Kill You Last #1

This isn't what happened with Tony Scott though.

Everyone already knew Top Gun and True Romance and Crimson Tide and Man On Fire. But they wouldn't admit they liked them, because Tony Scott was just a director of (mostly) action movies. He wasn't an auteur. But now he was dead they could admit they liked them. No one is going to disagree that dying is the coolest thing an artist can do. Everyone was ashamed to like action movies like Tony Scott made, and it took him jumping off a bridge for people to admit they liked The Last Boy Scout.

Well, fuck that. Action direction requires an incredible amount of skill and talent. It requires craft. Don't compare Renny Harlin to David Lynch or Jim Jarmusch. Die Hard 2 might not have the memorising dreamscapes of Mullholland Drive, but I very much doubt David Lynch could direct a decent car chase. People like John McTeirnan, John Woo, Simon West or Jan DeBont might not be artists in the same way that Spike Lee or Fellini are, but they are experts at their craft. They are as perfectly formed as Motown's very best output.

And I haven't even got onto the stuntmen, the fight choreographers, the second unit directors et al that are all needed to produce something like The Transporter. Action movies are not an auteur's genre.

Action movies don't really work on the same terms that other films do. They are entertainment, nothing more, and I don't mean that in a pejorative sense at all. I hate it when people say you just need to turn your brain off going into them. They stimulate your brain in a physical sense (I'm aware that doesn't really make much sense). They are purely about the experience. You can explain to someone why The Godfather or Vertigo is great, to someone who's never seen them, and they get some sort of enjoyment from you telling them about it.

But you can't explain the footchase in Point Break to someone. Well you can, but you just say that Keanu Reeves chases Patrick Swayze. The enjoyment, the fun of it comes from the combination of visuals, of editing, of sound, and everything synchronised together. It essentially what Sergei Eisenstein was on about all those years ago. It is arguably cinema in its purest form.

I know I'm being wanky about it. I just like seeing Jean Claude Van Damme kick people. And there aint nothing wrong with that.

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