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Apox66
Reviews
The Bounty Hunter (2010)
A Misfire
Comedies are one of the luckiest genres in cinema. They can be wacky, ridiculous, absurd and totally unbelievable, and it won't matter as long as they make you laugh. Because of this loophole, comedies get away with almost anything as long as they keep the audience stocked up with belly laughs.
'The Bounty Hunter' commits the cardinal sin of comedies - it's completely ridiculous, at the same time as just not being funny. It's certainly ambitious; it weaves the story of Aniston & Butler together with a murder conspiracy, and a pretty big gambling debt collection. But ultimately I felt that it was trying desperately to keep you distracted from the fact that you're not laughing.
So, this comedy doesn't find the fabled comedy loophole - it's too absurd to take seriously, and not funny enough to get a free ride.
Commando (1985)
Hilariously stupid
This film is, ironically, one of Arnie's most serious films yet it is hundreds of times funnier than his "comedy" films. This is because it is so deliciously clichè. He has the corny one-liners, the run-of-the-mill plot line and the massive explosions. For pure entertainment you could do much worse I assure you!
One of the funniest parts of the film, which borrows quite severely from the James Bond series, is when he wanders around the drug lord's compound with grenades and a mini gun. Here he kills between 50 and 100 jumpy henchmen, all armed with AK-47s. Naturally they don't get a single hit on him. Genius, in a spongy sort of way :-)
Fight Club (1999)
A twist of terms
I beseech you, noble reader, to name me a postmodern film. It's certainly not easy, because Postmodernism is not only a difficult term to define, but also a difficult term to set into a category. This is because Postmodernism in itself rejects catagorisation. The simple definition is "Of or Relating to art which reacts against modernist principles." This means it rejects genre boundaries and employs irony, parody, playfulness and ambiguity. Lots of big words eh? But to truly understand the genius of Director David Fincher, you have to understand, or at least have an idea of, how complicated Postmodernism really is. It's difficult enough to write down on paper, especially difficult to draw or create a piece of art out of, and [I would expect] incredibly difficult to create a film out of. Yet Fincher managed this with Fight Club.
Fight Club is a truly terrific piece of art. It's about psychology, it's about conformity, it's about fascism, it's about communism [!], it's about free speech, it's about enlightenment, it's about self improvement via self destruction, it's about the nature of violence; All these themes rolled up into one two-hour long assault on your senses. It's multi-genre structure gives this film a very clever intellectual twist while staying incredibly entertaining throughout it's length.
Many people complain that the film is too violent. I disagree; the violence, while being quite strong when on screen, is artistic in it's own context. The abuse of one's self for one's personal enlightenment. It is funny at the same time as being cynical, it is religious at the same time as being political, it is revolutionary at the same time as employing millennia-old philosophy. While the twist at the end takes some considerable thought to truly understand, it is nonetheless an incredibly feat of misdirection. A truly beautiful mix of Intellectualism and Brutality; one of my favourite films of all time.
[By the Way; If you haven't seen this film yet I'm not going to give you a synopsis of the storyline; you don't need one. Go and buy it, NOW!]