now I feel dirty
Friday, 19 February 2010 03:50 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
freckles_and_doubtJo&stv are Princely Hosts - I think I may have mentioned this once or twice. A day. For a month. They really are keeping me sane in the middle of all the start-of-term crises and the damage to my psyche done by a thoroughly filthy deconstructed house. They are also both in the middle of enormous work projects, so large tracts of the last week have been characterised by the three of us collapsing zombified in front of the TV of an evening in front of junky movies and good food cooked on a strictly rotational basis. This is how I ended up watching Crank, a film I otherwise wouldn't have gone anywhere near with a ten-foot electric cattle prod, a device which by some curious oversight isn't actually in the movie but certainly should be.
Crank is dreadful. It's a completely, mindblowingly, utterly brainless film, so far and firmly in the "action" category that it really constitutes little else. It has a stunningly simple premise, which can loosely be summed up by saying it's Speed with Jason Statham playing the bus. He's been injected with a sinister Oriental poison courtesy of strange organised crime shenanigans, and if his adrenalin levels drop below a certain threshold his heart stops. This weirdly simple plot is encapsulated neatly in the film's title image, which is a completely pixillated and badly-drawn 80s computer image of a heart, pumping, which they flash at you at intervals to remind you of the necessity of shutting down any expectations of complexity. The adrenalin-rush premise is actually pure genius: it's so simplistic, so utterly puerile that it achieves an almost transcendent level of elegance, which neatly underpins car chases, punch-ups, hold-ups, shoot-ups, unbelievably gratuitous public sex episodes, high-speed blow-jobs and the jolly little closing sequence with the helicopter. The underlying retarded elegance is supported by the film's profound lack of interest in set-up, characterisation, nuance, theme, moral or intelligence. Its actors are various shades of wood, from teak (Statham) to freshly-sanded pine (the girlfriend), and some slightly scenery-chewing poison oak from the bad guys, who rock the stereotypes rather rockingly. Bonus decadent doctor, brainless bimbo girlfriend, and a random snatch of Quiet Riot which forced me to confront the horrified realisation that they're a hugely guilty pleasure.
So's this film. I had a complete blast watching it. It's ungodly amounts of fun, probably because its sole saving grace is that it embraces its total lack of quality and absolutely refuses to take itself seriously. It's a violent, meaningless video game, and proud of it. I feel dirty, ashamed, sated, profoundly amused, and fundamentally apologetic to the several thousand of my long-suffering braincells, already weakened by all the curriculum advice, who undoubtedly perished in the endeavour. It was worth it.
We also watched Daywatch, about which I shall say not much except, dayum, those Russian drugs are not our Earth drugs1. I was severely hampered by having last read/seen Nightwatch several years ago, so I found this fundamentally incomprehensible, although weird and stylish, and very, very whiplashy with all the fast cuts. One of those movies that suffers from plot-shamble and inheres mostly in scattered fragments of profoundly strange urban-magical imagery which stay with you for a long time. Also, I like the main character, he's rather endearing, if occasionally a bit dim.
Crank is dreadful. It's a completely, mindblowingly, utterly brainless film, so far and firmly in the "action" category that it really constitutes little else. It has a stunningly simple premise, which can loosely be summed up by saying it's Speed with Jason Statham playing the bus. He's been injected with a sinister Oriental poison courtesy of strange organised crime shenanigans, and if his adrenalin levels drop below a certain threshold his heart stops. This weirdly simple plot is encapsulated neatly in the film's title image, which is a completely pixillated and badly-drawn 80s computer image of a heart, pumping, which they flash at you at intervals to remind you of the necessity of shutting down any expectations of complexity. The adrenalin-rush premise is actually pure genius: it's so simplistic, so utterly puerile that it achieves an almost transcendent level of elegance, which neatly underpins car chases, punch-ups, hold-ups, shoot-ups, unbelievably gratuitous public sex episodes, high-speed blow-jobs and the jolly little closing sequence with the helicopter. The underlying retarded elegance is supported by the film's profound lack of interest in set-up, characterisation, nuance, theme, moral or intelligence. Its actors are various shades of wood, from teak (Statham) to freshly-sanded pine (the girlfriend), and some slightly scenery-chewing poison oak from the bad guys, who rock the stereotypes rather rockingly. Bonus decadent doctor, brainless bimbo girlfriend, and a random snatch of Quiet Riot which forced me to confront the horrified realisation that they're a hugely guilty pleasure.So's this film. I had a complete blast watching it. It's ungodly amounts of fun, probably because its sole saving grace is that it embraces its total lack of quality and absolutely refuses to take itself seriously. It's a violent, meaningless video game, and proud of it. I feel dirty, ashamed, sated, profoundly amused, and fundamentally apologetic to the several thousand of my long-suffering braincells, already weakened by all the curriculum advice, who undoubtedly perished in the endeavour. It was worth it.
We also watched Daywatch, about which I shall say not much except, dayum, those Russian drugs are not our Earth drugs1. I was severely hampered by having last read/seen Nightwatch several years ago, so I found this fundamentally incomprehensible, although weird and stylish, and very, very whiplashy with all the fast cuts. One of those movies that suffers from plot-shamble and inheres mostly in scattered fragments of profoundly strange urban-magical imagery which stay with you for a long time. Also, I like the main character, he's rather endearing, if occasionally a bit dim.
1 Bugger, I think I inadvertently nicked this phrase from
smoczek. I blame the booze.
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no subject
Date: Friday, 19 February 2010 03:10 pm (UTC)I hear they're still planning to make a third movie; I have no idea what they're going to put in it, since the second movie is a departure from book canon on the order of a sudden downpour on Arrakis.
I heartily recommend the books, though; they actually make sense. If they have a genre, it's "Soviet bureaucracy urban fantasy", something I think my cultural brethren and cousins write better than anyone else. ;) I don't know if that vibe really comes through properly in the movies.
no subject
Date: Friday, 19 February 2010 05:17 pm (UTC)I agree about the male lead, who reprises his "nice but dim" role in WANTED and is one of the redeeming features of that film which is a shame as the comic they ignored but licensed was utterly superb.
no subject
Date: Monday, 22 February 2010 11:13 am (UTC)A weird side-effect of watching the film has been to make me realise that I really enjoy hearing both Russian and Polish spoken - lovely spluttering languages, full of snap and pop.
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Date: Friday, 19 February 2010 07:50 pm (UTC)no subject
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Date: Monday, 22 February 2010 01:16 pm (UTC)