Lessons of Darkness

Bangkok Dangerous (1999): C+

While Bangkok Dangerous proves that Danny and Oxide Pang know how to deliver kinetic, visually arresting action, it also establishes their too-intimate familiarity with the work of John Woo and Wong Kar-Wai, two Hong Kong auteurs whose style and tropes are aped mercilessly throughout this hitman-with-a-soul saga. Deaf-mute Kong (Pawalit Mongkolpisit) takes out inner fury over childhood bullying by working as an assassin alongside mentor/friend Joe (Pisek Intrakanchit). When his girlfriend Aom (Patharawarin Timkul), a stripper, is raped, Joe goes looking for revenge, a decision that leads to double-crosses and murder that eventually engulf Kong in blood, all while the handicapped gunman grapples with his conscience after meeting, and falling for, a lovely pharmacist. The Pangs go overboard with fluorescent lighting, fractured edits, and expressively cockeyed cinematography, jazzing up their bullet-peppered violence with buzzing techno and drenching their swoony romance in electric primary colors. It’s a flashy brew full of gorgeous slow-motion and grimy textures, but one that doesn’t make much of a lasting impression except as a case study in the dreariness of style-over-substance filmmaking when said style is the height of derivativeness.

Tropic Thunder (2008): C

Big budget, big stars, big concept – surprisingly little payoff. Tropic Thunder delivers extravagant set pieces and a raft of superstars, yet somewhere along the line, director/co-writer/star Ben Stiller forgot to concoct material that might elicit more than a mild chuckle. To an even greater extent than Zoolander, Stiller’s latest double-duty effort in front of and behind the camera relies, first and foremost, on its concept to generate comedy, a strategy that – because actual jokes are pretty sparse, and feeble when they do appear – leaves one feeling like the proceedings should be funnier than they are. The film’s story is an Apocalypse Now riff in which three idiot stars – action-hero doofus Tugg Speedman (Stiller), junkie comedian Jeff Portnoy (Jack Black), and Australian Oscar-winner Kirk Lazarus (Robert Downey Jr.) – go off into the jungle to make a Vietnam epic, and wind up in the midst of a genuine military conflict that they believe is part of the script. This leads to a host of tepid scenarios featuring actors yelling cut at real-life soldiers, Tugg’s agent (Matthew McConaughey) trying to get his client a TiVo, and a studio exec (Tom Cruise) cursing like a sailor at everyone in sight. All of these characters and situations are meant to spoof various aspects of the Hollywood machine (thesps’ vanity, studio boss’ crazed megalomania, etc.), though the only bits that have some sting involve Lazarus, a Caucasian who’s undergone a skin-pigmentation procedure to play an African-American, and finds himself perpetually stuck in stereotypical character. Embracing his moronic blackface routine with such goofy relish that the joke is acutely, amusingly on himself, Downey Jr. is pretty marvelous. Everyone else, however, is wasted in dreary one-note roles (Stiller is the vapid idiot, Black craves heroin), and even when its satire is spot on, Tropic Thunder fizzles simply on account of a dearth of honest-to-goodness humor.

Linkage

August is winding down, meaning that the studios are dumping their garbage into theaters before the fall awards season begins. As a result, this latest collection of reviews is short on positivity...

Now Playing:
Death Race (Slant magazine)
The Longshots (Slant magazine)
The House Bunny (Slant magazine)

Inside (2007): B

Inside might have been a horror classic if it didn’t, at key intervals, diffuse some of its tension through easy-shortcut storytelling that calls undue attention to the director’s manipulative hand. Four months after she (but not her baby’s daddy) survived a car crash, Sarah (Alysson Paradis) prepares on Christmas Eve to deliver her child the following morning. Home alone, she’s stalked by a crazed woman (Trouble Every Day’s strikingly off-kilter Béatrice Dalle) who wants to perform an amateur-hour C-section with a giant pair of sterilized scissors and take Sarah’s baby for herself. What follows is a night of blood-splattered mayhem that filmmakers Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury stage with grisly proficiency, employing long, silent takes punctuated by vicious hand-to-combat (and CG reaction shots of the fetus) in which each woman utilizes whatever environmental weapon they can get their hands on. The film is often eyes-averting nasty, delivering visceral thrills that are evocatively matched by more unreal images of Dalle’s psycho cloaked in darkness like a bedtime story specter. However, whereas their carefully attuned exploitation of space and sound imbues the story with constant dread – every composition, cut and musical cue has been expertly conceived with an eye toward augmenting anxiety – Bustillo and Maury wrongfully assume that a somewhat dreamlike mood excuses narrative corner-cutting. It doesn’t, and as a result, for all the expert horror artistry on display, Inside, in an effort to reach its terrifying climax, ultimately sabotages a few of its disturbing set pieces by imbuing its fiend with supernatural powers, whether it be her unexplained ability to successfully break into Sarah’s house, or her unnatural aptitude for both shrugging off any catastrophic injury and effortlessly dispatching all potential adversaries.

Death Race 2000 (1975): B+

At his peak, B-movie producer extraordinaire Roger Corman had an uncanny knack for melding cheap thrills with serio-comic social commentary, a gift feverishly on display in Death Race 2000, director Paul Bartel’s (Eating Raoul) action-packed saga about a future-America transcontinental car race in which participants receive points for running down citizens. Giddy, tawdry, and vigorously inventive, Corman and Bartel employ this bloody contest as the vehicle (so to speak) for an in-your-face critique of professional sports’ quasi-fascist brutality, the national appetite for violence, our society’s valuation of women and the elderly (who, when killed, net more points than adult men), the vapid and untrustworthy media, and – in typical ‘70s-era style – Big Brother-ish government. Thematically speaking, none of this is particularly novel, but the conception and execution are top-notch low-budget trash, blending arresting compositions, uneven race footage and wooden dialogue with enlivening tongue-in-cheek hysteria. David Carradine’s American hero Frankenstein (rebuilt after each crash to drive again) faces off against blowhard adversary Machine Gun Joe (Sylvester Stallone), sexpot cowgirl Calamity Jane (Mary Woronov), neo-Nazi Matilda the Hun (Roberta Collins), and fey Nero the Hero (Martin Kove), all while attempting to avoid the course pitfalls engineered by a group of democratic freedom fighters led by patriotic granny Thomasina Paine (Harriet Medin). A take-no-prisoners free-for-all in which caricatures are plentiful, stereotypes are mined for incisive (and not-so-incisive) laughs, and the action is at once cartoonish and gritty, Death Race 2000 is more than a little rough around the edges and far from subtle. Nonetheless, its crudity is the sort marked by ragged craftsmanship and wicked cleverness.

Link Quickie

I've been so busy finishing up reviews for this blog - including my latest ones, found below, for Hamlet 2, Rogue and Sukiyaki Western Django - that I haven't had time to do a link round-up. Until now, that is.

Now Playing:
Star Wars: The Clone Wars (Slant magazine)
Mirrors (Slant magazine)
The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2 (Slant magazine)
Fly Me to the Moon (Slant magazine)

Coming Soon:
The Rocker (Slant magazine)

Sukiyaki Western Django (2008): B+

Takeshi Miike takes cinematic homage to its absurd extreme with Sukiyaki Western Django, a tribute to Spaghetti Westerns – and, specifically, Sergio Corbucci’s seminal 1966 Django – that boils the genre down to its base phrases, scenarios and iconography. In this typically gonzo Miike creation, the situation is archetypal (a mysterious cowboy arrives in a desolate town and pits two warring factions against each other), the cast is largely comprised of Japanese actors speaking in stilted, often unintelligible English, and the camerawork is a mixture of Sergio Leone gorgeousness and bonkers hyper-realism. These are elements that don’t so much cohere into some sort of satisfying whole as simply assault the screen with the wild, anything-goes exuberance of a Looney Tunes cartoon, a style that’s deliberately recalled by a few choice sound cues and bits of physical comedy. Given its crazed, reverential remodeling of film history, it’s fitting that Sukiyaki Western Django features Quentin Tarantino in a (surprisingly amusing) cameo. Unlike the Pulp Fiction auteur, however, Miike’s homage is devoid of pretention and teeming with insanity, and though his central joke – Japanese actors struggling to articulate clichés like “hold your horses” and “a day late and a dollar short” – quickly wears thin, the director finds genuine beauty in the bizarre sight of a bloody infant emerging from the unfolding petals of a rose, and delivers visceral thrills in a series of slam-bang skirmishes and a sensuously mournful dance sequence by a woman irrevocably wounded by tragedy. Almost completely unconcerned with narrative, the film thrives on the strength of the director’s out-there impulses and proficiently crazy craftsmanship (such as with a digitized cinematographic zoom of a man leaping out a window onto his horse), making it a tribute not only to the Westerns Miike clearly adores but also to the euphoria of unfettered cinematic creativity.

Rogue (2007): B+

Despite having one of the decade’s finest horror films (Wolf Creek) on his résumé, Greg Mclean couldn’t nab his sophomore effort Rogue a full theatrical release. Given the assortment of crap made by nobody hacks crowding multiplexes each week, that alone is something of a travesty, though making matters even worse is the fact that his killer-crocodile thriller is taut, thoughtful and inventive. As in Wolf Creek, Mclean charts a group of people (mostly tourists, led by Radha Mitchell’s local guide) venturing foolishly into the wilds of the Australian Outback and being forced to confront a monster – in this case, a literal one in the form of a giant crocodile that doesn’t take kindly to territorial intruders. If his previous story served as a condemnation of such blasé globetrotting, the director’s latest is more of a cautionary tale in which human compassion and altruism ultimately turn out to be serviceable weapons against natural threats, with Mclean – such as in a somber shot of a tour boat passenger surreptitiously spreading his wife’s ashes in the water – once again casting his characters as empathetic individuals rather than simply doomed stick figures. Rogue may keep its creature hidden for large stretches in order to generate tension through omnipresent suggestion, but its expertly orchestrated set pieces don’t skimp on the killer-croc goods, providing enough glimpses of the beast feasting on terrified humans to deliver requisite horror-premise payoffs. Mclean’s tight scripting rarely relies on stupid behavior to elicit scares and refuses to one-dimensionally condemn its characters for less-than-noble reactions to trauma, exhibiting shrewd, nonjudgmental consideration for the strains its stranded travelers are under. All the while, his evocative widescreen cinematography of the Australian landscape – part Terrance Malick-entrancing, part John Carpenter-creepy – lends the action a sense of encompassing ominousness, and in its reverence for the natural world, proves in tune with the director’s own respect for his characters, his B-movie genre, and his audience.

Hamlet 2 (2008): C

Boasting a title more amusing than anything contained in its 90 minutes, Hamlet 2 concerns a failed actor-turned-high school drama teacher in Tucson, Arizona who, in order to save the school’s theater program, stages the titular story. The doofus in question is Dana Marschz (Steve Coogan), an untalented moron obsessed with inspirational-classroom movies whose obliviousness to his own stupidity recalls that of The Office’s Michael Smith, and whose self-penned sequel to the Shakespeare classic confuses and rankles the community. Coogan is given free reign to indulge in improvisatory buffoonery, and his pratfalling and verbal stupidity might have been brilliantly funny had Andrew Fleming’s film (co-scripted by South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut scribe Pam Brady) found a way to suitably lay the groundwork for its premise. Instead, however, there’s a persistent sense that the title (and accompanying concept) is meant to carry the bulk of the comedic load, that every awkward, profane stab at humor (including those by supporting players Catherine Keener, David Arquette, and Amy Poehler) is supposed to be hilarious simply because, you know, the movie is called Hamlet 2! Given the wealth of inane silliness offered up, it’s inevitable that an occasional riff hits its mark. Yet despite Coogan’s enthusiasm, the whole thing feels undercooked to the point of being raw, such that when the climactic performance of Marschz’s play features a Grease-ish musical number called “Rock Me Sexy Jesus” – replete with Marschz as Jesus as Fonzie – the sequence’s insane randomness is disastrously undercut by the film’s failure to recognize that randomness only works if there’s first some firmly established context (here, that would have been the play’s larger narrative) for it to be juxtaposed against.

Corporate Power

My latest feature for IFC News should be right up the alley of those Americans frightened to death of Wal-Mart and Starbucks. It's a list of cinema's ten most powerful corporations, and can be found via the stunningly efficient link below.

Ten Disturbingly Powerful Fictional Film Corporations (IFC News)