Movie Review: Any JCVD Movie

So, tonight there was a rather significant event going on in Dunedin called Hell on the Harbour, put on by Dunedin Derby.


They have a flash logo and are always looking for freshies.

Since we're not really into athletic women murdering each other on a track for three hours, we decided to stay in and have pizza, beer and watch a movie. But not just any movie - an 80's action movie.

Since Kyle's birthday in July, we've already been through the Patrick Swayze ultimate collection - Road House, Youngblood, Kyle watched Red Dawn for his birthday and, most importantly, Point Break. If you haven't seen Point Break, or don't know what it is, you should go rent it now. It's amazingly 90's.


Point Break was Academy-Award winning director Kathryn Bigelow's directorial debut. Movie poster copyright of 20th Century Fox.

Now, 80's action movies range in setting, structure and characters, but they always have two things in common - hair and music. With that in mind, let me present you with my review of Jean-Claude Van Damme's 1989 classic Kickboxer, a movie which spawned FOUR sequels in the early 90's, of which I've seen two and may review at a later date.

I will presenting this review as an overview of the structure of ANY Jean-Claude Van Damme movie, in the event that you haven't seen as many of his works as I have.

Of those listed on his imdb profile page. Of the 49 listed movies, I've actually seen 11 of them - so I think I'm more than qualified to run through it.

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There are at least six reasons why I like this movie.

Stage 1: The Setup

Every movie needs a setup. The setup is the exposition bit that tells you what the movie's about. This can take various forms - Lord of the Rings had a 5 minute opening deal with the story of the ring's creation, Avatar had a 25 minute opening exposition scene with Sigourney Weaver and The Lion King had aa five minute tribal migration bit introducing us to The Lion King. But I preferred the Animaniacs version that was only 1:14.

As applied to JCVD Movies:
You learn about the Bloodsport, Legionnaire, Street Fighter, Universal Soldier, whatever. In Kickboxer, it's a 30 second fight scene showing a Kickboxing match. Inspired. Clearly the plots are less complex than the movies noted above.

Stage 2: The Motivation / Revenue

OK, that was supposed to read "revenge" but, as you can see, I use the word revenue approximately 1000 times per week and my use of the word revenge is somewhat restricted. Anyway, something needs to the drive the plot of every movie. Usually you learn something in the Setup that hints at what the rest of the film will be about. In Point Break, there's a robbery featuring people wearing Richard Nixon masks - the plot thus becomes about catching the robbers. In the Green Lantern, Parallax gets released and starts destroying planets - Ryan Reynolds thus needs to stop him.


Like a Boss. Photo picked off of www.scifiscoop.com

As applied to JCVD Movies:
There's usually an initial plot, which involves either a bad guy trying to achieve something evil, or one of his mates tries to do something horribly self-centered and gets pwned (and probably teabagged).


8. teabagging
A term heavily used in the first-person shooter multiplayer online game "Battlefield 2." Teabagging is referred as, upon a successful kill of another player, crouching over the head of the victim's dead body as they lay on their back (dead); and doing so repeatedly in a "teabagging" motion. This act is to shame and humiliate the victim player, and usually incites anger and violence. This act is not unlike dances performed by football players after a touchdown.
"John began teabagging Jane after his hand grenade blew up next to her head; this angered Jane greatly."
[extract for this reference from Urban Dictionary - read other entries at your own Not Safe for Work risk]

Against his wishes, our sympathetic hero JCVD has to do the heroic thing and either kick the crap out of the bad guy, or avenge the mate who got pwned hard. In Kickboxer, JCVD's egotistical brother wins the World Kickboxing Championship, then flies to Thailand to fight the Thai champion, because they invented the sport or something.

Wikipedia tells me that kickboxing was invented in Japan in the 1960's, so the filmmakers might have been confused about the difference between Muay Thai vs. Kickboxing because UFC wasn't invented until 1993, but it's also possible that Thailand offered fantastic film and television tax credits in 1989.


Sadly, I've heard that the clubbing in Thailand is amazing. I'll probably never find out for myself, as I can think of many better ways to spend thousands of dollars and six weeks of my life. Stock image from WikiTravel.

The revenge scene was set up in Kickboxer when the Thai champ (photo below) beats the piss out of JCVD's brother, and then for good measure elbows his spine and paralyzes him for life.



According to the plot, the reason the brother lost was because he wasn't educated in Muay Thai, which is superior to American Kickboxing. So we need some character development.

Stage 3: The Characters

The characters are probably my favourite element of any JCVD movie. It's primarily because, right from the getgo, the filmmakers are saddled with the task of making a French-accented Belgian guy as American as possible.

Hero - JCVD
Let's be honest - JCVD is no Gerard Depardieu (and thankfully, to my knowledge, has never peed on a plane and caused Anderson Cooper to lose it entirely on air), so they never bother getting him to attempt an American accent.

To get around this, JCVD movies just insert a slightly ridiculous explanation for why he sounds Un-American. In Bloodsport, he was a French special agent seconded to the US Military for some reason. In Street Fighter . . . well, they never got around to explaining why Lt. Guile from Miami sounded sort of French. Oops.

To make JCVD as American as possible, he needs a name like Frank, Kurt, Alex, William Guile, Sam, etc. Universal Soldier was admittedly an exception.


Irrational Mate - Brother (Kickboxer)
Kickboxer is singularly amazing for portraying these two actors as brothers.



From this still, we've immediately got two hurdles to jump. The brothers are different races, and one of them has a heavy French accent. The explanation in the movie comes about five minutes in - here's my paraphrased retelling.

"I missed you, bro. After Mom and Dad got divorced when we were in grade school, and I stayed with him in California and you moved to Brussels to live with Mom, we were really separated." Seriously. That's the explanation.


Fry is uncertain whether this explanation holds water

But fortunately for the filmmakers, Star Trek V, Karate Kid III and Patrick Swayze's aforementioned Road House swept the Golden Raspberries that year.


Only Woman in the Universe - Some Thai Girl (Kickboxer)
No JCVD movie passes The Bechdel Test. But they throw a woman into the mix to teach young boys that, to be a lover, you have to be a fighter. Fantastic lesson if I ever heard one. Her role is restricted to cooking meals for JCVD while he trains with her uncle (the Yoda).


Culturally Diverse Local Guide - Taylor (Kickboxer)
The culturally diverse sidekick acts as cocking glue to seal up any holes that appear in JCVD's activities. In Kickboxer, Taylor is an ex-marine African American who's been living in Thailand for several years. Taylor knows the kickboxing circuit, which is convenient because JCVD needs to break into it. Taylor also knows this guy who's awesome at Muay Thai, which is also convenient because JCVD needs to learn it. Finally, Taylor has a pimp van, dresses like a pimp and is scene with Thai whores on several occasions. Not a stereotype AT ALL.

Yoda - Some Old Thai Guy (Kickboxer)
The Yoda figure is a staple in every JCVD movie. Usually, our hero doesn't have the necessary interpersonal skills and support to accomplish his end goal at the start of the movie, so he needs a trainer to show him how to learn.

This can take the form of being unable to kick a man's head right off his shoulders, or perhaps he hasn't yet learned to do the splits all the way.


Yes, that is one of my favourite screens of all time, from Bloodsport.

Learning from Yoda always culminates in . . .

Stage 4 - The Montage (Always Fade Out in a Montage . . .)

Eventually, JCVD meets the Yoda, and passes some sort of dumb test to get yoda to agree to train him. Then we have the start of the training, where JCVD has trouble running across a bridge, or suspending himself in the splits between two chairs (see above). There tends to be a lot of punching and kicking of trees and/or gym bags with awesome 80's action music in the background (turn on this Youtube clip while you read the rest of this post).

Once the montage is over, we usually get a scene to show JCVD's development as a person, where he's become a better fighter or something. In *one* of his movies, and I can't remember which one, it involved breaking concrete blocks with his hand. Since he couldn't do it before, showing a clip of it shows the viewer that Young Jedi ready he is.

In Kickboxer, he goes to a bar with Yoda and gets really pissed (ANZ slang - drunk). Then he beats the piss out of 10 local toughs, while intoxicated. And this all starts when he dances with one of their girls. This fight scene is also a montage, which nearly blew my mind.


This is an actual still from the movie. Apparently he learned to dance when living with Mom in France.

Stage 5: The Boss Fight
The end scene of any JCVD movie replicates the Nintendo Hard aspect of most ancient beat-em up games, like Final Fight, Double Dragon, Streets of Rage or a few of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle games. The commonality of these beat-em up games is they become IMPOSSIBLE to complete without Game Genie. Sometimes, once you've Genie'd to the end, it's STILL really difficult to "win."

At the end of the JCVD movie is the boss fight. Aside from JCVD trying to win revenge upon his opponent (see above), they usually Up the Stakes as well. This can include turning the fight into a deathmatch of some sort, or it could be a shoot-out with guns or a fighting match with a flying electrical bad guy.

In Kickboxer, they up the stakes by turning it into a "traditional" Thai kickboxing match. This means it has to be set in a dark underground cave lit by torchlight, and the competitors need to wrap their hands in bandages, then sticky tar, then shards of glass. So now both JCVD and the Big Bad can cut a bitch with their hands.

As expected, the Boss Fight ends with a JCVD win by knockout (and he NEVER kills the guy because Americans don't retaliate like that) and he gets the girl.

FIN

Online Gaming Fail

Today, we have an interactive game for my dear readers. It's a speed test to complete the following:

Pick a number between one and 10.
Multiply it by nine.
Add the two digits of the resulting number together.
Now subtract five from that.
Take your number and match it up with a letter of the alphabet (so 1 would be A, 2 would be B, etc.).
Pick a country that begins with that letter.
Pick an animal whose name begins with the last letter of the country name.
Pick a fruit that begins with the last letter of the animal's name.


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This is called the Orange Kangaroo game. Because most people come up with Orange, Kangaroo and Denmark as the last three answers. Our friends over at Cracked have a pseudo-scientific explanation for it, but the reason I'm linking today is because I lost the game.

Not because I couldn't think of a country that started with D, but I ended up with Apple Iguana Djibouti. This probably means I would have failed the Antarctica winter psych test.

Today's link to the Big Dead Place blog is so you can check out all of your Antarctica-related questions. It's a rather entertaining compilation of articles written by a scientist/writer/alcoholic friend-of-a-friend who spent a few years in Antarctica doing Antarctica stuff.

Movie Review

So once upon a time, there was this dude named Captain Awesome, who worked reasonably hard at his one job, was reasonably competent at his second job (no one's died yet), and admittedly phones in the third job teaching bored 20-year olds how to audit. Whatever, if you can't learn the difference between existence and completeness in four months, I'm not able to help you.

This kind of lifestyle is pretty demanding mentally, so once busy season started to end, the Captain decided to take a day off for no reason other than preserve his sanity. Also, I needed to catch up with a recently-returned Antarctica castaway ("Minnie" from Minnesota), the boss was away, and I needed a Hallowe'en costume. Minnie had not been to a movie since January, so that and popcorn was the prime focus of the day.

The other part of the story is that, as of last Tuesday, our CA hadn't been to a movie in three months because Hollywood is TERRIBLE. Seriously, there hadn't been anything decent since Harry Potter Part VII (which was, to be fair, extremely satisfying). So this very much became a situation where desperation drove you to insanity, like when you're playing poker and you've had a string of low cards, and you finally get a ten-jack offsuit and you play it because it's the best thing you've seen in a while. Bad move, genius.


For some unknown reason, this image came up from pokerbankrollblog.com when I Googled "Jack-ten offsuit." Weird.


Photo courtesy of Universal

I will say this - the day started out fantastically well, and ended pretty well, but the middle bit (THE MOVIE) was fantastically terrible. More on that later.

I woke up late - 9:30am and went to the museum for a coffee. The weather was TERRIBLE - it poured like this all day.


Photo courtesy of NZ's last independent newspaper, the ODT.


After coffee, it was off to downtown to see what movies are playing, and go to the Art Gallery, which is really quite excellent and changes quite regularly.

On the way to the cinema, we wandered past the casino, and I mused for the 500th time about how good the Ports O'Call restaurant in there is. To which Minnie responded that we should go into the casino. Now, I wasn't aware that casinos anywhere could close. However, in true Kiwi fashion, it's apparently considered a crime if an employee has to work before 9am or after 7pm.

The Dunedin casino is open 11am until whenever - whew, just made it at 11:10am. Sadly, we were not the first people to enter the Dunedin Casino at 11:10am on a Tuesday. To their credit, there are signs on EVERY MACHINE about problem gambling.



So ten minutes later, we were down $10 at the slot machines, and went to the movie to pick a film. And that's when Chris O'Donnell tricked me for what I swear will be the last time in my entire life.

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If you've been following the "career" of Chris O'Donnell of late, you'll be aware that he was in a few movies in the mid-90's, then showed his doodle to his last remaining fan in Kinsey, then came back slimmer and cuter as Finn on Grey's Anatomy (and ended up putting down Meridith's cancer-stricken McDog), then disappeared for a few more years.


Photo from ABC / Grey's Anatomy - please don't sue, Shonda

Then he joined one of the more interesting franchise in the history of television. I am, of course, speaking of the JAG-NCIS-NCIS:LA trifecta of courtroom drama . . . and I've never seen a single episode of any of them. Seriously - JAG was on for 10 seasons, NCIS has been on for 9, and LA is in its 2nd season. The only series to rival this is CSI (12 seasons), CSI Miami (10 seasons) and CSI NY (8 seasons). We'll ignore CSI Las Vegas.


You don't know what JAG looks like either. But NBC does.

So back to my original point. Way back before most of this stuff, there was a beloved little movie based on an 19th century French novel called Les Trois Mousquetaires par Alexandre Dumas. The cast was adorable - it featured Chris O'Donnell and three actors who had drug habit in their past, present and future.


I just did a fact check and Oliver Platt has not, as far as I'm aware, been involved in any sort of drug-related shenanigans. But the other two have about six incidents each, so it averages out.

So anyway, this little movie was released in 1993, was pretty cute and lighthearted, everyone spoke American English except the bad guy, Tim Curry, who played it Anglo-French. And, like many people, I have only the fondest memories of movies which I've only ever seen on TBS: The Superstation, at either 8:05 or 10:05, because they like to be themselves. Hey, it works nicely when they air Braves games.

So we're at the movie theatre, and we're looking at the available movies, and I'm thinking "Smurfs, Oprah's Book Club, Subtitled, Paranormal 3, Robot Fighting Movie, Other Robot Fighting Movie - oooh! Three Musketeers!" And I really thought it was going to be a little bit of swordplay, a little bit of fun, and most definitely a popcorn flick. I honestly thought it would be pretty bad, and I'll tell you why.

I hadn't read a review - I don't really believe in them. But, for good movies, the television usually tells you about 4 weeks before a movie premieres that something good is about to come. They spend a lot of cash to tell you way in advance, so you get excited about it, there's a build up, all that jazz. These are called "commercials." Before the days of PVR / Tivo, people used to watch commercials during scheduled breaks in their programming. Big companies would pay networks millions of dollars to air their commercials during these breaks. And it worked, because the companies got advertising, and TV networks got the money to produce quality programming.

When Tivo was invented, advertising revenues dropped and we started getting this:

Thank you, MTV.

In conclusion, commercials generally tell you whether producers believe in a movie enough to spend money to get you to spend money seeing the movie. Make sense? When a movie has a blockbuster cast, but you DON'T see advertisements for it, you should probably stay away from it. We learned the hard way, but at least I got a beer and a popcorn out of it.

Warning: Spoiler alerts below, but you're not going to want to see this film anyway

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Act 1: A New Hope

The film is set in 1625, like the book. This is important. It starts out Italian Job style, in Venice. There's a guard on a dock, standing around with a pike or something. Then a guy (Matthew MacFayden) rises up out of the water in diving gear and shoots him. I s@^! you not.


And then he kills the guard using hidden knives or something, and two more guards.

Then . . . some other stuff happens, we meet the other two guys, Titus Pullo and Hot Priest, and the femme fatale Milla Jovovich. They do a break-in scene that is somehow less believable than that scene in Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back where Sissy, Missy and Chrissy bust into the bank with the diamonds. That's right, I said less believable.

Then they meet up with a dude who has a French accent. But wait! the astute reader will interject - aren't they in Italy? Shouldn't everyone they meet have an Italian accent?

The easier, and less head-explodey, answer is no. Because accents do not matter in *this* imagination of the tale of the Three Musketeers, which is about three French swordsman and a French farmboy trying to stop a pseudo-English plot to dethrone the French king and replace him with a French cardinal. It took the next scene to confirm my suspicions, which is D'Artagnan (Logan Lerman) learning to be a swordsman from his father.

Please review the following chart of characters, the nationality of the character, the nationality of the actor who played the character, and the accent they display on screen:

Italian Guy, Italian - ??? actor, French accent
Three Musketeers (Athos, Porthos, Aramis), French - English actors, English accents
Cardinal Richelieu, French - Oscar-winning German actor, French accent
Milady de Winter, French - American actor, American accent
Louis XIII, French - English actor, English accent
Rochefort, French - Danish actor, English accent
Duke of Buckingham, English - English actor, English accent
D'Artagnan, French - American actor, American accent
Queen, French - English actress, English accent

As you can see by the chart above, there's no rhyme or reason for the accents to be all over the friggin place. It actually made the plot really hard to follow, because the English people sounded like the French, and the Americans looked as out of place as an alligator as a crocodile convention.

This is the point of the film where I first considered the possibility that this could be the new Rocky Horror. A film so terrible that people want to dress in costumes and watch again and again, starting at midnight, while screaming things at the screen.




Act 2: Many Bothans Died to Bring Us This Piece of Crap

OK, so the accents were abysmal, but let me get to the real problem with this film: the script. The script was a combination of a Disney Channel original show, Mean Girls, and a Kei$ha music video. Here's a link to the parody video if you haven't seen it.

The script did make me laugh here and there. There was a running gag about English vs. French fashion, and some of the pauses were awkward and hilarious. The script did, however, include the following unnecessary / unrelated scenes:

- Milla Jovovich killing twenty guys on a balcony for no reason other than to include a slow-motion fighting sequence, including the high twisty-jump thing made famous in Crouching Tiger, Hiddon Dragon
- the 3 Musketeers plus D'Artagnan slaughtering about 40 guardsment, with a limited amount of blood and villagers cheering thereafter
- pigeons pooping on a guy's face
- sailing to England to break into the Tower of London and steal back the French Queen's Necklace
- a situation where a lady buys clothes for Titus Pullo; it's funny because, you know, women aren't allowed to own stuff and such



And, of course, much of this was in 3D (which we didn't see, but probably should have in retrospect).


Act 3: I am Cronos, Master of Anachronism!

The one really impressive feature of this film is how Paul WS Anderson, who has previously brought us such amazing work as Death Race, Alien vs. Predator and Resident Evil, managed to manipulate time and space to include all sorts of stupid crap in this movie, which as noted above was set in 1624.

Among my favourite anachronisms:

Diving Gear
- as noted above, absolutely not

Versailles
- the movie is quite obviously set at Versailles palace on the outskirts of France. I couldn't verify this while watching the movie, because I wasn't sure when Versailles was built OR when the movie was set. For the record, construction of the main palace at Versailles didn't begin until 1632. The extensive renovations which we see today were begun on or about 1682, a full 50 years after.


Photo courtesy of Wikipedia Commons

Steampunk
- a key plot point of the film is the fact that the English have designed an airship that will be used to wage air warfare (aka "airfare") against the French. To say this requires some suspension of disbelief is an understatement. Here's a picture:



Now, we all know and love how the Final Fantasy series is wonderfully connected to Steampunk.



We're also aware that the steam engine was invented in 1690, a full 64 years after this film was set, and that Steampunk movement is ordinarily connected with Victorian Britain, not pre-revolutionary France.

So my question for you, Mr. Paul WS Anderson . . . why would you keep the movie in its original year of 1624 if you were going to throw in all sorts of crap that wasn't invented for another 75 years? Had you moved the film up another 100 years (or not made the mistake of mentioning 1624 of Charles XIII in the first place), you could have put together a plausible leap of faith which involved your primary setting actually existing, and the underlying technologies for the airships you've thrown in could actually being invented. Instead, what you've done is created a confusing world which straddles two and a half centuries of history.


Notre Dame
- I've been to Notre Dame. A lot of people I know have been to Notre Dame. The geography around the church that the airship crashed into during the final swordfight on the roof? NOT Notre Dame


This is real Notre Dame from this website. Even allowing for 400 years of construction in the interim, I'm not convinced that the setting was even remotely accurate.

The not so horrendous
- this film featured some pretty great costumes, which seemed period appropriate
- Orlando Bloom was perfectly cast as an annoying, smarmy, privileged Englishman. He should really consider being the villain in Disney movies for years to come


This photo is from the ODT - shocker!

I'm going to sign off with Minnie's status update post-date:

"I'm gonna be honest. It wasn't so much good as it was ... bad. We also gambled, had a coffee and a curry, misunderstood art, and walked around the Warehouse. I walked out with rubber gloves, some hangers and rags to clean up the mess that will follow. Wouldn't YOU like to know more. (But I did not purchase a mirror. Thought about it, though.)"

If only Paul WS Anderson had thought to stop by the Warehouse when he saw the script as submitted by the screenwriter, who was behind Bridget Jones 1 and 2.

Rugby World Cupdate

Hi Team,

So I'm extremely behind in the Rugby World Cupdates . . . in fact, I've missed six rounds of competition including the quarter and semi-finals. So . . . yeah, that happened.

Anyway, here's a selection of my favourite pictures from the RWC from the official website.


We had a caption contest




South Africa gave reach around a whole new definition in their game against Wales




This sheep was really excited for England




Morphsuits are amazing, and are the only things on the planet that make planking not stupid.




Richard Kahui tumbling across the try line against Japan




Romania got confused in their game against England - you're NOT supposed to push the pole, guys. Look at this picture, then consider this:



Do you see how the post is BEHIND the end zone? You know, so it doesn't disrupt play? Rugby officials haven't quite figured how to make the game not stupid.




Canada versus Tonga. Canada tied this match




As the youngest member of the Wallabies, James O'Connor (22) is forced to carry the mascot Wally wherever he goes. He's now been carrying Wally around since 2008.




I cheered for Scotland. A lot. This was one reason.




This was the other.


I think that's all I got for now. Saturday night is Wales vs. Australia for the 3rd place prize, which is mostly a victory lap for retiring players.

Also, New Zealand vs. France in the final on Sunday night. Labour Day is Monday, and I certainly won't be working hard.

Good Poker Hand, Too

Today's post is brought to you by my ASX-listed employer's sexual harassment training - enjoy!