Snakes for the Memories

Man, I almost forgot that we watched Anaconda (2025). It's easy to see why.

Jack Black, Paul Rudd, Steven Zahn, and Thandiwe Newton were childhood friends, united in their love of bad movies - such as Anaconda. With Black as a budding director and Rudd a hope-to-be actor, they even made their own amateur films. Now, Black is a wedding videographer, and Rudd is an aspiring extra in Hollywood, with a few episodes of S.W.A.T. as his resume. But when Black has a significant birthday, he shows up back home with a copy of their childhood movie, and a great idea.

At the party, he tells his friends that he got the rights to remake Anaconda for a song, and suggests that they go to the Amazon and do it, with Black directing and Rudd starring. And off they go.

The boat captain they hired doesn't show up, but someone claiming to be his daughter lets them aboard. But we know she's a fugitive from the police. Their local snake wrangler shows up with an anaconda that's a little spicy. And then it gets weird.

However, it doesn't get that weird. It spends way to much time on the group's mid-life crises. Black and Rudd have unsatisfied ambitions, Newton and Rudd have unsatisfied sexual tension, and Zahn has addiction issues. He's "Buffalo sober", just beer, wine and lighter pills - no hard liquor or drugs. He's does a lot with a tiny role, and I wouldn't have minded seeing a little more.

The Amazonian setting was largely wasted, and of course all snakes were CGI. There were some decent gags, like when Black is eaten by the big snake and killed - SPOILER! But there could have been a lot more. For a talented group of improvisers, they don't make much of what they have.

So, amiable fun, but not really fun enough. There's some cute stuff with Rudd and Black trying to work Themes into the script, and maybe that's the idea - there are no themes in this movie. Except the theme seems to be "mid-life crisis", and it doesn't do that very well. Also, the movie wants us to see the crew as completely incompetent and talentless, but also good enough to pull this remake off. 

Once I noticed this movie on my "To Watch" list and realize that I had watched it, I remembered quite a bit of it. But I don't think I will for long. 

K Hole

I just came off a Jackie Chan marathon, and part of the weaning process was Detective K: Secret of the Living Dead (2018). I've mentioned Detective K before - a three movie Korean series inspired by the Detective Dee movies. now I've watched all three.

In the Jeoseon Korea, a young woman wakes up in the rain. She has no memory but incredible strength. In this town, people are being found dead, with two holes in their neck, leading to rumors of vampires. Other people are also turning up burned to death, and we actually see one. Someone is shooting flaming arrows at people - and burning is one of the only ways to kill vampites.

When Detective K gets involved, the first "vampire" tracked down turns out to be a porphyry victim, drinking blood as a palliative for his condition. Typical Detective Dee/K - apparently supernatural events have a mundane, scientific explanation. But what about the girl with super-strength?

SPOILER - there are vampires, and she's one. 

The movie has the classic Detective K mix of buffoonery and horror. K is a braggart, full of himself even when wrong. And his sidekick is always there to make fun of him. But he quickly teams up with the girl, working together to get to the bottom of the vampires.

I enjoyed this in a sort of passive way - I didn't track most of the plot, but I laughed at the jokes and liked the action. I think the series may have run out of steam - the first was better than the second, and the third is weakest. But as a time-wasting fun movie, it was fine, and I hope to find more movies like it. 

Chan's the Man

I've been on a Jackie Chan kick, starting with DVDs in my own collection. When I was done with those, I found Rob-B-Hood (2006) streaming.

We meet Thongs (Jackie Chan) and Octopus (Louis Koo) cracking safes. Even while committing this crime, Chan is placing bets on the phone. When they are cracking the medicine safes at a hospital, they stumble into a hostage scene. A man has grabbed a woman's just delivered baby, claiming that it is his, not her husband's. When security starts to pile on him, he falls over a railing with the baby, and plummets to his death - but Jackie, in the middle of a heist, grabs the baby. In the excitement they slip away.  Their mastermind and mentor, Landlord (Michael Hui), is driving the getaway minivan.

We learn a little bit about their lives here. Chan is a degenerate gambler. He always owes money, ad his father rejects him in shame. Koo likes to spend money on Ferraris and shopping expeditions for high-class women. He is always running into his wife, who has to work at jobs like wearing a chicken suit outside a restaurant to make ends meet. And eventually, Koo's money runs out, his car is repoed, etc. 

And Hui, a tubby old man with thick glasses, has a wife who went crazy when she lost a pregnancy. She carries a baby doll whereever she goes. He is very kind and loving to her, and saves all the money he steals, building up a nest egg that is suddenly stolen. Now they all need money desperately. 

Hui finds a big job, and the guys jump on it with o questions. They only discover what it is when they are on the job - kidnapping a baby. They don't want to go through with it, but the price is millions. So they get the baby and get out. 

In the escape, Hui gets booked for reckless driving and has to go to prison for ten days. During this time, Chan and Koo have to keep the baby amused, fed and cleaned. So I went in thinking this was Little Miss Marker, now it's more Ransom of Red Chief. Actually, it's Three Men and a Baby - there's a mix of the regular trials of keeping a baby, and ridiculous stunts like getting the baby carriage stuck on the end of a police vehicle or carrying the baby over a roller coaster, being pursued by trains full of goons. 

It ends with them executed for kidnapping - nah, just kidding. There is no death penalty in China in 2006. But they do go to prison, with time off for saving the baby after kidnapping it. 

This is a different Jackie Chan movie, because he isn't a really nice guy. But he's about the softest he can be, while still being a crook and gambler. Also, he puts that baby in peril a lot. The movie also has a lot of baby poop jokes, which I could have lived without. But overall, pretty fun. 

I finished this Chan-athon with Magnificent Bodyguards (1978), a much older movie. Jackie plays an arrogant and skilled kung fu fighter. A woman crime boss, Wang Ping, hires him to escort her and her sick brother across the bandit-infested Stormy Mountains. Jackie gets James Tien for back up and they head for the hills. On the way, they pick up some allies, fight a lot of fights, and confront the king of the Stormy Mountains. There are some twists, including some that I couldn't figure out. A baby appears, who might have been Jackie in flashback, or maybe I was just flashing on Rob-B-Hood. 

Anyway, this was very conventional. Even though Jackie did fight choreography, it was pretty standard fare with a lot of wirework. And Jackie, in his period wig, could almost be anyone. He also shares screentime with a lot of people, so this doesn't seem so much like a Jackie Chan movie, more of a standard wuxia period piece.

Which is fine, I watch plenty of those. So this was a good way to wean me off of my Jackie Chan dependency. 

Mysterium Delirium

Here's a fun one from our youth: Beat the Deva (1980). A wacky student film that combines noir, New Age, and the classical music of Scriabin.

Caspar J. Upanishad is a film maker who works as a private eye to make ends meet. But he's thinking there might be money in this New Age stuff he's been hearing about. His girlfriend is playing something odd on the piano, and he finds out it's by Scriabin. He learns that Scriabin, or Screech as they call him, didn't just compose pretty sonatas, but also saw music as colors, was ispired by semi-divine Devas, and planned an enormous festival of sound, smells, tastes, colors and peace and unity in the foothills of the Himalayas, called the Mysterium. But he died before he could make it happen. (BTW, the Scriabin stuff is legit - even the "Scrjabin" spelling.) But Upanishad realizes that he was probably bumped off because he was getting too close.

He goes to a professor at Harvard for info, and is warned about the danger or color-music theory. Indeed, some thugs beat him up outside to get him off the case. While he's unconscious, he is visited by a cute little animated deva, who lets him know that he, Casper, is the chosen one - the one who will trigger world peace by staging Scriabin's Mysterium.

But Upanishad's name is Caspar, not Casper. Could the Devas have made a mistake. And why was there a sore on Upanishad's lip, right where Scriabin had a carbuncle - that killed him!?!?

This is a super-low budget student film, under one-hour long. But it manages to be stylish, smart and funny. Some parts are filmed in noirish black an white. Some are even silent, with old-timey intertitles. The Devas and the info dumps about the Mysterium are all colorfully animated. Plus, it's full of dumb jokes and Upanishad driving up and down Storrow and Mem. Drive. Don't you love it when a movie shows someone driving somewhere you know, and it doesn't make any sense? Driving east, then west, then crossing the river, then east and west again, then back to where they started? OK, maybe that's just me.

Also, the soundtrack is all Scriabin, and he wrote some cool stuff.

We know about this because Ms. Spenser went to art school with one of the animators. We got to see it open with Suzanne Pitt's Asparagus, which is actaully on the Criterion Channel. But you can find Beat the Deva on YouTube and Vimeo. And I hope you do. 

Tron: Leto

I knew it was trash going in. After all, Jared Leto is in it. But I figured I might as well watch Tron: Ares (2025). For all its faults, it wasn't even as bad as expected.

The state of play: ENCOM, the good gaming and virtual reality corporation, and it's rival, evil corporation, Dillinger, are trying to bring virtual reality into real reality. Evan Peters, head of Dillinger, is demoing his latest line of 3D-printed war toys, including an artificial soldier, Ares (Jared Leto). When the impressed customers leave, the tanks, guns and Leto all turn to dust. As nepo-baby Peter's mom, Gillian Anderson reminds him, without the "permanence code", none of these constructs will last more than 29 minutes.

Greta Lee, on the other hand, is in ENCOM's secret polar lab, looking for the permanence code, supposedly left by founder Jeff Bridges, wayback in the 80s. Since ENCOM is having a big gamer's conference and the CEO (Lee) is out of pocket, things are getting dicey for the company. 

And Leto is back in the Grid, an artificial life-form back in Tronlandia. He is beginning to think Peters is evil, and maybe doesn't have his best interests in mind.

The rest of the plot plays out like you'd expect, with Grid creatures like Leto and crony Jody Turner-Smith experiencing the real world and becoming more human. No big surprises. But I was surprised by how good it looked. Director Joachim Rønning did himself proud. Many of the in-Grid sequences have more than a touch of 2001's slit-scan neon feeling. All in a palette based on reds.

Greta Lee did well in a sort of nothing good corporate boss as boss nerd role. Evan Peters was great as that contemporary type pf nepo baby, where lies are just alternate facts and consequences all fall on someone else. His mother, Gillian Anderson, plays the old-style evil - when she promises weapons of war, by god she delivers. She is very disappointed in her son.

Jared Leto is about as expected - he plays an artificial lifeform artificially. I wouldn't say he ruins the experience.

So, not a good movie. But I enjoyed it anyway.

Bullet Plane

When I got Fight or Flight (2024), the only thing I knew was that it was "Bullet Train on an airplane." I just didn't realize how literally to take that.

The premise is that an international hacker terrorist called the Ghost is getting on a plane from Bangkok to San Francisco, with a McGuffin. But the government doesn't have any agents in Thailand, so they can't get anyone on hte plane in time. They have to re-activate drunk, disgraced agent Josh Hartnett, by promising him a legit passport.

Recognize the setup? Female agent activates cute but unconventional agent for assassination mission? Hartnett is even styled to look a little like Brad Pitt. 

To cut to the chase, when he gets on the plane, he discovers that everyone on the plane is either the Ghost, or trying to kill the Ghost, for the John-Wick-style bounty. Mayhem ensues. 

I don't think I need to go into any more detail. You get the idea. It was a fun ride, maybe not quite Bullet Train level. If you loved that, you'll at least like this. 

Falcon Cresting

Working my way through random Michael Jai White movies, I came across Falcon Rising (2014). It it is set in Brazil and White has some capoeira-adjacent skills, I figured it was a good bet.

White is a troubled veteran. He plays a complicated game of Russian roulette, and survives. Low on liquor, he heads to a local party store, which inevitably gets held up. When confronted, he holds the robber's gun to his heart and demands that he shoot. When the robbers won't kill him, he gets impatient, beats them up, pays for his booze with their money and leaves.

He meets with his sister, who has been down in Brazil, doing social work in the favelas. A while after she leaves, he is contacted by old Army buddy, now State Dept guy, Neal McDonough (white haired baddy from Arrow), His sister has been beaten into a coma, and they haven't caught the people who did. So White heads for Brazil.

There he meets Millie Ruperto, a beat cop in the favela who uses community policing methods, and Jimmy Navarro, a tough talking officer who pledges to do whatever it takes to find White's sister's killer. In one scene, White's PTSD is triggered by a loud noise, and he gabs Roperto's gun, triggering an armed standoff between the police and the favela gangs. Navarro defuses it by offering to fight the biggest guy in the gang, one on one. Ths is a decent fight scene with a capoeira flavor. 

Unfortunately, there aren't as many of these as you might want. White has a number of fights, but I didn't find them to be his best. There were a lot of chases, some gunfights, etc. It was a fine action movie, and White's power and charisma shone through, but the actual fight choreography didn't impress me. 

In the end, Nick Fury Neal McDonough invites White to join the Falcon Project, to become a deniable loose cannon for the State Dept. This would set up a series of sequels. SPOILER - never happened.