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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Late to the Game: Star Trek

2009 (USA)
Director: J. J. Abrams
Viewed: November 24, 2009
Format: Blu-ray - Paramount (2009)

With his reboot of the moribund Star Trek franchise, J. J. Abrams has chucked out the moralizing and paper-thin social allegory that characterized Gene Rodenberry’s original series and delivered something closer to a Buck Rogers-style swashbuckling space opera.  Abrams is keenly aware that for Trekkies and casual viewers alike, the iconic characters are always what lent the series its endurance. His tactic is to transplant those characters into a rollicking adventure, while retaining the physics mumbo-jumbo and desperate gambits that have always been the franchise’s bread-and-butter.  The film is also an arch variant on the “Getting the Team Together” formula, as Kirk, Spock, McCoy, et al. are slotted into place for their syndicated television destiny.  Predictably, the elaborate, time-hopping plot is only sketchily conveyed, and without William Shatner’s hammy presence, it is shockingly evident (to this non-Trekkie) that James T. Kirk was always a bit of an asshole.  Still, Star Trek is dazzling, giddy stuff, a complete re-purposing of a pop culture institution for distinctly old school cinematic thrills, complete with black holes, monstrous aliens, and doomsday weapons.  If Abrams’ only goal was to render Starfleet officers as the badass successors of pirates and cowboys, then mission accomplished.

Film Diary: Alien

1979 (UK / USA)
Director: Ridley Scott
Viewed: October 30, 2009
Format: Theatrical Print (Webster University Moore Auditorium)

Things That Go Bump

Paranormal Activity
2007 (USA)
Director: Oren Peli
Viewed: October 27, 2009
Format: Theatrical Print (St. Louis Cinemas Moolah Theater)

Ever since The Blair Witch Project slithered into theaters in 1999 to become the most profitable movie of all time, audiences have been periodically subjected to horror films that attempt to replicate various aspects of its formula, evidently with the hope that this will lead to a similar windfall.  The staggering hype and backlash that attended Blair Witch’s somewhat unexpected success—not to mention a subsequent decade of dispiriting decline in horror cinema—seem to have obscured an obvious truth.  Namely, that much of the attention surrounding Blair Witch was driven by its astonishingly slick marketing campaign, one that gave viewers the impression that this fictional film was comprised of authentic found footage. The problem, of course, is that the public can theoretically be punked only once, and for this reason alone Blair Witch would seem to be a once-in-a-lifetime sort of phenomenon.  Granted, there have been some satisfyingly scary attempts to rebottle the lightning, most notably the Spanish zombie thriller [•REC], but there seems to be little likelihood of a Blair Witch successor emerging when the original so ruthlessly exploited (and demolished) the credulity of contemporary horror film-goers.

Nonetheless, this hasn’t deterred enthusiastic boosters from bestowing that dubious honorific on a little ghost story entitled Paranormal Activity.  And I do mean little.  Writer-director Oren Peli, shooting the entire film in his own house on a notoriously anemic budget of $15,000, has doubled-down on the notion that a horror movie doesn’t have to be grandiose, polished, or even artful to be frightening (and I mean that in the best possible way).  With a video camera, two actors, one location, and a few post-production flourishes, Peli delivers a post-Blair Witch take on the familiar haunted house scenario. With these limitations in mind, I’m inclined to be generous when assessing a film like Paranormal Activity, which is essentially a horror movie at its most elemental, a contraption designed to evoke terror.  Only one question truly matters: Is it scary?  The honest answer is, “Not really, but…”

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Quick Review: The Baader-Meinhof Complex (Der Baader Meinhof Komplex)

2008 (Germany)
Director: Uli Edel
Viewed: September 29, 2009
Format: Theatrical Print

Uli Edel’s blood-spattered marathon retelling of the Red Army Faction’s rise and fall succeeds at establishing a fitting mood of social disintegration and open intra-cultural warfare.  Feverishly tearing through two decades of history while piling on endless, brutal setpieces, The Baader-Meinhof Complex foregrounds thrills and atmosphere, while neglecting character and context.  Writer Bernd Eichinger, who scribed the captivating Downfall, at least acknowledges the notion that the RAF was the ugly endpoint of the post-Nazi generation’s recoil from fascism.  The violent radicals depicted in Complex, however, are caricatures of unquenchable rage, not the best proxies for psychological delvings or an exploration of the origins of revolutionary zeal in affluent societies.  What Edel delivers is a relentless film that works primarily as grim entertainment, albeit one that non-Germans may have difficult absorbing, as the historical arcana come fast and furious.  Yet even as a depiction of revolution as process, Complex falls far short of last year’s mesmerizing Che, which was both more artistically daring and more coherent.  While Edel is adept at conjuring the madhouse spirit of the RAF’s murderous glory days, Complex is undemanding globetrotting drama at bottom, a grueling thriller with a dash of chilly Teutonic style.

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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Bros on Film

Humpday
2009 (USA)
Director: Lynn Shelton
Viewed: July 29, 2009
Format: Theatrical Print

The aesthetic markers of the mumblecore current in independent film—handheld digital video, scruffy lighting and sound, improvised dialog, nonprofessional actors—have always seemed less essential than its scorched earth approach to the fertile comedy ground of socially awkward interpersonal situations.  Mumblecore’s acolytes seem to accept, as an uncontroversial given, that everything will not turn out for the best, contra Hollywood’s usual comedic offerings.  There’s no gleefulness or operatic lustiness to this claim, as in the Coens.  Rather, what emerges is a kind of woeful acquiescence to the fact that human beings will screw up everything good in their lives, usually out of narcissism.  It’s a bleak sentiment to be sure, but the better filmmakers can hew to this worldview while rendering the painful amusing and the amusing painful.  Lynn Shelton’s deliciously discomfiting Humpday, the latest offering that might reasonably be tagged with the mumblecore descriptor, is a fine example of a comedy that follows every jot of human unpleasantness while maintaining the spirited tone of an outrageous, notorious anecdote.  Its Motel 6 production values are a perfect fit, but Humpday’s comedy is genuine, and not dependent on indie scuzziness for its street cred.

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