Review – Death Wish 2

When are these cheap street punks going to learn to stop screwing with Charles Bronson? All the man wants to do is buy some ice cream for his mentally ill daughter, and they’ve gotta go and break into his house, rape and kill his housekeeper, and kidnap his kid. Needless to say, after she dies trying to escape, that’s pretty much all she wrote for the criminals. The thing that surprised me the most about the movie is just how perfunctory our hero is about doing in the bad guys. He doesn’t linger over the killings. He doesn’t torture them, not even when torture might lead him to the next miscreant in the parade of slaughter. He just guns them down and moves on, indignities restricted to a stiffly-delivered quip or two. Frankly, his businesslike attitude takes some of the fun out of it. Mildly amusing

Xanadon’t: The limits of kitsch

Normally I wouldn’t devote an entire column to one movie, but I recently re-watched Xanadu and it got me to thinking. So now if nothing else I can lay claim to – most likely – being the first person to ever use the words “Xanadu” and “thinking” in the same sentence, at least without it being a reference to Coleridge.

For those of you so blessed by fortune that you’ve never seen this particular masterpiece, here are the basics: Michael “that guy from The Warriors” Beck plays a starving artist who has just given up on his dreams and gone back to work for the record industry. Within the space of a single morning he encounters a Muse (Olivia Newton-John) and a wealthy old guy (Gene Kelly – yes, that Gene Kelly) longing for his glory days as a clarinetist for Glenn Miller. Kara (short for Terpsichore, which is sort of like Dick being short for Richard) inspires the two guys to go into business and turn a wrecked-out dance hall into the ultimate roller disco.

You can tell just from the cold, hard, black-and-white description of the set-up that this movie was created for the specific purpose of being stupid. On one level it’s a good-natured send-up of the hey-everybody-let’s-put-on-a-show days of Hollywood musicals.

Unfortunately, the most difficult words to write in that last sentence were “send-up.” That comes closer than terms such as “parody” or “tribute,” but it doesn’t really hit the nail on the head either. What’s really going on here is something more crassly commercial.

Back in the 30s, stage door musicals were a desperately-needed antidote to the Depression. We’d gone through one world war, and another was looming on the horizon. The economy had gone into the crapper, and everyone lost their jobs. This created a big box-office demand for escapist movies. On the silver screen life was hard, but it was also innocent fun. Even Broadway’s gold-digging floozies were good girls at heart, ingénues who donned sparkly costumes, sang bouncy tunes with witless lyrics, and bubbled through to the end of the picture where they always ended up with Daddy Warbucks or his moral equivalent.

Xanadu uses this old, dusty recipe to bake a batch of brain candy for the newly-dawned 1980s. It should have worked. Certainly the nation was ready for simple-minded escapism, something to assure us that despite political turmoil and rampant inflation, everything was going to be okay. Why else would we have volunteered for eight years of Ronald Reagan?

But no, this doesn’t work. To start, it’s too stupid to function as anything other than kitsch. That criticism shouldn’t upset the folks who made this, as it’s clearly intended to be a kitsch production. The real problem, then, is that kitsch can’t be manufactured. It has to just happen. While some of the stupid stage-door musicals from the 30s are quaint and charming all these years later, this roller-disco reheat comes across as a marketing job.

Perhaps the passage of a few more decades will cleanse this production of its ultra-commercial roots. But then again, maybe it will always be a boring, brain-dead glitter fest. Only time will tell.

Review – The Monkey King

This is an odd blend of Sci Fi Channel crap and Chinese folklore. Strangely enough, it isn’t all that bad. To be sure, the effects are cheap and the acting weak. Further, the thing is four hours long (including commercials) and not all that tightly plotted. And I don’t know if I just turned my head away at the wrong moment, but there seemed to be big chunks missing from the plot. On the other hand, the story is entertaining enough. Further, I may be reading too much into it but I thought I detected a subtext of criticism of the Cultural Revolution. Mildly amusing

Review – The Butterfly Effect

I had a solid block of hate going for this movie until the last five minutes. For the most part this is an Ashton-Kutcher-intensive parade of violence inflicted on helpless children and animals. And on top of that, the story is the tried-and-tiresome canard of the guy who tries to go back in time to make things better only to screw them up even worse. Frankly, I could have done without the whole mess. But then at the very end it turns into a hilarious parody that Frank Capra has had coming for decades. I’m not sure that’s what was intended, but the result is solid nonetheless. Overall this isn’t worth looking at, but if you do sit through it you’ll have to sit through it all before it rewards your attention. See if desperate

The fine art of the bad movie

This entry isn’t going to be an actual column as much as it’s an introduction to a theme I plan to explore over the next couple of months. Around the Lens household we’ve been having a discussion about what exactly makes a movie bad. So that’s what I’m going to be looking at.

In education we’re supposed to approach students with the assumption that there’s no such thing as a bad kid, just good kids who sometimes do bad things. That might be okay at school, but I’m not going to apply that logic to the cinema arts. Some movies are good, but others are bad. In the latter category, some are born bad while others start out with potential and yet go wrong along the way.

Bad movies can also be divided into good bad movies and bad bad movies. Good bad movies are by definition more fun to watch, so I’ll finish up with them

Bad bad movies can likewise be divided up. Some – the “born bad” variety – are deliberately created to be terrible. Many horror comedies fall into this sub-category. The film-makers assume – often correctly – that there’s a market out there for something that’s designed to be stupid and tasteless.

Further, some movies that would otherwise have been good are spoiled by the inclusion of something offensive. Glaring examples include Birth of a Nation and Gone with the Wind, both of which are historically important but close to unwatchable because of the embarrassing racism that infects them. If tastes manage to continue to mature, many of the movies made today will seem intolerably sexist to future generations. Just a guess, or maybe a hope would be a better way to say it.

On the other hand, good bad movies are harder to define. For example, William Castle produced an impressive array of pictures with brain-numbing-bad plots, scripts and acting. Yet many of his productions are a pleasure to watch because they incorporate some sort of clever gimmick. Thus Castle is one of the ultimate “E for effort” film-makers, a master of the good bad movie.

That said, this whole thing is at least a little subjective. I love Castle, but I’m sure a lot of people don’t. And I have to respect their opinions. Castle’s movies are bad, after all.

There, that should provide us with enough to get started. Once we’ve considered some specific cases, perhaps at the end we’ll arrive at a better understanding of what bad cinema is really all about.

Conan, what is best in life?

The focus last week on Super Bowl ads meant that I spared nary a note for the game itself. For the most part the omission is perfectly excusable. This isn’t a sports column, after all. And even if it was, I still shouldn’t be covering football. I don’t know anything about it, or at least not much. The game was close. A lot of bookies lost money. Fans in New York were happy. Fans in Boston were not. That’s six of one, half a dozen of the other, done and done as far as I’m concerned.

The ads sucked (covered that last time). Even the halftime show sucked. It led off with a lighting-effects guitar approaching a lighting-effects heart, but someone in the booth must have noticed the obvious sexual connotation just in time to cut to a different shot before the consummating moment. Then out comes the decaying corpse of Tom Petty to belt out crowd-pleasers until it’s time once again for the players to take the field.

Given the lackluster nature of the whole affair, the last thing we should want to do is prolong the pageant. However, the following day a new Bowl marketing opportunity occurred to me. The game is always followed by a victory parade a day or two later in the city of the team that just took the trophy. Outside the metro area, however, these don’t amount to much. Some video of the players riding around in the backs of convertibles or perhaps a hastily-assembled float of some kind.

I think that’s squandering the chance for another massive media spectacle. Sure, the victory parade is a more limited draw. Somewhere around half the people who watched the game aren’t going to be in the mood to celebrate. And these things usually take place during the day, which further limits the audience.

Though this might not seem like a winner at first, I think the ancient Romans have a thing or two to teach us about how to make this work. For starters, give everyone the day off so it won’t matter when it’s televised. Add a musical guest or two, perhaps someone with ties to the winning team or its city.

But above all, add the losing team to the mix. Make them march solemnly before the chariots of the victors, heads hung in shame. Shackles are optional. Then behind the winners come the wives, girlfriends and/or road skank of the losing team. Turn the music down just enough that as they pass we can all hear their lamentations.

And if it’s in New York, maybe we could get Macy’s to sponsor it.

Review – The Rack

As POWs returned from the Korean War, the military began to notice strange behavior in some of the repatriated soldiers. They soon figured out that the prisoners had been psychologically tortured by their captors. The most famous movie about this is of course The Manchurian Candidate, but this grim little drama is an earlier and more historically accurate depiction of the problem. Paul Newman plays a soldier who returns from captivity in Korea with some obvious problems. The Army charges him with collaboration with the enemy, much to the chagrin of his career-military father (Walter Pidgeon). Turns out that he faked some cooperation with the guards, and they used it as an “in” to put him in solitary until he cracked under the strain. The script is based on a teleplay by Rod Serling, and much of the stiff dialogue and jerky plot flow reflect his tin ear for the way people relate to one another. That notwithstanding, this is an interesting little movie that doesn’t shy away from moral ambiguities. Mildly amusing

Review – Return to the House on Haunted Hill

This picture has at least one thing in common with its predecessor: I didn’t hate it as much as I thought I was going to. To be sure, the production has its faults. None of the cast is as good as Geoffrey Rush was in the “original remake.” The script is weak as well, with a lot of the plot dwelling somewhere in the realm of made-for-the-Sci-Fi-Channel quality. On the other hand, the special effects are better and the chills more effective and more frequent. For a low-budget horror movie, that’s all one can reasonably expect. Mildly amusing

Review – Death Wish 5: The Face of Death

It’s a good thing the cross-dressing psycho hit man decides to carve up the love interest’s face instead of her posterior; I can only imagine the marketing nightmares associated with a movie sub-titled “The Ass of Death.” Still, in many ways such a sobriquet would have been more fitting. For starters, this is the ass-end of the Death Wish series, released two decades after the first one hit theaters. But even more, the whole thing has a distinctly fecal odor about it. Though as of this writing I’ve never seen any of the other movies in the set, it isn’t hard to recognize the presence of a stiff, formulaic approach to plot and character. The first half of the production builds hatred for the bad guys, and then Charles Bronson steps in and spends the back half inflicting fanatical vengeance on them. After 20 years they seem to have run out of clever villain-offing techniques, leaving our hero with self-parodying modi operandi such as a poisoned pastry and an exploding, remote-control soccer ball. In the end the final, prevailing justice is the absence of a Death Wish 6. Mildly amusing

The eight best Super Bowl ads

In the fine tradition of lists of eight, here’s an octet of the best ads from this year’s Super Bowl:

1. The screaming ad for Bridgestone Tires. I’m a sucker for cute animals. And hey folks, we all hate it when squirrels run out in the street in front of us, am I right? Despite the obvious “borrowing” from an insurance ad that ran a year or two earlier, this one had some charm.

2 through 7: Nothing. This had to have been the worst crop of ads ever.

I guess a few of them were bush-leagues cute. The cavemen and their wheel were sorta clever, though maybe it was just such a relief to see cavemen not selling Geico that this seemed more charming than it was. It was nice of Richard Simmons to go along with the follow-up Bridgestone ad. The FedEx pigeons were eye-catching if nothing else.

Beyond that, however, this was an uninspiring harvest. As everyday ads running during the nightly news or a sitcom rerun, they would have been fine. But I can’t describe the millions spent on Super Bowl placement as anything but a waste of money for most of them.

Review – The Bunker (2001)

I just don’t get it. War movies rock. Horror movies rock. But for some bizarre reasons the two combined seem to cancel each other out. To be fair, this isn’t a bad movie. Indeed, among “weird war” movies this one stands out as one of the better examples of the sub-genre. German soldiers fleeing the Allied assault in late 1944 take refuge in an anti-tank bunker. It’s their bad luck that the place is connected to a series of tunnels that lead to some sinister stuff. It’s a fastball wind-up, but it turns out to be a slow-moving knuckleball of a pitch. If ever there was a time to not go the strictly-psychological route to chills, this was the moment. The script is good. The cast is good. The production values are good, especially for a low-budget picture. It just never quite manages to pan out. Mildly amusing

Review – The Condemned

Here we have The Running Man updated for the 21st century. Which is to say that it’s a killer game show in which the contestants have to murder each other in order to survive. Only now it’s being done on a remote tropical island (a la Survivor) and netcast rather than broadcast. The explosions are bigger. The costumes are less dorky. Still, it’s the same mix of macho action movie, former professional wrestlers and random moralizing about video violence from a violent video. Mildly amusing

Review – Halloween (2007)

I hardly know where to begin. For want of a better place, let me start with Rob Zombie. Without passing judgment on his merits as a person or a musician, I urge in strongest possible terms that he be kept away from cameras, editing boards, and even word processing software that he might be able to use to create another movie. This outing entertains only in the brief flickers where it mirrors a shot or a plot twist or some other element from the original. Otherwise this hunk of garbage is pure agony to sit through. Michael Myers’ back-story, which took up less than ten minutes the first time around, sprawls across the first 45 minutes of this go-around (and if we learned anything from episodes two, four and five, it’s that The Shape is better off without a lot of back-story). Then there’s the graphic (and almost completely unnecessary) rape scene. Then there’s the frequent, vicious animal torture. But worst of all, Zombie sets Michael up as the hero. We’re clearly supposed to sympathize with it as it brutalizes everything in its path. Seek help, Rob. Avoid at all costs