What kind of deadbeat am I? I haven’t written a post in a month and now, here I am, with a post a couple days after Christmas and not a single picture of pajama clad children tearing into presents. Instead, what do I write about? Blood Sport. And Jean Claude Van Damme.
I’ve been feeling old of late. Or, not old exactly, but like an adult. Like an adult with a recognizable chunk of time between now and childhood. Sure, you’d expect that feeling to hit before a person turns 29, especially if said person has been a parent to twins for nearly seven of those years. But thus is the state of adulthood these days. Thirty is the new twenty. For me, the feeling has been creeping in for some time now, but it has been made more acute since I brought Nirvana Unplugged to work. Katie and I have been rocking it quite a bit and talking about how good it is (it is really, really good). I realized that the concert/album was recorded in 1993. Since I very distinctly remember when the show aired– and the ubiquity of the album after Cobain’s suicide–it was something of a surprise to me that it was fifteen years ago. Until now I had thought of fifteen years ago as a soft mess of memory, something that belongs to the blur of childhood. Fifteen years ago has never had so many clear, concrete memories to me.
It’s always driven me crazy when people hit thirty and think they are old and on the downward slope to decommission. I’m not about to settle into that myself. I don’t think thirty is old. I will be forty when my sons are eighteen. I will be a young man ready to venture out into the world at forty.
Melissa and I went to see JCVD on Saturday, the new movie about Jean Claude Van Damme starring Jean Claude Van Damme. It a really excellent movie that is highly rewarding in many ways. It’s such a good idea that you can’t believe it’s never been made before.
I’ve been met with some skepticism from a few people I’ve gushed to about the movie and I suppose that’s to be expected. I’ve also read a few reviews that seem to have completely missed the point of the movie. But it made me wonder if the reviewers grew up with Van Damme as the action star that he was. This is Jean Claude Van Damme.
I had Rhythm, who’s fourteen, baby-sit while we went to the movie. He asked what we were going to see and when I asked if he knows who Jean Claude is he had absolutely no idea who I was talking about. Blood Sport? Kick Boxer? Nothing? I described him as a big action star like, like…who is a big action star now? I couldn’t think of anyone. Nor could I really think of movies similar to the ones that Van Damme made or Steven Segal. Do the ridiculously violent 1980 and early 1990s movies of Arnold and Chuck Norris–even Rutger Hauer–have modern day counterparts? Or have the gone the way of the message-free sex comedy and been replaced by a sanitized version of their former selves? The sex comedies still have the sex and nudity–though I don’t think as much; I remember Showtime late at night when I was a kid–but they have some kind of ridiculous and disturbing moral injected into the end. This is the Protestant Sex Comedy, a truly American invention.
Kids these days need Van Damme, they need Blood Sport. Gratuitous sex and violence! Message free!
But maybe you need to have seen Jean Claude as a one dimensional action star–a huge star–to appreciate him being taken apart as a guy who made a bunch of movies and just wants to keep doing that. It’s a simple idea, but in this film it’s brilliantly executed and constructed as something of a thriller. And it’s fucking hilarious.
Blood Sport was made twenty years ago, meaning Jean Claude was 27 at the time. And now he’s old and no longer needed as an action star. The world of the action star–like that of the female newscaster–is that of a young person. It’s not like real life where middle age is just that, the middle, not the end.
Holiday news to follow!