Tag Archives: Manny

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Premium Rush – Review

4/5 – Quite a rush!

I finally caught Premium Rush on Blu-ray this week. I missed it when it was in the theaters. Now that I’ve seen it, I wish I had seen it earlier. I remember not being that excited for it in the theater thanks to the trailer, which it turns out did not do this movie justice.

Premium Rush is an excellent thriller. I wouldn’t have expected a movie that takes place mostly on bicycles to be that entertaining, but Premium Rush really is great. The movie is told mostly in real time, between 5:30 PM and 7:30 PM on a weekday evening. Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays Wilee, a bike messenger with what appears to be a death wish. Granted, anyone who is a bike messenger in New York City is taking their life in their hands every day on the job, but Wilee lives at the edge. He doesn’t have brakes on his bike. He speeds through busy intersections and rides between buses.

Wilee picks up a package that gets him in a mess of trouble. It turns out there’s a McGuffin in this envelope that a bad man would like to get his hands on. It’s the bad guy in the movie, Bobby Monday (played by Michael Shannon), that was the only low point in the movie for me. At times, it just seemed like Shannon was overacting his part. But after watching the bonus features, it seems Michael Shannon might be like that in real life too, just full of crazed energy. So maybe I have to rescind this complaint.

Wole Parks does an awesome job as the other main antagonist in the movie, Wilee’s nemesis Manny. Manny is Wilee’s opposite in many ways. He wears a helmet, has brakes on his variable speed bike and trains daily, while Wilee thinks brakes will get you killed and rides a fixed gear, steel frame bike.

They’re chasing the ice cream man.

There are a few really cool chase sequences in the movie each involving a bicycle vs. something else. Bike vs. bike, bike vs. car, bike vs. pedestrian, they’re all done great. Director David Koepp does a really good job in the bonus features explaining how he wanted the bike chase sequences to each be very different from each other, and that’s what led them to having the bike face off against different modes of transportation.

My favorite of the chase sequences was the first one, with Wilee on his bike being pursued by Monday in his car. During this chase, a bicycle cop goes after Wilee as well. The bikes can go in places that cars can’t, which Koepp takes full advantage of.

It was also very cool to see Wilee’s point of view as he approaches a busy intersection. His decisions on different routes are mapped out on screen, showing which ways are perilous and which one will will work. The decision takes place in a split-second, but it was very cool seeing it mapped out like that.

It looked like at least 95% of this movie was shot on location. They are all over Manhattan, usually on the streets. It was very cool seeing actual New York City all over this movie. I felt like some of the geography didn’t match up during a couple of the chases, but for the most part, they were accurate.

Premium Rush is one of those rare movies where I recommend watching the special features after the movie. They are both very well done and definitely add to the experience of watching the movie.

Five people played Wilee in total throughout Premium Rush!

I wonder if Premium Rush is helping or hurting bike sales in New York City. After watching the movie, I plan on sticking to the subway.

Yeah…I think I’ll walk.

If I were to rank Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s movies from 2012, I’d rank them Looper, then The Dark Knight Rises, then Premium Rush, then Lincoln. How would you rank them? All-in-all, I scored those four movies 17/20 combined. That might make JGL the actor of the year for Tuesday Night Movies.

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On The Couch #44: Scarface

I’m not sure why I never saw Scarface before now. I’ve seen a lot of rap videos. I like rap. I have friends who like rap. How is it that I’ve managed to avoid this movie for so long, a movie which seems to be rapped about more than any other?

…with the possible exception of The Little Mermaid.

When I told a friend this morning that I just watched Scarface for the first time, he looked at me incredulously and said “You just watched it for the first time? That movie is awesome! It’s one of my favorites!” He then slipped into a faux-Cuban accent and said “My name is…Don Corleone. Let me introduce you to my papi.” “Wow,” I replied, “It’s one of your favorite movies and you managed to butcher both of those lines. Impressive.”

It’s interesting that when Scarface was first released, these characters in it were a break from the gangster movie cliché, but have now become the current gangster movie cliché.

Scarface is definitely firmly rooted in the 1980s. The fashion. The hairstyles. The neon lights. The non-stop coke binges. Some of those things should never leave the 80s. Specifically Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio’s hair.

How much coke do you have to snort before this perm looks good? The world may never know…

Tony Montana is a complete dick in the movie. Why does every fan of Scarface idolize Tony? They should idolize Manny. Manny was awesome. He was a fun loving, hard working ladies man. So of course Tony had to kill him. Why? Because Tony’s a dick and that’s what dicks do: murder their awesome best friends. The worst thing Manny did in the movie wasn’t dating Gina behind Tony’s back; it was hitching his boat to Tony’s sail in the first place.

Which brings me to Tony’s weird relationship with his sister Gina. When Gina first appears in Scarface, I had no idea she was Tony’s sister. Tony was talking to her like she was the girl who got away. When it was revealed they were brother and sister, I was skeeved as much as Han Solo must have been when he found out Luke and Leia were brother and sister. “Wait, so you two are related? Then why do you look at each other that way?” It was obvious from Gina’s first scene that Tony wanted to have sex with her.

Kiss her, you fool! Wait, she’s your sister?!

But it took a long time and Tony’s murder of her newlywed husband for Gina to realize that. Despite Gina shooting him in the leg, I’m pretty sure that Tony would have had sex with Gina when she burst into his office yelling “Fuck me!” Unfortunately for Tony, that Bolivian hit man had to mess up his game by bursting in after her and shooting her dead. The most surprising part of that scene is that Tony didn’t have sex with Gina’s bloody corpse.

I get why this movie is a cult favorite, but I wouldn’t call this the greatest gangster movie of all time. That title goes to Goodfellas in my book, but I can understand if you were to choose The Godfather instead. It’s funny that both The Godfather and Scarface both have three hour running times, but it’s only Scarface where I really noticed I was watching a three hour movie.