The Black Dahlia

I’ve been to Disneyworld on a handful of occasions in my life. When I was there I always loved the Haunted Mansion. I think I liked it as a kid because it was “scary lite.” I liked how it was scary was like without actually being scary. It was safe scary. Surface scary. Beneath the dark veneer it was all safe and bright. It’s a schtick that Disney has down pat. Managing to take something and give you the general idea behind it while making it completely removed from everything that makes “it”, well, it.

The Black Dahlia was like a Disney version of noir. It looked nice and shiny on the surface but lacked any of the depth and danger that makes noir, well, noir.

I’ll get this out of the way. I consider James Ellroy’s “The Black Dahlia” to be one of the ten best books ever written. It was an incredible characterization of obsession and paranoia. And I can’t begin to tell you how it pains me to see such incredible source material squandered on such a miscast, poorly written, badly directed piece of crap as this movie.

The movie is very badly miscast. Josh Hartnett as Bucky Bleichart simply does not work. Bucky is supposed to be a man obsessed with finding the Dahlia’s killer so that he can save his partner from going off the deep end and avoid being tempted by his partners girlfriend. Hartnett chooses to play this incredibly comples character with all the subtlety and panache of a block of wood. It pains me to hate on something like this, but it really truly deserves it.

I won’t go on about how the script manages to be bereft of everything that made the book so moving and emotional or how a movie about “the black Dahlia” barely makes any mention of her for the first 40 minutes. It’ll just have to suffice to say that it was all I could to not pick up my Gameboy and play Zelda until the movie was over.

3/10

Jet Li’s Fearless

A martial art film is a unique bird in the world of movies. They have to walk a fine line between the demands of action fans and the demands of the general movie goer. Some, like the Matrix, have done this with great aplomb. Others don’t worry about things like story, directing, or acting, and simply pile on the kicks and explosions. Nothing really wrong with either approach, but, I think most people would prefer an action movie to have some Punky Power to it. They would rather have some emotional weight and resonance along with their adrenaline. It’s a tough balancing act but when it’s done right it’ll give you some incredible cinema

Fearless walks that line between action and emotion with incredible deftness. The result is an incredibly moving and thrilling movie.

Fearless is based loosely on the life Huo Yuanjia. A Wushu master who lived during the time of western imperialism in china. Huo is raised by a father who fights for money and notoriety but forbids Huo from following in his footsteps. Flash forward to Huo as a grown man and he’s become what his father didn’t want. A braggart fighter who only wants notoriety and fame. The path that Huo travels through the rest of the film forces him to see the outcome of his selfishness and he is given a chance to redeem himself. He sees how the west has started to demoralize his countrymen. The leaders of the Japanese, French, German and American stage a fight where Huo will fight the best fighter of each country for the honor of china.

Where Fearless succeeds is in showing us the complete transformation of Huo from a talented fighter with a chip on his shoulder into a compassionate and gentle man more concerned with the fate of his country than his own legacy. And truthfully, some credit must be given to Jet Li for his great acting in this one. It may seem a bit of an oxymoron. Jet lit and acting. But he really does do a phenomenal job.

Any discussion of the action itself is almost superflous. It’s Jet Li. The fights are very very good and they’re never over the top for the sake of being showy. They always serve the story and help you to understand the characters and their motivation.

In the end I guess what there is to say is that Fearless was truly a great action movie and a great movie in general.

9/10

Jackass: Number Two

I try to start these reviews with a catchy opening paragraph. I try to create some kind of analogy to help people understand exactly what type of movie we’re dealing with. That’s not gonna work with this one. It’s because everyone knows what Jackass is all about by now. So any review of this may as well be a review of the first movie or of the T.V. series as a whole. I guess the best tact to take with this is by seeing if it stacks up to rest of the Jackass “ovewah.” And I’m happy to say yes. Yes it does. Not only is it just as good the other stuff, it’s quite a bit better in certain places.

Number Two has all the standards we’ve come to expect. Bodily evacuations. Self-violence. Pranks on unsuspecting people. It’s got everything we’ve seen from these guys before, only better. The classic Pontius bit where he dresses up like the devil and screams about keeping god out of California get’s a great update. The old people make-up gets taken to some awesome extremes. Even the played out bit with Preston chasing Wee-Man while they’re both in their underwear get’s a face-lift. It’s not just old stuff either. There’s some incredible new stuff in here.  I don’t want to ruin it for you. Suffice to say that the boys have had to step up their game creatively and they certainly went above and beyond what was expected of them

There’s a certain attraction people have to seeing things done that shouldn’t be done. A morbid fascination. We love to see people put themselves in danger. Whether for our entertainment or not. And it’s hard, very very hard, to look away when you see someone strap themselves to a real live rocket that’s going to be fired across a lake. If you’ve ever seen anything by these guys before and been at all interested then go see Number Two. You’re guaranteed to see at least one thing that will leave your jaw hanging and face cramped from laughing.

9/10

The Protector

Late at night, on certain subscription cable channels, they show soft-core porn. I’ll admit it. I watch it. You probably do to. It’s okay. You can say so. What always trips me up about this stuff though is the way they insist on showing 10-20 minutes of “story” between the good stuff. I’ve always wondered if they think we care. Surely they’re smarter than that. It’s almost like their nodding saying “Look we know what you want and we’re gonna give it to you. But we gotta dress it up and pretend that’s not the only reason you’re watching or else we may as well just be a porn channel”. Hey man, whatever you gotta do. It’s cool with me. Just so long as when the good stuff finally rolls around, It was worth the wait.

The Protector is like a soft core porn. It insists on making you wait through boring and nonsensical story before giving you what you want. But when it finally gets to the good stuff it was DEFINITELY worth the wait

The movie is about a young Thai man who owns a couple of elephants. One day he and his father go to a festival to see about giving one of the older ones to a king. Somewhere along the way the young mans father is shot and the elephants kidnapped. There was more to the story than that but to be honest it isn’t really that important. If you’re laying down money to see this movie there’s only one real reason you chose to. And that’s because you want to see some mind-blowing action. I’m very happy to say that The Protector delivers in spades.
There are stunts in this movie that will leave you smiling. Struggling to comprehend what you have just seen. It takes a few seconds to let it sink in that yes, it actually happened. A human being actually just did what you just saw. For real. No wires. No lame cgi trickery. Just straight up mind blowing athleticism. Seeing this sort of thing happen for real is one of the biggest adrenaline rushes any action fan could hope for. There is something so thrilling about seeing one guy do things that ought to be beyond the realm of human capability and it instills a sense of real wonder and astonishment. Of course this all due to the incredible work of the film’s star, Tony Jaa.  Get used to that name. It’s a name that all action fans are going to be intimately acquainted with over the next few years. With his first major American release under his belt and his star on the rise it’s only a matter of time before we see him filming in English with huge budgets and a token black sidekick.

I could try to describe some of the things that you’re going to see in this one, Like going from a standing jump to a full black-flip and kicking out a streetlight 7 feet above him ALL IN ONE MOVE Or the incredible scene where he fights his way up 8 flights of stairs for like 5 minutes ALL IN ONE TAKE, but it wouldn’t do any good. It wouldn’t convey the astonishment you feel at seeing this stuff actually happen.

The Protector is not for everyone. You gotta be a real action junkie to get hyped on this stuff. But if you are, and you can sit patiently through the all window dressing they tacked on to make this a “movie”, then you are in for one HELL of a treat.

7/10

Brick

Crime noir is a genre that is very near and dear to my heart. I love the way that great noir paints the world in shades of grey. As though good never existed. As though we’ve ever only had varying degrees of evil and nothing more. I love the way the hero of a good noir story is often the only moral person in the whole affair. The way they’re beaten and broken after a complicated past. And usually, it’s the hero alone against the world. Fighting for a principle, a moral, or an ideal that everyone else has given up on. It seems melodramatic I know. But when it works, when it’s from the heart, it works on such a gut level that it resonates. Powerfully
Brick is great classic crime noir.

Brick is set in modern day southern California. It tells the story of Brendan, a loner who eats his lunch at the back of the school by the dumpsters. One day he gets a note in his locker from his ex-girlfriend asking him to call her. He does and finds out shes in trouble. Very serious trouble. But before she can tell him anything else she gets cut off. Thus begins Brendan’s quest to find the truth at all costs.

What carries Brick and makes it such an astounding film is it’s ability to take such classic noir concepts and place them so seamlessly into a modern world. Never does the film feel like a cheap attempt to play on adolescent problems. It never crosses that threshold into melodrama that films dealing with teenagers very often can. This is due in large part to some incredible performances from it’s young cast. Joseph Gordon Levitt, whom you may remember as the kid on Third Rock From the Sun, manages to make Brendan and his obsession with his ex-girlfriend believable. He never crosses that line into selfish brooding that could have very easily been the role’s downfall. The film has so many great performances, in fact, that to comment on and list them all would make this review novel length.

In the end, what makes Brick so great is that it manages to hit all the right buttons while being completely detached from everything we’ve come to associate with crime noir. There are no trench-coat wearing detectives. No nightclub running bad-guys wielding tommyguns. You’ll not see any black and white footage here. What you’re gonna get is a very heartfelt story about a high school student trying to find out what happened to his ex-girlfriend. A story about one kid against the rest of the world, fighting for a moral, a truth, and an idea that everyone else has given up on.

9/10