New Release Tuesday!!! (1/7/14)

As is often the case with The New Year, there are not a lot of new releases worthy of your attention this week.  That being said, Drafthouse Films has an astonishing film, Criterion has a disc for every classroom, and a personal favorite gets trudged through yet another Director's Cut.  The next few weeks promise a lot more Classic Cinema, but 2014 is taking its time in bringing the Essentials.

MUST BUY DVD OF THE WEEK!

The Act of Killing:  Despite ranking #2 on my Top Ten Films of 2013, I was not originally planning on purchasing this brutally painful documentary.  It's not really the type of movie you drop in the player on Saturday Night; Joshaua Oppenheimer's inside look into the mindset of torture & murder during the 1960s Indonesian communist exterminations is probably the most disgusting thing I've ever subjected myself to, and it's a harrowing experience.  I certainly recommend every human on the planet to participate.  But do you need to own it?  Does it need to sit on your shelf?  Will high definition add to the experience?  Well, what really sends this into the MUST BUY category is the producer's commentary featuring the great mad director Werner Herzog.  I don't just want to hear what Herzog has to say in regards to the emotionally undercover filmmaking Oppenheimer had to commit, I need to hear the documentarian overlord assault these fiends with his beat poetry logic.  This is one of the rare occasions (especially these days) in which a commentary necessitates the purchase.  At the very least, you should find a copy to rent.  Again, not a fun-time movie, but one of those rare "important" documents that's worth the unease as it inspires serious conversation.

BUY!

The Wicker Man - The Final Cut:  I'm not really sure the world needs another cut of The Wicker Man (especially considering I just suffered through an abysmal Director's Cut of The Warriors - see next Week in Dork for details), but I'm certainly curious.  Director Robin Hardy claimed in an Entertainment Weekly interview that the restoration is "100 times better."  Bold talk.  I can't imagine anything revelatory here and reviews of the film have been mixed, but is that backlash on the new edit, or can modern audiences even tolerate an oddball pagan film with such murky morals?

Throne of Blood:  Criterion's first big release of 2014 is this blu ray upgrade of my favorite Macbeth adaptation.  During that brief & wild time in which I taught 8th grade English, I discovered that the best way to get kids pumped on Shakespeare was to attack them with some badass samurais.  Toshiro Mifune dips into madness with Rashomon, but his General Washizu is the ultimate expression of power lust CRAAAAAZY.  Sure, it doesn't help that his beast wife Isuzu Yamada cracks so easily herself.  Macbeth is an ugly little tragedy, accentuated to perfection by Kurosawa's grand vision.

RENT!

We Are What We Are:  This one slipped by me in 2013, but as I saw it pop up on multiple genre Best Of lists, I found myself drawn in by their lurid praise of the slow burn.  From the director of Stakeland, We Are What We Are sounds a lot like the "Home" episode of The X-Files, a cannibal tale that gives me nighttime shivers to this very day.  What is it about the consumption of human flesh that drives us all so buggy?  I can chow down on cow all day long as long as it's compacted into a nice, clean Big Mac.  But the very idea of snapping into a real-deal finger sandwich gives me the no-no-no-nos.  Uck.

--Brad

A Fistful of Criterion Wannabes! (Brad's Picks)

This has been an amazing September.  Because of Riddick, The Family, Prisoners, and Insidious Chapter 2?  Hell no!  This has been an abysmal month for the big screen, even more dull and drab than the summer sequel sludge.  My only hope for cinematic joy was my blu ray player, and my cannonball plunge into The Criterion Collection has been a resilient shot in the arm.  2013 has been a bummer year at the movies, but have no fear, there are decades & decades & decades & decades of great cinema to devour.  If you are looking for a gateway into Film History than there is no better place to start than with a Criterion disc.  And thanks to the good folks over at Janus Films I discovered the works of Akira Kurosawa, Powell & Pressburger, Jules Dassin, and Sam Fuller.  But I'd be lying if I told you I began obsessively collecting spine numbers because of the auteurs.  My Criterion addiction began, like most cinematic obsessions, with genre.  The Silence of the Lambs, Robocop, Hard Boiled.  Criterion might be most renown for their French New Wavers and Japanese Samurais, but The Collection certainly has its wild side.  See Seconds, Kiss Me Deadly, Repo Man, and The Game just to name a few.  They have it all.  And randomly snatching from their distribution list is a brilliant way to spend a September.

I'm often asked by those not-in-the-know, "What is a Criterion film?"  My simple go-to answer is that it's "A Classic Film Whether You Know It Or Not."  Snarky?  Sure.  But I've never regretted watching a Criterion Release.  Yes, not even Armageddon.  After you've worked your way through a myriad of special features and plowed through a couple of their essays, you will see the wonders of even the Michael Bayiest of Michael Bay Explosion Fests.  Of course, if you handed Criterion over to me, would I give Tiny Furniture the spine number privilege?  No.  I am a genre fanboy after all.  So forget rights issues, and blah, blah, blah excuses - here's what terror I would unleash upon the company...

5.  The Bad Lieutenant - Port of Call New Orleans (Werner Herzog, 2009):  It is a downright crime that Herzog is not yet represented in The Collection.  The closest he comes is in the Fitzcaraldo documentary Burden of Dreams (Spine # 287), but close is not close enough.  Anchor Bay put out a really nice box set of the Kinski/Herzog collaborations several years back, but it is certainly time that Aguirre - Wrath of God is given the HD Special Edition treatment.  However, I'm going with the more recent Bad Lieutenant because it needs your attention.  Herzog nearly recaptures the glory of his classic efforts, and The Bad Lieutenant holds the last great performance from Nicolas Cage with a perfect example of his Mega Acting power.  His Detective Terrance is the scariest mixture of madness and intoxication since Dennis Hopper in Blue Velvet.  Plus you've got dancing souls, lucky crack pipes, and invisible iguanas.  Mondo Posters has already produced some rather brilliant art for the film (see above), so just slap that sucker on the cover and we're good to go.

4.  A Boy And His Dog (L.Q. Jones, 1975):  Only months ago, Shout Factory released this weirdo picture on blu ray.  It's a great disc with a stunning transfer and a nifty conversation between director Jones & short story artist Harlan Ellison.  But I am not satisfied.  I want a Mr. Arkadin style box set here.  Give me the film, an isolated Ellison rant track, the original story, and some killer Richard Corben cover art.  And how about an in-depth documentary detailing A Boy And His Dog's watershed reinvention of the Post-Apocalypse genre with a confessional George Miller offering all of Mad Max's royalties to Ellison?  I'm sure the little tyrant would appreciate that.

3.  Conquest of the Planet of the Apes (J. Lee Thompson, 1972):  I love the Apes franchise.  A few weeks ago I dropped the original film on my Top 20 Films of All Time, but I could easily swap Part 1 for Part 4.  Conquest is an angry spit in the face of humanity.  Just watch (or read above) Caesar's climactic tirade against man, and witness cinema's greatest social exorcism.  Guys in monkey masks?  No way.  Roddy McDowell gives a towering performance behind the latex and false teeth.  The final twist of the first film might have had a fist pump of rage against the machine, but Conquest swings the hammer, smashing the idiocy of racism while understanding the pain of oppression.  This is the art of science-fiction.  Grab Devin Faraci for the essay & commentary track, and assemble Phantom City Creative for the art.

2.  The Gunfighter (Henry King, 1950):  I came very close to suggesting a Roger Corman School of Acting Box Set a la the BBS series, but made a last minute change preferring the film that launched the mega producer down his B Movie-blazing career.  It's a somber, low budget Western in which Gregory Peck's outlaw can't sip a drink in a saloon without quick drawing against some upstart punk.  Corman leant some words to the screenplay, but when he was never given the credit he fled the studio system to make his own movies.  The rest is exploitation history.  You want more reasons why this belongs in The Collection than read my cineAWESOME review from last year.

1.  Point Blank (John Boorman, 1967):  Here is a film I just can't shut up about.  You should already know that John Boorman's trippy nightmare adaptation of Richard Stark's novel The Hunter is my 7th Favorite Film of All Time.  The more time passes, the more I think about it.  Lee Marvin is a one-track thug.  He's double crossed by his wife and partner, but it's less about personal revenge and more about what he's owed.  The rage is certainly in the book, but Boorman brings some Kafkan blunt force trauma with him.  Inevitability.  Futility.  Frustration.  A real beast.  Steven Soderbergh & Boorman did a commentary track for a Warner Brothers disc a few years back, so just port that over to the Criterion.  But let's add a really swell remembrance of Donald Westlake aka Richard Stark, and throw in a Darwyn Cooke mini-comic for fun.  The Midnight Marauder poster above should definitely be used for the cover.

Pssst!  Darwyn Cooke's Slayground Adaptation is Coming Soon!

--Brad

Brad's Week in Dork! (6/2/13-6/8/13)

This was a great week of consumption.  The Wife & I are still plugging away at LOST, and we're finally starting to hit the place that absolutely giddies my brain - The Barge!  With last week's screening of 8 1/2 I plunged back into Roger Ebert's The Great Movies, and I continued that trend this week with Werner Herzog's Aguirre, The Wrath of God.  It's a damn good movie; I'm committed to the rest of the Herzog/Kinski collaboration box set and I've only got three left, but so far, so damn brilliant.  Klaus Kinski, the beautiful monster.  Every expression is a painting for my wall, a grotesque ripped from the finest Renaissance creation.  I also got serious about my Scorsese-A-Thon, cranking out three more of his classics - and yeah, all three are classics.  The De Niro era somewhat comes to a close with After Hours which in turn leads to another grab at the new mainstream of the 1980s, The Color of Money.  The Griffin Dunne nightmare adventure is often forgotten in the canon, but I (& Ebert) consider it to be a highlight within a flood of highlights.

This Pretty Much Sums Up The Night

I made it out to the theater for a pair of Ethan Hawke performances: Before Midnight & The Purge.  Could there possibly be a better example of Night & Day as far as quality is concerned?  Don't think so.  Hawke is an interesting actor - you can't really love the guy, but I'm hard pressed to think of a time in which I utterly loathed a performance.  His tour with Lionsgate is fun even when it's forgettable.  The guy just likes to work.  Respect.

LOST Season 3:  The second season dipped its toe into the pool of genre crazy, and Season 3 wades on into the deep end.  It's a little bit of a slow start as Jack, Kate, & Sawyer bang upon their cages, but once they worm their way out and into the barrack world of Dharma (or the Dharma that once was), LOST finds its story and finally stretches its science-fiction setting.  Michael Emmerson is a great nemesis for Flight 815 and Elizabeth Mitchell's Dr. Juliette is a welcome addition to a cast of morally broken people.  And let's not forget Nestor Carbonell's Richard!  What's his deal?  It's only going to get weirder and more ancient from here.  Plus, just when the flashbacks start to get stale (seriously, at this point, who cares what Sun & Jin were doing in Korea or how much of a tool Charlie was before getting to Gilligan's Island?), the writers find an exciting new device to launch us into the next season.  Finally, we have "Not Penny's Boat!"  Outsiders are on their way and the battle between 815 & The Others barely has time to breath before an even larger threat crests the horizon.

Raging Bull:  "I don't trust you when it comes to her.  I don't trust nobody."  This is a frustrating film for me.  Obviously, the craft and performances are stunning.  Robert De Niro's Jake LaMotta is a hateful brute and he's surrounded by corrupting influences.  Family, friends, lovers.  Everyone wants a piece and he's ready to take a bite.  Martin Scorsese shoots boxing like the horrific ballet that it is, a black & white bloodsport unfit for this "civilized" world we pretend to inhabit.  I could watch those bouts all day long.  But De Niro's LaMotta?  I hate him.  Cathy Moriarty's Vickie is the worst kind of victim, a woman asking for the punishment that is her life.  Joe Pesci's little brother appears good hearted, but he's little more than a punching bag for the bull.  I hate these people.  I recognize the craft of the film - the cinematography, the direction, the performances, the script - but the problems of these mooks are are boring to me.  I imagine a world in which the cast & crew remade Robert Ryan's The Set-Up, and it's a beautiful nirvana filled with heinous blows of genre.  Raging Bull is trying to get to the truth of a man, but Jake LaMotta is a jackass and I don't like living in his skin.

Aguirre - The Wrath of God:  "These savages are hard to convert."  And here is another character filled with hate & violence but one that is absolutely not boring.  Klaus Kinski is Aguirre, the second in command of a doomed expedition through South America in search for the fabled city of gold, El Dorado.  His men follow the conquering footsteps of Cortes, slashing their way through the jungle, capturing the natives, bashing the word of God into their brains, and falling victim to Mother Nature as well as their own black hearts.  What are Aguirre's desires?  I'm still not totally sure.  Domination does not appear to be one even as he sets up a noblemen as the puppet emperor for their expedition.  He appears to be solely concentrated on the destruction of others.  He stands upon a raft of corpses, leader of the dead and the dying.  Success?  I think he may see it that way.  This is certainly a film I'm going to have to go back to a few times.  It's an assault on the senses, but unlike Raging Bull, I enjoy the idiocy of the brutality.  Most must be contributed to Kinski's mad performance.  Is the character off?  Or is the actor the true madman of myth?  How rare to have an actor that convincing.

Aquaman Vol 2 - The Others:  I really, really, really enjoyed Geoff Johns' first entry into the New 52 Aquaman.  It was a fun, frothy story in which the king of Atlantis struggled to find his way between the two worlds of his parents.  Unfortunately, Volume 2 squanders all the high adventure of the first book for some shockingly dull Super Hero brawl.  Some time ago a pirate called Black Manta killed Aquaman's human father and in retaliation Aquaman killed Black Manta's father.  Here we get the very worst imitation of The Wrath of Khan and muddled in the middle are a team of 90s runoffs called The Others.  The book introduces six new characters but only gives you fistfights as a means of character development.  We get beats but not story.  And The Others just get in the way of the characters we actually care about - Aquaman & Mera, a husband and wife super team struggling to make life on dry land.  I know we have to have punch ups but it would be nice if the story didn't Schumacher it up with dead weight villains.  I don't think I'll be going any further with this series.

Before Midnight:  Richard Linklater gives us the third, but possibly not the last chapter in his romantic saga.  I don't want to go into specifics, just know that Before Midnight contains a lot more of walking & talking to camera.  If you've seen the first two then you know the deal.  Honestly, I absolutely adore the first film but was somewhat dismayed by the direction taken by Before Sunset.  Having now just spent six years in absolute bliss with my own significant other, I respond deeply to the heart & romance of Before Sunrise, but Sunset breaks down the "reality" of love, and it tasted cynical rather than truthful.  And Before Midnight continues that trend.  It's impossible to separate my own relationship and my own ideas of love from these films, but I find the conversation to be fascinating and absolutely worth the return trip.  Also, where else (outside of genre) can you find three films that follow the same two actors in the same two characters?  At the very least, the Before films are a magnificent exploration and I look forward to watching them as a whole.

Nosferatu - Phantom Der Nacht:  "Give me some of that love."  Werner Herzog & Klaus Kinski reteam to bring us this romantically haunting remake of the silent classic, this version containing much more of Bram Stoker's original source material minus the drab narration.  Kinski is exceptional in his portrayal of the undead Count and his droopy stares into camera are hypnotizing.  The man is a living sculpture!  Also, Bruno Ganz might very well be the only version of Jonathan Harker I've ever found sympathetic, and Isabelle Adjani is the most pained Mina (or Lucy as this film swaps her) ever filmed.  She is wide-eyed gorgeous, a tragic pet for Kinski's monstrous longings.  And have you ever seen a vampiric seduction of a town so mournfully shot than the one Herzog depicts here?  The town square rat feast!  Terrifying in its banality.

The Vampire Lovers:  "Put some blood back into her."  When I think of the quintessential Hammer Horror I think of The Vampire Lovers.  Sure, the adaptations of The Horror of Dracula or The Curse of Frankenstein might be a touch more iconic thanks to the performances of Christopher Lee, but what I really want from Hammer are the busty ladies tortured by the supernatural.  No one quite does pulp cheesecake quite like Hammer, and Ingrid Pitt is their ultimate pinup girl.  A cheap retelling of Sheridan Le Fanu's Carmilla, that short story donates heaps of sexual subtext to exploit in the world of B Movies, but the success of The Vampire Lovers is Pitt & company's full-hearted acceptance of the material.  There is no sheeping here.  It's cheese - bloody & booby - no apologies.  It's the perfect gift for 13 year old males or the stunted 30 year old.

Blade 2:  "Lock up your daughters, boys and girls, The Dark Knight Returns!"  This is a special film and I don't think enough people give it the credit it so rightfully deserves.  Dropped into the middle of a crappy comic book franchise is a classic of genre filmmaking.  I would go so far as to argue that Blade 2 is the finest hour in Guillermo Del Toro's career and one of the Top 5 comic book movies ever concocted.  Not satisfied with the mewling dreary whelps of the Anne Rice generation, the director set out to return the monstrous to the vampire, and in the process Blade 2 became an epic Blaxploitation remake of The Dirty Dozen.  This is the very finest of kitchen sink cinema.  Coming off of the disastrous Mimic & the rejuvenating Devil's Backbone, Guillermo Del Toro saw this sequel as his great grab at big time Hollywood filmmaking, bending David Goyer's script to his will.  Thankfully, it was a success.  I adore Blade's descent down the villain food chain, exploding a traitor in his midst, punishing an army of security guard lapdogs, slicing racial hate into Ron Perlman's Nazi, buffooning the vampire count, and eventually going toe-to-toe with Luke Goss's genetic abomination.  And each stop along the way of neverending set piece is peppered with winks and nods to comics, movies, and classical illustration.  Del Toro has absorbed it all, but his pop references manage to be more fluid and natural than anything found in the very best of Quentin Tarantino or Martin Scorsese.  Of course, this is just Blade 2 - a violent action film sandwiched between two slices of moldy bread and therefore it will never get the rightful appreciation.  And as much as I love Del Toro, I don't think he's ever come close to capturing the perfection of this film.  Deluded blogger praise?  Maybe.  But you should watch this film again if you doubt me.

The King of Comedy:  Ugh, this film is painful.  Funny at times.  But mostly painful.  Robert De Niro gives his finest performance as Rupert Pupkin, the wannabe comic who kidnaps his way into primetime legend.  Jerry Lewis is the hapless celebrity navigating the cost of fame, and failing his audience's impossible expectations.  The King of Comedy feels like its coming from a great sadness buried deep within its creators, but its beauty is that it never feels like "Woe Is Me" cinema.  This is truth via absurdity.  De Niro's Pupkin is just another sadsack living in his parents basement who fills the void in his life with delusions of celebrity.  If he could only get his act on TV than the high school dream girl would be his and the world would accept his comedy genius.  The film marches to a dark tune and each chuckle that escapes lands with a sick thud.  It's an uncomfortable watch, but one worth having every few years.  It's certainly a great reminder of De Niro's skill, and in the current era of cash-in action/comedy roles The King of Comedy reminds us just how the man got to his iconic status.

Star Trek - "The Cage":  Can you believe I had actually never seen this pilot episode before?  It's true!  Previously, my only connection to "The Cage" were the snippets seen within "The Menagerie."  Jeffery Hunter is a great Captain of the Enterprise.  Don't worry, I'm not ready to abandon Shatner, but I have to admit cool where cool exists.  Pike is certainly a more introspective Starfleet officer than Kirk.  He's been around the rings of Saturn a few too many times and fantasies of Orion Slave Girls plague his mind.  He's ready to toss in the towel.  Then comes a distress signal and the lovely captive Vina.  The Telosians are not the type of villains you punch, they're the type you strangle.  Using their big brains to keep Pike & Vina imprisoned, they desire to breed a perfect race of man but you get the idea that perfection is a mask for simple sandbox play time.  What would the world be like if Hunter remained on the bridge?  Hmmmm, it's an interesting thought.  I certainly think there was a great show here, and maybe not that different from the Star Trek we eventually got.  My whole reasoning for sitting down for the first episode was The Mission Log podcast, a detailed breakdown of every Star Trek episode.  It's prodeced by Gene Roddenberry's son and it's fun Trekkie stuff.

The Purge:  I really love the concept behind this flick - one day a year, the US Government legalizes all forms of crime.  Murder, Rape, Riot.  It's all cool as long as you don't use a weapon classified above a level 4 (whatever the hell that means, no bazookas I guess).  That's a very twisted Twilight Zone kinda thought and I had hopes that this B Movie would do something special with it.  Unfortunately, The Purge never quite rises above the typical stalk & slash and nearly every character falls into those Horror movie tropes we were warned about in the Scream franchise, "I'll be right back!!!!!"  The best moments happen early one before The Purge goes into full effect.  Ethan Hawke's daughter looking down into her neighbor's backyard and seeing him sharpening his machete.  That's damn creepy.  The Haves locking up their doors while the Have-Nots scurry for a hiding place.  There could have been a great film here.  Instead we get a forgettable dolt.

Action Comics - Superman vs The Men of Tomorrow:  Zack Snyder's Man of Steel is nearly upon us, and as the week came to a close I found myself hunting for the perfect Superman comic.  We all know that's Grant Morrison & Frank Quitely's All-Star Superman, but I'm holding off on that till next week's book club.  So, instead, I though I'd give Morrison's New 52 relaunch a try.  It's not as dull or painful as some would have you believe, but it's also nothing more than routine super heroics.  Frankly, I'm tired of being introduced to this character.  Secret Origin, Superman For All Seasons, Red Son, Birthright.  Why do all the classic stories center on his beginnings?  Morrison attempts a half-ass origin here with Lex working for the government, Clark Kent bumbling about The Daily Star, Brainiac bottling cities, and Superman rocking jeans rather than spandex.  The action scenes are solid enough and the dialog all works in that Morrison nostalgia kinda way.  But there is nothing special.  I hear it gets better before it all comes crashing down so I'll stick around for the next volume.

Woyzeck:  "All things of this world are evil."  Of the three Herzog/Kinski collaborations I watched this week, Woyzeck was the one that I found the most punishingly effective.  The story of a meek soldier slowly deteriorating over the course of several days as his wife openly lusts for another man, his doctor makes mockery of his exasperated state, and his commanding officer belittles his uncontrollable rushing.  Klaus Kinski has played brute & monster before, but with Woyzeck the actor reaches new depths of victimization.  Aguirre may have been The Wrath of God, but Woyzeck is the puppet of the Earth, hearing the planet's demand to stab the life from his bride.  Death is on the wind, prick up your ears.  The film's 80 minute runtime is busting with dread; almost from frame one you're waiting for catastrophe to strike.  No wonder the original play was transformed into Opera, Woyzeck is beauty through tragedy.  Not for the Saturday Night crowd, but the cineaste looking to wallow in despair will find plenty of misery to envelope them.

After Hours:  Griffin Dunne is just one more mindless cubical worker, a cog in the machine of capitalism punching his keyboard with as little mental effort as possible.  One night he leaves his office building, finds a diner to read his book, and strikes up a conversation with Rosanna Arquette.  Their brief flirtation sparks a Kafkan quest through the dirty heart of New York City.  Dunne bumps against the stupid and the absurd:  Linda Fiorentino's dominating artist, John Heard's grieving barman, Catherine O'Hara's vigilante ice cream trucker, and the dynamic duo of Cheech & Chong.  It's a gut-bustingly funny saga, but like The King of Comedy, it's often more sad than not.  The circular torment bestowed upon Griffin Dunne is uproarious and I often found myself shaking my head at the horrors forced upon him.  In a lot a ways, After Hours would be the perfect companion to John Landis' Into The Night, another neglected classic centering on the nighttime exploits of an anonymous data head.

--Brad

Matt’s Week in Dork! (5/26/13-6/1/13)

    On Sunday morning, I muscled my way through Silver Surfer: Parable.  That could have been a heck of a lot better, with a writer instead of Stan Lee.  And I read a few science fiction short stories.  Expediter, a Cold War story with a decidedly subversive bent and dashes of 1984, by Mack Reynolds.  One-Shot by James Blish, another Cold War tale that wasn’t really science fiction as far as I could tell.  Shipwreck in the Sky, a very brief story by Eando Binder.  And Zen, by Jerome Bixby.  All of ‘em from a collection of classic sci-fi tales that cost me like 2.99 or something on my Nook.  Still a dozen or more stories to read.

The Great Gatsby:  I had heard a lot of opinions about this movie before I saw it, most of them negative.  In fact, not just negative; almost hateful.  People really didn’t like this film.  I guess I get that.  If you don’t get into the style of the movie, there’s no way you’re going to enjoy it.  But once you get past the specifics of its rather outlandish and theatrical style, I don’t think there was enough of anything one way or another to warrant deep feelings of any kind.  It’s a rather workman-like adaptation of the novel, with actors all doing OK jobs portraying the characters.  Nobody stands out, except maybe Toby McGuire as the narrator.  He kind of sucks.  He’s playing an almost Ewan McGreggor type ‘naïve to the point of parody’ character, but unlike McGreggor, he doesn’t have the charm to pull it off.  I found the film frustrating because it didn’t seem to be able to make up its mind.  It’s too crazy for a normal drama, and not nearly crazy enough for a fantastical Jazz Age myth.  The director did much better hitting the right bugnuts tone in Moulin Rouge, and whoever made Idlewild did a better job of capturing the era’s strange fantasy (both of those films used contemporary music to better effect).  I like where Baz Luhrmann was headed with this movie, but he didn’t get there, and that’s too bad.  And like his Australia, the first half is much better than the second, though Gatsby is far more coherent, likely owing to their near slavish devotion to the plot and dialog of the novel.

Nosferatu, Phantom Der Nacht:  “The Master has arrived!”  Mad bastard Werner Herzog and madder bastarder Klaus Kinski take on the classic vampire tale, Dracula, seen through the filter of the silent film Nosferatu.  Bruno Ganz gives Jonathan Harker more personality than he is normally portrayed with (or written with, for that matter).  The location shooting and the music are extremely moody and effective.  Kinski is disgusting, but that’s not new.  Bald head, white makeup, and little rat teeth make an already terrifying man slightly more terrifying.  Admittedly, I’m not a vampire movie fan, and not especially enamored of Dracula adaptations.  But this, along with the silent film of the same name, are probably my two favorites.  This also seems the most spirited and stylistically interesting version I’ve seen (an argument could be made for the Spanish language version made by Universal, but meh).  There are some interesting variations on the original, like Lucy (played by Goth princess Isabelle Adjani) being Jonathan’s wife (Mina seems to be a housekeeper or some such), and it being Lucy who takes up the battle against the Count, being a much stronger person than seemingly anyone else in the film.

Embryo:  “I’m also what I believe is called a ‘junkie.’” The atrocious transfer on the DVD makes it hard to know what the quality of the film was originally.  Of course, seeing the boom mike and/or the shadow of the boom mike isn’t a good sign.  Still, when Rock Hudson develops a super-smart dog with a crazy-science drug cocktail, I got on board.  Of course, the next step is jumping into totally unethical human testing, which needless to say results in a Frankenstein’s Monster.  This came out during the initial explosion of anti-science films that we’re still seeing the blast waves from to this day.  Like pretty much every movie that involves an artificially enhanced human, said superhuman becomes intellectually (and possibly physically) superior, then subsequently violently evil.  Erg.  The music is awful made-for-TV soap crap.  The massive computer room sequence, where you know your laptop (if not your phone) could run circles around that warehouse full of dinosaurs, really puts technologic advances in perspective.  I do want Number One, though.  That’s got to be about the coolest dog ever, and his murderous rages seem mostly reserved for annoying little yappy dogs and bitchy sister-in-laws, so no problem there.  This is 70s PG, so there’s some nudity and see-through clothing.  The oversensitive and repressed should beware.  This would have an R rating by today’s puritanical, sex-fearing MPAA (graphic murder is OK; bare breasts are evil).

The Brain Machine:  “Anyway, in the Land of the Blind, the one eyed man is king.  …Nuts?”  Boom mike!  Evil, shadowy government and corporate interests are forcing a scientist to do experiments on four human subjects.  I guess.  This film is shoddy, with weird (bad) editing and overuse of what appear to be stock establishing shots.  There’s an interesting movie here, but it’s lost in the spotty script, low budget, and terrible technique.

The Stunt Man:  “I’ve fallen madly in love with the dark side of your nature.”  Casting a movie is very important.  Obviously, you want great actors.  Sometimes, you get a great actor, but the rest of the cast isn’t up to the job.  Sometimes, you have one of the greatest, Peter O’Toole, cast alongside one of the worst, Steve Railsback.  For some confounded reason, in the last 70s and early 80s, there seemed to be people who thought Railsback was going to be the new ‘it’ guy, kind of like how they keep trying to make Josh Hartnet a star, but it won’t take.  He’s bloody awful, and it’s made all the more obvious when he’s in scenes with O’Toole.  This movie is all about movies and their artificiality, keeping the viewer on constant edge, wondering what’s real and what’s not.  It reminds me a bit of Walker, where film and reality seem to trade back and forth, while trying to make a statement I just don’t understand.  Barbara Hershey sure is pretty in a very 70s kind of way.

Beowulf:  “How ‘bout a quick gobble?”  One of the greatest heroes in literature gets a lavish CG animated treatment, which shockingly manages to capture some of the epic’s magic.  The sins of a king come back to haunt his kingdom.  But glory-seeking Beowulf and his men are ready to come and dish out some bloody retribution.  This film version does not, as so many adaptations do, try to modernize the hero too much.  He’s not a nice and sensitive guy who miraculously embodies current American social mores.  He’s a brutal, violent, glory hunting, boastful bastard.  I still favor Odysseus, a man unwilling to bow to the will of the gods, and perfectly willing (possibly glad) to spit in their faces.  But Beowulf is up there.  He’s flippin’ hardcore.  Violence, sex, revenge, heroics, guilt, redemption, and madness.  Grand stuff.

Enter the Dragon:  “A woman like that could teach you a lot about yourself.”  Thanks again to the Alamo Drafthouse and co-Dork Brad, I got out to see this on the big screen, and it was all kinds of fun.  From the start, you’ve got loads of bad dubbing, awkward humor, strange flashbacks, and the pop-philosophy of Bruce Lee.  With cohorts Jim Kelly and John Saxon, Lee gets all up in evil martial arts master Han’s smiling face.  And no army of unfortunate looking henchmen are going to stop him.  Just a darned fine bit of 70s exploitation.

Where Danger Lives:  “We both got what we wanted…after a fashion.”  A poor sucker gets hooked into some bad, bad business.  Then it’s a slow, steady descent into a mad hell.  While not at all a great Noir, this one is a fun watch, and where it finally arrives is pretty nutty.  Again, not great.  But worth watching.  There’s some interesting technical aspects, including extremely long shots with few cuts.
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Tension:  “I got a file goes back further than you’d like to remember and up to where you wish you could forget.”  An uptight milktoast is married to a fickle, slutty monster.  I mean MONSTER.  He loves her, for some danged reason.  But when she pushes and pushes and pushes, something’s gotta give.  Obviously, the next step is to create a new persona, then harass, threaten, and eventually murder her boyfriend.  Of course, the fact that you start dating a smokin’ hottie, who isn’t a spawn of the devil, while living in your new persona should not distract you from your duty.  Obligatory twists and turns, and suddenly the cops are on the trail, but who killed who, when, where, and why?  The cast is especially enjoyable to watch, even if the circumstances are outlandish.  This one is very, very weird in its plotting, but loads of fun.  Hard to describe really.  But multiple people have excellent and unusual characters that they get to play with.  The cop, the pharmacist, the other cop, the hottie, the monster, even the a-hole boyfriend.

8 ½:  Well, that was something.  Way back in the prehistory of this Dork, in those dark days before Bob Dobbs invented the internet, a handsome young Matt made his way to the dusty backest of the back rooms at Dirty Daves to paw over obscure titles in the Art & Foreign section, hoping to discover a hidden gem (or at least some of that Euro-nudie stuff) he gave that Fellini fellow a try.  And it sucked.  I don’t know what I watched, Roma was one, I’m sure.  Anyway, I hated it.  Fellini and that awful Russian version of Solaris nearly turned me off of foreign films.  Fast forward 20 years, and I’m sitting down at the AFI Silver to check out a screening of the classic and much lauded 8 ½.  Well, nothing has changed.  I hated it.  It’s such a self serving, self aggrandizing, self indulgent bunch of artsy-fartsy crap I was shifting in my seat like a kid with ADD after like 10 minutes.  While the lead actor was obviously good and there are some funny moments, I went from mild discomfort to outright hatred somewhere near the last half hour.  Just in case you haven’t picked up on what he’s trying to say (Helen Keller couldn’t have missed it), the last half hour is a full on audio-visual assault that blares at you ‘GET IT?!  GET IT?!  GET IT?!’ like you’re a slow child struggling with the subtleties of Dick & Jane.  But hey, at least there’s Barbara Steele and her Picasso face.  AAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRGGGGGGHHHHHHHHH!!!  Is this a movie that is well liked because people think it’s obscure, but that they ‘get it’?  That’s the only thing I can figure would justify its film-fan street cred.  The problem is, it’s not actually obscure.  Fellini spends the entire movie outright explaining what the movie is about.  Every scene features dialog about what that scene means.  He spells it all out, even spelling out why he doesn’t spell something out, which pretty much spells it out.  Gah!  Anyway, the movie is crap.  Leave this to the oh so clever hipsters and college film professors, and watch something better.

Needs more clowns!

Splinter:  The X-Files/The Thing/Fringe type ‘creature’ in this movie is pretty cool, and there are some good effects and gore.  The actual characters aren’t too good, though they’re not as completely useless as a lot of modern horror characters tend to be.  Still, not good.  As always in movies like this, I kept yelling “Stop talking! Start running!”  Why, when speed is of the essence, do horror movie characters feel the need to drag ass.  It doesn’t ramp up tension, it makes me angry.  Still, it’s mildly enjoyable.  There’s potential here for something more.

The sequel should be called 'Shredder.'

Captain Kronos Vampire Hunter:  “On lonely nights, I shall think of you.”  This is an odd, but very good little Hammer Horror gem.  Horst Janson is the dashing blonde hero, Kronos.  And the Sweet Mother! hot Caroline Munro is the gypsy girl.  A supporting cast of solid character actors helps keep it all going.  It’s surprisingly funny, with a stripe of humor black as pitch.  It’s too bad that this was in the final days of Hammer’s glory days.  A series of Kronos adventures could have been very cool.

    I started watching Space: Above & Beyond.  I’d seen the first few episodes back in the Dark Ages of the 90s, and I’d enjoyed it.  Watching it again, I can’t help but be frustrated by the potential unrealized.  The general idea, telling the story of a group of new soldiers struggling through a war with an alien menace, has plenty of potential.  The design and setting are pretty good.  But the CGI is rough, and the main cast intolerable.  The two lead guys are a bundle of cliché packed in bad acting.  It feels like the show was put together by writers with ideas, and all the writing around the core cast was done by producers (‘Let’s not try anything new or potentially contravercial, only things that have been done time and again in every other TV series.’).  Hawkes is absolutely dreadful with all his bad-boy posturing and put-upon rage.  But West, with his crying and teeth gnashing, and idiotic pursuit of his wife…UGH.  The lingo feels fairly accurate, like they had an actual Marine advisor.  Though shows like this are kind of inevitable, helping to change the status quo, while not managing to survive themselves, it is too bad this didn’t come along 10 years later, when budget and unwritten rules of TV production could have  been different.  Battlestar Galactica has a similar vibe, but came out at the right time.

Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol:  “I would like to show you my collection of art.”  World travel, wild stunts, sexy dames, and weird high-tech gadgets.  No, it’s not James Bond, it’s the MI team up to their old tricks.  While the first movie was meh, and the second a steaming turd, the third and fourth have substantially improved the franchise, finally getting back to the roots of the original show.  Something about this one, the way their tech and their stunts don’t always work, where they miss their mark or slip or whatever, is a nice change of pace.  They’re not being stupid, just not always getting it right.

    On Saturday, I caught Studio 360 on NPR.  It was a whole episode on Superman, as an American icon.  Plenty of interesting stuff.  It even reveals how some of the worst elements of the character came about (he started flying on the radio, not in the comics).  But there is something enduring about his honorable, honest, and empathetic heroics.  I’m not a fan of the character generally, because it seems to be mostly an excuse to write oneself into a corner, then magically break out of it (like the last season or so of Doctor Who).

    And on Saturday night, I took a trip home.  Well, to the place I’ve always kind of felt should have been my home.  I decided to start watching Twin Peaks again.  It’s been 10 or so years, and it felt like the time was right.  There’s a magic, right out of the gate, about that crazy little town.  And if ever there were a place I’d fit in, I think it’s there.  I could go fishing with Pete, get some wisdom from Big Ed, avoid the Log Lady, crush on Norma over some cherry pie and darned fine coffee, and catch a show at the Road House.  Oh, sure, there’s the occasional alien (?) abduction, serial killing demon, dream dwarf & giant, and what have you.  But it’s a magical place.

-Matt

Werner Herzog: The Text Can Wait

I've been thinking a lot about Herzog lately.  His Jack Reacher appearance.  That death row documentary, Into the Abyss.  I'm gearing up to finally witness Aguirre.   I know Matt just watched his Nosferatu & was raving about it on the way to The Alamo's Enter The Dragon screening.  While we were driving some guy in the car next to us swerved in our direction, and careened back on to his side of the road.  Matt commented that the asshole was texting & driving - a favorite hate rant of Matt's....and with good reason.  Anyway, it's strange to encounter this PSA on the web today.  AT&T and Werner Herzog have partnered up for this brief, but extremely moving commercial condeming the absurdity & horror of text/driving.  I hope the careless ones out there pay attention.  Your actions have consequences.



--Brad