Flash Fic #12 – Off On The Wrong Foot

Nikki’s was one of those bars located down the stairs of some shitty alleyway. Me and Jordan pushed the door open only to be greeted by a heavy double-door, which was opened by a tall man in a tight shirt that showed his well-built figure, enormous muscles and large hands with spiky fingerless gloves. Jordan didn’t even bother to look at him as the guy searched us poorly, not too into his job. He didn’t check the back of my pants, the place where I’d usually be carrying my gun.

The stink of cigarette smoke made my eyes water. I tightened my face, squinting through the fog at the crowded bar. All the tables were taken and there wasn’t a single empty stool at the counter. There were people talking and drinking while standing up, leaving little room for maneuver.

Jordan didn’t even blink, as though the smoke was afraid to touch him. He walked up to the counter and surveyed the customers. The bartender was middle-aged and not too worried about her looks. The make-up was smeared and her skin, saggy. No owner in their right mind would hire her for that job, so I presumed she was the owner herself, Nikki. She looked at me, then at Jordan and her eyes lingered on him, reading “trouble” on his cranky, seven-feet tall figure.

Lipper said he’d be using a blue suit. Apparently he hadn’t arrived yet, even though we were fifteen minutes late. Jordan looked over at me, his head towering above the relatively short crowd, and shook his head, confirming the guy wasn’t there.

I felt a poke on my shoulder and turned. It was Nikki, eyeing me with an expression of disgust as if talking to a vermin.

“Don’t you two cause any problems,” she said with a roark voice that was probably the result of decades of chainsmoking. I turned my attention back to the crowd, observing the customers, then I felt the poke again. “I’m talking to you,” she said loudly.

I simply turned and held her stare. She stepped back, frightened, and wisely decided to take it as a “yes, I heard” instead of the “fuck you” I meant. As she returned to the counter, I traded looks with Jordan to see if he had watched me get the warning. Jordan nodded very slightly to his left, toward the doorman, who was flexing his fingers threateningly at me.

I heard a door click open nearby. It was the men’s restroom, and a man in a blue suit was leaving it. He was slim and hard-featured, with a wrinkled face covered partly by a badly-kept beard. He pushed his way to the counter without seeing me or Jordan. I could tell he was the careless type because anyone with any observational skills at all would have noticed a Jordan-sized man standing nearby.

I positioned myself behind his back, with Jordan joining me a second later. “Hello, Lipper,” I said softly.

He turned his head slowly, feigning confidence. “You’re late,” he said.

Then his face froze and he gulped. I looked down and realized, with satisfaction, that Jordan had tucked a nerve on Lipper’s lower back between his thumb and forefinger, and was squeezing. I added, “Don’t grow a pair, Lipper. We’ll have to kick it back into you.” Lipper resumed his breathing, which told me Jordan had let go.

Having had his tough man act ruined, Lipper didn’t seem to know how to start the conversation. Me and Jordan just stared at him, not willing to help at all.

“Look –” Lipper began, but didn’t finish. I smiled patiently.

“Lipper,” I said even more patiently. “Surely you haven’t called a meeting with us in this shithole for nothing, right? You have information, don’t you?”

Lipper seemed to remember what planet he was on. “Yeah, sure! It’s about Carrie.”

“Carrie,” I repeated, more to myself than to him. I thought about saying we already knew all there was to know about her, but it never hurts to make sure one of your new sources is reliable.

“Yeah, Carrie,” Lipper said, gaining some of his confidence back. “She’s dead.”

This source wasn’t. I looked at Jordan. His left eye was twitching. Five years with him taught me how bad a sign this was. And I was proved right by the umpteenth time when he grabbed Lipper’s hair and slammed his head against the counter. And then again. And again. Lipper’s legs went numb, so Jordan hanged him upright by the back of his suit and kept slamming his head against the counter so hard two glasses of beer fell from it.

“Hey!” the doorman yelled, running toward us. Jordan slammed Lipper’s forehead one last time, let him fall off and turned to the doorman, who halted, scared, but too late — Jordan grabbed the massive man by the neck and lifted him off his feet. He was merciful with this one. After choking him for ten seconds, he headbutted the guy into uncounsciousness and dropped him on the floor.

Lipper was dead. I could tell by the bits of brain sliding out of his forehead and the pool of blood forming beneath his skull. The customers didn’t know where to look at — at the dead body, the knocked out doorman or the seven-feet tall murderer. So they settled for fleeing the bar, tripping over each other.

Seconds later, only me, Jordan, the corpse and the sleeping doorman were left in that shithole. Nikki had fled too, apparently.

“You actually cracked the counter,” I commented, looking at the broken, blood-covered wooden surface.

Movie Review – Planet Terror

Originally written on March 10th 2008.

May 14th 2009 commentary: oh, whoops. I had almost forgotten that I had to compile my old reviews from Whitechapel into this blog.

This one is short, but gets the point across — a bit too enthusiastically, though. I like Planet Terror a lot, but not enough to have multiple orgasms over it as this review implies I did.

I fucking loved “Grindhouse”. It was a box office failure, but a high quality one. Tarantino is usually great at paying homage to old stuff, but when he tried to bring it to real life, the result was this: two great films, this one and the exceptional “Death Proof”, being watched by practically no-one in the movies. A man with Tarantino’s vision should have foreseen it wouldn’t work and released the two movies separately.

One of the two “Grindhouse” attractions, “Planet Terror” is a clear homage to trash films. With a zombie story that involves gas and hot chicks, director-screenwriter-composer-younameit Robert Rodriguez has created one of the most entertainingly funny films I’ve seen this year and the previous.

The story is about a gas that leaks, turns everyone into zombies except a group of people who reveal themselves immune to it and a group of military soldiers, who have a container with a gas that counter-acts the zombie gas. Unless they’re inhaling the antidote gas constantly, they’ll turn into zombies too. This being a trash film, obviously it doesn’t take long until all the immune-to-the-zombie-gas characters get together and cause a zombie-killing mayhem.

“Planet Terror” is filled to the brim with elements from trash films: the unbelievably huge sprays of blood after each shot, the ridiculous story, the absurd characters… the difference lies in Robert Rodriguez’ direction. While the screenplay is as trash (and funny) as it can possibly be, Rodriguez refuses to do a purposely bad directing job as well and adds his visual flair to the film, fortunately without calling attention to himself. Directing the action scenes with energy, he’s one of the main reasons this movie’s so fun.

Another reason is the cast. Bruce Willis doesn’t need to do anything, all he has to do is show up in a movie like this and you’ll start laughing already. Naveen Andrews, one of my favorite actors in “Lost” (he plays Sayid Jarrah), is clearly having loads of fun, and his comedy timing is impeccable. Josh Brolin is fucking fantastic, hands down the best in the whole cast. Rose McGowan is beautiful and funny. Freddy Rodriguez is the perfect b-movie action hero. Marley Shelton is brilliant (“Don’t point it at your face, it might go off”). And it’s great to see Michael Biehn again, doing a good job. Quentin Tarantino makes an hilarious appearance and Michael Parks once again plays Sheriff Earl McGraw, a character who shows up constantly in Tarantino’s films.

Not only Rodriguez directs and writes this wonderful piece of shit, he also does loads of other stuff: he has a hand in the special effects, he cuts the whole film, the cinematography is entirely done by him and he even composes the music. The main theme of this film is simply spectacular. The special effects are also surprisingly good, some are bad in purpose, others are excellent (Rose McGowan’s leg, for example).

Filled with hilarious moments and performances and plenty of exaggerated action and gore, “Planet Terror” is an incredibly entertaining homage to trash films. It’s not as good as “Death Proof”, but it’s definitely good.

Movie Review – The Day The Earth Stood Still

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0970416/

I have never watched the original, but I’m not one of those pricks who is prejudiced against “old” movies, in fact I like kicking those people in the face as a sport. But I’m quite young and haven’t yet watched as many films as I’d like. Hell, I watched “Citizen Kane” less than a year ago, and only after some friends gave me a hard time about not having done so already. There is an arm-long list of classics I have yet to watch. “The Day The Earth Stood Still” is not high on it. Not when movies like “Ben Hur” have not yet visited my DVD drive.

I stumbled across this remake and I have to admit I have a strange soft spot for Keanu Reeves. Perhaps because I think he’s a decent actor who gets so much hate for not being capable of many facial expressions. I agree he’s limited, but I’ve never seen him bring down a good film. You can see an actor is hated simply because it’s “cool” to hate him when he actually does a good job and critics go “but he was perfect for the role anyway”. It happens to Reeves all the time. Let me put it this way: he played one of the most iconic sci-fi characters of the last decade in “The Matrix” and avoided being typecast for the rest of his career. Also, he played an American John Constantine and somehow prevented the sheer thought of that from being laughable. He is miles above hacks like Hayden Christensen and Orlando Bloom, even if he is flawed.

So I watched this remake and, indeed, Reeves was the only reason I made it to the end. I mean, I could almost pretend this film happened in an alternate reality where the average human being has the intelligence of a dead chicken. As misanthropic as I am, not even I rate humanity that low. Just so you have an idea of how utterly stupid the characters in this film are: after seeing a huge alien robot called GORT neutralize an entire human army with nothing but a high-pitched sound, the president of the USA thinks bombing one of the alien ships with two measly fighter jets is the next logical step. Not even George W. Bush would have been this retarded — and bear in mind I think he’s a moron.

The story: NASA detects an object in extremely high velocity on its way to Earth. It is so fast it is only detected an hour before its ETA. Any attempts to destroy it with missiles fail, and at its speed the object will destroy the planet. But when it arrives, it slows down and lands in Central Park, revealing itself to be some kind of alien ship. Other alien ships appear around the world at the same time, their intention not yet revealed. On Central Park, an alien appears from the ship and is, of course, immediately shot by the moronic humans even though it didn’t seem to pose the slightest threat.

Upon healing, the alien turns out to be in human form and calls himself Klaatu (Keanu Reeves). Cold and detached, he’s on Earth to make a decision: whether or not to destroy humanity, since they are ruining one of the few planets in the entire universe capable of supporting life.

The obvious problem with this premise is the way the script portrays humanity so stupidly I actually hoped Klaatu would call in the airstrikes. There isn’t a single human character in the film that is even remotely interesting, except maybe for John Cleese’s character (the scene he shares with Klaatu is the one scene in the movie that truly works). Even the talented (and beautiful) Jennifer Connelly fails to be likeable, and Jaden Smith is absolutely fucking unbearable. I kept hoping Klaatu would use his powers to make his head explode all over his condescending mother. And blame the script all you like, but Smith does everything he can to turn an already annoying kid into pro-abortion propaganda.

Klaatu is the highlight. While Keanu Reeves indeed isn’t very expressive facially, he’s a very precise physical actor who can convey a lot with his body (a good example is the way he hits his head on a closet in “A Scanner Darkly” — his painful reaction is absolutely perfect). Klaatu is serious and distant most of the time, but Reeves manages to make clear when something gets to him — and his performance has some nice touches, like his difficulty in getting used to a human body or the change of tone in his voice when a character says Earth is the humans’ planet and he says “No, it is not.”. He is, however, brought down by the horrendous script, which makes Klaatu’s “change of mind” in the end sound completely forced.

Director Scott Derrickson lets the special effects do his job for him. When there isn’t CGI on the screen, he limits himself to choosing acceptable angles. It feels very much like automatic pilot, except on the moments that involve special effects — you can almost hear Derrickson reaching orgasm as he shows entire structures being destroyed by the GORT. The film is emotionally null. The one moment that manages to cause some response is when a woman begs another to use her cellphone, and that’s it. And while the CGI is well-rendered, the alien ships are no more than simplistic glowing spheres.

With a dumb ecological message and painfully stupid characters, I had trouble rooting for the humans in “The Day The Earth Stood Still”. And really, when a film manages to make you wish your own planet is destroyed when the goal was precisely the opposite, you really have to stand in awe at the ineptitude of the filmmakers.

Eeer, yes, about the updates…

Sorry. Really.

More stuff occurred aside from the novel and there is a shitload happening in my life at the moment. Which is why the reviews have stopped, and this blog is almost dead.

It shall be revived soon. Stay tuned.

(Please.)