brandon ledet

Kong: Skull Island (2017)

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The big risk in me venturing out to see the latest King Kong reboot was that my love for loud & dumb movies about giant monsters might be crushed by my ever-growing boredom with war narratives. Kong: Skull Island made no secret of its Vietnam War cinema aesthetic in its advertising, promising to be something like an Apocalypse Now With Kaiju Primates genre mashup. The actual film is something more like Platoon With Kaiju Primates, but the effect is still the same. Skull Island‘s main hook is that it uses the traditional King Kong narrative as a thin metaphor for U.S. involvement in Vietnam (and other unwinnable, imperialistic conflicts of world-policing), declaring things like “Sometimes the enemy doesn’t exist until you’re looking for them.” It’s the same exact themes that are hammered to death across nearly all Vietnam War movies with the exact same Love The Smell of Napalm imagery (ever seen an explosion reflected in aviator sunglasses before?) and more or less the same needle drops (don’t worry if they don’t immediately play CCR; it’ll eventually happen twice). As an audience, I’m missing an essential Dad Gene that enables people to care about a very specific end of Macho Genre Cinema (including war films, submarine pictures, Westerns, and, oddly enough, the James Bond franchise). If there’s anyone out there with that Dad Gene who still enjoys the occasional Vietnam War film, they’d likely have a lot more fun with Kong: Skull Island than I did. For me, it was like someone mixed jelly into my peanut butter jar because they didn’t bother cleaning their spoon.

Perhaps the biggest disappointment about Kong: Skull Island is that it amounts to less than the sum of its parts. The cast alone is a testament to a staggering waste of potential: Samuel L. Jackson, John Goodman, Tom Hiddleston, recent Oscar-winner Brie Larson, all wasted. The movie is stacked with onscreen talent, but just about the only memorable performances delivered are from a fully committed Shea Whigham & John C. Reilly, who both pull off a tragic/comic balance in their respective roles as shell-shocked war veterans. Reilly is (rightly) getting a lot of attention in this film as a shipwrecked soldier who’s been stranded on Skull Island since WWII and is deliriously relieved to see people who share his language & culture for the first time in decades. The biggest laugh I got out of the film, though, was in watching Whigham chow down on a can of beans and casually describe his first battle with a skyscraper-sized ape as “an unconventional encounter.” The sense of wasted potential extends far beyond the immense talent of its dispassionate cast, however. Even its central hook of attempting a Vietnam Movie With A Giant Ape seems like it was handled in the blandest, least interesting way possible. Instead of writing a revisionist history where Kong is transported to Vietnam and intermingles with the soldiers on the ground, the soldiers are transported to his home, the titular Skull Island. This sets up an echo of the exact same narrative we’ve seen in nearly every version of a Kong picture. Peter Jackson’s (infinitely more passionate) version of King Kong was released just a little over a decade ago. All this one does to update it is toss in some helicopters & flamethrowers and increase the size of the titular ape.

I’m not sure a full plot description is necessary here, so I’ll try to make it quick. The day after the U.S. declares its withdrawal from Vietnam in 1973, a military troop is ordered to secretly escort a geological mission to survey the once mythical Skull Island. [Scene missing: soldiers complaining that they’re being deployed instead of going home.] There’s a lengthy assembling-the-team sequence where everyone’s various motives & vulnerabilities are revealed for future significance, but no one character gets enough screentime to make any of it count for anything. Do we really need to know Brie Larson’s background as a hippie anti-war photographer to watch her blankly stare at monsters & the Northern Lights for the next 90min? Doubtful. The “geological” expedition, of course, is a betrayal, a cover-up for finding proof of a two-fold conspiracy theory: that the Earth is hollow and that giant monsters live inside it. Once discovered, King Kong is initially seen as a threat, as he attacks the military crew that bombs his home in an attempt to prove those (correct) theories. Eventually, however, it’s revealed that the gigantic ape is the protector of the island and, by extension, the world at large. He fights off & keeps at bay the other monsters that threaten to crawl out of the hollow Earth to terrorize mankind: giant spiders, squids, something John C. Reilly’s freaked out war vet calls “skull crawlers,” etc. This dynamic of Kong as a protector doesn’t really do much for the film’s central Vietnam War metaphor. It mostly just hangs in the air as a naked setup for a M.U.T.O. (Massive Unidentified Terrestrial Organism, no C.H.U.D. that) cinematic universe, which is eventually supposed to link up with the most recent American Godzilla property (as opposed to the far superior Japanese one) for a pre-planned crossover film. And there you have yet another passionless blockbuster that’s a mere placeholder for a future film franchise payoff.

If I haven’t talked enough about Kong himself so far, it’s because the movie doesn’t give me much to work with. There isn’t too much new or different about the infamous beast in his most recent form. The quality of the CGI hasn’t advanced all that significantly since Jackson last tackled the property in ’05, which is kind of a big deal in the King Kong genre, going all the way back to its stop-motion animation roots in the 1930s. The ape’s gotten a lot bigger in scale (likely in preparation for his upcoming kaiju battles) and modern 3D made for an occasional moment of action cinema eye candy, but I couldn’t work up much awe or horror for the misunderstood monster, which is a problem. His inner anguish is always secondary to the soldiers’, never being afforded much of an onscreen emotional narrative outside John C. Reilly plainly informing us that he’s the last of his kind. Sacrificing the ape’s inner life for some killer kaiju battles might’ve made that thin emotional groundwork forgivable, but the giant monster violence of Kong: Skull Island is also a little lacking. In old school kaiju movies (and in more faithful throwbacks like Pacific Rim) the monsters would fight for minutes at a time, establishing pro wrestling-style narratives through the physical language of their battle sequences. Here, the fights only last for seconds at a time as we follow the human characters who navigate their paths of their destruction. Again, my disinterest with that end of the dynamic might have a lot to do with my general boredom with war movie plotting, so mileage may vary on that point. It just feels strange to me that a movie that boasts Kong’s name in the title would be so disinterested in the ape himself.

None of this is to say that Kong: Skull Island is a total disaster and an entirely joyless affair. There are some moments of monster movie mayhem that work well enough as eye candy and both John C. Reilly & Shea Whigham do their best to boost the spirit of the proceedings with some much-needed levity & camp. (I think my ideal, streamlined version of the film just be those two characters alone in a Swiss Army Man-style romance adventure on the same kaiju-infested island.) Overall, though, the movie feels like a well-funded version of a SyFy Channel mockbuster that can afford to hire legitimate actors instead of Ian Ziering or Steve Guttenberg or whoever’s up for it that particular weekend. Unlike the recent genre film rehash Death Race 2050, which applies that SyFy style of direct-to-VOD CG cheapie energy to something uniquely bizarre, Kong: Skull Island lacks any distinguishing sense of passion. I guess you could point to a smash-cut of Kong eating a human to a human eating a sandwich or the basic novelty of a giant ape fighting a giant squid as holding some kind of camp value, but that’s a bit of a stretch, given how much the movie focuses on its stale Vietnam War themes. The silliest Skull Island film gets in its basic DNA (outside Reilly & Whigham’s respective quirks) is in its shameless shots of muscular Kong ass, but even that line of putting-it-all-out-there ape anatomy could’ve been more over the top, #GiveKongADong2017. Maybe audiences more in tune with the basic thrills of war movies as a genre will feel differently, but I struggled to find anything in the film worth holding onto. Its stray stabs at silliness didn’t push hard enough to save it from self-serious tedium and its Vietnam War metaphor wasn’t strong enough to support that tonal gravity. Everything else in-between was passable as a passive form of entertainment, but nothing worth getting excited over, much less building a franchise on.

-Brandon Ledet

Dirty Grandpa (2016)

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It’s so rare for Robert De Niro to put in a watchable performance nowadays that it’s tempting to overpraise his smaller roles in movies where he’s not even the main attraction, just because he put forth a notable effort. Bit parts in films like Stardust & Silver Linings Playbook keep the He’s Still Got It dream alive while most top bill De Niro performances urge us to abandon all hope, to accept that whatever talent or drive the actor held onto as a young man is long dead. Dirty Grandpa might be a game-changer in that respect (and in that one aspect only). Dirty Grandpa is a broad, crass comedy about overgrown man-children that makes no real attempt to distinguish itself from every other broad, crass comedy about overgrown man-children that have filled out theater marquees since the rise of the Judd Apatow era. Robert De Niro’s performance within that framework as the titular grimy geezer is worthy of distinguishing praise, however. Once you get past the fact that his role is a series of grotesque sexual come-ons, irreverent gross-outs, expletive-filled karaoke performances, and feverish torrents of masturbation, it becomes apparent that it might be the actor’s bravest, most fully committed work in decades. It’s almost Freddy Got Fingered levels of audience-trolling absurdity that he decided to apply that latent sense of passionate craft to such an aggressively inane, grotesque line of humor.

Zac Efron is a buttoned up lawyer on the verge of marrying an uptight woman he very obviously has no feelings for. Robert De Niro is his ex-military grandfather and a recent widower. At first he comes off as a kind of racist, homophobic asshole, but really no better or worse than any other old white man his age. As the film develops, he reveals that his outward crassness is a deliberate ploy to shake his too-refined grandson out of making the romantic mistake of a lifetime in marrying a woman he doesn’t love. It’s a typical bro comedy plot, playing almost like a The Hangover spin-off (especially in its demonization of a shrewish fiancée whose only enjoyment in life is in ruining boys-will-be-boys type fun). Dirty Grandpa manages to make the effort worthwhile, though. Centering its conflicts around the grandpa’s immediate quest to fuck a young college student (that’s right; this grandpa fucks) the day after his wife’s funeral, the movie seems entirely self-aware about the frivolity of the story it’s telling. Its climactic heart to heart has nothing to do with teaching the grandson a life lesson, but instead includes the line, “The greatest gift a guy can give his grandpa is unprotected sex with a college girl before he dies.” The road trip mishaps on the journey to organize that gift at a Daytona Beach Spring Break celebration also cut down on the movie’s ultra-macho posturing, especially once the brocation is interrupted by the likes of a crazed drug dealer (Jason Mantzoukas), a sarcastic gay man (UnReal‘s Jeffery Bowyer-Chapman), and a no-fucks-given anarchic monster (Aubrey Plaza).

I was initially very weary of the bro humor Dirty Grandpa gleefully rolled around in like a pig in shit. Verbal references to “retards,” “buttfuckers,” and prison rape cool the comedy a great deal in the initial goings, but it’s easy to warm up to the film once you realize De Niro’s elderly gremlin is supposed to be an unlikable monster. I wound up admiring how gross Dirty Grandpa‘s gross-out humor dared to be and by the time the ancient bastard was rapping along to Ice Cube’s “Today Was a Good Day” at a karaoke club I was fully on board with the cheap thrills this movie and this actor were willing to debase themselves to provide. Maybe De Niro is on some level too much of a talent to be employed for a gag where his adult grandson walks in on him fully nude & furiously masturbating (or “doing a #3,” in the movie’s parlance), but that kind of decision-making is more up to the actor & his agent than it is to me as an audience. I’m just happy to see the old man dive head first into non-vanilla, memorable material. Watching him take on a monstrous role as a wrinkled hellraiser with an unrelenting boner in a comedy whose title I consistently confuse with the throwaway Johnny Knoxville trifle Bad Grandpa might not have been my first choice in where I’d want to see his late-career trajectory go, but I’d be a liar if I said it wasn’t a pleasure to behold. A dirty, shameful pleasure.

-Brandon Ledet

Bringing Up Petey: Hawks’s Immeasurable Influence on Bogdanovich

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When I first read that our Movie of the Month, What’s Up, Doc?, was directly influenced by the classic Howard Hawks comedy Bringing Up Baby, the connection instinctively made a lot of sense. Bogdanovich’s nostalgic eye is a large part of his filmmaking aesthetic, so it’s only natural that his big budget screwball comedy starring Barbara Streisand as a chaotic hellraiser would look back to lavish big studio comedies of the 30s & 40s for direct inspiration. Bringing Up Baby just seemed like a recognizable title to cite that typified the era. What I didn’t realize until I revisited Bringing Up Baby after watching What’s Up, Doc? was just how deep its influences run. In fact, the first two thirds of the Howard Hawks classic makes What’s Up, Doc? look like a beat-for-beat remake. Bogdanovich didn’t look back to Bringing Up Baby for just its sense of comedic tone. It also mined the work for its basic narrative plot.

Instead of watching the chaotically whimsical Barbara Streisand wreck the life of hunky nerd Ryan O’Neal, Bringing Up Baby follows the chaotically whimsical Katherine Hepburn as she wrecks the life of hunky nerd Cary Grant. A nagging fiancée more interested in financial success than genuine romance pressures Grant’s pushover scientist into chasing grant money from a big shot financial donor to fund his research. The potential marriage & awarding of the grant are disrupted when the reclusive nerd is steamrolled by the chaotic presence of a total stranger, played by a breathlessly energetic Hepburn. This is more or less the exact same plot as What’s Up, Doc? except that instead of collecting rocks, Grant’s scientist studies dinosaur bones and instead of invading his hotel room, Hepburn steals his car. After the first two acts, the films part ways in their respective plots. Bringing Up Baby gets distracted by the comings and goings of its titular leopard, while What’s Up, Doc? gets wrapped up in a Bullit-spoofing car chase and both films have varying interest paid to the shrewish fiancée threatening to cool off the central romance. (She more or less disappears from Bringing Up Baby, while Madeline Kahn’s performance as Eunice is afforded a more humanizing dose of screentime.) However, by the time their central mix-ups are sorted out by perplexed authorities in their overly chatty stabs at denouement (in a police station and before a judge’s bench, respectively) the two films’ mildly varied plots sync back up for a final bow.

Initially a financial flop, Bringing Up Baby was derided by The New York Times for being cliché-ridden, derivative drivel. Hawks was dropped from his RKO contract & Hepburn was labeled “box office poison.” The esteem for the film has obviously risen since then and extends far beyond Bogdanovich reflecting its mirror image in What’s Up, Doc?. What I find funny about that initial backlash, though, is that Hawks’s work was already being shot down as too traditionalist and derivative at the time of its release, yet the film has endured as a consistently cited landmark of comedic cinema. I think that kind of cultural longevity is entirely dependent on the manic energy of Hepburn’s breathlessly frantic performance, which is all wreckless chaos and no pause for concern. Streisand does her best to match that energy in What’s Up, Doc? (with a little bit of Bugs Bunny thrown in for good measure) and she’s charming in the role, but even she can’t approach what Hepburn achieves in what seems to be an effortless act of constant destruction. By looking back to that performance and the chaotic film that barely contained it, Bogdanovich was not only recreating a work he fell in love with as a youngster, but also participating in a tradition Hawks was also consciously keeping alive his own work.

Before he got his start in filmmaking under the guiding hand of legendary producer Roger Corman, Peter Bogdanovich was already a film critic & historian. As such, he has been loudly vocal about his appreciation of Bringing Up Baby since the release of his Barbara Streisand comedy and has made that film’s deep-running influence on the work as well known as he can. In an interview between the directors collected in the book Who the Devil Made It?, Hawks even joked, “You made a mistake in telling ’em where you stole it from. I didn’t tell ’em where I stole it from.” What’s Up, Doc?‘s blatant appropriation of Bringing Up Baby‘s basic structure extends far beyond minor details like ripped coattails & tormented academics in lavish hotel settings, though. Bogdanovich gets to the real heart of the Hawks film in his admittedly derivative work. In his commentary track for the Bringing Up Baby DVD, he explains, “That’s what the movie is: Cary’s downward spiral into normality. In Hawks’s view, she’s the one who’s more normal, in the sense that he’s living a completely closed life and she’s at least engaged.” Most actual remakes that announce themselves as faithful cover versions of an already established work don’t bother to get that kind of spiritual essence of the film they’re recreating down. Bogdanovich nailed the exact tone & romantic dynamic of Bringing Up Baby in What’s Up, Doc? and does such a subtle job of borrowing from & updating the formula that you have to watch them back to back to catch exactly how deep Hawks’s influence runs.

For more on March’s Movie of the Month, the throwback screwball comedy What’s Up, Doc?, check out our Swampchat discussion of the film.

-Brandon Ledet

Roger Ebert Film School, Lesson 24: Camelot (1967)

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hobbit

Roger Ebert Film School is a recurring feature in which Brandon attempts to watch & review all 200+ movies referenced in the print & film versions of Roger Ebert’s (auto)biography Life Itself.

Where Camelot (1967) is referenced in Life Itself: On page 153 of the first edition hardback, Ebert mentions that he lacks a formal film education and that he learned a lot about filmmaking as a craft by visiting sets as a journalist. He writes, “I spent full days on sound stages during movies like Camelot and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, watching a scene being done with a master shot and then broken down into closer shots and angles. I heard lighting and sound being discussed. I didn’t always understand what I was hearing, but I absorbed the general idea. I learned to see movies in terms of individual shots, instead of being swept along by the narrative.”

What Ebert had to say in his review: “Camelot is exactly what we were promised: ornate, visually beautiful, romantic and staged as the most lavish production in the history of the Hollywood musical. If that’s what you like, you’ll like it.” – from his 1967 review for The Chicago Sun-Times

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Looks like I finally hit the inevitable crossroads in this project where Ebert & I greatly differ on our enthusiasm for a work. The late, great critic was ecstatic about the mid-60s movie musical Camelot, a towering production that managed to stretch across 170 minutes of celluloid despite omitting several musical numbers from its stage play source material. Personally, I only see the same uninspiring Big Studio bloat here that Ebert chided in our last lesson, the John Wayne action epic Hellfighters, except without that film’s stray moments of immense beauty. Arriving at a time when New Hollywood rebels like Bonnie & Clyde and The Graduate were re-energizing an increasingly workmanlike, dispassionate movie industry, this three hour swashbuckling Ren Faire musical feels lame, stale, uninspired. I can totally see how musical theater geeks or folks obsessed with Arthurian folklore could be enamored with the late-era Old Hollywood spectacle of Camelot (Ebert doubly so, since it was one of the first film sets he was invited to visit as a writer), but the movie just did nothing for me. Outside of providing some extratextual context for the recent film Jackie & boasting a delightfully mischievous performance from a young, scene-stealing Vanessa Redgrave, Camelot weighed on me heavily as an overlong bore. I couldn’t even take pleasure in its period-specific costuming, which had all of the visual interest of a local, underfunded Ren Faire.

Is there any point to summarizing the plot of this Arthurian legend? King Arthur, Merlyn, Excalibur, Guenevere, Lancelot, and the Knights of the Round Table should all be familiar names in the public conscious, even if by secondhand knowledge through Disney’s The Sword and the Stone or a half-remembered Wishbone episode. Besides a dirty hippie version of Merlyn nearly pulling off a proto-Rob Zombie look, there’s really not much deviation worth describing here. The one thing Camelot does differently from most tellings is delivering most of its character work through song, a result of its nature as a cinematic Broadway adaptation. The film’s main crisis centers on a love triangle vying for Guenevere’s affections, a tension that leads Lancelot & Arthur to engage in battle. The battling itself, depicted through carefully staged sword fights, isn’t nearly as important as the forbidden three-way Hollywood romance, a conflict conveyed through a series of characters noticing each other notice each other with intensely jealous eye contact. This might be compelling if all three participants in this doomed Arthur-Lancelot-Guenevere trio were interesting as individual characters, but only Vanessa Redgrave’s portrayal of Guenevere registers as particularly memorable. In her first two musical numbers, Guenevere sings about the simple joys of living single and how Springtime makes her horny, a one-two punch of strikingly modern numbers with entertainment value never touched by Richard Harris’s nostalgic/sappy performance as King Arthur. Unfortunately (but understandably), Arthur’s whiny inner conflicts eat up a majority of the runtime and Redgrave isn’t given nearly enough screentime to counterbalance the film’s overlong chore of a slow-drip narrative & uninteresting visual appeal.

Obviously, it’s highly likely that I’m the one who’s wrong about Camelot‘s entertainment value & filmmaking merits. After all, Ebert was likely much better equipped to judge the worth of a musical theater adaptation than I, a cynical outsider to the genre, and it did win three Academy Awards for its efforts: Best Art Direction, Best Costume Design, and Best Music. As heavily referenced in Jackie, the original musical version of Camelot was also a personal favorite of John F. Kennedy’s, so the musical & this adaptation surely held a strong cultural & historical significance in the years following his 1963 assassination. I’m okay with being the modern philistine who can’t relate with the material, because it’s just so far outside what I usually seek out in my entertainment media. It would take a very specific kind of theater/Ren Faire nerd to fully embrace Camelot as a first watch in 2017 and I just don’t fit the type. I will say, however, that Vanessa Redgrave’s performance, particularly in her musical number about Springtime horniness, almost made the three limp hours that surround it worthwhile. She’s that great.

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Roger’s Rating: (4/4, 100%)

fourstar

Brandon’s Rating (2/5, 40%)

twostar

Next Lesson: Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969)

-Brandon Ledet

B.C. Butcher (2016)

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It’s generally not the best policy to judge a movie based on its context instead of its content, but it’s nearly impossible to avoid doing so while discussing B.C. Butcher. Written by a 15 year old and directed in her dad’s (beautiful) backyard when she was 17, B.C. Butcher has a distinct teens-goofing-off vibe that makes a huge impact on its production value limitations and reasonable audience expectations. As young as she was, filmmaker Kansas Bowling did talk a big game in her promotional interviews for the film, citing names like Doris Wishman, Herschell Gordon Lewis, and Lloyd Kaufman (who distributed the film under his Troma brand) among her influences, names I didn’t know or care about until I was well into my 20s. Growing up in L.A. will do that for you, I guess, and Bowling is equipped with enough ingrained schlock history to know how to turn a small, unassuming camp film into a minor success. Shot on 16mm and coming in under an hour in length, B.C. Butcher looks & feels authentic to its trashy drive-in roots. This vibe carries over to the advertising’s David Friedman-esque claim that it’s the “world’s first prehistoric slasher film.” This isn’t the type of work that would normally bowl people over with excitement, but given the context of its production its’ difficult to shake the feeling that we may have another budding Anna Biller on our hands in Bowling: a young schlock historian looking back to old modes of B-picture filmmaking for new, interesting takes on since-stale genres.

In the year 1 million B.C., “before dinosaurs took to the skies,” a tribe of young prehistoric women are terrorized by two outside threats: a gross caveman who individually seduces members of the tribe only to cheat on them & an even somehow less gross monster that murders them one by one, slasher film style. The B.C. Butcher at least has a motive for his crimes against the tribe. He kills the girls as retribution for the slaying of his undead bride, who torments his nightmares with commands to kill! kill! kill! The caveman Casanova has no such excuse, driving the girls apart with his grotesque, predatory seduction merely for his own pleasure. The film boasts two “big name” actors: Kato Kaelin of O.J. fame plays the pantsless caveman loverboy and Kadeem Hardison, best known for portraying Dwayne Wayne on A Different World, is the off-screen narrator. The “plot” doesn’t get much more complicated from there, except maybe in the climactic moment where The B.C. Butcher sheds a magical tear, which was one of the film’s biggest laughs. That kind of slight, straightforward storytelling again feels true to Bowling’s schlocky roots and one of the smartest decisions she makes as a filmmaker is in limiting the runtime so that the story never really outwears its welcome. If it were actually released in the 60s or 70s it would’ve been the exact kind of throwaway junk that padded out a double bill at the drive-in. I mean that with love.

As something that shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone who’s seen a modern teen’s Tumblr or Instagram account, what B.C. Butcher excels at most is aesthetic. In the opening credits, girls pose in leopard print dresses, furs, and boas to a Coasters-type novelty song. In-between the film’s lightly gory kills, the same kids goof off while a punk soundtrack that sounds like it was provided by Burger Records, with band names like Vicky and the Vengents and The Ugly Kids, provides a pleasant aural backdrop for a mildly horrific version of playing dress up. These are, honestly, the best moments in the film. My favorite scene overall might be the mid-movie music video where The Ugly Kids mime one of their tunes on watermelon instruments. Bowling has a great eye for pure aesthetic, a saving grace that elevates her debut high above similar micro-budget horrors like Shark Exorcist & Desperate Teenage Lovedolls. She stumbles a little in a few stray decisions (it’s a little alarming that the only to black characters in the film are a killer ogre and a blind mystic), but there’s more than enough solid humor to be found in her gleefully schlocky details: character names like Anna Conda & Neandra, stock footage dream sequences, casual inclusion of plastic water bottles disrupting the prehistoric setting, etc. B.C. Butcher is a delightfully silly debut with a fascinating pedigree and even if the film itself doesn’t wholly satisfy every trash-gobbling viewer, it’s hard to imagine anyone walking away incurious about where its teenage director is headed next.

-Brandon Ledet

Cold Steel (1987)

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three star

It’s tempting to think of 1995’s Jade as the bargain bin version of William Friedkin’s masterfully sleazy 80s cop thriller To Live and Die in L.A., but maybe the director wasn’t at all imitating past success with that admittedly dire misfire. By the time Friedkin made Jade, the 80s sleaze market he helped shape with his Wang Chung-scored cop thriller masterpiece had formed into its own solid genre, ranging wildly in both content & quality. The Sharon Stone/Adam Ant cop thriller Cold Steel, delivered by the one-time director Dorothy Ann Puzo, is just as sleazy & cheaply made as Jade and could easily be accused of the same claims of To Live and Die in L.A. counterfeiting (heh, heh), but because it doesn’t feature a filmmaker retreading old ground it gets by as a straightforward genre entry. Cold Steel is undeniably of its time in every possibly way. Its clash of 80s pop ballad cheese with extreme stomach-churning violence is only unremarkable because there was so much other tacky, tonally incongruous violence being produced at the time of its release. Considered in isolation and divorced from its peers & influences, Cold Steel is a fairly entertaining picture (which is more than can be said in Jade’s defense, unfortunately).

Released the same year as Lethal Weapon, Cold Steel attempts to navigate the same balance of light humor and intense violence as that much more enduring work, but can’t manage to match the intelligence of Shane Black’s game-changing screenplay. In this scenario, our down on his luck, perpetually drunk cop mixes pills & booze to show his gritty side, but bangs an automated coffee machine with commands like, “C’mon! Squirt!” only to receive a coffee facial to show that he’s also, in effect, a lighthearted clown. This sloppy cut-up finds himself entangled in a never-ending loop of revenge when a vicious gang (including Adam Ant as a smooth-talking goon) murders his father on Christmas Day for a perceived past wrong. The leader of the gang responsible, known only as the Iceman, is a hard drug-shooting creep with a mechanical voice box that allows him to speak through the wound in his throat. It’s at first unclear if this thieving, murderous crew has any clear motive in their violent robberies or if they’re just generic gangster baddies, but as our boozed-out hero chases them down through a series of explosion-heavy car chases, industrial setting confrontations, and heartless double crossings, a much clearer picture starts to unfold. Somewhere in all this chaos he finds the time to woo a young Sharon Stone through the erotic exoticism of eating sushi and that’s how sleazy 80s cop movies are made.

Cold Steel and Jade are both derivative and narratively unambitious in their post-To Live and Die in L.A. genre sleaze, but Cold Steel is entertaining enough to prove that wasn’t Jade’s only problem. Some of its entertainment is pure novelty, especially in its casting of Adam Ant, Sharon Stone, and (in a brief scene) minor scream queen Heidi Kozak. What really struck me, though, was how shocking the film’s violence felt despite the familiarity of its generic narrative. Stuntmen on fire, vicious stabs to the neck, grotesquely detailed drug abuse (another nod to Friedkin?), and overeager sexual leering all give the film a slimy sheen of 80s sleaze that never quite reach the heights of films like To Live and Die in L.A. or Cruising, but are still affecting in their own right. I’ll even admit that a few of Cold Steel’s stray stabs at humor got a laugh out of me. I guffawed especially hard when the hero cop responds to the warning, “He’ll kill you both!” with a casual, “Yeah, I’m planning on not letting that happen.” Movies like Jade prove that following genre convention and searching for easy thrills doesn’t automatically equal entertainment value success, but Cold Steel somehow survives by playing by the rules and getting dirty in the details. It won’t blow your mind, but you could do much worse if this is the type of action picture you’re looking for and you’ve already seen To Live and Die in L.A. one too many times.

-Brandon Ledet

Transformers (2007)

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onehalfstar

Two cataclysmic events in my life have lead me to this desperate hour, where I’m considering watching the entirety of the live action Transformers franchise for the very first time. First, I found myself intrigued by the convoluted mythology and grave, self-obsessed tone of the trailer for the upcoming fifth entry, The Last Knight, which is being reported as the final directorial contribution to the series from explosion fetishist Michael Bay. Secondly, I recently fell in love with Bay’s 1998 disaster pic Armageddon as the beautifully constructed, spiritually corrupt Conservative fantasy piece that it truly is. These freaky, reality-shattering occurrences have lead me astray, tempted me into a den of sin. I knew it was wrong to watch Transformers, a transgression I’ve avoided for an entire decade until now, but I did so anyway. I was rightly punished for crossing that line.

Transformers matches Armageddon‘s massive runtime and occasionally approaches its attention to heightened visual craft, but it is in no way in the same league as that morally deficient masterwork. At one point a single-scene character shouts, I kid you not, “This is a hundred times better than Armageddon, I swear to God!” They are the worst of liars. The reason that one-liner is worth mentioning is that Transformers is in many ways not an action fantasy piece, but instead the absolute worst designation any film can achieve: a failed comedy. After kicking things off with a little jingoistic Army worship, the film gleefully launches into its true bread & butter: a torrent of shitty, often offensively unfunny “jokes.” Bernie Mac plays a sleazy car salesman who repeatedly yells “Mammy!” in the broadest delivery possible. Characters are made fun of merely for speaking Spanish or Hindi as their first language. Half of the bloated runtime is dedicated to the hilarious idea that the film’s protagonist is interested in fucking Megan Fox, a pursuit the leering camera very apparently identifies with. Once the titular transforming robots show up, they join right in with both the racial caricature and the Megan Fox Is A Total Babe lines of humor. They even add a little scatilogical flavor to the painfully unfunny comedy by pissing on one of the antagonistic G-men who slow down the plot. I’d like to claim that the jokes in Transformers would only appeal to ten year old boys who don’t know any better, but the film pulled in $700 million at the box office, so I guess the joke is ultimately on me for not laughing along.

As someone who regularly enjoys and promotes the sillier, campier end of genre cinema, it goes against everything I believe to say this, but I think Transformers would have been a much better film if it actually took its own ridiculous premise seriously. As a film built around a series of Hasboro toys (shape-shifting robots from a war-ridden planet that hide among us as common automobiles), the film is already wildly goofy enough in its basic DNA that there’s no need to lighten the material with constant, insensitive bro humor. By turning every single narrative beat in the first two hours of the film into a stale joke (Heh, heh. I like it when the black robot says, “This looks like a cool place to kick it.” Heh, heh.) and opting to center its story on the human characters who encounter the robots instead of the titular alien beings everyone paid a ticket to see in the first place, it’s as if Transformers is constantly apologizing for its own existence. Assuming the audience couldn’t possibly want to actually watch the talking robots film advertised on its poster, Transformers dedicates about two thirds of its runtime to watching Shia LaBeouf feebly try to charm the (short) pants off Megan Fox. LaBeouf is convincing as a high school con man here (just as he’s convincing as an adult con man drifter in American Honey), but for some reason we’re asked to identify with his sleazy, insincere ways and laugh at his slimy, immature humor. Megan Fox is . . . less convincing as a small town high school student, but it’s not really her fault that she was cast merely to look supermodel beautiful so Michael Bay could drool at her consistently exposed midriff. Did I mention that she’s hot and a gear head? It doesn’t matter, because she’s not a talking robot alien, which is what most people paid to see.

Full disclosure: I did attempt to watch this Transformers franchise-starter when it was first released about a decade ago, but I couldn’t make it all the way through. The first 50min of the film bored me to tears and when the robots started talking I just found it too goofy and had to abandon ship. I now see how wrong I was. The first hour of Transformers is indeed still a boring humor vacuum, but the talking robots honestly aren’t all that bad. A straightforward sci-fi action film about two Cybertronic races (the Autobots and the Deceptions) fighting for possession of an intergalactic MacGuffin known simply as The Cube and debating in grave, heavy-handed speeches about whether humanity is worth saving (“Humans don’t deserve to live,” “They deserve to choose for themselves!”) doesn’t exactly sound like anything new or unique. In fact, after the Marvel takeover that’s unfolded in the years since this film’s release, it sounds like par for the course for the modern, bloated blockbuster. However, when Transformers leaves LaBeouf & Fox’s “hilarious” nonstarter romance behind for its concluding half hour of nonstop robot battles, it starts to feel like a passable slice of Hollywood entertainment. Careless destruction of property & faceless casualties pile up while Bay matches his robo explosions with a soaring, almost religious orchestral score. I’ve heard the robots’ ever-shifting, impossible transformations in these films described as a form of Cubist art before, which is a little lofty of a critical claim, but actually starts to make sense once the battle gets out of hand. Then, when it’s all over, LaBeouf & Fox make out on the hood of a robot car (which, it’s with noting, is a sentient being), reminding the audience that the film wasn’t always entertaining. In fact, most of it focused on these two dweebs for no discernible reason.

I’d be a liar if I said I didn’t enjoy any of Transformers before that concluding robo-battle. The film’s 80s-obsessed music cues were often pretty funny, especially in comparison to the jokes in the dialogue. The actress who played Shia LaBeouf’s mother, Julie White, was a total charmer in her all-too-brief performance, especially when she joins in in oggling Megan Fox’s hot bod. I even got a laugh out of two (!) Shia LaBeouf one-liners: one where he describes the Autobots as “robots, but like super advanced robots,” and another where he answers his parents’ question, “Why are you so dirty and sweaty?” with “I’m a child.” My biggest laugh in the film, though, was when a cop abruptly tells LaBeouf to shut up, since it’s exactly what I had been thinking for at least the first hour of the runtime. If all the humans of Transformers had just shut up and let the robots do the talking/battling, the film might have actually been entertaining, or at least less painfully embarrassing (it’s especially difficult not to feel bad for Jon Tuturo & Tyrese Gibson here). It’s in the climactic battle when Michael Bay really lets loose. Hundreds of human lives are squashed within minutes without a stray, momentary thought given to their loss. A steering wheel comes to life and eats a Stuck Up Rich Brat’s face. Everything explodes and is ground to dust in a lovingly shot cacophony. It’s too bad that the two hours preceding that cathartic release is embarrassed of its own nature as a Transformers film and buries its talking robots under an insurmountable mountain of ill-considered “comedy.” I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I hope future entries in the franchise take their robo-alien folklore a lot more seriously.

-Brandon Ledet

Roger Ebert Film School, Lesson 23: Hellfighters (1968)

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Roger Ebert Film School is a recurring feature in which Brandon attempts to watch & review all 200+ movies referenced in the print & film versions of Roger Ebert’s (auto)biography Life Itself.

Where Hellfighters (1968) is referenced in Life Itself: On page 153 of the first edition hardback, Ebert gloats about how great being a professional critic was in his glory days. He writes, “It was a honey of a job to have at that age. I had no office hours; it was understood that I would see the movies and meet the deadlines. I loved getting up from my desk and announcing, ‘I’m going to the movies.’ A lot of my writing was done at night and on the weekends. I saw about half of the movies in theaters with paying audiences, sinking into the gloom to watch John Wayne fighting flaming oil wells in Hellfighters at the Roosevelt, or Pam Grier inventing blaxploitation at the Chicago.”

What Ebert had to say in his review: “Out in front of the Roosevelt Theater there’s a big photo of John Wayne and this quote, attributed to him: ‘I’ve made a lot of action pictures but never one as exciting as this.’ I doubt that Wayne volunteered this information; it sounds more like a studio publicity idea. The fact is, Wayne has made a lot of action pictures, and over the years he has gotten to be about as good at it as anybody. He must have been miserable during the filming of Hellfighters, which is a slow moving, talkative, badly plotted bore.” – from his 1968 review for The Chicago Sun-Times

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When praising the young, energetic talent that reignited American art cinema in the late 60s’ so called New Hollywood movement, it’s all too easy to overlook the undeniable virtues of the system those films were bucking against. The John Wayne action epic Hellfighters is a perfect snapshot of Big Studio glut when compared to its more forward-thinking contemporaries like Bonnie & Clyde and The Graduate. While these smaller New Hollywood upstarts were pulling influence from still-exciting sources like the French New Wave, the lumbering, old-fashioned Hellfighters more closely resembles instantly outdated modes of entertainment like Earthquake, Airport, and The Towering Inferno. Ebert was right to praise those smaller, more experimental works in his reviews while labeling Hellfighters “a slow moving, talkative, badly plotted bore.” I can’t disagree with a word of that. The dirty secret, though, is that although formally & thematically outdated in the face of smaller, more passionate films being made around them, Old Hollywood ghosts like Hellfighters effortlessly pulled off mesmerizing visual spectacles that were never truly touched by the likes of a Bogdanovich or a Friedkin or a De Palma. Even if its superiority was simply a question of budget, there’s an immense beauty to the costume designs, sets, framing, and rich colors of Hellfighters that could’ve been transcendent if were applied passionately instead of with workmanlike competence.

As with all John Wayne movies, whether or not they’re set in the dusty West, Hellfighters is often classified as a Western. This makes even less sense here than it does with the London-set cop drama Brannigan, since Wayne’s tuxedo’d firefighter lead doesn’t even carry a gun. Loosely based off the real world personality Red Adair, Wayne plays infamous oil field firefighter Chance Buckman (man, I love that stupid name) as he travels across the globe putting out dangerous oil well fires with barrels full of dynamite. Real manly stuff. Based on that description, you might think that the art film version of Hellfighters might be Sorcerer or its predecessor Wages of Fear, but it actually more closely resembles a film from the late 90s. Much like Bruce Willis’s tough guy hero in Armageddon, Chance Buckman is an oil industry legend who bullheadedly infantilizes his adult daughter by attempting to protect her from a twofold danger: the physical danger of his industry & the emotional danger of the womanizing men who work within it. It’s not at all difficult to imagine Michael Bay growing up fond of Hellfighters, thanks to its hyper-masculine self-delusion & over-indulgence in practical effects explosions. The John Wayne film often mirrors Armageddon‘s bullshit romanticization of the hard working men who risk their lives for oil & the worried women who love them, despite the constant danger of loss. Where Armageddon employs this ludicrous narrative & attention to visual craft for a punishingly kinetic live action fantasy, however, Hellfighters is content to lie still & talk its audience to death. It’s an entire movie built around the idea that large spouts of fire look cool. It’s not exactly wrong, just too long to justify that thin of a premise and too lethargic to fully command its audience’s attention, even as beautifully decorated it’s production design can be. If Hellfighters could’ve operated with Michael Bay’s punishing sense of immediacy it might’ve been an all-time classic. At the very least, it could’ve shot John Wayne into space to fist fight an asteroid the size of Texas. There’s pretty much no one who wouldn’t pay to see that.

A large part of what makes Hellfighters feel desperately old-fashioned is its constant glorification of traditionalist masculinity. So many bare knuckle punches are thrown without any real consequence in bar rooms, brothels, gambling holes, and hospitals that they start to register more like a handshake between bros than an act of violence. News reporters are whiny little wimps who can only get in the way while Real Men do the Important Work, the kind that requires muscles & explosives. The women of Hellfighters are wives, daughters, and secretaries, completely extraneous to the plot outside a fresh-from-The Graduate Katherine Ross, whose virtue & emotional well-being Chance Buckman is tasked to protect. The closest the movie comes to passing the Bechdel Test is a single scene where Buckman’s wife & daughter are golfing alone together, but their entire conversation centers on whether or not it’s worth the worry to love an oil field firefighter. Buckman himself is a stoic emotional void, only budging in his rock solid confidence to express annoyed frustration & mild worry with the women in his life who needlessly complicate his profession. Otherwise he just does what he does best: exploding fires into oblivion & unconvincingly delivering oil-themed one-liners like “If you’re coming to me for advice, I’m a dry hole” with a distinct lack of passion.

In the years since the New Hollywood takeover, directors have learned (and have been better funded) to apply Hellfighters‘s workman sense of extravagant spectacle to the energetic narratives that deserve it. Instead of overtalking its virtues between this piece, my initial review, and a subsequent podcast episode, I do believe Michael Bay’s Armageddon is a perfect example o how well that visual craft could be utilized with just a little creative gusto, even while holding onto its idolization of toxic masculinity. Hellfighters was an overlabored, undercooked movie industry dinosaur when compared to the more exciting, artier New Hollywood films that upended its place in the world, but that doesn’t mean it’s a film without value. When gazing into the rich color, impeccable costuming, gorgeous sets, and mesmerizing explosions that Hellfighters wastes on a going-through-the-motions John Wayne action epic, there’s an undeniable sense of missed opportunity. The film could’ve been something truly memorable if its better aspects weren’t helmed by a sleepwalking studio system that misread what its audience was interested in seeing. I can’t recommend Hellfighters as an entertaining work to anyone other than the most diligent John Wayne completist imaginable. However, I do think it works as a valuable reminder that there was a lot of untold merit in the bloated studio system that the late 60s broke apart with its scruffy batch of babyface auteurs.

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Roger’s Rating (1.5/4, 38%)

onehalfstar

Brandon’s Rating (2.5/5, 50%)

twohalfstar

Next Lesson: Camelot (1967)

-Brandon Ledet

Viva (2007)

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threehalfstar

One of the more intimidating aspects of discussing Anna Biller’s instant cult classic The Love Witch was coming to terms with the fact that most of its reference points as a pastiche were way beyond my grasp, even as someone who regularly watches schlock. The Love Witch mined old modes of horror-themed erotica, pictures like The Velvet Vampire, for its distinct visual palette & absurdist humor, but repurposed the genre for modernized modes of feminist discourse. I loved the results of that experiment, but have to openly admit that my very basic, surface-level knowledge of the genre & era The Love Witch was evoking was puny in comparison to Biller’s encyclopedic command of the subject. It turns out her debut film, Viva, would be even further outside my grasp as a genre film tourist. Paying homage to the softcore smut of the early 1970s that rode in on the success of Deep Throat and the optimistic promises of The Sexual Revolution (the kinds of films you’d hear detailed on the excellent podcast The Rialto Report), Viva is operating on a whole other level of schlock I have little to no experience with. My limited knowledge of smut peddlers like Russ Meyer & Doris Wishman don’t equip me with the full vocabulary necessary to discuss the ways Viva acts as a love letter to softcore smut past. The film feels very authoritative on the subject, though, and it achieves such a specific image & tone that I have to again put my trust in the fact that Biller knows exactly what she’s doing.

Viva often looks & feels like an early 70s magazine layout. Its bored housewives, swinger couples, and nudist camp vouyerism all read like a Letter to Penthouse, but its iconography is the stuff of that magazine’s advertisement: Scotch, lingerie, deviled eggs, jellos & dips. Emboldened by a newfound sexual freedom afforded to them by the commercial availability of the birth control pill, the Liberated women of Viva take charge of their sex lives by leaving behind the incessant sexual pressures of husbands, neighbors, and bosses to become high class sex workers & “models.” One friend turns to prostitution as a convenient means of making money and finds immediate fulfillment in a wealthy, older men who showers her with gifts: diamonds, horses, fur coats, etc. The other woman, Viva, has a much narrower path to satisfaction. Instead of money, she seeks a genuine emotional connection with a kind, sensitive man. No matter how many supposedly sensitive artist-types her pimp set her up with, though, the results are always the same. Men throw pouty fits whenever Viva doesn’t give them exactly what they want (casual sex) upfront and instead of waiting to meet her on her own terms, they manipulate, drug, and physically force her into copulation. It’s a fucked up plot for a campy genre throwback, but finding feminist themes in these old modes of schlocky smut seems to be Biller’s forte and the basic story structure of Viva feels true to roughies like Lorna, Another Day Another Man, and, I have to presume, the “mainstream” smut that followed in the 1970s.

If Viva has a central problem, it’s that it’s a little too faithful to the films it pays tribute to. At 120 minutes, with multiple extensive musical numbers, the film can often feel as tedious as its source material for once the initial turn-on wore off. It’s also disappointing that its modern feminist criticism wasn’t as fully pronounced in the dialogue & plotting as it was in its more outrageous follow-up. Biller threatens to steer away from genre traditions with some queer plotlines & rape culture criticism that bubble up naturally in Viva‘s era-evoking plot machinations, but imstead decides to follow the old guard and allow the story to play out exactly as it would have four decades ago. However, even though it feels slightly less brave in its willingness to shake up & modernize the formula, Viva is still an impressive feat for a debut feature. Much like with The Love Witch, Biller exudes auteurist control in nearly every aspect of the filmmaking craft – not only writing, directing, editing, and handling the set & costume design herself, but in this case also starring in the titular role. There are some thematic aspects of Viva I wish Biller had pushed a little further (and a few scenes I wish were shaved down to expedite the pace), but there’s an endlessly enjoyable aesthetic in her staging of the film’s lingerie lounging, Scotch swilling, porn-browsing swinger-era softcore smut I can’t help but take delight in. Just the way characters punctuate each of their own lame jokes with unwarranted, maniacal laughter feels both so true to the era & so clearly aligned with what Biller wants to accomplish in her modernization. It’s incredible she was able to figure out her own concrete sense of style as soon as her first feature.

It’s exciting to know that Biller’s best work is likely still ahead of her, but her aesthetic’s beginnings in Viva are worthwhile enough on their own merit that it doesn’t matter that she wasn’t yet fully formed as a filmmaker at the time she made it. If nothing else, the film expresses an incredible knowledge & affection for the past of America’s mainstream erotica. It also helps that Viva can be riotously amusing in stray absurdist moments, never playing like a dry, academic exercise in genre pastiche.

-Brandon Ledet