.
Him and me both.
The film has a way of sucking you into the tale, partly because of the sounds and visuals, and partly because you don't know what to expect or what to make of things. When 9 opens his eyes, so do we. Every time he learns something new, we learn something new. We're riding along on his trip on the learning curve. He makes quick progress, though, once he makes acquaintance with 2 (Martin Landau) and later with the rest of the nonet (including Christopher Plummer as 1, John C. Reilly as 5, and Jennifer Connelly as 7).
Along the way, 9 and his new friends have to deal with ferocious creatures, and eventually with the truth behind their existence.
9 is storytelling pure and simple and a small gem to behold.
(Running time: 79 minutes)
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