The first full body images of Vogons are here, from the Diamond Previews catalog, which has stuff that should be shipping to your local store in about two to three months. They have a big ad for toys from Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and it includes a look at the Vogons, Marvin’s gun, and a one-headed Zaphod Beeblebrox.

I have to tell you that the one-headed Zaphod is sort of freaking me out. In our stellar series of Q&A with director Garth Jennings and producer Nick Goldsmith – the last installment comes next week! – they assured fans that Zaphod would have two heads. I assumed that the quick image of Sam Rockwell that we saw in costume – solo skulled – was from before whatever special effects were added in. But the picture of the toy shows a distinctly one headed, two armed rogue president of the galaxy, and I can’t imagine a toy maker passing up the chance to make a cool multi headed and limbed figure. I am guessing that they’re going for a different effect, maybe some sort of How to Get Ahead in Advertising or Kuatto thing. I have to admit that this is the first bit of disappointment I have felt.  But I’ll hold judgement until I see this all in action.

Last weekend I intended to get a hold of Jersey Girl and figure out just what the heck happened to Kevin Smith. I didn’t get a chance, but I still want to work on this dilemma – I mean, this guy was one of the faces of indie filmmaking, he was one of the hopes not only of people who like interesting and personal films but also geeks. And how often do those two crowds get together?

But his career since Clerks has been spotty at best. While Chasing Amy is a bona fide great film that builds on his first picture’s promise, he hasn’t done anything even remotely up to speed since then. And he has come across time and again as more interested in ancillary marketing than making a movie that’s good on repeat viewings.

Now he comes to a crossroads in his career – Jersey Girl, his attempt at a more mature, serious film, bombed out. He used to have a ceiling on what his movies would gross in theaters, but now it looks like he has no floor. It seems to me that, panicked, he has retreated back to his first success, making a sequel to Clerks.

Now, if he hadn’t made Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back and if he hadn’t set Dogma in the View Askewniverse, I would welcome the return. The idea of catching up with the Clerks characters ten years later is an interesting one, if those characters and their world didn’t feel bled dry of relevance by cartoons, comics and toys. If Smith had gone forward as a filmmaker and not just tread water it would be fascinating to keep revisiting these autobiographical characters, with Dante a low-rent Antoine Doinel. But as it is, this all smells like desperation, trying to reconnect with a target audience Smith fears he lost by making a J Lo movie without enough fart jokes.

In the end I think Smith has a lot in common with George Lucas, who has cast his shadow over Smith’s whole career. Both are very stunted filmmakers who seem almost imprisoned by their own characters and worlds, and especially by their fans, who are unwilling to journey outside of a safety zone.

At any rate, Smith was supposed to start filming Passion of the Clerks (a joke title that is already far too dated) this January, but as he explains on his site, things have been held back. "[W]ith all the Miramax/Disney stuff going on, we’ve been delayed," he says, expecting an April start date.

Of course this wouldn’t be the first time that a Clerks-related project fell apart, but since Smith has shown his unwillingness to take new challenges by dropping out of The Green Hornet, I don’t know what else he would do, besides his long-talked about direct to video Clerks cartoons.

Now that he’s already twice ridden with his modern-day outlaws in the Ocean’s gang, Brad Pitt will change it up when he straps on the spurs and sixguns to tell the umpteenth story of notorious desperado Jesse James.

Pitt, who’s surprisingly never appeared in a Western (and no, Legends of the Fall doesn’t count), will star as the famed bandit in the adaptation of Robert Hansen’s unwieldy titled novel The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. The tale is told from the perspective of James Gang member Robert Ford, a man torn between worshipping Jesse and taking his place as leader of the crew. He resolves the minor dilemma by gunning down his comrade in cold blood, which could be a SPOILER for those who may have misinterpreted the subtle book title.

Aussie director Andrew Dominik (Chopper) will be at the reins of the gunslinging flick, to be produced by Pitt’s Warner Bros.-based production house Plan B, which I guess is still in action even though partners Brad Grey went to Paramount and Jennifer Aniston went to a divorce lawyer.

Previous versions of Jesse James’ story include Walter Hill’s The Long Riders, the classic Jesse James Meets Frankenstein’s Daughter, and CHUD favorite American Outlaws.

The Magazine: Giant

The Pitch: A newcomer in the world of magazines geared towards men and their entertainment. Sort of like an American HOT DOG. Of all the US books out there, this is the one most in tune with CHUD.com’s mentality.

The Cost: $3.99
The Month: Feb/March
The Publisher: Same
Cover Story: Ethan Hawke

Main Interview: Ethan Hawke

PRO:

• Busy, but really fun layout.

• Frank and solid Ethan Hawke review. I like his goateed self.

• Great reviews on things of all sorts for the attention span deficient (ie: people who only read our DVD captions).

• JOHN HUGHES RETROSPECTIVE!

• Awesome bit on books you NEED to read.
  

CON:

• Christina Milian. Didn’t need four pages of her.

• Don’t need pictorials of hot women in a mag liek this. Sorry, but you don’t.

• MICHAEL STIPE INTERVIEW!

• Fashion bullshit.
  

OVERALL:

Still a damn solid mag, but this one didn’t have the same grab as the first two.

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I’m jazzed about this flick. How could it not at least be a lot of fun? Travolts owns as Chili Palmer, The Rock makes for a great gay bouncer, Vince Vaughn fills out a pimp suit well, and Danny DeVito, Uma Thurman, and Harvey Keitel all add sauce to the sauce. Plus, it’s an Elmore Leonard story. Really, folks…

Then,
I’ll mail them! If you sent a SASE and never got it back (there’s about
eight unused envelopes on my desk), be assured I’ll stuff ’em. Oh, I
WILL STUFF THEM ALRIGHT…

The remake of John Carpenter’s Assault on Precinct 13 opens with a jittery, wired undercover sting gone wrong. Ethan Hawke, all too convincing as a junkie, is leading two cops in an effort to take out some Serbian mobsters, but it all goes to hell, as your average pre-credits sequence sting will do, and Hawke is the only survivor. He ends up taking out the main baddie with a gory shot to the head that gives the guy the Zapruder makeover, and you start to think that maybe this film is going to be going places.

If by “going places” you mean “an endless series of boring headshots,” you’re in for a treat. The opening of the film is essentially the only good part, with the rest of it being a slow trod to mediocrity. And frankly, mediocrity is the worst thing you can have in a film.

It’s important to note, by the way, that this is not a review that will compare the film to the original. The last time I saw that movie it was on VHS tape that my friend made off a Wometco Home Theater broadcast, so that’s maybe the mid to late 80s. I don’t have enough memory of the film to even begin comparing, and it wouldn’t be fair – the new version goes out of its way to get far from the original by making the bad guys cops.

I don’t know if that’s supposed to be a twist – it sure plays out that way in the film, but every ad for the movie trumpets it, so I guess it’s fair game to talk about here. This twist is inherently stupid and more or less ruins the film, but we’ll get to the absurdity of the basic premise in a bit.

Let’s start with Ethan Hawke, the main symbol of what’s wrong with this movie. Hawke is woefully miscast here – he’s supposed to be a hard-edged cop who has been pushed to despair by the failed sting at the opening of the picture. He’s kept himself on desk duty, determined to not have to be in a scenario where his decision making kills someone else. In the hands of an actor like Thomas Jane, someone with balls and grit, this cliché would work, but here Hawke just seems petulant. It’s as if his Dead Poet’s Society character somehow ended up in the police force and just couldn’t hack it.

What’s awesome about the casting of Ethan Hawke, though, is the metatextual aspect. In the film he runs Precinct 13, which is being shut down on New Year’s Eve. At the last minute a prison bus is forced off the highway in a blizzard and must stop at the all-but-abandoned Precinct. Among the prisoners is Laurence Fishburne, almost completely transformed into Ken Foree. He’s a mob kingpin and he’s been caught red-handed killing a cop.

So here’s the good part – just like in Training Day we get to see Hawke acting against a strong black man, and just like in Training Day, we see Hawke getting squashed. But when you add the two films together you have to start wondering about Hawke’s relationship with strong black men. There’s something being said about race here in these two films, where the black villains are strong and nefarious and well-dressed and charismatic and the white hero is a nebbishy jerk who seems like he can never take down this Nubian evil. It’s like these movies are reflecting the consciousness of Limbaugh’s America, where the white man is the underdog while the black man gets all the best perks and runs roughshod over the community. I think that Hawke, a pretty liberal guy, would blanche at the thought of this being the subtext of the films, but it’s right there on the screen. Looking at the black gangster in both films as a metaphor for affirmative action – people getting things that they don’t deserve while the white guy has to struggle to break even – is interesting. And even if it’s a faulty observation, keep it in mind while watching the film, as it will be the most interesting thing going on in the theater.

Back to the movie – it turns out that Fishburne is in cahoots with some very crooked cops, and they want to off him, because it was one of them he killed and they know he’ll testify and ruin their fun. Here’s where the idea of making the bad guys cops really just ruins the whole picture – rather than try some through the front door trickery, these rotten cops just break into the jail and try to shoot Fishburne. Of course they screw the pooch and kill a cop, and the whole siege begins.

That’s the first dumb thing. It just makes no sense that the bad cops (led by Gabriel Byrne, palpably looking for his paycheck) go in with guns ablazing. There is no reason that they couldn’t forge documents or something to convince Hawke to just let Fishburne go (and considering the level of equipment they get their hands on in the film, I think that this nitpick is more than justified). Of course there would be no film in that case, but it still sticks in your logical craw.

Not as much as their sheer incompetence does, though. The bad guy cops are armed with the latest technology – night vision goggles, body armor, heavy duty machine guns, flashbang grenades, sniper rifles, etc etc etc. They’re set up for a siege, like any big city police department would be. Meanwhile our heroes have a couple of handguns and a tommy gun. At some point in the film you really have to wonder why these bad guy cops don’t just bust down the door and lay waste to the place. It makes absolutely no sense that they keep coming in with these stealth tactics, or that they suck enough that Drea DeMatteo can take them down. With the bad guys being ordinary hoods or criminals you could believe that they don’t have the tactical training and that their weaponry would be on par with the defenders of Precinct 13, but in this scenario our heroes are so outgunned that it’s just embarrassing.

Here’s the thing – if the rest of the film worked I would be able to look past that kind of stuff. That’s the contract between filmmaker and audience with these kinds of goofy action films. On the filmmaker’s side there’s an agreement to make the action fun and exciting, and maybe to show us a thing or two that we’ve never seen before onscreen. It really is helpful if they cast  their leads as likeably as possible. On the audience side we agree to let the really inane shit slide if we’re having enough fun.

But the rest of the film doesn’t work. We’ll get to how bad the action is in a second – let’s talk about how bad the cast is first.

In general I have no problem with the cast of this film on paper. They’re mostly talented people. But they are either saddled with characters and actions that are beyond annoying or they’re just walking through the movie towards crafts services. In fact only Fishburne gives any sort of reasonable performance – he makes up for the debacle that was the last two Matrix films by being the year’s bad-ass to beat. But he can’t make up for everyone else. John Leguizamo continues his role from Spun as a junkie who could almost be enjoyable, but is essentially annoying. Maria Bello is just awful in her role as Hawke’s psychiatrist who ludicrously gets stuck in the precinct, and Drea de Matteo is the human equivalent of an exploding brothel as yet another tacky, classless character.

True hate must be set aside for Ja Rule, as Smiley, a con who talks about himself in the third person. This is easily the worst character trait you can have outside of being a genocidal maniac, and the Fetal Alcohol Syndrome brand of acting that Ja Rule brings to his role never helps. Poor Brian Dennehy. Did you see Carl Weathers’ guest appearance on Arrested Development, where he’s going on about the kinds of stew he made from stolen crafts services items? Dennehy seems to be there. Finally, Aisha Hinds is Anna, a walking stereotype who seeks to avoid being a stereotype by claiming that she has never been a criminal. Still, she’s so shrill – like many of the other characters – that the only suspense about her fate is how soon the filmmakers can manage to kill her.

Ah, the filmmakers. French director Jean-Francois Richet has managed to make a movie completely unglued from geography. Not only is the physical location of Precinct 13 sketchy at best, he has set a siege film inside a structure that has no apparent physical coherence. It’s important in a movie like this, where almost the whole running time is spent in one location, that we get an understanding of the layout of the place. That never happens. We never get to understand how parts of the precinct are related to each other, so we never understand the strategy of any of the characters, good or bad, and we never feel any tension because every scene could be in a different time zone for all we know.

That disconnect continues with the action scenes, which feel like they are floating free of the film. Part of the problem is that we just don’t care about what’s going on, part of it is the insane sounds the guns make, but most of it is sheer incompetent direction and editing. It’s almost like the film is endeavoring to keep us as far from the action as possible, making it so that we either can’t tell what’s going on or can’t figure out why.

There is one thing that I will grant the movie – it does have one completely ballsy kill that I didn’t see coming. Too bad it’s another boring head shot – people get shot dead center of the forehead with mechanical precision in this film, and since some of the shots look CGI, that makes some sense.

Never bad enough to offend or really elicit laughter, Assault on Precinct 13 is the quintessential January film – a nothing picture with nothing to say and no interesting way to say it. Boring and tepid, it’s something best forgotten about. Which you will do within an hour of seeing it.

5.0 out of 10

The Magazine: EW #802

The Pitch: America’s weekly (except for when they do pointless double issues) entertainment magazine. Sometimes totally fun and loaded with goodness and others absolutely flimsy and gosspiy, it’s one of those must read guilty pleasures we look forward to.

The Cost: $3.50
The Month: January
The Publisher: WB
Cover Story: 200 Forecast

Main Interview: N/A

PRO:

• The 2005 preview is quite good. Lots of pictures, and a decent amount of meat to go with them.

• I’ve never found Jessica Simpson to be attractive, but the picture they have of her from The Dukes of Hazzard is pretty solid. At least she’s not some skinny curveless beast. Her face is Ancient Greece, but who am I to say anything?

• A surprisingly solid reviews section.
  

CON:

• TWO Alias sidebars?

• The stuff they choose to devote page space to, primarily in music and television often scares the muscles right off me.

• There is never a reason you should have a picture of Lea Thompson in a post-1990 magazine.

• Stephen King, why do you deliver needles of hatred to me via your column? How did this turn out so bad?

OVERALL:

Worth getting for the 2005 preview.

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The Magazine: EMPIRE #188

The Pitch: The biggest and best movie magazine in the world. Made in the UK. Huge. That’s all you need to know.

The Cost: $8.99
The Month: February
The Publisher: Same
Cover Story: Ocean’s Twelve

Main Interview: Cast of Ocean’s Twelve

PRO:

• Tons and tons of interviews, most of them quite solid.

• The Ocean’s Twelve round table interview is golden.

• Nice stuff on the love affair between Hollywood and drugs.

• The reviews section is always terrific.

• The best written film magazine, bar none.
  

CON:

• While I give them credit for giving their cover film only three stars, I expected EMPIRE to "get" Ocean’s Twelve.

• British magazines… it’s perfectly fine to leave Withnail and I out of an issue or two.

• Their cartoon in the Hollywood/drugs article is not funny, and this is coming from the guy that does Ron!

• This issue is hurt by the American/British timing of film releases. Not much new stuff here.

OVERALL:

A good issue, but not as fun or engaging as normal. They need to keep the fun central . They have the floor. They’re the big boy. Have fun!

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At 8:00pm, est I’ll be right here on this page doing our traditional coverage of the Golden Globes (nominations) where we have a simultaneous message board attack to go with my constantly updates pissy commentary and recap of the show (last year’s coverage, last year’s MB discussion).