MCN Columnists
Mike Wilmington

By Mike Wilmington Wilmington@moviecitynews.com

MW on Movies: Unstoppable and Saw 3D

Unstoppable (Four Stars)

U.S.: Tony Scott, 2010

Unstoppable, a blow-you-out-of-your seat and slam-you-against-the-wall thriller about a runaway train — by Tony Scott, who knows how to make action movies, but rarely makes them this well — starts strong, hits the tracks fast, tears out the brakes, takes off like a shot, and then just keeps racing and accelerating, ratcheting up the action and raising the stakes, barreling through Pennsylvania and all of writer Mark Bomback’s plot twists and character cues with costars Denzel Washington (the grumpy old engineer) and Chris Pine (the slick young conductor), blasting along with a lung-clutching velocity Die Hard could only dream of, until it leaves you breathless (Phewww!) at the last stop.

If you watch this movie and say you weren’t excited, then you probably weren’t paying much attention. (Maybe the movie went by you in a blur.) If you think it’s the same old Tony Scott — remembering that last silly runaway remake subway train movie he made — you’re partly right, though this is the wittier, jazzier Tony Scott of Spy Game or True Romance, not the scriptless flash of The Fan and The (Mis)Taking of Pelham One, Two Three.


And if you complain about all that talk and babbling backstory between Washington’s Frank Barnes and Pine’s Will Colson, or between Rosario Dawson’s traffic manager Connie Hopper and Kevin Dunn’s greed-crazed creep of a Veep of Operations Galvin, or between Connie and the guys, Galvin and his bosses, and all those TV news people (Fox, local and otherwise) and the nation, all trying to keep up with the action, you’re actually attacking a lot of what makes this movie work so well, move so fast — and what’s more, something that most other action movies should have too.

But they mostly don’t. A lot of the new actioners you see, have hollow, unambitious, phony-baloney scripts: plenty of action, but not much room for acting, even the economical emoting we see here. How can you get excited about a riderless train, if it’s being pursued, in a way, by other riderless trains and pilotless helicopters and copless cop cars, and formula heroes and heroines just along for the ride?

The General needed Buster Keaton. But Runaway Train also needed Jon Voight and Eric Roberts. Speed needed Dennis Hopper, Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock, and it also could have also used a better script. And Unstoppable needs, and has, Washington as Barnes, the crusty old 28-year vet about to be put out to trackless pasture by the corporate cruds of his world — and Pine as Will, the twenty-something, well-connected railroad rookie, who represents everything blue-collar Frank despises, justly, while Frank represents something whiter-collar Will resents and misunderstands, not too wisely or well.

The movie and the actors swiftly sketch these two, and their families (a Hooters scene) and their class backgrounds, their conflict, and the mutual competence and feistiness that both will bring to the tasks soon at hand — and the picture and the guys give that speed-portrait just the right, more relaxed but steady opening style and rhythms, churning under the slowly mounting tension of catastrophe to come.

What goes wrong with the train here, actually comes partly from the real-life story of the driverless CSX train with a cargo of toxic chemicals that really went racing though Ohio in 2001. And though this story is an exaggerated version of that event, re-set in Pennsylvania, it’s cleverly overdrawn, retaining just enough real-lifey touches and semi-veracity, and just enough heavily-detailed railroad and police rescue backgrounds to keep us from going “Give me a break” at every rest stop. We’ll do it anyway, some of us, but probably with more affection than exasperation.

Here’s what kicks off Unstoppable. A chubby mope of an engineer named Dewey (Ethan Suplee), gets off a slowly moving freight train, which is carrying (surprise) a load of toxic, flammable chemicals, in order to switch the tracks, and then finds to his dismay that his train has speeded up and is pulling away and he can’t quite reach it and — Too Late! It’s Gone! Get a doughnut, Dewey. Your chance to avoid TV ignominy and infamy, just blew up the turnpike.

Soon the company knows, Connie and Galvin know, Pennsylvania knows, the TV networks know, and the country knows. And Frank and Will sure as hell know, because, as we know all too well, they’ll be the last men standing between this runaway train, the more populous cities on its route, and one of those slam-bang, fire-belching explosions we know Tony Scott can do extremely well.

We’re off on the wild ride we expect: a constantly frantic, slam-bang but neatly controlled race though a familiar but still wickedly exciting thriller-landscape, replete at times with another trainful of all-too-vulnerable schoolchildren, a heroic but futile attempted train-snatch on the tracks, and a gutsy Marine dangling precariously and heart-stoppingly from a helicopter, trying to set himself down on the roof of a train by now, by God, going 70 m.p.h. or more.

If you think about it for a while, it does begin to seem a little implausible — all those cliff-hangers on one train, and all those Fox cameras trained on all that action for so long, without anyone shoving Sarah Palin or Newt Gingrich into the frame. (Maybe it’s still 2001.) But the movie never gives you time to think. If you mull over what could possibly happen, and what did happen (some of which is on the screen, exaggerated), you might go “Hey, whoa….”

But Unstoppable doesn’t give you time to mull. It’s always two stops ahead of you, thirty seconds before the track-switch, one helicopter-dangle above us, and three cars in front of your caboose. You barely have time for anything but a laugh or a “wow.” The movie, like Hitchcock, makes us accept and enjoy the implausible (a slice of life that becomes a slice of cake), not least because Washington, Pine, and Dawson are such good company, and Dunn is the right kind of bad company.

Rosario Dawson, whom I first saw in Kids, a movie I disliked — although it was plausible — has become one of the screen‘s great current beauties, and a terrific toughie and a smarty as well, and she certainly makes Connie the kind of woman you’d love to see make a fool out of guys like Kevin Dunn’s prick of pricks Galvin. Dunn, in turn, nails all those corporate bastards who like hurting people, like the power, like to smile afterwards, and don’t give a damn about anything but appearances, the stock market, their bank account and possibly where their next orgasm is coming from. Dunn catches the look and glib, phony-testosterone manner of all those slimes: guys who, like Galvin, would probably outsource all the engineers, conductors and yard workers in the railroad, if they could just figure a way to remote-control their jobs from New Dehli. It’s good to have a heavy around like Galvin (in movies if not in life), and I loved his and Connie’s last after-The-End updates.

Chris Pine, the young Captain Kirk of the last Star Trek movie, is as cocky as you could possibly want, and as cute. (If this were a typical dumb action movie, he would probably wind up in a clinch with Connie.) And he’s the right kind of lippy, but eventually solid-acting smart alec you want as the second banana. As J. J. Abrams’ Kirk, Pine was cocky in a way that suggested he might well grow up to be William Shatner, and to be Spock‘s best friend, but you sometimes wondered if he wouldn’t die trying to surf in a meteor storm first. Here, Pine — maybe because he‘s working with a pro of pros, like Washington — learns his movie lessons well, and he goes through that John Fordian moment-of-truth Stagecoach ride Unstoppable offers him with a mix of swagger and good-guy community spirit. (Even so, Pine still looks more like Tim Holt than young Duke Wayne.)

As for Denzel Washington…Well, if you stopped and thought, you might muse that Denzel looked just a little too handsome and unworn by life, acted a little too wordly-wise, and didn’t suggest as much of a guy who’d be a real-life engineer, as say, a shaggier, rougher-hewn colleague like Gene Hackman — the actor Hopper once described as an “automatic truth machine.” But again, Washington and Tony Scott don’t give you time to ruminate about it, and when Frank’s train gets out of the way and then blows down the tracks after the runaway, you’re damned glad it’s Washington there as Frank, at the controls, or hopping from car to car, roof to roof, and not Denzel off being a U. S. Senator or a TV news anchor man or God knows what else.

Washington is one of those actors who, like the great noir leading men of the ‘40s — Bogart, Mitchum, Cagney, Ryan, Garfield, Douglas, Lancaster, Widmark — is equally good as hero or villain. (He got his leading man Oscar as a bad guy in Training Day, and his breakthrough part was as another baddie in A Soldier’s Story. That dual good-and-evil gift materializes because Washington isn’t afraid to show an edge or an attitude in his roles, which is why Frank is a believable old cuss, even when he’s hopping on those roofs. In a way, Washington is another “Automatic Truth Machine,” like Hackman, like Morgan Freeman, like De Niro, just a more glamorous one.

I love trains (wish I could take them more often) and I love a lot of train movies, though usually the more leisurely ones, like Keaton’s The General, and Hitchcock‘s The Lady Vanishes, or the train sections in Hitch’s North by Northwest and Strangers on a Train, in Billy Wilder‘s Some Like It Hot and John Hughes’ Planes, Trains and Automobiles and Sidney Lumet’s film of Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express. But I also like Konchalovsky’s hectic, hell-on-the-tracks Runaway Train; I only wish we could have seen Kurosawa’s version of it. (It’s the sensei’s story, after all.)

Train movies tend to be more visually interesting than plane pictures, simply because trains have more space to stage stuff, besides which, all that landscape rushing by outside can become almost another character. Unstoppable is so good on one level, because Scott so fully exploits almost everything you can do with a train on screen, except drop it off the Bridge over the River Kwai. (Well, maybe not quite everything. There are no upper berths.)

But movies like Unstoppable also work because of the way they‘re able to mix glamor and sarcasm, reality and fantasy, action and reactions, speed and smarts. Most critics so far have pretty much liked Unstoppable. (If you see it with a big audience, there’s a real electricity in the house you can’t ignore.) But the few that don’t seem to think there’s either too much fantasy for the movie’s reality, or too much fantasy for its reality. They’re wrong on both counts. The movie’s mix seems to me just about right.

Scott has made some half-dumb or illogical (but always exciting) movies, including Beverly Hills Cop 2, The Last Boy Scout and his and Denzel’s ruination of Pelham (which sorely missed both Walter Matthau and Robert Shaw, and Joe Sargent.) And have you seen The Fan lately? Not to mention the towel-snapping shower and butch flyboy scenes in his huge Tom Cruise hit Top Gun? (Or better yet, actor Quentin Tarantino‘s comic-phallic deconstruction of Top Gun, which he seems to like, in Sleep With Me?)

The younger Scott sometimes seems like the actor who brags he can make an audience cry with anything, including the phone book. True maybe, but why keep sticking yourself with wrong numbers like The Fan? The point is that T-Scott can make even a mess of a script pretty exciting, sometimes hellishly exciting. But with a good script, or a decent one, or with very good actors enjoying themselves, he’s that much better. (Anyone is, of course.) That’s what Unstoppable gives us.

Man, can he keep the speed up. Man, can he shoot (with cinematographer Ben Seresin.) Man, can he cut (with editors Robert Duffy and Chris Lebenzon). Man, can he score those action sequence knockouts. And man, can he stage one hell of a train chase down those Pennsylvania tracks. This is as good as Tony Scott can do, maybe as good as he’ll ever do.

Of course, Kurosawa could have done it better.
 
__________________________________________________
 

Saw 3D (One Star)

U.S.: Kevin Greutert, 2010

Let me explain why I’m reviewing Saw 3D, even though it’s already opened, and I don’t have to, and I avoided seeing the other six Saws — and, besides, it wasn‘t even screened for critics here, so I actually had to plunk down heard-earned cash for it.

Okay, Here’s why I saw Saw. I got out of the Megamind screening, which was at the local Cineplex 21, and I was in a fairly good mood, so I figured “What the Hell, I’ll go see Saw 3D. After all, Saw 3D was the biggest box-office hit in the country on its opening weekend, toppling Paranormal Activity 2 from its throne, making veritable mountains of moolah. How bad could it be?

I did know a few things. I knew that the Saw movies involved tying people up and harassing them with saws and complex, sadistic games, and that the director and writer of the first breakthrough Saw, respectively James Wan and Leigh Whannell (Whannell and Wan) were long gone, and that the current director, both of Saw 3D and Saw VI, was the series longtime editor (no cutter jokes, please), Kevin Greutert. And I still remember fondly all those great Dudley Do-Right episodes on Rocky and Bullwinkle, where dastardly villain Snidely Whiplash tied screeching heroine Nell Fenwick to the moving board before the deadly wheel-saw.

So here is a Saw review for people who don’t want to see the movie.

SPOILER ALERT

Okay, I bought my unaccustomed ticket, found the theater and settled down after the previews. Greutert and Saw 3-D wasted no time, even if they were about to waste most of their cast. Almost as soon as I could adjust my 3D glasses, after a flashback, I could see, in three dimensions, two young guys and the babe who’s been two-timing them, tied up in a store front, before a puzzled crowd on the sidewalk: kibitzers who, apparently like me, had never seen any other Saw movies and didn‘t know what the hell was going on.

There were buzz saws aimed at all of three tied-up kids and a tape-recorded explanation from whatever maniac did all this (all by himself?) explaining that the only ways the guys could save the girl is to let themselves get sliced up by all those saws.

I slouched down, popped some M & M peanuts.

I won’t tell you what happened next, except that soon there was a lot of blood and innards flying around, that the crowd (in the movie) didn’t do anything to help, but just gasped and snapped pictures, and the cops or firemen showed up too late to do anything.

END OF SPOILER

Well, this didn’t look good. Frankly, I prefer Snidely, Nell and the wheel-saw. Not only was the whole idea pretty silly and the writing pretty ordinary, the execution (in both senses) pro but messy. The acting was mostly (but not all) bad, the camerawork was so-so, the editing was frantic, the music was obnoxious (it kept going percussively dum-dum-dum, like a kid with a trashcan lid), the buzz-saws looked third-rate, the intestines looked phony (maybe they were actually kidneys), the popcorn was stale (I realize the makers of Saw 3D weren‘t at the concession stand popping the corn, but maybe they should have been) and the shock-o special effects and makeup were plausible and gory enough to annoy you. Even when it was good, it was bad. (I know that all sounds like an average reader‘s review on imdb, but there‘s a limit to the brain cells you can expend on stuff like this.)

Also, crucially, this scene wasn’t remotely scary, since you could tell that none of these screaming dimwits were likely to make it to Scene Two. And after the intestines or kidneys started flopping up at you, in 3D yet, you began to feel a bit disgusted, even with yourself.

“Wow,” I thought “Am I going to have to look at an hour and a half more of this?” Stiffening resolve, I recalled again those famous last words: It’s only a movie. And soon I was looking at more gore fests seemingly arranged by some surly psycho named Hoffman (played by Costas Mandylor), as well as the meeting of a Saw Victims Support Group addressed by an apparently phony Saw victim and phony Saw book author named Bobby (Sean Patrick Flanery), who was obviously exploiting the whole meaning of the Saw lifestyle, and was headed for big trouble.

Then it came: the next Saw trap or “game.”

These games, I quickly learned, are the money scenes of the Saw series. There would be a blackout. One or more helpless victims who have done something to rile the late Jigsaw (Tobin Bell) and his successors, including the sullen Hoffman — or maybe whatever maniac wanders in with a coping saw, or a Schick Xtreme3 razor and a grudge — get tied up and informed, by an old tape on a cassette recorder, that they have been bad boys and girls, and now they are going to get a chance to play the game. The “game,” apparently much beloved of regular Saw fans, consists of some new insane doo-jiggery contraption that looks as it were dreamed by a scientific team of Rube Goldberg, the Marquis de Sade and The Three Stooges, and which involved things like knives and pliers and hooks and furnaces and planks suspended over steep drops, and of course, saws.

The prisoner/players usually had about one minute to try to prevail in this maniacal version of “Beat the Clock.” So pretty soon, the victim (in Saw 3D, it was usually, but not always, Bobby and a very unlucky friend) was pulling teeth, or ripping his own back-skin off, or falling to his/her death or getting microwaved to a crisp, or getting attacked with some damned saw or other. All these games (except that first triangular bloodbath) tended to be played in dingy abandoned factories or darkened buildings that looked like warehouses of the damned, places full of muck, dust and clamorous steel whozits, ugly haunts that nobody, it seems, had supervised or had seen, maybe since the release of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre 2, when we still had guys like Dennis Hopper to play psycho villains.

It was weird, and maybe I missed something. (I certainly wanted to.) There was seemingly only one man, Hoffman, doing all this — setting the traps, conceiving the games (and patenting them?), kidnapping the victims, tying or chaining or gluing them up, shooting the tapes (as a super-hyphenate actor-writer-director), doing game intros as announced by some weird-ass Joker-looking white puppet who talked like Daffy Duck trying to be Darth Vader, maybe watching all this on closed-circuit TV, cleaning up afterwards, filing the tapes, renewing the patents, rehearsing the next intro, setting up the next game, maybe taping a few political attack ads, and all the while conducting successful raids and counter-raids on the apparently constantly bamboozled and impotent police force — and, well, he must be damned well unstoppable.

Indeed, nothing fazed Hoffman or whoever, even though, according to my feeble attempt at Saw scholarship, he just recently started out his career of Saw outlawry after formerly being a cop on Jigsaw’s trail — and now Jigsaw’s widow, Mrs. Jigsaw (Betsy Russell) was being protected by the police still left. (Famous last words). Hoffman apparently became a superman after he lay down his badge (“We don’t need no stinking badges!“) and picked up the saw. Now, for him or maybe someone else, it was just saw, saw, saw, all day long. Make another movie. Kidnap another victim. Set up another game. Hash, gash, splash. And the police still never arrive on time. (I know I must have missed some further explanation for all this in Saws 1-6. But I was unwilling to investigate.)

SPOILER ALERT

Look, I insist again, if you have an apparently unstoppable villain playing unbeatable games with unsavable victims and unavoidable saws in unspeakable scripts, all overseen by the most inept passel of police since the Keystone Kops fell out of their flivver and tripped all over Fatty Arbuckle, then YOU. HAVE. NO. SUSPENSE. You do have some horror, of course, and in my case, fear and loathing over all the money I’d just thrown into the sawmill.

Somehow, and I have no idea why, this works smashingly well for paying audiences and some horror cognoscenti — not I hope, overlapping the same audiences who flocked to the polls two Tuesdays ago, crying out for lower taxes for billionaires, an end to health care, and an end to the international communist conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids. (Hoffman does tie up and torture one trio who have committed the sin of bigotry, so I hope he and Jigsaw aren’t progressive Blue State liberals gone horribly wrong. Then again…The horror audience tends to be non-bourgeois and somewhat rebellious.)

END OF SPOILER

Eventually it ended. (Almost everything has one good point.) There was even a clever last twist, sort of. Rousing myself from my Saw-induced stupor (Dum! Dum! Dum!), I left the theater, strolled up to the assistant manager (an innocent bystander, I realize) and asked her to tell the manager or somebody that he should be ashamed of himself for showing a movie like this. The guy behind me piped up “I agree!” If she‘d had snap, she should have shot back at us, “Well you should be ashamed of yourself for watching it!” But instead, she explained, without much enthusiasm: “We show everything.”

Really? Do they show Au Hasard Balthazar? Tales of the Gimli Hospital? Fanny and Alexander? The first director’s cut of The Passion of Joan of Arc? No, you bet your ass they don’t, because, in both multiplexes or the halls of congress, money talks and bulls–t walks! And that’s why there have been seven Saws, and only one Citizen Kane and why universal health care is the bunk, and why billionaires should get tax breaks.

Morosely, I kept popping one M & M peanut after another, washing them down with a little blue bottle of Dasani water. As I watched, the water turned blood-red, a reverie. Paranormal Activity 2. Saw 3D. Piranha 3D. The Next to Last House on the Left Nightmare a Block away from Elm Street. The Crazies Vs. The Living Dead. Dracula Has Risen from the Twilight. Barn of the Naked Dead. (That last an actual movie title.) Was there no end to it? NO? END? TO? IT? Would this thirst never be quenched?

Don’t kid yourself that this is the last Saw, like they claim. Listen, they covered themselves by calling it Saw 3D instead of Saw VIII. They can come back now with Saw 3D-2. Or Saw III-D. Or they can do match-ups: Saw 3D Vs. The Living Dead. Saw Vs. Freddy. Or Saw Vs. Jackass. Or Saw-Ass: a movie where somebody jumps into a cesspool with an anvil around his neck and it’s filled with hacksaws. (Just kidding.)

But why be negative? Why spoil anybody’s fun? It’s only a movie. And I like horror pictures. (Really.) As I hit the escalator going down-down-down, I had a flash. I knew, visualized, saw what Saw 3D-2 could be, if only it broke its chains and ripped through the last bourgeois convention. Or went respectable.

Think of it: The Saw series goes postmodern, with an eventual director‘s cut and an article by the late Jean-Paul Sartre, called Sartre on Saw. Or David Thomson: I Saw Saw. Or simply See Saw. )

Dig: Eight people are all in a Hollywood studio conference room — including a tyrannical studio executive, a hot new director and writer, eager to cut their teeth on Saw 3D-2, a bosomy secretary called Debbi (no, make that a bosomy marketing executive called Debbi), a USC film school whiz kid named Howie Devlin, Robert Englund in full Freddy Krueger regalia fondling a chain saw, and Sherm Schermerhorn, the long-haired founder-editor of

ICutOutHerHeartandStompedOnIt.com (there to interview everybody for his cable show Stomping on the Movies). They’re all hashing over Saw 8. Or Saw 3D-2. (Or maybe it‘s Saw 43D, depending on who plays Debbi.)

They brainstorm. They yell. They cogitate. They pace. What about ditching saws for axes or guillotines? What about shooting it as if it were on the cell phone of a man sawing off his own leg? (Have they done that already?) What about a prequel with Jigsaw kidnapping and torturing that rotund British-born master of movie suspense and terror Albert Hatch-shock (played by Michael Moore, over Freddy‘s objections.) Then we have the new Jigsaw recreate, as “games,” top scenes from Psycho, The Birds and Frenzy (three movies both scary, and good.)

Hey! Got it! Nailed it! What about featuring the guy we never see, or never saw, at least never saw in Saw 3D: some poor working class shmo who maybe makes all those traps and games and bloody gizmos for the various maniacs and never gets any credit, overtime or bonuses? (And now, the new bosses want to outsource him!)

Dig: What if this guy, we’ll call him Tighten, or Wilbur, decides he‘s being exploited, and wants a bigger slice of the pie. What if he goes to the new Jigsaw — now some other cop or doctor who went Crazy, some nut job — and threatens him, says he’ll go to the National Enquirer or the Examiner. (Headline: “Behind the Saw — He Cut Out Their Hearts and Stomped on Them.”) And then there’s a race to see who can trap and imprison and saw up the other guy first….

BLACKOUT.

They’re in a cellar. All eight of them. They’re chained to the floor, each in front of a Visio flat screen TV (Except for Freddy who has an old Motorola console) and an old used Toshiba video player. And each of them has another of those same damned dirty, ratty old cassettes. They reach, stretch, agonize. Only Freddy can pop his tape in. He tries to use this leverage to negotiate a contract for Saw Vs. Freddy. They shout him down, rattle their chains. Then, slowly, fuzzily at first, the image comes on: That same stinking white faced puppet S.O.B. That same damned awful, Daffy-Darth voice:

“You have disgraced your professions. You are shameless and insatiable. For money and money alone, you have produced or aided or celebrated one idiotic blood-drenched atrocity after another… (“But it wasn’t us!“ they scream, ignored.) You have turned your mass movie audience of teen and twenty shopping mall males into howling connoisseurs of gore, kitsch-maddened phony-degenerate pseudo-nincompoops, who soon will be incapable of telling Godfather 2 from Troll II. You have sullied the memory of the first Saw, dishonored the legacy of Herschell Gordon Lewis and besmirched his great, seminal works Blood Feast and Two Thousand Maniacs! — the movies that made me what I am today. Where is Whannell? Where is Wan? You are moolah addicts, poltroons, caca-peddlers. Your actions are inexcusable, unstoppable, unsavable, unforgivable. And now…Unforgiven.

“Now you must pay. Now you must decide. Now you‘ll all be sorry you ever met up with this white faced puppet son of a bitch. Before each of you, tucked away in the black trash bags at your feet, there is a grappling hook, a harpoon, a pair of pliers, an electric cattle prod, a gallon of kerosene, a matchbook, a pumpkin, the lyrics to Bobby “Boris“ Pickett‘s hit song “Monster Mash,” the New York Times crossword puzzle, a Papermate pen, an electric chain saw and a funnel. In the next minute, you must pull out all your teeth, zap each other three times with the cattle prod, give yourselves haircuts with the electric chain saw, drive the grappling hook though your chests, harpoon yourselves to the wall and then solve the crossword puzzle, without a dictionary. After that, you must set yourselves on fire, without spilling one drop of kerosene, while singing “Monster Mash,” and balancing the pumpkin on your nose.

“If you refuse, or if you fail, if any of you fail, you will be chained by Wilbur to your separate TVs and forced to watch all seven “Saw” movies in an endless loop, uncut, unexpurgated, uncensored, unstoppable, forever.

“The choice is yours.”

FAMOUS LAST WORDS

Well, as Jack Benny said to the stickup man who snarled to him these words, “Your money or your life!” … Jack responded, after a minute or so of silence: “I’m thinking it over.”

Be Sociable, Share!

4 Responses to “MW on Movies: Unstoppable and Saw 3D”

  1. Pookie says:

    “Endless – The Blog from Hell”

  2. MrABlair23 says:

    For one, you are a complete asshole. How the hell can you judge a movie without even seeing the other ones? See, I just really hate when people like this go and make a review when they don’t even know what the hell they’re talking about! If you were an actual fan or at least watched the other films, then you would know that it is not just endless gore and traps. This series has a storyline to it and it is one of the most intelligent horror series in history (not including the highest grossing).

    So, I really suggest taking a look at the other films before you go and say that this one was absolutely horrific. Only then, you can tell me that it sucked. But, then, maybe your mind will be changed…

  3. joseph joss says:

    Saw 3d is an nice movie, i dowloaded from this site: http://moviesdl.tk

  4. Bob says:

    I agree completely with MrABlair23. You can’t expect the seventh movie installment of a continuing series to actually be good, if you hadn’t seen the other six! It’s impossible, and you won’t understand the importance of the ending like so many actual SAW fans did. It may have not been the best out of them, but all of the Saw movies do offer more than other horror movies. They offer a complex story line and actual character relationships and connections. That’s why its the most successful horror franchise, and that’s why so many fans appreciate this film.

Wilmington

awesome stuff. OK I would like to contribute as well by sharing this awesome link, that personally helped me get some amazing and easy to modify. check it out at scarab13.com. All custom premade files, many of them totally free to get. Also, check out Dow on: Wilmington on DVDs: How to Train Your Dragon, Treasure of the Sierra Madre, The Darjeeling Limited, The Films of Nikita Mikhalkov, The Hangover, The Human Centipede and more ...

cool post. OK I would like to contribute too by sharing this awesome link, that personally helped me get some amazing and easy to customize. check it out at scarab13.com. All custom templates, many of them dirt cheap or free to get. Also, check out Downlo on: Wilmington on Movies: I'm Still Here, Soul Kitchen and Bran Nue Dae

awesome post. Now I would like to contribute too by sharing this awesome link, that personally helped me get some beautiful and easy to modify. take a look at scarab13.com. All custom premade files, many of them free to get. Also, check out DownloadSoho.c on: MW on Movies: The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest, Paranormal Activity 2, and CIFF Wrap-Up

Carrie Mulligan on: Wilmington on DVDs: The Great Gatsby

isa50 on: Wilmington on DVDs: Gladiator; Hell's Half Acre; The Incredible Burt Wonderstone

Rory on: Wilmington on Movies: Snow White and the Huntsman

Andrew Coyle on: Wilmington On Movies: Paterson

tamzap on: Wilmington on DVDs: The Magnificent Seven, Date Night, Little Women, Chicago and more …

rdecker5 on: Wilmington on DVDs: Ivan's Childhood

Ray Pride on: Wilmington on Movies: The Purge: Election Year

Quote Unquotesee all »

It shows how out of it I was in trying to be in it, acknowledging that I was out of it to myself, and then thinking, “Okay, how do I stop being out of it? Well, I get some legitimate illogical narrative ideas” — some novel, you know?

So I decided on three writers that I might be able to option their material and get some producer, or myself as producer, and then get some writer to do a screenplay on it, and maybe make a movie.

And so the three projects were “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep,” “Naked Lunch” and a collection of Bukowski. Which, in 1975, forget it — I mean, that was nuts. Hollywood would not touch any of that, but I was looking for something commercial, and I thought that all of these things were coming.

There would be no Blade Runner if there was no Ray Bradbury. I couldn’t find Philip K. Dick. His agent didn’t even know where he was. And so I gave up.

I was walking down the street and I ran into Bradbury — he directed a play that I was going to do as an actor, so we know each other, but he yelled “hi” — and I’d forgot who he was.

So at my girlfriend Barbara Hershey’s urging — I was with her at that moment — she said, “Talk to him! That guy really wants to talk to you,” and I said “No, fuck him,” and keep walking.

But then I did, and then I realized who it was, and I thought, “Wait, he’s in that realm, maybe he knows Philip K. Dick.” I said, “You know a guy named—” “Yeah, sure — you want his phone number?”

My friend paid my rent for a year while I wrote, because it turned out we couldn’t get a writer. My friends kept on me about, well, if you can’t get a writer, then you write.”
~ Hampton Fancher

“That was the most disappointing thing to me in how this thing was played. Is that I’m on the phone with you now, after all that’s been said, and the fundamental distinction between what James is dealing with in these other cases is not actually brought to the fore. The fundamental difference is that James Franco didn’t seek to use his position to have sex with anyone. There’s not a case of that. He wasn’t using his position or status to try to solicit a sexual favor from anyone. If he had — if that were what the accusation involved — the show would not have gone on. We would have folded up shop and we would have not completed the show. Because then it would have been the same as Harvey Weinstein, or Les Moonves, or any of these cases that are fundamental to this new paradigm. Did you not notice that? Why did you not notice that? Is that not something notable to say, journalistically? Because nobody could find the voice to say it. I’m not just being rhetorical. Why is it that you and the other critics, none of you could find the voice to say, “You know, it’s not this, it’s that”? Because — let me go on and speak further to this. If you go back to the L.A. Times piece, that’s what it lacked. That’s what they were not able to deliver. The one example in the five that involved an issue of a sexual act was between James and a woman he was dating, who he was not working with. There was no professional dynamic in any capacity.

~ David Simon