The Last Stand

From what I can tell, the cast and crew of Jee-Woon Kim's The Last Stand had a great time making this film. It's permeated with a congenial sense of professional camaraderie no doubt galvanized by Arnold Schwarzenegger's return to the big screen.

I had a lot of fun watching it.

There's a scene where Luis Guzmán (Mike Figuerola) ballistically and kick-assedly asserts himself. The (former) Governator (Sheriff Ray Owens) squares off with villain Gabriel Cortez (Eduardo Noriega) in hand-to-hand combat in the final moments. Johnny Knoxville's (Lewis Dinkum) eccentricities are serendipitously deputized.

And there's a cameo from film legend Harry Dean Stanton.

These components congeal to corporealize an active fast-paced frenetic yet shackled free-for-all, quaintly elevating the inclusive merits of a multicultural small town.

Fun. It's fun.

If it wasn't starring the aforementioned along with Forest Whitaker (Agent John Bannister) and Peter Stormare (Burrell) it may not have been so fun, however; it may have been painful to watch through to the end.

By had a great time making this film, I mean they didn't spend enough time on the script or even bothering to use standard editing procedures (the narrative flow is truncated and uneven [it doesn't seem to be using a truncated uneven narrative flow as a device, although I suppose when Cortez's crew arrives in Sheriff Owens's small town it does disrupt the pastoral harmony]).

The film is an interesting study of improbability nevertheless and in relation to its subject matter the myriad improbabilities do function as distinct complementary bemusements (I'm thinking mostly of the bumbling antics of Agent John Bannister's contingent. The film is meant to salute the strength and integrity of small towns so it makes sense that bureaucratic agencies with vast financial resources would bumble within, but the bumbling could have been handled differently).

It's possible that if it didn't have so much starpower The Last Stand would still be remembered as an oustandingly disorganized entertaining flop.

It might still be remembered this way, and it is fun, but I think fans of Arnold Schwarzenegger films deserve better outputs, a bit more time and care spent crafting the entire film, not just the action, especially at this stage in his career.

Thought Peter Stormare put in the best performance.

We Are the Strange (Fantasia Fest 2007)

M dot Strange's new film We are the Strange is sincerely bizarre. A battle between the forces of good and evil is being waged in Stopmo City, the sinister chauvinist Him taking on noble outcasts Rain, eMMM and Blue. Blue has a disease of sorts that causes her skin to break out in scales whenever she speaks and eMMM is in search of cataclysmic ice cream. The battle scenes are intense, as is the scenery. The amount of depth worked into each of these split second scenes is incredible, leaving the hungry critic with an arsenal of symbolic material to analyze. While I wasn't too impressed with most of the dialogue, the following line is one of the most inspiring I've encountered in some time (concerning the saviour): "He will return and strike down evil with a fist made of aluminum foil. Then we will eat many scoops of ice cream."

Weird.

Transformers

Michael Bay's new film Transformers unravels a teenaged synthesis of hormones, military paranoia, and tryin' too hard comedy. The Decepticons and Autobots are back in another epic battle, fighting over the Allspark, a giant cube with the power to create or destroy worlds. Along for the ride are a number of would be high school heroes, numerous military personnel, cranky, mind-your-own-business parents, and the ever weird and wonderful John Turturro. The action sequences are slight, the offbeat comedy tedious (except for the masturbation bit), and Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman's script borrows heavily from every big time blockbuster this side of Cybertron. Focusing primarily on the myriad humanoid characters, Transformers forgets the main reason behind Transformers: Transformers. Instead of providing us with an elaborate narrative, transporting the Hasbroian folklore to another dimension, Bay caters too intensely to his earthly plot devices and quickly drowns his tale in banal political mumbo jumbo (note that Iranian scientists are not to be credited but North Korea's military is on par with that of China). Optimus Prime does wax quixotic about goodness and we are briefly reintroduced to Megatron's acerbic abuse of Starscream, but their scenes are far to brief, making me wish I'd simply rented seasons one through three, as well as the first full-length feature film.