Friday, July 29, 2005

Taking Care Of Business

Elvis survived. Of course we all knew that. What we didn't know is, that he ended up in a resthome in Mudcreek, Texas. Incidentially JFK also lives there. They coloured him black after the (more or less failed) assassination attempt in Dallas and ultimately hid him in the rest home. When an old egyptian mummy in cowboy boots and a cowboy hat (nicknamed Bubba Ho-Tep by Elvis) starts haunting the resthome and sucking the souls from geriatric geezers, The King and The President have to kick some serious ass.

Sounds strange? It is. It's also quite slow, Elvis and JFK move with the speed of 70 year olds and the mummy isn't much faster. What makes this great is the interaction between the two main characters, played by Bruce Campbell and Ossie Davis. Campbell absolutely nails The King, Davis plays JFK with a good dose of irony. Everytime those two are on screen together, you can see how much fun they had doing this. Elvis' monologues about fame and old age are great, too.

The movie was shot on a shoe string budget of $ 1.25 million. This shows in the special effects which consist of a few scarab models and a latex mummy costume. But that doesn't really matter, the movie is more about the interaction between JFK and Elvis, the whole mummy thing is just a framing device for that. If you get the chance, watch this. Hollywood got nothing on movies like Bubba Ho-Tep, this is where the real love is.

The DVD collection is a beautiful thing to behold, in addition to a commentary track by director Don Coscarelli and Bruce Campbell we get a commentary track done by The King, commenting the movie as he sees it the first time. Damn funny stuff. Many extra features on the second DVD, too.

Wednesday, July 20, 2005

[Movie] Madagascar

Oh! Look! Talking animals! Cuuuuute!

That pretty much sums up Madagascar, Dreamworks' latest computer animated feature. The funniest thing of this one are the supporting characters - the paramilitary penguins, the posh, poo-throwing monkeys and the dumb-as-doorbells lemurs. The main characters are unfunny most of the time, only the hypochondriac giraffe manages to get some laughs at times. The underlying message is, of course, "friendship conquers all". Didn't see that coming from a few miles. But hey, it's a kid's movie, so it isn't supposed to be too complicated, is it? On the other hand, if it can have dead human bodies and a major plot point revolving around the killing of small cute animals, why shouldn't it have a story that takes more than two fucking minutes to figure out? Only watch if you intend to give your brain 80 minutes of rest, you won't really need it for this.

[Movie] Rashômon

Akira Kurosawa is the godfather of Japanese movies. He's also been a tremendous influence for Hollywood, his Hidden Fortress was a major inspiration for George Lucas' Star Wars and his Seven Samurai have been copied time and time again, most notably in The Magnificient Seven. Rashômon has not been copied as such by Hollywood, but at the time of its making (1950) the non-linear storytelling - the story is told mostly in flashback - and the ambiguity of the characters' morale was untypical at the time. Especially the "I remember that differently" storytelling device has since found its way into cinemas mainstream, or even TV (having recently watched the third season of the BBC's Coupling, in the episode Remember This two of the protagonist experience a Rashômon effect when trying to remember the party they first met at).

Rashômon is set in 11th century Japan, a time of crisis, war, famine and frequent death. The movie opens with a woodcutter, a priest and a derelict man meeting in streaming rain in a half ruined temple. The priest and the woodcutter are quite outraged, the man wants to know why. They tell him. The woodcutter gives an account of how he found the body of a murdered samurai in a glade. He reported the murder and shortly thereafter a known bandit is arrested. The woodcutter tells the tale of the bandit's questioning, which results in another flashback (so the story is really told in double-flashback) of the bandit's account of events. Later the wife of the samurai is found and also questioned, as is the spirit of the murdered man through a medium. The three accounts differ greatly, every one of the questioned tries to embellish his actions while trying to make the other parties look bad.

Back at the temple, the derelict man notes that the woodcutter's account of how he first found the body doesn't match up and confronts him. So the fourth account of events, from the woodcutter, is told. Here the events take another different road, this time embellished in the woodcutter's favour. Afterwards the derelict man finds a baby left in another part of the ruined temple by its parents. He just takes the baby's blanket and wants to leave. The woodcutter and the priest are outraged, but the man just points out that the woodcutter most likely took a precious dagger from the scene of the crime, which he conveniently left out of his account of events. The woodcutter is dumbstruck, but his conscience rears and he decides to take the baby in and raise it as his own. When he walks away with the child, the rain stops and the sun comes out from behind the clouds.

Rashômon is a exploration of human tendency to embellish events in their favour. The accounts of the witnesses differ greatly, every one of them designed to give the maximum of honor to the narrator. Kurosawa ends the movie on an optimistic note, when he lets the woodcutter overcome his selfishness and adopt the abandoned baby. The acting is good, only Toshiro Mifunes antics as the bandit are a bit over the top. The movie has some very good visuals, the shots in the temple with the streaming rain in the background or the scenes in the courtyard where the accounts of the witnesses are heard, while the already questioned people are lined up in the back along the wall, are exceptionally done.

The Criterion DVD is a treat, the booklet contains an intro by a film critic, excerpts from Kurosawas autobiography and the two short stories the movie is based on. The DVD itself contains an introduction by Robert Altman, a commentary track by a film historian and some excerpts from a documentation about the film's cinematographer. There is also an English dub, but it's not very good allegedly, I've watched the film in Japanese with English subtitles. Watch this if you are interested in where many of the inspirations of modern cinematography and storytelling came from, but also if you just want to see a good movie and are not put off by subtitles or b/w.

Saturday, July 16, 2005

[Movie] The French Connection

And, starting off the New Hollywood reviews with The French Connection, a movie by William Friedkin starring Gene Hackman and Roy Scheider. Spoilers follow, but with a 33 years old movie, this shouldn't really matter.

Basically The French Connection is a straightforward crime movie telling the story of two cops in New York's narcotics department who stumble upon a $ 32 million heroin deal between a French syndicate and New York dealers. The story is based on a real life case, which was solved by the two most famous cops the narcotics department had back then. Eddie Egan and Sonny Grosso were the basis for Jimmy "Popeye" Doyle (Hackman) and Buddy "Cloudy" Russo (Scheider).

Friedkin shot the movie entirely on location, not a single set piece was used. He went for something he called a "faux documentary style" inspired by French films from the mid 60ies. Many shots were made using hand cameras or driving the cameraman around in a wheelchair instead of mounting the camera on tracks. The lighting is largely natural, so the overall feeling of the film is rather dark, gritty and realistic.

Doyle is basically the bad cop with Russo as his (more or less) good counterpart. The plot is rather straightforward, the cops stake out the bad guys and finally center them in an abandoned warehouse. What makes this one special is the execution. The scenes feel real, the famous scene where Doyle chases a train through New York was partly done without the other drivers on the road knowing about the movie being shot. Some of the cuts are a bit jumbled, without the commentary the scene where Doyle and Russo are taken off the case doesn't really make sense. The ending is rather strange, at first it looks as if Friedkin wanted to keep it ambigous if Doyle shot the Frenchman or the other way round, but the inserts afterwards clear up, that both of them survived. Friedkin mentions on the commentary track that the shot was meant to be Doyle frustratedly shooting in the air. But why keep it ambigous when the titles afterwards tell you exactly what happened to the characters?

Friedkin's commentary here is great. It gives insight into the creation of the film and the technical processes used in filming. Even if you normally don't watch commentary tracks, this one really is worth it.

Tuesday, July 12, 2005

Just A Reminder

Organized Religion sucks. I can prove it. With charts.

New Hollywood Got Me 30 Years Late

I'm in the middle of reading Peter Biskind's Easy Riders, Raging Bulls. While Biskind isn't known for his scientific accuracy, his account of the rise and fall of New Hollywood at the end of the 1960ies and during the 1970ies is brimming with interesting facts and gossip about the lifes and work of people like Dennis Hopper, Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, Peter Bogdanovich or Paul Schrader.

Biskind sees New Hollywood as the seminal era in filmmaking, with the studio system that preceded it as just as bad as the blockbuster era that started with Jaws and Star Wars and ended the creative madness that abounded in the 1970ies. Beginning with Easy Rider and spanning movies like The Godfather, The French Connection, M*A*S*H, Taxi Driver or What's Up, Doc? Biskind tells the story of an age where directors emancipated themselves from the studios and tried to follow their own creative vision rather than stay on the safe side and make as much money as possible. Ironically, New Hollywood layed the foundations for the blockbuster era, where movies started to get more and more expensive and had to appeal to a very broad audience, often at the cost of story and creativity.

Biskind's view of New Hollywood is a bit skewed, his appreciation for the good films produced there seems to make him forget that the 70ies produced as much crap as any other decade in hollywood. Nevertheless his enthusiasm for the masterworks of the era is infectious and I've decided to (re)watch some of the movies (as they are available to me) he raves about.

The first few I'll be watching include:
I'd really like to get my hands on some of the more obscure movies Biskind mentions, especially Dennis Hopper's The Last Movie should be interesting to watch in its madness just from a "what the fuck?" perspective. But I doubt I'll ever be able to lay hands on this one, since a DVD version seems to be out of the question.

Sunday, July 10, 2005

[Movie] Permanent Vacation

The local arthouse cinema is showing a Jim Jarmusch retrospective (link in German). I caught Permanent Vacation, Jarmusch's first movie, yesterday. On the technical side this clearly is a first effort from someone straight out of film school (in fact it was his master's thesis, I believe). The whole film is shot in 16mm and the sound is sometimes nearly unintelligible. The pacing is glacial, sometimes it takes minutes for the protagonist to just wake up and get going. This should become something of a signature device of Jarmusch's, his pacing picked up a bit in later movies but he still is famous for some of the slowest films in history.

Permanent Vacation tells the story of a few days in the life of Alyosious "Allie" Parker, a young man in Manhattan's lower east side, who loves to listen to Jazz and doesn't sleep much. Allie's life has no real point or direction, he just wanders around from place to place, meeting strange people in the process. He repeatedly tells his girlfriend that he doesn't want to do what normal people do, that he doesn't want to stay, get a job and stuff like that.

Allie's wanderings take him to the ruins of the house he was born in (which was destroyed in "the war, by the Chinese" - a plot point that went completely over my head, I really can't remember any war the US and China were involved in that resulted in property damage in New York and I can't figure out if this was supposed to be allegorical for something), then he pays a visit to his mother who is institutionalized in an asylum. Further meetings include the "doppler effect" guy who tells the absolute worst joke in film history, a sax player and a mad Latin-American girl.

In the end, Allie steals a car, sells it for $ 800, leaves his girlfriend for good and gets on a boat to Paris, where he intends to continue his drifting. On the way out he meets his French counterpart who just arrived from Paris and hopes that New York is to be his "Babylon". When Allie finally leaves on a ship, he refers to himself as a "tourist on a permanent vacation".

The movie revolves around the alienation Allie feels in regards to his surroundings and his unwillingness to do something about it. There are some memorable scenes (the "doppler effect" guy, the latina, the wandering through the derelict buildings of the lower east side), but overall this is a really early effort and it shows. The background sound really starts to go on one's nerves, especially the strange music playing when no Jazz is on.

Permanent Vacation is clearly a conciously artsy movie, which explains the lack of plot and the abundance of weirdness somewhat. It has some merits as an early glimpse of Jarmusch's work which already has some of the interesting bits of his later movies, but taken on it's own it is quite flawed. Only watch this if you're rather patient with your movies. Nothing for instant gratification lovers.

Sunday, July 03, 2005

[Anime] Last Exile

I am by no means an anime expert. I've seen the classics - Nausicaä and everything else Ghibli, Akira, Ghost in the Shell and some more, mostly feature length movies - but especially serialised anime never really appealed to me. So I surprised myself a bit when I picked up the first Last Exile DVD (containing Episodes 1-5) on a whim, just because the description on the back cover was intriguing and the art style looked interesting.

Last Exile is set in a steampunky world, where Victorian era steam engines power WWI inspired flying machines and two warring factions battle each other adhering to a strict code of honour, overlooked by a seemingly all-powerful "guild". The protagonists are two 15 year old youths, Klaus and Lavie, who fly their steam-powered vanship on courier missions, trying to survive in their harsh world. Their first mission is the delivery of a message to an Admiral of one of the factions. This episode sets up the world and its laws and introduces the main players. In further episodes the two youths run across a hunted courier and take over his mission, delivering a young girl to a mysterious ship namend Silvana, which doesn't seem to be allied with any of the other parties and pursues its own agenda.

The world building going on in the series is interesting, the blending of WWI aesthetics and Victorian technology works quite well, even if the guild's technology seems to be a bit too advanced to fit in seamlessly. The story is rather straightforward in the first episodes, but managed to keep me interested. The characters are introduced ok and overall likable, although Lavie tends to get annoying (which could well be because of the shrill voice she got in the German dub I watched).

What didn't work for me was the blending of traditional animation for the character scenes and CGI stuff for the battles and flight scenes. The transition is jarring and takes from the enjoyment of the thing as a whole. Traditional animation all the way would have been a better choice in my book. The quality of the DVD is flawless, although it is quite short on extras. I can't comment on the quality of the dub, since my Japanese has gotten a little rusty in the last years. Overall quite interesting, but no masterwork. Maybe I'll get the following volumes someday.

Friday, July 01, 2005

Watching Tripods Fall

The following contains spoilers on Steven Spielberg's War of the Worlds. The two people reading this blog should be aware of this and only read on if they don't mind being told stuff that could impact their enjoyment of the movie.

I really didn't expect War of the Worlds to be anything but a special effects laden Hollywood summer blockbuster. And while it fits this bill, it is also something more. There are scenes in there which are really frightening, the whole movie reeks of paranoia and fear. The whole thing has an air of realism, the crowd scenes are very intense. The panic of the people seems real and there is no hero figure rising up to vanquish the enemy.

A very nice touch was the whole "don't look" thing with Rachel (the daugther, played superbly by Dakota Fanning). Everytime destruction and death are shown, the girl's eyes are shielded from it by her father. The audience on the other hand, does get the full view of the carnage, until the big battle against the tripods. While Ferrier's son "has to see" it, suddenly the audience is cast into the role of the girl and doesn't get a view of the battle raging behind the hill. Nice comment on the "disaster watching" mentality fostered by CNN and other news stations. Also the scene with the News team at the plane crash site seems to be a comment on the strange set of priorities "news" reporters have nowadays.

"Were you in that plane?"
"No."
"Pity. Would have made a great story."

Another highlight of the film is the cellar scene with a great Tim Robbins playing Ogilvy, an ex-amubulance-driver gone over the edge. While the suspense scene with the alien eye dragged on a bit too long, the interaction of Cruise and Robbins was perfect. Here, too, the death of Ogilvy isn't shown on screen, the audience is as shielded from it as Rachel.

My only real point of criticism is the ending, which is just too sugary-sweet for the rest of the film that preceded it. The scene where Ferrier's son runs to his death just to see what's happening was very poignant and hit quite hard. Having him show up at the end invalidates that. People died left and right in the millions, but the family of the protagonist goes unharmed. But I don't like happy endings, so maybe that's just me.