HEY EVERYBODY! I am Flapjacks, the one and only, coming to you LIVE (well this is not live technically) on the internet because MGK doesn’t close his browser windows and I know how to create a new user in WordPress (okay it took me three tries).
Now, sure, maybe he’ll delete this post and my new account once he sees what I done but I don’t think he will because all of you have been demanding that I do such a thing. Perhaps some of you have been demanding it silently in your hearts, but that is very nearly the same thing and our society is founded on such principles. After all, would Barack Obama be president now if it weren’t for people being willing to vote for a black guy only if they could be sure nobody would know they were voting for a black guy? I would totally vote for Barack Obama if I were American and I’m not ashamed to say it but come on – North Carolina? Really? That wasn’t gonna happen without people knowing nobody was gonna tell on them. And that’s why you all love me. I speak truth to power.
So anyway I thought I would talk about the best movie of 2008. MGK was all “well it’s probably Wall-E or maybe Slumdog Millionaire” but one is about gay robots (and they totally ripped off Heartbeeps) and the other is about the Indian version of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire and Regis Philbin has a moustache for some reason and that was really strange, I thought.
No, the bext movie of 2008 is Max Payne because it has Mark Wahlberg shooting people in slow motion and saying gritty things (also possibly in slow motion, I am not sure on the technology). It is everything Punisher: War Zone wanted to be! Except without the Punisher and stuff. Now I know many of you are busy and cannot watch the best movie of 2008, so I will go over the high points for you.
Max Payne is a cop on the edge! Of a lake! And he is underwater! And he drowns. I thought this was gonna be a real short movie at first but then they went all “ONE WEEK EARLIER” and I was all “whoa, they are playing with time and space here, it is just like Kubrick.” And then there is some boring stuff I don’t care about but then Max Payne goes to the subway! I am pretty sure it was a Toronto subway. I recognized the way it looked shitty. Remember how people used to be all “Toronto is like New York but cleaner?” Now they are not all like that any more.
Anyway, it turns out he was in the subway ON PURPOSE, looking for a junkie killer who killed his wife. He beats up the gang of junkies and finds the specific junkie, but the junkie is all high from the blue powder drug they all do in this movie. Also another junkie runs into the subway and hallucinates angels and then gets killed by a subway train. THIS IS IMPORTANT SO REMEMBER IT FOR LATER. (The angels, not the train. Trains are just trains, mostly.) So Max goes to a party run by the guy who told him where the junkies were and threatens to beat up that guy, but then a Russian whore shows up and she totally wants to do him, but then Mona Sax (who is played by that girl from That 70s Show, but not Donna, the squeaky one) totally slaps her in the face. Then Max turns away for a second and they both vanish!
Max chases after the Russian whore and sees that she is in the Lesbian Room doing lesbian stuff with lesbians, and also the blue powder angel drug. (She is doing the drug, the drug is not with the lesbians. Well I guess the drug is with the lesbians in a geographic sense, but you get where I am going with this.) While he watches the Lesbian Room, Sucre from Prison Break shows up right behind him! Everybody in this movie is like Batman in that they disappear and appear out of nowhere and that is awesome. Max brings the Russian whore home and she is good to go, but she makes fun of Max’s dead wife so he totally kicks her out! WAY TO NOT HAVE ANY SEX, MAX! You can tell he is the hero because he avoids getting herpes. (She definitely had herpes.)
Anyway, the Russian whore heads home through alleys (bad idea, Russian whore! You’re a morally deficient character in a moralistic action movie! Shoulda stuck to more populous areas of the city) but then hallucination angels kill her. Man this is some amazing drug, if it kills you with hallucination angels and people still want to take it. So the next morning Donal Logue shows up in an undercover cop car wearing undercover cop clothes (IE he looks like he is a bum) and he takes Max to the crime scene where the Russian whore is all cut up into whore-bits. Sucre watches from overhead and it is very suspicious. Then Donal Logue and Max have a fight because they used to be partners and now they aren’t partners any more and Donal Logue is worried that maybe the other cops (who are assholes) will think Max killed the Russian whore.
Donal Logue figures out that the Russian whore might be connected to Max’s wife’s murder because of the wing tattoo she had (I probably shoulda mentioned that she had an angel wing tattoo, everybody who is bad in this movie has one, also Sucre has them on his face), but he goes to Max’s apartment to kill him and gets killed. Max nearly gets killed too (that’s what you get for not having electricity that doesn’t make lamps flare up dramatically, Max!) but he has a gun in his sock and he shoots the guy (maybe) but then Max wakes up in hospital and he’s not sure what happened.
And THEN Chris O’Donnell is worried for some reason!
Old guy who is a friend of Max’s takes Max to Aesir Corporation (where old guy works and Max’s dead wife used to work) so Max can get all dressed up for Donal Logue’s funeral. Then Max goes to the funeral and Donal Logue’s wife (who is way too hot to be with Donal Logue incidentally) slaps him. Ludacris (fulfilling the “rapper quota” that every action movie must have nowadays) thinks Max is bad and so do all the other cops, but Max figures out what Donal Logue wanted to tell him by walking past all the other cops who just stand there while he breaks into Donal Logue’s office. Max is badass.
Mona Sax waylays Max with a machine gun and one of those metal sticks that extends out so you can smack people with it and she thinks Max killed the Russian whore, who it turns out was her sister. But Max convinces her otherwise so they go to a building with a screaming guy who is also hallucinating angels but maybe he is NOT hallucinating them and the angels kill him or maybe he throws himself out the window because he is hallucinating. See, this is why this movie is so good: it isn’t letting you decide one way or the other if the evil angels are real or not! It is ambiguous.
Sucre tortures and kills a junkie for some reason. But he takes his shirt off first because of junkie blood and he doesn’t want to ruin his shirt. That makes sense. I bet junkie blood is harder to get out than regular blood. It’s probably more clingy and persistent. You’d need to bleach it twice or something. So Max and Mona go to a tattoo shop and then a voodoo gun gang shop, and Max figures out that whoa, Aesir Corporation has a wing in their logo, and the junkies all have wing tattoos and it is CONNECTED!
Chris O’Donnell gives the Aesir boss lady a package with a photograph of Sucre when he was in the army. She tells him to “deal with it.” So he goes back to his office but Max is there! And Max beats him up so Chris O’ Donnell will tell him everything, but Aesir security forces show up just as O’Donnell starts cracking about how there was a horrible government conspiracy and they shoot him (the security guys, not the government conspiracy – well, maybe it is both, the movie is really ambiguous about that, much like in a Scorcese film except with hallucination angels everywhere), and then there is an awesome gunfight as Max shoots at the security guys who shoot at Max and it only took an hour of the movie for Max to really start shooting people’s asses off but it was worth the wait.
Anyway, this is where I should stop recapping the movie because from here on in it is all awesome with twists and turns and so forth, and also Max Payne does a backflip while firing a shotgun and then it turns out the old guy is actually bad and you get to find out how Max got into the lake to drown in the first place and how he stops hypothermia just by being that hardcore. Let’s see Harvey Milk do that.
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25 users responded in this post
Flapjacks, you are a credit to our race.
Okay…so either MGK has gone insane, or Flapjacks is awesome. Or both.
Also, pretty sure I went to school with cWolfert!
I think inside Flapjacks lays the heart of a twelve year old boy, like back when I thought Jean Claude Van Dam movies were the best thing ever.
Thanks for the reminder. I kept thinking I needed to add this movie to my NetFlix queue but never when I was at my computer. And apparently I suffer a terrible lack of short term memory.
Fortunately I happened to read this article while sitting at my computer (go figure) so I just added it. Can’t wait to see such a highly acclaimed theatrical rollercoaster of emotions and hallucination angels.
Dammit, Flapjacks, I don’t know whether to hug you or punch you.
I’m still not entirely convinced this isn’t MGK in disguise.
“Norman! Put me down. Put me down. I can walk on my own.”
As they say on various forums, ‘pics or it didn’t happen’
Why is it that the phrase “it is ambiguous” is considerably more amusing than “it’s ambiguous” would’ve been?
Me too, since it reads like an MGK post in a lot of places. (And won’t I feel stupid if this really turns out to be somebody different!) I think the person who posted the “Fight Club” theory may have been on to something….
Ah well, whether Flapjacks is a real person, or whether Bird’s got a split personality, or whether he’s fictional, one thing is clear: every post involving a conversation between these two brings the lulz. 😀
Worst. Episode. Ever.
Harvey Milk did get into a gunfight once.
It did not end well.
Too bad this post didn’t involve a conversation between these two.
At first I was sure this post confirmed the fictionality of this “Flapjacks” person, but I am now more of the notion that Flapjacks is the gleefully earthy James T Kirk to MGK’s solemnly humanist Bones McCoy. In a parallel universe where the latter was the one everyone focused on.
Thank god there are movie critics of your caliber. Finally, someone who GETS Max Payne.
Greatest review/recap ever.
Yay! I’m not the only person who thought Max Payne was awesome!
Dude, I love you, even if you appear to be MGK’s split personality.
Now I have a reason (finally) to get around to seeing Max Payne. Thank you Flapjacks! And I’m casting my vote for “Flapjacks is very probably real” because, come on, The Wok Conversation. I have had a conversation like that, and there were absolutely two discrete entities involved.
And I always thought Flapjacks was the little demon that sat on MGK’s shoulder…
well said.
I had always assumed that Flapjacks referred literally to pancakes, and MGK was making up funny conversations.
Well, not actually ASSUMED, but the thought had crossed my mind.
For anybody who hasn’t been reading this blog long enough to have seen it, here is the first appearance of Flapjacks.
Ok…did That 70’s Girl get with the lesbians or not?
FLAPJAAAAAAAAAAAAAAACKS!! *throws up gang signs*
@Bah: Possibly because “it is ambiguous” exploits the violation of the Gricean conversational maxim of manner (since people nearly always use “it’s” instead of “it is” in informal speech/writing) – it creates an incongruous (and therefore humorous) Vry Srs tone while talking about blue-drug hallucination-angel movie-thing. (Show-offy linguistics major yay!!)
Best movie review EVAR! Thanks for sharing this.
Flapjacks FTW
So I watched this last night.
Pretty awesome. Just a couple things that should be mentioned. The conversation with Chris O’Donnell is like the ‘reveal’ where 90% of the random crap that goes on is mostly almost explained. So if you have to pee while watching it, hold it for a couple more minutes. Also the conversation with the old guy that happens after the back-flip slow-mo shooting. That’s pretty much it.
I love how they condensed all the plot points into a few short conversations so the rest of the movie could be filled with whores and hallucinations and shooting shit all to hell.
They should release a condensed version that is like those two conversations plus a little bit of the flashbacks, the important bits of Donal Logue doing stuff, and maybe Marky Mark going all freak ass and yelling and the snow turning into burning embers.