This film is on: Blade

You may or may not have noticed that I’ve started writing up films that I’ve seen. No doubt I’ll look back on these posts (currently grouped together under the title This Film Is On – you can never steal enough REM lyrics … ) in the future and be appalled at my opinions, but I’m interested to see how my emotional responses to films shift over time. There was a time, for example, when Peter’s Friends was my favourite film of all time ever.

Anyway, these write-ups will sometimes be quite brief, sometimes be bulleted, and sometimes be concerned with little more than what kind of stationery a minor character uses. I’m not trying to be Harry Knowles or anything (god forbid), I’m just trying to share the perspective of a thirtysomething graphic designer film geek, and open it up for discussion.

Okay, explanation out of the way.

A quick thought on Blade, watched a couple of nights ago. On the surface it looks like a standard comic book action movie, but it’s actually an off-kilter patchwork of oddball moments, like  the sped-up Benny Hill car chase, the better-than-Kill-Bill-if-you-think-about-it sword fights, or the genius casting of Kris Kristofferson as Kris Kristofferson With A Shotgun. Plus it features one of the most random climactic kill-off lines I’ve ever heard:

“Some motherfuckers are always trying to ice-skate uphill”

Very random. Very Blade.

I’ll have to sit down and watch Blade II again at some point, as I think I preferred it to the original first time round. Still haven’t seen the third one though, and I haven’t heard a single good thing about it. Surely there’s someone out there who likes it … ?