Sometimes, being a projectionist has its perks, although by the end of this story you might wonder how much of a "perk" it really turned out to be. One night, while I was working for a local multiplex, a few friends thought it might be fun to stick around after the theatre closed and watch one of the fourteen films playing*, and much to my surprise the assistant managers in charge that night gave it their blessing.
"Lock the doors when you leave," they said, and then took off. Maybe I got the pass because two of the people stick around were also employees, and another was a former employee, but I was genuinely not expecting this endorsement after the "Summer of Sam" incident**.
The only non-employee who came by (and who had a habit of simply wandering into the projection area when I was at work) wanted to see God's Army, an all-Mormon film playing at our theatre. For some reason, we were the only theatre playing the film in the Southeast, so busloads of Mormons would arrive to see the film, and it played for quite a while considering its status as a low budget independent film released late in the summer of 2000.
Now, I didn't really want to stick around and watch God's Army, so I struck a bargain with out interloping visitor: we'd watch a double feature instead. Here's where the question of how much of a "perk" staying after hours is, because despite the fact that we had access to a number of presumably better films, the double feature everybody settled on was The Nutty Professor 2: The Klumps, and The Replacements.
Why? I can't honestly say I remember; for the life of me, I can't figure out how three die-hard horror fans couldn't find anything better playing at that theatre than those two films. Some cursory searching into the films released on July and August of 2000 indicates that while our choices weren't, *ahem*, "good", we could have done slightly better than what we picked. Admittedly, I think we'd already slogged through Hollow Man, Bless the Child, What Lies Beneath, Loser and The In Crowd***, but considering that Scary Movie was still playing and that John Waters' Cecil B. Demented was probably playing there, I cannot fathom why we'd pick such a milquetoast pair of features.
The proof is in the pudding: during The Nutty Professor 2: The Klumps (a really boring, not-very-funny sequel to a movie that wasn't great in the first place), the only thing I can remember comes not from the film but from the enjoyment two employees took in being able to smoke in the auditorium. While I remember a little more about the Keanu Reeves / Gene Hackman / Rhys Ifans starring The Replacements, a film I imagine most people don't recall in any fashion (it involved a rag-tag team of football substitutes and, um, well, that's what I can remember; that, and it was "harmless"), what stands out is again what happened surrounding the film. Of the five people hanging around to watch the film, two of them wandered off, one fell asleep, and two of us were left to watch the movie.
It wasn't the last time we'd come in and watch a lousy movie in 2000: I can recall seeing Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2, Highlander: Endgame, Urban Legends: Final Cut, Bedazzled, and Little Nicky, to name a few. It was, I believe, this period of time, from 1998 to 2004**** or so, that the Cap'n earned the reputation of "will watch anything," a reputation I am unable to live down to this day. What we never did again was stick around "after hours" to watch any more bland, generic Hollywood comedies, or anything else for that matter.
Oh, and in case you were wondering, I never did see God's Army. I don't regret this oversight in my cinematic quest for knowledge.
* There are sixteen screens, but I'm leaning in the direction of having two screens for one or two marquee titles.
** The employees gathered together for a pre-screening of Spike Lee's Summer of Sam, only to make it 2/3rds into the film when the manager cut the projector off and told us he wanted to go home.
*** Looking back at what came out, the summer of 2000 may have been the weakest time to ever have unfettered access to a multiplex.
**** For the record, I think that ended during a group outing to see the wretched Alien vs. Predator.
Monday, March 21, 2011
Saturday, March 19, 2011
Throwing the Baby Out with the Bath Water
For almost twenty years, possibly longer, but certainly as long as the "director's cut"* of Blade Runner has been available on home video, a long standing debate exists as to whether Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford) is a replicant or not.
In fact, any iteration of the boxed set (the four disc set or the five disc "briefcase" edition) has a ten minute featurette titled "Deck-A-Rep: The True Nature of Rick Deckard" where both sides make their case (Ridley Scott says Deckard is, Harrison Ford says he isn't, and a number of people involved in or admirers of the film weigh in). One of the contributors is director Frank Darabont (The Shawshank Redemption, The Mist), and his impassioned defense of why Deckard isn't a replicant is embedded below:
What I've always found interesting about Darabont's argument is how many people I know simply dismiss his entire reading of the film because of the last sentence. Because he "rejects" the "Deckard is a replicant" argument out of hand, they accordingly reject the points he's making. One professor suggested that his unwillingness to consider the alternative automatically invalidated his position, which seems problematic to me.
Darabont's point - that Deckard's evolution in the film is meaningless or at best ironic if he's a replicant - is a valid reading of the film. His reading that the film being about Deckard's slow return to humanity is a valid one, a point that has plenty of thematic evidence in the narrative. If Deckard was a replicant, the character arc is somewhat rendered moot because his sense of humanity is totally artificial; the film ceases to be a "human" story and instead a clinical study of manufactured morality played out by pawns.
Now, I'm not saying that's not also a valid reading of the film: Blade Runner opens itself to a myriad of interpretations, beyond whether the protagonist is actually what he hunts or not. What I find fascinating is the willingness to completely ignore a perfectly valid reading of the film based on the last part of one sentence. Darabont rejects Deckard-as-replicant, and therefore several people I know summarily reject his argument, not on the grounds of the argument itself but because Darabont makes a sweeping claim on personal grounds.
It's fine to disagree with Frank Darabont that the "theme" of Blade Runner might not be the emerging humanity of its protagonist, or even that the idea Deckard might be a replicant undermines that, but to simply disagree with his point simply because he disagrees with one reading of the film is actually performing the exact kind of sweeping claim he closes the argument with. He rejects the "Deckard replicant" argument, ergo you reject his argument; the baby out with the bath water. It doesn't matter that he might have a point (or that "Deckard is a replicant" proponents might have a case), because you disagree with his disagreement, everything is nullified. In a manner of speaking, the whole dialectic collapses for almost comical reasons: I disagree with your disagreement, therefore you are wrong, regardless of your evidence.
Not to put too fine a point on this, but this is an academic equivalent of internet "comment wars" between two opposing sides: your valid claim and argument is eradicated because you misspelled one word in your argument, therefore I am correct. While that may sound ridiculous taken out of context, consider that many people are ignoring the almost everything Darabont says in order to focus on the word "reject" in order to invalidate his position entirely.
He's taken not on the grounds of his argument, but the perceived imprecision of his closing, coupled with what I will concede are sweeping claims about the sophistication of the theme, which can either be applied to Darabont himself or to the editor who chose this particular thirty second clip from the entirety of an interview. Regardless, the contention I've found almost never stems from the "theme" argument, but from the word "reject." I'm not going to reject your rejection, but I will say that it confounds me that spirited academic (or cinematic) debates collapse so easily.
* Contained in quotations because the 1992 re-issue was not overseen by director Ridley Scott, who was filming Thelma and Louise during its construction, thus necessitating his "Final Cut" in 2007.
In fact, any iteration of the boxed set (the four disc set or the five disc "briefcase" edition) has a ten minute featurette titled "Deck-A-Rep: The True Nature of Rick Deckard" where both sides make their case (Ridley Scott says Deckard is, Harrison Ford says he isn't, and a number of people involved in or admirers of the film weigh in). One of the contributors is director Frank Darabont (The Shawshank Redemption, The Mist), and his impassioned defense of why Deckard isn't a replicant is embedded below:
What I've always found interesting about Darabont's argument is how many people I know simply dismiss his entire reading of the film because of the last sentence. Because he "rejects" the "Deckard is a replicant" argument out of hand, they accordingly reject the points he's making. One professor suggested that his unwillingness to consider the alternative automatically invalidated his position, which seems problematic to me.
Darabont's point - that Deckard's evolution in the film is meaningless or at best ironic if he's a replicant - is a valid reading of the film. His reading that the film being about Deckard's slow return to humanity is a valid one, a point that has plenty of thematic evidence in the narrative. If Deckard was a replicant, the character arc is somewhat rendered moot because his sense of humanity is totally artificial; the film ceases to be a "human" story and instead a clinical study of manufactured morality played out by pawns.
Now, I'm not saying that's not also a valid reading of the film: Blade Runner opens itself to a myriad of interpretations, beyond whether the protagonist is actually what he hunts or not. What I find fascinating is the willingness to completely ignore a perfectly valid reading of the film based on the last part of one sentence. Darabont rejects Deckard-as-replicant, and therefore several people I know summarily reject his argument, not on the grounds of the argument itself but because Darabont makes a sweeping claim on personal grounds.
It's fine to disagree with Frank Darabont that the "theme" of Blade Runner might not be the emerging humanity of its protagonist, or even that the idea Deckard might be a replicant undermines that, but to simply disagree with his point simply because he disagrees with one reading of the film is actually performing the exact kind of sweeping claim he closes the argument with. He rejects the "Deckard replicant" argument, ergo you reject his argument; the baby out with the bath water. It doesn't matter that he might have a point (or that "Deckard is a replicant" proponents might have a case), because you disagree with his disagreement, everything is nullified. In a manner of speaking, the whole dialectic collapses for almost comical reasons: I disagree with your disagreement, therefore you are wrong, regardless of your evidence.
Not to put too fine a point on this, but this is an academic equivalent of internet "comment wars" between two opposing sides: your valid claim and argument is eradicated because you misspelled one word in your argument, therefore I am correct. While that may sound ridiculous taken out of context, consider that many people are ignoring the almost everything Darabont says in order to focus on the word "reject" in order to invalidate his position entirely.
He's taken not on the grounds of his argument, but the perceived imprecision of his closing, coupled with what I will concede are sweeping claims about the sophistication of the theme, which can either be applied to Darabont himself or to the editor who chose this particular thirty second clip from the entirety of an interview. Regardless, the contention I've found almost never stems from the "theme" argument, but from the word "reject." I'm not going to reject your rejection, but I will say that it confounds me that spirited academic (or cinematic) debates collapse so easily.
* Contained in quotations because the 1992 re-issue was not overseen by director Ridley Scott, who was filming Thelma and Louise during its construction, thus necessitating his "Final Cut" in 2007.
Thursday, March 17, 2011
Blogorium Review: Cyrus
John (John C. Reilly), a freelance editor*, has been divorced from Jamie (Catherine Keener) for seven years, but when she comes over to tell him she's marrying Tim (Matt Walsh), she also insists he joins them at a party in the hopes of meeting someone. After striking out repeatedly, John meets Molly (Marisa Tomei) and they hit it off. After two dates, John follows Molly home (wondering why she leaves early), and meets Cyrus (Jonah Hill), her 21 year old son. Cyrus and Molly have an unusual mother / son dynamic: she dotes on him too much, and he takes advantage of that to drive a wedge in her burgeoning relationship with John. When John realizes what Cyrus is doing, he must decide: "do I wage war with her son, or is this relationship worth pursuing?"
If I had seen Cyrus while working on my "year end" list, it would have fallen right in the middle; there's really nothing wrong with the movie, but at the same time there's nothing exceptional about it. The film, written and directed by Jay and Mark Duplass (The Puffy Chair, Baghead) is a by the numbers romantic comedy, right down to the predictable ending, presented under the auspices of an "indie" cinema. The catch is that, unlike the low budget Baghead or The Puffy Chair, Cyrus was produced by Ridley and Tony Scott, and despite their efforts to disguise the production values, the film is too conventional for anyone to by the mumble-y dialogue or gently-strummed-high-pitched-whisper song soundtrack.
The Duplass brothers do try to trick their fans into thinking Cyrus is more than a by-the-numbers romantic comedy: the camera work is designed to look like an "on the fly," caught in real time cinema verite, at least for a while. Before long, they begin to indulge in montages with dialogue that leaps forward and backward with the image**, and then the camera seems to settle down into "master/close up/reverse shot" setups. So too does the awkward, "mumblecore" dialogue begin to shift to the more traditional, and characters cease to behave like humans and simply behave according to story devices.
Story-wise, Cyrus falls into the "man-child" genre of comedies that Judd Apatow and Adam McKay have been occupying for the last six or seven years; John C. Reilly and Jonah Hill are essentially playing variations of their "type" - Reilly as the soft spoken, awkward loser and Hill as the sarcastic jerk. The only real difference is the level to which Hill pushes Cyrus into a manipulative sociopath; he just barely keeps himself out of stereotypical territory, despite all of the blank stares, muttered threats, and bogus "panic attacks."
Marisa Tomei has virtually nothing to work with as an actress: as the film progresses, Molly becomes less of a character and more of a cipher, an object for the emotionally stunted man-boys to fight over. By the time her character goes catatonic when John finally leaves, one struggles to remember the woman who saw past his act early in the story. Catherine Keener and Matt Walsh have absolutely nothing to do outside of giving Cyrus a "supporting cast": Walsh is barely in the film and Keener's Jamie is saddled with all of the "am I just being neurotic or is the kid evil" rants from John. Since Cyrus is transparently manipulative, Keener's assurances that he's "weird, but not in a bad way" are hollow to the audience.
I realize I sound like I'm panning Cyrus, which is being unkind to the film; I tend to be very hard on films that settle for being in the "middle": movies like Cyrus don't actually try to do anything that sets it apart from every other comedy of its kind, nor is it bad enough to simply ignore. John C. Reilly, Marisa Tomei, and Jonah Hill are all doing good work with what they have, and the film at least tries to insert a modicum of "realism" into an otherwise trite rom-com dynamic. Aside from the ending, everything that happens is organic within the story, derived from things unsaid or from character traits. The problem is that I just can't get that enthused about Cyrus: there's not enough going for it to merit recommending, and at the same time I don't hate it (the same way I do, say, Juno, which is as transparently obvious in its storytelling). Cyrus is just there, and for me that's not enough.
* The film is so vague about John's job that it isn't actually clear he's a film editor until he barges into Jamie's office (where he also works, although that's not clear until even later) to talk conspiratorially about Cyrus.
**I'm tempted to call this the Soderbergh effect, since it's one of his most relied on techniques, but that presumes that he invented the style instead of co-opting it from films like Point Blank
If I had seen Cyrus while working on my "year end" list, it would have fallen right in the middle; there's really nothing wrong with the movie, but at the same time there's nothing exceptional about it. The film, written and directed by Jay and Mark Duplass (The Puffy Chair, Baghead) is a by the numbers romantic comedy, right down to the predictable ending, presented under the auspices of an "indie" cinema. The catch is that, unlike the low budget Baghead or The Puffy Chair, Cyrus was produced by Ridley and Tony Scott, and despite their efforts to disguise the production values, the film is too conventional for anyone to by the mumble-y dialogue or gently-strummed-high-pitched-whisper song soundtrack.The Duplass brothers do try to trick their fans into thinking Cyrus is more than a by-the-numbers romantic comedy: the camera work is designed to look like an "on the fly," caught in real time cinema verite, at least for a while. Before long, they begin to indulge in montages with dialogue that leaps forward and backward with the image**, and then the camera seems to settle down into "master/close up/reverse shot" setups. So too does the awkward, "mumblecore" dialogue begin to shift to the more traditional, and characters cease to behave like humans and simply behave according to story devices.
Story-wise, Cyrus falls into the "man-child" genre of comedies that Judd Apatow and Adam McKay have been occupying for the last six or seven years; John C. Reilly and Jonah Hill are essentially playing variations of their "type" - Reilly as the soft spoken, awkward loser and Hill as the sarcastic jerk. The only real difference is the level to which Hill pushes Cyrus into a manipulative sociopath; he just barely keeps himself out of stereotypical territory, despite all of the blank stares, muttered threats, and bogus "panic attacks."
Marisa Tomei has virtually nothing to work with as an actress: as the film progresses, Molly becomes less of a character and more of a cipher, an object for the emotionally stunted man-boys to fight over. By the time her character goes catatonic when John finally leaves, one struggles to remember the woman who saw past his act early in the story. Catherine Keener and Matt Walsh have absolutely nothing to do outside of giving Cyrus a "supporting cast": Walsh is barely in the film and Keener's Jamie is saddled with all of the "am I just being neurotic or is the kid evil" rants from John. Since Cyrus is transparently manipulative, Keener's assurances that he's "weird, but not in a bad way" are hollow to the audience.
I realize I sound like I'm panning Cyrus, which is being unkind to the film; I tend to be very hard on films that settle for being in the "middle": movies like Cyrus don't actually try to do anything that sets it apart from every other comedy of its kind, nor is it bad enough to simply ignore. John C. Reilly, Marisa Tomei, and Jonah Hill are all doing good work with what they have, and the film at least tries to insert a modicum of "realism" into an otherwise trite rom-com dynamic. Aside from the ending, everything that happens is organic within the story, derived from things unsaid or from character traits. The problem is that I just can't get that enthused about Cyrus: there's not enough going for it to merit recommending, and at the same time I don't hate it (the same way I do, say, Juno, which is as transparently obvious in its storytelling). Cyrus is just there, and for me that's not enough.
* The film is so vague about John's job that it isn't actually clear he's a film editor until he barges into Jamie's office (where he also works, although that's not clear until even later) to talk conspiratorially about Cyrus.
**I'm tempted to call this the Soderbergh effect, since it's one of his most relied on techniques, but that presumes that he invented the style instead of co-opting it from films like Point Blank
Tuesday, March 15, 2011
Retro Review: Dead Man
I hadn't actually planned on watching all of Dead Man yesterday; the Cap'n had been backing up some videos and stumbled across a copy of Jim Jarmusch's 1995 western, and when I put the movie on, I found I couldn't turn it off. Jarmusch's sparse, black and white photography and minimalist camerawork had me transfixed, unable to turn away.
Dead Man, like Apocalypse Now and Blade Runner, is a film that operates in a dream-like state; I've seen all three many times, and while the narratives are all reasonably straightforward, they have a hypnotic effect that renders me incapable of remembering the story until I watch them again. For the life of me I couldn't remember the progression of Dead Man's story. Only moments, images stuck with me: Crispin Glover covered in coal soot, Lance Henriksen's cannibal bounty hunter, Iggy Pop wearing a dress, and Johnny Depp painting his face with the blood of a dead fawn.
Bill Blake (Depp) leaves Cleveland, Ohio and heads west by train to Machine, where he's promised an accounting job at Dickinson Metal Works. Informed by Dickinson's assistant, John Scofield (John Hurt) that the position was filled a month before he arrived, Blake demands to see John Dickinson (Robert Mitchum), which is met with disaster when the old man threatens to kill him on sight. Broke and with no work, Blake meets Thel Russell (Mili Avital), who left her life as a prostitute to sell imitation roses, but their romance is cut short when Charlie (Gabriel Byrne) returns to kill Thel, his former lover. Charlie kills Thel, and in the process shoots Blake near the heart, before Blake kills him and escapes. Unbeknownst to Blake, Charlie is Dickinson's son, and the old man hires three outlaws - Cole Wilson (Lance Henrikson), Conway Twill (Michael Wincott), and Jimmy "The Kid" Pickett (Eugene Byrd) to track down Blake and the horse he stole. The injured Blake awakens to find Nobody (Gary Farmer), an outcast Native American, trying to dig out the "white man's metal" next to his heart, but when Nobody discovers Blake's real name, he sets out to return the lost soul to the spirit realm.
Dead Man is a film of facsimiles, of imitations and "almost there"'s: Nobody mistakes Bill Blake for the spirit of poet William Blake, although Bill has no notion of his namesake. Blake wanders home with Thel Russell, who sells paper roses. Nobody is a mixed-blood Native, captured by white men and taken to England. Despite his escape, his heritage is denied by his tribe, and he is left to wander the desert, alternately imitating and mocking the "stupid white man." Blake, who arrives in town wearing a "clown suit" from Cleveland, doesn't seem to fit in anywhere - Depp's appearance is reminiscent of his role in 1993's Benny and Joon.
The hypnotic effect is a result of Dead Man's episodic lapses; despite the fact that the story is a simple "pursuit" film, Jarmusch and editor Jay Rabonwitz made the decision to fade out after every scene, effectively creating a series of dreamlike vignettes, starting with Blake's train ride from Cleveland to Machine - itself half-dream, half shifting reality, and closing with the Train Fireman (Crispin Glover)'s stream of consciousness warning against going "all the way out here to hell." The lapses in narrative, coupled with Neil Young's ethereal (if repetitive) score, result in an experiential, rather than linear, tone.
Nobody (a character whose name is almost certainly borrowed from Tonino Valerii's 1973 spaghetti western) has most of Jarmusch's directorial flourishes: his flashbacks fade to white (how appropriate) with images surrounded by a hazy iris. When he takes peyote midway through the film, Nobody sees Blake with a skeleton superimposed over his face (perhaps a too literal image for the film). Gary Farmer does manage to transition Nobody's role from off-kilter comedic to sage-like smoothly, which helps smooth over Dead Man's few, but obvious, thematic touches.
I'd also forgotten how funny Dead Man is, and not simply because of Nobody's insistence on calling Blake a "stupid fucking white man." As is the case in most of Jarmusch's body of work, the comedy comes from character quirks or awkward situations; the way that John Dickinson admonishes Wilson, Twill, and Pickett like errant school children, or the way they behave like petulant truants waiting in the Principal's office before Dickinson arrives. The bounty hunters, who are not accustomed to working together, are a mismatch from the outset: Conway Twill talks to much and sleeps with a teddy bear; Cole Wilson barely talks at all, but is prone to random, brutal acts of violence; and Jimmy "The Kid" Pickett is trapped in the middle, unable to fully grasp how out of his league he is.
The film teeters on the brink of self-parody during a sequence involving Blake and three trappers: Big George (Billy Bob Thornton), Benmont Tench (Jared Harris) and "Sally" Jenko (Iggy Pop), who eat beans and talk of philistines, then argue amongst themselves who gets to kill Blake, the interloper, before Nobody swoops in for the rescue. That Thornton actually utters the line "Well, I guess nobody gets you" before Nobody kills him, is almost too on the nose, but Dead Man recovers by resorting (as it often does) to a violent conclusion.
There are a handful of recurring themes in Dead Man: the conflict between Christianity and Native spirituality (particularly in a late confrontation between Nobody and a trader played by Alfred Molina), mistaken identity, running gags involving tobacco and beans, Blake's encounters with sexuality appearing increasingly bestial, of innocence corrupted, and miscommunication between allies. This is excluding the numerous references to William Blake in the film, both direct and implied.
I must have seen Dead Man for the first time in high school, almost assuredly on video. I have vague recollections of the film (dubbed an "acid western") not being received well, but can only find one truly negative review from the period: a one-and-a-half star review by Roger Ebert that might be the basis for my conception (although knowing the News and Observer, which nothing is ever "good enough" for, that was no doubt also a pan).
Revisiting the film, beyond the fact that I could not wander away from Jarmusch (and cinematographer Robby Müller)'s black and white photography, I find that I enjoyed Dead Man more than I have at any of the various points I've spent with the film in the ensuing sixteen years. While it doesn't have the intangible joy of Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai, or the laconic wit of Down By Law, or even the emotional resonance of Broken Flowers, Dead Man is certainly head and shoulders above the obvious, show-off-y The Limits of Control, and more cohesive than Mystery Train, Night on Earth, or Coffee and Cigarettes. Dead Man may never be clear where it's going (if it is, in fact, going anywhere), but the trip makes up for its ambiguous destination.
Dead Man, like Apocalypse Now and Blade Runner, is a film that operates in a dream-like state; I've seen all three many times, and while the narratives are all reasonably straightforward, they have a hypnotic effect that renders me incapable of remembering the story until I watch them again. For the life of me I couldn't remember the progression of Dead Man's story. Only moments, images stuck with me: Crispin Glover covered in coal soot, Lance Henriksen's cannibal bounty hunter, Iggy Pop wearing a dress, and Johnny Depp painting his face with the blood of a dead fawn.
Bill Blake (Depp) leaves Cleveland, Ohio and heads west by train to Machine, where he's promised an accounting job at Dickinson Metal Works. Informed by Dickinson's assistant, John Scofield (John Hurt) that the position was filled a month before he arrived, Blake demands to see John Dickinson (Robert Mitchum), which is met with disaster when the old man threatens to kill him on sight. Broke and with no work, Blake meets Thel Russell (Mili Avital), who left her life as a prostitute to sell imitation roses, but their romance is cut short when Charlie (Gabriel Byrne) returns to kill Thel, his former lover. Charlie kills Thel, and in the process shoots Blake near the heart, before Blake kills him and escapes. Unbeknownst to Blake, Charlie is Dickinson's son, and the old man hires three outlaws - Cole Wilson (Lance Henrikson), Conway Twill (Michael Wincott), and Jimmy "The Kid" Pickett (Eugene Byrd) to track down Blake and the horse he stole. The injured Blake awakens to find Nobody (Gary Farmer), an outcast Native American, trying to dig out the "white man's metal" next to his heart, but when Nobody discovers Blake's real name, he sets out to return the lost soul to the spirit realm.Dead Man is a film of facsimiles, of imitations and "almost there"'s: Nobody mistakes Bill Blake for the spirit of poet William Blake, although Bill has no notion of his namesake. Blake wanders home with Thel Russell, who sells paper roses. Nobody is a mixed-blood Native, captured by white men and taken to England. Despite his escape, his heritage is denied by his tribe, and he is left to wander the desert, alternately imitating and mocking the "stupid white man." Blake, who arrives in town wearing a "clown suit" from Cleveland, doesn't seem to fit in anywhere - Depp's appearance is reminiscent of his role in 1993's Benny and Joon.
The hypnotic effect is a result of Dead Man's episodic lapses; despite the fact that the story is a simple "pursuit" film, Jarmusch and editor Jay Rabonwitz made the decision to fade out after every scene, effectively creating a series of dreamlike vignettes, starting with Blake's train ride from Cleveland to Machine - itself half-dream, half shifting reality, and closing with the Train Fireman (Crispin Glover)'s stream of consciousness warning against going "all the way out here to hell." The lapses in narrative, coupled with Neil Young's ethereal (if repetitive) score, result in an experiential, rather than linear, tone.
Nobody (a character whose name is almost certainly borrowed from Tonino Valerii's 1973 spaghetti western) has most of Jarmusch's directorial flourishes: his flashbacks fade to white (how appropriate) with images surrounded by a hazy iris. When he takes peyote midway through the film, Nobody sees Blake with a skeleton superimposed over his face (perhaps a too literal image for the film). Gary Farmer does manage to transition Nobody's role from off-kilter comedic to sage-like smoothly, which helps smooth over Dead Man's few, but obvious, thematic touches.
I'd also forgotten how funny Dead Man is, and not simply because of Nobody's insistence on calling Blake a "stupid fucking white man." As is the case in most of Jarmusch's body of work, the comedy comes from character quirks or awkward situations; the way that John Dickinson admonishes Wilson, Twill, and Pickett like errant school children, or the way they behave like petulant truants waiting in the Principal's office before Dickinson arrives. The bounty hunters, who are not accustomed to working together, are a mismatch from the outset: Conway Twill talks to much and sleeps with a teddy bear; Cole Wilson barely talks at all, but is prone to random, brutal acts of violence; and Jimmy "The Kid" Pickett is trapped in the middle, unable to fully grasp how out of his league he is.
The film teeters on the brink of self-parody during a sequence involving Blake and three trappers: Big George (Billy Bob Thornton), Benmont Tench (Jared Harris) and "Sally" Jenko (Iggy Pop), who eat beans and talk of philistines, then argue amongst themselves who gets to kill Blake, the interloper, before Nobody swoops in for the rescue. That Thornton actually utters the line "Well, I guess nobody gets you" before Nobody kills him, is almost too on the nose, but Dead Man recovers by resorting (as it often does) to a violent conclusion.
There are a handful of recurring themes in Dead Man: the conflict between Christianity and Native spirituality (particularly in a late confrontation between Nobody and a trader played by Alfred Molina), mistaken identity, running gags involving tobacco and beans, Blake's encounters with sexuality appearing increasingly bestial, of innocence corrupted, and miscommunication between allies. This is excluding the numerous references to William Blake in the film, both direct and implied.
I must have seen Dead Man for the first time in high school, almost assuredly on video. I have vague recollections of the film (dubbed an "acid western") not being received well, but can only find one truly negative review from the period: a one-and-a-half star review by Roger Ebert that might be the basis for my conception (although knowing the News and Observer, which nothing is ever "good enough" for, that was no doubt also a pan).
Revisiting the film, beyond the fact that I could not wander away from Jarmusch (and cinematographer Robby Müller)'s black and white photography, I find that I enjoyed Dead Man more than I have at any of the various points I've spent with the film in the ensuing sixteen years. While it doesn't have the intangible joy of Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai, or the laconic wit of Down By Law, or even the emotional resonance of Broken Flowers, Dead Man is certainly head and shoulders above the obvious, show-off-y The Limits of Control, and more cohesive than Mystery Train, Night on Earth, or Coffee and Cigarettes. Dead Man may never be clear where it's going (if it is, in fact, going anywhere), but the trip makes up for its ambiguous destination.
Monday, March 14, 2011
Recommendations of a Supplement Junkie
Earlier this year, I came clean about the horrible, terrible affliction the Cap'n lives with every day: an addiction to supplements on DVDs and Blu-Rays. In order to help myself (and others), I thought it would be in our best interests if I shared some of my favorite "making of" documentaries found on various discs.
As I said previously, of late there have been some really clever, well designed, and revelatory documentaries (or "extended featurettes"), so I'll be focusing on those as opposed to feature-length "making-of" docs like Burden of Dreams of Hearts of Darkness. Mind you, those are fantastic in their own right, but they tend to have their own releases (or, in the case of Hearts of Darkness, are included as its own disc on Apocalypse Now's Blu-Ray set), whereas the longer pieces listed below are sometimes buried behind EXCLUSIVE INTERACTIVITY POCKET BLU BLAH BLAH BLAH. Don't let the noise and the trivial extras scare you away, because many of these longer pieces are every bit as good as the stand-alone docs.
The Hamster Factor and Other Tales of 12 Monkeys - directed by Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe (Lost in La Mancha), The Hamster Factor is a nearly 90 minute look behind the scenes of Terry Gilliam's 12 Monkeys, focused primarily on the director's working process. Gilliam, who has a partially deserved / partially exaggerated reputation as a "difficult" perfectionist, may do himself no favors by giving the documentary its title: the "hamster" in question is holding up an otherwise perfectly executed and technically elaborate shot because the rodent refuses to do what Gilliam wants in frame, slowing production to a halt. That's one of the many confounding, fascinating elements about making an already confounding, fascinating film.
Beware the Moon - While it balances "making of" stories with a "locations then and now" host structure, Beware the Moon is as thorough document of the making of An American Werewolf in London as you're likely to find. Not only has writer / director / host Paul Davis managed to track down most of the original locations, but he also assembles as many surviving members of the cast and crew to discuss Werewolf's origins, its filming, the special effects, and its peculiar balance of horror and humor. Among the heretofore unrealized tidbits was the fact that John Landis had the idea to make An American Werewolf in London while working as a production assistant on Kelly's Heroes; Rick Baker had already committed to The Howling when Landis finally pulled him back into Werewolf, after finding out the makeup effects artist would be using his designs for Joe Dante's wolf film; and the queasy feeling Griffin Dunne felt after seeing his "corpse" makeup design for the first time.
One By One We Will Take You: The Untold Saga of The Evil Dead, Life After Death: The Ladies of the Evil Dead, and Discovering The Evil Dead - Taken together, this nearly 86 minute story of Sam Raimi's debut film covers nearly every angle of its inception: from the attempt to raise money by knocking down investors' doors, to the extended filming in Tennessee, to the film's release, subsequent success, and controversy after being labeled a "video nasty" in England. While Raimi, Rob Tapert, Bruce Campbell, and much of the cast and crew appear in the first two docs, the third featurette is equally as interesting because it focuses on the film's appearance in Great Britain, and the subsequent trial that Raimi faced after the film was deemed "obscene."
The Making of the Alien Legacy (The Beast Within, Superior Firepower, Wreckage and Rage, and One Step Beyond) - If you haven't seen this epic set of documentaries (which total nearly 12 hours in length) and consider yourself a fan of the Alien series, I highly recommend checking the fifth disc of the Alien Anthology Blu-Ray. I highlight the Antholgy version over the Alien Quadrilogy version if for no other reason than Wreckage and Rage: The Making of Alien 3 is included in its full, uncut format, restoring footage devoted to the battles between director David Fincher and studio executives at 20th Century Fox. Exhaustive might be the best way to put the docs in perspective: nearly everything you can think of about the making of Alien, Aliens, Alien 3, and Alien: Resurrection is covered in detail, warts and all.
These comprehensive stories are not without controversy, divided opinions, embittered participants (Michael Biehn's explanation of why and how he discovered Hicks wouldn't be in Alien 3 is a great example), and various takes on why certain things didn't work, especially in the third and fourth films. That doesn't mean everything on Alien is roses, however: there's a protracted segment about the approach to the script with writer Dan O'Bannon on one side and producer / co-writer Ronald Shusett on the other. In totality, while it will take you a few viewings to get through, you'll learn so much more about the series than you ever thought possible. (This does not, by the way, include the BD's "enhancement pods," which extend all four documentaries by nearly an hour apiece!)
While I'd love to continue, this is going a bit long; also check out Empire of Dreams: The Making of the Star Wars Saga, Indiana Jones: Making the Trilogy, The Battle of Brazil: A Video History, Inferno: The Making of the Expendables, Fear of the Flesh: The Making of the Fly, Dangerous Days: The Making of Blade Runner, 30 Days in Hell: The Making of the Devil's Rejects, and Orson Welles: One Man Band.
Tomorrow: a Retro Review of Jim Jarmusch's Dead Man.
Next Tuesday: a Retro Review of Neil Young's Human Highway.
As I said previously, of late there have been some really clever, well designed, and revelatory documentaries (or "extended featurettes"), so I'll be focusing on those as opposed to feature-length "making-of" docs like Burden of Dreams of Hearts of Darkness. Mind you, those are fantastic in their own right, but they tend to have their own releases (or, in the case of Hearts of Darkness, are included as its own disc on Apocalypse Now's Blu-Ray set), whereas the longer pieces listed below are sometimes buried behind EXCLUSIVE INTERACTIVITY POCKET BLU BLAH BLAH BLAH. Don't let the noise and the trivial extras scare you away, because many of these longer pieces are every bit as good as the stand-alone docs.
The Hamster Factor and Other Tales of 12 Monkeys - directed by Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe (Lost in La Mancha), The Hamster Factor is a nearly 90 minute look behind the scenes of Terry Gilliam's 12 Monkeys, focused primarily on the director's working process. Gilliam, who has a partially deserved / partially exaggerated reputation as a "difficult" perfectionist, may do himself no favors by giving the documentary its title: the "hamster" in question is holding up an otherwise perfectly executed and technically elaborate shot because the rodent refuses to do what Gilliam wants in frame, slowing production to a halt. That's one of the many confounding, fascinating elements about making an already confounding, fascinating film.
Beware the Moon - While it balances "making of" stories with a "locations then and now" host structure, Beware the Moon is as thorough document of the making of An American Werewolf in London as you're likely to find. Not only has writer / director / host Paul Davis managed to track down most of the original locations, but he also assembles as many surviving members of the cast and crew to discuss Werewolf's origins, its filming, the special effects, and its peculiar balance of horror and humor. Among the heretofore unrealized tidbits was the fact that John Landis had the idea to make An American Werewolf in London while working as a production assistant on Kelly's Heroes; Rick Baker had already committed to The Howling when Landis finally pulled him back into Werewolf, after finding out the makeup effects artist would be using his designs for Joe Dante's wolf film; and the queasy feeling Griffin Dunne felt after seeing his "corpse" makeup design for the first time.
One By One We Will Take You: The Untold Saga of The Evil Dead, Life After Death: The Ladies of the Evil Dead, and Discovering The Evil Dead - Taken together, this nearly 86 minute story of Sam Raimi's debut film covers nearly every angle of its inception: from the attempt to raise money by knocking down investors' doors, to the extended filming in Tennessee, to the film's release, subsequent success, and controversy after being labeled a "video nasty" in England. While Raimi, Rob Tapert, Bruce Campbell, and much of the cast and crew appear in the first two docs, the third featurette is equally as interesting because it focuses on the film's appearance in Great Britain, and the subsequent trial that Raimi faced after the film was deemed "obscene."
The Making of the Alien Legacy (The Beast Within, Superior Firepower, Wreckage and Rage, and One Step Beyond) - If you haven't seen this epic set of documentaries (which total nearly 12 hours in length) and consider yourself a fan of the Alien series, I highly recommend checking the fifth disc of the Alien Anthology Blu-Ray. I highlight the Antholgy version over the Alien Quadrilogy version if for no other reason than Wreckage and Rage: The Making of Alien 3 is included in its full, uncut format, restoring footage devoted to the battles between director David Fincher and studio executives at 20th Century Fox. Exhaustive might be the best way to put the docs in perspective: nearly everything you can think of about the making of Alien, Aliens, Alien 3, and Alien: Resurrection is covered in detail, warts and all.
These comprehensive stories are not without controversy, divided opinions, embittered participants (Michael Biehn's explanation of why and how he discovered Hicks wouldn't be in Alien 3 is a great example), and various takes on why certain things didn't work, especially in the third and fourth films. That doesn't mean everything on Alien is roses, however: there's a protracted segment about the approach to the script with writer Dan O'Bannon on one side and producer / co-writer Ronald Shusett on the other. In totality, while it will take you a few viewings to get through, you'll learn so much more about the series than you ever thought possible. (This does not, by the way, include the BD's "enhancement pods," which extend all four documentaries by nearly an hour apiece!)
While I'd love to continue, this is going a bit long; also check out Empire of Dreams: The Making of the Star Wars Saga, Indiana Jones: Making the Trilogy, The Battle of Brazil: A Video History, Inferno: The Making of the Expendables, Fear of the Flesh: The Making of the Fly, Dangerous Days: The Making of Blade Runner, 30 Days in Hell: The Making of the Devil's Rejects, and Orson Welles: One Man Band.
Tomorrow: a Retro Review of Jim Jarmusch's Dead Man.
Next Tuesday: a Retro Review of Neil Young's Human Highway.
Saturday, March 12, 2011
Five Movies: Five Books About Movies Worth Your Time
Yesterday, I briefly mentioned that literature about film was a useful way of feeding the Cinephilic meme, so it only seemed fair that the Cap'n give you some suggestions. More often than not, the casual-to-curious film fan will wander into their local bookseller (or retail chain), head for the "Media" section, and find themselves inundated with oversized "making of" books, unauthorized celebrity bios, and more "1001 ____ Movies You Must See Before You Die" than you can shake a stick at. The end result tends to be that they leave with nothing, feeling perplexed about where all these "great books" their friends talk about are.
One of the problems - perhaps the largest problem - is that the critical analysis or scholarly approach to film texts are limited to small, university presses, and most major chains don't feel the need to carry them. It is, after all, not their target demographic - typically the casual shopper looking for a paperback to enjoy on a sunny afternoon - so you won't find analytical texts just anywhere (periodically they pop up in used book stores, especially ones in the vicinity of a college campus).
Then again, the neophyte or leaning cinephile will want to wait for most of those texts, so while I'll mention a few after the list proper, this edition of Five Movies will focus on good "entry points" with a dash of heavier reading to keep you busy. Whenever possible, I'll link the titles to Amazon, so you have a reasonably priced starting point.
1. VideoHound's Cult Flicks & Trash Pics (edited by Carol Schwartz with Jim Olenski) - Let's start with a video guide; when I was younger, I used The Video Movie Guide by Mick Martin and Marsha Porter, but as the list of films grows, the reviews become shorter and shorter, and omissions ramped up. VideoHound publishes guides by topic, genre, and year, so you get more concentrated subsections of films, with better information about the film and its relative merits. I chose Cult Flicks & Trash Pics because if you want a handy guide to the "underground" films that exist in the realm of meme-dom, this is a great point of entry. It also makes a good companion to J. Hoberman and Johnathan Rosenbaum's Midnight Movies.
2. Hooked by Pauline Kael - From movie guides, let's move on to collections of reviews by critics; while I do own a few books by Roger Ebert, Pauline Kael was far and away my favorite "newspaper critic" - her reviews are insightful, witty, and so effortlessly well written that it drives me crazy I can't come anywhere close. Kael died ten years ago, and her collections are woefully out of print (I found Hooked at a used book store), but our number 2 pick is a little bit easier to find than 5001 Nights at the Movies, which is also excellent. Hooked deals with reviews from 1984-1989, covering a number of titles you may be familiar with (and many you won't be), and even when I don't agree with Kael (like her pans of After Hours and Raising Arizona), I appreciate the level of writing she brings even to pithy dismissals. This book would make a fine counterpoint to Harlan Ellison's Watching, which covers much of the same time period in cinema.
3. The Kid Stays in the Picture by Robert Evans - You may have seen the documentary based on our third choice, also narrated by Evans, but it doesn't even scratch the surface of this entertaining, frank, and frequently revelatory autobiography from the former head of Paramount Pictures. Evans makes it clear from the get-go that this is his version of the story, but his path from salesman to B-movie actor to mogul is never dull, even if the facts tend to lean only in one direction. As "tell all"'s or Hollywood biographies go, skip what you normally see on the shelf and gravitate towards The Kid Stays in the Picture; you'll learn a lot more and have more fun doing it.
4. The Director's Series by various authors, editors, et al - This series, which sometimes goes by the name Directors on Directors, is a collection of interviews with various filmmakers about their process, history, craft, and themes in their body of work. There's one for just about any director you could be interested in: David Lynch, Martin Scorsese, Alfred Hitchcock, Federico Fellini, Werner Herzog, David Cronenberg, Douglas Sirk, Lars von Trier, John Cassavetes, Louis Malle, Ken Loach, Woody Allen, Kryzysztof Kielslowski, Pedro Almodoovar, Tim Burton, Paul Schrader, Barry Levinson, John Sayles, Robert Altman, and Terry Gilliam. Personal favorites? I'd start with Lynch on Lynch or Gilliam on Gilliam, which have a more conversational tone with the directors in question. Burton on Burton is a treasure trove of information, but its structure is more of introductory text preceding a quote from Tim Burton moving chronologically through his films. It's interesting, but less intimate, so I'd start with Gilliam or Lynch and more forward from there.
5. The Making of Star Wars: The Definitive Story Behind the Original Film by J.W. Rinzler - As chronicles of making a film go, you'd be hard pressed to find a more in-depth exploration than The Making of Star Wars. I assure you that even the most die-hard Star Wars fan is going to find plenty of revelations in the book, about the writing process, the conceptualizing of Lucas' vision, the perils of making the film, its disastrous first edit, and the effort that went into making the first film a cultural landmark. Rinzler does similar work with the Indiana Jones series and The Empire Strikes back (and, one must assume, eventually Return of the Jedi), with plenty of access to everyone involved in the making of A New Hope, and the book feels like it steps beyond the typical "Lucas whitewash" that other "histories" of the films have.
This is just to get you started, of course; if you want some really good "theory" I suggest More Than Night: Film Noir in its Contexts by James Naremore, Horror, The Film Reader, edited by Mark Jancovich, Theories of Authorship, edited by John Caughie, or Terminal Identity: The Virtual Subject in Post-Modern Science Fiction by Scott Bukatman. If you like more niche or subgenre guides, hunt down Stuart Galbraith IV's Japanese Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror Films.
If you want to have some fun with reviews or career pieces, check out Vern's Five on the Outside, Seagalogy: A Study of the Ass-Kicking Films of Steven Seagal, or "Yipee Ki-Yay, Moviegoer!": Writings on Bruce Willis, Badass Cinema, and Other Important Topics. You can also look at the series of director interviews with the likes of Steven Soderbergh, David Lynch and The Coen Brothers. Want to know how to make a movie? Try Robert Rodriguez's Rebel Without a Crew or Lloyd Kaufman's Make Your Own Damn Movie!. Want a cultural history of a genre? Check out David J. Skal's The Monster Show, Kendal Phillips' Projected Fears: Horror Films and American Culture, or Joe Bob Briggs' one-two punch of Profoundly Disturbing and Profoundly Erotic.
I'm always looking for more good reads, so if you have one, pass it on.
One of the problems - perhaps the largest problem - is that the critical analysis or scholarly approach to film texts are limited to small, university presses, and most major chains don't feel the need to carry them. It is, after all, not their target demographic - typically the casual shopper looking for a paperback to enjoy on a sunny afternoon - so you won't find analytical texts just anywhere (periodically they pop up in used book stores, especially ones in the vicinity of a college campus).
Then again, the neophyte or leaning cinephile will want to wait for most of those texts, so while I'll mention a few after the list proper, this edition of Five Movies will focus on good "entry points" with a dash of heavier reading to keep you busy. Whenever possible, I'll link the titles to Amazon, so you have a reasonably priced starting point.
1. VideoHound's Cult Flicks & Trash Pics (edited by Carol Schwartz with Jim Olenski) - Let's start with a video guide; when I was younger, I used The Video Movie Guide by Mick Martin and Marsha Porter, but as the list of films grows, the reviews become shorter and shorter, and omissions ramped up. VideoHound publishes guides by topic, genre, and year, so you get more concentrated subsections of films, with better information about the film and its relative merits. I chose Cult Flicks & Trash Pics because if you want a handy guide to the "underground" films that exist in the realm of meme-dom, this is a great point of entry. It also makes a good companion to J. Hoberman and Johnathan Rosenbaum's Midnight Movies.2. Hooked by Pauline Kael - From movie guides, let's move on to collections of reviews by critics; while I do own a few books by Roger Ebert, Pauline Kael was far and away my favorite "newspaper critic" - her reviews are insightful, witty, and so effortlessly well written that it drives me crazy I can't come anywhere close. Kael died ten years ago, and her collections are woefully out of print (I found Hooked at a used book store), but our number 2 pick is a little bit easier to find than 5001 Nights at the Movies, which is also excellent. Hooked deals with reviews from 1984-1989, covering a number of titles you may be familiar with (and many you won't be), and even when I don't agree with Kael (like her pans of After Hours and Raising Arizona), I appreciate the level of writing she brings even to pithy dismissals. This book would make a fine counterpoint to Harlan Ellison's Watching, which covers much of the same time period in cinema.
3. The Kid Stays in the Picture by Robert Evans - You may have seen the documentary based on our third choice, also narrated by Evans, but it doesn't even scratch the surface of this entertaining, frank, and frequently revelatory autobiography from the former head of Paramount Pictures. Evans makes it clear from the get-go that this is his version of the story, but his path from salesman to B-movie actor to mogul is never dull, even if the facts tend to lean only in one direction. As "tell all"'s or Hollywood biographies go, skip what you normally see on the shelf and gravitate towards The Kid Stays in the Picture; you'll learn a lot more and have more fun doing it.
4. The Director's Series by various authors, editors, et al - This series, which sometimes goes by the name Directors on Directors, is a collection of interviews with various filmmakers about their process, history, craft, and themes in their body of work. There's one for just about any director you could be interested in: David Lynch, Martin Scorsese, Alfred Hitchcock, Federico Fellini, Werner Herzog, David Cronenberg, Douglas Sirk, Lars von Trier, John Cassavetes, Louis Malle, Ken Loach, Woody Allen, Kryzysztof Kielslowski, Pedro Almodoovar, Tim Burton, Paul Schrader, Barry Levinson, John Sayles, Robert Altman, and Terry Gilliam. Personal favorites? I'd start with Lynch on Lynch or Gilliam on Gilliam, which have a more conversational tone with the directors in question. Burton on Burton is a treasure trove of information, but its structure is more of introductory text preceding a quote from Tim Burton moving chronologically through his films. It's interesting, but less intimate, so I'd start with Gilliam or Lynch and more forward from there.5. The Making of Star Wars: The Definitive Story Behind the Original Film by J.W. Rinzler - As chronicles of making a film go, you'd be hard pressed to find a more in-depth exploration than The Making of Star Wars. I assure you that even the most die-hard Star Wars fan is going to find plenty of revelations in the book, about the writing process, the conceptualizing of Lucas' vision, the perils of making the film, its disastrous first edit, and the effort that went into making the first film a cultural landmark. Rinzler does similar work with the Indiana Jones series and The Empire Strikes back (and, one must assume, eventually Return of the Jedi), with plenty of access to everyone involved in the making of A New Hope, and the book feels like it steps beyond the typical "Lucas whitewash" that other "histories" of the films have.
This is just to get you started, of course; if you want some really good "theory" I suggest More Than Night: Film Noir in its Contexts by James Naremore, Horror, The Film Reader, edited by Mark Jancovich, Theories of Authorship, edited by John Caughie, or Terminal Identity: The Virtual Subject in Post-Modern Science Fiction by Scott Bukatman. If you like more niche or subgenre guides, hunt down Stuart Galbraith IV's Japanese Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror Films.
If you want to have some fun with reviews or career pieces, check out Vern's Five on the Outside, Seagalogy: A Study of the Ass-Kicking Films of Steven Seagal, or "Yipee Ki-Yay, Moviegoer!": Writings on Bruce Willis, Badass Cinema, and Other Important Topics. You can also look at the series of director interviews with the likes of Steven Soderbergh, David Lynch and The Coen Brothers. Want to know how to make a movie? Try Robert Rodriguez's Rebel Without a Crew or Lloyd Kaufman's Make Your Own Damn Movie!. Want a cultural history of a genre? Check out David J. Skal's The Monster Show, Kendal Phillips' Projected Fears: Horror Films and American Culture, or Joe Bob Briggs' one-two punch of Profoundly Disturbing and Profoundly Erotic.
I'm always looking for more good reads, so if you have one, pass it on.
Friday, March 11, 2011
Cinephilia: Meme Without a Cause
Before the internet made (no pun intended) virtually everything accessible, I used to wonder how it was that knowledge of the obscure, the forgotten, or the "cult" films came from. The information seemed to travel like a meme; no one could pinpoint exactly where they heard it from, or declare with any certainty that this knowledge originated from any source more reliable than a "friend of a friend told me." It just appeared - one day you didn't know about these movies, and the next you did.
Voracious readers experience a similar phenomenon, one that provides a gateway into the experience I'm talking about: at a certain point in time, almost invariably high school, some students clue in to "alternative" literature, seemingly without a point of reference. The only point of entry that makes sense is the one student that always seems to carry around The Portable Beat Reader, but how one makes the leap from Jack Kerouac to Aldous Huxley or Philip K. Dick, H.P. Lovecraft, William Gibson, or Hunter S. Thompson, I can't say. If my library had a copy of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, I didn't know it. I don't even remember how I knew the book existed: I just did. Ironically, years before I had been reading issues of Rolling Stone that Thompson wrote essays for (the one that springs to mind is "Polo is My Life," which became the book he never released between Better Than Sex and Kingdom of Fear), but I didn't read those articles. In retrospect, I wish I had, but the literary "virus" infects without warning.
The same is applicable to film, even if there are a few more tangible sources to point towards. Most film "geeks" spend (spent? considering current trends) hours poring through the titles at video stores, attracted to lurid cover art or titles that confound the mind. The video store clerk, not always the stereotypical "comic book guy" from The Simpsons, was handy in offering suggestions. True story: while applying for a job at a local video store (a job I did not end up getting because I was too young), the manager interviewing me suggested that I watch Swimming with Sharks because I really enjoyed Kevin Spacey in The Ref. Had she not suggested I rent Swimming with Sharks, I may have missed out on the film entirely for years.
Looking back on the job I did get, a seasonal shift working for Suncoast Video (now FYE), the root cause for the cinephile "meme" still remains elusive: aside from a friend asking me to find Sid and Nancy*, much of my time working there wasn't spent combing through titles I didn't recognize or hadn't heard of. To be fair, it was the holiday season and I was only sixteen, but both prime opportunities to identify an originating "there" for the cinematic virus both come up blank.
The truth is that I don't know who told me that The Evil Dead was a film to see. Maybe it was The Video Movie Guide by Mick Martin and Marsha Porter - that was, I recall, the first time I ever heard that Evil Dead 2: Dead by Dawn was practically a "remake of the first film" - then again, maybe it was a review of Army of Darkness in the local newspaper. I didn't see Army of Darkness at the time, but I knew it existed, and with a bit of diligent investigation, it's possible I traced the sequel back to Sam Raimi's debut. The problem is that you always seem to be telling other people about these films, but can never suss out how you knew about them. Nobody told me about The Rocky Horror Picture Show; it just always seemed to be there, a midnight listing for The Rialto every week. One week, we decided to go, not really knowing much more about the film or the rules than when we didn't want to go.
Once the meme reaches you, infects you, the information and the desire to learn more increases exponentially. One film leads to another, that leads to another, that leads to a dead end, a rumor, a film no one can find: the Cannibal Holocaust's, the "director's cut" of Dawn of the Dead, a "workprint" cut of Alien 3, the "five hour" Dune. At the time, with limited resources, these seem like impossibilities. They have to be "out there" because you read some arcane reference to the fact, or saw a discrepancy in the running time** somewhere.
Now, things are a little different: the internet leveled out much of the conjecture, many of the second or third-hand sources, and the growing availability of DVDs have, in many ways, altered the landscape permanently. Access is different, although surprisingly as vague as the meme was before an era of instant availability. While it's much, much easier to find out about apocryphal "geek" trivia, like what's missing in different versions of a film (see Movie-Censorship dot com), the paper trail is nevertheless no more definite. The availability of information is more prevalent; it's source remains nearly as ethereal.
Apropos to this discussion is the fact that I don't consider the internet to have "ruined" geek culture: Patton Oswalt made several salient (if tongue in cheek) points in a Wired article titled "Wake Up, Geek Culture: Time to Die" and maybe the "cult" aspect of fandom is vanishing thanks to over-saturation. We live in an age when the random, the lost-in-the-shuffle, the marginal can not only be found on the Internet Movie Database, but the poster is only a Google Image Search away (often linked to a page where it's for sale), has at least one link on Amazon***, and if an industrious pirate has enough perseverance, the film itself is floating somewhere in the digital cloud.
The digital cloud, so to speak, has become another fold in which the film meme hides itself. What's different is that the limited resources of fifteen or twenty years ago have, for the most part, disappeared. People visit this blog as a result of image searches for films like Monsturd, a movie I can't imagine is really that widely discussed. Still, someone heard the title from a friend of a friend (or from Netflix), and plugged the title in. They ended up here, and I take great pride in being a source that passes on the film meme, or Cinephilia as I like to classify it. Maybe I can tell you where I heard about these films from, but I'll be more than happy to pass them on if they're worth your while.
* True story - Sid and Nancy was, at that point, not available on VHS. I jokingly suggested she buy a sixty dollar Laserdisc copy of the film. The laserdisc's publisher? Criterion.
** This continues to be a point of curiosity among friends: when Artisan released The Ninth Gate, the Spanish running time was fifteen minutes longer than the American version, which I have never found any accounting for, or if a longer cut even exists.
*** Take, for example, Five Minutes to Live, also known as The Door-to-Door Maniac: a Johnny Cash and Ronnie Howard vehicle from the 1960s that most Cash fans don't even know exists. Seven Amazon listings for the DVD as of five minutes ago.
Voracious readers experience a similar phenomenon, one that provides a gateway into the experience I'm talking about: at a certain point in time, almost invariably high school, some students clue in to "alternative" literature, seemingly without a point of reference. The only point of entry that makes sense is the one student that always seems to carry around The Portable Beat Reader, but how one makes the leap from Jack Kerouac to Aldous Huxley or Philip K. Dick, H.P. Lovecraft, William Gibson, or Hunter S. Thompson, I can't say. If my library had a copy of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, I didn't know it. I don't even remember how I knew the book existed: I just did. Ironically, years before I had been reading issues of Rolling Stone that Thompson wrote essays for (the one that springs to mind is "Polo is My Life," which became the book he never released between Better Than Sex and Kingdom of Fear), but I didn't read those articles. In retrospect, I wish I had, but the literary "virus" infects without warning.
The same is applicable to film, even if there are a few more tangible sources to point towards. Most film "geeks" spend (spent? considering current trends) hours poring through the titles at video stores, attracted to lurid cover art or titles that confound the mind. The video store clerk, not always the stereotypical "comic book guy" from The Simpsons, was handy in offering suggestions. True story: while applying for a job at a local video store (a job I did not end up getting because I was too young), the manager interviewing me suggested that I watch Swimming with Sharks because I really enjoyed Kevin Spacey in The Ref. Had she not suggested I rent Swimming with Sharks, I may have missed out on the film entirely for years.
Looking back on the job I did get, a seasonal shift working for Suncoast Video (now FYE), the root cause for the cinephile "meme" still remains elusive: aside from a friend asking me to find Sid and Nancy*, much of my time working there wasn't spent combing through titles I didn't recognize or hadn't heard of. To be fair, it was the holiday season and I was only sixteen, but both prime opportunities to identify an originating "there" for the cinematic virus both come up blank.
The truth is that I don't know who told me that The Evil Dead was a film to see. Maybe it was The Video Movie Guide by Mick Martin and Marsha Porter - that was, I recall, the first time I ever heard that Evil Dead 2: Dead by Dawn was practically a "remake of the first film" - then again, maybe it was a review of Army of Darkness in the local newspaper. I didn't see Army of Darkness at the time, but I knew it existed, and with a bit of diligent investigation, it's possible I traced the sequel back to Sam Raimi's debut. The problem is that you always seem to be telling other people about these films, but can never suss out how you knew about them. Nobody told me about The Rocky Horror Picture Show; it just always seemed to be there, a midnight listing for The Rialto every week. One week, we decided to go, not really knowing much more about the film or the rules than when we didn't want to go.
Once the meme reaches you, infects you, the information and the desire to learn more increases exponentially. One film leads to another, that leads to another, that leads to a dead end, a rumor, a film no one can find: the Cannibal Holocaust's, the "director's cut" of Dawn of the Dead, a "workprint" cut of Alien 3, the "five hour" Dune. At the time, with limited resources, these seem like impossibilities. They have to be "out there" because you read some arcane reference to the fact, or saw a discrepancy in the running time** somewhere.
Now, things are a little different: the internet leveled out much of the conjecture, many of the second or third-hand sources, and the growing availability of DVDs have, in many ways, altered the landscape permanently. Access is different, although surprisingly as vague as the meme was before an era of instant availability. While it's much, much easier to find out about apocryphal "geek" trivia, like what's missing in different versions of a film (see Movie-Censorship dot com), the paper trail is nevertheless no more definite. The availability of information is more prevalent; it's source remains nearly as ethereal.
Apropos to this discussion is the fact that I don't consider the internet to have "ruined" geek culture: Patton Oswalt made several salient (if tongue in cheek) points in a Wired article titled "Wake Up, Geek Culture: Time to Die" and maybe the "cult" aspect of fandom is vanishing thanks to over-saturation. We live in an age when the random, the lost-in-the-shuffle, the marginal can not only be found on the Internet Movie Database, but the poster is only a Google Image Search away (often linked to a page where it's for sale), has at least one link on Amazon***, and if an industrious pirate has enough perseverance, the film itself is floating somewhere in the digital cloud.
The digital cloud, so to speak, has become another fold in which the film meme hides itself. What's different is that the limited resources of fifteen or twenty years ago have, for the most part, disappeared. People visit this blog as a result of image searches for films like Monsturd, a movie I can't imagine is really that widely discussed. Still, someone heard the title from a friend of a friend (or from Netflix), and plugged the title in. They ended up here, and I take great pride in being a source that passes on the film meme, or Cinephilia as I like to classify it. Maybe I can tell you where I heard about these films from, but I'll be more than happy to pass them on if they're worth your while.
* True story - Sid and Nancy was, at that point, not available on VHS. I jokingly suggested she buy a sixty dollar Laserdisc copy of the film. The laserdisc's publisher? Criterion.
** This continues to be a point of curiosity among friends: when Artisan released The Ninth Gate, the Spanish running time was fifteen minutes longer than the American version, which I have never found any accounting for, or if a longer cut even exists.
*** Take, for example, Five Minutes to Live, also known as The Door-to-Door Maniac: a Johnny Cash and Ronnie Howard vehicle from the 1960s that most Cash fans don't even know exists. Seven Amazon listings for the DVD as of five minutes ago.
Tuesday, March 8, 2011
Retro Review: Dawn of the Dead (Extended Edition)
Welcome back to Retro Reviews: after that Night of the Living Dead anniversary hack job last week, the Cap'n needed a palate cleanser, preferably with zombies. I watched Shaun of the Dead (with the Edgar Wright / Simon Pegg commentary on, because I'm the kind of person who listens to commentaries, thank you very much), but I realized what I really wanted to watch was Dawn of the Dead. The last three times I saw the film, however, I had seen the theatrical cut, so it seemed high time to shake things up. It was time for the longer, zombie-er-er "extended" cut!
While I will cover aspects of the film, this review will also cover the history of the "extended" cut. Accordingly, I won't recap Dawn of the Dead for readers unfamiliar with the film, and will more than likely include spoilers.
Unlike the mangled, pointless Night of the Living Dead 30th Anniversary edition, Dawn of the Dead's history of alternate versions goes back almost to the film's release. There are a number of different cuts (many of which were bootlegs in the era of VHS) in different countries, but Anchor Bay settled on three versions for its Ultimate Edition: the theatrical cut (127 minutes), the "extended" version (139 minutes), and the "European" cut (121 minutes).
The Ultimate Edition is, in many ways, a combining of earlier (albeit bare bones) releases of the films: in the early days of DVD, Anchor Bay released the "extended" version as the "Director's Cut," a disc so early in the medium's existence that Dual Layer technology had not yet been implemented, meaning that you had to flip the disc halfway through the film*. Romero was quick to point out that he preferred the shorter, theatrical version, so when releasing the Ultimate Edition, it was given the "extended" moniker and suggested as producer Richard Rubenstein's preferred cut. The European Cut, also known as Zombi, was re-edited by Dario Argento for foreign audiences; this version is shorter, removes much of the humor, and adds a few smaller character moments.
And that is, in a nutshell, your brief recap of the different versions of Dawn of the Dead. For the purposes of today's Retro Review, the Cap'n is setting the wayback machine to the version I've had the most contact with, the "Director's" or "extended" cut. Over the years I've had multiple copies of the longer version on VHS and DVD, and while the Blu Ray release is the theatrical cut, the version I've seen as often (if not more often) is the longer cut.
Young cinephiles are always excited to find something they didn't know existed, especially "alternate" cuts of films they love. I had seen Dawn of the Dead, maybe made a copy on VHS, and knew the film well by the time I first saw the two tape "Original Director's Cut" at, of all places, a used Record Store. Assuming that the Dawn of the Dead I knew was merely a charade, some censored version, I paid eight dollars (or whatever the price was) to see the "true" Dawn of the Dead, and to show it to all the other zombie fanatics I knew, as I would with so many other films over the years. Despite the fact that this was something mass produced - not to mention something someone already bought and sold - we thought we had the inside track on movie secrets!
I confess that I owned the "flipper" disc of the "Director's Cut" as well as the later Theatrical cut (which wasn't a flipper), and more than likely owned the re-release that preceded the four disc Ultimate Edition (which I still have). The holy grail until the Ultimate Edition was Zombi, the Argento cut, but aside from stripping away much of the social commentary and the underlying humor that sold it, Argento's version (disc three) isn't much more than a footnote best remembered for allowing Lucio Fulci to make Zombi 2 (or, as it's known in the U.S., Zombie). Let's take a look at what makes the "extended" cut so, well, extended.
The chief difference between the "extended" cut (disc two) and the theatrical version (disc one) of the set is that there's more of just about everything: more mall, more interview footage with the scientists, more ransacking, more mall shopping montage, and more chaos at the beginning, both in the WGON news station and in the housing project. With twelve extra minutes, there's actually less zombie carnage and more time spent developing the relationships between Roger, Stephen, Francine, and Peter. The additions are spread out over the film, usually in little chunks rather than a noticeably different sequence. Over the years the 127 and 139 minute versions bled together so much that I don't notice when minor additions are missing or present.
In fact, the only scene I can directly point to is early in the film: an extended encounter between the protagonists and police officers escaping by boat. In the theatrical version, most of the conversation is limited to the conversation about escaping to an island ("any island") and the cop asking for cigarettes. In the "extended" cut, there's a longer standoff between the two groups, and a cameo that I found interesting with respect to Romero's last three "dead" films.
Visitors to the Blogorium (and no doubt many other pages) have periodically dropped in my Survival of the Dead review because Alan Van Sprang appears in Land, Diary, and Survival of the Dead, playing what may or may not be the same character (Brubaker, Colonel, and Sarge, respectively). Since Land takes place after Diary and Survival, it is entirely possible that Van Sprang is playing the same soldier, but it turns out Romero also cast an actor in Dawn of the Dead for a minor part only to use him in a lead role in his next "dead" film. Joe Pilato, who plays Captain Rhodes in Day of the Dead, is one of the escaping officers in Dawn of the Dead. The "extended" cut expands his cameo by giving him the most interaction with Stephen and Francine, and he's listed in the credits. It's almost certain that Pilato is not playing the same role; the Van Sprang connection remains to be seen.
Other than that minor trivia tidbit, the "extended" cut of Dawn of the Dead does feel a little padded at times. Oh sure, it's nice to spend more time in the mall, to see more of Roger before he "turns," and feel the sense of time as the Monroeville Mall shifts from dream to nightmare, but in other ways the additions hurt the film. The film's opening at WGON is interminably long, and while it conveys a sense of chaos as the world tries to explain what's happening, the urgency of Francine needing to escape diminishes with every cut back to George Romero's cameo, or to the longer argument on-camera about the nature of the dead. The cumulative effect actually lessens the immediacy of "getting away," in part because the audience is now mired in the minute details of keeping the station operational.
It also takes twice as long to introduce Ken Foree's Peter and Scott Reiniger's Roger during the apartment complex raid. The sequence is adversely affected as a result: while the raid itself doesn't appear to be any longer than in the theatrical version, it certainly feels longer because the WGON sequence dragged the pace of Dawn of the Dead to a crawl, and by the time the foursome leaves in the helicopter it feels like the film may never find momentum. Romero's theatrical cut allows the film to have a sense of urgency, of desperation, before the film slows down in the middle, then to pick up again during the biker raid near the end.
With respect to pacing issues, I will say that there's no great harm done to Dawn of the Dead as a whole in the "extended" cut. It's hardly a mangled version of the film and, at times, benefits from a more languid pace. At two hours and twenty minutes, you're going to get more Dawn than you ever knew you needed, but for fans who wore out their shorter versions, it's a nice break from the norm.
Join the Cap'n next week when I continue "March of the Dead" by reviewing, um... Day of the Dead? Maybe? Return of the Living Dead part 2? We'll see when we get there.
* Early DVD adopters might also remember this from Goodfellas and Sleepers discs as well.
While I will cover aspects of the film, this review will also cover the history of the "extended" cut. Accordingly, I won't recap Dawn of the Dead for readers unfamiliar with the film, and will more than likely include spoilers.
Unlike the mangled, pointless Night of the Living Dead 30th Anniversary edition, Dawn of the Dead's history of alternate versions goes back almost to the film's release. There are a number of different cuts (many of which were bootlegs in the era of VHS) in different countries, but Anchor Bay settled on three versions for its Ultimate Edition: the theatrical cut (127 minutes), the "extended" version (139 minutes), and the "European" cut (121 minutes).
The Ultimate Edition is, in many ways, a combining of earlier (albeit bare bones) releases of the films: in the early days of DVD, Anchor Bay released the "extended" version as the "Director's Cut," a disc so early in the medium's existence that Dual Layer technology had not yet been implemented, meaning that you had to flip the disc halfway through the film*. Romero was quick to point out that he preferred the shorter, theatrical version, so when releasing the Ultimate Edition, it was given the "extended" moniker and suggested as producer Richard Rubenstein's preferred cut. The European Cut, also known as Zombi, was re-edited by Dario Argento for foreign audiences; this version is shorter, removes much of the humor, and adds a few smaller character moments.And that is, in a nutshell, your brief recap of the different versions of Dawn of the Dead. For the purposes of today's Retro Review, the Cap'n is setting the wayback machine to the version I've had the most contact with, the "Director's" or "extended" cut. Over the years I've had multiple copies of the longer version on VHS and DVD, and while the Blu Ray release is the theatrical cut, the version I've seen as often (if not more often) is the longer cut.
Young cinephiles are always excited to find something they didn't know existed, especially "alternate" cuts of films they love. I had seen Dawn of the Dead, maybe made a copy on VHS, and knew the film well by the time I first saw the two tape "Original Director's Cut" at, of all places, a used Record Store. Assuming that the Dawn of the Dead I knew was merely a charade, some censored version, I paid eight dollars (or whatever the price was) to see the "true" Dawn of the Dead, and to show it to all the other zombie fanatics I knew, as I would with so many other films over the years. Despite the fact that this was something mass produced - not to mention something someone already bought and sold - we thought we had the inside track on movie secrets!
I confess that I owned the "flipper" disc of the "Director's Cut" as well as the later Theatrical cut (which wasn't a flipper), and more than likely owned the re-release that preceded the four disc Ultimate Edition (which I still have). The holy grail until the Ultimate Edition was Zombi, the Argento cut, but aside from stripping away much of the social commentary and the underlying humor that sold it, Argento's version (disc three) isn't much more than a footnote best remembered for allowing Lucio Fulci to make Zombi 2 (or, as it's known in the U.S., Zombie). Let's take a look at what makes the "extended" cut so, well, extended.The chief difference between the "extended" cut (disc two) and the theatrical version (disc one) of the set is that there's more of just about everything: more mall, more interview footage with the scientists, more ransacking, more mall shopping montage, and more chaos at the beginning, both in the WGON news station and in the housing project. With twelve extra minutes, there's actually less zombie carnage and more time spent developing the relationships between Roger, Stephen, Francine, and Peter. The additions are spread out over the film, usually in little chunks rather than a noticeably different sequence. Over the years the 127 and 139 minute versions bled together so much that I don't notice when minor additions are missing or present.
In fact, the only scene I can directly point to is early in the film: an extended encounter between the protagonists and police officers escaping by boat. In the theatrical version, most of the conversation is limited to the conversation about escaping to an island ("any island") and the cop asking for cigarettes. In the "extended" cut, there's a longer standoff between the two groups, and a cameo that I found interesting with respect to Romero's last three "dead" films.
Visitors to the Blogorium (and no doubt many other pages) have periodically dropped in my Survival of the Dead review because Alan Van Sprang appears in Land, Diary, and Survival of the Dead, playing what may or may not be the same character (Brubaker, Colonel, and Sarge, respectively). Since Land takes place after Diary and Survival, it is entirely possible that Van Sprang is playing the same soldier, but it turns out Romero also cast an actor in Dawn of the Dead for a minor part only to use him in a lead role in his next "dead" film. Joe Pilato, who plays Captain Rhodes in Day of the Dead, is one of the escaping officers in Dawn of the Dead. The "extended" cut expands his cameo by giving him the most interaction with Stephen and Francine, and he's listed in the credits. It's almost certain that Pilato is not playing the same role; the Van Sprang connection remains to be seen.
Other than that minor trivia tidbit, the "extended" cut of Dawn of the Dead does feel a little padded at times. Oh sure, it's nice to spend more time in the mall, to see more of Roger before he "turns," and feel the sense of time as the Monroeville Mall shifts from dream to nightmare, but in other ways the additions hurt the film. The film's opening at WGON is interminably long, and while it conveys a sense of chaos as the world tries to explain what's happening, the urgency of Francine needing to escape diminishes with every cut back to George Romero's cameo, or to the longer argument on-camera about the nature of the dead. The cumulative effect actually lessens the immediacy of "getting away," in part because the audience is now mired in the minute details of keeping the station operational.It also takes twice as long to introduce Ken Foree's Peter and Scott Reiniger's Roger during the apartment complex raid. The sequence is adversely affected as a result: while the raid itself doesn't appear to be any longer than in the theatrical version, it certainly feels longer because the WGON sequence dragged the pace of Dawn of the Dead to a crawl, and by the time the foursome leaves in the helicopter it feels like the film may never find momentum. Romero's theatrical cut allows the film to have a sense of urgency, of desperation, before the film slows down in the middle, then to pick up again during the biker raid near the end.
With respect to pacing issues, I will say that there's no great harm done to Dawn of the Dead as a whole in the "extended" cut. It's hardly a mangled version of the film and, at times, benefits from a more languid pace. At two hours and twenty minutes, you're going to get more Dawn than you ever knew you needed, but for fans who wore out their shorter versions, it's a nice break from the norm.
Join the Cap'n next week when I continue "March of the Dead" by reviewing, um... Day of the Dead? Maybe? Return of the Living Dead part 2? We'll see when we get there.
* Early DVD adopters might also remember this from Goodfellas and Sleepers discs as well.
Monday, March 7, 2011
Blogorium Review: The Seven-Per-Cent Solution
I don't know what to make of the 1976 Sherlock Holmes adventure The Seven-Per-Cent Solution, although I think that many detractors of the 2009 reboot starring Robert Downey, Jr. and Jude Law might want to rethink the "it's awful because Guy Ritchie made Holmes an action star," at least once they've seen this curious mishmash of detective fiction, wry but inconsistent humor, nonsensical action, and odd pacing.
The story, which is non-canonical (meaning that it's not one of Arthur Conan Doyle's Holmes tales), was adapted for the screen by the author's novel, Nicholas Meyer* and directed by Herbert Ross, deals with Sherlock Holmes' increasing addiction to cocaine (hinted at in the Doyle stories but made explicit in Meyer's novel; the title refers to Holmes' preferred mixture - seven-per-cent cocaine, ninety-three-per-cent water). In a fit of paranoia, Holmes (Nicol Williamson) locks himself in his study and informs Dr. Watson (Robert Duvall) that the nefarious Professor Moriarty (Laurence Olivier) is plotting to kill him. The befuddled Moriarty appeals to Watson, confused to why he is the source of threatening letters and being stalked by Holmes. Watson and Mycroft Holmes (Charles Gray) conspire to trick the detective into visiting Vienna, home of famous psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud (Alan Arkin). During treatment, Holmes, Watson, and Freud become embroiled in a kidnapping scheme involving Lola Deveraux (Vanessa Redgrave), a former patient of Freud and mistress of Baron von Leinsdorf (Jeremy Kemp).
The Seven-Per-Cent Solution is meant to be a comedy - at least, IMDB indicates that alongside "adventure" and "crime" - although you wouldn't really know it for long stretches of the film. While it does open promising that "the story is true - only the facts have been made up," the film teeters between wry and serious. I can understand chuckling at the voice-over from Watson; it relays, in a clever fashion, where this adventure fits in with other Holmes adventures**. The voice-over, which I would suspect Meyer lifted directly from his novel, disappears shortly after Holmes and Watson arrive in Vienna, and the humorous elements could easily be taken as serious, compounded by a shift in tone near the end of the film (more on this below). Whether we're supposed to find Lowenstein (Joel Grey)'s horror at a dead nun funny or not is up to you.
After seeing the film in totality, I was surprised how much Ritchie's Sherlock Holmes borrows from The Seven-Per-Cent Solution, particularly the beginning and ending. The erratic, unpredictable-but-nevertheless-brilliant Holmes bounces around London, confounding Watson, hiding in the bushes, disguised, and generally making life difficult for his compatriots. In this film, the blame lies centrally in his cocaine abuse, but the "manic" Holmes of Ritchie's film is manifest in Nicol Williamson's performance. The stoic, slightly annoyed Watson is less apparently embodied in Robert Duvall, but I must admit I was slightly distracted by his accent, which shifted between bad and laughable (the voice-overs are the worst)***.
Late in the film, after Sigmund Freud's role becomes as perfunctory as Jack the Ripper's in Murder By Decree, the trail of clues gives way to the sort of action 2009's Sherlock Holmes is criticized for: there's acar train chase, a gun fight that becomes a sword fight which inexplicably moves from inside a train car to on top of the train, Sigmund Freud providing the inspiration for Liam Neeson in Taken (I only wish I was kidding), and a moment which I must assume was meant to be clever but is instead painfully stupid (it involves axes and a superfluous train car).
This sequence is followed, unfortunately, by a radical shift in tone, brought about by a need to justify Sigmund Freud's presence in the film (his "treatment" earlier in the narrative merely consists of hypnotizing Holmes while the detective detoxes), and a final hypnosis session ham-handedly tries to explain away Holmes' mistrust of women, his addiction, his choice of profession, and his suspicion of Professor Moriarty. To say much more would spoil the end of the film, but it culminates in an abrupt and brutal flashback that robs the film of its lighthearted tone. Then again, the film also attempts to shoehorn in an eleventh-hour romance angle for no reason.
Unfortunately, despite being well-acted (if not well-accented), The Seven-Per-Cent Solution is too disjointed to be effective as a film. Like its 2009 descendant, the film is all over the map tonally: partly comic, somewhat sleuth-centric, sporadically dark, and unnecessarily action-heavy with a dash of religious overtones. Guy Ritchie's take on Holmes at least balances the disparate elements and settles to entertain, but if you're looking for a funny non-canonical Sherlock Holmes film, might I direct you towards Without a Clue, which is funnier and has a better mystery. Like Murder By Decree, The Seven-Per-Cent Solution is a curio, a diversion, the sort of "Sherlock Holmes meets ___" mashup which is periodically in vogue, but not much more.
* Many of you know Meyers better for his involvement in Star Trek's II, IV, and VI or, as most people like to call them, "the good ones."
** At the outset, the film identifies itself as what "really" happened when Holmes "died" in The Final Problem: Watson apparently fabricated Holmes' death while the detective snuck away to combat his addiction.
*** For the record, Alan Arkin's accent is less laughable, although not particularly good.
The story, which is non-canonical (meaning that it's not one of Arthur Conan Doyle's Holmes tales), was adapted for the screen by the author's novel, Nicholas Meyer* and directed by Herbert Ross, deals with Sherlock Holmes' increasing addiction to cocaine (hinted at in the Doyle stories but made explicit in Meyer's novel; the title refers to Holmes' preferred mixture - seven-per-cent cocaine, ninety-three-per-cent water). In a fit of paranoia, Holmes (Nicol Williamson) locks himself in his study and informs Dr. Watson (Robert Duvall) that the nefarious Professor Moriarty (Laurence Olivier) is plotting to kill him. The befuddled Moriarty appeals to Watson, confused to why he is the source of threatening letters and being stalked by Holmes. Watson and Mycroft Holmes (Charles Gray) conspire to trick the detective into visiting Vienna, home of famous psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud (Alan Arkin). During treatment, Holmes, Watson, and Freud become embroiled in a kidnapping scheme involving Lola Deveraux (Vanessa Redgrave), a former patient of Freud and mistress of Baron von Leinsdorf (Jeremy Kemp).The Seven-Per-Cent Solution is meant to be a comedy - at least, IMDB indicates that alongside "adventure" and "crime" - although you wouldn't really know it for long stretches of the film. While it does open promising that "the story is true - only the facts have been made up," the film teeters between wry and serious. I can understand chuckling at the voice-over from Watson; it relays, in a clever fashion, where this adventure fits in with other Holmes adventures**. The voice-over, which I would suspect Meyer lifted directly from his novel, disappears shortly after Holmes and Watson arrive in Vienna, and the humorous elements could easily be taken as serious, compounded by a shift in tone near the end of the film (more on this below). Whether we're supposed to find Lowenstein (Joel Grey)'s horror at a dead nun funny or not is up to you.
After seeing the film in totality, I was surprised how much Ritchie's Sherlock Holmes borrows from The Seven-Per-Cent Solution, particularly the beginning and ending. The erratic, unpredictable-but-nevertheless-brilliant Holmes bounces around London, confounding Watson, hiding in the bushes, disguised, and generally making life difficult for his compatriots. In this film, the blame lies centrally in his cocaine abuse, but the "manic" Holmes of Ritchie's film is manifest in Nicol Williamson's performance. The stoic, slightly annoyed Watson is less apparently embodied in Robert Duvall, but I must admit I was slightly distracted by his accent, which shifted between bad and laughable (the voice-overs are the worst)***.
Late in the film, after Sigmund Freud's role becomes as perfunctory as Jack the Ripper's in Murder By Decree, the trail of clues gives way to the sort of action 2009's Sherlock Holmes is criticized for: there's a
This sequence is followed, unfortunately, by a radical shift in tone, brought about by a need to justify Sigmund Freud's presence in the film (his "treatment" earlier in the narrative merely consists of hypnotizing Holmes while the detective detoxes), and a final hypnosis session ham-handedly tries to explain away Holmes' mistrust of women, his addiction, his choice of profession, and his suspicion of Professor Moriarty. To say much more would spoil the end of the film, but it culminates in an abrupt and brutal flashback that robs the film of its lighthearted tone. Then again, the film also attempts to shoehorn in an eleventh-hour romance angle for no reason.
Unfortunately, despite being well-acted (if not well-accented), The Seven-Per-Cent Solution is too disjointed to be effective as a film. Like its 2009 descendant, the film is all over the map tonally: partly comic, somewhat sleuth-centric, sporadically dark, and unnecessarily action-heavy with a dash of religious overtones. Guy Ritchie's take on Holmes at least balances the disparate elements and settles to entertain, but if you're looking for a funny non-canonical Sherlock Holmes film, might I direct you towards Without a Clue, which is funnier and has a better mystery. Like Murder By Decree, The Seven-Per-Cent Solution is a curio, a diversion, the sort of "Sherlock Holmes meets ___" mashup which is periodically in vogue, but not much more.
* Many of you know Meyers better for his involvement in Star Trek's II, IV, and VI or, as most people like to call them, "the good ones."
** At the outset, the film identifies itself as what "really" happened when Holmes "died" in The Final Problem: Watson apparently fabricated Holmes' death while the detective snuck away to combat his addiction.
*** For the record, Alan Arkin's accent is less laughable, although not particularly good.
Friday, March 4, 2011
The Cap'n: Debunker of Rumours.
Every few months, I hear one of the two statements about my movie viewing habits:
1. You didn't see that? I thought you saw everything!
2. Well, of course _____ sounds bad. Everything you show at (fill in the blank) Fest is bad.
or some variation thereof. When hit with both in the course of two days, it seemed like I needed to once again step up and dispel some assumptions about what I watch, what I show others, and other erroneous assertions made about the Cap'n.
The first assumption is fair, and goes along with the theory proposed last week about what non-cinephiles think that "film geeks" do with their time: watch everything. The truth of the matter is that I have neither the time, the money, nor the inkling to watch every single movie that comes out. I can't even see all of the critically well regarded films, though I do keep track of them, bookmark reviews so I don't forget they exist, and hope that I remember when the DVD or Blu Ray comes out so I can add it to an already lengthy Netflix queue.
As it is, I see as much as I can, where I can and when I can, but I'm just like you "normals": I have other concerns that occupy my time, I have the same mundane day-to-day tasks to deal with. I fit in movies late at night, or in small doses so that I have something to write about (which also takes time). While I'd love to be able to wander from theatre to theatre and soak in everything, then head to the video store (supposing they exist anymore) and rent every old title in stock to accompany the new releases I picked up, I can't do that. Yet. When I can, I'll let you know.
I also read, which may or may not come as a surprise (I don't really know what you assume the Cap'n does with his spare time), not always about film, but in reasonable doses. I find that if I ever want to pursue an education and career writing about film, I should soak up as much information as humanly possible about the aspects of cinema I find interesting, so the texts range from academic theory, compendiums of interviews with directors, writers, actors, and editors about process, work by other critics I admire, the occasional bio or autobiography, and one or two movie guides to use in order to find something I haven't heard of - and that tends to be plenty.
To address the second comment (which the first dovetails nicely into), I openly admit that the "about" blurb on the right side of the page says "trash savant," which implies that the Cap'n is knowledgeable about a certain type of film, one that others might hold their nose while walking past were the metaphor extended to food rather than cinema. I understand that, and it is true that that is a facet of what I watch, show, and discuss. It's also true that the Cap'n has a term coined in his honor: the "Trappening," a deliberate misleading of friends to come over and watch a movie only to show them something horrible (named for my devilish enjoyment of M. Night Shyamalan's The Happening and the dirty trick I played on everyone during Horror Fest III).
Somehow these facts, coupled with Bad Movie Night - an appropriation of what my brother and his friends do for each of their birthdays - has given people the strange notion that this is ALL the Cap'n is interested in. Yes, I take a certain amount of pride in finding the obscure and rightfully forgotten films for festivals; more often than not, those are the films that unite the audience and energize them between films with slower pacing or that are less easy to react to. The atmosphere created by a "party" movie can lift the group up and continue momentum over the night, as many fest attendees will attest to.
Let's address the main point for a moment, and where assumption one dovetails into assumption two: the idea that I will, or would want to, watch "everything." The second postulate goes further to assert that I will watch anything as long as it is "bad," which is demonstrably untrue. In fact, I turned the point around to the person who made it when he bemoaned how terrible Transformers 2 was. Here is a reasonable facsimile of the discussion:
Me: Now wait a minute... I never saw Transformers because it looked awful. You not only saw Transformers and hated it, but still went back and saw Transformers 2, which you knew you wouldn't like.
He: Yeah.
Me: And I'm the one who watches "bad" movies?
He: Fair point.
In the interest of full disclosure, the conversation then turned to the fact that I had seen Michael Bay's The Island, which I didn't like, in part because it sounded exactly like Parts: The Clonus Horror, a film I only knew existed because of Mystery Science Theater 3000. If you want to negate my point, there's your opportunity. I also mentioned an interest in seeing the 1989 film Red Scorpion, starring Dolph Lundgren, which was met with some derision.
Red Scorpion may well be a terrible movie; in fact, I've seen no kind words written about it, but my reasons for seeing it have nothing to do with the "quality" of the film. My interest in seeing Red Scorpion, like my interest in The Island, has to do with its place among other films. That the existence of Red Scorpion is one of the most surprising things in a film as revelatory as Casino Jack and the United States of Money spoke to me. I had no idea that lobbyist Jack Abramoff dabbled as a Hollywood producer, and this apocryphal piece of film history makes seeing Red Scorpion worth the diversion into "bad" movie territory.
Every now and then, I'll get a wild hair and watch something like Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li or s. Darko or, yes, Death Bed: The Bed That Eats, and despite the fact that the first two reviews appeared with the caveat SO YOU WON'T HAVE TO, people seem to think that I only seek these movies out. Yes, they're easy to describe and the reviews are often memorable because I go out of my way to describe the lunacy and ineptitude on display, but it isn't the only thing I write about.
The fact that I enjoy the loopy, nonsensical narrative of Death Bed and its novel, totally unexpected way of having the bed "eat", or the fact that Hillbillys in a Haunted House delivers nothing the title promises (but is still charming in a stupid, earnest manner), does not mean that I'm only going to program those films at festivals. What I run into by the time you get to 8 official "fests" is the risk of repeating yourself too much and running out of films that are going to surprise people. So I take risks - some pay off, like the deliriously offensive Blood Car and ThanksKilling, and some don't, like the turgid Matango or the lifeless Navy vs. the Night Monsters.
Do I sometimes relish in how much you hate these films? Yes, at times; I never said the Cap'n was sadistic, but many of you keep coming back knowing that there's a 50/50 chance things could not work. They can't all be as woefully pathetic and hysterical as The Giant Claw, after all. I appreciate your willingness to venture into uncharted territory with me, but by this point I had hoped more people would realize that's not all that makes up the Cap'n.
If not, then maybe "Good Movie Night" would be fun, if a bit redundant conceptually. Beats me; I just thought you were already watching those without my involvement. Am I assuming too much?
1. You didn't see that? I thought you saw everything!
2. Well, of course _____ sounds bad. Everything you show at (fill in the blank) Fest is bad.
or some variation thereof. When hit with both in the course of two days, it seemed like I needed to once again step up and dispel some assumptions about what I watch, what I show others, and other erroneous assertions made about the Cap'n.
The first assumption is fair, and goes along with the theory proposed last week about what non-cinephiles think that "film geeks" do with their time: watch everything. The truth of the matter is that I have neither the time, the money, nor the inkling to watch every single movie that comes out. I can't even see all of the critically well regarded films, though I do keep track of them, bookmark reviews so I don't forget they exist, and hope that I remember when the DVD or Blu Ray comes out so I can add it to an already lengthy Netflix queue.
As it is, I see as much as I can, where I can and when I can, but I'm just like you "normals": I have other concerns that occupy my time, I have the same mundane day-to-day tasks to deal with. I fit in movies late at night, or in small doses so that I have something to write about (which also takes time). While I'd love to be able to wander from theatre to theatre and soak in everything, then head to the video store (supposing they exist anymore) and rent every old title in stock to accompany the new releases I picked up, I can't do that. Yet. When I can, I'll let you know.
I also read, which may or may not come as a surprise (I don't really know what you assume the Cap'n does with his spare time), not always about film, but in reasonable doses. I find that if I ever want to pursue an education and career writing about film, I should soak up as much information as humanly possible about the aspects of cinema I find interesting, so the texts range from academic theory, compendiums of interviews with directors, writers, actors, and editors about process, work by other critics I admire, the occasional bio or autobiography, and one or two movie guides to use in order to find something I haven't heard of - and that tends to be plenty.
To address the second comment (which the first dovetails nicely into), I openly admit that the "about" blurb on the right side of the page says "trash savant," which implies that the Cap'n is knowledgeable about a certain type of film, one that others might hold their nose while walking past were the metaphor extended to food rather than cinema. I understand that, and it is true that that is a facet of what I watch, show, and discuss. It's also true that the Cap'n has a term coined in his honor: the "Trappening," a deliberate misleading of friends to come over and watch a movie only to show them something horrible (named for my devilish enjoyment of M. Night Shyamalan's The Happening and the dirty trick I played on everyone during Horror Fest III).
Somehow these facts, coupled with Bad Movie Night - an appropriation of what my brother and his friends do for each of their birthdays - has given people the strange notion that this is ALL the Cap'n is interested in. Yes, I take a certain amount of pride in finding the obscure and rightfully forgotten films for festivals; more often than not, those are the films that unite the audience and energize them between films with slower pacing or that are less easy to react to. The atmosphere created by a "party" movie can lift the group up and continue momentum over the night, as many fest attendees will attest to.
Let's address the main point for a moment, and where assumption one dovetails into assumption two: the idea that I will, or would want to, watch "everything." The second postulate goes further to assert that I will watch anything as long as it is "bad," which is demonstrably untrue. In fact, I turned the point around to the person who made it when he bemoaned how terrible Transformers 2 was. Here is a reasonable facsimile of the discussion:
Me: Now wait a minute... I never saw Transformers because it looked awful. You not only saw Transformers and hated it, but still went back and saw Transformers 2, which you knew you wouldn't like.
He: Yeah.
Me: And I'm the one who watches "bad" movies?
He: Fair point.
In the interest of full disclosure, the conversation then turned to the fact that I had seen Michael Bay's The Island, which I didn't like, in part because it sounded exactly like Parts: The Clonus Horror, a film I only knew existed because of Mystery Science Theater 3000. If you want to negate my point, there's your opportunity. I also mentioned an interest in seeing the 1989 film Red Scorpion, starring Dolph Lundgren, which was met with some derision.
Red Scorpion may well be a terrible movie; in fact, I've seen no kind words written about it, but my reasons for seeing it have nothing to do with the "quality" of the film. My interest in seeing Red Scorpion, like my interest in The Island, has to do with its place among other films. That the existence of Red Scorpion is one of the most surprising things in a film as revelatory as Casino Jack and the United States of Money spoke to me. I had no idea that lobbyist Jack Abramoff dabbled as a Hollywood producer, and this apocryphal piece of film history makes seeing Red Scorpion worth the diversion into "bad" movie territory.
Every now and then, I'll get a wild hair and watch something like Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li or s. Darko or, yes, Death Bed: The Bed That Eats, and despite the fact that the first two reviews appeared with the caveat SO YOU WON'T HAVE TO, people seem to think that I only seek these movies out. Yes, they're easy to describe and the reviews are often memorable because I go out of my way to describe the lunacy and ineptitude on display, but it isn't the only thing I write about.
The fact that I enjoy the loopy, nonsensical narrative of Death Bed and its novel, totally unexpected way of having the bed "eat", or the fact that Hillbillys in a Haunted House delivers nothing the title promises (but is still charming in a stupid, earnest manner), does not mean that I'm only going to program those films at festivals. What I run into by the time you get to 8 official "fests" is the risk of repeating yourself too much and running out of films that are going to surprise people. So I take risks - some pay off, like the deliriously offensive Blood Car and ThanksKilling, and some don't, like the turgid Matango or the lifeless Navy vs. the Night Monsters.
Do I sometimes relish in how much you hate these films? Yes, at times; I never said the Cap'n was sadistic, but many of you keep coming back knowing that there's a 50/50 chance things could not work. They can't all be as woefully pathetic and hysterical as The Giant Claw, after all. I appreciate your willingness to venture into uncharted territory with me, but by this point I had hoped more people would realize that's not all that makes up the Cap'n.
If not, then maybe "Good Movie Night" would be fun, if a bit redundant conceptually. Beats me; I just thought you were already watching those without my involvement. Am I assuming too much?
Thursday, March 3, 2011
Quick Review - Val Lewton: The Man in the Shadows
Forgive the brevity of this review, but Val Lewton: The Man in the Shadows is a captivating glance into the working process of what can best be described an auteur producer, a man of whom there is no audio, no home movies, but who influenced horror in a more profound way than anyone not named James Whale or Tod Browning. Val Lewton's inventive approaches to overcome budget limitations resulted in hypnotic, uncanny, and suggestively disturbing films, and The Man in the Shadows covers his story, the films, and analyzes themes and recurring motifs in 76 minutes - just a little longer than most of his RKO pictures.
Narrated by Martin Scorsese (who also "presents" the film above the title), Kent Jones' The Man in the Shadows begins with the regime change in RKO that effectively sullied Orson Welles' The Magnificent Ambersons forever. In the wake of this shift, however, RKO also decided they wanted to compete with Universal's successful horror division. They hired a script editor and assistant of David O. Selznick, Val Lewton. Lewton, the child of Russian immigrants, was raised by his mother (a script editor) and aunt (a star of stage and film), and the film hints the impact of their upbringing has something to do with the female protagonists of most of his films.
When he joined RKO, the creatively frustrated Lewton decided to build his own team to make "A pictures with B budgets," so he brought in director Jacques Tourneur, editors Mark Robson and Robert Wise in order to make the best of hectic schedules and little money - a run that included Cat People, I Walked with a Zombie, The Seventh Victim, and The Leopard Man. The result, as The Man in the Shadows examines film by film, are ethereal, suggestive films where characters wander into danger rather than recoiling in terror. His working relationship with Boris Karloff in Isle of the Dead, The Body Snatcher, and Bedlam are given ample examination, particularly into the question of how much "horror" really exists in the horror films. The documentary also covers his two non-horror films at RKO (Mademoiselle Fifi and Youth Runs Wild), before briefly covering the change in regime that swept Lewton (like Welles before him) out, and his troubled period of bouncing from studio to studio prior to his death at age 46.
Because there is no footage of Lewton, or audio recordings, excerpts from his correspondences with studio executives are read by Elias Koteas, the only glimpse into the mind of a man highly critical of his own work. The documentary also includes interviews with Robert Wise, film historians Alexander Nemerov and Geoffrey O'Brien, psychologist Dr. Glen Gabbard, Lewton's son, and admirers Kiyoshi Kurosawa (Pulse, Cure) and producer Roger Corman. Much of the interview footage is devoted to exploring themes, rather than specific technique, of delving into Lewton's melancholic stories and uncanny subtexts, and the film could be regarded as much a psychological sketch of the producer as it is a Hollywood narrative. The documentary is never dull, and feels greater than its slight running time might suggest.
A word of warning: the documentary features a considerable number of clips from Lewton produced films, including scenes that are more than likely going to spoil Cat People and I Walked with a Zombie for first time viewers, as well as giving away major plot points in Curse of the Cat People, Isle of the Dead, and Bedlam. I'm not sure how many horror fans that don't know who Lewton is (or, more importantly, haven't seen many of these films) are going to seek out a documentary about his impact on horror, but I advise you save The Man in the Shadows until after watching at least I Walked with a Zombie, Cat People, and The Seventh Victim. The films are all worth your time and will only enhance watching what is already a fine documentary.
Narrated by Martin Scorsese (who also "presents" the film above the title), Kent Jones' The Man in the Shadows begins with the regime change in RKO that effectively sullied Orson Welles' The Magnificent Ambersons forever. In the wake of this shift, however, RKO also decided they wanted to compete with Universal's successful horror division. They hired a script editor and assistant of David O. Selznick, Val Lewton. Lewton, the child of Russian immigrants, was raised by his mother (a script editor) and aunt (a star of stage and film), and the film hints the impact of their upbringing has something to do with the female protagonists of most of his films.When he joined RKO, the creatively frustrated Lewton decided to build his own team to make "A pictures with B budgets," so he brought in director Jacques Tourneur, editors Mark Robson and Robert Wise in order to make the best of hectic schedules and little money - a run that included Cat People, I Walked with a Zombie, The Seventh Victim, and The Leopard Man. The result, as The Man in the Shadows examines film by film, are ethereal, suggestive films where characters wander into danger rather than recoiling in terror. His working relationship with Boris Karloff in Isle of the Dead, The Body Snatcher, and Bedlam are given ample examination, particularly into the question of how much "horror" really exists in the horror films. The documentary also covers his two non-horror films at RKO (Mademoiselle Fifi and Youth Runs Wild), before briefly covering the change in regime that swept Lewton (like Welles before him) out, and his troubled period of bouncing from studio to studio prior to his death at age 46.
Because there is no footage of Lewton, or audio recordings, excerpts from his correspondences with studio executives are read by Elias Koteas, the only glimpse into the mind of a man highly critical of his own work. The documentary also includes interviews with Robert Wise, film historians Alexander Nemerov and Geoffrey O'Brien, psychologist Dr. Glen Gabbard, Lewton's son, and admirers Kiyoshi Kurosawa (Pulse, Cure) and producer Roger Corman. Much of the interview footage is devoted to exploring themes, rather than specific technique, of delving into Lewton's melancholic stories and uncanny subtexts, and the film could be regarded as much a psychological sketch of the producer as it is a Hollywood narrative. The documentary is never dull, and feels greater than its slight running time might suggest.
A word of warning: the documentary features a considerable number of clips from Lewton produced films, including scenes that are more than likely going to spoil Cat People and I Walked with a Zombie for first time viewers, as well as giving away major plot points in Curse of the Cat People, Isle of the Dead, and Bedlam. I'm not sure how many horror fans that don't know who Lewton is (or, more importantly, haven't seen many of these films) are going to seek out a documentary about his impact on horror, but I advise you save The Man in the Shadows until after watching at least I Walked with a Zombie, Cat People, and The Seventh Victim. The films are all worth your time and will only enhance watching what is already a fine documentary.
Tuesday, March 1, 2011
Retro Review: Night of the Living Dead (30th Anniversay Recut)
(editor's note: if you somehow arrived here looking for Tom Savini's 1990 remake of Night of the Living Dead, please follow this link.)
Ugh. You should know things aren't going to be pretty when the first (and most accurate) description of a film is "ugh." Can one even begin a review with an "ugh"? Have I basically assured you this is less a "review" and more "evisceration"? Is that apropos of "proper" film criticism, or have I already guaranteed that the term "proper" has no place in a "blogorium"? Oh well, Retro Reviews are designed to be more, *ahem*, informal than typical reviews here. After all, these are as much about reflection as they are about assessing the film on its relative merits.
Wait, I still have to assess the 1998 John Russo recut, 100% free of Romero input and it shows of Night of the Living Dead on its own merits? By "its own merits," I hope that means I can dispense with a recap of Night of the Living Dead - if you, for some reason, haven't seen George Romero's Night of the Living Dead, then the edited "special edition" created by its writer for the film's 30th Anniversary won't mean a thing to you. Even if you have seen it, it probably won't mean a thing to you, but this review is going to focus exclusively on what Russo was attempting to do, how it impacts the original film, and why it is this version of the film (mercifully) drifted into obscurity because of how readily available copies of Night of the Living Dead are.
The first thing you should know if you've never seen the 30th Anniversary Edition of Night of the Living Dead is that John A. Russo, the writer of the film, is perfectly aware there was no copyright on the original film. Romero is aware too, but he's content on simply continuing the story of the "dead" despite the decline in quality as he presses onward. Russo, on the other hand, had bigger plans, ones that bear the particular stench associated with "Star Wars Special Editions," released one year earlier. And this time, Russo slaps that copyright on twice, just so we're clear that this version of NOTLD isn't public domain.
Russo opts to drop 15 minutes of footage (a great compendium of what's missing here) and replace it with 15 minutes of his own, newly shot prologue, flashback, and epilogue material, none of which has any bearing on the original film's beginning, middle, or ending. Newly shot material tends to have this effect, like inserting Boba Fett into an existing (albeit previously unfinished) Jabba the Hutt sequence from A New Hope.
The Night of the Living Dead 30th Anniversary's new footage comes courtesy of Russo's decision to provide backstory for Bill Hinzman's "cemetery zombie": instead of simply being a ghoul that Johnny and Barbra mistake for a graveyard visitor, he's now an executed child murderer being buried in an unmarked grave, which allows for seven minutes of two gravediggers (Grant Cramer and Adam Knox) yammering with a Prison Guard (Scott Kerschbaumer), the family of the murdered child (George Drennen and Julie Wallace Deklavon), and the Reverend Hicks (Scott Vladimir Licina), before Hinzman's coffin is opened and he rises from the dead. Apparently, there's enough time for the gravediggers to escape before Johnny and Barbra arrive, although their truck leaving cuts immediately to their arrival.
I'm going to focus on Reverend Hicks, because Licina's character carries over into two of the other three major additions: a TV interview with Hicks where a zombie bites him on the cheek, and a "One Year Later" epilogue where the Reverend claims he didn't turn because he was "chosen by God" and that the living dead are "demons from hell" the righteous can (and will) overcome. But wait, Ben (Duane Jones) is still killed, only the nihilistic closing is replaced by Reverend Hicks providing a "happy ending."
Licina also wrote a new "score" for this version of Night of the Living Dead, a term I use loosely since it consists entirely of the same keyboard "theme" repeated ad nauseum that manages to rob the film of any suspense it had. Gone is the sparse, hopeless, background of Night of the Living Dead; in its place, a laughable "goth" soundtrack you'd expect to hear tacked on to a Public Domain release of Nosferatu. It doesn't help that Licina sticks out like a sore thumb in the new version: Russo does a perfunctory job of trying to make his new cast look like they existed in 1968, but Licina's Anton LeVay look-alike pulls viewers back into the late 1990s:
Not only is Russo's new dialogue terrible, but the amateurish acting (and terrible ADR while the gravediggers are driving) fail to salvage any of the hackneyed conversations about how "it ain't right" that Hinzman should be buried in a cemetery for "what he done." Worst of all is Licina's Reverend Hicks, and his final, asinine monologue about how "through me, a miracle has been worked*" that not only undermines Night of the Living Dead's bleak atmosphere, but is so stupid, so out of left field, that one wonders what Russo had in mind when he wrote it.
The other addition to the film isn't a negative or a positive, but an unneeded sidestep into flashback territory, ostensibly to include more "zombie" action and half-heartedly bridge the original film with the newly tacked on ending. After Ben recounts the "gas station" encounter with the dead, he barricades the farmhouse while a radio broadcast plays describing an attack nearby, and Russo cuts away to show the undead coming back to life and shuffling around, including a "waitress" zombie:
that is inserted into "crowd" shots outside of the farmhouse later before being killed during Reverend Hicks' attack. It serves no other purpose than to provide more gore, give a few more friends and family of Russo the opportunity to play "living dead" on camera, and removes the audience from the claustrophobic house.
I realize that it's cruel to attack a writer for wanting to go back and revisit a screenplay he co-wrote and make changes, but like The Version You've Never Seen of The Exorcist (which followed two years later) sometimes the director got it right the first time. The 30th Anniversary Edition of Night of the Living Dead serves no purpose, frequently cuts away from the main action for no reason, and tacks on moralizing prologues and epilogues with characters who have nothing to do with the story. It's a total waste of time. Say what you will about Tom Savini's 1990 remake of Night of the Living Dead (I happen to be a fan), but I assure you the Russo re-jiggering is the nadir.
For a while, Anchor Bay's release of the 30th Anniversary Edition was the biggest game in town on VHS and DVD: it had a wider release than most fly-by-night Public Domain copies of Night of the Living Dead, was better publicized, and claimed to have both versions of the film on the disc (it didn't, as the "original" version still had Licina's score overlaying on the soundtrack). Thankfully, Elite Home Entertainment released two better versions of Night of the Living Dead on DVD (one of which was the much lauded Millienium Edition), followed by a higher profile DVD release of the film designed to coincide with Dimension's release of Diary of the Dead on home video. These days, it's much easier to find any of those versions than the terrible, horrible, no good, very bad 30th Anniversary recut.
In fact, I'm going to slap a So You Won't Have To on this review as well, because there's no reason anyone should ever subject themselves to this garbage.
Ugh.
* actual quote.
Ugh. You should know things aren't going to be pretty when the first (and most accurate) description of a film is "ugh." Can one even begin a review with an "ugh"? Have I basically assured you this is less a "review" and more "evisceration"? Is that apropos of "proper" film criticism, or have I already guaranteed that the term "proper" has no place in a "blogorium"? Oh well, Retro Reviews are designed to be more, *ahem*, informal than typical reviews here. After all, these are as much about reflection as they are about assessing the film on its relative merits.
Wait, I still have to assess the 1998 John Russo recut, 100% free of Romero input and it shows of Night of the Living Dead on its own merits? By "its own merits," I hope that means I can dispense with a recap of Night of the Living Dead - if you, for some reason, haven't seen George Romero's Night of the Living Dead, then the edited "special edition" created by its writer for the film's 30th Anniversary won't mean a thing to you. Even if you have seen it, it probably won't mean a thing to you, but this review is going to focus exclusively on what Russo was attempting to do, how it impacts the original film, and why it is this version of the film (mercifully) drifted into obscurity because of how readily available copies of Night of the Living Dead are.The first thing you should know if you've never seen the 30th Anniversary Edition of Night of the Living Dead is that John A. Russo, the writer of the film, is perfectly aware there was no copyright on the original film. Romero is aware too, but he's content on simply continuing the story of the "dead" despite the decline in quality as he presses onward. Russo, on the other hand, had bigger plans, ones that bear the particular stench associated with "Star Wars Special Editions," released one year earlier. And this time, Russo slaps that copyright on twice, just so we're clear that this version of NOTLD isn't public domain.
Russo opts to drop 15 minutes of footage (a great compendium of what's missing here) and replace it with 15 minutes of his own, newly shot prologue, flashback, and epilogue material, none of which has any bearing on the original film's beginning, middle, or ending. Newly shot material tends to have this effect, like inserting Boba Fett into an existing (albeit previously unfinished) Jabba the Hutt sequence from A New Hope.
The Night of the Living Dead 30th Anniversary's new footage comes courtesy of Russo's decision to provide backstory for Bill Hinzman's "cemetery zombie": instead of simply being a ghoul that Johnny and Barbra mistake for a graveyard visitor, he's now an executed child murderer being buried in an unmarked grave, which allows for seven minutes of two gravediggers (Grant Cramer and Adam Knox) yammering with a Prison Guard (Scott Kerschbaumer), the family of the murdered child (George Drennen and Julie Wallace Deklavon), and the Reverend Hicks (Scott Vladimir Licina), before Hinzman's coffin is opened and he rises from the dead. Apparently, there's enough time for the gravediggers to escape before Johnny and Barbra arrive, although their truck leaving cuts immediately to their arrival.
I'm going to focus on Reverend Hicks, because Licina's character carries over into two of the other three major additions: a TV interview with Hicks where a zombie bites him on the cheek, and a "One Year Later" epilogue where the Reverend claims he didn't turn because he was "chosen by God" and that the living dead are "demons from hell" the righteous can (and will) overcome. But wait, Ben (Duane Jones) is still killed, only the nihilistic closing is replaced by Reverend Hicks providing a "happy ending."
Licina also wrote a new "score" for this version of Night of the Living Dead, a term I use loosely since it consists entirely of the same keyboard "theme" repeated ad nauseum that manages to rob the film of any suspense it had. Gone is the sparse, hopeless, background of Night of the Living Dead; in its place, a laughable "goth" soundtrack you'd expect to hear tacked on to a Public Domain release of Nosferatu. It doesn't help that Licina sticks out like a sore thumb in the new version: Russo does a perfunctory job of trying to make his new cast look like they existed in 1968, but Licina's Anton LeVay look-alike pulls viewers back into the late 1990s:
Not only is Russo's new dialogue terrible, but the amateurish acting (and terrible ADR while the gravediggers are driving) fail to salvage any of the hackneyed conversations about how "it ain't right" that Hinzman should be buried in a cemetery for "what he done." Worst of all is Licina's Reverend Hicks, and his final, asinine monologue about how "through me, a miracle has been worked*" that not only undermines Night of the Living Dead's bleak atmosphere, but is so stupid, so out of left field, that one wonders what Russo had in mind when he wrote it.
The other addition to the film isn't a negative or a positive, but an unneeded sidestep into flashback territory, ostensibly to include more "zombie" action and half-heartedly bridge the original film with the newly tacked on ending. After Ben recounts the "gas station" encounter with the dead, he barricades the farmhouse while a radio broadcast plays describing an attack nearby, and Russo cuts away to show the undead coming back to life and shuffling around, including a "waitress" zombie:
that is inserted into "crowd" shots outside of the farmhouse later before being killed during Reverend Hicks' attack. It serves no other purpose than to provide more gore, give a few more friends and family of Russo the opportunity to play "living dead" on camera, and removes the audience from the claustrophobic house.
I realize that it's cruel to attack a writer for wanting to go back and revisit a screenplay he co-wrote and make changes, but like The Version You've Never Seen of The Exorcist (which followed two years later) sometimes the director got it right the first time. The 30th Anniversary Edition of Night of the Living Dead serves no purpose, frequently cuts away from the main action for no reason, and tacks on moralizing prologues and epilogues with characters who have nothing to do with the story. It's a total waste of time. Say what you will about Tom Savini's 1990 remake of Night of the Living Dead (I happen to be a fan), but I assure you the Russo re-jiggering is the nadir.
For a while, Anchor Bay's release of the 30th Anniversary Edition was the biggest game in town on VHS and DVD: it had a wider release than most fly-by-night Public Domain copies of Night of the Living Dead, was better publicized, and claimed to have both versions of the film on the disc (it didn't, as the "original" version still had Licina's score overlaying on the soundtrack). Thankfully, Elite Home Entertainment released two better versions of Night of the Living Dead on DVD (one of which was the much lauded Millienium Edition), followed by a higher profile DVD release of the film designed to coincide with Dimension's release of Diary of the Dead on home video. These days, it's much easier to find any of those versions than the terrible, horrible, no good, very bad 30th Anniversary recut.
In fact, I'm going to slap a So You Won't Have To on this review as well, because there's no reason anyone should ever subject themselves to this garbage.
Ugh.
* actual quote.
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