Clerks III

Dante’s Inferno

Clerks III
USA  2022
Directed by Kevin Smith
View Askew
UK Cinema Release Print.

Warning: Some spoilerage may occur. Snoogans.

Wow. What can I say? I was expecting to have a reasonably good time with Kevin Smith’s new movie, Clerks III but I wasn’t expecting it to be as great as this. For starters, it’s an absolute belter of a movie which is going to be lapped up by Smith’s many fans and... rightly so. But there’s so much more to it than the expected rush of comedy gold when you are watching this one...

Clerks III is actually the eighth film in the Jay and Silent Bob series of movies (not counting the various animated entries) which began back in 1994, with the original Clerks. That debut film was shot in black and white over nights at the Quick Stop grocery store where Kevin Smith worked during the day, making the movie on credit cards for a very small amount of money and lots of good will (I would imagine). Clerks had one of the lowest budgets of any independent film at the time (probably still holds some kind of record) and it went and won first prize at the Sundance film festival before Smith continued to entertain many people with a series of films based on the ‘side characters’ Jay And Silent Bob, who are sometimes the main protagonists of the films and, in one instance, only appear in one scene. Jay is played by Jason Mews and Silent Bob is played by Kevin Smith himself... who also writes and directs all of these movies. If you want to see the movies in the order of their release, the eight of them are (again, not including various animated incarnations)... Clerks, Mallrats, Chasing Amy (the first one I actually caught at the cinema, after seeing the first two on TV), Dogma, Jay And Silent Bob Strike Back, Clerks II, Jay And Silent Bob Reboot (reviewed here) and, now, Clerks III.

For Clerks III, Brian O'Halloran returns to reprise the role of Dante Hicks and Jeff Anderson reprises his role of Randall. Also, the brilliant Rosario Dawson, who made her entrance into the View Askewniverse (named after Smith’s production company) in Clerks II, returns but she returns in such a way that... well... all I can say is that Smith once again continues to surprise me as a writer, because what might seem like a cop out of necessity in any other film seems like a really well thought out way of using a returning character in a different way... and that’s all I’m saying about Rosario’s return in this.

It would be true to say that this film isn’t really a jumping on point for people who have never seen a Jay and Silent Bob movie. Smith’s films are all slotting into their own linked up universe with characters from others of his films constantly turning up in cameos and crossing over in joyfully convoluted metatextual events... Clerks III is no different in this matter but, even more so in that the plot of the movie actually centres around a huge piece of self referentialism.

Near the start of the film, Randall has a heart attack in the Quick Stop (which long time watchers of the film series may remember has been rebuilt after fire and is now jointly owned by Dante and Randal after Jay and Silent Bob helped them out financially... it’s a long story, watch it all for yourself). Dante gets him to hospital and his life is saved (mirroring somewhat the director’s own real life experiences with a near fatal heart attack a few years ago). This forces Randall to realise how he’s wasted his life working in a Quick Stop for his whole working existence and so he decides to make a low budget, independent movie based on his life with he, Dante, Jay and Silent Bob... and a whole host of regular returning guest actors and returning real life customers... all playing themselves. Which of course, is what Kevin Smith initially did in real life to get him to where he is today.

Ad so the film is an absolute blast as it references a gazillion scenes and faces from prior View Askewniverse movies, basically saying many of the same lines as they did in the first two Clerks movies (primarily... with a few other movies thrown into the mix) and giving us, kind of, rebooted scenes, shot lovingly in black and white, to punctuate the new shenanigans these characters are all getting themselves into. Yep, the egg man (Walt Flanagan), the ‘cunning ruse’ lady, the Salsa shark scene... loads of stuff gets packed in here. There’s even a big reference to the original, cut ending of the original Clerks (which you can see as a deleted scene on many home video releases over the years). It was great seeing a lot of  these people back, including guest cameos from the likes of Danny Trejo, Sarah Michelle Gellar and Askewniverse regular Ben Affleck... but perhaps the nicest inclusion from me (along with the cameo characters played by Smith’s wife and daughter) was the return of Marilyn Ghigliotti as Veronica... Dante’s original girlfriend for whom fans of the original will remember for her association with the number 37.

But that’s not all folks... it turns out that Clerks III is not just a comedy... it’s also a really moving movie with the third act really going for the jugular in terms of emotional impact. It goes to a place I wasn’t quite, expecting and, what happens after the initial set up seems almost so out of left field as to be unfair... which stokes that drama so well. All I can say is I wish I’d taken more hankies with me because I was crying a little in the cinema and I was still in... lets call it a high state of sadness... 20 minutes later when I got home. This is a truly phenomenal entry in the series and yet another great Kevin Smith movie. Without giving it away too much... he could easily make another Jay and Silent Bob movie (and hopefully this isn’t the last) but, while he could still make another Clerks movie... well... what would be the point? I suspect that this is the last time that we’ll be seeing that specific iteration of the View Askewniverse headlining its own film.

And that’s all I’ve got to say about Clerks III... primarily because I’ve pretty much said all I wanted to but, also because I’ve now started tearing up again remembering it and it’s hard to see the screen when your eyes are all smeary. If you are into Kevin Smith’s movies... and you really should be, they’re a shot of pure joy... then you should really love and, will probably be very moved, by this latest installment of the franchise. And do yourself a favour and stay through the end credits to hear more, heartfelt ramblings from the writer/director.

Jay And Silent Bob Reboot

Snoogans Bluff

Jay And Silent Bob Reboot
USA 2019 Written & Directed by Kevin Smith
View Askew HMV Exclusive Blu Ray Zone B

Warning: Very mild spoilers.

I’ve been a big admirer of Kevin Smith’s Jay and Silent Bob movies for quite some time now (although apparently not as big an admirer that I only now find out there was a cartoon Jay And Silent Bob movie directed by somebody else about seven years ago). I tried to see this latest movie last year at the cinema in one of its very rare UK screenings in London. Heck, I even had my ticket booked but a real life situation arose so that I wasn’t able to get to the cinema and see it, sadly. So I’m really pleased that HMV have brought out a Blu Ray version of it this year, that’s for sure. I think this is now the third one, including the first two, that I didn’t get to see at the cinema.

Jay And Silent Bob Reboot is the seventh in the series of live action Jay & Bob movies, following on as a direct sequel to... let’s run the list in order... Clerks, Mallrats, Chasing Amy (my favourite), Dogma, Jay And Silent Bob Strike Back and Clerks 2.

This one is also a kind of reboot in a way because, even before the various characters in the movie have discussed how Hollywood reboots are just old movies where they take the good stuff and change it just enough to make a load more money off the reputation of the old ones (I think I got that right... it gets complicated but, as is Smith’s way, rings completely true), you will probably realise already that this is almost the exact same story as the fifth in the series, Jay And Silent Bob Strikes Back. In that film you had Jay and Bob going to try and stop the production of a Bluntman And Chronic Movie, based on the fictional comic strip that Holden McNeil (played by Ben Affleck who played the character in Chasing Amy, Jay And Silent Bob Strikes Back and this one) based on Jay and Silent Bob. They even beat up Harvey Weinstein at the end... that'll date it.

So, once again we have Kevin Smith reprising his role as Silent Bob, along with Jason Mewes as Jay. It’s really great seeing these two back as the titular characters again and lovers of the View Askewniverse will surely be delighted with this new movie. Now, for me, Jay And Silent Bob Strike Back was always the weakest link in the series of films but, honestly, Smith is a great writer/director and so even the weakest in the series was better than most comedy movies of the last 20 or so years.

Jay And Silent Bob Reboot is... well it’s kinda tying at the moment in my brain as least greatest of the films but... oh yeah... you can bet I got a lot out of it too and, since there’s so much going on in this one, I’m sure that once my head begins to unravel this properly, I’m going to love it even more the second time around.

Okay, so the film starts strong and reveals the exact same plot as the fifth in an unusual way. And I really don’t want to give away too many spoilers... at least not those unrevealed in the trailer but I will give you the heads up that, once again, Kevin Smith’s daughter Harley Quinn Smith, is in this movie playing the daughter of Jay, who he didn’t know he had. There are also, as to be expected, a heck of a lot of cameos for both actors and characters from the previous six films, including Smith’s wife Jennifer Schwalbach (as the manager of the branch of Mooby’s in this movie). Fans of the series will love seeing people like Affleck, Matt Damon, Jason Lee, Joey Lauren Adams and Shannon Elizabeth reprising some key roles. Although, bizarrely, none of them are playing dual roles here... they are all limited to only one character call back each. It’s also great to see Chris Hemsworth playing himself here and getting in on the “f*ck me ‘til I’m Thor” jokes. There’s also one very special ‘’pre-cameo’ during the many scenes shown during the end credits and I don’t want to ruin it for people but, this guy’s last ‘real’ cameo was in Jason Mewes directorial debut Madness In The Method (reviewed here) and Marvel fans might take note.

Like all the Jay & Bob movies, the film is absolutely crammed full of jokes and references to other films, including many of Smith’s own and yes, you will hear a lot of familiar lines from the series turning up when you see this. As with any film which shoehorns so much in, some jokes will hit right with you and some won’t... this is not my favourite of the series by a long shot but there’s enough in here that it hit the right spots for me and there are even some quite touching moments in the ongoing character arc between Jay and his daughter Milly, short for her full name Millennium Falcon. Yeah, you get the usual Smith Star Wars references in this too... that stuff never gets old. Silent Bob also has a ‘37’ football shirt on at one point so, yeah, you all know what that means, right (if not, watch Clerks immediately, you’re missing out)?

Actually, Smith originally had a full role written for Stan Lee, who would have been a big presence in the third act but who died before filming. Lee famously played himself in Mallrats, of course, and his cameo in Captain Marvel (reviewed here) last year was of him learning his Mallrats lines on the way to the set. However, after Stan ‘The Man’ Lee’s death, Smith wrote himself into the movie again, playing himself directing the new Bluntman And Chronic Reboot movie... so Smith has a dual role in this film and it actually works out quite well.

And yes, if all this sounds a bit too metatextual then you’d be right. Like the fifth movie, this thing goes so far beyond metatextual that it goes right back around to textual again. In addition to the Smith family roles mentioned earlier, you also have Jason Mewe’s infant daughter turning up as Holden McNeil’s daughter... but that’s okay because Kevin Smith plays Kevin Smith here, telling his audience that he hates nepotism so... again, it works out okay in the end. In fact, he’s as ready to send himself up as anyone else so you gotta love the writing on this. For instance, there’s a scene where Smith’s real life daughter playing Jay’s daughter says she hates Kevin Smith for always forcing his daughter to be in his movies. There are very few writer directors who would be in a position where they could get into that level of irony, I suspect so, yeah, good stuff. There’s even a great running gag where Jay tells people that God looks just like Alanis Morrisette (who, of course, played God in two of these films).

Additional references to Smith’s heart attack a couple of years ago materialise as an explanation for both him and his fictional alter ego, Silent Bob, having lost so much weight. Mallrats fans may particularly like the “Fly, Low Fat Ass, Fly” line here.

And that’s me done with the Jay And Silent Bob Reboot one I think... it’s a shame they couldn’t get Mark Hamill back as Cock Knocker but there is a Cock Knocker Army here and also a villain which, yes, did actually take me by surprise. So there’s that. All in all, Jay And Silent Bob Reboot is not the best of the Jay & Bob movies but that really doesn’t matter... it’s still pretty good and should certainly keep the fans happy. And, heck, yes I want Smith to keep knocking these movies out (I say that being one of the few people on the planet who actually liked Jersey Girl so, you know, judge me by that). If you’re not a follower of the Jay and Silent Bob movies or just plain haven’t seen them then, sure, you’re not going to get many of the jokes here so go see the others first. If however, you love these movies as much as me and are interested in seeing just what Holden McNeil and  Alyssa Jones have been up to... and just what the heck did happen to Bartleby and Loki after the events of Dogma, then you’ve come to the right place. Incidentally, for my money, Matt Damon gets the best punchline in the whole movie in his cameo scene so... it was worth me getting this just for that. Not the greatest of Smith’s oeuvre, for sure, but still an absolute hoot. Also, definitely check out Mewe’s movie Method In The Madness if you’re a fan of the Jay & Silent Bob films.

Madness In The Method

Methadone Actor

Madness In The Method
2019 USA Directed by Jason Mewes
screening at FrightFest 24th August 2019.

Okay, so my second feature at this year’s Arrow Fright Fest (now in its 20th year) was a much more positive experience for me than Ghost Killers VS Bloody Mary (which I reviewed here).

Madness In The Method is the directorial debut of actor Jason Mewes, who most people would best know as Jay to director Kevin Smith’s Silent Bob. This one was a blast and though I was initially skeptical of this guys ability to helm something like this, given his on and off screen personae and how easy it is to be fooled into thinking the character created by Kevin Smith based on Mewes,,, and Mewes himself... are one and the same, I found myself very pleasantly surprised at how good this was. Of course, since I am already an admirer of the duo in all their big screen appearances (I even forced myself to watch Scream 3 just to catch their cameo), I am part, of a ready made target audience and, although this movie wasn’t written by Jason himself (I suspect he had a fair amount of input in that process, credited or not), it’s actually a kind of mockumentary fantasy written about him.

Right from the outset, fact is blended with fiction as Mewes fills us in on just who he is and charts both his career path with Kevin Smith (done with some nice animated Jay and Silent Bob inserts) and his various trouble with substance abuse in one form or another. We learn about his former trade as a roofer and how tough it was for him growing up etc. And... I suspect it’s one of those films which Hollywood loves where fact and fiction are blended. The film is full of cameos, some as major roles such as Vinnie Jones and others falling somewhere in between that and what is, in this movie, Stan Lee’s final cameo performance. So, for example, both Dean Cain and Teri Hatcher, the two title character actors from TV’s Lois And Clark - The New Adventures Of Superman, have recurring roles in this.

It’s a bit like Fellini’s great masterpiece Eight And A Half, only filtered through a young Hollywood vibe.... in terms of the central character, Mewes playing a fictional version of himself who very consciously wants to crawl out from his stoner typecasting in which he finds himself trapped and reading a not so mythical book about Method Acting before ‘really’ getting into the ‘killer’ mindset of his latest role. I should probably also mention Paul Mazursky’s 1970 movie Alex In Wonderland as a kindred spirit to this film also... but I haven’t seen it myself (or I have and it's been so long I've forgotten it) so I’ll just drop that here in passing.

Okay, so this is a film which never gets dull and explores Mewes’ ‘descent into the method’ as he turns from accidental murderer to, by the end of the film, something else entirely. This is not a horror movie rather than a comedy thriller with the emphasis firmly on the comedic (so I don’t know why it’s playing at FrightFest but I’m certainly not complaining) but it is quite impressive and I especially liked the way the film is edited. Mewes calls some nice cuts here and, although it annoyed me at first, there’s good use made of a little, rotating, ball of Mewes’ head bouncing off the sides of his computer on a screensaver which shouts his catchphrase ‘Snootchy Bootchies’ every time it hits a side of the screen, used to punctuate the structure of the film and to show time and location shifts in the narrative... which is, by its nature, quite freestyle.

I also loved the idea that Brian O’ Halloran, who played Dante Hicks in three of the Jay And Silent Bob movies to date, plays himself as a director who is about to direct a large budget, major Hollywood production of Homer’s The Odyssey. It was genuinely nice to see this guy again although he is in a somewhat darker story here. And like I said, this film is full of cameos from the likes of Danny Trejo, Judd Nelson and even Kevin Smith’s daughter Harley Quinn Smith. There’s also an interesting performance by a modern character actor (future Elisha Cook Jr in the making?) called Mickey Gooch Jr, who plays a handle-barred moustached detective obsessed by his suspicion that it is, indeed, Mewes who is behind the killings in the movie. He’s pretty good in the movie but he was even better in the Q and A before the movie, regaling the audience with his tales of the production, which is obviously set in LA but had its shooting locations split between LA and Derbyshire, here in the UK. A very entertaining fellow, despite his choice of head gear.

Oddly, Kevin Smith himself comes off as a little of a darker version of what I perceive to be his true life persona here. However, I’m pretty sure this is one of a few deliberate deviations from real life, especially when Mewes and Moobs (Smith) do the lion face, lemon face routine from Jay And Silent Bob Strike Back. Also, it’s kind of a dead giveaway that this is definitely portraying a heavily fictionalised scenario bearing in mind the final fate of Vinnie Jones in the movie, which is actually pretty funny, I thought.

So there you have it. Turns out Mr. Mewes can actually direct pretty well, as well as act and, cannily, put together a movie which, in spite of its free form narrative style, holds together very well as a coherent, linear story. Whether it will actually get any kind of physical home media release over here in the UK is anybody’s guess but, if it does, I’ll certainly be shelling out to have another look at Madness In The Method, for sure. So now looking forward to the next film in my 2019 FrightFest experience, The Banana Splits Movie. Review to follow in a couple of days.

The Death of “Superman Lives”: What Happened?

Clerks Kent

The Death of “Superman Lives”: What Happened?
USA 2015
Directed by Jon Schnepp
Super Skull Ship Multizone Blu Ray

You know, I’ve been a big fan of Kevin Smith since first seeing and admiring Clerks, a few years after its initial cinema run, and one of the most entertaining stories I ever heard him tell was the routine where he goes through his side of what happened when he was hired to rewrite a draft of the screenplay to the movie Superman Lives... or Superman Reborn as it was when he was first brought on board. It’s an amusing story and, basically, Kevin Smith showed how a messed up few people started bringing on ridiculous sounding ideas and when Tim Burton came on board the project, Smith was told to depart.

I’ve always wanted to know more of what went on behind the scenes though and now, thanks to this crowd funded documentary by Jon Schnepp, we can get at least a little more of a glimpse of not only the stupidity and bad decisions which brought this movie down but also a look at some of the hard work the very talented people who were hired to conceptualise this preposterous venture did for the cause.

I remember reading about the pre-production of the Superman Lives movie when it was happening back in the early 1990s. Bringing on Nicholas Cage seemed a bit strange in terms of casting the film at the time (although I now believe he could do something credible, at least) and the designs of the costume which were leaking, backing up the idea that the studio were going to dump the famous look of the Man of Steel, wasn’t doing much to turn me on to the project, to say the least. I was kinda glad when it fell through at the time although, I have to say, the subsequent Superman movies we’ve had in its wake, especially the last one, have been less than what they could have been.

For this documentary, Schnepp has interviews with several of the key players involved including, of course, the aforementioned Kevin Smith... along with Tim Burton and Jon Peters. I’m really puzzled as to why Peters agreed to do this because, although he seems to be going through the motions, in some places, of defending himself against Kevin Smith’s portrayal of him and his part in this fiasco, it seems to me he comes off really badly. Peters says some things here and you kinda want to take him at face value but then, when you realise that what he is saying in some instances seems to contradict little details of what the facts are... and then you stack it up next to stuff a lot of other people say about Peters, well... if it comes to the question of Peters VS Smith, I think I personally believe Smith but, luckily, we have this documentary so you can make up your own mind.

Now Smith’s involvement ended very early on but we have some of the other writers highlighted in this film and also the conceptual designs and paintings done for this production. Some of it looks great and some of it looks, ill informed. It doesn’t take long before you realise the production had a mountain of really great talent working on this thing that were, somehow, not really handled in a way that would work for the studio. And you also have Tim Burton who comes off as quite an interesting guy on this. It’s obvious that he doesn’t value Kevin Smith's contribution still... and I was so on for this documentary to have Smith and Burton in the same room together and burying the hatchet because, it seems in terms of their attitude to the production, they have a lot of common ground. Alas, it’s not something Schnepp was able to pull off in this one but it seems clear to me, from Burton’s choice of words in some scenes that... yeah... he’s not the greatest fan of Peters either. I may be wrong but... see what you think.

The documentary is really nicely put together and includes a lot of test footage of Cage trying on various Superman suits and it also addresses the issue of the “regeneration suit” which was misconstrued by a lot of people interested in Superman Lives when it was seen at the time. Using live action and animated scenarios put in to ape some of the scenes which never were, Schnepp manages to work with the material he’s got of people describing their involvement in the project but still makes it relatively entertaining and interesting for even the casual observer. The scoring got to me a little bit and I think it was either dialled to prominently in the final mix or maybe was a little inappropriate and distracting in places... but overall the film is a nice piece of work and, certainly, something people interested in this story definitely need to see. I don’t rate the movie as highly as a similar project, Jodorowsky’s Dune (reviewed by me here) but that’s quite possibly because the stories told in this one were never gonna be as crazy as what was going on with the Jodorosky project... but it is a definite one not to miss if you are interested in the production of movies and just how badly they can go wrong.

Ultimately, the message I took away from this documentary is that, although I never even wanted to see the finished project, there was a great tragedy here on the film's cancellation because a lot of work had gone into this from a lot of people and, even if the movie had been made and received badly, it would have at least been a very interesting failure... for sure. Certainly, with all these years gone by and with the sense of perspective watching The Death Of Superman Lives: What Happened? has given me in regards to the fate of this film, it’s one I can imagine might have been better left running its course. At the same time, I can totally understand why Warner Brothers pulled the plug on it a number of years into the project.  But, whether you would have been a fan of the finished movie or not, this account of why it didn’t happen and, as interestingly, how bits of it did happen for a while, is certainly something most fans of movies and superheroes are going to want to take a look at. The film is available for download and in physical form from this website here... http://tdoslwh.myshopify.com/

Die Hard 4.0 (aka Live Free Or Die Hard)

Yippee Ki Hard

Die Hard 4.0 (Live Free Or Die Hard)
2007 USA/UK
Directed by Len Wiseman
20th Century Fox Blu Ray B

Warning: Spoilers exploding out of the paragraphs

John McLane never had a cell phone in the first three Die Hard movies.

Amazingly, when you look back at the way technology has progressed over the last few decades, mobile phones were not something that almost the entire population had with them back then. Only a minority of people would have them. In fact, in the first two films in this franchise McLane is shown to be “technically up there” in that, well... he has a pager.

It’s a good job mobile devices weren’t so prominent when it came to writing the scripts for those first three movies because, sad to say, technology has made their plot lines redundant in a modern world. In their first one, if McLane had been carrying a phone, he could have just called for police assistance and that would have made for one short movie. Ditto for the “communications outage” in the second movie. A quick call to one of the planes (oh, by the way, when you land, your sea level has been dropped by 100 metres) and the story is completely junked. And in the third movie, running around from phone booth to phone booth to get the next instruction.... err... yeah, right.

However, Die Hard 4.0 (as it is known in this country) was made twelve years after that initial trilogy. It is set in a world where the character and his ways are sadly out of step with the era. So what do the script writers do to balance the necessities of this character, in terms of giving audiences the kind of situations they are familiar with from John McLane... well, they make sure the phone networks are switched off as a part of the plot. A plot which is based on a newspaper article, in this case, and not on a random script or novel like the other sequels prior to this.

I remember thinking it was a bit late to make a Die Hard movie in 2007. I figured the writers would make a load of mistakes and concentrate purely on the action at the expense of plotting and character detail. Well... I was wrong (they saved making all those mistakes for the fifth movie, reviewed here). This fourth expedition for McLane is every bit as enjoyable as the previous installments (although the third movie is still my favourite) and, to boot, it’s the cleanest, nicest looking of the films to date with a beautiful sense of composition and some lovely colours pitched against each other in the shots. You might think this is at odds with the generally grimy milieu of the original films but, no, Wiseman manages to make it all work beautifully and, what’s more, it doesn’t just look good.

The plot is a little cliched in one hand... escort the witness (or hacker in this case) back to headquarters and don’t let him get killed. This plays out for the first third of the movie before the real story of a “fire sale” (the disablement of the IT systems across the city to render everyone, including all the authorities, pretty much powerless) kicks in properly and it becomes about McLane and his new hacker friend Matt (played expertly by Justin Long) taking on the bad guys and, incidentally, rescuing McLane’s estranged daughter Lucy (played by the always more than watchable Mary Elizabeth Winstead), who is taken hostage by the leading villains towards the end of the movie.

The story is really fine, putting McLane back in a situation where the odds are stacked against him and, also, there is the secret weapon of Kevin Smith (Silent Bob himself) playing a Star Wars obsessed super hacker who Willis also employed to rewrite the dialogue for his scenes. I gt a real kick out of seeing him in this and just wish he had a little more screen time throughout the film.

There’s one bad thing about this movie though... and that’s the credibility factor. Bruce Willis is fairly long in the tooth by now and, although he is in terrific shape, there’s no way you can really buy into him winning fist-fights with the likes of Maggie Q and Cyril Raffaelli (a man who, prior to this, I’d seen acrobatically beat up whole roomfuls of people with his bare hands as one of the two main action leads in the District 13 series). Sometimes the baggage an actor brings with him to a movie is good and, other times, it can strain credibility a notch, it has to be said.

But who cares, Die Hard 4.0 is brilliant, sometimes way over-the-top (jumping your car to take out a helicopter) fun and you still really care for the character and his friends in this one. There is one sad thing, however...

Michael Kamen, the composer of the first three Die Hard movies had already died tragically young by the time of this one. Here, the musical reigns are handed over to composer Marco Beltrami but, I’m happy to report, he does a good job. Writing in a modern action style while still weaving in some of Kamen’s original themes and ways of handling certain situations from the first three movies. It falls somewhere in between an homage to the late, great Kamen and a strong, appropriate score and it succeeds brilliantly on all levels. I wouldn’t have expected anyone to be able to recreate Kamen’s style all that easily but, in the scenes where that kind of respectful tribute to the franchise history is called for, Beltrami does really well and my respect for him truly went up a notch on this film. He does it even better in the fifth movie in the series. Nice work.

And that’s about all I have to say about this one. A great movie and a great Die Hard movie. Mission brief fulfilled. Job done.

You can read my reviews to the others in the series here...

Die Hard
Die Hard 2: Die Harder
Die Hard With A Vengeance
A Good Day To Die Hard

Fanboys

The Fandom Menace

Fanboys
USA 2009
Directed by Kyle Newman
Anchor Bay Region 2

Well this is probably going to be a short review but maybe my expectations were too high.

14 years ago I saw what amounted to a UK TV premiere of a new movie which didn’t get a cinema release over here, as far as I’m aware, called Free Enterprise. It was a comedy, which is a genre I rarely like outside a few select artists, but this one was actually quite funny and spoke volumes to me. I very quickly upgraded to a DVD copy and showed it to all my mates because, basically, this was a movie about me and my friends.

No question.

It’s lke the writer and director of Free Enterprise followed me and my mates around and absolutely captured our spirits, our behaviour, our way of communicating through sentences constructed from film quotes... and spat it back up on screen for all to see. It was amazing and as I’m typing this I realise it’s almost become a forgotten classic and so I need to start telling people about it again. So I’ll save that for a review next year maybe.

Anyway... what this meant was that when I finally got caught up to Fanboys the other month, I was expecting the same degree of wit and sophistication that was on show in Free Enterprise to somehow shine between the frames and make me laugh out loud. Unfortunately, what I got was something with a half clever script that didn’t come anywhere close to giving me either the sense of identification naturally inherent in the earlier film or, for that matter, anything I felt I could laugh at.

But like I said... maybe I was expecting too much from the premise of the movie.

Set in 1999, Fanboys tells the story of five friends who grew up on Star Wars reuniting to go on a road trip because one of them has terminal cancer and they want to break into George Lucas’ ranch and screen the work print of the upcoming Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace (reviewed here) so he can see it before he dies. And, of course, they have ludicrous adventures on the way, two of the friends who were estranged re-bond with each other and lots of Star Wars, Star Trek and various other franchise references abound.

With a warm hearted tale like this, I was really gagging at the bit to see this one and, truth be told, some of the cameos by people like Danny Trejo, Ray Park, Carrie Fisher, Kevin Smith, Jason Mewes and William Shatner, coupled with some fairly tongue in cheek references to various bits of genre culture mixed in with some fairly sophisticated homage in some parts, is not a totally unpleasant way to spend the lengtth of a feature film. It’s not badly shot, the editing and pacing are all fine... but for me it wasn’t quite working.

For me,  think, the main problems I had with it were:

a) I could only really sympathise with one or two of the five friends, to a certain extent, in this... and even then not fully. This movie was nowhere near any of my life experiences.

b) It really wasn’t funny. At least not to me anyway.

There was some stuff that should have made me laugh, for sure. Like Ethan Suplee playing the part of Aint-It-Cool-News founder Harry Knowles and beating up our heroes before subjecting them to a nerdy Star Wars quiz. Or Kevin Smith pimping out Jason Mewes to the guy who played the donkey-shagger in Clerks 2... but strangely, I felt nothing. Sounds better as I write it now than it was actually experiencing it, truth be told. But I really can’t find anything too much at fault here either. The acting was all great and everything seemed set to be a fine collection of Star Wars themed shenanigans and it should have been just great.

There were two moments that made me sit up and take notice. One was a bit which genuinely made me laugh and was a tiny sequence where, after the Fanboys have smashed up a statue of Captain Kirk fighting Khan, one of the trekkies in the movie picks up Khan’s head and does the famous... Khaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaan yell! Halfway through the yell, however, he stops to take a puff of his inhaler before continuing. That one gag just tickled me for some reason. I thought the film was about to kick into high gear... it didn’t.

The other thing was right near the end when, after the adventure has been more or less concluded, the dying friend sits on a rock in the distance and watches his friends interacting with each other around a camp fire at night. This little scene genuinely had some heart in it and made me feel some emotion, finally.

At the end of the day, I can’t honestly give a good recomendation to this movie as, although I’m glad I saw it, I really wasn’t happy about purchasing it (even for the very cheap price I got it for) and expected a lot more from it. However, neither can I, in all fairness, tell people not to watch this. I’m sure there will be loads of people out there who would find this a really funny movie. Personally I prefer Kevin Smith, Woody Allen and The Marx Brothers for my main suppliers of cinematic laughing gas, but this is just a taste thing and probably has no place in this review. So can’t really say there’s no point in trying his one out either.

View or view not, there is no try.

Sanshiro Sugata Part Two (The Films Of Akira Kurosawa #3)

Sanshiro The Hero


Sanshiro Sugata Part Two
Japan 1945
Directed by Akira Kurosawa
Criterion Eclipse Region 1

I was getting all ready to write the lead in to this review and I quickly looked on the IMDB to see if there was anything extra important I should know about it which I wasn’t going to cover, when I saw a review which really panned this movie, saying that Kurosawa’s heart wasn’t in it etc. It’s true, I would say, that Kurosawa’s heart wasn’t really in this, but I would have to say that this doesn’t stop this movie being another absolute masterpiece from an absolute “directing emperor” and I’ll highlight some of the reasons why I believe that as I go through.

It did make me angry though!

Okay, so my favourite director made this sequel only two years after his directorial debut with the first movie Sanshiro Sugata (reviewed here), which he had followed up with a wartime propaganda film called The Most Beautiful (reviewed here). It was here that Kurosawa, in his capacity as a director, first became the victim of his own popularity. Sanshiro Sugata was so successful, you see, that the studio practically forced Kurosawa to write and direct a sequel to the movie... something he would do only twice in is career, both times under studio pressure because his original movie scored hugely at the box office (the other sequel he made was Sanjuro, the sequel to his popular film Yojimbo).

And so he reassembled the cast of his original movie and went at it, perhaps a little less enthusiastically but no less diligently (I believe) than he did with any other of his films. There are possible flaws here, in that the action jumps around a little, but that could just be Kurosawa experimenting with a format that cut needless explanatory dialogue from the movie... and it’s not like anything is any less understandable or worse off for it. It’s a tad jarring in a couple of the transitions but, then again, it might be the effect he wanted to achieve.

The film is a double storyline, which leads up to two fight scenes which again show the simplistic, child-like intellect of the title character gaining a little wisdom and expansion while at the same time focusing on the purity of his naive point of view, which often leads him to the truth of the matter. One fight is the culmination of a set up in which Sanshiro is offered money to represent Japan against America in a fight to demonstrate that martial arts (such as Sanshiro’s expertise with Judo) are a match for the “art” of American boxing, by pitting him against a boxer in the ring for money and to profit the promoters. It’s a show match, purely for commercial reasons, and he wants no part of it.

The second storyline is of the two brothers of the man that Sanshiro fights at the end of the first movie, who want their revenge on him. The original character has been made very ill by the fighting and is dying. He comes to make his peace with Sanshiro but also warns him about his two, crazy, vengeance-hearted next of kin. In a brilliant piece of casting on Kurosawa’s part, the original actor playing this character also plays one of his two brothers in different make-up... something I didn’t even realise the first time I saw this movie at the cinema some ten years or more ago.

The set up to the first storyline is a classic piece of tension-and-release pre-action cinema staging and, considering the context of when this movie came out, is something which must have been really electrifying to the audiences on its initial release. Because an American Navy man is so tall and heavy, a rickshaw driver, on stopping, accidentally tips him out of the rickshaw... for which he begins to receive a beating by the brawnier US bully. After hitting and tossing him around a bit, the sailor brings his arm right back for another killer blow... when Kurosawa cuts to a close up of the same hand being grabbed from behind. Enter Sanshiro Sugata, who rescues the grateful Rickshaw driver by “taking care” of the bully and throwing him “in the drink”, so to speak. This unfortunate occurrence is what gets the Americans to notice the Japanese fighting style in the first place and so this incident is what sets off the US VS Japan theme of the plot. And, of course, it’s brilliantly staged by Kurosawa.

That “catching of the hand” shot has been used many times since and, due to the sheer inventiveness of silent movies, I’m guessing it had been used many times before this movie was made, but it’s a real interesting usage of something which has echoed down the years and which still keeps us watching this similar kind of dynamic interaction to the present day. Just think of the “entrance” of Jay and Silent Bob about 20 minutes into Kevin Smith’s Dogma, for example. Linda Fiorentino is about to be pummelled to death by the three minor, skateboarding, hockey-stick armed demons from hell when all of a sudden, just at the last second... Jay and Silent Bob arrive and despatch the three demons in a blare of heroic fanfare music (courtesy of composer Howard Shore). Kurosawa was doing this stuff a long time before that... powerful stuff and one of many visual master strokes in this film.

Another piece of brilliance is when the young rickshaw driver who was rescued by Sanshiro, and who has been pestering him to take him on as a Judo pupil, finally gets his wish. Instead of showing an action packed montage of the pupil going through his training, as many directors might choose to do, the director has one sequence where Sanshiro throws him about a lot to test his resolve, followed by a riveting montage with the camera locked in one place which shows the man entering from screen left and sitting down to begin a lesson. The same 6 - 10 seconds is repeated, each shot dissolving into the next, to show the way the attitude and confidence of the man changes and grows just by his demeanour and body language over time, lesson by lesson, as he enters and sits down in various ways in each of these silent shots. A brilliant and simple alternative to the obvious choice, of which a variation was used in a similar “locked camera” sequence with Charlotte Rampling, by Woody Allen in his greatest masterpiece, Stardust Memories. The montage of her repeating a phrase in different states to show her mental deterioration is, I think, something of a spiritual cousin to this sequence from the Kurosawa film, just used to reach a different conclusion.

Another piece of brilliance in the film is the fight where a Jujitsu man (who has stepped in because Sanshiro initially refuses to partake in the ballyhoo and commercialism of a “show fight”) is knocked down in the ring. Sanshiro already has a conscience about this as he has talked to the man prior to the beginning of the fight and is accused of making Judo so popular as a martial art, due to his prowess and status as a kind of figurehead for it, that the Jujitsu crowd are forced to perform for money. As the beaten man lays on the floor, the visuals are all about the audience going wild, then Sanshiro’s reaction to the audience, then a shot of the downed man failing to get up and then back to the crowd etc., in a cyclic montage which really presses the emotion buttons and pushes the point that Sanshiro is disgusted by the whole charade. This may be an old trick now, but it’s expertly done here and it’s always worth seeing a master director building sympathies like this.

The entrance of the two brothers in Sanshiro’s dojo is also amazing. Once of them is “touched in the head” and completely crazy... playing it in a very “in your face” (quite literally at one point) fashion in much the way I would imagine Toshiro Mifune would have played the role... if he wasn’t already busy at the time, before he became an actor, teaching Kamikaze pilots how to win the war. Similarly, his brother, has a laugh which is unexpected and creeps out unexpectedly, just the way in which Mifune would do it for his crazy samurai role in Seven Samurai, years later. It broaches and interesting question... where did “the Kurosawa” end and “the Mifune” begin, in terms of Mifune’s amazing acting prowess.

The final fight scene in the snow, where one of the brothers takes on Sanshiro, seems like two silhouettes fighting against the white and is a minor set piece intended, I believe, to echo the fight in the field at the end of the first movie. But it’s really only a prelude to the scene which comes after where Sanshiro in his sleep, simply by smiling in the midst of a dream, prevents his own death at the hands of the crazier of the two brothers... who is also seen to have become a little more enlightened, or at least agreeable, due to the good example of the title character.

So my final conclusion on Sanshiro Sugata Part Two, contrary to the drab condemnation of it on the IMDB, is that Kurosawa has indeed, through both sheer technical inventiveness and the invocation of some superb performances by the principal cast, managed to rend yet another celluloid masterpiece. If you’re not familiar with the work of Kurosawa then I would say that this film isn’t the best jumping on point (you really have to see his debut feature first to get the most out of this one) but it’s certainly another rich vein of textbook cinema at its best and should, perhaps, be treated a little with the level reserved for any great masterpiece. If you’ve seen the first movie though... seriously take a look at this astonishing sequel before the opportunity is no longer there. If the Criterion edition of this is anything to go by... that ropey old print isn’t getting any better as the years roll on.

.

Four Girls on Black Asphalt

4.3.2.1 2010 UK

Directed by

Noel Clarke and Mark Davis

Screening at cinemas now

Oh look. It’s Mickey! Hello Mickey! Mick Mick Mickey!

Right, got that one out of my system!

4.3.2.1, not to be confused with a similarly entitled Perry Rhodan movie from 1967, is another film co-directed by, written by and also co-starring Noel “Mickey from Doctor Who” Clarke.

And it’s a really great movie.

I’ve not seen anything written by or directed by this guy before but all I can say is that the movie I saw this morning is as slickly, stylishly and glossily put together as any current Hollywood mainstream action flick... and it doesn’t really pull any punches either.

The film follows four, admittedly extremely good looking young ladies, over roughly a 48 hour period. It seems very contrived but you don’t really notice that too much as it kinda gets buried in the editing of what is an extremely stylised visual feast. The pacing is relentless... it never really lets up and lets you find rest and that’s probably one of its key strengths since the long line of coincidences which drive the plot forward may start to look a little bit bedroom farce if you were given any real time to think about them.

Early on in the film it starts getting all mid-sixties split screen and, since I’d never seen any of this guys movies before, I immediately assumed that this was probably one of his visual signatures (you know, like DePalma) but after the first half hour played out and the movie, which is told in flashback, caught up to the start of the film again... it became apparent that this technique was being employed as a stylistic device to act as an intro to separate strands of the movie. I hadn’t realised until half an hour through that this was going to be one of those films where the, in this case four, central characters are given their own separate strands and followed individually... all moving forward to the same resolution.

Loads of the cast of recent years of Doctor Who turn up in it... even the guy who is the voice of the Daleks has a solid supporting role... but the best cameo appearance is the two scenes “stolen” by Mr. Silent Bob himself, the one and only Kevin Smith. He seems to be losing a lot of hair but it doesn’t matter. In this movie he plays someone called Larry... but he’s still quite cool.

I think the only minor criticism of this movie from my point of view is that I felt a little bit excluded from the target audience. This film deals with College age teenagers and that seems to be exactly the audience it’s going after. So everything that comes out of the various characters mouths seems a little naive or innocent or... I dunno... just plain childish?

But that’s fair enough. It’s a small grumble and I was so caught up in the snazzy editing and energetic pacing that I kinda forgot everything else. Definitely worth a watch to support a good little British movie that brings a kinda Tarantinoesque quality to the teenage movie market. Good stuff!