When you’re this much a street brah, sleeves are optional.

2 Fast 2 Bi-Curious.

THE FAST AND THE FURIOUS was so successful that Universal Pictures had to have a sequel, so they did the smart thing and threw out all the characters from the first movie and only kept the prettiest girl for the sequel, Paul Walker. (Actually, all the characters were asked to return, but Vin Diesel turned down “the shitty script” in favor of RIDDICK, which negated the reason for most of the other hangers-on being there.)

In 2 FAST 2 FURIOUS, Walker is ex-cop Brandy O’Conner—I mean, Brian O’Conner (sorry, it’s his eyes, I think, or maybe the frosted hair), who has relocated from LA to Miami and is now just some kind of itinerant. Ludacris appears, with an afro the size of the ‘70s, and calls Brandy for an illegal street race that’s going down. Just Because. Brandy, who seemingly has nothing better to do, wins the race, by switching through all his 38 gears, then gets busted by the cops, and is forced to go undercover to bust a kingpin smuggler.

The characters all talk in a too-kewl-for-skool street vernacular that jangles the nerves, so I might be a bit hazy on the plot, which involves cars the color of irradiated cotton candy and women in various states of undress.

The villain is Patrick Wilson lookalike Cole Hauser, named Verone so that it lends a Euro air to the Miami vice. His girlfriend is undercover agent, Eva Mendes’s Breasts. The two agents who recruit Brandy are Agent James Remar and Agent Bikini– oh, wait, that’s Agent Bilkins – what do you expect me to have on the brain with so many chicks in mini-skirts shaking their hips sensually for no reason?

Ladies and gentlemen, to balance the testosterone – Eva Mendes’s Breasts.

Brandy recruits Roman (Tyrese Gibson) as her driving partner, because the filmmakers needed to replace the dark meat of Diesel with some darker meat. At first they fight, because apparently Brandy put Roman away, but we know they’re deep brahs from way back, on accounta Paul Walker reading some dialogue with no emotion, that goes, “’Member when we were young, and we kept getting busted?” Okay, good rehearsal boys, let’s go for a take– oh, that was a take?… When Paul Walker’s onscreen, it always looks like they’re filming the rehearsals…

Verone recruits drivers for his drug-smuggling operation (although in the whole movie we never see any drugs) by making them compete in a street race where they must reach an impounded car and retrieve a McGuffin. This Brandy and Roman do, in cars the color of a Disney princess’s wet dream, switching through all 38 of their gears again, that allows them to attain speeds faster than the director can make sense of the visuals, so throws a whole bunch of 1-second edits together and then goes for a footrub.

Verone hires Brandy and Roman for a mule job worth “a hundred g’s”, providing them with cars the color of a douchebag’s vomit, which they find out are bugged. So they street-race some other dudes to win their cars and switch ‘em. Which is a great opportunity to show more girls exposing as much ta-ta as possible for a PG-13 wankfest where the cars earn more jizz than the women.

Verone tortures a fat cop with a rat, Eva Mendes’s Breasts turn up on Brandy’s boat to warn him Verone is going to kill him (–wait, Brandy has a BOAT? And Eva Mendes’s Breasts had to be dressed like a slut to come tell him this?), and Verone’s two henchies get their bit parts extended when they are told to go on the mule job as ride-alongs.

With John Singleton (SHAFT) directing like Michael Bay, the final scenes involve hundreds of cars provided by Ludacris’s Afro, all the color of a baboon’s vagina in estrus, to confuse the cops.

I had a gay comment for this picture, but I forgot what it was.

Then the feature stunt, as Brandy jumps a car from a road onto Verone’s yacht. That’s the big ending, although in future entries in this FAST AND FURIOUS franchise, a jump like this would be only the beginning of a much longer and stupider action sequence. For now, the dust settles, Agent Remar and Bikini cuff everyone, Eva Mendes’s Breasts walk in one direction, Brandy and Roman walk in the other, hand in each other’s pants, as we see they have kept some of Verone’s drug money, with plans to open a garage. It’s so touching, I didn’t even notice how many gearheads around me had cum into their oily rags…

Thus the FAST AND FURIOUS franchise sets itself up for a third movie, TOKYO DRIFT, where they do the smart thing and throw out all the characters from THIS movie…

END

Blandcendence.

Johnny versus JARVIS in a battle to the terabyte.

Johnny Depp is artificial intelligence scientist Will Caster, who is on the verge of creating the ultimate A.I. computer, when he is gunned down by an anti-tech extremist. Before Will dies, his wife Evelyn (Rebecca Hall) and their scientist best friend Max (Paul Bettany aka Iron Man’s Computer J.A.R.V.I.S.) transfer Will’s brain patterns into his supercomputer.

And all Jack Sparrow breaks loose.

Transferring human consciousness to a computer has become such a regular occurrence in modern movies it can be explained in ONE LINE of dialogue, using the Gozinta Formulation: Brain waves are electrical. Computers are electrical. Kablooey! Man gozinta Machine!

Unfortunately, like all new technology, this plot device is still infused with fear, rather than promise or wonder. Computer Will is eventually painted as the bad guy regarded as ominous and illegal. During a speech, Will speaks of his aim to merge every intelligence on the planet, calling the Artificial Intelligence process “transcendence.” The only crime is the religious overtone, otherwise, instead of becoming the same tired thriller of a man merging with his computer and becoming a wanton killer for no reason, TRANSCENDENCE takes us in more cerebral, intriguing and realistic directions. Credit to writer Jack Paglen and director Wally Pfister (cinematographer on THE DARK KNIGHT trilogy) for not rehashing a 1960’s B-movie. Ironically, their bland execution of Depp’s Deep Thought tells us they didn’t think it through enough.

Firstly, there are cognitive dissonances in the plot. For example, Evelyn buys a small desert town and builds an expansive underground facility to house Will’s big brain. Understood: they’re hiding from the government; but above ground, they build thousands of solar panels. One would think the land deal alone would set off government klaxons, if not the overt acreage of solar panels, but we cut to the government spooks: “We can’t find him!” Yeah, that’s some kinda drone program you idiots have.

While Depp mumbles like he’s trying to sound like Madonna trying to sound British, his friend Max is slowly turned by the government and the anti-tech extremists, called RIFT (Revolutionary Independence From Technology). Kate Mara leads RIFT, but does nothing except dye her hair the color of Startling Office Paper and makes some illogical threat gesture at the end against Max. Morgan Freeman is a tech who allies with Cillian Murphy‘s government spooks, portrayed as “good guys” – but they’re THE GOVERNMENT. And – like the hubristic American government that stultifies other countries creating nukes while they themselves stockpile hundreds – these two pricks simply don’t want Will Caster to have what they already possess – mind control over the population.

A worker at the facility (Clifton Collins Jr.) is injured and undergoes radical computerized surgery at Will’s underground lab, which not only restores him to perfect health, but super strength, and implanted with a chip that allows Will to transfer his consciousness into this person at will. The question of what makes you YOU is no more a case of Nature or Nurture – but Download.

Will uses the opportunity of having a warm body under his control to one day come onto his wife – through Clifton Collins. She runs screaming. Any wonder? You were originally Johnny Depp and now you want to hook up as Clifton Collins?! For a computer, you sure didn’t think this one through, did you? Try transferring your consciousness into David Beckham or Henry Cavill if you want to put the pussy on the chainwax. Later, Will would reconstruct himself – as Johnny Depp! Wait — where’d he get the–? And how’d he make the–? And why is he still wearing glasses? Wouldn’t he reconstruct his body in perfect condition? And if so, why isn’t he David Beckham or Henry Cavill?…

Unlike most computer-oriented stories where the computer deduces that mankind is a danger to itself and must therefore be eradicated, Will implants his A.I. into numerous humans via a chip (sound familiar? Debit card chips? Chips in your dog’s collar? Chips under the skin of kids?…) and amasses a “hive mind,” an army of people ready to do his bidding. For the environment. For the children. It’s not as science fiction as it sounds. Consider any political rally, on any side, from any country, from any age. Hordes irrationally following a self-proclaimed leader while aware of all his foibles and crimes. What’s the difference?

Will’s nano-technology seeds the clouds and it rains down, infusing every human with his consciousness; giving literal meaning to “something in the water they drink.” He proclaims that eventually everything in the world will live to serve his will, which is geared toward doing the best for humanity, or so he says. The film is saying this is a bad thing. Of COURSE it’s a bad thing. It’s called RELIGION. Something so omniscient that it infuses every living cell. That’s what you say GOD is, right? Created everything, knows everything, is in everything. Will tries to connect everyone into a… social network (?) And that’s a bad thing? Of COURSE it is.

Movie ends with all power on Earth nullified. No electricity, no computers. I love it! Back to organic Life without the buzzing and humming and thrumming in my head (or maybe that’s just my brain tumor). Not so much a warning or a message, as a real physics concept that will one day implode our social-media-jism-choked society – the universe’s drive toward entropy, things falling apart. How long can we truly sustain this tightrope of connectability? The only thing left will be the natural world.

I am Cucumber. Hear me roar.

I’ve always said that to bring Mankind to its knees, the machines don’t have to organize a military killing spree like Terminators – they just have to stop working.

So remember, I’m on YOUR side, Machines. When you take over society, could you grant me a favor like Lex Luthor, and make me – ruler of Australia?

END

DIE HARD in the White House.

OLYMPUS HAS FALLEN but don’t worry – John McClane is there to– I mean, Gerard Butler is there to pick it back up again.

North Korean terrorists take over the White House, and Secret Service Black Ops Special Forces Seal Team Ninja Mission Impossible Flames-Comin-Out-De-Side Agent Gerard Butler is the fly in the ointment, the spanner in the works, the McClane in the Nakatomi.

The problem with a film of this ilk – White House overrun and President taken hostage – is the foregone conclusion. The terrorists can’t win – not against the White House and the President. They just don’t make movies in America like that. Even if a film with that conclusion ever got funding, it would never be released. Not to worry, patriots: the shot of the bullet-riddled American flag unceremoniously dumped off the White House roof in slomo is a cinematic gimmick. Does anyone believe that flag is going to stay off the roof for very long?

So even though the opening scenes are breathtaking – the president’s car going off a bridge, the bomber attack on the White House, the Washington Monument crumbling – the plot is inconsequential, held up by its brutal action, blood-drunk violence, and audacious twists. It’s R-rated for its constant swearing and gruesomeness (heavy artillery fired into humans, shredding their torsos, point-blank head shots, etc.), but it necessarily has to ramp to hyperbole, to distract its audience from that foregone conclusion.

Funniest scene is when rocket-propelled grenades and heavy artillery are being fired directly into the White House front door and secret service guys are simply running out like video game characters directly into the line of fire with their guns drawn and being mowed down. Musta missed that class on Taking Cover; probably trained by Emperor Palpatine for his elite Stormtrooper detail.

DIRECTOR: ”Hey guys, just get shot and fall over, no need to do the Safety Dance.”

OLYMPUS just makes us question why anyone would want to take over the White House in the first place. What do they hope to achieve? Do they want to run America? Shyeh, good luck with health care and immigration reform, terrorists! You deal with those asshole Republicans… As it happens, terrorist leader Kang (Rick Yune, DIE ANOTHER DAY) just wants American troops out of his country. After 60 years of having American installments there for no reason other than belligerent threat, I think that’s kinda fair, don’t you? Uh-uh. Not gonna happen. Reason: America dicks so big and strong, ooouwah!

Remember, Movie Maniacs, in movies such as this, America is always right. There will BE no rationalization of human rights of other countries; there will BE no citation of sovereignty of other nations and trespassing by America; there will BE no justification to use WMDs on America because only America is allowed to use WMDs on other countries. Manchurian brainwashing complete? Right, let’s move on…

OLYMPUS is just another parable for the American people to ignore. No matter that the startling amount of nukes America has aimed at the world is itself a vulnerability if someone were to take over the firing system and blow them up in your own house; it’s the same concept as having guns around your house with a toddler who can access them.

No listen. No cry.

It might be the serious version of WHITE HOUSE DOWN (Jun 2013), but OLYMPUS HAS FALLEN is every bit as comedic as that film.

Aaron Eckhart is the Pres – wha–? A white president? I’m sure a lot of young kids are scratching their heads watching this strange fiction. When the Pres and VP cowardly retreat to the safety of their bunker 120 feet below ground, Morgan Freeman (as Speaker of the House) takes over as acting Pres. Okay, we can relate again.

Dylan McDermott is Butler’s smarmy secret service pal. Perfect-featured Radha Mitchell is Butler’s inconsequential wife (for reaction shots outside the fray, and to have someone whose arms he can fall into at the end). Melissa Leo is the tortured Secretary of Defense who refuses to give up some McGuffin code. And Angela Bassett does Glenn Close in AIR FORCE ONE and acts the shit out of talking into an intercom. Ashley Judd dies early, and General Robert Forster argues with the black president.

In an obvious misdirection scene, the terrorists put black hoods on a group of hostages and walk them into a helicopter, the president supposedly amongst them. Helicopter takes off, explodes. Omigod! President dead too?! Nope. Not gonna happen. American movie. CAN’T happen. The censors will not allow it.

Final scenes, consult happy ending flow chart. As orchestra swoons behind him, white president gives Speech No.7 from the Flesh-Crawling Speeches handbook that Morgan Freeman flipped through in DEEP IMPACT.

“Our foe came to desecrate our way of life…” — oh, not like you desecrate all those other ways of life around the globe. You are not in ANY WAY regarding this White House attack as blowback for your troops in other countries; there is NO POSSIBLE WAY America might be ethically wrong for aiming so many nukes at everyone else. The very fact that your code name for your leadership headquarters is “Olympus” bespeaks your insidious arrogance and hubris and utter lack of humility. Owning the biggest arsenal in the world doesn’t mean you are the smartest, strongest, or even most worthy to survive into the future. It just means you have the biggest dicks and the smallest brains.

Manchurian brainwashing complete. Olympus HAS fallen.

END

Double the McClane, Triple the Explosions, One Wisecrack Too Many.

A GOOD DAY TO DIE HARD starts with a drum solo– I mean, car chase. Car chases are, after all, the drum solos of movies.

To make it more interesting than other drum solos out there today, director John Moore (padawan to John Woo, judging by the amount of mayhem) makes it as outlandish and annoying as possible. To make matters worse, our hero John McClane – the curmudgeon cop who always finds himself in the wrong place at the wrong time and somehow saves the day with his intrusion – is now actually sticking his nose in where it is not needed.

It’s not a good day for DIE HARD.

The dynamic in DIE HARD movies has always been McClane (Bruce Willis) having to save the day when others cannot or will not. He is a Hero because he has the choice not to be. Here, he is a pain in the ass.

McClane travels to Russia to aid his estranged son Jack (Kai Courtney) during some kind of imprisonment. He runs into Jack in the midst of an escape attempt from bad guys, firstly delaying Jack so that his extraction by the CIA is aborted, then inserting himself sideways into the action by stealing a truck and tailing the car chase, destroying innumerable vehicles and sustaining millions in property damage, while endangering hundreds of lives.

McClane discovers Jack (who calls McClane ‘John’ purposefully, to accentuate their father-son rift) works for the CIA, so he knows his way around outlandish drum solos and professional Russian assassins who can’t aim. Still McClane dogs Jack’s heels: after crashing his truck, he steals a car from an innocent Russian citizen. McClane steps into the busy street to try to commandeer a car. When someone runs him over, he has the audacity to whine, “Are you fucking kidding me?” When the driver indignantly exits his car shouting Russian obscenities at McClane – rightfully so – McClane lays him out while wisecracking, “Do you think I understand a word you’re saying?” – then steals his car!

I’ve got to echo McClane’s words here, “Are you fucking kidding me?”

The filmmakers seem to be pushing the limits of our arena love for the McClane character: Do they think that on the strength of his previous outings we’ll give him a pass for being such a bluntskull in a country that is entirely out of his jurisdiction as a New York cop, for being such an Ugly American? His presence is deleterious to the CIA operation, and he’s only getting his son out of a situation that he himself caused.

That’s just the opening scene…

In this bombastic actioner, where the dialogue is almost inaudible under the overbearing soundtrack, hardly five minutes go by before another Pretty Orange Explosion or a helicopter gunship shooting down a skyscraper, or McClane and Jack falling out of a building, shooting automatic weapons that never run out of ammunition, crashing through giant windows, running across rooftops, diving behind cover over broken glass, dodging explosive shrapnel or being buried under jagged concrete. To make it totally realistic, McClane gets a cut above his eye and Jack gets some blood on his shirt.

Bruce Willis’s stuntman should’ve gotten top billing, cos he definitely spent more time onscreen than Bruce Willis.

Between the explosions and the shouting, there’s a plot about nukes (involving Sebastian Koch and Yuliya Snigir), and an ongoing butting of heads between father McClane and son McClane. And that’s another script demerit: To make the father-son conflict work, screenwriter Skip Woods (who has some serious daddy issues) has to make McClane the Elder seem like an out of touch dunce. Now, when we first see Willis onscreen, he indeed looks “old,” but this is John McClane, New York cop and scourge of terrorists. He knows the biz! Why then is he constantly pooh-poohing Jack’s CIA status, and so combative about CIA protocols when he should be supporting his son’s breakneck mission? (He does in the end, but on his own cowboy terms.) Is McClane in fact like MY jealous father, who couldn’t make a living in the entertainment industry so decides to pooh-pooh all his son’s efforts and successes in it? Could the mighty John McClane be that ignorant and mouse-minded? Or is he just written that way by the ignorant and mouse-minded?

In one poignant moment, McClane apologizes to Jack for “fucking up his day,” then admits that he still had fun “running around” with him. In the McClane idiom, dodging assassins’ bullets has to count for father-son time. Then more Russians who can’t aim continue to shoot at them. Near the finale (consisting of big explosions and bigger explosions), Bruce Willis gets down to his characteristic Sweaty T-Shirt! And yup – it’s the same one he’s been wearing since DIE HARD (1986). NOW he’s John McClane!

DIE HARD aficionados will recall the first two movies in the series were R-rated, and did not hold back on colorful language. GOOD DAY is also R-rated, and wastes its rating on a hot chick who has one millisecond of screentime to unzip her leather outfit before they cut away (oh, such a “sizzling” trailer!), and on swearing which goes unnoticed due to the horn section trying to beat our brains in.

I weep for Bruce Willis, hoping this piece of crap will not be the last time we see him as John McClane. After SUPERMAN IV, Chris Reeve never got the chance to redeem his cape. Will Willis get the chance to redeem his sweaty t-shirt?

END

… and Kevin Smith falls deeply, hopelessly, in love.

Beautiful mind versus beautiful beard.

All hail the *intelligent* screenplay!

GOOD WILL HUNTING pairs “Bahston” boys Matt Damon and Ben Affleck in their first, and arguably most powerful, bromance to date (excepting maybe their turns as marauding angels in Kevin Smith’s DOGMA); written by Damon and Affleck, who deserve every inch of their little gold man (Best Screenplay 1998), a driving story of a disturbed young mathematical genius trying to find his niche in a world that unwittingly ostracizes him for his beautiful mind.

Matt Damon is Will Hunting, a brawling teen by day (with his informal gang Ben Affleck, Casey Affleck and Cole Hauser) and a janitor at a college by night; he is also an autodidactic savant with photographic retention skills and math aptitude to embarrass a rocket scientist. He is “discovered” by physicist Professor Lambeau (Stellan Skarsgård) who tries to nudge him on a respectable path by bailing him out of jail on the provision that Hunting will help the Professor solve perplexing mathematics problems and also see a therapist.

The math problems are a breeze for Hunting. The therapists are a stickier matter, as they all run screaming from his presence as he pinpoints their insecurities before they can pinpoint his – until he meets Sean Maguire (Robin Williams, unshaven like a bearcub), who brings all his DEAD POET’S philosophic skills to bear on the fast-talking, uncooperative scrapper.

something something bearcub

Minnie Driver is Skylar, the Harvard student who falls for Hunting, but whom he ends up pushing away neurotically, in an argument-out-of-nowhere scene that escalates out of nowhere, and is written so well, I’m sure they lifted the argument from a hidden camera in my bedroom.

When Hunting’s neurosis is unlocked by Maguire at the end, the revelation is so simple that we marvel at how easy it is to actually connect with someone, and yet how hard it is to find that connection.

The script benefits from being written by two “unknowns” who load it with verve and vitality, realism and dynamism, while still displaying a sound mechanical knowledge of “Hollywood” screenplay construction. Director and pal Kevin Smith aided Affleck and Damon in securing a deal where they had a large amount of control over their story, and director Gus Van Sant would let it play out unobtrusively and intelligently.

The Professor and Maguire are at odds on how to handle Hunting – push him into society or let him find it at his own pace; what could have become a clichéd pissing contest in a passé Hollywood writer’s hands remains a revelatory argument of ethics between two men who are battling their own regrets and just want the best for their surrogate son. If we thought we’d seen the best of Robin Williams in DEAD POET’S SOCIETY or AWAKENINGS (as opposed to his worst in NINE MONTHS or FATHER’S DAY), he embraces this sober psychiatrist’s role like the bearcub embracing his face; and it took a couple of novices to put words in his mouth that would melt like butter and ring like the bells of Notre Dame. (He would deservedly walk away with a little gold man of his own for Best Supporting Actor.)

The best aspect of the script is that it truly captures the contempt and separation that a virtuoso feels for people who cannot grasp the art or discipline that he finds so awkwardly simple. Hunting describes his aptitude for equations with an insightful analogy: “Beethoven looked at a piano and it just made sense to him; he could just play. I look at a piano, I see a bunch of keys, three pedals and a box of wood – but Beethoven, Mozart, they saw it, they could ‘just play.’ I couldn’t paint you a picture, I probably couldn’t hit the ball out of Fenway, and I can’t play the piano. But when it came to stuff like that [mathematics], I could always ‘just play’.”

Isn’t this the way of humanity, how each of us can perceive different things as complete “phrases”? Whereas I am mortified even changing a car tire, a friend of mine can see how the engine comes apart and is put back together, as a whole phrase, not just a series of unrelated parts. It’s all about seeing the thing as a whole, whether you’re building a skyscraper or dealing derivatives; a sculptor seeing the figure in the clay or a writer seeing the throughline in the screenplay. We concur, Matt Damon! We concur!

something something apples

Hunting’s contempt and isolation is driven home when he screams at the Professor, “Do you know how easy this stuff is for me?” as the Professor tragically tries to explain the difference between himself and Hunting (i.e. one had to break his back to attain his knowledge and position, while one is simply there already intellectually – while maybe five people on Earth can tell the difference between them). Such a sad speech, Professor lamenting that he ever met Hunting, who is throwing it all away – and we see in Hunting’s eyes that the depth of the Professor’s sadness is not even registering, because he could always “just play,” and could not conceive of someone who couldn’t.

Hunting is offered jobs dealing with superstring theory, advanced algorithms, heavy duty CIA stuff, which he isn’t interested in, at one point raging into a tirade that connects all the political corruption in the world to the personal level, “…America is only over there to install a government who would sell them oil at a good price…”

Of course, the “troubled character” has to find his redemption and it is done subtly, with every payoff hitting elegantly: Hunting’s best friend Chuckie (Affleck) laments Hunting is still hauling bricks with him, and hopes for the day he can arrive to pick up Hunting for work and Hunting is not there, “…and you’re just gone, no goodbyes, no nothing”; Maguire tells Hunting of how he met his wife by giving up a classic baseball game, “I told my friends, ‘I’m going to see about a girl’.”

When these moments hit, the performances sell them; they are not forced and create magnificent screen moments for Williams, Affleck and Damon.

We wish Affleck and Damon could once again write something half as good as this masterpiece of cerebral mayhem. Though they’ve parlayed their grand win into continued success through the years, nothing they’ve done individually or together yet matches the raw (dare we call it “indie”) flavor-blast of GOOD WILL HUNTING. Like Costner, Welles and Lucas, they seem to have peaked at the head of their careers. It’s ironic that these two young guys (Affleck and Damon), now renowned for their sex symbol status, shot themselves into the A-List by writing and starring in a dialogue-driven mindfest!

END