Matt’s Week in Dork! (12/22/13-12/28/13)

Mmm. Crack.

    Ugh.  Glad this season is nearly at an end.  I miss when I could actually enjoy the holidays, when they weren’t just oppressive, depressive, stress filled weeks of gloom and frustration.  Flippin’ retail, man.  Flippin’ awful consumers.  I’m all for commerce, but the holiday season is sickening.  Like human swine pushing each other out of the way for more space at the trough, where they’re sucking down foul smelling bits of waste.   Anyway, the week was made better by a bunch of new movies.  I’ve been trying to cram in a bunch of 2013 films as we get down to the wire for writing the Dorkies.

The Prowler:  “If you were just a dame, it’d be different.”  Van Heflyn plays a failed sports star who became a cop for all the wrong reasons.  When he latches on to a bored housewife, the force of his persistent personality on her.  And it’s probably no surprise that things start getting ugly fast.  Heflyn is repugnant.  He should get together with Ann Savage from Detour.  The movie itself isn’t all that great.  But it’s fun to watch such an awful monster try to get one over on the world.

Stoker:  After the death of her father, a strange girl must deal with a distant mother and a sinister uncle.  Family secrets slowly creep out.  Things get weirder and weirder, as relationships become more tangled.  And then murder.  The film is extremely kinky and strange.  It’s beautifully shot and drips with a kind of Gothic eroticism.  I can’t say I loved the movie, but I definitely found myself enjoying watching it.  It’s like Poe writing a Noir.

Blancanieves:  This silent, black & white take on Snow White is a worthy attempt, though I don’t think a particular success.  There are some great bits, and I like some of the ending.  But it’s too often too modern, in spite of its early 20th century setting.  And, to be honest, the first hour is kind of bloated.  Still, there is charm, and it isn’t a bad movie.  I think it could have been much better, though.

Sapphire & Steel:  When I first tried this show, I wasn’t especially enamored of it, but for some reason kept watching, and came to really like it.  The atmosphere is kind of amazing; the surreal mystery and existential danger, with time and space being cracked in unfathomable ways.  I would love to try to recapture some of the gut-level weirdness this show managed to maintain.  Each story keeps you guessing, not just about where things will go, but even about where they’ve already been.  Really something.  And what an ending.  Holy crap.

Computer Chess:  “It could be Sanskrit, it could be Pig Latin.”  Set in the dorky world of a 1980s computer programmer chess tournament, this awkward slice of low budget comedy is very, very odd.  I suspect that much of the film is at least in part adlib, which definitely adds to the discomfort level, but I don’t know if it adds to the plot or characters all that much.  Man, things get so danged creepy and awkward as the film goes on.  Swingers are creepy, man.

Getaway:  Wow, this is some low-budget, shot in Eastern Europe garbage.  Cheap looking, boring, irritating, and ultimately dumb.  The ‘twist’ ending is f’ing stupid.  This along with The Purge, puts Ethan Hawke in two of the worst films of 2013.  I’ve never been a fan, but dang man.  What happened?  And Selena Gomez?  Some people have it.  And then there’s Selena Gomez.  I’ve now seen entirely too much of her attempts to act.  Enough.

Alice in Wonderland:  Disney’s take on the classic surreal children’s novel is kind of definitive Disney.  It has some really good moments and some technical mastery, but is ultimately a bit soulless and bland.  Alice wanders around, dealing with Warner Bros. cartoon type odd situations, where I guess she learns some lessons…sort of.  I feel about this movie sort of what I feel about the 1939 Wizard of Oz.  While taken on its own, it’s a heck of an achievement, but being familiar with the source material, I can’t help but be disappointed that more of the essential nature of the work didn’t make the translation.

Her:  This subject is something I’ve read a good deal about.  Emerging A.I., our relationships with them, the possibilities and pitfalls of romantic love with non-human intelligences, etc.  And Her does get into some of the less obvious, less ‘Hollywood’ areas of it.  And it creates a very buyable near-future world where this relationship becomes possible and very relatable.  It also manages to go in directions that kept me guessing for much of the film, which was itself sort of surprising.  That said, I didn’t love the movie.  I think part of what never quite worked for me might be what works for other people.  At its heart, it’s a movie about a guy and his difficulties with love.  OK.  That’s fine.  But while it did deal with some of the issues of human-A.I. love, it didn’t explore them to the depths I’d have liked.  The social aspects, the ramifications, etc.  Still, it felt more ‘adult’ than a lot of films about robots and A.I.  Less sensationalistic, and much less anti-tech than I expect from this sort of film.  And it’s well acted and well shot.  The movie looks beautiful.  Overall, I enjoyed it, but I didn’t love it.

The Future (Il Futuro):  “At the beginning, we’re all good.  And at some point, we all turn bad.”  The beginning of this movie reminded me of Rust and Bone, and other such depressing slice of European life movies.  You’ve got despondent young people, an emotionally confusing (and confused) young woman with an uncomfortable relationship with sex, thuggish petty criminals.  You know, all that Euro stuff that’s considered so ‘real’ and ‘not Hollywood,’ but is just as cliché as anything churned out by the US studios.  Not my favorite genre of film (Euro-Depression).  However, once Rutger Hauer appears as a former body builder and actor in schlocky 60s beefcake action movies, the film got my attention.  Hauer is typically excellent, playing a sad, former champion.  As he and the young woman, played by Manuela Martelli, begin their relationship, we see deeper levels of each.  She unravels his demon haunted past while he wakes her up to the wonder and possibilities of life.  Had the film not featured the whole drug dealing, weight-lifting thug subplot, and focused instead entirely on the Martelli-Hauer relationship, I think it would have been a better film, and I’d certainly have been more interested.  I don’t know that Martelli is a great actress (like most European actresses, she spends most of her time staring and looking sullen), but she and Hauer are excellent together and their scenes raise the movie several notches.

Tomb of Torture:  Yes, more like Tomb of Boring.  Perhaps not my most clever of reviews, but bloody true.  This movie looks pretty good.  The set design is nice and it’s shot competently, if not masterfully.  But it’s just so, amazing, completely, excruciatingly boring.  Even the Italians have done this kind of wannabe Edgar Alan Poe monster movie better elsewhere.  To say nothing of Corman and the like who could make a more interesting horror movie with a super 8 and fifty dollars.  Skip it.

John Dies at the End:  “Apparently, it’s Eyes Wide Shut World.”  Scott Pilgrim VS. The Naked Lunch.  Fear and Loathing in Las White Castle.  This hipster vision of a drug fueled break in timespace has elements of William S. Burroughs, Hunter S. Thompson, and H.P. Lovecraft.  Unfortunately, it’s got a couple extra doses of Chris Hardwick and the MTV’s Wild ‘n Out.  There’s definitely a lot of things in the film I enjoyed, but at no point did it ever feel as authentically weird as the authors it was obviously harkening back to.  I never quite connected; never quite bought into the weird world.  I’d be curious to see a follow-up to the film.  I liked it enough to say that.  But I can’t sing its praises.  And really, I spent a lot of the film thinking about how much I'd like to punch in the smug faces of the two leads.  They're extremely unlikable in that jock/cockbag high school cool kid sort of way, with their constantly ironic tone and bored contemptuous expressions.

Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues:  Occasionally very funny, this sequel to one of my favorite modern comedies just doesn’t have the magic.  It’s not bad.  There are a bunch of really good bits.  But there are too many moments that just call back to the first one, and few of those are particularly good.  Everyone does a fine job and there are some good humorous shocks.  However, it seems like this is another sequel from 2013 that misses the boat.  Not as bad as Die Hard, Star Trek, Monsters Inc., or Machete, by any means.  But it doesn’t thrill.

    I found myself really digging M.I.A. this week, too.  Her album Kala has an old school Rap sound, mixed with some cool world beats.  The whole thing trips off my Cyberpunk love.  I imagine the sounds of the under-dome being something like this.

    And that was it.  I’m still scanning through various roleplaying game books to get ready for trying to run a game in the near future.  We set a date for the first meeting, near the end of January.  There are so many great games, and so little time.  I have a dozen or more that I’d love to run, and most of them I’d especially love to run as long term campaigns.  Obviously, that’s not going to happen.

-Matt

Brad's Week in Dork! (11/17/13-11/23/13)

This was simply one of the best weeks I've experienced this year.  Matt & I spent a good chunk of it staring up at The Big Screen, and I would rather be nowhere else than in a darkened theater.   Sure, we missed a good bit of the Fantastic Fest Tour last week, but Matt & I managed to spend an entire day with The Alamo Drafthouse on Sunday.  I am happy to report that two of the films we watched there will land on my Top 10 List by year's end - Journey to the West & Why Don't You Play In Hell? are a couple of mindbendingly entertaining films from the East.  Hopefully the Fest will return next year, and I'll make damn sure to get the whole weekend off.  Midweek we took a peak at Matthew McConaughey's Oscar grabber Dallas Buyers Club, and we finished it all off with an AFI Silver screening of Kiss Me Deadly.  Ralph Meeker...monster...just an unbelievably good movie.

I spent the rest of the week diving into Noirvember.  A bit of too little, too late.  Next year I'll try to knock one out a day cuz it's a blast witnessing dumb dudes fall for diabolical dames.  I saw The Prowler for the first time on Sunday morning.  It's a demented little flick (see below).  And Netflix currently has Raw Deal streaming - I'll join novelist Eddie Muller in calling it one of the genre's best.  Matt's been raving about Gene Tierney's Leave Her To Heaven horror show, and I gotta heap on more praise.  Just a damn fine bit of melodrama.  Plus, Jean Rollin, Black Power, Robert Ryan, Charles Bronson, and Charlie Chaplin filled in the gaps.  A ton of fun.

The Prowler:  "You're a real cop now, aren't you?  You want everything free."  During the special features, author James Ellroy nails it on the head when he labels this whackjob flick as a "Perv Noir."  Van Heflyn's beat cop responds to Evelyn Keyes' distress call, and immediately slithers his way into her life.  This woman just can't say no; ten minutes inside her home, Heflyn's smoking the husband's cigarettes, drinking his booze, and plotting his murder.  Keyes is nearly unbearable in her ignorance, but Van Heflyn's badged monster owns this unlawful entry.  When you compare the bulging glares of his sleazoid cop with the dopey sadsack hero of 3:10 To Yuma, you'll finish the credits a Van Heflyn fan for life.  The Prowler's third act goes off the rails a bit with a ghost town pregnancy, but the surreal law & order showdown certainly delivers on the weirdo vibe.  It's certainly a must for fans of the genre.

Confession of Murder:  Unlike Van Heflyn's deputized pervert, Jae-yeong Jeong's Detective Choi is the type of badass Dirty Harry you love to root for as he bashes, gouges, and spits against the absolute worst of humanity.  Unfortunately, Confession of Murder's structure wanders on too long as it manufactures its inevitable twists.  There are certainly moments in this movie that I enjoyed.  When fists or bullets start to fly, I really appreciated the sloppiness of the action.  Whatever happens to be lying around the set is tossed into the violence; no bucket or frozen fish is safe.  Again, Jae-yeong Jeong is great.  He simmers rage and hate, but the film never really delivers on those emotions, opting for obvious narrative trickery instead.  May I recommend I Saw The Devil, if you are looking for some real-deal Korean serial killer cinema to fuel your nightmares.

Journey to the West - Conquering the Demons: This one surprised me.  I don't know why since I'm a tremendous fan of Stephen Chow's Kung Fu Hustle, and I should frickin' know better, but the early trailers for this yet-another-adaptation of the classic Chinese fable never captured my interest.  Dumb ass.  Journey to the West is the best fantasy adventure of 2013 - F YOU UPCOMING HOBBIT!  The story of a young demon hunter struggling to obtain enlightenment as he struggles equally to sack catfish and pig monsters.  And if fumbling about with cg folklore wasn't tough enough, the fool is constantly being shown up by Shu Qi's warrior princess.  The film is incredibly silly and weird, but as one demon hunter fends off the affections of another, and the epic quest marches towards the mischievous Monkey King, I found myself being incredibly moved by the climactic spiritual awakening.  As he had already proven with Shaolin Soccer & Kung Fu Hustle, Stephen Chow drags genuine warmth out of cartoon hijinks.  Journey to the West does all the cliche things you want from the movies - you'll laugh, you'll cry, etc.  High praise.

Why Don't You Play In Hell?:  "It's bullshit, but it's holy."  For me, nearly the second they were uttered, those five unimpressive words struck like a hammer.  Which is impressive considering how distracted I was with splatstick laughter at the time.  A group of teenagers, unable to shake their child-born attraction to the movies, are dragged into a gang war when Boss attempts to satisfy his imprisoned wife by transforming their daughter into a full-fledged starlet.  What does an obsession with Bruce Lee have to offer real life let alone a Yakuza crusade?  Movies are my own great Holy Bullshit, and filmmaker Sion Sono certainly understands this fictional infection.  Why Don't You Play In Hell? builds slowly as it connects film nerds to mob killers, but by the time Samurai Boss Shinichi Tsutsumi cracks his Carey Grant smile and ascends to Mifune Godhood, I was painfully smitten.  I loved Journey to the West, but Why Don't You Play In Hell? feels like an instant personal classic.  Will it speak to everybody?  Absolutely not.  But if you spend as much time as I do fretting over the merits of Crank 2 - High Voltage or the under appreciated kick-assery of Domino Harvey then boy, do I have the movie for you!

Red 2:  I dug the first flick.  I kinda hated this one.  John Malkovich & Helen Mirren are fun enough, but Bruce Willis is painfully checked out from this old foggie spy adventure.  I've seen Moonrise Kingdom.  I've seen Looper.  I know the guy can still deliver a solid performance when he bothers to give a damn.  But if he keeps cranking out the Red 2s, the Good Day To Die Hards, and the GI Joe Retaliations then I am going to leave him smirking across an empty theater.  Of course, I could just be bitter that Red 2 left Karl Urban standing at the alter.  If he had been there instead of Byung-hun Lee, then maybe I could have focused on the shockingly entertaining character work being done by Anthony Hopkins, and not the slackjawed yawn belching from its lead performer.

Dallas Buyers Club:  I am so glad that the rest of the world has finally caught up to my Matthew McConaughey love...or has the Surfer, Dude simply given up the aspirations of Tom Cruisehood and plunged into the splendid world of character actor?  Dallas Buyers Club is just what you think it is, a message movie circling themes of intolerance on both the personal and societal level (resulting in countless unnecessary deaths) and an opportunity for its star to horrifyingly transform himself.  The cynical might dismiss it as Oscar bait, but I appreciated the narrow focus of the Buyers Club money grab.  This is not just the story of a man inflicted with HIV only to magically discover that Life Is Beautiful.  Sure, he gets there.  But McConaughey's sex fiend dope head recognizes an opportunity to make a buck, and through his own greed witnesses the even more catastrophic avarice of Big Pharma.  If you really want to get your dander up then I recommend How To Survive A Plague for further viewing.

The Set-Up:  "Everybody makes book on something."  Here it is.  The granddaddy of all boxing stories.  Pulp Fiction, Snake Eyes, Raging Bull - they all wanna piece of The Set-Up.  Robert Ryan is Stoker, a mid 30s wannabe champion without a chance in hell of scoring the belt.  When his manager & coach make arrangements with his opponent they forget to tell Stoker to throw in the towel.  They've seriously under estimated the dying dog's determination.  The Set-Up is one of the most painful of noirs thanks to the impenetrable cloud of doom circling the hero. Ryan is the very definition of "poor bastard," from nearly the first frame you know he's screwed.    

The Necessary Death of Charlie Countryman:  Who doesn't want to see Mads Mikkelsen and Til Schweiger beat the stuffing out of Shia Labeouf?  That's what I call a good time out at the movies.  And the kid really does get the snot kicked out of him, but these poundings stem from a series of predictable setups.  Labeouf travels to Romania after his mother's ghost instructs him to strike out on an adventure, a man dies next to him on the plane, and he feels it necessary to deliver a spectral message to his daughter.  It's all very cute.  It's Eastern Europe so of course there are strippers and the mobsters.  Meh.  Not the worst thing I've seen this year, but I certainly won't remember a thing about it come Top Ten time.

The Black Power Mixtape:  From 1967 to 1975, a Swedish television crew shot hours upon hours of footage surrounding the Black Power movement in the United States.   Decades later it's assembled by director Goran Olsson into this masterful documentary.  The film touches upon the battling philosophies of Martin Luthor King, Stokely Carmichael, Malcom X, and Louis Farrakhan.  You've probably encountered much of this content in the past, but the Swedish perspective offers a fascinating angle that's not as condemning of us dumb Americans as you might think...although, it's appropriately harsh on the assholes of history.

Raw Deal:  "What do I care if you're dead?"  Edmund O'Keefe escapes from prison and plunges himself and two love struck dames into a vengeance quest against gangster Raymond Burr.  Like the best noirs, Raw Deal concerns itself with white hot hate, and revels in the resulting emotional torture.  I love how helpless O'Keefe is under the affections of both Claire Trevor & Marsha Hunt.  He just wants his dough, but these girls keep getting in the way!  Raymond Burr also gets an exceptional moment to showcase his villainy as he dumps scalding hot flambe upon a hapless dancing couple.  I can see where Lee Marvin gets his temper from in The Big Heat.

Leave Her To Heaven:  "Sometimes the truth is wicked."  Cornel Wilde stumbles into a diabolical Elektra complex when he locks eyes with Gene Tierney's gorgeous socialite.  The film chronicles a deeply disturbing love affair in which Wilde appears helpless against Tierney's fatherly obsession.  Once again...dames.  No one is safe from Tierney's perverted lust.  Not Wilde, his crippled kid brother, the family ranch hand, or any beast that dare grow in her belly can escape this monster.  Is Leave Her To Heaven the first color Film Noir as some have claimed?  Not sure that such a thing exists, but you can't doubt Gene Tierney's talent as a Femme Fatale.  She's stunningly gorgeous and filled with hate; to look upon her is to look upon the medusa.  Yer done son.

Fascination:  If you've been reading Matt's Week In Dorks then you've seen him slip into Jean Rollin madness.  He's been pestering me to jump on board this train for some time, and I finally broke down with this whackjob flick.  What's it all about?  I really don't know.  Some thief flees into a castle where two mysterious women keep dropping their clothes and ravaging his body.  Lots & lots of surreal imagery - a bloody butcher barn exchange opens the film, and it only gets more nonsensical from there.  Of course I enjoyed it.  Am I ready to go all in like Matt?  Hmmmmm...not yet.  I'll give another Rollin flick a try, but apparently, I need more in my films than dreamscape boobs.

Someone Behind The Door:  Two weeks ago I had never heard of this film, but then I encountered a random Best Of List online (which I currently can't track down) that put Someone Behind The Door at the very top of Charles Bronson's canon.  Better than Death Wish?  Mr. Majestyk?  Once Upon A Time In The West? Certainly not better than Death Wish 3!?!?!?!?  This random troll thought so, and I had to find out.  Well, I wouldn't rank it at the top of my list, but Someone Behind The Door is pretty damn good.  Bronson plays a drifter who stumbles into Anthony Perkins's hospital with some scratches on his arm and absolutely no recollection of who he is.  Amnesia...yeah, it's one of those.  Bronson is solid as this broken man hunting for identity, but it's really Anthony Perkins's show.  The kindly doctor is not so kind; he uses Bronson's blank slate as a means of punishing his adulterous wife, but how far will this revenge go - murder?  The man is Psycho after all.  Someone Behind The Door is certainly worth a look, and you might as well snag the DVD for a couple bucks online.

Just Like Being There:  A simple talking heads documentary detailing the resurgence of illustration in regards to concert and movie posters.  The stuff of internet dreams & nightmares.  I was definitely bit by the Mondo bug a few years back, and I had a streak there in which I desperately haunted ebay and other back channels for the must-have screenprints (Tyler Stout's Wrath of Khan & Assault on Precinct 13 being my favorite gets).  Now it's nearly impossible to score a Mondo on the release date, and I've lost the thrill of the hunt.  Of course, there are other companies out there doing work of equal value, even if it doesn't make Entertainment Weekly's radar.  Anyway, there isn't much to this doc.  It's cool to get some interviews from folks like Daniel Danger, Justin Ishmael, and Drew Struzan, but there is nothing new to be gained here unless you have only the slimmest of surface knowledge.

Kiss Me Deadly:  "You don't taste like anyone I know."  I've seen this flick a half dozen times now (twice this year now), and it has quickly risen to the top of my all time favorites.  Ralph Meeker's private dick picks up a crazy dame on the side of the road, and his life is propelled down a Kafkan spiral to Armageddon.  Full on Film Noir Horror, and Meeker is the blunt instrument of our ultimate doom.  Men don't get much tougher or downright stupid evil than Meeker's Mike Hammer.  Not sure if this is what Mickey Spillane had in mind, but it's the final statement on a genre of deadly stubborn, thick-headed misogynists.  And it's totally badass.  I have no idea why every random lady falls into Meeker's arms, or why he can't seem to give a damn about them in his quest for the Great Whatsit, but it is painfully funny to watch him bounce off these ladies until that final Fatale strikes.  What's in the box?  Something much worse than Gwyneth Paltrow's pretty little head.  Kiss Me Deadly is the strangest chunk of noir, and it climaxes in what is probably cinema's greatest grim climax.

Detour:  "For that kind of dough, I'd cut my leg off."  Film Noir is a genre of sadsacks, but the saddest sack of all is Tom Neal's lovelorn hitch-hiker.  While on the road to reclaim his starstruck lover, Neal thumbs his way into the wrong car.  As they often do, a corpse materializes.  Neal thinks the easiest option is to snatch it's identity and glide into the Golden State.  Naturally a woman appears to ruin his life.  Claudia Drake might not be the finest of actresses, but she nails the shrill vocal venom and that accompanying hateful stare.  Two pieces of scum made for each other, and the entertainment is watching them bring about their own ruin.  Not my favorite Noir, but whenever someone mentions the genre Detour is the first film that pops into mind.

City Lights:  The Wife & I watched this Saturday afternoon, and we had a blast laughing at The Tramp's romantic plight.  Chaplin falls hard for a blind flower girl, and when he becomes chummy with a drunk millionaire, he finds the monetary means to win her heart.  Unfortunately, the millionaire has no recollection of our man when he's sober.  Miscommunication and slapstick hijinks ensue.  As usual, Criterion does a bang-up job with this Chaplin release, and City Lights stands out even amongst other silent classics like Modern Times & The Gold Rush.  Those thinking that the silent era is best left to the historians are missing out on some serious comic gold.  I'd pit Chaplin against any number of generic Vince Vaughn duds.  Do yourself a favor and give The Tramp a try.

--Brad