Random DVD Round-Up 3 - THE EXPENDABLES

As a massive fan of eighties action flicks - everything from Arnie classics like RED HEAT and PREDATOR - to all those Sly Stallone ROCKY flicks - I was massively looking forward to Sly Stallone's nostalgia-fest, THE EXPENDABLES. Any movie features Sly, Dolph, Arnie, Mickey Rourke et al was going to be okay with me. It was a bit disappointing they couldn't get Jean-Claude van Damme too but hey, it was a dream cast-list of muscle-bound meat-heads plus their younger heir apparent, Jason Statham. The plot also sounded reassuring hackneyed - a bunch of mercenaries are hired by the CIA to go depose a Latin American dictator. Simple as. Knife fights, gun fights, fist fights, blowing shit up, liberating locals and presumably returning home to some grateful hot totty.

What did we get? Half an hour of sheer nostalgia and gratitude on the part of this viewer. Every time I saw another aged crony on the screen I felt warm and fuzzy. But after the initial thrill had passed, I was just plain bored. Because THE EXPENDABLES is basically a very very mediocre film. Sure, all the explosions and stunts are there, but there are no stakes. The dialogue is crappy and I really didn't care about any of it. What writer-director Sly Stallone failed to realise was that in those 1980s classics, sure there was ridonkulousness, but there was also heart. We cared about Rocky and Adrian. Rambo was actually a pretty deep film about psychological scarring and alienation. Movies like TERMINATOR and RUNNING MAN had proper political and sci-fi credentials. And even when the movies were purely stupid - PREDATOR springs to mind - they had the good sense to amp everything up to R-rated craziness. And while THE EXPENDABLES had some of the violence, and I say this with all respect to the feminist cause, where were the boobs?

Sad, but true, THE EXPENDABLES was just to bland and safe and polished.

THE EXPENDABLES opened in August/September 2010 and is now available to rent and buy.

Bina007's Danny Dyer Memorial List of the Ten Most Piss-Poor Flicks of 2008

Just in case you'd thought I'd gone soft, we return to bitter invective with this year's Trashcan of Shame. To find each nugget of Cinema Redemption your humble servant must crawl through a veritable sewer of lazy, formulaic, badly produced, stinky bilge. Here are the worst of the many offenders, conforming to the usual mix of shameless cash-in genre flicks; politically offensive exploitation flicks and auteurs gone awry.

THE SHAMELESS CASH-INS GENRE FLICKS.

1. P.S. I LOVE YOU. Hilary Swank attempts comedy. The film-makers mistakenly believe you can make a feel-good comedy out of bereavement. Mawkish. Unfunny. And what accent is Gerard Butler going for exactly?

2. MADE OF HONOR. Another offensively lazy, formulaic and charmless romantic comedy - all the more impressive for killing Michelle Monaghan and Patrick Dempsey's natural charm.

3=. 88 MINUTES and RIGHTEOUS KILL. Lo-rent "thrillers" in which Pacino and de Niro live off viewer nostalgia and clip their pension coupons. You know it's gone Pete Tong when Fiddy is far from the worst actor on screen.

HUMOURLESS EXPLOITATION FLICKS.

5. NEVER BACK DOWN. Like Karate Kid without the naive charm, NEVER BACK DOWN was basically misogynistic macho bullshit attracting the same sort of voyeurs who get kicks from happy slapping.

6. WANTED. Again with the misogynistic, macho bullshit. Bored viewers were left to ponder which was more ridiculous: James McAvoy affecting a six-pack or the Loom of Fate?

7. RAMBO. By far the most tragic entry in my trio of macho idiocy because as lurid as FIRST BLOOD was, it at least had a point. How are the mighty fallen.

8. BABYLON A.D. The existential angst of Vin Diesel vanishes in a puff of improbability. Mathieu Kassovitz flushes his art-house rep (LA HAINE) down the toilet with this star-vehicle sci-fi mish-mash. Even Michelle Yeoh as a kick-boxing nun can't save it.

AUTEURS GONE AWRY.

9. W. Liberal intellectuals wanted answers. Oliver Stone gave them a pastiche. 

10. AUSTRALIA. Baz Luhrmann promised us a knowing epic embracing romance, political injustice and war-time melodrama. He gave us a wooden, poorly edited, over-blown vanity project - a failure of monumental proportions.

Bina007's most spine-tinglingly awesome moments of 2008 - or why I still enter every movie theatre in joyful hope!

To quote last year's post: "It may be hard to believe when you read an excoriating review, but every time I sit down to watch a movie I do so in joyful hope. I can't explain how much I love cinema. Ever since I was a little girl there seemed to be something magical about a beam of light that transformed a negative into a living and breathing story. So in a rare annual moment of warmth and optimism, here follow those flashes of brilliance that reminded me - amidst the sequels, threequels and hopeless failures - just how wonderful cinema can be. Note that this list is significantly different from my Best Films of 2008 list (found in a drop-down box in the side-bar). Even piss-poor flicks can have moments of inspiration - which is a faintly hopeful thought."

1. When Rambo Strangles The Guy So Hard He Breaks Through His Skin and Blood And Veins and Shit Start Spurting Out. The long-awaited RAMBO flick was clearly piss-poor but among all that irony-free absurdity there was one moment so transcendentally ridiculous it gave me one of the biggest belly-laughs of the year!

2. The Sound-track and Cinematography as Daniel Plainview Rushes to the Oil Platform to Save His Son. A breathtaking moment of pure cinema in THERE WILL BE BLOOD - stunning cinematography, unbearable tension, intense orchestral score. This was cinema at its most visceral and inescapable and audacious. I'm still sore that the soundtrack was disqualified from the Oscars on a technicality. 

3. Michael Pitt Scares the Bejesus Out of the Middle Classes in the Final Frame of FUNNY GAMES. A movie so brilliant Michael Haneke had the arrogance to make it twice, this time with the angelic looking Pitt holding the audience's eyes in the final frame. Are we being warned that we're next or indicted for sado-masochistic voyeurism? Genius.

4. Hrithik Roshan's Dance Routine to Main Aisa Kyun Hoon Establishes Him As the Best Song and Dance Man in Cinema since Gene Kelly. Hrithik Roshan is a hoofer. He knows dance and not in the over-choreographed Michael Jackson c.Thriller style that most Bollywood movies adopt. Pure talent. Pure entertainment. The best traditions of Hindi cinema.

5. When Dawn Slices Off Tobey's Cock With Her Vagina Dentata. Seriously funny. (Probably not if you're a bloke, admittedly). And by far the best reason to watch the teen horror cum political satire, TEETH. 

6. When The Joker Slams The Droog's Face Into the Pencil. Great horror is not what you're shown but what you imagine. A lightening bolt of pure fright energises an over-long and over-worked Batman sequel.

7. When The Joker Rides Through Gotham Triumphant, His Head Out The Window Of a Moving Car. One of the most spine-chilling images of 2008. Shame Nolan didn't have the balls to end THE DARK KNIGHT on that image, creating a second part finale as powerful as EMPIRE.

8. When The Thief Chases The Cop In JAR CITY. I can't escape why this scene is funny. It doesn't sound funny when I try. Just please try and seek out this superb Icelandic comic thriller. Please.

9. Hellboy and Abe Listening to Barry Manilow's "Can't Cry Without You" closely tied with Johan Krauss kicking Hellboy's ass in the Locker Room. Pure Comedy Gold.

10. JAAACK!!!! The not unattractive and yet infinitely goofy Jean Dujardin as pre-Bond spoof Agent OSS-117. At times, this actor's facility for physical comedy almost touches Sellars in the Clousseau movies. Perhaps the most unexpected belly-laugh of the year - given that Professor007 and I were in an art cinema famed for showing turgid self-righteous foreign language flicks. 

LA Diary Day 2 - RAMBO - a short film about mutilation

Back to the Arclight for the fourth movie in the iconic and wonderfully mindless RAMBO franchise. Actually, that's a little unfair. The first Rambo movie was a rather moving, if violent, drama. A Vietnam vet called John Rambo is haunted by memories of war and cannot adjust to civilian life. He's picked up as a drifter by hick police, tortured and then hunted to (apparent) death. Rambo may have been a ridiculously tooled-up McGuiver figure, but he was also a credibly angst-ridden war hero. There was real substance to the film. The second and third films in the franchise were very meagre affairs by comparison. The ridiculous body-count went up and the movies almost parodied themselves. I grew up watching Rambo as a cheap thrill - a B-movie classic, if you will.

This new installment follows the sad trajectory of the earlier two movies. The plot is practically non-existent, and the run-time is almost insultingly short. Rambo is a cynical snake-catcher and boatsman in Thailand (I kid you not!) He's hired by a bunch of American evangelists to take them into Burma. Rambo refuses at first, but changes his mind when an inadequately pretty woman flutters her eyelashes at him. As if by magic (or the power of the Holy Spirit, for all the movie tells us) Rambo becomes a caring sharing do-gooder. Unless you're a Burmese pirate, in which case he's going to strangle you with his bare hands until blood oozes between his fingers and the flesh is ripped from your throat.

Yes yes. There may be no actual plot, character, credibility, production quality but there is CRAZY violence. Not crazy as in Tarantino or Korean extreme, cartoon violence but crazy as in multiple realistic-ish shots of bullets tearing into flush and bombs ripping off limbs. It's relentless and filmed in a straightforward manner that it is rather disturbing. It's all the more disturbing because Stallone chooses to use real footage of Burmase attrocities to open the film.

So, RAMBO is not a great action film and it doesn't return to the quality of the first movie in the franchise. Perhaps the best thing I can say about it is that it skips along at a rapid pace so you're unlikely to be actively bored. In addition, Graham McTavish does a good impression of a moaning London taxi driver, which is quite diverting.

Fans of lurid violence will be pleased to see a whole bunch of people get mutilated, not least Sylevestor Stallone, whose old, pumped-up body, throbbing with rip-cord veins, looks like a grotesque act of self-mutilation.

RAMBO is already on release in the US, Oman, the Philippines, Croatia, Greece, Israel, Kuwait, Russia, Singapore, Indonesia and Norway. It opens in Estonia, Iceland, Spain, Belgium, France, Argentina, Germany, Australia, the Netherlands, the UK, New Zealand and Denmark in February. It opens in Poland and Sweden in March; in Venezuela in April and in Japan in May.