by Thom Yee

The Raid images courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics

Throughout most of 2012, I kept hearing about this great Indonesian action movie.  It won the Midnight Madness Award at its debut at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2011 and proceeded to earn further accolades at the James Dublin International Film Festival in Ireland and the Imagine Film Festival in Amsterdam.  Most of the early reviews referred to it as The Raid (which is what I’ll be calling it), though it’s known as The Deadly Raid in its homeland and was released locally as The Raid:  Redemption.

For various reasons, mostly having to do with becoming unhinged in the land of wind and ghosts, back taxes, lost passports, and Malaysian judicial canings, it took me a long time to catch up to it, but I finally watched The Raid a few days ago.

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by Thom Yee

A Good Day to Die Hard images courtesy of 20th Century Fox

The first thing I asked when somebody told me there was a fifth Die Hard movie coming out was, “Is it set at Christmas?”  It’s not a necessary element.  It’s not central to the plot, nor is it something you contemplate in the overall context of the films.  But it’s important.  To me, the first Die Hard, the one, true Die Hard, is fundamentally three things:

1) a superlative action movie;

2) an all-around perfect movie; and

3) a quintessential Christmas movie.

It’s an atmospheric element that lends so much to the feel of the original that it’s inextricably, inexorably, and never-endlingly linked to what the Die Hard experience is.

A Good Day to Die Hard is not set at Christmas.

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by Thom Yee

Die Hard images courtesy of 20th Century Fox

You and I need to talk about Die Hard.

You either like the Die Hard movies or you’re an idiot.  Or, perversely, you haven’t seen them.  The thing about Die Hard, though, is that you also have to be an idiot to love them.  They’re all over the place, at times sublimely rendered, at other times unexpectedly dull and soul-less, even despite all the guns and swearing.

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by Thom Yee

Looper images courtesy of TriStar Pictures and Alliance Films

Conventional wisdom tells us writers (one of whom I do not claim to be) that time travel stories are tricky things.  That might depend on your background or what sort of stories you’ve been exposed to, but all it really takes to write one is a basic understanding of the rules you’ve set up.  Whether you’ve subscribed to Back to the Future principles or something a little more complex, all it takes is some fourth-dimensional thought and a reasonable grasp of cause and effect.  Keeping track of what’s going on isn’t what’s difficult; rather, it’s writing a story that should involve time travel at all that’s the trick.  What does time travel as a device bring to your story?  If it’s just a way of framing it, then that’s probably a wasted opportunity.  If it serves an integral purpose, whether it’s central to your plot or drives the story throughout, then you might have something worth peoples’ time.

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by Thom Yee

Django Unchained images courtesy of The Weinstein Company and Columbia Pictures

As Grace mentioned in her not-as-entirely-inadequate-as-usual review of The Hobbit:  An Unexpected Journey, reviewing epic-length movies can be a bit tricky.  There’re just too many things going on, literally, symbolically and metaphorically that it can be hard to get your bearings, sit down, write a review, and be satisfied with what you just wrote.  Though Django Unchained isn’t quite the epic that The Hobbit will prove to be over the course of three films… it is, at least, also a three-hour movie.   And, of course, obviously… Quentin Tarantino.

It’s nearly impossible to have a discussion of any Tarantino movie without discussing his previous films, their inspirations, and film in general.  Tarantino movies, though occupying a very insular and specific space in the movie landscape, are not at all self-contained.  Whether you subscribe to the Tarantino universe theory — the realer-than-real and movie-movie universes — or you’ve just noticed things like Red Apple cigarettes and Big Kahuna burgers coming up more than once, Tarantino films aren’t meant to just be seen and catalogued in the back of your memory.  Continue reading →