Sometimes I watch movies so you won’t have to. I sacrifice hours on lazy Sunday afternoons abusing my eyes and my sense of taste not just because I enjoy bad cinema, I do, but because some bad movies descend so low that even cinematic shit-eaters like myself can find no redeeming qualities to them whatsoever, and viewers need to be warned to avoid them. Like a signpost jutting out of the desert warning of rattlesnake country ahead, or a toxic waste dump, consider this article a harbinger, for there will be trouble for those who ignore it. Continue reading “Shitty Movie Sundays: The Transporter”
Tag: Thriller Flick
The Empty Balcony: Logan’s Run
Once again, the future is a terrifying place. This is a lesson that Hollywood continues to hammer home to moviegoers. Whether or not anyone is listening...well, that will be evident when we finally arrive in the future, won’t it? If the future is a place packed full of brain-eating zombies, cold-blooded murderous cyborgs, endless desert landscapes blasted with nuclear radiation, gigantic mutated insects, alien slave drivers, and any other myriad threats to the existence of mankind, then we have obviously failed to protect ourselves. Heed the warnings of science fiction, fair citizen, for to ignore them is to sow the seeds of our own destruction. Continue reading “The Empty Balcony: Logan’s Run”
The Empty Balcony: Burn After Reading
Watching a Coen Brothers movie is sometimes like attending a blind tasting. There won’t be any swill waved under one’s nose, but just what is in the glass could be surprising, or disappointing.
Burn After Reading, the Coen brothers followup to their best picture winner, No Country for Old Men, has a very serious plot. A former CIA analyst named Osbourne Cox, played by John Malkovich, is writing a memoir of his days with the company. His wife, Katie (Tilda Swinton), is secretly pursuing a divorce, and makes a copy onto disc of files from his computer, including the memoir and some classified materials. A secretary at her lawyer’s firm loses the disc at a gym, where it is found and comes into the possession of Chad (Brad Pitt), a personal trainer. Chad enlists his colleague, Linda (Frances McDormand), in a scheme to extort money from Osbourne in exchange for the disc. Meanwhile, Katie is having an affair with Harry (George Clooney), a Treasury agent who, coincidentally, meets Linda through an online dating service. It’s complicated, and only gets more so when plans crisscross and things inevitably go awry. Continue reading “The Empty Balcony: Burn After Reading”
The Empty Balcony: Soylent Green
The future is a rough place in Richard Fleischer’s 1973 film Soylent Green. Especially New York City in the year 2022. The population is 40 million, the city is in the grip of an endless heat wave, and apparently the only things to eat are colored crackers. At least the green kind, Soylent Green, to be particular, seem pretty popular. Man, of course, is to blame for the calamities of this bleak future, as the film demonstrates in an opening photographic montage that is artistically compelling. Continue reading “The Empty Balcony: Soylent Green”
The Empty Balcony: Robocop (1987)
Dystopian future societies are the stuff dreams are made of. They are what grow from the seeds of our own decadence and shallowness. The moral bankruptcy, and sometimes outright horror, of the settings of films like Blade Runner, A Clockwork Orange, THX 1138, Escape from New York, and Soylent Green wouldn’t be possible if writers and directors didn’t look around them and see the lightning speed with which we throw ourselves into unknown futures, sometimes without regard for so many of the present realities which work so well and don’t need change. The ever-present message is that change, sometimes jarring change, is inevitable. Films that look to the future warily revolve around placing the viewer in the role of Rip Van Winkle. When the theater lights dim, the familiar world of today dissolves into the freak show of tomorrow. The overriding questions always being: Why are the people onscreen comfortable with this? Why doesn’t everybody see how wrong things are?
Simply put, because that’s how things in the future work. People in the future grow up among the bizarre, things we wouldn’t recognize, as though these were the normal conditions of existence, rather than a manufactured reality that mankind has created for itself. The irony is, of course, that we, in real life, away from the fantasies of Hollywood, live like these silver screen wraiths, embracing the fast pace of technological advance, throwing off the yoke of millennia of human history to embrace the dictates of the electronic age. Implicit in films that depict the future is that civilizational advance is a given, destroying the ways and mores of the past, creating something unrecognizable to those who weren’t witness. This resonates because that is exactly how our ancestors would feel would they awake in today’s world. Continue reading “The Empty Balcony: Robocop (1987)”
October Horrorshow, Retroactive: The Last Man on Earth, The Omega Man, I Am Legend
The three films adapted from Richard Matheson’s 1954 novel I Am Legend vary widely in scope, story, and distance from the original source material. They are all shaky and mostly forgettable, but The Omega Man maintains a special place in cinema as one of star Charlton Heston’s many 1970s forays into post-apocalyptic science fiction. For that, it is the most interesting of the three adaptations, if not the best, edging The Last Man on Earth by a close margin.
The Last Man on Earth was the first of the adaptations, released in 1964. It was an Italian production following the spaghetti western model, and was credited with two directors, Ubaldo Ragona and Sidney Salkow. The film stars Vincent Price, at his Priciest, as it were. Price’s acting style takes some getting used to. He was a consummate professional who was more than capable in most of his roles. In Theatre of Blood, he was excellent. But he was victimized not just by type casting, but his own insistence on becoming a caricature of himself at times. The Last Man on Earth is b-cinema, and unfortunately, Price, playing protagonist Robert Morgan, fits right in. His many solitary scenes all seem to play like the boat deck scene in King Kong, where Robert Armstrong screen tests Fay Wray, giving audible directions for her first off camera encounter with a wild beast, finally yelling for her to “scream, Ann, scream for your life!” Continue reading “October Horrorshow, Retroactive: The Last Man on Earth, The Omega Man, I Am Legend”
Shitty Movie Sundays: They Live
After heaping backhanded praise on three John Carpenter films, never totally lauding nor completely decrying them, there is nothing ambiguous about my critique of They Live, Carpenter’s paranoid vision from 1988 of rampant consumerism and Reaganomics. It stinks. Continue reading “Shitty Movie Sundays: They Live”
The Empty Balcony: Escape from New York
Back before the great wave of gentrification began to hit American cities in the mid-1990s, there was the 1980s, an era when the distressed environment of the cities bottomed out. Long decades of neglect, strained local budgets, and rising crime left our cities veritable war zones. The inner cities were voids of hopelessness, abject poverty, and filth. Even affluent neighborhoods were just dangerous enough to breed well-heeled residents with canny street smarts, always looking over their shoulders for the dark figure hiding behind a tree or in an alley. This kind of palpable fear of urban environments is contagious, and it entered into our lore. We could envision no bright future for the American city because we had seen decay extend its grip for so long. Today’s cities have not fully recovered, and they remain always on the brink, ready to slide back as soon as people’s cares turn elsewhere, but it’s hard to picture just how bad things got unless one were a witness.
There are a few films here and there where our urban legacy is on full display. Wolfen had major scenes, some visually stunning, filmed among the devastation of the South Bronx. The classic film The French Connection was a study in browns — rust and dirt every bit as important a character as Popeye Doyle. Fort Apache, The Bronx was a caricature of the inner city, sometimes offensive, but it came from somewhere real. The Warriors has attained mythical status as New York’s ultimate cult film of the night, playing on our fears of a city gone out of control, at the mercy of costumed thugs. At times laughable, the film still wallowed in very real grit, a symptom of the disease that had befallen the city. Continue reading “The Empty Balcony: Escape from New York”
October Horrorshow, Retroactive: The Thing
Last week saw a unique event in film. Four John Carpenter films landed in Brooklyn as part of a mini-retrospective at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM). The featured films were Big Trouble in Little China, The Thing, They Live, and Escape from New York. All unique films from a unique filmmaker. B-movie schlock artist or perennially misunderstood genius, depending upon who’s doing the watching, Carpenter is a knowledgeable director who draws on his education, talents, and the best aspects of low-grade cinema to craft films that are unmistakably his. As soon as the opening credits roll, one enters Carpenter’s world. Viewer hears music (usually) from Carpenter’s own synthesizer, and the credits themselves are all the same white serif font on a black background, no matter which of his films is playing. Anamorphic lens effects and dark lighting cross among his works. Finally there is the thematic distrust of authority as a conceptual continuity throughout. All of this makes Carpenter’s films easily recognizable to anyone with even a cursory knowledge of his oeuvre. Continue reading “October Horrorshow, Retroactive: The Thing”
Film in the Tubes: The Italian Spiderman Movie
Pundits and scholars made bold predictions in the early ’90’s concerning the new World Wide Web’s ability to disseminate information to the masses, and while they all underestimated what the internet would become, there rose a clamor over the information itself. Good versus bad. Culture versus trash. News versus punditry. We all know which side is winning the battle for hearts and minds. This vast repository we have created for information also has an appetite of its own, craving volume to eternally build the noise to some crescendo that, at this point, remains in the far distance. Along with the opposing sides of quality and worth, there exists the obscure — information that would have been lost to time and degrading videotapes were it not for digitization. Look in any video section on any random humor website, and they are there, somewhere: excerpts from foreign, low-budget schlock cinema that has little regard for cinematic excellence or American trademark law. These inept productions laughably maul such cherished personas of pop Americana as Superman, or blatantly insert footage from Star Wars to beef up otherwise weak productions. Never meant to have much life, these turkeys were turned out for quick cash, and were it not for the great information void of the internet, would have remained in obscurity, instead of rising to the slightly more respectable level of kitsch. Continue reading “Film in the Tubes: The Italian Spiderman Movie”