Day 14: Bride of Frankenstein

"To a new world of gods and monsters."

The sequel. Though naysayers love to treat it as a new and lazy phenomenon, it has existed since the dawn of the arts. Sophocles created two sequels to his biggest success Oedipus Rex. D.W. Griffith created what is widely acknowledged as the first film sequel Fall of a Nation, released less than a year after his 1915 Birth of a Nation. A lot of film buffs point to The Godfather Part II as the legitimization of the sequel, but I think it occurred long before that.

I will grant you that sequels have become too heavily relied on in recent years, but this is hardly a new occurrence. Universal Studios sustained itself on virtually nothing but sequels to its wildly successful monster movies throughout the 1930s, 40s and 50s. Dracula spawned three sequels and a Spanish language  simultaneous release; Creature from the Black Lagoon spawned two sequels; and The Wolf-Man, Mummy and Invisible Man all had four sequels, as did the wildly successful Frankenstein. The first, and best, of all these sequels was 1935's Bride of Frankenstein. It reunited virtually all of the talent behind the 1931 original, director James Whales, stars Boris Karloff & Colin Clive, art director Charles Hall, and producer Carl Laemmle, Jr.

The film opens with a rather strange prologue involving Lord Byron, Percy Shelley & Mary Shelley (Elsa Lanchester, later playing The Bride) sitting around while Lord Byron waxes melodramatically about how he can't believe that a woman was able to conjure up such frightening images as Mary Shelley had with Frankenstein. After a brief recap of the events of the first film, Mary lets them know that this was not the end of the tale and there indeed is more to the story.

We are then transported to the immediate aftermath of the first film where Henry Frankenstein's maid Minnie (Una O'Connor) is mourning the loss of her boss and thanking the Lord for killing the monster. The parents of the girl the monster killed go to see the corpse of the beast for themselves when they find out that, surprise, The Monster (Boris Karloff) isn't really dead, but survived by falling through the rubble of the windmill and into a watery trench below it.

The Monster escapes as the body of Henry (Colin Clive) is brought back to his fiancee Elizabeth (Valerie Hobson). Henry isn't dead however and now they can marry. Late that night a strange visitor by the name of Dr. Pretorius (Ernest Thesiger) comes to call on Dr. Frankenstein and solicits his help in creating a mate for Frankenstein's monster, which Frankenstein not-so-politely declines. Later in the film, Pretorius and The Monster join forces, kidnap Elizabeth, and force Henry to bring The Monster's Bride to life.

The film is gothic horror to the max. The art direction, lighting, and score work together in such a way that it makes for a beautifully composed film. James Whale is one of the first true geniuses behind the camera and is an unsung hero for the countless directors who would mimc his style in the ensuing decades. Karloff's performance as The Monster is significantly more nuanced than it was in the first film. Thanks to some time spent with a blind hermit, he learns some basic vocabulary and is able to exhibit more emotions here than he was previously.

The 800-pound gorilla in the room while I was watching this however was Gene Wilder and Mel Brooks' 1973 classic Young Frankenstein. It began with the character of Minnie upon whom Cloris Leachman very clearly based her character of Frau Blucher. It continued with the blind hermit in the woods, a touching scene in its own right, but it's nearly impossible to keep a straight face when all you can think of is Gene Hackman's brilliant cameo in Young Frankenstein and his immortal line "Wait! Where are you going? I was gonna make espresso." There are many other similarities as well, and I know that Young Frankenstein was a parody, it's just hard to watch the original for what its creators intended it to be when the parody is much more a part of your understanding of the language of a film like this.
Is that unfair of me? Perhaps. As a dad, I love living vicariously through my daughters' first viewings of films I've seen countless times and watching them watch a film for the first time. It's a fact that you can't watch a movie again for the first time, so you bring whatever baggage you have to your viewing and hope that it doesn't interfere.

Bride of Frankenstein is a wonderful film but it doesn't have near the effect on me that I imagine its creators had hoped for. I can never be the little girl in Victor Erice's Spirit of the Beehive, forever haunted by the image of Karloff's monster, because the two things that come to mind are Peter Boyle in Young Frankenstein and Martin Landau's brilliantly delivered diatribe as Bela Lugosi in Ed Wood about how it doesn't take real talent to play Frankenstein. The horror is lost on me, but the mood, atmosphere and brilliant direction can't be lost on anyone. This is gothic filmmaking at its finest.

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Informal Poll

I know I don't have a ton of readers, but I'd like to know something from you guys...

Would you like to see more commercial reviews or more obscure reviews? I've found that reviewing more obscure movies forces people to go out of their way to find them which can be a challenge. More commercial movies however tend to be more middle of the road and it's hard to really critique them. I had a really hard time articulating why I didn't like The Change-Up more and I think it had to do with the fact that it's a perfect example of a Hollywood mainstream movie, it's not personal, it's a movie made by committee to appeal to as large an audience as possible and so it's hard to find a ton of faults with it or to find a lot of things to like about it.

Here are some of the movies I'm thinking about doing, but I fear that nobody will have seen them, making it harder for me to get people to read the reviews...

Alejandro Jodorowsky's El Topo or The Holy Mountain
Jean-Pierre Melville's Le Samourai or Army of Shadows
Gotz Spielmann's Revanche
Victor Sjostrom's The Phantom Carriage
Lucretia Martel's The Headless Woman and The Holy Girl
Pier Paolo Passolini's Mamma Roma, Gospel According to St. Matthew or Salo
Jean Cocteau's Orpheus or La Belle et la Bete
David Gordon Green's George Washington
Brian DePalma's Phantom of the Paradise
Claire Denis' Trouble Every Day or White Material
Errol Morris' Gates of Heaven, Tabloid, or Standard Operating Procedure
Christopher Nolan's Following
Monte Hellmann's Two Lane Blacktop
Terrence Malick's Days of Heaven
Michael Powell's The Red Shoes or Life and Death of Colonel Blimp
Anything by Louis Malle (Au Revoir Les Enfants, Zazie Dans Le Metro, Elevator to the Gallows, Black Moon, Murmur of the Heart, Lucien Lacombe, My Dinner with Andre)
Nicholas Roeg's The Man Who Fell to Earth

Do any of these interest anyone? What other movies could you suggest? I would love to hear from you guys about this! Let me know!

Day 13: THX-1138 Special Edition Director's Cut

"It's a strange life. Cybernetics, genetics, lasers and all those things. I guess I'll never understand any of that stuff."

Directed by George Lucas; Four words that have taken on a new meaning in the last decade. They didn't used to have a negative connotation, but since May, 1999, they're known to draw strong reactions, from eye rolls to aggravated groans to downright aggressiveness. Lucas had taken a hiatus from directing after Star Wars in 1977 and had moved more into producing and development. Then when it came time for him to create the prequels to Star Wars, he stepped back behind the camera, but this time he had the world at his disposal, and he no longer had to deal with adversity or people telling him no, and his myriad flaws as a director showed themselves.

In the late 60s, Lucas was coming out of USC as the wunderkind of his graduating class, and was interested in experimental films and, in particular, Japanese cinema. He took these influences and created his student film Electronic Labyrinth THX 1138 4EB which was told with no dialogue through images and sound. It caught the eye of Francis Ford Coppola who offered to executive produce a feature length version. The result is 1971's THX-1138, a film set in a dystopian future where people are forced to take pills to suppress their emotions in order to be more subservient, better workers and consummate consumers.

LUH (Maggie McOmie) is a worker who has stopped taking her pills and has begun to experience emotion for the first time. She begins swapping out the pills of her mate THX (Robert Duvall) for placebos, unbeknownst to him, so that he can experience the world the way she does. At first it has an adverse effect on him, causing him to lose concentration at work, question his faith and suffer a few meltdowns, but once the medication wears off, he's ready to get frisky with his lady friend. Unfortunately fornication is against the rules of society and they are now fugitives.

This is the essential plot of the film. It goes on to deal with THX being put on trial and being sentenced to be reprogrammed and incarcerated. One of LUH's co-workers SEN (Donald Pleasance) has apparently ratted her out and sent her off to be killed, but he is incarcerated with THX (I'm still not entirely sure why). THX and SEN try to escape, meeting up with SRT (Don Pedro Colley), a hologram, who knows how to get above ground, so this becomes their new goal. THX finds out that LUH was killed and her name was reassigned to a fetus, presumably their child, and with nothing else to keep him below ground, he fights to get above ground, ultimately succeeding.

The film clocks in just shy of 90 minutes but it is just this side of interminable. All the white gave me a headache and the ambient sounds and computer sounds got on my nerves after a while. The performances are fine, about as good can be expected in a Lucas film, they're serving the stylized whims of a director whose idea of directing actors is to just say things like "faster and more intense." It serves his purposes, but I don't really think that any of them are giving what I would call good performances.

One question that I have about the film that's never really addressed is the fact that every actor in the film except for SRT is white, and it's established that SRT is a hologram. All of the holograms that THX and LUH watch on their "television" are also black actors, so why are the whites real people and the blacks holograms? Maybe I'm just reading into this too much, but Lucas' history with stereotyping is well documented enough to raise the question here.

Unlike Death Race 2000, this film has so many commentaries going on that it's hard to understand who Lucas' target is. He attacks religion, consumerism, government, pharmaceuticals, technology, law enforcement, and authority in general. I know that it's not my place to tell George Lucas this, but I feel that without a point of attack, the overall commentary is lessened. If he had just gone after religion, or just gone after government, it would have had a stronger message. It still resonates, and it shows that the things that the rebels of the 70s were rebelling against never really change.

We'll always have those tenets of society to stick our middle fingers out at and comment on. Societal structure doesn't really change. The levels of power and influence of those in charge may increase, but they may also decrease, so any film that rebels against the establishment will always seem prescient. I don't know that it really speaks to George Lucas' talent as a visionary, so to speak. I don't think, and have never really thought that he was one. He's an idea man who has been savvy enough to surround himself with great actualizers and he's made some great films as a result.

When left to his own devices however, the result is a mixed bag at best.

Tomorrow's film will be James Whale's 1935 horror sequel The Bride of Frankenstein with Boris Karloff and Elsa Lanchester.

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Day 12: A Christmas Carol (2009)

"Keep Christmas in your own way and let me keep it in mine."

There has been endless debate about wholly created CGI characters and their viability in first rate motion pictures. Gollum in Lord of the Rings is the widely acknowledged start of their acceptance as a suitable presence in a movie, but like so many other things that occurred in Lord of the Rings, other filmmakers began throwing these characters into their movies, whether they worked, or even belonged there, or not. But as their prominence grew, so too did the discussion of the so-called "uncanny valley." This essentially deals with the fact that they may look like humans to a great extent, but there's something missing that makes them seem eerie and inhuman. Usually it's in the eyes, there's no spark of life visible in their eyes and the characters end up falling victim to the "doll eye" syndrome. All the characteristics are there of a human eye, but there's just something missing.

This really picked up steam with the release of three Robert Zemeckis-directed motion-capture films. It started with 2004's The Polar Express, continued with 2007's Beowulf, and wrapped-up with 2009's A Christmas Carol. Incidentally, all of these films were released theatrically in 3-D, which is yet another source of endless debate among cinephiles, but in animation is usually executed well as the filmmakers are savvy enough to understand that 3-D is about the depth of your scenery more than just having shit fly out of the screen.

I watched A Christmas Carol for the first time the other night (not in 3-D) and I have to say that I enjoyed it. It didn't blow my mind and it certainly isn't the best cinematic telling of Dickens' novel (that distinction belongs to Alastair Sim's 1951 version of Scrooge), but it's faithful enough to the original without being slavishly so, and it has a damn good cast. Jim Carrey plays Scrooge and all three ghosts, and does a serviceable job as Scrooge (he clearly took most if not all of his inspiration from Sim's portrayal), but he's outstanding as The Ghost of Christmas Present in particular, as he's able to cut loose and play jovial, at which he excels.

Gary Oldman plays Bob Cratchit and Jacob Marley (as well as Tiny Tim, although they have a child do the voice) and I don't need to tell you that he brings his A-game to the proceedings, particularly as Marley. The scene where Marley's jaw comes dislodged and he has to hit it from the bottom to speak is not only creepy, it's brilliantly done. Colin Firth is great as Nephew Fred, Bob Hoskins is fantastic as Fezziwig, and Cary Elwes & Robin Wright-Penn are also good in multiple roles.

The real question I'm left with, however, is whether this needed to be animated at all. It seems to have added an unnecessarily expensive element to what could have been a solid, straight-forward adaptation of the story. I guess the debate comes down to, just because the technology exists, does that mean it has to be used. Zemeckis is a director who's always been at the cutting-edge of technological advances. I remember watching Death Becomes Her in the theater and being blown away by the effects. Forrest Gump is obviously another watershed moment, but then he resurrected the same effects in Contact, inserting then-President Bill Clinton into footage, and it made me wonder, would he have done it had he not already pioneered the technique in his last film?

It seems that Image Movers, the digital effects house behind this technology, has gone belly-up, so this is likely to be the last of these films on this scale for a while (shelving the planned adaptation of Yellow Submarine which, for me, was equal parts dreaded and anticipated). I have never been bothered by this "uncanny valley" that appears to be a deal-breaker for so many people. Because it's animation, I accept it as such. Some people seem to want to treat these as live-action films, and therefore expect that the actors look 100% like real people. It's likely not going to happen anytime soon, but who knows? The technology has advanced at such a rapid rate in the last twenty years that there's no telling where we'll be twenty years from now.

A word of warning to parents, this movie is terrifying. I watched it with my five-year old Clementine, and she was genuinely frightened by some scenes. It's PG, but I wouldn't watch it with anyone younger than seven or eight.

Tomorrow's film will be George Lucas' directorial debut THX-1138, the 2004 Director's Cut.

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Day 11: Death Race 2000

"I happen to hold the power of life and death."
"Oh yeah, I happen to hold the clam sauce!"

Roger Corman, while he has never achieved anything along the lines of commercial success, has built a career around churning out close to 400 low-budget exploitation movies that cater to a very specific audience, lovers of schlock. Corman also has an eye for talent behind the camera and has launched the directing careers of no less than James Cameron, Francis Ford Coppola, Ron Howard, Joe Dante, and Peter Bogdonavich.

One of his most famous movies is the 1975 Paul Bartel directed action epic Death Race 2000. Set in a post-apocalyptic America where a trans-continental race is held annually for some, unexplained reason. There's some talk about it being the most popular sporting event in history, but there's no real reason given for the race to occur. Anyway, five racers compete in this race (and why only five, seriously?) The drivers are Matilda the Hun (Roberta Collins) a neo-nazi psycho babe, Calamity Jane (Mary Woronov) a demented cowgirl, Nero the Hero (John Kreese himself, Martin Kove), Machine Gun Joe Viterbo (Sylvester Stallone) and the fan favorite Frankenstein (David Carridine).

There's a social commentary buried in here somewhere, but it's buried so deep that it's hard to tell what they might have been going for. The racers are awarded points for killing people that are on the road, and the point system is based on the victim's gender and age. The race appears to be televised, and there are some peripheral characters that are announcers, commentators and analysts, headed up by your buddy buddy and mine, Junior Bruce (The Real Don Steele, not making that up). There's also a resistance of some sort to The President of The United Providences of America as it's called, and they've planted one of their own as the navigator in Frankenstein's car. There's also lots of smack being talked about the French that reeks of someone's agenda.

Essentially what I'm getting at here is that while filmmakers like George Romero were working social commentary into the horror and sci-fi genres, this film can't be bothered. And I'm not saying that this is a bad thing, I thoroughly enjoyed the movie as just escapist nonsense. However, a movie that goes so far out of its way to put all of these things into play must have been going for something. Later books and movies such as The Running Man would play this sort of thing as a commentary on the voyeur state of entertainment, but this movie doesn't actually stop long enough to form some sort of treatise against such issues.

If you're a fan of cult movies and 70's exploitation shlock, you could do a lot worse than Death Race 2000, and at least it's not trying to act like it's smarter than it is (unlike the 2008 Jason Statham remake which is pure garbage). But if you were able to glean any sort of commentary from this movie, you've got a much sharper eye than me. Let me know in the comments section below!

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Day 10: The Change-Up

"This is called hair gel, or product. To little, you look like a pedophile; Too much, you look Persian."

Like it or not, 2005's Wedding Crashers effectively changed the landscape of the American comedy movie in one crucial way, much like Lord of the Rings changed the landscape of the Amercian fantasy epic. They inflated the established running time and set a new standard for the genre. Comedies used to run no more than 90 minutes and fantasy films used to be two hour affairs. Now comedies run two hours on a regular basis, and three hours is the new standard for the serious, prestige epics. There's a lot to like in Wedding Crashers, but it's bloated at best and downright boring at worst, and that's where most American comedies have lived for the last 6 years.

That film's director David Dobkin has made two movies since then. The horrendous Christmas comedy Fred Claus, run time 116 minutes, and this past summer's The Change-Up, run time 112 minutes. Plainly put, the guy doesn't know how to take a knife to his movies, and man alive do they suffer as a result. There's a pretty good 80 minute comedy buried in both Wedding Crashers and The Change-Up (I challenge you to find anything good buried in Fred Claus). The other problem with The Change-Up is that it's another one of those movies, like 30 Minutes or Less, that wants to have it both ways. It wants to be raunchy, raucous and outrageous, but it also wants you to know that it's got a heart and there's a sweet, sensitive soul buried under all those dick and shit jokes.

Jason Bateman & Ryan Reynolds play best buds who, on a drunken night together, wish for each other's lives while peeing in a fountain. The next morning hip and swinging bachelor Reynolds wakes up in the body of Bateman's straight-laced family man, and vice versa (pun firmly intended). The standard tropes of the body switching sub-genre play out as hijinks ensue. Plainly put, these two are on a collision course to wackiness, and if nothing else, we'll soon find out that there's no lesson that these two can't learn in the course of a montage.

Bateman gets the MVP award in this movie and he clearly relishes the chance to play a complete and total fuck-up in the body of a normal buttoned-down guy. He has played the straight-man for so long that it's easy to see his desire to do a movie like this for no other reason than to play firmly against type. Reynolds is only hindered by his inability to play the straight man as well as Bateman would have. It's not that Reynolds is bad in the movie, he just isn't as comfortable playing the straight man. Leslie Mann is better than this movie deserves as Bateman's wife. She has some good scenes and was given a fairly well written part, but, and I hate to say this, it mainly survives because Dobkin seems to have refused to cut any of her scenes.

The movie never gets better than the first day they spend in each other's bodies. Bateman going into a merger deal as a big time lawyer, dressed like he's been on a yacht all day, is the comedic high point of the movie. Reynolds' lorno (light porno) movie shoot is made great by a cameo from Craig Bierko as that film's Eastern European director. I'm not lying when I say it was his best performance ever. The movie just gets so god-damned repetitive though as we slog through day after day of these two buffoons trying to fumble through one another's lives.

While I wouldn't call the movie a waste of time (it was well worth the $1.20 I paid for the night from Redbox), there are much better movies out there, and I feel as though I wasted valuable time watching this movie, which is also the lesson that these guys learn, so I feel like it's a wash and we're all coming out wiser on the other side of this thing.

Hooray for us!

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Day 9: Bottle Rocket

"I lost my touch, man."
"Did you ever have a touch to lose?"

Wes Anderson is a strange dude. No revelation there, but he's the kind of guy who likes to live in the world of the outcasts and people who, to paraphrase Frank Reynolds, "live on the fringe." To date he has made six films, and to be completely honest, I only loved one immediately (Royal Tenenbaums). The rest had to grow on me. I never disliked any of them, but I was either woefully unprepared to enjoy them, or I needed time to adjust to the world he created. A lot of the dialogue takes time to really catch on and enter your lexicon, but damn if it doesn't. Even Life Aquatic, his most unfairly maligned movie, has some of his best dialogue, which is odd as it's found in his busiest and most overly artificial movie from a visual standpoint. Rushmore became my favorite movie the third time I watched it and remained that way for a number of years. All of this is to say that maybe Wes Anderson is a director who rewards an audience who is willing to revisit his films and languish in their world for a while.

Bottle Rocket is his most straight-forward comedy, but it's hardly straight-forward. It's the only one of his films that doesn't seem to be set in an alternate universe. Being his first feature, I think he found it easier to have a band of outsiders inhabit the real world, but he quickly abandoned this conceit by the time he got to his next feature Rushmore that features a total of two characters that I could buy as real people outside of that universe (Max's father and Luke Wilson's O.R. {they} doctor). Take all of this with a grain of salt though as one of Bottle Rocket's more "real" characters is named Future Man.

Owen Wilson plays Dignan, a small time crook with big time aspirations. Actually, it's unfair to call him a crook as, when the movie opens, he hasn't committed any crimes yet. But he's a dreamer, and he has a 75-year plan that he's following, and it involves his former boss Mr Henry (James Caan). Dignan's best friend is Anthony (Luke Wilson) who has just been released from a mental hospital, and Dignan wants him to come along for the crime spree he's planning. They decide that they need a getaway driver and ask their other friend Bob (Robert Musgrave), a perpetually tormented guy who lives in constant fear of his older brother, the aforementioned Future Man (Andrew Wilson).

They start small, robbing a book store, and then they go on the lam, to lay low while the heat cools down. At least, that's what they convince themselves as there doesn't seem to be any real imminent danger of them being caught. But they hide out in a hotel where Anthony falls in love with a maid who works there named Inez (Lumi Cavazos). After some time laying low, Dignan hooks up with Mr. Henry and tells him about his plans to become a big time criminal. Mr. Henry, being the generous guy that he is, hooks the trio up with some of his "finest" men to aid in their next heist, among them are Rowboat, the narcoleptic Applejack, and Kumar the safecracker. Needless to say, this job is actually a decoy for Mr. Henry to rob Bob's house which is luxurious and full of expensive goods. When the decoy job starts to go wrong, Bob shoots Applejack and a smoke bomb sets off a fire alarm, the guys flee, but Dignan runs back to save Applejack and ends up getting arrested.

It sounds pessimistic, but the movie actually ends on a positive note with Bob and Anthony coming to visit Dignan at prison and tell him about what actually happened. Dignan is too consumed with the fact that, in spite of them being decoys, they had actually pulled off the heist of their dreams. In any other world, these characters would be viewed as sad and delusional, but Anderson has too much love for his characters to present them as anything but hopeless romantics. The entire climactic heist sequence is expertly staged and filmed, and has shades of Anderson's talent for composition that will reveal itself in his later efforts.

Anderson's best collaboration as a writer has always been with Owen Wilson. He's worked with other writing partners (Noah Baumbach twice and Jason Schwartzman & Roman Coppola once), but Wilson has always brought out the best in Anderson, and seems to almost be the voice of this hopeless romanticism (his other collaborators have been far more brutal towards their characters than Wilson was). Martin Scorsese is apparently an unabashed admirer of this film (he wrote a piece about it for Esquire which is included in Criterion's awesome blu-ray of the film) and selected it as his seventh favorite movie of the 90s. It's easy to see why, as Scorsese has always been a great lover of his characters as well, they just live in a far more dangerous and cynical world than Anderson's. While it may not be his most fully formed and realized film, it is certainly a great movie by a great director and shows all of the promise he would later fulfill in much better films.

On a side note, it would be great to have some feedback and/or discussion going. I'm sort of writing these in a bubble at the moment, and would like to know what some of you may think about these reviews and films. Just throwing that out there.

Tomorrow's film will be this past summer's body switching "comedy" The Change-Up with Jason Bateman & Ryan Reynolds.

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Day 8: 30 Minutes or Less

"I just want this fucking day to end!"

The sophomore slump is an interesting phenomenon. It involves an artist who, their first time out of the gate, creates an interesting or innovative album, film or other work of art, and then in their first follow-up, stumbles and fails to live up to that first effort. It has gained more prevalence in the 80s, 90s and 00s as the old studio system used to allow directors the chance to cut their teeth on tv movies or shorts, but as the independent film movement grew, the odds of this happening increased substantially.

The average film director manages to avoid this, as most first efforts tend to be lesser than their subsequent efforts. Some examples of this are P.T. Anderson, Stanley Kubrick, David Fincher, Hal Ashby, the list is endless. Then there are the directors who manage to avoid the sophomore slump. While a much smaller group, they are no less diverse, including The Coen Brothers, Orson Welles, Brad Bird, Quentin Tarantino, Martin Scorsese. Then there are the ones who fall victim to it, and again, it's a diverse group that includes Lars VonTrier, Steven Spielberg, Stephen Soderbergh, Michael Mann, Bryan Singer. As you can see, it doesn't doom a filmmaker to future failure, but all of these directors rebounded quickly, often by their third feature.

I would also add Ruben Fleischer to this group of filmmakers who've fallen victim to the sophomore slump. His first feature was 2009's Zombieland, one of the most original and funny films of the last few years and one that dealt with an almost boring convention (zombie apocalypse) in a new and original way. It didn't hurt that he had a pretty great cast and the most talked about cameo of the decade, but there was clearly talent being exhibited behind the camera and I looked forward to what he might do next. This summer gave us 30 Minutes or Less, his sophomore feature, and while the previews looked promising, it was greeted with disdain from most critics and apathy from audiences. Could it possibly be as bad as all that? I'm here to answer with a resounding yes. 

The premise has potential, two losers need $100,000 to hire a hitman to kill the one loser's dad and get his inheritance, so they strap a bomb to a pizza delivery guy and force him to rob a bank to get them the money. The movie runs 83 minutes, with credits, and has nearly 20 minutes of filler. There's at least 20 minutes of scenes that have no impact on the story and mostly consist of the two losers sitting around, talking. The two losers are played by Danny McBride and Nick Swardson. Swardson has proven with virtually every film he's in that he was better suited to stand-up than acting, and maybe that has to do with not being given a role that plays to his strengths (his character on Reno 911 is one example of him being very good in a role that plays to his strengths).

Danny McBride is another animal altogether. He was very good in his early supporting roles in Tropic Thunder, Pineapple Express, and Hot Rod, but as he began to get put front and center, his considerable weaknesses began to manifest themselves, namely, he just kind of does the same thing over and over again (plays a doofus with a filthy mouth). I like both of these actors, I just wish they would do something else. I don't think I laughed at a single thing they said because it was nothing but a variation on something they'd already said in another movie. 

Jesse Eisenberg plays the pizza delivery guy, and again, here's an actor I usually like, but here he just flounders. First of all, I don't buy him as a loser who would work at a pizza delivery place. It seems he was cast because the director had worked with him before and could therefore rely on him to infuse the character with the required empathy needed when he gets the bomb strapped to him. The problem I had here was that the film wants to have it both ways. It wants you to laugh at how buffoonish and unrealistic the characters are, but then wants you to empathize with them as you realize that they're all just victims of circumstance. I won't say I didn't laugh at all, but I certainly didn't laugh as much as they were trying to make me laugh. 

Comedies, no matter how low-brow, can elicit other emotional reactions from you besides laughter. However, they have to be rooted in reality and truth in order to achieve that, and when they are, they can transcend being a mere comedy and turn into something else. Many directors have achieved that, and Fleischer is one of them. Hopefully years from now, we can look back at this as a misstep in an otherwise brilliant career, but if this is a harbinger of things to come, at least he made one good movie which is more than some directors can say.

Tomorrow I'll review Bottle Rocket, I just got sidetracked by the opportunity to see this movie.

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Day 7: Superstar The Karen Carpenter Story

"Hangin' around, nothing to do but frown, rainy days and Mondays always get me down."

The Carpenters were one of those bands that achieved incredible popularity but were never viewed by mainstream music critics as anything but bland and lame. Karen Carpenter had a phenomenal voice, and as one character says in a fake talking head interview in the film, her voice didn't possess a trace of irony. Director Todd Haynes has built his career around taking risks and experimenting, not just with filmmaking, but with formula. One of his earliest efforts as a director is Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story and it set the stage for his future experimentation. Velvet Goldmine (my favorite film of his) is a glam rock odyssey that follows the same storytelling formula as Citizen Kane. Far From Heaven was a meticulous recreation of Douglas Sirk's melodramas of the 50s and 60s. In 2007 he cast six actors and Richard Gere to play Bob Dylan at various phases of his career in I'm Not There.

With Superstar he tells the story using a myriad techniques from stock footage, narration, fake documentary & most famously, Barbie dolls portraying everyone in the Carpenter family and some characters on the periphery. The film opens with her death and then flashes back to the start of their careers in 1970. Siblings Richard and Karen Carpenter cultivated a wholesome image that ran counter to most popular music at that time and reaped some pretty successful dividends as a result. Karen struggles with body image almost immediately, some of it attributed to a reviewer calling her chubby.

The film is constantly reminding us that anorexia is a very serious disease and one that is virtually impossible to "cure." Haynes places Karen's story squarely in the center of an examination of societal and cultural pressures on women to conform to a certain body image. Of course the biggest stroke of genius in this is using Barbie dolls as the "actors" as they are the very epitome of the body image that girls are forced by society to grow up trying to live up to. The film should be seen for it's contextualizing of the disease in the framework of a musical biopic, and should be required viewing for anyone raising a daughter in this country.

The big issue with the film not being able to be seen has to do with the surviving member of The Carpenters, Karen's brother Richard. Now the official story that I've always heard about why this film couldn't be released is because of its use of The Carpenters' original recordings, but the more obvious reason once you view the film is its portrayal of everyone around Karen. Richard is portrayed as a control freak and a closeted homosexual, and her parents are portrayed as abusive, mentally and physically (there is a cutaway shot used frequently of Karen's dad spanking her).

This film set the stage for the rest of Haynes' career and all of the traces of his genius are on full display here. He even paid homage to this film in Velvet Goldmine by having Curt Wild and Brian Slade's confession of feelings for one another be portrayed by two girls playing with Barbie dolls that looked like the characters. It's always interesting to revisit a filmmaker's earliest works and see if any of that spark existed back then (I defy you to get through Killer's Kiss and tell me that Stanley Kubrick would become the greatest filmmaker that ever lived). Todd Haynes however is that rare filmmaker that, while he may not have had the resources at his disposal he would later have, still managed to make films that were true to films he's always been making.

You may have a hard time tracking down a copy of this film, but I recommend that you see it if you can (I have a copy if you live near me). Tomorrow's film will be Wes Anderson's 1995 first feature Bottle Rocket with Owen & Luke Wilson and James Caan.

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Day 6: Blow Out

"You know, the only trouble I've ever gotten into was when I was too careful."

Brian DePalma is the most unfairly maligned filmmaker of the last 30 years, perhaps ever. The two things that his detractors love lording over his head are that he openly apes Hitchcock and that he's a misogynist. On the surface, these might be valid points, but DePalma is far too smart a filmmaker to actually engage in either of those two things. The guy is an unabashed admirer of Hitchcock, but I've never seen him do anything but pay homage to him (i.e. killing off his big female star forty minutes into Dressed to Kill the way Hitch did with Janet Leigh in Psycho). People don't give Tarantino shit for aping Leone, just as they don't give Wes Anderson shit for aping Bunuel. Homage is a different animal from straight rip-off, and maybe it's just the sheer number of Hitchcock homages DePalma has made in his career that earns him this level of disdain (though it's only actually four by my count Sisters, Obsession, Body Double and Dressed to Kill).

The misogyny issue is a separate one and, by my own admission, one I didn't necessarily see until it was pointed out to me. I'm not sure if that speaks more to my ignorance or to people's willingness to see whatever their agenda is represented anywhere that they can grasp at it. DePalma himself has addressed it to some extent in interviews and I tend to see his point of view and I accept the validity of it. He has said that putting females in danger is more visceral for an audience in a suspense film. Essentially, if a man is in peril, the audience will rest easier than if it's a female. It makes sense as it plays into our primal instincts as viewers, and while some may consider it misogyny, I think it's more a cinematic convention than anything else.

So, where does Blow Out fit in to all of this? It doesn't really, which makes that first paragraph all the more puzzling I guess. While Phantom of the Paradise is far and away my favorite DePalma film, Blow Out is inarguably his best work. This is a director and writer at the top of his game, working with actors and technicians at the top of theirs, and the result is a film that is both terrifically suspenseful and endlessly re-watchable. John Travolta, in the absolute pinnacle of his early career, plays Jack Terry, a foley artist working on small budget slasher movies in Philadelphia. The opening scene is more or less a bold and brash middle finger extended by DePalma at his detractors. The film opens with some of the more gratuitous nudity and sexual content of his career, but it's a classic bait-and-switch as we find out we're actually watching one of the low budget movies that Terry is creating the sound for. His director is angry with him, not just about the scream of one of the damsels in distress, but about the wind effect, saying it's the same wind effect he's heard a hundred times before. He directs Terry to go out and record new wind, setting the plot in motion.

While recording the wind effects, Terry also captures a car crash which happens mere feet from him. Inside the car is Governor McRyan (a man potentially on his way to the White House we're told in an early scene) and Sally, a prostitute (Nancy Allen). Jack manages to rescue Sally, but not the governor and it's only at the hospital that he discovers that the governor was the dead man he saw in the car. In talking to the police, he clearly states that while recording the sound of the accident, he heard two noises, the first being a gun shot and the second being the blow out of the tire, leading him to be convinced that this was not a mere accident, but an assassination. He is silenced by the governor's campaign manager before leaving the hospital with Sally, only adding to his fears that there was more to this than at first seemed to be.

The film kicks into high gear as Jack becomes obsessed with the events, re-listening to his audio, re-tracing his steps in his mind, even using published photographs of the accident to create an animated re-enactment. The film essentially deals with one man's obsession leading to his own undoing (and the undoing, however unintentional, of those he's surrounding himself with). The deeper Jack gets into the conspiracy, the more paranoid and irrational he becomes and the more he unravels.

The craft on display here from DePalma is second to none. His use of split screen is once again used to good effect, but it's his use of split-diopter that is truly exceptional. A split-diopter is literally a lens put on the camera with two planes of focus allowing us to see two things simultaneously, and have them both be fully in focus. For example at the beginning of the film, we're watching a tv on one side of the screen that's broadcasting a news program giving us information about the governor, while also watching jack walking around his sound room, annexing sound clips. DePalma comes from the oldest of old school styles of storytelling that goes back to Chekhov and Ibsen, where if you introduce a gun in act one, someone better use it by act three. Using camera tricks like this allows him to be economical in his use of this storytelling technique, and also gives the film it's aforementioned endless re-watchability.

For another example of this, just look at the scene where John Lithgow, as a hired fixer, is digging in his trunk for a tire to replace the one that, presumably, he shot out on the governor's car. If you look closely when he opens the trunk, you'll see a box labeled "magnetic tape eraser." He's also on the bridge when Jack jumps in to the lake to save Sally in the car (watch it again, he's there... twice).
The last remarkable scene I want to mention is the scene where Jack is in his editing room and realizes that all of his tapes have been erased. The camera is positioned in the center of the room and then begins a disorienting spin around the room. The scene is unrelenting and the speed increases with seemingly every pass through the room. It's incredibly effective and really puts you in the moment with Jack.

If you haven't seen Blow Out, I'm sorry for spoiling so much of it, but you need to watch it and just soak it in. If you've seen it before, I implore you to watch it again as DePalma puts on a clinic in technique and it's worth two hours of your time, even if you've seen it before. Criterion put out an incredible edition of it last year on both dvd and blu-ray and it's a gorgeous transfer.

I've heard people who like DePalma refer to themselves as apologists. I don't think that's necessary. He is one of the greats, and I mean that sincerely. You need look no further than Blow Out for at least a dozen examples of why he's a great filmmaker, and if you're like me, it makes his late career fizzle that much sadder. Thankfully we live in an age where we can get a filmmaker's entire filmography on dvd and we can relive their great works alongside their lesser works. With DePalma, any discussion of his great films has to begin with Blow Out, and that's why I started here. I'll be looking at at least six more of his films over the next year, but I thought it best to start at the top. I look forward to hearing your thoughts and comments both on this film and DePalma in general.

Tomorrow's film will be Todd Haynes' 1989 film Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story which he shot using Barbie dolls.

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