Belated #62 Submitting to the Hawkeye Initiative

#61 Lady Vengeance

Okay, well if you're going to have a violent antihero protagonist, at least do it right.

I'm sorry but the Kill Bill comparison is unavoidable. I want a signed release form saying each director was unaware of each other's movie so both can remain untainted in my mind. Not that I'm not aware of Tarantino's borrowings, but dammit, at least he picks good sources.

The set design in this movie is just stunning. Her bedroom when she leaves prison

So yes, like The Bride (or maybe the Bride is like Lady Vengeance. I refuse to consider any timelines), Lee Geum-ja is out for revenge. She has been framed for murder by a man who has taken her child away from her and sent to prison for 13 years for a crime he committed. And he will pay.

But instead of relying on assassin and martial arts skills, she gets to him with careful planning, a network of friends that she made on the inside, and an ornate antique pistol that she will not hesitate to use.

Along the way there's the usual noir touches, as the bright beginning slowly gets all the color bleached out of it until the end is faded colors and black and white. Cigarettes in bed, a naive young and loyal lover for the ex-con, decaying abandoned buildings, a disenchanted homicide cop that knows there's more to the case, an innocent child representing the life that the heroine could have had, and a villain that's so black-hearted that you don't doubt for a second that he has ruined her life and couldn't care less about it.

The villain's my only complaint actually. I'm still not sure what I think about plot twist at the end, but let's just say it complicates the idea of him getting a hot load of lead vengeance blown out the back of his head even less. Is it now even to the point that it's cliche to humanize the villain a little? Make the wronged hero a little bit in the gray area? Is it now avante garde for him to be even worse than you thought, and have no mitigating circumstances behind his crime against the hero but that he's dyed in the wool evil? I don't know but at least they do some interesting things with it after that.

I'm seriously going to have to watch a lot of Korean movies. Between this, The Host, The Good, The Bad the Weird, A Bittersweet Life...and the good things I've heard about all those directors' other films, there are a lot of beautiful visuals and fantastic storytelling coming out of that country's film industry.

#60 Son of Rambow

Spe-heaking of glorified violence in movies, here's a sweet British tale about a child from a strict religious family whose first exposure to pop culture comes from watching a bully's bootleg tape of Rambo: First Blood. Of course his reaction is to start wearing his tie around his head and volunteer to be the stunt double in the boy's action movie.

It's the director of Hitchhiker's Guide, and you can see some of the same imagination in this one as the two children, the sheltered Will and the neglected and abrasive Lee start making their action movie with a home video recorder. It's cute as hell, and it did feel true to the period it was homaging, the 80s, in the attitude towards these children's misbehaviors. I miss 80s movies, though I know it's just nostalgia. I like how these kids played like William Tell with a crossbow, and no one batted an eye, you could never do that in a kids' movie now!

Though, I think this is more meant for children of the 80s than for today's children to learn about the 80s. It gets a little heavy-handed towards the end. But hey, it's still darn cute.

#59 Armored

I'm not claiming it's art or anything. I watched it for two reasons. I wanted to get some screen grabs for my comic of an armored car. And I was bored.

But as B Movies go, at least this one's trying to be Assault on Precinct 13 era Carpenter instead of Michael Bay or Uwe Boll or something. I'd heard of it in any case because the director is this Hungarian guy who has also done the Predators remake, but I knew him from when my roommate rented Kontrol, this really great Hungarian movie about being a subway fare cop, and thus loathed by most of society. It's kind of like Clerks in Hungarian, but you know, with some great visual sense and some really graphic and chilling scenes of people getting run over by subway trains that still make me look over my shoulder and stand away from the platform edge sometimes.

But anyway, I saw one of his American offerings - Armored.

I just keep going back to the 70s in it. In the best of ways, it does feel like it could have been filmed back then. Stock characters saying cliche class warfare type junk, but over some very well-plotted suspense.

Even the fact that getting signals on the cell phone is drama makes it almost feel like it could have been a forgotten script that someone found in Don Siegel's closet, and someone just threw the cellphone reference in there to update it to modern times, but still keep the hapless would-be criminals out of communication with the outside world while they attempt their misdeeds.

It has a really equilibrium when it comes to the violent actions taken by the crew when they realize that the heist they're attempting has gone way off the rails. The violence isn't glorified. No slo-mo, no minor keys score, no attempts to pretend it has solved anything, but has only created more problems. Nor is it casual and thoughtless. It happens all too easily, but still keeps its weight.

And halfway decent cast: Matt Dillon, Laurence Fishburne, Skeet Ulrich, that guy with the bangs from Heroes, Fred Ward, Jean Reno. All that for roles that mostly consist of a dimension and half, a motivation and a reaction shot? In fact, the ostensible lead is a guy I didn't even recognize, and you surround him with those guys. Interesting call.

Anyway, good for what it was. And sadly, that does mean something these days of Gerard Butler being an action star. Yech.

#58 Poltergeist

Oh my god, I forgot I'd watched this on Watch Instantly. One of those classic 80s horror bits I'd never gotten around to.

Seriously? This was PG? Man, I missed out not being a kid in the 80s. It's ridiculously scary, and just imagining watching this as a kid, when the whole movie is based around putting the children in danger and the parents just feeling terror about it, it just hits you on this primal level.

Plus, the parents smoking pot and getting giggly, but before and after that just being part of the picture of an all-American family until Satan shows up? Can you imagine that in a PG movie now, when the whole rest of the movie is all about family values doing battle with underworld threats? That shoulda made Reagan's head spin around and explode or something.

And the effects? I gotta say, and it pains me to do so, I hope the Ghostbusters team threw some props these guys' way, because when the Poltergeist starts showing his face, it's scary as hell.

Great movie, and darn scary.

#57 Flying Dog Garde Dog

Ah fuck, I knew I should have read the label more closely. It's a wheat beer, or hefeweisen or something fruity and dry like that. Oh wait, label says French Farmhouse Ale. Guess I have a new genre of beer to say good bye to.

Oh well, at least it's cold.

#56 A Film with Me In It

I'm not the only one to make the comparison but sort of like Withnail and I...if it had some gruesome plot twists.

The Withnail stand-in being Dylan Moran in his typical charming drunk character. Seriously, I can no longer remember a time when I thought of him as that uptight guy from Shaun of the Dead.

The And I stand-in being the guy who wrote the movie, Mark Doherty, playing a failed actor, but talented clarinetist.

They're neighbors in a Dublin flat, have a sketchy and unpleasant landlord, and varying degrees of problems with their apartments. It all seems to be heading towards a flick about wannabe artists with Peter Pan syndrome living on the edges of society and then well, it takes a sharp left into surreally improbable gory accident territory.

Worth seeing, if you're an Anglophile with a morbid sense of humor...or whatever the equivalent is for the Irish...Eirophile? I dunno.

Way better than his cohort Pegg's attempt at the crime-gone-wrong movie I went on about earlier. Yech.