Body Heat

I have been putting off watching Body Heat for some time now; all I really knew about it was that it was supposed to be extra-steamy and sexy, with William Hurt and Kathleen "Man Voice" Turner as the lovers.  That idea never stimulated me enough to watch this acclaimed movie.  I finally buckled down and sat down for a viewing and was immediately and pleasantly surprised --- this thing is a neo-noir!  Awesome!  Some of my favorite films are classic noirs from the 1940s and 50s, and I have been appreciating the more modern homages to the style lately, too.  So, right off the bat, there is more to enjoy here than Man Voice and Mr. Male Pattern Baldness having another stab at the themes from Last Tango in Paris.  I cannot express just how happy that realization made me.

Ned Racine (William Hurt) is a low-rent Florida lawyer for sleazebags and people who want to frivolously sue.  He's a funny guy, aware of his lot in life, and he is infamous for sleeping with anything with a heartbeat.  Florida is in the midst of an oppressive heat wave, causing people to only talk about the weather; Ned's cop buddy also argues that the heat causes more crime because people start to believe that the rules of civilized life have stopped applying.  Well, one night, Ned happens to spot the striking Matty Walker (Kathleen Turner) walking unescorted through town.  Ned takes this as his cue to mercilessly hit on her, even after she tells him that she's married (but out of town.  "My favorite kind," he replied). 

Ned, quoting the market price for mustache rides.

Despite herself, Matty takes a shine to Ned and the two eventually retreat to her palatial home for some sweaty naked time.  Matty's husband, Edmund (Richard Crenna), is only home on the weekends, so the two are free to flaunt their post-coital bodies all around the house, without a care.  But things start to get serious.  Ned can't stop thinking about Matty and risks seeing her, even when he knows Edmund's around.  It's just as bad for Matty --- she has talked about leaving Edmund, but he had her sign a prenuptial agreement, so she would leave the marriage with a pittance.  But if Edmund were to die, Matty would get at least half of his estate...hmm...

Great.  It's hot, she's using him as a pillow, and she's a mouth-breather.

I tend to enjoy William Hurt's acting, and Body Heat is certainly no exception.  He does a remarkable job of being very likable and seemingly bright, but simultaneously sleazy and dumb.  This is important, because we watch the movie through his perspective.  Kathleen Turner, in her film debut, was an excellent femme fatale.  I'm not usually a fan of Turner's (to be fair, I have pretty much missed her in her heyday), but she was obviously dangerous and sensual, which made her irresistible pull on Ned Racine plausible.  Richard Crenna (Col. Trautman from the Rambo series) was unsympathetic in his small part, which was exactly what he needed to be.  Ted Danson, in a rare pre-Cheers role, was very likable as Ned's competent lawyer friend, and the guy who flat-out tells him that Matty is bad news.  Mickey Rourke also makes an early-career appearance as an accused (but not convicted) arsonist; he has the film's best line:

Anytime you try a decent crime, you got fifty ways you can fuck up. If you think of twenty-five of them, you're a genius. And you ain't no genius.

Mickey speaks the truth.  For his friends.

This was Lawrence Kasdan's first directorial effort, after co-writing the last two of the original Star Wars trilogy and Raiders of the Lost Ark.  After Body Heat (which he also wrote), he would be almost exclusively a writer-director, usually of Kevin Kline vehicles.  I loved his style in this movie.  It is clearly evoking and referencing noirs of the past, most notably Double Indemnity, but the writing feels fresh.  The acting was very good, too, but Kasdan had the most important task in the film.  He had to convince the audience that Ned's decision to do something stupid, dangerous, and illegal in exchange for the promise of money and sex made sense.  If someone, let's be gender-biased and say it's a lady, walked into this movie halfway through, she might scoff at this notion; after all, who is stupid enough to risk life and limb for sex?  Men, that's who.  Kasdan made the sex scenes earlier in the film so sweaty and lusty that having Ned's little head doing the thinking for him seemed natural and even inevitable.  That's some good filmmaking.

Matty, indicating the general area Ned wants to occupy.

Despite owing quite a bit to other noirs that I have seen, Body Heat is the first movie (that I can think of) that made the dangerous sexuality of the femme fatale character explicit.  That's kind of a big deal, even if it paved the way for Basic Instinct.  More importantly, Lawrence Kasdan was able to leave his own mark on a genre that resists change, and he did so with good actors and writing.

The Expendables

What you get out of The Expendables depends entirely on what you expect to get out of it.  If you watch this, expecting it to be drenched in testosterone and blood (ugh), to have awful dialogue with worse delivery, then you're absolutely right.  On the other hand, if you're expecting it to be drenched in testosterone and blood (woo!), to have awesome action and ridiculous amounts of violence, you're still absolutely right.  As long as you're not expecting an Academy Award-winning period piece romantic comedy, you pretty much know how much you'll like this movie before the opening credits.

The Expendables are a group of mercenaries that handle the dirtiest jobs.  Barney (Sylvester Stallone) is the group leader, with Lee Christmas (Jason Statham) and Ying Yang (Jet Li) as his trusted confidantes; the other members of the group include Gunner (Dolph Lungren), Hale Caesar (Terry Crews) and Toll Bridge (Randy Couture).  While those names aren't quite descriptive enough to be GI Joe names, they're amusing nonetheless.  The film opens with the Expendables on a mission to save hostages from pirates.  Obviously, that doesn't end well for the pirates.  In fact, Gunner blows the torso off a guy --- he doesn't cut the guy in half, he blows the torso off the rest of his body.  Gunner later decides to hang a pirate for fun, but that is crossing the line for the rest of the group, so Gunner is stopped and kicked off the team.  So, keep that in mind: blowing people to bits is a job well done, but hanging pirates is taboo.

Barney is later approached by a mysterious Mr. Church (Bruce Willis) for a dangerous mission; actually, Barney's group isn't the only group being considered, but the other group, led by Trench (Arnold Schwarzenegger), is allegedly too busy.  The mission is to kill a drug despot, General Garza (David Zayas, of Dexter fame), on the Gulf island of Vilena.  Barney and Christmas go to the island to do some reconnaissance and discover that General Garza is obviously a puppet dictator, with former CIA operative James Munroe (Eric Roberts) pulling the strings and Paine (Steve Austin) providing the muscle.

The film takes a slight detour to add emotional depth and (probably) earn its weight in Academy Award nominations.  Apparently, mercenaries don't have rich family lives.  **PSSST!!!**  Pick your jaw up off the floor!  Christmas stops by his girlfriend's (Charisma Carpenter) house, only to find that, after being gone for an entire month without warning or communication, she has gotten a new boyfriend.  What a tramp!  The boyfriend is a prick and beats her up, so we get to see Statham beat the jerk up and then tell his ex-girlfriend that he was worth waiting for.  That, Charisma Carpenter, is the sound of you being served!  Tool (Mickey Rourke), the group's resident tattoo artist/bar owner/pretty boy is a former member of the team who now spends his time surrounded by slutty young women; he actually is required to cry while giving a monologue about being alone.  For his part, Barney has become obsessed with his contact on Vilena (Giselle Itie), a woman who opted to risk her life on that island hell hole instead of coming to the US with him.  Barney's is not a romantic obsession, but and idealistic one.  He hasn't cared about anything in so long that the notion is incomprehensible to him.  To be fair, the word "incomprehensible" is probably also incomprehensible to him, so it might just be a vocabulary issue.

After the recon mission, Barney and friends (Why didn't they call the movie that?) were going to pass on the offer, but Barney's obsession drives him to take out Munroe, General Vargas, and anyone else that might threaten his idealistic contact.  The rest of the team agrees to go with, because the bond of brotherhood that is formed when bathing in the blood of a common enemy is stronger than any other.  Or, you could just say that they all have a major bromance going on.  After a brief battle against the angry Gunner, the team decides to topple an island dictatorship by blowing the whole island to hell and shooting whatever is still breathing.  Whoops, did that need a spoiler alert?

This film was directed and co-written by Sylvester Stallone, with all the subtlety you would expect from him.  As in any of his action movies, Stallone's direction is hard to gauge.  The action sequences are awesome, particularly the hand-to-hand stuff.  The acting...well, what do you expect?  The top three billed actors are Stallone, Statham and Li; only Statham can speak English fluently.  Actually, Statham's acting was much better than it needed to be in such a dumb movie, and Stallone was correct to give him one of the more emotionally complex roles.  Judging from the rest of the movie, though, it is clear that Stallone can't direct (or write) witty dialogue to save his life.  The plot is (mostly) perfect for a big, dumb action movie, but the dialogue is often awkward.  Do we really need to put up with Stallone, Couture, and Jet Li trying to deliver funny lines?  They couldn't get the timing right for a joke if they had a DeLorean.  That is forgivable, since action movies require poorly executed one-liners, but there is a glaring flaw with the plot.  Why does Stallone bother with the attempt at depth?  Look, I don't give a flaming crap about how these guys feel.   Aww...the elite murderers for hire are lonely when they go home!  >:-[  Did we ever need to understand Schwarzenegger's backstory in Predator?  No!  That is just 40 minutes that could have been better spent shooting people's faces off.  Or they could have had Arnold's team try the mission and die!  That would have been awesome!  Or they could have added a Predator on the island!  Or...well, pretty much anything would have made more sense in this movie than talking about feelings.

The acting is a lot like the writing and directing: not too surprising.  Bruce Willis is good in his cameo, Arnold gives us a reminder that English is not his first language, and Mickey Rourke cries to remind us that he has a Best Actor Oscar.  Randy Couture shouldn't have been given the "smart guy" role, but everyone else is as good as you expect them to be.  Statham is obviously the best actor out of the bunch, Terry Crews is amusing, and Stallone and Li are both pretty bad.  Fulbright scholar Dolph Lungren, while not a good actor, was much better than I remember him from the 90s, so that was a pleasant surprise.

I feel the same way about The Expendables that I feel about Transformers: I paid to see giant robots fighting, and I got my money's worth.  I wanted to see a bunch of action heroes kill the faces off of some bad guys, and The Expendables delivered.  As usual, Stallone tries to give his characters emotional layers, but does it in his typically inept way.  The violence was great, even though the blood was clearly CGI at times.  If Stallone had cut the emotional crap and just blown stuff up and garroted butts off, this movie would be perfect for what it is.  Since he tries to reach for something more than a stupid action movie --- nay, the stupid action movie --- it ends up falling a little short of perfection.  Still, this is a great example of the brainless fun that action and explosions can provide.  I would like to offer one more bit of criticism, though: in a movie called The Expendables, how many team members should die?

Iron Man 2

Making a good sequel is a tricky business.  Of course, you want to stay true to what made the first film good, but you also need to change it up a little to keep the audience interested.  The tricky part is that you don't want to change it too little, or the sequel feels too similar to the previous movie (see the Saw series).  One cure for this is to spend the entire film budget on the stars and special effects, leaving you with enough cash to buy eleven bananas, so you just hire a half-witted chimp to write your script (which is the true story behind the making of Bad Boys II).  Every so often, though, filmmakers get it right, giving depth to the characters, while including more action because the origin story has already been told.

Iron Man 2 is one of those sequels that gets it right.  A big part of this is the fact that the principal cast remains from the original film, with one exception.  The role of James "Rhodey" Rhodes is played by Don Cheadle instead of Terrence Howard this time around.  While both have been nominated for an Oscar, I think of this as a casting upgrade because Cheadle is charismatic enough to hold his own in the Ocean's movies, and Howard was pretty wooden in Iron Man.  Other than that, Robert Downey, Jr. returns as Tony Stark, the man that wears the Iron Man armor.  Gwyneth Paltrow also returns as his devoted not-quite-romantically-involved life partner/assistant, Pepper Potts.  Downey is once again fantastic as the egotistical and sarcastic lead character.  Paltrow's character has more to do in this movie, and she's fine, but the plot requires her to be annoyed with Downey most of the time, so their chemistry isn't as strong this time.  Cheadle, however, comes through with a pretty solid performance as Tony Stark's straight-laced best friend.  Jon Favreau apparently did another good job directing, because the actors all performed well and the action was awesome.

The supporting cast is good, too.  The role of the malicious Russian physicist/tinkerer, Ivan Vanko, is played with relish by Mickey Rourke.  It's always better when his character has a reason for looking as haggard as Rourke does naturally; here, he plays a heavily tattooed veteran of the Russian prison system with some very...um...attractive gold teeth and greasy hair.  Aside from his first scene, Rourke is very good; in that first scene, though, he gives a howl of mourning comparable to Hayden Christensen in Star Wars: Episode III.  Rourke's best moments are when he chuckles to himself.  That creepy laugh with that ugly face makes Rourke a pretty scary guy.  The other villain here is Stark's business (but not intellectual) rival, Justin Hammer, played by the always amusing Sam Rockwell.  Rockwell approaches his character as a first-class salesman that doesn't necessarily care to know the details of what he is selling, as long as it makes him money.  As such, he's perfectly annoying.  To be honest, he doesn't come across as a legitimate threat to Stark (because he's not), but the scene where he is talking weapons to Rhodey shows how effective he can be.  Sam Jackson expands his role as super-secret agent Nick Fury from the last film, and he is appropriately Sam Jackson-esque (read: bad-ass).  Scarlett Johannson stretches her acting range in a small supporting role as a sexy redhead/secretary/martial artist that wears really tight clothes.  Garry Shandling was amusing as an antagonistic senator.  They even had Leslie Bibb reprise her slutty journalist role from the last movie and threw in cameos by Olivia Munn and the late Adam "DJ AM" Goldstein.

You might notice that I've given a lot of attention to the actors so far.  While this is an action movie, Iron Man 2 spends a lot of time developing characters and plot.  The first movie was like that, too, but part of that was because they were telling an origin story.  Here, they use that down time to give Stark two separate types of problems.  The first is the fact that Stark is slowly killing himself with the Iron Man suit.  It's not his fault, really, but his chest battery thingie that saved his life in the first film has a metal component that is poisoning him in the long term.  Oops.  It turns out that no known element can replace the one he's using, either.  That means that, when Stark isn't being his arrogant public persona, he is planning for his eventual death.  These scenes go over well, with Downey doing another great job showing Stark at his most vulnerable.

The other problem is, like in the last film, one of assuming responsibility for his technology.  In Iron Man, it was about keeping Stark weapons out of the hands of terrorists.  This time around, Stark has decided to give the Iron Man technology to no one.  Obviously, the US government is not happy with this.  Justin Hammer wants to fill the hole Stark has left in military contracts, but he cannot figure out the Iron Man technology on his own.  That is where Ivan Vanko comes in; his father worked on a previous generation of the Iron Man battery with Tony Stark's father.  Vanko built an imperfect, but effective version of the battery to power his own suit, but this one has weird electric whips instead of armor.  Obviously, the bad guys team up to take down Stark as a business, as well as a hero.

Since this is a sequel, they have made the action scenes even bigger.  Vanko's first scene using his whips is surprisingly cool and the sheer amount of car wreckage is impressive.  Personally, my favorite action had Stark fighting Rhodey, with each in their own Iron Man suit.  It was just cool to watch.  I would like to point out that only billionaires can afford to fight like that in their own homes.  Scarlett Johannson looked convincing in her fight scene, too, although some of her poses seemed like a little too obviously T & A.  Not that there's anything wrong with that, but some of it just looked uncomfortable.  The big ending fight scene was great, once Iron Man and Rhodey/War Machine finally teamed up.  The action leading up to their team-up was a little underwhelming, given how long it took and I was a little disappointed by the durability of the evil robot drones in the climax, but the fight with Vanko made up for those concerns.  Until this movie, I never considered whips as even remotely cool or threatening; I'm sure they're an acquired taste (as a weapon), but Vanko looked like a legitimate threat in this movie.

Now, for the bad news.  There are a few moments where this movie failed for me.  The first involved Vanko's first battle scene.  As awesome as it was, it had a ridiculous plot hole.  It looked like his plan was always to sneak on the racetrack and attack Stark's race car...but Stark decided to drive the car himself only minutes before the race began.  Was Vanko planning on sneaking into the fancy restaurant where Stark was going to watch the race, dressed as a car mechanic?  It's not a big deal, I admit, but it was a stupid writing mistake.

The other moment was when Stark is watching an old video of his late father, Howard.  It's pretty boring stuff, showing how focused he was on business and not his family, until Howard addresses Tony through the video.  It's the typical emotionally distant father finally admitting how much he cares for his children speech.  If you liked it here, you'll love it in The Incredibles.  It's not that the scene was terrible, but it just...too predictable.  This scene is meant to show Tony at his most vulnerable, finding inspiration and love for an unexpected place, but it just feels flat.  This is probably because the father-son relationship is barely mentioned until the video is played, but Stark's vulnerable moments in this movie are just not as effective in this movie because they are not spent with other characters.


These flaws are pretty well balanced out by a lot of clever little things throughout the movie, though.  Justin Hammer is such a wanna-be, of course he uses bronzing lotion; it is just as obvious that his palms should be orange from using the bronzer, too.   Rourke's tattoos looked like legitimate Russian prison tattoos, too; I recognized some of them from Eastern Promises.  Pepper Potts was upset at Stark giving away his modern art collection because he worked hard to build it; this is a nice bit of work, making subtle reference to the modern art knowledge she showed briefly in the first film.  There's more stuff, but it's more fun to see it yourself.  Honestly, this movie has a lot going for it.  It is a nearly pitch-perfect sequel that introduced new problems to established characters and developed the returning characters even further.  The action is a little bigger and provides a very powerful character with a more even fight.