Cinecult: Blade Runner

Originally run on May 10, 2010 in the Union Weekly.

"I've seen things you people wouldn't believe."

About a year back, BBC film critic, Mark Kermode saying about Moon that “Good science fiction isn’t about technology or special effects, it’s about ideas.” Blade Runner isn’t just good science fiction, it’s great science fiction, and it’s one of the better movies about ideas that I can think of. While many treat Blade Runner as a meditation on life and all that, I see it as a movie about our society and just how screwed up we are. Beyond all of that is a film so wonderful, so iconic, that it is hard to imagine what a world without Blade Runner would look like.

Most of what is memorable about Blade Runner is probably down to the art design. Blade Runner was the third film of Ridley Scott (Alien, Gladiator, Robin Hood), who holds a BA in graphic design, and even then he demonstrates an eye for both designing a world and filming it. Much of the Los Angeles of 2019 was designed by legendary concept artist Syd Mead, who worked on films ranging from Star Trek to Tron. Both of these men’s visions (as well as an army of draftsmen, artists, and journeymen) combine to make a vision of the future that, at the time, was utterly unique.

Read the rest on page seven of the Union Weekly!

Cinecult: The Proposition

Originally run on 30 November 2009 in the Union Weekly.

The Proposition (2005)

"Australia, what fresh hell is this?"

It’s probably telling that The Proposition is one of my favorite films, since it’s one of the most stark and depressing films that’s come out in the past decade. It’s also the single best western to come out since Unforgiven, which is strange considering the film was written and directed by Australians and takes place on the same continent. It is an unusual place for a setting, but like Sergio Leone’s comic book melodramas or Akira Kurosawa’s samurai-filled iterations, taking the western down under breathes life into the genre. It’s an odd choice, but it’s the kind of choice that keeps the western alive.

The director of the film is John Hillcoat, an Australian who recently released the film adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. He’s clearly a man who knows how to put together a good movie, but what elevates The Proposition above most other films is the screenplay written by musician-cum-novelist-cum-former-heroin-addict Nick Cave, who also handles the score with bandmate Warren Ellis (not to be confused with the comic writer of the same name). Cave, though an Australian exile living in England, has an excellent handle on the western and American writing, an influence that’s quite clear in both his lyrics and in his debut Southern gothic novel, And The Ass Saw an Angel.

The film takes place in the year 1880, back before Australian independence, racial tolerance, and dental hygiene. The Australia of The Proposition isn’t the place we laughed at in that one episode of The Simpsons. Instead of koalas and lame jokes about knives, this Australia is one that’s basically unknown to us and, as I understand it, unknown to even the Aussies. This land is a fly-filled hellhole rife with delusional government officials, psychopaths, wars with the natives, and miles and miles of dirt. If the entirety of the United Kingdom was shaken up, all of the loose pieces of trash and deritus would wind up in Hillcoat and Cave’s vision the Land Down Under. It’s in this topsy-turvy terminal that our protagonist, Irish immigrant Charlie Burns (Guy Pearce) finds himself caught up.

The opening of the film is rather telling. It begins with the police ambushing Charlie and his youngest brother, Mike, at a brothel in the middle of the desert stocked solely with Chinese prostitutes. It’s a loud, brutal fight and ends with the two Burns brothers captured by police. But they aren’t executed or sent to prison. Instead, police Captain Morris Stanley (Ray Winstone) offers them a proposition: If Charlie Burns kills his eldest brother, Arthur who is “an abomination,” by Christmas Day, Stanley will let Charlie and his younger brother go free, absolved of all of their crimes. If not, Mike will be put to death for the crimes of the two older brothers. From there, the movie unspools into an anarchic, bloody race against time across the sun scorched wilderness of Australia.

The eponymous proposition is about as Biblical (or maybe Faustian) of a pact as could ever be made, but unlike the Bible, there’s no moral to be found, there’s no lesson to be learned, and nothing seems to occur according to any divine purpose. Things just happen and they’re incredibly ugly when they do. The world of The Proposition is deeply flawed and demonstrates just how messy things can be when humans try to do the right thing. It’s an interesting inversion on the typical representation of the western as the forces of good battle the forces of evil, and it’s what makes this movie more than just a simple piece of genre.

The film is also chock-full of wonderful acting, including a performance by one of my favorite character actors of all time: John Hurt. Hurt plays Jellon Lamb, a verbose and sadistic bounty hunter, adventurer, and “man of no little education.” Hurt’s career has spanned about 50 years and he’s acted in projects ranging from fantastic fare like Hellboy and Alien to more serious dramas such as Midnight Express and The Elephant Man, as well as the other great western of the past two decades, Dead Man. With all of these films in mind, I’d be hard-pressed to find a movie where he’s more engaging than here. He’s creepy, threatening, and hilarious all wrapped into one man.

Now, while he is my favorite actor in the film, he’s really a part of a much larger ensemble of great actors. There’s the beautiful Emily Watson (Punch Drunk Love; Synecdoche, New York), as the delicate, but frustrated wife of Captain Stanley, as well as David Wenham (Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, 300) as the wonderfully named Eden Fletcher, the dandiest authoritarian that ever drifted into the Victorian Outback. Danny Huston (son of the great actor/director John Huston) is also great as the villainous older brother, Arthur, who is as vicious and frightening as he is charming, a difficult combination to pull off and is entirely appropriate for this film.

It’s a shame to know that The Proposition’s unrelenting grimness will keep a lot of people from seeing it and just as many from finishing it. Their loss, I suppose, because despite the film’s bleak treatment of humanity (and of Australia), there’s still a beauty to be found in all this. Hillcoat’s film shows that as wicked as we might become, there’s still redemption to be had, if only we can find it. There’s plenty more to be sussed out of the film, but if there’s anything more significant, I’d be hard-pressed to find it.

Also Sprach Herzog

Originally run on 19 October 2009 for the Entertainment page.

Also Sprach Herzog: Fitzcarraldo, Being a Hornet, and Why School is a Waste of Time

The first Werner Herzog movie I ever saw was his documentary on the doomed naturalist Timothy Treadwell in the documentary Grizzly Man. I saw it on a lark with one of my friends and when I walked out, I walked out as a slightly different person. I didn’t know that documentaries could be this engaging, that there was people this crazy walking the earth, and that brooding German lecturing on the chaos inherent in nature made for good movies. Since then Herzog has become one of my favorite directors, so when I heard that there was a screening of his magnum opus Fitzcarraldo, followed up by a question and answer session with the director himself at the Aero Theater in Santa Monica, I jumped on the opportunity (after hunting up the nine dollars for admission). Watching what might be his best film, Fitzcarraldo, and listening to him speak, reaffirmed all of the reasons why I dig Herzog so goddamn much.

The production of Fitzcarraldo is probably every bit as legendary as the film itself (which is about an opera enthusiast, played by Klaus Kinski, who dreams up a scheme to move a steam ship up a mountain). It’s frought with disasters both man-made—such as the original lead actor leaving production half-way through the shoot—and those made by nature— such as a woodcutter who after being bitten in the foot by a snake, cut off his appendage with a chainsaw to keep the venom from spreading to the rest of his body. What results from all of this turmoil is a work of art that was entirely worth it. Even though parts of it are somewhat clunky (like the English dubbing) and the clearing of the woods and use of indigenous workers is morally questionable, it shines past all of this. Even the guy breathing through a tube two rows behind me couldn’t dim the experience. It also didn’t hurt that I was watching this movie for the first time on the big screen—the way the Lord Jesus Christ intended us to watch movies.

The real treat came after the movie concluded, when Herzog spoke about the film. He’s always a man worth listening to. Though he did repeat a few stories I’ve read enough times to feel like he’s told me himself (such as the story of an Indian chief asking him for permission to kill Klaus Kinski, Fitzcarraldo’s lead actor), he touched on a lot of subjects, such as how he believes that our society is “starving for discourse” or that, despite the trouble surrounding Fitzcarraldo, he said that “Any idiot could do it.” I think my favorite quote came when he talked about cinema vérité. He said that he didn’t want to be a fly on the wall,” observing a subject in its natural habitat, but rather, he wanted to be “the hornet that stings.”

Then Herzog capped off the evening by saying something that my parents have been saying for years, which is that my education is a waste of time. This comment came after the second fan of the night asked a question regarding parallels between his other South-American-adventure-film-on-a-river, Aguirre: The Wrath of God, and Fitzcarraldo. He blew off the question, probably half out of being tired of hearing the comparison for nearly thirty years, and mostly because he sees academia as an organization that “vivisects poetry” and that the people who pick apart films like this are “completely without human pathos.” Big talk for someone who stole a camera from the Munich Film School.

I have to disagree with Herzog’s blanket statement of film scholarship being bankrupt, but there’s a tinge of truth in his words. We don’t take in a work of art to tear it apart and poke at the insides, we do it to experience something outside of our normal lives. They show us something more delicate Herzog himself describes as the “ecstatic truth.” This is what film is supposed to do, and Herzog succeeds in this with Fitzcarraldo—even if movie dorks keep on asking him the same stupid film school questions over and over again.

So, while the questions weren’t quite up to snuff and my choice to go to college was assaulted by one of my heroes, I still had a full, worth-while evening because I didn’t feel like I wasted my time, because none of that junk can ever be as magnificent as seeing a ship sail up a mountain on the big screen. Werner Herzog is a guy that we could all probably learn something from. He’s a man driven to tell stories, no matter the hardship. Filmmaking is his vocation he lives up to every ounce of that potential.

Image stolen from Vice Magazine many moons ago.

Cinecult: The Thin Red Line

Originally published on the Entertainment page on 28 September 2009.

If you’ve never heard the name Terrance Malick before, there’s probably a good reason. In the past forty years, directors like Clint Eastwood and Francis Ford Coppola, have been involved in dozens of movies, while Malick has only directed a grand total of four. Despite this, among critics and terminal film nerds (like myself), he’s regarded as one of the great auteurs of the age. His films Badlands and Days of Heaven are regarded as some of the best films ever made. Considering this pedigree, if you watch The Thin Red Line, it shouldn’t be hard to understand why he’s so well respected despite his slow gestation time.

The Thin Red Line, despite being nominated for Best Picture has since fallen by the way side. There’s some pretty good reasons for this. First off, this slow-paced, but elegant war film had the misfortune of coming out the same year as one of the biggest action movies of all time: Steven Spielburg’s Saving Private Ryan. Secondly, and probably more importantly, it’s a sprawling, self-indulgent mess. It’s often plodding and it’s covered in scars from being cut and re-cut (and despite this it’s still probably too long). It also doesn’t have one main character—or even a handful of main characters-- that the audience can hold on to. The James Jones novel that the movie is based off of has the same massive cast of characters, but at least the book gives names to the people in it. Roger Ebert describes the movie as “hallucinatory” and that’s about as good of a one word summation of this film as there could be. As we should all know, hallucinations aren’t for everybody.

Despite the rough spots in the movie, there’s still plenty of beauty to be gleaned from this film. The Thin Red Line follows one of the bloodiest battles in American history, which takes place on the South Pacific island of Guadalcanal. Malick pays just as much attention to the horrors of war as he does the beauty that these battles take place in, and that alone makes this movie an interesting anomolly in the genre.

The dialogue is also fairly wonderful. Admittedly, most of it has no place in a war film (Would a character being shot at really consider the morality of nature? Probably not.), but it can’t be denied that, in and of itself, the writing is beautiful. That’s what most of the film is like and that’s what makes me love it so much. It isn’t quite a visceral war film and it isn’t quite a poem. It doesn’t do either of these things perfectly, but the failure that results is probably more interesting than most movies.

The Thin Red Line isn’t all poetry, though. The action scenes are among the best I’ve ever seen. Unlike the rest of the film, which moves with the swiftness of dream, the action scenes are as tightly plotted and assembled. Combat has a frightening weight that few other movies ever seem to execute. Part of this is because the Japanese aren’t just enemy soldiers, they’re ghosts. They slink out of the forest without a sound, kill something and leave just as quietly. In Saving Private Ryan, the Germans were something we could understand, they were in tanks or behind machine guns. In this case, the enemy is a mystery. How are these men supposed to defeat the enemy if he’s nothing more than a muzzle flash two hundred yards away?

The Thin Red Line isn’t for everyone. As I’ve said, it isn’t perfect and it’s probably the one of the spottiest movies that I would consider “great.” But in between the rough spots are some truly beautiful pieces of film making. If only for these quiet moment Malick’s movie is worth giving a shot. Plus, the loud ones are pretty goddamn good, too.

Image via Google. As usual.

Cinecult: Princess Mononoke

Originally run on 11 May 2009. Image by Google, clearly.

Japanese anime is a mixed bag, and for the most part it sits on the side of Japanese culture that’s full of methamphetamines and tentacle rape. There’s a lot of hay in that pile and very few needles. Cowboy Bebop is one of them, Ghost in the Shell is one of them, and the work of Studio Ghibli is one of them. Studio Ghibli is run by Hayao Miyazaki, the “Walt Disney of Japan.” In the past thirty years, he’s consistently produced and directed some of the best animation the island has to offer. The crown jewel of the studio is Princess Mononoke, which it’s safe to say is not only one of the best animated movies ever made, but it might just be one of the best films ever made.

The story of Princess Mononoke follows an exiled prince named Ashitaka (voiced by Billy Crudup in the dubbed version) who, after saving his village from a demon, contracts the same curse that drove the monster insane and, in time, will kill him as well. From there he encounters all of the shortcomings of the outside world: Samurai bandits, famine, disease, and human greed, incarnated in the form of Lady Eboshi (voiced by Minnie Driver) of Iron Town, a weapons manufacturer who will not stop until the entire forest is clear of the ancient gods that rule it. He also encounters the princess which gives the film its name (voiced by Claire Danes), who was raised by wolves and will stop at nothing to put an end to Lady Eboshi.

There’s a lot of room for Princess Mononoke to be a heavy-handed story about environmentalism, but Miyazaki doesn’t take the easy way out. Instead of casting judgment, he fleshes out his characters better than many live action films. At first appearance, Lady Eboshi comes off as callous and ignorant, but as the plot progresses it’s revealed that her ironworks contribute more to the world than burnt earth. Even the titular character isn’t guided by morally pure reasons, and is just as capable of savagery as her nemesis is.

At its core, Princess Mononoke is a fantasy adventure (without all the lame elf bullshit) and the top-notch animation makes the action sequences as well executed as the plot. It’s safe to say that Princess Mononoke has the single raddest use of a bow and arrow in film. The understated voice work of the English version doesn’t suffer from the problems that many dubbed animes are afflicted with. The dubbing goes hand-in-hand with the top-notch translation by the venerable Neil Gaiman (The Sandman). Princess Mononoke is the perfect example of why across the board hatred of a medium is stupid, because the only thing you’re succeeding in doing is keeping amazing films like this away from you.

The Limits of Control

Originally run on 4 May 2009. Image by Google.

The Limits of Control is the latest from the patron saint of independent films, Jim Jarmusch (Dead Man, Broken Flowers), and watches like a throw-back to a Jean-Pierre Melville movie if he was really into Zen Buddhism. As with Jarmusch's Coffee and Cigarettes and to a lesser extent Ghost Dog: Way of the Samurai, The Limits of Control follows an episodic structure, and has no real central plot. The plot is secondary to the characters that inhabit this world. The focus of the film is on a nameless, suit wearing gun-for-hire (who doesn't carry a gun) played by Isaach de Bankolé (the good African guy in this season's 24 and the ice cream man in Ghost Dog). The camera follows him as he travels from Spanish city to Spanish city, encountering various contacts who give him a coded message, along with a dose of unsolicited philosophical monologues.

Bankolé has the most screen time of the film, but it also includes roles from Tilda Swinton (Burn After Reading, Michael Clayton), Hiam Abbass (the mom from The Visitor), Gael García Bernal (Babel, The Science of Sleep), and the magnanimous John Hurt (who I would watch in absolutely anything). The movie also includes a beautiful actress by the name of Paz de la Huerta, who serves as a compromised version of the film noir sexpot. It's worth noting that she's naked for most of her scenes, and that she also has the only asymmetrical breasts I've ever seen in a movie (maybe the only ones in cinematic history). In a way, her lop-sided breasts serve as a metaphor for the structure of the film—they're compelling, but there's something slightly off that you can't quite put a name to immediately. The Limits of Control isn't bad, but it's very clearly different than most movies about stone-cold, international assassins.

There's a point where a film stops being mysterious and starts being obtuse. It's hard to tell which side The Limits of Control rests on. The plot isn't sparse, it's nearly threadbare, and this isn't helped by the Lone Man's stoicism. There's a brief glimpse at what the film might have been when Bill Murray briefly appears towards the finale. His appearance is wry and funny and carries a lot more energy than the previous hour and a half did. The scene also highlights what the rest of the film was lacking: Bill Murray being an unrepentant asshole. The characters that inhabit this world or their crazy theories are interesting, but they're spaced so far apart that they barely exist as anything more than overheard conversations at a coffee shop.

I know it's barely even May, but it's probably safe to say that The Limits of Control is going to be the coolest film in theaters this year. And much like cool people, Jarmusch's film is an enigma. It's unapproachable and, since it knows it's cool, doesn't feel the need to prove or explain anything. It can simply subsist off of the knowledge that it is cooler than most of the people on Earth, or, you know, filmgoers. Which is fine. Jim Jarmusch is a man who knows exactly what he's doing. He that isn't afraid of making challenging films, but with that said, he also probably knows that his movies aren't for everyone.

Cinecult: Aguirre: The Wrath of God

Originally run on 28 April 2009. Image via Google.

Aguirre: The Wrath of God was the sixth film directed by German auteur Werner Herzog and despite thirty years and three dozen more films, it might be his best. Aguirre could be seen as a thesis statement for the entirety of Herzog’s career, it’s the story about a single man driven to insanity and destruction by his power of will. What results is that despite its brooding, art-house posturing, Aguiree still manages to be a captivating adventure story.

The film begins in the Andes Mountains with the conquistador Gonzalo Pizarro’s quest for El Dorado, the legendary city of gold. After running short on supplies, manpower and morale, Pizarro sends one of his lieutenants, Pedro de Ursúa, along with an unbalanced soldier, Lope de Aguirre (Klaus Kinski), to try and scout the Amazon river. The foray into the Amazon is doomed from the start, and as time goes on the crew begins to succumb to the rigors of the Amazon forest. The axis of their demise isn’t the vicious, unseen natives, but rather, their comrade Aguirre, whose ambition eventually strips away his humanity.

Klaus Kinski is to Werner Herzog as Toshiro Mifune is to Akira Kurosawa, or as Ben Affleck is to Kevin Smith, I guess. Kinski is suited perfectly as the megalomaniacal conquistador, because like the character, he’s as bat-shit insane as the man he plays. The thespian’s raging tantrums are the things of legend (and the subject of at least two documentaries). His capriciousness eventually led to him threaten to leave the production, forcing Herzog (allegedly) to pull a gun on the star to keep him from departing (Herzog claims that this account is false—he claims that he only threatened to have Kinski shot and that he never pulled a piece himself). Wherever the truth lies, the actor isn’t in any position to judge, having shot the finger off of a crewmember during one of his tirades. Oddly enough, the two men worked together on another four movies, resulting in some of their most memorable work, Aguirre being the crown jewel of these endeavors.

Kinski aside, the story of Aguirre’s production was as plagued as that other great river-based epic, Apocalypse Now. The movie was shot on location in South America on a scant $370,000 budget and with a camera stolen from the University of Munich. On the DVD’s director commentary, Herzog details his trials on set with his signature brooding Teutonic monotone, and delivers one of the more edifying special features that I can recall (just You Tube his opinions on nature or the interview with Mark Kermode where he gets shot and carries on as though nothing happened).

Werner Herzog has been criticized for plenty of things, such as letting his obsessions get the better of him (not unlike many of his subjects in his fiction and non-fiction films), but he can never be accused of being a boring filmmaker. He is one of the great names of art house cinema and belongs alongside other artsy luminaries such as Jim Jarmusch and David Lynch (who produced the German’s latest film). Aguirre is the perfect example of the raw enthusiasm that he has for creating films. For those who aren’t familiar with the more esoteric side of cinema, Aguirre: The Wrath of God is a great place to start.

WHO WATCHES THE WATCHMEN?

Originally run on 9 March 2009.

Cinecult: COBRA

Originally run on 2 March 2009. Image via Google.

Cinema is a wonderful thing. There’s such an incredible array of meaningful and exquisite films to watch. There’s the body of work of Akira Kurosawa and American titans like Orson Wells or Martin Scorsese and then there’s my favorite living directors, the Coen Brothers. And even though I like to play the cynic, I know that as many terrible fat-suit comedies or Michael Bay movies come out, I can always fall back on the past and draw a new experience from a great film by a great director. Cobra is not one of these films.

Cobra began as a failed pitch for Beverly Hills Cop and it only takes about thirty seconds of watching the film to figure out why a studio would pass on it. It’s an incoherent, hyper-macho mess of a movie. The world of Cobra is one where no two lines of dialogue ever relate to the other and where good police work means machine-gunning bikers from a truck.

What keeps Cobra from being just another campy action film is that it was very clearly the product of a lot of thought, effort and money. Despite this professional, sincere effort what results is a low-rent, madcap version of To Live In Die in LA. This might sound like a reason to not see the film, and it sort of is. While it’s true that Cobra won’t teach you about the human condition or the terrors of the modern world, it also won’t bore you. It’s a psychotically perfect action movie and there isn’t a single minute of it that isn’t a wonder to behold.

The film stars Sylvester Stallone (Rhinetone, Over the Top), who also penned the movie, as Detective Marion “Cobra” Cobretti who isn’t so much a character as a collection of tough guy clichés packed into a single Mary Sue and has no personality beyond his love for shooting scumbags. Opposite the Cobra is the “Nightslasher,” the world’s most unimaginatively named serial killer, who is played by Brian Thompson, better known as “The Scary Guy From the X-Files” and “The One Scary Punk That Terminator Kills (That Isn’t Bill Paxton).” If I follow the plot correctly the Nightslasher is some kind of an axe murderer, cultist, biker, terrorist person—maybe. The script never makes it clear just what the bad guys are about other than a few rambling speeches that sound like they were cribbed from Charles Manson’s grocery list. Brigette Nielson plays Ingrid, a model who witnesses a murder (in the middle of the street, no less). Action ensues as Cobra protects her from the Nightslasher’s army of Mötorhead aficionados.

From there on the narrative jumps from one ridiculous action scene to the next with no real story other than a few scenes where a nebbish bureaucrat who harangues Cobra about “law” and “order” and “fair trials” (boooooooring) and where Cobra proclaims his theories about the Nightslasher that seem to come out of a completely different movie. What makes this senseless garbage worth watching is when Cobra espouses his beliefs about cops having to circumvent the law in order to protect it or when he lists off meaningless statistics about crime in America, we’re actually supposed to sympathize with him. The film’s philosophy is the only thing crazier than Cobra’s ability to hit a criminal with every single bullet he fires.

Cobra is the perfect example of style outstripping substance and what an unrestrained ego with too much money looks like. Sure, you could watch The Seventh Seal or 4 Months, 3 Weeks or 2 Days, and you’d probably leave the experience a little wiser, but then again, sometimes you need a man like Stallone to come by and remind you just how spectacular cinema can be.

Cinecult: Repo Man

Originally run on 9 February 2009. Image from Google.

What I like most about this column is that I can go from praising a bona fide classic film like Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo to smaller, stranger cult movies like Death Race 2000. Repo Man is definitely one of those cult movies and it is just as worthy of your time as on the Criterion Collection.

Repo Man is the first feature length film of the writer/director Alex Cox (Syd & Nancy) and focuses on commissar of the capitalist world: The repossession agent. If you filch on your car payments, the repo man is the guy who, through a number of legally gray means, will steal your car away from you. The mad world of the repo man is perfect comedic fodder for Cox who turns out a film that’s as funny as it is crazy—and in a world where traffic cops are vaporized and men in biohazard suits routinely walk around downtown LA collecting dead homeless people.

The bulk of the plot follows punk rocker and amateur repo man Otto (Emilio Estevez), who, alongside his sleazeballs-in-arms, as he searches for a mysterious Chevy Malibu which is also being tracked down by the CIA, a bunch of alien cultists and a couple of “gypsy dildo punks” by the name of the Rodriguez Brothers. Estevez is serviceable in the lead role, but the supporting characters and their semi-coherent monologues are the heart of the film.

The most memorable of the repo men is the crank-addled sensei, Bud, played by the venerable Harry Dean Stanton (Alien, Escape From New York, Kelly’s Heroes, among a dozen other worthwhile films). Stanton is one of the great character actors of the past forty years, and when you look at him its something of a surprise that the man isn’t dead. In the words of director Alex Cox, Stanton has a unique face that inhabits the area somewhere between a cowboy and a cadaver. He’s always worth watching, regardless of the actual quality of the film. He carries large segments of the film with his twisting, violent diatribes about the code of the repo man.

For good reason, Repo Man is among the most quotable movies ever made (right next to Predator and The Big Lebowski). There isn’t a scene in the movie that doesn’t deliver either a laugh or something profound (or maybe just crazy). The film also weaves gritty violence with surreal coincidences together extremely well, in a way that I can only compare with Cox’s revisionist western, Walker. Repo Man is a wonderfully crass comedy that you and your buddies in good time should be able to quote right into the grave.

Vampire Attack!

Originally run 26 January 2009
Drawn for Jason Oppliger's article "The Bleeding Wound That is Sundance."

Battle of Algiers

Originally run on 1 December 2008, under my column "Cinecult."

Everyone loves The Battle of Algiers—the Black Panthers, the Red Army, the IRA, Donald Rumsfeld— and for good reason. Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers is one of the best-made movies about the West clashing with the Middle East and of occupation forces clashing with an indigenous people fighting for independence. It’s a complex movie that’s as relevant today as it was in 1966—perhaps even more so.

The film begins in 1957, with a recently tortured Arab man being forced to lead French paratroopers to the hideout of several key revolutionaries. The soldiers surround the hideout and threaten four revolutionaries—a man, a teenage boy, a woman and a child—that they have a choice between surrendering or being blown off the face of the other. From there the movie shifts backwards to 1954 and chronicles the eponymous battle for Algeria’s independence and the French government’s attempts to quash the rebellion.

When I was watching the film, a friend of mine passed by and asked, “Is that real?” Pontecorvo’s film is shot in the style of a documentary or a newsreel, as a grainy, handheld affair almost completely devoid of romance or theatricality. Everything is filmed with the idea that the following events just happened to pass in front of the camera (the trailer to the film has a disclaimer explicitly telling the audience that, in fact, not a single frame of newsreel footage was used in the film). Not only do shots of the city streets and rooftops look realistic, so do the frequent scenes of torture and explosions. Pontecorvo knew that these kinds of things shouldn’t be cleaned up and sanitizing them completely would compromise the film’s integrity. If you can watch a scene where a man gets a car battery attached to his ears without feeling a tad bit squeamish, then the point is entirely lost. The Battle of Algiers doesn’t shy away from harrowing violence, even when you might like it to.

The film benefits greatly from the score by legendary composer Ennio Morricone (who is probably best known for the “Waa-Waa-Waaaaa” in The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly). While Morricone does a solid job throughout the film, his talent really shines in a sequence where three Arab women prepare themselves to place time bombs in the city’s crowded French District. The score gallops along as they dye and straighten their hair, bluff their way through military checkpoints and place their deadly cargo inside of a café, an airport and a bar full of Europeans of every age and gender. His score intensifies the seconds as they tick along towards an inevitable carnage.

The bombing in turn escalates the conflict from a band of idealists taking on the government to a full-blown war against every European that calls this corner of North Africa home. The women’s three bombs rip through the crowded buildings, throwing bodies. It shows that this fight to liberate Algiers, while a righteous cause, can at the same time be a cruel and terrible thing. On the other side of the conflict are the French paratroopers, who wish to pacify Algiers by any and all means, including assassinations and enhanced interrogations (i.e., Torture). Though, in their attempt to bring order and civility to Algeria, they ironically anger the population into resisting their increasingly tenuous authority. In this world, war is portrayed as both more inhuman and less inhuman than we typically view it as. War in the world of The Battle of Algiers is a horrific and fanatical affair and it is often justified as such, but it can also simply become a mundane job with fallout and consequences.

To label The Battle of Algiers as a political film is to sell it short. Doing so would mean that half of its audience would be lost. And, while it very clearly is a movie about a political situation, it’s far more than that and it doesn’t suffer to the same sanctimonious trumpeting that Michael Moore (Farenheit 9/11, Sicko) and Oliver Stone (Platoon, W.) are known for. Even though history did side with the Algerian people, the film doesn’t take either side and leaves it to the audience to decide the exact meaning of what they just watched, like a moving Rorschach test. Regardless of where you fall on the aisle, you should be able to recognize a great story that’s well constructed on every level. The Battle of Algiers is, at its most simple, a film about the trials that a people go through for the sake of independence and self-determinism—something all Americans should be able to empathize with.

Image via Google. Naturally.

Hell in the Pacific

Originally run on 10 November 2008 for my column "Cinecult.
Deep down in the heart of every urbane, liberal, too hip for westerns or war movies is a simple man who loves survival films. Everyone loves watching them, which would explain why zombie flicks have had such a renaissance as of late or why Survivor, after forty-million seasons, is still one of the biggest game shows on TV or why each of us is willing to shell out ten dollars to see Tom Hanks talk to a volleyball. We love survival stories and Hell in the Pacific is one of those great tales.

Hell in the Pacific takes place during WWII and centers around a shipwrecked American airman who washes up on a deserted island only to find that the island is already occupied by another stranded soldier—a Japanese one. Though, the main draw of the film isn’t the two men trying to survive or their clever plans to beat each other, the real reason to check it out is for Lee Marvin, (The Dirty Dozen, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance), Toshiro Mifune (The Seven Samurai, Grand Prix), and their respective beards.

Marvin is definitely one of the great faces in acting. He could tell you more about his character with one look from his grey, dog-tired face than most actors probably have in their entire oeuvre. Everything about the man is 100%, grade-A badass. If there ever were a man you wouldn’t want to fight a war against, it’d be him. Then, of course, there’s his rival, Mifune, who is always a delight. He’s a strong enough presence to convey what he’s saying despite his total lack of subtitling.

Hell in the Pacific is a rather brave movie in a few ways. It’s certainly entertaining to watch, but it’s a long way away from the spectacle that accompanies most other war films. Rather than the standard set pieces, their encounters resemble school boys bickering rather than a full-blown, drag-out fight. Though this isn’t a regular action movie, it’s a drama about two great actors—two of the manliest men ever to grace the screen—combating each other not for valor or country, but for a sack full of fresh water.

I’ve heard about movies starting without a finished script (Apocalypse Now, for example, went into production without one), but I don’t think I’ve ever heard of a film finishing without a finalized script. In this film, the whole narrative concludes suddenly with no reasoning as to why or how it ends. It would be like at the end of Star Wars, if some rebel walked in and said, “Oh yeah, the Death Star thing? It got blown up.” The End. Roll credits. It’s a black mark on an otherwise engrossing movie.

Beyond the questionable ending, Hell in the Pacific is a simple, but gripping drama. There’s no big fight scene, only a battle of wits and of attrition over a jungle-infested rock. From the acting to the score to the cinematography, it still delivers a solid, enjoyable experience and serves as an example of how a film can do so much with so little.