Justin Robinson's Blog, page 22

Yakmala: Passion Play

Megan Fox, trying to fart silently.

Who doesn’t love a good comeback story? Mickey Rourke, his career and appearance utterly destroyed by a disastrous combination of substance abuse, botched plastic surgery, and an ill-advised foray into combat sports, emerges by utilizing the scars of those very demons to craft one of the great performances of the modern age in The Wrestler. After that, he figured he was pretty much done and decided to sleepwalk through a bizarre little indie called Passion Play. Based on the script, I’m not sure I blame him.

Tagline: Love is stronger than death

More Accurate Tagline: Thank goodness, helpful Indians!

Guilty Party: Writer/Director Mitch Glazer. He has said this is exactly the movie he wanted to make. Bad news, Mitch. You wanted to make a stinker.

Synopsis: Nate Poole (Mickey Rourke in the Mickey Rourkiest role of his career) is a sadsack ex-junkie widower who plays jazz trumpet at a low-rent burlesque club. One evening, after a set at the Dream Lounge, he gets jumped by a goon (former UFC light heavyweight champ Chuck Liddell) and driven out into the desert to be executed. Right before the goon pulls the trigger, some helpful Indians, armed with bolt-action rifles and dressed in all-white versions of what a clueless guy might think of as “Indian costumes” shoot the goon and jog away.

In the most subtle allusion of the film, Nate wanders the desert, eventually happening upon a carnival. The star attraction here is Lily Luster (Megan Fox) a woman with a pair of wings coming from her shoulders. Is she an angel? A freak? Who cares, right? The fact that her wings look exactly like those of the hawk that Nate was staring at right before the Indians shot the goon is in no way foreshadowing. Anyway, she’s an angel woman who can float a little when the wind is just right. Nate is interested in her ostensibly because she has wings and not because she looks like Megan Fox. Honest. Lily, for her part, is intensely self-loathing, and in a scene that overtaxes Fox’s meager acting reserves, yanks feathers from her wings and sobs.

Nate and Lily flee the freakshow, and Nate instantly reveals himself as just as bad as everyone else. He calls up burlesque dancer Harriet (Kelly Lynch) and tells her to set up a meeting with gangster Happy Shannon (Bill Murray). Nate fucked Happy’s wife (hence the execution in the beginning), and now wants to go into business with him by putting Lily on exhibit.

Nate and Happy come to a deal. Nate, meanwhile, seduces Lily and in the afterglow, decides to tell her all about his dead wife. See, she did heroin because he did, and now she’s dead. Lily cries, presumably because if you just finished having sex with someone and they start talking about an ex, it’s pretty clear not a single fuck was given apart from the literal one.

Happy shows up the next morning, reveals that Nate was selling Lily out. She makes Happy promise not to kill Nate, which Happy agrees to, as long as Lily comes with him. Harriet, because she lives a thankless life, nurses Nate back to health so he can go stalk Lily some more. Things don’t go well, and Nate is reduced to selling his trumpet for smack. He refuses to sell the mouthpiece, which is odd, because a trumpet without a mouthpiece is pretty much just a funny-shaped bludgeon.

At the end of his rope, Nate suddenly gets the perfect piece of information from a character who was only vaguely mentioned once (and the way he was mentioned made him sound made-up). This information is that there’s a club, owned by Happy, where he shows off a woman with real wings. Nate, knowing when the plot hammer is hitting him over the head, rushes off to save Lily.

He finds her standing topless in a glass box for the amusement of a bunch of rich people. And seriously, this is all she does. She’s not even moving. Even if you think Megan Fox is the hottest woman ever, and anything with wings is incredible, that’s gotta get boring after a minute, minute and a half tops. Anyway, Nate breaks the glass and the two of them flee to the roof where Happy and his goons corner them. It looks so much like the rooftop set from The Room, I expected Tommy Wiseau to come charging out with a water bottle complaining about how he never hit her. Nate flings himself off the roof in order to force Lily to fly and she does, grabbing him and whisking him up into the sky. There’s more, but I’m saving it for the Transcendent Moment.

Life-Changing Subtext: Make sure to abduct any carny folk you happen across because one might be an angel.

Defining Quote: Nate: “Since when does normal win a goddamn prize?” Fun fact: weird doesn’t automatically get one either.

Standout Performance: You would think this should go to Mickey Rourke, since Passion Play is right during his Wrestler-renaissance. Rourke drifts through the film, never committing to any line, moment, or even facial expression. I’m giving this to Rhys Ifans, who plays the lead carny with the proper scenery-chewing gusto that the film script implicitly demands. What lead carny, you ask, since there is no such animal mentioned in the synopsis? And there’s another problem. This film prominently features an evil lead carny played by Rhys Ifans whose part is inconsequential enough to lift right out.

What’s Wrong: Megan Fox arrived at her stardom in the precise way that Rourke left his: through extensive plastic surgery. She has been sculpted into the biological equivalent of a real doll, and never really bothered to learn about this whole “acting” thing (although in her defense, she hasn’t had to and acting is hard). Beyond that, because of her appearance as a meticulously designed vector for the male gaze, when Rourke’s character wants to save her, it never plays as anything other than a creepy drifter trying to take advantage of a sheltered young woman. In many scenes, the bizarre appearance of the two leads implies a much stranger film about a pair of living wax statues, one of which was left all day in a hot car, trying to make a go of it in this strange noir world. Glazer would have been much better served casting someone who, while still attractive, has a more quirky, less terrifying sex clone element to her beauty. Also, someone who can act at least a little.

Flash of Competence: The movie has its share of pretty shots.

Best Scenes: The central curse of Passion Play is that it never commits to its own ridiculousness. It treats even its strangest elements with more of an indifferent shrug as though the movie itself is embarrassed of its own earnestness. Except for one glorious scene in which the carnies, having caught Nate sleazing around Lily’s Airstream, shake him down under the big top. While Rhys Ifans howls in rage, Rourke is encircled with the various weirdos until the snake lady, the fucking snake lady, comes after him with a rattler. It looks like curtains for Nate until Lily plows into the tent behind the wheel of a battered pickup truck. It’s a lively spot in an otherwise deadly dull movie.

As inert as the vast majority of the film is, it is also the least subtle thing this side of an indecent exposure charge. Every frame is filled with the kind of ham-handed allusions that bad writers use to appear deep. My favorite occurs when Nate asks for a bite of the apple Lily is chowing down on. Glazer might as well have popped up from the corner of the frame and screamed, “THUS SIN ENTERED THE WORLD!”

At one point, Lily sneaks off to a plastic surgeon to get her wings chopped off. Nate arrives just in time, and the resulting scene is… well, if the lack of subtlety in most scenes is a hammer, this scene is Mjolnir. Lily wants to be like “the other girls,” (a line that’s even more disingenuous coming from Fox’s balloon-like lips) while Nate loudly rants against normality (spitting out the Defining Quote in the process). My favorite moment is when the plastic surgeon bitterly refers to Lily as a freak. It’s not even treated as unusual when he does it, either. Great bedside manner there, pal.

Transcendent Moment: Many Yakmala films reveal the extent of the contempt for their audience in the final frame, and Passion Play is no exception. As Lily flies Nate up into the sky, they pass over the place where Nate was to be executed. Only Nate’s body lies down there, dead. See, Lily was an angel this whole time, but only now can she haul Nate up to heaven. I have to ask: if it’s that much work to get this asshole to redeem himself, does he really deserve it? Oh, who cares, it was all a dream.

I think you stepped in something.

Passion Play is a passion project gone horribly awry. Had Glazer been delightfully foreign and a Hollywood outsider, the film might be a modern anti-classic. As it stands, it will probably be mercifully forgotten.

Filed under: Projected Pixels and Emulsion, Yakmala! Tagged: bill murray, gone horribly awry, Megan Fox, Mickey Rourke, Passion Play, Yakmala!

Girls, Guns, and G-Strings: Hard Hunted

Donna & Nicole vs. Gyrocopter

Hard Hunted (1992)

Cast: Dona Speir, Roberta Vasquez, Bruce Penhall, Cynthia Brimhall, and Michael Shane all return as their veteran agent characters Donna Hamilton, Nicole Justin, Bruce Christian, Edy Stark, and Shane Abilene. You know them, you love maybe one or two of them.

RJ Moore plays a character named Kane, and it took me awhile to figure out that this is intended to be the very same Kane from Do or Die. You remember him, the one played by Pat Morita, who was always grinding on much younger girlfriend Silk (Carolyn Liu, reprising the role). Only instead of being an old and Japanese, he’s young and British. And it’s never mentioned. I’m going to assume he got a ton of plastic surgery and drank a couple gallons of unicorn blood.

Lucas has also been recast. The role is now played by alleged actor and registered sex offender lookalike Tony Peck.

Sidaris regulars Al Leong and Rodrigo Obregon return, playing brand new characters Raven and Pico. Richard Cansino and Chu Chu Malave are also back, once again playing a pair of dimwitted assassins, this time named Wiley and Coyote. Yeah, I’m sorry too. I initially though these were the same characters as in previous entries Guns and Do or Die, but then I remembered Bruce and Nicole killed them in a ladies room in the former. So I guess they’re like clones or something. Useless asshole clones.

Non-Actor Quotient: Because Sidaris hasn’t singled them out in the credits as such since Malibu Express, I’m going to stop as well. Actually, I’m going to expand this to include all of the various kinds of non-actors Sidaris was (in)famous for putting in his movies. Speir, Vasquez, and Brimhall are the only Playmates in this installment, but there are so many other oddballs lurking about.

Ava Cadell is, no shit, a Hungarian-born “loveologist” with seven books under her belt. In Do or Die, she played one of the ill-fated assassins. Confusingly, her partner Skip (played by Skip Ward — Andy Sidaris was not good with names) plays a completely different character also named Skip. This time, Ava is a good guy agent whose cover as a radio sex therapist lets her deliver poorly-coded messages to our heroes.

Buzzy Kerbox, whose name suggests his parents thought he was some kind of mail delivery system, was a professional surfer and male model. Here he plays double-agent Cole with all the nuance you would expect from a professional surfer and male model.

And lastly, Becky Mullen plays Becky, a woman whose only job is to stand in the background of shots wearing a variety of bikinis. She’s joined by Shane, who spends most of the movie hammocked up. There’s some kind of romance brewing between the two, and there’s even a background breakup. It’s like that one Community where Abed delivers a baby. Anyway, Mullen was part of the Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling, which was a thing that happened and we all have to live with that.

IMDB Plot Keywords: lust, nude girl, nude, sequel, scantily clad female

IMDB User Lists Appearing On: Movies I want to see only because of erotic scenes, My movies, Your Worst Choice Movies 1990-1999, My Grindhouse, Owned Movies on DVD

Synopsis: We open on a yacht where the newly young and Caucasian Kane has a threeway with girlfriend Silk and this new lady we find out later is fellow agent Mika. It’s pretty risqué girl-on-girl stuff for the early ‘90s, by which I mean at one point Silk kisses Mika on the cheek. Later on, Kane gets a Jade Buddha as a gift from his friends in China and declares it the most valuable artifact in the world. Mika steals it out of the safe and gets a ride back to land from windsurfer Cole.

Mika panics that her cover’s been blown and… did she not realize that would happen when Kane finds that his safe’s been blown open, the Jade Buddha has been stolen, and Mika’s gone? What was her play here? Anyway, she gets some guidance over the radio from Ava, sending her to Arizona to meet up with Donna and Nicole.

At a briefing in DC, Lucas reveals that the Jade Buddha contains the Klystron Relay which is basically a trigger for a nuke. This is super important. Once, Lucas was content to merely bother Kane… now he has to shut him down!

Cole returns to the yacht, revealing that he’s a double agent. Okay, then why did he get Mika to the airport? Why not just not show up? Or tell Kane that Mika was plotting against him? I probably shouldn’t be picking out logic gaps in early ‘90s spank material, but I am what I am. Cole reveals that Mika’s in Arizona, and Kane has an incredible response. “I have a contact in Arizona. He’s reliable. He’s Asian.”

That reliable Asian contact is Al Leong, the henchman from every ‘80s movie ever. Here he plays Raven, a guy in a rising sun headband who gets around in what looks like a gyrocopter covered in stealth panels. He zips over and kills Mika right as she finds Donna and Nicole’s campsite. They get the Buddha and escape in a dune buggy. Their plan? Get back to homebase, which is Molokai, Hawaii. Why even go to Arizona if they’re just going right back? Maybe Sidaris wanted a paid trip to Sedona.

That’s Raven on the left.

As Donna and Nicole land, Kane’s men are waiting for them. Ava’s “coded” messages are so transparent, they’re lucky the entire surviving rogue’s gallery isn’t waiting, including that weird guy who lives on the island. After a shootout, the bad guys succeed in tasing Donna and throwing her on a plane. At some point during the flight, they wake Donna up and Kane (over the radio) informs her that she’s going to be thrown out of the plane. And then Donna does something fucking awesome. She kicks one guy’s ass and throws him out of the plane, grabs a parachute and a grenade, pulls the pin, drops it at the pilot’s feet and jumps. The plane explodes.

That. Was. Rad.

That’s the limit on coolness, as she lands on an island, headfirst onto a rock. A group of survivalists led by eyepatched Pico finds her unconscious body. When Donna finally comes to, she has amnesia. Only she seems to have forgotten how to talk as well. It’s weird. Cole arrives on the island to negotiate for Donna and the Jade Buddha still in her possession.

Somehow Nicole and Bruce know which island Donna is on and fly there as part of a rescue mission. They kill all of Pico’s guys, but Cole escapes on a jetski with Donna. He then uses her amnesia to commit rape by fraud. It’s creepy and wrong. Fortunately, Donna has her radio on afterwards, and it’s tuned to K-SXY and Ava’s show. The ridiculously obvious “codes” remind Donna of who she is and she goes full Voorhees on him, by which I mean she stabs him to death with a fucking machete. Do not fuck with Donna.

Donna reunites with Nicole and Bruce right as Raven shows up in his gyrocopter. Raven manages to get the Jade Buddha, but Donna is back in full badass mode and shoots his copter out of the goddamn sky. Kane gets away, though not with the Klystron Relay. The world is safe once again!

Yakmala? The movie more or less works as it’s intended to, which I believe is as an action movie first and a softcore nudie flick second. Granted, it’s not very good at either one, but sadly lacks the spark of insanity apparent in the best Yakmala films.

Filed under: Projected Pixels and Emulsion Tagged: Al Leong, Andy Sidaris, continuity only happens to other people, dona speir, G-Strings, Girls, guns, recasting, Roberta Vasquez

Lifetime Theater: Flowers in the Attic

I first became aware of VC Andrews in elementary school. It seemed like all at once, every one of the smarter girls in my class was clutching a paperback adorned with vines twining around a circular portrait of a sad blonde. I got vague descriptions of the plot from my friends (I suspect some of the vagueness was due to embarrassment over the racier elements in the story) and at the time, I couldn’t understand how anyone would be interested in reading a story like that. Granted, at the time I couldn’t understand how anyone would want to read a story that didn’t have galactic wars, cannibal clowns, or sword murder either, so maybe I wasn’t the best judge. I haven’t read any of Andrews’s books, but when an adaptation of her signature work Flowers in the Attic appeared as a Lifetime movie starring Heather Graham, Mad Men’s Kiernan Shipka, and Ellen Fucking Burstyn, you know I recorded that bad boy.

Help! This attic is fucking tiny!

Flowers in the Attic is a southern gothic potboiler about innovative childcare, recessive genes, and the importance of using birth control during bouts of incest. The Dollangangers are the perfect family. That name instantly sounded made up to me, and to the movie’s (and I later learned the book’s) credit, that turned out to be the case. These people are so goddamn Aryan Hitler pops wood from beyond the grave at the sight of them. There’s dad Chris, mom Corrine (Graham), son Chris Jr., daughter Cathy (Shipka), and fraternal twins Cory and Carrie. Isn’t that cute? Chris Sr. gets killed in a car accident, and fragile Corrine decides she has no way to support her kids and instead of getting a job, reveals that her family is spectacularly wealthy. They’re all going to live with the grandparents in a giant haunted house in Virginia.

Shit gets weird pretty much as soon as they arrive at stately Foxworth Hall. Grandma (Burstyn) locks the kids up in a bedroom (that features a staircase into the titular attic), and the children are expected to be quiet, hide, and never reveal to anyone that they’re living there. Meanwhile, Corrine will try to get in good with her dying father and thus be written back into the will. The reason she was written out, and why grandma both hates the kids and seems to have an unhealthy fixation on incest, is a secret that another movie might have held onto for a crucial third act twist. Flowers in the Attic spills its juiciest, pulpiest secret on the first night: Corrine and Chris Sr. were blood relatives, with Chris a young half-brother to Corrine’s father. All four children are the product of incest, and grandma is damn sure that shit is genetic. She turns out to be kinda right.

What was supposed to be a week stretches into several long years of imprisonment. Corrine’s visits to the attic grow more and more infrequent, and in one of the funnier scenes casually mentions she got remarried and the reason she hasn’t been around was that she was honeymooning in Paris. Chris and Cathy undergo puberty, and Chris starts walking around with what I can only describe as the “please-don’t-let-me-fuck-my-sister face.” It’s not enough, and eventually, he does in fact fuck his sister. Corrine, now fully over the motherhood thing, tries to poison the kids (succeeding only in killing Cory and Cory’s adorable pet mouse). This is a bridge too far for the surviving children, and using a key made out of wood (no, really), they break out, steal a bunch of shit, and escape on a train to Florida. Chances are because only Florida is insane enough to believe what just happened to them.

“The Incest State” didn’t test well with focus groups.

After watching this, I read the synopses of not only the book, but also the series that followed. I came to a simple conclusion: Holy shit, you guys, this stuff is bananas. Flowers in the Attic seems like it belongs in the operatic hyper-reality of any pulpy southern gothic, but beginning with its follow-up Petals in the Wind the brake lines of this particular plot train are severed, and it goes careening hilariously off the rails. I understand why they’re so popular, especially amongst girls: they scandalous enough to make younger readers feel grown up and the plot is crazy in a way that will only trip the critical circuits of adults. Plus, I have it on good authority, that they’re reasonably well-written. The plot for the Lifetime adaptation is slimmed down of necessity, there was a single change that leapt out at me, and that was the rape scene.

See, Flowers in the Attic came out in 1979, and our understanding of rape was a great deal more barbaric back then. Hell, every time a Republican politician opens his ignorant cakehole about the subject (almost always unprompted), he reveals that attitudes are not much better, so maybe I should cool it on the temporal superiority. In the book, Chris rapes Cathy, though Andrews tries to justify it with the non-logic “she could have stopped it had she wanted to.” In the one good decision the Lifetime network made, they decided to make the sex consensual. It’s still brother/sister, who are probably also something else due to being the offspring of half-uncle/half-niece, but since my family tree branches, I’m not used to doing this kind of math.

I might be giving the impression that I enjoyed this movie, and that’s not quite right. While the insanity of the plot was admirable, the execution was, well, Lifetime. Director Deborah Chow has done a Zach Braff movie I will never see and an episode of Copper, otherwise known as That Show We Wished Were Better Until Ripper Street Came Out And Now We Don’t Care. Both Burstyn and Shipka are excellent actors normally, the former a deserving Oscar winner, and the latter providing some of the best moments on one of the best shows currently on television. Heather Graham can be at least decent, assuming she’s cast and directed well, though for every Boogie Nights on her CV, there’s a From Hell. Chow doesn’t manage to get much out of any of them, only managing a few woodenly campy exchanges.

And that’s the problem, right there. Flowers in the Attic is a melodrama. This kind of thing works well on the page, as, if the prose is decent, we will automatically read it in the most charitable manner possible. We make the madness work in our minds. But on screen, the director has a choice to make. She either has to play it straight or play to the rafters. The latter is the correct choice, as if you succeed you have Oscar bait, and if you fail, you have high camp. Either way, you’ve got yourself a ballgame. Unfortunately, Chow chose the former, playing this like it’s even slightly normal, the performances pitched too low to support the gonzo dialogue. Melodrama has a simple rule: go big, or go home. Preferably to an attic. To make paper flowers.

So what did we learn? Incest runs in the family. Chris Sr. and Corrine had sex, so their kids were condemned to repeat that sin. Also, if you don’t want two kids to fuck each other, maybe let them out of the house while they’re pubing it up. It’s a bad scene. The weird part about Flowers in the Attic other than its occasionally sunny attitude about incest, is the way it implies more possible relationships that never get consummated. Chris certainly has a strange attachment to his mom (who, in his defense, is Heather Graham, keeping it tight), but the weirdest was an earlier moment with Cathy and Chris Sr. It’s framed as a romantic scene, in which a father gives his daughter what is explicitly described as a Promise Ring. I remember Promise Rings. That Promise was that eventually the genitalia of the two people exchanging the ring would unite in some form of flesh-Voltron (I don’t understand sex). While the movie wants us to believe that the incest was the result of a self-fulfilling prophecy by a crazy old woman, it implies that there might have been even worse evil in store for the Dollanganger kids if dad hadn’t been killed in that car crash.

Filed under: Projected Pixels and Emulsion Tagged: Ellen Burstyn, Flowers in the Attic, Heather Graham, incest, Kiernan Shipka, Lifetime Theater, VC Andrews

Now Fear This: Dark City Director’s Cut

“Which one are we going to see?” I asked my friend Marc as we drove over to the Edwards multiplex in Upland.

“The Matrix,” he said unhelpfully. He must have read the blank look on my face and amended, “Dark City 2.”

“Oh, okay,” I said, some sense of context having been returned to the proceedings. You see, according to Marc, Dark City had three sequels coming out in 1999, all borrowing the gloomy aesthetic, supernatural overtones, and gothic-punk cool so in vogue in the late ‘90s. That night, we saw The Matrix and promptly forgot all about poor old Dark City. It’s tough to explain the reaction to watching Carrie-Ann Moss wirefighting a bunch of Australians through a green-dyed cyberpocalypse. I had never seen anything like it, and like many others in 1999, promptly devoured information on the wuxia genre that inspired The Matrix’s (for me) inventive action sequences. I joked with Marc later about how we used to call it Dark City 2, when that movie has been largely forgotten, and this one instantly became enshrined alongside Star Wars and Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Yet, when I watched The Matrix again for the first time in several years, it seemed hopelessly dated. It wasn’t just the fetishy fashions and the now-stale wire work. The morality of our heroes, which I had glossed over, now seemed monstrous. I could no longer ignore Keanu’s inert performance (and even at the time pretended he was Brandon Lee), or the ridiculous declaration of love in the final moments. Time had eroded away the wonder and laid the flaws bare. I still like The Matrix. I’ll still happily watch it. I’ll still wonder why they never made any sequels, aside from a short movie about Morpheus playing in traffic. But it is no longer the singular work of blindsiding genius that I saw four times in the theater as a broke-ass college student.

I can’t be certain when I first became aware of Dark City’s director’s cut. I read something about how vastly improved it was over the interesting but fatally flawed version released to theaters, and had become intrigued. The movie had wonderful elements, but the story never lived up to the promise of the German Expressionist style married to the modern retropunk aesthetic. Roger Ebert already named the theatrical cut the best film of 1998, but there was always the sense that Dark City could be better. Should be better, in fact. This undersells the director’s cut, which turns a flawed-but-fascinating film into a legitimate masterpiece.

The plot is framed as an amnesiac mystery: our enigmatic hero, John Murdoch (Rufus Sewell), wakes up in a bathtub to find he’s sharing a hotel room with a dead hooker. He gets a panicked phone call from a mysterious man we later learn to be Dr. Daniel Schreber (a pre-Jack Bauer Kiefer Sutherland), telling him that men are coming to kill him. As Murdoch flees the hotel room, he catches sight of a group of sepulchral men in black trenchcoats on his heels.

If it had been Jack Bauer, those trenchcoat guys would have already revealed where the bomb is.

Murdoch escapes into a dystopian cityscape so ominous it makes Gotham City look like Pleasantville, and has to unravel the two questions that face every man at some point in his life: 1) who am I? and 2) did I kill that hooker? All the evidence points to him as a cuckold taking revenge on unfaithful wife Emma (Jennifer Connelly, in the last gasp of her super hot and unruly eyebrow phase). Yet if he is a killer, he’s a soft-hearted one, as he takes the time to rescue a dying goldfish before fleeing the hotel.

He’s pursued by two groups. On one side there are the mysterious Strangers, the aforementioned men in the dark trenchcoats (including recognizable faces to genre fans like Bruce Spence and Richard O’Brien). They are pale as corpses, have bizarre vocal tics, and seem to be capable of some sort of telekinesis. On the other side, Inspector Bumstead (William Hurt) is the homicide detective investigating the murders of six prostitutes, the latest of which is the unfortunate woman in Murdoch’s room. Schreber’s motivations are initially murky: at times he seems aligned with the Strangers, and at others claims to be working in Murdoch’s best interests.

That’s all I plan to say about the plot, since this is a film best appreciated blind. It thrives on its central mysteries, playing out as an extended nightmare. The most important change from the theatrical is the elimination of an opening bit of narration that outlines several of the film’s plot twists. This is obviously the result of a dumbass executive who can’t wrap his brain around one of the most important elements of storytelling, and this demanded a front-loaded explanation. Before the director’s cut, it was common practice to simply mute the film until the close up of the pocketwatch (and this is something I heartily recommend if you can only get your hands on the theatrical version).

Like any well-constructed mystery, Dark City holds up well on repeat viewings. Innocuous dialogue artfully foreshadows twists, and weird moments take on deeper meaning once the layers are stripped bare. Bumstead’s partner, Walenski, initially appears as a raving schizophrenic, but like all Cassandras, his ranting is only understood in retrospect. One of my favorite hints that everything isn’t as it’s presented is a subtle moment when Murdoch goes to Neptune’s Kingdom, a local aquarium. There is only a quick shot of the fish tanks, but every single one of them is an Oscar. The mundanity of the fish and the absence of variety betrays the aquarium as an ersatz creation — who the hell would pay money to see a bunch of Oscars?

Spirals are a relentless symbol throughout the film, usually appearing during scenes of death or imprisonment. We first see them carved into the skin of the dead hooker, then later as compulsive drawings on Walenski’s wall, as Murdoch’s fingerprints (which a Stranger takes as a sign Murdoch is special), Bumstead’s coffee and doodles, Emma’s earrings, and perhaps most tellingly as a rat maze in Schreber’s office. Rats reappear when Bumstead finds a rat trap Walenski put amongst his files, ostensibly for people snooping, thus making the link between rodents and humans explicit. On the brighter side, when Murdoch first looks at his reflection, it’s in a cracked mirror, and later, once he’s accepted his wife, his reflection (with her beside it, as it’s through glass) is whole. Identity is remarkably fluid, the film states, yet we are whole in the eyes of those that love us.

Dark City is a big movie about identity and what role memory plays in that question. The answer the film finds is refreshingly humanist, helping to counterbalance the relentless darkness, both physical and metaphorical. With many entries in Now Fear This, I offer some caveat to enjoying the film I recommend. I point out that I’m mostly looking for fun, overlooked movies to enjoy, which is how I would have pitched the theatrical release. Not so the director’s cut. I am recommending one of the best science fiction films ever made. See it.

Filed under: Projected Pixels and Emulsion Tagged: alex proyas, Dark City, director's cut, jennifer connelly, Now Fear This, rufus sewell, william hurt

Yakmala: Stealth

Gotta love them pretending Jamie Foxx is the lead.

There’s a stereotype about Los Angeles: that everyone here works for the movie industry. That’s ridiculous. But everyone at least knows someone who does. Probably several someones. One of the most successful of my friends has made a damn fine career by supervising CG animators. Early on, she worked on the 2005 Top Gun meets Short Circuit action flick Stealth. In her defense, she had very little to do with the quality of the final product.

Tagline: Fear the Sky

More Accurate Tagline: Fear the Vag

Guilty Party: I brought up my friend’s connection because this is one of the few cases where I can 100% identify the guilty party responsible for a film. In this case, it’s director Rob Cohen, who is probably most famous for directing the most homoerotic of the Fast and the Furious movies, the least homoerotic of which are still so gay Fred Phelps thinks they shouldn’t be allowed to marry. Stealth is not homoerotic. It is, however, absolutely terrified of women. And for those who thought this was unintentional, Cohen often described the villainous aircraft as having “labia.”

Synopsis: In the near future, the Naval Air Force has created a new program to fight terrorism. Is it a police system that’s proven effective? Oh, hell no, it’s three idiots in super advanced jets flying around and shooting missiles at cities. Or as it’s called in Washington, “winning hearts and minds.” There’s Lt. Ben Gannon (Josh Lucas), Lt. Kara Wade (Jessica Biel), and Lt. Black Partner (Jamie Foxx), and they’re a three person squad who’s about to get a fourth member.

The “person” turns out to be the Unmanned Combat Air Vehicle Extreme Deep Invader. What? “Extreme Deep Invader”? Seriously, movie? Ugh. Anyway, “EDI” looks like a different plane than the others so we can tell during dogfights, something Godfrey Ho never bothered to figure out. EDI is also a robot. Captain Cummings (Sam Shepherd), is the officer behind the project and is thus very invested in EDI’s success, though how much is unclear until his third act heel turn. (I will be using the “he” pronoun for EDI because the movie does, although the robot’s assumed gender is one of the more fascinating aspects.)

In their first mission to take out three high-level terrorists in Rangoon (they were gathered there for summer luge lessons, and in the spring planned to make meat helmets), Ben doesn’t trust EDI to do the crazy flying necessary to take out the terrorists without leveling half the city, so he does it himself. On the way home, all three planes are struck by lightning, and since that’s the most reliable way to make an AI sentient, that’s what happens. EDI’s first act? Downloading all the songs on the internet. Yet whenever he plays something, its invariably some terrible early-aughts bullshit like fucking Incubus. You know what? If a robot plays Incubus, that means the fucker has no soul and should be fed into the nearest furnace. Hell, the same could be said for anyone who plays Incubus.

Fuck Incubus is what I’m trying to say here

The heroes get some shore leave and Ben abruptly decides he’s in love with Kara, but the vacation is cut short when they get called in for Mission in Tajikistan (which I spelled correctly the first time, thank you), to destroy some scud launchers and warheads. Once out there, they figure out that if they blow up the warheads, radiation is going to wash down on like a thousand innocent farmers. Ben tries to scrub the mission, but EDI refuses the order and goes to work, all while blaring some crappy alt-metal. Once everything is on fire and radioactive, EDI flies off to kill more shit. Kara inventories EDI’s missiles, saying he has “two Throatrippers, two Shockhammers, and three Blue Ferrets” which makes me think she accidentally checked her World of Warcraft character’s backpack instead.

The good guys hunt for EDI, and Black Partner catches up first. RIP, Black Partner. Kara’s plane was also damaged and ends up crashing over North Korea. Hey, if your aircraft is that fucked up, maybe don’t fly it over the most hilariously terrifying country on the planet? Just sayin’. Anyway, she bails out and survives, and spends the last part of the film running from North Korean soldiers. If Margaret Cho had played Kim Jong-Il in these scenes, this would instantly become the greatest movie ever.

EDI heads off to Russia on a fake mission called Caviar Sweep with Ben in hot pursuit. Russian jets damage EDI, and he and Ben decide to fly home because they’re friends now. They can only make it as far as a private base in Alaska. But oh no, Cummings is in full cover-your-ass mode, and orders Ben to be killed and EDI to be dismantled. Ben gets wise at the last minute, kills some dudes and flies off in EDI. Oh yeah, the AI has a cockpit because fuck you, logic.

EDI says he feels sorry for what happened, and he and Ben fly off to North Korea to rescue Kara. Before they go in, Ben radios HQ and tells them about Cummings, who responds by killing himself. EDI sacrifices himself to save Kara, and she and Ben make it home. After the credits, the camera pans in to the North Korean border where EDI’s memory core sits in a pile of rubble (incidentally, EDI’s brain looks like a dildo, just in case you were worried something might not be sexualized). A red light comes on, threatening a sequel that never happened.

Life-Changing Subtext: Here we go. Here we fucking go.

All right, EDI has a not-coincidental resemblance to a vulva. From the superfluous labia minora on his back to the entirely unnecessary cockpit, which only exists so that the machine has a clitoris, EDI is a vag. This has been confirmed by my friend, so don’t start with all that “dirty mind” bullshit. Yeah, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, but when the goddamn thing has a glans on the end and spits out white stuff, it’s a cock, got it?

Ben Gannon is the alpha male of the squadron, and he instinctively does not trust EDI. These sentiments are echoed by Black Partner, who flat-out states that he does not want another woman on the squad. Ben rationalizes why he doesn’t like EDI (Black Partner never bothers), but it’s pretty clear what they’re frightened of: the overturning of traditional gender roles. Yep. The core of their distrust of EDI (and Black Partner’s of Kara) lies in a woman appropriating the masculine. Specifically, the rock hard phalluses that are missiles. EDI, remember, stands for Extreme Deep Invader, which is what a high schooler names his dick. Yet EDI is a feminine avatar, armed with the masculine, and outperforming actual men in the manly task of war.

The plot doesn’t turn around until Ben climbs inside EDI, taming him by camping out in the fake clitoris that is the cockpit. Also: cockpit. Anyway, by manipulating the machinery around the clit, Ben is able to get EDI to apologize for his previous actions. They penetrate North Korea and rescue Kara (downgraded from a pilot to a damsel in distress, her masculine power safely taken away), and later, EDI sacrifices himself by ramming a North Korean helicopter.

So, ladies, stay where you belong. And don’t get struck by lightning or you’ll attain sentience.

Defining Quote: “If you go down, Cummings wins.” Well, yeah.

Standout Performance: Richard Roxburgh as Keith Orbit, the man who programmed EDI. He’s here as if to prove he will never be in a good movie.

What’s Wrong: Nothing after Kara gets shot down is at all necessary, making the back half drag on for an extra half hour. Also, the subtext is, at best, awful.

Flash of Competence: Ben’s rationalization for why he doesn’t like EDI is a solid moral argument. War is hell, he reasons, and that’s the a good thing, providing a strong incentive not to do it. Granted, he’s ignoring that wars are declared by rich, draft-dodging assholes who never actually get into the fighting, but hey, it’s a nice sentiment.

Best Scenes: The film wallows in its sexual subtext, but occasionally, some detail will break free of subtext and rise, erect and glistening, into actual text. Ben orders a penetration detonation early on, just to prove his manly bonafides. Cummings gives them all popsicles as a reward, which is an excuse for Jessica Biel to eat a popsicle on camera. Cummings at one point mentions his cigars are “rolled on the thighs of mulatto women,” just so Cohen can throw in a little old-timey racism in there.

I should mention that Black Partner is fucking insane. The reason he claims to dislike EDI? Three is a lucky number, while four is unlucky. See, prime numbers are lucky. Three is about Thesis and Antithesis coming together to make Synthesis. Wait, is he pitching a threesome? Also, he should remember that with four we get Parenthesis and therefore organization. See, I can play word games too.

Black Partner’s autism is echoed in the end when Ben says to Kara, “We’re two. Two is a prime number. Which makes it a lucky number. and I think we’re very very lucky.” It’s possible this script was written by Rain Man.

Transcendent Moment: All of the sex imagery reaches apotheosis during the Refueling Scene. EDI, blaring his shitty music, flies up to this fat metal blimp filled with gas, and… well, there’s no delicate way to put this… gets a robo-erection. He tries to jam it into the blimp’s… receptacle… and a feminine voice tells him, “Access denied.” EDI shoots the end off, and it gives him a facial of sweet, sweet fuel. Then he docks anyway, ramming his rod into the blimp’s port. Yep. Robot rape scene. It happened.

I don’t want “robot rape” on my search history.

Stealth could have been a forgettable special effects film cobbled together from the cast-offs of other forgettable films, but Rob Cohen threw his weird issues in there and we have something that, while stupid, is at least interesting.

Filed under: Projected Pixels and Emulsion, Yakmala!

Girls, Guns and G-Strings: Do or Die

Pat Morita has to pay the rent, same as you.

Do or Die (1991)

Cast: Erik Estrada’s back, though this time he’s playing good guy Colonel Richard “Rico” Estevez. There’s no comment about his uncanny resemblance to the Jack of Diamonds, either. And to make matters creepier, he’s romancing Donna this time around.

Dona Speir and Roberta Vasquez return as Donna and Nicole. Mrs. Supermarket hit on the problem with these two within seconds: they’re pretty much the same character. Since she was introduced in Hard Ticket to Hawaii, Donna was the glowering, no-nonsense one, which contrasted well with bubbly, goofy Taryn. Nicole basically has the same personality as Donna does. They’re the Even Couple.

Bruce Penhall, Cynthia Brimhall, William Bumiller, and Michael J. Shane are all back as Bruce Christian, Edy Stark, Lucas, and Shane Abilene respectively. Newcomer Stephanie Schick (better known by her classy sobriquet Pandora Peaks) rounds out the cast (sorry) as new agent Atlanta Lee.

Lastly, Pat Morita plays bad guy Masakana “Kane” Kaneshiro. And yes, he is frequently shirtless and massaging or being massaged by a woman young enough to be his granddaughter’s much younger cousin. It’s upsetting. There might be no more sacrosanct character from my youth than Mr. Miyagi, and this movie has a woman grabbing his dick.

Playmate Quotient: Surprisingly low! Speir, Vasquez, and Brimhall are the only actual Playmates on hand. This doesn’t mean the acting is any better, though.

IMDB Plot Keywords: assassin, sex, cleavage, gun action, director cameo

IMDB User Lists Appearing On: Trash & Treasure, List D, Watchlist + +, trash movie night, Owned Movies on DVD

Synopsis: We open on a luau, because goddamn it, we’re in fucking Hawaii. Donna and Nicole are pulled out of it to meet bad guy Kane. And he’s just doing the Miyagi voice. He’s not even trying here. Anyway, he tells them that he knows they’re government agents, he’s had it with their nonsense, and his dispatching six teams of assassins to kill them. “Why not kill us now?” they wonder aloud, not understanding that maybe that should be an internal monologue. He’s a sportsman, he explains. You need the opportunity to use your skills and resources. Then one of Kane’s thugs slips a tracking device on Donna’s watch without her noticing, and the bad guys leave.

The ladies head home and the greatest thing ever happens. Donna slips into her hot tub (what Mrs. Supermarket and I have referred to as their “thinkin’ tub”) with Nicole, and they’re both topless because they have to be to think. Only Sidaris somehow knew and he totally calls it out when Nicole says, “Don’t you do your best thinking in here?” So, yeah, Donna’s brain is fed through warm chlorinated water absorbed through her nipples. Mystery solved.

Donna calls up agency boss Lucas, and he titles at them that they’re in a “Do or die situation.” I suspect they will be invincible. He tells them to go to Vegas.

The first team of assassins attacks before noon, which only serves to annoy our grouchy heroines. These two guys attack from a helicopter (the same one that appeared in Guns), but fortunately they attended the Imperial Stormtrooper Marksmanship Academy. Donna and Nicole shoot back, and this time it’s Nicole shooting the thing down with a rocket.

Meanwhile, Kane gives a topless massage to a young woman, and I hate everything. The computer beeps, and they get to it in time to see the names Duke/Woody get transported to a box called the Death Zone. This happens every time one of the teams of assassins gets taken out.

The ladies arrive in Vegas and immediately attend a model airplane show, which is just as bizarre as it sounds. They’re just picking up a model helicopter, because of course they are. This gives the second team of assassins time to get on our heroines’ tail. This team consists of a weird bald guy, and a shapely woman in the most ’91 ensemble ever, consisting of a ripped up thong onesie, black leather pants, and a half jacket with shoulder pads. She’s so 1991 she looks like a modern Jim Lee design.

There’s a chase, and Bruce and Rico show up to save the day, which Rico does with some kind of weird hand-held rocket mortar. Hey, it wouldn’t be a Girls, Guns, and G-Strings movie without bizarre weaponry. It’s worth noting here that Bruce is in his black leather vest with no shirt. The good guys leave Vegas.

Ava/Skip get transported to the Death Zone, while Kane mutters about shiatsu.

Lucas picks up Edy, who is doing a Country Western lingerie concert, and I don’t even know how I can describe what she’s wearing. I’m pretty sure she was crocheted into it. Lucas picks her up there, and there’s a jarring cut to a sex scene between the two of them. This is the first time the series has really felt like softcore porn. Even the other sex scenes (which had been vanishing from the series) never felt this tacked on.

Donna, Nicole, Rico, and Bruce arrive in Louisiana, where the girls fly in this weird boat/plane thing while the guys use an SUV. I only bring it up because the boat/plane thing is so goddamn strange and it doesn’t actually factor into the plot.

Anyway, the next two assassins are waiting in a local restaurant, and they’re played by Richard Cansino and Chu Chu Malave, who played the mentally challenged hitmen in the last one. So they’re in their wheelhouse. Lucas and Edy, as well as Shane and new recruit Atlanta show up at the restaurant, and all eight heroes have gathered. That’s right. Eight heroes. Fighting two person assassin teams who can’t figure out that they might have a better chance if they attacked en masse.

The assassins try to poison the heroes, but Nicole susses it out accidentally when she feeds a cat. It’s a “bad dates” moment. The hitmen flee, but the heroes arrest them. Boudreaux/Herbert go in the Death Zone, which implies that Donna coldly executed them offscreen. Probably with a speargun.

The heroes sensibly think that they might have a mole in their midst, since wherever they go the assassins are just waiting for them. They go to a lake house, and Bruce says he’ll keep watch. Just to prove that they’re not too clear on this whole “keeping watch” thing, Nicole and Bruce have sex. Maybe he thinks the next team of assassins are hiding in her vagina?

The next day, the ladies are in a hot tub, but everyone’s tops are on, so they’re not getting any thinking done. Two guys show up on dirt bikes, pull out sniper rifles, and then miss an easy shot on Donna. At this point, it should be abundantly clear that all these assassins suck. Rico takes one of them out with an exploding baseball that the guy actually has to swing at to detonate! Spencer/Dudley go in the Death Zone.

The heroes decide to split up, because with their numbers advantage, it’s just ridiculous. “Synchronize your watches,” says Rico. Edy doesn’t have one, so Donna lends hers, which is where the tracker is. So the next two assassins, in brightly colored wetsuits, attack on jetskis. They are mercilessly killed by Edy and Lucas. Hotdog/Sledge go in the Death Zone (and with names like that, I’d hoped for more).

Shane and Atlanta do it in a convenient outdoor waterfall. One couple to go.

Anyway, Edy accidentally discovers the tracking device on Donna’s loaned watch. Then Kane calls up and suggests that Donna and Nicole meet Lew and Chen (James Lew and Eric Chen returning from both Savage Beach and Guns) and fight it out. I think he’s finally realized that he has no chance against this massive Justice League of Playmates, strippers, bodybuilders, and Erik Estradas.

Donna and Rico have sex in a pool, because they were the last couple.

The next day Donna and Nicole call Kane back and agree to meet the assassins. They go off in the woods, and are attacked by ninjas. The ninjas are the assassins, of course, but I couldn’t help but think that Donna and Nicole live in a world where random ninja attacks happen. The ladies beat the crap out of both ninjas, but instead of killing them, they draw them into a needlessly complex trap involving mannequins, the repurposed tracker, and that model helicopter. Lew/Chen go in the Death Zone. And then the computer hilariously flashes GAME OVER because this was 1991.

We get the final, formal-wear wrap up (and with none of Taryn’s charming kleptomania, either), and Lucas just handwaves that they turned Kane’s girlfriend. What? When? These movies really come off like the breathless ravings of a sexually-precocious eleven-year-old.

Yakmala? Mrs. Supermarket noticed something very important which might tip this film into Yakmala territory. On the computer screen, all the assassins are listed, ready to get thrown into the Death Zone. You know whose names aren’t on that list? Donna and Nicole. Her hypothesis: this was Kane’s way of disposing of the dipshits on his payroll. I’m inclined to agree.

Filed under: Projected Pixels and Emulsion Tagged: Andy Sidaris, boobies, Do or Die, dona speir, Erik Estrada, G-Strings, Girls, guns, Pat Morita, Roberta Vasquez

Lifetime Theater: Playdate

Chances are you had a friend just like mine. Once upon a time, he was a bit of a badass. Not the physical variety, but the intellectual kind. Always ready with an argument, opinion, or rant, and these weren’t the ersatz things that drip from my cakehole when I’ve had one too many, oh no, this shit was researched, footnoted, and probably published in Suburban White Rants Monthly. He invariably gravitated to harder entertainment than others too, probably just for the brownie points involved in dismissing one movie for one incomprehensibly insane and foreign. We were both horror fans, and he was always talking up the scariest, most violent, most outright bizarre of the genre.

And then he had a kid.

Now, he sucks. It’s been a variable slide down the hill into middle age. Certain aspects of his taste have been softened — or else merely revealed by a lack of sleep — while others have been dramatically blunted. This one time badass can no longer watch any movie, let alone horror, that involves a child in danger. If he sees a child in danger, he has to stop the movie and turn to the internet to make sure the kid gets out alive. Yeah. Digest that bullshit for a second. Oh, I know. “I’ll understand when I’m a father.” God, I hope not. Exhibit A: This week’s entry into Lifetime Theater, the 2002 horror Playdate. In the cold open, a young boy plummets to his death.

For those keeping track at home: the Lifetime network is too hardcore for my friend.

Although… wow. That was a little dark, right? In kind of a hilarious way, since Playdate is clearly their attempt to make a horror movie for stay-at-home moms (which puts a lie either to the “You’ll understand when you’re a father” nonsense or casts doubt on Lifetime’s greenlighting process. Frankly, I’ll believe either). The credits show at least a passing familiarity with slasher movies, both the grindhouse cinema of the mid-‘70s to the dark thrillers of the early ‘90s, as the names appear with a sting of buzzing feedback. It sounds like someone snapping photos of a horrifying crime scene in rural Texas, or assembling a crazy person’s journal to a Nine Inch Nails remix. Over this, there’s a reasonably arty chase through a wooded area, while the aforementioned boy (we find out later his name is Shawn Johnson, and no, not that one) flees from an unseen pursuer. The rest of the movie is about the identity of the shape coming after Shawn (who keeps calling to “Billy”).

Because this is one of Those Movies where the trailer guy should be snarling, “They were a perfect family,” we cut to the perfect family. Emily Valentine (Marguerite Moreau, who you remember as the one person from Wet Hot American Summer you don’t remember from anything else) is taking a leave of absence from her medical practice to spend some time with her family. Her husband Brian seems to be a stay-at-home dad to their daughter Olive, though he’s mostly just obsessed with fixing up a vintage muscle car. And like many single-income families living in one of the many far flung Los Angeles suburbs (it looks like Santa Clarita), they have a very large, characterless house.

Single mom Tamara (Abby Brammell, best known to me as the prostitute from The Shield who helps Aceveda with his… trauma) moves in next door with her two boys Billy and Titus. Yeah, Titus. That’s red flag number one. Both of the boys are serious creeps, and in a welcome bit of verisimilitude, Olive is instantly smitten with Billy. Billy’s favorite hobby is endangering Olive and imperiously informing her he saved her life. Someone’s read his Stephenie Meyer! He’s also covered in bruises, insensate to pain, and knows what nightshade is just by looking at it. He’s so obviously a serial killer I knew instantly he wasn’t one. Emily even finds a truly ridiculous amount of anti-psychotics at Tamara’s place, but assumes the T. Moor on the bottle stands for “Tamara.” Spoiler alert: it’s Titus, who spends much of his time staring ominously down from behind the blinds of his second-floor room.

Weird shit starts to pile up, from an unseen assailant pushing Olive off a slide and breaking her arm, to the family dog getting poisoned with Chekhov’s Nightshade, to this guy who shows up to demand his child and is later found hanged. Emily manages to connect the news of the strange man’s suicide with the disappearance of that same guy’s son two years earlier. She puts together that Titus is the one responsible moments too late to save her husband from being crushed under his muscle car. Fortunately for Brian, this is a Lifetime movie, and he survives, spending a little time in a photogenic coma. Tamara then kidnaps Olive while Emily has a showdown with Titus. Leaning heavily on the cliches of the genre, Emily (with some timely assistance from a police detective) disables the young psychopath. The movie ends with Brian coming home from the hospital to find his car all fixed up. Glad they tied up that loose end. I was worried about that car.

Horror movies are something with which I have a bit of a passing familiarity, so I’m especially unforgiving to toothless examples of the genre. There is no more lazy and half-assed horror than those that lean heavily on the fakeout jump scare. You know the one: the music swells, the protagonist peers in the dark, LOUD NOISE… oh, it’s just the cat. One or two are perfectly fine to set the audience on edge, but after that it starts getting a little tedious. By the third act, Playdate feels like Halloween for people too afraid to watch Halloween. It’s the Pat Boone cover of “Ain’t That a Shame,” taking something that would be threatening to a suburban white audience and watering it down to be palatable.

And yet, the film opens with an adult fear so primal it hopelessly defanged a friend of mine. Which leaves me baffled: who the fuck is this thing for? I wrote as recently as my last Lifetime Theater entry that the target audience is a known quantity in this corner of pop culture, and yet Playdate seems to buck that trend. What I’m left with is a colorless version of the serial-killer-next-door story chiefly interesting for answering the question, “Hey, whatever happened to the cute girl from Wet Hot American Summer? No, not Amy Poehler, the other one.”

Filed under: Projected Pixels and Emulsion Tagged: adult fear, Lifetime Theater, Marguerite Moreau, Playdate, serial killer, suburbia

Now Fear This: Cellular

Check out that cast!

Seems like every other day, one of the aggregate sites is posting another think piece about the dire state of the American movie. As stories grow more formulaic, the profits grow larger, and thus there will be no impetus to change until the whole damn thing falls apart. One of these pieces, culled from a screenwriter’s comment on yet a different piece (io9 is basically the Inception of websites), outlined a series of notes that every single executive gives. See, executives aren’t precisely sentient as we understand the term. Their existences are motivated by base fear and ravenous greed, which if you know your biology, is exactly what motivates your standard flatworm. They don’t understand why something is a hit, but they can pinpoint qualities that most hits seem to have, and often seem to zero in on the most head-scratching of reasons to apply to subsequent projects (i.e. Kristen Steward was in Twilight, Twilight was a huge hit, therefore Kristen Stewart is the reason why). One of these notes that this screenwriter hit on was that every film has to have not just high stakes, but the highest. It’s not enough for one guy’s family to be in danger; the fate of the entire universe must hang in the balance for any audience to care. This conveniently edits out relatively successful movies with lesser stakes, like the aforementioned Inception, or that little boat movie Titanic, or Halloween, a film about the worst night of babysitting ever. Or Show-favorite Die Hard, which has morphed into everyone’s favorite Christmas movie. The terrorists in Die Hard were after money (spoiler!), not at the forefront of an alien invasion. “Come on, no one will care that some cop makes up with his wife,” the standard executive would no doubt sneer.

“Or some guy can kill again.” — that executive might have a point with that one.

A thriller without world-shattering stakes just will not get greenlit in the current studio system that banks on a few runaway hits to finance the entire slate. And yes, this is much like anchoring one’s entire offense on Hail Mary plays, and the reason a couple guys who understand the business are predicting an implosion. It’s a shame, because the very best of the genre usually came down to one person’s life or death. There’s a very simple truism: all stakes are high if they’re happening to you, and one of the great tricks of writing is making the person reading/listening/watching react to the protagonist as him- or herself. When we watch Halloween, we identify with Laurie. When we watch Rear Window, we are Jeff. We’re Nick, Sam, and the Continental Op. None of these works put anything on the line greater than a few deaths, but we care. Hell, these are some of the most famous, most profitable, and most influential pieces of art in the genre. In the ‘80s and ‘90s they spawned a number of smaller films, disposable certainly, but no less enjoyable for it. This week’s movie, the 2004 thriller Cellular, is the last of its kind: a tiny film whose only stakes are the survival of a single upper-middle class family.

That middle class family gets kidnapped by a gang of thugs, and the shockingly resourceful matriarch Jessica manages to MacGyver a phone back together after it was pulverized by a sledgehammer. Her call is random, connecting her to the titular cellphone of Ryan, irresponsible beach bum whose estranged girlfriend lays out his problem (known in screenwriting circles as his “misbehavior,” i.e. the character flaw he must overcome to triumph) in their first scene: “You’re irresponsible, self-centered, and childish.” At first Ryan believes Jessica’s call to be a prank, but he soon gets drawn into the plot as he resorts to increasingly crazy ways to rescue her family. He essentially plays a live-action game of Grand Theft Auto through Los Angeles for the most altruistic of reasons. It recalls the films of Hitchcock whose everyman protagonists were caught in situations beyond their control. (Just to be clear — I’m not putting Cellular on Hitchcock’s level. That’s bananas.) Ryan stays one step behind the creepy goons organizing the kidnapping, until the third act when he starts getting proactive. The stakes get raised when Ryan learns the real reason these people are being victimized, but the movie stays in a comfortably intimate place throughout.

The most flashy part of Cellular, at least on the face of it, is the cast. Before he was the best thing in Marvel blockbusters, Chris Evans had a career as being the best thing in low- to mid-budget movies. This is one of the first of those, and he displays flashes of why he ended up being the perfect Captain America. Kim Basinger plays Jessica Martin, and though the character could have easily degenerated into a one-note screaming damsel, she is actively engaged in her rescue throughout. William H. Macy is a cop who wants to open a day spa (you know, because LA is wacky), but ends up being drawn into Ryan’s bizarre crime spree. Jason Statham is on hand as the villain, a welcome repurposing of his tough-guy act. There are other recognizable faces sprinkled throughout (including Jessica Biel’s glorified cameo as the ex-girlfriend), and everyone does solid work.

While the film leans a little heavily on “everyone in LA is weeeeeeird” for its humor, including the aforementioned day spa, an older Beverly Hills type listening to blaring hip hop (the always welcome Lin Shaye), and a borderline-sociopathic lawyer (Rick Hoffman, playing his specialty) breathlessly describing his new Porsche to his mom, the diversions are relatively brief. Macy sells his comic scenes best, putting just the right amount of weary exasperation into his line, “it’s a day spa, you fuck.”

The film feels anachronistic in its depiction of cellphone technology, the way we giggle at the giant suitcase phone Murtaugh uses in Lethal Weapon. If I had to guess, I would say that the original script appeared in the late ‘90s, right as cellphones were growing in ubiquity, but struggled to be made until the early aughts. Still, it’s an interesting window to the time when something we consider an indispensable part of modern life was still seen as an exotic distraction. Larry Cohen’s story (and I’ve talked about the double-edged sword of that statement) takes one of the great plot difficulties of the modern writer — how to create tension when a single phone call solves everything? — and turns it into the crux of the plot. It’s a fascinating writing exercise that became an effective thriller.

Cellular is a relic of a recently bygone era of smaller films, and of a time before smartphones. No one will ever call it a great movie, but it’s a damned entertaining one and well worth the time.

Filed under: Projected Pixels and Emulsion

CITY OF DEVILS, one of the best books of 2013!

I've somehow sneaked onto two best of 2013 lists.

Head over to Snobbery for a chance to win a copy!
http://booksnobbery.wordpress.com/201...

And then listen to this podcast, where Aaron Sikes says much the same thing!
http://www.sfsignal.com/archives/2013...

A Bad Movie Roundup

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year! If you’re anything like me, you love terrible films. In the bad movie club to which I belong, Yakmala, we’ve watched a lot of truly awful crimes against celluloid. Here are some reviews to keep you nice and warm and maybe pick an enjoyably bad flick to work off that New Year hangover.

After Last Season: One of the strangest things I have ever seen.

Ator, the Fighting Eagle: A swords and sorcery would-be epic that’s totally cool with incest.

The Avengers: John Steed and Emma Peel stage an informal contest over who can give less of a shit.

Battlefield Earth: A Saga of the Year 3000: Aliens vs. cavemen in the distant future.

The Beaver: Jodie Foster would like to know what the fuck you’re laughing about.

Blood Freak: A man smokes some pot, grows a turkey head, and becomes a vampire. No, seriously.

Breakin 2: Electric Boogaloo: You’ve heard of it, now see if it’s worth a look. (It totally is.)

Bride of the Monster: Ed Wood takes on atomic horror in this bizarre diversion.

The Cocaine Fiends: I make a lot of cocaine jokes. Cocaine not a joke.

Color of Night: An unerotic erotic thriller.

The Crocodile Hunter: Collision Course: Steve Irwin tries to parlay his reality show into feature stardom.

Devil: Five people trapped in an elevator. One of them is the devil. Wake me up when it’s over.

Diamond Ninja Force: There are no ghosts. Only ghost ninjas.

Fireproof: Kirk Cameron learns to treat his wife like a human being.

From Justin to Kelly: The winner and runner-up of American Idol’s inaugural season had some unfortunate contractual obligations.

Glen or Glenda: Ed Wood on the benefits of cross dressing.

Gor: Adapted from the popular pornographic novels, the movie isn’t even redeemed by being porn.

Gymkata: The first Yakmala film and a classic in bad movie annals.

The Hand that Rocks the Cradle: The movie that hates everyone.

The Human Centipede (First Sequence): 100% medically insane.

In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale: Uwe Boll’s masterpiece.

“Manos” The Hands of Fate: The Master wouldn’t approve of you skipping this one.

The Man Who Saves the World: Turkish Star Wars

Miami Connection: A terrible rock band is all that stands between biker ninjas and a cocaine monopoly.

Ninja Thunderbolt: One of the greatest terrible movies ever made.

No Holds Barred: A turducken of disbelief.

Omoo-Omoo the Shark God: Melville gets the Yakmala treatment.

Paparazzi: Rich people should be allowed to kill who they like.

Plan 9 from Outer Space: The ur-Yakmala film.

Prometheus: A bunch of idiots go up into space.

Quigley: Gary Busey turns into a pomeranian to learn a depressing lesson about God.

Samurai Cop: One of the greatest things to ever happen to film.

Starcrash: A Star Wars knockoff starring an ex-evangelist.

Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones: You’ve seen it. It’s terrible.

Street Trash: The finest exploding hobo movie ever made.

Sucker Punch: Zach Snyder talks about his love of rape.

Tiptoes: Gary Oldman plays a dwarf.

Troll 2: Not a single troll in this one.

Tuff Turf: James Spader fights a gang.

Twilight: See what all the fuss is about.

The Twilight Saga: New Moon: Abs vs. abs.

The Twilight Saga: Eclipse: Things take a turn for the homoerotic.

The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part 1: Nothing. Just nothing.

There you have it! A bevy of bad for a (really) long weekend!

Filed under: Projected Pixels and Emulsion, Yakmala! Tagged: After Last Season, Ator the Fighting Eagle, Battlefield Earth, Blood Freak, Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo, breaking dawn part 1, Bride of the Monster, color of night, devil, Diamond Ninja Force, eclipse, Fireproof, From Justin to Kelly, Glen or Glenda, Gor, Gymkata,