Films

Live Free or Die Hard [2007]

Director: Len Wiseman
Actor: Bruce Willis, Justin Long, Timothy Olyphant, Kevin Smith, Maggie Q, Cliff Curtis

Wow, another fantastic installment of the Die Hard series. I was very disappointed with the second film, the third film picked (I know that most people don’t agree with me on that), and this one showed me that it had not only come back after an absence of…what?…12 years, but that it had also evolved. The terrorists have evolved, McClane is getting a little older, and the stories become a bit more sophisticated.

McClane is asked to go pick up a young hacker in NYC. The Feds asked for a senior detective to do so, and of course, this hacker, together with many others, was the unwitting accomplice of a bunch of terrorists preparing a firesale, an attack on a system that completely cleans it out. The system they’re attacking; The United States. They want to completely shut down the entire country. Of course, this young, unwitting accomplice gets picked up by John McClane just as some terrorists come to kill him, cleaning up any loose ties.

John manages to get him out and to the Feds HQ in DC when the first stage of the terrorists’ plan is executed; completely derailment of all infrastructure. What starts then is a race against time as John and the hacker try to throw a monkey-wrench in the terrorists’ plans.

Personally, I love John McClane. He’s bitter, he’s cynical, he’s determined to the point of stupidity, and he’s one tough hombre. I laughed my ass off as John decides to drive an SUV through a bunch of offices just to get at a woman who kept kicking his ass. I also loved Kevin Smith’s cameo as a super-hacker still living in his mother’s basement.

Some might say that Timothy Olyphant as the big bad guy had too little personality, or perhaps not enough gravitas on screen. I think he displayed all the qualities of a sociopath to perfection, and combined it with the superiority-complex of most computer-literate geeks. :)

Fantastic film. I hope they’ll make another one soon. I really do. :)

Transformers (2007) [2007]

Director: Michael Bay
Actor: Shia LaBeouf, Jon Voight, John Turturro

The first scene in which one of them transformed sent a cheer throughout the packed cinema, and that set the tone for the entire experience I had. Cheers of surprise, amazement or just plain, unbridled, uncontained amounts of awesome. This movie kicked several shades of ass.

Sam is a highschooler with a crush on the “jock concubine” and once he finally gets a car he manages to get a shot at impressing her. His car, however, is one of several robots, come to earth and taken on the disguise of mundane vehicles. This is the start of Sam’s adventure, where he becomes – by way of a horrible plothook – a crucial part in the fight between the good robots, the Autobots, against the evil and oppressive ones; the Decepticons.

They’ve come to earth for the “allstar,” or “the cube.” This cube radiates energy that can make even the most mundane of electronic devices become lethal, sentient, killing robots. The good guys want to destroy it, the bad guys want to use it to destroy humanity and savage earth and strip it of its natural resources, building a vast army of toasters and mobile phones to conquer the next planet.

Since it’s Michael Bay that directs the movie, the action scenes are crazy wicked, and the humor is solid and continuous. They’ve thrown enough cartoon-references into the movies for the real punters, but it’s still (relatively) accessible for those people that didn’t grow up in the 80s. :)

2 Days in the Valley [1996]

Director: John Herzfeld
Actor: Danny Aiello, James Spader, Jeff Daniels, Teri Hatcher, Charlize Theron, Eric Stoltz

You know which movies I like? Not because they’re deep, not because they’re well acted, not because they’re well directed; I like movies that are based on books coming from the Elmore Leonard school of writing. You know, Carl Hiaasen type stuff. Good examples are Get Shorty, Out of Sight and Jackie Brown. The thing that these stories all share, is a seemingly disconnected cast of characters, usually set in a psuedo-crime or glamorous setting that are all tied together by one event, be that the death of a film-star, or a hurricane, or stolen diamonds, or whatever. The stories play out independently of one another, and all kind of converge on the same place. Sometimes the characters do know eachother, but it’s always a random, chance encounter.

Anyway, I love those type of stories, because they’re interesting without being pretentious or hard to digest. 2 Days in the Valley is exactly such a story, and I honestly can’t give anything of the story away without ruining the entire premise of it all. It features a hitman, a mafia-enforcer, an olympic skier, a Swedish model, a vice cop that wants to be on homicide, a disgruntled ex-film director, and many, many more. Entertaining from start to finish.

Death Proof [2007]

Director: Quentin Tarantino
Actor: Kurt Russell, Rosario Dawson, Vanessa Ferlito, Jordan Ladd, Rose McGowan, Sydney Tamiia Poitier, Tracie Thoms, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Zoë Bell, Michael Parks, Quentin Tarantino
Writer: Quentin Tarantino

I had seen so many bad reviews on this film that when I went to see it I was ready to be disappointed. Little did I realise that I was going to see a great, QT-original that had me, at times in stitches or on the edge of my seat. I loved this film, and was very pleasantly surprised. Instead of what I thought I’d get, I got a great film, with a refreshing story, solid acting, a kickin’ soundtrack, fantastic dialogue and a great deal of style and violence. Considering the strong women featured in this film, I agree that this film could be called Resevoir Bitches. :)

.: Act One
This film is roughly divided up in two main acts. The first act shows local radio-celebrity Jungle Julia and her friends going out for a night on the town in Austin, Texas with her friends. After a night of heavy drinking they make the aquaintance of Stuntman Mike (Russell), a washed up stuntman who specialised in car-stunts back in the old days. Stuntman Mike drives a muscle-car, which he explains is “Death Proof,” meaning that it’s been gutted – every dangerous and unnecessary object removed from the car – outfitted with a roll-cage, and reinforced every which way, giving a stuntman the best chances of surviving whatever stunt he might use the car for. Stuntman Mike is following Jungle Julia and her friends around, and for reasons that are never explained, he doesn’t seem to have anything good planned for them.

.: Act Two
Lebanon, Tennesee; Abernathy (Dawson), a Hollywood make-up artist, has a few days off from the movie she’s working on together with her friends (two stuntwomen and an actrice) and they decide to party hard and go wild. Zoë (Bell), one of the two stuntwomen is from New Zeeland and has decided that now she’s in the U.S. she wants to drive a muscle-car. She finds the perfect car for sale in the area and goes for a test-drive together with the girls. While in the middle of doing some crazy stunts with the car, Stuntman Mike shows up and decides to harass them, but quickly finds himself seriously challenged by the women. What follows is a crazy, fantastic car-chase that’s really worth it!

I’d like to make special mention of Zoë Bell, playing herself. Zoë is the woman who was the stand-in for Uma Thurman in Kill Bill. She’s so fantastic in the second act that I’ve declared her the sexiest woman in Death Proof. :)

Punishment Park [1971]

This is a weird fake-documentary about people rounded up and convicted to years of imprisonment during the Vietnam War for crimes of subversion, opposing the war-effort, draft-dodging, and spreading subversive, anti-government, anti-war, anti-capitalist or communist material. They are hauled before a tribunal that questions them on their motives, at the end of which they are given a choice; do their time, or do a three day run at Punishment Park, an area of the southern Californian desert in which they can earn their freedom by outrunning law-enforcers. If they can reach an American flag before national guardsmen, police officers and other law enforcers have captured them, they get their freedom. The odds are stacked against them, because they no water, no shelter, and no arms, and have to outrun well-organised, well-trained and well-equiped law-enforcers. Inevitably, things get violent and people die.

And all of this is filmed by British and German documentary makers. Which gives everything a very real sense of it being a documentary, to the point where sometimes you forget that it’s fictional.

Great, but weird. And it gives a good feel from what I can gather, of the political climate and popular opinion of the Vietnam War during the late 60s and early 70s.