Cynical Cinema

When last we left Richard Kimble, “The Fugitive”, at the end of Season One, Volume 2, http://blog.rogersradiointernet.com/cynicalcinema/2008/05/10/there-actually-was-good-tv-once-the-fugitive-season-one-volume-two-810/  he was holed up in a house with two crazy odd-couple friends who were shielding him from the long arm of the law.  The net was closing in on him as the cops had set up roadblocks and a search party in his area.  And then…he escaped.  I was kind of hoping for a cliffhanger ending to that first season, but I guess they didn’t do that in the old days.  They just figured that people would continue to watch if they made a good series.  And they DID make a very good series.  I would call it refreshing if a series did it today.  But this one is from the mid-sixties, so I don’t know what to call it.  I guess I just thought it was nice. 

          But this lack of cliffhangers and continuing story lines becomes a bit of a problem in Season 2.  It was great in Season One when each episode stood on it’s own.  It set up the premise of the show wonderfully, David Janssen was brilliant as Richard Kimble, and the writing was great.  So, OK.  Now you’re in the second season, and the whole premise of the show has now been set up.  Kimble has been wrongly convicted of murder, but managed to escape thanks to a disastrous train accident on his way to death row.  Now he is on the run from the law, searching for the one-armed man who is the real killer.  But now that I’m into this second season, I want more story.  I want to follow his hunt for the one-armed man, and I want to root for him as he gets chased by the law.  The whole premise of the show is one that screams for continuity between episodes, but we still get one-offs, all season long. 

          But of course, those one-offs are still very good.  Season Two of The Fugitive begins with Kimble looking for help from a superstar lawyer played by Ed Begley.  By the way - here’s a hilarious excerpt from a review of this DVD set at  www.tvshowsondvd.com  - or, at least I thought it was hilarious.“15 episodes that include guest stars like Ed Begley (father of Ed Begley Jr.)” Hmmm…no kidding, eh?  But you KNOW nothing is going to come of it, because each episode ends the same way it begins - Richard Kimble is on the move and on the run.  Anyway, the season moves along at a brisk pace, one episode at a time.  In the end, it is compelling TV, but it isn’t the kind of thing where you want to watch several episodes in a row.  Although, that is more than I can say for most television.  One at a time is enough, which means you can watch all fifteen hours of Season Two, Volume One of the Fugitive on fifteen different days, over the course of the next three months, which should be just enough time for Season Two Volume Two to come out.  Volume One comes out tomorrow, June 10th, from Paramount Home Entertainment.

          One of the worst things you can say about a TV show or movie from the 70s or 60s or even the 1930s and 40s is that it feels dated.  That it doesn’t stand up over time.  That what was once considered classic is stuck, mired, in it’s own era, completely lacking the ability to maintain it’s relevance in today’s world.  And then, every now and again, being “dated” can actually be a good thing.  Such is the case with Hawaii Five-O, a show which may be the classic show that holds up the least over time.  And I love that about it!  It is so cheesy and mired in the seventies that it becomes hilarious to watch.  The Fourth Season of Hawaii Five-O comes out tomorrow, June 10th, from Paramount Home Entertainment. 

          Jack Lord as Steve McGarrett must be the most hilariously dated screen character available on DVD right now.  His hair is glorious, in a 1970s pre-Flock-Of-Seagulls sort of way.  This is the most dated hair on TV, next to MacGyver’s mullet.  His delivery is painfully cheesy, the one-liners and the tough guy talk are a cross between Clint Eastwood and Don Johnson, which just doesn’t work.  Well, any more, I guess.  The tough-guy showdowns between McGarrett and the big evil bosses (especially the wooden yet enigmatic Wo Fat, played by Khigh Dheigh) are ludicrous but SO entertaining.  It’s pretty clear to me that on CSI:
Miami, David Caruso is channeling 70s-era Jack Lord.  And for some reason, people still love that show, while I think David Caruso is hilariously over-the-top.  The legacy of the ludicrous cop.  A funny one, I think. 

          Also awesomely dated is that famous theme music.  One of the most familiar tunes in the world, I had never seen an episode of Hawaii Five-O, I couldn’t have identified the theme correctly in any way, but as soon as the first episode started up there it was.  This one’s up there with Bonanza as probably the greatest most recognizable theme music in TV history.  Another hilarious part of the show - prototyping the David Carusos that were to come - is that Steve McGarrett seems to be the only character on the show.  Oh, they’re a team, McGarrett and the other guy…played by James McArthur…what was his name?  Oh yeah.  Danno!  A guy who exists simply as a reason for Lord to utter the line “book ‘em, Danno”.  I’m certain this series was intended to be extremely serious in it’s day, but it has now become so campy as to be awesome.  Watch it next time you’re about to get into CSI:
Miami and look for the comparisons.  Then again, many people don’t get the humour in CSI:
Miami either, so perhaps they’ll watch this and be very entertained.  I know I was.

          “Mannix” was a TV show from the 60s and 70s.  It seems to be one of those shows that was a success in its time, but it really doesn’t hold up today.  You see, it’s a detective show.  And there have been so many detective movies over the years, and detective TV shows, that for a film or show to cut through and maintain any kind of relevance in today’s world, it has to be something really special.  Think of Humphrey Bogart in The Maltese Falcon, or Eastwood as Dirty Harry, or yes, even Peter Falk as Columbo.  Each of those characters was so unique and so interesting that people will watch Columbo, Sam Spade, and Harry Callaghan for years to come.  Season One of Mannix comes out today, courtesy of Paramount Home Entertainment.  But I would recommend picking up the Dirty Harry Ultimate Collection instead, it also comes out today.  And comes with a free police badge! 

          Detective Joe Mannix is played by Mike Connors, who does a good job.  He has a Johnny Cash late-60s haircut, and looks and talks a lot like the Man In Black.  He is tough and implacable, and direct, and determined and smart.  And he always gets his man.  But then, haven’t we seen that a thousand times before?  He’s not as implacable as Sam Spade, not as tough as Harry Callaghan, less determined than Philip Marlowe, and not as smart as Columbo.  So he exists on this second-tier, forgotten rung of the Private Eye ladder from that era, who just doesn’t measure up to Mike Hammer, let alone the truly classic detective characters on TV and in film.  No knock against Connors here, he was just written that way. 

          And it’s the writing that makes this show seem terribly dated when you watch it now.  Mannix works for a company called “Intertect”, a massive private-detective company.  Which was something that apparently existed in the sixties.  There are virtually no cops in the shows, and although there are very often some heinous crimes, like murder, Mannix doesn’t call the cops for backup, he calls his boss.  And regardless of how many bad guys there are, his boss showing up with a gun forces them all to drop their guns.  Which means that Mannix and the boss, played by Joseph Campanella, are so bad-ass that the two of them are able to surround and outnumber ten bad guys at a time.  And “Intertect”?  Sounds a lot like a company name that is created for a punchline in a modern comedy.  Like “Initech” in Office Space.  And the bad guys always come from something that is cryptically called “the syndicate”.  It is never explained what this “syndicate” actually is, we just take for granted it is a large and powerful evil criminal enterprise.  But then, Joe Mannix is not James Bond. 

          In every episode there is a hot babe.  Almost always a blonde.  And in every episode, there is a femme fatale character.  Usually the blonde.  But Mannix is usually too smart and perceptive to fall for their traps and charms - I guess because he saw the exact same woman every week for seven years.  Your radar would be up after that.  The opening and closing credits are irritating, with this mosaic-style fade-cut where a bunch of squares appear on the screen to make a big picture.  Which would be fine if they didn’t do it every single commercial break as well.  And the theme music is sparse, and really short, which would also be fine if it was just for the opening and closing credits.  But they use it as a sting, as a car-chase theme, as dramatic pause music - always the exact same tune!  Through the whole show!  It’s annoying!   

          The episodes have titles that are hit-and-miss, some of them hilarious.  Skid Marks on A Dry Run.  Warning: Live Blueberries.  Coffin For A Clown.  Funny stuff.  There is always a bevy of hot women walking around Intertect, showing up as secretaries and office runners and so forth.  Which makes me think the casting agent for this show was getting laid a lot on the side by promising walk-on roles to every hot woman who crossed his path.  And even if the bad guys are NOT from “the syndicate”, they still seem to have hired thugs for some reason.  All this means that every single episode of Mannix is exactly the same as every other episode of Mannix.  And that makes the first season tough to watch all the way through - 24 one-hour episodes, the main difference in each being that the hot blonde is played by a different actress. 

          Now, there is one awfully cool special feature on the DVD worth mentioning.  Clips from the “Hard-Boiled Murder” episode of the TV show Diagnosis Murder, where the entire cast of Mannix was reunited for the show.  And by that I mean Connors, Campanella and Peggy Fair, who played Mannix’s secretary.  One of the first African-American women to have a regular role on a major TV series, Fair was very good, but she didn’t appear until Season Two.  So really, there is almost no reason to pick up Mannix Season One.

Cleaner, starring Samuel L. Jackson, is the kind of movie you get when producers look at all the other movies and TV shows that have been made in the past year, and try to make one just like that.  But with a new idea that will make this movie seem different!  And they’ve already done the spy thing, they’ve done the cop-on-the-edge thing, they’ve done the Negotiator (also with Jackson), and they’ve done every combination and permutation of the characters from CSI and Bones and Cold Case and Medium and every other cop-related profession.  But wait - we have never done a movie about the guy who cleans up the blood after murders!  This is so NEW!  Oh, it doesn’t matter that it’s the exact same story we’ve used in every movie and TV show over the past ten years, this character is new.  He cleans up blood!  Get it?

So you get a movie about a murder, and a guy trying to solve it, and police corruption and extramarital affairs and betrayal and father-daughter relationships and blah blah blah, ground up in the meat grinder of every script ever written, and spit out into this movie with the fresh new character idea.  And we have Samuel L. Jackson as the guy who comes by after cops are done their investigations and cleans up the blood and gross stuff at murder scenes.  This, really has almost nothing to do with the rest of the movie.  It just gives the film a title and a new, fresh main character who is still a cop and still solves crimes but isn’t the same.  And next thing you know, he gets caught up in a web of intrigue that involves a mysterious hot chick (Eva Mendes) and his former best friend and cop-buddy (Ed Harris).  Be warned - the next bits here contain spoilers!

In watching Cleaner, I discovered a few bothersome things.  First of all, one of my favourite actors, Ed Harris, has somehow become a bit of a caricature.  I was sad when Harris showed up, as Jackson’s best friend, and I thought - oh, no!  You can’t trust Ed Harris!  Think of Gone Baby Gone, A History of Violence, and now this!  I knew it the second he stepped onto the screen.  Ed Harris is just too big an actor to play second-banana, the hero’s best friend.  If he’s in there as something other than the star, he’s the surprise hero cop, or the bad guy.  That’s it.  And then Eva Mendes shows up.  And I’m thinking  - oh no!  Don’t trust Eva Mendes either!  She just looks like a vamp who will screw you over.  And then there’s Luis Guzman, who I really like.  He seems untrustworthy, which likely means that by the end he will be a good guy, and an ally to our hero.  And lo and behold, all of these assumptions turned out to be true!  This is either because these actors are now typecast, or because the director somehow telegraphed the ending.

 And I believe that the latter is true.  The direction in this movie, by Renny Harlin, is clumsy at best.  Harlin, I would argue, has never directed a good movie in his career.  His previous best was The Long Kiss Goodnight, also with Samuel L. Jackson, and it was average at best.  Too often he seems to try to add a small twist to existing plots and cliched scripts, and ends up making boring film.  And Cleaner is no exception.  The clumsiness is most apparent in the relationship between Jackson and his daughter, played very ably by Keke Palmer.  But the best acting in the world couldn’t save Cleaner from the clumsy, awkward, obvious and irritating moments between the two.  Their relationship swings wildly from that father-daughter sharing-everything warm and fuzzy one to the absentee-father-who-lets-his-work-dominate-his-home-life one.  Sometimes within the same scene!  And the latter relationship culminates in that oh-so-obnoxious cliche, him MISSING HER SOCCER GAME!  I HATE the parent-missing-the-child’s-soccer-game cliche. 

And the other, close-bond father-daughter relationship culminates with another horrible cliche that I hate.  The daughter, having to choose between her distant father and the trusted family friend who all of a sudden can’t be trusted, chooses to shoot the formerly trusted family friend.  I hate this ending.  It hasn’t been original or interesting since the third time it was used, in 1923.  Oh, come on.  Just an example of the powerfully unoriginal, clumsily constructed movie that is the Cleaner.  It is so neatly wrapped up in a tidy little package at the end that it looks really stupid.  This movie really needed to be far rougher around the edges to even keep my attention for more than half the film.  Avoid this, it sucks.

As I wait, with breathless anticipation, for a chance to go see Son of Rambow, I have been forced to make do with regular Rambo in the meantime.  The fourth installment in this moribund franchise came out yesterday, and I begrudgingly rented it, feeling as though it were something of a duty, rather than a pleasure, to watch this re-hashing of the aging Stallone’s one-time moment of glory.  But then, I felt the same about Rocky Balboa, and it was the second-best of the moribund Rocky series.  So pleasant surprises are possible just about anywhere.  Although I hate to call Rambo a pleasant surprise.  In point of fact, Rambo did not surprise me in any way.  Rather, I surprised myself in watching it.  I’ll explain that in a moment.  First, a bit of Rambo history.

When I was a kid, Rambo was more of a punchline than an icon.  You would see someone cutting their sandwich with an unnecessarily large knife, and say “look out, Rambo’s in the kitchen”.  Or some other such clever childish thing.  By the time Rambo III rolled around, even eight-year-olds were making fun of the over-the-top idiocy of the film.  Rambo was in Afghansitan, fighting with the Afghani “freedom fighters” against the Russians.  I put freedom fighters in quotation marks not because these people were not really “freedom fighters” because it is a Rambo buzzword that separates the good guys from the insidiously evil ones.  And he mowed down half the Russian army, muscles bulging, as fifty of them stood on a hill vs. the one guy with the massive machine gun.  This was even more ridiculous than Rambo:  First Blood Part II, where he shot the communist bad guy with the arrow, and the guy exploded.  And even as children, we all understood this.

What gets lost in all this mess is that the first Rambo movie, First Blood, was actually good.  It was actually very good.  Stallone was the vietnam vet, unable to shake the nightmares and the violence that had become a part of his life, and he just wanted to eat a sandwich.  But some small-town backward hick sherrif decided to exert his questionable authority, and the next thing we all knew, everyone was dead.  A very cool, very dark, very gritty film.  But we don’t remember that, for the most part.  We remember the sheer insanity and bonkers mayhem that resulted in those last two abysmal efforts at “movie making”.  Which is why most of the world expected total nonsense and horrible acting and ludicrous pacing and unimaginable explosions with the fourth movie, 20 years after the third became the most expensive movie ever made.  (At the time.)

So I was cringing as I pressed play on the DVD player.  I was cringing through the opening credits.  I was dreading the Rambo cliches and the lousy dialogue and the ridiculous, unnecessary violence and explosions.  But all of a sudden, as the movie began, my opinion started to change.  Rambo is living in the jungles of Thailand - still a damaged man, he catches snakes and sells them for a living.  Yet somehow he can still afford a boat.  Anyway, I know what you’re saying - Vietnam was a long time ago, how can he still be damaged?  Shouldn’t he be over that by now?  But you see, this is Rambo.  He also saw (and caused) horrendous violence in Afghanistan and small-town U.S.A.  He just can’t escape it, and so he becomes a hermit at the beginning of every movie.  But then, of course, something happens to draw him back into the killing game.

In this case, that something is a group of missionaries who are trying to go up-river (it’s always up-river) into Burma (how timely) to deliver medical supplies and medical attention to that impoverished and war-torn country.  They want to rent Rambo and his boat, but he is a wise old soldier, and he knows that they should really not be going up-river.  They will be killed, he knows.  But a sweet, innocent missionary lady named Sarah (Julie Miller from Dexter) convinces him that they have to try, so off they go.  But these missionaries think that he’s John Rambo.  They don’t know that he’s RAMBO.  After he delivers them to their destination, they are of course captured by the crazy-evil Burmese.  And now Rambo is hired, once again, to take a boat up-river.  This time filled with mercenaries, who also don’t know that he’s RAMBO.

But we know he’s RAMBO.  WE have seen the three previous films, or are familiar with this cultural icon.  And it is that knowledge that fills me with anticipation as the crew goes up-river…wait - anticpation?  I find all of a sudden that I am actually anticipating the shunting aside of John Rambo in favour of the emergence of RAMBO!  Not only am I anticipating it eagerly, I am irritated it hasn’t come sooner!  I find myself thinking “when is he going to become RAMBO?” in a very whiny voice inside my head.  All of a sudden, I want ridiculous bloodshed.  I want over-the-top explosions and gigantic machine guns.  Where IS the violence?  Well, I know these mercenaries are loose-cannon and maniac enough to cause some mayhem.  Here we go!  And the violence beings, and the RAMBO emerges, and I am able to revel in the idiocy.

Bodies blasted completely into pieces are de rigeur in this film.  Whether it be by explosions, mines, sniper rifles, or the you-knew-it-had-to-be-there gigantic super-power machine gun, body parts are all over the screen and flying through the air for about half an hour straight.  Explosions which could just as easily have been small ones turn into staggering spectacles of fire and dirt and booming, as the body parts are scattered over many many miles.  It is not enough for Rambo to break a guy’s neck, he must rip his entire throat out with his bare hands.  Yes!  It’s THIS kind of excess that made Rambo II and Rambo III so terrible and so laughable, and as I realized here, so very nostalgic for me!  I found myself cheering for every single Rambo cliche in the book - the shadow that flits past the bad guy just before he dies.  The slow rise of Rambo into view behind the bad guy at the opportune moment, with murder in his eyes, so you KNOW that guy’s gonna buy it next.  And of course, the machine gun that I would assume no single human being could operate alone.

And then there are the nightmares, and the flashbacks.  Just so we don’t forget who John Rambo really is, we get flashbacks - to the previous movies!  Now it is these movies that are giving Rambo himself nightmares, as I am certain they did for many a movie critic in the late 80s.  Scenes from First Blood - “Nothin’ is ovah!”, scenes from the other two, all tormenting this man.  And it is important to know that he is still tormented.  Rambo has never voluntarily, in any of his movies, taken up arms.  He has been forced into a position where he had no choice but to kill everyone he met.  And this movie must fit that mold.  Also, there must be a cause, a noble one, that could be taken up somewhere in the world.  In this case, Burma (or, Myanmar), a horribly violent country with a civil war that has been ongoing for many, many years.  (In fact, bootlegs of this movie were the hottest selling items on the streets in Myanmar until the devastating hurricane that killed thousands.  Now, the hottest selling items are bootlegs of video footage of the hurricane devastation, so people can see what is actually going on, and not the sunny everything’s-OK picture painted by the government.) 

And all of these things add to the greatness of Rambo.  The fun one has when watching.  This is a real country, with a real fight, that really needs help in a big way.  And yet, the people who made Rambo are willing to, on a certain level, trivialize the conflict itself by showing an aging Sylvester Stallone get behind the biggest machine gun in the world and blow the arms and legs and necks off thousands of people.  But they don’t care.  They have a budget, and explosives, and damn it all, they are going to use every single ounce of both!  I am still cheering for the dream sequence, which was absolutely hilarious.  And there are some seriously wicked Rambo-style lines - my personal favourite being “you either live for nothing, or you die for something”.  I think we could all picture Mel Gibson delivering this line in Braveheart, for example, but Stallone?  As Rambo?  LMAO.

Stallone still has what it takes to play John Rambo.  The ability to flex and the inability to articulate.  In the year leading up to the film, he was caught with steroids.  I guess he had to stop taking them, which is why Rambo, for the first time, does not appear shirtless at all in this film.  His arms are still gigantic, and he does flex them a lot, but one would assume that at the age of eighty-four, Stallone’s abs are not what they once were.  So he wisely keeps his shirt on, and we are all the better for it.  And in the end, we are all the better for having seen this movie, knowing that Rambo is still out there, unable to speak his mind but still tortured inside it, unable to persuade people not to fight but still the ultimate fighter.  And the final scene in the movie, which makes it almost inevitable there will be a sequel, is sublimely foolish, powerfully obvious and the cherry on top of this movie.  A movie which is not brilliant by any means, and it probably isn’t even good, but it is Rambo.  John Rambo always finds himself in a situation where he has to do bad to do good.  RAMBO, on the other hand, just has to be bad to be awesome!

This is the tagline for A Force of One, a Chuck Norris movie from 1979:  “He hears the silence.  He sees the darkness.  Only he can stop the killing.”  That isn’t even a joke.  I didn’t take it off the Chuck Norris list website.  It is really printed on the cover of the DVD, just like that. 

My thirteen-year-old step son has just discovered that Chuck Norris stuff on the internet.  You know, “Chuck Norris doesn’t sleep.  He waits.”  And, “Chuck Norris’ tears can cure cancer.  Too bad he’s never cried.”  And such like.  So he asked to see a Chuck Norris movie.  And I realized that with the exception of Return of the Dragon and Burn Hollywood Burn, I had no Chuck Norris movies at all.  The first is a Bruce Lee movie that happens to involve Chuck Norris in the climactic fight scene, and the second is just a poorly done comedy where Norris stars as himself.  But I didn’t have what could reasonably be considered a “Chuck Norris Movie”.  Like Missing in Action, or Missing in Action II.  Or, Missing in Action III.  I’m not sure what else he did.  I don’t like Chuck Norris.  I’m a Seagal man.  In fact, I’m not sure Norris has worked in years - last I saw, he was backing Mike Huckabee for the Republican presidential nomination, starring in infomercial reruns, and basically existing on that list on the internet, which was funny one year ago but really irritating now.

So when I saw A Force Of One for just six bucks at Rogers Video, I decided to experience Chuck Norris, just one more time, with my curious step-son.  I warned him ahead of time.  You know those Seagal movies that I watch a lot?  This might actually be worse.  But he has (through me, I think) developed a similar appreciation for irony to mine, and loves a truly bad movie almost as much as I do.  So we were very excited for this film.  Chuck Norris, you see, is a…karate expert…of course.  He needs to teach the cops how to fight, because a serial killer is knocking them off.  And there are drugs somehow involved, and eventually, his adoptive son is killed by the mysterious karate-expert serial killer.  This is so he can go on a vengeful tear, which of course culminates with the big final fight scene between the two karate fighters.

But here’s the thing - A Force of One wasn’t bad enough.  It mostly made sense.  It featured some average acting performances from the supporting cast.  The fight scenes were halfway-decent.  This was not what we wanted!  We wanted terrible!  Local-car-commercial-level acting!  Nonsense plot!  Inane dialogue!  A false sense of it’s own excellence!  The earmarks of Seagal fare.  But no.  This movie defied all odds and made a little bit of sense.  It was difficult to make fun of A Force of One.  Sure, there were cliches and idiocies, but not nearly enough.  And so the movie just became boring, and that made me sad.  Both of us, in fact.  We wanted abysmal.  Oh well, better put on Alone In The Dark.

But then - wait!  I checked out, on a whim, the special features.  And there it was!  A documentary on American Cinema, the company that put this movie out!  And it was all about - how “American Cinema”, the company, changed Hollywood and the movie industry in general.  And they were serious!  And here it is - this is how they changed Hollywood forever - they made a star out of Chuck Norris!  This was not tongue in cheek, it was totally serious, THIS is what the movie itself should have been.  Totally inflated with an undeserved sense of self-importance.  But even with this gem of a special feature, this DVD is still not worth six bucks.

Flashpoint opens with a short montage of Donnie Yen performing some impressive acts of police brutality in his pursuit of criminals. This lands him, within the first two minutes of the film, in front of internal affairs. Then the internal affairs thing is forgotten for the rest of the movie. It would just interfere with the leg-breaking and gunfights and bad-ass martial arts if he had to worry about who he was hurting and killing. Yen’s brother, you see, is also a cop - one who is in deep undercover with a dangerous and evil criminal organization. This gang is almost as good with the crazy kung-fu moves as Yen himself. Almost. Pay close attention, that will be important information at the end of the movie.

The gang is taken down, and the trial is going to happen, but witnesses start getting killed, and so do some cops. Hong Kong martial arts movies love killing cops, even when the cops are the heroes. In fact, especially when they are. And they also love to have tightly-bonded families, devoted brotherhood, and vengeance. Oh, and they’re also alla bout the lonely cops, loner cops, and possible-problem-drinker cops. Like Bruce Willis, with kung-fu and way more guns. And Flashpoint is no exception. All of these standard Asian action movie stereotypes are in place, and there is nothing new about this film at all.

However, it is good. Flashpoint, in fact, is very good. The gunfights are expertly choreographed, the action is fantastic, the story moves along at a lightning pace, the actors are suitably bad-ass, and Donnie Yen is at his best, sort of a Bruce Lee type - combining Jet Li’s fast and brutal abilities with Clint Eastwood’s dangerous stare. The final showdown is everything you could want from a martial arts movie and more. Not only are there high-flying attacks, hardcore kicking and punching and arm breaking and leg twisting, but there is a real UFC-type feel to the scene, as well as a tip of the hat to hockey fighting. Everything in the world of hand-to-hand combat is thrown at the wall here, and it all sticks. One of the most impressive climactic fights in modern Asian cinema. Flashpoint comes out, courtesy of Alliance Films, on May 27th.

Alliance Films is on a roll with their epic films. A few months ago, they released a magnificent three-disc Limited Collector’s edition of El Cid to DVD, one of the great but forgotten Charlton Heston epics. It came with cards and comic books and dozens of special features and booklets and all kinds of trinkets. Today, May 27th, Alliance is releasing the next in this epic series, a Limited Collector’s Edition of The Fall Of The Roman Empire. The three-disc set is almost identical to El Cid in terms of the goodies that come inside. And the two films are very similar as well, in that they are massive military epics with casts of thousands, enormous sets, and Sophia Loren. Starring with Loren in The Fall of the Roman Empire is Alec Guinness, one of the most under-rated actors in history, as the reasonable and wise Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius. He may well be one of the three greatest to ever live, up there with Brando and Olivier and Nicholson and DeNiro and Bogart.

The movie begins with Marcus Aurelius calling together the representatives of all the nations within the Roman Empire in order to secure peace and prosperity for the known world. Of course, this does not take place over the course of the film, and when it ends three hours later, it is with the Fall of the Roman Empire. This disaster comes about when Aurelius’ son, Commodus (Christopher Plummer), gets wind of his father’s decision to turn over the throne to his adopted son Livius instead of him. So Commodus decides to kill his own father in order to take the throne. And that leaves Rome in the hands of a childish, foolish man, who refuses to negotiate with his enemies or listen to other opinions, and thereby dooms the entire empire quite quickly. Well, in three hours.

This movie is famous now more as the movie that caused the fall of Samuel Bronfman’s cinematic empire, moreso than as a film. But as a film, it stands the test of time. The “Battle of the Four Armies” is as impressive a set piece as anything staged in The Ten Commandments or Ben-Hur or Lawrence of Arabia. 8,000 soldiers and 1,200 horses were used for the production, which was shot on a massive plain in Madrid. And the detailed reconstruction of the Roman Forum remains, to this day, the largest ever outdoor film set. With set pieces and sets like these, it’s easy to see how the movie cost a massive amount to produce. And when it became a gargantuan financial failure, it took Bronfman’s empire with it. He had previously been responsible for some of the massive films of the era - El Cid, King of Kings - but after this one he never made another. It was more his business plan than the failure of this film, however, that did him in. He had spent so much creating the sets for these epic movies that he overextended himself, and owed millions of dollars when he became financially destitute and shut down operations.

The Fall of the Roman Empire plays a little fast and loose with actual, factual, history. But the tone, the costumes, the sets and the structure of the armies and the senate are all perfect. The Battle of the Four Armies, while an impressive scene, never actually took place. But the scene toward the end where the senators attempt to bribe the military into making one of them emperor is taken from historical fact. But in the end, you don’t watch a movie like this to learn specific facts about world history. You watch it to be entertained. And The Fall of the Roman Empire IS entertaining. Livius is played by Stephen Boyd, who does a terrific job in a role that was first offered to (of course) his Ben-Hur co-star, Charlton Heston. Sophia Loren is great as always, and of course smoking hot. The role of Commodus was only the third movie role for Christopher Plummer, and it’s the role that propelled him to stardom. And Alec Guinness is simply magnificent as Marcus Aurelius, a role that sadly ends halfway through the movie with his death.

There are many similarities to Gladiator in this film, and indeed a few people have suggested that on many levels Gladiator was actually a remake of The Fall Of The Roman Empire. I wouldn’t go so far as to suggest that is the case, but the stories certainly approximate one another. They occur at the same epoch in history, they deal with the same characters and the same downward spiral that consumed Rome in all her glory, and certainly the final scene is almost identical in both films. But Gladiator is a little more fanciful, and The Fall of the Roman Empire is way bigger in scale.

Now - while I certainly do recommend picking up this film, and this three-disc edition is wonderfully done, you might want to wait. For true rabid fans of this film, there is another edition coming out later, possibly as much as a year later. This edition features the standard two hour and 52 minute theatrical version that has been around for years. However, there was some lost footage that was discovered, too late to be included in this particular edition, that will be added to a later set. This will, though, likely be the only set with the poster-cards and the booklets that are included here. So perhaps, if you are a hardcore fan of The Fall of the Roman Empire, you could well do both. Like my nerd-buddy Dave, who owns all thirty-four different editions of the Star Wars trilogy. On VHS and DVD and LaserDisc and reel-to-reel and so forth. If only he had a laser disc player.

On May 27th, Paramount Home Entertainment is releasing Jackass presents: Mat Hoffma’s Tribute To Evel Knievel. It’s a 45-minute film of Johnny Knoxville yapping about nothing while BMX legend Mat Hoffman gets a bunch of the best stunt guys in the world together to attempt to break some world records. The actual connection to Evel Knievel is dubious at best, but there is a very little bit of decent footage of Evel’s biggest stunts at the beginning of the movie. Then, we get Knoxville doing his I-talk-a-lot thing, as some seriously cool stunts are attempted in a dirt pit somewhere in America. Flying motorbikes, tandem jumps with midgets, funny crashes and painful crashes, and general…well…jackassery.

In the end, it’s 15 minutes of motorbike jumping and cool stuff like that shoehorned into 45 minutes. How is that extra 30 minutes filled? With Johnny Knoxville. Talking. And then trying some stunts himself, injuring himself in the junk…blah blah blah. Have we not seen all that before? Maybe a hundred times? C’mon Knoxville. Just shut up and show us the stunts. And the stunts are truly impressive. Travis Pastrana and Allen Cooke are true daredevils, maniacs with no fear whatsoever, who wax eloquent about Evel Knievel for a brief moment before attempting some death-defying motorbike action. Again, the connection to Evel Knievel is loose at best. He was a stunt guy, they’re stunt guys…you see?

That being said, there is one stunt which is totally worth the price of admission. It is even worth sitting through thirty superfluous minutes of braying Johnny Knoxville. And it’s one that actually has nothing whatsoever to do with the rest of the movie. You see, forty minutes of the movie are about motorbike stunts. And five minutes are about skydiving. We get to see Scott Plamer jump out of an airplane, tens of thousands of feet above the ground - without a parachute. He then, in the air, hooks up with another skydiver, attaches himself, and pulls the cord, landing what is not only an impressive stunt, but seemingly a staggeringly stupid one as well. Then it’s back to the motorbikes, but we’re pretty bored of them after seeing this one.

I am starting to think one of the reasons for the rise in gun violence in the world is the dumbing down of TV shows. When I was a kid, and the A-Team fired three thousand bullets at people, none of them hit anyone, and certainly didn’t kill them. Yet in the old days, guns killed people. And killing people came with consequences. Take Gunsmoke, the longest-running Western series of all time. Season 2, Volume 2 comes out May 27th from Paramount Home Entertainment. It’s a show where guns are a way of life and Western frontier justice is doled out one bullet at a time. And the thing is - this show was actually very good! Marshal Matt Dillon has become something of a pop cultural icon in the years since Gunsmoke.

Also iconic are Dodge City and the bizarrely detached attitude the marshal and others have toward human life. There is an episode in Season 2 where the “suits” from the big city come out to check on the practices of the cops in this town. They make an ordinance that forbids anyone from carrying a gun in Dodge. Of course, guns are not only essential to these people, they are the “air they breathe and the water they drink”. Dillon, of course, being a good, loyal NRA member, wants to show this suit that taking peoples’ guns is a bad idea, so he lets a bunch of people get killed to prove his point. Then there is the episode where a guy yells “I’m going to kill you” and then gets shot, and the man who shot him hangs. Two episodes later, a man yells “I’m going to kill you”, and gets shot by a woman, and the marshal escorts her out of town and says it was self-defense. Frontier justice is certainly not blind, like the kind we have today. Allegedly.

But frontier justice IS entertaining. And so is Gunsmoke. Considering how long this show ran, and how popular it was in it’s day, I was initially amazed that it doesn’t show up too often in reruns on TV. But then it occurred to me - perhaps that is because when the 80s rolled around, and censors and silly anti-violence monitors abounded, perhaps this show was kept off TV, what with the occasional killing and so forth. And what was left? MacGyver and the A-Team. Gunsmoke makes me happy, in that it hearkens back to a better day for television, the type of TV we are only recently beginning to get again. Season 2, Volume 2 comes out May 27th, and is worth it.