MasterChugs Theater: ‘Any Given Sunday’

As a cinematic flasher of not-so-secret mass culture fantasies, Oliver Stone is Hollywood’s R-rated answer to P. T. Barnum. Instead of clowns, aerialists and lion tamers, he parades his own hyper-macho vision of modern American life as a primitive bread-and-circuses carnival of power, greed, lust, fame and violence (especially violence). And in Any Given Sunday, his viscerally charged, razzle-dazzle ode to professional football as a blood sport, he comes up with some quintessentially zany Oliver Stone moments.

Using the film, Stone dissects the glory and decadence of football, as seen through the stunning victories and stinging defeats of the fictitious Miami Sharks. Stone presents the players of the NFL as modern-day gladiators who do battle before bloodthirsty crowds in multi-million dollar coliseums, where on any given Sunday, you either win or lose. And while the veteran director has assembled some top-notch talent for this ode to the American past time, the film’s potential for being one of the great films of 1999 ends up being sabotaged by Stone’s own directorial indulgences, which almost make it unwatchable. Almost. Continue reading MasterChugs Theater: ‘Any Given Sunday’

MasterChugs Theater: ‘G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra’

We’ve had comic book movies, superhero movies, and video game movies; but G.I. Joe: Rise of Cobra is something slightly different. Call it action figure filmmaking, a movie poured straight from the same mold as the ones used to create Hasbro’s legendary toys. A story ripped straight off the back of a G.I. Joe card and plopped down in front of you. The heroes are fully poseable and the bad guys are as stiff and contorted as they are evil. In fact, this sensation is almost palpable, as you can honestly feel it in every frame of Stephen Sommers’ film. It’s as if were you to remove the clothing from the movie’s characters, you’d see nothing but anatomically incorrect plastic and crudely put together ball and socket joints.

Now, G.I. Joe doesn’t have a lot going for it, at least initially. The movie’s director is, as mentioned earlier, Stephen Sommers, a man known for creating one of the worst movies in cinema history, Van Helsing. The trailers have been laughably bad at best, and quite frankly, the inclusion of work done by Kid Rock into anything is not exactly a good move. In fact, Paramount chose not to test screen the movie for critics–that’s almost always a bad sign for a movie. What’s scary is that this tale of woe and misfortune just stems from the lead-up to the movie, not the actual movie itself. So, how is the movie?

Think of that old phrase: “It’s a mystery found in an enigma, wrapped up in a conundrum.” Continue reading MasterChugs Theater: ‘G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra’