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We begin mid-story with Yellow Hair's buddy The Pecos Kid (Ken Roberson) in jail and with Colonel Torres (Luis Lorenzo) in possession of the fabled deer-horn-carved-into-a-wind-instrument that could help him find the legendary Aztec City of Gold. When the troops come after her tribe in their search for the gold she has personal reasons to find it for herself.
I thought HUNDRA almost worked as a movie for young girls who like adventure, except it opens with an implied rape and a graphic decapitation. And then later it's all about mating and sex slavery. Okay, it's not for kids. Yellow Hair is funny though because it actually opens with stock footage of an audience of rowdy little kids watching it, to show that it's the latest chapter in an ongoing serial. (Just like HUNDRA was made after CONAN THE BARBARIAN, this one must've been made to piggyback on the success of the Indiana Jones pictures.) So you'd think that would be the audience, but right at the beginning the mysterious Talupan tribe stick needles through a guy's eyelids, hang him upside down, dunk him in molten gold and then break his head off. But if you can get them past that I think otherwise it's pretty good for the little ones. At least if you're ready for that talk about cinema's depiction of Native Americans played by white guys in makeup.
But the tone is fun and upbeat. Yellow Hair is immediately endearing because of her introduction when she notices the flattering onscreen text about her and turns bashful.
To be frankly honest there's nothing else as funny as that in the movie, but it gets it started off on the right foot. I don't know if the movie itself is brave or heroic, but it is easy going.
Pecos Kid (who calls her "Yella" after she gets him to stop calling her "darling") establishes his laidback roguery by not wanting to be broken out of jail. He figures he doesn't have that much time left before they let him out. But what's he gonna do when she throws dynamite in and blows a hole in the wall – follow the honor system? Nah, he goes with her to have an adventure and what not.
It takes longer to get going than HUNDRA did, but it has plenty of action both traditional (a battle on a movie stage coach, Landon appearing to do her own stunts) and unusual (the Talupas bomb them with snakes inside tumbleweeds). Yellow Hair's most badass scene takes place inside a gambling den (she pre-empts cheating by throwing a knife through Pecos's cards from across the room) and protests their racist admissions policy (by shooting off a guy's earring and then beating him up). This is made better by Pecos's confidence and amusement about her being able to handle these dicks.
As far as being a flag-bearer for women of action, Yellow Hair is no Hundra. At the climax she naively falls for a lie and gets strapped to a table, and Pecos has to rescue her. Then she wonders if he did it 'cause of love. It's actually very sweet and her vulnerability is part of why she's so likable, but you can't deny that it would be more exciting if she got to use her previously demonstrated knife, gun or grappling skills when it matters.
By the way, the city of gold is not that impressive. I'm pretty sure there was alot of spray paint involved. But maybe real gold doesn't look as shiny as we expect. I don't know, I never really visited a city of gold. Also the transfer on the DVD is terrible, even worse than the HUNDRA one because it's very noticeable on a modern TV that they use some cheap ass process where every frame looks like it went through a Photoshop filter. There are stills online where the colors look a little better, so hopefully some day they'll remaster it and make it look right. A double feature blu-ray with HUNDRA would really hit the spot, rights owners.
It's a good idea to get some female perspective in some of these super hero pictures, and an interesting challenge. There unfortunately isn't a very big pool of established female directors to choose from, and zero who've been allowed experience in big budget effects or super hero movies. One who came close was Patty Jenkins (MONSTER), who was supposed to do THOR 2, but was fired before filming allegedly for "a lack of overall clarity in her choices." Women who've done medium-sized or small studio genre movies include Karyn Kusama, who did ÆON FLUX; Catherine Hardwicke, who did the first TWILIGHT (then got dumped); Kimberly Peirce, who did the CARRIE remake; and Lexi Alexander, who did the b-movie THE PUNISHER'S WAR ZONE.
To date the biggest budget live action movie directed by a woman is Kathryn Bigelow's K19 THE WIDOWMAKER. She also happens to be a great action director, but after THE HURT LOCKER and ZERO DARK THIRTY it's hard to picture her going super hero. I assume they offered to greenlight six serious contemporary issue dramas if she'd do this, but if so she must not've been interested.
So they're digging into the TV directors. MacLaren got the internet's eye by directing episodes of Breaking Bad, Game of Thrones and The Walking Dead. Obviously they've talked to her about what she wants to do, so they have more to go on than the we do. Personally I'm skeptical of counting on the cinematic vision of TV directors. From what I understand TV is usually a totally different gig than movies. They come in and try to follow an established approach, directing a cast and crew already working together as a team who know how it's supposed to go. It's the producers and show runners who have the vision. That's why it's rare to see one episode of a TV show that stands out filmatistically.
Of course, there have been some great transitions from TV to movies, including two of the best of the modern super hero movies, THE AVENGERS and CAPTAIN AMERICA'S WINTER SOLDIER. But Joss Whedon started as a movie screenwriter, then as TV show creator and writer who branched out into directing, and the Russos started as feature writer/directors before they found more success in TV. J.J. Abrams is a similar story to Whedon. These are all people who started as storytellers, not directors for hire, so we already knew they had a vision.
Hopefully MacLaren will get added to the list of success stories, but I don't think there's any way for us to guess based on her TV work. However, despite what I've seen reported elsewhere, WONDER WOMAN will not be her feature directing debut. We actually have one movie to judge her on, a 2006 DTV thriller called POPULATION 436. And you know me and DTV. I'm on the case.
Jeremy Sisto plays Steve Kady, a census taker visiting the small town of Rockwell Falls for counting purposes. You know, the ol' census-taker hero archetype. The people of the town treat him as an honored guest and are impressed when he pretentiously quotes Pythagoras. Somehow he doesn't notice that this is weird. But he does figure out that some weird shit is going on because the population has stuck at exactly 436 for decades. (At least it's not 666 I guess. That would make for an even stupider cover.)
It's alot like THE WICKER MAN, either version. Actually, closer to the remake, but minus the thrilling injection of mega-acting and bear suit freakiness. You got old timey town festivals, off-putting seemingly brainwashed residents and semi-secret occultish ritual. A council entirely made up of friendly grey-haired men discuss town business and then recite an inspirational chant. There's something going on with a hospital and a little girl undergoing shock treatments. Kady hears her screaming for his help and tries to rescue her but then she gets cold feet and disavows him.
It turns out everybody's concerend about "The Fever," a highly contagious disease with the main symptom being that you want to get the fuck out of this podunk town. So as you can imagine it's real easy to catch. The cure turns people into good ol' unquestioning small town folk. Kind of a STEPFORD WIVES type deal except it comes from their experience that anyone who leaves town is immediately struck down by God. So I guess getting brainwashed to stay in town and not die is actually for their own good. It's like somebody's pills that dampen their energy and personality but keep them from killing themselves. A necessary evil.
While in town Kady makes friends with a sheriff's deputy played by – would you believe this? – Fred Durst. You know, the director of THE LONGSHOTS. I've always disliked his music with Limp Bizkit and his stupid face, but he's not bad in this. In fact he works really well for a guy that we don't know if he's sinister or just a doofus. He also looks a little less douchey with no soul patch, no backwards baseball cap, skinny face, balding. He's actually the most likable character. I liked him.
I can't really say the same for the protagonist. Sisto is generally pretty good, but his character takes a drastic turn for the dickish when he starts making moves on the deputy's fiancee. This guy has taken him to the bar to introduce everybody, stopped a local from shooting him in the face, taught him how to shoot guns and hung out and talked relationships with him, and how does Kady repay him? By trying to take his woman behind his back, not even talking to him about it. I'm not talking about some bro code, I'm talking about common decency. That is obviously not cool. Guys like this, they think they're the fuckin king of the world, just because they're good at counting.
These types of small towns in movies always ring false to me. Of course there really are communities where everyone knows each other, where they pride themselves on being old fashioned, where they don't see hardly any crime. And it's true that they may be protective of their way of life and suspicious of outsiders and big cities. But also every one of the motherfuckers has a satellite dish on the outside of their house or trailer. They are connected to the outside world. They're not Amish. They're not historical re-enacters. They probly don't offer a bed and home made peach pie to everybody that drives through and invite him to their annual festival. But every small town in movies does all that shit. This is the same exact scary small town you've seen in every other movie about this same thing.
It's a decidedly mediocre movie. If we're hoping MacLaren is the one to find a really good way to tell the story of Wonder Woman this is not very persuasive supporting evidence, though it doesn't damn her either. The filmatism is fine, completely competent DTV work. Fast editing is used effectively, not confusingly, and avid farts are limited to dream sequences. There is very little that could be considered action, and nothing that hints at how she might handle bullet-deflecting bracelets or invisible jets. And no lassos.
But if Fred Durst gets cast as Wonder Man or whatever don't fret, she does know what she's doing in that department.
I want to say something like "Let's all just pledge to do what we can to make things better," but I have no idea how we would do that. I think back to 20 years ago and the Rodney King verdict. Seems like the only thing that's changed is that it happens so often that we saw this one coming. And also those guys didn't kill him and at least had to go on trial.
But I'm not going to get into it. Instead I will turn, as I often do, to Stevie. He knows how to turn anger into something beautiful.]]>
You know what's great about movies? Any of us who are reading this who are currently alive were born some time after they were invented. They got a head start on us, and no matter how hard we try we'll never catch up with all the good ones that already exist. It's just a beautiful thing to realize that even now there are movies out there as perfectly tuned for me as REMO WILLIAMS: THE ADVENTURE BEGINS that I haven't gotten around to yet. Thank you, Lord. Good work on that one.
One reason it's great: it's an action vehicle for Fred Ward. He's been a great utility player in SOUTHERN COMFORT, UNCOMMON VALOR, TREMORS, etc. but even playing the lead in the great MIAMI BLUES he has to compete with scene-stealing villain Alec Baldwin. Here he's the main attraction from beginning to end. It glorifies him as a fit badass in his 40s, and it shares his dry sense of humor.
We first meet him as a tough but lazy cop (with mustache) sitting in his patrol car eating a burger and drinking coffee, being hassled over the radio about gambling money he owes. When some dude gets chased right past him he doesn't react at first. It doesn't seem like he's even gonna bother to intervene.
But he does, and it's a set up, and the next thing you know a secret organization have kidnapped him, faked his death, changed his name, shaved his mustache, given him plastic surgery, renamed him from an engraving on his bedpan and are ready to train him to become their new assassin who will take out horrible people that the broken system is unable to deal with. Awfully presumptuous of them, but over time he comes to understand their point of view and see the value of participating.
The organization is very small. There's a boss (Wilford Brimley!) who pretty much knows everything because of his circa 1986 super computer, and a weathered enforcer (J.A. Preston), and they bring Remo to Chiun (Joel Grey) who's like Pai Mei in KILL BILL VOLUME 2. He's a mean old Korean guy who specializes in dodging bullets (photographic documentation below) and will teach Remo an ancient Korean art that pretty much amounts to super powers. Remo reacts with Fred Ward cynicism, until of course he starts to see results. It's largely a training movie with a bunch of great lessons, the best being when he demonstrates impossible parkour skills balancing and jumping across various precariously balanced objects in his apartment, and when he somehow pulls it off Chiun is totally unimpressed.
Meanwhile there's corruption going on in the military, a scumbag general pushing dangerously defective guns on the troops for his own profiteering purposes. Remo is sent to protect Major Rayner Fleming (Kate Mulgrew), who has gotten too close to the truth, putting him in conflict with a group of thugs. The most colorful is Stone (Patrick Kilpatrick, BEST OF THE BEST II, UNDER SIEGE 2: DARK TERRITORY, THE SUBSTITUTE: FAILURE IS NOT AN OPTION), who has a diamond on one of his teeth. It seems like just a fun, James Bondian detail but it leads to a great action moment when Remo finds a good use for it. (Okay, I'll SPOILER it: he grabs him by the head and uses him to cut glass.)
Important bit part: DIE HARD's own Reginald VelJohnson as "Ambulance Driver." Remo steals an ambulance to try to escape custody at the hospital, so ol' Powell gets to do one of those "Hey come back here, that's my car!" type parts that I'm sure are very fulfilling for actors.
I love that this is a movie mainly about climbing on shit! Makes me realize we don't see nearly enough cinematic climbing on shit. There's a ton of great stuntwork, including a training scene where he has to hang off a ferris wheel and an elaborate fight climbing on and around the then-scaffolded Statue of Liberty. Sometimes it's clearly a stuntman, but what are you gonna do. That gives it authenticity.
I guess it makes sense that this was the next-to-last movie from Guy Hamilton, an old school director who did GOLDFINGER, DIAMONDS ARE FOREVER, LIVE AND LET DIE, THE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN GUN and FORCE 10 FROM NAVARONE. Some review I read said that he was behind the times making this movie in 1986, but if so it doesn't matter in the long run. It's great lo-fi action occasionally spiced up with Remo's supernatural-ish abilities (running across the surface of wet cement during a foot chase is a particularly good move).
It has a good sense of humor without being a straight up comedy. There's definitely jokes about the clashing personalities of the characters, an American who loves greasy hamburgers trying to live with an old man who forces him to eat plain rice. He's a super spy sneaking around like a teenager trying not to get in trouble.
I could see it as a Kurt Russell movie. The problems Remo runs into in the field seem almost unfair at times. Like when he has to break into a place and it turns out to have the world's smartest guard dogs, dobermans that actually figure out how to follow him up onto a catwalk and trap him. He always seems exasperated because as soon as he gets cocky some shit like this is likely to happen.
But it's great when he's cocky. You all know I'm a connoisseur of the Walking Casually Away From a Fiery Explosion trope. And in all my studies I don't think I've seen a more jaunty strut away from an explosion than Remo has here.
There's one weird thing about this movie you should be warned about. Chiun is a Korean character but is played by Joel Grey, who in my opinion is a Caucasian. His makeup is real good, definitely better than, say, CLOUD ATLAS (in fact it was nominated for the best makeup Oscar, which it lost to MASK), but it still looks not quite right.
The thing is, I wasn't there but I bet there were some Korean actors in the business at that time. Maybe one of them coulda done it and it wouldn't be uncomfortable to watch. On the other hand, it's a really good performance by Grey, good comic timing, grouchy personality and very deliberate movements and posture that could be credited to him being a dancer or whatever he is.
No comment on the accent.
I'd say it's less offensive than some Ken Jeong characters. Is that a good defense?
REMO WILLIAMS is actually a Dick Clark production, but not a rock 'n roll movie. It has a great theme song by Craig Safan that reminds me of Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom or something. Big, majestic and epic music to elevate a down to earth working class super hero who works out of an apartment with an old man who watches soap operas.
Like Hamilton, writer Christopher Wood came from the James Bond series. He wrote THE SPY WHO LOVED ME and MOONRAKER. This one is adapted from a novel called The Destroyer by Richard Sapir and Warren Murphy. There was a whole series of over a hundred Destroyer novels I guess. Seems like something I should look into. Incidentally Murphy did a draft of LETHAL WEAPON 2 with Shane Black, who has recently been attached to a new Destroyer movie. Also Murphy has two kids with the voice of Bart Simpson. That might be less relevant.
Note 1: If you love this movie and it bums you out that the DVD is full frame, there is an anamorphic widescreen version available in region 2. I think this is it below, but the listing doesn't specify. Also there's a Region B blu-ray if you can play that.
Note 2: There was a pilot made for a Remo Williams TV show in '88. I haven't watched the whole thing yet because this guy Jeffrey Meek is no Fred Ward, even if he did play Rayden and Shao Khan on Mortal Kombat: Conquest. But let me know if it's good.]]>
Sometimes you get together with some friends, one thing leads to another, you end up watching THE PHANTOM MENACE on blu-ray again… you know how it is. All the sudden you get a late night notion about the Star Warses that you decide needs to be said because you know for god damn sure nobody else is gonna say it. And that's what I've decided to do here.
I'm afraid this is not me playing devil's advocate. This is my sincere opinion. And I swear it, friends, I'm not trying to be a contrarian, I'm not trying to get attention. I'm just being honest. To prove it I didn't give this post the "wh-wh-WHUT!?" spit take click bait headline it could have: Why Hayden Christensen Should Be In Episode VII, But They Don't Have the Balls To Do It. Don't go spreading it around, but that is my thesis.
Hear me out, fellas. I'm gonna lay out my argument below, and you can do as thou wilt.
Let me run through certain star-events in each episode that relate to my point here:
Mr. Qui Gonn Jinn is the master to Obi Wan Kenobi, and later to li'l Anakin Skywalker. But he gets killed, his body is burned and Obi Wan takes over as Anakin's master.
Anakin's training is a mixed bag, and when he gets into some trouble (murdering Sand People) we hear Qui Gonn's voice from beyond the grave. He's yelling "Anakin, noooo!!!" but he's helpless to stop or help Anakin, or even be heard by him. He's dead, after all.
Anakin turns evil and abandons the Jedi, sending Obi Wan and Yoda off into hiding. But Yoda tells Obi Wan that Qui Gonn has found a way to talk to them from beyond the grave.
Obi Wan becomes the master to the next generation, represented by Luke Skywalker, to fight what remains of Anakin, now known as Darth Vader. Obi Wan is killed and his body weirdly disappears. During the climax Luke can hear Obi Wan's voice encouraging him. Somehow he's taken Qui Gonn's technique and used it to inspire Luke to do what he needed to do to save the day.
A blue ghost of Obi Wan appears to Luke and advises him. Using the Force this deceased Jedi master can can actually communicate with the living. This is Qui Gonn's legacy: the sneaky bastard invented the blue ghost!
The blue ghost of Obi Wan appears to Luke again. This is how Jedis operate now. Yoda dies and his body disappears like Obi Wan's did. Luke manages to get Darth Vader to remember who he once was and redeem himself by killing the Emperor before he dies. Vader's cyborg body is burned on a pyre like Qui Gonn's was. Then, in the final moments of the movie, we see the blue ghosts of Obi Wan, Yoda and Anakin watching the victory celebration and smiling.
Like many things involving the Star Warses, this moment is hugely controversial. Originally, when that movie was just RETURN OF THE JEDI, the conclusion of the Star Wars trilogy, the ghost was actor Sebastian Shaw, portraying an Anakin who never existed: a 78 year old non-burnt-up, non-cyborg man in a Jedi robe. But we figured out who it was supposed to be. We let it make sense in our heads. Maybe we figured Anakin was already an old man when he became Darth Vader. We didn't know.
But by the time the movies came out on blu-ray it was a world where Star Wars was a six episode story, and Anakin was not an old man when he became Vader in part 3, he was young Hayden Christensen. So to make RETURN OF THE JEDI fit as part 6 of the series George Lucas altered that scene so that Christensen was the blue ghost. This drives people crazy because 1. Don't change a great movie 2. They want to pretend the prequels don't exist and don't want to see the guy from them in the new movie 3. Why does Anakin's ghost get to be young but Obi Wan's doesn't.
The first two complaints are legitimate. The original theatrical version of the movie should always be available. But it's not, and what exists is this altered version that has become part six of a series, and in that context blue Hayden Christensen makes sense. Yeah, I know, Obi Wan looks the age he was when he died, so you think Anakin should look older too and should be a burnt up guy with no arms or legs just floating there. But the fact that he's not tells us something important: that Anakin has been absolved of his sins. The Jedi Anakin died when he became Darth Vader. When he is redeemed and dies he returns to the form of young, promising Anakin. The real Anakin.
If STAR WARS: THE FORCE AWAKENS ends up being labelled EPISODE VII as expected then it should continue this story, shouldn't it? And the natural progression of this story requires that at some point the blue ghost of Anakin appear to Luke to advise him. Otherwise, why did Qui Gonn give the Jedi this gift of communication between the living and the dead? Why did Anakin redeem himself and become one with the Force or whatever? After all that they have gone through to get to this point, would Luke really just consider his father dead, forget about him, not communicate with him?
Well, it doesn't matter what he would do. George Lucas's Star Wars was about telling a story that he hoped fans would like, I think Disney's Star Wars will lean more toward giving the fans what they think they want. Hopefully there will be some surprises and some risks taken, but I think they will cater toward the older generation who tend to not like the prequels. They'll go out of their way to avoid referring to the prequels, even when it's natural.
J.J. Abrams might put a Yoda ghost in there. He might even make up Ewan McGregor to look like Alec Guinness. But I don't think he has the balls to put Anakin in there, even though the six previous movies are about him. Even though the story demands it.
Prove me wrong, Mr. Abrams. Or have Pac-Man be the bad guy and say that he ate all the blue ghosts in between trilogies. Nothing else makes sense.
. . .
MY APOLOGIES EVERYONE, SOMETHING BETTER TO READ COMING SOON. thanks, Vern
So the truth is I'm not the audience for this movie. I was better in monster biting head off a robot class than in science. When a guy sitting by me in the theater said he read that the black hole created for the movie was so "mathematically accurate" that scientists were now making discoveries based on it, I literally had no idea what that meant. Still don't. On several different levels. So keep that in mind when I tell you I liked, didn't love INTERSTELLAR. But I'm still gonna write about it, 'cause this is America.
Matthew McConaughey of THE PAPERBOY fame plays Cooper, an ex-test pilot, widower and father of two, forced to be a corn farmer in a bleak near future where crops are dying, food is scarce and kids aren't allowed to go into engineering because TVs don't work anymore or something. His teenage son Tom (Timothee Chalamet) is okay with taking over the farm some day, but his daughter Murph (Mackenzie Foy, THE CONJURING) loves the ol' engineering, and he hates to see the school discourage her.
There's a nice poetic touch near the beginning after Cooper and the kids recklessly chase down a low-flying drone to capture and steal its parts. Dad decides that it's an Indian drone that's been wandering the world with no mission since the collapse of its command center. Murph sympathizes with the machine and wants to let it go, like it's a fish. This sort of foreshadows the NASA robots TARS and CASE, who later steal the movie whenever they go into action. They're valuable members of the team, completely trustworthy, never used for creepiness like HAL 9000s waiting to happen. They're even programmed to make jokes and talk shit. You gotta respect the rare movie about technology that comes down entirely on the pro side.
(QUICKIE SPOILER: My favorite thing in the whole movie is Cooper sitting on a porch having a beer and reminiscing with a rectangular robot.)
Cooper encourages Murph's intellectual curiosity, which gets her in trouble at school. Also it causes them to decode a message from what she believes is a ghost in her bedroom, which leads them to trespass at a secret NASA hideout, where Cooper is recruited to join a team of astronauts on a mission to find out if some other guys on a previous mission figured out how to save the world. Meanwhile Michael Caine (ODG), Cooper's former mentor and father of space teammate Anne Hathaway, will stay on earth and try to invent some kind of anti-gravity thing that would also save the world from the, uh… from too much corn and not enough wheat, or whatever.
The opening obviously makes you think a little bit of CLOSE ENCOUNTERS and alot of SIGNS (maybe just because it's sci-fi taking place at a farmhouse in the middle of a corn field where a widower and his kids try to decode mysterious signs). But of course any smartypants space movie like this is gonna get compared to 2001 (not the year, the space odyssey). That's the unreachable benchmark. INTERSTELLAR doesn't feel much like 2001 at all, except that the visuals get kinda trippy when they go through a black hole (though that part reminded me more of Space Mountain at Disneyland. I could almost hear the music playing). And maybe it's an homage that the robot brothers look like monoliths with monitors for faces. The incomprehensible space technology of 2001 co-opted to serve man.
The thing 2001 gets criticized for when it gets criticized is being cold and distant, looking at the proceedings from more of a God's eye view than a human one. INTERSTELLAR takes the other approach of aiming mainly for humanity. It says yeah, scientists traveling beyond the galaxy and space and time to save the human race and all that, blah blah blah, but really it's about a father and his daughter. (You know, like CONTACT.) And it's sweet and you can't really fault a movie for being about what it's about, but to me it demonstrates the wisdom of Kubrick's approach. By making INTERSTELLAR really about the same thing that many a normal drama is about it sort of trivializes the awe inspiring epic part of the movie. It tries to make relatable a story that is more impactful if it's unfathomable. Why you always gotta fathom everything, Nolan.
The main thing being examined here is a dad abandoning his kids. And because of all that "relativity" business (good call, Einstein) even if this mission is successful he'll be gone for decades in earth time and they'll age faster than him. In his mind it's the right thing to do because he figures if he doesn't go the whole planet will die, so seeing them briefly when they're decrepit and old and he's still in MAGIC MIKE shape is better than nothing. And his son agrees. He doesn't give a shit. But women are emotional, am I right fellas? Go to the bathroom in groups, etc. So Murph refuses to forgive him for leaving her. She won't even send him video messages until she's grown into Jessica Chastain.
But then there's sort of a reverse thing where daughter Hathaway left father Caine behind, and he mentors grown up Murphy, becoming a surrogate father. Meanwhile, in space, Hathaway is emotional too. With the future of the human race hanging in the balance she makes a decision based on following a boy she likes (homage to that one TV show Felicity I believe). Then she makes a speech about how it's a sound scientific basis for a decision because "love is the one thing that transcends time and space." The fifth element is love.
(By the way, it's kind of unusual that the male and female leads never have a thing for each other. He only cares about his kids and she only cares about a doctor we never see. That's pretty cool.)
But the thing is: the ladies are right. Most of the men in this movie fuck up every damn thing, often because of their emotional distance. One goes to his death bed having lied to and betrayed his loved ones for the supposed greater good and not even achieving his goal. Another one chooses to doom the human race rather than sacrifice himself for it. Dr. Michael Caine fails and surrenders, but Murph is the one who refuses to give up. After we hang with Mr. Cooper for a while and see him transcend space and time (yes, with love) he gets back home to find that his daughter still eclipsed him.
Another movie it's been compared to is SUNSHINE, it being the other most recent non-laser sci-fi movie about scientists on a last ditch mission to most likely fail to save the human race from imminent extinction. I believe the current consensus is that INTERSTELLAR is way better, but I don't agree. To me the characters in SUNSHINE are more interesting and more believable as experts in their fields. I would be the last man on earth to criticize INTERSTELLAR for fakey science, but even I gotta chuckle when on the mission to save the world by traveling through a black hole one of the astronauts has to get out a piece of paper and make a sketch to explain the concept of traveling through a black hole to our hero. Like, maybe this sort of thing should've been covered before take off? In my layman's opinion.
You know what would be interesting would be if at that point he says "Ah, nah guys, Coop don't do black holes. I don't believe in it. You gotta bring me back."
The pro-science theme is handled a little goofy I think. The dystopian world of the opening feels more like heavy-handed preachiness than "it figures it would be something like this" verissimiliwhatever. In a movie like, say, CHILDREN OF MEN, the world unfolds in front of us, we see all the chaos and piece together what has gone so wrong with the world. In INTERSTELLAR we get more explaining because we gotta understand that a world where everyone is starving is not bad just because everyone is starving, but because WHO WILL FUND NASA?
Cooper constantly annoys his kids with nostalgia about how great it was when we used to invent all the time and explore and shit, but now we just farm. The hardest part to swallow is when we learn that the school system has revised all textbooks to claim that the Apollo missions were faked. It doesn't seem like that's supposed to be the truth, it's just what The Man wants you to believe. I'm not sure I really understand why. So kids will be want to be farmers instead of astronauts? I'm just surprised that this "my kid wants to be an astronaut and refuses to learn how to drive the tractor" problem is widespread enough to inspire such a conspiracy. But maybe they're also teaching 'em that rappers, movie stars, basketball players and celebrity heiresses were a hoax.
I mean this with all due respect because I love a Nolan movie: this part comes off almost Ayn Randian in its "I want to be educated and do sciencey shit but SOCIETY is forcing me to be a mere farmer!" paranoia. And it's kind of a pet peeve of mine when movies preach the gospel about science, then go on to be a bunch of bullshit. All this talk about the power of love really works with the movie and is a cool idea, but it's right up there with intelligent design and The Secret as far as scientific theories go. So it rubs me the wrong way a little bit. But not as bad as the cartoon FRANKENWEENIE, in which a teacher accurately chastises his town for their ignorant disregard for science, then teaches them that electricity brings dead bodies back to life.
But of course we do live in a country where superstitious idiots can get high up in the government and try their damndest to fuck up our future (for example we have a guy who wrote a book denying the existence of climate change in charge of the committee that deals with climate change). So I agree with the sentiment, if not the execution. And I love the idea that in the future NASA is a scrappy underground organization working in the shadows like Batman.
Batman was also a hoax, kids. Don't be Batman.
I'm not trying to nitpick the movie. It's definitely worth seeing. I just would have it low in my rankings of Chris Nolan pictures. Most of his movies are puzzles, carefully designed machines. I believe he talks about it as "the geometry of storytelling." The ultimate example of that – and in my opinion his best batless movie – is INCEPTION, a meticulously constructed contraption of a story, an elaborate magic trick. You can picture alot of charts and diagrams going into the creation of that story. INTERSTELLAR is, in comparison, almost loose and unstructured. Mostly just a series of shit that happens until the end, it's not as much of a mousetrap. Which is fine, but I prefer the more narratively show-offy Nolan, I think that plays to his strengths better.
Or maybe I'm just unimpressed by the trick at the end because I coincidentally watched INSIDIOUS CHAPTER TWO earlier in the day, and weirdly they have kind of the same twist. SPOILER FOR BOTH MOVIES: First of all, they both start with the letters IN, so they are alphabetically similar. Case closed. But secondly they both have an earlier time period where a kid is dealing with an apparent ghost in the house and something unexplainable happens and then many years later the protagonist watches the event from another dimension just outside the room and manages to intervene and becomes the cause of the odd thing seen the first time around.
Oh my god you guys, it's THE SIXTH SENSE too. He was a ghost the whole time.
Okay, I'm arguing that we don't get the full power of a Nolan narrative, but we do get most of the rest of his arsenal. Another Christopher Nolan movie, another building, portentous Hans Zimmer score. I love 'em. Always a big part of that Nolan mood. This one's recognizable as the kind of churning, droning, driving sounds Zimmer's been messing with since DARK KNIGHT, but this time with some good old fashioned church organ added to the mix. Reminded me a little bit of CANDYMAN and maybe INFERNO. I kinda wish he'd added KOYAANISQATSI style throat singers chanting "interrrrrr… stellarrrrrrrrr" over and over again, see how that would go over with everybody.
Nolan also insisted on using alot of analog effects techniques. Apparently alot of the spaceship shots are done with models (not computers), the robots with puppets and all of the footage inside the ships was done with projections outside of the windows, not green screens. That was a great idea to prevent the actors from having to answer that question about what it's like to act against a green screen and have to imagine stuff. But – and I am fully aware that I'm not supposed to think or say this – it does look a little not-up-to-modern-standards at times. Hardly a dealbreaker, but in my opinion a decent defense of digitaling shit up.
Still, it's an impressive production, definitely designed to be seen big, and the majority of it is shot in Imax, even more of it than DARK KNIGHT RISES. I love that it was a genuine movie-going event. I saw it on the biggest screen in Seattle, at a sold out 3 pm weekday show. It also felt like kind of a wake for projected film, because I had heard this would be the last thing showing in actual Imax, who are apparently going to start using new laser projectors instead of their 70mm film. I guess it's not really the last one, but they are planning to transition. I hope that works out because this has been a special place for me for many years and it will be a shame if it gets replaced with something not as good. I should mention that this theater is at the Pacific Science Center, so our ticket and concessions purchases support science education for kids and help prevent a future of corn farming.
Hardy's character Ivan Locke has a 90 minute drive to a hospital. While he's driving he's also trying to:
1. Convince the brass at his construction company that it's okay that he decided to ditch work on the big day they've been working toward forever when he is supposed to oversee the largest concrete pour in English history.
2. Supervise the pour by talking people through it on the phone.
3. Calm down the emotionally fragile one night stand who's at the hospital about to give birth to his baby and thinks she loves him.
4. Break the news to his wife that he had an affair and got someone pregnant and plans to be there for the kid.
5. Come to terms with feelings he has about his father abandoning him.
6. Observe traffic laws.
You know what it is, it's CALM MAX: RESPONSIBILITY ROAD. He keeps telling himself that if he's relaxed and rational about all this he can make everything right. When the people at work flip out he keeps telling them "This is the decision I've made," as if that settles it. When his panicked in-labor one-time mistress wants affection he'll only talk about fulfilling his responsibilities. When his wife is devastated at the revelation he explains why his affair was a mistake but what he's doing now is morally correct. It's all very logical, but of course none of these people want to hear fucking logic right now. They're justifiably very emotional, and his cold calculation is really not helping matters.
There are other actors in the movie – voices of people he talks to on speaker phone – but it's clearly a one-actor showcase, like TALK RADIO or THE TELEPHONE. And it's nice that he can show off in such a laid back way. He keeps it under control. Very little scenery chewed, which is a good thing because there's very little scenery. It's just this car and the road around it. Lots of Tom Hardy face and reflections on the window. And it's convincing that he's really driving. I'm sure there's gotta be tons of green screens involved, but it fooled me, and that's important. Alot of potential for cheesiness there if it seems like he's just fake turning a steering wheel in front of a moving background.
It must be interesting to be one of the other actors in this. Kind of thankless, nobody even knows you're in it. Or you could claim you weren't in it even if you weren't, and people wouldn't know. I was in it, for example. You didn't know I was in LOCKE? I was really good in it. The best part was doing a dramatic pause after he said something. Leave then in suspense about how you are reacting to it. A powerful tool in my toolbox, I found, when I was in LOCKE, playing multiple characters like Peter Sellers.
By the way, hats off to Locke for using speaker phone. Not just because we get to hear both sides of the conversation, but because of safety. This would be an even more uncomfortable movie if we had to watch him driving with one hand and the other hand cramping up. Or if we had to look at him with a bluetooth in the whole time.
Writer-director Steven Knight is the guy that wrote Cronenberg's excellent EASTERN PROMISES and directed the not-well-enough-known Jason Statham drama REDEMPTION, aka HUMMINGBIRD. I guess this has in common with those a double life, betrayal, an anti-hero under extreme pressure, and the lack of a cookie cutter story. But it's missing a foreign crime family working out of a restaurant and a sweet, unrequited love story. Instead it's two depressing quitting-love stories. What's the deal, Steve Knight. Get it together.
Be careful – the quote on the cover says that Tom Hardy's acting is "EXPLOSIVE." Not the plot. And when it says "suspense" it doesn't mean who will live and who will die, it means will any of these people forgive this guy for pulling his dick out that one day and fucking everything up for his wife, his kids, this lady, a new son, all his co-workers and his bosses and their company and anyone counting on the cement to be poured in properly so that the street doesn't collapse and they die or whatever? You know what Ivan Locke, if you can't handle not sticking your dick in a hole that's gonna have that many repercussions maybe you're not ready to have your own dick.
Anyway, it's not a white knuckle thrill ride. It ends with more of a "Hmmm" than a "!!!" You don't really know what happened, a blatant sequel set up. I think this LOCKE franchise will be pretty cool, sort of the uneventful version of THE TRANSPORTER. He has to drive around and make increasingly more difficult phone calls to emotional co-workers, family members and acquaintances.
LOCKE is a good enough title, it shows that it's just about this guy. But another accurate one that could be mistaken for a thriller title would be MULTI-TASK. Also it would be funny if the distributor forced them to splice in a part where stock footage makes it look like he goes off a jump and another car flips and blows up. But this version will have to do.
Anyway, cannot wait to find out what Locke's next case is.
Here it is again, the ol' New Movie Directed By Clint Eastwood But Without Him Acting In It rigmarole. It goes like this: New Clint movie comes out. It doesn't seem like my kind of thing. It gets bad reviews (at least if it came out in recent years). I genuinely intend to see it in theaters, but I keep putting it off. There's always something I'm more excited for that's playing. Like, uh, I believe I might've seen some robot/dinosaur related picture around the time JERSEY BOYS came out. So I end up missing the movie in theaters. Months later it comes out on video. I'm not excited. I feel like I'm doing my homework. I watch it.
And then the Hey, this is pretty good!
I wouldn't say this surprised me as much as J. EDGAR (which I still believe is totally underrated, and got 10% worse reviews even than JERSEY BOYS, according to Rotten Tomatoes) but I'm happy to say I enjoyed it. It's a solid, entertaining biopic of Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons based on a Broadway show of some kind. Vincent Piazza of Boardwalk Empire plays guitarist Tommy DeVito and then the guys from the stage version play the other three: John Lloyd Young as lead singer Frankie Valli, Erich Bergen as songwriter/keyboardist Bob Gaudio and Michael Lomenda as bassist Nick Massi.
I thought it was gonna be a musical, but thankfully it's not. It's just a story about musical performers doing musical performances, recorded by the actors. I don't know about the show, but the movie version only has one actual musical number and it's during the end credits. In my opinion it is more of a blooper reel than an official part of the movie, because why would they be dancing around on a soundstage street singing songs, I mean it just doesn't make sense.
The rest of the time it's them singing "Sherry" and "Can't Take My Eyes Off Of You" and stuff, and these are good songs. So it's not a problem.
But I'm not saying it's not stylized. The big storytelling gimmick is that each of the four take turns narrating the story, turning to the camera mid-scene to do it. I remember critics making fun of this when the movie screened, to which I say stop being such cinematic pussies. Just 'cause it's not normally how it's done doesn't mean it can't ever be done. I think for this it works. It allows for shifts in perspective without seeming like a wannabe GOODFELLAS.
The idea of the story is that these guys, or at least the first three members before Bob joins, were troublemaking hoods in Belleville, New Jersey who dreamed of getting out of the neighborhood either in the mob, by being famous, or both. (Like Sinatra, they keep saying.) Tommy was the biggest Jersey asshole of the bunch, but recognized the great talent in younger Frankie, got him in the group and tried to protect him from being sidelined by juvenile delinquency. Nick was the sideman, the quiet guy who puts up with all the shit, but instead of getting mostly ignored by the movie like these type of characters usually do he gets to steal it at the end, taking over the POV when he gets fed up, even forcing it to skip back in time to show the problems he noticed earlier that everybody else ignored.
I didn't know this was gonna happen, but Joe Pesci (who has somehow never worked with Clint) is actually a character in the movie, played by Joseph Russo (JERSEY SHORE SHARK ATTACK). Russo sort of resembles Pesci physically, doesn't do a straight up impression, does have a pretty corny in-joke (asking the famous question "Funny how?" No LETHAL WEAPON 2-4 references though as far as I noticed).
Bruce Willis is also a Jersey boy, I don't know why the movie doesn't mention that. It kinda pisses me off, actually. It's just not fair. Anyway, Pesci is a mutual friend who introduces the group to genius songwriter Bob, who instantly makes Tommy jealous by being more important to the group. The more talented nerd butting heads with the more aggressive cool guy.
You know, I bet this is pretty much the white version of the STRAIGHT OUTTA COMPTON movie that comes out next year. The "getting out of the hood by any means necessary" story, and then the fractured brotherhood, the feuding, the breakup, the apologetic reunion years later. And the old man makeup during the old men making up scene at the Rock 'n Roll Hall of Fame is pretty good, unlike earlier when it's just youth + sideburns and goatees. I was pretty shocked when all the sudden Frankie had four or five teen daughters. I thought he was still like 25.
As you'd expect, it has some of the usual biopic problems. There's the little things, the distracting anachronisms like when a Warhol Campbell's Soup print is prominently displayed while the narrator is saying it's 1959. And there's the unbelievable dramatization of moments considered important in retrospect. The most painful example is when the Seasons call producer Bob Crewe (Mike Doyle) and sing part of a brand new song over the phone, and after about two seconds he excitedly tells his engineer to get ready to double Frankie's vocals.
"I've never heard of that before."
"That's because it's never been done before!"
(I wonder how he knew what "doubled" meant then.)
It's like one of the writers was just really into that little detail that that song had more than one track of Frankie singing, and they were not gonna rest until some character awkwardly pointed it out.
I'm glad Crewe is a character though. I never knew that "The Bob Crewe Generation" who did the excellent BARBARELLA soundtrack was a gay guy that wrote and produced with Frankie Valli. According to my research he's also credited as lyricist for the JERSEY BOYS show and was a member of Disco-Tex and the Sex-o-Lettes, a shitty disco band I was briefly fascinated by decades ago because of the stupid name.
Of course the women in their lives get sidelined. Frankie falls in love with an assertive woman (Renee Marino) and then goes on tour and pretty much forgets to mention her in the story until it's time to get a divorce. But she does contribute by convincing him to spell his fake last name 'Valli' because "y's a bullshit letter."
Of course there's a mob element. They're not killing people or anything, their worst depicted crime is a comically inept safe heist in which Frankie stands lookout and sings a song as a warning that a cop is coming. But they take pride in their frequent prison stints. When they show up the screws seem happy to see them and address them like old friends. One bid is for breaking into a church to play the organ and take advantage of the acoustics. I don't believe that story anymore than the one about Vin Diesel becoming an actor because he got caught breaking into a theater to vandalize it. But they're both good stories.
So they're not exactly made men, but the gangsters from the neighborhood protect them. Christopher Walken (who also has somehow never worked with Clint before) plays Gyp DeCarlo, a lovable Don who likes Frankie because his rendition of "My Mother's Eyes" made him cry. So he intervenes when dumbass Tommy gets them into trouble with a loan shark. The power of art.
I like how much of the story is about negotiating. It's about the difficulties of four dudes getting along over the years. Everybody's always threatening to start their own group, and everybody has genuine grievances. But Tommy has the best reason to get kicked out and Frankie the best chance of success on his own, so it's touching when Frankie chooses to stick with his old friend and go on a more difficult path. Trying to live by a neighborhood code of loyalty and responsibility.
There's a scene early on where one of the guys' girlfriends says she wants to go see THE BLOB, and I thought it would be funny if she said REVENGE OF THE CREATURE, since Clint Eastwood is in that (also it would be closer to historically accurate, I think the scene takes place before either movie came out). But actually Clint finds a better way to reference his early career.
It's a great moment that's not necessarily what the movie's all about, but it caught my interest. The group records "Walk Like a Man," a kind of macho song about keeping one's head up despite his woman "telling dirty lies to my friends." Tommy complains that he doesn't understand what it's about, and the two Bobs try to explain it. The song continues over a montage during which we see a quick shot of young Clint on TV, in an episode of Rawhide I believe. Is this just a cute Hitchcock type director cameo, or does Clint understand that his persona represents an ideal of masculinity for many of us? I'm not saying this is good or bad, but westerns and later action movies gave many boys and men our idea of what it means to "walk like a man." And then, over time, Clint's evolution as an artist and as a person paralleled or inspired our own growth, I hope.
But to be frankly honest I think these guys as depicted in the movie are a little on the meathead side. There's a tragic section of the movie where he finds out one of Frankie's daughters has run off and become a druggie, so he comes home to deal with it. He uses his street connections to find her, meets with her in a diner like his mobster friends might do. It turns out sometimes big girls do cry-y-y. He apologizes for his absence in her life, has good advice for her and tries to connect with her through their shared passion for music.
Their close relationship after this point is not shown, just mentioned in a line of dialogue, as if to drive the point home that it's too little too late, you dumb motherfucker. You didn't walk like a man in the fatherhood department. You blew it.
There's also an interesting racial component to the story that the movie only comments on by not commenting on it. Frankie's voice drives people crazy because he sings with soul for a white kid. We know this because when Frankie and Bob shop their demo around some record company guy doesn't believe they're The Four Seasons because he thinks that's "a colored group." (They also get turned away by a label that only does "colored music," but fortunately they don't cry reverse racism.) Yet, from what we see in the movie, they may not even know any black people at all. They don't grow up with them in the neighborhood, they don't play music with them, they don't watch them perform. Black people are in the movie, but always, I'm pretty sure, as background extras. The people sitting at the table behind them during a conversation. These kids are profoundly affected by black music and culture, but don't seem to notice. They just stayed in their world and sang their songs. In 1990 they got into the Rock n Roll Hall of Fame alongside The Four Tops, The Platters and Holland, Dozier and Holland, among others. It's an interesting story.
I'm not saying I'm gonna buy the blu-ray or nothin, but I don't get why people hated this one so much. Did they notice that Brett Ratner was an executive producer and hold that against it? Were they thinking of JERKY BOYS? What is the deal?
Another good job by Clint. Lay off JERSEY BOYS it's pretty good. Come on fellas.
I had none of those problems with WHIPLASH. It would actually be hard to exaggerate how strong its effect was on me. You know how a hyperbolic critic would say they had to catch their breath after a movie? That was literally true for me. When the credits rolled I felt my skin tingling and then I realized I was breathing fast. Honest to God exhilaration from this movie.
The set up and the execution are very simple. Nerdy loner Andrew Neyman (Miles Teller, who I have liked since the remake of FOOTLOOSE) is a student drummer at an elite music conservatory in New York. He idolizes old timey jazz drummers like Buddy Rich and wants to get into the top band at the school, the one conducted by Terence Fletcher (J.K. Simmons, THE JACKAL). Fletcher is maybe some kind of genius teacher, but for sure a total fucking asshole. I'm not talking a strict teacher, a grouchy curmudgeon, a Joe Clark type guy that's gonna turn out to have a heart of gold. I'm talking just… you want to punch this fucking guy in the face in the opening scene and I'm pretty sure you're not gonna love him by the end. One of the most abusive, hateful non-murderers ever put on screen, and not in an endearing Billy Bob Thornton type of way. He doesn't even give you the usual cinematic satisfaction of going too far and becoming a psycho in the criminal sense. It doesn't turn into THE STEPFATHER or something. He's just… a Total Fucking Asshole (TFA).
But Andrew is a kid and he wants to be great, he's willing to work his ass off, he wants to prove himself, he doesn't want to give up. So he's gonna have to deal with this TFA. Get into the class. Survive the first class without running away in tears. Practice all day and night. Survive another class. Survive a competition. Compete with other drummers for the lead spot. Don't fuck it up. Don't get kicked out even without fucking it up because Fletcher likes to tell people they're doing it wrong to find out if they know they're not.
This motherfucker has a whole arsenal of abuse techniques. The main one is R. Lee Ermey style yelling in people's faces, calling them cocksuckers and faggots, digging into their personal lives, telling them they're retarded, talentless and bound to fail. Another is physical intimidation. He's pretty short and old but he works out and wears tight black shirts so he can flex and then randomly charge at people. At one point he throws a chair at Andrew's head. This is actually pretty much at the beginning, it's not after reaching his boiling point.
The worst is the fake nice guy trick. After emotionally pummeling and humiliating Andrew before he's even in the class, suddenly he acts like he's actually his buddy. Takes him aside, seems friendly, asking him about his family, telling him good jazz to listen to, calling him "man," telling him to relax and have fun today. To just "do your best."
And he continues the act through the first four or five times he starts and stops the song and tells him he has the wrong tempo. And then he starts the insulting and the yelling and the throwing. And he uses what he just found out about his family life as cruel emotional ammunition.
I believe this character will start showing up on top ten villain lists, and it will be justified. No exaggeration: I have not seen a horror movie as intense as this. It's musical torture porn. It's an ever-tightening ball of tension and anxiety and discomfort and trauma, with very little relief until the credits roll. They were originally gonna call it THIS AIN'T MR. HOLLAND'S OPUS but then they got sued by the people making a porn parody with the same title.
I really enjoyed the music. There are a couple songs that the band performs over and over that work great in the context of the movie, and are beautifully performed. And it's got what I have to assume is the longest drum solo in cinematic history. You might find yourself tapping your feet if you're not too distracted by the painful pit in your stomach worrying that he might slip up. It's hard to imagine the pressure of being the new kid and having this whole elite band counting on you to keep the beat, even without this fucking maniac terrorizing you. Andrew is obviously incredibly talented but, you know. He's tired, he's scared, his hands are covered in sweat and even blood, the sticks could slip. And we wouldn't even have to notice it. Fucking Fletcher would notice it. It's like he has to lose himself in the music but also walk a tightrope with alligators below him and people throwing rocks and shooting arrows.
Fletcher makes Viggo Mortensen's Master Chief character from GI JANE seem like a cool, laid back dude, but his appeal as a villain is pretty similar. He's a terrible person and you also understand his point of view and why he thinks he's doing the right thing. He makes an impassioned argument for his philosophy. He believes that musicians need to be pushed beyond their limit in order to achieve greatness. And he thinks that if he's just nice and accepts their mistakes then they'll never become great. His example is always about a guy throwing a cymbal at Charlie Parker's head. Apparently he really threw it at his feet (as pointed out in this rare negative review that I think bumblingly mistakes the villain's point-of-view for the moral of the story). Fletcher could also talk about Jackie Chan's rough time in the Chinese Opera, Michael Jackson being beaten and terrorized from childhood, Beatrix Kiddo's cruel tutelage. But I would point to greats who never went through that kind of abuse. I never heard about Ip Man throwing shit at Bruce Lee's head. I know Prince's childhood wasn't strawberries and cream, but I believe his dad encouraged him as a musician. What about Michael Jordan, Tiger Woods, Thelonious Monk? Didn't some of these people just start young and teach themselves and work harder than hell and happen to be brilliant? I don't think you could even say that a majority of The Greats were broken down by sadistic assholes.
But Fletcher really believes this and at times he's persuasive enough that you might teeter a little bit. Maybe he's not a totally evil person?
And you see these little bits of dimension to him. The time he comes into class obviously down and, instead of the usual abuse, plays a recording to the class and shares a tearful reminiscence. The time Andrew sees him in a hallway talking to a friend, being nice to the guy's little daughter, giving her a high five. I assumed he was talking to a former student, but on the Q&A podcast J.K. Simmons says it's a stage hand at the venue that he's gotten to know. That actually makes a big difference. Still, having a friend at all makes it seem like there's a side to him that's almost like a human man.
But… I mean… You do what you want, but I cannot forgive this guy.
He's such an accurate TFA. He brought back memories of terrible teachers and coaches from my childhood. None of them were Fletcher-level, but I encountered a few peaches. I remember a sixth grade teacher, I won't say his name, even though he died of a heart attack decades ago and everybody was happy to hear it. I just tried searching for evidence that he existed and luckily the internet got invented too late to care about him. But if I wrote his name down it might get read out loud in front of a mirror or something and I don't want to take that chance.
This guy did a vocabulary test every week. This is when I was a kid and I still remember what day of the week it was. I would wake up every Thursday with a pit in my stomach. It was just a test, who cares, but if you did badly it wasn't just a grade. It was this big bearded asshole at his desk berating you to the whole class. He liked to just sit there and listen to himself riff about how stupid everybody was, like a prototype Rush Limbaugh.
I was in third grade, but they did this thing where they tested everybody on reading and writing and put them into an English class based on their supposed level. Joke's on you Ain't It Cool readers that called me illiterate: I used to be a smartypants when it came to words. Me and two other third grade kids ended up taking this class with the older kids. You would think maybe he'd try not to scare off the younger kids, but it seemed like he rode us harder than anybody. Always singling us out for humiliation.
From his point of view it worked. He tormented us into getting together and studying all week until we started doing good on these tests. Then all the sudden he would talk nice about us to the class. Like Andrew we would crave that acceptance from the scary monster. But I also remember feeling bad, like a collaborator, when he would belittle the other kids and say they should be more like us. You guys are sixth graders. You can't do as good as a third grader? What is your problem?
He deliberately pitted us against each other. One trick he must've been real proud of was when he announced we were going to have a pizza party at the end of the week. So on Friday he bought some pizzas and passed them around to everyone who was getting an A or B in the class. Everybody else had to sit silently and watch.
I made it through that class and of course three years later became an actual sixth grader and had to deal with the prick again. I got into the other class, but the teachers would switch every day for math, so he was inescapable. Here are the two Hall of Fame memories from that year:
1. He made a friendly bet with our class. We would have a movie day. Whichever class did better overall on the math test had to buy the other class popcorn. Our class ended up winning. He brought a little bag of dirty popcorn crumbs, which he proudly explained he'd swept up off the floor of a local theater. He thought it was hilarious. He did not bring edible popcorn, he just left it at that.
2. He got angry at a kid for nervously blowing on the open end of a Bic pen during a test. He decided that throughout the class whenever he yelled "Music!" the kid had to run to the front of the class and whistle with his pen. Eventually he got bored of this and just made the kid jog in place. I still remember the sounds of the housekey and ID tag on his necklace jingling.
Looking back on it as an adult I wish I could ask the other sixth grade teacher how he felt about that popcorn business. He had to have known the guy was a dickhead, but couldn't have expected he would do something like that, or he would've avoided the whole "friendly bet" in the first place. He must've been as clueless about what to do about this guy as any of us.
In fact, I imagine myself now, or almost any adult, standing in his classroom hearing the way this adult man talked to a bunch of kids, some of them as young as 8 or 9 years old. Nobody would just stand there and let it happen. You'd want to break a desk over his head.
I guess that kind of person is more common in sports. Another memory WHIPLASH brought up was about a guy that coached basketball and soccer when I was little. He was with another team but everyone knew his name because they'd seem him yell at kids and parents and referees. One time he felt a ref was calling bad fouls so he made a big show of having his team practice fake injuries.
I bring him up because I remember seeing a kid on his basketball team get in a big argument with his dad. He was crying and went into the arms of the TFA coach, like, "You don't understand me! I don't need you! I have him!" Who knows what that kid was going through with his family, but at that age it was unbelievable to see that. We couldn't believe he had the attachment to the guy that yells at him. At the time I understood it as what I now know is called Stockholm Syndrome. Or like a cult leader. He treats them like shit and then gives them a little glimpse of kindness and they'll scratch each other's eyes out trying to get that again. That's Fletcher's method.
It sure works on Andrew. It turns him into a dick, too. At home he ruins a standing-up-for-himself moment by talking like Fletcher, being way too mean, personal and elitist about it. Making you root for the jocks who ignore his accomplishments as an artist.
The students don't help each other either. As a band they have to play in unison, but within each instrument they're in brutal competition. The drummers trade chairs on Fletcher's whims, and they want that approval bad. It's painful to see Andrew taking over as the other guy is humiliated, and looking happy about it.
You'll mostly hear about J.K. Simmons from this, because it's a no-brainer Oscar nomination and possible win. It's a truly unforgettable performance from a guy that has always been good but never showed that he had this in him. I mean, Kevin Spacey probly watches this and says "I don't know if I could be that much of a prick." But it's not just a good-acting movie, it's pretty much perfect from top to bottom. It brings up interesting questions about art and humanity, and not just the main one here about how to achieve so-called greatness. Like, how does something beautiful come out of a person who is horrible? Does it mean that they're actually not horrible? Does it make it not beautiful? More beautiful? I don't know. And there's at least one moral quandary that comes up in the movie that I don't know the answer to.
The writer/director is named Damien Chazelle. Not surprisingly he played drums in high school and had an intense teacher. He directed another music-related movie called GUY AND MADELINE ON A PARK BENCH and he also wrote that movie GRAND PIANO. Alot of people say WHIPLASH feels like a thriller even though it's about playing music, and GRAND PIANO actually is a thriller about playing music. He's also one of the writers of THE LAST EXORCISM PART II, so maybe I do need to see that one.
Don't fuck around and miss this one, you guys.
Sometimes when you're on a Slasher Search or a Horror Quest you have to take what seems like an empty barrel, turn it upside down and start banging on the bottom and see if any chunks break off and fall out into the dirt. And if you do that you run the risk of watching something like DEMENTED (1980). From the box it sounded like an I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE rip-off, which is dangerous territory. It's actually a little weirder than that sounds, but not really in a good way.
Director Arthur Jeffreys has no other credits, which is not surprising, or might mean that it's a porn director using a fake name. The writer, Alex Rebar, did an obscure Christmas horror called TO ALL A GOODNIGHT, directed by David Hess.
In the opening scene our heroine Linda Rodgers (Sallee Elyse, credited as Sallee Young) comes home and starts petting her horse before suddenly being jumped by a bunch of yahoos with pantyhose on their heads who drag her into the barn and gang rape her. The complete lack of buildup or establishing of characters or story makes it seem even cruder than I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE, but at least the rape scene is much shorter and less graphic.
Suddenly it cuts to an unspecified time later when Linda is leaving the sanitarium with her husband Matt ("Bruce Gilchrist," which is actually a pseudonym for prolific porn legend Harry Reems from DEEP THROAT). She's apparently been through an ordeal, but now she's ready to go home and get back to her life. Of course, her home is the scene of the assault, so she keeps having memories of her attackers and even faints while thinking about them. This leads to uncomfortable scenes of her husband and doctor sitting in the living room wearing suits and stiffly discussing what to do with her.
Matt is a surgeon, which is not important, and one of the very few character details they bothered to give anybody. He seems to be a very sensitive husband, not the vengeful/possessive/paternal type you'd usually have in a movie about a rape survivor. But then we find out that every time he claims to be covering somebody's shift or something he's actually going to fuck his gold digger girlfriend, a wannabe actress who lives off his money and openly sees other men, even makes plan with them on the phone while he's in the room.
One of Matt's first questions to the doctor was about when Linda might be ready to have sex again, so you can guess what his excuse is. And later, when she's still having trouble with intimacy, he tells her to just "get over" being raped.
There's no way around Linda being the victim of all the men in this movie, and yet they manage to make her so whiny and helpless that she's not sympathetic. Half the time she seems drugged out, and she goes back and forth between being understanding about her husband allegedly having to work and talking in a baby voice about wanting him to be home with her.
The horror-ish part comes in when a teenage neighbor boy and his friends, for reasons I cannot comprehend, decide to play a "prank" where they break into the house wearing Halloween masks and attack her. One of them pins her down on the bed and I thought it was supposed to be an actual rape, but the way they talk later it seems like no, they were just trying to do one of those practical jokes where they pretend to be rapists. Ha ha. I don't know. Maybe we had to be there.
Anyway, when it happens she loses her grip on reality, believes they are the same people who attacked her before and decides to kill them. At this point Elyse's performance is much better, she talks in a little girl voice and pretends to be girly in a kind of menacing way. For some reason the kids are able to be in different parts of the house and not see that she's luring them out one by one. The guy that attacks her she slashes with a meat cleaver (pretty good neck wound makeup), another guy she tells him he's handsome, pretends she's gonna "make love" to him, gags him and ties him up naked for a romantic pepper steak dinner by the fireplace. Her version of the TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE dinner scene I guess. I like that she makes banal conversation about such topics as "The French make great sauces." And then she tries to cut the kid's weiner off with a wire.
It's too poorly made to be a satisfying revenge, and it's hard to see it as any kind of empowerment when it's all about her being crushed mentally by what happens to her. More importantly I couldn't escape the nagging feeling, based partly on the way it's scored and the way these kids act, that it was possible we were supposed to be on their side. One of them sounds like a nice, All-American kid as he begs:
"It was just a joke! We were just having a good time!"
"Please, we didn't mean any harm, we were just having fun!"
"Miss Rodgers, it was only a joke. We aren't the ones that raped you. We were just playing a joke!"
It's kind of like a cautionary tale. Be careful with your jokes, boys. It's understandable that you would break into a lady's house and pretend you were gonna rape her (#GamerGate) but you just might get yourself into trouble there.
It really seems less like "this is the repulsive underbelly of the patriarchy" and more like "wouldn't that be fucked up if some lady who got raped snapped and went after other men?" But who knows. Either way it does capture a little bit of the baffling feeling of clueless sexism. And that's about the movie's only good quality.
I don't say this too often, but if you've never heard of this one, don't.
It starts cute with undiscovered genius Seth Brundle (DEATH WISH's Jeff Goldblum) awkwardly hitting on magazine reporter Veronica Quaife (THE LONG KISS GOODNIGHT's Geena Davis) and somehow getting her back to his lab, which she's not happy to learn is also his bachelor's pad. She's skeptical and probly a little creeped out until he demonstrates what he's secretly been working on: "telepods," a set of chambers that can disintegrate matter on one end and reintegrate it on the other. Teleportation. Star Trek shit! He points out that it will revolutionize transportation. In one of the few corny bits in the screenplay by Charles Edward Pogue (PSYCHO III, KULL THE CONQUEROR) we find out Brundle gets car sickness as extra motivation for inventing such a thing.
He's proved to her he's gonna change the whole world forever, but he can't let her write about it yet. It needs work. I mean it's perfect for inanimate objects, but it can't handle living organisms. The poor baboon he experiments on gets taken apart just right and put back together real wrong. He's not getting his deposit back from the zoo, I bet.
So he lets her stick around to document his experiments and also they start a relationship (WHAT HAPPENED TO ETHICS?). There's a complication in that her editor, Stathis Borans (John Getz – I did not notice that was Ray from BLOOD SIMPLE! Wasn't I just wondering what happened to him?), is also her jealous ex and a creep who lets himself in to her house to take a shower and says inappropriate things at work. And he's trying to push her into publishing before Brundle is ready.
The experiment scenes are great, a strong mix of dread for the inevitable horrors of science gone wrong and excitement for problem solving and discovery. I think we all know about the turning point when he tries to teleport himself without realizing there's a fly in there with him and the computer is like "shit, I don't know what to do with this… I guess combine the DNA sequences?" I mean, if that's what happens with telepods it would really limit the use of this technology. You don't want to end up with some dude turning into The Lice, somebody else The Crab.
The accident is set up well too. It's not his plan all along to experiment on himself. He gets upset at his new girlfriend, gets drunk and then he does it. And what he's mad at her about is a total misunderstanding. If he would've just talked to her it would've been straightened out. You know how it is. A mix of jealousy, stupidity and beer, you do something you'll regret your whole life. Which in this case won't be that long. Fucking idiot.
At first doing fly shit is cool. He feels great and strong, so he thinks teleporting is purifying. He turns it into a sexual thing and a religious thing, a push to purify a sexual partner. In other words he's in a Cronenberg movie. He pulls a Cronenberg. You know what would be a funny mashup t-shirt, it says Cronenbergers and it looks like a burger place but with weird misshapen flesh on the burgers ha ha.
The gymnastics and the ceiling crawling are cool but disconcerting, a similar feeling to my favorite part in POLTERGEIST where the mom laughs while playing around with the weird ghostly thing she discovered in her kitchen. The physical transformation starts gradually enough that Brundle ignores it. At first his splotchy face could be anything.
Because it came out in the '80s this is widely considered a parable about AIDS, and it definitely captures the terror of an unknown disease. But it's not a direct correlation, for example it's not sexually transmitted and AIDS doesn't give you powers. This is more generally "body horror," the fear of your own physical deterioration. His skin rots, his fingernails and teeth fall out, eventually his eyeballs too and his face peels off. This might be the best ever depiction of this classic type of tragic monster. He loses it slowly, it's a believable jump from eccentric scientist to The Fly.
One thing that's great is how intimate it is. There are a few different locations, but most of it takes place in Brundle's lab. There are many long dialogue scenes. There aren't very many characters, and most scenes are between just the two leads. If not for the incredible makeup effects transformation this could easily be a stage play.
And that really helps to make it feel so human, so sad. If there was a remake of THE FLY now, even a really good one, I can't imagine it wouldn't have a big final showdown with him on a rampage in a city, most likely flying around smashing things, the military coming after him or something. A traditional studio movie climax. In this movie he tries to combine himself with another person. It's an insane violation, but not a rampage. The horror ends in the same place where it began, the lab. There's not a hero who defeats him, there's the uncomfortable situation of the asshole ex-boyfriend trying to protect her. It ends with a mercy killing. The whole movie is leading up to the gut-punch of the look on the monster's face when he's ready to die. It's a pretty different take on the original's "help me."
The worst part is he really didn't need to push so hard for teleporting living beings. Just the object part was incredible. Can you imagine how different the world would be if he sold that shit to Amazon? If they somehow got it to where there were public telepods around and not prohibitively expensive it would change everything. You're at work, you spill something on your pants, BAM, buy new pants. Online shopping addicts would be fucked. Just ordering ordering ordering. And sure, you'd still have to fly across the country, but you wouldn't have to worry about if you can fit your carry-on into the overhead luggage. Or renting a car, if you own one you could send it over.
In fact, if you did want to rent a car, they could have one central location with every type of car that they could send out to different cities. The Amazon model for everything, and instant. Man, people would get so fucking lazy and entitled. Careful what you wish for.
Could've been useful though. You blew it, Brundle.
It's also an issue movie, inspired by the debate of whether or not to allow women in combat in the U.S. military. Moore plays Jordan O'Neill, a lieutenant in military intelligence who knows her shit far beyond expectations. If she were a man she probly would've moved to some sort of special ops team where she could take advantage of her expertise, but women aren't allowed there.
Until now. When a female senator (Anne Bancroft) cleverly throws her weight around at a confirmation hearing and gets the military to agree to a number of women-in-combat test cases, O'Neill is chosen as a good poster girl – skilled, but not too butch. So she gets to try out for the Navy SEALs. This was before they were known for killing Osama bin Laden, this is when they were known as Jesse Ventura's buddies. But they were among the toughest of the tough. They bring in the very best special ops soldiers and even most of those guys drop out before Hell Week is over. So it's a hell of a challenge for her. It's a grueling test of strength and endurance that only a small percentage of men can hope to survive, not believed possible for a woman. And that's not even figuring in the likelihood that nobody there wants a woman to be able to do it.
So it's primarily a boot camp movie, that nightmarish section of FULL METAL JACKET reimagined as a triumph of the underdog story. She has to deal not only with the near impossible feat of endurance, not only with the resentment of men who think she doesn't belong there and superiors who feel like they're being jerked around by outsiders who don't understand their world, but also with the idea that she needs special provisions like female-only stairs on an obstacle course and separate quarters. She's smart enough to understand that if she gets any type of special treatment she'll never be accepted as a member of the team. But even if nobody cared it seems pretty clear she wouldn't want to be handicapped anyway.
Things look so bleak that just knowing one single person is rooting for her is a big deal. When a female medic gives her a small gesture of sisterly solidarity it's hugely satisfying.
Some of the soldiers are more dickish than others, so she has more than one nemesis here, but the main one is Master Chief Viggo Mortensen. It's his job to scare the shit out of the potential recruits, and he pretends to delight in making people quit, not allowing the first day to end until at least one person does. There's a big bell in the middle of the camp that you ring in order to drop out, and it seems to taunt them by being there. Just ring it and you're free. You can stop carrying giant metal things through the mud, you can take a shower, sleep, eat from a plate. It kinda reminded me of HANDS ON A HARD BODY. When the first guy stumbles over to it in a daze, his buddies yelling not to do it, his mind is clearly somewhere far away.
O'Neill takes more of a beating and goes through a longer ordeal than most slasher movie heroines. (Come to think of it, they could have a slasher movie that takes place during military Hell Week. They got enough of 'em during sorority Hell Week.) It's made worse by her teammates instinctively not listening to her ideas and therefore fucking up their exercises, leaving her to take the fall. Most memorably their disobeying her gets them taken prisoner in a war game and Master Chief beats her so brutally that his macho second in command raises an objection and has to go outside.
Master Chief is a great nemesis because he's an asshole but he's not evil. He sincerely believes that he would be putting his men in danger by passing her, and therefore it's his duty to stop her. He's got some dumb supporting arguments, which O'Neill rebuts well, but clearly he believes he's doing the right thing, and that makes him more formidable. Despite looking ridiculous in his tight khaki shorts.
Ironically he ends up accidentally helping her, because his ruthlessness towards her starts to seem over-the-line to her fellow soldiers and they finally start rooting for her. More importantly she wins their respect by persevering, getting some good shots in on Master Chief and yelling for him to "Suck my dick!"
Scott does a great job of making this kind of punishment seem appealing. The idea of being taxed to the limit and beaten to a pulp and just getting up and going and going, never giving up, still stumbling forward while the others are dropping all around you. It's running a marathon, or a Tough Mudder run. It's a boxing or MMA match, it's American Ninja Warrior, it's fighting the League of Shadows right after climbing the mountain, it's training with Pai Mei. The feeling of accomplishment if you can push your body and mind beyond its limits. Looks like hell, but also very satisfying.
At the end it goes full action movie, they get unexpectedly sent on an important mission and she and Master Chief even have to work together. Good shit. It's weird though, during Hell Week they only really got tested in endurance and teamwork, they didn't seem to receive any elite training in addition to what they came in with. I hope they know what they're doing.
That she's being treated this way for being a woman just makes her a great underdog hero. I think it says something that she doesn't care about the politics at first. She has no interest in making a statement. But when faced with blatant unfairness she fights back. She's like women now who say that they're not feminists. They just want to stay out of it, but they might not always be able to.
I do think the movie (written by My Two Dads writer Danielle Alexandra and Riddick creator David Twohy) is a little too cynical when (spoiler) the senator who started the whole thing sells her out, she was just doing it as a stunt and didn't even want it to succeed. I know politicians are often/usually full of shit and have trouble getting shit done, but is it too much to believe in a woman politician sincerely fighting for the rights of women? I don't think it is.
So here we are 17 Veteran's Days since this came out. The military has been more integrated, but it's still believed to be physically impossible for a woman to pass the SEAL tests, and there is some fear of them having to lower the qualifications to be gender-equal. I'm not sure how influential the movie has been in that discussion.
What has really changed since '97 is the policy on gays in the military. In the movie she gets temporarily kicked out by being framed as a lesbian. I think the movie shows the ridiculousness of the "Don't Ask Don't Tell" policy, and it implies that a very sympathetic character actually is gay and can't be herself without putting her whole career at risk. But it doesn't really get into that fight, it seems like we have to be outraged about the lie, that she was set up, not that the policy is unfair. The soldier that's most immediately accepting of O'Neill is McCool (two-time Seagal co-star Morris Chestnut), a black man who compares her treatment to previous generations of his family trying to get into the military. But they don't have time to get into the gay issue in those conversations.
It really does feel disappointing when she's suddenly back home. She went so far and now she's just jerked out of there because of some shitheads pulling a dick move. Back home in a comfortable bed with her boyfriend and it's painful as hell. Very effective. I really like this movie.
Since Scott has done a prequel to ALIEN and is working on a sequel to BLADE RUNNER I hope he'll keep in mind something like GI JANE II: HELL HATH NO FURY. She's retired and living in seclusion somewhere and some white supremacists or meth dealers or sex traffickers or somebody push her too far. Or maybe she's an aging mercenary and she goes on a mission and it's gotta be in a really backwards woman-oppressing country for dramatic purposes.
Have we ever seen a "retired badass reluctantly pulled back into the world of beating and killing a whole bunch of sorry motherfuckers who sorely deserve it" movie where the badass is a lady? I can't think of one. But it's a barrier we can pass even without finding a senator who truly believes in it.
If not for that, though, perfect movie!
I know people got mad years ago when I complained about Jason Statham's character Chiliman Chevrolet from the CRANK movie pulling one of these "it doesn't count as rape if you win her over before you're done" moves, known on the streets as "the ol' Straw Dogs." But I haven't changed my stance on that. It's a misogynistic fantasy and kind of a dangerous thing to depict in movies. What kind of influence could this have on the samurai constables of the future if they grow up thinking this is how the world works?
I can't say I completely fathom what they're trying to do with this movie. I know there's gotta be some cultural differences going on here, but I'd really like to know what the thinking is on this. Director Kenji Misumi also did the LONE WOLF AND CUB movies and writer Kazuo Koike did both the movies and the comics (and the comic this is based on). So he's a genius storyteller, creator of supreme badassness and (from what I understand) critic of samurai era values. He points out the hypocrisy of these codes of honor that serve the corrupt elites more than the citizens they're meant to protect. Like LONE WOLF's Ogami Itto, "Razor" Hanzo Itami (Shintaro Katsu, guy who played Zatoichi, producer of this series and brother of the guy that played Itto) is an extreme figure who recognizes the evil of the system he works for. But Itto calls himself a demon while unable to avoid doing heroic things. Hanzo intentionally fights for justice while casually using barbaric techniques. Like the Punisher, maybe?
At first he seems like Serpico. He flat out refuses to sign the officer's oath because he's too honest. He knows his office takes bribes and it would be a lie to say otherwise. His superior Magobei Onishi (Ko Nishimura, YOJIMBO, SWORD OF DOOM) – who he maliciously calls "Snake" – is outraged, a perfect example of treating a ritual as sacred while violating its actual meaning, much like certain people who rally around the flag or the cross while being ideologically opposed to freedom or Jesus' teachings.
Hanzo isn't gonna back down. "Simmer down and listen!" he yells at his boss. He might get fired for that. For being more pure than the other officers. Or at least that's what it seems like at first.
But then he goes home and… well, jesus, man. You need to know that Hanzo has, like, an eccentric lifestyle, you know what I mean? First he has his two underlings brutally torture him so he can feel for himself which techniques are the most painful and do a better job when he does it to suspects. I guess he has to know these tortures in case he ever interrogates a man. In this movie he only interrogates women, so he only does the rape one.
I mean, that's some freaky shit, but also he gets a little alone time when he seems to be… hold on, is this what I think it is? Yes, I'm pretty sure he laid his dick out on a board and is banging it with a club. Then he cuts a hole in a basket of rice and fucks it. Again, sensual love music. Huh.
See, now days we're used to this, because of the internet. And the movie ZOO. In the moderm world anybody that has some crazy sex thing, they like to wear diapers and a wolf costume or make little miniature hotel rooms for lobsters and make them fuck or watch all the episodes of My Little Pony or whatever sicko wacko baloney gives em a hard-on, it doesn't matter, they will find people on the internet that do the same thing and make up lingo and a websight and now it's officially a subculture and it's okay. But I believe even in the modern world Hanzo would not have to join some sort of bulletin board for dick clubbers and rice bangers. He doesn't give a fuck about your acceptance of his lifestyle. He just does what he thinks is right. Or what he thinks will turns his dick into a Kanabō.
There's alot of talk about his dick. He admits that the pain of torture gives him a boner. A group of adversaries exchange legends of seeing his johnson, say it's huge and covered in warts. They're in awe of it. They say this cat Hanzo is a bad mother. From the opening moments, the wah wahs, saxophone, split screen, strutting and later freeze frame credits suggest a blaxploitation movie. He's Shaft with a deadly shaft. The score by Kunihiko Murai is straight up funk. If you played it to somebody out of context only the Japanese lyrics on the theme song could give away its origins.
There's other weird fetishy stuff that happens. He identifies a woman based on her not having pubic hair, and verifies it by having one of his guys pull a Chuck Berry maneuver. And there are some abstract shots during the sex scenes that I think are supposed to be, uh, some sort of internal closeups. Freaky shit. So it's always a relief when he turns his interest away from his dick and towards cool weapons. He has spiked knuckles and little dagger things and a chain that he swings and it is a delight when we learn about the booby traps and secret compartments full of weapons hidden all over his house. He has levers he pulls that make huge spikes come out of the walls or ceiling. He uses it to kill attackers or, in one case, a lizard that gets in his house. It's overkill, but it's Hanzo.
This guy is so close to being one of the all time greats. I can't judge a man for fucking rice, but I can judge him for treating women like bags of rice. I mean, they eventually go willingly into his hot tub and have sake with him. Why can't he start with that?
But if I could set aside the sex predator stuff this would be the type of extreme character I really gravitate toward. A dude that just takes things way too far, and then moves through polite society as if he belongs there. Like Blade walking around in broad daylight with a vampire slaying samurai sword on his back. He doesn't give a fuck. Hanzo is the same way. Yes, I have a secret arsenal hidden in a flip-over panel in the wall by my sauna. What's wrong with that? That's my style. That's just my thing.
Other than the raping he has it all figured out. And he has sort of his own rehabilitation program where he catches criminals and instead of the harsh punishment the system prescribes he takes them under his wing and makes them officers of the law. Almost like how the Shadow and the Phantom get favors from the guys they saved previously. One day he's supposed to round up transients and lock them up but he thinks that's bullshit so instead he breaks this guy's nose and tosses him over his shoulder telling the other officers he's dead. Later he has the guy play dead, bloody smashed up nose and everything, as an excuse to arrest somebody. Dirty tricks.
At one point he seems to have taken badass to preposterous levels. SPOILER. It turns out to be a fake out but when he reveals bloody bandages around his torso and claims to have already slit his belly and just be holding it in for now it seems like he's serious. Because that's the type of shit this guy would actually do! He's ten times crazier than Riggs.
This guy is a total freak, and that's why the movie is amazing. The huge distance he goes over the line is obviously intended to be outrageous. It feels almost like Verhoeven doing ROBOCOP, daring you to root for this fucked up super hero. But if Robocop was going around raping people I'm not sure I would enjoy that movie as much, in my opinion. It makes it even more extreme but harder to have a fun time with.
This is the first part of a trilogy, and it seems like it was planned that way. It's a good beginning of a story type of story, and then instead of coming to a conclusion it takes a left turn and goes into a little mini-story about euthanasia. Come to think of it, about the youth in Asia dealing with euthanasia. It's a nice little bit about using smarts and fighting skills to get around rules and codes and put a poor old man out of his misery. And then it points toward the Razor's future adventures.
The part of me that suppresses the existence of those rape scenes enjoys the "tune in next time" ending where he stands on a giant map, looking toward the castle, stroking his chin. I mean, it's hard not to get swept up in the theme song describing how "the veins in his temples stand out / his lips firmly pressed together" and "his spirit snarls at the government."
Ah, shit. I'm gonna have to watch part 2, aren't I?
God damn it. This is like how Mike Tyson is interesting and then you remember what he did time for. An inconvenient truth. Say it ain't so, Hanzo. You would've been my hero.
As with all lists like this there's no way to read it without noticing what you think should be on there that's not. Personally I can't help but note that there's not a single Steven Seagal*, Jean-Claude Van Damme or Dolph Lundgren film on there. Is there any Charles Bronson? There's a couple Clints. I'm okay with no Chuck Norris. Stallone and Schwarzenegger get their due, and most of us can get behind the obvious choice for #1. It's got some westerns, some samurai, lots of martial arts. But the b-action gets the shaft. (And blaxploitation, come to think of it.)
*except for MACHETE
But then again I know how the voting was done. We all voted for 10, based on our own definition or criteria of action. So some people are always gonna vote for various things outside of the bounds of straight-ahead action. And it's hard to narrow down to the 10 best. If I was doing the 20 best or the 30 best you bet your ass I would've gotten into Brian Bosworth territory. But trying to honor the full breadth of action cinema history in ten movies, even I neglected Van Damme and Dolph. I blew it, you guys. I'm part of the problem.
On the other hand, I can get behind the vast majority of the movies on the list, and I'm pleased at all the love for Hong Kong. There's my favorite Shaw Brothers movies, there's a whole bunch of Jackie Chan, a couple Jet Li, a couple Donnie Yen, there's five John Woo movies (BULLET IN THE HEAD, A BETTER TOMORROW, THE KILLER, FACE/OFF and HARD BOILED). And EASTERN CONDORS came in at #56! I didn't vote for it but I'm glad somebody else did.
Here was my list:
On another day I would've voted differently, but here was my rationale. #1 and #2 go without saying. The rest I tried to choose based on equal love for the story and characters and for the actual action. I didn't want something that is a great movie that if you think about it has action in it (the Lucas and Spielbergs for example). I wanted it to be a great movie that also I sometimes watch just for the action scenes. For example I love KILL BILL on so many different levels but also I can just watch the fight with Elle Driver in the trailer over and over again and it always moves me. I got movies with incredible physicality and choreography, also chases and stuntwork, and a couple that are just quintessential badass attitude. A decent variety of the type of stuff I love.
7 out of my 10 made the cut for the actual list. The ones that didn't were WAY OF THE DRAGON (ENTER THE DRAGON did, of course), OUT FOR JUSTICE and THE PROTECTOR (ONG BAK did make it). Glancing at the lists I'm pretty sure I'm the only one who voted for THE PROTECTOR or for anything starring Steven Seagal. Oh well. That's how these things go.
To me the funnest part is looking at what the people in the "Actors, directors and stunt performers" category voted for.
Danny Trejo put MACHETE at #1, that's gotta be part of how it gone onto the list. Some of the other guys probly saw that and thought "Ah shit, I didn't know I could vote for my own movie!" I believe he's also in HEAT which is #3 on his list, but that seems fair. Zoe Bell voted for her own movie RAZE (and KILL BILL, where she was the lead stunt double) but at least she put them at the bottom of her list.
I like that Iko Uwais, star of THE RAID, has the Mark Dacascos-teaching-capoeira-to-troubled-teens movie ONLY THE STRONG on his list. I love that movie too but that's a deep cut.
John McTiernan is a funny one too because here's the director of the #1 movie on the list (by quite a margin I'm guessing based on how many lists it's on) and most of the stuff on his list nobody would consider to even be action movies. For example he has FARGO on his list. And THE GRAPES OF WRATH.
One weird thing to make it onto the list is WAR, a poorly reviewed Jet Li-Jason Statham movie from 2007. Not a terrible movie, but when you look at all the things I mentioned above that didn't make the cut its inclusion is a real head-scratcher.
Or that's what I thought anyway. Then I saw that Yayan Ruhian had it at #3 on his list. Shit, if Mad Dog from THE RAID wants it on there it's going on there. I'll allow it.]]>
Maybe that's what I was worried BOXER'S OMEN would be. Then I was looking at the box and it said Bolo Yeung was in it so of course I rented it. Why didn't you say so?
Bolo's the first thing we see in the movie, but as usual he's playing the unsportsmanlike opponent of the hero. He's the Thai boxing champion who's KOd by the Hong Kong champ, but wakes up and kicks him in the back of the head, fracturing his neck.
The champ's brother Hung (Phillip Ko, EIGHT DIAGRAM POLE FIGHTER) has to get revenge on Bolo, but he happens to be going through some weird shit. He's a suave criminal who gets betrayed and hung upside down with his head dipping in a bucket when he's magically rescued by what seems like a hallucination of a monk. While in Thailand to challenge Bolo he has more visions that lead him to a Buddhist temple, where he learns that in a past life he was twins with this monk who's having trouble attaining immortality because of a feud with a black magic wizard (who he attacked at the airport, which reminded me of the witches in MOTHER OF TEARS).
They bring Hung to talk to the monk, who is dead but posed like he's sitting to meditate, and he sort of comes to life to talk to him and tell him what's what. If the monk's body decomposes that will kill Hung, so he gets drawn into some kind of intense wizard duel of sorcery and magic. Man, if it's not cancer it's something like this.
This is where the FUCKIN CRAZY part comes in, and this is most of the movie. It abandons the real world for a soundstage full of demon statues, giant human hands and magic runes where a long series of bizarre rituals are performed. In the airport attack the black magic wizard is turned into an old lady, but a cute puppet bat comes out of her mouth, so the monk takes it home and ritualistically sacrifices it with a magic dagger, so the wizard spits blood on it and chants and resurrects it as a skeleton and makes it march around and later more of these bats come out of the eyes of a bunch of crocodile skeletons and he cuts off the head of a rooster and sprays blood all over them and commands them to chomp their way into battle. You know, that kind of thing.
The thing that really fucks up Hung and the dead monk is when the wizard guy crawls on the ceiling while the monk is asleep and lowers two evil spiders that spit poison needles into the monk's eyes. But, you know, they have various battles throughout the movie involving not just the bats and tarantulas but also rats, snakes, rotting human heads, meal worms, killer caterpillars, piles of bubbling slime that grow into a weird green flying alien head with a wiggly tentacle…
…a burning tree, a glowing, crying mushroom, talking statues, magic crystals, projectile hands, etc. And after some of this type of shit they win the duel. The day is saved. Hung gets to go home.
So it's been a few months and Hung gets back to his girlfriend in Hong Kong. He's exhausted, bald like a monk, disavowing vanity, living a clean life and feeling great about it. This experience seems like it's made him a better man. And they have welcome home sex in the shower.
Here's the trouble with that. Monks take a vow to be celibate. He was living like a monk when he was out there at sorcery camp, but now that he's back to reality he's not gonna stick with that shit. Unfortunately that impurity or whatever opens him up to warlock curses. He has his match against Bolo and he does well, but then all the sudden he's totally blind.
Well ,this is what he sees:
That's not spaghetti, that's worms. This is his life now, 24 hour worm blindness. Somehow he manages to get back to the temple in Thailand (he's surprisingly nimble jumping off a canoe for a guy that sees nothing but worms) to ask the monks for help. Sure enough it was the doing it that caused the problem, a different type of sex = death than in the slasher movies. Once the monks find out they don't want anything to do with him so he runs in to where the monk's corpse is and wrecks his shit until he starts talking again and they go to a big Buddha head with a tree growing out of one eye hole and make a plan to defeat the wizard (it involves cutting open his arm and sewing a magic iron amulet that he got from a mushroom inside his flesh and stealing the holy ashes of a reincarnated monk).
In the final battle there's a lady involved. Already while he was fighting Bolo the fucking wizards were preparing this new curse. See, what you do, you catch a crocodile, right? And you slit its belly open. Then you pull out all the guts and you put a slimy mummified body (or something shaped like a body?) inside the croc's belly and sew it up using its guts and then later you open it up again and take the body out and it's covered in caterpillars and you hose it off and then you chew up and spit out a whole bunch of rotten meat and drurians and other disgusting things and force feed it to the body and it turns into this lady with metal claws and you train her to want to kill the monk using a dummy with a picture of his face attached.
Remember that trick. A little knowledge for you aspiring warlocks out there, that's how you do it.
After seeing this I realize that the weird magic duel in the Steven Seagal/Ching Siu Tung joint BELLY OF THE BEAST could be inspired by this, but as much as I love that movie and those scenes they can't compare. More than that, though, this reminds me of THE HOLY MOUNTAIN, the alchemy scene in particular. Your huge, stylized sets full of ancient symbols and strange architecture, and your complex, bizarre, sometimes disgusting rituals that just happen in front of us with no explanation. Of course, Jodorowsky's story is more laden with spiritual symbols and satirical subtext, this is just a real fancy and insane way for a couple guys to fight each other.
This is a Shaw Brothers movie, but there's very little martial arts. Instead it's heavily choreographed magic battles. For every move there's a countermove. At the end this lady shows up and fires her hands off like a giant robot, they grab onto his pecs like Janet Jackson on the cover of that magazine. But she's no match, she gets her skin torn right off so she looks like Slim Goodbody or Julia from HELLRAISER. And I really do wonder if Clive Barker could've seen this movie, which came out a couple years before HELLRAISER. Probly not, but it has some stuff that really reminds me of the great scene where Frank reconstitutes himself from drops of blood on the floorboards.
Blue paint pours out of her crotch, she gives birth to three little crawling sac babies, turns to sugar that melts away in time lapse as meal worms eat it, then the babies crawl away and grow into the warlock and his two homeboys, and they're mummy-wrapped in Saran Wrap, and they commit ritual suicide and turn into, uh, these guys:
…who shoot electric eye beams at the eyes of a Buddha statue and cause an earthquake and the statues start moving and things blow up and a beam of light goes onto Hung and (spoiler) the needles come out of his eyes. You know how it is. It's another one of those movies.
That was pretty amazing but in my opinion the best move was not a winning move, it was the part where the warlock concentrated real hard and it made his head lift off and rip itself off and then it levitated across and wrapped the hanging viscera around the monk's head.
Now that's a fuckin move, man. If Bolo had learned that he would've won.
Hung is a big shot gangster, not an everyman, but he spends so much time under the moon with slimy things and laser beams shooting around and worms and temples and shit that it must be total mental whiplash to just be, like, on a street or in an apartment or something. Or even a boxing ring. He doesn't really get to be in the normal world that much. In one scene where he is he's staying at a hotel, but he wakes up and pukes out an eel.
So I really love the ending where he finally wins the battle, gets the needles out of his eyes and then he immediately stands up in the middle of all these monks and just struts out. Like, I'm done with this shit. They're all orange, he's blue, he's lit different from them, he completely stands out in the shot. Part of a different world, which he's going the hell back to right fucking now.
There's no way anybody can blame him, but it's too bad. He gave the spiritual world a real shot, and it seemed like it would be good for him. Maybe this was just the wrong monk to be past life twins with.
Also it's a more violent movie than most, or at least more effectively violent. Always good to hear somebody in the back of the theater loudly gasp right at the beginning of a movie. I guess somebody thought this was gonna be about nice, polite combat.
But I think FURY is signifying something too, and I'm still processing what I think about that. Writer/director David Ayer last did the really enjoyable Schwarzenegger movie SABOTAGE, which was a more fun and pulpy version of his usual topic, the Burnt Out Cops That Cross the Line (END OF WATCH, HARSH TIMES, STREET KINGS, TRAINING DAY). And this is kinda like the soldier version of that.
It seems to be saying that even a "good war" is barbaric business, and that even The Greatest Generation were a bunch of dicks. In contrast to almost any other WWII movie we don't see any of the Nazi war crimes, I don't think we even hear about them. We just see Germans being soldiers, usually outnumbered and on the losing end of a fight. We see them captured, terrorized and executed. We even see one offering a crucial, unexplained act of mercy to an American. And we see German citizens that have been hung in the streets for not joining the war. In other words, alot of these bad guys we're seeing get blown to bits didn't have much of a choice.
The Americans are not painted as positively as they usually are in movies about this particular conflict, they're more of the Vietnam War movie type. The crew's brand new gun assistant (Ladies Love Logan Lerman) is in a similar boat as some of the Germans. He's a secretary thrown into combat. He's never seen the inside of a tank before, he's never killed anybody and he doesn't want to. When his hesitation to shoot a child gets another tank blown up, Sergeant Brad Pitt drags him out, slaps him around, yells at him and forces him to shoot a captured German soldier in the back. Everybody else stands around unimpressed, like they've seen this a thousand times.
Didn't know you like to get wet, dog. King Kong ain't got shit on Brad Pitt.
The other crew members do their best to bully, torment and threaten the kid, and try to guilt him for not having suffered through as many horrors as they have so far. They're such yahoos they come across like post-apocalypse punks or Texas Chain Saw family members. In fact the big tour-de-force character scene strangely reminded me of the classic TEXAS CHAIN SAW dinner scene. Two German women sit terrified at their own table forced to endure a hateful meal while the soldiers fight over one of the girls.
Pitt sort of becomes the good guy in this scene, protecting the girl (whose boldly colored dress makes her pop off of the mostly grey and faded green screen like she's from a different world). But earlier he was the one who barged into this woman's apartment and decided that the kid would hook up with her cousin, who he found hidden under the bed.
The implication is that they worry the girl is too pretty for these American pillagers not to try to rape her. Which turns out to be true. They're marching around the village trying on people's clothes, taking people's food, grabbing terrified women like they're auditioning to be in the Pirates of the Caribbean ride. They walk on the rubble and joke around, showing nothing close to a sign of sympathy for the innocent conquered locals.
It's grim and harsh but it's not all rubbing your nose in the shit. There are some laughs, some scenes of bonding, some humanity. A little bit. I really like the scene where they're on top of the tank talking about religion, they're all kinda teasing LaBeouf about his concepts of who will and won't go to Heaven. They really have a chemistry there like they've been together a long time and they've had this conversation before but they're always happy to do it again because it amuses them.
It's kinda weird seeing Pitt killing Nazis again not that long after INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS, where he had such a great character and colorful performance. There are definitely shades of Aldo Raine here, he's going for a similar intense manliness, but he's a little more normal I guess. And there's no rule that says you're only allowed to do one WWII movie. It used to be an actor could do a dozen war movies or westerns without doing different accents or anything and it was fine.
I guess the big difference between the characters is this guy is more like a mean dad or coach. He can be a total asshole but he's doing it – or at least believes he's doing it, or maybe just wants you to believe he's doing it – out of tough love. Shortly after slapping the kid around and forcing him to commit a war crime he tells him to make sure to get something to eat before they leave. Don't worry son, I'm looking out for you.
Also his hair is shorter on the sides, almost bald, that's pretty different.
Jon Bernthal (Walking Dead season 1 and 2, WOLF OF WALL STREET) puts in another movie-stealing performance, though I wish he got a chance to do a little more of the scenes where he does something other than menace people and be a prick. Same goes for Michael Pena, although he gets to be a little funnier at least. LaBeouf's character is probly the most complicated because he's always trying to be the righteous Christian member of the team but then he has no objections to their terrorizing those German cousins.
LaBeouf does a good job, but I feel bad that he thought he had to yank out a tooth for that. I only noticed it in one or two shots, and it could've easily been faked. Also it wouldn't make much difference if he just had all his teeth in those shots. I don't see missing-a-tooth as an important character trait there. I can only hope that feeling the empty space with his tongue helped him get into character and take the performance to the next level.
I have to admit I'm not much of a Lerman-maniac. I don't like how we always gotta have these kinda bland everyboy characters as an audience surrogate. I guess the idea is that it's okay to have a bunch of interesting crazy guys on screen as long as the main character is a younger guy that's kinda weak and lacking in personality. To be honest I thought he was the same kid from JACK THE GIANT SLAYER and/or WAR HORSE. I don't know the difference between these guys.
Imagine if in RESERVOIR DOGS there was a wimpy young kid who was the new guy in the gang being shown the ropes. Just to make sure we as the audience have an entry into that world. That wouldn't be as good in my opinion.
Okay, admittedly it has more of a purpose in this one. He's the innocent who tries to make it through war without his soul getting soiled. One minute he's a harmless typist, the next his morals are responsible for one of his fellow Americans being on fire shooting himself in the head. I get it.
It's a rough journey to take, but a good one. If you like a good war movie this one stands out, definitely worth your time. Pretty cool theme song too:
I think I saw BRAINSCAN a long time ago and thought it was stupid. And I was right. But watching it again I think I give it a little more credit than I did back then. It's definitely not of the quality one would hope for from the director of ROLLING THUNDER and the writer of SEVEN. But even in its dated technology (it's about an evil interactive CD-ROM) it's kind of ahead of its time, and it has a very ominous tone to it, darker and more unsavory than the NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET sequels it was aping.
Like, in the opening scene Michael (Edward "and if you want to shine them on it's 'Hasta la vista, baby"" Furlong) is talking to his best bud for life Kyle (Jamie Marsh) on the phone while watching his neighbor Kimberly (Amy Hargreaves from BLUE RUIN) change her shirt. When he comes away from the window he turns on the TV… but then we see that he's watching her on the TV from a camera he set up. Then he makes a hang up call and watches the footage of her answering in slow motion. At least he's not jerking off as far as we can see, but jesus. This is our protagonist?
Michael is not that bad a prediction of what life is like for a big chunk of society now. He's a kid who spends most of his time in his bedroom with his technology. He has a voice activated animated "Igor" on his TV screen that he tells to dial numbers for him or hold his calls or other things. It's unclear how intelligent it is. He talks on speaker phone and the TV screen shows photo montages of his friends. He's ahead of his time.
Where he gets this technology is not really spelled out, but his only parental interaction during the movie is a voicemail from his dad telling him he loves him and that "Business is going well here. I wish you were here with me to see all the new equipment." His mom died in front of him when he was a kid. It still haunts him, and is implied as maybe the reason he's so attracted to the morbid shit.
Kyle tells Michael about an ad in Fangoria for this fucked up CD-ROM game called Brainscan, so he skeptically calls and talks to the operator, then it just shows up. Supposedly they scanned his brain over the phone to make a game specifically for him. All it is is he watches a bunch of trippy designs on the TV and gets hypnotized and then experiences what it's like to sneak into somebody's bedroom and murder them. That part is done POV style kinda like STRANGE DAYS or the remake of MANIAC, giving you a little bit of that same dirty feeling, implicating you in the murder. The scene is kinda silly (the guy having a big tattoo on his foot so we will be able to identify it later is a little forced) but also kinda disturbing (stumbling around with a bloody sheet stuck to his back by a knife is an odd, messy detail that makes it feel more real).
Michael and Kyle are obviously meant to capture a little of the ol' zeitgeist for what some teens may or may not have been feeling at the time. You know these young people, they're real morbid and feel misunderstood and hate the man because fuck you, teen spirit. The soundtrack has what I believe is a pretty legit line up of alternative rock type business that was popular in the couple years before: Butthole Surfers, Primus, White Zombie, and Seattle's own Tad and Mudhoney. Some of the rockin out during horror scenes sounds pretty cheesy, but the score by George S. Clinton is really effective, reminded me more of Angelo Badalamenti's Twin Peaks shit than Clinton's MORTAL KOMBAT and what not.
I'm always okay with Furlong as an actor, because he saves the world in the future and he likes Public Enemy. But there's a couple parts here where he kind of overdoes his "I'm upset" business, dropping things and pulling his hair back over and over. On the other hand there's one part where he rides a scooter which in my opinion is a good use of his motor bike riding skills from T2. Adds production value.
Michael's supposed to be sort of a lonely outcast. Homicide detective Frank Langella claims that when he asked his schoolmates about him they described him as frightening, strange, weird, a freak. But it doesn't seem like Kyle is his only friend. Michael started a horror club where a bunch of the other kids with long hair and shit sit in a classroom and watch what looks like a '70s Hammer movie with gore called DEATH DEATH DEATH PART 2. The uptight principal shuts down his club, but hey, at least somebody let him start it in the first place. There is some room for him to be himself.
But himself is a dude who is attracted to death and violence. And this is obviously supposed to explore that in some way. This game makes him feel like he committed murder, and he tells his friend how intense and awesome it was, but of course all the sudden they find out that this really was a murder that happened in the neighborhood. Playing the game seems to make him black out and murder people, but he can't stop playing the game because he's being threatened.
This brings me to the indisputable #1 reason why this movie doesn't work, which is the villain, "The Trickster" (T. Ryder Smith, John Brown on The Abolitionists), the host of the video game who comes out of the screen and makes a mess out of the house like the Cat in the Hat. He's obviously supposed to be a Freddy type character, but based on the later, lame Freddy that makes bad puns and does magic tricks (breaking his own fingers, spinning a CD on his finger). Also, he looks like he's wearing an outfit stolen from Michael Jackson's GHOSTS and has a ridiculous receded-all-the-way-to-the-back glam rocker hair. Actually he's as much Drop Dead Fred as Freddy Krueger. This guy sucks. Arguably dumber than Wishmaster.
This pulls the old classic of showing The Three Stooges on a TV a couple times, which could be interpreted as showing that violence in entertainment is not a new phenomenon, or as a relatively cheap way to get something recognizable on the TV. Or maybe it's supposed to be deep. The stupid fucking Trickster seems to think he's teaching Michael a lesson about his attraction to violence. Like, oh yeah, you like DEATH DEATH DEATH PART 2 and have a subscription to Fangoria, well what about if you were tricked into going around committing a series of actual murders? Not so fun now, is it?
But of course Michael is 100% correct: there is a difference between imaginary violence and real. A huge, very obvious and definable difference (one is fake and has no consequences, the other is real and hurts real people). It's not like there's some blurry line between fake movie violence and actual stabbing of people. Maybe to an asshole monster rock star guy with giant hair who has the power to walk in and out of a TV it's hard to tell the difference, but to actual humans it's very clear and not a reasonable comparison. So fuck off, Trickster.
But despite that dork I gotta say it's a really good fear they're exploiting here. Usually in movies you're scared of the bad guy killing you. Being scared of you killing people is less common (though used in werewolf movies of course, and the first part of NIGHTBREED). It's just a really upsetting nightmare, the idea that suddenly you wake up and you're guilty of murder, your whole life is ruined forever. Since the protagonist is accidentally doing thrill kills and then having to sneak around and burn evidence and try to hide his guilt it's a real sleazy kind of dark not seen in many teen horror movies since A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET 2. So I think it's kinda nice that (SPOILER) it ends up pretty happy. Yeah, it's easy to guess that the whole thing is the game, but I never would've predicted how invested it would be in the IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE ending, having him tell his friend that he loves him and missed him, and actually spending time dealing with whether or not he gets the balls to ask the girl out.
Of course then there's some bullshit in the end credits where the Trickster says "Forgetting something?" and it goes back to a scene from the beginning. No, I'm not forgetting something, I was already told this shit didn't happen. You're not making any sense. Go play air guitar by yourself in a closet or something. Make up some new tricks for the sequel that you're never gonna get. Nobody wants to see or hear your dumb ass ever again. You were born obsolete.
The one notable thing about that stupid tacked on scene is that it involves a dog from earlier in the movie, and of course we all know that John Flynn's OUT FOR JUSTICE has a weird tacked-on-after-reshoots last scene that also involves a dog from earlier in the movie. Maybe that was his curse, having to get stuck with scenes like that.
The weirdest, most uncomfortable aspect is the voyeurism part from the beginning. I mean, I don't think it's supposed to be sweet that he's making recordings of her taking her clothes off. But we find out that she has a crush on him too, and they fall in love. There's no subplot about having to hide that he's been recording her. The way they resolve this is to have him find a folder of photos she took of him through his window. But those aren't as much of a violation. He's just brooding and what not, he's not taking his clothes off. It's a false equivalency in my opinion.
So I do think this is one way the movie is kinda observant, even if I'm not 100% sure what exactly it's observing. The technology developed since then has mixed with young people's weird sexuality and turned into a mess. I think of the recent incident with hacking of celebrity nude photos. It used to be that a peeping tom was the scum of the earth. Now with technology we can all be the town pervert from the comfort of our living rooms.
Because of celebrity hacking there's been this problem I've had on Twitter: if a celebrity name is trending I think "Oh no, did they die or are they just on an awards show right now?" But you gotta weigh your curiosity about if they're okay vs. your aversion to the possibility of their naked photos popping up. This happened to me with an Academy Award winning actress, I honestly didn't know, the photos just appeared when I clicked her name. And I cannot lie, they were impressive photos. But she didn't make those to be shown to us, they were stolen from her, this was a sex crime, and for a minute there I was involved. It feels gross. But there are plenty of other people who don't even see the problem, they feel like they're entitled to see everybody naked just like they're entitled to download any movie or song they want for free. So that's where we are right now. I blame The Trickster.
* * *
The inspiration for renting this again was all this "#GamerGate" business. Hopefully some of you never heard of it, especially if you're reading this in the archive. Right now it's a controversy in the world of video games that has poured over so loudly into the human world that even people like me who don't play video games (except the occasional Ms. Pac-Man) ended up seeing enough references to it to get curious and try to figure out what it is. In that sense it's exactly like when I see some gibberish phrase trending on Twitter and I click on it and read up on it for 5-10 minutes before deciding it must have something to do with the boy band "One Direction."
Here's my understanding of what "#GamerGate" is:
1. A guy who used to date a lady who made a small independent video game posted a long too-much-information blog post claiming she was a real meanie who cheated on him with multiple dudes
2. Thousands of video game nerds started harassing the ex-girlfriend, telling her they were going to rape and kill her, exposing her home address, calling up her dad and telling him she was a whore, sending her co-workers her nude photos, saying she faked it and fun pranks like that. Just joshin' around though, nothing serious. Internets will be internets.
3. Also they said that games journalists were corrupt because allegedly one of them had slept with the video game designer, although he had only written about her before that and didn't review her game
4. Notoriously dickish actor Adam Baldwin (COHEN AND TATE) linked to a video about it and used the hashtag "#GamerGate."
Now the group of angry videogamers is called "GamerGate" and "GamerGate supporters." It's not clear if they understand that the "gate" from "Watergate" implies a scandal to expose rather than a movement to support, and I'm not clear why Baldwin thought the second G should be capitalized. But I guess it's kind of late to change it to something good.
5. Other women in the world of video games keep having to leave their homes or cancel speaking engagements because of creepily specific threats. Most recently it was a lady who did a series of videos analyzing sexist tropes in video games, and she got a long letter promising a massacre at the school where she was supposed to speak. Basically these little shitbags harass and threaten them and then when it becomes public the same shitbags or their associate shitbags accuse them of making up the whole thing to get attention. Just real classy stuff like classy gentlemen do.
(Here's a good take on the movement or whatever from somebody who's researched it much more thoroughly.)
The biggest contention between GamerGate and the rest of the world is about what GamerGate even is. According to them they're an ethnically and politically diverse group of women, girls, other women, many different minorities and one or two white men (if any, but most likely not) who are trying to stop corruption in video game journalism. According to everyone else they're some assholes who hate women and like to harass them online and also play video games.
Why, the GamerGaters want to know, do all the articles focus on misogyny and harassment done, they say, by a very small anonymous group of trolls who coincidentally started at the same time as them for the same reason using the same name and targets and arguments and goals but are otherwise completely unrelated and there's nothing they can do about them? Why don't the articles not mention that and instead talk about the totally different issue of "ethics in video game journalism" that they want to talk about?
Well, no offense GamerGate, but the answer is that most people don't give a shit about that. The number of people who play video games AND read about them AND think there's an epidemic of compromised reviews AND are angry enough to want to read and campaign about that issue is not enough to get this much attention. If that was all this was ever about none of us would have heard of you. But we do hate sexist assholes, so when we hear about some weird Nerd Taliban's harassment campaign against women who they suspect of sexual activity or video game analysis it piques our interest. So those guys who you don't know and are completely opposed to and unaffiliated with are the ones we're talking to. They're the ones whose crazy, hateful and deluded tweets and blog posts have pulled us into a masochistic sinkhole of fascinating awfulness. If you're a different GamerGate don't worry about it, we're talking to the other one.
You know, this is kind of like when the World Wildlife Foundation sued the World Wrestling Federation for having the same abbreviation. It's not about the Camel Clutch and the DDT, it's about pandas in natural habitats.
After weeks of reading GamerGate shit this is the conclusion I've come to: these are people who can't accept their video games being treated as art instead of product. They, or other gamers, have been whining for god damn years about respecting games as art. If Roger Ebert was alive he'd tell you how many fucking letters he got about it when he said they didn't deserve that. Now it's happening and these guys don't know what to do.
Look at who their targets are. That first one they went after was known for creating a free indie game about depression. It won awards and people hated that because they don't consider a minimalistic, self-expressing, message type of thing to be a game. If they respected games as art they'd say "Not my thing" and go play something else. Instead they fixated on her, tried to uncover some kind of wrongdoing, any kind of wrongdoing. That people who write about games for a living (or as a passion) did find it interesting and wrote about it killed them. There's no room for artistic movements in video games.
My guess is these are the video game equivalent of the dummies who watch movies but don't really respect them and still feel the need to open their big stupid mouths about them. The people who see DRIVE and try to sue the distributor because it was different from FAST AND THE FURIOUS or see THE AMERICAN and are outraged that it's quiet and low on explosions. If they see something arty they can't just say "That's not for me," they get mad that somebody must think they don't get it and they say they hate "critics" and if somebody liked it they must've gotten paid off. Or in this case sucked off.
Sadly this is promoting the popular stereotype that people who play video games have never had sex. In some of these cases you gotta assume it's true. Look, I've never had sex, but I know what it is. It's when the parked car shakes up and down in Grand Theft Auto. And it is how small independent games that aren't what I'm into get positive write ups on websights.
Their other obsession is a lady who did a series of Youtube videos analyzing sexist tropes in video games and other pop culture. They hassled her so much they made her kind of famous and got her onto the Colbert Report, and as far as I can tell she has no connection to the topics of ethics or journalism. But she does analyze video games, and find things that they disagree with.
The thing is, if you love an artform you love to dissect it and look for meaning in it and find new ways to do it. I haven't watched all these videos, I'm sure there's plenty of stuff to legitimately disagree with, but they are obviously heavily researched and based in a reality that women are often portrayed in degrading ways in pop culture. If she didn't have a point they could easily just ignore her videos, like the whole world does with 99% of stupid Youtube videos. If you don't agree with her conclusions you rebut them or make your own argument or you ignore her. This discussion and debate is part of what art is about. It's part of the fun.
Are you a horror fan? Do you use the term "Final Girl"? Well, that term and entire concept came from a feminist analysis of slasher movies, Carol J. Clover's Men, Women and Chainsaws. This type of study can be both fun and important. If video games are so great that you base your life around them then they can fucking stand the examination, you ninnies. Jesus.
Are you afraid of anybody looking too deep into games, or are you just afraid somebody might think your favorite game is sexist? In reading what these people write, it's clear that for many of them, possibly most of them, this is a backwards, conservative type of movement. They constantly use the words "feminist" and "social justice warrior" (usually abbreviated to SJW they use it so much) as insults, seemingly unaware that justice and equality are considered positive concepts to normal, not-crazy people. For example here are just a few of the comments on this video of a heartbroken nerd spending 8 minutes responding to one anti-GamerGate tweet by Joss Whedon:
(To answer that last guy, Whedon wrote and directed a movie called THE AVENGERS a couple years back, but I don't think much came of it.)
Like Rush Limbaugh and his "feminazis" (also a word I've seen GamerGaters use), these pricks have redefined feminism to mean anti-male. They're those "men's rights advocate" dipshits with the persecution complex where they really believe whatever minor inconveniences they've experienced from being male (If I walk close behind a woman at night she thinks I'm a rapist!) is as bad as actual oppression. I remember a guy 20 years ago saying to me "If there was a channel called White Entertainment Television people would say it was racist!" I always think about that one when I come across another one of these type of knuckleheads. They make my blood boil.
In addition to the feminist analyst, many GamerGaters fixate on two female game makers who they always label as feminists even though it's rarely relevant to the allegations of ethics violations that they claim are their only concern. They're at least sexist enough that many of them un-self-consciously refer to one of their hated enemies as "5 Guys" in reference to claims of her having multiple sex partners. They've attached themselves to the nutball right wing tabloid Breitbart.com. Some of them probly don't like this, but they're perceived as backwards enough that they've gotten the support of the white supremacist sight Stormfront. That's not a problem that most ethics campaigns have to deal with.
Despite that right wing bent they've fallen in love with enforcing the kind of rigid sensitivity that conservatives call "political correctness." They have a separate, cryptic hashtag campaign (#NotYourShield, whatever that means) to promote all the women and minorities who support them, and they accuse opponents of "silencing minority voices" by not agreeing with them. They specialize in finding tweets that they can take literally or simply misinterpret and accuse the person of insensitivity and demand an apology, or for their employer to fire them, or for all other feminists to disavow a moronic misinterpretation of somebody's words. And it's nearly impossible to tell if these people know they're completely full of horse shit (ha ha, I'll pretend to be upset to get them in trouble) or if they've fallen into some undercover-in-too-deep type situation where they can't even tell where their true feelings end and their phony ass whining campaign begins.
It's ironic that they've adopted those tactics, because I think some of them are in it out of a fear of censorship. After weeks of reading up on this and being as confused by the GamerGaters as the people who fuck My Little Pony dolls (no overlap implied), I finally came across a comment on an article that seemed to illuminate some things. In the middle of a bunch of hysterical, hard-to-translate-for-outsiders claptrap about the movement this guy said something about somebody trying to ban video games. Of course I would be against that too, but as far as I can tell there's not anyone making a serious attempt to do that, and even if some asshole tried to do it, in today's world of downloaded content I just don't think it would be possible. So it's ridiculous. But the fact that this guy is scared of it is significant I think.
I think that's what it is for some of these kids. They think that anybody critical of their video games is like Michael's principal in BRAINSCAN, or Tipper Gore and the people trying to ban dirty lyrics in the '80s. They think they're protecting their shit.
But they're doing the same thing the PMRC, the Reverend Don Wildmon and other anti-rock or movie or TV scolds of the '80s did: contacting advertisers and employers of people who wrote columns they disagreed with and pathetically threatening a boycott. In one case they actually got some nitwit at Intel to pull advertising from Gawker by pretending to be too stupid to understand a tweet (!) by one of their writers and shaming them as "pro-bullying". (Intel later tried to distance themselves once they figured just who it was they had caved in to.)
Honestly I've got more respect for the PMRC because at least their tattle-taling and snitching was based on authentic prudery. Look how these weiners crowdsource finding old posts to pretend to be offended by.
And of course these campaigns have been aimed at writers of editorials they disagreed with for saying that the culture of the stereotypical gamer dude was obsolete. Again, as far as I've seen none of these things have any connection to the crusade for "ethics in video game journalism" they talk about. In fact, encouraging writers to cater their content based on the demands of their advertisers is the opposite of promoting ethics in journalism.
Have you ever been in a place of business and some douche is unhappy with some policy or perceived failure in service and they make a big scene and demand to see the manager and all that? Those are the worst fucking people. Even if something completely outrageous happened you could usually try to be calm and polite, but these people have a sense of entitlement. They believe that "the customer is always right, no matter how obviously unreasonable and dickish" is enshrined in the Constitution. And also they probly never worked a job like that and see service people and low wage workers as subhumans.
Well, that's what GamerGate does. They can't rebut an argument without sounding crazy, so instead they write letters to the bosses. They want to see a manager. It's a movement based on the techniques of the crazy asshole you wanted to get kicked out of the store or the high maintenance grandma who embarrasses her family at a restaurant.
Ethics, though
But you know, I'm sure some of them actually are concerned about the ethicalness or whatever, and that's not a bad thing. Obviously there are bigger fish to fry in the world of journalism (do they know about Judith Miller?) but I'm sure there is shit going on that's worth complaining (not rape-threating) about.
But this brings me back to my original point of them not accepting video games as art. They're not talking about hard reporting here (whatever that would be in video games), they're talking about reviews. They refuse to accept the reality that reviews are (and should be) subjective. They don't want intelligent criticism or good writing, they want soul-less consumer reports.
I can think of one example of a serious ethics violation in criticism, but it was in music. I remember in the early 2000s I started reading The Source magazine again to try to stay up on the newer hip hop. I liked some of the things they were doing but at that time they had a weird vendetta against Eminem, spending an inordinate number of pages attacking him in everything ranging from essays by well known scholars comparing him to Elvis (in a bad way) to juvenile comic strips making fun of him. They called him racist and even dug up a tape he made as a teenager where he dissed a black ex-girlfriend, tried to make a big tabloid style scandal out of it. Another thing that seemed odd at that time, every issue had multi-page ads for a group called Made Men, who I never heard of anywhere else. I kept wondering, how big is this label's advertising budget?
What I didn't know at first was that a Boston rapper named Benzino who hated Eminem had become part owner of the magazine and was pushing this anti-Eminem agenda. More importantly Made Men was his group, and they received a cover story and a 4 out of 5 mic review. It was fishy, to say the least.
I haven't seen accusations of anything like that going on in the video game world. I think there are only accusations of hobnobbery. They believe that the people who are passionate enough to write about video games should not be friends with the ones passionate enough to write about them. This is a well-meaning sentiment, but weird.
As a critic in a different artform that has worked by an unusually rigid samurai code, I think I'm qualified to comment on this. I've been uncomfortable sometimes with a phenomenon I call "Friends of the Internet," where directors and people who write about movies have built some kind of friendships over the course of junkets and film festivals and it seems to me like sometimes it makes the writers see way more in their movies than a normal person would and overrate them. This was my theory for the internet popularity of KICK-ASS, for example.
I don't really think that's ethics, though. Criticism is not journalism or science. It's not about facts. It's about interpretations, connections, feelings and ideas, and it's the responsibility of the writer to either catch themselves being too easy on a movie because of their personal relationships or communicate that that relationship is part of their subjective view of the movie. Writing a review that's too affected by a personal relationship is something I as a writer strive to avoid, but it's not fucking Watergate. And even if it was I don't think anybody should be sending out naked pictures of Matthew Vaughn or threatening to stick something up his butt.
And although personally I try to avoid reviewing things by people I've had some interaction with there is not a code of ethics that requires this. You think Roger Ebert didn't become friends with a bunch of directors and actors over the years? Of course he did.
In fact, look what I just uncovered. Roger Ebert once dated Oprah Winfrey. Source: Oprah Winfrey. AND THEN HE GAVE THE COLOR PURPLE A 4-STAR REVIEW AND CALLED IT THE BEST MOVIE OF THE YEAR!!! Smoking gun! #ThumbsUpGate
Or maybe it's okay for artists to know critics. These things happen. It's okay because we can tell when a critic is full of shit, including in Benzinogate. It's fine.
But seriously you guys, just get a different name besides GamerGate if you're not about the things it's associated with to the rest of the world. Do you think the makers of the Brainscan CD-ROM would've kept the same name if it had really caused a murder spree? "No, that's not us, that was the Trickster. We never condoned that." Come on fellas. Use your noggins.
* * *
Wrapping up, I guess the relevant question is "Would Michael from BRAINSCAN support GamerGate?" It's hard to know. Due to his experiences with the principal shutting down the horror club he might have that fear of censorship. He's not yet able to intelligently articulate a defense of violent movies and games, but doesn't want to lose them. Due to a childhood without a mother and his limited experience with girls, except in an electronic spying capacity, it's possible that he would be a strongwomanphobe, but I don't remember any evidence of that in the movie. As far as ethics in video game journalism I think he probly doesn't care, because it's not like he looked up reviews for Brainscan. He just saw the ad and ordered it. He likes there to still be some mystery in this world. (But Fangoria reviews horror games now so he has it covered.)
Maybe GamerGate is kind of the same as the Horror Club. It's people trying to protect something they love from people they think don't understand it, but they can't make a good argument because they don't really understand it either. Michael could've grown out of that, or he could still be holed up in that room, more reclusive than ever, talking to a super-advanced version of Igor, running GamerGate, a gore movie subreddit and a network of bathroom spy cams via voice commands. We don't know.
But I doubt it. It was only a game, and he didn't even like it in the end. I bet he turned out okay.
1. I think we can all agree, !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
2. I cannot find Lucas Black anywhere in this trailer
3. There is a little bit of Tony Jaa though (he's in that bus they attack)
4. The careful editing of dialogue over Paul Walker shots is moving without being tacky, in my opinion
5. I don't know who that lady is but I like how she seems to be a normal person not familiar with the rules of the Furiousverse so she just flops onto the hood of the car and screams
But today instead of another review I thought I should do something different, a Halloween special if you will. Something great and beautiful and timeless that really captures the traditions and atmosphere and feelings of the holiday, like It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown, the world's only animated tribute to sincerity. Good cartoon in my opinion. I should totally do something like that if I'm up to it. Or maybe I could write about the Freddy Krueger rapping, that might be something more appropriate to my level of expertise. I guess I'll do the second one.
In the late 1980s, a period when horror sequels were a major part of pop culture, there were two songs by popular rap acts that were inspired by the A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET saga. Let's take a look at them both.
"A Nightmare On My Street" by DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince was the first track on their second album He's the DJ, I'm the Rapper (released April 5, 1988, between ELM STREETs 3 and 4). There was a single of it released in August, but not a video.
The Fresh Prince (who is now known as the popular movie actor Will Smith, little bit of trivia for you there) plays himself, talking about getting off of a tour and going to the movies with his DJ, his beatboxer and their dates. But when he goes home and sleeps he's haunted by Freddy, who he describes as "burnt up like a weenie." He alternates between a jokey tone and a serious one, telling Freddy that he can't pick up girls because "your face is all burnt," but also describing creepy images from the movie like a melting phone and slashes in his sheets that are still there when he wakes up.
This song is not officially connected to the ELM STREET series, so Smith (I believe) gets to play the part of Freddy. (For the record, that means Robert Englund, Jackie Earle Haley and Will Smith are the three actors who have played Freddy.)
This Freddy does indeed rap. The voice is electronically lowered and sounds pretty accurate to how he sounded in part 1. It works surprisingly well, especially when he manages to work part 2's famous "You've got the body and I've got the brain" line into a rhyme.
One Freddy line I have gone 26 years not understanding is, at least according to whoever made the above Youtube video, "You turned off David Letterman now you must die." Okay, I'll take it. There's alot of late night TV viewing in the ELM STREET movies, isn't there? So it was smart to get that into the song. Welcome to prime time, bitch.
The part that seems to be taking it most seriously is at the end when he calls Jazzy Jeff in a panic at 3 a.m. to warn him not to fall asleep. Instead of rhyming about it he actually acts it out, complete with phone dialing sound effects and everything. Of course the call is interrupted by Freddy, who changes his "I'm your boyfriend now" line from part 1 to "I'm your DJ now, Princey!"
That's an absurd concept, that they would become DJ Freddy Fred and the Fresh Prince, but let's not take it literally. It's just one of those stupid things Freddy would say to him in a nightmare. Freddy would be wearing a red and green striped Kangol bucket hat and a fat gold rope with a medallion version of his glove, and he would fold his arms in a b-boy stance before cutting into his head with a bunch of records and then using an iced out version of his claws as needles to scratch with the records, slicing him up in the meanwhile. This dream would happen on a set with spraypainted cartoons on a white background like the "Parents Just Don't Understand" video.
"Are You Ready For Freddy" is another Freddy rap song, this one by The Fat Boys. It's on their album Coming Back Hard Again, but originally played over the end credits of A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET 4: THE DREAM MASTER. Yes, that means it's an official Elm Street song with Robert Englund rapping as Freddy. I never knew this, but according to Wikipedia it actually came out as a single a few weeks before the Fresh Prince album came out.
As you can see this one did have a video about Freddy stalking the Fat Boys through the famous 1428 Elm Street house that Nancy (and the kid from part 2) lived in. It was directed by Harvey Keith, who had directed the performance art movie MONDO NEW YORK that came out the same year.
The Fat Boys drive up on scooters wearing striped sweaters and learn from an uptight white lawyer that they have to spend a night in the house to get an inheritance from Prince Marky D's "Uncle Frederick," a relative from a part of his family he never told his fellow Boys about. This bit of information is never addressed in the movies (or even the boring remake) but in my opinion it is for sure canon. In FREDDY'S DEAD when Freddy's daughter was the only one who could kill him she could've called her cousin Prince Marky D to help.
Also, this proves that DISORDERLIES is part of the ELM STREET franchise and should be included in future box sets.
This being official gives the Fat Boys a bit of an advantage, they're able to be on an authentic set with picket fences and Renny Harlin style beams of light shining out of the boarded windows into the smoke. The production design is by Mick Strawn, who also did THE DREAM MASTER and the Freddy's Nightmares TV series. Almost cheating. Also they get to use footage from the movies and samples of Nancy's voice from part 1.
And of course they have Robert Englund as Freddy, both in the video and on the recording. We've heard Freddy say some pretty ridiculous things between the sequels, the Freddy's Nightmares intros and the time he hosted MTV's Headbanger's Ball (I have that on VHS somewhere) but this is one of the few times he ever said "Yo, bust a rhyme!"
The Fat Boys do more of a free-form song talking about different Freddy-related topics rather than telling a story like The Fresh Prince did. But there's alot of overlap in the content:
* Both have some very cliche old school lines in them: Fresh Prince starts out with "Now I have a story that I'd like to tell" and Freddy uses "You see my name is Freddy and I'm here to say." (Advantage Fresh Prince on that one, since Freddy's line forces our brains to expect "I love Fruity Pebbles in a major way" as the next line.)
* Both describe Freddy's clothing. Fresh Prince makes fun of him because "He wears the same hat and sweater every single day / and even if it's hot outside he wears it anyway." But I really like the Fat Boys saying that he wears a "hat like a vagabond." Vagabond is not a word you hear in enough rap songs in my opinion.
* Fresh Prince describes Freddy attacking him in bed and slashing his sheets. The "Are You Ready For Freddy" video shows this happening to the Fat Boys.
* Both blur the line between movie and reality by talking about Freddy as a real guy but also mentioning his movies. Fresh Prince talks about seeing "ELM STREET" in the theater (I assume that's the original but I suppose it could abbreviate whatever the latest is at the time of the incident). Prince Marky Dee specifically brings up a previous sequel: "Even in part 3, the Dream Warriors failed."
* Both use their fear as wacky hijinks. Fresh Prince does it better, claiming unconvincingly "Heh, I wasn't that scared anyway" after waking up from his nightmare. But the Fat Boys video combines scaredy cat humor with fat guy humor for the ultimate lowest common denominator jokes. In one scene Buffy the Human Beat Box runs and jumps on a bed in fear and it breaks. In the last scene the Boys come running out of the house and trample over some dude carrying groceries. But Buffy overcomes his fear long enough for the video to end on a freeze frame of him eating one of the guy's powdered donuts.
The Fat Boys deserve credit for their rapping, which is a little more complex than Fresh Prince's. But the production, with the female backup singers singing about Freddy and the slick slap bassline, is over-polished and cheesy. When Freddy starts rapping over it it reminds me of something that could be on a WWF album such as Piledriver: The Wrestling Album II.
"A Nightmare On My Street," on the other hand finds a perfect way to rework Charles Bernstein's original ELM STREET theme into a keyboard loop that's a little bit funky, a little bit creepy. I didn't expect this when listening to this song for the first time in many years, but musically this is a great song, which you don't usually get in a novelty tune. Just having better music behind it may be the secret to their fake Freddy's rap sounding better than the real one's. Or maybe it is possible that Grammy award winner Will Smith has a better flow than Robert Englund, I'm not sure.
Despite "Are You Ready For Freddy" being first, officially licensed and played over the end credits of part 4, "A Nightmare On My Street" is the clear winner here. There is no ambiguous ending like in FREDDY VS. JASON. It's just a way better song.
Anyway, happy Halloween everybody! You've earned it!
The end credits of A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET 5: THE DREAM CHILD feature a way better rap song, "Let's Go" by Kool Moe Dee. This one has nothing to do with Freddy, though, it's actually a diss of LL Cool J (HALLOWEEN H20 TWENTY YEARS LATER). It was nominated for a Razzie Award for "Worst Original Song" (fuck you Razzies) but lost to "Bring Your Daughter… to the Slaughter" by Bruce Dickinson, also from THE DREAM CHILD, since we were going through an awkward heavy metal to hip hop transition in the world of horror sequel soundtracks.]]>
Wow, DEATH SPA was not what I expected from a movie about a spa of death. This is a much more professional and imaginative movie than its Fitness Horror forefather KILLER WORKOUT. Sure, it's completely ridiculous, because it's about a whole bunch of spectacular deaths at a health club run by a supercomputer. But it's a little more credible than that sounds, in my opinion. A little.
It opens with a long, show-offy tracking shot in which some of the letters on the STARBODY HEALTH SPA neon light go out so it spells "D EA TH SPA". And then the first woman we see practicing alone in the dance studio (Brenda Bakke, UNDER SIEGE 2: DARK TERRITORY) seems to have a screen presence and beauty of a caliber much higher than required. I actually thought damn, she should be the lead, but she's about to get it.
Actually she survives, but is hospitalized for a while and then wears bandages over her eyes. (And remember, Eric Bogosian threatens to burn her eyeball in US2. Coincidence? Yes.) The lead-lead is William Bumiller (LAST RESORT), who has not gone on to canonization in a Seagal film, but who also seems better than the material needs. As spa owner Michael Evans (not based on the actor from Good Times as far as I can tell) he projects rugged, capable, but not dumb. He gets a call about what happened and rushes there in his Porsche between quick flashbacks of somebody on fire. So right away we know he's got a fairly noteworthy past.
Turns out his wife Catherine died under terrible circumstances, and police are still suspicious of him. His late wife's creepy twin brother (Meritt Buttrick, STAR TREK II-III) doesn't like him, but runs the fancy computer systems, so there is some tension there. After a couple of terrible "accidents" (chlorine gas in the sauna, acid in the sprinklers, body-breaking automated weight machines) Michael wants to shut the whole thing down, but his lawyer convinces him to wait until after the big Mardis Gras party. It's like in JAWS when they refuse to close the beaches during tourist season.
The Starbody Health Spa is not just a gym, it's not just a place they make themselves go after work for a little bit to try not to get fat. It's a state-of-the-art hang out, a hot spot and a second home for the fitness-minded. It has sophisticated computerized weightlifting systems overseen by a control room manned by sometimes a small team of technicians (most of them perverts). It has a huge dance studio, a juice bar, a tanning room (okay, not that healthy, especially considering what happened in KILLER WORKOUT). It's huge and almost always full of customers and also a place where big cool parties are thrown. It's a way of life.
So you can see why they're worried that their bank accounts will take a hit from this, but in the great Fitness Horror tradition the string of gruesome, painful deaths doesn't seem to phase any of the members at all. They're surprisingly understanding about the whole thing. Like the two girls who almost get smashed by tiles shooting off of the locker room shower wall, they don't seem to mind after Michael offers them two months free membership. (He also implies they're gonna have a threesome, so maybe they have a crush on him that's worthy of risking death.)
Things get crazy. There's conspiracy. There's cross-dressing. There's (SPOILER) a ghost. And she uses ghost powers. In one scene she causes the food from a walk-in freezer to kill a guy. He gets eaten by frozen fish puppets. (They look kinda like rotted versions of the fish from Pee-wee's Playhouse.) Catherine can toss people around and stuff. And control computer systems. I'm not sure where she gets the chemicals that she uses to burn people. Maybe they're ghost chemicals.
I knew Catherine looked familiar. Turns out she's Shari Shattuck, who played Michael Caine's right hand lady Liles in ON DEADY GROUND (1994, d. Steven Seagal). You remember Liles, she has one of the top 100 all time greatest moments in the movie when Aegis-1 is under Taft Attack and she comes up with a really good excuse to save her ass:
DAWN OF THE DEAD and FROM BEYOND star Ken Foree gets to be around as club employee and old football buddy of Michael. I don't know if this is a brag, but I recognized him from his leg when he first appeared standing in the background. This is not one of his better characters, but his likable presence is always welcome in a movie, he seems like a guy who actually gives a shit about the people who are dying. It's also kinda cool to see Rosalind Cash from OMEGA MAN as one of the cops investigating the spa deaths.
Director Michael Fischa followed this up with the pretty good Anthony Edwards/Lance Henriksen buddy cop movie DELTA HEAT. And before this he did CRACK HOUSE with Jim Brown and Richard Roundtree. I've considered watching that one before. Can anybody vouch for it? Fischa is still around, including doing some segments of the George Romero produced anthology DEADTIME STORIES a few years ago.
Weirdly it doesn't really come across like a satire of '80s health fads. You can say the same of KILLER WORKOUT, but it's less surprising there because they don't seem self aware at all. This one is slicker and a few years more removed from Aerobimania, you expect it to get some laughs from the whole trend. But the main characters are pretty reasonable people and nobody is made fun of very much. In fact, there's alot of juxtaposition cutting from the gym-goers to the police detectives stuffing greasy hamburgers in their mouths and guzzling Shasta and things like that. If anything the joke is on them for not being healthy.
I respect the sincerity, but it might've been cool to really emphasize the fanatic worship of the sculpted body as a contrast with what the brilliant effects people end up doing to them. When it gets gory it gets real gory – there's a person that just explodes, a face that tears open and dumps out its contents like a breaking bag full of chili, a poor woman that melts under acid sprinklers and turns into a body-shaped gooey mass. I think that's the worst one. She looks like a salted slug.
You know what, I try to stay in shape but I'm a cheap ass, I don't go to gyms, I just jog outdoors. I think DEATH SPA supports my approach. But alot of people won't do that, especially during shitty weather, so I wonder if these filmatists considered the potential outcome of this if it had been really scary. What if it kept people away from gyms like JAWS kept people away from the water?
Just when you thought it was safe to get back on the treadmill
Scream Factory MPI put this out on a beautiful blu-ray, and that's the last thing we need during this epidemic of obesity in the United States. Shame on you, Scream Factory MPI. Shame. Pretty good movie though.

subset: commoncrawl