I just watched Rumble in the Bronx today and it was great. Incredibly fun action martial arts movie. The setpieces are incredible and outlandish and a testament to how much money Hong Kong is completely fine burning to make movies. I don’t know how it was received at the time, 1995 seems kinda late for a movie like this, which plot is 100% late 80s action. It also has a boat chasing sequence which feels played out at that point. I’m fishing for thoughts from more knowledgeable folks whether my impressions are the case or not (and if you got recommendations in case a prior movie does it all better)
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MY CUSHION!!
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Been watching old old war movies in tiny chunks. I have not seen a lot of John Wayne (who is a monster). I watch his Island In The Sky which is about a downed plane in the Canadian Wilderness. It was supposed to be him playing against type. The final line of the movie is going to stick with me. “We’ll tell your wife you are okay.” “I didn’t know you were married and had kids.” “Yeah six of them.” THE END
In contrast is SAHARA about Humprey Bogart driving a tank in retreat during the North African Campaign IN 1941. America had apparently sent some forces into the area the summer before we were in the war. Woah. Bogart makes a series of moral choices and makes sure to bury every dead man. Seeing that Tank really in the fucking desert and imagining how unbelievably hot it all was. You didn’t need to act hot and exhausted and sweaty you were already. Especially in some fucking officer uniforms. They meet up with a French Man and an Italian POW and a Somalian British Soldier and a German Pilot. all the accents do a bit to help distinquish between all the white people. This was made during the war. Anyways Bogart is great.
In continuing bad titles 12 O’Clock High has Greggory Peck as a Army Air General taking over a squadron in 1942 as they make bombing runs on Europe. You get to see them crash a B17 for real right at the beginning. The first 20 minutes is about combat fatique and PTSD and then the film kind of forgets about that because Greg is such a great leader but will he fall for the same problems as his predecessor. At the end is this combination of archive footage and actors in planes that works relatively well but does make me think “wow the dogfights in Star Wars are really good.” B17s had TEN guns bolted and cut into them. And the stock footage of seeing 12 of these planes swinging their 30cals all around was something.
As for this round Bogart > Peck >>>>>>>> Wayne
John Wayne more racist than you think he is! Also a fucking asshole.
Edit: I forgot 12 Oclock High has so many MA-3 Bomber Jackets!!! And highwaisted officer pants. Boy you are gonna wanna look at all these jackets.
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Wow I just got to watch a film in one sitting. It was Flattop which awful and all on youtube:
Which despite that I laughed really hard twice and said wow half a dozen times at the archival footage. You see real ships blowing up and planes crashing and well…probably qualifies as a snuff film. You also see a whole fuckton of ships.
George Lucas must have seen it 10 times.
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I got distracted but this was a peace time navy vanity project so the structure is really bad but there are also two very gay scenes and the second lead looks so much like Phil Hartman and is clearly the kind of guy Hartman made a career of parodying.
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Hi Rudie watch Ice Cold in Alex ok
Is there a more overrated actor than John Wayne? I don’t think so.
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De Niro
oh god hard disagree
he’s been in a lot of crap lately but he’s still incredible
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taxi driver and the king of comedy alone are untouchable, I don’t even like raging bull or goodfellas that much and casino which I adore isn’t exactly his best work, but nope, he’s safe in the pantheon
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that was my gut reaction, honestly i haven’t seen any of his older stuff
let me dig a bit deeper ,hold on
oh, i know, Benedict Cumberbatch in like, 2014.
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the best thing about this movie is it killed john wayne
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we went to the pharmacy the other day and did you know there are 35 volumes of john wayne magazine which is all shit like “the duke’s advice to a lasting relationship” and suggests some kind of mysterious, underground john wayne thinkpiece industry has existed for years. just guys getting paid to read playboy interviews with him from 1971 and write some bullshit about how not to lose your kids in family court
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speaking of things that suck, i couldn’t sleep the other night and put on frost/nixon, which has recently shown up on netflix here, hoping it would bore me enough to fall asleep to but i ended up drowsily hate-watching the whole thing, mostly because, well, frank langella is pretty captivating even in a bad movie
but like… the script for this is so bad. it’s one of those movies where the dialogue is characters explaining who they are to other people constantly. there’s almost something clever in this in that frost is portrayed as kind of a cipher, and he never has one of these little mini speeches where he tells you exactly what he believes in or whatever. so maybe it sucks on purpose? i don’t know.
also it has a really great actress, rebecca hall, playing an absolutely meaningless role, a woman who exists seemingly exclusively to bring men food, have sex with them, and occasionally do some light banter. very cool ron howard. i want someone to do a supercut of movies where women bring men food as they work on important political bullshit, it would include this movie and The Post (which sucks too, but is a hundred times better than this even though it is even more on the nose re: using nixon as a political allegory for the present)
then the interview segments themselves pretty much seem to just be reenactments, presumably shit both people actually said but edited in a narratively meaningful way. it’s weird to think of why this movie was made in 2008, i guess maybe as kind of like a bush analogy thing? but if it were written today it would seem like an extremely on the nose commentary on the trump presidency, in that in the very least nixon was like kind of a thoughtful asshole as opposed to a literal moron. which is more evil? who knows, who cares i guess. but it is kind of interesting to revisit in that way. i feel like what centrists are really outraged about re: trump is that he doesn’t try to make his callous evil sound like it has an ivy league education.
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Rumble in the Bronx rules. I recall it being well-received – people like Jackie Chan. This was at a point when we had very little, if any, Jackie Chan-lead movies being released widely in theatres in the West. This is prior to those awful Knights movies he did with Owen Wilson, and prior to those not so great Rush Hour movies. I love putting on Rumble in the Bronx, along with Van Damme movies, in the background when playing MMORPGs or grinding or something, because you can always look up and something interesting will be going on and you don’t really need to know why it’s happening or what’s happened up to that point because it’s mostly just a spectacle.
Also, Rumble in the Bronx ends with the villain getting flattened by a hovercraft or some shit that’s riding on land. That kind of rules, and I bet every film critic agrees.
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they are enamored by this movie.
“Any attempt to defend this movie on rational grounds is futile. Don’t tell me about the plot and the dialogue. Don’t dwell on the acting. The whole point is Jackie Chan – and, like Astaire and Rogers, he does what he does better than anybody. There is a physical confidence, a grace, an elegance to the way he moves. There is humor to the choreography of the fights (which are never too gruesome). He’s having fun. If we allow ourselves to get in the right frame of mind, so are we.”
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I was pretty fucked up by the wood chipper scene in Rumble in the Bronx when I watched at like, 10 years old. vivid memories of that scene with the garbage bag. “Look what they did to LANCE!”.
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I straight up YELLED at that scene. I thought they were just going to threaten him with the woodchipper but no they just STRAIGHT UP DO IT without giving the guy another chance to answer them. like WHAT?!
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