vhsparrow

Under discussion:

Sun Dogs  (2007)

This was a pleasant surprise -- not necessarily a good film, but more interesting than I expected

Far from a cruel parting gift from Javier, this was an interesting, affirmative film, but it was both mislabled from a marketing standpoint and mismarketed as a sports film.

As many of the film's subjects exclaim at the beginning of the film, Jamaica had a bobsled team, which became the subject of Disney's 'Cool Runnings', but 'Sun Dogs' is neither fiction, nor comedy -- it is a documentary by director Andrea Stewart, who sought to make a film about the efforts of Danny Melville and Devon Anderson to save some of the Bahamas stray dog dog population in by putting the dogs to work in some meaningful way.

Perhaps the dogs could have been retrained as guard-dogs, seeing eye dogs or drug seeking animals? All of this are viable canine careers, but training the animals as sled dogs (instead of putting them to sleep) seems something of a flamboyant stunt.

Then again, this whole enterprise was conceived and sponsored by Magaritaville founder and sometime musician Jimmy Buffet, so I guess the idea of taking Bahamian strays and subjecting them to sub-zero temperatures with the expectation that they perform in a strenouous competition might  have sounded like a good idea.

While the Bahamian dogsled team might have started out as a humanitarian effort, I'm not sure that training the dogs on sand and then switching them to snow was the kindest of gestures.

While I find the goals of Melville, Anderson and the filmmakers noble, I'm not sure I can applaud the way they packaged it. It's a well made documenatary as it features good interviews and does a solid job profiling its human protagonists, but it's a documentary about Carribean dogsled racers for cryin' out loud!

As a travelogue and impact-study, 'Sun Dogs' may be well intentioned, but as a practical humanitarian program, it gets a 'D'. People who pick this up as a rental will likely be expecting a comedy based on the cover-art, so it gets a 'D' there as well.

Who was this film intended for, again?

Under discussion:

Africa Unite  (2008)

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  

Under discussion:

You're Gonna Miss Me  (2007)

‘You’re Gonna Miss Me‘ is a 2005 biopic on musician Roger ‘Roky’ Erickson (b. 1947) ,the former front-man of the groundbreaking, late ’60’s psychedelic band, The 13th Floor Elevators (1965-69). However, the way in which the filmmakers depict him, one would assume that Erikson’s creative life is behind him, which both untrue and unfortunate.

Documentarian Keven McAllester does a satisfying enough job of tracking Erikson’s youth and early music career, before arresting his musical inquiry to dive into a disquisition on the singer’s mental illness and the 17 years he floated in and out of Texas’ Mental Health Care system and the care of friends and family.

Apparently, Erikson discovered LSD in the early ’70’s and it triggered some nascent schizophrenia that Erikson had been walking around with his entire life. At this point - the 20 or 30 minute mark – the film becomes a bit too much like Terry Zwigoff’s ‘Crumb‘ (1994) and the filmmakers take too much of an interest in Erikson’s schizophrenia, twenty years of institutionalization and his eccentric family, specifically his Mother Evelyn and his brother, Sumner. And this is where the documentary seems to go wrong.

If the movie was meant to be a proper portrait, the filmmakers ought to have spent more time on the music that Erikson made and the influence he has had, given that most people have likely never heard of The Elevators or recognize the influence that they had on American music, an influence that trickled into Jefferson Airplane or that of their sometime-collaborator, fellow Texan Janis Joplin.

A case for Erikson and the Elevators’ influence could easily be made, given that they were the first psychedelic rock band. Current scholarship links the Elevators to Michael Stipe and R.E.M., The Jesus and Mary Chain and ZZ Top, while missing the likely influence they had upon acts like The Velvet Underground, Jefferson Airplane, Patti Smith, the Talking Heads and the American ‘Punk’ and ‘Emo’ movements during the ’70’s, ’80’s and ’90’s. Instead, it seems as though director Keven McAlester and his producers, Laura Boyd DeSmeth and Lauren Hollingsworth would rather use Erikson’s story as a springboard to discuss the inequities and difficulties of mental health care here in America, as they go into the homes of Roky, his mother and brother, to reveal some shocking details about the disorders each of them seem to share.

The filmmakers then wrap-up their story create an inaccurate ‘happy’ ending, by depicting a middle-aged Erikson, moving from a State mental facility to the custody and Guardianship roles that have been given to his brother Sumner. What the filmmakers conveniently omit from their coverage is that Erikson has maintained something of a music career since 1995, despite his institutionalization. As part of his role as Roky’s legal guardian, brother Sumner has encouraged his brother to continued playing and organized an annual annual Ice Cream Social in their native Austin and that Roky has largely weaned himself of the many psychiatric medications he was dependent upon while he was a ward of the State.

In this case, I wish the filmmakers had spent more time in the film talking about Erikson and his musical influence, rather than the Jerry Springer-style evocation of American Mental Health care and the traps that it creates. Though Erikson was a victim of that system it is neither the beginning or end of his story.

*** out of *****

Under discussion:

Invasion of the Body Snatchers  (1978)

I recently tried – and failed – to endear two of my younger friends to Philip Kaufman’s 1978 remake of Don Seigel’s 1956 classic. I personally think the problem was demi-generational as both of the young men I tried to introduce the film to were 5 years my junior and therefore entirely unconscious during the Watergate hearings, not to mention the slow cavalcade of Vietnam casualties being announced on the evening news in the early ’70’s and the protests that those deaths inspired.

When I was an undergraduate at Brown University in the ’80’s, I remember Michael Silverman lecturing to us about Kaufman’s remake of this oh-so-wooden ’50’s Cold War science-fiction/horror canard. “Pod-people, how absurd,” he’d said, “but such was the environment of the US during the ’50’s. when it was imagined that fluoridated water might divert the nation’s youth from red meat and turn everybody into Communists.” And it was no small consequence that Kaufman remade ‘Body Snatchers’ after Watergate and the Vietnam War because our distrust and suspicion had turned a full 180º to point at our domestic enemies, a President that had betrayed the public trust and put our young men into harm’s way. The ‘enemies’ of the ’70’s – the enemies of freedom and democracy were none other than the President of the United States, Richard Nixon at the time and the other s-called leaders who had propelled us into SE Asia with the Gulf of Tonkin, a draft, a decade of warfare and 50,000 dead American soldiers. How soon we forget.

Of course, the subtext of Kaufman’s film – and yes, film as opposed to movie, the like of which now occupy American Cineplexes for weekends at a time, failing to break even after a weekend of exhibition; films being crafted with greater introspection, with something other than product-placement or the mockery of another generation’s sensibilities as its centerpiece – is the betrayal of the public good. In Kaufman’s remake, it is public servants, the Police, loved-ones and self-improvement gurus, conspire with the invading aliens, a form of creeping vegetation. Of course, this metaphor of creeping vegetation, betrayal and Fifth Horsemen has proved so fertile that the Wachowski Brothers have crafted a fifth incarnation of this tale in 50 years, after Seigel’s original, Kaufman’s remake, the Heinlein variation of ‘The Puppet Masters’ and Abel Ferrara’s ‘Body Snatchers’, which put the Religious Right and the Military-Industrial complex into high-relief. I’m hoping that the Wachowski remake is something other than a gratuitous rebranding of an essential metaphor as old as the Salem Witch Trials.

But what makes Kaufman’s film memorable are his hundreds of small touches – his stunt-casting of a post-Star Trek Nimoy as an unfeeling psychotherapist, a young Jeff Goldblum as a misunderstood writer and Veronica Cartwright’s pre-Lambert hysteria turn as Goldblum’s wife, Nancy Belicec. Add W. D. Richter’s sometimes Woody Allen-like patter and you have something more interesting than the standard B-movie schlock that this sort of thing so often is.

And my guests said it was too long.

**** out of *****

Under discussion:

The Ring Two  (2005)

A rash of these Hollywood/not-Hollywood type films landed in American cinemas this past winter - ‘Darkness’, an American film made in Spain with Miramax/Dimension dollars; ‘Boogeyman’ an American film made in New Zealand; ‘The Grudge’, the American remake of the Japanese ‘Ju-On’ ; ‘Hide and Seek’, incredibly enough, made here in the U.S.A., not to mention ‘Excorcist:The Beginning’ by Norweigan-born Renny Harlin and his yet-to-be-released ‘Mindhunters’.

What do most of these films have in common? Besides the fact that all but one of them were produced outside of the U.S. but marketed as the ‘real’ thing — many of them were re-makes of foreign films, and NONE of them had American Directors.

Granted, many of these films were American remakes of Asian horror-pieces, and the ones that worked best exhibited a fundamental understanding of a plot and a script. No such understanding is demonstrated in this sequel to 1999’s successful American remake of ‘The Ring’. ‘Ring 2′ was a double-disappointment, because this time out, the director of the original Japanese films was making his US debut. It was a triple-disappointment because the writer of the sequel was the same as that of the prior - Ehren Kruger - but the sequel sucked rocks. So what happened?

‘Ring 2' was so bad that it began to eat away at the virtues of the first film during the last half-hour. I know that Kreuger wrote both films, and the director of the original Japanese versions directed this new film, but it honestly felt as though Chuck Austen had snuck onto the set to give Hideo Nakata tips on storytelling, or was mis-translating the Director’s instructions to the actors and the crew.

The movie felt like a Chinese bootleg, only in this case, they were working from a bootleged script to create a knock-off, imitation American movie. Somehow, I got the impression that the director didn’t understand the dynamics of English conversation - that the boy’s ‘Rachel’s - had the capacity to become grating. And/or that Nikata had been fed misinformation about Americans leaving dead people and animals scattered about our roadsides.

Sure, stuff like that happens in shithole movies like ‘Jeepers Creepers’, ‘Final Destination’ and all of their sequels, but suspension-of-disbelief apparently works in those movies’ favor.

Oh my.

At least ‘Darkness‘ and it’s b-reel of outtakes, ‘Boogeyman‘ looked positively stellar in comparison. At least I could believe in those characters’ motivations. But here? Meh.

Under discussion:

War of the Worlds  (2005)

The attack sequences are a re-enactment of the US assaults on Baghdad, Mosul and Fallujah - from the Iraqi  P.O.V. That much is clever, but…

The thing is a too linear. Sure, it’s the anti-’Close Encounters’ and writer David Koepp has done a masterful job of rendering the inter-familial relationships, including little side-jabs at ‘Independence Day’ and the novelty of doing an invasion film from a singular, non-omniscient P.O.V., as opposed to Emmerichian and Speilbergian control-room cutaways. The Government isn’t gonna save us this time, folks.

We’ve already seen Dakota Fanning get all wide-eyed and screamy this summer, just like we’ve also seen Tom Cruise in roles where he’s O.D.’ed on testosterone and proceeds to over-aggress through the rest of the film.

It’s a fun little entertainment for Liberal ‘America-haters’ like myself, but I’m not sure there’s much more ‘there’ there. There’s a ‘comment’ about American foreign policy buried in Cruise’s live-alone Dad, but I’m not sure it’s worth pursuing.

***1/2 out of *****

Under discussion:

The Skeleton Key  (2005)

Item #1.) Before I went to this movie, I looked up the ‘twist ending’ on the internet. I was less interested in playing plot-twist games with the writer and director than I was interested in seeing a story well told. For 3 weeks, television commercials have been trumpeting the “re-introduction of the classic thriller from the creator of ‘The Ring’” — but ‘The Ring’ was a remake of a Japanese horror film directed by Hideo Nakata with a screenplay by Hiroshi Takahashi based on a novel by Kôji Suzuki. I didn’t see THEIR names anywhere, but I did see the name Ehren Kruger.

‘The Skeleton Key‘ was written by the AMERICAN re-writer of the Japanese ‘Ringu‘ (1998) — Ehren Kruger, who somehow wrote ‘Arlington Road‘ back in 1999. His ‘Ring‘ was actually very good, and there is a rumor that ‘Ring 2‘ actually had a reasonable script, before Director Nakata - one of the creators of the Japanese ‘Ringu’ - violated the thing by adding sentient reindeer and fingernails-on-chalkboard recitations of ‘Rachel!’ to David Dorfman’s dialogue. But I digress.

Item #2) A small Child, approximately 3 years old, attended the same showing as I. About halfway through the screening the child broke out of her seat, and proceeded to run up and down the theater’s central aisle, playing an improvised game of tag with her half-crippled sextogenarian father or grandfather.

The Child’s mother and brother were of no avail — Paternus had to limp up and down the aisle as the child squealed and dodged the Old Man’s advances. She continued to race around the theater a few more times even after the Old Man dragged her back to her seat.

That said, I can now resume this review and warn readers against spoilers.

Ehren Kruger is a hack.

With the exception of ‘The Ring’, all of his screenplays have had the appeal of last week’s leftovers, up to and including the script that somehow won him the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ coveted Nicholl Fellowship (’Arlington Road’). In Kruger’s teleplays, the antagonist typically flips the script with a role-reversal, and the ‘hero’ typically finds him- or herself in a 1st Class seat on his or her way to some personal hell. It happened in ‘Arlington Road’ (1999), it happened in ‘Impostor‘ (2002) and ‘Reindeer Games‘ (2000). Kruger has Shyalaman’s Disease™ and seems incapable of delivering a script without a revaluation of all story elements.

Characteristically, movies that depend on ‘twist’ endings tend to be the most linear and artificial kinds of stories — typically they are told from the solipsistic P.O.V. of one character and feature the periodic visits from other characters, whose opinions, goals and objective may, possibly differ from the central protagonist. Seldom, however do these alternative characters manage to delay the tragic ends that the protagonist seem to be bound for. Twist endings, it seems, must always betray common sense in order to defy expectations. And such is the case with ‘The Skeleton Key’.

***POSSIBLE SPOILERS BELOW***

If Kruger’s ‘Skeleton Key’ is supposed to be an accurate rendering, African-Americans in Louisiana at the turn of the last century are supposed to have been jealous enough of white children to want to pull a body-snatching routine on them. Two adults. Must be prepared to re-live their formative years in order to exact some sort of revenge on their oppressors. To be beholden and dependent upon those selfsame oppressors for another 10 years, as they repeat their maturation toward adulthood and autonomy.

As an adult, I would find it difficult to want to re-visit all of the dependency and the privations that accompany childhood. I locate a central plot-hole there, in Kruger’s script — as if two powerful members of New Orleans’ so-called HooDoo community would be willing or able to sacrifice their social standing to become young children in their employer’s caste. That’s a f@cked-up and racist supposition to make: Jack-and-Jill is one thing, but the suggestion that brujos would really prefer to be Yanquis is something else altogether.

So, Kruger follows his unspectacular Ring sequel with an unspectacular ‘Body Snatchers’ redux, using folk magic as a catalyst, rather than spores from outer space. I won’t be buying tickets to any more of Kruger’s movies —I’ll be buying tickets to the show in the next theater over, and sneaking into the Kruger feature, if not taking a two-fer at the cineplex. It’s that disappointing.

* out of 5

Under discussion:

Serenity  (2005)

No, start over.

Joss Whedon is a genius, but he’s going through an interesting stage of re-development. I was one of those people who might have seen ‘Buffy:the Movie‘ (1992) on it’s initial release and greeted the series with an attitude of ‘meh’, only to see it grow into the trenchant occasion of ‘The Body‘ during its 5th Season, before the show became bored with itself.

I also watched ‘Angel’ grow from its dodgy 1st Season to the kick-ass triumph of its early cancellation by the WB network. While both of those shows were interesting and ‘important’ in that parenthetical way that takes old ideas and recasts them in surprising new ways, the thing that REALLY sold me on Whedon was his ‘Alien: Resurrection‘ script.

Though many people hated — hated - ‘Alien:Resurrection’ (1997), I thought that it was the best installment of the franchise since the original film. Some things, like the alien-sex thing were a bit overdone, but on the whole, the characterizations, conflicts and story-development were as good as the first movie – the exchanges between Ron Perelman and Michael Wincott were every bit as good as the banter between Harry Dean Stanton (Brett) and Yaphet Kotto (Parker) in the original film. Whedon was able to catch that lightning-in-a-bottle for that 4th installment of the ‘Alien’ franchise, and THAT made me really sit up and take notice.

Fast-forward to 2003, and Whedon steps away from the gotho-horror-dramedy of ‘Buffy’ and ‘Angel’ to produce a new television show for Fox. It is to be a science-fiction show called ‘Firefly’. WTF?! For kill-your-newborn Fox Television? Hmmn… the same network that had drowned ‘Profit‘, ‘Space:Above and Beyond‘ and ‘Harsh Realm‘ in the bathtub – each, in their own, smart television for quality-starved genre fanatics. But with the success and bread-buttering that Whedon, ‘Buffy’ and ‘Angel’ had been for Fox, the show ought to have had a chance – but of course, those shows had been made by Fox for OTHER networks, and the climate of network television had changed dramatically since the late ’80’s such that ‘The Bachellorette:Syphilis Island’ and ‘Date-Rape My Mom’ were somehow viable ratings-earners for the otherwise Right-Wing and reactionary Fox Television network.

So, all in all, that’s the long way around to discussing the particular circumstances that brought about the resurrection of short-lived ‘Firefly:The Series’ as ‘Serenty:The Movie’. 2002 was a particularly tumultuous year for genre fiction as all 3 of Whedon’s television shows were cancelled, not to mention the genre-stalwart ‘Farscape‘, a show that had embraced a bit of the Whedon-extreme ethos. Honestly, the producers of Farscape ought to have gotten the embrace of the newly-formed NBC-Universal corporation, just as the Fox-ejected Firefly did, but that’s another turgid story of entertainment politics.

Firefly, like ‘S:AaB’ and the rest, was a show a couple of years ahead of its time. Given that Gene Roddenberry had originally pitched ‘Star Trek’ to NBC as “Wagon Train to the stars” back in 1966, it became something of a mantra in MLA circles that science-fiction had taken the place of the Western in popular culture, starting in the mid-sixties: With the Apollo space missions, the Stars had become mankind’s new frontier. When I heard that Whedon’s new series was going to be something of a Space-Oater, I assumed that he had read many of the same critical-theory books that I had, and we were about to enter something of a smart, self-conscuious paradigm shift in commercial television. I largely assumed that Whedon was aware of the Western/Sci-fi progression and that this new show would somehow be a treatise on said far-horizons – an exploration of ‘Space’ (read:imagination) and human limitations. In the hands of Whedon, a writer known for snappy dialogue and the exploration of emotional voids – high school, the death of a parent, anonymous and preternaturally omnipotent law firms – this was bound to be exciting new territory. And it was… for the 13 mis-marketed and broadcast out-of-order episodes that Fox allowed.

By all rights, Firefly ought to have been the new Star Trek. Firefly took the lived-in, culturally diverse sensibility that had been created in ‘Alien’ (1979) and disregarded by Trek since its second inception and the homogenizing influence of Rick Berman and Brannon Braga. Firefly made a go of science-fiction television without omnipotent extraterrestrials and bad prosthetic make-up. In Firefly, mankind’s only antagonists were other humans, relieved of terrestrial and ethical constraints (see DEATH and CORPORATIONS, above).

Though this is Whedon’s first theatrical feature, Firefly is certainly NOT his first stab at the big screen. Whedon of course, wrote the original ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer’ (1992), not to mention ‘Toy Story’ (1995) and ‘Alien:Resurrection’ (1997) while he was a staff-writer for ‘Roseanne’. On account of his elaborate television resume, Firefly seems to be just a little constrained by the limitations of a feature - 120 pages, 120 minutes of screen-time – with many characters who’d had the luxury of 720 minutes of small-screen time on the small(er) box. Several of the members of Firefly’s LARGE cast (9 total) are reduced to short moments in single set-pieces: The dynamics of commercial cinema require that Whedon give short-shrift to some characters, if only to give his story greater focus.

That said, there are MANY successes - the imagination deployed in Whedon’s script and Zöic’s SFX kick the crap out of any and everything that Lucas and his Skywalker Ranch were able to cook-up, and I can only suspect that Lucas’ people were working with a technically unlimited budget. The fight choreography is sen-fucking-sational, and Yuen Woo-Ping is nowhere in sight. Hats off to ex-ballerina Summer Glau.

Lastly, it’s just about the only good, solid series conclusion that I’ve seen in a long time and there’s plenty of room for a sequel.

I hope that it makes a LOT of money and those Fox idiots go into conniptions.

****1/2 out of 5.

Also of note, The CulturePulp Q&A with Joss Whedon.

Under discussion:

Traffic  (2000)

After watching the British version of ‘Traffik’ alongside a broadcast of 2000’s Steven Soderbergh remake, both courtesy of the Sundance Channel, I think I like the original more, even though Benicio Del Toro and Don Cheadle aren’t in it. The Brits are less black-and-white about the subject - the criminals aren’t all resident aliens, and fewer prominent characters live in the suburbs. Many are ‘respectable’ natural-born citizens, and international monetary policy (read IMF) is as culpable in the propagation of the drug trade as the well-to-do professionals of Southern California. Interesting, isn’t it, how Soderbergh moved the incidence of drug use and propagation out of the ‘Heartland’ of America into those ‘blue’ Gore margins. But we all know who’s catalyzing crystal-meth in Iowa - and his name don’t end with ‘Rodriguez’…

The Soderbergh film is substantially Goddard-ized, and full of editorial commentary, whilst the British made-for-tv version is remarkably ‘pure’. It’s much more like a real documentary - like an early Wenders film - that simply watches it’s protagonists as the story unfolds, and makes no comments. But then the Brits had 6 hours to play with, and Soderbergh only has 2-1/2.

There are currently two cable programs that pick on the lost Soderbergh narrative - HBO’s ‘The Wire’, which follows an ongoing narcotics investigation in Baltimore, MD, and Showtime’s ‘Street Time’ (w/ Rob Morrow of ‘Northern Exposure’ fame), set in a less-than-yuppie, less-than-Hollywood LA. Both of these programs pull the drug issue out of the rarefied realms of the idle rich and the destitute poor, to color the middle-classes. The better program, ‘The Wire’ offers the unspoken truism:”You follow the drugs, and you get a drug dealer; you follow the money, and you don’t know where you’ll end up - a City Councilman, a banker, you don’t know…” - and really, that’s what’s missing from Soderbergh’s list of tropes and exoticisms - the real criminals, like Jefferey Skilling , Ken Lay, Adelphia and WorldCom - are the vaunted business leaders who walk above us, and pocket our politicians. The criminals in ‘The Wire’ are as disciplined and organized as any Fortune 500 company, despite the fact that they make most of their cash operating out of the projects on Baltimore’s West-side. Soderbergh would have you believe that only yuppies and corrupt Mexican Generals could be so efficient.

Showtime’s ‘Street Time’ inverts the equation some, placing Rob Morrow in the role of a parolee trying to make good after incarceration. He’s out after a five year stint, though his brother and brother-in-law escaped the rap an are still plying their hash and marijuana importing concern out of their LA club (An interesting sub-plot indicates that Morrow’s affable retiree parents are unwittingly living off of their sons’ drug money in beautifully gladed Carmel, CA. Presumably, their retirement funds got tanked in the stock market…). Morrow’s got a wife and a kid he’s trying to do well by, but he feels his business partners owe him $1.5mil for the years he spent in the can. On the flip side, his over-eager parole officer (also a family man) has both an ethical streak and a gambling problem. Both are solidly middle-class, though the Morrow character is a bit more bohemian, if not a natural entrepreneur. Morrow’s character is addicted to the dealmaking, but not the drugs.

Additional incentives to these programs are beautiful black women in the supporting cast, and the well-drawn detectives on ‘The Wire’. The criminals may not have Coca Colas distribution channels, but they do manage to make out - which keeps them one step ahead of the cops - everywhere. (2002)

Under discussion:

X-Men: The Last Stand  (2006)

That said, you can leave all of your X-Men canon at the door. Especially for ‘The Last Stand’.

This much I knew from my lukewarm appreciation of the first 2 movies, with their unnatural emphasis on Rogue and Wolverine. In the comics, Rogue started out as a villain, as she was the adoptive daughter of Mystique (yes!) and a former member of the third incarnation of the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants. For some indertminate reason I thought she was Australian when I was reading the X-Titles back in the ’80’s, but that might just have been a bit of poor transcription in whatever way Mr. Claremont had chosen to record her dialogue.

Wolverine? At some point, I owned Incredible Hulk #181 (October 1974), the issue that included Wolverine’s first appearance. I also owned a crapped-out copy of Giant-Sized X-Men #1 (May 1975), that apparently included Wolverine in it, but I had no recollection of his participation. Maybe Thunderbird’s death – a tragic waste of so much potential — just traumatized me and made me forget.

Anyway, whatever had motivated Bryan Singer and his writers was *not* the way that it had happened in the comics some 25 years earlier, I knew that. What Singer had put on screen was an awkward confab of Kitty Pryde’s introduction to the X-Men and something else altogether.

I’m not sure if it’s a good thing or a bad thing that I can’t seem to remember any salient plot elements from the first X-Men movie, other than Wolverine’s weird flashbacks that seemed to ask more questions than they answered. Yes, I bought the trade of Barry Windsor-Smith’s Weapon X miniseries back in the day, but I never read much of Wolverine’s solo title. But it was all there in Weapon X, as in ‘Weapon Ten’, as it was later retconned by Grant Morrison when he wrote ‘New X-Men’.

But that first movie was something of an acceptable introduction for a mainstream America that had probably not bristled with a recognition of the alt.sci-fi.marvel.universe that I grew up in, in a time before the internet. ‘X-Men’ was good enough of a start and better than boring old Batman and Superman. I’ve always been a Marvel Zombie.

X-2? The one with the redundant title, ‘X-Men United’? They are the X-Men. Thay are a team, there is no need for them to be ‘united’ because they are presumably already working as a TEAM. Halle Berry still sucked and I have no idea why Singer cast her in the first place, other than that she’s a black woman. (It was probably at the insistence of Fox franchise-killer Tom Rothman, forced upon Singer because she might be a box-office draw.) Trick casting like Berry’s only works in movies that are presumably boring or undersubscribed. X-Men was never going to be either – Singer ought to have either cast the woman who already is Storm, Angela Bassett, or just found an unknown. Fox could have saved a whole lot of money.

Other than absurdist plots to turn everybody into mutants or some looney, Mageto-led plots and apparently a direct lift from Claremont and Byrne’s ‘God Loves, Man Kills‘ storyline. Again, my memory for small details fails me yet once again, but the pattern had already been established: As with the first movie, Bryan Singer and his writers took a little here and a little there and mashed the whole canon-thing up, as X-2 again borrowed liberally from the X-canon by strinkling both Mastermind and Lady Deathstrike into the same storyline with no mention of the Hellfire club or Wolverine’s history with both Hydra and the Yakuza. Interesting, but still short on the fanboy goods. But this movie was better than the first one.

Now with X-3, the rumored final movie in this constructed ‘trilogy’, several characters have died while the 3rd directorial choice, Brett the Ratt has allowed his writers Zak Penn and Simon Kinberg to cherry-pick other X-Men stories rather than just try to do ONE and remain fathful to it. All while cramming as many mutant cameos into the thing as possible. Thus we get faux Morlocks, a faux-Sentinel and a sudden personality-disorder for Jean Grey, just as we get Joss Whedon’s Dr. Kavita Rao, introduced last year in ‘Astonishing X-Men’ suddenly introduces a ‘cure’ for mutancy.

The script, IMHO, was both over- and under-written. As a fan of Farscape, I’ll be the first to admit that I’ve been spoiled by character-development and shippiness, but there was NO room for either in this movie. Sure, Bobby Drake (Iceman) takes the new Kitty Pryde ice-skating in the middle of the night, but only after decimating what *ought* to have been the most important relationship in the whole movie.

Several reviewers have commented on this movie’s mysogyny, and I’d have to agree: The writers and the director seem to have conspired to strip 2 of the female protagonists of their powers, while a third literally gets stabbed through the heart. But hey, it’s just meant to be a popcorn movie, right? There’s also been much commentary about the franchise being something of a roman à plume for homosexuality and much chatter about Singer himself being gay. Whether either are true, I have no idea. Such talk and justaposition of this movie to HBO’s ‘Angels in America’ by way of Warren Worthington III just seems to be a bit of a stretch to me. If any of Marvel’s openly gay mutants had been featured in X-3 or any of the movies that preceeded it, I might see the point. But neither Northstar nor Ultimate Colossus were featured in this movie, so those bored reviewers might as well leave it aloone. The X-Men are about gifted people and common alienation, no less and no more.

Even Xavier’s relationship with Jean failed to make an appearance, despite some early scenes that suggest that their history extended significantly further back than the first movie.

I’m entirely of two minds on Ratner’s adaptation of the X-Men mythos. As a lifetime fan of the comics, I recognize that the first movie was the failure and subsequent efforts have managed only to drive more nails into the coffin while rolling numerous favorite characters into the ovens. Harsh, yes – but until Alex Proyas or Guillermo del Toro are given $200 M to make an X-Men movie that’s been written by Mark Millar or Joss Whedon, the real deal ain’t gonna happen.

OTOH, I’m still surprised that this movie didn’t end up like that car accident at the beginning of ‘Final Destination 2, with talk of mutant pheromone hooker characters (Stacy X) and numerous other rumors circulating on the internets after Kinberg and Penn finished their notorious ‘6 Day draft’. And Juggernaut sucked. Whoever thought that it might be clever to name-check that moronic fan-clip of a misogynistic Juggernaut was just wrong. Period.

So, Ratner got it righter than I expected it, but that still doesn’t mean that he passed the test.

*** out of 5