There’s cheese, then there’s cheese sprinkled with a healthy dose of cinnamon and pure sugar cane. You know, a loony idea that will give you a mind-blow buzz and halt your heart, all in one convenient package.
During the past two decades, as the costs of movie production inflated exponentially, studios became cautious about the types of projects they assembled. Original, unproven scripts became increasingly rare because of financial risk, and producers resorted to sequels, franchises, remakes, literary works, even video games (remember Wing Commander and Doom?).
But that still doesn’t explain Elf Bowling the Movie.
Back a bit before the turn of the century, before Homestar Runner and Weebl and Bob became cottage industries, Flash oddities still were little more than fun time-wasters created by stressed-out programmers slaving away at the dotcom rack. In the Christmas season of 1999, a slightly off-color seasonal game starting making the rounds, featuring a miffed-but-still-jolly Santa using his striking (heh) elf workers as bowling pins. The game was stupidly bemusing, with the elves mooning and taunting Santa, even “cheating” by occasionally moving out of the way of the ball. My stressed-out publishing office loved it, and soon little high-pitched voices yelping “Who’s your daddy?” and “Is that all the balls you got, Santa?” floated daily above the gray cubical walls.
See? Exactly the kind of material on which to construct a Christmas children’s toon.
Even in a cinematic age where few films are truly original and studios are digging out the most obscure properties to develop, a movie based on a 9-year-old, free Flash-in-the-pan game sounds more like a mad movie hoax than an actual project, z-grade level as it may be. That’s because Hollywood isn’t to blame for this one: Fiji is. Yeah, Fiji. The island. Apparently, they have a film industry now. Maybe it makes cottage, too.
It says something about the home video market when a little island country can produce a full-blown animation feature based on barely-remembered game and get it released on DVD by a major Hollywood studio. I’m not sure what, but it says something.
It also says something when said game has produced several sequels that are not remembered much at all. The movie version includes elements from Elf Bowling 3, which introduces Santa’s brother Dingle Kringle and his couch-crashing ways. There’s even a bocce version. Bocce!
Americans’ constant obsession with shiny techno variations of the Pet Rock may speak to an inner child, but with Elf Bowling, static seems to have mangled the transmission. A harmless joke is dragged too far, substituting absurdity for humor. Yet, that common creative error becomes fascinating by itself, and the obsession continues on, slightly mutated. We simply can’t look away, dazzled by disbelief.
Like watching a car wreck. Involving Cool Whip and chickens.
The same day but a couple hours before Scott “I Paid to See Drop Dead Fred” Foy alerted the denizens of the B-Movie Message Board to Elf Bowling the Movie’s existence, I had just rescued my aged Hewlett Packard from the junk room and turned it on for the first time in six years. First the forgotten Michael Whelan painting reclaimed its backdrop spot on the screen, then all the little time-waster icons popped into place, including three little bowling pins. I had completely forgotten it was there.
When synchronicity calls, I can’t ignore it. Yes, I will see Elf Bowling the Movie. But only because I prefer nutmeg on my Muenster.
Monday, October 01, 2007
Thursday, September 27, 2007
REVIEW: The Plague Dogs
Martin Rosen’s production of Watership Down is almost as well loved as Richard Adams’ original novel. Rosen, who wrote, directed and produced the 1978 animated movie, was careful about what story elements and characters were changed or removed, resulting in probably the second-best animated adaptation of a novel (the first being The Last Unicorn). The movie became a critical and financial success, thus it shouldn’t come as any surprise that Rosen returned to Adams’ writings for inspiration. Probably because Shardik boasted human characters and unspooled to more than 500 pages, Rosen turned instead to Adams’ third novel, The Plague Dogs. Like Watership Down, Adams told much of the story from the point of his animal characters, in this case two dogs escaped from an animal testing facility.
And that’s where the similarities end.
The film opens with a black screen and a soft voice cooning “I don’t feel no pain no more.” Slowly, we hear first the lapping of water and then the sounds of a dog struggling as the title cards in red lettering begin to roll by onscreen. Once the credits run, we see what we’ve been hearing—a black Labrador vainly struggling to stay afloat in an enclosed tank of water. As two scientists calmly watch above, the dog finally gives up and slowly floats to the bottom of the tank. It doesn’t matter that you’re watching a cartoon. It’s still sickening.
The scientists revive the black dog and put him back in his cage. Later that night, when a man comes by to feed them (and take out the dead body of another dog), the black Lab’s door is accidentally left open. A terrier with a cap taped to his head notices, and tries to wake the Lab. It is thus we learn the names of Rowf and Snitter, and it’s the first we hear them speak, with Rowf, still fighting against the water, on the verge of giving up all together. Snitter finds the wire fencing between their cages loose, and slips through to convince his friend to escape. They do, but barely, and find themselves alone in the rocky crags of England’s Lakeland District.
Where Watership Down was pastoral, The Plague Dogs is bleak. Beautiful watercolors—both naturalistic and abstract—create the backgrounds of Watership Down, but here, Snitter and Rowf climb and fall over roughly-rendered harsh rock and deadwood, all in different shades of gray and brown. Rarely do we see any lively green and blue, and those instances are few, as few as the moments of joy for the two escapees. Even the red fur of the tod, a fox who joins the dogs, is as muted as the landscape in which they live.
The Plague Dogs also is violent. Very violent. If there’s anyone left who thinks that animation, with animals or not, is for kids will be cured of that belief after watching this. Sheep are killed and eaten, dogs piss constantly, a man has his face blown off by a shotgun....heck, at one point the tod tells Rowf, “The way you came over the fell, you’d think your ass was afire.” But Rosen’s animators pull it off with a remarkable restraint. The man holds his hands over his face as blood seeps through for only a few seconds before he drops to the ground. After the sheep are killed, they almost become part of the rock of the landscape, with only their heads and brown blood to reveal the dead body. It’s a haunting touch. Two other scenes in particular stand out—Rowf and Snitter’s first sheep killing and the infamous man-eating scene. In the first, instead of seeing Rowf chase down the ram and fighting it, we see brownish blood flow down rock into a brook, and then Snitter and Rowf with the felled ram. We only learn in the aftermath that the ram nearly battered Rowf to death as the Lab shakily limps back down the crag to rest on safer ground. In the other, a starving Rowf and Snitter watch as a would-be hunter falls to his death. Rowf sits on his haunches and looks at the body. After a brief look at Snitter, he gets up and walks off the screen. Both scenes are effective, because we realize what happened off-screen, and the deletion of both the action—which would have numbed for later, similar scenes—and the gore—which would have revolted the audience—saves the film’s quiet power.
In addition, the animation improved greatly since Rosen’s first effort. Motion of characters is never choppy or stiff, and their rendering is much more consistent than Watership Down. It ain’t anime or even Disney, but you knew that already. Rosen also made the wise decision to focus on the animal (the novel gave equal time to humans), which allows him to avoid big scenes that require full blown human interaction, always a problem for animators (see: Balto). Instead, we see the humans mostly from the dogs’ point of view: legs, torsos, feet, but rarely heads and faces. The only time we see a face is jarring and frightening.
The film is not without faults. The music at times feels completely out of place, especially in the film’s denouement. While the animation is solid, facial expressions are still somewhat limited, especially with the tod. An important subplot from the novel was taken out, evaporating some of the movie’s power. A large problem is the story itself. Once Snitter and Rowf escape the research center, we watch them stumble around the countryside trying to survive. There’s no instant pursuit by the scientists, who just seem content to let their research roam the countryside. Not only that, the possibility that the two dogs may carry the bubonic plague doesn’t surface until an hour into the movie, and then nothing is done with it. It is only after the dogs eat the hunter that any organized action is taken by anybody. In the novel, the media whips the populace up in a frenzy with the notion of “plague dogs” running around in their backyards. In the film, there’s no panic. It’s not until the end of the movie that the dogs actually are pursued. Watership Down meandered from scene to scene as well, but at least it had a direction—first finding a new home, then rescuing the does from Efafra. The Plague Dogs focuses instead on its two main characters and their transformation, which brings us to the film’s greatest fault—Rowf.
While Snitter has enough back story and problems to fill an entire novel by himself, Rowf is a cipher. He’s a laboratory dog. He’s afraid of water, a fact of which we’re constantly reminded. He hates men, or as he calls them, “whitecoats.” That’s it. Without knowing where he came from, how he ended up at the research center, how long he’s been there....well, it’s just hard to become emotionally attached. The tod has more life and character than Rowf, and the fox is in the story only half of the time. Rowf seems simply there to play off of Snitter, and with no strong plot to help out, that gets tiresome after a while.
It’s ironic then that Rowf dominates the movie’s most powerful scenes: the opening and ending, the sight of Rowf howling in his loneliness, the aforementioned man-eating. It’s a tribute to Rosen and his crew that these scenes are still affecting and disturbing even with Rowf as their catalyst. And when all is said and done, that’s what they’ve accomplished as a whole. With all of its problems, The Plague Dogs is still a powerful story. There’s so much I haven’t mentioned—the way the movie starts and ends in water; how the dogs’ dark adventure is like Rowf’s water tank; how the humans’ dialog is spoken over scenes of the dogs struggling from crag to crag, adding to their isolation; how Snitter’s view of masters changes…the list goes on and on. If you can find it, rent it, buy it. Watch it more than once, because for all its darkness the movie demands you discover it on your own. And you won’t realize until you try to sleep at night that the image of Rowf struggling against the water is still dancing before your eyes.
---
Film Information
Year Released: 1982
Director: Martin Rosen
Main Cast (voices): John Hurt, Christopher Benjamin, James Bolam, Nigel Hawthorne
Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wUDzklWlvho
And that’s where the similarities end.
The film opens with a black screen and a soft voice cooning “I don’t feel no pain no more.” Slowly, we hear first the lapping of water and then the sounds of a dog struggling as the title cards in red lettering begin to roll by onscreen. Once the credits run, we see what we’ve been hearing—a black Labrador vainly struggling to stay afloat in an enclosed tank of water. As two scientists calmly watch above, the dog finally gives up and slowly floats to the bottom of the tank. It doesn’t matter that you’re watching a cartoon. It’s still sickening.
The scientists revive the black dog and put him back in his cage. Later that night, when a man comes by to feed them (and take out the dead body of another dog), the black Lab’s door is accidentally left open. A terrier with a cap taped to his head notices, and tries to wake the Lab. It is thus we learn the names of Rowf and Snitter, and it’s the first we hear them speak, with Rowf, still fighting against the water, on the verge of giving up all together. Snitter finds the wire fencing between their cages loose, and slips through to convince his friend to escape. They do, but barely, and find themselves alone in the rocky crags of England’s Lakeland District.
Where Watership Down was pastoral, The Plague Dogs is bleak. Beautiful watercolors—both naturalistic and abstract—create the backgrounds of Watership Down, but here, Snitter and Rowf climb and fall over roughly-rendered harsh rock and deadwood, all in different shades of gray and brown. Rarely do we see any lively green and blue, and those instances are few, as few as the moments of joy for the two escapees. Even the red fur of the tod, a fox who joins the dogs, is as muted as the landscape in which they live.
The Plague Dogs also is violent. Very violent. If there’s anyone left who thinks that animation, with animals or not, is for kids will be cured of that belief after watching this. Sheep are killed and eaten, dogs piss constantly, a man has his face blown off by a shotgun....heck, at one point the tod tells Rowf, “The way you came over the fell, you’d think your ass was afire.” But Rosen’s animators pull it off with a remarkable restraint. The man holds his hands over his face as blood seeps through for only a few seconds before he drops to the ground. After the sheep are killed, they almost become part of the rock of the landscape, with only their heads and brown blood to reveal the dead body. It’s a haunting touch. Two other scenes in particular stand out—Rowf and Snitter’s first sheep killing and the infamous man-eating scene. In the first, instead of seeing Rowf chase down the ram and fighting it, we see brownish blood flow down rock into a brook, and then Snitter and Rowf with the felled ram. We only learn in the aftermath that the ram nearly battered Rowf to death as the Lab shakily limps back down the crag to rest on safer ground. In the other, a starving Rowf and Snitter watch as a would-be hunter falls to his death. Rowf sits on his haunches and looks at the body. After a brief look at Snitter, he gets up and walks off the screen. Both scenes are effective, because we realize what happened off-screen, and the deletion of both the action—which would have numbed for later, similar scenes—and the gore—which would have revolted the audience—saves the film’s quiet power.
In addition, the animation improved greatly since Rosen’s first effort. Motion of characters is never choppy or stiff, and their rendering is much more consistent than Watership Down. It ain’t anime or even Disney, but you knew that already. Rosen also made the wise decision to focus on the animal (the novel gave equal time to humans), which allows him to avoid big scenes that require full blown human interaction, always a problem for animators (see: Balto). Instead, we see the humans mostly from the dogs’ point of view: legs, torsos, feet, but rarely heads and faces. The only time we see a face is jarring and frightening.
The film is not without faults. The music at times feels completely out of place, especially in the film’s denouement. While the animation is solid, facial expressions are still somewhat limited, especially with the tod. An important subplot from the novel was taken out, evaporating some of the movie’s power. A large problem is the story itself. Once Snitter and Rowf escape the research center, we watch them stumble around the countryside trying to survive. There’s no instant pursuit by the scientists, who just seem content to let their research roam the countryside. Not only that, the possibility that the two dogs may carry the bubonic plague doesn’t surface until an hour into the movie, and then nothing is done with it. It is only after the dogs eat the hunter that any organized action is taken by anybody. In the novel, the media whips the populace up in a frenzy with the notion of “plague dogs” running around in their backyards. In the film, there’s no panic. It’s not until the end of the movie that the dogs actually are pursued. Watership Down meandered from scene to scene as well, but at least it had a direction—first finding a new home, then rescuing the does from Efafra. The Plague Dogs focuses instead on its two main characters and their transformation, which brings us to the film’s greatest fault—Rowf.
While Snitter has enough back story and problems to fill an entire novel by himself, Rowf is a cipher. He’s a laboratory dog. He’s afraid of water, a fact of which we’re constantly reminded. He hates men, or as he calls them, “whitecoats.” That’s it. Without knowing where he came from, how he ended up at the research center, how long he’s been there....well, it’s just hard to become emotionally attached. The tod has more life and character than Rowf, and the fox is in the story only half of the time. Rowf seems simply there to play off of Snitter, and with no strong plot to help out, that gets tiresome after a while.
It’s ironic then that Rowf dominates the movie’s most powerful scenes: the opening and ending, the sight of Rowf howling in his loneliness, the aforementioned man-eating. It’s a tribute to Rosen and his crew that these scenes are still affecting and disturbing even with Rowf as their catalyst. And when all is said and done, that’s what they’ve accomplished as a whole. With all of its problems, The Plague Dogs is still a powerful story. There’s so much I haven’t mentioned—the way the movie starts and ends in water; how the dogs’ dark adventure is like Rowf’s water tank; how the humans’ dialog is spoken over scenes of the dogs struggling from crag to crag, adding to their isolation; how Snitter’s view of masters changes…the list goes on and on. If you can find it, rent it, buy it. Watch it more than once, because for all its darkness the movie demands you discover it on your own. And you won’t realize until you try to sleep at night that the image of Rowf struggling against the water is still dancing before your eyes.
---
Film Information
Year Released: 1982
Director: Martin Rosen
Main Cast (voices): John Hurt, Christopher Benjamin, James Bolam, Nigel Hawthorne
Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wUDzklWlvho
Wednesday, September 26, 2007
Back to the Big Screen
When I told my Dad about the AFI Silver Theatre’s huge main screening room, he replied, “Just like they all used to be.” He had to rub it in, didn’t he?
Back in the 1970s, as drive-ins began fading out and ticket sales struggled, downtown palaces were forced slice their single-screen cinemas in smaller pieces to compete against the new onslaught of shopping mall multiplexes. By the time I reached high school, every theater in the Danbury area had split into 2 or 3 screens each—the Cine, the Palace, the Crown, the Bank Street Cinema, and the Fine Arts. Less than a decade later, the new 10-screen multiplex drove all but one out of business, leaving just the little art house in Bethel and the second run house in Newtown clinging to their niche audiences.
One screen, cut in half, sometimes in thrice. No wonder I was shocked by the Silver’s grandeur.
I vaguely remember seeing a movie as a kid at the old Palace Theater on Main Street before it was cut. The crowd was large enough to invade the balcony above, but my Mom got me safely away from any falling popcorn or soda. I last attended the Palace in the early 1990s, to see Highlander: The Final Dimension. This time, I got to be in the balcony, but only because the theater had cut it away from the screening room below—the balcony now was its own theater, with a sloped wooden “floor” yawning from my front row seat to the screen. The theater closed only a couple of years later.
I wonder if it’s time to reopen them.
An unexpected side effect to the advent of multiplexes has been the shorter runs of major releases. Two decades ago, a blockbuster film like Raiders of the Lost Ark would run all summer and into the fall. But with studios churning out more and more event crowd-thrillers to please the working class and school-aged clientele of the movie mall, the finite amount of available release dates grew smaller and smaller, until blockbusters—once a monthly event—started piling on top of one another. A major movie losing about half its audience after its opening week used to be an ominous sign of a possible turkey; today, it’s the general rule. This past summer, Spider-Man 3, Shriek the Third, Knocked Up, Pirates of the Caribbean, Ocean’s Thirteen, The Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer, Evan Almighty, A Mighty Heart, Live Free or Die Hard, and Ratatouille all were released within two months of each other and all before July, with dozens of smaller studio and independent films filling the in-between cracks. Studios now expect blockbusters to win back most of their production costs in the hopefully huge opening weekend, accepting that audiences will move onto the next big release the next week.
The problem with this fiscal philosophy is that even modern stadium-seating rooms are fairly limited to a few hundred, if that. With highly anticipated releases like Pirates and Spider-Man, showings are sold out well in advance, leaving people scrambling to find later showings or another day. Which seems a bit counter-productive, given how movies are viewed today: comfortable lounge seats with cup-holders, multiple-speaker sound systems, tickets that finally have risen to double-digits. Movie-going has become an outing, just like going to a baseball game or concert.
So why not go full-bore and bring back the big screen?
Not every theater needs one, and not every multiplex screen must be gargantuan. But with more and more people installing personal home theaters, the idea of spending between $10–$30 to go out to see a movie has become impractical; movie-going used to be, and should be, a unique experience that cannot be replicated unless you’re Howard Hughes. Restoring some screens to retro size would bring back some of the lost grandeur and make the event movies a true event, and with the shorter runs of major movies, the risk is far less than it was 20 years ago. It works for the Silver—they manage to draw people in with dusty classics, foreign films, and one or two actual new releases. Imagine what would happen if the local multiplex had one “blockbuster screen.” Imagine seeing something like Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter on it.
Movies still are struggling—last week’s Resident Evil: Extinction grossed more than its predecessor but actually sold fewer tickets. Theater-going quickly is growing from a regular activity to a special occasion; perhaps it’s time theaters began treating themselves the same way. They have little to lose.
Back in the 1970s, as drive-ins began fading out and ticket sales struggled, downtown palaces were forced slice their single-screen cinemas in smaller pieces to compete against the new onslaught of shopping mall multiplexes. By the time I reached high school, every theater in the Danbury area had split into 2 or 3 screens each—the Cine, the Palace, the Crown, the Bank Street Cinema, and the Fine Arts. Less than a decade later, the new 10-screen multiplex drove all but one out of business, leaving just the little art house in Bethel and the second run house in Newtown clinging to their niche audiences.
One screen, cut in half, sometimes in thrice. No wonder I was shocked by the Silver’s grandeur.
I vaguely remember seeing a movie as a kid at the old Palace Theater on Main Street before it was cut. The crowd was large enough to invade the balcony above, but my Mom got me safely away from any falling popcorn or soda. I last attended the Palace in the early 1990s, to see Highlander: The Final Dimension. This time, I got to be in the balcony, but only because the theater had cut it away from the screening room below—the balcony now was its own theater, with a sloped wooden “floor” yawning from my front row seat to the screen. The theater closed only a couple of years later.
I wonder if it’s time to reopen them.
An unexpected side effect to the advent of multiplexes has been the shorter runs of major releases. Two decades ago, a blockbuster film like Raiders of the Lost Ark would run all summer and into the fall. But with studios churning out more and more event crowd-thrillers to please the working class and school-aged clientele of the movie mall, the finite amount of available release dates grew smaller and smaller, until blockbusters—once a monthly event—started piling on top of one another. A major movie losing about half its audience after its opening week used to be an ominous sign of a possible turkey; today, it’s the general rule. This past summer, Spider-Man 3, Shriek the Third, Knocked Up, Pirates of the Caribbean, Ocean’s Thirteen, The Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer, Evan Almighty, A Mighty Heart, Live Free or Die Hard, and Ratatouille all were released within two months of each other and all before July, with dozens of smaller studio and independent films filling the in-between cracks. Studios now expect blockbusters to win back most of their production costs in the hopefully huge opening weekend, accepting that audiences will move onto the next big release the next week.
The problem with this fiscal philosophy is that even modern stadium-seating rooms are fairly limited to a few hundred, if that. With highly anticipated releases like Pirates and Spider-Man, showings are sold out well in advance, leaving people scrambling to find later showings or another day. Which seems a bit counter-productive, given how movies are viewed today: comfortable lounge seats with cup-holders, multiple-speaker sound systems, tickets that finally have risen to double-digits. Movie-going has become an outing, just like going to a baseball game or concert.
So why not go full-bore and bring back the big screen?
Not every theater needs one, and not every multiplex screen must be gargantuan. But with more and more people installing personal home theaters, the idea of spending between $10–$30 to go out to see a movie has become impractical; movie-going used to be, and should be, a unique experience that cannot be replicated unless you’re Howard Hughes. Restoring some screens to retro size would bring back some of the lost grandeur and make the event movies a true event, and with the shorter runs of major movies, the risk is far less than it was 20 years ago. It works for the Silver—they manage to draw people in with dusty classics, foreign films, and one or two actual new releases. Imagine what would happen if the local multiplex had one “blockbuster screen.” Imagine seeing something like Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter on it.
Movies still are struggling—last week’s Resident Evil: Extinction grossed more than its predecessor but actually sold fewer tickets. Theater-going quickly is growing from a regular activity to a special occasion; perhaps it’s time theaters began treating themselves the same way. They have little to lose.
Thursday, September 20, 2007
She Was Wongo!
Gypsy and her cronies recently survived something called a Wild Women Weekend, and apparently they’re so bedragged and bushed that she hasn’t even posted any pictures yet, much less tell me anything about it. But some guy in a trench coat and fedora…or was it a checkered blazer and bowler?...anyway, this guy slipped me this video, swearing up and down that it was actual footage of the cataclysmic event. I only had to pay him $50 for exclusive rights:
Man, no wonder Gypsy’s been mum. Well-coiffed, beefcake barbarians are hard to come by.
(Sad bit of disclosure: I actually rented this movie, which came on a Something Weird DVD with two other lovely barbarian women flicks. Yes, I did watch all three, but I can't remember the titles of the other two, probably because Wongo euthanized what remained of my brain.)
Man, no wonder Gypsy’s been mum. Well-coiffed, beefcake barbarians are hard to come by.
(Sad bit of disclosure: I actually rented this movie, which came on a Something Weird DVD with two other lovely barbarian women flicks. Yes, I did watch all three, but I can't remember the titles of the other two, probably because Wongo euthanized what remained of my brain.)
Saturday, September 15, 2007
Bride of Stardust
Stories spring from a common well of tradition, reaching back to the storyteller carrying down fables and legends from their youth long before the literary could live on the page. Everything is connected, everything inspiring offspring, everything a subconscious creature of its past, both personal and ancestral. Nothing is wholly original, and originality does not make a quality story. What does is the telling, the belief of the teller in his characters, her imagination, and their ability to captivate.
And yet, when a film bares a striking resemblance to another, the natural tendency is to compare and contrast, often unfavorably. A modern story, seeking at least acceptance, is forced to live against expectations built by a well-loved predecessor; if the newcomer fails to surpass, then it is branded a failure.
Stardust has been discovering this conundrum for about a month now. A fairy tale adventure with a healthy sense of whimsical wit? The Princess Bride staked that territory years ago and registered it at the Cinema Classics Department. And to be honest, the two films do share several traits: based on books by well-known authors (Neil Gaiman and William Goldman), an adventure rooted in the emotion of love, an adaptation with a major tonal change from the original work, pirates and evil princes, unexpected modern humor enlightening the faerie tropes, and, unfortunately, a less-than successful theatrical run despite generally favorable reviews.
But that’s only the surface scan. A fundamental difference exists between the two features: One is a story about a fairy tale, while the other is the fairy tale. The Princess Bride’s well-known twist is that the narrator tells the “good-parts” version, leaving out all the overly mushy and (in the book, at least) the more dreary traits. Stardust, however, has no such censor, and the whimsy plays hand-in-hand with a twisted darkness borne from the Brothers Grimm. Unlike Westley and Buttercup’s light-hearted adventure, real danger awaits in Stardust’s more macabre world.
The two films, despite their easy kinship, are two completely different experiences.
That’s the significance of the telling. One change in perspective, and the entire narrative atmosphere shifts, touching characters, schemes, motivations, and setting. Those expecting a spiritual rewind of The Princess Bride will be disappointed, a fault not of Stardust’s making but one for which the film is marked. Both films may succeed in their own way, but because one came before, the other is the lesser copy that didn’t quite get it right.
Expectations can ruin a good movie, as can history buttressed by an easily accessible archive. Since the 1980s, home video in its various forms has allowed moviegoers to watch films endlessly rather than wait for the next theatrical showing. Favorite movies are learned by rote, favorite lines repeated to friends and fellow fans as cultural code words, and all the while little forgotten failures become reborn as cult treasures. Why chance another story when a well-loved familiar is in hand? Maybe that’s the hurtful concession—while cinema now has a second chance for stranger tales, the attention of the audience is mostly elsewhere.
And thus, a tale well told is left unreeling in vacant theaters, undone by both similarity and difference.
And yet, when a film bares a striking resemblance to another, the natural tendency is to compare and contrast, often unfavorably. A modern story, seeking at least acceptance, is forced to live against expectations built by a well-loved predecessor; if the newcomer fails to surpass, then it is branded a failure.
Stardust has been discovering this conundrum for about a month now. A fairy tale adventure with a healthy sense of whimsical wit? The Princess Bride staked that territory years ago and registered it at the Cinema Classics Department. And to be honest, the two films do share several traits: based on books by well-known authors (Neil Gaiman and William Goldman), an adventure rooted in the emotion of love, an adaptation with a major tonal change from the original work, pirates and evil princes, unexpected modern humor enlightening the faerie tropes, and, unfortunately, a less-than successful theatrical run despite generally favorable reviews.
But that’s only the surface scan. A fundamental difference exists between the two features: One is a story about a fairy tale, while the other is the fairy tale. The Princess Bride’s well-known twist is that the narrator tells the “good-parts” version, leaving out all the overly mushy and (in the book, at least) the more dreary traits. Stardust, however, has no such censor, and the whimsy plays hand-in-hand with a twisted darkness borne from the Brothers Grimm. Unlike Westley and Buttercup’s light-hearted adventure, real danger awaits in Stardust’s more macabre world.
The two films, despite their easy kinship, are two completely different experiences.
That’s the significance of the telling. One change in perspective, and the entire narrative atmosphere shifts, touching characters, schemes, motivations, and setting. Those expecting a spiritual rewind of The Princess Bride will be disappointed, a fault not of Stardust’s making but one for which the film is marked. Both films may succeed in their own way, but because one came before, the other is the lesser copy that didn’t quite get it right.
Expectations can ruin a good movie, as can history buttressed by an easily accessible archive. Since the 1980s, home video in its various forms has allowed moviegoers to watch films endlessly rather than wait for the next theatrical showing. Favorite movies are learned by rote, favorite lines repeated to friends and fellow fans as cultural code words, and all the while little forgotten failures become reborn as cult treasures. Why chance another story when a well-loved familiar is in hand? Maybe that’s the hurtful concession—while cinema now has a second chance for stranger tales, the attention of the audience is mostly elsewhere.
And thus, a tale well told is left unreeling in vacant theaters, undone by both similarity and difference.
Tuesday, September 11, 2007
A Good Trade
I’m not a melancholy man, nor do tearjerkers manage to manipulate me. One thing, though, one thing, no matter the story, will blindside a raw weakness in me and crack the stoic.
The last full measure.
Whether it’s the regiment of black Union soldiers, silently marching to their willing deaths on the beach, willing to die to prove to everyone that they are worthy of humanity not slavery, and the white soldiers, the ones who depraved them, realizing what they’re about to do and spontaneously snapping to a salute.
Whether it’s the metal man created for malevolence but forgetting and learning from a boy to be more than tool, the metal man hunted without mercy by those who fear him and in so doing launch their own destruction to rain down on them…it is the act of the metal man, shaken from his anger, to smile, turn, and fly into the annihilating rain to save everyone in exchange for himself, joyfully calling out his ad hoc hero’s name: “Suuuuperman.”
The tears flow.
Six years ago today, malevolence fell on us, sending thousands to their deaths in New York and Washington, DC. Six years ago, I drove by the Pentagon 10 minutes before it was hit, only to helplessly watch the television with most of my coworkers as the towers fell.
Within the horror, heroism bloomed. Firefighters, police, and emergency workers responded, many coming in off-duty. They chose this. They chose this life, they chose this moment. But an old wartime saying hammers the reality home: Real heroes never come home.
They give up their life so that another may live.
The people on Flight 93 understood. They and those who chose to enter the burning destruction, full knowing the end would come without warning but also knowing others would die if they didn’t, they understood what they had to do, and what awful but awesome trade they had to make. One life for another.
Today, tomorrow, forever, that is the ultimate lesson of September 11. It was a lesson that propelled strangers to come after the fires were out to dig through the wreckage on a faint hope more were alive. It was a lesson that fueled unrivaled donations to the American Red Cross and other emergency organizations. It was a lesson we should never forget: That the ultimate gift we can give is of ourselves.
Tonight, in the quiet night, the painful memory of that day perhaps is dulled, scabbed over by time. But then I think of the heroes, the real heroes, glancing up at the hell above them, yet still going in. And the tears flow.
The last full measure.
Whether it’s the regiment of black Union soldiers, silently marching to their willing deaths on the beach, willing to die to prove to everyone that they are worthy of humanity not slavery, and the white soldiers, the ones who depraved them, realizing what they’re about to do and spontaneously snapping to a salute.
Whether it’s the metal man created for malevolence but forgetting and learning from a boy to be more than tool, the metal man hunted without mercy by those who fear him and in so doing launch their own destruction to rain down on them…it is the act of the metal man, shaken from his anger, to smile, turn, and fly into the annihilating rain to save everyone in exchange for himself, joyfully calling out his ad hoc hero’s name: “Suuuuperman.”
The tears flow.
Six years ago today, malevolence fell on us, sending thousands to their deaths in New York and Washington, DC. Six years ago, I drove by the Pentagon 10 minutes before it was hit, only to helplessly watch the television with most of my coworkers as the towers fell.
Within the horror, heroism bloomed. Firefighters, police, and emergency workers responded, many coming in off-duty. They chose this. They chose this life, they chose this moment. But an old wartime saying hammers the reality home: Real heroes never come home.
They give up their life so that another may live.
The people on Flight 93 understood. They and those who chose to enter the burning destruction, full knowing the end would come without warning but also knowing others would die if they didn’t, they understood what they had to do, and what awful but awesome trade they had to make. One life for another.
Today, tomorrow, forever, that is the ultimate lesson of September 11. It was a lesson that propelled strangers to come after the fires were out to dig through the wreckage on a faint hope more were alive. It was a lesson that fueled unrivaled donations to the American Red Cross and other emergency organizations. It was a lesson we should never forget: That the ultimate gift we can give is of ourselves.
Tonight, in the quiet night, the painful memory of that day perhaps is dulled, scabbed over by time. But then I think of the heroes, the real heroes, glancing up at the hell above them, yet still going in. And the tears flow.
Monday, September 10, 2007
American Wuxia
Patiently we waited in the AFI Silver Theatre lobby, milling amongst the display cases laden with pop culture relics recalling our childhood. While starring at the synthesized one-hit records and Rubik’s Cubes, we would hear the muffled roar of Brazil’s climax, signaling that its showing was running late. We didn’t mind.
Hey, we were simply waiting for Jack Burton.
When John Carpenter’s oddity barreled into mid-1980s theaters, the likes of The Goonies and Gremlins formed audiences’ conception of fantasy adventures with their amusement-park-ride décor, light-show magic, and deformed monster suits. General assumption dictated that Big Trouble in Little China was more of the same, and the trailers only reinforced that notion. But Carpenter—who, with the acclaimed and commercially successful Starman, had just shaken free of the horror genre after a string of hit movies—Carpenter had something different in mind. Something that mainstream American audiences or critics knew nothing about.
A riff on wuxia, done up sai yan style.
Also known as “Hong Kong swordplay,” wuxia long has been a crazy subtext to the martial arts cinema. Combining kung fu philosophy and swordsmen traditions with a mishmash of fantasy, comedy, horror, and tragic romance, wuxia movies play a melodeon of emotions, flipping and flying along on wires among lavish sets and colorful costumes mimicking a symbolic edition of ancient China. Although the genre’s roots reach back as far as the 1920s, the heyday of wuxia really started during the kung fu boom of the 1970s. The following decade, though, began with a radical reworking of the mythos—Tsui Hark’s Zu, Warriors of Magic Mountain. After the international success of Star Wars, Hark borrowed that space opera’s special effect techniques and Saturday matinee storytelling to translate what had been a style heavy on Buddhist and historical tradition to something more buoyant and randomly adventurous. The more dramatic traits of wuxia were and are still present, but in many of the popular specimens, they fight for screen time with the insanity.
It was this version of wuxia that Carpenter discovered and fell in love with, so much so that as he rode his recent Hollywood success, he decided to create his own Hong Kong fantasia, but from his perspective. Which, in the end, turned out to be ours.
As we finally drifted into the screening room, we were engulfed by an art deco cavern. The Silver has three theaters, two of which resemble the stadium-seating efficiencies of modern multiplexes. But the third has been restored to its mid-20th century form, its tapestry wallpaper embellishing between the wood carvings roiling on the walls. The ceiling feels a mile or two away. The screen is simply huge, while the seating dwarfs the 50 or so now finding perfect seats everywhere.
As the lights dim and the old Fox logo appears, there’s a strange stillness I can’t place. It is anticipation: As soon as Egg appears, questioned by his cynical lawyer, an ovation rises in the darkness, followed by giggling and geek-riven glee. The Three Storms get a even louder one when they appear in their grandiose entree. Ole Jack, meanwhile, got complete silence, because everybody wanted to hear every single line.
It’s been a long time since I’ve sat in a theater watching a movie everybody with me adored. Maybe it’s been never.
Big Trouble in Little China flopped back in Big 80s, eclipsed by, all things, Eddie Murphy’s The Golden Child. Critics shamed Carpenter for using Asian stereotypes in his movie, never realizing that the director actually was paying proper homage to the films the Asian industry was churning out. Those critics, and unfortunately the mainstream audience, were unfamiliar with Hong Kong cinema; their ignorance led to misunderstanding, and Big Trouble ended with the dreaded “ahead of its time” tag.
Over the years, Carpenter’s fun opus found its fans and slowly rose in estimation, strangely coming to help define the cinematic artistry of the decade that spurned it. Blame Jack Burton.
Sitting in the Silver, loving every minute of a movie I knew far too well, I realized two things. First, akin to the screening of The Terminator, I noticed things I never did before, but this time, it had to do with Carpenter and writer W.D. Richter’s (Buckaroo Banzai) sly character humor. Jack is Jack, and Egg is bemusingly sage-like, but I’ve never noticed how hilarious the globs of exposition were ratta-tating from Kim Cattrall’s Gracie Law, nor how gloriously earnest Dennis Dun’s Wang Chi tried to be.
The second is, well, Jack himself. The accepted great joke of Big Trouble in Little China is that Jack Burton thinks he’s the hero, but he’s really Wang’s sidekick. With one big exception, Jack doesn’t accomplish much heroic, and instead stumbles around completely out of his depth among a dozen Chinese hells, elemental henchmen, and Six Demon Bags.
Just like the audience.
That’s the honest fun of Big Trouble—Jack is one of us. For all of his bluster, Jack’s perspective is the same as his creator’s—the outsider experiencing Chinese magic and mythology for the first time. Carpenter knew he could never make a pure wuxia movie, so he made a twisted translation with a familiar cliché. The real joke of Jack Burton is that he’s more than a confused sidekick—he’s a Western hero waylaid in a Chinese wuxia movie, the modern cowboy equipped with his one-liners and bravado hopelessly out-of-place. Jack grounds the wuxia insanity with well-intentioned buffoonery, allowing his audience to both laugh and learn. We know Jack, even though Kurt Russell is playing a parody, and Burton calms the strangeness by entertaining us with what we know.
Big Trouble in Little China transcends nostalgia because it’s a preface, a guided introduction to another culture’s unique genre. Years later, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon would become a surprise hit escaping the art house, opening the multiplex door for modern-day wuxia. Every year, Hong Kong fantasies perform for the mainstream—from House of Flying Daggers to The Banquet to Hero. This time, audiences were ready for the magic.
Thank Jack.
Hey, we were simply waiting for Jack Burton.
When John Carpenter’s oddity barreled into mid-1980s theaters, the likes of The Goonies and Gremlins formed audiences’ conception of fantasy adventures with their amusement-park-ride décor, light-show magic, and deformed monster suits. General assumption dictated that Big Trouble in Little China was more of the same, and the trailers only reinforced that notion. But Carpenter—who, with the acclaimed and commercially successful Starman, had just shaken free of the horror genre after a string of hit movies—Carpenter had something different in mind. Something that mainstream American audiences or critics knew nothing about.
A riff on wuxia, done up sai yan style.
Also known as “Hong Kong swordplay,” wuxia long has been a crazy subtext to the martial arts cinema. Combining kung fu philosophy and swordsmen traditions with a mishmash of fantasy, comedy, horror, and tragic romance, wuxia movies play a melodeon of emotions, flipping and flying along on wires among lavish sets and colorful costumes mimicking a symbolic edition of ancient China. Although the genre’s roots reach back as far as the 1920s, the heyday of wuxia really started during the kung fu boom of the 1970s. The following decade, though, began with a radical reworking of the mythos—Tsui Hark’s Zu, Warriors of Magic Mountain. After the international success of Star Wars, Hark borrowed that space opera’s special effect techniques and Saturday matinee storytelling to translate what had been a style heavy on Buddhist and historical tradition to something more buoyant and randomly adventurous. The more dramatic traits of wuxia were and are still present, but in many of the popular specimens, they fight for screen time with the insanity.
It was this version of wuxia that Carpenter discovered and fell in love with, so much so that as he rode his recent Hollywood success, he decided to create his own Hong Kong fantasia, but from his perspective. Which, in the end, turned out to be ours.
As we finally drifted into the screening room, we were engulfed by an art deco cavern. The Silver has three theaters, two of which resemble the stadium-seating efficiencies of modern multiplexes. But the third has been restored to its mid-20th century form, its tapestry wallpaper embellishing between the wood carvings roiling on the walls. The ceiling feels a mile or two away. The screen is simply huge, while the seating dwarfs the 50 or so now finding perfect seats everywhere.
As the lights dim and the old Fox logo appears, there’s a strange stillness I can’t place. It is anticipation: As soon as Egg appears, questioned by his cynical lawyer, an ovation rises in the darkness, followed by giggling and geek-riven glee. The Three Storms get a even louder one when they appear in their grandiose entree. Ole Jack, meanwhile, got complete silence, because everybody wanted to hear every single line.
It’s been a long time since I’ve sat in a theater watching a movie everybody with me adored. Maybe it’s been never.
Big Trouble in Little China flopped back in Big 80s, eclipsed by, all things, Eddie Murphy’s The Golden Child. Critics shamed Carpenter for using Asian stereotypes in his movie, never realizing that the director actually was paying proper homage to the films the Asian industry was churning out. Those critics, and unfortunately the mainstream audience, were unfamiliar with Hong Kong cinema; their ignorance led to misunderstanding, and Big Trouble ended with the dreaded “ahead of its time” tag.
Over the years, Carpenter’s fun opus found its fans and slowly rose in estimation, strangely coming to help define the cinematic artistry of the decade that spurned it. Blame Jack Burton.
Sitting in the Silver, loving every minute of a movie I knew far too well, I realized two things. First, akin to the screening of The Terminator, I noticed things I never did before, but this time, it had to do with Carpenter and writer W.D. Richter’s (Buckaroo Banzai) sly character humor. Jack is Jack, and Egg is bemusingly sage-like, but I’ve never noticed how hilarious the globs of exposition were ratta-tating from Kim Cattrall’s Gracie Law, nor how gloriously earnest Dennis Dun’s Wang Chi tried to be.
The second is, well, Jack himself. The accepted great joke of Big Trouble in Little China is that Jack Burton thinks he’s the hero, but he’s really Wang’s sidekick. With one big exception, Jack doesn’t accomplish much heroic, and instead stumbles around completely out of his depth among a dozen Chinese hells, elemental henchmen, and Six Demon Bags.
Just like the audience.
That’s the honest fun of Big Trouble—Jack is one of us. For all of his bluster, Jack’s perspective is the same as his creator’s—the outsider experiencing Chinese magic and mythology for the first time. Carpenter knew he could never make a pure wuxia movie, so he made a twisted translation with a familiar cliché. The real joke of Jack Burton is that he’s more than a confused sidekick—he’s a Western hero waylaid in a Chinese wuxia movie, the modern cowboy equipped with his one-liners and bravado hopelessly out-of-place. Jack grounds the wuxia insanity with well-intentioned buffoonery, allowing his audience to both laugh and learn. We know Jack, even though Kurt Russell is playing a parody, and Burton calms the strangeness by entertaining us with what we know.
Big Trouble in Little China transcends nostalgia because it’s a preface, a guided introduction to another culture’s unique genre. Years later, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon would become a surprise hit escaping the art house, opening the multiplex door for modern-day wuxia. Every year, Hong Kong fantasies perform for the mainstream—from House of Flying Daggers to The Banquet to Hero. This time, audiences were ready for the magic.
Thank Jack.
Sunday, September 09, 2007
Netflix Almanac: August 2007
Well, three is better than none. Except when two is really one. Once that English major’s method of math begins to sink in, read on for last month’s slight excursion into kiddy kaiju and a wee bit of nostalgia.
Turk 182! (1985)
Only could the Big 80s spit out a film like this. While partying with his buddies down at the local pub, an off-duty New York City fireman (Robert Urich) rushes into a burning building to save a child, only to be blown out a window by an errant fire hose. The resultant psychological and physical trauma takes its toil, and with medical bills climbing and the bureaucracy denying any help, the fireman's younger brother (Timothy Hutton) takes matters into his own hands—with graffiti. Bob Clark’s crowd-pleasing contraption became a cable television staple, largely because of a solid cast boosting a paper-thin premise. Robert Culp leads the troupe of character actors, creating a realistic NYC late Seventies mayor frustrated by Hutton’s antics. Urich also excels, subtly essaying suicidal depression and hopelessness under a brave but cracked exterior. Peter Boyle, Kim Cattrall, James Tolkan, and Darren McGavin also contribute their little warped spins in underwritten roles. Turk 182! is one of those movies that shouldn’t work and sometimes doesn’t, but still manages to be addictive fluff.
Rebirth of Mothra (1996)
The 1990s saw the resurrection of the kaiju film, with the likes of Godzilla and Gamera receiving a reimagining long before Tim Burton coined the term. It only was natural that Toho also would revive its Mothra series; the monster moth had been the studio’s second-most popular character in the Showa era and enjoyed fandom from girls as well as boys. But while Godzilla experienced a new-found maturity in its showcases, Toho headed the opposite direction with Mothra, creating a trilogy for tikes. Which makes the inaugural production surprising—nearly half the film features one gigantic brouhaha involving Mothra, her larvae off-spring (she has a lot of those, doesn’t she?) and their antagonist. Unfortunately, that’s about the only real fun to be had. Rebirth of Mothra is weighed down by an environmental soapbox, a sermon delivered so stiffly I’m surprised they didn’t include a pulpit. An executive for a logging company accidentally unleashes Desghidorah (another variation of Ghidorah), which will destroy the Earth’s environment by sucking out all of nature’s energy and lifeforce. The executive’s two children, meanwhile, are embroiled in the goings on when he gives them the medallion that he found at Desghidorah’s ancient tomb. Soon, Mothra’s two twin fairies—riding a mini-Mothra—are racing against an evil one named Belvera to recover the seal, which can control the monster. The family eventually “helps” out (basically, they stand around and try not to get killed). The aforementioned battle takes place halfway through the movie, evaporating much of the excitement from the climatic confrontation. Rebirth of Mothra conjures some good moments, such the death of one of the creatures and Belvera’s scenery stealing, but those are swamped by an earnest effort to send the message, rather than let the story tell it.
Rebirth of Mothra II (1997)
With all of the kaiju tropes exhausted in the first film, the sequel wisely heads toward more fantastic territory. Belvera, the twins, and mini-Mothra are back, but the human family is exchanged for a shy girl, two bullies/friends-in-training, and a Furby with antenna. The little furball, which befriends the girl, is a key to an ancient treasure buried in an underwater city. The treasure is the only thing that will stop Dagahra, a sea creature (also ancient) originally designed to fix pollution but which has turned malevolent. The kids, pursued by two greedy fishermen employed by Belvera, explore the city while Mothra holds off Dagahra. Better writing and an emphasis on the supernatural help this outing find a better identity than its predecessor, even if it is aping The Neverending Story. The environmental preaching is still there, but it’s not as cumbersome. The action is steadily silly and the story even toys with a bit of dark consequences, copping out past the last minute. The kids also are far more likable and lively than their two counterparts in the original film, ultimately making Rebirth of Mothra II a decent adventure for its heroes’ audience.
Turk 182! (1985)
Only could the Big 80s spit out a film like this. While partying with his buddies down at the local pub, an off-duty New York City fireman (Robert Urich) rushes into a burning building to save a child, only to be blown out a window by an errant fire hose. The resultant psychological and physical trauma takes its toil, and with medical bills climbing and the bureaucracy denying any help, the fireman's younger brother (Timothy Hutton) takes matters into his own hands—with graffiti. Bob Clark’s crowd-pleasing contraption became a cable television staple, largely because of a solid cast boosting a paper-thin premise. Robert Culp leads the troupe of character actors, creating a realistic NYC late Seventies mayor frustrated by Hutton’s antics. Urich also excels, subtly essaying suicidal depression and hopelessness under a brave but cracked exterior. Peter Boyle, Kim Cattrall, James Tolkan, and Darren McGavin also contribute their little warped spins in underwritten roles. Turk 182! is one of those movies that shouldn’t work and sometimes doesn’t, but still manages to be addictive fluff.
Rebirth of Mothra (1996)
The 1990s saw the resurrection of the kaiju film, with the likes of Godzilla and Gamera receiving a reimagining long before Tim Burton coined the term. It only was natural that Toho also would revive its Mothra series; the monster moth had been the studio’s second-most popular character in the Showa era and enjoyed fandom from girls as well as boys. But while Godzilla experienced a new-found maturity in its showcases, Toho headed the opposite direction with Mothra, creating a trilogy for tikes. Which makes the inaugural production surprising—nearly half the film features one gigantic brouhaha involving Mothra, her larvae off-spring (she has a lot of those, doesn’t she?) and their antagonist. Unfortunately, that’s about the only real fun to be had. Rebirth of Mothra is weighed down by an environmental soapbox, a sermon delivered so stiffly I’m surprised they didn’t include a pulpit. An executive for a logging company accidentally unleashes Desghidorah (another variation of Ghidorah), which will destroy the Earth’s environment by sucking out all of nature’s energy and lifeforce. The executive’s two children, meanwhile, are embroiled in the goings on when he gives them the medallion that he found at Desghidorah’s ancient tomb. Soon, Mothra’s two twin fairies—riding a mini-Mothra—are racing against an evil one named Belvera to recover the seal, which can control the monster. The family eventually “helps” out (basically, they stand around and try not to get killed). The aforementioned battle takes place halfway through the movie, evaporating much of the excitement from the climatic confrontation. Rebirth of Mothra conjures some good moments, such the death of one of the creatures and Belvera’s scenery stealing, but those are swamped by an earnest effort to send the message, rather than let the story tell it.
Rebirth of Mothra II (1997)
With all of the kaiju tropes exhausted in the first film, the sequel wisely heads toward more fantastic territory. Belvera, the twins, and mini-Mothra are back, but the human family is exchanged for a shy girl, two bullies/friends-in-training, and a Furby with antenna. The little furball, which befriends the girl, is a key to an ancient treasure buried in an underwater city. The treasure is the only thing that will stop Dagahra, a sea creature (also ancient) originally designed to fix pollution but which has turned malevolent. The kids, pursued by two greedy fishermen employed by Belvera, explore the city while Mothra holds off Dagahra. Better writing and an emphasis on the supernatural help this outing find a better identity than its predecessor, even if it is aping The Neverending Story. The environmental preaching is still there, but it’s not as cumbersome. The action is steadily silly and the story even toys with a bit of dark consequences, copping out past the last minute. The kids also are far more likable and lively than their two counterparts in the original film, ultimately making Rebirth of Mothra II a decent adventure for its heroes’ audience.
Wednesday, September 05, 2007
Maelstrom of Movies
An anniversary passed quietly last month: 10 years ago, Warners Brothers released the first wave of DVDs in general retail stores. Some industry commentaries may pin the advent of home theater entertainment a bit earlier, but to the public at large, August 1997 was the month this new fangled technology first became available and the digital video disc (or digital versatile disc, depending on who you ask) entered the everyday conscience.
DVDs captured my interest the instant I saw them in Circuit City. Perhaps it’s hard to understand in the Information Age, but I never had heard of DVDs before, and that center display with the slim cardboard cases was their introduction.
Movie studios recently had begun releasing specific films in widescreen VHS, something I wished they did for all their tapes. Whether a movie boasts the epic screen or the old square Academy ratio, a director frames each shot like a photographer frames her stills. There’s a subtle language to film, one in which emotions and story are imparted not only with actors or script but with editing, camera movement, and shot selection. I never was cognizant of that art until Braveheart, which I saw three times in the theater. Mel Gibson used very inch of his frame in every shot, and when I saw the movie again on cable, I couldn’t believe how much the television screen butchered the picture. I finally realized why some movies seemed better in the theater than they were on cable.
While widescreen presentations still were rare for videos, every DVD Warners released in that first wave contained one, along with the film’s trailer and a “full-frame” version. I think I drooled.
Warners was the only major studio that fully believed in the new home video format—the others attempted to push something that was called DIVX, a disposable DVD that would be cheap but stop playing after a certain time. It lasted only a year. Obviously, people wanted their movies to last forever.
I’ve touched on it before—Hollywood’s initial disinterest turned into the film fringe’s gain. With the same vision as the Warners bosses, independent licensors soon gambled on the new technology and struck deals with the studios for their unwanted movies: the Army of Darknesses, the Portrait of Jennies, the Black Holes. They also acquired disused film libraries like the post-Corman New World, while negotiating agreements with European and Asian film companies to strengthening their new catalogues. Silents, serials, b-grade programmers, big turkeys, kung-fu adventures, Hammer horror, giallo… they all found a home on DVD, long before special editions became standard expectation.
By the time I bought my first and only player three years after that Circuit City find, the studios had taken note of the increasing sales and the success of the likes of Anchor Bay, Elite, Image, and Kino. They had quickly abandoned their DIVX obsession and slowly started playing catch-up. DVD was beginning to grow up, which only meant more movies for me.
Because of its initial concentration in indies and oddities, DVDs only fed my one obsession. I was the one in the video store seeking the goofy-looking box with the most dust; now, I had a hundred to choose from. For the first couple of years, I played my own game of catch-up, buying an average of 3 or 4 DVDs a month. Upon seeing my still-blooming collection for the first time, my friend Karen called me “a video store.” My sister was a bit more precise: “You have a lot of really strange movies.”
Yeah, I do. Ten years ago, thanks to circumstantial timing, the little cult films, the failures, the foreigners, the small ancients, the little-known but the loved—for a brief time, they took center stage, stealing the monologue and singing the lead. I was in the audience, and I’m still there, with the world’s guiltiest grin embracing my face.
DVDs captured my interest the instant I saw them in Circuit City. Perhaps it’s hard to understand in the Information Age, but I never had heard of DVDs before, and that center display with the slim cardboard cases was their introduction.
Movie studios recently had begun releasing specific films in widescreen VHS, something I wished they did for all their tapes. Whether a movie boasts the epic screen or the old square Academy ratio, a director frames each shot like a photographer frames her stills. There’s a subtle language to film, one in which emotions and story are imparted not only with actors or script but with editing, camera movement, and shot selection. I never was cognizant of that art until Braveheart, which I saw three times in the theater. Mel Gibson used very inch of his frame in every shot, and when I saw the movie again on cable, I couldn’t believe how much the television screen butchered the picture. I finally realized why some movies seemed better in the theater than they were on cable.
While widescreen presentations still were rare for videos, every DVD Warners released in that first wave contained one, along with the film’s trailer and a “full-frame” version. I think I drooled.
Warners was the only major studio that fully believed in the new home video format—the others attempted to push something that was called DIVX, a disposable DVD that would be cheap but stop playing after a certain time. It lasted only a year. Obviously, people wanted their movies to last forever.
I’ve touched on it before—Hollywood’s initial disinterest turned into the film fringe’s gain. With the same vision as the Warners bosses, independent licensors soon gambled on the new technology and struck deals with the studios for their unwanted movies: the Army of Darknesses, the Portrait of Jennies, the Black Holes. They also acquired disused film libraries like the post-Corman New World, while negotiating agreements with European and Asian film companies to strengthening their new catalogues. Silents, serials, b-grade programmers, big turkeys, kung-fu adventures, Hammer horror, giallo… they all found a home on DVD, long before special editions became standard expectation.
By the time I bought my first and only player three years after that Circuit City find, the studios had taken note of the increasing sales and the success of the likes of Anchor Bay, Elite, Image, and Kino. They had quickly abandoned their DIVX obsession and slowly started playing catch-up. DVD was beginning to grow up, which only meant more movies for me.
Because of its initial concentration in indies and oddities, DVDs only fed my one obsession. I was the one in the video store seeking the goofy-looking box with the most dust; now, I had a hundred to choose from. For the first couple of years, I played my own game of catch-up, buying an average of 3 or 4 DVDs a month. Upon seeing my still-blooming collection for the first time, my friend Karen called me “a video store.” My sister was a bit more precise: “You have a lot of really strange movies.”
Yeah, I do. Ten years ago, thanks to circumstantial timing, the little cult films, the failures, the foreigners, the small ancients, the little-known but the loved—for a brief time, they took center stage, stealing the monologue and singing the lead. I was in the audience, and I’m still there, with the world’s guiltiest grin embracing my face.
Sunday, August 19, 2007
Immortally Wounded
Some film franchises die hard, no matter how hard they try.
I'm not dissing the long-running, mostly long-in-the-tooth ones, like James Bond or Godzilla. It's the ones that probably shouldn't exist in the first place, yet still find ways to shuffle on, zombie-like with mindless will yet unfortunate coordination. I mean, did we really need The Crow: Wicked Prayer?
But the granddaddy of them all just received a mercy gut shot. The new Highlander movie...
Yeah, there's another Highlander movie coming. Really. Didn't know that? Not surprised....
Anyway, after a year in post-production, the next Highlander film finally will make its world premiere...on the Sci-Fi Channel.
Is that a funeral march I hear?
You know, it's pretty sad when a straight-to-DVD release would be preferable to becoming an "original" for a cable station, who's reputation for new programing is somewhere slightly above Lifetime movies. As somebody who loved the original film and everything it represents, this turn of events hurts. And it's the sequel's fault.
If there was a film that shouldn't have had a sequel, the original Highlander was it. No more immortals left, and the anti-hero had his love and his own mortality. Yet, the movie became a cult classic, and at the beginning of the last decade of the 20th century, the enterprising producers decided it was high time for a sequel, even managing to rope Sean Connery back into their merry mess. The fact his character had died probably didn't matter much--this is fantasy! About immortals! We can make it work!
The wretched thing is that it probably could have worked. Highlander II: The Quickening came out when I was in college, and I swear that just about every male on the campus but me went to see it. The following Monday, I asked a buddy of mine how it was, and you would have thought I kicked his kitten before tying its tail in a square knot on top of the Old Main fountain.
"Don't. See. It."
"That bad? How can it be that...?"
"Two words: they're aliens."
He then listed off several other problems, but honestly, I had stopped listening due to my brain suddenly imploding. The original Highlander was about people--humans, not little green men--dealing with the curse of immortality, how it tore everything they are and loved away from them. For a story that sounded like the worst Hollywood pitch ever, Highlander took it seriously, creating something more than just silly swordfights in the always-wet car park. It was about Connor MacLeod, being forced into a way of life he doesn't want but can't avoid. After Connor's first wife Heather dies of old age, while he never ages a day, Conner uses his clan sword as her headstone and takes up his mentor's Japanese katana, which had been made by his third and last bride's father. The death of that love devastated that old immortal, and in a single image, the film managed to tell of Connor's pain--he was taking up his mentor's loss, while burying everything from his old life. He was no longer a MacLeod, no longer a Scot, but a nameless nomad, passing through his existance under pseudonyms, fighting battles he doesn't want to fight.
It wasn't a perfect film, but it was good enough. A sequel would have been hard, but to fail as mightly as The Quickening, which contradicted just about everything from the original, took a great deal of thoughtless strain. Instead of a romantic, dark urban fantasy, the sequel presented a cut-rate William Gibson futuristic brew with pseudo-science and narrative nonsense. The original film deserved better. Much better. And in the theater at least, it never got it.
Two more sequels followed. The Final Dimension returned to the original "it's a kind of magic" story, but did so in a souless, well-abused carbon copy manner, yet it still managed to contradict its mother movie. Endgame hoped to bridge the movie and television series stories, but it sunk under too many characters, too much plot, and not enough logic. Plus, it commited the sin of killing off the original hero...even though he was the last immortal.
And yes, there was a television series, which followed the adventures of Duncan MacLeod: "Same clan, different vintage." Despite the crater of The Quickening, the producers managed pull together enough interest in a syndicated show. Surprisingly, it worked this time; after a shaky first season, the series found a direction and began adding to the mythology of the immortals, creating stories with the same adventurous attention as the original Highlander. Unfortunately, the show's success only raised hopes. The Final Dimension followed. Then an animated series. Then a sequel series that succumbed to convention. Somewhere in there were books, comics, and long-forgotten video games. Then Endgame.
Failures all.
And that should have been that. But when series star Adrian Paul announced that he was helping produce the fifth Highlander movie, dubbed The Source, I got my hopes up again. When the series story supervisor David Abramowitz signed on to rewrite the script, my hopes climbed a bit. Maybe this time, they'll get it right. Maybe this time, we'll get a good sequel. Maybe this time, I can see a real Highlander film in the theater.
Whoops. I should have seen this coming, though. The Source features no names; the biggest movie star is Peter Wingfield, who had a small soldier bit in X-Men 2 and a turn as the villan's henchman in Superbabies 2. Star Adrian Paul has been in little except straight-t0-video flicks for years. Although Lionsgate Films had signed on to distribute the movie, the chance of The Source seeing a projector was between slim and nil; the idea of anything but a horror movie being distributed without any real stars--especially one in a near-dead franchise whose last attempt was seven years ago--is fantasy by itself. Then, a few months ago, a hurried rough cut got released on DVD in Russia, and the diehard fans have done nothing but skewer it, calling it worse than...wait for it...The Quickening. Sigh.
We get what we deserve, I guess. The original Highlander is a cult classic, a rare cinematic moment when something that shouldn't have worked does. Anything that followed would have been diminished, a Quixotian venture to replay that moment. If a sequel never had been attempted, nobody would have been noticed, but because the first try was so wrongheaded, the wish to set things right became overpowering, while the right thing was to leave the original film and Connor MacLeod alone.
Yet, I'll probably see this, when the official "unrated cut"--at least the R-rated version--finally finds its way to DVD. Then I can judge it for itself. Maybe my thirst will be quenched, but I doubt it. It'll be a nice surprise though. And hey, I could always watch the anime movie.
Yes, the anime movie.
Man, I'm pathetic. That's what hope does, I guess.
I'm not dissing the long-running, mostly long-in-the-tooth ones, like James Bond or Godzilla. It's the ones that probably shouldn't exist in the first place, yet still find ways to shuffle on, zombie-like with mindless will yet unfortunate coordination. I mean, did we really need The Crow: Wicked Prayer?
But the granddaddy of them all just received a mercy gut shot. The new Highlander movie...
Yeah, there's another Highlander movie coming. Really. Didn't know that? Not surprised....
Anyway, after a year in post-production, the next Highlander film finally will make its world premiere...on the Sci-Fi Channel.
Is that a funeral march I hear?
You know, it's pretty sad when a straight-to-DVD release would be preferable to becoming an "original" for a cable station, who's reputation for new programing is somewhere slightly above Lifetime movies. As somebody who loved the original film and everything it represents, this turn of events hurts. And it's the sequel's fault.
If there was a film that shouldn't have had a sequel, the original Highlander was it. No more immortals left, and the anti-hero had his love and his own mortality. Yet, the movie became a cult classic, and at the beginning of the last decade of the 20th century, the enterprising producers decided it was high time for a sequel, even managing to rope Sean Connery back into their merry mess. The fact his character had died probably didn't matter much--this is fantasy! About immortals! We can make it work!
The wretched thing is that it probably could have worked. Highlander II: The Quickening came out when I was in college, and I swear that just about every male on the campus but me went to see it. The following Monday, I asked a buddy of mine how it was, and you would have thought I kicked his kitten before tying its tail in a square knot on top of the Old Main fountain.
"Don't. See. It."
"That bad? How can it be that...?"
"Two words: they're aliens."
He then listed off several other problems, but honestly, I had stopped listening due to my brain suddenly imploding. The original Highlander was about people--humans, not little green men--dealing with the curse of immortality, how it tore everything they are and loved away from them. For a story that sounded like the worst Hollywood pitch ever, Highlander took it seriously, creating something more than just silly swordfights in the always-wet car park. It was about Connor MacLeod, being forced into a way of life he doesn't want but can't avoid. After Connor's first wife Heather dies of old age, while he never ages a day, Conner uses his clan sword as her headstone and takes up his mentor's Japanese katana, which had been made by his third and last bride's father. The death of that love devastated that old immortal, and in a single image, the film managed to tell of Connor's pain--he was taking up his mentor's loss, while burying everything from his old life. He was no longer a MacLeod, no longer a Scot, but a nameless nomad, passing through his existance under pseudonyms, fighting battles he doesn't want to fight.
It wasn't a perfect film, but it was good enough. A sequel would have been hard, but to fail as mightly as The Quickening, which contradicted just about everything from the original, took a great deal of thoughtless strain. Instead of a romantic, dark urban fantasy, the sequel presented a cut-rate William Gibson futuristic brew with pseudo-science and narrative nonsense. The original film deserved better. Much better. And in the theater at least, it never got it.
Two more sequels followed. The Final Dimension returned to the original "it's a kind of magic" story, but did so in a souless, well-abused carbon copy manner, yet it still managed to contradict its mother movie. Endgame hoped to bridge the movie and television series stories, but it sunk under too many characters, too much plot, and not enough logic. Plus, it commited the sin of killing off the original hero...even though he was the last immortal.
And yes, there was a television series, which followed the adventures of Duncan MacLeod: "Same clan, different vintage." Despite the crater of The Quickening, the producers managed pull together enough interest in a syndicated show. Surprisingly, it worked this time; after a shaky first season, the series found a direction and began adding to the mythology of the immortals, creating stories with the same adventurous attention as the original Highlander. Unfortunately, the show's success only raised hopes. The Final Dimension followed. Then an animated series. Then a sequel series that succumbed to convention. Somewhere in there were books, comics, and long-forgotten video games. Then Endgame.
Failures all.
And that should have been that. But when series star Adrian Paul announced that he was helping produce the fifth Highlander movie, dubbed The Source, I got my hopes up again. When the series story supervisor David Abramowitz signed on to rewrite the script, my hopes climbed a bit. Maybe this time, they'll get it right. Maybe this time, we'll get a good sequel. Maybe this time, I can see a real Highlander film in the theater.
Whoops. I should have seen this coming, though. The Source features no names; the biggest movie star is Peter Wingfield, who had a small soldier bit in X-Men 2 and a turn as the villan's henchman in Superbabies 2. Star Adrian Paul has been in little except straight-t0-video flicks for years. Although Lionsgate Films had signed on to distribute the movie, the chance of The Source seeing a projector was between slim and nil; the idea of anything but a horror movie being distributed without any real stars--especially one in a near-dead franchise whose last attempt was seven years ago--is fantasy by itself. Then, a few months ago, a hurried rough cut got released on DVD in Russia, and the diehard fans have done nothing but skewer it, calling it worse than...wait for it...The Quickening. Sigh.
We get what we deserve, I guess. The original Highlander is a cult classic, a rare cinematic moment when something that shouldn't have worked does. Anything that followed would have been diminished, a Quixotian venture to replay that moment. If a sequel never had been attempted, nobody would have been noticed, but because the first try was so wrongheaded, the wish to set things right became overpowering, while the right thing was to leave the original film and Connor MacLeod alone.
Yet, I'll probably see this, when the official "unrated cut"--at least the R-rated version--finally finds its way to DVD. Then I can judge it for itself. Maybe my thirst will be quenched, but I doubt it. It'll be a nice surprise though. And hey, I could always watch the anime movie.
Yes, the anime movie.
Man, I'm pathetic. That's what hope does, I guess.
Friday, August 17, 2007
Theatrical Traveler
Despite my love of film, I rarely went to the movie theater growing up. My parents--who came of age with 50 cent flicks and double-features--balked at the $3 or $4 ticket price plus concessions, deciding that there were many other, more worthy things on which to spend Dad’s paycheck. The first movie I saw on my own was WarGames, and that’s only because Mom shelped me off to the discount theater one afternoon. Not until I hit high school and driving age did I manage to see movies on my own.
Thus, most of the 1980s cinematic zeighast passed me by . . . but only in theaters. Starting in the early part of the decade, around the time I began trolling video stores, I started stealing the entertainment sections of the Sunday New York Times and Daily News from my parents for the sole purpose of gazing at the movie advertisements--the more obscure, the better. Back then, commercial independents like New World and Empire were in full bloom, able to shop their wares on limited theatrical runs before usually making their money back on video. And if it wasn’t playing in New York, it wasn’t playing anywhere.
I read those sections every Sunday for years, right up to the time I left for college, and even then I occasionally visited the Ezra Lehman Memorial Library to read the Times’s Arts section. That’s how I learned about Highlander, Clearcut, The Plague Dogs, Walker, The Quiet Earth, Clockwise, American Ninja, Powwow Highway, Where the Rivers Flow North, Queen of Hearts, Fright Night, Johnny Dangerously, Night of the Comet, One Crazy Summer, even Troma’s The Toxic Avenger. In the unwired era, before even Windows existed, those advertisements were a boon. Sometimes it would be years before I finally saw the movies, but if I was interested, I eventually saw them.
But I still missed out on the theatrical experience.
Maybe in these days of digital discs and plasma televisions, the brick-and-mortar cinema seems antiquated. But whether it be a modern multiplex littered with stadium seating or a relic from the grindhouse age irking out a second-run existence, the movie theater still is the only place where the communal emotion of live theater and timelessness of recorded media come together. It is a unique show, one that has existed since Edison photographed a man’s sneeze. The experience can be shared, not just in one sitting but across the country at the same time--a connection so painfully subtle--and the experience can be returned to, any time the reel is threaded. For nearly half my life, I missed out, and missed the glory days of the cool little flicks I adore so much. One of those was The Terminator.
Back when it was released in the mid-1980s, The Terminator looked like any number of action flicks, decked out with titles like The Exterminator and The Eliminators. The ads were simplistic--Arnold wearing those sunglasses, holding that big arse gun complete with laser target. I didn’t think much of the movie until it appeared on cable a year or so later. All Dad and I knew was that the big German guy who played Conan was in it, and it had explosions.
The movie left me breathless.
It moved, and until I stumbled into John Woo’s The Killer halfway through, I never saw a movie that moved like that. Ever since, The Terminator has become one of my favorite genre films, reliving Sarah Connor’s and Reese’s desperate flight and fight dozens of times on cable or DVD. I always wondered, though, what the movie was like big-screen-style, while trapped with a dozen or so strangers.
So, there I was last Friday night, staring up at the marquee of the AFI Silver Theater in Silver Spring, Maryland, where The Terminator flashed across on a lighted message board, wondering if this is how it felt 25 years ago.
I still have no idea. It couldn't have been this good, could it?
From the start, from the moment the electronica title score pulsed alive and stilled the audience, everything was different. First, I just noticed things I never did before, like the ironic Jetsons tee-shirt Sarah wears early on, or the tire track tattoo slapped across the face of a very young Bill Paxton, playing a very short role. The terminator’s brutality rippled shivers through my spine for the first time in years, the impact screaming for my attention with little gore for embellishment. The tin model effects and old school back-screening also got my attention, but strangely, seeing the now-obvious seams didn’t bother me so much--it’s been a while since I saw a handmade movie like this, with every effect in-camera. It’s a film that’s been crafted, not processed in post.
There is one scene in the movie, though, that I’ve never been able to sit through: when Arnold’s cyborg operates on himself after a particularly messy encounter with Reece and Sarah. I made myself watch this time--the only time I’ll ever get to see this movie in the place it was meant to be shown. I cringed, even though the head is clearly a robotic stand-in. Cringed, because I can’t pause the film, take a break, make a snack. Sure, I can get up and leave, but there’s something about sitting in a theater that prevents me. By then, you see, I was lost.
At the beginning of the movie, as the story bloomed, I immediately noticed the stitches, holding up facades for fantasy. But The Terminator’s window dressing was never the point, and by the time the skeletal chassis rises within the fire, the stop motion doesn’t matter, and I’m fully within James Cameron’s nightmare.
What drives The Terminator isn’t just the action--it’s the demented triangle of Sarah and the two pursuing her--one to save and one to destroy. What people remember most of the movie isn’t the gunfire or the carnage or the futuristic vision or even Arnie playing doctor. It’s that one line.
You know, that one.
That line became a pop culture staple because of Schwarzenegger’s performance. Maybe some joked, maybe some still do, about how Arnold’s best role is one where he plays a robot. But that performance is unique among the genre--many have played androids, replicants, and droids, but no one has conveyed the cold, physical menace that Schwarzenegger did. That’s better than any special effect.
The characters of The Terminator do more than distract; they offer a way into the fantasy. Not just the malicious metal man, but Sarah, with her transformation from nice waitress to humanity’s hope, and Reece, with all of his expectations and fear. They aren’t players, they’re people, thrown into a peril where their limits are tested and broken. The audience is caught up in their story, and accepts their reality. They know they are watching fiction, but just for a brief moment, they are caught up in that fiction, not just witnessing but sharing the experience with the avatars on screen.
That’s the theatrical experience--a willing, emotional immersion into a false reality. Only the cinema, where there’s no escape from the story on screen, can weave that trick. From epics like Blade Runner and Doctor Zhivago to little movies like The Terminator, for all their hand-worn faults exposed by time and technology, they still manage to make us disappear for a while.
And not even the audience tittering at Sarah Connor’s last line could spoil it.
Well, not completely.
Thus, most of the 1980s cinematic zeighast passed me by . . . but only in theaters. Starting in the early part of the decade, around the time I began trolling video stores, I started stealing the entertainment sections of the Sunday New York Times and Daily News from my parents for the sole purpose of gazing at the movie advertisements--the more obscure, the better. Back then, commercial independents like New World and Empire were in full bloom, able to shop their wares on limited theatrical runs before usually making their money back on video. And if it wasn’t playing in New York, it wasn’t playing anywhere.
I read those sections every Sunday for years, right up to the time I left for college, and even then I occasionally visited the Ezra Lehman Memorial Library to read the Times’s Arts section. That’s how I learned about Highlander, Clearcut, The Plague Dogs, Walker, The Quiet Earth, Clockwise, American Ninja, Powwow Highway, Where the Rivers Flow North, Queen of Hearts, Fright Night, Johnny Dangerously, Night of the Comet, One Crazy Summer, even Troma’s The Toxic Avenger. In the unwired era, before even Windows existed, those advertisements were a boon. Sometimes it would be years before I finally saw the movies, but if I was interested, I eventually saw them.
But I still missed out on the theatrical experience.
Maybe in these days of digital discs and plasma televisions, the brick-and-mortar cinema seems antiquated. But whether it be a modern multiplex littered with stadium seating or a relic from the grindhouse age irking out a second-run existence, the movie theater still is the only place where the communal emotion of live theater and timelessness of recorded media come together. It is a unique show, one that has existed since Edison photographed a man’s sneeze. The experience can be shared, not just in one sitting but across the country at the same time--a connection so painfully subtle--and the experience can be returned to, any time the reel is threaded. For nearly half my life, I missed out, and missed the glory days of the cool little flicks I adore so much. One of those was The Terminator.
Back when it was released in the mid-1980s, The Terminator looked like any number of action flicks, decked out with titles like The Exterminator and The Eliminators. The ads were simplistic--Arnold wearing those sunglasses, holding that big arse gun complete with laser target. I didn’t think much of the movie until it appeared on cable a year or so later. All Dad and I knew was that the big German guy who played Conan was in it, and it had explosions.
The movie left me breathless.
It moved, and until I stumbled into John Woo’s The Killer halfway through, I never saw a movie that moved like that. Ever since, The Terminator has become one of my favorite genre films, reliving Sarah Connor’s and Reese’s desperate flight and fight dozens of times on cable or DVD. I always wondered, though, what the movie was like big-screen-style, while trapped with a dozen or so strangers.
So, there I was last Friday night, staring up at the marquee of the AFI Silver Theater in Silver Spring, Maryland, where The Terminator flashed across on a lighted message board, wondering if this is how it felt 25 years ago.
I still have no idea. It couldn't have been this good, could it?
From the start, from the moment the electronica title score pulsed alive and stilled the audience, everything was different. First, I just noticed things I never did before, like the ironic Jetsons tee-shirt Sarah wears early on, or the tire track tattoo slapped across the face of a very young Bill Paxton, playing a very short role. The terminator’s brutality rippled shivers through my spine for the first time in years, the impact screaming for my attention with little gore for embellishment. The tin model effects and old school back-screening also got my attention, but strangely, seeing the now-obvious seams didn’t bother me so much--it’s been a while since I saw a handmade movie like this, with every effect in-camera. It’s a film that’s been crafted, not processed in post.
There is one scene in the movie, though, that I’ve never been able to sit through: when Arnold’s cyborg operates on himself after a particularly messy encounter with Reece and Sarah. I made myself watch this time--the only time I’ll ever get to see this movie in the place it was meant to be shown. I cringed, even though the head is clearly a robotic stand-in. Cringed, because I can’t pause the film, take a break, make a snack. Sure, I can get up and leave, but there’s something about sitting in a theater that prevents me. By then, you see, I was lost.
At the beginning of the movie, as the story bloomed, I immediately noticed the stitches, holding up facades for fantasy. But The Terminator’s window dressing was never the point, and by the time the skeletal chassis rises within the fire, the stop motion doesn’t matter, and I’m fully within James Cameron’s nightmare.
What drives The Terminator isn’t just the action--it’s the demented triangle of Sarah and the two pursuing her--one to save and one to destroy. What people remember most of the movie isn’t the gunfire or the carnage or the futuristic vision or even Arnie playing doctor. It’s that one line.
You know, that one.
That line became a pop culture staple because of Schwarzenegger’s performance. Maybe some joked, maybe some still do, about how Arnold’s best role is one where he plays a robot. But that performance is unique among the genre--many have played androids, replicants, and droids, but no one has conveyed the cold, physical menace that Schwarzenegger did. That’s better than any special effect.
The characters of The Terminator do more than distract; they offer a way into the fantasy. Not just the malicious metal man, but Sarah, with her transformation from nice waitress to humanity’s hope, and Reece, with all of his expectations and fear. They aren’t players, they’re people, thrown into a peril where their limits are tested and broken. The audience is caught up in their story, and accepts their reality. They know they are watching fiction, but just for a brief moment, they are caught up in that fiction, not just witnessing but sharing the experience with the avatars on screen.
That’s the theatrical experience--a willing, emotional immersion into a false reality. Only the cinema, where there’s no escape from the story on screen, can weave that trick. From epics like Blade Runner and Doctor Zhivago to little movies like The Terminator, for all their hand-worn faults exposed by time and technology, they still manage to make us disappear for a while.
And not even the audience tittering at Sarah Connor’s last line could spoil it.
Well, not completely.
Monday, August 13, 2007
Netflix Almanac: July 2007
Nothing. Nada. Not one movie, film, nor flicker. The 39-episode Seven Swordmen box set I rented from the local video store probably had something to do with that, along with the simplicity that, hey, it’s been a cool summer and I could use the air.
But I promised myself to do this report each month, and rather than leave all three of my readers wanting, I culled my many pages historia of Netflix rentals for a selected few titles from previous Julys. So, much sooner than originally planned, I present to you the first issue of Netflix Almanac: Rewind, in disguise:
Savior (1998)
After American military official Joshua Rose (Dennis Quaid) witnesses his wife and son killed in an Islamic terrorist bombing, he storms into a mosque and guns down the Muslims praying there. Several years later, he has found an existence as a mercenary plying his trade for the Serbs in the Bosnian civil war. His partner is killed by a child, leaving him without a mentor at the worst moment--when he is assigned to help escort a Serbian female prisoner named Vera, who was impregnated by a Muslim captor. When Rose’s Serbian cohort beats and threatens to murder her and her “unclean,” unborn child, Rose kills him and winds up delivering the baby. He then takes them under his protection, no matter how much she doesn’t want it. Director Predrag Antonijevic’s film has the subtly of a sledge, but Quaid’s Everyman performance for what is a very difficult character makes the story work. Savior takes a personal approach to war, allowing Rose--the American outsider yet involved--to witness and experience the hatred that destroyed that region’s people. Hating her Muslim baby, Vera refuses to feed or care for it, but then in turn is ostracized by her father. With his own hatred mirrored in Vera, Rose’s compassion is dragged out of his dead heart. Antonijevic was born in the region in which the film takes place, and he presents an uncompromising story of the conflict with no pat answers or fully happy endings. In this post-September 11th era, with the raging rhetoric of radical Muslims drowning out reason and stirring up religious prejudice, Savior is a hard film more important now than it was a decade ago, showing how hatred and cruelty have no boundaries, political or ethnic. (Viewed: July 29, 2001)
Rare Birds (2002)
In a small, quirky Newfoundland seaside town, Dave Purcell (William Hurt) irks out a living with his barely-solvent, fine-dining, seaside restaurant called The Auk. Dave is a quirky perfectionist, which has driven his business to the brink. Then his quirky neighbor, who believes the government is spying on him, suggests creating a hoax in which a rare duck is sighted near The Auk; the customers will flock (groan) to his restaurant for lunch while vainly searching for the non-existent fowl. The quirky plan works, and soon Dave needs a waitress. Enter Alice (Molly Parker), the neighbor’s “bookish” cousin, who is anything but bookish. Dave and Alice begin to fall for each other, but strange (or, quirky) obstacles keep tripping them up. And maybe the government is watching....Suffice to say Sturla Gunnarrson’s film is quirky, too quirky at times, trying too hard and hitting several discordant notes, the loudest of which is the cocaine subplot. Although greatly reduced from the source novel, it still feels out-of-place with the rest and, honestly, prevented me from completely falling for the film. Molly Parker, on the other hand, already had me. Still an enjoyable little movie, with just a few missteps. (Viewed: July 25, 2004)
Gamera 2: Attack of Legion (1996)
The 1990s reinvented the Japanese monster genre. First, Toho brought back Godzilla, unleashing a series of comic book adventures that nonetheless were more serious and mature than the vast majority of the original classic series. Most of all, Godzilla was back to being a bad guy and a threat. But what really changed Japan’s expectations for the kaiju film was the mid-1990s Gamera trilogy. The big turtle was a joke of the genre--the “friend of all children” starred in a desperate series of mostly kiddie movies designed to feed off of the Godzilla phenomenon in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Director Shusuke Kaneko and writer Kazunori Ito brought the monster back and completely reworked him into a mythological epic tale that put the Godzilla films to shame. Most fans apparently feel that the second film is the perfect kaiju film and the best of the trilogy, but I don’t. Although the special effects are a startling improvement over this film’s predecessor, released just one year before, the story features far too much “leap-of-faith” exposition, in which characters reach just the right conclusion based on the barest of evidence. Also, those characters simply aren’t as compelling to me as the previous film’s, while Asagi--such an integral part of the first movie--is reduced to a near cameo here. Attack of Legion thrives, however, in the battles, when the aforementioned special effects bolster some excellent visual storytelling on the part of Kaneko. A strong kaiju film and perhaps the best one to watch of the trilogy as a standalone. (Viewed: July 23, 2004--bought it)
Shall We Dance? (1996)
I remembered this movie from its theatrical run, back when Miramax tried to find a foreign film every year to dominate art houses and critics’ best-of-the-year lists. Unfortunately, as Miramax was wont to do, the studio cut nearly 20 minutes out of the original Japanese version. Which only amazes me: The film is still wonderful. A successful Japanese businessman--dutiful husband to a lovely wife, father to a good kid, and a new homeowner--feels completely buried in routine, empty and alone. One night on the train ride home, he sees a beautiful woman standing forlornly at a dance studio window. Taken with her, he spontaneously bolts off the train and stumbles into signing up for dance lessons, only to learn that the woman is not his instructor and also doesn’t date students. But the businessman sticks to his lessons, in secret from his family and coworkers because ballroom dancing is viewed with suspicion. He falls in love not with the dancer but with the dance, awakening from the repression that enveloped his life. Shall We Dance? is a charm of a work, the kind of quiet romance that eschews the cliched ideals of what is a love story. The missing scenes from the movie apparently spend more time with the supporting characters populating the dance studio, which is a shame, because they are all wonderful surprises, sending the story spiraling into unexpected directions. Heh, now I’ve made myself go watch it again. (Viewed: July 22, 2005--bought it)
Project: Valkyrie (2002)
The advent of digital technology in the film industry revitalized the independent scene and helped the old regional movie industry resurface in homemade movies, made by pure amateurs with grandose ideas and miniscule budgets. Jeff Waltrowski’s creation features all of the problems of those films--hideously low production values, hammy acting, in-jokes that overstay their welcome, ill-advised shifts in tone, and a wandering plotline in dire need of an editor. That plot involves a loser inheriting a World War II-era mechanical superhero and the neo-Nazis who become mutated with one of his grandfather’s failed chemistry set experiments. This comedy, though, still manages some legitimate laughs and only really falters at the end when Waltrowski’s overdone gore swamps any hilarity. Far better than it has any right to be. (Viewed: July 26, 2006)
But I promised myself to do this report each month, and rather than leave all three of my readers wanting, I culled my many pages historia of Netflix rentals for a selected few titles from previous Julys. So, much sooner than originally planned, I present to you the first issue of Netflix Almanac: Rewind, in disguise:
Savior (1998)
After American military official Joshua Rose (Dennis Quaid) witnesses his wife and son killed in an Islamic terrorist bombing, he storms into a mosque and guns down the Muslims praying there. Several years later, he has found an existence as a mercenary plying his trade for the Serbs in the Bosnian civil war. His partner is killed by a child, leaving him without a mentor at the worst moment--when he is assigned to help escort a Serbian female prisoner named Vera, who was impregnated by a Muslim captor. When Rose’s Serbian cohort beats and threatens to murder her and her “unclean,” unborn child, Rose kills him and winds up delivering the baby. He then takes them under his protection, no matter how much she doesn’t want it. Director Predrag Antonijevic’s film has the subtly of a sledge, but Quaid’s Everyman performance for what is a very difficult character makes the story work. Savior takes a personal approach to war, allowing Rose--the American outsider yet involved--to witness and experience the hatred that destroyed that region’s people. Hating her Muslim baby, Vera refuses to feed or care for it, but then in turn is ostracized by her father. With his own hatred mirrored in Vera, Rose’s compassion is dragged out of his dead heart. Antonijevic was born in the region in which the film takes place, and he presents an uncompromising story of the conflict with no pat answers or fully happy endings. In this post-September 11th era, with the raging rhetoric of radical Muslims drowning out reason and stirring up religious prejudice, Savior is a hard film more important now than it was a decade ago, showing how hatred and cruelty have no boundaries, political or ethnic. (Viewed: July 29, 2001)
Rare Birds (2002)
In a small, quirky Newfoundland seaside town, Dave Purcell (William Hurt) irks out a living with his barely-solvent, fine-dining, seaside restaurant called The Auk. Dave is a quirky perfectionist, which has driven his business to the brink. Then his quirky neighbor, who believes the government is spying on him, suggests creating a hoax in which a rare duck is sighted near The Auk; the customers will flock (groan) to his restaurant for lunch while vainly searching for the non-existent fowl. The quirky plan works, and soon Dave needs a waitress. Enter Alice (Molly Parker), the neighbor’s “bookish” cousin, who is anything but bookish. Dave and Alice begin to fall for each other, but strange (or, quirky) obstacles keep tripping them up. And maybe the government is watching....Suffice to say Sturla Gunnarrson’s film is quirky, too quirky at times, trying too hard and hitting several discordant notes, the loudest of which is the cocaine subplot. Although greatly reduced from the source novel, it still feels out-of-place with the rest and, honestly, prevented me from completely falling for the film. Molly Parker, on the other hand, already had me. Still an enjoyable little movie, with just a few missteps. (Viewed: July 25, 2004)
Gamera 2: Attack of Legion (1996)
The 1990s reinvented the Japanese monster genre. First, Toho brought back Godzilla, unleashing a series of comic book adventures that nonetheless were more serious and mature than the vast majority of the original classic series. Most of all, Godzilla was back to being a bad guy and a threat. But what really changed Japan’s expectations for the kaiju film was the mid-1990s Gamera trilogy. The big turtle was a joke of the genre--the “friend of all children” starred in a desperate series of mostly kiddie movies designed to feed off of the Godzilla phenomenon in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Director Shusuke Kaneko and writer Kazunori Ito brought the monster back and completely reworked him into a mythological epic tale that put the Godzilla films to shame. Most fans apparently feel that the second film is the perfect kaiju film and the best of the trilogy, but I don’t. Although the special effects are a startling improvement over this film’s predecessor, released just one year before, the story features far too much “leap-of-faith” exposition, in which characters reach just the right conclusion based on the barest of evidence. Also, those characters simply aren’t as compelling to me as the previous film’s, while Asagi--such an integral part of the first movie--is reduced to a near cameo here. Attack of Legion thrives, however, in the battles, when the aforementioned special effects bolster some excellent visual storytelling on the part of Kaneko. A strong kaiju film and perhaps the best one to watch of the trilogy as a standalone. (Viewed: July 23, 2004--bought it)
Shall We Dance? (1996)
I remembered this movie from its theatrical run, back when Miramax tried to find a foreign film every year to dominate art houses and critics’ best-of-the-year lists. Unfortunately, as Miramax was wont to do, the studio cut nearly 20 minutes out of the original Japanese version. Which only amazes me: The film is still wonderful. A successful Japanese businessman--dutiful husband to a lovely wife, father to a good kid, and a new homeowner--feels completely buried in routine, empty and alone. One night on the train ride home, he sees a beautiful woman standing forlornly at a dance studio window. Taken with her, he spontaneously bolts off the train and stumbles into signing up for dance lessons, only to learn that the woman is not his instructor and also doesn’t date students. But the businessman sticks to his lessons, in secret from his family and coworkers because ballroom dancing is viewed with suspicion. He falls in love not with the dancer but with the dance, awakening from the repression that enveloped his life. Shall We Dance? is a charm of a work, the kind of quiet romance that eschews the cliched ideals of what is a love story. The missing scenes from the movie apparently spend more time with the supporting characters populating the dance studio, which is a shame, because they are all wonderful surprises, sending the story spiraling into unexpected directions. Heh, now I’ve made myself go watch it again. (Viewed: July 22, 2005--bought it)
Project: Valkyrie (2002)
The advent of digital technology in the film industry revitalized the independent scene and helped the old regional movie industry resurface in homemade movies, made by pure amateurs with grandose ideas and miniscule budgets. Jeff Waltrowski’s creation features all of the problems of those films--hideously low production values, hammy acting, in-jokes that overstay their welcome, ill-advised shifts in tone, and a wandering plotline in dire need of an editor. That plot involves a loser inheriting a World War II-era mechanical superhero and the neo-Nazis who become mutated with one of his grandfather’s failed chemistry set experiments. This comedy, though, still manages some legitimate laughs and only really falters at the end when Waltrowski’s overdone gore swamps any hilarity. Far better than it has any right to be. (Viewed: July 26, 2006)
Monday, July 30, 2007
Babylon 5: In Memory Still Bright
Tomorrow, after nearly a decade away, Babylon 5 returns. But it does so something less than it was.
You see, Richard Biggs and Andreas Katsulas are gone.
Any television series that loses actors, either through dispute or death, can suffer. But this is different. Babylon 5 completed its story in the late 1990s--the novel finished, the author’s pen retired--so the two actors’ work still stands, complete and whole.
About a year ago, Warner Brothers approached Babylon 5’s Great Maker, J. Michael Straczynski, about finally creating a feature film, something that he always wanted to do for the cast.
He couldn’t do it. Not without Richard and Andreas. Not yet.
Instead, Warners Bros. is releasing Babylon 5: The Lost Tales on DVD, the first of a proposed series of anthology stories that work within the show’s universe. The initial two-part volume, Voices in the Dark, features the return of Bruce Boxleitner as John Sheridan and Tracey Scoggins as Captain Elizabeth Lochley, as well as Peter Woodward as Galen, a refugee from the aborted Babylon 5 spin-off Crusade. Future installments should feature Garibaldi, Delenn, Londo Mollari, and other characters long missed. A feature film still may come after that, but only when Straczynski can write it without Dr. Stephen Franklin and Citizen G’Kar.
That is a task both herculean and saddening.
Babylon 5 is the story of a turning point in humanity's future, told from the fulcrum of that chaos—a well-intentioned space station designed for universal peace but regarded as an ill-fated albatross. The human crew deals with squabbling alien races salivating for war, while an ancient threat begins to slowly grow to engulf everyone. Dr. Franklin (Richard Biggs) is the station’s chief medical officer, a xenobiology expert whose morality nearly drives him to his own destruction. Meanwhile, then-Ambassador G’Kar of the Narn plots his government’s latest incursions against their former masters the Centauri, personified by fun-loving and heavy drinking Ambassador Londo Mollari (Peter Jurasik).
Although fans rarely cited Dr. Franklin as a favorite character, Biggs created a flawed but humane man, a seeming anchor in the midst of turmoil. Biggs’ brightest moment came in the 3rd season, when Franklin, always pushing himself too hard to run the overrun sick bay, becomes addicted to stimulants. Finally realizing what has happened, he leaves his job and goes on “walkabout,” hoping to meet the man he used to be:
When Franklin finally comes full circle, on the brink of death, the answer he gets isn’t one he expects to hear. That episode, that experience, was born out of Straczynski’s own life, written into a fictional character’s story arc without realizing until after it happened. It remains one of the most powerful moments of the series, not because of any originality but because of honesty, as well as Richard Biggs’ very real performance.
In his tribute to Biggs in his Babylon 5 script book, Straczynski said Richard had a “perpetual light” about him, and everyone expected him to outlive them all. But on May 22, 2004, Biggs felt tired and went to bed, never to awake again. His passing was sudden and shocking, and his funeral brought everyone together again, no matter what disputes had grown between them. Biggs loved everyone, and that feeling was returned in kind.
The loss of Andreas, however, is in many ways harder to take. Those who had the chance to meet this private man always were flattened by his dignity, laughter, and warmth, and those who grew to know him loved him dearly. For most fans, the complex dance between G’Kar and Londo is the heart of the series, and the two’s journey is dramatically, unexpectedly natural, filled with great crimes and quiet triumphs. Katsulas brought a soul to an alien persona that shone through whatever make-up and headpieces he had. Andreas claimed, however, that the costume actually helped--it made him feel sexy, allowing him to easily disappear into one of modern science fiction’s greatest characters.
A little more than a month after Katsulas’s death in 2006 after a brave fight with lung cancer, Straczynski and some of the cast of Babylon 5 attended an industry launch for In2TV, an online broadcast service through AOL. The gathering was held at the Museum of Television and Radio in Beverly Hills, and as they entered, Straczynski stopped at the sight of something that hit him “with the force of a hammer to the chest.”
Just inside the entrance stood G’Kar’s costume--the uniform, the boots, the gloves and gauntlets, the sash--everything but Andreas. It was on a mannequin that ended at the shoulders, so that the costume “seemed to stand alone, and empty.”
Without Andreas, there is no G’Kar. Without Richard, there is no Stephen Franklin. Neither role can be recast; the actors gave everything to these characters, creating friends out of fiction and telling a story with more than just dialogue and plot device.
After both actors passed away, a former crew member created tribute videos for each, using only clips from their performances on Babylon 5. With the Lost Tales promising more Babylon 5 in the future, it’s good to witness the past and how two men enlivened it. They are in character, in the midst of a grand epic tale, but the actor behind glows through. When one loves their role, he can’t help but commit to it fully, wrapping his own personality round the fiction. When roles come to life, they are not birthed from a void; they become an extension of the player, and they become as vital as the breathing.
Thank you, Richard. Bless you, Andreas. We miss you.
You see, Richard Biggs and Andreas Katsulas are gone.
Any television series that loses actors, either through dispute or death, can suffer. But this is different. Babylon 5 completed its story in the late 1990s--the novel finished, the author’s pen retired--so the two actors’ work still stands, complete and whole.
About a year ago, Warner Brothers approached Babylon 5’s Great Maker, J. Michael Straczynski, about finally creating a feature film, something that he always wanted to do for the cast.
He couldn’t do it. Not without Richard and Andreas. Not yet.
Instead, Warners Bros. is releasing Babylon 5: The Lost Tales on DVD, the first of a proposed series of anthology stories that work within the show’s universe. The initial two-part volume, Voices in the Dark, features the return of Bruce Boxleitner as John Sheridan and Tracey Scoggins as Captain Elizabeth Lochley, as well as Peter Woodward as Galen, a refugee from the aborted Babylon 5 spin-off Crusade. Future installments should feature Garibaldi, Delenn, Londo Mollari, and other characters long missed. A feature film still may come after that, but only when Straczynski can write it without Dr. Stephen Franklin and Citizen G’Kar.
That is a task both herculean and saddening.
Babylon 5 is the story of a turning point in humanity's future, told from the fulcrum of that chaos—a well-intentioned space station designed for universal peace but regarded as an ill-fated albatross. The human crew deals with squabbling alien races salivating for war, while an ancient threat begins to slowly grow to engulf everyone. Dr. Franklin (Richard Biggs) is the station’s chief medical officer, a xenobiology expert whose morality nearly drives him to his own destruction. Meanwhile, then-Ambassador G’Kar of the Narn plots his government’s latest incursions against their former masters the Centauri, personified by fun-loving and heavy drinking Ambassador Londo Mollari (Peter Jurasik).
Although fans rarely cited Dr. Franklin as a favorite character, Biggs created a flawed but humane man, a seeming anchor in the midst of turmoil. Biggs’ brightest moment came in the 3rd season, when Franklin, always pushing himself too hard to run the overrun sick bay, becomes addicted to stimulants. Finally realizing what has happened, he leaves his job and goes on “walkabout,” hoping to meet the man he used to be:
As a Foundationist, I was always taught that if you’re not careful you can lose yourself in the world. You get to busy with things and not busy enough with yourself. You spend your days and nights fighting someone else’s battles, living someone else’s agendas, doing the work you’re supposed to do, and every day there’s less and less of you in it all. Then, one day, you come to a fork in the road . . . and because you’re distracted, not thinking, you lose yourself. You turn right, and the rest of you, the really important part of you, turns left. You don’t even know you’ve done it, until finally you realize you have no idea who you are when you’re not doing all those things . . . .
I realized I had no idea who I was when I wasn’t being a doctor. I think I was using the stims to avoid facing that. So now I have to fix it.
When Franklin finally comes full circle, on the brink of death, the answer he gets isn’t one he expects to hear. That episode, that experience, was born out of Straczynski’s own life, written into a fictional character’s story arc without realizing until after it happened. It remains one of the most powerful moments of the series, not because of any originality but because of honesty, as well as Richard Biggs’ very real performance.
In his tribute to Biggs in his Babylon 5 script book, Straczynski said Richard had a “perpetual light” about him, and everyone expected him to outlive them all. But on May 22, 2004, Biggs felt tired and went to bed, never to awake again. His passing was sudden and shocking, and his funeral brought everyone together again, no matter what disputes had grown between them. Biggs loved everyone, and that feeling was returned in kind.
The loss of Andreas, however, is in many ways harder to take. Those who had the chance to meet this private man always were flattened by his dignity, laughter, and warmth, and those who grew to know him loved him dearly. For most fans, the complex dance between G’Kar and Londo is the heart of the series, and the two’s journey is dramatically, unexpectedly natural, filled with great crimes and quiet triumphs. Katsulas brought a soul to an alien persona that shone through whatever make-up and headpieces he had. Andreas claimed, however, that the costume actually helped--it made him feel sexy, allowing him to easily disappear into one of modern science fiction’s greatest characters.
A little more than a month after Katsulas’s death in 2006 after a brave fight with lung cancer, Straczynski and some of the cast of Babylon 5 attended an industry launch for In2TV, an online broadcast service through AOL. The gathering was held at the Museum of Television and Radio in Beverly Hills, and as they entered, Straczynski stopped at the sight of something that hit him “with the force of a hammer to the chest.”
Just inside the entrance stood G’Kar’s costume--the uniform, the boots, the gloves and gauntlets, the sash--everything but Andreas. It was on a mannequin that ended at the shoulders, so that the costume “seemed to stand alone, and empty.”
Without Andreas, there is no G’Kar. Without Richard, there is no Stephen Franklin. Neither role can be recast; the actors gave everything to these characters, creating friends out of fiction and telling a story with more than just dialogue and plot device.
After both actors passed away, a former crew member created tribute videos for each, using only clips from their performances on Babylon 5. With the Lost Tales promising more Babylon 5 in the future, it’s good to witness the past and how two men enlivened it. They are in character, in the midst of a grand epic tale, but the actor behind glows through. When one loves their role, he can’t help but commit to it fully, wrapping his own personality round the fiction. When roles come to life, they are not birthed from a void; they become an extension of the player, and they become as vital as the breathing.
Thank you, Richard. Bless you, Andreas. We miss you.
Wednesday, July 25, 2007
B-Deviled
At long last, Doc Freex, one of the Grand Masters of the B-Movies Cabal, has returned. With the happy masthead "Face It--We Love Crap," Freex's Bad Movie Report was one of the first b-movie review websites I bumbled across nearly a decade ago, and even though the updates more or less ceased two years ago, it has remained my most-read one. Freex tackles a lot of the low-grade horror, science fiction, and sexploitation flicks that graced the grindhouses and drive-ins of the 1960s and 1970s--tubs of buttered junk he grew up watching and now returns to with an older, more cynical eye. Even though many of these movies simply aren't my thing, Freex's analyses are both intelligent and hilarious--simply good reads by themselves. In addition, Freex has experienced the other side of cinematic "art," writing his own b-movie, a little gore flick called Forever Evil, and he chronicles the tortured making of that opus at the Report. I finally got to meet the Doc at this past year's B-Fest 24-hour marathon in Chicago, and his grand appearance, complete with cane and salt-and-pepper Orson Welles beard, matches his reputation in the online b-freak community. After I painfully endured all 14 features and various tortured shorts, Freex greeted my bed-dragged mug with a proud smile and intoned in his best Sage, "Now, you are a Man."
Thanks, Doc, and welcome back.
Thanks, Doc, and welcome back.
Tuesday, July 24, 2007
Silenced Laughter
Awaiting its cue, the unaccompanied grand piano sits to the side of the stage, camouflaged by dimmed lighting. The Academy screen adorns the wall behind, looking far too small for the posh theater. But when the projector hums and whirs, the films that flicker across the silver curtain match its diminutive size. Ancient shorts, from the silent and early days of sound, starring jesters of the pratfall, but these clowns aren’t the well-known and well-shown masters of yesteryear. These are the forgotten ones, remembered, if at all, as a faded photo or an unexplained footnote.
No Chaplin, no Lloyd. Buster may attend, but only unannounced with a good-natured sales pitch. Laurel and Hardy are here, but they came separately. Mabel’s alone but the center of attention for once, while Langdon is regarded as royalty. All around, other old ghosts gather to laugh again, their tricks and gags perhaps cruder than their greater peers, but still better than cinematic history would relate to memory.
Welcome to Slapsticon 2007, the sanctuary of lost slapstick.
A few months before, while milling around the Weinberg Center lobby before the start of a Keaton feature, I stumbled across a cut-and-paste flyer. After a quick glance I pocketed it and, like most things I collect, forgot about it until a couple of weeks ago. What I had thought was a little showing of shorts actually was a four-day celebration of rare and obscure films from the Teens all the way through first two decades of the sound era, when many of the discarded silent stars continued to ply their trade in low-budget quickies.
Film historians tend to parrot the works of the giants, and deservingly so; Chaplin, Keaton, and Lloyd were pioneers in their art, their creative skill overcoming the shifts in societal taste. But at the same time, those historians often dismiss other comedians as pretenders or imitators, using their fall into obscurity as evidence. Most of these players are more heard about than seen, their work judged by a chosen few. The chance to actually judge these films on their own merits is a chance that doesn’t come too often.
I didn’t have time to attend all four days (I don’t think I would have survived 35 hours of slapstick, anyway), but by late Saturday morning, I was heading toward the Rosslyn Spectrum Theatre in Arlington, Virginia, for two showings.
The first began with the Keaton surprise--There's No Business Like No Business. Shortly before the festival, the organizers of Slapsticon uncovered this lost industrial film that Buster did late in his life for the long-gone Maremount auto parts company. Keaton has great fun as the hapless owner of a service station who keeps ignoring golden opportunities to help his customers and make some money. At one point, Buster opens the hood to see a smashed carburetor, a leaky radiator, and a burned out generator--not to mention the dinner roll serving as a head gasket. He gazes at the mechanized disaster with concern, pours a bit of water in the radiator, puts back the dinner roll, and sends the driver on his merry way! The acrobatic physicality of Buster’s silent work is absent here, but he aptly replaces it with quick, subtle visual gags that pile on, inducing giggles and at times outright laughter, such as when Buster joyfully bounces when his cash register begins spontaneously adding up.
Following Buster is the Queen of Silent Comedy herself, Mabel Normand. Mostly remembered today for either the scandals that derailed her career or as the frequent female costar for Charlie Chaplin and Fatty Arbuckle, Mabel was the silent era’s most gifted comedienne whose popularity led to several starring feature roles as well as many of her own shorts. Slapsticon obtained two Mabel Normand silents that bookend her career. The first, the 1914 Keystone comedy Hello Mabel, features a typically frenetic pace long on energy and short on logic. Mabel plays an apartment building phone operator who gets caught up in a comedy of misunderstandings between her, her boyfriend in the building, a flirtatious tenant, and his unforgiving wife. Broad and bawdy, Hello Mabel doesn’t cater to Normand’s talents, but she manages to stay afloat among the nonsense. The short is most notable for the plethora of future stars in cameo roles, including Charley Chase, Chester Conklin, Mack Swain, and Al St. John.
The second Mabel short is the five-reel version of her comeback film, Raggedy Rose (1926). After two scandals and several health problems brought on by hard living, Normand returned to the screen after three years away thanks to her good friend F. Richard Jones. Jones supervised the making of Raggedy Rose, even ghost-directing some scenes, while Richard Wallace and Stan Laurel shared the director’s chair. The film took months to reach theaters, as Pathe Studios rejected the feature several times before finally agreeing to handle a three-reel version late in 1926. The film was a huge success with critics and audiences, but Normand’s fragile health limited her to four more two-reelers before retiring from filmmaking. Graced with a talented supporting cast, Raggedy Rose is an era away from the Keystone short. Normand is like a hyperactive Lillian Gish while playing a poor young woman working for a junk dealer (Jewish comic Max Davidson, who had his own collection of shorts at Slapsticon). In a hilarious opening in which Mabel and Max use two cardboard cats to trick an affluent neighborhood to toss junk into the street, Rose is knocked senseless when a handsome millionaire throws his shoe at the faux kitties and accidentally hits her. A series of silly mischance leads a purposefully unconscious Rose being delivered to the millionaire’s doorstep to wait for a doctor. While Rose thinks she’s in the hospital (which is where she hoped to get a good meal), the millionaire’s gold-digging girlfriend and her mother conspire to get rid of her. Meanwhile, the butler has gone nuts. He thinks. Like many slapstick stories, what starts as a sweet comedy spins faster and faster into inanity, throwing logic out the window until Rose conks the millionaire on the head by accident. Normand’s performance, leaning more on her visual timing and quirky character than stunts, serves as the rubber cement to the increasingly illogical plot threads--the audience is too high on the fumes to notice the cracks. Unfortunately, bits of this five-reel version feel padded, while the print is missing some footage, especially most of the resolution after Rose realizes who she conked. Time ravages Rose in other ways, too: Some of the humor with the junk dealer feels anti-Semitic, a discomfort somewhat disfused by Davidson’s natural warmth.
The final two shorts of the program feature a lesser known comedian and another known more for his decades-long work in sound. The first, the 1924 independent Wedding Belles, stars Monty Banks, who looks for all the world like a pudgy, erstwhile playboy version of The Tramp. Banks, however, is completely upstaged by his main costar: Pal the Dog. In Wedding Belles, Monty’s girlfriend believes that the strange dog in his apartment (snuck in by a neighbor hiding it from the landlady) is from another woman and demands that he get rid of the it. Only the dog likes Monty, and no matter what he does, the dog keeps outsmarting him. Banks’ standard performance pales next to Pal, whose timing and personally is creepily humanistic and provide the vast majority of the laughs.
The final short, on the other hand, is about the funniest silent short I have ever seen. Small wonder when the young star is Edward Everett Horton, who would become a well-regarded character actor in film and television, including his work as the narrator of the Fractured Fairy Tales segments of Rocky and Bullwinkle and as Chief Roaring Chicken in F Troop. Horton got his start as a silent comedian in the 1920s, even getting his own brief series under Harold Lloyd’s production company. Dad’s Choice is one of those films, and Horton’s character--an erstwhile young suitor of a wealthy man’s daughter--easily could have been played by Lloyd himself. But I actually prefer Horton’s laid-back, put-upon turn over Lloyd’s usual driving ambition. Horton is extremely likeable as he first keeps bumbling across a battle-axe store customer again and again and then mistakes the bodyguard as his girlfriend’s father. The best bits come when Horton thinks the father is the gardener and asks for help in eloping with the girlfriend. Dad actually goes along for the ride, relishing every minute. Unlike other slapstick shorts, Dad’s Choice never leaves the realm of believability, even when employing the typical plot devise of misunderstandings. In fact, that could describe the whole film: tired comical tactics revived by whimsical tension, excellent timing, and some unexpected character turns. Horton’s two foils drive the film, allowing the lead to deliver an understated, reactionary performance. The battle-axe, who becomes a living running joke, is essayed by Elinor Vanderveer, whose stony facial expressions are gags by themselves. Otis Harlan, meanwhile, creates a gruff but loveable father whose own behavior becomes unpredictable. Sadly, neither actor had much of a career outside of bit parts, but both help Horton carry this little unknown short to heightened hilarity that matches anything Keaton or Chaplin have done. When Harlan can make a modern audience erupt in laugher by simply jogging across a driveway, you know he’s doing something wonderful.
A short intermission later, during which I started a new collectable hobby, and its time to discover perhaps the best-kept secret of silent film comedy: Charley Chase.
A mixture of John Cleese and Weird Al Yankovic, Chase began his career as a director at the famous Hal Roach Studios under his real name, Charles Parrott. He helped usher Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy to fame and directed many of the early comedian stars before replacing Harold Lloyd in front of the Roach camera. Charley Chase was born, and he became the studio’s most popular money-maker of the 1920s, continuing to make shorts after the sound era arrived. He embraced the new technology, altering his playboy persona to something more flaky and directing his own starring shorts well into the 1930s. He even appeared in a couple of features, one of which was the Laurel and Hardy vehicle Sons of the Desert. Unfortunately, Chase died from a heart attack in 1940, before his sound career would take hold.
For its “Chasing Charley Chase” program, Slapsticon obtained five silent and sound shorts, including a fragment of his lost feature sound debut Modern Love. Because of a technical problem (namely, the film was upside down and backwards), the first short is a sound one: His Silent Racket, directed by Chase in 1933. Chase plays a sap conned into buying interest in a failing dry cleaning business. When the local protection racket leaves a mysteriously ticking package that Chase tries to deliver to his partner, the pace finally begins to pick up, dropping gag after gag until the denouncement, when the “bomb expert” drops the package in a tub of gasoline. When the explosion's smoke clears, all of the staggering cops are suddenly wearing the dresses from the delivery truck. Yeah, it didn’t make too much sense then, either. Until the absurdity kicks in, the short is pretty predictable but buoyed by some nice throwaway gags. Chase actually feels drowned in the goings on.
Not so with his most famous short, the silent classic Movie Night (1929). His last silent comedy, Chase plays a husband and father who attempts to take his family (including his wife’s brother, who was staying with them “until he was old enough to be hung”) to the movies. Mishap after mishap occurs--from his young daughter’s reoccurring and contagious hiccups to a misplayed scam to get a child’s ticket. Chase is at his best here, giving a textured character that goes beyond the one-note heroes of most silent shorts; his frustration and reactions recall Cleese’s best work. The funniest bits feature Chase’s little girl, played by Edith Fellows, who kindly torments her screen father with an unpracticed innocence. The print used for this showing was the UCLA Film and Television Archive’s restoration, which returned several previously lost sequences to the middle of the short.
Hopefully, restoration will return a complete Modern Love (1929) to audiences as well. During the transitional years between silent and sound, Chase was loaned out to Universal to replace another actor in this marriage comedy. A hybrid sound–silent feature, most of Modern Love has been lost, with surviving elements spread across various different celluloid formats. Universal, the same studio that dumped their silent library into the San Francisco Bay in the 1940s, is attempting to construct a complete print, but until then, Slapsticon obtained reels 3 and 4 of the silent version. Dropped into the middle of an obviously complicated story is a bit bewildering, but what’s most evident is Chase’s easy charisma in full force, and he delivers an engaging performance as the frustrated “secret” husband. Most comedians relied on personas to sell their films, but based on these reels and Movie Night, Chase appears to have delivered something richer, allowing for more complex, character-driven comedies that expand the humor beyond the basic setup, gag, and pratfall.
That ability served Chase well when he finally started making his own sound pictures. While audiences of that transitional era frightened filmmakers into movies of wall-to-wall dialogue, Chase understood how to balance the new talkie-driven stories with his visual gags. One of his earliest sound shorts is Crazy Feet, made in the same year as Modern Love. Unlike the hybrid film, the footage for Crazy Feet is intact--except for a soundtrack. Made as a talkie, the original sound elements have been lost. Yet, outside of opening setup, the film still works wonderfully as a silent. Chase pretends (badly) to be a chorus dancer to be near company star Thelma Todd, who was at the beginning of her career. Todd and Chase did several shorts together, and their chemistry glows in a climatic, wildly prancing dance number that will have Monty Python fans doing whiplash double-takes.
The last short brings Chase’s career retrospective to a close. In The Nightshirt Bandit (1938), Chase plays a new criminology professor who discovers that he’s a sleepwalking kleptomaniac and frantically tries to recover some stolen money in a girl’s dormitory. Chase’s screen persona has been fully transformed to a meek and awkward caricature, a far cry from the deeper, more assured roles he played before. Part of the problem is that the film is directed by Jules White, notorious for his obvious and loud slapstick. Chase, however, handles the predictable violence with aplomb, delivering the short’s best lines and stunts and squeezing entertainment from a leaden stone.
Before the lights come up, Chase teaches me a simple truth: While the popular legend is that the silent clowns couldn’t adapt to the sound era, the reality is that audiences simply were no longer interested in their shtick. The silent comedians, discarded in favor of the screwball and farce, really didn't lose any of their ingenuity when handed talkie projects, but under the pressure to quench the public's fascination with the new technology, the clowns were reduced to cheap programmers where their "outdated" act wouldn't lose money. The irony is that these bargain-basement oddities are far more timeless than many of the successful talkie films of those days. For every Thin Man, dozens of comedies that didn’t know when to shut up filled theaters, delighting audiences with the gimmick of gab. Gimmicks eventually fade, though, exposing the technology as vapid technique. Meanwhile, the slapstick artisans continued making movies they knew worked; people simply had forgotten. Forgotten like much of the silent era, thrown away like precious canisters in a metropolitan bay.
Only today, two generations and nearly a century later, do we realize what may have been lost. Slapstick was only a part of the beginnings of cinema, but it is the one that most people understand. Laughter is contagious, and silent laughter is universal, scaling the barricade of language to infect us all. Through slapstick, people can begin to understand the unique gift of the silents--storytelling that reaches beyond culture and language. All film is emotional. Sit in a theater and laugh with an audience, cry with strangers. During first days of cinema, a movie could play anywhere in the world and connect. Without translation, a German film could play in America, while its American counterpart could tour Europe and Asia. The stories were understood, with no spoken explanation. Only the silents could do that.
That entire era of film, the era that forged the one true communal art of the modern age, is gone. Silenced. Not every film will be recovered, not every star will be rediscovered. But what those movies gave us should never be forgotten, and laughter is the best place to start.
No Chaplin, no Lloyd. Buster may attend, but only unannounced with a good-natured sales pitch. Laurel and Hardy are here, but they came separately. Mabel’s alone but the center of attention for once, while Langdon is regarded as royalty. All around, other old ghosts gather to laugh again, their tricks and gags perhaps cruder than their greater peers, but still better than cinematic history would relate to memory.
Welcome to Slapsticon 2007, the sanctuary of lost slapstick.
A few months before, while milling around the Weinberg Center lobby before the start of a Keaton feature, I stumbled across a cut-and-paste flyer. After a quick glance I pocketed it and, like most things I collect, forgot about it until a couple of weeks ago. What I had thought was a little showing of shorts actually was a four-day celebration of rare and obscure films from the Teens all the way through first two decades of the sound era, when many of the discarded silent stars continued to ply their trade in low-budget quickies.
Film historians tend to parrot the works of the giants, and deservingly so; Chaplin, Keaton, and Lloyd were pioneers in their art, their creative skill overcoming the shifts in societal taste. But at the same time, those historians often dismiss other comedians as pretenders or imitators, using their fall into obscurity as evidence. Most of these players are more heard about than seen, their work judged by a chosen few. The chance to actually judge these films on their own merits is a chance that doesn’t come too often.
I didn’t have time to attend all four days (I don’t think I would have survived 35 hours of slapstick, anyway), but by late Saturday morning, I was heading toward the Rosslyn Spectrum Theatre in Arlington, Virginia, for two showings.
The first began with the Keaton surprise--There's No Business Like No Business. Shortly before the festival, the organizers of Slapsticon uncovered this lost industrial film that Buster did late in his life for the long-gone Maremount auto parts company. Keaton has great fun as the hapless owner of a service station who keeps ignoring golden opportunities to help his customers and make some money. At one point, Buster opens the hood to see a smashed carburetor, a leaky radiator, and a burned out generator--not to mention the dinner roll serving as a head gasket. He gazes at the mechanized disaster with concern, pours a bit of water in the radiator, puts back the dinner roll, and sends the driver on his merry way! The acrobatic physicality of Buster’s silent work is absent here, but he aptly replaces it with quick, subtle visual gags that pile on, inducing giggles and at times outright laughter, such as when Buster joyfully bounces when his cash register begins spontaneously adding up.
Following Buster is the Queen of Silent Comedy herself, Mabel Normand. Mostly remembered today for either the scandals that derailed her career or as the frequent female costar for Charlie Chaplin and Fatty Arbuckle, Mabel was the silent era’s most gifted comedienne whose popularity led to several starring feature roles as well as many of her own shorts. Slapsticon obtained two Mabel Normand silents that bookend her career. The first, the 1914 Keystone comedy Hello Mabel, features a typically frenetic pace long on energy and short on logic. Mabel plays an apartment building phone operator who gets caught up in a comedy of misunderstandings between her, her boyfriend in the building, a flirtatious tenant, and his unforgiving wife. Broad and bawdy, Hello Mabel doesn’t cater to Normand’s talents, but she manages to stay afloat among the nonsense. The short is most notable for the plethora of future stars in cameo roles, including Charley Chase, Chester Conklin, Mack Swain, and Al St. John.
The second Mabel short is the five-reel version of her comeback film, Raggedy Rose (1926). After two scandals and several health problems brought on by hard living, Normand returned to the screen after three years away thanks to her good friend F. Richard Jones. Jones supervised the making of Raggedy Rose, even ghost-directing some scenes, while Richard Wallace and Stan Laurel shared the director’s chair. The film took months to reach theaters, as Pathe Studios rejected the feature several times before finally agreeing to handle a three-reel version late in 1926. The film was a huge success with critics and audiences, but Normand’s fragile health limited her to four more two-reelers before retiring from filmmaking. Graced with a talented supporting cast, Raggedy Rose is an era away from the Keystone short. Normand is like a hyperactive Lillian Gish while playing a poor young woman working for a junk dealer (Jewish comic Max Davidson, who had his own collection of shorts at Slapsticon). In a hilarious opening in which Mabel and Max use two cardboard cats to trick an affluent neighborhood to toss junk into the street, Rose is knocked senseless when a handsome millionaire throws his shoe at the faux kitties and accidentally hits her. A series of silly mischance leads a purposefully unconscious Rose being delivered to the millionaire’s doorstep to wait for a doctor. While Rose thinks she’s in the hospital (which is where she hoped to get a good meal), the millionaire’s gold-digging girlfriend and her mother conspire to get rid of her. Meanwhile, the butler has gone nuts. He thinks. Like many slapstick stories, what starts as a sweet comedy spins faster and faster into inanity, throwing logic out the window until Rose conks the millionaire on the head by accident. Normand’s performance, leaning more on her visual timing and quirky character than stunts, serves as the rubber cement to the increasingly illogical plot threads--the audience is too high on the fumes to notice the cracks. Unfortunately, bits of this five-reel version feel padded, while the print is missing some footage, especially most of the resolution after Rose realizes who she conked. Time ravages Rose in other ways, too: Some of the humor with the junk dealer feels anti-Semitic, a discomfort somewhat disfused by Davidson’s natural warmth.
The final two shorts of the program feature a lesser known comedian and another known more for his decades-long work in sound. The first, the 1924 independent Wedding Belles, stars Monty Banks, who looks for all the world like a pudgy, erstwhile playboy version of The Tramp. Banks, however, is completely upstaged by his main costar: Pal the Dog. In Wedding Belles, Monty’s girlfriend believes that the strange dog in his apartment (snuck in by a neighbor hiding it from the landlady) is from another woman and demands that he get rid of the it. Only the dog likes Monty, and no matter what he does, the dog keeps outsmarting him. Banks’ standard performance pales next to Pal, whose timing and personally is creepily humanistic and provide the vast majority of the laughs.
The final short, on the other hand, is about the funniest silent short I have ever seen. Small wonder when the young star is Edward Everett Horton, who would become a well-regarded character actor in film and television, including his work as the narrator of the Fractured Fairy Tales segments of Rocky and Bullwinkle and as Chief Roaring Chicken in F Troop. Horton got his start as a silent comedian in the 1920s, even getting his own brief series under Harold Lloyd’s production company. Dad’s Choice is one of those films, and Horton’s character--an erstwhile young suitor of a wealthy man’s daughter--easily could have been played by Lloyd himself. But I actually prefer Horton’s laid-back, put-upon turn over Lloyd’s usual driving ambition. Horton is extremely likeable as he first keeps bumbling across a battle-axe store customer again and again and then mistakes the bodyguard as his girlfriend’s father. The best bits come when Horton thinks the father is the gardener and asks for help in eloping with the girlfriend. Dad actually goes along for the ride, relishing every minute. Unlike other slapstick shorts, Dad’s Choice never leaves the realm of believability, even when employing the typical plot devise of misunderstandings. In fact, that could describe the whole film: tired comical tactics revived by whimsical tension, excellent timing, and some unexpected character turns. Horton’s two foils drive the film, allowing the lead to deliver an understated, reactionary performance. The battle-axe, who becomes a living running joke, is essayed by Elinor Vanderveer, whose stony facial expressions are gags by themselves. Otis Harlan, meanwhile, creates a gruff but loveable father whose own behavior becomes unpredictable. Sadly, neither actor had much of a career outside of bit parts, but both help Horton carry this little unknown short to heightened hilarity that matches anything Keaton or Chaplin have done. When Harlan can make a modern audience erupt in laugher by simply jogging across a driveway, you know he’s doing something wonderful.
A short intermission later, during which I started a new collectable hobby, and its time to discover perhaps the best-kept secret of silent film comedy: Charley Chase.
A mixture of John Cleese and Weird Al Yankovic, Chase began his career as a director at the famous Hal Roach Studios under his real name, Charles Parrott. He helped usher Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy to fame and directed many of the early comedian stars before replacing Harold Lloyd in front of the Roach camera. Charley Chase was born, and he became the studio’s most popular money-maker of the 1920s, continuing to make shorts after the sound era arrived. He embraced the new technology, altering his playboy persona to something more flaky and directing his own starring shorts well into the 1930s. He even appeared in a couple of features, one of which was the Laurel and Hardy vehicle Sons of the Desert. Unfortunately, Chase died from a heart attack in 1940, before his sound career would take hold.
For its “Chasing Charley Chase” program, Slapsticon obtained five silent and sound shorts, including a fragment of his lost feature sound debut Modern Love. Because of a technical problem (namely, the film was upside down and backwards), the first short is a sound one: His Silent Racket, directed by Chase in 1933. Chase plays a sap conned into buying interest in a failing dry cleaning business. When the local protection racket leaves a mysteriously ticking package that Chase tries to deliver to his partner, the pace finally begins to pick up, dropping gag after gag until the denouncement, when the “bomb expert” drops the package in a tub of gasoline. When the explosion's smoke clears, all of the staggering cops are suddenly wearing the dresses from the delivery truck. Yeah, it didn’t make too much sense then, either. Until the absurdity kicks in, the short is pretty predictable but buoyed by some nice throwaway gags. Chase actually feels drowned in the goings on.
Not so with his most famous short, the silent classic Movie Night (1929). His last silent comedy, Chase plays a husband and father who attempts to take his family (including his wife’s brother, who was staying with them “until he was old enough to be hung”) to the movies. Mishap after mishap occurs--from his young daughter’s reoccurring and contagious hiccups to a misplayed scam to get a child’s ticket. Chase is at his best here, giving a textured character that goes beyond the one-note heroes of most silent shorts; his frustration and reactions recall Cleese’s best work. The funniest bits feature Chase’s little girl, played by Edith Fellows, who kindly torments her screen father with an unpracticed innocence. The print used for this showing was the UCLA Film and Television Archive’s restoration, which returned several previously lost sequences to the middle of the short.
Hopefully, restoration will return a complete Modern Love (1929) to audiences as well. During the transitional years between silent and sound, Chase was loaned out to Universal to replace another actor in this marriage comedy. A hybrid sound–silent feature, most of Modern Love has been lost, with surviving elements spread across various different celluloid formats. Universal, the same studio that dumped their silent library into the San Francisco Bay in the 1940s, is attempting to construct a complete print, but until then, Slapsticon obtained reels 3 and 4 of the silent version. Dropped into the middle of an obviously complicated story is a bit bewildering, but what’s most evident is Chase’s easy charisma in full force, and he delivers an engaging performance as the frustrated “secret” husband. Most comedians relied on personas to sell their films, but based on these reels and Movie Night, Chase appears to have delivered something richer, allowing for more complex, character-driven comedies that expand the humor beyond the basic setup, gag, and pratfall.
That ability served Chase well when he finally started making his own sound pictures. While audiences of that transitional era frightened filmmakers into movies of wall-to-wall dialogue, Chase understood how to balance the new talkie-driven stories with his visual gags. One of his earliest sound shorts is Crazy Feet, made in the same year as Modern Love. Unlike the hybrid film, the footage for Crazy Feet is intact--except for a soundtrack. Made as a talkie, the original sound elements have been lost. Yet, outside of opening setup, the film still works wonderfully as a silent. Chase pretends (badly) to be a chorus dancer to be near company star Thelma Todd, who was at the beginning of her career. Todd and Chase did several shorts together, and their chemistry glows in a climatic, wildly prancing dance number that will have Monty Python fans doing whiplash double-takes.
The last short brings Chase’s career retrospective to a close. In The Nightshirt Bandit (1938), Chase plays a new criminology professor who discovers that he’s a sleepwalking kleptomaniac and frantically tries to recover some stolen money in a girl’s dormitory. Chase’s screen persona has been fully transformed to a meek and awkward caricature, a far cry from the deeper, more assured roles he played before. Part of the problem is that the film is directed by Jules White, notorious for his obvious and loud slapstick. Chase, however, handles the predictable violence with aplomb, delivering the short’s best lines and stunts and squeezing entertainment from a leaden stone.
Before the lights come up, Chase teaches me a simple truth: While the popular legend is that the silent clowns couldn’t adapt to the sound era, the reality is that audiences simply were no longer interested in their shtick. The silent comedians, discarded in favor of the screwball and farce, really didn't lose any of their ingenuity when handed talkie projects, but under the pressure to quench the public's fascination with the new technology, the clowns were reduced to cheap programmers where their "outdated" act wouldn't lose money. The irony is that these bargain-basement oddities are far more timeless than many of the successful talkie films of those days. For every Thin Man, dozens of comedies that didn’t know when to shut up filled theaters, delighting audiences with the gimmick of gab. Gimmicks eventually fade, though, exposing the technology as vapid technique. Meanwhile, the slapstick artisans continued making movies they knew worked; people simply had forgotten. Forgotten like much of the silent era, thrown away like precious canisters in a metropolitan bay.
Only today, two generations and nearly a century later, do we realize what may have been lost. Slapstick was only a part of the beginnings of cinema, but it is the one that most people understand. Laughter is contagious, and silent laughter is universal, scaling the barricade of language to infect us all. Through slapstick, people can begin to understand the unique gift of the silents--storytelling that reaches beyond culture and language. All film is emotional. Sit in a theater and laugh with an audience, cry with strangers. During first days of cinema, a movie could play anywhere in the world and connect. Without translation, a German film could play in America, while its American counterpart could tour Europe and Asia. The stories were understood, with no spoken explanation. Only the silents could do that.
That entire era of film, the era that forged the one true communal art of the modern age, is gone. Silenced. Not every film will be recovered, not every star will be rediscovered. But what those movies gave us should never be forgotten, and laughter is the best place to start.
Wednesday, July 04, 2007
Netflix Almanac: June 2007
So I have this addiction: More than 200 movies stashed away in my cider chest or hutch, taking up valuable space probably best used for the family china or Colonial-era blankets. The scary thing? It could be much worse if I didn’t use Netflix.
I discovered the online rental service a little more than seven years ago, shortly after I bought my first and only DVD player. Despite my love of film, I tend to be a careful buyer; I won’t purchase a movie that I won’t watch more than a few times. Which was a problem.
When DVDs first hit the market in 1997, most studios didn’t support the format, so several independent niche licensors like Anchor Bay Entertainment, Elite, and Tai Seng stepped in. Because they didn’t own their own movie libraries and studios were unwilling to let go of their big classic or contemporary productions, the licensors acquired the odds and ends: Hong Kong fantasy films, b-movies, old American independents, silents, European cinema, Hammer flicks, big screen turkeys, little cult films....
In other words, movies right up my alley.
By accident, DVDs opened up the film world to me, making historically obscure and difficult-to-find film suddenly available. But only if I could buy it.
My local video store didn’t carry most of the new DVDs, and they had just started to sell off their collection of out-of-print videos. Within a few years, that collection would be reduced to major Hollywood films and incomplete anime collections, with nary an oddity to be found. I was faced with the “blind buy,” and after the second-degree burn I got from Alex Cox’s Death and the Compass, that prospect was wearying.
Faced with dozens of new releases each season I wanted to see, Netflix came around at the right time. I joined in March of 2001, back when they had only one distribution center, and it was in California. My queue list grew as the discs trickled in, and by the time another center opened a half hour down the interstate, my waiting list began to resemble one for football tickets. Still, I managed to save money and space, and discovered some interesting film along the way.
Even though I no longer use Netflix as heavily as in the past, I still manage to watch several discs a month. Now that I have a movie blog, a chronicle of those odds and ends may serve as a guide to some unwitting movie lover or a window to my own peculiar taste.
Besides, I need something to write about once in a while.
Three Ages (1923)
Buster Keaton’s first feature, and he was hedging his bets. Done up as a parody of D.W. Griffith’s Intolerance, Keaton tells and retells the same love story in three eras: Stone, Roman, and Modern Day. The Boy (Keaton) woos Beauty (Margaret Leahy), but the family prefers The Adventurer (the great Wallace Beery). Thus, The Boy must prove his worth to the family and reveal the true intentions of The Adventurer. Rather than run through each story piecemeal, Keaton intercuts among the three by story points. For instance, when The Boy needs advice about what to do with his intentions, in the Stone Age, he consults a witch woman, in Roman times a tottering oracle, and in the Modern a daisy (she loves me, she loves me not). As the stories continue to unwind, the intercut becomes quicker, matching the rising frantic energy on screen. Keaton gets a healthy dose of humorous mileage from the interplay among three vastly different times, usually using the Modern era as the punchline, especially in the film’s final joke. Unlike Keaton’s follow-up Our Hospitality, Three Ages is closer to his gag-driven shorts--a technical wonder far beyond what other silent comedians were doing at the same time, but strangely absent of any emotional investment. That would come later. But Three Ages remains worthy of a laugh--a very loud and never-ending one.
Android (1982)
A science fiction b-movie from Roger Corman’s New World factory, but not exactly what you expect. An eccentric scientist (Klaus Kinski) is working on an illegal project when his naive, android assistant Max 404 (writer Don Keith Opper, but billed as “Himself”) lets three escaped convicts land on their station. What follows isn’t a thriller but a study of the spiritual awakening of a machine. Shot economically on a small but well-designed set, Android shows a lot of care behind its ambition, and mostly avoids the exploitation that usually seeps into Corman’s productions. Unfortunately, the good intentions are undercut by human characters too narrowly drawn to be compelling and a plot that really stagnates between the film’s opening and closing sections. Opper makes a nice debut as an actor, but as a writer, he waits too long to introduce some story points and adds a last twist that doesn’t make much sense. In the end, Android is a nice, faulty film showcasing a nice character in Max 404. The rest is mostly forgetful.
Richard Jeni: A Big Steaming Pile of Me (2005)
I’ve already discussed my own feelings on Jeni, and this HBO stand-up special--his last recorded performance--makes me miss him that much more. Jeni, whose routines usually dealt with entertainment or relationships, ventures into the political arena, attacking both right and left with a sly grin. In one hour, he exposes ridiculous societal rhetoric better than a decade of Dennis Miller. Jeni left us too soon, but he left behind a great performance everyone should watch.
And if political humor gives you the gives you the jibbles, don't worry; Jeni still hits on his normal points:
Samurai Banners (1969)
The general conception of knights and samurai is one of honor. Yet, as this classic samurai epic clearly shows, honor is a many faceted thing. Toshiro Mifune stars as Kansuke Yamamoto, an ambitious ronin dreaming of a united Japan. Yamamoto becomes a warlord’s most-trusted strategist by concocting plots to raise both his and his lord’s prestige and power. But the intrigue only sets the table for a wonderfully complex character-study of three people: Yamamoto, his lord Shingen Takeda, and Princess Yufu, the captured daughter of a dead rival whom both love. The film also dissects the common conception of honorable actions, but that’s a post for another day. What makes Samurai Banners all the more interesting is that it is not some grand samurai but a historical film--the legend of Takeda is one of Japan’s greatest. The epic, with its bright and grandly staged battle scenes, is a gloss for a quiet story of three people who nearly changed a country, for better or worse.
The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension (1984)
God, I love this movie. “Remember, wherever you go, there you are.” Hee.
A Man Called Sledge (1970)
James Garner does a Spaghetti western. He portrays Luther Sledge, a dour outlaw with no illusions to his ultimate fate. After a partner is killed in a card game, Sledge meets an old man who follows a weekly gold shipment from a mine to a prison. Sledge creates a heist plot to break the gold out of the prison. He succeeds at the cost of a friend, but then the gold begins to turn his gang against each other and, ultimately, him. Like most Spaghetti westerns, this story does not end well for anyone, even the survivors. Garner’s own inherent likeability and natural charisma gives this tale a bit of a twist, but otherwise, it’s pretty standard fare--too afraid to plunge into the nihilistic darkness of the human soul like The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly or The Great Silence. An oddity, written and directed by longtime character actor Vic Morrow and featuring some notables like Garner, Dennis Weaver, and Claude Akins riding in territory to which they were not accustomed.
I discovered the online rental service a little more than seven years ago, shortly after I bought my first and only DVD player. Despite my love of film, I tend to be a careful buyer; I won’t purchase a movie that I won’t watch more than a few times. Which was a problem.
When DVDs first hit the market in 1997, most studios didn’t support the format, so several independent niche licensors like Anchor Bay Entertainment, Elite, and Tai Seng stepped in. Because they didn’t own their own movie libraries and studios were unwilling to let go of their big classic or contemporary productions, the licensors acquired the odds and ends: Hong Kong fantasy films, b-movies, old American independents, silents, European cinema, Hammer flicks, big screen turkeys, little cult films....
In other words, movies right up my alley.
By accident, DVDs opened up the film world to me, making historically obscure and difficult-to-find film suddenly available. But only if I could buy it.
My local video store didn’t carry most of the new DVDs, and they had just started to sell off their collection of out-of-print videos. Within a few years, that collection would be reduced to major Hollywood films and incomplete anime collections, with nary an oddity to be found. I was faced with the “blind buy,” and after the second-degree burn I got from Alex Cox’s Death and the Compass, that prospect was wearying.
Faced with dozens of new releases each season I wanted to see, Netflix came around at the right time. I joined in March of 2001, back when they had only one distribution center, and it was in California. My queue list grew as the discs trickled in, and by the time another center opened a half hour down the interstate, my waiting list began to resemble one for football tickets. Still, I managed to save money and space, and discovered some interesting film along the way.
Even though I no longer use Netflix as heavily as in the past, I still manage to watch several discs a month. Now that I have a movie blog, a chronicle of those odds and ends may serve as a guide to some unwitting movie lover or a window to my own peculiar taste.
Besides, I need something to write about once in a while.
Three Ages (1923)
Buster Keaton’s first feature, and he was hedging his bets. Done up as a parody of D.W. Griffith’s Intolerance, Keaton tells and retells the same love story in three eras: Stone, Roman, and Modern Day. The Boy (Keaton) woos Beauty (Margaret Leahy), but the family prefers The Adventurer (the great Wallace Beery). Thus, The Boy must prove his worth to the family and reveal the true intentions of The Adventurer. Rather than run through each story piecemeal, Keaton intercuts among the three by story points. For instance, when The Boy needs advice about what to do with his intentions, in the Stone Age, he consults a witch woman, in Roman times a tottering oracle, and in the Modern a daisy (she loves me, she loves me not). As the stories continue to unwind, the intercut becomes quicker, matching the rising frantic energy on screen. Keaton gets a healthy dose of humorous mileage from the interplay among three vastly different times, usually using the Modern era as the punchline, especially in the film’s final joke. Unlike Keaton’s follow-up Our Hospitality, Three Ages is closer to his gag-driven shorts--a technical wonder far beyond what other silent comedians were doing at the same time, but strangely absent of any emotional investment. That would come later. But Three Ages remains worthy of a laugh--a very loud and never-ending one.
Android (1982)
A science fiction b-movie from Roger Corman’s New World factory, but not exactly what you expect. An eccentric scientist (Klaus Kinski) is working on an illegal project when his naive, android assistant Max 404 (writer Don Keith Opper, but billed as “Himself”) lets three escaped convicts land on their station. What follows isn’t a thriller but a study of the spiritual awakening of a machine. Shot economically on a small but well-designed set, Android shows a lot of care behind its ambition, and mostly avoids the exploitation that usually seeps into Corman’s productions. Unfortunately, the good intentions are undercut by human characters too narrowly drawn to be compelling and a plot that really stagnates between the film’s opening and closing sections. Opper makes a nice debut as an actor, but as a writer, he waits too long to introduce some story points and adds a last twist that doesn’t make much sense. In the end, Android is a nice, faulty film showcasing a nice character in Max 404. The rest is mostly forgetful.
Richard Jeni: A Big Steaming Pile of Me (2005)
I’ve already discussed my own feelings on Jeni, and this HBO stand-up special--his last recorded performance--makes me miss him that much more. Jeni, whose routines usually dealt with entertainment or relationships, ventures into the political arena, attacking both right and left with a sly grin. In one hour, he exposes ridiculous societal rhetoric better than a decade of Dennis Miller. Jeni left us too soon, but he left behind a great performance everyone should watch.
And if political humor gives you the gives you the jibbles, don't worry; Jeni still hits on his normal points:
Samurai Banners (1969)
The general conception of knights and samurai is one of honor. Yet, as this classic samurai epic clearly shows, honor is a many faceted thing. Toshiro Mifune stars as Kansuke Yamamoto, an ambitious ronin dreaming of a united Japan. Yamamoto becomes a warlord’s most-trusted strategist by concocting plots to raise both his and his lord’s prestige and power. But the intrigue only sets the table for a wonderfully complex character-study of three people: Yamamoto, his lord Shingen Takeda, and Princess Yufu, the captured daughter of a dead rival whom both love. The film also dissects the common conception of honorable actions, but that’s a post for another day. What makes Samurai Banners all the more interesting is that it is not some grand samurai but a historical film--the legend of Takeda is one of Japan’s greatest. The epic, with its bright and grandly staged battle scenes, is a gloss for a quiet story of three people who nearly changed a country, for better or worse.
The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension (1984)
God, I love this movie. “Remember, wherever you go, there you are.” Hee.
A Man Called Sledge (1970)
James Garner does a Spaghetti western. He portrays Luther Sledge, a dour outlaw with no illusions to his ultimate fate. After a partner is killed in a card game, Sledge meets an old man who follows a weekly gold shipment from a mine to a prison. Sledge creates a heist plot to break the gold out of the prison. He succeeds at the cost of a friend, but then the gold begins to turn his gang against each other and, ultimately, him. Like most Spaghetti westerns, this story does not end well for anyone, even the survivors. Garner’s own inherent likeability and natural charisma gives this tale a bit of a twist, but otherwise, it’s pretty standard fare--too afraid to plunge into the nihilistic darkness of the human soul like The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly or The Great Silence. An oddity, written and directed by longtime character actor Vic Morrow and featuring some notables like Garner, Dennis Weaver, and Claude Akins riding in territory to which they were not accustomed.
Saturday, June 30, 2007
Ifukube Rocks
A few years ago, Toho decided to “retire” Godzilla for a while, and for the franchise's faux finale, the studio chose Ryuhei Kitamura (Versus) to direct. Although the Japanese wunderkind is best known for ultra-violent action adventures heavily influenced by anime, Kitamura grew up on the 1970s campy Godzilla flicks, especially his favorite Godzilla v. Mechagodzilla. Small wonder, then, that the 50th anniversary film Kitamura created celebrated the Showa era--evil aliens, monster wrestling bouts, cute baby Minyas, Kennys in short pants, cameos from dozens of classic kaiju, the old Tohoscope opening logo, and even familiar flying battle submarines from Toho’s science fiction adventures of the same era.
The only thing Godzilla: Final Wars was missing was Akira Ifukube.
Perhaps Japan’s greatest classical composer, Ifukube also scored more than 200 films from 1947 until his retirement in 1978. But he’s best known for his work with the Godzilla franchise, creating the timeless themes that became inseparable from the radioactive beast from the first masterwork in 1954, and he did it without even seeing the film. He went on to compose and conduct music for 6 of the next 14 Godzilla movies, plus innumerous other kaiju, samurai, and genre pictures. Even the films that he didn’t score used his famous themes so much that Toho convinced Ifukube to come out of retirement in the 1990s for four more Godzilla movies, including his last score: 1995’s Godzilla v. Destroyer, which he considered his best work. Without Ifukube, Godzilla would be missing his Greek chorus and his melody, and the monster would be much less than he became.
Ifukube passed away in 2006, two years after Godzilla: Final Wars. Unfortunately, the producers failed to honor his memory and contribution. Instead, they employed Keith Emerson to produce what became a modern technobabble of a score. Too bad, because Godzilla: Final Wars needed something extra.
So, a film fan decided to fix that oversight. Armed with an apparently limitless selection of Ifukube’s film work, he’s completely rescored much of the movie and posted it on YouTube. Similar to Ifukube’s own Godzilla: Fantasia, where he performed his scores over clips from the original films, the reworked Final Wars features no dialogue or sound effects--only the legendary composer’s wonderful work.
Suddenly, the outrageousness becomes grand adventure, the music lending Kitamura’s tribute a weight absent from the actual release. The lifts from The Matrix and Star Wars are no longer as painfully obvious, and seeing Godzilla rampage to his own battle hymn again brings Final Wars home to kaiju’s golden era.
So enjoy; even with only music to tell the story, the music is Ifukube. Nothing else is needed.
The only thing Godzilla: Final Wars was missing was Akira Ifukube.
Perhaps Japan’s greatest classical composer, Ifukube also scored more than 200 films from 1947 until his retirement in 1978. But he’s best known for his work with the Godzilla franchise, creating the timeless themes that became inseparable from the radioactive beast from the first masterwork in 1954, and he did it without even seeing the film. He went on to compose and conduct music for 6 of the next 14 Godzilla movies, plus innumerous other kaiju, samurai, and genre pictures. Even the films that he didn’t score used his famous themes so much that Toho convinced Ifukube to come out of retirement in the 1990s for four more Godzilla movies, including his last score: 1995’s Godzilla v. Destroyer, which he considered his best work. Without Ifukube, Godzilla would be missing his Greek chorus and his melody, and the monster would be much less than he became.
Ifukube passed away in 2006, two years after Godzilla: Final Wars. Unfortunately, the producers failed to honor his memory and contribution. Instead, they employed Keith Emerson to produce what became a modern technobabble of a score. Too bad, because Godzilla: Final Wars needed something extra.
So, a film fan decided to fix that oversight. Armed with an apparently limitless selection of Ifukube’s film work, he’s completely rescored much of the movie and posted it on YouTube. Similar to Ifukube’s own Godzilla: Fantasia, where he performed his scores over clips from the original films, the reworked Final Wars features no dialogue or sound effects--only the legendary composer’s wonderful work.
Suddenly, the outrageousness becomes grand adventure, the music lending Kitamura’s tribute a weight absent from the actual release. The lifts from The Matrix and Star Wars are no longer as painfully obvious, and seeing Godzilla rampage to his own battle hymn again brings Final Wars home to kaiju’s golden era.
So enjoy; even with only music to tell the story, the music is Ifukube. Nothing else is needed.
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