No, really (12/1/00)

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Director Don Edmunds on his first perusal of the script for Ilsa, She-Wolf Of The SS [1974]: “I was just flat-on-my-back broke...I read it and thought, ’Man, what a piece of shit,’ went back the next day and told [the producer] Dunning: ‘This is a piece of shit. No — this is the worst piece of shit I have ever read in my life,’ And he said, ‘Yeah, but I’ve got this much money.’ So, whore that I am, I said, ‘Well, there is something very distinctive about it... .’”


Whipped. [Peter M. Cohen, 1999.]

Essentially a feature-length episode of Sex In The City: the Sunday morning breakfast meeting [a sort of Village-diner SportsCenter where the panelists swap stories about rimjobs] of three selfproclaimed urban sexual adventurers [once again the Mad Hatter, the March Hare, and the Dormouse] is disrupted when by apparent freak coincidence they all separately and simultaneously encounter Amanda Peet, find in her the love that transcends affectation, and become contenders for her hand. In a few brief weeks their friendship is over, their egos are crushed, their boners have wilted, and the joy they once derived from loudly swapping tall tales of sexual conquest is at an end. Is this mere accident, or some elaborately plotted comic revenge? Take a wild guess. — Though there are amusing observations regarding jerking off, ass crust, the effects of pineapple juice on the flavor of semen, the equation of Marriage with Shopping, and the difficulty of retrieving a vibrator that’s fallen down the toilet, after ninety minutes of listening to these people accuse one another of totally messing with each other’s shit [Dude, that is like, so fucked up], I feel a powerful need for a couple of Merchant-Ivory Edwardian costume dramas to restore my acquaintance with the English tongue. — Ms. Peet, however, appears with this feature to have arrived at the stardom she richly deserves. So I guess every fucking cloud has, like, this totally silver lining.


Corman Retrospective, Volume One.

Any remaining skeptics will be instantly convinced of the superiority of the DVD format when they discover that it makes possible the presentation of a Roger Corman triple feature on a single disc: an entire evening at the drivein for the price of a single rental. Here provided for your viewing pleasure are Attack Of The Giant Leeches [swampdwelling bloodsuckers of improbable dimensions develop a culinary interest in the neighboring trailertrash, notably Designated Slattern Yvette Vickers], The Wasp Woman [aging cosmetic tychoon Susan Cabot rejuvenates her appearance with injections of wasp venom which have the unfortunate side effect of giving her a monstrous lust for human flesh], and A Bucket Of Blood — the legendary cult classic, written by Charles Griffith, in which B-movie great Dick Miller depicts a dim but earnest busboy so desperate to acquire status with the beatniks who frequent the coffeehouse scene that when he discovers by macabre accident the striking sculptural effect created by packing a dead body in modeling clay, he goes on a killing spree in the name of Art. — This last is one of the best remaining portraits of classical beatnik culture [“the old coffeehouse scene,” laughs George Figgs in the John Waters documentary, “where people dressed in black, had cigarette holders, played bongo drums, read poetry, drank Chianti all day... .”] — And its affectations. — Miller, transmogrified, orders confidently at his reception: “Bring me a cappucino and a piece of papaya cheesecake. And a bottle of Yugoslavian white wine.” — Ah, those were the days.


Who Am I? [Jackie Chan, 1998.]

After a mysterious meteorite with uncanny physical properties is dug out of a diamond mine in South Africa [compare Karloff’s find in The Invisible Ray], a crack multinational team of commandos — deceived, alas, as to the nature of their mission — is dispatched to purloin it by a bent faction of the CIA determined to employ its unearthly powers for evil ends; after their success in obtaining the prize ensures their own expendability, their pilots bail out of the helicopter carrying the illfated band and they auger into the jungle. Only the preternaturally athletic [and movie-star lucky] Jackie Chan survives the crash, though the bouncing-pinball descent through the treelimbs that saves his life serves also to erase his memory, and the African tribesmen who nurse him back to health christen him Who Am I? In due course he recovers from his merely physical injuries and ventures back into the world beyond to rediscover his origins, immediately finding himself pursued simultaneously by several factions of Bad Spooks and [scariest of all] the South African security forces; escaping their clutches, he flees to Rotterdam, where he tracks down the parties responsible for his betrayal, kicks the butts of their security dudes, and hands the bad guys over to the good guys — or at least, some somewhat better guys; no one in this scenario seems particularly trustworthy, and our hero makes plain his intention to renounce the purported comforts of civilization and return to his adopted tribe. — These adventures provide Jackie the opportunity to paint himself like an African warrior, hang a glucose IV from a cocoanut, climb sheer walls while bound and shackled, dodge a falling piano [though I wish they’d done the falling safe as well], stage a fight in wooden shoes, and effect yet another of those patented unorthodox descents of a skyscraper, this time a buttslide down twenty stories of not-quite-vertical glass. Harold Lloyd lives.


Drowning Mona. [Nick Gomez, 1999.]

When psycho Bitch from Hell Bette Midler loses her brakes and goes over a cliff into the river bordering the bucolic hamlet of Verplanck, New York — a town where everyone drives a Yugo with vanity plates — police chief Danny De Vito launches an investigation [illustrated by many amusing flashbacks] which rapidly establishes not only that the fatal mishap was no accident, but that nearly every one of the colorful braindamaged eccentrics who make up the population — among them Neve Campbell, Casey Affleck, and Jamie Lee Curtis — had some reason to kill her. Can this be the Murder on the Orient Express? Alas, after an elaborate setup that is obviously designed to suggest just that, the authors let slip their grasp of the development and, not to put too fine a point on it, chicken out; leaving most of the evidence unexplained, as even the drunken priest or the mortician on the make would have been able to figure out — let alone the lesbian auto mechanic who discovered all of it. But despite this disappointment, the flick still has its moments. [“I get half!” says one moron. “And don’t give me that ‘fifty percent’ bullshit!”] Anyway, a town where even really dumb guys get to play Wheel Of Fortune with Jamie Lee Curtis can’t be all bad.


The Art Of War. [Christian Duguay, 2000. Written by Wayne Beach and Simon Barry.]

Black Ninja Wesley Snipes and Trusty Sidekick Michael Biehn [but you can see through that one right away, can’t you] are enjoying productive careers as secret agents for the United Nations [Napoleon Solo and Ilya Kuryakin without tongue in cheek] — blackmailing recalcitrant North Korean generals, bungeejumping off skyscrapers, downloading maps of the Solar System in the twinkling of an eye through their T1 cellphones — until the hidden agenda of Scheming Executive Anne Archer [for once not married to Harrison Ford] embroils them in the political intrigues surrounding a new international trade agreement, unspecified parties frame Snipes for whacking a Chinese ambassador, and the FBI and the, uh, Triads [what ever happened to the fiendish agents of the insidious Doctor Fu Manchu?] take turns chasing him around New York blowing stuff up and ignoring traffic regulations until the Wow Finish, predictably [if you didn’t fall asleep in the second act] a one-on-one John Woo gunfight between Cain and Abel in the lobby of the UN building. — All this is derived from distinguished sources but leaves Wesley hanging midway between Robert Cummings in Saboteur and Leslie Nielsen in Wrongfully Accused: Hitchcock never belabored his exposition; Pat Proft knew that if you did, you made sure it was funny. — Will our hero escape the vengeance of the Shameless Profiteers [wow, is it getting difficult to invent bad guys for spy movies] and live to retire to the South of France with that cute Chinese translator? Will I remember next time to look and make absolutely sure the theater is empty before I start whistling “Secret Agent Man”? If this is really the UN, why aren’t they taking bribes? — Not that bad, of course; but obviously all this has about as much to do with Sun Tsu as Purple Rain had to do with Machiavelli.


Where’s Marlowe? [Daniel Pyne, 1999. Written by Pyne and John Mankiewicz.]

A tragicomic essay on the confusion of subject and object: undaunted by the indifferent reception their epic three-hour cinema-verite essay on the New York City water supply receives at the somewhat-less-than-world-famous Utica Film Festival, inept documentarians John Livingston and Dante Beze commence their next project, an intimate study of two equally incompetent private detectives [Miguel Ferrer and John Slattery] operating an agency in Los Angeles who despite having adopted the standard affectations [brass knucks, pocket flasks, shoulder holsters] are not making enough getting conned by teenage runaways and mediating neighborhood disputes over dogshit to pay the office rent, the phone, the electrical bill, or the medical expenses incurred when one of them was bitten on the ass by a parrot. Improbably, the reigning lord of the late-night commercials [the famous Beeper King] walks in the door and assigns Ferrer the chore of staking out a motel to find out who’s popping his wife; lo and behold, though it isn’t the wife after all [as the real wife explains, it is instead his mistress], the absent partner Slattery is the transgressor, and is whacked forthwith for this presumption by parties unknown. The detectives having thus become the matter of their own investigation, the filmmakers in turn become detectives and the objects of their own documentary. So who is filming whom? — At one remove, a movie about making itself. — “Is that an Arri SR?” asks the hooker who went to film school, pointing at the camera. Indeed it is.


The Big Blue. [Luc Besson, 1988.]

Besson’s epic about free diving in the Mediterranean is here rereleased at greater length in a director’s cut which answers none of the questions I harbored about the original, e.g.: why are a bunch of scientists studying diving in the mountains of Peru? and, how am I supposed to identify with a protagonist who is more in love with Death than he is with Rosanna Arquette? Frivolities like the plot aside, however, this is an astonishing piece of photography [students of Besson will note here the first instance of his signature motion-over-water opening shot, later repeated with ingenious variations in La Femme Nikita, The Professional, and The Fifth Element], Jean Reno is great, and even if the human characters aren’t particularly believable, the dolphins are.


The Replacements. [Howard Deutch, 2000. Written by Vince McKewin.]

Called back from retirement by curmudgeonly team owner Jack Warden to put together a pickup team to finish the season when the spoiled millionaires of the Players’ Union decide to go on strike, old pro coach Gene Hackman assembles a rainbow coalition of colorful losers desperate for that one last shot at the brass ring — an assemblage oddly reminiscent of the roughnecks Bruce Willis led into space in Armageddon, Cage’s gang of carthieves in Gone In Sixty, the planeload of psychos in Con Air, etc., etc. — a chainsmoking Welsh kicker several fathoms deep in debt to the Mob, a couple of guys who look like Doctor Dre and Ed Lover [unless it’s the other way around], a truly enormous Sumo wrestler, a deaf tight end, a fast black kid with huge scared rabbit-eyes and terrible hands, a psycho con, a psycho cop, etc., etc., etc. — led, naturally [for believe it or not this is a major motion picture] by quarterback Keanu Reeves; who has, for the purposes of this scenario, been cleaning barnacles off the bottoms of boats for a living since his team melted down around him in the mortifying Sugar Bowl blowout which put a period to his career at Ohio State. [Some Keanu scholar will have to explain to me why he is always a former quarterback from Ohio State.] — Sewage would have been funnier than barnacles, but then Keanu isn’t as funny as David Arquette. — After a couple of days of practice that go badly and a game that takes a turn for the worse, the merry band bond in a spirited barfight with the strikers which is rather more entertaining than any of the football sequences [this should have been an embarrassment], do a nice group dance number in the holding cell to cement their relationship, and return to the field for a not-particularly-suspenseful run at the playoffs which reaches its climax [shortly after Keanu scores with Head Cheerleader Brooke Langton] with essentially the same football game the Marx Brothers won in Horsefeathers. — Obviously this could have been better, but even so it’s an improvement on Oliver Stone. — With John Madden, Pat Summerall, and a truckload of strippers in cheerleading outfits.


Titus. [Julie Taymor, 1999.]

A flamboyant restaging of the Shakespearean revenge-tragedy, with Anthony Hopkins and Jessica Lange as the contending leads: Greenaway Lite.


The Indian Tomb. [Joe May, 1921. Written by Thea von Harbou and Fritz Lang.]

A silent serial from the first Golden Age of the comicbook plot: an Indian prince [Conrad Veidt] with a knowledge of the occult gets wind of the scheme of weird Yogi Ramigani [Bernhard Goetz, the large spooky-looking dude with glowing eyes who played Death in Lang’s Destiny] to be buried alive in order to achieve enlightenment; ordering his minions to dig the seeker up, he awakens him from his trance, demands his fealty, and dispatches him to Europe to recruit the services of brilliant but underemployed architect Olaf Fønss, whom we discover staring wistfully at a photograph of the Taj Mahal and complaining to his girlfriend Lya De Putti that he, alas, will never be so fortunate as to have a Maharajah commission him to build a tomb for his departed wife. Guess again: Ramigani [now possessed of supernatural powers which allow him to walk through walls, negate distance, and cancel the credit cards of his adversaries with a snip of his mental scissors] shows up with precisely this proposal, and brushes aside the feeble practical objections of the thunderstruck European with an appeal to the moral imperative: “No man can ignore the unborn children of his soul, Sahib!” Mesmerized by the Yogi’s force of personality, the architect drops everything and walks out the door for Bengal; baffled by her abandonment, his faithful fiancée sets out in pursuit, and in a twinkling they’re all striking dramatic poses in front of gigantic statues of Kali. Here we discover that the princess in question [Mia May] isn’t dead at all, but, rather, under house arrest since the mad Maharajah found her fooling around with a handsome English White Hunter; and that his plan, actually, is to bury her alive; albeit in something architecturally impressive, that being the custom of the province. Complications ensue. — Though the authors exhibit an admirable grasp of the vocabulary of the adventure serial [why not, Lang invented most of it], and you find herein no dearth of leper pits, stampeding elephants, skinny guys wearing diapers sleeping on nails, energetically gyrating exotic dancers wearing gem-encrusted Mickey-Mouse ears, snakecharmers, fireswallowers, arenas filled with tigers, and chases down rivers full of crocodiles ending with standoffs on rope bridges over bottomless gorges, I’m not sure on the available evidence that the Germans ever really caught onto the idea of ending a chapter on a cliffhanger. But obviously they had everything else.


Hollow Man. [Paul Verhoeven, 2000. Written by Andrew W. Marlowe; story by Gary Scott Thompson.]

Brilliant megalomaniac Kevin Bacon — the kind of movie scientist who practically announces with his first entrance upon the screen that he is going to transgress against the cosmic moral order, usurp powers Man was not Meant to Wield, and call down upon himself the dreadful retribution of the gods — invents invisibility in an underground laboratory, with the incidental assistance of Elisabeth Shue, Josh Brolin, Kim Dickens, and a guy in a gorilla suit, and then, alas [don’t these people ever get out to the movies?] chugs a draught of his own magic potion to make sure of its effect on human subjects. Before you know it he’s sneaking into the neighbor’s apartment to watch her undress, and after that it’s a short slide down the slippery slope before he’s a mad serial killer and a danger to all mankind. Fortunately he returns to the subterranean fortress to gloat, allowing Ms. Shue and her posse to overcome him in the usual grand finale, a firefight in a warehouse; the chase ends [I am not making this up] with a scene in which she outruns an explosion by climbing a ladder up an elevator shaft. Kids, don’t try this in your underground laboratories at home.

I’m not sure that everyone knows exactly why Galileo didn’t really have to drop a bowling ball and a golf ball off the Leaning Tower; it was because he had a gift for the embarrassing question. — If you tie a twenty pound weight to a ten pound weight, does the heavy one speed up the lighter one, or does the lighter one act as a brake? But, wait a minute, ten and twenty is thirty; shouldn’t the two joined together fall faster than either one separately? [Where do you draw the invisible dotted lines?] — Similarly, if you’re invisible and you eat a visible Twinkie, does it disappear when it enters your aura? or does the camera record its mastication by invisible teeth, the progress of its fragments down an invisible throat, their attack by invisible stomach acids and transformation into — what? — invisible sugars and carbohydrates? How is this supposed to work? Do you gradually become visible again? Or is it the other way around? So if you’re walking around invisible in a cloud of smoke, do you acquire a layer of visible soot? Or does your invisibility start to rub off on everything you come in contact with? like the invisible imitation butter on this fucking popcorn, come to think of it; gaah, the slime... . Anyway, if light passes through you, it passes through your retinas; so it should work out that they can’t see you and you can’t see them. Right?

Wrong. Always wrong. — Ah well. — Astonishing effects in the service of a really dumb plot; but, then, what did you expect. Check it out.


Spy Games. [Illka Jarvilaturi, 1999. Written by Patrick Amos.]

CIA guy Bill Pullman and KGB girl Irene Jacob are enjoying the aftermath of the Cold War with an extended romantic interlude in Helsinki until a couple of buffoons from the Home Office show up with a pornographic video that encodes the command sequences for every surveillance and communications satellite known to man, and they’re propelled willynilly into a game of spooks and robbers. Entertaining as hell, despite the nagging suspicion that the authors of movies like this are still stealing their characters from The President’s Analyst. — Finland? Sheesh. Check out those reindeer.


Gorgeous. [Vincent Kok, 1999.]

Pigtailed Taiwanese cutie Qi Shu, the kind of simple fishing-village girl who likes to hang around the docks talking to dolphins, finds a romantic message in a bottle, supposes herself smitten by its unknown author, and travels to Hong Kong to track him down. Contrary to expectation he turns out to be a gay dude in the fashion industry pining away for his missing boyfriend, but they hit it off anyway and he takes her under his wing. On a photo shoot in the harbor she observes pirates boarding the yacht of a baron of finance, rushes to the rescue in a powerboat, and thus makes the acquaintance of Jackie Chan [whose fight choreography in this particular sequence seems to have derived from a study of the Three Stooges]; after ascertaining that he is, indeed, a millionaire playboy who resides in a fabulous mansion her heart is naturally won, and it’s only a matter of a few dozen plot twists before the two are united, separated, and united yet again. - There’s more dancing than fighting in this one, but Jackie does manage a couple of dustups with hired gun Brad Allen; something about the way they decide to converse in English while they’re punching one another out makes me suspect Jackie saw Mike Myers switching from subtitles to dubbing in the middle of the fight with his prospective father-in-law, and took this opportunity for homage.


Titan A.E. [Don Bluth/Gary Goldman, 2000.]

An interesting attempt at an animated feature on the cosmic scale: after the evil Drej [a swarm of electricblue insectoid Terminators who cruise the galaxy in a wickedly angled mothership that looks like a giant virus] take offense at something we said and destroy the Earth, the scattered survivors wander aimlessly until the Han Solo guy [who sounds like Bill Pullman] finds the Kid Flash/Luke Skywalker guy [who sounds like Matt Damon], introduces him to the Princess Leia chick [who sounds like Drew Barrymore], and launches him on the quest that will save humanity; the Drej, of course, give chase. A peculiar mixture of processes leads to weirdly mixed results — the characters look like Saturday morning, the backgrounds are firstrate CGI: Clutch Cargo meets The Phantom Menace. The high point is a beautifully-rendered game of spaceship hide-and-seek among an orbiting field of icebergs: the classic Lady From Shanghai finale in a threedimensional hall of mirrors. — Incidentally, even Drew Barrymore’s voice gives me a woody. I think I need help.


Later.

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Dancing on the bar (10/5/00)

Ball buster.