It’s so nice to be more or less through the TV season and onto the movies. We’ve got a considerable amount of catching up to do, and Van Fleet tells me that my brand spankin’ new neighbourhood Blockbuster is now open. They knew I was comin’. Hallelujah, because Lord knows that I’ve seen just about everything there is to see at the grubby little four dalla Chinese video store up the street. And since most of us are in the same boat, I’ll do my best to have an updated video checklist out to you sometime this month.

LOVE ACTUALLY (TWO SPUDS)

This movie is kind of like eating chocolates. The first one or two are sweet and delightful, but after you have been force fed a dozen or so, the sweetness somehow loses its charm and becomes very sitcom like and just before the ending gets going, you somehow decide you just can’t take anymore of the sweetness and you get up and go upstairs to watch sports highlights.

Love Actually is written and directed by a dude named Richard Curtis. He’s a Brit so he’s written everything from situation comedies like Blackadder, The Vicar of Dibley and Mr Bean to outstanding romantic comedies like Four Weddings and A Funeral, Bridgit Jones’s Diary and Notting Hill. Just for Blackadder alone he gets my vote for being one of the finest comedic minds in show business on either side of the Atlantic.

This latest opus is a very Robert Altman-like venture in which the writer creates and plays out six different romantic stories that all end up being drawn together in a neatly contrived ending that only the most ‘Hollywood’ of minds could have come up with, and which caused me to evacuate before it was over. But up to that point we were treated to a very bright, very witty, very intelligent and, most importantly, very funny movie, which is all about, well, love actually.

Like I said, I have a lot of respect for Mr Curtis’s formidable talent, but quite frankly, I really do have to question the reasoning behind casting Hugh Grant, of all people. as the British Prime Minister. In my opinion, this crosses the line that separated the cute and funny from the absurd. I mean, sure Hugh is funny and actually appears to be taking the part rather seriously. But at the end of the day, Hugh Grant is Hugh Grant. Hell I thought he was even pushing it too far by playing a millionaire real estate developer in Two Week’s Notice.

But I digress. (Again) This movie is very well written for the most part and very funny without being cruel about it, which is Curtis’ real gift. There is a lot of touching stuff in this film and it’s all brought home by an all star cast of people who I am sure would have killed, if necessary, to snare a part in one of Curtis’ flicks.

HELLBOY (TWO SPUDS)

Right now, you can’t swing a dead cat in Hollywood without hitting a producer who’s
developing a movie from a comic book. It’s been a longstanding tradition and, admittedly, some of the best action adventure flicks ever made were appropriated from this medium.

But nowadays it’s hotter than ever. Unfortunately for some of the wrong reasons. First of all, making a movie out of a comic book assures you a kind of built-in audience of kids who will come to the movie, then buy it when it comes out on DVD and then buy, wear out and buy a second video game, and can also be counted on to buy at least $22.17 worth of other promotional merchandise. All of which is quite ironic when you consider than most comics are created by highly introverted people who are using the characters and the stories they create to exorcise personal demons of one kind or another and generally don’t give a shoit about commercial success. In the past this has made them easy prey for the pirhanas of Hollywood. Fortunately, most of them have lawyered up and are no longer being raped and pillaged.

But I digress. Hellboy has been touted as one of the best of the new generation of comic book based features and I guess you could say that’s true. Most of this is due to the performance of Ron Perlman who’s Hellboy wears his emotion right there on his sleeve.

In a nutshell, Hellboy got here from the underworld as a result of a botched Nazi funded attempt to contact the devil back in the late days of the second world war. X number of years later, the devil has showed up and wants Hellboy back. It’s not much of a plot, but these kinds of movies are more about character and action than they are story.

Like most comic book movies this one takes place in a world where there’s very little in the way of sunshine and Hellboy spends a lot of timing cleaning up the city from a bunch of underworld monsters that Satan has sent to cause havoc and create chaos yadda yadda.

Like all comic book movies you either buy into it all and sit back with your popcorn and let it happen or you snicker as it tries but fails to make you a temporary believer.
I hardly ever engage in the latter, because, quite frankly, adapting comic books is something that Hollywood has gotten quite good at. Hellboy isn’t as good as Ang Lee’s Hulk, X-Men, or even Road to Perdition but it’s OK, I guess. At the end of the day these movies are all kinda sorta interchangeable, just like the X-Box disks they eventually become.

MAN ON FIRE (TWO SPUDS)

I had read the novel which this movie is based on about 20 years ago and when I heard that it was finally coming to the big screen, I kind of groaned to myself. I guess I was wondering how Tony Scott, the director would manage the resist the pressure to high tech up and dumb down this film for today’s hard core audience of brain dead idiots.

Well the fact is that he didn’t high tech up or dumb down anything. What he managed to do was create something that’s very hard to do in mainstream cinema these days, what with all the pressure from focus groups of the aforementioned brain dead idiots and the even more brain dead studio suits who hang off their every word. He made another Tony Scott masterpiece.

Tony Scott is the brother of Ridley Scott and between them, these two crazy Brits have managed to make a couple dozen of the highest grossing and most watchable action adventure flicks of the least quarter century.

The difference between the two brothers in terms of subject matter is as negligible as their differences in style is remarkable. Ridley tends to be much more painterly in terms of what he puts on the screen, whereas Tony is more photojournalistic. But both brothers have an almost unerring sense of how to make a big time motionpicture, and I admire their skill and tenacity a great deal.

Man On Fire is about a burned-out assassin played by Denzel Washington, who takes a gig as bodyguard to the daughter of a Mexico City businessman and his gringo wife. The little girl is played by a young actress named Dakota Fanning and she is easily one of the most talented kid actors I’ve seen since Mickey Rooney. It seems odd to say it about a ten year old.

But the chemistry that she and Denzel have together in this movie is amazing. And it is this chemistry that forms the soft, warm, human core of what is otherwise and extremely violent and nasty film. But Tony Scott knows what he is doing and when the killing starts, we are extremely well prepared. Nuff said, except for the fact that there is some pretty creative stuff going on here. Tony Scott is the master of the big shot and in Man On Fire there are several.

It had been a while since I read the book, and because I don’t work for anybody who would force me to do so, I didn’t go back and re-read it to see how accurately Tony Scott and writer Brian Helgeland reproduced the book. I haven’t cared about any of that crap since I was a kid. What I do know is that this story crackled with the adrenaline rush that comes from solid everything. Writing. Editing. Music. Acting. Camerawork. Star power. And some great supporting work from the Maestro Christopher Walkin, Giancarlo Gianinni, crooner Marc Anthony, Rachel Ticotin and Mickey Rourke.

This is an extremely violent, but well rendered film, that’s sitting on the top of top ten
grossing lists all over North America. But then there’s nothing like a buncha lowlife Mexican scumbuckets being dispatched in true commando style by a Jim Beam addicted ex-special ops assassin whom they just happened to piss off severely.

One thought I had coming out of this film was that the Mexican government must have a real PR problem to deal with, as people only seem to make movies or TV series in Mexico about political corruption, drug traffic, labour slavery, kidnapping and various other forms of murder and mayhem. Over the years the accumulation of this sort of imagery must have dissuaded hundreds of thousands of pe0ple from choosing Mexico as a vacation destination.

My theory is that if they didn’t have such a bad PR image, it wouldn’t cost you a couple thousand pesos to buy a greasy taco down there.

TONY SCOTT FLICKS WORTH SEEING

Spy Game (2001)

Enemy of the State (1998)

The Fan (1996)

Crimson Tide (1995)
True Romance (1993)

The Last Boy Scout (1991)

Days of Thunder (1990)

Revenge (1990)

Beverly Hills Cop II (1987)

Top Gun (1986)

WIN A DATE WITH TAD HAMILTON (SPUD? WHAT SPUD?)

There are movies that get made in Hollywood, quite frequently, that are nothing more that are nothing more than showcases for new talent, either acting or directing or whatever. It’s kind of an expensive way to make a show reel, but it’s done all the time.

And every now and than an unsuspecting Spud like yours truly gets sucked into renting one.

Win A Date With Tad Hamilton is just such a movie. It’s Hollywood formula crap at its most basic. It features prettyboy Josh Duhamel (who is actually starring in his own TV series, Los Vegas). I guess the powers that be are just trying to see if young Josh has what it takes to be the Next Big Thing. It also features a young deb by the name of Kate Bosworth who’s biggest claim to fame so far seems to be a role in Blue Crush, an equally insipid drama about a female surfer in Hawaii.

I didn’t hate this movie. It kind of reminded me of the films that Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello used to make back in the day. Pure fluff all the way.

In a nutshell, Tad Hamilton is a completely neurotic Hollywood movie star in between
pictures. To counter the effects of some bad publicity, his handlers ( Sean Hayes & Nathan Lane in completely wasted roles), decide to auction him off to the regular folk in a Win A Date Contest. Kate, who works at a Piggley Wiggley in West Virginia wins the date and goes to Hollywood to have it. When she comes back, guess who shows up? This is basically a kind of love triangle story since Kate’s manager at The old Piggley Wiggley, (who is actually cooler looking than Josh), is in love with her but too chicken to say anything. Yadda Yadda.

Just about everybody in this film is sleepwalking through their parts, and the story, while coherent, has so little going on philosophically that this movie soon becomes the cinematic equivalent of watching paint dry.

Oh well. That’s all for this episode, tune in two weeks as we start catching some of the early summer blockbusters.