"I made the list of top 5 Hitlers of all time - real Hitler's not even on the list!"

As much as I find this new season of UNBREAKABLE KIMMY SCHMIDT overly broad, the bit where Titus earns the wrath of a bunch of bloggers has really rung true as of late.

First, io9 issued the breathless "Reminder: Rudyard Kipling was a racist f*** and the JUNGLE BOOK is Imperialist Garbage", written with the zeal and incompetence of a fourteen year old who just discovered Howard Zinn. I'm not really interested in arguing with this piece, other than to point out that any halfway decent point gestured at in the article was already made, in a more coherent and readable manner, by George Orwell, a man whose leftist bonafides and direct knowledge of the workings of imperialism are unimpeachable. At the very least, it is hilarious to read Bombast McGawker going into hysterics over "lesser breeds without the Law" as coded to represent the White Man's Burden over other continents, where Orwell points out that it was probably a dig at the Germans.

But let it not be said that Slate, with its delusions of grandeur evidenced by a paywall, is afraid to sally forth into the fray that Gawker Media has started with a mostly unmourned dead author in the public domain. "Not only was Kipling racist," Katy Waldman must argue, "but so was Walt Disney!" Which is probably true, but Waldman then picks the hill she wishes to die on.

But as far as pure and explicit racism goes, Kipling’s novel scores lower than Disney’s 1967 movie, which introduced a great ape called King Louie (after Louie Armstrong) who sang minstrel songs about his desire to get civilized.

*crickets sound*

I might have only been born in the mid-80s, but I do still remember a time when writers, before turning in an article, had to actually do some research. Waldman, who is apparently Slate's "words" correspondent, whatever that even means, has probably watched the 1967 animated Jungle Book at some point, but that appears to be where her knowledge and research ended.

Now, Disney and his studio certainly deserve criticism. But if you are going to attack Disney on racism, at least pick a time when he and the studio were intentionally racist. Because Waldman didn't bother to do any research.

King Louie in Disney's 1967 Jungle Book is voiced by Louis Prima. Louis Prima was an Italian-American band leader and singer who grew up in New Orleans. He is the one who sings "I Wanna Be Like You", which is not a minstrel song, but a swing/jazz song. Which is the type of music Louis Prima played.


A quick visit to Wikipedia's entry on The Jungle Book shows that Prima was suggested for the part early on. And the book the Wikipedia entry cites (accessible here) mentions that Prima brought down his entire band for his audition, and performed their regular Vegas act. Key point: "Some of the antics of Prima and his crew also found their way into the film".

So the 1967 King Louie was not meant to be a caricature of African-Americans. His image, attitude and mannerisms were inspired by the man who voiced him, a pop-culture icon, who was an Italian-American (!). If this can somehow be construed as racist, then the word has lost all meaning. Instead, this is an example of lazy research. A high school freshman writing an article on Disney's The Jungle Book using Wikipedia would have turned in a more accurate paper with better sources than Slate's own 'words" correspondent.

I e-mailed Ms. Waldman about this error yesterday, and the article has yet to be corrected. Slate, a site that posts clickbait about how Hamilton, a musical where the Founding Fathers engage in rap battles has *gasp* indulged in artistic license, apparently has lower standards for its own content than a Broadway rap musical. Why anyone would even pay for this elephant dung Slate calls journalism is beyond me.

Speak of the blogger and he shall appear!

So, once again, I am contributing to a Deadshirt retrospective, this time about Batman, in honor of
Coldstone Creamery, Turkish Airlines & Warner Brothers Presents Batman vs. Superman: Dawn of Franchises.

My choice was The Dark Knight Rises. And it's still a flawed movie, but some of those flaws now seem kind of charming? Check it out here!

A Very Coen Brothers' February....

So the wonderful folks at Deadshirt asked me to write about one of my favorite Coen Brothers films (so far), MILLER'S CROSSING. You can find that here.

I'd like to thank Max Robinson, who has been an amazing, sympatico editor for the two articles I've written for them so far, as well as my lovely wife Terra, for watching the movie again with me and discussing it as I tried to articulate my thoughts.

My thoughts on STAR WARS: THE FORCE AWAKENS

Hey blog fans, sorry for the radio silence. I've been busy with moving to Seattle, starting a new job, having a baby and getting another dog.

However, I do have a new post on awesome pop culture website Deadshirt about THE FORCE AWAKENS. You can find it here. And it should be a different take than most of the stuff the blogosphere has been talking about.  So check it out and there might be more coming soon!

"Last of the materialists. That's like last of the dinosaurs": GHOSTWATCH

GHOSTWATCH (1992)
Directed by Lesley Manning
Starring Michael Parkinson, Michael Smith, Sarah Greene, and Craig Charles

Among a niche audience of horror buffs, Ghostwatch stands as the British answer to Orson Welles' "War of the Worlds" broadcast. This is actually a little too simplistic, because whereas Welles' broadcast was never intended to be taken for a real news broadcast (it had been presented with the Mercury Theatre opening and credits, but station-switching audiences had missed the introduction), Ghostwatch was.

Ghostwatch was presented on Halloween in 1992 as a BBC news special, including normal television anchors and interviewers, who were investigating a haunted house on live television. This wasn't an "In Search Of" style show, where an expectation or suspicion of trickery lurks around the edges. Nor was the footage presented as pre-recorded and edited. And the anchors weren't faded TV stars or credulous mystics. These were normal, trusted BBC newscasters (imagine Mike Wallace or Stone Phillips or Bryant Gumbel perpetrating a similar hoax). The fact that this was a call-in show, that was supposed to include interviews with experts, discussion with viewers, and interviews with other people that had experienced hauntings, suggested that there was no certainty that the "haunted" house would even present any paranormal phenomenon. For the majority of the show, the anchors and reporters range from politely skeptical to outright condescending to the idea that the paranormal was even possible.

So it's no wonder that the public was shocked when the show was "interrupted" with technical difficulties suggesting paranormal activity, or that a bunch of "concerned citizens" blocked it from airing on Television in its original form for years to come.

But heading into a screening at Cinefamily at the Silent Movie Theatre, I had to wonder how shocking it would be. After all, I already knew the backstory. And in an age of "found-footage" films and "mockumentaries", how ground-breaking would it really seem?

The answer is that Ghostwatch still has the capacity to scare. It's not really a gory film and the effects are rather simple (a wind machine, a lot of sound effects, a creepy figure in a costume), but the whole thing is handled to such an elegant effect that it haunted me long after I left the theatre.

To its credit, even knowing the central premise of Ghostwatch, the show was very suspenseful. The show tips its hand fairly early that there is something odd going on here, when the anchors broadcast footage previously shot in the haunted house and we see a shadowy figure that the anchors can't see, even when they slow it down and watch frame-by-frame. So the old axiom, attributed to Hitchcock, that watching two men play cards can be thrilling if you know there's a ticking time bomb under their chairs and they don't, is at work here.

Furthermore, the haunting scenario has a few twists and turns in it that will surprise even a viewer expecting to get spooked. For one thing, the theories of the paranormal investigator, Dr. Lin Paskoe (Brid Bevan), who is the only one other than the victims that believes in the haunting from the outset, turn out to be somewhat off-base. On the house's history, she's as much in the dark as the victims and the anchors. Usually in these types of films, the occult expert is usually completely right and the skeptics are completely wrong. It's refreshing to have both sides to turn out to be somewhat right in the details, but wrong on the big picture. And the scenes where she's arguing with a skeptical American researcher suggest that, for all her careful work and attempts to remain scientific, that she's a little too emotionally invested in this pursuit for her own good.

For another thing, about halfway through, the reporters capture footage on tape of a young girl making the "noises" attributed to the poltergeist. For the audiences at home, unaware of what was to happen, it must have lulled them into a false sense of security. For a more cynical viewer, it knocked me off my feet. How were they going to recover from that?

As for whether the show would hold up after years of films like the Blair Witch Project and several iterations of Paranormal Activity, the answer is that it does. Since this event is being filmed by a professional news crew, there's not a ridiculous over-reliance on "shaky-cam". And once all hell breaks loose, the broadcast has a variety of tricks to show us things going wrong.

The production design is also worth complimenting, given that the studio and house are both banal and ordinary enough to pass as normal, while taking on an increasingly creepy and ominous appearance as reality breaks down (I can't describe the effect apples swinging from string achieve, as lame as it sounds).

The performances and the writing are very sharp, with Sarah Greene showing a nice steely determination to protect the house's children even as she grows more and more terrified of the house and Michael Parkinson having a great arc from open-minded host to condescending bastard (when he believes he's exposed a hoax) to a confused and frustrated man unwilling to admit that reality is not what he thought it was.

There are a few mis-steps, mostly in the form of Craig Charles as the Odious Comic Relief who peppers his location-hosting duties with way too many jokes about how ridiculous Halloween and the supernatural are. He's a little too unprofessional to convince as a TV host and his tongue-in-cheek performance suggests there's some trickery afoot. It's a bit disappointing, given that I enjoyed him on "Red Dwarf", but he sticks out like a sore thumb here.

But despite a few laughs in the audience as Ghostwatch started up, by the end, everyone was shocked into silence. And we thought we were in on the joke.

Halloween countdown: He served a dark and a stupid god

Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (2007)

Directed by Tim Burton
Starring Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham Carter, Sacha Baron Cohen, Alan Rickman and Timothy Spall

I know quite a few people I like and whose opinions I respect won't agree with what I'm about to write. Not just friends, but apparently even Mister Stephen Sondheim himself. But Tim Burton's Sweeney Todd just isn't good.

In all fairness, it's not bad, either. But that's the disappointment. Because what Burton turns in is the sort of cowardly pseudo-musical and pseudo-horror film that Hollywood churns out for respectable people these days. And that really is what disappoints from Burton, of all people, who, in the first half of his career, often put out off-kilter movies with only the slightest concessions to present popular culture. A parody of 50's alien invasion films cross-pollinated with '70s disaster films? An ode to a cult film-maker notorious for being awful, shot in black-and-white? A horror comedy about a ghost that exorcises living people and wants to abduct a teenage girl as his bride?

But the grotesque and strange taste that made these films wonderful has congealed into something more "bubblegum goth", giving us a movie afraid to fully leap into the campy and also terrifying.  Burton is willing to give us a lot of blood and gore, but he's afraid to give us the sexual insanity of the Beggar Woman, Toby's final transformation into something as twisted as Sweeney, or Joanna murdering the insane asylum director. And of course, Mrs. Lovett has to feel bad about what she's doing, to some extent (missing the entire point of the character, but whatever). Our heroes have to be sympathetic, goshdarnit! And we have to have clear delineation between good and bad!

Heaven knows what Christopher Bond, the playwright whose work gave Sondheim the basis for Sweeney Todd by marrying the revenge motive to a more vicious Marxist reading of the story. After all, Bond rewrote King Lear to be less romantic and hopeful!

But this is really Burton giving into the most trite and cliche of his excesses: almost everything production designed to a somehow charming goth version of urban blight, cleavage-baring outfits for Helena Bonham Carter (regardless of appropriateness), and generic,ugly CGI that makes 18th Century London look like a video-game cutscene.

Burton really doesn't seem comfortable with the fact he's directing a musical, stripping the movie of almost every group chorus, shoving several songs off into dream sequences or fantasies, as if the audience will be hard-pressed to believe that people could just burst into song.  It doesn't help that Carter's voice is a slight and mediocre one, and that Johnny Depp sounds like he's trying to channel either Anthony Newley or David Bowie.

There are some moments that hint at the better job Burton could have done. Alan Rickman and Timothy Spall, though underused, are both living embodiments of nightmares of authority figures, and Sacha Baron Cohen as the barber/mountebank Pirelli is an unnerving mix of oily charm and barely-restrained rage.

Even Depp, in a few moments, hits the mark, such as when he rushes about London in his mind, brandishing a razor at every person he meets.

But for every moment that works, there's a song chopped to bits, or another godawful bit with Helena Bonham Carter, and it just becomes a junk food film again, every bit as much a mish-mash as Mrs. Lovett's pies.

A special treat for Mr. K fans...

I fly to Chicago tomorrow. I'm going to be gone for a week, and probably without internet access for most of that week.

But I do have a special treat for you. I was volunteering at Cinefamily last week for a special event they did with clothing label Stussy. They screened Punisher: War Zone and clips from a bunch of obscure Marvel multimedia (including the Japanese live-action Spider-Man and that Turkish film where Captain America and El Santo are pursuing an evil Spider-Man). I got some neat Stussy-designed pins of Marvel Comics characters and they took some pictures.

I'm the guy in the blue polo shirt and khakis midway down the page. Too bad you can't see those pins. They're pretty awesome.

My retro career just melted....

On top of reading The UFA Story, I've been on a "behind-the-scenes" of Hollywood kick lately.

About John Gregory Dunne's The Studio I have very little to say, other than that it is a fascinating view of how some great (and not-so-great) films were created over at 20th Century Fox, even as studio executives show an inability to relate to the realities of '60s America.

However, I also read Edward Jay Epstein's The Hollywood Economist: The Hidden Financial Reality Behind the Movies. I can't really recommend it as highly as Dunne's book, because most of Epstein's book is just reprints from his Slate and New Yorker columns, with even the new material feeling short and fluffy in the way that most magazines and internet publications expect from regular columns.

The snapshots that Epstein gives of the movie industry can be fascinating. He hints at what would have been a more interesting book in the epilogue, where he breaks down the ways that the loss of foreign financing and the bank/hedge fund collapse have severely impoverished the film world (artistically as well as financially). Epstein lays out the case that the recession strikes the independent production companies the hardest, since the difficulty in securing initial funding sinks almost anything without a big star already attached.

Furthermore, even the major studios, which are slightly better off as far as actually getting their films made, but still in an unenviable position re: making a profit, are relying more and more on overseas sales, which means a swing further towards the comic book/licensed property/shoot-out/car-chase side of the entertainment spectrum. So if you were hoping that the recession would mean smaller, smarter pictures and less empty blockbuster, Epstein's not on your side.

Which, jumping back to The UFA Story, sounds vaguely reminiscent of the German film industry's problems between 1924 and 1928 (which, I remind you, was during a period of economic improvement BEFORE the Great Depression hit). To quote Kreimeier:

This risky product with unpredictable sales potential, which even on the domestic market made life hard for producers wanting quick returns, was now pulled into the malestrom of crisis-prone international finance. (123)

 Moving on from there, Kreimeier notes that the studios that managed to weather this storm the best were those with vertical integration (control of distribution and exhibition) and investments in property (studio space, equipment, movie theatres). These giant conglomerates also usually had ties to a friendly and corporatized press that printed stories and reviews that were basically glorified press releases.

That sounds rather familiar to me. Is this where the American film industry is heading for the near future?
 

"Me? I'm a businessman. You and me are going to do a little business..."

Note: Another old draft I reread and realized was publishable. More new content soon.


Act of Violence (1948; d. Fred Zinneman, starring Van Heflin, Robert Ryan, Janet Leigh and Mary Astor)

I'm a Van Heflin fan. That's kind of an odd thing to say, if only because his filmography, while not undistinguished, is fairly minor. An important supporting role in Shane, a lead in the original 3:10 to Yuma, and a bunch of roles in a mix of mostly forgotten films. However, he was one of the stars of The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (Kirk Douglass' debut! with Barbara Stanwyck), where his unshowy but solid performance provided the whole foundation of the film. Without him, there is no place for Stanwyck and Douglass' neurotic performances to go.

What I loved about his performance in that film is the way he played a tough good guy who is always one bad choice away from becoming a thug. He's got good impulses and empathy, but he usually bristles at the first sign of confrontation, holds onto grudges and loves to play the angles. And these might have served his character well in the army, but in Strange Love they keep pushing him to the edge of criminality.

So I feel vindicated by his performance in this film, where he plays a nice, hard-working family man... with a very dark secret. It's the polar opposite of his role in Strange Love, and he plays it like a craftman, carefully but with no showiness or cheap tricks. The rest of the film is like this, stripped down and sleek, with few frills, but it puts everything in service to the story.

Act of Violence starts with a limping man (Robert Ryan) in a rain-soaked trenchcoat going into his apartment, grabbing his gun and heading straight for the bus depot. He buys a ticket to California,  arriving on Memorial Day in a small town a couple hours outside of LA. He immediately gets a hotel room, ignoring all the festivities, and starts looking in the phonebook for Frank Enley.

Meanwhile, Frank Enley (Van Heflin) is at the dedication of a housing development he helped construct, where his business associates praise his hard work and joke about his distinguished war record.  After the ceremony, Frank, his wife Edith (a young Janet Leigh) and year-old son Georgie head home, where he packs for a weekend fishing trip at the lake with his neighbor Fred (Harry Antrim). He leaves a little bit before the limping man shows up, asking for Frank. Edith tells the stranger that he just left for the lake but he should be back by Monday. So the limping man, gun still concealed in his trenchcoat, sets out for the lake.

Bad timing and Frank's own surprising paranoia keep the limping man away for a day more, but when Frank leaves for a business conference in LA and Edith confronts the limping man, she finds out that Frank's distinguished service in WWII acquired an awful blot while he was in a POW camp and Frank's pursuer is his old army buddy Joe Parkson. As for how Joe got the limp... well, let's just say it's tied to that same POW camp. And by the way, we've still got another hour to go in the film. And we still haven't seen the titular Act of Violence yet...

For a movie that sounds like an '80's action film, Act of Violence is mostly devoted to building tension. Joe's unflagging pursuit of Frank hangs like a cloud over everything, even when Frank doesn't realize he's being chased. The first fifteen to twenty minutes, as we watch Frank barely evade Joe by sheer coincidence, is like a cinematic response to "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God", with doom waiting around every corner, never thwarted, just delayed. 

For a film noir, in fact, this film actually contains a fair amount of moral complexity. It never sinks into the easy nihilism that imitators usually pick up (i.e. everyone's flawed and corrupt). Instead, it shows the crucible of war, where a fundamentally decent man makes an awful decision in a moment of weakness and is punished for it. I don't watch the movie wanting Enley let off the hook (there's a sense throughout that Frank knows he deserves to be punished but is afraid to face that), but Parkson murdering him will not solve anything. In fact, it will just corrupt Parkson. Act of Violence actually manages to find a cathartic way out of this conundrum that doesn't feel cheap or sentimental, but offers a hope of redemption all the same. B+

Mad Men, 1950s-style...

Watching Robert Wise's Executive Suite (1954), and I get the feeling that Matthew Weiner must have seen this movie at some point. Not to say that Mad Men is ripping it off, just saying that this feels like a source of inspiration.

Also, Nina Foch in this reminds me a little of Joan Holloway, down to the pen hanging in front of her cleavage.

Less scary horror films...

There's a theme going around on twitter of #lessurgentmovies. For Halloween, here are some of my suggestions:

And Now the Nagging Starts

The Yipping

An American in London

Ginger is Kind of Testy

28 Days Earlier

The Legend of Heck House

Taste the Sweat of Dracula!

Frankenstein Created Women's Clothing

Frankenstein Must Be Sternly Lectured!

Children Shouldn't Play With Things

Wait Until After Lunch

"I promise you, things are about to get a whole shit-load brighter": BEACH PARTY AT THE THRESHOLD OF HELL

Director: Jonny Gillette/Kevin Wheatley
Starring: Kevin Wheatley, Paul Whitty, Jamie Bullock, and quick cameos from Daniel Baldwin, Jane Seymour and Tony Hale

In case Kevin Wheatley serving as both star and (one of the) director(s) wasn't enough, he also wrote the screenplay. Also, his biggest credit other than this is a recurring role on "Dirt". And if that didn't kill your interest, the fact this movie's official title includes "National Lampoon Presents" probably might.

Wait, wait, come back!

Okay, those of you that are left might be wondering, "why did you watch this movie, Mr. K?" Well, one, I'm a masochist. And two, it's a post-apocalyptic comedy.

A low-key, low-budget, poorly-executed comedy that mostly reminds me I still need to see Six String Samurai. But it has a slight charm.

The plot, such as it is, is this. In 2075, something called the Sunstroke Corporation apparently obliterated America, leaving only a few hundred thousand survivors, mostly underground. While underground, the survivors were comforted by Clarke Remington (Daniel Baldwin, basically being a low-rent version of his brother Alec), a used car salesman who convinced people he was King of America and that his half-mad, blind, albino nephew Benny (Bill English) was his sucessor. When the surviving Americans finally emerged, Tex Kennedy (our star, Kevin Wheatley, trying for a Kennedy impersonation and mostly failing) makes it his mission to let America know Benny is their king, and hopefully get the Vice-Kingship in the process. Unfortunately, he's opposed by a bunch of Satanic spring-breakers, Clarke's pyschopathic son Jackle (Lea Coco) and his mysterious advisor from the "Republic of Arizona", Marcellus St. Joan (Ted Schneider).

That's a lot to take in. Also, that really doesn't represent what the story is. It's a hell of shaggy dog story. The Sunstroke Corporation? Not mentioned after the first five minutes. What the Republic of Arizona represents (if it exists), what Benny's visions are, who killed Clarke Remington, why a bunch of spring-breakers were protected by the Devil from the nuclear fall-out, and if Tex Kennedy will actually become Vice-King are not answered either. Don't even get me started on a half-assed framing device that includes Tony Hale and a few other people pretending to be historians commenting on this film as if it were a documentary.

Now, comedies have a tendency towards rambling, disconnected narratives (though both Hot Fuzz & Shaun of the Dead prove this isn't necessary). Some movies, like Monty Python and the Holy Grail, even turn this to their advantage, using the loopy and disjointed nature of the plot to make fun of the way stories about King Arthur and his knights are cobbled together from a variety of sources with a variety of different motives. At the very least, digressions in a comedy should lead to something funny. Why does Stryker's flashback in Airplane! turn into a Saturday Night Fever parody? Who cares, because it's unexpected and (more importantly) hilarious.

Now, to be fair to Beach Party, it does have a few funny moments. But way too much of the film is devoted to setting up an incredibly developed mythology that isn't funny and is clearly setting up another film. This mythology isn't even interesting enough to build up my interest in another film. It's just distracting and confusing. And not funny.

In my estimate, a good 20 minutes of exposition, mostly in the beginning of the film, are spent setting up characters and situations who don't even figure into the climax, and the last 13 are spent setting up the next film. Beach Party is only an hour and a half! You don't need to remember your Robert McKee to see the structural problems.

It certainly doesn't help that, even when Beach Party is trying to be funny, their reach exceeds their grasp. The low-budget and inexperienced actors make the movie feel like a collaboration between a college improv troupe and the film department. Daniel Baldwin is probably the best actor in the entire movie, and he's just on auto-pilot (Tony Hale and Jane Seymour are completely squandered). Most of the other performances give off that strange mix of apathy and over-acting that people new to improv display. Though at least Lea Coco and Ted Schneider go all the way into scene-chewing, and are frequently the funniest because of that.

This is a shame, because there are some good ideas in the mix. A movie set in a post-apocalypse where the survivors are incompetent assholes pretending to be tough guys is a great concept. When Mr. Jackle is trying to chainsaw an offending minion and takes five minutes to get the chainsaw started, it's hilarious. The idea that one of the new Founders ends up inspiring a holiday devoted to cannibalism, complete with cheesy patriotic commercials, is comedy gold. And a failed car salesman who ends up becoming king of (part of) New America merely because he's the most charismatic guy with a radio is an inspired character.

But throughout, Wheatley and company are trying to convince the viewer that they're ready to play in the big leagues, squandering whatever charm their laid-back approach sometimes earns. Cannibal! The Musical is only slightly less hit-or-miss, but the low-key, communal feel to the film draws you in. And the "National Lampoon Presents" label suggests a level of professionalism and polish that just isn't there. Maybe if Troma had released it, it might have done better.

As for why National Lampoon might have decided to release this film, it's probably because of the titular  Beach Party, which is about as salacious as a TV edit of American Pie, and a torture scene with a lesbianic catfight. Trust me, it sounds more interesting than it actually is.

Grade: C -

Screening Log: December - January

Le Corbeau (d. Henri-Georges Clouzot) - A series of poison pen letters nearly destroy a rural French village. I think this is basically the film Michel Haneke has wanted to make his entire life. Clouzot has a keen eye for small-town hypocrisy and the cruelty of children, both in his villains and his heroes. At the end, you realize the most hateful character is the most victimized person of all, while a friendly, charming man is actually a black-hearted, twisted human being. A-

Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus (d. Terry Gilliam) - Dr. Parnassus (Christopher Plummer) makes a deal with the Devil (Tom Waits) to win more souls to imagination than to earthly delights and... ? Visually stimulating and beautiful, with great moments of acid wit about wish-fulfillment. Too bad the plot is a jumble and Gilliam can't make up his mind who the main character. That said, Gilliam displays a fascinating amount of cynicism towards self-proclaimed prophets of imagination, which I never would have expected. C-

Jack Goes Boating (d. Phillip Seymour Hoffman) - A character piece about Jack (Hoffman), a man whose life seems stuck in neutral, finally getting his shit together, as his best friend (John Ortiz)'s life falls apart. Hoffman's got a great eye for color and visuals (rare in actors turned director), and his relationship with Amy Ryan is realistic yet incredibly sweet. The movie falters most when pushing the melodrama of Ortiz and Daphne Rubin Vega's relationship. C+

The Errand Boy (d. Jerry Lewis) - Jerry Lewis is an errand boy who is supposed to spy on movie productions, but mostly just messes them up. The promise of the high concept is mostly ignored, but for every stock piece of Lewis shtick, there's a sequence of absurdist wit, like Lewis continually sitting down to eat lunch in the action sequences of other films, or when a long shot out of an Minelli musical caps his ruining a musical sequence. B-

Hot Rod (d. Akiva Schaffer) - A dirt-bike riding stuntman wannabe (Andy Samberg) tries to raise money for his dad's heart operation. Story is secondary, and like Lewis's film, it's more about the comedic heights than a sustained comic genius, often defaulting to the view that the 80s are funny. With the Lonely Island crew, Will Arnett, Ian McShane, Danny McBride, Sissy Spacek  and Isla Fisher, this has to be the most overqualified cast I've seen in a small comedy, and everyone outside of the Lonely Island crew is underutilized. That said, if you like SNL Digital Shorts, there are at least 4 or 5 sequences that could have made good ones. B-

UHF (d. Jay Levey , 2nd viewing) "Starring Weird Al Yankovic" is rarely a good sign, especially in the '80s, when the shrillness of his shtick often overrode whatever humor there was in his music. Moments like "Gandhi 2" or that involve Michael Richards and/or Kevin McCarthy work well. Would have been better if Frank Tashlin or Joe Dante could have directed it. Maybe. C-

Creepshow (d. George Romero) Hit-or-miss anthology mimicking old horror comics, but Romero probably gets the best overall cast he'd ever have (Leslie Nielsen, Hal Holbrook, Ed Harris, Ted Danson). "They're Creeping Up On You" and "Something to Tide You Over" hit that sweet spot of misanthropy, camp & dark humor that EC Comics stood for. A-

The Big Sleep (d. Howard Hawks) - It's the 40's Transformer: Revenge of the Fallen! In the sense that the whole story fails to hang together, & is more about individual cool scenes at the expense of the whole. However, what makes these scenes "cool" are dialogue, performance and mise-en-scene, not shakycam and incomprehensible action. Bogart and Bacall make it all go down smooth... B+

"The men are dressed like children; the kids are dressed like superheroes": GREENBERG

Finally saw GREENBERG last night at one of the last theaters playing it in Chicago. It was a well-done movie, that really mined the awkwardness of situations and the problems of the characters for laughs. It might make you hate people for a little afterwards, however. I wonder how Noah Baumbach can still be so misanthropic after having married a woman like Jennifer Jason Leigh. But considering she is credited on the story, maybe it's like that 30 Rock episode where Tina Fey and a popular, handsome guy who asks her out find they share the same withering misanthropy for the human race (genders reversed, in this case, I assume).*

Tim Brayton (whose wonderful Antagony & Ecstasy I have already added to my blogroll) does a much better dissection of the film qua film than I could. So I'll use this post to address a few points he raises in his review.

Tim doubts that we can really like Ben Stiller's title character, that we can really only feel sorry for him. And yes, I mostly agree. Roger Greenberg is excellent at sucker-punching everyone when they let their guard down. There's a rather brilliant moment where, one second after he finally says something nice to his best (perhaps only) friend (played by Rhys Ifans)**, he asks for Ifans to tell him every criticism he's heard about Roger.

The thing is, I had a hard time not feeling empathy (which is a little deeper than pity) for Roger at a few moments. One of them was when his brother starts ripping him apart over the phone because the dog got sick  while Roger is house-sitting. His brother lays into him in such a way to suggest a person pissed off at an incredibly bad employee, not your flesh-and-blood. His brother laments the fact that his dog is sick and he can't be there because he's on vacation. He's not concerned about Roger, who was just released from a mental institution and has been abandoned in an empty house while his family is a country away... by their OWN CHOICE! Which might be an understandable reaction to Roger, but still, to feel less loved than your family dog would really, truly suck.

The other moment was towards the end, when Ifan's character calls Roger on all his shit, including ruining their band's one shot at a career. And Roger says that he knows he screwed it all up, but he never thought the whole band was going to make the call based on HIS decision. He made a really bad decision, that he didn't know the scope of when he was just out of college, and he's been carrying around the blame for that ever since.

As for what GREENBERG's about,  I think it's as much a state of the union and/or eulogy for Generation X as a character study. The casting of Ben Stiller certainly plays into this, given his own significant role as filmic stand-in for Gen Xers (Reality Bites, the Ben Stiller Show, etc.). Greenberg's attitudes towards authenticity & irony, his use of comedy to tear apart other people, his own self-seriousness in contrast to his mocking views of everyone else, all seem very specific (though not exclusive) to Generation X. He's even lived out the rejectionist ethos that Chuck Klosterman identified in his essay on Empire Strikes Back, which he suggests represented every X-ers' desire to not become their parents. Unfortunately, living that life out sucks.

And notice his fear of kids and young adults throughout the films, especially his epic monologue at the party his step-niece throws, about how kids today are better-adjusted and well-trained and that makes them vicious to people like him. And given the way his step-niece and her peers treat him like some sort of amusing pet, who they overindulge unhealthily as much as they do the dog, only to get annoyed at the consequences, it's hard not to sympathize with Greenberg's point-of-view at least a little. Of course, a human should have more agency than a dog, but... well... Baumbach's not really interested in the "should'ves".

I know that doesn't quite say what Noah's message is, but there is something a little more than character study here. How else to explain the apocalyptic/epiphanic tones of Greenberg, walking in darkness after seeing laughing, impressed young adults fishing the drowned rat/skunk (?) out of the pool...

*Do not take that as a dig at Noah Baumbach. I just have an extremely high opinion of Jennifer Jason Leigh.
** If there is a character who symbolizes for this movie what people should be like, it's probably Ifans' character, who is subjected to so much hurt, but never glories in it the way Greenberg does. He's a better friend than most of us deserve, but he's able to stand up for himself when he realizes things aren't going to change. This might not be any kind of ideal, but he's probably the only person in the movie you'd want to hang around with in real life for any extended period of time.

Dept. of Burying Your Lede, Econo-blog Edition

Some day I will post the final part of that blogging Tyler Cowen's book on capitalism & the arts, even though by now I've forgotten most of what's not in that rough draft. Still, today he has a post about the oft-raised idea of a movie stock market, where investors can bet on a film's box-office.

And even though I have to admit I'm not as strong on some of the economic stuff, he does have a good final few sentences about how the highly variable quality of movies (which is what allows the occasional masterpiece to slip through, as well as atrocious misfires), ending with this kicker:

So much of our cultural industries have been built on consumer mistakes and those days are coming to an end, rapidly.

RTWT here (it's only a couple of paragraphs).

Dept. of Loathsome Movies...

So, are there actually people who think Falling Down is a good movie? I think Glenn Beck must have seen this movie, and thought it was a documentary....

Quote of the day: Movies and ideas

I can't find the original source, but D Cairns at Shadowplay is the immediate source:

"Lots of American movies start out with interesting ideas, but they usually wind up with a fight in a warehouse." - Olivier Assayas

Man, I've been riding a tide of snark and annoyance for too long

I know I haven't been the sunniest person lately on this blog, when I post. So let me say something good for once.

The Ghost Writer, the new Roman Polanksi film? It's actually pretty good.*

It's no Chinatown, obviously. But it's not pretending to be anything bigger than it is, which is: a well-done psychological thriller. It has characters with believable motivations, a refreshing lack of explosions, and builds suspense out of the inability to know what other people think or feel.

I have no idea how wide a release this'll get, for several reasons. But it's got some great performances by everyone involved, including Kim Cattrall (I know!). Oh, Olivia Williams has a bigger part than the posters & press might suggest, which is always great. Someone give her another lead role, please. The production design & cinematography is well-done without screaming "this is a set!" or "look at what great geniuses we are!"

I don't want to oversell it. But the film is just so unassuming and competently put-together that it surprises you.

*And as regards Roman Polanski's proclivities: he's in jail, he certainly deserves to be. But it's not like going to see it is going to get him released. And he's a talented film-maker.

The Creature With a Thousand Films

I'm kind of conflicted by what I'm about to write. For I am a geek and I love the horror and sci-fi genres. And if you love horror and sci-fi films, then the man you owe the most thanks to is Roger Corman.

Roger Corman was/is not the best director or producer to work in those genres. He obviously wasn't the first. He was never the most ground-breaking one, even at his heyday. But he was probably the most prolific one*. And as Stalin once said, "quantity has a quality all its own."

Even if you think AiP/New World Pictures put out mostly cheap cash-in crap (which is true), Corman's desire to corner areas of the market that the "serious" studios like MGM or Warner wouldn't touch with a ten-foot pole often produced interesting or daring work. Corman made a movie attacking the KKK in 1962 (!), when such a film could be personal and commercial risk (The Intruder). His Bucket of Blood and Little Shop of Horrors helped to perfect the dark comedy. And X, the Man with X-Ray Eyes, really needs no defense or explanation, beyond the fact that it is a well-made and effective horror film that mines the seamy side of our desires to great effect.

And if, for whatever reason, those films just don't speak to you, then remember that Corman helped raise an entire generation of film-makers, giving them a place to learn their craft and perfect their voice. Directors like Jonathan Demme, Joe Dante, Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorcese, John Sayles, Jack Hill, James Cameron, Monte Hellman and Paul Bartel all learned at his feet or the feet of people working for him. Corman's films gave actors like Jack Nicholson, Robert DeNiro, William Shatner, and Peter Fonda some of their first major acting gigs.

But he made a lot of crap. Sometimes personal crap, sometimes exhilarating crap, but in the end, enough to keep MST3K running for years on his directorial & production work alone. And the older he got, the more of a cash-in artist he became. The Vampirella movie. The 1990s Fantastic Four movie. The endless Syfy/Sci-Fi channel re-makes and originals.

And while you could never claim he alone dumbed down the industry, he specialized in cheap, stupid movies aimed at teenagers, filled with blood and sex and rock 'n' roll (or his best approximations of them). He churned out endlessly padded films with no plot, bad science, attractive but lightweight actors,  and ridiculous costumes. He practically invented the car chase movie. Corman was no Val Lewton, taking a trashy genre and finding the beauty in it. He was a dumpster diver, who could recognize when someone threw out something perfectly good, but more likely to take a pile of junk to the scrapyard.

When you watch a summer tent-pole film that's clearly cobbled together around action sequences and catch phrases, market-tested to the 18-25 demographic, you're watching the inheritors of the Roger Corman tradition. The difference is that they are more scientific about it.

So it's easy to complain the loss of intelligent movies these days, the bad actors, ham-fisted direction & awful scripts. But that's the commercial model, dreamed up by a man who knew how to compete with TV without having to work on TV's model.

So don't complain about the culture wars. Roger Corman's Hollywood is on one side, really; the side of the consumer.

Let's give Roger Corman an Invisible Hand, everyone!

*I'm excluding people like William "one-shot" Beaudine, who were so prolific because everything they churned out was unadulterated crap. Corman certainly put out crap, but almost all his crap is at least trying to do something.

Thoughts inspired by "Shutter Island"

Do you think that the trend of praising competent work as classic is a recent trend or something that has happened in all ages?

It could be Sturgeon's Law, and the 90% that is crap from previous eras is forgotten as footnotes. Or it could be the things that craftsmen valued in previous times are not the same thing businessmen value in these times.

Because Shutter Island is a decent movie and well-made. It's not great and doesn't deserve such praise for having a few really good performances, a well-sketched plot and some vivid cinematography. I would hope those would be starting points for a decent film, not grounds for effusive praise.

On the other hand, next to a trifle like Up In the Air, I can see why people like it so much. But that's not necessarily saying it's Goodfellas or even the King of Comedy.