Category — Lights, camera... action!

Umm, one of these things does not belong here: among the cast for the reboot of the Predator movie franchise you’ll find Adrien Brody, Topher Grace and Oleg Taktarov. Now, I’m not saying Brody and Grace won’t make great alien killers but UFC and PRIDE FC vet Taktarov seems better-suited to the job of shooting up the jungle, not having time to bleed and getting to the choppah. Anyway, the film is shooting in Hawaii and the Russian dreadnought is hanging out with BJ Penn.

I was on the treadmill at the gym looking for any kind of distraction from the progressive tightening in my legs when a Bully Beatdown marathon came on one of the TVs. Eighty minutes later and I was still running while professional MMA fighters knocked the snot out of guys who picked on smaller geekier guys. It was an entertaining trainwreck that appealed not to the MMA fan in me but the dork who got picked on in junior high school. And the host, Jason “Mayhem” Miller, is like the Joker from the Batman cartoon crossed with Bugs Bunny on a Red Bull rush . And for this kind of show that’s a good thing.

I don’t believe that fighters should act – I don’t really believe that fighters can act – but I’ll make an exception for Gina Carano, especially since she’s starring in a movie to be directed by Steven Soderbergh (Traffic, Ocean’s Eleven). As I reported here, Carano will star in a spy-action-thriller called, appropriately, Knockout. Now Empire Magazine has an interview with Soderbergh, who gives a few details on the film:

“My feeling was, If I don’t do this, somebody else will,” says the Oscar-winning director. “I felt, somebody is going to look at her and go, ‘She should be in a movie!’ And I felt like, Why shouldn’t I be the person saying that?

“If you start following the female MMA fighters, Gina pops out pretty noticeably,” says Soderbergh. “I thought it was a fascinating combination of appearance and activity… I’d been wanting to make a spy action film for a while, but hadn’t really determined what I was going to bring to it that would distinguish it from the traditional approach. Then I thought, ‘Why don’t I just build it around her? She can actually break people in half.’ I was interested in doing something ultra-realistic.”

Carano – who appeared as Crush in TV’s American Gladiators and has a role in the Michael Jai White actioner Blood And Bone – will play someone who is ‘outsourced’ by the government to perform tasks the state can’t be seen to undertake. “My desire is for it to be a very realistic portrayal of somebody who gets hired, as these people do, by the government, to go and perform certain duties that it would be inappropriate to give to the military,” says Soderbergh. “That could be anything from a hostage-grab to surveillance to an actual killing…”

Plot details are light, because the script is currently being written, but Soderbergh describes Knockout as “a combination of a Bond movie and Point Blank,”though, “more on the scale of From Russian With Love than, you know, Quantum Of Solace… Something where the characters and the story are as prominent as the action stuff.”

Lem Dobbs, whose scripts for Kafka and The Limey were previously directed by Soderbergh, is writing the screenplay, with cameras expected to roll in February.

Nothing impressive in these set snapshots from the new A-Team movie. Quinton “Rampage” Jackson’s BA Baracus will be sans mohawk, Liam Neeson’s Hannibal looks like old Paul Newman, Bradley Cooper’s Faceman looks just like Bradley Cooper from The Hangover and the guy in the red ballcap is probably the director. Ho. Hum. I hope something blows up soon. Or Rashad Evans and Keith Jardine show up for a set visit.

Now I’m just going to post stuff that Quinton “Rampage” Jackson says just because I think it’s funny. This is from an interview with MMA Bay:

“The bottom line is I’m thinking, ‘What should I do?’ My family is standing behind me 100 percent and my kids are too young to even care. All my kids know is I’m always gone and I’m not spending much time with them and I even asked my dog how does he feel and my dog said, ‘Who the hell are you, I don’t know even know you no more. I don’t even know you, why you even talking to me?’ My dog just looked at me, licked his nose, lit up a fart and walked out my room.

“Everybody knows I’m doing this A-Team movie and now I’ve got a lot of other movie offers and it’s for big money. So I’m thinking, ‘What should I do? Should I let an organisation disrespect me, tell me what I can’t do, make loads of money off me and call me a baby?’ I love the fans. I really do love the fans and I’m thinking, ‘Should I go out there and give them what they wanna see?’ The fans buy the pay-per-views, they give you the strength to go out there and put on a show because they’re cheering for you but I’ve grown to like making movies. This movie is really fun, I get to shoot people and that something I’ve never done before because I’m too nice of a guy. But every time I shoot somebody I see Rashad’s face over and over, like I get to shoot Rashad thousands of times and it’s fun. I get to beat people up. I can put anybody’s face on them and beat the hell out of them.

“People are coming up to me with all these other movies and I’m thinking, ‘Man, do I really wanna bust my ass in training every day, have all these injuries, worries about whether I look good and whether I’m going to win?’ I don’t have that with the movies, I already know what’s gonna happen, it’s scripted so there’s just no worries. At the end of the day I go home, I can just kick back and enjoy myself. But I can’t lie, my heart is with fighting. When I meet my good fans on the street and they say, ‘Oh man, you’re the reason why I got into the UFC’ or I see a fan wearing my t-shirt it, means a lot to me. It means a lot to me that the fans like me and my fighting style and I really respect that. That’s a part of fighting that would keep me there and keep me motivated.”

I’m pretty sure the new ink on the right side of Chuck Liddell’s skull is fake as his Dancing With The Stars partner Ana Trebunskaya has a smaller version of the Mike Tysonesque tattoo near her right eye. I don’t know what the reason is but it’s ugly. As for his dancing, he did look a lot more comfortable than last week and the tearing-the-shirt-off=arms=flexed/crossed salute is cheesy but classic Chuck Liddell. Best judges’ quote: “Savage and primeval but always a tango.”

This Wanderlei Silva video blog is basically an advertisement for the November 14 Wand Fight Team tryouts that will result in some sort of Wanderlei reality TV show. Fast forward four minutes or so and check out Silva in trainer mode. Makes me want to slap on some gloves and shin guards and jump in there.

So this is what has been keeping Cung Le from defending his Strikeforce middleweight title: Pandorum, a grimy glowstick-illuminated sci-fi monster movie that owes much – well, pretty much everything – to the Alien films as well as bits of Pitch Black and Resident Evil. Yet for all its genre-splicing derivativeness, it still manages to be a more-than-above-average thrillride.

Pandorum is set aboard an intergalactic Noah’s Ark, where crewmen Ben Foster (3:10 To Yuma) and Dennis Quaid (Any Given Sunday) awake from years of hyper-sleep to find their memories and fellow crewmembers missing. From there it’s a struggle to figure out who they are and what happened to everyone else while also trying to fix their malfunctioning spaceship. Toss in the aforementioned monsters in the dark, a serious case of deep-space psychosis and enough muck and grime to make you feel like you need a shower, and the result is, well, exactly that, a space movie that flirts with Lovecraftian existentialism and the occasional disemboweling.

The film is heavy on atmosphere, and it’s a pretty heavy atmosphere at that – paranoid, claustrophobic and just plain icky. Fortunately, you can tell that the man at the helm, director Christian Alvart, loves the space monster genre and does his best to hold our attention, even when it slips into the occasional blackhole of bleakness and boredom. Sure there are plot holes big enough to swallow a supernova – how many times can Foster fall down a shaft, tunnel or tube without collapsing a lung? And how many glowsticks did he stuff into that tight little flight suit of his? But those are minor quibbles. I mean, what movie about a spaceship infested with cannibalistic creatures hasn’t had a few tumbles in logic? It’s the nature of the beast and in Alvert’s hands, and aided by solid performances all around, Pandorum pretty much pays off.

Now, if you’re seeing this for Cung Le, you might be disappointed. He has an important but minor role and his ass-kicking is kept to a minimum and is unfortunately shot in that Bourne-inspired shaky-cam style that prevents any appreciation of his martial arts ability. Still, he’s a charismatic presence even when he’s speaking only in Vietnamese. That he only speaks in Vietnamese and his dialogue has no subtitles makes it difficult to know how good his line delivery is, but he seems convincing given the restraints and limitations of his role.

Is he good enough to warrant abandoning MMA for acting? That’s hard to say. On a scale of one to ten, with one being Steven Seagal in Fire Down Below and ten being Jean-Claude Van Damme in JCVD (and yes, JCVD really is that good), Le comes in around a Chuck Norris-circa-Code of Silence level six.

A little old but worth a quick look. Again, though, some people have way too much time on their hands.