Caffeinated Clint
Bruce Willis in a comedic “Chinatown”
Bruce Willis has just signed up for what sounds like one of the best flicks he’s been offered of late – and that’s saying something.
Whilst I can’t comment on “Perfect Stranger” yet, I can say that based on Bruce Willis’s back catalogue – he can even put a glistening finish on a turd (which is good for the aforementioned movie, since the reviews say its stinkier than the fish left atop of my fridge from Good Friday). And yes, I include “Color of Night” in that analogy. Maybe not “North”…. Definitely “Color of Night”.
In all seriousness, he’s one of today’s most magnetic actors – and I’d watch the guy in anything… even if he were running in a 50 metre sprint from one Afghani hotel to another (which I hear goes on a lot there). “Die Hard” is on a permanent loop on my plasma; my VHS of “Striking Distance” is more worn than my grandmother’s slippers; and “Armageddon” sits proudly atop the Morris family shelf. Yep, I know a couple of those films were shite…. But Bruce’s presence kinda makes you forget all that. And whatever the case, over the last decade or so, he’s given us pretty much nothing but “good” stuff…. “The Sixth Sense”, “Unbreakable”; “16 Blocks”; “Hostage”; “The Story of Us”; “The Kid”; “Bandits”; “Sin City” and recently, “The Astronaut Farmer”. Some aren’t as good as the others… but they’re all damn watchable movies, mostly thanks to the artist-formerly-known-as-Bruno.
This July, he returns (minus hair-piece; regrettably) as John McClane in the fourth “Die Hard” movie. He’ll follow that up with his ‘Samuel L.Jackson reunion movie’ “Black Water Transit”. Both look pretty cool – though, I will say, I’m not as sold on “Die Hard” (could be because I’m not a huge fan of Len Wiseman’s work) as I think I should be.
Oh, and let’s not forget his cameo in “Grindhouse”… OK, since you’ve already forgotten “Grindhouse” itself it goes without saying that Bruno’s cameo’s probably left your memory spool too.
The film he’s just been roped into is “An Assassination of a High School President”, based an original script written by first-time screenwriters Tim Calpin and Kevin Jakubowski.
The Los Angeles Times says it’s a comedic homage to “Chinatown” set at a Catholic high school. How cool is that?
Brent Simon will direct the film, in which Willis will play a principal, whose also a Desert Storm veteran fond of recounting pungent anecdotes from his time liberating Kuwait.
Apparently the script is so cool – even likened to that of a John Hughes’ script! – that every young hottie in town, namely Lindsay Lohan and Hilary Duff, is keen to play the femme fatale of the piece.
The newspaper’s columnist says it is replete with surprising twists, duplicitous characters and a wry, hard-boiled voice-over delivered by Bobby Funke, a bullied sophomore investigating the theft of the school’s SAT exams for St. Dominick’s newspaper. Of course, this leads to broader conspiracies, and no one is without a secret agenda. Throw in fart jokes, wet willies, beer pong and lunchroom class war and it’s “All the President’s Teenagers.”
“The script I sped through was a fast and funny read”, writes The L.A Times columnis. “A riff on “JFK,” “All the President’s Men” and Robert Towne’s neo-noir classic, “Assassination” contains dialogue richly peppered with the stupidly slangy put-downs of the teen years, and it’s more accessibly stylized than last year’s “Brick,” a previous dramatic attempt to set a noir in a modern-day high school. The plot is intriguingly convoluted, and Calpin, 27, and Jakubowski, 28 — former assistants on “South Park” — make great use of the locales, relentless humiliations and social hierarchies of the high school snake pit.”
Sounds cool. I’ll have two.
