Blade Trinity

Blade Trinity.  Blade Trinity.  The problem with most movies now is that they don't exactly suck and they aren't exactly good either.  They are like corporate cheeseburgers.  You need something to eat and so you go and get a cheeseburger.  It's fast, it's simple, it isn't something you think about--you just put it in your body as fast as you can and get on with life.   Corporate cheeseburgers are nothing more than mechanical sustenance.  They aren’t even meant to be savoured.  They just taste good enough to keep you from retching, and then after 10 minutes you get up and some other person slides into your plastic seat and consumes their cheeseburger.

I feel that the movie making machine has convinced us that we need movies in the same way we need cheeseburgers.  We just go, consume one and then think little about it after the fact.  Case in point: Blade Trinity.  There was absolutely nothing there that I hadn't seen before.  I even thought that Blade fought a tougher bad guy in Blade II.

Anyhow, how stupid can you get?  Blade vs. Dracula?  I mean, come on!  But for the special effects, Ed Wood Jr. could have made this movie.  I would certainly highlight the acting talents of Parker Posey as evidence of Ed Wood's legacy.  This girl delivers lines will all the emotion of a speak and spell.  At least they wrote a character for the other girl, Jessical Biel, that cast her as an introvert who doesn't like to talk much and who listens to her walkman all the time--this way she can remain blissfully monosyllabic and spreads her lone utterances between almost utopian gaps of up to ten minutes.

Jessica Biel is yet another one of those sultry young actresses who looks great in skimpy clothing and whose acting is so awful that she probably couldn’t play dead convincingly.  I know that it’s important to put these girls into movies to get all teenage boys between 13 and 75 to come in and coo, but does anyone honestly want a woman like that? 

Jessica Biel in Blade Trinity, Megan Fox in every film she has ever been in, That Russian girl with the freckles in the last James Bond movie.  They look as enticing as Burger King cheeseburgers when you see them on TV—the lettuce and tomatoes falling in slow sultry motion onto the bun—the flames licking up over the meat…wouldn’t you just love to take a bit of them? …but they lack the kind of nutrition that a heart needs.  There’s no personality apparent behind the looks.  I suppose these kinds fo roles have been around as long as movies have, but now and then its nice where there’s a female character who is gorgeous (because I’m not oblivious to beauty) and at the same time complex; difficult to fathom. Aren’t there any roles for girl actors out there like that?  Aren’t there any girl actors who can play those roles.

You know which one was interesting?  Monster with Charlize Theron—by all accounts, she’s a highly attractive lady (although she made up to be less pretty in the film), and the character she played in that film was full of complicated and at sometimes contradictory motivations—still they had to make her ugly to do it.  Well, I’d better get back to Blade.

The violence is predictable in Blade Trinity and, as usual, it’s a Hollywood production  that has no concept whatsoever of how to shoot a martial arts scene.  Because American actors often lack the grace and flexibility to participate in an acrobatic fight scene, the sense of the fight is conveyed by a series of rapid cuts that make it look like a lot is happening when actually the actors are barely moving at all.  Jean Claude Van Damme grunts/cut/ he kicks up his leg/cut there is a scene of a foot in the air/cut/ there is a scene of a foot hitting a face/ cut/ we see Van Damme again growling in slow motion/cut/ we see the enemy fall slowly through a table.  The same thing is done in Jennifer Lopez videos, incidentally, to mask the fact that she can't dance worth a damn.  Cut cut cut.  It looks like she's busting moves.

What makes real martial arts movies so breathtaking is the fact that they cut in a way that highlights the acrobatics as opposed to masking them. You can actually see that these people are doing the movies.  Watch the last fight in Drunken Master II, the one in the Iron Foundry.  When I saw that I was like--holy shit did Jackie Chan just do that shit I thought he did?  No cutting there.

So back to Blade, the worst part of it all for me was this idea that the vampires have a future plan for us (that is to say we, the human race) that includes vacuum sealing us like deli meat in plastic bags and hanging us up in a big warehouse to harvest our blood while we slip away in chemically induced comas--this concept that the human being will eventually be overmastered and harvested by a superior race that we ourselves have created is getting to be pretty common now.

You will remember that this was pretty much the concept in the almost unwatchably bad
Matrix trilogy (I actually didn't watch the third, and I watched the second as a download onto my computer and to be honest I fast-forwarded through most of it because it was just
garbage...but I was forced to sit through the whole first one by Anthony who seems to find some redeeming quality in the Matrix that I must admit was never obvious to me)...machines harvesting human beings.  Here in Blade the concept is a little closer to what might actually happen.

There certainly is hybridity in our future.  Through the wonders of xenotechnology animal and human organs are already being interchanged, and this begins to beg the question of when does a creature stop being the animal it was and start being a human animal?  Will such an animal have rights at that time?  How much human, I mean, does a creature have to have within it to be considered for human rights?  You can say it is a question of consciousness and thinking in the abstract and all of that stuff, but this then excludes people in comas and retards and stuff, all of whom are afforded human rights.

As one person pointed out to me, when I was talking about this a few months ago, we have to remember that even a human being is not purely human, that we have all sorts of things in our bodies which are not of us, per se.  One has to question when a human is purely human.  It's too much of a question to tackle in a review of a Wesley Snipes movie, but let me say this: In the same way that humans are making animals into something slightly sub-human genetically--ostensibly for the purposes of harvesting usable parts, so humans are also altering themselves to become more like the computer technology they are developing.  At the same time that we become more like the computers, efforts are being made to make the computers more like us--to give them biological functions, and to make them function biologically.

Thus I don ´t believe in the conquest theory of the human future; this is to say one kind of
technology and one kind of sentience taking over the other and enslaving it (á  la
Terminator, etc)...rather, I see a gradual (though not that gradual) convergence of the
human into the machine...it becomes more like us and we more like it, until we are one
indivisible new race.  There may well be animal hybrids, but what I think is more likely is that the technology will be developed to simply grow new parts without the use of living animals--a new liver in a dish, that sort of thing.

The first human hybrid with another living species visible in this movie seems to be Kris
Kristofferson who looks like he has had his DNA fused with a dried out apple.  Still I give him a lot of credit for not having any shit done to his body.  He should be happy that he is a crusty horrible looking old man and not some fucking plastic nightmare like Dick Clark or whoever else had had millions of dollars of work done to their bodies.  They killed him off in this one though (although he seems to die in every Blade movie and somehow just keeps coming back again and again in slightly worse shape, so maybe by the time they make Blade 4 he ´s be alive again---or maybe they can clone him or something like they always did with Duncan Idaho in the Dune books).

Speaking of Blade 4, though, what a bad idea that would be.  Now that they have introduced a virus that wipes out all vampires and also killed Dracula I wonder if there are any more mountains that can be crossed?  I suppose there is all that stuff about the thirst eventually taking over blade, so he could be a baddie in the next one, or maybe now that he is doing versus movies he could fight Batman or Predator...we´ll see I guess.