Mish Mash (T2, Independence Day, RoboCop, Cliffhanger, Rampart)

Time for a couple of miscellaneous items that I thought were worth mentioning and decided for no good reason to combine them into one post.  Here a goes:

1. Ok, not to harp on the topic of T2 but there’s one more thing I forgot to bring up in Judgment thoughts, we see the T-1000’s breath when he talks.  As best as I can remember this only happens once and only with the T-1000 (let me know if it comes up again in other parts of the movie).  It’s when he says, “say, that’s a nice bike”.  Now depending on how you look at it this breath thing either makes perfect sense or absolutely no sense.  The T-1000 is a walking computer and therefore would give off some sort of heat.  So when we see his breath in the cold night air we could assume that this is just part of this thing being a machine.  I mean we have fans in our computers to help keep them from overheating, right?  But at the same time we also have things like iphones and ipads ‘n shit that don’t require fans to cool them down (or they don’t get hot in the first place?  I don’t fuckin’ know how that shit works).  Technology in the future could progress to the point where machines don’t need bulky, loud fans to help keep them cool.  If the T-1000 is like this then we shouldn’t see his breath.  Of course you could also say that the terminator manufactured his own breath to make it appear more human.  Personally I think that’s a copout and I want to say that the whole breath thing makes no sense.  And I know this is real nitpicky but I’m sure this has run through some of your guys’ minds out there.   

2. Next, Independence Day is a pretty fucking terrible film but goddamn it the alien autopsy scene is kinda cool.  I don’t know why I ended up watching most of this when it was on about a week ago.  It’s seriously up there as one of the fakest and cheesiest fucking movies ever.  And that description goes for all of Roland Emmerich’s pictures by the way. 

When I say it’s fake I mean that nothing about the premise, characters, emotions or actions feels like it could ever possibly exist outside of a film set.  Everyone speaks and acts in clichés.  Like when Jeff Goldblum is explaining the countdown clock to one of his coworkers the coworker asks what’ll happen when time runs out and Goldblum answers, “checkmate”.  It even takes his colleague a second to realize what he’s saying.  Goldblum should’ve just said, “they’re going to attack us and we’re going to fucking die”.  Another one is when President Bill Pullman is asked what happens if the aliens become hostile and he responds, “then god help us”.  Almost every line or at least the last line of every scene is the fakest most movie-ish thing you’ve ever heard. 

Then there’s the part where Jeff Goldblum and Will Smith fly an alien spaceship.  Ok, putting aside that the humans were somehow able to tap into this alien piece of technology and give it a virus (which makes absolutely no fucking sense), these two guys actually fly the thing!  The spacecraft was designed for a totally different anatomical makeup so how Will Smith is able to just get in there and start cruising it around is beyond me.  He also looks like he flies the ship as good as the aliens if not better.  I guess those space creatures should’ve put some safety features on their shit so this kinda thing wouldn’t happen.  After all they do go from planet to planet destroying all life in its path.  I'm not even going to get into that these two guys fly into outer space and back to Earth with no space suits, source of oxygen, etc.  

And when Goldblum and Smith are walking in the desert at the end smoking cigars trying to look all cool, badass and sexy is another one of those fake things.  First of all Jeff Goldblum is not sexy, badass or very cool.  In Independence Day he plays a nerd and he doesn’t do anything badass in the whole movie.  All the flying, dog fighting, missile firing and alien punching is done by Will Smith.  And I don’t think Will Smith is particularly badass either but next to Goldblum he’s fucking Jules from Pulp Fiction.  With the cigar smoking desert swagger Emmerich is trying real hard to convince us that these guys are our ass kicking heroes but it’s just so hard to swallow.     

The last point I want to make about this film is in the form of a question, where the fuck is…the world?  It annoys me that the U.S. seems to be the only one to fight back and destroy mother ships.  It’s like the movie’s saying, “don’t worry guys America’s on the case and we’re the fucking best at everything, figuring out this countdown clock, flying alien spaceships and knowing how to take down all the aliens with one blow”.  Do you remember the end of 2012 when there was some dispute with letting people onto the arks (I think) and no one would do it until the U.S. went first?  Then when the U.S. did take action the other countries followed suit as if they couldn’t think for themselves and needed America to decide for all of them?  Yea, that’s fucking stupid.  Don’t get me wrong I love my country but I can’t stand this type of overblown dick sucking.  

There are many, many movies out there that are very “Hollywood” but this one in particular irritates me to no end.        

3. Moving on to Robocop there was a part at the end that I completely forgot about.  It’s when one of the bad guys crashes a truck into a vat of toxic waste and he comes out all mutated and fucked up.  It just seems like such a funny fucking thing to throw in there because the movie isn’t very cartoony or comic booky.  They went for a fairly realistic approach with how the thing looks and how it was shot.  And this is what I love about Verhoeven man.  If he wants a toxic waste creature at the end of his picture then he’s gonna make sure it gets in there, that it works and he’s gonna tell everyone else to go fuck themselves. 

And just to talk about the ending in general, it’s epic.  I mean there’s a shootout, explosions, a car chase, a toxic waste mutant and it’s all set in an abandoned factory (classic choice).  The final fight between Robocop and Clarence is awesome because Clarence actually stands a chance with Robocop pinned down under a pile of scrap metal (by the way isn’t it great that one of the henchmen knows how to operate the crane so he can dump it on Robocop even though there’s no context for it?  He just knows man).  And the battle gets so intense and even scary when Robocop gets stabbed in the chest with a giant metal rod and he cries out culminating the return of his human side.  It’s a great ending to a great picture.  

4. Do you guys remember the fight in Cliffhanger where Stallone goes toe to toe with one of Lithgow’s henchmen in a cave?  I had forgotten about this part of the movie myself.  And when I saw it this last time I was surprised to see how gruesome the bad guy’s death is.  So Stallone is getting his ass handed to him for the whole fight by Leon (The Temptations, Little Richard, Oz).  He can’t even get one punch in.  Then as Leon is about to go in for the kill he tells Stallone that he’s going to rape his girlfriend which gives Sly the boost that he needs to grab Leon by the balls, lift him up over his head and impale him through the abdomen on a stalactite.  Goddamn is that a nasty way to go.  Stallone must be incredibly strong to be able to not only pick up a guy over his head but also force the man’s body through a not terribly sharp shaft hanging down from the ceiling.  What gives this death extra impact is that it’s over an hour into the film and the first that Stallone directly dishes out.  The other couple of guys that die in the vicinity of him really occur by happenstance.  The stalactite death is also the most horrible way someone gets killed in the movie (in my opinion).  Probably the second nastiest is when Stallone shoots his rock climbing gun at Rex Linn (Breakdown, Cutthroat Island) and he falls into the icy cold hypothermic inducing water.    

5. This last item is one that a buddy pointed out to me and it’s a film called Rampart.  It looks like Woody Harrelson did a Bad Lieutenant rip off which of course I have to check out.  The trailer looks like it could be pretty good too.  But I’m a little skeptical because it was written by James Ellroy and I’ve never been that enthused with his body of work.  Cop is boring and not very good.  People seemed to love L.A. Confidential when it came out but I saw it recently (maybe a year ago) and it doesn’t hold up.  It’s really cheesy and the ending is anti-climactic.  Dark Blue I remember being pretty damn good actually but I haven’t seen it since it was out in theaters so who knows.  The Black Dahlia is a film I know I saw but have no recollection of it.  I always get it mixed up with Hollywoodland too because they’re both neo noir thrillers about famous real life Hollywood deaths and they came out one week apart.  And Street Kings wasn’t terrible but pretty forgettable overall.  I really hope Rampart is good though.  It would be nice to have another Bad Lieutenant type movie to watch if I don’t feel like seeing either of the actual Bad Lieutenants.