Two things I love: ridiculously bad films, and bargain price DVDs. So when we spotted Toughest Man In The World, a 1984 TV movie starring Mr T for $5.99 in the Specials/Cheap pile at my local video store, a friend and I thought we’d give it a try. It would be, in some ways, the equivalent of consuming movie junk food: cheap, nasty, yet still inexplicably and morbidly satisfying. But what does one expect from a Mr T film, really, especially a doubt-raising one like this with a PG-rating? What sort of anticipation is humanly possible for such an anomalous celebrity, particularly someone like Mr T who seemed to have somehow achieved fame and a copious amount of jewellery for no real reason at all? Unintentional humour is all well and good, however there must come a point where such blatant disregard for basic standards of one’s mental health turns horribly into a sick form of sadomasochism, particularly when this kind of trash is on the cover:

Well all right then: Junk food, check. S&M, check. Onto the review. Read More

How do you take a very ordinary, very formulaic film idea and turn it into something so over the top that it becomes an over-spectacularised mess of explosions and colour? Well if you’re Michael Bay, you:

(a) Shoot every scene with a moving, sweeping camera so that you end up focusing on the bottom of people’s chins. Or the bottoms of “hot girls”. 

(b) Base the action around America’s world-superiority and military might and exaggerate it to the point that it makes the pro-Americanism sentiments of the likes of Rambo First Blood Part II  and Rocky IV seem like dissident communist propaganda.

(c) Get as many helicopters as the film’s budget can pay for, which in the case of Transformers 2 is a lot, and have them fly around next to each other for a third of the film’s duration.

(d) Have multiple “funny” characters of various stereotypically ethnic backgrounds, particularly the African-American ‘homie G gangsta’, to balance out the hardcore caucasian American patriotism in order to, presumably, deepen the experience of the movie. 

(e) Have your CGI artists do the directing for you while blowing up as many things as possible. 

And there you have it, the five step formula for a Hollywood blockbuster. However unlike Pearl Harbour, Armageddon, The Rock, and Bad Boys I & II, Transformers started out as an excuse to sell toys to kids with the flimsiest and most nonsensical excuse of a plot holding all the figurines/characters together. Flimsy as in mechanical shape-shifting good guy aliens coming to Earth to fight their mechanical shape-shifting bad guy equivalents, all of them masquerading as vehicles while befriending humans and learning to speak English; nonsensical to the point that if a major character like Optimus Prime dies (in order to pave the way for another series of all-new toys) then no worries, just resurrect him with a convenient plot device like The Matrix of Leadership. In other words, with a film license so full of “anything goes”, Michael Bay hit the jackpot. 

Preamble, T1 and T2

I am a hardcore Terminator fan and this rant has been a long time coming.

The original was one of the very first movies I ever saw as a kid of about 6, complete with all the violence and swearing and even the sex scene – none of which made any sense to my child mind, of course. Along with the Conan films which my parents also enjoyed, I suppose it’s fair to say that I was born into being a Schwarzenegger fan, although only in hindsight do I realise that I was actually born into being a James Cameron fan. I was terrified by the dark vision of the future in the film, by how hard it was to destroy just that one Terminator, and how when 1991 came round all the kids raved on about how awesome the sequel was and how the T-1000 in particular was one of the scariest film villains ever, even surpassing the Arnie T-800. T2 lost a lot of its dark edge and replaced it with a more hopeful tale of the value of humanity achieving victory through their inner strength, and it was also the cementing of Schwarzenegger as a true Hollywood icon. But the real star was Cameron, the creator, writer, and director. He had raised his credibility with Aliens (as well as the tremendously underrated The Abyss) in between the two Terminator films, with a vision of exactly what he wanted his story to say. And he chose to end it with just T1 and 2, even shooting an alternate ending to T2 with an old Sarah Connor sitting in a park post-August 29th 1997 but opted instead for a black highway ending which was, looking back, a huge mistake.

So when does a film like Being John Malkovich get out-Malkoviched? When Takeshi Kitano makes one, that’s when.

A few words about Kitano San to begin. Many of you will remember that crazy old 80′s TV show Takeshi’s Castle, where contestants participated in a myriad of next-to-impossible obstacle courses with predictably hilarious, injurious, I’ve-got-a-bad-feeling-about-this, results. Well this is that very same Takeshi. The very same Takeshi who then went on to make a name for himself in the 90′s with hauntingly beautiful (and often very violent) Yakuza films, before finding relative international success in the 2000′s with the fascinating Zatoichi, a film about a blind samurai, a pair of revenge-seeking geishas, and tap-dancing. Obviously. And in between? Well, that very same Takeshi made a lot of weird ones too. And when I say weird, I mean crazy, messed up, only-in-Japan weird.