Gateway Cinephiles

Film Diary: In The Loop

2009 (UK)
Director: Armando Iannucci
Viewed: March 7, 2010
Format: Blu-ray - MPI Home Video (2010)

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.

Men in Trenchcoats

Public Enemies
2009 (USA)
Director: Michael Mann
Viewed: July 3, 2009
Format: Theatrical Print

Public Enemies seems like the sort of film that was made for Michael Mann.  Tackling the story of John Dillinger’s final months, Mann enters terrain with which he is intimately familiar. In Dillinger, he rediscovers his reliable archetypal protagonist: a man with a disciplined code of behavior, a code tested by allies and rivals and by the sheer capricious character of life.  Like any period American epic worth its salt, Public Enemies examines the national soul from a variety of angles, pitting conflicting impulses against one another and commenting on contemporary agonies with a cunning reserve.  Mann’s captivating style is as welcome as ever, even if it is unfortunately hidden by the murk of digital video.  Despite this questionable choice, Public Enemies is peppered with stunning cinematic moments, matings of color, sound, and motion that linger long after the context has vanished.  It’s a shame that the surrounding film is unexpectedly rote, a collection of lively sequences that lack the narrative thrust or consistency in tone that might have made for an outstanding criminal fable. It’s a gratifying and expressive film, to be sure, but Public Enemies doesn’t even aim for the psychological and social complexity of other late Mann works.

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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: Synecdoche, New York

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

Film Diary: The Great Race

1965 (USA)
Director: Blake Edwards
Viewed: March 12, 2009
Format: DVD - Warner Brothers (2002)

Film Diary: Across the Universe

2007 (USA)
Director: Julie Taymor
Viewed: March 5, 2009
Format: Blu-ray - Sony (2008)

Film Diary: Duck Soup

1933 (USA)
Director: Leo McCarey
Viewed: March 5, 2009
Format: DVD - Universal (2004)

Film Diary: Pan’s Labyrinth (Laberinto del Fauno)

2006 (Spain / Mexico / USA)
Director: Guillermo del Toro
Viewed: February 12, 2009
Format: DVD - New Line (2007)