It turns out we're all connected.
The end.
Nah, just fuckin with you. So last year, 2006, some people said was the Year of the Mexican Director because of the so-called Three Amigos, named hopefully not after the Chevy Chase movie but after a half English, half Spanish phrase that literally translates as "Tres Friends":
AMIGO #1,
Alfonso Cuaron, broke through to the V.I.P. Director's Lounge with CHILDREN
OF MEN, which alot of us consider the best or one of the best movies of 2006.
AMIGO #2, Guillermo Del Toro, finally got some respect from
the fancypants establishment critics and Oscar voters with arguably his best
Blade-less movie to date, PAN'S LABYRINTH.
But it was #3,
Alejandro González Iñárritu, who got his new one BABEL
somehow nominated for best picture, with some people (comparing it to CRASH
because of its multi-cultural ensemble cast, goofy coincidences and themes
of different cultures interacting) thinking it's gonna win.
Well, I don't want to be
an asshole, but I gotta say the other dos amigos made better movies this year.
Nice try Alejandro, but you ain't besting the jawdropping continuous handheld
shot through war zone or the weird naked monster with no eyes who eats babies.
BABEL is a really well made movie, it has some great scenes in it, and all
the actors in it are very good. It has basically four different stories:
1. some Moroccan kids get a gun and accidentally shoot somebody in a tour
bus
2. Cate Blanchett is in a tour bus in Morocco and gets shot
3. a deaf Japanese school girl turns into a sex maniac and starts molesting
dentists and cops
4. Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett's Mexican maid has to take their kids to Mexico
because she's stuck taking care of them during her son's wedding.
All of the stories ultimately turn out to be connected. And as far as I can tell the connections all pretty much make sense except for the Japanese one - it turns out the gun was given to a Moroccan guy by the Japanese sex maniac's father when he was on a hunting trip. This guy's wife committed suicide so you wonder if maybe he got rid of the gun for that reason, but no - he was on a hunting trip, and he gave it to this dude for being a good guide. Maybe the arbitrariness is kind of the point, but it still kind of feels like cheating.
The Brad Pitt-Cate Blanchett story is kind of hard to watch. When we first meet them they're arguing about something that's never fully explained, and Cate seems like a total bitch. Worse than the arguing she is being a pain in the ass to her server at a small outdoor Moroccan food joint, asking what on the menu is nonfat and dumping out Brad's ice because she thinks the water might be bad. This is a really good way to establish that she is a horrible, obnoxious person who I would never want to be around, and then right after that she gets shot and spends the rest of the movie bleeding almost to death. So you feel bad because you hate her and want her to go away somewhere where you never have to eat food with her, but also you gotta feel bad for her because she's a human being who has to stare death in the face while she lays in a hut pissing herself. Good times.
The story of their maid is easier to watch - at first. This woman is very likable and of course you gotta feel bad for her because her boss (Brad Pitt) tells her she has to watch the kids even though her son is getting married. It's not until the end of the movie that you learn that this takes place after Cate has already been shot, so you spend the whole movie thinking Brad Pitt is such an asshole that he decided to stay an extra day in Morocco even though it would cause his maid to miss her son's wedding.
Anyway, she tries to get someone she can trust to watch the kids but nothing works out, and she decides that the responsible thing to do is bring the kids to the wedding. This is the most joyful part of the movie (well, the only joyful part of the movie) because it's a beautiful wedding and you get the feeling that the kids are having fun even if they don't understand what anybody is talking about. This woman practically raised them from birth but they've never seen her house before today; now they also get to see her home country, her entire family and her life outside of serving their food and cleaning up their piss.
But I guess it wouldn't be a story if it didn't turn out fucking horrible, so on the way back into the country they get totally screwed and she ends up wandering through the desert all night, having to abandon the kids to find help and then getting royally busted by the Man. And this lady is much nicer than Cate so you feel horrible watching her suffer and, again, it's hard to watch. There's a pretty moving part where she and the kids have been hiding in the desert all night, waiting for her crazy drunk nephew to maybe come back for them, and one of the kids asks "Why are we hiding when we didn't do anything wrong?" And it's true, they didn't, but you also start to realize, in retrospect, that an undocumented worker probaly would've known it might be difficult to bring these two kids across the border. Oh well, that's the magic of cinema.
The story about the Moroccan kids is really well done, they seem very real and there is some humor here and there but, you know, they just accidentally shot a human being. So it's not exactly soap box derby races for these kids. Kind of a bad day.
The most fun story is the deaf girl who likes exposing her privates and making passes at respectable adults. But by the end not only is she miserable, but I realize I don't even understand what the fuck is going on. She lies to a cop about the details of her mother's suicide, and I'm not really clear why. Then she hugs her dad while naked, this is the closest we get to a happy ending.
Now, I'm obviously not somebody
who demands a happy ending to every story, but this is one of those movies
that almost seems sadistic in what it puts the audience through without offering
any relief. I probaly missed something, but when it ended I wondered why exactly
I had to sit through all that horrible misery. What have I gained? I'm not
sure. Just a guess, but I bet this guy is the gloomiest of the three amigos.
I can imagine them sitting somewhere having lunch and Guillermo is all excited
about some monster movie he just saw. Alfonso is interested and asks a question
about the cinematography. But Alejandro just pouts, poking at his food, staring
blankly at the plate. He mutters,"Who gives a shit anyway, it's all bullshit.
The world is a cruel bitch and she will stick a mop handle up your ass whether
you deserve it or not." Whatever, Alejandro.
Both CHILDREN OF MEN and PAN'S LABYRINTH take place in worlds more cruel and
dangerous than BABEL's. But they each have a ray of hope. PAN's has the innocent
little girl, who we obviously root for and relate to, and her fairy friends.
They face horrible real life monsters, and the ending is just as fucked up
as it is happy, if you think about it. But there is that heart at the center,
you know what side you're on and what you're fighting against, and you like
to see the ending as happy even if part of you knows it's not. CHILDREN OF
MEN, because of the way it's shot, forces you to identify with Clive Owen,
and eventually leads you to hope for the future. The whole movie is about
finding hope.
BABEL, I'm not so sure. I'm sure some people would find something deep in these clashes between languages and cultures, but I don't know. I don't feel like I learned anything new and I'm pretty sure I didn't enjoy myself.
I had heard this notion that BABEL was a smarter version of what the oscar voters liked about CRASH. After seeing it though I really don't think it's gonna win because it leaves you feeling like shit. CRASH, to the people who liked it, made you feel good about yourself because you can be redeemed, you can fall on your ass like Sandra Bullock and be cured of racism. here, all you can do is hug your daughter because everything is fucked up and even then you gotta feel kind of uncomfortable because she's totally naked and you're out on the balcony and somebody could get the wrong idea. And you'd have to explain no man, everybody is connected.
Anyway, I'll have to catch up with this guys earlier movies, which I'm sure are better. He's my least favorite of the amigos but he's obviously got talent, you can see why they'd let him sit at their lunch table. As long as he cools it with all the doom and gloom.
BABY BOY
Baby Boy is the underrated new picture by young Johnny Singleton, the director of Shaft 2K who was also the youngest fella to ever get nominated for a best director oscar. That was for Boyz N the Hood, and what makes Baby Boy interesting is that it is a companion piece to that movie, telling the story of thugs and gangstas in South Central Los Angeles. But now Singleton is older and he sees things differently. So instead of portraying these thugs as a menace to society, he portrays them as a bunch of fucking babies who need their mommies.
The main character is Jody, who is played by a model named Tyrese. He is bald and muscled, like what Singleton wishes he looked like. But he drives his girlfriend's car or, when necessary, rides a bike. And he lives with his mom, even though he has two different babies from two different mamas.
The story is about Jody trying to grow up and move out of his mom's house. But all he can figure out to do is steal a bunch of dresses and sell them. And then beat up some kids who steal his beer.
I don't know much about modeling so who the fuck knows if tyrese is good at that, but I'll tell you this. He's real good in this role. And I like the character because he's VERY flawed, but this tyrese is charismatic enough to make you keep rooting for him. to some extent.
There are sort of two villains in the piece. The best one is the great Ving Rhames, who steals the movie as Jody's mom's ex-con boyfriend. He's a tattooed motherfucker who threatens Jody by moving in, inventing new sex moves with his mom, and walking around the house naked. He's a thug who smokes cigars and dresses up like an old school gangster. Like he could be one of those bank robbing LA cops that worked for Death Row Records and killed those two rappers back in the '90s. He's a real scary character but he's also sort of the yoda character. He has the funniest scenes in the movie and also the most powerful. In short, he is Ving Rhames.
Then there is the more one dimensional ex-boyfriend of Jody's baby's mama #1. He gets out of prison and wants to move in with Jody's girl and wants Jody out of his way. He is played by the rap singer Tha Dogg, who also stars in an upcoming horror picture called Bones. Boyz N the Hood also had a rapper playing a gangsta in it, and he was the troublemaker who was a bad influence on our hero Cuba Gooding and pulled him into a world of murder and revenge. Tha Dogg isn't as much of a threat though, he turns out to be comic relief. He just sits around on the couch in an undershirt playing video games and shit. He's a total joke, and I think that's Singleton's statement about his generation. Why can't they be less like Jody or Tha Dogg, and more like Shaft?
I think Singleton is an underrated director, but only because he is so disliked since Boyz. The other ones weren't too hot but they had their moments. I have talked to white people who hated Boyz N the Hood because it's so preachy and has goody two shoes Cuba Gooding in that ugly ass shirt trying to teach the boyz of south central to go to college and become businessmen. They say it's like an after school special n the hood and that Menace II Society is the better, rawer, truer version of the "hood picture".
And when they say that I say that's interesting, because I read that john singleton grew up in south central and filmed these movies in his neighborhood, and hired people from his neighborhood to be on his crew, whereas the hughes brothers have been criticized for being suburbanite tourists doing their hood movie to confirm all the greatest fears of white people and in fact Tupac was originally cast in Menace but he got fired after he beat up one of the Hughes brothers for allegedly being a poser, and by the way did you notice that now that they made it in hollywood they're off doing some white people comic book movie about jack the ripper?
(I only say that for educational purposes, though, because actually I agree that Menace is a better picture and the Hughes brothers are born filmatists having also given us Dead Presidents and last year's best documentary American Pimp. But Baby Boy is pretty good though even still.)
spoiler warning: there is spoilers in this warning
a warning: If you sense the end coming on you might want to duck out early, because the ending really pusses out in my opinion. Suddenly Jody learns to move out of his mom's house and somehow that solves all of his problems. Now we're supposed to believe he'll stop cheating on his girl, and he marries her and he's happy. And we're supposed to forget that he has another baby from another mama that he's NOT taking care of. And we're supposed to believe that nobody's gonna come looking for Tha Dogg and say, "Oh hi, Jody, you moved in to where Tha Dogg told his parole officer he was living? That's interesting. Anyway, did you know he is dead? Do you know anything about that? Oh, okay. I guess we'll never know who killed him, then. Oh well." Come on Singleton. You've probaly seen Homicide: Life On the Streets. get it together before shaft 2, please.
BABYLON
A.D.
7% on Rotten Tomatoes... that's bad, right? I was kind of interested in this
idea of Vin Diesel returning in a big sci-fi movie directed by the guy who
did LA HAINE (you know, Kassovitz. Amelie's boyfriend, later in MUNICH). But
then there were all these stories about the studio cutting it to shreds, and
then the reviews were CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST brutal, and even Kassovitz called
it "pure violence and stupidity" before it was even released, pretty
much signaling that he was so disappointed in the movie that he was willing
to throw away any future chance at directing in Hollywood. I mean those are
some pretty bad omens there in my opinion so I couldn't work up the courage
to pay money to see it in a theater. I remember even talking a buddy out of
going to see it by describing how bad the buzz was. It was so bad it wasn't
even buzz, it was more of a whistle.
So I'm surprised to be sitting here telling you this, but this movie is actually
kind of good. I mean, unlike Vin Diesel's character, who does a flip on a
snowmobile in one scene, the movie doesn't stick the landing. The conclusion
borders on silly, the storytelling becomes pretty muddled (possibly due in
part to those studio cuts, I'm not sure) and I was not sure I really understood
the point of how it ended up. But as a whole it's so much better than I had
been led to believe. Aside from some corny Riddick-style opening and closing
narration Diesel is a cool action movie character inhabiting a fleshed out,
believable world of chaos not too far in the future.
The movie opens with a pretty spectacular show-off camera move, zooming from
space onto the earth, through the clouds, down to the United States, to the
Northeast, to New York, to New York City, to a particular block, down onto
the street, onto Vin Diesel who is kneeling on the ground, and into his face,
into his eye, in which we see reflected a fiery explosion coming in his direction...
Man, I hope they got that explosion right on the first try, would've been
a real pain in the ass to go all the way back up into space.
That was cool but the movie really got me with the more mundane scenery immediately
following that. Diesel's character Toorop wakes up, stumbles through his filthy
New Serbia apartment in his boxers, swigging on bottled water as he glances
out the window at refugees rioting for food. Later he goes down to beat up
a dude for selling him a lemon of a handgun and to get himself some rabbit
meat, which he butchers himself and fries up with some onions. When he hears
someone at his door he plants his face right in his lunch - not sure if he's
protecting his food, his head, or both. (I like if it's the head because usually
in movies they act like wearing a vest protects the whole body.)
The movie is based on a book that I haven't read. Maybe the hero is not supposed
to be a Vin Diesel badass type, I'm not sure. I suspect Diesel is very protective
of his persona and made sure to get it into this movie, and that that might
be part of why Kassovitz was unhappy. But I think the two styles make for
a good combination. When a paramilitary force comes to abduct him Toorop recognizes
their leader's voice, calls him by his first name, kills him, then pleads
with the others to mind their own business since he was settling a personal
score, and willingly goes with them. He just wants a moment to get his shit,
including a winter jacket and the frying pan with the meat in it. Now that's
badass.
Meanwhile Kassovitz holds up his part of the bargain, giving the movie a more
natural look and less bombastic feel than I expected based on those reviews.
It mostly avoids that digital, artificial feel of so many modern sci-fi movies
- it feels organic. And it's not always trying to wow you like, say, a Jason
Statham movie. It's content to linger on interesting images like Toorop trying
to light his cigarette while being transported in a car hanging from a helicopter's
magnet.
Toorop, a mercenary, is hired by an ugly Russian gangster who I did not recognize
as Gerard Depardieu to smuggle a girl from Russia to New York. He doesn't
think it's possible, the way borders are closed in this world, but Depardieu
gets him a passport which is an implant he has to inject into his neck. In
exchange he goes to a convent and picks up this girl and her adopted mother,
played by Michelle Yeoh. Most of the movie is about the experience of transporting
her, although things get a little weird once they get to New York and discover
who exactly she is.
Along the way are some pretty inventive action setpieces. Admittedly these
scenes tend to seem a little more cartoonish than the rest of the movie, but
they're alot of fun. One takes place in a dance club where people dance beneath
a bloody cage match going on in a plexiglass cube suspended above. I would
give the movie points just for including that concept at all, but then it
finds a way to get Toorop locked inside the cage (therefore challenging a
huge UFC dude to a duel) while Michelle Yeoh is below fighting DISTRICT B13's
David Belle and his parkour team. Yeoh plays a nun in this movie but does
more fighting than she did as an ancient witch queen in THE MUMMY 3. I hope
Vin Diesel calls up Rob Cohen and gives him some shit about that.
There's also a pretty intense snowmobile chase, although I have to admit it
seemed better after I watched the featurette about it and learned that all
the flips and jumps were real and not effects. (Apparently there is some team
called "Slednecks" who did them. And by the way, these guys call
them "snowmobiles," not "snow machines." Sarah Palin was
lying to us.)
I guess if you drop all the pins at the end it doesn't count as good juggling.
So you may disagree with calling this "kind of a good movie." But
the fact is that for most of the running time I found it enjoyable, and not
even in the stupid sort of way I expected. It's not CHILDREN OF MEN, but it's
above average intelligence for modern sci-fi, it's more serious than most,
but also more fun than many. It showcases Mr. Diesel's particular talents
well, it has some real nice production design (New York City of the future
has a little BLADE RUNNER in it but more seems like it's turning into Tokyo),
a strong atmosphere of modern chaos, and even some of the more ludicrous FIFTH
ELEMENTy ideas in the last stretch are kind of clever.
I mean, it doesn't succeed in the end, but I don't see how you get "terrible"
out of watching this. So how do I explain the hatred toward this movie? Is
it nothing but Diesel envy? Anti-Furyianism? To me BABYLON A.D. seems undeniably
superior to many 2007 and 2008 action, sci-fi and adventure movies that were
not reviewed with nearly as much venom, including HITMAN, ALIENS VS. PREDATOR:
REQUIEM, GHOST RIDER, TRANSPORTER 3, THE MUMMY 3, 10,000 BC, and fucking DOOMSDAY.
Even the god damn SPIRIT managed to eke out 15% on the Rotten Tomatoes.
But they reviewed the theatrical cut, which probaly made less sense than the
ten minutes longer one on DVD. And even in this version it's got a little
bit of that SILENT HILL feel of suddenly starting to explain too much through
dialogue when it's time to wrap up. Poor Toorop, who has been pretty stoic
throughout the movie, suddenly has to say the line, "You tried to corrupt
mankind by creating a fake virgin birth." Watching the extras I got confused
when there was a whole featurette about the making of a chase scene I didn't
remember even seeing. Sure enough it's included as a deleted scene. I have
no idea why they cut it. When you're almost to the end and Diesel narrates,
"I thought I saved her..." I recommend going to the special features
menu, watching the "Deleted Hummer sequence," then going back to
the last scene. Then the ending seems slightly less awkward.
When this came out in theaters it seemed like another nail in the coffin of
Vin Diesel's career outside of children's movies. But actually now that I've
seen it I think it might help him. I like him in this movie. Even if the movie's
a failure it's nice to be able to like Vin Diesel for something he's actually
done instead of something he has the potential to do.
1/6/09
BACK
IN ACTION
Script-wise, I gotta say, this is a half-assed affair. They got the maverick
cop (Roddy Piper), the ex-soldier who is back in action on a one man mission
of justice (Billy Blanks), standard issue evil druglords, damsel-in-distress
sister and also the female reporter love interest always looking for a good
story but who ends up trying to help (see also DARKMAN 2, UNIVERSAL SOLDIER).
Also some obvious one-liners that I guess I got a laugh from, like when the
bad guy thinks (let's face it, naively) that Piper won't kill him because
of his Miranda rights. Piper stabs him and says "You have the right to
remain silent. Forever."
Other than that there is no effort to put any spice on the usual cliches or put them together in a way that makes sense. And it's kind of stupid that Billy only thinks he's on a one man mission of justice. He's going after these drug dealers who he thinks kidnapped his sister, but actually she's hiding from them in an apartment with her boyfriend. The filmatism is low rent like an American International Pictures jungle commando movie or something. There are lots of scenes at bars, warehouses and docks.
Piper seems to be trying,
doing what he can with a nothing character. I realized during the scene when
he looks at his dead partner that movie acting really has nothing to do with
wrestling acting. He lets you read his facial expressions but doesn't project
them to the back row. I wonder if he ever fucks up and does wrestling acting
on a movie shoot and gets yelled at by the director? And then he breaks a
chair over the director's head? That could explain why there are two directors
credited. One had to tag in when the other one got knocked out.
There's a few cheesy laughs. I thought it was funny that Billy Blanks lives
with his sister. That would be unusual even if they were college kids, but
when you get a side angle on his high top fade you realize Billy has a pretty
serious receding hairline going. Did they move in together after high school
and just never move on after that? I guess he's been in the military for a
while, maybe she's helping him out now that he's back. By the way, he sleeps
in his boxer briefs. We know because he has to fight a home invader wearing
those. Buddy, your sister lives there, time to invest in a bathrobe.
Since I brought up the high top fade I want to mention something that occurred
to me during the movie. I started to wonder if the '90s were the only time
in American history when black guys dressed more ridiculous than white guys.
Any other time period they had the best fashion or pulled it off the best.
'50s and '60s - nice suits. Late '60s - you know Jimi looked better in that
hippie shit than white people did. '70s, white people start trying afros with
little success. The other stuff, the collars and bellbottoms and shit, black
dudes always wore it as good or better than white dudes. And I've already
written about Richard Roundtree's mastery of the turtleneck. '80s, everybody's
wearing the same jeans and ringer t-shirts, except you got all those fuckin
white rock bands wearing girl makeup, pretty hair and cheetah skin spandex
and shit. Not working. In the rare cases where the brothers did it - Rick
James, Prince - there is absolutely no question, they did it better. Way better.
But here we have Roddy Piper wearing a leather jacket he could've worn any
time from 20 years before the movie until today and look pretty good. Nothing
too flashy, a timeless getup. Meanwhile Billy's got some loud purple speckled
Huxtable vest, one like Cuba Gooding Jr. might've worn in BOYZ N THE HOOD.
He doesn't go too far, he never wears the white and black polka dots or the
MC Hammer harem pants, but he looks pretty silly, and his sister dresses like
she's on her way to Fly Girl practice.
It seemed like a reasonable theory until the scene where Billy had to throw
a white dude out a window. The guy had a wavy mullet, a blue tank top and
zebra-striped Zubaz pants. Theory disproven. Oh well, I heard we live in a
post-racial society anyway.
There's alot of action, Billy doing lots of kickboxing, a car chase, some
shootouts, a couple of explosions that cause guys to fly through the air.
Cheesy but professional. By far the best scene is when Blanks and Piper first
meet and get in a bar fight. Piper gets to do the whole fight like a wrestling
match - clotheslines, leg drops, drop kicks. When Billy comes at him with
high kicks he does the ol' blinky "I just got hit in the face" wrestler
expressions. It shows how the two styles differ and where they meet, and treats
the less disciplined as equal to the highly disciplined. (Piper also uses
wrestling moves in a couple other fights.)
But if this was supposed to be a Piper/Blanks buddy movie it didn't really
work out that way. They're not in many scenes together and hardly get to know
each other. Also, Piper never seems to realize this, but Billy is indirectly
responsible for his partner's tragic death at an undercover drug sting. Billy
is a protective brother so he tries to get his sister away from her gangster
boyfriend. He's sneaking around at the cemetery where a drug deal is going
down and causes an accidental uzi discharge that turns the sting into a shootout
and ends up killing the partner. Thanks alot, Billy. (And his sister doesn't
even want his help anyway.)
This isn't a very good one, but I've seen worse, and if you're a big Piper
fan like I am you'll like him in it, which may make it worth it.
A reader named Stephen A., and probaly some other people in the past, have been reminding me to watch BAD DAY AT BLACK ROCK, a classic 1955 badass picture from director John Sturges (THE GREAT ESCAPE, McQ). So I finally did. Thanks guys.
In a weird way the opening kind of reminded me of a great late '80s, early '90s action movie, because it's widescreen with this train coming and SPENCER TRACY and everybody else's names are in huge letters that fill almost the whole screen. Just like it would say STEVEN SEAGAL if that train was from UNDER SIEGE 2 PART 2: DARKER TERRITORY.
Our boy Spencer plays a mysterious stranger who comes into a tiny little turd of a town in the middle of nowhere. The movie takes place in the '50s but it's alot like a little old western town. And kind of depressing to me in the same way as those towns we have now where when you go into town all you find is a bland little strip mall identical to the strip malls in every other part of the country. The town is so small that everybody in it comes out to watch this guy get off the train, which they say hasn't stopped there in 4 years. So watching it stop is like watching the Olympics I guess.
Spencer is not some drifter like Clint. He came on a specific mission. We just don't know what that mission is yet. He has a suit, a fedora and a briefcase. And only one arm. He is coy about what the hell he's doing there, I figured he was a detective investigating some crime, and the whole town obviously wants him to just get the fuck out. But they won't say it in so many words, they just try to stare at him and make him uncomfortable.
And it's a hell of a group of people to be intimidated by. The guy who turns out to be the top villain is Robert Ryan, and his top thugs are Ernest Borgnine and Lee Marvin. It quickly becomes clear that the rest of the town, including the sherriff, are scared of these guys and helping to conceal some crime. And some of them (especially the sherriff) are completely ashamed of it. And there's a doctor who talks kind of like Alan Alda.
Unfortunately I already SPOILER knew that Spencer Tracy was gonna know karate in this movie. I know it because Steven Seagal used to always mention this movie when defending his status as an actor, asking if Spencer Tracy is no longer an actor after playing a one-armed karate expert in this movie. But still, I love the way they don't let on what an asskicker he is until well into the movie when Ernest Borgnine forces him to unleash it. You could tell he was tough because he didn't seem to have much fear. He wasn't really talking trash or anything, but he would be a little bit of a wiseass and would pretend to not understand as people were threatening him. But in the bar Borgnine is bullying him and trying to provoke him, and obviously not expecting much because the guy has one arm. But then with a handful of karate moves he manages to knock the hell out of Borgnine (and knock the bastard through a door). To everyone who has been singing the praises of this as a great badass scene in the history of badass scenes: you were right.
This is a very slow-paced movie that might kill some modern action fans. It's a slow boil. They used to have those. That bar fight is almost like Takeshi Kitano in the way it's a sudden and quick burst of violence. There has been this threat all throughout the movie but when the shit suddenly goes down it's surprising. There's a car chase at one point and a molotov cocktail, but most of the movie is about talking and smoldering.
What I like best about the movie is how it slowly reveals what's really going on. It turns out Spencer Tracy could've left at the beginning if the townspeople hadn't freaked him out by acting so suspicious of him. But it's a good thing he stayed because his mission is very personal and noble, and it hits on a type of prejudice that was not commonly acknowledged in movies in those days.
I didn't get a chance to listen to the whole film historian commentary track, but the beginning is pretty good. He makes a good argument for this being the type of movie I love most: entertaining b-movie type story but with an unexpected substance at the center. And if you enjoy one-armed karate experts, well, this has one. Merry Christmas.
BAD LIEUTENANT
A guy I know told me a funny anecdote about renting this in the early '90s when he was a teenager. He said he got it at a tiny little mom and pop store in a suburb of Seattle. You don't really see stores like that now but they used to be around, especially in the '80s, before Blockbuster and Hollywood were everywhere. This one had a nice old man who ran it (the pop) and when this kid and his little sister brought up BAD LIEUTENANT the old man got excited. "My niece is in this movie!" he says.
"Really?"
"Yeah! Watch for the scene where he pulls over the two teenage girls. She's one of the girls!"
So, of course, if you've seen the movie you will remember the scene where Harvey forces one girl to show him her ass and the other one to pretend she's sucking a dick as he stands there jerking off and repeating "you ever had a guy's cock in your mouth? You ever have a guy's cock in your mouth?" over and over again. Well, don't worry, one of those actresses has a proud uncle.
That's right man, that Harvey Keitel is one bad lieutenant. I'm not talking about a baaaaadass lieutenant. I'm talking about a coke snorting, crack smoking, heroin shooting, hard drinking, walking around naked, money stealing, lying, gambling addicted, n-word using, jerking off in front of some teenage girls he pulled over, spying on a naked rape victim, law enforcement sonofabitch. That would be a more accurate title but it's too long to fit on a marquee and gives away pretty much 95% of what happens in the movie.
I saw this movie years ago and thought it was a piece of shit, but after years of movie-watching training I have to admit I kind of liked it this time. At least for a while. The rawness of the acting, the minimalistic camerawork, and there's sort of a dark sense of humor to it when, for example, a cop is telling a crime victim to contact them with any details she remembers because "the sooner we get that over the radio--" and it cuts to Harvey listening to the Mets-Dodgers game that he has his life savings bet on. And we know all the cops are obsessed with this series and betting money on it. One of the central events in the movie is Keitel investigating the gang rape of a nun, but there's way more screen time spend on these playoffs.
After a while you get sick of seeing him going to different places and shooting up with different people, but especially in the early scenes it's pretty interesting to see how things unfold. I like the scene where some guy across the street is opening up the trunks of cars and Harvey's watching from across the street but he's on a payphone changing his bet. There's some obvious drug deals going on and you're not sure if he's gonna do anything or not. Then he runs over there and chases one guy into a building and up a couple flights of stairs but then the guy stops and sells him some crack and he smokes it right there. I guess this is not a lieutenant who chases drug dealers, except for show. Or looking for a bargain.
Keitel looks high out of his mind for most of the movie. He does at least 50 of those wookie-style yelps he did after Mr. Orange got shot in RESERVOIR DOGS. In one part he's naked, waddling like a penguin. Trying to settle a dispute between some young guys and a store owner who says they stole money out of the register he suddenly pulls out his gun and fires a bullet at one of the kids' heads. This guy is the biggest fuckup you've ever seen, but he has kids! In the hilarious opening he's driving them to school, yelling at them for missing the bus. They complain that their aunt hogged the bathroom and that was why they were late. Harvey says "she hogs the bathroom, come tell me I'll throw her the fuck out!"
By far my favorite scene though is near the end when he's starting to feel, you know, bad about being a coke snorting, crack smoking, heroin shooting etc. etc. and owing $120,000 to a bookie and everything. And he can't figure out why the nun says she forgives her attackers and won't tell him who they were. So he goes into the church and just starts blubbering and yelling at God for allegedly forsaking him. And he's high as usual so all the sudden he sees Jesus standing there. And he says to Jesus, "What!? You got something to say to me? Huh? You rat fucker! YOU RAT FUCKER! FUCK YOU!!!" etc. So as repetitive and as miserable of an experience this movie may be for most people, at least you are rewarded by the ridiculous sight of Harvey Keitel seeing Jesus and calling him a "rat fucker." If there is anybody out there who is in an acting class I highly recommend choosing this monologue for one of your class assignments. If not ALL of your class assignments.
As the bad lieutenant keeps piling up the bad behavior you start to wonder where the hell this could be going. Ultimately I think it's supposed to be a story about redemption. In the end he does break down and the way he ends up finding redemption is by not killing the nun-rapists when he finds them. He really wants to kill them, but he's trying to be a better person so instead he puts them on a bus out of town. So it's kind of a head-scratcher. In a way it's deep because that is true religion right there, to forgive somebody for something that seems crazy to forgive somebody for. But frankly I don't think not having an understanding of true Christian forgiveness is high on the list of Bad Lieutenant's faults. He's got bigger fish to fry in my opinion.
Man, I wish this was one of the movies they remake in BE KIND REWIND. Or maybe some kids somewhere grew up loving it and did their own remake. Or they could do an ill-advised stage musical of it. It lends itself better to a musical than GREY GARDENS, that's for sure.
I probaly shouldn't recommend this movie to anybody, ever, but in the irresponsible spirit of the Bad Lieutenant I recommend that every one of you see it immediately, preferably with children and grandparents in attendance. You will probaly have a fun time and if not you will forgive it and put it on a bus.
BAD SANTA
Well I seen this picture a while back when it was in a theater. I remembered it was pretty good so I wanted to watch it again for Christmas. Because it's about Christmas. It's called Bad Santa. (I mentioned that above so you probaly know that already)
Well I watched it about a week too late so this review is not very timely. But since this review will still be here to read next christmas I feel this bad timing should not count against my 2005 New year's Resolution, A Commitment To Excellence. If you disagree take it up with the magic new year baby.
Anyway what this BAD SANTA one is about is Billy Bob Thornton is a character called Willie, a self loathing alcoholic safecracker who every year gets a job as a department store Santa. His partner Marcus (Tony Cox from FRIDAY) is a dwarf who is his elf. Then after closing time on christmas eve Marcus will be disguised as a snowman decoration or something, he runs and turns the alarm off and they rob the place.
The robberies seem to go pretty easy but the tough part is in the lead up to the robbery, the actual Santa part. Having to get his picture taken with a bunch of kids on his lap. This is hard because he hates everybody (especially kids, himself, and his boss, John Ritter), he is always drunk, he has no social skills, he says fuck more than I do, he often pisses himself, etc.
Now I could imagine a movie with this premise but it pulls its punches, it tries to make the bad santa charmingly mischeivous, and then he learns his lesson at the end. This is not that movie. This is a movie with a heart, but it's a dark, cruel, dried out heart with thorns on it. This is a character who swears at kids, goes to bars in his Santa costume, takes his beard off in front of kids, passes out while kids are waiting, etc. In one scene a kid sneezes chocolate ice cream cone onto his face and he spends the rest of the day looking like he was dragged face first through mud and doesn't give a fuck.
This character is so mean and low that he does not have to be redeemed at the end. He just makes one small gesture of friendship, and in the context of the story, for me it is sweet and moving. His heart doesn't have to grow 3 sizes. Because it's a small gesture, that makes it seem more sincere. This guy really is a huge fucking asshole, so the fact that he makes one measly bit of effort is a big fuckin deal. A normal guy, you would expect to be nice to somebody. But this guy? Give him a fucking trophy he does something for somebody other than himself. Good job bad santa.
The heart of the movie is in Willie's relationship with this fat kid, who is called "kid" for most of the movie. Not only does Willie not call him by his name, it doesn't even occur to him that he has a name until 2/3 into the movie when he reads it on his report card, then gets confused. The kid is introduced getting off the bus with snot all over his face, pretending not to notice the bully skateboarder kids calling him a fag and pegging him in the head with cans. He comes into the mall and talks to Santa, who does not treat him any nicer than the kids did. Then for some reason he creepily follows Santa around all day.
If the wrong kid had been cast in this role, it would've ruined the movie. But this is the perfect kid. You look at this weirdo kid, you got no clue what he is thinking or feeling. All you know is he lives alone with his grandma, he's obsessed with sandwiches, and he believes his dad is "having an adventure in the mountains." There is also one mention of a talking walnut but I don't even have a clue what that's about. This kid is not cute or perky or sassy. He is a complete blank. It makes me laugh just thinking about him.
When Santa brings the kid home and decides to rob his house, it's so easy that he seems almost disgusted by it. Then he moves in for a while.
The other main characters are John Ritter in his last role, the uptight mall manager who tries to be sensitive about disciplining Willie when he catches him cornholing a fat lady in the big & tall dressing room, yelling "You ain't gonna shit right for a month!" Also Bernie Mac as an intense mall security chief. Like pretty much all of his movie roles, you don't get to see him quite as much as you want to, but this one takes advantage of his talents in a subtle way. He doesn't get alot of jokes but he gets to be both funny and menacing and it's mostly in his gestures and facial expressions.
Also the older Gilmore Girl is the love interest, who seems a little too wholesome for the movie but she is interested in Willie because she has a fantasy about fucking Santa. It's not really believable that this guy would be able to charm her. I mean if this was real, he would probaly smell like piss and bad aftershave. And he would probaly get pissed off when he's drunk (i.e. always) and hit her or at least say some stupid shit to her and scare her off. There's no way their relationship would work out as well as it does. But luckily this movie doesn't try to get serious or get too deep into the love story so you can just pretend not to notice that.
There is one scene that involves three different characters getting punched in the balls, but I feel I can still say this is not that kind of comedy. This is the kind of comedy where Billy Bob gets real drunk and ends up eating all the chocolates from the kids advent calendar. But then the next day the kid cuts his hand real bad so Willie feels bad and he tapes the advent calendar back together, but all he can find to put inside it is candy corn and aspirin. Also there's a real funny scene where Billy Bob almost suffocates himself in the garage but decides not to. Merry Christmas, America.
The movie is directed by Terry Zwigoff (CRUMB, GHOST WORLD). The script is by just some dudes but they based it on a story by the Coen brothers, whose humor comes through in some of the narration and what not. This is a movie that is not for everybody, or most people. Alot of people will think it's too dark, too mean, too repetitive in its constant abuse of human decency, common courtesy and civil discourse. To me though it's funny as hell. It's like the funny Christmas version of BAD LIEUTENANT.
Well ol' Ice Cube has put out some clunkers lately, even when he teamed up with one of my favorites, Mr. John Carpenter, for GHOSTS ON MARS. When he's not making mediocre action movies he's trying to recapture the magic of FRIDAY, or trying to do a mediocre action movie that also recaptures the magic of FRIDAY. And even when he's taking a break from recapturing the magic of FRIDAY, you got DJ Pooh out there trying to recapture it with movies like THREE STRIKES and THE WASH. But he recaptures even less of the magic than Ice Cube manages to recapture during his recapturing. With all the attempted recapturing going on you start to wonder whether the magic is even available to be recaptured anymore. It's probaly busy.
BUT, in my opinion Mr. Cube has some new magic now, some THE BARBERSHOP magic. This magic is not as powerful as FRIDAY magic but it's still fairly magic, in my opinion. In a way.
Now as far as I as a white man can figure, there are two major movements in the African-American comedies today. First of all you got the "hood comedies" which is basically the recapturing the magic movies I mentioned before, including the upcoming FRIDAY AFTER NEXT. And then you got the higher budgeted, upper class romantic type comedies, which usually are about a wedding and star Taye Diggs. In those movies there is less poo jokes, the characters have more emotional issues to deal with and also have conversations about topics important to the community and american culture. But they're not as funny and the music is cheesier, unless they put an old Stevie Wonder or James Brown song on there.
What Ice Cube has managed to do in this one is combine the two movements by getting the producers of SOUL FOOD to make an Ice Cube movie. He plays a young man who has inherited a barbershop. The story takes place on the day when he fails to get a loan he needs and decides to sell the shop to a loan shark played by the great Keith David, then changes his mind when he finds Keith's gonna turn it into a barbershop themed strip club.
The movie mostly takes place in the barbershop, so you got your FRIDAY style group of colorful neighborhood characters bickering and what not. There is also a subplot about Anthony Anderson, the big comic relief fella from the Joel Silver DMX movies, stealing an ATM machine. There is lots of humor such as: I dropped the ATM machine on my foot, it hurts, etc. This subplot constantly threatens to kill the movie. But the movie manages to escape.
Now I'm not saying this isn't what I expected when I came in, but what I liked about the movie was the message about the importance of the barbershop. This theme feels less tagged on than the message you got in FRIDAY because you see the sense of community throughout the movie and it is easy to realize the importance of the barbershop. But it's good to see a movie, especially one starring one of these rap singers, that says to care about something more important than money, or even loving some gal. This is a whole group of characters who are happy about a job because of its personal meaning to them despite it not bringing them money or status. It's not all about the benjamins as the title of a recent bad Ice Cube picture tried to claim. Nice try all about the benjamins but I can see through your bullshit.
Also I thought this was a real good role for Mr. Ice Cube. He was the perfect straight man in FRIDAY and has failed sometimes when he tried to be more showy. Here he plays it straight again but it's a different kind of character because he's actually an authority figure. In FRIDAY he got fired on his day off, in this one he's the boss, and he tells people to knock it off and shit. He stands across the street drinking juice and watching his employees with a smile. I think he does a pretty good job, I would let him manage my barbershop. Except, this is his barbershop, so he probaly wouldn't be interested. I guess I would just give him my barbershop then. (I don't have a barbershop though, sorry.)
Also I gotta mention Cedric the Entertainer from ORIGINAL KINGS OF COMEDY. He plays an older character who is the heart-of-the-barbershop, give-Ice-Cube-wise-advice type of dude but at the same time is completely full of horseshit and everybody laughs at the ridiculous things he says. So he's basically the Ice Cube's dad in FRIDAY character except he never shits or falls in shit or has to shit real bad, which makes him a little more dignified, in my opinion.
And that's pretty much the end of my review, people, but I would like to mention one thing about the cultural differences between white people and black people in the united states of america. This is not one of those standup comedy routines though, this is a legitimate point in my opinion. You see, most white people try to be quiet during movies. So when one of them talks, they are a big asshole. However when you see a movie with a predominantly black audience, it is usually a different deal. There is alot more interaction and liveliness. Sometimes it makes it hard to hear some of Cedric's lines, but then that's what renting the dvd is for. I have to say that watching this movie today I felt embarassed for all white people. Because we just don't know how to enjoy a movie properly. There was more screaming and laughing in that audience than I have ever done in my life. And I claim to like the motion pictures.
I mean when white people talk about the communal movie going experience, they usually just mean that they all go "whoo!" when Yoda first whips out his light saber. But this really was a community, where you can feel what goes over well with the ladies, with the fellas, with everybody, with a couple people in the back, etc. The part where the African barber went apeshit on Eve's asshole boyfriend was universally popular. But there were more controversial parts. When some characters spoke out against reparations for slavery there was a cautious smattering of applause, but they were definitely in the minority.
Shame shame shame on us whites. Not for not wanting to talk about reparations, which is also bad, but for being a bunch of pussies when it comes to the art of watching movies with a group. To be fair, it was at NEXT FRIDAY that I first heard a dude answer his cell phone during a movie and actually have a conversation. "Hello? Oh, I'm at the movies. What? Next Friday. Yeah, pretty good so far. About half an hour. Well, he moved to the surburbs. What? Yeah, it's funny. Right now Debo is in the back of the dog catcher truck..."
I was against that.
But it was at THE BARBERSHOP that I first heard a woman ask, "Could you take that outside?" in such a way that the guy had no choice, she sounded like she wouldn't accept no for an answer. I would like to hire her to go to every movie I go to, in case somebody answers their cell phone. Good job, lady.
Anyway, I thought this one was pretty good.
BALLBUSTER
Remember when that jackass Geraldo opened up Al Capone's vault on live tv, and there was nothing inside? I know he remembers, people probaly give him shit about that four times a day. Well, most of us are smart enough to check inside the vault before we go live on tv, but the truth is that most of our big discoveries turn out to be a bust. I mean, if it was easy to find gold it wouldn't be gold, would it?
I only bring this up because when I discovered this little known '80s blaxploitation/karate dude from Indianapolis named Ivan Rogers, and especially when I found his movie BALLBUSTER, I figured I had pretty much just opened Al Capone's vault and found Jimmy Hoffa and Amelia Eirhart's skeletons inside holding hands. I mean the title alone is a treasure, but you read the back of the box, one of those way-too-detailed synopsises you find on some real low budget movies, and you gotta get excited: Ivan Rogers plays a P.I. named Roosevelt "Ballbuster" Prophet. I repeat, his name is Roosevelt "Ballbuster" Prophet. Two of the villains he fights are called Hacksaw and Paycheck. Later he fights mercenaries called "The Nasty Boys." (I'm not sure if they said this in the movie, so I'm glad it's mentioned on the box.)
But of course, once the initial excitement wears off you realize this is actually a pretty boring movie where you spend alot of time watching Ivan Rogers fire a gun, then another guy fire a gun, then Ivan fire a gun, then the other guy falls over because Ivan must've hit him, then Ivan fires a gun again, repeat for 15 minutes.
Ballbuster is slightly warmer than Rogers's character in CRAZED COP. He talks more. It's not as dark of a movie, although they do make a big deal about him getting his start by busting up an international kiddie porn ring. And I think maybe his daughter was kidnapped or something, I can't remember.
This story is about him taking a case from a famous artist woman. At the beginning we see her painting, and her painting is really bad. Later we see her painting again, and she keeps smoking and drinking scotch, so you know she's troubled. (In CRAZED COP they just used scotch to signify inner turmoil, now they added cigarettes.)
There are a couple unique touches here and there. I was impressed
that they state explicitly that Ballbuster Doesn't Play By The Rules.
At the end, when the bad guy has the girl hostage, Ballbuster won't hand over
his weapon because he figures he'll still kill her. "Either way 2 or
3 of us are gonna die, and it ain't gonna be me." The bad guy says "You're
crazy!" and Ballbuster says, "No, I just don't play by the rules."
This was important to point out because, personally, I was thinking that he
played by his own rules, but actually he doesn't play by any
rules. I'm glad they make that clear.
And you know how at the end of this type of movie the bad guy gets shot, and
they turn and start to walk away and you yell at them because you know the
guy is gonna come back to life and try to shoot them? In this movie, Ballbuster
is very aware of that. He turns his back on the apparently dead bad guy. When
the girl starts to say something he holds his hand out to silence her. He
is listening for the click of the hammer, then he turns around and shoots
the guy dead. Self defense. Well played, Ballbuster.
But my favorite thing in this movie other than the title, this may seem insignificant to most people, I don't think most people would blink an eye at this particular scene, but hear me out. There's a part where Ballbuster goes to the girl's house and she doesn't answer the door right away, and when he complains that he was knocking forever she says it's because she was washing her shoes. She's not lying, and this is not important to the plot. It just happened that she didn't answer the door right away because she was washing her shoes.
See, that's the type of thing Hollywood tries to gloss over. They want you to think that everybody wears brand new shoes every day. But not in an Ivan Rogers picture. In an Ivan Rogers picture people gotta wash their shoes. Just like reality. Some people don't want to face it, but it's the truth. Wash your shoes.
Of the two Ivan Rogers pictures I've seen, BALLBUSTER was the most entertaining, so keep that in mind.
Vern's thoughts on the movie, the historical event, and Thursday's
opening of the 2008 Seattle International Film Festival
NOTE: This is another one of those ones I sent in to Ain't It Cool and they never ran it. But I was kind of thinking of making it a geocities exclusive anyway because I knew as soon as some asshole talkbacker pointed out it was long I would ram my head through a wall.
***
IMPORTANT NOTICE - RFL/NFW: This will be a Real Fucking Long review that will
also talk about my own observations of the actual historical events the movie
is based on. You've been warned so NFW (No Fucking Whining).
***
At a glance BATTLE IN SEATTLE might seem like a perfect opening film for this
year's Seattle International Film Festival. For one thing, it has the word
"Seattle" in the title. For another it takes place in Seattle. Those
are only two of the reasons.
But I was thinking it was a mistake because this is a movie about the WTO
protests in Seattle in 1999, screening within walking distance of where it
happened, but most of the movie is filmed far away in Vancouver. And some
of us might have a problem with that. Could be risky.
I got a big laugh when I flipped through the Seattle Weekly's coverage of
SIFF. The Weekly was bought out by Village Voice Media a year or two ago,
so alot of their reviews now are just recycled from the weeklies in other
cities. Here is a movie about protesting globalism in Seattle, and instead
of a local perspective they re-use an old review from a previous film festival
written by Texas-based Robert Wilonsky. Don't call Alanis Morissette yet,
I'm still looking into this, but I have reason to believe it may be ironic.
At least actor-turned-first-time-director Stuart Townsend acknowledged what
he was up against when he introduced the movie. He asked how many people had
been there during the protests and when the hands went up he said, "Oh
shit."
Well, he didn't have to worry about this crowd. They gave it a standing ovation,
they cheered every time some character made some political statement they
agreed with (which was alot), or when it reminded them of something cool that
happened during the protests. There was alot of attempted sticking it to the
man going on in the Seattle Opera House. The audience questions afterwards
gushed about the movie. And to be honest the switches to Vancouver were not
as noticeable as I expected. You get used to movies taking place in Seattle
and just having one helicopter shot of the Space Needle. This one had quite
a few scenes in front of the real Paramount Theater, the Chief Seattle statue
by Zeke's Pizza, the monorail, and a shot of the Cinerama. You see, THE HOLLOW
MAN 2, or CHAOS starring Wesley Snipes and Jason Statham? You could've done
better.
So opening night was not the disaster I imagined. There weren't many major
regional faux pas other than Governor Gary Locke being given a Chinese accent.
There were no protesters outside the opera house chanting "This is what
Seattle looks like." So that was all good but in my opinion the movie
was not. I hate to say it, because Townsend seems like a nice, sincere guy
(and Charlize Theron is purdy - she was there and I can confirm that it was
only makeup in MONSTER) but for me this movie doesn't cut it. The characters
don't have much depth, too much of the story is told through awkward dialogue
or news reports instead of showing it, the scenes don't feel very real and
I don't think it does a very good job of communicating what exactly was going
on.
That last one is partly because of the budget, because what made those days
so awe inspiring was the sheer size of the protest. Without a ton of money
it's hard to show how epic it was. In the movie it mostly looks like a small
group crowding up maybe half a block. The only time you can see how big it
is is when they cut to actual documentary footage, but that's always a little
offputting because it instantly feels so much more real than the rest of the
movie and emphasizes how fake the re-enactments are. There are a whole lot
of scenes in huge crowds but where you can clearly hear the main characters
talk to each other with minimal background noise. It just feels artificial.
The outsourced review compared it to CRASH, but that's not an accurate comparison.
There is no fucking of leg wounds or rubbing nipples against airplanes or
anything like that. Or if they're talking about the Paul Haggis one I don't
agree with that either. This is neither as hilariously ludicrous as CRASH's
worst moments or as well directed and acted as CRASH's best moments. The only
similarity is that it follows various characters on different sides of the
conflict and eventually some of their stories intersect. You've got Ray Liotta
as the in-over-his-head mayor (not named Paul Schell like the genuine article),
Martin Henderson, Michelle Rodriguez, Jennifer Carpenter and Andre 3000 Benjamin
as activists, Woody Harrelson and Channing Tatum as cops. Inside the WTO there's
a couple recognizable faces trying to get their issues to the table, including
Rade Sherbedzija (the costume shop owner from EYES WIDE SHUT) and Isaach De
Bankole (the ice cream man from GHOST DOG!).
The style of the movie is Paul Greengrass, handheld documentary kind of look.
That's a good way to do a movie on a budget but directors don't seem to consider
how the style can backfire. If the camerawork is "real" shouldn't
the acting and dialogue be more real than this? Should we really have the
characters explaining the story to the audience, like "Six months of
preparation. Here we go" or "Welcome to the first internet protest!"?
The "real" look clashes with the Hollywood feel of some of the writing,
like giving Henderson a back story about his brother who was killed in a previous
protest. And none of the characters end up with enough screen time to really
have a strong story. Theron especially seems wasted playing half of her role
in a hospital bed.
The most interesting character is actually one of the few establishment figures,
the mayor. Both in the movie and in real life I kind of felt sorry for that
guy. He thought he had this big coup bringing the WTO to the city, and it
turned into a notorious disaster that ended his career. He made a genuine
but naive attempt to honor Seattle's way of life by not squelching the protest,
but it was worse than he expected and then pressure started coming from the
(American-accented) governor and the White House to clamp down. So he goes
in the opposite direction, complete overkill, and makes the problem way worse.
But he can't seem to accept the fact that he's now The Man. He keeps mentioning
to the press that he protested Vietnam. Hey come on guys, I'm one of the good
guys, I swear.
A guy in that position is so much more interesting than protesters that I
started to wonder why the movie wasn't just about him. Alot of what happens
is never shown, you just hear somebody telling the mayor that it happened,
so maybe they should've saved money and gone in a more minimalistic theatrical
kind of approach. You see the whole thing from the perspective of this poor
bastard hiding out in a building somewhere trying to make the right decisions.
But I guess that wouldn't have had the messages Townsend wanted to get across.
* * *
Let me give some of that local perspective that Seattle Weekly couldn't give.
I had my own minor brush with the protests so I have an idea what they were
like. I'm a left winger but not an activist. I was living outside of town
and I wasn't about to go to the protest because I didn't know what the fuck
a WTO was. I watched the news on the first day and saw those anarchist kids
smashing some windows, which was portrayed as violence and a legitimate reason
to spray tear gas and shoot rubber bullets at all the thousands of other people.
I was suspicious because I'd seen kids get beat up by cops before and then
watched them call it a riot on TV. But I wasn't there, I was just guessing.
Then the next day they declared a "No Protest Zone." Basically there
was a small square where you were allowed to still have the first amendment,
and the rest of downtown you would be arrested if you had a sign or accidentally
chanted or played a drum or something. During the Bush years this became a
regular part of protests. If Bush comes into town they square off a little
cage of fence where you're allowed to protest out of the sight of Bush and
the media, and the rest is off limits. I've heard people credit Bush's people
for starting this technique but this is one thing you can't pin on him. They
already did it for Clinton when he came to town for WTO.
Anyway, I am one of those guys who believes in freedom and America and what
not, so when I heard about the No Protest Zone (which is not explained in
the movie) is when I decided to go downtown and see what was going on with
my own eyes. When I got there it was pretty surreal. Quiet, not alot of activity,
but lines of militarized riot cops blocking off numerous streets, standing
there like stormtroopers under the Christmas lights.
In the afternoon I was talking to some friends on the corner when a relatively
small group of marchers burst out of the Pike Place Market stairway, coming
back downtown after a labor rally. These were the friendliest, happiest group
of protesters you ever saw. Hippies, union members identified by their jackets,
people in turtle costumes like Andre 3000 wears in the movie, and everybody
was dancing and chanting to the beat of a percussion band. They were gesturing
for innocent passersby like ourselves to join them. My friends and I looked
at each other and shrugged. Why not? I like drums. I like turtles. I don't
like the priorities of global capitalism taking precedence over our local
beliefs or whatever.
So we marched for a little bit and it was pretty uplifting and then as we
came around the corner we saw another crowd of marchers coming from a different
direction. Two relatively small groups combining to form one larger one! What
poetry! As the crowds merged we cheered. But I remember seeing fear on the
faces of the other crowd. They were not happy to see us and were gesturing
back in the direction they came from, like "No-- you don't understand..."
And then I noticed the battalion of riot cops behind them. They were firing
concussion grenades into the air, basically like a firework that makes a loud
bang to scare and disorient people. There were white clouds wafting around
- this was the CS gas I believe. Even nowhere near the clouds your eyes and
nasal passages began to burn. They had some sort of tank-like vehicle, and
a loudspeaker repeatedly announcing that everyone must disperse immediately
or be arrested.
I gotta be honest, the whole thing pissed me off, but my friends were more
interested in getting away from tear gas and pepper spray than in fighting
the man. Which was not a bad idea, so I went with them. This was not our fight.
Sorry, turtles.
The problem we found then was that dispersing was easier-said-over-a-loudspeaker-than-done.
Every direction we went there were more cops, more chemical clouds, and lines
of National Guard. And it's hard to see when you keep rubbing your eyes. The
Guard are mentioned in the movie but, as far as I noticed, never shown. In
the media they were always referred to as "unarmed National Guard,"
although in reality they each held a large wooden bat that in my opinion would've
hurt if they chose to use it on you.
I went up to a line of them who, obviously, would not let me pass. I asked
them which direction to go. "We're trying to disperse, but every way
we go is blocked." They not only wouldn't answer, they wouldn't look
at me. I'm sure that was what they were told to do to avoid being tricked
or distracted by the wily anarchists of Eugene, Oregon. I don't think I ever
heard anything about National Guard getting out of line, so good for them.
But let's just say it was not comforting to have them there. I did not feel
it was people they were guarding.
We eventually found an unguarded alley to sneak out through and got the hell
out of there. But it was sobering to be caught in the middle of this very
minor skirmish in the several days of cop vs. protester battles. Alot of people
have a kneejerk reaction against any protest, assuming whoever does it is
a crazy extremist or is just trying to show off or something. If you think
I should be beaten, gassed and arrested for the crime of stupidly joining
a hippie conga line for a few minutes then so be it, I will accept your wise
judgment. What disturbed me though was seeing elderly people bent over coughing
at the bus stops. Look, I don't agree with some stupid kids breaking windows
and spraypainting shit. But is that worth pepper spraying an old lady waiting
for the bus out of town? I'm against it.
The movie tries to address this issue with Charlize Theron's character. She
doesn't know anything about the protests except that her husband (Harrelson)
is a cop and has to work overtime. She works downtown but when she's sent
home she gets caught in the crossfire. To get around the crowd she tries to
cut down an alley, where she sees protesters running out of a cloud of tear
gas, gas-masked cops chasing after them. I was surprised how much this reminded
me of actually being there (even if Charlize's alley was in another country).
But here's the thing (SPOILER)... her character is pregnant. That's the kind
of thing that spooked me when I was in the middle of that, thinking of how
many random pregnant women or asthmatic elderly people might've been stuck
there. But in the movie (seriously, SPOILER) a cop runs up and hits her in
the belly with his club, and she loses the baby. The audience gasped. It hurt
to look at. I have no doubt that something like this could happen. But on
the other hand... it didn't.
Don't get me wrong. My blood still boils at some of the fucked up shit some
cops did. The only officer fired for excessive force during the protests was
a King County Sheriff's Deputy named John Vanderwalker. He saw two young women
in a parked car videotaping. He knocked on their window and when they cracked
it he said "Tape this, bitch!" and sprayed pepper spray into their
car. A separate videotape showed a medic, clearly labelled with a red cross
armband and holding a first aid kit, crouching on a sidewalk. Vanderwalker
ran up behind her and kicked her in the back. He denied that it was him in
the video but they were able to enlarge the image and read the name on his
helmet, so he was fired. The next year an arbitrator found that it could not
be proven that he had lied, because he might have forgot that he ran up and
kicked a lady in the back for no reason, so he was reinstated with back pay.
He got a free vacation out of it.
That's the one guy they tried to hold accountable, and that's just the stuff
he did on tape. Who knows what else he forgot about doing? But if he had hit
a pregnant lady and caused her to miscarry, well, I think we would know about
that. So to attribute something that horrible to a police officer seems like
cheating.
I think that's the biggest problem with the movie in getting its message across.
There's alot of truth in the movie, but by mixing it with typical movie phoniness
you kind of dilute it. For example:
* They mention that the police tried to get the fire department to spray the
protesters with firehoses, and they refused. That's true (it's verified in
the REPORT OF THE WTO ACCOUNTABILITY REVIEW COMMITTEE SEATTLE CITY COUNCIL)
but will people who don't know that believe it? I mean, it sounds pretty over-the-top,
like clubbing a pregnant lady.
* There's a scene where an anarchist breaks a store window and Henderson and
other protesters try to stop him. He thinks vandalism doesn't constitute violence,
they try to convince him it's still giving the media exactly the images they
need to make the whole demonstration useless. This kind of thing really did
happen, but it seems phony when it turns into Rodriguez melodramatically calling
Henderson a coward, and when the anarchist is played by Joshua Jackson of
DAWSON'S CREEK.
* They also have a subplot about a local news reporter having her eyes opened
over the course of her coverage. I felt like this really did happen as I saw
local reporters trying to smear the whole protest because one dumbass vandalizing
the Nike store was wearing Nikes, but eventually as the police started firing
tear gas into bars on Capitol Hill they started to become more sympathetic
toward the people getting beat up and visibly upset about what was going on.
But in the movie they have her join the protest on live TV when she's supposed
to be reporting from a press conference. Do you really have to manufacture
stick-it-to-the-man moments when you're telling the story of a real one?
* It is also true that there were undercover police pretending to be protesters
as Channing Tatum's character does. I'm not sure if any of them got beat up
by other cops, but I'll let that one go. I liked what they did with his character
so I hope people don't think it's just made up.
To me it seemed like the most crucial turning point was Capitol Hill. The
mayor had declared a curfew, and the police had forced a small group of lingering
protesters out of downtown and up the hill. Capitol Hill is a neighborhood
with alot of young people, hipsters, gays, artists, punks. There are many
bars and restaraunts and a lively night life. It's where Sir Mix-a-Lot was
talking about in that old song "Posse On Broadway." He wasn't lying,
there's always a long line for burgers at Dick's even late into the night.
The movie shows a little bit of what a bad situation the cops were in.
They were working over time, not getting breaks, not getting enough water,
pissing in bottles, getting piss bottles thrown at them. What it doesn't mention
is that most of them were from out of town. There weren't enough Seattle police
for the job so officers were shipped in from all over the state. So you have
these tired, pissed off cops chasing protesters up the hill... I wonder if
they even knew where they were? Did they know they had left the "No Protest
Zone"? Did they know that the crowds up here were not protesting anything?
What did they expect to happen when they started spraying and hitting regular
apolitical people and telling them to "disperse" from their own
neighborhood?
That night was the most out of control because the police found themselves
battling not with WTO protesters, but with Capitol Hill residents pissed off
that their businesses and hangouts were being tear gassed. The police wouldn't
leave, so the locals wouldn't go inside. After being mistaken for protesters
many residents went ahead and became protesters, gathering outside the local
police headquarters. A city council member showed up and tried to negotiate
between the locals and the police. The news crews stopped spreading hearsay
about protesters being seen with molotov cocktails and started interviewing
various bloodied people about all the horrible things that happened to them.
And they kept showing the video of Vanderwalker kicking the medic.
BATTLE IN SEATTLE tries to show some of the chaos that night, but without
really explaining the context. And then two of the leads are involved in a
pretty ludicrous foot chase. But the thing I felt was really missing was the
next morning. After having the police do nothing was a failure, and having
the police beat the hell out of everybody was even worse, they tried a new
approach. The stormtrooper outfits were put away and protests were chaperoned
by un-armored bike police. Suddenly everybody calmed down and there were no
more scuffles. This is the approach they've used for most political protests
since then, with much success. Both Niketown and the old ladies at bus stops
have gone relatively unscathed.
I can't expect Townsend to tell the story I want him to, but to me that was
the inspirational part of WTO. That was what showed me that people could take
a stand and make a difference. Not activists but regular people who could've
gone inside to safety but felt the need to stand in the way of an injustice
in their neighborhood. And it did force the city to change their tactics.
It made a difference.
As for the WTO protests? Well, despite what the trailer for BATTLE IN SEATTLE
tells you it is debatable how much effect they had on anything. But in the
movie's one truly great moment it acknowledges this. Hundreds of protesters,
including the main characters, are in jail. Henderson's character is especially
glum because he's on his third strike, and he thinks they've failed. But Andre
Benjamin's Django tries to cheer him up.
"Yesterday those people didn't even know what the WTO was," he says.
"But today..."
And you're thinking oh come on Stuart Townsend. Let's not overstate this.
"...well, they still don't know what it is. But at least they know it's
bad!"
I didn't mention Benjamin before because I was saving the best for last. He's
definitely the highlight of the movie. As the guy who tries to keep morale
high among protesters he gets all the funny lines and few of the self righteous
ones. It's also nice to see a major rap star wearing a cardboard turtle costume.
You don't see enough of that.
I should also single out Martin Henderson. When I saw him on stage I realized
"Holy shit, that's the guy from TORQUE!" (and he was standing next
to the stars of THE FAST AND THE FURIOUS, AEON FLUX, LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY
GENTLEMEN and HOLLYWOOD HOMICIDE - quite a collection). I do not mean that
as an insult because to be totally and completely honest I enjoyed the hell
out of TORQUE. But he was not very good in it. In this one he is good and
I think we will be seeing more of him.
* * *
Like most political movies it's hard to see this one converting many people.
I don't think those people who instinctively hate protesters will have their
eyes opened too wide. In fact, I'm not sure some people are even going to
understand what the World Trade Organization is (it's mostly explained in
an opening montage like ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK).
But I do truly believe that Townsend's heart is in the right place, so I'm
glad he was able to show it in Seattle without derisive laughter (except during
a climactic scene where a cop tracks down the protester he beat up and apologizes
to him - I guess we weren't ready to believe that one). It kind of reminded
me of Emilio Estevez's movie BOBBY, but it wasn't as laugh-out-loud corny
as that one, and Townsend didn't even cast himself in the movie. So it's not
THAT embarrassing.
My apologies for the negative review, and I look forward to the intelligent
and courteous political discussion that will take place in the talkback.
thanks,
Vern
5/23/08
BE COOL
This is the sequel to GET SHORTY. Based on another book by Elmore Leonard, but this book was made after the GET SHORTY movie and with the idea that it would become a movie too. So this is a movie about sequels based on a book that was a sequel to a movie based on a book. Which means there's all kinds of metapostmodernistical type business running around calling attention to itself. Hey, look at me, I'm a character in a sequel talking about how sequels are bad. Now I'm a character in a PG-13 movie talking about how if you say fuck twice you get an R.
(John Travolta, as badass loanshark turned movie producer Chili Palmer points this out and says, "You know what I have to say about that? Fuck that." And if only he had repeated "fuck that" again for emphasis I guess he would've gotten the R and I could've seen this movie in a quiet theater full of adults and not a fuckin high school cafeteria. But that's a subject for a separate rant.)
Anyway that's kind of how GET SHORTY was though and most of it works here, it's fun if not exactly a fresh new idea. There are a couple of fuck ups though where they got celebrities playing fictional characters who make references to trademarks of the actual celebrities, and that shit just doesn't fly. The Rock for example keeps doing his famous eyebrow movement (oh jesus, I can't believe there is even such a phrase as "famous eyebrow movement"), and that's just not funny. That belongs in the scrap pile with the part in SCREAM 3 where some asshole tells Carrie Fisher she looks like Princess Leah. That's not a joke, that's a reference. Stop it kids.
Also, they got a scene where John Travolta and Uma Thurman dance together, and you're supposed to be excited because remember, they danced together in PULP FICTION. But in PULP FICTION you were supposed to be excited because remember, he danced in SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER. I mean how many fuckin times we gonna get excited because the man dances? At some point it's gonna occur to America that John Travolta's a dancer. So by definition he ends up dancing at some point. It's not really that big a fuckin deal, in my opinion.
Anyway this time Chili gets caught up in the music industry, becoming the manager for a promising young singer, stealing her away from a wannabe gangster manager (Vince Vaughn) and getting caught up with debts to a heavily armed gangsta rap group and the russian mafia. I haven't read the book on this one but there's a cast of characters with the scent of Elmore Leonard all over em, including Vince Vaughn's white pimp/manager Raji, who "thinks he's black," and his gay Samoan bodyguard who wants to be an actor (The Rock). Cedric the Entertainer is also in there as a bourgeious businessman turned thug rap producer, the rapper Andre Benjamin is the ridiculous leader of the gangsta rap group the Dub MD's. Uma Thurman is the love interest, widow of James Woods, and Harvey Keitel is in there too. Pretty good cast now that I think about it, although they don't all seem like they're in the same movie.
And I'm gonna lay the blame on F. Gary Gray, director of FRIDAY and SET IT OFF. The movie is exactly like he's been since FRIDAY: good but not great, impressive but not consistent, serious but not serious enough. Always showing promise but never quite living up to it. But not completely disappointing. Just in the middle there somewhere, that area where we're all gonna forget about it pretty soon.
Now I liked GET SHORTY but I think it's a little too cartoony for Elmore Leonard. It doesn't take a genius or me to tell you that the two best Elmore Leonard movies are JACKIE BROWN and OUT OF SIGHT. Those are movies that can be funny at times but only in the way that real life and real people are funny. They are still serious crime stories with dangerous people and consequences.
(I also love MR. MAJESTYK but that's more of a Charles Bronson vehicle with a great Elmore Leonard premise than it is pure Leonard. He wrote the script, didn't really like how they played it in the movie and wrote the book afterwards.)
(Oh and by the way when the fuck are they gonna put out KAREN SISCO on dvd? Come on home video market, I know you fuckers are reading this. Get me a KAREN SISCO dvd.)
For some reason when I heard F. Gary Gray was doing this one I thought he might give it a little more grittiness than the last one, treat it a little more serious. But he's actually kind of in FRIDAY mode here. Which I guess is okay, FRIDAY is a funny movie and a dumb silly GET SHORTY sequel is what America wants. But if anybody ever decides to ask me, I'll say he plays it too broad at times and loses the effect. The main mistake is the way Vince Vaughn plays Raji. Either Vaughn or Gray or both thought he was supposed to be in another wacky comedy with the ol' "white guy talks in black slang" joke that we all adore. What could possibly be funnier than a white dude saying "homey," ha ha ha, etc. But without having read the book, I'm 200% positive that in Elmore Leonard's version, this is a character quirk to a dangerously stupid thug. It should be played like a real guy, not like a character in a Will Ferrell movie. I'm gonna do a SPOILER here so be ready. There's a scene where Raji is talking to a hitman he doesn't like that's supposed to kill Chili for him, and the hitman starts choking on a ham sandwich. Suddenly Raji turns on the hitman and beats him to death with an aluminum bat that the guy made fun of earlier. This is pure Elmore, because it makes no sense for him to do this, but he's a violent idiot and that's why he's dangerous. He's fucking himself by doing it but it's his chance to impress himself by killing the guy. As Chili later says, "It's impossible that you're this dumb." But really he knows it's not impossible. It happens every day.
Unfortunately because Vaughn has played this character like this is just a silly comedy and not a real guy, you don't take the scene seriously at all. It's a cartoon. Compare that to the scene in JACKIE BROWN where DeNiro's funny pothead character loses it in the parking lot. You see the whole slow process of him going from room temperature to boiling over, and it's fuckin dynamite. It makes you squirm. You feel it in your gut. I choose feel it in your gut over a brief chuckle.
The Rock and Cedric the Entertainer are a little over the top too but I think they work a little better. The Dub MD's are pretty funny, they're like a whole gang of Deebos (Tiny Lister's character in FRIDAY), gigantic monsters but strapped and always wearing kevlar vests like they're at war. They drive around in a convoy of hummers playing, I'm guessing, their own album at full volume. Which is kind of like a band going on stage wearing their own t-shirts, I think. Andre Benjamin is pretty funny in this.
The most important supporting performance is by The Rock, because as previously discussed this guy is the future of cinema, etc. He treats his character with respect if not dignity. He gets dressed up in a silk cowboy outfit and sings Loretta Lynn's "You Ain't Woman Enough to Take My Man" with a straight face. His best part is the look of intense pride on his face after performing a dialogue from BRING IT ON for Chili. He's playing on gay stereotypes but I don't think it's homophopic. You're supposed to like this guy. But as usual, you watch this with a PG-13 audience going "eeeeewwww" at every wave of the wrist and it becomes a pretty different movie, you start to feel bad about it.
Anyway, it's a good step for him to do this comedic supporting role. Somebody give this guy a truly great role and it will be over. 100% guaranteed The Rock could be a beloved movie actor as long as he escapes from dumb movies like WALKING TALL and THE SCORPION KING. Where the fuck is Steve Soderbergh? I got a job for him. I'm serious.
Okay, so the movie is forgettable. But there's some good news too. For the two hours of this movie, John Travolta is cool again. Who ever thought that miracle could ever happen again? Definitely not me. Let me share a few words and phrases with you:
The General's Daughter.
Battlefield Earth.
Lucky Numbers.
Swordfish.
Domestic Disturbance.
Basic.
etcetera
Admittedly, I thought he was surprisingly restrained in THE PUNISHER, especially considering he was playing a villain in a comic book movie. But that's not the same as this. Playing Chili Palmer again he reminds you what we as a country once loved about John Travolta, for a little while. He lets go of the crazy overacting bullshit and becomes just a slab of undilluted swagger squeezed into a nice black suit. He even looks good in those suits! Maybe his face is a little rounder than it used to be, but the spirit is still there, still pure inside. It's about his confident posture, his menacing smirk, his complete lack of fear. It's about sitting comfortably in a chair with a gun pointed in his face, showing no trace of concern, knowing he can come out on top of any situation. Walking out from around the corner after his friend and his car have just been gunned down, then stopping to light a cigarette two feet in front of the killer, not even looking at him. Because he's Chili Palmer.
I'm not sure I'll ever get the chance to say this again, so I'll say it now: good job John Travolta. Thank you for this performance, bud.
THE BEACH
This is a movie that looked pretty promising, but shit if I even liked it at all. It is hard to come out with a Fight Club type of picture in the same year that Fight Club came out and not end up looking like a bunch of garbage. But that is what these folks did.
Yes, this is the Fight Club type of movie. You know, the type of movie that is released by Fox, based on a popular novel, crammed full of first person narration criticizing the culture. These type of movies have really beautiful widescreen photographical techniques as well as little showoffy computer camera gimmicks and wall to wall techno music. They are generally about a character who is fed the fuck up with American consumerism and superficiality who wants to leave it all behind and push himself to the limit and seek out danger and blah blah blah. Then they get involved in a secret counterculture which at first is fun and utopian and represents everything they want out of life. But there is always a hint of danger and then one of the colorful supporting characters gets some kind of injury - usually a gunshot blast to the head or shark bite - but the counterculture handles the situation in a heartless bastard of a manner which signals the turning point when you start to realize WELL FER CRYIN OUT LOUD, the counterculture is just as fulla shit as the culture itself. At this point in these type of movies the character either goes crazy or finds out he's been crazy all along, and then they start having delusions about the founder of the secret counterculture, who is some kind of intensely charismatic wacko, who starts to take on sort of superhuman powers, and blah blah blah. You know the type of movie I'm talking about.
Anyway the Beach is not the best in this type of genre. The star is Leonardo DiCaprio who is a young boy who I believe also starred in one of Sam Raimi's pictures if I'm not mistaken. His acting is okay but he is such a goofball that it is hard to get involved in the story. His narration is not funny like in Fight Club it is just corny. It takes itself too god damn seriously. And whenever he does something to push himself, like cliff dive, there is a long scene of him yelling and raising his fists in the air like he just won the fucking championship belt or some shit. And the music gets all triumphant like you're supposed to go sing "For he's a jolly good fellow" to him. Even in one of the deleted scenes on the dvd where he joins a drum circle, the little fucker can't play the damn bongos without getting an intense crazy look on his face. I mean jesus boy why can't you just smile. playing a drum isn't exactly an extreme sport.
What makes matters worse is the dude just isn't likable. He does some weasely ass things and not in a way that you can relate to. Then he gets into a rivalry with another guy at the beach who tries to tell a story about killing a shark. So Leonardo does this fake yawn and then makes a smartass comment about how he just got really tired. This is the weakest tell off I have heard in a long time. The boy's timing and delivery are very poor, I would like to have him watch some Richard Pryor tapes or something, the kid is horrible.
But the way his narration paints a portrait of the problems in our culture I'm pretty sure you're supposed to like him and think he's cool. I don't think the filmatists had a very clear view of how we should see this boy.
Now admittedly there is a pretty hot young french gal in the picture. There is a swiss family robinson type community which is sort of a fun fantasy. And the whole "there is a price for paradise" type theme is not a bad one. But I just couldn't relate enough to this little fucker to enjoy the journey with him.
THE BEASTMASTER
After 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.
The baby grows into Marc Singer, who can see through the eyes of animals and has to go off to the mountains to practice swinging his sword around real fast like he's trying to be a helicopter. Then he meets Tanya Roberts (timelessly hot compared to most '80s babes) and uses a tiger to try to get some. You know, the old pretending-to-protect-a-gal-from-a-tiger-but-actually-the-tiger-is-no-danger-because-you-can-communicate-with-animals-and-he's-your-buddy routine.
Tanya just thinks he's a regular dude, she has no idea he was born of ox, so he has that going for him. He wants her to come hang out, no pressure, let's just see what happens. But it turns out she's a slave of Rip Torn, so the movie becomes about trying to free her. One highlight is when Beastmaster finds some slaves in cages inside a cave full of weird birdworshipping creatures. He lets one of the slaves go, which seems like a good idea until one of the creatures wraps his membranous batwings around the little guy and melts him into goo. Well, at least he had those 2 seconds of freedom, I guess. I hope he enjoyed them.
So there's lots of good Coscarelli shit that happens along the way, but of course the premise alone is weird enough to make it more interesting than your average sword and sorcery type of picture. He is the Beastmaster so he has a bird that helps him and two ferrets that he carries around. Remember the '80s phenomenon of the trailer park type individuals who keep ferrets as pets? I get it now. Beastmaster also has a black leopard pal but unfortunately since this was made in a racially insensitive era the leopard is clearly played by a tiger in blackfur (kind of like MR. MAJESTYK has all those white people playing Mexicans).
I have to admit, this is not a genre I like. Don't get me wrong, I'm not racist against Barbarians. They are a proud people. But their movies are generally made fast and cheap by sleazy European exploitation producers who love making money but never thought to try to make a good movie. Sword and sorcery movies are almost always boring. Honestly the only old school one I can think of that I genuinely like is CONAN THE BARBARIAN, and in more recent years THE SCORPION KING and 300 was pretty good the first time.
THE BEASTMASTER is way more interesting than most, but it's not on the level of the good ones I listed because it has that same long, drawn out feel all the bad ones suffer from. I can appreciate lingering and a deliberate pace but when a movie is about a dumb guy defeating evil through brute strength you might as well throw some fuckin momentum in there. In CONAN you have that shot where he's a kid pushing a wheel around and then all the sudden he's Arnold pushing the wheel around. That's what you gotta do, say everything you need to say in the span of one edit. But most of these movies would prefer to show the kid pushing the wheel for 5 minutes and then show Schwarzenegger pushing the wheel for 10 minutes and then have him rest for another 5 minutes and then go on a long journey. I mean how long can I possibly watch a dude stand around in some mountains swinging a sword for practice?
It turns out there's a reason for this, though. Late in the commentary track Coscarelli suddenly gives the most important information: he was screwed by some of the producers and not allowed to edit the movie. They thought it was too short and instead of doing reshoots they cut the existing scenes longer. That is exactly what's wrong with the movie and the entire genre. Thanks alot, assholes. I hope you all get bitten by ferrets.
BEAVIS AND BUTT-HEAD DO AMERICA
This is
a cartoon but its not for kids and its not Japanese. If you don't know in
japan the cartoons are not only for kids, there is also demon raping, etc.
Bruce plays Muddy Grimes, a scruffly dude not unlike myself who tries to con two dumb heavy metal kids into smuggling a powerful weapon for him. Bruce does not have as much screen time as you would like but the story of these two little pricks Butthead and Beavis is pretty funny. Kind of reminds me of the old pink panthers how they go around and get chased by the FBI and then save the day and have no clue any of this shit went down.
What this has is a lot of dick jokes and masturbating but in my opinion there is a bit more going on then that. This film uses the satire when various law enforcement branches strip search and violate innocent bystanders and make fun of them for invoking the constitution. There are sly cultural references and what not with Chelsea Clinton, a psychedelic sequence, a ridiculous Engelbert Humperdinck tune called "Lesbian Seagull," etc. The cartoonists are very observant about the values of various social classes - ex-hippie teachers, retired Texan couples, Motley Crue roadies and whatnot. Also I like when they stand in front of the automatic flushing toilets with their eyes full of awe and wave their hands around.
okay is that enough
BEHIND THE MASK: THE RISE OF LESLIE VERNON
Ever since this movie played some film festivals it has gotten great reviews, especially here on the internet where people tend to fall for this sort of shit. Of course you know I am a fan of the horrors and it's always good to see somebody try a different approach, so I was hoping they were right. But one thing I noticed was every review I read would explain the premise, which sounded like a stupid idea that would never work. But at no point did any of the reviews say, "I know, this sounds like a stupid idea that would never work, but somehow they managed to pull it off." Instead they talked about this idea like it was a good idea. A really good idea.
Here is the stupid idea that would never work: BEHIND THE MASK is done in a fake documentary style (or fakeumentary). It takes place in a world where the iconic killers of horror movies (Freddy, Jason, Michael Meyers and Chucky are specifically mentioned) are all real. A grad student who looks kind of like Sarah Polley is doing a documentary about a guy who calls himself Leslie Vernon, a guy who is an aspiring slasher. And he explains to the camera his whole made up horror backstory, how he picks out his victims and what he plans to do with them, all of course based on the formulas of slasher movies. And there is lots of jokes about how he has to work out alot to be able to chase people while it seems like he's just walking, and corny shit like that. So it plays off of all these archetypes or cliches and then at the end it switches from documentary to "real movie" as he tries to kill his victims in scenes inspired by FRIDAY THE 13TH 2 and 3 (the Steve Miner years). And according to the vast majority of the critics, who really liked this movie, it gets genuinely scary at this point.
Well I beg to differ, although the "scary" part at the end is at least closer to pulling off its goal than the "funny" part. I'm pretty sure it's supposed to be funny because the main guy, Leslie Vernon, who looks like Sean William Scott without the muscles, clearly thinks he's being funny the whole time. Nice try dude.
Here are the 3 main problems I had:
1. The actress who plays the documentarian is pretty likable, she does a good job. But her character is an idiot, because she is making a documentary about a murderer planning some murders. Then at the end she is surprised when she finds out that he commits murders. You already hate this character about 5 minutes in and then you're supposed to sympathize with her when she catches up with common god damn sense at the end of the movie. That's a pretty big leap to expect your audience to take.
2. This schmuck could never be a killer in a real slasher movie. He's too small and normal looking. He doesn't have to be a hulk like Leatherface or later Jasons, but come on. He's much smaller than all the horror icons mentioned in the movie except for Chucky. There is a scene where he kills a fat cameraman with a backwards baseball hat (if you point out the cliches it doesn't count as a cliche) and I didn't believe it for a second. That dude would've beat the hell out of Leslie Vernon. At this point it has already been established that he has no supernatural powers, just smoke and mirrors, but the big guy runs from him. And you know, if they actually got a big scary guy, a Kane Hodder or a Muse Watson type, then it might actually be kind of funny to see him in his mundane home life and explaining his techniques. Especially if he had some fucked up Jason type face. That would be a good two minute skit maybe.
Also, I didn't really understand
the background behind the character. This is supposed to be him establishing
himself as a killer, right? But he keeps saying I usually do that
and this usually happens like he's been doing it for 25 years. Is
he already a killer or is he not, and if he is then why doesn't she asked
him about or look into his previous murders?
3. Haven't we already been through this meta-post-infra-modern slasher movie
bullshit, like, ten years ago? This one doesn't go much deeper into Slasher
Deconstruction for Beginners than SCREAM did, and it's not as funny or
scary as that one. Worst of all, I don't think they really know their horror
shit as much as they ought to if they're making a movie like this. SCREAM
made a big deal about the Final Girl (called Survivor Girl by these guys)
being a virgin, so this movie also makes a big deal about that. But is it
really even true?
I say no. Laurie in HALLOWEEN
is a prude compared to her friends, and Nancy in A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET
is sort of too. But do we even know for sure they're virgins? All that matters
is that they are not having sex at the time of the killing spree so they don't
set off their puritanical stalkers. But what about Sally in TEXAS CHAIN SAW,
how is she any more or less virginal than her friends? What about Stretch
in part 2? The heroine of CHILD'S PLAY (since they brought it up) is definitely
not a virgin, because she has a son. There are also moms as the heroes of
NIGHTMARE 5 and 7. No, virginity never had anything to do with it, SCREAM
made that up for dramatic purposes and these guys copied SCREAM's answers
on the test.
Although they don't use the Final Girl term from the classic slasher theory
book MEN, WOMEN AND CHAINSAWS by Catherine Clover, I do think these filmatists
might've read that book. Because they get into all the Freudian bullshit about
the weapon is phallic and such and such represents a womb, and they have Leslie
Vernon explain all this. And we're still supposed to be scared of him after
we've seen him talking like some reject from WAKING LIFE.
Also, that book talks about many of the Final Girls having masculine or unisex
names. I thought she was kind of stretching it with that one since most of
my favorites don't follow that (Nancy, Laurie, Sally) and she included "Laurie"
as a masculine name for some reason. SCREAM followed that rule by having a
Final Girl named Sidney. This one does it too, using the name Taylor, but
then goes reverse and gives the killer a really dumb sounding sissy name.
All the better to include in a dumb sounding (but not necessarily sissy) title.
There is one sign that the filmatists are true horror fans: they have an homage
to MANIAC by having this sissy-named killer copy that part where Joe Spinnell
cries, "I'm so happy!" But since this guy's not handcuffed to a
mannequin that he just stapled a human scalp to it just doesn't have the same
effect as in MANIAC.
To be fair, the execution is not as bad as you might expect. For digital video,
the photography and lighting and everything is pretty good. The score sounds
like a real horror movie during the real horror movie parts. But there is
shit in here that is amateur too. Like there's a scene where Robert Englund
comes out of nowhere, calls out Leslie Vernon's name and shoots him. After
Leslie escapes he gets excited and says "I think I have an Ahab!"
and then repeats variations on that for about two minutes. And of course the
audience figured out two minutes ago that Ahab is the guy who hunted Moby
Dick, so "an Ahab" in post-meta-deconstructed-reverse-slasher lingo
means a guy who hunts the killer. So then, long after you're sick of them
repeating this term, the idiot documentarian character says, "Okay, you're
gonna need to define what an Ahab is" and then he actually EXPLAINS IT,
as if to say "You - you there in the audience. You
are fucking stupid. Open your mouth so I can spoon feed you this wonderful
concept I made up about 'Ahab'."
And the thing is, Robert Englund's character isn't some kind of composite
character representing all sorts of slasher movies, he is just Dr. Loomis
from HALLOWEEN. Why? Because "the Ahab" is not really a common slasher
movie archetype. I suppose there is Dennis Hopper in CHAINSAW 2. There is
that stupid bounty hunter guy who showed up out of the blue in JASON GOES
TO HELL. But it is not a necessary part of the slasher formula, there is not
another iconic one besides Loomis. And Loomis just came from Van Helsing.
There are not enough "Ahabs" for there to be such a term as "Ahab."
If you're gonna do a movie that has nothing going for it except this stupid
deconstructing horror movies gimmick, then you better know your horror movies
inside and out. No cheating. This is cheating.
And by the way, if you expect it to deliver on the horror movie goods, like
the reviews claim, well, good luck with that one. There is almost no gore
in the movie and only the most basic special effects. I don't think that really
matters much, but I thought I should point it out since I checked some reviews
and some of them described it as "gorey." Simply not true.
I feel like kind of an asshole giving this movie a negative review, because
it's obviously a small little underdog of a movie. But the word on this one
has been so universally positive that somebody's gotta say it. I'm not drinking
the Kool-Aid, and I like Kool-Aid. Also Tang is pretty good. This
is an OSMOSIS JONES type of movie, the type of movie where after they thought
of the premise they should've realized, "nah, not good enough to make
a whole movie out of." Take my word for it: don't take their word for
it.
BELLY
I can't remember who recommended this picture to me. It's sort of a different take on the "hood movie." You know, the old "two friends, one more crazy than the other, get mixed up in urban crime but then they try to go straight but at least one of them dies at the end" movies like BOYZ N THE HOOD and MENACE 2: SOCIETY.
I gotta warn you, it's meandering and slow, sometimes amateurish, sometimes pretentious, and mostly humorless. But I still thought it was pretty fuckin good and I'll explain why. (that's what I do in these writings.)
First of all I gotta mention that this is the movie directing debut of Hype Williams, some famous music video director. What's unusual about him doing this movie is that instead of getting some hired gun gig doing a sequel or a shitty eddie murphy comedy or something, like most of them do, this guy wrote his own script, an attempt at a personal statement, and did it independently and on a low budget.
Also unlike many music video directors who come up with shitty half assed movies like ALL ABOUT THE BENJAMINS, the look of this movie is absolutely stunning. Really, it's one of the best looking movies I've seen in a while. I figured this Hype was obsessed with the visuals and not the storytelling (since that's where he needs the most work), but it doesn't sound like it on the commentary track. He credits the look to director of photography Malik Sayeed and some film processing thing called silver retention, which I believe Mr. Fincher used on SEVEN. And he complains that he cut out too much and it didn't make sense and he didn't put enough emotion into the movie. (which is true.)
Anyway whatever he did, this movie LOOKS fantastic. The quality of the photographicry and lighting is a step above what you get in most any movie. It just looks so vivid, like you're looking at the world closely for the first time.
I think this movie should be seen in the tradition of movies made by musicians who save up some money and then write a movie about themselves or their lifestyle. Examples include the Prince pictures, TOUGHER THAN LEATHER, and etc. It probaly shouldn't be compared to the Beatles pictures. Anyway if you see it in that light, it's pretty spectactular.
Now, I've seen some of these low budget crime pictures starring rappers. I kind of liked LOVE AND A BULLET but that's the only one I can think of that I actually sat through. I tried to watch RANDOM ACTS OF VIOLENCE from the same director, but I didn't get far. BELLY is different because although it has some of the same flaws (over explanatory narration poorly performed by a non-actor, to name one), the feel of it is so strong, you know right from the first shot that you're not only dealing with A REAL FUCKIN MOVIE, you're dealing with something a little more. The whole thing has a heightened reality, where it can seem highly stylized and documentary style at the same time. The acting styles (when they work) are naturalistic non-actor shit, like you get in BLACK AND WHITE or SLAM. But at the same time the look is out of this world. After a surreal shootout at a dance club (with strobe light and glowing green eyes) they go back to DMX's house, where the carpet and furniture are solid black and everything else is white. The whole house is like a giant painting. And then DMX plays GUMMO on his big screen tv and his buddies get all confused.
It made me wonder though, what if you bought some doritos or something, or you were wearing the wrong clothes. It would just look stupid in a black and white house. Or it would draw attention to itself. If you're standing there having a conversation with somebody, and you're both wearing all white, and you're holding a sandwich, your friend is gonna be staring at the sandwich the whole conversation. Unless the sandwich is painted black or white.
There are a couple of gun battles and car chases that have that adrenaline pumping, oh shit this is really happening chaos that I liked so much when Mr. Pink was on the run in RESERVOIR DOGS. These don't come off as thrilling action sequences, they come off as sudden explosions of violence. You don't enjoy them.
And as soon as you think you've figured this picture out, DMX goes to Jamaica. The real Jamaica. The footage is great and there are some exotic characters there, straight out of a Luc Besson picture. There is a guy with a blond mowhawk with white feathers carefully attached. He gets shot though, too bad.
His Jamaican connection is a legendary drug lord named Ox. I'm not sure if the actor was really Jamaican but if not he is incredible. This guy is a classic character, very menacing and likable, you kind of want to hang out and watch soccer with him in his living room to find out what kind of crazy shit he'll tell you. One thing though: you can't understand half the shit he says. The accent and slang are impenetrable, like Lee Scratch Perry or somebody. A couple times DMX even says, "Say again?" You get the idea he's pretending he understands him even when he doesn't, which is probaly what I'd do too. Anyway I've seen about ten thousand fake ass "yeah mon" Jamaicans in movies, thank god this Hype Williams finally gave us a real one.
DMX is great too. He does a nice poem at the beginning and end, otherwise I couldn't tell you anything about his music. But the guy has a real presence and seems like a natural actor. I mean he stole EXIT WOUNDS right out from under Steven Seagal, that tells you something. Well, it doesn't tell you much. But Morris Chestnut couldn't do it in UNDER SIEGE 2, and he's a real actor.
By the way here's a tangent about this rapper versus actor business. Samuel L. Jackson never said he didn't want to act with rappers. He actually likes the rap singers. What he said was he didn't want to accept roles in movies that were just vehicles for a rapper to act in, or any other celebrity non-actor who gets to star in a movie just because they're famous. His view is that an actor has to work hard to get those roles and it's not fair for some fuckin tennis star or tv chef to take those roles just because they can. He probaly wouldn't've done CROCODILE HUNTER either.
I have heard people say they don't watch movies with rappers in them, and that's just retarded. First of all you got a couple rappers who are good actors, like Ice Cube and Will Smith (in ALI only). Second of all, how come it's not okay for rappers to jump right into movies, but it's okay for comedians? Eddie Murphy, Richard Pryor, Tim Allen, Bill Murray, Michael Keaton, Steve Martin, Michael Meyers, Robin Williams, Adam Sandler, Kevin Spacey... nobody complains when these jokers make movies, but they started out standing on a stage telling jokes. Well, maybe people complain when they make movies, but not because they didn't start out as actors.
But anyway back to the movie though. DMX is good. A guy called Nas is actually the main character, and he's okay. The actual filmatistic language is easy to follow, it's not that quick cut shit you expect from MTV guys. But Mr. Williams still needs to learn to tell a story. You don't really get to know the characters very well, too much is explained with narration instead of shown, and the story doesn't have enough focus or flow to get you very involved in what happens to these dudes.
BUT, this is a real interesting debut. Next time this guy directs a movie I'll see it right away, instead of dicking around for four years without renting the dvd.
p.s. I have no fuckin clue why it's called BELLY. My best guess is something about "belly of the beast" but I couldn't tell you why.
THE
BEOWULF 3-D IMAX EXPERIENCE
BEOWULF is the new "motion
capture" weirdly computerized sword and sandal 3-D movie from Robert
Zemeckis. He's using the same technology and directational style as POLAR
EXPRESS but it will go over better because that one was for kids, this one
has a bunch of stabbings and monsters and a part where Virtual Angelina Jolie
gives a handjob to a sword, so that means it's more sophisticated and adult.
Ray iWinstone voices the blonde he-man of the title. Anthony Hopkins 2.0 plays
the old king, Robin Wright Penn's likeness plays the princess from the fuckin
Shrek movies, and John Pac-Mankovich does his usual distractingly weird performance
as some asshole who is pissed off about something or other. Also you got Crispin
Glover inhabiting the monster Grendel and a very good computerized duplicate
of Angelina Jolie's head as Grendel's hot mom.
I guess they ran out
of comic books and '70s horror movies to remake, so this one is based on an
epic poem from 700 AD. All I knew was a dude named Beowulf fights a monster
named Grendel, so it was a fresh new story for me. But some 1300 year olds
might say it's raping their childhood, because apparently co-screenwriters
British-guy and Pulp-Fiction-guy-besides-Tarantino throw in a pretty big reinterpretation.
In this one the king fucked Grendel's mom (take that Grendel!) and in fact
is Grendel's dad. And Beowulf fucked Grendel's mom too (ooh, snap!) and the
dragon he fights at the end is his son. Ha ha, your son is a dragon!
The weird thing is that this modernization of the ancient poem actually makes
it more politically incorrect. I mean, that shit is fucked up. The
whole story is about some dudes going to a cave and fucking a demon and then
lying about it and killing their own poor bastard sons. On the surface they
seem like fairly noble kings, but their way of absolving themselves of their
past sins is to murder their own children. King Anthony Hopkins could've solved
this whole problem if he would've bought Grendel some ear muffs and let him
hang out at the castle. I know he's a fucked up Elepehant Man looking giant
with no genitals who likes to bite people's heads off and hates merrymaking,
but I'm sure if you get to know him he's pretty cool.
The main villain is Angelina Jolie Robot as Grendel's Mom (or "Beowulf's
Baby Mama" I believe they call her in the credits) and her brand of evil
is to look real sexy and lure people in to fuck her. I'm not sure how it works
because you can see that she has no vagina, but I guess they figured something
out. Admittedly she does fly down to the hall and kill a bunch of dudes Predator
style, but that's only after they murdered her retarded son. She's like Pamela
Voorhees without the sweater. Anyway, the emphasis is definitely on "oh
jeez, she's so hot, how can I not fuck her?" The ol' male fear of female
sexuality. And the fear of the consequences of sex, and the responsibility
of fatherhood. They cannot turn down the magical golden cave pussy, but then
they're ashamed of the sons it creates. I guess politicians have always been
the same.
You know now that I think about it the main villain is not the king's baby
mama, it's the king's johnson. In fact, that would be a good title for the
movie, THE KINGS JOHNSON. No apostrophe because there are two kings, it's
a double meaning. They would have to rename him Beowulf Johnson though for
it to really work.
Actually I read on wikipedia that the manuscript of the original poem is not
titled, it just has become known as BEOWULF. So in my opinion it was always
meant to be called THE KINGS JOHNSON.
The Kings Johnson only think with their johnsons. The Queen (Robin Wright
Penn OSX) seems like she's supposed to be really nice and loving, but she
gets passed on to Beowulf like property, and then he sleeps with some younger
girl anyway. I mean he used to go around on adventures fucking mermaids and
shit, so that's the lifestyle he knows. If this whole thing was gonna turn
out less tragic, one of these King Johnsons needed to man up and have a more
mature relationship with his woman. The Anthony Hopkins King Johnson should've
done the right thing and married Grendel's Mom and helped her raise Grendel
into a more respectful young man with more self esteem. I'm sure Grendel's
Mom would've settle down a little if she got married. She's a smart lady and
ahead of her time, she invented stiletto heels you know. I don't think she
could've breast fed Grendel though, unfortunately. That might be part of the
problem with that boy.
Before I go on, I gotta say, you should go see this movie in 3-D right now.
I can't vouch for the digitally projected 3-D they are using in some theaters,
but the Imax version is great. It's a fun movie but the 3-D and the Imax sound
is half of the experience. On video the stupid idea of using computerized
dummies instead of human beings will be much more distracting.
See, here's how the movie is made. It would be nearly impossible to film Anthony
Hopkins making a speech in live action, so instead they have him make the
speech while wearing specially designed scuba gear and with hundreds of little
dots glued on to his face, and then they spend two or three years having a
team of computer scientists create a multi-million dollar computerized simulation
of him standing there making a speech. Through this miracle of technology
he looks like rubber but he's wearing a robe and not scuba gear! There is
no trace of the scuba gear at all! Amazing! I don't know how people even made
movies before this was invented, must've been a huge pain in the ass.
So now the movie has some of the subtlety of an Anthony Hopkins acting performance,
but with the not-being-real of animation. So it's part of the best of one
out of two of both worlds. This technology was also a good way to get Angelina
Jolie to appear completely nude, although the technology is apparently not
good enough yet to give her nipples or a vagina.
Like with POLAR EXPRESS, I sort of got a kick out of the creepy stiltedness
of this completely misguided approach to animation. It's a good novelty, like
those Thunderbirds puppets they used to have. But I know that's not what they're
going for, so I don't know what the fuck they're thinking making a movie this
way. I love what Zemeckis does with the camera, constantly flying up to a
God's eye view, pulling back from the hall into the rafters, into the sky,
into the clouds, and into Grendel's cave for a closeup of the back of his
fucked up head, all in one shot. Or the way in POLAR EXPRESS he followed a
girl's ticket as it flew out of the window of the train, got captured by a
bird, trampled by wolves and fell off a cliff back into the train.
But is that camerawork really a good trade off for having characters that
are an abomination against God? Yes, they've improved it since POLAR EXPRESS
but it's still distracting as hell. John Malkovich still looks like he's either
blind or not looking in the right place. Most of the characters have realistic
heads and weirdly stubby, blobby bodies. Even the horses look kind of like
dwarves. (Guess they couldn't get a horse into scuba gear.) There's a crowd
scene that really creeped me out, because it's so obvious that nobody in the
crowd is really standing in the same place or looking at the same thing and
nobody knows how to create a realistic standing-watching-a-guy posture. And
things are always dropping or being carried or flying through the air with
no sense of weight at all. How hard is it to just flip an actual gold coin?
I guess it's some of the same problems you have with live action movies these
days, since so much is done with green screens. But what about the hair? When
the characters are talking to each other should I really be ignoring what
they're saying and thinking they must have a hell of a conditioner in
700 AD to give their warriors such perfect, doll-like hair?
But I don't know, maybe that was how they described it in the poem.
Also, I'm not entirely convinced that you can't do shots like that in a live
action movie with effects. Yes, it would be hard and require alot of computers,
but I think you could do it, and probaly for cheaper. I mean, Peter Jackson
did shots like that in LORD OF THE RINGS, following the moth around. The only
differences are 1. Peter Jackson had to plan it before shooting it, instead
of letting the effects people figure it out later and 2. it's not as distracting
and creepy.
So BEOWULF is a crazy and
misguided movie, but it's also a fun time. I enjoyed it. There's alot of good
spectacle here. Beowulf tells a story where he fights a bunch of sea monsters
and it's pretty crazy, he's stabbing their giant eyes with his sword. The
most hilarious shot in the movie is him tearing out from inside a giant monster
eyeball, then puffing out his chest and yelling "I. AM. BEOWULF!!!"
Top that, 300. It's gotta be one of the most violent PG-13 movies ever made,
but they shoulda gone for rated-R just for the sake of nudity. Not just because
of Angelinabot's Barbie anatomy, but because Beowulf fights Grendel butt naked,
and there's no way to take it totally seriously when they keep using conveniently
placed objects to cover him up. Obviously Zemeckis didn't see EASTERN PROMISES.
That's how it's done, fella.
The best part of the movie is Grendel. I expected a big mean monster, but
you immediately feel sorry for this guy. He's giant but he's pathetic, he's
a fucked up Elephant Man looking motherfucker with parts of his insides exposed,
weird bumps and slime and scales all over him. He has super-sensitive hearing
so the loud noises make him flip out, and he's screaming and crying the whole
time he's attacking. The design of him is blobbier and cartoonier than he
oughta be but it's still a great monster because you get the tragedy just
looking at him. Poor guy, it looks like it hurts just to be alive. Plus he
still lives with his mom. And she's always bringing new boyfriends to the
cave. Not fun.
And I think Zemeckis, despite all the shit I'm giving him about this stupid
process, is doing alot of cool stuff with it. I like his storytelling. I love
the scene where Grendel comes back up to the cave and his mother is talking
to him, and the whole scene is from the point of view of the mom, coming up
out of the lake, one of those killer's-eye-view shots like in horror movies.
But then at one point a 3-D tentacle comes out from behind the camera and
caresses Grendel's deformed face. Pamela Voorhees never did that.
In fact, I think this movie is gonna give more kids nightmares then any other
in recent years. Poor fucked up fifteen foot deformed naked man kicking the
door down, running around screaming like he's on a speed binge, tearing people
in half, biting people's heads off, impaling them on chandeliers, carrying
their limp dead bodies up to a cave so his mom can fuck em. Grendel will be
the WIZARD OF OZ flying monkeys of 2007.
So maybe it's not a great movie, but it's a good theme park ride. I think I might go on it again.
UPDATE: I did go on it again, and I can now vouch for the Real-D digital 3-D version. Looks like the digital projecting technology is finally catching up with the hype. It looks real nice, quite possibly a little clearer than the Imax version and for me it had less ghosting. I still prefer the giant screen and the sound system of the Imax though. But either way if you can see it in 3-D it's gonna look good. Also I thought of another alternate title for it: CAVES WITH BENEFITS.
BEYOND THE MAT
Now to be honest I am not usually the type of dude to go to the documentarian type pictures. In fact, I never even seen one before in my life unless you count watching the news on TV. But this Beyond the Mat was playing at one of the multiplexes in my area so I decided to broaden my horizons and what not. Turns out there were a few others trying to broaden their horizons, because this was the type of crowd that yells "YEEEEEEAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!" when the Freddy claws pop out of the guy in the X-Man preview, and who randomly yell out little jokes from the south park cartoons, you know, to be funny.
This is a documentary about the real lives of professional wrestlers, and I will tell you straight off the bat this movie is great even for those of us who don't watch wrestling or south park. I mean I like the Roddy Piper pictures as much as the next guy, I've watched a little grapple here and there, but I don't know what the fuck a mankind is or the rock or whatever. I mean who knows. It doesn't matter.
Right at the beginning the movie explains yes, wrestling is fake, no, wrestling fans don't think it's real. But then it goes on to show just how devastating this "fake" sport is on a man's body and in some cases his soul. It is a business that even more than football or prostitution chews up your body and when you're old spits you out like a loogie never to think about you again. Because I mean think about it, how long do you think about a loogie after you spit it out, not very long.
There are about four major storylines in this movie. One is about Mick Foley who I guess wrestles as Mankind, Dude Love and Cactus Jack. But in this movie he's a normal chubby guy who lives with his wife and adorable daughter and son. He is very nice and even normal and he always dreamed of being a wrestler. But it scares his family to always see him drenched from head to toe in his own blood after a match, saying, "Daddy's okay, daddy's okay, don't worry about daddy."
Another storyline is about the legendary Texan wrestler Terry Funk, whose knees are barely functional. He continues to wrestle while his family believes he should have retired 5-10 years ago. When we first meet him he groggily wakes up in his underwear, then stares at himself in the mirror looking like the saddest motherfucker that ever lived. He's got that old problem that many in my own former occupation feel, which has been summed up in Hollywood cop movies as "we're getting too old for this shit." I mean you know you're losing your touch, you're getting slower, your leg is probaly gonna fall off next time you try to knee drop a guy but you just can't stop. Throughout the movie we get to see Terry struggle with whether or not to retire.
But the saddest storyline by far is about Jake "The Snake" Roberts. I remember this motherfucker, he was skinny and plain for a wrestler, but he was a superstar because he had a cold look in his eye, he brought a boa constrictor into the ring and he brought Alice Cooper with him when he wrestled in front of like 90,000 people at a wrestlemania. Well that was in the '80s, now Jake is living in crappy hotels, addicted to crack, performing for some independent league in front of a few dedicated fans. He is much scarier looking now, his face wrinkled, belly bloated, voice gravely, body sheathed in a leather trenchcoat and his eyes giving a pretty good indication of how much horror he's seen in his life.
Part of Jake's problem is his past as a wrestling superstar. He says that in the days when he had to wrestle every day, board 8-9 planes a week, it was impossible to function without sleeping pills and cocaine. He also became addicted to sex with groupies which he makes sound a lot less pleasant than I might make it.
But the real demons haunting Jake were there before the wrestling. Turns out this motherfucker has a backstory like Freddy Krueger or somebody out of one of my prison stories. He was conceived when his father raped a sleeping 13 year old. His father was a wrestler who treated him like shit, he got into wrestling not out of a passion for the Art but to prove he could do it better than his father. Well he pulled that one off, but he's doing no better in the fathering ring, which you will see in a heartbreaking reunion with his neglected, angry daughter.
What's great about this movie is that it's about these guys in these ridiculous outfits doing this silly theatrics and what not, but it's full of genuine emotion. I dare you motherfuckers to not be affected by Jake's visit to his father's house, or the scene they've been showing clips of to promote the movie, where Mick Foley's family cries as he is bashed over the head with a steel chair, and the wrestling fans around them look at them like, "What the fuck?"
There is even some sweetness in there. Mick Foley wonders if the crowd got their money's worth as he looks in the mirror at a huge, dripping gash in his head. As he lays on the ground, medics wrapping bandages around his freshly stitched head, his daughter says "Daddy looks cute."
All of the people in this movie are fascinating, even the people that just make cameos. I wanted to see more of Jake and Mick and Terry. I wanted to find out more about Koko B. Ware, this flamboyant black dude who used to be on top but still tries to stay upbeat in his tiny hotel room putting on a sequin jacket and talking about his parrot Franky like he's a person.
I also wanted to see more of the sleazy guys. Vince McMahon, the billionaire owner of the WWF, made me laugh as he tries to pump up a guy who he's hiring just for his ability to puke, or casually insults the wrestling skills of two auditioning newcomers. But later he is shirtless and blood drenched like the rest of them, because he too has the need to perform.
The character I most want to see more of though is this weasely fat dude who runs a small wrestling school. You know who he looks like, tony clifton from last year's big wrestling picture the man on the moon. He's got this gigantic belly and he tells two musclemen they need to watch their diets and stay away from the jack in the box. Later he laments that one of his wrestlers is "too big to be a flyer, but to small to be a heavyweight." It looks like a tear is about to come out of his eye even as he rolls a toothpick around in his mouth. I mean this motherfucker is hilarious.
This is not a documentary about how wrestling is done. It does not answer any of the big questions, like if Jake the Snake is holed up in the Ramada then where the fuck does he keep that boa constrictor. What it is is a brief and amazing glimpse into what it's like to be a regular guy who willingly destroys his own bones and muscles for a living.
Here's a John Carpenter movie I somehow never reviewed before. Kurt Russell plays Jack Burton, a loudmouthed truck driver who stops in Chinatown to gamble with an old buddy, and ends up stuck in the middle of a gang war, an ancient prophecy, magic powers, monsters, etc.
The opening scene of the movie is classic. It fades in on Egg Shen, the driver of a tour bus in Chinatown, being interviewed by a lawyer about "what happened." We know that something big and crazy happened, that a whole block erupted into "green flames," and that people want to know where "Jack Burton and his truck" are. Shen admits that he believes in Chinese black magic and when the lawyer asks why he should believe in it Shen holds up his hands and shoots bolts of green lightning between them. "See?" he says. "That was nothing. But that's how it always begins. Very small." Then it cuts to a shot of a truck as the opening credits begin, and you realize "okay, a truck. This must be that Jack Burton they were so concerned about." Classic!
So I was kind of surprised to learn from the commentary track that the scene was a concession to the studio. Barry Diller, chairman and CEO of Fox at the time, demanded and helped write the scene to make Jack Burton seem "more heroic." Which is kind of going against the whole joke of the movie that he's the main character but not exactly the hero. His buddy Wang (Dennis Dun) is smaller than him and seems like the sidekick, but is actually far more capable than him. This is probaly Carpenter's most overtly comedic movie and that idea of this blowhard thinking he's the reluctant hero when he's actually not doing much is where alot of the laughs come from. For example during one of the big fights he fires his gun in the air causing a piece of the ceiling to break off, fall on his head and knock him out while the others do battle. Later he confidently pulls out a knife and you think "How does he know how to throw knives?" but then he throws it and in fact he doesn't know how - it flops through the air and bounces off a gong.
And come to think of it, his adventures don't begin "very small" either. Unless you consider gangsters kidnapping Wang's girlfriend at the airport and luring them into a gun, sword and magic battle with people flying around shooting lightning to be "very small." So I guess I can see how that opening scene doesn't fit. I still think it's a badass way to start the movie, though.
I've watched this movie many times since the '80s and I've always enjoyed it, but I gotta admit it's not as streamlined as the better John Carpenter pictures. In the middle section it gets pretty repetitive and hung up in that '80s adventure movie thing where the characters have to climb around through an ancient underground structure with secret passages, traps and chutes (at least this one doesn't look like a waterslide like they usually do). One way Carpenter makes it stand out from the other movies of this type though is the great special effects for the occasional monster or weird transformation. There's a part where a guy puffs himself up like a balloon that looks pretty amazing, and even more impressive is when the villain Lo Pan glows from inside his head - I'm not even sure how they did that. And it also stands out by not treating these supernatural acts with any reverance. Whenever Jack sees another impossible sight he gets pissed off and starts ranting about it. When they face off with a big levitating ball of flesh covered in eyes called a "Guardian" Jack shoots it in the nose and says "You never know until you try."
I also gotta admit it's kind of a throwback to the racist days of Fu-Man Chu and Charlie Chan and Dragon Ladies and Opium Dens, the Exotic Mysteries of the Orient and What Have You. But I don't know, I'd be interested to know what any of my readers of Chinese descent think of it. It does have the spooky old creep with long fingernails doing magic, but the rest of the bad guys are all pretty badass. And it's got the lovable old Egg Shen who's definitely a stereotype, but the rest of the good guys are more down to earth.
There's better martial arts than your usual American movie of the time. The Three Storms, with their giant shinobi hats and wire-fu floating powers, seem like something out of an authentic martial arts film more than an American studio film. That said, it's not like a great Shaw Brothers movie or something. That stuff is more like background mayhem for the real attraction, which is Jack Burton.
For Snake Plissken Russell seemed to be channeling Clint Eastwood, Jack Burton talks a little more like John Wayne. But he's much more of an egomaniac and a doofus than Wayne ever played. It's a really funny character, so not surprisingly fans still dream of a sequel. The only problem is that not only is Jack reluctant, he's not very effective. So it's not like if there was some new problem that came up they would need his help. I just learned that they did come close to making a sequel in '95, but it would've been a TV movie, and skimming through the script it looks like they didn't even include the character of Jack! I'm not sure why anybody would want to see that.
The out of print DVD from Anchor Bay is a good one because it has a funny commentary track with both Carpenter and Russell. Russell sure laughs alot. This is the one where Russell goes off on a long tangent about his son's hockey team before suddenly remembering that he's doing a commentary track and that people might not be interested in that. The DVD also has a hilarious music video for the theme song - hilarious because it shows John Carpenter himself singing and rocking out. His bandmates in The Coup De Villes are Tommy Lee Wallace (writer/director of HALLOWEEN III and VAMPIRES: LOS MUERTOS) and Nick Castle (the original Michael Meyers and director of THE LAST STARFIGHTER). I do not recommend watching this movie when you're sick like I did though, because having that song looped all night in your fever dreams is worse than when the same thing happened to me with the ROCKY theme. Under normal health conditions though this is a goofy but worthwhile viewing experience.
4/7/08
BIRTH
Imagine you're Nicole Kidman (well, a character played by Nicole Kidman) and
your husband died ten years ago. (Not Tom Cruise or the country singer guy
she's with or whoever, I am talking about a fictional character played by
Nicole Kidman). You're still sort of getting over this but your boyfriend
(the head vampire from 30 DAYS OF NIGHT [but not a vampire, just the same
actor]) has proposed to you and you think you're finally ready and you're
gonna make this work.
And then a 10 year old boy (the kid from X-Men 3 [playing a different character
{I think I will stop mentioning what other movies they've been in}]) shows
up at your apartment and tells you that he's your dead husband Sean. Hopefully
this hasn't happened to most of you, so just try to imagine what it would
be like.
At first you might laugh it off and not want to embarrass the poor kid, he
may be emotionally fragile or something. But he keeps showing up and seems
to know things. So you go to his parents to tell them to do something about
it. And they yell at him but he refuses to say he'll leave you (Nicole) alone.
And then he faints.
So then you feel sorry for him again and invite him over so your family can
quiz him and sort of prove to him that he's not who he says he is. But he
keeps passing all the tests.
I mean what the fuck are you gonna do? Is this an uncomfortable situation
or what? Aren't you gonna get creeped out? Not that you are gonna believe
this kid is your dead husband reincarnated, but what would possess a kid to
pull some shit like this? And how could he do such a good job? I mean jesus.
The rational explanation is actually scarier than the supernatural one.
Shit, even if he thought he was your LIVING husband that would be creepy.
Or if he thought he was your cousin Jeffrey. Or your former co-worker from
when you drove a delivery truck. I don't care who he thinks he is, a little
boy following you around making spurious claims is fucked up. I'm against
it.
When I saw this premise explained in the trailer for BIRTH I thought it was
about the most asinine thing I ever heard of. But when I saw it unfold on
screen in the actual movie, I thought it was absolutely brilliant. This is
a completely original and beautifully directed thriller that haunts you for
days. It haunts you like a little kid who thinks he's your dead husband.
And this is definitely a song in the key of Kubrick. Almost as if the director,
Jonathan Glazer, has shown up at your penthouse apartment claiming to be your
dead favorite director. And he knows things only your dead favorite director
would know, like how to open a movie with an awesome tracking shot of a guy
jogging through snow forever until he suddenly collapses and dies. I guess
since Nicole Kidman is in there, and it's this antiseptic world of rich New
Yorkers, you definitely think of EYES WIDE SHUT. But the whole movie feels
like Kubrick in general - the use of classical music, the deliberate pacing,
the serious tone with just a hint of dark humor in its uncomfortableness,
the confidence to tell a story you've never seen in a movie before, and to
leave the audience never sure where the hell this is all going.
It doesn't look or sound like a normal thriller and it never turns into one. It wraps things up with inevitability instead of a crazy twist. It leaves enough ambiguity that you might question your conclusions about what happened. And it asks you some uncomfortable questions, like what if the love of your life really did die and come back in a different body, should you be with them again? Or was it not meant to be? And aren't you glad this isn't gonna come up? And it gets even worse because for poor Nicole it not only pours salt on her old emotional wounds, it brings up secrets that she didn't know about and probaly shouldn't have. So mostly the movie leaves you feeling for Nicole Kidman's character. It's more emotional than your standard Morgan Freeman/Ashley Judd type thriller.
I recommend everybody check
this movie out but afterwards, under no circumstances should you read what
the chuckleheads on the IMDb message boards are saying about it. I mean I'm
used to disagreeing with people on the internet but reading that this great
movie is the worst movie somebody ever saw is a shitty way to come down from
the high of discovering an amazing under-the-radar movie like this.
BLACK AND BLUE: LEGENDS OF THE HIP HOP COP
I don't know if you ever saw that Nick Broomfield documentary BIGGIE AND TUPAC. It's a pretty good one, but I mention it because it had this one part that kind of threw me off. At one point in the narration, Broomfield claims that the government had Tupac under surveillance. It seemed believable, but the movie doesn't back it up or mention it again and I've never seen it explored since then. I just wondered if this was true why the documentary didn't explore it at all. I mean that seems like a pretty big story to me.
This movie is not exactly that story, but almost. It's about a special task force of the NYPD set up specifically to spy on famous rappers. At first the movie kind of seems like it's full of shit. They interview various A-list and B-list rappers who sort of brag about getting harassed by cops. In particular I noticed there was a white dude named Pitbull who bragged that "the hip hop cops" must be following him, he bets, in his opinion. I almost turned the movie off at this point figuring this was going to be the level of documentation they were willing to settle for. Some dumbass white rapper you never heard of claiming that MAYBE people are spying on him. Not because he has noticed being spied on, but because he's fuckin PITBULL, man. Why wouldn't they spy on him?
But then right away the movie actually proves that it's not full of shit. They talk to some journalists in Miami who were the first to prove the existence of the long rumored "hip hop cops." It started with a reporter who did a profile on some local rapper, and later she received a letter from the police department asking for contact information on this rapper, and the letter specifically stated that it was for a database the Miami Police Department was keeping on rappers. The reporter was smart enough to realize there was a story there and investigated until she uncovered that the Miami rap squad had been trained by the long-rumored-but-never-before-proven-to-exist task force in New York. And specifically she found a retired cop named Derrick Parker who had started the task force. Apparently the NYPD still hasn't officially admitted to its existence, but Parker and other retired cops tell all about it. None of them think there's anything wrong with the task force so they're pretty open about it.
Most of the movie is interviews with Parker himself, and he's an interesting character. He likes rap music and had schmoozed with many rappers, even tried to have a musical career at one point. But as a second generation cop he decided to parlay this interest into spying on and harassing his favorite rappers. After Notorious BIG was murdered the police decided to pay more attention to what's going on with these rappers. Seems reasonable enough, but it quickly went from trying to learn more to a kind of COINTELPRO type vibe.
Parker tried to keep tabs on every rapper in New York and compiled a fat ass binder with photos, addresses, acquaintances, social security numbers, associated vehicles, criminal record, etc. They put rappers under surveillance, you know, to learn about their culture. There are people in this thing like Wyclef and Missy Elliot. People who are probaly not gonna be shooting up the joint, in my opinion. In fact I am pretty sure there is a 400% higher chance of either one of them starring in a sitcom or doing a voice for a cartoon animal than shooting, stabbing or karate chopping a motherfucker.
My favorite part of the movie is when Parker agrees to meet with a representative from the ACLU. He gives a half-assed defense of the program, pointing out that all of the people have a criminal record. (I don't think this is actually true, they mention that Missy Elliot doesn't have a record.) He can't explain though why this means they should be perpetually under suspicion or spied on at the airport or why there's a binder on all the rappers but not on, say, CEOs of corrupt corporations. He starts to say that rappers should be investigated because of their lyrics, but catches himself and backs off. Then he tells a story about some rappers being harassed because of a song about Giuliani, but can't seem to understand why the ACLU guy doesn't like that story.
It never rises to the level of great documentary, but it's an interesting subject and main character. It's not the direct cinema style I prefer, it's all interviews, but they find some creative ways to do it. Like when they let famous rappers flip through the binder and laugh at their files. John Lennon never got to do that. They definitely could have gone deeper into the subject, but it's better than you might expect from this type of straight to video release. This is produced by Quincy Jones the third, who has done a whole series of these hip hop related half ass documentaries.
Unfortunately the movie has a bummer of an ending. But before I describe it let me tell you a story. One day I was headed home on a crowded bus, and there was a young dude and a middle aged woman who apparently lived in the same apartments, having a loud conversation about their landlord. Yeah, look out for him. He was supposed to fix the heater and he kept not fixing it. Then he went into my apartment when I wasn't home and some of my money was missing. He keeps knocking on my door at 11 at night asking for money. Can you believe that? He came into my apartment without knocking. Yeah, he does that to me all the time. That guy creeps me out. etc. etc.
The conversation got more interesting when a third guy suddenly interjected. He said "If I found out one of my managers was doing that, I would fire his ass."
The other two said yeah, and continued with the anecdotes of what horrible things this landlord supposedly keeps doing to them.
"Seriously," says the third guy. "I'm a supervisor for apartment managers, that's my job. If this guy is doing what you're saying, it's completely illegal and I would never let him get away with it. You need to report him so he can't do that anymore."
And he starts telling them exactly what they need to do, who they need to talk to in order to stop this injustice and be treated fairly under the law and that kind of thing. I couldn't believe it. What are the chances you're gonna be in a bad situation and talking shit about it on a bus and happen to be overheard by a concerned person in a position to do something about it? It was amazing. I couldn't believe their luck.
And they said I know, totally, this guy is so shady, and just complained more about the shit the guy did. They didn't even acknowledge what the guy was saying. And they kept talking about it as they got off at their stop. They were totally oblivious. They just wanted to top each other's stories of a bad living situation and show off on the bus about how they live on the edge and what not. They had no interest in making it better.
BLACK AND BLUE ends with that same type of bummer. The narrator (who by the way is Saul Williams, the great poet and star of SLAM) tells us that the ACLU is filing a lawsuit against the NYPD over this task force. But he says not to expect many rappers to help out. Then they go back to the interviews with all the rap stars they've shown throughout the movie, and they all back down like petty punk bitches and say how well I'm really not a lawsuit kind of guy and nah I really wouldn't want to mess with that and you know, it's hard out here for a rapper and the man is always gonna keep me down so I'm used to it and I can't really do anything anyway because I'm busy this week polishing my custom made ten million dollar car made out of diamonds that only runs on rare sheep clone blood.
It's even mentioned as a possibility that maybe these dipshits WANT to be able to say they're spied on, for bragging rights. (see: Pitbull.) It makes them cool to have their civil liberties violated (or in the case of Pitbull, to pretend maybe their civil liberties are being violated.)
These are people who make a ridiculous living by bragging about how tough they are, how unstoppable they are, how no motherfucker better fuck with them. But they let this chubby balding dude who used to know Heavy D fuck them left and right. What was that line Jay-Z said? "You know the type, loud as a motorbike, but couldn't crush a grape in a food fight"? I challenge you fuckers to challenge this bullshit. You can't sit around dusting your jewelry and drinking out of pimp cups all day letting Al Sharpton and Russell Simmons do all the important work. I mean come on rappers. Get it together. Take a stand. If nobody does it I'm taking your movie acting priveleges away.
BLACK BOOK (ZWARTBOEK)
Paul Verhoeven has always been one of the top weirdo-pervert directors in my book. (Literally - in my book 5 On the Outside I had a review of THE HOLLOW MAN in chapter 9, "WEIRDOS, CREEPS & PERVERTS.") Less pedophilic and more of a crowdpleaser than your Larry Clark, Verhoeven is a true original. Even making a studio movie about a cyborg he manages to tell a story with a strong point-of-view about the state of the world. Throughout his years in Hollywood, Verhoeven made many great popcorn movies that outrageously pushed the envelope of violence and sex and sneakily snuck in some subversive politics. And that's pretty much my favorite type of movie in the world is one that does that. It's like some poor sucker buys a box of Mike and Ike's and doesn't realize somebody tossed a couple MATRIX red pills in there.
But hot damn, I didn't expect a movie this good out of him at this date. I'm a ROBOCOP man, I'm a STARSHIP TROOPERS man, a TOTAL RECALL man, even to a certain extent the world's only HOLLOW MAN man. But I'm ignorant of his pre-robots and spaceships period in his native Netherlands, I've never even seen SOLDIER OF ORANGE (which this is I guess a companion piece to). So I didn't know what to expect when Verhoeven packed his bags and went back to the motherland for an expensive by their standards thriller set in the last throes of World War II. The movie he made came out officially in 2006, but since it's a new release here it's an early favorite for my BEST GOD DAMN MOVIE OF 2007.
BLACK BOOK is the story of Rachel Stein, a fictional Jewish singer in the Netherlands trying to cross over into the safety of Allied territory. Her plan goes south, but she ends up joining the Resistance and changing her name to Ellis. Throughout the movie she is involved in many adventures and ordeals, but her primary mission involves going undercover as an employee and lover of a Gestapo leader she met on a train, a guy named Muntze. Her friend tells her what a bastard this guy is, but on the train he had seemed kind of charming, and showed her his stamp collection. "And such a man collects stamps," she says, curiously.
And most of the characters in the movie are filled with those kinds of contradictions. The main theme of the movie is that even in a situation like this, The Last Great War, nobody is 100% good guy or bad guy. Even the most appalling character in the movie, the bastard who killed Rachel's family, is shown to be human in a disgusting sort of way (we see him drunk and naked after sex, taking a piss and then trying to grope Rachel without washing his hands). And it becomes clear that you shouldn't trust most of the people even on your own side. Some of them really try to follow their own code and not lose their humanity in fighting the Nazis, but they screw up. Others appear to have those same morals, but are really traitors. Rachel's SS boss and lover sometimes does the right thing by trying to "negotiate with terrorists," so his side turns on him. Rachel's side misunderstands what she does and turns on her. After the war, many of the victims, understandably and disappointingly, start doing appalling shit to people, just like their enemies.
All this we see through the eyes of Rachel, a perfect performance by the gorgeous Verhoevien beauty Carice van Houten. She starts out looking almost regular by Verhoeven standards, but once she has to bleach her hair (yes, including her pubic hair, way to go Verhoeven) and cleans up she turns into a tough as hell version of a Naomi Watts type. Let's be honest, she is sort of a James Bond type super hero. She performs this dangerous mission fearlessly, almost seeming to enjoy it. She knows how to use her sexuality as a weapon and still seem ladylike. Plus, van Houten really does the singing, in both German and English. One scene that sums up her super powers is the one where she has to sing German songs at an Adolph Hitler birthday party. While she's singing this fat Nazi asshole who she despises comes up behind her and starts doing a whistling solo. But she doesn't flinch, she plays her part and smiles at this ugly fucker like he's Cary Grant. Which would be hard to do even if she hadn't just busted open a passage to the boiler room so her comrades could, at that very moment, break into the headquarters and rescue the hostages locked up downstairs.
It's interesting because supposedly Verhoeven and his co-writer worked on this for 15 years, but never could get it to work until they realized they should switch their hero to a heroine. I don't get it because I can't imagine how this story could've been told with a dude. And that dude sure wouldn't have been as good of a character as Rachel.
This isn't gonna be a huge mainstream hit in the US. For that it would have to be really bad and star Will Ferrell or Nicolas Cage, which I would be against for this particular movie. This one's mostly not in English and it's almost 2 1/2 hours long. If you're one of these people who gets mad every time a movie has the audacity to take the time to tell a big story then by all means, stay home and flip the channels around while checking your phone messages. But still, this is alot like Verhoeven's best Hollywood movies because it's always exciting, never boring, and the substance part of it sneaks up on you like a ninja. It's a thriller, an old fashioned adventure, with a classic score that sounds like Bernhard Hermann or somebody. This movie didn't remind me of THE PIANIST or something like that as much as it reminded me of those old great adventures that happened to be set during wars, like THE GREAT ESCAPE or THE DIRTY DOZEN. You're with the resistance and you're rooting for them to pull off their capers, plant their bugs, rescue their friends. It was only at the end that all the atrocities and double crosses and ironic twists of fate accumulated enough to really get me at a deeper level. There's an ironic note at the end of the movie that manages to be quick and almost subtle. Things end up fairly happy for Rachel on a personal level, but at the same time profoundly sad for all of humanity.
The opening says it's inspired by true events, which refers to some of the things going on in the movie like Nazis pretending to help Jews escape, then killing them and stealing their money. That point-of-view I mentioned from ROBOCOP and STARSHIP TROOPERS was always said to be shaped by Verhoeven's childhood living in the Hague near the German headquarters, where he witnessed all kinds of violence and had neighbors bombed by the Allies trying to get the Germans. Now here he is making a movie that takes place right there. A WWII movie from the perspective of someone who saw people victimized by both sides.
Yes, he was there, but this is his movied up version of the war. Rachel's friend compares her to Greta Garbo in MATA HARI. At one point Rachel gets thrown in a filthy prison cell, but she's still wearing a party dress and has a big red flower in her hair. The only time this type of thing got silly in my opinion was when Rachel was a prisoner of war and still had an amazing hairdo. Historically, the movie is probaly bullshit. But hey, it's closer to actual historic events than ROBOCOP or STARSHIP TROOPERS. Like those movies, but moreso, the surface is not the real world, but underneath it definitely is, there's a truth to it.
Remember I started this review with a metaphor seamlessly connecting Mike and Ikes candy to the subtext of a popular science fiction movie of the '90s. That was a pretty fuckin good move in my opinion, I will accept your congratulations on that one. Although Mike and Ikes did exist in the 1940s (and are certified kosher) they do not appear in BLACK BOOK. However, alot of Cadbury chocolate is eaten in this movie (at one point it saves her life), so I apologize if that makes another candy metaphor too on-the-nose. BLACK BOOK is a chocolate bar. A delicious Cadbury chocolate bar with a creamy filling of essential truth.
BLACK CAESAR
In my opinion BLACK CAESAR is one of my favorite blaxploitation movies. It's got a good story and direction (by Larry Cohen), a badass soundtrack (by James Brown) and a super badass lead (Fred Williamson). Fred plays a cruel motherfucker, sort of a Scarface type anti-hero, but makes him mostly sympathetic.
You already know the movie is good at the beginning because it has such a good and unusual opening. Fred's character Tommy Gibbs is a kid (played by some young guy, don't worry it's not Fred wearing a beanie or nothin) working as a shoe shine boy.
There's a nervous white man in a suit, looking over his shoulder, but Tommy convinces him to get a quick shine. Suddenly a scary mafia dude comes out with a gun and the whitey tries to run. But Tommy holds onto his shoe. After the dude is dead, Tommy meets up with the mafia dude in an alley. He gets his payment and also gets to hold the murder weapon and check it out. This kid may have some problems, is the idea.
Later, when the kid has just gotten out of the joint (where he grew into Fred Williamson) he decides to enact a master plan to take over a neighborhood from the Italians. It's a bold plan and even though Larry Cohen is probaly some sort of white dude, he puts alot of race and class wish fulfillment shit in there to make it fun. For example, Tommy is so rich he buys a penthouse apartment from a white couple, forcing them to move out immediately and leave all their belongings. Then he tosses the wife's fur coats out the window. The next morning we figure out why he bought the place - his mom is the maid. He tries to get her to just retire and live in the apartment herself, but it's more complicated than that. She can't see herself living in the rich white people building. She's just sees herself as the maid.
And Tommy is not exactly a nice guy. He completely loses our sympathy after he rapes his best friend's wife. (not that it would matter if it's his best friend or not. this is not good.) Later he beats them both up and pulls the wife's wig off. After that she never wears the wig again, she has short hair and starts to look like Angela Davis or somebody, a good visual symbol for the change in her character. This couple represents the other approach to fighting the system, these guys try to follow the straight path. If this was South Central in the '90s Fred would be Ice Cube and his friend would be Cuba Gooding Jr. But with better taste in clothes.
Speaking of which, Fred looks fucking cool in this movie. I didn't get a chance to listen to all of Larry Cohen's commentary track, but I heard him tell a story about sending Fred off to buy his wardrobe for the movie. He came back with all these suits and Larry asks him how much he owes him. "$800." "You mean $800 for each suit?" "No, 800 total." He explains that he got them all at discount stores, some of these suits cost $35.
"But how could that be a $35 suit? It looks so good!"
"Cohen - EVERYTHING looks good on me."
And it's true.
At the climax, Fred beats his enemy's head in with the same shoe shine box he used as a kid. What better way to illustrate where this guy is coming from? He's a cold motherfucker but he also held onto his shoeshine box so he could use it to beat a white man's head in... and then they respect the audience enough to not have to point arrows at it like HEY LOOK, THIS IMPROVISED WEAPON IS ACTUALLY AN IMPORTANT PIECE OF SYMBOLISM.
This is a real compelling story, a rise and fall kind of tragedy, based on the old gangster movies. Specifically LITTLE CAESAR of course. He made up the story originally for Sammy Davis, Jr., 'cause he's a little guy. Fred spends the last act of the movie holding his hand to a bullet in his chest. And at the end he gets a hell of an et tu Brute. (there's a sequel though, I'll have to see that and find out what's what.)
Anyway, highly recommended. If you're just getting your feet wet on blaxploitation, this is definitely one of the most important ones to see.
BLACK
CHRISTMAS
You probaly know director Bob Clark as the guy who did PORKY'S and A CHRISTMAS
STORY. More recently he did the two BABY GENIUSES movies and something called
KARATE DOG which, judging by the cover, is not a metaphorical title. But back
in the day he was a pretty good director of horror movies. One of the ones
he did was DEATHDREAM, a really eerie movie about a guy coming back undead
from Vietnam and everybody is sort of in denial that he's different. I liked
that one a hell of alot better than HOMECOMING, Joe Dante's sort of similar
anti-war zombie thing from the Masters of Horror show.
But right after DEATHDREAM Clark did his most famous horror movie, BLACK CHRISTMAS,
and it's a pretty good one.
There are no killer Santas, not even maniac elves or savage, carnivorous reindeer.
In fact there's not too much of a Christmas ambience in the thing. But it
does take place over Christmas break. This sorority house has been getting
weird phone calls from some anonymous pervert. In the opening, one of the
girls is attacked and suffocated in her room and taken up to the attic. The
rest of the characters spend the whole movie trying to find her.
The next day, the girl's dad shows up on campus to pick her up. After waiting
forever he starts asking around for help and ends up meeting people who know
his daughter, and together they look for her. Luckily her boyfriend has an
in with the John Saxon at the police department so they are miraculously able
to put together a search party when she hasn't even been gone a day. (It's
refreshing to see a movie with a missing person where they don't mention that
"she has to be gone for 24 hours before she can be considered missing"
thing.)
There's a bunch of different characters. Two of them are alcoholics. Margot
Kidder plays the trashiest girl who's always drunk. I don't really get the
popularity of Margot Kidder, she is just not that appealing. But she seems
like a real person. You also have Olivia Hussey, who is pregnant and wants
to get an abortion. I'm not sure how they would portray that these days but
in this movie they are sympathetic towards her. And you are definitely supposed
to be suspicious of her boyfriend, who wants to keep the baby. He's played
by Keir Dullea, and it's nice to see that he can be in college five years
after being an astronaut in 2001. He plays kind of a cold, creepy classical
pianist. There's a weird scene where he does an important recital drenched
in sweat and playing some crazy atonal thing that doesn't go over well. Then
later he violently kills the piano. Hmmm.
The phone calls that they get every once in a while are really creepy. In
one case they're aggressive and explicit, even using the c-word which is still
pretty taboo all these years later (bet they don't use that in the remake).
But mostly they're just bizarre and you can't really figure out what they're
talking about. The guy keeps referring to himself as "Billy" and
changing voices. There is a female voice too. It could be more than one killer
or just a weirdo who's good with voices or who knows what exactly. I hope
it's not that guy from Police Academy who does the sound effects. Or any of
those cartoon voice guys, you don't want any of those freaks sneaking around
your sorority house attic. Oh shit, or the one uncle from "Full House"
who always had to do the Popeye voice and the Bullwinkle voice. That would
be fucked up to have that dude stalking you. But at least you'd be able to
spot him from a distance because of his Hawaiian shirt.
And seriously, it might be him. Here's a big fuckin SPOILER. The twist at
the end is that when you apparently find out who the killer is, it turns out
not to be true. And then the movie ends without revealing who the killer really
is, just that he's still up there in the attic making phone calls. This is
kind of a cool twist, but at the same time a little frustrating. Because you're
really programmed to think all this "it's me, Billy" shit is gonna
tie together and make perfect sense by the end. But you get no explanation
at all. Who the fuck IS Billy? I don't know.
I've always heard from certain horror snobs that HALLOWEEN is an inferior
rip-off of BLACK CHRISTMAS. Now that I've seen it I know that idea is pretty
ridiculous. Both take place on holidays, but the stories are completely different.
The killers are nothing alike, the types of scares are nothing alike and the
storylines are nothing alike (BLACK CHRISTMAS is a whodunit complete with
black herrings and the whole works). The one major similarity is that both
open with an extended voyeuristic shot from the POV of the killer. The scene
is way creepier in HALLOWEEN but I have to admit that the one in BLACK CHRISTMAS
is shot even better. I guess the cameraman attached a camera to his shoulder
so he could turn, look up a ladder and that kind of thing. We go with him
as he spies on the sorority house, climbs up the side and crawls into the
attic. It's very impressive.
I liked this, it made me want to watch other Bob Clark movies in case I missed
some good ones. I'll probaly skip SUPER BABIES, but KARATE DOG isn't out of
the question. I'd probaly start with CHILDREN SHOULDN'T PLAY WITH DEAD THINGS,
though. Or at least PORKY'S.
I should note, there is a remake of BLACK CHRISTMAS already being made, I
believe by the FINAL DESTINATION dudes. I liked their remake of WILLARD so
I don't want to write it off, but it seems like a modern version would abandon
everything that makes it BLACK CHRISTMAS. I mean, a huge part of the plot
has to do with the police desperately trying to trace the phone call, and
the killer having a phone hooked up in the attic. That's not gonna cut it
in the days of cell phones and caller ID. More importantly, I doubt they would
keep the unresolved ending. You know they're gonna come up with a backstory
and a solution to the mystery, and since it wasn't planned that way the first
time it's gonna feel phony. I think. But hopefully not.
BLACK SNAKE MOAN
Some people might say, just because Christina Ricci spends a good third of BLACK SNAKE MOAN wearing only panties and a half shirt, chained up like a dog to control her bestial urge to fuck anything with a dick, that it's degrading to women. Well, okay, if I put it that way. But as cool as Samuel L. Jackson's backsliding bluesman Lazarus is, it's Ricci's coughing town slut Rae that you sympathize with most. The weird thing is this ends up being a sweet movie, a cute movie. Like a really subdued KILL BILL, BLACK SNAKE takes ridiculous notions that don't have to make sense in an exploitation* picture (a man chaining up a young girl to cure her nymphomania, her forgiving him for it) but then treats the characters' emotions so seriously that I actually start to care about them.
I'm not gonna complain about seeing Ricci half naked or the lurid pulpy advertising campaign revolving around Lazarus having her on a chain like a pet, or something worse. But honestly, swear to God, cross my eye with a needle, etc., I was excited for this movie because it's from the writer-director of HUSTLE & FLOW. If you have to compare the two I'd say this one isn't quite as compelling, although some would disagree due to the panties and boobs.
It starts out with a fair share of titillation and it invites The Male Gaze. At first Rae's nympho-attacks invite giggles with the pounding soundtrack that seems to, uh, let's say emanate from her loins. But before long it's more tragic than funny. You feel sorry for this gal. Just like any real life "town slut," she's gotten this way by being sexually abused, and in one of the more satisfying (and sad) scenes she confronts her mother about it. See, the chain is empowering.
Lazarus is a good character too. His wife just ran off with his younger brother, leaving him all alone in the house to come up with ideas like this chaining thing. The new lifestyle also gives him a chance to get out his old guitar again and sing some blues. Jackson sings the songs himself and does a real good job of it. Whoever does the guitar playing is great too, and either Jackson has some fucked up fingers, or a good makeup job, or a good finger double. Those are workin man's fingers. He says it's from pickin peas though, not from pluckin a guitar.
The blues are not as central to the plot as the hip hop in HUSTLE & FLOW, but once again the songs are highlights. To me the best scene in the movie is probaly when Lazarus combs his hair and goes to the bar to put on a show. The audience knows that Rae's soldier boyfriend (Just Timberlake) is back in town looking for her and is gonna be angry to find her with Lazarus. Then you kind of forget about it as they're preparing to go out. But Rae has this watch that is set to beep at the same time her boyfriend's beeps, so they can always think of each other even if he's in Iraq or somewhere. And in the parking lot her watch beeps, reminding the audience that he's out there. That little storytelling trick causes dread to hang over the whole scene, through a medley of songs and a montage of feverish, slow motion dancing, all the way until the end of the scene when the camera pans over to show the boyfriend watching ominously through the window.
Now, I gotta be honest, I think this might work a little better if it wasn't Justin Timberlake. He does fine, it's not embarrassing at all like that horrible EDISON FORCE movie. But his character is supposed to be dangerous, and this is not a guy we think of as dangerous. This is some white kid from a children's lip synching group who's grown up to be semi-respected in pop culture because he's kind of funny when he hosts Saturday Night Live. So it's dick in a box guy versus Shaft 2000, or Jules Winfield. How scared are we gonna get? And how touched are we gonna be if he turns out to be a softy? I think both angles would work better with a genuine tough guy.
As long as we're pointing out flaws, I gotta say that there's a few too many white man's blues songs on the soundtrack too. Craig Brewer is white, so maybe he's just trying to be honest. But if you're gonna have a blues movie like this it should be 100% pure authentic blues. Oh well, most of it's good. (By the way, Steven Seagal, you should try to hook up with Craig Brewer.)
Like HUSTLE & FLOW, this ends up being a story about people who aren't related coming together and forming a family unit. You feel like they're a family and you could almost be a member of the family. There's a weird little detail where, to calm Timberlake down in a particularly tense moment, Rae pulls up her shirt and pushes her boobs against his back. It's just this weird thing they have, she knows she can comfort him that way. And that's pretty much what I like about the movie right there. The boobs are good but it's the sweetness that wins you over.
*Please accept my apologies for using this word. It's a rare case where nothing else fits. I love Tarantino but ever since KILL BILL I'm so sick and god damned tired of him and other people talking about "exploitation movies." Give it a rest, fellas. At least I didn't use the word "grindhouse," though.
BLACKJACK
Recently I reviewed RED SCORPION and I talked about The Enigma of Dolph Lundgren. The enigma is that this guy who I'm betting is fascinating in real life (he's a big muscleman martial artist who does dumb action movies, but he's highly educated) has almost no presence in movies. Well after seeing this topnotch John Woo TV movie I take it back. It turns out when he's not pretending to be Russian he's got all kinds of charisma.
I know this is made for TV, not video, but it's exactly the kind of gem I'm looking for when a dig through all this crap. A ridiculous, enjoyable and unusual action movie. The main reason it's unusual is that Dolph Lundgren's character is afraid of the color white.
Well, it's a long story. Something in his past that he doesn't quite remember yet has given him a phobia. Dolph is playing some kind of federal marshall or something turned bodyguard. And he's got alot of problems. For one thing, his friends recently died and he has to adopt their precocious daughter Casey. For another thing, another friend (Fred the Hammer Williamson to be specific) was recently killed protecting a supermodel from a stalker, and he has to take on that case. Even though Casey's parents were in trouble with organized crime in the prologue, it's said their death was an accident and we never learn otherwise. But that's okay because Dolph is haunted by the death of the Hammer and the death of his father, and two separate deaths are more than enough for an action hero to be tormented by. Especially an action hero who is afraid of the color white.
At first he kind of lucks out on this white thing, because the model-stalker he's after likes wearing all black. Not in a goth way, more of a Johnny Cash I guess. You figure if the hero is afraid of the color white, he's gonna come up against Puff Daddy or somebody and be in trouble. But he lucks out. At first. Then he comes up against the stalker dressed as a nurse. Not like Elle Driver, a male nurse. It's not THAT crazy of a movie. Or maybe it is, because soon after that he fights the stalker in a milk factory, in a giant puddle of milk. White milk. You might think I'm joking about that, but I'm not. This is a great movie.
This is not your ordinary stalker, by the way. I'm not sure how this is possible, but he has henchmen on motorcycles. They never explain how and it doesn't seem to occur to Dolph that it's odd. Anyway, there are lots of flaming motorcycles, which is a good thing. This guy's better than your usual villain too. For the first half of the movie you don't even hear him talk, you just see him setting up snifer rifles in far away apartments. There's a great scene where he's going to kill the model and he's shaky, it kind of looks like he might be fondling himself outside of the frame. Then while he spies her through the scope and gets ready to pull the trigger he starts to cry. He's not quite as interesting later in the movie when he talks, and it's weird because he looks like this suave European dude but he turns out to be a redneck. But he does do some weird things like tie Dolph up in front of a bunch of dummies made out of hay and blond wigs. You don't see that every day.
Before the Hammer gets shot he seems to be overestimating this stalker. This guy tries to shoot the model while she's on the runway, but he misses and hits a vase (maybe because he's crying). Investigating the crime scene, the Hammer says that they are "disappearing bullets" and that means "this guy is a real pro." But he's a real pro that can't shoot for shit. Hammer says "We know he can hit from ten blocks away." Yeah, he can hit a fucking vase. I want 24 hour surveillance on all the vases within a ten block radius.
I thought the Hammer was overestimating this crybaby but the guy does turn out to be pretty smart. Somehow he figures out that Dolph is afraid of white, and invests in alot of drapery. And I think it takes alot of balls for him to point out that Dolph is afraid of the color white. I mean, they're fighting in milk and Dolph seems kind of freaked out, and it occurs to him that this is caused by a phobia of the color white. Okay, it's one thing for that theory to occur to you during a fight. It's another thing to say it out loud. I mean, in almost all cases where you're fighting a guy and you announce that he is afraid of the color white, you are gonna look like an idiot. Afraid of white? Where the fuck did that come from? That's pretty random.
Another thing that's unusual about this movie: I really think Dolph is supposed to be gay. He lives with an eyepatch wearing dude played by Saul Rubinek. This guy helps him out and cooks for him, so you could argue that it's his personal assistant. But he always introduces him as "my friend Thomas." There's a scene where he has to bring the super model to the house, and Casey asks "Is she your girlfriend?" and he says no. And then his female psychiatrist, who obviously digs him, comes over to help, and Casey asks "Is SHE your girlfriend?" and he says no. And his friend Thomas seems a little annoyed by all these women coming in the house.
At the end of the movie the model kisses Dolph, and it's ambiguous as to whether he is in love with her too. This is the only part that made me think, "Hmm, maybe he's not supposed to be gay." But I'm still going with gay because it makes the movie way more interesting. I mean, it's kind of sad to think that he's afraid to tell Casey why he lives with his friend Thomas.
In fact, BLACKJACK is a good argument for gay marriage. What if Jack gets shot or run over by a flaming motorcycle or something? Shouldn't his friend Thomas get the same visiting rights as a spouse? Shouldn't they get the same health care coverage? Fuck man, there's no way Jesus would be against Jack and Thomas being married. They're a great couple. I bet Jesus would even be best man if he was asked. These are some cool motherfuckers. And one of them has an eyepatch. I mean come on.
By the way, Dolph's character is named Jack, which maybe explains the title BLACKJACK. Also, he carries bladed playing cards that he uses as weapons.
I like Dolph alot in this movie. He's not the dumb hunk of meat I've seen him play in other movies. He's actually charming and he seems like a guy you would hang out with, even if you don't have alot of gay friends. I mean he knows how to fight, and "there's no better backup in a fire fight," says little Casey. But he has to juggle alot more than that. He has to deal with raising this new daughter while stopping a deadly stalker AND trying to keep the model off of drugs. And by the way I forgot to mention that he had a problem with painkillers some time between the opening scene and the present day. So he's complicated. Also he teaches her how to dance.
The great thing about watching BLACKJACK now is that it's just become ripe. Because back in 1998 when it was made, there was still that naive hope that John Woo had great things ahead of him. He had just done FACE/OFF which seemed to prove he could fuse the strengths of his Hong Kong movies with the Hollywood method of filmatism. It was before MISSION/IMPOSSIBLE 2: THE REVENGE OF MISSION IMPOSSIBLE and more importantly it was before WINDTALKERS. After those I think most of us kind of gave up on John Woo and forgot about him, left him to the hole he dug for himself where he's stuck being listed on IMDB as director of video game and cartoon adaptations that never materialize.
So now that we've seen John Woo's fate, it's easier to accept him doing a movie where Dolph Lundgren plays a gay guy with bladed playing cards who's afraid of the color white. This is not the John Woo that blew us through the back of the theater and into the lobby and then into the restroom and through the side of the restroom and then back through a new hole in the back wall of the theater and back into our seats in HARD BOILED and THE KILLER and BULLET IN THE HEAD. This is the other John Woo, the silly one we* also love, the one who directed HARD TARGET and that part in MI2 where they fly off their motorcycles for a mid-air chest bump.
(*and by "we" I mean "I".)
Let me describe the opening scene for you, then you'll know what you're getting into. Our man Jack gets temporarily blinded while protecting the little girl from bad guys. So she climbs on his back and tells him where to walk and where to shoot. Like Master Blaster or The Double Man in EL TOPO. Okay, so that's cool, but then what's even better is that a grenade gets thrown down, so Jack throws the girl out the window and she bounces off of a trampoline into a swimming pool. And then he jumps on the trampoline and fires off the trademark John Woo double-pistols while in mid-air. The first ever slow motion trampoline mid-air gunfight.
Really the only complaint I have is in the casting of the little girl (who is annoyingly plucky at times) and the supermodel (who is not nearly exotic enough to be a famous model). But it's a TV movie so I forgive it.
If anybody knows of any other movies as good as BLACKJACK, please tell me. It's not right to keep this kind of information secret.
Earlier this week I saw a highly anticipated sequel, based on an old comic book character, a half man/half vampire who has become the best vampire killer there is. He travels the world, even during sunlight, cloaked in black, wielding a sword, slaying vampires. This time around he is after the same prey as a macho team of fighters who are both his rivals and reluctant allies. Their quest takes them to the seat of vampire royalty, and along the way - against his nature - he forms a tender friendship with a female on the rival team of fighters, and stays with her until the end.
That wasn't Blade II though, it was some cartoon called Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust. Actually that's what it says on the box, but the title screen just calls it Vampire Hunter D. (Just like the ticket stub for Blade II called it Blade II: Bloodhunt, but the title screen just called it Blade II.) This movie has rightfully been praised for its cartoon drawing, which is very detailed and elegant. Much more interesting than that blue hair, big eye japanese stuff certain musty smelling individuals can't get enough of. But what surprised me though, I thought the story was real good.
It's got kind of a Hong Kong feel because none of the characters are really the good guys or the bad guys. At first you have to side with D, because he's hired to save this girl who's been kidnapped by a vampire. But later you learn that she's actually in love with the vampire, and went willingly. D's quest starts to become morally questionable, especially since he's doing it for the money. At first he convinces himself that the girl doesn't know what she's doing, she's been seduced, whatever. But the vampire really seems to like her - I mean, he walks into sunlight, his skin boiling, screaming in pain, just to embrace her. How many cartoons have art this good, characters this ambiguous, full of this much violence and monsters AND emotion? Definitely one of the best cartoons of last year, it pees all over those movies that were nominated for the cartoon oscar. Even the monsters one.
My one complaint is the voices. I thought the dvd was just cheap because it only has an english track. But my anime correspondent tells me it was made in english. Anyway the guy who plays D sounds like Daria from that mtv cartoon that girls watch. At least he doesn't talk much. And at least there aren't any celebrity voices. I thought a couple guys sounded like Roddy McDowall, but they turned out to be the dude that played "Murdock" on the A-Team, so that doesn't count as a celebrity.
Anyway Vampire Hunter D was great but it could hardly prepare me for BLADE II, which is about pretty much the same exact crap and somehow manages to be every bit as good as the original BLADE. And how is that possible when BLADE wasn't even possible? A vampire movie, starring wesley snipes, based on a marvel comic, with martial arts and techno music, and GOOD? In the eloquent words of Blade himself, "Some motherfuckers always tryin to ice skate uphill," but they did it - not once, but twice now! In a row! What in christ's lord and name of god and the bible is going on? How did we, as a movie-going society and culture, get so god damn lucky?
I guess I never reviewed BLADE so let me have a paragraph about what a great movie that is. Which is kind of like having one sentence to describe the contributions of Miles Davis to american music. BLADE is a Badass action movie, with perfectly choreographed comic book ludicrousness, hilarious macho one-liners, thrilling fight scenes with effective use of electronic music, original vampire ideas, all brought together with elegant lighting, a rare instance of effective "MTV style editing", a moody John Carpenter heartbeat type score, and perfectly iconic acting performances by Kris Kristofferson, Stephen Dorff and especially Wesley Snipes. Forget the miracle of a good marvel comics techno kung fu vampire movie - what about the miracle of Wesley Snipes? Here's a guy known for actual acting, like in Spike Lee movies and shit. Dramas. Then he tries a few weak action movies like PASSENGER 57 and US MARSHALLS, and pisses his career away on crap like "1600 PENNSYLVANIA AVENUE: AN ADRESS THAT CHANGES ALL THE RULES." Suddenly, out of nowhere, he is an actual action hero, like Shaft reinvented as Batman meets Van Helsing. Completely ripped, mostly stoic, covered in tattoos without looking silly, and doing much of the fighting himself. Turns out he does some African martial art you've never heard of that looks pretty fuckin good on screen. He did some of the choreography, even produced the film himself. Suddenly Wesley Snipes is cool again! I love BLADE.
So I was pretty fuckin anxious for BLADE II, especially when I heard the directionist was Guillermo Del Toro. His first movie was CHRONOS so you knew the occasional brilliant touches in MIMIC weren't a fluke. And you know how I felt about THE DEVIL'S BACKBONE. BLADE II seals it, this guy knows what the fuck he's doin. He's captured the tone and texture of BLADE but injected it with some kind of weird Del Toro serum. The look is more gothic, the monsters are weirder, the villains are more sympathetic and mythic. It's gorier and more brutal and not always in the phoney video game kind of way of the first picture. It feels faster and more action packed than BLADE but has more moments of tragedy and beauty. Blade spends the movie inside the vampire underground, so you don't get the culture clash comedy of him walking around town with a sword on his back, shooting at a cop in broad daylight in front of a crowd of witnesses, etc. The emphasis is on Blade the samurai, with his code of his honor, and the start of his acceptance of being half-vampire.
(Did you ever notice in BLADE how before the final battle he does a little samurai ritual, burning incense at an altar to his dead mother - not realizing that his mother is actually a vampire, and that she's one of the enemies who he'll be fighting? OH JESUS the irony. There's another, less ironic but equally great samurai moment in BLADE PART II where he poses in front of Japanese windows, holding a gun like it's a sword.)
Though Del Toro has perfectly captured the tone and character of BLADE the movie is far from a rehash. He's thrown into a whole different world, the vampire society in Prague, this time not a lone avenger with a couple of allies, but a member of a team of colorful characters. BLADE had Udo Kier (Andy Warhol's Dracula) as a vampire leader. Now we go to the top of the totem pole to find a Nosferatu-like king who bathes in blood like Vlad the Impaler or Elizabeth Bathory, but probaly doesn't get a boner from it because he's so old his skin is practically see-through.
There are homages to other sequels: Whistler's fate in the first film is treated like Hans Solo at the end of Star Trek 2, and now Blade has to track him down. Soon after the Blood Pack, a team of highly trained vampire fighters shows up for a truce with Blade to fight a mutant vampire strain called the reapers, you know you've got ALIENS with a bunch of tough guys wading through sewer water looking for monsters in the dark - you even got a reaper autopsy that's more disgusting than the alien autopsy in that movie. But just about the very moment when the ALIENS shtick gets old, the story suddenly changes gears and you get something else you didn't expect.
It's the story that makes this movie great, but it's still an action movie. Now first off let me say this, BLADE invented bullet time. I don't care that the technology in the Matrix was much more elaborate, that the technique was used in the gap commercial, that the animator from Oregon did it years before that. The point is, BLADE already had a scene where Stephen Dorff dodged a bullet in slow motion. Same thing that happened in the matrix. I think THE MATRIX is a great movie and it was obviously a huge influence on every other american movie in the years since but BLADE was there first, combining comic book ideas and computer animation techniques with asian action movie influences.
That being a true and inarguable scientific fact of law set in stone and backed up on disc, it would be understandable if the fight scenes in BLADE PART II: THE GODFATHER 2 OF COMIC BOOK MOVIES seemed a bit, you know, matrixy. But they don't. I didn't notice anything that seemed to involve wires. Donny the Iron Monkey Yen has a small role as one of the Blood Pack, and even did some of the choreography, but most of the fighting is more Japanese swordplay or more grounded, street fight type kung fu. When they do get acrobatic, Mr. Del Toro is doing something I've never seen before: replacing actors with computer generated fight doubles, even within the same shot. So for example Wesley Snipes will jump, his computer double will do a bunch of ridiculous flips, and then Wesley Snipes will land in that cool pose from the last fight scene in BLADE, all in the same shot. It takes a bit to get used to, and a couple times it seems mortal-kombat-the-video-game-not-the-movie-like, or like that part in BLADE when Stephen Dorff started zipping around in fast speed. But mostly it works and I guarantee you they'll be borrowing this idea for the next Batman movie. How come nobody ever thought to use animation for live action comic books?
The filmatism in the fight scenes is very slick and high tech, lots of flashy camera moves and motion control type crap and that doesn't sound like something I'd agree with but this time it works. In the last, best fight scene the camera throws your head around and disorients you so much you feel like you're getting your ass beat along with Blade (just like in DEVIL'S BACKBONE when you felt like you really were in the explosion, battered and tossed and filled with shrapnel). But this being GUILLERMO DEL TORO'S BLADE 2, the highlight of the scene is not any of the fighting, or even a Blade one-liner, but a sad line of dialogue from the villain.
The
feeling of going to see BLADE II - that's enough to keep me out of trouble
for life, if I can have some more of that. That feeling of looking forward
to something for so long, and when you finally see it it is even better than
you were hoping, and you can't stop thinking about it. That's why individuals
like us love movies, isn't it? The only thing better is when you don't expect
anything, and the movie still hits you that hard. A surprise. But come on,
what kind of a fuckwad didn't see Blade II coming? It's BLADE II, for crying
out loud!
BLADE III
Man I tell you, I wish it was possible for lightning to strike 3 times in the same spot. It would be useful for many things including meteorological research and movie trilogies. But it's not possible. Never happened. Not once. Only once has it hit the same exact place twice. And that place was the exact spot where Blade was standing at the time. Both times.
What I'm saying obviously is that BLADE III - and I will not call it BLADE TRINITY because what the hell kind of name for Blade III is BLADE TRINITY - is no BLADE or BLADE II. And there are many reasons why. The most immediate thing you notice: it just doesn't look as good. Steve Norrington and Guillermo Del Toro were both so careful and artful. BLADE felt so exact and carefully composed, II was so spooky atmospheric with shiny gold tinted edges. III (directed by the guy Dave Goyer who wrote all the other ones but only directed the small indy drama ZIG ZAG) tries hard to imitate some of both of those looks. It has the same cinematagraphist as the last one, and I mean it's not an ugly movie. But you can tell it's not quite real. Not it's own look, not quite capturing the previous looks. I think I read this was more expensive than the others but to me it feels cheaper. Almost like a really damn impressive TV version of the Blade universe. But not quite the real Blade universe.
And then you notice the villains. Parker Posey is real cool as a bitchy vampire ex-girlfriend of a young wisecracking white dude who saves Blade from the FBI (long story). But her crew are just not up to BLADE standards. In the first one the vampires were all exotic and interesting looking, plus Donal Logue. The second one raised the bar, making the villains weirder, scarier and more sympathetic. Here you just got a couple cheeseballs, one of them a big wrestler guy with bad hair. Like Tyler Mane in X-MAN but not as appealing. They work out of some fancy hipster office building, like they are the well paid staff of some smarmy vampire magazine. I don't really understand what they are doing there, but there are lots of good catwalks to tumble from and windows to break through.
The lead villain is Dracula, the first vampire, dug up from a Pyramid in the Syrian desert (nobody checked there before). He's a morphing monster version of Dracula with an ancient warrior type human form. You know, some bland muscle guy with a necklace and armor on one arm. He looks like he could be some guy from Hercules or Xena. From some angles he actually looks a little bit like Bela Lugosi, but other than that it's a strike out. Not much in the way of charisma or presence. Again, seems like TV. Good TV, but still TV. And we're not in the TV business here, Goyer. This is the silver fucking screen. If you can't take the heat get out of the boiler room.
I guess the problem is, this seems like the BLADE II you would've thought they would've made, before they made BLADE II and surpassed all our expectations. One of the reasons why BLADE II is such a god damn masterpiece is because it captured most of what was great about the original but put the characters in a whole different situation. The first one he's running a three person operation underground in a city, fighting against a vampire masterplan. So what do you do for the second one, you transport him across the planet to Europe, where he has to side with a team of highly trained vampire soldiers to fight off a new more monstrous mutant type of vampire. That's a totally different story and it doesn't even take place in the human world at all - almost every character in the movie is a vampire.
So shit, where do you go from there? How do you make it exciting after that? Well Goyer came up with a pretty brilliant idea, which was to skip forward 15 years to an apocalyptic future world where the vampires have won. The world is entirely run by vampires, and Blade is the lone rebel fighting back, like Omega Man or Planet of the Apes or The Ten Commandments. (Well, maybe not The Ten Commandments. I haven't seen that one in a long time.)
The only problem is, Goyer didn't use this brilliant idea, he just talked about it in magazines and instead went with a less risky brilliant idea: to put Blade back in the human world and have him outed. In the human world people don't know about vampires, so what are they gonna think about this weirdo in the leather jacket who carries a sword, walks around in broad daylight shooting at people, even beats and murders cops who secretly work with the vampires? Well it turns out the FBI have been after him because he's left a pretty long and windy trail of non-vampire corpses. This is great turning Blade into an outlaw, making him fight against the authorities and not just the vampires. And it's very exciting when he gets captured and interogated and even checked out by a psychiatrist who makes the mistake of asking him about his relationship with his mother. (And the whole theater went, "Oooooooooohhh!")
This is great, right? A great way to spin the series in a completely different direction? Yeah, for about 5 minutes, but then you find out all the cops and the psychiatrist and everybody are actually the familiars, the vampire's bitches, and we're back to square one. He's just fighting vampires again. The completely new direction was a false alarm. (Don't get me wrong, I appreciate this subversive/uncomfortably realistic theme in the BLADE pictures that authority figures are lackeys to the bloodsuckers. I just think after BLADE II you got no choice but to try to raise the bar even higher.)
Then Blade teams up with these kids called the Nightstalkers, which is mainly Hannibal King (aforementioned white dude who saved him) and Whistler's "out of wedlock" daughter Abigail (who I would say is from the remake of TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE but fortunately that møvie does not exist and will never be thought of or mentioned again). And that's fun but I seem to remember an elite team of special ops vampires called The Blood Pack who he teamed up with last time, and they were more interesting as characters and as a storyline because of the tension and because they turned on him, etc. The Nightstalkers as backup was Whistler's plan, and then they convince Blade to follow their plan for stopping the vampire menace once and for all. That's great but what about one thing, what about Blade's plan? It's Blade that executes their plan and kick's Dracula's ass, but I couldn't help but think that this movie is not giving Blade enough credit. Blade is always on top of things. Remember when his sidekick Scud betrayed him, but it turned out he knew all along Scud was betraying him and had a bomb implanted in him? That's Blade, man. We're talking about a guy who specially designs his sword to take off the hand of anybody else who touches it. Blade is prepared, he can handle shit. That's what he does, handle shit. He doesn't need some blind computer genius to give him a plan. Come on now. Especially if you're really going to make this the last Blade movie, you can't chump him like this, you bastards.
And what about Whistler! What about fucking Whistler? I don't know about out in the red states but in the circles I run, the Kris Kristofferson mentor/sidekick character is considered one of the pantheon. One of the greats. He always grunts out funny lines, calling Ron Perlman a "nipple head" or busting through a wall with two machine guns and asking "Catch you fuckers at a bad time?" But in this one, where his part is much smaller, he doesn't get the chance. He seems sick and he rushes out a bunch of exposition and then he gets one good line to go out on but that's it. Fortunately the Hannibal King character has a lot of funny lines to pick up the slack but at the same time you're thinking, who is this kid, this fucking bearded muscle kid, who is he to overshadow fucking Whistler?
That's the bad news. Here's the good news. Despite all this, this is still an enjoyable movie. Not a bonafide god damn masterpiece like the other two. But an enjoyable fizzle out of the greatest trilogy since Lord of the Rings and/or The Godfather. The Alien 3 of the series, maybe. I don't know.
Because even when you take away all the great style, when the casting department starts phoning it in, when you make the storytelling a little sloppier... all you're doing is fucking up the movie. But standing there in the middle of the movie, looking real fuckin cool, you still got Wesley Snipes and the character of Blade. Wesley Snipes is Blade. He has such conviction and such dedication to Blade, that even as the whole movie around him seems a little on the crappy side, he is completely unaffected. You look at him in awe. Because Wesley knows how Blade looks and talks and walks and stands and poses and fights. He could walk on to the set of some sitcom and he would still be Blade, standing there.
When Blade is surrounded by cops and knows he can't get away, he doesn't say anything. He's samurai Blade. He holds onto his sheathed sword, considering it, but then sits down and holds out his sword in a samurai pose of surrender.
When Blade is shackled in an interogation room, he still looks imposing. He doesn't offer much for the humans questioning him and seems more occupied with studying the room around him, figuring out what to do. (Too bad we never find out what he would've done. Because you fucking know he would've escaped.)
And I mean, he looks like the same exact Blade. Same haircut, sunglasses, coat, armor, posture. THe costume is a little altered and the biggest change is the color red. Now his coat has red on the inside, a nice touch for fighting Dracula. And he wears a long sleeved red shirt under his coat. I don't know how exactly but somehow the red shirt makes him look like even more of a bad motherfucker. Not sure how to explain it. Somebody should look into this.
So any problems in the movie, they aren't Blade's fault. They are an injustice against Blade. Blade is clearly doing his part. David Goyer fucks some things up, but that can't stop Blade. Blade lives on.
Man, I love Blade. America, I love Blade.
I got a few questions though. In BLADE II, the reapers were an artificially created mutant strain of vampires. So why does Dracula, the original vampire, have the same kind of mouth as the reapers? And why, in some article I read, do they claim that they were careful not to make the monsters in this one look like the reapers? There are only a couple monsters in this and they are not very impressive but their most memorable features are splitting mouths like the reapers.
Also, wouldn't it suck to be a vampire? (not a pun) I realized as Blade was killing them that they have too many god damned vulnerabilities. I mean they really gotta work hard to kill Blade and his young companions. All Blade has to do is cut them with silver or expose them to sunlight, they die instantly. If they cut a human, the human still has to bleed to death. Of course, most vampires across the world probaly don't ever encounter the Daywalker. If they're smart, they won't push it by coming up with some master plan or "vampire final solution" so they can be left the fuck alone.
What's worse though is being a driver for the Nightstalkers. No fucking respect. In this movie there's a young african-american gentlemen who shows up out of nowhere to pick up Blade and the kids. And you can read into it that Blade trusted him partly because he was a brother and because he chose to bump some beats while defying the po-po. But then they get in the car, Blade asks them who they are, Hannibal introduces himself and the girl. No mention of the driver at all. And soon after, he dies.
Come to think of it, we never get to find out anything about any of Blade's black friends. I always wonder what happened to that guy in the first one, had that little shop where he used to hook up Blade with garlic. Blade has moved on to more powerful sedatives, but I'm sure they're still friends. You saw the way they gave each other a pound. I bet Blade misses that dude more than ever now that he's hanging out with these wisecracking white kids.
Anyway. The fights and action scenes in BLADE II seemed like a big step up from BLADE and the best job I'd ever seen of real SUPER-POWERED fighting. Remember Blade getting swung around and his head breaks through a cement column? The action this time isn't as amazing but they do alot of fun new stuff, like a car chase (welcome back, Blade-mobile) and I really like the scene where Blade chases Dracula through an apartment building, and Dracula just runs through walls and jumps through ceilings and (fucking asshole) steals some lady's baby.
There is also a whole lot of funny lines, almost all of them given to Hannibal King, who is sort of a Jason Lee type with muscles and guns. I realize this guy is the formula wisecracking character but somehow he sells pretty much all of them. While being tortured for information, he reveals that Blade is "working on a new formula for flavor crystals," a pretty good moment. You gotta be skeptical about some white dude muscling in on Blade's territory, but when he's introduced wearing a sticker that says "Hello, my name is FUCK YOU," it's a good icebreaker.
One thing I've noticed about people in the vampire slaying business, they're rescuing each other all the time. Whistler rescued Blade from the vampire library in part 1, Blade saved Whistler from a water tank in the opening of part 2, the Nighstalkers rescue Blade from the FBI headquarters in part 3 and later Blade and Abigail rescue Hannibal King from his interrogation/wisecracking session. In part 1 though it was just an example of Blade's tremendous resources. Here he is railroad-spiked into a pole and surrounded by enemies, and he starts laughing. They get confused, why is he laughing? The camera moves in to reveal Blade's earpiece which explains how he knows that Whistler is about to bust through the wall with that "catch you fuckers" line I mentioned before. Even when he's nailed to a pole, he is not backed into a corner.
This time it's Hannibal King that gets to laugh off his tormentor when he's seemingly at a dead end. He knows Blade and Abigail are coming to save him and he starts to brag about it. They use this to set up a little joke, but it still didn't get past this BLADE afficianado that Goyer is, consciously or not, tipping the movie a little bit toward the white dude. And this is a problem.
Now, who knows how true this is, but many articles have claimed that Snipes and Goyer got into a fist fight on the set and from then on Goyer travelled with a biker gang entourage. There are also claims of tension between Ryan Reynolds (who plays Hannibal King) and Snipes. Goyer has been telling web sights for months that he might make a spin-off about the Nightstalkers, that Ryan Reynolds is the greatest guy in the history of the world, that this would probaly be the last Blade movie, that they'd shot an ending where Blade dies and hadn't decided whether or not to use it. Snipes supposedly wrote a letter to New Line Cinema complaining about the movie and its advertising focusing on the new white kids and not as much on Blade. And Ryan Reynolds who plays Hannibal King told Entertainment Weekly "I've never met Wesley Snipes, I've only met Blade."
My guess is that Snipes, heavily into character as Blade, sensed the movie going away from his character, causing him to resent this goofball the same way Blade does. And causing him to get angry at Goyer. Which caused Goyer to get angry at him and move the movie even more away from being the triumphant last Blade movie and in the direction of being the episode of Growing Pains (or whichever show it was) that sets up Just the Ten of Us.
Blade is still the main character but he definitely has to share the spotlight with these Nightstalkers. And they're fine, I got no problem with them, but they just aren't Blade. I'm sure if they really make a spin-off about them I will watch it, and there's a good chance I'll like it. But the whole time I'll be thinking yeah, these guys are cool. But they're not fucking Blade. Not even close. I mean Whistler is better than these guys, and they didn't make a Whistler movie.
And since SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER Whistler moves on to the big anti-vampire garage in the sky in this one, it doesn't really make sense that we're NOT focusing on Blade. We've always had Blade and his support team, now the support team is dead, so let's see what Blade does on his own. The loner. Not the superstar graciously sharing the spotlight with the newcomers. Maybe David S. Goyer doesn't get along with Blade anymore, but the rest of us do. So give us a fucking break, Goyer.
I still enjoyed watching it though. And I'm thankful that it's not a total disaster. 4 more years of Bush and an unwatchable Blade III - what would be the point? I would've tossed myself off the nearest bridge.
