I seem to be the only person alive who really loves Superman Returns. Most found it too long, too slow, and too sappy. I agree that it is all of those things. But of all the superhero movies out there, it’s the only one that affects me emotionally because it features one of the only heroes in the genre who's really worthy of the title.
To cynical contemporary audiences raised on ironic distance and gritty antiheroes, Superman seems outlandishly corny, a boring goody-two-shoes with no rough edges or shades of gray. And that’s what I love about him. Unlike other superheroes, the world would actually be a better place with him in it. A world so insane, so chaotic and brutal that it requires a violent, emotionally scarred vigilante like Batman to mete out the justice its government cannot is kind of depressing, but what if Superman existed? Imagine the ecclesiastical joy you would feel knowing that there’s someone out there looking after you, who will catch you when you fall. It must be what it’s like to really, truly believe in a just and loving God, only you can actually see Him in the flesh, zooming across the sky in glorious Technicolor.
This religious yearning is crucial to the character’s creation myth, both in the comics and in the real world. Subverting the Nietzschean Übermensch ideology that so inspired the Nazis, Superman was created by two sons of Jewish immigrants at a time when their relatives in Europe desperately needed their people’s long-delayed savior to finally arrive. A survivor from a decimated culture arriving in the heartland of America to defend the innocent and preserve justice, Superman was both of manifestation of the Jewish people’s longing for a protector and a celebration of American idealism. A powerless infant in his native land, he was given strength by his arrival in America, a land where, theoretically, a person of no means could leave behind his suffering and start a new life of hope and promise. Created during the Great Depression, Superman was a symbol of compassion and generosity in a world given to corruption and rot.
I strongly disagree with the idea that being purely noble somehow makes Superman less interesting than more conflicted characters like the X-Men. Just for a moment, pretend that you’re Superman. Earth’s yellow sun gives you immeasurable power, more than enough to rule the world if you wanted to. But you don’t want to. Instead, you only want to help people. You choose to be polite and generous and forgiving and self-sacrificing. Do you understand how remarkable that is? Do you think you or anyone you know would possess enough self-control and basic human decency to not give in to the temptation to use your unlimited strength for your own ends? They say that absolute power corrupts absolutely, but Superman refutes that. In a world where abuses of power are more often the rule than the exception, I find that immeasurably inspiring. Batman did the best with the hand he was dealt, but he’s a flawed character for a flawed world. Superman flies trailing the promise of utopia behind him like a cape.
And don’t think that Superman doesn’t suffer by choosing not to lord over every human on earth like his own personal ant colony. His body might be Kryptonian, but his soul is pure human. He has the same desire for recognition and adoration as any of us, but he chooses to hide his light under a bushel by trying to make his way in the world as a lowly reporter named Clark Kent. I believe that Quentin Tarantino was wrong when he wrote in Kill Bill that Kent’s bumbling personality is Superman’s criticism of mankind. I don’t believe that Clark is an act. Clark is what being human does to Superman. Because he can’t use his powers without blowing his secret identity, he becomes just like the rest of us: unsure of himself, socially awkward, prone to mistakes. It’s easy to make everyone love you when you can save them from a falling airliner, but wouldn’t you want them to love you for you, not what you can do for them? When he’s Superman, he’s invincible, which gives him confidence and a certain swagger, but when he’s Clark, he’s vulnerable to the same pitfalls of human interaction as the rest of us. Being able to stop a bullet with your eyeball doesn’t help when the people at work think you’re a dork (which you kind of are—you’re a farmboy from Kansas, for God’s sake). That’s why it’s so important to him that Lois Lane fall in love with him as Clark, not Superman. It’s like a rock star wanting to make sure that his favorite groupie loves him for his personality, not for the fame and fortune. It shows that we’re all the same inside, no matter how powerful we seem on the outside.
Superman Returns illustrates this facet of Superman’s personality better than any of the other films in the series. Christopher Reeve gave a deft dual performance as both Superman (a man with so much natural grace that he could sit at a dinner table in a blue leotard and seem perfectly comfortable) and Clark, whose slapstick antics displayed Reeve’s underrated comic timing. For my money, he was Superman incarnate, but Brandon Routh synthesizes the two sides of Superman better. When he has the cape and tights on, he seems like a modest guy who’s been thrust into the spotlight, like a shy best man making a wedding toast. Rather than basking in the glow of his loving public, he seems embarrassed by the hero worship. He knows that he did nothing to deserve these powers he has, so he feels unworthy of such adoration in a world where so many have to work so much harder than he does to achieve far less. To me, Superman’s humility is much more impressive than his superpowers. The latter he was born with, but he earned the former through strength of character alone.
The movie is far from perfect. The plot is non-existent (Superman lifts heavy things!), the ending anticlimactic, and Kate Bosworth's bland, humorless Lois Lane makes me yearn for the feisty oddness of Margot Kidder. It also makes mincemeat of the denouement of Superman II, which, let's be frank, was never hot shit to begin with. Worst of all, they continue the franchise's misstep of using Lex Luthor as comic relief, undermining his effectiveness as a nemesis. In the comics, Luthor isn’t just a criminal mastermind yearning for wealth and power. He’s a captain of industry who already has both. What makes Luthor a villain is his pathological resentment of Superman. In a world without a man who’s more powerful than a locomotive, Luthor would be its most remarkable specimen. He’s a brilliant scientist, a genius businessman, and a stunning lateral strategist. He is the epitome of human achievement, but he pales in comparison to Superman, who attained his magnificence not through hard work and intelligence, but by a simple fluke of biology. This cosmic injustice drives Luthor mad with envy. In his mind, he’s trying to destroy Superman not because the Man of Steel is constantly thwarting his plans for world domination, but because he feels that Superman’s very existence belittles mankind itself, turning all of its achievements into the scribblings of children who need a father figure to protect them. (They do cursorily address this in the film, but this theme gets abandoned for the goofy "Let's make an ugly new continent that no one would ever want to live on" scheme.) To Luthor, humanity will never achieve its potential as long as it has Superman to coddle it. If Superman is God, then Lex is Lucifer, attempting to shove Man out of the Garden of Eden so that he might fulfill his destiny under his own steam. Of course, Luthor also believes that the only way for that to happen is for him to rule the world and show his fellow man the way (while taking his cut, of course—you can’t expect him to work out of pocket), but what do you expect from an egomaniac who feels that his only rival is a man who can lift continents?
Superman Returns is too ponderous and weakly plotted to be a masterpiece, but it does the right things right, at least for me. It shows me a hero who cares more about saving people than he does about the collateral damage-intensive psychodramas that other superheroes engage in with their fellow cosplay fetishists. His past is every bit as tragic as Batman’s, but he rises above it with class and grace. Even when he’s not flying over our heads like a bird or a plane, he still gives us someone to look up to.
Saturday, August 28, 2010
Thunder and Lightning
Today we got my tribute to the late, great David Carradine. Now, I don’t want to brag, especially considering the morbid and tragic nature of his death, but I cracked the Carradine case several hours before both the press and the authorities. When I first heard of his supposed suicide, something just didn't add up for me. I knew there was no way Carradine would off himself. That dude loved living. He still had broads to ball and martial arts to master. My gut said “sex game gone awry,” and I shared that hunch with the world. People said I was just being a clueless fanboy. In their stunted view, David Carradine was ashamed of his 45-year B-movie legacy and decided to take the coward’s way out. But I knew he was proud of the work he’d done, and I stuck to my guns. Now everybody’s talking about “autoerotic asphyxiation” this and “murderous ladyboys” that. This is one case where I take no joy in being right, but you have to admit that dying in the middle of a sleazy sex game in a Bangkok hotel room is way less of a bummer than hanging yourself in the closet of a Bangkok hotel room. It's not exactly a blaze of glory, but I guess it'll have to do.
Anyway, I said goodbye to the star of possibly the two greatest B-movies of all time, Death Race 2000 and Q: The Winged Serpent, by watching a Roger Corman-produced moonshinin’ picture from 1977 called Thunder and Lightning. Carradine plays a swamprat who wears an earring in a time and place where that’s probably a lynch-worthy offense, but he runs the county’s best rotgut so it’s okay. Then his girlfriend’s fatcat daddy, who runs his own bootlegging operation out of a soda factory, starts blowing up Carradine’s stills and smacking around his whiskery hillbilly compatriots. So you know what that means: car chases and kung fu.
Since this is a Roger Corman picture, Thunder and Lightning gives it to you with the science. At the three minute mark, we got an explosion. At seven minutes, we got a hydrofoil chase. At ten, we got a car crash. Then we need to handle some business like introducing the villain and the love interest, Kate Jackson (a.k.a. Charlie’s Other Angel), but that’s okay because these scenes get sugarcoated with some tits and gator-rasslin’. That makes the eight minutes we have to wait until the next explosion fly by. Then we got some minor karate at the 25-minute point, followed by a car flipping over two minutes later. At 28 minutes, we got a speedboat race, and at 33, we got a fistfight. Then we got 15 minutes of plot, so you can go take a piss or smoke a cigarette or something, because then the rest of the movie is pretty much just shootouts, crack-ups, and moonshine Molotov cocktails.
Thunder and Lightning is a pretty damned entertaining good ol’ boy flick full of great character actors like George Murdock (playing pretty much the same role he did in Chuck Norris’ starring debut, the CB-craze cash-in Breaker! Breaker!) and Majestyk's Movies salutee Charles Napier (Hit List). It’s also got lots of quotable cornpone dialogue like “Shit fire and save matches!” and “Sweet kidneys o’ Christ!” David Carradine’s filmography is full of little gems like this, and when he died (hopefully in the middle of a toe-curling orgasm), the B-movie world lost one of its most gracious and elegant ambassadors.
Anyway, I said goodbye to the star of possibly the two greatest B-movies of all time, Death Race 2000 and Q: The Winged Serpent, by watching a Roger Corman-produced moonshinin’ picture from 1977 called Thunder and Lightning. Carradine plays a swamprat who wears an earring in a time and place where that’s probably a lynch-worthy offense, but he runs the county’s best rotgut so it’s okay. Then his girlfriend’s fatcat daddy, who runs his own bootlegging operation out of a soda factory, starts blowing up Carradine’s stills and smacking around his whiskery hillbilly compatriots. So you know what that means: car chases and kung fu.
Since this is a Roger Corman picture, Thunder and Lightning gives it to you with the science. At the three minute mark, we got an explosion. At seven minutes, we got a hydrofoil chase. At ten, we got a car crash. Then we need to handle some business like introducing the villain and the love interest, Kate Jackson (a.k.a. Charlie’s Other Angel), but that’s okay because these scenes get sugarcoated with some tits and gator-rasslin’. That makes the eight minutes we have to wait until the next explosion fly by. Then we got some minor karate at the 25-minute point, followed by a car flipping over two minutes later. At 28 minutes, we got a speedboat race, and at 33, we got a fistfight. Then we got 15 minutes of plot, so you can go take a piss or smoke a cigarette or something, because then the rest of the movie is pretty much just shootouts, crack-ups, and moonshine Molotov cocktails.
Thunder and Lightning is a pretty damned entertaining good ol’ boy flick full of great character actors like George Murdock (playing pretty much the same role he did in Chuck Norris’ starring debut, the CB-craze cash-in Breaker! Breaker!) and Majestyk's Movies salutee Charles Napier (Hit List). It’s also got lots of quotable cornpone dialogue like “Shit fire and save matches!” and “Sweet kidneys o’ Christ!” David Carradine’s filmography is full of little gems like this, and when he died (hopefully in the middle of a toe-curling orgasm), the B-movie world lost one of its most gracious and elegant ambassadors.
Fair Game (1986)
Fair Game proves my theory that every Australian movie will turn into The Road Warrior sooner or later. I never made it all the way through Picnic at Hanging Rock, but I wouldn’t be surprised if a dune buggy tricked out with spikes and monster truck tires figured into the finale somehow.
Fair Game came late in the Ozploitation cycle, but it’s a good’un. It’s about this foxy animal conservationist chick who doesn’t own pants. She gets into a rivalry with these kangaroo-poaching yahoos who drive a pick-up that has red headlights and big pipes welded to the hood so it kind of looks like they made a Hot Wheels car out of the devil from Spawn. The set-up seems like it’s gonna be a real sleazy I Spit On Your Grave type deal, where a chick gets raped around the Outback for an hour before getting her revenge. But this is an Australian chick we’re talking about, so she refuses to be a victim. There are plenty of opportunities for her to back down and let it go before things get out of hand, but she keeps giving as good as she gets. They sneak into her house and take a Polaroid of her taking a nap bare-assed; she sneaks into their camp and welds their guns together into an abstract barbed wire sculpture. They drive their truck through her house; she drives their van off a cliff. They strap her naked to the front of their truck like a deer carcass; she sets up a bunch of booby traps and kills the living fuck out of them with electricity, fire, and iron. This is some badass shit. I mean, John McClane gets a lot of credit for kicking ass barefoot, but let’s see him do it pantsless.
I recommend this one. There’s some pretty great stuntwork with this dude jumping from car to car in the middle of a high-speed chase, and it manages to have a bunch of nudity and a feminist message at the same time, so you get to have your tits and eat ’em, too.
Fair Game came late in the Ozploitation cycle, but it’s a good’un. It’s about this foxy animal conservationist chick who doesn’t own pants. She gets into a rivalry with these kangaroo-poaching yahoos who drive a pick-up that has red headlights and big pipes welded to the hood so it kind of looks like they made a Hot Wheels car out of the devil from Spawn. The set-up seems like it’s gonna be a real sleazy I Spit On Your Grave type deal, where a chick gets raped around the Outback for an hour before getting her revenge. But this is an Australian chick we’re talking about, so she refuses to be a victim. There are plenty of opportunities for her to back down and let it go before things get out of hand, but she keeps giving as good as she gets. They sneak into her house and take a Polaroid of her taking a nap bare-assed; she sneaks into their camp and welds their guns together into an abstract barbed wire sculpture. They drive their truck through her house; she drives their van off a cliff. They strap her naked to the front of their truck like a deer carcass; she sets up a bunch of booby traps and kills the living fuck out of them with electricity, fire, and iron. This is some badass shit. I mean, John McClane gets a lot of credit for kicking ass barefoot, but let’s see him do it pantsless.
I recommend this one. There’s some pretty great stuntwork with this dude jumping from car to car in the middle of a high-speed chase, and it manages to have a bunch of nudity and a feminist message at the same time, so you get to have your tits and eat ’em, too.
Tuesday, August 10, 2010
I Know Who Killed Me
A couple things about this movie we have to get out of the way right off the bat:
1) Yes, the title is a line of dialogue from the movie, and no, it doesn't make any goddamn sense at all. The character who says it was never killed, so it's one of those bait-and-switch deals, like I Spit On Your Grave. But unlike that movie, where the main character surely would have spit on somebody's grave were there any actual graves in the movie for her to spit on, this movie's titular line of dialogue actually contradicts everything that the character who speaks it has been saying about herself for the whole running time. It's like they came up with a title first, but then forgot to tell it to the guy they hired to write the movie, but they'd already printed up the posters so they were stuck with it.
2) Lindsay Lohan does not get naked in this movie. But you already knew that, since she plays a stripper and strippers don't get naked in movies anymore, a dangerous precedent set by Jessica Alba in Sin City and continued by Rose McGowan in Planet Terror. (You know, I'm starting to think this is all Robert Rodriguez's fault.) Personally, if I were a stripper, I would be insulted by these Hollywood starlets who think they're too good to do what real strippers do every night for far less money. Spoiled brats like Alba and Lohan want all the cool accoutrements that come with playing a stripper (the "bad girl" attitude, the sexy dance routines, the slutty costumes, etc.) but they don't want to do any of the heavy lifting. It's like if an actor got cast to play a cop but refused to carry a gun. I understand your ethical dilemma, but that should have stopped you from taking the role in the first place. It's not a matter of me wanting to see some tits; it's a matter of an actress' lack of commitment to the role she has been paid to bring to life. And in the case of I Know Who Killed Me Even Though I'm Not Dead And It's Not Really Me I'm Talking About Anyway, it's even more insulting because all of the other strippers surrounding Lindsay Lohan get naked. It's like they needed some tits to create a realistic atmosphere for a strip club, but Lindsay's were too expensive so they had to hire some stunt knockers. It just ain't fair. These other actresses have dreams, too. They want to be famous and star in their own movies, but they don't have the full might of the Walt Disney Corporation backing their careers, so they have to pay their dues and show off some skin like many accomplished actresses did before they got famous. And for what? So Lindsay Lohan can have her stripper cake and eat it too. Fucking bullshit.
Okay, we should probably talk about the plot now. Lindsay plays a high school piano prodigy who gets kidnapped by a psycho. When she shows up later, she's missing a hand and a leg and claiming that she's really a stripper named Dakota. So since the movie tries real hard to make you think that she's just crazy, you know she's really telling the truth. That's the shocking twist, that everything turns out pretty much how you thought it would.
This movie has already become a little notorious, not only because it so closely mirrors Lindsay Lohan's real-life transformation from America's Sweetheart into America's Drunken Whore. It's also a completely ridiculous movie from beginning to end. This thing is positively Italian in its aggressive commitment to utter implausibility. It's like a Brian De Palma thriller, only half-assed. De Palma would go so far over the top that you'd have to appreciate the audaciousness of it all, but the best this movie can do is get you on a "so bad, it's good" level. But on that level, this shit works. It is pretty goddamn goodly bad/badly good in on nearly every category.
Let's break it down:
Cinematography: This is one of those movies with symbolic colors, so everything is either blue or red. Blue represents Good Lindsay, red represents Bad Lindsay. At one point, a character shows up wearing yellow and automatically becomes the most interesting thing in the movie. You can't take your eyes off of him. It's like that little girl in the red dress in Schindler's List. But what I don't get is why everything except Bad Lindsay (who always dresses in red) is blue. And I do mean everything. There is more blue in this movie than in a Jacque Cousteau documentary. Seriously, it's like the director has some grudge against the color blue. Maybe the Smurfs murdered his mom or something. The killer even wears bright blue gloves and a blue stocking over his face. An awesome twist would have been if he turned out to be in Blue Man Group and was chopping off limbs to create some kind of syncopated musical routine. That would have ruled.
Script: I love these movies where not only is the basic premise impossible to swallow, but they also throw in some other minor outlandishness for no good reason. Okay, I'm gonna have to spoil the big twist: Good Lindsay and Bad Lindsay are separated-at-birth twins, so when something bad happens to one of them, it happens to the other, too. So when GL gets her hand and leg amputated, BL's hand and leg just fall off. That's some pretty crazy shit to base a whole movie on, and any other movie would have tried to make everything else as realistic as possible to compensate. Not this one. This one also throws in a super-strong robotic hand that responds flawlessly to nerve impulses and a prosthetic leg that needs to be plugged in at night. It's shit like this that marks this movie as something special. Another thing that makes this movie particularly Italianesque is that the cops are fucking retards. In real life (as well as in better movies), what investigators do when hunting for serial killers is to cross reference the victims' histories to find points of comparison in hopes of discerning a pattern that will lead them to the perpetrator. They don't do that here. They just yell at Lindsay because she's not cooperating. If they'd done what I suggested, they would have easily found several clues linking the victims to the killer. (And in any case, they would have known it was him because he's the only guy in town who has dozens of prosthetic limbs hanging from the ceiling in his basement. Shit hanging from the ceiling = psycho.) As a film viewer, you'll actually figure it out in the first five minutes, since there's this one scene right at the beginning featuring a character who's only around long enough to get all intense about something that he doesn't have any business getting intense about. Then he never appears again, and the movie doesn't give you any other suspects. The only way the villain could have been any easier to identify is if he'd been played by Christopher Plummer.
Acting: Dude, it's awful, particularly from Ms. Lohan herself, who is utterly unbelievable as both a goodie two-shoes and a chain-smoking tramp. I, for one, am grateful. Competent acting could have easily raised this movie to the level of mediocrity, which is the last place you want it to be.
So yeah, if you like terrible movies, this is a terrible one you'll like. It's not as balls-crazy as The Wicker Man remake, though, because it doesn't have Nic Cage dressing up in a bear costume and beating up women. That's the kind of thing that only comes along once in a lifetime, though, so don't hold that against I Know Who Didn't Actually Kill The Person Who Isn't Technically Me.
1) Yes, the title is a line of dialogue from the movie, and no, it doesn't make any goddamn sense at all. The character who says it was never killed, so it's one of those bait-and-switch deals, like I Spit On Your Grave. But unlike that movie, where the main character surely would have spit on somebody's grave were there any actual graves in the movie for her to spit on, this movie's titular line of dialogue actually contradicts everything that the character who speaks it has been saying about herself for the whole running time. It's like they came up with a title first, but then forgot to tell it to the guy they hired to write the movie, but they'd already printed up the posters so they were stuck with it.
2) Lindsay Lohan does not get naked in this movie. But you already knew that, since she plays a stripper and strippers don't get naked in movies anymore, a dangerous precedent set by Jessica Alba in Sin City and continued by Rose McGowan in Planet Terror. (You know, I'm starting to think this is all Robert Rodriguez's fault.) Personally, if I were a stripper, I would be insulted by these Hollywood starlets who think they're too good to do what real strippers do every night for far less money. Spoiled brats like Alba and Lohan want all the cool accoutrements that come with playing a stripper (the "bad girl" attitude, the sexy dance routines, the slutty costumes, etc.) but they don't want to do any of the heavy lifting. It's like if an actor got cast to play a cop but refused to carry a gun. I understand your ethical dilemma, but that should have stopped you from taking the role in the first place. It's not a matter of me wanting to see some tits; it's a matter of an actress' lack of commitment to the role she has been paid to bring to life. And in the case of I Know Who Killed Me Even Though I'm Not Dead And It's Not Really Me I'm Talking About Anyway, it's even more insulting because all of the other strippers surrounding Lindsay Lohan get naked. It's like they needed some tits to create a realistic atmosphere for a strip club, but Lindsay's were too expensive so they had to hire some stunt knockers. It just ain't fair. These other actresses have dreams, too. They want to be famous and star in their own movies, but they don't have the full might of the Walt Disney Corporation backing their careers, so they have to pay their dues and show off some skin like many accomplished actresses did before they got famous. And for what? So Lindsay Lohan can have her stripper cake and eat it too. Fucking bullshit.
Okay, we should probably talk about the plot now. Lindsay plays a high school piano prodigy who gets kidnapped by a psycho. When she shows up later, she's missing a hand and a leg and claiming that she's really a stripper named Dakota. So since the movie tries real hard to make you think that she's just crazy, you know she's really telling the truth. That's the shocking twist, that everything turns out pretty much how you thought it would.
This movie has already become a little notorious, not only because it so closely mirrors Lindsay Lohan's real-life transformation from America's Sweetheart into America's Drunken Whore. It's also a completely ridiculous movie from beginning to end. This thing is positively Italian in its aggressive commitment to utter implausibility. It's like a Brian De Palma thriller, only half-assed. De Palma would go so far over the top that you'd have to appreciate the audaciousness of it all, but the best this movie can do is get you on a "so bad, it's good" level. But on that level, this shit works. It is pretty goddamn goodly bad/badly good in on nearly every category.
Let's break it down:
Cinematography: This is one of those movies with symbolic colors, so everything is either blue or red. Blue represents Good Lindsay, red represents Bad Lindsay. At one point, a character shows up wearing yellow and automatically becomes the most interesting thing in the movie. You can't take your eyes off of him. It's like that little girl in the red dress in Schindler's List. But what I don't get is why everything except Bad Lindsay (who always dresses in red) is blue. And I do mean everything. There is more blue in this movie than in a Jacque Cousteau documentary. Seriously, it's like the director has some grudge against the color blue. Maybe the Smurfs murdered his mom or something. The killer even wears bright blue gloves and a blue stocking over his face. An awesome twist would have been if he turned out to be in Blue Man Group and was chopping off limbs to create some kind of syncopated musical routine. That would have ruled.
Script: I love these movies where not only is the basic premise impossible to swallow, but they also throw in some other minor outlandishness for no good reason. Okay, I'm gonna have to spoil the big twist: Good Lindsay and Bad Lindsay are separated-at-birth twins, so when something bad happens to one of them, it happens to the other, too. So when GL gets her hand and leg amputated, BL's hand and leg just fall off. That's some pretty crazy shit to base a whole movie on, and any other movie would have tried to make everything else as realistic as possible to compensate. Not this one. This one also throws in a super-strong robotic hand that responds flawlessly to nerve impulses and a prosthetic leg that needs to be plugged in at night. It's shit like this that marks this movie as something special. Another thing that makes this movie particularly Italianesque is that the cops are fucking retards. In real life (as well as in better movies), what investigators do when hunting for serial killers is to cross reference the victims' histories to find points of comparison in hopes of discerning a pattern that will lead them to the perpetrator. They don't do that here. They just yell at Lindsay because she's not cooperating. If they'd done what I suggested, they would have easily found several clues linking the victims to the killer. (And in any case, they would have known it was him because he's the only guy in town who has dozens of prosthetic limbs hanging from the ceiling in his basement. Shit hanging from the ceiling = psycho.) As a film viewer, you'll actually figure it out in the first five minutes, since there's this one scene right at the beginning featuring a character who's only around long enough to get all intense about something that he doesn't have any business getting intense about. Then he never appears again, and the movie doesn't give you any other suspects. The only way the villain could have been any easier to identify is if he'd been played by Christopher Plummer.
Acting: Dude, it's awful, particularly from Ms. Lohan herself, who is utterly unbelievable as both a goodie two-shoes and a chain-smoking tramp. I, for one, am grateful. Competent acting could have easily raised this movie to the level of mediocrity, which is the last place you want it to be.
So yeah, if you like terrible movies, this is a terrible one you'll like. It's not as balls-crazy as The Wicker Man remake, though, because it doesn't have Nic Cage dressing up in a bear costume and beating up women. That's the kind of thing that only comes along once in a lifetime, though, so don't hold that against I Know Who Didn't Actually Kill The Person Who Isn't Technically Me.
Rambo
Unspeakable awesome. That's the only way to describe the new Rambo.
Over the weekend, I walked around telling anybody who would listen that Rambo is the greatest movie ever made. I said it without hesitation, without qualification, and for damn sure without shame.
But now that some of the initial elation has worn off, I have to amend that statement. It's probably not the greatest movie ever made. It's only the absolute no-contest best action movie since Terminator 2.
The lukewarm and/or condescending reviews this landmark in no-nonsense action cinema has received from mainstream critics mystifies me. I don't know what's up with these people. It doesn't seem like they saw the same movie I did. Maybe it's just that they grew up in some parallel universe where justice always reigns and hatred doesn't congeal in the bone marrow, so they're missing that hard chunk of black diamond that the rest of us carry around in our hearts that makes us scream for violent retribution against an unfair world. But for people like me, Rambo is 100% emotion. It angries up the blood in the most beautiful, life-affirming way.
Rambo is not a complicated film, but it is a powerful one, if you can allow yourself to experience it on a purely emotional level. George Lucas once said that engaging an audience emotionally was easy: Just strangle a kitten on camera. (Too bad he didn't follow his own advice. A few kitten-stranglings might have injected some life into the prequels.) Sylvester Stallone agrees, so the whole first half of Rambo is just one metaphorical kitten being strangled after another. Then the second half is Rambo killing the fucking shit out of those dirty kitten-stranglers. Simple. Basic. Primordial.
The plot: Rambo now lives in self-imposed exile in Thailand, running a riverboat service and catching deadly cobras for snake shows. He fucking hates everybody and has lost all faith in both himself and the world. Then some Christian do-gooders come to town, asking him for a ride into Burma (a.k.a. Myanmar). I don't know if you know this, since Britney's custody battles seem to take up a lot of space in the papers, but there's been a bloody civil war going on over there for over 60 years, the longest in history. It's basically a genocide, with the Burmese government using profits earned from crystal meth trafficking to systematically eradicate a tribe of independence-seeking rebels, the Karen. So these Christians want to bring food and medical supplies to the Karen. Rambo knows that passive resistance won't do shit against a methed-up army of killers trained to see their enemies as subhumans worthy of extinction, but he lets himself get talked into it by the foxy blonde of the group. I don't see a lot of sexual tension going on here. I think he's just reacting to the earnest idealism he sees in her, as opposed to the self-aggrandizing "My morals are better than yours" dick-swinging of the other missionaries. Community service as masturbation.
A lot of people in the theater were laughing at this part. I think that's part of Stallone's plan. He lets you chuckle at the over-baked dialogue that blatantly poses the philosophical question: Is it enough to merely do good, or must you also destroy evil? This question is posed in as blunt a manner as possible, as befits a Rambo movie. It's not ironic. It's not post-modern. And it's definitely not cynical. As he proved in Rocky Balboa, Stallone doesn't have time for cynics who keep themselves insulated from both the darkest and brightest aspects of human nature by a buffer zone of cosmopolitan irony. Stallone isn't talking to them, because they're not listening anyway.
So he lets them laugh at the beginning of the movie. Ha ha, isn't this corny, the way this weird-looking old man discusses age-old ethical quandaries in the rain. Thank God I'm young, middle-class, and white so I don't have to actually give a fuck about anything.
But nobody's laughing once the killing starts. At about the 20 minute mark, there's a massacre that shuts everybody the fuck up. It is absolutely punishing. Body parts blown off. Women raped and executed. Babies bayoneted and thrown into burning huts. It is the hardest action scene I have ever witnessed, and it hurts. This isn't fun action, with exploding arrowheads and pithy one-liners. This is man's inhumanity to man. This is war, and Stallone shoves it right in your face. It's like he's saying to the skeptics, "Why aren't you laughing now? Isn't it funny? C'mon, you fucking hipster, laugh this shit off. I dare you. Laugh."
Lots of people have a problem with the fact that Stallone is showing this shit the way it really happens. They think it's wrong for him to portray real-life atrocities in his cheesy action movie. They'd rather have him fight the Russian mafia or Eurotrash mercenaries or even not-explicitly-Muslim-but-probably-Arab terrorists. Because that's safe. It's just a campy good time at the movies. They don't have to suffer the indignity of being forced to think about stuff while sharing space with the unwashed masses.
It's like when South Park introduced Timmy, the retarded kid. He was the singer in a band, and his spastic verbal ejaculations were both hilarious and catchy. The audience loved it and he himself had a blast. But nonetheless, the townspeople protested, saying that Timmy was being exploited. But it had nothing to do with protecting Timmy. It was just that the liberal townspeople would rather have retarded people locked away where polite folks wouldn't have to feel guilty about the fact that they make them uncomfortable.
That's like Rambo with this Burma situation. Critics may bitch that Stallone is co-opting a real and ongoing tragedy, but the fact of the matter is that this movie will raise more awareness of what's going on over there than a dozen newspaper articles and documentaries. So how do you think the actual Karens feel about it? Do you think they feel exploited by Stallone, or do you think they're just glad (like Timmy) that someone is finally listening? Rambo clearly isn't a message film (it's too unpretentious for that), but Stallone knows that Rambo is a mighty worldwide icon, and he has chosen to train this symbolic power on a situation that desperately needs it.
This no-holds-barred approach also performs a vital storytelling role. The more evil Stallone makes the bad guys, the more righteous his eventual payback. It's simple physics. The farther you pull back the bowstring, the farther the arrow goes. Well, since he's Rambo, Stallone pulls that motherfucker back until it damn near snaps, and when he lets it go, that arrow flies several miles and stabs right through some inhuman cocksucker's face. And the people in the audience who aren't dead inside cheer and cheer.
I cannot describe the emotional catharsis of the last act of this movie, when Rambo leads a group of mercenaries into the woods to rescue the Christians. I could try, but I'd fail. I'm not that good a writer. Rambo is like the Roman Coliseum, only nobody really gets hurt and justice prevails in the end. And it prevails in the messiest, most jaw-dropping way imaginable.
I don't know any other way to say it, but while watching this movie, I felt more loved than I'd felt in months. When it comes to loving me, there's this movie and then there's my mother. And quite frankly, this movie knows me better. It's never been a secret what action movie fans want, but for some reason, Hollywood likes to pretend that it's a big mystery. They think we want smirky prettyboys swinging around on cables, bicycle-kicking generic henchmen. They think we want techno music and villains who bleed dust. They think we want our violence to have all the viscera and gravitas of a pinball machine.
But Stallone knows better. He listened to our pleas and gave us the action movie we've always wanted. When people get shot with a .50 caliber jeep-mounted machine gun, they don't just fall down, clutching their torsos. They break apart. Pieces fly off in clouds of blood. Just like in real life. It's not pretty, but my God, is it awesome. It is an unholy wail of rage, and if you've got the bloodlust in you, the uncivilized caveman fury, then it is absolutely exhilarating. There was a moment at the end, when Rambo is about to waste the main bad guy, and he stands up into frame in slow motion like a fucking mountain rising through the earth's crust, and I found myself releasing a roar of triumph. It was a goddamn battle cry, and I didn't plan it. It just bubbled up out of my warrior place, my don't-fuck-with-me place. After 236 individual onscreen deaths (half good guys, half bad), I felt punch drunk, blood simple, shell shocked, and kill crazy. I felt alive, invincible, and unashamed. And if that ain't loving me, then God didn't make the little green apples.
I've never seen a movie like Rambo. I've never seen a movie that combines the entertainingly cheesy with the legitimately hardcore in such separate-but-equal measures. It's a feel-good movie for people who don't usually feel so goddamn good.
Maybe some of you can't relate. Maybe you have nothing but goodness in your hearts and can't understand how watching an hour and a half of heads exploding can be an expression of joy. If that's the case—honestly and without sarcasm—I'm happy for you. You're lucky. Most of the time, this rage that people like me carry around is a curse. Unchecked, it locks us in a shell of resentment and prevents us from evolving. But properly vented, it can be a powerful motivating force—and a fucking rush. People like me spend our whole lives looking for an opportunity to use the power of our rage for something positive (as Rambo would say, "Live for nothing or die for something."), but most of us never find it, and our anger eats us up inside like stomach acid with no food to dissolve. Because we know that evil isn't just a concept. It's made flesh every day by the actions of misguided men and women, and there isn't much we can do about it. But Rambo can.
And that's the secret. That's why Rambo has remained a hero in the Third World to this day, while we Americans grew soft and weak, reimagining our heroes as video game avatars who fight simply because it looks cool. Rambo is going to be a fucking phenomenon in the Third World, especially amongst the kind of persecuted peoples that those liberal critics are so eager to protect from big, bad Sly's exploitation. Oppressed people from all over the globe are going to love it, because the poor and disenfranchised know about that hate inside, the one that needs to be vented. They know better than you or I that there is no justice in this world. But there is Rambo. And sometimes, for an hour and a half at a time, that's enough.
Over the weekend, I walked around telling anybody who would listen that Rambo is the greatest movie ever made. I said it without hesitation, without qualification, and for damn sure without shame.
But now that some of the initial elation has worn off, I have to amend that statement. It's probably not the greatest movie ever made. It's only the absolute no-contest best action movie since Terminator 2.
The lukewarm and/or condescending reviews this landmark in no-nonsense action cinema has received from mainstream critics mystifies me. I don't know what's up with these people. It doesn't seem like they saw the same movie I did. Maybe it's just that they grew up in some parallel universe where justice always reigns and hatred doesn't congeal in the bone marrow, so they're missing that hard chunk of black diamond that the rest of us carry around in our hearts that makes us scream for violent retribution against an unfair world. But for people like me, Rambo is 100% emotion. It angries up the blood in the most beautiful, life-affirming way.
Rambo is not a complicated film, but it is a powerful one, if you can allow yourself to experience it on a purely emotional level. George Lucas once said that engaging an audience emotionally was easy: Just strangle a kitten on camera. (Too bad he didn't follow his own advice. A few kitten-stranglings might have injected some life into the prequels.) Sylvester Stallone agrees, so the whole first half of Rambo is just one metaphorical kitten being strangled after another. Then the second half is Rambo killing the fucking shit out of those dirty kitten-stranglers. Simple. Basic. Primordial.
The plot: Rambo now lives in self-imposed exile in Thailand, running a riverboat service and catching deadly cobras for snake shows. He fucking hates everybody and has lost all faith in both himself and the world. Then some Christian do-gooders come to town, asking him for a ride into Burma (a.k.a. Myanmar). I don't know if you know this, since Britney's custody battles seem to take up a lot of space in the papers, but there's been a bloody civil war going on over there for over 60 years, the longest in history. It's basically a genocide, with the Burmese government using profits earned from crystal meth trafficking to systematically eradicate a tribe of independence-seeking rebels, the Karen. So these Christians want to bring food and medical supplies to the Karen. Rambo knows that passive resistance won't do shit against a methed-up army of killers trained to see their enemies as subhumans worthy of extinction, but he lets himself get talked into it by the foxy blonde of the group. I don't see a lot of sexual tension going on here. I think he's just reacting to the earnest idealism he sees in her, as opposed to the self-aggrandizing "My morals are better than yours" dick-swinging of the other missionaries. Community service as masturbation.
A lot of people in the theater were laughing at this part. I think that's part of Stallone's plan. He lets you chuckle at the over-baked dialogue that blatantly poses the philosophical question: Is it enough to merely do good, or must you also destroy evil? This question is posed in as blunt a manner as possible, as befits a Rambo movie. It's not ironic. It's not post-modern. And it's definitely not cynical. As he proved in Rocky Balboa, Stallone doesn't have time for cynics who keep themselves insulated from both the darkest and brightest aspects of human nature by a buffer zone of cosmopolitan irony. Stallone isn't talking to them, because they're not listening anyway.
So he lets them laugh at the beginning of the movie. Ha ha, isn't this corny, the way this weird-looking old man discusses age-old ethical quandaries in the rain. Thank God I'm young, middle-class, and white so I don't have to actually give a fuck about anything.
But nobody's laughing once the killing starts. At about the 20 minute mark, there's a massacre that shuts everybody the fuck up. It is absolutely punishing. Body parts blown off. Women raped and executed. Babies bayoneted and thrown into burning huts. It is the hardest action scene I have ever witnessed, and it hurts. This isn't fun action, with exploding arrowheads and pithy one-liners. This is man's inhumanity to man. This is war, and Stallone shoves it right in your face. It's like he's saying to the skeptics, "Why aren't you laughing now? Isn't it funny? C'mon, you fucking hipster, laugh this shit off. I dare you. Laugh."
Lots of people have a problem with the fact that Stallone is showing this shit the way it really happens. They think it's wrong for him to portray real-life atrocities in his cheesy action movie. They'd rather have him fight the Russian mafia or Eurotrash mercenaries or even not-explicitly-Muslim-but-probably-Arab terrorists. Because that's safe. It's just a campy good time at the movies. They don't have to suffer the indignity of being forced to think about stuff while sharing space with the unwashed masses.
It's like when South Park introduced Timmy, the retarded kid. He was the singer in a band, and his spastic verbal ejaculations were both hilarious and catchy. The audience loved it and he himself had a blast. But nonetheless, the townspeople protested, saying that Timmy was being exploited. But it had nothing to do with protecting Timmy. It was just that the liberal townspeople would rather have retarded people locked away where polite folks wouldn't have to feel guilty about the fact that they make them uncomfortable.
That's like Rambo with this Burma situation. Critics may bitch that Stallone is co-opting a real and ongoing tragedy, but the fact of the matter is that this movie will raise more awareness of what's going on over there than a dozen newspaper articles and documentaries. So how do you think the actual Karens feel about it? Do you think they feel exploited by Stallone, or do you think they're just glad (like Timmy) that someone is finally listening? Rambo clearly isn't a message film (it's too unpretentious for that), but Stallone knows that Rambo is a mighty worldwide icon, and he has chosen to train this symbolic power on a situation that desperately needs it.
This no-holds-barred approach also performs a vital storytelling role. The more evil Stallone makes the bad guys, the more righteous his eventual payback. It's simple physics. The farther you pull back the bowstring, the farther the arrow goes. Well, since he's Rambo, Stallone pulls that motherfucker back until it damn near snaps, and when he lets it go, that arrow flies several miles and stabs right through some inhuman cocksucker's face. And the people in the audience who aren't dead inside cheer and cheer.
I cannot describe the emotional catharsis of the last act of this movie, when Rambo leads a group of mercenaries into the woods to rescue the Christians. I could try, but I'd fail. I'm not that good a writer. Rambo is like the Roman Coliseum, only nobody really gets hurt and justice prevails in the end. And it prevails in the messiest, most jaw-dropping way imaginable.
I don't know any other way to say it, but while watching this movie, I felt more loved than I'd felt in months. When it comes to loving me, there's this movie and then there's my mother. And quite frankly, this movie knows me better. It's never been a secret what action movie fans want, but for some reason, Hollywood likes to pretend that it's a big mystery. They think we want smirky prettyboys swinging around on cables, bicycle-kicking generic henchmen. They think we want techno music and villains who bleed dust. They think we want our violence to have all the viscera and gravitas of a pinball machine.
But Stallone knows better. He listened to our pleas and gave us the action movie we've always wanted. When people get shot with a .50 caliber jeep-mounted machine gun, they don't just fall down, clutching their torsos. They break apart. Pieces fly off in clouds of blood. Just like in real life. It's not pretty, but my God, is it awesome. It is an unholy wail of rage, and if you've got the bloodlust in you, the uncivilized caveman fury, then it is absolutely exhilarating. There was a moment at the end, when Rambo is about to waste the main bad guy, and he stands up into frame in slow motion like a fucking mountain rising through the earth's crust, and I found myself releasing a roar of triumph. It was a goddamn battle cry, and I didn't plan it. It just bubbled up out of my warrior place, my don't-fuck-with-me place. After 236 individual onscreen deaths (half good guys, half bad), I felt punch drunk, blood simple, shell shocked, and kill crazy. I felt alive, invincible, and unashamed. And if that ain't loving me, then God didn't make the little green apples.
I've never seen a movie like Rambo. I've never seen a movie that combines the entertainingly cheesy with the legitimately hardcore in such separate-but-equal measures. It's a feel-good movie for people who don't usually feel so goddamn good.
Maybe some of you can't relate. Maybe you have nothing but goodness in your hearts and can't understand how watching an hour and a half of heads exploding can be an expression of joy. If that's the case—honestly and without sarcasm—I'm happy for you. You're lucky. Most of the time, this rage that people like me carry around is a curse. Unchecked, it locks us in a shell of resentment and prevents us from evolving. But properly vented, it can be a powerful motivating force—and a fucking rush. People like me spend our whole lives looking for an opportunity to use the power of our rage for something positive (as Rambo would say, "Live for nothing or die for something."), but most of us never find it, and our anger eats us up inside like stomach acid with no food to dissolve. Because we know that evil isn't just a concept. It's made flesh every day by the actions of misguided men and women, and there isn't much we can do about it. But Rambo can.
And that's the secret. That's why Rambo has remained a hero in the Third World to this day, while we Americans grew soft and weak, reimagining our heroes as video game avatars who fight simply because it looks cool. Rambo is going to be a fucking phenomenon in the Third World, especially amongst the kind of persecuted peoples that those liberal critics are so eager to protect from big, bad Sly's exploitation. Oppressed people from all over the globe are going to love it, because the poor and disenfranchised know about that hate inside, the one that needs to be vented. They know better than you or I that there is no justice in this world. But there is Rambo. And sometimes, for an hour and a half at a time, that's enough.
Friday, August 6, 2010
Get Crazy
In my neighborhood—Fort Greene, Brooklyn, home of brownstones, bodegas, and baby strollers—they have a flea market every weekend in the summer. I like to stroll through on Saturday afternoons, still stinky from sleep, to buy a fancy hot dog covered with apple chutney from the food tents or maybe a bootleg funk compilation from the guy selling incense. But my favorite booth sells used CDs (I found a promo copy of bodybuilder/heavy metal god John Mikl Thor's Thor Against the World for five bucks), DVD-R's of out-of-print movies, and random duped CD compilations (I got one called Ultra Chicks Vol. 5 that's full of French bubblegum pop from the sixties. I'm weird like that.) It's run by one of those hyperactive older gentlemen who never really grew up. On weekends, he projects real 35mm film prints of strange old movies at a playground in my old neighborhood (Greenpoint, which is like Sesame Street, only with Polish people instead of Muppets). He still rocks a vintage rock T-shirt, usually Television or New York Dolls or something of that vintage, and despite his upbeat demeanor, he carries an air of melancholy. He seems like a man who's watched the world leave him behind as it forgot about all of the music and movies he loved when he was young and vital. But he's a fighter, so he shows up every weekend with a small assortment of lovingly hand-selected bootlegs to spread the word. I bought Chained Heat from him, as well as the cheapest copy of Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! in existence. He's one of those older guys who's just so psyched that a young dude is at all interested or knowledgeable in anything made before 1998. You should have seen his eyes light up when he realized that I knew who Henry Silva was. For just a moment, he believed that maybe the glories of his youth wouldn't be buried under the sands of time, that there are a few whippersnappers out there who can tell the difference between classic and old. And I looked at him and I wondered: Is this my future? Someday, when my roguish good looks have abandoned me, will I be out there in the park, preaching the gospel of Kickboxer and Luther the Geek to a crowd of skinny hipsters who can't even remember a time when movies weren't all 3-D choose-your-own-adventures that get beamed directly into your cerebral cortex? Maybe. If that's what it takes to keep the B-movie alive in the 21st century and beyond, then so be it. I will be a prophet of the absurd, unappreciated and malnourished, but crackling with wisdom for those brave enough to absorb it.
Anyway, this dude really recommended today's movie to me, and it's a great one. He called it "the best rock movie of all time," and I think he may be right. It's directed by Allan Arkush, a graduate of the Roger Corman Academy of the Drive-In Arts, and it's a pseudo-sequel of sorts to Arkush's earlier cult classic Rock & Roll High School, the movie that airlifted the Ramones from the dank cellars of Queens to the sun-kissed streets of California, where they looked like leather-clad bog monsters compared to all the tanned teenyboppers.
Get Crazy might be even better. It's a screwy madcap comedy set at a Filmore-esque theater on New Year's Eve, 1982. It begins, as every movie did back then, with a Star Wars parody. A model spaceship with a hair dryer hot-glued to its underbelly flies overhead with a tinfoil-wrapped astronaut astride it, Dr. Strangelove-style. It crashes into a giant blinking 1983 sign, and the lights come up, introducing us to the wacky crew of the Saturn Theater. Daniel Stern is the harried stage manager who has to wrangle the night's concert into shape, but he's kind of distracted because he just met the girl of his dreams and every time he looks at her he imagines that he's Tarzan and she's Jane, so they have these getting-to-know you conversations while he walks around with a live chimp in his arms. It's that kind of movie.
Meanwhile, the villain (Ed Begley, Jr.—remember him?) and his two sycophantic sidekicks Mark and Marv (former teen heartthrobs Bobby Sherman and Fabian) are trying to buy the theater so they can turn it into a soulless stadium where the kids can't afford tickets and no one can see the stage. "Fuck you and fuck rock & roll!" he declares, fucking fighting words if I've ever fucking heard them.
Luckily, the rockolytes of the Saturn have an ace in the hole in the form of their drug dealer, Electric Larry, a glowy-eyed cryptkeeper heavy metal high plains drifter from outer space who appears in a puff of smoke every time anybody needs any pharmaceutical enhancement, whether they know it or not. I don't want to lapse into hyperbole here, so I will merely say that Electric Larry is only the coolest goddamn thing I have ever seen in my entire fucking life and leave it at that.
So then the bands start arriving, and they rule, too. The opening act, a Muddy Waters parody called King Blues, is underwhelming, but he does provide a much-needed history lesson by singing a boogie-woogie song called "The Blues Had a Baby and They Named It Rock and Roll." From that point on, every succeeding act does their own cover of "Hoochie Coochie Man," bringing it back to where it all began and proving that no matter what style you play, it's all American music, baby, straight from the gut.
The next band is called Nada, and they're a sort of New Wave Oingo Boingo-y chick band with a million members and a lead singer in a cheerleader/marching band uniform who likes to do cartwheels around the stage while the audience pogos up and down like lottery balls. Then they bring out punk icon Lee Ving on vocals. He's playing a dude named Piggy who's pretty much the Tazmanian Devil of rock who has to be chained up before the performance so he doesn't headbutt everybody to death. With him encouraging the people in the balcony to perform 20-foot triple-lindy stagedives, they blast through a supersonic punk version of "Hoochie Coochie Man" that flat-out rocks. "Who says a whiteboy can't sing the blues?" says King Blues.
The next act is the best. It's a Mick Jagger spoof called Reggie Wanker played by none other than Malcolm Mac-Fucking-Dowell, who is so awesome I can't even describe it. Most actors simply don't have the raw animal charisma to play a believable rock star, but he does. He doesn't have a great voice, but who gives fuck? This is rock and roll. You want perfect pitch, go listen to folk, hippie. He belts out a Kiss-like "God of Thunder"-y anthem called "Hot Shot" with lyrics along the lines of "I'm a mystical sage of a nuclear age in seduction / I can take any heart, I've mastered the art of corruption!" It's phenomenal, a truly transcendental rock saga. Then, while his Keith Moon-like drummer (played by Doors skinsman John Densmore) pounds out a 20-minute solo on a kit the size of a cargo van, Wanker goes backstage to have an orgy with a literal roomful of naked girls packed from floor to ceiling in a cube-shaped mass of sweaty limbs. Unfortunately, when he extricates himself, he discovers that his wife is banging the house nerd (Dan Frishman of Head of the Class fame), so he goes back onstage and turns "Hot Shot" into a heartbreaking lighters-in-the-air dirge. Then he sips some Electric Larry-spiked water and goes into the bathroom to get a pep talk from his penis, who becomes his new manager.
Fuck, this movie rules.
Anyway, there's all kinds of other shit going on backstage, like a glowing disco bomb and an uptight fire inspector, played by Robert Picardo, one of fellow Corman alumni Joe Dante's stock company. (He was the first werewolf in The Howling.) Other great cameos include Clint Howard in a one-line role, Eating Raul's Mary Woronov and Paul Bartel doing their usual thing, and, most interestingly, Dick Miller and Jackie Joseph, who played Mr. and Mrs. Futterman in Dante's Gremlins—which didn't come out until the following year. I have no idea how this strange cinematic intermingling came about, but it's probably my favorite dual cameo of all time. I doubt anyone else gives a shit, but seeing this early version of the Futtermans made my fucking day.
In the end, the theater is saved, a giant talking joint walks around, and Lou Reed (supposedly playing a Dylan parody, though I honestly couldn't tell the difference) shows up for a solo closing number that actually kind of breaks your heart. This movie is just pure joy from front to end, a big, stupid, sublime rock & roll blowjob. Movies just aren't this fun anymore. It's a shame I had to find this one on bootleg DVD on a racketball court in Brooklyn when it should be out there in every Best Buy in the land. I guess that's why we need people like the guy who sold me Get Crazy. He's the real Electric Larry. Shine on, you crazy diamond.
Anyway, this dude really recommended today's movie to me, and it's a great one. He called it "the best rock movie of all time," and I think he may be right. It's directed by Allan Arkush, a graduate of the Roger Corman Academy of the Drive-In Arts, and it's a pseudo-sequel of sorts to Arkush's earlier cult classic Rock & Roll High School, the movie that airlifted the Ramones from the dank cellars of Queens to the sun-kissed streets of California, where they looked like leather-clad bog monsters compared to all the tanned teenyboppers.
Get Crazy might be even better. It's a screwy madcap comedy set at a Filmore-esque theater on New Year's Eve, 1982. It begins, as every movie did back then, with a Star Wars parody. A model spaceship with a hair dryer hot-glued to its underbelly flies overhead with a tinfoil-wrapped astronaut astride it, Dr. Strangelove-style. It crashes into a giant blinking 1983 sign, and the lights come up, introducing us to the wacky crew of the Saturn Theater. Daniel Stern is the harried stage manager who has to wrangle the night's concert into shape, but he's kind of distracted because he just met the girl of his dreams and every time he looks at her he imagines that he's Tarzan and she's Jane, so they have these getting-to-know you conversations while he walks around with a live chimp in his arms. It's that kind of movie.
Meanwhile, the villain (Ed Begley, Jr.—remember him?) and his two sycophantic sidekicks Mark and Marv (former teen heartthrobs Bobby Sherman and Fabian) are trying to buy the theater so they can turn it into a soulless stadium where the kids can't afford tickets and no one can see the stage. "Fuck you and fuck rock & roll!" he declares, fucking fighting words if I've ever fucking heard them.
Luckily, the rockolytes of the Saturn have an ace in the hole in the form of their drug dealer, Electric Larry, a glowy-eyed cryptkeeper heavy metal high plains drifter from outer space who appears in a puff of smoke every time anybody needs any pharmaceutical enhancement, whether they know it or not. I don't want to lapse into hyperbole here, so I will merely say that Electric Larry is only the coolest goddamn thing I have ever seen in my entire fucking life and leave it at that.
So then the bands start arriving, and they rule, too. The opening act, a Muddy Waters parody called King Blues, is underwhelming, but he does provide a much-needed history lesson by singing a boogie-woogie song called "The Blues Had a Baby and They Named It Rock and Roll." From that point on, every succeeding act does their own cover of "Hoochie Coochie Man," bringing it back to where it all began and proving that no matter what style you play, it's all American music, baby, straight from the gut.
The next band is called Nada, and they're a sort of New Wave Oingo Boingo-y chick band with a million members and a lead singer in a cheerleader/marching band uniform who likes to do cartwheels around the stage while the audience pogos up and down like lottery balls. Then they bring out punk icon Lee Ving on vocals. He's playing a dude named Piggy who's pretty much the Tazmanian Devil of rock who has to be chained up before the performance so he doesn't headbutt everybody to death. With him encouraging the people in the balcony to perform 20-foot triple-lindy stagedives, they blast through a supersonic punk version of "Hoochie Coochie Man" that flat-out rocks. "Who says a whiteboy can't sing the blues?" says King Blues.
The next act is the best. It's a Mick Jagger spoof called Reggie Wanker played by none other than Malcolm Mac-Fucking-Dowell, who is so awesome I can't even describe it. Most actors simply don't have the raw animal charisma to play a believable rock star, but he does. He doesn't have a great voice, but who gives fuck? This is rock and roll. You want perfect pitch, go listen to folk, hippie. He belts out a Kiss-like "God of Thunder"-y anthem called "Hot Shot" with lyrics along the lines of "I'm a mystical sage of a nuclear age in seduction / I can take any heart, I've mastered the art of corruption!" It's phenomenal, a truly transcendental rock saga. Then, while his Keith Moon-like drummer (played by Doors skinsman John Densmore) pounds out a 20-minute solo on a kit the size of a cargo van, Wanker goes backstage to have an orgy with a literal roomful of naked girls packed from floor to ceiling in a cube-shaped mass of sweaty limbs. Unfortunately, when he extricates himself, he discovers that his wife is banging the house nerd (Dan Frishman of Head of the Class fame), so he goes back onstage and turns "Hot Shot" into a heartbreaking lighters-in-the-air dirge. Then he sips some Electric Larry-spiked water and goes into the bathroom to get a pep talk from his penis, who becomes his new manager.
Fuck, this movie rules.
Anyway, there's all kinds of other shit going on backstage, like a glowing disco bomb and an uptight fire inspector, played by Robert Picardo, one of fellow Corman alumni Joe Dante's stock company. (He was the first werewolf in The Howling.) Other great cameos include Clint Howard in a one-line role, Eating Raul's Mary Woronov and Paul Bartel doing their usual thing, and, most interestingly, Dick Miller and Jackie Joseph, who played Mr. and Mrs. Futterman in Dante's Gremlins—which didn't come out until the following year. I have no idea how this strange cinematic intermingling came about, but it's probably my favorite dual cameo of all time. I doubt anyone else gives a shit, but seeing this early version of the Futtermans made my fucking day.
In the end, the theater is saved, a giant talking joint walks around, and Lou Reed (supposedly playing a Dylan parody, though I honestly couldn't tell the difference) shows up for a solo closing number that actually kind of breaks your heart. This movie is just pure joy from front to end, a big, stupid, sublime rock & roll blowjob. Movies just aren't this fun anymore. It's a shame I had to find this one on bootleg DVD on a racketball court in Brooklyn when it should be out there in every Best Buy in the land. I guess that's why we need people like the guy who sold me Get Crazy. He's the real Electric Larry. Shine on, you crazy diamond.
Action Jackson
You can tell right away that Action Jackson is going to be an awesome movie because both the actors in the first scene were in Lethal Weapon, and one of them (Mary Ellen Trainor, wife of Robert Zemeckis) was also in Die Hard. Then the American terrorist from Die Hard (the one who bet on the Lakers) rappels through the window along with a bunch of other ski-mask-wearing villains and shoots the dude from Lethal Weapon (he's the guy forced to hold the lighter under Mr. Joshua's arm) with a grenade launcher, sending him crashing out another window and plummeting 20 stories like a flaming dude-shaped meteorite until he crashes through the glass roof of a five-star restaurant.
Action Jackson begins as it means to continue: With lots of fire and lots of That Guys, Late Eighties Action Movie Division.
You kind of have to expect that from a Joel Silver movie, though. Back then, he liked to use the same That Guys (and the occasional That Chick) over and over, so if you're a big fan of that period, every movie is like a high school reunion. In Action Jackson, I counted three Predator alums (Carl Weathers, Bill Duke, and Sonny Landham—no Jesse the Body, sorry), four Lethal Weapons (the two from the opening scene, Danny Glover's cop buddy who thinks he's an eighties man, and Al Leong), an incredible six Die Hards (the two in the first scene, Robert Davi, the guy who says "Send in the car," Argyle, and Al Leong again), and a couple of repeats who were also in Commando (Duke, the "Send in the car" guy). As a bonus, there are also two from Weird Science (Grandpa and the raspy-voiced black guy who says "She kicked you in your nuts?"). If you know what the hell I'm talking about, congratulations, you're in your thirties and you have steadily watched the world get less awesome with every passing year. I turned 31 today, so let's all raise our glasses to an era when men were men but you couldn't tell it by the hairstyles.
Action Jackson was one of my favorites from way back when, for obvious reasons. I mean, some guy gets fireballed in the first two minutes, then it cuts to a scene where Biff from Back to the Future is a Detroit cop who can't stop lying to his partner about how much pussy he gets. They nab this pursesnatcher (one of the black guys from Tour of Duty. Don't worry, the other one shows up later) and start telling him about Sergeant Jericho "Action" Jackson, how he was created by NASA to be the first man to walk on the moon without a spacesuit, how some perp he was interrogating gnawed off his own hand like a trapped skunk or marmot, how his father was a sasquatch, etc. Your classic "How badass is this guy?" speech, pioneered by the famous "He can eat things that would make a billygoat puke" monologue from First Blood. So when the pursesnatcher accidentally spills coffee on Action's desk, he faints. It's that kind of movie. One minute a dude is exploding, the next it's Three's Company-style slapstick. It's the typical anything-goes approach of stuntman-turned-director Craig "Stone Cold" Baxley.
Anyway, there may or may not be some plot in here at some point. All we really need to know is that Craig T. Nelson is a big rich jerk and Action Jackson is going to kill him. We know that because Craig T. is cheating on his wife (Sharon Stone in what, as far as I can tell, was her first of at least 36 nude scenes) with Vanity, one of Prince's old protégés. He keeps her happy by making her take her clothes off and shooting heroin into her thighs without looking for a vein or anything. She eventually became a Born Again in real life, so I'm sure she's not real proud of this scene. That or the fact that her stage name was one of the seven deadly sins. Oh well. Better than Sloth, I guess.
So people and property get blown up, Action races a car on foot, Craig T. gets a karate lesson, somebody says "Hi! I'm Mr. Ed!" completely out of context, and Action gets captured by these gay thugs who have a collection of jarred testicles in their cabinet. Then, to make up for that lame Mr. Ed crack, Action shoots the Die Hard guy in the chest with a grenade launcher and says "Barbecue, huh? How do you like your ribs?" But before that, he throws Sonny Landham out a window and into another window on the other side of the alley, which is just the kind of whimsical twist on a classic stunt that makes Baxley the most underrated action director of all time.
Then Action and his assortment of sidekicks crash Craig T.'s party for some wacky violence before Action drives a red sports car into Craig T.'s house, up his surprisingly wide staircase, and right into his bedroom, where they have a kung fu fight. It's nothing special (I'd swear that Craig T.'s leg isn't attached to his body for some of the kicks), but every now and again you remember that there's a sports car parked in a bedroom, which never stops being funny. So after Action splatters Craig T. all over the wall, his captain (Bill Duke, obviously) promotes him to lieutenant, even though he's wanted for murder and has no evidence to clear his name. All he did was drive a sports car into a rich dude's bedroom and shoot him twice in the chest. I guess that's how they roll in Detroit.
This movie was clearly meant to give Carl Weathers an action franchise of his own after more than a decade of sidekickery, but alas, it never happened. The lack of Action Jackson 2: Detroit Muscle pisses me off even more than the lack of Remo Williams 2: The Adventure Continues. But that's life, I guess: one fucking disappointment after another.
Action Jackson begins as it means to continue: With lots of fire and lots of That Guys, Late Eighties Action Movie Division.
You kind of have to expect that from a Joel Silver movie, though. Back then, he liked to use the same That Guys (and the occasional That Chick) over and over, so if you're a big fan of that period, every movie is like a high school reunion. In Action Jackson, I counted three Predator alums (Carl Weathers, Bill Duke, and Sonny Landham—no Jesse the Body, sorry), four Lethal Weapons (the two from the opening scene, Danny Glover's cop buddy who thinks he's an eighties man, and Al Leong), an incredible six Die Hards (the two in the first scene, Robert Davi, the guy who says "Send in the car," Argyle, and Al Leong again), and a couple of repeats who were also in Commando (Duke, the "Send in the car" guy). As a bonus, there are also two from Weird Science (Grandpa and the raspy-voiced black guy who says "She kicked you in your nuts?"). If you know what the hell I'm talking about, congratulations, you're in your thirties and you have steadily watched the world get less awesome with every passing year. I turned 31 today, so let's all raise our glasses to an era when men were men but you couldn't tell it by the hairstyles.
Action Jackson was one of my favorites from way back when, for obvious reasons. I mean, some guy gets fireballed in the first two minutes, then it cuts to a scene where Biff from Back to the Future is a Detroit cop who can't stop lying to his partner about how much pussy he gets. They nab this pursesnatcher (one of the black guys from Tour of Duty. Don't worry, the other one shows up later) and start telling him about Sergeant Jericho "Action" Jackson, how he was created by NASA to be the first man to walk on the moon without a spacesuit, how some perp he was interrogating gnawed off his own hand like a trapped skunk or marmot, how his father was a sasquatch, etc. Your classic "How badass is this guy?" speech, pioneered by the famous "He can eat things that would make a billygoat puke" monologue from First Blood. So when the pursesnatcher accidentally spills coffee on Action's desk, he faints. It's that kind of movie. One minute a dude is exploding, the next it's Three's Company-style slapstick. It's the typical anything-goes approach of stuntman-turned-director Craig "Stone Cold" Baxley.
Anyway, there may or may not be some plot in here at some point. All we really need to know is that Craig T. Nelson is a big rich jerk and Action Jackson is going to kill him. We know that because Craig T. is cheating on his wife (Sharon Stone in what, as far as I can tell, was her first of at least 36 nude scenes) with Vanity, one of Prince's old protégés. He keeps her happy by making her take her clothes off and shooting heroin into her thighs without looking for a vein or anything. She eventually became a Born Again in real life, so I'm sure she's not real proud of this scene. That or the fact that her stage name was one of the seven deadly sins. Oh well. Better than Sloth, I guess.
So people and property get blown up, Action races a car on foot, Craig T. gets a karate lesson, somebody says "Hi! I'm Mr. Ed!" completely out of context, and Action gets captured by these gay thugs who have a collection of jarred testicles in their cabinet. Then, to make up for that lame Mr. Ed crack, Action shoots the Die Hard guy in the chest with a grenade launcher and says "Barbecue, huh? How do you like your ribs?" But before that, he throws Sonny Landham out a window and into another window on the other side of the alley, which is just the kind of whimsical twist on a classic stunt that makes Baxley the most underrated action director of all time.
Then Action and his assortment of sidekicks crash Craig T.'s party for some wacky violence before Action drives a red sports car into Craig T.'s house, up his surprisingly wide staircase, and right into his bedroom, where they have a kung fu fight. It's nothing special (I'd swear that Craig T.'s leg isn't attached to his body for some of the kicks), but every now and again you remember that there's a sports car parked in a bedroom, which never stops being funny. So after Action splatters Craig T. all over the wall, his captain (Bill Duke, obviously) promotes him to lieutenant, even though he's wanted for murder and has no evidence to clear his name. All he did was drive a sports car into a rich dude's bedroom and shoot him twice in the chest. I guess that's how they roll in Detroit.
This movie was clearly meant to give Carl Weathers an action franchise of his own after more than a decade of sidekickery, but alas, it never happened. The lack of Action Jackson 2: Detroit Muscle pisses me off even more than the lack of Remo Williams 2: The Adventure Continues. But that's life, I guess: one fucking disappointment after another.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)