Post-Memorial Day Action
Memorial Day week provides us a great opportunity to rest and relax, to enjoy the company of friends and food, but also to ask important questions, to dig deep into the what really matters, to ask questions that matter — like, for example: What are the greatest action movies of all time? I ask because, here at a large house on the North Carolina shore, a group of people are watching Terminator 2, which I’d rank, along with Aliens and Die Hard, as one of cinema’s three greatest action pictures. All three movies combine, almost perfectly, gripping story, compelling characters, and relentless, totally jaw dropping, did-you-just-see-that?!! action sequences. They’re genre, yes, but they’re models of the form, operating at the highest possible level. I know these films — particularly T2 — have detractors, but as action movies go, can they really be beat?
The fact that you would put Terminator 2 in the same category as Aliens and Die Hard has caused me to reassess my opinion of you, Peter.
— Tony Comstock · May 26, 05:32 PM · #
Spent the weekend on the NC shore myself. Come inland for home-roasted coffee if it tempts.
So, the best ass-whuppin’ movie of all time, is The Professional. That’s because it is, in fact, an ass-whuppin’ movie, with some truly over the top ass-whuppin’. But it’s also sort of an intellectual, art-house type movie. So you can have it on the shelf and your (women) friends won’t sneer at you. You can put it right next to Wings of Desire and Rashomon and don’t have to hide it in the back or in plain brown wrap with Bloodsport or Running Man. It’s a convenience thing.
— Sanjay · May 26, 05:37 PM · #
Sanjay – Hey now, not only do I own Running Man — proudly! — I brought it to the beach. It’s almost perfect beach-watching. The Professional is a pretty good pick, though. The problem is that, as ass-whuppin’ as it is, the ass-whuppin’ bits make up a relatively small portion of the total film.
Tony – I know, I know. What can I say? It’s so awesomely relentless, I just can’t help myself. It has that thing that a great action movie has — rather than start low-key and push upward, it starts at maximum intensity and then attempts to push it even further. The action scenes are perfect, the story never gets in the way, and the characters are people it’s actually possible to care about.
— Peter Suderman · May 26, 05:46 PM · #
Sanjay,
Save that brown paper wrapper for the Wim Wenders, man.
— Matt Frost · May 26, 06:02 PM · #
Sanjay:
1) Are you actually going to make me ask you to send me a pound of your coffee? Or are you going to FUCKING GET THE HINT ALREADY AND OFFER?
2) If you fear your women friend sneering at your DVD collection, they aren’t really your friends.
Peter:
Maybe it’s an age thing. When that movie came out you and John Conner were about the same age, yes? Me? He completely ruined the movie.
— Tony Comstock · May 26, 06:06 PM · #
I swear I am reading Tony as saying that Terminator 2 is far superior to Aliens or Die Hard, Peter. The Iris Indigos that did the CGI for that movie became the computer of choice for macromolecular modelling so they’d show up in quiet protein chemistry labs and have this amazing loud demo on them….
I’ve heard rumors of a movie containing both Jean-Claude Van Damme and ice hockey, which certainly has the necessary ingredients not only for a good action flick but for some kind of Nobel prize, but I have not seen the work in question lest I be disappointed.
The original Transporter (I have not seen 2 or 3) has some awesome ass-whuppin’, particularly in a scene involving an oil slick and bicycle pedals. I got it because its pedigree was such that I thought i might not have to be ashamed of it (cf. Professional) when on my shelf, but it turned out to be sadly nonhighbrow.
Kung Fu Hustle has respectable ass-whuppin’ and a certain campy, tongue-in-cheek intellectual quality that allows you to make the “I only buy it for the interviews with artists” claim straight-facedly, and I return often to the deep well that is the Man with No Name trilogy.
— Sanjay · May 26, 06:16 PM · #
Tony:
1) It’s like this, man. I have a similar problem with young guys who work for me and want me to supply them with offee they’ve had at my house. See, if I send it to you, it gets older, so it’s no longer fresher-roasted than the stuff you can buy. Then you grind it with your el-cheapo propellor grinder. Then you make it with the finest tap water available. Then you think, that guy’s full of himself, but I’ll tell him it was OK and keep buying my shit at Starbucks. And we all lose. Come get the shit fresh. I live in a truly, truly sociologically fascinating community anyway so it’s worth the trip; you could write a dissertation.
2) “Friends” was a euphemism, they weren’t my friends and thank God for that. But I needed to keep, y’know, looking like an intellectual for a couple hours. Van Damme would’ve screwed it all up.
3) What? You were dissing on T2? Why do you hate my country? Why do you hate my Constitution? Why do you hate my Declaration of Independence?
— Sanjay · May 26, 06:23 PM · #
You really are some sort of self-absorbed asshole, aren’t you Sanjay. Let me lay it out for you in clear language. I do not care how your coffee tastes, or at least I do not care in this context. Nor do I care how your pride might be wounded if I misbrewed a carafe of your (now stale) coffee and was unimpressed.
What I want is the collegiality and whimsy of having a pound of your finest hand-roasted delivered to my doorstep FedEx. If you dont’ have the juice at the CDC to use their FedEX account, I’ll give you the Comstock Films corporate account number. I want to say to my wife, “This is Sanjay’s coffee we’re drinking, you know, that guy from TAS who’s losing his hair. He sent a pound, but says we need to stop by the next time we’re in NC to know what it really tastes like.” And if it really doesn’t taste all that good, we’ll just add more cream and sugar.
It is embarrassing for me to have to lay it all out for you like this, but I guess IQ isn’t EQ. I suppose that’s why you’re scientist and I’m the artist.
And yeah, T2 sucks. I’ll cut Peter some slack cause he’s just a pup, but you should know better.
And double yeah; at Casa Comstock Sergio Leone and Ennio Morricone are gods.
— Tony Comstock · May 26, 06:53 PM · #
I think Sanjay is pretty much on the right track with item 3.
I agree that Connor is kind of annoying in that movie (and yes, he was almost exactly my age — maybe 2 or 3 years older?). But the thing is, it’s so well paced that I just don’t care.
— Peter Suderman · May 26, 06:54 PM · #
Didn’t mean to mislead, Tony, I don’t work for CDC. But if I did, shit, man, don’t go drinking stuff sent from places that handle bioweapons. Geez, Louise, Tony, I have your best interests at heart.
OK, OK, I’ll come up with something. A pound is a hefty chunk of my financial resources as I roast in a cast-iron pan, so it’s more like a handful. But I’ll come up with something. Give me a while: the powers-that-be are sending me away from home Sunday for a bit of a long work trip (so I’ll be drinking cruddy coffee for a long while) and I’ve been making preparations, getting the wife and kids set.
— Sanjay · May 26, 07:18 PM · #
I’m sorry if this is a closed board, as most of you seem to know each other’s tastes in coffee and NC vacation spots, but the lack of regard being given to another Arnold vehicle is too much to ignore.
Predator hits all the high notes of a good action flick and then some. Scary bad guy: check. Muscles: check. Quotable one-liners: check (think Jesse the Body). Firepower: sweet-Jesus-they-mow-down-a-forest-with-a-mini-gun check!
I place Predator, Die Hard (for which every movie thereafter is “Die Hard on a X”) and T2 as the Holy Trinity of action.
PS – And yes, T2 could be a generational thing. For a 12 year old, that GnR T2 video was like the call of the Pied Piper.
— Casey · May 26, 07:19 PM · #
Actually I just had a sudden auditory memory flashback to that snot-nosed Conner yelling “I order you” as an about-to-suicide Schwarzenegger, and shuddered. It would’ve been kind of awesome if the T2 had waxed Conner somehow and then the mom and the robot had to “make it all right,” maybe by reprogramming the T2 to be the new John Connor, which would also, I point out, have been some deep shit right there.
Casey: This is as good a time as any to point out the brilliance that is “Alienlovespredator.com.” And, no, no, it’s all strangers ‘cause of the internet. For example I’ve never told Tony that I had my arms ripped off in a tragic knitting accident and have to type this stuff with my nose. That’s the kind of thing I’d like to keep secret.
— Sanjay · May 26, 07:29 PM · #
Predator seems like the top of the second tier to me — perfectly functional, but not creative or innovative in the ways that the three I listed were. Naturally, it also gets cred for being the only movie I’m aware of to feature two future Libertarian Party candidates.
— Peter Suderman · May 26, 07:30 PM · #
To counter Sanjay bringing in The Professional, we should limit this to US movies, else we need to deal with the contingent of John Woo movies running from “A Better Tomorrow” to “Hard Boiled.”
Peter, if you needed to pick an affirmative-action 1990s selection into the 4th place, what would it be? I fear with T2 being the latest at 1991, we are missing a decade of things exploding. Is The Matrix action?
— Rortybomb · May 26, 08:11 PM · #
Yes, I’d follow with The Matrix. Absolutely the most influential action film of the last decade.
John Woo’s old HK films are amazing, particularly the two you mentioned. But they’re somehow different in kind. Both have strong stories (particularly The Killer), but the films still seem more like exercises in gunplay than actual action movies. Certainly, they don’t hew to the conventions of an action blockbuster in the way the others do.
The most innovative low-budget action flicks I’ve seen recently, since we’re on the topic, are both foreign: 1) the parkour-based French film District B13, which has a combination of the most hilariously naive politics and the most awesomely awesome ass-kicking I’ve seen in a long, long time and 2) Night Watch, the Russian vampire regulatory agency flick by Timur Bekmambetov (_Wanted), which is probably the only film I can think of to truly and effectively follow up on what the Wachowskis did with bullet time.
— Peter Suderman · May 26, 09:11 PM · #
Ummm… ah, yes, when I think Die Hard I think, “creative, innovative.”
— Sanjay · May 26, 09:27 PM · #
I couldnt agree more with Casey. Predator is the most watchable of the 1980s action flicks. Another forgotten great one is Point Break. Keanu delivers a perfectly wooden performance, lots of great action scenes, hilarious shows of intensity and silly surfer mysticism, Swayze and Keanu going toe to toe in the B-actor version of Ali-Frazier. I could watch it on a weekly basis.
— pc · May 26, 10:19 PM · #
I heartily concur. I certainly agree with your description of them as “action” movies (duh), but I hope people don’t take the word “action” as a qualifier. Those three movies are not just among the best action movies, but among the best movies, period.
— Ray Butler · May 26, 11:07 PM · #
People are venturing insane preferences here with such certainty, it’s starting to make me think that aesthetic taste is not objective after all. “The Professional”? “Taken” is Luc Besson’s best movie, and that’s only not terrible because he didn’t actually direct it, and also it’s unintentionally funny. I know “Aliens” has the big rep, but I’m not a big fan of horror movies, and “Aliens” is, structurally, indistinguishable from a horror movie. The first hour of T2 is James Camerons’ best work, period. Sarah Connor shrills it up a little after that, and also the explosions start, which makes it pedestrian. But geez, the buildup to the mall scene is just poetry. That is some quality cinema. Tony’s animadversions towards the young John Connor suggest that he hates not only the Declaration of Indepedence. He hates children.
Also, nobody has mentioned “Ronin.” And, yes, “The Matrix” belongs. At the top.
For a definitive take on this topic, all you chumps need to check yourself and then check this brilliant essay.
— Matt Feeney · May 27, 02:47 PM · #
“Tony’s animadversions towards the young John Connor suggest that he hates not only the Declaration of Indepedence. He hates children.”
This suggests, Matt, that you do not know the difference between children and saccharin Holllywood moppets. I weep for your triplets.
— Tony Comstock · May 27, 03:33 PM · #
Oh thank God and Allah be praised! Wrong Matt, again! Those lovely triplets are safe, from this at least!
— Tony Comstock · May 27, 03:37 PM · #
Tony,
I will dress my five kids in identical Public Enemy shirts, and I will train them to jack ATM machines and to ride dirtbikes. Just to spite you. If you hate T2, I don’t see why your wife doesn’t put a gu— oh, never mind.
— Matt Frost · May 27, 06:48 PM · #
The latest Rambo was the best of the new breed of testosterboners. I’ll brook no dissension on this point.
— Sargent · May 28, 02:47 AM · #