tommythegun Reviews

The Thing (1982)

John Carpenter's masterpiece

[26 October 2002]

John Carpenter reinterprets the 1951 film "The Thing from Another World", hewing more closely to the John Campbell story the movies were based on, and strikes gold. Admittedly, the FX are not the greatest by modern standards, 1982 predated common use of CGI to show us what an alien monster is "supposed" to look like, and the movie may overdo the visuals a little, but Carpenter IS a horror director after all and we pay to see the gore and slime, don't we?

While the story of otherworldly threats to man, particularly those that hide inside people, like Alien, is always good for visceral creep, what really makes The Thing shine is its use and portrayal of psychological fear. Carpenter already has a solid grasp of the tools of the trade, with the creepy Ennio Morricone theme, the frozen, dark wasteland setting outside and the claustrophobic shacks inside, the questions and guesswork he leaves you with to guess at what happened that he didn't show, and has a solid cast including Kurt Russell, Keith David, Richard Masur, Richard Dysart, Donald Moffat, Wilford Brimley to work with. But the real effect of this movie is in its portrayal of all too real human fears under such circumstances. The isolation of being stuck on a continent that's a frozen wasteland with only a few people for months, 1000 miles away from aid, an inhospitable and deadly environment outside that forces people into close confines, the manifestations of anxiety, paranoia, cabin fever and how all the characters react differently to it make this movie very accessible and believable. Carpenter could have completely deleted the alien altogether and this would still be an effective scary story about people forced together in an isolated and inhospitable place who begin to turn on each other, something that can and does happen to people in such circumstances.

Kurt Russell does excellently as the macho, practical, "let's find this sucker and get it" protagonist, as does Keith David, whose skeptical, and sees the other men, Russell in particular, as as much of a threat as the alien, Wilford Brimley as the scientist who recognizes the threat before anyone else and is intent on stopping it before it can get out, everyone else be damned.

This is Carpenter's best work to date.

New Jack City (1991)

Coulda been better, but that's hindsight talking...

[21 February 2001]

To its credit, New Jack City remains an obligatory stop on the tour of gangster/drug-lord epics. If I were a sociologist or an historian charting the history of 20th century American crime through its cinema, I would showcase New Jack along with Scarface as the best example of both the situation and attitudes towards it during the 1980's in the Eastern United States.

Okay, the story is heavily borrowed from Scarface, consciously. Several minutes of film are used to let us know this, showing the drug baron and his entourage enjoying an evening with the climax shootout of DePalma's contribution to the same canon showing. The story is familiar: ambitious criminal becomes rich and powerful thanks to America's 1980's appetite for cocaine, in this case crack cocaine sold to the inner city rather than the powder cocaine provided for the upper crust, engages in brutal wars with rivals for market share, become megalomaniacal, overambitious, overexposed and neglectful of the realities of his existence, and finally, gradually, gets taken down by personal fractures within his own organization and by the police. This particular production devotes more screen time to the police than others, dividing time between the sides almost evenly and developing the story as a war/vendetta between the police and the dealer, as opposed to simply being a Rise and Fall of the dealer, but the ground is familiar.

The movie is pretty decent at what it does. Characters are rather well developed. We don't have cardboard cut-outs of good cops, bad dealer... or bad cops, worse dealer... or any of the other possible cliches. Nino Brown, the dealer, is shown realistically. He is intelligent, ambitious, sees an opportunity where it exists and moves to take advantage. We hear in an early speech that he intends to get his along with everyone else in the Reagan era, and so is taking the only route he has left to it. He is also extremely fallible: combative, egomaniacal, unstable, imperious, more suited to solving problems with mindless violence rather than thought-out maneuvering and Machiavellianism. He is tailor-made for this role of a mid-level drug boss who comes up hard and fast on a head of steam, but ultimately doesn't develop what it takes to last. A 1980's Al Capone. Scotty Appleton, Ice-T's cop and Wesley Snipes' foil in this story, is a rough, play-it-his-own-way experienced narco cop with a chip on his shoulder. On the outs with his own department, he gets a rare door back in when his superior gets the green light to head up a task force to take down Nino Brown. He is the classic movie cop since Dirty Harry: independent, angry, very aggressive, the classic lone blue guardian defending us nice people from the hordes at the gates. His mother was killed by a drug addict when he was a boy, he hates what he's seen drugs do to his neighborhood, he is on the thin line as to whether or not he will take the bad guy to court or take him out. Ice-T's not the deepest actor in the world, but he plays the conflict decently enough.

This movie is definitely a New York movie. Those who haven't spent much time in New York or around New Yorkers probably will tend to think that some of this movie, particularly the characters, strain credibility. But in the light of it's cultural setting, both in terms of time and place, it captures well enough. The characters in terms of their behavior and thinking are accurate enough and the events are similar enough to real things to be believable. The story, in most ways, strains believability only as much as movies always do to keep us, the audience, excited and involved.

Snipes does a good early turn as Nino Brown, we could see here that he was going places. Ice-T was alright, this was before his slide into the video store. Mario van Peebles has a comparitively smaller role as the police superior behind the scenes. He reminded me, more than anything, of John Woo as the old mentor cop in his "Hard Boiled". Judd Nelson did well enough as the Italian Bensonhurst cop suddenly sent up the train into black Bed-Sty.

Where this movie starts to crack a bit is largely based on where and when it was produced and the purpose that it was intended for at the time. We see these things with the clarity of hindsight now. In many ways parallels can be drawn between this and Scarface as 1980's crime cinema and 1930's films of the same type. Scarface was (it was actually a remake of a 1932 film of the same name in fact) a rise and fall type picture of the common hood taking advantage of money and power to be had off of a criminalized product at the time, becoming powerful, then getting killed in business (you more observant types out there will catch Scarface's references to James Cagney and Humphrey Bogart films from the 1920's and '30's within the first five minutes: again just to tell us what we're seeing here). These were morality plays of a type, we see that crime doesn't pay. New Jack was in a similar vein, but of a different type. It serves, as it would have seventy years ago, as a more blatant effort: a clarion call to us nice people in Middle America about the threat facing us (the most blatant, and wildly humorous, example from the '30s would be "Reefer Madness", originally titled "Tell Your Children"). We see here in this movie the very worst depictions of the misery of urban crackheads, the powerful ingenue who profits on evil and the righteous guardians of law and order who sally forth to protect us. We are left with a call, actually shown to us before the credits roll at the end, to gird ourselves for the beast we face. This is the 1980's, when Nancy was telling us to Just Say No, George Bush declared a War on Drugs, and cops started showing up in Dare classes to every sixth-grader in America; and New Jack City was on the cinema propaganda front in this war.

The best example is the moral tone of the movie. Beyond its obviousness as such a clarion call, not much shading is used in the characters on the respective sides, a serious hit to the credibility of the film. The good guys, the cops and theirs, might get close to the line, but they never cross it. Ice-T's cop, with all his worldly sensibility, is on a crusade. Even with that, he doesn't do the Dirty Harry thing, killing the bad guy when he has a chance, and instead takes him in, in a move to do a 1930's movie cop proud. While the drug dealers, even with some good character development, are shown to be primarily mindlessly greedy and ambitious and totally self-absorbed. Maybe not far-off in some cases, but contrast it with Catherine Zeta-Jones character in "Traffic". Significantly, corruption on any level, always a significant factor in the drug business and a depressing reminder in nearly every other drug-lord pic (including Scarface) of how the unstoppable profitability of drugs draws all comers, is never portrayed or mentioned at all.

On a lesser, more subtle level, we see the other elements of the 1980's inner-city drug business: crack being the drug of choice, the takeover of whole neighborhoods and apartment blocks at the point of a gun, gang wars, the whole bit. All of it seems just a bit out of place, a relic of a time before we started "winning" the War on Crime. But it serves to drive home the central disconnect. I just happened to see this movie again recently on cable shortly after seeing "Traffic": the jaded, "poorer-but-wiser", portrayal of Drugged America, 2001, in the theater, so I picked up on it in a flash.

This film is a product of not just a physical and temporal environment, but a psychological, social, political and moral environment so different from our own today. When crack first started bringing that so very jealous god Cocaine within reach of the urban poor; urban youths were fighting wars over it and turning American cities into Beirut; ambitious, brutal but short-sighted hoodlums were trading most of the rest of their lives for millions of dollars; no one had ever heard of "medical marijuana" and we had Republicans who actually didn't inhale in office: naturally we got a war, an all-out, all-encompasing, uncompromising effort to enlist All the Americans in a crusade.

Twelve years later, things have changed a bit. The drug endemic, both in business and in its effects, has undergone a "correction" and become more stable, less outwardly violent and more distributed outside the cities. Crack has waned in popularity and market share. Laws have become harsher and wider-ranging and police have become more numerous and more aggressive. Over a million people, including a lot of those who would have been dealing and killing with abandon ten years ago, have been penned up in prisons since then. Those that do make fortunes in drugs are smarter, less ambitious and less overt. We have been "winning" the war on crime. But even in that, we've hit a lot of limits. We've barely scratched the actual drug business itself or its loyal customers. We are concerned about more and more about the costs of this war. We are asking what's the point of fighting a war and asking whether we really want to fight a war anyways. The focus of the problem has shifted from drugs being about "other" people, as inner-city blacks and latinos, who have seen plenty of examples not to follow over the past fifteen years, have learned to avoid crack cocaine and left the current hot "front" in the war around less-urbanized whites and their burgeoning appetite for crystal meth. We are willing to look at alternatives and speak truths unmentionable a decade ago. We even tacitly admit that the US President used cocaine. Ultimately, we've more or less accepted that an uneasy stability is a lot easier to deal with, a lot safer, a lot easier, probably a lot more profitable for everyone and just generally better than engaging full-bore in a pointless and unwinnable war that we don't even really want to fight anyways. If the War on Drugs is Vietnam II, then the 1980's was 1966 and today is more like 1970.

And that's ultimately the disconnect people probably feel about this movie. It's from a different era and a different attitude about the "War". Watch it next to "Traffic". For our era, it is the same thing as watching "The Green Berets", one of John Wayne's last serious efforts at a war movie in 1968, right at the climax of Vietnam, where he tries to do us proud against the evil Communist North Vietnamese; and then watching "Platoon".

American Beauty (1999)

This is why people deride Hollywood...

[8 January 2001]

And I'm from LA too!

I hated this movie. Why? To tell the God's honest truth, I can't entirely tell why. It's not poorly produced or directed or acted. In fact, it's rather well made as a film. The acting is quite good from such a stellar cast. The symbolism and nuance and shading is quite deep.

No, I hate this movie because of the message, if it has one, that it conveys, what the writer was trying to say, the way it portrayed people, what this movie means and why Hollywood likes this film.

Basically, this film is a quite frank, and I would say somewhat fearful, message from Hollywood about what it thinks about people and what they ought to be. Hollywood hates suburbia, normalcy, families, convential sexuality, the people who were popular in high school, the military, etc., etc., etc. So, their response, lets show them for what they "really" are. Let's say that they're all repressed and degenerate and we are the normal, good, healthy people. Of course, none of this is reality. Hollywood is, especially at the "creative" level, populated by the quiet artsy kids who spent too much time alone in high school and came to Tinseltown as refugees so need to fire a backshot here. This was this movie's inside joke to it's own, "See, those people out there in Middle America aren't so normal and happy. They are shallow, lonely, screwed up, full of hate and angst, etc. They should ditch the kids, move out here, get a pair of leather pants and a big bag of pills and do what will make them 'happy'." This message is pretty thickly laid on from the get-go, and it reeks of agenda, of having been written by someone filled with fear and urgency about communicating this "message". This is why the movie got the Oscar, Hollywood got the joke, got the message, and appreciated it, appreciated deluding themselves into believing that maybe they really aren't so out of touch and that everyone out there on the other side of the screen is also trapped in adolescence and hedonism but since they're repressed about it, it's the people at night on Santa Monica Boulevard who are "normal". It was a major shot in the culture war here, and apparently Hollywood will never be disabused of it's own circular logic, since any dissent is simply dismissed as the "surface level" or "living in the '50s" and we are all required to "look closer" at what Hollywood thinks.

I'm reminded of what Oscar Levant said about Hollywood: "Beneath the phony tinsel of Hollywood lies the real tinsel."

Some spoilers below.

Watching this film, yes, I can pick out everything I don't like. But, just in the general sense, I get a nagging nauseousness and uneasiness watching this. It's just something in the film, something about degeneracy and irresponsibility at every turn. I really wonder how anyone could actually contrive some picture of life where no one is mentally above the age of 13. The writer obviously wasn't. No one in this film seems to be able to think more than 5 seconds down the road, look deeply within themselves or do the work with themselves or do much more than react, rather than act to their circumstances. And the characters, all, without fail, were at best one-dimensional. They were nothing more than cardboard cut-outs, archetypes from what someone thought they were supposed to be. We have the not-happy, burned-out dad in the middle of a midlife crisis who snaps and just wants to do his own thing, the mom obsessed with the nice house and finding her own inner "strength" ("I had to grow up in a duplex!"), the normal daughter caught in the middle, the flirty, sex-obssessed cheerleader tart who, big surprise, is still a virgin despite all her bluster, the creepy, film-student kid who can't see ugliness anywhere, the big, tough, I-hate-homos-but-secretly-am-one (another big shocker), Marine officer, and all the rest. In a general sense, I didn't like, on a personal level, anyone in this film, couldn't identify or understand a one of them. It hit me when I realized that there isn't one character in this film, if they were a real person, that I would want to know.

No real creative thought or originality was put into these characters. They were, in the most basic and dry sense of the word, placed there simply to send a message, used as vehicles for an agenda, and not as characters in and of themselves. The flirty cheerleader and the colonel are my favorite. The girl is unoriginal as hell, the joke told in every neighborhood. And the colonel, is both an inside joke for homosexuals and liberals and serves to send the "we hate the military and masculinity" message from Hollywood. Also, note that the two homosexual couples shown in the neighborhood seem to be the only normal, well-adjusted people in the film (although they're only shown for a few minutes each).

I almost wondered about this film in the way people talk about Hollywood and it's liberal Bolshevik agenda. But, in that sense, this film was a failure in the sense that it was clumsily executed. This movie shows that the culture war has gotten to the point where Hollywood's bolshies are simply too far away from the people they are trying to propagandize to be effective, they can no longer craft something that can be understood and accepted by the population. This isn't the sort of sneaky, tightly crafted, New Institute of Social Research Frankfurt School stalking-horse sort of thing that the media could do in the 30s to destroy Western culture. This film paints in too-broad strokes and comes out too obvious and strong in its attempt, too far away from people at large and their lives, and so it misses the mark. Hollywood got the joke with this film, so they gave it an Oscar, but Middle America wouldn't.

That's why this got the Oscar, Hollywood reacted to a message it wanted to hear, wanted to be flattered by, and so goofed. Like I said, it's a pretty clear shot in the culture war, how far they've degenerated away from anything American or normal. This isn't culture.

BTW, a little footnote, things can get funny in a cultural war when they start moving in both directions. We don't totally notice this sort of sly, under-the-radar sort of maneuvering, but not everyone in "the industry" has become totally corrupt. If you watch the Oscars, Mel Gibson, maybe Hollywood's best "stealth conservative", was presenting the Best Screenplay Oscar, which went to this film. When Alan Ball, the Broadway-veteran writer (which tells the whole story about him and why he wrote this film...) came up, note that ole Mel didn't shake his hand, want to get close to him, and seemed distinctly uncomfortable around him. Surprise, surprise! This from the producer and star of Braveheart and The Patriot. Funny indeed!

The Rosie O'Donnell Show (1996–2002)

If you like Rosie, don't read this...

[4 December 2000]

This is probably the most insipid thing that's ever been on TV. I don't know who they are supposed to be appealing to. They stick America's favorite Doyenne of Dumpiness out there to push gooey smarm on the unfortunate viewer for half an hour (except when Rosie goes after something she DOESN'T like, like Tom Selleck, and out comes the bile). I think someone has to be seriously masochistic to actually watch this. I personally can't even stand Rosie doing that wobbly-lookin' chicken dance in commercials on NBC anymore.

Seriously, I seriously think that this show's survival is either some trick of the devil or just because she's some sort of sacred cow to NBC's programmers. I really wonder who this show is supposed to appeal to. Someone staying at home during the afternoon, which eliminates most people with jobs. Poor people? I doubt they would get or be interested in Rosie's rosy and banal world. Independently wealthy people? Usually people that have already made their mark have better things to do than watch TV in the afternoon. Housewives? I guess this has to be it but I've really wondered how they can identify with her not-so-well-disguised... different lifestyle from them. You know what I mean. ;)

Even Rosie's "good person" act is getting tired and definitely wearing thin. A double-edged sword that, as her worldview is apparently rather viciously absolutist and probably quite a few degrees from the mainstream. She's all nice and warm and sugary and likes things that are nice and warm and sugary but anything apart from that, like guns, Fight Club, or whatever and she hits the roof. She's sort of like an evil Miss Manners, or better yet, a socialist counterpart to Dr. Laura (sans the protesters, of course).

I consider this show a one-woman equivalent of Regis and Kathy Lee, but even less scintillating or relevant. One can spend one's life more productively watching the Weather Channel or the Farm Report in the afternoon than this garbage. Even if you like this show, there's better things to do at 3 in the afternoon. Go out, do something big. Direct a movie, write a book, publish a website, start the Save the Children from Big Meanie Republicans Foundation, whatever, and maybe you could actually be a guest on the show.

As for Rosie, well, I'm just waiting 20 years or so for the E! True Hollywood Story about her. I'm really curious as to what that's going to say about her in hindsight.

Tremors (1990)

A Great Movie! Truly one of a kind...

[3 December 2000]

This movie was a winner, one of the best of the '90s for its type. It managed well to mix the best of being a throwback to '50s horror B-movies with some new concepts.

The concept of the big, unknown horror come to menace us decent folk is an old theme that gets a retread here. A lot of the best stuff from the '50s treatment of this kind of story remains, but it's all seen through a modern and earnest perspective. And, at the same time, it still mixes witty humor without insulting the audience or its characters.

The realistic approach to this movie is the winner. Basically, this movie asks: "What if giant worms really did come to menace some dust-bowl podunk in the middle of Nevada?" The scientist-babe is the only slightly sketchy touch, but it still works. We don't get too much scientific mumbo-jumbo to detract from the flow, we don't get people acting either like superheroes or terrified victims, we don't get told too much or too little. The characters act as what we can expect very well could be people facing a bizarre and alien threat as best they can.

That is the '50s style of this movie: people thrust into an encounter with the bizarre who use their native human intellect and resourcefulness to win. And, unlike many '50s films, such as The Thing from Another World, we don't have trained professional soldiers or know-it-all scientists to save the day but the actual, varied and honest inhabitants of a nowhere desert town, with all their commonness, vulgarity and faults, being pushed to tap their inner resources and combine their strengths. That's the message of this film: that human beings everywhere, whatever their usual station in life, possess a nascent native and evolved instinct towards surviving by their wits and joining together against a threat, exactly as we did when we had to compete with bigger, stronger and more naturally dangerous predators for food. In this respect, it ranks with "Deliverance" or "The Edge" in retelling this theme of humanity thrust back into the jungle.

The mix of characters and their interplay is done in a honest, believable and humorous way. We don't have any gross stereotypes or exaggerations here. Fred Ward and Kevin Bacon's characters have a lot of fun as a pair of working buddies who josh and joke around but who prove a winning team, still retaining their ways, in the fold. Fred Ward comes to bloom as a natural planner and leader while Kevin Bacon demonstrates quick-thinking and bravery. The other characters, the pretty seismologist stuck away from the college, the survivalists played by Michael Gross and Reba McIntyre, the prank-loving teenager, and the rest all fit into the same. They don't change their ways, and don't really need to, in their fight, but instead contribute their own strengths. While this movie comes across as horror in one respect and comedy in the other, it contains a remarkable amount of frankness.

The monsters, too, in this film are realistically (for fantastical monsters) treated. They are big, bad, dangerous, previously unknown, and can suck you right down into the ground before you know it. But they aren't magical, they aren't unstoppable, and they are far from infallible. Although they do have some intelligence, they can be outsmarted and beaten by the dangerous prey they've come to get. This is realistic, treated them as very dangerous and strange, but not invincible, animals.

I appreciated the treatment of these sorts of people, the kind of people Hollywood, in other respects, might look down on. The survivalist couple with a hundred big-bore guns are the real test here. In other films, especially nowadays, these sorts of people would be portrayed as dangerous wackos or gun-nuts talking about blowing things up or black helicopters or whatever. While they don't try to gussy up or smooth over the characters any, you can still see them as a little paranoid and obsessive, they serve an important addition to the cast and definitely come across as the sort of people you would want to have around in an emergency. This is a realistic and unbiased treatment. I wouldn't be surprised if there was an NRA member or two on the writing staff.

One of my favorite scenes in this movie (you may want to skip over this paragraph if you haven't seen it), one that I regard as iconoclastic, is the scene where the survivalist couple fight off one of the worms coming in to their survival basement. Backed to the wall, they draw on the dozens of guns they have around, eventually grabbing for a big old double-barrelled elephant rifle, to just desperately shoot the thing as many times as they can. In most films, you would expect that the humans would lose. In most films, our puny human weapons are no match for the monster, and the humans who try to fight either are forced to run or they are quickly overtaken and eaten and you expect in this scene that this is what's about to happen. But here, the humans just stand their ground and pour on fire furiously and they win. They don't get eaten, they don't flee for their lives, there's no sudden deus-ex-machina that comes to save them at the last minute, no super-scientist from the local college who invents a destructo-ray to kill the monster. It's inherently simple and yet, it's something you don't see much in movies like this, our stalwart earth-man ways overcoming the terror from elsewhere.

If you have the chance, I highly recommend renting this movie. It's a real diamond in the rough.

The Punisher (1989)

One of the better comic adaptations, but that's not saying much...

[3 December 2000]

The Punisher is... okay, if it's three in the morning and you're still watching cable. Nothing special.

The movie takes off from the hyper-violent Marvel comic series of the same name. After his family, including his two children, are senselessly and brutally murdered by the Mob, Frank Castle launches himself into a one-man war on crime to avenge them. In the movie, The Punisher, in the midst of a five-year campaign of rising up from the sewers to kill 125 people and break the back of the mob, faces a new threat. Against his weakened foe enters the Yakuza, the Japanese organized-crime faction, playing to a bid to oust the Mafia for control. When the children of the remaining power-players within the mob are kidnapped by the upstart Japanese gangsters, The Punisher must take up arms with his old enemies to rescue them.

The changes from the comic book were numerous and jarring to a long-time fan of the series. Castle's background was changed from Marine Corps Vietnam veteran to police detective (presumably, it was cheaper to film and set up the conflict with his old partner still searching for him). Rather than living (relatively) high in various safe-houses and depots paid for with vigilante bounties and money seized from his victims, as does Marvel's Punisher, the movie version tools around in the sewer tunnels under the city. His sidekick and link with the aboveground world has been changed from Marvel's "Microchip", a super-genius computer hacker and weapons procurer, apparently to a former stage actor turned drunken bum. The change of villains from the mix of sundry drug-dealers and other upstart criminal entrepreneurs and old Marvel standbies, like The Kingpin, to a mix of Italian mobsters and Yakuza is another change. Lastly, Lundgren plays the Punisher as a brooding, sullen, half-dead avenger 5 years into his career, instead of the somewhat more energetic, aggressive, and "happy", for want of a better word, Punisher more than 20 years down the line. As a side note, the nordic Lundgren (even with dyed-black hair) isn't quite the same as the Brooklyn native whose birth name was Castiglione.

None of this is serious, it can simply be said to be an "interpretation" or "inspiration" on the part of the writers. Or just the various exigencies of having to tell a different kind of story in a different medium.

The movie itself is largely mindless violence and stereotypes. The criminals are super-powerful and totally above the law, making the Punisher necessary. In a strage way, this turns into a curious mix. We have somewhat retrograde stereotypes of crime (a very Italian mafia in natty suits, peddling heroin; criminals acting with no concern for legal ramifications, doing stupid things like kidnapping for ransom or killing cops, etc.) mixed with newer ideas (the introduction of the Yakuza, for example). It's sort of like The Professional's interpretation of the New York mob, but written more larger-than-life. The Punisher has gotten into the middle of a mob war, set up to set tension for the movie.

The gangsters themselves are a complex of strange stereotypes. For one, the Italian mob is incompetent, unsophisticated, and apparently always eating. Their leader, played in a strange twist by Jeroen Krabbe, is the only one with a brain. The Yakuza are portrayed as dangerous, ruthless and alien invaders who mean business. They all, it seems, are incredible, super-human ninjas who possess incredible martial arts skill, and they act in incredibly vicious and bold ways, performing child kidnappings, open assasinations, torture, etc. In short, we have a pair of competing stereotypes, largely ethnically based.

The backstory of his former partner, played by Louis Gossett Jr. (he just shows up everywhere, doesn't he?), is interesting, and personalizes the story more. Castle, as a cop, was Gossett's partner and is obssessed with finding his old comrade turned above the law. This adds to the story, setting up a second fold in things, but is poorly handled. A new female partner, who turns into an otherwise useless and totally wasted character, finds The Punisher's hideout in 30 minutes when the seasoned veteran couldn't do it in five years. Ultimately, any conflict gets left to the wayside, as Gossett's character proves to have little impact on the outcome. This whole aspect to the story had potential, but should've been done much better if, for example, the ex-partner was more like Tommy Lee Jones in The Fugitive, a relentless and capable detective always just one step behind his quarry.

The battle scenes are interesting and much different in style from the comic book. Marvel's Punisher, in his war on crime, was a man of big guns, big presence and big entrances. His means of fighting as one man against many was to use stealth, speed, surprise, firepower, intimidation. A typical comic Punisher move would be to sneak in first and get set, set off an explosive in an ambush and then dash in quick and waste as many bad guys as possible with the biggest guns available, evening the odds and shocking the rest into panic, and then usually getting away before the cops showed up. This Punisher is a little lower in scope (it was probably cheaper anyways). He's even sneakier and stealthier sometimes, but he tends towards using less firepower in a more cinematic type of way (no armed vehicles, rocket launchers or machineguns for this fellow), wading through, firing a weapon at full-auto, and not taking any sort of cover or moving in and out quick. Realism, if that's important, slips a bit as he also gets into hand-to-hand fights a lot more and uses throwing knives as much, if not more, than guns. In fact, for both the Punisher and the Yakuza, throwing knives or other thrown weapons seem to be preferred to guns. Whoever made this movie really liked throwing knives, and it's used as a metaphor. The incompetent cops and Mafia never use knives and the message is that they are too unsophisticated and clumsy for them and are no match for either the Yakuza or the Punisher, with their sneakiness and their hundreds of pieces of hand-launched steel.

Dolph Lundgren, as I said, does the Punisher in his own way. He's laconic, droll, half-dead seeming. Perfect for Dolph. He actually didn't do bad, as I'm sure this is what he was going for. He plays the Punisher as a walking dead man rather well. Even his eyes look dead, almost as though he were stoned. The shaving job, the penciled five o'clock shadow, was a neat touch, and was (deliberately or not) shaped just right to evoke the Punisher's skull motif that is noticably missing from his chest here. Gossett does... Gossett here. The "good man" trying to do right. He got the part of the cop who owes something to his former friend well enough. Jeroen Krabbe did well, as the embattled but visionary and very snaky mob boss. The lady who played the Yakuza boss did very well, evoking sufficient menace and arrogance to nearly make one's skin crawl.

The movie is an interesting take on the Punisher theme. Execution could have been a bit better, but they got their money's worth I think. If you like action and are looking for an action-packed Death Wish homage, check it out. Just don't expect either the comic book or anything really challenging or new here.

Just one question that has bothered me ever since I saw this movie. Why is Louis Gossett Jr.'s detective, who (obviously) is black, named Berkowitz? Now that left me scratching my head a few.

Cobra (1986)

This is more a videogame than a movie...

[28 November 2000]

Okay, Cobra. People either say this film rules for all its action or sucks for it's utter farcity and lack of acting or plot. Fair enough on both counts.

Actually, it helps to say that this isn't really a movie. This is what people had to do for their fill of mindless action before computer and video games like Doom, Duke Nukem and Quake came out. Full of overblown violence, thrilling action scenes and unrealistic, over-the-top characters.

As far as the regular film rudiments like story, plot or acting or niggling little things like believability, forget it. The story is nothing more than an unoriginal joke. They basically made Dirty Harry Plus here. Picture Harry Calahan younger, with sort of a '50s styling, with more and bigger guns and a cooler car vs. a whole army of axe-wielding fascist psychos who seem to want to kill people for... no reason at all. Throw in Brigitte Neilson as the blonde model Cobra (Stallone) has to protect from the psychos, the obligatory police department brass who don't believe him or in his violent loner ways, etc., etc., etc. and you basically have every cheesy cops and robbers movie since the 70's, times 10. They even have the obligatory Latino sidekick (who gets injured and taken out of the big, final fight early), the bad cop who turns out to be in cahoots with the bad guys, the big, bad knife-wielding leader of the psychos who expects to plead insanity and get off and calls Cobra a pig repeatedly, they even went so far to throw in Andy Robinson, who played the Scorpio killer in the first Dirty Harry movie, just to let us know what they were going for. The crazy loner cop who kills everybody, the brass who don't back him up, the weasely "by the book" competitor detective, the blonde bombshell, the car chases, gun-fights, cheesy one-liners, the trip to take a witness away into seclusion that turns into a trap and big battle, it's all here. Get philosophical about it: Cobra isn't just a cheesy cop action vehicle from the 80's, it's EVERY cheesy cop vehicle ever. Every one of them was just leading up to this movie. Arnold Schwarzenegger's "Last Action Hero" was making fun of this kind of movie. This is "McBain" from "The Simpsons".

Okay, Cobretti (Cobra) is a loner cop who doesn't like to play by the rules who is the top cop in the "Zombie" squad in the LAPD, the squad that takes down the psychos nobody else wants to mess with. Arrayed against him is some bizarre cult of nuts who like to clash two axes together over their heads in a warehouse and want to establish some sort of "new order", which they hope to achieve by senselessly knifing or axing people. They target a fashion model, played by Neilson, and relentlessly pursue her through her building, hospitals, streets, foundries, etc. Cobra gets involved to protect her, stumbles on to the "whole army" after her that the brass won't believe, even after multiple suspects are stopped coming for her. This goes through fights with fists, guns, explosions, a car chase with Cobra in his stylin' nitro-boosted roadster, and the denouement in the backwoods somewhere where they are hiding out to protect her and get mobbed by the whole lot of Jason Voorhees disciples.

This is a pretty fascist movie, in the Dirty Harry way. Cobra isn't like Harry, just bending or breaking the rules when he has to, he does it as his regular job. The brass seems to look the other way when he gets results, at least by the end. The criminals have no background or motivation, they are just miscreants who like to kill because, well, just because the movie needs bad guys who aren't nice people like you and me, and bad cops who aren't like you and me either to protect us.

I have a lot of cops, and other people in some part of the legal or law enforcement profession, in my family so I know the straight dope up front. Frankly put, everyone is on to the fact that all the cop stuff on TV and movies over the past 30 years is mindless garbage. Cops work as part of a system and are expected to follow the rules. While they do break the rules, they can get in serious trouble if they get caught doing it flagrantly all the time and no department is going to get caught sanctioning that in the face of public and legal pressure for long. Police also work in teams, as part of a big system, and the idea of a "cop who works alone" is a contradiction in terms. Cops win against the bad guys by using teamwork as their primary weapon. Bad guys also usually have at least some intelligence and limited self-preservation instincts. While some do really stupid things like act out in public, kill people for little or no reason, or try to kill cops, most don't simply because those that do don't live very long.

The other realism stuff: any cop who tools around in a private car like that has gotta be on the take; that wierd not-quite submachinegun thing Cobra uses in the end is too complicated, with all sorts of shiny, neat looking but useless things, like a laser-sight, and I wouldn't take it to a fistfight; all the fighting scenes, people are usually dead or seriously injured within seconds in any serious fight, etc., etc., etc. ad nauseum.

I'm sure everyone knows this, and will say "It's just a movie", and they're right. I just had to say all of this.

Stallone doesn't so much act his way through this as muddle. Total deadpan, cheesy lines, etc. He's just on autopilot. Neilson actually does better, and that's not saying much. The big bad guy knife killer is a bit better, in his totally out-there role, he plays big evil psycho guy up decently enough.

Okay, for all the "bad" about the movie, it has its merit. We watch cheesy cop movies for a reason, they're fun. This movie is nothing more than mind candy, but it is tasty. I said that this was pretty much a video game. That's the way to think about it, think of it as watching someone else play Quake. They run around solo shooting people and blowing things up with all sorts of big guns for no real reason. We like the long fights, chases, the big explosions, the big guns, the hammy dialogue. This film isn't on the level with anything by John Woo, supreme master of the action ballet. Woo always uses action as a secondary vehicle to tell a compelling story, which is why he is great. But his actions scenes are masterful in and of themselves and leave us breathless and Cobra doesn't lack much for the breathless factor. We want to watch movies that take us some place bigger, faster, louder, more exciting, more over the top than real life ever could be. We also, even if we like originality, can and do find some comfort in familiar formulas, if they hit the right, time-tested notes.

I truly believe, on this score, the producers fully knew what they were doing. This flick is just way too far into copying the Dirty Harry formula, especially with all it's little extra touches, to have been accidental. One can call it soulless or spineless or lazy to just bite off what others have done and know how it will work, but if it does work all the same, we can't really fault them for it.

There was talk that Cobra was meant to be the first in a series, another character with a name with five letters and two syllables for Stallone to turn into a franchise. (i.e.: "Rocky", "Rambo") It wasn't successful enough for a talked about sequel around 1990. Actually I'm almost glad it didn't get spun off, and not because it was a bad film or a failed effort (though one could say it was). This film best stands alone, by itself in film history, on a number of fronts. As an ultimate expression of style over substance, or scene over script, or action over acting. Or as the final, logical, distilled product of so many cop-action films before it: the absolute zenith, or the absolute nadir, of everything that came even before Dirty Harry.

Crimson Tide (1995)

Excellent! Superb acting and script. Very deeply nuanced.

[14 October 2000]

This is one of my favorite movies. It asks some very serious questions about the nature of military orders and nuclear warfare and shows both the leads at their best. It contains some very deep levels of its message about conflicts between officers and how that affects the chain of command. This movie, more than anything, is driven by its two leads. Both Hackman and Washington are gold and the characters they play were excellently written and developed. Both are extremely nuanced and balanced (in terms of character) and one can easily understand either one. Hackman's Capt. Ramsey is the quintessential "implement of policy", a 25-year veteran fanatically committed to his mission while Washington's Lt. Cmdr. Hunter is a "new Navy" product of Annapolis and Harvard, who sees "war itself" as the enemy in the nuclear era and displays a careful deliberation and consideration of how to proceed in the crisis. One could see Hackman as the gallant front-line defender who exists to protect his nation, while at the same time being dangerously overzealous, rash and callous in consideration of the power at his all-too-human hands. At the same time, Washington's polished officer, while being wise, cautious can also be seen as perhaps still being too fresh, inexperienced and indecisive at times. It's a dilemma and a wonderfully done character-sketching in grey, that leaves one with the point, as the movie ultimately concludes, that both men are right, and also wrong, at the same time. I've heard a lot of commentary on this movie a couple of different ways. For one, regarding whether or not something like this is possible. That's a valid point, thankfully. Nuclear submarine crews are famous for their mature, polite and intellectual natures. They spend months underwater in relatively cramped, sealed steel tubes, work potentially long shifts at highly technical jobs, face a tremendous amount of responsibility and have to maintain extraordinary composure and discipline in a potential combat situation when they probably have a very limited picture of what's around them and no real chance to escape if something bad happens. The Navy tends to select and screen people for that silent, and arduous, service very carefully, and it is tough to imagine that there would be mutinies with crewmen pointing guns at each other on a US nuclear sub. It's important for a military command structure to function smoothly, with everyone doing their best to work together within the system, which the movie points out. Militaries have been in business for thousands of years, they've continually figured out how to function and what kind of people they want. The likeliest scenario, probably, if the situation ever got as bad as an XO being forced to relieve his CO, would be for them to confer privately, after everyone's cooled off a little, and try to come to a workable solution to preserve the chain-of-command and carry out their orders. That's probably better than a mutiny with 24 nuclear missiles up for grabs anyway. (If you haven't seen the movie, you may not want to keep reading) The other issue I've heard about is the ending, that the system decides that both Hunter and Ramsey are right, and wrong, and Ramsey simply retires while Hunter goes on to his next assignment. That is actually believable. The scene at the end, with the board of inquiry, is actually very nuanced and could mean a couple of things. For one, such boards are going to have respect for a 25-year veteran and show him professional courtesy. They also will work to head-off a potential publicity nightmare that drops into their lap. The Jason Robards two-star who heads up the board says "in recognition of his long and dedicated service", Captain Ramsey's "request for early retirement" is granted. At senior levels of government service, including the military, no one is ever publicly given the boot, unless either they force it on themselves or they commit a crime or a serious breach of trust. Instead, their "resignation is accepted". The point is to avoid ugly publicity and to show someone the respect of allowing them to walk away with their reputation and honor intact. Ramsey very well might have thought it best to resign himself. Given the circumstances, whatever the findings, he was never going to be given another command, and so would have taken the best opportunity to end his career with his head high and his pension and prospects for a teaching, consulting or writing position secure. When he leaves, he never really admits that he was in the wrong, with that little joke about the horses to Hunter, which probably sits well with the psychology of someone in that situation. His whole world is turned upside down as it is, so he copes with it by taking the best route out and leaves still proud and this is accepted and expected, even by Hunter. They maintain a mutual respect. Notably, the board states that Hunter's being sent on to his next assignment with all due speed is in part due to Ramsey's recommendation. The ultimate resolution was one that was in everyone's best interests, given the circumstances, and that is why it came out the way it did. It made the job of the board easier as well, as they could deftly evade a potential landmine by saying that everyone acted "in the best tradition of the Navy and the best interests of the United States", pensioning off the old-timer and giving the younger guy his next job, with the implicit knowledge that he ought keep up the official line for the sake of his career. An interesting dichotomy, at first a total breakdown in the system and then the system working to resolve it as best as possible. Of course, this time, without a nuclear war looming on the horizon. Probably Hunter's career would survive, though he would ALWAYS have an eye looking down on him from above and would have to know that no one ever survives something like that twice, that if he ever went outside the chain of command again, no one would believe it an accident. It is possible, in the future, that he would never promote past a certain level, or that a superior could hold a bias or attempt to hold the affair over his head. These, of course, are all assumptions and possibilities that are left to the viewer to decide. As in the submarine itself, we are presented only with what the players see, another mark of genius to this film.