Guilty Pleasures Part 2

Ok..so sue me. He's gained a 100 pounds, makes direct to DVD fodder that feature 2 minutes worth of aikido, of which a full minute is probably executed by a stuntman...but I still spend some time during my DVD trawls trying to seek out a watchable Steven Seagal flick with the ardent yearning of a lovestruck puppy hoping for a glimmer of attention from his crush. In vain.Since Half Past Dead, the last Seagal movie to unspool from a cinema projector way back in 2002, he's made about 17 DVD flicks, out of which only Shadow Man, Belly Of The Beast, Urban Justice and Into The Sun managed to extricate themselves (barely) from the dungheap of dreck that Seagal's output has shat out onto the B-Movie landscape these past 8 years. So for a whiff of nostalgic longing for a leaner, meaner Seagal (available only in the first 6 flicks of his career) , I periodically pop in Marked For Death, the 3rd Seagal movie and for some bone crunching, neck twisting, wrist snapping demonstration of aikido at it's most lethal, look no further. Sadistic Jamaican Drug Lord Screwface ( a brilliant Basil Wallace) rubs retired DEA agent Seagal the wrong way, and gets his eyeballs gouged in, spine snapped, thrown out a window and impaled on a stick. After watching his entire posse get wiped out. Don't fuck with an irate Buddhist man...

Another longing, this one for Missed Opportunities assails me whenever I see Brandon Lee strutting on screen. Handsome, lean and athletic, he was poised to carry the Martial Baton from his late father Bruce Lee when death tragically cut him down, via a stunt accident on the set of The Crow.

Showdown In Little Tokyo sees him play second banana to Dolph Lundgren, but Brandon exudes natural charisma and maintains his dignity even when a scene forces him to admire the size of Lundgren's Dong. Showdown is so gleefully unabashed in it's casual racism and sexism and over the top in it's violence , it's to me, an important artifact of the '80s. And like the best Bad Movies you keep coming back to it has a kick ass villain, in this case Cary Hiroyuki Tagawa in full tattooed Yakuza regalia, oozing reptilian charm with his sonorous voice even as he disrobes a blonde escort and fondles her breast as a prelude to hacking her head off..while video taping the whole act. The movie's one charming concept (Scandinavian Lundgren is steeped in Japanese lore while Asian Lee is Californian Clueless) is soon buried under an avalanche of escalating violence as the ass kicking duo take on Tagawa's Yakuza minions.

Rapid Fire was a far more effective launchpad for Brandon Lee, as he now gets to strut his stuff solo, playing the world's least protected Witness under Protection. Invigorating fight scenes, smoothly executed by a very limber Lee, a decent plot and the always reliable Powers Boothe make this a Prime Replay Candidate on my Player.

Jean Claude Van Damme's career arch is scarily similar to the Pony Tailed one, with the exception that he's still kept himself in shape but I steadily bypass his current output and pop something like Timecop in when I need my JCVD Martial Mayhem fix.

It's time travel plot makes nary a lick of sense..but it features some decent ass-kickery from the Muscles from Brussells and it's climactic showdown where the baddies have to contend with both Past and Present Van Dammes is still a B-Movie delight.

The Adventures of Indiana Jones

So, can I commit sacrilege and actually admit that the much revered, oft exalted first installment in the Indy trilogy is not my favourite? In anticipation of the upcoming fourth installment in this ace adventure series from the Spileberg-Lucas collaboration next summer, I decided to re-visit the Man with the Whip, that along with the fedora and leather jacket, was patterned after the daring hunks who headlined Saturday Matinee serials, an American experience in the '40s and '50s, shorts attached to regular features which ended in cliff hangers, ensuring audience attendance the following week to find out its conclusions. Lucas drew inspiration from the Flash Gordon sci fi serials to make some little known movies called Star Wars Episodes 1 to 6. The adventure epic with a hero constantly in peril became the Indiana Jones films.

Raiders will always retain its place as the franchise kick off, the template and standard setter for not only its gazillion grossing sequels but countless (often inferior) imitators.

But what works best for me in Raiders isn't the movie as a whole but individual scenes and images:

• The opener which is a self contained masterpiece of everything you expect in an action adventure epic- the search for an elusive treasure deep in dangerous and exotic territory, blow dart wielding natives, rival explorers, duplicitous aids and booby trapped mazes.


• Indy's perfunctory dispatch of a sword wielding assailant


• Mischievious monkey and poisoned dates ('Nuff said!)


• The sinister Mr. Thoth


• The opening of the ark, in spite of some obviously dated effects, still packs a whallop, with melting faces and flesh not to mention bodies drilled with light.

Perhaps it was because my intro to Indy came via The Temple Of Doom rather than Raiders, but it remains my favourite of the three. A breakneck pace that hardly pauses to take breath, Indy 2 opens in a Shanghai Nightclub, with a rousing musical number rendered by nightclub singer Willie Scott(Kate "Mrs. Spielberg" Capshaw ) (in Mandarin no less), while Indy negotiates with shifty looking Chinese Gangsters. One Switch and (poisonous) double-cross later, the action kicks off in high gear as a fight erupts amidst machine guns, gigantic gongs and loads of balloons which climaxes with Indy and Willie leaping out a window, crashing through canopies and landing in the getaway vehicle comandeered by Indy's Asian Boy sidekick Short Round. I use the word climax loosely as, like every other action scene in this breathless installment, the end of one deliriously executed set piece is merely the set up to another.

The nightclub fracas gives way to a car chase that ends with an airborne getaway, which turn out to be anything but as the aircraft is soon without it's shifty pilots who parachute off it, leaving the trio to exit said aircraft on an inflatable canoe, careening down a snowy mountain before careening off it down a waterfall and onto a river, finding themselves in India (Sri Lanka, actually )

There, Indy is put on a mission by a village elder to retrieve the lost Shankara stones, which have been stolen by a vicious Thuggee Cult that still specialise in Human Sacrifices.

If you want to get pissy about such things, there's plenty to get offended by Temple Of Doom. Short Round's pidgin English quickly becomes the movies least contentious exercise in racial stereotyping as you quickly get a grand tour of Exotic India, replete with jewelled and turbaned Maharajahs, whose palace subjects' enjoy feasting on sumptious courses of Chilled Monkey Brains, Pythons stuffed with live, wriggly eels, assorted bugs and eyeball soup, Kali Worshipping blood cults, epitomised by bald and baritone voiced Amrish Puri, spouting gibberish incantations as he rips the still beating heart out of a hapless sacrificial victim.

Or..you could just take it for the harmless fun it all is, although this is the darkest of the Indy movies, and more than the other 2, exudes a real sense of menace in certain scenes that do a better job of convincing you that our intrepid hero is in genuine danger, notably in a scene where he's force fed blood and falls under a spell. In fact, that's probably the only action lull in the movie as Indy goes rogue and almost kills Willie before recovering his senses and donning back The Hat and Whip. And the ride then commences...

For a movie that could justly be described as a rollercoaster ride, it's apt that it's climactic mine car chase is truly that, still a stunner even after decades of advancements in special effects and CGI.

Evil vanquished, Baddies Dipatched to become crocodile fodder,Shankara Stones Found, and Hero and Heroine share a final kiss. Action movies don't, and shouldn't, come much better than this.

And honestly, it didn't as revisiting the third installment, Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade, I was struck by the fact that it's action scenes , by now seem, by the numbers, with Spielberg and Lucas regurgitating the original's plot point of a religious artifact sought after by the Nazis (Ark in Raiders, Holy Grail here). Hell, it even apes Raiders in its University scenes of Marcus walking into Indy's class filled with adoring female students!There are, however, 3 nice touches, one interesting, one delightful and one bordering on brilliance.

Interesting would be Alison Doody as Elsa Schneider, the Indy heroine who strictly speaking, is anything but. Shifty and manipulative, Elsa beds Indy, then double crosses him and is finally undone by greed. There is some attempt to tone down her Nazi sympathies, but ice blonde Elsa is the closest thing in this serial adventure to approximate a Femme Fatale, which is no bad thing.

Delightful would be prologuing the film with Indy as a young boy (it's a little poignant to see the late River Phoenix as Young Indy), tracing his first encounter with a whip that yield the famous Harrison Ford chin scar, neatly explaining his later dislike of snakes and topping off with him being gifted The Hat. Short, brilliantly executed and concluded, this part in The Last Crusade is the best in the series' that consistently seem to pour most of its imagination and exuberance into it's Prologues. It's leanness merely accentuates the bloat in the rest its running time.

But all that pales alongside the film's Casting and Conceptual Coup, the Touch Of Brilliance: The casting of Sean Connery as Indy's crusty, academic but no less driven father. As the forerunner and very much patterned on James Bond, who better to play Indiana Jones Sr. then the first (and in many quarters acknowledegd to be the best) actor to play the agent with the Licence To Kill. Connery's chemistry with Ford is dynamite with the latter marvellously potraying Indy's by turns irritation, affection and in one sublime scene, genuine respect for the Father who never had time for him.

The Last Crusade scores on the Connery/Ford dynamics even while it flatlines with some of the dullest and least charismatic villains to grace the Indy franchise. Julian Glover's billionaire philanthropist and a Nazi general so generic I've forgotten his name is a pale shadow of the creepy and reptilian Thoth in Raiders and the flamboyantly over the top Mola Ram of The Temple Of Doom.

It's been more than 25 years and I await the the latest Tilt Of The Fedora and the Crack Of The Whip with glee.

As Elsa would say "Giddy as a schoolboy!"

The Big Books

Call it the anticipation of several days, weeks or even months of reading pleasure to come or the comfortable heft of a meaty tome under my arms but I love big books. They have to be novels of course. Fiction definitely. Epic tales unfolding over decades or centuries preferably. My first large book was Shogun, James Clavell's saga set in 16th Century feudal Japan. I carried that brick of a book around for months, spending many a splendid hour immersed in its riveting tale of a shipwrecked English sailor who gets sucked into the impending war between 2 rival warlords, becoming a confidante of one and the lover of a married samurai noblewoman.

So, it could well have been my pleasant first experience with a hefty tome, but to this day, I still seek out big tales, running well past the 800 page mark, demanding undivided reading focus (I, not belonging to that band of multi-tasking bookies who can juggle up to 3 different books at a time) and generally taking up my reading life for weeks on end.

Larry McMurtry's Lonesome Dove was another source of unadulterated pleasure derived from a long epic tale, this one chronicling a massive cattle drive from Texas to Montana. Vivid characters occupying a panoramic, post Civil War landscape of pure Americana acting out scenes of nail biting tension co-existing with ones of unbearable heartbreak, Lonesome Dove deposited me in Reader Nirvana as I sparingly parcelled out pages to read as the book drew to a close, a desperate attempt to prolong the joy of complete immersion in this spell binding Western.

Not all my encounters with big books yielded Reader's Gold, unfortunately...

Tom Clancy started out writing riveting thrillers that fused state of the art military and surveillance info married to a tight plot laced with geo-political overtones, and they rarely ran less than 600 pages. Then they got even longer (Executive Orders), sloppier( Without Remorse), increasingly Right Wing (Debt Of Honour, Rainbow Six) as they descended from thrilling to average, sliding down to ponderous and finally landing with a squelchy thud into GobShite (Red Rabbit, Teeth Of The Tiger) . The culmination, length wise was The Bear And The Dragon, a 1000 page plus arduous trek through mediocre prose that delivered, in spite of its unholy length, a fraction of the thrills in earlier Clancy novels. I call it The Bore And The Drivel.

And then there was Colleen McCullough's The First Man In Rome, the first in a now 7 book series on the rise and fall of the Roman Empire.

Pre-Julius Caesar and Post Etruscan and Punic Wars, it chronicles the rise of 2 men who would plot the course change of Rome from Republic To Empire; Gaius Marius, low born but brilliant military strategist and leader and Lucius Cornelius Sulla, of high born Patrician stock but penniless.

Novelisations of actual historic events require a deft touch. Especially one as well documented as the saga of Rome. Trawl a bookshop, browse through a library or random search the Net, and you'll be drowning in information deluge on the sheer amount of text that's been devoted to chronicling the minutiae of this once great civilization.

To make the actual reading of it a pleasure requires an adept touch at whipping and stirring up a tale of passion, ambition, treachery, political chicanery, epic battles and sex, elements that were in abundance during this period ( and pretty much any period in history book- ended by the rise and fall of a civilisation, if you want to argue the point) .

What McCullough serves up instead is an academic and episodic saga that never reaches the giddy depths it should. Her research is a Gold Star in meticulousness; Rome is brought alive in geography, people, customs, food and social hierarchy, complemented with a 100 page glossary that covers topics spanning from how long an actual toga was to the complex political machinery of the Senate, a half dozen maps and even sketches of some of the main players.

One wishes McCullough brought the same attention to giving you a riveting historical epic. There are flashes of brilliance, sadly counterbalanced by a sluggish pace, a grave misstep in a book that stretches well past the 900 page mark. The poisonously intriguing Sulla, who sleeps with both his step mother and mistress before murdering them in cold blood is given short shrift, playing second fiddle to Marius, sketched 2 dimensionally as a brilliant general in the opening pages and never attains any depth beyond that for the rest of this long book (although one supposes that Sulla will come into prominence in the second and third book as his friendship with Marius gives way to a bloody feud later.).

Of the 3 key battles dominating this period in the Republic, 2 are given short shrift: the war against Numidia culminating in the capture of King Jugurtha and the final battle against the Germanic tribes which seals Marius' position as the most powerful man in Rome. Peculiarly, it is the middle battle, the Roman armies rout by the Germans that McCullough chooses to flesh out in more detail.

But the book is filled with such idiosyncracies; Jugurtha's capture is perfunctory but a fascinating, though tragically short description of his final march through the the city of Rome before being executed hints at what this book could have been

I took more than a month to finish this book, putting it down twice before picking it up again, gazing longingly at my book shelf at the titles I'd RATHER be reading, flicking to the end ever so often to see how much more I had to go, counting the number of pages daily, longing for characters with simpler names than Quintus Lutatius Catulus Caesar and Publius Rutilius Rufus, wishing I could speed read, hoping the languid pace would go from canter to full gallop, and finally breathing a hefty sigh of relief as I turned the last page, vowing not to touch another hefty tome for a long while. So, what did I turn to next?

Ken Follet's The Pillars Of The Earth.

Number of pages: 973

Like I said, I love Big Books....