Category Archives: Reviews

Reviews, Satire

They Live

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Far from being outdated, They Live is now more relevant than ever.

While I probably would have cast someone other than this professional wrestler as the hero, John Carpenter must have thought he could entice action adventure fans into watching this science fiction satire with “Rowdy Roddy” in the lead role. That would also explain the obligatory (and marathon-length) fight scene that occurs after the scene above.

Hmm. Those are profit-driven decisions, John.

In the tradition of the cheesiest action movies of all time, here’s one of the most memorable lines from They Live:

The whole plight-of-a-blue-collar-working-class-Joe-trying-to-find-a-job schtick in the first act would be much more believable in 2013 than it was during the economic boom of the 1980s, but on the plus side it was accompanied by a nice bluesy soundtrack.

There are two kinds of people who like this movie: Those who see it as harmless exploitative schlock; and those who consider it a brilliant metaphor for the reality we live in, right up there with The Matrix. (The second group could be broken down, however, according to political affiliation.)

Whichever group you might belong to, if you haven’t seen it yet, you should.

Action, Reviews

The Condemned

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I love watching good movies (and reading good books) and am usually motivated to tell others about them. (Most of my Amazon reviews are four or five stars because I’m more motivated to share my reactions when I enjoyed the experience than when I didn’t.) However, I kinda’ consider it my job here at VP to also warn you about the stuff I don’t think is so good. Here is one such review.

Somebody lent me the Condemned DVD and, with no internet connection in the crib at that time, I burned up a couple hours watching it.

It’s a scenario I’ve seen before: evil rich guy throws a bunch of desperate cutthroats into an elaborately controlled environment and has them fight to the death (Similar to The Running Man, in a way). The “twist” this time is that they’re all death row prisoners from around the world. Evil Rich Dude’s logic is, “They’re gonna die anyway, so why can’t I make a buck off it?”

OK–sounds logical, I guess. And there were some nice touches throughout the flick. But amidst all the splattering blood, the film makers kept going back to the theme of how inhuman the spectators can become in spectator sports. Sort of like the original Rollerball, only subtle.

As subtle as a 12-pound sledgehammer.

There were some real douche-bag characters in this flick, and the director employed all the usual tactics to make us want to see them suffer the same kind of torture and horrific deaths that they inflicted. And then we were supposed to feel guilty about it. “OMG! We’re just as bad as the 40 million people paying to see this snuff circus on the internet! Maybe we’re almost as bad as the eeveel capitalist scum that’s getting rich off the whole thing!”

Yawn.

OK, whatever. Let’s get to the fighting, since that’s really the appeal of this kind of film, ironic guilt messages notwithstanding.

Steve Austin…wasn’t he an astronaut who suffered a terrible accident, then wound up with bionic legs, arm and eye?

…A man barely alive.

“Gentlemen, we can rebuild him. We have the technology.

We can make him better than he was. Better…

Stronger…

Faster…”

Ahem.

I like old western movies, alright?

But even so, I admit they had some of the most ridiculous fight scenes ever filmed: 20-minute bare-knuckle brawls. Punches telegraphed from two miles away. Men on the receiving end of those dramatic haymakers standing around waiting to get hit (when it was their turn). Heros flooring villains with said haymakers, then stooping down to pull the villain to his feet in order to hit him again.

Well, the fight coreography in this flick was that bad. Not just with fists, either. The sadistic, murderous ex-SAS dude was given a bow with arrows. Twice he had our hero dead to rights, but didn’t take a shot. One of those times, rather than launch an arrow into Austin’s considerable target area from his protected position on high ground, he jumps down to Austin’s level to menace him with the bow at melee range. (Evidently the director of a few Arrow episodes was inspired by this flick.)

I guess classic westerns have some stiff competition for Most Ridiculous Fight Scenes in “professional wrestling.” That’s where I think Austin came from and probably what influenced the stupid fighting.

Movies like this are hard to pull off, I guess. Especially when they take their hackneyed message too seriously.

Nevertheless, you can find it here if you refuse to heed my warning.

Reviews, Sports

The Champ Has a Glass Jaw!

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I’m doubling up the jab, here. My last blog entry was about boxing fiction; this one is about a boxing game. It may be an “old” game, but it’s still a fun action game to play. So nyah nyah.

Well, let me qualify that: Fight Night was fun to play.

Round Two was an improvement on the original. Round Three was arguably an improvement on Two. Then Round Four stunk so bad that EA Sports evidently gave up on it (until Fight Night Champion, which redeemed them to an extent I guess).

It seems that the design team used up the entire budget improving the graphics for Round Four, then had to outsource the game play programming to pro bono data entry clerks. Aside from adding long-overdue fighters like Mike Tyson to the pantheon…

…Round Four took every weakness of the earlier versions and concentrated on making them even worse.

  1. EVERY BOUT RESULTS IN A KNOCKOUT. This is a case of entertainment-over-realism (real fights often go the score cards even when two punchers are matched). Not so bad by itself but a related issue is:
  2. EVEN FEATHER-FISTED DANCERS ARE KNOCKOUT ARTISTS IN FIGHT NIGHT. Some attempt at capturing the style of the real fighters was made–the AI version of Ray Leonard has an incredible defense, for instance. But everyone’s a power-puncher.
  3. THE TRAINING GAMES ARE EVEN MORE DIFFICULT WITHOUT BEING INTERESTING. This was already the trend by Round Three. Four put the trend on steroids.
  4. YOU HAVE TO BE A COUNTER-PUNCHER TO WIN. According to this game, the only time one boxer can inflict serious damage to another is after blocking a punch. Whose idea was this?
  5. AN EFFECTIVE PARRY RENDERS THE BOXER WHO THREW THE PUNCH UTTERLY DEFENSELESS. C’mon, have you guys ever even watched real boxers in a fight?
  6. SUFFER ONE KNOCKDOWN AND YOU’LL PROBABLY NEVER GET UP. Your character might still have plenty of juice after a flash knockdown, but that won’t help you without the Magic Sequence of Controller Input. In the Fight Card Round Four Universe, Buster Douglass would lose in Tokyo; Jersey Joe Walcott retains the title after Marciano’s challenge; and Joe Louis loses half his fights.

But Round Four introduces some brand new sucky features, too.

  • There’s a delay between control input and screen action that makes spastic brainless button-mashers invincible against those who attempt to use skill and strategy.
  • The cut man is of little significance.
  • Human-controlled fighters plateau in abilities after about 10 fights, while AI characters keep improving.
  • Button configuration was designed for an epileptic octopus.

If you’re like me and enjoy fun games regardless of their vintage, I strongly recommend Fight Night Round Two or Round Three, or perhaps Champion, which adds a storyline, but duck Round Four like it’s Sugar Ray Robinson with something to prove.

Crime, Reviews, Sports

Paul Bishop’s Felony Fists

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After Paul Bishop read Mel Odom’s retro-boxing novel Smoker, he found Odom’s website and looked up his contact info.

“We hit it off immediately,” says Bish. “We had a ton in common including a shared love of the fight pulps.”

During their first phone conversation, the brainstorming began for a new sports fiction series. The series is called Fight Card. It is a throwback to the boxing pulps of yesteryear.

Felony Fists was the first Fight Card instalment by “Jack Tunney.” For you armchair fight historians out there, that nome de plume is exactly what you suspect it is–a fusion between Jack Dempsey and Gene Tunney, though the series takes place in the ’50s, not the ’20s (when those two were heavyweight champs). Several different authors in the Fight Card stable are writing under that amalgamated name.

The Fight Card series consists of monthly 25,000 word novelettes, designed to be read in one or two sittings. The stories and stylings are inspired by the fight pulps of the ’30s and ’40s – such as Fight Stories Magazine – and Robert E. Howard’s two-fisted boxing tales featuring Sailor Steve Costigan. – Paul Bishop

Patrick “Felony” Flynn is an LA beat cop who is also possibly the world’s most seasoned amateur middleweight. He’s offered a spot on the detective squad if he’ll help knock gangster Mickey Cohen out of boxing. That means he has to move up in weight to light-heavy, turn pro, and arrest Cohen’s fighter Solomon King’s ascent toward a title shot against Archie Moore. A middleweight moving up to fight a badass light-heavyweight is a monumental chore all by itself, but in case the reader doesn’t appreciate that, the pressure is heaped upon Felony Flynn increasingly right up until the last chapter.

During all this time, Flynn becomes partners with another rookie detective, Tombstone. A black detective on an historically/notoriously bigoted force like the LAPD must be exceptional, and Tombstone is. This subplot, a counterfeiting subplot, and the fight plot all come together and are tied off nicely. The writer set out to tell a retro-style pulp boxing yarn and I’d say he did a good job.

For my taste, Cohen’s tactic to get Flynn to throw the fight was overkill. The stakes were plenty high already, as were the odds against Flynn in the fight. For Cohen to be so scared of an Irish brawler with one professional fight (against an over-rated has-been) presenting a threat to a contender who consumes talented pros for breakfast (and who Archie Moore is worried about) was just too much. In Flynn’s other fights, he never was 100% on. He was either distracted, or careless…something to put the outcome in doubt. I really would have liked to see Flynn go to war from Round One in the climactic fight, and let the tension come from the fact that he’s overmatched, and making it through 15 rounds with Solomon King requires a superhuman effort. Plenty of tension that way and far more realistic.

Speaking of realism, I just have to provide the following advisory about boxing technicalities:

In boxing, a right-handed fighter does not have a right jab or a right hook. He jabs and hooks with the left. He throws straight rights or a right cross. (Everything I’m saying is mirror-opposite for a southpaw, of course.) What some people call a right hook from a right-hander is actually either an angled right uppercut or a roundhouse right–an ill-advised punch 99% of the time, though I did see Lennox Lewis score a knockout with one.

I don’t know how many other readers would notice or care about getting these fundamental details right, but for me it was an annoyance in what otherwise was an enjoyable read. To be fair, a LOT of authors who write about boxing make these kind of mistakes. (One exception is this book from the Fight Card series.)

Paul Bishop retired from the LAPD, so he knows a thing or two about the crime angle. That and his hard-hitting, fast moving prose in Felony Fists makes this a great read, and one of many highly entertaining Fight Card books.

P.S: Check out this trailer for Fight Card: Front Page Palooka below!

Reviews

Ender’s Game – A Review

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Originally posted November 2013 by Hank Brown.

Watching this film, I couldn’t help but draw comparisons to other specific sci-fi on the big screen: Not too long ago the Star Trek reboot showed us Kirk, Spock, McCoy and Uhura together at Star Fleet Academy. And some 15 years ago was the abysmal adaptation of Starship Troopers. I liked Star Trek, despite my annoyance at some aspects of it, but still, Ender’s Game is, so far, my favorite space cadets-playing-war-games movie.

As far as Heinlein goes, this film captured the spirit of his military science fiction better than the movie that bore the title of his trail-blazing book. I’ve never read Orson Scott Card, but am tempted to at least add his books to my bucket list, now.

Card used an interesting premise for this storyline: Future armed forces will train children for war, since youngsters adapt quicker to new/changing technology. Hence the hero is a child, with the responsibility of Earth’s very existence resting on his bony pre-adolescent shoulders.

Or is he a hero? It wouldn’t surprise me if the critics hate this movie because of what survives to the big screen from Card’s book: the suggestion that ruthlessness is required to win wars. That is watered-down considerably by writing the character as a “bleeding heart” type with an emotional maturity more on par with an aged monk…who just happens to be a savant with military tactics and strategy.

The acting is fair, on average–nothing spectacular. The boy playing Ender is called upon to be misty-eyed in too many close-ups to remember, and he delivers. And Harrison Ford hams it up (this is a consistent phenomenon in his recent roles, seems to me) as Ender’s stage mom commander. Other actors are believable enough. (In Ford’s defense, the role did strike me as written with a lack of dimension.)

What made the experience enjoyable for me was the character interaction written into the academy scenes. Group dynamics can be fascinating from an anthropological perspective (or depressing and infuriating from a participatory one). Reduce the group members in age to when the passion and motives of human beings are easily observed, and the intensity amplifies accordingly. For this reason I should have loved Lord of the Flies, but they lost me at “fade in.”

I can nit-pick pretty much any movie to death (even those I like), and have. This one is no exception. But I’ll just mention one thing that bothered me: the mixing of naval and land force ranks in one branch of service. Having sergeants, colonels and admirals all in the same branch is just…wrong.

But anyway, I found that the good outweighed the bad and Ender’s Game is worth a watch.