There are more notable filmmakers working now than at any time before. It’s just a matter of access. It is still harder to make a film now than to paint a picture in the 19th century, but there are a fuckton more people who are in a position to pursue a career in art. So I often wonder which films and filmmakers will be remembered during the impending dystopia, after the baby boomers finally collapse civilization under the weight of their greedy retirements. If I could take action on such things, I’d give you very short odds on Alexander Payne. While I can’t identify some special stroke of genius that separates him from any of the dozens of equally celebrated auteurs, he does have a central and universal theme that he has made his own. Payne is the poet laureate of the mediocre. That is, the vast majority of us, usually overlooked, especially by artists. I don’t know why Payne, who went to Stanford and then found some success with his first film and increasingly more with each one to follow, has taken an interest in, neither serial killers and drug addicts, nor presidents and revolutionaries, but in mid-level insurance men, high school civics teachers and novelists who are almost good enough to be published by small presses. However, he is clearly fascinated and nails every detail, from the cars his characters choose to the McAllisters’ bottled salad dressing in Election. Maybe his films are so funny because of this unusual choice in subject. In Sideways, Giamatti and Church are funnier in their pretensions, for example, because there is a seed of justification to them. Bagging a fat chick in the San Joaquin Valley who remembers you from an old soap opera role that led nowhere is funnier than, say, a total loser passing himself off as movie star to a dumb blond. Everything is perfect when Virginia Madsen lobs herself underhanded, right over the heart of the plate while out on the porch with Giamatti, only to have him freeze up and take a called third strike. Would the scene have worked if Giamatti had a National Book Award? Or even if we thought he might win one down the line? Would it have been so frustrating if he was just a joke or a junkie? Obviously, I think not, and the result is one of the most empathetic romantic scenes or record, as we connect completely with both characters simultaneously, as they disconnect. Payne realizes that the struggle between “good enough” and “not quite” is just as fruitful a source material as any. I doubt it’s a coincidence that his own film making tends to be just right, rather than revelatory or jarring. Maybe it’s because he went to Stanford and so forth and doesn’t share, with 95% of living creative types, the delusion that he is Charles Bukowski. Anyway, it’s good.

Best Gangster Saga – Election and Election 2

While the aughts will be remembered as the decade of television, the gangster epic of the decade is not “The Sopranos” by any criteria. It seems like, perhaps in the wake of “The Wire’s” greatness, more people are realizing how flawed David Chase’s opus was. You can’t blame anybody for being blown away by the absurdly high level of the acting and writing at the time. But by now you should be able to look back and see the moral, psychological and narrative impossibilities that culminated in a final season or two that was often unwatchable. The defining scene is when Tony–a minor mob boss–is sent a private luxury jet to fly to Caesars in Vegas to hang out and maybe gamble a few grand, the staff at Caesar’s supposedly having taken the same holiday from sanity and common sense that we were to take in giving a fuck if AJ would get into college or about Meadow’s feelings. With characters like this, at some point, you have to face the fact that they are murdering psychopaths controlled by greed. That is the driving force of the really great gangster films, beginning in recent history with The Godfather and The Godfather Too! , continuing through Goodfellas and the even better Casino (that’s right). Perhaps this sequence of films rounds off in Election and Election 2 (AKA Triad Election). Johnnie To’s films proudly pay homage to these predecessors, particularly in the final murder in Election, which is Fredo’s death combined with the deaths of Nicky Santoro and his brother.  Unlike most other HK flicks, including To’s own, there is a mastery of the techniques and material rather than an apprenticeship. If you agree with me that the greatest Godfather moment is Hyman Roth, Michael and some cronies cutting up a cake shaped like Cuba, while discussing how to slice up the people and resources of the country; if you wanted to see more of the decrepit, Machiavellian, Midwestern bosses hashing things out in Casino (”why take a chance?”) you’ll be absorbed by the focus on endless back room dealings and machinations in these films .

Everything is cold calculation; strategy driven only by self-interest and self-aggrandizement. Some abide by a system of honor, but it quickly becomes evident that the system is revered as a method for stability and profitability as an alternative to constant war. With sufficient corporate streamlining, even these ethics can be cast aside and buried alongside their adherents. These men have nothing in common with the Flintstones. Their families don’t humanize them. Contrast an early scene of our protagonist having dinner with his son to another of his son watching him bash in a friend’s head with a rock. If anything, these men drain away any sympathy we might be inclined to feel for their innocent family members. And it is getting to the true ruthlessness of the gangsters that makes this line of films so compelling. We have moments of understanding, of course–they are still human. But perhaps the guilty pleasure in such films is that the coldness of accurate depiction gives us the emotional distance to happily watch psychopaths position themselves and bump each other off like game pieces. And there are some magnificent bump-offs, from quick and brutal daylight hits to a very convincing argument made with sound reasoning, a sledge hammer, a meat cleaver and some German shepherds. Even when a kung fu guy chops up multiple attackers (they had to do it once, they are Asians, after all) the tone isn’t broken. To’s powerful visuals are evidently at their best when applied solemnly, though there are spots of dark humor. The Hong Kong setting–often a pleasure, even in the hands of hacks–gives the gangster epic a fresh surface. The history and the traditions of the Triad are seamlessly integrated with the traditions of Scorsese and Coppola to create something new. And finally, these HK crime epics are well written. Whereas many (or most) of the more celebrated HK films work around the script, these films realize great scripts. It’s said that you can watch them independently, which is true. But you’ll miss some interplay, including direct and subtle allusions, and lines of thought left for the viewer to take up. Watching the films a year apart, it might not occur to you that the viewpoint of Big D, the destructive hot head in Election, is largely vindicated in Election 2. As good as Casino, Goodfellas and the first two Godfathers? Nobody said anything about “films of the century.” But there’s a viable epic here, which I never would have believed.

Best Biopics – Sun

On the one hand you’ve got Sun, Soukrov’s praised but still underrated piece on the downfall of the emperor of Japan. Some found the film dull, perhaps because it is emotionally hollow, but the beauty of the filmmaking more than makes up for that. Anyway, emotions are for girls. After meeting the Hirohito to negotiate some details of his part in the surrender, MacArthur says what I had been thinking. “He’s like a child.” The Emperor agrees to disavow his divinity–an act that highlights the absurdity of the Japanese arrangement. You can’t agree to stop being the son of a god, you can only agree to stop pretending. Though the Emperor is extremely intelligent and refined, unchecked indulgence has indeed fostered a perpetual child who collects photos of movie stars (why do all dictators love Hollywood?) and practices “marine biology” by dicking around with a microscope while his country lies in ruins. He’s aware of internal tensions, but doesn’t really grasp the external realities, as evidenced by his nightmarish visions of aquatic monsters bombing Japan. Hirohito plausibly theorizes about the reasons for Japan’s defeat, but fails to see that, at the heart of each bad decision, is an antiquated social structure based on personal status and deference, rather than the competition of ideas, and that he is the center of the broken system. All of this is captured in one of the decade’s most subtly great performances by some Japanese guy. The unceremonious MacArthur offers him a box of Hershey bars as a consolation prize.

American Splendor

On the other hand, you have American Splendor, about a schlub of slight notoriety. The mixing of media might seem obvious or trendy after the fact, but it’s perfect and seamless in the movie, as when Harvey’s eventual wife looks for him at the train station, imagining different depictions from his comic books, brought to life with animation. The inclusion of Harvey and his friends works so well because the film is the conclusion of the story. Giving them major roles magnifies the effect the film has on itself. Not only have these dorks from Cleveland, who inhabit a world in which Robert Crumb is fucking Lincoln, occasionally reached the periphery of public attention; there’s a Hollywood movie about the whole thing now, and they’re in it. What makes the film great–apart from stuff like the acting and direction–is that it chooses to focus on a small success story from within a small subculture. Not that Ruthless is on par with a moderately successful series of independent comic books (someone, please cut the breaks on my car tonight), but I was only a bit less shocked to see this site mentioned in The Guardian than Harvey was to get a call from a Letterman producer. Every DIY dork who’s almost died from a boner over selling 500 CDs or getting an article into an obscure magazine that they liked will understand what such small victories mean. It’s not only finding an audience, but finding an audience among people who share your unusual tastes and therefore must be brilliant and discriminating. The film is also a suitable requiem for, and a fun look back at all of that DIY shit, from ‘zines to obscure record collecting. Nerds will compile limited editions and misprinted Wheaties boxes ’till the end of time. But now such practices are marketing ploys and symptoms of social disorders. They were back then too, but they were also part of how unheralded forms of expression forced new outlets. The days when there were veins of creative material only obtainable through “underground” social networks are pretty much gone, unless you’re into kiddie porn, and it’s fun to look back.

Best Crime Film: Bubble

Who says social realism requires the threat of starvation? In America, the joyless existence of the underclass is best represented not by a bicycle thief, but by wares of The Hamburglar. Soderbergh and writer Coleman Hough glean every idiom and detail for his portrait of the struggling middle American. So, as an added perk, this will always be a window to what it’s like in a time and place, which is the most underrated quality a movie can have. I’ve been to New Baltimore, Michigan and New Hartford Falls, Iowa plenty of times. If you want to soak it in without actually having to visit, here’s your chance. The experiment in dialogue must have been tried 20 times per semester at every film school in the country–”I know you’re not an actor, Chase, just talk like you do on the quad. I’m capturing… reality!” But pulling it off so well is fresh and memorable and hinges upon the all of the awkwardness and pointlessness being perfectly designed. There are many moments where we can tell that a character is saying what experienced judgment tells them is the right thing to say in order to fill up a that particular space. The relationships and motivations underlying the mundane and the murder are likewise, sparse but perfect. Martha, our killer, is not only a stepping stone, but one that would only be slightly missed and has already nearly sunk in the mud. Her clumsy and irrelevant gestures around the time of crime–like some random gifts, given in a final effort to inject herself meaningfully into the life of her “friend”– verify that, even as a murderer in a small town, she’ll be forgotten in a year’s time. As an irrelevancy who killed a trivial person who was kind of a bitch anyway, Martha will be denied even infamy.

Man Getting Hit By Football: Punisher: War Zone

Originally, I was going to make this into an 80’s Action Legacy award of some kind. But, if I did that, I’d feel compelled to give the spot to the impeccable Rambo, which is the better movie and also has Rambo in it.  But in this case, I’m going against the more cerebral work and with the movie that had me grinning like an idiot the whole time. Yes, Punisher: War Zone has some flaws, including the characters and the story. But then we must also consider what a mighty achievement it is to salvage the fucktastically ridiculous “Loony Bin Jim” character with a single line: “Let me axe you a question.”  Another motivation here is that I know most of you have denied yourselves this film, though I sense that it is creeping towards becoming a cult fixture. It is a fact that every single person who has ever seen this film has enjoyed it, and I want you to share in that enjoyment. I’m being serious now.  If you are going to see a movie for the action, why would you see some pile of shit like Iron Man, rather than Punisher: War Zone?   Iron Man is a story (that makes absolutely no sense) for little boys about some guy who flies around in a magic robot suit. The action is not cartoonish.  It is cartoons.  I defy anyone to make a significant, qualitative distinction between the CGI cartoons of guys in stupid, magic, robot suits slugging it out at the end of Iron Man and the CGI cartoons of, say, Shrek arguing with Donkey.  What, Shrek is cuter? And that makes it OK? Hell fucking no.  Look, if you’re going to see Shrek, by all means, see Shrek. It’s a better and far more intelligent film than Iron Man, Fantastic 4 or, for that matter, The Anal Rape of Indiana Jones. But, if you are going to see an action movie, see shit get properly fucked up. In this movie, while it does contain a bit of comic book silliness, The Punisher decapitates an old lady!  He jams the leg of a chair through someone’s eye! He runs a man through a glass recycling machine! I’m pretty sure the script is just a string of such exclamations, but director/kickboxer/woman of the century, Lexi Alexander, realizes it beautifully with tension, surprise, humor and some pretty slick filmmaking.  Perhaps Ebert’s condemnation is the best recommendation:

“The Punisher: War Zone” is one of the best-made bad movies I’ve seen. It looks great, it hurtles through its paces and is well-acted. The soundtrack is like elevator music if the elevator were in a death plunge. The special effects are state of the art. Its only flaw is that it’s disgusting.”

Best of all, it looks like real action, not a super glossy version of the Saturday morning shit I outgrew at some point during elementary school.  I get that we Americans are too pussy to see images from the actual wars we start that kill actual people. But goddammit, at least our fake violence should be real and it should include sadistic heroes, one liners and a novelty death every twelve frames. Football in the groin, not nerfball in the stomach.

Best Horror Film: The Descent

The Descent is about an international group of hot women in their late twenties to early thirties who go on annual adventures. This year, they’ve chosen to explore caves in the Appalachians of North Carolina. One of the girls, hoping to create a truly special experience rather than a run through a “tourist trap,” tricks the group into going into totally unexplored caves, rather than taking the tour they have mapped out. In these unknown caves, they find an enclave of creatures that are kind of a cross between bats and humans–having evolved to survive in total darkness and remaining undiscovered for millennia, though they sustain themselves by preying on whatever animals stumble into the caves. Now, this is a horror movie, so of course you have to suspend disbelief. I mean, a bunch of hot chicks banding together to escape male attention so they can be supportive of each other and pursue their collective interest in geology? But it’s worth letting these things slide to get to some great horror. What sets the movie apart is that it is an excellent thriller even before the ghouls show up, to the point that it doesn’t even need them.  The underground setting is beautiful and dangerous, the interactions between the characters seem real and the danger they face is already terrifying. They could plummet to their deaths, be instantly crushed, or they could be trapped and die of starvation, during days of total darkness. It’s also a good problem solving movie, as the women devise plans and utilize tightly fixed resources to maximize their limited chance of survival.  When the ghouls show up, they actually could have ruined a good movie. But instead, they make a great one.  They are scary, there is not too much CGI and the creatures’ strengths and weaknesses don’t wildly vary depending on if the story’s need for them to be fought off or not. The rest of the film follows the formula, but with some nice twists and one that I think is exceptional. Much has been made of the different endings, one for North American rubes, the other, the original. Though the original ending is immediately darker it’s kind of disjointed. The American one (as I’ve heard it described) still works.  Without getting into details, I kind of like the idea of a survivor left to tell the tale, never believed, and to carry the memories of the horror. It’s like the renegade cop who leaves one hoodlum alive and says, “Tell Mendoza. I’m coming.”  Either way, I think the real gut punch of the film comes in what the women do to each other in the cave. One mistakes a friend for a ghoul in the dark, and another finds out what happened without knowing the reason why. Some other stuff happens in between.  The way this story line unfolds is ice cold, but conflicted.  So this shit is just relentless. Woman against nature, against monster, against woman… there are multiple points of tension at all times. Oh shit. I forgot to say, “spelunking.”

Best Movie That Is Just A Bunch Of People Standing Around And Talking–On the Occasion of Remembering the Turning Gate

To the best of my knowledge, the French invented this kind of film and Eric Rohmer perfected it. Nothing earth-shattering happens. People sit, walk, eat and talk and we have a window into pretty unremarkable lives. It’s surprising that this can work as well as it does. It’s even more surprising that, once a few filmmakers figured out how to make it work, very few others were able to successfully emulate them. And no approach to drama is more excruciating when it fails. The formula only works with good (but not necessarily great) acting, understated direction and seemingly organic story and dialog. It is best if the characters are attractive, intelligent and interesting, but none are astronauts, and you probably know 20 people who’ve been through more “drama,” especially if you are homosexual. The key seems to be the writer/director’s ability to convey what is going on in his characters’ heads, without doing anything intrusive or interrupting the natural flow of events. Ultimately there should be an illusion that the main creative force behind the film is merely trying to stay out of the way, even when he is slipping small cues into beautifully framed shots. Then, you just get sucked in by the these characters and their stories for no immediately obvious reason, as you are to Sang-soo Hong’s soap operas about nothing. An Occasion for Remembering The Turning Gate has a betrayal, remorse, and requited lust that turns into unrequited love (or at least longing), but these things happen in a few, key moments. The rest of the film is the pedestrian shit that leads up to and comes after the “big” events. It’s the unspoken jockying for position between romantic rivals, the manipulations of suitors by the desired and the winner immediately weaseling out of commitments after the game is over. There are also ancillary events that don’t really lead to anything, but might have. The characters are sympathetic, or not, depending largely on the tendencies of the viewer. The important thing is how real they seem. You can argue that Hong’s films, much like Asian people in general, are all pretty much the same, and I’ve found a couple others more entertaining. I just picked this one because it seems like an answer to a favorite Woody line: that the only love that lasts forever is unrequited love.  True, but because we idealize them at some point, all loves wind up feeling at least partially unrequited and this lingers into future relationships. This is one reason you will never be happy. I assume the final shot of the gate in a downpour is meant to evoke, not only the titular myth about a princess ditching an infatuated peasant to execution, then ditching him again after he finds her in reincarnation as a snake, but also, Rashomon. Each relationship is a potential version of the protagonist’s love story.  It’s not so much the same events perceived differently from different individual perspectives, as the individual wavering between his own perceptions of what has been, could have been and could be. For example, towards the end of the film, the protagonist runs into a girl who he saved from bullies when they were children. It sounds like the beginning of a Kate Hudson movie and he and she are suitably intrigued.  He decides that maybe there’s a reason he didn’t remember her (plus, she is married) and gives up after a brief pursuit, but only reluctantly and wondering.  All of this is sedate to the point of being relaxing and conveyed mostly through conversation and static shots. And some graphic, bareback banging.

Best intellectual exercise: Inglourious Basterds

I have only have a little to add to Matt’s review. That is where you should start. I read it before I saw Inglorious Basterds, which, based on the trailers, I had been leaning against, as the film looked like it overestimated our willingness to savor the suffering of an otherwise unknown man because he wound up fighting for an evil cause. So I luckily had my eyes open early on, when The Jew Hunter gives his little speech about how we hate certain beings without really considering why. If it didn’t dawn on you until later that QT was massively fucking with the audience, and everything else that the film touches, it’s worth rewatching. Basterds is also worth another look because it is fucking great. Anyway, rather than regurgitate or slightly tweak too many of Matt’s points, I just want to reiterate how special an achievement the film is because there are so many who would to diminish everything Tarantino does. I remember the one film class I took in college, when the professor said that Tarantino was not so much good at making movies, as at stitching together other people’s movies. This is a common criticism. The justification is that he–holy shit!–is influenced by other filmmakers and often reworks what they’ve done. I sat in intimidated silence, not wanting to be like some kid who struts into ethics 101 (or any other class), proudly touting Ayn Rand. But I really had to wonder which little Asian film, known only to QT and his critics, had so pithy, smooth and entertaining a commentary on how we are “fooled by randomness” as Pulp Fiction’s sequence in which Jules is luckily missed by gunfire at close range, becomes a man of faith, and then doesn’t flinch when his ally, Marvin, is shot dead by a freak discharge midway through his personal conversion. So, these people who want to diminish Tarantino’s work are generally the people who go to museums where you eat a piece of candy and they are like, “that’s the art!” I actually enjoy conceptual art and the idea of playing with interaction between the artist and viewer. But you can’t have it both ways and celebrate the museum piece and disparage one of our great filmmakers because the wrong people like him, especially in this case. If you saw Basterds with an audience of more than a dozen, you almost certainly saw people in a movie theater sadistically hooting and cheering at the deaths and suffering of characters on the screen. They were so delighted because they despised these characters who were… sadistically hooting and cheering at the deaths of characters on the screen of the movie theater they were in. Tarantino actually gets the audience to act out the parts of the villains on screen, the very characters they were cheering the deaths of, to the point where it felt like someone is flipping a switch back and forth between the two, making one cheer, then the other. And the attackers of the hooting, Nazi audience in the movie are the filmmakers, who reveal a message of condemnation covertly slipped into the film, before attacking from behind the screen and from within the projectionist’s booth. Tarantino is playing with his audience, but is he condemning them? The characters are actual, fictional Nazis, but the audience is just watching a movie and it’s not like Tarantino opposes violence in cinema. Maybe he’s just making fun of all parties for not being able to make the simple distinction between real suffering and actors playing with fake guns and blood. In any case, out of the millions of attempts to incorporate the audience into the art, you’d be hard pressed to find one so slyly yet directly successful and you won’t find one on such a massive, international scale. And, it wasn’t like, “that’s the art!” That was one flourish of art incorporated into an entertaining movie that was full of them, including one legendary acting performance and a few very good ones, a few laugh out loud moments and Tarantino’s, now barely noteworthy command of both dialogue and the visual. You can weave interpretations forever about the film as the end of the historical film, or a critique of propaganda, a commentary on the nature of terrorism and a Godard-inspired deconstruction and a bookend to his Les carabiniers and on and on, and you’d be right to do so. But I doubt Tarantino had some central, propaganda point of his own in mind. He just puts so many cards on the table that he must be playing more than one game at once–or at least some game I can’t totally decipher–about movies, their relation to real life, history, war and violence. Just take something small. Did Tarrantino, who can have any actor he wants, chose Eli Roth (Hostel, the “torture porn” discussion) for a big role in this film about movie violence just because they are pals? Quite possibly. But that’s just one card on the table.

Best Zucker Movie:  OSS 117: Lost in Rio

Obviously, the real David Zucker caught syphilis, went insane and made An American Carol, so the torch must be passed, but only after it is used to burn the script of the upcoming Scary Movie 5.  The OSS 117 movies are celebrated like few others in our forums, but I’ve found only one English review of OSS 117: Lost in Rio online and it was written by a gorilla. The online review claims that the OSS films rely upon “a refusal to go for the easy joke” which is the exact opposite of how they work. The films take every easy joke that comes their way, though they usually finesse it to perfection.  The “easy” jokes are mixed with more subtle humor, wit, parody and satire in equal parts.  There is no less original film on this list.  The OSS films are based on a real OSS 117 series of  “serious,” Bond-style spy capers from the 50’s and 60’s.  They owe a lot to the Zuckers and Jim Abrams. Obviously, making fun of spy movies and the “hip” film techniques of the 60’s is nothing new. It was actually being done during the 60’s.  Nor is the guileless, political incorrectness of the bungling master spy, Hubert Bonisseur de La Bath, particularly innovative.  It is impressive, however, that the films take so many influences and approaches to humor and blend them into a perfect cocktail. Michel Hazanavicius’s films wouldn’t be David Zucker films if they didn’t misfire here and there, but that’s part of the charm. Jean Dujardin stars and is one part the actor you wish Bruce Campbell had become, one part Leslie Neilsen. I don’t think humor translates across language and cultural barriers as well as people like to pretend it does, but Dujardin really does git r done here with a comic performance bordering on genius.   Doubtless, some of the humor is still lost in translation, but I was laughing out loud pretty much throughout the film. Americans will appreciate how La Bath’s imperial arrogance mirrors the caricature of the Ugly American. Take the film as an overture to mend the resentments between the two countries. Frenchmen and Americans are both self-important pricks and this should be a cause for unity.  There are two films in the series so far, OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies and OSS 117: Lost in Rio.  I probably chose the latter, more recent film because I just saw it.  However, it also refines the OSS 117  blend even further. Like Austin Powers, OSS 117 borrows much of the earnest appeal of the very films it parodies, including exotic settings. There are some beautiful, and hilarious uses of the Rio setting here. And, yeah, it’s meant to be a joke that the oafish spy is swimming in scantily clad, model-caliber ass, but it’s by design that the audience gets a good look as well. So for hot chicks in leather costumes and cheap jokes about Chinese accents, you turn to little-known French films. For winding deconstructions of film, violence, war and war and violence and film that integrate the reactions of the audience into the movie itself, you turn to $100 million-grossing Brad Pitt movies. We’re in Rand McNally, people.

Could you find any faults with the science?

One or two. But I think they did a nice job advancing an impossible story without lingering on details and trying to over-explain the unexplainable. Yeah, nutrinos don’t work like that. This is why the initial reaction of scientists is, “that’s impossible!” Then they quickly move on to the totally realistic approach a film like this is supposed to take.

So it’s pretty plausible?

No, you jackass. It’s a movie about the world ending in 2012 in accordance with the Mayan calendar. Nothing about the film is plausible, but that’s OK. My own preference would be for some of the escape scenes to be a shade more realistic. Like, it’s a bit much to watch Cusack and family outrun the collapse of the earth’s surface, keeping 10-50 feet ahead of the edge of destruction at all times as they drive across LA in judgment day traffic. Most of the action sequences follow that format. There’s a wave of… it doesn’t really matter, there’s a wave engulfing everything and our heroes have found an awkward vehicle that is exactly .5% faster than it. “I’ve never driven a hansom cab before!!” “Oh no, it’s a tsunami! Just go! Go!” Still, a lot of these scenes are pretty exciting and there’s nothing coy or miscalculated. Emmerich is pulling out all the stops all the way without apology and he’s pretty good at it. That makes for some cool visuals, but diminishes the suspense of the actual action scenes.

Yeah, and the protagonists just happen to catch every lucky break and be the one group out of millions to escape.

This is a complaint commonly made about movies and other stories by people who overestimate their own intelligence. The point is that the film has chosen to focus on the one incredibly lucky family who catches scores of breaks to escape and tell their story. A movie about the guy who is instantly crushed while taking a dump at work would be pretty pointless.

Fair enough. But I do want to see that work dumper being crushed along the way. Corpse count?

Paltry. Using 80’s Action standards, the corpse count is under ten. You could blame “PG-13,” but this film is nowhere close to an “R” so I doubt that it was cut down to avoid one. The relentless destruction of city after city was enough to hold my attention. The destruction is maintained creatively, though streets and buildings were sometimes conspicuously empty.

How maudlin was it?

More maudlin than Maude herself! There are a lot of scenes where people are making heartfelt goodbyes to their loved ones. But it is a movie about the end of the world. I know that if you or I discovered that everyone would be dead soon, we would spend our last hours reciting “The Wasteland” from memory. But it’s possible that lesser individuals might say goodbye and be sad. Arguably, some of these scenes could have been cut out. Like maybe seventy or eighty of them. But they are generally effective, which is due largely to good acting across the board.

Where there any cliches?

Emmerich seems to love the generic so much that his passion almost elevates it to artistry. The first major fissure in LA is, of course, met with a “Duuude!” by blond surfer dudes who are like the children Jeff Spicolli had with Jeff Spicolli. Whether it’s Tibet or Rome, Emmerich seems to imagine everything with the mind of a citizen in an authoritarian country, connected to the rest of the world by an illegal satellite dish. The landmark motif that every hack review of this movie begins by mentioning is really emblamatic of his overall approach. France=snooty art guys. Russians=bearish baritones and their decadent tarts. A group of VIPs includes the queen of England. Which isn’t to say that Emmerich’s hyper-generic approach doesn’t work. Woody Harrelson’s hippyish conspiracy nut/radio host is as generic a character as you can imagine, but he also steals the show.

How many times was Cusack certainly dead, but then he crawled out of a freshly made fissure in the earth’s crust or popped up after having been under water for fourteen minutes?

912

Writer Count:

Just two are credited: Emmerich and Harald Kloser. I looked because about halfway through the film, I thought “I bet this film didn’t have a swarm of writers.” This is because it’s a good, coherent script, well plotted with characters who have clear and consistent motivations. Within this, Emmerich works in some little pieces of cleverness, like nods to his friends in the community of jabbering nutjobs who actually believe in this 2012 shit. A subtle one is a quick hint that Princess Di was assassinated. There are little preemptive digs at critics and a few funny lines. A Russian tycoon on why he didn’t buy his ex-wife a seat on the arks meant to preserve humanity: She said she never wanted to see me again for as long as she lived. So be it! Maybe my favorite moment came during the destruction of my own city. Our equivalent to the White House and the Vatican, here in LA? The giant doughnut on top of Randy’s Donuts which is sent rolling down the street. Yeah, LA Story made essentially the same joke, but it’s still funny.  PS, the burgers and fries at the run-down place next to Randy’s might be the best in the city

Box Office Predictions:

I actually enjoyed the film, so the smart money says that it will bomb. However, I think it will exceed projections in spite of the handicap of being a pretty good movie. Firstly, this is the film Emmerich was born to make. If this doesn’t do well, his career is finished because he can do no better and there aren’t a lot of cities to smash after all of them. But I think he’s still a viable commercial director, so it stands to reason that his definitive film will make money. Secondly we love the idea of the world coming an end because we are such conceited little animals. Living in the End of Days is probably tied with having a three way with sisters for the most persistent fantasy of all time. Not only does it fulfill our secret belief that the world could not possibly manage to go on without us, it also means we had great timing. If there’s no future after us, then we didn’t miss anything. Plus, we get to witness the coolest thing imaginable: the Apocalypse.

How bad was it really?

It’s the best massively budgeted Hollywood film I’ve seen in at least two years. I’m not an authority on these movies, but I can say that this is much better than Iron Man or the last Indy movie. I also liked it better than Godzilla or Independence Day. I won’t rush out to see it again, but I can imagine coming across it in a few years on TV, where I think I’d find this freshly enjoyable. Even though you pretty much know what’s going to happen next, you’re eager to see it. For example, I was excited to see the arks and the film doesn’t disappoint. We see them, there’s a lot of time spent inside them, they crash into each other and they are pretty awesome. It should go without saying that there are tons of flaws, particularly the great show of man’s nobility at the end. But I had a good time, as advertised. So it’s nice that, for once, Hollywood ringing the doorbell  doesn’t mean they’ve left a flaming sack of shit at the door like they did the last fifteen times. One of these days, I might even give The Dark Knight a whirl.

One of the interesting things about America is that it can still have subcultural movements that become enormous without anybody else noticing until way after they generate more money per year than Central America. Sometimes this is a racial thing. My mom has no idea who Tyler Perry, the world’s richest man, is. Maybe you remember when the movie, The Original Kings of Comedy came out, and every review began with something like, “apparently, the highest grossing comedy tour in history happened last year and it was headlined by such African American stars as Bernie The Entertainer. What makes this even more incredible is that black people won’t even cough up money to eat at restaurants with waiters or go to basketball games–but this thing packed those same arenas to the rafters.” This also happens with stuff for kids. Somehow every child and parent in America finds out about a musician who never performs in mainstream media, and one day you read an article about how some guy named Race Car Steve made $86 Million last year. It’s pretty impressive that these social networks  can function at least somewhat independently and build something that huge. Similar social networks exist among many groups, including people who are actually retarded. Occasionally, you’ll learn about some guy who you have never seen or heard of, like the late, unlamented Danny Gans, who has a $20 million a year contract in Vegas to do impersonations of Jack Nicholson, Elvis and Richard Nixon. Most of these people eventually break through to the mainstream by sheer volume. But someone like Dr. Laura was already well known in the retarded community and mega-rich before she really showed up on the radar of sentient beings.

The horrible reality of Jeff Dunham hit me when I learned from Dan, an Armenian degenerate, that Dunham’s new show was Comedy Central’s biggest debut ever, carrying the channel to ratings victory over all other cable channels.  Unfortunately, I decided to look for some of his act on youtube. It is possibly the worst act I’ve ever seen. Also, Dunham has really odd, fake hair. Let me couch that by saying I’m not a big fan of stand up in general and therefore, not the least bit snobby about it. While it is a legitimate craft, and very difficult to do well, I hate comics who think they are serious business and get all upset about Dane Cook being more popular than Brian Regan. I don’t give a shit. To me, Dane Cook is just kind of a generic, mildly amusing comedian who (apparently) possesses a lot of charisma. I found Caliendo’s Madden and Barkley impersonations to be kind of funny, the first few hundred times. Bill Hicks, allegedly on the other end of the spectrum, was also pretty funny but I don’t think he was a genius just because I agreed with some of his political views and he got cancer. So my standards for stand up are about on par with a Night Ranger roadie’s standards for one night stands. And it is from this perspective that I say, “The Jeff Dunham Show” is an abortion sandwich.

I’ve seen two of his puppets in action. I watched the old man puppet, Walter, again on youtube and it was just agonizing. Like, I have literally never seen anything less funny on TV. Dunham enters a massive tie with a bunch of other things that were not funny at all, like the “Dateline” report on Matel having union organizers murdered in it’s Malaysian factories, and the Bears’ losing the Super Bowl, but behind things that were just the slightest bit funny, like the Geico Cave Man Sitcom. For example, the old man puppet–get this–complains about his wife!! While watching this video, I was honestly taken aback and, almost confused, as the audience laughed hysterically at jokes that were barely jokes and certainly not at all funny.

Walter: I could get a real job.

Jeff: Yeah, what would you do?

Walter: I could be a greeter at Wal-Mart.

Get it? Because he’s old. Dunham actually had to stop for laughter, then delay resuming the bit  as a second wave of laughter swept over the audience. I was dumbstruck. People find this hilarious. Apparently the way to revive ventriloquism was to somehow come up with cornier, more worn-out and boring material than the guys used during the seeming death farts of the genre. Not, “how can I do something creative with this old approach,” but “how can I come up with something lamer than the dummy calling the ventriloquist a dummy.”

The other Dunham puppet I’ve seen, both on youtube and in a clip from the new show–more than enough self-sacrifice to qualify for writing a review–is of Achmed The Dead Terrorist. This routine is vaguely right wing, but not as much as you would think. It’s too bland for that. What Dunham has done here is discover the territory that people who are actually retarded believe to be edgy. Achmed is a dead terrorist, which is vaguely un-PC in itself. The puppet tells a couple of jokes about Jews and Catholics, and a joke about Michael Jackson being a pedophile. Runs something like this. Two Jews would fight over a penny. Two priests would fight over a little boy. But they’d have to fight over the little boy with Michael Jackson, who also likes little boys. All of this is doubly hilarious because foreigners have funny accents, and therefore, so does Achmed. But don’t tell the PC police! I bet they would be outraged!

Nothing this guy does even brings a hint of a smile. If I just saw the act without the audience reaction, I would actually feel horrible for the guy, imagining him to be bombing in historical fashion after putting so much work into making those puppets. But this is a major crossover hit, breaking Dunham free of the retarded subculture once and for all. So now I hate Dunham and hope the swine flu kills everybody on earth. If you think I’m exaggerating, watch this youtube clip of Dunham’s act.  Note that this clip is closing in on 100 million views.

Actually, I couldn’t bring myself to link to the Dunham clip because it really is that terrible. Hope you enjoyed that one.

Though sometimes accused of misogyny, we at Ruthless will happily march arm-in-arm with our sisters when the cause is just–whether it be for more nudity in JCVD films or against reactionary, sexist propaganda, such as Gremlins. We have always opposed criticism that over-thinks or politicizes films to meet the agenda of the reviewer.  Yet, the patriarchal propaganda that is Gremlins is too transparent to ignore.  With a little analysis, we can see that the message of Gremlins is that society cannot function without a rigid patriarchy that produces obedient women. Given free reign, female behavior will land somewhere between that of animals and children and society will descend into anarchy.

The central figure in Gremlins is, of course, Gizmo, a mogwai. Mogwai represent women in a neutral state. The superficial similarities are obvious. Gizmo is cute, seemingly harmless and vulnerable and calls upon our protective instincts. We want to take Gizmo in, provide for him and snuggle up in bed with him. To grouchier feminists, this initial presentation of Gizmo/woman might seem condescending, but it is not so far from the reality of many male/female relationships. At worst, this depiction is conventional or conservative, but it is the starting point of a deeply reactionary fable.

The extreme, patriarchal expression begins with the three rules of “owning” a Mogwai/woman.

1) Don’t get them wet. Water, a classic symbol of fecundity, is taken a step further and is also a symbol for actual semen. The well-trained Gizmo avoids water. This is because Gizmo has been raised in a firmly patriarchal society (China) and both literally and figuratively kept in a box. But freed from control and supervision in the decadent West and left in the care of an immature man who lacks a firm hand, even virtuous Gizmo can’t avoid coming into contact with water. He goes into an accelerated labor, and painfully ejects his offspring. One minor slip up, and Billy suddenly finds himself with several more mouths to feed. The poorly managed woman, even if virtuous,  is portrayed as a source of ever-increasing burdens.

Gizmo’s offspring lack his strict upbringing and revert to their natural, insatiable desire for water/semen and offspring. Each poorly raised mogwai is governed by a mad desire to reproduce, but the most burning urge belongs to Stripe, who is a stand in for Reagan’s mythical “welfare queen.” Stripe reproduces indiscriminately, seeking water from any source available, including a public pool (bathhouse). He cares little for his offspring and even abuses them, but he expects the rest of society to provide for them. As Stripe’s spawn absorb the town of Kingston Fall’s resources, the remainder trickles up to Stripe who helps himself to the best of it. A rigid patriarchy is essential. A single generation without it leads to a cycle of reckless breeding as one batch of valueless baby factories passes it’s behavior to still larger broods in the next, dragging society into economic collapse, then chaos.

2) No bright lights, especially sunlight. The metaphor here is more subtle but again, sunlight is a common enough metaphor for openness and exposure. This rule is more patriarchal than misogynistic, as mogwai, and even gremlins, must be kept from exposure to light for their own protection. The analogous duty is protecting your women by not allowing them excessive exposure to the outside world. According to the worldview of Spielberg, writer Chris Columbus and director, Joe Dante, women left to their own devices will invariably dress like prostitutes, literally exposing their skin to sunlight or worse, the pulsating lights of “da club.” Of course, the immediate danger is not sunlight itself (though decadent women quickly become obsessed with “tanning,” and risk skin cancer), but the fact that men are entitled to rape women who dress in such a way. Even if such a woman is somehow not raped, a man like Spielberg or Dante will assume she has been violated and is therefore soiled and useless, effectively ending her life. Also note that one of the most common ways gremlins are killed by light exposure is with flash cameras, which is analogous to a woman appearing in pornography or (in 2009) posting shameful pictures of herself on the internet. While camera flashes and significant sunlight are lethal to the mogwai, women who are allowed excessive freedom will immediately demean themselves for sexual attention, couple with shady men or, less commonly, grow intellectually curious and absorb dangerous ideas.  Any of these things can render them useless as daughters, sisters or wives. As the keeper of a mogwai/woman, it is your responsibly to rigidly control their exposure to harmful elements so that they might maintain their virtue and purpose.

3) Do not feed after midnight. The lesson here is not to overindulge your woman and spoil her. Women who are allowed to live modestly are grateful to their breadwinners for sustaining and sometimes even treating them, as Gizmo is to Billy. We see this in Billy’s mom as well, as she remains grateful and respectful towards Billy’s dad, even though he is a poor provider and the family lives modestly. Billy’s mom is the uncritical representation of the homemaker portrayed by Friedan. She is fully occupied maintaining the home, excels at it and is a force for order. As though cleaning up after her husband’s destructive inventions was not enough, she is able to use her household appliances–most memorably a blender and microwave–to dispatch some of the first gremlins. Only Billy, however, is allowed to wield the sword against the gremlins, in his first step towards authentic manhood.

Though women’s willing contributions are essential to maintaining the patriarchal order, boundaries must be drawn. Once overindulged, women become insatiable, greedy and entitled. Because the patriarchy is ultimately victorious in the film, most human women are prevented from reaching the gremlin stage, but a human woman who is “fed after midnight” would turn out like Paris Hilton or Kim Kardashian. Sustenance is not only taken for granted, but becomes a vehicle for aimless ostentation and excess. This is exacerbated by the fact that women care little for practical or intellectual gifts, favoring hallow expressions of exclusivity, wealth and idleness (We get a glimpse of this in the movie with Mrs. Deagle’s motorized chair up her stairs), in accordance with Veblen’s account of conspicuous consumption in women. When they become spoiled, their desires easily spin out of control. As their wants become impossible to satisfy, they become unhappy no matter what they are given. For example, a diamond ring has no purpose other than conspicuously displaying of the expenditure of resources. Perhaps one or two such items can be given to a woman to mark special occasions, but if there are no limits the display becomes increasingly meaningless, and therefore increasingly gross and unsatisfying until the woman is adorning her dog with expensive jewelry to show her total disdain for the labor and resources that have gone into it. So, indulged without limit, the woman has moved from a contented being, grateful for sustenance to a monster of consumption and waste–from Gizmo to a gremlin. Just as the overindulged woman will buy expensive clothes to wear once, or often not at all, gremlins destroy as much as they consume, smashing glasses after they drink from them, then demanding more. The gremlin/spoiled woman would neither dream of working for the resources they consume, nor pay the slightest respect or consideration to the effort of those who do work to provide those resources

Women with money, mistaking their luck for superiority and consumed by status, are notoriously callous and cruel to service and others they deem beneath them. This is demonstrated in the film by the relentless and shortsighted abuse dished out by the greedy heiress, Mrs. Deagle. Deagle, clad in ridiculous furs, is clearly unhappy herself and abuses her power at the bank. By hastily foreclosing local businesses and being inflexible with borrowers, she is a threat to the long term survival of the local economy and ultimately the bank itself. We see similar behavior as the gremlins torment Kate (Phoebe Cates) as she tries her best to serve them in the local bar which they destroy in a shortsighted display of power and excess. Kate has emerged as a virtuous woman in a corrupt society. This is only because Kingston Falls is an idealistic depiction of 1950s nostalgia: a representation of what is being lost. In any case, the Gremlins take special joy in harassing a modest and contented woman, just as they do her analog: Gizmo. Of course women who have been “fed after midnight” tend to express similar disdain for, say, housewives or working women.

So we can see the collision between the patriarchy and the liberation of women on a few fronts. First there is Kingston Falls itself: small, almost magically anachronistic town, not yet soiled by the general “progress” of American society and the 1960s in particular. Even the music played on the radio in Kingston Falls is pre-Woodstock. The town teeters between the traditional, patriarchal society represented by China, and the corruption of post-feminist America. It is no coincidence that Gizmo is brought in from Chinatown in New York City.

The faces of patriarchal order are Mr. Wing, the revered father figure who is ignored at first, then vindicated and acquiesced to and Gizmo, the figure of the woman who is content and happy to literally live in the box created by the patriarch. Billy represents the weakened male who no longer knows how to control the new generation of mogwai/women.  So they become gremlins: ungoverned women who erode society, almost to the breaking point, never realizing that their uncontrolled desires are ultimately self-destructive. In reigning in the anarchy created by the gremlins, Billy becomes a real man. Importantly, Billy needs the help of Gizmo and Kate, female figures who understand their place and therefore are as much a part of the patriarchy as he is. Only then, is Billy able to both restore order and begin a relationship with Kate, who intimidated him when he was in his weak state. Also important is that part of Billy’s maturation is realizing that he must take a secondary position in the patriarchal structure, in deference to Mr. Wing and hope that Wing is right in saying, “perhaps someday, you may be ready.”

If you’ve ever wondered what would happen if Takashi Miike made a video game… you are a virgin.  But Izo is yo’ answer. This is the tale of a samurai who is crucified and punctured with spears, which he feels is unfair.   So Izo becomes a “half-dead,” almost invincible spirit and travels through time butchering people.  He rampages through social strata and institutions much like the levels of a video game, in search of “divine retribution.” Initially he lectures the “boss” of each level about the failings and hypocrisies of their viewpoint before dispatching them, but as he proceeds he becomes more demonic and almost completely  inarticulate.  He massacres judges, generals, clergy, yakuza, police, a street gang, political leaders, families and a flock of cowering business leaders. Also, his old boss and his mother. There’s some politically tinged dialog along the way that is pretty much all over the map, but here’s a sample.

Teacher: Okay then, Ms. Sato what is a nation?

Student: Yes.  A nation is a vicious delusion that exists only in human minds.  It is an imaginary notion of falsehood only there to control and govern people that instinctively gather into flocks.  It is the basic principle of the fiction that requires one side to be sacrificed.

This might also answer the question, “what if Bakunin made a video game?”

As is often the case, half my motivation for writing this is reading several other reviews, all of which were terrible.  One reviewer told of seeing  Izo with a bunch of film school types and how they were laughing derisively at its “absurdity.”  This tells us that, somewhere, there is a film school that must be discredited, if not burned to the ground. I mean, let’s give them an enormous free pass for not going into the film familiar with Miike and how he works.  Even then, maybe people who study or teach film should be able to discern that, when the protagonist, a samurai ghost, is woken from a slumber in a cave by two dorky guys in suits who try to sell him a retirement property, then he impales one of the real estate salesman, then the real estate salesmen turn into vampires and start girlishly giggling as they pull out knives and stab the guy like 80 times, which doesn’t kill him because he’s a ghost, then he kills the vampires and one of them says, “hell is in your heart, salvation is not in this world. My blood is gushing…” with his last breath, the scene is not meant to be taken 100% seriously.  Maybe it is supposed to be absurd.  Another, very subtle clue is how 20 different characters say things like “Izo is loathsome nonsense.”

There are certainly philosophical themes present in Izo.  “History is written in blood,” is the message of one opinion-maker.  I honestly forget if Izo kills that guy, but he does kill 90% of the people who appear on screen, so there’s a  good chance.  In any case, one can certainly take that as a general theme, especially with the footage of historical monstrosities worked into the film against microscope footage of teaming sperm.  I don’t think Miike’s ever really out to bestow lessons and deep thoughts, though, so much as he is out to cheerfully destroy them.  If you want to get wonky, it’s a deconstruction of deconstruction.  All of the norms, morals and institutions are bogus, based on assumptions geared to benefit those in power.  Izo takes them down.  To what end?  Obviously, none.  Total revolution is universal oppression.

I don’t know if I would even go that far, though.  Miike just likes to piss all over everything, thus the inclusion of a little parody of the old samurai fight scenes.  Other elements, most notably the conclusion, look to me like very funny spoofs of “deep” films ranging from The Matrix to 2001.  After killing everyone, Izu arrives at a chamber occupied by celestial beings, dressed in splendorous clothing of old Japan.  He decapitates one woman, butterflies swarm from her head and a screen opens revealing an enormous moon.  Then her carcass transforms into a caterpillar. It’s all very beautiful and I don’t think you’d be foolish to look for some symbolism, but you have to realize that Miike is always, always taking the piss even when he is kind of being serious.  I think that when you are as funny as he is, you just can’t help it. I’m going to stop here and write an essay that should help you feel relatively comfortable with this guy and his movies.  Ready? According to wikipedia, Takashi Miike’s favorite film is Starship Troopers.

Not that I think he’s all that hard to “get” or that I’m a genius for roughly understanding Miike’s films.  But reading other reviews of his work certainly makes it seem that way.  But I’m sure that you, reader, are not nearly as stupid as the average film reviewer.  You know, Starship Troopers went over most of their heads too.  Seriously.  Go look at the old reviews.  Miike also lists Lynch as a big influence and there’s a similar problem in viewing him. People feel like there should be something to “get” and if they don’t get it, there must be some kind of fraud afoot.  In this case, they conclude that Miike is just arbitrarily shocking and he’s famous because everyone is afraid to say so.  As with Lynch, my advice is to forget all of that. If deeper thoughts are stirred, all the better.  But don’t be caught up in subtext that is or isn’t there and deny yourself the pleasure of shots and scenes that are, just by themselves, highly entertaining or even beautiful.  There’s some undeniable artistry to this shot…

Then, boom!  It’s fucking Bob Sapp!  If you know who Bob Sapp is, ( MMA’s most [only?] lovable star who is very famous in Japan because all Japanese are racist and they see him as a King Kong figure) this is unbelievably great. But Bob Sapp is still Bob Sapp even if you’ve never heard of him. Just look at him!

As with Lynch, I can understand why Miike might not be for some people.  This film doesn’t  have much of a plot and I wouldn’t really say it’s a must see for anybody.  Miike has done better.  But, while hundreds are killed, there is relatively little gore (even Bob Sapp being chopped in half is minimally graphic) or sexual perversion, so watch it with the kids.  There are a good number of very funny scenes and beautiful or absurdist shots that demand appreciation. Just don’t be one of these idiots who thinks they are too smart to enjoy it.  Be honest with yourself. Do you want to see a ghost samurai running amok on the streets of Tokyo, slicing and dicing a flock of businessmen for no good reason?  Of course you do.

Hubert Selby Jr: It’ll be Better Tomorrow, is a solid film about a writer I’ve never read but would probably like.  He dropped out of school after the 8th grade and became a merchant marine during WWII and therefore a drunk.  We’re told that he only turned to writing after narrowly escaping death and being debilitated by TB.  Selby’s most famous book was Last Exit to Brooklyn which sold a bunch of copies, largely because of two idiotic obscenity trials.  He made a bunch of money and squandered it on drugs before rebuilding his life, continuing to write and becoming a popular teacher at USC.  The part of the film that actually sets out to tell his story does so quite well.

However,  about a third of the film irritated the fuck out of me, not because of unusual sins, but because of typical ones found in the biographical doc.  If you’ve watched any number of “Real Men of Genius” documentaries such as Sketches of Frank Gehry, or Lisa “Left Eye” Lopes; Crazy Sexy Cool you’ve seen the breathless fawning and hyperbole and, depending on the time in which the person lived, the celebrity hob-knobbing and circle-jerks.  Look, Henry Rollins has injected himself into the situation in act of self-promotion number 10,000.  Here’s Anthony Kiedis for no reason.  Selby overcame a drug addiction, so let’s get Robert Downy Jr. to narrate.  That’s how good a writer Selby was.  Huh?

The truth about greatness is that it’s a matter of increment, rather than orders of magnitude.  This is most clear in more objective endeavors like sports.  The most commonly cited example is golf, where one stroke separates Tiger from the field and the field from the club pros.  I like the example of football though–bear with me you unclean foreigners.  Football is a multi-billion dollar industry and meticulously scouted athletes conform to a narrow range of physical attributes.  You can rule out 99.99% of the population from a given position just by watching them run ten feet.   Yet the differences between the greatest of all time and the home town heroes are so subtle that you could build a team almost exclusively of first tier, all-time greats who weren’t even noticed by college scouts and wound up at barely-known programs.  Build an offense around Walter Payton, Jerry Rice, Randy Moss, Jackie Slater, Larry Allen, Gene Upshaw and a properly sedated Terrell Owens and you’re in pretty good shape.  Steve McNair is probably your quarterback and though, he’s “only” a borderline hall of famer, he wasn’t even a Dvision I player and your team would still score 80 points per game.  Yet nobody could tell that any of these guys were good enough to play for Iowa.

Within the arts and academics, where success is more subjective, greatness is just as hard to spot and narrowly achieved.  You probably know that Confederacy of Dunces was only published under improbable circumstances after the author committed suicide as a failure.  There must be hundreds of such books that were never discovered. Marconi and Tesla tied on inventing the radio.  Leibniz and Newton tied on inventing calculus.  A bunch of other people would have also tied with them, except they died at age seven because they crapped in their drinking water.  Only a handful of living filmmakers will be remembered through the centuries, but nobody really has a clue which ones.  Will future generations believe that Sokurov is ten times better than Scorsese?  Will there be hundreds of professors specializing in “The Simpsons” or “The Wire” who look down their nose at film from this era?  Will Hubert Selby Jr. be completely forgotten? It all seems possible.

Again I don’t have a huge problem with the strictly biographical elements of this film and the footage chosen of Selby.  Nor is my argument that the great people who are separated by timing, chance and marginally better ability are any less great or interesting because of it.  In fact, the things that make up those little differences are far more interesting than the scenario of the typical hagiography, wherein the genius is a comic book hero.  If some people just popped out of the womb with IQs of 300 and the ability to throw a 180 MPH fastball, their stories would quickly become boring.  Warranted hagiography is fine, but what are the nuances and idiosyncrasies that allowed the subject to shine?  Selby talks about his style, but only briefly.  There has to be more to say about the man and his work that could be included at the expense of cameos testifying to his freakish genius.

In fact, with rare exceptions, other celebrities should usually be excluded from these films.  Anyone who’s ever listened to a DVD commentary knows the mechanism at work here.  Celebrities, though usually talented and deserving, have still just scraped past other talented and deserving and people to achieve their status.  Insecure and unwilling to face this fact, they establish a tacit contract whereby all parties wildly exaggerate each others ability.   Maybe the producers casting the voice of ALF thought it was a coin toss between the guy who got it and the next guy at the time.  But now, we can see that he was unbelievably fucking brilliant!  I’m not saying that Selby is the same as the ALF guy, but I did want to throw up when an actress from the film of his Requiem For A Dream declared that the chance to give voice to his words was “one of the great gifts of my life.”

The best part of the contract is that even those giving out the blowjobs benefit.  Not only is there the understanding that they too will be blown down the line (the guy who did the voice of ALF will talk about the stunning vision of the producers of ALF),  there is the implication that they have earned the right to understand and opine on the genius by being brilliant themselves.  Why is Richard Price in a film about Selby for like fifteen minutes?  So he can say, “Hubert Selby is a Genius.  I ought to know… I’m Richard Price.”  And Michael Jordan loves Ball Park Franks.  They plump when you cook ‘em!  Obviously Rollins, who is a genius at tricking people into believing he’s not an idiot, is the more gratuitous example.  But it’s specifically because I’m fine with Price that I mention him.  I know Price deserves a spot on the totem pole that is invisible from my own.  But, apart from perhaps a few words on Selby’s influence, that has absolutely nothing to do with Selby the man. Long after it’s explained to we uninitiated why Selby was great and what he did, we still hear from Price and the like.  Give me more from his students at USC.  His mailman.  Hell, maybe the guy himself.  There’s a decent amount of footage with Selby, but seeing as he is the subject of the film, maybe he should be in it more than Darren Aronofsky.

Apart from just being fed up with this hagiography approach in general, I think it irked me so much in this particular film because Selby comes across as unbelievably modest and unconcerned with stratification of status.  He wasn’t a monk, but it seems like if he knew a film was being made about Robert Downy Jr, it would never even occur to him to involve himself.  When he called for a job at USC he wasn’t sure they’d have one for him because he never seemed to realize that, according to one testimony, there should be a wing of the Harvard library named in his honor.   So I doubt he’d believe that his legacy is best conveyed via celebrity endorsements.

Tagline:

There is no substitute.

Can the premise even be articulated?

Oh my, yes.  It’s about a kickboxing fashion consultant trying to save the world from exploding jeans.  JCVD is a cheap knock-off artist in Hong Kong who tries to go legit as a jean manufacturer and unwittingly partners up with an undercover CIA agent.  There is a CIA agent undercover in the Hong Kong garment industry because Russians are planting “nano-bombs” in knock-off merchandise hoping to detonate them once they reach American consumers.  The Russians’ motivation for doing this is…  They’ve chosen to distribute the bombs via knock-offs manufactured in Hong Kong because… Well, look if I was the producer, it wouldn’t have gotten to that point of the pitch before giving a green light either.

“Well, I guess to start off, I’d say it’s Halloween III meets Red Dawn meets Bloodsport meets Prêt-à-Porter.  But before you…”

“SOLD!!!!”

B -list costar

Rob Schneider, who according to my calculations was still fairly popular in 1998, plays the undercover CIA agent.  The atrocious dubbing detracts from the comic timing and boundless charm you are accustomed to, but he still wears Hawaiian shirts.  Seriously, he wasn’t bad.  Paul Sorvino plays his boss.

Homoeroticism:
It’s nice when we review one of these films and don’t have to embellish or creatively interpret anything to find homoeroticism.  Which is about 98% of the time.  During a rickshaw race, JCVD is pulling Schneider and they take a short cut through an alley fish market.  When they emerge, Schneider is holding an eel which he uses as a whip, flogging JCVD’s tightly clad posterior and shouting “Move that big beautiful ass of yours!”  Just the facts.

How Bad Was It Really?

Obviously it was atrocious, but it kept my attention.  I read a couple other reviews and it’s amazing how much people are willing to concede to HK flicks.  The Onion even talked about the contrast between exciting HK action and the dull JCVD.  The HK director has a POV of a stray bullet going through a roll of toilet paper for no reason… Genius!  Kevin Thomas of the LA Times who, admittedly, is grossly incompetent in general, claimed this was “one of Van Damme’s best movies ever.”  Again, it is about a kickboxing fashion consultant saving the world from exploding jeans.  The excess in aimless style does kind of make up for the ridiculous plot and terrible dialogue, in that it gives you something to look at, including cool stunts that would have no place in a rational storyline.  But let’s stop deluding ourselves into believing that the “electrifying” HK action is something other than an entertaining gimmick to cover up coarse scripts for internationally diverse audiences, many of whom can barely read.  There’s a reason that approach is terrible in Hollywood: because people are taking the films at least somewhat seriously.  But the approach does work here because the whole thing is so ridiculous that the pointless shot from the POV of a shoe fits, where it would just be a waste of time if you actually cared what was happening.

Corpse Count:

Um… not that many, but some are deaths by exploding jeans.  Also, the nano-bombs make green explosions for some reason.  Another guy has his safe booby trapped with some kind of rocket intended for shooting down helicopters.  A few other people are shot or crushed by cargo containers.  The total is probably about fifteen.

Novelty Death:

Somehow, JCVD winds up in a karate battle on a moving truck.  In Hong Kong they use huge bamboo chutes to make scaffolding for construction.  I know this because, being a world traveler, I have been to Hong Kong, where I saw this scaffolding all over the place.  I also dined at a Wendy’s.  Anyway, JCVD unleashes a wicked spin kick and knocks one of the Russians  off the truck and he is impaled on one of those bamboo chutes.

Post-Mortem One Liner:

“Yaaaarrrgggghhhhh!”

The unusual thing about this one is that Paul Sorvino screams after the toy dinosaur he is working on has already exploded and killed him.  HK action films are so dynamic and exhilarating!

Stupid Political Content:

The whole thing is set around the time of the handover of Hong Kong from England to China.  And… yeah.

What You Learned:

Even when it’s done by the original actors, who were originally speaking English, Asians will find a way to fuck up the dubbing.

Also, “Counterfeiting happens to be a federal crime.  Whether it’s clothing or whether it’s money, it doesn’t matter.”

Tagline:

He’s not only smarter than the police; he’s doing their job… He’s the Exterminator

Entire Story In Fewer Words Than Are In This Fragment:

A gang paralyzes John’s pal, he becomes a vigilante.

Homoeroticism:

Well, there’s the unusually close bond between John and his ‘Nam buddy, Michael, to the extent that the attack on Michael sends John on a bloody rampage. There’s the usual masculine palling around at their blue collar job. And, that’s about it.  Oh yeah, there’s the scene where a teenage boy is chained face down, nude and anally assaulted with a soldering iron. Even when The Exterminator rescues him and gives him a towel, the towel keeps slipping off. That boy’s bare ass has more screen time than Michael’s wife and kids, who are supposed to be the chief objects of our sympathy. Don’t pretend you’d have it any other way.

Corpse Count:

13, but a pretty brutal 13. Most of the gore is off-screen, except for this scene where a GI is tied up and decapitated in the ‘Nam prelude. But two gang members are tied down in a rat infested basement and left to be devoured.  A chicken hawk is tied to a bed and burned alive. There’s a lot of scenes in which men tie each other up.

Novelty Death:

Tying a man up (see) and slowly lowering him into a meat grinder will usually score you top novelty death, and this case is no exception. John has abducted a mob boss, suspended him in chains above the grinder and extorted some money from him. When the dago tricks John into walking into a dog attack, John comes back and makes some extra greasy hamburger.

Pre-Mortem One liner:

Before leaving the mob boss, John utters the trailblazing line “if you’re lying, I’ll be back.”  Arnold is nothing but a two bit thief.

How bad was it really?

Well, the critics would give it a low rating, then shower it with praise. Ebert raves, “The Exterminator exists primarily to show burnings, shootings, gougings, grindings, and beheadings. It is a small, unclean exercise in shame.” How is that not good for at least 3.5 stars?

Also, this random guy on IMDB simply must be quoted. “Dark as a panther’s kiss, this top notch killer thriller pops all the right tubes and leaves you dancing like Sullivan. There’s something about a good vigilante film to get the old blood pumping and your mouth salivating. When I watched it as a youth, it made me want to track down Barry Bargeld, the school bully, and grip his coat collar.” Obviously, I simply can’t compete with that.  But I’ll finish the review anyway.

Really, the movie is pretty bad. The story rambles and changes course for no reason. For example, we’re barely introduced to the cop chasing down The Exterminator before we see him involved in a romantic subplot.  This is supposed to draw us in, but instead we ask, “who the fuck is that guy?” Once we remember him as that cop who was on screen for 13 seconds a while back, he completely changes heart for no real reason and decides it’s best to let The Exterminator do his work without police interference. There’s a lot good about The Exterminator.  It has a  higher budget than I expected.  It foreshadows much of what is to come in the world of action.  It’s dark as a panther’s kiss.  Its one flaw is not being a very good movie.

Stupid Political Content:

The film is liberal in that it is pro-euthanasia.  Everyone seems to agree that John pulling the plug at his paralyzed friend’s request, which he can only make by blinking twice, is the right thing to do. It’s conservative in that it is pro-murdering-anyone-you-even-suspect-of-a-crime.  The Exterminator was also at the forefront of the whole notion that we have a crazy, liberal criminal justice system that leaves our prisons sitting practically empty. We are to believe that the state of affairs is typified by the rap sheet of one of The Exterminator’s victims, read off by a cop: “42 arrests for promoting prostitution, assault, rape, white slavery, corrupting the morals of minors. Lately, he specialized in young boys. He was convicted twice and served a total of 18 months.”   I’m not sure that there’s an actual crime called “white slavery.”

What You Learned:

You get 18 months for 42 severe sex crimes?  Time to get bus-ay!

Séance is really good. The main thing holding it back is me being a prick who can’t let a segment of about ten minutes slide. The film rests on a string of incredible coincidences. A psychology student is working on the paranormal with a sound engineer whose wife is a psychic medium. The engineer needs to get a recording of some trees blowing in the wind, so he drives out to a remote forest. A kidnapper snatches up a little girl and drives her out to the same area of the same remote forest. The girl gets free when neither man is paying attention and manages to hide in the case where the sound engineer keeps some of his gear.

So far, I’m OK. Movies generally tell unusual stories plucked from billions of possibilities. Like, you don’t watch United 93 and say, “oh, of all the planes in the world, this just happens to be the one that gets hijacked as part of a major terrorist attack.” The point is, it’s the story of the plane that did get hijacked. So this is the one about the kidnapped girl whose abductor picked a hiding spot where there was a sound engineer and with a good equipment case to hide in and a psychic wife. Fine. The sound engineer doesn’t notice that his case is suddenly like sixty pounds heavier… I can look the other way on that. And when the police come to the very same engineer’s house to talk to his psychic wife about the very same little girl… well… that could happen, and the psychology student is supposed to somehow be the common link between all of these parties, but the coincidences begin to be distracting.

After the passing of what seems like about 24 hours, and an initial visit from desperate police, the couple finally discover the girl in the trunk. Though she looks OK, they assume she’s dead, freak out and predictably waiver about calling the police because this doesn’t look very good for them. The husband then moves the girl upstairs and only later discovers that, what must have been a warm, breathing body, is still alive. At this point, I was like “Oh, come on!” As good as virtually every other part of the movie was, once you’ve issued an “Oh, Come On!” it’s there.

The rest of the movie is based on the couple’s ambition and superstition biting them in the ass, causing them to be haunted and eventually arrested for murder. The basic storyline is pretty predictable, though in fairness, the film came out in 2000, so it was only the 475th Asian movie with a ghost girl. The beauty is in the execution, as the characters are well developed enough that the source of tension is our feeling from them, rather than wondering when some CGI cartoon is going to pop up. Fearing for the fate of characters we’ve come to know makes watching it unfold even more tense than a false highwire act. My teacher says this is called dramatic irony.

The scenes with ghosts are deliberately tame and even realistic, as far as scenes with ghosts go. In one instance, the girl emerges from the horizontally placed, 2001 homaging case only to walk up to the husband and leave her dirty hand prints as markers of guilt. Another time, the man is faced with his doppelganger, which just sits staring at him until he sets it on fire. All of this is done with a minimum of screaming and no totally x-treme camera work or ginsu editing. Instead, it is shot coldly and beautifully.

Korean film has a reputation built largely on severed tongues and scenes that border on psychological attacks against the audience.  I like those kinds of films, but you might not realize that the Koreans make some excellent popcorn flicks.  They seem to be in the golden zone of having accumulated the money and talent for making mid-budget crowd-pleasers and not having Will Smith.  And no, it’s not like in the days where everyone pretended that Hong Kong B-Movies were totally awesome because hot Asian chicks shot their way through boring stories and terrible dialogue using two handguns at once.  R-Point is, without qualification or any kind of grading curve, an excellent action/horror flick, somewhere between Predator and The Descent in content, and only a notch or two below in quality.

The film is about a group of Korean soldiers stationed in Vietnam during the American phase of occupation.  The main guy (I’ll skip pretending that I can remember anybody’s name, but it might have been Park) is a loose cannon, but he gets results.  By “results,”  I of course mean massive casualties for the enemy and/or his own platoon.  He even ices a VC posing as a cleaning lady during the preliminaries, opening fire on little more than a hunch.  He’s chosen for a special mission to retrieve soldiers who have not returned from a sojourn to R-Point, which is supposedly a non-combat zone.  Only the leader of the mission has made it back and he sits mangled in a hospital bed, swearing that everyone but him died in the field.  But the supposedly dead soldiers continue to radio in with cryptic messages for help , so it is decided that someone must look for them.  The brass more or less blackmails the loose cannon into taking the assignment, then dangles a special furlough before a group of other soldiers, most of whom are inexperienced in combat, to entice them into going on the mission under his command.  The Vietnamese fill the role of the American Indian in Hollywood.  A few pop up in their black PJs and create some chaos, but the real source of problems is an ancient Vietnamese burial ground: a lake that the Chinese filled in with a mass grave centuries ago, during one of the earlier instances of the foreign oppression that makes up most of Vietnamese history.  As the betrayals and deaths accumulate, so do the ghosts.  The evil on the patch of land intensifies and the soldiers are plagued by spirits from various nations and eras, including their own.  It’s even implied that there are French spirits from a massive slaughter, but it seems they were sitting around eating ghost cheese for the duration of this film.

You can fill in the blanks from there, though the specifics of some of the twists are unpredictable.  The point is, everything about R-Point is well done.  The film starts off more in the action vein, and while not up to the impossible standards of Predator, we get lines like “My cock has more power than any of yours.  I’m the godfather of the bitches!”  Or the men waiting, pantless, in line for medical inspection.  Dr: “What the…?  Disgusting!”  Cut to the next scene, “What’s the big fucking deal?  So we got syphilis!”

R-Point is funny when it tries to be, but shifts smoothly to high suspense.  It’s heavily atmospheric, with the action set partially in a dilapidated French colonial mansion, partially in jungles and fields strewn with ancient markers and monuments.  There is an underlying anti-war theme about collective guilt and cyclical violence.  These elements, however, serve to lend weight to the horror and tension of the ghost story, which is always the central point.  Nobody has their tongue cut out or is forced to eat vomit, by the way.  Again, things I am perfectly fine with, but they would be out of place here because this is just a good, mainstream film.  In an era plagued by Transformers and comic book bullshit, pure entertainment is becoming one of the rarest commodities in film, and that’s the reason to see this one.