A.    Foreign action movies

B.    Movies featuring actors doing their own stunts

C.    Movies centered around obscure sports

D.    None of the above

If you’ve never been to Rochester, New York, congratulations, you’ve been doing something right with your life. However, it does mean that you’ve never been to the Little Theater on East Ave. And that is a shame. What’s more the shame is that the Little Theater isn’t in a better city. It’s this little (creative right?) movie theater in the heart of the artsy (which is to say, “overpriced”) parts of Rochester where you can find shitty coffee for 5 dollars a cup and worse tee shirts for 40 dollars off the rack. But it’s an awesome damn theater. Little too.

This is really circumventing the point, but George Eastman was born in Rochester. Which isn’t really true; he was born in Waterville, New York, but don’t tell let anyone in Rochester know – they’ve already lost Xerox to Connecticut, and I’m not sure how much else they could handle. He was from there anyway. So the George Eastman of “Eastman Kodak” which is the Kodak (of Paul Simon fame) built a giant-ass mansion there. And it’s a museum now. Why not? And whilst I lived in this cold-as-the-ass-end-of-the-universe city, my wife worked there. In the gift-shop. (Did I mention Eastman invented camera film on a roll? He got a museum for that. But really, it’s a nice house. But the elephant head is a facsimile. ) The downside to this glamourous position was the lame hourly rate. The plus side was completely free admission to movies at The Little Theater.

not actually Rochester

Top 3 Best Things About Rochester, New York (The I couldn’t come up with 5 Edition)

3 – The Flour City Knuckleheads

2 – The Little Theater

1 – How small it looks in your rear-view mirror
.

And having admission to an arthouse gave us a chance to see great movies like Brokeback Mountain and Nine Lives without risk of feeling like we got ripped off if we didn’t like them. There was also Little Miss Sunshine and ‚Ķ oh I dunno. A few others. What other artsy movies came out around 2005? A Prairie Home Companion, Brick, Nochnoi Dozor, MirrorMask and then there was the¬†satisfaction of being one of the two people not pissed off at wasting money on A Scanner Darkly. And most (some) of these I‚Äôve since bought on home video. The Little Theater afforded me the opportunity to see movies I‚Äôd never be willing to pay to see. Like, say, a French action movie about guys who jump off buildings.

Banlieue 13 (pronounced: BAN-lieue 13) came to America with awesome haircuts and the normal Ellis Island treatment to become District B13. And during the opening CGI’ed credits we see that nice fat sections of Paris have been blocked off with huge ass concrete fences Arizona-style (boooo!) to try and contain the shit that is Parisian crime. Not to mention the fact that this lil film was written and produced by French badass Luc Besson (writer/director of The Fifth Element, Leon and Angel-a) and directed by Mediabreach favorite Pierre Morel (director of Taken and From Paris with Love). The problem is that not everyone locked up in this banlieue is a baddy. Enter Leito (David Belle: Babylon A.D.) – a good guy with awesome hair who we first meet as he’s commandeered a buncha-muncha-cruncha cocaine and is doing his best to wash it all down the bathtub before the dealers track him down. See? Told you he was a good guy. But, of course, he’s not quite fast enough, and the baddies (a gang owned by the kingpin Taha and headed by x-game-friendly-named tough-guy K2) break into his building (the only one without graffiti Рbecause everyone knows he’ll whup dat ass) and we get a footchase scene that would make Jackie Chan jealous.

parallel parkouring

A BRIEF HISTORY OF PARKOUR
For whatever reason, Parkour has been kind of blasted in the United States – maybe because it requires that you leave your home and run for extended periods of time. Basically, all it is is extreeeeeeeeeme running. You run around and jump on walls and jump over trashcans and leap tall buildings with a series of small bounds. Parkour (as a modern practice) was developed by French militarist Georges Hebert as a way to train the French military (as a sidenote, it might not be the best strategy to teach your army the fastest way to run away from something). Hebert was influenced by the physical abilities he witnessed from the indigenous African tribes he encountered while on a tour of the continent he took prior to the outbreak of World War I. It is, however, fair to say that creative running has existed as long as people have.

The story develops as we see that the French authorities have little regard for the actions behind the walls. So when Leito reaches out for help from the police, just outside the quarantine zone, he is jailed for his troubles. And when he … um … expresses his displeasure for his mistreatment, he is locked away for good.

THIS MOVIE NEEDS A HERO!

good guys

Cut away, time has passed, and the French version of the FBI has an undercover kung-fu badass they call Damien (Cyril Raffaelli РRand in Die Hard 4: The Crappy One and stuntman extraordinaire). He does all the running and flying-knee-to-face chop socky (right? That’s ok to say, now?) you could want. And he does it in a casino. And he does all his own stunts, and he jumps off buildings and down ropes and onto roulette tables. This is really an awesome Jackie Chan movie that got made with a French cast. And honestly, the biggest thrill of seeing this movie for the first time is knowing that countries other than America and China made crazy, over-the-top, stunt-driven action movies. The French, who’ve brought us the first goddamn movie ever made and cinematic behemoths like Jean-Luc Godard and Francois Truffaut, not to mention Michel Gondry and Jean-Pierre Jeunet, love movies where dudes run around kicking the shit out of drug-dealers and hitting on hot chicks in tight tank-tops too! Honestly, what on Earth is it that Americans don’t seem to like about the French??

Top 5 Awesome Things About France (The Totally Ordinary Haiku Version)

Pierre Izzard

5 – What part of life has
not been made better by soft,
smelly Camembert?

4 –There is no word in
English to which “guillotine”
can directly translate.

3 – I’m Louis the Four-
teenth the Sun King; I’m Louis
the ruler of France!

2 – Three in one: Audrey
Tatou, Emmanuel Beart
and Sophie Marceau

1 –Thanks to General
Lafayette, I’ve come to have
sex with your fam’ly.

Christing hell. Get on with it, yeh? Here’s the skinny: Leito’s in prison, but Taha is still running the show. Someone’s hijacked a NUCLEAR GOD DAMN MISSILE and thought it’d be a good idea to sell to a criminal, like ya do. RE-enter Damien. Damien has to pose like a criminal to gain Leito’s trust, get Leito to show him how to get into Taha’s evil badguy dungeon office building, find the bomb, disarm the damn thing, and get out without getting killed by the roughly 10,000 toadies under Taha’s command and the other assorted banlieue riff-raff.

This is a popcorn, action movie if ever there was one: prison-breaks, car-chases, foot-chases, paper-chases, big guns, big guys with big beards, stop the bomb, save the girl! There aren’t even any Shakespeare references. What more could you want?

Daaaaaaaaaaaaaamn yo

The story is by far the weakest element of the film so I’ll get that out of the way. ¬†There’s really nothing here you haven’t seen before- two “buddies” are paired through unusual means and forced to work together to stop a terrorist plot. ¬†As per usual, one of the dudes is the grizzled, anti-hero played by a veteran actor (John Travolta) and the other is an up and comer in the world of terrorist resolution. ¬†The newbie is James Reese, played by Jonathan Rhys Meyers. ¬†We meet him as he’s just become engaged to his wife and given a new assignment that’s supposed to get him¬†the promotion. ¬†The assignment, of course, is way more than he bargained for. ¬†Like I said, this is not some revelation in film plot but it works. ¬†I also liked that it didn’t force feed information to you and moved at a rather brisk pace. ¬†That said, I’m sure some could feel lost at times but this in no way would curtail your enjoyment of the movie.

So let’s get right down to the elephant in the room: no, Travolta does not suck in this movie. ¬†I know, I was surprised myself. ¬†But from the moment we’re introduced to this Charlie Wax character as he bitches at a customs agent in France, you know that this isn’t the normal character Travolta plays. ¬†I mean, we’ve had the goofy bad guy Travolta from films like Broken Arrow or Face/Off. ¬†But this early sequence does a nice job of proving that not only is Wax a bad ass, you can believe Travolta’s portrayal of the character. ¬†I will say though, the viewer’s ability to actually buy into this role/performance hinges greatly on their overall satisfaction with the final product. ¬†For the record and as you might have guessed, the previews led me to believe that Travolta would not work here. ¬†The difference maker is all the non-rated R dialog you hear in those snippets. ¬†Seeing the unhinged Travolta as he spews profanity and kills “one terrorist per hour” certainly convinces me of his legitimacy as Charlie Wax.

Speaking of killing, holy shit does this movie go nuts. ¬†In one sequence bodies are literally falling from the ceiling and the baddies are dispatched one after the other. ¬†There’s even an Asian gang that just simply accosts Wax and Rees and they end up as nothing more than padding for the film’s body count. There is a frenetic and fresh technique to the action that easily sells itself to you. ¬†And with the exception of the aforementioned gang and one of the car explosions, the action serves to further the story. ¬†Director Pierre Morel (District B13, Taken) has a great way of making these sequences flow rather nicely and they’re never boring. ¬†My guess is that if anything turns you off it’s that the climax doesn’t necessarily occur during what you might call an “action sequence” but instead completes an emotional arc for one of the characters.

That’s another thing I really dug. ¬†You might consider this a bit of a spoiler so skip this paragraph if necessary. ¬†About half way through the film is what I would refer to as a “game changing plot twist.” ¬†I could kind of see it coming but the way it’s introduced into the story is rather jarring so I really liked it. ¬†The delivery totally caught me off guard and introduced an emotional element to the film that I really wasn’t expecting at all. ¬†Things like this have been tried in other movies and failed miserably. ¬†At this point it’s safe to say that Morel is three for three in his directorial outings so it is no surprise that he’s able to handle this with ease.

I know I’m probably building this movie up beyond reasonable expectation but I really did enjoy myself. ¬†As soon as I got out of the theater I texted Adam and told him that we were wrong about it and that he really should go check it out. ¬†I’ll tell you this much: while everyone would have you believe that The Book of Eli is some really awesome action flick, it doesn’t hold a candle to From Paris with Love. ¬†Ignore the previews and check it out. ¬†Highly recommended and totally worth your time.