A film that takes us somewhere, yet goes nowhere.

Quentin Tarantino once again brazenly rewrites history in his scintillating homage to La La Land of the 1960s, ONCE UPON A TIME IN HOLLYWOOD.

Hollywood 1969. Two tales intertwine – one, a tale of an actor and his stuntman, hustling for work in a business that has moved past their cowboy attitudes and advancing ages; the other, a tale of a rising young starlet going somewhere, while her throughline goes nowhere.

And that’s the small gripe I have with this meticulously made film: a little less homage, a little more story.

Writer-director Tarantino paints two fictional characters from scratch and portrays one real life character; the fictional pair are actor Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his stuntman bro Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt, as leathery and runneled as Tommy Lee Jones), while the historical character is Sharon Tate (Margot Robbie), who is connected to real life acquaintances that would scar history forever – the Manson Family (portrayed as peripheral characters, including a lookalike who could be a young Liam Neeson or, I’m guessing, Charlie Manson).

Tarantino also re-dresses Hollywood the town (either in CGI, practical effects or a combo of both) in the glitter gown it wore in the ‘60s, from the shop facades on Hollywood Boulevard, to the car models from that era, down to the street signs, bus shelters and billboards. And credit where it’s due – that effort in itself is a stunning achievement!

However, Tarantino seems to have lost his throughline in chasing his art. Firstly, only movie-philes would know or care that he has brought 1960’s Hollywood to life so fastidiously; secondly, he spends way too much time with eyes on Sharon Tate. Movie might have benefitted had Tarantino simply followed the two buddies (with their own compelling narratives), because by inserting Tate and rewriting her as a survivor of the “Tate Murders,” her appearance in the film is meaningless to any cinemagoer with no knowledge of her real history (victim to the Manson Family, that murdered five people in Roman Polanski’s Los Angeles home in 1969), and she ultimately becomes nothing but a red herring to those who do know the history. Tate happens to be Rick Dalton’s neighbor, therefore a motivating subplot for actor Dalton, who craves to make contact with Tate’s director husband, Polanski. After the film’s climax (in which Tate is not involved), she appears as a concerned neighbor, in the smallest of comedic payoffs.

That being said, allow me to commend IN HOLLYWOOD for its sudden, savage climax – one of the most satisfying payoffs in cinematic history, with Brad Pitt pulling out his big dick for the type of studied gore-ballet that Tarantino is renowned for. The crafted gutshock blunt blow to our skulls doesn’t get any better. It’s Hero Time.

Most women have to be held back when confronted with The Pitt.

Like the two films that inspired its name (ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST and ONCE UPON A TIME IN AMERICA, both directed by one of Quentin’s heroes – Sergio Leone), ONCE UPON A TIME IN HOLLYWOOD is a tale about a few connected characters set against the backdrop of a kaleidoscopic cultural sprawl. Definitely a passion project for Quentin (who admits 1969 holds a rose-colored grip on his youth), movie is a pastiche wrapped in a homage and doused liberally with roman a clef, packed with Easter eggs, classic rock, in-jokes, and parts for all his brahs.

There’s ice-cool Timothy Olyphant and ice-veined Michael Madsen as cowboys, Kurt Russell as a producer (and narrator), stuntwoman Zoe Bell as his wife; there’s even Bruce’s daughter Rumer Willis and Kevin Smith’s daughter Harley Quinn, as Manson cultists. Leo, of course, did DJANGO, and even Pitt has crossed paths with Tarantino before… remember Floyd the stoner in the Tarantino-penned TRUE ROMANCE? “Don’t conden-send me, man! Fucken kill you, man!…”

Al Pacino is producer Marvin Schwarz, who steers Dalton toward spaghetti westerns out-of-country, to build an overseas cachet and return a hero (a real life gambit that rocketed none other than Clint Eastwood to stardom); Margaret Qualley is Pussycat, a free spirit who tempts Booth to the cult; Bruce Dern is old George Spahn, who allows the Manson Family to camp at his Spahn Movie Ranch (which features in the other prime scene of the movie – Booth visiting the eerily stagnant Ranch and talking his way through the ominous female hippies to visit old George, who may be… dead? prisoner? worse?…)

Martial artist Mike Moh plays Bruce Lee (during his Kato period in THE GREEN HORNET), comparing dick size with Cliff Booth on the set of a movie. Booth ends up getting kicked off the set for beating up Lee. Now that’s just wrong. No matter how funny or artistic license the scene is – no one beats up Bruce Lee!

Rare picture of Bruce Lee at one of his Fight Club meets.

The primo performance in this movie is Leo. His Dalton looks haggard, old, he’s coughing, smoking, clearing his throat, he has a slight stutter (which is beautifully played by DiCaprio, not as a full-blown “b-b-b-but” type of impediment, but an occasional slight hesitation when he is talking to people in uncomfortable situations), his usually pretty eyes are bloodshot with lack of sleep, but also with the knowledge that every hour he rests is one less hour he is spending trying to stay on top of a profession which is leaving him in its wake. Though he’s starred in his share of TV serials, his confidence as a viable leading man is waning, because he cannot get the breaks to transition to the big screen, (like Steve McQueen and other contemporaries).

On the cusp of a new decade, Dalton feels aged and used up, realizing the movie industry is No Country for Old Men. And we are in the fibers of his being and suffering with his soul through his existential crisis. And I personally feel every bladed inch of his anxiety; that character – is ME. And I’m guessing a lot of YOU as well…

His crisis is brought to a head when he meets a precocious little girl on set (an outstanding performance by young Julia Butters, who is reading a book where the hero feels the world has moved on without him. Dalton confesses “I’m more useless every day,” and breaks down in tears in front of her.

Tarantino is transmitting directly into my darkest limbic fluids, that place where hope goes to die, my sunken place…

While Dalton is Acting The Shit out of his angst, Pitt’s Booth – also in the autumn of his career – comes across as still vital and more in touch with his previous power. He seems happy to flit from one odd job to the next, always the faithful second banana to Dalton, his stuntman skills serving him well in street fights, drifting, and taking life on the chin; in essence, DiCaprio has the meatier role, while Pitt has the meat.

“I’m having such a good time doing nothing in this movie.”

The Rolling Stones’ Out Of Time drives us into the third act, and I found myself wondering why I was not gripped around the throat yet, which is the usual modus operandi for Tarantino films at this late stage. Also, besides Dalton and Cobb starting a new life chapter, eyes are back on Tate, and no one will fault me for thinking the Stones song is a harbinger of her doom, “Baby baby baby – you’re out of time…” (hinting that her time is up soon?). Not only that, Russell’s narration describes the people who would be the real life Manson victims moving in next door with Tate – but in this movie, they do NOT meet a tragic end, and are therefore useless to this movie’s plot, yet the narration continues this red herring throughline! Looking back on it, I’m actually getting annoyed. Technicians and actors spent days, weeks on these scenes; editors, lighting, costumes, et al, only to have this thread completely dropped when the Manson Family – led by the real life character “Tex” (Austin Butler) – skulked up Cielo Drive to start the mayhem. And Tarantino cut out all Tim Roth’s scenes for that non sequitur garbage?!

Maybe Tarantino is right, when he says he only has 10 films in him. In this penultimate one, he is finding it hard to clear his own high bar; his own legacy of leaving us breathless for weeks, months, years after viewing his iconoclastic product. Besides the compelling performance from Leo and the mantastic muscle of Pitt, this film wasted more time meandering up and down the Hollywood Hills than idiot tourists searching for the Hollywood sign.

ONCE UPON A TIME IN HOLLYWOOD, “The 9^th Film from Quentin Tarantino,” definitely ends with a bang not a whimper, which flavors our exit libido, however, do we allow Quentin to skate on the body of the film being “merely great,” or do we insist on nothing less than gripping from film start to final frame?

We await Quentin’s 10^th, insisting on, and anticipating, the latter…

END

NUMBER FOUR is number two.

Like a turd falling from the sky and hitting every branch of the Cliché Tree on the way down, I AM NUMBER FOUR dumps on us by way of TWILIGHT and the Uncanny X-Men. And every other superhero/teen/action/alien movie it can possibly steal from.

A couple of sexy aliens are fugitives on Earth from a race of evil aliens called Mogadorians. Yes, before we go one step further, they used that name. Say it out loud and taste the kindergarten toughness: Mogadorians. Really? Was the word “Zambathustian” taken? Or how about “Bombalambian”? (Vonnegut did call his fictional alien civilization Tralfamadorians – but they were meant to be satirical.)

You’d never know these guys were aliens though – they are Alex Pettyfer (blond as a supermodel and twice as bland) and Timothy Olyphant (somehow retaining his characteristic ice cool through this idiotic role). Normal humans in every aspect, except they can fire energy bolts from their hands and say Mogadorians with a straight face.

But let’s get past the utter lack of imagination in once again making intergalactic aliens able to morph into human shape (and then not utilizing that shape-shifting ability when it would actually be worthwhile – like when they’re recognized by Mogador– sorry, I refuse to say that word again, in case I have to run for Congress one day).

In a movie rife with stupidities, here’s the apex stupidity that drives the prosaic plot: the good aliens (the ones who have morphed into blond supermodels) can only be killed in numerical order. Pettyfer, so he tells us, is “Number Four,” and One through Three have been killed in requisite order, so now it’s his turn. Again, I urge you to discard any queries about how aliens have a numbering system that is identical to our Roman/Western European idiom that developed over millennia. Any pondering over this fact will result in running for Congress.

Number Four falls for a blond high school chick with a big nose who is actually blander than he is (Dianna Agron) and before we can question whether convergent evolution has outfitted his intergalactic man parts to fit her trailer trash girlie parts, they are bonding on dates by running from evil aliens together. Big Kevin Durand is the eight-foot tall evil alien commander, whose gilled nose is even uglier than Agron’s. And before we can ask why alien Four would be attracted to an organism who isn’t even on his species line, we realize the story has gotten too stupid for us to care, as big special effects battle other special effects and in the midst of running from aliens on one of their dates, Four and Big-Nose stop at her high school dark room to develop some sweet 35mm pictures. Now before we can ask why this teen in 2011 is still using film rolls in her camera instead of using a digital camera like everyone else on planet Earth, we realize there are some questions best left unasked, in case some idiot answers.

Australian Teresa Palmer is Number Six, one of the New Wave Of Fantastically Gorgeous Blonde Bims, flaunting her bim-bone like a baboon in leather-panted estrus. When Number Four meets her in a blaze of sensual lightning, teleportation dynamism and Thigh Kwon Do, we wonder how he could ever consider going back to the ugly-nosed human chick who isn’t putting out because of primitive Earth customs.

When you aim your movie at teens, I guess you’re hoping that none of them realize every single frame is ripping off someone else’s style, story, substance, character, concept, clothing, hairdo, jawline and telekinetic abilities. D.J. Caruso directs this milky ride into explosive mediocrity, from a series of novels by two witless authors whom it is no surprise use a collective pseudonym – Pittacus Lore (Jobie Hughes and James Frey).

To top off the clichés, they literally ride into the sunset… If there’s anything we learn from I AM NUMBER FOUR, it’s that teen love can cross intergalactic species lines (but I just want to see the startling deformity they call a baby); and that evil aliens are quite anal about killing people in order of ascending integers; and that no matter how much Alex Pettyfer poses, he’ll never be as cool as Timothy Olyphant.

Mogadorian. Really?

END

Same Shit Different Director.

So why is it that films made from Stephen King’s stories turn out, for the most part, to be movies that look as if they’d been chiseled out of Silly Putty by escapees from the Home For the Terminally Inept?
— Harlan Ellison, Oct 1984, “In Which We Scuffle Through The Embers” (Magazine of S&SF).

DREAMCATCHER perfectly embodies Harlan Ellison’s lament: from a novel by King, screenplayed by director Lawrence Kasdan and William Goldman, we palpably feel the tone of King’s words in the tense, superbly-mounted first third of this film, and then seasoned King readers will feel it unravel into formulaic dross due to filmmakers who will never be able to grasp the nuances in King’s tone.

Four best buds take their annual hunting trip into the Maine woods and find that this year, something horrifying is spreading its seed there. Not only that, this year they all seem to be teetering on the edges of midlife crises, visions, suicidal wishes, lovelorn, lost and indecisive. And a “slow” childhood friend named “Dudditz” seems to have summoned them psychically. They employ an old saying that describes their daily grind: “SSDD” (Same Shit Different Day).

The four friends are Beaver (Jason Lee, whose penchant for chewing on toothpicks will be his undoing), Henry (rugged psychotherapist Thomas Jane, who is saved from suicide by a phone call), Jonesy (Damian Lewis, teacher with a library of memories that he guards from evil in the most intriguing way), and Pete (ubercool Timothy Olyphant, whose psychic powers scare off potential panties).

When the four friends are in the woods, the movie is at its peak. When Beaver and Jonesy find a lost stranger wandering the woods with a bloated chest and stomach, burping and farting, they give him shelter – and the horror begins. Meanwhile Henry and Pete find a woman almost frozen in the snow and Pete stays with her while Henry goes for help. Again, bad decision.

The two strangers in the woods are somehow connected to Dudditz. Dudditz as a young man is Donnie Wahlberg, playing slightly retarded – but is he? Or is he from “somewhere else” and only inhabiting this human form?

Cue unravel.

Extraterrestrial aliens have crash-landed and are infecting humans with worm-like things that psychically overtake the brain. The military (led by Morgan Freeman as a crazy general) are planning a deathstrike on the whole area, which would wipe out innocent townships for miles – unless the four friends and Dudditz can stop the aliens infecting the water supply. Okaaay…

The Dreamcatcher is a Native American totem that filters out nightmares; this movie’s title pertains to Dudditz being a “dreamcatcher,” filtering out evil before it gets to Earth.

DREAMCATCHER is very well made, with good effects and some excellent thriller elements in its first half – Beaver holding down the toilet seat while something bashes at it from below trying to escape is especially nail-biting. But like the blind men and the elephant, if we just catch the second half, we can safely dismiss DREAMCATCHER as a formulaic alien invasion movie with penis-shaped aliens and Morgan-shaped madmen.

In King’s books, the most outlandish plot points sound as plausible as your own name – I remember how easily he rationalized John Smith’s common name and psychic ability in The Dead Zone – but on film, the explanations are more forced. So when the extraterrestrial element is introduced, it doesn’t feel organic to the mystery atmosphere pervading the film up to that point. It feels like a shark jump is imminent. Miscast Morgan Freeman as a fanatic general and throw in Tom Sizemore as his wanton liege, both hunting aliens with army tech-ware and straight faces – and The Fonz is on skis behind Richie’s motorboat…

END

Crazy like a pox.

Remake of the 1973 George A. Romero movie of the same name, THE CRAZIES is a simple, shallow, well-made thriller. A virus drives the people of a bucolic Midwestern town crazy and they start killing people. I don’t mean to nitpick, but killing is kinda natural for a species that kills to eat, to mate, to survive. You know what would really be crazy? A virus that made you paint your house.

I can’t compare the two versions, not having seen the Romero film, though in reading about it, we can discern how Romero’s ham-fisted, no-budget execution subsumed his sociological commentary. The Romero version shows the military as becoming a bigger problem than the virus problem they were sent to solve; as reviewer Michael Atkinson puts it: “The Ashcroftian governmental cure out-terrorizes the disease.” Yet that version is hobbled by its usual Romero non-acting. Again, I cannot speak with authority, so check it if you have two hours of life to throw away.

Me? One THE CRAZIES is more than enough derangement.

This 2010 version has the same military plane going down, releasing its cargo of deadly bio-weapon virus, but after the fervor that has grown up around America’s deadliest, most useless arm of government, the military who arrive to clean up their mess here do not exacerbate the problem but are merely callous authorities that Our Heroes must escape. Bedecked in ominous gasmasks and hazmat suits to terrorize civilians just right.

Timothy Olyphant is David, the Sheriff of this town where, like CHEERS, everybody knows your name; the man he must shoot in the film’s first minutes (for going, uh, crazy), he addresses by his first name. His doctor wife is Judy (Radha Mitchell), Danielle Panabaker is Judy’s intern, and Joe Anderson is Russell the deputy, a likeable, dependable redneck (how many times can anyone say that?). These four are unaffected by the virus and escape the town and the military who are trying to kill or quarantine them.

Olyphant seems like he’d be a cool guy to hang with. Even in ROCK STAR, he out-smoothed Marky Mark. (Call me, Tim: few beers, shoot some pool, bird-doggin’ chicks. Boys’ night.) One month after this role as a jeans-wearing small town sheriff quick on the draw, his TV series JUSTIFIED would premiere, where he plays a jeans-wearing small town sheriff quick on the draw. Born to do it. That guy’s so cool…

The film’s one touching moment is when Russell realizes he is affected by the virus. Instead of being left to die in the wilderness, or killed immediately, he asks David and Judy, “Can I walk with you guys awhile?” That’s so sad. His performance at that moment captures that human need for others of our kind, the universal truth of fearing to die alone. For a species grown so inured to killing, that vestigial aspect of our nature is our great irony.

THE CRAZIES is the usual romp of jump-scares and gross-out killings and people with makeup that looks like a KFC factory exploded on their faces senselessly trying to kill other people (kinda like zombies; thanks, Romero – what an “original” idea!) and everyone saying “fuck” whenever they want, garnering an R-rating. Now remember kids, excessive gore alone can still warrant a PG-rating. THE CRAZIES is rated R because of its swearing. In other words, the gory mashings of skulls or the pitchfork through the torsos, or the knife through the sheriff’s hand which he succeeds in slamming through the throat of his assailant while it is still through his hand, do not by themselves garner an R-rating; it’s because the filmmakers chose to retain their frequent use of a word which is a euphemism for the act of procreation.

Who’s crazy now?

END

Sunny, with a chance of homicide.

Remember when it was cool for a movie to have a twist? Even a bad twist was a Good Thing. Then M. Night Shyamalan came along and gave us The Greatest Twist Of All in THE SIXTH SENSE… and screwed it up for everyone. “Twist” has become a bad word over the last decade, and people only discuss “twists” of movies to weed out the less sophisticated who never saw it coming, disparaging them as if they have no sense of story structure like THEY do. I don’t know how this elite poo-poohing of twists has come about. All I know is – I still get that boyhood thrill when a filmmaker can put it over on me for a length of time – and then, after revealing the Big T, still pour on the storytelling to the end.

Writer-director David Twohy gives us some fine twists in PERFECT GETAWAY, a tension-soaked thriller that ratchets suspense not unlike a junior Hitchcock or Tarantino. (Twohy is probably better known for those Riddick movies (PITCH BLACK, 2000, and CHRONICLES, 2004) which took themselves a tad seriously, but his 1996 THE ARRIVAL was more along this movie’s lines – a suspenseful, surprise-filled actioner with Charlie Sheen discovering extraterrestrial aliens infiltrating human society.)

Cliff and Cydney (Steve Zahn and Milla Jovovich) are a dorky, good-looking couple honeymooning in Hawaii, who hear of a murderer couple who have just escaped capture on the island of Oahu, where they just came from. They meet and tag along with dynamite-sexy adventurer couple Nick and Gina (Timothy Olyphant and Kiele Sanchez). Skulking on the periphery is ripped hippie couple Kale and Cleo (Chris Hemsworth and Marley Shelton).

Through dialogue and misdirection, Twohy strings us along jungle trails, in a well-constructed, simple but effective story, where every couple fake-smiles and secretly suspects each other couple to be the Oahu killers trying to blend in to escape notice, with all of them giving each other good reason to suspect.

It doesn’t hurt the production that there are sexy chicks in bikinis at every eye-candy turn.

Timothy Olyphant has The Cool Role, as some kind of covert ex-special forces operative, a self-proclaimed “American Jedi,” whose outlandish anecdotes seem like pandering to Cliff’s screenwriting proclivities.

Twohy throws in a few minor characters that all sport that suspicious glare to throw us either on or off the track. And some fine split-screening and extroverted gore keeps the action tight.

Can’t say any more for fear of ruining the tale – come on, you don’t REALLY want to sacrifice pant-tearing enjoyment for stink-nose sophistication, do you?

END

Nothing Stops the Loss.

“FUCK THE PRESIDENT!”

I didn’t say it. Ryan Phillippe did. In its stunning 37th minute, STOP-LOSS gets raw as Staff Sergeant Brandon King (Phillippe) protests being “stop-lossed” – involuntarily deployed again after his voluntary service to the U.S. military has ended.

Stop-loss me once, shame on you
Stop-loss me twice, shame on me.

The Stop-Loss program is exactly what it sounds like: a fine print clause in military contracts to stop the loss of American troops from active service – by forcing them back onto the death fields at the behest of the Murderer in Chief. No courts dare oppose this presidential order, so soldiers hoping to contest “stop-loss” are dead in the water. Or dead on land. Doesn’t matter – as long as you’re dead by the time they’re finished with you.

The irony is, all the American Military cares about is stopping the loss of its ranks, not about stopping the loss of family members from their families, or about stopping the loss of life on either side, or stopping the belligerence, or stopping the insensible foreign relations, or the loss of American credibility worldwide, or stopping the Middle East slide further into terrorism… Nothing stops the “loss” from someone’s perspective. Therefore “Stop-Loss” – another dumb Amerikan Military Euphemism.

Director Kimberley Pierce does the first ten minutes of STOP-LOSS like an MTV video; almost feels like a flag-waving call to arms, colorful soldiers on colorful battlefields, everything blowing up sexy, edited like a Maroon 5 video. Then Brandon and his unit (Chippendale dancer, Channing Tatum and Heath Ledger doppelganger, Joseph Gordon-Levitt) return home to a redneck Texas reception as heroes, and a Senator (Josef Sommer) making empty promises to pull strings for Brandon should he ever “need anything.” When Brandon actually seeks the Senator’s help, the Senator does nothing but remind us what an unprincipled, unethical, mindless talking head pol he is.

In flashback, we see Brandon’s unit in Iraq checking cars for – what? Apparently, strategists and generals and the president-moron-cowboy himself believe that checking traffic and terrorizing civilians somehow curbs terrorism in the fake War on Terror in the Middle East.

I constantly shout at the screen, What are you DOING? Why are these troops at checkpoints? Are terrorists gonna have a BADGE or something, stating their intent? Get OUT of that country, you maroon-necks!

When a group of “terrorists” do a drive-by on Brandon’s unit, Standard Operating Procedure is to follow the hot car and take it out. So Brandon’s unit tails the car to a civilian abode, beat down the door, terrorizing the bewildered people in their kitchens and living rooms with full armor, guns drawn, full shout, itchy triggers… no one here… oops! wrong house… leave without any apologies, recompense, or remorse. Now imagine…

…Imagine there were Iraqi military checkpoints every few miles in these United States, your car strip-checked, you and your passengers/ wife/ children submitted to humiliating body-searches; imagine the travel time to your job, school, the store, a dinner date or business meeting; imagine an Iraqi battalion beating down your door on a lazy Sunday afternoon (because they believe they have a right to) and searching your house for weapons you don’t have and terrorists you are not harboring, with their weapons drawn, no permission, no apologies, no reasoning; imagine them shooting one of your family callously and leaving with no repercussions. They say they’re searching for American terrorists – but the “American terrorists” are only terrorizing the Iraqi occupation forces because the Iraqis are in their country beating down American doors.

How many houses would Iraqis have to destroy and how many American twelve-year-olds would they have to grope before you yourself loaded up a car with ammo and did a drive-by at an Iraqi checkpoint? Answer: not fucking many. Will George W. Bush ever get it?

Back home, after telling his commanding officer (Timothy Olyphant) what should be done to the president (see above), Brandon steals a jeep, goes AWOL, and spends the movie wondering how to stay out of a) military service, b) jail, c) Mexico. Fake choice, as all three will get him killed or give him mad diarrhea.

Though he enlisted for patriotic reasons (“I signed up thinkin’ I was gonna go over there, protect my country, my family; payback for 9/11 – but you get there, you realize it wasn’t even about any of that!”), his reason for leaving is just as patriotic – he wants to live in the free America he fought to defend. But he finds “this war is never gonna be behind me” and ends up headed for Iraq again with his unit, all misdemeanors forgiven, as long as the military is able to put him back on track to an early grave.

Phillipe’s performance in FLAGS OF OUR FATHERS was good – here, it is exceptional; true grit as a man and actor, and a Bible Belt accent that would get him into a knife fight in any tittie bar in the slave states. In perfunctory, gore-filled flashbacks, we see he is battling the demons of accidentally shooting a child. Even so, he is the most psychologically stable of his unit.

Post Traumatic Stress Disorder manifests in his fellow soldiers: Tatum beating his wife, Gordon-Levitt hitting the bottle.

Now… I have a theory:

This society blames PTSD for any sign of maladjustment in returning soldiers. But anyone who signs up for war is already maladjusted to begin with! “Returning from war” gives them license to act like the maladjusted pricks they already are, via the magical excuse of PTSD.

Not everyone returns from war maladjusted. That’s our clue that PTSD is not always the reason why Bubba is bonkers. It is used like alcoholism: a fake “disease” that serves as catch-all EXCUSE. The tragedy is, the soldiers who are well-adjusted – who see they’ve made a mistake about the “honor” of the military and want out – are ostracized, destroyed, disciplined for their GOOD SENSE in realizing it is a fool’s vocation.

Tatum has “Death Before Dishonor” tattooed across his back. Is it because I’m not an indoctrinated army grunt that I just can’t figure exactly where that honor thingy kicks in? Is it when he’s sleeping naked with his loaded gun in a ditch he just dug while blind drunk, after smashing his home and beating his wife? Explain the honor part?… I’ll wait.

And exactly how is the American Military honorable in criminalizing leaving the service after your duty is done? Where is the honor in the government itself not honoring its military contract? The stop-loss program can only be enacted in times of war and since the president himself declared the war over (even though it was never legally declared a war in the first place – double whammy!) the military should not be able to stop-loss anyone. This never stopped the gutless cur 43rd president (who ran from his own duty to the country) and the chickenheart vice president (who deferred from service five times) re-sending other men’s children off to die for them.

I’m still waiting for that explanation of honor…

A Mexican soldier makes gravy from his prospective bloodbath: “I might go back because if I got killed, my family would get green cards.” Ridiculous rationalizations spawned from desperation and hopelessness.

Brandon furtively makes contact with an underground group of AWOL stop-lossed ex-military, but their existence is too shadowy and insubstantial for him. At first, his decision to return to his unit felt like a cop-out, but we realize the poor guy had nowhere to run. The military would squeeze him until he died one way or another.

At a funeral for a suicide friend, Tatum presents a flag to the grieving widow, voice breaking, holding back tears, hollow words of sympathy from an uncaring government, “This flag is presented on behalf of a grateful nation and the United States army as a token of appreciation for your loved one’s honorable and faithful service.”

“My loved one dies in this unnecessary war prosecuted on the basis of a lie and all I get is this crummy flag?!”

FUCK THE PRESIDENT!

END

In Bruce We Trust.

Never trust a computer you can’t throw out your window.
– Steve “Woz” Wozniak.

This mess is not his fault; he’d rather be home with a cold one; he’s no superman, just an average guy who must act like a super man – and I think he’s wearing the same sweaty shirt from DIE HARD (1988).

The Sweaty Smart-Aleck T-Shirt Brigade

Justin Long asks Bruce Willis (playing Detective John McClane as flippantly and dynamically as only he knows how): “What makes you That Guy?” That lovable lump, that forthright avenger, that pissed off everyman…Arnold’s pressing flesh instead of pounding it, Sly just gave his last gasp as ROCKY BALBOA, Clint Eastwood is defiantly aging gracefully, though – sadly for us – on the other side of the camera; Van Damme and Seagal? As gone as the 1990s… Is Bruce Willis the Last Action Hero?

LIVE FREE OR DIE HARD gives us every reason to believe it; a ramped, incendiary, chest-beater of a thriller and surely the best Boy’s Movie of the summer; distinguishing itself from the rash of CGI-fueled actioners by performing most of its stunts in Dangerous Real Life.

Which is ironic, considering LIVE FREE revolves around computers, pitting veteran detective McClane against a hacker, Gabriel (Timothy Olyphant) who has commandeered the nation’s networks, bringing the country to a standstill in what hackers call a “Fire Sale” (Everything Must Go) as he helter skelters the stock market, transport and energy systems, his ultimate goal, securing the accumulated virtual wealth of America. An ex-government agent, Gabriel designed the very security systems he is now breaking down. (It is quite sobering to be shown how integral the Big Bad Computer has become to our society.)

A low-tech hero in a high tech world, Luddite McClane must rely on the geek stylings of unwitting virus tester, Matt Farrell (rising star, Justin Long – is it serendipity he is the Mac Guy?) to walk him through the virtual anarchy, whilst he in turn shepherds Farrell through the bone-crunching kind, shadowed by hitmen with big automatic weapons who can’t aim.

It’d be good to be Unbreakable right about now. As the frenetic camera of director Len Wiseman (the UNDERWORLD movies) never stops creatively moving, and as we wonder how many rounds professional hitmen can expend without actually killing anyone, McClane is pummeled by all comers, not least a taut leathered Asian chick (Maggie Q) whom he doesn’t ruthlessly shoot down like the rest of the bad guys because she’s a taut leathered Asian chick. Exerting that movie double standard (which only reflects societal double standard): she can kick him as much as she wants, but he’s not allowed to dispatch her like a guy – she’s got to die “passively” (falling to her death in an elevator shaft) so it doesn’t seem “unfair.”

At least he’s got a smartarse comment to salve the pc pain.

Kevin Smith (yes, writer, director and Silent Bob) is Warlock, STAR WARS geek and computer nerd, just one action figure short of being totally convincing.

Mary Elizabeth Winstead is McClane’s daughter, Lucy (who actually looks like an older version of the little girl who played his daughter in DIE HARD), with the best naturally rounded ta-tas I’ve seen in awhile (at least, her bra makes them so). Gabriel kidnaps her to raise the dramatic stakes and give McClane more smart-aleck jabs to throw.

Besides the obvious weathered and witty character Willis is reprising, LIVE FREE gets its kicks paralleling DIE HARD in innumerable winks to the audience: FBI Agent Johnson; the fact that McClane is in constant communication with the villain yet cannot get to him; being in communication with the authorities (Cliff Curtis, FBI chief, but to me, forever Uncle Bully from ONCE WERE WARRIORS) yet powerless to aid them or them, him; the shoulder shot – somehow he always gets it in the right shoulder, seemingly exacerbating that real life scar he already sports there; once again he is attacked by air support and screams to the pilot, “I’m on your side, assholes!” (in an insane sequence battling an F36 Harrier jet which is not the least bit plausible); in a broken and bedraggled state, he greets his daughter the same way he greeted his wife in DIE HARD, as if it’s all in a day’s work, “Hi honey”; and – like his estranged bitch wife before her – his daughter is tough little “Mz. Gennero” until McClane’s man-sized rescue levels her fem-lib posturing and she reverts back to Daughter McClane. But Beethoven’s Ninth – though used in trailers – was sorely missed.

Probably the most obvious callback to DIE HARD is that which reminds us that this movie isn’t in the spirit of DIE HARD – the catchphrase “Yippie ki yay, motherfucker!” As you’ve seen on the sides of buses (in the most annoying advertising campaign since “Jack FM–We play what we want”), the “motherfucker” is shortened to “mo” as if the billboard has run out of space or been cut off. If this was just the advertising, we could shrug it off as a smart way to convey the street without being explicit, but the movie itself is rated PG-13, in that painfully obvious “summer audience” grab, sanitizing the film to grade school speak. Upon re-watching the R-rated DIE HARD series the characters come so much more alive when allowed to speak like hard men under pressure; infinitely more believable as ruthless combatants involved in death struggles. LIVE FREE OR DIE HARD is stunt piled on stunt so we don’t notice the lack of street dialog.

So when Olyphant is criticized for lacking gravitas as the villain, it may just be because his mouth is soap-washed for family viewing, not because of his metrosexual youth (anyone over 30 would have been too old to be a hacker anyway). Going for Bond, smooth criminal élan was probably a wrong turn – maybe he should have tried for Johnny Lee Miller in HACKERS: bottle-blond leatherboy.

The actual “Yippee ki yay mo” moment is as truncated as its bus billboard. But the circumstance itself is an action gem. Screenwriter Mark Bomback and co-story David Marconi arrive at a situation where McClane’s wounds play an integral creative part in the demise of the villain who caused those wounds. It’s an amazing little conundrum – with a nifty solution by McClane.

Set in Washington D.C. during a July 4 weekend (so there is no need to excuse the American flags aflutter everywhere), the title could be construed as a grim reminder to real life Americans who flutter that flag unthinkingly – LIVE FREE… For is it also serendipity that Olyphant’s villain seizes criminal control of the virtual world at a time in America’s dark present when the Bush administration is trying to do just that by tapping the internet without warrants?

No denying it, we love Bruce Willis as John McClane. After his intense turns as deeper characters in HOSTAGE (2005), SIN CITY (2005), 16 BLOCKS (2006), he’s back at his shallow best. Taking cover behind corners, pointing a gun, or limping in pissed off pain, he looks like himself again. At a slammin’ 52, Willis still reeks of Hero; still ranks as someone who gives bruises as good as he takes ‘em; still rocks when he’s in the wrong place at the wrong time.

That’s what makes him That Guy.

END

Trying to out-act a cardboard cutout.

Mock Star.

In ROCK STAR, Chris Cole (played sufficiently blandly by Mark Wahlberg) is a big loser with bigger hair and an even bigger voice. Through a freak turn of events he is hired by an international metal band (Steel Dragon, led by a big-haired Dominic West) and attains his dream of rock superstardom. Finding he is too vagina-whipped – and what a vagina! Jennifer Aniston’s! – for that level of adulation and its attendant financial, sexual and psychological abandon, he abjures that well-salaried and well-knob-polished position only to purvey his feeble artistry at the lowest possible echelon of the music business – the toilet pub level. For no pay.

Er – Wha?

From stadiums to Starbucks. Every musician in the world knows what is wrong with this Hindenburg Disaster of a plot arc. But when it comes to music, rock bands in particular, observers and listeners and drunken rednecks in pubs who ululate “Freebird!” at regular intervals selectively forget that we live in a world that revolves not because of orbital angular momentum – but because of capitalism. Though it is true that one can easily find a wannabe rock-n-roller in any given pub in any major city in the world who is plying his art for free, his goal is invariably to earn wodges of cash in the foreseeably-planned or far-fantasized future.

Iggy Poff

ROCK STAR’s denouement decimated everything it had painstakingly purveyed as Chris’s goal – fame and fortune. We are told to “work hard enough, want it bad enough and to follow our dreams” – yet when Chris attains his sought-after dream, he gives it up! It is implied that The Dream is a lie; that it holds no substance. He renounces everything for the sake of two things: his chick (any man who would place his chick before music is not a musician in the first place – nor is he a man), and because his band disallowed him creative input on their songs – oh, cry me a river, Tchaikovsky! Not only would this songwriting condition have been spelled out in his contract, even if he was too monkey to apprehend the copyrighting and royalty situation, his enviable position in the band – as prominent lead vocalist – would have lent itself to riding on the legacy of Steel Dragon to forge a solo career parallel to theirs. But no logic could save this movie once we saw the predictable character arc aiming towards the intersection of Hollywood and Whine.

After coercing us into rooting for the struggling Chris, the movie does an about-face and has Chris gutlessly back away from his own ambition – purely for the sake of “dramatic” impact. But who would this spineless ending appeal to?

Dumb chicks.

ROCK STAR’s demographic of wannabe rockstars and starving musicians would have welcomed a story where the struggling kid becomes an international rocker – and stays an international rocker. I was heartily enjoying this portrayal of my past life of debauchery and devil-may-care enterprise (the inclusion of real-life rockers, Zakk Wylde and Jason Bonham as Steel Dragon members, and source music culled directly from my archived record collection only enhancing the nostalgia) – until the denouement insulted every musician who ever bashed his brains against the unyielding wall of the deaf music industry, and made the hero a puerile girly-man whose supposedly giant “dreams” were ultimately low-brow, middle-class, blue-collar mediocrity. And any real musician will tell you that a dork who gives up an international music career for a chick deserves every non-paying toilet gig he gets.

The last scene finds Chris puling his alternative angst to coffee house yuppies and the untalented, introspective “singer-songwriter” coterie. Next stop: Nursing Homes and Poetry Slams. If this is indeed Chris’s dream coalescing, it is more correctly a NIGHTMARE. I know. I’ve lived it. It is implied this dead-end gig is part of an epiphany or righteous road, whereby he now “creates art” on his own terms, when it is merely to whine his way back into his girlfriend’s panties.

One of the feature songs is Steel Dragon’s Stand Up And Shout, which the movie metaphorically achieves in spades during its first act. Soon enough, it devolves to Bowie’s livid shout of outrage: ”This ain’t rock and roll, this is – genocide!”

The writer of ROCK STAR, John Stockwell, was an actor in EDDIE & THE CRUISERS, which was an abject lesson on how NOT to write a rock and roll movie – and Stockwell seems to have learned that lesson well, showing us how good he is at NOT writing one.

Director Stephen Herek (who crafted a reasonable music-based movie with MR. HOLLAND’S OPUS, 1995), seems to capture the essence of 80’s Bighair Metal in all its garish androgyny. The song stylings are there, as are the leather pants, low-slung guitars, bovine attitudes and Big-Haired-and-Breasted bims. The parking lot argument over which tribute band is better of the two is a slice of history more hilarious, asinine and ridiculously true than any fiction could conceive. There is also a searing scene involving Aniston wearing a tantalizingly see-through dress, squirming the dance floor, while Nugent’s Stranglehold sensuously sweeps the soundtrack. All these things about ROCK STAR are commendable.

We soon realize – well, at least musicians soon realize – that the movie is merely the media portrayal of the 80s Metal Scene. Sure, this Scene existed, but underneath the glam-hamming and strumpet-humping, there was a struggling, starving reality, which ROCK STAR tried desperately to pin down. And failed.

Much was touted about this story mirroring that of real-life vocalist Tim “Ripper” Owens and his rise to prominence with metal gods Judas Priest, but though the story quantizes the basic events surrounding Ripper’s situation (singer of a Tribute Band ends up playing in the Real Thing), it captures none of the streetwise intelligence or truthful motivation of someone in Ripper’s position.

Instead, it gives us Marky Mark.

the high life of the lowlifes

“Is it hot in here – or is it just these pants?”

Achieving a goal of living a shallow, yet sinfully entertaining existence doesn’t necessarily mean that your life is meaningless or unfulfilled. Your goal may very well have been to achieve a shallow, yet sinfully entertaining existence, with all your finances, food and fun taken care of by people whom you pay to manage those aspects. Who ever said that Life has to be stoic and boring and routine to be Meaningful?

Who even made the rule that “art” has to be created on your own terms to be fulfilling? We seem to forget that all the art of the Renaissance was commissioned by the church or state or royalty; if those shiftless artistes were allowed to create art on their own terms, we would never have had the Sistine Chapel, The Last Supper, The Ninth Symphony or St. Paul’s Cathedral.

People really do believe artists do not exist on the same capitalistic plane as the rest of the world. And here we hit the teeth-grinding fallacy of the public’s ignorance pertaining to rock and roll bands.

Must have been so easy to sell ROCK STAR as a feasible story, not only because the chick demographic would fall for the idiotic ending (where his girl returns to him for being so loyal to give up his dream for her puss), but also because – it’s not a “real” job, right? You just get up there and wangle your dangle and get paid and laid, right?

And when you fly to the Moon, you just sit there and they press a button and you fly upwards, right?

Over twenty years of performing has made me realize that non-musicians have no idea how musicians come to be onstage before their eyes, or how we fit into the fiscal scheme of things; they think we put this together just last night and arrived here two minutes before downbeat. (Like they believe radio personalities arrive at the studio one minute before airtime; or all it takes to be an actor is to memorize your lines.) What you see onstage is the culmination of years of studious learning, finger-bleeding practice, ear-numbing rehearsal, frustrating hustling, prodigal promoting, inspired recording, sleepless nights, jet-lagged days, thankless personnel coordination, futile sacrifice, abject poverty, deranged ambition, iron will, starving, stealing, creating controlled chaos and burning bridges; getting had, getting took, I tell you folks, it’s harder than it looks…

What we do, we do for arena love and blood money – we earned our bones long before you ever heard Freebird for the first time. This is a Real Job that no one gives us any credit for, because of pasty-faced karaoke dweebs who think they can sing, art-choking MTV who thinks it promotes music, AMERICAN IDOL douchebags who think they have talent, countless films portraying bands as mental deficients or portraying a ludicrous hyper-reality (like this film), and every joker who thinks he can play rock guitar after stumbling erroneously through Smoke On The Water using barre chords –

And you have the audacity to be outraged because I won’t play your insipid redneck request?

I got your Freebird right here, mongo!

the business of rock and roll

Jennifer Aniston in a see-through mesh dress? Okay, I’m done.

We know Chris is a Loser from the outset because his girlfriend is his manager. (Only musicians will understand that gag.) We are given many other indications that Chris is not real rock star material, first from his brother, who points out, “You don’t have any fantasies of your own – you fantasize about being someone else” (that being, Bobby Beers, vocalist of Steel Dragon, played by Jason Flemyng). Chris’s bandmate (Timothy Olyphant) also alerts Chris to the fact that, “You don’t know where Chris Cole ends and Bobby Beers begins.” The screenwriter seemed to be including these elements to illustrate how “dedicated” Chris is, but it only kept pounding home the fact that he was clueless. He is content to live off someone else’s laurels and had no interest in promoting original music. Later, when the songwriting bug bites him, he does another stupid thing and walks out on the biggest band on Earth…

When Chris initially walks out on his garage band, girlfriend Emily (Jennifer Aniston), states, “All the talent in the room walked out that door – the first rule in this business is to go where the talent is.” Uh, no. It’s a lot more complicated than that, honey…

It’s not about talent. Or looks. Or networking. Or even songwriting. All those aspects are part of a bigger picture that requires your willingness to morph to whatever the people who are advancing your salary tell you to morph into, to appeal to a pointed market and recoup your advance, staying economically viable by making a profit. For them.

After your initial success, if any, no matter how much “talent” you display with your bedroom songs and kitchen voice, you will be left with only your force of will to continue in the music business, or to succumb to its decadences or obstacles, and die a funky death.

Your employer will abandon you at the first sign of flagging sales or a better Business Model (read as someone even more willing than you to Do What He Say), and each successive deal, each contract you sign, each company you work, each funder and producer and agent will take slices of your integrity and humanity and leave you a husk of a prostitute. But by then, you won’t care. In LAST ACTION HERO, Arnold tells us he “won’t die till the grosses go down.” And when they do… your Q plummets, the scripts stop arriving, and everyone stops calling you “Mel baby.” Either you forge ahead with your force of will or you find a comfortable corner to die. Most people in the entertainment business are not so much afraid of dying alone, as dying unknown.

And we can’t even count the number of unnecessary blowjobs given in the name of the “who you know” fallacy. It’s not who you know, but HOW you know them. You can “know” scores of high-echelon stars, but if they are merely passing acquaintances, employers, fellow musicians, that gets you exactly nowhere. But know one high-level “executive” responsible for signing or development of acts at a major label; know him as a drinking buddy; know his sexual war stories, as he knows yours; know him so well that you can reach over his arm and scam a slice of his pizza with the familiarity of a room-mate – and your ticket to stardom is sealed. It’s about personal trust. No talent required.

The first rule in music is really: No One Cares About Your Music – Except YOU.

So keep your demos away from me. And stay away from my pizza.

dying young, living old.

“If you work hard enough, and want it bad enough, dreams do come true, so follow your dreams man, cos we all die young…” I don’t think even the cliché-churning screenwriter comprehends exactly how portentous those words are.

“I’ve lost my eyeliner, someone cut my hair like a lesbian, and my sweater smells like a dog fart… uh, this next song is dedicated to Eddie Vedder…”

If you do not “make it” – become a financial success as a “rock star” – at an early age, your chances of becoming a success dwindle at an exponential rate as your age increases. That is, your marketability as a star – a product, a brand, an icon – is tied to your formative years. In the entertainment world, we all “die young”; spent by the time we are 30. But, you argue, the Eagles are still around, as are KISS and the Stones and McCartney – yet all those denizens of the upper reaches of the superstar stratosphere “made it” WHEN THEY WERE YOUNG. Only by doing so could they have guaranteed their current longevity. Pink Floyd and Madonna and Aerosmith all found themselves entrenched in the industry while still under 30.

The movie gives Chris many aspects of his stellar fame to be dissatisfied with – all of which are superficial. When you are solidifying your financial future and that of your potential family’s for generations hence, what piddling nuisance is it for a girlfriend to whine that you’ve “lost your way”? What triviality that your band does not allow you to write songs for the band? You are on a salary per night that the working class makes per quarter – what juvenile gripe that you feel unfulfilled? Is a 4 a.m. garbage route any more fulfilling? Try it. You might like it.

At one point, manager Timothy Spall tells Marky about a dead-end marriage he was in, and how he just walked away from it when he felt trapped. Marky uses this analogy to simply walk away from the band onstage one night in the middle of a gig, and let a kid from the audience take over (coincidentally enough – it’s Myles Kennedy (Alter Bridge, Slash), an awesome actual hard rock vocalist!). Contracts, lawyers, rehearsals, insurance, waivers, logistics of stage show and explosives and moving platforms be damned!

Emily decides she wants to own a place where hippie assholes converge to talk Sartre and pretend sophistication and industry clout – in other words, a coffee shop. The movie implies – insidiously, via Emily’s disparagement of Chris’s tour schedule – that stabilizing your base of operations is the path to successful business. But the rock band’s base of operations – the Record Company – is stabilized; the band is only that cog of the Stable Machine that must necessarily move to progress business. Emily whines that she “wants a life.” And being on tour is not A Life? The tragedy is that Emily – through the ignorant, traitorous screenwriter – speaks for everyone who arrogantly and condescendingly believes that being on the road in a band is “not a real job.”

All we ever hear in life is that we should aspire to never being tied behind a desk – when Chris achieves this, Emily decides to Stand Up And Pout and leaves him. Her last straw is when Chris cannot remember what city he is in and forgets their date due to sleep-deprivation coupled with insensate philandering. (So what? On the road, band members rarely know which city they’re in, even when they are completely cognizant – performing the gig and promoting the product is the paramount reason for their existence at that juncture. Since they are cattled at the road manager’s behest onto a stage which is constructed to look exactly the same every night, all they have to do is go through their well-rehearsed motions to earn their pay.) Emily sees this as an ongoing problem which will only escalate – but if she won’t stand by him during the good times – and make no mistake, these are the good times (with chicks and guns and firetrucks and hookers and drugs and booze – all the things that make life worth livin’ for) – why would Chris ever consider her a candidate for standing by him during the bad?

The obvious paradox is: by movie’s end, when Chris has re-started below the bottom of the barrel, just what is he aiming to achieve?

Maybe in five years, his feeble, freebie “project” might graduate to pub band level, playing Sweet Home Alabama and Brown-Eyed Girl to a gaggle of drunk ingrates and Skynyrd junkies, pulling down a whole $35 per man for five hours onstage, shelling out expenses for flyers and petrol and food and rehearsals and equipment, and eventually getting fired for not bringing enough heads in the door; making sycophantic calls to venue managers who assuage their small-knobbed insecurities by playing power games of hiring and firing; entering every futile Battle Of The Bands comp, never realizing it’s still about bringing heads in the door and not about their “soul-searching” music; trying to secure an “audition” gig in a Pasadena restaurant and fantasizing that one day they’ll be –

Rock Stars – ? – !

END