Double Review: 'Blade of the Immortal' / 'Killing Gunther'

What better way to wrap up the cinematic year that was than with a double shot of Takashi Miike and Arnold Schwarzenegger? 

By: Jimbo X
JimboXAmerican@gmail.com
@JimboX

I've been thinking about this for quite some time, but after some tempered debate, I've decided to go on ahead and publicize my formal view on the matter:

I think it's time we rounded up every marijuana user in America and summarily executed them.

Now, I know what you're thinking. "Gee, Jimbo, doesn't that sound a little harsh, not to mention despotic?" Well, right then and there I know you've never had the luxury of cohabitating alongside marijuana users, because if you have you'd know that there's really nothing of value to be lost here.

Marijuana users, point blank, are the WORST human beings on the planet, and by proxy, the worst kinda' drug addicts. My parents were rampaging alcoholics and serial drunk drivers, but by golly, at least they were functional rampaging alcoholics and serial drunk drivers. You can be drunk as shit and still turn in a full eight hour work day and halfway decent work - hell, my granddaddy missed just three days of work over a 45-year career working at the local chemical plant and I guarantee you his B.A.C. was at the point-two range for at least 44 of 'em - but people high on weed can't do fuckin' anything for at least three days after their last bong hit. 

What do people high on weed do? They just lay on the couch and laugh at everything on TV and keep farting and eat all the good cereal, then they fall asleep with their remote control wedged halfway up their buttholes so you can't even move the channel off Rick and Morty. People who smoke weed have the worst taste in everything. They listen to the shittiest kinda of music and watch the shittiest kinda TV shows and they even play the shittiest kinda video games. You ever seen some dude strung out on kush spend seven hours playing Dynasty Warriors before? Well, I have, and I can guarn-damn-tee you it's the greatest endorsement of straight edge living you'll ever encounter.

At least people who shoot up heroin are mostly quiet about it. People who smoke weed are roughly as loud as a turbo jet the whole time they're high, and if their ear-splitting cackling doesn't drive you to attempted manslaughter, they fact that they ALWAYS play musical instruments while stoned will. Long story short, if somebody owns an acoustic guitar, I can tell you right now they're a bunch of weed-heads, and they WILL be playing that shit at 3 in the morning when you have a job interview you've gotta' leave for at 6:30. Weed smokers have no concerns for the well-being of others, and I think it's only fair that we as a collective society show them an equivalent amount of existential concern and compassion - which, obviously, is fuckin' none.

But the WORST thing about living around weed smokers is the smell. I would rather smell ANYTHING besides marijuana - shit, dead animals, dead animal shit, you name it. That is legitimately the most disgusting scent in the world, and the fact that it lingers in the drywall for a solid week afterwards makes even the most spacious abodes unlivable. Have you ever tried to get the smell of weed out of the curtains before? Or even block the shit from seeping in under your bedroom door and making your entire wardrobe smell like a goddamn Phish concert? Well, if you have, then you'd know full well why I think these assholes need to be exterminated en masse. Fuck, at least crack heads and meth addicts have the decency to use life-destroying chemicals with only minimal stenches. 

Of course, somebody's gonna' chime in and say "hey there Jimbo, not all marijuana users are like that," or try to turn this shit around and say "well, if weed is so bad, then how come (insert famous person here) used it?" Well, that doesn't change the equation - if somebody uses weed, they ARE an asshole. Yeah, I admire the works of George Carlin and Bill Hicks, but there's no denying they'd be a pain in the ass to live with and it'd only be a matter of time before I was having to crack 'em upside the head with a mini-fire extinguisher for leaving the oven on at two in the morning again. Not all assholes are marijuana users, but all marijuana users are undoubtedly assholes of the widest, stretchiest and stinkiest caliber.

Oh, and I almost left out the best part - when these stupid fucks try to convince themselves that what they're doing to their bodies isn't destructive and stupid, but "mindful" and even by God "healthy." I can't tell you how many times I've heard weed-heads tell me "well, if marijuana is so bad, then how come nobody's ever overdosed on it before?" To which I always reply, "well, nobody's ever overdosed on cigarettes before, either, but they still kill hundreds of thousands of people each year, don't they?" Just talking to a habitual weed-user for five minutes is enough to tell you the shit is detrimental to one's health and mental well-being. Just fucking look at what people who've smoked weed for 30 years look and sound like - you either turn into some Bart Simpson-looking bull-dyke or a wall-eyed space alien that looks like a cross between that deformed baby from Eraserhead, a three piece KFC original meal and an old flea market rug. And of course, there are reams and reams of scientific research outlining how chronic weed use destroys a user's lungs, heart and brain, but I'll let you flip through those on you own time (and do feel free to email 'em to your nearest and dearest weed-smokin' chums - surely, they'll appreciate your concerns.)

Of course, I'm not saying I would vote, necessarily, for a candidate who said he was going to round up every weed smoker in the country and - irony of ironies - light them up like doobies in the killing fields of the Great Plains, but I would be more likely to attentively listen to him than other candidates. And if somebody pulled a page out of the last Kingsman movie and tainted the country's weed supply with a lethal poison, I prolly wouldn't shed too many tears. And it's pretty hard to deny that we wouldn't have a better overall country with all of the weed users factored out of the gene pool. Shit, just the fact we'd get rid of Widespread Panic and Ben and Jerry's in one fell swoop almost justifies the whole pogrom alone.

But then again, I guess it is a little inhumane to round up millions upon millions of drug users and systematically slaughter them. But you've got to think long term here - it'd be a lot of money as an upfront investment, but just imagine the dividends ten years down the road. Within a decade, nobody will have any recollections that Dave Matthews Band or Adult Swim even existed. 

And isn't a world that beautiful worth it, no matter the dire costs?

From now on, Miike oughta' be the only person making live action movies based on Japanese cartoons. Shit - just imagine him directing Gigantor!

Speaking of things that'll blow the back of your skull off, if you haven't already you DEFINITELY need to check out Blade of the Immortal, the latest flick from Takashi Miike, which - as fate would have it - just so happens to be his 100th movie. 

Yep, that's right - 100th. Miike is the anti-James Cameron; instead of waiting 15 years in between movies, Miike cranks 'em out like an assembly line. He's already made 17 movies this decade, which is actually a substantial step down from his rate in the aughties, when he directed damn near 40 movies, plus a couple of TV shows and even a few stage productions. But here's the thing; considering the dude is averaging three to four movies a year, you'd expect his oeuvre to be underwhelming, but no way, Jose - not only is Miike putting out a staggering number of great movies each and every year, he's also putting out a diverse slate of great movies across every genre you can think of. Slashers. Giant robot movies. Weird family comedies. Yakuza movies. Movies based on video games, comic books and old Japanese cartoons. 

But the one genre he's REALLY carved out a niche for himself is the neo-samurai movie, as evident by the rousing success of flicks like Sukiyaki Western Django, 13 Assassins and Hara-Kari: Death of a Samurai, which I'd easily consider one of the greatest remakes of anything ever. Now, we all know by now that Miike is my favorite living director and, by default, that makes me a shameless, biased as hell fanboy. But hear me out, this Blade of the Immortal truly is one of the best movies you'll see in 2017, and you need to go out of your way to see it pronto.

The flick starts off like your average Miike movie, with some samurai in a kimona named Manji slicing and dicing motherfuckers left and right while his sister plays with horse turds in a stable. Then a Hare Krishna punk rocker samurai hacks her up so Manji has to pick up his sword and massacre 40 people while dudes in the woods shoot at him with bows and arrows. The he gets his hand whacked off and has to have a one-handed sword fight against some mohawked dude in a dress, which ends with Manji stabbing that mofo right in the spleen. But you see, Manji is mortally wounded in the fight, until this 800-year-old ghost woman cuts his chest open and puts devil worms in his wound and it makes his hand re-attach itself, so now he's pretty much unkillable. Hence ... the name of the movie.

So 50 years later, there's this guy in light blue pajamas named Master Anotsu roaming around the countryside, wrecking dojos just for fun so he can cleave the senseis in half and rebuild the villages in his own graven image. Then the ghost woman visits a 10-year-old samurai girl after Blue Pajamas rapes her mama and murders her daddy and tells her to find the one guy in town who can't die and hire him as a bodyguard. Sure enough, he's living in a shack on the outskirts of town with scars the size of Earl Campbell's Hot Dog links on his face, eating deep fried squirrel guts on a stick. Then a 50-year-old dude with a fake mustache wearing a Shredder costume tries to rape her, but not before showing her her mama's severed possessed head. And that's our cue for Manji to spring to action - and if you've ever wondered what it would look like if Raphael from Ninja Turtles split a dude's head open with his sais, wonder no more.

Then Manji goes out into the woods and fights this ninja guy with huge ass anime hair who is really good at blocking and likes to give unsolicited details of his childhood while hacking away at people. Then Manji pulls out a big ass dagger shaped like The Artist Formerly Known As Prince symbol and pokes him right in the kidney. Then a monk wearing a basket on his head tells him where to find Anotsu. But apparently they have a misunderstanding and have to kung fu fight a little before it's revealed that the monk is ALSO immortal. Then the monk kidnaps the little girl and forces her to lick the bloody worms out of his palm (cue Ernest face ... ewwww) as a prank. Then Manji bursts through the wall like a samurai Kool-Aid Man and it's time for round two and they literally turn each other into human pincushions before the monk lets Manji know there's a poison that CAN kill his blood worms and by proxy himself. So naturally, they kung fu one more time with the death juice all over their swords and Manji finishes off the monk for real this time - by dissecting him limb from limb, Evil Dead-style. 

Then Manji has to karate fight this girl wielding a pair of tree-trimmers on nunchucks. But she won't go down easy and keeps dropping bamboo poles on his head so he has to pick up a spear and a pair of sais and chase her around like Tenchu for a while. But then she cuts his hand off and starts monologuing about whether or not she's made the best life decisions then the little girl hops in at the last second to keep him from getting torn to shreds. After that the movie starts slowing down a little, with Manji visiting his sister's grave and being all wishy-washy about being too old to karate people's heads off anymore, then the little girl stumbles upon Anotsu. Anyway, this cues up a flashback to their grandfathers killing each other 50 years earlier. But he won't kill her, because it's just too dadgum easy.

Then the little girl decides to go on a suicide mission to kill Anotsu, knowing full well he'd rip her guts out in five seconds. Then Blue Pajamas gets set up, but that doesn't stop him from slaying about 40 samurais all by his lonesome. Then Maji fights three dudes at once and he's about to die and then the ghost woman shows up and taunts him and he calls her "a stupid cow" 'cause he can't die yet and has to save that girl. Then all of the remaining samurai in Japan show up to kill off Anotsu for good, then Manji shows up and now HE has to fight all of the remaining samurai left in Japan. So it's basically two against, I don't know, 600 or 700 in our paint-the-countryside-red HALF HOUR long katana fu grand finale.

And if you think they can't POSSIBLY top the part where a dude sharpens his own bones into stabbing weapons, just WAIT until Anotsu and Maji finally go at it one-on-one. This thing is already a candidate for best movie fight in history, and if absolutely nothing else, it definitely sets a new indoor record for the most number of times two dudes stab each other over a ten minute period in any kind of medium. 

Let's run down the highlights, why don't we? We've got 334 dead bodies. Zero breasts. Seventeen sword fights. Multiple rapes. One seppuka. One mass poisoning. One exploding body. Hands roll. Arms roll. Legs roll. Intestines roll. More impalements than dialogue. Throwing star fu. Throwing dagger fu. Axe fu. Sai fu. Two-pronged saber fu. Unkillable worm fu. And the thing more or less responsible for this movie existing in the first place - some SERIOUS katana wax fu.

Starring Takuya Kimura as Manji, the all-but-invincible swordsman with zombie worms crawling through his innards who says lines like "you're lucky, you can die" and "what kind of idiot would pick a fight with a maniac?"; Hana Sugisaka as the ten-year old who hires Manji to turn everybody who killed her family into teriyaki jerky; Sota Fukushi as Anotsu, the villain who doesn't want to rule the world or unleash some sort of supernatural evil force - he just wants franchisees for his kickboxing school; and Hayato Ichihara as Anotsu's most sadistic lieutenant, who can count attempted rape of a prostitute as one of the nicer things he does in the movie.

Written by Tetsuya Oishi - the world-famous anime scribe behind Death Note, among many, many others - and directed by the man himself, Takashi Miike, who more so than any other filmmaker on the planet, knows how to make his actors say "no matter how bad the memory, sometimes just remembering gives you incredible power" and make it sound like they dadgum mean it. 

This is the movie Logan wished it could've been, right down to the plot about the dude with healing powers trying to rescue a little girl from super evildom. It's The Professional meets Highlander meets Kill Bill meets Yojimbo meets every SNK fighting game ever made, and - needless to say - you need to see it. 

This one easily gets four stars out of four from me. Jimbo says check it out, and the sooner, the better.

Just wait 'til you hear him sing the flick's closing number!

Since it's only playin' in about four or five postage stamp-sized theaters right about now, I reckoned it was worth our respective whiles to let you know that there's a new Ah-nold movie out, and while it ain't nowhere near as good as his last flick Aftermath, it's still pretty decent and maybe worth checking out, if you really don't have nothing else going on with your life (and since the college football season is over and done with, that includes pretty much all of us.)

Anyway, the name of this flick is Killing Gunther, and it's one of those "found footage" style flicks, except this one is explicitly meant to be a parody. The movie starts off in Argentina and we learn about this guy named Blake who hires a documentary crew to follow him around on his quest to knock off the world's greatest assassin. So, to finish the job, he assembles a crack team of the world's best hitmen and hitwomen.

There's this fisherman guy from Chicago who dresses just like that one guy from The Big Lebowski who's an explosives whiz. And there's this middle eastern sniper chick whose dad follows her around wearing a sweater declaring himself her number one fan. And there's also this super nerd with mega hacking skills named "The Human Computer" and - you know, it's probably a lot easier if I just make it a bulleted list, huh?

• Ashley - a poor man's Morgan Freeman who has a heart attack two minutes after being introduced as the team's secret weapon.
• Crusher - a former Islamic extremist with a robotic arm (that isn't compatible with Apple devices, by the way.)
• Pak Yong Qi - a self-avowed "master of poisons" who wants revenge on Gunther for killing his beloved pet snake.
• The Bellaklakova Twins - a brother and sister duo who killed 14,000 people in a soccer stadium fire, love McDonald's and took the job just so they could go to Hollywood and meet Scott Wolf in person.
• Max Palane - Blake's ex-partner and new de facto secret weapon - who, naturally gets shot in the head right before he can tell everybody where Gunther lives.

After all that, we get some exposition on Blake's ex-girlfriend, who stopped doing hit jobs and started her own erotic ceramics company ("I'm not killing people anymore," she says, "so I'm sleeping better.") Anyhoo, it doesn't take long for us to find out that she shacked up with Gunther, which is probably why Blake wants him dead so damned much, so he takes his comrades on a trip to Miami to buy some military-grade weapons from a dude with a mullet, but things take a turn for the worse when they get involved in a high-rise shootout and Ah-nold starts powerbombing people through all the IKEA furniture. They think they kill him with a car grenading, but even after celebrating with the worst Sister Hazel cover of all-time, they start to have their suspicions that maybe he ain't as dead as they thought he was once SOMEBODY starts picking off members of the crew one-by-one.

Around the 50 minute the movie starts hitting some serious snags. There's way too much subplot going on, with Blake trying to find a new apartment and discuss, ugh, his feelings and trying to convince the fat Chicago dude to rejoin the team after the Iranian chick's dad finds out he had sex with his daughter.

Then Blake gets piss drunk after Ashley's funeral and decides, damn it, he's gonna' off Gunther all by his lonesome (well, all by his lonesome with the documentary crew following him, if we're gonna' be sticklers for accuracy.) So he and the remaining assassins eventually find Gunther's mansion in California and he apprehends them all at gunpoint and reveals he wore a bunch of disguises earlier and that he and the documentary crew have been in cahoots the whole time. 

And that's our cue for Blake vs. Ah-nold in a knock-down drag-out brawl through the whole house, complete with the refrigerator door getting ripped off and used as a melee weapon and multiple flower vases getting cracked over multiple skulls.

Now, if the movie would've ended there, you wouldn't get too many complaints from me. The problem is we've still got about 20 minutes of post-script, with a buncha' unnecessary scenes about the fat Chicago dude and Muslim chick having a kid and Gunther retiring and moving to Austria to grow organic vegetables and coach a girl's field hockey team.

So yeah - it's about 50 minutes of a really great post-post-postmodern comedy and 30 minutes of shit that'll put you to sleep faster than a Nyquil sundae. Still, there's marginally more good than bad here, and it's probably about as close as we'll ever get to seeing a live-action No More Heroes movie (speaking of properties Takashi Miike ought to get his hands on next ...)

Anyhoo, we've got 21 dead bodies. Zero breasts. Two dead snakes. One exploding yacht. Multiple exploding cars. Gratuitous vomiting. Gratuitous The Running Man references. Gratuitous Predator quotes. Kung fu. Suicide bomber fu. Rocket launcher fu. Flash grenade fu. Karaoke fu. And the thing that really makes this flick noteworthy - for the first time in the history of cinema, a movie concludes with Ah-nold singing a country-western ballad, complete with lyrics like "I have a George Strait kind of sound, if you know what I mean" and "when she's around, I cant help myself, I want to hold on tight to her continental shelf." And no, I'm not kidding, and holy shit, is it genuinely one of the most amazing things I've ever heard in my life.

Starring, Ah-nold, who gets top billing despite only being in the movie for ten minutes and looking like he ate Carl Weathers (although he does get to drop at least one all-time classic quote - "that fuckin' cunt over there is going to get terminated."); Bobby Moynihan as the demolitions expert cosplaying as John Goodman from The Big Lebowski throughout the movie; Hannah Simone as the Iranian assassin chick (who was actually born in Canada and is half Indian); Ryan Gaul and Allison Tolman as the psycho Russian twins, the former who says "fuck you, you're not Mickey Mouse" to an arms dealer; and Cobie Smulders - yep, Maria Hill herself - as the antagonist's ex-main squeeze and hitwoman-turned-dildo-entrepreneur.

Written by and directed by Taran Killam, who also plays Blake, the movie's central "bad guy," so to speak.

Eh, it's a mixed bag of a movie, but I didn't really hate it too much at any juncture in the movie. For that, I'll give it a slightly above average two and a half stars out of four. Jimbo says check it out, but be prepared for this doldrums to hit hard.

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Double Review: 'Aftermath' / 'The Hatton Garden Job' 2017 Movie Reviews

Are you ready for a two-fisted double shot of two of 2017's manliest fuckin' movies? Well, you better be, because these two movies exude so much testosterone, women will be walking out of the theater with full mountain man beards.

By: Jimbo X
JimboXAmerican@gmail.com
@Jimbo___X

You know, there's this great verse in the Book of James where Jesus' brother (boy, talk about a hard act to follow!) says something along the lines of "a double-minded man is unstable in all his ways." Over the years people have sorta' distorted that to mean that no man can serve two masters, but I think the original King James prose is much more interesting - and relevant - considering the state of affairs in the U.S. these days.

Now, it's not secret that I ain't exactly too fond of liberals. This is pretty funny, seeing as how most of my life, I was a dyed-in-the-wool blue "free abortions for all illegal immigrant gays who need universal healthcare" democrat. I suppose I still have some classical liberal leanings - I'm mostly in favor of gun control, I think big businesses are mostly evil devil worshiping conglomerates and pretty much everything libertarians believe, I reject out of pure principle - but as I've gotten older, the more and more I realize that the great big liberal Tao is just one enormous golly-whopper of a contradiction.

That's not to say that Republicans and anarcho-capitalists and whatever flavors of conservatism that are in between AREN'T free of hypocrisy and logical shortcomings. They are. But in most cases, that stuff is circumstantial, and usually, there's some sort of "you've got to crack a few eggs to make an omelette" reasoning that can justify the cognitive dissonance. Liberals - the transgender-lovin', white people-hatin', free healthcare, education and rent-wantin' identity politicians they are - however, subscribe to a much greater logical fallacy. In fact, the entire contemporary liberal progressivist ideology is a humongous, waddling, reason-resistant contradiction of terms. There's no way that the modern liberal ideology can work, because it absolutely defeats itself at every pillar and plank of the platform.

Think I'm yankin' yer chain? Just take a look at these six nailed-down tenets of contemporary liberal ideology and try and tell me all these dimmicrats ain't full of grade-A bull hockey...

Contradiction One:

America is a capitalist, corporatist nightmare...

Well, this one might as well be the First Commandment of modern liberalism. Did you know that the top 1 percent of income earners in America possess 99 percent of the nation's wealth? Well, that would be a damning indictment of capitalism, if only it were true. In reality - you know, that thing Democrats spend most of their free time avoiding -  the top 1 percent of income earners in the U.S. actually posses just 20 percent of the nation's wealth, and at the same time pay a whopping 46 percent of all federal taxes. One look at the actual mathematical data shows the exact opposite of what the Democrats claim; the top 1 percent actually PAY more into taxes than the bottom 90 percent of incomers in the country combined. Now, seeing as how almost 70 percent of the $3.9 trillion federal budget goes towards Social Security, Medicaid, Medicare and welfare - you know, all those programs liberals just LOOOVE - you would think Democrats would be besotted by all those huge assed corporations, since without their massive income streams, there's no way in mathematical hell they could finance their humongous, bloated entitlement programs (especially since nearly half of Americans pay NO federal income tax whatsoever.) But no, democrats continue to criticize, condemn and actively lobby to destroy multi-billion dollar companies out of some petty, make-believe Marxist class struggle nonsense, completely oblivious to the fact that without those same turbines of commerce, absolutely NONE of their most beloved liberal policies and programs could exist. Hell, they don't even comprehend the basic tenets of their own anti-corporate ethos half the time: after all, weren't these the same kids that protested big business during Occupy Wall Street by having a candlelight vigil for a man who commandeered a one trillion dollar a year company? 

Contradiction Two:

Americans are, by and large, victims of the system...

Well, this one is just plain stupid. If the system seeks to victimize its own people, how come the feds spend more than $2 trillion EACH AND EVERY YEAR subsidizing its citizens? The mere fact that 40 percent of the federal budget goes EXCLUSIVELY towards medical and welfare services for people over the age of 62 demonstrates Americans are unquestionably beneficiaries of one of the most generous social entitlement states in the history of humanity. And say, where does the U.S. rank in terms of economic opportunity, democratic freedom and quality of life again? Hey, what do you know, our oppressive capitalist dictatorship somehow managed to outscore China, North Korea, Venezuela, Cuba and all those other socialist regimes out there. Who'd thunk it?

Contradiction Three:

The system just plain doesn't work for average Americans...

Oh, you mean our representative democracy? You know, that thing you vote in every two years? If the system "doesn't work," if anything, it's your fault for voting in shitty politicians who don't know what they're doing. Those assholes in Washington don't elect themselves, and if you don't like how things are going, get this - you can vote them out of office. Hell, you can even rally to amend the Constitution to change how people are elected or even who can run for public office, if you actually got up off your fat ass and did something other than complain on the Internet all day. Perhaps the bigger question is if you've been voting for Democrats your whole life and you still think the system is still all shades of fucked, how come you're still voting for Democrats? Which, naturally, brings us to this little sticking point...

Contradiction Four:

Only the Democratic ideals can get Americans out of poverty...

This is a nice thought, until you look at real entitlement spending statistics. If welfare programs like food stamps and the Earned Income Tax Credit were meant to be one-shot cure-alls for poverty, then how come the programs still exist decades down the road? Democrats said the food stamp program would once and for all stamp out poverty way back in the seventies, but holy shit, today one in six Americans is on SNAP. Furthermore, EITC and other income-based government assistance program spending has monumentally increased  year over year. The logic here is inescapable; all of these beloved Democrat entitlement programs aren't doing a goddamn, motherfucking thing to stop poverty in America, and in all sincerity, are actually making it worse. Instead of eliminating poverty by making people economically independent and self-sustaining, Democrats have more or less invented a permanent welfare state in which millions of poor people (many of them locked in what are tantamount to inner city war zones or literally toxic, rural no-man's-lands out in the sticks) have no choice but to subsist on whatever meager payouts the feds give them because there ARE no jobs or opportunities to earn substantial money legally anymore. Why? Because those same Democrats rallied like motherfuckers to bring domestic job destroyers like NAFTA to fruition, and they're continuing to dilute the job market by prioritizing foreign and illegal immigrant workers over the native born. We've had huge, overarching, social entitlement programs rooted in Democratic policies for more than 50 years, yet somehow, poverty has increased substantially across the board, ESPECIALLY in regions where democratic elected officials practically run unopposed at the ballot. The evidence here, really, is indisputable; not only has half a century of "democratic ideals" done NOTHING to alleviate poverty in America, it's actually made wealth inequality even worse - especially (and ironically) for poor Democrat voters themselves!

Contradiction Five:

Poverty is destroying America...

Alright, so about 15 percent of Americans - that's 45 million people - live below the Federal Poverty Line. That's a lot of people, no doubt, but it's still a smaller percentage of impoverished people than those living in poverty in other economic titan nations like Germany and Japan (and it's certainly a better lot in life than those in Mexico, where almost half the country lives in poverty.) No one is going to say America's poverty problem isn't concerning, but then again, when there are countries out there like India were literally 400 million people are poor, comparatively, we're STILL living high on the hog. The thing liberals NEVER want to address is that even if you're poor as fuckin' fuck in the U.S., you're STILL doing better than 95 percent of everybody else on the planet. Even if you are flat out broke in the States, you've still got a smart phone, air conditioning, clean drinking water, indoor plumbing and essentially free health care (remember, hospitals are forbidden by federal law from turning away people, and if they can't pay, the medical facilities usually just write it off as tax deductible charity care.) Say what you will about unemployment rates and low wage pay, even the poorest of Americans are living among the most comfortable lives of any people on the planet; rest assured, a good 5.6 billion people would GLADLY jump at the chance to live in what liberals constantly describe as our nation's "unlivable" lower-class conditions. 

Contradiction Six:

Our Democratic ideals ARE working...

Then why in the bluest of fucks are liberals hell bent on replacing American policies and programs with gigantic federal collectivist programs that have done nothing but fail and falter everywhere they've been attempted? Why are liberals so hellbent on exporting the disastrous social democratic practices of Europe and Latin America to the U.S.? Doesn't one look at the multitudes of troubles in Sweden and Germany let you know that maybe - just maybe - a laissez-faire approach to open border governance might not be the wisest decision? Considering the unmitigated disaster that was the European Union, why do Democrats think abandoning American economic independence in favor of an even larger global common market is an any way, shape or form a smart decision? Haven't all of those European nanny states - with their shitty socialized health care programs - all deteriorated into insolvency and free expression squelching lite-totalitarian systems? Sweet Jesus in a burning brick canoe, doesn't the fate of Venezuela let you know that the great liberal socialist utopia is just one big lie that can never, ever work in practice? Practically EVERYWHERE communism has been implemented, the end dividend has been crushing dictatorial regimes. New wave liberalism seeks to depower the individual and give the state more authority, which in and of itself, is the exact opposite of classical democracy. Rather than empowering the people, the democratic agenda is - and has been for decades - to accumulate as much power for itself to erect its unmanagable, open-borders and open-trade social-democracy welfare state utopia: a system that even half baked commies like Bernie Sanders know can't work, which in turn, would give the federal government an oh-so convenient excuse to assert its strength on the private market and our individual lives even more.

That's the unavoidable paradox of being a liberal in this day and age. You want freedom and equality and think the government can give you both, when - as history has proven time and time again - the inevitable outcome is the state depriving you of both liberty and egalitarianism. That's what happens when you vouch for inclusivity over autonomy and promote emotional ideals over pragmatic socioeconomic realities - not only are you destined to lose self-government, that very government might just look to deprive you of self altogether.

Even as a 70-year-old, old Ah-nold still conveys a sense of unbridled machismo that limp-dicks like The Rock or Channing Tatum couldn't dream of in a million years.

Anyhoo, speaking of things that'll blow your brain outta' the back of your skull, we actually have a damned great double feature lined up this week, with two of the best - and manliest - movies I guarantee you'll see all year long on the docket. Up first, it's Aftermath, a flick starring AH-NOLD as a construction worker who can't wait to see his family flying in for the holidays from Germany or Romania or wherever the hell they're from, but whoops! The guy at the air traffic control desk was too busy pouring himself another pot of coffee to realize two 747s were hurdling headlong into each other over New York state, and well ... let's just say AH-NOLD's wife, mama and pregnant daughter ain't going to be watching Jingle All The Way with him this Christmas. 

So Ah-nold - who, despite being in Hollywood for 50 years and being the governor of its most populous state, STILL can't speak convincing English - walks back to the parking lot in slow-mo and he just sits there in his car stewin' all night like a Christmas sweater-wearin' Terminator. Then the flick goes all Rashomon on us, letting us see what happened the day of the crash through the air traffic controller guy's eyes. He's this scrawny beanpole looking dude with a face kinda' like Rand Paul's whose eyes literally sink into his skull when the news hits that he's pretty much responsible for the deaths of 271 people. So Ah-nold spends all of New Year's weekend drinking whiskey and Pepto-Bismol and he decides to sneak into the crash site wearing a Hazmat suit and he looks at all the charbroiled headphones and sippy cups scattered all over the forest and then finds his daughter's corpse impaled on a tree limb. Then he just lies between his dead family's body bags and cries the manliest tears anyone has ever wept.

Meanwhile, that air traffic controller guy has had his life royally fucked up by the crash, too. People have spray-painted the word "killer" all over his house and he's so out of it he eats runny eggs for breakfast every morning and tells his therapist that if he don't order him some more dope, he's going next door and robbing the pharmacist. Then Ah-nold falls asleep on his daughter's grave, and - uh-oh - some nosy female reporter shows up and lets him know the identity of the air traffic control guy.

So the air traffic control guy buys a gun and ponders blowing his brains out during a Felix the Cat cartoon, but then he gets the wise idea of legally changing his identity and starting all over again two towns over. Meanwhile, Ah-nold sues the plane company and they offer him $160,000 in damages and all he does is just shove a picture of his dead wife in front of their faces and scream "I want someone to say they're sorry for killing my family," and goddamnit, you believe him. 

From there, Ah-nold goes full A Beautiful Mind, posting every nook and cranny of his basement with photos of his deceased family and news articles about the crash. At one point, he even mulls jumping to his death, but visions of disintegrating airplane wings, for whatever reason, prevent him from taking his own life.

So flash forward one year later. Ah-nold is at the newly opened victims' memorial (basically, they just put a bunch of white Target balls all over the woods, which was apparently based on his daughter's pearl necklace) while the former air traffic control guy has changed his name to Pat and works as a travel agent. Interestingly enough, Ah-nold has a new job working as a handyman for a dude who looks just like the old pro 'rassler Big Van Vader, and the first thing we see him do is literally mend fences, because symbolism, that's why. 

But just when it looks like all has been forgiven, here comes that snoopy reporter again, who now has info on the air traffic controller's physical address. At that point, Ah-nold promptly excuses himself from the dinner table, hops in his SUV, purchases a hotel room right across the street from the air traffic controller's new apartment - whose wife and son are visiting him for the first time since the accident - and ... well, you know shit is going to get real, and in a real damn hurry.

We've got 272 dead bodies. No breasts. No car chases. One head-on double airplane collision. Knife to the jugular. Multiple nervous breakdowns. PTSD fu. Dry heaving fu. And the thing that makes the whole movie possible - forgiveness fu. 

Starring Arnold Schwarzenegger as Roman, the construction worker whose life is turned upside down after his family gets blown to smithereens and spends the rest of the movie plotting his revenge; Scott McNairy as the bug-eyed air traffic controller Jacob, who represents the most diametrically opposite version of the male form you could ever possibly contrast against big, bad Ah-nold; Maggie Grace as the wife of the disgraced air traffic controller, who really doesn't do anything in the movie at all; and Glenn Morshower as Roman's next door neighbor, whose idea of helping a grieving man who just lost his entire family to a tragic aviation accident is to bring him two beers instead of just one. 

Directed by Elliot Lester, whose probably best known for helming the made-for-HBO movie Nightingale from 2015, and written by Javier Gullon, who based the script on the real life story of Vitaly Kaloyev, who only spent two years in jail for knifing the air traffic controller responsible for the 2002 Bashikirian Airlines Flight 2937 disaster and was treated as a a public hero in the wake of his release.

This is quite possibly the first legitimately great movie of 2017, folks. It's an old school revenge drama, through and though, devoid of all of the forced muliculturalism and needless estrogen that usually fucks up films of the like nowadays. This is the kind of movie that would've made Sam Peckinpah and Sam Fuller proud; somewhere in heaven, you just know Lee Marvin and George C. Scott are watching this one on a loop and ain't neither one of 'em haven gotten tired of it yet. 

I give it three and a half stars out of four. Jimbo says definitely check this one out, if the opportunity is afforded to you.

Just give me four crotchety veteran British character actors and a whole bunch of dialogue about committing crimes and I am sold. 

I don't know if the second bill of our double feature is as good as Aftermath, but it is mighty close. And it's prolly the best heist flick to come out in years - no doubt about it, The Hatton Garden Job wallops the shit out of any of them overhyped Ocean's Whatever movies and it ain't anywhere next to being close. 

Now I know what you're thinking. With a name like The Hatton Garden Job - not to mention it's an all-Brit production - you'd think it'd be some kind of pantywaist melodrama or one of them dry English comedies where you can't understand 95 percent of the dialogue because everybody in the cast sounds like they're gargling on crumpets or something. Thankfully, this flick is all-man and sort of a mini-masterpiece of crime saga minimalism. The folks who made this one prolly only had one week to film everything and about 200 Euros to get the whole thing wrapped up, but by Job, they just plain managed to do it.

Based on a true story (sorta), the flick starts off with this young up and coming criminal who doesn't even have a name going to the slammer and meeting up with this one Hungarian dude who looks The Thing from Fantastic Four and as soon as he's out of the clink he's hooking up with the GMILF-iest GMILF of all-time to coordinate a robbery of a bunch of safety deposit boxes in London's ritziest jewelry store district. The only thing is, he don't trust all of those millennial wannabe gangsters to get the job done, so he meets up with this dude in a windbreaker to assemble a crack team of career heisters - who, as fate would have it, all happen to be north of 60 and about one slipped disc away from buying the farm altogether. So naturally, they bicker and banter in an abandoned warehouse for a while going over the plans, but it's only a matter of time until the posse is intimidating 19-year-old kids in pubs, buying second-hand power tools from Arabs and dressing up like fake garbage men as a lead-in to the outstanding jewelry tomfoolery. 

Since all "heist" movies dating back to The Brinks Jobs more or less have the same plot, you do get all of the expected tropes and cliches here. We've got the gang walking down the street in slow-mo for no real reason and sudden "freeze frame" shots with Goodfellas voiceovers and a whole bunch of intrigue about whether or not anybody in the robbery or paying for the robbery is actually in cahoots with the bobbies. At times, the thing sorta plays it like a REALLY low budget version of American Hustle, and the people who made the flick certainly play that to their strengths. This isn't about building up to a suspenseful, action-packed robbery scene (indeed, the job takes place over Easter weekend, when the streets of London are practically vacant), it's about developing a strong cast of personalities en route to the big heist-a-roo. 

Of course, the real drama in any heist movie worth a hoot is in telling the after the fact part of the story. The big suspense of the subgenre isn't built around whether the heist will be successful or not, but just how long the culprits can steer clear of Johnny Law AFTER said heist. And I ain't going to spoil shit for you, kids - let's just say this one'll keep you glued to the screen literally start to finish. 

We've got no dead bodies. No breasts. No car chases. No kung fu. One joke that takes three minutes of screen-time to get to the punchline. Gratuitous British slang (so expect plenty of "tits" and "sods" in this 'un.) Gratuitous construction helmet size measuring. Gratuitous Johnny Thunder (no, not the plural one.) Security camera spray-painting. Chav informant fu. Insulin injection fu. Sledgehammer fu. Giant pneumatic drill fu. Malfunctioning compressor fu. And - of course, the anchor of any great heist movie - vault cleaning jamboree fu. 

Starring Matthew Goode as the nameless central character who drops such pearls of V.O. wisdom as "luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity" and spends half the heist worrying about whether or not he tripped a silent alarm; Joely Richardson as the Hungarian mob queen whose Polident-flavored tongue you definitely wouldn't mind having in your mouth; Clive Russell as the getaway driver with chronic emphysema who initially thinks they're risking six years in jails for a $100 heist instead of a $100 million one; David Calder as the massive candy bar addict who says "this is going to be the biggest bingo blag in history!" and serves as the ragtag group's "muscle" even though pure fat makes up 98 percent of his body; and Larry Lamb as the guy who tells the group "we don't want to find ourselves with nothing but our limp dicks in our hands" and conveniently keels over dead halfway through the big job. 

Written and directed by some bloke named Ronnie Thompson, who was somehow able to not only make a movie about a bunch of senior citizens spending three hours trying to drill a hole in a wall entertaining, but one of the best light-hearted crime capers to come along in years.

I give it three and a half stars out of four - Casino, it ain't, but it's definitely entertaining as hell and, perhaps most importantly, never overstays its welcome nor tries to be anything more than it has to be. An increasingly effeminate Hollywood could learn a thing or two from this one - take note,  stewards of the Avengers and Justice League franchises, THIS is how you do an "ensemble" getting the gang together" flick right.

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Five Reasons Why 'The Running Man' is Awesome

We revisit one of the most underrated cinematic violence-fests of the Reagan Years. Anti-consumerist satire, deliciously corny one-liners, exploding heads, Jesse Ventura walking around wearing a suit made out of refrigerator parts … this baby has it all!

By: Jimbo X

JimboXAmerican@gmail.com

@Jimbo__X

When it comes to specific timeframes in cinema, I feel that the 1980s are – by and large – an incredibly overrated era. Yes, there were a lot of great genre pictures – your Evil Deads, your Revenge of the Nerdes, your Robocops, etc. – and truly magnificent world cinema offerings – the last hurrahs of Kurosawa and Bergman, highbrow artistic stuff like Fitzcarraldo and My Dinner with Andre, not to mention outstanding documentaries like the unparalleled Shoah – but taken as a whole, I think the epoch pales in comparison to the 1950s, 1970s and 2000s, which undoubtedly had more interesting and diverse fare. When it comes to sheer nostalgia, it’s hard to beat grandiose Reaganomics opuses like Roger Rabbit and Batman, but if you want something that actually appeals to you beyond reminding of you of your salad days, there really isn’t that much to dig through. The eighties were a great time for enjoyable cinema, but it was a real dead zone when it comes to meaningful cinema – so for every Do The Right Thing, you had about six or seven Brewster’s Millions and Heartbeeps.

Perhaps no Hollywood star embodied the all style and no substance Tao of the 1980s more than one Arnold Schwarzenegger. The son of a legitimate Nazi officer who once declared he admired “dictators” in a bodybuilding documentary from the late 1970s, he took the box office by storm in a string of roles that required little grasp of the English language and a lot of walking around shirtless and bazooka-ing things. Basing his career on such nuanced roles as a sword-wielding prehistoric cave-warrior who doesn’t talk much and an emotionless, futuristic cyborg assassin who says even less, the future governor of California would go on to more intricate performances in the mid-80s, playing a guy in the witness protection program who blows a lot of stuff up and a dude whose daughter is kidnapped so he has no choice but to blow up a lot of stuff. By the late 1980s, he had learned enough English to star in films that required him to pantomime human feeling, and it was at this point in his career – the sweet spot in between Predator and Last Action Hero – that Ah-nold put on perhaps his most entertaining performances.

Now, say what you will about Mr. Schwarzenegger’s skills as a thespian, but there’s no denying that between 1987 and 1991, the dude was on fire, starring in all-time action movie masterpiece after all-time action movie masterpiece. I mean, acting deficiencies aside, even egg-headed, hoity-toity critics like Roger Ebert and Rex Reed acknowledge Predator, Total Recall and Terminator 2 as among the greatest blood-and-bullets action flicks ever filmed. Alas, there is a fourth genre masterpiece hidden in Arnie’s impressive run, and for the life of me, I cannot figure out why it isn’t celebrated as one of the decade’s top populist cinema offerings.

Granted, 1987’s The Running Man may not be an intellectual tour de force, or even that impressive a special effects set piece. That said, it’s nonetheless one of the most enjoyable cheeseball action flicks of the decade, giving us what is essentially Smash TV: The Motion Picture.

On the surface, there’s not a whole lot about The Running Man’s plot that is all that fresh or unique. Very loosely based on one of Stephen King’s earlier works, the film is basically a high-tech, 80s-tastic variation on The Most Dangerous Game. The idea is a tried-and-true sci-fi staple (the same core concept serves as the basis for several preexisting genre films, including Punishment Park, The Tenth Victim and Warriors of the Year 2072, not to mention more recent works like Battle Royale and The Hunger Games), but The Running Man approaches it in such a fun, ephemeral way that you can’t help but overlook its general lack of creativity.

Although the film is certainly no Verhoeven-social commentary classic, it’s nonetheless a bit sharper, more culturally cognizant work than most action films of the epoch, in a way, almost foreshadowing the rise of reality television and, to a certain extent, the post-9/11 surveillance state. But more than anything, it’s just grade-A, New Coke-and-crack-cocaine-flavored, NES-era bullet hole-riddled cheese, virtually impossible to not enjoy with a big, dopey, grin on your face from start to finish. So, what exactly makes The Running Man such an indelibly enjoyable little slice of nostalgia? Well, if you asked me, I’d boil it down to these five essential elements…

Reason No. 1

Richard fuckin' Dawson!

Growing up, I was a huge fan of Dawson’s work on Family Feud and Match Game (where he was consistently the only panelist sober enough to feed contestants decent answers.) Although the idea of a TV game show host portraying the central villain in a blood-and-guts-strewn action movie seems like a recipe for disaster, Dawson absolutely KILLS IT in The Running Man, putting on far and away the best, and most memorable, performance in the movie as TV show host\state propagandist Damon Killian. He’s just such a sublime slimeball, pouring on the synthetic Limey charm when he’s playing it up before the TV-viewing audience and acting all shades of asshole-ish behind the scenes, presumably portraying just a slightly more embellished version of his real-life self. As the master of ceremonies for our three-rings of pre-Savings & Loans Crisis carnage, Dawson is about as good ringleader as you could hope for … which kind of makes you wonder, considering how great he was in this flick, how come this dude never got any calls to star in any more Hollywood productions?

Reason No. 2

Arnold’s quips!

The puns are a highlight in pretty much every Ah-nold movie, but in The Running Man, they are especially delicious. Forget cleverness, forget literary allusions, the dialogue here is just cornball city. After garroting pro wrestler Professor Toru Tanaka with barbed wire in a facsimile of a hockey rink, Ahnold replies "Here is your Sub-Zero .. Now just plain zero!" in his thick, barely intelligible Austrian brogue. After shoving a whirring chainsaw through another man's crotch - effectively splitting him down the middle like a chicken wing - he ripostes "he had to split." Before sending Richard Dawson to his demise via the world's most explodey billboard, our hero drolly verbalizes the following epitaph: "you're cancelled." And of course, who can forget Ah-nold's immortal remarks to Killian when given an offer to become one of the program's new hunters: "You cold-hearted bastard! I'll tell you what I think about it. I live to see you eat that contract! But I hope you leave enough room for my fist because I'm going to ram it into your stomach and BREAK YOUR GODDAMN SPINE!" And if that wasn't enough, there's even a bit of hilarious foreshadowing early on in the movie. When underground resistance leader Mick Fleetwood (yes, the due from Fleetwood Mac) asks Ah-nold to join his guerrilla warriors, how does the future governor respond? "I'm not into politics. I'm into survival." And hey, speaking of gubernatorial contests...

Reason No. 3

Schwarzenegger vs. Ventura in a steel cage death match!

In 1987, who'd thunk that the "climactic" fight to the death between Jesse Ventura and Arnie towards the tail-end of The Running Man would represent a retroactive tussle between two democratically elected U.S. governors? The sheer weirdness of seeing two state leaders beating the dog shit out of each other in a barbed wire-draped UFC cage alone is enough to make this one of the film's most memorable sequences, but the titanic struggle itself is pretty damned fun to watch, too. Witness Ventura in fake-ass Captain America get-up choke and strangle a bloodied Ah-nold, with each men exchanging hellacious blows and emitting virtually every form of grunt the human larynx can muster before Schwarzenegger meets his end via a bull rush into a rusty-spike bedecked cage door. Of course, the entire thing is a virtual reality simulation (uh ... spoiler, I guess?) but the bait and switch doesn't detract from any of the awesomeness. Next to the back alley brawl in They Live and Arnie's battle to the death with roided-up Freddy Mercury at the end of Commando, there isn't a more awesome mano a mano brawl to be found in 1980s cinema. 

Reason No. 4

Dynamo – the most electrifying cinematic rapist of the 1980s!

The eighties really were a great time for silver screen sex criminals. Standing shoulder to shoulder with prom night rapist Biff Tanner and the non-consensual fun house boner in Revenge of the Nerds is arguably the most memorable hunter in the movie, our good pal Dynamo. Whereas the other hunters (among them, Jim Brown running around with a goddamn flamethrower) are definitely physically imposing specimens, this tubby, opera singing prisoner-slayer clad in what appears to be bits and pieces of a Commodore 64 doesn't exactly strike fear into one's heart at first glance. That is, until he hops in his dune buggy and starts zapping motherfuckers with lightning out of his hands. Although spared a slow and painful death by Arnie earlier in the film, Dynamo certainly deserved his demise at the end of the movie, when he threatens to rape Maria Conchita Alonso for referring to him as "dickless." Thankfully, the morbidly obese Electro-wannabe is done in by that old action movie standard, the old flicking-on-the-sprinkler-system-so-the-dude-wearing-exposed-wiring-on-his-sternum-gets-deep-fried-like-a-turducken routine. Oh, and as an aside: the guy who played Dynamo, Erland Van Lidth De Jeude - a legitimate Dutch royal, Olympic-level wrestler, professional bass-baritone and MIT-trained computer scientist (not to mention a damn fine character actor, as evidenced by his performances in The Wanderers and Alone in the Dark) - died just months after wrapping up principal photography for the film, hence the producers' decision to dedicate the movie in his honor. 

Reason No. 5

The old lady’s response!

In a film absolutely stocked with awesome B-level and nontraditional actors, who would have suspected that film's most hilarious moment would belong to Barbara Lux - a senior citizen with just two IMDB credits to her name? Yes, the virtual no-name actress pretty much steals the movie in her role as an elderly woman, who is picked out of the crowd and asked by Dawson who she thinks will make the next kill. Of course, keeping with convention, everybody expects her to pick one of the stalkers. However, she throws everybody for a swerve when she instead nominates Arnie's character, Ben Richards, to be the one to record the next fatality. And when Dawson asks her to pick somebody else, she fires back with one of the greatest comedic bits in any blood-soaked, 1980s violence-fest, doubling down on her endorsement of Ah-nold and confidently proclaiming "that boy's one mean motherfucker." It's such a profane, silly, outlandish and cheesy moment that panders to the lowest common denominator - in a film, that comprehensively, could be described using all of the above adjectives - but somehow, someway, it retains a simplistic, unrefined charm that, in a way, symbolizes everything great about the ostentatious, gloriously un-P.C. 1980s. In a big, loud, dumb movie, it's probably the biggest, loudest and dumbest moment of all - and by golly, if it doesn't make you laugh your ass off every single time, you've lost the part of your soul that makes you a human being worth a damn.

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