My arrest record is so thick it has to be drawn into court by a team
of a dozen oxen, but I still love a good cop story. Ever since Edgar
Allen Poe's story "The Gold-Bug That Shot JFK and Mr. Burns," the
detective and crime genre has become one of art's best.
A four-week series on Cop Month can't help but fail to even scratch
that genre's surface, but when discussing the American justice system,
failure seems like a pretty relevant method. A good place to start,
then, is with a movie that probably should have been awful but is
inexplicably good: 1993's Demolition Man.
When loose cannon cop Sylvester Stallone is sent in to capture the
homicidal Wesley Snipes, thirty hostages end up dead. Snipes and
Stallone are both sentenced to a new cryogenic prison program, but 36
years later, Snipes breaks out, running wild in the gentle, pacifist
future. Helpless to stop him, local cops must unfreeze Stallone to
once more bring Snipes to justice.
Good science fiction stories ask "what if?" and go from there. Of
Wesley Snipes, Demolition Man asks "What would happen if Dennis
Rodman learned tae kwon do, turned evil, and divided his time between
mugging the citizens of southern California and every camera pointed
his way?"
The answer is we'd get a movie that acts like a stereotypical
Hollywood action flick but comes at you with a perverse sense of
humor. Instead of songs, the "oldies" station plays classic commercial
jingles; salt, swearing, and sex have been outlawed; in a sign of true
prescience, Arnold Schwartzenegger's elected president. In one of my
favorite moments, gunless police are instructed to approach the
murderous Snipes "with extreme assertiveness."
It's goofy, funny, engaging worldbuilding. Admittedly, most of it's
just exposited in our lap by naive cop Sandra Bullock, but while she's
dressed in that uniform, Bullock could explain to me I had retroactive
double-cancer that killed me six months ago and I wouldn't mind.
As for Stallone, he's the kind of cop who rolls in, explodes a
mini-mall, then makes a one-liner so corny it throws a cold shadow on
the entire history of jokes. Still, there's a little pathos in his
failure to connect to a future that's left him behind.
Much more important is his race with Snipes to destroy as much of
SoCal as possible. A movie of many visions and lessons, Demolition
Man reveals two vital truths for a happy society: all we need to
do to solve our problems is exchange some fluids and blow stuff up.
Similar stories:
'Real Steel' rocky sock 'em robots
'Real Steel' rocky sock 'em robots
Here’s the premise. Set in the near future, Hugh Jackman is a loser robot boxer working fairs and rodeos with a robot destined for the scrap heap.
More con than kind, Jackman’s Charlie ends up signing the parental rights of his son, Max, over to the boy’s mother’s rich sister to finance his endeavors. He’s estranged from the boy anyway and doesn’t know him at all.
-- Local show times, theaters, trailer.
'Man on a Ledge'
'Man on a Ledge'
When a guy steps onto a narrow ledge, many stories above a messy bit of New York City asphalt, you figure it is someone in dire straights taking desperate measures. In "Man on a Ledge" that guy is an ex-cop, convicted felon and recent prison escapee played by Sam Worthington - a situation that is about as fraught as it gets. And yet, Worthington's Nick Cassidy doesn't seem all that frantic, in fact, except for a couple of deep breaths he barely breaks a sweat.
'The Innkeepers'
'The Innkeepers'
Lean and scary, "The Innkeepers" was shot in 17 days in a quaint Connecticut hotel called the Yankee Pedlar, where writer-director Ti West stayed while making his previous movie, "The House of the Devil."
'Revanche' shows revenge is sweet
'Revanche' shows revenge is sweet
Writer/director Gotz Spielmann's Oscar-nominated film 'Revanche' is an incredible piece of work. He’s a patient storyteller playing with the proverb "Revenge is a dish best served cold."
New 'Conan' just good enough
New 'Conan' just good enough
Despite being a wasteland so terrible people were inventing time machines just to get out of the place, the '80s were a pretty cool time for B-movie genres.
Ninjas swept the nation like a plague in black pajamas, setting the stage for years later, when Chris Farley would slap the hell out of some dudes with a pair of giant salmon. Speaking of the dead, zombies also rose once more from their graves to remind us that eating internal organs isn't just for foreigners. And did you like Star Wars ? Good because you got enough third-rate ripoffs starring space ninjas and fey droids to last you from here to a galaxy far, far away.
Fortunately for those of us who love genre flicks, we still get a lot of that stuff. Yet another '80s product has not been so lucky: the barbarian movie. For years, films like Conan the Barbarian , Beastmaster , and The Barbarians swept the big-screen steppes until suddenly they didn't. This was because, much like the Mongols before them, they were responsible for the loss of 10s
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