Bruce Willis' gender has nothing to do with it

I read an article on Quora that discussed why Bruce Willis was allowed by his agents and managers to continue to work, even though it was obvious to them and to everyone on set that he was ill.

The conclusion of the piece wasn't the notable part, because I already knew it. Willis wanted to continue collecting paychecks for as long as he could to provide for his second family, which includes younger children, having only married his second wife some 15 years ago. In a way, you could say he was exploiting the people willing to pay him for the nominal performances he was able to give as much as they were exploiting him. 

No, it's the judgment this Quora author reached about why Willis was able to do this that struck me as noteworthy and considerably flawed:

"He wanted to be an actor, he wanted to work, and he wanted to provide for his loved ones while he still could. He did it, and he didn't mind the judgment of criticism. Because Bruce Willis is a man."

It occurred to me what an old-fashioned, and often inaccurate, thing it is to describe someone making a hard decision and taking responsibility as "being a man."

I don't know about you, but most men I know -- myself include -- are much more reluctant to make really tough choices and do things that are unpleasant than the women in our lives. 

Literally every big long-term decision, best practice, bit of preventative maintenance, and example of forward thinking in my family is something initiated by my wife. Me, I'm happy to enjoy the short-term, day-to-day pleasures that carry me through life. I'd face up to the important things eventually, but not nearly as quickly as my wife would, and does. 

And yet somehow, my gender is the one that gets rewarded for standing up and doing the right thing.

Now, I don't think the argument is quite as simple as this. The way this is being used, the opposite of "man" is not "woman." I think the opposite of "man" is more accurately described as "boy," or "wimp," or "coward," or "spineless person." 

But in most arenas in life, the opposite of "man" is indeed "woman," so it begs the question: If standing up and doing what's best for your family is "being a man," then is lying in the corner in a fetal position "being a woman?"

I just think we need to change our thinking so that Willis' very laudable actions don't have to be framed in terms of "being a man," even if no offense is intended toward the women who more often actually do the things attributed to Willis while their men drink beer and watch sports. 

You could even re-write that sentence and say "Because Bruce Willis is a good husband and father." In reality, the people he's speaking well of there are husbands and fathers, not men in general. We expect husbands and fathers to be providers, but not in a way that runs contrary to what wives and mothers do. In that phrasing, it isn't excluding any woman, it's celebrating the exploits of particular sorts of men, not all men. And with the word "good" added, it excludes those who aren't. 

Even "Because Bruce Willis is a good person" is far better, and maybe the superior choice overall, because then it is just celebrating the capacity of human beings, without any gender associations at all. 

Bruce Willis already wasn't usable in Glass

Spoilers for Split and Glass.

I watched the first two movies of my informal M. Night Shyamalan weekend, The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable, to examine Shyamalan's filmmaking choices in two of his most highly regarded films.

I ended up thinking about a different one of his choices in my Sunday night film, Glass -- the choice to use Bruce Willis. And yes, my own choice of the word "use" has two meanings there. 

Glass was the only post-Sixth Sense Shyamalan movie I hadn't seen, and by seeing it now instead of 2019, I have an entirely different perspective on it than its initial viewers would have had.

It was less than a year ago that we learned that Willis has aphasia, a language disorder that affects people's ability to speak, read, listen and write -- which also provided a sad explanation for the Willis we were getting in a dozen cheap-o genre movies a year. This news was immediately followed by concerns that an obviously compromised Willis had been exploited by filmmakers eager to cash in on his name, though I think it's more complicated than that as it was revealed that Willis himself also wanted to keep earning money while he still could, to provide for those who depended on him.

Was M. Night Shyamalan one of those filmmakers?

Given Willis' usage in Glass, you'd have to think so.

I wasn't counting, but I don't think Willis' David Dunn has more than ten lines of dialogue in the whole movie. Given that his was the character who launched the whole eventual surprise trilogy that started with Unbreakable and includes Split as a middle film, you'd really expect him to factor in to the final movie more than he does. I'm only exaggerating a little bit when I say he almost has more screen time in his cameo at the end of Split than he does here.

You don't do that with a star of Willis' caliber unless you know something is wrong. And it seems Shyamalan had to have known. 

Now, this is not me accusing Shyamalan of anything, except possibly entering into an agreement with his friend Bruce to appear in the movie even though he couldn't remember more dialogue than about seven words in a row. I do think it's interesting to have this perspective on Glass, though, because it reveals a lot about what Willis was dealing with even back then.

For example -- and here comes the spoiler I warned you about -- his death scene. In fact, in the film's climax, all three of the characters you see on the poster above die within about a minute of each other outside the institution where they were being held for scientific study and/or simple detention. 

Pointedly, James McAvoy's Horde (is that the right character name?) and Samuel L. Jackson's Mr. Glass both get sentimental, old school Hollywood death scenes, where they are closely attended by a loved one and they speak poignant words, through tears, that put a bow on their characters as they are expiring.

David Dunn? He gets unceremoniously drowned in a small puddle in a pothole.

In addition to that being a rather ridiculous way to kill a character that the audience presumably loves, it points up the limitations that Shyamlan may have felt he was dealing with. He may not have felt it was possible for Willis to deliver anything approaching a dramatic death speech.

Then again, when you drown, you don't get to give a death speech. So it worked out that the manner of his death did not require a speech, which I suppose was always going to be the manner of his death since it was revealed that water is David Dunn's weakness.

But really, Willis is barely in this film otherwise. There are a couple fight scenes but it is obviously someone else doing the fighting, another detail made logistically easier by the fact that Dunn wears a black rain slicker that shrouds his face. Though maybe a fight scene was something Willis would have been capable of doing.

I started this long movie too late, after two beers, so I wouldn't say I had the most uninterrupted viewing of Glass. But I could swear there was a good half hour in there when Willis doesn't appear on screen at all, which is strange indeed -- unless you know what was happening with him.

Again there is a potential justification for this. It's certainly arguable that Willis is the least essential of the three characters, at least as far as this particular film is concerned. It's an immediate continuation of the story of the Horde, who we just spent an entire film with two years earlier. But it's also named after its other main character. David Dunn -- who I guess is called the Overseer (who knew?) -- is a distant third in terms of importance, especially as Glass is executed.

Overall, with my maybe eight (!) short naps during the movie and finishing at 1:42 a.m., I'm probably not the most qualified person to tell you how good Glass was or was not. But I did find that it was really too long for the little amount that happens in the story, and that it didn't end up in what I considered a satisfying place.

But at least with all three characters dead, Shyamalan won't be tempted to make a fourth movie directly in this universe ... another element related to this film that Willis' condition has rendered fairly convenient.

Okay, back to non-Shyamalan movies. 

A sad explanation for Bruce Willis' choices

Two 1990s action icons may have seen their careers end this week -- one by his own stupid actions, and one by something far less within his control. 

Bruce Willis had taken on the aspect of a laughingstock in recent years, a man so indiscriminate in his choices that he might have appeared in a teenager's first backyard movie if there were a couple thousand dollars in it for him.

But aphasia is no joke, and now we may never see Willis in a movie again. 

It was announced this week that the actor has been diagnosed with a form of brain damage that prevents its victim from being able to formulate or comprehend language. Presumably, that includes the speaking of lines of movie dialogue, and the ability to react to other people's lines of dialogue.

It means he's retiring from the business.

It's a sad day. 

Sadder: Apparently he was really being taken advantage of on set. It was clear he didn't know what was going on, couldn't remember his lines, etc. But they just kept on rolling him out there, making money off him. One might argue they did it to make Willis himself enough money so that he would be set once he could no longer work, but I'm skeptical. 

I can't remember where Willis stands in our good graces outside of the bad movies he's been appearing in, whether he's on the correct side politically (I remember some possible Republican leanings) or whether he's a good guy personally (I remember Kevin Smith hated him on Cop Out). I suspect the undeniable charm and charisma he once displayed had long since curdled into something far more toxic. I could look it up, but today is not the day to do so. 

At the height of his powers, though, what a movie star.

I won't go on at length about him as I might in an "in memoriam" piece -- he isn't dead -- but I did think it would be nice to highlight the top five times Willis' star wattage made a huge difference in a movie. That doesn't mean only that a "big name" was needed for the role, or that being a star was what made his performance in it memorable. I could have just called this "top five Bruce Willis roles" but I don't think that's exactly what I mean either. Maybe it is, you be the judge. 

Anyway, here is the list. 

5. Looper (2012) - This was sort of a comeback for Willis as it followed a long fallow period for the actor -- fallow as in not fruitful, though still as busy as ever. Especially paired with Rian Johnson's heady and intriguing concept, it reenergized our relationship with Willis, and Willis did his part to vanquish the accusations that he cared less and complained more. (I suppose he may have complained behind the scenes, but I didn't hear about it.) It's an interesting role in the sense that there is something sinister about it -- there's a moment of very poor judgment that leads to him committing a truly horrific action -- but it all comes from a place of sorrow, informed by all this foreknowledge of his preordained fate, and the loss of a loved one. Anyway, the performance really works for the film.

4. Twelve Monkeys (1996) - Willis really works well with heady subject matter involving time travel, doesn't he? He really communicates the disorientation his character finds himself in in Terry Gilliam's film, which involves trips through war zones, both actual (World War I) and metaphorical (an insane asylum). It's also a performance that eschews vanity, as he's broken and beaten up and sometimes without any clothes. Especially against a performance by Brad Pitt that's characterized by all its tics, you can appreciate how Willis underplays this material, and you really get a sense of his chemistry with Madeleine Stowe.

3. The Sixth Sense (1999) - This was not the first "unexpected" usage of Bruce Willis but it continues his ability to pair up with directors with a certain vision. Willis' work with M. Night Shyamalan was truly of the internal variety -- particularly in their follow-up collaboration, Unbreakable -- and Willis played that perfectly in setting up one of the biggest surprise twists in recent film history. (From which Shyamalan himself may have never fully recovered, artistically, as it set him off on the path that has caused us all to laugh at him so much.) This was one of the first times I remember feeling real pathos for a Willis character, which was present in other of his films but overshadowed by a more dominant tone, such as confidence or wise-cracking.

2. Pulp Fiction (1994) - Less than a decade after he even came on the radar for most of us, Willis already felt like a surprise addition to Quentin Tarantino's follow-up to Reservoir Dogs, and perhaps the first example (along with John Travolta) of Tarantino's knack for 70's style stunt casting, where a big name comes along at the end of the opening cast list to really put a spin on your expectations. Butch Coolidge is probably Willis' second most iconic role, though funnily enough, I just had to look up what his last name was. (Do they ever even say it in the movie?) This role may demonstrate more range than Willis has ever displayed in one performance, from the eternal take of Butch quietly listening to Marcellus' speech, to the anger and frustration involved with the loss of his watch, to baby talk with his girlfriend. This, here, is a star.

1. Die Hard (1988) - Number one had to be Die Hard. The best action movie of all time remains one of the all-time best breakout performances for a movie star. Willis' everyday NYC cop, unwittingly transplanted to La La Land for Christmas, is effortlessly identifiable to the audience -- not because we are police officers or would have any clue how to singlehandedly take down a building full of terrorists, but because John McClane handles every new piece of information with exactly the bemusement/frustration that we would feel, and with the ingenuity we would hope to produce. He's the ultimate aspirational character for a certain brand of audience member, who wants to brave in a time of extreme danger but also knows he or she could end up pulling broken glass fragments out of bloodied feet and praying aloud not to die. 

Honorable mention: 

The Story of Us (1999) - This is a personal favorite that I had to throw in there. It's a different sort of role for Willis, where he plays the estranged husband of Michelle Pfeiffer and the father of two kids. They have a trial separation while the two kids are off at summer camp, and the film considers the couple's present, history, and future together during the course of that summer. I suppose it has the contours of a romantic comedy -- which is actually how we first got to know Willis in Moonlighting -- but it's more poignant and contemplative than funny, and I don't think it produces any easy answers, even if it finishes in a way that feels easier than such a real world situation might be. I love this movie for its ultimate optimism, for the performances (Pfeiffer slays me in a scene near the end), and for its attention to detail, particularly a montage of moments from their history set to "Classical Gas."

All six of those movies were movies I had already tagged on my blog and written about previously. Yep, Bruce Willis has definitely been a big part of my cinematic upbringing. 

As one indication of how poor his choices had been, and how much he was being taken advantage of, he doesn't just have one or two roles in the can, as many actors who are taken from us prematurely do. No, Willis has eight movies in the can. Whether any of them will be worth a squirt of piss, or 90 to 120 minutes of our time, is another matter. 

But maybe we'll be ten percent more likely to watch those movies, and other movies he's made in the past decade, just to appreciate him -- and to see if we can see the signs of this terrible affliction. I regret any time I referred to one of his performances as "sleepwalking" through a movie. It now seems clear that giving those performances was extremely difficult for him, even if it was, at some point, the laziness and disinterest talking rather than the aphasia.

But as I said earlier, today is not the day to impugn Bruce Willis, nor to call in to question any of his past choices. Maybe even the right-wing political leanings were evidence of the aphasia. That would explain a lot.

Until they have a cure, fare thee well, Bruce.

That's one way to market a movie

I checked my ReelGood email today to find a promotional email about a new straight-to-video Bruce Willis special, Midnight in the Switchgrass. It also stars Megan Fox, who could be joining Willis on his fast track to paycheck movie hell. 

It also stars some person named Machine Gun Kelly -- I know who he is, I just think he's stupid -- and that's what I'm writing about today. (Actually I don't know if he's stupid, but his name makes him stupid enough for my purposes.)

The big promotional hook this publicist was selling was that this is the movie where Fox and Kelly started a relationship.

The email subject reads:

"MEGAN FOX and MACHINE GUN KELLY hookup film lands on #1 spot on iTunes within 24 hours - starring Bruce Willis"

Don't worry Bruce, we didn't forget you.

When I first glanced at the email, I thought it was a "hookup film," in other words, a film where two characters hook up. But no, Midnight in the Switchgrass is just your standard detective v. serial killer movie, based on somebody called "the truck stop killer."

I guess the fact that two actors started bumping uglies while working together on a movie is a plausible way to sell it, especially in the tabloid/Kardashian/social media hell that is our world today. (If I were any younger I would have come up with a more current reference there than Kim Kardashian. Maybe at least Kylie Jenner.) I mean, I was always interested in Two Much because that's where Antonio Banderas and Melanie Griffith started dating. (No I wasn't.)

But maybe the fact that the other person is some person named Machine Gun Kelly makes me resent it all the more. 

Incidentally, this is a great picture of Willis. He looks confused and angry. I guess many an elderly gentleman find themselves in that situation. 

Carry on.

The interchangeable erotic thriller posters of yore

Did I say something about Bruce Willis?

If you've been keeping up with the blog, you know I've watched three Bruce Willis movies in the past month, and written about each. Friday night would have been the fourth, totally unwittingly -- as in, I didn't realize it was another Bruce Willis movie until after I'd already decided to watch it. The Sixth Sense had been mentioned on one of my podcasts this week, and that gave me a hankering to catch up with it for the first time in at least 15 years. Alas, it was not available on either of my streaming services, and I didn't want to watch it enough to pay for it.

While looking for it, though, I did notice something extremely funny in the search results of my Australian streaming service, Stan.

The Sixth Sense is, quite obviously, not an erotic thriller. But it is a thriller, so I guess that triggered a number of erotic thrillers lurking around in Stan's database on the search algorithm. Better to provide you irrelevant results than no results at all.

I couldn't help but laugh at those results, which, on the second row, looked like this:

A five-poster wide image isn't great for the blog layout, which is why I've excerpted two of these posters for the artwork above.

Looking at these five posters side by side, it reminded me how similar the marketing campaigns for erotic thrillers used to be -- and how basically gone from the landscape that marketing approach is now. If you saw a poster like this in the lobby of your local multiplex in 2020 -- assuming it was open, of course -- you'd get a good laugh at it. It would be too cheesy by half.

But in the years 1987 to 2004 -- which covers the range of release dates for these movies -- these posters were plentiful. So plentiful, in fact, that a search for a fairly different type of movie could bring up a random swath of these posters and have them be almost identical to one another.

In a full three of these posters, the man is plunging his mouth deep into the neck of the woman, though in two of them she is looking elsewhere. The two others are perhaps the more suggestive, as both parties appear to be naked in the Indecent Proposal poster, while Josh Hartnett might just be doing the "lift and fuck" in Wicker Park.

The other similarities are rather funny as well. Three of these have sensationalist two-word titles -- a kind of platonic ideal for the erotic thriller -- which could probably be used interchangeably for each other without compromising one iota their ability to describe the plot. The other two? Place names.

I don't have any good way to search it, but I wonder how many other movies made during this period have a poster that's almost identical to these. There could literally be hundreds. Of course, if a five-panel wide image doesn't work very well on a blog, neither does one that goes a hundred across.

Rather disappointingly, when you search for any of these other titles individually instead of The Sixth Sense, the results are less satisfying. Some of these pick each other up, but none of them pick up all five in a row the way The Sixth Sense does.

Of course, if I did actually want to choose a Bruce Willis movie, I'd have my options there as well:

Not streaming though, unfortunately.

Sleepy Bruce Willis

I swear I'm not on some Bruce Willis kick, all evidence to the contrary. Yesterday I wrote about how I watched my second quarantine-themed Bruce Willis movie of quarantine, and one day later, I've already watched a third Willis flick. This one isn't quarantine-themed, unless you count one scene where a couple guys rob a store wearing half-masks that are basically surgical masks. That was the only possible connection to COVID-19 I could make.

In fact, I certainly wouldn't have watched Cop Out on Friday night if it weren't for a discovery I made the night before, shortly after finishing Surrogates. I can't remember what bit of internet research it was that led me to it, but I stumbled across the information that Willis acted in a stage version of Stephen King's Misery, which ran from late 2015 to early 2016. He played Paul Sheldon, of course. (What, did you think he played Annie Wilkes? That was Laurie Metcalf. Would have really liked to see this.)

I messaged the surprising information to a friend, another big Stephen King fan, and he responded that he didn't think Willis would have the chops for that. I countered that Willis does have the chops, he just doesn't usually use them. In this case he might, since he would obviously not have taken that role for a paycheck. In all other cases, at least lately, he tends to phone it in.

So Friday night, as proof of my theory, I decided to watch him phone it in.

I had heard awful things about Kevin Smith's movie -- both that it was bad, and why it was bad. The latter, at least, was according to Smith himself, who hasn't been shy about talking about how difficult Willis was to work with. I'm not googling his exact quotes now, but I think it was both an attitude issue and a preparedness issue. Like maybe Willis didn't want to be there, hadn't learned any of his lines, and was an asshole to everyone on set.

I was inclined to believe it, even as I also subtracted points from Smith for blaming the failure of a movie on one of the actors. For directors, in most cases, the buck should stop there. Or at the very least, accept the blame publicly even if you don't privately.

But in the ten years since Cop Out was released, I hadn't had occasion to see for myself how terrible Willis was in the movie, which would likely either confirm Smith's comments or render them as overblown blame-shifting.

The thing I remembered before watching was that I thought Willis looked "sleepy" on the poster. That was what I wrote in this post, a decade ago. It was a slightly different version of the poster than the one here, a version where he looks sleepier. I can't use the same one due to my long-standing rule of not using the same poster art twice for two posts on my blog -- even when they are separated by ten years. Anyway, that's why I'm invoking the adjective "sleepy" in the subject of this post, even if it comes a little closer than I'd like to Trump's lame characterization of Joe Biden as "Sleepy Joe."

Well, Willis may be sleepy in this movie, but I'd argue it's a lesser sin than other elements of Cop Out that are way too awake.

The worst scene in a very bad movie is not a Willis scene at all. He's in it, but he's on the other side of the glass of the interrogation room where Tracy Morgan is busy hamming his fool head off. Screenwriters Mark and Rob Cullen -- Smith can't take the blame for the script, at least -- apparently thought it was a good idea for a five-minute scene in which Morgan's character plays bad cop to a perp, roughing him up with lines he's gotten from movies. The joke is supposed to be that the lines start out as from cop-related movies, but devolve into famous quotes from any movie. It's actually a funny idea, but it goes on at least four times as long as it should, and Morgan doesn't sell it well. That could be because he's also wildly putting the perp in headlocks and pushing his head into the interrogation table while trying to deliver his lines.

Willis' responses, on the other side of the glass, are pretty sleepy, but they aren't what makes the scene so painful to watch.

This is just one example of the typical mode of Cop Out, an early tone setter. Willis is not good in it, and maybe he isn't as engaged as he should be, but his disinterest wouldn't have stood out to me if Smith hadn't called attention to it. There's no doubt the movie is quite bad. It's reasonable, I suppose, to conclude that Smith was so worn down having to cater to Willis' diva mentality that he had nothing left for the rest of the movie.

It occurs to me that Cop Out represented an interesting turning point for both men, in different directions. It's only a year after Surrogates, in which I thought Willis was quite good, and definitely engaged enough. After this, though, he started steadily sliding into where we find him now, selling his phoned-in performances for increasingly smaller paychecks on increasingly smaller movies. (The theory works better if you disregard Looper in 2012, in which he is again quite good.)

On the other hand, it's only a year before Red State, which is still the best directing Smith has ever done if you are considering both the performances of the actors and the overall craft of the film. I know most people don't like that film as much as I do -- it made my top 25 of last decade -- but I hope most people at least acknowledge that it is good by Smith's standards. You can see him having used the experience of Cop Out as motivation to be better. The win streak continued with Tusk before he came back down to earth again.

Well, one thing I can tell you for sure -- tonight will not be my third straight Willis movie.

Bruce Willis can still make mainstream movies

Bruce Willis' filmography has become so littered with straight-to-video crap over the past few years that one tends to forget there's a movie star hiding in there somewhere.

I didn't expect Eli Roth's Death Wish to be the movie that reminded me of his capabilities as an actor, but it was.

Probably in part because it's shot really well (by Rogier Stoffers), Death Wish has a sheen of mainstream credibility that has been missing from most other Willis films lately -- even though its release was pushed back, and never seemed like a good bet as a remake of some very grim (if successful) subject matter.

Here I guess I'm revealing my own biases, so maybe I should stop to explain.

I have never seen the original Death Wish or any of its sequels in its/their entirety. However, I have a very clear memory of being over at a friend's house and seeing some chunk of it -- maybe 35 minutes -- and being struck by how bleak and amoral it seemed. I was definitely too young to be watching it, and I probably missed the part of the movie in which Charles Bronson was still a nice guy and his family had not yet been killed. All I saw was the carnage he unleashed, with that stoic Bronson look that he'd just as soon shoot lowlifes as read the newspaper. In fact, these 35 minutes seeded in me a bias against Bronson that I haven't fully shaken to this day.

So when I heard that Willis was starring in a remake, it felt like a perfect fit -- which was a bad thing. Willis has developed a reputation for sleepwalking through his roles, which certainly contributes to the choices he's had to make. Just ask Kevin Smith what he thinks of Willis as a cooperative collaborator on set. The sleepiness of this era of his career seemed like a match for that stoic, amoral quality that I did not like in Bronson, and the movie carried just as little promise.

Well, Eli Roth was not interested in trudging through the grim sensibilities of a 1970s exploitation film updated to the 2010s. With a lively use of that camera, an energetic soundtrack (AC/DC makes an appearance) and a definite sense of humor to mingle with his love of gore, Roth makes this movie actually fun. What's more, he devotes enough time to Willis' descent from a law-abiding surgeon, husband and father who shrinks from a confrontation with another parent on the sidelines of a soccer game, to a vigilante who makes no distinction between the thugs who harmed his family and other thugs harming others in society.

But he couldn't do it without Willis. And though this is by no means Willis the joke cracker -- the guy who Moonlighting made famous -- that wouldn't be appropriate for this kind of movie anyway. Neither is it Willis the sleepwalker. Whatever he may do on the sets of other movies, he put effort into this one, taking evident care to get the emotions right. Whether he came to work on time and was nice to the other actors, I may not know, but the results appear on screen.

One wonders if it has something to do with the Roth-Tarantino connection. Quentin Tarantino produced a couple of Roth's movies, Roth made a short in Grindhouse and Roth appeared as an actor in Inglourious Basterds. Tarantino also of course cast Willis in Pulp Fiction, which was even sort of a comeback for the actor a full 24 years ago. I can see that being the reason Willis appeared in Death Wish, as a favor to Quentin, and he was therefore also on his best behavior. Whatever it was, it worked.

I should pause here to point out some obvious drawbacks of Death Wish. The film is verging on right-wing propaganda in certain parts with its attitude toward gun ownership and protecting yourself when the cops cannot. I don't think Eli Roth actually believes that, and the stores selling weapons, the people who work there, and the ease of getting those weapons are all treated with light parody here. Still, the movie reaches some pretty uncomplicated conclusions about the ultimate wisdom of arming yourself, and its overall mentality is closer than one would like to "shoot bad guys first, ask questions later." That said, as a critic I try to go with my own instinct of whether I enjoyed a movie or not without evaluating whether I fully agree with its politics, as I think a critic always should. On that score I did enjoy Death Wish, though I mightn't have as much if I thought it were actually Roth's intention to make right-wing propaganda.

If calling on old connections and past collaborators worked for Willis in Death Wish, it does give me hope for his next big role in Glass, a reprisal of his role in M. Night Shyamalan's Unbreakable. Shyamalan directs here as well. If we get Willis wide awake for this one, maybe we'll have a full Willis comeback on our hands.

Then again, that seemed possible back in 2012 with Looper, but it never happened.

I'm rooting for it, though. What I saw in Death Wish was enough to remind me of the movie star I miss, the movie star who's still in there and who is not yet too old to give us plenty more of what he did best.

Missing only the Stallone Christmas movie for the trifecta

If you were to name the three most iconic action stars of the 1980s, you would likely identify Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone and Bruce Willis. In fact, I believe one of the Expendables movies does that very thing, getting all three together in one scene. (I only saw the first Expendables movie so I will have to take the word of some review I read.)

That designation is a little bit of a fallacy, as Willis had never done an action movie before Die Hard in 1988, and didn't get his second on his resume until Die Hard 2, which is already in 1990. But it's easier to say "the three most iconic action stars of the 1980s" than "the three most iconic action stars of the 1980s and 1990s." And besides, Die Hard is so iconic that it can fill in Willis' gaps in that decade all by itself.

Anyway, the point of telling you that is to tell you this: In the past two nights, we saw one Christmas movie each from two of those three guys.

On Christmas Eve it was Jingle All the Way, not Schwarzenegger's only foray into comedy, but his only foray into Christmas movies (that I could tell by just looking at the titles of the movies on IMDB).

On Christmas night we watched the aforementioned Die Hard for the first time in six years, not Willis' only foray into Christmas movies, but the only other of which (that I could tell just by looking at the titles of the movies on IMDB) was also a Die Hard movie: Die Hard 2.

We're just missing the Stallone Christmas movie for the trifecta, but alas, that won't be an option for Boxing Day. As far as I can tell (just by looking at the titles of the movies on IMDB), Sylvester Stallone has not made a Christmas movie.

Hadn't seen Jingle All the Way before, which is funny since I consider myself something of an Arnie completist. Then again, it's funny I consider myself that as I have also not seen Stay Hungry, Conan the Barbarian, Conan the Destroyer, Red Sonja, Raw Deal, Predator, Red Heat, Junior, End of Days, Collateral Damage, The Kid & I, The Expendables 2, Escape Plan, The Expendables 3 and Killing Gunther.

Anyway, I didn't like Jingle All the Way. Arnold's charm carries the movie farther than it should, but very little of the comedy works and the thing is just that fateful combination of slapstick and schmaltzy, with an ending that crosses over into the absurd. My wife gave up on it before the finish, and not only because it was Christmas Eve and we had to get to bed at a reasonable time. (In fact, the only reason we were watching it in the first place was that The Night Before didn't end up available on Netflix streaming in Australia, only America.)

It did allow me to see the movie that, I guess, prompted them to cast Jake Lloyd as Anakin Skywalker, though he was also in Unhook the Stars that same year, 1996. And though I hate bashing the acting of Lloyd -- especially considering what the experience of playing young Anakin has done to the guy's life -- he's really not good here, even for a child actor. There's one moment where he tears his neglectful dad a new one that I guess must have been the moment George Lucas saw the potential for petulant anger in him. Then again, Anakin isn't even petulant at that age, as far as I remember. I guess Lucas must have just thought he was really good.

As for Die Hard ... I imagine this would be my eighth viewing or so. I still remember the grand time I had on my first at that small four-screen theater that used to be at the Burlington Mall in Massachusetts, watching with a half-dozen friends and howling with laughter and joy. I commented to my wife last night that I half expect Die Hard not to be good the next time I see it, since upon its release I thought it was just another gritty Charles Bronson-type thriller that was already feeling like a moribund genre at that point. And of course, every time I watch Die Hard it's just as good as it was the time before.

So we got no Stallone, but funnily enough, Die Hard actually has him covered. As a matter of fact, it's got both of the other guys covered in various lines of dialogue.

First (chronologically), there is this line by Hans Gruber: "Just another American who saw too many movies as a child? Just another orphan of a bankrupt culture who thinks he's John Wayne? Rambo? Marshal Dillon?"

Which is perfect, of course, because Stallone played Marshal Matt Dillon on Gunsmoke.

But then, just to put the cherry on top, we get this line from John McClane: "They have missiles, automatic weapons and enough plastic explosives to orbit Arnold Schwarzenegger."

Which is perfect, because Schwarzenegger played an automatic weapon in My Life as a Machine Gun.

After the movie my wife reminded me that both Stallone and Schwarzengger were offered the part of John McClane before they somehow landed on the star of Moonlighting for their movie.

I'm just as glad we don't have to live in a world where we have to see Arnie's bulky frame trying to shimmy through an air duct as I'm glad we don't live in a world where we have to see Eric Stoltz hopping in and out of a Delorean.

Pulp Fiction has-beens

Move over, Nicolas Cage. You've got company.

Once the undisputed king of random straight-to-video movies you might stumble over at the Hoyts kiosk (think Redbox for you North American readers), Cage has since ceded his throne. Or, at least, scooched over his butt cheeks to make room for a couple more pairs.

And as it happens, they both appeared in one of the greatest films ever made (so says me): Pulp Fiction.

I've been following the freefall in selectivity by Bruce Willis and John Travolta for some time now, and thought it was finally time to write about it.

The inciting incident, to use a screenwriting term, was my decision to stop at the Hoyts kiosk on Friday night.

I didn't come away with anything to rent -- two phone calls to my wife went unanswered, and I decided that either selecting something she'd like or renting something for myself to watch when I was this tired, and she and I might watch something else together anyway, were both too great of a risk. But it did give me the chance to scroll through not one, not two, but three movies apiece by Mr. Travolta and Mr. Willis that I'd never heard of. Or really, that I'd heard of only because I'd scrolled through many of these Hoyts kiosk choices on other occasions.

Look, I'm not saying Willis and Travolta should be in the primes of their careers. The former is 61, the latter 62. I am saying they should be going more gently into that cinematic night with choices that are better than these:

Most legitimate element: Director Chuck Russell also directed such comparatively respectable films as The Mask and Eraser, though he hadn't directed a feature in 14 years, since The Scorpion King in 2002.

Least legitimate element: It steals its IMDB tagline from Pulp Fiction! "I lay my vengeance upon them." If only Samuel L. could be there to deliver it.

Verdict: Terrible.

Most legitimate element: It had a plum December 18th release date, meaning its producers surely thought it had a chance to pick up some Oscars. Plus, Gina Carano can actually fight and stuff.

Least legitimate element: I think Kellan Lutz was a guy once, maybe.

Verdict: Awful.

Most legitimate element: Jackie Earle Haley (The Bad News Bears (original), A Nightmare on Elm Street (remake)) directed this. Interesting. Though Dan Stevens' decision to leave Downton Abbey early is looking worse and worse by the year.

Least legitimate element: The script was written by a guy named Robert Lowell, who died 38 years before the film was made. (Look it up! The guy linked in IMDB could be the wrong Robert Lowell, I suppose. But still.)

Verdict: Unwise.

Most legitimate element: It co-stars Dave Bautista. After Guardians of the Galaxy, its upcoming sequel and Spectre, his career has got real heat.

Least legitimate element: This was directed by the same guy who directed Extraction.

Verdict: Not good.

Most legitimate element: At least there isn't a gun in the poster.

Least legitimate element: That beard is just ridiculous.

Verdict: Ill-advised.

Most legitimate element: None.

Least legitimate element: I understand Mark-Paul Gosselaar and Claire Forlani were once people. Plus, this was written and directed by the guy who wrote Extraction. Not the guy who directed Extraction -- he directed Marauders -- but the guy who wrote it. Are we clear?

Verdict: Why??

Of note: Christopher Meloni also appears in both Marauders and I Am Wrath. Maybe Nicolas Cage needs to gives those buttocks one additional squeeze tighter.

Yes, it's really true that you can walk up to any Hoyts kiosk in Melbourne and walk away with any of these six movies. But I wouldn't recommend it.

But before I paint too dire a picture of these men's fortunes, we should pause to recognize that John Travolta just won an Emmy for his work as producer on the terrific The People vs. O.J. Simpson, and was also nominated for his acting as Robert Shapiro, which may have been my favorite performance in the whole series.

Willis?

Well, there's a rumor they're making Die Hard 6.

Avoiding expendability

If G.I. Joe: Retaliation hadn't been pushed to 2013, Bruce Willis might have been the biggest movie star of the summer.

Not the summer of 1992. Not the summer of 2002. The summer of 2012.

If G.I. Joe had come out on June 29th as originally planned, The Expendables 2 (releasing today) would have been the second of three high-profile Willis action movies coming out before the end of September. The third is Looper, which I wrote about last week. Don't forget he was also in Moonrise Kingdom, though that was obviously a very different kind of role.

Methinks Willis' cameo in The Expendables in 2010 was some kind of career wake-up call. Maybe the title didn't only refer to a bunch of soldiers of fortune whose lives were of no consequence. Maybe the title referred to former action stars of his age group, who were teetering on the age of their own expendability.

Having a more significant role in the sequel to Expendables seemed like a good start.

And once he started, it seems like he couldn't stop. Willis is also credited as appearing in an action movie called Fire With Fire alongside Josh Duhamel and 50 Cent, which is supposed to be releasing just two weeks from now. However, this could be straight to video, as I'm having a hard time finding much promotional material on it. And some movie called The Cold Light of Day, which features Henry Cavill and Sigourney Weaver, is supposed to get a limited U.S. release a week after that.

2013? In additional to the delayed G.I. Joe, how about A Good Day to Die Hard, the video game adaptation Kane & Lynch, and Red 2?

Okay, Vance. Maybe Willis is just a busy guy. So what?

Except he hasn't really been. It's not like Willis turned away from acting or even action movies in the five years since Live Free or Die Hard came out. But he had been doing a lot fewer of them. He had a small role in Planet Terror in 2007, though that actually came out before LFODH. Then What Just Happened in 2008, Surrogates in 2009, Cop Out in 2010 and Red later in 2010. Last year brought a pair of very limited releases, the more prominent of which was Catch .44.

I know careers have their ebbs and flows, and the events of a person's private life can have a significant impact on their professional life. (Willis got married in 2009, so perhaps he was just dutifully devoting a couple years to his new wife.) But Willis' current pace of making movies gives the impression that he has stared into the abyss, and didn't like what he saw. The man is 57 years old, and perhaps he figures it's now or never if he wants to appear in 19 more action movies before he gets too gray. (Not that his bald dome would actually reveal any encroaching grayness, though the beard he grew for his role in What Just Happened certainly did.)

The nice thing about Willis relative to some of the other stars of The Expendables 2 is that he doesn't look dramatically different from how he did in his prime. Granted, the other two of the film's informal holy triumvirate -- Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger -- have nearly a decade on him. But their faces have become puffy and misshapen -- not altogether surprising for guys facing the latter half of their sixties, but funny indeed for action movie stars.

So go forth, Willis. Make The Expendables 3 and Red 3 and G.I. Joe 3 and Die Hard 6 and Cop Out 2 and Moonrise Kingdom 2. I'll keep watching.

Starting with Looper, that is. If Expendables 2 is anything like The Expendables, I'm sitting it out.

The hyper-stylization of Joseph Gordon-Levitt

What have they done to Joseph Gordon-Levitt??

Whatever it is, I like it.

The first time I saw the trailer for Rian Johnson's Looper -- which was not the other night, though that second or third viewing inspired me to write this post -- I thought there seemed something a little off about the young actor's appearance. His features seemed sharper, his eyes wider. There was an airbrushed quality to him.

I thought it might just be that the actor worked out for this role, or that the man who has always looked sort of like a little kid (perhaps because we met him as a little kid on Third Rock from the Sun) was finally maturing. But the changes still looked a bit too extreme. He looked like a cartoon character or something.

After this last viewing, I decided I had to investigate.

It turns out that during the Looper shoot, the actor had to submit to three hours a day in a makeup chair in order to achieve the appearance you see above. Much of that had to do with grafting on a larger chin.

So what was wrong with Gordon-Levitt the way he was, babyface notwithstanding?

Here's the cool part: They are trying to make him look like a younger version of Bruce Willis. Not just because they wanted him to have a "Bruce Willis aura" to him -- but because he actually plays a younger version of Bruce Willis.

And don't tell me that you aren't getting a Bruce Willis vibe from those eyes. I don't know how they did it, but to me, it seems clear as day.

I find all the trouble they went to to be especially interesting, because that's usually the last thing anyone cares about in a movie: whether the actor they got to play the younger version of a character (or the older version) really looks like the actor they got to play the older version (or the younger version). Actors are usually hired because they are right for the part, and they bear at least a passing resemblance to the actor who has already been cast. Like, they need to have the same hair color, though that itself is not an insurmountable obstacle. Being the same race certainly helps.

Here though, Johnson and his crew decided it would add to our appreciation of the film if JGL and Willis really looked like the same person. I'm sure there's something about this intriguing story that will make us appreciate all the more that they made that decision.

We'll find out on September 28th.

Looper -- about a present-day hitman who is hired to kill the future incarnation of himself -- is the kind of big idea movie that would ordinarily shoot straight to the top of my "most anticipated" list. It hasn't, which is primarily because in the maybe two years since I first heard about it, I have known it was from the creative team (writer-director and star) behind Brick.

I've mellowed on my dislike of Brick after a second viewing, but I still feel like it contains altogether too much posing and posturing for my tastes, and it turned me against JGL for a number of years. I refused to see Johnson's follow-up, The Brothers Bloom, just because of his involvement.

But this is a new and improved Gordon-Levitt -- literally -- and I have since heard Johnson appear as a guest host on my favorite film podcast, Filmspotting. So I'm ready to open my arms to him again as well.

There will be no teenagers tripping over their noir jargon, so at least there's that.

My name, but not my face

Well just lookee what the good old internet can find for you. A five-panel montage of the most common outdoor ads for Surrogates, due out tomorrow.

(And yes, I do recognize the following irony: I vowed last Friday to dig deeper into the meat and potatoes of films, rather than dwell on things like their advertising campaigns, yet three of my four posts since then have been about movie posters. Let's just say that old habits die hard.)

The first billboard I ever saw for Surrogates was the middle one, the blonde lying on her stomach. I considered there to be a couple interesting things about this billboard:

1) I laid my eyes on it about three times before ever realizing it was even an advertisement for a movie. Since it was executed in the abstract style of ads for perfume and clothing, at first I just mistook it for one of those -- a prospect made easier by needing to keep most of my attention on the road while passing at 35 mph. I think the second or third time, I noticed the word "surrogates" and thought that seemed like a strange name for a perfume. I now laugh at myself that it took until the fourth time before I realized the woman's midsection was incomplete, composed only of metal endoskeleton. That would have been more immediately evident if I'd seen either of the top two posters first.

2) Bruce Willis, whose name is on the billboard, does not appear on the billboard. Nor does he appear in any of these other four pictures, though his name appears in each. With the two that feature the guy -- who, like Willis, has a shaved head -- you might for a second think "Damn! Bruce Willis has been working out!"

It was #2 that made me realize that there can be an odd disconnect between wanting to advertise the star of a movie, and wanting to advertise its content.

Now, I'm not saying that the only posters that should bear the names of movie stars are the posters that also bear their faces. That would obviously be quite restrictive. Besides, many of the best movie posters don't have the face of an actor or actress on them at all.

But I do think it's a little weird when there's one name on the poster, and one face on the poster, and they don't match. If you'd added one more star -- um, let's see, Radha Mitchell -- then it might have made a little more sense. But as it was, it struck me as odd.

Yet I really like the concept of the campaign. I'd hardly want to sacrifice that, either. It tells you a lot about what you might be getting -- without telling you much at all. What the hell do I mean by that? It sets a mood. You know this film will be something about the artificial creation of physical beauty. The fact that they appear to be androids makes it all the more intriguing -- it's science fiction, and science fiction always holds the potential to blow your mind. (If you're like me, you forget all the times it massively disappoints you).

Someone must have felt the same sense of uneasiness I did about Willis' name next to the body of a smoking hot cybernetic organism, because after awhile, I started to see these posters appearing:



Okay, that answers one concern: You've got Bruce Willis appearing next to his name.

But what else do you really know about Surrogates from this poster? The blue hue and the circular tunnel both give you an idea that it probably takes place in the future. But you really have to squint if you want to see what else they're trying to offer you, which is a row of, well, surrogates, I guess, along the bottom. And squinting's not that easy to do at 35 mph.

So the posters of the models win. But then, do you take Willis' name off?

Like most of the discussions on this blog, this one is academic. The movie comes out tomorrow, and there will be no new posters made.

And I think I might go. In fact, I think I might go tomorrow. My wife has not shown particular interest in Surrogates, which means it gives me the perfect opportunity for a solo expedition after work. I'm not "opening day pumped" for it -- it just happens that tomorrow is the day I can conveniently see a movie, and it's opening day. After all, it's been a whole nine days since I've seen a movie in the theater. I'm falling behind during this September, which has been a surprisingly fertile one for new releases.

Normally, a sci-fi film released in late September should not inspire a person with much hope, and there's every chance this could be more S1mone than The Terminator. However, there is a chance it could be The Terminator, and here's why: Surrogates is directed by Jonathan Mostow, who also directed the quite passable Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines. Of even more interest to me is that he directed a little 1997 Kurt Russell thriller called Breakdown, which I happen to love. (As well as U-571, which I did not see).

So ultimately, whether Bruce Willis is in it (not the draw it was ten years ago), or whether there are hot model robots in it (still a draw), is not as important to me as the guy behind the camera.

Where's the Surrogates poster featuring Mostow's mug?