twelve_cards

Six more rentals and a review for each except for the one that I didn't watch. Yes, I failed in my commitment to watch all my rentals and had to return one unviewed. Oh well.
 

THE TRANSPORTER 3: Another slick Luc Besson production following the adventures of ex-SAS professional driver, Frank Martin (Jason Statham). In this one, he winds up escorting a package that turns out to be this red-haired Ukrainian girl who I am sure is also a gamine model in her spare time and they get to repeat a lot of the dialogue from Besson's The Professional. See, she's the daughter of a big-time politician who refuses to sign documents with evil corporate polluters (ah, topical!) so they have kidnapped her and are forcing at gunpoint our hero to drive her across Europe. Great sequence where Statham kung-fus a bunch of thugs in a mechanic's warehouse and she is watching him from the car and he keeps taking off his jacket and his tie and doing comical Jackie Chan shit with those clothing items, until his shirt is ripped off and our shirtless Statham is fighting bare-chested with his muscular frame causing the Ukrianian girl to go all a quiver. Yes, they fall in love and kiss and stuff but I was okay with that as at least she wasn't humilated or shot naked like all the women in Statham's previous film, Crank 2. After watching Crank 2, the most generic and predictable aspects of The Transporter 3 were quite comforting really  Also a bullshit moment where Statham flips his car on two wheels so he can slide past two trucks clogging the road. Most memorable thing about the film is that it was directed by Oliver Megaton. I wish he would get his own auteur credit like 'A Spike Lee Joint' but instead it would be 'A Megaton of Film.'

WHAT JUST HAPPENED?: Now I read the Art Linson memoir that this film was based on and like that memoir it's a soft tap against the Hollywood industry with the most memorable annecdote being Alec Baldwin throwing the shits when Art Linson asks him to shave his Grizzly Adams beard off before they shoot The Edge. Here that annecdote is repeated with Bruce Willis (playing himself and NOT unfortunately playing Alec Baldwin). There are a few comic moments here or there, such as when De Niro confronts writer Stanley Tucci about him sleeping with De Niro's ex-wife but hears whispers that a big star is interested in Tucci' script and finds that more interesting, but it doesn't approach the sharp satire of either The Player or State and Main. Director Barry Levinson did a better job of skewering the role of a producer with Dustin Hoffman's parody of Robert Evans in Wag The Dog. Much like Robert De Niro's lead performance, the film just stands there existing without much laughs or insight to really offer.
 

WAR, INC: I had heard bad word about this John Cusack film, one that he produced and co-wrote much like his previous personal productions like Grosse Pointe Blank and High Fidelity. In fact the film feels like a remake of Grosse Point Blank since he plays another black-clad hit-man in an existential crisis but this time with a rewrite from The Daily Show writing stuff since it seeks to satirise American involvement in Iraq with a fictional country called Turqistan. I felt that this film would be awful from the first big joke of Cusack dialing up his superior over video phone and we see that it's Dan Aykroyd playing a Dick Cheney caricuture and shown sitting on the toilet with his pants around his ankles. I was like, "Here we go." But as it went on, I actually enjoyed the film and some of its political jokes worked like the VR "war" experience provided for visiting journalists. More importantly after watching Cusack slouch through a film like 2012, you can clearly tell he's invested here, funny and quick in his archetypical role of the weary but wounded anti-hero looking for redemption. Well worth a look but not for everyone.
 

STUCK: Macabre black comedy based on a true story about a young girl (Mena Suvari) who accidentally hit a homeless man (Stephen Rea) with her car. With his body stuck in her car's windshield, she decides to leave him to die in her garage so as to not ruin her career as a nurse. Meanwhile the homeless man, still alive though bleeding profusely and stuck with a windshield wiper stuck in his stomach, tries to figure out how he get out of this situation. Stuart Gordon's film version of such a grotesque incident is both an effective close quarters Hitchcockian thriller and a cracking satire of the American economic imperative. All throughout Suvari's character keeps shouting at the body stuck in the windscreen, "Why are you doing this to me?" and the whole story is like a perfect metaphor for anything really (the economy, war in Iraq, whatever you want) since it involves one person not acknowledging the grave situation, blaming the other person and doing anything they can to remain free and clear.  A compact flick at 80 minutes in length, it often feels like an extended Twilight Zone or Tales From The Crypt episode but the acting is great and the writing smart. Recommended though not for the squeamish.
 

VALKYRIE: Bryan Singer's film version of the famous true life plot to kill Hitler is watchable and well acted but never seemed to prove to me that it was necessary for some reason. It's all plot basically, sticking close to the planning and execution without providing any depth or shading particularly with Tom Cruise in the lead strictly in hero mode rather than really giving anything different (I do think he can be a good actor and at least watchable but here it just feels very muted and uninteresting). Also, what are we to make of a film that celebrates German resistance to The Third Reich but stars primarily British actors led by an American?