A pound a day movie project: JCVD
I got to watch the first movie that my movie bot "bought" the other day and I figured that as part of the process I should write up reviews for them too.
This film is a bit of an odd one. I remember it coming out and being intrigued by it, but I didn't get a chance to see it in the cinema. Essentially it's sort of like a day in the life of Jean Claude Van Damme. A really shitty, but ficticious day mixed with a bit of an autobiography.
After getting royally boned by his agent and losing a custody battle for his daughter, he flies home to visit his parents and try and get his life back in order. Except things turn from bad to worse when he accidently stumbles upon a bank robbery and gets mistaken by the police as being the one orchestrating it.
Once he's holed up in the bank, the film focuses on JCVD discussing with one of the real bank robbers his life, career etc...which is where the semi-autobiographical nature of the film comes in. There's even a scene where the bank pans away and JCVD is left monologuing with what is clearly a set's lighting rig in the background about how sucky Hollywood and the media are to him.
Despite the lack of action you'd normally expect from one of his films, I quite enjoyed it. It paints him as a pretty ordinary guy that is understandably fed up with the media butting their noses into his private life just because he's in movies and you can certainly sympathise with him. Whilst it is the first (of many) films this project has thrown up, it's certainly not making me regret getting it for the paltry sum of £3.99
I've also come up with some kind of goal for the end of the project. I'm going to work out what the average score is for all the films and see whether on the whole the movies I've got have been good or utter shite. Using IMDb's ratings I've got the following so far...
JCVD7.3 Beowulf & Grendel6.1 Wallace and Gromit in 'A Matter of Loaf and Death'7.7 Becoming Jane6.9 Candy7.2 Code Name: The Cleaner4.1
...and doing the sums I make that an average of 6.55 which on the whole isn't too bad. It'd be 7.04 if it wasn't for the latest addition dragging things down, but I think we all expected I'd be ending up with a few less than quality movies.