Cutting Coyote Comedy.

I can’t tell whether MACHETE KILLS is stupider than EXPENDABLES 2 or smarter than JACK REACHER.

Knowing that director/co-writer Robert Rodriguez intentionally crafts this movie with tongue planted firmly in Danny Trejo‘s ass cheek (sorry about the visual) affords it some leeway, however the hyper-reality clashes so discordantly with the ultra-stupidity that Wile E. Coyote called and said he wanted his Acme products back.

In this cartoonish sequel to the equally-cartoonish MACHETE (2010), body-inked, runnel-faced Trejo returns as the unkillable ex-Federale Machete, who is sent on a mission by the president to stop a Mexican terrorist from blowing up Washington DC.

Machete (the kewl pronunciation, of course: “Ma-CHET-ay”) prefers machetes, knives and swords to guns. He has a penchant for speaking of himself in the third person (“Machete don’t tweet!”), and he escapes bullets by running.

The American President Rathbone is credited “and introducing Carlos Estevez” – yep, it’s Charlie Sheen; overacting, underacting – I don’t know what that’s called. Jessica Alba reprises her character from the past movie for a few seconds and is shot immediately (y’know, I agree her acting is so bad that even Zooey Deschanel called and asked for lessons, but putting a bullet in her brain seemed quite extreme). Cuba Gooding Jnr. in a solid few minutes as a gritty assassin (why isn’t this great actor getting more great roles like this?). Lady Gaga takes her clothes off as an assassin, once again trying to distract us from her big Italian nose with her medium-sized dirty pillows. Antonio Banderas plays an American playing a Mexican; so… just playing himself then.

Michelle Rodriguez returns as eyepatched freedom fighter Luz, who escapes bullets by wearing hardly any clothes – because going into battle three-quarters naked is the best way to avoid being shot. I’ve always thought of Sofia Vergara as “Soft Viagra.” I know what you’re thinking, “Who needs Viagra with a curvaceous hoo-er like that?” Coincidentally, here she plays a curvaceous hoo-er – but with a nails-down-blackboard voice that guarantees the need for dick pills. Speaking of dick pills, Amber Heard; only good for two things on this Earth – and neither of them are acting.

Tom Savini (FROM DUSK TILL DAWN) is looking haggard. He killed Machete’s brother (Cheech Marin) in MACHETE; explained into this plot as a good guy because, uh, because he’s friends with the director.

Cool Demian Bichir (CHE, 2008) is multi-personality villain Mendez. At first it’s his bomb, then the real villain appears – Mel Gibson.

One of the great actors of our generation, brought low by his big mouth, Gibson has somehow lost his acting talent, but retains his big mouth. Like every cartoonish villain in action movies, he gushes to our Hero of his grand plan for no reason, reading pages of dialogue as exposition as if he’s reading pages of dialogue as exposition.

Serendipitously, he delivers half of his exposition while riding a replica of a landspeeder – a prop used in one of the renowned non-acting gigs in the universe.

MACHETE KILLS is one of those movies where bad guys constantly train guns on our Hero and never shoot him. Then when he’s running or leaping to escape them, they’re shooting like maniacs who literally can’t hit the side of a helicopter. In this movie where knives make a “shink” noise every time they’re moved through thin air, is it any wonder helicopters play into some of the most egregious stunts that only 7-year-olds will find entertaining (intestines into the blades, Machete swinging around on the blades chopping people, etc.)?

And the most egregious stunt/plagiarism of all: Machete riding a bomb (a la DR STRANGELOVE) while it is flying toward Washington. Using all his Wile E. Coyote skills, Machete saves the day by cutting the blue wire (it’s always the blue wire, isn’t it?).

It’s actually the eighth time Danny Trejo has sliced into the character of Machete, starting with SPY KIDS (2001), SPY KIDS 2, SPY KIDS 3D: GAME OVER, GRINDHOUSE, PLANET TERROR, MACHETE, SPY KIDS: ALL THE TIME IN THE WORLD. There is hilarious promo for another sequel: MACHETE KILLS AGAIN… IN SPACE!, but that’s purely just Danny Trejo’s ass cheek talking…

END

Freakonomics and Con-sumerism.

“The mother of all evil is speculation…” So says Gordon Gekko in WALL STREET: MONEY NEVER SLEEPS.

23 years after WALL STREET (1987), Gekko’s back! Oliver Stone‘s sequel to that pimping film is just as confusing and hedonistic, with its insider knowledge and corporate thuggery, but set very much in the present of the 2008 economic meltdown. (A newspaper headline featuring Obama indicates the times they are a-changing.) Released one year before Occupy Wall Street, I wonder how MONEY NEVER SLEEPS – a story set smack amongst the 1% – might have gone over, had it been released after the police pepper sprayings…

Michael Douglas returns as money shark Gordon Gekko, looking the worse for wear, exiting prison after doing 8 years for his amoral, sharky past, yet holding his dignity in a world market gone mercury-fast and Too-Big-To-Fail arrogant. (It should amaze all of us how everyone on the real life Wall Street is committing the same crimes Gekko committed – even as you read this! – yet only a few scapegoats do actual time.) Meanwhile, Gekko’s daughter Winnie (Carey Mulligan) is contemplating entering prison – yes, she’s thinking of getting married. Her boyfriend is young financial upstart Jake (Shia LeBeouf) who, like most young financial upstarts, worships Gekko as a legendary Wall Streeter; while Winnie’s view of her father is akin to the Occupy Wall Streeters’ – he’s a criminal, plain and simple.

Jake works for a financial firm run by Frank Langella, a more traditional trader from a more ethical time, who is run out of business by one of the new breed of unethical sharks, Bretton James (Josh Brolin, so well-coiffed and upscale we can smell the Yves Saint-Laurent wafting off him). Plot is about Jake’s moral choices as he decides whether to follow the Old Guard or swim with the new sharks.

Gekko has published a book, Is Greed Good?, twisting around his much-quoted 80’s axiom, to reflect the cultural Zeitgeist that is now vilifying the very same avaricious hedonism it lauded in the 80s. Co-writers Stanley Weiser and Stone attempt the TERMINATOR 2 schematic, where the “villain” from the first movie returns as the “good guy” – or at least “anti-hero” – of the sequel. Michael Douglas (looking very much like father Kirk) has become a “Hannibal Lecter” trope in MONEY; the bad guy who’s the good guy, the perp who has done his time and now advises on criminal practices from the inside track. Jake seeks his advice on how to destroy Bretton.

And we realize Brolin’s Bretton is the Gordon Gekko of this movie – as ruthless, filthy rich and greedy as bad boy Gekko used to be. When Jake asks Bretton, “What’s your number to walk away from the deal? Everyone has a number,” Bretton answers, “More.”

The Wall Street crash is almost implied with this movie, as we never do hear of the methods of the crash, or the investment bankers and credit raters who gave AAA ratings to trash stocks, then sold them and betted against them – that is not the focus of this drama. And it would completely remove us from the story in blood-red outrage were those predatory felons ever mentioned.

But one aspect of half-witted trading practices comes through loud and clear. Speculation – and speculation alone – drives stocks up or down, not actual financial activity. Activity is generated BY speculation. Some mothergrabbber standing on the floor of a stock exchange wonders out loud, “D’ya think Atlantic’s stock will go down because Kim Jong Il is dead?” – and Atlantic’s stock goes down. This is how you idiot humans let your society be run. On the whims of wonderers. Stock doesn’t go up or down because the stock itself is becoming rare or plentiful, not because of the stock’s intrinsic worth at any given time, not because it is actually “rising” or “falling” in any way! Any wonder the business-savvy amoral sharks who stand in those glass-paneled rooms overlooking the stock exchange ripped your money from your incognizant, grasping fingers. You idiots deserve it!

Gekko’s illegal insider trading involved inducing others to trade on information that he knew to be false. In other words, selling a lie. So who sold the lie that women look attractive with short hair? Carey Mulligan is a tremendous actress, but whoever is telling her she’s beautiful with that atrocious Bieber hairdo is just cultivating panty, nothing further need be speculated.

And the movie itself is a grand rope-a-dope con. We only realize it during a short scene between Michael Douglas and Charlie Sheen – you read that right: Charlie “Tiger Blood” Sheen makes a cameo (playing Bud Fox playing Charlie Sheen), with two women on his arm, arrogant, coked-to-the-gills, and hilarious; Gekko and Fox trying to out-boast each other on fiscal war stories. We realize this movie would have been more entertaining had its focus been these two characters circling each other like mythic beasts, rather than Brolin and LeBeouf hazily discussing stock derivatives. They called it WALL STREET and roped us in, but it’s not about those two flamboyant characters we met back in the ’80s, it’s about two new characters whom we are on the verge of actively hating due to what their real life analogues did to our mortgages and retirement accounts.

And the greatest con of all: Just when we think Gekko has been relegated to second-stringer, passively watching from the sidelines as his short-haired daughter and Jake play out their romantic drama, we discover this old dog has some new tricks. Reminding us who really has the tiger blood…

END

Up against The Wall.

Veteran stockbroker Gordon Gekko wakes upstart stockbroker Bud Fox in the middle of the night with a phone call, to remind him the Hong Kong markets are open: “Money never sleeps, pal!”

WALL STREET is a powerful albeit slightly cheesy look at the inside of insider trading. Co-writer/ director Oliver Stone, with his characteristic insider knowledge on his filmic subject, conveys another wider world out there that we are not always privy to; amongst the cloying office environments, frenetic relationships and insecure personalities, the people of Wall Street do that mysterious thing they do with imaginary money that isn’t theirs – illegally, unethically and with a plastic 80’s soundtrack.

Bud (Charlie Sheen) is a hungry young stockbroker in a bull pen who dreams of breaking out into something more substantial. Like TWO AND A HALF MEN. Rampant charging corporate bull Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas) is on the pedestal Bud would like to inhabit. Through persistence, Bud gets a five-minute meeting with Gekko, to try and land a position as broker for him. Gekko is unimpressed – until Bud lets slip some “insider information” about an airline company that piques Gekko’s buy-and-chop-up instincts.

Bud’s dad, Carl (coincidentally, Martin Sheen) is a union boss at that airline, which is how Bud “just knew” it was ripe for the picking. The elder Sheen brings a stately ease to his role, paternally looking down his nose at Sheen The Younger, both in real life and in character, calling him a “salesman” when Bud insists he is an “account executive, soon to move onto investment banking.” When young Bud asks Carl for a loan, Carl inquires of Bud’s $50K Manhattan job, “Where does it all go?” Bud breaks down his payments on car, apartment, suits, etc. to make him look like the richie he aspires to be, ironically adding, “There is no nobility in poverty any more, dad.”

WALL STREET truly is a snapshot of WASP life in the 80s; young fantasizers throwing themselves into the river and hoping they don’t sink. It’s ultimately what we’ve all become used to doing with our lines of credit and the powerful agitprop of capitalistic culture. Wall Street: convincing Americans that in order to grow your money you have to risk it. And dumb cluck Americans buying into the Orwellian dream.

Gekko is under no illusion how he retains his 1% status. He tells the naive Bud that insider trading (the corrupt kind) is the difference between riding in a private jet and owning a private jet. He’s brash (“I’ll talk atcha!”), he spouts the most amusing axioms (“A fool and his money are lucky enough to get together in the first place”); he rationalizes his unethical practices (“Money itself isn’t lost or made. It’s simply transferred from one perception to another”); he coaches Bud in Sun Tzu’s The Art Of War. In essence, Gekko tempts Bud like a modern Mephistopheles, gradually claiming more and more of Bud’s soul, as Bud acquiesces to performing more dangerous and fevered favors for Gekko in the pursuit of treasure. I’m sure TWO AND A HALF MEN was not part of the equation…

No matter how big of a dog you think you are – there’s always a bigger dog. The dog bigger than Gekko is Terence Stamp as Sir Larry Wildman. He’s richer, scarier and Britisher. Gekko puts Bud on Wildman’s tail for inside info, exploiting Bud’s hunger and rewarding him with riches.

WALL STREET is the same parable espoused in TRADING PLACES (1983): engage in insider trading, lose your shirt. That is, being drunk on power makes you as likely to screw up and go to jail as being drunk on alcohol. Bud’s downfall looms as he moves into a swank penthouse apartment (decorating it in 80’s Gaudy), scores a sophisticated blonde, Darien (Daryl Hannah), and develops a penchant for preparing sushi for dinner. His hubris would lead him to try brokering a deal to chop up the small airline company where his father is a union boss.

Of course, the downfall of the padawan presages the downfall of the Master…

By the late 80s, it was established that the richest 1% in America “owns half the country.” Gordon Gekko would make a speech that would become infamous for the catch-phrase “Greed is good,” making it seem as 80s-dated as Adam Ant, but the speech is relevant in 2011 for various reasons. The opening phrase, “You do it right – or you get eliminated” is still the model for everyone in business – except for the corporate dishonest who do it wrong and still get rewarded (the “Too Big to Fail” asshats).

It is ominous that even back then, director Stone and corporate raiders were acknowledging that the USA was run by corporations; what they couldn’t predict was that greed would not save the corporate model but set it up for takeover by other countries with a better grasp on capitalism.

…The new law of evolution in corporate America seems to be Survival of the Unfittest. Well, in my book you either do it right – or you get eliminated… I am not a destroyer of companies. I am a liberator of them. The point is, ladies and gentlemen, that greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right. Greed works. Greed clarifies and cuts through and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed in all of its forms, greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge, has marked the upward search of mankind, and greed – you mark my words – will not only save Teldar paper but that other malfunctioning corporation called the USA.
— Gordon Gekko, WALL STREET.

Will that “malfunctioning corporation” ever learn its lesson when there’s a steal-from-the-poor-and-give-to-the-rich bailout around every corner?

In the end, both Gekko and Bud have met their downfall, Gekko ending up in jail and Bud ending up in TWO AND A HALF MEN.

END

The Importance of Being Malkovich.

Being Poffy The Cucumber

It’s about a puppeteer who finds a portal into the head of a real-life actor… No, it’s about an over-sexed, 105-year-old pirate who runs a company on the 7 ½ floor of a building who has found a way to live forever… No, it’s about a woman who realizes she is transsexual after having sex with her lesbian lover whilst inhabiting the body of John Malkovich… Okay, I give up.

I plead the Charlie Kaufman defense.

Like 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY, like BRAZIL, like A CLOCKWORK ORANGE, BEING JOHN MALKOVICH is like nothing else in filmdom. For originality alone, it deserves the highest accolades. Like its eponymous subject matter, it is inexplicable and indefinable.

Transcending its own marginally sane storyline (penned by that maniac, Charlie Kaufman), this movie stuns us with its audacity: has there ever been a puppeteer as movie hero?; when was the last time action took place on the 7 ½ floor of an office building?; have characters ever spoken plain English to a secretary, only to have her accuse them – in English – of speaking gibberish?; have we ever met such a lovable Grandpa character with such a liltingly filthy mouth (“My spunk is, to you, manna from heaven”)?

And the grandest audacity of all is the plotline of the puppeteer finding a tiny hidden door in his office which turns out to be a portal into the head of John Malkovich. (Don’t even ask…) Enter the portal and for fifteen minutes you see what Malkovich sees, hear what Malkovich hears, experience what Malkovich experiences; basically a passive passenger onboard the Malkovich train – until the puppeteer finds a way to manipulate Malkovich like a human puppet…

Brought to the weird screen by director Spike Jonze, MALKOVICH stars John Cusack as the puppeteer, Craig Schwartz; Cameron Diaz in an actual thinking, speaking, acting role as his wife, Lotte; Catherine Keener being arrogant as usual, as the glibly aloof Maxine (I would sincerely hate to be the guy Keener comes home to every night), Orson Bean as the lovable old lech, Lester, Mary Kay Place as his befuddled secretary whose naked thighs he wants to feel next to his and, of course, John Malkovich, being – well, you know…

Comporting himself in that slightly askew manner that can only lead us to believe he is a closet knife-killer, John Malkovich proves to be quite the sport when it comes to self-deprecation. Skewering himself as thoroughly as the movie skewers him, he does such an exemplary job of acting as if other people were inhabiting him, that we truly forget it is he himself who is calling himself an “over-rated hack,” or lamenting that he should have found a younger body to inhabit, for fear of breaking a hip…

Jonze and Kaufman bend storytelling convention so far backwards so successfully that – like 2001, like BRAZIL, like ORANGE – we could never guess at what might be coming next in this sui generis tale – which is as satisfying in its own way as any left-turn plot twist.

The bizarre intertwining between Maxine and Lotte and Craig-as-Malkovich will not support a simple “Hollywood” solution and commendably, there is no sappy ending with a heterosexual couple finally together after enduring adversity. Another portal has opened, another soul is diluted, and Carter Burwell’s sad, evocative score shadows a tragic, disturbing conclusion.

MALKOVICH is a wonderful balancing act between comedy and pathos: the ongoing reference to “that jewel thief movie,” which Malkovich is constantly accused of acting in, against his denials; the sudden cameo of a well-known Hollywood roisterer as Malkovich’s confidante; a funny little backstory involving Lotte’s chimp, Elijah; Cusack as the tragic, unappreciated puppeteer, walking a line which could have easily led an audience to regard him without pity – as a ball-less, amoral cur, who had to inhabit someone else to realize his own potential – yet somehow evoking our sympathies through his pathetic attempts at progress.

Though the story alludes to sublimated personalities, possession and transmigration of souls, it thankfully steers clear of any pseudo-science or mysticism, holding firm to the credo of not explaining a damn thing.

And what happens when Malkovich enters the portal himself? That, faithful reader, is too Malkovich for mere words to Malkovich.

END