Just a quick post. I’m planning on undertaking a sizable Dude Movie project during my forthcoming week off. I have two ideas:

1) A Brian De Palma Edition. I’m thinking Phantom Of The Paradise, Raising Cain, Snake Eyes and Obsession, as they are four semi-forgotten De Palma movies.

2) As many Highlander movies as I can stand.

Mitigating factors: I’ve only ever seen the first Highlander film, and I hated it. Mind you, I haven’t watched it since it came out. Perhaps time has been kind, but I doubt it. Anyway, I’m not even sure how many Highlander movies there are – four? five? There’s no way I’ll get past four of them.

On the other hand, I am an unapologetic De Palma fan. I’ve seen Phantom Of The Paradise probably a dozen times.

So what say you, faithful Slothians?

Crank

What’s it about?
Sloth’s number one mancrush Jason Statham gets injected with a Chinese poison that will kill him in an hour unless he keeps his heart rate at approximately the level of a mosquito’s. Sorta like the movie Speed, with Statham playing the role of the bus.

Any chicks in the movie?
Amy Smart. Yeah, I’ve never heard of her either.* Whoever she is, she’s certainly game enough for this flick, which at one point asks her to get fucked in the middle of the street by Statham while he screams “I’M ALIVE!!!” as a gaggle of onlookers cheer him on. If I were her, I’d use that in my show reel for the rest of eternity.

Awesomeness Factor?
Through the roof. There’s nothing more entertaining than a stupid movie that not only knows it’s stupid, but luxuriates in it’s own stupidity like a pot roast basting in it’s own gravy.** The old-school videogame graphics during the credits give away the intentions of Crank: basically, we’re looking at the evolution of the action movie as recontextualized by the emerging dominance of first-person shooters and action gaming tropes. Or, to translate for the Laurier students reading this: Crank is mostly concerned with looking cool and being awesome, pretty much in that order. Making sense is, like, twenty-seventh on the list, just below “creating strong and empowered female characters” and “sensitive portrayals of Latino and Asian immigrant life”. The plot, such as it is, basically requires Statham to run a lot and look really pissed off as he jacks his body with cocaine, energy drinks, defibriliation equipment and (eventually) liquid adrenaline as he tries to kill all the motherfuckers what poisoned him. Sure, it’s stupid, but when the end result is scenes of Statham driving his car through a mall before wedging it sideways in an escalator or chopping off a dude’s hand with a cleaver and then using the gun the now-cleaved hand was using by pulling the finger that’s still in the trigger, it’s hard to give a shit about narrative integrity. Coming in at a lean 93 minutes, it’s also a movie that’s smart enough in it’s awesome dumbness not to overstay it’s welcome.

Mitigated By?
File Crank in the Statham pantheon after Death Race, but just before Transporter 2. Can’t wait for the sequel.

* Every time I see a blond actress in an action movie, I assume she’s a cast member on some sassy CW show about football or hairdressers or something.

** Note to self: Don’t write these before dinner.

Prime Cut

What’s it about?  Hitman Lee Marvin is sent to the redneckiest parts of Kansas City to collect on meat magnate Gene Hackman’s debts to the mob.

Any chicks in the movie?
Plenty, seeing as Hackman is also running a side business in drugged naked girls next to the regular kind of cattle. Sissy Spacek, back when she was surprisingly hot, achieves a near perfect 1:1 naked-to-clothed ratio, helped immeasurably by some questionable 70s fashion choices that really show off those dirty pillows.

Awesomeness Factor?
You want to know why people miss the seventies? Because stuff like Prime Cut, a movie I’d warrant nobody reading this has ever heard of, could open with a completely audacious credit sequence where we watch a human body literally get turned into wiener sausage at a meat-packing plant. Granted, this is not the kind of thing you want to watch while macking down a Quarter Pounder, but it amazes me that a near-wordless credit sequence from 1972 is better than anything else I’ve watched in the past four months. I was half-expecting the movie to have shot it’s wad with those credits, but amazingly the rest maintains awesomeness. See, Gene Hackman is indebted to the mob, but he has a nasty habit of literally turning the mob’s debt collectors into hamburger when they show up with the bill. Luckily, the mob knows Lee Marvin, who they send down to kill some time before the inevitable moment when he shoots all the people between him and Gene Hackman. Prime Cut wants to make some sort of statement about how chicks are treated like cattle, man,* but it’s also the kind of movie that won’t let a subtext or plot contrivance get in the way of chasing Lee Marvin around a wheat field with a combine harvester.** Semi-forgotten auteur*** Michael Ritchie keeps things clicking at a good pace and directs the set-pieces with intelligence, so much so that I wonder if the Taviani brothers watched this before making Night Of Shooting Stars.

Mitigated By?
Lee Marvin’s great, but what pushes this from interesting 70s artifact to a must-see is the incredible what-the-fuck performance by Gene Hackman. Sporting a mustache that wouldn’t look out out of place on To Catch A Predator, Hackman’s first scene has him at a table forking pig guts into his greasy maw. “Want some?” he asks Lee Marvin. “They’re goooooooooooood.” Also, he plays a dude inexplicably named Mary Ann, which made me wish for a alternate-universe Gilligan’s Island where Gene Hackman runs around in denim cutoffs and pigtails.

* By the incredibly clever conceit of having them treated like cows. I said the 70s were awesome, not subtle.

** You think I’m kidding, but that scene ends with Marvin’s goombas materializing out of nowhere, plowing their car into the harvester, and shooting the fat redneck driver in the head before the harvester eats the car and shits out the engine.

*** If I can describe the dude what did The Candidate and The Bad News Bears as an auteur. Maybe auteurette.