We watch several movies a week. Every Friday, we'll talk a little about some of the movies we watched that we felt were Worth Mentioning.
The latest Sniper movie, '80s action, Superman, and The Karate Kid.
SNIPER: ASSASSIN'S END (2020)
This was something I didn't predict, but I've been glad to follow along: the Sniper franchise is now up to eight installments, and franchise stars Chad Michael Collins and Tom Berenger both returned for the latest sequel, Cabin Fever 3: Patient Zero director Kaare Andrews' Sniper: Assassin's End.
Oliver Thompson crafted the story for the latest adventure of sniper Brandon Beckett (Collins), who is enjoying his first leave in years when government agents come busting down his door and arrest him for the assassination of a politician in Central America. We know Brandon was framed for this because the very first scene in the movie shows a hitwoman called Lady Death (Sayaka Akimoto) pulling off the assassination herself, then leaving one of Brandon's hairs at the scene. It will take most of the film to figure out exactly why Lady Death was hired to kill the politician and frame Brandon for it, but it's not Brandon who does the investigation. While Agent Franklin (Lochlyn Munro) is immediately convinced that Brandon is guilty, another agent known as Zero (Ryan Robbins) takes the "innocent until proven guilty" approach and really steps up to become one of the film's primary heroes as he conducts a full investigation, with some tech assistance from Agent Clover (Emily Tennant) - who helps Zero against Franklin's wishes.
Of course, Brandon doesn't spend the entire movie as a prisoner. This is still his franchise, after all. Whoever hired Lady Death to frame him also wanted him dead, and when more assassins hired by this mystery villain fail to kill Brandon while he's in custody, he ends up on the run... And he's too busy to investigate the situation himself, so it's a good thing Zero is around. Brandon just heads out to a shack in the woods to do some bonding with his dad Thomas (Berenger), who was the star of the franchise for its first three films. When more government agents arrive at Thomas's place at the same time Lady Death is lurking in the forest with her sniper rifle, it kicks off a standout sequence in which Thomas and Brandon also grab rifles and we get three snipers at the ready, waiting to see which one is going to make the first move.
Zero and Clover are able to tie the whole assassination / framing thing back to the shady dealings of a pharmaceutical company based out of Vancouver (and when Lochlyn Munro is in the cast, it's no surprise that Vancouver is one of the locations), but I can't say I was very interested in the answers they dig up. For me, the mystery was filler between action scenes with Lady Death. She's a very cool character to put Brandon up against, and Andrews proves to be a very capable action director.
Sniper: Assassin's End is a good entry in the series - in fact, given that this is a "Part 8" everyone involved should be very proud that they made a movie that's this good. I may not have gotten wrapped up in the mystery, but the writing was fine and Zero is a strong character, even if his presence too often draws focus away from Brandon.
I'll keep watching Sniper movies as long as they keep making them. The quality on these are surprisingly high for direct-to-video movies, and I enjoy seeing that this type of B-level action movie is still getting made. My father would pretty much only watch action, so I grew up on stuff like this.
EYE OF THE TIGER (1986)
The Survivor song "Eye of the Tiger" was specifically recorded as the theme song for Rocky III, and got a Best Original Song Oscar nomination for its association with that film. For me (and for blog contributor
Priscilla), the song can't be viewed as something separate from Rocky III, I can't listen to it without seeing visions of Sylvester Stallone as Rocky Balboa. So Priscilla and I were shocked to find that just four years after the release of Rocky III, an action movie called Eye of the Tiger was released, and this movie features Survivor's "Eye of the Tiger" as the title sequence theme song, the end credits song, and also has the song on the soundtrack during the movie proper as well. This happened because Survivor was signed to Scotti Brothers Records, and the Scotti brothers also had a film production company called Scotti Bros. Pictures. The 1986 action movie Eye of the Tiger is a Scotti Bros. production.
Directed by Richard C. Sarafian from a script by Michael Montgomery, Eye of the Tiger is a revenge flick that really did not need to be called Eye of the Tiger. Gary Busey stars as Vietnam veteran Buck Matthews, a man has just been released from prison after serving time for a violent dust-up in a bar. (Buck says he was defending himself and shouldn't have been charged, and we believe him.) After returning home to his wife and young daughter, Buck finds that his small town has been overrun by a group of drug running, maniacal bikers led by William Smith as a fellow called Blade - because if you need a biker for your movie, Smith has been one of the top choices ever since the 1960s. Buck gets on the bikers' bad side when he stops them from assaulting a young woman, and from that point on it's war. The bikers attack Buck in his home and kill his wife, shocking his daughter into a catatonic state. Then Buck sets out to get revenge by wiping out the biker gang.
While the threatening, corrupt sheriff (Seymour Cassel) disapproves of Buck's "stupid vigilante shit", he gets some help from his friend J.B. Deveraux (Yaphet Kotto), a deputy on the edge of retirement. His vengeful endeavors are made more successful thanks to the fact that a wealthy fellow convict owes him a favor, and Buck cashes in by asking the guy to send him a pickup truck that has been turned into a war machine, complete with machine guns and rocket launchers.
James Bond's gadget providers at Q Branch would love this thing. As Buck knocks the bikers off, Blade and his buddies make sure we'll be rooting for Buck every step of the way by doing awful things like digging up the coffin Buck's wife was laid to rest in and dragging it back to his home behind their motorcycles. When Buck blows these guys away, catches them in explosions, and sets up decapitating booby-traps for them, it's very satisfying.
The decision to call this Eye of the Tiger and lift Rocky III's theme song was a goofy one, but chances are I wouldn't have stumbled across the movie if it didn't have that title. The film itself is actually a really cool 1980s B-movie, and for viewers who are into this sort of thing, I would even go so far as to call it an undersung classic. How a movie that's called Eye of the Tiger and shows Gary Busey fighting bikers with a gadget-packed pickup while Yaphet Kotto provides air support, dropping dynamite from a plane and blasting James Brown, managed to slip into obscurity is beyond me.
SUPERMAN (1941 - 1943)
Created by writer Jerry Siegel and artist Joe Shuster (and a display in the Cleveland airport will have you know that Siegel and Shuster created the character while in Cleveland), Superman first appeared in the pages of Action Comics #1 in 1938. Three years later, Fleischer Studios brought Superman to the screen for the first time in a series of short cartoons - and many of the things the average person knows best about Superman are already present in the Fleischer animated shorts. That "Look, up in the sky! It's a bird! It's a plane!" saying? That's part of the intro to the Fleischer cartoons. So is the stuff about Superman being faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive, and able to leap tall buildings in a single bound.
The Superman in these cartoons isn't quite as powerful as we're used to, though. In these shorts, we see that it can sometimes be a struggle for Superman to accomplish his heroic acts, despite the fact that he has remarkable physical strength. Superman gets tired, he gets knocked down, this hero thing isn't easy.
All of the cartoons are under 10 minutes in length, so they move through the story quickly - and usually they have something to do with Daily Planet reporters Clark Kent and Lois Lane getting wind of something odd or something that might be a threat to their city (which is simply Manhattan in the cartoons, rather than the fictional Metropolis), looking into it, and then getting mixed up in a whole lot of trouble. Whether the threat is a mad scientist with some kind of dangerous gadget, hi-tech thieves and terrorists, a thawed-out T-rex, a volcano eruption, or rampaging animals that have escaped from the circus, it's a "job for Superman" (that line is from the cartoon as well, spoken right before Clark Kent decides to ditch his civilian gear and change into his Superman costume), and more often than not Lois becomes a damsel in distress, either captured by the villain or in danger of being killed by something. It does get a bit old, seeing that play out over and over.
The cartoons may not dazzle with their storytelling, but they certainly dazzle with their artwork. To this day, the animation in the Fleischer cartoons looks incredible.
There are seventeen of these Superman cartoons, but they weren't all made by Fleischer. Halfway through the run, Paramount bought out the company, ousted the Fleischers who founded it, and started producing Superman cartoons through the renamed company, Famous Studios. There is a bit of a decline in quality in the cartoons when they switch from Fleischer to Famous; they're not as impressive, not as fun, and they start paying a lot of attention to what was going on in the world at the time - namely, World War II. Superman gets involved in the war effort, and at times even appears to be flat-out killing people when he sabotages America's enemies. There are still some outlandish things to be found in the Famous Studios cartoons, like mummies and a tribe of cave-dwelling people in bird costumes, but for the most part they liked to focus on WWII.
The Fleischer/Famous cartoons are some of the first Superman stories I ever saw, I have clear memories of watching these cartoons at my grandma's house when I was a little kid. They held up then, more than forty years after they were made, and most of them still hold up (the Fleischers more than the Famous entries) as we close in on the eightieth anniversary.
THE KARATE KID (1984)
There are lines and images from The Karate Kid that have been burned into my mind since my earliest days. I was just six months old when the movie was released to theatres, so I would have been in the toddler stage when it reached VHS and cable, and it got a lot of play in my household throughout my childhood. Especially since I have a brother who's ten years older and would watch the movie frequently in his tween and teen years. Decades later, I still understand why my brother watched it so much, and why it's one of the most popular movies of the '80s: even now it holds up as a really solid, entertaining flick.
Directed by John G. Avildsen from a screenplay by Robert Mark Kamen, it stars Ralph Macchio as the title character, teenager Daniel LaRusso, whose single mom Lucille (Randee Heller) moves them from New Jersey to a questionable apartment complex in the Reseda neighborhood of Los Angeles just a couple days before school is scheduled to begin. Daniel has only been in Reseda for about a minute before a neighbor invites him to a party on the beach, and there he catches sight of Ali Mills (Elisabeth Shue). Daniel is instantly smitten, but it turns out that Ali is a dangerous girl to have a crush on when her ex-boyfriend Johnny Lawrence (William Zabka) shows up at the beach and demands to talk to her - breaking her radio in the process. Daniel steps into the middle of the confrontation, and Johnny gives him a black eye for it. Daniel knows a little karate, but Johnny knows more.
Daniel will come to find out why Johnny was able to beat him so easily on beach: he and his friends are students at a karate dojo called Cobra Kai, where the instructor is hardcase Vietnam veteran Kreese (Martin Kove), who teaches a philosophy of "No Mercy". After the school year begins, these Cobra Kai guys continue causing trouble for Daniel... and at a Halloween dance, he makes the mistake of getting some revenge by dousing Johnny with water while he sits in a bathroom stall, rolling a joint. The beating Daniel receives from Johnny and his friends - who are all dressed in skeleton costumes, one of those things that has been burned into my mind all these years - is so bad, one of the other guys even tries to get Johnny to stop. Johnny doesn't listen.
Then something unexpected happens. The beating is taking place right outside the apartment complex Daniel lives in, and the place's handyman Mr. Miyagi (51-year-old Noriyuki "Pat" Morita, playing several years older than his real age) saves Daniel with some karate moves of his own, quickly taking down five teenage Cobra Kai students. Daniel and Miyagi have had some friendly interactions before this; Miyagi fixed Daniel's bike after Johnny and co. busted it, he taught him about bonsai trees, he even made the shower costume Daniel wore to the Halloween dance, but the kid definitely didn't see this coming.
Producer Jerry Weintraub had purchased the film rights to a news article about a kid who had earned a black belt in karate so he could stand up to his bullies, and Kamen took that concept and worked autobiographical elements into it. He had been bullied as a child and turned to karate in hopes of learning how to stand up for himself. The first instructor he met was a Kreese type, someone who was into using martial arts for violence. But then he discovered Goju-ryu, a type of karate that originated from Okinawa and was founded by Chojun Miyagi. The Miyagi character was named in honor of Chojun Miyagi, is also from Okinawa, and he tells Daniel he's a descendant of the person who came up with the name "karate". Miyagis have been teaching their children karate ever since one of them learned the techniques while in China in the 1600s. Mr. Miyagi believes that karate should only be used for defense, the opposite of what Kreese teaches at Cobra Kai. He says there's no such thing as a bad student, only a bad teacher - so he and Daniel decide that he should have a talk with Kreese.
Kreese, of course, is not respectful, and only agrees to tell his students to leave Daniel alone when Miyagi - to Daniel's surprise - says they'll have a chance to face off at a karate tournament in just over a month and a half. Daniel is not at a tournament level, so Miyagi will have to give him a crash course of lessons... leading to what may be one of the most well-known sequences in cinema history, where Miyagi employs some unconventional teaching methods. Daniel doesn't even realize he's learning karate while Miyagi has him waxing his cars, sanding his wooden deck, and painting his fence and house.
In his downtime between lessons, Daniel even manages to properly pursue Ali now that he knows Johnny has been ordered not to give him any grief. The courtship includes a trip to a very cool-looking place called Golf-'N-Stuff, but there are issues involving social status (Ali is rich, Daniel doesn't fit into her world) and whether or not she's truly done with Johnny.
Speaking lines that are often amusing in an accent inspired by a relative of his, Morita is fantastic in the role of Miyagi, and it becomes very clear why he was nominated for an Oscar for playing the role when he's given a devastating dramatic scene (a scene the studio wanted cut out, but thankfully it stayed) in which Daniel finds him drunk, mourning the wife and unborn child he lost forty years earlier. The wife and child who were forced to live in an internment camp even while Miyagi himself was serving in the U.S. Army during World War II.
From Morita to Macchio, Zabka, Shue, Heller, and supporting roles, The Karate Kid was perfectly cast. Everyone turned in a great performance, and Avildsen and Kamen gave them the material to work with to turn this into a movie that is packed with iconic moments that have been an enduring part of pop culture for nearly forty years. I think I might like it even better now than I did when I was a kid, because now it has '80s nostalgia going for it as well.
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