Day: June 26, 2021

“Best Action Flicks of the 21st Century” was posted on 5.9.17. What if anything has changed in the action realm in the four years since?

To most people “action film” means violent, whoop-ass shit with lots of leaping around, automatic rifle fire, squealing tires and non-stop adrenalin. But when it comes to deciding on the best action films, most viewers aren’t that demanding. They love their jizz-whiz and don’t care about the shadings and subtleties. But I am demanding, you see. To really love an action film I have to believe that (a) what I’m watching bears at least some relation to human behavior as most of us have come to know it and is therefore delivering a semi-believable, well-motivated thing, and (b) what I’m watching could actually happen in the real-deal world of physics (i.e., no idiotic swan dives off 50-story office buildings).

I don’t care, by the way, if the action content in a film takes up the first 10 minutes or the last half-hour or the whole damn running time. All I care about is whether or not I believe what I’m seeing, or…you know, whether I’m distracted or dazzled enough so that I don’t pay attention to logic or realism factors. Whatever works. As long as action defines character and vice versa.

If I’m enjoying an action flick it’s because I fucking believe it, and I never believe anything that doesn’t respect some grown-up concept of reality. Fantasy flicks can blow me for the most part. I want an action movie that will plant its feet, look me in the eye and tell the fucking truth.

Very few 21st Century action films live up to HE’s rules and standards, or even give a damn about doing so. The Fast and Furious franchise is notorious for spitting in the face of reality. Almost all superhero comic-book movies revel in the fact that their realm allows them to ignore logic and believability. Once in a great while and in a very blue moon, a first-rate action flick will come along that defies HE rules but gets away with it. One of these was Ang Lee‘s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (’00), but that’s a very rare occurence. On the other hand Crouching Tiger led to the stars of Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle flying around on wires, and that was an awful thing to behold.

Here are Hollywood Elsewhere’s choices for the 11 craftiest, best-made, most believable action films of the 21st Century, and in this order:

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Initially posted on 8.26.07: Paul Greengrass‘s The Bourne Supremacy became notorious in certain circles for the exhausting, hyper-cutting, whip-pan technique that came to be known as “Paul Greengrass shaky-cam“, and which was later explored in a groundbreaking essay titled “Chaos Cinema.” I never felt sick from this technique, but others (I don’t know how many but at least a few) did.

I experienced my first shaky-cam vomit-splatter incident during an early-ish screening of The Bourne Supremacy on 7.12.04.

Sometime during the third act of an Ultimatum showing at the Writers Guild theatre, an older woman sitting on the left side spewed on the floor. It was kind of alphabet soup mixed with pumpkin puree and chopped Spanish peanuts. A few people got up and moved away. A guy who was sitting nearby told me later it smelled pretty awful in that section of the room.

The next day I mentioned the episode to a Universal publicist in an e-mail, not as something that was necessarily caused by Paul Greengrass shaky–cam but as something funny that had merely “happened.” I really hadn’t put two and two together. I was simply chuckling the way a fifth-grader might chortle with his friends if the really smart girl with the freckles and the pigtails had vomited in arithmetic class.

But the Universal publicist wasn’t in fifth grade — she was coming from the office of Roy Cohn during the Army-McCarthy hearings. Her voice shrill and agitated, and she read me the riot act in order to dissuade me from mentioning the incident in the column. I felt so overwhelmed with bludgeonings and bad vibes that I caved (wimp that I am deep down) and said, “Okay, all right…good God.”

Chaos Cinema Part 1 from matze on Vimeo.

“The Covid epidemic may be subsiding, but the epidemic that preceded it — the anxiety epidemic — is not, and usually when people drink, it’s too alleviate some form of anxiety. As we reenter society half of America has been saying that Covid was so stressful, they worry they’ll never fully recover. We’re using liquor as a crutch…”

Even during my drinking days I never once sipped wine or beer during a film, or prior to watching one. If anything I would down a strong cappuccino or an energy drink. I want to up my alterness levels during a film, not diminish them.

A 6.25 interview with F9 costar Jordana Brewster, written by The Hollywood Reporter‘s Aaron Couch, made me want to melt and die.

I don’t give a flying eff how Brewster landed more action scenes in F9…even flirting with such thoughts is tantamount to poisoning my being, my soul, the necessary communion with the fundamentals of life on the planet earth…these people — Couch included — are snarling beasts of the forest. Pardon my French, but they make me want to ralph.

“After playing Mia Toretto onscreen for 20 years dating back to the first The Fast and the Furious movie, Brewster knew she had more to offer, so she lobbied director Justin Lin to up her action this time, texting the filmmaker about the action-chops she was picking up as a guest star on the Lin-produced TV show Magnum P.I. and through doing her own training”…I don’t care and fuck Couch for attempting to inject that shit into my head.

“I’ve heard throughout my career that if you want something done, show you can do it. That’s something that is very difficult for me to do. To advocate for myself, but it paid off”….die a slow, agonizing death! Not Brewster or Couch but those who read this and go “hmm, interesting.”

Brewster: “There is…the opportunity to downsize it and go back to our roots with [the first Fast and Furious], where there is a little less green screen and we don’t have to visit as many cool locations, so maybe it’s less of a risk for the studio and we can just make something awesome and run with it.”

In other words, Brewster would like the franchise to cut the bullshit and become a feminist Drive a la Nicholas Winding Refn. Sounds good to me, but it’ll never happen. Because the Fast franchise it run by animals, and it’s about appealing to the taste buds of animals.

“Those improved action chops will likely come in handy down the road, as Lin has two more Fast films he’s directing to wrap up the main series. There are also rumblings of a female-focused spinoff in the works. Though nothing has been announced officially on that front, Brewster wonders if going back to the basics could be a way forward.

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