Spandau here………
This one picks up where the last one left off, which is being the best fucking action film series out there right now. Paul Walker and Jordana Brewster have sprung Vin Diesel from jail and are now fugitives on the run. They have made it to Brazil, but are waiting for Vin to catch up. It takes longer to sneak through customs when you’ve got twelve dufflebags of protein shakes. Jordana gets to show off her real life Portuguese speaking abilities, but I doubt this series will ever have an installment set at Yale University, although never say never. She’s holding a friends baby and then has to run out of the room and vomit, and the friend asks if she’s told Paul Walker yet and she says no. I thought this was weird because it’s pretty common to be sickened by the sight of small children and nothing to keep a secret about, but it turns out she herself is pregnant. Ah, movies and their depiction of pregnancy, they always remember the puking, they always forget the big swollen breasts. Once Walker hears the news he know life has changed and he’s going to have to keep them on the run forever so that she never has time to contemplate one of those non-sexy mum haircuts.
JAMES WAN IS BACK! After his auspicious and marvelous debut film SAW he floundered with his last two outings, Dead Silence and Death Sentence. What’s interesting is how SAW gets shoehorned in as a horror flick but watching it a second time recently, it teeters on that edge of horror and thriller and isn’t enough to fully be considered one or the other. So it makes sense that James would be conflicted with his next two follow-ups. With Dead Silence he went straight for the horror genre and with Death Sentence, the thriller. Neither of them really worked. Now, with his fourth film, he is firmly in the horror zone and the result is staggeringly effective.
Are you looking at Colin?
COLIN HAY
Gathering Mercury
2011, Compass Records
Colin Hay’s gruff tenor is known to millions as the voice of multiplatinum Aussie pop-rockers Men at Work (“Down Under,” “Who Can It Be Now?”). But only diehard fans are aware Hay was born in Scotland—and that the creativity and grandeur of his solo output eclipses his work from the early 80s. Indeed, the material on Going Somewhere, Company of Strangers, and Transcendental Highway is the stuff the Grammys were made for. Yet the man-at-work remains overlooked, notwithstanding the occasional movie soundtrack (Morning Glory, Garden State) and television cameo (Scrubs).
As much as I love The Getaway and Straw Dogs, I consider this to be Sam Peckinpah’s true masterpiece. I think the first time I saw this film was back in the late 80′s and I remember being completely blown away that this film was released in 1969 with this amount of remorseless violence. Can you imagine some dirty fucking hippie sitting in the theater coming down from an acid trip and seeking refuge in a dark movie theater for a few hours only to be bombarded with this film?
That first viewing was great, I remember being giddy with the amount of carnage. Something special happened with this film for me though, the more I saw it and the more I read reviews from the era and several books on Peckinpah, I began to understand the movie, and Sam’s subsequent movies, in a different light.
