Never Say Never Again: Or do, really, it's up to you

Due to complicated legal issues, Never Say Never Again is not part of the official Eon-MGM/UA-Columbia/TriStar-Sony* Bond cannon. But it does have Sean Connery, so that gives it way more street cred than the original Casino Royale. Unfortunately, for a Bond film, it's a little lame. Don't get me wrong it's got some cool stuff (Connery fights a couple of sharks) but it also has some not so great stuff (Bond and a villain have a video game showdown, comic relief is provided by Mr. Bean as Nigel Small-Fawcett). The critical misstep, however, is having the film focus on the number two man at SPECTRE, Maximilian Largo (played by some random guy), as the main bad guy when they have Max von Sydow cast as Ernst Stavro Blofeld, the number one man at SPECTRE and coolest Bond villain. It's a missed opportunity and one that could only be made by someone who doesn't really know what makes a Bond film.

*This corporation is no longer affiliated with the MGM Grand Las Vegas.

Black Caesar: More of a referance to Little Caesar than Julius Caesar

Black Caesar stars Fred Williamson who I'm familiar with because of his role as Capt. Oliver Harmon "Spearchucker" Jones in M*A*S*H and who you might know as Frost in From Dusk Till Dawn. I'm sorry, that was presumptuous of me. Maybe you're a big blaxploitation fan who's seen him in The Legend of Nigger Charley, Hammer, That Man Bolt, Hell Up in Harlem and Boss Nigger. Or you could know him from his professional football career where, according to Wikipedia "Williamson became one of football's first self-promoters, coining the nickname 'The Hammer'--because he used his forearm to deliver karate style blows to the heads of opposing receivers" (Seriously?!? You're allowed to do that?). Perhaps you know him from more recent roles in Original Gangstas or Starsky & Hutch. I don't know and I shouldn't assume.

The movie is fairly standard blaxploitation fare (Williamson gets tired of taking shit from the man and decides to start sticking it to him instead) and I really wasn't that engaged for the first hour or so while I was semi-busy transferring my CDs to my laptop. So, I was fairly unprepared for the intense ending to this one. (In case it's not clear, Spoiler Alert) After a failed assassination attempt, Williamson runs across half of New York using his hand to cover a nasty gunshot wound to his gut trying to track down his nemesis, who I'll just refer to as "Whitey". When Williamson finally catches up to his enemy, Whitey is ready and gets the drop on his critically wounded foe. This begins a sequence rife with symbolism as Whitey forces Williamson to kneel before him and shine his shoes in front of an American flag. Williamson then turns the table on his opponent by beating him with the shoeshine kit and telling Whitey that he's "going to die like a field nigger!" Then Williamson picks up the shoe polish and says to Whitey that he's "going to make you look real good" as he gives him a blackface makeover. Finally, Williamson attempts to force him to sing a minstrel tune as he beats Whitey to death. It's an incredibly powerful sequence and it's followed by a poignant sequence where Williamson himself is assaulted by a gang of black youths and left for dead in the wreckage of the ghetto to James Brown's "Down and Out in New York City".


This film taught me that a James Brown soundtrack makes everything way cooler.

Pirates of the Caribbean - At World's End: With all of that violence it should have been rated . . .

Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End continues in the tradition of it's predecessors by being way better than Jerry Bruckheimer presents A Theme Park Attraction: Part 3 has any right to be. The more I think about it the more I just can't get past the fact that I really like these movies. This movie has a nearly three-hour runtime, more characters than it knows what to do with, the most complicated, convoluted plot I can imagine when you combine that with Disney's tradition of craptastic live-action fare, the fact that Bruckheimer might be a demon sent from hell to destroy the art of cinema and that this whole disaster-on-paper is based on a glorified carnival ride it's inconceivable that it could still be this much fun the third time around.

Johnny Depp has recieved plenty of (well-earned) praise for his role as Captain Jack Sparrow but he can't just turn a mess into an awesome movie all by himself. I'm going to have to give some credit to Gore Verbinski. I suspect that the man behind the wicked American re-make of The Ring is the unsung hero of this trilogy. I mean, Johnny Depp might be cooler than Jebus but at the end of the day he's one of many balls that needs to be kept in the air to prevent this franchise from turning into a Hindenburg.


Anyone know when Cameron Crowe is going to finish his Elizabethtown trilogy? Orlando Bloom's gotta work, you know.

Karamoja!: The exclamation point stands for exploitation

I went to a Secret Cinema screening the other day and the guy who runs the show over there got up and a made an impassioned plea to support repertory cinema and spread the word to our friends (Well, impassioned for the Secret Cinema guy, he's pretty mellow and has a really dry sense of humor). In case you don't know, repertory cinemas are places that show classics, older films that are not quite classics and occasionally newer movies that don't make it to theaters, usually foreign (I'm talking about Africa foreign not, like, Pedro Almodóvar foreign). So, go see repertory films . . . and the Ritz doesn't count, try IHouse, Exhumed Films, Andrew's Video Vault or Secret Cinema. Well, that's my plug for today.

The program began with some short films. The first one was an off-brand Soundie called Jungle Rhythm. A Soundie was essentially a music video made for video jukeboxes that were commonly found in bars and nightclubs in the 30's and 40's. This one featured a chick in a skimpy outfit dancing to a vaguely tribal beat. You could see, like, half her belly-button, it was pretty hot. The second short was called Adventure Parade: South Africa or maybe it was Adventure Paradise, my notes are unclear and I don't really remember anything about it. The final short was an educational/propaganda film produced by a group of missionaries called African Cousins. I was a little worried that this one was going to be way racist but it turned out to be a very positive look at a community in Africa and how similar they were to Americans (at the time we had considerably more people growing up on farms in this country than we do now). The whole production was geared toward children, complete with cheesy narration and my favorite part was when the narrator described how a young boy scoffed at an ancient ritual to banish evil spirits explaining that the boy had learned that there were no such things as evil spirits in his Sunday school class (where he, presumably, learned the much less-silly idea about the three good spirits).

Then things got underway with the main attraction, Karamoja!, a documentary about Uganda (who's history of genocide was made into a major motion picture starring Forest Whitaker, not Don Cheadle). This film was made by a dentist who was informed that he only had six months to live. This man, who had never made a film before, decided to grab a camera and head off to an area that had been undisturbed by western culture bringing with him a small crew (one of who he wound up marrying early in the process).

When this movie was released in America it was presented as a Shockumentary, a kind of exploitation film that could get away with showing violence and nudity under the auspices of educational fare. And although this film has plenty of violence and more full-frontal nudity than you'll ever see in a non-pornographic film, it's also a sensitive look at a culture that's remained unchanged for thousands of years. The violence is mostly directed at animals, which can be hard for some people to watch, but it's all part of surviving in a harsh environment and probably more humane than our industrial slaughterhouses. And even though there's plenty of nudity, none of it is sexual. It's just that Africa is really hot and these people have never heard of skin cancer, there's really no reason for them to not walk around with their junk hanging out.

It's an odd juxtaposition, the sincere attempt to understand an alien culture packaged as a sleazy sex and violence expose, but that's what makes repertory films so fascinating.

Spider-Man 3: It's a good sign when the characters are more developed than the action sequences

I finally got around to seeing Spider-Man 3 (and writing this post) and I must say that, after hearing about the tepid response to this installment, I was pleasantly surprised. When the film begins things are going great for Peter Parker but in a way that's very grounded in reality. I think my favorite moment was seeing Parker stare, through a store window, at an engagement ring with a tiny diamond just as a clerk puts up a sign that reads "layaway available". It's a very authentic moment and it made me think that I could enjoy a 90-minute film about Peter Parker's life going swell.

Of course, it would be insane to spend 250 to 300 million dollars on a movie like that so Harry Osborn begins showing signs of his father, Willem Dafoe's, evil geniusness; genuinely nice-seeming crook, Thomas Hayden Church, walks into some strange nuclear-sand experiment that I'll never understand; and a goopy black creature drops out of space. Non of these things bode well for our friendly neighborhood Spider-Man.

Parker eventually takes a sample of the creature to the creepy guy from Happiness who tells him that it is a symbiote that "amplifies characteristics of its host, especially aggression." Not quite, guy who will one day turn into a giant lizard, the characteristic that the symbiote primarily amplifies is douchebaggery, which is infinitely more entertaining on screen.

At this point the film takes a fairly long detour where Parker goes through one of the most amusing transformations I've ever seen on-screen. There's a montage where he gets a new, all black wardrobe and walks down the street giving every girl he sees the double finger-gun point, receiving an awful lot of eye-rolls in return. That's what I like so much about Sam Raimi, I think a lesser director would've had Parker become an arrogant prick and gotten all the chicks but when Parker douches it up in this film Raimi keeps it real by not having the ladies buy it.

I suppose I should take a moment to point out that the sequence I just described seems to be the reason why many people dislike this movie. It's goofy, bizarre and generally incongruous with what is supposed to be an action blockbuster. Of course, those are all of the reasons why I love it so much. So, there you go.

Although I like the way the group dynamic works out in the final battle, it is a little disappointing when the film moves away from the fun stuff and gets on with the real plot. Raimi seems to have so much fun with these characters and the material that you hate to see see the film devolve into a standard action movie. Even if it's a really well-made action movie, and it is. One of the great things about Raimi is that he's got such a strong background in horror that he can slow a fight scene down to a moment of pure terror in a way that I don't think a Brian Singer could.

Raimi is just a quirky guy with a low-budget past who's managed to work his way up to big blockbusters while keeping many of the idiosyncrasies that made him interesting in the first place. Not a lot of guys have done that and I applaud him for it.


By the by, every time I see a Spider-Man movie I think "Who's that black guy in the newsroom" and I am always amazed when I find out that it's Radio Raheem.

Assault on Precinct 13: We are not safe

Sometimes, just sometimes, a film will contain a moment so shocking that you are unable to believe what you just saw. A third of the way through Assault on Precinct 13 one of those moments occurs. I won't spoil it but I will say that as my jaw dropped I knew that if John Carpenter could show something that brutal, he could do anything. From then on out there were no rules and nobody was safe. The scene actually earned the film an "X" rating and when Carpenter asked his distributor what they should do they suggested that he cut the scene out, resubmit the film to the MPAA, get a "R" rating and then simply release the uncut version in theaters. Rather surprisingly, this plan was successful. And it's a good thing because what makes this film so successful is that when things start to go wrong they get very bad very quickly. After carefully establishing characters for the first thirty minutes Carpenter mercilessly slaughters most of them over the next several minutes, leaving the few remaining characters in an impossible situation. Carpenter drew his inspiration from Howard Hawks' classic Rio Bravo (the screenplay he wrote was even attributed to John T. Chance, John Wayne's character in that film) but the film that kept coming to my mind was Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in the West. In addition to a direct allusion in the previously-mentioned notorious scene, a convicted criminal explains how his life turned out that way by saying that, at an early age, he was told by a priest that he had "something to do with death". That's the same line that Jason Robards uses to explain Charles Bronson's outlaw to Claudia Cardinale. God, that was a great movie . . . and so is this one.

A Sunday in the Country: That's pretty much it

I've been working my way through Roger Ebert's Great Movies and that's how I found A Sunday in the Country. This one didn't really do anything for me. It's about an old man who's children and grandchildren come to visit him in the country . . . on a Sunday. And, uh, not a lot happens. I guess that if you have a burning desire to find out what a typical lazy Sunday was like outside of Paris in the early 1900's this would be a great film for you. Otherwise, you can probably give it a miss.

Grindhouse: Like two old awesomely shitty movies, only way better

Now, I've seen my fair share of exploitation double/triple features thanks to the guys down at Exhumed Films and the Philadelphia Film Festival's Danger After Dark series, so I was well prepared for Grindhouse when I saw it with Corey and Ringo last night. The movie gets off to a great start with a fake trailer for Machete, starring Danny Trejo. It looks like just about the most awesome thing I could imagine:


Danny Trejo is such a bad ass that not only did he serve time in San Quentin but he also won the lightweight and welterweight boxing titles while he was there. I have no idea what "welterweight" is but I'm pretty sure that means he could kick the crap out of everyone in prison. And I guess I'm not the only one who who fell in love with the idea. It looks like Robert Rodriguez is working on a feature-length version of Machete. I've never been excited about a direct-to-video release before!

After the preview, we get into the meat of the film with Rodriguez's Planet Terror:


This is a post 9/11 zombie flick that is completely disgusting and an awful lot of fun. When people get shot, blood erupts from their bodies and cars blow-up for no apparent reason. The whole thing is just infused with a genuine affection for old exploitation movies and a real joy of film making. Oh, and somehow Rose McGowan with a machine gun leg is even hotter than it sounds:


After a few more super-awesome trailers comes Quentin Tarantino's Death Proof:


First of all, who knew that Sidney Poitier's kid (the irritatingly named Sydney Poitier) had such a great ass? Secondly, Kurt Russell is still great. I don't want to talk about the plot at all because I think it's got a couple of nice surprises. However, I will say that I think it's Tarantino's most subversive film to date. A lot of people seem to complain that this one is boring but I think that's because it's got a lot of character development. And that's something more movies could use.

Also, Grindhouse features Fergie and I think this picture pretty much sums up her role in the film:

Film Festival: Closing Night

Waitress

For the closing night of the festival they always show a bigger movie that's about to get a theatrical release. Waitress is no exception, it stars Keri Russell and on May 2nd it will open with a limited release. If I had to place this one in a genre I'd say it's sort of a drama with a lot of light romantic-comedy conventions and a dark streak to keep things interesting. I suppose you could label it a chick-flick but I have to say that I really enjoyed this one and I think it has the potential for broad-based appeal. Russell plays a waitress who is also a pie virtuoso (come on, that's just adorable) in a diner owned by a grizzled old man played by Andy Griffith (who, I was happy to discover, is still alive). The film was directed by Adrienne Shelly who was murdered shortly after the editing of this picture was completed. There are so few female directors working today (and, therefore, even fewer ones who are any good) that, after seeing this, I can say it's a real shame that the world lost this one. Essentially, her last act on this earth was to make a very sweet, funny, and touching film about life. I would recommend that you all see this one, it's a real crowd-pleaser.

Well, that's it. The film festival is over. In two weeks I saw 52 programs (I could have seen 53 but I overslept one day) and none of them sucked. I'm pretty impressed. Sure, a few of them were a little boring but they all had their moments. I'm completely exhausted and I've got a ton of work to catch up on, so I better go.

Oh, and that may be me in the audience pictured below.

Film Festival: Day 13

Out Of This World Animation

This is a collection of animated shorts (mostly from CalArts students). These things are always a mixed bag, most are good, some are pretty boring. The one I enjoyed the most was Golden Age, itself a series of shorts. The film presents the "E! True Hollywood Stories" version of newsreels about fictional cartoon characters (as opposed to real cartoon characters?) and their personal turmoils off-screen. It's pretty witty and has a good sense of animation styles through the ages as well as the darker side of Hollywood history. One great moment comes during a segment that lampoons wartime shorts like Donald Duck's Der Fuehrer's Face and Bugs Bunny Nips the Nips (don't try looking for that last one on your Looney Tunes - Golden Collection, Warner like to keep it under wraps). In it the villains are racist caricatures of Hitler, Mussolini, and Hirohito. Only for Hirohito they use Chinese stereotypes instead of Japanese ones, priceless.

Dog Bite Dog

This is an incredibly brutal Chinese gangster film about a Cambodian hitman and the Hong Kong cop trying to track him down. It's a real competition to see which of these men is more ruthless in the pursuit of his goals and, although I'm not all that familiar with the situation, after seeing this film I could believe that all of China's human rights violations are perpetrated by the police in Hong Kong. This is a strange movie and when you think everything has been resolved, it just keeps going only to find more complications. This is also one of a few movies I've seen that has double subtitles (Chinese and English) and it's funny to think that China is such a large country with so many dialects that they have to subtitle their own movies so that the non-Cantonese speakers can understand what's going on.