back to James Teitelbaum movie reviews main pageReview by James Teitelbaum
back Tydirium Multimedia
El Topo
Review by James Teitelbaum
©2007 All Rights Reserved
v.1.0
A man in black, looking like a hippie version of someone from Clint Eastwood’s Man with No Name movies rides across the Mexican desert on his horse. A young boy, totally naked save for a hat, rides with him. They stop, and the boy is told that he is now a man (at age 7), and must bury his first toy and the portrait of his mother in the sand. They boy does so. The pair come across a brutally massacred village. The sole survivor has been horribly wounded, and begs to be put out of his misery. The gunslinger draws his weapon... and gives it to the naked young boy. The boy shoots.
The man in black discovers that the massacre was prepretrated by ‘The Colonel’, who is currently holed up in a desert monistary with some of his flamboyant and fetishistic bandito henchmen. The gang is holding the padres of the monistary hostage, along with a young woman who is The Colonel’s servant. The gunslinger humiliates the Colonel, who then kills himself. Leaving the boy with the monks, our man rides off with the woman to an oasis, where he plays a flute and spouts some biblical verse before riding off into the desert with his new mate to look for the four legendary gunslingers of the desert.
Thus we have the first half hour of El Topo (1970), the famous surrealist freak show from famous surrealist freak Alejandro Jodorowsky. This was the middle film in a loose trilogy that Jodo made between 1968 and 1973. What I have described here doesn’t do justice to the bizarre nature of the first half hour of this film. I didn’t mention the banditos running around with lizards between their legs, the Colonel’s hut which is much bigger on the inside than the outside, or the banditos and monks dancing together. None of this can prepare the viewer for what is coming next, which definitely includes more bizarre and absurd imagery than some sort of fantastic Dali-Lynch-Cocteau collaboration... by way of Sergio Leone.
Unlike some other Surrealist films, like Bunel’s L'age D'or, which may be completely plot-less, there is a definite story in El Topo. It is just that the story is layered with liberal doses of some sort of hippie psychedelic dream logic. The gunslinger - 'El Topo', or 'The Mole' - is given lessons by all of the four gunmen of the desert, lessons that seem deeply rooted in various Eastern philosophies. All four men are gurus, teachers, peaceful men (for gunslingers, that is). El Topo slays them all. Although a violent man, El Topo spouts Christian scripture, and never seems to learn from those who try to teach him. There is a sense that he feels remorse, that his actions are contrary to his nature. Perhaps this is the central theme - that the violent actions so often carried out in the name of Christianity are contrary to the teachings at the religion's heart; perhaps the west can learn a lot from the east rather than trampling over it, shooting at it, and trying to oppress it.
By 70 minutes into the movie, The Mole -- a creature who is blinded by the illumination of the brilliant and life-giving sun whenever he ventures out from the dark hole that he calls home -- is stricken with self loathing for his actions, and freaks out.
The movie then changes radically, as El Topo makes like his namesake and ends up a white-haired guru living in an underground cavern full of stalagmites and inbred dwarves who live in oil barrels stacked up like hexacombs in a beehive.
Yeah, you have to just see it.
Essential Clash
Review by James Teitelbaum
©2007 All Rights Reserved
v.1.0
This isn't really a movie, but since it is a DVD that I bought, I'll review it here.
This is a compilation of music videos and other video ephemera from The Clash. The 45-minute music video portion starts off with a short montage of The Clash getting ready for a show in New York. Then, the videos: London Calling (concert footage, the music is recorded live too), Radio Clash (shots of the band hanging out in NYC), White Riot (the band on a small set, the music is live), Safe European Home (more live music with shots from a variety of Clash gigs, a lot of it recycled from other videos), Tommy Gun (the band on a very small set), Clampdown (another particularly energetic live take), Train In Vain (yet another concert clip... who's the guy playing keyboards?), London Calling (the band on a boat in the rain), Bankrobber (shots of the Clash in the studio mixed with two guys robbing a bank), The Call Up (the band in a warehouse wearing military gear), Rock the Casbah (the band plays in front of an oil well as an Arab guy and a Jewish guy become friends... my friend Alice Berry is in this one for like three frames), Should I Stay Or Should I Go (filmed live), Career Opportunities (filmed live).
Next is a 49-minute film called Hell W10. This is a really, really rough black and white gangster movie with members of The Clash in key roles. Joe Strummer wrote and directed it. There is no dialogue, just title cards like in old silent movies. The whole thing is set to Clash songs from their last three albums. A few of the songs are presented in mixes unique to this production. It is kind of an interesting artifact, but is sort of tedious to sit through.
Three songs filmed on the same little set as the White Riot video (and also performed live) are in the Bonus Features section: 1977, White Riot (again), and London's Burning. Interviews with The Clash in a pool hall bridge the videos together. A live clip of I Fought the Law is next; this one has the best image quality of anything on the whole DVD. Taken from the film Rude Boy, it seems to be from the same concert as some of the earlier videos that were filmed live, so perhaps this whole concert is being cleaned up for a release somewhere? The last thing on the disc is a three-minute television interview from 1976.
Review by James Teitelbaum
©2007 All Rights Reserved
v.1.0
This film was directed by Jean Delannoy, who is a bit eternal in his own right: he was born in 1908, began his career as an actor in the 1920s, directed films between 1934 and 1995, and is still alive (October, 2007). Even more so than Delannoy, Eternal Return bears the stamp of writer Jean Cocteau. Although at the time Eternal Return was filmed in 1943, Cocteau had only done one film to date (Blood of a Poet, way back in 1930), he was on the verge of his most creative period as a film maker. His classic take on Beauty and the Beast arrived three years later (1946), and then after making The Eagle Has Two Heads in 1948, Cocteau unleashed his astounding Orphee in 1950.
It is clear that in the late 1940s Cocteau was obsessed with mythology and fairy tales. For the film of Eternal Return, he has fused Nietzsche’s concept of eternal return - which Nietzsche in turn pinched from the Greeks - with a fairy tale story. The idea of eternal return, or history repeating itself endlessly, is a theme in Neitzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra, in which a dwarf says: 'All truth is crooked, time itself is a circle'. This idea of historic events recurring again and again also recalls Joseph Campbell’s ideas on mythological archetypes, heroes from many time periods and many lands who all essentially play out the same stories.
In the film, there is a dwarf, and his job is to make as much trouble for the hero as possible. The dwarf Achille (played by Pieral) lives with his parents on the huge estate of his uncle. Uncle Marc (Jean Murat) has no children of his own, but he has another adult nephew in addition to Achille: Jean Marais is Patrice, who has been orphaned, and is treated like a son by his rich uncle. Achille resents the young, athletic, good looking Patrice of course.
Patrice is concerned about his lonesome uncle’s state of being single, so he goes on a quest to find a bride for Marc. He discovers Nathalie (Madeleine Sologne) who is a beautiful girl, just a bit younger than Patrice (and therefore quite a bit younger than uncle Marc). Marc and Nathalie are soon married, but it is clear to everyone that Patrice has opened a bit of a Pandora’s box; he wants Nathalie for himself, and she wants him just a much. Eventually it happens, and both are banished from the estate. Patrice goes to work for a mechanic, and meets the mechanic’s pretty sister - another Nathalie. They are to be married, but poor Patrice just can’t get his mind off of the previous Nathalie. She is thinking of him as well. They both become so broken hearted over missing each other that their very lives are in danger. Thus, Cocteau has mined Tristan and Isolde for material, but adapted it to his own sensibility.
The whole film plays out like a myth or fairy tale. The tone, the dialogue, and the settings all recall the great stories. Marc is of course the kindly king, and his estate is the castle. Patrice is the prince who must save the princess from bad guys (and he does, early in the film). She rewards him with love, but of course it is forbidden. The dwarf, the evil stepmother or aunt (Achille’s mom), the helpful friend, and even voyages by boat to other lands are all here. There is magic, there is tragedy, there is love.
There is also a lot of inspiration here for legions of future film-makers: the two Nathalies immediately bring to mind Hitchcock’s Vertigo, and the broken-hearted fate of certain characters has been recycled with far less success as recently as 2005 in George Lucas’s Revenge of the Sith - and not for the first nor last time I am sure.
Georges Auric’s first film score was for Cocteau’s Blood of a Poet in 1930, and he went on to do well over one hundred more, right into the 1970s. He does a nice enough job with this one, suitably romantic and heroic. Jean Marais is always dependable in Cocteau’s films (he was in all of them from this one forward), and he turns in a nice performance here. Sologne is suitably damsel-esque, whereas Junie Astor is also suitably distressed as Natalie 2.0. Pieral goes out of his way to be as absolutely unlikable as possible.
Cocteau would refine all of these themes of this film in his own directoral efforts, but this is a great look at the beginnings of his genius as a serious film-maker - even if it isn't actually his film.
At all costs, avoid the VHS release from The International Collection (Nelson Entertainment). The subtitles are absolutely miserable, with long dialogue scenes being summarized in just a few words, and some lines of speech missing titles completely. Criterion really needs to release this one.
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
©2007 All Rights Reserved
v.1.0
Jim Carey is a really annoying actor. Michael Gondry began as a director of music videos. Together, it seems unlikely that they’d make a good movie. Unless: add insane scribe Charlie Kaufman into the mix, and see if the cast and director can pull it off. Kaufman came from a background writing for television. For his motion picture debut, he was the one who came up with the completely nutty ideas in Being John Malkovich. Then he went on to write the cool Adaptation and that biopic about Chuck Barris, host of the Gong Show. Well, anyway, between the three of these guys, they’ve come up with a decent but not great movie.
Jim Carey and Kate Winslet meet and fall in love. Then things fall apart, and they split. She goes to a clinic where selected memories can be erased. She has Carey wiped out of her memory completely. He finds out that she’s done this (he wasn’t supposed to have), and so he does the same thing. The problem is that halfway through the procedure, he is reliving his memories of Winslet as they’re wiped out, and decides that he wants to keep them. So within his mind, he and his memory-girlfriend flee the memory wiping, and begin a mad dash through his consciousness, trying to outrun the erasure. This gives Carey the chance to be all goofy and exercise his usual retarded Careyisms, as all sorts of surreal images and situations arise. Meanwhile, there is all manner of drama going on with the peripheral characters in the real world, including Elijah Wood, Kirsten Dunst, and Tom Wilkinson. Carey and Winslet meet again after their procedures, and connect once again. When Dunst, a disgruntled employee of the clinic, clues them in to their past, they must decide whether or not to continue, risking the possibility of making the same mistakes, ultimately ending up unhappy again, or not.
Kaufman is able to weave a script that succeeds in asking some of the interesting questions inherent in this unlikely scenario, while crafting a mainstream-friendly love story with a happy ending. The cast all do a good job, even Carey, who is able to transcend his miserable Careyness for most of the film, except for during part of the dream sequences. This film reminded me just a little bit of Stranger Than Fiction (also reviewed on this site) in that it had an interesting and surreal premise, putting average Joes into extremely strange circumstances, but stopped just short of truly challenging the audience. Both films work as slightly odd entertainments, but neither truly grasps the brass ring of depth within their weirdness.
Review by James Teitelbaum
©2007 All Rights Reserved
v.1.0
This pair of made-for-television Star Wars spin-off movies uses the idiotic teddy bear characters from Return of the Jedi as a hook to hang some kiddie adventures on. I think that even the most die-hard Star Wars fan will find these films to be almost unbearable to watch, but if you must, there's a two-sided DVD out there for like $10 that has both telefilms on it.
Caravan of Courage was originally televised as The Ewok Adventure. It is narrated by Burl Ives, no less. In this movie, little Cindel (Aubree Miller) and her older brother Mace (Eric Bruno - a dead ringer for a young Mark "Luke Skywalker" Hamill) are separated from their parents after their starcrusier crash lands on the forest moon of Endor. The parents are abducted by a big ogre-like creature, while the siblings befriend a tribe of Ewoks (those three-foot tall furry bipeds who helped the good guys fight the bad guys in the final film of the Star Wars saga). Seems like they got some extra mileage from the stiff masks that were made for the movies, but the sets all look like they were built in G. Lucas's back yard in California (occasionally enhanced with some rather obvious matte paintings). The Ewoks help Cindel and Mace find their parents, who are many miles away in the beast's lair. A caravan of is organized to make the journey (cue Duke Ellington). This ends up being a by-the-book Hero's Journey sort of thing; useful magical gifts are given, prophesies are foretold, friends are made along the road, the kids undergo tests, and hardships are overcome. In one of several scenes that seem more or less lifted directly from Tolkien, they fight an ultra crappy looking giant spider, and scare it away with a magic light. In the end, the spaceship remains broken, but the family are reunited and have made friends with the Ewoks.
As Battle for Endor opens, an evil human witch woman named Charal (Sian Phillips) is working with some ugly guys in bad rubber alien masks. Thinking that Cindel and her family have something they need, they kill off Mace, mom, and dad (sort of a gutsy move, I admit, for a family film), leaving Cindel as sort of a Tarzana-like orphan being raised by the village of apes (Ewoks). The expressionless Wickett can speak English fairly well by now, so he and Cindel escape their captors and make a trek across the forest moon of Endor. They meet an old human prospector named Noa (Wilford Brimley) and his speedy little gnome-alien pal. Noa is trying to fix the spaceship that he crash-landed on Endor decades previously. The key missing part is of course in the hands of the evil aliens. They know that the part is powerful, but don't know exactly what it is; they just want 'the power' without much reason given as to why. Finally, there's a battle, but it is rubber-faced aliens versus Ewoks, and the battle is simply for a spaceship battery, not for the planet itself, as the movie's title implies.
Even given that these things were made by Lucasfilm, the special effects are awful, the rubber masks are especially lame, the story is super-thin, and the acting is miserable. Johnny Weismuller Jr. - son of the guy who played the original Tarzan - is listed very last in the credits as "Card Player #2". That's how far having a famous dad will get you these days.
I only watched these because at one point in my life I insisted on sitting through every and any thing Star Wars related.
Sometimes being a completist is a real pain in the ass.
Review by James Teitelbaum
©2007 All Rights Reserved
v.1.0
Sienna Miller plays 1960s society bad girl Edie Sedgwick in this 2007 biopic. Either Edie or director George Hickenlooper has seen Breakfast at Tiffany’s one too many times; this movie wants to be an edgy remake with a tragic ending (Tiffany's is even referenced in one scene). Edie drops out of college, moves to New York, and embarks on an endless series of parties and fashion and drugs. She spends all of her cash, keeps going, and eventually burns out. Really, she’s not so bad, just lonely and possibly abused.
Boo hoo.
Along the way, she meets an artist named Andy Warhol (in real life this character was named Andy Warhol, and is played here by Guy Pierce who looks exactly like Andy Warhol), and a rock star named Billy Quinn (in real life this character was named Bob Dylan, and is played here by Hayden Christensen, who looks nothing like Bob Dylan). Jealousy happens, and Edie makes the wrong choices, again and again.
Miller does an adequate job as Sedgwick, but the real problem with the role is that it just isn’t sympathetic. There is no particular reason to like her as she moves from little rich girl, to art-hag, to fag-hag, to fashion victim, to groupie, to junkie, and sometimes several of these at once. It doesn’t really feel tragic, because in order to feel for a character who finds dark times, you have to like or at least empathize with the character first. Doesn’t happen here, but that isn’t Miller’s fault - it was Sedgwick’s. Miller just does what’s on the page.
Guy Pierce, on the other hand, kicks ass all over the Warhol role. Totally nails it. I didn’t even realize it was him for a solid half hour. Best Warhol since David Bowie’s take in the otherwise over-rated and boring (both the film and the artist) Basquiat. The less said about Christensen’s thinly disguised Dylan, the better. I really wanted to believe all of the hype that this kid is a great actor who just happened to find himself with a crappy script and a lousy director in the new Star Wars films, and that he was about to start impressing everyone... but no, he just can't act.
Review by James Teitelbaum
©2007 All Rights Reserved
v.1.0
This 2005 film stars Matt Damon as Henry Chinaski, the frequent alter-ego of writer Charles Bukowski. Bukowski was a hard-core alcoholic, a skid-row bum, and a genius poet and novelist. In his early years, whilst trying to become known as a writer, he held countless jobs, but never maintained any one position for very long. Hence, the novel, and now film, Factotum (meaning 'one who does many jobs'), an autobiographical account of Bukowski’s early years. Bukowski/Chinaski’s primary interest is writing. Having a job is a necessary evil, women are an intermittent distraction, gambling is an easy way to the top (or not), and booze makes it all bearable.
Every decade or so, someone dusts off the Bukowski legend and does a film. The Italian production Tales of Ordinary Madness starred Ben Gazzara in the Bukowski role, Mickey Roarke did Chinaski in 1987’s Barfly, and now, Matt Dillon takes a turn. Of all the three actors, perhaps Dillon has most closely nailed Bukowski’s mannerisms, posture, and vocal cadence. He’s a bit too good looking and thin, however - Bukowski was the definition of one seriously ugly dude. Looks aside, Dillon does a good job with the role, and I’d even almost go as far as to say that it could have been a career-defining role for him, had the film received better distribution and more press attention. But let’s be honest - our mainstream society isn’t going to buy into a biopic about an alcoholic writer who beats up his girlfriends. In this film, Marisa Tomei plays one of those girlfriends, in the same role handled by Faye Dunaway in Barfly. Lili Taylor plays the other woman, a floozy every bit Chinaski’s equal. Both women are good sports about taking on these less than glamorous roles. It is probably also worth noting that Adrienne Shelly has a small part in the movie; it was the last of her film appearances that she lived to see before being murdered.
This film, like the other two Bukowski biopics, is a series if vignettes about Bukowski’s drunken life, and has no real plot. Nevertheless it is an engaging and more or less accurate portrait of one of 20th century America’s most honest writers, or most notorious alcoholics (or both).
The one thing I found distracting is that the production designer seems confused about whether this film is set in 1955 or 2005; the costumes, sets, and locations are all a bit ambiguous about this - perhaps by design. Anyway, Factotum wraps up on a glimmer of hope as Chinaski finally gets a story accepted by Black Sparrow Press, who in real life have gone on to publish dozens of his novels and poetry collections.
Dillon waxes philosophical for a bit while watching a stripper, and credits roll. See you in a few years for the next Bukowski biopic.
Review by James TeitelbaumThis 1973 animated feature is about a race of beings called Draags, who are more or less like humans, except for that they are about fifty feet tall, plus they have blue skin, big round red eyes, and fins where their ears should be. The Draags are really into meditation, depicted symbolically by images of bubbles containing their headless bodies floating up to a moon, where they dance. Draag society is very much like our own in many respects. The Draags keep pets called Oms, which they once brought back with them from a planet called Terra. The Oms are actually little human beings (well, normal sized humans, but little to the Draags), who have become vermin as they have reproduced and run all over the planet. They are about the size of mice compared to the Draags, and are treated in the same manner that we would treat mice: the Oms are occasionally kept as pets, but more often are nothing but a problem to be dealt with via regular exterminations. The Oms have lost all knowledge of their human technology and live in stone age fashion. One Om which has been a pet of a little Draag girl, is able to gain the knowledge of technology, and then finally escapes. He leads a revolution in which Oms are finally recognized as something other than vermin by the Draags.
©2007 All Rights Reserved
v.1.0
This is a really cool little flick. The animation is a little cheap, but the art direction is quite unique. The fantastic planet is very surreal, full of weird plants, animals, and machines that seem to be a cross between something from Dali and a page from the Voynich Manuscript. The musical score by Alain Goraguer is totally psychedelic, tripped out freakiness... as are most of the visuals. There’s no doubt in my mind whatsoever that this film was a stoner classic in the years after it was made, and probably still is. Regardless, it is a pretty imaginative looking piece of work, and a must see for fans of any sort of fantastic animation.
Review by James TeitelbaumI guess the story here is that youthful-looking journalist Cameron Crowe went back to high school while in his 20s, in order to write an article for Rolling Stone (and later a book), about the youth of the day (‘the day’, at the time, being 1980) in San Diego. Of course, it was turned into a movie, and of course Crowe has gone on to have a successful career in Hollywood. Now, according to Crowe, all of the characters in the book are real people, but with their names changed. In fact, my ex of seven years (a San Diego native) claims that the character of Jeff Spicolli (Sean Penn in the film) is based on a guy named Ward whom she dated for a while. I’m not so sure about how I feel about playing second banana to Jeff Spicolli, but I guess that if nothing else, I have three degrees of separation with Mr. Crowe.
©2007 All Rights Reserved
v.1.1
Sometime after Crowe wrote about this Ward fellow, and sometime before my ex became Ward’s future ex, I snuck (under-age) into a movie theater to see this particular R-rated film. Must have been 1982. At the time, I didn’t know or care that the direction, by Amy Heckerling was on the good side of competent, and that the writing by Crowe was very nice too. Together they crafted a nice portrait of coming of age in that era, told through four intertwining stories. As teen comedies go, Fast Times is one of the better ones, a film that still resonates after twenty-five years. The cast is stellar, featuring Sean Penn, Forest Whitaker, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Phoebe Cates, Robert Romanus (each of the five of them had exactly one other film credit to their names when cast in Fast Times, although most of them were juniors and seniors - not sophomores - in the movie's story), as well as the slightly more experienced Judge Reinhold, and of course Ray Walston as Mr. Hand.
There are some nice tunes on the soundtrack - and some crappy ones - but the award-winners are a really fun Oingo-Boingo tune, and a great use of the astounding classic Cars track, Moving in Stereo, during Reinhold's infamous masturbation scene.
Review by James TeitelbaumThere was all sorts of hype about this movie when it came out, because it was created up in the Canadian arctic regions by native peoples. This is a little bit of a weird reason to hype a film, because why on earth shouldn't these people get to make movies? The film community was behaving as though the movie was made by as bunch of retarded children or something, and treating it as being oh-so-precious. But it was made by perfectly intelligent, perfectly competent adults, albeit ones who happen to live somewhere really freaking cold. The hype actually stuck me as somewhat condescending, as though it was some big surprise that the Inuit who did this picture actually had the wherewithal to get it together.
©2007 All Rights Reserved
v.1.1
All of that said, I tried to watch this film objectively, and judge it on its own merits. The thing that becomes most immediately apparent is that it was shot on a consumer-grade home video camera. The whole production has a super-cheap look to it. Again, I am not going to give it a pass just because it was shot by Eskimos. That said, there is some pretty good cinematography here, it is just that the medium on which these images were captured is too low-fi to do the better shots justice. The reds and oranges of fire are frequently juxtaposed with the various blues and purples of the sky as the arctic sun sets. But the predominant color in this film is white. The vast empty landscape is amazingly bleak. There are no mountains, no trees, no rivers, no cities. Just an endless white plain that goes on for as far as the camera eye can see. Appropriately then, the main sound accompanying these visuals is that of mukluks crunching on snow. There's an old cliche that these people have dozens of words for snow, and I believe it after seeing The Fast Runner.
I was somewhat relieved that the people who made movie this avoided the most obvious cliche, and chose not to make a story about how an industrialized world is destroying native culture. This is a hugely important issue, and I am 100% supportive of all ethnic peoples efforts to preserve their language, their traditions, and their lands. But another movies about his just would seem a bit forced.
The story of The Fast Runner is a centuries old tribal folktale. This is one of the best parts of the movie, actually, in that via the ancient setting, we really get to see a real glimpse of how the stone-age natives of Alaska or Canada might have lived. We hear their language, and see what they wear, what they eat, and how they interact. Small families, tribes, making a life in a really harsh environment. It's almost like a National Geographic documentary at times.
Sometimes we forget that all people, everywhere, have concerns similar to those we have in the modern era: Atanarjuat is the weaker little brother of Amakjuat, always needing the care of his big brother. Local girl Atuat has been promised as a wife to local bully Oki. Atanrjuat and Atuat like each other, so Atanrjuat and Oki face off in a big igloo. It is sort of a really cold version of Thunderdome. Two men enter, one man leaves. They engage in two equally mindless competitions that only prove that perhaps these people are retarded after all. In the first, the two men each put an arm around the other's shoulder, and then they stick a finger in each other's mouth. They each try to rip the other guy's cheek off. Then they face each other and each takes a turn punching the other guy, hard, anywhere on his body. Like in the head. First guy who can't take a punch loses. Atanarjuat gets the girl of course, and they head for the sea, where there is a bit of a respite from the snow on the pebbly shore. A gal named Puja makes the scene, and she is trouble. Turns out that someone isn't faithful to someone else, there is some violence, perhaps a framing, a lot of crying, and the whole thing becomes a big drama. Atanarjuat ends up with people ready to kill him, and has to behave in a manner in keeping with the movie's title. Sprinting across the crunchy snow, we get full frontal Eskimo weenie as Atanarjuat has to flee some pissed off persuers chasing him across the amazing landscape.
The performances here range from passable to awful, the editing is clumsy, the flashbacks can be confusing, and the movie is way too long. And yet, I couldn't help but to be drawn in to these characters' lives and their fascinating world. Let us hope that the Inuit film industry continues to evolve, and is able to build upon the momentum of The Fast Runner.
Review by James TeitelbaumHal Hartley’s 11th full-length film is truly the work of an auteur: Hal wrote, directed, produced, and edited the movie; he also composed the sparse musical score. Hartley has always worked cheaply and close to the ground, setting most of his films in his native Long Island or nearby New York City, while using the same talented ensemble of devoted actors, and keeping large sets and other whiz-bang to a minimum. His movies are stylistically simple and to the point, but always full of lots and lots of ideas which are voiced by memorable characters. This economy has allowed him to continue making movies which prove that indie creators can and should continue to get their ideas onto screens - proved that they are in fact making films that are about, and are full of, ideas.
©2007 All Rights Reserved
v.1.0
Hartley’s previous film, The Girl From Monday (2005) was the only film in his canon that I rank as a failure. He flirted with the sci-fi genre in that one, and proved that his usual simple character stories are something that he is perhaps best suited to stick with. However, Hartley has always enjoyed skirting around the edges of the spy genre as well, injecting mysteries and crime elements into films like Amateur (1994). With Fay Grim, he not only embraces this genre fully, but also does it in the context of his first-ever foray into making a sequel. Fay Grim is not a sequel to Amateur, however, but to 1997’s Henry Fool.
Fay Grim picks up the lives of Henry Fool’s characters a decade later. As the titles of the two films clearly outline, the titular Henry Fool (Thomas Jay Ryan) is the focus of the first film, while the character of Fay Grim (Parker Posey) - who is a minor character in the 1997 film - is the focus of the sequel. In the new film, Fool doesn’t show up until ninety minutes into the move, while Fay’s character steps up to the front of the stage, and features in almost every scene.
Parker Posey dials her perpetual snarkiness down a few notches here, and comes up with a really solid performance, full of humor and pathos. Beginning as the same stupid and trashy New Jersey single mom we last saw in Henry Fool, she finishes the film as a sexy, stylish, and savvy (if not smart) caricature of a secret agent, perhaps a Modesty Blaise for the current generation. This is one of Posey’s best pieces of work, and as she approaches forty, it would be wonderful to see a more mature Parker continue to display what we see in Fay Grim: a great talent, finally free from hiding behind the endlessly sarcastic nature seen in her other performances. The rest of the original cast are also back, and are augmented by a bunch of new players, most notably the reliable Jeff Goldblum.
The story here is almost unimportant. By half way through the film, a mystery story has unspooled involving Henry’s disappearance, a bunch of mysterious notebooks, and more or less every government on Earth all butting heads, each using the hapless Fay to further their own goals. None of it makes a lick of sense, but when Fay decides that she has had enough of being everyone’s pawn and takes matters into her own hands, we realize that we have come to the meat of the film. What we are dealing with is a lampoon of both spy moves and of international politics, juxtaposed with a character study. This movie is about a trashy suburban American woman who has never left home, and her eyes opening as she wakes up to the big, wide world. Everything we learned about her husband Henry Fool in the previous film is turned on its head, and Hartley almost seems to be having a laugh at making the story as complicated and convoluted as possible. When someone explains a complicated and unlikely plot point, and asks a confused Fay “...isn’t it obvious?”, Fay looks around for a moment, and then says, confused, “no, no it isn’t”. Not to her, not to us.
It is also interesting to observe how completely different in tone this movie is from that of Henry Fool. Although it is a sequel, it is in no way a continuation of the story. The former movie was about an insane writer with a criminal past and delusions of grandeur, and the garbageman whom Fool inspires to begin writing astoundingly profound poetry. Somehow, these people are now all back, but the scope of their lives has zoomed out from their little New Jersey neighborhood and now encompasses a global conflict, secret agents, guns, terrorists, and atomic bombs. Never has a sequel twisted the preconceptions of the original in such an unexpected way.
Hartley’s trademarks are all here: the funny dialogue, often delivered stiffly (on purpose), the naked sets, and his usual cast: Posey, James Urbaniak, Elina Lowensohn, and more recent regulars like D.J. Mendel.
However, the film has some problems. The very fact that the spy mystery is indeed so complex as to be nonsensical may have been Hartley’s point, but exactly when this stuff becomes unimportant will vary from viewer to viewer as each individual just gives up on it all. Or perhaps, more worrisome is that notion that Hartley might have expected us to follow the espionage tale... in which case he has failed miserably. I also had issue with the constant and conspicuous use of so-called Dutch camera angles, or shots in which the camera is tilted a few degrees to the left or right to produce an unsettling effect. Seems like almost every shot in the movie was filmed this way, and it becomes annoying and draws attention to itself rather quickly. These things out to be used much more sparingly.
Review by James TeitelbaumIn 2000, I was browsing in a bookstore in London, and who should walk in but Terry Gilliam. Working as I do in the music biz, I meet famous people all the time, and I am not really excited or impressed by the idea of fame or celebrity. They’re all just people, y’know? But I have been such a big admirer of Gilliam’s work for so long, that I pulled a book about the making of his movie Brazil off of the shelf (I’d actually been thinking of buying it anyway, as it isn’t available in the US), and had him sign it for me. We ended up shooting the breeze for about fifteen minutes. He was a really cool guy. He asked me why I thought Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas had flopped in the US.
©2007 All Rights Reserved
v.1.1
I told him that the American public wasn’t ready for a film that glorifies drug use.
Terry got a bit hot under the collar and told me that this film is anti-drug use.
I said: “Terry, I know that and you know that, but the average dipshit bible-belt illiterate narrow minded redneck American can’t figure that out”.
And it is true.
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (the genius 1971 book by Hunter S. Thompson, and now the genius 1998 film by Terry Gilliam) is about the death of the American dream, and about life in our society during the twilight of the 1960s, as Viet Nam and all of the social unrest of the era closed the lid on America’s golden age. These were the years in which the slow decline of America began, a decline that to any clear-headed person who has their eyes open to reality, has been speeding up year by year ever since. Although containing humor and chaos and a pair of pathetic characters behaving badly, the film (and book) is grim in overall tone as Thompson (Johnny Depp) and his lawyer (Benicio Del Torro) encounter all manner of pathetic and worthless characters while stoned out of their minds on every drug imaginable. This movie also contains some of the most realistic acid trip sequences ever put on film. Not the scenes of people running around in lizard costumes, but simply the shot where Depp looks at some carpet, and the swirling patterns begin to crawl up the wall. A quick, simple, and elegant shot, that lasts for a few seconds, but illustrates the hallucinatory state of LSD ‘victim’ better than just about anything else ever put to film. And then it goes over the top. Way, way over the top.
So... Depp and Del Torro nail their antihero roles, having fun but also being serious, and sometimes downright scary when applicable. Gilliam’s script (with Tony Grisoni, Tod Davies, and Alex Cox) and his direction are completely assured. This is one of his better features, and he really nails the intent and feel of Thompson’s book. In fact, I have always felt that this film is one of the most accurate book-to-screen adaptations I have ever seen. Given the nature of this book, that’s a real achievement.
Criterion did a really nice job with their DVD release.
Review by James TeitelbaumHere we have the famous “Man with No Name” trilogy, made in rapid succession (1964, 1965, 1966) by Sergio Leone, starring Clint Eastwood. I have looked for a message here, a moral, a point, and I can’t find one. It is just Eastwood kicking bandito ass all over the place. He uses his guns, his fists, and his brains to outwit a series of bad(der) guys and come out ahead in the end, leaving a trail of bodies in his wake. He can’t be called a hero, because his motives are selfish, and he doesn't really help people (except by coincidence). An early anti-hero, probably only made possible because these films were Italian productions (it was still too early for this sort of thing to get past the American production code).
©2007 All Rights Reserved
v.1.1
In A Fist Full of Dollars, the Man with No Name rides into a speck of a desert town, completely populated by two crime families - the Baxters and the Rojos - and proceeds to play them against each other. They all end up dead, and the Man ends up rich. He returns in For A Few Dollars More, wherein a gang of bounty hunters with prices on their heads are the source of a lot of reward money for the Man. Another bounty hunter is after the gang, and the two men become partners to take the gang down. In The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, there’s a treasure hidden in a graveyard, and three men each have a piece of the map. They don’t like or trust each other much. They go for the treasure. Crosses, double crosses, and triple crosses are crossed.
The third movie is by far the biggest production. Weighing in at 2 hours and 40 minutes, it brings the Civil War to the wild west, and places the three greedy anti-heroes right in the middle of the conflict. Of the three films, only this one deserves to be called ‘epic’, for whatever that is worth.
These films are pure testosterone-fueled entertainment, but definitely not for the whole family. All of the characters have good sides and bad sides, and considering Eastwood to be the hero - and his adversaries the villains - wouldn’t be accurate. They’re all just people, with varying degrees of integrity, often willing to change their ethics where gold is involved. Not unlike real life.
Fans of the band New Order might want to pay careful attention to the score of the second film. The band has always had a habit of naming their songs after classic films (In a Lonely Place, Cries and Whsipers, Thieves Like Us), but here we have the genesis of the guitar riff from one of their most famous tracks: listen for a bit of Blue Monday on Ennio Morricone’s famous score.
Review by James Teitelbaum"We're all part monster in our sub-conscious, so we have laws, and religions".
©2007 All Rights Reserved
v.1.1
The science fiction movie genre is as old as movies themselves. One of the first flicks ever made was Georges Melies’ 1902 fantasy, Voyage To The Moon, and of course Fritz Lang's 1927 Metropolis is often cited as an early classic. The 19th century literary works of H. G. Wells and Jules Verne have been providing fodder for sci-fi movies for a century now. However, it was in the 1950s that fantastic tales of outer space really came into their own. There were hundreds of really awful science fiction films made in that era, and a few good ones. The vast majority of them were made as disposable entertainments for kids. Five decades later, it is interesting to look back and see which of the surviving bits of entertainment have floated to the top of the heap. Look there, at the top of that heap, and you'll find Forbidden Planet.
Yeah, Forbidden Planet is definitely corny at times, and is certainly a product of the 1950s. There is plenty to laugh at, and plenty that looks quite dated. But this is inevitable. Go back to the sci-fi films of the era and find me a better one. Sure, there's the Day the Earth Stood Still, and maybe War of the Worlds, but even these two giants can't stand up to the terrific Forbidden Planet. MGM, who were at the height of their powers at the time, designed this to be the first science fiction A-movie, and they succeeded.
A scientific mission to the planet called Altair-IV has vanished. Leslie Nielsen - playing it straight, decades before Airplane or the Naked Gun - is the captain of the flying saucer sent from Earth to discover the fate of the previous mission. The team arrives to find Dr. Morbius (Walter Pidgeon) and his luscious daughter Altaira (Anne Francis) living alone in a great mid-century modern ranch home. Morbius warns the rescue mission away: the rest of his initial exploration team is dead, but he is in no danger and doesn't want to be rescued. This is suspicious, so Nielsen checks it out. He also checks Altaira out. She likes to run around in couture mini-dresses and bat her big blue eyes at all of the astronauts. She's got them all on the hook, and will reel you in too. Morbius eventually reveals that he has discovered the remains of a great society called the Krell who lived under the surface of the planet. They were super-smart, very technologically advanced, superior to us puny humans in every way... and they all vanished, overnight. The brilliant Morbius realizes that mankind is not fit to wield the awesome knowledge of the Krell, and he wants to stop his rescuers from telling home base about what they have found (he might have been better off just not showing it all to them, but we'll let that slide). Meanwhile, the monster that killed off the members of the first mission starts to make trouble for the new batch of visitors to the forbidden planet. The creature's origin is quite unusual.
There is so much great stuff in this movie. The special effects are way ahead of their time, with innovative use of miniatures, matte paintings, and rotoscoping. These effects hold up much, much better than most other films from this era, and a lot of them still look pretty cool, period. The production design is great, with the spaceship interior and Morbius's home both looking like they came out of a truly edgy 1956 interior design expo - right down to the starburst light fixtures and fuschia sofa. The music is genuinely legendary (I actually play excerpts from it in the electronic music classes that I teach). Created by Louis and Bebe Baron, it is the first completely electronic film score, and consists of a pastiche of weird, alien, electronic soundscapes that were absolutely unlike anything else heard by anyone at that time. The flying saucer crew uniforms are cool. Anne Francis's costumes are... distracting. The robot character was the first major mechanical man seen on screen since the one in Metropolis thirty years earlier, and was the clear inspiration for the robot in Lost in Space, and so many other cinematic men of metal (Robby brags of knowing 187 languages, but was later out-gabbed by Star Wars' C-3PO, who is fluent in over six million forms of communication. But Robby can cook. Take that, Threepio!). The clicking relays in the Robby's dome are so 1950s tech. The acting is overall is nothing special, although Pigeon takes a stab at elevating things, except for when he's given lines like "The fool! The meddling idiot!".
About the only thing that falls short is the concept of Altaira never having seen another living person (except her father) in her 18-ish years of life. This idea could have really been developed and exploited more - aside from her fending off all of the Earth men trying to teach her to kiss. Lots of possibility here.
Forbidden Planet by no means reaches the great heights of art reached by 1950s contemporaries such as, say, Bergman, Fellini, or even Hitchcock, but it is entertaining and made with care, especially considering the genre and the vintage.
The 2007 DVD, released for the film's 50th anniversary looks great. The film is totally cleaned up of scratches and other damage, the technicolor palette really pops, and the stereoized soundtrack sounds great. Extras include thirteen minutes of deleted scenes (or alternate takes), nine minutes of 'lost footage' (mostly special effects tests), two excerpts from MGM Parade with Walter Pidgeon promoting the film, a bunch of trailers, and a 25-minute episode of the miserable Thin Man television series from February of 1958. Robby appears in the episode.
A second disc contains an entire extra movie from 1957 called the Invisible Boy. This is a completely silly cheapo flick that re-uses the Robby costume/prop. Some military types go to a secret lab to ask questions of a mighty computer. The computer is the size of a very large room, and features flashing lights, spinning reels of tape, and a big plastic dome that flashes when the big brain talks in it's stilted robotic voice. Meanwhile, Jimmy, the young son of the computer tech, is feeling a bit neglected by his belaguered dad, and by his pretty, proper, June Cleaver-ish mom. Jimmy falls asleep in the computer lab and spends the next hour of screentime dreaming of adventures with his robot pal Robby. Their hijinx include building a better kite, turning Jimmy invisible, and scenario where dad becomes a hero among his military pals. There's a bit of a cautionary tale here about allowing machines to become too advanced. The computer becomes sentient and malevolent, almost causing a war with the Russkies. Dad and Robby save the day, of course. We never see Jimmy wake up, so we're left with that whole "is it a dream.. or is it" thing. The best thing this film has going for it is a score by the amazing Les Baxter. It is otherwise pretty skipable, but you're getting it anyway with your copy of Forbidden Planet, so I'd sit through it once, max.
Also on this disc is a very good 55-minute documentary about the 1950s golden age of science fiction, featuring interviews with all of the movers and shakers of the second big wave of science fiction (late 1970s / early 1980s) such as George Lucas, Jim Cameron, Ridley Scott, and Steven Spielberg. All the big names are here, talking about the fifties, the cold war, nuclear fear, and how they got interested in science fiction as kids, two decades before they started making all of their own great (and not great) sci-fi films. Even Mark Hamill shows up to narrate. Well-written, good interviews, lots of classic film clips, definitely worth seeing. But wait! There's more! A second 26-minute documentary is about the making of Forbidden Planet, and a third one (13 minutes) is about the Robby phenomenon. Both are of the level of quality that we usually see on DVD extras - breezy and not too detailed, worth watching but far from definitive: made up of interviews with all of the surviving cast and crew members, they occasionally contain some interesting insights.
Review by James Teitelbaum
©2007 All Rights Reserved
v.1.1
I can take or leave Hugh Jackman. In 2006, I guess I took him. He did four movies that year, and I saw all of them. X-Men 3, The Prestige, and Scoop (the latter two pairing Jackman with Scarlett Johansson twice in a row) are reviewed elsewhere. The last of the four movies was The Fountain, the long-awaited third feature from up and coming auteur Darren Aronofsky (Pi, Requiem for a Dream). The Fountain finds Aronofsky reaching for the brass ring of truly compelling film making, making every effort to create something as meaningful as the best work of Bergman or Kubrick. He makes a solid grab here, but doesn’t quite get a grip. The film seems to get away from him, and just doesn’t quite work 100%.
Jackman stars as a scientist trying to cure cancer with some rare herbs and roots found in South America. Turns out his wife is dying of brain cancer, and the desperate Jackman thinks he can find the cure before she expires.
Truth is, he is actually close.
In order to deal with her situation, the wife (Rachel Weisz) is writing a metaphorical story in a journal about a conquistador 500 years earlier, who leaves Spain on a quest at the behest of Queen Isabel. He goes to South America to search for the Tree of Life in the Garden of Eden. The movie flashes back and forth between the real world of today, and the fictional quest. So far so good. But then we have another story, set 500 years in the future, where Jackman is floating around in outer space in a transparent bubble, with only a weird and possibly sentient tree for a companion. Weisz's ghost (or Jackman’s hallucination thereof) appears in the bubble as well. They are about to reach some far-off galaxy, and Jackman needs the dying tree to survive just a bit longer, just until they get to where they’re going. Well, these segments makes no sense, but that is perfectly all right, actually.
Aronofsky jumps back and forth between the three stories, until all three begin to intersect. It becomes unclear if the 16th century stuff is really just in Weisz’s book, or if perhaps Jackman’s character has traveled in time. It becomes unclear if Jackman really has found a cure for aging and death, and if he really has survived for 500 years, eventually traveling into outer space (which seems just as outrageous to us now as sailing across the entire sea might have seemed before Columbus). The whole ordeal becomes dreamlike and metaphoric, and ends up with a lengthy sequence that is yet another homage to the ending of 2001: A Space Odyssey (but in all fairness, this is probably the best tribute and/or rip-off I have seen since the original). All three stories seem to converge as all three versions of Jackman attain their goals, but with unexpected and not always happy results.
This film definitely warrants multiple viewings. It may be pretentious, it may be overblown, it may be reaching for more than Aronofsky is capable of delivering, but until I see it again, I will resist trying to analyze the subtext, meaning, or symbolism of the film. I will recommend, however, that you give it a go for yourself, and see what you get out of it, particularly if you like the ambiguous ‘puzzle without an answer’ nature of David Lynch’s recent work, or (of course) if you like Kubrick (erm, doesn’t everyone?), to whom Aronofsky now owes a bit of a debt.
Review by James Teitelbaum
©2007 All Rights Reserved
v.1.0
This crudely animated 1972 feature is alternately a late-night stoner classic, and a scathing parody of (or warning to) early 1970s pseudo-intellectual hippie wanna-be college students. Told in a then-shocking mutation of the genre that comics and animation pros call ‘funny animals’ (Mickey, Bugs, etc.), Fritz and his friends do drugs, and then indulge in orgies, while also inadvertently causing race riots. This stuff is just a bit heavier than your standard Goofy and Daffy adventures.
The story concerns the titular Fritz, a tomcat NYU student whos chief concerns seem to be getting laid, doing drugs, skipping school, and making music, roughly in that order. In the early scenes of the film, he and his friends do all of these things, finally indulging in a crazed orgy. At this point, the film seems to want to be a good time cartoon for stoned adults. A haze of multi-colored psychedelic texture permeates the backdrops, and it is easy to see how this film could appeal to the drug culture of the time.
However, Fritz is also a poseur radical, shouting revolutionary slogans with no idea what he’s talking about, and trying to discuss the problems of the world in his hopelessly naive ways. After the good time opening, the film takes a decidedly grim tone. A very weak sequence follows the orgy scene, in which two cops (portrayed as pigs, of course) insult a synagogue full of Rabbis (dogs). The story then wisely moves back to Fritz, who manages to piss of all of the blacks (crows) in Harlem, sparking a riot. Then he flees New York with a girlfriend ; they hook up with some revolutionaries (a rat and a snake), and nearly end up dead.
Fritz the Cat is a gun pointed at an exact target: upper middle class college students with too much time and too much money who cluelessly plow through a world they have no comprehension of, causing trouble every step of the way. Clearly this was a rather large group of people in 1972, and I wonder how different things are now.
Fritz was voiced by Skip Hinnant, who played Fargo North: Decoder on the kidde television show Electric Company, and Schroeder in the original stage production of You’re A Good Man, Charlie Brown. Let us not confuse Fritz with Skip’s other roles, parents.
Director Ralph Bakshi is an animation legend. Visually, his productions are often a bit crudely rendered, but his themes are important and often engaging, and almost no one has used the medium to such profound effect. He began with Mighty Mouse and Deputy Dawg cartoons in 1959, spent the 1960s doing a variety of further shorts for Terrytoons, and ended the decade by animating all 45 episodes of the classic 1968-1970 animated Spider Man show (that’s the one with the theme song that we ALL remember). Then he got serious. The 1970s were Bakshi’s heyday, beginning with Fritz in 1972, Heavy Traffic the following year, and such classics as Wizards in 1977, his rotoscoped take on Lord of the Rings in 1978, the very cool American Pop in 1981, and a few others among and between these. All of these films (save perhaps Rings) use animation to tell stories that are perhaps too heavy, intense, or controversial to have been told in a live-action setting. Although most of them are not as blatantly pornographic as Fritz, topics of race, religion, gender issues, drugs, and the decay of society due to war and violence are constant themes.
Bakshi famously got in trouble in 1988 for sneaking drug themes into a new series of Mighty Mouse cartoons meant for kids, and did his last high-profile feature, (Cool World - which was mangled by Paramount people), in 1992. Bakshi has been attempting to get a follow up to Heavy Traffic - entitled The Last Days of Coney Island - made for a 2007 release.
Review by James Teitelbaum
©2007 All Rights Reserved
v.1.0
One theory as to why The Simpsons has lasted on television for twenty years now is that the writing during the show’s golden age(s) is genuinely smart, even if it is written for rather dim characters. The layering of keen social satire being delivered by characters that even the lowest common denominator viewers can relate to has given The Simpsons a truly universal appeal. I am not sure that I have ever met someone who doesn’t like the show at all, and that is a truly rare thing.
Given all of this success, how could Simpsons creator Matt Groening fail to become involved in another series? He could not, and the result was a geek’s dream: a Simpsons-style show, set in a science fiction environment. Futurama ran for 72 episodes between 1999 and 2003. After a haitus of four years, the first in a series of feature-length telefilms was released in late 2007, with at least three more films in production for release into 2009.
The series centers around a delivery boy named Fry, who is sent from 1999 to 2099, and must contend with adjusting to life in the future. Fry is a bit dim-witted and sort of a loser. He lands a job in the future, as a delivery boy. His co workers become a sort of extended family. As the crew goes from planet to planet making their deliveries, a series of misadventures ensues.
The strength of Futurama is of course in the writing. Contemporary society is often lampooned by imagining where our current actions might take us if left unchecked for a millennium. Futurama is also allowed to explore human nature: the more things change, the more they stay the same. Even when our co-workers or family members are 200 years old, or are robots, or are cyclopses, or are lobster-men, somehow people are people (if I may use the word ‘people’ loosely). It is also clear from the outset that Futurama cannot help but to have fun spoofing the entire science fiction genre, mercilessly, if lovingly. From the first science fiction film - Georges Méliès’ A Voyage to the Moon (1902) - to the present, sharp eyed (or many-eyed) viewers will find clever homage or parody almost constantly.
The animation in Futurama is a notch better than on The Simpsons. The sets and vehicles are designed in 3D, allowing the animators to efficiently (read: on-budget) render things in dynamic ways, with a moving camera (note that the camera on The Simpsons, which is created in traditional 2D animation, almost never moves within any single shot). The production design is 1950s atomic meets classic Matt Groening, with a healthy dash of Earle K. Bergey, Joe Doolin, or Frank Paul thrown in (they were cover artists for 1920s-1940s pulp sci-fi titles like Startling Stories, Amazing Stories, and Planet Comics).
Futurama is hilarious, but probably failed to find as much success as The Simpsons did, due to the show being broadcast on cable (The Simpsons is on Fox), and due to the science fiction themes, which are (let’s face it) a turn off to many viewers.
The first of the telefims, Bender’s Big Score, made its debut on DVD and broadcast in November 2007. The entire original cast was brought back for the film.
Review by James Teitelbaum
©2007 All Rights Reserved
v.1.0
“This gang now has fifteen shotguns, three hand grenades, and a barrel of gunpowder. Yesterday, they blew the top off of a palm tree”.
A young Mexican gangster explains to the law how he became who he is. Some lower income little kids band together as pals, and after nine years pass, they narrowly avoid becoming violent criminals when they opt to open a legit social club. They become a real gang of criminals when forced into conflict by another gang of more violent teenage rebels. Dig the great clothes, cool cars, and slick hairdos on the gangster kids - they look like all of my rockabilly friends do right now. This 1954 short film (27 mins) was probably made to be shown in high schools. The message here is that society is to blame. The gangster tells the cops that he’s a product of his surroundings, but the cop counters that it’s up to the gangsters to change things in a positive manner, rather than being destructive. Gang Boy is stilted, campy, and obvious, but it is also an interesting peek into 1954 youth culture.
Review by James Teitelbaum
©2007 All Rights Reserved
v.1.0
When I first saw Gattaca in 1997, I deemed this flick a contender for that ever-elusive short list of meaningful and important sci-fi films. l thought that the bits about Ethan Hawke’s character’s relationship with his brother were a little sappy, but I loved the rest. Seeing it again decade later, I didn’t mind the brotherly syrup as much, but I also thought that the rest of the movie was not as important as I had remembered it being. Still, the messages here about the value of personal identity, the rights to privacy, the psychological dangers (on a societal level) of eugenics, and the usual warnings against all things Orwellian are even more topical now than they were in the 1990s. Spooky stuff here; we may not be planning manned missions to Saturn’s moons just yet, but the whole rest of the film is on the verge of being reality, rather than sci-fi - and that is not a pleasant thought. Hawke does good work with the tight script he’s been handed, and Jude Law does a nice job too, but Uma Thurman sleepwalks through it all.
Review by James Teitelbaum
©2007 All Rights Reserved
v.1.0
I never really read the Marvel comics series that this movie was based on, but let’s face it: if you were a middle class white kid who grew up in 1970s midwestern America, and didn’t think that the image of the guy with the leather jacket and flaming skull cruising around on a chopper from hell was cool, then you must have been some sort of Commie or something. I was no Commie, and therefore as an adult I was mildly curious to see Ghost Rider out of some sort of debt to childhood.
Comic book geek turned high-priced actor Nicholas Cage is clearly enjoying playing Johnny Blaze, who is cursed with becoming the Ghost Rider: Satan’s bounty hunter. The flaming skull effects work well, and Blaze seems to have a thing for monkeys, and for jellybeans sucked up from a martini glass. This movie is really freaking dumb, but it knows that it is dumb, and seems comfortable in it’s dumbness. There are some moments that are supposed to be funny, and are, and some moments that aren’t supposed to be funny, and are. The film seems just as perfectly OK with the latter as it does with the former. This movie also demonstrated something to me that I was previously unaware of, but not at all surprised by, which is that co-star Eva Mendes is not only one of the prettiest women alive, but is also a completely worthless and shamefully inept actress. She also needs a manicure. Aren’t these things seen to before they start filming? Wes Bentley is woefully miscast as Satan’s kid (Ghost Rider’s prey), although Peter Fonda is fine as daddy devil, and Sam Elliott shows up to play exactly the same role he always plays. This movie was mildly amusing to me, but if you weren’t a comics geek in the 1970s or 1980s, you probably won’t find much to like here.
Review by James Teitelbaum
©2007 All Rights Reserved
v.1.0
“You are sentenced to two years hard labor - teaching high school”.
I am a big fan of the works of Hal Hartley, who crafts smart, well-made indie films.
I am a big fan of the occasional smart and well-made sci-fi film.
Somehow, when Hal Hartley decided to make a sci-fi film, there ended up being some sort of phase cancellation in play, and the result was the only film Hartley has ever made that I didn’t enjoy. In fact, I thought The Girl From Monday downright sucked. This came as a bit of a disappointing surprise, because I didn’t think the man was capable of making sucky movies.
Perhaps old Hal was getting into a genre he didn’t understand, since all of his other films are rather wordy (in a good way) character dramas. That said, the best sci-fi is about ideas, and films about ideas are what Hartley does best. Somehow, The Girl From Monday never gels.
The Girl From Monday is about a near-future version of New York, where consumerism has spiraled completely out of control. I can’t really say much more than that, because the story - even with the continual voice-over explaining things - is hopelessly muddled. All of the usual cliches of the dystopian corporate-controlled future (sci-fi handbook plot #14) are here, including the barcodes tattooed onto people, the fascist shocktrooper police force, and the evil corporate empire running things. Somehow, in this society, having sex makes someone’s net worth increase. There is some sort of resistance going on. An illegal copy of Walden is floating around. Among all of this, an alien woman (Tatiana Abracos) from the planet Monday splashes down into the sea, and is sheltered by Jack (Bill Sage, star of Hartley’s 1992 Simple Men). He is involved with a co-worker named Cecile (Sabrina Lloyd). Hartley repertory company member Bill Urbaniak also shows up incognito as a school principal.
The character motivations are completely incomprehensible. The film was shot on a cheap digital camera and looks really low-fi, in a bad way. The camerawork relies on amateurish gimmicks, such as having almost every shot tilted to the left or right by a few degrees, plus switching between color and black-and-white, and skipping frames to give the images a jumpy look. The few props that are supposed to look futuristic look sub-Ed Wood-bad (such as the cop uniforms and the virtual reality headsets that some students wear). Many props are hopelessly contemporary to the year the movie was made (2005) such as an Apple laptop, all of the cars, and particular models of cell phones. The titular girl from Monday herself has basically nothing to do with the story, which is really more about Sage and Lloyd’s characters (and to a lesser degree a high school kid who gets mixed up in things). The Stranger In a Strange Land elements of the space girl trying to cope with being on Earth are underdeveloped, but the parts we do see feel like something that Hartley half-heartedly lifted from StarMan or The Man Who Fell To Earth.
All of this said, the best (only) thing this film has going for it is the cast. Abracos is very watchable, Sage is always reliable in Hartley films, and does his best here. Lloyd is the revelation of this film - I’d never seen her work before. Here, she is directed in Hartley’s usual style, delivering her lines in a purposely stilted and flat manner. I’d like to see what else she can do. Lots of promise.
The DVD has a trailer on it, and a 20-minute documentary consisting mostly of fly-on-the-wall behind the scenes footage mixed with a few interviews.
Review by James Teitelbaum
©2007 All Rights Reserved
v.1.0
No point looking at this 1934 romp as anything that attempts art.&nbs