WWJCVD Do? Hall of Fame inductee: Eric Roberts

The What Would Van Damme Do? Hall of Fame is reserved for those people who have made important contributions to the overall enjoyment of this site’s operators, and no one over the years has been as consistent in doing that than the one and only Eric Roberts.

Yeah, yeah, his sister might be more famous, but can she play a slimeball? Can she say she’s been in a staggering 106 productions this decade? Can she even come close to the number of countries her brother has visited while filming his on-the-cheap movies? I think not.

Now, we’re not talking about the Eric Roberts that gained fame and Oscar recognition back in the 1980s. No, we’re specifically referring to the transformed actor that became known in mine and Adam’s eyes as ER – an overly dramatic, super-intense thespian that was perfect for the burgeoning direct-to-video landscape of the early ’90s and beyond.

Movie review: 2012

Roland Emmerich, the master baiter of the disaster porn genre, has ejaculated another epic of worldwide destruction upon eager audiences, but the result, “2012,” is nothing but a sticky mess.

More than anything, Emmerich’s latest opus feels like a blood relative of one of Irwin Allen’s cheesy flicks of the 1970s, movies like “The Towering Inferno” or “Earthquake,” where a poor actor like Henry Fonda got roped into delivering stilted lines and cowering in fear of whatever special effect raged behind him.

Here, the unfortunate victim is John Cusack, a respected actor who must have been tired of appearing in films with zero commercial viability or who wanted to buy a new yacht. To say Cusack looks pained to be in this junk is an understatement; his disdain for the material nearly drips from every pore.

CD review: No Ceilings

Lil Wayne has been all over the place  recently, but his scattershot raps and lean-induced warblings haven’t indicated the talent that longtime Wayne listeners are familiar with. ”No Ceilings” represents his most focused effort in years, and it’s no surprise that it’s the mixtape of the year.

Recorded within the last few weeks, and capitalizing on the hot beats of the past year (it says a lot about the state of popular music that I didn’t recognize more than half of these songs), this mixtape shows Wayne at his best. It’s too bad that he’s off to jail for a while – I’m sure that when he returns, he’ll be back on the AutoTune nonsense.

It’s been a long time since I listened to a mixtape that had this many quotable lines. Wayne rips through most of these songs, and I literally laughed out loud at some of these punchlines:

Great scenes in awful movies, Part 8

“Soldier” is one of my favorite awful movies, one that I can watch almost any time. But even I can admit it’s a rather ludicrous film, a “Shane” makeover set in a futuristic world filled with genetically modified soldiers and pacifist hippies living on a trash planet.

This was a legendary bomb, but that’s what you get when you produce a script that sat in a drawer for 15 years. Star Kurt Russell speaks a mere 79 words throughout the entire film, but the final seven in this scene are so simple, yet kick-ass.

Tell me that doesn’t get you fired up!

Movie review: This Is It

No matter what you thought of Michael Jackson’s wildly successful, extremely strange and eventually tragic life, there’s no debate that the man was a musical talent the likes of which we will never see again.

And so, “Michael Jackson’s This Is It” feels less like another public eulogy and more like an intimate, yet carefully crafted, look into Jackson’s creative process as he prepares to launch what was to be his big comeback concerts.

Here, we get to see Jackson at his most natural – working with musicians and dancers, focusing on song arrangements and melodies, and articulating his razor-sharp vision – and it’s a touching thing to see.

Here was a man who was hounded by publicity, consumed by his addictions and plagued by money woes, yet it seems as if the only thing he truly cares about is the correct tone of the keyboard intro on “The Way You Make Me Feel.”

Movie review: Black Dynamite

“Black Dynamite” is the kind of movie you want to root for – after all, how many homages to 1970s blaxploitation films are there? – but save for some moments of truly inspired lunacy, it works better as a concept than as an actual film.

I want to be clear that I had a lot of fun with the movie, but in the end, it fell short of reaching the pantheon of truly great spoof/homage flicks like “The Naked Gun” or “I’m Gonna Git You Sucka!”.

In fact, calling “Dynamite” a spoof would be off base. It is as straightforward as a blaxploitation film made in 2009 can be. The level of authenticity in creating a 1974 milieu is impressive, and one of the elements that works in the movie’s favor. There are no wink-wink nods to the fact that everyone is in on the joke. The entire movie is the joke.

Live on stage: Ghostface Killah

“My name is Tony Starks, and I have powers.” So sayeth the Wu-Tang clansman also known as Ghostface Killah, and given his dextrous wordplay, prolific output, critical adoration and forays into TV and film, I tend to believe him.

Touring in support of his Ghostdini: Wizard of Poetry album, Ghost made an appearance at the Showbox in Seattle on Saturday and proceeded to put on the kind of show that makes him the hiphop legend that he is.

Yes, it was the kind of concert you’ve seen a thousand times before if you’ve ever seen a rap show – tributes to ODB, Biggie and Tupac, diatribes against today’s brand of hiphop, bringing the hottest girls in the audience to the stage – but Ghost imbued the proceedings with his own special brand of energy.

In defense of: Ocean’s 12

Ask most people about the middle film in the Ocean’s trilogy and you’ll get a response along the lines of, “Oh, I didn’t like that one” or “No, that was too silly.”

But I think that “Ocean’s 12″ is the best of the three movies, an opinion a find that I share, for some strange reason, with only a handful of people.

Freed from the sentimental nods to the original in the first film and not yet inured to the desperate cash-grab feeling of the third, “Ocean’s 12″ represents the best of what director Steven Soderbergh set out to do with these movies – create a larky, mainstream caper film that’s not afraid to take itself (or its cast) too seriously.

Yet this went over like a lead balloon with the general public, and even worse with the critical cognoscenti, who trashed the film for being too complex. Imagine that! A film that challenges its audience? No thank you!

The sad ballad of Cuba Gooding Jr.

This is NOT what Kilmer's hair looks like in the movie

I blame “Snow Dogs.” I mean, how else can you explain the precipitous descent of an Oscar-winning actor from the A-list to direct-to-DVD junk that even Steven Seagal would pass on?

At one point, Cuba Gooding Jr. was one of the hottest actors working in Hollywood. Now, save for a blip here and there, he has fallen off the map completely, and I just don’t know why, except that starring in that ridiculous Disney film permanently crippled his career.

But heck, even Paul Walker was in “Eight Below” and he still gets work. It hasn’t been the case for Gooding – proof that when it’s all said and done, an Oscar doesn’t pay the bills.

As a connoisseur of off-the-radar movies, I’ve been astonished at how much shit Gooding’s been in over the last year. It seems as if every week he’s on the cover of some generic action thriller usually reserved for Wesley Snipes.

Movie review: Surrogates

“Surrogates” is one of those cautionary tales about the dangers of technology, but it’s so earnest and bland that it saps all the fun out of a potentially entertaining movie. It brings nothing new to the table – it could have been made in 1994 for what statements it makes about modern gadgetry.

Coming on the heels of the far superior “Gamer,” a film with a similar plotline, “Surrogates” can’t hide its seams as a major-studio production that has probably been focus-grouped to death.

In the near future, humans have given up their lives and put them in the hands of robot doppelgangers who look, talk and act better than the real thing. These surrogates allow people not only to live out thier workaday lives but their wildest fantasies.