NSFW:

—–

Brought to you by the same folks who eviscerated “Avatar,” the “Star Wars” prequels and more.

The second video expertly deconstructs the film’s overbearing politics and moral equivalencies, and hammers Lucas for his political hypocrisies.

“When the filmmakers can’t choose a clear side, it affects the overall film.”

(more…)

In an early review of Spider-Man 3, Britain’s Times Online reviewer infamously wrote:

Also disappointing is the inability of the director, Sam Raimi, to end the romp without a fleeting shot of the American flag. The Stars and Stripes just happens to be fluttering behind Spidey as he makes his triumphal return to honour, probity and good honest fist-fighting.

I thought of this review the other day after I’d exchanged a few notes with a reader (I certainly can’t call him a fan) who contacted me at my public email address. The guy was unhappy with my treatment of Muslim terrorists in one of my recent novels, and what started as Pee-Wee Herman-level “I know you are, but what am I?” schoolyard taunts quickly devolved into anti-Semitism. I’m part of the Zionist plot, see, and the plot of my book was just a plot within that larger plot.

So what do my Zionist leanings and Spider-Man’s fluttering Stars and Stripes have to do with Remo Williams, that old Eighties action flick? To begin with, Remo Williams isn’t just the title of a 1985 film, produced by Dick Clark and distributed by now-defunct Orion. Remo is also the main character in nearly 150 Destroyer novels (26 of which I’ve had a hand in writing). It’s okay if you didn’t know that. Aside from a quick opening title credit to series creators Warren Murphy and Richard Sapir, much of what makes Remo The Destroyer was jettisoned for the movie.

While the original Remo Williams didn’t do well at the box office, it has picked up a cult following through home video and cable. I’ve gotten mail from fans who’d enjoyed the film for years before finding out the books even existed. And if my mailbox is any indication, pretty much everyone who came to the books via the movie agrees with us old-time fans: None of us can believe Hollywood did such a lousy job adapting the characters to the screen. But in our current age of endless updates and reboots comes some fresh cinematic hope, and if things work out Remo will soon be starring in a brand new motion picture adaptation brought to the screen by Sony and some of the folks who gave us Batman Begins and The Dark Knight. Hopefully this time it’ll be the real Destroyer we see, a goal best achieved by not ignoring or re-imagining what’s made the book series a success. (more…)

At the urging of a friend, I recently plowed through all twelve episodes of the first season of the Fox action/adventure series Human Target (2010) on DVD. He thought I’d like it, and he was right. Loosely based off of a DC comic book character, it’s a story about a trio of badasses (a reformed assassin, a former cop, and a torture-happy, jack-of-many-trades mercenary) now running a company set on protecting innocent clients against the evildoers looking to harm them. The plots were peppered with hefty amounts of first-rate stuntwork, exciting gunplay, MacGyver-like ingenuity, and some memorably feminine (in all the best ways) supporting players.

The music by Bear McCreary (Battlestar Galactica, The Walking Dead) evoked a cinematic air in the James Bond/Indiana Jones mold, but with an underlying somberness that lent a pleasing heft to the proceedings:

YouTube -- click here to watch in full-screen

Actors Mark Valley, Chi McBride, and Jackie Earle Haley all shine in their roles for various reasons — especially Haley, whose delicious politically incorrect performance as Guerrero is the most consistently entertaining tough guy I’ve seen on TV since Michael K. Williams’ Robin Hood-of-the-ghetto Omar in HBO’s The Wire (a show that ended up ruined by its nihilistic writers, but that’s a topic for another post).

But later, settling in to begin watching Season 2 of Human Target on my computer, I wondered if Fox could bring a fledgling action/adventure series into its sophomore year without their usual pattern of first screwing it up and then unceremoniously canceling it. The sad spectacle of Big Hollywood regular Adam Baldwin’s Firefly getting canned before it even had a chance to get started was the most lamentable flameout of many at that often hapless network. Sure, they gave us The X-Files, but that was a looooong time ago. They also gave us 24, but I go against the usual conservative meme by thinking the show terrible. Human Target, on the other hand, held a lot of promise — but would they be able to capitalize on it? (more…)

I hated the ending of Raiders of the Lost Ark. No, not the Citizen Kane homage rosebud scene at the end – I loved that – but the ending of the movie. I didn’t want it to end. I hadn’t enjoyed a film that much since, well, Star Wars, Empire Strikes Back, or Jaws. I wanted it to continue. I wanted more. 

I got more and I didn’t want it. 

Why don’t sequels do well? Obviously, I’m not alone in feeling the way I do about Raiders or Star Wars or Jaws or any other great character-rich, dynamically set film that pulls you in and doesn’t fully let go even after the end titles trail up and we see that film certification symbol fade out. So, why is it that more of what we love, we hate? Well, maybe not hate, but not love quite so much. What’s going on here?  (more…)