There isn't much to say about this two hour and fifteen minute snoozefest, much like the Wachowski's last two Matrix sequels, except that they're way too long and cannot hold your interest despite their attempt at nonstop visual stimulation.
The films of the Wachowskis are better analyzed as simulations of films, as though state-of-the-art computer programs were designed to "make a movie for humans" and reached the following mathematical conclusions:
1) More run time = more value
2) Humans either cannot tell the difference between CGI and reality, or they don't care.
That said, the casting is actually really good. It makes me wish the film had been made by human beings and not tech geeks with Rage Against the Machine posters in the filthy workspaces of the mansions they bought by capturing the filthy tech geek zeitgest in 1999. They haven't exactly had to undergo emotional growth since then.
One of the most annoying arguments I continue to have with film fans is what constitutes "mindless fun." I posit that truly "mindless fun" is actually a misnomer since anything that's actually fun takes a combination of intelligence and skill which transcends simple material into something universally appealing and timeless. Things like Looney Tunes and Star Wars are not intellectually challenging but couldn't have been great without a lot of thought put into them.
By the same token, mindless fun and fun of any kind cannot be fun without some innate humanity that transcends culture and time and connects with the hearts and minds of young and old.
That's why Speed Racer convinced me the Wachowskis have no souls and no love for humanity and not a single shred of joy in their hearts. They are hollow shells.
There are about twenty two minutes in Speed Racer when the Wachowskis actually deliver on the promise of uninterrupted sugar rush thrills...a blissful stream of cartoon consciousness...a euphoric ADD high. There are moments, miraculously, which are finally framed in the animation storyboard / comic strip panel style:
Hey, they got it right for one shot! Whoops, there it goes!
And they're about two in the entire movie. I had given the Wachowskis waaaaay more benefit of the doubt than they deserved as to what kind of visual tricks they'd have up their sleeves. Again, the lack of invention wouldn't be so hard to ignore if it didn't go on for so damn long.
The rest of the now-common gratuitously mammoth running time is wasted on ponderous, ponderous "plot" which is all standard hypocritical suburban faux-Marxism.
Why did they cast a professional Christopher Hitchens impersonator as the world's most effeminate purple-clad evil Mr Burns capitalist villain? Seemingly half the dialogue is the film's ponderous and condescending attempt at Raging™ Against The Corporate Machine.
Imagine this guy dressed like the Joker, and sliding his hand across Speed's lithe muscular shoulders.
He's barely even featured in any of the advertising. They just spring him on you and give him as much screen time as anyone else to speechify your ears off about his diabolical conglomerate.
It says so much about the self-hating capitalist mentality of Hollywood that charged with the task of plotting a Speed Racer feature, the Wachowskis thought it was most appropriate to reinvent the Racer family as an independent company who somehow afford to make their own cars and are somehow allowed to compete in various races without belonging to any leagues.
That's their idea of getting you to care about these characters hopes and dreams. Apparently they don't even care about winning races (!!!) We also have no idea why Speed and Trixie are into each other. Their romance could've made a fine emotional center if the Wachowskis were actual human beings with human wants and needs.
There were no shots in the film like this, because that would have been sexist.
So the capitalist who actually produces things is of course the scum of the Earth who secretly rigs all the races, and Racer X's mysteriously faked death and secret identity were created in order that he could "fight the system." Meantime, Speed tells Mr Burns that sponsors are "the devil" in his household and Pops Racer monotonously bemoans that Speed's victories are ignored because the big conglomerates "control the media."
OHHHH! Kind of like how Time Warner AOL, the conglomerate who owns Speed Racer™, is able to advertise incessantly in every channel of media on behalf of the Wachowskis, while smaller independent films don't even have a chance?
These two idiots want you to WAKE UP!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
If they believed in practicing a word of what they preached, the Wachowskis would be independent filmmakers who raised their own funds and presumably made their own film equipment without all that evil big business sponsorship, just like the Racer family.
This is why the heart of Western Faux-Marxism is hypocrisy, and the pinnacle of it's design is the Che Guevera t-shirt for $19.99.
Why do we expose children to this kind of drivel? Why should they be sermonized to about corporate greed when their parents have just shelled out money for them to enjoy corporate entertainment? It's no coincidence that corporate entertainment which fails miserably at entertainment also has no confidence in it's own raison d'être.
By the same turn, how the hell can so many Marxist "Film Studies" professors claim that Hollywood movies exist solely to promote capitalism and the military-industrial complex these days when capitalists are the only villains left in mainstream Hollywood movies? Even fucking IRON MAN denounces the military industrial complex!
About the lack of humor: if Batman suffers from ennobling the insanity behind the psychodrama, please try to imagine how badly a kitsch cartoon suffers from being "dramatized" when the Wachowski-bots best approximation of real human drama was all the aforementioned posturing.
The promised sensory feast didn't just fail due to lack of visual invention. It failed by taking itself too seriously. By staunchly refusing to acknowledge the pop culture gravitas of the material.
Even the couple leaving were riffing on Speed Racer's iconic fast dubbing - not their own riff, mind you, but Family Guy's - even these normals had an inkling of what could've been. Like, for instance, speeding up the dialogue soundtrack in post. That would be a start. It might have saved some fucking time.
The Wachowskis' M.O. is all too indicative of the larger trend in Hollywood: no one knows how to be purely entertaining, or they don't want to try. Instead we must WAIT through filler and "moral" lessons to get to what little good stuff there hopefully is, and we're not allowed to question such priorities.
And the cast, the cast! Christina Ricci has naturally big anime eyes, the guy who plays Speed has a perfectly comic book jawline and permanent hair coif, Racer X looked and sounded perfect, John Goodman made a great Pops Racer and the little kid who plays Sprittle defies all laws of child actor probability to emerge as a genuinely funny spastic little comic relief foil.
Such a waste. The casting was actually so good, I don't think the villain's resemblance to Chris Hitchens was an accident anymore.
In final rebuttal to this piece of shit, here is a brilliant Dexter's Laboratory cartoon that is 10 years old but paid extreme attention to detail in the joys of Speed Racer's hyper stylized cheesy fun. They also do a legitimate imitation of the weird dubbing cadences, unlike Family Guy.
What might a perfect live action recreation of these techniques have been? T'would have been astonishing. For all the CGI bells and whistles of Speed Racer the movie, it astonishes no one.
Thursday, May 15, 2008
Speed Racer, or The Death of Fun
Monday, May 12, 2008
Donna Darko
I don't toot my own horn often, but seeing as the Donnie Darko sequel has been announced and the premise is essentially "what if the same thing happened...to his SISTER?"- I'd like to submit that they stole the idea from this video I made in high school:
Also, given how batshit crazy Southland Tales was, I was surprised to read Richard Kelly was NOT behind this.
Saturday, May 10, 2008
"Near Future" : Mad Max
Near-Future movies are a cool subgenre which Aussie director George Miller helped create with helped create with Mad Mad in 1979 and essentially killed with The Road Warrior in 1981. In fact, there are only three Near-Future movies I can categorize. That's how small a blip they were, despite their enduring popularity: Mad Max and The Warriors in '79 and Escape From New York in '81. The Road Warrior killed it, which makes this definition very Mad Max-centric...but I will get around to illustrating Near-Future's echoes in stuff in more overtly futurist stuff like Robocop.
Like Music Movies" this is not so much a subgenre as a genre between two others. If Music-Movies are the split difference between rock concert films and musicals, Near-Future nestles between the oft-assumed dystopia of the future (Fahrenheit 451, Brave New World) and films set in the present during times of lawlessness.
This effectively removes the technology from futurism and imagines a future opened up by anarchy. The details of futurism are more subtle. Note especially the costumes of the Main Force Patrol...
Essentially, in this type of science fiction the police or lack thereof are the main futuristic feature.
The fact that the only police in a future "A FEW YEARS FROM NOW..." are saddled with an old school Fascist handle like the MAIN FORCE PATROL and the fact they ride around in solid Black leather invokes a lot of imagination towards how things have changed. No laser guns required. Only the inevitable loss of one essential service of government.
SOMETHING is amiss, though it took a sequel to retroactively offer an explanation. Here in the original, nothing.
The MFP officers do not wear uniforms as such, but instead wear black leather suitable for motorcycle riders. The leather imparts a harshness to the officers, who display a callousness toward their target. In this world the officers appear far more menacing than their off screen counterparts; they seem uninhibited by such details as Miranda codes, but seem to focus only on getting the bad guy. They do not stop to ensure that citizens whom they happen to punt off the highway are uninjured, and do not seem to follow any standard procedure for high speed pursuits...They are a product of a harsh version of our reality, when law is declining despite all attempts to save it."
- From an excellent disseration on the Near Future subtleties of MM by Mr Chris Crockett
To paraphrase Back to the Future: in the near-future there are roads, but you won't want to use them.
Obviously the low-rent futurism was inspired by the limitations of budget. George Miller filmed the first Max for about $400,000. Was setting the film "A FEW YEARS FROM NOW..." a necessity? Was the level of increased lawlessness Miller wanted only plausible in the near-future?
Given that The Road Warrior takes another quantum leap forward in depicting a destroyed and re-primitivized world, I'd venture that it was. Road Warrior created the full on "Post-Apocalypse" as it exists in pop culture, leaving Near-Future behind in the dust. There's no subtlety about declined conditions when the people driving around are dressed like Atilla the Hun, but we'll get to that later.
And yet Mad Max before it was already etching out the trend, in the quasi-warrior garb and manner of the primary villain, The Toecutter...note the stylized of the gang member to the right.
The funny thing about Near-Future as Mad Max invented was that the film's American distributor, the great American International Pictures (AIP) really didn't get it. First of all, they redubbed the entire film from Australian English to American English. Nothing to do with futurism, but a hilarious reminder that Australia hadn't yet captured American pop culture's imagination as it would throughout the 80s, softening our ears to their guttural dialect.
The futurist thing they didn't get was that this thing wasn't post-Star Wars hyper-futuristic. Hence this radical but inaccurate AIP poster:
Fuck yeah, he's the maximum force of the FUTURE! He looks like he's walking around fucking MARS and wearing a special mask just to BREATHE! (Obviously modified from the Toecutter gang and tweaked) Check out that badass metallic cyber-car!
Compare that to this more understated and truly near-futuristic French poster.
And this Aussie poster, which gets the point across just as well about the lawlessness.
The Australian trailer adds primitive synthesizer score, the type that would become ubiquitous with action films in general during the 80s, which isn't in the actual film but does it's part to convey the inferrence of the future...
The world only needs so little modification to imply a plausible, timeless representation of an alternate world. Science fiction, after all, is a parallel shift into another world, like our own but transformed. What if that shift is almost in the present tense?
The absence of technology and law creates the breakdown of society in the form of the under-funded MFP and their loss of order to the gangs of the near future. And that's just Mad Max.
Master of horror John Carpenter and Master of thrills Walter Hill were about to make their marks before George Miller brought the concept full circle and beyond with Road Warrior.
Next installment: The Warriors
Friday, May 2, 2008
In The Spirit of Rehashing
No sooner was I done noticing Speed Racer (ie, anywhere there are billboards in Los Angeles) then did the teaser posters for the next great live action cartoon reality retro trip sprout around: Frank Miller's adaptation of Will Eisner's The Spirit.
First off, Frank Miller is coming from all directions these days. Essentially he's been riding the name recognition of The Dark Knight Returns during the mainstream media attention given to Batman up to and including the 1989 movie, with mixed results.
Hollywood came calling for a Robocop 2 script, which got majorly watered down in the final film so much that Miller had it remade into a comic book years later. Then he remained in comic fans' good graces by drawing Sin City and 300 and some new, increasingly whacked out Batman comics.
Man, I really want to read that thing sometime.
A Batman vs Al-Queda project, reported but now seemingly on the permanent back burner, may yet accomodate Miller's new gonzo take on Bats with his latent awakening to Western Civilization's existential challenge. We'll see...but not if he stays as preoccupied with the goddamned motion picture business as he seems to be.
Robert Rodriguez's Frank Miller's Sin City. I never read the comics, but there were two unreality hooks that required viewing. Number one: almost shot-for-shot comic book adaption. Rodriguez made it known in nearly every publicity interview that as many actual panels as possible would be replicated in their original sequences, almost as though Frank Miller were directing. The dialogue would also carry over verbatim.
Numero two-oh: The near monochrome color would stay. This was a riskier move and a technical feat to boot, as nearly the whole movie was shot in front of green screens. Total CG immersion for the heightened reality effect. Speed Racer is essentially the psychedelic technicolor version of this aesthetic.
Ditto for Spirit.
The panels-in-sequence venture was a well-intentioned awkward misstep, a concession to the same nerd lobby that mandated a "serious" Batman. I don't need to read the original comic book material to tell that the sequence of images in a comic book does not translate fluidly to live action: panels of art can be lingered upon for the duration of the reader's choosing, movie shots move irrevocably forward. Sin City feels like a 2 hour montage for well-versed acolytes of the source material rather than a movie audience, much like Batman Begins. At least the script is retarded on purpose.
So far as the green screen cartoon aesthetic, the content of Miller's Sin City stories are so farcically violent and fetishistic that their imagery is often well replicated via CG trickery.
The thing that sticks in my craw is that like Speed Racer, the meticulous re-creation of animation and comic book aesthetics through post-production comes off as:
a) A hungry cry for the dead and rotting corpse of American animation, and -
b) An abandonment of in-camera action aesthetics, the best of which have achieved the kinetic thrill of the "comic book" aesthetic through old school analogue techniques like direction, production design, casting and screenwriting - Mad Max, Max Headroom, Escape From New York, the original Robocop and even Batman 1989 - a lot of these belong to the "near future" subgenre of sci-fi which deserves it's own definition article soon, and obviously peaked in the 1980s.
Heavens, the only 1980s film to attempt a literal comic book panel aesthetic was George Romero's Creepshow, which hasn't aged quite as well as I'd thought.
Comic book purity was such a selling point for Sin City that Rodriguez even brought in Frank Miller on set for consultation with actors regarding their characters. When he pushed for Miller's inclusion in directorial credit and the Director's Guild of America denied the honor, Rodriguez actually resigned so that Miller's name could be paired with his!
Then, in the interim between that and The Spirit, Zach Snyder adapts 300 into a mainstream hit using panels as storyboards. My knowledge to what extent and of how much success is nil since I haven't seen the movie or read the comic, but given Snyder's sole directing credit I suspect there's a bit less of the insta-panel-to-film stiltedness. Also allowing more breathing room is the inclusion of more COLOR.
Now given all this, is there any wonder Miller wants try his hand at sole directorial credit? His credentials basically guarantee warm nerd reception as long as he keeps things artificial.
As you'll read in a zillion fluff pieces, Will Eisner's 1940s comic book The Spirit was an unique blend of noir and superhero elements which through brilliant stories, deft humor and amazing art helped solidify Eisner's reputation as one of the masters of the medium. There is a good measure of egotism in Miller's appropriating this beloved material for himself, rather like Peter Jackson's dream project of remaking his all-time favorite film King Kong and we know how that turned out (badly.)
I've only read a couple Spirit stories but Eisner's art and storytelling are simply unforgettable. It's underwhelming that Miller should put it through the technical wringer and emerge with something resembling, well, more Sin City-esque tomfoolery. Either he was offered the property or the guy just has a raging hard-on for black and white noir cartoons populated by archetypes in goofy costumes. Or both.
How lousy does it look when he hops from building to building like fucking The Tick? It doesn't look real OR fake in a cool way.
Compared to any smattering of original Eisner art, the two mediums once again show their greatest strengths in their initial conceptions. Films may benefit from consideration of their aesthetics, but as with Speed Racer the reliance upon blurring the line between live action and animation (computer or otherwise) merely calls attention to the dearth of current excellence in either.
Progress, John Kricfalusi reminds us, was once taken for granted in our culture. Today our mainstream entertainment runs mainly on the fumes of what our ancestors managed to create before political correctness slowly began retarding our imaginations and post-modern relativism began eroding standards of hierarchical artistic competence.
Between adaptations and remakes, as The Onion put it, we may soon be running out of past.
Sunday, April 27, 2008
Getting Forgetting Sarah Marshall
This review contains some spoiled jokes.
The Apatow Reparatory Co. is doing great. The troupe includes many principal writers or actors from the seminal tv series Freaks and Geeks, some of whom do both, as in Seth Rogen's starring in Knocked Up and writing Superbad, or Jason Segel's writing and starring in Forgetting Sarah Marshall. Both were key players on F&G.
Rogen and Segel as seen in Knocked Up
The gradual transition from the grossout-ready premise of Virgin to the conceptual adulthood discomfort of Knocked Up (which includes footage of childbirth) and profane but sensitive coming of age of Superbad has now arrived at a bare-bones romantic comedy plot structure of FSM, which sounds as cliched on paper as you can imagine:
A guy breaks up with his girlfriend and goes to Hawaii to forget her but finds her there with a new boyfriend. Then he meets a new girl.
The marketing campaign doesn't make the film sound any more intriguing, starting with the fake-graffiti posters which convey an extremely inaccurate animosity emanating from Jason Segel, star and writer -
Which are wrong! He's not even mad at her for three-quarters of the film, he's pathetically heartbroken! Oh well. Some Boomer in the marketing department with a 20 year delay from reality must've just caught up to the hipness of the word SUCKS...
As to the trailer, Roger Ebert once sagely observed that trailers represent the film the studio wanted and not necessarily the one that they got. In FSM's case, they wanted a film as simple as the premise.
The premise is annoying simple. What makes the movie very good is the level of characterization given all the supporting cast you'd expect to be two-dimensional, from the stoner surfer to the hunky new lothario boyfriend to the honeymooning Christian couple...
Speaking of Christians, the Apatow brand of comedy has been likened to a more morally responsible and sensitive form of raucous
The raunchy version of cultural conservatism remains seen in FSM. Though the two main couple of the film have sex out of wedlock (why do I feel like CAP Alert all of a sudden?) the story's Hawaiian location is a hotel full of honeymooning couples, one of whom are the aforementioned Christian who have waited until marriage to get it on.
Where the Apatow brand diverts in a big way is not making their inexperience a derisive joke at the characters' expense. Critically, 40 Year Old Virgin didn't either. Instead, there is for instance a joke where the new husband (who vaguely resembles Toxic Avenger's Melvin the Mop Boy) can't feel sexual pleasure despite endless pounding away, making him a total stud to his cute new wife.
Virtually every supporting character crosses paths with one another, and when The Lothario meets up with The Christian, his response to the former virgin's lack of experience is simply "What? Oh, right, right, the God thing" and then he proceeds to give an impromptu graphic lesson in sex positions.
Also of note is Jason Segel's witty stepbrother, a husband and father and whose wife is tricked into a harmless dirty joke of pantomiming oral sex on her spouse. The non-explicit no-hard-feelings vulgarity of this scene nearly encapsulates the Apatow ethos at play from film to film.
We have in this film a 50/50 ratio of married and unmarried people, all of whom are shown to be sexually active and open-minded about it, including Christian dorks. That's a hell of a lot more "progressive" than the manner in which Baby Mama and Juno casually offer single yuppie midwifery and guilt-free adoption as emotionally agreeable and valid alternatives to the formation of (gasp) nuclear families.
Which brings me to the first thing I noticed coming out of the theater, a strange dichotomy to the cultural sensitivity: three of the four leads are Hollywood fucks with lives most people simply cannot relate to. Titular Sarah Marshall is an actress, her new boyfriend The Lothario is a freaking international rock star, and Jason Segel composes music for television, including Sarah's show. Everyone is worried about their careers. The only non-entertainment industry person is Segel's new love interest Mila Kunis, who works at the Hawaiian hotel. She encourages him to follow his dream of mounting a theatrical rock opera, which he certainly couldn't afford to do if not for his prior industry capital.
Would it have been so hard to make the key players non-famous people? There was nothing in the story that couldn't have worked without that detail, even the Rock Opera could've been realized by Segel's character on a smaller budget in less elaborate scale than what we end up seeing in the film.
Who relates to this, outside of people who are in or want to be in the entertainment industries? Steve Carrell's employment at a Best Buy type store in Virgin seems practically proletariat by comparison. Knocked Up's female lead was a TV hostess as well, and the detail was just as irrelevant to the story.
I really am surprised, and hope this doesn't reflect a disconnectedness stemming from the time some F&G kids spent growing up a bit in the world of The Arts - I recently saw 1998's SLC Punk and was surprised to see an 18 year old Segel in the supporting cast.
Anyhow, the next event Apatow production is Pineapple Express, some sort of stoner action comedy hybrid directed by David Gordon Green, of all people...So we'll continue to see the full spectrum of the F&G alumni's cultural outlook, which in spite of some apparent Hollywood out-of-touchedness continues to be more empathic and honest towards the post-Boomer generations' emotional needs and concerns than any of their competitors.
And those emotional needs certainly include a bigger, better weed comedy.
Monday, April 21, 2008
Joe Dante's Inferno at the New Beverly: Gremlins 2
A certain sense of childlike wonder and optimism existed amongst the post-Star Wars baby boomer filmmakers. Steven Spielberg is the most obvious example and the sentimentality of most of his films make me either want to puke or mourn that pulpy premises like Jurassic Park were carried out as children's films instead of halfway gritty fare like Duel or Jaws, my two favorites.
Hey look, someone put the whole movie on the 'tube!
Joe Dante's boomer moviegoing years were spent in the b-movie junk drawer, and as a happy result he became a sort of mutant Spielberg: sentimental but cynical, and unmarred by the temptation of mainstream respectability. Both directors are very much crowd-pleasers, but Dante's relationship with his audience is far more whimsical and mischievous. The only Dante-esque gag in Jurassic Park (and gags are Dante's forte, not Spielberg's) is when Samuel L. Jackson's arm lands on Laura Dern's shoulder. I'd much rather it'd have been Joe Dante's Jurassic Park.
Dante was also a student of horror far more the Spielberg. Duel was a thriller, Jaws was mainstream high-gloss horror adventure and Poltergeist's scary scenes were directed by Tobe Hooper as Steven indulged his fetish for magical old people. Meanwhile, Dante got his start cutting trailers for Roger Corman before directing a parody of Jaws, the junky and funny and gruesome Piranha (being remade in 3-D, oddly.) He followed with another no-nonsense horror genre entry, The Howling. By contrast, Spielberg spent the late 70s escaping the disreputable "horror director" stigma with Close Encounters of the Third Kind, 1941 and Raiders of the Lost Ark.
Then in 1983 their careers crossed paths in the most appropriate of ways: Spielberg chose Dante to direct a horror-oriented segment of The Twilight Zone: The Movie while he himself chose to direct a nauseatingly cute segment about magical old people.
They must have spent a long time discussing classic cartoons, of which Spielberg is a pronounced fan and collector. Dante's love goes a bit further than that, making cartoon logic (and gags, natch) a frequent staple of his films. His Twlight Zone segment is, after all, about an evil boy who turns reality into a cartoon.
He's not an animator-turned-director, but the influence is so strong his films somewhat deserve mention in the same category as his American contemporaries in that directorial subgenre, like Tim Burton, Frank Tashlin, Mike Judge or Savage Steve Holland. Well okay, Looney Tunes: Back In Action was an actual melding of the two mediums, but much as I love Dante I can't bring myself to watch that.
Animation means to invoke life. So what else is good for invoking life into, other than drawings?
Puppets.
Hence the titanic collaboration of Spielberg and Dante, Gremlins. The warm fuzziness of E.T. meets the malicious intent of Dante's monsters. The cartoon anarchy of one director runs rampant in the small town Capra coziness of another. Magnificent.
The most telling detail of their creative pairing is this: Gizmo, the lovable "good" Magwai, was initially to transform into the lead evil Gremlin, Stripe. Spielberg stepped in at the last minute and realized Gizmo was too cute. According to Zach Galligan in his Deadpit Radio interview, one of Dante's creative impetuses for the project was the ol' switcheroo - make the kids fall in love with the cute creature, and Steven Spielberg's name, and then...!
This film and it's sequel had me obsessed from about age 8 to 12, no exaggeration. I have never been and probably will not ever be as in love with any film and it's sequel for the duration and intensity those movies inspired. Which is why I was delighted to see Gremlins 2: The New Batch on the big screen at the FABULOUS New Beverly Cinema last week.
And Dante was there for Q + A! How fucking rad! The New Beverly continues to delight. I didn't know he'd be there, and having learned more or less everything about the Gremlins films that was humanly possible over the years, I couldn't think of a question until afterwards: Were there other voices considered for the talking "Brain Gremlin," besides Tony Randall?
I realized listening to the Q and A that other nerds listen to commentary tracks too. One kid was particularly bad, asking questions specific to information revealed in the DVD commentary of the movie, and then finishing Dante's sentences. Sheesh.
The only significant thought he shared regarding the film which wasn't mentioned on the DVD and couldn't have was - and take this with a grain of salt, it's heavy - that he "made Gremlins 2 to make sure there wouldn't be a Gremlins 3."
Wow. That implies he regarded the production as a hostile action...but it's not hostile, it's a rollicking good time. The context of the comment was the self-parodic nature of the sequel, the deconstructive humor...
....Which ranges from slight:
- Characters point out logic holes in the 3 "rules" of the gremlins
- A "bat gremlin" breaks through a window, leaving the Batman logo
- One gremlin tattoos another with the Warner Brothers logo
- Gremlins often look at the camera
....To snarky, as when Phoebe Cates parodies her famous "Christmas speech" from the first film with a demented equivalent centered around Lincoln's birthday...(Dante shared another story unfit for DVD use regarding that original speech; that Jeffrey Katzenberg kicked his seat during a screening and exclaimed "you sick fuck!")
....To CONCEPTUAL, as when the fourth wall is broken, spectacularly, by momentarily tricking the audience into thinking the film itself has broken in the projector, and then we suddenly see the shadows of gremlins on the white screen making shadow puppets, as if they're in the projector booth. Dante even wanted actual theaters to be rigged with gremlin puppets in the projector booth for when people turned around! Then Hulk Hogan yells at them, and says to us, the audience, "Sorry, folks. Won't happen again." Seriously.
And boy, this is fun to see in a real theater. Brought the house down!
There is also some parodic dialogue at the end of the film regarding the marketability of Gizmo, when the Turner/Trump hybrid "Daniel Clamp" (played flawlessly by John Glover) forsees a whole line of Gizmo merchandise. According to Dante, a movie making fun of it's own marketing was still verboten in 1990. Now it's practically de rigeur.
What all this means is that Dante wasn't trying to make a BAD movie, it's just that he couldn't take the idea of a necessary sequel seriously one iota. If the first film was 50-50 horror and comedy, the second was more like 95-05 in comedy's favor.
All things considered, Gremlins 2 is Joe Dante's best movie. Why?
First of all, a truly witty fantasy/comedy is a rare thing and I hadn't seen one play to an audience so well since seeing Pee-Wee's Big Adventure at the State theater in Ann Arbor, Michigan. With this kind of movie, if you're in for a penny you're in for a pound. Every joke plays at the same tone of humor, and hits its target.
Second, none of the goofy self-parody humor is disruptive. Even as a kid I didn't feel as though the mockery of the first film was berating - it felt more like a fun celebration of the Gremlins mystique. There was even a special video/vcr version of the theater gag, which was delightful.
If there's one film that was primed for nonstop Airplane! style gags, it was the sequel to Gremlins, as if the bar scene from the original were extended into the entire second and third acts. The gags and details fly so fast I even managed to catch a new one: a dentist's office plaque belonging to one "Dr Farb" of the original, Little Shop of Horrors fame.
Thirdly, Dante's bent towards "live action cartoon" filmmaking is the perfect fit for a puppet show. This was 1990, when animatronics and practical makeup effects were at their peak and the tide hadn't yet turned toward CGI, post-....hey, waitaminit, post JURASSIC PARK!
Nearly every scene with a puppet manages to blur the line between reality and the animation of the puppets treats us to pure nonverbal filmic storytelling. So too does the brilliant music of the recently departed Jerry Goldsmith, whose score runs nearly the entire length of the film and helps support that magical, lyrical stream-of-consciousness style.
In summary, the film opens and closes with Chuck Jones animation of Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck and Porky Pig. Welcome to Joe Dante's wildest untethered imagination.
PS. HOLY SHIT, ZACH GALLIGAN HAS A BLOG
Sunday, April 13, 2008
Netflix Doc Double Punch
Super High Me
I always feel guilty seeing a movie like this on the big screen. The production company is "Red Envelope Entertainment," which is Netflix's outfit - basically a guarantee that what you've got is best watched on the computer or TV. There's just no reason to pay extra money to see the non-existent handheld cinematography. This goes double for amateurishly videotaped, hastily edited docu-comedies.
Ahh, docu-comedies. Almost every documentary now is a docu-comedy, post Michael Moore. Of course, this is a pot comedy docu-comedy. So it's okay if you take the sloppiness as a given. Maybe getting stoned first would help.
The pot-specific comedy (all of it) IS funny, though not really as much as Doug Benson's stand-up act on any given day. Benson once had a pretty funny, casual comedians-on-the-movies podcast for a while. The scenes excerpted from his performances were the best by far. Today's alternative stand-up scene is very pot-fueled, West Coast stoner style.
It'll make you laugh, but be warned, the docu-comedy in question contains "serious" moments that bring everything to a screeching halt. Scenes of medical marijuana protesters waving their signs at cops with no warrant to raid their "dispensary."
This is where the Michael Moore influence slips its greasy fingers in. The movie should be funny, or it should be a serious examination of something because the two elements are anathema to each other (unless you're as morally frivolous as Moore.) I've seen this a thousand times in student film documentary shorts - here's the part where we make you laugh, now an awkward shift to the part where you nod your head in seriousness...
What we have is a comedy, shot as a documentary, and since it's a documentary, there has to be some soapboxing. Welp, sorry, my passion for justice hasn't been stirred by handheld footage of well-off suburbanites lazily holding bad signs halfway above their heads and chanting. (Can we acknowledge that chanting has jumped the shark as a force of cultural change, yet?)
Netflix it and fast forward through the parts that try to make you take a movie called "Super High Me" seriously.
A much better disc to Netflix, currently distributed stateside by Red Envelope Entertainment is a documentary one would think to be funny...and is, occasionally...but even also even sadder than you'd expect.
The Great Happiness Space is a peek inside the Japanese world of "host boys," male geishas for girls with the money.
This one of the best documentaries in years!
The boys are in their 20s, mostly long-haired and feathered up like boy band members. They work at a bar, essentially. The women come in to be with these charmers and get charmed into buying more drinks. Like Hooters. There are apparently several hundred of these bars but we only see the one.
The boys also hook. They stand on the sidewalk and chat with each and every little darling they meet. There's a scene where a rookie host boy is told he'll have a month's training, but the director doesn't follow that thread. I think if this were an American film, it would've, because as evidenced by the success of The Game, the males of my post-boomer generation are in an obsessive panic about their lack of manhood.
One host boy says he's whatever the girl wants him to be. Funny, intense, moody, straight-up chivalrous, crazy...whatever. That's what the women are there for, and if/when any woman actually has sex with her favorite host boy crush...that's the last time they'll ever see that host boy. Such is the difference in male/female brain calibration. The host boys are always leading them on, teasing them with the prospect that if they stick around the club long enough, they might fall in love.
Which leads to the most shocking thing about the movie: many if not all of the girls who pay for the company of the host boys have fallen into prostitution to afford it.
Let me repeat that: regular female patrons of charming boys they do not have intercourse with turn to having intercourse with patrons of their own so that they can afford to be charmed.
As much as I think host boy clubs could go over gangbusters anywhere outside Japan, the virtually casual indifference with which the interviewed women discuss how they get the extra money to finance their obsession may be endemic of societies with deep seated misogyny.
Amongst the fascinating character studies, The Great Happiness Space is a unique angle on how profoundly detached and lonely relations between men and women have become.
You must see this movie.
