Please Hammer Girl Don't Hurt 'Em: The Flat Circle of Screen Violence

The same weekend I saw both Captain America: The Winter Soldier and The Raid 2 -- prompting this piece for NPR Monkey See -- my pal Glen Weldon showed me the mostly-animated G.I. Joe episode of Community. The show got a lot of mileage out of the fact that nobody ever got killed in that war cartoon, wherein an elite American military unit fought a uniformed army of terrorists to a stalemate every 21 minutes using ray guns. 

The G.I. Joe comic book, meanwhile, took a realistic approach to firearms. Characters sometimes got killed, too, although not very often. It didn't get me hooked on guns, thankfully, but it got me hooked on comics. It was also pretty clearly a gateway drug to more sophisticated depictions of violence in movies and TV.

Touchable: No God, No Master, reviewed.

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Handle with Care: Cool Hand David Strathairn defuses a package bomb in No God, No Master.

Terry Green's low-budget, high-ambition Prohibition-era conspiracy thriller No God, No Master isn't quite The Untouchables, but then again, what is? I admired the movie's overreach in my review for The Dissolve.

Ray Wise is in the film, too. I met him in 2004 or 2005 when he appeared in a short film directed by a pal of mine. He very kindly indulged my request for Paul Verhoeven stories. Nice guy.

Unscary Movie: Jinn, reviewed.

Turns out that this bitchin' Camaro, and not any of the film's various CGI flame creatures, is "The Firebreather." Image from Jinn's Instagram feed.

I took one for the team and reviewed the the un-super, non-thrilling supernatural thriller Jinn for The Dissolve. I can't say I didn't have fun, mostly because Rachel Manteuffel came with me.

Footnotes: When I mention Liam Neeson in The Phantom Menace in this review, I cite him by his real name rather than his character name in that movie, Qui Gon... Jinn. It's all connected. Also, I didn't have room or cause to mention that William Atherton also played unctuous TV reporter Dick Thornberg in Die Hard, one of my pantheon films. Or that Faran Tahir, who gets plenty of work but whom I always remember from that great prologue to J.J. Abrams' Star Trek from five years ago, is here, too.

Listen, all y'all, this is my review of Sabotage.

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"Vhat did I tell you about those stupid cornrows!" Arnold Schwarzenegger and Joe Manganiello in Sabotage.

Both of Sabotage's prior titles, Ten and Breacher, make more sense than the one it ended up with. Actually, the title is no more nonsensical than the convoluted plot of David Ayer's gruesome, vulgar, throughly disreputable dirty-cop thriller. It's only just barely a Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle, which is part of why it's the most satisfying picture he's made in 20 years.  I reviewed it for The Village Voice.

What About James? Maladies, reviewed.

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James Franco steals some shaving cream, and 97 minutes of your time, in Maladies.

My review of Maladies, a deeply pretentious, long-shelved character study written by director "Carter" for star James Franco, is up on The Dissolve today. Curiously, Alan Cumming gets billing in the opening credits though he's in it for one brief, unmemorable scene. He has less screen time here than he got as the hotel clerk who hits on Tom Cruise in Eyes Wide Shut.

The Shape of Things: Exposed, reviewed.

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Burlesque artist Mat Fraser in Beth B's Exposed

I reviewed Exposed, Beth B's documentary about New York City burlesque artists, for The Dissolve.

Then, the night after I filed, I ran across a reference to B --  a documentarian whose work I'd never previously encountered -- in "Something Nice," a short story in Mary Gaitskill's 1988 collection Bad Behavior.

The world broadens.

Colon? We don't need no steenking colon! War of the Worlds Goliath, reviewed.

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Here Come the Warm Martian Tripods: War of the Worlds Goliath

If I were designing the poster for War of the Worlds Goliath, the suspiciously colon-free, animated steampunk sequel to H. G. Wells' seminal sci-fi novel War of the Worlds, the tagline would be, "And this time, they wore their flu masks!"

Orson Welles' 1938 radio adaptation of the book is one of my favorite things ever. I still listen to it every single Halloween. I'm a big fan of Steven Spielberg's 2005 movie version, too.

The cartoon sequel, which I reviewed for The Dissolve, does not fare well in such venerated company. Or even, more importantly, on its own terms.

And speaking of the Oscars, I reviewed Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues (Super-Sized, R-Rated Edition)

Putting the band back together: Rudd, Ferrell, Koechner, Carell, an Arabic numeral.

Oscars Oscars Lupita Cuaron blah blah blah.

In other movie news this weekend, I had the supreme honor of reviewing Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues (Super-Sized R-Rated Edition) for The Dissolve. My review is more or a less an encomium to long movies and more or more a bunch of jokes.

(I was rooting for Chiwetel Ejiofor over McConaughey, but I'm very glad Alfonso Cuaron and 12 Years a Slave won. Lupita Nyong'o gave the classiest speech of the night. I bet the makers of Non-Stop feel pretty dumb for not giving her anything to do in that movie, now.)