16 BLOCKS...

Saw 16 BLOCKS tonight with Glen. If you're looking for a fun action flick, definitely check it out. Bruce Willis and Mos Def are a great unlikely pair, perhaps Hollywood formula-ish, but hey, formulas become formulas because they work, right? And these guys both bring their own unique flavors to the familiar recipe, an oddball riff on LETHAL WEAPON-ness, with Willis as an over-the-hill detective with nothing to lose, Def as the hapless lowlife screw-up who can make the prosecution's case against a group of cops gone bad...

I actually, finally, didn't feel like laughing at David Morse in the role of the bad guy heavy in this. I can't remember every time I've seen him play assassin or thug or destined-to-go-postal (I *do* remember him in that Hackman/Hughes/Sarah Jessica COMA update... EXTREME MEASURES?), but it seems like I've seen him do it a LOT (OH, he was also in 12 MONKEYS, but in a better fitting role), and almost every time, I've found him to be hard to buy as dangerous or scary.

I know some of that comes from my first imprinting of him being the quiet doctor on ST. ELSEWHERE, who was not a bad guy, soft spoken, a good man, sadly, by the harshest of misfortunes, driven to a bit of madness, but not a bad guy. I think he's been picked for these hitman type roles because he's not the guy you'd expect to be the dangerous one, which of course makes him exactly the guy you expect to be the dangerous one, right? He is picked to play up the "quiet guy, keeps mostly to himself" idea of menacing. Well, I just never bought it. He seems more mannequin in those roles than killing machine. In BLOCKS, tho, he gets to be all personality, That Guy, smart, ready with the patter in the tensest of situations, connected to other human beings. I really think he plays this buddy-buddy guy who goes bad much better than the cold blank stare killing type.

ST. ELSEWHERE. Does any station anywhere carry that show anymore? Denzel, Harmon, Begley, frickin DEAL OR NO DEAL glove-on-the-head Mandel, and the voice of KITT! *sigh* What a great show that was, dayumn! I think it was channel 38 here in Boston, before it became the UPN a decade or so ago, they would play ELSEWHERE and CHEERS whenever they had a gap in their programming that wasn't bought up for infotisement. Beantown pride.

I don't think they ever played GOODNIGHT, BEANTOWN, tho. Go figure. I miss ya, Bill B. Who else ever held his own opposite The King and the Hulk?

Hrmm... I was talking about... What was I talking about? Oh yeah! 16 BLOCKS... How to boil it down into a synopsis...?

Oh, I know! I sent Glen an email listing movie options downtown. Let's see how I put it then...

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I'd see...

STAY ALIVE @ 8
Video game that kills its players in real life the way they die in the game, only at fewer frames per second, and fewer polygons.

THANK YOU FOR SMOKING @ 7.55
Dark comedy about a lobbyist for big tobacco trying to be the good guy AND do his job in the face of mounting evidence that smoking kills. Obviously fiction.

HILLS HAVE EYES @ 7.45
Family mutated by atomic bomb testing likes to eat visitors.

16 BLOCKS @ 8
Good cop/detective Bruce Willis has to get witness-against-bad-cops Mos Def, across town to testify. The rest of the police force is against them.

ULTRAVIOLET @ 8
Milla Jovovich is a supermodel superweapon that superkills supereverybody. Also, she's the only thing standing between superfreedom and supertyranny, like all supermodels. Based on a true story.

Any of that look good to you?

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V FOR VENDETTA and INSIDE MAN were not on the list because I'd seen them already. For full price at Boston Common ($9.75 I think?) I wanted to see something new.

By the way, both flicks are excellent. V is definitely more excellent, tho. If you're in a situation where you have to choose - see V first. When you get out of that, flip a coin to decide whether to sneak into INSIDE MAN or 16 BLOCKS.

Anyhow, Glen came back to me with STAY ALIVE or 16 BLOCKS, and I had to go with BLOCKS. I *know* STAY ALIVE is gonna be crap, even with Adam Goldberg as one of the gamer victims, and if I'm gonna pay full price for a show, I'd rather it was better than crap.

(I saw DOOM at a matinee.)

Not that DOOM was crap...

Cuz it's actually a pretty satisfying spam-in-a-space-cabin action flick with a couple of creative kills and one very entertaining "first person shooter" segment, heh...

I just, y'know... couldn't be sure of that before seeing it...

I'm just sayin =)

16 BLOCKS! I highly recommend it for an adrenaline fixx with much more heart than you'd expect. Maybe even smarmy for a moment or three, but those moments balanced against the rest of the cat-and-mouse action are just right. There are some clever little twists to keep things interesting, but nothing you haven't seen before. They're well employed here is all.

You'll likely find the affectations Mos Def bestows upon his character Eddie's voice and speechifying a bit annoying, but except for losing a couple of lines of dialogue to apparent mumbliness, it's worth enduring to get to know Eddie.

Kind of interesting, maybe not really Important - and the marketing doesn't push the idea - but from my reckoning of the events in the movie, versus the length of the experience of watching the movie, most of the film seems to happen "in real time," y'know? A la 24 and NICK OF TIME (Johnny Depp vs. Christopher Walken a few years back). Just a little interesting thing...

After the movie Glen gave me the dumbest headache. I got a ride home from him, and when dropping me off, he started talking about how he doesn't get how people can be allowed to park in a bus stop space in front of my building. The T bus stop sign has another sign on the same post that says "NO PARKING" with some conditions written below it. I explained that you can park there only for certain hours, when the bus isn't running. So he looks at the sign a little more closely, and says, "6am to 7pm except Saturday and Sunday." Or was it "weekends?" I'm not sure.

So he says that a few times out loud...

(You can see it coming, can't you?)

"Wait, 6am to 7pm... EXCEPT Saturday and Sunday... Does that mean I CAN park here on the weekend? No, I can park here EXCEPT then, right? No, but I CAN park here when it's NOT 6am to 7pm, so EXCEPT that would be that I CAN park... What does that mean?"

I wasn't about to try to explain/parse that out for Glen. I got out of the car, said "Good night," and walked away into my building.

I'm not sure how the sign copy would be correctly diagrammed and factored out, but I'm sure it wil match what I do know - that cars are parked in the bus stop space overnight on weeknights and all day and night on weekends and don't get ticketed or towed.

Keep on keepin on~

"But you can be smart every day!"
--- Mos Def, as Eddie, 16 BLOCKS.