My schedule has been/continues to be a real motherfucker and when Terrence Malick's new entry in the annals of cinema and the anals of your movie-watching ass Song to Song came out, it wasn't as easy to find time to watch it.
The days of a Malick joint hitting the local neighborhood cineplex are either on hold or long gone because after The New World in '05, I had to make the drive to an Arclight or a Laemmle to see what he was up to, and even then, these last three films (counting this one) have only had two-week runs. It's like the distributors are admitting out loud "this shit ain't gonna make money, let's just put it out there long enough for award consideration and for the sad people such as the Exiled from Contentment guy who are still on Malick's balls to be able to see it".
Oh hey, real quick: He made a fuckin' IMAX movie a few months ago, Voyage of Time, and for the record, I loved it but I feel I need to see all three versions of it before I even begin spouting my bullshit about it on the blog. I ended up catching the 45-minute IMAX version that had no narration and was presented in a weird super-ultra-widescreen aspect ratio that Malick preferred because homeboy's wacky like that. It took me longer to drive to a theater playing it than it was to watch it. My commitment is that deep.
Anyway, what was I saying? Oh yeah, by the time I had time to see this one, the closest theater still playing it was about 40 miles away from me -- at least with this one I wouldn't have that same driving/watching time imbalance as with Voyage -- and they only had one showtime at 12:30pm. It was playing at a theater smack-dab in the middle of a college, so I had to deal with walking among young people full of hope and energy, which just made me want to punch all of them in the face.
I sat on the far left of the back row and on the far right was an old couple and to the best of my ever-decreasing hearing I could make out the dude saying something like "I like this theater, they have closhbuthawthawbulaw" and the lady curtly responded with "The seats are uncomfortable" and so her point was made: YOU AIN'T NEVER GONNA GET TO SAY ANYTHING WITHOUT ME SLAPPING IT DOWN. TILL DEATH DO US PART, BITCH.
To be real with you, I was both hyped and apprehensive about this particular film. I mean, I love Terrence Malick, and if you don't believe me, ladies and gentlemen of the jury I present to you:
This time there was something about this film -- the subject matter! -- that was kind of making me pause and move forward and pause and move forward, kinda like hitting the Slow Motion option on your NES Advantage or other super controller for your 8-bit system. That was some bullshit, wasn't it? It wasn't real slow motion, it just kept pausing the game or bringing up the menu. Did anybody ever really get any use out of that shit? I'm asking for a friend. (Just kidding, I have no friends.)
As with most films, I know little to none about them going in aside from the very basic premise, who directed it, and maybe the actors in it. In the case of Song to Song, I knew it was Malick doing his thing in Austin, Texas about musicians, and I don't know man. I like music and all but I'm not sure I'm a big fan of musicians. Shit, I'm not the biggest fan of artists in general even though I love art -- figure that shit out. But musicians? Ugh. I've worked with some in the past and we're just different species, but to be fair, I feel that way about most people I work with regardless of what they do. I don't like them. But that's OK because you know who I dislike most of all? Me.
I swear, if I were a Highlander, I'd kill myself so many fucking times because I'm that fond of myself. At the very least it would be an awesome way to relieve myself of the awkwardness of being, that's for sure.
So.
I went in with trepidation, and it turned out that I had nothing to fear because in this film, Malick does not really focus on the wankery involved in creating tunes, it really is just a background to what he is really interested in -- what he's always been interested in -- how we deal with our existence.
And a couple of paragraphs ago you found out how I deal with mine.
But how does pretty boy Ryan Gosling handle his? I don't know, you'd have to ask him. But as for the character he plays, BV, he seems to handle it in Gosling-esque ways by being kind of a goofball while trying to get his music career going. I like his musician character more in this film than the musician he plays in La La Land, because in this movie BV isn't trying to explain jazz to a lady while standing five feet away from a jazz band mid-performance who are probably wishing he would either shut the fuck up and let them play uninterrupted or just fucking die. He hooks up with a big time music producer, Cook, played by Michael Fassbender, who handles his existence in very Fassbender-esque ways by banging everything with a pulse.
My understanding is that despite (or maybe in spite of) writing a script, Malick pretty much tosses it away and just gives a few basic instructions -- if that -- to his actors and then has three-time-consecutive-Oscar-winning Mexican cinematographic wonder Emmanuel Mi Hermano The Muthafuckin' Chivo Lubezki Raza Cabron! run around filming them for as long as there is digital memory space available in the camera. And even then I'm sure there's some memory cards being constantly swapped for fresh ones.
What we see is what they came up with (Correction: what we see is the edited two-hour-plus result of miles and miles of footage; the original cut ran eight hours!) and mostly I feel what they come up with is as close to exposing the real them in the guise of being the character. It's some good shit, man -- both this process and the whiskey I'm currently drinking.
Anyway, things start off well -- Gosling and Fassbender are getting along, with the latter showing off his nice crib to the former and then saying some jerky shit like "I don't like it". Motherfucker. I'm looking at this awesome house and dreaming right there in the cinema about getting a place like that, but this guy is like EHHH I'VE LIVED IN BETTER and already I want to punch him in the throat on some Denzel/Liam shit.
During one sequence, Cook takes BV on his private jet to Mexico where they do the White Tourist thing by getting drunk and singing and rolling around on the ground, taking their shirts off while the locals continue playing la guitarra because they're so used to this kind of behavior from the Whites, they just want El Presidente to build that pared because the U.S. doesn't send us their best, they send us a bunch of cheap gueros who just want to get drunk and see a donkey show -- which was invented by some lonely guera who couldn't get a black dude and she just had to find a footlong one way or the other.
I guess it wouldn't be a surprise to tell you that somewhere along the way BV learns to regret letting Cook own the copyright on his work, because people are stupid enough to assume that the guy who promises to get you a house like his, or a closet full of suits just like the ones he wears, a guy who will jet you to Mexico and back for fun, is 100-percent trustworthy in business manners. And that's before Love gets in the way in the form of another aspiring musician named Faye played by Rooney Mara.
Ms. Mara is in town and she gets by with various odd jobs, including dogwalking and housesitting. At one point I thought she worked a gig as one of those sushi girls, but I guess these gamine types all look the same to me. She eventually gets a job with that asshole Fassbender, and from there hooks up with Gosling and then we get the usual Malik-ian scenes of walking around and frolicking and touching and looking at each other; it's like Malick took away most if not all things in a room or location that they could use to occupy their time with and instead instructed them to play with each other, like grown-up kids.
And maybe that's the idea; that when people are truly able to exist in a state of love with each other, only then can we actually become the pure and innocent creatures that God created us to be, before some apple-slinging asshole snake told us otherwise. The bitch of it is that these blissful moments are just that: Moments. And the snakes forever exist and don't have to be literal, they just have to be the things Life throws at us.
Like one example of a snake could be Fassbender's giant cock slithering its way into this A and B conversation of Love between our two, like "Hey, I want me some of that Rooney Mara action" and that's when things get complicated -- or should I say, more complicated because there's also Malick pulling his whole playing-with-the-concept-of-a-timeline tricks again, leaving me in the audience to go "Oh wait, so he's back with her -- oh no, this was before that happened -- oh wait why is this person still alive -- oh wait it's metaphorical --" before remembering that with a T-Mal joint it's just best to treat it like MST3K and really just relax.
By the way, speaking of "still alive", this motherfucker Malick kills off a character here and it fucking crushed me for what felt like twenty minutes, the sadistic fuck. I didn't even know this person's name -- by the way, I didn't know any of the character's names until I looked it up on IMDB because nobody ever calls each other by them, probably Malick's way of saying Fuck It They're Playing Themselves -- but I spent enough time with this person and watched this person change for the worse. I wanted the best for this character. I fucking cared for this character! It still pisses me off!
Anyway, yeah we follow these three along with a couple others -- Cate Blanchett! Holly Hunter! -- and then there's Natalie Portman as a waitress who has the pleasure of serving this unshaven fuck Fassbender and she falls for his bullshit despite having told him that she's busy and could get in trouble with her boss. She's all giggling and smiley but I bet you if I tried to pull that Fassbender shit with her, I'd end up being written about on fucking Jezebel or something. So many feminists would have a hard-on for me until someone else becomes Asshole Penis Of The Week and I'm left forgotten and crying about the attention I'm not getting anymore.
No sir, the best I could do with a waitress is get a smiley face on the check, maybe even a heart. Which I would then interpret as a sign that she loves me and there I go, beating off at home later that day imagining the life I could've had with her, if I had the balls to actually talk to her. But no, I pussied out and while I'm wiping the jizz off my blanket -- the fourth time this week! -- she's getting taken to Plow Town by Michael Fucking Fassbender.
As far as the music stuff in the movie, none of it really stood out for me. Despite there being many scenes taking place in and around concerts, music didn't feel that important a contribution to the film. It could've easily taken place at a food festival, really. It could've been about chefs. Ugh, no I take that back, because you know fuckin' Guy Fieri would show up and then I'd have to kill the world for allowing such a thing.
There are appearances by some real life musicians like Patti Smith, Iggy Pop, and Johnny Rotten (who for once isn't pulling that sad "I'm still an angry young lad" shit, siddown ya old bloated fuck). Oh and Anthony Kiedis pretends to beat up punk-ass Fassbender, which I guess I can pretend to applaud. And at one point we are treated to the sight of Val Kilmer on stage, losing his shit as he chainsaws a speaker, chops off his long hair with a knife, then throws what he claims to be uranium from his mom at the audience, before being escorted off the premises.
There are also non-appearances by Benicio Del Toro, Christian Bale, Arcade Fire, and Angela Bettis, who all had roles but were cut out of the movie. As I've said before in a previous Malick rambling, the list of people who were cut out of a Terrence Malick movie is just as impressive -- if not more impressive -- than the ones who made it.
(Oh shit, I mentioned Cate Blanchett earlier which means I have to make my mandatory "Cate Blanchett held open a door for me once" statement. Well, she did. Yeah, yeah, I know -- for her, it was Tuesday.)
I'm fucking around here with my ramblings on this movie, but the truth of the matter -- the brass tacks, as it were -- is that Song to Song was just as much an intensely introspective experience for me as every other Malick film since The Thin Red Line, and as such, it left me exhausted and in borderline tears sometimes. Some of it had to do with the relationship stuff, certain actions and lines felt too goddamn real and true in the worst way -- which just goes to show how naked these actors were in playing these parts, exposing probably a little more than they expected in these marathon filming sessions. And in addition to the death of a character knocking me off balance, there was also a scene between a character and an ailing father and you probably already know how I feel about THAT.
There's also a scene with a lady with what appeared to be acne scars on her face, and she just finished banging that fuckin' asshole Fassbender and sweet Natalie Portman in a three-way, and I think she was paid for it. Which I guess makes her an escort. Anyway, she starts talking about how she lost the man in her life to that piece-of-shit Death and how it left her psychically adrift, and how she's still kind of adrift but she feels that God has a plan for her -- as he does for all of us, I hope, if He exists, I hope -- and this must be part of the plan and OH MAN the shakiness in her voice felt too goddamn real for me. I felt I was watching a "real" person sharing something incredibly personal with all four of us in the audience and it made me tear up and I wanted to give her a hug before asking her what kind of action I could get for fifty bucks.
I know what kind of action I can get from a twelve dollar movie ticket, though; hot Bérenice Marlohe from Skyfall shows up as a hot French lady who hooks up with Rooney Mara and here is another reason Terrence Malick is one of my favorite filmmakers EVAAAAR -- he gives us One Perfect Shot where the two ladies are passionately kissing each other on the left side of the frame right in front of us, while on the right side of the frame in the background is Marlohe's slightly out-of-focus dog who is basically frozen with his face all like OH YEAH and the only thing missing was for this dog to have on a pair of sunglasses so he can tilt them downwards while peeking his eyes above the frame, followed by the soundtrack cueing up "Oh Yeah" by Yello.
Listen, I've already gone on in other Malick ramblings about his style with the wide-angled ever-roving camera and the heavy use of inner monologue and the elliptical editing style and how the whole thing feels less like a story and more of a peek into someone's fragmented memories -- or shit, even their final thoughts before leaving this world -- or holy shit, God hitting the "shuffle" command on his iTunes playlist labeled "Human Beings". I've said it then and I'm saying it now. It's that same style and thankfully Malick has succeeded in whatever the fuck it is he was trying to do. All I know is that it feels like I get it.
Anybody could've taken the premise of following the love lives of three people in the Austin, Texas music scene and made more or less the same movie. Malick uses it as a jumping off point into something deeper. Or wankery. Your mileage may vary -- just make sure your mileage is as far the fuck away from me as possible.
At this point -- seven films in before this one -- if you're familiar with Malick and he just isn't your jam, then you should know by now to stay as far away from this film as if it had all of the Ebola waiting to creep into your open-wounds. To complain about Malick's filmmaking now would be like suddenly going "You know what, I regret voting for him".
On the other hand, if you were a fan of his work and have seen Song to Song and this was the one that made you get off the Terrence Malick train, it's understandable. You have my respect for making it this far. Now all I need you to do is ignore the tears rolling down my cheeks as I tell you to turn around and face the other way and close your eyes while I put the .22 to the back of your head. It will be quick, I promise.
But to the rest of you, you lucky few who are still on board with my man and haven't had a complaint yet? I say Welcome, brothers and sisters. And fuck Michael Fassbender.
Walter Hill is my dude, and if you've read this blog for a long time, you already know this. But in case you didn't, well, Walter Hill is my dude.
And so, you bet I was going to make it to the Aero Theatre in Santa Monica for the Los Angeles premiere of his latest film, The Assignment, not to be confused with the 1997 film The Assignment, which only shares the similarities of having a nutty premise and being good times. Mr. Hill would be in attendance for a Q&A following the film. (I found out later that Michael Mann was also there but left before the Q&A. The presence of both manly man filmmakers in such close proximity would explain why my voice is now deeper, there's more hair on my chest and my testicles appeared to have gotten bigger.)
As for the film: Masculine/feminine actress Michelle Rodriguez is perfectly cast as femme-y macho hitman Frank Kitchen, who one day wakes up to find herself plus tits and minus penis because one of his marks was the brother of a brilliant-but-mad doctor played by Sigourney Weaver. At this point in my life, I think I'd be fine giving up the dong if it meant I would wake up looking like Michelle Rodriguez. It's not like I've been using said D to its full potential. Besides, I already have the tits, so it's like I'm halfway there.
It's very much a Walter Hill joint in that it's a fast and simple tale, a painting told in broad strokes of primary colors. It doesn't try to pass itself off as anything more than purely B-movie. There are occasional uses of comic book framing similar to what Hill did to his director's cut of The Warriors, which didn't bother me at all, because this is a brand new movie with an established style rather than a classic that we all loved just the way it was.It also shares a similarity with his other works by featuring a hero who speaks in few words going up against a villain who speaks in many words (who much like Bruce Dern's character in The Driver, just wants to let others know how smart she is.)
Rodriguez acquits herself well in the role. Her portrayal of Frank Kitchen isn't so much a stoic badass as more of a person who prefers to keep his distance in all endeavors due to...what? I don't know. Hill has never been one to give a shit about someone's backstory, preferring to let the actions of the character speak for themselves. And it works here.
When Kitchen picks up a girl for some late-night banging, his post-coital dismissal of her is less of a "love 'em and leave 'em" type of vibe and more like someone who's been hurt before and prefers not to let that happen ever again. There's a hint of vulnerability to everything Rodriguez does in the film, but just a hint. I mean, Kitchen still is quick with the steel and not one to cross.
And yet, that's what Sigourney Weaver's character does. And man, as much as I liked Rodriguez in this film, it's Weaver's performance that I was most impressed with. She's nuts, this lady (her character, I mean -- I wouldn't know about Ms. Weaver's mental stability) but it's not a raving loon kind of crazy, or even a creepy Hannibal Lector kind of crazy.
For the most part, she speaks in a rational manner that would lull you into thinking she's fine, then you would ask her about the many homeless people she experimented on and she would respond in a calm and rational manner what basically amounts to "Well of course, why wouldn't I use homeless people to perform my horrific experiments on?" and her tone might change a bit to annoyance because you're so stupid and your small brain would never be able to comprehend the greatness she hopes to achieve. She's not chewing up the scenery, but you just fucking know Weaver is having a ball playing this character.
In comparison to other Walter Hill movies, The Assignment isn't a slam-bang actioner like Extreme Prejudice or a stylish neo-noir like The Driver; this felt to me more like a 90-minute version of one of Hill's "Tales from the Crypt" episodes, albeit one with a shootout every once in a while. If you're not familiar with his directorial contributions to that series, they weren't really horror hikes but instead a swim in the waters of Lurid and Pulpy As Fuck. So imagine my delightful surprise when Hill said during the post-film Q&A that his approach to this film was to make a "king-sized Tales from the Crypt episode". Me and Walter Hill are in sync, brother!
Speaking of that Q&A, it started off fine with the interviewer having a reasonable discussion with Hill, then the dreaded words "let's open it up to the audience for questions" were spoken and therefore caused my usual Pavlovian response of clenching shut both my eyelids and asshole.
An elderly gentleman started by asking why Hill didn't allow Weaver's garrulous character to complete a quote from Aristotle's Poetics, to which Hill responded "You're complaining that she didn't talk enough in the movie?" and then the elderly man asked Walter Hill -- who had earlier discussed reading EC Comics as child -- if he was familiar with the old EC Comics and then he asked Walter Hill -- who had produced the "Tales from the Crypt" HBO series and said ten minutes ago that he had basically made a feature-length Crypt episode with The Assignment -- if he was familiar with a series of comic books called "Tales from the Crypt" and I was too busy digging through the carpet and concrete below me with my fingernails to remember if Hill even answered him.
Hill also told a story about how he went to Michelle Rodriguez shortly before filming began and said something like "In case you haven't noticed, you're Latina. So maybe we should change the name of Frank Kitchen to something Latino" and her response was something like "No, why would I do that? Of course his name isn't really Frank Kitchen, he's always in disguise and uses a false name. It would make it easier for cops to find me if they knew I was Latino" and Hill laughed as he told us that he felt humiliated -- here was the writer/director being schooled on his own creation by the actor. But basically his point was that he doesn't like to do too much discussion about the characters with the actors, feeling that if the actor does his or her job right they would know the character better than anybody else.
Later, Hill discussed the controversy about the film being seen as transphobic. He first cleared the air by saying that things have definitely changed since he was young, and that we are living in an increasingly gender-fluid society, which he feels is a good thing. Hill went on to say that this wasn't meant to be a transphobic film; for one, Frank Kitchen isn't trans -- he identifies as male throughout the entire film, regardless of the forced genital reassignment surgery given to him. This is also why they didn't cast a trans actor, even though that was considered earlier in production -- well, that and the simple issue of the financier who would only invest money in the film if a name actor starred in the project.
I have to agree with Hill; the film doesn't treat being turned into a woman as the A Fate Worse Than Death. Hell, even Mad Scientist Weaver says in the film that she didn't mean it to be some kind of absolute punishment, but more of a second chance for Kitchen to start over by removing him from the "macho prison" she believed he was living in. In response, Rodriguez's vengeance mantra is simply a matter of: I Didn't Ask For This, You Forced It On Me, Now You're Going To Pay.
The worst of it is when Kitchen wakes up and finds himself sans johnson; he screams and smashes some stuff, which I completely understand. I mean, unless you're me, you'd probably freak out too if you woke up with the complete opposite of the usual genital situation you've been accustomed to all your life. And that's about it for the freak-out stuff; there's no monologues that follow about being cursed to live as a female from now on. At most, there's a scene where Kitchen visits a surgeon and asks about the possibility of getting the procedure reversed, and a moment where he bitches about having to sit down to pee.
So I don't feel the film is transphobic, but then again, I'm not transgender, so what do I know? I don't like my non-Latino brothers and sisters to assume they know how I feel, so I sure as shit ain't gonna do it to my alt-gender peeps out in that cold, hard world.
What I do know for sure is that this was a good-not-great entry in the Walter Hill canon for me -- one that is mostly surface but what an entertaining surface! -- and that I'm gonna run for the hills the next time a moderator asks for questions from the audience.
In conclusion, The Assignment (2016) would make a good double feature with The Assignment (1997).
It was a Friday night, not my preferred night for a movie all-nighter because, you know, work and all that that entails: a long night preceded by a long day, making it harder to get through both. But hey, that's when they scheduled it and if I really had a problem with it I wouldn't have bought the ticket -- which is why I didn't buy a ticket. But then I was given one by a friendly party who had to cancel at the next-to-last minute. Hooray for girlfriends who cancel on friends!
Ticket to what, you ask? The Dario Argento All Nighter at the New Beverly Cinema: six of the Italian horror maestro's films, the titles remaining secret to the audience until they are projected onto the screen.
It was a packed house, and because we got there later than my preferred arrival time, I ended up sitting between two individuals -- in front and behind me -- who were Down With The Sickness based on their all-night non-stop wet phlegm-hacking coughs (one would later use his empty cup to dispense of his inner slime wads). It made for an even more tense night than expected because I didn't have Emergen-C or a face mask with me. I was unarmed and afraid, having already gone through The Sickness a couple weeks earlier. And now I was stuck between these two jokers. Would I be Down again?
I don't know what the refund policy is with the New Bev and/or Brown Paper Tickets (who sold the online-only tickets to this event), but assuming it's Too Late Jack, I would still think that when it comes to being sick on Show Day, perhaps it's better to go Needs Of The Many over Needs Of The Few -- in this case, the few who felt it was more important to share The HIV with the rest of the audience, rather than just stay home. Throughout the night, my mind would suddenly make unwelcome detours into the scene from Outbreak where one of the infected coughs up Death Germs in a movie theater.
There were foreign posters on the wall and lobby cards in the, uh, lobby for Argento's films throughout the night and the selection would circulate; where a poster for The Bird with the Crystal Plumage was placed early in the evening, there would be lobby cards for Tenebrae later. These were supplied by a gentleman I only heard referred to as "Rich" during the introduction. There was also a laserdisc jacket for the Dario Argento's World of Horror documentary placed near the door to the ticket booth, but I don't know who that belonged to.
Speaking of which, around 7:30pm, Phil Blankenship came up front with a lady whose name I don't know, but she was wearing a cap and had been working the concession stand earlier. Because I was sitting between Dolby Stereo Cough-Cough, the best I could make out was that the films and trailers were selected by both Phil and New Bev owner Quentin Tarantino, and the lady then said something about Phil being "humble" in what I assume was him downplaying his contribution to the evening.
Phil then told us that anything we liked were his choices, to which we laughed and perhaps some of us (one of us) wondered how much of that was a joke and how much of that was how he really felt about Mr. T's choices; later he mentioned the $4 coffee cups being sold that were good for all-night refills, adding that "you're going to want to stay caffeinated for some of these". He then asked us not to be inconsiderate with the chatting and phone-using; he felt that those actions were "lame" and not something the "cool" audience would/should do.
The lady then told us that the prints were mostly 35mm but at least one was a 16mm print, then quoted/paraphrased Quentin by saying that some of these prints had been "enjoyed immensely a lot of times by a lot of audiences" which I believe was her way of saying that these weren't exactly going to be sparkling DCPs -- which is fine by me, that's part of the fun of watching old prints.
The night's entertainment began with trailers for two Westerns co-written by Argento; The Five Man Army (starring Peter Graves) and Once Upon a Time in the West (not starring Peter Graves). Then the first movie of the evening: 1970's The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (or as it was called in this print, The Phantom of Terror).
Uncle Pete from The Pope of Greenwich Village plays an American in Rome who witnesses a woman inside an art gallery getting a little of the ol' in-out knife-style, and tries to save her by getting stuck between two glass doors because that's gonna help, I'm sure. He finds an old man staring at the two of them impassively, which is either Argento's way of heightening the horror by adding helplessness via neutral observation, or it's just the first of many examples throughout the night that Mr. Argento isn't really that interested in acting as much as he is interested in camera and editing.
But c'mon, honey, I say to myself -- nobody watches a Dario Argento flick for the great acting. They go to get creeped out and see black-gloved mystery peeps stalking and killing women, as in the case of this film. And also to see everyone else give non-reactions to otherwise crazy stuff. I mean, maybe in the Argento-verse, your reaction to having a hatchet miss you by thismuch in the middle of morning fog would be to just shrug it off and casually mention it to your hot girlfriend later on before going in on some Netflix And Chill Minus The Netflix, but not in my 'verse; for one, I don't even have a girlfriend, let alone a hot one -- and yet I've had people try to chop my head off many times.
So yeah, there's a serial killer taking pictures of potential victims, followed by fulfilling their potential with a little stabby slash slash. Uncle Pete, like most early Argento film protagonists, becomes obsessed with solving this case despite there being qualified individuals known as Detectives who do this sort of thing for a living. Along the way, Uncle Pete runs into fruity antique dealers and stuttering pimps, the latter of which made me wonder if R. Kelly had seen this film before; his last run of "Trapped in the Closet" featured a stuttering pimp named Lucius played by Mr. Kelly in an attempt to become like the Eddie Murphy of R&B singers who like to pee on underage girls.
This seems to be considered one of Argento's best, which is interesting because this is also one of his tamest; it's not a particularly gory film, at least not this print, but I don't remember this movie ever having much in the blood department to begin with. And while the movie has plenty of well-composed shots (by Vittorio Storaro), save for one trick, Dario hadn't started dosing his cameras yet. But it is very Argento in that it's a good movie.
Before the second film, we saw an old Pepsi Challenge ad, followed by trailers for Last Stop on the Night Train (aka Night Train Murders and like 20 other titles) and Strange Shadows in an Empty Room (aka Blazing Magnum and like 30 other titles), then it was 1971's The Cat O' Nine Tails, starring Karl Malden and James Franciscus.
The reddish print looked like it might've been the 16mm one mentioned earlier, and when Ennio Morricone's score played, it sounded like the Maestro was trying something new by having his music performed by the Royal Underwater Orchestra. But then the movie stopped playing and everything went dark, and suddenly we were all sitting in a black void filled with the sounds of OHHHH! and AHHHH! and WHAAAA?
Then a voice entered the void, telling us that they were going to fix the problem with the sound. A minute later, the film came back on and everything now sounded non-gargley. The film appeared to have a narrower aspect ratio than 2.35:1, like on some Hateful Eight shit, or maybe it was just my eyes. Hell, at least I can see, unlike Malden's character who lost his sight years ago. Now he has to do the sunglasses and cane combo, his only companion a little girl because I guess it's cheaper than a seeing eye dog.
I guess Argento wasn't having the American-in-Italy thing with this one; instead, our Yank protagonists are named Carlo Giordani and Franco Arno, giving us something not unlike an Arnold Schwarzenegger character, who despite his heavy Austrian accent was playing guys named John Kimble and Ben Richards. Anyway, Franco overhears some dude talking in his car about blackmail, and a couple days later his seeing eye girl reads to him from the newspaper that the same dude did a header onto a oncoming train -- which is pretty awesome, I have to admit; there's a slow-mo close-up as the front of the train straight-on BOOOOOOSHs this poor man's head, followed by a wide shot of his dummy body going all spinny spin down the platform while his Italian loafers go flying off his feet. In real life, that would horrify me, but in a movie that shit is comedy, bro.
Franco goes to the reporter covering this, Carlo, and soon they are both doing the detective thing and it involves shady shadiness at some medical institute. In between them looking at photos and breaking into crypts, you get a couple strangulations and a slashing. Again, like the previous film, this one doesn't really get too bloody, but there's quite a bit of drool during one killing, if that's what you're looking for to cover the bodily fluid angle.
Another thing I noticed appears to be Dario's fascination with alternative lifestyles, namely trans and gays or both. In Crystal Plumage, there's a scene where a police lineup is made up of "perverts" but among them is a transvestite named Ursula Andress. The lead detective then yells out something like "I told you, Ursula belongs with the transvestites, not the perverts" which I'd like to think was kind of a progressive judgment call from Argento, kinda like he's saying "Just because this dude identifies as a woman doesn't mean she's a pervert" but who knows, he could be all Italian macho about them, like "Eyyyy it's-a just-a another category of-a sick-a people!"
And in this film, one of the characters turns out to be gay, and considering this was made in 1971, his representation could've been a lot worse. Even the gay bar he hangs out in isn't some kind of Cruising-style fist-tacular, it's just a bunch of dudes hanging out listening to sad trumpet music with slightly happier piano accompaniment. The worst you get is some dude with a few too many buttons left unbuttoned on his shirt, exposing his hairy chest. Nothing against that, I mean, I'd wear my shirts like that too were it not for the obvious farmer's tan I'd expose, making me look like a White dude who got a head transplant from some Mexican that nobody will ever miss BECAUSE HERE IN TRUMP COUNTRY WE GRAB FRESH BEANERS BY THE PUSSY, FAGGOT
This one is less of a thriller and more of a straight-up mystery and it's well made and all, but I gotta be honest with you, lady and gentleman, this was my first time watching Cat O' Nine Tails and it got a little tiring for me. It's nearly two hours long and for extended stretches -- like 90 percent of the film -- I forgot I was watching a Dario Argento film. You could've replaced his director credit with Massimo Dallamano or maybe even Alberto De Martino and you could've convinced me it was one of their movies. It's my understanding that this is Argento's least favorite film of his, and I'm not going to argue that with him -- but I haven't seen Dracula 3D either, so maybe I would?
It has its moments (especially in the last half hour or so -- also there's an insert of a pocket watch that looks damn near like the insert of the pocket watch in Pulp Fiction, just wanted to point that out), but occasionally I was tempted to rest my eyes and let my ears pick up the slack (I did naaaaht, though). Was it the movie's fault? Or maybe it was the effects of a long day getting to me at that point? I don't know but what I do know is that the third film of the night felt like getting a bump of some of Bolivian's finest following the warm glass of milk that was this film.
And what was, in fact, the third film, the one that played after the trailers for Twisted Nerve and Blow-Up? Why, it was the 1975 joint Deep Red (better Italian title: Profondo Rosso), which upon the title being revealed had the audience applauding up a storm, the loudest yet. Maybe they were just happy that we didn't get another early work like Four Flies on Grey Velvet or worse, his non-horror non-giallo joint, The Five Days of Milan -- because let's be real, I can totally see Quentin doing something like that, regardless of what time it was or how tired we were.
The film stars David Hemmings as a pianist who witnesses his psychic neighbor getting terminated with extreme psychic-hating prejudice by a hatchet-loving killer, so obviously he becomes obsessed with figuring out Who and Why because that's how Argento protagonists do in these joints. He's joined by a reporter played by Daria Nicolodi, and the only thing more awesome than her character is the interactions between her character and Hemmings'sesesss.
There's a scene that had quite a few women in the audience cheering, as well as men who would love the touch of a female (like me), where Nicolodi responds to Hemmings' skepticism over women's strength with an arm wrestling challenge. I loved that scene, and I remember there being a few more like that in the full uncut version that runs over two hours, but what we watched that night was the "export version" which is about 20 minutes shorter.
As much as I like those extra scenes between them in the longer version and as much as I'd love to imagine that in an alternate universe there exists a series of films with their characters solving mysteries, I actually prefer this shorter version and I'm glad that's the one we watched that night. It moves like a freight train carrying boxcars of plot, whereas the longer cut has more of a hangout vibe to it -- and we certainly had enough hanging out with the previous two films.
So I guess around this time began the real life couple-ship of Nicolodi and Argento, because from here on, she would show up in his films or co-write them, but whatever the case I'm thinking that it can't be a coincidence that once Daria came on the scene, Dario upped his freak-out game in his movies. It shows, man, it shows, not just in the storytelling getting more and more out there but his filmmaking was also going up some notches. Deep Red is when he really started going "You know what? I'm not dollying and crane-ing this camera enough, I mean, they have wheels and levers and shit for these things, I might as well start using them!" It could also be a budget thing, but I also think something about this lady brought something out of this man.
He also dropped Ennio Morricone for Goblin or The Goblins or whatever the fuck name they go by, and the music scores in this film and his following ones became less traditional and more Fucking Awesome. The coughing gentleman in front of me and his uninfected friend started rocking out to some of the tunes at this point, bobbing their heads to the point that I almost expected home-cough to raise his hands and go "YASSS DIS MY JAAAM!"
By the way, I'm not dissing Morricone here. Don't get it twisted, friend, he's my favorite composer and he did good work in the previous films. But Goblin and Argento go together like transgenders and fucked-up characters in Dario Argento flicks.
Yeah, he continues the trans tradition here, with a minor character popping up wearing makeup and a girly bathrobe and an Adams Apple, and had the Internet existed back then they would probably be breaking Dario's balls about this stuff the way we break Tarantino's balls about his thing for bare feet -- or we'd give Argento shit for his thing for drooling victims because I think there are two cases of that in this movie. Maybe it was his way of making stuff more violent without boring us on the red stuff. Maybe this was Argento's drool period or something.
The kill game gets upped here as well, because the blood really starts to flow and now the killer is doling out death with a hatchet, hot water, and corners of tables and shelves. There are also other creative kills involving otherwise innocent everyday things that are only an unfortunate schmuck away from getting caught up in it and dying the hard way. There's also a freaky doll that pops up at one point, and I felt bad for the few people sitting near the front who got temporary vision impairment when a guy decided to pick that moment to return to his seat, meaning they were treated to a far more frightening sight -- his big ass in their faces.
This was the halfway point, and those who stuck around (nearly everybody) after this third film got a sweet treat courtesy of some sweet treats from a bakery or donut shop or something, I can't remember the place. Doughnuts, ham & cheese croissants, and cronuts were brought to the stage and anybody who wanted one got one. In the end, there were still croissants available for anyone who wanted them. I usually stay away from them during all-nighters to keep from sugar-crashing, but I was in What The Hell mode and grabbed a cronut.
Trailers for the Argento-edited European print of Dawn of the Dead (known to these universal health care-having motherfuckers as Zombie: Dawn of the Dead) and the U.S. edit of The Beyond (titled 7 Doors of Death) came up next. The trailer for the latter gives away nearly every character's fate and included praise blurbs from Tobe Hooper and Kim Henkel that were made humorous by the announcer replacing some of the on-screen quotes with different words and mispronouncing the names. After that we had the fourth film, Suspiria -- which drew even louder applause than the previous film.
At this point, Argento was well into dipping his quills into the crazy ink, and I bet you it was co-writer Nicolodi who was hooking him up with said ink. There's a lot of Just Because in this movie, starting with the narration that begins over the opening credits pretty much telling you everything about the main character's trip to Germany except what they served on the flight, and then it just trails off, fading away and never returning for the rest of them film just because. I mean most of this film is going to leave you begging for that narrator to return to help you understand Why anything happens, but Dario Argento has no time for your needs -- unless your need is to get fully owned by Pure Goddamn Cinema.
So you have the lovely Jessica Harper -- all wide-eyed innocence -- headed for a ballet school, and the poor girl already has to deal with assholes as early as the arrival gate at the airport. Taxi cabs are just whizzing past her in the hard rain, and when she finally gets a driver he pulls that shit Euros do to filthy Muricans by pretending they have a comprehension problem with your simplest request. But my girl Harper, she's smart -- she has the name of the school written down on a piece of paper which she plasters onto the glass divider all like HOW DO YOU LIKE THEM APPLES? and now he has no choice but to take her there.
See, this is why Uber is fucking your shit up, cabbies.
I have to give credit to Harper's character for immediately feeling uneasy upon unpacking once she's at the school. Everybody is acting strange or doing that really asshole move of what I call "passive-aggressive friendly antagonism", but I think she kinda shrugs it off at first because she figures "Hey, this is Germany" and that's how the Deutschlanders get down. At least she doesn't try to tell a joke, like I did there once -- ONCE -- because there leads the path to heartbreak and embarrassment. Humor? No. Beer? Hell yes.
But things are even weirder than she should accept, because she hasn't even spent one full day there and she's already getting the vapors during practice and passing out. That was either because some lady flashed her a glowing triangle blade thingy five minutes earlier (that scene looks beautiful, by the way) and that put her whole system on tilt, or because she's wearing borrowed ballet shoes and they're probably two sizes too small for her. Cuts off the blood circulation, I think. Or maybe she's like me and finds the idea of wearing someone else's worn dancing shoes kinda gross. Fuck that shit, you give me that as my only choice and I'm hittin' the floor sans footwear like my man John McClane.
Immediately, the town doctor is telling her she has to eat bland and down red wine every meal because red wine is good for the blood. Red wine is good for everything, bro. I feel I'm letting myself down by not having a glass or two everyday.
I'm not going to go too much into plot because there isn't that much plot, to be real with you. Also, what there is is best discovered on your own. Then again, the soundtrack is literally telling you with voices going WITCH WITCH WITCH, so there's your road map, honey. I'll just bring up a couple things that stood out that aren't intense violent kill scenes (honestly, I think Argento literally and figuratively shot his wad with the murders during the first 15 minutes).
Some poor servant at the school has some big white chompers on him; turns out they're fakes he got after gingivitis had their way with his former gum partners. He's so proud of them and I would be too, if I were Gary Busey. You know what? That wasn't nice, and I shouldn't judge. Considering that my own sugar-to-brushing ratio is wrongly one-sided, and the upcoming dental work I'm having done, I'm sure I will eventually eat those words with teeth bigger than either of those guys.
Also, Udo Kier shows up looking young (which he was) and sounding American (which he's not) and that was cool to see.
What was kind of not cool was that the print of Suspiria we watched was the edited R-rated cut. It didn't really hurt the film though, it's missing a couple shots here and there and that kind of threw me off to not see what I had seen before. And sometimes the sound/music would suddenly skip as a result of the trims, which kinda added to the off-feeling of this nightmarish film. So that's kind of the unintentional bonus of such edits -- or I just know how to make some bomb-ass lemonade out of these lemons.
And besides -- the print was beautiful! I'm sure you already know the story of how this was one of the last films printed (not shot) using the three-strip Technicolor process, really making the colors pop on this movie -- which combined with the already color-saturated lighting and production design makes for the tastiest kind of candy overkill. But if you didn't know, I just told you. It also sounded as intense as it looked, with the volume turned all the way up to wake up even the sleepiest in the audience -- or at least drown out the sounds of the snoring (which if there was, I didn't hear at all. At least not where I was, sitting in the eye of the germ storm.)
Following the break, they showed us trailers for Dressed to Kill and Inferno (the Argento film, not the Forrest Gump & Jyn Erso buddy film). I had only seen Inferno once, and I had forgotten there was a scene involving someone getting attacked by cats and it made the audience laugh. It reminded me of a similar scene in an SCTV sketch that involved John Candy getting cat-tacked, and I wonder if the SCTV guys saw this movie or if it was just a coincidence (given the film and SCTV were around at the same time).
The fifth film immediately had the audience do the boisterous applause cheer thing because the first thing we saw was the title printed on a book: Tenebrae (or Tenebre, depending on which of the Berenstein/Berenstain alternate universes you live in). This was the second time I watched Tenebrae on the big screen; the first time was right here at the New Beverly Cinema during the third All Night Horror Show, back in 2010. I'm going to take the easy way out and kill myself post an excerpt from that blog post (which you can read in its entirety here, if you want): In a rare departure for Argento, this film features scenes of people dying harsh deaths at the hands of a killer wearing black leather gloves; someone is killing people in Italy and sending letters to mystery writer Peter Neal (who's there promoting his new book), informing him that he will be the last to go, because they're all filthy slimy perverts and he's the corruptor or some shit like that. But never mind that, let's talk about the best character in the entire movie -- let's talk about that awesome fuckin' Doberman. There's a scene where this cute jailbait chick (I can say that because I'm sure the actress was above legal age -- I hope, otherwise Chris Hansen's gonna walk in and ask me to take a seat over there) is walking home and she gets a little too close to a fence. RAWR RAWR RAWR goes the guard dog Doberman, and rather than keep walking, Cute Jailbait Girl picks up a stick and starts banging it against the fence. What the fuck, Lolita? That dog is just telling you to stay away, fool ('cause love rules, at the do-oo-og shack) and you gotta get all indignant on homedog? He's just doing the job he was hired to do; he's a blue collar dog trying to put Alpo on his litter's table. Oh, you sure showed him. Well, this dog, he's not having it, he jumps the fence and runs after her -- what's up now, bitch? At one point, she climbs over a tall fence and you figure that's the end of the line for the Doberman. Nah man, this dog, he walks up to the fence, looks it over, does the calculations in his dog brain, backs up a couple yards, runs and fuckin' parkours that goddamn fence. This dog rules. Even when she hides inside the killer's Underground Room of Murder Planning, that dog still manages to find a way to get to a window(!) to show her that he hasn't given up. The Doberman can't be bargained with, it can't be reasoned with. It doesn't feel pity, remorse, or fear and it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are bitten numerous times. That's what he does, that's all he does! The actor who plays Peter Neal had this slightly George Takei-esque way of pronunciation that I'm going to probably mimic for the next few days in everyday life. What else, oh yeah, pretty much all the women in this film are attractive in a They Probably Don't Shave kinda way, even this flashback sequence chick who's pretty hot for having a dick and balls in real life. The title more or less translates as Darkness, so naturally Argento had his cinematographer blast everything with bright light, thinking he was trying out some daring shit but ultimately giving the proceedings a look reminiscent of low-budget Mexican genre films. The camerawork is still aces, though, especially that There's-No-Reason-To-Do-It-This-Way-Except-That-It's-So-Fucking-Cool shot where the camera starts at one end of a house, goes over the roof, then ends up on the other side; Johnny La Rue would've killed for that kind of crane shot. This is one of my favorite Argento flicks, the print looked great (it came from Australia) and I'm pretty sure nothing was missing since this wasn't the U.S. "Unsane" edit of the movie.
I'm going to add a couple new things here. I'm still going on with my Argento-fascinated-by-alternative-lifestyles deal, so here we go; at one point in the film, an interviewer brings up how Neal's latest book displays a point-of-view on how "deviant behavior" affects our lives, pointing out that one of the "deviants" is gay, which Neal immediately responds with something to the effect of "the character is gay, but he's portrayed as being perfectly happy" and that it doesn't make him a deviant.
It's like Argento is saying that sometimes how we perceive art doesn't mean that's how the artist intended it to be perceived. We bring our own beliefs and baggage to it, and yet we'll condemn the artist for something he or she never thought. So, one can see an Argento film and the women being killed in them as being the product of a misogynistic mind, or one sees the appearance of a gay character in his films as being some kind of judgment call on that particular lifestyle. Doesn't necessarily mean that, though.
Kinda like how I'm seeing all these trans and gay people pop up in his films and I'm thinking more like, maybe he's just intrigued by it. Or maybe he's disgusted by it. Or maybe he's turned on by it. Who knows but the man himself (and maybe his loved ones)? I don't know what I'm talking about anymore, I've been writing this all night, I have to get ready for work in an hour, and I'm so goddamn tired. I just want to post this today before the 20th, otherwise if I finish then, that means by the time I get to the bar it's going to be packed with decent human beings getting fucked up and burying their faith in their fellow man or woman, sitting on my favorite seat and drinking up all the Maker's Mark. Then where am I supposed to sit? What am I supposed to drink? Which girl am I going to drunkenly wink at before the inevitable drink-in-face? FUCK THAT SHIT ESE. I'll finish today.
After one final break, the lights came down and we saw trailers for Demons(co-written and produced by Argento) and Two Evil Eyes (directed by Argento and George A. Romero), then I decided to make a run for the restroom because the Red Bull I drank during Tenebrae was fuckin' done with me, but as I left, I recognized the Swiss countryside and 1.66:1 aspect ratio as belonging to Phenomena -- except the title card said Creepers, meaning this was the shorter U.S. cut. When I returned, the lights were back on and the screen was blank, so I'm guessing there was a technical issue. A few seconds later, the light went down and the movie came up and everything was A-OK again.
Like Tenebrae, I had seen this at the New Beverly before at the very first All Night Horror Show back in 2008. Unfortunately for lazy me, I didn't have a blog yet back then, so I didn't ramble about this movie or that evening. I'll just have to ramble about the flick here.
Some girl is killed in the first five minutes, and she's played by Dario Argento's daughter Fiore, because Dario is on some Stuart Gordon shit by killing off loved ones in his films, I guess. Then Jennifer Connelly steps in, she's the star, and wow, man, wow. I'm not gonna get all pervy because she was underage at the time, so I'll just imagine that if a girl who looked like her went to my junior high school, I would definitely ask her out in my imagination while saying nothing to her in reality because being rejected sucks.
Jennifer Connelly plays Jennifer Corvino, a movie star's daughter who is a new student at a Swiss boarding school, and the knives and claws are out for our girl because these other girls are some low self-esteem-having motherfuckers who are threatened by this beautiful newcomer. When it comes out that she's a sleepwalker and a bug-lover (not in *that* way, you ass, she thinks of bugs the way I think of dogs and cats -- they are more deserving of love than most humans), I was surprised Dario didn't have the girls drool over this new tender spot in her soul to flick at.
By the way, that second thing of hers, the bug thing, it appears that the bugs love her back; they won't sting or bite her and even a firefly will help her walk through a dark forest.
My most Corvino-esque moment in my youth was when I was in the first grade and during recess, some of my fellow students were gathered around the sandbox, where they had trapped a few ladybugs and were stabbing them with sticks. (Of course, they were all boys.) They were laughing and MWAHAHAHA-ing the way most of Argento's villains laugh and MWAHA, and it really brought me down. But even back then I knew not to protest because they would then do to me what these fucking asshole Swiss boarding school students do to precious Jennifer (she's so precious); incessantly mock her in the manner that only the heartless young (a redundancy, I know) can.
Thankfully, Precious Jennifer finds a friend in a wheelchair'd Donald Pleasence, and luckily he's an entomologist, so they can both geek out about insects. There's definitely a kind of grandfatherly vibe coming from him, and I liked watching their scenes together. I've only seen the longer Phenomena cut once back in '99, so I can't remember if there were more scenes between them, but the Creepers cut did leave me wanting more of that. Hell, I would've been fine with a movie that was just about their friendship.
But this is Dario Argento we're talking here, baby! And if the way these films were programmed that night tells us anything, it's that home-paisan has been getting nuttier and nuttier over the years with his stories. No way is he going to start dialing it down to something like a movie about two friends who bond over insects, no fucking way! No way Jose.
Instead, there's someone or something out there, man, out there in the forest, and whatever it is, it sure loves getting head from schoolgirls -- which is to say, he murders them and leaves behind their severed heads. Wait. Actually, my attempt at telling one of the hackiest R-rated jokes ever in the history of hacky R-rated jokes makes no sense at all. He takes the bodies, he ain't getting head. He doesn't want it.
Shit, maybe the Germans were right not to laugh.
I've heard that this is Argento's favorite of his films; I'd have to watch the longer cut again to confirm, but what I remember from that one and what I do remember from the Creepers cut definitely makes it one of my favorites. My only quibble would be this: I like heavy metal and I like Dario Argento movies, but I was never a big fan of the both of them combined, which he does here and in Opera.
It's a slow burner but by the end, Phenomena/Creepers goes completely off its rocker and if you're not digging it, then you're not digging vida, my friend. When this played at the first All Night Horror Show, it was the first film of the night and the audience loved it. They were particularly big on Inga The Chimpanzee With A Prolapsed Anus, for reasons I won't give away, but yeah, her scenes were real crowd-pleasers. It played just as well with this audience too, who were a little more muted and slow to respond in comparison, probably because it was already around six in the morning and everybody was tired, but by the last ten minutes, everybody was up and jacked up by the cine-meth supplied by the film's climax.
By 7:30 am, we had reached the end of the Dario Argento All Nighter.
Those of us who made it to the end (quite a few, actually) were rewarded with this coffee mug:
My girlfriend-less buddy and I then went to Little Dom's in Los Feliz to try out their breakfast pizza, because I saw it on a rerun of "The Best Thing I Ever Ate" on the Cooking Channel. You know the Cooking Channel, right? If there's an actor you haven't seen in a while, he or she is probably hosting a show on that channel. Because suddenly everybody is a fucking chef now.
Despite your greatest efforts, sometimes the hate builds up and you'll be surprised where you decide to relieve yourself of it. Turns out that this time, I'm going to evacuate all over this fucking La La Land movie, which I've heard nothing but wonderful things about. But I'm telling you in complete honesty, dear reader, that when the trailer popped up with Emma Stone singing a lovely sad tune over beautifully magical looking footage of her and Ryan Gosling in Los Angeles, a mantra formed in my mind and I repeated it non-stop until the clip ended: FUCK YOU MOVIE
No man, really. Fuck this movie. Fuck watching the trials and tribulations of two young good-looking White people in a city full of minorities who have some real shit going on and it's only going to get shittier and that's not counting the piece of human garbage -- Human Nature incarnate! -- who is going to run this fucking country in a few weeks. I don't need and I don't want. Not this fucking movie.
And I'm sure it's great, this movie. And I'm sure it will win Best Picture. It might even deserve it more than the last magical Oscar-winning film that had people come out of the cinema tiptoeing on air after having seen it: The Artist. I do not believe in words like "overrated" and "underrated", at least not in a serious manner, because they are douchebag words. Yes, I am a douchebag too but even I have my limits and those words are among them. Because those words, what they really mean is "everybody else is stupid for liking/disliking this, but not me" and I'm not down with that kind of belief. So I would not use "overrated" to describe The Artist but I would definitely say that I wish I experienced what everybody else experienced upon watching that non-experience of an experience.
ARGH! I'm being irrational but I'm letting it happen. I don't want to watch White People Fall In Love In Browntown. So sue me. Then there were other trailers, but the last one was for Passengers starring Chris Pratt and Jennifer Lawrence and again, I'm supposed to give a shit about two good-looking honkeys -- in the future, no less! -- FUCK DAT CHIT MANG FUCK EM ALL I BURY THOSE COCK-A-ROACHES ALL THE SAFETY PINS IN THE WORLD WILL NOT MAKE ME FEEL LESS FLOWING OF FIRE WITH YOU MOTHERFUCKERS no sir I will not see that movie either.
The worst part is knowing I would've been so down to see this movie had it come out last year.
But then the movie started, this movie I paid to see: Hacksaw Ridge. Because what I needed to see was lots of White people from the days when America Was Great die horrible fucking deaths in a war of which one of the major players was a cunt who convinced a country that he would make it great again if only we got rid of certain people who were bringing it down. Thank God that we learned from that and we will never make that mistake again because human beings are good that way.
And oh my brothers, it was beautiful. Guts and severed heads and flaming bodies and entrails and limbs and tears and plasma and morphine all over the place and BLOOOOOOOD so much blood it got my dick hard but because I'm not Mel Gibson I did not have pre-cum form at the tip. I suspect with Mel, it goes a little farther, he probably went a little gooey with all this violence.
Yeah, Mel Gibson directed this and I wish he hadn't been born with the trifecta of mental illness + alcoholism + being raised by a father with fucked-up beliefs and the eagerness to upload them. Then maybe I wouldn't have to wear a hat, sunglasses, and raincoat with the collar up just to work up the nerve to buy a ticket to his works nowadays. I mean, Mad Max aside, I really don't give a fuck about seeing him act in more movies but holy shit I want him to keep directing because the motherfucker knows how.
So this movie is about a real life guy named Desmond Doss -- and not once in this film does anyone call him "Double D" which I sure would had I known him. He's played by Andrew Garfield, who I only know from The Social Network and Never Let Me Go, because I sure as fuck wasn't going to waste my time on those fucking non-Raimi Spider-Man movies, no sir-fuckin-ree.
He's really good in this film, playing a kind of aw-shucks sometimes goofy sometimes creepy simple bumpkin-esque Seventh-day Adventist who is big of heart and strong of faith. His beliefs are so strong, that he takes that commandment about not killing seriously. Doss will run far away, as far away from the concept of taking life as possible, all the way to becoming a combat medic so he can save lives in the war.
This poor dumb son-of-a-bitch signs up to go overseas for some WW2 non-killing only to find out that the United States Army doesn't take kindly to the idea of him serving his country Conscientious Objector style. The funny thing is, neither does Doss; he prefers to call himself a "conscientious cooperator", because he doesn't object to the war -- a war that he agrees is one against Evil -- he just won't touch a rifle. His fellow recruits show their understanding of his beliefs by beating the fuck out of him.
I guess I can try to see where these guys are coming from because they're looking at it, like, if this goofy-looking motherfucker won't pick up a rifle there's no way he can watch my back. A motherfucker like him is a motherfuckin' liability and I'm tired of these motherfuckin' liabilities on this motherfuckin' plane!
But goddamn, you really want to convince this guy by hurting him enough to change his mind? Well, what can you do? We're talking about a generation of boys who grew up getting whippings every day for even looking at their old mans the wrong way -- and that's probably right after the old man just smacked dear old mom for overcooking the pot roast. This is what they know.
(And in the old man's defense, this is the second time she burned dinner.)
Doss' drill sergeant is played by Vince Vaughn, who appears to be having a good time playing, because that's what it comes off as: playing. I mean, his ability is evidently not ability enough to convince me. I'm sorry, Mr. Vaughn, you're fun to watch but really the only thing you can convince me of is that you're probably in real life a charming quick-witted type who can turn into a hot-tempered asshole in a second, and you're lucky this wasn't made fifteen years ago because then Tom Sizemore would've been playing this part and he would've been a hell of a lot better at it.
On the other hand, you also have homeboy from Avatar here as Vaughn's superior and it's probably the best performance he's given yet.
Since this is some real life true story shit, I am confident that I am not spoiling shit by telling you that Doss was awarded the Medal of Honor for saving 75 soldiers during the battle at the titular ridge -- and he did it without even firing a single bullet. (It gets even crazier; in real life, Doss claimed he saved 50 while his superior said it was 100, so they compromised with 75 -- which says a lot about a guy like Doss and the rest of us credit-inflating assholes.)
The first half of the film focuses on Doss' life back home; everything during this part of the movie has a kind of cheap-ish nostalgia-glow that made me feel like I was watching something on ION or UP or Hallmark. I kept expecting Lacey Chabert or Lori Loughlin to show up somewhere, as some kind of career gal on the rise who discovers there's more to life than making money, there's also the spirit of Christmas or something. (Instead there's Teresa Palmer as Doss' sweetheart.)
I think the filmmakers decided to use up most of the budget on the second half, because gore and explosions ain't cheap, son. I gotta give it up to Gibson, he might be the last horror filmmaker around to keep it real with the violence. I mean, there is some CGI blood used here and there but I swear it seemed like mostly old-school prosthetics were used. I stuck around during the closing credits looking for Tom Savini's name somewhere, but nope, nothing.
That "horror filmmaker" part is only partly a joke; the second hour is a horror movie that can stand tall with Fury and Saving Private Ryan when it comes to imagery that would get an NC-17 in a slasher or zombie joint but because this is Real Life somehow it gets a pass from the ratings board. There's also one moment among the moment-filled battle that gave me a jump scare in such a way, man, scary movies haven't made me jump like that in forever. That part kinda reminded me of something that happened in Mad Max 2, leaving me to wonder if that was some kind of weird shout-out to George Miller. I wouldn't put it past Mel, the fuckin' nut.
As for how the Japanese are presented here, well, they were the enemy back then and so they're the enemy in this film. This isn't Letters from Iwo Jima, but the gruesome violence and its after effects seem to be dwelled upon the Americans more than the Japanese, and Doss appears to -- as it has been documented -- find all life precious, not just Yankee life. So I guess that's as even-handed as it was ever going to get in this film.
Unlike fellow two-act war movie Stripes and like fellow two-act war movie Full Metal Jacket, this one maintains quality from beginning to end. It's kind of fascinating the way it veers back-and-forth between hokey gosh-gee-willikers sentiment and dark-as-the-dickens grim imagery. It feels like constantly changing the channel between two different war movies on television -- a dated red-white-and-blue rah-rah joint from the 50s and a cynical war-is-Hell movie made today. It's that inconsistency of tone that keeps Hacksaw Ridge from being Apocalypto levels of Fucking Awesome in the Gibson auteur oeuvre but it's still Pretty Fucking Good.
Oh, real quick before I wrap this up: Agent Smith from The Matrix is in this and he plays Doss' papa. His character served in WWI and the experience left him a drunk who never hesitated to whip his sons or give his wife shit in the following years, and yet he's not a complete son-of-a-bitch. There are moments where you see how much he sincerely loves his family (well, his sons at least - don't know where he stands on the missus) despite his overwhelming manner of being a Fuck. My favorite is his reaction to Doss' brother signing up for the military; he responds with some hard asshole-type words while struggling not to cry because it's absolutely breaking his heart. It was heartbreaking for me to watch.
I don't know about Doss' dad, but I gotta give total absolute props and respect to a guy like Desmond Doss. I hate to admit how much of a cynic I am, even when it comes to men who serve in the military but this is one of those cases where I would love to shake the hand of someone like Doss, but I'm not going to because Doss has been dead for ten years so who knows what the fuck I'd be shaking by now. A skeleton hand?
But here's a man whose faith in God was capital-L legit and with zero leeway for hypocritical actions. He didn't think he was better than others despite what the other soldiers thought, there's even a moment where he kinda freaks out at the possibility that his refusal to touch a weapon might come from pride rather than his love and respect of a higher power. Even after fact-checking and separating the Hollywood bullshit from reality, you'll see that this man put up with a lot of shit and did not buckle once. And he didn't deserve it, he put himself up for some genuine abuse before even getting to the action in Okinawa. Motherfucker was already under attack before going to war! I'm not that strong a person; if that were me, I probably would've given in and picked up a rifle -- which I would then use to fire rounds into every asshole who fucked my shit up during Basic Training.
I don't know. All I know is that in the end, when they showed real life footage Desmond Doss and others who served with him, I got teary eyed -- in particular when they showed one guy talking about how he had judged Doss wrong. This guy, he was talking about how he thought Doss to be worthless as a soldier but in the end he did more and showed more courage than anyone with a rifle could. Tears roll down his face as he says this, and I saw myself in this dude, in the way he was being judgmental and in the way he felt bad for being that way. Because I know I have those instincts and I'm finding myself fighting what feels like 20/20 vision when it comes to reading what looks to be the clearest writing on the biggest wall when it comes to my fellow humans.
But then you have guys like Doss who took so much shit and still had the goddamn magnanimity to risk his life for every one of these bastard-asshole-cunts. It made me think that maybe there are still people like that out there. And if they are still out there, then maybe we're not so fucked.
I'm still not going to see La La Land, though.
After it ended, I walked out of the auditorium and down the main aisle towards the nearest exit. I passed the concession stand where walking the opposite way were a group of girls in their late teens. One looked me over and then smiled and began giggling, then she leaned over to her friends and said something I couldn't hear. They then looked at me and began giggling and smiling. It felt great, to be honest with you. I then walked into the restroom to use the facilities. When I went to wash my hands of excess popcorn butter and salt before touching a sensitive area, I took a look at myself in the mirror. "Maybe you're not so bad looking", I thought to myself, "at least the teen girls dig you in a 'they don't know any better' kind-of-way". I then upgraded that hope into a sincere belief that "maybe the old man still has it". A couple fresh drops of water had splashed on my shirt, so I began drying them off with a paper towel. And that's when I noticed that my fly was wide open and a tuft of underwear peeking out of it. If I hadn't been blessed with such a small pecker, I'd probably have been locked up for indecent exposure. So I should at least be grateful for that.
In conclusion: as far as White people go, Doss was one of the good ones.
For as many years as this country has left, November 2016 will forever be known as the month that our very own The Adorable Amy Adams had two films released in which she had a starring role, and both of them have had Oscar buzz. Also this was the month where that other thing happened.
I finally made time to catch them both the other day at the Arclight Cinemas in Pasadena, where I tortured myself with the lovely scent of freshly made popcorn that I can't eat yet because of some recent dental work. I was able to eat an overly salted soft pretzel, though, which I'm sure gave me about a week's worth of sodium in one bite.
First, there was Nocturnal Animals, written and directed by (I Don't Pop Molly, I Rock) Tom Ford, adapted from a novel called "Tony and Susan" (which has now been retitled after the film because, well, money). The Triple A plays Susan, a well-off art gallery owner who is married to The Lone Ranger from The Social Network and has a daughter in college, but clearly she's not happy, despite living in an awesome house that's clearly populated by the damning evidence that the person occupying it has nothing but Good News in her bank account. But at least she's aware. Susan tells her friend that she feels bad about feeling bad, because she knows she has it good.
The scene where Susan confides in her friend? They're having a dinner party in that scene, and one of the guests is this young woman who is being cheerfully vulgar to the crowd, and we find out she's a famous actress. I'm going right ahead and assuming that character was a kind of swipe at Jennifer Lawrence, at least because she appears to be the Hot Actress Who Is Such A Regular Joe Like The Rest Of Us du jour, that's who I was reminded of. There is the occasional moment like that in this film -- all of them during the Susan art-world scenes -- that made me want to laugh out loud and e-mail Mr. Ford the Catty Motherfucker award.
Anyway, Susan receives a package in the mail from her ex-husband, containing the proof for his new novel. The name of the book is "Nocturnal Animals" and what's better than having the title of the movie said by someone in the movie? I'll tell you: having the title of the movie show up during the movie.
You mean, like in the credits?
Bitch, you know what the fuck I mean.
So she's reading the book, right, and luckily we don't follow each word she reads but instead we see it played out. The story begins with Donnie Darko from Nightcrawler taking his family on a road trip through West Texas. His wife is played by Isla Fisher aka The Australian Amy Adams, and that right there is why Tom Ford is my dude: he knows what's up. There's also a daughter played by quite possibly someone who was created in a machine using both Adams' and Fisher's DNA. He and his two Amys end up in a horrifying situation that took me off guard. I hadn't seen any trailers or ads for this on purpose, I just knew it was a Tom Ford joint and The Adorable Amy Adams was in it, all I expected was that it would probably look good.
Darko's family end pissing off a group of the kind of angry/cruel/irrational rednecks that would probably feel more at home angrily F-wording up the proceedings in a Rob Zombie film and you can tell these assholes are just looking for an excuse. It's possibly the most worked up (in a negative sense) I've gotten watching a film this year, I was feeling both tensed up and enraged. I swear a couple times I wanted to scream at the fucking movie screen. Plus, I was thinking, what the fuck, this is Texas and nobody has a gun? Isn't that the whole point of that fucking place -- that they're like their own little country that plays by its own rules and shit?
Ford's almost as sadistic as those characters, because right when you're all worked up and ready to see what's about to happen, the film cuts back to Susan taking a break from reading because the events in the book are working her up in a negative way too. (Also, she's seeing a lot of parallels between the characters in the book and Susan & Ex-Husband.) The novel then turns into something that feels like some Cormac McCarthy shit written in between chapters of "No Country for Old Men", and that's when Michael Shannon shows up and he is, to nobody's surprise, great in this.
Everybody is great in this, like Mr. Jake Gyllenhaal; this poor guy has been really putting himself out there every year to good notices and nothing else. The Academy finally gave an Oscar to DiCaprio, now they need to give it to Jakey G. here before he does something rash like cine-torture himself for Alejandro G. Innaritu. I don't know if it's going to happen for him this year, but Jesus, at least give him a Supporting nod because I think the dude deserves it for his work here.
I would be surprised if Amy Adams gets any kind of award recognition here. Because her character is more internal, that means all her beats have to be subtle, so hers is not a particularly showy performance and you know Oscar is kinda deaf and vision-impaired; they'll probably be able to make out Gyllenhaal but they'll be squinting their eyes and cupping their hands to their ears going "Whaaa?" at poor Amy. Whatever, she's always been bringing the quality goods to these proceedings, which is all that matters.
(Until she eventually wins, of course. Then it will be all that matters. Suddenly Oscars will mean everything.)
The film cuts between the novel, Susan reading it and doing her art gallery/unhappy-well-off-woman-in-her-40s thing, and flashbacks to when Susan and her ex-husband (also played by Gyllenhaal) were in their early 20s. That last part, the early 20s stuff, really tripped me out because there is some kind of movie magic being used here to make them look like they just finished promoting Junebug and Jarhead in '05. If there's CGI de-aging being used, then it's not as heavy as when they young'd up Robert Downey Jr. in Captain America: Civil War -- either that or the technology has improved that much over these past few months, because it looks a lot more natural.
I'm thinking it's a combination of aging up Adams (black clothes and caked on makeup) and Gyllenhall (thick ass beard) in the beginning, and then cleaning them up in the flashbacks with some light CGI work. Whatever the case, it's not just the wow factor of that shit that got me, but it worked because it really hit me how much happier and fresher the characters look because Life hadn't bent them over yet.
This is Ford's second film, following 2009's A Single Man (which I rambled about somewhere here) and like that film, this one is pretty goddamn good. (Like that one, this one isn't the feel good movie of the year either.) He wrote the screenplay adaptation and knocked that out, he gets good performances from his actors, he is clearly a big part of the visual look for this film -- a film so beautifully set designed and shot-composed, one could freeze-frame a random moment and frame it on a wall.
And man oh man, you can tell a Tom Ford joint from the others just on the fact that everybody here is so impeccably dressed and groomed. (Even the West Texas stuff gives everyone an artfully disheveled kind of look.) They all look like they stepped out of ads from a fashion magazine; as soon as I saw Armie Hammer step in for a giant glass of iced coffee in this movie, I'm thinking Fuck I Need That Suit I Need That Haircut.
LATE BREAKING UPDATE: EFC believes Tom Ford would make a stylish-as-fuck James Bond movie if they're cool with an American/Texan directing a 007 movie.
Also, there's two instances of Girls Wearing Glasses here, and in case you didn't know, that's like a thing I have. It's not a fetish, no sir, I don't need glasses to get hard or achieve orgasm, it's not that kind of party. I'm just saying it ups every lady's attractiveness quotient by like 10 percent for me. I can't explain it, it just is, dude. Like, if I had directed She's All That, it would've been about Laney putting those glasses back on after her makeover. Anyway, Susan puts on glasses sometimes to read the novel and then later on Jena Malone shows up in a pair of thick frames and that put a smile on my penis -- FACE! I MEAN IT PUT A SMILE ON MY FACE!
(The rest of you Gyllenhaals and Hammers can stick to contacts and laser eye surgery. No glasses for you. Nobody wants to see that shit. My eyes are Exit Only, bro.)
I hate this motherfucker Tom Ford, this man who already won at life long ago but then decided to become a filmmaker -- and he's great at it! At least so far he's great at it. Maybe next time he'll fall on his face and get to feel what it's like to be loser for once HAHAHAHAHAHA SUCK IT FORD
If you're into seeing naked obese women jumping around with firecrackers but you're not really interested in this film, then show Amy your support by buying a ticket for this movie, and then sit down and watch the first five minutes of this, then get up and walk over to Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them and watch that shit. I mean why not? They don't need your money, they're gonna make like 20 years worth of sequels for that shit. But I want to see more movies directed by Tom Ford and starring The Triple A, and that shit ain't happening unless some fuckin' cash is flowed into their current projects.
I then flowed some more money Ms. Adams' way while dealing out ducats in Denis Villeneuve's direction; the second half of my Triple A Double Feature was the aliens-are-here movie Arrival. Look, I get it -- there was no disrespect intended towards David Twohy and Charlie Sheen by giving their film the same title as theirs, they shot this as Story of Your Life which is the title of the Ted Chiang's short story it was based on. But I'm sure the studio suits were like Nah, Bro, Nah and so now we have these dueling Arrivals.
Except I think some respect was paid here, because the original film is titled The Arrival while this one eliminates the The. The filmmakers are saying "It's cool, we're Arrival but you guys are THE Arrival and no one will forget that." It's kind of like what they did with the Evil Dead remake a few years ago; they were Evil Dead but Sam Raimi's will always be THE Evil Dead.
Had I not known that this was from the director of Sicario and Prisoners, I would've thought this was a Terrence Malick joint early on. It has that same handheld shallow-focus personally close/personally distant look thing going on with narration over it, and I'm thinking, wow, has his style become like a thing now? Like I see even dudes like Zack Snyder and Christopher Nolan taking this style, and I'm afraid I'll get sick of it, the way I'm sick of zombies now. Meanwhile, much like George A. Romero, it seems like Malick is getting props as the originator while everybody else makes bank off of it. It's not fair, but whoever said this shit was?
So yeah, it opens with our Amy as Dr. Louise Banks, she's a linguist but she works for a living as a professor at a college, she's probably too busy to correct your grammar and all that shit online or at least I don't think she does. Or maybe that's just an English major thing, I don't know what Dr. Banks majored in, so who knows if she would correct your tweets and e-mails if she knew you.
Come to think of it, I don't even know if she has any friends, she just has a nice house by the lake -- oh shit, that reminds me, both her character in this film and her character in Nocturnal Animals share similarities in that they both hang their hats in nice pads and both have trouble sleeping. So there you go, it's the Amy Adams Lives In A Nice House And Can't Sleep double bill, ya'll,
Anyway, she lives alone in this nice lake house -- well, she lives alone *now* because in the beginning we watch her raise a kid until the kid becomes a pre-teen who then dies of some disease, so we're dealing with that heavy shit too.
But yeah, she lives alone, and she's so into her bubble that one day she's walking through the university while people around her are looking all weirded and freaked, but she doesn't notice this. She then walks into her class and wonders why there's like five people in this big room, then everybody's phones start to ring and she's like "Huh?" until she turns on the giant flat screen television behind the dry-erase board and that's when I went HUH?!
Bro, I missed all this good shit. In schools primary, secondary, and post-secondary, if we were gonna watch television for something in class, that shit had to be carted in on some big metal tv-stand shelf cart-thingy. And it was the square tube tv, too. Man, these kids today now have giant flat-screens to watch the world go ape-shit on? Lucky motherfuckers.
Or maybe not, because I was talking to my niece and nephew and they told me that at their schools they got rid of soda machines and sugary snacks and all that shit. The food is all health conscious stuff, and part of me is thinking that's a very good thing because we need to wean the future generations off of garbage that does nothing for you other than give you a brief moment of joy in this overcrowded sinking ship of a planet. And the other part of me is like, damn, so you kids missed out on insane lunches like Rice Krispies Treats washed down with a Dr. Pepper, which was one of my go-tos in high school. I'm really surprised I still have all ten fingers and toes, to be honest with you.
Anyway, so she finds out on the tv that giant spacecrafts have materialized out of nowhere, 12 in all, and they're hovering over different spots in the world. There's one chilling out over a field in Montana, USA and that's why Colonel Ghost Dog shows up to recruit her to join the Devil's Tower-meets-Tent City festivities out in that field to help them figure out how to communicate with the things inside and figure out what they want. She's joined by Marvel's Hawkeye, playing a scientist who's all about the math, so fuck that guy -- because math is the fastest way to remind me how stupid I am.
What your usual sci-fi action-adventure would spend about a couple minutes on, Arrival devotes its entire running time; the movie is all about trying to figure out how to figure out what these aliens are saying. They just want to be able to ask these things what is the purpose of their visit, business or pleasure? Of course, you have different ideas from different kinds of people; a couple of educated libtards like Dr. Banks and Hawkeye think it's more of a peaceful let's-help-each-other type of visit, while shadowy creepy CIA types like the dude from A Serious Man (not to be confused with Tom Ford's A Single Man) think these aliens are on some Independence Day type shit. Then you have Colonel Ghost Dog who is more of a I Don't Question Orders, I Just Follow Them type who just wants good enough answers from Banks and Hawkeye to give to his superiors. (He's also from a part of the country I haven't figured out yet; based on his accent here, he's either from Boston or Texas.)
Upon finding out that I was going to see this film, a buddy of mine who had already seen Arrival told me that he liked it and then we had the following text exchange:
See, my Good Friend here has my Amy Adams admiration figured out incorrectly, but I indulge him by responding in kind because that's what Good Friends do. You talk to me about Amy Adams like that and I'll indulge you too, you son-of-a-bitch bastard.
(To be honest, I felt like Ms. Adams needed to cover herself up during the bathtub scene in the Batman/Superman movie because there were plenty of men in the audience who were going to get the wrong idea about her. And we most certainly couldn't have that. She's a nice girl! Plus, I didn't want her to catch cold.)
I'm a sucker for scenes of Smart People Figuring Shit Out, like, my favorite scene in Apollo 13 was when all those nerds are gathered around a table and they're told they have to find a way to get one device to connect another device using only the various tools and junk on the table and Arrival is kinda like that scene. It's a slow-moving film but not boring, it's just they're taking baby steps in this one; the funny thing is even with a deliberate pace the film takes more than its share of shortcuts.
Like early on, when Banks and Hawkeye are taken on-board the ship to talk to the aliens, they go through this whole process of getting on a scissor lift that elevates them to the ship's entrance, then they hop off and let the ship's anti-gravity thingy carry them the rest of the way, where they then begin walking the rest of the vertical path like it ain't no thing. Then they get to this glass wall where the aliens are on the other side -- by the way, kudos for finding a way to give us aliens that don't follow the usual humanoid shape with big eyes and all that. They're kinda spider-y, kinda octopus-y, and they're both cool and scary at the same time.
By the time our scientists are boarding the ship for the first time, Ghost Dog and company have already gone through all of this, to the point that Ghost Dog shows no signs of excitement or tension or anything. He seems kinda bored by it. And I'm thinking, holy shit, that's a whole movie right there! Imagine what these guys went through at the very beginning of this -- and how long! -- how long did it take them to figure all that shit out about how to board the ship and deal with the anti-gravity and all that shit, before being all nonchalant about it by the time Banks and Hawkeye arrived? If I remember it right, it was about two days before Team Banks arrived. Two days! These boys had to have been working around the clock. And who was the lucky son-of-a-gun who took that first step onto that ship?
(They do carry a bird with them in a cage with every visit, placing it a few feet ahead of them. So maybe they should give that bird a medal of some kind. Or some quality newspaper for its cage.)
Anyway, that's what I mean by shortcuts. We'll never know that or how even in the brief period of time they are able to make the advances that they make and then I remind myself that it's a movie and that they only have so much time to tell this story before losing us all in the minutiae. Besides, that Cleveland Show-looking motherfucker Neil Degrasse-Tyson would shit all over it on Twitter (if he hasn't already) on how much they got wrong while never understanding that all the degrees and smarts in the fucking galaxy will not help him reach the self-awareness required to step back for a couple seconds and say to himself "Neil, you are doing a lot of good for humanity by stressing the importance of knowledge -- in particular in the fields of science and reason. We need a lot more of that in a world drowning in superstition. But dude, you are a thin-skinned asshole who thinks he's fucking hilarious, and that, sir, is not a good combo."
No sir, a good combo is Amy Adams and Denis Villeneuve. Arrival is a heavy-on-the-science sci-fi joint with some surprising emotion popping up here and there. It features a great performance by The Triple A, but, oh Amy, I'm sorry but you're probably not getting any Oscar gold with this one either. I'm thinking about it, and I'm realizing that she ends up doing a lot of acting by herself, which has to be one of the hardest things for an actor. I think I mentioned this on the blog a while back, but there is what I call the Robert Forster school of acting, named after one of my favorite actors who will never win an award because his stuff is so subtle and within and I already told you how the Academy gets down with performances like that. And I think for these two back-to-back performances, she took a brush-up course at that school.
Also, it does that movie thing that Kiss Kiss Bang Bang made fun of, where if a shot lingers on a nameless character a little too long after the fact, like the cook in The Hunt for Red October, you can bet the fuckin' Brinks truck that Chekov's Extra is going to pop up in some plot-changing shit later, you just fucking know, bro!
As for the ending, I liked it but I can see how it would piss off others. It's not a twist, by the way, at least not in my book (pre-orders available now!), just a revelation that some people have issues with, either for logical reasons or whatever else they have a bug up their asses about. I dug it. It kinda reminded me of the ending to -- well, shit, it reminds me of the endings to a lot of things, to be real with you.
OK, I'll mention one of them -- Runaway Train, and I feel comfortable saying that one without feeling that I spoiled something because you will not be able to figure out the connection. You would need to invite me to an expensive dinner that you will pay for, and it would have to be after I've had at least half of that meal before I explain to you how I feel that both this film and Runaway Train have similar endings. They all have to do with Free Will, I'll give you that much/little.
(Also, they are both similar in that this film also features a scene where Amy Adams is shouting out of a runaway train screaming at an evil warden in a helicopter above her while sticking her middle finger at him, in between taking slugs out of Eric Roberts' flask, saying "sucka" in every other sentence.)
It was a morning/afternoon well spent at the Arclight Pasadena. I don't know if they do this for all the movies at the Arclight, but for both Arrival and Nocturnal Animals there was a clip before each film telling us that after the credits there would be some extra behind-the-scenes stuff. They were each about five minutes or so; the Nocturnal Animals one featured Gyllenhaal and Ford and it focused on how the ending could be interpreted, while the Arrival one featured Ms. Adams doing her impersonation of her French-Canadian director -- which I of course found delightful. I appreciated these little extras, called "Arclight Stories" because they allow you to stick around after the credits for other reasons aside from finding out if there are any hints about what the next Marvel film is going to be about.
Nocturnal Animals or Arrival? You can't go wrong with either one, whether you're an Amy Adams fan or a fan of good movies. But I get it. You have kids, or just like Dwayne Johnson so much, you just have to see Moana, right? It's cool. I mean, you can go fuck your mother, but it's cool.
Posts
