BLOODSPORT

TYPICAL REVIEW

"Proudly plotless in a way that other low-budget actioners ought to emulate more often." - Luke Y. Thompson, NEW YORK TIMES

THE PLOT

When Frank Dux learns his sensei Tanaka is dying, he goes AWOL in order to honor Tanaka in the only way possible; by traveling to China to participate in an unsanctioned full-contact martial arts tournament and beat the living spit out of every man there. Once in China, Frank must rely on help from his new best friend, fellow fighter Ray Jackson (Ogre from Revenge of the Nerds), in order to dodge the two military officers sent to bring him home. As the contest proceeds, it seems inevitable that whoever makes it to the final round will have to face reigning champion Chong Li, a sociopath who already killed one man in the previous tournament. Can Frank achieve ultimate victory and bring honor to the house of Tanaka, or will he fall to the mat like so many others?

THE POINT

Back in January, The People's Choice Award for favorite male action star went to Johnny Depp. Read those words again before going any further; male...ACTION...star. Welcome to the new millennium I suppose. I mean, he's a good actor, he's in good physical shape, he can swing a mean sword, but in the end, he just doesn't scream action to me. Maybe it's because once the cameras stop rolling and the special effects are turned off, he looks like someone you could hold your own against in a fight. Sylvester Stallone recently said, "When an individual can step into a latex suit bulging with muscles and Velcro himself into an action star body, we knew the times they were a-changing." The "times" he was referring to was, of course, the late 1980s. Back then, there was a breed of "actor" who could walk off the set and STILL look like he could punch a hole through your skull.

Welcome to Bloodsport, the low budget 1988 hit that launched the career of one such living action figure, Jean-Claude Van Damme. Bloodsport! Where the acting is atrocious (Including one of the military officers who is inexplicably played by Forest never-remind-me-I-did-this Whitaker.), the script is pre-pubescent in its simplicity ("You broke my record, now I'll break you!"), and the 80s fashions are downright frightening (Van Damme wears sweatpants, a snakeskin jacket, and lipstick[!] through most of the movie). You could go on ad naseum about this movie's faults. And yet you would still have a hard time finding someone who actually hates it. It's just too goofy to take its shortcomings seriously. For instance...

When Frank arrives in China, he immediately bonds with the enormous Ray, not by sparring or discussing martial arts philosophy, but by winning at the video game Karate Champ. This bond is so strong that a mere three days later the men embrace in a tearful farewell, boldly declaring their undying man-love for each other. In contrast, Frank's lady friend for the weekend gets nothing more than a formal bow as he boards the plane for home.

Also, just like in a video game, each of the invited combatants has a special style of fighting. There's a sumo, a kick-boxer, a good old-fashioned street brawler (the big ugly American, of course), practitioners of judo, karate, tae kwon do, etc. There's even, unbelievably, an acrobatic black guy who bounces around on all fours and acts like a monkey. (I know, I almost feel like I'm insulting everyone in creation just writing that, but it's in the movie. He even makes it to the top eight.)

And just look at the main bad guy! When Chong Li takes off his shirt he looks like 5 feet of chest (in all directions) with little muscular appendages glued to it. I'd be afraid to let this guy give me a friendly pat on the back for fear my lungs would shoot out of my mouth. And he's EEEEEEVIL! First he dishonors the competition by purposely killing a helpless opponent. (Bizarrely, the officials do not remove Chong from the tournament, they just turn their backs on him.) Then he enrages Frank more by nearly doing the same thing to Frank's new hetero-lifemate Ray. (He even steals Ray's Harley Davidson bandana, the fiend!) And when Chong finally starts to lose, he cheats by throwing powder in Frank's eyes. Frank's expression becomes so twisted with rage at this point it makes that whole Richard Gere "I got nowhere else to go!" scene look like a Hallmark moment in comparison.

One thing I really appreciate about Bloodsport is the fact that anger never becomes a real factor for Frank until the very end of the film. It's atypical in this genre for the impetus of the drama to be anything other than revenge for a dead relative, a kidnapped lover, or some such similar device. In Bloodsport, however, Frank is primarily acting on his desire to fulfill the dying wish of his teacher, a wish that has no bloodlust or vengeance attached to it. Frank's distaste for Chong doesn't cross the line into anger until the villain clearly steps outside the acceptable parameters of the Kumite. (Incredibly loosely defined parameters I might add, but apparently they are there.) In a weird way, Frank comes really close to being the model for the proper Christian approach to anger.

Father Joseph F, Delaney writes in The 1907 Catholic Encyclopedia that anger "is rather a praiseworthy thing and justifiable with a proper zeal. It becomes sinful when it is [1] sought to wreak vengeance upon one who has not deserved it, [2] or to a greater extent than it has been deserved, [3] or in conflict with the dispositions of law, [4] or from an improper motive." Being an EEEEEEVIL sociopath, Chong pretty much deserves what he gets and since his crimes include murder, it's kind of hard to punish him disproportionately. Frank doesn't kill him though, he merely forces him to "cry uncle", which is in keeping with the "law" of the competition. (This is another welcome departure for the genre. Any other movie would have had Chong suddenly leap back to his feet, forcing Frank to rip out his esophagus or shatter his heart or something.)

It's only on the last point, motivation, that Frank comes up a little short at first. As noted, anger can be praiseworthy, but only in the sense that it is a spark intended to move us to action and then let go. St. Augustine wrote that "anger habitually cherished against any one becomes hatred, since the sweetness which is mingled with what appears to be righteous anger makes us detain it longer than we ought in the vessel, until the whole is soured, and the vessel itself is spoiled." You get the feeling that Frank comes into the final day of the Kumite holding a bit of a grudge over Ray's injury. And though one day might seem like a short time to believe Frank has "habitually cherished" his anger, you have to remember it only took two days for Frank to develop a deep (manly) love for Ray. And doesn't it seem like Frank is in an awful hurry to get that bandana back?

Still, in the end, Frank handles his anger well, even when Chong temporarily blinds him. Oh, he goes bonkers for a minute, makes one of the most hideously contorted faces in film history, and nearly loses the final match. But like St. Thomas Aquinas suggests, Frank never allows his anger to become so strong that he loses the ability to reason. Recalling the lessons of his old teacher Tanaka, Frank releases the anger through a brief meditation and moves on to actually addressing the situation at hand. All in all, he scores about a 3 1/2 out of 4 on the Christian anger management scale. We should all do so well.

THE STINGER

Oswald Sobrino over at Catholic Analysis suggests that "when a religious person begins speaking doctrine, even if we agree fully with the doctrine being proclaimed, he is not persuasive if he is angry or on the attack... Angry apologetics or tirades do not make for conversion of those who are normal and retain their common sense and good human sensibilities. If you have Christ, you have Peace. Our words, our ways of speaking, our tones, our gestures, and our faces will give us away, regardless of the theological accuracy of our content."

"Joshua" trailer

I might be behind the curve on this, but I haven't seen it actually posted in many places. Even IMDB doesn't have an official trailer link yet. I'd heard of it, but only just saw the trailer today in front of "Civic Duty" (which is kinda "meh," for the record.)

Y'remember that movie "The Good Son?" "Godsend?" That horrendous recent remake of "The Omen?" "Joshua" kinda looks like what those would look like... if they didn't suck:



Gah. I can't remember having been that freaked out by just a trailer.

COMING ATTRACTIONS: BLOODSPORT

It's time to take a short break from the creature features and head over to the next auditorium for some low budget 80s action hero cheese!

REVIEW: Spider-Man 3

The bad news is, what you've heard is technically true: "Spider-Man 3" is, when all is said and done, just a bit overstuffed.

The good news - the very, very good news - is that it's not overstuffed for the reason most were worried about, i.e. "too many villains." If anything, this is the least "bad guy centered" "Spidey" entry yet. Whereas the prior films featured singular antagonists (Willem Dafoe's Green Goblin, Alfred Molina's Doctor Octopus) with character-arcs detailed enough to take up a full half of their respective films, the three heavies this time around are a bit more on the dramatically-streamlined side: Two of them have pretty basic ambitions and straightforward, uncomplicated agendas, while the third (James Franco's Harry "Goblin Jr." Osborn) already did his "turning into a bad guy" arc in the backdrop of the prior installments - he arrives here as a full-fledged nemesis ready to go from (literally) the first act on.

Instead, "Spider-Man 3" is bursting at the seams with story. Director/co-writer Sam Raimi has a lot of plot threads left to tie up from his previous two movies to begin with, and on top of that he's piled surprising reversals, character-twists and unexpected new directions and revelations - and then some. There's enough going on here in the living, breathing universe this cast and crew have built for themselves over the last eight years to fill three more movies - and, save for some irritatingly-noticable contrivances here and there, it seems almost churlish to take a summer blockbuster that could easily have coasted on residual narrative-fumes and perfunctory action scenes to task for wanting to have "too much" story, character-development and narrative gotchas.

In the big-picture sense, Raimi demonstrates once-again his unquestioned "getting" of the key Spider-Man themes; framing this third go-round as a rude-awakening "oh yeah?" rebuke of "Spider-Man 2's" fairytale ending. Turns out, wouldn't you know it, grand romantic gestures like Mary-Jane (Kirsten Dunst) dashing out of her wedding and turning up on Peter Parker's (Tobey Maguire) doorstep aren't quite 'grand' enough to stave of harsher realities forever. In the time between that ending and this beginning, things have started to go wrong. And, for a change, not "supervillain-assisted" wrong... just "that's life" wrong. In fact, it would seem the two of them have managed to "swap" issues: As New York begins to overwhelmingly embrace Spider-Man as it's resident champion, Peter is letting fame and acceptance go to his head a bit - he's almost too distracted to notice the MJ's Broadway "star" has already started to wane, and that she's picking up the 'sad sack' right where he left it off. Also on the list of things Peter should be paying closer attention to: Harry still knows Spider-Man's secret identity, he's still convinced that Spidey murdered his father, and he's still got an attic full of dad's old anti-Spidey weaponry to play with.

The choice of new villainy also demonstrates a tremendously-appealing confidence on Raimi's part - both in his own skill and in the strength of the original material he's adapting. Other lesser genre entries like "Fantastic Four," "Daredevil" or (from the looks of things) the upcoming "Transformers" movie tend to flee in mortal terror from the more "out-there" concepts of their ancestors. Raimi and his film, on the other hand, fearlessly drop into an already well-stocked narrative a pair of supporting supervillains who each constitute the franchise's headlong-leap into the realm of full-blown pulp science fiction: Sandman, aka Flint Marko, (Thomas Hayden Church,) is a small-time escaped convict who, after an accident of science, has a body made of sentient, shape-shifting SAND; while Venom is, literally, a Monster From Outer Space.

Technically speaking, Sandman isn't so much a "supervillain" as he is a hard-luck crook with his own agenda who's aquisition of super-powers is more distraction and hindrance than benefit: He turns up on Spidey's radar mainly because of a "maybe": Marko, it turns out, was the accomplice of the robber who murdered Uncle Ben Parker - and may have been the one who pulled the trigger. On top of all this, Peter has an unethical rival at work in the personage of Eddie Brock (Topher Grace,) his ongoing Harry troubles, MJ's emotional distance AND jealousy over his in-costume flirtation with freshly-rescued blonde bombshell Gwen Stacy (an almost-criminally gorgeous Bryce Dallas Howard); a whirl of stress and dissonance that makes him perfect prey for Venom - a liquid-goo alien "symbiote" that slithers out of a crashed meteor and morphs itself into a sleek new black Spidey-suit that cranks up Peter's powers... but also leads him to indulge his dark side.

It's with this "symbiote" subplot that Raimi and company tip their most devious hand - turning Spider-Man/Peter Parker into the prinicipal villain of his own movie. Most of the time, the "good guy goes bad" routine underwhelms in films like this, because the "evil" version of the hero turns out to be exponentially more-compelling and watchable than the "good" one (looking at YOU, Anakin Skywalker.) But, through guts and willpower, the same fate doesn't befall "Spider-Man 3." 'Bad Peter' is 'dark,' yes... and you can tell Maguire had fun (literally) letting his hair down and playing against-type. But Raimi's camera and story-structure make the difference, lingering on the bewildered/disgusted reactions of women Peter shoots winks and leers at as he struts down the street utterly convinced of his own coolness, and building an almost unspeakably crass display in a "dance sequence" to a genuinely shocking "line-crossing" level. 'Bad Peter' is a sleazy, unlikable jerk; and even though most of the audience won't be TOO worried about him not snapping back to normal by the end credits, it's still brave of the film none the less to ask them to follow him down this particular road.

Unfortunately, all this good comes with a few notable "issues" that keep it just shy of the near-perfection that was "Spider-Man 2." Most of the missteps are structure and pace-related, i.e. the two and a half hour run-time isn't quite expansive enough to contain all the movie it needs to. As a result, some elements arise in questionable, artificial-seeming ways. This becomes especially apparent, though not disasterously-so, in the third act where the innevitable Bad Guy Team-Up seems to come almost-completely out of left-field, and the "things we really should've told someone BEFORE right now" revelations start to stack up. This is more than a bit forgivable, though, when one takes into account that it leads into an action sequence that could easily be the best "guys with super-powers" brawl since "Superman 2."

Other problems have "followed" from the previous movies: Kirsten Dunst is STILL the weak link of the series, it's three movies in and she still alternates between looking bored, stoned or eager to get on to something "better." And Raimi still hasn't lost his strange penchant for having Spidey lose all or most of his mask midway through nearly every action scene.

It does seem as though the writing is on the wall as to this being the "last" Spidey installment for this full group of castmates and filmmakers. If so, they leave behind quite a legacy: A true epic-in-three-parts superhero story, one of the only one's not to stumble in the third entry. Whatever comes next has some big boots to fill.

FINAL RATING: 8/10

Miyamoto makes it! (UPDATED!)

"Time" has closed-down the online-voting portion of it's "Time 100" list, and Shigeru Miyamoto makes it into the top-ten at the wire! http://tinyurl.com/23xeeb


The democratically-named 92nd Most Influential Person in The World, with his most famous

creations, his creation's friends and a sampling of his greatest accomplishments.

Now, I'm reasonably certain that "Time" doesn't correlate the "online vote" list and the "final list" exactly, but this is the first year Miyamoto was even nominated and placing in the top-10 in reader-votes is impressive as hell... so I'd say it's likely that he'll turn up on the "real" list, too. Either way, this is quite a showing a fan-support for a guy who's been overdue for it for far too long. Kick-ass.

UPDATE!!! Shigeru Miyamoto has made the final list!

For this year's list, "Time" divided the full-100 into five subcategories, with spots 82 through 100 reserved for "Builders & Titans." Miyamoto is placed at #92, meaning that he not only places on the list but lands comfortably in the TOP TEN of his field!

Shigeru Miyamoto. Creator of Mario. Savior of video-games. One of the 100 Most Influential People on Earth. He's earned it.

How To Not Suck: A Simple Primer

Michael Bay, Tim Story, Brett Ratner, et al., please pay close attention to the following:

Pictured below, to the left: Marvel Comics superhero "Iron Man" as he is generally remembered during his more popular eras of publication. To the immediate right: "Iron Man," as he currently appears in the 'main' Marvel Universe, including the traditional (and, please note, still immediately-recognizable) armor re-worked to greater detail and "realism" by artist Adi Granov.



Picture below: "Iron Man," as he will appear in the upcoming live-action feature film of the same name starring Academy Award Nominee Robert Downey Jr., Academy Award Nominee Terrence Howard and Academy Award Winner Gwyneth Paltrow.



This concludes "How To Not Suck." Please stay tuned for our next, slightly more-difficult lessons; including "How Not To Fall Down The Stairs," "Remedial Breathing" and "Remembering Not To Cast Jessica Alba In Roles Requiring Speaking And/Or Recognizable Human Emotion."

GODZILLA (GOJIRA)

TYPICAL REVIEWS

“[This film] might well trump the art films Hiroshima Mon Amour and Dr. Strangelove as a daring attempt to fashion a terrible poetry from the mind-melting horror of atomic warfare.” – The Village Voice

“[This film] can now be appreciated not just as a minor classic of tragic destruction, but also as a somber exploration of conflicted postwar emotions.” – L.A. Weekly

“There's a surprisingly powerful thrust to this film. And it's instructive to recall the political era in which the movie was made.” – The Washington Post

THE PLOT

Just in case you've been in suspended animation for the last 53 years...

When ships start disappearing at sea around the same time villagers on nearby islands begin reporting the return of an ancient sea god, the Japanese government sends an investigative team to determine the truth. They find more than they could have imagined when up from the depths, thirty stories high, breathing fire, his head in the sky, Godzilla makes his appearance. It seems he's a little peeved from having a few hydrogen bombs dropped on him while he was sleeping and is looking for some payback. From the island, Godzilla makes his way to Tokyo, where he easily lays waste to half the city. With the government and the military helpless, Japan's last hope appears to be Dr. Serizawa, inventor of a secret weapon that could save the world...or destroy it.

THE POINT

In April of 2004 Godzilla (Gojira in his native tongue) celebrated his 50th anniversary with a fully restored worldwide re-release. The reviews above are a fair sampling of the critical reaction that appeared in major news outlets. That’s right, major critics the world over were heaping a bucket load of serious praise on a film featuring a guy in a rubber monster suit stomping on cardboard cities. Not all of them, of course. Roger Ebert didn't like the original Godzilla, and thought the restored Gojira was still a bad film, but he did at least admit he found it to be a much better bad film than the version available in America for all those decades. Why the big deal about the re-release though? I mean, we've all seen Godzilla haven't we? Well, as it turns out, we hadn't.

Now I've been a true fan of the big G for as long as I can remember, going so far as to copy word for word an entire book on him I found in my elementary school library. So, even as a child, the fact that the first Godzilla movie was altered for viewing outside of Japan was no big secret. Like a lot of people, though, I assumed the cuts weren't that relevant to the story. So they took out some scenes involving a Japanese reporter and inserted scenes with an American reporter; no big deal. Some scenes were dropped to shorten the movie by 15 minutes to a more acceptable drive-in runtime of 80 minutes; unfortunate, but television has done worse to make room for commercials. And even though some of the overt references to Hiroshima were left out, the no-nukes tone of the film is still there. Regardless of any changes, the Americanized Godzilla, King of the Monsters is still a good monster movie.

But Gojira is better. Now don't get me wrong, it's still a guy dressed as a big freaking lizard slapping at toy planes hanging from strings. So if your suspension of disbelief ends at that kind of thing, then there's probably nothing I can say to convince you to watch Godzilla again, especially in Japanese with subtitles. But if you can get past the "special" effects, then there is something of real substance here. And I think the key to it all is a brief aside made in the audio commentary on the recently released DVD regarding the beginning of the film.

The American version opens with a view of the aftermath of Godzilla's rampage through Tokyo and then proceeds to tell the story in flashback. It's effective enough, although you could make the argument that it robs any suspense as to whether or not our American reporter survives. In contrast, the Japanese version opens with a more mundane scene of a fishing boat destroyed by a bright flashing light of unknown origin. The few sailors who are recovered from the wreckage appear to be suffering from severe radiation burns. For all intents, it's a standard introductory scene, with little purpose other than to introduce a mystery and get the ball rolling... unless you happened to be Japanese.

As the commentary points out, on March 1, 1954 (the same year this movie was made) a Japanese fishing boat named the Lucky Dragon was caught in the fallout caused by a US thermonuclear weapon test on Bikini Island. All of the crew members came down with radiation sickness and one man died. Within two weeks hysteria swept through Japan as the populace feared contamination of the fish supply. Even the Emperor swore off sushi for awhile. To the Japanese, the U. S. response to the incident appeared a bit lackluster, amounting to "Hey, we told you these things would be going off every now and then." Enraged is probably not a strong enough word to describe Japan's national temperament during this period.

With that in mind, we can go back and take a second look at those two opening sequences. For Americans in the cold war era, the threat of nuclear destruction was always an open possibility, and the multitude of radioactive mutants wandering across movie screens reflected this fear. Godzilla's opening images of a smoldering ruined city must certainly have resonated with American audiences, especially the children who were going through weekly duck-and-cover drills at school.

But for Japan, the reality of nuclear destruction had already come to pass. Initially the Japanese citizenry appeared to have accepted the atomic bombings as a cost of the war. Father John A. Siemes, a Catholic priest living in Hiroshima when the bomb was dropped, noted that "None of us in those days heard a single outburst against the Americans on the part of the Japanese, nor was there any evidence of a vengeful spirit." But as survivors began to be subjected to regular check ups by the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission, fears about the lasting effects of exposure to radiation began to surface and resentment started to build. And just when you would hope that time might heal old wounds, along comes the Lucky Dragon incident. By opening with the fishing boat scene and then following with images reminiscent of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Gojira was the first film to openly address the fact that for the Japanese the nuclear issue was not a fading memory or potential threat, but a decade long continuing nightmare. The Japanese audiences recognized immediately the anger and sorrow and feeling of helplessness portrayed in the movie. It's almost as if Gojira represented some form of primal therapy for the entire nation, resonating so strongly that it actually received a Japanese Academy Award nomination for Best Picture. For those of us raised on the American cut of the movie that all sounds a little crazy, I know, but once you understand some of the cultural references in the original film, Godzilla really does take on new dimensions and becomes something deeper and more satisfying than you could have thought possible. You get emotional depth AND a big monster stomping on things, what more can a B-Movie fan ask for?

I was recently reminded how this same kind of cultural recognition can deepen our own understanding of Catholicism. My home parish was visited by a priest who had been born to a Jewish mother and he spent some time talking on Passover and the Eucharist. In June of 1985, the Vatican Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews released a document with the no-nonsense title of Notes on the Correct Way to Present the Jews and Judaism in Preaching and Catechesis in the Roman Catholic Church. (And you thought the title Snakes On A Plane was direct and to the point.) The document noted that "Jesus was and always remained a Jew" and was "fully a man of his time, and of his environment - the Jewish Palestinian one of the first century, the anxieties and hopes of which he shared." To this end "He wished to achieve the supreme act of the gift of himself in the setting of the domestic liturgy of the Passover, or at least of the paschal festivity (Mk 14:1,12; Jn. 18:28)." It would seem then, to fully understand the Eucharist, a Catholic should have some understanding of the Jewish Passover celebration.

Most of us know that, for the Jews, the Passover is a celebration of the Exodus, of God’s actions on their behalf to free them from oppression in Egypt. But the feast is more than just a simple remembrance. As part of the ritual, the Book of Exodus instructs the Jewish father to explain the meaning of Passover using these specific words “On this day you shall explain to your son, ‘This is because of what the Lord did for ME when I came out of Egypt’” With this simple wording, Passover is celebrated as though every Jew throughout history had been alive and present at the time of the Exodus. They aren't just remembering it, they're experiencing it.

Jesus incorporated this same meaning into the Last Supper, and by extension The Eucharist, when he says the words "Do this in memory of me". The celebration of Holy Communion is not just remembering Christ and his last days, but actually experiencing this event that occurred both once and for all time. This doesn't mean all of the other teachings on the meaning of the Eucharist are wrong. Such ideas as "agape feasts" and "table fellowship" are important to the Eucharist and should be discussed. But it's this simple Jewish understanding of the concept of "memorial" which points us towards what is most profound in the ritual. Father Lawrence E. Mick writes "That’s the deepest meaning of both Passover and Eucharist. Just as God acted in the past, God continues to act in the present and will act in the future to save us." You ignore or edit out that understanding of the Eucharist and you end up with a mass that's the equivalent of the Americanized Godzilla; still good, but not the best.

THE STINGER

Dr. Frederick J. Parrella writes that "people today are bored at mass because they are celebrating a transcendence that is vague .... They are celebrating the most serious element of their human lives in forms that trivialize the mystery....Without a sense of the Holy, we cannot pray, ask forgiveness, worship, be filled with gratitude before God's grace or, most significantly, know each other as brother and sister ....The church must have the courage not to reduce the liturgy to what people think they want .... but to make of it what they really want at the deepest levels of their being.... " It sure sounds like he believes we're getting the edited version of liturgy these days, sanitized of the difficult content and reassembled to make it more entertaining. But the 50th anniversary of Vatican II is approaching. Is it possible that like Gojira, the liturgy is due for a restored re-release, if not in form, then at least in content?