Colette Arrand

Tag: Johnny Knoxville

  • Movie Review: The Last Stand (2013)

    Movie Review: The Last Stand (2013)

    The Last StandThough botox, spray tans, and intense training regimens can try to reverse the ill-effects of time, even the most stalwart action hero will eventually succumb to the ravages of his old age. Though Channing Tatum, Sam Worthington, Gerard Butler, and Jason Statham are for one reason or another incapable of claiming the skull- and gun-hewn thrones of 80s titans Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone, nearly every role the two have taken since Terminator 3 has acknowledged that their heads will eventually be unable to bear those heavy crowns. Of course, the empire the pair surveyed has shrunken considerably since the 1980s. While Stallone has been able to make hay by revisiting Rocky and Rambo and has made a small fortune with the Expendables movies, the kind of dumb, charming action movies he and Schwarzenegger used to make between tentpole movies like First Blood or Predator are no longer the cash cows they once were, nor do they make tentpole movies like First Blood or Predator anymore. After an extended dalliance with politics, Schwarzenegger makes his proper return to action films with The Last Stand but, instead of being hailed as a conquering hero, finds himself saddled with a January release date—typically the death knell for films that aren’t expanding Oscar contenders.

    Is this fate necessarily fair? Yes and no. The majority of The Last Stand, in making every accommodation for Schwarzenegger’s considerable rust, creaks and groans with its star as he goes through the motions. Even during his prime, that a movie would ask its audience to believe in Arnold Schwarzenegger, small town sheriff, is a stretch—something from a lazy sketch comedy show—and yet there he is, patrolling the dusty streets of an Arizona hamlet, teaching his bumbling deputies (Luis Guzmán, Zach Gilford, and Jaime Alexander) the finer points of police-work while bemoaning that the town’s war hero (Rodrigo Santoro) has become the town drunk. Things on patrol are so boring that most of Sheriff Ray’s deputies can hang out with local gun nut Lewis Dinkum (Johnny Knoxville) without missing a beat. Out in the big city, however, the FBI botches the transfer of a big-time Mexican drug kingpin (Eduardo Noriega) who takes an FBI agent (Génesis Rodríguez) hostage and takes off for the border in a souped up muscle car. With head agent John Bannister (Forest Whitaker) utterly powerless to stop that kingpin from slipping over the border, its up to Sheriff Ray and his skeleton crew to make a stand.

    This is the American debut of director Kim Ji-woon, whose versatility and appreciation for genre filmmaking makes him uniquely suited for a modern Schwarzenegger film. He’s hamstrung by a screenplay that divides its time between Whitaker’s bumbling pursuit of the bad guy and Schwarzenegger’s bumbling attempt to stop the bad guy’s henchmen (led by a wonderfully hammed-up Peter Stormare) from constructing a bridge that spans the ravine separating America and Mexico. Drug kingpin Gabriel Cortez almost smothers The Last Stand with his cheap suits and macho platitudes; every scene save his demise at the hands of Sheriff Ray is forgettable, though they try really hard to make something more of him. The FBI is also patently unnecessary save for your usual exchange between local law enforcers about how ticked that the FBI is coming to town to take over jurisdiction. In fact, The Last Stand is so overstuffed with inessential characters and details that its easy to miss out on the fact that Ji-woon is setting up for an impossibly pleasing final firefight in Sommerton Junction, abandoned for the weekend for an out-of-town high school football game.

    That battle—really the film’s third act—is one of the most satisfying bloodlettings a standard action movie has featured in awhile, using effective staging, a varied arsenal, and a car chase that sends two muscle cars through an endless cornfield before Sheriff Ray and Gabriel Cortez meet on the bridge for their final slugfest. Even that feels like a breath of fresh air: despite Schwarzenegger’s imposing physique, very few of his movies end in hand-to-hand combat. Here, both Ray and Cortez rely on an arsenal of brutal looking maneuvers adapted from professional wrestling and combat sports. It used to be that wrestlers and martial artists showed up in Schwarzenegger movies with guns and grimaces to serve as cannon fodder. That the man himself ends up in a triangle choke feels like a more genuine acknowledgement of changing tastes than Chuck Norris’s deployment in The Expendables 2 as a man dispensing seven-year-old internet memes.

    Were Stormare the main villain and the FBI left behind at the scene of their botched operation  it’d be possible to talk about The Last Stand in terms of it being a comeback vehicle. Instead, we’re given Schwarzenegger and a collection of incomplete characters creating chaos in the desert. Say this for the man: though Hollywood has strip mined his formula, he still manages an effortless charisma. He’s not much of an actor, but he’s still a hell of a personality, and within his genre, that counts for a lot. Movies like The Last Stand and men like Arnold Schwarzenegger may not prop up the industry like they did 20 years ago, but they’re also not a bad accompaniment for a tub of popcorn.

    The Last Stand. With Arnold Schwarzenegger (Sheriff Ray Owens), Johnny Knoxville (Lewis Dinkum), Forest Whitaker (Agent John Bannister), Peter Stormare (Burrell), Jamie Alexander (Deputy Sarah Lawrence), and Luis Guzmán (Deputy Mike Figuerola). Directed by Kim Ji-woon and produced by Lorenzo di Bonaventura. Screenplay by Andrew Knauer.

  • Movie Review: Movie 43 (2013)

    Movie Review: Movie 43 (2013)

    Movie 43Way out west they made this movie, a movie I want to tell you about, movie by the name Movie 43. At least that’s the handle its loving producers gave it. Movie 43 doesn’t have much use for the name, itself. This Movie 43, even though its about a deranged man (Dennis Quaid) who pitches a movie to some poor schmuck producer (Greg Kinnear) at gunpoint, never calls itself anything. That’s fine. Movies as bad as Movie 43 probably don’t wish to self-identify. There’s a lot about Movie 43 that doesn’t make a lot of sense to me, and a lot about where it was produced, likewise. But, then again, maybe that’s why I find that place so darned interesting.

    They call Los Angeles, “The City of Angels.” I don’t find it to be that, exactly. But I’ll allow, they make some nice movies there. Of course I can’t say I ever saw one where Hugh Jackman had testicles on his chin, or where Superman slicks his spit curl with his super sperm. And I ain’t never seen a cartoon cat violate itself with a toilet brush, as a fella says. But I’ll tell you what: after seeing Movie 43, this movie that I’m about to unfold, well, I guess I’ve seen something every bit as stupefying as you’d see in any other movie, and in color, too.

    Now this here movie I’m about to unfold took four years to make, just in the spare time its wildly overqualified cast had in-between other projects that people actually enjoy; movies and TV shows—many of them comedies—with some degree of critical and/or popular acclaim. I only mention this because sometime’s there’s a movie—I won’t say a film, because what’s a film?—but sometime’s there’s a movie—and I’m talking about Movie 43, here—sometime’s there’s a movie, well, a movie that’s absolutely the result of spare time. Hugh Jackman, Kate Winslet, Seth MacFarlane, Liev Schreiber, Naomi Watts, Anna Faris, Chris Pratt, Emma Stone, Richard Gere, Uma Thurman, Kristen Bell, Kate Bosworth, Chloë Grace Moretz, Halle Berry, Terrence Howard, Elizabeth Banks—they just fit it right in there, in their spare time. That’s Movie 43. Filmed in Los Angeles. And even if it’s a lazy movie—and Movie 43 is most certainly that, quite possibly the laziest movie filmed in Los Angeles County,which would place it high in the running for laziest worldwide—sometimes, there’s a movie. Sometimes, there’s a movie.

    Lost my train of thought here. Aw, hell. I’ve done introduced it enough.

    Movie 43 wastes no time, opening with a sketch wherein Kate Winslet goes on a blind date with Hugh Jackman, who, as mentioned, has a pair of testicles dangling from his chin. Winslet—who is, as Quaid’s pitchman describes her, smart and career driven—is the only person in the five star restaurant who can see Jackman’s pendulous scrotum, though if it’s because of Jackman’s money or Movie 43’s unfailing belief in women as shrill, howling she-beasts is unknown. This sketch—and most of the sketches contained here—is modeled off of the hair gel joke from There’s Something About Mary, a gross out gag designed to get people in the theater to go home and tell their friends about that one hilarious scene. Those who went to see There’s Something About Mary were rewarded with a complete film. Those who see Movie 43, on the other hand, will be seeing 90-minutes of sketch comedy that can be charitably described as “half finished.” Even Movie 43’s wrap-around sketch, the plot that’s meant to justify the rest of the movie, a segment that had four years to find a resolution, instead ends with Kinnear, Quaid, Common, and Will Sasso throwing up their hands and shrugging their way into the penultimate sketch, which is about how black people are really good at basketball.

    There’s nothing about Movie 43 worth praising, but hey, at least it’s out to offend everybody, right? Though twelve people directed bits and pieces of Movie 43, its preoccupation with race, gender, and sex suggest something of a hive mind mentality. Even if white people can’t jump and Asian men aren’t attractive to Halle Berry, the women of Movie 43 have it the worst. Their demands—like Anna Ferris’s wish for Chris Pratt to incorporate scat into their sex life—are unreasonable. Their behavior—like Emma Stone’s general filthiness and Elizabeth Banks’s abuse of an animated cat—is unconscionable. When Kate Bosworth points out that horny teenage boys are likely to stick their appendages into the moving parts of an iPod designed to look like a naked, catatonic woman, she’s regarded by the mostly-male board of an Apple-like conglomerate as a buzzkill. When Chloë Grace Moretz has her first period, not only do her boyfriend and Chistopher Mintz-Plasse freak out about the blood, but her father and Patrick Warburton regard her condition as, quote, disgusting. Even if you’re the sort of person able to mine pleasure from watching the incredibly famous humiliate themselves, Movie 43 has little to offer: as the blooper reel that plays during the credits handily illustrates, everybody involved is more in on the joke than you’ll ever be.

    Movie 43 was pretty clearly inspired by The Kentucky Fried Movie and Amazon Women on the Moon, though what genre it’s out to mock is beyond me. The targets, I suppose, are hacky, feel-good movies prone to rousing speeches, slow clapping, bro hugs, and passionate first kisses, but when a sketch mocking modern superhero movies ends in the BOOFs and POWs of the old Batman TV show, the result is something botched and horrible: a Frankenstein’s monster akin to Epic Movie or Meet the Spartans, but with the benefit of legitimately funny people like John Hodgman, Aasif Mandvi, and Jack McBrayer standing around with their dicks in their hands, as opposed to a gaggle of folks from central casting. Not every sketch movie gets to be Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life, but few make as succinct an argument against the genre as does Movie 43. As a fella wiser than me once said: sometimes you eat the bear, sometimes the bear, well, he eats you. Just pray that the bear doesn’t have testicles dangling from its jaw.

    Movie 43. With Dennis Quaid, Greg Kinnear, Hugh Jackman, Kate Winslet, Liev Schreiber, Naomi Watts, Anna Faris, Chris Pratt, Kieran Culkin, Emma Stone, Richard Gere, Kate Bosworth, Jack McBrayer, Aasif Mandvi, Justin Long, Jason Sudeikis, Uma Thurman, Kristen Bell, John Hodgman, Christopher Mintz-Plasse, Chloë Grace Moretz, Patrick Warburton, Gerard Butler, Seann William Scott, Johnny Knoxville, Halle Berry, Stephen Merchant, Terrence Howard, Josh Duhamel, and Elizabeth Banks. Directed by Peter Farrelly, Banks, Griffin Dunne, James Gunn, Bob Odenkirk, Brett Ratner, and 6 others and produced by Farrelly, Charles B. Wessler, Ryan Kavanaugh, and John Penotti. Screenplay by Gunn and 17 others