The Marshes (2018): This Australian horror movie by Roger
Scott about three biologists encountering something or someone pretty nasty in
some marshland right out in the middle of nowhere brings me back to my old
favourite concept of “boring competence”. There’s nothing really wrong with the
film at all: it is competently structured, competently written (though lacking
in any originality), competently staged and competently acted. Yet, despite the
film’s worst sin being the pretty harmless tendency to keep the cameras close to
the characters in scenes where showing a bit more of the landscape would
actually be more threatening and claustrophobic, it all adds up to a film I find
much less enjoyable than all this competence would suggest. There’s just a total
lack of any adventurous spirit on display here I find rather dispiriting.
The Sonata (2018): In comparison, Andrew Desmond’s film
about a violinist (Freya Tingley) finding an unpublished violin sonata in her
estranged father’s (flashback late great Rutger Hauer) estate and the somewhat
devilish consequences thereof should actually be a lesser movie. At least, its
direction – while hitting some great moments of modern gothic atmosphere – is
less slick, the film’s budgetary constraints are quite a bit more visible (don’t
mention the CGI Devil). However, the film tells its old-fashioned tale of music
and the devil with much more conviction, as well as an organic sense for the
proper atmosphere the Australian movie lacks despite its higher technical
values.
Captive State (2019): Completely unrelated to any of this is
Rupert Wyatt’s film about a secret resistance operating in a post alien invasion
USA (as is tradition in these films, it doesn’t care about the rest of the
world) whose new alien overlords have taken rather a lot from the playbook of
the contemporary demagogue. It’s a fantastic, dark, and moody piece for as long
as Wyatt is following a great cast (counting among its numbers John Goodman,
Ashton Sanders and Vera Farmiga and other fine actresses and actors) to explore
this brave new world. There’s a nice eye for the telling and weird detail and a
general sense of calmness and control to Wyatt’s direction in these parts of the
film that make the slow progression of things enormously convincing. Alas, once
the PLOT truly rears its ugly head, all of this gets subsumed by one of these
contemporary Hollywood “clever” plans which can only work if everyone involved
acts exactly like the planner expected – and often not in terribly convincing
or psychologically sound ways either.
Showing posts with label rutger hauer. Show all posts
Showing posts with label rutger hauer. Show all posts
Saturday, February 15, 2020
Sunday, April 7, 2019
Wanted: Dead or Alive (1987)
Nick Randall (Rutger Hauer), for unfathomable reasons the descendant of Steve
McQueen’s character in the old TV show “Wanted: Dead or Alive”, is also working
as a bounty hunter like is great-granddad (or whatever). He also has a thing for
playing harmonica, badly, whenever he has reason to mope. Nick’s actually a
former CIA operative, but that particular business got to unpleasant for
him, especially when he worked against terrorist Malak Al Rahim (Gene Simmons).
Despite being a bit of a loner, Nick has found happiness with his new girlfriend
Terry (Mel Harris), and his best buddy, the cop Danny Quintz (William Russ).
Unfortunately, that happiness won’t last when Nick agrees to help out his old (and only) CIA pal Philmore Walker (Robert Guillaume) with a terrorist cell that seems to plan something big, a cell working under the recently arrived Malak Al Rahim. Now, Nick turns out to be well able to help Walker out, but unfortunately, a different old CIA acquaintance named John Lipton (Jerry Hardin, The X-Files’ Deep Throat himself) has rather different plans with Nick, which will eventually lead to various terrorist attacks that really had no need to happen at all, among other things. The film never gets around to actually explaining what Lipton thinks he’s doing beyond making Nick’s life harder as a form of vengeance.
Gary Sherman’s Wanted is a weird one, consisting of various disparate elements that never quite gel enough to become a whole but still make the film an always interesting watch. The main problem is how incongruous the film’s impulses are. On one hand – be warned, this is a film with more than just two hands – there’s the whole call-back to the old TV show that really has no function in the film apart from looking at an audience that has come for a very different film and saying “remember that?”.
On the next one, there’s the nature of the film’s bad guys, who are strictly US late 80’s action movie “Arabian” terrorists, the kind of terrorists that don’t have an actual ideology beyond being evil, and whose leader is played by rock star who can’t act and tries to get away with just not moving his face. Said rock star, to make matters really weird, is also the son of Hungarian Jewish parents. Adding another element of what the heck to this whole business is the fact that Al Rahim enters the US cosplaying as an orthodox Jew. I got nothing.
Hand number three is the way the film handles its very 80s action movie set-up – with the thoughtful slowness of 70s cinema, giving much more space to the characterisation of Nick and his family of choice than any 80s film about an action hero fighting terrorists is supposed to do. As a matter of fact, it’s this part of the film that makes watching it worthwhile, Sherman giving his actors and their characters enough room to breathe. Why, I found myself actually beginning to care about what happens to them. Consequently the entirely expected scene when Terry and Danny are killed off acquires a bit of emotional weight, particularly since Hauer plays the moment as if his character were an actual human being who has just seen the people he loves die. There’s more sadness and desperation than rage in that scene from him, and the film for a moment seems to teeter on the edge of not going the way of all 80s action films but go someplace more interesting.
Obviously, a violent rampage then follows anyway, and as all action sequences in the film, it seems to stand halfway between the way 70s cinema had approached its violence and the gung ho action style of the 80s. It’s not a great place to stand for action scenes, frankly, because it feels less than Sherman trying to split the difference between two eras but rather more as if he simply doesn’t want to commit to one.
Unfortunately, that happiness won’t last when Nick agrees to help out his old (and only) CIA pal Philmore Walker (Robert Guillaume) with a terrorist cell that seems to plan something big, a cell working under the recently arrived Malak Al Rahim. Now, Nick turns out to be well able to help Walker out, but unfortunately, a different old CIA acquaintance named John Lipton (Jerry Hardin, The X-Files’ Deep Throat himself) has rather different plans with Nick, which will eventually lead to various terrorist attacks that really had no need to happen at all, among other things. The film never gets around to actually explaining what Lipton thinks he’s doing beyond making Nick’s life harder as a form of vengeance.
Gary Sherman’s Wanted is a weird one, consisting of various disparate elements that never quite gel enough to become a whole but still make the film an always interesting watch. The main problem is how incongruous the film’s impulses are. On one hand – be warned, this is a film with more than just two hands – there’s the whole call-back to the old TV show that really has no function in the film apart from looking at an audience that has come for a very different film and saying “remember that?”.
On the next one, there’s the nature of the film’s bad guys, who are strictly US late 80’s action movie “Arabian” terrorists, the kind of terrorists that don’t have an actual ideology beyond being evil, and whose leader is played by rock star who can’t act and tries to get away with just not moving his face. Said rock star, to make matters really weird, is also the son of Hungarian Jewish parents. Adding another element of what the heck to this whole business is the fact that Al Rahim enters the US cosplaying as an orthodox Jew. I got nothing.
Hand number three is the way the film handles its very 80s action movie set-up – with the thoughtful slowness of 70s cinema, giving much more space to the characterisation of Nick and his family of choice than any 80s film about an action hero fighting terrorists is supposed to do. As a matter of fact, it’s this part of the film that makes watching it worthwhile, Sherman giving his actors and their characters enough room to breathe. Why, I found myself actually beginning to care about what happens to them. Consequently the entirely expected scene when Terry and Danny are killed off acquires a bit of emotional weight, particularly since Hauer plays the moment as if his character were an actual human being who has just seen the people he loves die. There’s more sadness and desperation than rage in that scene from him, and the film for a moment seems to teeter on the edge of not going the way of all 80s action films but go someplace more interesting.
Obviously, a violent rampage then follows anyway, and as all action sequences in the film, it seems to stand halfway between the way 70s cinema had approached its violence and the gung ho action style of the 80s. It’s not a great place to stand for action scenes, frankly, because it feels less than Sherman trying to split the difference between two eras but rather more as if he simply doesn’t want to commit to one.
Sunday, March 25, 2018
Deathline (1997)
aka Redline
aka Armageddon
aka The Syndicate
We are in some sort of mildly cyberpunk-y future where everybody’s a bit of a freak. Aging tough guy John Anderson Wade (Rutger Hauer, not doing much, but doing it like Rutger Hauer, which is what we came to see) is smuggling some kind of virtual reality implants into Russia. Alas, he is betrayed by his girlfriend (Yvonne Sciò) and his partner Merrick (Mark Dacascos). Not that his girlfriend has much joy of it, for Merrick guns her down right after Wade.
Wade’s corpse is recovered by corrupt elements of the Russian authorities who use some kind of experimental technique on him to revive him. I’m still not quite sure why, and am not willing to even start thinking about the how, but there you are. Anyway, once Wade’s alive and awake again, he quickly manages to escape captivity and goes on a murderous rampage, I mean, subtly tries to find and take vengeance on Merrick. Only without the subtlety. Merrick for his part is now a middle-sized wheel that would like to be a big one in criminal and corrupt circles, so there are goons to shoot before him.
Wade’s good at that sort of thing, though, so no biggie there. He also quickly acquires the help of one Marina K. (also Yvonne Sciò), who not only happens to look exactly like his late girlfriend but also shares her taste in older men. Oh, and she’s handy with guns and face-kicking, too.
I wouldn’t be at all surprised if someone told me that an earlier script version of Deathline explained all of the weirdness going on in it by most of its plot being an Incident at Owl Creek Bridge-style fantasy in the brain of a dead man. As it stands, the finished version of Tibor Takács film doesn’t explain or excuse any of its weird shit at all; as a matter of fact, it doesn’t even bother to explain much of its plot. Which is fair enough, given that most of what’s going on is only meant to set up various pretty okay action scenes, some hideously bad CGI effects, and a really, really, really long sex scene.
Everything that’s going on between these scenes feels like variously successful attempts by the filmmakers to distract themselves and their audience from the most basic of plots and the vagaries of working on a small budget (but at least shooting in Hungary where you get somewhat more bang for your miniscule buck) by throwing as much random crap on the screen and at the audience as possible. It’s a time-honoured technique which can help enhance a film with snarky dialogue, bizarre satire, or just with a bunch of sight gags. Quite a few Roger Corman productions from the 70s and 80s became at least minor classics of various genres this way. Deathline never manages to do anything quite this successful, but for an action film that obviously can’t afford much action – and even less martial arts action despite casting Dacascos – its general weirdness and distractibility keeps it pretty entertaining. At least if you enjoy stuff like “The House of Culture” being a bordello, a TV re-enactment of Wade’s crimes that shows him gunning down a baby in its cart in a play on exactly the scene you’re thinking about just now, only with a pretty tiny flight of stairs, bizarre dream sequences that feel like set-ups for future psychological depth which will never arrive, and so on.
Too bad that Takács’s direction is atypically bland for most of the time, but I still had a reasonable amount of fun with Deathline.
aka Armageddon
aka The Syndicate
We are in some sort of mildly cyberpunk-y future where everybody’s a bit of a freak. Aging tough guy John Anderson Wade (Rutger Hauer, not doing much, but doing it like Rutger Hauer, which is what we came to see) is smuggling some kind of virtual reality implants into Russia. Alas, he is betrayed by his girlfriend (Yvonne Sciò) and his partner Merrick (Mark Dacascos). Not that his girlfriend has much joy of it, for Merrick guns her down right after Wade.
Wade’s corpse is recovered by corrupt elements of the Russian authorities who use some kind of experimental technique on him to revive him. I’m still not quite sure why, and am not willing to even start thinking about the how, but there you are. Anyway, once Wade’s alive and awake again, he quickly manages to escape captivity and goes on a murderous rampage, I mean, subtly tries to find and take vengeance on Merrick. Only without the subtlety. Merrick for his part is now a middle-sized wheel that would like to be a big one in criminal and corrupt circles, so there are goons to shoot before him.
Wade’s good at that sort of thing, though, so no biggie there. He also quickly acquires the help of one Marina K. (also Yvonne Sciò), who not only happens to look exactly like his late girlfriend but also shares her taste in older men. Oh, and she’s handy with guns and face-kicking, too.
I wouldn’t be at all surprised if someone told me that an earlier script version of Deathline explained all of the weirdness going on in it by most of its plot being an Incident at Owl Creek Bridge-style fantasy in the brain of a dead man. As it stands, the finished version of Tibor Takács film doesn’t explain or excuse any of its weird shit at all; as a matter of fact, it doesn’t even bother to explain much of its plot. Which is fair enough, given that most of what’s going on is only meant to set up various pretty okay action scenes, some hideously bad CGI effects, and a really, really, really long sex scene.
Everything that’s going on between these scenes feels like variously successful attempts by the filmmakers to distract themselves and their audience from the most basic of plots and the vagaries of working on a small budget (but at least shooting in Hungary where you get somewhat more bang for your miniscule buck) by throwing as much random crap on the screen and at the audience as possible. It’s a time-honoured technique which can help enhance a film with snarky dialogue, bizarre satire, or just with a bunch of sight gags. Quite a few Roger Corman productions from the 70s and 80s became at least minor classics of various genres this way. Deathline never manages to do anything quite this successful, but for an action film that obviously can’t afford much action – and even less martial arts action despite casting Dacascos – its general weirdness and distractibility keeps it pretty entertaining. At least if you enjoy stuff like “The House of Culture” being a bordello, a TV re-enactment of Wade’s crimes that shows him gunning down a baby in its cart in a play on exactly the scene you’re thinking about just now, only with a pretty tiny flight of stairs, bizarre dream sequences that feel like set-ups for future psychological depth which will never arrive, and so on.
Too bad that Takács’s direction is atypically bland for most of the time, but I still had a reasonable amount of fun with Deathline.
Sunday, August 27, 2017
Surviving the Game (1994)
Jack Mason (Ice-T) has hit rock bottom. He is homeless, and making his life
even more difficult by torturing himself for something pretty damn traumatic
that happened in his past. When his only friend, an elderly white guy, dies,
Jack gives up completely and tries to kill himself by walking into traffic. He’s
rescued – or at least dissuaded – by Walter Cole (Charles S. Dutton) who works
at the local food bank and thinks Jack is just the right man to work for him and
his partner as a wilderness guide, even though the only external wilderness Jack
knows is on the streets (or probably the Streets).
Alas, once Jack has gone through a curious encounter/job interview with Walter’s partner Thomas Burns (Rutger Hauer in his best creep mode), and he ends up with Thomas, Walter and a group of clients in the wilderness, things turn out to be less empowering for our hero than he thought. In fact, Jack isn’t there to help some rich idiots hunt, but rather to be the human prey of former CIA men and assorted perverts – the most dangerous game, you know the drill. Co-hunting Jack are psychiatrist Doc Hawkins (Gary Busey in a short, surprisingly nuanced and creepy performance), cowboy John Griffin (John C. McGinley), and rich people supremacist Wolfe (F. Murray Abraham) who has brought his son Derek (William McNamara) to make him a real man by making him complicit in sadistic murder. Turns out this amount of injustice and cruelty is just the therapy Jack needed, and soon, he’s rather effectively striking back at his tormentors.
Among the group of rappers gone genre actors, for my taste Ice-T has always been the best one, probably because he usually makes efforts to act his characters instead of exclusively performing his standard persona. So it is no surprise that Ice-T in a film directed by undervalued (most probably because he’s black, if we’re being honest) Ernest R. Dickerson makes a rather fine action hero; and he is the more interesting kind of US action hero to boot – the one with troubles, who isn’t a perfect killing machine. In fact, the film makes rather a point out of our hero not being a killer by nature or inclination but a guy who defends himself with as much force as necessary and who is even willing to give the worst people imaginable a choice and a chance to walk away. Which is certainly more than they did for him.
Another obvious point in Surviving the Game’s favour is its cast of a host of great character actors, all with copious experience at being entertaining Bad People. They all can chew as much scenery as is needed but also don’t chew more than they should this time around. Not that the characters are exactly subtle, mind you: each and every one of them does after all represent something that is very wrong with (white, powerful) America and its structures turned up to eleven. Still, Dickerson treats these crazy freaks at times much more seriously than you’d expect, giving even the worst of them some depth beyond their inherent horribleness. Which doesn’t make them better people or people we as an audience don’t want to see killed or maimed (preferably both) by Ice-T, but sure turns them into much more interesting action movie villains. Obviously this also gives the film’s political arguments about the intersections of race and class in the USA further heft.
Mind you, this is not first and foremost a deep analysis of US society but a great (perhaps the greatest, depending on the day you ask me) action movie version of The Most Dangerous Game that just doesn’t see why it shouldn’t also consciously comment on the world around it; its makers are after all living in it and had to live through part of it.
As US style action director, Dickerson here is as fine as they come, delivering many a tense scene, a handful of pleasantly absurd ones, and nary a moment after the very effective set-up that isn’t exciting. He also really knows how to get the best out of his actors – which isn’t always typical of directors good at action – by leaving them space to work. There’s an incredible monologue by Busey’s character about his fucked up childhood in the film’s big dinner scene that alone would be worth the price of admission but in this film it’s just one of many great scenes, some of them delightfully and cleverly cheesy, some just clever.
Alas, once Jack has gone through a curious encounter/job interview with Walter’s partner Thomas Burns (Rutger Hauer in his best creep mode), and he ends up with Thomas, Walter and a group of clients in the wilderness, things turn out to be less empowering for our hero than he thought. In fact, Jack isn’t there to help some rich idiots hunt, but rather to be the human prey of former CIA men and assorted perverts – the most dangerous game, you know the drill. Co-hunting Jack are psychiatrist Doc Hawkins (Gary Busey in a short, surprisingly nuanced and creepy performance), cowboy John Griffin (John C. McGinley), and rich people supremacist Wolfe (F. Murray Abraham) who has brought his son Derek (William McNamara) to make him a real man by making him complicit in sadistic murder. Turns out this amount of injustice and cruelty is just the therapy Jack needed, and soon, he’s rather effectively striking back at his tormentors.
Among the group of rappers gone genre actors, for my taste Ice-T has always been the best one, probably because he usually makes efforts to act his characters instead of exclusively performing his standard persona. So it is no surprise that Ice-T in a film directed by undervalued (most probably because he’s black, if we’re being honest) Ernest R. Dickerson makes a rather fine action hero; and he is the more interesting kind of US action hero to boot – the one with troubles, who isn’t a perfect killing machine. In fact, the film makes rather a point out of our hero not being a killer by nature or inclination but a guy who defends himself with as much force as necessary and who is even willing to give the worst people imaginable a choice and a chance to walk away. Which is certainly more than they did for him.
Another obvious point in Surviving the Game’s favour is its cast of a host of great character actors, all with copious experience at being entertaining Bad People. They all can chew as much scenery as is needed but also don’t chew more than they should this time around. Not that the characters are exactly subtle, mind you: each and every one of them does after all represent something that is very wrong with (white, powerful) America and its structures turned up to eleven. Still, Dickerson treats these crazy freaks at times much more seriously than you’d expect, giving even the worst of them some depth beyond their inherent horribleness. Which doesn’t make them better people or people we as an audience don’t want to see killed or maimed (preferably both) by Ice-T, but sure turns them into much more interesting action movie villains. Obviously this also gives the film’s political arguments about the intersections of race and class in the USA further heft.
Mind you, this is not first and foremost a deep analysis of US society but a great (perhaps the greatest, depending on the day you ask me) action movie version of The Most Dangerous Game that just doesn’t see why it shouldn’t also consciously comment on the world around it; its makers are after all living in it and had to live through part of it.
As US style action director, Dickerson here is as fine as they come, delivering many a tense scene, a handful of pleasantly absurd ones, and nary a moment after the very effective set-up that isn’t exciting. He also really knows how to get the best out of his actors – which isn’t always typical of directors good at action – by leaving them space to work. There’s an incredible monologue by Busey’s character about his fucked up childhood in the film’s big dinner scene that alone would be worth the price of admission but in this film it’s just one of many great scenes, some of them delightfully and cleverly cheesy, some just clever.
Tuesday, March 7, 2017
In short: Split Second (1992)
I don’t know how a film about a hilariously overacting Rutger Hauer chasing a
serial killer who is actually a monster through a half-flooded London in the far
flung future of 2008 can get quite this boring, but there you have it.
Well, actually, I have a rather good idea how Split Second manages to get quite this boring. Just show none of the monster attacks in a misguided attempt at creating suspense through the power of loud heartbeat noises on the soundtrack and music that’s perpetually swelling for little reason at all. Hire a bunch of actors who either – understandably so – hate the script so much and – deplorably so - have so little professional dignity they just flat out refuse to actually act or drug them with valium before the shoot.
Pretend what an audience really wants from a film about Rutger Hauer hunting a Predator-style (or maybe its supposed to be Alien) monster is to witness lots and lots of scenes of people getting in and out of cars, walking in and out of a police station, strolling through corridors (and then some more corridors) and from time to time talking to each other in the sort of zingers a writer will come up with when a producer runs into his home brandishing a gun and shouts “Joke! Now!” at him.
Because that’s still not good (well, bad) enough, add murky photography, and an embarrassing amount of pointless borrowing from movies that aren’t a horrible pain to watch to the rancid stew of bad filmmaking.
What you have now is Tony Maylam’s Split Second, the perfect antidote for insomnia.
Well, actually, I have a rather good idea how Split Second manages to get quite this boring. Just show none of the monster attacks in a misguided attempt at creating suspense through the power of loud heartbeat noises on the soundtrack and music that’s perpetually swelling for little reason at all. Hire a bunch of actors who either – understandably so – hate the script so much and – deplorably so - have so little professional dignity they just flat out refuse to actually act or drug them with valium before the shoot.
Pretend what an audience really wants from a film about Rutger Hauer hunting a Predator-style (or maybe its supposed to be Alien) monster is to witness lots and lots of scenes of people getting in and out of cars, walking in and out of a police station, strolling through corridors (and then some more corridors) and from time to time talking to each other in the sort of zingers a writer will come up with when a producer runs into his home brandishing a gun and shouts “Joke! Now!” at him.
Because that’s still not good (well, bad) enough, add murky photography, and an embarrassing amount of pointless borrowing from movies that aren’t a horrible pain to watch to the rancid stew of bad filmmaking.
What you have now is Tony Maylam’s Split Second, the perfect antidote for insomnia.
Wednesday, April 13, 2016
Precious Find (1996)
Welcome to the future of the solar system, when a kind of repeat gold rush
has the outer planets and their moons in its grip. A metal generally known as
Precious is the new gold, and yes, that does indeed mean every character in the
movie is going to say “Precious! Precious!” about every two minutes or so, my
precious.
Anyway, a series of very script-like events finds young, somewhat naive despite the obligatory tragic past, rookie miner – with a nose for Precious as he never gets sick to tell anyone who will or won’t listen – Ben (Harold Pruett), former cheating executive now cheating crazy gambler Armond Crile (Rutger Hauer in full-on-scenery-chewing mode) and garbage hauler Sam (Brion James, doing nearly as much overacting as Hauer here) teaming up to find and exploit a Precious claim. Of course there are complications, among them SPACE FEVER(!), Armond being crazy as a bag full of badgers even before space fever takes the rest of his sanity, general distrust, claim jumpers lead by a terrible racist stereotype named Loo Seki (Don Stroud, like, totally an evil space samurai), absurdly cute roguish space captain Camilla (Joan Chen) and the shittiest CGI tentacles I’ve seen in a long time.
Calling Philippe Mora’s Precious Find “Treasure of the Sierra Madre in Space” would be rather unfair. Unfair, that is, to the John Huston film which does after all feature a psychologically deep, tense script, a plot that makes sense, 1948-style acting performances of the highest quality and intense direction, all things you won’t find in Mora’s film at all.
Being a Philippe Mora film – and an ultra cheap 90s SF movie to boot – Precious Find seems most interested in two things. Firstly, in a type of self-sabotage that I’ve often encountered in Mora’s films (though I have to add I’ve not seen all of them by far, I’m not that kind of a masochist), an unwillingness to ever go into the obvious direction of playing a narrative straight or using its potential sensibly. Secondly, and closely related to the first point, doing everything in as weird a way as possible, with ideas of varying degrees of bullshit inanity or just plain insanity popping up with light speed and for no good reason.
I mean, nobody can honestly have thought dressing up Don Stroud in yellow face and letting him speak in a fake Japanese accent was a good idea, right? Not to speak of Hauer suddenly starting to imitate him – new eyebrows, kimono, sword and accent included – for the last act of the film. And that’s really just the tip of the iceberg of the film’s weirdness, with so much goofy, nonsensical, and just plain bizarre stuff going on throughout it becomes impossible to take anything that happens in it seriously. On the other hand, you’d be hard-pressed to call this thing an actual comedy, for it is just too awkward and plain peculiar to sell as such.
While this approach doesn’t lend itself to making this an actual version of Treasure of the Sierra Madre, IN SPACE, it does certainly keep the film lively and interesting, because there’s no way to guess what dubious delight Mora will pull out of his – probably very strange looking – hat next. While Precious Find is certainly horrible, abstruse nonsense, it’s absolutely my kind of nonsense, containing not a single boring second, and giving no hint it might be ashamed of being the kind of bizarre nonsense it is.
Anyway, a series of very script-like events finds young, somewhat naive despite the obligatory tragic past, rookie miner – with a nose for Precious as he never gets sick to tell anyone who will or won’t listen – Ben (Harold Pruett), former cheating executive now cheating crazy gambler Armond Crile (Rutger Hauer in full-on-scenery-chewing mode) and garbage hauler Sam (Brion James, doing nearly as much overacting as Hauer here) teaming up to find and exploit a Precious claim. Of course there are complications, among them SPACE FEVER(!), Armond being crazy as a bag full of badgers even before space fever takes the rest of his sanity, general distrust, claim jumpers lead by a terrible racist stereotype named Loo Seki (Don Stroud, like, totally an evil space samurai), absurdly cute roguish space captain Camilla (Joan Chen) and the shittiest CGI tentacles I’ve seen in a long time.
Calling Philippe Mora’s Precious Find “Treasure of the Sierra Madre in Space” would be rather unfair. Unfair, that is, to the John Huston film which does after all feature a psychologically deep, tense script, a plot that makes sense, 1948-style acting performances of the highest quality and intense direction, all things you won’t find in Mora’s film at all.
Being a Philippe Mora film – and an ultra cheap 90s SF movie to boot – Precious Find seems most interested in two things. Firstly, in a type of self-sabotage that I’ve often encountered in Mora’s films (though I have to add I’ve not seen all of them by far, I’m not that kind of a masochist), an unwillingness to ever go into the obvious direction of playing a narrative straight or using its potential sensibly. Secondly, and closely related to the first point, doing everything in as weird a way as possible, with ideas of varying degrees of bullshit inanity or just plain insanity popping up with light speed and for no good reason.
I mean, nobody can honestly have thought dressing up Don Stroud in yellow face and letting him speak in a fake Japanese accent was a good idea, right? Not to speak of Hauer suddenly starting to imitate him – new eyebrows, kimono, sword and accent included – for the last act of the film. And that’s really just the tip of the iceberg of the film’s weirdness, with so much goofy, nonsensical, and just plain bizarre stuff going on throughout it becomes impossible to take anything that happens in it seriously. On the other hand, you’d be hard-pressed to call this thing an actual comedy, for it is just too awkward and plain peculiar to sell as such.
While this approach doesn’t lend itself to making this an actual version of Treasure of the Sierra Madre, IN SPACE, it does certainly keep the film lively and interesting, because there’s no way to guess what dubious delight Mora will pull out of his – probably very strange looking – hat next. While Precious Find is certainly horrible, abstruse nonsense, it’s absolutely my kind of nonsense, containing not a single boring second, and giving no hint it might be ashamed of being the kind of bizarre nonsense it is.
Wednesday, February 5, 2014
Ladyhawke (1985)
At some point in time in medieval fantasy France. Notorious thief Gaston Phillippe (Matthew Broderick), generally called “the Mouse”, manages a lucky escape from prison. Marquet (Ken Hutchison), the man whose supposedly inescapable prison Gaston escaped from, and who clearly doesn’t take too well to the stress of pleasing his boss, the evil bishop of evil (John Wood), is so angered he and his man spend quite some time trying to hunt the thief down again.
Gaston is rescued from probable (he is very lucky, after all) doom by the knight Navarre (Rutger Hauer), former captain of the guard Marquet now captains. Navarre has an old grudge against Marquet and the Bishop, and has returned to finally put an end to their shared story. Navarre and his lover Isabeau (Michelle Pfeiffer) have been cursed, you see, and he has to spend his nights in the form of a black wolf, while she turns into a hawk by day, both doomed only ever to catch a short glimpse of each other as humans at dawn and at dusk.
At first involuntarily, but once he learns the whole story and meets Isabeau increasingly voluntarily, Gaston is drawn into the lovers’ story, and his help, and that of a monk (Leo McKern) with his own share of guilt for the curse, just might be what will keep it from turning into a tragedy.
Ladyhawke’s Richard Donner always has been one of these curious directors to me whose films as a whole never seem to cohere into a directorial personality. There does seem no philosophy, nor a shared approach beyond technical slickness visible in his films. That isn’t to say the films of Donner and directors like him can’t be worthwhile, because there is something to say for direction that steps behind the story it is telling, even though it does make it rather difficult to declare someone an auteur. At the very least, these films will be worthwhile when these stories are actually worth telling.
Ladyhawke’s story certainly is that. Actually, I find it difficult to avoid the word “perfect” to describe it, seeing as it seems to never take a wrong step in any direction it takes (let’s just pretend the main theme by Alan Parsons doesn’t exist), effortlessly mixing comedy, fantasy, and romance in just the right way. This is a film told from the perspective of what would usually be a mere comic relief character, after all, who never becomes annoying, and never is just a comic relief character even in the scenes when he’s bumbling. As a matter of fact, there’s a suggestion that things turn out well in the end (oh, come on, that’s not a spoiler) because Gaston’s metier isn’t tragedy, and he can therefore choose the part he wishes to take in a doomed romance and turn it right.
But really, this sort of consideration pales behind the way the film uses a pretty perfect – and pretty – cast, beautiful photography of extremely photogenic Italian locations, and a script that’s tighter than you’d expect to tell a romantic story in both meanings of the word, what could be seen as (and most probably is) the film’s slick sheen of commercialism turning into its own kind of poetry. That is an effect a more discrete director like Donner can probably achieve easier than somebody more pushy, for what’s more distracting from (a) romance than a director shouting “look at me! I’m an artist!” when in fact the audience really should look at the tale itself instead of the teller.
Ladyhawke as a whole projects a certain kind of conviction, as if the film itself would believe in its own story enough to produce a sense of wonder out of thin air (certainly the best place for senses of wonder to come from), taking what could have turned out trite and unpleasantly manipulative (the film is of course still manipulative, as all art is, but in a way I at least didn’t mind being manipulated), romantic.
Of course, one person’s poetry is another person’s insufferable kitsch, and one person’s romance is another person’s voluntary slavery but at least today, and with Ladyhawke, I’m one person, and not the other.
Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,reviews,fantasy,romance,richard donner,matthew broderick,rutger hauer,michelle pfeiffer
Tuesday, April 23, 2013
On Dario Argento's Dracula 3D (2012)
I'm pretty sure Argento's version of Dracula will automatically get the critical drubbing all his late period films get, be they great like Mother of Tears, abominations like Giallo and The Card Player, or fine workman-like efforts like his Masters of Horror episodes. Argento shares the fate of his co-sufferers in directing horror films like George Romero and John Carpenter of having turned their once rabid fanbases against themselves by continuing to change their styles. And we all know by now that "fans" only stay "fans" as long as you give them exactly what they expect, lest they turn into a highly enthusiastic lynch mob that wouldn't even realize if you made the best movie of your career. Thusly, the Internet has turned my private definition of "fan" into "person who hates something so much (s)he won't stop shouting about how horrible it is", but I digress.
Not that Dracula (3D) is the best movie of Argento's career. It is, in fact, a rather curious artefact that attempts - and perhaps half of the time succeeds - to build a luridly dream-like mood out of a mixture of operatic theatricality, cheapness, misguided uses of modern technology, an improbably bad soundtrack, and plain weirdness. When this works, Dracula becomes rather magical, like a pulpy version of that weird vampire sex dream (vampirism is all about sex and domination for Argento here) you once had after reading Bram Stoker and drinking too much red wine. When it fails, Dracula turns into a horrible mess half bad soap opera, half gore flick made by a teenager.
The most curious thing about it is how easily the film slips from one extreme to the next, with nearly awe-inspiring moments of Gothic horror turning into poor cheese and back again at the drop of a hat. Really everything in Dracula is changing from one moment to the next in this way - the acting (with generally lovely actors like Asia Argento, Thomas "Dracula" Kretschmann and Rutger Hauer as the least interesting Van Helsing imaginable) is convincing in one sentence, stiff in the next, and melodramatically overdone in the next, the special effects permanently meander between decent practical effects, utterly horrid CG most SyFy channel movies were ashamed of, and beautiful and imaginative CG, while the script wanders between homages to every other Dracula adaptation in existence, clever changes to the original (for example, not taking the plot to England doesn't just put away the xenophobic subtext, and is good for the budget but also makes the film dramatically tighter, or rather would make it tighter if this were a film interested in it; and I love what the film in the end does with the old, terrible "Mina is the reincarnation of Dracula's wife" bit), random weird shit I can't help but approve of (I'll just say "mantis"), and stuff that is of little use however you look at it.
Locations and sets are at times beautiful and atmospheric, and at other times so ill lit they have the fake, plastic-y look of a doll house. In this Dracula, the sublime and the ridiculous don't just go hand in hand, they change from one into the other like a hyperactive werewolf. I'm actually pretty sure Argento does this all on purpose (for he can hardly not see it), but what his purpose is - apart from making it much easier for people to hate on the film without having to think about it - I surely don't know.
What I do know is that, even though Argento's Dracula surely isn't his best film, or even a good one, it is a film containing as much personality, strangeness and idiosyncrasy as I could have wished for. It's certainly not the film I would have wanted Argento to make, but then I'm convinced that if you're expecting any artist, in whatever part of his or her career, to do the exact sort of thing you want from her or him, you're doing art appreciation wrong.
Technorati-Markierungen: italian movies,thoughts,dario argento,horror,asia argento,rutger hauer,thomas kretschmann
Wednesday, January 18, 2012
In short: Hobo With A Shotgun (2011)
It looks like movies based on the fake trailers in Grindhouse have truly arrived and become their own little genre now. Jason Eisener's film about a Rutger Hauer's titular hobo (soon enough to be outfitted with a shotgun, obviously) doing the vigilante thing in a city full of freaks also has a lot in common with the school of self-conscious Japanese exploitation films following The Machine Girl in that it manages to make up for its low budget and the usual problems that come with it by dedicating itself to a feverish interpretation of what's most entertaining in exploitation films. Which it then proceeds to heighten to the absurd to at times awesome and exhilarating effect. Often, the film is even as funny as it thinks it is.
Alas, there are a few other times when the film's hysteria comes over as phony, the winking and nudging taking away some of the fun Hobo's crassness and violence generally bring. I'm also a bit disappointed about how little imagination the film shows when it comes to the treatment of its female lead Molly Dunsworth. I'm not going to complain about her being a prostitute - for the stories of prostitutes are worth telling as much as (let's be honest, more than) those of vacuous New York media people - but I was quite disappointed that the film chose to let her sudden moment of kicking some ass end in a whimper that's only there so that Hauer can die a more heroic death - especially compared to the Japanese school of these movies where objectification of girls in school uniforms and having a female lead with actual agency mingle in classic exploitation style. Not that I expected much from a movie from North America in this regard. Keep in mind that Dunsworth still gets to stab someone with her arm bone splinter.
This doesn't mean I didn't enjoy myself for most of Hobo's running time. As I said, large parts of the film are exhilarating and/or imaginative in that special blood-spattering way and/or crassly funny - what's not to enjoy about that?
Plus, Rutger Hauer imbues his on paper utterly ridiculous character with surprising amounts of humanity, putting the "man" back in homicidal maniac. Not a bad achievement for an actor often described with the cruel words "limited range". Clearly, it's not the range, but what one does with it.
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