So there’s a Crank 2 trailer online, (warning the link contains copious nudity, swearing, absurd levels of violence and the absence of love and compassion during the sexual act) (double warning – the vid is not formatted properly = a 16×9 pic shown in 4×3 – that drives me nuts) :
Crank 2 – High Voltage (Link removed at the request of Lions Gate Studios)
Now the thing is, the first Crank is notable. Why? Because we all know that cinema has been usurped by video games = they are the novel medium of our time. And one cinema-coping strategy has been to adapt video games into movies.
And they’re always uniformly terrible.
Just terrible.
But Crank is different – in that it’s not adapted from a video game – yet so completely is of the video game genre that I left the theatre thinking I just played Grand Theft Auto – or, at least, had fun watching a friend play Grand Theft Auto.
What I’m saying here is that the people who made Crank got it. The understood the grammar of video games, what makes them so fun and what makes them different from linear, non-interactive moving pictures.
Which makes the trailer for Crank 2 so fascinating.
For what does it resemble? In its opening montage of swearing? Nothing less that the fan created montages from other films. It’s as if Crank 2 has already been released and this is the fan version of the trailer – or it’s made by fans – or in other words, it’s liberated cinema. Shot on a consumer camcorder. Cause it was – the film was shot on the Canon XH A1. You can buy it on Amazon for 2,961 dollars and 99 cents.
Of course it’s not really liberated cinema. The folks who made it had already ‘made it’ in the business and it’s populated with various notables, (including my current favorite actor Jason Statham); but it’s another clear marker on the road towards the end of ‘film’, (celluloid and its attendant production and distribution system); endings and beginnings are always interesting times.
(And it’ll be nice seeing movies made with the ‘Crank vibrancy’ whose target demographic isn’t just young males who haven’t had sex yet).
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Interesting, certainly made my heart race… I don't know about liberated cinema–I see it as a genre for a new generation of kids who cannot sit still for more than 2 minutes, who are overexposed to sex and violence and have money in their pockets to spend. Hollywood knows this. It may seem new and creative, and you know these kids will buy it and the video game that follows… I recall a TFT episode where you mentioned something about Oliver Stone being a hack and the music in his films tells you how to feel, correct me if I'm wrong. But I feel that way about films like this and the Bourne films, and the new James Bond films to some extent. The irratic camera, the jerky editing and the music tell me how to feel. I don't have to think at all, just bring some aprin and anti-nausea medication and I'm set. I must be old. It makes me dizzy, annoyed and sad for the future.
I guess I'm thinking 'liberated' in the sense of acceptance for 'movies' produced with consumer equipment – of course this happened with Blair Witch but that was content specific – we're seeing a breakdown/merging between amateur and professional methods of production in the cinema – which I think is liberating – though, as I mention in the post – the subject matter and tone of Crank 2 may be hard to view as liberational :)
this doesn't look like anything i'd want to see in theaters. this doesn't look liberated, it looks like sloppy filmmaking and gratuitous violence. Jason Statham did such an amazing job in The Bank Job, why does he follow it up with In The Name of The King, Death Race, and now this?
He should stick to Transporter movies and Guy Ritchie movies. This looks so bad, and it taints every other movie he's made.
Why was the first one made in the first place. We went to see it with some friends and it was SO BAD. They drive a car through a mall at one point, and it's not fun, fantastic, inspired, or amazing… it looked really really fake and very very cheesy.
This sequel is gonna FAIL.
P.S.
Is Amy Smart the new Tara Reid? Or Denise Richards? Either way… man… she's come a long way from… or wait….
Where to see Crank 2
this movie is so stupid and the topic is so moronic, i honestly believe you could call this a parody of crank 1. you can keep your hart pumping with adrenaline, but you cant charge an artificial hart by shocking yourself !
(this really might be the first sequel made by the same developers that could be categorized as a parody…seriously.)
Hmmm…it's a fine line IKnowParodys = am not sure how scientifically accurate the first Crank was! ;)
but you point to an interesting way forward in sequels = don't just keep remaking the first movie actively parody it! (president's secret book?)
crank and crank high voltage are 2 of the most fun movies! life isnt always serious! jay statham is so hot its crazy.
crank and crank high voltage are 2 of the most fun movies! life isnt always serious! jay statham is so hot its crazy.
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I agree completely. This film is fresh and vibrant visually–one cannot help liking at least that aspect of it if one loves cinema: And besides, its ingeniously satirical: the opening long shot of Chelios falling out of the sky (ad continuum from the previous film's climax) and landing atop a car, bouncing, then landing again face down (or rather, cheek down) on the pavement in the extreme foreground is hilariously cartoon-like. The next shot of henchmen literally scraping him off the street with a SNOW SHOVEL is priceless!
On a more sober note the tight framing and the dynamism of a hand held $3,000 Canon XH A1 retail camera (!) is both dynamic in its verite primitivism, and impressive. Dynamic due to the quick, jerky hand-held reality of having no million dollar behemoths to track and jack around, yet impressive in that directors Neveldine and Taylor have such a stripped down technical setup to work with that real directors' chops show in their cuts, edits, mise-en-scene, tracking(?) and running shots. The lack of the typical million dollar accoutrement of Hollywood corporate cinema means that this B movie was going to either be the worst thing since somebody's film school MFA thesis or else be exactly what it is: a master's class in how to create suspense, comedy, satire, and thrills with the most basic visual storytelling tools of action movie making.
It gives us something to think about. Namely, is this how engaging new cinema will be once the old corporate oligarchy has fallen and everybody is able to run through the streets with Canons? No. Because Neveldine and Taylor show with “Crank High Voltage” that the chicken still needs a skilled chef to make it edible. Chops are required,
And then there is Neveldine's and Taylor's almost insanely proliferating accumulation of film references on top of references.
“He die hard wid uh vengeance!' one Asian 'nurse' exclaims to another during one of Chev Chelios' several surgery/vivisection/autopsy scenes. The references range from macro pastiches like the early rooftop shootout as video game set piece, to the smallest, oddest fetishes of B movie excess, e.g., the 50's/60's horror film sub genre of disembodied heads. Chev is dragged by El Huron before Huron's brother who is now a living human head suspended in a vat of nutri-mucous electro-bio liquid stuff. Have Nev and Tay gone too far past satire and even parody with this? Au Contraire, mon frere. They have merely resurrected the sub genre motif of those heady hollywood rags, “The Man Without a Body,” “The Frozen Head,” and my favorite, “They Saved Hitler's Brain!”
Nev and Tay provide hi-larious allusions to the widely varying film grammars of Sergio Leone, Tarantino, Antoine Fuqua, Spike Lee, Robert Rodriguez' “Mariachi” cycle, and Run Run Shaw's Gung Fu vengeance motifs. Bravo to the directors' playful and impilcitly critical takes on a long string of horribly racist LA movies such as “To Live and Die in LA,” and “Colors.” Not to mention their attack on heavy handed 'Oye Ese, Mi Vato' television fantasies – cop shows like “The Shield”. Bai Ling's shameless, tripped out crack whore and Efren Ramirez's over the edge and into the trees gay Mexican 'full body Tourette's Syndrome' suffering Venus (brother to Kaylo) are sublime parodies of the predicament of every gifted actor and actress of Asian and Mexican descent who is forced by Hollywood to demean themselves in roles that are little more than ridiculous ethnic slurs.
Likewise, Amy Smart's running series of public copulation scenes with Jason Stratham is a parodic nod to all the gifted women in Hollywood films who are forced to do sex scenes with the male lead and show some T&A (ala Halle Berry) as the price of the Hollywood ticket. I don't know about you but I'm STILL heebie-jeebied by my memory, all these years later, of Catherine Zeta Jones slinking all up on old coot Sean Connery in 1999's “Entrapment,” which even ten years earlier, in its nicer version, 1990's “Russia House” was just as nasty, putting not quite as old but just as bald Sean Connery in bed with Michelle Pfeiffer. Ick!
Is it just me, or did the incredible actresses of my youth (Diane Keaton, Faye Dunaway, Ruby Dee, Mia Farrow, Rosalind Cash, Sally Field, Sissy Spacek, etc.) seem a bit less badly used? Sure, there are some dignified actresses these days, such as Meryl Streep, grand dame of 'art babes' who never has to take her clothes off (okay, the necrophilia and booty popping of “Death Becomes Her” blows my theory to hell here, but, ya know what I mean), and we've had Susan Sarnadon and Little Susan Sarandon (Julianne Moore) as serious movie fare in recent years. Still, none of my students (I teach at the college level) has ever heard of the ground breaking feminist film, “Thelma and Louise” which doesn't seem to play the college circuit, and though Callie Khouri won the 1992 best screenplay Oscar for “Thelma and Louise” it was another 17 years before the very first academy award to a woman director was bestowed upon “The Hurt Locker.” In short, Yvette Mimieux might have gone for it ala the creepy fusion of grumpy grampy John McCain and babe Sarah Palin, but I think Jean Seberg would certainly have turned down a tongue kissing scene with Extraordinarily Old Gentleman Sean. Pam Grier would have smacked him around a little for even asking.
Yes, I hate that I love the thing, but this “Crank” sequel is parody with a vengeance, and with the smallest curlicues of detail, such as the old woman molested by Chev at the race track telling the inevitably vaguely Chicano stand-up reporter that her attacker had been sexy, 'like that guy from 'Train Spotting' (!!) Or did she say 'Transporter' (??) I started to get rewind fatigue after a while (or is that 'reverse' now that it's digital?), as I played and replayed scenes to catch the smaller details.
I became obssessed with trying to figure out if Clifton Collins Jr,'s megalomaniacal Mexican underworld boss was really Jim Carey or just an ironic sketch tribute to him (??) I mused over another recent moment, while watching the Star Trek reboot, when I'd gotten the strange feeling, watching the character Ayel, Nero's first officer, that I was watching Jim Carey in a lot of disfiguring makeup. A quick check of the cast of “High Voltage” told me that the same actor who'd played Ayel was now beneath the El Huron makeup. Oh, snap!
When I suddenly realized nearly at the last scene he was in that the Triad Boss “Poon Dong” was David Carradine made up to look like Keye Luke (Brilliant, I tells yuh! Brilliant!) I didn't know whether to keep laughing or seek out my dusty old VCR transfers of “Kung Fu” episodes to run on the TV beside “High Voltage” on my computer so I could do a close comparison. So I thought about it a moment and realized it wasn't Keye Luke as Master Po in “Kung Fu” I was looking at Carradine doing–it was Keye Luke as “Mr. Wing” in 1984's “Gremlins”. Now I had the urge to look up my Betamax copy of “Gremlins.”
I didn't. I'm a cine-geek, but even geeks have to draw the line somewhere. I mean, for dignity's sake, right? Somehow I suspect I would have seen startling similarities in the makeup jobs done on Carradine and Luke and that Neveldine and Taylor meant to do this to me–make me want to look. Besides. Think about it. 'Neveldine' — 'Carradine'. You want to tell me that's just a coincidence?? I almost wanted to run to YouTube to seek out some videos on the subtleties of illuminati conspiracy theory.
“Crank High Voltage” in its second half pulls out all the stops and tosses off every possible LA youth gang crack whore Mexican underworld crime boss and Chinese Tong/Triad fantasy ever conceived by Hollywood–with a little organ theft paranoia (ala William Gibson and the genre of Bio punk) thrown into the mix. In fact, by the time I started to feel paranoid about just exactly HOW many homages and film references were piling up in every scene, even to the point where I was searching the background mise-en-scene and straining to hear non diegetic and off camera details in the sound montage for clues, I began to think that “Crank High Voltage” is a little something more than simply a parody.
The two films taken together are above all the comedic take of Nev and Tay on the paranoia and absurdity of 21st century information sickness, bio punk organ theft phobia, the body as cyborg disposable, and the Mary Shelly nightmare gone viral. The first film and the second (and the obviously Mary Shelleyesque third film in the cycle that is upcoming in which Chev will be reincarnated once again, this time as something not quite human), are altogether a cycle making up one grand and crass homage to our lives today.
Urban trash, street opera, strip club machete killers, Black gay bikers, buttocks, elbows, nipples, and testicles at risk, as well as the dawning realization we all have been awakening to, that somebody has done something to us, and we have a limited time to track down who did it and where our collective heart has been spirited off to.
What the heck was in that cold box Johnny Vang was carrying and desperately protecting, anyway? Maybe only Marcellus Wallace can tell us for sure, but it might have something to do with the other stolen artifact Chev Chelios will be looking for in the next film: his soul.