Who Am I?

1998 premake of The Bourne Identity

Rating: 11/20

Plot: Special agent Jackie Chan tumbles out of a helicopter, bangs his head on a tree branch, and forgets who he is. He befriends a tribe of Native Americans living in South Africa but reconnects with society after helping a woman win a off-road racing event. Suddenly, everybody's trying to kill him, and he finds himself in a situation that he must kick his way out of.

The last twenty minutes or so contains some great kick-'em-in-the-noggin action with a dangerous glassy slide and a furious fight on a rooftop. Most of what precedes that final act is just dumb and confusing action story-telling. There are twists and turns that either don't make sense or just don't work, some awful acting, a bunch of explosions, a bunch more explosions, a car chase, some guns. It feels derivative, not a problem if the action's got me on the edge of my seat or if the characters are interesting. That's not really the case here though. I like my martial arts movies simple. I just want to see cats kicking each other. I don't need all this story, especially this sort of convoluted story that I have to pay a lot of attention to. That final twenty minutes? That's something I could watch again. The rest of it? Don't need it. By the way, I don't think he actually makes that face he's making on the movie poster above at any time during this movie. So if you were planning on renting this to see him make that face, don't waste your time. You'd be better off enlarging the image and shaking your monitor around and making explosion sounds with your lips.

Repo! The Genetic Opera

2008 genetic opera

Rating: 8/20 (Anonymous: 12/20)

Plot: It's the year 2056, and folks organs aren't working too well anymore. Luckily, there's GeneCo, a company that helps the needy get transplants. And if the patient can't make make his or her payments? Well, the organs are repossessed violently by a masked singing repo man. A girl with a mysterious illness, her dad, a grave robber, the president of GeneCo, and his idiot children all sing about it.

Apparently, there are a ton of posters for this one. One of them even clearly says at the top "From the producers of Saw" and a little bit lower "Paris Hilton" but that didn't stop my brother from grabbing this and inviting me over to watch it with him. For the most part, Repo! The Genetic Opera looks and feels just like something made by the producers of Saw that happens to have Paris Hilton in it would. For a musical to work, the music has to be good, and the throbbing gothic industrial shit in this is not, lyrically or sonically. Musically and visually, this is pretty gross. I was surprised that this movie had the budget it did. The sets were elaborate, and the dark future the makers of this envisioned is fully realized although it suffers from some CGI-ugliness. The concept is clever enough to deserve a decent budget, I suppose, but it's so poorly executed. The acting is bad universally, and strangely, a lot of the performers don't sing very well. I suppose it would be hard to have to sing such poorly written lines while trying to keep from laughing though. Perhaps that was the situation with actor Bill Moseley, a guy who's had a lengthy career doing small bits in horror movies including Army of Darkness. Nearly every time he was given screen time, I wanted to laugh, and I'm not sure that was the intention. When the producers of Saw tried to inject a little dark humor into the proceedings--a few bad puns here and there, some gross-out stuff--it didn't work at all. Repo! The Genetic Musical ends up nothing more than an attempt to make the next Rocky Horror Picture Show. I don't like that movie at all either but wouldn't even recommend this to people who do. For those out there who happen to enjoy this sort of thing, it sets up nicely for a sequel. Anonymous and I will be there opening night, probably dressed up as Blind Mag and Luigi Largo respectively.

Paris Hilton, by the way, plays a character whose face falls off. I thought for sure I was watching a Carl's Jr.'s commercial during that scene.

Kill!

1968 samurai comedy

Rating: 16/20

Plot: A ex-samurai bumps into a farmer who desires to become a samurai in a dilapidated old town with a few people and a chicken in it. They end up on opposing sides of a gang war.

More a parody of samurai cinema than an actual samurai movie, Kill! is an entertaining ride albeit a convoluted and wacky one. I really liked Tatsuya Nakadai as the "Man with No Name" character Genta. He seemed recognizable, but that's probably just because all samurai look the same. And that's not racist because samurai ain't a race. Look it up. Look up Nakadai's resume, and you'll see a ton of movies I've seen though. I remember watching this movie before I should have (like, before I'd watched a bunch of the other movies on Nakadai's resume), and I understood it even less. This time, I dug it despite not completely being able to follow every twist and turn, every betrayal and backstab. The cinematography's nifty, the camera often finding itself in places other directors wouldn't put it, and Okamoto, like so many other Japanese action directors, sure can frame a scene. He also knows how to set a mood, from the claustrophobic fort the seven guys hole themselves up in to the ubiquitous dust during the opening ten or so minutes that reminded me more of a spaghetti western than anything else. And speaking of that genre, I thought the music, obvious nod to Morricone, was strange but also strangely fitting. Pretty cool flick, the personal level of coolness probably determined by how many of these types of movies the viewer has seen.

Kihachi Okamoto is the director of a really bitchin' movie called The Sword of Doom, by the way. You should definitely see that one.

Breaker! Breaker!

1977 truckdriver kung-fu movie

Rating: 5/20

Plot: Chuck Norris, truckdrivin' tough guy, puts his ears on and gets word that his brother is lost in Texas City, California, a town run by a corrupt judge. Chuck, his roundhouse kick, a yellow t-shirt, and a tacky blue van with a giant eagle painted on the side go looking for him. Unfortunately for the citizens of Texas City, California, they're not smart enough to realize that the best way to get rid of Chuck Norris is just to shoot him.

Seriously, I'm with the Judge Trimmings (that's his name) on this one. "He was unarmed." When an action hero gets by on ingenuity, resourcefulness, or something else, I can accept it. But when he's walking out in the open in broad daylight, and the bad guys can't figure out a way to kill him, there's a problem. And speaking of Judge Trimmings (that's his name), what a character you've got here. George Murdock plays the character like he's in a Shakespearean production. He's Acting with a capital A. His lines clash incongruously with everybody else's in Texas City, California, things like "I'm gonna stick ya! I'm gonna stick ya!" repeated by a guy with a pitchfork and another hick whining, "The guy's a bad dude!" Texas City and its occupants reminded me a bit of the locale and characters in Deliverance, so imagine Hamlet replying to "Squeal like a pig!" This doesn't seem like an authentic representation of the profession of truck driving. At the end (SPOILER ALERT!), a bunch of unseen truckers, including one named Mudflapper, come to the rescue after easily locating this dump town (Texas City, California) sans modern technology and crash into buildings in their manic search for Chuck, all while taking turns crackin' wise on their CB's. Their CB banter sounded like the type of thing that was improvised, possibly by some of the dumbest people on earth. At one point, a trucker (maybe Mudflapper) says, "I haven't had this much fun since I broke my shoulder." I had to rewind that to make sure I heard it correctly. Without context (did I miss a prequel to this?), that makes no sense. This also has one of the most terrible musical montages I've seen in a long time with this insipid pop song accompanying scenes of Chuck Norris and Arlene just standing in various places. And there's a stutterer with a stutter that, just like the representation of truck driving, doesn't seem like an accurate representation of stuttering. Chuck Norris says, "I had a brother but I lost him," to him. There's also a wonderfully poignant moment when the stuttering character says, "I'm-I-I-I-I'mma, I-I'm m-m-m-m-m-ma-ma-m-mad at y-y-y-you," leading to one of the bad guys, the stutterer's brother, doing a little soul searching. Oh, and there's a scene where the stuttering guy makes love to a stuffed lion in a barn. But you can't talk about a Chuck Norris movie without discussing the fight scenes. They're nearly nonstop, but they aren't entertaining at all. I couldn't understand why a kick to the abdomen seems to finish off anybody. Maybe that's because Chuck Norris was the fight coordinator for Breaker! Breaker! I've never been roundhouse-kicked in the stomach by Chuck Norris though, so I'm not exactly an expert. I do know that if I was to remake this movie, I'd have anybody who is roundhouse-kicked in the stomach to violently explode in a CGI fireball. That would totally rule and oddly wouldn't really affect the believability of Breaker! Breaker! It all builds to a climactic fight scene where the hero, right after he's been shot, survives having hay and a tire hurled at him, fights off a man attacking him with a hook and later a bottle, and ends up killing the guy with a roundhouse kick to the abdomen. All while a horse watches!

Special note: Jack Nance followed his award-worthy performance in Eraserhead with a performance as a truck driver in this one. Maybe that's why Cory recommended it to me.

This trucker movie was recommended by Cory!

Food, Inc.

2008 horror movie

Rating: 15/20 (Jen: 19/20)

Plot: Troubling expose about how food production has changed. It's not good. Essentially, we're all going to die if we keep eating.

Scary stuff, people. There's not much that was really revolutionary here. Animals are being maltreated. A handful of corporations run everything. Corn is used too often. We eat things that are unfit for animals. The meat we eat is filled with hormones and fecal matter. The government doesn't really care about us. Corporations try to mislead consumers or keep them in the dark about what is in the food they eat. A waterfall of chickens, no matter what anybody else says, is really kind of funny. They're mostly lessons already learned and this is a ton of information to try to digest. It's a ninety minutes bursting at the seams, like the typical American threatening to break apart the fragile fabric of his action pants. It's presented very well, however, and the documentary is as entertaining as it is informative. Similarly to Al Gore's horror movie about how we're all going to drown (same producers actually), this spits out the problems but left me pessimistic. There was a flashy little list of tips before the credits, but most of the solution to our food production problems can't be solved by the average Joe Blow. And this particular Joe Blow is way too lazy to really do anything about all of this anyway.

I believe this was recommended by Oprah. I wouldn't want to eat her either.

The Thing from Another World!

1951 science fiction movie

Rating: 16/20

Plot: Some army men discover a space ship buried in the ice somewhere near their Alaskan post. They decide to dick around with it and bring a space-monster-on-ice back to base. It turns out that he's a vegetable man! Vegetable man! He thaws, and havoc is wreaked.

A movie with a title this goofy isn't supposed to be this good. And speaking of the title, I'm sticking with the punctuation mark because the poster up there has one. Movies are always better when their titles include punctuation marks. Speaking of that poster, that's actually more of the monster than you get to see in the movie. It's more the suggestion of the monster, quicky glimpses, sound effects, and the after effects that create tension in this 50s Frankenstein-like-dude-on-the-loose flick. And the theremin-heavy score, of course. The winter wonderland setting also works well with the black and white to set the mood. Most interesting, I think, is the characters' banter, something that sets this apart from more ordinary science fiction movies from this time. You learn more about a lot of these people rather than just one or two of the most important ones, and there's a really interesting conflict other than the obvious man vs. space monster conflict. I also like the overlapping dialogue, almost reminiscent of Robert Altman. I think this one holds up very well. The fact that the monster is made out of celery is actually enough to make this a classic.