Religulous

When writing film reviews, it's inevitable that at some point you'll hear someone say to you, "Can't you just watch a movie and enjoy it?" The implicit question here is, "Can't you stop thinking so much?" The reason I bring this up is twofold: 1) it annoys me (and I think people should be ashamed of themselves for even thinking such things, much less voicing them) and 2) because I feel Bill Maher's pain. Religulous features Maher talking to various religious figures, asking them questions about their beliefs, and expressing his skepticism, his outrage, and his disappointment at the lack of critical thinking that people apply to their faith. The film is predominently focused on Christian thought in the United States, but makes a cursory stab at discussing similar problems and absurdities in the Jewish and Muslim worlds as well. This is not a film that is likely to convert anyone in any direction, but for fans of thinking, it's an amusing, and even important document of how people deal with matters of belief.

From all evidence, Maher is a bruised cynic of a comedian, the kind of jokester who cares deeply about the "rightness" of the world while despairing that things will ever work out to his satisfaction. He pulls few punches with those he speaks to; he often scoffs and mocks the ridiculousness of their claims as they defend, say, the existence of a talking snake. He's a funny man, and his quick wit and observations are satisfying. But underlying his mirth is a clear desire to understand, to have a reasoned, intelligent discourse on the topic. When talking to Ken Ham, who represents the risible and dangerous Creation Museum in Kentucky, Maher's sense of disappointment at not being able to have an intelligent debate on the topic of "Creation Science" is palpable. He looks positively crestfallen as Ham refuses to engage and evades Maher's questions. In the early portions of the film, I began to fear that the deck was stacked too much in Maher's favor, that he was choosing to debate lightweights so he could emerge victorious. But after his interview with Dr. Francis Collins, the director of the Human Genome Project, exposed this respected, notable scientist's bizarre standard of evidence for a historical Jesus, I realized that any interviewee would suffer. It's not Maher's fault that there are no rational discussions in this film--when it comes to religion, there can be none. For good or bad (and, in case it's not obvious, I'm with Maher that it's bad), religion and faith exist in a realm beyond rationality's reach.

This, of course, is the film's point. It's interesting, and perhaps appropriate, that the the film doesn't develop an argument, doesn't develop point-by-point to its conclusion. Rather, Religulous is an emotional appeal, a screed decrying the laziness of thought demonstrated by religious proponents and the danger inherent in this type of thinking. It's strange, and I doubt it's intentional, but Religulous is almost like a religious experience in and of itself--it stacks up subjective, personal experience after subjective, personal experience until it reaches its fiery, impassioned, and evangelical conclusion. I guess this may be called hypocritical, but I found it exhilarating--if appealing to reason is fruitless for Maher (and it most evidently is), what else does he have left?

The film is unfocused and scattershot, full of wacky, digressive edits to film clips and stock footage that underscore a point Maher's making or reveal the subtext of a particular scene. I passionately hated the cutting at first, but after a time, I got into the film's aggressive editing style. I came to an awareness that more than anything, this is a goof-off film, a comedian's comedy movie. At times it felt like a naive avant-garde film school project, laced with non-diagetic sound effects and smart-aleck subtitles exposing the vacuousness of the subject being interviewed. The kitchen-sink mentality of the film was alarming at first, but as I began to understand the tone of the film, was incredibly satisfying. In Religulous, laughs are valued over fairness, but honesty is valued above everything.

Those of weak faith who feel threatened by having their beliefs challenged would be wise to storm out like the burly trucker at the beginning of the film. Those who cannot see the absurdity in deism will no doubt chafe at the lack of any semblance of balance. But this is an important movie, one whose shelf-life is probably very small, but vital. In this time and place, it is increasingly more important that our leaders have more religion than intelligence, and the standards for basic scientific education are continually undermined by those who would supplant their own mythologies for sound methodology. For good or bad, it is important that these beliefs be questioned, be loudly interrogated in public discourse, if only for the sake of caution. Religulous fulfills this need, and it makes its point in a single shot. During a Las Vegas-style Passion Play at a Florida Bible Amusement Park, an actor portraying Jesus writhes on a cross, casting his eyes toward heaven. The camera tilts up and there, crossing the sky, is not God, but a commercial airplane. The shot successfully argues, all by itself, that the coexistence of these two things is monumentally absurd. It's as momentous in implicit meaning as when the bone becomes a space station in 2001.

Would Be a Good Double Feature With: The Passion of the Christ

Redbelt

After watching David Mamet's Redbelt (recently out on DVD), I asked myself, "Why isn't everything at least this good?" Redbelt is a small, twisty movie about a seasoned, dogmatic Jiu-Jitsu instructor who exhibits a purity of spirit and grounded optimism (some may say naiveté) in the face of an intricate and often ludicrous plot sprung on him by opportunistic lowlifes. Like the small intestines, the film bends in on itself and turns so many corners, that it's able to compact a surprising amount into its limited space (in this case, 110 minutes). Better still is the fact that, up until the final moments, the film moves through this structure like a shark; every moment moves the plot or the characters forward. Its momentum is such that any nagging questions about the plausibility of the narrative or the fact that people are engaging in some pretty complicated deceptions to accomplish things that would probably be easier handled with a good old-fashioned exchange of large amounts of currency are left behind.

What happens in Red Belt is tidily explained by Ricky Jay near the end of the film, a summation of all the trickery and deceit employed to the disadvantage of the noble Jiu-Jitsu instructor. It's a relief to the instructor when he does, but also to the viewer. Mamet's script is marvelous in the way it rations out the pieces to the film's central puzzle to the audience and the protagonist at once. Having a character whisk away the subterfuge to reveal the machinations of the plot can feel arbitrary or lazy, but here it's simply a confirmation of everything you (and the instructor) have suspected all along. The pieces are in hand, you've got them fitting together just fine, and all this revelation does is confirm the picture on the box. It doesn't hurt that it's swiftly done.

The film is anchored on Chewitel Ejiofor's performance, and he serves with great distinction. The noble and pure artisan is a cliche of the highest order, particularly when dealing with martial arts fellows. Ejiofor avoids the traps of making his character either self-righteous or a martyr. When he can't scrape up the money to pay for his studio's broken window, he exhibits both regret that his ideals will not allow him to earn a quick buck by fighting professionally and the enticement that such an easy path holds for him. Like Mamet's script, the performance is a carefully controlled drip. When he shouts at someone at the film's climax, it's both a surprise and a delight to see this otherwise gentle, selfless man explode into such a commanding fury.

In negotiating the con-artist plot Redbelt stacks up one small success after another, but it bungles the finale. The movie's smart enough to know that the real fight does not happen in the ring, and I was delighted that the final fight was motivated by ideals and philosophy, not brute aggression or something as trite as revenge. The writing is just as sharp here as any other moment in the film, but the filmmaking turns a shade too mawkish. When the sentiment starts roaring in, it's a bit too much and too soon.

It's a disappointment to see the movie falter so, as it's otherwise a solid little movie. The whole endeavor has the vibe of a great B-movie from the past. One of the things that makes these films valuable, even now, is an efficiency in their storytelling--absent time and money, they couldn't afford to focus on anything but their subject matter. Redbelt is similar. It provides an honest look at a small corner of the world and tests its main character's ideology in a taut, efficient framework. It's no surprise given Mamet's pedigree that it's the writing that distinguishes this movie from similar, but less successful fare, and it is also writing, I believe, that is the answer to the question I posed at the film's conclusion.

Would be a good double feature with: The Set-Up

Spout.com link: http://www.spout.com/films/326740/default.aspx

The Ruins

I find most modern American horror films to be dispiriting rather than frightening, and while watching The Ruins, I had an epiphany. At its core, the genre has always had a close relationship with fairy tales, and in this way, it's always been moralistic, wagging its finger at the arrogance of those who would dare cross societal boundaries. Of course, the subject of its moralizing is ever-changing with the times--horror films of the 30s had, among other things, a fascinating ethnocentric dread (beware the swarthy Romanians!), the horror of the 80s punished those who indulged in the sex, drugs, and rock 'n roll lifestyle of the 60s (ladies, stay chaste!), and so on. In The Ruins, the decision to explore the ancient culture of Mexico, rather than remain shallow, uncultured tourists at a beach resort, is the decision that dooms its college kids. By itself, this is an anti-intellectual message (another staple attitude of the genre), but pair it with other recent films like Hostel where characters are punished for their exploitation of foreigners by remaining shallow, uncultured tourists, and you have the beginnings of what seems to be the modern horror movie's message: Don't do anything at all. Stay where you are.

Give it credit, even while indulging this sort of xenophobic terror, The Ruins manages to make flowers kind-of scary. Not "I'll never feel safe at the florist's again!" scary, but, at least, "Hey, Main Character, look out behind you, there're flowers there!" scary. The Ruins is about a group of college kids who, while vacationing in Mexico, take a trip to an ancient Mayan pyramid that lies unexplored and uncharted. It's not, we're told, on any maps, so the knowledge of its existence is passed along like a bootleg concert recording, with rudimentary maps passed down to the curious from insiders. When the youngsters get there, they're forced to the top of the pyramid by some gun-toting Mayans who then set up camp at the pyramid's base, killing all who come back down. Thus trapped and with no cell phone signal (this lack of a cell phone signal has become as trite as the invader cutting the phone lines... can we find something else to do with cell phones, please?), the collegiates must fend for their survival, find water and food, and wait for rescue. Meanwhile, the local foliage seems to be trying to eat them.

These carnivorous plants are, by far, the best part of the film. The flowering vines delight in blood, and they move, indifferent and innocuous, toward each freshly-spilled pool. Their casual, reliable reaction to the suffering of the humans is (I'd wager) intentionally funny; the film is aware of the silliness of a group of vines slithering toward a freshly severed limb, so what could have been a laughable attempt to scare instead becomes darkly comic and even endearing. Goofier still is the narrative invention that the flowers of these vines have gained the ability to mimic the sounds around them, but this too emerges as more creepshow fun than implausible stupidity. The reveal of this trait happens in a nifty bit of sound design--each flower, by itself, seems to sound off just a fragment of the noise being mimicked, so, the full sound is achieved when all the flowers noise in unison. It's not all laughs, though; they're creepy little creepers. They're ubiquitious and unceasing. After spending a night on the pyramid, one of the college kids wakes up to find that some of the vines have crept upon her overnight and inserted their stalks into some recently-sustained wounds. Worse, the plants are thriving, reproducing within her bloodstream itself. The inexorable threat of the plants is about the only thing that pops up above an otherwise formulaic survival horror story. It's certainly a much better eco-threat than the one in The Happening, anyway.

Nevertheless, the film is suffused with the sense that nothing matters, that the characters have no agency. Each idea they employ to deal with their predicament is about equal in terms of whether or not it's a good or bad idea, and the success or failure of their ideas seems entirely up to the dictates of chance or, as it were, the screenwriter. In this case, the screenwriter is a punishing fellow, and none of their ideas have any degree of success (up until the last one), and so the movie just hops from one kind of hopelessness to another. There's no sense of building action or increasing horror, just a steady drone of people screaming as each fresh, random horror is visited upon them. This is getting increasingly typical--The Strangers, for all its craft, had the same problem--and it's why the net effect of modern horror films seems to be saying, "Give up. Stop trying. Whatever you do, it's going to result in the same thing." That there is, eventually, a plan that works seems as much an accident as anything else in the film (it's also a betrayal of what we've been told about the Mayan force at the base of the pyramid), and, so, The Ruins falls flat on even providing a catharsis.

What we're left with is another film that sees the very act of doing things and going about your business as a punishable act of hubris. Rather than being frightening, these films just leave me numb--as in the rancid, unforgivable ending of The Mist, the twists of fate are often as absurd as an old Warner Brothers Cartoon. Characters are punished not for any transgressions, but for lacking omniscience. They turn left instead of right and, so, get eaten by goblins. Someone bites into a cracker and an anvil falls on their foot. If only they'd have known! Bad, arbitrary things happen to people all the time, it's true, but most modern horror films seem to be content to simply state this and then nod knowingly. "Whaddya gonna do?" they say, shrugging. They don't provide us with stakes through the heart or "shoot them in the head!" There's nothing to be done. The bad guys are out there, and they will get us no matter who we are or what we might learn. In a world in which the earth that once nourished us turns noxious and the government unapologetically tortures in our name, it's pointless--these films show us--to do anything. The Ruins and its ilk offer us a justification for surrender to the perils of living, a way to excuse one's apathy in the face of violation. Ok, now I'm scared.

Romeo Is Bleeding

Romeo Is Bleeding is a convoluted mess, a dispirited neo-noir that inspires no passion or suspense. The plot twists and turns and raises the stakes, but there's nothing recognizable at its core but recycled, worn archetypes of the film noir genre. The film provides no compelling reason to once again dredge up these femme fatales or the corrupt hero who brings about his own spiritual downfall. And, even watching it as a straight homage, it fails to recapture the spark or wit of the films that are its inspiration. As the histrionics climax and ebb, climax and ebb, over and over again over the course of one hour and fifty minutes, it's like watching a ghost of cinema past; what was once vibrant and sexy is here pale and withered, empty and lifeless.

Gary Oldman stars as Jack Grimaldi, a corrupt police Sargent who offers the mob information about protected witnesses in exchange for money. He's amassed a good deal of dirty money over the years, but has a crisis of conscience when one of his tip-offs leads to an off-camera bloodbath where the cops protecting the witness are also killed. Now he's not just an informant, but a cop-killer as well. Feeling that the mob has not lived up to their end of the bargain, he attempts to extract himself from the dirty dealings but finds he's (gasp!) in over his head. Then, Lena Olin shows up as an ambitious and nihilistic hit woman named Mona who's been marked for death by mob boss Roy Scheider (doing his best Kirk Douglas from Out of the Past impression). Mona (double gasp!) seduces Jack in order to secure his allegience in helping her escape with her life. This complicates Jack's relationship with his wife, his mistress, and the mob.

Like all noir-ish plots, this has the ingredients for a good, tawdry time at the movies where the audience feels a Puritanical glee at seeing a corrupt soul punished for his (and it's always his) ethical ambiguity and a concurrent delight in watching a man overcome seemingly omnipotent malevolent forces. But Jack never emerges as a relatable character or anything worth investing in, either for or against. He leads so many contrary lives--cop and mob informant, husband and philanderer--yet somehow there's nary a hint of danger that he'll be found out. There's not even a sneaky thrill at the outset that he's getting away with it. His affair is joyless, his mob relations are testy, and we never get to know his cop buddies. The only spark of joy in the film is when he hordes his money; his love for this growing pile of cash is the only relationship that connects. But later in the film, the movie asks us to believe that he really, really, truly, no-seriously-I-mean-it-this-time loves his wife (despite everything we've seen), and he abandons his money without so much a moment of hesitation. He comes off not as an anti-hero, but an anti-person, a vessel into which the film pours its plot.

Absent a main character, Romeo Is Bleeding also fails to find a tone that reflects the material. Rather, it's slow and moody, takes little delight in turning the screws on the duplicitous Jack, and, at times, even asks us to take his undoing seriously. It thuds along at a metronome-like pace, with no escalating rhythm or discernable tempo. The score's a distraction, too heavy-handed in its references to older noir scores. Even the shots of the film are disorienting; people in the same scene often feel like they're in different rooms.

Though, to be fair, some of that disorienting quality could be due to the acting. Oldman delivers a fun, theatrical-but-nuanced performance, yet he never really connects with any of the other performers. There's no chemistry between Jack and his wife, his mistress, or Mona. Even the wonderfully disarming Roy Scheider can't seem to penetrate the wall of Oldman's acting and forge a genuine relationship. Lena Olin is the only one besides Oldman who seems to be having any fun, but her performance is a cartoon--Jessica Rabbit playing a James Bond villain. Juliette Lewis, as the mistress, just looks like she's trying to keep up.

Romeo Is Bleeding's only redeeming feature is the lengths to which it goes in torturing its characters. It's gutsy to have a character remove an arm in order to serve the screenplay's labyrinthine plot or to have the unwitting hero forced to bury a man alive. A better film would have played with these moments more, found more absurdity in them, and used them for comedic purposes. And that may have been the intent with this project at one time. But if the movie's laughing at all, it's only a nervous, guilty laugh--a sexist joke from a misogynist, searching the crowd to see which fellas are with him.


Would Make a Good Double Feature Wtih: Angel Heart

Edited to Add: RIP Roy Scheider. May the curse of your living corpse haunt us all.

Day 93: Reflections of Evil

This is the final film for One Movie a Day.  This film was viewed on a VHS tape a friend of mine sent me some years ago.  I note that a DVD for this film has been released, but have no idea if this is the same version.

Like channel flipping through time while taking a methamphetamine-inspired jump into a nest of cobras, Reflections of Evil is a media-saturated pastiche, the plot focusing on an obese street vendor in Los Angeles.  His sister disappeared sometime ago on the Universal Studios tour (not unlike the famous story about a young Steven Spielberg who is lampooned without mercy in the film) and she figures into the film in oblique, sometimes terrifying ways.  Reflections of Evil is a kitchen sink style production with crazy and inspired choices in overdubbing, editing, and shooting.  When it works, it's touching, scary, and exciting - suffused with the life and vigor of undiluted artistic integrity.  It's far too long, though, and the valleys in the film are very, very low with a final sequence that falls to the level of a home video prank and makes too coherent a plotline that previously meandered at its own whim.

The film's audacity is almost enough to carry it off, though.  The film opens with an intro by Tony Curtis, who introduces what would seem to be a completely different movie, but he's overdubbed at times to say the correct title (and "he" reveals that the director was sued by George Lucas and Steven Spielberg). We're then treated to an old Serta commercial and some old ABC promotional material.  More materials like this are cut in and out of the movie, and there's even a clip of John Ashcroft talking about the war on terror from FOX News at one point.  There are also clips from other films like 2001 and The Omega Man that play counterpoint to the narrative.  The soundtrack of the film also contains many "sampled" elements including music and sound FX (I heard the bird noises from The Birds at one point).  These alternate media sources float in and out of the film like radio interference at times.  They often work well as jokes or distortions of mainstream culture, but they're as often digressive.

A better idea of what this movie is like:  We first meet our main character as he stumbles around a neighborhood shouting obscenities, gets drunk on candy liquers, shouts at dogs, and vomits a great deal of some disgusting substance.  Then, the film flashes back several months to when he's selling watches on the streets of L.A.  When he's got free time, he eats giant sugar-filled snacks with great delight, though his sound effect laden gorges will put anyone off food for some time.  The citizens of L.A. and, indeed, the city itself are presented as blatantly hostile to the main character and he responds in kind with grandiose threats of pent-up rage.  Much later in the film, there is a sequence in which the main character is attacked by dogs that rivals the traffic jam sequence in Weekend for its length, intensity, brilliance, and insufferablity.

This is a good movie, made good by brilliant passages and kept from brilliance by overindulgence.  It's a feverish experience: dirty, random, and smoking with temple-vein bursting vitriol.  However, even as the film beat me down, I was terrified, excited, and overjoyed for much of the movie because I had no idea, whatsoever, what would happen next.  And that, it seems to me, is as good a place as any to stop.  

Day 86: Rumor Has It...

Hate to spoil the fun for anyone, but this is just awful. The premise of this film is that the characters featured in The Graduate were based on real life people and Jennifer Aniston is the daughter of the Elaine character. Kevin Costner is the Dustin Hoffman surrogate, and Shirley MacLaine is Mrs. Robinson.

This is not a bad premise by any means; it's ripe for some fun pop culture riffing, finding how The Graduate has affected Aniston's generation, and possibly exploring the differences in how personal insecurity and uncertainty about the future express themselves in each generation. What do we get? The soulless, dead gaze of Jennifer Anniston, an earnest, but misplaced Kevin Costner, and Shirley MacLaine as one of those profanity spouting, oversexed old ladies that screams out, "LAUGH AT THIS MOVIE!" Really, only Mark Ruffalo as Anniston's well-meaning fiancee is worth seeing, and even then, he's got nothing to do except shout a speech about how much he's been hurt.

This is pablum. Flat, sitcom-like lighting and blocking, more jokes that fall flat than hit, and good God almighty, this is a film that actually has the audacity in late 2005 to use the theme to The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly as a joke. HA HA HA! That joke's so old! HA HA HA! I've seen that so many times before. OH MY SIDES! There's an older lady mad at Kevin Costner and they're playing music that usually plays when tough people have a showdown! HA HA HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHEEHEEHEEHOHOHH.

The Graduate remains a dangerous movie about the flaunting of all societal conventions and an accurate depiction of how the passions of youth entrap younger generations into repeating their parents' mistakes. It's funny and it's poignant. It's a perfect comedy, and one of my favorite films, ever, ever, ever. This film plays with the themes at play in The Graduate, but is so coy and shy about the sexual matters, it might as well be talking about spoons. Even if we throw out the inevitable comparisons to The Graduate, the film is an unfunny muddle, a sterile and bland piece of dough with cheap, easy psychological revelations. If you were to throw this all together and bake it, it would turn into a flavorless mush. And, what's worse, it's only half baked.

Day 72: A Real Young Girl

A frank, graphic look at the burgeoning sexuality of a pubescent girl, A Real Young Girl is nauseating, appropriately so, in its treatment of youthful, pubescent eroticism.  The titular character, Alice, is home on her family's farm for her summer holiday from boarding school, and she spends a great deal of her time playing with herself, rubbing her naughty bits with household items while concocting elaborate sexual fantasies about those around her.  With its dreamy, unfocused, and blown-out photography conflating the textural details of a broken egg in the palm of Alice's hand or dead fly ridden flypaper with her genitalia, it feels like a standard exploitation movie from the 70s somehow got mixed in with the more extreme elements of David Lynch's work.  This is the film's greatest success, tingeing Alice's inexpert experimentations with a visceral sense of shame and disgust.

That the film is equally inexpert only adds to the overall sense of pubescent instability.  Because it has the same aesthetic as both cheap horror and porn, and it zooms in on details that would be more appropriate in the former, there's a continual sense of unease that mirror's the character's.  She's afraid of being caught, of being seen as a sexual being by her parents because it's clear that they'll react by reining her in.  And, as she's already bored and disgusted by her passive-aggressive mother and lecherous, philandering father, being held close to them would be a terrible fate.

While the movie is successful at capturing the feeling of adolescence, its plot is somewhat pedestrian and rote.  Alice lusts after a sweaty, muscular young man who works for the family.  She makes lewd advances, lifting her skirt at him, sitting on the ground without panties and her legs spread when he walks by, watching him pee, but he doesn't seem too interested given her age.  When he does notice her, it brings about his downfall, but, of course, he doesn't matter, really, since he's just a background player in Alice's adolescent self-absorption.  Were it not for the graphic nature of the film, this would be completely by-the-book, standard awakening of a young girl's sexuality fare.  That the movie is able to transcend such material by exploring it fully and realistically is to its credit.

The film darts in and out of Alice's real life and her fantasy life, and the fantasies are shockingly detailed.  One dreamscape has her bound by barbed wire, spread-eagled while the young worker places a rather large earthworm on her vagina.  This is the most extreme fantasy and one of the highlights of the film, but the other fantasies are no less, um, affecting.  And, given what we know about her family life, these sexual daydreams are actually rather unsurprising and logical.

A Real Young Girl is a hard film to shake once it's over.  It proceeds at a leisurely, dreamy pace that's quite seductive, while the totality of its emotional power is overwhelming.  One of the more interesting film's I've seen about young sexuality, it would make a good, more sophisticated companion piece to Heavenly Creatures.  Unfortunately it lacks inventiveness in its plotline; otherwise, it's a great, extreme film.

Day 27: Robocop 2

So, the thing about Robocop, as portrayed in the original movie, is that he’s a symbol for the power of humanity over the cold, heartless mechanisms of technology and corporate enterprise. Robocop tells us that a corporation works much like a machine, treating the human elements as cogs within the machine and that eventually, due to the capacity for emotion in the human brain, these cogs will fail to function as they’re intended and will eventually take down the inhumanity of the machine by appealing to things like loyalty and compassion, or at least have the audacity to question what the machine is doing. Further, the movie Robocop depicts an iconic police hero while simultaneously deconstructing said police hero by creating the perfect cop who, like Dirty Harry, is remorseless, unstoppable, and driven by a sense of duty that overwhelms every other aspect of his life and also happens to be as robotic as these traits imply. But, ironically, where the robotic cop’s perfection fails is in a conflict of identity: Robocop is swayed by fleeting memories of a life lived in which stopping crime was not the only thing that motivated him, a life where he felt things that he is no longer able to. Robocop shirks his duty as he seeks answers to the inevitable questions, “Who am I? Where do I come from?”--the answers to said questions being two-fold: that he is first a product of corporate manufacturing and, second, a being with a name (Murphy) and sentience and, thus, an identity beyond his technological components or programming. So, when Robocop shoots Dick Jones at the end of the first movie and is asked by the leader of the heartless corporation what his name is and Robocop replies “Murphy,” it’s a symbolic victory of the power of human identity, no matter how tenuous, to override whatever programming may be inflicted on us by life and/or genetics. The movie also states that free will is an integral part of being human, one that will overcome all programming and that this is preferable, even at the great risk it entails, to the alternative (witness the failure of the purely robotic [and thus, anti-human] ED-209 due to its inability to take in
new information and Robocop’s persistence to get around his own robotic limitations).

Additionally, Robocop was a sly, though not subtle, critique of Reagan-era policies, realistically projecting the effects of favoring pure capitalism as the means to solve the problems of society to the point that the police department is privatized and ineffectively managed by Omni Consumer Products (OCP), causing the police to strike. There are quick digs at a society based on “cowboy-style” militarism (a family board game depicted in the film is called Nuke ‘Em) and the Star Wars missile defense system (which, when it malfunctions, only adds to the robotic/human crisis in the movie). Robocop also pokes fun at the very idea that corporations can effectively provide social services, since Robocop is prevented by his programming from arresting any members of OCP, at least one of whom is involved in illegal activities, particularly with the notorious criminal Clarence Boddicker (the man who happens to have killed “Murphy,” thereby providing the opportunity for Robocop to exist at all). The equating of crime and corporatism, technological failure and inhumanity provides a rich subtext over which a conventional Western (the cowboy kind) revenge story plays (reminiscent of the plot featured in the movie Hang ‘em High) as the noble sheriff relentlessly seeks closure to a crime that personally affected him.

To take it even further, the story of Robocop is a reinterpretation of the Christian myth (something I never thought of until I heard the film’s director, Paul Verhoeven [by all accounts, a madman] mention it on the Criterion Collection’s DVD commentary track), depicting Murphy as spiritually pure (he arrives in the tempestuous city from the beatific suburbs), tortured to death, and resurrected to administer judgment on the crimes of humanity, this time in a very literal sense. The movie wisely casts the members of the OCP corporation as members of the heavenly arena, working above the common folk of Detroit in lofty towers, led by Dan O’Herlihy’s benevolent “Old Man” character, designing a new, utopian paradise called New Detroit, something that would be rather simple for them to build were it not for this pesky problem of misused free will (i.e. crime) among the human population. When tasked with ridding Detroit of this problem, the #2 guy at OCP, Dick Jones or, if you will, Lucifer, comes up with ED-209, a purely robotic solution that hilariously malfunctions at a board meeting, causing the Old Man, or if you will again, God, to come up with a new solution, one that can make decisions based on the experience of having lived in the shoes of a man and thus, Robocop or, if you will one more time, Jesus.

In fact, the ending of Robocop encapsulates the thesis of both The Passion of the Christ (that the sacrifice of Jesus is instrumental in containing the devil in hell) and The Last Temptation of Christ (that Jesus’ sacrifice was the act of a superhuman making a conscious decision to create a better world for mortal mankind) as Robocop eliminates the Lucifer character (the Old Man’s favored staff member) from heaven. Dick Jones is even, funnily enough, depicted as falling out of the heavenly towers, plummeting to the earth, cast out of Heaven and sent to hell. Heaven is therefore purified of a corrosive, jealous element and Robocop has found a way to combine both his human-like free will and his robotic super powers (which carry the limitations of programming) by taking on the mantle of the people’s protector.

I fucking love this movie!These are half-assed, undeveloped, sophomoric reads on the film, each one of which can be elaborated on, all of which are firmly supported by the film, all of which play with and against one another simultaneously in the film, and there are probably a great many more reads one could apply to the movie. The movie is a superb example of how a surface-level, stupid, simplistic and commercial idea (PART MAN, PART MACHINE, ALL COP!) can be developed into something far beyond its facade by taking a plot chock full of conventions and clichés and using it as a framework on which to hang something that says much, much more than the simplistic narrative would. Robocop, the character, is taken from human, to robotic, to a synthesis of the two that is compelling, exciting, and, like a Shakespeare play, appeals to every aspect of my psyche, from the groundling desire for Old Testament-style revenge to the high-minded desire to see society and humanity seriously and effectively examined. I mean, I like to see men mutated by toxic waste and smooshed by cars and to see the bad people in the world get what’s coming to them as much as anyone, but at the same time I want to think about why I feel that way and what it means to be a “bad guy” and where “get what they have coming to them” comes from. Robocop is a movie that provides all of this and it’s funny too. I’ll buy that for a dollar.

So what the fuck happened with Robocop 2? There’s a scene about halfway through the movie where OCP needs to reprogram Robocop and they take the opportunity to make him “friendlier,” to have him shoot less and solve conflicts in a more non-violent fashion. The result is something that should be a funny comment on design by committee, but is not (I’ll explain why in a second), as Robocop consequently walks around smiling, teaching hoodlum kids lessons about hygiene or saying to a man whose shooting at him, “we should talk this out.” This isn’t funny in the movie because prior to this scene in the movie, the script has already neutered Robocop into being the lamest, squarest Joe fucking Friday by-the-book cop you’ve ever seen! He’s got these lame one-liners as he offs baddies, like Robocop has watched a bunch of cop shows or, hell, even the original Robocop (where the one-liners like “Dead or alive, you’re coming with me” originate from the Murphy character in a naturalistic way [by that I mean, Murphy actually means “dead or alive you’re coming with me” when he says it, even though Murphy’s personality is also informed by watching a show called T.J. Laser {the key to, perhaps, a further read of the original Robocop}] so, when Robocop says these things, it’s depicted as nothing more than a distorted reflection indicating that some of Murphy’s memory has been retained and furthers the movie’s robotic/human questioning) and Robocop 2 emphasizes Robocop’s disdain for those who break the law to such a point that whatever nuance and humanity he learned (or remembered) during the events in the first film have, apparently, been tossed out the window. For God’s sake, before they reprogram and defang Robocop, he’s already admonishing children in an arcade to go back to school, he’s already defanged by, for some reason, not being able to assault a child who menaces him with a gun (Robocop’s three prime directives are “Serve the public trust”, “Protect the innocent”, and “Uphold the law,” which means that in the eyes of this movie, children are alwaysinnocent, even when they’re clearly not, a perspective that’s furthered by the tenderness with which the menacing child’s death scene is depicted [a scene so unintentionally schmaltzy, I wanted to throw my TV out the window] and a perspective which would seem to defy all logic in face of the fact that the movie is constantly depicting children breaking the law and hurting others [and one wonders at which age Robocop is suddenly allowed to hurt someone... is it 18?]!), so this “funny” bit where he’s a “by the book” socially mannered nice cyborg is painfully boring, as Robocop has already been depicted as someone with a robotic “users are losers” or “crime doesn’t pay” attitude, despite his ascension from one who rigidly follows the code of law to someone who learns how to negotiate subtleties within the law in the first film.

Additionally, gone is the sly critique of the Reagan-era policies; instead we have the most strident endorsement of them since Nancy Reagan’s “Just Say No” educational videos. Robocop encounters a cache of a futuristic drug called “Nuke,” sighs and shakes his head ruefully, and then says “Nuke” in a mournful tone. He might as well say, “Those kids today, when will they learn?” Additionally, though the police force is on strike again (in both cases I’m reminded of the air traffic controller strike that happened during Reagan’s term) Robocop is quite content to be a scab, one of the only cops working. Later, Robocop even indirectly inspires his fellow police officers to break their strike in order to fight the evil force that is soon to
plague the streets. Take that, you pinkos!

I think the problem with this movie is that someone, somewhere in the production took the whole concept of Robocop seriously. Verhoeven’s film was parodying itself while it played, constantly poking fun at its own moral code and asking the question of whether or not a robotic enforcement of the law would be such a good thing. This movie doesn’t get the joke and treats Robocop as seriously and with as much reverence (and as unsuccessfully) as The Passion of the Christ depicts Jesus. Yes, the movie says, Robocop is a good cop, particularly when he’s obeying his prime directives. The movie apes the original in style, but never what was going on underneath the style. To wit: the commercials and newscasts in the first film were satirical and brilliantly expositional, projecting a world where violence and technology were more commonplace than the time the movie was made. Here, they’re just silly, Saturday Night Live parodies of television commercials and newscasts exaggerated to the point that they’re completely unbelievable (though they are funny), nowhere near as smart as what was going on in the original film. The same thing goes for the corporate stuff: it’s all so arch, it’s as if it was made for kids. Strike that: it’s as if it was made by kids. The movie ends with Robocop stating, “we’re only human,” referring to the question of whether Robocop is a human or a machine. But this is one question Verhoeven’s film did answer. It concludes that he was both, but he got to choose how he saw himself, and I think it also suggested that this is true for all of us. It makes me angry because the sequel ignores this. I’m also angry because the original Robocop asked a lot of other interesting questions, and Robocop 2 either ignores them or answers them as if they weren’t tough questions to begin with. In fact, the sequel acts as if there are no tough questions at all as long as you’ve got a tough cop to gun them down.I fucking hate this movie.

Day 13: Rasputin: The Mad Monk

Rasputin: Careful, Peter. There are acids in here.

Clocking in at 92 minutes, Rasputin: The Mad Monk is a lean Hammer Horror film of little consequence. It plays out inoffensively; it hits its plot points with efficiency, but doesn’t go anywhere altogether interesting along the way. To its credit, there’s a hammy, fun performance by Christopher Lee as the title character and it’s a jollier movie than I would have expected. The movie traces Rasputin’s life from his time at a monastery through his ascent to a life of privilege and influence in the Russian government. As this is a traditional horror film, there are a few deaths and mutilations along the way.

Rasputin lives as a monk in a monastery, but, like a naughty boarding school student, sneaks off on the weekends to get drunk and party down at a local tavern. When the movie opens, the tavern owner’s wife is ill and Rasputin, wanting nothing more than to drink wine, heals her with his magic hands so that the tavern will reopen. After throwing a party to celebrate the wife’s recovery, Rasputin gets caught making out with the owner’s daughter. There is a fight, Rasputin cuts off someone’s hand, and flees back to the monastery. He is soon after forced to leave the monastery due to his bad behavior and for unapologetically using the special healing powers in his hands that, according to the other monks, could only have come from Satan. So, Rasputin takes his special healing powers and his hypnotic eyes to the big city. Here, he uses his magic eyes and hands on several people high up in the Russian government to gain access to wealth and luxury. Eventually, he takes things too far and subjects loyal to the government plot to take him out – with extreme prejudice.

The title of this film should really be Rasputin: The Hedonist Monk since Rasputin isn’t so much mad as desperate to have a good time, whatever the consequences may be. He hypnotizes women for sexual purposes, heals those who will give him the most stuff, and drinks a lot of wine. It’s fun to watch Christopher Lee play him. He belly laughs when he gets his way, dances with gusto, and eats food like every meal will be his last. When he hypnotizes someone, the movie cuts to Lee in a close-up, his eyes get as big as a giant squid’s. “Think only of my eyes,” he intones to his victim in an icy cool voice, sounding like someone who’s just eaten 40 breath mints. Lee is always a compelling actor, but I’ve never seen him so gluttonous and bawdy before. It’s utterly charming.

If only the movie wasn’t so moralistic. Rasputin upsets the natural order of things by being so manipulative and greedy, and so, of course he has to die for this reason. Though lip service is paid to the idea of Rasputin messing with the government, the movie glosses over any political implications of a hypnotist in a position of power. Instead there’s a rather boring subplot of some military officer’s sister being seduced by Rasputin and so, naturally, revenge must be had. I don’t know anything about the historical Rasputin (though I’d be very interested in learning: from what I do know, there’s a good movie in his story somewhere) or how he died or what exactly he did. What I do know is that this is too ignoble a death for Lee’s character. He gnaws on some poisoned chocolates and sips some poisoned wine while waiting for his next sexual conquest to show up. He screams and clutches his stomach as the poison kicks in and, eventually, falls out of a window. Yawn. The food poisoning makes sense for the character, but the Rasputin we’ve watched for the previous 85 minutes or so would have, upon realizing he’s been poisoned, scarfed down more poisoned chocolates and guzzled the poisoned wine while laughing and, probably, dancing.

It’s funny, watching this movie after Carnal Knowledge. Rasputin is the person Jack Nicholson’s character wanted to be: heedless, irresponsible, and selfish. There’s a breakup scene between Rasputin and one of his paramours that was eerily similar in tone and consequence to one in Carnal Knowledge. The main difference here was that Rasputin felt nothing was wrong about the fact that he was emotionally hurting the woman in question. He was bored with her and ready to move on. I realized that one of the interesting things about Carnal Knowledge was that Nicholson’s character, Jonathan, felt exactly the way Rasputin did, hated himself for this, and hated the woman for, as he saw it, putting him in a position where he hated himself. Part of the fun of watching a character like Rasputin is that he feels no such boundaries. It’s undeniably fun to watch him or, for that matter, Diabolik shuck all of society’s rules and conventions to get what they want. Indeed, Rasputin gives a justification for his hedonism to the head monk that is priceless: God is able to forgive Rasputin more than the other monks, because he sins bigger than they do! I think the key to making a movie about a character like this work is to make the alternate voice of society as compelling and interesting as the impish destructor. But those who plot against Rasputin are boring. Because of this, Rasputin: The Mad Monk is slight and, except for Lee, pretty forgettable.