Gateway Cinephiles

Film Diary: Black Mama, White Mama

1973 (USA / Philippines)
Director: Eddie Romero
Viewed: February 19, 2010
Format: DVD - MGM (2001)

The hallmarks of a sexy, scuzzy Women-in-Prison feature–including a gratuitous shower scene complete with frolicking, and hard-assed lesbian guards in ridiculously short shorts–are pretty much dispensed with in the first fifteen minutes of Black Mama, White Mama.  What remains is an exploitation The Defiant Ones, as Pam Grier and Margaret Makov (the former a working girl, the latter a freedom fighter of some sort) scurry from one ludicrous set piece to another.  This is a straight-up Z-movie guilty pleasure, just the sort thing one can imagine a teenage Quentin Tarantino devouring.  It’s a shame director Romero was so enamored with tedious gunfights, as it gives him less time to indulge in the loathsome weirdness that is the film’s real appeal.  The torch-bearer of BMWM’s oddities is undoubtedly genre fixture Sig Haig, as a creepy, strangely high-spirited bounty hunter in a Jim Croce ’stache, whose choice of wardrobe and automobile are best described as “Roy Rogers on LSD.”  That’s him above.  Just take a moment to savor that shirt.  Truth be told, I spent the better part of this film trying to puzzle out where the hell it’s supposed to take place.  The vague “island” setting seems, at different times, to be somewhere in Hawaii, Cuba, Puerto Rico, or Vietnam.  Between the Spanish-speaking Asian gangsters and the stray police uniform patch with the word “Manila” stitched onto it, I eventually tumbled to the fact that we are, indeed, in the Philippines.  Such is the way of cheap, sleazy films bound for grindhouses the world over.

Film Diary: Black Caesar

1973 (USA)
Director: Larry Cohen
Viewed: February 19, 2010
Format: DVD - MGM (2001)

Perhaps the most valuable lesson to be learned from Black Caesar is this: Do Not Fuck With Fred Williamson. Not only can the man take a bullet in the gut and keep on coming for your traitorous ass, he will, as the above screenshot demonstrates, beat you within an inch of your life with a shoe-shine kit.  I had been aware of ex-football star Williamson primarily from Italian dreck like Warrior of the Lost World and his campy performance in From Dusk Till Dawn.  Little did I know that he had a significant career as a blaxploitation leading man, a career that this film kicked off.  Intriguingly, many of Black Caesar’s elements crop up in Scarface, and especially in Goodfellas (including that aforementioned shine-box, which a corrupt cop uses to humiliate Williamson before it is turned on him as a weapon).  Do you think that DePalma or Scorsese would ever cop to cribbing slightly from the fellow who directed Q, It’s Alive, and The Stuff?  And by the by, that James Brown soundtrack? Pure gold.

Film Diary: Vanishing Point

1971 (USA / UK)
Director: Richard C. Sarafian
Viewed: January 31, 2009
Format: Netflix Instant Queue (via Playstation 3)

Vanishing Point definitely plays like a work from another era, in the worst and best sense.   The “Can’t Drive 55″ spirit that the film seizes upon–which it shares with the much zanier The Cannonball Run–unfortunately dates the film as an artifact from an era when a national speed limit was a hot political button.  That said, what’s most appealing about Vanishing Point is how eagerly and even joyously it strives to present a generous, oddball-ridden slice of early 1970s America.  The on-location shooting lends it a documentary look and texture, but the characters are so deliberately out-there, it never feels remotely like realism.  I mean, c’mon: the naked biker girl; the faith healers; the blind, black DJ in a shitheel desert town; the old rattlesnake catcher who turns up out of nowhere?  Delicious stuff, if you can stand it.  And for all the hurtling cars, this strangely-placed, slow-motion shot of a basket of snakes flying through the air is what most caught my eye.

I took a bit of a breather on the posting during January, but more reviews and other items will be coming soon.

Smoke and Mirrors

The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus
2009 (UK / Canada / France)
Director: Terry Gilliam
Viewed: January 17, 2009
Format: Theatrical Print (Landmark Theaters Tivoli Theater)

When it comes to Terry Gilliam films, I wouldn’t say that the only attraction is their design, but I’d be kidding myself if I denied that the essential allure of a new Gilliam feature is the look of the thing.  Those occasions when Gilliam has mated his distinctive mode of fantasy—part Victorian / Edwardian stagecraft, part comic strip zaniness—to a compelling set of characters, the result is tongue-in-cheek gold, as in Time Bandits and The Adventures of Baron Munchausen.  (His two dystopian science-fiction films, Brazil and Twelve Monkeys, are equally great, but vibrate to an entirely different frequency.)  Gilliam’s new feature, The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, is a weird bauble that fits snugly into oeuvre, yet like all of the director’s weaker efforts, it’s also a mess from a storytelling perspective.  It’s debatable how much of that can be blamed on the regrettable death of his leading man, Heath Ledger, and how much on Gilliam’s own hand, but it’s also telling that Imaginarium is disjointed tonally and narratively.  At its worst, Imaginarium plays out less like a film and more like a book of concept art that has been inelegantly cobbled together into a film.  There’s something more than a little perverse about a film-maker with such palpable thematic interest in myth-making but who nonetheless has a hard time finding a foothold in his own tale.

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Now We Are All Sons of Bitches

Inglourious Basterds
2009 (USA / Germany / France)
Director: Quentin Tarantino
Viewed: August 21, 2009
Format: Theatrical Print

I really should know better at this point.  My reaction upon hearing of an upcoming Quentin Tarantino film is reliably a mixture of excitement and trepidation.  When I think about it for more than a moment, however, this response seems disgracefully childish, if completely understandable.  I was one of countless thirty-somethings whose early appreciation of independent American film was driven primarily by Tarantino’s first two films, Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction.  Consequently, my responses to his subsequent films are tinted by an unfortunate reactionary urge, whispering at me to contrast his latest feature with the Real Tarantino on bombastic display in Dogs and Fiction.  Of course, this is monstrously unfair.  Tarantino has grown significantly as a director in the past fifteen years, parlaying his success as the American wunderkind of thrilling, densely referential cinema into ever more ambitious works.  Even as he refined the familiar stylistic trappings that are comfortable for him (the “how,” if you will), he has tackled increasingly challenging stories and themes (the “what”).  With a little effort, I’ve shaken off my blinkered way of looking at Tarantino’s post-Fiction output.  What’s more, I’ve come to regard Kill Bill Volume II and Death Proof as among most vital works of American cinema in the past five years.  And so here we are with Inglourious Basterds, Tarantino’s answer to the World War II film.  And damn if it doesn’t exhibit every sign of continuing the director’s recent arc of daring, socially aware films that triumph as both giddy entertainments and bracing studies of desperately held cultural values.

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The End Is Near

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
2009 (UK / USA)
Director: David Yates
Viewed: July 22, 2009
Format: Theatrical Print

It seems safe to say at this late date that pining for a rigorously faithful adaptation of a Harry Potter novel is an exercise in fanboy/fangirl futility.  Devotees of the Potter series–and I count myself among that ubiquitous club–are inevitably better off appreciating each new cinematic incarnation as a freestanding indulgence of a dense and often daring fantasy aesthetic.  More substantively, and with varying success, each Potter film has attempted to evoke a distinctive tone and set of themes, an endeavor that has always been constrained by the fact that each film is but a small segment in an epic saga.  The visual excitement that Alfonso Cuarón brought to Prisoner of Azkaban has not yet been matched, and for a time it seemed as though Mike Newell’s adept juggling of Goblet of Fire’s pubescent terrors–physical, emotional, sexual, and existential–would also prove to be a high point.  Fortunately for the series’s long-term relevancy, director David Yates has bested all his predecessors save Cuarón with the thrilling Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, and that includes himself.  Although Yates rose to the occasion in delivering a satisfactory Order of the Phoenix two years ago, the result was in some ways disappointing. Phoenix often seemed a hodgepodge of scenes that lacked both cohesion and dramatic propulsion, with the notable exception of the terrifying climactic battle in the Department of Mysteries.  As a storyteller, Yates exhibits a significant evolution with Prince, evincing a clear understanding for the source material’s most affecting narrative arcs: Malfoy’s torment, Slughorn’s shame, and the overdue germination of love between Ron and Hermione. At the same time, the director demonstrates a deft handling of mood, alternately evoking giddy joy and chilling horror without subjecting his audience to whiplash.  In other words, Half-Blood Prince does fantasy adventure exactly as it should be done.

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It Burns, Burns, Burns

Drag Me to Hell
2009 (USA)
Director: Sam Raimi
Viewed: June 7, 2009
Format: Theatrical Print

Horror films with a camp sensibility are a dime a dozen, but outright giddy horror is a much more elusive creature.  In his much-ballyhooed return to the form after a seventeen-year hiatus (if we disregard 2002’s The Gift), director Sam Raimi delivers the latter species in Drag Me to Hell, a wicked delight so gratifyingly realized that calling it a “genre exercise” seems faint praise.  While its title suggests exploitation schlock in the vein of Die Screaming, Marianne and I Spit on Your Grave, the trappings of Raimi’s film are standard occult thriller fare.  The tone, however, summons forth the nightmarish, absurdist character that was previously endemic to the Evil Dead films.  Also evident is the bleak, even malevolent worldview that emerges from Raimi’s smaller (read: non-Spider-man) films, from Darkman to A Simple Plan.  Exhibiting both tremendous confidence and a ravenous appetite for unholy fun, Drag Me to Hell deserves better than a soft-mouthed label like “tribute” or “throwback.”  Let’s be clear: It’s a damn fine horror film in every way.

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Film Diary: The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters

2007 (USA)
Director: Seth Gordon
Viewed: June 4, 2009
Format: DVD - New Line (2008)

Film Diary: Deep Water

2006 (UK)
Directors: Louise Osmond and Jerry Rothwell
Viewed: June 4, 2009
Format: DVD - IFC (2007)

Film Diary: Synecdoche, New York

2008 (USA)
Director: Charlie Kaufman
Viewed: April 4, 2009
Format: Blu-Ray- Sony (2009)