The Big Boss (1971)

Tagline: KARATE KUNG-FU! The new screen excitement that gives you the biggest kick of your life!

Curiosity: I wanted to see Bruce Lee beat up drug dealers.

Plot: Looking for work, Cheng (Lee) moves in with his cousins. His cuz Hsiu Chen (James Tien) gets him a job at an ice factory. But the ice they sell… IS LACED WITH DRUGS. When Hsiu investigates, he ends up dead. But how can Cheng avenge his beloved family member when he swore an oath against fighting to his mother? Maybe he’ll come around once the drug dealers kidnap his crush Chiao Mei (Maria Yi)… who is also his cousin (which is gross and weird and gross!)

Thoughts: Big Boss is all types of crazy. It’s crazy because of the incest. It’s crazy how many people the drug dealers kill in an attempt to cover up their dealings, yet nobody ever calls the cops. It’s crazy how many people Lee defeats via nardular destruction. Also it’s crazy that for the first half hour or so, Lee is actually the comedic sidekick.

Tien gets all the fight scenes for the first 30 minutes, something I did not expect when I bought this film as part of a Bruce Lee box set. While Tien beats up bad guys something fierce, Lee is reduced to making faces at a necklace his mama gave him while lullaby music plays to remind that fighting is wrong. I like to think that he’s just a very sleepy Bruce Lee.

Which makes it all the better when he loses his shit [fast-forward to 1:15 if you want]:

Also enjoyable: Watching Lee stagger around after downing a bottle of Hennessey. Dude was cool.

Big Boss isn’t perfect. There are long stretches without action or plot advancement – this could have been a tight 90 minute flick, and I definitely could have done without the love story. But the fight scenes and shockingly abrupt ending are so perfect that they buoy the film overall.

Reflection: Just once, I would like to scream like that at a customer.

What I've been up to lately...

Just finished the first season of Star Trek. Two more to go. Posts will be infrequent until I finish this beast. Until then, here are videos of Iron Man bein' awesome:

Defendor (2010)

Tagline: Fight back.

Curiosity: It stars Woody Harrelson as a crazy person! He throws wasps at people!

Plot: Thick-as-a-brick construction worker Arthur Poppington (Harrelson) spends his nights searching for Captain Industry, his mother’s killer. Along the way, he becomes bff with a crack whore (Kat Dennings), repeatedly beats up an undercover cop (Elias Koteas), and causes an awful lot of mischief for both a drug syndicate and the police force.

ALSO HE THROWS WASPS AT PEOPLE.

Thoughts: While the trailer makes Defendor look like a comedy – like the Canadian Kick-Ass – it’s actually the awful, non-union equivalent of Chris Nolan’s Batman films. Oh sure there are jokes spread around – WASPS!!! – but the majority of the film strains towards grittiness and drama. Yet it’s still a fairly ridiculous premise and, without someone like Nolan to guide the material, the film fails to work as a comedy or a drama.

I blame in the script. Harrelson does what he can with the material, and Dennings makes for a convincing crack whore (which I think is a compliment?), but the dialogue is too hammy to deliver much oomph. It’s pulpy, ludicrous – oddly enough the stuff of comic books, but it often fails the actors here. That the film comes padded at 100+ minutes doesn’t help either. One minute the viewer is expected to take drug trafficking very, very seriously, the next we’re to laugh at Arthur’s mental issues.

The movies feels perpetually ready to cross the line into tastelessness, as its few sources of humor stem from prostitution and mental retardation, but it can’t even make the leap into true trash. Defendor is too serious yet too silly, too offensive yet too toothless.

Reflection: Not to get all spoiler-y, but the self-important ending felt like a deliberate, personal attempt to piss me off. Superman IV: The Quest for Peace didn’t even get this self-righteous.

Gigantic (2009)

Tagline: Quirky mumble mumble! [Note: This is not the actual tagline]

Curiosity: My special lady friend wanted to rent it during a recent Blockbuster trip. And hey, it features supporting turns from John Goodman, Ed Asner, and Zach Galifianakis.

Plot: Mattress salesman Mumbley (Paul Dano) is super duper indie and has a scientist best friend. When he sells a mattress to the wealthy and influential Al (Goodman), he gets a bargain: Al’s autistic but hot daughter Happy (Zooey Deschanel) has car sex with him the second time they meet! Now he’s just gotta figure out how to keep their relationship steady while tripping mushrooms with his dad (Asner)! And he’s trying to adopt a Chinese baby!

Reflection: Interestingly, the adoption plot point was the genesis for Gigantic’s script, but it’s the first thing I would have cut. The story’s actual focus is the relationship between Mumbley and Happy, which has its own issues, but throwing in a the unrealistic, arbitrary adoption angle is too much. Per the dialogue, Mumbley makes $700 a month; most adoption agencies require a family’s income to be at least $80,000 a year. So, uh, that’s bullshit.

Also bullshitty: Everything else. The movie piles on the quirks without stopping to make sense. Galifianakis plays a bum who assaults Dano throughout the film, and while his presence is arguably to symbolize Dano’s issues with becoming a man¸ it’s a flimsy side story at best. Why symbolically show his growth when you could, I don’t know, have a plot?

Watching Dano and Deschanel interact is painful at times. Happy has no job, prospects, or personality. Nathan Rabin once coined the phrase Manic Pixie Girl, meant to describe the hyperactive women in indie comedies who save nebbishy men. Deschanel represents the inverse of that, the Autistic Slut. She’s beautiful, but she also has no personality. In a way, she represents everything I hate: rich, maddeningly stupid, pretty fucking useless.

AND ON TOP OF THAT, I don’t know if I can enjoy Up as much having watched Asner trip balls.

Reflection #1: I take a lot of grief from the girlfriend for my love of bad movies, but I just wanna say that I picked the stellar Irish indie drama Five Minutes of Heaven while she chose Gigantic. I got taste; I just don’t employ it often.

Reflection #2: We had to literally walk through shit to get inside Blockbuster, which I think symbolizes how the company is doing perfectly. When you’re so in the red that your employees won’t clean up goose poop in front of your entrance and exit, maybe you should just close up shop.

Mega Piranha (2010)

Tagline: They were created to save mankind. Something went wrong.

Curiosity: My good friend Eric Crack was so excited for this made-for-TV movie that a party instantly formed around his anticipation. Cookies were served.

Plot: A group of scientists, led by Tiffany (of “I Think We’re Alone Now” fame), accidentally designs super piranhas that grow at an exponential rate. They also accidentally set them loose in Venezuela. AND pretty much er’rybody in South America hates them. Rough week. When the jumbo piranhas eat an important, meaty American diplomat, government guy Bob Grady (Greg Brady from The Brady Brunch! See what they did thar?) sends in well-muscled, badly dubbed Jason Fitch (Paul Logan, Komodo vs. Cobra) to take out these extra-large piranha.

But then they get mega-sized. And the Venezuelans are really, really angry about that.

Thoughts: Everything about Mega Piranha is amazing and I will fight you if you say otherwise. OK, actually, I’ll just mumble something under my breath next time I see you at the local market, but you get the point. Mega Piranha more or less knocks out all of its key plot points within its first 14 minutes – sans the ending obviously. That means that the next hour or so is filled to the brim with good ol’ piranha action. Sometimes Tiffany acts with aggressive hand gestures. Sometimes Greg Brady looks all old and Brady-ish. But mostly, CGI piranhas ate models and kids and it was awesome. At one point, Logan bicycle kicked a bunch of piranhas. This scene was so awesome that someone on this glorious series of tubes we call the Internet saw fit to loop it:

I am so stoked on being alive right now. Mega Piranha’s brisk pacing makes it an efficient action flick even if my friends and I enjoyed it more for its extremely cheesy flavor. The acting is ridiculous, the special effects are poor, and the fact that Greg Brady’s part amounts to little more than stunt casting kind of makes me question reality. But when those piranhas tear into nuclear submarines and overbearing mothers alike, it makes me feel so dang good.

Also Logan blows up a bad guy’s head with a flare gun at one point. How did that get on air?

Reflection: This is one of the best movies I’ve seen so far this year. I mean, A Single Man and Shutter Island are on my short list too and what-not, but man, I got sweet, sweet sci-fi action and cookies to boot.

Repo! The Genetic Opera (2008)

Tagline: From the producers of Saw!

Curiosity: Basically, it had Anthony Steward Head from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and I am stupidly loyal to the people I love.

Plot: In a totally industrial rock/goth dystopian future, people need to buy organs from corporations (corporations run by The Man!) to stay alive. If they don’t, Repo Men take ’em back [SIDE NOTE: This is the exact plot to Repo Men, the unofficial sequel to Repo Man, sans music. I find this interesting since Repo Men has fuck-all to do with Repo Man.]. In this hellish Hot Topic-laden time, organ vendor Rotti Largo (Paul Sorvino) has hopes to make Shilo (Alexa Vega from Spy Kids!) the heir to his empire. This is difficult since…

A) She’s not his kid, but rather the daughter of rival Nathan (Head).

B) He’s got kids of his own. Evil kids!

C) Eh…. Who gives a shit?

Somehow Paris Hilton and Sarah Brightman factor into this.

Thoughts: As a rule, musicals recall a higher suspension of disbelief than most works of fiction. The audience has to accept that people burst into song at random. Repo! puts this requirement to the test by having the characters sing ALL THE TIME WITHOUT REGARD TO METER OR RHYME. Repo! actually holds the record for most songs in a musical as of this writing at 64, and the filmmakers actually had to cut songs from the film. While it’s arguable that having characters sing dialogue is unnecessary, Repo! succeeds in having its songs be extra-unnecessary. The music is badly mixed, with the backing music and back-up vox mixed way, way down compared to the lead vocals, creating a sort of knockoff karaoke effect. The music itself is sub-Ministry industrial, so maybe the low mix isn’t such a bad thing. The crap tunes are far more uncomfortable than the gore, which is sadly scarce.

There are plenty of crappy lines throughout. Check out “Infected” – with lyrics! – below:

Yet people on the Internets really like this song.

Reflection: I am wasting my life.

The Wild Angels (1966)

Tagline: Their credo is violence...Their God is hate...and they call themselves 'The Wild Angels.'

Curiosity: I like Easy Rider a lot. And I wanted to know if Nancy Sinatra could act.

Plot: Heavenly Blues (Peter Fonda, star of Easy Rider… and Ghost Rider… and Thomas and the Magic Railroad!) is the leader of a gang of jerk-butts called the Wild Angels. They’re on a quest to avoid the Man! The Man is always telling them not to ride their motorcycles! Or rape women! What a dick!

Also they’re trying to save their friend The Loser (Bruce Dern) from the cops.

Thoughts: The Wild Angels was my third Roger Corman film (behind the awful Gas-s-s-s and the actually not bad The Pit and The Pendulum with Vincent Price, and probably my least favorite. Gas was at least funny-bad; Wild Angels is borderline offensive. I say borderline because, being a Corman film, I didn’t exactly expect it to open my eyes to new artistic directions.

Rather, I expected a threadbare line of a plot broken up by long, dialogue-free scenes of partying and car chases. These expectations were thoroughly met. If there is a plot, it’s arguably Blues’ relationship with The Loser – their exploits together, his attempt to save him, and, when he fucks that up, the feeling that he needs to give the guy a proper burial. All of these things take up about 15 minutes. The remaining 75 minutes or so are dedicated to filming whatever the fuck. Here’s a scene of bikers drunkenly chasing a rabbit for no reason! Here’s more dancing! Now let’s watch Fonda act like he doesn’t care about nobody (even though he totally does! He’s a badass with a heart o’ gold!). And there are copious amounts of motorcycles on highways, let me tell ya.

The Wild Angels is an excellent slice of ’60s counter-cultural storytelling. By which I mean just about everyone in the film is full of shit. The characters I found myself identifying with most were Gaysh (Diane Ladd), The Loser’s girlfriend and the only gang member who tries to build a better life, and the priest (Frank Maxwell) at The Loser’s funeral. When he pushes Blues to explain the Wild Angels’ anti-social behavior, their argument for absolute freedom quickly falls apart. So instead they beat the dickens out of the preacher and stuff him in The Loser’s coffin.

Reflection: …why is there a Nazi swastika at the funeral? Why is everyone OK with that…?