Parking Lot Pictures

Games Movies Play

2007-10-01T19:21:00.000-07:00

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.

REVIEW: The Plague Dogs

2007-09-27T07:15:00.000-07:00

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

Back to the Big Screen

2007-09-26T21:45:00.000-07:00

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.

She Was Wongo!

2007-09-20T15:38:00.000-07:00

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.)

Bride of Stardust

2007-09-15T19:57:00.000-07:00

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.

A Good Trade

2007-09-11T19:14:00.000-07:00

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.

American Wuxia

2007-09-10T19:44:00.001-07:00

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.

Netflix Almanac: August 2007

2007-09-09T19:17:00.001-07:00

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.

Maelstrom of Movies

2007-09-05T19:46:00.000-07:00

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.

Immortally Wounded

2007-08-19T19:33:00.000-07:00

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.

Theatrical Traveler

2007-08-17T23:10:00.000-07:00

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.

Netflix Almanac: July 2007

2007-08-13T21:30:00.000-07:00

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)

Babylon 5: In Memory Still Bright

2007-07-30T17:52:00.001-07:00

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:

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.

B-Deviled

2007-07-25T20:02:00.000-07:00

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.

Silenced Laughter

2007-07-24T15:27:00.000-07:00

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.

Netflix Almanac: June 2007

2007-07-04T17:10:00.000-07:00

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.

Ifukube Rocks

2007-06-30T14:31:00.000-07:00

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.

Reality Bites

2007-06-29T21:32:00.000-07:00

Sometimes, I’m afraid to watch a movie. No matter how much I want to.

A couple of weeks ago, I stumbled across the trailer for a little film called He Was a Quiet Man. Rather than trying to describe it, just watch it, watch the whole thing, and you’ll meet my conundrum:

Maybe a few months ago, it would have been a no-brainer. My taste in movies makes room for off-key oddities, probably welcomes them warmly on the front porch. But after the events at Virginia Tech, I’m not so sure this time. The conceit of the film is that Christian Slater’s character is contemplating a suicidal shooting spree when somebody else beats him to the trigger. Slater’s character is disturbed and lonely, a man who never outgrew his violent, child-like fantasies about revenge for perceived slights and social torment. Opening with that spree, the trailer sings the problematic tune--He Was a Quiet Man is a black comedy.

Black comedies are tricky, and most attempts fail. Their goal is to make you laugh at situations normally deserted by laughter, mining humor by skewing reality to the absurd. But the shock of Virginia Tech is still too soon, and the reality clamors in, twisting the absurdity with bad timing.

It’s not the first time. When September 11th shook us, Hollywood suddenly became cautious. Sam Raimi pulled a sequence--originally shot for a teaser trailer--from the first Spider-Man movie because it featured the World Trade Center. Jackie Chan had to scrap a film set at the Towers, which climaxed with Jackie fighting to prevent a terrorist attack. Some film fans cried censorship, but the reality actually is capitalistic: Any producer or studio head knows that making entertainment out of a tragedy too soon creates discomfort for the audience and, in turn, spells financial doom. Even legendary producer Joseph Schenck realized that when he ordered Buster Keaton to change the finale for Steamboat Bill Jr. to something other than a huge flood--the recent, real-life Mississippi one had claimed far too many lives to be fun.

The climax became a cyclone, hatching Buster Keaton’s most iconic image.

The ripples tragedy leaves behind don’t have an expiration date, either. Paul Greengrass’s United 93 earned all kinds of critical acclaim for its honorable retelling of the one plane that didn’t reach its target on September 11th, but the film still struggled at the box office. Even five years after that event, the wounds were too sensitive to relive it all again. I know mine were.

Which brings me back to He Was a Quiet Man. I’ve watched the trailer several times and unearthed festival reviews, which tell of a “pitch black comedy” taking utterly unexpected turns. They also tell of spirited discussions after the credits roll--most of the festival showings came after Seung-Hui Cho’s rampage. But what the audience yearns to talk about is not recorded. I still don’t know.

I don’t. Watching a troubled man struggle against his worst instincts, perhaps to fail, perhaps to succeed by failing...the message may be one for which I’m not ready. Especially if that message is wrapped up in a laugh lost to echoing gunshots.

Then the trailer’s second half plays again, and makes me wonder.

The real problem isn’t the film’s timing; it’s whether the film understands the true nature of black comedy: to tear away the trappings of tragedy and horror to reveal humanity’s heart. A dozen late-comers have followed Heathers, attempted to carbon copy its twisted teen inanity, but none have matched it. Heathers succeeded because instead of finding hilarity in suicide itself, the film found the fragility in the acts of the people responding to it. While Heathers attacked the strange popularity and the cult of celebrity surrounding teen suicide in the late 1980s, it treated its lead characters as more than simple biological bags of quirks. A black comedy doesn’t vicariate its characters; a black comedy is about the tragic faults of the characters that lead them to mistakes...or enlightenment.

He Was a Quiet Man can be about exploitation, or it can be about healing. After an event like the campus massacre, we briefly ask why, then look for villains. But we forget that there are no real monsters. Something broke, something turned, something smoldered in Cho; failing to understand that helpless hate only deepens the tragedy. A film about a similar character driven toward a similar act, only to be stopped by circumstance to confront his own existence, may help me see past the assumption and dismissal of madmen. And that possibility makes me want to drive a hundred miles to see it.

I watch the trailer again.

Classy Cult Cinema

2007-06-25T12:14:00.000-07:00

Lightning can do strange things. Strike places twice, stalk people, roast chickens, even cause annual conventions. And it can blow out phone lines. Specifically, my phone line. About a week ago, Frederick experienced two full days of lightning storms. While my neighbors and I sat (safely) under our porches to enjoy the night sky crackling, one apparently smacked my 30-year-old split and switch. For days, my phone fluttered between stone silence or laughing static, as if the lightning bolt still danced on the line. My Internet connection also suffered: After about 10 minutes online, the connection would sputter and fade out, leaving my browser grasping blindly.

But the phone guy just left, after installing a completely new line and adopting the burned-out switch for his display wall at work. The computer connection is finally healthy, and I jump online to see what's happening.

And at the prestigious AFI Silver Theatre, this greets me.

Big Trouble in Little China? Evil Dead 2? The Terminator? This is Spinal Tap? Repo Man? Porky's?

What, did lightning strike me, too? Am I really in heaven? Or did reality's axis just go all unhinged?

A few years ago, The American Film Institute helped Montgomery County restore the historical Silver Theatre in Silver Spring, Maryland, for the purpose of showing classic and world cinema. With two stadium-seating screening rooms, the theater usually shows older foreign and American art films, classic cinema, and even the occasional first-run indie feature. The line-ups usually feature the likes of Seven Samurai, Ingmar Bergman's Wild Strawberries, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, My Own Private Idaho, and The Lady Vanishes. In a week, a Sunday Buster Keaton retrospective ends after playing all spring. Recent pulp films, however, never really have been shown there. Sure, a few years ago, I got to see the original Japanese Godzilla at the Silver, but that movie is now regarded as a monster classic alongside the likes of Frankenstein and Dracula.

But that's really the point, isn't it? Many of the films we regard today as important classics were the entertainment of yesteryear. John Ford, Alfred Hitchcock, Akira Kurosawa, Tod Browning...they all created timeless work that helped shape film history, but they all were storytellers first. Some filmmakers simply were more subtle than others.

The films the AFI Silver Theatre is showcasing as great 1980s cinema boast growing reputations: The Termintor is regarded as a contemporary time-travel classic, while Evil Dead 2 begatted Sam Raimi's career, hyperactive filmatic style, and comedy horror. Porky's, for better or worse, predated today's tasteless teen comedies; you can thank the late Bob Clark for the likes of American Pie. This Is Spinal Tap helped introduce the modern concept of the mockumentary, one that star Christopher Guest has continued to develop with Best in Show and A Mighty Wind. All these films from my teenhood influenced the makers of movies today; the cultural ascension to critical respect just seems odd to me, who still remembers them for the celluloid escape they originally gave us.

Of course, that still doesn't explain Jack Burton's appearance. But who cares?

Oh yeah, I have my tickets yesterday.

Father Flickers

2007-06-17T18:22:00.000-07:00

After church on Sundays, our family would go directly to my mother’s parents’ house for brunch--Grandma and Grandpa only lived a somewhat long walk from our own house, and their home was a second one for me. On one of these Sundays, my Grandpa, the former bank vice president and erstwhile inventor, sipped on his afternoon martini as Dad and I regaled him with raves about an amazing movie we saw the previous night: Prisoners of the Lost Universe, a no-budget sci-fi comedy populated with multidimensional claptrap, cavemen, albinos, flintlocks, digital watches, and Richard Hatch.

Hey, we have taste.

I owe Dad a lot. I mean more than my existence (Mom had something to do with that, too, ya know). He taught me independence, introduced me to the joy of reading, shaped an athlete out of me against all odds, bestowed a goofy sense of humor, helped me learn to take people as they come, and many, many other little things. But most of all, he shared his love of silly movies.

On Saturday mornings way back in the hazy 1970s, he’d come and join me to watch the Looney Tunes. I originally thought he was making sure I didn’t pick up anything fun to imitate; I already had received the “Only Superman Can Fly” lecture after they found me using my bed as a landing pad. But no, Dad wasn’t duly fulfilling some unwritten parenting law to protect his child; he was coming down to watch because he loved Bugs Bunny and Co. just as much as me. Sometimes, he’d even stick around for the martial arts movie in the afternoon, simply ’cause they were almost as silly as the cartoons (“Hey, why don’t they attack him all at once?”). Even today, when I go home for holidays, I bring along my Looney Tunes box set, just in case we have some free time to watch.

So, when cable finally arrived in our household complete with HBO and Cinemax, Dad and I found heaven. Back then, the movie channels scrambled for anything to fill in their schedule around the 3 or 4 major films they showcased. That’s when we first discovered The Beastmaster, The Ice Pirates, Yellowbeard, and countless post-apocalyptic Road Warrior knockoffs. I witnessed my first PG-rated movie, then my first R. It didn’t really matter what we watched, only if it was silly, fun, a little off-the-wall, and exciting. You know, goofy guy stuff.

That appreciation for the odd and little-known grew in me. When video stores began spreading throughout the town, I loved to browse through, finding some interesting looking flick most likely bearing an Embassy or New World logo. Later on, I discovered New German cinema, wuxia swordplay adventures, ghost stories, silents, Japanese anime, classic romantic mysteries--all adding to the wealth of westerns, b-movies, and fantastical silly fun Dad and I discovered together.

Today, in my DVD cedar chest, Return of the Killer Tomatoes sits comfortably right next Alfred Hitchcock’s Rebecca, which sits right next to Young Frankenstein, which sits next to Rock and Rule, which sits next to She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, which sits next to The Brother from Another Planet. I’m often surprised when I’m asked if there are movies I don't like admitting I own. It’s a strange question--why should I be ashamed of movies I like? A conceit exists within film fandom, a conceit that extends to literature as well: The idea that a story can be less worthy of another simply because of the kind of story. Science fiction literature often is ignored by “serious” readers and critics, so an author like Gene Wolfe, who perhaps is the best living American writer today, can be left unknown, then forgotten. For years, Kurt Vonnegut fought against that sci-fi label for the same reasons--he felt his work deserved better, that it was more than “just” genre fiction. Only Slaughterhouse-Five changed academia’s minds, and only after they had missed Mother Night and Cat’s Cradle.

The same goes with film. Every year’s movie releases are divided between the summer blockbusters and the Oscar hopefuls in the fall. One is mindless entertainment, the other important cinema. Where the idea the two had to be separate is beyond me.

The point is, and always has been, to tell a good story. Just that, nothing more, no matter if the eye-candy is blinding or the soapbox’s call is clarion. If a film doesn’t have compelling characters imbuing a well-wrought narrative, if a story does not draw you in, does not create laughter or tears or adrenaline or just simple joy, then any entertainment is absent, the film a failure.

That’s what Dad taught me about movies, whether he intended or not. The importance isn’t in the inner meaning, or the subject matter, or the genre, or even production quality. The importance is in the entertainment--the modern day, silver-screened equivalent of ancient storytellers, mesmerizing their audiences with imagination, humor, and humanity. No matter how serious or silly.

Thanks, Dad. Happy Father’s Day. And I promise to bring McLintock! this time.

Heroes Among Us

2007-06-16T18:04:00.000-07:00

So Gypsy (*ahem* Wonder Gypsy Without-Pushup-Bra) posts a superhero personality quiz by way of The Film Geek. So, of course, I do it.

And I turn out to be Easy Reader's sidekick. Awesome.

As a kid weened on Saturday morning Filmation and The Electric Company, Spider-Man was my favorite comic hero. Given all the other cool choices around, it was no contest.

I'm sure every comic book chronicler will be happy to tell you--Spider-Man was a hero with problems just like us. He wasn't a god-like Man of Steel, nor was he a rich gentleman with every gadget known to humanity. He didn't have just one cool power like The Flash, nor did he spend his days leadng a bunch of other supers like Captain America. Spidey was Spidey--an average kid (later, Joe) who just happened to be a hero with amazing strength, the ability to climb walls before Velcro, and a few toys he built from odds and ends. To comic book readers, he was closer to them than anybody else, and the problems that Peter Parker faced in his everyday life were much worse than theirs. I mean, who else has a boss who not only rides you everyday and fires you every other, but also uses your best work to make your own life harder?

Still, the thing I loved the most about Spider-Man was that the hero was the alterego. In Superman, Clark Kent was a guise with glasses, Supes pretending to be a somewhat bumbling reporter. Bruce Wayne was an act; the Batman was the personification of Wayne's true soul. But in Spider-Man, the real hero was Peter Parker; he just happened to swing around town in red and blue pajamas once in a while. That's what the stories were about, and that's what Sam Raimi got so right in the first movie--the story of Spider-Man is a story of sacrifice, of how somebody decides to use his special abilities to help others and the cost that selflessness takes on his life and loved ones. A cost Parker doesn't want M.J. to bear.

Now you know what it's like to be a fireman, or a policeman, or a rescue worker.

My father and his father were volunteer firemen for the Germantown Volunteer Fire Department in Danbury, Connecticut. I remember going to the department's Christmas party every year as a kid, getting to climb up on the trucks and later watch Santa come in on top of another one, which always was mysteriously missing from the firehouse. A fireman was one of the first things I wanted to be, but I never could because of my eye problems back then. I always remembered them, though, especially what they do for us.

What many people forget is that many if not most firefighters have families. Wives, husbands, children...they're the ones most affected by the selflessness, but they accept it, maybe even understand it. They're also the ones who get left behind when their loved ones never come home. And that's the cost of great responsiblity.

Over in the right column, you'll see a few links. With one, you can go and create your own superhero, complete with amazing powers and strength. With another, you can go to the National Fallen Firefighters Foundation, where those who through amazing strength gave the last full measure for someone they probably didn't know.

And that's a true superhero. One among us.

Your results:

You are Spider-Man

You are intelligent, witty,
a bit geeky and have great
power and responsibility.

Spider-Man 85%

Superman 80%

The Flash 70%

Green Lantern 70%

Robin 68%

Supergirl 65%

Hulk 55%

Wonder Woman 50%

Catwoman 35%

Iron Man 35%

Batman 15%

Click here to take the Superhero Personality Quiz

Oh, and F.G.? Green Lantern's not that bad. You could have been Aquaman.

A Deliciously Evil Man

2007-06-14T06:16:00.000-07:00

From my Dad: "You know, Gisbourne is an idiot, but even he should knock off the Sheriff for being such a [censored, but having to do with uncomfortable anatomy]."

Sherwood Calling

2007-06-11T07:50:00.000-07:00

So, after a long work day after a long week after a long film festival, I finally drift home. The backyard, once landscaped, is lush with undisciplined life, and the birds roosting in a mostly dead tree have left some presents on my deck. The kitchen door argues, but finally bangs opens enough to allow me into the chaos strewn inside. Bag dropped, slippers on, and the day’s laundry already bucketed and escorted to the basement, I begin preparing for a long night of cleaning and blog updating. The festival report isn’t going to finish itself.

Then something pushes me to check the front porch. Sure enough, a box is waiting for me. What’s that rule about best-laid plans, again?

They weren’t supposed to arrive until the following week, but the new additions to my DVD collection are welcome: a low-key television western with Sam Elliott, a high school noir flick, and Buster Keaton’s last two silent movies. One more, though, ruins any best intentions for the evening--Robin of Sherwood (with Merries) has arrived.

When I think of Robin of Loxley, two screen personas spring to mind—Errol Flynn’s iconic swashbuckler, and the mythological Robin of the Hood. Back in the mid-1980s, when the BBC planned yet another version of England’s most lasting legend, writer Richard Carpenter concocted a strange mix of realism and mysticism--a young, misfit band of roughens finding a cause beyond simple survival, guided by a shaman of Celtic legend. Robin isn’t a disgraced noble--he’s a freeman whose freedom is stolen by the Norman Sheriff of Nottingham, a deliciously evil man with a hilariously horrendous temper. Little John is a man bewitched by an English lord fallen into the dark arts, and his duel of a meeting with Robin on the log is more deadly than the cheerfully playful one of tradition. Marian is a headstrong young woman as at home in the woods as surrounded by stone, so her fate as a pawn of the political church--represented by the Sheriff’s brother--is not one she accepts. Will Scarlet has become as heated as his name--in a devastating entrance in a prison pit, his features muted by shadow, Will tells the tale of his wife’s horrific death, of how everything he loved in this world was cruelly ripped from him. When he growls, “My name was Will Scathelock. It’s Scarlet now,” the never-absent hatred glows from within. A Saracen Muslim named Nasir joins the band, rarely speaking but wielding two wicked swords and a wry sense of humor. Then there’s Herne the Hunter--the aforementioned shaman, wandering around Sherwood granting Robin sage advice, weaving some naturalistic magic, and wearing Bambi on his noggin.

Tuck, on the other hand, is Tuck. Some things never should change.

For a nearly 25-year-old series, Robin of Sherwood is timeless. Clannad’s synthetic music doesn’t sound dated, only otherworldly. The strength of the series comes from the little things: the quiet camaraderie between the Merry Men, the affection between Robin and Marian, the give-and-take between the Sheriff and the childlike obstinacy that is Guy of Gisburne. These things, combined with unpredictable stories respinning the legendary tales in a different color, made Robin of Sherwood a series I never forgot.

Or maybe it was simply Sherwood.

When I reached my 8th year, my family moved from a Bill Cosby-like neighborhood filled with children my age to a small, quiet, dead-end street surrounded by woods. The youngest boys were in high school and didn’t want to have anything to do with the goofy, awkward new kid. The woods, then, became my friend. During the spring, after the snows finally melted, I would grab my cowhide backpack rescued from Dad’s attic and disappear into the wood for an hour or two, following the streams to map little islands and natural oddities like the Wooden Arch (that lasted all of two years), the hidden patch of Christmas wreath plants, the waterfall married with the crumbled dam, the grove of twisted and brittle swamp trees carpeted with fern. Although I never pretended I was Robin, I shared the comfort the fictional Merries felt within the underbrush and leaves. Hidden away from the rush of modernity, I discovered more than just a few personal landmarks in two acres of seasonal swamp and hillside woodland; the natural world became open to me for the first time in my life, and I’ve been drawn to it ever since.

These days seem further and further removed from those times, but I’m still drawn to the woods at Gambrill Park, where there’s a spot where all the mechanical noise can’t reach and true silence prevails. You can learn much from silence.

As I watch Robin and his crew crash through Sherwood, playing gracious hosts to sometimes unwilling guests and waylaying lords and knights, I’m a bit envious. Their time in the wood is perpetual and their life natural, even if forced on them by the official crimes of their time. I only get to return as my time permits. Maybe that’s why Robin of Sherwood left an impression on me.

Or maybe I simply had a crush on Marian.

Yep. That was it.

Living It Like Buster

2007-05-21T18:34:00.000-07:00

Something silly to share. I tend to play this when the stress gets too hot, and all I want is a simple smile.

The clip is from one of Buster Keaton's 1930s Educational Films shorts, called Grand Slam Opera. In retrospect, that random dance, with Buster switching styles whenever the unseen orchestra changes, means much more than just a gag.

When the silent film era suddenly ended in 1928, Keaton signed a contract with MGM, his first real studio. Until that point, Buster had worked as an independent, creating such classic silent comedies as The General, Sherlock Jr., and The Navigator. But The General--today considered one of the greatest films of all time--was a financial and critical flop when released in theaters. When Steamboat Bill Jr. also lost money, Keaton's producer Joseph Schenck convinced him to retreat to the security of MGM. The looming talkies worried many silent stars, and Keaton was in no position to take a risk.

Although the partnership initially produced another silent classic in The Cameraman, Buster soon discovered that MGM saw him as nothing but an employee. Buster never directed a feature again, nor did he have much input in the films in which he starred. By the time Keaton made his first sound film--the abysmal Free and Easy--he had become nothing but a square peg, forced into the round holes of "snappy" dialog-driven comedies, always portraying the dimwitted fool "Elmer," while the heroes of his silent classics had redeemed themselves with their ingenuity and tenacity. The complete loss of creativity, combined with his already-deteriorating home life, took away whatever joy he had left. He had already lost his wife's affection; now he lost his art. Buster essentially lived on the studio lot in a bungalow supplied by MGM, away from his beloved sons. His drinking escalated dangerously, to the point where he was finishing off a bottle of booze daily. In his last MGM film--What, No Beer?, the last of a trilogy of pairings with up-and-comer Jimmy Durante--Buster is embarrassingly inebriated, his eyes glazed and hollow, his words slurred, his once-sharp timing muddled. His wife had divorced him by then, taking everything but his paycheck. Soon he didn't even have that. Although Buster's sound films, in spite of their low quality, made more money than his landmark silents ever did, studio head Louis B. Mayer fired him on the final day of shooting.

That was January of 1933. Exactly five years after he had signed with one of the most successful Hollywood studios as one of the great comedians of film, Buster Keaton had nothing left.

The next couple of years probably should have killed Keaton. No major producing firm would hire him, and he bumbled into a second marriage to a nurse who probably did more harm than good. Several of his close friends died suddenly, including his mentor Roscoe Arbuckle, punching another hole in Keaton's life. In his last days, however, Arbuckle had worked with Educational Films, the cheapest studio in town, and now they offered Buster work. With the vaudeville stage fading and no where else to turn, Keaton took the job and began churning out extremely low-budget, sound two-reelers. But his alcoholism got worse.

In the middle of October 1935, with his second marriage sliding toward divorce, Keaton began drinking heavily and wouldn't stop. An old family friend, Dr. John Shuman, took him to a hospital while Buster was unconscious. The next morning, Keaton's alcoholic withdrawal was so great that he was restrained in a straitjacket. He stayed in the hospital for two weeks. Shuman and other doctors explained to Buster how the drinking was killing him, and if he continued, he wouldn't live much longer.

According to Tom Dardis's Keaton: The Man Who Wouldn't Lie Down, "Buster listened calmly and did not drink for the next five years."

Keaton returned to Educational Films sober and anew. Grand Slam Opera was the second short he made after his hospital stay, and it's the only one in which Buster has a writing credit. His timing, his energy, his creativity...in a bargain basement short, mostly lost to time and memory, Keaton's joy in creation is completely alive on screen.

Educational Films would go bankrupt the following year, but Keaton would find more work back at MGM, as an anonymous gag writer. He gave away his famous routines to the likes of the Marx Brothers, Abbott and Costello, and Red Skelton, who remade Keaton's two MGM silents as sound films, but did them Buster's way. Most importantly, Buster Keaton would meet Eleanor Norris, a young dancer at the studio. Despite the differences in their ages, the two would marry in May 1940, and would live happily together until the end of Buster's life 25 years later. By then, audiences had rediscovered Keaton's silent features and shorts, and Keaton lived the last years of his life recognized as one of the giants of comedy.

Buster's Educational Films work mostly has been forgotten, and those who have seen the shorts call them "shoddy," "beneath Keaton," and "embarrassingly bad." But the 16 two-reelers Keaton made over those three years perhaps are among the most important of his life--they gave him work when he needed it, and when he was ready, allowed him to unearth the talent he nearly destroyed with the bottle. Few of us have traveled the road that Buster Keaton did, and for a time, that road was hopelessly perilous. Like the heroes he conjured for his silents, Keaton never gave in, despite the despair and melancholy that wrapped his existance. Even when hope left him, he continued on. When I watch that clip, made so soon after the darkest time of his life, I remember Keaton's dance lesson.

Swinging on the devil's dance floor? Buster did, and survived. And he's still dancing.

Maryland Film Festival '07, Day 2: Trippy Temp

2007-05-05T21:50:00.000-07:00

Just got back, so this is a placeholder post until I have time and alertness to write something more substantial.

Man in the Dark--This year's traditional 3-D film actually beat House of Wax as the first studio, two-projector movie...by a day or two. A potboiler with some nice depth of field and 3-D effects, wonky movie science, and "snappy" one-liners that provided more entertainment than the film itself. Just a fun time.

Syndromes and a Century--Storytelling without a story. A highly visual film that follows a number of characters in a rural army base, and then suddenly switches to an urban, sterile hospital setting with the same characters going through the same plot swings, but from different perspectives. Still not sure what it was all about, but genuinely affect still.

Animation Shorts--11 short films of varying styles, tone, and techniques. The first was the funniest: "Ujbaz Izbeneki Has Lost His Soul" is a claymation work about a young man showing up in hell after losing his soul because, well, he loses things. Much to the devil's distress, Ujbaz is still losing things....The worst was "The Ballad of Mary Slade," a generally well-done short about the tragic downfall of a young woman as retold by the insects who have come to, um, consume her. Too gruesome for my taste. Overall, a solid selection with one very powerful work ("Everything Will Be OK") and only one music video to be found (a problem that has developed from past festivals).

Golden Days--A behind-the-scenes documentary about the experience of The Damnwells, a self-made indie band who signs a major record deal with Epic, spends a year waiting for the recorded album to come out, and then gets dropped without a release. Far from a VH-1 Behind the Music special, Golden Days features no cataclysmic climax featuring tragedic or excess; instead, the film shows a band still discovering who they are and how they've grown stronger from the experience rather than unravel from it. The final scene shows The Damnwells performing on stage, opening for and then performing with The Fray, another indie act Epic kept and promoted to two million dollar sales. The Fray insisted on keeping The Damnwells as their opening act; "we're fans." It's refreshing to see a music documentary where the music does pull the band through.

That's all for now. More detail later.

Maryland Film Festival '07, Day 1: Of Changes, Wanted or Not

2007-05-04T22:00:00.000-07:00

Prelude

On this morning, a workday morning, I awoke at my normal 6 a.m., stumbled down the hallway, fed the finches, shuffled into the bath, and got as far as turning the hot water knob before realizing that the first screening at the Maryland Film Festival didn’t start until the early afternoon. I suddenly had time.

So, I commenced to lose track of it.

I ran some errands. I puttered around the house. I paid my mortgage, restocked my CDs and DVDs, and e-mailed a very special welder of the latest cattle prods. Then, while reading some online news sites, I looked down at my computer clock: 11:15 a.m. No problem; the first movie didn’t start until 1:30, and although it takes me at least an hour to get to the Charles Theatre, I still could leave at noon and be there in plenty of time. I just needed to clean up first....

And as I stepped back into the bath, my phone rang; a freelancer for a major project had an urgent question. I quickly answered, and because she’s a former coworker, we gabbed some more, catching up. Feelin’ good, I hung up, cleaned up, and finally got to the car.

It’s 12:15, and I still have to pick up some cash. By the time I finally get on the road, I’ve got one hour to make the movies.

This happens every year. Every. Year.

American Fork

With independent filmmaking, projects are connected, and one success can birth lesser-known but worthy siblings. Producer Jeremy Coon helped writer/director/star Jared Hess create the cult fave Napoleon Dynamite three years ago. Coon and much of that film’s crew then helped make Napoleon first assistant director Tim Skousen’s own work, The Sasquatch Dumpling Gang, which features a cameo by Hess and showed at the MFF last year. One of the main actors of that effort, Hubbel Palmer, then wrote and starred in another Coon production--American Fork.

Like Napoleon Dynamite, American Fork centers on the travails of a gentle lost soul. In this case, Tracey Orbison is an overweight grocery clerk who writes (good) poetry in his notebook while irking out a life in a dead-end town. Living at home with his depressed mother and stuffed-animal-loving sister, Tracey is stuck in a cycle of trying to loose weight and failing at passing the driver’s license exam. Then, one day, he attends a play at the urging of his well-meaning boss (Bruce McGill). There, overbaked actor Truman Hope (William Baldwin, in a delicious turn) dazzles Tracey with his bad acting, and Tracey quickly signs up for Hope’s class. But when Hope eventually lets Tracey down, our hero decides to become a mentor for the teenaged hooligan friends of new coworker Kendis. Bad decision, but before it ends, Tracey finds redemption, accomplishment, and, most importantly, a sense of peace, told wonderfully in a poem.

Although American Fork shares Napoleon Dynamite’s themes and character-based humor, it avoids the episodic nature and greater absurdist minimalism of its predecessor. Instead, as written by Palmer and directed by Chris Bowman, American Folk remains a very human film, despite some goofy sequences and outlandish jokes. Palmer’s performance, propelled by his melodious voice, anchors the picture, creating a believable axis around which the story orbits. The result is a compelling little comedy where the humor accents the characters, allowing the more saccharine touches to become genuine and smoothing over some predictable plot points. Some bits, especially in the middle where Tracey hooks up with Kendis’s crew, stretch the balance between the off-the-wall humor and human fable, but Tracey’s climatic poem makes all forgivable.

Just the perfect kind of little picture to start the festival.

After the film, Palmer and Bowman answered questions from the audience, revealing that American Fork was shot in the town in Utah where Palmer grew up and based the story. Many of the basic situations that Tracey found himself in were inspired by Palmer’s life, which probably is how the story discovered its more affecting traits.

Intermission

After the screening, I had an hour to kill. I found out two things.

One: Don’t buy a S’mores Crepe unless they give you a plate. Two handi-wipes and countless napkins still didn’t clean up the mess (and wound up with a sticky spot on my nose). In sucking down the tasty concoction before it wound up in a puddle in my lap, I felt like Tracey during one of his stress-fueled gorges. Next time, I'll stick (groan) with my butterscotch crepe.

The crepe place has been next to the Charles Theater for a few years now, but it's expanded a bit to include a small eating and waiting area. No tables, but a nice shelf-style bar along the window, with a cushioned bench seat running along back wall just behind it. I'm off in the corner, frantically wiping off the marshmallow and chocolate into the trash can, when I happen to glance at the side wall next to me. There's a door, which I assume leads to the playhouse next door, but surrounding it and covering the wall are keys--dozens and dozens of keys hanging each on their own hook, running from floor to ceiling. Behind me, a customer discovers that the keys are the idea of the owner's art student son. I'm too busy staring at it, smiling at its simplicity.

Two: The Maryland Film Festival has grown even from last year. Usually, the majority of the films are screened at the Charles Theatre’s five screens, with an odd showing at another theater nearby. This year, they have three additional screens--one at the MICA center and two just across the bridge at the University of Baltimore, where my next film was showing. 'Course, I didn't notice that until I actually looked at the ticket 20 minutes before the movie started.

Every. Year.

I wander a bit, meeting a statue of Edgar Allen Poe--looking for all the world like an inebriated Lincoln holding a ciggie--when I finally notice the UB Student Center across the street and climb the glass-enclosed stairwell to its fifth floor theater. Where the main screening room at the Charles was nearly pitch dark, the center’s theater is completely white and modern, except for a pure parquet floor and a low wood stage below the small hanging screen. From a cavern to an art gallery, only this one has one picture....

Time and Tide

In 2002, two filmmakers joined a group of 60 New Zealanders returning to their homeland of Tuvalu, a small Pacific Island nation that achieved notoriety for selling their international Internet domain of “.tv” to a start-up dotcom company for $50 million. Many have never seen the island, and even the oldest have not returned since leaving 15 years before.

What they find is a communal culture struggling with its newfound Western capitalism. The capital town is overwhelmed with people and trash, and the rising sea is rapidly overwhelming what little land the island holds.

Despite its themes of globalization and global warming, Time and Tide is a humanistic documentary about cultures as well. The film interviews both the visitors and residents, discovering how Tuvalu has experienced firsthand the effects of change. Some of the visitors ride to one’s childhood home, only to find that it’s become a massive trash heap because Tuvalu has no other place to put it. Residents talk about losing Tuvalu’s tradition of sharing while establishing an economy to raise money to send their children elsewhere for schooling. Two weeks before they leave, the visitors take a trip to an inlet island, where they find happiness in a more traditional settlement. Until some realize that the lagoon used to be their own village, on dry land less than two decades before.

Without a pulpit, Time and Tide instead preaches with the people living through the experience. Humor and joy is mixed with an undercurrent of dread about Tuvalu’s future, and the message is obvious that this little country’s future could be ours as well. The message is quiet, but sent with more finality and honesty than anything Al Gore could deliver.

Fortunately, the film will not be restricted to festivals. The directors Julie Bayer and Josh Salzman said that Time and Tide will be shown on PBS this month. Needless to say, I recommend it.

Missed Today: Bobcat Goldthwait’s raunchy comedy and third film Sleeping Dogs Lie, presented by John Waters.

Maryland Film Festival '07: Preview

2007-05-02T20:28:00.000-07:00

This Friday, a personal, annual tradition will be reprised: For three days, I’ll attend the Maryland Film Festival in Baltimore, seeing a hodgepodge of little-seen independent features, off-the-wall short films, cult cinema, and the occasional documentary. As a self-proclaimed film nut, my yearly pilgrimage (well, driving back and forth on I-70 each morning) is something I probably should have done sooner.

Back in 2001, I first learned of the existence of the "MFF," which, like me, was nearly new to the festival circuit. Begun in 1999, the festival was housed entirely at the Charles Theatre, a restored movie house in the revitalizing art district across the railroad gridwork of Penn Station. Originally a cable car barn and later a ballroom, the 108-year-old, brown-brick building with two-story arched glass windows was gutted and expanded to five movie screens plus a little lobby. The festival was small, giving special emphasis to Baltimore filmmakers and the city’s reputation as a purveyor of strange cinema.

In other words, just my size.

By a month, I missed the 2001 festival--which featured such works as The American Astronaut, Four Dogs Playing Poker, Bill Plympton’s latest feature Mutant Aliens, the documentary Mr. Smithereen Goes to Washington, and the cult horror gore classic 2000 Maniacs (shown at the Bengies Drive-In and featuring a panel discussion with its director Herschell Gordon Lewis)--but I made plans for the following year, even though my life and work had completely changed by that point. On the early afternoon of May 3, I stepped into the Charles to see my first truly independent film, a movie with no distributor or bright financial future, made only because its creators coerced its existence against all common sense. The film was Body Drop Asphalt, a South Korean Jekyll-and-Hyde of a romantic comedy that first tried my patience and then propelled me on a visual, pop musical feast. I’ve been hooked ever since.

The Maryland Film Festival and its relatives around the country give a special gift to audiences: They provide an outlet for the real artistic film, one ill-made for profit. No where else can you see short films in vibrant abundance, nor will you see many of these features on the big screen anytime soon. To me, the festival is the chance to see something unusual, unexpected, and individualistic, and then meet the people behind the creation. Every year, Baltimorean cult giant John Waters presents a fringe film of his liking, while actors, directors, and producers attend others’ showings over the weekend in addition to their own presentations. They, too, are film fans.

This year’s festival is an odd one: Short of some truly standout features, I originally thought it was going to be an off year. The now-traditional Saturday 3-D and Sunday silent with the Alloy Orchestra still are intact, but the Comedy Shorts program--guaranteed worthwhile entertainment--is weirdly absent. Yet, my own schedule still boosts nine planned viewings, with a couple of others possibly in the offing given budget and ambition. My choices:

Friday

American Fork (2007). A gentle and naive grocery store clerk enrolls in an acting class, which in turn inspires him to mentor his dead-end friends. Things, however, take an unexpected, dark turn. A black comedy co-starring William Baldwin as the overdone acting class instructor and produced by Jeremy Coon of Napoleon Dynamite and The Sasquatch Dumpling Gang.

Time and Tide (2006). A somewhat short documentary about two friends who return to their indigenous homeland of the Pacific Ocean island nation of Tuvalu.

Saturday

Man in the Dark (1953). This year’s 3-D film was the first to use processed-projected background plates, creating an unusual depth-of-field. The film is best known for its roller coaster climax, finishing off a noir story of a former gangster who agrees to undergo experimental brain surgery to erase his criminal tendencies. Unfortunately, his former colleagues want one very important piece of information from him that he no longer knows, and they’ll stop at nothing to get it....

Syndromes and a Century (2006). A highly-acclaimed Thai film featuring two stories of courtship and love in two different time-periods, one inspired by the story of the director’s parents. The film, however, apparently an emotionally visual experience in addition to gentle, quiet storytelling. Can’t wait.

Animated Shorts. One of the two short programs I see every festival. This year’s feature 12 shorts, none of which I’ve read about, because I enjoy seeing these things unscathed by preparation. Usually, an eclectic mix of style, technique, and tone.

Golden Days (2006). A fly-on-the-wall documentary about a self-made indie band nearly torn apart by the major record label deal they somehow manage to land.

Sunday

Nosferatu (1922). The Alloy Orchestra, a three-man musical ensemble using an “outrageous assemblage of peculiar objects,” has created new scores for more than 20 silent films. Since the 2003 festival, the Alloy Orchestra performs one of their pieces with the film in question every Sunday morning. This year, the silent classic is F.W. Murnau’s classic vampire film. I’m normally not a fan of horror, but I adore the silent German Impressionistic filmmaking, and Murnau’s Sunrise (shown at the Charles before with the Alloy) and The Last Laugh are part of my home collection. Some films you just have to see, regardless of personal taste.

Domino Effect Shorts. With the absence of the Comedy Shorts program, I’m left with parsing out what I might like from the creatively-titled, but telling little program descriptions. This one features “a dark yet playful ensemble of highly visual shorts.” Really, that’s all they tell us outside of the basic plot descriptions.

Sound and Vision Shorts. Nearly music video more than film, these five shorts should be a fun and exhilarating way to end the festival, especially with a musical tribute to the Atari 2600. (!)

Despite my previous stillborn attempts, I hope to drop in each evening with a report of the day’s films and other activities. Unheralded, unpredictable, and otherwise, the Maryland Film Festival is a once-a-year chance to see once-in-a-lifetime cinema, and it’s long past time I shared it.

The Distant Shore

2007-05-01T16:14:00.000-07:00

As the plane taxis to the runway, an innocent voice asks, “Are we going to the clouds?”

“Yes, we’re going to the clouds,” answers her father. I never knew.

In my childhood, my parents preferred to drive wherever our holidays resided, seeing all the tourist traps and historical landmarks along the way. I’ve only flown a few times in my life, and in my first real business trip, it was a necessity. After a long and busy weekend, I was heading home.

As St. Louis rapidly shrinks behind us, its sliver of an arch looking more and more like a wicket by the riverside, what appears as mist gently wraps around the plane. The ride suddenly buckles and bounces, not a lot but enough to grip the armrests just a little bit harder. The little girl in front of me giggles. I look out the window again. The mists are still swirling, but open air surrounds the wing. Past that probably by miles, the billowing surface of a cloud is slipping by, with sunlight softly breaking through. So, this is what it feels like to be a bird.

Suddenly, we’re free.

I look back to see a towering wall of a single cloud, Moher standing guard on an airy ocean. At its foot, more clouds peel away, streaming out to blanket the earth far below. The cirrus is stripped, pulled cotton forming ghostly fjords. The setting sun is hidden but tints the sky with dusk. And all I can think of is a song.

Lay down
Your sweet and weary head
Night is falling
You have come to journey's end
Sleep now
And dream of the ones who came before
They are calling
From across a distant shore

In Hollywood, from the early silents to today’s blockbusters, heaven often is depicted simply as lost loved ones hanging out above the clouds. They can watch us, the living, continue on; all they have to do is part the mist to see. When Annie Lennox wrote her song for Peter Jackson’s film, she didn’t write about the glory of battle or the triumph of humanity over ultimate evil. She wrote about the quiet end to the struggle, not of any war, but of life’s weary walk. As I gaze out the airplane porthole, no angels or spirits wander along this shore, but I understand why movie producers of yesteryear would want to believe so.

I think of Virginia Tech, of the road rage incident that claimed a couple’s life just down the road from where I live. I think of a local family found dead in their homes and the mother still missing, her urgent police poster still adorning the doors of coffee shops and stores. I think of a little girl with cancer, for whom another coffee shop is gathering anxious donations to pay for the medical treatment her parents can’t afford. I think of a lonely man, barricading himself in a liquor store at midday, and then burning everything down around him rather than surrendering. I think of the employees and shop owners watching everything they’ve worked to build become ash in moments. I think of a hundred horses wasting away in a field, because their owner loves them but doesn’t know how. I think of all that and more that has happened in the past two months, and I wonder where the madness ends.

When we’re born, we depend on our parents and friends. When we leave home, we muddle our way through, using the lessons we’ve learned and learning even more. Some people never close their eyes, but some people simply live to exist, never wanting to think of the meaning, much less the end. The prospect is too frightening.

The movies show us a fantasy, one where life has a clear rhyme, where injustices are repaid, crimes solved, evil vanquished in kind. Small wonder that their heaven is even cleaner. But our lives don’t have a screenwriter arranging for the fated romance, a director calling for the sunrise. We write our own script, character-driven and epic all at once. Maybe there is fate, but the choices still are ours.

Sometimes, the easy way is to shut the door, lock the deadbolt, and go to bed. The world carries on, though, with all its pain, hurt, and enmity. People make it so, as do those too frightened for nothing more than well-intentioned words.

Nobody is looking down from the clouds. I’ve seen their emptiness. Everyone we need to see is right here, souls both lonely and alive.

Night is beginning to fall. Far below on the patchwork earth, houses and towns switch on their street lamps. The lights are orange, like a hundred small fires together against the night.

What's the First to Go, Again?

2007-04-30T10:36:00.000-07:00

Netflix, that infamous online DVD rental store, does a very neat thing for members: They keep track of very single movie, television, or oddity rented and returned. On one of my slower days, I’m gazing at my list. I’ve been a member since 2001, so it’s a long list. But I remember every single movie, episode, and oddity…except that one.

Strange Impersonation?

What’s a Strange Impersonation? Other than a bad Rich Little routine, I mean.

I go online, check the Internet Movie Database. The plot rings a bell, but not much else. So I look up a review or three. Vague outlines begin to appear, but they’re blurred by bad camerawork and poor developing. One review has a picture, of a blonde woman ironclad in a stiff Forties suit, severe blonde pompadour, and horn-rimmed eyeglasses. The blur refocuses a bit—I remember the scientific accident, a jealous assistant, the vengeful lead heroine, a misunderstood beau, a convoluted setup…but that’s as far as it gets.

For the life of me, I can’t remember how it ends.

Sigh.

This is what happens, right? First the eyesight (which faltered before puberty, actually), then the old brain pan springs a few leaks. I’ve never forgotten a movie, even ones I wish I could forget. Some are welcome houseguests, others are burned in with a brand. Except this one.

Yes, Strange Impersonation is back in the queue. I swear old age is a conspiracy.

Of Editors and Rebels

2007-04-29T11:12:00.001-07:00

I was one of the Star Wars generation, the group of kids who were still kids when the original, first movie came out 30 years ago next month. It’s hard to explain how that film affected us, even that famous and fabulous first scene. Imagine seeing for the first time that small transport suddenly streaking over our heads, fleeing the impossibly huge Star Destroyer running it down, all the while John Williams's trumpeting score erupting in echoes around us. From Luke and Leia’s daring swing across the chasm in the depths of the Death Star, to Han's “negotiation” with Greedo, from Vader’s first menacing appearance to Ben Kenobi’s sacrifice--now pieces of pop culture, they once were simply a story told well. All the way to the end, when the center of mechanical evil suddenly bursts into fragments of light, all by the hand of one boy trusting in himself. No doubt, Star Wars is a great adventure, but the film is one of those rare works where everything--characters, story, music, eye candy--combine to do more than entertain. As Luke found his own way, the film made children believe they could, too. And for adults, it uncovered a bit of their own missing childhood.

I just wanted to know what the hey happened to Biggs.

Like many other kids, I clamored for the Star Wars toys: playsets and action figures, ships and games. Because I’m a bit of bookworm, I also wanted the books, and one of the first ones was the movie picture book--a toddler’s retelling embellished with movie stills. And there, near the beginning, was a picture:

Hey, I knew who that was! That was that guy who was the last to get blown up in the Death Star trench run! The one whose death made Luke seem slightly put out! What was Biggs doing on Tatooine?

Of course, when I read the novelization ghostwritten by Alan Dean Foster, I found out. Biggs was an old buddy of Luke’s, and at the very beginning of the story, he had come back to say goodbye. Novelizations usually are based off of the original script, before the film receives its final edit. Many times, scenes that seemed crucial on paper become extraneous on celluloid, and they’re cut and cast aside. They live on, however, where they started--in words.

Because of that picture, I knew even at my preteen age that the scenes had been filmed. It was the first time I knew anything about deleted scenes, and that knowledge began a lifelong obsession about them. I love to see what might have been and what justifications the editor or director used in removing them from the finished story. In a strange way, it probably led me to my career as a book editor--trying to figure why some things work and others don’t, why a piece of information that originally seemed so important suddenly has outgrown its need, long before the narrative is made public.

A age or so later, I read that the Biggs scenes still existed, and I hoped that one day I could finally see them. Thirty years after Star Wars surprised everyone, I have. Whoever dirtiejon is, I owe him and, by extension, YouTube a debit of gratitude. Enjoy:

Poetic Silents

2007-04-28T10:59:00.000-07:00

In the living room, under the table, sits a book saved from childhood. Its jacket gone, its cover slightly bent, the binding with faded gold lettering weak from age. Open it. Inside, hundreds, thousands of stills and portraits, three decades’ worth, black and white and staring out frozen or posing dramatically, with little explanation other than a name. Silent, like the films they show.

Open it.

In another era’s theater, the lights dim. From everywhere comes a crash of pipes and whistles, and a bright light appears at the foot of the stage. The organ rises, where it belongs, with an older man playing by inspiration and tradition. The audience is enthralled and applauding; the movie hasn’t yet begun.

The fairy tale film pretending but doing it well preaches of love and acceptance. Modern melodrama done up like old, accompanied by the strings and winds of an orchestra.

In the classroom, a boy among others hears the projector cough and whir, and soon a flicker appears of a mountain, people in single file winding up the pass like ants. One falls and remains still. Later, when the little man makes the rolls dance a gig, the boy can’t help but laugh.

Open it.

The groom by duty strides down the middle of the road, leading to the only woman he wants. Behind him unknowingly a horde of brides, wanting anything but love, pursues and gathers speed. Soon, he sees, and he is running like a madman. He becomes a blur.

The dashing buccaneer laughs in triumph from the main mast, betrayed pirates swirling in frustration below. All in ancient color.

The wife cowers in the corner of the tram, looking away. The husband, horrified at what he did and what he may lose, stands over her, his eyes never leaving. They remain still, but the tram slips from woods to town to city.

The woman lies prone on the ice flow, senseless from misery. Her baby dead, her reputation gone, her new family betrayed, everything lost, she has given herself to the storm. The river rushes heedless toward the falls, while forgiveness jumps from ice block to ice block after her.

Three women, never trusting, drift like fragments of ghosts in the desert, stumbling from the body of the man who loved all. One plots to destroy, another hates. The third knows, and struggles against hopelessness.

He is innocent, and the girl knows now. She is there, in the projection room, after he awoke from a dream. He does not know what to do, so he looks to the screen for inspiration.

Open it.

The girl kisses him; he never smiles, but the joy is in every movement. The couple rediscovers their love in the vows of another, and he cries to her for forgiveness. The lost baby brings out the women’s better natures. The tramp thinks her note is for him. The disgraced doorman is on his knees in the washroom. The daredevil man hangs periously from the clock.

Open it.

Still images made fluid, wildly fluid. Not fiction but memory, burned forever. Tinted or monochrome, scratched and worn, but still moving, dancing, laughing, crying, living. Living. Living.

They're Hangin' at the BMMB

2007-04-18T21:08:00.000-07:00

It occurs to me that I have other reviews reclining over at the B-Movie Message Board, aka the BMMB. Since I'm not going to have Internet access for a few days, head on over there and witness some serious gushing about Equilibrium, some serious hurtin' over Shatter, and some serious self-consciousness in praising Bubba Ho-Tep. Hey, there might be a pop quiz someday.

Incidentally, I wrote two of those reviews after seeing them in the theater. The only other time I did that? Brick.

Hager Haunted No More!

2007-04-18T18:11:00.000-07:00

Even a little good news is still good.

When I saw the ruins of the Hager Drive-In this past weekend, I got worried. A friend had told me about the act with the inflatable screen, but what I saw made me think something had gone awry. At home, I got even more worried: their website was down, even though the one for the Hager Cineplex was still active. Luckily, the cineplex site included an e-mail address for the drive-in, and the resultant worrywart missive captured a happy response.

I'll not post it here, since it was a private communication, but the gist is good: the crumbled ticket booths actually represent progress on renovating the drive-in, and although nothing really everlasting will be constructed for a couple of years because of various zoning issues, a permanent steel screen tower rising 80 feet should arrive in a few weeks--probably one of the reasons why the theater hasn't opened yet. (Oh, and the website is being overhauled by a professional, and "it will ROCK.")

In other words, that golden marquee will be alone no longer.

Huzzah!

Virginia Tech

2007-04-17T08:54:00.000-07:00

Sometimes, you wish it were all a movie.

You wish that the people who died were acting. You wish that you could rewrite the script, that you could add a hero to stop the madness, that you could change the plot an hour earlier.

But the shuttle still explodes, the plane still flies into the tower. And one morning, one student destroys the lives of many others.

A family member goes to Virginia Tech. On this day of all days, he skipped class and spent the morning in town. Thank God for small favors. A coworker awaits the list, hoping for safety of old friends who went to school at Tech and stayed to teach. My prayers and thoughts are with them, the families, and the survivors.

We watch the violence on screen, both wide and small, where soldiers and foreign enemies, murderers and vigilantes, crime syndicates and cops, heroes and villains all rain fire. It’s exciting, it’s entertainment.

One survivor said the shooter “had a very serious but very calm look on his face.”

We live in a connected world. We touch someone, and that touch migrates to others. Throw a pebble in the ocean and birth a wave. The violence we cause rings out and wounds. Someone loses five loved ones in the tower. Her friends see her grief and share it.

Today is a day to share. Solace is necessary, needed, either in thought or action. We live in a connected world. Touch.

REVIEW: Slapstick of Another Kind

2007-04-16T16:49:00.000-07:00

(Note: I actually wrote this movie review for the BMMB, but I always felt it was overbaked. Now, with Vonnegut's passing, I thought this might be a good time to post a review of one of the (justifiably) lesser known film adaptations of his work, especially of one I discussed specifically this past weekend. You'll also see I used "loving sadness": When I wrote So It Goes, using that again just felt right. This review is the new, improved version; you can read the long-winded one here.)

“I was born in 1922, and I call my generation of writers the class of 1922. This would include Gore Vidal and James Jones and others all born around then. We are the last generation of North American writers to be inspired by other novels rather than movies--Norman Mailer, John Updike, we wrote book books, and just thought that a movie sale was found money. Now young writers write books intending to be movies. But I never did that.”
--Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

When authors sell the movie rights for their works, it’s the studios that actually make the devil’s bargain. Although each novel comes with a built-in audience, that audience is harder to please than, say, the stereotypical teenager who’s never cracked open any book on their own, much less one translated for the screen.

Therefore, it’s ironic that Kurt Vonnegut Jr.--a classic “unfilmable” author if there ever was one--has had not one, but two artistically successful theatrical films that both he and his fans are happy with: Slaughterhouse-Five and Mother Night. But Vonnegut didn’t completely escape unscathed. Back in 1982, writer/director/producer Steven Paul somehow got hold of one of the author’s lesser known works and brought it to the screen. In so doing, he forgot the meat, heart, and damn near all of the skeleton.

Hi ho.

Slapstick the novel is a short breath of a tale. Like Mother Night and Bluebeard, Vonnegut structures it as a memoir--in this case, that of Dr. Wilbur Daffodil-11 Swain, a 100-year-old, 2-meter-tall, Neanderthal-like man who served as the last President of the defunct United States and now lives in the ruins of Manhattan, renamed the “Island of Death.” With the sad humor of Stan Laurel and Buster Keaton, Dr. Swain recalls his strange life, which always revolved around his twin sister Eliza. The two grew up together in seclusion at their family’s abandoned Vermont estate--their parents thought the two were as stupid as they were ugly. But when the siblings touched heads, they became geniuses that would have made Albert Einstein look average. After their unwilling separation at age 15, Wilbur eventually becomes President on a campaign of artificial families (based on an essay from one of Wilbur and Eliza’s “lesser” thinking sessions) and the slogan of “Lonesome No More,” all while American civilization crumbles around him. But Eliza still remains a part of his existence, even as an absence he can’t fill until death.

Not a perfect book, Slapstick still could have made an interesting little movie with its absurd humor laced with loving sadness. An enterprising screenwriter or a visionary director could have strengthened some of the plot’s weaknesses and inherent difficulties. But writer and director Paul proves himself neither as he recasts a somewhat flawed satire into an insanely unfunny and tedious low-rent comedy.

Hi ho.

Instead of an elderly Wilbur, the film opens in outer space, or at least a badly painted backdrop of stars and galaxies. A glowing flying saucer floats by, looking suspiciously like an escaped extra from Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Two god-like disembodied narrators--one male, one female--begin discussing the problem of Earth, where their previous gifts of intelligence to the Chinese have gone astray. They decide to try again, this time with a model American family blessed with power, beauty, and intelligence. And thus the twins Wilbur and Eliza are born unto the beautiful couple of Mr. and Mrs. Swain, played by Jerry Lewis and Madeline Kahn.

Let me say that again: The beautiful couple played by Jerry Lewis and Madeline Khan. Just wanted that to sink in a bit....

The babies, unfortunately, are so ugly that their appearance sends the doctors and nurses into hysterics and causes Mr. Swain to accidentally fall out a hospital window and into a convenient trough of mud (it’s a Lewis thing...go with it). A distraught but concerned Mrs. Swain takes her doctor’s advice to seclude the twins and allow them to live out their hopefully short days without ever knowing they are freaks. The doctor handles the hiring of the staff to take care of the children, including a Chinese cook, a Brooklyn handyman, a French maid, and Sylvester, a mortician-turned-butler played by Marty Feldman. Meanwhile, the 3-inch-tall Chinese ambassador (Pat Morita) announces that they are withdrawing their embassy from the rest of the civilized world.

Fifteen years later, the Swains are still distraught; their supposedly doomed children are still alive. As Mrs. Swain vents her frustration to her doctor--strangely, Mr. Swain stays mostly in the background for the run of the movie--a badly animated flying fortune cookie suddenly appears, scattering everyone on the patio (and Mr. Swain down the cliff, of course). The cookie lands, and out jumps the miniature former Chinese ambassador. He tries to convince the Swains that their children--who their doctor insists are morons--are in fact geniuses and America’s only natural resource. Somehow, this all ties into the Chinese wanting to negotiate for approval to take control of gravity. Somehow, but screenwriter Paul forgets to tell us.

Hi ho.

At this point, we’re 20 minutes into the movie, and we haven’t even seen Wilbur and Eliza. With that amount of build-up, you’d think that there would be a big reveal. Instead, we get the maid tucking them in for the night. Once she leaves the room, Wilbur and Eliza (also Lewis and Kahn, in heavy make-up and pj’s) get up to review several of their essays and to waltz to music while the hired help party away downstairs. It’s a routine to which everyone’s grown accustomed, until Mr. and Mrs. Swain phone Sylvester in mid-reverie. For the first time since the twins were born, the parents are coming to visit . . . and the President is coming along.

And that, sadly, is more than half the movie. No film can contain every part of a novel, but Paul guts Slapstick, ripping away much of its story and shredding the remnants. Gone are the Island of Death, Wilbur’s presidency, the King of Michigan, Eliza’s forgiveness, their writing of So You Went and Had a Baby in a five-day orgy, Wilbur’s granddaughter Melody, fluctuating gravity, Vera Chipmunk-5 Zappa and her slaves, and so on. Wilbur’s plan of artificial families is regulated to a final plot point, and “Lonesome No More” is just an exclamation from Wilbur when he awakens from electroshock therapy near the end. All that remains in the film is Wilbur and Eliza’s backstory--hardly half of the original work. Without the aching tragedy and conflict that Vonnegut created, the movie is infused with an inertia that doesn’t let up until Paul finally and completely abandons the story for a Hollywood climax that undermines any meaning left over.

Are you ready?

You’re sure?

Okay . . .

The twins are aliens. Hi ho.

The Wilbur and Eliza of Vonnegut’s novel are freaks, but they’re still human. Like everyone else, they have to muck through their lives and deal with the pains inflicted by loved ones, even by themselves. In many ways, that’s what the art of slapstick is about. But Paul doesn’t understand that--he sees pratfalls without pathos. So he goes for sap instead.

Paul errors badly in trying to make a goofy comedy out of a satire. Slaughterhouse-Five and Mother Night succeed because their makers didn’t attempt to shoehorn them into a certain genre style. The films follow their books’ rhythms, and like the books, create something unique. Vonnegut is not a comedy writer, but Paul ignores that, and the result is that Vonnegut’s gentle absurdity is replaced with clumsy slapstick and comedy with a capital C. The family doctor is named Dr. Frankenstein. Comedy! Wilbur’s mandated disguise at military school is a pair of Groucho glasses. Comedy! Wilbur sticks his smiling mug through a portrait’s hole where the head used to be. Comedy! Hey, watch the flying fortune cookie! Comedy!

And we all know that there’s nothing funnier than a Chinese man speaking bad broken English. Ugh.

There are some admittedly nice touches. Laurel and Hardy, to whom Vonnegut dedicated his novel, make a silent cameo appearance. When Wilbur and Eliza appear at the top of the stairs, intelligent and well-attired for the first time in public, the scene is strangely moving and slightly surreal. The make-up for the two giant Neanderthanloids also is very good, although slightly toned down--Eliza looks cute rather than ugly. Tall, but cute. And Paul actually provides the movie’s best joke: Because gasoline has become too rare or expensive, the remaining cars and airplanes run on chicken “products.”

However, any goodwill won is lost by the film’s obvious low budget and Paul’s incompetence with his own material. Many of the sets look like they were lifted from the nearest television sitcom, and the staging for several of the physical comedy bits is placid, cluttered, and slow. Eliza and Wilbur’s height varies wildly throughout the picture: when Sylvester introduces the twins to their parents, his head only comes up to their waists, but later on, Eliza is obviously only a head taller than her butler. Then there’s a prolonged scene in Air Force One, where the President discusses America’s situation with the plane’s captain. It’s nothing more than a big set-up: the camera eventually pulls back to reveal that the compartment is filled with chicken cages. But Paul already spoiled his punchline by telling the joke earlier in the picture, and the entire scene becomes a waste of time.

For Vonnegut fans, the resulting mishmash becomes even more painful whenever something from the novel creeps through. The miniature Chinese ambassador’s press conference at the start of the film begins with a line from the book: the Chinese are severing relations because “simply there was no longer anything going on in the United States which was of interest” anymore. It’s a very simple, subtly funny line, but Morita’s ensuing dialog slides downhill from there, ending with, “Up your ass with Mobile gas!” Not to mention the tiny sumo wrestlers laughing and high-fiving behind him. Other pieces of the original novel peek through, but they’re distorted or dimmed through Paul’s cracked circus mirror.

The dreary cast doesn’t help, either. Lewis and Kahn sleepwalk through their dual roles; Kahn seems uncharacteristically half-asleep. Perhaps she was trying to play “dumb,” but both her mother and daughter characters stretch the same blank expression throughout the picture. Lewis gets more mileage out of his make-up as Wilbur, but his physical comedy is lifeless and most of the time spontaneously out of place. For his part, Feldman saves some dignity by channeling Alec Guinness’ Professor Marcus from Ladykillers, but resorts to mumbling as the film lumbers to its denouement. Morita seems to be the only one having any fun with his role, and it’s unfortunate that most of his lines are Paul’s and not Vonnegut’s.

By itself, Slapstick of Another Kind isn’t as painful as, for instance, a Tom Green waste of celluloid. But by taking the novel’s title literally and forgetting to read beyond the first hundred pages, Paul misses out on most of the story and thus its meaning. There is little slapstick in the original Slapstick. But Paul can’t even handle his own handiwork, and the haphazard remains only remind us of what could have been. Ironically, the traces of Vonnegut’s inherent absurdity save the film from its own utter dullness; perhaps that’s a kind of comedic poetry after all.

Hi ho.

Flickers of a Ghost

2007-04-15T19:27:00.000-07:00

I got lost. Took a wrong turn, wound up in a different state, discovered a direction, and began to wind my way home.

I was tired, and the sunlight was fading rapidly behind the grey and black clouds roiling in the sky. So when I saw it, I tried to blink away the hallucination.

It is huge--a bright, pulsating marquee of yellow and orange, standing, it seems, at least two stories high. A white placard juts out, demanding passer-bys to come see the zombie movie premiere at the Hager 10 Cineplex. But the strange thing is that the marquee fronts an empty parking lot.

I drive by, but slow...the cineplex actually is about a football field or so away. What’s behind that empty lot, though, causes me to turn around.

For about 20 years, the Hager Drive-In had operated here alongside the cineplex, but 20 years ago, it closed down. The marquee is the only operating remnant of the drive-in left, but there are other bones.

The parking lot, which probably once held the bulk of the drive-in, stretches far back and curls all the way behind the indoor movie theater. Even though a Saturday crowd is at the cineplex, their numbers are dwarfed by the size of the lot. In a far corner sit the drive-through ticket booths, weirdly guarding the edge of an overgrown field. Only a year ago, the entryway was still intact, but since then, the roof with the Hager heraldry has crumbled, leaving the two booths standing free. A deteriorating snack bar and projection house building stands in the field, drowning in the brown weeds and vine.

As I gaze at the ghost, the skies open. The deluge matches my mood.

But the Hager may not be completely lost. According to Drive-In Theatres of the Mid-Atlantic, a group is working with the cineplex to to restore and reopen the drive-in. In the meantime, an inflatable screen shows double- and triple-feature revivals of b-movies past and present.

I hope they succeed. Drive-ins are an American creation, one in-grained in our collective conscious like Route 66, jazz, convertibles, and baseball parks. Losing part of the American identity to a dusty, historical relic would be more than a simple shame--we would be giving up a unique part of our culture willingly.

They’ve started to have a revival the last few years, but the resurrection can’t come fast enough. More than 200 drive-ins once dotted the landscape of Maryland and the Virginias. Now only 11 remain.

Far too many ghosts.

So It Goes

2007-04-14T03:19:00.000-07:00

One regret I’ll never dispel is that I never got to meet Kurt Vonnegut.

Like many people, I first encountered Vonnegut’s writing in high school, where his surreal storytelling seemed to make a lot of sense to an embryonic adult. The first novel I read was the mostly forgotten Jailbird, but it was good enough for me to seek out the granfalloons, artificial families, Tralfamadorians, and Kilgore Trout. My literary gluttony only ended when I grew sick with influenza; trapped to a bed, I was in the midst of Player Piano, Vonnegut’s first novel about a dystopian society where punch-card computers dehumanize the human worker. I had just reached the point where the story’s hero, the nervous and gentle Paul Proteus, finally rebelled and began running from the authorities. My fever was hot, and I began to hallucinate--suddenly, I was Paul, and I needed to get away. Right. Now.

No, I never finished the book. An absurdity that Vonnegut would appreciate.

I’m sure many will call him the modern Mark Twain; heck, they even looked like each other, especially late in life, when despondency overtook both. Vonnegut, however, was his own writer, a unique narrator who brought a fantastical brevity to modern literature, and a prose that turned a cynical but humorous eye to humanity’s foibles. Lord knows we need it.

War, as with other writers, shaped most of Vonnegut’s work, not just his penultimate novel, Slaughterhouse Five. As a prisoner, he survived the Allied bombing of the German civilian city Dresden, an event that the American government denied for years, yet fully demonstrated man’s inhumanity to man. A lesson like that cannot be forgotten, and Vonnegut struggled to write about it for two decades.

Despite that experience, or perhaps because of it, Vonnegut never lost his own love of humanity. The villains in his stories usually weren’t individuals but characters representing corporations, the science community, the military, even society itself, all twisting good intentions into bizzare contortions. In his most famous short story, “Harrison Bergeron,” people of talent and intelligence are purposely handicapped by the government so that everyone is equal--idealism run rampant. His heroes tended to be the meek, the Billy Pilgrims, Rabo Karabekians, and Eliot Rosewaters, who, for one reason or another, find themselves in the convolution of ridiculous tragedy brought on by a blinded adherence to a higher ideal.

For Vonnegut, humanity was forever building the tower of Babel, never realizing that the blueprints were in gibberish.

Still, the best of his stories, even dark satire like Mother Night, contain more than biting deconstruction of the human condition. Whenever I think of Vonnegut, Buster Keaton somehow slips in. The Great Stone Face persona was a myth--Buster’s characters weren’t emotional automatons going through the motions of comedic timing. He perhaps was the most subtle actor of the silents; joy, fear, nervousness, and frustration all were conveyed through his eyes, quick expressions, and body movement. What Keaton never did do was smile--no matter what chance or fate threw at him, Buster’s characters doggedly persevered, usually to the unheard laugher of his audience. Vonnegut fully understood Keaton’s art. One of my favorite Vonnegut novels is Slapstick, considered to be one of his lesser works. Flawed it may be, but the narrative is Vonnegut unfettered. His hero is a gifted freak who recounts his sad life from the shambles of Manhattan, of how his own well-meaning mistakes helped push away those close to him as the world slowly frayed. But the story is not a tragedy because the storyteller is not tragic; his telling is lighthearted despite itself, and a helpless hope still clings.

That is the essence of slapstick. And that is the essence of Vonnegut.

This week, we lost a voice for humanity, one that loved us enough to gently poke at our own grotesque grandiose. Vonnegut understood us, perhaps too well, and his stories will forever remind us that while we are still human, we sometimes forget the humanity of others. A lasting image of Slapstick is that of the hero’s pregnant granddaughter, crossing the Midwest with nothing but a shopping cart to find the grandfather who doesn't even know she exists. It’s an image that is both lovely and sad. And that’s Vonnegut’s gift to us: loving sadness.

I think I’ll finish reading Player Piano now.

Screenin' the Green

2007-03-30T18:39:00.000-07:00

The other night, we met the music of two Irish bands in a silent-era theater, boisterous with sounds of pipes, tin whistles, bodhráns, flutes, and guitars...all clashing and weaving amongst the restored chandeliers and flying to us in the balcony, where reels and jigs shook our souls from our boring seats to the aisle frightfully creaking with age. In between, we listed to lilting Celtic accents tell stories--some true, some laced with humorous exaggeration--about where the songs came from, their heritage as important as the notes probably learned by heart.

The night ‘twas my idea (apparently, poorly articulated); I’ve loved Celtic music for years, and one of the bands performing was Lunasa, who’s Merry Sisters of Fate is a favorite. I’ve never seen ‘em live, the best way to experience that music. But I never imagined how much it would hit me that night, and I’m glad I was able to share that with someone who loves Celtic music as much, if not more, than me. Both bands--Dervish and Lunasa--managed to make the night a larceny of expectation.

The funny thing is that I’m not actually Irish, though I’m probably as close as you can get without being one. While my own heritage is Germanic and Scandinavian, many of my family’s friends had Irish blood. I grew up surrounded by Keefes, Sweeneys, and Doughtertys. Several of my own friends wear their Celtic roots proudly, including two of my closest. I live in a small city with a strong Irish American community, complete with two pubs, a couple of annual festivals, and, of course, the occasional Celtic artist selling out the local theater.

So, on St. Patrick’s Day, when Bushwallers overflows with drunken revelers donning bright green teeshirts, plastic bowlers, and ageless gift shop buttons, all I can think about is The Quiet Man.

John Ford’s love letter, as traditional as It’s a Wonderful Life is for Christmas, is an Emerald picture postcard of Ireland, done up Hallmark-style. Americans love their fantasies, and The Quiet Man has them, in charming spades, right up to and including a leprechaun-like matchmaker. But The Quiet Man is an American fairy tale, not an Irish one. Not like another film, John Sayles's quiet The Secret of Roan Inish.

You know how you can tell? The music and the storytelling.

The Quiet Man comes with a Golden Age Hollywood score, with nary a hornpipe to be found. There might be a bagpipe, but I’m not sure. The aforementioned leprechaun delivers the standard, book-ended narration, but remains silent through the film.

Roan Inish, though, mines traditional folk tunes to embroider a story filled with story, told by characters as family history rather than fable. The grandfather exiled from the home of his heart, the cousin "touched" by a legacy that traps him between sea and land...they see a world undone, their family strewn across Ireland in cities and steamshops, broken apart and away from the life they were meant to live. The stories told are sad, rimmed with tragedy, but they are woven with love and longing all the same.

That's Ireland.

It's in their music, their humor, their history. Seanchai are more than simply carriers of heritage--they are the heritage of ancestors. The songs, dancing, and stories are the Irish's connection to their past, but not just the chronological litney of events. Seanchai tell the soul of Ireland.

As Americans, we see fables separate from the lives we wear everyday. Not the Irish, and that's why their culture has become important in my own life. Our existence brims with loved ones, those we know today and those who came before. Celebrate and cherish them, for they are our own magic.

And that's the secret of Roan Inish.

Lunasa played a hornpipe called "The Last Pint" the other night. It was one of the first songs they played together 10 years ago. Almost a lament, it speaks of lovely memories of friends past never forgotten. It was my favorite of the night.

Sláinte.

Richard Jeni

2007-03-18T19:15:00.001-07:00

It was a tough week for B-entertainment.

First, Andy Sidaris, television sports pioneer and silicon-movie maven, succumbed to throat cancer and probably happily joined a gaggle of buxom Valkyries in Vahalla. The next day, John Inman--known best for his role of Mr. "I'm Free!" Humphries on the classic British comedy series "Are You Being Served"--passed on at age 71.

But the one that hurts the most was comedian Richard Jeni, who took his own life last Sunday at age 45.

According to Jeni's family, Richard suffered from "severe clinical depression coupled with bouts of psychotic paranoia." I've had friends who suffer from mental illness, and it's more than a hard thing to live with. As Jeni's tragedy painfully demonstrated, it can take your life.

Sometimes, the ones who make us laugh are the ones with the most pain.

Richard Jeni first came to fame during the stand-up saturation of the early 1990s, when you couldn't find a channel without a comedian dishing some routine. What made Jeni stand above most, however, was his delivery. Nobody was better. If you listened to his jokes, they weren't funny by themselves. Until Richard told 'em. He didn't do anything fancy--he didn't have props, gimmicks, or catchphrases. He simply was your drinking buddy, telling you a funny story while you're watching a boring game with beer and wings. If he had a "gimmick," that was it: he was your friend. Just sit back, listen, and laugh.

Rest in piece, Richard. And thank you.

REVIEW: Brick

2007-03-15T20:03:00.000-07:00

Since the end of black and white, film noir has struggled as a genre. The advent of day-bright Technicolor seemed to mortally dim the genre’s popularity. With its stylish but grim view of humanity, the pure noir film felt tired and out of place during the radical, love-in Sixties. Even when the genre returned during the societal cynicism of the following decade, classics like Chinatown or Point Blank either feel like homages or pale in comparison to the likes of Key Largo, The Big Combo, or Double Indemnity. It’s almost as if the noir film can’t be complete without the visual impact of German Expressionism, lost when movies’ color palate changed from monochrome to a rainbow.

Which makes Brick all that more a pleasant surprise. At first glance yet another high school black comedy/thriller, the film instead is a crackerjack noir flick through and through. It manages to tread carefully among the well-worn archetypes without waylaying into parody or self-awareness, delivering instead a vibrant crime story in the classic form.

The film opens with stillness. A young man is crouched on the edge of a drainage ditch, his hands folded. He is staring at a body of a young woman.

The story cuts back, two days earlier. The young man, Brendan (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), finds a note at his locker from his ex-girlfriend Emily, asking him to wait for her call by a pay phone. When he answers, her voice is shaking, hesitant, scared. She’s in trouble, and something frightens her away before she can explain. A mysterious car roars by, and Brendan realizes Emily was just around the corner.

With little to go on other than the scratches Emily blurted out, Brendan begins his search, first going to his informer friend “The Brain” for a direction. During the next several hours, Brendan encounters slightly altered archetypes of old: the siren, lost souls, stylish parties, mysterious notes written in code, whispers of a crime lord. Camera tricks and cinematic style are hurled at you, giftwrapped in clipped, slang-ridden dialog that sounds like the bastard child of Hammett and Hinton. For 20 minutes, Brick fulfills every expectation.

And then writer/director Rian Johnson hits the reset button. The ditch, the body. Brendan suddenly looks up, hears someone in the dark tunnel. And without hesitation, he runs into it.

From that moment on, Brick becomes more than a simple redress of genre tropes. The tunnel is symbolism with a sledgehammer: All bets are off for Brendan, and from this moment forward, he has no idea where his pursuit will end. The neat trick is that the audience doesn’t either. They enter the tunnel with Brendan, suddenly realizing they’ve lost their safety net of assumptions.

Brick manages to keep its crime story vital by populating it with odd, enigmatic characters: Laura the rich girl temptress, Dode the punk-greaser hybrid, Kara the theatrical black widow, Tug the pressure-cooked enforcer, and, especially, The Pin, Brick’s young crime lord-in-the-making. None have a real backstory, not even Brendan. Instead of growing and changing, the characters gradually reveal their true natures, never allowing the audience to come to grips with their first impressions. Each character can find a predecessor from the classic era, but each is slightly translated through the high school environment, providing small, odd, humorous surprises. And that’s where the movie either lives or falters.

When Brick was unleashed in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it theatrical release, it got a good amount of publicity for that high school setting, but in reality, it’s nothing more than seasoning. Instead of tricking out a Heathers clone with hardboiled attributes, Johnson actually does the reverse. He only appropriates the vague outlines of high school drama clichés--the tyrannical assistant principal, the schoolyard brawl, the teen party. He’s simply dropping a noir story into an unexpected setting to see what window dressing changes. Instead of a limo, The Pin cruises around in a plush van. Instead the expected confrontation between the gumshoe and the police, we have the confrontation between Brendan and the vice principal (Richard Roundtree, in a fabulously straight-laced cameo). Although the actors are playing it as if they were living in Mickey Spillane’s universe, the situations themselves become entertainingly absurd because the context is skewed.

This tenuous fantasy Johnson has constructed works only because every player sells it without any wink or nudge. Gordon-Levitt, best known for his work on “3rd Rock from the Sun,” has the toughest assignment--it’s hard to play stone stoic convincingly, but he manages by expressing his emotion subtly through body language. His is a physical performance of limitation, and the rest of cast follows suit. Lukas Haas stands out as The Pin; with his black cape and cane, he projects an aura of quiet menace that imbues his youthful appearance. Noah Fleiss as Tug and Matt O’Leary as the Brain bring a nice touch of humanity to two roles that are more caricature than character, while Emilie de Ravin is suitably vulnerable as Emily. Only Nora Zehetner struggles a bit as the sultry Laura; she’s very good, but she simply isn’t as believable as the others. At times, she almost seems to be playing her role conscientiously rather than disappearing into it.

Perhaps the greatest strength of Brick, however, is the visuals. Whoever led the design--Johnson, cinematographer Steve Yedlin, or projection designer Jodie Lynn Tillen--replaced the traditional black and white with a stark but muted look for Brick. Each scene is lit coldly, sometimes dimly, and one color in each setting dominates the others. Combined with the hardboiled style of Johnson’s direction and editing, Brick’s visual sense recalls the visceral garnish of Hong Kong thrillers, dialed down to create an almost benign tension.

In some respects, the film’s style may be too much, at times drowning the characters rather than enhancing them. Laura’s teen party near the beginning is the closest Johnson ever comes to upsetting his delicate universe; Laura’s a rich kid, but her parent’s neo-classical house seems pulled out intact from an affluent speakeasy of the Roaring Twenties, and the high school partiers act as if they belonged more to that decade rather than the current one. It’s the only time in the film where the characters’ age clashes with the story’s tone, and the result rings false. Other situations work because they exist purely in the high school environment, creating a believable foundation for the young characters, but the film teeters on cracking it with what is probably an ill-advised homage.

But with few real missteps, Brick remains one of those cinematic oddities--a unified vision that transforms a gimmick into genuine personal expression. Johnson obviously loves these stories, and his cast and crew crafted more than a tribute to a nearly lost genre; they’ve created the real thing. With a slight twist. The end result is unique and old school all at once, and that’s something as rare as noir itself.

---
Film Information
Year Released: 2005
Director: Rian Johnson
Main Cast: Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Lukas Haas, Nora Zehetner, Noah Fleiss
Trailer: http://www.apple.com/trailers/focus_features/brick/trailer/

No Better Time Than the...Whoops

2007-03-08T19:30:00.000-08:00

So, here we are.

Looks different ’round the old place, doesn’t it? Something had to change; three posts in two years isn’t exactly buzzing the ether. Blogging just isn’t my well-used bag, unfortunately. I’ve never kept a diary, and any writing journal I managed to maintain served more as a testing ground for story figments, fragments, and remnants. Although I am a windbag of the Uilleann pipes variety, I need an audience to engage, and a message board is a far better place for that crime than a blog. Combine all that with knack for privacy, and you have a tailor-made digital cubicle for cobwebs. A decision about the Parking Lot needed to be made.

Thus, welcome to my movie blog. Sad, I know.

In light of last year’s post, the switch to film flam commentary and reviews may seem odd. But I realized something about myself: I can talk about anything, but I love talking movies the most. Heck, my last two entries were movie-related. When you love something, the work of writing transforms to joy, and that includes reviewing. Too many critics believe in their title too much; instead of watching a film for pleasure and simply conveying to readers what worked and didn’t work, they enter darkened theaters with dread, their critical mind firing on all cylinders before the first trailer rolls. Which probably is why critics get paid for their work--for them, there’s no fun to be had anymore.

Well, I’m having fun now. Since my “revelation” last year, I cut back the Netflix subscription and watched whatever smacked my fancy. Movies hiding at the bottom of my cedar chest found their way out of the dust to my DVD player. Big Trouble in Little China, Rock and Rule, Mannequin, Still Breathing, The Shawshank Redemption, Equilibrium, Sherlock Jr., The Thin Man, Bubba Ho-Tep, Murder by Decree—all movies that, in their own unique madness, managed to fix a smile on my face. I can recognize their faults, but I also can recognize why, for me, those faults simply make the movie more endearing and immediate. Perfect imperfection, the blessing of the indie and B-movie.

I love movies, especially little ones that ambush you from the commercial fringe. I want you to know about them, and I want you know why those strange flickering images are so important. So, I’m trying again, for the joy of it. Besides, a beautiful woman talked me back into it, and I’m a sucker for beautiful women. Especially ones with cattle prods.

Anyone got any Bactine?

Revelations in Reels

2006-02-19T19:35:00.000-08:00

It's been a while since I was a kid.

This afternoon, I finally caught Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire at the local second run theater. Scrunched down in the chair with my head propped up against the seat back, I began to notice little voices, followed by little heads bobbing down the aisle. Pretty soon, I was surrounded by a bunch of mites, giggling and gibbering away in whatever language 6- and 7-year-olds speak these days. Maybe I need a sign: Dangerous! Crotchety Old Movie Fan. No Loud Talking Within 20 Seats. Please Feed With Popcorn.

But any fears that I had dissipated as soon as the Warners Bros. logo appeared. The theater went silent, and for the course of the movie, it stayed silent.

Well, outside of a couple of frightened titters from too-young children. Whoops....

The last time I sat with people mostly born within the current decade, the movie was Star Wars: Episode 1. All the bad press and fanboy wailing had reached my ears by that point, so I was surprised when I actually enjoyed myself. Months later, in the safety of my cave, the glaring weaknesses of that film flared up at me, leaving to wonder why I hadn't noticed them the first time.

Most likely, it was the kid's fault.

Two seats away from me back in that theater, a little boy had clutched his bucket of popcorn, yapping away to his mother in whatever language 4-year-olds spoke in those days. But when the lights went down and the Lucasfilm logo appeared, the boy had one expression the entire time: wide-eyed with jaw in lap. I think I had more fun watching him than the movie itself.

The kids' movies of my childhood were no different for me--from Time Bandits to Willy Wonka to, yes, the original Star Wars, they took me on a ride that I didn't quite understand but still enveloped my imagination. As the years went by, my tastes grew old, demanding more complexity, more originality, more intelligence...mature challenges instead of simple wonder. Nowadays, when I watch those movies from my youth, there's more than a touch of nostalgia in my enjoyment--a laminated gloss covering the unwanted imperfections.

When I first found in the ether alike minds corrupted by strange cinema, I wrote a few movie reviews, even planned to start up my own little cornershop in the b-movie community. But after the first couple, the reviews came harder. My harddrive contains at least three unfinished ones, mere notes and phrases barely making sense. This despite the fact Netflix was sending me about 15 to 18 DVDs a month (yeah, I'm one of those). The reviews had become a chore. I didn't enjoy writing them, even when I wanted to praise the film to the seventh level of heaven.

Recently, even the Netflix hamster's wheel slowed. It was bound to happen. My own stash of DVDs isn't some "collection"; I've seen them all at least once, and most several times. The past few months, I've been revisiting those movies, remembering why they found their way into my home in the first place.

That's when I realized I was in another wheel.

I love films. A day spent watching new movie after movie is a good day. The last few months, however, I haven't enjoyed them as much as before. I had no idea why until today. I had not only forgotten the movies I love, but why I love them.

I'll never regain that kid's unfettered wonder, when something shiny on screen was enough. I wish I could return to the days when I didn't notice the seams in Godzilla's suit. Seeing Harry Potter with those who hadn't yet misplaced their basic delight, though, reminded me that I don't have to go that far. I was them once. And one day, those kids will look back, maybe scoff at the now-dated computer graphics, and pick apart how unfaithful Mike Newell and Company were to the original novel. Or, they'll remember why they went to see the movie in the first place.

I'll never be a kid again. But I can damn well try.

By Unpopular Demand....

2005-05-07T12:51:00.000-07:00

Dusty in here, isn't it?

One of my annual rituals is attending the Maryland Film Festival in Baltimore, Maryland. Hosted mostly at the Charles Theatre right across the street from Penn Station and two blocks down from the local meth factory, the festival is usually a fun mix of independent features and documentaries, short film collections, and classic odds and ends. John Waters always presents a film, and about four years ago, they started a tradition of showing a 3-D movie Saturday morning and a silent film with the Alloy Orchestra on Sunday morning. That said, the festival always seems hit-or-miss with me. Last year, I saw 9 to 10 showings, including a collection of work by music video icon Chuck Statler, a mockumentary about a death row inmate released to play in the (sorta) Super Bowl, and a little-seen Harold Lloyd movie.

This year, it's mostly miss.

Outside of the comedy and animated shorts programs, there isn't much of interest. Even the 3-D and silent films are underwhelming: the Raymond Burr thriller Gorilla at Large (about a serial killer gorilla) isn't as bad as last year's William Castle special Fort Ti or as classic as Vincent Price's House of Wax, while the silent version of Hitchcock's Blackmail pales next to previous showings of Sunrise and the two-color Technicolor Black Pirate with Douglas Fairbanks. I'll probably see Blackmail, but I've already missed the 3-D flick, mostly 'cause sleeping in sounded better. On the other hand, I really wanted to see Murderball--a documentary about the clash between Canadian and U.S. wheelchair rugby teams--but the two showings of it conflict with the aforementioned short programs. That's another problem with the festival: Sometimes they have a lot of movies I want to see, but most wind up showing at the same times.

One of those conflicts this year is between two independent features that sound interesting but could excruciate more than entertain. One is Black-Eyed Susan, wherein two friends rob a dead man's apartment but get caught up in a cat-and-mouse game with the man's relatives. The film was written and directed by Jim Riffel, who apparently has been making ultra-low budget films for years now, including the Howard Stern documentary Shut Up and Listen, the feature Mass of Angels (which really does sound interesting, damn it), and a unnamed cult film that he's disowned but was named to the 300 Films of All-Time by the Edinburg University Film Society. The other is After the Apocalypse, a Japanese film about the survivors of a nuclear war. More Lord of the Flies than The Road Warrior, the film is shot in black and white and features no dialogue. The latter can be extremely effective, as borne out by the horror film Soft for Digging, which I saw in my first Maryland Film Festival.

Since I wasn't able to choose between two movies that don't demand my attention, I instead left it up to my esteemed fellow collegues, zombies, witches, and whatnot at the B-Movie Message Board. They have until Sunday morning at 8 a.m. to vote. I'll go see the winner and post an in-depth review on the BMMB later in the week. Sounds fun, huh?

In 24 hours, I've gotten a grand total of 3 votes.

Looks like they're just as excited about the festival as I am. Oh well. A review still will be done, and a report of the rest of the festival should appear here as well.

Hey, What's This?

2005-04-17T21:45:00.000-07:00

Or, "The Technological Caveman Dips His Toe in the Water"

Nothing much to say to start off, which is probably a bad sign. This hodgepodge of a column will feature a wealth of blab, a smattering of movie capsule reviews, dribs and drabs of sports commentary, and the occasional enlightening deconstruction of our democratic governmental system. Or not.

Obviously, this blog will update whenever I have time to write something, which isn't anywhere near enough (or, those three short stories sitting on my hardrive would have won the PEN Faulkner Award by now). Because I'm not one to rant when angry, nor do I have an ideological agenda to flog, the very idea of founding my own outlet of visceral verbosity sounds a bit off. I assure you, there is a very good reason:

My ego.

You see, back when I was a wee teen dreaming of becoming a much-honored muckraker, I started a high school newspaper column called "The Cockeyed View." Like most high school newspaper columns, it was very gimmicky: each week's entry was divided into two sections--one funny, one serious--that usually discussed two separate issues but always ended in a question. The idea was to get my readers thinking; the usual result was a question grafted awkwardly onto a one-sided argument.

Nevertheless, that column helped me get through high school. It gave me an identity, and my classmates suddenly had a peek at what kind of person that wallflower was. Heck, it almost got me a girlfriend. And since my love life today hasn't improved much since then....

In some ways, this blog is way to get back that feeling. But mostly, it will be my little niche on the Web where I can express myself the best way I know how.

Which is, go figure, what blogs are about.

How about that?