Craig J. Clark Watches a Lot of Movies
July 2010
Thursday, July 1, 2010
I treat most of my stock better than farmers treat their animals.
Occasionally it surprises me what shows up on the Independent Film Channel in prime time. Take tonight, for instance, when they showed the 1980 cannibal horror-comedy Motel Hell. The last time I saw this was back in the '90s, late on a Saturday night on TNT's MonsterVision with Joe Bob Briggs. Of course, that time it wasn't letterboxed, which makes a slight difference, I suppose. Directed by Kevin Connor (who spent the better part of the '70s making Edgar Rice Burroughs adaptations like The Land That Time Forgot, At the Earth's Core and The People That Time Forgot), Motel Hell is about an enterprising country farmer (Rory Calhoun) who's famed for his smoked meats, which have the same special ingredient as Soylent Green, if you catch my drift. With the help of his younger sister (Nancy Parsons), Calhoun waylays unwary travelers (and, prefiguring Eating Raoul, the occasional swingers who mistakenly show up at their motel), buries them up to their necks in his secret garden, severs their vocal cords so they can't scream, and fattens them up for the kill. It's an elegant -- albeit extremely twisted -- system and Calhoun and Parsons make a point of keeping it in the family.
Then one night Calhoun takes pity on the female passenger (Nina Axelrod) who's injured in a motorcycle accident he causes and instead of planting her alongside her biker boyfriend, he takes her in and, when she shows an interest in his work, offers to shares his secret recipe with her. ("Sometimes folks don't have the stomach for it," he says.) Meanwhile, the local sheriff (Paul Linke), who just so happens to be Calhoun's younger brother, clumsily tries putting the moves on Axelrod and is rebuffed, but eventually he shows some competence and gets to the bottom of things, whereupon he has to face off against a pig head-wearing, chainsaw-wielding Calhoun in the over-the-top climax of the picture. That's the scene it's best remembered for, but there are other draws, like a supporting cast that includes Wolfman Jack as a preacher who's rather glum because his television ministry isn't exactly raking in the bucks, and John Ratzenberger as the drummer for Ivan and the Terribles, who are among Calhoun's victims. To think he went from playing a bit part in The Empire Strikes Back to a bit part in Motel Hell. Now that's what I call paying your dues.
Friday, July 2, 2010
I haven't seen anything like this since the Anita Bryant concert.
Today marks the 30th anniversary of the release of Airplane!, the preeminent spoof film and still the best thing Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker ever did, either individually or as a team. Practically a scene-for-scene remake of the 1957 film Zero Hour! -- which starred Dana Andrews as the nervous passenger-turned-reluctant pilot and Sterling Hayden as the no-nonsense captain who has to talk him down -- Airplane! soars above the parodies that came out in its wake, largely because it had a cast of seasoned pros who knew how to play things absolutely straight. There's no need to wink at the audience or keep elbowing them in the ribs. If what you're doing is funny, the laughs will come. That's a lesson that the likes of Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer -- whose latest cinematic atrocity, Vampires Suck, is due out in August -- seemingly will never learn.
Airplane! was the directorial debut for David Zucker, Jim Abrahams and Jerry Zucker, whose previous film -- 1977's The Kentucky Fried Movie -- had been helmed by John Landis. And it also gave a big boost to the careers of Robert Hays and Julie Hagerty, who were aided and abetted by the likes of Leslie Nielsen (who doesn't like being called Shirley), Peter Graves (who likes movies about gladiators), Lloyd Bridges (who picked the wrong week to quit amphetamines), Robert Stack (who knows what it's like to be face down in the mud and be kicked in the head with an iron boot), Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (who's really the co-pilot, honestly), Barbara Billingsley (who knows how to speak jive in an emergency) and Stephen Stucker (who practically steals the entire film with his crazy antics). A good number of them returned for Airplane II: The Sequel in 1982, but I confess I've never seen more than a few minutes of that. Without the involvement of the Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker team, it just doesn't seem... essential.
Saturday, July 3, 2010
If that was your idea of being an ambassador, we're headed for a lot of trouble.
With Airplane! fresh in my mind, there's no better time to check out Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker's second exclamatory feature, 1984's Top Secret! (In between they created the short-lived cult television series Police Squad!, which morphed into the Naked Gun trilogy later in the decade.) Top Secret! was a staple of my childhood thanks to its ubiquity on cable, which goes a long way toward explaining my affection for one of the strangest genre mash-ups in film history: an anachronistic rock and roll musical/cold war spy thriller starring Val Kilmer as singer Nick Rivers, who gets himself into a whole heap of trouble when he agrees to doa concert behind the Iron Curtain.
The film is set in East Germany in what purports to be the present (i.e. 1984), despite the fact that the East Germans all act like Nazis, Nick's songs are patterned after hits by the Beach Boys (the catchy opening number "Skeet Surfin'") and Elvis Presley, and after he escapes from the bad guys he winds up aiding the French Resistance (who are operating out of East Germany why, exactly?). It's the kind of plot that makes less and less sense the more you think about it, which is the reverse of what usually happens, but the jokes come flying so fast and furious that you never really have a chance to question why anything is going on at any given moment. Even the musical numbers, which could have been real dead spots in terms of the comedy, are as funny as what goes on around them, especially Nick's renditions of "Tutti Frutti" and "Straighten the Rug" (which he sings as a crucial moment to prove that he's not Mel Torme).
Compared with Airplane!, the cast of Top Secret! isn't packed with quite so many familiar faces, but it does feature Omar Sharif as a secret agent (who is put through the ringer in the few scenes he appears in), Michael Gough as an imprisoned scientist (and father to Kilmer's love interest, Lucy Gutteridge) and Peter Cushing as a Swedish bookshop proprietor (whose one scene is played entirely backwards). And I would be remiss if I didn't mention Resistance members Harry Ditson (as the put-upon Du Quois), Jim Carter (as the perpetually confused Déjà Vu) and Eddie Tagoe (as the unforgettable Chocolate Mousse). Absolutely everybody pitches in and does their part, though. Even the cow.
For my second film of the day, I went with Johnny Dangerously, which was released the same year as Top Secret! and was also the sophomore effort for its director, Amy Heckerling, who had previously had a hit with Fast Times at Ridgemont High. This time out she set her sights on a broad gangster movie parody that occasionally hits the mark, but more often than not winds up spinning its wheels. Michael Keaton heads the cast as the reluctant ne'er-do-well who only turns to a life of crime to pay for his mother's (Maureen Stapleton) increasingly costly medical expenses and to put his younger brother (Griffin Dunne) through law school. Along the way he impresses mob boss Peter Boyle, romances torch singer Marilu Henner, and constantly antagonizes Joe Piscopo, who easily makes the biggest impression out of all the characters as the psychotic Danny Vermin.
The film features gags aplenty and that standby of zany comedies: funny signage. Some examples include the "I'D RATHER BE STEALING" bumper sticker on Boyle's car and the "HENCHMEN" and "HENCHWOMEN" rooms at the club owned by rival gangster Richard Dimitri (whose mangling of the English language is a joy to behold). Other supporting roles are filled by Dom DeLuise (as the Pope), Danny DeVito (as the corrupt D.A.), Ray Walston (as a hapless news agent), Joe Flaherty (as an impatient death row prisoner) and Alan Hale, Jr. (as the desk sergeant whose delivery of the "duckies and bunnies" line is priceless). Even if the film winds up being less than the sum of its parts, I'll always think of it fondly thanks to the countless times I watched it as an impressionable youth. I'm just less impressed by Your Testicles and You than I was before I hit puberty.
Sunday, July 4, 2010
I have a sound in my head, and so far it's not like anything we've done here.
What could be more American than rock and roll? It may seem like an institution now, but in an early scene in 1978's The Buddy Holly Story, a preacher condemns it -- and those who perform it -- as un-Christian, un-American and a "threat to society." Since the society being depicted is Lubbock, Texas, in 1956, I can understand why the powers that be would find Holly's music threatening, but as any cultural historian will tell you, we as a nation have withstood much, much worse in the decades that followed. Take, for example, the subsequent career of Gary Busey. (Ba-dump bump.)
But I kid Busey. He really does an amazing job in this film and was justly nominated for Best Actor at the Oscars for his work. (Out of three nominations, the film's one win was for its Adapted Score.) Also pitching in are Don Stroud and Charles Martin Smith as Holly's drummer and bass player, soon to be known as the Crickets, and Maria Richwine as the Puerto Rican girl he pursues after moving to New York to sign a record deal. (This is after an abortive session in Nashville that nearly soured him on the music business altogether, so he comes armed with a set of demands.) Success comes quickly for the band -- they even break the color barrier in a huge way by being the first white act to play the Apollo -- but with it come the inevitable tensions that result from Holly's perfectionism and his desire not to return to Lubbock with the others.
So, dramatic? Definitely. Factual? Ehh, not so much. All it takes is a few minutes on Wikipedia to find out just how much director Steve Rash and screenwriter Robert Gittler stretched the truth and fudged the facts, but that doesn't take anything away from the film's effectiveness. Sure, it may not be the Buddy Holly story, but as a Buddy Holly story it gets the job done -- even if it does reduce Richie Valens to a brief walk-on (shaking a pair of maracas, no less). Valens shouldn't feel too bad, though. At least he got his own biopic eventually. Can the Big Bopper say as much?
I've never seen anybody that can do what you do to an audience.
I feel like I should admit this right up front: I've never been much of an Elvis fan. There's a deleted scene from Pulp Fiction where Mia Wallace asks Vincent Vega whether he's an Elvis person or a Beatles person, and while Vincent turns out to be an Elvis person, I fall squarely on the other side of the divide. In fact, I've never even seen an Elvis movie. (You'd think I would have at least gotten around to Jailhouse Rock, but this is not the case.) So it may seem strange that I would spend three hours of this beautiful Fourth of July watching Elvis, the 1979 TV movie about the King of Rock and Roll, but I am a big fan of director John Carpenter's work with Kurt Russell (even Escape form L.A.), so when Shout! Factory announced that it was finally releasing Elvis on DVD it had "can't miss" written all over it.
Made by Dick Clark Productions and written and produced by Anthony Lawrence (a television veteran who also co-wrote three Elvis movies in the mid-'60s), the film is bookended by Presley's comeback concert in Las Vegas in 1969, a personal and professional gamble that could have meant the end of his career if it had flopped. As one television commentator drones -- before Elvis shoots his TV in disgust, that is -- "No rock act survives forever." At that point, Presley's had lasted a good 15 years, though, and after a brief flashback to his youth in Tupelo, Mississippi, Russell carries us through all of them, starting with his decision after finishing high school to pursue a career in music in spite of his father's (Bing Russell) insistence that he get a day job as an electrician. Then he makes a fateful trip to Sun Records to record a couple songs for his mother (Shelley Winters) and, well, the rest is history.
The supporting cast includes Melody Anderson (who was one year away from playing Dale Arden in Flash Gordon) as Presley's high school sweetheart who doesn't wait around long enough for him to get famous, Charles Cyphers as Sun Records owner Sam Phillips, who steps aside when Elvis becomes too big for him to handle, Pat Hingle as Colonel Tom Parker, who ever so reluctantly agrees to take him on, Season Hubley (who was soon to become Mrs. Kurt Russell) as Priscilla Presley, who meets him when he's in the army, and Joe Mantegna in an early role as one of the members of the "Memphis Mafia" (which was, in essence, his second family). Meanwhile, on the soundtrack country singer Ronnie McDowell performs the songs for Russell, who apparently couldn't approximate Presley's singing the way Gary Busey could Buddy Holly's. And there's another connection with The Buddy Holly Story since Joe Renzetti, who won the Oscar for that film, also composed the original score composed for this one. (Somehow I doubt Carpenter was considered for the job, although I would like to hear what that would have sounded like.)
Monday, July 5, 2010
He just looks so retro. Kind of 20th-century.
Had me a good old-fashioned John Carpenter/Kurt Russell Portraits of Badassery marathon today: four movies in seven and a half hours. That's a lot of ass-kicking in a relatively short period of time, folks. First up, naturally, was 1981's Escape from New York, which introduced the character of Snake Plissken to the world and gave Russell the chance to play a bad ass for the first time in his career. (It also gave him an excuse to do a feature-length Clint Eastwood impression.) Written by John Carpenter and Nick Castle, the film is set in what was then the far-off future of 1997. The United States is essentially a police state and the island of Manhattan has been cordoned off and converted into a maximum security prison. The perfect place for the president (Donald Pleasence, who does little to alter his English accent) to crash land when Air Force One goes down on its way to a crucial international summit.
Enter Plissken, who's recruited by police commissioner Lee Van Cleef to slip into the city undetected and get Pleasence out. Not an easy task, especially since he only has 24 hours to complete it before the microscopic explosives that have been injected into his bloodstream go pop. Along the way he encounters a helpful cabbie (Ernest Borgnine), an old associate (Harry Dean Stanton) and his main squeeze (Adrienne Barbeau, who was Carpenter's wife at the time), and the self-proclaimed Duke of New York (Isaac Hayes), who has his own plans for the Commander in Chief. As for the story, it takes a little while to get into gear, but once it does it's quite a fun ride. Plus, I'm sure it was a welcome change of pace for Carpenter after two horror films in a row.
The year after Escape from New York, though, John Carpenter was right back in the thick of horror with 1982's The Thing, his first picture for a major studio, his first based on a script he didn't write (that was Bill Lancaster's job) and his first remake (of the 1951 classic The Thing from Another World). This time out Kurt Russell plays the loner helicopter pilot at a remote scientific outpost in the Antarctic which falls prey to a hostile alien organism that can replicate any living creature it comes into contact with, which is much closer in conception to John W. Campbell's story "Who Goes There?" than the original film was. Credit for that goes to the advances in special effects, with creature designer Rob Bottin contributing some of the most creative (and frankly nauseating) transformations ever put on film.
At the time of its initial release, The Thing was faulted for allowing its effects to overpower the story and characters, which may account for its failure at the box office. (The fact that it came out two weeks after E.T. and has an incredibly pessimistic ending probably didn't help matters.) After the initial shock wears off, though, the performances -- by the likes of Wilford Brimley, Keith David, Donald Moffat, Richard Dysart, Richard Masur and others -- really shine through and give the characters more depth than audiences might be able to pick up on their first time through the film. Of course, there are some people who don't have the stomach for one viewing, let alone two or three. Or more. (I couldn't say how many times I've seen it, but it's probably close to a dozen.)
Another John Carpenter film I've seen countless times over the years is 1986's Big Trouble in Little China, which is just plain fun from start to finish. It looks like it was a blast to make as well, with Kurt Russell letting loose as trucker Jack Burton, who carries himself with a John Wayne swagger but actually leaves most of the heroic heavy lifting to buddy Dennis Dun (who also appeared in Carpenter's follow-up, Prince of Darkness). Largely re-written by W.D. Richter (who's credited with adapting the original screenplay, which was set in the Old West), the film also ropes in Kim Cattrall (as crusading lawyer as Gracie Law), James Hong (as the evil Lo Pan) and Victor Wong (as tour Chinatown tour bus driver and part-time sorcerer Egg Shen). I would try to summarize the plot, but frankly I don't want to be at this all day. It's so convoluted, in fact, that the characters occasionally have to sit down and explain it to each other (with Russell more often than not the one having to play catch-up).
This is, of course, not to say that the film is incomprehensible to the first-time viewer. It just takes some getting used to the fast pace of both the action and dialogue scenes. When you get right down to it, though, Big Trouble is a film that has a little something for everybody. There's martial arts, romance, physical and verbal comedy, special effects, monsters, and a guy who gets so mad that he blows himself up like a balloon until he explodes. I probably don't need to tell you that that's not something you see every day.
To date, John Carpenter's fifth and final collaboration with Kurt Russell was 1996's Escape from L.A., which both of them co-wrote with producer Debra Hill (who had previously produced and co-written Halloween and The Fog). Set in 2013, 13 years after a devastating earthquake leveled much of Los Angeles and separated it from the mainland (sound familiar?), the sequel finds the country in the hands of a sanctimonious president-for-life (Cliff Robertson) who uses L.A. as a dumping ground for those who break his draconian codes of morality. Then the great man's daughter (A.J. Langer) commandeers Air Force Three and takes off with a doomsday device which she places in the hands of Third World terrorist Cuervo Jones (Georges Corraface), who is apparently gearing up for a full-scale invasion of the First. This, of course, will not do, so Snake Plissken is pressed into service once again for his country by Lee Van Cleef stand-in Stacy Keach.
While the sequel hits many of the same plot points, there are numerous differences between the two films (above and beyond the change in locale). For instance, this time Snake has just eight hours to complete his mission thanks to a designer virus he's infected with that will kill him if he doesn't get the antidote in time. Also, while the running joke in the first film was that everybody thought Snake was already dead, this time the line he hears the most is, "I thought you'd be taller." Then there are the L.A.-specific characters he runs into like Map to the Stars Eddie (Steve Buscemi), surfer dude Peter Fonda (essentially playing himself) and the Surgeon General of Beverly Hills (Bruce Campbell), who lords over an enclave of wretched plastic surgery junkies. As in the earlier film, Snake bumps into a doomed young woman (in New York it was Russell's then-wife Season Hubley, in this film it's Valeria Golino) and a former partner-in-crime (Pam Grier, who has undergone a sex change since the last time he saw her) who abandoned him on a job on the outside. Also as in the previous film, he manages to make it out just in the nick of time, but his complete disdain for authority prevents him from playing into their hands. No matter what, Snake Plissken always gets the last laugh.
Tuesday, July 6, 2010
At the end of the day, we can endure much more than we think we can.
Thanks to Google, I found out that today is Frida Kahlo's birthday. And thanks to my library, I have finally gotten around to seeing the 2002 biopic Frida, which was directed by Julie Taymor and starred Salma Hayek in the title role. I'm not entirely certain why I skipped this when it was in theaters -- I enjoyed Taymor's previous film, 1999's Titus, and Kahlo's life story is certainly fascinating enough -- but better late than never, right?
As much as possible, Taymor integrates Kahlo's paintings into the film, having them blend into live-action scenes and vice versa. She also incorporates stop-motion animation (in the hospital scene after Kahlo has her debilitating accident), collage techniques and even a recreation/parody of the original King Kong at a particularly appropriate moment. None of this detracts from the performances, though, since Hayek received an Oscar nomination for Best Actress, and Alfred Molina makes a distinct impression as her chronically unfaithful husband, hotheaded muralist Diego Rivera. The film also features Valeria Golino as Rivera's jealous ex-wife, Antonio Banderas as a leftist radical, Edward Norton as Nelson Rockefeller (who commissions Rivera to paint a mural at Rockefeller Center and then regrets it), and Geoffrey Rush as Leon Trotsky (who stays with Rivera and Kahlo when he goes into exile in Mexico). Along the way, their careers and their marriage have their ups and downs, and Kahlo struggles with a body that betrays her almost as much as Rivera does, but eventually she gets the solo exhibition she's always wanted. Now, when is Diego Rivera going to get his biopic?
Wednesday, July 7, 2010
Grand is the name and money is the game. Would you care to play?
Thanks to Google News, I found out that today is Ringo Starr's 70th birthday. Accordingly, I spent the evening watching him play second fiddle to Peter Sellers in 1969's The Magic Christian, based on the novel by Terry Southern. Southern also co-authored the screenplay with director Joseph McGrath, with additional material credited to Graham Chapman, John Cleese and Sellers. If that makes it sound like there were a few too many cooks, that's pretty much right on target since the satire is rather scattershot at times and some of the set-pieces take longer to set up than is probably warranted given the payoffs.
At any rate, the story is about the obscenely wealthy Sir Guy Grand (Sellers), who on a whim one day takes in a scruffy young vagrant (Starr) and legally adopts him. (A loud rock song -- one of several by Badfinger that dots the soundtrack -- plays over their first conversation, preventing us from knowing just what Sellers sees in Starr.) From there Sellers goes about proving to his newly minted heir that just about anybody can be bought for the right price. Object lessons are provided by a roll call of guest stars, including Laurence Harvey (as a Shakespearean actor who does a striptease to Hamlet's "To be or not to be" soliloquy), Ferdy Mayne (as a restauranteur who lets Sellers make a spectacle of himself), Spike Milligan (as a traffic warden who eats a parking ticket), Richard Attenborough (as an Oxford rowing coach who accepts a bribe to throw a race) and Patrick Cargill (as a Sotheby's auctioneer who allows Sellers to make a mockery of an auction). The supporting cast also includes Frank Thornton (as a police inspector), Graham Stark (as a waiter), John Cleese (as a smarmy Sotheby's director), Graham Chapman (as an Oxford crewman) and John Le Mesurier (as a dignified spectator at the race).
The film is highly episodic, with Sellers and Starr flitting from one self-contained scene to the next, until they wind up on the maiden voyage of the titular cruise ship, which comes with its own set of co-conspirators (Leonard Frey from The Boys in the Band as the effeminate ship's psychiatrist, Christopher Lee as the ship's vampire, Raquel Welch as a whip-bearing slave-driver, Yul Brynner as the transvestite singer who comes on to drinker Roman Polanski) and unwitting dupes (pretty much everybody else). Finally, Sellers and Starr fill a large vat with animal blood, urine and feces from a slaughterhouse, throw in a suitcase full of money, and stand back and watch as a crowd of people gathers around and finally wades in to pick up whatever they can grab. It's not exactly subtle -- and Sellers admits as much -- but it amply illustrates his point. "I just wanted to see if you had your price," he says to one of his marks early on. "Most of us do."
Thursday, July 8, 2010
New York is the busiest, the loneliest, the kindest, and the cruelest of cities.
It's been a few months since I watched my last film noir and TCM has been helping me out by showing some good ones over the past week or so. Tonight I went with 1950's Side Street, which was written by Sydney Boehm (who later penned The Big Heat for Fritz Lang) and directed by Anthony Mann (who made it the same year as his seminal westerns The Furies and Winchester '73). The film stars Farley Granger as a part-time mailman and expectant father who unwittingly steals $30,000 from a crooked lawyer and winds up getting in way, way over his head while he tries to figure out what to do with his windfall. Cathy O'Donnell, who starred opposite him in Nicholas Ray's They Live by Night the year before, plays his young wife, and Jean Hagen is the boozy nightclub singer who leads him on while he's trying to clear himself of a murder charge. (Like I said, things get complicated for him in a hurry.) I also recognized film noir fixture Charles McGraw as one of the detectives on the case and Whit Bissell as a bank teller. And it was actually filmed on location in New York City, which was still something of a novelty at the time.
Friday, July 9, 2010
My taste doesn't usually run to cops, but you might not be such dull company at that.
I've seen a goodly number of noir films over the past few years, but no matter how many I track down, there are still plenty more classics out there left for me to catch. For example, tonight I finally got around to 1952's The Narrow Margin, a taut little number that hits the ground running and never lets up for a second of its lean 71-minute running time. The film stars Charles McGraw as a gruff police detective who grumbles his way through his latest assignment, protecting a mobster's widow-turned-government witness (Marie Windsor) on a tense train ride from Chicago to Los Angeles. It also features Jacqueline White as a fellow passenger who gets mistaken for Windsor (somehow the bad guys don't know what she looks like) and plenty of nail-biting suspense, proving that director Richard Fleischer really knows how to work the confined spaces. A landmark noir.
Saturday, July 10, 2010
If they're mortal, they must have mortal weaknesses. They'll be stopped. Somehow.
The theme for July's Kryptic Army Mission is "Alien Invaders," so I took the opportunity to catch a pair of classic alien invasion films from the '50s. First up was 1953's The War of the Worlds, which had somehow escaped my attention until today. (I've seen clips from it, of course, usually in other movies, but never made a point of watching the film itself.) Directed by Byron Haskin, a former special effects man who later made From the Earth to the Moon and Robinson Crusoe on Mars, and produced by George Pal, the film was adapted by Barré Lyndon from the novel by H.G. Wells and stars Gene Barry as Dr. Clayton Forrester (yes, this is where Mystery Science Theater got the name), a scientist who happens to be on the scene when what appears to be a meteor lands outside a small California town. There he meets a beautiful library science teacher (Ann Robinson) and together they go on the run when the meteor turns out to be the first harbinger of a full-scale Martian invasion.
When one thinks of this version of The War of the Worlds, the images that probably come to mind are the Martian war machines laying waste to downtown Los Angeles. This doesn't happen until the final reel, though. Up until then we get to watch as the invasion gears up and the military and scientific community try everything they can to turn the tide in Earth's favor. After all appears lost and Los Angeles is evacuated, there follows some eerily effective shots of the abandoned, trash-strewn streets, which soon give way to scenes of societal breakdown and unrestrained chaos as those remaining in the city try to take advantage of the situation. It's pretty disquieting stuff, maybe even more so than the destruction to come.
Widespread destruction at the hands of beings from another world is also the focus of 1956's Earth vs. the Flying Saucers, which was directed by Fred F. Sears (one year before he gave us the immortal The Giant Claw) and is best known today for Ray Harryhausen's special effects. The film stars Hugh Marlowe as a scientist whose satellite program attracts the attention of aliens (whose origin is never specified) and Joan Taylor as his new wife who is at the wheel when they attempt to make first contact. (Because it's the Fifties. Beaumont immediately has to take over driving, Taylor being far too shook up by the experience.)
Unlike in The War of the Worlds, where mankind is powerless against the Martians, Marlowe is able to develop a sonic weapon that can cause the flying saucers to fall out of the sky. Naturally this takes place in Washington, D.C., where Harryhausen can animate the saucers crashing into several national landmarks. Unfortunately, the film's tight budget shows in its repeated use of some of the effects shots and its reliance on stock footage to depict the military's response to the threat. Even so, it's still better than anything Ed Wood could manage.
Sunday, July 11, 2010
No man's beaten without some hatred.
Doubled up on the Samuel Fuller films today so I could polish off his '50s output in one fell swoop. Coincidentally, the two films I had left to see -- China Gate and Run of the Arrow -- were both released in 1957, but that's about all they have in common. China Gate is set in French Indochina in 1954 and stars Gene Barry as an American demolitions expert serving as a mercenary for the French Foreign Legion who's been given the job of destroying a strategic ammo dump in the north. To accomplish this, the French strike a deal with a Eurasian beauty nicknamed "Lucky Legs" (Angie Dickinson) whose goal is to get her five-year-old son (who was fathered by Barry) to safety in America. At first she's not crazy about the idea of working with the man who abandoned her, but her practical side wins out and she leads the men through the jungle to their objective.
The demolition team is practically the definition of ragtag, with mercenaries from France, Germany, Greece and Hungary, all of whom get a chance to say why they're there and what they're fighting for. The other American in the group is Korean War vet Nat King Cole, who even served with the Big Red One in World War II (and who gets not one but two chances to sing the title song). The film also features Lee Van Cleef (himself a "half-caste") as the major in charge of the ammo dump who wants Dickinson to be his woman. She plays up to him long enough for Barry and his men carry out their mission, but Van Cleef's argument never really had a chance of sticking. The promise of a new life in America will always beat out the prospect of going to Moscow with Lee Van Cleef.
With Run of the Arrow, Samuel Fuller tells the story of a Confederate soldier (Rod Steiger) who refuses to accept the South's defeat (he fired the last bullet in the war) and heads west to get away from the Union. There he joins a tribe of Sioux Indians (whose chief is played by Charles Bronson) and takes a squaw (Sarita Montiel) as his wife. He doesn't get much time to settle in, though, before the U.S. Army arrives and sets about building a fort in Sioux country. Army engineer Brian Keith wants to keep peace with their soon-to-be neighbors, but cavalry officer Ralph Meeker is itching for a fight and is even described as a "frustrated Custer." (It's worth noting that this story takes place about a decade before Custer's Last Stand at the Battle of Little Bighorn, but the implication is clear.) That Meeker turns out to be the Union officer that Steiger shot at the beginning of the picture may seem like too big a coincidence, but Fuller never was one to shy away from that sort of thing. And he was also the first director to use squibs to depict bullet wounds in a film, so that's gotta count for something.
You gotta get their friendship, get their confidence, get their trust, then get their money.
In between his first two projects for John Carpenter (Elvis and Escape from New York), Kurt Russell starred in Robert Zemeckis's sophomore feature, Used Cars, in 1980. Written by Zemeckis & Bob Gale, who previously collaborated on I Wanna Hold Your Hand (which Gale produced and Zemeckis directed) and 1941 (which they wrote for Steven Spielberg), Used Cars allowed Russell to show off his comic chops as a conniving used car salesman who wants to make a lateral move into politics. It's a riotously profane comedy with a profoundly cynical vision of the American Dream, which is why releasing it one week after the Fourth of July may not have been the best idea in the world, but the passage of time has been kinder to it than some films that were hits at the time.
The film surrounds Russell with a great supporting cast including Jack Warden in a dual role as brothers with competing used car lots (Russell naturally works for the good brother, who's a little behind the times), Gerrit Graham as Russell's extremely superstitious compatriot (who has a paralyzing fear of red cars), Frank McRae as the narcoleptic mechanic, and Deborah Harmon as the good Jack Warden's daughter, who is strung along by Russell and the others when he turns up dead (and not of natural causes). Thus freed up to try out some of Russell's more outrageous schemes to get customers onto the lot, they break into a football game and broadcast a racy commercial (with the help of techno wizards David L. Lander and Michael McKean), hire strippers, and even interrupt an address by President Carter and destroy some of the evil Warden's cars on live TV. The evil Warden isn't taking that lying down, and tries to shut them down with the help of the assistant deputy district attorney (Joe Flaherty), but nothing is ever as easy as it seems. In the end it all comes down to a wild car chase involving hundreds of junkers to prove to hanging judge Al Lewis that they have a mile of cars on their lot. Getting there is quite the adventure, though.
Monday, July 12, 2010
I tried writing some stuff about real life, you know, stuff that the everyman's got to deal with.
Early this morning, Harvey Pekar was found dead in his home in Cleveland Heights, Ohio. He was 70. As soon as I heard the news, I knew which film I would be watching tonight: 2003's American Splendor, based on his autobiographical comic book of the same, which he started in 1976 and kept up pretty much for the rest of his life. He was a real iconoclast who believed that the life of an ordinary government file clerk could be fodder for comics, and he was such a singular personality that he proved himself right countless times over.
The film, which was written and directed by Robert Pulcini & Shari Springer Berman, captures the flavor of his life and comics by picking and choosing incidents to dramatize, frequently referencing the original comic panels, and having Pekar himself narrate it. Pekar also appears onscreen being interviewed (as do his friend and co-worker Toby Radloff and wife Joyce Brabner), but most of the time he's portrayed by Paul Giamatti, who delivers an indelible performance in one of his first leading roles. The film also features James Urbaniak as Robert Crumb, who bonds with Pekar over their mutual love of records and comics and is the first artist to illustrate his stories, Judah Friedlander as Radloff, who relishes his status as a "genuine nerd," and Hope Davis as Brabner, a political activist who is nearly as neurotic in her own way as Pekar is, which makes her the perfect match for him. Sort of. It's complicated.
As the film progresses, and Pekar's work starts becoming better known, we get to see how he reacts to having American Splendor adapted for the stage, and how he handles being invited to appear as a guest on Late Night with David Letterman. This results in one of the most audacious moments in the film as we start out with Giamatti waiting in the green room to go on and then stay on the television monitor while the real Pekar comes out to be interviewed by Letterman in archival footage. The biggest upheaval in his life comes when he's diagnosed with lymphoma, which Pekar and Brabner documented in their graphic novel Our Cancer Year, the source of some of the more harrowing passages in the film. He comes through it all right, though, and the film ends with the real Harvey's retirement party. As it came to a close, I teared up thinking about something he said earlier in the film when he was depressed about things in general: "Life seemed so sweet and so sad and so hard to let go of in the end." I guess we all have to let go sometime.
Wednesday, July 14, 2010
At what precise moment does an individual stop being who he thinks he is?
In honor of Bastille Day, tonight I watched a film by France's most famous fugitive, Roman Polanski. It didn't take me long to settle on 1976's The Tenant, which was the first feature he made in France (not counting the 1964 omnibus film The World's Most Beautiful Swindlers, to which he contributed one segment) and also the only one where he plays the leading role. Considered by many to be the third part of his "apartment trilogy" (with Repulsion and Rosemary's Baby being the first two), The Tenant is based on a novel by Roland Topor (adapted for the screen by Polanski and Gérard Brach) and stars Polanski as a clerk of Polish extraction who takes an apartment in Paris (at a time when they were at something of a premium) which is only available because the previous tenant threw herself out the window, as concierge Shelley Winters cheerfully tells him when she's showing it to him. He accepts the terms of irascible owner Melvyn Douglas (which include strict rules about noise and visitors) but soon wishes he hadn't because he starts having problems pretty much the instant he moves in.
I've seen The Tenant a few times over the years (although this was my first time watching it in French with the subtitles on) and I find that it gets more and more compelling each time I watch it. I'm right there with Polanski each time his fussy neighbors unjustly complain about the noise he's making (or not making as the case may be) and understand all too well why he starts to panic every time there's a knock at the door. I watch as he cautiously embarks upon a relationship with a friend of the previous tenant (Isabelle Adjani) knowing full well that he'll end up sabotaging it with his own paranoia. I cheer when he stands up to the building's resident busybody (Jo Van Fleet) because I know it's the last personal victory, moral or otherwise, he has before he goes off the deep end. "There is something odd going on in my building," he says to one of his friends after he's lived there for a while and observed some strange goings-on. Of course, if he'd exchanged the word "head" for "building" he would have been more of the mark.
Thursday, July 15, 2010
Gold will be your ruin, captain. It will cost us our heads.
At this point, there are few Roman Polanski films left for me to see. One that I wasn't all that anxious to get under my belt was his 1986 swashbuckling adventure Pirates, which doesn't have the greatest of reputations, but I figured it wouldn't hurt to give it two hours of my time. Written by Gérard Brach, Polanski and John Brownjohn (who later co-wrote Bitter Moon and The Ninth Gate), the film was originally conceived in the mid-'70s as a vehicle for Jack Nicholson, but after he bailed on the project it didn't resurface until a decade later, which was rather unfortunate timing. For reasons unknown, the early '80s suffered from a glut of pirate comedies, including The Pirate Movie in 1982, The Pirates of Penzance and Yellowbeard in 1983, and even Ice Pirates in 1984, so by the time Polanski's film came along audiences simply didn't care to see another one, no matter who was behind it. Or in it, apparently.
For the lead role of the notorious Captain Red, Polanski cast Walter Matthau, who probably didn't get too many of Jack Nicholson's cast-offs, but he proved to be an inspired choice and really gave the part his all. As the film opens, he's adrift in shark-infested waters with only his resourceful cabin boy (Cris Campion) to keep him company (and possibly provide him with a meal or two if it comes to that). They're eventually rescued by a Spanish galleon, but are immediately placed in the brig and nearly put to death before being spared by the ship's ailing captain (Ferdy Mayne). After Mayne passes, a priggish lieutenant (Damien Thomas) takes command and Matthau attempts to foment mutiny among the crew, which doesn't work very well the first time but Matthau isn't one to take failure lying down, even when his timber leg is cut out from under him. Luckily, the second time's the charm and Matthau sets sail for his hideout with the ship, its cargo (including a priceless Aztec throne) and some hostages (including the virginal Charlotte Lewis, who becomes Campion's love interest). There he finds his old band of cutthroats, whose ranks include Sydney Bromley (as a positively ancient pirate) and Roy Kinnear (who's been keeping the operation afloat in Matthau's absence), and quickly reasserts his authority. His desire to possess the Aztec treasure overrides all other concerns, though, so when Thomas escapes with it, Matthau has no choice but to give chase. It seems he's determined to give his greed enough chances to be the death of him.
Friday, July 16, 2010
I decided to reject conforming when society rejected me.
To my mind, the film version of American Splendor is basically an offshoot of Terry Zwigoff's 1994 documentary Crumb (by way of Zwigoff's second feature, Ghost World). I had planned on watching all three back-to-back next month, since the Criterion Collection is putting out a new edition of Crumb alongside Zwigoff's first film, the hour-long documentary Louie Bluie, but Harvey Pekar's sudden passing on Monday threw that for a loop. In the meantime, I have the Crumb DVD Sony put out a few years back, so I guess that will do for the moment.
A penetrating look into the life and creative mind of an underground comix legend, the film shadows Robert Crumb as he's preparing to move his wife and daughter from California to the South of France. Along the way, he visits some of his old haunts, catches up with his extremely messed-up family (older brother Charles is a zonked-out shut-in, younger brother Maxon has his own problems, but at least he doesn't still live with their mother), and even reconnects with some of his old girlfriends. A few of them are among his more vocal critics, particularly when it comes to his depictions of women in his comics, but Zwigoff balances them out with the views of some of Crumb's more ardent admirers. Nothing expresses the disdain he has for the culture he's leaving behind better than the epigram he attaches to one of the many sketches he does while Zwigoff is filming: "WORDS FAIL ME / PICTURES AREN'T MUCH BETTER." I wonder if he would apply that to moving pictures, too. My guess would be yes.
Saturday, July 17, 2010
I've been up and down the four corners of this big old world. I've seen it all and I've done it all.
In the documentary Crumb, Robert Crumb talks briefly about how much he hates the film version of Fritz the Cat. In fact, he even went so far as to kill the frisky feline off in a strip that was published in 1972, the same year the film came out. That didn't stop producer Steve Krantz from making a sequel, The Nine Lives of Fritz the Cat, two years later, but it did tell anyone who was paying attention how much Crumb disapproved of what was being done with his character.
In spite of what Crumb may think of it, Fritz the Cat is significant for a number of reasons. For one thing, it was the directorial debut of Ralph Bakshi, who had been toiling in TV animation for well over a decade and was itching to break into features. It was also the first X-rated animated film and its resounding success led to many more (including Bakshi's next film, Heavy Traffic) in the years that followed. Most importantly, it uses Crumb's anthropomorphic characters to comment on race relations, religion, political movements and the battle of the sexes in a way isn't as strident as it might otherwise have been. It's by no means a perfect film, but it has an energy and an attitude that you just can't fake.
Set in the 1960s, the film follows the title character -- an NYU student who fancies himself a poet -- around New York City as he tries to score with chicks and prove that he's down black folks (who are portrayed as crows). He also spends a lot of time evading the cops (who are, quite naturally, pigs) and eventually lights out for San Francisco when the heat gets to be too much. Along the way he joins up with a group of revolutionaries, but quickly becomes disenchanted with their violent ways. Not soon enough, though, since he becomes one of their unwitting victims, but Fritz, being a cat, has plenty of lives to spare.
That's the basic premise of the sequel, 1974's The Nine Lives of Fritz the Cat, which was co-written and directed by Robert Taylor after Ralph Bakshi declined to work on it. Set squarely in the 1970s, Nine Lives finds Fritz married and with a kid, but still ducking responsibility by staying perpetually stoned. As his wife harangues him, his mind wanders and he imagines himself in close personal contact with Adolf Hitler, living it up in 1930s America, taking part in the first manned flight to Mars, and acting as an envoy to New Africa (a sovereign nation that was formed by giving New Jersey to the crows). Story-wise, the film is less cohesive than the first one, but it's just as cheerfully vulgar, with fart, piss and shit jokes aplenty. There's less of an emphasis on sex, though, which was a deliberate choice so the film could secure an R rating, but it wasn't nearly as successful. I guess audiences decided they'd seen more than enough of Fritz the first time around.
Sunday, July 18, 2010
He's got a personal reason for coming after me. And personal reasons lead to mistakes.
Occasionally a film shows up in the "Chilling Classics" set that seems completely out of place. Exhibit A: Death Rage, an Italian mob drama from 1976. Directed by Antonio Margheriti (using his Anglicized pseudonym Anthony M. Dawson), the film stars Yul Brynner as a American hit man who takes a job in Naples (Italy, not Florida) to avenge the death of his brother. (In fact, you might say it enraged him.) His eyesight is also failing him -- he sees red whenever he's reminded of his brother's murder -- but an Italian optometrist he visits while on assignment is convinced that it's psychosomatic. No matter; Yul has a job to do and he's not going to let anything or anyone stand in his way.
The film opens with a mobster being assassinated at a rock show (an event that is never referred to again, which makes you wonder why it's there in the first place) and a shootout at the track, which is what actually sets the plot in motion. Soon after his arrival in Naples, Yul finds himself being pestered by a small-time race-fixer (Massimo Ranieri) who is eager to show how useful he can be. The kid even introduces Yul to an exotic dancer (Barbara Bouchet), who becomes his improbable love interest, and generally follows him around like a lost puppy until Yul takes pity on him and gives him something to do. Meanwhile, police inspector Martin Balsam (looking as rumpled as he did the year before in Mitchell) tries to figure out how to catch Yul in the act and mostly succeeds in not embarrassing himself.
There isn't a whole lot that distinguishes Death Rage from other, similar films of the period. The action is pretty generic (some shootouts, a couple car chases that result in a fruit stand and a trash can being knocked over) and the chase music is a blatant ripoff of the Peter Gunn Theme. The dialogue is also quite uninspired, although there are a few moments where the tough talk doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Take this exchange:
YUL: Where's Gennaro Gallo?
HOOD: I don't know.
YUL: (to Angelo) Convince him.
Whereupon Angelo punches the hood in the face. Yeah, I'm sure that convinced him, but of what?
This is incredible. I hope you can appreciate the scale of this in the video.
As long as I've been a Tobe Hooper fan, there are a number of his films that I've never gotten around to seeing, most of which fall into his post-Poltergeist period. One that I can now cross off the list is 1985's Lifeforce, which was the first of three he made for Cannon Films in the space of two years. (The others were his remake of Invaders from Mars and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2, neither of which was very well-received.) Written by Dan O'Bannon & Don Jakoby (who went on to write John Carpenter's Vampires) and based on the novel The Space Vampires by Colin Wilson, Lifeforce was Hooper's chance to show that he could handle a big budget without Steven Spielberg looking over his shoulder (as he had on Poltergeist), but its failure at the box office pretty much assured that he wouldn't be getting another $25 million to play with anytime soon.
The film starts off well enough with a joint British and American space mission to have a look at Halley's Comet before it reaches Earth. When the crew discovers what appears to be a derelict spacecraft in the head of the comet, commander Steve Railsback leads the team that checks it out and discovers that it's occupied by hundreds of giant, dessicated bat-like creatures as well as three naked humanoids (two male, one female) in suspended animation. Naturally they decide to bring them back to the ship, which is never a good idea in movies like this, especially one co-written by one of the creators of Alien. When the three aliens are brought to Earth, it isn't long before the female (Mathilda May) gets up and start sucking the life out of people, which turns the victims into shambling zombies after a two-hour incubation period. Naturally this alarms biochemist Frank Finlay of the Space Research Centre and attracts the attention of special investigator Peter Firth, whose efforts to get to the bottom of things are aided by the arrival of Railsback, who took the shuttle's escape pod and has a weird psychic connection with the female vampire. (The two males eventually revive and start causing havoc as well, but they're blown up before they can show off their naughty bits.)
By the time all is said and done, things have gotten very silly indeed, with Railsback and Firth taking a side trip to a hospital for the criminal insane (which is run by Patrick Stewart) with home secretary Aubrey Morris before returning to London and finding that it has become overrun by the vampire's victims. This is the point where the film goes more than a little off the rails, I'm afraid, and the special effects go into overdrive in an effort to distract from the nonsensical story. From what I can gather, the original theatrical release was even more confusing since it was cut by 15 minutes (and part of Henry Mancini's score replaced), but all of the excised footage was restored for the video release. That doesn't really help sell the grandeur of the space scenes, though. I expect those were most impressive on the big screen.
Monday, July 19, 2010
Don't mess with me, man. I am an American and I am crazy.
I couldn't say for sure why it's taken me so long to get around to Roman Polanski's 1988 film Frantic or why it's the second-to-last film of his that I needed to see. (After this, only Oliver Twist remains and the main reason I skipped that when it was in theaters was because I couldn't figure out why it needed to be made in the first place.) A marked return to form for Polanski after his Pirates fiasco, Frantic stars Harrison Ford as an American doctor in Paris to speak at a medical conference whose wife (Betty Buckley) is kidnapped for reasons unknown to him and he winds up jumping through all sorts of hoops -- while suffering from sleep deprivation, no less -- in order to get her back.
As plotted out by Polanski and his frequent co-writer Gérard Brach, the opening of the film almost plays like a black comedy. Severely jet-lagged after their flight from San Francisco, Ford and Buckley are taking a taxi to their hotel when it gets a flat tire. Once they've checked in, they discover that Buckley picked up the wrong suitcase at the airport and while Ford is showering she leaves the room and doesn't return. Exhausting all avenues of inquiry at the hotel, Ford asks about her in a bar across the way and is told by a drunk (Jean-Pierre Jeunet regular Dominique Pinon) that he saw her get abducted. From there he goes to the police, who aren't very sympathetic, and then to the U.S. embassy, where the officials are equally unhelpful. ("This is their country, it's their jurisdiction," bureaucrat John Mahoney tells Ford. "We can't just send a posse out after her.")
In order to get to the bottom of the mystery, Ford has to venture into the Parisian underworld (no easy feat since he doesn't speak a word of French) and hooks up with Emmanuelle Seigner (a.k.a. the future Mrs. Roman Polanski), whose suitcase was switched for Buckley's by accident, thus precipitating the whole mess. The deeper in he gets, the more Ford is put into potentially dangerous and/or embarrassing situations (a chance meeting at the airport with fellow conference attendee David Huddleston is particularly awkward since he has Seigner in tow) and it becomes increasingly difficult for him to know who to trust and how much. There's even a good old-fashioned MacGuffin which features into the exciting climax of the film. I'm sure Hitchcock would have been proud.
Tuesday, July 20, 2010
Listen, when I said we all needed therapy, this is not what I had in mind.
Continuing to play catch-up with Noah Baumbach, which isn't too difficult since he only has a handful of credits. Tonight I watched 1998's Mr. Jealousy, which was his last film before the long hiatus that ended with The Squid and the Whale in 2005. That was the first film of his that I saw in theaters, but I had at least heard of Mr. Jealousy. I knew the basics of the plot -- jealous guy starts going to his current girlfriend's ex-boyfriend's group therapy sessions -- and that it starred Eric Stoltz, but that was the extent of it. Now that I've seen the film I can confirm that while it is funny in parts, it's a lot darker than most romantic comedies ever dare to get. For one thing, you know pretty much from the get-go that Stoltz is going to wind up sabotaging his relationship. It's just a matter of how long it's going to take and how many punches are going to get thrown.
Anyway, Stoltz plays an struggling playwright whose chronic unemployment (which is only relieved by his infrequent and absurd substitute teaching gigs) gives him plenty of time to pick over his relationships looking for flaws. When he starts getting serious about an art history major (Annabella Sciorra), he hatches the therapy scheme as a way of finding out more about her past through one of her many ex-boyfriends (Chris Eigeman), a successful young writer who's the toast of the town thanks to his first short story collection. Instead of being himself, though, Stoltz poses as his best friend (Carlos Jacott), a mildly insecure lawyer with a fiancée (Marianne Jean-Baptiste) he isn't 100% sure he wants to marry. Rounding out the cast are Peter Bogdanovich as the group therapy leader and Bridget Fonda as Eigeman's stammering girlfriend, whose reaction to one of his stories (which turns out to be about Sciorra) is recounted in the first session Stoltz attends, which doesn't help alleviate his jealousy much.
Even if it didn't feature some of the same actors who were in Kicking and Screaming (Stoltz, Eigeman, Jacott), Mr. Jealousy would still feel of a piece with that film. The characters may be more removed from school (save for Sciorra, who's working on her fourth master's), but they're still preoccupied by the trivial and the hypothetical. (One of Sciorra's flirtatious questions to Stoltz the first time he has her over to his place is "What would you do if I came over to you right now and kicked you in the head?" At least I think that's supposed to be flirting.) Unlike in Kicking, though, Stoltz is genuinely interested in changing his ways. He's just not so sure he's going to be able to pull it off.
Wednesday, July 21, 2010
I tend to leave destruction in my wake.
My library only has a small selection of mumblecore films in its collection, but that's understandable since the movement has really only existed for about half a decade. One of its more prolific practitioners is Joe Swanberg, whose 2007 film Hannah Takes the Stairs is emblematic of the genre and even features many of its central figures. For one thing, the title character is played by mumblecore darling Greta Gerwig, who also co-wrote the film with Swanberg and Kent Osborne. For another, core filmmakers Andrew Bujalski (whose Funny Ha Ha is considered the first mumblecore film) and Mark Duplass play key roles and contributed additional material to the largely improvised script. I'd say that's enough, wouldn't you?
Gerwig stars as a recent college graduate and aspiring playwright who's marking time by interning at a Chicago-based production company. At the start of the film she's seeing Duplass, an aimless slacker and frustrated musician who quits his job on a whim because he wants to try doing nothing for a little while, but it isn't long before they're broken up and she's on the rebound. Rather unwisely, she rebounds with Bujalski, one of the company's in-house writers whose potential book deal for his personal blog is distracting him from the television pilot he's supposed to be writing with Osborne. Then the chronically dissatisfied Gerwig drops Bujalski and takes up with Osborne, which is where the film leaves her, but there's no guarantee that their relationship is going to be any more lasting.
The film gets a lot of comic mileage out of the distracted pronouncements of their flaky boss (Todd Rohal), and Gerwig's interactions with her roommate (Ry Russo-Young) are well-handled. (You really get the idea that these two have been through a lot together.) Even if the problems of four or five little people don't necessarily amount to hill of beans in this crazy world, they're still a big deal to the people who have them -- and will continue to have them long after the credits have rolled.
Friday, July 23, 2010
I don't think the truth about men can be found in a book.
I've never read David Foster Wallace's short story collection Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, so I don't how difficult it was for John Krasinski to adapt it for the screen when he chose it to make his directorial debut. I do know how impossible it was for me to see in a theater when it was released last year, so I have made do with catching it on the Sundance Channel. As the title suggests, the action -- such as it is -- mostly consists of men being interviewed about their feelings toward women. The fact that they are being interviewed by a female graduate student (Julianne Nicholson) doesn't appear to faze them in the slightest and they are, for the most part, pretty loathsome people. "Men are mostly shits," one says, agreeing with another's evaluation. "It's true." And based on the evidence presented, one is definitely inclined to believe him.
There's more to the film than that, of course. Krasinski jumbles the chronology quite a bit and includes scenes outside of the official battery of interviews where Nicholson overhears conversations between men and incorporates them into her data set. Some of her subjects include her professor (Timothy Hutton), a neighbor who's been locked out of his apartment (Will Arnett), a man who professes to love everything about women (Will Forte), a friend who turns out to have an elaborate Bewitched-inspired sexual fantasy (Joey Slotnick), a persistent student who has written a provocative paper (Dominic Cooper), and a one-armed factory worker who describes how his accident gets him "more pussy than a toilet seat" (Bobby Cannavale). Then there's Krasinski himself, who plays the ex-boyfriend whose involved break-up speech is what inspires her to conduct the interviews in the first place. She claims it's so she can gauge the effect of the feminist movement on men, but clearly there's something more personal going on. Of course, who's to say women aren't capable of being just as disingenuous as men?
Saturday, July 24, 2010
I've spent all my life in areas like this, as close to the animals as a man can get.
When I saw there was a film called The Legend of Bigfoot included in the "Chilling Classics" box set, I figured it was the one Bill Rebane made in 1979, which also goes by the name The Capture of Bigfoot. Alas, or perhaps alack, it was not. Rather, it's a bogus documentary directed by Harry Stuart Winer in 1976 about a professional wildlife tracker named Ivan Marx who goes off the reservation, so to speak, in search of Bigfoot. At first Marx is highly skeptical, as his sarcastic voice-over narration attests ("First the ranchers, now my brother-in-law. My head was reeling with Bigfoot!"), but he changes his tune after a chance encounter with one of the creatures and starts chasing tips all up and down the continent, attempting to establish Bigfoot's migratory pattern and find its breeding grounds. As he tools around in his red Volkswagen Beetle, the tone of Marx's narration turns bombastic, hectoring and downright cantankerous at times, and the fact that he sounds a lot like Jean Shepherd makes it that much harder to take him seriously.
The first sign that this is all a crock of Sasquatch poop is in the opening credits, since Winer shares a writing credit with the film's editor, Paula Labrot. After all, the only thing one would reasonably expect to be scripted in a documentary would be the narration, so if Marx isn't speaking in his own words that kind of destroys his authority. Then there's the footage, which was supposedly shot by Marx and his wife Peggy. Again, one can expect some recreations or things staged for the camera in a documentary, but too many scenes in the film -- especially the ones that are supposed take place at night yet clearly were shot during the day -- strain credibility. Then there are the creatures themselves, which are consistently described as having dark hair, a domed head, large footprints, glowing red eyes and a nauseating musky odor. Fair enough, but when they finally do appear onscreen they're so patently men in fursuits I can't imagine how anybody could have been expected to swallow this, even in 1976. One thing is certain: anybody who gets hoodwinked into wasting 75 minutes of their life on The Legend of Bigfoot had better be prepared to sit through a ridiculous amount of unrelated nature footage. Kind of makes you wonder whether we're the ones at whom the snow-bird is laughing.
I must hold my own if I'm going to stay within this land.
To combat the debilitating effects of The Legend of Bigfoot, I decided to watch a much better documentary about man's relationship with nature, Werner Herzog's Grizzly Man. Made in 2005, it tells the story of Timothy Treadwell, who spent 13 summers living among wild grizzlies in a remote part of Alaska, using video footage Treadwell himself shot during his expeditions. Throughout he presents himself as "a kind warrior" who believes it's his mission to protect the bears (all of which he has given cute names) from poachers and other potential threats. At the same time, he's aware of how dangerous his subjects are and mentions several times that they could kill, bite, claw or decapitate him with ease. For his part, Herzog wastes no time in revealing that that was Treadwell's very fate, which he shared with his then-girlfriend who had accompanied him on the trip. If there's one thing that makes Treadwell look particularly bad, it's that he not only put himself in harm's way, he also endangered another human being. And the bear that killed and partially ate them was shot and killed by the authorities, so so much for his stated goal of protecting the bears, right?
To supplement Treadwell's footage, Herzog interviews a number of people who were close to him, including his parents and an ex-girlfriend with whom he founded Grizzly People, a grassroots organization dedicated to the protection of grizzly bears and their environment. And while Herzog, in his ever-present narration, expresses admiration for Treadwell's skills as a filmmaker, he's also unsparing in his belief that he took one risk too many and paid the ultimate price for his naïveté. In the end, Treadwell may be another in the long line of Herzog's impossible dreamers, but he was able to live the dream for 13 years before his luck ran out. Plus, he got to be the subject of a Werner Herzog film with an excellent score by Richard Thompson, so that's something.
Sunday, July 25, 2010
It's the lie of the pipe dream that gives life to the whole misbegotten mad lot of us.
Back when I was in college one of the many plays I read for my own edification was The Iceman Cometh by Eugene O'Neill. It's a long play, so I doubted I would ever get to see a production of it, at college or elsewhere, but that's where the American Film Theatre comes in. In 1973, John Frankenheimer recruited a dynamite cast to bring the play -- all four hours of it -- to the screen as part of that series. (When it was originally shown in theaters it had two intermissions built in and it's easy to see why they were necessary.)
Lee Marvin heads the cast as a traveling salesman who arrives at his favorite New York watering hole with the intention of stirring up all of the sad sacks who populate the joint, always making plans for the future but never following through on them. Marvin's entrance is highly anticipated, too, since his semi-annual visits always result in everybody getting blotto on him. While they wait for him, we get to know the regulars, whose ranks include former anarchist Robert Ryan, saloon owner Fredric March, fallen lawyer Bradford Dillman, harmless old coot Sorrell Booke and crony Clifton James, who was thrown off the police force for being on the take. There's also a new face in the guise of Jeff Bridges, an anarchist on the run after a bombing that resulted in his mother (a true believer if there ever was one) getting arrested. (No points for guessing who turned her in.) When Marvin finally does arrive, he shocks them all by announcing that he's on the wagon and goes on an anti-pipe dream crusade that ruffles more than a few feathers among them. Thing is, most people need their pipe dreams, no matter how unrealistic they might be.
This illness came from Tibet. Anything can happen there.
The Summer of Naschy continues with The Fury of the Wolfman from 1970. The fourth film in the "Hombre Lobo" series (which doesn't concern itself too much with continuity, so it's okay that I've skipped over the second and third entries), Fury turns Paul Naschy's Waldemar Daninsky character into a professor who is the sole survivor of an expedition to Tibet where he was attacked by a yeti. (He would return there for a rematch in 1975's The Werewolf and the Yeti, but this time out their fight is left to our imagination.) Believing he has been cursed, Naschy is obviously in the perfect frame of mind to find out that his wife (Pilar Zorrilla) is cheating on him and her lover (Fabián Conde) has tampered with the brakes of his car, causing him to get into what they hope will be a fatal accident. It is not, though, which puzzles the detective on the case. "It's an accident that's very strange," he says. "There's a killer and there must also be a victim. Our problem now is to find them both."
Meanwhile, Naschy reveals his condition to a colleague (Perla Cristal) who used to be his lover, and who wastes no time in making him part of her brain-control experiments. ("Very soon you will be the beast that I dominate," she tells him. "And I'll have you always as a man.") Cristal also enlists the aid of her assistant (Verónica Luján), whose middle-aged reporter boyfriend (Mark Stevens) is looking into the strange goings-on but doesn't have a whole lot on the ball. First Naschy eliminates his wife and her lover, then he attacks some random people we've never met before, which baffles both the audience and the police. Even more baffling, though, is the way director José María Zabalza intercuts shots of Naschy wandering around like he's just out for a stroll (or perhaps waiting to catch a bus) with more energetic scenes from Frankenstein's Bloody Terror which do not match at all. Eventually the action shifts to Wolfstein Castle, where Cristal is holding Naschy and Luján captive, and where she keeps her failed experiments locked up in the dungeon. All Naschy has to do is wait for the next full moon, though, and he'll make sure the mad scientist gets hers.
In a lot of ways, this film feels like a real grab-bag affair. It opens with a bit of doggerel cribbed from Universal's The Wolf Man ("When the heliotrope starts growing among rough rocks and the full moon shines at night, in a certain area of the Earth a man turns into a wolf."), its story of an expedition to the Himalayas where a scientist contracts lycanthropy is straight out of The Werewolf of London, and there's even a man in a bizarre white mask skulking around the castle in a long black cape like Vincent Price in The House of Wax. (When the mask is removed, he is similarly disfigured.) In its defense, the film is forward-thinking, too. For example, the subplot about Cristal subjugating others to her will is echoed in Dr. Hill's theories in Re-Animator. And there's a point where the reporter boyfriend wanders into a bar to get some information and is told by the bartender: "Ah, we're pretty far off the road, you know. Only the village people come here and sometimes guests from the castle." Who knew the Village People hung out in Spain seven years before they were formed? I don't think that's in their official bio.
Monday, July 26, 2010
Are you looking for laughs? Or are you soul-searching?
At the present time, the last Douglas Sirk film that's available through the Criterion Collection is 1956's Written on the Wind, based on the novel by Robert Wilder. (I keep waiting for them to announce that they're releasing his 1958 drama The Tarnished Angels, but that has yet to come to pass.) A Technicolor melodrama about the spoiled son of a Texas oil baron, his down-to-earth best friend and the woman they both love, Written on the Wind may very well be the purest expression of Sirk's heightened style of filmmaking, which can be a major stumbling block to some and manna from cinematic heaven to others. The more I see of his work, the more I find myself firmly in the latter camp.
Since Rock Hudson had previously played the reckless playboy (in Magnificent Obsession) and the earthy working man (in All That Heaven Allows) he could have easily handled either role, but the best friend (a geologist who works for the father's oil company) was more of a lead so that's what Hudson ended up with, leaving the part of the spoiled son to Robert Stack (who received an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor for his work). As the woman who comes between them, Sirk cast Lauren Bacall, who tries hard not to get swept off her feet by the free-spending Stack and then falls into a whirlwind romance (and an even whirlwindier marriage) with him anyway, much to consternation of Hudson, who is madly in love with her. Meanwhile, Stack's sister (Best Supporting Actress winner Dorothy Malone) is holding a torch of her own for Hudson and turns into something of a cartoon villainess over the course of the film as she attempts to win him for herself. (Just listen for the music cue every time she enters a scene.) Rest assured, by the time the film reaches its violent climax (which first plays out under the opening credits), we know exactly how all of them came to be where they are and why.
Tuesday, July 27, 2010
Please, don't make me the heavy and have to yell all the time.
In 1957, the same year he made his feature debut with The Young Stranger, John Frankenheimer directed eleven live television dramas for the revered Playhouse 90, for which he did a total of 27 teleplays over the course of its four seasons on the air. One of his most acclaimed shows from this period was The Comedian, starring Mickey Rooney as a tyrannical television comic who runs roughshod over everybody around him. Written by Rod Serling (then riding high on the success of Patterns and Requiem for a Heavyweight) from a novella by Ernest Lehman, the story takes place behind the scenes of a live comedy show, which gives Frankenheimer the chance to depict the orchestrated chaos it takes to make live television happen. (It also gave him an early crack at the kind of multi-camera effect that he would revisit in The Manchurian Candidate five years later.)
Co-starring with Rooney (who is absolutely terrific as the titular holy terror) are Edmund O'Brien as his dried-up head writer (who's so desperate for material that he steals a dead man's work), Mel Tormé as his put-upon younger brother (who makes for a convenient target in Rooney's monologues), Kim Hunter as Tormé's long-suffering wife (who wants him to stand up for himself for once), and Whit Bissell as an opportunistic gossip columnist sniffing around for dirt on Rooney. It's never stated why Bissell is out for Rooney's blood, but when one considers that Lehman's other screen adaptation that year, Sweet Smell of Success, is about a villainous newspaper columnist who ruins the lives of just about everybody who enters his orbit, it's easy to imagine that he didn't have much love for them. Similarly, nobody who works with Rooney seems to have much love for him, but as long as he knocks the audience dead during his program, that's all that seems to matter to him.
Wednesday, July 28, 2010
This was it. This was rock bottom, and we knew it.
When the Criterion Collection released The Golden Age of Television, a three-disc set collecting eight live television plays produced over the course of five years, it included a number of stories that were later remade as feature films. One of those was JP Miller's Days of Wine and Roses, which originated on Playhouse 90 in 1958 before making the leap to the big screen four years later. In its television incarnation it was directed by John Frankenheimer and starred Cliff Robertson and Piper Laurie as the young couple who lose their battle with the bottle. That none of them were asked to do the film is a real shame since they all do excellent work here, but at least it has been preserved for the ages.
The bulk of the story is told in flashback while Robertson is making his first speech after being in Alcoholics Anonymous for four months. He tells of meeting Laurie at a company party where they discover they're the biggest drinkers. He tells of pressuring her into drinking with him after they have a baby. He tells of drinking on the job, which he loses, and of being reduced to downing vanilla extract when the booze runs out. And he tells of being taken in by her father (Charles Bickford) when they hit the bottom, which still doesn't curb their thirst. Eventually Robertson finds his way to AA and cleans up his act, but Laurie wants no part of the organization and ultimately walks out on her family. It's a sobering tale, but then again, that is the point.
Thursday, July 29, 2010
Have you ever met one of your Internet girlfriends?
One year before he made Hannah Takes the Stairs, mumblecore stalwart Joe Swanberg co-wrote, produced, directed, photographed, edited and starred in LOL, a film about the myriad ways modern technology can sabotage a relationship. Among its case studies are Alex (Kevin Bewersdorf), a musician who books a nonexistent tour of the Midwest so he can attempt to hook up with a girl he's only talked to online, his friend Tim (Swanberg), who finds it next to impossible to end a conversation on the phone or online, and his friend Chris (C. Mason Wells), who's visiting from out of town and fields a number of calls from his absent girlfriend. The women in their lives (who in most cases would be justified in ringing their necks) are Ada (Brigid Reagan), who is becoming disenchanted with Tim because he pays more attention to his computer than he does to her (he doesn't even notice when she undresses right in front of him), Chris's offscreen girlfriend Greta (Greta Gerwig), who is only heard in phone conversations and voicemails and seen in grainy camera phone pictures, and Walter (Tipper Newton), a girl who meets Alex at a party and unwittingly facilitates his Internet hook-up. I expect it goes without saying that few love connections result from these interactions.
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