Another mish mash so soon?
Yeah, why not?
1. I couldn’t help myself and saw On the Line starring active at the time
‘N SYNC members Lance Bass and Joey Fatone.
I was expecting not only a disaster based on who was in it but also
extreme awkwardness because Bass is gay and here he has to play a guy who falls
in love with a girl. When this movie was
made he hadn’t come out yet so I wondered if that would play into this at all. Sadly it didn’t. Bass turned out to be an ok actor. He’s not good really, but he certainly got
the job done just fine.
The film itself is your usual romance chick
flick with the guy searching for this girl that he met on the train but never
got her name or number. Since he has
nothing to go on he makes flyers describing the encounter and posts them all
over Chicago (this picture sucks Chicago’s dick so hard). Bass clearly didn’t think ahead because he’s
shocked when a million women respond.
It’s a bad movie and at times put together pretty poorly. But it’s just average bad and not anything
special. Oh well.
2.
Over the years I’ve seen most of The Juror a couple of times but I wasn’t
sure if I ever saw the ending. I
couldn’t remember it so that means I probably didn’t. Well the other night I finally manned up and
kept with it ‘till the credits. Now the
whole thing is set in New York (mostly upstate) but somehow the last ten or
fifteen minutes take place in a Mayan temple in Guatemala. How the fuck did we end up here? Once this started happening I knew for sure I
had never seen this part of the movie ‘cause I would’ve remembered this
shit. It’s so unbelievably out of place
from the rest of the two hour picture.
There was absolutely no reason to end in
Guatemala either. They very easily
could’ve tweaked things to have a showdown in another part of the U.S. like
Texas or Seattle of some shit. But
ancient Mayan ruins in Guate-fuckin’-mala?
Who the hell approved that script and why did they think it was vital to
have the story end there? I’ll admit I
like it though. It was such a left turn
that I was absorbed by the sudden drastic change in setting. I was very intrigued about where this was
headed and if there were going to be more surprises. Boy, that was such a goddamn strange choice.
When it’s all said and done The Juror isn’t a great movie. It has some fun moments and Alec Baldwin plays
a pretty dark figure but it’s nothing to write home about. Oh wait, I think I kind of just did that. Shit.
3.
Speaking of Demi Moore movies (she stars in The Juror), I finally saw G.I. Jane the other night. It’s alright.
I liked a bunch of that training shit but it was also really
cheesy. The whole thing unfolds exactly
how you think it will with one exception: the ending.
Man was this film anticlimactic. I thought Moore was going to get thrown in a
situation where she gets caught by foreign enemies, fights her way out of it,
kills a lot of dudes, rescues her squad and they escape to freedom. But instead it ends with her just formulating
some plan to save the master chief that barely works out. She doesn’t really kick a lot of ass or do
anything that makes her an exceptional soldier (at least among Navy SEALs).
On top of the lackluster finale the whole
firefight sequence that closes this thing out was shot unbelievably
poorly. I mean this is some of the worst
filmed action I’ve ever seen. And I’m
not just saying that willy nilly. I
really mean it. All the fucking snap
zooms in and out, the camera shaking, the quick cuts, the obvious lack of choreography,
the total confusion of who’s where and what’s actually happening…holy shit…it
was such a goddamn fucking mess. Equate
it to whatever you want (a group of monkeys, ten year olds, blind people, etc.)
with who was in charge of putting this together. It won’t change the fact that it exists.
But to end on a good note, the fight
between Moore and Viggo Mortensen (Daylight)
is fucking great. They really kick the
shit out of each other. That was my
favorite part of the picture.
4.
I wonder why Jackie Chan and company decided to
go for an R rating with Rumble in the
Bronx. They very easily could’ve
left out two of the three “fucks”. Maybe
the guy getting thrown in the wood chipper off camera was part of it too? I dunno.
I don’t really get it. It’s such
a light R. It could be that since this
was going to be Jackie’s first big film in North America he wanted to start off
on a seemingly edgy foot. You know, get
people interested with the fireball filled poster and the rating and then when
you have their attention show ‘em some incredible martial arting. They’ll be so captivated that they’ll stop
looking for a harder movie than the one they really made. Whatever it was it worked and established
Jackie in North America for the foreseeable future.
5.
Another film I finally got around to was Hard Rain. This was an obvious attempt by Christian
Slater to repeat the magic of Broken
Arrow. He got the same writer (Graham
Yost who also wrote Speed and Speed 2: Cruise Control) and put himself
in the starring role. He even produced
this thing further ensuring that the final product would be as Broken Arrow-y as possible.
His character, Tom, is essentially the same
guy in the same position as Hale from Broken
Arrow. Tom’s an armored car guard
and his truck gets held up. He takes the
money and hides it while he battles the bad guys. Then when the money ends up in the bad guys’
hands Tom has to go retrieve it. Oh yea,
and all of this takes place during a torrential downpour that has flooded an
entire town.
I like the idea of a town being flooded and
the water constantly rising so that it ups the ante every so often. I guess they used that angle to full effect with
a couple of moments of near drowning, boats and jet skis are ridden, giant waves
of flood water knock people over, the power goes out, one dude gets electrocuted,
large debris like trees smash into things, and so on. I can’t really think of something obvious
they should’ve done with the water that they didn’t.
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