Four Year Strong - Enemy of the World

Boston-bred hardcore/pop-punk band Four year Strong's Enemy of the World opens with the single "It Must Really Suck to Be Four Year Strong Right Now," which contains the lyric "Don't fix it if it hasn't broken yet." It's a good thing to remember - I'm going to sum up their approach and my reaction in that single line.

...

Just kidding.

Four Year Strong aren't a band that sets out to reinvent themselves with every song or every album; they set out to be consistent, riff your brains out and write some tight, explosive pop-punk. I'm in the middle of writing a feature involving The Offspring, and their approach makes me think this is the evolution of that band's approach: some very metallic elements laid over a foundation of strong hooks and punkish speed. Their sound is heavy, but never brutal - even their singers' roaring vocalization isn't really going to threaten anybody but the feebly elderly. It's just what you expect of the sound. The drums rarely slow, and the instruments push and pull on different tempos ("fast" and "wicked fast," in Bostonian parlance) to make everything feel like everything is always moving toward something. Yet there is never a shortage of listenability - all eleven songs present on the album pulverize the ears, but they also keep the melodies at front and center. The choruses are infectious.

This is important, because Four Year Strong's music is specifically meant to be channeled into its audience singing back to them in concert. All the backing vocals are recorded to sound how they probably are in concert: like a huge mass of fans singing back these lyrics. These are little songs meant to make little shows sound like arena spectacles. They're not gonna stop to smell the roses, but they also make sure that everyone can keep up. The bridges slow down just enough to let everyone feel the music swell before the chorus hits again. A single word to describe the band is "Communal." They told AbsolutePunk that they "just play exactly what we want to hear." To an extent, most bands do that (I'm sure Radiohead's not in a studio right now noodling around on music they hate), but for Four Year Strong, that means their fans share their very same passions.

That leads to all the lyrics being very overdramatic: broad but deliberately and easily relatable. Everything's about misery; death is almost a recurring theme. Variations on the idea of "proving that [someone is] alive" show up on "Nineteen with Neck Tatz" and "Find My Way Back" - two consecutive songs in the middle of the album. The hook to "Flannel is the Color of My Energy": "'cause I don't wanna live another day without your company." Even the album's title implies a unity against something bigger than the band. Is this directness a fault? Maybe. It gets repetitive to hear it over and over again, but there's comfort to be gleaned from the very shared nature of everything in music. Everything is tailor-made for maximum chanting, singing along and being part of something in the moment.

So, no, the album doesn't quite set the world on fire. They're not the most original band, and their set of ideas can feel limited a couple songs away from the end of it. But the genre's not meant to be experienced as a record on a hard drive as an end unto itself. This music thrives in concert, surrounded by fans who feel the same way. As a side note, it's admirable that there's nothing alienating about it. Everyone gets a chance to feel, whatever that feeling is. It almost feels like a bonus that they're skilled musicians who aren't wasting their time on silly novelty ditties. It hasn't broken yet.

The Lady Eve: Old Hollywood Were Magnificent Bastards

Oh hello. There.

Give The Lady Eve a shot this Valentine's Day, or any day, for that matter. Those 1940s romantic comedies truly hold up compared to most of the stinkers that come out these days; there's just an easygoing charm about them that's hard to resist once you get into it. The Lady Eve isn't my choice for the funniest movie of the era (I'm a big fan of His Girl Friday), but it's probably one of the tightest and best-scripted. The dialog can be subtle, and it helps that Henry Fonda seems to be up for anything to be spilled on him or to trip over however many times. The physical elements are often missing from modern comedies (is it an insurance thing?), so there's some fun in seeing a screen legend like Fonda fall all over the place for a movie. He's not known as much of a pratfall guy, y'know. And this might be Barbara Stanwyck's best role, if not for Double Indemnity. It's certainly neck and neck - I feel like it's easier to gravitate to her character here than in the latter. But then, the reasons this works in Double Indemnity's favor is a whole other essay. My point is: God, why can't they make romantic comedies like this anymore?

Hollywood churned out movies like a production line at this point, so maybe they didn't overthink things so much. Certainly, it's been said that Casablanca was "just another movie" to everyone involved, and I have no reason to think that The Lady Eve would be different for anyone else. Maybe this is why the comedies of the era strike that balance of being fun to make and fun to watch. Stanwyck, in particular, seems to have fun playing the grifting seductress who wins over Henry Fonda's naive trust fund kid. I'm sure it was hard work and all, but there seems to be a lightheartedness in Stanwyck dressing up in so many costumes and playing with accents in character. It's a rare performance that manages to be simultaneously great acting and infectious. Even the momentum of the picture isn't forced in any way; there isn't extensive fretting over will-they-or-won't-they drama. It actually resolves itself so suddenly, that's almost a joke in and of itself. That leave a tidy 92 minutes packed full of jokes and fun.

While I could go in a couple directions on what would be Barbara Stanwyck's best performance, I would also nominate this as the best role Henry Fonda got in his prime. Not just for his pratfalls - which are funny and taken with aplomb. But his boyish good looks work absolutely perfectly here. His roles in dramatic fare such as The Grapes of Wrath hold up; don't get me wrong. My Darling Clementine is my favorite western of the 1940s. But Fonda's good looks work best for me when they are conveyed with the light stupidity here. Can you really truly buy Fonda as OK Corral gunslinger Wyatt Earp? Exactly. That's why playing a kind-hearted simpleton works so well here; it's easier to believe he's a sheltered rich kid's son than a wandering outlaw. It comes down to his looks and is not a knock on those roles or Fonda himself. His playing a villain in Once Upon a Time in America is a whole other story, though, partly because it plays off of his good guy roles such as this one.

It's the sheer charm of the leads that helps elevate this movie. Charm that Dane Cook cannot match. A kind of simple decency that a movie like I Hate Valentine's Day could never decipher. And a focus that He's Just Not that Into You and the upcoming Valentine's Day don't have, despite the star power attached. It's a simple love story, with two double crosses. Sometimes, several shots of trains running through tunnels are all the punchline you need.

A couple followup thoughts:

After watching The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser, I got into reading the wikipedia page for the real Kaspar Hauser. That dude sounds like a lying bastard. I'll take the Bruno S version any day.

Also, an extension of my Nic Cage thought from earlier: there is a brutally honest and metaphorical truth to be found in a film where Nic Cage plays a famous actor who buys a European castle to save it from decay, goes broke and then takes creatively unfulfilling, miserable, big-money roles to make his money back to live his dream.

Expect me to keep pushing that idea until it happens.

The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser: The Liveblog

Hi there, all!

Superbowl weekend. Usually I take two days to make a single post, but with the festivities around this weekend, I would rather get something up quickly. I've been thinking of using this format every now and then, so let's test it out: I will be liveblogging Werner Herzog's The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser. Never seen it before, but I've blogged about other Herzog films before. Consider this as though I was tweeting these thoughts individually. Here goes something (hopefully!)

• Hoo boy. It's gonna be interesting to do this for a movie with subtitles. All those years of learning to type without looking at a keyboard - finally worth something!
• I like that this film was introduced via scrolling text explaining Hauser's life (discovered not knowing how to speak, not knowing how to walk, no history, no name, etc,). It really lets us get on with the thing - imagine if every movie used the first half of its trailer to rush through the setup before the action began.
• Strange note I realized before starting: there is no trivia page on IMDB, and this is, last I checked, Herzog's highest-rated work on the site. A movie as mysterious as its character...
• Ah, some wonderful still shots of the village, fields, etc. Such a great eye for these little details, and the elegant opera brings the perfect ethereal mood.
• Same goes for the shots of townsfolk looking at Kaspar and the diagetic sounds that have been paired with them.
  
• Bruno S. as a screen presence, is a find. I may have mentioned that in writing about Strozek last week, but there's just something fascinating about him: always nervous and not exactly "endearing," but something a standard deviation removed from that. It's different from the contagious intensity of Kinski or his work with Christian Bale and Nic Cage.
• On the subject of Nic Cage: doesn't his recent off-camera life sound like a Herzog movie? A world famous actor buys a broken European castles with the intention of fixing them up, then goes broke? I hope one of them thinks of making it into a movie.
• It's impossibly endearing when Bruno or the children look off camera. It's like the next words out of their mouths are "What do I do next?"
• I don't think anything has made me smile so much all day as Kaspar making a cat walk on two feet.
• The use of animals in this movie is freaking fantastic. I would say the parallels between Kaspar and the animals is a little heavy-handed, but this movie has some really cool shots of animals. And what is up with that camel!?! What the fuck - is that what they look like?
• I have little to say about this scene where Kaspar is being taught religion except that it is an excellent scene, both in concept and execution.
• This scene trying to explain inanimate objects is better. Go apple!
  
• Yesterday-ish, a couple of people I follow on Twitter were saying that Herzog's movies feature somewhat stilted acting. I propose this: it is not the acting that is stilted, but the situations. The actors in many of his movies are reacting as natural as they can while knowing they've got a camera watching.
• I feel like I've seen something like this before, where someone is corrected but their "misspeak" reveals some kind of truth. Yet, there's still something very moving about this film and its tone.
  
• Helping the dreamlike atmosphere: the untraceable passage of time. I was shocked earlier when it said Kaspar had been in society for two years. Now, he's learned to read music and play some piano, and no one's mentioned how many years it's been.
• I may have to rewatch this movie with the swans in mind - there's a definite motif there, but I've got to focus in on it to see what that's about.
• Oohh, that was actually pretty perfect timing: I was just typing that the second half of this movie loses some of the natural-ness of the beginning, so it's less charming. But then it switches to a story being told by Kaspar.
• Okay, I thought the story about the procession up the mountain through death would be a good ending. Then I thought the story about the caravan led by a blind man would be better. But the actual ending is superb thematically.

I hope this has been as readable as anything. This has been fun writing and watching a truly remarkable film in a lot of ways. Like most of Herzog's films, I can't wait to watch it with commentary sometime (though I have yet to actually listen to the commentaries).

"Thank you all for listening to me. I am tired now."
-Kaspar Hauser

Pierrot Le Fou, or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Be Ok I guess with Godard Sort of Probably

O! Hall hallo there there

I'm gonna have to apologize now, before you go further. The first chunk of this entry's less about Pierrot Le Fou than it is about my reaction to it. Why? Because I can't think of any other way to write about anything by Jean-Luc Godard. Here's one of the directors that forms the backbone of the French New Wave, and he's the only one of the bunch I've seen whose critical praise leaves me scratching my head... up until now.

Some history, to start: the first Godard film I saw was Notre Musique, in a film class, and I honestly cannot recall a thing about it other than it being in color. There's a distinct chance I nodded off during it, since my sleeping patterns get weird in the winter. I bought and watched Alphaville next - as part of some deal on Criterion Collection DVDs at Barnes and Noble. That one left me cold, but it was interesting. Next, Breathless, possibly his most renowned film - I quite liked that one. So going into this movie, Godard was 1 for 3: a track record hardly befitting an acclaimed director. And now I've watched Pierrot Le Fou, which has charmed me more than the rest. Yet, I can't decide if it's because the film's that much better, or if I have gotten used to Godard's directing style.

I'm inclined to think the difference is that I'm getting increasingly used to what he's doing; the last three, at least, are almost entirely built around exemplifying film technique. More consistently than any other major film maker, Godard makes me consciously aware that I am watching a movie. His characters, at least in Breathless and Pierrot, are seemingly conscious that they're in movies, or at least are consciously willing to imitate movie characters. Music and sound cues are conspicuous; the characters break the fourth wall (one character to another: "who are you talking to?" "the audience." "oh."). They don't behave realistically, at any rate, and the plot is a vessel through which one hangs a feeling.

And in this way, while watching Pierrot last night, I realized: my feelings for Godard must be how someone who dislikes Quentin Tarantino's films feels about those. Specifically Pulp Fiction, where the characters exist solely to have highly stylized dialog come out of their mouths. Are you really that worried when Uma Thurman overdoses in that movie? Nah, but it's the shit when Travolta stabs her in the heart with the adrenaline needle. Pierrot Le Fou is the same way: you barely see the gangsters chasing the main characters, or even remember them half the time, but the characters are fun to be around.

Part of the fun is the contrast between the two leads: Ferdinand (Jean-Paul Belmondo), a man of stoic cool, and Marianne (Anna Karina), an almost impishly joyful presence. They play off of each other beautifully, so when a spontaneous musical moment breaks out (the movie's not a musical), it's fun to watch, rather than annoying. Similarly, they're both easygoing about the whole "being chased by gangsters" thing, which gives the film a playful tone. This is helpful: at times with Breathless and Alphaville, I got annoyed by their protagonsts' almost dour nature. It makes the dissolution of their relationship feel more subtle, and I almost did a double-take when I realized they'd split. It also grounds the movie, which is unnatural in its editing and sound choices.

The editing, specifically the pacing of the thing, is what won me over the easiest. Time isn't wasted on fight scenes or action sequences. They're memorable and brief, but more or less beside the point. It's an inversion of most action movies: when an Asian midget is holding Marianne hostage and a scene later is face-down with bloody scissors in his neck, no explanation is necessary. Who cares how Marianne got out of that predicament? It's like a dance they do, splitting and rejoining, so it only makes sense Marianne would be out of Ferdinand's life before they inevitably meet again. The ending is also well-paced. Ferdinand spends lots of time painstakingly painting his face blue and wrapping his head in dynamite. He lights the fuse, then instantly says "this is stupid" and tries to put out the flame. He can't; he explodes. From him lighting the fuse to the explosion is less than 10 seconds, I bet. It's a smart use of timing, since the movie knows that there's little tension to be taken from this predicament. He's gonna die, and the movie's gonna end. And then Ferdinand and Marianne meet in a meta, characteristically pithy way to end the movie, too.

All of this adds up to how self-aware the movie is, which can be grating but generally works well. The verbal dance where Ferdinand and Marianne speak over shots from offscreen, alternating sentences, can be hit or miss. It feels too cute. Same goes for Ferdinand addressing the camera with his angst. But then it adds something when the music clashes with what's going on onscreen, like when dramatic music fades in and out while Ferdinand is looking at a car. Or when Marianne imitates a Lauren and Hardy gag (after stating her source of inspiration) to get out of a tight squeeze. It's these moments that are fun and, most of all, make you consider the construction of a movie without being alienating.

That quality is probably the thing that dawned on me, this time around. There's something very mechanical about the construct of Godard's films (from the few I've seen), and in some ways it clashes with what might be a personal perspective. His interest in how films work is laudable, and understandable given his past as a film critic. It doesn't necessarily make for movies that I'd revisit very often (though I would see Pierrot again if someone wanted to watch it with me), but there's also something necessary and vital to his films from this period. I at least understand why he's "important" now.

Bigger, Stronger, Faster: The Size of Manliness

allo ther

"I think pro athletes should be forced to use steroids. I think we as fans deserve the greatest athletes science can create! ... I have high definition TV; I want my athletes like my video games. Let's go! I could care less if you die at 40. You hate life after sports anyway, I'm doing you a favor." -Daniel Tosh

Daniel Tosh is a stand-up comedian, but there's a harsh truth to that quote. Bigger, Stronger, Faster is just over 100 minutes, but it covers a lot of ground in the subject of steroids. Too much, I would argue. There's a lot here, and Chris Bell, the director, does a little bit of a lot of things. Including:

• His brothers' and his own history of using steroids
• The perception of steroids (and their effects) in the media vs. the results of research
• The competitive cultural pressures that would lead an athlete to use them
• Societal pressure that would lead one to use steroids for aesthetic purposes
• His family's reaction to finding out he and his brothers use them
• The supplement industry
• The government's investigation into performance enhancing drugs in baseball
  

And a few more things I'm probably just not remembering right now. It is a packed documentary, and any one of these topics alone could have been given the 90-minute treatment. Yet, I can't really imagine any documentary about this topic without covering nearly all of these bases, especially after the attention that baseball has gotten. It's all informative and interesting, though little of it is particularly shocking (e.g. they use Photoshop on the before/after shots for weight loss ads? o rly?). Because the movie doesn't have much going for it from a film perspective, I can't say I'd want it to be any longer, but it's a bit much for such a short running time. Despite that, it's a helpful movie to have out there, especially since it manages to be somewhat impartial, with the goal of sparking discussion.

I think the most notable thing about this movie is that it implies that Bell is less concerned with the medical side effects of performance enhancing drugs and more concerned with the things that cause a person to use them and the effect heightened performance has on society. He's a bit disingenuous about this; he cites numbers that say drinking and smoking cause more deaths than steroids, for example. Of course they do - but few people are going to need to enhance their physical performance with drugs compared to the people who drink and smoke. It's probably the most obvious example of misrepresentation here, but it makes steroids seem more harmless than they probably are. His focus on the medical effects are more or less focused on steroids straight-up killing a person, while he glosses over the possibility of sterility. It still seems nearly fair compared to the "facts" constantly repeated in news reports whenever the topic comes up.

Essentially, this means that much of the movie focuses on the various ways society reacts to and sometimes encourages it. Bell recounts his youth, idolizing action stars of the 80s and watching pro wrestling. It's these images of larger than life men that can define society's image of manliness, and it's not surprising that Arnold Schwarzenegger is the inspiration to every model and body builder he talks to (his name is even in my spell check!). The example set by these kinds of entertainment is less ubiquitous than the influence of models and women's magazines, etc. etc. on women, but it still got through to a small subset of guys. And these guys wanna be bigger than would be natural. It also seems to stick out that everyone Bell interviews is around the same age group, and they all cite 80s action movies and pro wrestlers as inspirations for their lives. That makes it seem like there's a chance that this is somewhat of an aberration in cultural history: before and since Arnold's heyday we've seen action stars trim down to more reasonable levels of muscularity.

The near-impossible quest for washboard abs remain, but it's probably easier to a Jason Statham level of fitness. This slow changeover isn't covered in the movie, but then, it isn't covered in the heads of the guys Bell interviews. His brother, most notably, seems driven to obsessive levels of becoming a big star, either in wrestling or in acting, and he's not alone. The sight of grown men who believe that with size everything will go their way is thoroughly depressing. His brother and at least one gym employee says "you never know" and hold out hope for an acting career based on looks. It's like a weird alternate universe, now that our action stars include Nic Cage and John Cusack. Reliable ol' wrestling will still promote the shit outta John Cena, though, and Hulk Hogan's still limping around. I guess not everything has changed.

The parts about athletics are informative, too, and the movie itself is persuasive enough to reconsider whether 'roids are "cheating" in light of regular-ass modern medical advances. Not persuasive enough to convince me totally, with its aforementioned occasional leaps in logic and such. The kinds of surgeries and other medical/health knowledge that makes today's athletes so much better than anyone even in generations past is fascinating; it'd make a good PBS special on its own. Hell, it probably has been done, and most know better than to directly compare an athlete from the 1930s to one today. I was also impressed by the research going into better enhance people's physical abilities; those segments create a vision of the future that is either amazing or frightening.

The most convincing segment of the movie, though, is Bell's interview with Rep. Henry Waxman, one of the congressmen who spearheaded Congress' then-current (current?) investigation into steroids in baseball (and, to a lesser extent, pro wrestling). His inability to answer anything - even the legal drinking age for alcohol - without help from an aide was saddening at best, distressing at worst. A cynic might say that it's no surprise that politicians will put their face on a cause they don't really care about (and Bell does juxtapose the segment with an interviewee saying just that). It's just captivating to see it illustrated so directly.

In the end, though, the movie stops short of being very great for its information, mainly because there's so damned much of it presented. There are good and insightful bits here and there, but Bigger, Stronger, Faster feels like it's trying to cover as many bases as possible. It thankfully isn't pro- or anti- anything directly, but it also lacks focus. In its explicit primary goal, it works to start considering a more balanced discussion on the role of performance-enhancing drugs in sports that likely will never happen. Otherwise, though, it works better as a reflection of a conflicted culture, which is one of its secondary goals.

Orson Welles' The Trial: Feel the Gathered Masses Closing in

heeelllloooooo there!

Why the hell is Orson Welles' The Trial a cult item? It's based on a story by Franz Kafka! It stars Anthony Perkins (shortly after Psycho, at that)! Directed by Orson Goddamn Welles! By the praise Citizen Kane gets, you'd think every one of his films would be revered, if not puzzled over for their failures. Instead, it seems like the consensus is that Kane, Touch of Evil, Chimes at Midnight and The Magnificent Ambersons are Great Films, and you're on your own for the rest. Those last two aren't even available on DVD in America right now!

"Bollocks!" I say! The Trial is at least as great as Touch of Evil, and it seems like it was released more or less as Welles intended (though it looks like there was an edited version in the US). That's more you can say about Touch of Evil. All The Trial needs, I reckon, is a Criterion DVD release with cleaned up audio.

Welles' European years generally get short shrift, though, and I guess The Trial is no different. It makes me glad that it's at least available on DVD (among a slew of bootleg copies, though). Like I said, seems that it's a bit of a cult item; it's at least generally well-regarded by the subset of people who have seen it and have rated it on Amazon and IMDB. Yes, that's part of the same demographic that once put The Dark Knight as one of the top 5 films of all time, but it's still high praise from a relatively large group. Does 4-stars from Roger Ebert sound better?

(Side note: I generally don't link to Ebert because he's that much better a writer than I am, but I do like that review an awful lot for its insights. I will try to avoid doubling over on it. What he has to say about Perkins' sexuality is fascinating, though.)

But on to the film itself: it's a story centered on accusation. Anthony Perkins plays Joseph K, who is accused of... nothing in particular, and eventually he stops asking. But he's put through the rigeurs of a legal system that seems to only consist of loopholes and an unrelenting, loopy but lockstep logic. Everything seems to be going against him in this series; every person, no matter their intention, seems to be getting in the way somehow. He never sleeps once he wakes up at the start of the film. At every turn, it seems like the world is out to trap him. In its shadows, in its rules, in its multitudes.

It's those multitudes that caught my eye on this first viewing; almost every scene that takes place in a space that would be cavernous is filled, packed with details. The actual courtroom where Perkins is on trial is a large auditorium consumed with people. It echoes the stage of Charles Kane's big campaign speech. But where that was a triumph for that character, this setting is terrifying. Joseph delivers a speech, too, but it's harried and interrupted. The room is relatively small, but every frame is packed with so many people watching this "trial" that it is intimidating, even for a viewer from home.

Perkins carries himselfs perfectly, too, giving his character the perfect blend of innocence, determination and frazzled intensity. The guy's under stress, and it's not just his trial, from what we see of his workplace. His office is an endless sea of rows of people at typwriters, typing furiously. It's a constant, noisy racket, made only noisier by the lousy sound quality on the version streaming on Netflix. Just walking from the door to his desk (a lone desk on a short pedestal above the other desks) seems to take minutes, and there isn't an open space within the frame in that whole time. Later, we see there's a computer, and this, too seem to be the length of infinity, a giant even among the standards of the early computers.

Welles was a master at using expressionism to get into his characters' heads. It was somewhat subtle in Kane, but increasingly apparent by Touch of Evil. In this movie, it's at an absolute peak. His lawyer, The Advocate (Welles) lives within what appears to be a maze of bookshelves, walls and windows, lined with hundreds of lit candles. It's as intimidating as the castles in Super Mario Bros, where it always seemed like the same castle with new traps. There's a sense of paranoia and dread here that's impenetrable, and the very use of objects plays a large role in it. Would the mood be the same if The Advocate's study was littered with random objects, rather than seemingly infinite newspaper bundles? I think not. Would The Advocate himself seem as much like a big deal if his office was lit with a few lamps or a chandelier? These things get into your head, too, don't they?

The effect changes the tone from a could-have-been comedy to a psychological torture. I imagine this movie was one of the influences on Scorsese's After Hours, which has a similarly absurd plot (that one is Kafka-esque, this one is by Kafka). But where Welles' movie creeps along with great fear, Scorsese's is comedic in its absurdity. The strangeness. Note how the protagonists wind up chased by groups: Joseph by a horde of young girls, After Hours' Paul by an angry mob of people he'd run into over the course of the movie. The latter is directly threatening the protagonist's life, yet it's taken as a dark comedy. We understand their misunderstanding, and their familiarity makes it funny. Not so in The Trial. The girls (again, we're talking huge numbers that overwhelm the frame) seem to only annoy with their persistent adoration of Joseph. They are less a character and more an unrelenting force, much like the movie's events. More unsettling is when they're locked out of a room with shabby wood, perfect for peaking within.

It's interesting that this is the kind of story told by two great filmmakers in despair. Welles always seemed to be despairing in his later career, with his films almost obsessively centered around men whose world is collapsing while he scrounged for funds for his projects. Scorsese found himself needing to show resilience with After Hours. It's the mark of their genius that the freedom afforded by surrealist stories let them consolidate their strengths, but their genres reveal much about the film makers. In The Trial, the protagonist is constantly being watched or surrounded by others. He's being judged. How much of this is a reflection on Welles film career? His films seem to be awfully perceptive of their maker's place in the world at all times.

In a lot of ways, The Trial is a great film. There's something deeply personal about it, I'd say, that makes the absurdism gripping. The internal logic is fascinating on its own, anyway. Some of it, too, is the grand scale of so much of it. Much has been written about Citizen Kane's... well, everything. But its camera tricks specifically. The Trial contains much of this ambition in its very framing of things, and not for the sake of doing things on a grand scale. Put aside just great film making; The Trial is straight-up great psychological trickery.

Expect it to come up again when I do After Hours some day.

Les Diaboliques: The Stranger Details

O 'ello there.

I've greatly enjoyed Henri-Georges Clouzot's work before. Le Courbeau was one of the first pre-New Wave French films to really wow me, and Wages of Fear easily ranks in my top 5 all-time thrillers. So it was a no-brainer that eventually I'd check out ,Les Diaboliques, his most renowned film (according to IMDB, which, I know, isn't saying much). Supposedly, it was an influence on Hitchcock before he made a little film called Psycho. I can definitely see the influence it had in its suspense-building techniques. I'm a bit underwhelmed by the movie overall, but there's a lot of excellence going on throughout and a lot of peculiarities I'd picked out were resolved in the closing minutes. 

Anyway, I think it's only fair that I warn that there will be spoilers here. Normally, I don't care, but this film does end with a warning not to spoil the movie for my friends. Plus, it was nice of the movie to ask that specifically. And I do consider anyone reading this to be a friend.

Les Diaboliques concerns two women, the wife and mistress of a boarding school principal named Michel, and their plot to murder him. The wife owns the school, technically, but the principal's force of will seems to overpower that detail. He's a cruel man, not just to them, but also the schoolchildren and his other employees. He seems to have a short fuse, and the first time we see Nicole (his mistress, played by Simone Signoret), she's got bulky sunglasses on to hide bruises. The guy's painted as a bastard quick and hard, activating my Sword of Vengeance: Sense of Justice rule, as it should. The murder's only the setup, so it makes sense to make the audience understand why these women want this guy dead fast. Michel's murder is wrapped up in the first third of the movie; a less inspired film could've done that as the whole movie.

From the get-go, though, something's off: Nicole is awfully dead-set on killing Michel. Christina, his wife (Vera Clouzot), is nervous about it and backs out a couple of times when it's too late. This is one of the things the movie gets right, since my inclination to think the two women would turn on each other. They don't, which is an interesting surprise. In some ways, that's more surprising than the idea of a wife and mistress working together, but I digress. I was actually more worried about Nicole more than anything for the first third of the movie; she would not take "no" for an answer for the murder. At one point, she says that she's seen a corpse before in her life. Does that imply she's done this before? I was glad at the end that, winds up, she was conspiring with Michel all along to kill Christina via heart attack (she's got a heart condition. It's a movie. She's gonna have a heart attack.) to take ownership of the school. Winds up she wasn't a sociopath. Just your run of the mill... uh... Conspirator-Thief?

Also somewhat run of the mill nowadays: the detective character, a cold investigator, just interested in the facts, ma'am kind of fella. In this instance, he's a fresh presence on screen, mainly because of the added pressure he gives Christina. Odd that he never seems like his investigating Nicole. He asks questions of everybody at the school, and, at one point, shows up in Christina's room in the middle of her sleep. Again, it ratchets up the pressure. He's an odd character that adds to a movie that's already unsettling. I will say this, though: It does seem fishy when Christina admits to murder and he doesn't arrest her or have much of a reaction. Later, you find it's because he'd figured out Michel and Nicole's plot.

But then again, the guy does let them murder Christina. Their plan does come to fruition, and he only comes out of the shadows to arrest them after the deed is done. The ending may imply that she and he came up with their own solution - but how would they do that?

That ending, in and of itself, makes be absolutely glad we got this movie in 1955 rather than 2005. A young boy who'd previously been the only student to see Michel after his "death" mysteriously gets his confiscated slingshot back from Christina after she was already dead (I know! OH SHIT!). It's a final turn of the screw that maybe goes too far, since it doesn't make much sense. Yet, it's the kind of thing that's become standard for horror films. If this movie had come out in 2005, we'd be on our third or fourth direct-to-DVD sequel by now, where the ghost of Christina (or otherwise her ghastly friends) would be haunting the new owners and boarders of the school, slow dread of the original replaced by hilarious, cheap gore. I do appreciate that Clouzot thought it would be necessary to add one more mystery to the movie, though. It's some out of nowhere business to throw off a movie whose real twist is one of those "that makes so much sense, why didn't I think of it?" deals.

Another logical choice the film makes is to explain why the boarding school was so crumbling and shabby: because Michel's a cheap bastard who doesn't even want to run the school (again, Sword of Vengeance rule). That gives the movie the freedom to have the building be functional without ever seeming pleasant. In the black and white photography, it allows the pool to be so dirty it looks like ink. Along those same lines, the setting helps make the climax - where Christina seems to be chasing Michel's ghost - so much more enveloping. The sight of Michel rising from the tub after this chase is easily one of the most memorable images in film. It and the chase preceding it are easily the most virtuoso sequence in the movie; it's the one thing that moves Les Diaboliques from mysterty/thriller to horror movie. Its technique won me over, though, making me truly love the film in that moment.

Much of the middle part of the movie, where Christina and Nicole investigate the strange occurrences around Michel's disappearance, was tense and well-done, but I never bought it. I did get a real shock when I found out Nicole was planning this whole thing with Michel, but I had guessed that Michel was still alive. In some ways that makes me a jaded modern viewer, but I recently watched Psycho and found it effective, still, even knowing every step of the plot. Maybe my opinion of Les Diaboliques will improve with repeated viewings. There is much to love here, though, most of all, the way the movie makes all the little details matter.

ROTTEN TOMATOES: 25 Movies So Bad They're Unmissable

ROTTEN TOMATOES: 25 Movies So Bad They're Unmissable

You best believe many of these will make the Hall of Fame.

Tears of the Black Tiger: How to Make an Intentional-Bad Movie

In some ways, making an intentionally bad movie is more daring than making a good movie. If you fail, you have failed at something others have done by accident. If you succeed, there are going to be plenty of people taking your movie's badness at face value (as Rodriguez and Tarantino learned with Grindhouse), and at some level, being intentionally bad can be a lot less satisfying than accidentally stumbling upon it (as Snakes on a Plane will tell you). Compounding this is the difficult balance between winkingly bad and truly bad. I general good rule for this is that you can never, ever be boring. It's one thing to go way over the top, like in any of Chuck Norris' movies. But if you attempt some form of emotional content and miss the mark, the bad movie suffers as bad as a good movie. Case in point, Tears of the Black Tiger proves this in its potent mastery of fight scenes and its flailing attempts at emotional context.

Granted, the emotional context is as over-the-top as the action scenes. But they're boring. They're slow and filled with rote dialogue. It's built around one of those Slumdog Millionaire-esque "boy meets girl, grows up to find girl as an adult" scenarios. Our protagonist Dum has a couple flashbacks to his youth as he saves a young girl, Rumpooey, from harrassment again and again. She loves him, but class separates them. Blah blah blah. The story is, I assume, intentionally cliched, but the scenes are too slow to make an impact. There is much weepy-eyed hugging and sadness at broken promises. The simple story, the love plot also weighs down the momentum badly, taking up so much time pouting and being sad. Dum's flat acting is helpful when the movie settles into Western bullshit, but when it has to carry actual complex emotions (like conflict), the scenes just seem like tedious monologues for Rumpooey. If there ever needed to be a case to show why Clint Eastwood-directed westerns are low on the intimate sweetness, this is a pretty good one. They clash with the gleeful "I'm getting away with this!" attitude of the action scenes, and it's always hard to trust the emotional subtext when the movie includes a gag where an officer forgets to pull the pin from a grenade.

Let it never be said that they don't go gore well in Asia, though. This movie's a take off of Westerns, so it's filled with gunfights. Ever see someone take a rocket launcher to a gunfight? Ever see someone get shot at the tip-top of his ten-gallon hat and bleed from it? How about a bullet ricochet off a dozen different objects in the room before nailing its target? These scenes are absolutely fantastic and inventive. The cliche-ridden dialogue works so well here, as it underscores the corniness of these Western conventions and the ham-fisted impossibility of every fight. Best of all, it doesn't talk down to westerns; it's as much an homage as parody. There's a clear love for the revisionist westerns from the 60s, and it bursts out of every frame when it's an action scene. In the moments like the bloody shootout between the police and outlaws, which includes the aforementioned rocket launchers, the movie is incredibly entertaining.

But these scenes are relatively (emphasis on relatively) few and far between, and their tone clashes with the romantic subplot. Similarly, the relationship between Dum and his sideman, Mahesuan, underlines how distant the actor playing Dum is when he's talking to his love interest. There's even a montage that gives the best Brokeback Mountain parodies a run for their money. I can't find a clip right now, but let's just say... lots of drinking and smiling at each other while spinning in a circle happens. Also, horseback riding side-by-side along a beautiful landscape. It's not inherently gay, but let's just say neither is pro wrestling. They just seem closer than Dum and Rumpooey (his love), but not in a way that makes it any more convincing when Mahesuan turns on Dum. Their final gunfight never plays on their relationship at all, either, which makes the montage seem more an aberration than anything.

But let's get back to those landscapes. The set and costume design for this movie are phenomenal. I'm reticent to say "cinematography" because a lot of it seemed blurry and dimly lit to me, to the point that my eyes were feeling a little strained, but that also might be the DVD transfer. Everywhere - from the verdent greens of the lake filled with lillypads to the Barbie-pink of Dum's university - there are shockingly gorgeous colors used. Everything is over-saturated, like Speed Racer. Everything looks cheap, too, though, so imagine Speed Racer being done on a soundstage rather than CGI. Some sets are specifically on a soundstage to be similar to older Thai films. The aesthetic pleasures of the mvoie alone are almost enough to make this a recommendation, but not completely.

That underscores why I am put off by the romantic subplot, too. It's standard for the fighting in westerns to be over a woman, but these scenes appear to attempt face-value emotions. Then everything around it, from the settings to other scenes, is over-the-top. There's even a little person dancing around in a cowboy outfit! There's no way that little person is meant to be anything but comedic in this movie, or he'd do more than dance in his cowboy outfit. Anyway, everything else about the movie strikes the right tone, so I do recommend it if you want to see the western (arguably the most American of film genre) reflected in Asian cinema. Hell, even the mock-Morricone (Mockorricone?) score is absolutely note-perfect. Actually, that might be the best thing about the movie, really. But it's also a definitive case study on why it is difficult to make an movie that knows it's bad. Compared to this, I'll defend Snakes on a Plane or Shoot 'Em Up any day. They at least treat themselves like bullshit the whole time.

Stroszek: The American Landscape and its Buried Dreams

HI THERE

Some of Werner Herzog movies have a way of growing on me, unlike other filmmakers' projects. I liked Grizzly Man when I saw it, but over the years after that, I came to identify it as one of my favorite documentaries. Similarly, Aguirre: The Wrath of God felt like a fun (in its own way), surreal trip, but I never really got it out of my head. After rewatching it one more time, it became one of my all-time favorites. One of the keys to these movies, and Stroszek, too, is that the characters are so damned inherently memorable. In the minutes after watching it, I was pleased but not overwhelmed. Now, writing about it a day later, thinking about individual scenes makes me smile or cringe.

Part of this: Bruno S. (the character: Bruno Stroszek, the actor who plays him: Bruno Shleinstein) is an unnatural presence in front of a camera. He's awkward and nervous throughout; even when he's ranting loudly, it doesn't sound like a man with much confidence in the moment. His friend Scheitz is also intensely memorable for his quirks, but not in the indie-quirk way we've seen in, say, the works of Wes Anderson. Movies like Rushmore have characters that are clearly written creations (which is not to take away from Rushmore's greatness); Herzog at times seems like he could make a feature-length film about any random inmate at an asylum or a prison. That's definitely one of the things that gets commented on a lot in relation to this film, though. I'd rather go in another direction and focus on the settings, which reach a kind of verisimilitude of their own.

The movie begins in Germany, with Bruno getting let out of prison. He goes to a bar and has an apartment. The movie depicts the city as live-in; even Bruno's apartment is a cluttered mess. He's a street performer, and he performs in an alley that looks dingy and empty while he's playing his song. His prostitute friend Eva cleans it up, but Bruno's piano always seems too big for the room. Eva's pimps wreck the place, soon enough, anyway. Overall, the city is dark and confining. There's so much history there; it's almost a metaphor for Europe itself. It may just be coincidence (the nagging of film professors tells me it's not), but everything does seem small and lived-in, but also homely. Despite the mess, Bruno still has a fond nickname for his piano, and, once out of jail, picks up his street performing where he left off. Even as violent pimps roam the streets, it's clear tha thte city in some ways is home, or at least familiar, to Bruno and his friends.

Later, they move to Wisconsin, which is mostly barren fields. Even when Bruno's on the run after robbing a barber shop, the streets seem wide and inviting. Their trailer, a massive, hulking box, cannot fill in the space of the desert landscape enough to make the place seem populated. The truck yard nearby seems so empty. Scheitz wanders a field at one point testing "animal magnetism," and the land seems to go on forever. He never once has any conversation with anyone but his nephew and Buruno. There's something beautiful about these areas, but there's also something alien and strange about them, captured by the main characters. It helps to make Bruno a more sympathetic character, since America's such a strange place to him, yet it's not so strange that society will accept him.

Underscoring this, there's a scene where their trailer is auctioned off. Eva was the only person of the little group who spoke English, and she's long gone by this point in the movie. The auctioneer calls prices for items, too fast for me to fully understand what he's saying. One can only imagine how overwhelming it is for someone who doesn't speak English. From an establishing shot, the camera captures how empty this part of the country is, while a small mass of people huddle outside the massive trailer. Bruno's there, weaving in and out of the crowd, understanding what's happening, but not its specifics. After the auction is over, the town's police chief starts his car. Bruno berates and directly threatens him, but he drives off after apologizing for not understanding him. Bruno and Scheitz are alone, and it's painful to watch their every word be met with a sad confusion.

Some have said that this movie seems anti-American, but I don't think that's the intention. Almost everyone in the area is strangers to the group. They have no stake in their well-being, and they all treat the immigrants with politeness. The language barrier is too much to overcome for almost anyone, though; they're only there for a short amount of time before their living arrangements start to come apart. When Eva pays the man from the bank with cash she earned prostituting, he's bewildered that it's not in check or card form. Neither side really has the time or inclination to get to know the other. This is one of the scenarios where the casting of non-actors helps; the townspeople seem even more dumbfounded by what's happening then Herzog's actors. From the way from the guy from the bank continually apologizes for demanding payments, it's like their housing issues move along on their own accord.

It's interesting, then, that the happiest moments in the film are when Bruno, Eva and Scheitz are sightseeing in New York. Now, all I know about New York circa 1977 is learned from Scorsese movies, Al Pacino's 70s works, Saturday Night Fever, and the Rolling Stones album Some Girls. I am under the impression that a lot of motherfuckers got shot up a lot and things that would be crimes in other cities went unchecked. That makes it interesting that the most idyllic part of the Stroszek takes places as these immigrants who barely speak English looking around this city in a sunny daytime. You never see New York having that in those movies. New York, too expensive for a street performer, a prostitute and an old man to live, is the American myth that they hope to find when they first set out. At one point, Bruno admits that he believed America would be different from Germany, only to find that he's an outcast in both places.

More pro- or anti- anything, though, the movie is observant. It's the perfect mode for a director who went into documentaries later on, where everything seems natural-ish, if not truly natural. Hell, I went this whole way without even mentioning that the Wisconsin town was the homeplace of noted grave robber Ed Gein (try to find that on their welcome sign, though). That's never brought up in the movie, though. Does knowing that add anything to it? I don't know, but it kind of explains some of the emptiness, doesn't it? It doesn't? I don't know, then. The movie ends with a chicken dancing nonstop, though. What does that mean? I have guesses, but I would venture to say it was filmed with nothing specific in mind. Just feelin' right, like the rest of this movie.

Big Fan: Does This Jersey Make My Ass Look Insane?

oh hi there

Robert Siegel's directorial debut Big Fan can be seen as a companion piece with The Wrestler, also written by him. In some ways, each are grittier versions of Funny People, too. They're all movies about guys who live arguably misguided lives, come close to death and learn nothing from it. I'm not going to compare the three further than that, since I think The Wrestler and Funny People are each worthy of their own entries, but I just thought I'd point it out. Of the three, Big Fan is probably the easier to relate to, and is maybe the best-balanced of the three, all-around. That is to say, The Wrestler almost built entirely around Mickey Rourke's (excellent) performance, and Funny People meanders somewhat badly (though I find myself defending it frequently). Big Fan's biggest strength is its story, which stays down to earth in even the most unlikely of times.

Patton Oswalt plays Paul Aufiero, and to say Paul is a huge Giants fan is an understatement. The movie takes place over the second half of a regular season of football, and leaves you with no idea what the guy does when the Giants aren't playing. That's most of the year, right? At the start of the movie, we see Paul at work as an attendant at a parking garage, listening to sports radio. He's listening to his arch-rival, Philadelphia Phil (Michael Rapaport) rave about how the Eagles are going to kick the Giants' asses. Paul spends the dead time during his job scribbling a rebuttal. This is a weekly dance they do; aside from actually watching the Giants play (for home games, in the parking lot of Giants stadium on TV), Paul lives to be a fan. He calls into the sports show after work to read out of his notebook while his mother yells at him to quiet down. His friend congratulates him afterward on a job well done. It's not crazy if someone else thinks you're right, I guess.

The rest of Paul's family is introduced at a nephew's birthday party. They've all got "normal" lives while Paul lives with his mother; it's an obvious source of tension for a man in his mid-30s. He's happy to be just a fan, though. It's going to sound odd to say this, but the scenes with his family introduce sexuality into the picture. He has a long and funny conversation with his mother on the way home from the party about his brother taking up with (and marrying) his secretary, who looks like a reject from the Jersey Shore auditions. The movie lingers lovingly on his poster of his favorite player, Quantrell Bishop (Jonathan Hamm). His size and muscles are romanticized in thr picture. Paul masturbates under bedsheets, but never appears to look at porn ot be interested in women. The movie smartly has the meeting between Paul and Bishop (which ends with Bishop beating the living fuck outta Paul) take place in a strip club. Paul and his friend are so enamored with Bishop's presence that they almost don't notice a stripper, or, really, that they're in a strip club. The way the duo watches Bishop from afar almost resembles a kid in elementary school being too shy to approach a crush. They even buy Bishop a drink.

So am I saying Paul gay? Not any more than the millions of football fans who idolize big, muscular men. But it's an inherent homoeroticism (which does not mean to be gay!) in sports fandom, and I enjoyed that the movie pointed it out.

But even if there's something strange about Paul, Oswalt plays him with a warmth that makes him understandable. His fanaticism is tested in probably one of the strangest, most difficult ways imaginable. Wisely, the movie avoids having him debate whether or not to continue being a Giants fan. There aren't any big speeches about the nature of fanaticism, even if that's one of the movie's themes. His only verbally explosive moment is when he yells at his mother for insisting he live a "normal" life. Even after being concussed, he's more concerned with how the team is playing - and blaming himself that the team suffers while Bishop is suspended for the incident. It could have been subtitled "The Passion of Paul," since his allegiance to his team is tested so thoroughly.

Late in the movie, he takes on the guise of an Eagles fan, which leads to something similar to a Jesus-like death/redemption without so much as a single Jesus pose. After defending the Giants from Philadelphia Phil for the whole movie, it seemed like the ultimate betrayal for him to wear the green, black and white. He seems so resigned when he sits in a bar with Phil, there's palpable psychological torment. In the end, though, movie only flirts with a Taxi Driver-esque descent into madness, which leads to a perfect climax. It works much like a joke that is only funnier because of how long it is (unlike The Aristocrats, or its namesake). Paul still winds up in jail, though, and because of that, we never see how he spends a normal off season. Handled differently, the implication that this could all happen again next football season could be horrifying, but instead Siegel gives it a fair amount of warmth and optimism.

Something that helps keep things warm is probably the kind of fanaticism he exhibits. Philadelphia Phil is an obnoxious douchebag; I don't even think other Eagles fans like him much. Paul, strange as he is, pretty much only roots against other teams when they're playing his Giants, or as a rebuttal to other football fans. It helps keep him likable, even if his decisions are irrational and unfair to himself. This (as well as that punchline of a climax) is probably why this is often cited as a comedy. It's really not funny for most of its duration (and it's not a long movie, either), at least in the way one would expect from a normal comedy. Or even possibly a dark comedy. It's a bitter and observant kind of comedy, which makes it wholly successful and digestible movie than a drama would have been. As a previous writer for The Onion, Siegel is probably familiar with the cliche "it's funny because it's true." And, while Big Fan isn't necessarily true (and for the sake of any real-life Pauls, I really hope it isn't), it contains a kind of truthful insight that applies to any kind of passion that makes it funny in its own way.

...Go Pats

Laura: For When Your Movie Barely Needs to Make Sense

OH! Hi there!

My first exposure to Laura came in a "Music in Film" class I took in college. The professor used it as an example of film makers going to strange lengths to shoe-horn music into their movies. In the scene he showed as an example, Dana Andrews' Det. McPherson walks into the home of the titular Laura (Gene Tierney), whose murder he is investigating. While he looks around and talks about the case, he turns on her phonograph and pipes in music. When watching it yesterday, I especially noticed that he did that again in another scene. It's an odd man who goes around turning on strangers' radios for ten seconds before shutting them off.

But then, Laura is a strange movie. It's a noir that deals with a murder, but its characters are played to a campy effect. Not only that, but its main characters almost all seem to belong in their own separate movies. Yet, they all make sense together and form the cast of a genuine classic. The most interesting of the bunch is Clifton Webb's Waldo Lydecker. The film starts with his narration, but eventually that gets dropped. He also narrates a flashback, which includes scenes that he is not present to witness. It's an odd inconsistency, but it works within the film because the whole thing is so surreal by 1944 standards.

For this reason, I wish I had seen this in tandem with Masked and Anonymous. It accomplishes a lot of that movie's goals with seemingly a lot less effort (and a 579% reduction in plodding monologues). When I wrote about that movie, I noted that the casting was eclectic but predictable. Well, how about this? Webb, an open homosexual (I didn't even know they existed in 1944 America), plays Lydecker as a person who at least carries a prissy narcissism with him at all times. At most, he's a full-blown caricature of homosexuality. At the same time, he's fiercely protective of Laura, his ...what, exactly, is she to him?

Lydecker's relationship with Laura is poorly defined. He's shown to be a mentor to her; it's implied they might be lovers. They at least live together and have a set weekly routine. But the age difference is enough to make it strange. His demeanor is so distant, one wonders what Laura sees in him. From his nastiness during their meet-up to the odd moment where he reminisces about reading his own articles to her, the relationship is somewhat amorphous and vague.

Similarly, McPherson's relationship to Laura is odd, even by the low standards of romantic subplots. He falls for Laura while investigating her murder. Lucky for him, it turns out Laura is alive. The woman who was murdered wasn't Laura after all, but a model having an affair with Laura's fiance. Still, the characters lack any chemistry, so when they kiss near the climax, it's a forced moment, like the characters are doing things out of some kind of obligation. Up to that point, Laura showed no interest in the detective. It becomes another odd detail in a movie full of them.

Laura herself is an odd character, so perhaps it isn't so strange that her relationships are a little off, too. Played with detachment by Gene Tierney, she is hailed by Waldo, and her fiance as being a kind and radiant person. Her housekeeper is so grief-stricken at her "death" that she comes off as a nervous wreck. She's so wonderful, remember, that the detective falls for her a little while he still thinks she's dead. Later, the maid is absolutely terrified at the apparently alive Laura. Laura's reaction? About a minute of comforting words and a request for eggs. When Laura shows up midway through the movie, she's a curiosity precisely because she doesn't live up to the hype.

There apparently was a scrapped studio-mandated ending where the whole thing was a dream. This ending was scrapped because it was hard to understand. What's interesting is that the movie itself very much has its own internal logic, much like a dream. So many little things fall apart under scrutiny, whether it's the characters, their motivations, etc. To nitpick a movie like this ("Why didn't McPherson try harder to find the woman who was with Laura's fiance once he found out about her?") is to miss the point. It's a tightly-wound, pulpy little mystery that casts suspicion on everyone. When a movie has me wondering if the most minor of characters are the criminal, it's doing something right.

Lone Wolf and Cub: Sword of Vengeance: The Art of Waiting to Slice a Dude

o hello

Before watching Lone Wolf and Cub: Sword of Vengeance, I had been watching The Incredible Hulk (AKA Hulk: Ed Norton remix). In few ways are the movies similar. Yet, they build on the same foundation of a guy who destroys opponents with ease taking his time to be coaxed out of his shell by others doing wrong. What I mean is that the plot of each is pretty much the protagonist getting treated badly and then RRAAAAWWRRRGGGHHH (or in Lone Wolf and Cub's case: SWOOOOSH SWISH!): instant gratification and justice. It's a comparison that can be made to the westerns by Sergio Leone, where gunfights are not drawn out; it's Rainbow Six rules: one shot kills. This probably doesn't last for The Incredible Hulk (I only saw the first half; it's in my Netflix now to finish at some other date), but Lone Wolf and Cub never creates a villain who is able to equal its protagonist, Ogami Itto.

That's notable, in looking at so many superhero adaptations. John Favreau's Ironman and Ang Lee's Hulk both struggled to create a suitable villain in their final act. One of the flaws of the (still good) Tim Burton Batman movie was that they spent more time on the villains than the hero. The villain of the series has no fighting prowess in this Lone Wolf and Cub movie. He's an old man running a "shadow" clan, an elderly man played in an overdramatic way, like a Noh theater character. His strength is in the number of men he commands, and while his villainy sets off the movie's narrative, he is not seen for the last third.

The movie is almost strictly an origin story for is first two acts; it's a story of betrayal and corruption that ends with Itto vowing to be an assassin for hire as he travels with his son. It establishes his skill with a sword, and the aesthetic of its fights. The fights tend to be bloody - individual swordsmen are slashed and killed in single swipes, while Itto is untouched. No one, not the officers come to arrest him, nor the army trying to stop him after he refuses to commit seppuku for his crimes, can touch him. Throughout, we see him wronged until he unleashes the awesome power of slicing the fuck outta someone with a really sharp blade. Then, he fights the odds in self-defense until he uses his cunning to get into a duel. Then, he uses his cunning again combined with his ability to decapitate motherfuckers to win the duel.

The action is handled with vigor, handling special effects for the various severed limbs and campy spraying blood smoothly. Yes, it's all cartoonish, but it's also fun in a B-movie way. Of course, the movie saves the best for last, with Itto taken captive in a town taken over by an evil chamberlain and his men. Upon first sight, they threaten to cut down a bridge while he is on it. They rape a woman. Then kill her father. One guy demands to challenge him because he is insulted. They force him to have sex with a prostitute while they watch. They even wipe a bloody sword clean on the robe he's wearing. The movie pushes them to cartoonish levels of depravity, not even feigning a chance that Itto could be beaten by them. Instead, we get a violent bloodbath of righteous vigilante justice (AKA justice in its purest form).

Anyway, I can't labor over this entry because the movie is both simple and short (82 minutes! When was the last time anyone produced a movie that was 82 minutes? Freaking Cars was nearly two hours!). Also, the entire series is on my Netflix queue now, and I fully intend on doing an entry for each. It's just that sometimes it's the simplest things that are great pleasures. Like when a dude gets pushed too far and winds up he can cut your sword in half and then jam the loose half through your throat with blood sprouting out of the top of your head somehow. Or when Bruce Banner's got some spanish dude and his posse kicking his ass for no reason while the government's on his back, and he's been running, and his Portuguese isn't so good and RRAAAWWRGGH HULK SMASH. Of course, in the case of Lone Wolf and Cub, it helps that it's a straight-up well-made movie, with great cinematography and some extremely well-chosen set pieces. But, in the end, how much of the audience is gonna care about that really gorgeous waterfall with a wood bridge overlooking it?

Masked and Anonymous: No, Your Song Is Not a Screenplay

Oh, HELLO there?

Can you name a song turned into a movie? Not counting rock operas or full albums? I can't, at least off the top of my head. I suppose it's possible; if Spike Jonze can turn Where the Wild Things Are into a movie, it follows that some songs can become movies. If you have an interest in doing this, see Masked and Anonymous. It's very much an illustration of why you should probably put that screenplay of yours in the shredder. While not based on a specific song, it was penned by Bob Dylan and its director, Larry Charles. It's more a curiosity than a movie, featuring the same kind of impenetrable imagery one might find in Dylan's songs. Charles admits as much:

When I made the Bob Dylan movie [Masked and Anonymous], I wanted to make a Bob Dylan movie that was like a Bob Dylan song. One with a lot of layers, that had a lot of poetry, that had a lot of surrealism and was ambiguous and hard to figure out, like a puzzle.

Mission accomplished, I say. It truly is a movie that's "ambiguous" and "hard to figure out," but to what end? A Dylan song can be densely packed, full of small details, contradictions, literary and historical characters. His "Desolation Row" is an example of this, but I would not want it as a movie.

The problems with the idea itself are numerous, and they undercut some okay acting, a great cast and interesting direction. Dylan himself is cast as Jack Fate, one of many unfortunate names that would probably sound fine as a character in a song (others include: Tom Friend, Pagan Lace, Uncle Sweetheart... aw, fuck it. Look at imdb's page). As characters in a movie, though, they are all one-dimensional creations. Fate is much like the singer in a song: an observer, which is unfortunate because Dylan is not much of an actor. If the canonization of his music and persona has sealed him into an almost inhuman figure, his flat line readings and evasive maneuvers when questioned by the press aren't helping. His physical appearance - so small and thin - makes him a worrisome presence (and it doesn't help that he spends much of the movie standing next to John Goodman). He would not be out of place in the background of a diner in a David Lynch movie. Of course, he is based on Dylan: Jeff Bridges' journalist questions him about not being at Woodstock; the songs by "Jack Fate" are old Dylan songs.

Aside from those details, though, he is an observer to the events around him, passively listening as Jeff Bridges berates him with questions, or as Val Kilmer waxes philosophical about God-knows-what. That's a problem for a movie, because the viewer is already an observer to the action. If a song is like a story being relayed (via its singer), a film is like a memory being shared. You don't need the passive figure to hang up your decorative crazy characters. It frees up the cast to do a whole lot of "ACTING" around him in monologues, which, unfortunately, are not as full of insight as they (the actors, writers, directors, characters) may think. They all riff on the nature of revolutions, war, the world, whatever. It's all related to the plot, which is just window dressing for Dylan and Charles to congratulate themselves on their ability to write a good comeback ("If you had to kill a man, what would you use? A knife or a gun?" "My bare hands," and so the conversations in this movie goes). One of the problems of the movie is the sheer normality of its characters, despite its attempts at strangeness. Of course John Goodman's a blowhard. Of course Luke Wilson's a really nice guy. Of course Mickey Rourke's a bit of a bastard. Part of the problem with loading the cast with such big names is that you can't get past the types of characters these actors generally play. It robs the movie of its attempted weirdness to typecast everyone in roles we've seen before.

One could argue that maybe that's another layer to the movie, like, maybe the "movie" is commenting on how we "perceive" these "people" as "characters," maaan. But even if that was intentional, doesn't that seem like an awful burden to load onto a movie that already ruminates on the nature of war, man, the role of the protest singer, journalism and whatever the hell else Dylan and Charles were getting at? A Dylan song's lyrics can run into wild, surreal directions, but they're always much more focused than this movie. Even something that twists and turns like "Tangled Up in Blue" or "It's Alright, Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)" are focused on one subject or mood.

Masked and Anonymous struggles to share the dense detail of a Dylan song, too. Every frame is packed with little decorations, but to what purpose? The lighting has a greenish hue. John Goodman wears an atrocious powder blue suit. Penelope Cruz wears a Metallica T-shirt (to his credit, Mickey Rourke probably just showed up on set looking like that), but why? People exist and say things that don't matter. It's like a dream, but in a bad way. A song can coast on its melody; if the lyrics are merely evocative (and Dylan's often can be), it's merely for the mood or the idea that's being expressed. Feature length films don't generally have this luxury because they're at least 90 minutes long. An exception might be David Lynch films, but his inventions are more outrageous than anything here.

Anyway, I don't want to belabor this point much. In the end, as an attempt to make a movie out of a song (or some kind of "movie song"), it's proof that maybe this isn't a great idea. To leave on a positive note, though, the reworkings, remakes and covers of Dylan songs are pretty interesting. Also, near the end of this movie, you do get a chance to see the (estimating from this movie: 4'7"/27 lbs/205 y.o.) Bob Dylan beat up the (estimating from this movie: 6'1"/250 lbs/47 y.o.) Jeff Bridges without any effort (or acting) whatsoever. This won't be a Great-Bad Hall of Fame entry ever (too boring), but that scene on its own certainly deserves a mention.

Let the Right One In: How to Make an American Remake

"It's funny, but is it going to get them off their tractors?"
-Gammabot (of Futurama) evaluating a TV show

Oh, Hi there!

So, Let the Right One In, right? Like, fuck Twilight, right?

That's got to be the first thing lots of people in America thought upon seeing this movie. Unfortunately, that's only 5 words, not counting titles. I don't have any word limit, but, you know... Let the Right One In was a sweet movie. It's deliberately paced and has some wonderful acting and cinematography. But I do wonder if the movie would be so critically acclaimed if Twilight wasn't playing at the local multiplex down the road from it, its siren song like the world's loudest brown note.

Anyway, apparently an American remake is in the works, under the title Let Me In. From what I gather from interviews and shit (read: wikipedia), it's going to be based on the novel on which the original movie was based, but I don't know how different it will wind up. Obviously, it would be slicker in terms of production. Could they go for the Twilight crowd and tone down the gore? They could also make it gorier, too. Make its pace faster? Probably. This is all speculation on my part. It's being directed by the guy who helmed Cloverfield, so maybe they're going for more horror than Twilight-esque romance. All kinds of things can be done with this plot. It'll be interesting. They're at least changing the names of the names of the characters (instead of American-izing the spelling. Because why the fuck not, right?). But then, from wikipedia, I see this:

Producer Simon Oakes has made it clear that the plot of Let Me In will closely resemble that of the original, except that it will be made "very accessible to a wider audience".

Well, of course. Because this movie was so freaking impossible to understand. Let's see if you can make sense of it: a lonely boy (Oskar) is a social outcast, picked on by bullies. A girl (Eli) is lonely because she's a vampire. The two meet and strike up a friendship. Yadda yadda yadda, Eli's vampirism puts her in danger of being discovered and she must flee the town, but her mutual love with Oskar is deepening.

Sorry if I went too fast - those tweens get into so many complications! (Also, I yadda yadda yadda'd over some pretty cool shit.) But all joking aside, I understand why Hollywood insists on remaking any foreign film that isn't a European historical drama. A lot of America is averse to reading subtitles, and in other cases some places lack smaller cinemas that will show independent movies or indie flicks. I get that. For awhile, the trend of remaking Asian horror movies made some good bank, too. It makes total business sense, so I can't blame Hollywood for going to that well so often. (I actually think it's too bad the Battle Royale remake never came to fruition, because I would love to see how any American studio would handle that particular movie.)

So, with that in mind, here are some more ways that Let me In can changes things for an American audience:

• More slow-mo. Emotions are too fleeting - I need time to register my sadness
  
• One-liners. Eli should be making bad vampire puns every 3-4 lines in her scenes (Oskar: Would you like Twizzlers? Eli: No fang-k you!)
• Oskar should get into a kung-fu fight scene within the first 30 seconds of Let Me In, just to get your attention. He should lose, though, because his character's a wimp
• It takes place in the early 1980s. Each scene should be devised around a pop culture reference from the 80s - the failest decade! lmao!
• All of Eli's vampiric attacks should be more gory than anyone would imagine
  
• The amount of body glitter is indirectly proportional to how much your plot needs to make sense. (Not a suggestion, just some math to keep in mind)
• Can Oskar have a wisecracking (ethnic?) best friend to provide comedic moments? You damn well right he can!
  

With these suggestions in mind, I think America will get a Let the Right One In remake that plays to its sensibilities. Let the rest of the world have their subtitles or lips that don't match the words! This is America! We deserve better than that!

...this pretty much damns me into having to watch Let Me In to give it a fair chance, doesn't it?

Jan Svenkmajer's Alice: The Only Film I Like Dubbed

Oh hi there...

Lots of attention given to Jan Svankmajer's Alice is given to its visuals. As a stop-motion retelling of Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, they should be. Here's a plot summary for the uninitiated: Alice encounters a White Rabbit and chases him. A bunch of shit happens, and the shit that happens is fucking crazy. This movie's dark, haunting, maybe not disturbing, but definitely strange and uncomfortable. When I first saw it, it was the first for a college film class, in an auditorium with booming loud speakers. At the time, I thought that was just the auditorium. Now, after rewatching it via Netflix on my computer, it definitely does not seem that way. This movie is loud, and that does so much for the movie's ability to get under your skin, it almost outdoes the visual aspects. Almost.

Remember how cute Disney's Alice in Wonderland is? And how distorted but still kinda cute (or at least "wow look at the bright colors!") Tim Burton's looks (from the trailers)? Svankmajer's version includes stop-motion, which is an inherently creepy form of animation. Objects are more dimensional than traditional animation, but are given an unnatural jerkiness that can be used to great effect, as it is here. It helps that there's so much death in this retelling. Not that characters die, but in their design. The white rabbit is a stuffed rabbit that comes to life; his friends are all made of bird and fish bones and doll parts. It's a combined creepy effect, with everything being somewhat jerky, yet remarkably smooth, like everything is played at only a couple frames per minute slower.

So, you get Alice in Wonderland, but told with dead animals. If that doesn't seal the creepiness, the narration will. All dialogue is delivered by Alice, with a closeup of her mouth ending each phrase (sample: "'I'm going to be late!' SAID THE WHITE RABBIT"). At first, the effect is intriguing. Then annoying. Then strangely unsettling. The version I've seen is dubbed in English, this intensifies this effect greatly. The lips in closeup clearly don't match what's being said, and it become surreal because you're forced to read her lips. This causes a mental dissonance, at least for me. It's the exact reason I can't stand dubbing. (and I've heard people insist that the only way to watch bad martial arts movies is dubbed. Can't do it. Sorry.) It magnifies how strange the film's world is.

This extends to the sound effects, too. The majority of the film takes place with clearly puppets, either among Alice or occasionally when she becomes a doll. Every crash and clang is mixed far louder than would be natural for the dolls. There's a dissonance with comes with these little objects causing such a racket. For example, there's the scene with the Mad Hatter and March Hare, which is driven by repetition of the Hatter ("'I want a clean cup!' SAID THE HATTER"), the sounds of the hare's cart, chairs scraping against the floor, butter slathering over clocks. In its extended repetition, the scene grates partially because of its sound.

In the end,talking about the sound of the thing is mostly just me trying to find a unique perspective on this movie, though. The striking animation of it - alive, yet unnatural, much like the White Rabbit who bleeds and eats sawdust constantly - is the real star here.

Still, I don't want to give too little credit to Kristyna Kohoutova, who plays Alice. She plays the role with the perfect mix of curiosity and bratty determination. The latter trait is probably magnified by her refusal to be intimidated by anything she sees throughout her journey, but it makes her reactions fascinating. She deadpans her way through being turned into a doll, being trapped inside a doll, being attacked by a bunch of dead animals, having her socks come alive, being nearly submerged in her tears, among other strangeness. In some ways, this is a dark comedy, and she is its straight man.

Overall, Alice is an interesting trip down some surrealist stop-motion animation. It's more a showcase of technique than a narrative film, given that there isn't a real plot to it. It's unforgettable, though, for its design and style, which deftly walks the line between horror and nonsense. There isn't much wonder here, just unending madness falling into itself.

SAID THE FILM BLOGGER

The Great-Bad Hall of Fame: Rocky IV

Oh! Hi there!

For years, I've been saying that there should be a hall of fame for movies that are so bad they're good. Then I realized I have a blog! I can be proactive and make this happen! So with that, I am going to write about Rocky IV. If you don't know which Rocky that is from the title, let me summarize it for you: Rocky ends the fucking Cold War -nay, the very USSR itself- via boxing.

The thing that makes Rocky IV stand out as a great bad movie, for me, is that it's the continuation of a film series that began with a great film. It's a perversion of all the things that made the first one great. The Hollywood rule for sequels is "like the last one, but more of it!" Much like a game of Jenga, though, the base erodes until it is unstable as you add sequel after sequel. So, eventually, you get a series of events that reads like this:

Rocky: Rocky, a fighter around 30, is drafted to fight the Heavyweight Champion, an undefeated Ali-esque character. He doesn't win, but his ability to stand toe-to-toe with the champ inspires the nation.
Rocky IV: Rocky, a multimillionaire who must be nearing 40 now, must avenge the death of his best friend who was killed in a boxing match against a hulking Soviet, a probable steroid user with double the punching power of an average professional boxer. He wins against the Russian, and also inspires the all-Russian audience to look at themselves and realize their government is wrong. The audience includes the government.

Of course, Rocky wins the fight. That's fine. This movie was produced in America, after all. But who would have guessed that Rocky would end the movie with a rousing speech about about, well:

During this fight, I've seen a lot of changing, in the way you feel about me, and in the way I feel about you. In here, there were two guys killing each other, but I guess that's better than twenty million. I guess what I'm trying to say, is that if I can change, and you can change, everybody can change!

Because when it comes down to it, wasn't the Cold War just a bunch of pansy-ass "feelings?" The thing is, this speech barely makes sense in the script's dramatic continuity as "change" appears as a theme multiple times. Apollo and Rocky talk about "changing," with Creed claiming that he and Rock are always fighters and will never change. Meanwhile, Rocky says things can never be the way they were before. Later, Rocky insists that he can't change, which is why he has to fight Drago. Which makes him a hypocrite. But then Rocky wins - as a fighter, without changing his core nature - and insists that the entire USSR can just switch over and we'll find world peace. Even on its emotional axis, it's an astounding, hilarious failure.

Speaking of emotional axes, how about that Adrian? In every movie, she goes from "Rocky, you can't fight!" to "Go get 'em, tiger!" Except in this one, it literally happens over the course of two laughably perfunctory scenes.

Really, it's an abomination against everything that was good about the original movie. From the opening shot in this movie - an American flag-decorated glove punching a Soviet flag-marked glove and EXPLODING - you can tell something's amiss (and not just the fact that the Russian glove falls down before the explosion happens. Or was that symbolism?). At 91 minutes, it's the shortest Rocky movie. Let's look at that running time a little more closely, though.

• After the gloves go off, the movie spends the duration of "Eye of the Tiger" summarizing Rocky III. Then, we see the last scene of Rocky III in whole. So it's probably about seven minutes until we get to the actual movie.
  
• Later, Apollo Creed fights Drago, and his entrance is an entire James Brown song and performance ("Living in America," the "Batdance" of the James Brown discography). That takes up another six minutes.
  
• After Creed dies, Rocky drives in his car to reflect on life and friendship, or love, or something. The movie switches here to another montage. This one summarizes the entire Rocky series up to that point. And when I say "up to that point," I mean from the original Rocky to the the events of Rocky IV as of a minute ago. This also includes Rocky III, which you just saw in a montage that started this movie.

So this movie is actually less than 80 minutes long, which is the perfect length for a good bad movie. Then you have the obligatory training montage, where Drago trains with the latest technological advances (and implied steroids). Because using technology is cheating, and if you're going to use computerized gym equipment, you might as well be on steroids to boot. Meanwhile, Rocky is outrunning a KGB car and running up a mountain in the snow. Because all Americans need is some elbow grease and good old-fashioned (and revenge-driven!) determination. It's an impossibly heavy-handed moment that winds up being hilarious. Again, if you keep stacking the odds, you're gonna get Jenga'd. And Jenga is at its most fun when the thing falls down.



Can I just mention that this movie also has a robot? In 1985? And it has some advanced AI, even by today's standards? Did you ever notice that Rocky's kid watches the fight (the one with a high likelihood of his father dying live on international TV on Christmas) from home, and in the background, the Robot is in a Santa outfit, with beard? Just thought I'd mention it.

So yes, Rocky IV is the first entry of the Great-Bad Hall of Fame. I can't think of another sequel that does so much to piss all over a great film. Even the Rambo sequels have the benefit of First Blood being only okay. What's one more thing that's definitive about Rocky? The theme. You know it. This one scraps that for pop songs. So fuck you if you liked the original. The thing is, I love the original. When I worked at Hollywood Video, before opening the store, I'd pop it in while I counted the money and did all the opening duties. Damn near every week, I'd half-watch and listen to it. So this movie holds a special place in my heart as the most wrong-headed sequel possible, even compared to the much-maligned Rocky V, which is just a depressing mess. No, this one is deserving of being in the Good-Bad Hall of Fame.