What was the last movie you watched?

[stethacantus]

Iceman: The Time Traveler ( 2018 )
As Saturday was New Years Eve, once again no evening movie. For the afternoon martial arts film, I finally got around to seeing Iceman: The Time Traveler. About five years ago I bought Iceman, a 2014 remake of The Iceman Comethstarring Donnie Yen. Both Iceman and a proposed sequel had been shot at the same time. Iceman bombed at the theater, so the sequel was never completed.  That is until 2018 when it was quietly released. Quietly enough that I didn't realize the sequel had been released until about a year ago when it turned up as a suggestion on Amazon. The movie is a bit of a mess, and suggests there would be at least a third film where now Donnie Yen travels around through time writing wrongs. He had returned to his original time to prevent a series of tragedies from happening, yet ends up failing, he then shows up back in time again before the tragedies happen, and is not sure he can prevent them as they are probably destiny. And that is where the movie ends, without revealing if he tries to save everyone, and if he does, if he succeeds or fails. One really big problem this movie has is that it seems heavily edited. Not just key scenes missing, but a lot of stuff explained in montages. If they still had a lot more scenes to film when production on the sequel was discontinued, then that would explain the odd editing.  To get around the missing scenes. However, it seems more like they decide this movie should have a 90 minute running time, so cut everything down to the minimum they could cut. At least this time around there are a lot of fight scenes instead of just a couple that bookend the beginning and ending of the film.

And yet, I'm curiously indifferent to An American Werewolf in London. It's not a film I ever thought was great or even particularly good. There were parts of it that I loved when I first saw it, sure. I loved every minute of the undead Griffin Dunne scenes and I had a huge crush on Jenny Agutter left over from Logan's Run (which I got to see at a drive-in in its "R"-rated version before it was cut to a PG for cable). I never thought the combination of humor and horror worked very well and I hated the werewolf.

I saw American Werewolf in London about three times in the theaters. It wasn't a film I was particularly trying to see. Before the multiplexes wiped them out, most of the independent theaters still showed double features, even when they were screening first run movies. I forget what films American Werewolf in London was the "B" feature for. But we would always watch the "B" feature, even for films we had seen more than once before. I remember being disappointed in the film. It wasn't promoted as a horror film, but the latest comedy from the director of Animal House and Blues Brothers. I don't recall it being funny at all. Maybe the audience snickered at the porn film being shown in the theater when the husband bursts in, but at nothing else. The transformation scenes were groundbreaking. But those effects were put to better use in the Thriller video. The horror elements to the film were the only thing that kept it interesting.

But as to Logans Run ever being "R" rated... I really doubt that. I saw that film in theaters when I was still in grade school during it's original run ( no pun intended. ) and it was PG in the theater I saw it in.  PG was a lot different in the late 60s and 70s when it was first invented. It originally meant no children under 12 years of age would be allowed in the theaters without a parent or guardian ( or some adult standing on line you paid an extra dollar to get you and your friends in to see an R or PG film. )My parents had taken me to see a few PG films ( all in the disaster movie genre ), and decided the rating was pretty tame. They decided I was allowed to see any PG film except for Jaws, which they said would give me nightmares. So they drove me to the theater showing Logan's Run, told the woman in the ticket boot that I had their permission to see the movie, then I went in without them. And that is how I saw my first tits on a movie screen. ( Three times,. Twice when they are in the ice cave with BOX, and once when skinny dipping a little later. Also, sideboob when Logan first meets Jessica. )  It wasn't until the arrival of PG-13, which had the same rules as PG, only you now needed to be 13 to get in, that PG films became more like G films. ( no more cursing or nudity. )  What you are probably thinking of is the network television edit. Whenever a theatrical film aired on network television, they edited out all nudity, violence and foul language. Sometimes they even added deleted scenes to pad the run time of a popular movie, so it ran for three hours instead of two and they could add more commercials. They also did something called "Pan & Scan Editing" where they took the wide screen film and turned it into a square shaped film, so it fit the dimensions of the old television sets without having a black bar at the top and bottom of the screen. The Pan & Scan was a very complicated process where you copied the theatrical print onto the square print, panning back and fourth on the theatrical print so that the main characters were always on screen and never cut off. Or sometimes cutting back and fourth between two characters talking who were on opposite sides of the widescreen theatrical print. When cable television first started, they didn't want to spend the money making a brand new Pan & Scan edit, so simply used the existing network Pan & Scan. But this also meant that they aired all the network censorship. This ended with the arrival of home video on videotape. The company releasing the film prepared an uncensored Pan and Scan for home video, which the cable outlets used. Although many of the first movies released on home video used the censored network television Pan and Scans. It wasn't until they realized people wanted uncut and uncensored on home video that they stopped this. But Embassy Home Video was releasing censored Pan & Scan movies up until the 90s when their label was discontinued.

Jenny Augutter  never got the fane she deserved from Logan's Run. It was released a couple of months after the first Charlie's Angels television pilot aired, and around the time the Farrah Fawcett poster became a best seller. And Farrah had a small part as a runner named Holly. So when they began promoting Logan's Run, they promoted Farrah in the movie instead of Jenny, nor was Jenny on any of the merchandise. Every Logan's Run poster at the time had Farrah as Holly. Even on the theatrical movie poster, Farah's head was five times bigger than that of Jenny. All the fan magazines talked about Farrah being in the film, and only casually mentioned Jenny as being Michael York's co-star. Poor Jenny was all but forgotten.

[Charles Castle]

There is a certain irony in Blood Freak (1971, directed by Brad F. Grinter and Steve Hawkes), a real dyed-in-the-wool sickie. Y'see, it was made in Florida, the stomping grounds of the Godfather of Gore himself, Herschell Gordon Lewis, and it does his tradition proud. Don't get me wrong, it isn't the film that Blood Feast is, or Two Thousand Maniacs, but it is weirder than anything that Lewis ever attempted (Something Weird and She Devils on Wheels not withstanding), because... well, this is an anti-drug propaganda movie produced by Christian fundamentalists.

The video box on the edition of the film I rented over 20 years ago calls it "Dracula on Drugs," but that's giving the movie too much credit. This movie is a huge gory moralizing mess. Our protagonist, an Elvis-looking biker portrayed by Steve Hawkes, one of the film's directors, meets up with bible-reading Angel and helps her out on the highway. She takes him home, where her slattern sister, Ann, leads him astray into a world of drugs and poultry. After eating a turkey that has been laced with a bizarre super drug, he turns into a blood-sucking turkey monster.

That's right: A turkey monster.

I would describe the plot mechanisms that lead up to this and spin away from it, but the movie is simply incomprehensible, filled with non-sequiturs and repulsive gore scenes. Every so often, the film's OTHER director shows up as a narrator to guide the viewer to the uplifting moral message of the film. He does this with downcast eyes, as if he is reading from the script. These sequences bear unfavorable comparison to the Criswell sequences from Plan 9 from Outer Space or Night of the Ghouls - if only our narrator were as flamboyant as Criswell. Blood Freak has a grotty feeling to it that is both distasteful and heartwarming at the same time: distasteful because it is an eyesore of a movie, but heartwarming because so many memorable exploitation films are wrapped in the same kind of package. But unlike, say, a Deranged or a Basket Case (two movies that make this an asset), Blood Freak doesn't turn that grottiness to advantage. Alas. This had the potential to resonate the way that an Eraserhead or a Reflecting Skin resonate, but it has no guiding artistic vision behind it, which is often the case with propaganda. And it's really too raw and bleeding an experience to function as a high camp object of derision. It just isn't that much fun to watch.

Sure is weird, though.

[Charles Castle]

And yet, I'm curiously indifferent to An American Werewolf in London. It's not a film I ever thought was great or even particularly good. There were parts of it that I loved when I first saw it, sure. I loved every minute of the undead Griffin Dunne scenes and I had a huge crush on Jenny Agutter left over from Logan's Run (which I got to see at a drive-in in its "R"-rated version before it was cut to a PG for cable). I never thought the combination of humor and horror worked very well and I hated the werewolf.

But as to Logans Run ever being "R" rated... I really doubt that. I saw that film in theaters when I was still in grade school during it's original run ( no pun intended. ) and it was PG in the theater I saw it in.  PG was a lot different in the late 60s and 70s when it was first invented. It originally meant no children under 12 years of age would be allowed in the theaters without a parent or guardian ( or some adult standing on line you paid an extra dollar to get you and your friends in to see an R or PG film. )My parents had taken me to see a few PG films ( all in the disaster movie genre ), and decided the rating was pretty tame. They decided I was allowed to see any PG film except for Jaws, which they said would give me nightmares. So they drove me to the theater showing Logan's Run, told the woman in the ticket boot that I had their permission to see the movie, then I went in without them. And that is how I saw my first tits on a movie screen. ( Three times,. Twice when they are in the ice cave with BOX, and once when skinny dipping a little later. Also, sideboob when Logan first meets Jessica. )  It wasn't until the arrival of PG-13, which had the same rules as PG, only you now needed to be 13 to get in, that PG films became more like G films. ( no more cursing or nudity. )  What you are probably thinking of is the network television edit. Whenever a theatrical film aired on network television, they edited out all nudity, violence and foul language. Sometimes they even added deleted scenes to pad the run time of a popular movie, so it ran for three hours instead of two and they could add more commercials. They also did something called "Pan & Scan Editing" where they took the wide screen film and turned it into a square shaped film, so it fit the dimensions of the old television sets without having a black bar at the top and bottom of the screen. The Pan & Scan was a very complicated process where you copied the theatrical print onto the square print, panning back and fourth on the theatrical print so that the main characters were always on screen and never cut off. Or sometimes cutting back and fourth between two characters talking who were on opposite sides of the widescreen theatrical print. When cable television first started, they didn't want to spend the money making a brand new Pan & Scan edit, so simply used the existing network Pan & Scan. But this also meant that they aired all the network censorship. This ended with the arrival of home video on videotape. The company releasing the film prepared an uncensored Pan and Scan for home video, which the cable outlets used. Although many of the first movies released on home video used the censored network television Pan and Scans. It wasn't until they realized people wanted uncut and uncensored on home video that they stopped this. But Embassy Home Video was releasing censored Pan & Scan movies up until the 90s when their label was discontinued.

Jenny Augutter  never got the fane she deserved from Logan's Run. It was released a couple of months after the first Charlie's Angels television pilot aired, and around the time the Farrah Fawcett poster became a best seller. And Farrah had a small part as a runner named Holly. So when they began promoting Logan's Run, they promoted Farrah in the movie instead of Jenny, nor was Jenny on any of the merchandise. Every Logan's Run poster at the time had Farrah as Holly. Even on the theatrical movie poster, Farah's head was five times bigger than that of Jenny. All the fan magazines talked about Farrah being in the film, and only casually mentioned Jenny as being Michael York's co-star. Poor Jenny was all but forgotten.

I put quotation marks around "R" to allude to tv editing. Even HBO edited Logan's Run if they ran it in the afternoon until the mid 80s or so. This made seeing the original version of the film seem like the equivalent of finding a Playboy in the woods to an 8 year old.

[Charles Castle]

There is a scene at the beginning of Romeo Must Die that announces its intentions pretty clearly, in which a Chinese man sits in a night club watching two gorgeous women on a dance floor french kissing. There is no reason for this scene at all, except perhaps to establish that this is, in fact, an exploitation film. After all, the fewer actual merits an exploitation movie has, the likelier it is to have a lesbian scene of some variety in it. From almost the first scene in the movie, Romeo Must Die wallows in exploitation traditions: it's a kung-fu movie and a blaxploitation movie all rolled into one. But it isn't very good.

The plot of Romeo Must Die is dime store Shakespeare. I guess the story has been done in stranger settings than this one. Jet Li plays a former policeman who is doing time for a crime he didn't commit in order to save his gangster father. Word reaches him that his brother has been killed in a gang war between Asian gangsters and Black gangsters. He escapes and goes to San Francisco to investigate. There, he meets and falls for the daughter of his father's rival. During the course of the investigation, he is crossed and double crossed, and eventually brings both families down in violent kung-fu sequences. This sounds good enough on paper, but it doesn't work very well for a couple of reasons. First, the kung-fu sequences are poorly filmed and utilize obvious computer enhancement (including some really silly extrapolations of the "X-ray" shot in Sonny Chiba's Streetfighter). This is pretty much a cheat, since the audience is there to see Jet Li kick ass on his own, but i guess Li's Hong Kong films use a lot of wires. Second, the relationship between Romeo and Juliet is bloodless and without passion, which indicates that the filmmakers don't care about the characters so much as they care about bodies and bullets in motion. Since, as I have already established in point one, the bodies and bullets in motion are underwhelming, the lack of character development becomes more obvious. Oh, the film has one or two good ideas - the scene where Li uses his girlfriend's body as a kung-fu weapon against a female opponent is pretty funny (he won't hit a girl, you see), as is the football game where Li kung-fu's the entire opposing team (and some of his own team, too). But on the whole, Romeo Must Die is so much less than the sum of its parts that it stands revealed as the shallow exploitation film that it is. Jet Li and his fans deserve better.

[Charles Castle]

Luis Buñuel's late career has been described as one of the great artistic flowerings in cinema. Starting in (roughly) 1961, the conventional wisdom suggests, Buñuel began making masterpieces as a matter of course. I'm not entirely sympathetic with this point of view. By the time he made Viridiana (1961), he had already made Los Olvidados and The Criminal Life of Archibaldo De La Cruz. It is, perhaps, more correct to say that after 1961, the world noticed that Bunuel was making masterpieces whenever he was given his head. The revival of his reputation occurred, perhaps, because he was no longer working in the ignored cinematic backwater of Mexico. The film cognoscenti can be Eurocentric, sometimes, especially the French. Even two years before Viridiana, French critics were wondering what had happened to Buñuel after the promising start to his career. And then Viridiana happened and Buñuel's fortunes changed. Even if one accepts that Buñuel's late flowering is an illusion or a trick of one's point of view, Viridiana remains a film upon which his career seems to turn.

The liner notes on the Criterion edition to Viridiana describe a cartoon in which Buñuel steps off the airplane and hands General Franco a present. To the astonishment of both Franco and a protester in the background, it explodes in Franco's face. This is more or less the story of Viridiana. No good deed goes unpunished. It seems incredible that the fascist, Franco, didn't know what he was getting in Buñuel. His early films were notorious. Even as late as 1960, Don Luis was making films to shock the sensibilities of the bourgeoisie. His 1960 film, The Young One, was a film to make audiences of the day blush. So Franco invited a bomb-thrower into the palace and was shocked that that bomb-thrower threw a bomb. He might as well have asked a leopard to change his spots.

Buñuel returned to Spain at the urging of Carlos Saura's new production company, Uninci, as a means of kickstarting Spain's long-supressed national cinema. Buñuel, for his part, had been existing on marginal productions in Mexico. His films there rarely made money unless they were pre-selected genre pictures, and he continued working on the good will of his admirers. In Viridiana, Buñuel would have resources denied him in Mexico, so making the film - Franco or no - could only be a good thing for him. He made the most of his opportunity.

Viridiana tells the story of a young woman who is about to take her vows to become a nun. Her mother superior orders her to visit her uncle before taking the vows. Obediently, she complies. Her uncle is fixated on Viridiana, who resembles his dead wife. He convinces Viridiana to dress in his wife's wedding gown and proposes to her. When she refuses, he drugs her with the intent of raping her. But he can't go through with it. He tells Viridiana that he did rape her as a means of preventing her from taking her vows, but to no avail. When it becomes clear that she will always despise him, he hangs himself with a jump rope. This thwarts Viridiana, who stays on at her uncle's estate, no longer interested in taking her vows. She has too much guilt to expiate in a convent. She chooses to expiate her guilt by providing charity to a group of beggars, who she puts into the abandoned dormitories for the workers on her uncle's now-fallow farm. Meanwhile, her uncle's son arrives to take up residence with his girlfriend. Viridiana's presence soon breaks them up. Jorge, like his father, lusts after Viridiana, but to no avail. Jorge soothes his wounded pride by taking up with the housewoman, Ramona. When Jorge and Viridiana leave the house on business for a short while, the beggars invade the house and wreck the place. Finding them en flagrante when they return, Jorge is taken captive and the other beggars decide to rape Viridiana. Jorge manages to avert this by bribing one beggar to kill the would-be rapist. The film ends with Viridiana beholden to Jorge, and with Jorge inviting Viridiana to "play cards" with Ramona and himself.

One of the things you see in Viridiana is a full flowering of Buñuel cinematic anima. Perhaps because he wasn't answering to his producers for a change, this is a film that's full of the markers that distinctively stamp the film as Buñuel's. There's the foot fetish and crossdressing (Don Jaime is seen trying on his wife's slippers and is interrupted before he can lace himself into her corset). There's the fascination with insects. There's the dialogue between Buñuel's lack of faith and the things the church taught him as he came of age. Buñuel is a classic ex-Catholic, one who excoriates the church while still being deeply influenced by it's teachings. He responds to his upbringing by revering the Church's images while simultaneously desecrating them (in the sense of making them "not-sacred"): the crucifix that hides a switchblade, the beggars' parody of "The Last Supper," Viridiana's crown of thorns consigned to the fire. The Catholic Church, predictably, was horrified by the film. The Church colluded with Franco to make sure the film was suppressed, an action made very difficult by the Cannes Film Festival, which awarded it the Palme d'Or. It would be over a decade before the film actually played in Spain. In the interim, it became an underground film, one seen in private on bootleg prints. Fortunately, the film was adopted by Mexico after Franco and The Church orphaned it.

One of Viridiana's most famous images is a dog being dragged along by a mule cart. Slow down for even a second, and the dog will be choked. Jorge buys the dog, ignorant of another dog in the exact same predicament passing behind him. In the context of the movie, the message seems to be that charity is a fool's errand. This is certainly the case with Viridiana's beggars. As in most Buñuel's best films (of which this is one), this critique of piety and religious generosity is a harsh rebuke to the bourgeois notions they inform. This is laced with a withering irony. The most reprehensible character in the film is arguably Don Jaime, Viridiana's uncle, who Buñuel shows us engaging in acts of charity throughout his portion of the film: he supports Viridiana at the convent, he takes her in when she visits, his generosity has supported Ramona and her daughter for years. He's even shown fishing a honeybee out of some water. This character trait appears to have been passed to Jorge, who, as I've noted, takes pity on the dog. The movie doesn't condemn this variety of charity, since it's all entirely self-interested. It's Viridiana's charity, performed as penance to a vindictive god that Buñuel doesn't believe exists, that sticks in his craw, and he punishes her for it.

Buñuel is not often thought of as a visual innovator, a fact that Buñuel seems to acknowledge in the interviews and such provided with the Criterion dvd. "I have never liked refabricated cinematographic beauty," he once said, "which very often makes one forget what the film wants to tell, and which personally, does not move me." The surrealism of Bunuel's ideas are often accompanied by an unfussy naturalism. Los Olvidados could be mistaken for a neo-realist film if taken at face value, for example. This notion of utilitarianism is belied by the beauty of Viridiana, a film that shows that even if he doesn't care about the aesthetics of his shots, he does care about how they communicate the space and the blocking of his scenes, something at which Bunuel was a master. Take this shot, for instance:



It uses space to communicate the distance between Viridiana and Don Jaime. The arrangement of elements in receding planes of film space is accidentally beautiful. Or maybe not so accidentally. Bunuel is not always a director whose word should be taken without a grain of salt. He was capricious.

In another version of film history, Silvia Pinal and Luis Bunuel would be mentioned in the same breath, like Von Sternberg and Dietrich or Scorsese and De Niro. She ultimately made three films with Bunuel, and she's partially responsible for Viridiana existing at all. Her husband produced the film at her urging. She had been pushing to work with Bunuel for years. She was Bunuel's first choice for the lead in Diary of a Chambermaid, Belle de Jour, and Tristana, parts that eventually went to Jeanne Moreau and Catherine Deneuve respectively for their supposed box office clout. Being pushed out of Diary of a Chambermaid, produced by her husband, broke up her marriage. Pinal in Viridiana has something of the look of Catherine Deneuve, though without the glacial distance and inhuman beauty. In the dark Gothic set of Don Jaime's mansion, dressed in the wedding gown, she glows incandescent. As with Deneuve in Belle de Jour and Tristana, Bunuel sets out to defile the image of holy femininity Pinal represents. Over the full course of their collaboration, Bunuel presents Pinal as both madonna and whore, spiritual ideal, foolish bourgeoisie, and, ultimately, as the devil in Simon of the Desert. Perhaps ironically, Pinal named her daughter Viridiana. She knew the eventual fate of the film. It's one for the ages and she knew it and consequently she gives everything to it.

As I've said, Bunuel's late period begins with Viridiana, and even though I may discount the idea that Bunuel's films of the 1960s and 70s are necessarily more important than his Mexican films or his early surrealist films, they are the films upon which his reputation and fame rests. And, if I'm honest, I'll admit that Viridiana is my favorite of his films. It's his funniest deconstruction of Catholicism. The ex-Catholic in me revels in its blasphemy. It's also his easiest to watch. Mind you, Bunuel was never one of those arthouse directors whose films require a great deal of patience to unlock. Bunuel's unfussy style puts everything in front of an audience while it unreels. He never shirked at providing a narrative, and Viridiana's narrative hook pulls the viewer along with a persistent tug. Rewatching it, I was struck by how much fun it is to follow. Alfred Hitchcock once cited Bunuel as his favorite director. Perhaps he sensed a kinship with a filmmaker who knew how to please an audience without sacrificing his own themes and interests or worldview.

[stethacantus]

Along with the Gods: The Two Worlds ( 2017 )
I occasionally buy a movie released by Well Go. Actually, a lot of films released by Well Go.  And whenever I do, I watch the trailers for other Well Go releases. Often I see something I like, then write down the name of the movie for later purchase. The trailer for this movie looked fantastic. It also made it look like this was going to be a  martial arts film, of which there was very little martial arts. Still, this was a fantastic fantasy with quality visual effects. A fireman is killed in the line of duty, and in the afterlife must go through seven trials in order to reincarnate. Each trial judging him based on what he did during his life. If he is convicted at any one of his trials then he will be sentenced to one of seven hells. Coming to his aid are three guardian spirits who act as his lawyers. Not just a thrilling visual effects film, but with a genially touching story to go with it. Worth seeking out.


Space Jam ( 1996 )
So I had casually mentioned to someone that the only movie with King Kong I was missing was the sequel to Space Jams, although I was not sure how much screen time King Kong actually had. Perhaps like Ready Player One and Lego Batman, King Kong was only on screen for less than a minute. So then this Christmas this person gives me Space Jams and Space Jam: A New Legacy in one of those budget double feature sets. To tell the ruth, many many years ago, when I first started buying superhero films, I was considering buying Space Jam because I thought that it would only take me a few months to buy all of the existing superhero films, and was considering expanding my collection to include any live action movies based on comic strips, and Saturday morning cartoons.  But then a lot of superhero movies got released every year, and I kept finding a lot of movies in the superhero genre, and I realized the genre could not be completed in a few months. So extending it beyond Superheroes was put on hold. Normally I do not get to the Blu-rays and DVDs gifted to me for Christmas until March, as I still have the bunch I bought for Cyber Monday, the next batch I bought from Amazon gift cards given for Christmas, and in late January I buy a lot of superhero films released the previous year because by then the price has dropped from around $30 per film to around $10. But the person who gifted me the Space Jam's double feature kept asking me if I had watched it yet, and why I had not watched it yet. So this Saturday, with  Saturday Night Live still on hiatus, I thought I would watch both films back to back. And after the first one, realized I could only stomach one Space Jams movie this weekend. So instead, spent the rest of the evening catching up on the television series that I had bought complete series sets of.

Back in 1984 Michael Jordan signed a deal with Nike to endorse one of the first expensive designer sneakers called Air Jordans. Getting a cut of the sales profits, Michael would wear the latest Air Jordan during his games and appear in commercials for the shoe. In 1992 Nike wanted to promote the latest Air Jordan with a Super Bowl commercial, and was stuck with thinking of a concept that would stand out against the other Super Bowl commercials, which was to include the return of the popular Bud Bowl and Cindy Crawford in a Pepsi commercial. Meanwhile, Warner Bros. had begun pimping out their various properties to the advertisement firms for use in their Super Bowl commercials, including the D.C. superheroes, old films like Casablanca and the Looney Toons characters. Someone at Nike's advertisement firm realized Bugs Bunny could be called Hair Jordan, and a commercial was born. In the original advertisement, Bugs Bunny gets into an altercation with some basketball players, challenges them to a game, and brings in Michael Jordan as his teammate. The commercial was a huge success, but could not be repeated the following year as Jordan had signed a deal to be in a McDonalds commercial with Larry Bird where they challenge each other to increasingly impossible trick shots, the first to miss has to buy the other lunch at McDonalds. In 1994 Michael Jordan was free to do another Nike commercial, the sequel to the first Hair Jordan commercial. This time Mike and Bugs find themselves on Mars, and challenged to a game against a group of large Martians called the Scream Team. ( a nod to the 1992 men's Olympic Team for Basketball which for the first time allowed professional players, and was made up of the best NBA players of the era, including Jordan, Bird, and Magic Johnson. ) The sequel commercial was just as popular as the first. This inspired Warner Bros. to turn the commercials into a full length feature film. Supposedly the film was greenlit in 1992 based on the success of the first commercial, and was cancelled by Warner Bros. when Michael Jordan retired from Basketball because he wanted to become a baseball player. This lasted for two years as Jordan played for a couple of minor league teams, but was not good enough for the majors. In 1995 he retired from Baseball and returned to Basketball. The movie was back on, this time based on the second commercial. Michael's retirement from basketball and his attempt at a baseball career were used as part of the plot of the film, suggesting his desire to return to basketball came from playing a game against the aliens.

I had only seen the two Nike commercials, and aside from them both being hectically edited, as if they were originally planning a 90 second commercial but cut it back to 60 seconds, they were amusing. But the entire concept was condensed to a minute. Space Jam is 90 times longer. Everyone who saw this movie seemed to have liked it. I thought I would like it too. I would not call it boring. But I would also not call it funny. A couple of gags with Daffy Duck almost made me laugh, but that's about it. Like I said, it somehow isn't boring, which is it's only saving grace.  A couple of things to note. The audience at the game is made up of several Loony Toon characters, mostly minor ones. But because they needed the audience to fill out an entire arena, if you look closely you can see the same set of characters repeat over and over again as if everyone there had hundreds of doppelgangers who moved exactly the same. Another thing. Apparently the Blu-ray disc this came on ported over all of the extras from the DVD, except for one. The R Kelly video for I Believe I Can Fly is not included, despite all the other promo videos for the film being present. I get that the Blu-ray was released after R Kelly's conviction, but did they really need to cancel him from the extras? At least they didn't remove the song from the soundtrack.

I put quotation marks around "R" to allude to tv editing. Even HBO edited Logan's Run if they ran it in the afternoon until the mid 80s or so. This made seeing the original version of the film seem like the equivalent of finding a Playboy in the woods to an 8 year old.

So apparently  M.G.M. was one of the companies who took the already existing network television edit to use for their VHS home video release. Not to censor it, but because they were too cheap to pay for a second pan-and-scan edit with the deleted material kept in. It is possible the network version which was used on home video and cable was longer than the theatrical version, if the network ( I believe it was CBS ) added in deleted scenes to pad the running tome for the television broadcast. ( The ultimate padding for a network broadcast of a theatrical film goes to NBC's version of Earthquake, which not only included every existing deleted scene and extended scenes, but had NBC shooting 20 minutes of new footage involving an architect and his wife on an airliner on his way to Los Angeles, as well as new footage with Marjoe Gortner as the crazy national guardsman.  What was 2 hours in the theaters was extended to 2 hours 40 minutes on Television, or approximately 4 hours with commercials, which they aired over two nights.  Logan's Run was also turned into a television series, but with new actors, and a rebooted story line which replaced Peter Ustinov's old man character with an android called REM. It was cancelled after 14  episodes. More recent home video releases have the uncut theatrical version, as they needed to have the widescreen print.

[Charles Castle]

On the eve of the American Revolution, Benjamin Martin (Mel Gibson), a veteran of the French and Indian War, is building a life for his family on his plantation in South Carolina. He supports the cause of independence from England, but he is a man with a family to raise and he doesn't wish to leave them fatherless. His hotheaded oldest son doesn't see eye to eye with his pacifism and enlists in the Continental Army. When the fighting eventually reaches Martin's plantation, Martin tends the wounded of both sides, even as his son, now a military courier, staggers home. When the British take the farm, a sadistic colonel (Jason Isaacs) orders Martin's son hanged as a spy and the house and barn burned. During the fracas, one of Martin's younger sons is killed. Martin is pushed into the war, where he conducts a guerrilla campaign against General Cornwallis, who has swept the Continentals from the field in South Carolina and has no one to oppose his march north. By now, Martin has achieved a reputation as a "Ghost" and the British are hell bent for his death or capture. They attempt to smoke him out with brutal terrorist tactics even as Martin continues to harry their forces. Meanwhile, the war has taken on a personal dimension for Martin, as he seeks the death of the colonel who killed his son: "Before this war is over," he tells him, "I'm going to kill you." The war in The South comes to a head when the Continentals under General Green and the British under Cornwallis fight a battle with the fate of the war at stake. Martin's militia volunteer to help the Continentals and a devious battle plan is enacted.

There is a point about forty minutes into The Patriot (2000. Directed by Roland Emmerich) when the whole thing threatens to slip the leash and rampage into uncharted territory. The film took some heat at the time for being based on the less than heroic figure of Francis Marion, "The Swamp Fox," who was notoriously racist, who enjoyed hunting Chrerokee Indians for sport, and who was guilty of atrocities as bad as or worse than those attributed to the British in this movie, but at the heart of the movie, in this one scene, there is a sense of the man who inspired the film. The scene: Martin's farm has just been put to the torch, his second eldest son killed, and his eldest son taken away in chains for the hangman. Martin storms his burning house to retrieve his guns and a tomahawk taken as a trophy during his wilder days. He arms his youngest sons (neither of which is older than twelve) with the muskets and they take off through the woods to rescue his oldest son. "Start with the officers and work your way down," he tells his boys as he sets up the ambush. "Aim small, miss small" he instructs as he positions them to snipe the British. The ambush is a frenzy of violence as, his guns expended, Martin wades into the surviving British soldiers with his tomahawk and massacres them in hand to hand combat. One surviving British soldier is blown into the nearby stream. As he tries to crawl away, Martin kills him from behind with the tomahawk, and keeps chopping as his horrified sons look on. Martin is a madman at this point, drenched in blood with a frightening light of madness in his eyes. He is certainly not a heroic figure here and the scene is profoundly shocking. An audience expecting the lighthearted mayhem of, say, a Lethal Weapon movie was going to sit in the theater after this scene in stunned silence. It's an energizing sequence, certainly the best thing Roland Emmerich has ever put on film, and hints at the movie The Patriot could have been. There are other glimpses of this - from the set piece battles that demonstrate the sheer madness and horror of eighteenth century warfare (one of the film's strongest images is a soldier being decapitated by a cannonball), to the personal skirmishes between Martin's militiamen and the British patrols where, in a bloodthirsty frenzy, they execute the British soldiers who have surrendered. The film could have been a trenchant examination of what constitutes heroism and of the kind of men who are often celebrated as heroes. The film's title could have been bitterly ironic. The film could have been a dark examination of what drives men to violence. It could have been a contender, but...

Every time the film threatens to slip the leash, the scene is followed with some kind of banal sentimental hogwash which defuses its characters' rage and calls them to a higher purpose, or a scene of banal comedy relief intended to let the audience off the hook. The film also casts the British as such monsters that it is impossible for the audience to see both sides of the equation (when they burn a chuch filled with civilians, all hope of a balanced view of the war is lost). In between energizing scenes are lax, lazy scenes which pad the length of the movie unmercifully. There are two movies here: a dark masterpiece yearning to get out and the Hollywood pablum designed to keep it in check. The result is a hopeless muddle that doesn't trust the audience with challenging material and which feels the need to feed them a "ride" movie as junk food. This is too bad, really.

More troublesome, though, is The Patriot's depiction of Eighteenth Century South Carolina as some kind of egalitarian Eden where white and black people live in some kind of natural harmony. One racist militiaman has a change of heart after a black soldier saves his life in a skirmish. Later, after the black man is free, the ex-racist tells him that it has been an honor to serve with him. Yeah, right. Or, to cite another example: when the British are searching for Martin's family, they hide in a gullah, which is a village of runaway slaves (the nature of this village is never stated explicitly in the movie, by the way). There is no tension in the air as the inhabitants of the village take in and shelter the white plantation owners, nor does there seem to be any threat to the village itself. Yeah, right. This kind of careless revisionism is chilling - even moreso in 2023 (first time I've typed that. What an unappealing number) with school curriculums getting whittled down to a near Song of the South level naivete.

The Patriot is a puzzling movie. It works marvelously in fits and starts, occasionally coming to a vivid kind of life that is rare in Hollywood epics. It is certainly Roland Emmerich's best movie (no big feat, admittedly). But it still panders and treats the audience as drooling infants who can't make up their own minds about what they are watching. This is an unforgivable sin. When you get right down to it, Roland Emmerich is still just going through the motions, aping his idol, Steven Spielberg (in Saving Private Ryan mode here - Ryan screenwriter, Robert Rodat is credited as writing this film), without understanding a whit of Spielberg's craft or appeal.

[stethacantus]

So this weekend was unintentionally a sequel to last weekend.

Along with the Gods: The Last 49 Days ( 2018 )
A sequel to Along with the Gods: The Two Worlds which was shot at the same time as the first film. The sequel centers around the guardian spirits, revealing the back story of their deaths when they were still human. Another excellent fantasy drama.  Two more sequels are in development.

Space Jam: A New Legacy ( 2021 )
And here is the sequel to Space Jam starring LeBron James. The plot this time, LeBron, his fictitious movie son and millions of other people are zapped into the Serververse, which is basically a rip off of the plot of Tron, but with more people. Also trapped in the Warner Brothers Serververse, properties from past Warner Bros. films, and properties Warner currently holds the rights to ( such as the M.G.M. Wizard of Oz ) which includes King Kong, who is currently leased from copyright holders Universal Pictures to Legendary Pictures for their Monsterverse. The film's villain, an A.I. program called Al-G Rhythm, tells LeBron that he is challenging him to a basketball game that LeBron has to win in order him and everyone else to be released from the cyber prison. He recruits the Looney Tunes to be on his team, and as in the first film, they go from loosing in the first half of the game to rebounding in the second half for a come from behind win.

There had been plans for a sequel of Space Jams since the success of the first film. Warner spent a couple of years developing Space Jams II under the misconception that Michael Jordan was signed to a two picture deal with the producers. When Jordan mentioned during a live television broadcast that he was not doing a Space Jam sequel, and had no intention of doing one, Warners immediately cancelled the sequel.  There was then an attempt at a Jams franchise that was to include Race Jam with Jeff Gordan, Skate Jam with Tony Hawk and Golf Jam with Tiger Woods. Eventually deciding sports themed Looney Toons films were a bit limiting, began developing Spy Jam which they hoped would star Jackie Chan. Unable to sign Jackie, the project continued to be developed into Looney Tunes: Back in Action  deciding to drop the Jam from the title as it would be released six years after Space Jam. Looney Tunes: Back In Action was both a critical failure, and a box office failure, and all further Looney Tune movies were cancelled.  Plans for a Space Jam sequel resurfaced when LeBron James mentioned that Space Jam was one of his favorite films growing up, and he would love to do a sequel.

Critics hated this one, and I was expecting something really bad. But while, like the original Space Jam, this is by no means a good film, it once again isn't boring. And unlike the original, this one had a few gags I actually laughed at.

[Charles Castle]

A few weeks ago i wrote about The Sting and my perception of it changing over time. Another stark example of how movies change as people age, I offer up Becket (1964, directed by Peter Glenville). When I first saw the film as a teen, I enjoyed it a lot. You had powerhouse performances from two legitimately great actors. You had "very serious themes." You had historical pageantry. You even had a bit of naughtiness in the early part of the film, the part that details Thomas Becket's life before becoming a saint. This is to say nothing of the homoerotic undertones. I originally watched this film with my mother, who loved this kind of history porn, so I have fond memories of it that have nothing to do with the film's actual qualities.

This was not the same film I saw last week. What I saw last week was a tendentious bore. I realized what the problem was when we got to the excommunication scene. At that point, I recognized that neither side of the film's political dilemma had any kind of moral authority. The movie sides with The Church, though it gives The State its due. The hero of the film is clearly Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury and a martyr for the Holy Catholic Church. The film is adulatory of Becket's transformation from a womanizing rake into a pious champion of Christianity. Frankly, as he becomes more pious, he becomes less interesting. But that's not my issue. The fulcrum of Becket's clash with King Henry II is that Henry won't turn over a priest that has allegedly committed a crime for The Church's justice. In siding with The Church, the film is saying that there should be two standards of justice, one for The Church, and one for everyone else. Even if I wasn't an atheist, this idea would be anathema to me for many many reasons. We've seen how the Catholic Church cleans its own house in the years since the film was made, after all. So basically, Thomas Becket, and the film for that matter, are arguing in favor of the benefit of clergy. In this regard, it is completely regressive.

The alternative is an authoritarian State, though. Henry II has about the same moral authority as Thomas Becket. Vested with the divine right of kings, he rules absolutely. The early parts of the film demonstrate this in vivid detail. While Henry isn't Caligula, say, he plays in the same ballpark. For the most part, Henry doesn't even care about the idea of equal justice under the law. He plays politics for advantage. He wants to expand his own powers. For what? Vanity? It's certainly not an altruistic drive. I would suggest that the authority of Henry's state is also completely illegitimate. So the film offers a choice between two overweening powers, neither of which is vested with a justified authority. On the whole, it's a very confused, very vile tangle.

Still, palace intrigue is fun to watch, and so is Peter O'Toole as Henry, though I would argue that his Henry II is a LOT more interesting in The Lion in Winter than he is here. There's a certain amount of twitchiness to his performance that invests it with some life. Burton, on the other hand, starts reserved and then withdraws into a fog of piety. It's not one of his better performances.

[Charles Castle]

The first ten minutes of Nicholas Winding Refn's Drive (2011) are some kind of manifesto. The film's nameless anti-hero is the wheelman for a robbery. He tells his compatriots that he'll be there for five minutes. They don't need to know the getaway route, and if they're late by even one minute, he's gone. The Driver also appears to be a sports fan, but that's part of the plan. The resultant chase sequence is unlike any other chase I can remember seeing on film, as the filmmakers map out a strategic cat and mouse game that relies less on speed - though that helps - and more on grace under pressure, intelligence, and seeing two moves ahead. I say that this is some kind of manifesto, and I think it is. It's a repudiation of the way Hollywood films action sequences. This is not a run and gun sequence, nor even a classical Hollywood action sequence a la Bullitt. This is a sequence that deconstructs the conventions of action. It breaks it apart and examines its function. It provides the audience with the geography of the scene, with a crystal clarity of purpose. It shows not just what happens, but why, and it shows how each action flows into the next. This sort of thing used to be the province of directors from Hong Kong, though they never wielded it as a kind of ideological statement the way Refn does. Refn, it should be noted, is a Dane.

The rest of the movie shows the same kind of clockwork precision and economy of action. The Driver is a stuntman and mechanic who makes an occasional payday as a getaway driver. During the movie's first act after the prelude, we see a little bit of his life. We see him performing a dangerous stunt for a pathetically small payday. We see him as he becomes enamoured of his pretty neighbor and her son. We meet his mentor. And the filmmakers set up the conflict of the second half of the film. The Driver's neighbor, Irene has a husband who is getting out of prison. The husband has debts from prison. The Driver's mentor, Shannon, has financial problems, too, and he's pitching The Driver as the key to getting rich in stock car racing if he can only get the scratch to build a car. The investor he approaches is former movie producer and current gangster Bernie Rose. Rose has an unruly henchman named Nino, a brutal and ambitious second in command, who has no interest in anything that doesn't come with a heaping dollop of gangland respect. As far as the movie is concerned, these are all pieces of clockwork, and like the opening sequence, each sprocket fits exactly. The second half of the movie shows how the clockwork runs. Irene's husband asks The Driver to be the wheelman on a heist that will pay off his debt and leave him free to be the father to his son. The target is a pawn shop, where the take will be $40,000, though the reality is quite different. The Driver agrees, but the whole thing goes bust. It's a set-up in which the thieves are intended to take the fall while the actual robbery is a million dollars and the real thieves are a second team entirely. Unfortunately, The Driver is too good at his job and that heist goes awry. When the heist's masterminds come to take out the survivors, The Driver discovers that Nino is behind the whole thing. When Nino tells Rose about the whole thing, the breadth of everyone's dilemma is made clear. There will be no winners.

Apart from the opening action scene, there are two other key scenes in Drive. In the first, early in the movie, The Driver is approached by a former client who wants to engage him in a barroom conversation. The Driver will have none of it and when he tells the guy off, there's a flash of steely ruthlessness that will come to define the character. This comes after we've seen The Driver engaging in a kind of romance with Irene. Up until this point, The Driver has seemed completely benign. Charming even. A nice guy. This scene upends that. The other defining scene finds The Driver and Irene in an elevator with one of Nino's underlings, sent to kill them both. This scene is the movie in a nutshell. The Driver kisses Irene with surprising passion, before turning on the goon and smashing his skull. Irene, the film's only true innocent, retreats from the elevator with a shocked expression as The Driver looks at her with a mixture of loss and incomprehension. As the door closes on her as she backs into the parking garage, The Driver is severed from a life of loving kindness. The movie afterward becomes a kind of existential bloodsport.

Refn sure does love his violence. He likes to take it the extra step. The elevator scene is one example, and where a less ruthless director might turn his camera away from The Driver's foot as it destroys a man's head, Refn makes it as explicit and ugly as he can. He does something similar in the scene where The Driver and Blanche (the third participant in the pawn shop robbery) are attacked in a motel room. Refn is all about the shotgun decapitation, and the aftermath. These scenes rely on that flash of steely ruthlessness I mentioned to make them seem organic. The Driver is a badass.

When Drive isn't in motion, it has a kind of classical stillness. It's not quite the classical frieze that Valhalla Rising was, but it's along the same lines. There's a striking scene where the Driver is surrounded by nude or mostly nude women that's positively surreal. They don't move; it's like they're posed like mannequins. As a stylistic exercise, Drive is like an early Michael Mann film. Thief, maybe, or Manhunter. Maybe better. It feels less suffocated by it's style. The quality of the actors helps immeasurably.

This movie has an uncommonly good cast. Ryan Gosling is able to turn on the charm in the scenes with Carey Mulligan's Irene that he developed in romantic movies, while he has a blankfaced psychopathy in his arsenal as well. Mulligan is good, too, in a relatively thankless role that turns particularly good. Bryan Cranston's Shannon is a nice variant of Walter White, though weaker (the actor affects a limp as an outward manifestation of Shannon's weakness). Christina Hendricks is more a presence than anything as Blanche. The limited amount of time her character gets kind of hamstrings her as far as building a character and Blanche is the most ill-defined character in the movie. Ron Perlman can play characters like Nino in his sleep. The movie belongs, ultimately, to Albert Brooks, who is cast way against type. Who knew that he had such coiling nastiness in him? His Bernie Rose is simultaneously a vicious parody of the has-been Hollywood producer, and an indictment of the movie business itself as a kind of gangsterism. Brooks's screen persona is such that when Rose begins opening the veins of the people around him, it's an attack on the audience, too. It's as good a bit of casting as any in recent memory.

I wish the very ending of Drive were more focused than it is. This is very much in the hard boiled tradition, where characters are defined by what they do. It's inconceivable that Philip Marlowe has a personal life. When he wakes up, he's a detective and he remains one until he goes to sleep. So, too, is The Driver. He's not even given the grace of having a name. Driving is who he is. Everything else is secondary. So, I can understand why the filmmakers would have him simply drive away from everything. This is a deliberately existential movie, after all. But the way this is accomplished is the film's only real false note. Does he die behind the wheel? Given how he's been stabbed at the film's end, he bloody well should, but the movie is cagey about this. The film shows him driving at night at the end, hours after he should be dead. Is he? Who knows? It's a useless piece of ambiguity and smacks a little of a Hollywood ending, which is disappointing in a film that has so astutely dismantled the way that Hollywood does things up until that very point.

[LucasM]

This is gonna' be short.

In case I'd had the slightest doubt that the Jurassic ___ film series had LONG since used up any really new ideas:
I decided I'd "finally" watch Jurassic World: Dominion earlier this week.  I was watching, not particularly impressed or drawn into the story, when - a bit after the one hour 30 minute mark - I realized I'd fucking watched it already!  Since it only became available for home viewing in the last 4-6 months, that is incredibly telling for how forgettable the film was.  [For the record, it was when they snuck into the glass-walled grasshopper breeding area that I thought that it was familiar.]

[stethacantus]

The Guillotines  ( 2012 )
This was supposed to be director Andrew Lau's remake of Shaw Brothers Flying Guillotine( 1975 ), although it is neither the plot or the weapon of the original. Flying Guillotine had always ben divisive among martial art movie aficionados, with some calling it a groundbreaking classic, and others calling it  one of the worst movies to be released by Shaw Brothers. Martial arts film historian Ric Meyers had it on his worst list, referring to the movie as "A hat box with teeth". One thing that could not be denied was that it was a big enough hit for Shaw Brothers to make a sequel, and that other production companies made their ow Flying Guillotine films, most notably Master of the Flying Guillotine (1976 ) which was a sequel to Jimmy Wang Yu's One Armed Boxer. In the original Flying Guillotine film, a Qing emperor wants  a team of assassins to eliminate any political enemies. One of his advisers invents a weapon on a chain  which  can be thrown over a victims head from a distance, and then by yanking on the chain, cuts the victim's head clean off and brings it back to the assassin wielding the weapon. Even if you thought the movie was terrible, you had to admit that the weapon was awesome. The movie followed the predictable plot where one of the members of the flying guillotine assassin squad begins to realize what he is doing is wrong, and quits the squad. the others are sent after him to hunt him down, resulting in a showdown between flying guillotines.

This sequel has a different plot. After generations  of being in the service of the Qing emperors, he guillotine squad is being replaced by soldiers armed with guns bought from the Europeans.  They are sent on a final mission to track down and behead the rebel leader known as The Wolf. However, unbeknownst to them, the rifle squad is sent to ambush and kill the entire guillotine squad as outlaws, as the new emperor wants the fact that his family has been employing assassins for decades to be covered up. The Guillotines ends up being an original film with a great dramatic plot. It's only drawback is the weapon. In this film, it is a circular blade with gears which spins on the end of the blade the squad carries with them. The Shaw Brothers flying guillotine seemed like a plausible weapon.  The one in this film seems to complicated to be real, and the CGI used to bring it to life is sub par. Otherwise, this was a terrific film.

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey ( 2012 )
The Lord Of The Rings film trilogy was one  film per book. This is three films from a single short novel. WTF Peter Jackson? Okay, so I knew going into this that some padding of the original story should exist. But I found out I had purchased the extended version, so each film is around three hours long. WHAT?  I thought that maybe each film would be around 90 minutes as each would only be a third of a story. But somehow Jackson was able to get three hours of plot out of a third of a book. Amazingly though, there does not seem to be much in padding. Okay, maybe the way out of place musical numbers seem a bit like padding. But the movie for me moved along at a brisk enough pace that I didn't get bored. Not as good as The Lord Of the Rings, but it wasn't supposed to be.

[Charles Castle]

But this rough magic
I here abjure, and, when I have required
Some heavenly music, which even now I do,
To work mine end upon their senses that
This airy charm is for, I'll break my staff,
Bury it certain fathoms in the earth,
And deeper than did ever plummet sound
I'll drown my book.

I always forget that The Tempest is a comedy. It's a bitter kind of comedy, but it ends with a wedding, so by the rules of Shakespearean taxonomy, it's a comedy. It's funny sometimes, too, particularly when dealing with the various misadventures of Trinculo and Stephano, the play's buffoons, but it's hard to see a comedy in the central narrative. It seems, rather, a bitter summation of the life of its conjuror, William Shakespeare, who ends the play with a lament to the end of things and a note of despair. Julie Taymor's interestingly genderqueer 2010 screen version plays Prospera's lament over the end credits as a Bjork-ish song. It's surprisingly effective.

What's that? Did I write "Prospera?" Not "Prospero?" I did indeed. That's the movie's central conceit. It changes Prospero's gender by casting Helen Mirren in the role. Are YOU going to argue that The Tempest starring Helen Mirren as Prospera is somehow a perversion of the play? A modern "reworking" that's unneccesary? Because I'm surely not going to make that argument. I can watch Mirren in anything, and giving her the role of one of literature's great magicians seems entirely meet, bookending her career as it does with Morgana Le Fey and Prospera. The adaptation works better than you might think, too. It certainly adds a certain feminist politic to Antonio's usurpation of Prospera's dukedom, and it adds a certain amount of historical resonance to her persecution as a witch. Frankly, I wish Shakespeare had thought of it himself, though if we assume that Prospero is an avatar of the author himself, I understand why he didn't. In any event, listening to Helen Mirren perform Shakespeare is a rare pleasure.

The Bard rises and falls on the actors and this film has pretty good ones. Some of the casting is unexpected, Dame Mirren aside. One doesn't look at Russell Brand and think "Shakespeare," but he works as Trinculo, the foppish jester. Equally unlikely, but surprisingly apt: Chris Cooper as Antonio, David Strathairn as King Alonso, and Alfred Molina as Stephano. Brand and Molina are terrific clowns in this movie, and their antics relieve the melancholy that often threatens to o'erwhelm some productions of the play. On the other side of the coin, Djimon Hounsou seems like an inevitable Caliban, while Felicity Jones is a splendid Miranda.

Ariel is played by Ben Whishaw and deserves some extra commentary. This film's conception of Ariel reinforces its subtle (and not so subtle) subversion of gender. Ariel is usually male, but in some scenes, Whishaw's naked form seems to have been appended with breasts. The play isn't nearly so ambiguous, but the movie seems to be taking the femininity of the name and making it literal. I like this.

Ultimately, though, this is Helen Mirren's film. She's one of the best Prosperos I've ever seen. There are few contemporary actors of any gender with the same mix of gravitas and impish twinkle in their eye.

Taymor, for her part, is all over this with creative cinematic styling. This is less arty than Titus, it should be said, but the director's visual stamp is ever-present. Certain of the special effects flourishes remind me a bit of Taymor's Across the Universe, while stagings remind me of, I dunno, Derek Jarman maybe? I don't have any beef with this, really, because if any of Shakespeare's plays demanded special effects and "style," it's The Tempest, something that's been evident from Forbidden Planet through to Prospero's Books. It's a nouveau tradition that this film gleefully inherits. It's an attractive movie, easy on the eyes. It's all so very fey that it almost slips past that The Tempest is as bitter a pill as it is. This was Shakespeare bidding his farewell to the "airy charms" of the theater. It's Shakespeare breaking his staff and drowning his books and shuffling off this mortal coil. There's a strong theme in Shakespeare, if you want to look for it, of the failure of rhetoric, which is one of the great paradoxes of Shakepeare's work. The Bard was, after all, arguably the greatest writer and poet in the history of the world, and throughout his plays, the word is inferior to the action and talk is a means by which evil is done and weakness is shown. The Tempest seems like Shakespeare's ultimate abdication of the life of letters and the life of the mind and of fantasy as a way of life. As he wrote elsewhere, "when my mistress walks, she treads upon the ground." The flights of fantasy one finds in The Tempest are a delight, but their juxtaposition with Prospera's ultimate vacating of her spells and books creates a kind of cognitive dissonance. It's an easy play to admire. It's a hard play to love, especially among the kinds of people who become Bardolators. We live in our minds, after all, we are suckled by books all our lives. And here is William Shakespeare telling us to drown those books and join the dance.

[stethacantus]

Kung Fu Hustle ( 2004 )
I wasn't sure if I already had this one or not. I know I bought a few Stephen Chow films, but lost track of if this was among them.  I originally had a checklist of the films I had bought on my previous PC, but it was lost when that PC permanently crashed. Decided to buy a copy and see if I had seen it before. The good news is that I hadn't seen this before. So at the least I hadn't bought it twice. The bad news, it is a Stephen Chow film. Nowhere near the worst of his films. But the only gag I laughed at was "Who's throwing handles!?" Everyone who thinks this is a groundbreaking martial arts comedy clearly hasn't seen any other Hong Kong comedy from the past two decades. This isn't even groundbreaking among the previous Stephen Chow films. I guess if you are not familiar with Hong Kong comedies then this would blow you away. But you are better off with the Aces Go Places or Lucky Stars series. 


The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug ( 2013 )
Yea, this was good.  A bit bummed that it ends with a cliffhanger.  Not that it is much of a cliffhanger to me as I have both read the novel before and seen the animated TV movie. Interesting to see how they take what was the final couple of chapters in the novel and pad it out to another three hour film.

[Charles Castle]

People are messy. That's something that movies seldom understand. The mystery of why people behave the way that they do is something that eludes most films. Hell, the fact that there even IS a mystery is lost on most filmmakers, who are content with canned motivations and "turns out what happened was" back stories. People are sometimes broken and unpleasant and there's no solving that at the end of two hours. The characters in Rust and Bone (2012, directed by Jacques Audiard) are broken and unpleasant and human and inhabit a movie that refuses to look away from this fact. It's a harrowing film.

Rust and Bone follows Alain, a shiftless father who moves from Belgium to the south of France with his young son, Sam. They're penniless and Alain is first seen gathering leftovers from the train they're on to feed his son. On arrival, he resorts to petty crime while they wait for a ride to his sister's house. Alain is a kickboxer and those skills come in handy as he finds work as a bouncer, and then as a security guard. While working as a bouncer, he meets Marie, who is on the receiving end of a scuffle at the club where he works. He takes her home because she's in no condition to drive and discovers that she works at a marine park, training killer whales. He leaves her his number. Marie, for her part, is in an unsatisfying relationship that ends dramatically when the scaffolding where she works collapses and one of the whales bites off her legs. During her rehab, she calls Alain, and they form a friendship. He takes her to the beach and doesn't look away from her when he sees the remains of her legs. Alain, for his part, has fallen in with Martial, a shady security consultant who illegally spies on employees for management and arranges black market MMA fights on the side. Alain likes to fight, so he starts fighting for Martial. Marie comes along. They're forming a close relationship even though they're not quite lovers. They have sex, but it's impersonal. It grows to be personal for Marie, whose self image has been shattered by her accident. Unfortunately for Alain, Martial is caught by the workers he's spying on, and has to lay low. To Alain's sorrow, one of the employees fired for impropriety based on Martial's footage is Alain's sister, who throws Alain out of her house. Alain, for his part, shucks his responsibilities and heads out for parts unknown.

Alain, played by Matthias Schoenaerts, is nobody's idea of a screen hero. He's irresponsible, a neglectful, even abusive parent, he's not above petty crime. The movie shows all of this, warts and all, but it doesn't judge him. That lack of judgement is what permits the movie to grant Alain occasional moments of grace. The scenes between Alain and Marie show his qualities and his shortcomings in stark relief, sometimes in the same instance. Marie is not Alain's savior, or vice versa. They don't magically cause the other to heal from whatever traumas they're suffering. These are people who carry those traumas with them always, just below the surface. This is doubly true of Marie, who has a very visible trauma. She's not noble in her suffering. She's a woman in pain and she lashes out. But even before she loses her legs, there's something absent in her life. Her home life with her boyfriend gets only a cursory glance, but that glance illuminates a hollow relationship. She's looking for something more, even if she doesn't know what it is. Having no legs only makes that harder for her. Alain, for his part, has a horrible trauma awaiting him at the end of the movie, too, and the damage that does finds Alain looking for the same kinds of things Marie is looking for. The movie is ambiguous as to whether either of them find it in the end. This is, as I've mentioned, a film about messy human relationships that pursue their own logics rather than the pat narratives of movie romances or of noble people overcoming horrible odds. Neither Alain or Marie is ever particularly likeable, but the movie's close attention to them makes them at least comprehensible and recognizable.

I almost hesitate to mention that this is a special effects movie. I mean, this is no one's idea of a spectacle, but it is a film that takes full advantage of the state of the art in digital effects. Its use is largely invisible because the effects here are primarily subtractive. The removal of Marion Cotillard's legs and their replacement with robotic prosthesis is the stuff of science fiction, but we live in a science fiction world anymore so it all seems natural. The film gives this a sly nod when Alain calls Marie "Robocop" at one point. She is, by any definition of the word, a cyborg, and if this film had been made forty years ago, its futurism would have been astonishing. The content here might have been fertile ground for a David Cronenberg film back in the day. It has the elements: flesh and technology, identity through sexuality, you name it. These days, it's all commonplace, just so much background noise for a film that looks at how people in the here and now live. This is like a Cronenberg film in one other respect: it's about the fragility and mutability of our bodies, and in this regard, it's an almost purely existential movie. It's an areligious film, though I would stop short of calling it an atheist film. Spirituality doesn't enter into it at all. This is about the limits and needs of the flesh, the brittleness of bones, the unbearable pains of mere being.

Matthias Schoenaerts is good as Alain. He gets the slacker attitude that motivates him and is good at the more physical demands of the film. Given that the film is primarily about him, it's surprising that he's second-billed, but when you have Marion Cotillard opposite, that's bound to happen. Cotillard, for her part, burnishes her reputation as one of the finest actors in the world. It's not a showy performance, special effects not withstanding. Most of her character is internalized. She's good at showing the rage and hurt and emptiness behind Marie's eyes, and when she starts to come back to life in the last act of the movie, it's profoundly cathartic. This is all down to her performance. She gets the movies best scene, too, when having returned to the water park for a visit, she confronts a whale from the other side of an aquarium glass, then begins to play with the whale in the way that she used to when she was abled. It's a haunting image, the whale ghostly in the water and Cotillard shot from behind, where the entire emotional content of the scene is played without seeing her face.

This is an impressionistic movie, full of splintered images. This is on full display in the accident where Marie loses her legs, shot from below the water and clouded by debris. It doesn't show the whale biting her legs or the agony afterward. This isn't a horror movie and it's not interested in that kind of shock. The scene is poetic and sad none the less. The fight scenes later in the movie are brutal. Sometimes filmed from a distance, from Marie's point of view, where what's happening isn't clear, sometimes filmed from Alain's point of view, where the film turns into a riot of brief, glancing blows. As Alain fights, the film either slows down or speeds up depending on whether or not he's in the moment. These scenes are a stark contrast to the sex scenes between Alain and Marie, which are frank and reportorial. The movie shows us the details of Marie's private life and it's in part about watching a woman with no legs have sex or sit on the toilet or swim, because these are universal activities regardless of whether one is able or not. I doubt an American film would have the nerve to film what Audiard films, but Americans have always been disconnected from our bodies in one way or another. This film, by contrast, rubs the audience's nose in Marie's essential humanity. There's a scene late in the movie where she heads out to the bar with her fight club buddies, Alain has flown the coop with some blond barfly, and a man starts chatting her up. At this point, we've seen Marie's needs and wants, so when this guy realizes that she has no legs and starts backpedaling, it's kind of shaming. Not just for the guy in the bar, but for the audience, too. It's a hard scene to watch. A lot of this movie is hard to watch. It's not opposed to making the audience feel as unhappy as its characters. Maybe that's the key that separates this from a film like... (gestures broadly at virtually every film with handicapped and/or otherwise broken characters). A good comparison in the same general time frame as Rust and Bone is 2011s The Intouchables, which was intent on touchy feely emotions of uplift and optimism. This film just points the camera and lets the audience themselves decide how to feel about these characters without painting them as noble or heroic. They're just people, and that's enough.