Day 18: Shadows

There’s a title at the end of Shadows informing the viewer that the movie was improvised. It’s not surprising. Shadows is a free-form and lively character driven film. There’s a plotline, but it moves forward based on the characters and their actions, and there are many detours from it along the way. The movie pauses for long stretches to observe the behavior and attitudes of the people involved. And there are times when, perhaps, the movie pauses a bit too long or repeats itself as the characters find different ways to express the same thing. In short, it has the benefits of a good improvisation (feeling emotionally “live” and the ability to explore tangential areas at a whim), but contains some of the drawbacks (being too indulgent). It’s not a powerhouse of a movie, but it’s well observed and thoughtful.

Shadows is shot and edited not unlike Godard’s Breathless, a low-budget, haphazard style that obeys none of the traditional conventions and flaunts them at whim. There are a lot of close-ups in the movie, and there are a few sequences where the movie dissolves at random from one angle, close on the actor, to a second angle equally close. The sound ranges from adequate to awful. It’s unclear, from watching the movie, whether the roughness is a matter of choice or a matter of economic necessity. I’d lean towards the latter. But this is one of those movies, like Night of the Living Dead, where the dirt poor production values are an asset rather than a drawback. For instance, the score of the film is mostly solo instrument improvisation, not really synced to the action taking place. Because the movie deals, in part, with musicians, it feels like source music and is more effective at drawing us into the world than any finely orchestrated counterpoint could be. The story focuses on people who are on the fringes of society and the gritty, scrappy production echoes their lives. You could say this is a happy accident, but it’s also good casting: putting the right ideas into the right aesthetic.

The movie focuses on three siblings in New York City, sometime in the late 1950s. Hugh is an unsuccessful singer; when the movie opens, he has a gig at a strip club and he suffers the indignation of introducing the strippers after his set. Benny is a rootless, aimless young man. He hangs out with a two other similar men and together they play cards, wander the streets, and try to pick up girls. Leila is Hugh and Benny’s sister, a young woman, still uncertain who she is or what she wants out of life. She is somewhat enlightened (note: this being the 1950s, there is no scene involving a corset) and defies the convention that she must be subservient to or classified by the men that she dates.

All three characters are African American and they are rendered with an honesty and realism that seems progressive for the time. The emotional crux of the film occurs when Leila, who is so fair skinned she passes for white, sleeps with a white man named Tony. But, as this is an observational movie at its core and not a didactic, message movie, the racial conflict is subtly drawn. Tony is conflicted when he meets Hugh, and, though he’s just professed his undying love to Leila, makes a feeble excuse to leave the apartment. When Hugh then insists that Tony leave in order to protect his sister from being hurt, Tony insists that the two remember he was forced to leave. It’s an interesting character beat, showing Tony’s uncomfortability with the fact that he’s slept with a black woman, as well as his desire to not be seen as prejudiced. He later tries to redeem himself by offering some bland, racially sensitive platitudes and the movie wisely ridicules him for this empty gesture.

The acting in the movie is, for the most part, a treat. There are a few false steps every now and then, particularly with Leila. However, for every bad, overly acted moment, there’s a naturalistic one that follows it. Like everyone you know, the characters’ extreme emotions are held in check and break out in only the most dire of circumstances. And sometimes they break out in very interesting (and very honest) ways. Leila reacts to the hurt Tony causes her by making a new suitor wait for hours while she gets ready for their date and acting in a very controlling, powerful manner. Benny and his cohorts flee to an art museum when challenged about their unambitious lifestyle and engage in some funny and poignant discussions about the art they find there.

Where the movie succeeds is in its matter-of-fact presentation of the lives of these characters. So often, matters of racial inequality or discrimination are presented with pointed fingers and an epic grandiosity that cheapens all the characters involved, reducing all of them to “types,” no matter how well drawn the characters are (I’m looking at you, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner). Here, we simply observe the way these characters live and interact with the world around them. Racial issues are a part of their lives, but not all of their lives. Near the end of the film, Benny and his friends hit on some girls whose boyfriends are momentarily absent. When the boyfriends return, a fight breaks out between the two groups. I wondered if the extremity of the boyfriends’ reaction had anything to do with Benny’s race. The movie doesn’t say and there’s really nothing in the movie to suggest it. A lesser movie would make that the only reason the fight breaks out.

The Rules of the Game

Editor’s note: These reviews are getting later and later, aren’t they?  I’m having some trouble keeping up.  Heh.  This is getting fun.  For the record: the rule is I post the review before I go to bed.  Not some, “ah! It’s not up by midnight!  I got you!  You’ve failed at your blog!” Gremlins-style rule.  Though if I eat after midnight, I sometimes dream of kissing a mogwai.  And sometimes, if I get wet, balls of fur pop out of my back.  But the fur thing is a medical condition known as mogwaitis.  It doesn’t result in gremlins.  But if you like Gremlins, you’ll love the Kappa!

Day 17: Corpse Bride

At once an exhilarating visual feast and a disappointing, shallow story, Corpse Bride is successful in creating an exciting world, but not in exploring it. Its main problem lies in its protagonists, passive characters who mostly wait for circumstances to revolve in their favor. The movie has a few good moments, but fails to capitalize on them. And yet, it’s a thoroughly enjoyable movie, probably because it is internally consistent. That and it’s very, very pretty.

I have a condition that is either genetically based or firmly rooted in my cultural upbringing. I like animated skeletons. It’s not something I have any control over. When I was a kid and saw an old Disney cartoon featuring dancing skeletons, I was delighted. Later, I became obsessed with the Ray Harryhausen stop-motion skeletons from The 7th Voyage of Sinbad and Jason and the Argonauts. There are a lot of animated skeletons in this movie and they are very well designed and have just the right lighting, highlighting the texture of the bones and giving them a nice expressive color. There’s a pleasing weight to the skeletons, too, an effect that only stop motion can produce. I realize I’m spending a paragraph here talking just about the fucking skeletons, but, again, I have no control over this. There were so many dancing, singing skeletons in this movie, it was like something out of a dream I had when I was ten.

The premise is storybook simple, wonderfully so. Victor (voiced by Johnny Depp), is engaged to Victoria (who has the seemingly inevitable corset scene). It’s an arranged marriage in which the transfer of wealth benefits both of the two youngsters’ families. At the wedding rehearsal, Victor stumbles with his wedding vows to the point that the minister declares the wedding cannot go on until he can remember his words. Feeling the burden of saving these two families, Victor heads out to the woods, where, while practicing saying his vows, he inadvertently proposes to the corpse of a jilted bride. She whisks him away to the land of the dead, as she believes they are married.

The movie is clever in the way it paints the land of the living in grey, Victorian-era drabness while the land of the dead is a colorful, bawdy place. The animation is as top-notch and as inventive as it was in The Nightmare Before Christmas. But the story itself, while seeming like it should be a simple affair, is pretty stagnant. When Victor is taken to the land of the dead, he attempts one act of trickery to get him back to the land of the living, but after that, he mostly just sits around and waits for others to help him out of his predicament. Not necessarily a bad thing, but it’s not particularly engaging here. The Corpse Bride is rendered with a striking scariness when she first rises, but her scariness disappears as quickly as Jack Nicholson goes crazy in The Shining. After a while, the rules governing the two worlds seem arbitrary and confusing (a bad step for any movie dealing in supernatural elements like this movie does) and, after we’ve revisited the same locations again and again, the two worlds feel too insular.

As much as it pains me to say this (being a huge Danny Elfman fan), the musical numbers don’t come off very well here. In fact, they’re a bit out of place. The big, bold, and brassy song that setups the back story to the Corpse Bride is the only song that seems to fit into the milieu correctly, appropriate to the New Orleans-esque land of the dead. The other numbers feel shoehorned in. The opening number suffers from this quite a bit. The characters singing are Victor & Victoria’s parents, stuffy, society people and they don’t look like characters that sing. Their song falls flat and goes on far too long. The other problem that the musical numbers have is something that has been bothering me since I saw Charlie and the Chocolate Factory earlier this year. I don’t believe that Tim Burton has a knack for staging musical scenes. The direction of both Charlie and Corpse Bride’s songs felt flat to me, not in tune with the music Elfman had written. The character and camera moves aren’t kinetic enough to carry the songs, and that’s too bad (particularly on the brassy one).

These problems are not to say that I dislike the movie. I enjoyed it quite a bit (see: skeletons). There’s a lot of cleverness to it. I really enjoyed the maggot character who talked like Peter Lorre and the way the dead came into the land of the living at one point in the film (though the reason they do so is, ultimately, boring). If I believed in star ratings, (I don’t) on a four star scale, this movie felt like the perfect three-star movie. Not enough to really sink your teeth into, doesn’t hold up to scrutiny, but it goes through the paces enjoyably enough while you’re watching it for its running time (in this case, a paltry 82 minutes). I wish that it had connected on a simpler level with its very simple story, since many of the plot machinations served to literalize and dispel a lot of the magic. Perhaps it would have been better as a short-form film.

Day 16: At the Circus

J. Cheever Loophole: I bet your father spent the first year of your life throwing rocks at the stork.

This is a definitely a lesser entry in the films of the Marx Brothers. The jokes are pretty stale, the plot is excruciating to sit through, and there’s a reliance on old tricks that worked better in previous movies. And yet, after sitting through Dr. Goldfoot & the Bikini Machine, it was clear that even a lesser Marx Brothers movie is still worth watching. At the Circus relies on a lot of the same tricks that Goldfoot did; it contains plenty of the same kind of mugging to the camera and contains a similar style of slapstick. But where Goldfoot felt like Carrot Top was nudging you for an hour and half and begging you to laugh, At the Circus feels more like spending time with an aging relative who is genuinely funny, but tired.

Full disclosure time! I watched this movie in about 20 minute increments as I worked on various things that needed to be done in my non-blogging life. I was also extremely tired when I watched it. I think both of these factors contributed to my liking the movie a lot more than I would have otherwise. As a straight-through 90 minute experience, I think the movie would have dragged on a lot more than I felt it did. And the second rendition of the song “Two Blind Love”, sung by the very boring non-Marx male lead, would have driven me to fits of violence.

I’d describe the plot, but it’s a Marx Brothers movie. The plot of a Marx Brothers movie is as irrelevant as the outfit a stripper wears at the beginning of its routine. Yeah, it sets the context for everything, but what lies underneath it all is what we’re here for. What matters is whether or not the three have the material they need to shine. As said, here they don’t. But there’s enough to keep one’s interest (if only in 20 minute increments). Groucho has a wonderful number in Lydia, the Tattooed Lady. The song is written with plenty of wit and staged (somewhat cheaply) with an anarchic fervor; it’s reminiscent of the musical numbers in Duck Soup. There’s a scene where Chico and Harpo search the living quarters of a strongman while he’s sleeping in them that builds nicely. By the end of this scene, after the two spend several minutes trying to be quiet (so as not to disturb the strongman), feathers from a pillow are flying around the room and Harpo is pretending to be Santa while ringing a bell. Additionally, Margaret Dumont makes a welcome appearance toward the end of the film, giving Groucho the opportunity to flaunt the high-society dame (and all the decorum she stands for) yet again. Oh, and special mention must go to this joke: After Harpo balks at going into the strongman’s room, Chico calls Harpo a coward. Harpo nods, pulls a gun out of his coat, and points it at his head.

It was somewhat depressing to watch several lengthy bits not work. There’s a scene with Chico preventing Groucho from boarding the circus train that felt like it was made up of bits that were cut from a much funnier scene from A Day at the Races and is so illogical in its placement in the film, it made the whole scene uncomfortable to watch. Groucho narrating the climax of the film (which features a gorilla and trapeze) as a sports announcer is the same joke as the one used at the end of Monkey Business with nothing any funnier added to it. Too much of the movie is taken up in adherence to the dud of a plot. This movie also continues a trend in the later Marx Brothers movies (started with A Night at the Opera) giving Groucho a sort-of Mad Max character arc, where he begins the movie caring only about himself, but he eventually starts working to help the young couple win out over adversity. This diminishes Groucho’s anarchic appeal, giving him some characters he won’t blithely insult.

But, you know, I don’t’ really care that this movie isn’t really any good. I can honestly say that no matter my mood, if I watch just a snippet of one of their movies (well, the snippets that contain at least one of the brothers [and not Zeppo]; the actors they cast as the young couples in love are always so bland as to make me prone to fits of violence) I come away feeling better. Even at their worst (Love Happy). There’s a scene in Hannah and Her Sisters in which Woody Allen, depressed to the verge of suicide, decides that life is worth living in a world where there are Marx Brothers movies. This is a sentiment I agree with wholeheartedly. I was tired while I watched this, cranky, and a little overwhelmed by the whole “movie a day” thing. I really watched this movie because I’d never seen it, it was already on my shelf, and it was short. By the end of the movie, when Margaret Dumont gets shot out of a cannon and a symphony orchestra floats out to sea, I was much happier. About pretty much everything. Take that for what you will.

What a Shine

A review of At the Circus, a lesser Marx Brothers movie will be up later tonight.

Day 15: Dr Goldfoot & the Bikini Machine

Man on Motorcycle: Why me? Why me all the time?
Every now and then, The Simpsons will portray a parody of an entry into an older genre of film. Dr. Goldfoot & the Bikini Machine plays just like one of these parodies. Of the movies I’ve watched so far, it was the hardest to get through. It’s a frantic, horribly paced, unfunny comedy whose only saving grace comes, just barely, from Vincent Price’s gleeful performance as Dr. Goldfoot. The score is atrocious, playing constantly, Mickey Mousing every minute detail of the film. For all its sound and fury, it just winds up being noisy and, really, really not funny.

Was this kind of movie ever funny? It reminds me of the lesser entries in Leslie Nielsen’s oeuvre, titles like Spy Hard, or Wrongfully Accused. So very, very misguided and desperate to make you laugh, it resorts to pulling your pants down in public, pointing and laughing at your underwear, and then nudging you with its elbow, saying, “huh? Huh?” Frankie Avalon stars in the film as our protagonist and he’s like Jerry Lewis’s unfunny 3rd cousin. Clowning, mugging, and slapstick are the order of the day. There’s no wit to the wordplay and the script has a lot of, um, “fun” giving Vincent Price lines containing slang, the kind of joke you’d see Estelle Getty doing on The Golden Girls.

Poor Vincent Price. He’s clearly having fun playing against his persona as Dr. Goldfoot here. I thought that his having fun would be infectious for a while, but the movie fails him time and time again by giving Price the lamest line you can imagine and then cutting to Frankie Avalon smacking a door into his boss’s ass or falling down or mugging while a slide whistle plays in the background. Ugh. Goldfoot wants to take over the world, like any good super villain. The plan is to make sexy women robots trick men into marrying them, and, then, stealing all their money through power of attorney paperwork. Avalon works for some government investigation place that’s abbreviated SIC (leading to such classic exchanges as, “I’m a SIC man.” “I’ll say you are.” UGH) and gets wind of Goldfoot’s plot. Yeah.

To be fair: I did laugh once or twice in the movie. One scene has Price instructing his bikini-clad robots on the arts of seduction (this is funny in and of itself, in retrospect). One of the robots starts dancing and the music takes on a surf-music beat. Then, as if dancing is a virus for robots, the others start dancing too. Price blusters and screams, “STOP! STOP! STOP!” as they dance around him. If they had let this scene go on longer, I probably would have been on the floor. And there’s one joke that is inexplicably funny to me, just in the way it’s so completely nonsensical. Price, showing off his lair to some captives, walks to a door and says “I think you’ll like this.” He opens the door and a man is chained to a running a motorcycle. The man looks up to the camera and says, “Why me? Why me all the time?” I’m positive I’m missing a reference here because this makes no sense whatsoever. And that’s precisely why I was on the floor after this, um… joke?

The movie is shot, acted, and paced like a live action Looney Tunes cartoon. But part of the joy of those cartoons is their running times. Ninety minutes is far too long to sustain this breakneck pace and, anyway, there’s hardly enough story to go around. This movie would have been much better as a five to seven minute short and, preferably, directed by Chuck Jones. As it is, it plays like a stereotype of a bad sixties comedy, rife with sexism, pratfalls, and crossed-eye fainting. It’s certainly an interesting curio piece that is easier to laugh at than to laugh with.

Week 2 Index

Day 8: Wallace & Gromit
Day 9: The Passion of the Christ
Day 10: First Blood
Day 11: Danger Diabolik
Day 12: Carnal Knowledge
Day 13: Rasputin: The Mad Monk
Day 14: Dracula (1979)

Day 14: Dracula (1979)

Van Helsing: There is work… wild work to be done!

The story of Dracula, as Bram Stoker originally wrote it, was ultimately a story warning men that swarthy heathens from abroad will come to our homeland and pollute the purity of our blood lines by sleeping with our women. Additionally, these foreigners know things: secret, sexual things that we don’t, and so can seduce our women away right from under our clueless noses. Further, these vile creatures are so good at the act of seduction, our women will develop some kind of psychic bond with the thing and actually crave its company. What can we do against this threat but close ranks and make a circle around our women so they don’t succumb to the vile seductions of these beasts, the book asks? Indeed. I’ve seen quite a few filmed versions of the Dracula story, but this is the first one I’ve seen that actually seems to understand this subtextual essence and, what’s more, uses it to its advantage. In fact, up until the climax of the film, it plays counterpoint to these themes in the original material and, as a result, brings an air of freshness to this oft-told story.

Where this version of Dracula differs most from the countless other versions of the tale is in its main female character, Lucy. She’s pluckier than most women in Dracula movies and more enlightened. In our introduction to her, she’s reading a letter of acceptance to a law school. Her friend, Mina, makes a comment about her defiance of all the expectations men have for a lady. Yeah, this is your standard “spunky” and anachronistically-enlightened-woman character development stuff that we’ve all seen thousands of times (usually in the form of “why do I have to wear this corset???”... groan…). But as I watched the plot unfold and Lucy become enamored with Dracula, it occurred to me that Lucy’s enlightenment, however clunkily established, gave this character actual motivation to like Dracula. And this was, perhaps, the first time I’d actually seen that element of the story done right. No longer was Dracula just engaging in rape when he got the main guy’s girl, and she wasn’t so awed by his sexual prowess during the rape that she actually wanted to drink his blood. This is refreshing and smart.

(A little digression here: In Bram Stoker’s book, the main female character is named Mina. Mina has a friend named Lucy who is the first to succumb to Dracula’s bite. And, for some reason, this movie decides to focus on Lucy as its main female character. Whatever. No good movie has ever been made by being slavish to the book, right? But the movie gives Lucy a friend named Mina, and here she is the first to succumb to Dracula’s bite. Additionally, it is Lucy who is engaged to Jonathan Harker in this version. Basically, they just switched the names of the two original characters. I’m not entirely sure why they decided to make this change, but it confused me on more than one occasion due to my familiarity with the scores of other Dracula movies, as well as the book. I think it even confused the person who made the subtitles on the DVD, because, towards the end, as Lucy was struggling with Dracula and making whimpering noises, the subtitles read “Mina struggling”.)

Of course, this Lucy lusts for Dracula and leaps into his arms. She’s not interested in what her fiancée, Jonathan, wants for her. She’s smarter than he is and quite a bit more ambitious. She wants to be more than a wife, more than a mother, and, certainly more than a protected treasure. This is something that Jonathan is unable to cope with. It makes sense that the man who offers her, on the surface, the convention-defying pleasures she seeks (you think she’s getting oral sex from the doofus with the ratty mustache? I doubt it.) is the man who is so very rooted in old-school ideas that he physically remakes her to be the loving, devoted wife and mother he wants. This aspect of the movie was a lot of fun to watch, since it’s the first time this part of the story has ever made any sense to my late 20th century mentality.

But as progressive and smart as it is, the movie fails on its promise. When, at the end, Dracula is spiriting the partially vamped-out Lucy back to his homeland on a clipper ship, Jonathan and Van Helsing spring forth to rescue her, and there’s a Darwinian fight between the men and the vampire for reproductive rights. Lucy, now straddling the line between human and vampire, fights the two men, defending her new lover and her newfound status as wife and mother-to-be. Here, Jonathan slaps her, giving him the character moment of putting his woman in place (you do not sleep with Romanians while we are engaged, got that?!) and, the movie would tell us, the power to destroy Dracula. It’s a silly and disappointing choice, since Jonathan has been, mainly, a supporting character in the Lucy/Dracula narrative. The movie seems to be headed towards a conclusion where Lucy offs Dracula herself, but then reasserts the male protector image and all of that development of Lucy goes to waste. Ah well.

Anyway, subtext, shmubtext. The horrific stuff is nicely handled. There are a few genuinely creepy scenes (one in particular when Mina rises from the dead as a vampire). The effects in the movie aren’t exactly top-notch, but the actors take them seriously and, so, lend them an air of legitimacy. Frank Langella does a fine job as Dracula, playing the character like a soap opera star come to live amongst Midwesterners. He has an air of regal superiority that turns to a believable menace when he’s crossed, believable the same way you’d believe a member of royalty wouldn’t hesitate to kill some peasants in order to preserve their way of life. The mythology of the character is nicely tucked into the script too; there are glancing mentions of his past as a king, his unnaturally long life, and his species being on the brink of extinction. The movie doesn’t dwell on these things, so avoids the all-too-common poutiness of vampire tales of late. The score by John Williams is effectively tragic and romantic, though it’s far too overwrought at the beginning.

Curiously, this movie feels to me the way I always imagined a Dracula movie would feel when I was a kid. Dracula seemed like a real threat, very powerful, and nearly unstoppable. His lady vampire creations were as pale white and shiny eyed as I’d always imagined they would be. Purists will probably hate this movie since it eschews so much of the book, but the cuts rid the movie of a lot of unnecessary dramatic dead-weight (see Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula if you want to see how economical this Dracula is versus that movie’s near-unwatchable bloat). I particularly liked the way it toyed with the gender roles and the way it moved deftly over familiar material to draw new ideas from an old, old well. It’s interesting that a cross is the symbol used to ward this menacing foreigner away, since the cross symbolizes (among other things) the unifying aspects of Western society. Unfortunately, the film concludes that it’s a good thing when an English lad scares Dracula away from “his” woman’s womb using this symbol. That it’s his choice to make and not hers.

2 things this morning

I've been getting a lot of comments about my review of The Passion of the Christ. I'm not entirely surprised since that movie seems to attract controversy like Africa attracts missionaries. But...I'm bracing myself because tomorrow morning, I'm going to review a movie that will no doubt inspire even more controversy: Dr. Goldfoot & the Bikini Machine

Yesterday, I posted my review of Rasputin and wished that the voice of society in the film was more compelling than the voice bent on flaunting all societal conventions. I was thinking about it, and it occured to me that is the problem with too many movies (the Batman movies, for instance). In fact, I can think of only one movie that successfully shows us characters that defy society and characters that protect society with equal weight. Quick Change, with Bill Murray. Weird.

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.

an experiment in dancing

While watching Rasputin: The Mad Monk last night (review up later today), I was miffed that the movie missed two opportunities for a dance-off. I go crazy when I see a two or more people resolving conflict via dance. It's so stupid. But, you know, I guess it's no more ridiculous than people hitting one another or writing scathing letters to the editor about one another. The setup usually goes something like this:

Guy 1: "She's my girl!"
Guy 2: "No she's mine!"
Guy 1: "We'll see about that!"

Then, Guy 1 busts a move, right in Guy 2's face, as if to demonstrate to Guy 2, that if Guy 2 does try to woo Guy 1's girl, he will have to contend with Guy 1's dancing while they date, ruining any chance Guy 2 has of setting the mood! (Girl: "So, I've never been to this restaurant before, it's really... is that Guy 1 dancing over there?") Guy 2 responds by dancing back at Guy 1! This escalates until they've danced away their troubles or one of them throws a shoe and has to be shot.

Besides West Side Story or Strictly Ballroom, anyone know of any good dance-off scenes? And if there are any featuring monsters?

Day 12: Carnal Knowledge

Sandy: You can't make fucking your life's work.

While watching Carnal Knowledge, it struck me how perfect an actor Jack Nicholson is for director Mike Nichols. Both men seem to have an impeccable understanding for the comedy found in every moment of high drama and the drama found in every moment of comedy. Carnal Knowledge is full of moments where Nicholson says something that makes you laugh while it simultaneously makes you cringe. It’s a raw, nerve-jangling movie about misogyny, sexual dysfunction, and male ego that pulls no punches. It’s powerful and honest from moment to moment, but there’s something ultimately off-putting about it as a whole that keeps it from gelling into a sum greater than its parts.

The movie opens, not unlike a Woody Allen movie, with credits over a black screen. It’s hard to put the similarity out of your mind as two men talk over the credit sequence about the kind of women they would like to have in their lives. The two men are Sandy, played by Art Garfunkel, and Jonathan, played by Nicholson. At the movie’s start, Sandy is nerdy, shy around women, and virginal. Jonathan is brash, confident, and equally virginal (though he hides this quality in himself behind a false bravado). The structure of the movie presents vignettes from their lives (beginning in college and ending in middle age), during which they fall in love, pursue relationships with various women, and break up with them.

This structure is compelling, but it is also one of the problems with the movie. The jumps in time are followed by some laboring on the script’s part to bring the viewer up to speed on where the two are in their lives and what girls they’re with. At these moments, the movie’s dialogue, otherwise elegant and stylish, is too expositional. Indeed, the overall pace of the movie is interrupted at these time shifts, since the movie has to pause while we get our bearings. It’s an admirable concept, depicting the characters’ lives as defined by their relationships with women, but the execution didn’t work for me.

What really does work in the movie is Nicholson. He’s a joy to watch as he sinks his teeth into the script (and at times, the scenery), creating a character that is realistically angry at women. He’s not a two-dimensional cad, but a very, very confused man. When a woman tells him that all she wants is him, Nicholson screams, “I’m taken!..... by me!” The beat between the two lines is both absurdly funny and bitterly honest. Art Garfunkel also has a nice turn here, surprisingly convincing as Nicholson’s nebbishy foil. He is equally unjust to women, though he means well and hides his anger in sublimation.

And that’s just it, the two characters mean well, but they suffer from misogynistic tendencies; they treat women as sexual objects first, trophies second, and actual people never. This, too, is reminiscent of Woody Allen’s films, but Jules Feiffer’s script doesn’t let these two off the hook the way Allen does. Where Allen’s films surrender to the misogyny of their main characters, at best (celebrate it at worst), Carnal Knowledge examines the results of the misogyny, not just on those it hurts, but on the men who exhibit it. At one point, Nicholson launches into an angry tirade at his live-in girlfriend and then collapses and asks her to leave him. “I’d marry you if you left me,” he sighs.

Another problem in the movie has is some stylistic choices by Nichols. The script is somewhat stagy and Nichols is certainly adept at transforming stage work to film (I’ve only seen the 1st half of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, but that was more than enough to impress me), but here, for every neat trick that works there’s one that doesn’t. It’s emotionally resonant when a prostitute, kneeling between Jack Nicholson’s legs while reciting a monologue, is framed in front of wallpaper that is constantly moving upward (lending the appearance that she’s going down (heh) the whole time she is speaking) but not so much when Nicholson wines and dines a woman and the restaurant revolves around their table.

At all other times, Nichols’s direction is fantastic. This is first an actor’s movie and then a writer’s movie, but Nichols is able to put his own stamp on it. The camera setups are lovely and the blocking of the actors in relation to the camera is delightful. The characters are constantly moving into the foreground, the background, off camera, into light, and out of light in accordance with their emotional state. There’s a close-up of Candice Bergen laughing and laughing as she flirts with both characters that goes on so long it crosses the line between comedy and drama at least twice.

Carnal Knowledge is a fantastic movie in fits and starts. It’s a pity that these bits couldn’t have come together, for if they had, it probably would have been one of the all-time greats. As it is, it’s worth it just to see Jack Nicholson at the top of his game and a script that never flinches. Some of its sexual politics are a bit dated in this day and age, but the emotions on display have, unfortunately, never gone out of style.

Day 11: Danger: Diabolik

Song: You, only you, deep down… in my heart deep down, in my blood deep down, very deep deep down...

Danger: Diabolik is a winning, lurid movie. It’s exciting, funny, absurd, and so very of-its-time that its retro-charm destroyed my retro-charm meter (which looks curiously like a mood ring). Any movie that opens with its hero, an arch criminal, stealing ten million dollars from under the noses of the authorities and laughing at them — no, cackling at them in a full-throated MUAHAHAHAHA — is off to a good start as far as I’m concerned. If the movie then launches into a title sequence featuring random spinning colors while a song, written by Ennio Morricone, blares out, grabbing you by the ears to tell you, “listen, dammit, LISTEN OR I’LL JUST GET LOUDER...” I’m confident I’m going to like it. This is one very fun comic book movie.

Effectively combining the worlds of Batman and James Bond, the world of Danger: Diabolik is a colorful, archetype-filled landscape of cops and robbers, cool cats and squares. In this world, it is possible for one man to bring down the tax system of an entire nation by exploding a series of buildings with signs that say “TAX”. It’s the kind of world where mob kingpins own planes with trapdoors to dispose of their disobedient associates (and the air pressure problem is somehow fixed too). And in this world, it’s not unlikely to come across a round bed, rotating around a not-too-distant-futuristic hi-fi system.

This movie is ridiculous, to be sure, but there’s wit to it. One sequence has Diabolik trapped on top of a castle spire after stealing a necklace. The cops are in hot pursuit. He glances at a catapult. No way, I thought, he’s going to catapult off the roof! Sure enough, the cops break down the door in time to see Diabolik’s white-costumed body flung off the top of the building. The effect is fake-looking and laughable, but it fools the cops. They run down, unaware that a naked Diabolik is crouched behind the catapult, grinning, and, I assume, barely restraining another MUAHAHAHA. I had no reason to restrain my delighted laughter.

Yes, the pace lags occasionally. Yes, it’s the highest of high camp as Diabolik runs around in a black mask and suit, cackling at the authorities. Yes, the acting is bad and, yes, there are some real questionable plot and editing choices in the movie. But does it matter? When the pace lags, it’s because the movie is pausing to show off its mod stylishness, John Philip Law plays the titular character with infectious gusto, and if there are story problems, Morricone’s silly, in-your-face score covers up any ill-will you feel. Anyway, there’s a surprising sweetness to the relationship Diabolik has with Eva, his blonde bombshell partner-in-crime. The dialogue is also more clever than you’d expect, though the movie’s full of howlers (“I had the gold radioactivated”).

So, yeah, the movie’s not a triumph. It’s outrageously cheesy, but every time I thought I was laughing at the movie, it winked right at me, telling me I was laughing with it. When Diabolik flipped over the side of his car, it made me laugh, it thrilled me, and it reminded me of why the hell I watch movies anyway. Some things are just cool.

The 16mm Shrine

Just thought I'd give a throw to this blog by "Ash Karreau"

The 16mm Shrine

My blog is like his, only his is devilshly funny and mine is like a puppy that tries too hard.

Day 10: First Blood

And what best to follow up the belabored sufferings of an ancient martyr God than with America’s very own prototype of a martyr, the Vietnam Veteran. Before watching First Blood, I’d never actually seen a Rambo movie all the way through. I caught parts of them on TV when I was younger, but never actually sat through them. Imagine my surprise that First Blood (which I refuse to call Rambo: First Blood) is actually a halfway decent movie. Literally.

The first 50 minutes or so of this 97 minute movie are nicely paced, edited, and shot. Sylvester Stallone plays John J. Rambo, a Green Beret/Special Forces type who’s come to a small Oregon town to find an old Vietnam buddy. After learning that his buddy has died of cancer, Rambo, with nowhere to go, walks around aimlessly until he is picked up by the town’s sheriff. The sheriff, played by Brian Dennehy in an over-the-top performance that is still somehow convincing, apparently hates drifters with a passion most people reserve for suspected child killers and so, unaware of Rambo’s past, arrests him for vagrancy. When Rambo is abused by the other officers in the small town police station, he snaps, fights back, and flees to the wilderness.

All of this is handled with an admirable efficiency, as is the ensuing sequence when Rambo stalks the pursuing cops in the forest. He sets traps, hunts them down, and immobilizes each one without killing them. It’s a fun meshing of the classic formula of a falsely accused man on the run and slasher movie conventions. It also reminded me of the old adage (I think from Hitchcock) that you will enjoy watching someone who is good at his job. Rambo is very good at his job and it’s enjoyable to watch him turn the tables on the coppers.

This section of the film has some effective location photography. It also best showcases a fun score by Jerry Goldsmith, fun because it is slightly too “big” for the scale of the movie. For instance: the music swells into an epic Western/Americana theme after Rambo steals a motorcycle from an innocent bystander and rides away from the chasing cops. The disparity between the epic music and the small motorcycle made me smile.

But the movie can’t keep this up for too long, and eventually, too many characters diffuse the essential conflict between Dennehy and Stallone. There’s a hefty chunk of time where nothing much happens as Rambo is hidden and Dennehy and others keep looking for him. A final confrontation that has Rambo blowing up a gas station and knocking out power in the small town to draw Dennehy out is kind of exciting but doesn’t amount to much. The movie concludes with a monologue from Rambo in which he cries and shouts about injustices, the terrible things he saw in Vietnam, and his treatment when he came back home. This monologue really is something to see. It’s embarrassingly funny as Stallone slurs and screams his lines at a rapid-fire pace, rendering most of it incomprehensible. The emotional beats are just right, though. So, even if it's not expressed with the best of care by Stallone and is transparently manipulative, I can’t deny that the tearful speech got to me a little.

I think it’s fascinating that this movie found the audience it did back in 1982. It tapped a zeitgeist of some sort and became a cultural watermark, no doubt there. I think there’s something about the way it puts a Vietnam Veteran in the same position the North Vietnamese were in (outgunned, outmanned, using a familiarity with the land to gain his advantage, and setting traps like the North Vietnamese) and has him, ultimately, come out on top that appealed to people. Perhaps the movie hit an undercurrent of atypical American self-flagellation over mistakes made in Vietnam. Perhaps I’m thinking too much about a Rambo movie.

Day 9: The Passion of the Christ

For a non-Christian, watching The Passion of the Christ is a lot like watching a Star Trek movie when you’re not really familiar with the show. Sure, you might recognize some characters and thrill at some space battles, but ultimately, you’re left a little confused. What’s the big deal here? I certainly felt that way about The Passion of the Christ. It’s hard for me to write this without taking into account the vast success of the film or its place in the political landscape of the United States, but I’ll do my best.

Full disclosure: I made every attempt to engage with this film on its own level since, as a staunch atheist, I’m predisposed to disliking religious propaganda. Still, I feel safe in saying that this is not a good movie. Its biggest problem is the way it takes a spiritual subject and literalizes every damn thing to the point that any higher meaning or metaphysical implications are sublimated. It also gets several demerits for an egregious use of slow-motion throughout that is annoying at first (Judas is thrown thirty pieces of silver, struggles to catch it, drops the bag, and the coins go flying out, all in slow-mo… where’s the slow-motion “NOOOOO”, huh?) then tiring (as Jesus is being tortured, a figure meant to be the devil walks in slo-mo through the onlookers, gazing menacingly at him) then just silly (Jesus, tortured to the brink of death, falls down in slow motion! And again! And again! And again! And…). There’s a cool scene depicting Jesus saving Mary Magdalene, done silently and played with the right amount of action-movie gravitas from James Caviezel, and I enjoyed a couple of parts that had demons in it (though this is part of the literalization problem… Judas is literally chased by zombie-demon-children onto what looks like the set of Conan the Barbarian and then hangs himself. I suppose it’s hard for audiences to relate to guilt unless there are zombie-demon-children to indicate the character’s state of mind… but I digress) but, for the most part, this movie is full of cheap sentiment, and it’s plodding and dull, hitting the same notes over and over again.

I can’t write about this movie as its own entity, though. I got super-mad after watching this because I remembered The Last Temptation of Christ being a pretty awesome movie and that it couldn’t make any money because some jerks decided that depicting Jesus as having any sort-of sex at all, even if it was in a vision inspired by Satan, and even if the sex was, like, nice happy marriage sex, was a bad thing. What made me angry was that this movie, which was wildly popular with many of these same types of jerks, does exactly the same thing as The Last Temptation of Christ. Both movies focus on the humanness of Jesus to further explore the sacrifice the God-man made. In Scorsese’s version, it’s an emotional humanness fraught with sorrow, doubt, isolation, fear, and anger as a result of Jesus’ divinity. In Gibson’s version, it’s about the human physicality of Jesus, the pain of being whipped, scourged, and having your hands nailed to something. There’s a shameless use of Jesus’ mother (who’s named Mary) being sad that her son is in pain (at one time reminiscent of a scene in Dumbo (of all things)). And, of course, Jesus is in a constant state of pain, starting around 52 minutes into the film and we are given many close-ups of him wailing in agony (sometimes in slo-mo) as he’s beaten. All of this serves to emphasize Jesus’ humanity over his divinity. And yet, this fallible, frail humanity is acceptable while Scorsese’s is not? What the fuck people?

It’s actually pretty instructive to look at the endings of both movies: At the end of Last Temptation, Jesus, played by Willem Dafoe, is given a chance to renounce his crucifixion, a choice that has disastrous consequences for the world while allowing him to have a happy human life for a while. When he sees the consequences, Jesus takes that choice back and dies on the cross, allowing the world to live on at the expense of his own happy life. The Passion ends with God shedding a single raindrop tear for the death of his son, said tear resulting in an Indiana Jones-esque earthquake destroying the temple of the Pharisees (I think), and causing the devil-figure to scream at us, now isolated somewhere in hell (again, I think). The movie then cuts to Jesus rising from the dead, looking out of his tomb as action-movie music builds and builds. Jesus then stands, naked (though the movie never shows his junk, making it better for kids!) and walks off and the music kicks into overdrive like we’re watching Gladiator or something as it fades to black. It’s like Jesus is going to KICK SOME ASS on the people what tortured him!

At least with Scorsese and Dafoe, we had an idea of the life Jesus was actually sacrificing by allowing his fate to befall him. Here, we get flashbacks to Jesus making a table and saying ponderous things to his followers. There’s a Sermon on the Mount scene where Caviezel delivers his lines like a quirky dead-language-speaking high school professor. For a movie that so desperately wants us to empathize with the humanity of Jesus’ body, we are given little-to-nothing to see about Jesus’ mind and so the too, too solid flesh that melts away at the hands of gleeful of Romans is attached to nobody important. Of course you sympathize with Jesus on the same level you’d sympathize with anyone being crucified by a mob. In fact, I can make a direct cinematic parallel here: I felt as bad for Jesus as I did for the Brain Bug at the end of Starship Troopers.

Day 8: Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit

br/>Walking out of Wallace & Gromit, I had a big grin on my face that I’d been wearing for the duration of the movie. It’s a delightful movie watching experience, perfect in nearly every way. It works as a clever, original animated comedy, as a spoof of horror movies, and even, at times, as a serious werewolf movie.

If you haven’t seen any of the previous Wallace & Gromit short films, you’re doing a disservice to yourself and those who love you. It’s been scientifically proven that watching any of the Wallace & Gromit movies makes you a better person. Really. Science.

Here’s the basic setup: Wallace is an inventor who lives with Gromit, his dog. Gromit never speaks, but is animated with such care that you always know what he’s thinking. Wallace creates Rube Goldberg-like inventions that tend to go awry or have consequences different than they’re intended. Gromit is often tasked with taking care of the cheery, optimistic, and, accordingly, short-sighted Wallace. Their relationship is charming and feels as rich and wonderful as that of any Classic Comedy matchup you can think of.

This is supposed to be a “family” film, no question about it, but it is written, directed, voice acted, and animated so well that it avoids the pandering and restrictive tone that has become so commonplace in movies that children are supposed to watch. The movie is unafraid to explore fear, sorrow, and anguish in this movie and it’s refreshing to see that amidst the usual hyperkinetic imagery that one finds in Animated Films for the Whole Family™ these days. It is a spoof of many horror films, but it also takes its plot seriously and never betrays its characters to make a joke. Thus, when things get just a little serious, it’s easy to take them seriously. Even after a vast amount of zaniness, late in the film, Gromit makes a sacrifice to save Wallace and, as he does, their friendship becomes even more resonate than it was earlier. And it’s been a long time since I’ve seen the pathos of lycanthropy (I guess I should say lepusanthropy here) realized so well. But, here I’ve gone on about how serious it is when it’s mostly a very funny movie.

If anything, the movie has the feel of the great comedies made between 1940 and 1960, movies like Some Like it Hot or The Lady Eve. It’s a solid piece of work through and through with characters who make sense, a storyline that’s at once funny and engaging, and a genuine sweetness to it that’s rare to see these days. It’s a brilliant use of the medium of claymation. I wish someone could give an award to Gromit and his animators for one of the very best animated performances I’ve ever seen. I can’t think of a single person I would not recommend this movie to. So, in other words, go see it. Remember… Science.

Day 7: Zombi 3

Roger: Hey, this Blueheart's music is great, huh?
Bo: Yeah, it's making me horny.

Comedy is a subject that is very important to me, something I’ve spent a lot of time pondering for many years now… what is it that makes us laugh, why is something funny and something else tragic? Why do those two intermingle so often? It all boils down to absurdity for me. We laugh because some things defy our expectations as to how the world is structured and, when confronted with those things, we respond by being terrified or laughing (depending, I imagine, on how threatening these things are). I laughed harder watching Zombi 3 than I’ve laughed in response to any movie for quite some time. I’m aware that a few days ago I made clear my feelings about watching bad movies for the purposes of laughing at and feeling superior to them. I am comfortable with the fact that, while I was laughing at Zombi 3 and while the laughter was borne of the movie’s incompetence, what I was really laughing at was its illogic and its absurdity.

I love zombie movies as a general rule and so I am no stranger to the work of Lucio Fulci. The maker of Zombi 2 (here in the States, it’s just called Zombie… the reason for this is that Dawn of the Dead was originally called Zombi in Italy and abroad…Fulci’s Zombi 2 is an in-name-only sequel if I remember correctly.) and The Beyond, he specializes in making films that are like a crossbreed of Dario Argento’s and George Romero’s, though his movies are nowhere near as good as either of those two’s films. Fulci’s zombies are the slowest of the “slow” zombies, moving with the speed of snails and, somehow, becoming ten times as creepy for it. When Fulci brings in a gore scene, it can go on for minutes as the unconvincing effects spill out in a torrent of red before our eyes. It’s rather endearing sometimes, like in The Beyond, there’s a scene in which spiders eat a man’s face for what seems like an hour. Some of the spiders are clearly made of rubber and being bounced up and down on fishing line. The spiders also squeak while they eat the poor man. And their entrance into the movie is quite, um, random. The randomness and the extremity of the gore can lend Fulci’s movies a dreamlike quality not unlike Argento’s.

For the first hour of Zombi 3, I was a bit upset because this movie did not feel like a Fulci movie, though he was the credited director. No dreamlike pacing, the gore was weaker, and the zombies were not Fulci zombies. These zombies were moving super-fast! One of them was involved in a choreographed fight scene in which he menaced a woman with a machete. A lot of zombies leapt down from above the camera just when one of the characters was nearly safe. A couple of them talked. Later, I learned that this was only a half-Fulci movie, that he’d left after shooting 70 minutes, and only 40 minutes were used in the final product. And this shows quite a bit in the movie.

Before I go on to talk about Zombi 3, I’d like to describe to you the following scenes.

• A woman in an abandoned gas station, looking for water for her soon-to-be zombie boyfriend. She walks around in the darkness for a bit doing the standard, “hello, is anyone there” routine. A zombie, chained up, lunges at her. She screams. It grabs her and she wiggles away, out of its reach. The zombie then lunges forward again, pulling against its chains. A large quantity of debris, seemingly out of nowhere, then falls on the zombie’s head, causing the zombie to fall down.


• A soldier guy in the jungle is attacked by a zombie. He wrestles with it for some time until they come to a dock by a river. The soldier throws the zombie off of the dock into what appears to be two or three inches of water. The movie then cuts to a shot of the soldier looking relieved, like the fight is over.


• A group of people (including the soldier from the previous description) have just found respite from constant zombie attacks. They are lying outside in some grass. We hear the noise of a chicken. The movie cuts to a shot of a man in glasses who starts making chicken noises at the chicken and chasing it around, unable to catch it. This is intercut with shots of the others in his group smiling and shaking their head as he struggles to catch the chicken. That guy!


• At the end of the movie: a soldier is running away from some zombies toward a helicopter where his friends are flying off to safety. The helicopter has ascended a little and he is forced to leap onto the landing strut of the helicopter. As he struggles to climb into the helicopter, a group of zombies emerge from a pile of hay below the man and they get him.

In each of these instances, I laughed and laughed hard. Particularly at the chicken thing, but also at the zombies hidden in hay. I don’t know why they were in the hay, but I believe it’s a new breed of zombie that we can all call the “hay zombie”. The scene descriptions don’t even begin to account for the amount of inanity in the film. There’s a flying zombie head with no visible means of propulsion other than its desire to consume human flesh. There are zombie birds. And, most importantly, I may be wrong, but I believe one character dies at the hands (eh) of the severed flying head, only to come back moments later and then die again at the hands of a zombie-mob. It occurs to me that I haven’t even mentioned the scientist who created the means by which the dead come back to life, whose acting abilities reside in his index finger or the way the main soldier characters in the film start rolling around everywhere.

I’m glad I watched this movie. It’s helped me figure out some of my movie-watching philosophy. I generally like to respect the filmmakers when I watch movies, so if a movie is working in a way that you can tell it’s trying to be scary, exciting, whatever… I will try to engage with it on those terms. When I am given inconsistencies and shoddy craftsmanship, it is fair game for me to enjoy on whatever level I like. Therefore: Zombi 3 is a comedy. Things happen for no reason in this movie and they’re decidedly not scary. It even appears as if it switches from being shot on film to shot on video at random. The movie has no merit as a horror movie. It has no new horror ideas in it, no tension, no scariness. It is structured more as an action movie, with its fast zombies, soldiery shootouts, and pounding score similar to Day of the Dead, but it has no merit as an action movie either. However, it is so shoddily put together that it does have merit (at times) as an absurdist comedy. And since we’ll never get to see The Marx Brothers starring in A Night with the Living Monkeys, this will do just fine.

Linkages

I've been trying to coordinate some of these movies so that there's a nice linkage between each one. This hasn't exactly worked out. I've been delighted to find some connections in the movies I have watched, though, that were unexpected. For instance: watching Seven Up! I was fascinated at the nature film aspect of watching seven year olds interact with one another and play at being grown ups. The next day, I watched Zardoz and it featured a lot of talk about the evolution of man that felt like a tangental connection to Seven Up. Zadoz features a floating head quite prominently and so I was delighted last night, while watching Zombi 3, when a severed flying zombie head attacked some people. Additionally, there was a scene in this movie where people barricaded themselves in a hotel to escape the zombies, much as the characters in Hotel Rwanda found a hotel to be a safe haven from an overwhelming threat. I began to think that Zombi 3 might contain links to every movie I've watched so far, but, upon further reflection, that would be far too much of a stretch and I don't have the time to engage in those sorts of mental gymnastics.

The most disappointing thing about all of this is that I was planning to follow Zombi 3 with The Passion of the Christ since, as Superman is really an alien, Jesus returning to life after dying would denote him zombie status. Unfortunately, this didn't come to pass and, tonight, I will be inadvertantly finding links between Zombi 3 and Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit. And then from that movie to The Passion of the Christ. Which is probably better for some reason.

Day 6: Fucking Zardoz, man.

Zed: Stay behind my aura!

In short: Zardoz is a trainwreck movie. It may even be the perfect example of a trainwreck movie. In order to discuss Zardoz, I think it's necessary to first state what I mean when I call something a "trainwreck movie". It's pretty simple: a movie is going along for a while and in your mind you're thinking to yourself "this is pretty good!" and then, at some point, the movie jumps the tracks and at the end of it, you're shaking your head and saying something in a disappointed tone, like, "fucking Zardoz, man..." There are a few examples I can think of right now... The Hulk, The Keep, and Lifeforce(that one's a BIG TIME trainwreck). All of these are not bad movies, per se, they're just movies that lose the way at some point while maintaining very good intentions. What denotes a trainwreck movie from a bad movie is that it is always internally consistent (just as a train doesn't cease being a train when it leaves the tracks, The Hulk doesn't stop being the movie that preceded it when Nick Nolte and Bruce Banner have a metaphysical special effects fight and, in fact, if the movie ended any other way it would be a betrayal of everything that came before it) and full of intriguing ideas that never seem to make it to the screen in a coherent fashion.

Zardoz is probably the perfect trainwreck movie because, as soon as it starts, you can see that it's going to wreck somewhere along its path. You can feel it the same way you feel like you're in the most competent of hands when Touch of Evil starts with that uncut tracking shot. It's hard not to know that disaster looms when the floating head of a man, dressed up like a genie and claiming to be immortal, tells you that Merlin was his idol and that the story you're about to see is an allegory and a satire. It's even harder to put aside feelings that disaster is going to eventually beat this movie into a bloody pulp as a giant stone head flies over gorgeously photographed landscapes like a hot air balloon with a guidance system and lands near a bunch of people on horseback wearing nothing but red underpants and bandoliers. And when, after said people on horseback bow before it, pledging allegience to the head they call Zardoz, that floating head responds to them by saying "the gun is good, the penis is bad" and spewing gun after gun after gun from its giant mouth, it's difficult to shun the knowledge that you are going to dislike this movie for the very same reasons that you are going to unabashadly love it.

The movie's plot is one of a science fiction utopia/dystopia in which, sometime in the future, humans have divided into two camps. One group is barbaric and is policed by the horseback people, known as Brutals. Their leader, Zed, sneaks into the giant floating head and finds himself among a second group of people, the Immortals. The Immortals are just that, immortal. Everytime they die, their bodies are regenerated by a supercomputer/A.I. thing known as The Tabernacle. They're also telepathic and like to meditate. They're superintelligent and super bored, living in a 1970s science fiction dreamland, a combination of colored plastics and old architecture, glass and stone. Their food and wealth is provided to them by the barbaric outsiders who, to appease their god Zardoz, give offerings of wheat to the giant stone head. They're obviously patterned after hippies or hippy ideals and, as Zed arrives, they're unsure of what to do with this bummer of a brute. Study him or kill him with telepathic powers?

The movie is one of these science fiction movies that is mostly about ideas. I would wager that a majority of the running time is spent explaining the world and it's landscape. It is fascinating for a while, but eventually the explanations of whatever new wrinkle to the world is presented start seeming repetitive at best, dull at worst and, in the second half, just confusing. What little narrative tension that exists in the second half is borrowed from popular mythology, The Wizard of Oz, Lord of the Rings, etc. Nothing wrong with that, of course, and it's neat in a "oh they snuck that in nicely" kind-of way. But the people never resonate on a human level... The Immortals are mostly too remote and clinical to care about. Zed spends too much of his early screen time not doing anything but following Immortals around as they explain what he (and we) are seeing.

Zed is played by Sean Connery in, unfortunately, the worst performance I've ever seen him give. He is a killer and a rapist who, eventually, learns to be the smartest guy on the planet, but Connery just looks bored or confused most of the time. Perhaps I'm projecting. His acting is more interesting as the character grows smarter, but by that time, I was so busy keeping up with the overly complicated and expanding plot that I hardly noticed. Connery is also saddled with an unfortunate costume, spending the entire running time of the movie in red underwear that makes him look like a cheap Tarzan (though there is one moment when he wears a wedding dress that allows me to cross off "see Sean Connery in a wedding dress" from my list of things I'd like to see before I die).

It's too bad, too, that the movie buckles under the weight of all its concepts because there is so much to like here. I had the most fun watching this movie than any of the others I've watched so far for this blog. The movie is terribly earnest, sometimes to the point of campiness. There is a logic and a cleverness to everything and it's beautifully shot and produced. The first hour is delightful as the movie introduces us to the world it's devised, but, again, once the plot starts to take off and Zed inspires a civil war among the Immortals and is taught the secrets of the universe while inseminating women Immortals with his seed, it just flies right off the rails. It flies so far off the rails, in one scene an Immortal tells Zed that they built a spaceship. Zed says, "did you use it?" The Immortal replies, "yeah, it was a dead end" the way you might say you once ate a pear and didn't quite care for it.

There are three scenes I need to describe here that might give you an even better idea of what kind of movie this is: First scene: an Immortal man enters a room of other Immortals and speaks in "dubbed". His lips don't match the sounds he's making and the sounds are incomplete and garbled. The other Immortals applaud it as if it was a performance of poetry. Second scene: at dinner, the Immortals go into "second level meditation" and make loud moaning noises. One man doesn't want to go into second level meditation and they wiggle their fingers at him as he struggles under their psychic weight. Third scene: Sean Connery in red underwear running around a hall of mirrors with various images projected onto them, shouting over and over again, "TABERNACLE!!!" while looking confused and angry.

Pauline Kael apparently said that if this movie wasn't in English, we all might have thought it was a maserpiece. I'm inclined to agree somewhat. It's a fascinating movie, to be sure. It's thougtful, serious, witty, insightful, and honest... and these are all the reasons it's a bad movie. Whatever it happens to be being thoughtful, serious, witty, insightful, or honest about at any given time in the movie, it is ignoring everything else that is important. Still, something in me thinks that someday, fifty years from now, people could resurrect it as an overlooked classic. It's too good to be this bad. It's Fucking Zardoz, man... and there's nothing else like it.