Tag: USA

Roller Derby Mania

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★★★
“I love the 80’s…if not the clothes.”

This dates back to 1986, which is a little odd, as the sport was pretty much in one of its down-turns at the time – the excesses of RollerGames were still a couple of years away at that point. This isn’t probably the best place for a novice to start, as there’s no explanation at all about the sport, since it assumes you know what’s going on, how bouts are staged, scored and what the rules are . There’s a little about the history (including a cute song from the 1940’s), but it’s mostly action featuring the Los Angeles T-Birds.

It’s important to realise that this was also the era of mixed leagues – the men and women skated alternate periods – but the cover picture about sums up the significance of the sexes, with the women definitely to the fore. In contrast to the modern version, the staged elements seem more obvious, with some acrobatic stunts very clearly pre-planned – the best hits will still leave you wincing. However, the camerawork often leaves a lot to be desired, though this may be an inevitable result of the sport’s nature.

The managers of the teams are also much more prominent, in a way that also recalls pro wrestling. The likes of Georgia Hase – Miss Georgia Hase, to you – E.G. ‘Pretty Boy’ Miller, Ana Anaya and T-Birds’ manager John Hall are the focus much more than currently seems the style. But if anything sticks in your mind, it’ll be the clothes and hairstyles, which mark this as a child of the 1980’s, in indelible, luridly day-glo marker. While your feelings for this slab o’ nostalgia might thus be heavily coloured by your feeling regarding fluffy hair and sideburns, it’s entertaining enough.

Senorita Justice

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★★
“Justice = vengeance according to the cover. That’s about as thought-provoking as this gets.”

This is an interesting contrast to Sunland Heat which took a woeful script and executed it briskly enough to work. Here, the story isn’t bad – Anna Rios, a Hispanic lawyer (with a special forces background!) goes back to her roots, after her brother is gunned-down, and uncovers a maze of murky deals. It’s the execution which is largely inept, “Kantz” providing further evidence that one-name directors suck at GWG films – see also Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle (McQ), Catwoman (Pitof), Ecks vs. Sever (Kaos) and Tomb Raider 2 (Jandebont).

Mendia isn’t bad as Rios, but the action scenes are almost entirely unconvincing, badly-shot and badly-staged. The worst offender is the final fight between Anna and a Yakuza hitwoman (Grayce Wey) brought in to deal with her, which failed to live up to anticipation in the slightest. The pair basically stand still and trade punches, before Anna – and I trust I’m not spoiling this – disposes of her opponent in a way best summed-up as laughably implausible. To its credit, the film does do a good job of capturing cocky Hispanic street ‘tude before the punches and/or bullets fly: Michael Francis as heavily-tattooed thug Mo makes the best impression here.

The film’s poverty-row aspects aren’t necessarily a major issue, since it’s aiming for an urban and street-credible approach, but they are painfully obvious in departments like sound-effects, with all the blows sounding exactly the same. I also wonder if most of the cast wouldn’t have been more comfortable speaking street Spanish than the English used here, which seems forced and unnatural. Eva Desperate Housewives Longoria turns up as a cop, but in all likelihood, would no longer thank you for mentioning this disappointing and flat entry in the genre.

Dir: Kantz
Star: Yancy Mendia, Kalex, Edith Gonzalez, Tito Puente Jr

The Last Man on Planet Earth

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★★★½
“After World War III, there will be no more long queues for the restroom.”

You’ve got to admire any film – particularly a TV movie – that provokes diverse reviews. This, then, not only “was obviously written and made to appeal to a lesbian slumber party,” it’s also a “manifestation of heterosexual panic.” Such even-handedness can only be applauded. Of course, as usual, the truth falls somewhere in the middle. After an errant bioweapon kills almost all the male population off during WW3, the survivors decide that for humanity to survive, the “man” must be taken out, and use cloning techniques to end male childbirth. However, renegade scientist Hope Chase (Bowen) creates one (Francis) without those nasty violent tendencies. But when he escapes and finds his way to Washington, the authorities, led by FBI Agent Hastings (Tomita), are ordered to hunt him down, as a threat to the new world order.

There are some painful clunkers here: calling the man “Adam”, dodgy model FX, and an ending that, far from the “shocking climax” promised by the sleeve, was correctly (and in detail!) guessed by Chris with half an hour to go. It would also benefit from more thought beyond the obvious: what about Earth outside the US? And what would such a world really be like? [Here, it’s almost unchanged – I suspect for budgetary reasons] But if it only has half a brain, that’s still more than most TVMs manage, and bonus points are due for predicting both terrorism on American soil and war in Afghanistan – and this back in 1999, when most people thought Al Qaeda was the guy running the local 7-11.

Tamlyn Tomita comes out best as the FBI agent; she gets nice lines like, “I bet you’re one of those closet heteros, aren’t you?” and manages to avoid the usual stereotypes – or, at least, twist them in interesting ways. Bowen is less effective, but DeYoung is entertaining as the scruffy rebel, ranting against the “Lesbian Conspiracy” that has sent the male sex packing. Overall, this isn’t great SF, or great TV, but it’s edgier than I expected – and as the opening reviews suggest, is likely to peeve both the politically correct and incorrect about equally.

Dir: Les Landau
Star: Julie Bowen, Paul Francis, Tamlyn Tomita, Cliff DeYoung

Superstarlet A.D.

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★★★½
“Couldn’t put it better than the tagline: Apocalypse Meow!”

After civilization’s collapse, men have regressed to the level of Neanderthals, while women live in clans decided by their hair colour, with names like the FayWrays, Satanas and Tempests. Clothing is in short supply: lingerie, it would appear, is not, and nor are large, automatic weapons. Unsurprisingly, this leads perhaps to the finest opening five minutes in girls/guns cinema ever – “My name is Rachel, and I am a blonde. Blondes are extinct” – as our heavily-armed, suspender-and-stiletto clad heroines stagger round a post-apocalyptic landscape. This looks fabulous, and totally belies the fact that it cost $16,000 and was made in sixteen days.

Once the story kicks in, it’s less satisfactory, with a rambling tale involving brunette Naomi’s search for a long-lost stag film starring her grandmother. There are also a couple of utterly interminable musical numbers; whatever McCarthy’s talents (and he has a great visual sense), Rodgers and Hammerstein he most definitely is not. Mind you, it didn’t help that the actress playing Rachel quit two days in – as a result, McCarthy fabricated an “insanity” subplot, and used no less than seven different women to play the role.

In the end, 68 minutes is a blessing rather than a problem; this would likely have been intolerable at full feature length, despite great use of locations and (mostly b/w) photography. Instead, it’s a quirkily mad project that strongly suggests too much watching Russ Meyer films and hanging round strip-clubs – as one femme fatale says, “I pop pills like I pop culture.” Any similarity to how I mis-spent my own youth, is purely coincidental.

Dir: John Michael McCarthy
Star: Helen Heaven, Gina Velour, Kerine Elkins, Rita D’Albert

Alias: season four

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★★★
“Fourth verse – same as the first.”

Poor Alias. Shunted from its Sunday slot to make way for Desperate Housewives – which proved successful beyond SD-6’s wildest dreams – this season felt as if JJ Abrams was more devoted to his second child, Lost (again, the owner of bigger ratings). By the end of the season it was Sydney, Jack, and their associates who found themselves both lost and somewhat desperate in TV-land, despite much-improved viewing figures – largely a result of following Lost, which got about 30% more audience.

Replacing the arcane beauty of Rambaldi and complex plans from the middle ages, was what seemed like an endless string of long-lost relatives and associates from the more recent past. Careless of Sydney to lose all these, wasn’t it? And somehow we went back to Season One: Sloan running operations, with Sydney sure he’s up to no good somehow. Abrams said it was a return to the core concept of the show, but it felt more like a shortage of ideas.

Not to say there weren’t moments; most tied to Sonia Braga, Isabella Rossellini and Lena Olin, a triumphant trio of femmes fatales whose scheming reached Shakespearean levels. [spoilers!] Sophia framed Irina for putting a hit on Sydney, and got ex-husband Jack to shoot Irina – only, was it really her? [end spoilers] In lesser hands, this could have been one step above “and it was all a dream”; these three magnificent actresses undoubtedly saved the day.

What the series lacked was any real enemy for Sydney, up until the later episodes. Anna Espinosa made a welcome return, but the show felt like it was marking time at best, with a final “twist” that seemed to have been made up at the last minute, and showed little evidence of advance thought. Plus, all the action scenes continue to be infected with the jump-cut editing that made it impossible to tell what is going on.

There was, however, just enough to keep us around for season five. Perhaps the biggest surprise – and the one with most potential – was the deft touch showed by Garner behind the camera; the episode she directed was one of the series highlights. Given the disappointments which have been her movies to date, might this show a possible direction for her future career?

Star: Jennifer Garner, Michael Vartan, Victor Garber, Ron Rifkin

The Lost Angel

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★★
“If Dirty Harry had a daughter…with issues.”

The daughter of Clint does her best in this police thriller but, despite one decent twist, and a couple of half-decent scenes, this collapses under the weight of too familiar a storyline and some rampant overacting. Inspector Billie Palmer (Eastwood) is assigned to catch a killer who has promised a victim a day for 20 days, and is living up to their promise. Events centre around a local deaf priest (Rhys-Davies), but she also must deal with a disgruntled suspect whom she shot, a traumatic incident in her past, and a suspiciously knowledgeable informant. Oh, and a laughably gratuitous sex scene that appears out of nowhere, 80 minutes in.

It’s as if the film-makers didn’t believe any single thread would hold our interest, and decided instead to shovel them on without real logic – hey, if you don’t like this plot, don’t worry, there’ll be another one along in a minute. Which is a shame, since a couple of the ideas have potential, and if better developed, could have made for a decent movie. However, there’s no way any police officer, special crimes or not, would get away with behaving the way Palmer does; in particular, her method of interrogating Goth red herring, C.Thomas Howell (chewing every bit of scenery within reach), is not in the manual, except perhaps at Club Lapdance.

Despite this, ah, no-nonsense approach, which extends to most aspects of her detective work, there’s a reason this one has been sitting on the shelf for the past couple of years. Eastwood does have some of her father’s presence, but needs to make a significantly better choice of material if she is to reach the same level of stardom.

[This film was released by MTI on DVD, April 26th – for more details, visit their website]

Dir: Dimitri Logothetis
Star: Alison Eastwood, Nickolas Celozzi II, Judd Nelson, John Rhys-Davies

Girlfight

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★★★★
The story of a girl who “didn’t make the cheerleading team”.

The opening shot zooms in on Rodriguez with her head down; slowly, she raises her head, and stares into the camera with ferocious intensity. If this renders the rest of the film largely redundant, it’s not really anyone’s fault. In Michelle Rodriguez, the makers have the perfect person to play Diana, a pissed-off, troubled/troublesome) teen, who finds that violence does solve problems after all. Okay, that’s not perhaps the message the authors intended, but when Diana finally lays into her father, it certainly seems that way.

However, that’s typical of the honesty the film shows: uplifting, without sugar-coating the harshness of life or the toughness of training. Though it’s hard to remember a time when Rodriguez’ stare wasn’t a cliche (see S.W.A.T.), the rawness of her emotion shines out, and getting someone with little screen experience turns out brilliantly in the end, even if it could have backfired badly, and completely sunk the picture. Rodriguez certainly puts the fear of God in me, that’s for sure. While the rest of the cast are much lower-key, and barely memorable, they do their jobs adequately, in roles that are little more than cliches e.g. ex-boxer turned trainer.

However, by making Diana’s boyfriend a boxer too, it adds a significant spark, even if the “Gender Blind” boxing tournament that pits them against each other for the climax, is contrived, ludicrous, and can be found nowhere in the real world, AFAIK. Yet the film brings you along so well, that it’s easy to take that final step, which provides more than adequate closure for Diana – if not necessarily anyone else.

Dir: Karyn Kusama
Star: Michelle Rodriguez, Jaime Tirelli, Paul Calderon, Santiago Douglas

Elektra

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★★½
“Sai It Ain’t So…”

True story. A friend of ours has a job as an intern in Los Angeles, and coming round the corner at work one day, he literally bumped into Jennifer Garner. He immediately started apologising profusely (he’s an uber-nice kid, who wouldn’t say “Boo!” to a fly) but she wouldn’t have any of it and began cursing him out in the nastiest of ways. Garner finally stalked off, while he continued to apologise – just before vanishing, she turned round and gave him the finger. So now we know: Jennifer Garner = bitch.

Despite this, it gives me no real pleasure to report on the failings of Elektra. It was a pleasant surprise, and says a fair bit about Daredevil, that the studio chose to pursue her character as a spinoff, rather than following up with a sequel. I hoped that they’d do a good job, capturing the dark passions and conflicts of the character, whose incarnation in works like Frank Miller’s Elektra: Assassin is truly memorable. [Interestingly, the screening was preceded by a trailer for another Miller adaptation, Sin City, which looks at least stylistically accurate] Unfortunately, what we have here is another shallow dumbing-down, offering little more than another straightforward good vs. evil battle.

The first issue is, of course, that Elektra died in Daredevil. No problem: we have a Yoda-like character, Stick (Terence Stamp), who can bring characters back from the grave. Yet this causes more problems than it solves: sure, Elektra’s back, but now, death, where is thy sting? Any threat to life is now no more inconvenient than in a video game: press X to continue. Anyway, after getting booted from Stick’s training camp in her second life, Elektra becomes a freelance assassin. However, when assigned to target a father (Visnjic, who remains miraculously just stubbly throughout) and his 13-year old daughter, Abigail (Prout), she suddenly has second thoughts.

This is kinda fortunate, since the pair turn out to be lynchpins in a battle between good (Stick and his allies) and evil. The latter are a group called The Hand, led by villain Roshi (veteran Cary Hiroyuki-Tagawa, from Mortal Kombat), who sends his son Kirigi (Lee) and his interesting-ability acolytes after Elektra and her wards. They can do stuff like make their tattooes come to life, kill things with a touch, or withstand shotgun blasts. Poor Elektra is just very, very good with weapons, which comes across as rather weak in comparison.

The aim is clearly to put Elektra across as an emotionally-scarred individual, who connects with Abigail, seeing herself in the teenager, and has enough baggage for an entire convention of shrinks. However, all we get in terms of her psychology are some clumsy flashbacks and a touch of pointless OCD which feels like it strayed in from Monk. Even after her agent (Colin Cunningham) both offers the trio shelter, then bravely stays behind to give them time to escape, his sacrifices don’t merit the slightest subsequent mention. Superheroes: they’re just so damn ungrateful.

There is entertainment, mostly lurking in the background. A moment with impact sees Typhoid (Natassia Malthe), the girl with the poison touch, kiss Elektra; the pair fall to the ground surrounded by a shower of dying leaves. It feels almost like it could have been inspired by the work of Zhang Yimou (House of Flying Daggers), and is at least less obviously stolen than the “House of Flying Bed-Sheets” battle later on. It’s also interesting to see Mark Houghton as a chief bodyguard in the opening scene: he made his debut against Yukari Oshima in The Outlaw Brothers, back in 1987.

The fight scenes are actually pretty good too, though the editing occasionally borders on the incoherent, and there just aren’t enough of them. What about Roshi? After sending out his son, he vanishes entirely from the picture, leaving the result disappointingly like a Bond film where 007 never gets to meet Blofeld, and is left dispatching minions instead. I guess they were perhaps hoping to save that confrontation for a sequel, but having just seen the first week’s box-office returns (Elektra took in several million dollars less than Catwoman), doesn’t look like that’s going to happen anytime soon.

 In terms of quality, this is probably about the same as the recent version of The Punisher, and that started from a lower point, the comics adapted there being basically a hyperviolent revenge fantasy for teenage boys. Frank Miller’s work on Elektra was truly for mature readers – in both the sense that its intricacies require a sophisticated mind to unpick, and the intense nature of its images. Instead, we get this PG-13 rated Elektra, that simply rolls out the usual comic-book cliches without sufficient enthusiasm or invention. It’s polished until the surface positively gleams, but is just a thin layer of precious gold, over a heart of basest metal.

We should have guessed: January is a bad time to release an action movie, and Garner’s absence from publicity (allegedly due to a viral infection or “nerve damage” – though that’s actually what our intern friend suffered at her hands) was another warning-sign. So was the fact Daredevil wasn’t that good. Regardless, it doesn’t bode well for a year where adaptations of comic-books come thick and fast, with February’s Constantine next. And after the failure of Catwoman, it unfortunately seems to be strike two for big-budget action heroines.

Dir: Rob Bowman
Stars: Jennifer Garner, Will Yun Lee, Kirsten Prout, Goran Visnjic

Women’s Extreme Wrestling

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★
“Horrible. Makes you yearn for the subtlety and wit of GLOOW.”

In my collection, I have DVDs from six different American wrestling federations, plus others from Japan. This is, by far, the most tedious and badly-put together. There isn’t an aspect here that even reaches bearable: the wrestlers are almost without exception incompetent, the announcers are juvenile jerks, and the presentation is truly dreadful. Shot at WEW’s first two pay-per-views at Viking Hall, Philadelphia on February 22nd and April 6th, 2002, it is frankly a mystery how the company didn’t immediately fold. But rising from the remnants of GLOOW, it uses some of the same “talent” plus porn stars, and still seems to be offering its X-rated mix of sex and violence – though this DVD entirely lacks the nudity promised by the commentators, which has presumably been edited out. Really, all the naked female flesh in North America wouldn’t have helped this – the only thing that’s “extreme” is some bad language, and while I could be wrong, personally, there’s more to being extreme than a potty-mouth.

The number of blown spots and flubbed moves here is almost uncountable, and the live audience seemed severely unimpressed: applause was sporadic and outnumbered by chants of “You Fucked Up!”, a nostalgic throwback to ECW days that brought a smile to my face. But I digress. GI Ho, Laree and Weed have some skills. As for the rest, I think every single woman at our local federation, IZW, could use them to mop the floor. Time is short, so let us gloss rapidly over the two commentators, who have the combined mentality of a single 13-year old, and finish on the incoherent presentation. For example, a tables match manages to edit out the actual breaking of the tables entirely; disc four contains repeats of half the disc one matches; and you don’t even get to see who won the final bout, since the DVD ends in the middle of it! The 4-disc set may run 210 minutes, and seem good value for money, but don’t be fooled. Setting ten bucks on fire and ramming it down your own throat would be more entertaining.

Star: Alexis Laree, Amanda Storm, Tai ‘Killer Weed’, Psycho Bitch

Female Suicide Bombers

  By

★★★
“A shallow look at a very complex subject.”

This photograph shows 18-year-old Ayat Ahkras from the Dheisheh refugee camp on the outskirts of the West Bank town of Bethlehem. Ahkras killed herself, two others and injured about 20 people when she detonated her explosives outside a Jerusalem supermarket in March 2002.

Female suicide bombers might perhaps not fit into the generally-perceived definition of “action heroine”, but they have much the same quality of transgressive behaviour – women acting in ways outwith the norm. And, of course, heroism depends on your point of view; one thing this documentary does, is show the cult on the West Bank that surrounds their martyrs. The thin line between “terrorists” and “freedom fighters” is illustrated perfectly by the scene of small children carrying posters of suicide bombers. On the other hand, most of the program skims irritatingly across the surface, not least because host Lisa Ling is a puffcake journalist, uninterested in asking – or perhaps, too scared to ask – the hard questions. Her interview with the mother of Wafa Idris, the first West Bank female martyr, is a masterpiece of shallowness; she doesn’t even bother to follow-up on the answers, let alone challenge the assertions.

Even more annoying is its desire to cram the motivations for all female suicide bombers into the same hypothesis: abused or brainwashed women, who have broken the laws of society, and in particular, religion, so find suicide the only way out. They dig through the histories, looking for evidence to justify their theory: oh, Wafa was infertile and divorced, that must have been it. But this hardly even counts as an explanation: how many women get divorced without committing suicide? It’s actually fairly patronising, the clear implication being that women are incapable of consciously sacrificing their lives for a political or social cause. I think Joan of Arc, Emily Davison (the suffragette who threw herself under the King’s horse at the 1913 Epsom Derby) and Violette Szabo might care to argue with that conclusion.

The film also concentrates the great majority of its efforts on Palestinian bombers; the Tamil Tigers merit only a brief mention, even though they have been using female martyrs for far longer, to a greater extent (almost 40% of their suicide bombers are women) and with greater impact, including the assassination of former Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Ghandi in 1991 – unmentioned by the program, despite it supporting their theory, is the fact that his killer had been raped by Indian soldiers. On the other hand, the Tamil struggle is secular rather than religious, making it hard to apply the same hypothesis of guilt-stricken women opting to go out with a bang. However, I do give the program credit for piqueing my interest in the topic; expect a full article sometime in 2005… [Said article has been delayed indefinitely, as I couldn’t get a good handle on how to approach the topic. I made a lot of notes, then basically gave up. Will maybe dig them out sometime…]

National Geographic Channel documentary, December 2004