Friday, December 08, 2006
How Dario Got His Groove Back
The geek subgenre of horror is a strong one. We basically consider every horror film a classic of some sort. But even in a fanbase where the "C" word is attached to such trifles as The Monster Squad and Sleepaway Camp, there are films that rightfully earn the title. One such classic is Dario Argento's surreal masterpiece Suspiria. Regarded by many as not just a classic but as the greatest horror film of all, Suspiria is actually part of a trilogy of terror (a trilogy scarier even than Karen Black fighting a toothy demon doll).
What came to be known as The Mothers Trilogy continued with Inferno, a sequel/not a sequel that continues the tale, of evil witches. But it ended there. For decades fans were left hanging as Dario diddled about with bugs and Poe adaptations. But the Italion stallion has awakened and has begun filming La Terza Madre/The Third Mother (a.k.a. Mother of Tears)! Fangoria reports that the auteur is throwing himself into this project with a renewed sense of bloody enthusiasm.
At the Andezeno cemetery location, where the urn containing the Mother of Tears’ ashes is discovered, Dario answers the burning question: Why now, after all these years? “Because my fantasies have never been freer than in the past four years of my thinking about the second sequel,” he says. “I had a great experience on the MASTERS OF HORROR series [for which he helmed the first season’s JENIFER and this year’s PELTS]. They let me do whatever I wanted, and that creative freedom allowed my imagination to bubble over like sparkling champagne. I rediscovered the fury in my soul, the feelings I had as a young man directing SUSPIRIA. That drive, my dreams and a stream of obscene consciousness led me to visualize a modern fairy tale for our confusing times, full of sadomasochistic sex and shocking violence.”Between this and George Romero's back-to-basics flick, Diary of the Dead, it looks like the old heads are ready to rise up like an ancient Lovecraftian god and tear it up again. Can a Carpenter revival be far behind? Dare to dream!
Source: Fangoria.comDiscuss this and other Fakery on our message boards! Continue reading How Dario Got His Groove Back
Two Trailers With Conflicting Degrees Of Quality Presented For Your Review
The latest 300 trailer is up and running. Click it here, baby. More after the jump.
The totalitarian prison state I work for won't allow me streaming media. They expect me to use this computer on my desk to serve their evil agenda instead of letting me gorge myself on images of half naked men stabbing each other to the sounds of Nine Inch Nails. Surely this is not the America our forefathers envisioned. Hope you like it, you lucky prick. Know that the heat you feel from your monitor is my seething jealously projected throughout the www.
Oh good, look at this. I may not be able to take in an action packed comic book brought to life, but I can feast upon the first trailer for Hannibal Rising. Or a Taco Bell Gordita™ for similar results.
Source: Yahoo, ComingSoon.netDiscuss this and other Fakery on our message boards! Continue reading Two Trailers With Conflicting Degrees Of Quality Presented For Your Review
Thursday, December 07, 2006
Racist Drunks Threaten Your Home Video Amusement
The news about the college frat boys featured in Fox's smash-hit Borat - how they were supposedly duped into being portrayed as obnoxious drunken racists - is not new. But I did just catch wind that now, after their initial and failed lawsuit in seeking an injunction to stop the studio from displaying their likeness (along with unspecified monetary damages), the dullards and their attorneys are at it again, this time taking aim at the film's DVD.
From Reuters: A Los Angeles judge on Thursday said he would consider a request by two U.S. college students to have a scene cut from the hit movie "Borat" that shows them guzzling alcohol and making racist remarks.
In a lawsuit originally thrown out a month ago and now aimed at DVD sales, the fraternity brothers said they were tricked into appearing in the film and that including the scene on the forthcoming DVD would harm their chances of finding work.
One of the South Carolina students has already had to resign from a prominent position in his fraternity and another lost a "very prestigious internship," their lawyer said.
The two men, whose names are not used in court papers to protect them from "additional and unnecessary embarrassment," (the fat prick who's pictured throughout is Justin Seay) appear in a drunken interview in which they watch a sex tape and make racist remarks about slavery and minorities in the United States.
They said they were taken to a bar to "loosen up" before filming and never expected the movie to be shown in the United States. The pair are seeking unspecified damages and footage involving them removed from the DVD.
First of all, these guys are idiots and deserve every ounce of shit that gets lobbed their way. Secondly, I still LOL heartily at the original court document (which you can check out over at The Smoking Gun) that states, "Believing the film would not be viewed in the United States, at the encouragement of the defendants, plaintiffs engaged in behavior that they otherwise would not have engaged in." Naturally, the internets, bastions of Truth, Justice, and the American way, would provide stunning evidence to support the above legal court statement:
Whoops!
So what does this mean for the Borat DVD? Nothing at the moment, and my suspicion would be that this will eventually get thrown out like it originally was. But this is probably the farthest these dickheads have gotten in their lame pursuit to make themselves seem less awful than they really are. The scary thing is that if this were to go through, the floodgates could be opened to further frivolous litigation against other such exposes, documentaries, or whatever. Borat's just a fictionalized comedy that plays on real world absurdities and pokes fun at them. What if it were something more real? A precedent could be set as to what a filmmaker can or can't show. And studios, wanting to protect their own asses, will take less risks and be less willing to support their creative talent. But, I think the premise of this particular lawsuit is so damn shaky that Fox probably needn't worry. The publicity is, I'm sure, a welcomed thing as it would no doubt be a boost to ticket purchases and DVD sales from the curious.
I guess we'll see what happens next. Till then, the next time you see a drunken fratboy, get him to buy you some beers. Then punch him.
Source: Reuters, The Smoking GunDiscuss this and other Fakery on our message boards! Continue reading Racist Drunks Threaten Your Home Video Amusement
Sam Raimi To Beat Us All To A Pulp
Sam Raimi, the workhorse behind the cult classic Evil Dead series and the Spider-Man franchise, is rumored to be helming an upcoming smorgasbord of classic pulp heroes all slammed together in a single movie. Because no, we haven't yet learned our lesson in the wake of LXG and Van Helsing.
IGN has the scoop:
"The project would unite a number of famous pulp heroes from Street and Smith Publications, which had once been among the top pulp publishers.
Characters that we were informed would be included in the film are Doc Savage, The Shadow and The Avenger, and quite possibly other (or all) major Street and Smith characters."
Before we all groan and roll our eyes and make jokes about Alec Baldwin, I'd like to point out that Raimi's often overlooked and very entertaining Darkman is completely a pulp hero story at heart. He knows the tone of this kind of story, the pre-superhero post-film-noir masked men, pretty damn well. This could all be complete bullshit anyway, but I'll say I'm hesitantly excited by the prospect.
Oh, and Mr. Raimi? Please, please use the image I posted in this article as inspiration for your film.
Source: IGNDiscuss this and other Fakery on our message boards! Continue reading Sam Raimi To Beat Us All To A Pulp
Wednesday, December 06, 2006
It Happened One Boogie Night
John C. Reilly is doing penance for his part in inflicting the faux-musical on moviegoers. The Chicago star is working with comedy superfuckinggenius Judd Apatow on a parody of these Oscar baiting crowdpleasers. Walk Hard, a musical biopic parody directed by Jake Kasdan (Lawrence Kasdan's son) and co-written by Apatow, stars Reilly as a Cash/Orbison amalgam in a scathing satire that's sure to shock and dismay every blue haired suburban old lady.
On the flipside, Don Cheadle is sick of acting and is ready for his own Oscarbait project. The geek favorite is slated to direct and star in a Miles Davis movie sure to please every one of those blue haired suburban old ladies. The fact that Cheadle, an immensely talented performer, is directing gives me the faintest glimmer of hope that this will not be yet another safe and tepid biopic. I just hope he doesn't follow the method-actor trend of playing his own instruments or the narcissistic-actor trend of releasing his own CD of covers. Reilly is supposed to be singing his own songs for his pic, but that's funny in an ironic way. As opposed to Joaquin recording his own Johnny Cash CD, which is funny in a sad and pathetic kind of way.
Note: This news item was written by the illustrious Doug Slack.
Source: Production Weekly, TMZ.comDiscuss this and other Fakery on our message boards! Continue reading It Happened One Boogie Night
Hannibal Rising, Franchise Sinking
RopeofSilicon.com, a name that has always sounded vaguely pornographic to me, has some new pics from the upcoming Hannibal Rising.
I think we've turned a corner here. These flicks have steadily declined from brilliant to flawed to forgettable. But the level of quality indicated by these shots - the cheesy mugging, the flat compositions, the mere presence of Peter Stormare - have given me cause for hope. Consider the fact that this has a February release date and we haven't seen a single moving image yet. Consider also that the book was only just published THIS WEEK. Instead of another dull Ratner Pastuerized Processed Cinematic Product we may have a spectacularly awful failure on our hands. Keep your fingers crossed, kids! I haven't been this excited since I saw the trailer for Jason X.
Source: RopeofSilicon.comDiscuss this and other Fakery on our message boards! Continue reading Hannibal Rising, Franchise Sinking
Ghost Scowler
When I was a kid, I had this set of lenticular dinosaur stickers, where if you turned them one way, the tyrannosaur started roaring. I thought it was the pinnacle of technological evolution. I was also five years old. Now, some two decades later, the gimmick has come back, and it's invaded the world of superhero movies.
Sony Pictures have unveiled the new change-o-matic poster for the upcoming Nic Cage vehicle, Ghost Rider. Now, when moviegoers ignore The Fountain and go see The Wayans Bros. Vs. Predator, Nicolas Cage will scowl at them. And then the flesh will melt off of his face, revealing a burning devil skull.
The devil skull will also be scowling at them.
Source: Sony PicturesDiscuss this and other Fakery on our message boards! Continue reading Ghost Scowler
Jaws, Episode I?
"Japanese submarine slammed two torpedoes into our side, Chief. We was comin' back from the island of Tinian to Leyte... just delivered the bomb. The Hiroshima bomb. Eleven hundred men went into the water. Vessel went down in 12 minutes. Didn't see the first shark for about a half an hour. Tiger. 13-footer. You know how you know that when you're in the water, Chief? You tell by looking from the dorsal to the tail."
Everybody should know that quote, being that it's from Robert Shaw's monologue in the perfect Jaws when he talks about the doomed USS Indianapolis and its mission to deliver the Hiroshima bomb. For aeons there's been rumours about a movie being made about this, occasionally touted as an actual Jaws prequel/sequel. But now it looks like it's actually happening, thanks to Open Water director Chris Kentis and Warner Bros. who will produce Indianapolis.
In case you don't know, or you haven't seen Jaws (if not, buy it now or suffer the consequences), the USS Indianapolis was the ship that delivered the first atomic bomb to Hiroshima, before getting downed by a Japanese submarine. The ship went down, and the 900 or so of the crew that survived the initial attack were left floating in the water, much to the delight of the various sharks indigenous to the area. 321 men survived to be rescued, and the commander, Charles McVay, was controversially court-martialled and eventually killed himself. However, he was exonerated in 2000 of any blame for the accident.Kentis himself said "Being a diver and a WWII buff, this is a story that long haunted me," and apparently his movie Open Water (which provides a similar, if scaled down, concept to Indianapolis) was a testbed for what he could do with the film. I never saw it myself, so I have no idea if it's any good, although like many films I haven't seen, I do own the DVD.
Indianapolis is an adaptation of Douglas Stanton's book In Harm's Way, and will be produced by Laura Lau, Mark Gordon, Betsy Beers, and celebrated scriptwriter Akiva Goldsman. Oh fucking joy.
Source: VarietyDiscuss this and other Fakery on our message boards! Continue reading Jaws, Episode I?
I Kill Kills Me
The news here is that producer John Avnet is teaming with immortal vampire clan, the Di Laurentiis, to turn Italian serial killer novel I Kill into a movie. So there's going to be another serial killer movie. The reason for writing it up as a news story is so that I can bitch about there being another serial killer movie.
AAARRRGGGHHH!!! OH FOR FUCK'S SAKE WOULD YOU STOP WITH THE SERIAL KILLER MOVIES ALREADY! JESUS!
The gag here is that the killer always asks a local dj to play a song on the radio that is themed with his next murder. And this is what fucks me off. He hasn't gone loopy on drugs, his dog isn't talking to him, and he wasn't raped by his priest to the point where his suppressed rage and sexuality have to be expressed through murdering young women. No - he's a gimmick serial killer, one of the cheapest and sleaziest film conceits of recent years.
Because as soon as you make his reasons for or his method of killing clever or interesting, you've immediately entered into a cartoon world. Serial killers are often intelligent, but they are far from coldly rational. These elaborately MO'd cinema psychos are more like Bond villains than actual murderers.
You want a serial killer copying the murders of other serial killers (Copycat)? You want serial killers murdering serial killers (Suspect Zero)? Or how about a serial killer taking body parts from victims in order to reconstruct the body of Christ just before Easter (Resurrection)? How about a serial killer murdering the surviving members of the Kellogg family because his younger brother choked to death on a Frostie (Tony)?
These MO's are very clever but they are meta, removed from any real sense of human motivation and horribly, horribly smug. Absolutely fine in a Bond villain or comic book character, but in serial killer films that are filled with lingering depictions of death and the suffering of innocents it creates an ugly atmosphere. It's the very ugliest traits of tabloid journalism in film form - a puritanical moralism about the terrible evil being perpetrated mixed with a fanatical obsession with all the gory details. The human suffering is irrelevant here, only the coolness of the story. Having a girl be stabbed just isn't sexy enough.
It's odd that films like The Devil's Rejects, which resolutely avoids the hypocrisy of histrionic moralising, are the ones that get censored and criticised, whereas mainstream dross like this is allowed merrily on its way, snuffling its snout through the filth it declares to abhor.
That said, Silence of the Lambs, the film who's fault this all is, is great, as is Seven. And I can't wait for David Fincher's next film, Zodiac, which is about a serial killer who links his killings to the signs of the zodiac. Kind of. Hypocrisy is a game the whole family can play.
Source: VarietyDiscuss this and other Fakery on our message boards! Continue reading I Kill Kills Me
Angelinos: "Stop your grinnin' and drop your linen."
Apart from only about a handful of good people (and myself), I'm not sure how many actual Los Angeles area denizens we have reading TFL. Hopefully thousands. That'll click our ads. And pay for my Nintendo Wii this holiday season. In any case, those who are here, give thanks to Collider for this heads up: The Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences will be screening Aliens, James Cameron's space action opus, this Friday, December 8th here in Hollywood as part of a 20th Anniversary retrospective on the film.
Lifted from Oscars.org: In the 20 years since this Academy Award®-winning science fiction classic was released in theaters, its following has only increased. Recognized for its groundbreaking visual effects and animatronic creations, as well as its stellar sound effects editing, this sequel to the 1979 film Alien provided some of the most startling imagery in the history of the science fiction genre.
Aliens picks up 57 years after the previous story ended. After barely surviving her first expedition to an alien-infested planet, Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) is discovered by a deep space salvage team and taken back to Earth. When communication with the now-colonized alien planet suddenly ceases, Ripley is asked to return to the place where all of her nightmares began.
Nominated for seven Academy Awards, including Actress (Weaver), Art Direction (Peter Lamont, Crispian Sallis), Film Editing (Ray Lovejoy), Music – Original Score (James Horner) and Sound (Graham V. Hartstone, Nicolas Le Messurier, Michael A. Carter, Roy Charman), Aliens won Oscars® for Sound Effects Editing (Don Sharpe) and Visual Effects (Robert Skotak, Stan Winston, John Richardson, Suzanne Benson).Several of the film’s key cast and crew members will gather for an onstage conversation to discuss the role motion picture science and technology played in shaping Aliens.
Ticket information and screening location can be found at Oscars.org. I myself might be there, and if so it'll probably be followed by heavy drinking and more Bill Paxton quotations at "The Well" (on Sunset and Argyle).
Source: Oscars.org, ColliderDiscuss this and other Fakery on our message boards! Continue reading Angelinos: "Stop your grinnin' and drop your linen."
Tuesday, December 05, 2006
Torture Porn Goes Art
It's taken a long time for me to start watching the films of Pedro Almodovar, the Spanish director who's every film receives a wave of positive reviews and awards. They were being praised way back in the 80's when I didn't want to watch them due to a lack of exploding heads and they were praised through the 90's when I thought films about women's emotions didn't seem cool enough and praised through the 00's when I as too lazy to dig into a filmography already dating back decades. I finally saw Talk to Her and Bad Education and, you know what? They're fantastic. Volver is currently the object of much love from everyone who sees it, which will include me in the next week, and is the favourite for this year's foreign language Oscar, but Pedro is already lining up his next which will be called El Piel Que Habito, or The Skin I Live In.
His films are technically brilliant, with no wasted scenes, and with every shot expressing character, plot and emotion in beautifully elegant fashion. They are also full of joy in a way that more austere technicians like Michael Haneke seem hellbent on avoiding. Pedro's films are tightly plotted, but the plots concern the movements of emotions between characters rather than on existential musings on guilt or on the contents of a McGuffin-esque briefcase. He's also not above using the more gaudy conventions of melodrama to kick his films off. Talk to Her is about two men who meet while caring for lovers in permanent vegetative states. Bad Education starts off as a Hitchcockian thriller who's mystery just happens to revolve around the issues to transgenderism. As he has grown older the more over the top jokes, like fake adverts for incontinence pants, have gone, but Talk to Her still contains a fake silent movie about an incredible shrinking man that ends with him disappearing up his lover's vagina.
Another bonus is that, as a big homo, he seems to show no embarrassment over dwelling on the visual beauty of the female form. I know she's in a coma and it's all a bit necrophilic, but the lady in Talk to Her has got the most fantastic breasts. Seriously.
Anyway, Almodovar films are a treat and, as long as you've had enough life experiences to know what love and loss are, you'll have no problem getting into these (horror!) European art films.
So on to his next film. The Skin I Live In is based on the very salacious idea of a plastic surgeon inflicting terrible revenge on the men who raped his daughter. See what I mean about gaudy melodrama? It is based on the novel Mygale by Thierry Jonquet, but apparently will only include one scene from his book, so we shall just have to see how Pedro handles it.
Perhaps this will be the film to break Almodovar with the Saw watching hordes of mouth-breathing dullards like me? The producers are hoping to start filming in the first half of next year with Penelope Cruz in the lead.
Source: Variety Discuss this and other Fakery on our message boards! Continue reading Torture Porn Goes Art
Hitman To Hit Next Year/Vin Diesel
Reasonably successful computer game franchise, Hitman, is now finally moving towards production after years of will they/won't they development hell and inaccurate Internet news items. The bad news is that Vin Diesel, a bald muscly man good at fighting will not be playing the lead character, called Agent 46, who is a bald muscly man who is good a fighting.
Vin Diesel, like Dwayne 'The Rock' Johnson, is a very charismatic presence on screen, plays an awesome action tough guy role, has been in some nifty movies, but has never really had a huge success. Pitch Black, which was only ever a small cult hit, earned less than the catering cost on its sequel, The Chronicles of Riddick, which went on to earn less than the catering cost at my last birthday. Such public failures can kill careers in Hollywood, leading Vin's dream Hannibal project to change from Hollywood epic to TV miniseries to possibly animated tv series to nothing much at all at the moment. This seems the most obvious reason for him to be kicked off the project. So much for the beefcake revival. Those who would mock me as a retarded child of the 80's for wanting a beefcake revival in the first place can go look at Casino Royale again. Men of unlikely musculature punching things is lots of fun, especially if they can show a sensitive side and, if you've seen any of his interviews, Vin Diesel is almost all sensitive side.
But while I mourn the passing of Vin, you can all feel happy for Timothy Olyphant, who is taking his place. Tim was great in HBO western Deadwood, apparently, but looks like the average sharp cheekboned Hollywood pretty boy to me. Bully for him nonetheless.
Having an interest in minor jobbing actors aside, the reason for you all to get excited about this is that Luc Besson is producing. Kiss of the Dragon, Unleashed, Banliue 13, The Transporter 1 & 2 - these films are all immensely entertaining fighty punchy movies that would also be far better critically regarded if they were from Asia instead of Continental Europe (traditional home of shit). These films aren't pretentious, sometimes very silly, sometimes even deliberately, and feature lots of rocking fighting and action. There's no reason to believe Hitman would be any different.
In fact we can ignore any of those arguments about whether games-to-movies are always shit, or arguments about washed up steroid abusers - this is ultimately a story about Luc Besson making another action film about a professional killer. If he manages to sneak Natalie Portman in as a rival killer we could have a classic on our hands, or we would if she killed people in the nude. Judging from Luc Besson's track record, we should cross our fingers.
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Review: For Your Consideration
On the commentary track of the Criterion Collection edition of Sullivan’s Travels, Christopher Guest and Michael McKean reminisce about possibly the greatest movie-within-a-movie movie ever made. That film is about a man who looks to make a message film to help people, but finds that making a nicely entertaining film helps people enough by itself. While making their movie-within-a-movie movie, Preston Sturges and his stable of actors accomplish just that, so it’s fitting that Guest and his stable of actors do the same with their new film For Your Consideration.
That’s not to say that For Your Consideration is comparable to Sullivan’s Travels; it’s not, but it is an entirely entertaining flick which is well populated with jokes, most of them merely chuckle-worthy, with a few purely laugh out loud moments.
Eschewing his mockumentary principal, Guest and co-writer Eugene Levy shoot for a straight narrative here. As a director, Guest’s aesthetic remains mostly unchanged. There’s a lot of handheld camera-work here, (and coupled with the very funny faux-film clips that show up, it can sometimes look like the BBC series Extras).
The theme of the plot is not all that different from Guest’s Waiting for Guffman. It’s about passionate-and-bad actors getting a rumor about possible stardom – here stemming from internet-created Oscar buzz for their film "Home For Porim", a WWI-era drama about a jewish family in the south coming together for the holidays (as an aside: if there’s a theme to the film, a lesson to be learned, it may be that Yiddish words sternly spoken with a southern accent might be the funniest linguistic thing ever). This buzz grabs the cast and a few local TV shows by storm, and allows for a nice abundance of ego from the cast.
There are some plot points that don’t make a lot of sense – why everyone in the media goes along with the buzz for the whole ride is a bit strange – but those moments allow for some great gags, so what does it really matter?
Guest’s cast here is as good as ever. The reason I mentioned Sullivan’s Travels earlier was due to Guest’s point about Sturges’ stable of actors and the special feeling that you get when you see that familiar face on the screen, and how nice that feeling is. He’s completely right, and you feel that connection often in this film, with his full cast in tow, and a few new faces, if you’re a big fan of Guest’s other films, you’ll really love thinking “Oh, hey, that guy. I wonder what he’s gonna do?” when that familiar face pops up.
For Your Consideration doesn’t have many flaws – it’s a bit shallow, and doesn’t play with its themes about ego, artistic integrity, and hype as well as it could – but it has a lot of jokes, with most of them good, a few great, and very little wasted moments. It’s not an incredible film, or even a really special one, but it’s quite good, and completely worth your time and money to see it.
7.4 out of 10
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Monday, December 04, 2006
Trucks - Part 2
When I was a kid I used to fantasise about me and my brother having matching Mack trucks. White with blue pointing for me and red pointing for him. Then we'd drive around and solve crimes and stuff. It was cool. Toy companies in the 80's made sure to have big trucks in their toy lines and, although Optimus Prime is the greatest, the truck from MASK was better, even though the driver was a twat. The drivers of the Trans Am and Camaro MASK toys were cool however, even though they didn't have moustaches. All of these things are linked by 1977's Smokey and the Bandit: a film that hopped on to the truckin' and CB radio craze and turned it mainstream. I know most people my age are willing to bang on about their Star Wars toy collection, but how many are willing to admit the influence this deeply stupid Burt Reynolds vehicle had over their childhoods?
The plot consists of The Bandit (Reynolds) being bet that he can't travel across state lines to Texas, pick up a truckload of beer and illegally bring it back to Georgia in 28 hours. The Bandit enlists the help of The Snowman to drive the 18 wheeler while The Bandit drives a black Trans-Am as the 'blocker' who will keep 'Smokey' (the police) out of The Snowman's way, usually by jumping over a broken bridge while a country rock song plays. That all plays out in the first ten minutes, leaving the rest of the running time free for endless sequences of driving.
To mix things up, The Bandit picks up Frog (Sally Field) who has just run away from her wedding to the son of Buford T. Justice (Jackie Gleason), the main Smokey, who then proceeds to chase The Bandit all the way home.
The Bandit gets chased by Smokey, escapes them while humiliating Buford T. Justice, who then gets more Smokeys into the chase, rinse and repeat.
And it does get repetitive. There's a reason why Every Which Way But Loose is very different from how I remembered it while this is exactly the same, and it's that this film is pitched at 8 year olds. There's nothing here, from the plot, the characters, the swearing, the romance, or even the cultural milieu, that isn't immediately graspable by a kid.
And it's really good fun. The country rock soundtrack is pumping and catchy, the car chases are shot with an excellent eye for how to make the vehicles look fucking cool, and all the characters are basically having a really good time. There's none of that fancy modern angst going on here, just automotive fetishisation and the great southern men with their hands on their gear sticks. Yee-hah.
It opens with a close-up of a Mack truck's radiator grill, filling the whole screen, with 'golden hour' light reflecting off the chrome. James Cameron obviously stole this for the fist post-credits shot of Terminator 2 but his version, all coldly precise and blue, just doesn't have the muscle, the smell of diesel or, dammit, the sexiness of The Bandit's grill. Not satisfied with that, the entire credits sequence consists of shots of a truck. Lots of shots of a truck. What the film is communicating by this sequence is 'Truck! TRUCK! TRUCK!!!!!!' and that's it. It does go on too long, but for the first 30 seconds you too will be thinking 'TRUCK!!!'.
There's lots of cars doing u-turns on freeways, ruining their tires into huge clouds of wheelspin, lots of cars jumping over and through and into things, and there's a great shot where the Trans-Am is hiding in between two trucks while another truck blocks a smokey, in the outside lane, from seeing The Bandit. It's all shot very low down and from the side, all at 50 odd miles per hour and is like a mechanised 5 vehicle ballet, if ballet dancers drank diesel fuel, weighed 3 tonnes and weren't all poofy. The sequels had cars driving underneath trucks, and other cars crashing so hard they span three times without touching the ground, all in the slowest of slo-mo's, but the first film's simpler stunts still give off the satisfying whiff of burnt rubber and collapsed axles.
A large part of the film is also spent on the CB Radio, which was pretty much cool as shit back in the 70's. Thus we have most of the script involving gobbledygook like 'breaker, breaker one-nine, got a smokey on my tail, what's your ten-four, over?'. Fortunately we have an 'outsider' character, Frog, there who needs to have the language explained to her, so kids and the sorts of people who would consider getting a CB Radio can know what is going on. Equally, speaking in code means the conversations stay very simple, just so no-one ever actually gets lost.
So there's lots of chases, lots of 'comedy' segments every bit as low as the monkey farting in Every Which Way (Buford T. Justice comes out of the rest room and some toilet paper is stuck to his glasses!), a dash of romance and then more chases, but the most interesting thing about the film is the world being created around The Bandit.
There's a lot of mythologising going on in this film. The opening song details the many adventures the Bandit has got up to in the slightly disingenuous tone of the storyteller who will smile to tell you that even he knows how tall these tales are but still wants you to believe them. Imagine someone winking at you and saying 'trust me, I'm a liar'. It's cute, but it's still a bunch of bullshit.
The Bandit is a legend before the film begins, and we first see him at a truck rodeo, being paid just to be there, sleeping on a hammock with his stetson covering his face. He's the outlaw, the iconoclast and the last true independent man, and he takes the bet. He takes it for the thrill, for the chance to thumb his nose at Smokey and for the chance to drive cars really fast and have some fun. But underneath that is his need for money. He's stuck at these rodeos getting paltry appearance fees because he's got nothing else in his life but his legend, like those poor souls who make their living touring every sci-fi convention, signing glossies of themselves from when they appeared in that one tv show back in the 80's. Yes they're worshiped by fans, but they are slaves to those fans and their $20 a pop.
This is a very debased form of freedom. People like The Bandit, or Clint from Every Which Way are the modern cowboys and the Independent Man but the myth is small now, even in films that seek to pander to it. These men are sidelined, irrelevant, often fools and usually losers. Clint falls for a girl and chases her halfway across the country, only to find out that she's a huckster, squeezing money out of her marks and then skipping town. He has been made a fool of. He is immature emotionally and, instead of standing up for himself, he walks away, accepting his humiliation. Equally he finds out that the legend of bare-knuckle fighting, the only thing he's really good at, is an old fat drunk. They fight and Clint let's the old man win so he can keep his empty glory. Ideas of winning, of respect or of being 'the man' are gone. The horizons have shrunk, their ideals have been undermined and this modern world has left them behind.
Clint, interestingly, by giving up the idea of glory, actually retains some amount of dignity, by simply driving back home with his friends, at peace with having lost and ready to accept his anonymous life. These towns are not the frontier anymore, and these battles are meaningless. The Bandit, however, is that old fat bare-knuckle champion, and isn't even allowed Clint's compromised dignity.
He has defined himself as the law-breaker, the anti-authoritarian. At the end of the film he has basically won: the beer was delivered and he has a clear chance to escape scott free with the money. but he doesn't accept that. Instead he accepts a double or nothing bet for an even more difficult bootlegging trip and, even further, tells Buford T. Justice what he is going to do so that the chase can continue. He chooses to remain the legend - a legend even he admits to Frog was a lie of basically being silly, childish, and of avoiding responsibility or growing up.
And further, the film treats this as a happy ending. The legend has become a joke, and yet they still choose it. But this is just a kid's movie, of course, where everything is cartoonish and simplified, so we can not draw any conclusions about the ideal of the 'modern cowboy' from it, right? No-one buys into it, surely? Just as with the opening song, or the liar who says 'trust me', the myth tells you it is not real, but demands you accept its conclusions anyway. And considering that American foreign policy was indistinguishable from the cartoony nonsense of Rambo during most of the 80's, that people do accept it is all too believable.
These late 70's trucker films become elegies for the 'Cowboy' in American myth, even as they try to re-invent it.
I should also make quick mention of Burth Reynolds', and his moustache's, position as the sexiest man alive back when this was made. Well he starts off far too cute, being a smug bully, walking over everyone else's plans while always getting the last word and making wise-cracks that, if you think about them for more than a second, are amazingly lame. But then, when he's settled into the Trans-Am with Sally Field, a more relaxed charm comes through, just the merest hint of some maturity and vulnerability and, when the peddle steel country ballad comes on for the 'romance' scenes, a big soppy heart. So basically an arsehole and a liar with a touch of humanity that he's spent his entire life trying to cover up. What a hero. And we were talking about lowered standards. Did you ever hear those wives on 'Cops!' who screamed 'Buht hee's ah Guuhhd Maaa-uuyn!" while he's being hauled away for multiple murder? Also, Tom Selleck's moustache was bigger, Sam Elliot's could kick its ass, and Roseanne's was sexier.
Every Which Way But Loose was very much about the trucker, but didn't have many trucks in it, and Smokey and the Bandit still gave more screentime to The Bandit's sexy black Trans Am than to the truck, so for the last film (and three parts is definitely the right length for Internet articles) we'll have one that puts the trucks, and the myth of the trucker as cowboy, absolutely centre stage - Sam Peckinpah's greatest film: Convoy.
"East bound and down, 18 wheels a'rollin'
And we're gonna do what they say can't be done.
We've got a long way to go, and a short time to get there,
so run on Bandit, run on Bandit, run!"
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TFL's Favorite Shameless Rip-Offs! - Part 1
Grouse and moan all you want about the endless remakes coming out of Hollywoodland, but you and me both know nothing hits the spot like a good rip-off. The pantheon of geek classics is littered with rehashes and riffs of hit films. We here at the TFL World Headquarters And Center For Cinematic Logistics Management like a good knock-off, but we love a bad one even more. Here's the first in an epic series chronicling our very favorite shameless rip-offs.
(Note: My choice of favorite which follows below is subject to change once the Snakes on a Plane rip-off Plane Dead hits the streets. Snakes are for wimps and old ladies. But zombies on a plane? THAT'S some hardcore shit!)
Children Shouldn't Play with Dead Things (1972)
The Night of the Living Dead model is generally recognized as the prototype for zombie movies. George Romero unknowingly established the ground rules that would become universally recognized canon. Similarly, Bob Clark laid the foundations for the slasher genre with his cult classic Black Christmas (Look for the remake this holiday season at a theater near you!). But before Bob crafted his own little groundbreaker, he gleefully ripped off Romero's inherently scary formula. Unlike drive-in peers such as Roger Corman or Al Adamson, Bob (director, co-writer) and his cohort Alan Ormsby (co-writer, actor) were horror fans first, businessmen second. It's this love of the genre that gives Children Shouldn't Play With Dead Things its own unique personality. Unique for a flick that blatantly steals Romero's favorite plot device (Trapped in a house, surrounded by flesh eating zombies, aieeee!), that is. Dead Things adds a meta approach to its plot. A group of young stage actors, lead by an arrogant director sporting a goatee and his very best apricot scarf (cue Carly Simon tune), gather on a small island cemetery to rehearse a horror production and defile some graves. Kids today.
It's never quite clear just why Alan, a Charles Manson influenced egomaniac played by the film's co-writer and effects artist, brings his thespians out here. This setup reflects a kind of free-form 70's approach to theater, when an idealistic group of friends could gather and spontaneously explore their art. And dig up graves just to screw around with corpses. Further ripping off NoTLD, the performances here range from adequate to awful. What this cast does have going for it, however, is real chemistry. The troupe, who worked together on other Clark projects such as Deathdream, share a familiarity with each other that goes a long way towards making the non-flesh eating scenes enjoyable. One assumes the budget wasn't there for 90 minutes of zombies and gore, so the movie is front loaded with plenty of bad jokes, pontificating about the evils of society, and a ridiculously elaborate prank that requires an innocent caretaker to be bound and gagged so that a body may be dug up.
While there are a few early scares and plenty of time spent with an impressive looking corpse named Orville, we don't get to the fireworks factory for almost an hour. It's when the dead finally decide to rise from their graves that Clark and Ormsby reveal their true talents. The rising dead scene is scored with a collection of wonderfully bizarre keyboard transgressions and sound effects that could be outtakes from a King Crimson jam fed through a broken reel to reel player. It's an effectively unnerving scenario - shot after shot of dead people crawling out of the ground - that manages to sustain itself much longer than one would expect. From here on in it's all about the money shots as our heroes attempt to escape the angry assault. Alan Ormsby, who worked with Tom Savini back in the day, was quite the accomplished make-up artist (Click it here for further proof, baby!). His applications here are top notch for such a grassroots production. He creates a pack of zombies that each carry their own unique personality. There's the stumbling, one eyed zombie that looks like he'd rather be in bed, there's the glassy eyed Laraine Newman looking zombie that pierces you with her terrifying scare, and there's this dark eyed snarling zombie who's obviously just plain pissed off and looking for an excuse to royally fuck you up. They shamble about like Romero's dead guys, but they aren't clueless. Clark makes them all the more threatening by giving them one agenda - kill the actors! Unfortunately audiences may feel the cast deserves such a fate after sixty minutes of awful jokes and worse line readings. While it can't top Night's cruelly ironic twist ending, Dead Things delivers a one-two punch of a climax. There's the darkly comic moment when Alan throws a girl to the zombies in an effort to appease them (Causing even the living dead to all stop and stare at Alan as if to say, "Dude, what an asshole!"). Then the poetic justice of Alan being dispatched via a horrifying bear hug from Orville, the corpse he dishonored the most. These final shots of zombie retribution can still chill the blood.
And just so you know, there is a remake is in the works. A remake of a knock-off? If this comes to pass, we will truly be through the looking glass, people!
There's a lot more I'd love to share about this cheap little gem, but I don't want to prattle on. Hop on over to our message boards and we can talk all about zombies and Alan Ormsby and apricot scarves.
For further info, pics, sound bytes, and even a clip in QuickTime, click it here.
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Sunday, December 03, 2006
Trailer Park Handjob: 12/3/06
Trailers: movies for midgets.
First up is the full trailer for a film that actually has a chance of being quite good: Hot Fuzz. Hot Fuzz is an action/comedy/action-comedy pastiche that puts the ideas of the Lethal Weapons of this world and transplants them into rural England. Hot Fuzz is made by the same people who made Shaun of the Dead, which is your favourite movie. You will watch Hot Fuzz lots and lots or else I'm not inviting you round for tea anymore. Also Nick Frost seems to be playing a nice person in this movie, which is great because he's a sweetheart and his character from Shaun, while great, was such an unbelievable shit. He has a line in the trailer about a monkey that's really cute. Yay!
Things to worry about: There's something about English movies that makes them look they were made for tv - a flatness, an overlitness, an 'I don't care if it's the climactic scene, it's four o'clock and i'm having my tea'-ness. While this crappy-look could play in to the idea of showing how ridiculous all those cop movie action beats are, it could also, you know, look crap. Plus I get the feeling that it wants to be an actual action movie too, and having cars skidding to a halt while going 20 whole mph on a slightly damp English road just doesn't cut it. Equally there's a bit in the trailer where they load up on weapons and they strap unfeasibly huge shotguns to Shaun's (sorry, Simon's) back that is kind of funny, but is really broad, like the three shotguns in Undead. 'Ha Ha! Look at this! It's silly!' it screams in order to ensure the 12 year olds and drunk college students know when to laugh. The best bits of Shaun were when the world was completely realistic (that long tracking shot when he goes to buy some coke from his local shop. That's realistic) and very silly stuff grew organically out of it. Also on the realistic tip, Shaun's London felt real because the film-makers lived there. This rural English town is in danger of being a touch quaint and Richard Curtis-y, and there's nothing worse than London meedja types faffing about patronisingly in 'the country'.
Then again, that bit in Shaun when they pretend to be zombies seemed a bit daft in the original trailer (and, being honest, it still is in the film) and that film turned out great. This proves conclusively that Hot Fuzz will rule too (though being a film nerd and having jerked off to Lethal Weapon when you were a kid will probably be necessary to achieve the full effect).
If they have a scene in a strip club I will give it 10 out of 10, especially if you've seen the inside of an average English strip club. What the trailer here.
Mr Bean's Holiday: The great thing about Mr Bean was that he was actually a complete bastard. He was selfish, contrarian and often ingeniously devious in getting what he wanted. He was actually a complex character, made all the more brilliant by being almost entirely silent. That and he fell over a lot. Unfortunately the first Bean film mostly concentrated on the last part, turning him into not much more than a semi-retarded clown. And Buster Keaton just slipped on banana skins a lot, right? Anyway, it made loads of money so here's the sequel.
Bad things include lots of semi-retarded clowning and the soundtrack being heavily loaded with his semi-retarded hmm-hmmm's, aa-hah's and guttural moans. Good things include the bit on the bikes where he gently peddles past all the huffing, straining Tour De France-ers, as if he were just on a Sunday ride. That's the Mr Bean I remember. Watch it here.
Blood and Chocolate: You bastards. You absolute bastards. This is a film about a sexy young lady-werewolf from the same people that brought you Underworld, the film about the sexy young lady-vampire. That means violence and sex, which is enough to get me to at least watch the trailer. But you see it is hosted by MTV and they won't let non-Americans see it. Corporate, cocksucking exceptionalist whores you all are. Watch it here. What's it like?
The chick's no Kate Beckinsale but she's cute, the men have poofy hair, and it features some terrible female pop vocals towards the end. You'd love it. -- George Merchan
The Astronaut Farmer and The Architect: It's coming up to the Oscar nomination deadlines and, as if by magic, worthy dramas full of issues, dreams, tragedy, struggle, uplift and, above all else, ACTING start popping up. Now, all of these films have the potential of being good in the way that the average summer blockbuster doesn't. They tend to be made by good filmmakers and at least pretend to concentrate on character and people instead of explosions. However the Oscar-Bait movie has now become a genre just as the Independent movie has, with their own rules and strictly adhered-to cliches. Certainly when the sappy emotional crescendo start kicking in on the soundtrack to The Astronaut Farmer while Billy Bob Thornton does the Courtroom Speech thing, we know we are in familiar territory. Equally The Architect seems worryingly close to brandishing its 'issues' with as much subtlety as Crash, which brandished them like a sledgehammer.
For the record, The Astronaut Farmer is about a failed NASA trainee who decides to build his own damn rocket on his farm, and The Architect is about the guy who designed one of those awful inner city high rise estates and the mother who lives on one who confronts him. Some careful direction, a committed performance and a plot that doesn't pussy out at the end and these could be very good films. From the trailers though, I wouldn't hold your breath. Watch them here and here.
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