Craig J. Clark Watches a Lot of Movies
June 2010
Tuesday, June 1, 2010
It gives me great pleasure to introduce you to the future of law enforcement.
For his first film made on American soil, Paul Verhoeven pretty much hit a home run with 1987's RoboCop, a film that launched a franchise and introduced one of the most iconic characters of the '80s. Further cementing its instant classic status, it was one of the earliest DVDs released by the Criterion Collection (spine no. 23) and also one of the first Criterion DVDs to go out of print. This is why I was so elated when I found a sealed copy for $20 at Amoeba Music the last time I was in Los Angeles. Sure, there have been other editions that have come out since that probably look and sound a whole lot better (DVD technology has advanced a great deal since 1998), but there's something about having the Criterion edition that gives me an extra kick. Call me a Criterion fetishist; I would say it's a fair cop.
Written by Edward Neumeier (who would go on to write the script for Verhoeven's Starship Troopers a decade later) and Michael Miner, the film is both an exciting action film with science fiction underpinnings and a trenchant satire on American society and corporate culture. It also gave Peter Weller his signature role, which is somewhat ironic considering he spends the bulk of the film with his face hidden by RoboCop's helmet and delivers his lines in a robotic monotone (which, it has to be said, is frequently quite comical). Putting a more human face on Old Detroit's overburdened police force are co-star Nancy Allen as Weller's ass-kicking partner, who is the first to recognize that he has been "recruited" for the RoboCop program after dying in the line of duty (in a violent scene made even more gruesome in the unrated cut that Criterion put out), and Robert DoQui as their non-nonsense sergeant.
On the corporate side of things are Dan O'Herlihy as the chairman of OCP, the company that has privatized Old Detroit's police force, Ronny Cox as the senior vice president whose ED-209 droid (a stop-motion marvel created by Phil Tippett) malfunctions in a spectacularly bloody fashion, leaving ambitious junior executive Miguel Ferrer the opening he needs to bring his contingency plan to O'Herlihy's attention (an act that doesn't exactly endear him to Cox). And leading the collection of colorful villains is Kurtwood Smith's amoral psychopath, with a pre-Twin Peaks Ray Wise as one of his goons. The real star of the film, though, is the RoboCop suit, which was designed by Rob Bottin. It sure takes a beating over the course of the story, especially once the bad guys break out the heavy artillery, but even at its most distressed it's still incredibly cool-looking. That's probably why it wasn't altered much in the sequels, TV series, video games and comic books that followed. It remains to be seen whether the proposed remake, with Darren Aronofsky attached as director, will follow suit or not. Personally, I don't see why the film needs to be remade at all. This is definitely a case where they got it right the first time.
Wednesday, June 2, 2010
Truth is we're animals, all of us. If you forget that, you're lying to yourself.
Since Abel Ferrera's immediate follow-up to Fear City -- 1987's China Girl -- has never been released on DVD and Plan 9 doesn't have it on VHS, I have moved on to the next title in his filmography, 1989's Cat Chaser, based on the novel by Elmore Leonard, who helped adapt it for the screen. The film stars Peter Weller as an ex-Marine running a run-down Miami hotel who unwisely gets involved with the unhappy wife (Kelly McGillis) of a rich, expatriate Dominican general (Tomás Milián), who is the not the sort of person you want to cross. There's no shortage of people who want to cross him, though, including McGillis, who wants the $2 million she was promised in her pre-nup, shady ex-cop Charles Durning, and boozy combat veteran Frederic Forrest, who gets roped into Durning's plan to shake Milián down.
While not as stylized as Ferrara's earlier films, Cat Chaser still has plenty of atmosphere thanks to the efforts of cinematographer Anthony B. Richmond. (The two episodes of Miami Vice that Ferrara directed between Fear City and China Girl probably also helped in that regard.) There's also the hard-boiled narration, which sounds likes it was taken straight out of Leonard's novel, but the film probably relies a little too heavily on that considering it's not narrated by any of the characters. (For a while I thought it was Alec Baldwin, but the IMDb says otherwise.) And then there's the matter of the ending, which is way too abrupt to be entirely satisfying, but from what I can gather, this film didn't really satisfy the people who made it, either.
Friday, June 4, 2010
We're biochemists. We can handle this.
For my first film at the AMC Showplace 12 West (formerly the Kerasotes Showplace 12 West), I went with the science fiction/horror hybrid Splice, which shares more than a little of its DNA with the 1995 science fiction/horror film Species, but that's not such a crime, is it? Co-written and directed by Vincenzo Natali (previously best known for making 1997's Cube), the film stars Adrien Brody and Sarah Polley as hotshot genetic engineers (they've even been interviewed by Wired and everything) who have been able to create new life forms by splicing together the DNA of different animals and decide to push the boundaries of science by adding human DNA to the mix. The result is a bizarre, ever-evolving creature that grows at an accelerated rate and periodically sprouts previously unseen appendages while at the same time it comes to look more and more human (and, rather disconcertingly, more and more attractive).
"What's the worst that can happen?" is a mantra that gets repeated by Brody and Polley several times over the course of the film and it comes to represent something of a challenge to God or Mother Nature or whoever's laws they're blithely fooling with. Then again, there's also their bottom line-driven boss (David Hewlett, who's been in each of Natali's films since Cube) and Brody's terminally curious brother (Brandon McGibbon) to deal with, so by the time their creation reaches maturity (and is embodied by French actress Delphine Chanéac) it's pretty much a given that they won't be able to keep it under wraps for long. Happily, Natali doesn't allow his film to be subsumed by creature-on-the-loose clichés (one thing that sets it apart from the likes of Species), but it remains to be seen whether modern audiences are ready to be refreshed in this fashion.
Saturday, June 5, 2010
Anything's in the cards when you're on a trip. You're capable of doing anything.
This month, the Kryptic Army's mission is to see two films by one of the "Godfathers of Gore," namely Herschell Gordon Lewis and Lucio Fulci. Having previously exposed myself to Lewis's work (which I did not find very edifying), I decided to go with Fulci, who's infamous for the run of extremely gory films he made in the early '80s, starting with 1979's Zombi 2. For my first Fulci, though, I reached back to his 1971 giallo A Woman in a Lizard's Skin, in which the emphasis is less on the blood (and even less on the gore) than it is on the fragile mental state of the main character, a woman undergoing psychoanalysis who dreams about killing her decadent next-door neighbor only to find out there really was a murder and that she's the prime suspect. (It's not for nothing that this was retitled Schizoid when it was released in the States.)
As the woman in question, Florinda Bolkan is suitably bewildered and distracted, whether she's relating her bizarre (and frequently erotic) dreams to her analyst (George Rigaud) or enduring the raucous party being thrown by her promiscuous neighbor (Anita Strindberg) at the same time she's trying to have a more intimate gathering with friends and family. Naturally that turns out to be the night that Strindberg gets snuffed, which attracts the attention of police inspector Stanley Baker, who has a penchant for whistling in a most unconvincing manner. The film also features Jean Sorel (who played Catherine Deneuve's husband in Belle de Jour) as her unfaithful husband, Silvia Monti as the woman he's being unfaithful with, Ely Galleani as the daughter who isn't given much to do, and Leo Genn as her father, a prominent lawyer and political hopeful who does everything in his power to clear her name.
On the whole, the story doesn't make a whole lot of sense, what with the killer hippies appearing out of nowhere and extended sequences like the one where Bolkan flees from a motorcyclist and somehow finds herself in a chamber where she's attacked by bats on wires. Then there are the things that don't make sense on a procedural level, like the police allowing civilians to trample through a crime scene (or maintaining that you can get fingerprints off a fur coat). Oh, sure. Everything gets explained in the end (quite thoroughly and with the aid of flashbacks), but until that point Fulci doesn't make things easy for the amateur sleuths in the audience.
I am a man. Damned maybe, but still a man who knows shame and sorrow and revulsion and regret.
Not that I really needed to add another Mill Creek 50 Movie Pack to my collection, but the "Nightmare Worlds" set called out to me thanks to the number of werewolf-related films it contains. One of the main ones, though -- 1971's The Beast of the Yellow Night -- isn't really a proper werewolf movie, so I refuse to refer to it as such. Written and directed by Eddie Romero, the film was one of the first to be distributed by the newly formed New World Pictures and when Roger Corman saw what could be made on a slim budget in the Philippines, he quickly started greenlighting films for the express purpose of shooting them there.
As for this film, it stars John Ashley as a U.S. Army deserter who makes a deal with the Devil (the amusingly portly Vic Diaz) to save his life in 1946 (in what the opening title refers to as "A SMALL TOWN IN SOUTHEAST ASIA") and a quarter of a century later (in "A CITY IN THAT SAME COUNTRY") is still doing Satan's bidding, much to his own chagrin. This is because Diaz's idea of fun is zapping him into the bodies of the recently deceased and having him resume their lives and corrupt their loved ones. So it is that Ashley finds himself in the body of a disfigured American businessman (which is why he's able to get away with having his own face) with a distant wife (Mary Charlotte Wilcox) and a brother (Ken Metcalfe) who may or may not have the hots for her. That's all well and good, but when Ashley complains too much about their deal, Diaz gives him a severe stomachache and transforms him into a murderous beast (which doesn't look like a werewolf so much as a severe burn victim).
Unsurprisingly, Ashley's murder sprees attract the attention of the local police, who are headed up by Leopoldo Salcedo and Eddie Garcia, one of whom gets to say my favorite line that pops up in some form in virtually every movie of this sort: "There must have been some kind of weapon used. Nobody could have done that with their bare hands." What is surprising, though, is the way Ashley befriends an old blind man (Andres Centenera) who turns out to be the key to his ultimate salvation. No silver bullet necessary if you can find a way to be forgiven for your sins.
For my second beastly film of the day, I went with 1976's Track of the Moon Beast, which was tackled by MST3K in its final season long before Mill Creek decided that it qualified as a "Chilling Classic." Directed by Dick Ashe, this New Mexico-set clunker stars Chase Cordell as a mineralogist who literally has rocks in his head when he's struck by a meteorite one night and a tiny piece of it gets lodged in his skull. That this causes slight headaches and periods of dizziness is understandable. That the light of the moon transforms him into a seven-foot-tall lizard creature capable of tearing its victims limb from limb is slightly less so.
Stuffed with inanity from the word go, Track of the Moon Beast saddles Cordell with a vacuous love interest, photographer Donna Leigh Drake, and gives him a mentor of sorts in the form of Gregorio Sala's Native American anthropologist (and rusher of the Halloween season), who can recite a great recipe for stew from memory and knows of a 400-year-old Indian legend about a lizard man who slew many brave warriors before spontaneously combusting. (Oddly enough, only one of those turns out to have any bearing on the plot.) As for the Moon Beast himself, he's played by special makeup effects artist Joe Blasco, who was killing time between David Cronenberg's Shivers and Rabid. I guess rubber-suited monsters just weren't his thing.
Sunday, June 6, 2010
I think about what my days would be like without having you as friends and I would just want to die.
With Nicole Holofcener's latest film, Please Give, coming to Indy in a couple weeks, I decided it was high time I caught up with her last film, 2006's Friends with Money. Her third collaboration with actress Catherine Keener, who has starred in all of her features, the film somewhat improbably casts Jennifer Aniston as the sole unattached member of a group of four female friends, all of whom have much more financial security than she does. Keener and her husband Jason Isaacs are screenwriters in the midst of renovating their house, Joan Cusack and her husband Greg Germann are wealthy enough to be able to donate $2 million at the drop of a hat, and Frances McDormand is a clothing designer whose husband Simon McBurney owns his own business. That leaves Aniston as the lone woman out, an ex-teacher who cleans houses for a living and barely scrapes by.
Out of pity more than anything else, Cusack sets Aniston up with her personal trainer (Scott Caan), who starts tagging along on her jobs and turns out to be something of a dick. She's far from the only one with problems, though. Keener and Isaacs are slowly drifting apart, even as they're upending their lives by having a second floor added to their house, and McDormand has definite anger issues which may or may not be exacerbated by the fact that McBurney is constantly being hit on by other guys. (On more than one occasion, Keener tartly speculates that he's probably gay.) When he actually strikes up a friendship with one of them it may seem like his subplot is headed down a certain path, but Holofcener's stories have a way of not always going the way you might expect them to. Even if she only averages a film every four or five years, it's refreshing to have her voice out there.
Have any of you heard it? The heartbreak of a parent who's lost a child?
The Host was South Korean director Bong Joon-ho's third feature film, but it was the first to have a real impact in the States. This probably has a lot to do with its monster movie trappings (which have always had a way of making foreign films go down easier), but when you get right down to it, it's just a damned good movie, period. Co-written and directed by Bong, the 2006 film is about a giant, mutated amphibian creature that is created when an American military official callously dumps toxic chemicals into the Han River, where the Park family has a food stand. Patriarch Byeon Hee-bong runs the stand with his imbecilic son Song Kang-ho and both dote on Song's daughter (Ko Ah-seong), so when a monster rears its ugly head one day and carries her off (along with a number of other unfortunate souls), they're understandably beside themselves.
They don't have much time to dwell on their loss, though, before they're swept up in the government's response to the disaster, which is predicated on the notion that the creature is carrying a deadly virus and anyone who had contact with it is a threat to themselves and others. Those others include Song's siblings, an unemployed college graduate (Bae Doona) and a champion archer (Park Hae-il), but when Song receives a frantic cell phone call from Ko, who is miraculously still alive and trapped in a sewer by the monster, the family springs into action. First, though, they have to break quarantine and somehow save her before the U.S. military (which has stepped in to help contain both the outbreak and the creature) can unleash a toxic substance called Agent Yellow (which was evidently named by somebody with a short memory). Bong has said his film isn't strictly anti-American (it's nothing on the order of the infamous Turkish film Valley of the Wolves Iraq, for example), but the fact remains we don't come off too well in it.
Monday, June 7, 2010
He's a bit different from your average murderer.
When the Cinemat went out of business last year and I bought their lone copy of John Woo's Hard Boiled, I was disappointed that somebody had already beaten me to its companion film, 1989's The Killer, which was also put out by the Criterion Collection back in the day. Thankfully, the Weinstein Company's Dragon Dynasty imprint has brought it back into print, so I have now caught it courtesy of Netflix. Like Hard Boiled, The Killer stars Chow Yun-Fat, only this time he's on the wrong side of the law, playing a principled hit man modeled after Alain Delon in Jean-Pierre Melville's Le Samourai. His counterpart on the police force is a detective (Danny Lee) who relies on his intuition and is always getting chewed out by his superiors as a result. And in between them is a nightclub singer (Sally Yeh) who is partially blinded when she's caught in the line on fire while Chow is carrying out a hit. And since, as Lee says later on, he's not your average murderer, this makes him feel really guilty and start hanging around the bar where she sings, stepping in to protect her when she's jumped by some hoods.
That's all just prelude, though. The story really kicks into high gear when Chow is given a job to do and, after he's carried it out, is double-crossed by his mysterious employer, who refuses to pay him. Now, not only is that bad form (as he commiserates with his Triad contemporary, Paul Chu Kong, that sort of thing never used to happen in the old days), but he was also planning on using his exorbitant fee to pay for an operation to restore Yeh's sight. (Hmm, I wonder if Woo also took some inspiration from Magnificent Obsession.) The end result: shoot-outs galore (some with flying doves and all with dozens of Triad fatalities) and multiple scenes where Chow and Lee wind up pointing their guns at each other. I suspect it's the mutual respect that keeps them from pulling the trigger.
Tuesday, June 8, 2010
No wonder you're having nightmares. You're always watching the news.
Building on the success of RoboCop, Paul Verhoeven's next American film was 1990's Total Recall, based on the story "We Can Remember It for You Wholesale" by Philip K. Dick (although it must be said that it's an incredibly loose adaptation). Originally written by Dan O'Bannon and Ronald Shusett, the script had kicked around Hollywood for many years and gone through countless permutations (at one point David Cronenberg was even slated to direct), but the version that ultimately reached movie screens took most of its cues from star Arnold Schwarzenegger, who helped shape it in his own image. That's why it's essentially an action film with science fiction overtones instead of the other way around. As action films go, though, it's a fairly intelligent one, and Verhoeven packs the proceedings with his usual visual panache. It's just a lot more explody than Cronenberg's version would have likely been.
Anyway, the film as it stands is about a bored construction worker (Schwarzenegger) who dreams of being on Mars and, since his knockout of a wife (Sharon Stone) doesn't want to go there, he goes to a company called Rekall Inc. which implants false memories in people and pays for the complete Mars vacation package. That's when things go haywire, though, since it turns out he's already been there and had his memory erased. And furthermore, he's a secret agent who's being hunted down by security forces headed up by Michael Ironside, who answers to Mars administrator Ronny Cox (a carryover from RoboCop). Once Arnie gets his ass to Mars, though, and hooks up with the rebel underground -- as well as his hot maybe-girlfriend (Rachel Ticotin) -- things start to fall into place. All he needs to do is figure out where he fits into the puzzle.
On a visual level Total Recall is impeccable, combining extensive model work, futuristic sets, state-of-the-art computer graphics, sophisticated animatronics and amazing makeup effects (by Rob Bottin, another RoboCop holdover) to bring its world to life. (It's not for nothing that it won a Special Achievement Award at the Oscars for its visual effects.) It also features a brilliant score by Jerry Goldsmith (who did the same for Verhoeven's immediate follow-up, Basic Instinct, as well as Hollow Man a decade later) and one of its characters provided the inspiration for Tiny Attorney on The Venture Bros. Could it really ask for any better cultural caché than that?
Wednesday, June 9, 2010
They're doing their part. Are you? Join the Mobile Infantry and save the world.
After two controversy-courting films in a row that were either successfully (Basic Instinct) and ludicrously (Showgirls) erotic, Paul Verhoeven returned to the brand of satirical science fiction that had been his previous stock in trade with 1997's Starship Troopers, based on the novel by Robert A. Heinlein. No stranger to controversy itself (some charged it with promoting militarism and celebrating fascism), it's a film that reunited him with RoboCop screenwriter Edward Neumeier and composer Basil Poledouris, and it marked his sixth collaboration with cinematographer Jost Vacano, whose association with Verhoeven goes all the way back to 1977's Soldier of Orange. (And I get the impression that if Vacano hadn't retired in 2000, Verhoeven would still be working with him.)
As for the cast, it's headed up by Casper Van Dien's Mobile Infantryman (which is another name for cannon fodder), Denise Richards's hotshot pilot and Neil Patrick Harris's psychic military scientist, with Dina Meyer as a former classmate who enlists because she's hung up on Van Dien (who, in turn, is hung up on Richards), and Jake Busey as a private who plans on making a career of military service. In fact, they're still in training (under tough-as-nails drill sergeant Clancy Brown) when the Federation declares war on "the Bugs," an event that calls for their immediate mobilization. Eventually Van Dien, Meyer and Busey wind up in the same unit as their former civics teacher (Michael Ironside), who lost an arm fighting for his country, but you should see what they can do with robotics these days. I should also mention Rue McClanahan, who plays their blind biology teacher, who expresses great admiration for the Bugs' highly evolved physiology. Frankly, I'm surprised that kind of talk didn't get her into trouble, but then again that was before they were at war.
If there's one thing Verhoeven enjoys, it's satirizing the media, and that's in full effect in this film with its frequent "Federal Network" reports, which update RoboCop's news segments for the Internet Age (which was still very much in its infancy at the time). The society in Starship Troopers has little time for silly distractions, however, so there are no crass entertainment programs like the one that spawned the catchphrase "I'd buy that for a dollar!" There is, however, a hysterical point/counterpoint show with two apoplectic talking heads arguing over whether Bugs can think. Frankly, that doesn't seem to be much of an improvement.
Friday, June 11, 2010
You volunteered for this. You knew there could be consequences.
To date, Paul Verhoeven's last American film -- and the last of his science fiction extravaganza -- is 2000's Hollow Man, a film which boasts some amazing special effects, but they're in the service of a story that is ultimately just as hollow and mean-spirited as its main character. Taking inspiration from H.G. Wells's The Invisible Man (but then again, doesn't every movie about invisibility?), screenwriter Andrew W. Marlowe (with a story assist from Gary Scott Thompson) updates it to modern day and gives its cocky protagonist (Kevin Bacon, who's terrific at playing an amoral jerk) a lab full of fancy equipment and a dedicated team of scientists and technicians (including ex-lover Elisabeth Shue and her current beau, hunky Josh Brolin) to assist him both before and after he decides to be his own human guinea pig. "I need the grandeur and the spectacle," Bacon says early on. "I can't concern myself with the details." After watching the film, it's easy to come away with the impression that Verhoeven and Marlowe got carried away in the same fashion.
That said, the grandeur and the spectacle are pretty darn grand and spectacular. (Some might cite the various disappearing and reappearing scenes, which all happen in stages, but I get the biggest kick out of the one where the liquid latex -- a clever substitute for the original story's bandages -- is first applied to Bacon's head.) It's just disappointing when all those inventive effects are used to turn Bacon into the Invisible Serial Killer. To top it off, his victims are all broadly drawn, and Bacon's own transformation from a selfish egotist who believes he's God's gift to molecular biology to a selfish egotist who violently offs his co-workers hardly counts as character development. Another big turn-off is the scene where he sneaks into the apartment of the woman who lives across the way and rapes her for shits and giggles. Then again, what should one expect out of a man who has a thoroughly tasteless joke about Superman, Wonder Woman and the Invisible Man in his repertoire?
Saturday, June 12, 2010
Something went wrong here. This has "personal" written all over it.
I had an opportunity to see The Boondock Saints with an audience last fall, but chose to pass on that because I didn't want to watch it with the kind of audience that the film was likely to attract. Still, I've been meaning to get around to it ever since it was added to the A.V. Club's New Cult Canon way back when, so when IFC aired it last month in tandem with Overnight, the 2003 documentary about the meteoric rise and precipitous fall of its egotistical writer/director Troy Duffy, I knew the time had finally come.
Set in South Boston, the film follows twin brothers Sean Patrick Flanery and Norman Reedus -- good Irish Catholics both -- as they embark on a campaign to clean up their neighborhood. For the most part, this involves taking on the mob, starting with the Russians who threaten to close down their favorite bar (on St. Patrick's Day, no less) and moving on to the Italians once they develop a taste for the work. (Hey, it sure beats meatpacking.) Their efforts attract the attention of the police, of course, and FBI Special Agent Willem Dafoe, who is important enough to be given a slow-motion introduction and who has some decidedly unorthodox methods for conducting his investigations. (The fact that he's an unrepentant homosexual, and a fairly insensitive one at that, strikes me as somewhat reductive on Duffy's part, though.) The cast also includes David Della Rocco as a low-ranking mob flunky who joins the cause after he's set up by his boss, Ron Jeremy as one of the mobsters they go after, and Billy Connolly as a one-man army who's sprung from prison and sicced on them.
Well, so much for the characters. What about the pyrotechnics? As one might expect, this is hyperviolent film and Duffy's camera lovingly captures every bullet hit and grievous bodily injury. As for the plot, Duffy frequently skips over major events and then immediately backtracks so the characters can fill us in on what happened between fade-outs -- and boy, does Duffy love his fade-outs. He also loves his religious iconography, drawing our attention to the crucifixes that the brothers have on them at all times and even having them recite a prayer after each of their killings. Sounds kinda like he took more than a few pages out of the Quentin Tarantino playbook, eh?
In a way, it's not really surprising that Miramax was the company that showed the most interest in Troy Duffy's screenplay, which he had written between shifts tending bar at a Los Angeles watering hole. What is surprising is that there were cameras rolling through all the ups and downs his career went through in the years that followed, but Overnight's co-directors, Mark Brian Smith and Tony Montana, were the co-managers of his rock band The Brood, so they had unprecedented access to him and got to see him at his best (and more frequently at his worst).
The ball got rolling with the Miramax deal, which would have given first-time director Duffy a $15 million budget and final cut on the picture, and soon Maverick Records was interested in signing the band, but when both of those prospects fell through (Miramax put the movie in turnaround, Maverick withdrew their offer), Duffy started getting abusive and prone to profanity-ridden tirades. (We get to see him slagging off Kenneth Branagh, Jerry Bruckheimer and Harvey Weinstein -- especially Harvey Weinstein.) He also developed an extreme "us vs. them" mentality, which was only exacerbated when The Boondock Saints went before the cameras (at a fraction of the budget it originally had) and nobody was interested in distributing it. Eventually it found a cult audience on home video, but by that time the band was history (their one album was a commercial flop) and Duffy was struggling to revive his film career. He must have managed somehow, because last year saw the release of The Boondock Saints II: All Saints Day. I won't be going out of my way to see that, though.
A lot of things are going wrong today. It's just not my day.
Ever since I saw Roy Andersson's Songs from the Second Floor, I've been eager to catch his follow-up, 2007's absurdist comedy You, the Living, so I was happy when my library acquired it. Not quite as grim as his previous film, it still manages to convey the listlessness of his miserable characters as they trudge through their mundane existences, rarely getting so much as a moment's pleasure. This is, of course, not to say that the film itself is a slog. I was highly amused by the sequence where a laborer stuck in bumper-to-bumper traffic takes time to relate to us a bizarre dream he had where he was sentenced to die by electrocution for failing to pull off the old tablecloth trick. Andersson even allows a couple of his characters to spontaneously break into song. They're just not the kinds of songs that lift the spirits.
I'd say if there's any one thing that sums up the film, it's the way that more than one character complains that "Nobody understands me." And the one person who seems like he would be able to help his fellow man out, an elderly psychiatrist who deliberately breaks the fourth wall to address the audience, has long since given up on listening to his patients and merely prescribes pills for them to take. Judging by the long lineup of sad individuals in his waiting room, I'd say they're probably not working.
Sunday, June 13, 2010
When a man meets a man, you never know which one will die.
Okay, so there's this kid, see, and his name is Ilias (Andrea Occhipinti), and he comes from the only agrarian society at the dawn of civilization, but before he can become a man, he has to don some leather armor, take up a mystical bow that shoots flaming arrows and make his way in the world. Then there are these goat herders with mud smeared on their faces sitting around waiting for their high priestess, a topless beauty in a gold face mask named Ocron (Sabrina Siani, veteran of the first Ator movie), to bring forth the sun. Then Ocron's beast men attack some cave dwellers, smash their elder's skull in and tear some random naked girl to pieces, delivering the head to Ocron, who subsequently drinks from it and writhes around on an altar with a large snake. Then she has a vision where she's shot with a glowing arrow fired by a faceless man wearing Ilias's armor, which really harshes her buzz. Incidentally, all this happens within the first twelve minutes of Lucio Fulci's Conquest, so if you haven't figured out you're in Conan the Barbarian ripoff land by the first reel change, then you obviously didn't live through the early '80s.
Made in 1983, at the crest of the wave of sword-and-sorcery flicks inspired by Conan's success, Conquest actually takes place so far back in the past that it's more of a sticks-and-stones flick, with Ilias's magic bow being the most sophisticated weapon around. In order to establish the dream-like atmosphere, Fulci kind of overdoes it on the smoke and haze, though. (Just because your story is set way back in the mists of time, that doesn't mean it has to be misty all the time.) Soon enough, we're back with Ilias, who saves some random naked girl (Maria Scola) from a snake, is attacked by some random soldiers, and is saved by a passing stranger named Mace (Jorge Rivero) who is friend to all animals, but doesn't take kindly to the beast men who try to jump him. Mace is only interested in the bow, but lets Ilias tag along with him as long as he shows him how to use it. The two of them get trapped in a cave by Ocron's forces, but easily escape and Mace takes Ilias home with him to meet the family (well, a family, at least). There Ilias runs into the girl again and they make doe eyes at each other over dinner, but before she can make a man out of him they are ambushed, the women and children are brutally killed, and Ilias and the bow are captured. Mace was inexplicably left alive, though, and after he rescues Ilias, Ocron roasts her head beast man Fado (José Gras) alive for failing her. (His biggest failing, it appears, was not inventing the night watch.)
Realizing she needs to bring in the big guns, Ocron summons forth the all-powerful Zora (Conrado San Martín), a magical dude in thick plate mail, and promises herself to him if he kills Ilias. Zora is down with this and shoots the lad with a poison dart while he's out hunting with Mace, but luckily Mace knows of a small valley where a magical plant grows and goes to fetch some of its leaves while Ilias lies around oozing pus from nasty-looking wounds that Fulci shows us in extreme close-up. On his way back from the valley, Mace is attacked by some swamp mummies, but manages to impale all of them and, upon his return to Ilias's side, has to fight his own double (Zora in disguise) before he can apply the life-saving vegetation. This is followed by a truly bizarre scene with Zora sitting on a throne and Ocron fondling his metal plating, but I guess it's no more strange than Mace being captured by some white-haired, cobwebbed Wookiees and, after he's thrown into the water, being rescued by some dolphins that happen to swim by. (This is lot more tedious than you would imagine.) From there, Ilias and Mace are captured again, this time by cave creatures we can't see too well in the blue light, and Ilias is beheaded, but that isn't the end of him, for when Mace burns his body (in a sequence that Fulci lingers over for several minutes) he takes on the fallen warrior's spirit and fulfills his destiny. The end. And in case you had any lingering doubts about what you've just seen, a title card comes up that states, "Any reference to persons or events is purely coincidental." Thanks for clearing that up, title card.
Well, here I am at the end of my write-up, but I can't leave you without including at least one shot of the beast men that are seen throughout the film. They look pretty wolf-like, which I suspect is why somebody added the plot keyword "Werewolf" to the film's IMDb listing, but I know werewolves and these are no werewolves:
P.S. - Please don't ask me what they're doing here. I don't even know and I watched them do it.
Do you think God knew what He was doing when He created woman?
As a child of the '80s, I grew up on the teen comedies of John Hughes, but inexplicably never got to see any of them on the big screen. (The closest I ever came was Ferris Bueller's Day Off, which I wanted to see for my 13th birthday, but it was vetoed as being inappropriate by my mother since it was PG-13 and my younger brother, who was only 11 at the time, would be with us. This is why I saw Howard the Duck for my 13th birthday. This, as you might expect, explains a lot about me. But getting back to the subject at hand...) As a result, I caught most of them when they came to cable and for a while there the one that I seemed to catch the most was 1985's Weird Science, which is far from Hughes's best work, but it's a film that stretched him in ways more ordinary fare like Sixteen Candles or The Breakfast Club did not.
I'm planning on going into the film in a lot more detail for Unloosen in a couple weeks, but very basically, Weird Science is about a pair of high school outcasts (Anthony Michael Hall and Ilan Mitchell-Smith) who feed a lot of data into a computer and, because this is 1985 and nobody really knows how computers actually work, out comes a beautiful woman (Kelly LeBrock) who can do just about anything. There are lots of supernatural shenanigans as well as some of a more earthbound variety. (Our heroes are constantly tormented by a couple of alpha males, one of whom is played by a young Robert Downey, Jr., as well as Mitchell-Smith's loathsome brother, Bill Paxton.) LeBrock even conjures up obstacles for them in the form of some mutant motorcyclists played by Vernon Wells (of The Road Warrior fame) and Michael Berryman (from The Hill Have Eyes) -- all so they can impress some girls and get some self-respect. Because the lesson that you want to take away from any given situation is that the threat of violence always solves everything. I realize I shouldn't expect too much out of an effects-laden teen comedy with a theme song by Oingo Boingo (which is still the best thing to come out of it), but a little coherence never hurt anyone.
Had somewhat better luck with my second feature, 1987's The Witches of Eastwick, which was based on the novel by John Updike and (speaking of The Road Warrior) directed by George Miller. Instead of a couple of horny teens creating a supermodel out of thin air, this is about three unattached women (Cher, Susan Sarandon and Michelle Pfeiffer) who wish for the perfect man to come into their lives and are astonished when Jack Nicholson moves to their tiny New England hamlet. He seduces each of them in turn, becoming exactly what they think they want out of a man, and brings out their latent magical powers, but local busybody Veronica Cartwright isn't having any of it and starts speaking out against the diabolical things she believes are going on up at Nicholson's mansion. Eventually she becomes too much of a handful for her severely henpecked husband (Richard Jenkins), the editor of the local newspaper, and gets taken out of the picture entirely, which is about when Cher, Sarandon and Pfeiffer realize that you have to be careful what you wish for. You never know who's going to be filling your order.
Monday, June 14, 2010
I wonder what's with me. I always get the weirdos.
Pedro Almodóvar ran into some trouble with the MPAA when it came to his 1993 film Kika, which was slapped with an NC-17 rating for its sex scenes and eventually had to go out unrated as a result. The fact that one of the scenes in question depicts a woman being raped repeatedly and is played at least partially for comedy probably didn't help matters, but still. It wouldn't be an Almodóvar film if there weren't some outrageous transgressions involved, and this one definitely has more than its share of outrages.
The film stars Verónica Forqué as the title character, a perpetually perky makeup artist who becomes involved with both an American writer (Peter Coyote) and his stepson (Àlex Casanovas), a photographer who's prone to catalepsy and believes Coyote had something to do with his mother's death. This probably has a lot to do with the fact that Coyote turned the circumstances surrounding her suicide into a novel in which an American writer kills his wife and successfully covers up the murder (shades of O.J. Simpson's If I Did It). Meanwhile, tabloid TV reporter Victoria Abril, host of a program called Today's Worst and frequent wearer of bizarre fashions, starts prowling around and making a general nuisance of herself. (She's pretty hard to miss with that camera strapped to her head.) Also involved are the family's lesbian maid (Rossy de Palma), who can't stop hitting on Forqué, and her brother (Santiago Lajusticia), a former porn star and current rapist who escapes from jail and makes a nuisance of himself. (And by "makes a nuisance," I mean "ties up his sister and rapes her employer in a semi-comical fashion.") The fact that Forqué takes all of this in stride says a lot about her character and, some critics thought, a lot about Almodóvar's attitude toward women.
As for me, I think Almodóvar knew what he was doing with all of his illusions to British and American thrillers (a poster for Michael Powell's Peeping Tom on the wall, Joseph Losey's The Prowler on TV, Bernard Herrman's score for Psycho on the soundtrack) that are sprinkled throughout the film. What he's really concerned about is voyeurism and how people act when they don't know they're being watched -- and how they react when they find out they have been. Suffice it to say, there's a good reason why Abril introduces one of the clips on her show by saying, "Warning, it'll shock your senses, if you still have any."
Wednesday, June 16, 2010
You'd think they'd never seen a new toy before.
When Toy Story was released in 1995, few people knew quite what to expect from the world's first completely computer-animated feature, but those who had seen Pixar's earlier shorts knew that they were accomplished at the art of bringing inanimate objects to life and investing them with full-fledged personalities. And with John Lasseter, who had been with Pixar from the start and had directed all of those shorts, at the helm, the proposition seemed like even more of a sure thing. It's just too bad, then, that critics and audiences roundly rejected the film, effectively strangling the computer animation industry in the cradle. Even so, I thought it would be worthwhile to revisit it after 15 years and ponder what might have been if only the public had embraced the shiny new toy on the block.
Where to lay the blame? Well, it can't be at the feet of the voice cast, which is impeccable. From main stars Tom Hanks and Tim Allen on down to supporting players Don Rickles, Jim Varney, Wallace Shawn, John Ratzenberger, Annie Potts, R. Lee Ermey and Penn Jillette, everybody pitched in and pulled their own weight. And it can't be attributed to the writers, whose ranks include Lasseter, Andrew Stanton and Joss Whedon, with contributions to the story by Pixar stalwarts Pete Docter and Joe Ranft. And it surely can't be assigned to respected composer Randy Newman, who also wrote three original songs for the film. I guess audiences just weren't ready for the paradigm shift required to accept computer-animated characters. Maybe someday, though. Maybe someday.
Thursday, June 17, 2010
What went wrong with us? I mean, did I do something horrendous to, like, turn you off?
For the first few years after the release of Living in Oblivion I thought of Catherine Keener as the talented actress who showed up in all of Tom DiCillo's films yet somehow never showed up in anyone else's. That all changed in 1998 when she got cast in Steven Soderbergh's Out of Sight and Neil LaBute's Your Friends & Neighbors, both of which raised her profile significantly. After that, it was like she was off and running. A couple years before that, though, she took the lead in Nicole Holofcener's directorial debut, 1996's Walking and Talking, a film that I somehow never got around to seeing. It's not like I was actively avoiding it or anything -- I made a point of catching Holofcener's follow-up, Lovely & Amazing, when it was in theaters -- this one just managed to slip through the cracks. Until now, that is.
Set in New York City, the film pairs Keener up with Anne Heche as best friends who have known each other since they were children and who aren't as close as they used to be. Keener is an unfulfilled single woman (is there any other kind?) in therapy who's remained friends with one of her exes (Liev Schreiber) who is constantly hitting her up for money; Heche is a psych student who gets engaged to her longtime boyfriend (Todd Field), a jewelry designer who sometimes chafes under her control-freak ways. Rounding out the main cast is Kevin Corrigan (who also co-starred in Living in Oblivion) as a scruffy video store clerk who manages to get Keener to go out on a date with him, which doesn't work out the way either of them planned.
For such a slice-of-life kind of film, Holofcener sure packs in a lot of incidents and character quirks. For example, right after she decides to stop seeing her therapist, Keener's cat (which also used to be Heche's when they lived together) is diagnosed with cancer and Heche and Field announce their engagement, which causes her to change her mind. As for Heche, as part of her training she sees a series of patients, one of whom tells her about the little red devil that he sees everywhere, and she even entertains the notion of sleeping with another. Meanwhile, Schreiber is in a long-distance phone-sex relationship with a woman in California and is addicted to pornography and his father has Alzheimer's. Compared to the rest of them, Corrigan's enthusiasm for gory horror films and dwarf bowling doesn't seem quite so terrible.
Friday, June 18, 2010
It's a dangerous world out there for a toy.
I recall groaning when it was announced that, for its next feature after A Bug's Life, Pixar was going to be making its first sequel, Toy Story 2, which I figured was at the behest of its parent company. This was not an unreasonable assumption to make since Disney spent the better part of the '90s pumping out direct-to-video sequels to Aladdin, Beauty and the Beast, Pocahontas and The Lion King, so why would Pixar be exempt? Happily, the Pixar team declined to do a half-assed job on it, so in the middle of production Toy Story 2 was upgraded to a theatrical release and ultimately proved to be the equal of its predecessor. How often can one say that, especially about a children's film?
The sequel brought back most of the creative team that had made the original such a success, with John Lasseter joined by co-directors Lee Unkrich & Ash Brannon, and everyone in the cast also re-upped, with some new additions in the form of Joan Cusack, Kelsey Grammer, Wayne Knight and Estelle Harris (as Mrs. Potato Head). This time out the plot involves rescuing Woody from a reprehensible collector (the perfectly cast Knight) who steals him to complete his set (which includes Cusack and Grammer, who is mint in box) so it can be sold to a Japanese toy museum. The jokes come fast and furious, there's plenty of action to keep the kids entertained, and the film also contains a great message about how toys are meant to be played with. Who could ask for anything more?
Saturday, June 19, 2010
Come on. Let's see how much we're going for on eBay.
Drove to Indianapolis for a do-it-yourself double feature today. First on the bill was Nicole Holofcener's latest, Please Give, which I've been waiting to see for the past two months. The story revolves around a married couple (Catherine Keener and Oliver Platt) who sell furniture that they've purchased in estate sales, usually at a sizable mark-up, and a pair of sisters (Rebecca Hall and Amanda Peet) whose 91-year-old grandmother lives next door to Keener and Platt. The thing of it is, Keener and Platt have already bought the old woman's apartment. They're just waiting for her to die so they can expand theirs, and that -- among other things -- is making Keener feel tremendously guilty.
This guilt manifests itself in Keener's compulsion to give money to every homeless person she sees, as well as the nagging desire to volunteer to help the less fortunate in some way or another. It's a noble thought, but she's clearly not cut out for it. She also has a strained relationship with her teenage daughter (Sarah Steele), who is obsessed with her complexion and finding the right pair of jeans. Meanwhile, Hall and Peet have their own disagreements, usually over the care of their grandmother, and Peet embarks upon an affair with Platt which couldn't possibly do either of them any good. The film also features cameos by Kevin Corrigan as one of the people Keener buys furniture from and Sarah Vowell as a tartly sarcastic customer (which is amusing because early on we see Keener reading her book The Partly Cloudy Patriot).
As in Holofcener's previous films, there are no big blow-ups or emotional confrontations. We just watch the characters as they stumble through their daily lives and occasionally learn something about themselves and/or the people around them. Not exactly a recipe for big box office, but those with a taste for character-driven stories should find plenty to like about it.
I didn't need to trek all the way to the Keystone Art Cinema to see my second film, the just-released Toy Story 3, but I figured the children in attendance would be reasonably well-behaved and happily this turned out to be the case. The first solo credit for Lee Unkrich, who previously co-directed Toy Story 2, Monsters, Inc. and Finding Nemo, the film picks up the saga of Woody and Buzz and company when Andy is 17 and heading off to college, which translates to an uncertain future for his toys. With fears running high that they'll wind up in the trash or put away in the attic, the gang is initially excited about the prospect of being donated to a day care center, but the reality is far from rosy.
As with the last installment, there are some new voice actors on board, chief among them Ned Beatty as Lots-O'-Huggin' Bear, who rules the roost at the day care center, and Michael Keaton as Ken, who curiously finds loves at first sight with a Barbie doll. (Who'd have figured?) The supporting cast also includes Timothy Dalton, Jeff Garlin, Bonnie Hunt, Whoopi Goldberg and Richard Kind, with a wordless turn by the title character from the Hayao Miyazaki classic My Neighbor Totoro (which should come as no surprise to anybody who knows how much of a Miyazaki booster Pixar head John Lasseter is). To its credit, the film goes to some dark places before all is said and done, and I believe it brings the series to a more than satisfying conclusion. My hope is that Disney will resist the temptation to go back to the well for a fourth time, but you never can tell.
Sunday, June 20, 2010
That guy needs a sun lamp like Fred Astaire needs dancing lessons.
This week, TCM Underground doubled up on satirical takes on race relations, but I reversed the order the films were shown in, which was a wise choice since they turned out to be night and day in terms of quality. Made in 1970, Watermelon Man was Melvin Van Peebles's second feature and his first for a Hollywood studio. Written by Herman Raucher, it tells the story of an arrogant insurance man (Godfrey Cambridge in whiteface) whose casual racism comes back to bite him in the ass when he wakes up one morning with black skin. Not only does this disrupt his routine (which includes his morning run to beat the bus), but it also throws a monkey wrench into his marriage to Estelle Parsons, a flaming liberal who watches race riots on TV, much to his displeasure. Cambridge skips work two days running while he tries various remedies -- slathering his face with creams, drinking milk, even bathing in it -- all to no avail. He even thinks his condition might be blamed on his sun lamp or the soy sauce in the health drink he buys every day from counterman Mantan Moreland, but his doctor confirms that it is none of these things.
Meanwhile, Cambridge's job performance suffers, he starts getting threatening phone calls telling him to move out of the neighborhood, and wherever he goes he's always being accused of stealing something. Out of desperation, he goes to an employment office and finds that, as a black man, his 17 years of experience in the insurance industry qualifies him for a job working at the city dump. (Blink and you might miss Paul Williams as the agent who gives him the job.) Eventually he goes into business for himself, giving financial advice to what are now, for better or for worse, his people, but that only comes after he accepts that his skin color isn't changing back. Depending on how you look at it, this could even be construed as a happy ending. One thing is certain, though: the Cambridge at the end of the film is a lot better adjusted than the one at the beginning.
The main TCM Underground feature was actually 1975's Darktown Strutters, which was released by New World Pictures and quite possibly set the cause of African-American cinema back decades. Produced by Roger Corman's brother Gene and directed by William Witney, the film stars Trina Parks as the leader of a quartet of flashily dressed female motorcyclists (who ride custom trikes) who comes to Watts to find her missing mother. Almost immediately they run afoul of a quartet of racist cops (including Dick Miller) and hook up with a gang led by Roger E. Mosley, who clumsily puts the moves on Parks. All signs point to pork rib king Norman Bartold, who presents himself to the community as a philanthropist but is actually picking off the cream of the ghetto so he can clone its leaders. He also spends a good portion of the film running around in a pig costume, as do many of his minions. This is about as nonthreatening as you would imagine.
There is so much that is wrong with Darktown Strutters, it's impossible to tell how it could have possibly gone right. Did the filmmakers really think this parade of exaggerated characters, over-the-top dialogue, outlandish costumes, gratuitous musical numbers and egregious overacting was going to be entertaining? Were the cartoon sound effects really necessary? And what about the interminable chase scene where Parks (or, rather, her stunt double) is pursued by members of the Ku Klux Klan on motorcycles for minutes on end? I realize good taste is usually the first thing to go when one is making a wacky comedy, but this is a film where no one escapes with their dignity intact.
Use of unnecessary violence in the apprehension of the Blues Brothers has been approved.
Thirty years ago today, The Blue Brothers went into general release, having received its Chicago premiere on the 16th and its New York opening on the 18th. The first major motion picture to be based on characters from Saturday Night Live, it remains the best of that breed and doesn't seem to be in danger of being knocked off its perch anytime soon. Much of the credit for that goes to director John Landis and actor Dan Aykroyd, who collaborated on the script and filled in the characters' backstories (something that had never been done on the show since they were just presented as a musical act) to such an extent that they became living, breathing personalities. Of course, the fact that they were inhabited by comic pros like Aykroyd and John Belushi (with whom Landis had previously worked on Animal House) also had a lot to do with that.
I doubt I need to say much about the plot, especially since it's little more than an excuse to string a series of musical numbers by the likes of James Brown, John Lee Hooker, Aretha Franklin, Ray Charles and Cab Calloway (not to mention the Blues Brothers themselves) together. Add in funny supporting turns by Kathleen Freeman (as "the Penguin"), Carrie Fisher, John Candy, Paul Reubens (in one of his first screen appearances), Henry Gibson, Charles Napier and Twiggy, and cameos by some of Landis's show business pals (Frank Oz, Stephen Bishop, Steven Spielberg) and you've got a recipe for success. Even its wanton excesses (the countless car crashes, the rampage through the mall, the hotel that gets demolished, the phone booth that gets blown up, the climatic orgy of destruction) have their place in the grand scheme of things. One moment that sticks out, though, is the point in the final chase sequence where Aykroyd and Landis suddenly decide that the laws of gravity and physics simply don't apply to the Bluesmobile anymore. (You'll know it when you see it.) I'm not saying it ruins the film for me or anything, but it does kind of jerk me out of it momentarily.
Monday, June 21, 2010
People shouldn't have kids if they're not responsible.
My goal of seeing all of Hal Ashby's features is one step closer to completion now that I've seen his 1982 comedy Lookin' to Get Out, which was his last film to be photographed by frequent collaborator Haskell Wexler. The film also reunited him with his Coming Home star Jon Voight, who co-wrote the script with Al Schwartz and plays perpetual schemer Alex Kovac, who gets in deep to a couple of New York mob types to the tune of $10,000 and skips town with his dimwitted pal Burt Young. Naturally the two of them wind up in Las Vegas, where Voight cons his way into a free suite and enlists blackjack whiz Bert Remsen's help in making a big score. He also runs into old flame Ann-Margret, who's being taken care of by the owner of the casino where all the action goes down, and is introduced to the five-year-old daughter he never even knew he had (played by his real-life daughter Angelina Jolie in her screen debut). Meanwhile, Young uses the opportunity to take in a show (which includes a performance by Siegfried and Roy) and be treated like a big shot for once in his life.
For all its freewheeling qualities, Lookin' to Get Out went through a pretty rocky post-production period. In fact, Ashby spent so long editing the film that it was finally taken away from him and recut by the studio, which shortened it by a good 15 minutes. The version that was released on DVD, though, was Ashby's original cut, which turned up unexpectedly years after the fact. Not having seen the theatrical version, I can't say which is better, but I'm glad Ashby's vision is the one that's been preserved for the ages.
Tuesday, June 22, 2010
One can love a man though everything in him is despicable.
Under Roger Corman's watch, New World Pictures picked up numerous foreign films for distribution in the States, partly for the prestige factor but mostly because they could turn a sizable profit if they became hits on the art house circuit. This is how New World came to release films by Bergman (Cries and Whispers, Autumn Sonata), Fellini (Amarcord) and Kurosawa (Dersu Uzala) at a time when the majors wouldn't touch them. New World also distributed two of Francois Truffaut's films, the first of which -- 1975's The Story of Adele H. -- even managed to garner an Oscar nomination for its lead actress, Isabelle Adjani, which was something that rarely happened with the company's home-grown product.
As if anticipating charges that he made it all up, Truffaut opens the film with a message that reads: "The story of Adele H. is true. It is about events that really happened and people that really existed." The director doth protest too much, methinks. Anyway, Adjani plays the daughter of Victor Hugo (who is called "the most famous man in the world" at one point, which explains why she travels under an assumed name) and at the start of the film she arrives in Halifax, Nova Scotia, in pursuit of a British officer (future Withnail and I writer/director Bruce Robinson) with whom she is madly in love. Sadly for Adjani, the feeling is not mutual and in her delusion (she writes letters home saying that Robinson has asked for her hand in marriage) she becomes something of a stalker. She even feigns pregnancy when he becomes engaged to another woman and completely debases herself in front of him, thinking this will somehow win him back. (SPOILER ALERT: It doesn't.) It's a heartbreaking performance that becomes progressively more difficult to watch as she divorces herself further and further from reality. No wonder the Academy was impressed.
Wednesday, June 23, 2010
I pledged myself to do every black deed my father did, and more.
Whenever Turner Classic Movies sees fit to show a John Huston film I haven't seen before, I always make a point of capturing it on tape for later study. Such was the case earlier this month when they aired Sinful Davey, one of two films Huston made in 1969. (The other was A Walk With Love and Death, which marked the screen debut of his daughter Angelica.) An early starring role for John Hurt, Sinful Davey is a riotous comedy set in 19th century Scotland that tells the story of the son of a notorious thief who decides to follow in his old man's footsteps and even do him one or two better if possible.
For starters, he deserts the army, believing that "the trouble with the king's service is the service you have to give him." From there he hooks up with a pickpocket by the name of MacNab (Ronald Fraser) with whom he graduates to grave-robbing, but they're soon caught and sent to prison. Upon his release, he takes up the life of a highwayman and even attempts a little piracy before setting his sights on the Duke his father was unable to rob (the always-amusing Robert Morley). Along the way he's shadowed by Annie (Pamela Franklin), a girl from his village who's sweet on him and tries to get him to go straight, and a determined constable (Nigel Davenport) eager to see him meet the same end as his father, namely the end of a hangman's rope. The question is which one Hurt would actually prefer.
Thursday, June 24, 2010
You guys have a bad habit of starting something you can't finish.
Tonight TCM is marking the 60th anniversary of the start of the Korean War (which officially began on June 25, 1950) by kicking off a 24-hour block of films set (and in some cases made) during that conflict. Naturally, one of the films on the schedule is 1951's The Steel Helmet, which was the first film about the war to make it to the screen, but TCM isn't airing it until 11 p.m., which is a bit late for me, so I got the DVD out of the library to watch at a more reasonable hour.
Written, produced and directed by Samuel Fuller, who based some events on his own combat experience in World War II, The Steel Helmet stars Gene Evans as a gruff, unsentimental sergeant who is the sole survivor from his unit after it is ambushed. Having miraculously escaped certain death, he reluctantly gains a mascot in the form of an orphaned South Korean kid he nicknames Short Round (William Chun, paving the way for Jonathan Ke Quan three decades later) and they hook up with a black medic (James Edwards) in a similar situation before meeting a patrol that's been tasked with setting up an observation post at a Buddhist temple. Evans immediately clashes with the lieutenant in charge (Steve Brodie), but agrees to help them reach their objective in exchange for a box of cigars one of the soldiers has on them. Not exactly the model soldier, but he knows what he's doing and he gets the job done.
The film is bracketed by title cards declaring that it is "Dedicated to the United States Infantry," which Fuller had served in throughout World War II, and that "There is no end to this story," which was true enough at the time since the conflict in Korea was still years away from its provisional cease-fire. As for the part in between, if anybody knew how to tell a war story from the grunt's point of view, it was Fuller, and in Evans he found the perfect grunt -- one who could quickly size his fellow soldiers up, convincingly bark orders at them and expect them to be followed. In fact, the only one he really respects is fellow sergeant Richard Loo, a Japanese-American (and fellow World War II vet) who goes by the nickname "Buddha-Head" and doesn't seem to mind it. At least that's better than the conscientious objector (Robert Hutton) who has to put up with being called "Conchie."
Saturday, June 26, 2010
I've heard about this Daninsky person. He's very strange, yet very respected.
On this, the day of the first full moon of the summer, I hereby kick off the Summer of Naschy. Over the course of his long career, Paul Naschy wrote (under his given name Jacinto Molina) and starred in a dozen films in which he played Polish Count Waldemar Daninsky, Wolfman (or "Hombre Lobo"). The first was 1968's La Marca del Hombre Lobo, which was directed by Enrique López Eguiluz and somewhat nonsensically retitled Frankenstein's Bloody Terror when it was released in the States. The American distributor's bait-and-switch is revealed right away, with a stentorian narrator intoning: "Now, the most frightening Frankenstein story of all, as the ancient werewolf curse brands the family of monster makers as Wolfstein. Wolfstein, the inhuman clan of blood-hungry wolf monsters." So, not a Frankenstein story at all. Thanks for clearing that up.
Anyway, even before he gets turned into a werewolf, Naschy stalks a pretty young countess (Dyanik Zurakowska) whose would-be fiancé (Manuel Manzaneque) doesn't take kindly to the interloping nobleman. That all changes when two gypsies take shelter at the Castle of Wolfstein and, in the course of ransacking the crypt, disturb the tomb of a werewolf which kills them both and goes on a rampage in the village. While out hunting the wolves that are believed to be responsible, Naschy saves Manzaneque from the beast but is bitten himself and, although he thinks he has a few days before the bite takes effect, pretty soon he's sprouting fur and fangs as well. Thus, he has to place his trust in his romantic rival, who's actually pretty loyal when he's not being Mr. Jealousy, and holes up in an abandoned monastery where he can be locked away during the full moon.
All the while Naschy refuses to see Zurakowska, who naturally insists on tracking him down to the monastery. There she finds the address of a doctor (Julián Ugarte) who supposedly has a cure for lycanthropy and he is sent for. When the doctor arrives, though, it soon becomes apparent that he and his wife (Aurora de Alba) are vampires whose only interest is in chaining Naschy up and calling on Satan to possess his body. (This is definitely one case where the cure is worse than the disease.) Actually, that's not entirely true since they also have unnatural designs on Zurakowska and Manzaneque, but Naschy gets free in time to put a stake in their plans. In the end, he's put down with a silver bullet, but Naschy's producers knew a cash cow when they saw one, so it didn't take long for him to get back up again. And again. And again. And again. And again...
Sunday, June 27, 2010
You like to play jokes, don't you?
With Frankenstein's Bloody Terror fresh in my mind, I wanted to follow it up with another Spanish horror film, so I settled on the 1973 "Chilling Classic" A Bell from Hell, which was directed by Claudio Guerín Hill (who, on the last day of shooting, upped the ghoulishness factor significantly by dying in a fall from the very bell tower featured in the film). As with a lot of "Chilling Classics," the print featured in the set leaves something to be desired and in this case it's the soundtrack which is severely muffled, making it next to impossible to make out a lot of the dialogue. Even so, I was able to discern that the story is about a mentally unstable young man (Renaud Verley) who is released from a psychiatric clinic and immediately sets about getting his revenge on the wheelchair-bound aunt (Viveca Lindfors) who put him there to gain control of his inheritance.
It's clear from the start that Verley has artistic tendencies (the very first thing we see him do is make a plaster mold of his own face) and that he loves playing practical jokes on people (the one where he pretends to gouge his eyes out is a real riot). What's not so clear is what's going on in the scene where, upon his release from the clinic, he goes to the woods to talk to a man in a tree. Or why he goes to work at a slaughterhouse and then quits on his first day. Or why he rides his motorcycle everywhere, even when it's raining out. Or what we're supposed to make of the scenes of the little girl who's menaced by four hunters, only to rescued by Verley, who then humiliates one of the men. After a while we're left with the impression that the director threw a whole lot of bizarre elements into the mix, figuring that some of them would pay off. One thing is certain: he managed to wring every last drop of creepiness out of "Frère Jacques."
There have been some abnormal reactions with a few of the patients.
One of the best parts of Grindhouse was Edgar Wright's hysterically funny fake trailer for Don't (which still has yet to see a DVD release), and one of the original "Don't" movies was 1973's Don't Look in the Basement, which is included on Mill Creek's "Drive-In Movie Classics" set -- and rightly so since it was a perennial drive-in favorite. Produced and directed by S.F. Brownrigg, whose other genre efforts include Don't Open the Door! and Keep My Grave Open, and written by Tim Pope, the film is set in a private sanitarium where the patients are encouraged to act out their fantasies, which is all well and good in theory but in practice it turns out to be both impractical and dangerous. This is amply illustrated by one of the very first scenes in which the doctor in charge (Michael Harvey) is axed by one of the patients whose therapy apparently isn't working out.
It's a good thing there's another doctor (Anne MacAdams) on hand to keep order among the patients and welcome the new nurse (Rosie Holotik) who applied for the job based on Harvey's "unusual psychiatric methods." For example, everyone is treated like family and there is no division between patient and staff. Also, there are no locks on any of the doors, which doesn't seem very wise considering some of the loonies are in the habit of carrying axes and knives around with them, but Holotik takes everything in stride -- at least at first. After one or two attempts on her life, though, she begins to see the value in well-defined doctor/patient relationships. There are a number of featured patients (including a nymphomaniac and a fiercely protective woman who believes her doll is a real baby), but the most prominent are a lobotomized man-child (Bill McGhee) and the aforementioned axe-wielder (Gene Ross), a judge who skips right past the jury and takes the part of executioner. You know, when you get right down to it, there are some people who really shouldn't be encouraged.
Oh, yeah. As for the part about not looking in the basement, there is no point in the film where anybody is told not to look in the basement. In fact, the basement isn't even mentioned once before Holotik goes and sees what's down there. This is because this film was originally made and released as The Forgotten, and if it hadn't been for the title change it probably would have been. Zing!
Monday, June 28, 2010
It's not just a stand, it's not just a crusade. It is where we are.
Last year, for the 40th anniversary of the Stonewall riots, I watched the documentaries Before Stonewall and After Stonewall. This year, for the 40th anniversary of the first Gay Pride marches, I watched the 1977 documentary Word Is Out: Stories of Some of Our Lives, which was released on DVD earlier this month and shown on TCM last Wednesday. The film was made by the Mariposa Film Group, a collective that included Nancy Adair, Peter Adair, Andrew Brown, Rob Epstein, Lucy Massie Phenix and Veronica Selver, and consists of conversations with 26 men and women, all of whom give their unique perspectives on being gay, with more of an emphasis on the emotions involved than the sexual politics. Most are interviewed individually (with the filmmakers tossing in questions and interjections from off-screen), but there are also some who are presented as couples or who are eventually revealed to be couples. And to keep things from getting too static, the filmmakers throw in the occasional musical interlude or cinema verité sequence, which help to break up all the talking heads.
In addition to its value as an anthropological document, Word Is Out is significant because it was the first feature-length documentary about homosexuality made by gay people, and the matter-of-fact way it shattered myths and misconceptions about gays and lesbians means it's still relevant today, despite the passage of time. From the first halting question ("Were you always gay?") to the final summations, it's a film with a clear message and that is that homosexuals are people, too. As one of the participants says, "Let's take it for granted and go on from there and live our lives." Ah, if only it were that simple.
Tuesday, June 29, 2010
You know, despite my efforts -- my intense efforts -- to do nothing, things happen anyway.
A couple weeks back, when I caught up with Walking and Talking, I wanted to watch it in tandem with Noah Baumbach's directorial debut Kicking and Screaming since they came out around the same time (Kicking in 1995, Walking one year later) and they're both about young adults beginning to make their way in the world (and yes, because they both have "____ing and ____ing" titles), but Kicking didn't get returned to the library in time for that to happen. Of course, as the joke which is told in the film by perpetual student/bartender Eric Stoltz goes, how do you make God laugh? Make a plan. I'll bet God got at least a chuckle out of that one.
Almost without exception, the characters in Kicking don't have any idea what they want to do with their lives after college graduation (which doesn't give God a whole lot to grin about). A few (frustrated writer Josh Hamilton, sarcastic philosopher Chris Eigeman, indecisive would-be grad student Carlos Jacott) get a house together near campus out of inertia more than anything else. Another (Jason Wiles's pricelessly named Skippy) audits some classes so he can be near his girlfriend (Parker Posey), who still has her senior year to get through. The only one who manages to escape their orbit is Hamilton's ex (Olivia d'Abo), a fellow writer who's spending a year in Prague and is mostly seen in flashbacks sprinkled throughout the film. Other than that, her only presence in the present is a series of messages left on Hamilton's very dusty answering machine, but she's in good company since he generally lets it pick up when his father (Elliott Gould), a sad sack in the process of getting separated from his mother, calls as well.
Not a whole lot of consequence happens, but that's to be expected since all of the characters are basically rudderless. Good thing, then, that they spend a lot of their time tossing off sardonic quips like they're going out of style. (One example: "What I used to be able to pass off as just another bad summer could now potentially turn into a bad life.") Maybe eventually they'll get their acts together, but that would probably take some planning.
Wednesday, June 30, 2010
She's not lucky. She's entitled. Every child's entitled to have a mother.
I saw Nicole Holofcener's 2001 film Lovely & Amazing when it was in theaters and remember it well enough from that screening, so it's not like I absolutely needed to revisit it for this journal, but I figured if I can see a director's entire filmography over the course of one month, why not do it? (It helps that Holofcener has only made four films in 14 years.)
At its core, Lovely & Amazing is about three women (and one child) and the problems they have with how other people see them. Foremost among them is matriarch Brenda Blethyn, who gets liposuction surgery to flatten her stomach -- something that's supposed to be an outpatient procedure but winds up having complications which prevent her from leaving the hospital. This means her adopted daughter Raven Goodwin (who is overweight herself) has to be shuttled back and forth between her biological daughters, who have their own problems. Catherine Keener is a would-be artist who bristles at every rejection (it doesn't help that she makes miniature chairs and handmade wrapping paper and tries to pass them off as art) and Emily Mortimer is an insecure actress who worries over every little imperfection. Then there are the men in their lives, who are less than ideal mates. Keener's husband (Clark Gregg) is cheating on her with one of her friends and Mortimer's boyfriend (James LeGros) thinks she's superficial. Then they wind up with even less ideal matches: Keener with a teenage co-worker (Jake Gyllenhaal) when she gets a regular job at a one-hour photo place, and Mortimer with a fatuous actor (Dermot Mulroney) who beds her after she auditions to star opposite him in a movie. (In many ways, her audition is very similar to the one Naomi Watts goes on in Mulholland Dr., which came out the same year, but the end results are vastly different.)
What's refreshing about Holofcener's approach to filmmaking is the way she treats what would be earth-shattering events in most other films (an unexpected illness, a break-up, an arrest) in a very matter-of-fact fashion. If there's any message to be taken from a film like Lovely & Amazing, it is that no matter what else happens, life goes on. It may not always go the way you want it to go, but it goes on nonetheless. And who needs everything wrapped up with a nice little bow anyway?
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