I finally saw The Sting (1973) last night and can't believe I put it off for so long! Great stuff from Newman and Redford!

I watched Underboss.

I've been wanting to see this too, and The Hustler.

Saw Marley and Me in the theatre last night. My wife thought it'd be a funny comedy type of movie and it did have some funny moments but the ending made my wife cry and now she hates the movie and called it mean.

Thanks for the heads up, I won't be watching this with my girlfriend any time soon. The last thing I need is her to be upset over a stupid movie.

Great movie I've had it on my list of movies to revisit. Redford and Newman make such a great duo. Have you seen Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid ?

Oh, "The Sting" and "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid" are two of my favorite movies as well. Great pictures.

Robin Williams is a great Actor, he can play funny, and then play really serious characters such as Insomina!

I like Bill Murray too

Thank You for the clip!

-Grace

One Hour Photo and RV are also very good.

Yeah, check out the Robin Williams "evil trilogy":

-DEATH TO SMOOCHY
-ONE HOUR PHOTO
-INSOMNIA

I just saw a rerun of Law & Order SVU with Robin Williams as a very creepy guy. He was so good that he actually made my skin crawl.

He sure is creepy. Did you by chance see One Hour Photo with him?? Yikes, from a standup comic to one heck of a creepy guy.


TIS

No, I haven't. It's one of those I've been meaning to get to, and just haven't yet.

La Dolce Vita (1960) -- Man, do I ever feel like a dumbass trying to follow along WTF is going on in this film -- and then admitting as much. I mean, I get (or thought I had) the gist of it for about the first two hours (despite wondering who the hell so-and-so was all of a sudden), but then nearing the end I was just like... what??? I'm sure it's me, or maybe it's Fellini -- I'm not familiar with his style -- and I've seen and enjoyed my fair share of bizarre and out-there stuff, but... hmmm.... maybe I should've just popped in Terminator 2 or something my feeble adolescent mind can follow along.

IMDb: 8.1/10 ??!



Now on the other hand, I've gotten totally addicted to the A&E reality series Airline (2004-2005)! I'd never head of it 'til I saw it on Netflix, and have been playing it via my awesome Roku Netflix player on my TV. Anyone who's done extensive travel (or worked in an airport) would LOVE this!! "The customer is always right" is a nice mantra and all, but it certainly isn't true -- but they have to pretend it is sometimes. I cannot believe Southwest Airlines okay'd this because sometimes they look bad (deservedly so), but most of the time the customers are just dumbasses who deserved to be bumped or denied! People who show up 2 minutes before a flight... wasted customers = denied... "COS's" (Customers Of Size) needing to be told they need to purchase a second seat... but also happy human interest stories mixed in. You can watch this in 20-minute shots, with 20-something episodes in the first season. I'm just very sad that only the first season (of 3) has been released, and I'm almost thru it....

IMDb: 6.1/10 ??!

How do you like your Roku? My brother just got it for Christmas and has been telling me about it. I just signed up for the two week trial for NetFlix and am very impressed. The Roku box thingy sounds like a better device than all the On-Demand cable crap I'm bombarded with in commercials.

Thumbs Up! I have a thread about it here...

Absolutely deserving of the rating IMO. A great film on general decadence in society and commentary on values in journalism etc (I forget all the themes). And great black and white cinematography like other Fellini.

It's Dumas. Didn't you ever see "Shawshank Redemption"?

Geeesch.

I've got to watch La dolce vita again; it's been a while. From what I remember, I agree with svsg: a piercing, scathing comment on social decadence.

THE HOUSE BUNNY (2008) - ***

Yeah RRA yours truely is putting aside his usual queue of masculine pulp action exploitation trash and 1980s fantasy cinema by reviewing this girlie flick. Plus my girlfriend made me watch it or else I can't get my next DVD through Netflix, so I had to make the most of this situation.

For better or for worse, THE HOUSE BUNNY is exactly the sort of picture I interpreted from the trailer that endlessly played in theatres back in the summer, but is that a compliment or an insult, or both? You know what I mean, BUNNY following a time-honored plot formula practiced from ANIMAL HOUSE to BACK TO SCHOOL and OLD SCHOOL and so forth where some outsider joins a college campus, meets up with misfits who won't conform, jokes at the clashing of contrasts between hero and academics, duels with snobbish elites and ultimately triumphs. They all also include epic confrontations at student government hearings and meetings, which from my experience is nonsense since student government is nowhere that fun or interesting.

But for what it is, THE HOUSE BUNNY is basically LEGALLY BLONDE meets REVENGE OF THE NERDS, with self-absorbed and absolutely clueless Playboy bunny Anna Farris kicked out of the Mansion, become the House Mother of a Sorority of losers. I mean come on you've seen this movie before, do I really need to go on?

You bastards, I'll never forgive any of you.

OK I'm kidding, for HOUSE BUNNY was alright, but not for the film itself but simply for Farris. I never cared for that SCARY MOVIE series, but she was always a winner in them. Hell, she was only one of two decent things in Ivan Reitman's otherwise terrible MY SUPER EX-GIRLFRIEND, and also she was in BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN and on ENTOURAGE. But what pays her bills is playing very well, perhaps too well, a persona of the charming but vapid blonde, a shtick that made a fortune decades ago for Goldie Hawn. The sad thing I guess is that Farris is so good at it, I wonder if most people assume she is truely such an intellectual flake. Plus she has a very nice ass, or at least her body double does.

Since BUNNY is a Happy Madison production, thus Adam Sandler is a producer, expect some uninspired if at times funny cruel demaning gross jokes. I mean really, a FOREST GUMP-based gag with a crippled girl? Yeah you paralyzed people, your problem is that you all are too lazy. I mean dear Lord I can't believe I just typed that. I mean you get what you pay for. I warned you.

What I did despise though was that after Farris transforms her girls from ugly duckling archetypes of Goth, Midget, Knocked-Up, Hick, Mute, Nerd, etc., then this film then had the gall to end with preaching "be yourself." WHAT?!? Isn't that what these gals were doing in the first place? I mean for fucks sake, what a goddamn condescending message.

There is a point to be made that society never took these women seriously until they ditched their brains in favor of upgrading and bitching out., and pose for a calender. I guess I like that they all initially were doing all this just to save their charter, but that point is lost and we're stuck with Hollywood once again telling girls that boobs are better than brains. I mean I love both, so why can't we have both like say Scarlett Johansson, a woman I could have an intelligent conversation with while I'm undressing her with my eyes.

Hey, I'm at least a honest guy.

So I guess I'm like the Colin Hanks character, playing a brighter but less chummy role that his dad would have played in the early 1980s. I laughed at that one scene of depressed Hugh Hefner eating ice cream because Farris left the mansion, then I realize how irrelevant Playboy itself has become. My generation of guys were the first to figure out that instead of sneakingly shoplifting a Playboy magazine at the local convenience store or try to watch scrampled porn on pre-digital cable days looking through back issues of National Geographic, you could get the same content and more easier and for free on the Internet. Oh sure there's that popular THE GIRLS NEXT DOOR reality TV program, but that's it for Playboy.

Also, I'm sure Hefner has some dumb blonde bimbos stacked around after Farris left, like Pamela Anderson. OK, she's got Hepatitis, but there are others.

So I like HOUSE BUNNY, or I like Anna Farris who just happened to be in a movie called HOUSE BUNNY. I mean better than having to watch the SEX & THE CITY motion picture, right?

Wait, I gotta review that too? No, that's it. We drew a specific line here when we came into our holy Netflix covenant. With two at a time, you get your stupid shit, and I get my stupid shit. I know you're not interested in watching Jean Claude Van Damme's SUDDEN DEATH or Steven Seagal's FIRE DOWN BELOW, so don't watch it. No, BRIDGET JONES' DIARY isn't higher brow than DIE HARD 2, for both are disposable but fun popcorn. I love you, I really do, but you're killing me here. How about 50 FIRST DATES again, and I'll clean your car?

Deal.

LEGEND (1985) - ****

(NOTE: This is a review of the Director's Cut.)



[size:"5"]"What is Light without Dark?"[/color]

I'll admit it, but I just don't care much for fantasy, especially that ole fucking "sword & sorcerey" nonsense. When any of those stories or movies go off with their elves, unicorns, princesses, dwarves, goblins, a hero on a magical quest and all that crap, they just give off an awkwardly goofy vibe of which I can't take seriously. Remember in my CONAN THE BARBARIAN review how the genre is mocked for being "silly and effeminate?" At the penalty of sounding chauvinistic, but I think most fantasy works deserve that criticism.

Sorry kids and gals.

Now a good example of such was Sir Ridley Scott's LEGEND, which had a rambling labyrinth plot tied together only by the art direction and the groovy Tim Curry, but even then they're neutralized by the embarrasingly cheesy and dated synthesizer soundtrack by Tangerine Dream (which reportedly they hastily composed and conducted within 2 weeks.) LEGEND was like a good case study of everything that 1980s Hollywood was at its worst: Tom Cruise starring in pretty eye candy designed to appeal to the teenie boppers, but as damn hollow as a dead oak tree for everyone else. It's the sort of movie where it's ok if you had liked it as a kid, but as an adult? Like owning Barry Manilow records, either keep such information to yourself, or accept that people will nod and then quietly walk away from you.

While LEGEND bombed in America, it was a hit in Europe which was a mystery to me. Then I find out that their LEGEND is completely different than the LEGEND we Yankees knew. For one thing, Scott chopped out 25 minutes for the USA release, which explains the massive plot holes. Second, the European version had a supeior score composed by the late great Jerry Goldsmith. Third, Scott and crew obviously took this whole enterprise seriously, which nobody would have gleamed from the infamous American cut. Fourth, and most important....despite containing elements of the genre which I usually hate, I actually ended up quite liking this particular LEGEND.

Hey crazier shit has happened, right?

As John Milius did with CONAN THE BARBARIAN, Scott took material that could easily be dismissed as adolescent illegitimate fare, and instead sought to grant it an aura of respectability, and not be ashamed of itself. He wanted to create visually and wholeheartedly a fairy tale, almost I guess in ambition the ultimate vision for fantasy cinema that some would argue that Scott had done for science fiction with ALIEN and BLADE RUNNER. Indeed with production design by Leslie Dilley, Assherton Gorton, and Norman Dorme, their hyperbolic symbolic worlds are tremendously juicy rich, and should have won an Oscar (fuck you A ROOM WITH A VIEW.) The beautiful forest of Light luscious with critters is Heaven, the frozen-over woods after the disaster is Purgatory, and the fire pits at the Palace of Darkness is pure Hell on Earth, a joint damned personally by God himself on day one.

I'll say something controversial here, but I'm more impressed by the overall aesthetics accomplished in LEGEND than with the whole LORD OF THE RINGS trilogy. Yeah what Peter Jackson and WETA did with special effects was commendable and certainly raised the cinema bar, but so what? They had computers, LEGEND didn't. It's one of the last great pre-CGI FX hurrahs, for everything you see had to be done practically on-set, including Rob Bottin's great Oscar nominated make-up, an art thankfully still not conquered by the microchips, and better for it methinks.

I mean take for example Tim Curry's excellent performance as Darkness. It seems that no matter what he does like ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW or CLUE or whatever, he always seems to be awesome. Unseen initially in LEGEND, his booming voice alone is the background threat always present and dangerous for the heroes and his henchmen monsters, but when he finally makes his entrance in full glory, you go Holy Shit! Scott claimed one of his inspirations for LEGEND was the classic Disney picture FANTASIA. Remember the giant frightening as hell demon in FANTASIA in the "Night on Bald Mountain" sequence? Well, Curry's Darkness is him coming to life. Would Darkness in full red satanic horns glory be as surprisingly stunning or convincing in CGI?



Come on, be honest folks.

In lock-stock with all this is Goldsmith's soundtrack. He had given us some great memorable themes from PLANET OF THE APES to PATTON to STAR TREK to FIRST BLOOD, and LEGEND might just very well be his most underrated work. Unlike that awful Tangerine Dream score, Goldsmith's music embellishes both the absolute goodness of the Light and the utter evil of the Dark, but re-enforces a crucial lesson that the world could flip to either on a whim, fairly or not.

This is important because on the surface, the story of LEGEND is what you would basically expect I assume, where both a beautiful princess (Mia Sara) and a mare unicorn is kidnapped by Darkness, who killed the other sole living unicorn and took his horn. The world is plunged in snow and without sun, and if the last unicorn dies, there will never be another dawn. Since that would totally suck, forest boy Jack (Cruise) and his rag-tag gang of elves and fairies embark into the Palace to stop Darkness. But underneath all this is a Grimm's fairy tale-esque parable that the road to Hell was paved by the well-meaning intentions of decent folks.

I mean consider that all this trouble started when Cruise showed Sara the unicorns. He knew that mere mortals can't lay eyes on such a rare divine creature, but hey he was horny and wanted to impress her. She herself got curious, and ignoring Cruise's warnings, her corruptable hands touch an untainted unicorn, because hey she's spoiled naive royalty. If neither had made their mistakes in spite of knowing better, Curry wouldn't have been to take the horn, and everything would have been alright. Then when Darkness seduces Sara in a great imaginative operatic dancing sequence, there is present a mature undertone of sexuality and lust:



See what I mean? Children will miss all this of course, but keen adults won't, and just consider all this when you watch the Director's Cut edit. This aint Disney folks.

As visually ambitious and successful as LEGEND is, it just lacks as great of a script as say CONAN THE BARBARIAN did. Oh sure the William Hjortsberg screenplay captures fine the spirit behind the Heroic Myth, where the protagonist decides to defy the impossible, finds his weapons, uses his wits to outsmart diabolical creatures, escape from ensured doom numerous times, ultimately defeat the bad guy, blah blah. But remember that CONAN did all that, but Milius included some insanely creative touches from Arnold Schwarzenegger knocking out a camel with a punch, being an enslaved breeding stud, his sole prayer to his God, throwing down his enemy's head like a basket, etc. LEGEND doesn't really have any such special twists on the Myth, though interestingly Hjortsberg's original script draft was even more ambitiously unique in designs, and even had a shocking scene where the villain did bed the Princess. Now consider that Sara was 15 at the time, yeah that would have been nuts enough to equal CONAN.

Still Hjortsberg did give Curry some awesome lines, particularly:

"The dreams of youth are the regrets of maturity."

Fuck yes.

The other problem is this: Curry is evil, Sara is the princess, and Tom Cruise is playing the hero. Notice the difference? Curry and Sara are perfect for their respective parts, the essential archtypes for the myth, but Cruise? Not so much. I know I've been ragging on him lately, but he's just out of place here. Not terrible, but he doesn't belong in this movie. Plus there are way too many shots where with greasy hair dangling over his face, I keep forgetting that this is Cruise and not Spicoli from FAST TIMES AT RIDGEMONT HIGH. I doubt that was Scott's intention at all. Also, the ending with Cruise and Sara strangely feels like a wrong turn, despite in idea being such a conclusion that I would usually applaud. My good pal Blasty wanted his release that the finale for CONAN failed to provide, and now I know how that feels like with LEGEND. Oh Karma you bitch.

Regardless, I strongly recommend that you defy alleged persisting myths of campyness and garbage, and go check out the Director's Cut of LEGEND. It's a pretty good strong picture bordering greatness that unfortunately is still tainted with ill-repute among certain circles because of its evil twin brother that was released back in America in 1986. Scott admits he conceived that disaster because some stoners at a test screening hated it, and he second-guessed himself. He absolutely wanted a hit, so he made his changes and it failed.

Such good intentions he had....

I've just watched Von Ryan's Express a classic POW film featuring Frank Sinatra. Very good film

7/10

That's about how I'd rate it.... Sinatra, although past his acting prime, was good in it. I loved the ending!!

I just watched Dishonored. Marlene Dietrich is good in the role of Mata Hari, but I do prefer Greta Garbo. Yummy on both counts!!

Watched THE ASSASSINATION OF JESSE JAMES BY THE COWARD ROBERT FORD.

I thought i would not enjoy it but i did. It reminded me of Deadwood in its dialogue and its attention to the detail of that era. Affleck and Pitt both played great parts also!

Just watched The Long Kiss Goodnight with Geena Davis. It's the perfect sort of action, "no brains required" movie to watch on a snowy day. I've never seen the laws of physics suspended so many times in one film, but I honestly enjoy this movie every time I see it.

MORTAL KOMBAT (1995) - *1/2

FINISH HIM!!!

You young kids who grew up in the Epoch of Playstation and X-Box just don't understand how big of a fucking deal MORTAL KOMBAT was back in the day. It wasn't the first arcade fighting game, for hell STREET FIGHTER II came out earlier and was pretty popular too, but creators Ed Boon and John Tobias decided to push the envelope in digital violence. The problem is, many parents and politicians thought it shredded the envelope.

Instead of defeating an opponent by knock out or whatever sillyness, you can kill him or her with the right combination activate a Fatality, and...well, it's called a Fatality for a reason. Now you tots may look at these 16-bit deaths, subdued compared to contemporary video game gore, and laugh. But this shit for us was hardcore insane, and light-years ahead of anyone else. So much that overnight, FIGHTER II became synonymous with lame, or it did for me. Remember when many silly authorities tried to get GRAND THEFT AUTO III banned? Well those same jerks earlier in 1992 tried the same with KOMBAT and it's homicidal cousin DOOM (which came out a year later), enough that the video game industry tapped out and created the ESRB rating system so to shut them up.

Sequels quickly followed, and I tell ya that's the biggest thing I miss about the Video Game Arcades. You and your friends would find out KOMBAT and its sequels from either Nintendo Power magazine or Electronic Games Monthly, wait months for that giant-ass arcade console to be hauled to your local Arcade, and then everyone literally everyone would take a crack at it, see who can be the first to beat the machine, metaphorically from victory or literally due to resentment from futility. Then when the Sega or Super Nintendo version goes on sale, we all buy it and likewise afflict similar abuse to ourselves over utterly meaningless bragging rights. Of course this was before on-line play, so thankfully you didn't have to endure some stupid jackass ruining your little party, nor commit any post-mordem humpings on you like QUAKE.

Anyway boys and girls, MORTAL KOMBAT was so popular, the movie adaptation was inevitable, and we were hyped up for it in summer 1995. KOMBAT was such hot shit, that the film was a big box-office hit in spite of the fact that it was absolutely terrible, and even the techno-theme song went platinum. It also launched the Hollywood career of director Paul W.S. Anderson. That's right, the same asshole hack auteur who later shot such turds like ALIEN VS. PREDATOR, RESIDENT EVIL, and the recent DEATH RACE, all either based on video games, or scripted like them. So basically, it's my generations fault that you kids had to suffer A.V.P.

Sorry.

Some well-meaning people out there insist that KOMBAT is the best video game-adapted movie ever, but that's complete bullshit. It's not just bad for that genre, which itself has not one single quality work, but just individually horrible horrible horrible! Yes I know it's sequel MORTAL KOMBAT ANNIHILATION is remarkably even worse, but that's like excusing the Khmer Rouge because the Nazis had a higher body count.

What strikes me immediately in watching this again, for a would-be martial arts action extravaganza, all the fights in KOMBAT are all incredibly...dull. How the fuck can you make a movie brawl with super-powered jumping and kicking all over the place boring, much less all of them in the same movie? This was before THE MATRIX and THE BOURNE IDENTITY, when we expected our movie stars to be credible action heroes, so you get lots of awkward Steven Seagal-esque close-up shots and body doubles. But at least in many Seagal pictures, you had fun watching him kicking ass. Not here with KOMBAT.

That stems from KOMBAT not having a nonsensical story worth spit, for that script is a glorified quota of producers trying to appease fanboys. Sure KOMBAT wouldn't be Oscar-winning material, but there was good trash pulpy storylines to mine from the KOMBAT games themselves. I mean why would any would-be intergalactic Emperor agree to a truce where he has to win ten straight tournaments before being allowed to conquer Earth? Why not just two? Is he that lazy? There is many plot holes I really want to drill, but there's too many of them, and they're giving me a headache. Worse I

The KOMBAT crew could have been inspired by the Bruce Lee classic ENTER THE DRAGON, and infact the basic plot follows DRAGON. But at least the filmmakers behind DRAGON were slick in producing an economical screenplay to give enough plot without getting in the way of action, and those Lee-choreographed fights were great. For example, DRAGON had three principal heroes in Lee/Saxon/Kelly brought together to a MacGuffin-island tournament for different reasons, but ultimately they together end up defeating the villain. Each were fleshed out and dynamic with unique individual scenes to make us care about those archetypes, and all those actors were adequete for the job.

With KOMBAT, the opposite is true. We simply just have way too many characters, all underdeveloped and I just don't give a shit about any of them. It doesn't help that most of them are casted with bad actors who display some cringing thespian work, poor even for the martial arts genre.The biggest offender methinks is the one playing the sole-female Sonya Blade. Supposedly that character is supposed to be a special forces soldier trained in the fighting arts, but notice that that actresses' major fight how pale and flabby her physique is.

Plus, her part in general is written not as a tough soldier but as a prissy bitch who seems more at home at the Nail Salon than the Firing Range. I mean Jesus they don't never even come close for her to be a credible warrior, which would wrongly insinuate that they tried in the first place. We viewers also suffer as we get scene after scene of comedic interplay between her and egotistical Hollywood action star Johnny Cage, who's a bigger whiney bitch and annoying than Jean Claude Van Damme (his alleged inspiration) ever was. I mean remember that YouTube video of Van Damme accidentally poping a boner on live television? That at least was funny, so he stomps his parody's teeth in as far as I'm concerned.



Fun Hollywood trivia for you, but that Sonya player got that part after the original actress dropped out due to a wrist injury. Cameron Diaz. Yeah she would have absolutely sucked too.

The only good thing in KOMBAT I guess is Christopher Lambert, if out of default because that casting wasn't a complete failure. As lightning god Raiden, he just hams the fuck out of the movie as he chews the scenery to new heights, annoying at times but at least I was sorta engaged with KOMBAT when he was on-screen. His odd foreign accent, giving off an unhuman vibe, worked for HIGHLANDER and for the same goals here. I mean trust me, all things considered with Lambert here, we're lucky that he's here and not in another HIGHLANDER sequel instead.

Alright fuck this movie, let's instead talk about the original classic video game. My favorite character was Cage (he wasn't a pussy in the game), and my favorite fatality that I only pulled off once (by accident) was when I uppercut my buddy off a stone ramp, and onto the pit of spikes. Also, I loved that Cage's special trademark move was the nut punch, which I wanted to do to this movie.

But I can someday to Anderson when I meet him on the street.

URBAN JUSTICE (2007) - ***

Even for a self-admitted action movie junkie like me, I don't bother with Direct-to-DVD pictures. They all usually are extremely low budget affairs, last refuge for washed-up movie stars, that produced by crews that usually lack both the talent and the vision to go beyond their circumstances. Indeed as noted Internet critic and SEAGALOGY author The Outlaw Vern laments, such productions in theory have much more artistic freedom because they cater to a specific niche genre-nerd cult, not to broad audiences like most major studio action movies. Those studios with these quickie pictures could potentially be for 2009 what Roger Corman and American International Pictures were in the 1960s and 1970s, outright but creative exploitation B-cinema.

URBAN JUSTICE has all those painful DTD filmatism limitations, but does have a very clear and concise goal as a simple straight up no-bullshit down and dirty pulp revenge actioneer, the little cheap midget cousin to Brian Helgeland's PAYBACK or John Boorman's POINT BLANK. For fans of Steven Seagal's early sleazy-but-slick fun exploitation filmography like ABOVE THE LAW or HARD TO KILL, this is his return to form. Hell, the only reason I Netflixed JUSTICE is because of Vern's personal high recommendation. That's why he's the best and most unique critical cinema voice on the Internet, for he intellectually admires the action film genre as a legitimate art. I mean the dude wrote a smart and funny if respectful book about Seagal movies!

He must be doing something right.

Anyway, Seagal himself gets JUSTICE right for he's finally not in denial about himself. Some of you may remember him back in the 1990s wearing rather colorfully loud wardrobe and large leather jackets in a pathetic egotistical attempt to hide his cheeseburger gut this side of Oprah. This was most awkwardly glaring in HALF PAST DEAD, his last American theatrical release. In URBAN JUSTICE, he sheds all that nonsense to be what he is: physically over-the-hill, and gaining in age at the same rate as his waistline.

But I really dig that element, for every gangster and corrupt cop in JUSTICE are all wreckless junkyard amateur brawlers. Seagal may have lost a step or two, but using trained-precision and wisdom from experience that only an older warrior would know, for the first time since UNDER SIEGE I actually believed Seagal kicking ass. Holy shit. I also liked that JUSTICE never bothers with explaining exactly what Seagal got all his skills from. Ex-Military? Ex-SEAL? Ex-Mercenary? Ex-Terrorist? Who cares?

All JUSTICE wants you to know is that a cop gets murdered, and daddy Seagal comes to town for the funeral. He's not seen his ex-wife in years, and she welcomes him by making him promise to kill whoever was responsible. Immediately Seagal rents a dump apartment in the heart of ghetto Los Angeles. He then promptly beats up a local hispanic gangbanger to a bloody stump, but Seagal keeps him alive to pass the word: "Tell every motherfucker on the street they're not safe 'till I find the motherfucker who killed my son." He repeats this mission objective many more times, to which I lost count, but at least keeps his word.

Sure that sounds roughly like every other action movie you've seen, but Seagal here is very literal. He doesn't care why his boy was shot, or who ordered it. He just wants the killer, nothing more. He has dealings and alliances with vicious criminals (like Danny Trejo), arguably more evil in what they've inflicted on society as a whole than that one assassin, but he doesn't care. When a civilian friend tries to persuade Seagal to quit this avenging crusade, for he'll be as bad as they are. Seagal's stone cold badass response?

"No, I'm fucking worse."

Certainly you would expect Seagal during this journey to exterminate drug kingpin villain Eddie Griffin. Yes, stand-up comedian Eddie Griffin plays a serious villain, and he's surprisingly solid and even legit menacing at times. My favorite moment of his is when after eliminating a snitch within his operation, he keeps talking and mocking the corpse for being so stupid as to get rubbed out. Who knows, maybe a risk-daring indie filmmaker or someone will give Griffin more such roles to explore his dramatic potential than say UNDERCOVER BROTHER.

But Seagal doesn't kill him, even after Griffin in action cinema baddie tradition was too busy talking to pull the trigger before he's disarmed. Seagal says he's got done the one thing he wanted to accomplish, gives the gun back, and walks away. Griffin doesn't try to shoot him in the back or whatever we usually see in such scripted situations within the genre, but instead he ends up admiring him for being so effortless gangsta. It's such creative touches to well-abused material that I recommend JUSTICE, even if what most action fans demand in their quota of shoot outs and car chases may feel underwhelmed, casualties of no money.

Maybe director Don E. FauntLeRoy's real knack isn't in action cinema per say, for I fell asleep during his finale bang bang sequence. But what kept my attention were more the quiet moments when he and crew know what they exactly wanted, without trying to be cool or cutesy. If anything his minimalistic blunt storytelling narrative somehwat reminds me of Abel Ferrera, for like JUSTICE Ferrera's KING OF NEW YORK relied more on acting and script than stylish direction or editing to tell its story, or in other words get to the goddamn point. Again like Griffin, hopefully FauntLeRoy will get more ample opportunities to flex his possible talent instead of DTD projects like softcore porn and Steven Seagal vehicles.

Though if Seagal's DTD are or can be as good as URBAN JUSTICE, I'll be there.

Righteous Kill (2008) ...Pacino, De Niro... really together this time. Great seeing them actually interact for more than 2 nanoseconds on screen for the first time! But this film really lacked quite a bit besides, in almost every category. If you're on this site, it's a must-see for obvious reasons, but there's nothing special here otherwise. Unfortunately.

Last night i watched BLACK RAIN at work.

Had not seen it in a while. Great film,Michael Douglas at his very best! The brooding menace of Tokyo itself is awesome.

they look incredibly old in the main poster. I will watch the movie and hope it is great but I doubt they'd be better off without this one.