I Can Die Harder Than You Can: The Enduring Legacy of the Action Movie ft The Fugitive

There’s a certain breed – homogeneously if not exclusively male – who crave an undying love for 80s and 90s action films. I’m a devout member of this church. It’s curious; their marriage of steroids-for-breakfast masculinity and residual campness is innocuous but fruitful, perfectly captured in a single frame by Predator’s notorious bro handshake. My initial preconception, before I delve into this trivial, self-aggrandising project, is that our enjoyment is based on its embellishment of nascent male fantasy. Cool stunts, contrived pun one-liners, and the prospect of women finding cool stunts and contrived pun one-liners sexually appealing, is something inherent to the chimpanzee male psyche. In turn the campness perhaps suggests the innate desire for an idealised bromance not dissimilar from the idealised romance of cinema’s love stories. I mean, look at Top Gun; just look at how close Maverick and Goose are. This whole notion is obviously reductive and offensive – we men are far more complex than this – but I do think this hypothesis is at least partially founded. I guess that’s one positive from this idea for a new project, discovering something inherent and primeval about our love for action films that maybe isn’t completely denigrating my own gender (gender is fluid yes yes, but I’m just saying for argument’s sake okay? Cool).

Said frame from Predator. My theory epitomised

Nothing in cinema attracts such a cult following like these films, because they’re indeterminately evaluated by their fans. It’s a love that is concurrently completely ironic and completely sincere. We know that they’re primarily not very good, but in a roundabout way they are fantastic. How does this make sense? The hell if I know, but let’s try and find out over the next few articles. They’re effortlessly, entertainingly watchable, and bizarrely difficult to objectively critique because they’re so distinctive. An action movie can be structurally inept, punctured by hapless acting and lame effects, but if it fulfils the idiosyncratic criteria of the action movie it can still achieve stone cold classic status. What these criteria precisely are, I hope to educe in the next few weeks. It’s the same with horror films after all; a horror can be bland and unimaginative, but if it’s scary and provocative, it can be Great; the most obvious recent example in my opinion of this is The Conjuring, which peddled every ghost story motif and trope in cultural history and came out with a gleefully terrifying smash. The Conjuring took some eggs, flour, cheese, tomatoes, spring onions, chocolate icing, digestives, and ending up with a Michelin star pudding. Maybe this eclectic scrimmage is applicable to the action.

What I’ve realised, is that genre cinema generally fails to appeal to the academy (THEOSCARSAREASHAM) because it’s not predicated on conventional systemic formats, but through audience interaction and reaction. Horror films and action films are synchronous because their value and worth depends on making the viewer feel something, whether it’s the Freudian thrill of The Shining or the primitive wish fulfilment of Point Break. For all we joke over the ridiculousness, ludicrousness and preposterousness of action films conceptually, they subliminally touch its fans in ways Best Picture winners simply can’t. Again, hopefully I’ll be able to articulate the what, and why, of this theory, or, again, prove it to be complete bullshit.

My workmates have essentially bullied me into watching The Fugitive, which steered me towards the idea of writing about this most quietly bountiful of genres in the first place, therefore, by process of logical association, The Fugitive will be the first in the series where I approach this subject with a critical analysis; part-review, part meandering rumination on each film’s individual implications, and their immutable impact in the endurance of the action movie as a collective and our semiotic responses to this. I hope to at least attempt to paint tangible some of the most testing questions of our time; why don’t cops in their 50s just retire already if they’re too old for this shit? Is Die Hard the best Christmas film of all-time? Will we ever know categorially whether Nic Cage is a good or bad actor?

There'll be a LOT of Cage

I’ll hopefully do The Fugitive before the weekend. Please provide recommendations for me for after The Fugitive as well, people, with two criteria; it must have been released in either the 80s or 90s, and it must to some extent constitute an action film. Get involved people, you love action as much as I do.

Shoutouts to Andy, Pete, Abs, Ali, Huw and Nath for verbally bludgeoning me to death with the demand to do this.

PS: This AV Club running series on the history of the action film is really cool.

http://www.avclub.com/features/a-history-of-violence/

Kanye West: The Life of Pablo First Impressions

Kanye’s previous two albums have been very coherently conducive to their ideas; while frequently adventurous with sonic and structural experimentation they ostensibly remain drinking from the same conceit, somewhat at odds with the scatology of his earlier work. My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy – as I’ve often recorded in this blog – is a solipsistic self-exploration of egoism so layered and ambitious it registers as the cumulative Ulysses, Infinite Jest and Moby Dick to its contemporaries’ airport paperbacks. An absorbing Freudian goldmine overshadows what is a musically complex, enormously fun record. Furthermore, Yeezus confronts the precept of Black identity and its tumultuous history with a lairy aggressiveness that compels and threatens; neither as sophisticated or as intellectual as last year’s To Pimp a Butterfly (which examined a similar discourse), but more direct in its often misappropriated, sometimes confused, always justified fury. Before my first listen of Life of Pablo, I What’s App’d my friend Nic explaining my curiosity over the subject of Kanye’s latest homily, as it's evidently his new and abrasive format of composition. Two minutes into ‘Ultralight Beam’ and its gospel choir and self-aggrandising wordplay reveal little except flirtations with self-parody. When Chance The Rapper arrives with his perpetually weed-chilled croon, he warbles some thanks to Kanye and congratulates himself on his gorgeous ‘Sunday Candy’ from last year. But he also observes something we’ve only glimpsed in our fifteen years of Kanye. He opens with “when they come for you/I will shield your name,” evoking Kanye’s doubt, fear and paranoia with a nebulous, protective couplet. When they routinely stress that the Ultralight Beam in question is a “God Dream,” the emphasis is decisively on Dream. Kanye knows that his fame and infamy is a goddamn lie and everything could crash in on him at any moment. Even Gods need friends.

The dichotomy between deity-sized narcissism and inveterate vulnerability is overpowering. Famous begins as an anthemic self-endorsement of sexual prowess, Kanye riling up every woman he’s ever slept with and smugly backs himself with Taylor Swift despite all the melodrama they’ve shared, before transcending into a bellicosely heartfelt plea, no; a vocalisation of necessity, for authentic love, propelled by an affectionate, syrupy Rihanna refrain as this nameless idealisation of romance. One of the few sequences of contentment is the track ‘Waves,’ which Chance now famously fought to keep on the album. It’s pronounced and adulatory before abruptly switching to the intimate exposition of “birds can’t fly in a cage.” It’s a poignant, ephemeral verse, compounded by ‘Waves’ being bookended by the sneeringly confident put-down ‘I Love Kanye,’ which somehow encapsulates all the love/hate paradigms which he laboriously provokes into under a minute, and the jarringly despondent ‘FML,’ a spiralling panic-attack of forgotten spirituality. These three tracks are roughly six minutes chronologically, but could legitimately function as a self-contained EP and would still be as traumatically effective. 

This fluctuating juxtaposition is coalesced with the instrumentation, screaming drones and thunderous bassdrums - reminiscent of Yeezus's politically charged adrenaline - bang when Kanye's at his most defensive, while mellifluous synths and iconoclastic, revealing sample choices complement his cathartic disclosures. While Kanye begins defiantly and controlling, the cracks to his diamond-studded fortress are always translucent and ‘Waves’ is the emphatic breach. The two most notable pre-release singles, ‘Real Friends’ and ‘No More Parties in LA,’ are eloquent expressions of not so much pain as exhaustion. Kanye confesses his anxieties, because he’s just too tired to hide; the gaping artifice of building sincere relationships in the background of notoriety and opulence is destructive and impossible. The clever back-and-forth dialogue Kanye employs with Big Sean in ‘Real Friends’ suggests not only an attempt to, inadequately, communicate on an emotional level in an established but faltering friendship, but a sense of desperate isolation, as Big Sean’s distorted vocals ring out as if on some other sonic plane. Superlative speech and superlative hedonism is afforded by his stature in celebrity culture, but it’s a deal with the devil, proffering an inability to connect as a return. 

For his impact on rap music and general pop culture, Kanye is a veritable God; but on Life of Pablo he discloses a precipitous chasm of human insecurity. Maybe Kanye will have to settle for being merely a demi-god, omnipotent and immortal with the Achilles heel of the capacity to feel; a metaphor aptly emblematic of his lasting legacy as a beautiful contradiction.

Mini Reviews: Creed & Goosebumps

Creed

At the centre of the Oscars Diversity debate lie Ryan Cooglar and Michael B. Jordan, respectfully Creed’s director and star. Despite its “Oscar worthiness” – by which I mean its serious subject matter, serious performances, and ultra-super-special serious disposition, Creed hasn’t been nominated for Best Picture. A critic provocatively hypothesised that this is because Creed’s a film with a black protagonist that isn’t approaching issues of race with its caps-lock on. Of course every film’s about racial experience, but enough of my pseudo-intellectual tangents. The director/actor partnership resurges following their magnificent Fruitvale Station, incidentally a film very much concerned with the present black reality, and I’d be quite happy with them just making movies together for the rest of time. Cooglar uses shaky, proactive framing entwined with more cinematic Steadicam to generate a sense of murky actuality while maintaining an assured air of confident elegance.  The result is compelling, and he’s ably aided by Jordan establishing his own quiet classiness with a telluric performance, not Oscarly bombastic but rather beguilingly exacting and naturalistic. Same goes for Stallone, an always unfairly derided actor. Di Caprio can chew all the frozen scenery he wants and win an Oscar, but he can’t act like this. Maybe Creed’s nost interesting paradigm is its mutual timelessness and contemporariness. It’s immutably and pleasurably Rocky in its not-quite-rags-to-riches redemption narrative, a timely prompt that we’ll always be a sucker for these stories, but its economic literacy around the financial crash and excellent Cloud jokes, compounded by Tessa Thompson’s Bianca existing as a FKA Twigs-esque alternative R&B singer, suggests a context rooted in the of-the-now. Presumably this is the point; Rocky’s aged and his working class background contrasts with Adonis’s privilege, which in turn is an interesting inversion of normal race/class models, and his oldschool dependency alienates him from modern technocracy and ease of living. Creed’s very overtly about the idea of building your own family and identity, and while at times it can be didactic it is morally moving, and thankfully refuses to beat you to death with its “themes” (CC. Trumbo). Creed never goes anywhere you wouldn’t expect – despite passing up a radical, and in my opinion prosperous, opportunity to do so – but it’s accomplished and layered, perhaps a fine reminder that good cinema doesn’t have to be original or dynamic as long as it’s finely tuned. And for the record, the Oscars are a malodorous irrelevance and a taintedly arbitrary valuation of film.

Goosebumps

 The Goosebumps TV show used to scare the crap out of me. I’ve not watched an episode in over a decade but the memory of F-grade CGI blobs and animatronic, carnivorous chickens languishes in the deepest recesses of my subconscious. Sceptical is an imprecise description of my initial impression of this reimagining of RL Stine’s bestselling series; rather, I was uninterested. Transposing Stine as an definite character while having his lurid, monstrous machinations come to life in a Spielbergean suburbia sounds sorely twee. After unprecedentedly positive reviews I indulged myself, and came away pleasantly surprised. It’s a quirky, fun caper evidently inspired by the great adventure films of the eighties, a la Goonies and Gremlins in its accumulated breezy and eccentrically knowing tone, unremarkable setting and gregarious ensemble. In fact, easily its most potent quality is its intractable self-awareness. Its ceaseless nods and winks to monster history, including a great Stephen King gag, never feel unwelcome because it’s so authentic, and its scattershot structure works because it’s an exercise in charming shenanigans with familiar pop culture icons. Zombies in a graveyard is so nailed-on that it can’t be anything other than unpretentious genius. Why not have zombies in graveyards? Where else would you have them, in a Jane Austen novel? Jack Black is impressively restrained, while relative newcomer Dylan Minnette possesses everyman affability as the lead. It’s funny, simultaneously clever and deferential, and is enjoyably simplistic.