A Day At The Movies

To survive the night, cops and criminals alike will have to unite and fight. A classic head-to-head showdown ignites in Assault on Precinct 13, an all-new update of the 1976 action thriller of the same name.

With only a few hours left in the calendar year, Precinct 13, one of Detroit's oldest precinct houses, is closing. Amid heavy snowfall and unsafe road conditions, only a few lawmen remain on duty for New Year's Eve. They are headed by Sergeant Jake Roenick (Ethan Hawke), a good cop wrestling with bad memories of a fatal undercover op from the previous spring. Roenick and Precinct 13 have both seen better days. Early on December 31st, deep in the city, formidable crime lord Marion Bishop (Laurence Fishburne), is cornered by an undercover cop. Their ensuing struggle leaves the cop dead - and Bishop captured, by the Organized Crime and Racketeering squad that Marcus Duvall (Gabriel Byrne) runs. Bishop is handcuffed and herded onto a prison bus with several criminals: junkie Beck (John Leguizamo), hustler Smiley (Jeffrey "Ja Rule" Atkins), and gang member Anna (Aisha Hinds). But the battering snowstorm stops the bus well short of its high-security destination and strands it at the remote Precinct 13 - where, as night falls, the prisoners are temporarily incarcerated. This influx of prisoners irks Roenick, almost as much as visiting police psychologist Alex Sabian (Maria Bello) does. But Precinct 13's provocative secretary Iris Ferry (Drea de Matteo) and salty veteran cop Jasper "Old School" O'Shea (Brian Dennehy) won't let the increasing workload deter them from celebrating...

"D.A.R.E To Watch Assault on Precinct 13" A Review of Assault on Precinct 13 by Ryan Hailey
Assault on Precinct 13 is a movie written and directed by John Carpenter, released in 1976. A lot of people call John Carpenter the “father of horror” or “the founder of ‘modern’ horror” or something else equally as lame. John Carpenter has made a large handful of my absolute favorite movies of all time, none of which really being in the horror genre. Namely They Live, Big Trouble in Little China, Halloween, my personal favorite Escape from New York and this movie, Assault on Precinct 13. Originally, John Carpenter wanted to make a Western. He had for sometime. But with the amount of money he was given to make his next movie, he didn’t think he could make one, so he decided he would make an inner city version of a Western. That eventually became Assault on Precinct 13. So yeah, that’s pretty much about as cool as it sounds. A fucking Western taking place in a deserted ghetto in the middle of L.A. The movie opens with a gang who appears to murder and pillage for no real reason at all. They’re just bad guys. Kind of like in Westerns. Bad guys are bad guys, that’s just who they are. So in the movie, an old police station is about to be shut down. Only an officer and two secretaries are in it preparing for it to be shut down the next morning. Also, three death row inmates are being transported by bus to another prison. But one of them gets sick and the bus has to stop at the nearly abandoned precinct. ALSO, a man sees his daughter and an ice cream man get shot by this gang and then chases them down and kills their leader. Unfortunately, he runs for cover from the other gang members into Precinct 13. So everything is now set up for the assault, as advertised in the title, on Precinct 13. And what an assault it is. Probably the best assault I’ve seen in a long time. It’s a good assault, really. The officers can’t hold the gangs alone, so they unleash the death row inmates, give them guns, and everyone fights. So it’s officers, inmates and secretaries verse unruly and downright rude gang members, who will stop at nothing for the blood of the man who killed their leader. Who by the way, is a complete asshole. Dude just runs into the precinct in a daze, won’t tell anyone what happened, and then passes out in some office while the whole assault went down and people died. So nobody knows why this bloodthirsty gang is out for them the whole movie, and they never find out. Another thing, I’d like to comment on is the score. John Carpenter usually performs all of his films’ scores. And they’re usually always awesome, this one included. Most times they’re real dark synthesizer tunes that make me feel like I’ve just shot a bad guy in the face. Notably, the Escape from New York score is excellent. So Assault on Precinct 13 is just a real fun movie to watch. One might determine that the movie didn’t take much money to make (I just looked it up and it said around $100,000). The whole thing takes place in one building essentially, and a majority of the movie is long shoot outs where gang members keep climbing through windows and getting shot. It’s chock full of gratuitous violence and sweet one-liners and little girls getting shot. So if that sounds interesting to you, like it does to me, then go rent this. And be sure not to rent the shitty remake that was made last year. It is not good.
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On that day in 1605, Guy Fawkes was discovered in a tunnel beneath Parliament with 36 barrels of gunpowder. He and his co-conspirators had engineered the treasonous "Gunpowder Plot" in response to the tyranny of their government under James I. Fawkes and his fellow saboteurs were hanged, drawn and quartered, and their plan to take down their government never came to pass.

In the spirit of that rebellion, in remembrance of that day, V vows to carry out the plot that Fawkes was executed for attempting on November 5th in 1605: he will blow up Parliament.

As Evey uncovers the truth about V’s mysterious past, she also discovers the truth about herself – and emerges as his unlikely ally in the culmination of his plan to ignite a revolution, bringing freedom and justice back to a society fraught with cruelty and corruption.
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"1984 With Dykes" A Review of V For Vendetta by Jason Vernon
Someone somewhere I’m sure is saying something about how much this movie didn’t live up to its graphic novel counterpart. I’ve never read the graphic novel, so I can’t comment except to say to that person, “Hey. Shut up. Go read the graphic novel then.” I went into this film not really knowing what to expect. I wasn’t even sure it was based on a comic book until I saw the “DC Comics” graphic in the open. When I saw that I knew I was in for something I would probably enjoy. Comic books seem to be the last bastion for a certain style of storytelling that I enjoy immensely. The style mostly revolves around an ambiguity in the main character’s morality. We are enticed to be on their “side” simply because they are the focus of attention (and in this case the worse of two evils is presented clearly), but their motives and actions are questionable. Sure it’s fun to watch Indian Jones find gold things and kill Nazis or to watch the good tornado chasers thwart the evil tornado chasers, but it’s also fun to question the ideals of the character the film maker is dropping in your lap saying “Here’s the good guy.” There are a few “suspension of disbelief” issues. It’s a movie based on a comic book, so I’m already ready to accept a lot of hooey as truth. Two things really rubbed me the wrong way though. Near the beginning V uses some sort of concrete sealing gun to seal a door. When it happened I was like “woah that was cool,” but the gun never reappears and there is little other technology of the kind laying around in this not-so-far-in-the-future future. The other that struck me as odd is the big brother-esk government can’t find Natalie Portman when she leaves V and just starts walking around. I’m sure they didn’t stop looking for her. They found her easily enough the first time. They even try to explain it with a story about her at the supermarket and that somehow when V changed her outlook on life it changed her enough that no one would recognize her. Cheesy. The plot of the movie resembles what most liberals would consider to be a wet dream. One guy is wronged by the government, he gets mad, and somehow gets the entire country to unite in toppling that government. Basically imagine a 1984 government with a George Bush-esk hyper-conservative religious right-winger gone awry mixed with a genetically enhanced masked idealist. What you get is a heavy-handed political story with style and violence. Add a misplaced dash of romance, british accents, numerous references to Bonfire Night and there you have it. Oh and the dykes.
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"D.A.R.E To Watch Assault on Precinct 13" A Review of Assault on Precinct 13 by Ryan Hailey

"D.A.R.E To Watch Assault on Precinct 13"
A Review of Assault on Precinct 13 by Ryan Hailey