Cinema Omnibus

Like a Virgin? What's the (sex) story with Captain America?

"Captain America is a boy scout.  No depth," a friend of mine said in his assessment of the basic character of the latest Marvel superheor to grace summer movie screens.....

Now, I'm a HUGE sucker for a summer action flick--esp. if it has a gorgeous serving of beefcake with it. 

And Chris Evans is one of the sexiest piece of beefcake this summer! (yes, IMO, he's sexier than Chris Hemsworth's Thor...)

My friend, though, has a point....Captain America has no depth.  Unlike the fabulous Robert Downey, Jr. Iron Man, who has "depth" to spare, Captain America doesn't appear to drink, smoke, or have much of an interest in girls or guys (although the latter would be a bit difficult to demonstrate in a manistream action hero movie, generally speaking.)

Yes, he's dedicated to his cause, and his friends, but when he's traipsing around the U.S. with a bevy of USO beauties, we could have seen him slap a butt or two, or see him take a drink.  Just maybe not to Tony Stark's excess...

Heck, he even gets upset over the word "fondue!" 

So, it's not such a stretch to hazard a guess that Captain America is, at the time of his freezing, still a virgin! 

Poor guy. 

Captain America's sexuality aside, I still enjoyed the retro-historical feel of the movie.  As with Watchmen, there is a clear sense that this is an America-not-America, a place that might have been if super heros were real.  Overall, a good action flick with rousing heroism and tragedy--although it under-untilizes the great Hugo Weaving (who I completely adore and is the best face and voice for either hero or villan--see Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, the Matrix Trilogy, The Lord of the Rings Trilogy, V is for Vendetta, and a whole bunch of other Weaving wonders.  He's simply the best.) 

It seems, too, that the whole 3D thing is getting over-done.  I saw Captain America in 2D and it was quite fine without the dude flying towards my face and giant blast clouds hovering over my head.  It was easy to tell which scenes would have been enhanced with 3D but is it really worth it?  More often than not, 3D projects look dark and muddy.  When that happens, we as viewers miss some important background details.  That's most certainly how I thought when I saw Thor in 3D. Felt like I was watching it projected through a very bad filter. I don't know what it is with so many 3D projections looking so dark. This article in the Boston Globe explains why 2D projections might look awful, but no explanation why so many 3Ds I've seen in a variety of theaters look plain old awful. 

So much so that I won't go see a 3D movie again. 

But back to Captain America....

Yes, it would be nice-- in the Avengers flick next year perhaps?--to see Captain America grow a set and perhaps use them?  Maybe get drunk a bit, or get caught doing more than having an elisted girl throw herself at him. 

Or was there something in those injections that neutered him?  oh, I hope not....

 

McDowell, Harlan remember "A Clockwork Orange" on its 40th Anniversary (& a synopsis of the bastardization of the X rating by the porn industry)

A friend of mine recently posted a link to this great video from The Guardian with Malcolm McDowell,Jan Harlan and Christiane Kubrick discussing Stanley Kubrick's "A Clockwork Orange.  It's a great discussion on the film's impact on the U.K, how they didn't see it as a "black comedy" because of the violence,  what Anthony Burgess was writing about in the story, etc., etc.....

I guess since I saw ACO in 1980, and was very familiar with Kubrick's other black comedy, "Dr. Strangelove,"  and perhaps because I was a callow young punk rocker, I saw it as black comedy.  ACO adhere's to certain conventions of black comedy:  it takes place in a familiar yet surreal world, the characters are over-the-top, situations trying to make distinct points about current society, and scenes that make one laugh even while wincing at the violence, cruelty or ignorance of the characters. 

oh, and Malcolm McDowell was kinda cute....

But ACO left a big impression on me long before !980.  It was seeing this poster in a drive-in snack bar when I was about 10....

 

.....that image haunted me for years.  Geeze, I even remember the aqua and chrome decor of the Rt. 18 Drive-In Theater's snack bar, the smell of hot dogs and popcorn, the red and white stripes of the popcorn machine.....

The other thing about this poster--and about the movie--is the X rating.  Back In The Day (I'm talking late 60's and early 70's), an X rating wasn't necessarily the kiss of death. "Midnight Cowboy" was another mainstream film that was X rated when first released.   The lettered rating system was fairly new, and X was serious business. It meant that, if you weren't an adult, you would not be admitted.  And movie theaters had no problem enforcing that rule.

 The X rating was respected at this time because there were still a number of films that hit the market that didn't have official ratings. Low-budget exploitation pics made the rounds of both indoor and outdoor movie theaters, and they didn't always have official ratings. One of those movies (I just can't call them films)  that I remember because of the size of the ads in the newspaper was "My Baby is Black" (don't ask--just watch the trailer.  you'll be horrified, but not for the same reasons some audiences Back Then were horrified)

For some reason, I can't seem to embed the video here--how annoying!  But there's no rating to this bizaare exploitation flick.  At the end of the trailer it simply says "For ADULTS ONLY."  None of the stuff we're used to today with the ratings system...and a film like this, without a rating, would never make it to a local movie theater.  Those whacky days are gone...

Not to mention that within a year of ACO's release, porn would hit the big screen big time with "Deep Throat."  Pretty soon the porn industry would co-opt the X rating and create the XXX rating. This was ot a real official motion picture board rating, but just a cheezy symbol that in its own weird way helped differentiate porn from mainstream Hollywood productions.

Be that as it may, ACO was eventually downgraded from X to R--yet this may have had as much to do with changing mores than with the bastardization of the X rating.  By 1980 there were other films that were considered far more violent and titilating, including "Chinatown," "Rollerbal," and "Mad Max." 

None of those could be mistaken for black comedy (or porn, for that matter.)

It's certainly quite fascinating to think about how much has changed since "A Clockwork Orange" premiered, and, from an American perspective, interesting to hear what the impact of the film was on British audiences.  Apparently, it was quite incendiary.  The reaction here, as I recall, wasn't quite the same.  Then again, it did get the X rating....

 

Many thanks to CineMasterpieces for the image--and you can buy the poster from them too!

 

 

 

Why Tom Cruise???

Yesterday, a group of friends across Western Massachusetts where heard to collectively facepalm at the news that Tom Cruise is currently considering the role of Jack Reacher, the hardboilded badass detective in a novel series authored by Lee Child...

Mike Fleming reporting for Deadline New York tells us that Child is excited to have Cruise play Reacher, and that Cruise embodies the character qualities of Reacher...

Um, really???

Is Child perhaps "excited" the way Anne Rice was "excited" when Tom Cruise ended up playing Lestat in Interview with the Vampire?  (a character that was inspired by Rutger Hauer in Blade Runner.  Personally, I would have loved a paunchy Hauer as Lestat than wimpy Cruise...)

So, let's look at the possiblity of Cruise being believeable as a badass.  Or even slightly badass.  Did we really believe him in Valkyrie?  According to the Tomatometer, only 61 percent of critics and slightly more (66 percent) of audience memebers bought it.

Looking over Cruise's movie credits, very few of the characters he's played could be the embodiment of a 6' 5", 250 lb. badass.  Even Ethan Hunt of the Mission Impossible francise is more one of those coiled ropey little guys who *might* have got into the CIA because of some certain level of either intelligence or sociopathology.  In Minority Report he's surrounded by beefy guys and looks kind of funny trying to haul Samantha Morton around....

So, really--Tom Cruise as Jack Reacher?

If you think about it, you might find yourself facepalming too.

Fox Movie Channel and the Movies that Time Forgot

I'm sitting here on a warm wonderful Friday afternoon glued to the TV watching The Young Swingers (1963)--a train wreck of a movie on the Fox Movie Channel.....

Apparently, not everything with the Fox brand is all nonsense and Bill O'Reilly ;-)

I can't quite recall when the Fox Movie Channel hit my cable system, but when a movie network is run by one company, viewers get to view the gamut of the studio's catalog.  From the sublime to the ridiculous, from the banal to the fantastic, from  A-grade Oscar winners to the bottom of the B-grade barrel. 

The one I'm watching now--the aforementioned Young Swingers--is about a night club frequented by the niece of a sour real estate developer who wants to shut the club down.  The club, all faux wood panelling and crepe-paper streamers, looks more like Al's Drive-In from Happy Days than a swanky night club that might be frequented by youth-corrupting influences. 

Then again, wasn't it "folk music" that later corrupted young people and made them protest the (unjust) Viet Nam War??

But I digress....

Here's a clip from the movie featuring those demonic Sherwood Singers doing the devil out of a youth-corrupting songs:

Last week, or the week before, I caught the super-saturated Technicolor spectacular Sweet Rosie O'Grady (1943)  starring Betty Grable as music hall singer Madeline Marlowe, who is trying to hide her past as burlesque queen Rosie O'Grady from her Duke of a fiance.  Robert Young plays the Police Gazette reporter who reveals Madeline's racy Rosie past.

I couldn't find a clip from SRO'G, but here's one of Grable teasing some Stage Door Johnnies in Meet Me After the Show:

So, whether you have a hankering for some cheeze, want to bask in the glow of Technicolor splendor, or just watch Elizabeth Taylor get it on with Warren Beatty, make some time in your day for the Fox Movie Channel :)

"The Killer Inside Me": Film Noir in the Texas Sun, 50's Style.

I've been a film noir fan since, oh, perhaps the first time I saw Robert Mitchum in Cape Fear or Dan Duryea in Criss Cross.  It never occurred to me that a truly disturbingly dark "film noir" could be made in the bright Texas sunshine of the the candy-colored 1950s.  Filmmaker Michael Winterbottom has taken Jim Thompson's creepy pulp classic and turned it into an masterpiece of modern film noir (and I'm not saying that just to be nice to the guy who directed 24 Hour Party People)

When making this type of film, a lot or the plot hinges on the psychopath.  How long can he keep his false face on?  Who will he reveal it to--the victims or the lawmen?  How long will it take for this to happen?   The portrayal has to be believable--any small crack in the facade and an astute cinephine will notice.  Casey Affleck has stone-cold killer Lou Ford down, well, cold.  Affleck has the slight build, and boyish look makes him an unassuming as a psychopath--but there's a coldness in his eyes and a hollowness in his warm Texas drawl (which never wavers) that made me find him unnervingly attractive while the hair on the back of my neck stood up.  His narration, which is mostly about keeping up appearances and the social order in the Texas oil town where Ford is a deputy sherriff.  

Then there's the look on his face when Jessica Alba's Joyce Lakeland smacks him...... 

See what I mean?

While Alba didn't seem like she fit the 1950's all that well, Kate Hudson becomes that schoolteacher who will do anything to get Ford--a "good catch" by 1950's standards-- to marry her.  Hudson obviously gained a few pounds for the role, rounding her figure out enough to wear the corseted creations that made women miserably uncomfortable and princess-like at the same time (seriously:  who could go to work in a longline bra and crinoline and actually be able to move and breathe.  Trust me.  I've worn both.) 

We don't get enough backstory to know much about the relationship between Ford and Union boss Joe Rothman (Elias Koteas) and Simon Baker's FBI agent Howard Hendricks is never actually introduced.  Ned Beatty turns another great character performance as the Texas oil baron Chester Conway, whose name the town now bears (much to Ford's chagrin.)   So it is surprisng that Lou seems to show respect to the guy who could be called a "commie" and exacts a certain kind of vengeance against the guy to whom he feigns respect. 

No matter how good or mediocre the rest of the cast, the film belongs tol Casey Affleck (outdoing anything his brother Ben has ever done.)  He is shocking, yet enough is revealed that we understand (perhaps) what has made him such a creep :[spoilers ahead]  from catching his brother in the midst of molesting a 5 year old, to a very sexual, incestuous mom, to the sadomasochistic pictures of a woman he finds in his so-respectable deceased Daddy's bible.[end spoilers.]  Yet how can we be sure that Lou's recollections are real?  The only things that are real are the pictures--and, of course, Lou's own twisted crimes....

Playing a psychopath is probably one of the hardest things for a normal, well-adjusted actor to do.  Certainly someone who really is a psychopath couldn't play a psychopath--because when someone has that kind of condition, what they do appears to them to be normal.  So is the world of Lou Ford--to Lou Ford.  And Casey Affleck is one hell of an actor.....

Review of Note: Peter Bradshaw raises some excellent points in his reveiw in The Guardian UK.   While he gets the violence-against-women almost right, he doesn't quite get the violence against others, esp. males, who are seen as less than.  Beyond a doubt there's a whole lot of violence in this film, but it's doled out with contempt for just about everyone, not just women.  Still he makes a great point about how the movie doesn't glamorize violence.  Here I totally agree.  The violence, to whomever it is doled out to, is awful, and could make even the most hardend film critic flinch just a bit.

Russ Meyer: A fascinating Dirty Old Man and his influence on moviemaking

When I was a kid, I was fascinated with the Movies section of the newspaper.  I think it was all the pictures that I couldn't understand, and movies I certainly wasn't allowed to see.  Along with ads for Johnny Wadd movies, some of the most intriguing (and largest) ads were those for Russ Meyer movies.  I hesitate to call them "films":  that would be giving them a little too much artistic cachet.  But, he certainly had an influence on filmmakers, for good or bad.  If it wasn't for Russ, we might not know Roger Ebert (who, now that he is older, is seen by those who don't know his history with Russ as something of a wizened, fatherly figure--the Gandolf of film reviewers.)  For those of you who don't know, Ebert along with Meyer penned the script for Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, Meyer's first "legit"--but no less, shall we say, unique--movie.  

Nowadays, when I watch BVoD, I'm really impressed by the way in which it shows 60's youth filtered through the viewpoint of a someone who could be considered the quintessential Dirty Old Man.  It's shocking--just not in a good way....

However--I'd totally forgotten about Meyer's interactions with The Sex Pistols (who were more about being pistols than they were about sex.)  In a recent post on Flavorwire of  10 Great Films That Were Never Made, I watched this great clip from a 1988 U.K. documentary--with both Meyer and Ebert talking about some of their work:

Russ Meyer-- the most fascinating Dirty Old Man to emerge from The Greatest Generation. (think about it.)

"Everyone should go to zombie school...."

Normally, I would't write about something that's on TV, but AMC's putting together a series titled "Walking Dead" about zombies.  Being something of a zombie afficionado, I had to check out this video about their "zombie school"

Courtesy of "Walking Dead takes you to zombie school" on io9

Cinema Classics: The Last Metro

IFC had a wonderful surprise in their 8 a.m. - 10 a.m. slot: Truffaut's "The Last Metro"!  (which I'd never seen before, although I've heard a lot about it over the years...)  Set in WWII during the occupation of Paris, the film revolves around the life of the Monmartre Theatre, its owners, the players,  Paris theater journalists, and Nazis (naturally.)  It's an amazingly human movie which, 30 years on, does not have the feel of a movie that could have been tinged with a wierd 70's notstalgia that plagues many other films of the same period.  Films of the 70's and early '80's have a certain "feel" to them (as most movies do of their own times) and yet "The Last Metro" feels as if it is not of that filmmaking era. 

Most of this more than likely has to do with the storytelling abilities of Francois Truffaut.  Many Americans who are not cinephiles would recognize Truffaut as Claude Lacombe in Close Encounters of the Third Kind (kind of like we know who Alec Guinness for his role as Obi Wan Kenobi..but I digress.)  It might be easy to say "well, Truffaut's French! and we all know those Europeans make better movies than kitsch-conscious Americans"  but that simply isn't the case.  Truffaut was in a class of filmmakers that understand the human condition on a deep level, and can get their actors to transform into the characters they are portraying.

The actors, under Truffaut's direction, become the people they are portraying.  It's a subtle thing that doesn't always happen, even in some of the most enjoyable films. 

However, there is something in "The Last Metro" that, to me, is a hallmark of many French films, and is something you simply do not see in American films:  women who acknowledge having lovers, display affection for those lovers, and do not suffer Madame Bovary-esque consequences. 

Tres Nouvelle! (pardon my lousy French...)

Maybe it's just something about French society that allows for the fact that women aren't always the long-suffering faithful ones of the marriage.  And maybe it's just something in French films that acknowledges the essential sexuality of women.  It's not that women don't ever suffer consequences--some suffer horrid consequences, have to confront mistresses--but in "The Last Metro" [SPOILER] it appears that Mme Steiner gets to have her husband and young lover. [end]  Relationships in French cinema are never easy, never cut and dried, never confined to a kind of monogamy that so many people can't sustain for whatever reasons.  French cinema isn't ashamed of the complexities of relationships between men and women.  And that, too, is something that makes "The Last Metro" something of a timeless masterpiece--and one that could never be made by an American filmmaker (thank the gods of cinema!)

If you ever get the chance, please do watch this beautiful film. 

 

 

Doing it in 250 characters (or less)

Last week, I found out about ShortReviews.net by getting followed by imunfair on Twitter. 

So I signed up, and found it quite fun to leave a movie review in 250 characters or less.  You can also review books, music, games, and TV shows.  and you are not stuck with creating another login: you can login with your Twitter, Facebook, or MySpace account and post directly to those sites as well. 

I found the layout really nice, and it was easy and fun to use.  It's a new site, so it needs some time to grow, but has lots of potential.  Thinking of how to reivew something in 250 characters, and to be somewhat amusing about it, really takes a bit of creativity. 

If  you're interested in adding your $.02 about movies, tv, music, and the like, ShortReviews.net might be the place for you. 

"The Human Centipede" and post-modern Japanese-style horror porn....(Updated)

OK....so I'd been hearing a bunch of hoo-ha about "The Human Centipede," a pretentious bit of post-modern muck making the independent film festival circuit as well as the On Demand tv circuit...and it's taken me over a week to get back to this post.  Sometimes that happens.  Good thing I took notes before I forgot what I wanted to say...Please be advised that this post is full of SPOILERS, so if you haven't seen the movie yet, read at your own risk.  Here's how THC becomes both post-modern as well as an echo of far superior Japanese horror-porn....

Before we get to the latter part of my observation, let's discuss a bit about what makes THC "post-modern":  it has to do with the motive, or lack thereof, of the central evil  character.  We know something's up with Dr. Heiter.  We know he's going to be a sadistic weirdo.  Which makes the line "I hate human beings"  redundant.  Yet what is most disturbing is that other than being a sadist (if I said narscisitic or egomanical, I might be redundant) and wanting to do something just because he can, there doesn't seem  to be much of a motive for what he does. 

Dieter Lasser does have an impressive resume when it comes to playing weird characters.  So, other than Udo Keir, Lasser was indeed the perfect choice for the part

Honestly--what makes a satisfying weirdo sadistic psychopath is his or her motivation.  Be it bad parenting or some other kind of strange circumstance, we get why the charachter does what he/she does.  Sometimes the more complex, and the slow revelation of what makes the psyco tick, creates an additional layer of suspense leading to stronger emotional engagement with the film....

Even if that emotion is disgust, it's a good thing.  With Dr. Heiter, I didn't feel much of anything.  And I understoon why Katsuro calls him a Nazi--what else would you call a sadist with a German accent??  But unless the guy was in his 80's, he couldn't be a Nazi.  In fact, the whole Nazi Doctor thing totally falls apart because Dr. Heiter isn't old enough to be a Nazi.  Nazi influenced, maybe--but I'm really not buying the whole Nazi angle.  If that was the case, then  it would have made sense for him to have trappings of Nazi influence.  Yeah, maybe if there were it would have made the film too campy...but hey it was *campy* even without the Nazi paraphernalia.  So why not push it over that edge? 

Oh, what am I thinking?  Director Tom Six may be going for auteur with this film...

Perhaps Six was influenced a bit by Paul Verhoeven. (see this I wrote years ago on Verhoeven, one of my favorite filmmakers, who knows a bit about *campy* as well as creepy as well as soft-core porn...) who knows how to give some depth to even the shallowest of characters.

So, in the post-modern world of the European Evil character we don't get the Nazi trappings, nor do we get a clear motivation for his evil.  He's just evil. Which is post-modernist thinking on the nature of evil....(no following orders for this Eichmann...)

As for the Japanese style horror-porn, I'd suggest viewing Takeshi Miike's "Audition"

as well as Tetuso: the Iron Man

Which has to be seen to be believed....and both are far weirder than The Human Centipede....but THC does have elements of these two...

Overall, THC is a fine bit of kitsch, but needed to be taken further if it was going to accomplish a true gross-out that comes in Japanese horror-porn.  Heck, even the shit-eating was quite tame.  If you're looking for serious corprophagia, try Pasolini's Salo