Author: Teel

Of all the movies I’ve seen today, I most highly recommend The Rules of Attraction. It’s based on a novel by the author of American Psycho, but I definitely liked this movie a lot more overall than American Psycho. And as some of you may know, I identify with the main character of American Psycho on a deep, personal level. (Though I wish I had more in common, like wealth and the ability to so easily get away with mass murder.)

The Rules of Attraction doesn’t have nearly as much death in it as American Psycho, but it definitely has at least as much weird, and quite a bit of well-written, introspective voice-over narrating characters’ inner-most thoughts. It’s basically about the relationships between people who want someone who wants someone else, though there’s plenty of sex and drugs and just-plain-craziness to distract from this complex examination of mis-placed emotional attachment.

I recommend that you watch both trailers for it. Trailer 1 really gives you a good idea of what the movie is about. I don’t want to give too much away, because there is just so much great stuff, innovative story-telling, interesting combinations of characters and situations and temporal dynamics that sometimes even conflict with themselves that this movie is almost worth watching again. (Except that I still don’t have a job, so spending so much on movies isn’t really the best idea right now.) There are things that will make so much more sense after seeing it all the way through. I saw things I missed just re-watching Trailer 2 for this review.

Great performances by Van Der Beek and Sossaman and Somerhalder, and a surprize appearance by … wait, that would ruin the surprize. Fun camera work, and you may be interested to know that just like Trailer 1 says, one of the features of this movie is “backwards”. Not in a Memento way. More … interesting and fun. You’ll like it. Go See It.

The Transporter is pure action flick. It opens with a fast, fun, original, well-thought-out car chase, and it hardly slows down from there. Lots of very skilled driving, but you’ll see why they call it The Transporter and not something awful like “The Driver”; plenty of vehicles make their way into this man’s hands.

Sure, they’ve thrown a little story in, but basically as a vehicle to anchor all the fun action and fight sequences to. One day the transporter accepts a job that happens to involve moving a kidnapped woman, which leads him to break his own rules, from which point everything gets totally out of hand. By the end of the movie, instead of being a nameless guy who works for whoever will pay and gets away with it, he’s our hero fighting to save the lives of the innocent.

There is a point in the movie where it becomes clear that he must have been trained as a Navy Seal or equivalent, and from that point forward it just becomes less and less believable that one man so young could have learned all this in the course of a military career and managed to get out and onto the business of “transporting”. The fight scenes just become more and more inventive as the film goes on, moving into smaller and smaller spaces or introducing stranger and stranger elements.

There is one fight in particular where ‘our hero’ intentionally spills something like 25-50 gallons of dirty motor oil on the ground and himself to help him fight off 10 or 20 armed men. They can’t get a hold of him or stand up, and he’s slip-sliding around with ease, kicking and punching and trippin and bashing them. He slides out of the huge oil-slick, grabs a bicycle and jumps straight down on it, breaking the pedals off before throwing the bike at a couple of guys who have regained their footing. Here’s the REALLY clever bit: he steps into the pedals (they have those straps to hold your feet on) and is then able to stand and fight in the middle of the oil slick while surrounded by men who can hardly keep from falling, let alone fight. It goes on like this for almost two hours, and if you love action, you’ll love it!

There’s one scene we’ve all seen in the trailer for this movie that depicts him deflecting a rocket with a pie-plate or similar hand-held metal disc, and sadly to say it was not included in the final movie. Or I blinked. There was definitely a rocket fight.

Still, an overall enjoyable movie. The story was well-worn and forgetable, but the action it anchored was more inventive and interesting than most of the action I’ve seen lately. Good stuff.

Knockaround Guys has been waiting well over a year to be released. It was originally scheduled to be released in late September of last year, but I guess it involved criminals on planes, and there was one scene where a plane burns to the ground, and someone thought it wouldn’t be able to make money right after 9/11/01. So they put it off and they put it off, and it finally came out today.

Starring Vin Diesel, Seth Green, John Malkovich, Dennis Hopper, Barry Pepper, etc. The basic premise is that the sons and nephews of big, powerful leaders of organised crime are trying to prove that they’re worthy of being involved in the family business by starting with a simple job. All they have to do is fly cross-country, pick up a package, fly back and deliver it. Of course, they manage to screw it up. The bulk of the movie is watching them further screw up trying to make things right.

Overall, Knockaround Guys comes just short of feeling satisfying to me. That may be because I’ve been waiting for it a while too long, or it could be something about the movie. There are a lot of satisfying elements within the movie, but somehow they don’t seem to add up quite right. Some of the film feels like its trying to be dark and gritty, and where it tries, it succeeds. Other parts are moving the plot along, and while they all make sense and come together without gaping holes or unbelievable twists, they’re too easily predicted and almost like the moviemakers realised part-way through that something was missing and lost their enthusiasm.

Angela may be able to say more about this movie. We’ll see. If you’ve been looking forward to this movie, you should probably see it; it is just what you think it will be. If you’re iffy, remember that you may find the movie a little iffy, too.