Z CHANNEL: A MAGNIFICENT OBSESSION
This is a documentary about something I never heard of before, one of the first pay cable channels, one for movie buffs. This was in Los Angeles of course and started in the '70s, before home video. The movie focuses on the obsession and tragic life of Jerry Harvey, who was the programmer for most of the time the channel existed.
This guy starts out watching the channel at home, writing a letter to complain about their programming choices and how he thinks they should do it. They end up liking his ideas and hiring him, and he becomes a force, one of those ones that you have to reckon at or whatever. He starts playing foreign films, forgotten masterpieces, movies he loves that he thinks were unfairly panned. He makes friends with Sam Peckinpah, Robert Altman, Michael Cimino (they don't mention Thunderbolt and Lightfoot though) and guys like that, using his connections to get movies nobody else knew were out there. He creates an event out of the director's cut of the Wild Bunch. The director's cut of The Leopard. Which it turns out is not about a leopard, but some kind of prince or somebody. The way the movie tells it, this guy singlehandedly turned around the reputation of Heaven's Gate by showing the director's cut. Same thing with Once Upon A Time In America. They interview James Woods and he says how the critic Sheila Benson called the theatrical release one of the worst movies of the year, then after seeing the director's cut called it one of the best of the decade. (I've only seen the bastardized version and I thought it was great - can't wait til I have 4 hours free.)
So basically what you have is a haven for people who love movies. They show movies people have heard about but never thought they'd be able to see. They resurrect movies from the dead. They get a reputation so they can show a movie you heard was shit and you think wait a minute, Z-Channel is showing this? Maybe I better give it a chance. And late at night they show Emannuelle movies and shit. So you got everything you need.
They also put out a newsletter that even people who didn't get the channel wanted to subscribe to because it was not just program listings but critical writings, probaly like the kind of stuff I write except more knowledgeable and not as good.
Apparently this channel was very influential. Get this. They interview Paul Verhoeven who talks about some of his early movies like Turkish Delight. Then he says that it was the interest created by his movies showing on Z Channel that caused him to emigrate to the US. What I'm saying is, without Z Channel there would be no Robocop, no Total Recall, no Starship Troopers, not even a Showgirls. So this shit is important.
The movie is full of passion for movies. It goes off on tangents about particular movies (like Once Upon a Time in America) just talking about how great they are and how people reacted at the time, and you don't mind the diversion. It's mostly acknowledged masterpieces they're talking about but it definitely added a few to my to-see list. (won't ever get around to them though, sorry, Seagal keeps churning em out.)
At the same time, this is a movie with a dark side to it, because this guy Jerry Harvey always struggled with depression and booze and luckily they tell you right at the beginning that he ends up killing his wife and then himself. So it's really a bummer but it's interesting to see these poor bastards who knew him try to find a balance between their admiration for everything he accomplished and the fact that he ended up murdering his wife. I mean you just can't get around that one. I, personally, am against it. But I mean you gotta figure, somebody does a horrible thing, it taints everything they did before but does it really erase it? That kind of shit is extra tragic because not only does everybody lose two of their friends but they have to change the whole way they see this guy. Now he's a murderer. One guy says that's why the story of Z-Channel hadn't really been told before, because people were too fuckin bummed out by the whole sordid mess to really want to go over it. And to make matters worse the channel turned into a sports channel and went belly up a year later.
But despite the sad ending I think the main thing you will remember about this movie is the passion for doing something right, going after something you love and putting some elbow grease in it. Alot of my younger readers probaly don't know about this, but there used to be a thing called working hard and doing a good job. What you would do is strive for excellence, refuse to compromise, maintain complete integrity and follow your heart. You would not try to make alot of money and if you did you wouldn't use it to buy platinum chains. I don't know if this is true but I read somewhere that the rapper Fifty Cents buys very expensive jewelry but then what he does, he doesn't want it to get stolen or damaged so he has fake duplicates made of them and he wears those on tour. You hear what I'm saying? He spends hundreds of thousands of dollars on a stupid fuckin necklace, and then he LOCKS IT UP and wears a fake one. There is exactly ONE THING that is more disgustingly asinine than spending thousands of dollars on Liberace style jewelery, and that one thing is to then NOT USE the jewelry. You know what would be alot easier, bud? Just DON'T BUY THE STUPID JEWELRY. That way you don't have to look over your shoulder so much, and you have extra room in your safe. You could use it as a bookshelf or something, you could buy a bunch of books about how to enunciate better for example.
Well anyway the point is that most people are Fifty Cents who just want to buy shiny metal shit and cars, but every once in a while you find one of his peers that instead wants to write great lyrics and record good albums and what not. And then there are the guys who take it to the next level and go out of their way, even to the point of losing money (gasp), to make it great. And it becomes legendary. And that's Z Channel.
I mean it's true that Z Channel would not be as big of a deal now because with video and DVD and the internet many more people have access to these movies, and knowledge of them. And nobody prints newsletters anymore because they got web sights. But still, looking at this documentary you can't help but notice that there's no channel like that even now, at least not in the US. With all the different cable channels you'd think one could play these type of movies. But nobody's showing the old masters, nobody's seeking out director's cuts, most channels edit and have commercials and I guess AMC is pretty good but for some reason it comes in fuzzy on my cable so fuck those guys. And one thing that seems like it was great about this channel, if the movie can be believed, is that if they show it on Z-Channel it's almost like an endorsement. So you end up seeing all these things that you wouldn't have rented or gone to the theater to see. But I'm not talking about straight to video movies you see on the Sci-Fi Channel. I'm talking about good movies.
So let's all tip our hats to the people out there that follow their dreams, the people that go the extra mile and go broke to make you happy: the real good arthouse theaters, the independent video stores, the kids who do a shot for shot remake of Raiders of the Lost Ark, the authors of books where they analyze every single Steven Seagal movie in chronological order, etc. May they all fulfill their dreams and not kill their wives and/or selves.
ZATOICHI (2004)
I've seen a couple of the old Zatoichi movies and I liked them, but I was excited for this one not because it was a Zatoichi film, but because it was a TAKESHI KITANO film. The great badass laureate does his usual writing/directing/editing deal while playing the blind masseuse with the deadly cane sword.
So I don't know why but for some reason it threw me off that this really was more of a Kitano movie than what you expect when you see a Zatoichi movie. It's like, what if Jim Jarmusch made a Zorro movie? It's kind of weird. The character is very similar to how Shintaro played him, with a little more of the Beat Takeshi humor and for some reason with blond hair. But the feel of the movie itself is very Kitano. It wanders around like a dotted line in a Family Circus comic, gradually introducing a family of offbeat characters, without letting on too strong about which ones the movie is about. It has the usual Kitano sense of humanity, introducing a couple of dumb (one arguably retarded) characters and one crossdresser, without a trace of being judgmental.
Man, I felt dumb that I didn't figure out that geisha was a man until Zatoichi pointed it out. The dude is blind and he figured it out before me. I feel your pain, Eddie Murphy.
The weirdest thing is that alot of the movie really doesn't focus on Zatoichi at all. It keeps flashing back to tell the stories of the other characters like the two geishas and the rival samurai bodyguard (all of them interesting). Early on, Zatoichi goes to gamble on dice, and I thought it was going to be that scene from the first Zatoichi where he pretends not to know his opponents can see the dice, tricks them into cheating and then scams them out of all their money. Instead, Zatoichi just gambles. And gambles. And he stays there for days. It's partly my own fault, because it took me longer than it should have to figure out what he was really doing: bonding with one of the gamblers, the nephew of the nice old woman Zatoichi is staying with. But this portion of the story is so long it's kind of weird. It seems like the first half of the movie every time they cut back to Zatoichi all he does is sit there and bet. You want him to be onscreen more and passive less. Even though when he's offscreen you definitely get involved in the other characters.
I gotta be honest, while I appreciate this approach when I think about it, I had a hard time going along with it while I was sitting there in the theater. I just had trouble getting involved in the story for a while, and I would even go so far as to say I was bored. It wasn't until late in the game, when the story started revealing itself as more of a traditional samurai type story (Zatoichi avenges the two geishas whose parents were murdered and frees the town from control by gangsters) that I got all the way into it. But I have a hunch it's one of those movies where now that I got the plot over with, if I go back and watch it again I will like it alot better.
When it does turn into a straight ahead Zatoichi movie, that's a little weird too. Takeshi Kitano is known for the violence in his movies, but he's never been an action star. Now all the sudden there he is running around slaughtering people with a sword, and he's really fucking good at it! On the other hand, all the gore is done with - man, I hate to even tell you this - they do it with computers. As far as I could tell, not a single robe was stained in the making of this picture. You got blood spraying all over the place and sometimes it works, because they make it squirt out in pretty spectacular ways that maybe would be hard to pull off with blood packets, I don't know. But then you got all these stabbings and it just doesn't really look right. Part of the problem is that the effects are not up to modern Hollywood standards of realism, but I think it's just a bad idea from the beginning. Use computers to add detail, or for particular shots. But don't do all your bloodshed digitally. It just doesn't have the same effect that it had in the old samurai movies when you at least knew that the sword was a solid object and not just a bunch of 1s and 0s. There's a pretty great slicing that worked okay, but I was almost offended by the flying severed arm. That would've looked so much more real if it was just a rubber arm. They have those in Japan, don't they? I bet they do.
Maybe the most surprising and most successful aspect is the way Kitano turns it into an almost musical. At various times throughout the movie he zeros in on people working in the fields or chopping wood and shows how their actions turn into a beat. I think this is showing how important sound is to Zatoichi, how he hears things and notices patterns and what not. That's how he knows how to kill these motherfuckers. At the end, the beat is infectious because it turns into a huge festival with fancy costumes and thunderous tap dancing. I almost feel like I dreamed this but there's even a shot where the geishas morph back into their childhood selves before their parents were killed, and it made me think of the end of Return of the Jedi where everyone was celebrating, the Ewoks were enjoying the savory flavor of barbecued stormtrooper meat and a bunch of shimmery blue ghosts were there to enjoy the show. It was like that, but some guy in the shitter afterwards told me it was like Riverdance.
Anyway it's weird moments like that that stick with you more than it's the sword fights. When I think of this movie I won't think of a badass blind swordsman, I will more likely think of the scene out of nowhere where the aunt starts laughing because Ichi has painted eyes on his eyelids. Or where the nephew says he's going to teach three guys how to fight, then gets mad at them for "doing it wrong" when they fight better than him.
In other words, it's a Beat Takeshi movie. Yeah, I'm gonna have to watch this one again.
Leguizamo, and Snipes, the box says. The Star & Writer of Blade & Blade II Reunite, the box says. For the first time in months, I think.
I don't know, this is only a screener, maybe they'll change the cover, which is colored like THE ROCK or TRAFFIC and just shows giant closeups of John and Wesley's faces, lookin real serious. You have no fuckin clue what kind of movie this is. "One's good. One's bad. An innocent boy is caught in the middle." Where's the boy, then?
See, this movie is not a Wesley Snipes movie at all. He plays a crucial role but he's only in a handful of scenes. Leguizamo is more important but the actual star is Sam Jones III. This young man plays a 15 year old autistic kid who's bein looked after by Singer (Leguizamo), who named him Zig Zag and convinced him his talents were super powers. Wesley is great as Zig Zag's dad, an abusive crackhead. The story is about how Zig Zag steals money from work, and then his dad steals it from him, but Singer doesn't want Zig Zag to get in trouble so he tries to steal it back from the dad so he can give it back to the work and I mean, you know, complications happen. Not real spectacular complications, really, but complications.
This is by no means an action movie, suspense thriller, comic strip vampire epic, mystery, action adventure or neo-noir. There are no guns, no parachutes, no motorcycles. Not even fires. Only one baseball bat. Well, two, but one's off screen. It's really just kind of a character drama from an outsider kid's point of view, reminded me a little bit of THE MIGHTY, but less corny, and even a little of FRESH, but not as good.
The movie is based on a novel which is very obvious, because you got characters with wacky, colorful names like Zig Zag and Toad. If it were a movie-movie, everybody would be called James, Fred, Gary or William. There would probaly be a Detective John something or other and a Lieutenant Frank Grimes. Or maybe it would take place in New York and everybody would be Lou. But it's not a movie-movie, it's a book-movie, so you get Zig Zag, Toad, and Cadillac Tom. If there was time they could've also had Rewind, Dr. Fate, the Human Statue and Bunnigula.
You still get the movie-movie cliches, though, like the hooker with the you know what, the detective closing in on the truth (as he actually bothers with a full investigation of a petty theft at a diner), the sleazy boss having an affair, and of course the old it turns out John Leguizamo is dying of cancer routine.
Now you might wonder, why in fuck's name would Vern want to watch this type of crap. And then you would remember that's right, BLADE II is the best movie of the year so far and Vern will do whatever he has to to support David S. Goyer, who makes his directorial debut with this picture.
Now before entering the hall of fame with his work Writing the BLADE pictures, David S. Goyer was by no means a heavy hitter. Sure, he had his work on DARK CITY and what not. But he got his start doing Van Damme movies, DEMONIC TOYS, even a tv movie starring David Hasselhoff. So it would not be all that surprising if ZIG ZAG were a piece of garbage. But it's not.
I'm not saying it's great, like Harry Knowles did on the front of the box ("This will be one ofthe best films you see all year long"). But I think it's one of those obscure movies that a number of people will accidentally catch on cable, and then wonder what that movie was, and when they find out recommend it to friends.
The main attraction is the performances. Sam Jones III is very good, bobbing his head around and not looking people in the eye but not going over the top or even once reminding you of RAIN MAN. John Leguizamo is as good as he always is in his straight roles, charismatic and likable even if whiny. Wesley Snipes, who I forgot was such a good actor until BLADE II came out, is pretty scary in his few scenes. He seems like a real guy - a complete asshole, but not pulling any of that scenery chewing "King Kong ain't got shit on me" bullshit. He does yell but I don't think he spits. When he's being thrown into a police car and says "I don't need incarceration, I need help" there's a possibility that it's a glimpse into his hidden vulnerability and a probability that he's just full of shit.
Hell, I even liked that goofball Oliver Platt as Toad, the racist asshole boss, a character that had all the potential to be a 2-dimensional cartoon, but comes off more like 3-D computer animation. Or something. I don't know.
As a director, Goyer is not off to a bad start. Admittedly, most elements of his Cinematism are merely average for this one. There's nothing special about most of the staging, photographicity, etc. The score is cornball and should've been left out during the trying-to-open-the-safe-a-second-time scene so it could've been more tense. That said, Mr. Goyer seems to work good with actors, which is no small tomatoes. And they always say that for your first movie, you don't want to work with children, special effects, or gorillas. Goyer had a 15 year old star who had to perform tics that could've led to embarassing overacting, and it's the highlight of the movie. Good job Goyer.
Mr. Goyer's script is not exactly Shakespeare, as BLADE and BLADE II are. But it has some good touches, some occasional subtleties. I like the fact that they never show Wesley smoking crack, never actually call him a crackhead or have him say explicitly why he's desperate for money. But it's obvious. They also never say the word autistic, or claim that Zig Zag is a genius or anything like that. Most people just treat him like they treat other kids, which is to say they push him around and call him retard.
And there are some dramatic ideas in here. Zig Zag really doesn't seem to understand the morality of the things he does, the seriousness of the trouble he gets in. And when he finds out about pussy, it leads to some awkward social situations. This stuff mabye isn't explored as deeply as it might've been, but it's also not pounded into the ground.
This is not a bad movie, and I hope it will lead to some Badass directorial works by Mr. Goyer. For the next one they could show the kid on the box, but have it actually star Wesley Snipes.
BLADE RELATED APPENDIX: Luke Goss, the creepy looking british pop star who played Jared Nomak in BLADE II has a small role as "Cadillac Tom". Also did you notice that that new '50s gang movie DEUCES WILD has the guy who played Deacon Frost in BLADE alongside the guy who played Scud in BLADE II? And also the kid from MALCOLM IN THE MIDDLE. That's some weird shit.
ZODIACDavid Fincher's movie SEVEN (no, I'm not gonna do that cute shit where you type the number seven instead of a v, do I look like the type of dude that would try to pull that sort of typographic horseshit, I don't think so) is the deadbeat dad of the modern serial killer thriller. Or the killer that inspired all the copycats. Ever since then, hacks have been trying to cop that thick atmosphere, that dark-as-tar nihilistic tone, that sicko mix of religion and violence, that serious treatment of the type of gimmicky murder sprees that used to be fun when Vincent Price did 'em, and especially those fonts used on the opening credits. Simply put, without SEVEN there would be none of those other movies where Morgan Freeman tries to catch a serial killer, nor would there be a GLIMMER MAN. And then where would we be as a society?
When you take away the artfulness of Fincher's direction (and add a side order of Seagal/Wayans bickering) you can see how morbid and ugly that type of subject matter is. So the fact that Fincher took the time to do such a good job of it makes you question his mental health a little. Didn't they say he personally splattered the fake blood on some of those victims?
So with that in mind it's interesting that Fincher's new movie (and by the way, it's about god damn time I'm able to write those words) is ZODIAC. Now we're dealing with a real life serial killer, one that really did taunt police and play games and use bizarre gimmicks. But this movie isn't like SEVEN - after all, it's a story without the expected ending, the guy was never caught. This is almost an anti-SEVEN. It starts out with a scary re-enactment of the second for-sure-done-by-the–Zodiac murder, and you get that familiar one-two-punch of the true crime genre - morbid fascination and guilt for being morbidly fascinated. On one hand I feel like a creep for wanting to know every detail of some sicko in a super villain hood and robe who murders people and then sends puzzles to the newspaper. On the other hand, how can you not? That is some crazy shit, that that actually happened.
But what you don't necessarily realize at first is that the movie's not really about re-enacting the case. Once it's lured you in with the scares you find out it's really about obsessing over the case. It's full of factoids and contradictions and false (or are they?) leads. After the movie I spent way too much time on the internet reading about the real case to see how accurate the movie was, and I didn't find one thing that contradicted what is presented in the movie. I didn't find anything they left out to make a theory more convincing or dramatic. In the movie you see some of these murders committed (something you actually didn't see in SEVEN) but at least 90% of the movie follows the various people spending years of their lives puzzling over all these facts, trying to find the right combination of leads and details and scraps of evidence that will unlock the whole thing. There's a hell of a cast of characters, with police from multiple jurisdictions (including but not limited to Mark Ruffalo, Anthony Edwards, Donal Logue, and that one balding guy that's on one of those cop shows like Law & Order: Police Murder Science Squad or CSI Underwater Consultation Unit), and there's the people at the San Francisco Chronicle (mainly Robert Downey Junior as a flamboyant Robert Downey Junior type reporter and Jake Gyllenhaal as Robert Graysmith, the editorial cartoonist who watches from the sidelines and winds up so obsessed he ruins his marriage doing his own investigation and writing the two books that the movie is based on).
After seeing the movie I did your basic internet research and saw that alot of people think the books are crap because they disagree with Graysmith's theory. The movie shows him gathering a huge amount of circumstantial evidence against a particular guy he thinks is the Zodiac, and the movie itself notes that the guy was later apparently cleared based on DNA evidence. That's the frustration of this case and this movie in a nutshell - there are so many coincidences with this guy that you can't imagine how he could NOT be the one - I mean, if you've seen it or are familiar with the case,what about that watch? What are the chances of that happening? - and yet all of the physical evidence says he's not the killer.
At least one Amazon review of Graysmith's first book is written by a guy just as obsessed as Graysmith is portrayed in the movie - this guy claims to have tried to visit residences, businesses and roads described in the book in order to refute it. Just check out one or two Zodiac related web sights to see how this sicko's games in the late '60s take over people's lives even to this day.
I think we can all recognize a little bit of that obsessive quality in ourselves. Or at least I hope so because I know I can. Not just because of my whole Steven Seagal thing either. Sometimes you stumble across something and your brain just gets stuck on it. One time I read about this lady who tried to sue Warner Brothers and the Wachowski Brothers claiming that THE MATRIX was plagiarized from an unpublished manuscript she supposedly sent to the Wachowskis in the '80s. Sounds curious, but then you read about it and find out that when somebody from the FBI pointed out that her story also was similar to THE TERMINATOR, she decided that THE TERMINATOR was also plagiarized from the same story and added 20th Century Fox into the lawsuit. To me that bit was enough to prove that the woman was a few nipples short of a hog's teet, but I was amazed to see how many web sights and even magazines picked up her story and repeated her basic claims as if she had credibility. So I started reading more and listening to interviews with her, wondering why people's inclination to believe the worst about Hollywood overcame their suspicions of a lady who would go on the radio and talk about how there's no such thing as the ten commandments because numerology proves that there's no such thing as the number 10, and that the spells used in Harry Potter movies are real, and that she would offer a $1 million reward for a bootleg of the "original" version of THE MATRIX she claims was played in theaters where a STAR WARS style scroll at the beginning gave away the plot twist later in the movie that there was a nuclear war and people were living as batteries. Also in her version of THE MATRIX there was no matrix.
I worked on a column about that shit for weeks, compiling the craziest things she said and inconsistencies in her argument before I realized I had to throw the thing away, nobody wants to read that shit, nobody should want to read that shit. And that's just alleged plagiarism, man - when the crime is murder, especially unsolved murder, you can see how somebody's mind could get swallowed by that current. All kinds of horrible shit happens in the world but when it happens on your block or to somebody you used to know or something, it strikes a different chord. A guy crashes his car near the exit of the freeway where you grew up, climbs over the side and beats some random people to death before the cops shoot him, you end up reading every article about it trying to figure out what made him snap.
Here in the northwest there are any number of macabre historical locations to get you wallowing in the mental muck. Thanks alot, Green River Killer. Recently a friend of mine found out that a particular bar in his neighborhood was where Ted Bundy prowled for some of his victims. I tried to cheer him up by pointing out a thrift store four blocks away that had been one of Bruce Lee's kung fu studios, where at one point he even lived in the back. You need some positive energy to balance out the negative, or you're gonna be like Jake Gylenhaal and fuck up your marriage with Chloe Sevigny. If only Bruce had crossed paths with Bundy at some point, I think he could've defeated him. Or the Zodiac, for that matter, because Bruce lived in San Francisco too. (although he belongs to us, you fucks.)
There's only one man who ever did defeat the Zodiac, and that's Dirty Harry. Obviously the killer "Scorpio" in DIRTY HARRY is inspired by the Zodiac killer, and I've read that David Toschi, the cop played by Mark Ruffalo in ZODIAC was one of the inspirations for Dirty Harry. It's interesting because they give Ruffalo a Dirty Harry hair do and he even talks quiet like Clint. I didn't know if they'd deal with that issue in the movie but they do - we even see him attending a screening of DIRTY HARRY and walking out in disgust. He believed in actual procedure and, unfortunately, never had an opportunity to jump off a bridge onto a schoolbus driven by the killer like in that awesome scene in DIRTY HARRY. I'm not sure what to think about the idea that Dirty Harry Callahan is based on this guy - after all, the role was originally written for Frank Sinatra and turned down by John Wayne, Steve McQueen and Paul Newman, and at times would've taken place in New York or Seattle, so how much can it really be Toschi? But I guess during production Clint may have used the guy as reference, who knows. (In the movie they say he inspired BULLITT and I've also read he inspired Michael Douglas's character on Streets of San Francisco.)
I've already heard people saying this one is a masterpiece, but I'm not sure about that. FIGHT CLUB and THE GAME both blew me away and struck me as classics the first time I watched them. ZODIAC didn't quite knock me on my ass like that, but it's definitely an interesting movie, an original one, with a great cast, some beautiful but subtle (can't believe it's digital) camerawork, and some haunting subject matter that I can't stop thinking about. Maybe on a second viewing I might feel like pulling out the M-word, but for now it's just a good movie.
By the way, if anybody goes in expecting the Rubik's Cube to be solved at the end of this 2 hours and 40 minutes they're in for a hell of a disappointment. It ends with the cube almost solved, but one edge is all mixed up, and it puts the cube down and says that's it, that's as close as I'm gonna get.