BRUCE WILLIS - ACTION MAN

So A Good Day to Die Hard has been released and lets be honest, the reviews have been terrible but I loved it, I went in with low expectations and came out getting exactly what I wanted, a Die Hard movie with Bruno, kicking ass and quipping like the badass he is.

Who Farted?

The question is, why do we love Bruce Willis???
What makes him a great action hero???
I mean he’s not built like a Sly or an Arnie, even in the original Die Hard he started out as someone who seemed very unwilling to take on Gruber and his batch of terrorist/robber bastards but he is very much held in the same justified esteem as Sly and Arnie.

Personally speaking, Sly and Arnie are the guys we want to be, huge, tough and with the one liners. Whereas Willis is the everyman we can relate to, not extremely well built, down on his luck at times, some hair thinning but he can stand on his own when he needs to, kick arse and always be ready with a well placed quip. His characters are always different, and he seems to like genre hopping as much as he can, but lets be honest, Willis will be known for being an action legend.

This year Willis will appear at the cinema in 4 action movies, A Good Day To Die Hard, Sin City 2, Red 2 and as the original Action Man himself 'G.I. Joe' in G.I. Joe 2. Its the genre that truly made him who he is, and he keeps returning to keep the genre alive.

Who didn’t have a huge smile on their face when at the end scene of Expendables 2, a great shot of Arnie, Sly and Willis were all there machining gun bad guys??? Personally speaking that was a shot in a movie I thought I would never see, and it shows how much we the audience and, a legend in his own right, Sly, holds Willis in such high regard.

One of the GREATEST moments in movie history EVER. FACT

Nothing quite portrays Willis as the down on his luck, but he can kick your ass while making you laugh, hero than Joe Hallenback. The Last Boy Scout is truly, in my opinion, one of the greatest action movies of the nineties. Willis gets cheated on, beaten up and his daughter mocks him, yet we still want him to win and we all think, I wish I was as cool as him.
I will be reviewing the whole movie at some point, so I won’t gush over it too much but listen to our latest commentary of it, myself and The Kick Ass Kid LOVE this movie.

Wayans, your agent is on the phone, this is the best film you'll ever be in

So Willis isn’t our typical action hero, but in my opinion the most relatable. He is still out there making action and I will never grumble about that. Once I see him on screen, I see the smirk and he shoot the baddies, I will never tire of him as an action hero.
Well its been 25 years now since Die Hard was released, Willis has gone the distance and sir I salute you, keep doing what you’re doing, cut out the comedy stuff if you want, but please keep saving the world.
The Doc and The Kid thinks you’re great and damn, we wish we could be as cool as Bruno!

- The Doc

What's wrong with critics and action films?

Figures from Rotten Tomatoes:

The Last Stand - 59% Audience 68%

Parker - Critics 38% Audience 63% 

Bullet To The Head - 49% Audience 71%

I just got back from seeing Sylvester Stallone's latest film Bullet To The Head and basically I loved it. Was it flawless? no but was it well acted, well directed, with a great soundtrack and some great violent action? damn right it was! 

I am going to leave the full and official review to the doctor himself but something struck me checking out reviews and the like online after the film, I don't read them before the film I want to go in fresh, and that was when it comes to action, critics and audiences seem to be on opposite sides to each other.

The above scores from that loathsome and divisive website Rotten Tomatoes illustrate my point quite well and that's the only reason they're there.

Why can't critics review action well? maybe it's the same for all genres they arrogantly deem beneath them, maybe horror and comedy fair just as badly, I don't know I haven't done the research, but lately it sure feels like action is taking a beating.

My philosophy is that you review stuff within its genre. If you're a big budget blockbuster then I am going to stack you up against everything from Ghostbusters to The Dark Knight, if you're a quirky indie film then everything from Rushmore to Looking for a Friend at the End of the World is fair game and if you're action, especially a certain type of action, then you are going to be reviewed alongside Cobra, Die Hard and Commando.

Why do critics seemingly just rate everything on the same pointless and impossible scale? 

Why do critics go on about action stars not having depth of character or action films not having intricate plots?

They are seemingly willfully missing the point! 

Did they not see that Jason Statham just fired a flare gun from the nose of a fucking plane onto a gasoline covered pontoon and blew the fucker sky high?! The nose of a plane people!! AWESOME!

They dismiss death defying stunts, often performed for real by mere actors wanting authenticity and, yes, in a safe environment but show me Dustin Hoffman willing to climb down a building, hang off a helicopter or run out of an exploding building, even if offered a harness he'd nasally refuse and toddle off somewhere.

They dismiss the screen presence, the charisma, the athleticism, the enjoyment, the humour, the catharsis, the drama and the great feeling we all get when good triumphs over evil.

I wrote an article on here about Jason Statham and how he has constantly tried to do more, achieve more, work with interesting people, take interesting scripts and push himself. When you hear these guys in interviews they've thought about the character, the director, the great stunts, the chases, they care about their audience and they want to entertain but because they're not Daniel Snore Lewis, who is yet to be in one film I want to see ever, they don't get the time of day!

I just want The Kick Ass kid to like me... *sob*

Also action stars, like Stallone and Statham never get credit for their characterisations why? because they're not playing Mr.Darcy or mumbling pretentious, impenetrable shit in a Paul Thomas Anderson movie?

Yet Stallone is never the same person twice, seriously. Watch Rocky, Rambo, The Expendables, Cobra, Demolition Man, Bullet To The Head, hell watch fucking Over The Top for christ sake and each one is different. He uses different voices, changes his appearance, thinks about the way his character would walk, talk and the different weapons his guy would use to pulverise his next low-rent hood... all important things and all on screen for you to see.

Do you know how I know critics are full of shit? well look at the way they coo and swoon when someone like Stallone does a film like Copland or Bruce Willis does sensitive in Twelve Monkeys, they practically fall over their collective tongues to lick the stars balls! Or what about when they actually get in a room with these icons to interview them and they turn into girly, sycophantic wretches, just seconds away from wetting their draws in excitement. Then they get home to their little rooms and write about how there wasn't enough serious drama or character development in Expendables 2. Morons.

Serious drama just shit itself

The same goes for comedians when they play-it-straight, the critics act all surprised and taken a back that these guys can do a great performance but year after year they have entertained and excited audiences everywhere. That's no easy feet you know and should be acknowledged.

Our beloved action stars are having a rough time in the market place so far in 2013. It's down to a combination of the gun violence debate, bad press, bad marketing and a changed audience, that's clearly now 12 and would rather see glittery vampires, zombies in love, endless remakes and Paranormal Activity 14 (this time it slams a door and turns off a light in night vision! ooooh!) than these icons of cinema perform tremendous acts of physical endurance all wrapped up in an awesome, timeless tale that'll make you forget your rotten existence for 90 minutes!

I can't help but wander, though, that the rough time would be alleviated somewhat if some of these critics lightened the fuck up, pulled the 'worthy' 'earnest' drama stick out of their ass and reviewed some of these films as the damn good time that they are and are clearly meant to be and urged people to go see them. I have even read critics condemn perfectly good action films by getting involved in the gun debate instead of saying "That's reality and these are MOVIES". It's so irritating, unprofessional and down right bad at their job to not critique them within their own wheelhouse. 

Lastly, critics, stop fucking mentioning how old these guys are and how they're 'passed it'. Please call me when you're 64 and lets see if you could make Expendables 1, brake your neck, recover and then get back to work in a manner of days. It's awesome these guys are old and kicking ass, I'd take 1 Schwarzenegger over 50 Sam Worthingtons that's for damn sure! and how come Eastwood gets a pass? oh yeah because occasionally he directs worthwhile dramas about women who can box or war films about a battle from 70 years ago that everyone should really have gotten over by now! 

Get over yourself critics!

You're worthless idiot hacks and if you had any testicles you'd be dangerous.

Love The Kick Ass Kid

Finding Your Manself At The Movies

Men (and I am talking about the human gender and not their genitals when I say this) come in all shapes, sizes and types.

I will give some of you a moment for the innuendo fueled snickering to subside, and then I will continue.

Sure the image of us as sports and tits loving, lager beer swilling yahoos with a Neanderthal mentality may seem an easy go-to generalisation sometimes, but really our gender is rich, complex and confused. No, really.

The geeky Brit-com Spaced had three main, but very different, examples of the male psyche and, to quote John Hughes (another master of the subject), in the simplest terms and the most convenient definitions: Tim was a Geek, Brian was an Artist and Mike was a wannabe action man; but the show hypothesized that when you get 2 or more males in a room and start some fake gun-play, they would all join in regardless of race, creed, class, style or hobbies.
Now while I myself would have no problem still as a grown man flailing about like a child engaged in a fictional battle with some of my sillier friends, I know plenty of repressed and/or defiantly ‘adult’ chaps that would look forcibly down their nose and scoff at such a bonding ritual (despite, no doubt, strangling that rambunctious child deep within their soul or maybe smothering it with a cushion so they didn’t have to hear its cries of agony and longing).
So I would make an addendum to Spaced’s previously stated claim, and say that the single element that unites us as a gender is action movies.

Now before I go on, I am not being in any way sexist. Women can love action movies too. My wife, for one, loves them and introduced me to some that would become life-long favorites (I am not above calling myself a little inexperienced on the breadth of action available before I met her); but this article is purely speaking to one half of the population I am afraid, the ones with the funny looking, dangly genitals that we were all snickering about just a few paragraphs earlier.

Action Movies, like men, come in a variety of forms. Sure they might end up in the same place (exploding and/or on fire) but depending on their star or stars and their positioning on the fabled A, B and C Lists of Hollywood, they might take very different journeys, or distribution if you will, to get there.
While there has been action in the movies since their very inception (Inception, too, was, in its own way, a trumped up action movie funnily enough), the era that I am currently splashing around in is the late 80’s / early 90’s golden age of either ‘play on a few screens somewhere in the mid-west’ or straight-to-video action gems. I realise I am late to the party, and I understand that there are people more qualified than me out there to wax rhapsodic about the misunderstood genius of Michael Dudikoff, or folks who can reel off the name of every Cynthia Rothrock movie. I mean, up until 5 years ago my pure action knowledge was restricted mainly, but not exclusively, to the Die Hard and Leathal Weapon Franchises! But firstly, this article isn’t necessarily for the hardcore fans and freaks of this high-kicking kingdom; and secondly I can learn fast.
So watch your back Jack, I am coming through!

I presume, although I have never done the research, that you could stop a gent of any age on a street corner in any part of the globe, and they would know the name of someone like Sylvester Stallone, Bruce Willis or Arnold Schwarzenegger (although they might not be able to pronounce that last one).
I would also say that maybe 1 in 4 would know someone of the level of a Van Damme, a Steven Seagal or a Dolph Lundgren; but how many would know a Jeff Speakman? a Sho Kosugi? or a Leo Fong?
And that’s where this article slowly moves from being about how men love action movies, and how there is a rich seam of action movies to suit all men, to being about movie fanatics and just what kind of man are you anyway, huh?

Like almost any genre, thanks to the VHS revolution of the mid 80’s and distributors popping up everywhere dying to make a quick buck on the back of some barely bearable b-movie, peel back the A List Hollywood layer and you will find a labyrinth of seemingly never ending tunnels (not to mix analogies), each one of them containing film after film, each one more obscure and fascinating than the last. Some may be content to go and see the latest Bourne or Bond flick in the cinema and watch the stunt men of millionaire actors engage in the latest fight/chase trend from ‘the streets’ and that would be fine. I go see those movies and they are fantastic, but if someone asked you to name an action star would your first answer really be Matt Damon or Daniel ‘pouty’ Craig?

Others though are going to want more, or will go to the opposite extreme, to become collectors and completists. They used to spend their days rifling through endless racks of clamshell VHS cases trying to find something they’d never heard of before with a glistening man’s fists on the front and a title featuring the word ‘death’ or ‘ninja’, and now they spend their days searching Amazon, E-Bay or any number of online DVD retailers for films starring people like Don ‘The Dragon’ Wilson or anything that features a mutant killer robot, a villain in a bad 80s shiny suit with a female sidekick that looks like Chewbacca in leather hot pants, or an exploding oil rig (in fact, preferably many exploding oil rigs).

I know of what I speak; with the films of Bruce Campbell I was that guy, and any weird films like Traxx (a 1988 film about a highlighted and feathered mullet sporting ex-soldier dude who just wanted to settle in a small town and bake horrible cookies but keeps getting embroiled in trouble), or something like Dead Heat (another 1988 film that I came across sitting on the shelf in the back of a second hand record store), well so much the better.
Film fans have this strange burning urge inside them to know something more obscure than the other guy; to find something only a tiny community of people know about and treasure it. Which is ironic, when deep down all any of us really wants to do is belong; just not to any group big enough so we cease being the best one in it I guess.
It’s either that, or so-called money-making ‘popular’ movies are such lazy piles of crass horseshit that us folks who want to watch something genuinely different have to hunt a bit. Probably six of one and half a dozen of the other, as my old man used to say.

So anyway, as I had always been a film fan, and had always been a little bit of a jack of all trades where being creative was concerned, I decided to blend the two and I started a blog. Then 8 months later I started a podcast (both called The After Movie Diner), and 8 months after that I started ANOTHER podcast focusing specifically on action movies (Dr.Action and the Kick Ass Kid Commentaries). One of the reasons for telling you all of this (and indeed the name of this article for all those still paying attention) is that doing any internet venture leads you, just in the promoting of it, to meet other people who are normally roughly in the same ballpark. And when you meet this community (because 95% of the people I have met online since the beginning have been incredibly nice and now are practically family!) you realise two things:
 1. You don’t know half as much about movies as you pretend to know to the friends who don’t know any better
and
 2. Somewhere along the line you had forgotten that there is a wide, rich and varied world in every genre just waiting for you to delve right in.

For me these realisations both humbled me a little and made me hungry for movies again, not in a Steve Seagal way where I went on a gut inflating rampage devouring films like they were chocolate cake, but in a way that I hadn’t been in almost a decade; specifically, and most recently, action films.

So as I step and stumble through this world of films featuring sweaty muscle bound goons with across-the-board bad hair and bad clothing choices who break arms, bounce crims heads off the hoods of cars and make things go BOOOOOM! I come across people on twitter, websites, blogs, podcasts, facebook posts and forums that give me info, new film titles, actors I could look out for and lead me further down the path to…
I don’t know what…
maybe a film where Louis Gosset Jnr, Al Leong and Robert Davi all have to wrestle a giant, genetically-mutated, electronic boa constricter on a runaway train loaded with conflict Diamonds, that is in the process of being hi-jacked by a Lithuanian splinter group hell-bent on using the diamonds to buy a new super weapon being manufactured by a ludicrously pock-marked gentleman who has decided to wear a series of man-boob-exposingly-tight turtle necks. He is the defecting ex-partner of a New York cop, played by Brian Dennehy, who is down on his luck trying to solve his last case when his daughter gets kidnapped by a death metal band and a megalomaniacal robot Orangutan who is secretly a cover for James Hong and Yaphett Koto who are in league with the Lithuanians as they are trying to get their new, highly potent and illegal strain of cocaine fueled fire arms into Eastern Europe… or something…

My point being, I found a part of my manself again. I reconnected with the fan in me through venturing out there reading and listening to things, and I am learning more about my manself with each man-movie I watch.

Will today be the day that you find your manself?

Written by The Kick Ass Kid