I’m a little late but I want to pay tribute to the late Rudy Ray Moore with a long overdue review of his first movie, DOLEMITE. But also I felt a little weird paying homage to a dude like that on the eve of our first black president, so for balance I decided to revisit MALCOLM X too. Pretty good double feature.
Archive for November, 2008
11/28/08
Friday, November 28th, 2008Dolemite
Friday, November 28th, 2008Josef von Sternberg was an Austrian-American director whose first film, 1925’s THE SALVATION HUNTERS, is considered by some to be the first American independent film. He worked with Charlie Chaplin and Howard Hughes, he discovered and bedded Marlene Dietrich, Robert Mitchum threatened to throw him off a pier, he directed 25 movies including THE LAST COMMAND, THE BLUE ANGEL and THE DEVIL IS A WOMAN, and his influential films and stubborn dedication to directorial vision made him a hero to proponents of the auteur theory. Also he had a son named Nicholas Josef von Sternberg who was the cinematographer for DOLEMITE.
While DOLEMITE is arguably not as accomplished a picture as THE SCARLET EMPRESS, it does follow in von Sternberg’s spirit of independence, and that’s part of what appeals to me so much about the works of my man, the legendary Rudy Ray Moore, who passed away last month.
I don’t know about other places but in these past 10 or 15 years young white people in Seattle have picked up the adjective “ghetto” to mean low rent or shoddy. It kind of bugs me because I don’t know how the “ghetto Safeway” that doesn’t have the best selection of organic foods is comparable to the actual experience of living in poverty and segregation. But I think “ghetto” is a pretty good adjective for the life works of Rudy Ray Moore, because he seemed to maintain the same ethic from beginning to end, the ethic of a club singer who learned a poem from a homeless man, reworked it into a standup act, started pressing his own comedy records and selling them out of the trunk of his car, made a cottage industry of underground XXX comedy records like “Eat Out More Often” and used those profits to make a series of scrappy low budget movies shot in his house, at a night club where he performed and in the parking lot of Ralph’s. (more…)
Malcolm X
Friday, November 28th, 2008The first actor you see in MALCOLM X is not Denzel Washington, or even a kid playing a young Denzel Washington. It’s Spike Lee getting his shoes shined, then strutting across the street in a zoot suit. As if to say, “Yep, after a long fight to be hired by the producers, struggling to shoot the movie, fighting the studio for the 3 hour running time, gathering donations from black celebrities for completion funds, here I am. Playing Malcolm X’s best friend Shorty. Welcome to my movie.” The audacity makes me laugh, but oh well, it works.
This is by far Lee’s most Serious and Important film, but there’s some fun to be had early on. In his youth Malcolm went to dances, tried to look good and pick up women, and Lee couldn’t resist an epic lindy hop sequence that’s incredible to watch. Hard to believe people used to know how to dance like that. I wonder how many people landed on their heads?
But Malcolm is headed toward an inner struggle and that’s symbolized in that first scene with Spike in the zoot suit. He’s actually strutting across the street to the barber shop where he’s about to put lye on Malcolm’s red hair to straighten it out. Malcolm loves the look (”looks white, don’t it?”) but it burns his head and he tries to rinse it off before it’s ready. Later in the movie he’ll be straightening his hair and discover the sink’s not working and be forced to dunk his head in the toilet. This was in the book so it apparently really happened to Malcolm but it’s the perfect poetic way of making the point about trying to be someone he’s not.
He has a black girlfriend, but prefers the white one, uses her as his moll and accomplice when he falls in with criminals, becomes a numbers runner, has a falling out, and starts robbing houses. When he goes to prison he says it’s not as much for robbing houses as for having sex with a white woman. (more…)
11/26/08
Wednesday, November 26th, 2008Okay, we had that whole horror detour for Halloween. I want to get back into some action movies now. On Ain’t It Cool I recently reviewed the underwhelming TRANSPORTER PART 3 and the excellent J.C.V.D. And to celebrate that second one I also went and watched BLOODSPORT for the first time.
J.C.V.D.
Wednesday, November 26th, 2008This is one of those things that almost seems too good to really exist. Did a talented French director really convince Jean-Claude Van Damme to play himself in an arty hostage thriller, giving him his best production values in years, one of his best movies, and definitely the best acting performance and most personal artistic expression of his career (so far)? Okay, I can believe somebody would come up with the idea, I can sort of believe Van Damme would be interested, but it’s hard to believe that they really found the money, really made it, really executed it this good. 2008, I love you.
This is the story of Jean-Claude Van Damme (Jean-Claude Van Damme), an action star getting too old to do long takes and depressed because he’s in a losing battle for custody of his daughter. The worst part: his daughter says she doesn’t want to live with him because everybody makes fun of her every time he’s on TV.
Jean-Claude goes home to Brussels, where he plans to stay with his parents and get his life back together. But he needs to get some money to send to his lawyers and just happens to choose a bank that’s in the middle of being robbed. So the thieves take him hostage, but instead of seeing him as a threat like they might in most action movies they just think this is surreal – holy shit, that’s Jean-Claude Van Damme! One guy in particular is excited and gets him to kick a cigarette out of a guy’s mouth. I mean, what would you do if you had Jean-Claude Van Damme hostage? I wonder why he didn’t try to get him to do the splits on a wall like he did in CYBORG?
The feel is more art movie than Van Damme, at times it’s even kind of pretentious, which you gotta kind of appreciate in a Van Damme movie. Never thought you’d be able to accuse him of being pretentious. The storytelling is very confident, bordering on cocky, some good non-linear tricks and unfolding the story from different perspectives. The soundtrack is nice and soulful, lots of horns used in the score, a throwback to action movies from the pre-Van Damme era. (more…)
Bloodsport
Wednesday, November 26th, 2008Okay, now that J.C.V.D. has polished Van Damme’s plaque in the action hero hall of fame I can’t keep running from the inevitable, it’s time to go back and watch those early Van Damme pictures I’ve always ignored. I’ve already seen NO RETREAT, NO SURRENDER, his first major role, so I’ll start with BLOODSPORT, his first starring vehicle.
BLOODSPORT is from Cannon, and it’s very much in the vein (get it, vein, BLOODSPORT) as other Cannon chopsocky pictures like AMERICAN NINJA and ENTER THE NINJA, or other ’80s chopsocky movies like THE PERFECT WEAPON. These are stories of goofy white dudes mentored by Asians to take on ancient traditions and become great warriors. They lack charisma, presence and acting ability but are good at martial arts (or at faking them in the case of Michael Dudikoff). In this one there’s not an evil villain to vanquish, just kind of an asshole who’s the one to beat in honorable competition. He’s played by Bolo Yeung of CHINESE HERCULES and ENTER THE DRAGON fame, so he’s mainly a bad guy because of his muscles and his facial expressions:
But Van Damme shows that he is a formidable foe by actually topping Bolo’s insane facial expressions. Without these faces it’s possible Van Damme would’ve never caught on more than, say, Jeff Speakman. I mean check this out:
That’s serious. That goofball there is Van Damme’s character Frank Dux (”like ‘put up your dukes’”), apparently based on a real guy. He’s a soldier for the U.S. who sneaks off to Hong Kong to compete in the Kumite, the legendary secret underground fighting tournament thing. He is pursued by 2 FBI agents (one of them played by Ghost Dog himself, Forest Whitaker) but not to bust him for going AWOL – they just don’t want him to enter the Kumite because he’s so awesome it would be a shame if he got hurt. Also there’s a gal with a bad perm who wants to have sex with him and write an inside story about the Kumite (she succeeds at both [also it shows Van Damme's ass {SPOILER}]). Meanwhile he has flashbacks where a kid playing Van Damme (accent and all) sneaks into a house to mess with somebody’s samurai sword. He gets caught and leaves without a sword but with a new best friend and a sensei. (more…)
Transporter 3
Friday, November 21st, 2008Here’s a test for you. How many times did you rewind the part in TRANSPORTER 2 where he sees in a reflection that there’s a bomb on the bottom of his car so he drives the car off a pile of junk, flips, successfully hooks the bomb onto a nearby crane and lands the car safely?
If you answered 3 or more, like me, then you will probaly be disappointed in TRANSPORTER 3, like I was. If you prefer part 1 then all bets are off, but me, I’m strictly a part 2 man. The first one had some good action scenes, like the sliding-around-in-oil-on-the-ground fight. But it put too much emphasis on the melodrama. I don’t care how cool he looks in a suit, that’s not gonna make it interesting to hear him keep talking about his fucking “rules.” Oh geez I wonder what would happen if he ever broke one of those rules he won’t fucking shut up about, I guess it’s kind of a moot point though because obviously he would nev– WHUH? He broke his own rules? What’s gonna happen now? We’re through the looking glass, people.
Part 2 was a work of beauty though, a complete re-engineering that chops out everything that was dull and fills the empty space with added awesomeness. They still have the elaborate Hong Kong style fights, they raise the level of preposterous stunts/effects shots, they introduce more colorful characters. They got all kinds of crazy shit: a skeleton thrown at a guy, a firehose as a weapon, a car straddling two buildings. Frank jumps a jetski onto a street, jumps over two colliding cars, has a kickboxing match inside a spinning plane. How many movies have a female assassin in a sexy nurse costume, garters and Tammy Faye style smeared makeup driving a stolen police car? Not many. Later she is impaled on a wall of spikes in her boyfriend’s apartment, which in my opinion was an unsafe thing to have but I guess that’s easy for me to say, I wasn’t there. Hindsight is 20/20. Anyway, the point is that I love unapologetically over-the-top action when it’s well executed, and TRANSPORTER 2 delivers. (more…)
11/20/08
Thursday, November 20th, 2008I finished all the Phantasms, but there’s more Coscarelli where that came from so I decided to watch THE BEASTMASTER. Also, I forgot to link to this last week but I reviewed DANIEL CRAIG IS IAN FLEMING’S JAMES BOND 007 IN MARC FORSTER’S THE QUANTUM OF SOLACE.
The Beastmaster
Thursday, November 20th, 2008After watching the complete PHANTASM series I thought maybe it was worth re-evaluting this Don Coscarelli individual, so I looked him up on that one websight. Turns out he did this BEASTMASTER movie that every American male child of the 1980s always talks about – I had no idea he did that one and I didn’t have cable in the ’80s so I’d never seen it before.
THE BEASTMASTER stars Marc Singer as Dar, aka The Beastmaster, a shirtless dude who is friends with animals. Basically, he is the Aquaman of land, he can communicate with the animals and they help him out, but you won’t see any animals talking like a Dr. Dolittle picture or the later installments of the Air Bud saga such as AIR BUDDIES, SPACE BUDDIES or CSI – CANINE SPORTS INVESTIGATORS. No, it’s pure man-to-animal telepathy. So, you know, he basically hangs out with alot of different animals, they are his homies, they goof around together and then if he falls in some quicksand or something they help him. Come to think of it this is not that great of a power, if he just had human friends they would actually be better at pulling him out of quicksand than a couple of ferrets. I mean it’s simple physics, really. So maybe his real power is that he’s friends with John Amos from Good Times.
This definitely has some of that Coscarelli magic, there is some crazy shit happening in this one. First of all, you got a villain played by Rip Torn with a fake nose and two braided pigtails with little skull barrettes on them. And Rip’s got his stable of witches who must’ve caused some real havoc in the ale houses back then because, as the camera demonstrates by panning up their bodies, they’re some real hot numbers but then they turn around and they got hideous monster faces. And in my opinion they don’t make up for it with their personalities either. They prophesize that the king’s unborn son will some day kill Rip Torn, so he sends them on a fetus hunt. I guess they’re pro-life or they don’t believe in aborting after the third trimester or something, so instead they use magic to transfer the unborn baby from his mama’s belly to the belly of an ox that they lead away and then slice open like a tauntaun. Witch, are you for real? Like I said, this was directed by Don Coscarelli. (more…)
Quantum of Solace
Friday, November 14th, 2008QUANTUM OF SOLACE
(a particular amount of consolation)
You and me we’re movie nerds. So when we go out to a movie we try to see it on the biggest, nicest screen. We see it in Imax if we can, or we have our favorite theaters where we hope it will be playing. But you gotta wonder why we keep doing that when more and more movies are not designed to be comprehensible on a large screen. Increasingly, action movies are designed to be viewed on your phone or wrist watch or whatever silly shit they invent next. Why do I wait out in the cold for two hours to see this movie on the giant Cinerama screen when it’s just gonna guarantee that I will have no idea if James Bond’s car is in front of or behind the other car, which one went off the cliff, what James Bond is doing to the guy he’s fighting and also which one is James Bond? At the very least they should rope off the front 2/3 of all these theaters since Marc Forster, the director of QUANTUM OF SOLACE, apparently was not told that people may sit within 250 feet of the screen.
There’s a whole lot of action in this movie. It hits for the cycle on different types of chases: foot, motorcycle, car, boat, plane. It’s got lots of quick, brutal (Golden Era Seagal style) fisticuffs, it’s got guns, some knives, I don’t think there were any swords or bow and arrows but I might’ve missed those. All the gunshots and crunching flesh, it sounds so exciting and it really made me wish I could’ve been there on the set to see what it looked like standing back where the camera should’ve been.
I mean fuck, if you’re gonna shoot a thrilling car chase/shootout almost entirely in close-ups why not go all the way and just put a stationary camera on the dashboard showing Daniel Craig’s expressions for the whole scene? At least then it’s something new and nobody will waste their time darting their eyes back and forth trying to figure out what’s happening. (more…)
