Independence Day (1996)

Welcome to Earth!

The third part in this contest brings me to my guilty pleasure genre: disaster movies!  Disaster movies, if done well, are a combination of various different genres.  They’re mostly action based, they always attempt drama (they don’t always get there), and they’re generally science fiction.  Usually corny and dumb, but mostly lots of fun.  Today’s movie exemplifies the genre, at least in my mind.  If the movie doesn’t exemplify the genre, the director certainly does.  Almost every movie I can think of that this guy has done has been a disaster movie.  And I’ve actually liked the majority of them, dumb and cheesy though they may be.  And so, as the biggest and the most fun in the genre, and the movie that best exemplifies the genre for me, I had no choice but to give my favorite disaster movie to Independence Day, written by Dean Devlin, written and directed by Roland Emmerich, and starring Will Smith, Jeff Goldblum, Bill Pullman, Randy Quaid, Vivica A. Fox, Harry Connick Jr., Margaret Colin, Judd Hirsch, Harvey Fierstein, Robert Loggia, Mary McDonnell, Mae Whitman, James Rebhorn, Adam Baldwin, Brent Spiner, James Duval, and Frank Welker.

On July 2^nd, a signal appears in outer space, between the Earth and the moon.  Spirits are lifted temporarily when the giant curiosity slows down and stops before hitting Earth, but then it gets more curious when it “splits” into smaller pieces and enters the Earth’s atmosphere, first appearing as strange clouds that seem like they’re on fire, but changing to reveal that they are massive alien spaceships that then settle over the Earth’s major cities.  David Levinson (Jeff Goldblum) discovers a transmission in the satellite signal that he first thinks is just going to go away, but soon realizes that it’s a countdown to an attack.  He collects his father, Julius (Judd Hirsch), and rushes to Washington to warn his ex-wife, Constance (Margaret Colin), who is the Communications Director at the White House.  With the president, Thomas J. Whitmore (Bill Pullman), they barely manage to escape.  Also going on, a drunken crop duster named Russell Casse (Randy Quaid) escapes with his broken family, Captain Steven Hiller (Will Smith) takes part in an aerial assault on the aliens that he alone survives, and we go to Area 51 where scientists like Dr. Brackish Okun (Brent Spiner) have been studying these aliens in secret since some of them crashed here in 1947.

Roland Emmerich has got to be one of the best directors in the big dumb action category.  The story is pretty basic alien invasion fare that’s been going down pretty much since movies were invented, but it does it so well and makes it so fun that I can’t help but love the thing.  How can you not get behind the heroes of the movie when these fuckin’ aliens come down here and get all rowdy for no reason, laying siege to the biggest cities in the world?  It’s the easy way to get the audience invested in the movie, and it works on me.  Of course, I don’t know how much the other countries of the world will be invested near the end.  I mean, they all get involved in taking down the aliens, but it was all America’s idea.  FUCK YEAH!  It’s certainly not the brightest of movies, but I doubt it was trying to be.  From what I’ve read, they spent 4 weeks working on the script and 13 months on the production.  They knew what they were doing.  But I’m not like most film critics.  A movie doesn’t have to have a message or intelligence or something important about it; it just needs to be entertaining.  That’s what entertainment is supposed to do.  And how could you say Independence Day wasn’t entertaining?!  It’s impossible!  It’s at least impossible to finish that sentence before I slap you in the mouth.  As corny as it is, how can you not get amped by the “Today we celebrate our Independence Day!” speech?  Watching it again almost inspired me to drive to the airport, steal a jet, and fly it up the butthole of an alien spacecraft.  And the ending is entirely satisfying.  Obviously, there are stupid things that happen in this movie, but none so stupid that they ruin the experience.  I would say it was probably in bad taste for the president to joke that he was in bed with a young brunette to his wife.  Not because adultery is bad (he is the president, what do you expect?), but because the young brunette was his nine year old daughter.  I don’t get behind the idea that the super advanced aliens wearing the biomechanical armor can be knocked unconscious for several hours by one punch from the Fresh Prince of Bel Air.  Probably not as much as I wouldn’t get behind the idea of letting the drunken guy who can’t even formulate the sentence, “I’m a pilot.  I can fly,” without stumbling into the driver’s seat of a jet fighter.  Also, early on in the movie, it’s a little on the nose to have one of the scientists playing the R.E.M. song “End of the World”.

The performances did exactly what they were supposed to in this movie.  You probably couldn’t say that any of them impressed, but they all performed adequately.  It’s kind of hard to say who the main character in this movie is though because they have about 4 main characters in separate stories that come together at the end.  You have Will Smith’s story, Bill Pullman’s story, Jeff Goldblum’s story, and Randy Quaid’s story.  Will Smith was just becoming a superstar around this point, but he show’s what makes him a superstar in this movie.  Both charming and funny in his role, he makes for a very likeable character.  I had problems with other people in his story though.  First, Vivica A. Fox.  She’s pretty and dances in a bikini at one point, but I had already gotten fairly mad at her for her reaction to Smith getting called to the base when the aliens showed up.  Bitch, you want to marry a guy that’s in the military!  What do you think’s going to happen when a threat to America shows up?  Also, Harry Connick Jr. was usually really annoying, definitely not funny, and possibly gay.  Something about the way he kept calling Will Smith “Big Daddy” – in a post BioShock world – seems gay to me.  Pullman was strange to me in this movie.  He didn’t do a bad job, but he’s got this smug raspiness to every line delivery, making ever sentence end with a smug sounding “uh”.  His wife also made me mad because she was so naïve that, when Vivica A. Fox said that she was “a dancer”, this bitch automatically goes to ballet.  Yeah, ‘cause that’s a common occupation in America.  Also, his daughter was Mae Whitman, who was in Scott Pilgrim vs. the World.  That’s all I have to say about her.  Goldblum acted just like Goldblum, but he was good at it.  His dad was a little weird.  I don’t know if this is how Judd Hirsch always acts in movies, but I couldn’t help but wonder if Jackie Mason was unavailable.  Quaid plays a good drunk, but I hated pretty much everyone in his family.  His younger son was a pussy and his daughter was a whore.  Well, she never had sex with anyone in the movie, but she did fall in love with and try to have sex with about three different guys through the course of the movie, and usually within 5 minutes of meeting them.  I also assume that James Duval (who played Miguel Casse, the oldest son) never really got famous because the world already has one Keanu Reeves and doesn’t require another.

Independence Day still stands up as the shining example of how to get past the limitations of your story with fantastic special effects, spectacle, and all around fun factor.  Even after all these years, it still stands up as the most fun disaster movie that I was able to think of.  It’s what Roland Emmerich does best.  I probably don’t need to recommend this movie as I have a hard time believing that anyone has managed to not see it by the point in their life where they could be reading this.  If you haven’t, do it.  Independence Day gets “You Don’t Actually Think They Spend $20,000 on a Hammer, $30,000 on a Toilet Seat, Do You?” out of “Yes yes.  Without the ‘oops’.”

Congratulations goes to my sister, Katie, for not only guessing my favorite disaster movie, but also guessing my runner up disaster movie, Armageddon.  That just proves that she’s Country Strong.

Let’s get these reviews more attention, people.  Post reviews on your webpages, tell your friends, do some of them crazy Pinterest nonsense.  Whatever you can do to help my reviews get more attention would be greatly appreciated.  You can also add me on FaceBook (Robert T. Bicket) and Twitter (iSizzle).  Don’t forget to leave me some comments.  Your opinions and constructive criticisms are always appreciated.

Kill Bill: Volume 2 (2004)

It’s the Wood That Should Fear Your Hand, Not the Other Way Around

The inevitable followup to watching and reviewing Kill Bill is Kill Bill: Volume 2.  When Fabio suggested Volume 1, it was simply implied that Volume 2 was part of the deal.  And after watching the first movie, why wouldn’t you want to finish it up?  But there’s a problem here: there’s a pretty drastic style change between Volume 1 and Volume 2.  The people that really liked the first movie may not necessarily appreciate the changes that were made.  Of course, the other possibility is that it’s equally good in it’s own right.  Let’s see what happened in my review of Kill Bill: Volume 2, written and directed by Quentin Tarantino, and starring Uma Thurman, David Carradine, Michael Madsen, Daryl Hannah, Gordon Liu, Chris Nelson, Perla Haney-Jardine, Lucy Liu, Vivica A. Fox, Michael Parks, Bo Svenson, Samuel L. Jackson, Larry Bishop, Sid Haig, and Helen Kim.

We start off back at the wedding rehearsal between The Bride (Uma Thurman) and her groom-to-be (Chris Nelson).  The Bride’s former leader – and former lover – Bill (David Carradine) shows up and asks if he can sit on The Bride’s side of the church.  The Bride is pretty trepidatious, but welcomes him to the ceremony.  Unfortunately for her, Bill’s brought along the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad – O-Ren Ishii (Lucy Liu), Vernita Green (Vivica A. Fox), Budd (Michael Madsen), and Elle Driver (Daryl Hannah) – who promptly kill up the place.  Four years later, after awaking from a coma, The Bride sets off to get her revenge.  She already killed O-Ren Ishii and Vernita Green in the first movie, so now she sets her sights on Budd.  But Budd is waiting for her, and shoots her in the chest with a shotgun blast full of rock salt, and then proceeds to bury her alive.  A little trick she learned from her master Pai Mei (Gordon Liu) helps her escape and allows her to go after Budd again, but Elle Driver beat her to the punch.  Now The Bride can kill two snakes with one sword.

I found myself fairly bored by Volume 2, but I’m also well aware of the reason.  I know that Tarantino’s movies tend to be really talkie, but after the excitement and swordplay of the first one, I went into the second one expecting something different.  This is not to say that Volume 2 is a bad movie, but it’s certainly a different movie, and I didn’t really want it to be.  The first movie was a sword fighting martial arts movie, and the second one was a slower paced spaghetti western.  In the first movie, The Bride kills somewhere in the vicinity of 90 people.  In part two, she kills two people.  It would’ve been three but she, like the movie, was moving too slow to get it done before Elle did.  It’s a bit of a harsh shock, but once you settle in to the movie, you get to liking it a little more.  The story is still a pretty typical revenge movie, but without the over the top sword fighting, I had to find something else to be interested in.  The dialogue was mostly Tarantino quality, so I paid attention to that instead.  I didn’t really dig on the fightin’ words between Elle and The Bride right before they fought.  Tarantino’s trend of having people sitting around and talking too much works at a table in a diner, but not so much right before two people kill each other.  And when that fight was over in three seconds after they finally stopped talking, that was a bit of a bummer.  The aftermath of the fight was pretty hilarious though.  I liked the monologue Bill delivers about Superman because it’s clever and it’s something that I’ve never though of before, but it also had very little to do with the situation.  It reminded me of the conversation about “Like a Virgin” from Reservoir Dogs.  I also liked the conversation between The Bride and the assassin, when The Bride has just found out she was pregnant.  Even though I still liked the movie, I felt it moved a little slow from the expectations I had going in.  I liked the Pai Mei flashback scenes, but the rest of it was too talkie and not enough action for my taste.

I had no real complaints about the performances in this movie.  Uma Thurman was still great, but the character of The Bride was not able to show her true badassness as well in this movie.  David Carradine was also really good.  I had mixed feelings about Michael Madsen’s character though.  I enjoyed the fact that Budd seemed to be the only one in the group that realized they deserved what The Bride was going to bring to them.  Doesn’t mean he intended to just let it happen though.  Problem with that part of it is that, when the time came, he decided to protect himself like a Bond villain.  The movie would’ve been over in the first 10 minutes if he had buckshot in his shotgun instead of rock salt.  And then he had to put the hero of the movie in a dangerous and difficult, but ultimately escapable situation.  If he had performed the coup-de-grace with a rock as he had suggested … well … he’d still be dead because The Bride didn’t kill him, but The Bride would’ve been dead.  Also, kudos to Madsen for burying The Bride in my hometown of Barstow.  I’ve always thought that place was only good for burying people alive in.

Ultimately, Kill Bill: Volume 2 is a really good movie that’s hindered by the expectations it’s predecessor set for me.  The first movie was exciting and spectacular, and the second movie was more low key and talkie.  Still good, but The Bride needed to get her sword wet a little to satisfy me.  I still recommend the movie though, especially since you need it to see the conclusion to the movie I recommended you buy yesterday.  I have this movie on Blu-Ray as well.  Kill Bill: Volume 2 gets “You’re a natural born killer” out of “Bitch, you don’t have a future.”

Let’s get these reviews more attention, people.  Post reviews on your webpages, tell your friends, do some of them crazy Pinterest nonsense.  Whatever you can do to help my reviews get more attention would be greatly appreciated.  You can also add me on FaceBook (Robert T. Bicket) and Twitter (iSizzle).  Don’t forget to leave me some comments.  Your opinions and constructive criticisms are always appreciated.

Kill Bill: Volume 1 (2003)

Leave the Limbs You’ve Lost.  They Belong to Me Now.

Fabio came through in a big way after work today.  I was trying to figure out what I should watch next, and he was more than happy to give me a recommendation.  And what’s more exciting about it is that he actually requested a movie that I like.  Technically two.  Today, we’re going into the first movie in the series.  I’ve liked the greater majority of the movies put out by this writer/director, and today’s movie is probably my favorite of his movies.  It takes a great writer/director and allows him to play in a world that both he and I are very passionate about, and today’s movie is the spawn of that passion.  At least of his passion.  Today’s review is the spawn of my passion.  With that, we get into my review of Kill Bill: Volume 1, written and directed by Quentin Tarantino, and starring Uma Thurman, David Carradine, Lucy Lui, Vivica A. Fox, Daryl Hannah, Sonny Chiba, Julie Dreyfus, Chiaki Kuriyama, Michael Parks, Michael Bowen, Gordon Liu, and Michael Madsen.

A pregnant lady – we’ll call her “The Bride” (Uma Thurman) – winds up on the business end of a gun held by her former boss, Bill (David Carradine).  Something she’s done did not sit right by him, causing him and his posse – O-Ren Ishii (Lucy Liu), Vernita Green (Vivica A. Fox), Elle Driver (Daryl Hannah), and Budd (Michael Madsen) – to attempt to kill The Bride and everyone attending her wedding.  When the police arrives, Earl McGraw (Michael Parks) finds that The Bride survived her head wound.  Four years later, she wakes up from her coma and takes a Pussy Wagon off to get her revenge.  Her first objective is to travel to Okinawa to get a sword from legendary swordsmith Hattori Hanzo (Sonny Chiba).  With that in hand, she sets her sights on on O-Ren Ishii and Vernita Green.

Mother fuck this is a good ass movie.  There’s a very strong chance that I liked this movie more than your typical movie goer because of my own passions.  If you’ve ever been inside my house, you’ll know that I love swords.  I have a decent collection of swords hanging around my house, and I always feel like I want more.  Every time I watch this movie, I feel like I need to go out and get myself a replica Hanzo.  The story of this movie is a pretty typical revenge movie, but told in a Tarantino fashion.  The Bride’s motivations in this movie are never in question.  That girl deserves her revenge.  You never once doubt that she deserves to kill the people in the way of her goal.  I could’ve done without Tarantino’s signature style of showing the movie out of order, but it also didn’t hinder the movie at all.  There was just no point to it.  Did The Bride kill O-Ren first, or was it Vernita?  And more to the point: who cares?  At that point, why bother?  I also didn’t understand the idea of bleeping out The Bride’s name.  Does it spoil anything in the movie to know that her name is Beatrice Kiddo?  Hells to the no.  So why are you doing it?  Again, it takes nothing away from the movie, but it also adds nothing but the question in my mind.  I also don’t understand The Bride’s notebook.  Does she really have trouble remembering the names of the five people that killed her friends and family, caused the death of her unborn child, and attempted to kill her?  Or is it that she has trouble remember who she’s killed already?  Either way, if it’s something my memory is capable of, your memory should be as well.  On the other hand, she DID get shot in the head in the beginning of this movie, so maybe I should let it go.  This movie is also done in a grindhouse style, and if you read my previous review of Hobo With a Shotgun, you’ll probably assume that I hate this movie because of that.  Not the case.  This is grindhouse done right.  It doesn’t look like shit; it’s just stylized.  It looks great.  They just went a little over the top on the violence so that it wasn’t really realistic.  I don’t mind that.  I also appreciated the one long shot of The Bride walking to the bathroom in the club before the fight with the Crazy 88’s.  I appreciate those kinds of shots because of the potential difficulty in getting an entire scene shot correctly in one go.  The music is also great, as Tarantino is prone to do.  It’s the music you wouldn’t necessarily expect in such a scene, and certainly not music I would’ve ever liked on it’s own, but it helps the movie greatly.  It’s all really memorable too, like Elle Driver’s powerful whistling or “Battle Without Honor or Humanity” by Tomoyasu Hotei.  After seeing the movie, you could probably do a pretty good rendition of either of these two songs at any point in the future.

As much as I liked everything else about this movie, the fights are really what sold me on it.  And they really don’t waste too much time before they get into a good fight.  We barely get into the movie before The Bride and Vernita have having a knock down, drag out fight.  It’s not a particularly pretty or impressive fight, it’s just two chicks throwing down with a couple of knives and a butt-load of glass.  The next fight is an animated one, vaguely reminiscent of the old Akira cartoon.  It’s very violent and pretty awesome.  But the real treat of the movie is the 15 minute sword fight between The Bride and 88 soldiers in O-Ren Ishii’s army.  This is a masterpiece of a massacre, a symphony of slaying, a bolero of blood.  It’s stylized and gory, and never gets boring, even though it goes on for 15 minutes.  The fight with O-Ren afterwards pales in comparison, but only because the previous fight was so freaking good.  If you weren’t sold on The Bride as a badass before this scene, you should be afterwards.  There is one part in the movie (which I won’t say, but you’ll know it once you’ve watched the movie) where a character gets the top of his or her head cut off, and it was really fakey.  I don’t know if it was intentionally bad because it would fit the grindhouse style, but I feel like they should’ve, and could’ve, done it better.

I liked every performance I can currently think of in this movie.  Uma Thurman was a boss.  The greater majority of this movie she was a relentless, stone-cold killer.  She also had to drop some emotional performances, like when she realized she had lost her baby.  She had a couple of parts where she was just real and normal, like the part with Sonny Chiba and about three lines of her conversation with Vernita.  Speaking of Vernita, Vivica A. Fox didn’t really work for me in this movie.  I think it was mainly the way she talked shit to The Bride when they were fighting because it sounded less like something a professional killer would be saying and more like something two drunk girls would be yelling at each other while pulling each other’s hair outside of a club.  O-Ren Ishii was a good character though, and Lucy Liu did it well.  She was pretty friendly in parts, then completely sadistic, and in her battle with The Bride I actually started liking her because of how respectful she was being in battle.  I was also a fan of Sonny Chiba.  I know that Tarantino was a big fan of him because of his older movies, but I’d never seen any of those.  I gained my appreciation because of this movie alone.  He seemed like such a nice and friendly (except to his lazy assistant) sushi chef, and then became the legendary swordsmith, filled with regret for the lives that his weapons had taken.  I also really liked Chiaki Kuriyama as Go Go Yubari.  I believed that there was a very good chance that she was crazy.  She was also hot, so I liked that.  And she was good in the fight, so that was nice as well.

Kill Bill: Volume 1 is a fantastic movie.  Putting someone like Tarantino into a genre that he and I are both really passionate about works out to make an amazingly entertaining movie.  The story isn’t entirely impressive, but the way it’s told is.  Amazing action, fantastic style, and some really good performances sells this thing.  I thoroughly recommend this movie, for both watching and purchasing.  I own this thing on Blu-Ray.  I technically own it on Blu-Ray AND DVD right now.  It’s definitely visually appealing enough to go straight to Blu-Ray, and definitely a movie that’s great enough that you should own it.  We’ll find out tomorrow how I feel about Volume 2, but for now Kill Bill: Volume 1 gets “Wiggle your big toe” out of “Lucky for her, Boss Matsumoto was a pedophile.”

Let’s get these reviews more attention, people.  Post reviews on your webpages, tell your friends, do some of them crazy Pinterest nonsense.  Whatever you can do to help my reviews get more attention would be greatly appreciated.  You can also add me on FaceBook (Robert T. Bicket) and Twitter (iSizzle).  Don’t forget to leave me some comments.  Your opinions and constructive criticisms are always appreciated.