If Only This Were Out Of Sight: Parker

This review originally appeared on the San Francisco Appeal.

By screening the Jason Statham movie Parker for critics the night before the movie opens, the studio is pretty much letting the world know they have no faith in it. Oh sure, they may have a little more faith in it than they would in a movie that isn't screened at all, but I have a feeling Jennifer Lopez's presence in the film has something to do with the screenings it did get. No way Jenny from the Block is going to be associated with that kind of movie!

But alas, Jennifer, you ARE.

And because I am having to write this in the wee hours of the morning, I'm going to have to rely on bullet points; I can't be expected to turn out the usual borderline-comprehensible review at this time of night!

• Taylor Hackford directed this. At one point in time, Taylor Hackford actually put out some solid, audience-pleasing films, (Officer and a Gentleman; Against All Odds), so even now, I sometimes get my hopes up when I see his name in the credits. Unfortunately, once again I am left feeling more impressed by the fact that he's married to Helen Mirren than I am by his film.

• Jason Statham plays a neurosurgeon who is also a single dad.

• Of course Jason Statham doesn't play a neurosurgeon who is also a single dad. This is a Jason Statham movie all the way, down to its shirtless scenes, many, many kick punches, and his playing a thief who doesn't "care about the money it's all about the integrity of the job don't you understand that now hold still while I shoot you in the face."

• Jennifer Lopez really wants you to think this is somehow on par with the great Out of Sight, but the only thing Parker has in common with that movie is its Florida location, and a scene where Lopez strips down to her underwear.

• The script is one of the worst I've seen adapted to an actual theatrical release in years. It feels like a first draft, with completely clunky dialogue, useless scenes that go on forever, and characters that exist for no discernible reasons.

• Bobby Cannavale is one of those characters. Poor Bobby Cannavale.

• Nick Nolte's character is slightly, only slightly, more useful, but every moment he's on film is uncomfortable because the man is a walking heart attack waiting to happen. He's red; he can hardly breathe; he's shaky. In all seriousness, I'm kind of worried about the guy!

• There's a flashback scene in the movie where Parker (Statham) remembers being shot in the chest when his crew turned on him after a robbery. You know, in case the audience has forgotten what happened 15 minutes prior.

• I fell asleep for a few seconds during the 45 minute sequence (approx.) where Lopez's real estate agent character is showing Parker houses for sale in Palm Beach, so I might have missed something crucial then. Apologies. [No, you didn't. Unless you wanted to hear EVEN MORE of Jason Statham speaking in a (I hope, humorously terrible) "Texas" accent--ELB]

• I kind of liked the purse Jennifer Lopez carries around throughout most of the movie; I wonder if it comes in blue?

• There's one moment where a barely conscious, bloodied-up Jason Statham looks at a small fluffy dog sitting in his lap, and smiles. I liked that moment. I hope someone makes an animated gif out of it.

• Wait for the gif and stay the hell away from Parker.

Questionable Accents: The Last Stand

This review originally appeared on the San Francisco Appeal.

Arnold Schwarzenegger has his fans. I mean, he must! You don't go from being one of the top action stars of the 1980s, to becoming governor of the nation's third largest state if you DON'T have fans. I've just never been one of them. No matter how much I'd try, and no matter how good the movies he's in might be, (and really, that kind of begins and ends with the first two Terminator movies, right?), I just could never get past the fact that Arnold is a terrible actor with an accent that isn't doing him any favors.

So, perhaps there are people out there who are anxiously awaiting the return of Arnold Schwarzenegger, action star, and they'll rush out and make The Last Stand, Arnold's first leading role since the end of his governator reign, a number one hit. But for me, well, this is the kind of movie that I wouldn't bother to watch even if it was on Netflix Instant, I had gone through my entire queue, and was clamoring for something, anything to watch next.

Schwarzenegger plays Ray Owens, the sheriff of a small border town in Arizona called Sommerton Junction. He was once a cop in Los Angeles, but after a bad drug raid left many of his fellow officers dead, he decided to leave the big city behind and settle for podunk sheriffhood in the kind of place where the only diner in town gets its milk delivered from a local farmer every morning before the sun comes up. (Are there even dairy farms in Arizona?!)

The quiet town gets even quieter when almost everyone leaves for some big local sports team championship somewhere, and Ray is looking forward to some quiet days off...until he notices some suspicious truckers in the diner, and decides to look into their legitimacy.

I'd be suspicious of them too, because one of them has an accent that defies explanation. He's played by Swedish actor Peter Stormare, and I suspect he's trying to do some kind of Southern twang, but man alive, does he fail miserably at it. 

Turns out Ray had reason to be suspicious. Those truckers are actually there to help an escaped drug lord cross the border into Mexico via a bridge over a canyon separating the countries.

The drug lord is played by Spanish actor Eduardo Noriega, (which means another slightly off kilter accent, as he's playing Mexican), and he spends the majority of the movie behind the wheel of a Corvette ZR1, a car I know the name of because it's said about 25 times in the movie. As he races from his escape point in Las Vegas to the town of Sommerton Junction, hostage in tow, he's being pursued by a pissed off FBI agent, played by Forest Whitaker. (His accent is fine.)

Back in Sommerton, Ray must pull together a motley band of deputies to help stop the drug lord from making it to Mexico. These include Johnny Knoxville, as a local gun nut with a veritable arsenal of firepower whom Ray deputizes; Luiz Guzman, (whose presence reminded me that P.T. Anderson should never have stopped using him in movies), as one of Ray's legitimate deputies; Jamie Alexander as an impossibly pretty deputy, (who never puts her long hair up, a move I will never buy since putting my hair up is the first thing I do when I get home, let alone when I'm planning on shooting people with a sniper rifle from a rooftop; shit gets in the way!); Zach Gilford, as another deputy; and finally, Rodrigo Santoro as the pretty deputy's ex-boyfriend, who begins the movie behind bars, but also ends up deputized. He's another one with an unexplainable accent, as he's a Brazilian actor playing, I assume, Mexican-American, but sounds vaguely French?!

And ultimately, there's no real explanation for Schwarzenegger's accent either, aside from one line in which he laments the fact that the evil drug lord he's fighting gives "us immigrants a bad name." Which just makes all the other attempts at accents other than the actors' actual accents just weird. When you've got an Austrian inexplicably the sheriff of a Arizona town, why bother with any other attempt at vocal realism?

And indeed, the movie requires a huge amount of suspension of disbelief, especially since the whole 200 mile high-speed chase after the drug lord could have been easily stopped after about 30 minutes with the mere placement of some tire spikes. But I guess this movie takes place during the United States' famous Tire Spikes Shortage of 2013.

Director Kim Ji-woon has made a name for himself in his native Korea for his versatility in crossing movie genres. The Last Stand is his first American film, and I will give him props for a few well-staged action sequences, including a nice bit that follows a rooftop escape via zipline onto an opposing rooftop, then down to the street below, and on to a foot chase.

But the best directing in the world just can't save a film with a script that has Arnold complaining twice that he is, basically, too old for this shit; a Corvette that can cause an SUV to flip over three times just by stopping in front of it; and a chase between two very low sports cars through a gigantic corn field with impossibly high stalks. (Are there even corn fields in Arizona??)

Finally, with all the recent debate and controversy surrounding gun control, this movie will do nothing to help Hollywood's argument that they play no real part in the country's love affair with heavy fire arms, as about 60 minutes of the film is devoted to watching people admire guns, shoot guns, and get shot by guns. America, fuck yeah!

Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Quest For Fire, Bye Bye Brazil

Day two of the weekend movie marathon included another horror movie, a movie I couldn't stand, and a movie that was probably picked by my mother.



I think this was a first-time viewing of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, but am not quite sure...I can say that the movie didn't give me nightmares, or freak the shit out of me, but I was impressed by it. Its low-budget gives it an all-around creepy feeling, and that house really looks like a crazy-ass place you might actually stumble upon after taking a wrong-turn in Texas.

It didn't leave quite the impression on me that Halloween did, but that's probably because there aren't any really developed characters in it. There's no Laurie Strode to root for. But it still remains one of the best horror movies ever.



Quest for Fire was a big snore as far as I was concerned; I just thought a whole movie in which people grunted was a waste of time. As it is, I think the only thing I remember about it is the cave-people-getting-it-on moments. Of course.

Which brings us to Bye Bye Brazil, which I'm pretty sure I slept through most of. My loss?

Targets, The Night Andy Came Home, Swamp Thing (2)

In what what must have been a weekend of non-stop movie watching, horror movies were the choice for Saturday, November 20th.

I've written about Swamp Thing already, and once again, the fact that this was on VHS for rental within the same year it was released in theaters debunks my theory that movies took a lot longer to reach the rental market back in the day. What is NOT debunked, however, is how insanely expensive it was to actually BUY movies back then, with tapes going for something like 80 bucks on average. Nuts!

The night's other two films, Targets and The Night Andy Came Home are two low budget horror movies, although one is probably better known than the other.

That one is Targets, which was Peter Bogdanovich's first movie, and an effective little thriller loosely based on the Charles Whitman shootings at the University of Texas.



The scariest thing about the movie? It is still totally relevant today...

The other movie, The Night Andy Came Home, AKA Deathdream, AKA Dead of Night, was written by Alan Ormsby, who also wrote Cat People, which is probably why I chose to watch it. It was directed by Bob Clark, the man behind A Christmas Story--and another classic Christmas movie, Black Christmas--and is based on the old story "The Monkey's Paw." In this one, parents of a son killed in Vietnam wish him back to life, but of course, that kind of thing comes with its drawbacks...



I actually don't really remember much about the movie, aside from it having a kind of spooky soundtrack, but I think it was my first introduction to the "Monkey's Paw" story, and I certainly noticed the parallels about a year later, when reading Stephen King's Pet Semetary....

Creepshow

While it has absolutely nothing to do with the holidays, for years, and even to this day, I think of Creepshow as a holiday movie, simply because it came out at the end of 1982, and I would end up watching it during Christmas breaks for several years after.

Creepshow is also one of those movies I have a distinct memory of seeing, and yet, the date seems weird.  If we did see it on November 10th, that was a Wednesday, which means we went on a school night. Which wasn't unheard of, but still seems odd.

But I definitely remember what theater it was at: the Serra, which was just off 280, before Serramonte. It was a great single-screen theater, but had a notoriously dim projector bulb, which was a bit of a problem when it came to horror movies.

Since the movie is five stories in one, (six, if you count the surrounding story of the kid and the comic book), of course some segments are going to better than others. I think my favorite is probably "The Crate," owing a lot to Adrienne Barbeau's brilliantly obnoxious Wilma--sorry, "Billie"--a woman just screaming to be eaten by a crate monster.



I also really like "Something to Tide You Over," which features Leslie Nielsen as a very affective bad guy. If you haven't seen the movie, maybe don't watch this clip, as it's the end of the segment. But I think it really illustrates what a beautiful horror movie Creepshow is, with its use of bright colors, emulating comic book panels and comic coloring.



Even the weaker stories, like "The Lonesome Death of Jordy Verrill," have their moments, even if Stephen King's bad acting almost ruins it.

Yep, Creepshow is a movie I grew to love even more as an adult, and one I could watch over and over again, and never grow tired of.