Wednesday, December 31, 2008

shoot 'em up

Looking for an escapist piece of postmodern nonsense to distract you from the Holiday Recession Blues? Please try Shoot 'Em Up (2007). I don't know if it's just because I was in the right mood or what, but I watched this with my brother over vacation and frickin' loved it. I have no idea how this got by my radar last year, since usually the presence of Clive Owen in a movie will perk my interest a little.

It's disturbingly, humorously violent. It's aware of what it's trying to do and does it unapologetically. Clive Owen plays the mysterious bad-ass, Paul Giamatti the annoyed villain, and Monica Belluci the lactating prostitute. Don't want to spoil it for you, but several things won this movie over for me.
  1. Wolfmother & Motorhead on the soundtrack.
  2. Scene: Owen is shooting at thugs while protecting a pregnant women, and the empty shells slow-mo onto her exposed, bulging belly.
  3. Owen tries to buy a gun with food stamps.
  4. A carrot is used as a killing weapon.
  5. The movie bends over backwards so that there can be a firefight in a gun factory.
If you're still not convinced, that pretentious A.O. Scott of the NY Times dubbed this a "worthless pile of garbage."
at

2 comments:

  1. The GoodkindJanuary 3, 2009 at 3:07 AM

    Hmmm, I love Clive Owen too, but hated this movie, thought it was unabashed attempt to make violent criminal homicide fun and cool(er) than it already shouldn't be. Gun fluff.

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  2. rchavezJanuary 5, 2009 at 3:31 AM

    No shit its gun fluff. Thats the whole point. An unabashed attempt to make violent criminal homicide fun and cool? Really? That sentence was an unabashed use of the word unabashed in an attempt to sound intelligent.

    Any movie where a man kills another man with a carrot in the first five minutes gets a thumbs up from me. It's so hard to figure out an original homicide these days. This is clearly satire and I think it pokes fun at the Action genre in a fun and thoughtful way.

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