HOW CAN YOU TELL A COKED-UP MONGOOSE FROM TONY JAA?

Tony Jaa's the one with less fur. That's not a joke, that's actually the only comparison I can think of.

Here's a simple breakdown of the five dumbest fucking things you can do:

(5) Forget that Clint only fired five shots.
(4) Cross the streams
(3) Forget about Dre.
(2) Let Egyptian kids fuck around on Twitter (this Bud's for you, Hosni Ceausescu)
(1) Get Tony Jaa pissed off

It's a really, really bad idea to get Tony Jaa pissed off. Very large amounts of shit gets broke when Tony Jaa gets pissed off. Unlike a lot of his predecessors in martial arts cinema, Tony Jaa takes shit really fucking personally. Jet Li will assume the form of the ocean and through a weird blend of reification and Zen poetics end up leveling your shit like a natural disaster, but his emotions are always in check, because he becomes existence. Jackie Chan will flip through his Buster Keaton DVDs and use stunts and physical comedy to entertain you into submission. Bruce, however, would get pissed every now and then and fuck everybody in a five mile radius up, but with the exception of that one scene in The Big Boss where he knifes the henchmen to death at the ice factory, he was always in control, however fierce his style might be.

By contrast, Tony Jaa looks legitimately dangerous in his fight scenes. As in, there's probably more than one stunt dude somewhere in Thailand breathing really carefully and grumbling to himself that at least the check cleared and once these ribs heal up and my leg is reattached I'm going to get a surplus Soviet tank and go over to Tony's place. To his credit, though, Tony does a ton of insanely dangerous shit himself; he isn't asking the extras to do anything he wouldn't do. Only problem with that is, Tony Jaa is fucking crazy.

His entire life was based around learning martial arts so he could make really violent movies where he owned the fucking shit out of everyone in sight, and this ambition was realized with Ong-Bak: Muay Thai Warrior (released in the US as Ong-Bak: Thai Warrior). The opening scene sets the tone in an indirectly perfect way, featuring country boy Tony Jaa competing with a shitload of other dudes to see who can climb a tree the fastest; as they climb, they all try to throw each other off the tree, and by the end of the sequence, dudes are falling off the top of the fucking tree in uninterrupted takes and crunching on the ground.

Tony, being the star, wins, which means he gets to get ordained as a monk. Meanwhile, a bunch of sleazy city dudes are trying to buy the village's prized possession, a statue called Ong-Bak. The locals steadfastly refuse, which leads to the city guys chopping the head off the statue and scurrying back to Bangkok. The villagers send Tony Jaa to the big city with all the money they can collect, to go see his dickhead cousin Humlae (Petchtai Wongkamlao) to help him get the statue's head back.

When Tony Jaa arrives in Bangkok he finds that his dickhead cousin has befriended a teenage girl named Muay who holy shit is like the fucking Thai Carol Kane with that voice. When she's not talking she's pretty, but gaaaaaaaadDAMN do you want her to shut the fuck up once she gets started. Still, once you get used to it, her voice isn't that bad. Kinda like Carol Kane.

Humlae has developed a bunch of city ways—dying his hair, gambling excessively, running various short cons to pay off his debts—which lead inexorably to Tony Jaa wandering into an underground boxing club. The place is run by a bad guy in a wheelchair with a voicebox, who hangs out with a bunch of attentive and decorative girls and some other gangster who laughs a lot with whom Voicebox Guy gambles on the fights. The other gangster is thoroughly getting his ass handed to him by Voicebox Guy, until Tony Jaa accidentally volunteers to fight this big mean motherfucker, when all he's trying to do is get to the cashier to get his money—that Humlae stole to gamble on the fights—back. It looks perilous for Tony, until Tony just up and owns the fucking guy with one move.

Tony, pissed at Humlae but fond of the girl Muay, grumpily tries in vain to find the statue while Humlae keeps fucking up and getting bad guys pissed off at him and requiring Tony to do all kinds of awesome stunt work evading bad guys (one shot during a chase scene reveals some graf on the wall that says “Hey Speilberg, let do it together!” [all misspellings the movie's], which actually was a message from the director to Steven Spielberg suggesting that they make a movie, though the syntax is ambiguous enough Spielberg, had he seen the picture, might have thought someone was asking him to shtup).

Tony's quest for the statue leads back to Voicebox Guy's boxing club, where Tony has to fight a few more dudes. The first is a racist Australian guy, in a possible homage to the racist New Zealander Bruce Lee teaches the art of fighting without fighting in Enter the Dragon. Tony Jaa, however, teaches the Australian the art of fighting with fighting, beating the living fucking shit out of the guy.

Next up is a Japanese guy with a fro (the thumbs-his-nose-at-causality nerd in me couldn't help but think “Sushi K from Snow Crash really fuckin came down in the world since the future, man, damn . . .”) and really fast feet, with whom Tony has a highly entertaining fight.

Then, another goddamn white guy, who takes advantage of Tony's fatigue to almost win, before Tony just goes like “fuck this” and finally lays his ass out. After this, the crowd throws coins at Tony in recognition of his off-the-chain insanity and badassness, thoroughly pissing off Voicebox Guy, who's been betting against Tony the whole time, and delighting his giggly adversary, who makes out like a goddamn bandit.

The fighting stops for a couple minutes, to reveal that Voicebox Guy is annoyed with his underling who stole Ong-Bak's head and introduced the headache that is Tony Jaa into his midst. The underling, bristling at this rebuke, kills a hooker (who happens to be Muay's sister) by jamming a fistful of cocaine into her face. This leads to a wild tuk-tuk chase (a tuk-tuk apparently being the product of a wild night of sex between a golf cart, a rickshaw, and a Mini Cooper), at the end of which, Tony Jaa finds a cache of stolen Buddhas, and is exhorted by Voicebox Guy to go out way out in the sticks to the Burmese border to have a rope-fist fight against Voicebox Guy's henchman who shoots himself in the tits with steroids so he's invulnerable to pain. If Tony throws the fight he gets Ong-Bak back, as well as Muay and Humlae.

Tony throws the fight, but Voicebox Guy decides to be a fucking asshole—he is, after all, the bad guy—and Tony is forced to go out to this cave in the mountains and own a few dozen more bad guys and recover the head of Ong-Bak and rescue Muay. In the ensuing scramble, Humlae (who has been getting gradually less buffoonish and douche-y over the course of the picture) nobly sacrifices himself, and the severed head of a much-larger Buddha crushes Voicebox Guy to death. Humlae's last wish is that Tony Jaa put Muay through college and make sure she grows up right.

The chases and fight scenes are extremely well done and Tony Jaa is a staggering fucking badass in them. His moves, based on really old-school Muay Thai, are absolutely spectacular, with a startling amount of power for such a little guy (Tony claims to be 5'6” . . . I don't know, everyone else in this picture must be 6' plus if that's the case; not to generalize about SE Asia but I find that highly unlikely) and he has a couple positively terrifying finishing moves, one in particular where he wraps his legs around the dude's shoulders and chops him with superhuman ferocity in the fuckin head with the sides of both hands about eight times . . . that's just gotta hurt. Also Tony beats the fuck out of a guy with his legs literally on fire (the first take, Tony burned his eyebrows off because the fire got out of control, but insisted on doing a couple more takes).

Now, you might read through all that and go, “Holy shit, that movie sounds crazy.” You'd be absolutely right, too. It is totally fucking crazy. But it pales—pales, I say—in comparison to Ong-Bak 2: The Beginning.

The stories behind this movie are crazy enough: Tony, who was directing this time around, was rumored to have disappeared for a couple months midway through production. The juiciest rumor—started by the movie's producer, no less—was that he'd had a nervous breakdown and wandered into the jungle to randomly kick ass. Tony claimed that this wasn't true, but was vague about what exactly had happened. Either way, not the smoothest shoot.

I'm reluctant to write too much about Ong-Bak 2, because this Cracked article sums it up pretty much perfectly. Take a few minutes to read that and meet me on the other side of this picture of a typical scene.


Yeah, that's a picture of Tony Jaa ripping a motherfucker's larynx out with his fingers. He does that a few times.

Okay, the thing to keep in mind about that Cracked article is that it understates the case. Ong-Bak 2 is what would happen if you took a 10-12 year old boy who was into fantasy novels and martial arts movies and got him tripping his nuts off on a sugar high and gave him some crayons and told him to write a movie script. It has flashbacks less because they're necessary and more because Tony is like “oh yeah, right, and while all this shit was going on, this thing that happened a few years ago is what 'explains' what's going on.” After about an hour, you can kind of get a bead on what the fuck is going on, and then it's time for Tony to go have his final boss fight against the evil prince and a couple hundred ninjas.

Tony doesn't dwell on the backstory, which happens in no rational order, and is basically about how his 15th century nobleman father raised young Tony to be gay and sent him to dancing school, where he fucked up at being gay by falling for a girl. So then there's some intrigue or something and Tony gets kidnapped by a bad good guy, and then a good good guy re-kidnaps him before a bunch of dudes shoot the good good guy with arrows and Tony gets sold into slavery and then thrown into a muddy pit to wrestle a crocodile, whereupon a mysterious dude throws Tony a knife with which he dispatches the crocodile, and then the mysterious dude takes Tony off to the middle of nowhere and teaches him all kinds of ridiculously awesome martial arts and teaches him how to blow shit up. The movies shows that he's learned all this shit by jettisoning the kid actor who had been playing the lead character and plunking Tony Jaa down to have a succession of fights where he casually owns the master of each discipline. The chronology jumps around all over the place, and Tony gets his extremely bloody revenge against the slave traders who threw him into the crocodile pit as a kid, and liberates all their slaves. Then the fucking prince or whoever he is shows back up and starts acting like a dick and Tony kills a whole bunch of people and then infiltrates the palace, where the girl he'd been in love with as a little kid is there as the lead dancer. But, rather than have a big romantic reunion, Tony has to kill a couple hundred ninjas and then realize that the guy who taught him all the cool shit he knows actually killed his father, and they square off to have a boss fight but then the guy tells Tony to kill him to avenge his father's death, so Tony kills him and then fights a couple hundred more ninjas and kills the bad guy except he doesn't and Tony Jaa, improbably, is about to get owned when the camera cuts to black and basically fucking says, per the Cracked article, “Clap your hands if you believe in fairies and Tony Jaa will live.” No shit.

That's not even a spoiler, because you actually have to watch Ong-Bak 2 in its entirety to grasp how fucking weird that ending is, and the even weirder reality that that ending doesn't totally suck, in spite of how ridiculous it sounds. The thing is, the entire movie is just as ridiculous, and there really is no other way it could have ended, other than in some way you simply were not fucking expecting.

But narrative, shmarrative. Does Tony Jaa own motherfuckers in Ong-Bak 2? You're goddamn right Tony Jaa owns motherfuckers in Ong-Bak 2. The insanity of the fight scenes in the first Ong-Bak—oh, and by the way, to clear up any misunderstanding, there is literally no connection whatsoever between Ong-Bak and Ong-Bak 2 except Tony Jaa ownage and some vague Buddhist connections—pale in comparison (pale, I say, pale) to Ong-Bak 2. Tony Jaa kills people with fucking grenades in the fucking 15th century. Tony Jaa makes elephants bend to his will toward the beginning, and he has an elephant show up to help him fuck people up toward the end. (Tony likes elephants; there's a whole bunch of elephant-related awesomeness in The Protector as well; The Protector warrants a whole post of its own, which it'll get soon). And there is plenty of fighting that's just straight up hand-to-hand or with swords, and it's all amazing. What makes it all the more thrilling is the sneaking suspicion that Tony might have forgotten to give a fuck about safety regulations while filming, because seriously, some of that shit looks like some extras fucking bought it (and at least one of those elephants should have lawyered up before taking part in Tony's batshit stunt work).

It's almost a shame that he decided to make an Ong-Bak 3 where he tried to link the first two by implying that his character in the first was the reincarnation of his character from the second, because the sheer novelty of having a second movie that bore that little resemblance to the first would have been goddamn perfect. Oh, well.

It's tempting to conclude with something along the lines of “Tony Jaa immediately redefined the hierarchy of action gods with his arrival on the scene etc etc” except for the fact that he's so fucking crazy he's in his own category. This tiny elephant-obsessed anger-management issue having motherfucker cannot be compared to any other entity ever. He is simply Tony Jaa. All praise is due.

ALEX IS: A SOPHISTICATED CINEASTE

Well, so much for writing a blog post about Commando. There's no way I can do a better job than this kid. Seriously, if Gina Gershon movies ever get distribution in Tanzania I'm going to have to turn my whole blog over to this little guy.

R.I.P. PREMIERE.COM

Once one of the best movie magazines we had, and then in its web-only edition the first place that ever paid me to write for them (a sign of excellent taste), Premiere as we knew it has ceased to be. It's now been folded into some French entertainment website. The exact details, whatever. Premiere will live on in my memorial gratitude.

In all the hooraw in the site's last days, they never got around to posting the last thing I wrote for them (the original idea for which was James Comtois' that he let me have because he couldn't think of 7 movies to fill the list out). That they never posted it is a shame, because I rather liked it, but the good news is they did pay me for it. My good friend and editor John DeVore told me (well, I think is what he said, if it turns out I heard wrong, it's my fault not his) that this piece was basically mine to do with as I chose since they never posted it. What I choose is to share it with y'all; it's in a different style and format than I usually employ here, but hey. Fuck monotony. (Ed. Note: anything that contradicts anything that the author wrote here on this blog is because he was talking out of both sides of his mouth to please The Man like the shameless little slut that he is):


****

7 MOVIES THAT MAKE NO SENSE (BUT THAT WE STILL LOVE)

by

Danny Bowes

We've all been there: watching some movie, thoroughly enjoying it, but one thing (or more) comes up and you're like “wait a minute . . . what?” If the rest of the movie's good enough, more often than not we'll cut it some slack, but that doesn't make it make any more sense. Here are a few examples of the most forgivable “huh?” movies:



1—Inception (2010) dir. Christopher Nolan

Dreams within dreams within dreams (within dreams?) Christopher Nolan's enormously successful summer mind-heist blockbuster features a lot of very attractive, well-dressed people doing a lot of very attractive, well-photographed things. And talking. A lot.

But what about all those rules? The thing about attractive people is that you want to be cool enough to understand everything they say, so that they'll think you're smart enough to sleep with. But much like the previous sentence, not everything the comely cast of Inception says holds up to close scrutiny. Or any scrutiny at all: why, if it's so important to use your own totem, does Leo DiCaprio use Marion Cotillard's? That's just the first of many threads that, if pulled, start to unravel the movie.

Why none of that matters: They're all so pretty. And the zero-gravity fight scenes. And that awesome BWWAAAAAH sound. And Edith Piaf.




2—Mulholland Dr. (2001) dir. David Lynch

You could plug most David Lynch movies in this spot, since they're all really good and none of 'em make a lick of rational sense. And do not, whatever you do, ask your pothead friend to help. You'll be listening to them make as little sense as the movie for twice as long, without getting to see Naomi Watts naked.

So . . . what the hell's going on here? Ya got me. It looks cool, sounds cool, makes a couple thought-provoking statements about the subjectivity of reality (I think) and both literally and metaphorically deals with the cruelty of the movie industry (maybe?)

Why it's still great: Naomi Watts and Laura Harring may be the sexiest couple in the history of cinema. The “no hay banda” scene is killer. And even if the movie's gibberish, you still have to pretend you like it to shut annoying David Lynch fans up, since nothing is worse than having them tell you you “just don't get it.” Cut them off by saying “I enjoy it on a post-rational level” and go get another beer.



3—The Matrix (1999) dir. The Wachowski Bros.

Sure the sequels sucked, but the first one still holds up. The action's great, no one says “whoa” like Keanu, there is no spoon, and any movie with Joe Pantoliano playing a weaselly douchebag is automatically watchable at least for his scenes. However, there is the matter of the script . . .

“The body cannot live without the mind”? Seriously, Morpheus? If that was really the case, the whole country would drop dead each Election Day. The machines spent all this time and brainpower coming up with a virtual reality for human beings to live in, when they could just as easily have kept everyone in a coma. But that's not even the most confusing thing: a bunch of artificial intelligences smart enough to subjugate humanity, and they can't find a more efficient energy source than the bioelectricity generated by a human body? For real?

Why none of that matters: Because they need a virtual reality in order for Neo, Trinity, Morpheus et al to do all that cool bullet time stuff. And make no mistake, The Matrix is a cool action movie, not a deep science fiction opus.



4—The Terminator (1984) dir. James Cameron

Arnold Schwarzenegger is sent from the future by evil computer Skynet to unleash hell on southern California (as redundant an idea as that might be) and kill the mother of the leader of the human resistance before she can give birth to him.

But wait . . . Much like the computers in The Matrix, Skynet is in serious need of an Occam's Razor program: it's going up against a small human resistance composed of biologically frail opponents who need food, water, and sleep and often make emotional mistakes. The humans squeak out a couple lucky military victories and Skynet's first response is to launch this byzantine time-travel plot that violates causality and the laws of physics instead of just making a few more new Terminators and just laser-gunning the fleshlings?

However . . . Are you really willing to give up the awesomeness of The Terminator (and the first sequel) just because the central premise doesn't make any sense? That's what I thought.



5—Superman (1978) dir. Richard Donner

Young Kal-El is sent by his parents from the dying planet Krypton to a small, out-of-the-way place called Earth for his own protection, where he Anglicizes his name and finds he can do all kinds of cool stuff like fly and see through women's clothes.

Not to belabor the obvious, but to belabor the obvious: No one can tell Clark Kent is Superman just because he has glasses on? I thought the Jedi mind trick was invented on Tattoine, not Krypton.

Again, obviously: The general public had gotten over that little problem before the actor who played Superman in this movie was born. Christopher Reeve was great, and the whole movie really holds up in terms of craft, narrative drive, and genuine wide-eyed innocence. Also, Gene Hackman and Ned Beatty are the greatest closeted gay couple ever.



6—Vertigo (1958) dir. Alfred Hitchcock

Jimmy Stewart develops a fear of heights after a terrible accident, and has to leave the police force. An old college buddy hires him to follow his wife (Kim Novak), who's acting weird.

I'm not saying it's not still one of the 5 best movies ever made, but . . . The college buddy wants to kill his wife and make it look like a suicide. Sure, why not. Okay, why does he hire Kim Novak to pretend to be her? Wouldn't it be easier to just snuff the wife and bribe some cops to falsify the evidence? Same probability you'll get away with it, much simpler. And the whole thing about bringing Jimmy Stewart there to be a witness to the fake suicide and assuming that Jimmy Stewart will have a panic attack and not see the college buddy throw the dead body of his wife (remarkably well preserved, since Jimmy Stewart didn't smell her) off the tower? Little complicated.

But, still, it's one of the 5 best movies ever made: It's so gorgeously shot, and Jimmy Stewart is so good playing a guy whose obsessive love for a woman he barely knows drives him to mania, and the ending is so beautifully tragic and ironic that, really . . . let the logic loopholes slide. It'll be okay.



7—The Usual Suspects (1995) dir. Bryan Singer

A modern classic, made stars out of Kevin Spacey (temporarily) and Benicio del Toro, though Gabriel Byrne was still the coolest guy in the whole movie. Well, except Keyser Soze. Unless he is Keyser Soze . . .?

Spoiler alert: he's not: When Kevin Spacey is revealed to be Keyser Soze, after spending the whole movie tying Chazz Palmintieri in knots with that story about the $91 million in coke and mythical Hungarian/Turkish gangsters and Pete Postlethwaite as a Japanese guy (a clear sign something was off), it raises the distinct possibility that the movie we just spent two hours watching was all a lie and never happened. Or was Kevin Spacey lying to protect Gabriel Byrne? Probably not. Either way, untangling everything causes massive headaches.

Or, more accurately, only if you let it: There's plenty of textual support for the “twist” ending, that only seems like one because the story is so masterfully constructed. Actually, part of the appeal of The Usual Suspects is that it's confusing. It's a story being told by a con man. If you were able to see where it was going before he wanted you to, he wouldn't be much of a con man. As with the other movies on this list, too, it's better to figure it out afterward (if possible). Until then, enjoy the ride.


****


So, yeah. I'll miss Premiere. Thankfully Tor.com's still going strong; I'd hate to get a rep for killing every publication I write for. I'll have to kill more than one to do so in any case, and I have no intention of doing so. I'm in the process of finding more freelance work, and will keep you all updated on what far-flung spots in cyberspace are kind enough to print my ravings. 'Til then, happy weekend, my friends.

THAT THING DOES NOT GO THERE: A LOOK AT SOFTCORE CABLE MOVIES

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"AWWWWWWWW, HELL . . ."

Today is Nick Nolte's birthday. Rather than be all shocked about the fact that he's still having birthdays (cats who drive drunk and fucked on GHB tend to elicit that kinda response) let's instead celebrate the greatest thing Nick Nolte was ever part of: 48 Hrs.



Make no mistake, Nick Nolte fucking owns shit in 48 Hrs. Everybody remembers it as Eddie's big breakout vehicle, and while it's true, Eddie's amazing in 48 Hrs, Nick Nolte is awesome enough that it raises the bar for Eddie: “Oh, you think you're going to be awesome in this movie? Well I'm 21 years old and essentially a sentient testicle, I WILL COMPETE WITH YOU MOTHERFUCKER.” That's acting, Gary.

What makes 48 Hrs so brilliant is that, unlike every other mismatched partner movie (yes, including Lethal Weapon) that followed, it had the balls to make Nick Nolte a total, balls-out fucking racist. He claims, later in the movie, that he was just saying the shit that he did (calling Eddie a spearchucker, making cracks about watermelons, with the coup de grace “One thing you should know about me, nigger, I fight dirty” before suckerpunching him) to wind Eddie up. Eddie doesn't totally buy it, nor should be; you get the feeling that Eddie eventually warms up to Nick Nolte out of a sort of exasperated awe at just what a fucking asshole he is.

That might sound odd, except for the fact that any transcendant state of being is inherently interesting, even the state of being a transcendant fucking asshole. This is a harder level of existence to attain than one might think at first glance. For example, I'm an asshole; I'm loud, I curse too much, I shoot first and ask questions later emotionally. But ultimately, I'm harmless, since I mean well, and when I find out that some asshole-y thing I've said offends someone I'm genuinely contrite and I apologize. A fucking asshole doesn't really care, or at least not enough to stop. Nick Nolte takes that and runs with it (for a couple feet before he starts wheezing from all the cigarettes), creating, in 48 Hrs lead Jack Cates, perhaps the biggest prick “good guy” in the history of cinema.

Director Walter Hill stages a pretty impressive long take right toward the beginning of the picture, where Nick Nolte arrives at the cop shop to find all hell breaking loose—cops yelling, shoving perps around, general bedlam—and has a few conversations with other cops, concluding with Nick Nolte begin hauled into irate lieutenant Frank MacRae's office. Walter Hill is enough of a mensch that doing something difficult and badass just for the sheer fuck of it would be an acceptable explanation, but here this long take serves another purpose. It shows, in a couple random conversations where he's not even really all that pissed off, what a swaggering fucking asshole Nick Nolte is. Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying he's not awesome (he is), but holy Christ is he a dick. The uninterrupted take is a great way of showing “oh no, I'm not using editing or lighting or anything, Nick Nolte's just a grumpy, growly fuck in this movie.” The use of cinema vocabulary as exposition in a nutshell, kids.

Of course, if Nick Nolte's the good guy, the bad guy has to be an even bigger twat, and 48 Hrs has a humdinger. James Remar, like Nick Nolte, has his finest hour in this picture as uberbaddie Ganz, who takes an almost sexual delight in blowing holes in people with guns. This is noted by the hooker he hires toward the beginning; the movie makes an excellent point out of her being way way way way too attractive to be a run-of-the-mill hooker (she's the white girl world record holder in the Ass Olympics, for one) and unsubtly showing how little James Remar could give a fuck, while even more unsubtly showing the utter joy he takes in shooting cops. This, of course, is not right. And this, amazingly, is how someone can be an even bigger asshole than Nick Nolte in this movie: James Remar is a rude, snarling, poorly socialized shitbag even when he isn't killing cops.

One of the most interesting things about 48 Hrs to me has always been its pace. One associates cop movies with having super fast pace, racing ahead like a patrol car with its siren on. 48 Hrs certainly doesn't drag by any means, and I want to be perfectly clear that in saying the picture feels like it's two hours long even though it's about an hour thirty five I am not saying that it's slow paced. It's simply a very dense movie, with several very tense set pieces that stretch time because they expand in the moment; their grandeur exceeds their physical size. The main one is, of course, the scene where Eddie tears the redneck bar a new asshole. (Warning, clip is NSFW because everything awesome is NSFW)



This is the most famous scene in the picture for a very good reason: Eddie rules to a degree you need really sophisticated equipment to calculate. But the reason he's given the space to do so is that Nick Nolte allows himself to become a secondary character for the whole thing. A less secure actor would be worried about some 21 year old punk comedian coming in and hogging the show, but Nick Nolte was like, “ya know what, fuck it, let's see what happens when I just hang out at the bar and don't pull focus.” A less secure actor would have gotten all up in Walter Hill's shit and demanded some kind of increased role in the scene. But no, Nick Nolte sits back and lets his co-star kick fucking ass. Sure, this sounds like congratulating someone for not kicking a puppy, but fuck it. It's his birthday.

Also, playing the straight man is a lot harder than just standing there while the funny dude is funny. The funny dude needs to be fed energy, but not too much, because the straight man can't pull focus. It's amazing that Nick Nolte does all the crazy shit that he does in this, like running around with long (and damn luxurious for such a macho dude) hair and chainsmoking and hitting his fucking flask while driving and doing so as a fucking cop and basically acting like a goddamn Bukowski character . . . and he still manages to do so subtly enough to fulfill his duties as a straight man. Of course, him so perfectly embodying the grouchy, jowly, square-ass white dude gives Eddie the freedom to be the equal and opposite reaction as a witty, fit, stylish black guy. The fact that Eddie gives the greatest debut performance in movies since Orson Welles is only partly because Eddie's awesome: give Nick Nolte some credit for throwing those batting practice fastballs right in Eddie's sweet spot so he could knock the fuckers out of the park.

The success of 48 Hrs—and the fact that the hard-drinking fuck-you lifestyle wasn't just getting in character—led to Nick Nolte playing a lot of this type of dude. Periodically he'd branch out and play a civilian, but it was always hard to buy him as a normal dude who isn't one ill-fated round of shots away from drinking himself to death. Like Cape Fear. Cape Fear arguably works better with Bobbert playing the good guy and Nick Nolte playing the fucked up psycho. Bobbert gave one large, entertaining performance in that picture, but if we're being real, swapping parts is the bolder choice. Lorenzo's Oil makes more sense if oil is a euphemism for booze and the poster is Nick Nolte holding a glass of scotch and smiling with the subtitle “His kid had a horrible, fatal, and unique disease . . . so Daddy decided to get fuckin drunk.” The Prince of Tides doesn't even count because Babs only casts guys so she can cut their balls off (see Bridges, Jeff in The Mirror Has Two Faces), and she also has to hold open calls of thousands of dudes to see who can keep a straight face when they call her a “beautiful woman,” giving her an extremely limited selection of guys to pick from.

That Neil Jordan remake of Bob Le Flambeur he was in wasn't bad, but seriously, casting Nick Nolte as a junkie is kinda lazy. Even if he isn't actually smacked out on the day you're shooting, it ain't gonna take much for him to convey that. Homeboy fucking worked it in The Hulk (the Ang Lee one); me and my buddy were like “Is he awesome because we drank all that tequila? Probably.”

This all might be taken to mean that Nick Nolte isn't awesome and a blast to watch in his pictures. This is not what this should all be taken to mean. Nick Nolte is always a delight to watch. He was even watchable in that horrible Sidney Lumet movie where he goes to fuck the guy in the ass and then strangles him, Q&A. He's a classic case of an actor who does one thing brilliantly well; this isn't a bad thing, if you do one thing brilliantly that beats the fuck out of doing several things kind of all right. When he's not quixotically pretending to be a civilian, Nick Nolte is a Hall of Famer, because no one (at all, ever) is better at being drunk and pissed off in a movie. Not even Harvey Keitel. And so, on his birthday, let us salute him in the proper fashion, by raising a glass.

A BRIEF UPDATE (YES, THIS BLOG STILL EXISTS)

All kinds of good stuff coming up, fear not. I'm rechargin' the old batteries in this post-Super Bowl, pre-Oscars interregnum. While awaiting more substantial words from your old pal (I'm going to try to get out to The King's Speech and The Mechanic this week, and I love that those two pictures are at the top of my to-see list), here's two things to tickle y'alls fancy:

1) My wrap-up at Tor about the trailers aired during the Super Bowl. I can't remember whether Battle: Los Angeles was on during the game or not (I know I saw it, I just don't remember whether it was during pregame) but I'll be reviewing it when it comes out. I'll be reviewing damn near all those pictures, so look for those.

2) Because I like to show the love when a fellow writer absolutely fucking kills shit, check out this much-needed antidote to all the gooshing over the fuckin Star Wars kid. Salud, Devin Faraci.

Tomorrow night I take the Jeopardy! test. Oh yes, that's right. Their movie categories are fucking toast.

BATMAN WEEK: A LOOK BACK

All my Batman reviews are now up in all their glory over at Tor.com:

1) The 1940s serials.

2) The 1966 Batman.

3) The 1989 Batman.

4) Batman Returns.

5) Batman Forever.

6) Batman & Robin.

7) Batman Begins.

8) The Dark Knight.

There you go. The reviews you deserve, and they are the ones you need right now. So motherfuck me for my abrasive opinions, because I can take it. Because I'm not your hero. A not-so-silent guardian. An extremely unwatchful guardian. A Foul-Mouthed Blogger.