The Screengrab : reviews by request

Reviews By Request: King of New York (1990, Abel Ferrara)

Paul Clark — Fri, 29 May 2009 19:00:00 GMT

Once again, thanks to Scott Tobias from the Onion AV Club for recommending this film, which he previously selected for his weekly column “The New Cult Canon.”

One of Christopher Walken’s greatest assets as an actor is his unpredictability. Watching Walken onscreen, it’s hard to tell how he’s going to deliver even the most mundane bit of dialogue, much less predict how his characters will behave under pressure. But while Walken’s off-kilter presence has garnered him a sizable cult following, it’s easy to overlook what a fascinating actor he can be in more complex roles. In many of his character roles, Walken has fun with his image, but he’s not afraid to play it straight when the part calls for it. Abel Ferrara’s King of New York is one of those parts, and consequently one of his best performances.

Frank White, the crime lord Walken plays in King of New York, is one of the most frightening criminals I’ve ever seen in a movie, due in large part to the unpredictability that Walken brings to the role. From the first time we meet Frank, he seems to be capable of anything, which gives him an edge in his criminal endeavors. Most of his competition sticks to hard and fast traditions, the most important being that the bigwigs keep their hands clean while the foot soldiers fight the wars. Frank has no use for such traditions- when he needs someone killed, he’d just as soon do it himself. There are many possibilities as to why Frank would do this, but I think it’s because he wants people to think he’s the baddest, scariest man in New York. And when he follows the killing of a rival gang leader by inviting his underlings to join his gang, it sends a very specific message- if you’re crazy enough to follow a guy who does this, I want you on my side.

Consequently, many of Frank’s foot soldiers are as volatile as he is- and some even share his flair for the theatrical, as when one storms into a hotel room shootout screaming, “room service, motherfuckers!” In addition, Frank’s gang could be called “post-racial”- whereas Frank’s rivals generally adhere to ethnic boundaries, such concerns are beneath Frank. Most of his underlings are African-American- two of his most prominent foot soldiers are played by Laurence (then Larry) Fishburne and Giancarlo Esposito- but Steve Buscemi also turns up as Frank’s in-house drug tester. And Frank’s own ethnicity- just look at his name- allows him an entry in legitimate society that would be more limited to other criminals of his stature.

It’s this air of near-legitimacy that rankles the NYPD, especially a trio of cops played by David Caruso, Wesley Snipes, and Victor Argo. Whereas the power of the city’s other top criminals is relatively contained to the underworld, Frank hobnobs with New York’s elite, turning up at black-tie parties and charity events. “He’s a movie star,” says Caruso, who bemoans the fact that Frank is running roughshod over the city while he and his partners are only bringing in a modest policeman’s salary. But how to stop him? Caruso and Snipes determine that in order to catch Frank, they need to be as crazy as he is. It isn’t until it’s too late (when Frank crashes one cop’s funeral to kill another one) that that discover that crazy isn’t enough- one must also be lucky.

Argo’s Roy Bishop is the one exception to the film’s cycle of brutality- the one “good cop” who sticks to his principles and hopes to bring Frank in not by sneaking around but by nuts-and-bolts police work. We see him sitting at home in front of his computer, sifting through police files in an attempt to make a case. Throughout the film, Ferrara contrasts Roy’s steadfast adherence to old-fashioned morality with Frank’s more slippery kind of ethics, and Frank understandably sees Roy as his biggest threat. I found it interesting to see Argo, who usually played wiseguys, playing the closest thing this film has to a steady moral compass.

King of New York is one of the bleakest crime movies I’ve ever seen, with one scene of unsparing violence after another. But it’s stylish enough that it’s anything but a slog- like GoodFellas and Scarface before it, it’s amassed a considerable cult, even serving as an inspiration for the late Notorious B.I.G. I’ve only seen a handful of Ferrara films to date, but one thing that’s impressed me about them is how stylish his films can be despite their budgetary limitations. In King of New York, Ferrara uses the low budget to his advantage, setting scenes in scruffy back-alleys and abandoned buildings to give the film a grittier feel than most movies of its kind. I also liked that Frank’s home isn’t an expansive estate but a suite at the Plaza, which combines a location in the heart of New York (perfect for shots of him overlooking the city) with a kind of rented luxury that says everything about the mystique Frank wants to create for himself.

At the center of it all is the enigma of Frank White. Throughout the film Ferrara and Walken invite us to ask the question, what drives this man? Late in the film, he confronts Roy in his apartment and tells him that he considers himself a businessman rather than a criminal, and states that “I never killed anybody that didn’t deserve it.” But how to reconcile that with the charge he seems to get from his power? Or for that matter, what of his efforts to save a children’s hospital in a poor neighborhood? One thing’s for sure- he’s hooked on his sense of power. When he says he wants to run for mayor, everyone laughs until Frank tells them he’s serious. Is he? Who are we to question him?

Reviews By Request: Angel Heart (1987, Alan Parker)

Paul Clark — Fri, 15 May 2009 19:00:00 GMT

As always, voting for my next Reviews By Request column can be found at the end of this review.

The conventional wisdom regarding cinematic plot twists is that they be unexpected. This means that either the audience shouldn’t see that a twist is coming, or that they shouldn’t anticipate the particular twist that the movie has in store. So what to make of a movie like Angel Heart? Here is a movie that more or less announces from the beginning that nothing is what it seems, and the film is filled with clues that are somewhat less than subtle. Yet at the same time, it’s entertaining and stylish enough that it entertained me even as I was waiting for the other shoe to drop. I more or less guessed where it was headed, but I had a good time getting there.

Consider an early scene in the film, in which the detective protagonist Harry Angel (Mickey Rourke) meets his mysterious retainer Louis Cyphre (Robert DeNiro) to discuss the case Harry has been investigating. In most detective movies, Cyphre would be portrayed in a way that makes him seem slightly off, but wouldn’t hint at his dark secrets. But rather than trying to hide Cyphre’s true nature, director Alan Parker almost dares us to guess, as he tempts Harry by offering him $5,000 to take the case (a pretty good sum for a fifties-era gumshoe), then uses his elegant long nails to peel one of the hard-boiled eggs on his plate. Angel knows something is afoot, but he’s so anxious (both by Cyphre and the eggs, since he’s “got a thing about chickens”), and in thrall to the money being offered that he doesn’t even try to guess what. But it becomes pretty clear to the audience who Cyphre really is by the time he mentions that eggs are seen by some cultures as symbols of the soul then takes a big bite from one of his eggs, a sinister glare in his eye. It’s almost like… Parker wants us to guess.

Really, the whole movie is like this. And while as a mystery Angel Heart leaves something to be desired, it’s much more successful as an exercise in lurid style. Parker, who first worked as a commercial director, has always been more comfortable with visuals than with substantial narratives, which torpedoed serious efforts like Angela’s Ashes and The Life of David Gale, but was well-suited to more stylized and less plot-driven fare like Pink Floyd: The Wall (Evita straddled the line, making mincemeat of plot and character development but providing thrilling, almost Riefenstahl-esque lighting and choreography for the production numbers). Angel Heart fits into the second category, which goes a long way toward explaining why this is one of the director’s more interesting films.

If Parker doesn’t seem especially interested in making a whodunit, that’s because they’re largely a setup for the story’s seamier trappings- the dingy home of a morphine-addicted doctor, the shadowy back alleys of old New Orleans, the ornate choreography of a late-night pagan ritual. Likewise, Parker’s use of blood makes the movie feel almost like an old-school giallo in parts, complete with leering closeups of freshly disembodied corpses and the various organs that were removed in the process. And the notorious sex scene between Rourke and Lisa Bonet is one of the more memorable of Parker’s career, so frenzied and over the top that it must be seen to be believed. That the scene in its current form was actually edited down so that the film was get an R rating just goes to show how far Parker was willing to go to get his effects.

However, the movie would be nothing more than empty style without the assured lead performance by Rourke. Even prior to his nineties career meltdown, Rourke excelled at playing down-and-out guys who thought they were smarter and more charming than they actually were, and the role of Harry Angel was a perfect fit. While many actors would have turned Harry into a retro-cool archetype, Rourke’s performance is eccentric (look at the way he reacts whenever he spies a chicken) and emphasizes his deep-seated anxieties and preoccupations. Rourke isn’t afraid to highlight Harry’s less capable side- for a detective he can sometimes be pretty slow to pick up on things, and he occasionally makes some pretty big mistakes out of carelessness. Yet he’s so engaging in his rumpled, careworn way that it’s hard not to like the guy, and to feel sorry for him once the story has painted him into a corner.

In the climactic scene of Angel Heart, Rourke faces off against DeNiro for the final time, as Harry finds out not only Louis Cyphre’s secret but also his own. DeNiro was still in the full flower of his talent at the time, not yet having become a bloated parody of himself. But it’s Rourke who shines in this scene, as he cries out “I know who I am!” again and again. As the scene continues, Rourke wrings one emotion after another from this line- first defiant, then pathetic, then resigned- and it’s a reminder of what a fine actor he was back before we nearly lost him to his own self-destructive impulses. When I saw The Wrestler this past winter, I knew that it was designed to be Rourke’s comeback vehicle, but I had only a limited exposure to the early years of his career. Now that I’ve seen Angel Heart, I’m eager to see more.

For my final Reviews By Request column here at Screengrab, I’d like to pay tribute to one of the Screengrab’s favorite sites, The Onion A.V. Club. One of the A.V. Club’s most interesting regular columns is The New Cult Canon, a weekly feature written by the talented Scott Tobias. Every week, Scott takes on a fairly recent cult-friendly movie, and he was gracious enough to recommend five of his favorite New Cult Canon selections for this column. Which of the following should I review next?

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In case you’re having trouble reading the poll, the choices are: Bitter Moon (Polanski), I Am Cuba (Kalatozov), King of New York (Ferrara), Married to the Mob (Demme), and Millennium Actress (Kon). And remember, the comments section is open. See you in two weeks!

Reviews By Request: Juliet of the Spirits (1965, Federico Fellini)

Paul Clark — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 19:00:00 GMT

As always, voting for my next Reviews By Request column can be found at the end of this review.

The “late period” films of Federico Fellini are one of the major blind spots in my moviewatching history. I’ve seen nearly all of his earlier works, up to and including the “transitional” work 8 ½, which remains my favorite of his films. However, the only Fellini films I’ve seen after this are Amarcord (which I love) and Satyricon (which I don’t), but I was certainly familiar with these films’ critical reputations, which tend to echo the sentiments expressed by the loudmouthed intellectual in the movie line in Annie Hall.

Having just seen Juliet of the Spirits for the first time, I can’t argue with the opinion that it’s an “indulgent” film, but I’m not sure that’s a bad thing, since it reveals aspects of their maker that his more disciplined films could not. Supposedly, Fellini intended Juliet of the Spirits to be a tribute to his wife and frequent leading lady, Giulietta Masina. If this is the case, it’s a funny sort of tribute. Yes, Juliet (played by Masina) sticks to her principles when her husband cheats on her, and eventually finds escape from their marriage. But for most of the film, she is portrayed as a hapless victim, carried along by the whims of the film- and those of her husband.

Consider the way that she is portrayed visually. Juliet never seems to fit in no matter where she is. From the beginning of the film, when her husband (played by Mario Pisu) hosts an impromptu dinner party, the guests are garishly dressed and glamorous, while Juliet wears a simple dress and a matronly brown wig. This will be a trend throughout the film, as Juliet clashes with her more decadent surroundings. Likewise, throughout the film Fellini accentuates the Masina’s petiteness, often showing her amidst people (even her own mother) who tower over her. In other hands, Juliet’s inability to fit into the film’s world would be a defiant statement, but Fellini’s feelings about it seem to be more complicated than that. One can see that he feels affection for his wife, but he can’t resist being drawn toward the decadence that had become such an integral element of both his life and his work.

And what is one supposed to make of the way Juliet is treated by the film after discovering her husband’s infidelity? A more conventional film might have taken the husband to task for his cheating, but not Fellini, who kept mistresses throughout much of his adult life. Instead, one character after another tells Juliet that in order to win her husband back, she needs to embrace her sexual side- to be more like, say, her buxom, sexually liberated neighbor Suzy, played by Sandra Milo, who by her own admission put in time as one of Fellini’s mistresses. Needless to say, Juliet has some trouble with this advice, especially as it relates to her own Roman Catholic upbringing.

The worldview we see in Juliet of the Spirits is a decidedly pre-feminist one, and one that’s a little hard to stomach. But at the same time, one needs not agree with what a film is saying to appreciate the film itself, and Fellini uses the framework of this story to lay bare his own ideas about marriage, sexuality, and the female gender in general. Because these ideas run so contrary to more “enlightened” points of view that have found their way into most contemporary works of art, Juliet of the Spirits is more thought-provoking than a more politically correct film might have been.

And even if you’re not down with Fellini’s worldview in Juliet of the Spirits, it’s hard to argue with the sheer visual splendor of the film, Fellini’s first in color. Many of world cinema’s greatest filmmakers first made the transition to color during the 1960s- Bergman and Antonioni had already made the switch, with Buñuel and Kurosawa still to come. What these filmmakers had in common is that they didn’t simply make the change for commercial reasons, but treated color as another filmmaking tool to be used wisely. In Juliet of the Spirits, Fellini uses color to create images that would not have had the same impact in black and white, as when he painted the walls red to create unease during a scene in which Juliet visits a mysterious healer. Also striking is the full spectrum of colors found in Suzy’s cavernous home (reminiscent of a fantasy version of a brothel), which contrasts with Juliet’s memories of her Catholic upbringing, which are full of solid shades of red and grey, with innocent white on the children and the almost impossibly dark violet (not black) of the nuns’ robes. Juliet of the Spirits is a feast for the eyes- and, with Nino Rota’s mindbending score, for the ears as well.

In doing research for this review- which must no doubt seem as rambling as the film itself- I came across the following quote from Fellini:

“We don't really know who woman is. She remains in that precise place within man where darkness begins. Talking about women means talking about the darkest part of ourselves, the undeveloped part, the true mystery within… [The] problem for man is to reunite himself with the other half of his being, to find the woman who is right for him-right be she is simply a projection, a mirror of himself. A man can't become whole or free until he has set woman free-his woman. It's his responsibility, not hers. He can't be complete, truly alive until he makes her his sexual companion, and not a slave of libidinous acts or a saint with a halo.”

Perhaps this quotation is the key to what Fellini was attempting with Juliet of the Spirits- not simply translating these ideas into cinematic form, but also struggling to reconcile them with his own weaknesses and deeply-ingrained ideas of what women meant to him in his life. Of course, it’s hard to say what Masina really thought of all this, but that’s part of what makes the movie so darn fascinating, isn’t it?

When coming up with a theme for the next Reviews By Request selection, I kept thinking back to this week's DVD release of The Wrestler and reflected on the fact that I've seen only a handful of movies from the eighties salad days of Wrestler comeback kid Mickey Rourke. So the next Reviews By Request will attempt to remedy this. Some of the titles I've listed below have solid reputations, others not so much, but I haven't seen any of them. That I've seen not only 9 1/2 Weeks but also Wild Orchid (not to mention Double Team) says a lot about me as a moviegoer, but that's a topic for another time. Anyway, which of these should I review next?

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Due to a software snafu involving the new polling software, the above poll may be displaying too small to be easily readable, so here are the options in chronological order: Rumble Fish, The Pope of Greenwich Village, Year of the Dragon, Angel Heart, and Johnny Handsome. Hope that helps. And ss always, feel free to sound off in the comments section below. See you in two weeks!

Reviews By Request: Great Expectations (1946, David Lean)

Paul Clark — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 19:00:00 GMT

As always, I’ll be polling you folks to determine my next Reviews By Request column. To vote, see the poll at the end of the review.

With more than 270 adaptations of his work listed on the Internet Movie Database, Charles Dickens is one of the most-adapted authors in movie history. It’s not hard to see why- unlike many literary giants whose greatness lies primarily in their style, Dickens was first and foremost a gifted storyteller, famous for telling vivid tales full of memorable characters. Even in novel form today Dickens is both compulsively readable and easily adaptable to movies and television. Many adaptations of his work have a nuts-and-bolts Masterpiece Theatre quality, while others have re-imagined the stories in a different setting. But a few Dickens adaptations- the best ones, really- have managed to honor the author while simultaneously making his work wholly cinematic.

David Lean’s version of Great Expectations fits into this final category. It’s the kind of movie that reminds us not only of what made Dickens’ work special, but also of the pleasures of a particularly well-done big-screen literary adaptation. In run-of-the-mill cinematic adaptations, the filmmakers dutifully step from one storytelling beat to the next like an actor hitting his marks, and their films feel like homework. But in Great Expectations, the novel is the starting point rather than the destination, and Lean spins the yarn as if it were his own. Where most of its counterparts are pale shadows of the works that inspired them- the Cahiers du Cinema critics of yore disparagingly referred to these films as “tradition of quality”- Lean’s Great Expectations is a great entertainment in its own right, perhaps because he understands that Dickens was himself an entertainer.

To see this at work, look no further than the film’s opening scene in the graveyard, in which Pip (played as a boy by Tony Wager and John Mills as an adult) first meets the escaped convict Magwitch (Finlay Currie). A lesser filmmaker would have made this scene feel like exposition, a plot occurrence in which the hero meets one of the story’s key supporting players. Instead, Lean’s direction is reminiscent of an atmospheric horror film, with deep shadows and heavy fog, and a great unease as the fearsome Magwitch threatens this harmless young boy. In making the scene cinematic, Lean shows trust for both Dickens’ story and for the audience’s ability to keep up without having to have everything explained the way it was (out of necessity) in the novel.

Lean’s instinctive feeling for Dickens comes through again and again in Great Expectations, which allows him to wonderfully bring the world of the novel to the big screen- the cobwebbed mansion of Miss Havisham (Martita Hunt), Joe Gargery’s (Bernard Miles) blacksmith’s shop, the flat Pip shares in London with Herbert Pocket (Alec Guinness, in his first onscreen speaking role), all of it. Working with cinematographer Guy Green, production designer John Bryan, and costume designer Sophie Devine, Lean turns Great Expectations into a feast for the eyes, but the visual trappings of the film are more than just eye candy. Look at the way Pip’s gradual metamorphosis into a gentleman is reflected by his clothing- when he first arrives in London, he wears a garish suit that looks like one of Chris Elliott’s “fancy lad” outfits in Cabin Boy. Later on, when the kindly Joe arrives for a visit in a similar outfit, Pip scoffs at his poor taste, only to realize that his experiences have made him a snob.

The film’s version of Great Expectations is above all a story of kindness in a cruel world, and the far-reaching effects that this kindness can have. In the opening third of the movie, Pip is mistreated by nearly everyone he meets- his sister “Mrs. Joe” beats him and berates him for his curiosity, his more well-to-do relatives condescend to him because of his humble origins, and Miss Havisham uses him as a pawn in her revenge scheme against men. But there is goodness in Pip’s life as well, both in the form of the gentle Joe and in the favors Magwitch does Pip for his kindness- a small one at first, then a far greater one later. Because of the charity shown to Pip, he too becomes a charitable person in the end, in a story in which goodness is rewarded in kind.

Perhaps this push-pull relationship between cruelty and kindness is the reason why I found Estella (Jean Simmons as a teenager, Valerie Hobson as an adult) to be the film’s most compelling character. In her early scenes, she shows contempt for Pip, addressing him as “Boy” and bossing him around. But eventually we discover that, even more than Pip, she’s being manipulated by Miss Havisham, practically losing her soul as a result. Hobson’s performance as the adult Estella is particularly fascinating- years of living with Miss Havisham have caused her to ignore and distrust her emotions, so when she finds herself warming to the kind and forthright Pip, she has to hide it under good manners and forced politeness lest she be overwhelmed. When she finally sets aside her guardian’s teachings and gives herself over to her heart, it’s a lovely moment, because the movie has earned it.

We continue this week with the ever-popular themed Reviews By Request. April is a big month for Roger Ebert, marking not only the 11th Annual Ebertfest, but also the 300th installment in his ongoing Great Movies series. To commemorate the occasion, I’ve picked five of his Great Movies selections that I haven’t seen yet- an early masterpiece from India’s most acclaimed filmmaker, a Hollywood take on the Scopes trial, a classic samurai drama, a phantasmagoria from a giant of world cinema, and one of the most celebrated Canadian films ever made. So, which of these should I review next?

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Remember, voting closes on Monday night. As always, the comments section is open. See you in two weeks!

Reviews By Request: Death Bed: The Bed That Eats (1977, George Barry)

Paul Clark — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 19:00:00 GMT

As always, I’ll be polling you folks to determine my next Reviews By Request column. To vote, see the poll at the end of the review.

Like many people, my introduction to George Barry’s Death Bed: The Bed That Eats came through the stand-up comedy of Patton Oswalt. In this routine, Oswalt complains about the difficult process of bringing a big-screen project to fruition- writing a script, selling it to a studio, enduring the clueless questions and comments from studio functionaries, and so on. In Oswalt’s mind, Death Bed is forever mocking him- a movie that, despite its lame-brained premise and Z-grade production values, actually got made. Oswalt’s Death Bed bit- like nearly everything he’s done- is hilarious, but it’s also the best advertising Barry could’ve hoped for, turning a long-buried exploitation movie into something of a cult favorite.

The premise of Death Bed: The Bed That Eats is so simple that the title scarcely needs the phrase after the colon to sum it up. Simply put, there’s this bed, and it eats damn near anything that’s unlucky enough to sit, or lie down, or be set down, upon it. Of course, there’s more to the movie than a series of bed-related murders. There’s a backstory involving the bed’s origins- the demon who tried to seduce a young woman years ago, and the somewhat ill-defined curse that befell the bed when she rebuffed the demon’s advances. There’s also the spirit of an artist who was consumed by the bed who is now trapped behind one of his paintings, and who observes the killings and takes care of all the exposition in voiceover.

But really, this is basically a movie about a bed that eats people, which should be enough to tell you whether you’ll like it or not. In my experience, people are either down with cheeseball exploitation movies or they’re not, and never the twain shall meet. My pal Steve C., who originally recommended this to me, is something of a connoisseur of the cinema du fromage, and he found Death Bed to be just his cup of tea. On the other hand, my girlfriend, bless her heart, found it pretty insufferable. A few hearty laughs aside, she pretty much hated it, and when it was over, she sarcastically remarked about how much watching the movie had enriched her life. Thanks for trying anyway, honey.

As for me, I’m in the middle. I’m no aficionado of the form, but I’ve seen and enjoyed more than enough to know that Death Bed is no better or worse than most no-budget exploitation fare of the day. There are a handful of classic moments, but writer/director/producer George Barry just doesn’t have the filmmaking chops to make the movie work for more than a minute or so at a time. The editing is choppy, the camerawork barely functional, the storytelling fragmented, the ending completely arbitrary. What’s more, the movie also lacks the kind of fully committed insanity of which exploitation classics are made. Barry lacks the courage of his convictions, and he fails to fully exploit the wacked-out possibilities that his premise presents.

That’s not to say that there aren’t inspired bits in the film. I had high hopes during the film’s first few minutes, beginning with Barry opening the film with a pitch black screen under which we hear only the chomping of the titular bed. He then progresses to the first killing scene (following a title card that reads “Breakfast”), in which we see the bed eat an apple and a bucket of chicken and drink a bottle of wine, leaving the core, picked-over bones, and empty bottle behind. Pretty impressive trick, especially when you consider that the bed has feet but no hands. How the bed consumes its victims is never explained in detail- it seems to have a solid mattress, but it absorbs its prey with a sort of foam, and once it begins eating Barry cuts to shots of the food/victims submerged in a pool of bubbling liquid, as though they’re drowning in corrosive Alka-Seltzer. But then, one doesn’t watch a movie called Death Bed expecting exhaustive detail on the physiology of man-eating sleep implements (hoping perhaps, but hardly expecting). Also, the bed tends to wait for its prey to come to it, although it’s prone to manipulating the house that surrounds it to trap its victims, and at one point it even uses a sheet to lasso a victim who tries to escape.

Watching this scene, I couldn’t help but notice that while the Death Bed generally quick work of its previous (white) victims, it took its time with this African-American woman, eating away at the skin on her legs before she escaped, then allowing her to crawl slowly across the floor to help the bed draw in more victims before roping her in for the kill. But while this initially seemed like dodgy racial politics, subsequent scenes revealed a different reality- that she was the only one in the cast who could convincingly act like she was actually suffering. The rest of the cast consists of the kind of blank-faced nobodies who populated most exploitation movies, like the guy who reacts to the skin on his hands being eaten away with an expression that suggests that someone nearby has recently passed gas. Death Bed isn’t as bad as its premise would suggest, but in a way that makes it all the more disappointing, because Barry includes enough entertaining moments (the Pepto-Bismol!) that it makes one wish the whole movie was on that same level.

As in previous Reviews By Request columns, this week’s choices are united by a single theme- in this case, the IMDb Top 250 list. Sure, some of the IMDb voters’ choices are pretty dicey (American History X? V for Vendetta? Friggin’ Snatch????) but the list also has its share of interesting choices. If nothing else, it’s an interesting snapshot of popular tastes among a certain segment of the population. This week’s selections, taken from the list as of Thursday morning, represent the only films in the Top 250 that I have yet to see. Which should I watch for the next Reviews By Request?

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Remember, voting closes on Monday night. As always, the comments section is open. See you in two weeks!

Reviews By Request: Tom Jones (1963, Tony Richardson)

Paul Clark — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 19:00:00 GMT

Due to some difficulty I had in getting my hands on Tony Richardson’s Tom Jones, I was unable to post this review last week as promised. Sorry about that. As usual, to vote for the next Reviews By Request selection, see the poll at the end of this review.

In a survey of the Oscar winners for Best Picture, Tony Richardson’s 1963 film Tom Jones is one of the more intriguing titles. Sure, it’s an adaptation of the classic novel by Henry Fielding, but this is hardly the kind of reverent literary epic that usually gets the Academy to take notice. But beyond its bawdy comedy, it’s also a stylistic departure from the usual period pieces, with Richardson employing the techniques of the French New Wave to take the wind out of the wigs-and-horses period setting. On paper, Tom Jones is just the kind of movie that ought to be recognized more often by the Academy- a film that boldly tweaks cinematic convention in an attempt to entertain audiences in a unique way. But the trouble with judging a movie on paper is that sooner or later one must actually see it to get the whole story, and in the case of Tom Jones, the whole story is that it doesn’t live up to its potential.

I knew I was in for a long sit during the opening sequence, in which Richardson establishes the circumstances of Tom’s birth. Rather than portraying it in a more conventional way- say, through narration or montage- Richardson turns it into a silent movie, complete with intertitles. Now, I’m sure most of you would agree that this is an interesting and unexpected twist on the usual style of the genre. However, with the actors’ hyper-exaggerated mannerisms and John Addison’s manic harpsichord score, the scene comes off more cutesy than bold. By the time the opening titles have hit the screen, Richardson has already dug himself into a hole that he never manages to escape.

Richardson drops the silent-movie pastiche after the opening credits, thankfully, but he still has plenty of tricks up his sleeve- jump cuts, cheeky narration, and more. In one of the more glaringly out-of-place bits, there’s a scene in which the adult Tom (Albert Finney) evades a jealous husband in which Richardson speeds up the film like an old slapstick comedy (think the Keystone Kops). There’s also a handful of moments in which Finney breaks the fourth wall, as when he asks the audience for support when a female innkeeper accuses him of trying to weasel his way out of paying his bill. It takes an inspired film to pull off moments like these, and Tom Jones is not that movie.

It’s a shame, because Finney cuts a fine figure as Tom. At its heart, this is the story about a man who’s torn between his good nature and his base impulses, which lead him into trouble. Tom’s loyalty invites others to take advantage of him, and his dashing good looks bring him the kind of female attention he would be wise to avoid. Despite the film’s period trappings, Tom bears more than a passing resemblance to Arthur Seaton, Finney’s breakthrough role in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, who was unable to reconcile his desires to have fun with his need to do right by his single-mother girlfriend. With these two films, Finney announced to the world that he was a major actor, and he effortlessly holds his own here opposite an impressive cast, including Susannah York, Hugh Griffith, Edith Evans, Joyce Redman (with whom he shares the film’s most famous scene), and the great Joan Greenwood, who had one of the great voices in cinema.

One key directorial decision that I appreciated was Richardson’s unwillingness to lend the usual glamour to his period setting. Most historical and literary films tend to be showcases for the art directors and costume designers, who spare no expense in re-creating the trappings of period luxury. By contrast, Richardson’s portrayal of country gentility in the early 1700s is hardly luxurious. Meals consist of copious amounts of wine and freshly-killed meat eaten with the hands, and interiors are dusty and dark, lit only by a handful of candles. Practically the only form of entertainment was the hunt, which Richardson portrays as scores of dogs and men on horseback pursuing a stag- hardly very sporting. To accentuate the less charming aspects of this world, Richardson and cinematographer Walter Lassally shoot the film in anemic-looking tones and with a mostly handheld camera. When it comes to epic splendor, Gone With the Wind this isn’t.

Richardson’s de-glamorization of his period setting is such a refreshing change of pace from what one normally expects from a movie of this kind that it seems a shame that he feels the need to goose it with his arsenal of New Wave tricks. Unlike most Oscar-winning films, which seem to have little on their minds besides taking home rafts filled with awards, Tom Jones is rather more ambitious- in the end, too ambitious to be successful. In the end, the film must be labeled a noble failure, and although one can’t help but admire Richardson’s desire to step outside the well-trod path for literary adaptations, that doesn’t mean I look forward to seeing Tom Jones again anytime in the near future.

Now that Oscar season is over, we can get back to some more diverse and, uh, interesting choices for Reviews By Request. As promised, we’ll kick off things with a poll devoted to reader requests. So, which of these will it be? A seventies SF thriller from the director of The Taking of Pelham One Two Three? A documentary about two children who were switched at birth? An infamous horror film about evil children? A thriller starring Alain Delon? Or will it be the long-shelved seventies exploitation title that was immortalized by Patton Oswalt? It’s your call, folks:

Which should I review for my next Reviews By Request? | BuzzDash polls

As usual, the comments section is open, particularly for those who would like to suggest future titles for consideration. See you in two weeks!

Reviews By Request: How Green Was My Valley (1941, John Ford)

Paul Clark — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 20:00:00 GMT

After last week’s Reviews By Request poll resulted in a tie, I decided to watch and write up the first of the two “requested” films, John Ford’s How Green Was My Valley, in advance of this weekend’s Oscar ceremony. My review of the second film, Tom Jones, will run two weeks from today.

Among many film lovers, John Ford’s How Green Was My Valley has gotten something of a bad rap as the movie that bested Citizen Kane for the 1941 Best Picture Oscar. And while Valley isn’t the film Kane is, we might say the same of nearly any other film ever made, which makes the comparison a little unfair. Moreover, it makes perfect sense that the Hollywood establishment would prefer the elegiac Valley to the scathing Kane, especially when you consider that both films were made during World War II, when national and pro-Allied sentiment were at their peak. But today, these concerns are incidental, and the most important thing is this- How Green Was My Valley is still a pretty terrific film.

How Green With My Valley, based on a best-selling novel by Richard Lewellyn, tells the story of the Morgans, a Welsh family living in a mining community around the turn of the century. The Morgans aren’t rich, but they seem to be pretty blessed- patriarch Gwyllim (Oscar-winner Donald Crisp) works in the coal mine alongside his five eldest sons, mother Beth (Sara Allgood) cares for the house with their only daughter Angharad (Maureen O’Hara), and the youngest boy Huw (Roddy McDowall) is bright and full of potential.

However, the family’s troubles begin soon enough. The closing of mines in neighboring valleys lead to a surplus of workers in the area, leading to lower wages and job loss. Two of the sons leave home to seek work overseas, later followed by two others. Angharad, despite her feelings for the local preacher Gryffudd (Walter Pidgeon), marries the son of the mine’s owner, a marriage that takes her overseas as well. And the mine claims both the family’s eldest son Ivor and, eventually, Gwyllim.

But although How Green Was My Valley is undeniably a story filled with loss, it’s anything but a slog. That’s because Ford, Lewellyn, and screenwriter Philip Dunne infuse the film with a warm nostalgia for the long-gone world of the film. The story is narrated by the now-grown Huw, and he remembers his childhood with fondness, and even when things didn’t go so well, he learned from his experiences and survived to tell the tale. Heck, look at the title. Not only does it emphasize the “was,” thereby implying that it’s no longer so green, but it’s also “my valley”, implying that it’s the valley of Huw’s memories.

Consequently, the storytelling is characterized by broad narrative strokes rather than minute detail. The circumstances of a miners’ strike are sketchy, as they would have been to a young boy (this is a far cry from the grimness of Ford’s last film The Grapes of Wrath). Huw’s memories of the strike consist mostly of talk of unionization, and the gloom that settles over the town during the months when the men aren’t work. Most of the film is like this, with adults’ affairs observed as if from a distance, although Huw’s own experiences seem more vivid. The only (small) objection I have to the film’s storytelling is that it occasionally brings out Ford’s somewhat awkward sense of low comedy. I for one could have done without the antics of a pair of drunken brawlers who are tasked to teach young Huw how to fight.

But such objections are small compared with achievements of How Green Was My Valley. Supposedly, the film was originally intended to be a massive Technicolor extravaganza in the vein of Gone With the Wind, but when the war began Fox had to move shooting from Wales to California, trim the running time in half, and shoot in black and white. I can’t say for sure, but I think the film benefited from this smaller scale- the travails of the Morgans probably couldn’t withstand the epic treatment. And while shooting in black and white was a practical decision that allowed the hills of California to convincingly double as the Welsh countryside, it also enhances the nostalgic vibe given off by the film in a way that the flashier Technicolor couldn’t have managed.

And if nothing else, it’s that nostalgia that makes How Green Was My Valley work even today. The chief pleasures of the film don’t come from the story but rather from the portrayal of the community itself, a community that, if it didn’t already belong to the past when the film was made, surely does now. Perhaps most important are the old Welsh songs that fill the soundtrack. Ivor is the leader of a chorus in town (he gets invited to perform for the Queen), but even the miners sing hearty tunes as they come down the hill after a long day’s work. “Singing is in my people as sight is in the eye,” observes the adult Huw, and this music extends even to the spoken dialogue. When Angharad gets engaged, Gryffudd’s heart is broken, but he buries his own feelings in the interest of her future. As he tells her, “I think I would start to kill if I saw the white come to your hair twenty years before its time.” Who talks like this anymore, if in fact anyone ever did? Exactly.

Reviews By Request, Oscar-Nominated Edition: Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942, Michael Curtiz)

Paul Clark — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 20:00:00 GMT

As usual, I’ll be polling you folks to determine the subject for the second of two Oscar-themed Reviews By Request columns, which will run in two weeks. To vote, see the poll at the end of this review.

It’s practically become a running joke that biopics are catnip to Oscar voters. It’s not difficult to see the reasons why- the historical setting gives affords technicians plenty of chances to show off, while audiences enjoy seeing the lives of their heroes brought to life through movie magic. Most of all, playing historical figures often gives actors an opportunity to show facets of their talent that aren’t normally on display. Nowhere is this more apparent than in biographies of musicians or other live performances, in which actors get the chance to not only portray real-life characters but also perform their work- in character, anyway. And of all the acclaimed showbiz biopic performances out there, few are more beloved than James Cagney’s Oscar-winning turn as George M. Cohan in Michael Curtiz’s Yankee Doodle Dandy.

As showbiz biopics go, Yankee Doodle Dandy has a pretty standard trajectory. We follow Cohan from his birth through his early days on the road, performing in vaudeville shows with his parents and sister as “The Four Cohans.” By the time he’s a teenager, young George has become good enough that he gets cocky; and despite his undeniable talent he’s been largely blackballed from the business by the time he’s hit adulthood. It’s only by composing his own material- combined with a lot of luck- that George makes a name for himself on Broadway, eventually becoming its biggest star. And all the while, he sticks by his family (including his dad, played by Walter Huston), and in turn his loving wife Mary (Joan Leslie) sticks by him.

And yet, compared to most movies of this sort, Yankee Doodle Dandy has almost no interest in the darker undercurrents of its protagonist. There’s a very good reason for this- made in the early years of World War II, the filmmakers wanted to tell the rousing story of a homefront hero, a patriot who served his country not with a gun but with songs like the World War I anthem “Over There.” This comes through clearest in the movie’s (supposedly apocryphal) framing device, in which Cohan is called to the White House late one night so that FDR can personally present him with the Congressional Gold Medal. And while this makes the film pretty hopeless as biography- as Cohan himself allegedly quipped after the premiere, “It was a good movie. Who was it about?”- it’s rousing entertainment all the same. In light of the tendency of many contemporary biopics to air out their protagonists’ dirty laundry, the film’s refusal to do so is perhaps its most refreshing aspect. Yankee Doodle Dandy is content to let its hero be a hero.

But the film would be nothing without Cagney’s infectious performance. Like many moviegoers of the time, I mostly knew Cagney through his hard-boiled gangster roles, combined his great late-period turns in films like Billy Wilder’s awesome One, Two, Three. But while I always knew he was an energetic actor, I wasn’t prepared for the high spirits he would bring to the role of George M. Cohan. The role had been turned down by the likes of Fred Astaire, and while Cagney wasn’t the dancer Astaire was (or the singer, for that matter- Cagney probably speak-sings half his lyrics), he throws himself so completely into the role that it scarcely matters. Cagney’s irrepressible desire to entertain is matched only by his inventiveness, as in the scene in which he first meets his eventual wife while covered in old-age makeup. It’s an irresistible performance, and one I dare say the Academy would’ve been hard-pressed to overlook even if it wasn’t based on a real person.

Yankee Doodle Dandy isn’t a movie about the life of George M. Cohan so much as it is about the myth of George M. Cohan. Consequently, it scarcely matters that Cohan was actually born on July 3rd, that the movie’s “Mary” was actually his second wife, or that the circumstances under which he received his Congressional Gold Medal were somewhat different than they are in the film. What matters is that, like its hero, it’s filled to the brim with an unabashed flag-waving spirit, and anchored with Cagney’s timeless, inspired performance. Yankee Doodle Dandy is cornball to be sure, but it’s the kind of movie that gives cornball a grand old name.

For the second Oscar-themed Reviews By Request column, I’m asking you to choose from five Best Picture-winning films I’ve never seen. So, which will it be?

Which should I review for my next Reviews By Request? | BuzzDash polls

As always, the comments section is open. See you in two weeks!

Reviews By Request: Shotgun Stories (2007, Jeff Nichols)

Paul Clark — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 20:00:00 GMT

Now that I’ve caught up with just about all of the major 2008 releases I’ve really wanted to, we’ll be going back to the old alternating-weeks format of Reviews By Request and Yesterday’s Hits starting next week. So, as before, I’ll be polling you folks to determine the first of two Oscar-themed Reviews By Request columns, which will run in two weeks. To vote, see the poll at the end of this review.

One of the better surprises among last week’s Oscar nominations was Michael Shannon’s nomination for best supporting actor in Revolutionary Road. Shannon has been acting in movies for well over a decade, but he first made an impression on me in Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center, in which his frayed-nerve intensity provided that ponderous film its only sign of life. Since then, Shannon has given vivid performances in Sidney Lumet’s Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead and William Friedkin’s Bug, which along with Revolutionary Road have turned him into Hollywood’s go-to character actor for playing hyper-focused crazies. Shannon’s character in Jeff Nichols’ revenge drama Shotgun Stories might seem on paper to be another unhinged role, but in his capable hands it instead becomes his deepest and most complex performance.

Shannon plays Son, the eldest of three brothers living in a small southern town. Shannon’s character’s name is not a nickname, but rather the legacy of a drunken, uncaring father (his brothers are named Kid and Boy). That he wasn’t named Sue is no doubt of small consolation to Son, whose father left them “in the care of a hateful woman” only to sober up, find Jesus, start a second family and become an all-around productive member of the community. It’s at his father’s funeral that the story is set in motion, when Son and his brothers show up and speak out against the man who abandoned them. Son’s act of spitting on his father’s casket causes the long-simmering resentments between the father’s two families to escalate into an all-out feud.

Normally, the revenge movie isn’t one of my favorite genres, because most movies of the type either emphasize violent action in a way that makes me feel vaguely unclean, or engage in so much hand-wringing that the ethics overwhelm the storytelling. With Shotgun Stories, Nichols avoids falling into either trap. This isn’t a pumped-up thrill ride, but neither is it a pious anti-revenge screed. Instead, it’s a sad, low-key story of two families whose mutual hatred for each other overwhelms their better judgments. Making the story especially tragic is that those who fueled the hatred (the deceased father and the two mothers) don’t bloody their hands from the violence- it’s their sons who suffer from their parents’ misdeeds. As Son tells his mother, “you’ve taught us to hate those boys, and we do. And now it’s come to this.”

Key to the movie’s effect is its setting, an “empty-ass town” with few opportunities available to its residents. In its feel for small-town life, Shotgun Stories owes a debt to filmmakers like David Gordon Green, who executive-produced. Son and Kid work together in a fish hatchery, Boy coaches a youth basketball team, and Son’s hopes of bettering himself hinge on his perfecting a technique to scam the local casino. Son’s wife Annie has moved out of the house with their son, but it’s clear that she still loves Son despite all the disappointment she feels for him. There are moments of happiness to be found in these people’s lives, but this happiness is either fleeting (as when Boy rigs up a blender to his car battery so he can fix margaritas while watching the sun set) or bittersweet due to the difficulties they face. It’s telling that Kid is reluctant to propose marriage to his longtime girlfriend not because he doesn’t love her, but because he’ll have a hard time affording a ring and a place of their own.

In short, these aren’t the stone-cold killers who usually inhabit movies of this sort, so when the violence begins, it doesn’t play out quite the way we expect. At one point, a character purchases a shotgun to use against an enemy, only to realize that he needs lessons in how to assemble and use it. And rather than emphasizing the violence, Nichols focuses on its horrible aftermath, the irreparable damage it causes. For example, Nichols cuts away from a brutal fight that kills one brother on each side, lingering instead on a scene in which both families gather in the hospital, staring each other down from opposite ends of a long hallway.

And in the middle of it, there’s Shannon’s performance, almost certainly the best he’s given to date. It’s been said that intelligence is the ability to hold opposing viewpoints simultaneously, and much of Shannon’s talent is his ability to convey seemingly contradictory impulses in his character. On the one hand, he wants to protect his family and uphold its honor; on the other, he wants to prove to his wife that he can care for her. In theory, these two impulses aren’t so different (they’re simply different facets of his need to do the right thing), but in practice it’s much more complicated. It’s a burden that weighs heavily on Son, and what makes Shannon’s performance such a marvel is that he’s able to convey this burden with a minimum of dialogue or affect, and without resorting to actorly histrionics. With his other notable performances and now Shotgun Stories, Michael Shannon is quickly becoming one of my favorite character actors, and the news that he’s playing the lead role in an upcoming Werner Herzog film is very, very good news indeed.

As you’re all aware, the Oscar ceremony will be airing later this month, and in anticipation of the Academy Awards, I’ll be running special Oscar-themed features over the next four weeks. For my next Reviews By Request column, I’m asking you to choose from five Oscar-nominated favorites, none of which I’ve seen all the way through. So, which will it be?

Which should I write about next? | BuzzDash polls

As always, the comments section is open. See you in two weeks!

Reviews By Request x2: Reprise (2006, Joachim Trier) and Son of Rambow (2007, Garth Jennings)

Paul Clark — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 20:00:00 GMT

When I asked you folks to vote on my next three Reviews By Request columns a few weeks ago, one thing I hadn’t anticipated was that there’d be a tie for third place. Under other circumstances, I might simply have chosen one film to write about over the other, but I’m more or less a man of my word. I briefly toyed with the idea of running a poll to determine which I’d write about, but when I realized that both of the films- Joachim Trier’s Reprise and Garth Jennings’ Son of Rambow- deal with creative sorts, I figured that the best way to solve my problem would simply be to write a tandem review of the films.

The act of creation can be tricky to portray cinematically. When someone is inspired to create a work of art, it can be the most exciting feeling in the world for that person. But it’s much more difficult to convey this excitement to others in the form of a film. Moreover, some media are better-suited to a cinematic treatment than others. While the making of a movie consists not only of a series of creative decisions but also the logistics and politics of collaboration with others, writing is essentially an inward, self-absorbed act. In this sense, Reprise begins at somewhat of a disadvantage compared to Son of Rambow. Does Trier’s film transcend this disadvantage to become a more memorable finished product than Jennings’? Not quite.

There’s an old writers’ joke that says that because young writers are told to “write what they know,” this explains why there are so many books and movies about writers. Reprise doubles up the usual beginning-writer-on-the-make storyline by focusing on two budding authors, a pair of friends who we first see mailing off their manuscripts at the same time. Of course, not all writers are created equal, and while Phillip (Anders Danielsen Lie) finds literary success almost overnight, Erik (Espen Klouman-Høiner) gets turned down by the publisher. From that point forward, the film cuts back and forth between the two, with Phillip suffering a nervous breakdown, Erik finding his own measure of success, and each of them trying to find their ways in life.

Unless they’re especially well-written, I find that educated twentysomethings can make for some of the least interesting and most insufferable characters in films, partly because their intelligence has yet to be tempered with maturity, humility, and the wisdom that gets born from actual real-world experience. The protagonists of Reprise harbor some lofty ideas both about life and literature (Erik’s first novel is entitled Prosopopeia, fer chrissakes), but when they give voice to them, they come out mostly in writerly clichés, like when Erik decides to dump his girlfriend in order to live the stereotypical writer’s life of booze and cheap sex. If the film had shown any real self-awareness about its characters in the manner of Arnaud Desplechin’s My Sex Life…, this might have worked. But it doesn’t.

And that’s a shame, since Trier’s film has plenty of interesting ideas that would have been worth exploring. In one subplot, we see Phillip, recently released from a mental hospital, trying to re-connect with his ex-girlfriend Kari (Viktoria Winge). Phillip’s mother has gotten rid of his photographs of Kari, fearing they might trigger another mental collapse. So Phillip decides to take Kari to Paris, where they vacationed shortly after they met, in order to re-take the photos and, consequently, re-live the memories. There are a number of other compelling ideas in Reprise that mark Trier as a talent to watch. Even if this feels very much like a first film, there’s real potential here.

~~~

Compared to Reprise, Son of Rambow is a relatively modest work, one with little more than a desire to entertain. Yet it succeeds in this sense in a way that Trier’s film can’t quite manage to fulfill its loftier ambitions. I’m not a huge fan of the sorts of festival darlings that are routinely labeled “crowd-pleasers”- I’m not drinking the Kool-Aid™ on Slumdog Millionaire, for example- so I was a little surprised by how well Son of Rambow worked on me.

Like Reprise, Son of Rambow tells the story of two young friends, although the heroes of Jennings’ film are preteen boys, which tends to cut down quite a bit on the navel-gazing. The unlikely friends are Lee (Will Poulter), a troublemaker who spends his free time working on elaborate home movies, and Will (Bill Milner), a pint-sized boy from a staunchly religious family who Lee cons into working for him as a stunt man. Inspired by a bootleg of First Blood that he sees at Lee’s house, Will gets the inspiration to turn Lee’s movie into a kind of sequel to the Stallone opus- one that stars himself.

In its story of DIY movie-making against a small-community backdrop, Son of Rambow bears a casual resemblance to Michel Gondry’s Be Kind Rewind. However, I think Son is the more successful film, in part because the story works better with kids in the lead roles instead of adults, even if one of those adults happens to a man-child like Jack Black. What’s more, the visual flights of fancy Jennings brings to the story- inventive production design, flashes of hand-drawn animation- are more effective than Gondry’s, since Jennings’ touch is lighter and the whimsy never wears out its welcome.

Son of Rambow flags a bit in its second half, after other characters (led by a Culture Club-ready French exchange student) are brought in to collaborate on Will and Lee’s movie. Thankfully, Jennings recognizes this, and acknowledges it when he has Lee confront Will to tell him as much. But for much of its duration, Son of Rambow is fun and occasionally even enchanting, as in the scene when Will’s drawings come to life. And it’s hard to resist a movie that manages to combine Lee’s anarchic spirit with Will’s wide-eyed innocence without making us decide on one over the other. Son of Rambow isn’t perfect, but it’s a real charmer.

Reviews By Request: The Foot Fist Way (2006, Jody Hill)

Paul Clark — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 20:00:00 GMT

For the next three weeks, I’ll be reviewing three movies you requested in last week’s column. Polling for future Reviews By Request columns will begin again on January 30.

Over the past few decades, there has emerged in American popular culture something that can be called the “comedy of awkwardness.” In this style of comedy, which draws heavily from British humor, the comedy comes not merely from a character’s strange behavior, but also the discomfort their behavior causes. Often, in comedies of this sort, it’s the surrounding characters’ dumbfounded reactions that generate the most laughs. Comedy of awkwardness has become an integral part of some of the most popular and acclaimed sitcoms in this country like The Office and 30 Rock, and it’s begun making inroads into movies as well.

However, to successfully pull off the comedy of awkwardness, one must walk a thin line. To begin with, the character who generates the discomfort has to think he’s acting perfectly normally. If there’s any sense that this person is aware of how crazy he looks, the comedy is lost. In addition, the audience has to get a sense that the people who surround the crazy character acknowledge, if only to themselves, how strange his actions are. Jody Hill’s The Foot Fist Way gets only the first rule right, while ignoring the second altogether. So in spite of a fine and wholly committed performance by Danny McBride in the lead role, the film never takes off as comedy, coming off not so much funny as simply odd.

The Foot Fist Way focuses on the character of Fred Simmons (McBride), a boorish one-time tae kwon do champion-turned-small town instructor. Fred presides over his dojo with the authority of a drill sergeant, barking out orders and insisting that his students address him as “sir.” Meanwhile, Fred’s life begins to fall apart when he discovers that his wife cheated on him with the manager at her new job. Soon, Fred falls apart and becomes consumed with rage and grief, surely the last emotions one wants to see from a man who makes his living instructing people- children, even- how to fight. Fred discovers that his wife’s boss’ name is Mr. Fisher, and when he assumes that a student, also named Fisher, is the boss’ son, Fred decides to take out his rage on the boy, with predictable results.

But let’s look at that particular scene. A grown man beating the hell from a young boy is not inherently funny, but there are comic possibilities for such a scene if done right. Unfortunately, The Foot Fist Way doesn’t deliver. Hill shows McBride fighting the boy in long shot, but never takes the time to show us how the other characters in the scene feel about this. Just one well-timed reaction shot from a disbelieving onlooker could have salvaged some laughs, but that reaction shot never comes. The whole film is like that- plenty of promise, but very little end result. There are a few scenes that work, such as Fred’s misguided attempts to seduce a pretty female student or a weepy monologue in which he schools a young student in life’s harsh realities, but many more that don’t. By the time the story has become a mano a mano between Fred and karate movie superstar Chuck “The Truck” Wallace (played by the film’s co-writer, Ben Best), the movie’s comedic potential has long since been squandered.

It’s a shame, since McBride’s performance is really very good, in large part because he’s completely convincing in the role. I’ve never taken a martial arts class, but I can imagine that many of the instructors are more or less like Fred, attracted less to its traditions than to the power teaching gives them. Tae kwon do is rooted in self-discipline, but my guess is that most students sign up for martial arts so they can learn to fight, and when one is teaching people who are clearly weaker and less skilled, there can be a temptation to prove one’s superiority by cutting others down to size. In many ways, Fred is the flip side of Chiwetel Ejiofor’s character in David Mamet’s Redbelt, who is more of an old-school purist. Fred, on the other hand, enjoys being in control and doesn’t know any better way to go about it than by intimidating others, and McBride effortlessly projects the arrogance of a man who harbors no doubts whatsoever that he can kick your ass, while also showing occasional deference to those who are more powerful than he is. It makes perfect sense that when Fred’s wife tries to patch up their marriage, Fred insists on telling her, “I’m the stronger man, and you’re the weaker woman.” Although considering what a ringer she's already put him through, is he trying to convince her of this, or himself?

If nothing else, The Foot Fist Way should be remembered as that movie that introduced Hollywood to the brilliance of Danny McBride. McBride had previously appeared as the scene-stealing Bust-Ass in David Gordon Green’s All the Real Girls, but with this film, he quickly made fans of Will Ferrell and Judd Apatow, and has since been cast in such high-profile films as Pineapple Express, Tropic Thunder, and the upcoming big-screen version of Land of the Lost. But while McBride’s comic skills are undeniable, there are also moments in The Foot Fist Way that hint at darker undercurrents, leading me to think that he might become a fine character actor if given the chance. The Foot Fist Way isn’t much of a movie, but it announces McBride as a talent to watch.

Reviews By Request: Sukiyaki Western Django (2007, Takashi Miike)

Paul Clark — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 20:00:00 GMT

As always, I’ll be polling you folks to determine my next Reviews By Request column, although this time the rules will be somewhat different. To vote, see the poll at the end of this review.

Of all of the United States’ contributions to popular culture, one of the most enduring has been the Western genre. In the mid- to late-1800s, stories about cowboys and the Wild West carved out a particularly American idiom in literature, and after the invention of the motion picture, many of the most popular movies- such as Edison and Porter’s The Great Train Robbery- were Westerns. In the classical age of Hollywood, few genres were more popular throughout the world than the Western.

By the 1950s, foreign filmmakers were beginning to show their Western influences, notably Akira Kurosawa in films like The Seven Samurai. And this influence became explicit by the 1960s when a number of Italian filmmakers began to produce Westerns in Europe. The resulting films quickly became known as “spaghetti Westerns,” and their popularity began a wave of Wild West stories made on foreign soil. There were “paella Westerns” in Spain, “cod Westerns” in Scandinavia, even “curry Westerns” in India. It was only a matter of time until a Japanese filmmaker would offer up a Japanese take on the genre, and it seems only natural that the filmmaker would be prolific genre-bender Takashi Miike. It also seems obvious that Quentin Tarantino would have some part in the proceedings, but that’s another issue entirely.

Miike’s Sukiyaki Western Django is first and foremost an homage to classic Westerns of the past. Even its premise- a mysterious mercenary wanders into the middle of a turf war and proceeds to play both sides- is one of the archetypal storylines of the genre. It has served as the storyline for a number of “spaghetti Westerns” including Sergio Leone’s seminal A Fistful of Dollars and Corbucci’s Django, which lent Miike’s film its title. Of course, both films were essentially Western takes on Kurosawa’s Yojimbo, which in turn was a samurai version of Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest. But you get the idea- Miike’s genuflecting before the old masters. There’s even a whiff of Shakespeare in the story, in which the rival gangs are signified by the colors Red and White, in homage to England’s Wars of the Roses.

But although Miike has all his references in order, the end result is somewhat underwhelming. Miike hits all of the expected genre beats, but very little that happens in the film carries much weight. Part of the problem is that the characters just aren’t all that memorable. We meet the mysterious gunfighter, the samurai-styled leader of the Whites, the Shakespeare-obsessed leader of the Reds, the revenge-bent woman, the duplicitous lawman. Hell, there’s even a middle-aged woman who turns out to be the famed warrior Bloody Benten, whose name I would imagine was inspired by the same Japanese deity who lent her name to Screengrab favorite Benten Films. But Miike is so busy with other business that he never finds time to really do much with the people who populate his story. Even the gunfighter gets lost in the shuffle for much of the film.

As I mentioned before, Miike fan and friend Quentin Tarantino appears in the film, playing an old gunfighter named Ringo who tells the saga of Bloody Benten and literalizes the sukiyaki motif. Many of Tarantino’s own films also tend to be elaborate homages, but unlike Sukiyaki they tend to add up to something more than the sum of their references. Much of this has to do the way Tarantino actually manages to take time to establish the characters in his films- for example, the way he actually shows us some of Budd’s life in Kill Bill instead of just making him a rival, or the scene in Death Proof in which he reveals that the fearsome-looking Stuntman Mike is actually a whiny baby. On one level, Tarantino noodles in the margins of his story just as much as Miike, but while Tarantino’s noodlings lend his films additional depth, Miike’s tend to feel like one-off moments, designed to grab the attention but have little relevance on the story at large. Granted, some of these moments are pretty awesome- look at the way Ringo procures an egg for his sukiyaki, or the goofy touch of having the two-faced lawman suffer from multiple personality disorder- but put together they don’t really add up.

Or consider the films of Sergio Leone, whose storylines were every bit as impenetrable as Sukiyaki’s, but whose style pushed the iconography to such frenzied levels that they’re hypnotic on a moment-to-moment basis even if the broad outlines of the story get lost in the process. Leone’s “spaghetti Westerns” are Westerns taken to their stylistic extreme, and while “extreme” is a word that’s often associated with Miike’s films, Sukiyaki Western Django is a rarity- a Miike film that feels too tame. It’s entertaining enough, and the final shootout is good as these things go, but overall it’s a little disappointing. I’ve gone on record as a rabid fan of Audition, but with each subsequent Miike film I see I’ve come to realize that that film’s tight directorial control and bold formal structure was a rarity in his work. Sadly, Sukiyaki Western Django needed a more assured hand on the reins.

In my ongoing effort to see as many 2008 films as possible, I’ve decided to change the rules a bit this time around. Below, I’ve listed five of the most intriguing titles from the last four Reviews By Request polls (sorry, no House Bunny). As usual, I’m asking you to pick your favorite, but rather than only writing up the top vote-getter, I’ll write up the top three, one per week for the next three weeks. So, what’ll it be?

What 2008 movies would you like me to see? | BuzzDash polls

As always, feel free to sound off in the comments section. See you next week!

Reviews By Request: Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead (2006, Lloyd Kaufman)

Paul Clark — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 20:00:00 GMT

As always, I’ll be polling you folks to determine my next Reviews By Request column. To vote, see the poll at the end of this review.

For all of my supposed affection for good trashy movies, I’m a little ashamed to admit that I’ve never seen a film made by Troma, one of the names to know in cinematic junk food. I’m not sure what took me so long. It’s not like I was unfamiliar with the work of Troma and its founder and chief spokesperson, Lloyd Kaufman, having seen boxes for his movies lining the shelves in the Cult section at the local video store. Hell, I’ve enjoyed the hell out of the Troma trailers that have becomes staples of Columbus’ Horror and Sci-Fi Marathons, such as Sgt. Kabukiman, NYPD and Maniac Nurses Find Ecstasy (“filmed on location in the Republic of Hungary!”).

But whatever it was, I was no longer able to overlook Troma following the release of Kaufman’s latest opus, Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead, which didn’t take the usual direct-to-DVD path of most of Troma’s recent movies but got an honest-to-goodness, 35mm theatrical release, complete with a positive review (B+!) in Entertainment Weekly. This newfound media presence, coupled with a handful of positive recommendations from friends, finally motivated me to start remedying my Troma blind spot. Thankfully, the movie didn’t disappoint. While I wouldn’t call it one of 2008’s best by any stretch, it’s got a lot of spirit and energy, and I’m not likely to forget it anytime soon.

From its opening scene, Poultrygeist makes no bones about the sort of movie it is. In the film’s first shot, we see the requisite “Indian Burial Ground” (a plot point straight out of Poltergeist, which of course inspired this movie’s title). However, the sign at its entrance deflates any potential eeriness that the shot might have, saying, “desecrators will be cursed to the fullest extent of ancient tribal law.” From there, we get a couple of hornball teenagers dry-humping behind a headstone, some comedic fumbling with the girl’s bra, a faux-sincere conversation about the pair being separated by the girl’s leaving for college, a mid-hump attack by a half-dozen decaying arms reaching out of the Earth, and finally, a sneak attack by a creepy-looking man, axe in one hand, erection in the other.

All of the hallmarks of Troma are there- low-rent homages/parodies of well-known blockbusters, quirky humor, an arrested-development view of sexuality, and plenty of gonzo violence. For Troma, these aspects have proven to be a winning combination, and Kaufman puts them to good use in Poultrygeist. But while plenty of awful movies have tried a similar cocktail of ingredients, what distinguishes Poultrygeist is Kaufman’s go-for-broke spirit, in which pretty much anything could happen at any time. It’s the kind of movie in which a grossly obese man will suffer a prolonged bout of explosive diarrhea before quasi-birthing a giant zombie chicken, another character gets a mop handle shoved through his rectum and out his crotch, or a romantic ballad will include a chorus line of naked lesbians pawing each other. And if you can’t predict that a burqa-clad character will eventually cast off her clothes to reveal a bikini-clad hottie, this probably isn’t your cup of tea.

I realize that many of you might not enjoy a movie like Poultrygeist, and if the subject matter and style don't appeal to you, there really isn't much in the way of cinematic values- high-caliber acting, first-rate filmmaking- to make it go down easier. Yet like all good trashy movies, this one scratches a moviegoing itch in me that most other movies cannot. In recommending Poultrygeist to me, loyal Screengrab reader Steve C. said, “watch this and tell me this isn’t, in essence, Lloyd Kaufman’s suicide note.” While I’m not familiar enough with Kaufman’s other films to say for sure, I certainly see a go-for-broke spirit in Poultrygeist that’s only possible from a director who’s got nothing to lose. In his own way, Kaufman spews a lot of bile in the film, and in many directions as well- at the fast food establishment, at the pseudo-activists who pretend to fight the establishment only to roll over once they’ve been catered to, and at those people who settle into low-pay jobs rather than fulfilling their potential. Granted, these themes have been tackled by other movies, but how many of those movies have included a subplot in which a gay illegal immigrant worker gets run through a meat grinder only to return as a talking, lisping sandwich? Troma’s films may not be for everyone, but if Poultrygeist is any indication, they’re right up my alley. So readers, I ask you: what other Tromas would you recommend?

What’s next for Reviews By Request? I’m still catching up on some 2008 releases, and this week’s choices include a crowd-pleasing British comedy, a typically bizarre Takashi Miike film, the latest starring vehicle for the inimitable Ana Faris, and a pair of acclaimed documentaries, one about a counterculture icon, the other about a famous trial and media circus. Which will it be?

What should I review next? | BuzzDash polls

Feel free to stump for your favorite in the comments section, or even recommend possible future titles for this feature. Remember, voting closes on Monday night. See you in two weeks!

Reviews By Request: Bigger, Stronger, Faster* (2008, Chris Bell)

Paul Clark — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 20:00:00 GMT

As always, I’ll be polling you folks to determine my next Reviews By Request column. To vote, see the poll at the end of this review.

Watching Chris Bell’s Bigger, Stronger, Faster* (*The Side Effects of Being American), the first thing that I noticed was that Bell didn’t look like the typical documentarian. Of course, there really isn’t a mold for what a nonfiction filmmaker ought to look like, but normally documentary filmmakers tend to look either like intellectuals (Errol Morris, Frederick Wiseman) or self-styled man-of-the-people types (Michael Moore, Morgan Spurlock). By contrast, Bell is a good-looking thirtysomething, broad-shouldered and well-muscled, in keeping with his life as a former bodybuilder. But in making this, his first feature, Bell obeyed the first rule of writing- when in doubt, write what you know. Or in Bell’s case, film it.

On one level, Bigger, Stronger, Faster is about steroids. However, considering Bell’s experiences in the world of competitive lifting and bodybuilding, the movie is hardly an anti-steroid screed. Bell knows this world too well to come out against chemical enhancement. For one thing, while he’s against taking steroids himself, his brothers Mike (aka “Mad Dog”) and Mark (“Smelly”) have no such qualms. Mad Dog still harbors his childhood dreams of pro wrestling stardom, while Smelly continues to compete in power-lifting competitions, at one point bench pressing more than 700 pounds. Meanwhile, Chris is working at Gold’s Gym selling gym memberships, and is smaller than both his older and younger brother. Did the drugs make the difference?

For years, health experts have warned athletes about the dangers that steroids can wreak on one’s body. But Bigger, Stronger, Faster presents a dissenting opinion, calmly and surprisingly convincingly. According to the scientists and doctors Bell interviews for the film, the health risks that come from taking steroids are relatively minor, and are generally temporary. But while another director might have taken these findings as evidence in favor of steroid use, Bell is up to something altogether different. He’s dispelling the overblown health-related myths of steroids in order to approach the issue on ethical and sociological grounds.

In Bell’s mind, the use of steroids among athletes is symptomatic of a deep-seated desire not only to succeed, but to come out on top. From a young age, Bell remembers idolizing men (Arnold Schwarzenegger, Hulk Hogan) whose success came, according to them, as the result both of their muscular physiques and their hard work. Children are taught that if they dream big and follow their dreams, they can be anything they want to be and escape their humdrum lives. And if it takes chemical enhancement to get the edge one needs to prevail, so be it (this doesn't end with muscle mass either- why would I keep getting e-Mail spam advertising penis enlargment unless someone was buying?). Besides, asks the film, if fighter pilots are required to take amphetamines, and teenagers are prescribed Adderall to get the edge at school, why shouldn’t athletes be allowed to use steroids?

Bigger, Stronger, Faster isn’t an especially distinguished documentary- it’s fairly nuts and bolts from a directing standpoint, and Bell is occasionally prone to digressions that don’t really go anywhere. He occasionally includes a surprising scene such as the one where he interviews Donald Hooten, who famously spoke out against steroids after his steroid-using son killed himself. But he also includes such unnecessary sequences as the one where he decides to make his own energy supplement, hiring a couple of migrant workers to help him prepare the supplement and even staging an ad campaign. More often than not, however, Bell’s points hit home.

One of the key points he addresses is the paradox of modern professional sports- that on one hand we demand our athletes win, while on the other we need them to play fair. During the film, Bell remembers the incident when the hated wrestler The Iron Sheik was arrested for doing drugs with fellow wrestler Hacksaw Jim Duggan, and Bell recalls being shocked less by their actions as he was by the idea that the two were supposed to be mortal enemies. Perhaps this explains much of the outrage stirred up by the Congressional hearings on steroid use in Major League Baseball- that deep down, we still want to believe in our sports heroes as we did when we were young. In a world that’s complicated and difficult to figure out, we need a place where success is easily measured, everything is governed by rules, and there are clear-cut winners and losers. Above all, we need to believe that our dreams are attainable. In one of the last scenes of Bigger, Stronger, Faster, we see Mad Dog, now thirty-six years old and married, putting on a unitard and making an audition video for the WWE. Of course, his chances of making it in professional wrestling are long gone, but he forges on. After all, it’s easier and more comforting than reality.

What’s next for Reviews By Request? I’m still catching up on some 2008 releases, and this week’s choices include a low-budget comedy starring one of the year’s most dependable scene stealers, a spring horror release that received decidedly mixed reviews, two very different documentaries, and finally, the latest film from the Troma team. So, what’ll it be?

What movie should I review next? | BuzzDash polls

Voting closes on Monday night. Remember, the comments section is open for you to talk up your favorites or recommend other titles for future installments. See you in two weeks!

Reviews By Request: Mister Lonely (2007, Harmony Korine)

Paul Clark — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 20:00:00 GMT

As always, I’ll be polling you folks to determine my next Reviews By Request column. To vote, see the poll at the end of this review.

I find myself sort of at a loss at how to review Harmony Korine’s latest film, Mister Lonely. Here is a film with plenty of ideas without enough ways to satisfactorily tie them together, yet it’s also so rich and strange that it’s impossible to ignore. That it doesn’t really work in any of the usual ways is to its credit. Just because I have such a hard time pinning the movie down doesn’t diminish my admiration for it.

Like all of Korine’s films, Mister Lonely deals with characters who live on the fringes of society. In this case, his protagonist is a Michael Jackson impersonator (played by Diego Luna) who ekes out an existence in Paris. Most of time, he performs on the street, although occasionally his agent (fellow filmmaking enfant terrible Léos Carax, who’s really overdue to direct another movie) will find him a job. It’s at one of these jobs- a “personal appearance” at a nursing home where he cheerfully tells the residents, “don’t die! Live forever!”- that he meets another impersonator, a Marilyn Monroe played by Samantha Morton, who invites him to live with her in a commune just for impersonators.

The commune, an old castle in the Scottish Highlands, is inhabited by Marilyn’s husband Charlie Chaplin (Denis Lavant) and their daughter Shirley Temple (Morton’s real-life daughter Esme Creed-Miles). There’s also the Pope (James Fox), Queen Elizabeth II (Anita Pallenberg), Abraham Lincoln (Richard Strange), Madonna, James Dean, Sammy Davis Jr., Buckwheat, Little Red Riding Hood, and the Three Stooges. A rather eclectic mix, I’m sure you’ll agree. Here, Marilyn promises, they can all live the lives they’ve chosen in an environment where they will be understood and welcomed.

The early Paris scenes are good, but the movie gets really fascinating once Michael makes the journey to Scotland. It’s also here that the idea of impersonation becomes complicated- for some celebrity impersonators, it’s primarily about making money or indulging their fantasies in a relatively healthy context. Yet the residents of the commune are another breed entirely, having substituted the lives they’ve assumed for their own. Korine shows us the Pope getting drunk at dinner, Buckwheat tending to his chickens, and so on. But try as they may to escape who they are, their real natures end up coming out- Lincoln reveals himself to be a foul-mouthed petty tyrant, Chaplin alternately abuses and neglects his wife, and Marilyn begins to unravel. Even the sheep end up getting sick and having to be put down.

Complicating matters even more is the show they put on for the locals- a few of the impersonators do their own chosen celebrity’s shtick, but some do other people’s famous routines, with such strange sights as James Dean doing stand-up comedy. Indeed, all Three Stooges are never onstage at the same time. Could it be that these people are so uneasy in their own skin that they’re forever searching for another identity to assume? Regardless of the intent, the show is hardly the success that it was intended to be, no doubt because if people are paying to see celebrity impersonators, then by gum want to see them impersonating those celebrities.

All the while, Michael mostly keeps to himself, practicing his routine, never quite giving himself over to the commune’s vibe. If most of the other impersonators have turned the celebrities’ identities into their own, it becomes clear that Michael is more of a seeker, using the Michael Jackson persona as a way to find fulfillment in his own life. Once it’s clear to him that he won’t find it at the commune, he makes his way back to Paris and gives up his Michael Jackson persona, seeking fulfillment from something different altogether.

Perhaps it’s this search that best explains a strange subplot involving a group of nuns led by a priest who’s played by longtime Korine friend Werner Herzog. One day, when air-dropping bags of rice in Central America, one of the nuns falls out of the airplane only to discover that if she prays hard enough, she will survive the fall unharmed. In contrast to Michael, who has searched all his life for some kind of inner peace, the nuns happen upon it by accident, and seize upon the opportunity to experience transcendence through their literal leaps of faith.

After rising to prominence as the writer of Larry Clark’s Kids, Harmony Korine has made three features to date, all of which have attempted to push the boundaries of cinema. But while julien donkey-boy and particularly Gummo were dragged down by Korine’s need to turn them into freak shows, with Mister Lonely he has matured as a filmmaker by showing a real curiosity for his characters and a willingness to approach his ideas with real sincerity. In an interview earlier this year, Korine described his directing style by saying, “I try to create a place where you feel that anything's possible.” With Mister Lonely, I believe he has successfully accomplished this, and in doing so he’s made his best film to date.

What’s next for Reviews By Request? Once again, I’m playing catch-up on my 2008 releases, and this week’s choices include two of this year’s most acclaimed documentaries, a comic corrective to the rather humorless Quantum of Solace, a celebrated Danish drama, and a David Gordon Green-produced family tragedy. So, what’ll it be?

What should I watch for my next Review By Request? | BuzzDash polls

Voting closes on Monday night. Feel free to stump for your favorites or to recommend future candidates in the comments box. See you in two weeks!

Reviews By Request: The Times of Harvey Milk (1984, Rob Epstein)

Paul Clark — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 20:00:00 GMT

As always, I’ll be polling you folks to determine my next Reviews By Request column. To vote, see the poll at the end of this review.

When I floated Rob Epstein’s documentary The Times of Harvey Milk as a possibility for a Reviews By Request column, I did so primarily in anticipation of the upcoming biopic Milk. The principal reason for this is because I generally have a rule against getting my history from “fiction” films, so I wanted to learn about Milk’s life beforehand, the better to concentrate on the performances and filmmaking in Gus Van Sant’s film. Not having seen Milk yet I can’t be sure, but to my eyes, The Times of Harvey Milk, though relatively undistinguished as filmmaking, is invaluable as a cinematic account of the life and legacy of Harvey Milk. It doesn’t tell everything about him- what movie could?- but it’s a great jumping-off point.

One of the biggest misconceptions that The Times of Harvey Milk cleared up for me was that Milk was more or less a one-issue politician. I knew going in was that Milk was the first openly gay man ever elected to major civic office in the United States, so I jumped to the conclusion that his political interests revolved around gay-centric issues, like his successful campaign against 1978’s hateful “Briggs Initiative”, which would have forced California’s openly gay school teachers out of their jobs. However, this was hardly the case. Milk was a vocal advocate for the rights of senior citizens and minorities in San Francisco, and also was a proponent of stricter “pooper-scooper” legislation in the city. One of the film’s most vivid moments is an old news report in which Milk discusses the poop law and dramatically steps in a pile of droppings he’d strategically placed there earlier that day.

But The Times of Harvey Milk isn’t just about the man, but about, yes, the times in which he lived. San Francisco became a haven for homosexuals during the 1970s, including Milk himself, a former Wall Street analyst who moved West during the sixties. Already into his forties, Milk unsuccessfully ran for public office three times before being elected city supervisor, a beneficiary of a new San Francisco policy that required supervisors to represent specific districts rather than the city as a whole. As one of the interviewees states, “we had finally elected one of our own.” Indeed, this same election would also elect the city’s first Chinese-American, the first African-American woman, and the first committed feminist to the city board.

The fifth (and final) newly-elected city supervisor was named Dan White, who of course would eventually kill Milk and Mayor George Moscone. White’s trial and the fallout from the verdict take up most of the film’s final third, and this is its most troublesome aspect. Most of The Times of Harvey Milk is devoted to historical accounts of Milk’s work and impressions of his life by people who knew him, but in the section on White’s trial, Epstein includes some unfortunate editorializing by the people he interviews, in which they posit that White’s reduced charges (for voluntary manslaughter rather than murder) were the result of homophobia among the jurors. While this was no doubt a factor, so too was the boneheaded move by the prosecution to play White’s taped confession for the jury, which only served to humanize him and make him seem penitent. But whatever the reason, White’s verdict- predicated on the now laughable “Twinkie Defense”- remains a colossal blunder by the courts.

Much more interesting, and illuminating to Milk’s legacy, is a pair of public events that followed Milk’s death, the first a candlelight vigil a few days after Milk was shot, the second a full-scale riot in reaction to the White verdict. It’s in the second case that Milk’s absence is most profoundly felt. The Milk we get to know throughout the course of The Times of Harvey Milk was not about violence or fear, but a positive inspiration to others- as someone else once put it, “a uniter, not a divider.” In one of his most famous speeches, Milk said, “you gotta give ‘em hope,” a message that seems particularly relevant today, considering the hopeful message of change put forth by our recent President-elect. How unfortunate, then, that there was no Milk-like figure to lead the movement to defeat California’s Proposition 8. With anti-gay marriage laws being passed across the country, will we soon see the times of the next Harvey Milk? Only time will tell.

The end of the year is fast approaching, and with that the time to make end-of-year lists and awards. However, ever since I went and got myself a life, I haven’t had time to catch all the movies I’d like to see. So for the next couple of months, I’ll be devoting the Reviews by Request polls to 2008 releases only. This week, five acclaimed- and very different- movies from which to choose. Should I see the latest documentary from the great Herzog, which sadly never made it to my area? The weird-looking kids’ movie from Kung Fu Hustle’s Stephen Chow? A Berlin Golden Bear winner from the director of the awesome Bus 174? A lightweight French cinematic bonbon starring Amelie’s own Audrey Tautou? Or would you like me to review the latest from cinematic enfant terrible Harmony Korine? Ball’s in your court:

Which should I watch next? | BuzzDash polls

As always, the comments section is open. See you in two weeks!

Reviews By Request: Chelsea Girls (1966, Andy Warhol)

Paul Clark — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 20:00:00 GMT

As always, I’ll be polling you folks to determine my next Reviews By Request column. To vote, see the poll at the end of the review.

If one reads enough movie reviews and articles, eventually the expression “critic-proof” will emerge. Normally, this is used to describe big-budget, lunkheaded Hollywood blockbusters that are virtually guaranteed to be massive hits no matter how much the critics dump on them. However, I think the phrase could just as appropriately be applied to Andy Warhol’s Chelsea Girls, which I recently saw for the first time as part of the Wexner Center’s exhibition Andy Warhol: Other Voices, Other Rooms. Like many movies that are labeled “underground films,” Chelsea Girls stands outside the accepted rules of mainstream narrative cinema. The film, loosely structured as a series of vignettes featuring a number of Warhol Factory “superstars,” is a rebuke to traditional notions of “good” and “bad.”

Adding to the confusion is the film’s nontraditional method of exhibition. Warhol intended the film to be projected on two screens, with two different scenes playing next to each other. He also gave projectionists permission to choose which scene’s soundtracks they wished to turn on. Consequently, no two viewings of the film were the same, and because of this, there is no definitive integral version of Chelsea Girls, although I can imagine it being a prime candidate for a special “interactive” DVD cut that allows viewers to choose their preferred soundtracks or the synchronization of the images.

Because of its unconventional nature, I found the questions I normally ask when evaluating a film to be mostly useless. Instead, I approached Chelsea Girls like I would a modernist painting, asking myself, “how do I respond to this?” As it turns out, I dug it, as audience members might have said during the film’s original release. Parts of Chelsea Girls are confounding and almost tedious, like promising bits that go on far too long in order to fill the predetermined 33-minute scene duration mandated by Warhol’s 16mm camera equipment. But most of the time, the film is fascinating to behold, with Warhol’s experimentation sometimes yielding magical results.

As befits Warhol’s background as a visual artist, Chelsea Girls is often beautiful to watch, full of striking imagery both black and white and in color. Nowhere is this more evident than in two scenes involving Nico that bookend the film, the first a black-and-white domestic scene involving the singer/actress doing her hair while her son plays nearby, the other a closeup of her crying while brightly-colored lights play over her face. In addition, Warhol deploys a vast arsenal of camera tricks, including insistent unmotivated zooms, fiddling with the focus and depth of field, and even employing what I like to call “typewriter pans”- basically, sweeping the camera slowly over a scene from left to right before whipping it back to the left and starting again.

The two-screen effect also pays off, resulting (during my viewing, anyway) in some interesting pairings and juxtapositions. The most obvious example for me was the pairing of Eric Emerson’s extended monologue and a crowd scene involving many of Warhol’s “superstars”. Emerson’s monologue is of an intimate nature, as he discusses details of his life and his sexuality before doing a slow strip tease. Yet the lighting Warhol uses for him- mostly red and blue- is almost the same as the lighting on the other screen, giving the impression that Emerson is delivering his speech for an audience. Which, I suppose he is. Other pairings are more mundane, like Mary Woronov in one frame looking like she’s listening to herself in the other.

But while some scenes in the film come close to working as drama- especially one in which “mother” Marie Menken berates “son” Gerard Malanga- more often the scenes don’t so much build as simply exist, giving off a loose, hanging-out vibe. And while this has proven frustrating to those in search of the thrills associated with narrative cinema, it’s an essential and endlessly compelling bit of cultural anthropology, a portrait of the Factory era as seen by some of its most important figures. Many Factory favorites are represented here- Ondine presiding as a foul-mouthed pope hopped up on amphetamines, Brigid Berlin as a surly drug dealer, Mario Montez turning up briefly for a song, Nico of course, and most memorably Mary Woronov, berating Ingrid Superstar and International Velvet before going into her extended, uproarious version of a Hanoi Hannah radio broadcast (one of only two segments of the film that wasn’t completely improvised).

Warhol called them his Superstars, but in their “natural” habitat of the Chelsea (with its bohemian mien and Spartan décor) they feel much more like a pack of strays that Warhol took in off the streets. Perhaps that’s why they were so widely embraced by so many young people of the time, including John Waters, who has spoken fondly of the times he drove up to New York from Baltimore to catch the latest Warhol film. These weren’t big-screen gods and goddesses living in mansions in California, but people they could relate to, people who were trying to make their way in New York City before Warhol turned them into his own kind of movie stars. As Eric Emerson says in the film, “I can see me. Looks pretty good.”

For this week’s Reviews By Request poll, I’ve carried over one of the also-rans from the last poll- Jacques Tati’s Trafic, and added four new titles to the mix. One of these was suggested a few weeks back by reader “The Dreaded Rhubarb,” while another has some obvious relevance to both an upcoming film and a recent political issue. The third is a film for which I’ve seen the remake, but haven’t gotten around to seeing the original. Finally, I included a movie I actually own, only it appears that I actually need to be motivated to get off my lazy ass and watch it. So, which will it be? You make the call!

What should be my next Review By Request? | BuzzDash polls

As always, the comments section is open for you to stump for your favorites, suggest a possible future candidate, or to offer thoughts on Chelsea Girls, even if it’s just “Andy Warhol Bites a Big One.” See you in two weeks!

Reviews by Request, For Real This Time: Let Sleeping Corpses Lie (1974, Jorge Grau)

Paul Clark — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 20:00:00 GMT

Note: As promised, this is my review of the previously-requested Let Sleeping Corpses Lie that I was unable to watch in time for last week’s Reviews by Request column. My next regularly-scheduled column will appear next Friday due to the Veteran’s Day holiday and a special Yesterday’s Hits I have planned for the occasion. Apologies for the delays, and enjoy!

One of the first thoughts that occurred to me after watching Jorge Grau’s Let Sleeping Corpses Lie was how small of a role the undead actually play in the story. Sure, there are some choice zombie attacks, rendered in loving, graphic detail by Grau and his makeup team. But strangely, the zombies seem almost incidental to the storyline. What initially seems to be the story of a battle between the living and the undead becomes something else entirely, which makes the movie more intriguing than your garden variety zombie thriller.

The story begins fairly unassumingly, as these stories often do, with George (Ray Lovelock) making a weekend trip out to the country. At a filling station, a car backs into his motorcycle, ruining the front wheel, so he gets a ride from Edna (Christine Galbo), the woman driving the car. It’s the beginning of a disastrous day together for the pair- each person has people waiting on him, and at least one of them won’t make it on time. Certainly, George has been inconvenienced by the mishap, but he also seems to take advantage of the accident to get his way. Eventually, they get lost and pull over to ask for directions. That’s when the first zombie shows up, a zombie who we soon see attack Edna’s sister and kill her husband.

After the killing, the movie’s third major character arrives on the scene, a local police inspector played by Arthur Kennedy. From the outset, he makes no bones of his dislike for George and Edna, who he sees as a pair of big-city longhairs. Soon, George and Edna find themselves stuck in a little town awaiting further questioning in the murders. As they wait, they begin investigating the killings themselves, but their poking around arouses the suspicions of the police, especially when more people turn up dead.

Of course, there’s no doubt that the zombies are to blame for the killings. We see the first zombie infect other corpses, who proceed to attack the living all over the countryside. George and Edna’s investigations lead them to a small cemetery, where they are cornered by a trio of the undead. Eventually, they escape with help from a police officer, but the zombies kill and eat the officer and tear apart the cemetery before George sets them on fire. Having been raised on zombie movies that almost invariably follow the Romero rule of removing the head or destroying the brain to stop zombies, it’s interesting to see a movie that was made before this method was universally acknowledged.

But then, what is Let Sleeping Corpses Lie but a movie that was made before the zombie mythos had been fully formed? Understandably, the characters in the film are reluctant to believe that the dead can not only be brought back to some semblance of life, but are actually compelled to kill and eat their victims. This leads to the central conflict of the movie, between George and Edna and the Inspector, whose antipathy towards these outsiders only worsens when he sees the situation on the cemetery. Observing the overturned graves, charred bodies, and half-eaten remains of his officer, the inspector assumes that they’re Satanists and cannibals.

It’s this friction, this constant misunderstanding that takes place between the protagonists of the film and the inspector, that makes Let Sleeping Corpses Lie very much a product of its time. At every turn, the inspector questions the motives of the pair of big-city twentysomethings. At one point, he even tells George, “You're all the same the lot of you, with your long hair and faggot clothes. Drugs, sex, every sort of filth!” He seems to devote more energy to monitoring them than to actually solving the case, having quickly jumped to the conclusion that the two actions are one and the same. And when he finally thinks he’s closed the case, he confidently states that he’ll be treated as a hero. Needless to say, things don’t quite work out that way.

Yet all the while, the real culprit hides within plain sight- a snazzy experimental machine that kills insect with “ultrasonic radiation,” within a five-mile radius, but has the unwelcome side effect of raising the dead within that same range. George catches on to this fairly quickly, but his protestations go unheeded by the people who would blindly defend the establishment rather than keep an open mind about a potential solution. And therein can be found the most timely and despairing aspect of Let Sleeping Corpses Lie- the acknowledgement that the generations might solve their problems if they would only listen to each other instead of pointing fingers. Pretty heavy stuff from a movie in which a woman gets her breast chewed off by a zombie, I’m sure you’ll agree.

Reviews By (Sorta) Request: Tenebrae (1982, Dario Argento)

Paul Clark — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 19:00:00 GMT

Note: Due to an untimely Netflix issue, I wasn’t able to watch and review your selected film, Let Sleeping Corpses Lie, in time for this week’s Reviews By Request. Instead, I’ve written about the film that received the second-highest number of votes, Dario Argento’s Tenebrae. I’ll be writing about Let Sleeping Corpses at a later date, as soon as I’m able to view it. Thanks for understanding.

In addition, I’ll be polling you to determine the film for my November 14 Reviews By Request column. To vote, see the poll at the bottom of this review.

One of my fondest memories as a moviegoer was attending the semi-legendary world premiere of Dario Argento’s The Mother of Tears at last fall’s Toronto Film Festival. The movie itself was only so-so, but what made the experience such a thrill was that Argento himself was in attendance. While most filmmaker Q&As are pretty buttoned-up affairs, Argento’s was anything but. There was an irreverent, almost party-like (since it was his birthday, we even sang to him) atmosphere that filled the room, and Argento, crazy eyes beaming as he took the stage, presided over it all. As he answered question after question in his own inimitable way- even discussing his urge to cast lesbians with no pubic hair as witches- one thing was clear: It was Dario’s happening, baby, and it freaked him out.

I mention this experience not to brag or to be a name-dropper but to make it clear that, above all else, Dario Argento is a showman, something that comes through in all of his best-known work. And of all the Argento films I’ve seen to date, none has demonstrated this so clearly as Tenebrae. In Tenebrae, Argento uses all of the filmmaking tricks in his arsenal to keep his audience entertained. The result is intoxicating.

The movie begins as a fairly standard-issue whodunit. The story focuses on Peter Neal (Anthony Franciosa), a best-selling author who specializes in violent mysteries. After he arrives in Rome, people begin getting killed in gruesome ways. A woman, her throat slashed, is found with Neal’s latest page-turner- entitled Tenebrae, of course- stuffed into her mouth. The police get involved, and Neal begins receiving letters from the killer. As is par for the course in murder mysteries, Neal is surrounded by plenty of likely suspects, nearly all of whom are picked off, one by one, by the actual killer. As bodies begin to pile up, it’s up to Neal and the police to figure out who, shall we say, dunit.

As I said before, the setup is nothing special. But Argento is too much of a showman to make a simple- albeit extremely bloody- murder mystery, which the second half of the movie makes abundantly clear. Around the time Neal- and the audience- has figured out the most likely suspect in the case, the suspect is brutally and decisively murdered. Yet the killing is far from over. From that point on, the key color is red- the color of both the herrings and the blood that flows liberally up until the very end of the movie. At one point, Neal quotes Arthur Conan Doyle, saying, "when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” One of the chief pleasures of Tenebrae is just how improbable Argento is willing to make his storyline in the service of his crazed, brilliant vision.

As one would expect from Argento, the killing scenes are worth the price of admission- not merely the manner of death itself, but also the way Argento directs them. Clearly, Argento means to entertain the audience with the carnage, and while that might not wash with those who tut-tut the use of violence as entertainment (Michael Haneke would certainly not approve), the sheer excessiveness of Argento’s style makes them shamelessly thrilling. There’s an undeniable naughty-boy glee to be derived from seeing the convoluted ways in which Argento steers his characters to the slaughter, coupled with liberal uses of Grand Guignol-style lighting, complex camera movements, and of course, that Goblin score. And now, having seen Argento in person, it’s impossible not to imagine him sitting next to the camera and reveling in the bloody deliciousness of it all.

Perhaps most delicious of all, to my eyes, is the way Argento teases us with the identity of the film’s killer. At several points in the story, Argento intercuts a flashback sequence involving the murder of a beautiful woman, but fails to tell us who’s having the flashback. Eventually, when the woman’s red shoes turn up again on the feet of another character, Argento tantalizes us with by making us wonder what the connection might be. It goes without saying that the killing of this character and the revelation of the killer will go more or less hand in hand, but when Argento makes it happen in one of the most spectacularly bloody scenes I’ve ever witnessed, the result actually surpassed all my expectations.

In the past, I’ve enjoyed a number of Dario Argento’s films, especially Suspiria and Inferno, but none has ever really clicked for me the way Tenebrae does. In many ways, Argento’s classic-period films are fairly similar. But I’d say that what puts Tenebrae over the top is that it’s goes, well, over the top. More than any other Argento film I’ve seen, Tenebrae injects the style that won Argento legions of fans with an irresistible kind of wretched excess. And, to quote a film by another famously stylish contemporary of Argento’s, “nothing exceeds like excess.”

As before, I’m using a poll to select my next Review By Request. This time around, I’ve included two titles from a previous poll along with three new choices, which have nothing in common but for the fact that I’ve never seen them. The choice is yours:

What should I watch next? | BuzzDash polls

Again, feel free to use the comments to stump for your favorites of this lot, to suggest possible future titles, or simply to agree with me about how awesome Tenebrae is.

Reviews By Request: Cockfighter (1974, Monte Hellman)

Paul Clark — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 19:00:00 GMT

Note: Since the poll format of selecting movies for future Reviews by Request columns worked so well last time, I’ve decided to keep it for the time being. See the bottom of this piece to pick a Halloween column from five horror favorites I’ve never seen. But before you do, enjoy this review of the movie that was chosen by popular vote two weeks ago- Monte Hellman’s Cockfighter.

I honestly have no excuse for not seeing Cockfighter before. After all, I’ve long been a fan of Warren Oates, who I believe to be one of the finest and most undervalued of all screen actors. And I’ve enjoyed a number of Monte Hellman’s films in the past, particularly The Shooting and Two Lane Blacktop, both of which also starred Oates. So why have I taken so long to see Cockfighter? It wasn’t the violence against animals, which I’ve been able to handle in numerous other films. Maybe I was just waiting for the right occasion to see it. So thanks to those of you who voted for it.

As those of you who haven’t seen it might guess from the title, Cockfighter tells the story of a man who raises gamecocks to fight for sport. The man’s name is Frank Mansfield and is played, of course, by Oates. Cockfighting isn’t a lucrative line of work, but Frank seems to be pretty good at it. He’s got a house, a farm, and a mobile home- that is, until he loses it by making a too-rich bet against a longtime rival, played by Harry Dean Stanton. It’s not the first time that Frank has let his greed get the best of him, and the film flashes back to a previous occasion when he lost his best rooster and his chance at the Cockfighter of the Year medal by running off his mouth. Since then, he’s maintained a vow of silence (though he’s prone to talking in his sleep). It’s Frank’s quest to make it to the top that serves as the film’s story.

Given its subject material and Deep South setting, it should go without saying that Cockfighter is a B-movie. But like all of Hellman’s best-known work, it’s a B-movie of the highest caliber, which is to say that it takes advantage of the possibilities of working quick and cheap. A more extravagantly-budgeted film on the subject would spare no expense to re-create the world of Southern cockfighting. But because all Hellman could afford was to film real cockfights, the world more or less created itself. The fans don’t feel like extras because they aren’t, and the blood from the fights is real. It’s this aspect of the film that troubles many viewers, who object to the non-simulated violence against the animals. But Hellman directs these scenes in a matter-of-fact style that avoids the cheap thrills that are often part and parcel with exploitation movies. Cockfighting is a way of life for these people in the movie, and for the most part they’re long past the point of being affected by the violence they see in the ring.

My only prior experience with cockfighting, either in real life or onscreen, came from Claire Denis’ No Fear, No Die. The difference between the two films is striking. In Denis’ film, cockfighting is an underworld activity, run by criminals and dominated by immigrants, with fights taking place in shady back rooms. By contrast, Frank’s world is out in the open- there are special cockfighting arenas, police officers are seen at the fights, and the final tournament is sponsored by a Senator. Everyone involved in the cockfighting world- be they trainers, sponsors, or fans who bet on the matches- accepts the way it is, which makes it all the more affecting when an outsider is invited in only to discover she can’t take it. A lesser film might take the side of Mary Elizabeth (Patricia Pearcy), who loves Frank before seeing the disgusting business he’s in. But the film is above all a character study of a man who has chosen a less-than-savory path, but is committed to riding it as far as it’ll take him.

For this reason, Oates’ presence is invaluable. Hellman fills the film with plenty of vivid character actors- Harry Dean Stanton, Richard B. Shull, Laurie Bird, a young Ed Begley Jr., the inimitable Millie Perkins- but Oates owns the film. Cockfighter was released the same year as another of Oates’ too-rare lead roles, in Sam Peckinpah’s Bring Me The Head of Alfredo Garcia, and the differences between the two performances illustrate Oates’ formidable acting talent. In his own way, Frank is just as desperate as Garcia’s Benny, but whereas Benny was a down-and-out loser, Frank sublimates his desperation into the pursuit of his goal and blocks out anything that’s unrelated to it. And Frank’s vow of silence allow Oates to demonstrate his gift for physical acting, which often leads to priceless bits of comedy (the film is sometimes very funny, something I’ve somehow neglected to mention before).

All the while, Oates never allows the character to become too charming or too heroic. Perhaps that was his greatest asset as an actor- his ability to keep his characters human-sized, with all the frailty and foolishness that implies. Rather than serving as larger-than-life vessels for audience wish fulfillment, Oates’ performances reflect the way we believe (or fear) that we ourselves would react to life’s biggest challenges. And while that’s not the stuff of top-flight movie stardom, it’s real grown-up acting of the highest order, and few did it better than Warren Oates.

So, what’ll it be? The Hammer release that introduced the world to Christopher Lee’s Dracula? A semi-forgotten Euro-zombie movie that’s allegedly ripe for cult resurgence? A late-period Jacques Tourneur fright favorite? A Criterion-anointed Japanese classic? Or will it be a Dario Argento giallo, a subgenre in which I’m woefully underversed? You decide!

Choose a movie for my next Reviews By Request column: | BuzzDash polls

As always, feel free to stump for your favorites in the comments section, or suggest possibilities for upcoming columns. See you in two weeks!

Reviews by Request: War of the Gargantuas (1966, Ishiro Honda)

Paul Clark — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 19:00:00 GMT

Note: Beginning this week, I’m changing the format for Reviews by Request in an attempt to allow more people to participate in the requesting process. See the note at the end of the review for details.

Special thanks to reader Kent M. Beeson for requesting this week’s review, of which he said, “I'd love to hear what you think, but I fear the words will get stuck in your throat.” Hope I did it justice, Kent.

As sophisticated as I like to pretend my moviegoing tastes are, there’s still a part of me that loves old-school Japanese monster movies with a childlike glee. I’m guessing a lot of this has to do with the monsters themselves, which without fail tend to make me want to emit loud, Harry Knowles-like cheers of “man in suit! Yeeeeeah!!!” But while I (usually) refrain from doing this, there’s still something about this antiquated technique that takes me back to my youth. In an age when practically any monster imaginable can be created on a computer, it still proves tricky for FX whizzes to really give their CGI beasties a real presence in the action.

Now, some people out there aren’t as keen on old-school monsters as I am, presumably because they’re still in the thrall of the new and the flashy. But in my experience, it’s rare to find a digital monster with even half the personality of the man-in-suit creatures of yore. Peter Jackson’s Kong came close, as did the slimy baddie in The Host, but most of them are too graceful and weightless to really work in the same way as, say, the classic incarnations on Godzilla. By actually dressing a person up in an oversized rubber costume, a monster takes on a kind of imperfect human physicality that’s nearly impossible to duplicate on a computer. This is the difference between a monster who works as an actual character in the story and one that’s merely a plot device. And if a monster movie succeeds or fails on the basis of how good its monster is, Ishiro Honda’s War of the Gargantuas is one of the greatest monster movies ever made.

The plot is… well, I’m sure you can guess. A giant monster attacks Japan, the army tries to fight it off, and scientists work to determine how to destroy it. As with most of the classic “kaiju” movies, science is to blame for creating the monster- in this case, an American scientist (played by Russ Tamblyn) who once created an ape-like hulk who later escaped into the wild. The characters usually refer to the monster as “Frankenstein,” although anyone who paid attention in Brit Lit will no doubt recall that “Frankenstein” was the doctor’s name, while his creation was “Frankenstein’s Monster” or “The Creature.” No matter- the monster’s out there now, and much effort is expended to take it down.

But suddenly… wait, what’s this? There are actually TWO Frankensteins! Of course, there’d kind of have to be, or else the title wouldn’t make much sense. Anyway, it seems the creature currently menacing the coastline of Japan is not the same creature as the escaped Frankenstein. The new Frankenstein (called Gailah) is the destructive one, while the one that originally escaped (now called Sanda) tries to stop him. At one point, Tamblyn helpfully explains that human cruelty apparently caused Sanda to lose a piece of his body, which eventually developed into Gailah. “It’s kind of like cloning,” he says, although it sounds more like budding to me. If there’s a subtext here, it’s that the man’s appetite for destruction will only sow more hatred and evil in the world. Needless to say, this development leaves the army at a bit of a loss, since they can’t risk creating more Frankensteins in their efforts to destroy the one they’re facing.

I know what you’re saying- what about the monsters? Well, they’re awesome, in large part because they’re not the godlike creatures you’ll find in many movies of this sort. Gailah is basically an overgrown baby, panicking at the sight of fire or bright light, injuring fairly easily for a being of his size. Meanwhile, while the Japanese army would prefer to simply rid themselves of both Frankensteins, Tamblyn and comely assistant Kumi Mizuno know that Santa is really a gentle soul. In my favorite shot of the film, Sanda slides down a mountain in slow-motion to rescue Mizuno, who he remembers from when he was (much) smaller.

What’s inescapable about the Frankensteins is how clumsy they are. They don’t leap around with a balletic grace, but instead lumber and lurch like, well, Frankenstein’s monster. When they fight, they stomp around, they occasionally miss their punches, they fall with a thud. And of course, they do plenty of damage to the city, both inadvertently and purposely. In the end, they take their battle out to sea, where they are presumed destroyed by the sudden emergence of a massive volcano (a volcano ex machina?). Yet it’s never quite clear if they’ve actually been destroyed. One yearns for a sequel, but alas, it never happened.

War of the Gargantuas has pretty much everything you could want from a Japanese monster movie, and nothing you don’t. There’s very little “human interest” in the movie, aside from a hint of a love story between Tamblyn and Mizuno. Instead, the movie gives you 90 minutes of monster mayhem, army battles, wanton destruction, and stern-faced scientists trying to puzzle out what it all means, all in glorious Tohoscope™ and accompanied by music by the great Akira Ifukube. Yes, it’s formulaic, but when the formula is done this well, it’s churlish to complain. If you like movies like this, War of the Gargantuas should be right up your alley. I know I enjoyed the hell out of it.

~~~~

Beginning this week, I’ve decided to switch the format of my Reviews By Requests columns. Rather than taking suggestions in the comments section, I’m going to start using a poll to determine my next Review By Request. Below, I’ve listed five noteworthy films I haven’t seen. I ask only that you, the readers, choose your favorite from this rather diverse bunch. So, what’ll it be? Andy Warhol’s two-projector art film? Monte Hellmann’s Warren Oates-starring B-movie favorite? Werner Herzog’s early documentary about a blind and deaf woman? The Vincente Minnelli/Rat Pack classic that has lent its name to the blog of Screengrab fave Glenn Kenny? Or Kon Ichikawa’s epic account of the 1964 Olympic Games? It’s up to you:

Which of the following should I review next? | BuzzDash polls

This poll will remain active through Friday, and whichever movie receives the most votes will be my next Review By Request. So feel free to stump for your favorite of the bunch in the comments section below, or even suggest a few titles for the special horror-themed Review By Request that will run the week of Halloween.

Reviews by Request: The Wizard of Gore (1970, Herschell Gordon Lewis)

Peter Smith — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 19:00:00 GMT

[This piece is by Paul Clark, but his computer's down, so I'm posting it for him. — ed.]

Special thanks to reader Steve for requesting this week’s review. If you’d like to recommend a movie for the next installment of Reviews by Request, please read the procedures at the bottom of this review.

Unlike many film lovers I know, my cinematic education began fairly late. Sure, I’ve been watching them all my life, but I didn’t really get serious until I turned 17, and since I started reading movie reviews around the same time, I mostly tended to seek out the acknowledged classics. Throughout my college years, I would watch as many canonical titles as I could, and since then I’ve been working on trying to plug up the major gaps in my viewing- major titles by lesser-known filmmakers, lesser-known titles by major filmmakers, recommendations by friends and Screengrab readers, etc. Because of this, I’m pretty well versed in “quality” films, but much less so when it comes to exploitation favorites. I suppose this is as good an explanation as any of why The Wizard of Gore is my first Herschell Gordon Lewis film.

Now, all of you Lewis aficionados who are reading this (especially sleaze hound extraordinaire Steve, who requested this review) are probably wondering if I liked the movie. But while I did enjoy the film, it’s difficult for me to explain why, since The Wizard of Gore isn’t remotely good by any of the typical critical yardsticks. It doesn’t work as suspense, the plot is a non-starter, and Lewis isn’t director enough for it to be an effective horror movie. Heck, it doesn’t even have the saving grace of good performances or solid production values.

So the movie’s only remaining opportunity to work is to be schlock, and on those grounds it’s pretty successful. Practically the entire purpose of The Wizard of Gore is to gross out the audience with creative killings, and Lewis delivers on this front. The film’s title magician Montag the Magnificent (played by Ray Sager) is seen subjecting his onstage volunteers/victims to all sorts of depraved acts in the name of showmanship (especially twisted is the punch-press machine), which allows Lewis to show the resulting grue in loving close-up. By today’s standards, the gore isn’t remotely realistic- the blood’s too bright and the makeup effects are very latex-y looking. But I thought the lack of realism in the gore added to the old-fashioned entertainment value- Lewis is out less to horrify the audience than to disgust them, and it is pretty darn disgusting, but entertainingly so, especially when Montag leers at the camera while gleefully running his fingers through the crimson-colored entrails.

Another old-school aspect Lewis brings to the movie is his use of a narrative backbone that’s both bizarre and almost arbitrary to bridge the gaps between the gross-out scenes. In most movies of this sort nowadays, the filmmakers place a great deal of weight on their stories, expecting audiences to really care the characters and their personal dramas and demons. And while I respect any movie that actually pulls this off, most of the time this tactic backfires. Consequently, I find the half-assed filler material has a kind of charm. The story’s pretty much a meat-and-potatoes murder mystery, light on the potatoes, giving the movie a repetitive structure that would make formalists drool in ecstasy- gory magic show, aftermath, death, Montag stealing the bodies, investigation, lather, rinse, repeat. The perfunctory nature of these scenes feels like Lewis acknowledging that they’re primarily there to make the audience wait for the good stuff.

Then there’s the movie’s final reveal- obviously foreshadowed by Montag’s opening “is it all a dream?” monologue- which is brilliant in its sheer idiocy. Whereas most twist endings (even some of the bad ones) give audiences a chance to piece together how it all works, Lewis just drops this one on us and almost immediately ends the movie. Like most of The Wizard of Gore, it doesn’t really work in any conventional sense, but it’s sort of irresistible on its own terms. And while the film doesn’t reach the awful-awesome heights of Juan Piquer-Simon’s Pieces (for me, still the benchmark for blissfully bad schlock), it’s still a good time, and a worthwhile introduction for me to the now-intriguing career of Herschell Gordon Lewis.

Want to recommend a movie for the next installment of Reviews by Request? Be the first to submit (via the comments section below) the name of a movie that meets all of the follow criteria: (1) it must be something I’ve never seen before, and (2) it must be available via Netflix. The first person to submit a title that meets these criteria will have his or her chosen movie reviewed two weeks from today. Please- only one recommendation per person. See you in two weeks!

Reviews by Request: The Wizard of Gore (1970, Herschell Gordon Lewis)

Peter Smith — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 07:26:00 GMT

Reviews By Request: Knightriders (1981, George A. Romero)

Paul Clark — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 19:00:00 GMT

Note: Beginning this week, I’ve decided to make a change to my normal posting schedule, switching the posting dates of my big features. So from today onward, Reviews by Request and When Good Directors Go Bad will post on alternate Tuesdays, while Yesterday’s Hits will run every Friday.

Thanks to reader Jason Alley for requesting this week’s review. As always, for instructions on how to request the next review for this feature (to run in two weeks), see the bottom of this post.

In the opening scene of George A. Romero’s Knightriders, we see a blackbird flying through a forest at daybreak. The bird awakens a man, sleeping on the forest floor, next to a woman. We next see the man, stripped naked, in the river, flagellating himself with a stick. Then the man and woman don their clothes- the man, a suit of armor; the woman, a cloak and a crown. As they prepare to leave the woods, the camera finally reveals their trusty steed- a shiny new motorcycle, gleaming in the morning sun.

Make no mistake about it- Knightriders is a strange creature, from its premise on down. As the film continues, the man and woman soon join up with their companions, a traveling Renaissance Faire-esque troupe whose specialty is staging medieval tournaments using motorcycles instead of horses. It’s an odd juxtaposition and something of a bizarre spectacle around which to make a movie. But somehow, against all odds, Romero pulls it off.

From the beginning, Romero acknowledges the strangeness of pairing these two extremely dissimilar concepts. For most people, chivalry carries such associations as tradition, discipline, and a code of honor, while motorcyclists have a stigma of being hell-raisers and outlaws. Part of the reason the movie works is because it doesn’t so much try to reconcile the two ideas as let them play off each other.

On one side, there’s Morgan (Tom Savini), a mustached biker who joined the troupe to rider and fight, and started calling himself Morgan Le Fay until he was informed that the character was a woman. Morgan has set his sights on being the troupe’s King, until he gets another offer from a sleazeball agent to start his own show. Not for Morgan is the chivalric code, not when there’s money to be made and women to be bedded.

On the other side is Bill Davis (Ed Harris), the man we met in the forest at the beginning. Bill formed the troupe and became the King, and honestly believes that he’s carrying on the old ways. To him, the bikes are a necessary evil- they’re certainly not horses, but under the circumstances, they’ll do. But he’s not happy about it. When a young fan asks him to autograph a motorcycle magazine with his photograph inside, Bill refuses on principle. He treats the knight’s code of honor with deadly seriousness, and even when his actions seem foolish to others, he’s acting with the honor in mind.

In terms of the material, Knightriders would seem to be an odd choice for Romero, best known as director of horror movies like the Dead franchise, Martin, and The Crazies. But thematically, the films are more similar than they initially seem. Like all of his best-known work, Knightriders deals with the gulf between the lives of an insular, marginalized minority and the outside world.

The Dead films portray this idea at its most basic- a band of survivors barricading itself against outside threats. Here, the outsiders are those who aren’t part of the troupe- the “suckerheaded American driftwood” (Billy’s words) who come to see destruction and mayhem with no care for the meaning of it all. A pivotal tournament scene happens just as the troupe looks like it’s about to disband, but all the spectators care about is the motorcycles and the violence, even complaining when the musical accompaniment gets shut off.

But no less important to the story is the internal conflict of the group, between those who want to pander to the crowds and make big money, and those who want to stay true to the ideals upon which the group was founded. What’s sort of amazing is how successfully Romero integrates it into his story, instead of simply paying it lip service. As a filmmaker, the conflict between commerce and idealism no doubt held a great deal of interest for Romero, who must have had numerous temptations to make “safer” and more respectable films following the success of Dawn of the Dead.

I sometimes wonder if Romero doesn’t get his due as a filmmaker because he usually made movies in “disreputable” genres. Does the fact that action and horror movies are designed to provoke an emotional response first and foremost make the best ones unimaginable as art? Romero’s typically unobtrusive direction of Knightriders ranks among his best, effective in both its larger moments (the tournament scenes) and the smaller ones. One indelible moment in the film, almost incidental to the story, finds a middle-aged woman with a black eye standing alone in her kitchen just after her daughter has left with one of the troupe members. Romero’s camera watches her from a distance through a doorway, as she turns on the faucet just before she starts to cry. It’s a perfect little touch, one that tells us everything we need to know about her, and I’m glad Romero decided to keep it in the film.

Knightriders is divided into three main sections, centered around three tournaments. In the first two tournaments, the troupe is putting on a show for the paying audience, knocking each other off their bikes to get the spectators to whoop and cheer. But for the third, there’s no one watching but the rest of the troupe. The ideological conflict between Bill and Morgan has become real, and the battle could decide the fate of the group. True, no money will be made from this battle, but no matter- the participants finally have something to fight for.

So, what movie would you like me to review for the next installment of Reviews by Request? Let me know in the comments section below. To refresh your memory, here are the rules for requesting a movie to be reviewed: (1) it has to be a movie I haven’t seen, (2) it has to be available through Netflix, and (3) please only request one film. Other than that, anything is fair game. First to suggest a movie that qualifies gets their requested review. See you in two weeks!

Reviews By Request: The Hot Rock (1972, Peter Yates)

Paul Clark — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 19:00:00 GMT

Thanks to reader “Uncle Crizzle” (a.k.a. Craig Lindsey) for requesting this week’s review. As always, for instructions on how to request the next review for this feature (to run in two weeks), see the bottom of this post.

The more heist movies I see, the more I realize that the secret to a good one lies in three factors. First, the characters have to be engaging. There are only a limited number of heists one can pull onscreen, but if we enjoy the people onscreen it scarcely matters. Second, the script shouldn’t run out of ideas before the ending, so that the audience won’t be too sure where everything stands until all the pieces finally fall into place. Third- and perhaps most importantly- the movie has to be light on its feet. If the style or the storytelling becomes overbearing, the movie will turn into a slog, which is pretty much the last thing you want from a heist movie.

Peter Yates’ The Hot Rock succeeds on all three counts, with the added bonus of getting better as it goes along. In the opening scenes, I was expecting a fairly standard issue heist movie, albeit one with an impressive, quintessential seventies-era cast. But The Hot Rock has plenty of surprises up its sleeve, not least that the story’s central heist scene happens even before the midpoint of the film. Best of all, it takes itself just seriously enough that it doesn’t feel like a lark, but never too seriously. It’s a lot of fun.

But back to that central heist, which involves the titular rock, a massive diamond that’s long been a point of contention between the ruling factions of an obscure (and apocryphal) African nation. The country’s ambassador to the U.N., played by Moses Gunn, hires the recently-released-from-prison John Dortmunder (Robert Redford) to mastermind a plan to steal the stone for him. Dortmunder’s team- comprised of safecracker George Segal, driver Ron Liebman, and explosives expert Paul Sand- exhaustively plan the job which, while quaint by modern-day standards, is a pretty good one. Of course, it doesn’t quite go according to plan, and it’s the aftermath of the heist that makes the movie so enjoyable.

The Hot Rock was based on a novel by Donald E. Westlake, who I was familiar with primarily for his hard-hitting crime novels written as Richard Stark and his nihilistic screenplay for The Grifters. However, this film is based on one of Westlake’s lighter Dortmunder books, which gave me some pause since my only previous exposure to a Dortmunder story was the godawful 2001 Martin Lawrence vehicle What’s the Worst That Can Happen? That film took Westlake’s story and buried it in shticky storytelling and hammy performances until it became all but unwatchable, and I feared the worst from The Hot Rock as well.

However, the difference between the two movies is telling. Whereas the broadly comic style of What’s the Worst That Can Happen? didn’t suite Westlake’s terse prose one bit, Yates wisely plays the story straight. Primarily known up to that time as an action director (his biggest hit had been 1968’s Bullitt), Yates never leans too hard on the film’s comedy. Instead, he directs the story like a straight thriller, matter-of-factly following his band of crooks from one complication to the next. This only makes the movie that much funnier. Due to unforeseen difficulties, the original heist ends up leading to another job, then another, then yet another, each more unlikely than the last. And the team, which seemed so well-chosen at the beginning, becomes less so with each successive job. Consider that Liebman is perfect behind the wheel of damn near any car, but fairly out of sort when he finds himself in an entirely different sort of vehicle.

As I said before, the cast is a lot of fun. I’ve never been a big Robert Redford fan, but he’s a natural here as the master thief who has to keep his cool in order to think himself out of the messes in which he keeps finding himself. Segal is his usual reliable self as Dortmunder’s trusty lieutenant, all business to the outside world but always kvetching to the boss. Liebman and Sand have some good moments as the other team members. Gunn gets lots of laughs as the seemingly imperturbable diplomat, at first amused by his involvement in the crime (observe his wry smile when he states, “I am a criminal”), only to become increasingly frustrated with every new development in the case. And there’s a choice supporting role for the one and only Zero Mostel, as Sand’s shifty father. Given his over-the-top signature performance in The Producers, I sort of expected Mostel to clash with the others, but instead his outsize personality is in service of an outsize character, which allows him to fit in perfectly with the ensemble. It’s an indelible character turn, with the unfortunate side effect of making me wonder how many priceless Mostel performances we lost to the blacklist.

The Hot Rock is yet another reminder of the kind of action movies Hollywood was great at making during the seventies, but not nearly as good at today. The cast is enjoyable, the storytelling efficient, and most of all, the direction never calls attention to itself. As fun as Steven Soderbergh’s Ocean’s films sometimes are, there’s always a layer of self-consciousness to them, as though Soderbergh deliberately means to evoke a bygone filmmaking style. By contrast, Yates trusts in his story enough to stay out of the way, and the result is a highly enjoyable example of its genre, and a darn good entertainment in general.

So, what movie would you like me to review for the next installment of Reviews by Request? Let me know in the comments section below. To refresh your memory, here are the rules for requesting a movie to be reviewed: (1) it has to be a movie I haven’t seen, (2) it has to be available through Netflix, and (3) please only request one film. Other than that, anything is fair game. First to suggest a movie that qualifies gets their requested review. See you in two weeks!

Reviews By Request: Camera Buff (1979, Krzystzof Kieslowski)

Paul Clark — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 19:00:00 GMT

Thanks to reader Steven Carlson for requesting this week’s review. As always, for instructions on how to request the next review for this feature (to run in two weeks) see the bottom of this post.

When watching foreign-language films, it can be illustrative to look at their original titles. For example, the original title of Krzystzof Kieslowski’s early film Camera Buff is Amator, which roughly translates as Amateur. The difference between the two titles is telling. Whereas Camera Buff implies that the title character is a hobbyist or an enthusiast, the word “amateur” implies something more than that. The common definition of “amateur” is “non-professional”, but the root of the word is the Latin “amator”, or “lover.” In other words, someone who does something out of love.

Watching Camera Buff for the first time recently, I kept coming back to this idea, since for the film’s protagonist Filip Mosz (Jerzy Stuhr), making films is much more than a job. He first buys the camera to film his new baby girl, but soon gets the attention of his local party boss, who asks him to document the anniversary of his factory. Before he knows it, Filip has become a filmmaker- bankrolled by the party, traveling to film festivals, appearing on television, meeting major figures like Krzystzof Zanussi. All the while, Filip seems more than a little overwhelmed by the attention.

At one point in the film, Filip tells a coworker likens his filmmaking to stamp collecting. However, his behavior tells a different story. Once he picks up his camera at the beginning of the film, we rarely see Filip in a context that doesn’t involve filmmaking. When he’s at home, he’s usually reading a movie magazine or shooting footage out the window, much to the consternation of his wife, who finds herself attending to her newborn daughter alone. Meanwhile, the party boss becomes dismayed by the films Filip is making, as when he shoots a short film about a dwarf who works at the factory. The boss wonders if Filip might be holding his subject up to ridicule, but the look in his eyes says something different altogether. Could Filip be making a subversive work on the factory’s dime?

What gets Filip into trouble is that he can’t quite find a way to put the camera down for long enough to live his life. The very act of filming requires one to maintain a certain distance from the world around him. After all, how can everyone see what’s being shot unless the cameraman steps back to take it all in? However, this also distances Filip from his wife, who finds that she can no longer take his new vocation. When he leaves for his first film festival, she calls out from the train platform, “don’t win!” This isn’t because she doesn’t love him, but because she fears she’s losing him to his camera.

Early in the film, the boss quotes Lenin, who said, “cinema is the first art.” More than any other art form, movies connect deeply with people, and Filip’s work is no exception. His coworkers love him, the dwarf cries when the film about him is broadcast on television, and when a friend’s mother passes away, the first thing he asks Filip is to show him a film he shot of his mother when she was alive. Seeing the film, he remarks, “what you do is beautiful.”

But the party boss has a different point of view, seeing Filip’s work as potentially inflammatory. The film about the dwarf seems harmless enough, but it doesn’t necessarily put forth the image the Party wants. Even more troubling is Filip’s latest project, in which he peers behind the refurbished facades of the local buildings to reveal the crumbling structures behind them. In the film’s key scene, the boss takes Filip for a drive and talks to him not like a stern autocrat, but as someone who’s just pragmatic enough to know better than the rock the boat. “Public life cannot always withstand the light of day,” he says, before revealing that the local cultural minister- one of Filip’s friends and supporters- will be replaced because of Filip’s work.

Afterwards, he speaks with the fired minister, who assures him, “something good has awoken in you. Cultivate it.” But Filip isn’t strong enough to be responsible for his friend’s dismissal or for the resulting fallout from his construction exposé. So rather than facing this responsibility, he sabotages his own film and retreats, camera in hand, into his own life. Trouble is, most of it is gone, his wife and child having moved away. In the film’s final shot, Filip turns the camera on himself and remembers his wife and child- a touch that’s devastating both because of how much he’s lost and because of how pathetic it is that he still feels the need to cling to that camera.

Camera Buff lacks the ethereal quality that would distinguish most of Kieslowski’s later films, but given the oppressive regime under which he worked, perhaps that was for the best. Here, Kieslowski is largely concerned with telling one man’s story. One of the most interesting aspects of the story is how singleminded it is, charting the path taken by Filip as his love for filmmaking consumes his life. There’s almost nothing in the film that doesn’t have something to do with Filip’s vocation-turned-obsession, and more than once I was surprised by how elliptical the storytelling was, with months passing between some scenes. I was reminded of Hitchcock’s famous quote, “cinema is life with the boring bits cut out.” Unfortunately for Filip, those boring bits he missed were his life, passing him by.

So, what movie would you like me to review for the next installment of Reviews by Request? Let me know in the comments section below. To refresh your memory, here are the rules for requesting a movie to be reviewed: (1) it has to be a movie I haven’t seen, (2) it has to be available through Netflix, and (3) please only request one film. Other than that, anything is fair game. First to suggest a movie that qualifies gets their requested review. See you in two weeks!

Reviews By Request: The Atomic Cafe (1982, Kevin Rafferty, Jayne Loader, Pierce Rafferty)

Paul Clark — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 19:00:00 GMT

Thanks to reader Jason Alley for requesting this week’s review. As always, for instructions on how to request the next review for this feature (to run in two weeks) see the bottom of this post.

One of the most fascinating aspects of American history during the 1950s was the way the image of wholesome innocence was juxtaposed with perhaps the greatest sustained wave of fear our country has ever felt- the fear of nuclear annihilation. Of course, the two were hardly mutually exclusive- it was partly the paranoia that was sweeping the country at the time that kept all “good law-abiding Americans” on the straight and narrow path, lest they draw undue attention. This contrast between the white-bread face of fifties America and the tangible threat of the Bomb is but one notable aspect of the documentary The Atomic Café, but it’s probably the one that registered with me most strongly.

When regular Screengrab reader Jason Alley recommended The Atomic Café for this week’s Reviews By Request, I was expecting something more kitschy. The film's poster and the synopsis on IMDb suggested something along the lines of the documentary Hell’s Highway, which took a wink-wink look back at those cheeseball highway safety movies many of us were made to suffer through in Driver’s Ed. But while some of the helpful hints offered by the atomic bomb-themed classroom films seen in The Atomic Café sound pretty risible in retrospect, the film is deadly serious not just about the horror of potential nuclear war, but about how little we really knew about it back then.

Rather than a haphazard montage of old educational films and newsreel footage, Atomic Café directors Kevin Rafferty, Jayne Loader, and Pierce Rafferty structure the film as a chronological history of the building nuclear threat, told entirely through “found footage.” It’s this structure that’s key to the movie’s effect. A looser film might draw attention to the individual bits themselves, possibly drawing the same sort of knowing laughter that is often afforded misguided cautionary relics of yore (e.g. Reefer Madness). Instead, the chronology of the film allows the information to have a cumulative effect, as we approach the mindset of the shorts based on what the film has already shown us.

Consider how the film begins with the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The footage that follows focuses largely on the American idea that these bombings brought about the end of World War II (there’s even a newsreel entitled ”Peace: Isn’t It Wonderful?”). But while this might have indeed been the case, the footage from Japan tells a different story- charred corpses, mangled bodies, buildings leveled to the ground. As we see an aerial view of a bombed city, the filmmakers play an old American radio show in the background, with the hosts joking that the city looks “like Ebbets Field after a Giants doubleheader.”

But it wasn’t a joke anymore when the Soviets got their own Bomb. Anti-Communist fervor consumed our government, the Rosenbergs were executed, and we began preparing for the worst. Yet strangely enough, American newsreels and educational films actually downplayed the potential destruction a Soviet attack could cause. Bert the Turtle tells children to “duck and cover,” grade schoolers stock up on canned goods, and families build fallout shelters in the basements. All the while, those in the know suggest that these preparations might not be nearly enough to protect us, and wouldn’t even function as a deterrent.

All the while, the Raffertys and Loader use nothing but pre-existing audio and film, but they nonetheless make their points in no uncertain terms. This is especially true of the film’s final montage, when the film intercuts declassified films of actual nuclear tests with shots of people reacting to hypothetic blasts in educational films. As we see children crawling under their desks and adults covering themselves with picnic blankets, it’s hard not to marvel at how ill-prepared we really were for the possibility of nuclear war. How lucky for everyone that we never got to that point.

Small touches linger in the mind. An Army film showing soldiers participating in radiation experiments. An announcer interrupting a monologue about the Communist threat to plug two local shopping centers as bastions of “glorious capitalism.” A single shot of a Japanese man used twice, once in the lead-in to the footage of the Hiroshima bombing, and again in the final montage- perhaps as a way of musing how little good ducking and covering would have done him. Newsreel footage of a Wisconsin town simulating a “Communist invasion.” Then-Vice President Nixon proclaiming mental health to be “the single most important issue facing Americans today.” A priest insistently preaching the need to keep extra people out of your fallout shelter, by using force if necessary.

Watching The Atomic Café, I thought back to Peter Watkins’ masterpiece The War Game, which imagined the aftermath of a nuclear blast on an ill-prepared society. But while The Atomic Café lacks the gut-punch terror of Watkins’ film, its specificity and comprehensive recreation of the mindset of the period makes it worthy of being mentioned in the same breath, and that’s no mean feat.

So, what movie would you like me to review for the next installment of Reviews by Request? Let me know in the comments section below. To refresh your memory, here are the rules for requesting a movie to be reviewed: (1) it has to be a movie I haven’t seen, (2) it has to be available through Netflix, and (3) please only request one film. Other than that, anything is fair game. First to suggest a movie that qualifies gets their requested review. See you in two weeks!

Reviews by Request: Three on a Meathook (1972, William Girdler)

Paul Clark — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 19:00:00 GMT

Thanks to reader Cameron for requesting this week’s review. As always, for instructions on how to request the next review for this feature (to run in two weeks) see the bottom of this post.

I only have myself to blame. When I first came up with Reviews By Request, I did so in the hope that some loyal Screengrab readers would be recommend some treasures I hadn’t yet seen. However, there was always that fear that I’d left myself open for someone to come along and request something really terrible, and I would be committed to it by my word. And now, sure enough, it’s happened. I can’t begin to guess why reader Cameron might recommend William Girdler’s Three on a Meathook. Perhaps he legitimately likes the movie, or maybe he wanted to shake up the format a bit by recommending something crappy. Perhaps he’s one of those democratic souls who believe that every movie deserves a fair shake. Whatever the reason, I’ll honor his request. I’ve given my word, and I’ll be damned if Three on a Meathook is the movie that’s going to make me break my word.

That’s not to say I wasn’t tempted to mothball the feature this week. Hell, when I first started playing the DVD, it kept skipping and stopping, so maybe that was a sign. But I forged ahead all the same, cleaning off the disc and using another DVD player. And wouldn’t you know, that did the trick. I settled in to watch this movie which I hadn’t even heard of before Cameron recommended it to me, in the hope that maybe it would be some long-last classic of the horror genre. It wouldn’t be unprecedented, after all.

Then the movie began. I knew I was in for a long sit from the opening shot- a slow, deliberate pan across a cityscape, ending in a zoom into a hotel window. This seemed a bit too familiar. “It’s the opening shot of Psycho,” I thought. I wondered, optimistically perhaps, if Girdler might be wittily paying homage to the Master by beginning his debut feature this way. But as the film continued, I realized that the Three on a Meathook was a ripoff, and a shabby one at that. If Girdler had any talent as a filmmaker when he made this movie, he did a damn fine job keeping it to himself.

There are so many things that are wrong with Three on a Meathook that it’s impossible to know where to begin. Should I mention Girdler’s inability to set, let alone maintain, any sort of tone? His nonexistent sense of pacing, which leads to frequent digressions such as when protagonist Billy (James Pickett) goes into a bar and Pickett essentially stops the movie in order to watch the band American Xpress perform not one, but two songs? How about his godawful editing selections, as when he cuts away from a dinner scene to a completely unmotivated shot of the same scene from outside the house? Or how about those plot twists- one obvious, one nonsensical, both lame?

Possibly the most glaring issue with the movie is that the characters are so stupid. Now, I realize that Three on a Meathook was made in 1972, before the clichés of the slasher genre were long since established. But I’m not talking about characters wandering off alone here. I’m talking about a character who believes he has a problem with murdering young women against his will, yet doesn’t see any problem with picking up a truckload of female hitchhikers or bringing home a young woman he meets in a bar. I’m talking about a killer who doesn’t lock up the evidence when there’s a guest in the house. I’m talking about a woman who discovers a shed where the killer keeps his victims, then promptly runs back into the house where she knows the killer is. Part of what makes a successful horror movies is that we can relate to the characters, and we can imagine ourselves making the same decisions they do. Who could possibly identify with anything these people do?

It also helps when the movie is, you know, scary. And Three on a Meathook definitely isn’t that. Girdler’s chintzy visual style makes it impossible for him to build any atmosphere, and he barely even tries. The movie has plenty of violence and gore, but it’s all makeup and special effects, and even if they were good effects- which they certainly aren’t- gaping wounds and decapitations aren’t scary in and of themselves. Girdler’s only trick to elicit screams from the audience is zooming in quickly on “shocking” imagery, accompanied by dissonant synthesizer chords (Girdler also composed the score). Sorry, but unless you’re two years old and have never seen a movie before, this just doesn’t do the trick.

I’m reminded of a quote from Citizen Kane, in which Joseph Cotten says, “it’s no trick to make a lot of money, if what you want to do is make a lot of money.” Similarly, anyone can make a movie, provided all the person does is want to make a movie. Horror has long been a way for young aspiring filmmakers to create a calling card for themselves, as horror movies can often be made on the cheap and there’s always a market for scary stuff. However, only a chosen few of these movies can reach the heights of Night of the Living Dead, and most attempts to capture that same magic have been closer to Three on a Meathook than The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. It’s not a hateful movie, just a useless one.

I suppose that’s what pissed me off about Three on a Meathook, that it was so bad that I couldn’t even feel anything about it except vague annoyance. A great movie transports me, and good ones entertain me and sometimes stimulate my mind. Hell, at least when a movie makes me angry, it at least makes me ponder the reasons for my reaction. But aside from the aforementioned quote from Citizen Kane- surely the only time Welles’ masterpiece and Three on a Meathook would be mentioned in the same breath- all I could think of was how much this movie was wasting my time. There were so many other things I could have done with the 80 minutes it took to watch the film, and the hour it took to write this review. I suppose that faced with a movie like this, all that’s left for me is to remember the words of Willie T. Soke, who sagely said, “they can’t all be winners, kid.” Amen to that, Willie.

So, what movie would you like me to review for the next installment of Reviews by Request? Let me know in the comments section below. To refresh your memory, here are the rules for requesting a movie to be reviewed: (1) it has to be a movie I haven’t seen, (2) it has to be available through Netflix, and (3) please only request one film. Oh, and please- no more William Girdler. I’m pretty much Girdler-ed out for a while, I think. Other than that, anything is fair game. First to suggest a movie that qualifies gets their requested review. See you in two weeks!

Reviews By Request: Faithless (2000, Liv Ullmann)

Paul Clark — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 19:00:00 GMT

Thanks to reader “borstalboy” for requesting this week’s review. As always, for instructions on how to request the next review for this feature (to run the afternoon of Thursday, July 3 due to the holiday) see the bottom of this post.

On the surface, Faithless tells a story that’s been told thousands of times before. It’s a story of infidelity, with the fortyish Marianne (Lena Endre) falling in love with family friend David (Krister Henriksson), and leaving her husband Markus (Thomas Hanzon) to be with him. It’s an age-old story, familiar from plenty of novels, plays and films. There are numerous ways the story could play, perhaps as a thriller or a domestic melodrama. But in the end Faithless is neither of these, due in large part to a character I haven’t yet mentioned- the key character in the story. He’s a director played by Erland Josephson, who’s aging, thoughtful, solitary. A man not unlike Ingmar Bergman.

Faithless, directed by Liv Ullmann from a screenplay by Bergman, is not so much the story of a love affair as it is the story of the memory of that affair and the deep and painful scars it left on the lives of all it touched. The film begins and ends with the director, who sits at his desk to write down the story, and much of the story is structured as a dialogue between the director and his characters. Most of the time, we see him talking to Marianne- or more precisely listening to her- as she tells him her story. Yet whose story is it? In the film’s opening scene, we see the director conjure Marianne as if from thin air, emerging from the shadows as his conception of her comes into focus. But where did this conception come from?

More than most films, Faithless practically demands a level of familiarity with both the personal and professional lives of its makers. Bergman was, of course, one of the world’s greatest and most celebrated filmmakers, and Ullmann his frequent leading lady and muse. Offscreen, she was also his lover- hardly his first and certainly not his last- and his treasured friend as well. In many ways, Marianne feels like a surrogate of Ullmann, and Bergman can be seen not only in the director (Josephson was his closest friend) but also in the distant, severe David.

So what did Bergman and Ullmann hope to accomplish in making Faithless? Perhaps, to its makers, the film represented a shared act of empathy. It’s significant that the director imagines Marianne- not David or even Markus- as his story’s central player. By seeing the unfortunate series of events through her eyes, the director (and, one presumes, Bergman) finally comes to understand the emotional toll this had on her, albeit many years after the fact. But the understanding goes both ways, as Ullmann frequently makes use of Josephson’s face in reaction shots. At various points, we even see him reacting in pain or horror even before Marianne tells him what happened, in anticipation of what she’s about to say. It’s as though there’s a dialogue going on right before our eyes between writer and director, with Bergman apologizing for all the pain he’s caused and Ullmann reminding him of how deeply it hurt, even as she forgives him his sins.

Given his status as a master filmmaker, it’s tempting to watch Faithless solely as en film av Ingmar Bergman. But Ullmann’s own contributions to the film should not be underestimated. Visually, the film has a lushness and warmth that isn’t characteristic of Bergman films, which makes it more effective when Ullmann employs Bergman’s more clinical style in the scenes between Josephson and Endre, as well as key moments involving the character of David. But where the difference between the two filmmakers is most apparent comes in the characterizations. Bergman’s characters usually come off as archetypes, personifications of the psychological traumas or anxieties inherent to the stories they inhabited, and this suited his filmmaking perfectly. But the characters in Faithless have broader emotional palettes than the residents of Bergman’s world. Seen in their flashback scenes, they’re capable of joy and sorrow and passion, and of becoming caught up in the moment. Look at the scene where Markus discovers Marianne and David in bed together. As Markus tries to sort out his feelings, David keeps chuckling to himself, not out of cruelty but because he’s embarrassed at not wearing any pants. In turn, Marianne can’t help but chuckle as well, even as she wrestles with her own emotions. I can’t imagine Bergman directing this scene in this way, but it works perfectly.

Looking back at my review, I can’t help but notice that I’ve barely touched upon the acting in the film, although every performance is ideal, especially Lena Endre as Marianne. And I have devoted very little space to the film’s infidelity storyline which occupies the great majority of the film’s 2 ½ hour running time. But you can find great acting and stories of infidelity in any number of movies. What makes Faithless truly special is the way it presents two great cinematic artists- friends, collaborators, ex-lovers- trying to make peace with each other. In her final act of graciousness, Ullmann lets the camera rest on the director, alone once again, as he tries to piece together his memories so that he can write them down. After all, at this point in his life, what else can he do?

Previously on Reviews by Request:

The New Kids (1985, Sean S. Cunningham)

Lone Wolf and Cub: Sword of Vengeance (1972, Kenji Misumi)

Zulu (1964, Cy Endfield)

Baxter (2000, Jérôme Boivin)

So, what movie would you like me to review for the next installment of Reviews by Request? Let me know in the comments section below. To refresh your memory, here are the rules for requesting a movie to be reviewed: (1) it has to be a movie I haven’t seen, (2) it has to be available through Netflix, and (3) please only request one film. Other than that, anything is fair game. First to suggest a movie that qualifies gets their requested review. See you a week from Thursday!

Reviews By Request: The New Kids (1985, Sean S. Cunningham)

Paul Clark — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 19:00:00 GMT

Thanks to reader Jason Alley for requesting this week’s review. As always, for instructions on how to request the next review for this feature (to run in two weeks) see the bottom of this post.

A few years ago, a friend jokingly referred to me as an “art movie snob.” At first, I practically recoiled at the suggestion, but then he explained his reasoning- “think of the first section you go to when you walk into a video store. Some of us, we’ll hit the cult classics or the horror movies, but every time I go with you, you always head straight for the foreign films.” And you know, he was right. As a moviegoer, I tend to be drawn to more artistically edifying cinema, and even though I’ve tried to become more versed in genre filmmaking in the intervening years, truth is I’ve still got a lot of catching up to do. All of which is, I suppose, a roundabout way of saying that The New Kids wasn’t really the kind of movie I would normally seek out. But thanks to reader Jason Alley, I caught up with the film for this week’s Reviews by Request column, and while it wasn’t exactly my cup of tea, I found it sort of fascinating.

When Jason requested the film for review, he pitched it to me by saying “it’s like Straw Dogs directed by John Hughes.” He wasn’t far off the mark. The New Kids tells the story of Loren and Abby McWilliams (Shannon Presby and Lori Loughlin), a pair of Army brats who have recently moved to Florida following the deaths of their parents. Soon after, Loren and Abby run afoul of a gang of redneck bullies at their high school, led by Eddie Dutra (a young James Spader). The gang begins by menacing the attractive Abby, and when she rebuffs them, they respond by defacing the amusement park where they live with their uncle. But as the film progresses, the threats become more dangerous, until we see how crazy Dutra and his gang really are.

Okay, so the story isn’t exactly groundbreaking. Hell, it even provides a colorfully weird backdrop for the film’s climactic showdown. Yet The New Kids is made with a kind of brutal efficiency that makes it sort of charming. The tone is set early on when we see Loren and Abby exercising with their Army officer father (played by quintessential That Guy! Tom Atkins). Then, not five minutes after he’s been introduced, Atkins is dead. Never an explanation- just gone. The whole film is like that, never explaining anything or going into unnecessary detail, which I found refreshing in our time of bloated genre films that feel the need to dot every I.

The New Kids has no agenda except to be a lean thriller. Sean S. Cunningham, best known for directing the original Friday the 13th paints his story in broad strokes, with sympathetic protagonists and irredeemable villains. Yet sometimes some small bits of character business sneak in through the cracks. For example, I found it interesting how the film treats Loren’s more chivalric side. Every time he defends his sister or his family from Dutra, he doesn’t come off as simply heroic, but a little crazy himself, and his actions usually only serve to make the situation even worse.

Somehow, in the middle of it all, James Spader gives a surprisingly fine performance- surprising not because of Spader but because of the somewhat disposable nature of the film, in which one wouldn’t normally find memorable acting. But Spader makes for a genuinely frightening villain, mostly by projecting a kind of charismatic chilliness that almost imperceptibly segues into madness. Spader’s performance is a marvel of economy, with next to no wasted gestures. Look at the scene where he rallies his gang to chase down Abby after she escapes, where he cocks a shotgun and says, “let’s go hunting.” Rather than playing up the cheesiness of the line, Spader says it calmly, like he would if he’s about to shoot a squirrel, and as a result it’s more chilling than any overacting he might otherwise have done.

Most of The New Kids is fairly standard-issue revenge movie material, but the climactic faceoff between Dutra’s gang and Loren and Abby is pretty fascinating stuff, mostly because Cunningham shoots much of it from the point of view of the villains who are trying to find the heroes, rather than the heroes who are hiding and sneaking around. To be honest, I’m not sure this was intentional on Cunningham’s part, given his background in horror movies, but whether he meant to shoot the scene this way, it’s strangely compelling. At this point, the film becomes a kind of hybrid between slasher movie and revenge drama that I don’t think I’ve seen before. And then there’s the final scene, which plays like a combination of sick joke and setup for a sequel that never got made.

As I said before, The New Kids isn’t exactly what I’d call “my kind of movie.” But one of the goals of Reviews by Request is to broaden my horizons, to shine a light into shadowy corners of cinema that I might not have peered into otherwise. In the end, The New Kids isn’t a classic by any yardstick, but it’s certainly the kind of movie I can imagine becoming a cult object given half a chance, much as I’m told it already has among Jason (our intrepid requester) and his friends.

Previously on Reviews by Request:

Lone Wolf and Cub: Sword of Vengeance (1972, Kenji Misumi)

Zulu (1964, Cy Endfield)

Baxter (1989, Jérôme Boivin)

So, what movie would you like me to review for the next installment of Reviews by Request? Let me know in the comments section below. To refresh your memory, here are the rules for requesting a movie to be reviewed: (1) it has to be a movie I haven’t seen, (2) it has to be available through Netflix, and (3) please only request one film. Other than that, anything is fair game. First to suggest a movie that qualifies gets their requested review. See you in two weeks!