Saturday, May 13, 2006

The Transporter

As usual, while you were reading essays by Pauline Kael, I was wasting my time watching a trashy movie. This time it was The Transporter. I'd already seen The Transporter 2, being a guy who does things backwards, and I thought it might be fun to see the first movie in the series.

It was. If The Transporter were a book, it would be a Gold Medal novel. It has the strong, competent (boy, is he competent!) hero, played by David Stratham, the enigmatic woman he encoungers in odd circumstances (boy, are they odd!), and plenty of action. When I say plenty of action, that's an understatement. This movie is almost all action. Stratham puts the Bruce Lee on dozens of guys in various scenes, defies the laws of gravity and physics, and drives like a NASCAR guy on meth. The plot didn't make a whole lot of sense, but that was okay. It was just something to hang the action scenes on.

The movie also features great photography and some nice scenery. Compared to Transporter 2 there was only one thing missing: my favorite nurse. So I put her photo here anyway, just to cheer myself up a little this morning.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Well, Pauline Kael would be writing about THE TRANSPORTER, doncha know, if not necessarily all that enlighteningly (Judith Merril took a lot of grief in the SF community for a similar approach to cultural journalism that people still laud Kael for...I preferred John Simon; still do. bell hooks, too, when she chooses to write about film). Meanwhile, the almost Too doll-like gorgeousness of Shu Qi was the major reason for me to eventually watch THE TRANSPORTER, and if you haven't given Shu Qi's industrial espionage explosion movie SO CLOSE (as it's known here) a shot yet, I doubt you'll be sorry if you do.

Unknown said...

OK, it goes in the queue.