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"FacebookPinterest\n\n An enormous, ungodly whining sound fills the air as a man wearing a tudo and a gleaming sliver rocket pack flies into the sky. The rocket pack doesn\u2019t shoot flames or smoke, but it\u2019s loud enough to leave ears ringing a block away. There\u2019s a crowd watching and probably applauding, though no one can hear anything over the whir. The man hovers for a moment, more than 20 feet up. As he rises, I\u2019m driving past Pack Square Park, looking for parking, not an easy prospect in downtown Asheville, North Carolina. I stop short, but I don\u2019t get rear-ended\u2014the driver behind me stops short, too. All traffic stops to watch the rising man.\n\n This rocket flight marks the opening of the third annual ActionFest, a film festival dedicated entirely to action movies and the stunt professionals whose acts of death-defying absurdity make them possible. The man in the rocket pack is Dan Schlund, a performer who got his start in live stunt shows, playing Indiana Jones and Batman. He\u2019s a compact man, maybe 40, tanned and, from the look of things, incredibly fit, and he\u2019s been flying that rocket pack for more than a decade. When I speak to him a couple of days later, he says, &amp;quot;More people have walked on the moon than ever flew one of these. Right now, on earth, there\u2019s maybe three people who can fly this.&amp;quot; When Diddy arrived at the 2005 VMAs via rocket pack, it wasn\u2019t really Diddy; it was Schlund in a helmet.\n\n Schlund is everywhere at ActionFest: signing autographs, posing for pictures, taking multiple rocket flights, hosting a live stunt show, asking everyone if they saw his rocket flights, delivering the festival\u2019s awards show introduction. (He never gets around to watching any of the movies; his schedule doesn\u2019t allow it.) Schlund has flown his rocket pack at all three ActionFests, and he\u2019s got the festival\u2019s logo emblazoned across the back of his pack for the occasion. Nobody calls him by his given name; he\u2019s Rocketman. During the technical-glitch pauses before screenings, people yell &amp;quot;Rocketman!&amp;quot; into the darkness. (They also sometimes yell &amp;quot;Manborg!&amp;quot; More on Manborg later.) Later on, I\u2019ll learn that he finished his Pack Square Park flight by landing on the red carpet outside downtown Asheville\u2019s art museum, fishing a cigar from his jacket pocket, and lighting it.\n\n\n\n Action movies are at something of an impasse at the moment. Most of the biggest movies coming out of Hollywood in recent years have been action-oriented; Avatar and The Hunger Games and the like are populist entertainments that get plot mileage out of fight scenes. But these movies, and their lesser peers, are many degrees removed from the simplistic plots and fist-on-flesh tangibility of, say, Die Hard or Predator. Digital effects have transformed so many of these movies\u2019 biggest scenes into lovingly rendered tech-cartoons, taking away much of their physical dimension and immediacy. The recent trend of jittery, panicked handheld camera movements has turned fights into indistinguishable blurs; it\u2019s now impossible to make out the simple geography of what\u2019s happening in too many of these movies. And with the profit-maximizing PG-13 rating in vogue, we no longer get to see the forcible limb amputations and bullet-wound blood spurts that once got teenage hearts pounding. R-rated American B-movies\u2014or, at least, those that don\u2019t star Jason Statham1\u2014have become endangered species. In Michael Bay, old-school action fans have a satanic bugbear who commits every possible sin and is also one of the most popular filmmakers on the planet. So it goes.\n\n But, partly in response to this particular kind of Hollywood bloodlessness, a sort of alternate canon has arisen. Violent B-movies that build their drama from flying knee-kicks and insanely balletic daredevil maneuvers are coming from around the world and finding their way to American DVD players. Thailand\u2019s Ong-Bak, France\u2019s District 13, Hong Kong\u2019s Ip Man movies, Chile\u2019s Mandrill, the straight-to-DVD sequels of the unremarkable Wesley Snipes prison boxing picture Undisputed: These movies all evoke a certain hushed awe whenever anyone mentions them at ActionFest. To a very particular audience, their stars (respectively: Tony Jaa, David Bell, Donnie Yen, Marko Zaror, Michael Jai White, and Scott Adkins) are absolute icons, more for their ability to deliver insanely brutal onscreen kicks and to heedlessly leap between buildings than for any traditionally understood acting ability.\n\n In 2012, two instant classics have already joined that canon. The Raid: Redemption, a brutal and simplistic Indonesian thriller already in limited American release, screens to a packed and enthusiastic room. The film\u2019s story could easily be a video game: A heavily armed SWAT team has to fight its way to the top of a high-rise building populated entirely with petty criminals, to arrest the drug lord who lives on the top floor. And the movie uses that simplicity to its advantage, gradually upping the chaos level until star Iko Uwais\u2019s visceral brawl with the villain\u2019s lead henchman, a scene that draws spontaneous and sustained applause from the ActionFest audience. In one scene, Uwais takes down an assailant, MMA-style, and then shoots him in the head as soon as his body hits the floor. In another, he grabs a thug\u2019s face and uses it to smash every tile on a wall. People ooh. It\u2019s great.\n\n\n\n 1. Or, lately, Liam Neeson. Which is weird.\n\n And then there\u2019s Haywire, Steven Soderbergh\u2019s spy thriller vehicle for female MMA fighter Gina Carano. The movie failed at the American box office in January, but the types of people who come to ActionFest loved it to pieces. Carano and fight coordinator J.J. Perry both show up in Asheville to accept awards and to sit on a panel about film fights, telling stories like the one about how Carano accidentally broke a vase over Michael Fassbender\u2019s face because Fassbender turned his head at the wrong moment.\n\n One of the people responsible for bringing foreign action movies to U.S. screens is Tom Quinn, one of ActionFest\u2019s co-founders and now the co-president of Radius-TWC, a new distribution label at the Weinstein Company. In his years at Magnolia Pictures, Quinn bought a ton of these movies: Ong-Bak, District 13, the Korean monster flick The Host, Takashi Miike\u2019s gore-drenched Japanese samurai epic 13 Assassins. The Raid is one of his. So is Headhunters, maybe the best movie I saw at ActionFest, a Norwegian art-thief thriller that quickly devolves into a bloody and hallucinatory chase movie. So is the closing film Wu Xia, a sort of Hong Kong version of A History of Violence with Donnie Yen in the Viggo Mortenson role.\n\n At ActionFest, Quinn is one of the few sharply dressed people in a sea of goatees and hoodies. Talking to Quinn is an enormous amount of fun, especially once he gets to telling stories about marketing Ong-Bak in the U.S. (Magnolia Pictures owner Mark Cuban also owns the Dallas Mavericks, so they got Jaa to do crazy twist-kicks at NBA halftime shows.) &amp;quot;I qualify these movies as art films,&amp;quot; Quinn enthuses. &amp;quot;Take something like [the Korean movie] The Good, the Bad and the Weird. To me, that is an extraordinary fucking glorious epic Western action film, a revisionist movie of the best kind. And that\u2019s really an art film. That premiered at the Cannes Film Festival. It is a global film.&amp;quot;\n\n Like a lot of people at ActionFest, Quinn speaks lovingly of the dragging-a-bank-vault chase that ended Fast Five. To ActionFest fans, that dangerous and elaborate stunt is an example of the way Hollywood should be doing things. So is Tom Cruise\u2019s breathtaking Burj Khalifa plunge in Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol. Those movies were both hugely successful, but searing and memorable action scenes like those have become outliers in Hollywood\u2019s blockbuster economy. For someone like Quinn, though, that\u2019s not really a problem, since people elsewhere in the world are keeping the flame. And they\u2019re doing it on the cheap.\n\n Talking about the Fast Five vault stunt, Quinn says, &amp;quot;To know that that was actually happening\u2014there was a guy driving inside the vault, and it took three months to put together, two months to shoot it\u2014that\u2019s fascinating. But to see Marko Zaror doing a movie shot for $250,000 in Chile, with this off-the-cuff and fucking amazing shit in there, I don\u2019t know... The Raid is a classic example of a director, Gareth Evans, who, not unlike Marko Zaror, has built a team around him from soup to nuts: his stunt guy, his writer. They were working outside the studio system. His first movie Merantau, which I distributed at Magnolia, was an awesome movie. We awarded it the first year. But that was a stepping stone for him to take his entire team and go and do The Raid. It\u2019s this perfect mix of being able to work at budgets that are more frugal overseas with different teams, but having a completely Western sensibility, and ultimately doing it better.&amp;quot;\n\n\n\n For a film festival with so many stabbings and spinkicks, Asheville is an odd site. I hear a couple of people refer to it as the Southeastern version of Portland, and despite a few Old South touches, like a highway through the center of town named after Billy Graham, they\u2019re not far off. Vegetarian restaurants and bike shops abound. The storefront next to Film Arts, the theater that hosts the fest\u2019s final screening, is a tasting gallery for locally produced olive oil and vinegar; the one around the corner has a sign out front advertising its djembe drums. The big news around town is that New Belgium and Sierra Nevada have both recently announced plans to open massive local breweries, a development that could make Asheville something like the Detroit of America\u2019s craft-brewing industry. Deliverance was shot near here, and so was The Hunger Games, but the place still feels remarkably peaceful. It would be hard to invent a mountain hippie town quite this perfect.\n\n The bulk of the festival goes down at Carolina Cinemas, a movie theater on the outside of town. Once a corporate multiplex, the Carolina has been retrofitted to sell beer on tap and serve paninis cooked on-site. And if you\u2019re going to spend an entire day watching low-budget action movies in a suburban multiplex, it\u2019s a remarkably pleasant place to do so, even if you have to hike a half-mile to the Wal-Mart next door to get Ibuprofin when the inevitable headache sets in.2\n\n\n\n 2. When you see enough onscreen mutilations, your head begins to throb. Or maybe that\u2019s just me.\n\n ActionFest isn\u2019t exactly a glossy affair. Inside and outside, microphones cut out or fade into near-silence without warning. A screening of the antic Chinese action/comedy blockbuster Let the Bullets Fly starts out, and then runs for maybe five minutes, without sound. The awards ceremony is held in a tent out in the multiplex\u2019s parking lot, one about the tenth a size of the tent I had at my wedding. The festival\u2019s jury includes a couple of prominent film writers and a Weinstein honcho, but also a drivetime DJ from the local album-rock station. During the Saturday afternoon stunt show, a demonstration of air-rams, the catapults that help stuntmen fly away from explosions, has to go down with no explosion. &amp;quot;We couldn\u2019t get a permit to do a real explosion,&amp;quot; explains Rocketman. &amp;quot;Call your councilman.&amp;quot;\n\n If Rocketman is ActionFest\u2019s unofficial mascot, its public face is probably festival director Colin Geddes, a bearded Canadian movie enthusiast who works as one of the main programmers at the Tornoto International Film Festival. During the festival, Geddes dashes madly from one screening room to the next, introducing as many movies as possible with admirable dorky fervor.\n\n The one movie Geddes is most excited about, the one he keeps plugging before unrelated screenings, is Manborg, a no-budget Canadian sci-fi flick about a reanimated robot-man who helps humankind win its war against the armies of hell. Talking about the movie, Geddes repeatedly refers to it as &amp;quot;this year\u2019s Hobo With a Shotgun,&amp;quot; and the phrase &amp;quot;this year\u2019s Hobo With a Shotgun&amp;quot; is almost great enough to justify Manborg\u2019s existence. But the movie itself turns out to be a hollow, ironized mess. The amateurish, extremely cheap film is obviously intended as an homage to the low-budget sci-fi movies of the \u201980s, right down to the pulsating synth score, but it comes off like the world\u2019s longest chillwave video. The jokes don\u2019t land, the fights essentially work as simulated Atari games, and I walk out after half an hour. Most of the Actionfest crowd loves it.\n\n &amp;quot;[Manborg director Steve Konstanski] is such a young kid who just did this on his own,&amp;quot; says Geddes, celebrating in an Asheville tea house just after the last ActionFest movie screens. &amp;quot;He didn\u2019t expect people to see the film. The film was only supposed to be a demo reel of what he could do. And if he was in the position to have a producer or a decent small budget, he could do wonders.&amp;quot;\n\n I couldn\u2019t watch Manborg, then, but it does have a certain underdog appeal going for it. So do all the movies screening at ActionFest, good and bad alike. It\u2019s probably the only place where anyone has ever screened back-to-back films starring Kim Coates, the scary-intense wiseacre who plays Tig on Sons of Anarchy. Even the bad movies\u2014like The Aggression Scale, in which a mute and deranged adolescent brutally murders the criminals who have come to kill his family, taking Home Alone\u2019s ideas to their natural conclusion\u2014work as goofy comfort-food fun. And the good ones\u2014The Raid, Headhunters, the excellent French single-location thriller Sleepless Night, the punch-happy hockey comedy Goon3\u2014send me out of the theater buzzing with excitement.\n\n The Hong Kong actor and fight-choreographer Donnie Yen may be the single greatest action star working today. In the Ip Man movies, Flash Point, Legend of the Fist, and countless other movies, he\u2019s developed a persona as a calming Tom Hanks-ian presence who, when necessary, will throw you in an armba. Two of Yen\u2019s movies screen at ActionFest, and they illustrate the festival\u2019s divide pretty well. Wu Xia is one of the festival\u2019s best, a weird and beautifully shot hybrid of kung-fu period piece and detective noir. Its centerpiece scene, in which an investigator pieces together the way Yen was able to kill an apparently superior foe, is like nothing I\u2019ve ever seen in a movie before. Yen\u2019s other movie is The Lost Bladesman, an overlong historical epic with an indecipherable plot and way too many characters. But even that movie has great fight scenes and a camera shot done from the point of view of a severed head flying over a battlefield. It\u2019s not exactly a waste of two hours.\n\n Dragon Eyes, one of the festival movies I\u2019d been most excited for, turns out to be a bit of a clanger: An incoherently plotted Yojimbo retread in which MMA fighter Cung Le turns various ethnically grouped gangs against each other. The fight scenes are great, if too rare, and Peter Weller has fun as a cackling mob boss. But the whole thing is drowning in weird direct-to-video sheen, and Jean Claude Van Damme\u2019s above-the-title role turns out to be an extended cameo with one fight. But Cung Le is in attendance and radiant with energy, coming off of an awards ceremony in which he\u2019s won Rising Star of the Year and Best Fight. (The awards show hands out distinctions for both Best Fight and Best Action Scene. The scene that wins Best Action Scene is a fight.) Halfway through the movie, he finds the film\u2019s director of photography, sitting directly in front of me in the crowd. Le is beaming. &amp;quot;Two fucking awards, man! Two awards!&amp;quot; I\u2019m not mad at him.\n\n\n\n The most famous actor who shows up to this year is almost certainly leathery great Tom Berenger, who comes through, be-scarfed and deeply tan, to promote his supporting role in the New Orleans cop thriller Sinners Saints.4 He seems a little befuddled by the whole thing. When I ask him what he thinks of the festival, Berenger says, &amp;quot;It\u2019s interesting because it\u2019s a theme. You could do the same thing with sci-fi, I suppose. You could do it with mystery, chick flicks, Hugh Grant films, things like that.&amp;quot;\n\n\n\n 3. Goon, despite all its fights, isn\u2019t exactly an action movie, nor are plenty of other movies screened. Bobcat Goldthwait\u2019s God Bless America is easy-target black comedy, the documentary Wonder Women looks at female comic book superheroes, and others are just intricately plotted thrillers. And the festival\u2019s liberal definition of its own theme works in its favor; three straight days of Tony Jaa-style head-kicks would be too much for just about anyone.\n\n 4. Berenger is pretty great in the movie, lending an air of weary gravitas that it badly needs. His performance seems even more impressive after he tells the crowd that he spent a grand total of three days on the set. Sinners Saints is not one of the better films on display at ActionFest. It\u2019s worth watching for the short and brutal fight scenes and for the New Orleans on-location atmosphere, but it has a whole lot working against it: leaden, expository dialogue, half-assed conspiracy-addled plotting, clich\u00E9 character motivations, a wooden leading man in Johnny Strong (who also supplies the godawful trudging alt-rock soundtrack), and the sight of Method Man in rubbery facial-scar makeup. There\u2019s already a sequel in pre-production.\n\n I ask Berenger if he considers himself an action-movie guy. He doesn\u2019t want to say yes, and he doesn\u2019t want to say no. &amp;quot;If it\u2019s war, it\u2019s going to have action. If it\u2019s sports, it\u2019s going to have action. If it\u2019s police, there\u2019s going to be some action. Someone to Watch Over Me: I don\u2019t know how much action there was in there. Not a lot\u2014at the beginning and the end, mostly. And I think some of the things that they call action, they weren\u2019t necessarily action-genre. It\u2019s not holding up the film; it\u2019s just in there because it\u2019s part of it... Is Gettysburg an action movie? I don\u2019t know. It\u2019s blurred.&amp;quot; He doesn\u2019t mention Sniper. Or The Substitute.\n\n &amp;quot;In the future, I\u2019d like to maybe potentially get some bigger stars,&amp;quot; Colin Geddes tells me a couple of nights later. &amp;quot;Jason Statham was busy shooting. Kurt Russell was busy shooting. Arnold Schwarzenegger is busy writing an autobiography. With a few more festivals behind us, people will recognize it. The great thing is having the stuntmen on board.&amp;quot;\n\n The stuntmen could not possibly be more on board. One of the festival\u2019s co-founders is Aaron Norris, Chuck\u2019s brother5, who started out as a stuntman and a stunt coordinator before eventually becoming the showrunner on his brother\u2019s hit show Walker, Texas Ranger. Norris is a constant jovial presence at the Fest, clapping strangers on the back and flashing movie-star\u2019s-brother smiles in every direction. At the awards ceremony, where he appears slightly drunk, he announces that he\u2019s starting a production company where only stunt coordinators and second-unit directors will be directing movies. He also repeatedly invades the stage to dole out hugs to the various stuntmen who have won awards.\n\n This year\u2019s Lifetime Achievement Award winner is Mickey Gilbert, a former rodeo rider who parlayed that experience into chariot stunts in 1959\u2019s Ben-Hur. He\u2019s worked in the industry ever since. He doubled for Robert Redford in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, pulling off the movie\u2019s iconic cliff jump. He also did stunts in Sam Peckinpah\u2019s The Wild Bunch, and after an ActionFest screening of that particular classic, he says, &amp;quot;Looking back at it now, I think it was a little long.&amp;quot; He also tells stories about the times he almost died: dangling from one hand from a railroad bridge while filming the Charles Bronson Western Breakheart Pass; getting hit by a Jeep while filming an episode of The Six Million Dollar Man. He seems very happy to be here.\n\n Stuntmen are a special breed. It\u2019s a blast at the stunt show, where Sylvester Stallone\u2019s former stunt double Mark De Alessandro, who bears a similar chin, stages a fistfight with another stuntman, who gamely plays the bad guy. (&amp;quot;I think kids are great!&amp;quot; &amp;quot;I think kids suck!&amp;quot;) But it\u2019s better when they\u2019re just hanging out, trading war stories, and radiating goodwill towards each other. There\u2019s a sense of grizzled fraternity between them even when they\u2019re talking to the youngest of their colleagues.\n\n I ask Gilbert what that Lifetime Achievement Award means to him. &amp;quot;It means a lot to me, but not so much because it\u2019s me winning the award,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;I\u2019d like to give this award to a lot of my buddies that have died who, I feel, should\u2019ve been getting awards in their time. Our business is such a rude business as far as stuntmen go because we were hidden in the closet.&amp;quot;\n\n A big topic of conversation at ActionFest, one I\u2019d never considered, is the feeling, among stuntmen, that they should have their own award at the Oscars. Everybody mentions this. There\u2019s lots of talk about the requisite Cirque du Soleil segment, and how that time could be used to give an Oscar to a stuntman. It\u2019s hard to find an argument against it. If someone\u2019s jumped off enough cliffs just to make sure there are scenes of people falling off cliffs in movies, and that person wants an Oscar, they ought to give it to him.\n\n\n\n Everyone involved in ActionFest has big hopes for the festival. Colin Geddes wants to bring Clint Eastwood out some year for a retrospective. Tom Quinn has even more ambitious ideas: &amp;quot;I want every living Bond in the same room. I want all six of them here. I want every major vehicle from every Bond film out here in the parking lot. To me, that is the absolute dream of what this could be.&amp;quot;\n\n For now, ActionFest is content to be something else: a celebration of all things cheap and hard and visceral. It\u2019s a place where a man named Crazy Mike can do motorcycle tricks\u2014no-hands wheelies, donuts while sitting on his own handlebars\u2014while an appreciative crowd of film buffs surrounds him in a parking lot. It\u2019s a place where people get excited to see the opening 10 minutes of a forthcoming straight-to-video Universal Soldier sequel. It\u2019s a place where B-movies, and the people who make them, can go to feel proud.\n\n During a panel about staged film fights, Gina Carano and Cung Le, both world-class real-life fighters, cede the spotlight to fight choreographer J.J. Perry. Perry\u2019s a veteran stuntman who recently made the jump to choreographing fisticuffs, starting with straight-to-DVD brawlers like Undisputed 2 and Blood and Bone before moving onto bigger projects like Warrior and Haywire. Right now, he\u2019s working on Quentin Tarantino\u2019s forthcoming Django Unchained. During the panel, someone asks Perry about his philosophy of staging fights. His answer is an ActionFest ethos.\n\n &amp;quot;I\u2019m a big fan of impact,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;You can\u2019t fake that.&amp;quot;\n\n\n\n 5. Chuck Norris, despite his absence this year, is a sort of spirit animal for the entire festival. The first year, he showed up to accept a Lifetime Achievement Award but gave it to his brother instead. Every year since, it\u2019s gone to a stuntman, perhaps as a result of Chuck\u2019s premeditated magnanimity. He still sends videos congratulating the various award winners, and the award that Gina Carano accepts is regrettably titled the \u2019Chick\u2019 Norris Best Female Action Star Award. ActionFest may be the last place on Earth where Chuck Norris\u2019s name doesn\u2019t evoke images of frat-humor coffee table books or Governor Mike Huckabee."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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