vhsparrow Blog

Under discussion:

Africa Unite  (2007)

This film is a strange confab of celebrity travel souvenir and retrospective of the Rastafarian movement on the occasion of Bob Marley’s 60th birthday.

Much of the surviving Marley clan is featured here — Ziggy, Rita, Cedelia, Damian and Julian — there’s music and interviews. And more interviews — interviews with lots of people who just happened to show up for Bob’s birthday celebration down in Ethiopia. There’s Danny Glover, Angelique Kidjo, Lauren Hill and others but the participants here seem to be fighting over Marley’s legacy as much as celebrating it.

But the title of the film is ‘Africa Unite’ and NOT ‘A Posthumous Celebration of Bob Marley’s 60th Birthday’. Though the film doesn’t come together as a cohesive narratve or a document of an important event, it does feature a few good, informative moments for people unfamiliar with Marley and/or the Rastafarian movement.

Notably, Haile Selassie’s 1963 address to the U.N. and the pan-African movement are addressed after the 2nd half-hour, the same speech that Marley put to music and recorded as the song “War“.

But the relationship of these celebrities and the search for human rights, cultural development and education get somewhat muddled as the filmmakers wander back and forth from hotel conference-rooms to the streets of Addis Ababa apparently seeking some sort of grilled-cheese manifestation of the departed musician. There’s plenty of archival footage and information about Haile Selassie, but those who are really interested in the subculture and Marley’s impact might do better to see Jeremy Marre’s ‘Rebel Music‘ (2001), Awake Zion (2005), The Promised Ship (2000) or any of the many Wailers concert videos.

Under discussion:

Dead and Buried  (1981)

Wow, wow, wow -- I guess this movie *is* as obscure as I expected if there's only an All Movie Guide summary of it up here. First of all, credit is due to where I discovered ‘Dead & Buried‘, on the Video Nasties Project, which is a blog created by some fellow named Ben who has the temerity and no doubt the stomach to pursue the 79 B-movies that were banned by the British Nanny State after the invention of the VHS player in 1979.

A list of all 79 of the ‘banned’ movies is available here, but as we all know, just because something is banned it doesn’t mean that college kids and high schoolers aren’t going to figure out a way to smuggle the item home from the Continent or that long summer vacation in the US.

For some reason, each of the 79 movies on the VNP list got the dander of right-wing British pols like Mary Whitehouse, a member of the British equivalent of America’s Moral Majority. Importantly, Whitehouse was interesting in prohibiting all sorts of morally degrading crap like cannibal zombie movies and morally ambiguous stuff like ‘I Spit On Your Grave‘ (1978). Well, the Video Recordings Act 1984, which was entirely irrelevant by 1997 — just in time for DVDs.

Anyway, ‘Dead & Buried‘ a/k/a ‘Dead and Buried’ (1981) was written by Dan O’Bannon and Ron Shusett, the screenwriters better know for their 1979 hit ‘Alien‘. I should add here that Shusett and specifically O’Bannon were responsible for several other big genre his of the ’80’s, including John Carpenter’s ‘Dark Star‘(1974), ‘Toral Recall‘ and ‘Return of the Living Dead‘ (1985), so O’Bannon’s B-movie water-into-wine chops are pretty formidable, given that he was inspired by the dross of ‘Queen of Blood‘ (1962) and ‘It! The Terror from Beyond Space‘ (1958).So essentially ‘Dead & Buried’ is the Shusett-O’Bannon take on the small New England town of Stephen King’s ‘The Fog’ (1980) or the seaside community of H.P. Lovecraft’s ‘Dagon‘, ‘Dead & Buried’ takes the high concept of the bucolic locale one step further.

More to the point, ‘Dead & Buried’ is a strange sort of mash-up of ‘The Stepford Wives’ and some sort of zombie movie. While that may just be a huge spoiler, the pleasure is in the execution of the thing and the pleasure of watching the whole thing play-out. The only thing that hurts Dead as a film is the 27 years of twist-ended films that have been made since 1981. As a writer myself, I can’t help but to watch Dead today and reflect on the numerous ways in which the story might be updated for contemporary audiences.

Dead stars James (’Ironside’/'Melrose Place’) Farentino as Sheriff Dan Gillis and Jack Albertson as the town Coroner-Undertaker. The typical sort of seaside horror-drama gets set up when a number of visitors to the scenicPotter's Bluff keep turning up dead, only to have their bodies disappear from the morgue. For genre fans, the movie features early performances from both Robert Englund and Prince of Darkness‘ Lisa Blount.

It’s not quite a classic but it’s a necessary film for any self-respecting horror buff to investigate. It’s definitely a movie that warrants a second look, if not a remake.

Is it 'lost' or just 'forgotten' if I'd never heard of it before?

Under discussion:

Minority Report  (2002)

I’d seen the movie and written another review of the movie back in 2002 and wasn’t so impressed with it — I felt that Spielberg had taken the Philip K. Dick material and slicked it up just a bit too much. When Ridley Scott adapted ‘Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep‘ (cf. Blade Runner’ (1982)), he made an exerted attempt to ground his story in a world we’d understand, a polyglot, super-ethnic place that had felt the pre-millenial bleed-in from Hong Kong and other portions of east Asia. Even if Minority Report is set in D.C., it feels as though Spielberg’s future is a bit too squeaky-clean, a Googie architecture for the early 21st century.

That’s not to say that Spielberg and his gang of futurist consultants didn’t present us with a compelling vision of the future, with his mag-lev superhighways and reconfigured cityscape, the world of Minority Report looks more line the year 2554 A.D. rather than the intended 2054. We’re still nowhere near the place where the police are able to use jet-packs as personal accessories.

There are interesting details in MR that I wish I’d paid greater attention to the first time, specifically the Precogs’ relationship to the illegal drugs - neuroin - that Tom Cruise’s John Anderton procures on the ‘back-streets’ of a very shiny, futurist Washington, D.C. Apparently the Precogs are all some 21st c. version of crack-babies that have been rehabilitated enough to make their precognative birth-defect useful to the larger society.

Since production on Minority Report started on March 22, 2001, there’s no way that Spielberg and company could have anticipated 9-11, much less incorporated its effects into Scott Frank’s script.

But the National Security Agency’s Total Information Awareness program seems to be very much the stuff that Spielberg’s Precrime Division of the Justice Department was after — however, rather than use precognitives to divine their subjects, the Bush II Justice Department uses credit information and unlawful wiretaps.

The operative motivation in Information is guilt-by-association — Total Information Awareness — renamed the ‘Terrorism Information Awareness Program’ after Total tested poorly — assembles financial information, telephony and the movement of individuals as a digital surveillance package. In short, there are already computers out there tracking your ‘movement’ when you purchase your lunch with plastic, when and whom you telephone, and who calls you and the movement of your EZ Pass™, when you need to pay tolls, not to mention the alarms that go off if you attempt to transfer more than $10.000 to another entity.

As a former D.A., Sptizer should have known all about anti-money laundering restrictions and the ramifications of asking Ashley Dupré to transport controlled substances across State lines for him. The fact of the matter is that the NSA, the FBI and Homeland Security already use a collection of invasive tools that make Clinton’s partisan problems with FISA seem quaint by comparison.

So, the Bush Administration has invented their own version of a Precrime Division and promoted the NSA officers formerly in charge of it to senior positions at the Pantagon and the CIA. Bravo to those unreasonable searches that the Constitution was supposed to protect us from. Philip K. Dick, a drug-addict and paranoid schizophenic somehow predicted the future. Just sayin’.

But, to return to the matter of the film, it must be said that Tom Cruise’s star-power damages this film somewhat, since the story literally grinds to a stand-still whenever he isn’t on screen.

Besides all of the lavish production values, what’s also to be admired in Minority Report is the always sturdy Neal McDonough and Lothario-in-real-life, Colin Farrell. If any of their gravity could have been injected into the plot-important scenes between Max van Sydow and Kathryn Morris, specifically the Agatha and Anne Lively subplot it would have helped the flagging 3rd act. More energy, enthusiasm or even musical emphasis might have some breathed life into final 30 minutes, which goes flaccid after Farrell’s Witwer is ::SPOILER::.

Even though it’s now 6 years old, Minority Report is well worth seeing again.

Under discussion:

The Lookout  (2007)

The other sadness is that Mr. Frank, the award-winning writer of ‘Minority Report‘ (2002), ‘Out of Sight’ (1998) and ‘Dead Again’ (1991) got next to no promotional support for his debut feature. It was budgeted at $16M, took in $4M and slipped quietly beneath the waves 5 weeks later.

Problem is, Mr. Frank’s feature shared it’s opening weekend with last year’s Tarantino/Rodriguez double-feature ‘Grindhouse’ (2007) and it was released by the post-Weinstein Miramax and Spyglass Entertainment. So, given a choice between promoting a celebrated screenwriter in an open field against the brand-names Tarantino™ and Rodriguez™, Disney chose to punt. The unfortunate fact is that it’s a pretty good, if over-budgeted film, far more engaging than the two-fer that Wonder Twins Tarantino and Rodriguez produced.

“Over-budgeted”, you ask? Despite the fact that Mr. Frank has been revered as the go-to script-doctor out in Hollywood for more than a decade, his first feature could have/should have been able to do more with less. The cinematography just a bit too assured, the music just a bit too lush for a film that’s essentially a neo-noir set in a midwestern town someplace (really Winnipeg, Manitoba). However, I guess Disney/Miramax wanted to treat Frank well, considering all of the work he’s done for Spielberg, Jodie Foster, Kenneth Branagh, Steven Soderbergh and Sydney Pollack.

From all accounts, the screenplay was finished back in 2002, yet sat on a shelf for 4 years. By all rights, The Lookout should have been an independent film, but what are you gonna do if someone offers you $16M to make your first feature?.

The story is sound here. As other writers have observed, Frank’s main strengths are sharp dialogue and character-driven stories, which is particularly why the film is overproduced: The script is an admirably small-scaled character-driven thing, full of unknowns, save for Jeff Daniels — yet the quality of the production is entirely A-List, nothing that Spielberg or Soderbergh or Pollack wouldn’t be disappointed with.

Early scenes in the film are so beautifully presented that they are at odds with the would-be grittier feel of the story that follows. Frank’s script might have benefitted from a more verité treatment. Of course, those production choices could be Frank’s alone and not that of his DP or production designer; ultimately though, it all falls back upon Frank.

Numerous reviewers have commented that The Lookout seems to be a cross between ‘Memento’ (2000) and ‘Fargo’ (1996) due to its rural small-town location, and the hook of a protagonist with memory problems, but Frank’s most remarkable invention in this film is his use of the amnesiac story-device — writing things down — to create a meta-narrative that speaks to the very heart of screenwriting.

“Ritual, Pattern, Repetition”, mutters our protagonist, Chris Pratt (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) , during a session with his occupational therapist. As a result of the events in the film’s teaser episode, he has suffered a traumatic brain injury that denies him a short-term memory, requiring that he write everything down, just to get through his day as a janitor at a local bank. Eventually, this writing serves the story in a central way as Chris plots against his antagonists to rescue his best friend, Lew (Jeff Bridges), from arch-crooks Matthew Goode and Greg Dunham. As his therapist suggests, “Start at the end, and work your way back toward the beginning,” thus, Mr. Frank’s graduate school lessons are made available to us mere-mortals spec-monkeys.

All told, The Lookout  is ultimately a noir film, down to it’s femme-fatale, it’s central caper and betrayal.

In any case, this one is highly recommended — stick it in your Netflix cue or catch it on cable — whichever comes first.

Under discussion:

Charlie Wilson's War  (2007)

‘Charlie Wilson’s War’ is a tricky film to write on, because I have both a Proustian relationship with the material and a more generalized, historical appreciation for the the effort that writer Aaron Sorkin and director Mike Nichols have accomplished.

In fact, the week before I went to see 'Charlie Wilson' I was revisiting 1984 and discovered a scene that bears a curious similarity to waterboarding, with John Hurt on the table and Richard Burton alternately dousing Hurt and fiddling with electricity. That said, I fell into something of a fugue when David Bowie's "Let's Dance" spilled across the speakers for a key scene.

In 1984, I was also a junior in high school, choking down Orwell’s complete body of work and fair measure of dystopian British fiction - Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and a good few Philip K. Dick novels. Even as the year 1984 came and went I wondered if the world that Orwell decribed had, in fact, arrived unbeknownst to everybody alive at that moment.

Lo, and behold, history has been re-written before our eyes as it was Ronald Reagan that took credit for ending the Cold War by outspending the Soviet military budget. What has been left out of the ‘official’ history is Charlie Wilson’s role on the front-line of that conflict.

Based on the eponymous George Crile book, ‘Charlie Wilson’s War’ recounts the political career of the Honorable Charles Nesbitt Wilson (1933- ), who served in the U.S. Congress for 24 years, spanning the Carter, Reagan, Bush 41 and Clinton Administrations, and served 16 of those years on the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee, earmarking funds for the CIA’s ‘black bag operations throughout Central America and the Middle East.

No stranger to fast-living, liquor and controvery, Wilson apparently had an epiphany while sitting in a Vegas hot-tub with a pair of showgirls. A consummate public servant, Wilson was distracted from his hot-tub by a 60 Minutes segment , where Dan Rather reported on Russian incursions into Afghanistan. As a fervent anti-Communist, and a member of the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee, Wilson saw a funding opportunity in the Afghani Mujahideen.

Of course, the Mujahideen were absorbed by the forces of light, once Ronald Reagan heard of them, but by that time Wilson (played by Tom Hanks) and his CIA attaché, Gust Avrokotos (Philip Seymour Hoffman) increased foreign appropriations for the Afghani ‘freedom fighters’ from $5 million to $750 million a year during the ’80’s. Through Wilson and the efforts of his sometime-mistress, Texas Socialite Joanne Herring (Julia Roberts), the US funneled weapons to Afghanistan, creating a Vietnam-like quagmire for the Soviets on the other side of the Black Sea. The billions of dollars that the Russians sank into Afghanistan invariably helped collapse of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War in 1989.

Politics aside, there is actual entertainment to be found in ‘Charlie Wilson’s War’. Rather that take the easy route and lampoon the New World Order pontifications of the Republican Administrations that Wilson served, Sorkin uses the opportunity to make art. Between the progress of the Mujahideen and Wilson’s back-room deals, Sorkin and Nichols have fashioned an old-fashioned Capra-esque movie.

Hanks’ Wilson is a fairly serviceable imitation of Jimmy Stewart , while Roberts seems to channel Barbara Stanwyck in either ‘Executive Suite‘ or ‘Meet John Doe‘. And just to make sure you know what kind of movie you’re watching, Sorkin and Nichols have peppered their film with numerous door gags, rapid-fire dialogue and a few trademark Sorkin walk-and-talks.

The productive ingredients here are Hanks’ and Roberts’ willingness to play character roles, rather than the soppy, Libtard heroism stuff that they’ve become accustomed to.

This one gets five stars for the willingness to tell a relevant story and the effort they’ve taken to tell it as an old-fashioned Hollywood yarn. Usually such efforts make me suspicious, but in Sorkin’s hands it’s a marvelous piece of restraint.

It’s not always the guy on the white horse that’s the hero — sometimes it’s just the paper-pusher who makes the funds available for the revolution.

Unfortunately, Universal chose to dump ‘Charlie Wilson’ into release four days before Christmas, denying it the attention of the broadest possible audience. But it *is* on the Oscar, Bafta and Golden Globe short-lists and remains in theaters 6 weeks after it opened. Try to see it while it’s still in theaters!

Under discussion:

The Man From Earth  (2007)

For those that don’t know, Jerome Bixby’s claim to fame are the teleplays he wrote for the original Star Trek back in the ’60’s and a couple that he wrote for Rod Serling’s original iteration of The Twilight Zone and a little story he wrote called “It’s a Good Life”.

But ‘Man From Earth’ has it’s start in one of Bixby’s Star Trek contributions, specifically Season 3’s “Requiem for Methuselah“. There, the Enterprise, fighting a ship-wide outbreak of Rigelian fever docks at an apparently uninhabited planetoid to mine Ryetalyn to maufacture an antidote. As was the convention with many early Trek episodes, the planetoid turns out not to be uninhabited and Kirk, Spock and McCoy must make fast friends in order to accomplish their mission.

In this case though, the planetoid is inhabited by an apparently immortal human being, who has lived for 16,000 years as Alexander the Great, Leonardo DaVinci and a host of other historical figures. There’s something of a romantic diversion in the Trek episode, but it was the immortal that Bixby was still interested as he finished the screenplay for Man From Earth on his deathbed in 1998.

Certain friends of mine are fond of saying that the best ’special effect’ is that of writing and that Bixby achieves here by the deft execution of a fairly plain situation : The apparently young college professor, John Oldman invites several faculty friends to his home for a going-away party. After a successful decade at his college he has announced his ‘retirement’ and plans to move on despite his popularity and the entreaties of the University. Faculty from almost all of the departments are represented, Math, Biology, History, Physics, Chemistry, Geology, Psychology, etc. What they hadn’t planned on was the ’secret’ he decides to impart to them that afternoon, the ‘fact’ that he’s 16,000 years old, born a caveman and lived through ALL of the formative ages of mankind.

Certainly, it is impossible to prove Olman’s claims within the setting of the filmscript, but what ensues in the film’s 90 minute runtime is a multifaceted debate over Oldman’s claims - whether he’s lived that long, the events he’s experienced vis-à-vis the informal panel of experts gathered at the home Oldman is evacuating.

And it works. Where somone might expect a boring, single-camera, ‘My Dinner With Andre type of affair, the whole thing comes together as a remarkable tour de force that plays as a powerful extended improvisation rather than a scripted piece.

‘Man From Earth’ is a remarkable piece of scripted drama and far from any of the fare that typically shows up at the local Cineplex. If it turns up at your local videostore or on cable, be sure to give it a look.

***** out of 5 stars

John Billingsley  ... Harry
Ellen Crawford ...  Edith
William Katt ... Art
Annika Peterson ... Sandy
Richard Riehle ...  Dr. Will Gruber
David Lee Smith ...  John Oldman
Alexis Thorpe    ... Linda Murphy
Tony Todd  ...  Dan

Under discussion:

Ripley Under Ground  (2005)

Filmed back in 2004, but left on the shelf for 3 years, ‘Ripley Under Ground‘ a/k/a ‘White On White‘ has been released on DVD in Europe.

Barry Pepper plays Ripley as a rock-star - long hair, a close shave and charisma to burn – and the tone of the thing is far lighter than any of the previous incarnations - ‘Purple Noon‘ (1960),’The American Friend‘ (1977), ‘The Talented Mr. Ripley‘ (1999), ‘Ripley’s Game‘ (2002), etc.

Some early reviewers have referred to it as a ‘comedy’, but it’s not, really. Unfortunately, the lighter tone actually hurts the film a bit, because this outing paints Mr. Ripley as less of a predator and sociopath than any of the Ripley films that have preceeded it.

Apparently, this interpretation sprang from a comment that Ms. Highsmith made about the filmed interpretations of her novels. Highsmith apparently felt that previous movie versions missed the humor of her character and the droll wit of her dark plots. But the humor in this effort undermines whatever suspense the film might have held.

Beside having freed Mr. Pepper from the short-haired grunts that he usually plays, the film really allows Alan Cumming and Claire Forlani to shine in ways that they usually aren’t allowed to when they are shoe-horned into American roles and American accents. She is officially excused from having participated in ‘Meet Joe Black’.

It’s a good, but not great film. The delight was seeing Barry Pepper stretch-out in the kind of role he’s seldom given. I typically enjoy the Ripley films and novels for their psychopathy, but this was different enough to be enjoyable. If you come across it on cable or the Shanghai bootleg carrels try not to overlook it.

*** out of *****

Starring: Barry Pepper, Jacinda Barrett, Tom Wilkinson,  Alan Cumming, Claire Forlani, Ian Hart,  Willem Dafoe; Directed by Roger Spottiswoode