Screenhead

It might surprise you to know that both Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwartzenegger will be back to take on the action movie world in 2010’s The Expendables. It might be especially surprising since, at last report, California was one bus token away from complete fiscal Armageddon, so what is the governor doing running around in movies?

But anyway! A trailer was successfully bootlegged out of Venice for The Expendables, and we’ve got it directly below thanks to the magic of YouTube.

If you think it looks a lot like every other movie Stallone was ever in, then you’re probably not too far off.  Except, of course, this one has Jason Statham.  And Jason Statham is pretty much always awesome.

The teaser trailer, meanwhile, is of relatively poor quality but such is the way that all bootlegs pretty much go.  You will, however, get to see how very cookie-cutter this action flick will be in advance, so you’ll know in advance if you want to see it.  Frankly, I’m probably in because I enjoy this kind of mindless eye-candy.  And somewhere, an entire studio hopes against hope that you will be too.

One thing is perfectly clear about Jean Claude Van Damme’s career–it’s been a long strange ride that’s been mostly downhill for the last twenty years or so.  It may have something to do with the fact that he’s been mostly doing the same ROLE for those last twenty years, but one clear difference, one even I have to applaud him for, is Replicant, now available on Blu-Ray thanks to Lions Gate.

Replicant, you see, puts Van Damme in two roles at once, as a serial killer is pursued by police who have a special weapon on their side, a clone of the killer taken from DNA found at one of the crime scenes.  Believing that they can recover “genetic memory” from the clone, they begin the long and arduous process of socializing their clone so that he can actually lead them to the killer.  And when the killer and the clone end up taking each other on, it remains to be seen whether nature or nurture will win out.

Replicant is a strange sort of animal, caught between freakishly idiotic science fiction and terribly interesting crime drama.  The science couldn’t be more wrong–watching the killer wince when his clone was brought online suggested a level of connection that’s never been even posited, let alone proven.

But watching Jean Claude Van Damme hide under a table, and act like everything he saw, he saw for the first time was well worth the price of admission.  This may well prove to be the best thing that Van Damme ever did as an actor, because it required him to, for once, ACT.  As opposed to his normal modus operandi of punch things and deliver lines.

The Screenhead Ten Scale, therefore, gives some due props to what may be one of Jean Claude Van Damme’s better roles, and gives Replicant a six out of ten.  Sure, the science is about as outlandish as is humanly possible, but the action is worth the watching, and there are vastly worse pieces out there.

This one made me cough up a perfectly good bottle of Dew, folks.  ALL over my keyboard. It was vile.

See, I was cruising the news sites, looking for something interesting to talk about.  What do I find?  I find that none other than Guy Ritchie has been detailed to handle directing duties for the upcoming Lobo movie.

First, I’m amazed, because I never thought anyone would try and bring The Main Man into things.  If there was ever a comic book movie I wanted quite so badly as a Venom / Carnage, Deadpool or Transmetropolitan movie, it was clearly Lobo.  Better yet, shooting’s going to start early next year by last report.

Okay, sure…so putting Guy Ritchie in charge pretty much ensures that it’s going to turn into Lock Stock and Two Fraggin’ Barrels O’ Fun, but it’s Lobo.  How bad can it be with The Main Man on the scene?  You know you can’t go anywhere with the Last Czarnian without lots of things blowing up and some choice one-liners.  Even with Guy Ritchie it can’t be too highbrow.

I’ll take bets right now–two to one Ron Perlman gets an offer to play Lobo.

Now here’s a really exciting piece of news, especially for anyone who likes a good pirate movie.  Michael Crichton’s last book, Pirate Latitudes, is going to be adapted into a movie by no one less than Steven Spielberg.

This isn’t the first Michael Crichton movie adapted by Spielberg–he tackled both Jurassic Park and its sequel The Lost World, so you can be pretty sure that he knows how to handle a Crichton novel.  Even better, he’s got a personal high opinion of Crichton’s work–check this out:

Anything that Michael wrote, Steven would be keenly interested to read. But without Michael knowing it, or even me knowing it, it turns out Steven always wanted to direct his own pirate film.

This isn’t surprising–considering how heavily pirate-themed The Goonies was and the somewhat piratical nature of the Indy film, it’s definitely a logical step for Spielberg to go to piracy as a theme.  Got to admit, though, I’m definitely looking forward to this.

I thought things were getting desperate when they started adapting every old TV show and children’s book into a movie, but frankly, when I heard that they were looking to modify The A-Team into a movie, I pretty much abandoned all hope.

And so it continues on with a new chunk of casting data–Quintin Jackson is now slated to play Mr. T’s old character, B.A. Baracus.

Considering that their other option was Tyrese Gibson, they might have gone with the lesser of two evils, but frankly, neither was a good call.  Where’s Michael Clarke Duncan?  Where’s Kevin Michael Richardson?  Where’s VING RHAMES??

Why is Mr. T’s old character being played by a MIXED MARTIAL ARTS FIGHTER??  And worse yet, this is his FIRST major movie role.  He’s completely inexperienced!

It’s enough to drive a fella to drinking, and I’m not talking milk, either.

Well, hopefully he won’t bungle the job too badly, anyway…not that I’m really holding out a lot of hope for this mess from the get-go.  But we’ll find out how well it comes off in 2010.

There really, REALLY, were a lot of plot holes in Terminator: Salvation–my personal favorite is how Skynet couldn’t manage to make a better Terminator than the Sam Worthington model despite the fact that the Sam Worthington model existed BEFORE Skynet did.  And Sam Worthington, meanwhile, can see all those plot holes himself.  And he hates himself for them.  Check THIS out–oh, I cleaned it up a bit for general consumption, but I think you’ll still follow what’s being said:

“If there was a big 10 ton robot coming outside that gas station, surely we would f**kin’ hear it! And I missed that! So now I’m going to be a bit f**kin’ better when I’m going through my scripts because now I feel like an idiot for not turning to McG [and saying something].”

Of course, some would say that he was possibly encouraged to miss it, by a large paycheck or a role in a big movie, and now he’s coming back to work around the backlash.

But it’s entirely possible that he really DID miss all the plot holes, is actually now contrite and does plan to read his scripts better.  Either way, it’s a pretty entertaining picture that makes great news.

Someone needs to tell Vin Diesel to stick to World of Warcraft, because his movies are just getting less and less pleasant with each passing iteration.

You read the headline exactly right, folks–we’re talking Triple X 3, also known as XXX: The Return of Xander Cage. Needless to say I’m downright horrified; it’s been almost eight years since our first go-round with Xander, and another five years since the second.  You’d think Hollywood might have learned its lesson and said, hey, surely there’s better movies to make than to dredge the harbor and pull some corpse out of the water.

But sure enough, they went a-dredgin’ and the next thing you know, we got Vin Diesel coming back to gravelly-voice his way through yet another installment of Stuff Go Boom.  Raaaaaaay.

Of course, there’s already some problem with this concept as they’re going to have to work around the previous title’s death scenes involving Xander–some are already very vocal in their opposition to even bothering to try.  But one thing’s for sure, chances are this’ll make Hollywood a few bucks, and these days, that’s better than nothing.

I’m intensely conflicted about what to write about Robert Rodriguez’s newest outing, Shorts.  It’s clear that, despite the fact that he’s gunning for more family-friendly stuff of late, you can still feel the influence of his grittier stuff like Machete, Planet Terror and From Dusk Til Dawn.

And it’s this strange synthesis that leaves me a bit nonplussed.

The plot is about what you’ve gathered from the trailers–a magic wishing rock falls from the sky one day for no clear or explained reason, and the town of Black Falls, a planned community revolving almost entirely around a corporate headquarters, runs amok, horrendously misusing its powers.

Where Shorts is somewhat different is that, mostly because it’s told by a ten year old with all the short term memory of certain breeds of hamster, it’s presented as a series of interconnected short films shot out of order.  They’ll start with zero, a fairly pointless exercise about a brother and sister who regularly engage in long-term staring contests, so much so that they’ve developed the ability to sleep with their eyes open.  They’ll then segue into a series of other shorts, starting with a lonely boy with few friends and braces like railroad ties who’s regularly hassled by the town’s bad girl, her lunkhead brother, and their gang of small evil children.  They’ll move to a threesome of adventure-craving brothers who aren’t too bright, a germophobe engineering wizard and his brilliant put-upon son, a costume party gone terribly wrong and finally the end of the whole mess in which pretty much every character we’ve seen so far comes back to settle the assortment of loose ends that have spawned throughout the film.

On the one hand, Shorts is a highly unique and highly entertaining film that takes a lot of chances and succeeds about half the time.  On the other hand, Shorts is a poorly written pile of garbage with lots of unresolved plot holes that watches like it was conceived, whole and breathing, by a particularly bright ten year old who just learned about narratives last week in Mrs. Thompson’s English class that takes a lot of chances and FAILS about half the time.

I found myself wondering how long it would take before someone noticed that the town bad girl’s name was actually a FONT (her highly unlikely name: Helvetica Black.  They’ll make a SONG out of it while she’s driving a rocket-propelled motorcycle in the grandest Rose McGowan tradition despite the fact that she’s about TEN.) and sure enough, when the movie was almost done, the put-upon genius son of the town’s germophobic engineer called her “Typeface” and all was briefly well.

Basically, Shorts is one of those movies that you don’t want to insult too loudly because it actually tried to do something different for a change, and in Hollywood, that’s all too rare.  However, Shorts only manages to succeed in the chances it takes roughly half the time, therefore, the Screenhead Ten Scale recognizes effort and gives Shorts a seven out of ten: a five for its successes, and two bonus points for effort.  It’s a great kids’ movie, but adults shouldn’t be too insulted by it.

You loved him in Star Trek, you probably barely noticed him in Doom, but Karl Urban is definitely sticking like glue to the whole science fiction / fantasy thing these days.  In fact, he’s just been tapped for a whole new role in this same bent, of sorts–he’ll be playing Black Hat, the lead vampire role in the upcoming film Priest.

Priest takes the whole post-Apocalyptia concept to new and interesting extremes by placing the world at war between men and vampires, like Karl Urban’s upcoming Black Hat.

It’s not a terrible idea, this; he’s definitely got the chops to handle post-apocalypse vampires.  I mean, he went blasting demons on Mars not so long ago, so why not?  And considering that he’ll be joined by Paul Bettany as the title character, he’s in such good company that I can’t help but think this will turn out well, when it finally gets released in the good long future.

Back in the long long ago that was my sophomore year of high school, back when Johnny Depp was still trying to live down 21 Jump Street, back before Pirates of the Caribbean was anything more than a ride, there was Cutthroat Island.  Featuring Matthew Modine and Geena Davis, this fun pirate action thriller of the past comes back to us on Blu-ray courtesy of Lions Gate.

When the quasi-legendary pirate Morgan Adams (Geena Davis in a big surprise) goes forth on a quest to find the treasure that comprises her family’s legacy, she’s pursued by her uncle, who wants the treasure himself, and the various authorities of the British Crown who want both her brought to justice, and while they’re at it, a cut of that treasure.  Can Morgan manage to lay claim to her legacy and dodge most of the Caribbean, who just happens to be after her?

Considering that this one beat Pirates of the Caribbean to the punch by somewhere in the neighborhood of half a decade–even had the adorable monkey sidekick–you’d think this would get a lot more attention than it does.  That and it’s a downright entertaining movie, let’s not forget that.  There’s lots of sailing and fun and explosions and treasure and suchlike to be had here, and it’s a great watch that I’ve loved ever since my high school days.

The Screenhead Ten Scale, thusly, hands over an eight out of ten to a fantastic pirate romp that beat Pirates of the Caribbean to the punch by a good long while.  If you liked witty Jack, there’s no reason you won’t enjoy Morgan Adams.