counterrevolutionary's reviews

Oh, it'll be another twenty or thirty years, but someday, some smart young filmmaker is going to read Richard Matheson's novel and make the low-key, modestly-budgeted, intellectually serious, and CGI-free film it cries out for. At least, I hope so.

*The Last Man on Earth* came closest, but even there, the filmmakers completely missed the point of the novel's ending (which is as necessary to the story's meaning as the ending of *The Sixth Sense* or *The Caine Mutiny*). Then, somehow, it became de rigeur to "reimagine" Matheson's quiet, intelligent novel as a Big Dumb Action Movie.

This version is the worst by a wide margin. Will Smith plays a scientist/action hero (yeah, we all know lots of those guys) who for some reason has survived the CGI Virus, which transforms its victims into unconvincing computer animations. Then some stuff blows up, and some coincidences happen, and some more stuff blows up, and the filmmakers throw in a dumb plot device to justify keeping Matheson's title even though they have discarded the events which justify the title.

Why even bother? Surely they could have made this movie without paying Matheson for the rights to his novel, which this film in no way resembles. Just change the main character's name and call it *Fresh Prince and the Not-Scary Zombies* or something. Then someone else could have given *I Am Legend* the cinematic treatment it deserves. The Coen Brothers, maybe. Or give me $20,000,000 and let me make it. I could do better than this.

You watch this movie, with its depiction of humans (with a single exception) as either mindless order-following automata or mustache-twirling stock villains, and you have to ask yourself: Is this what the filmmakers think people are like? Well, no, of course not. This is what the filmmakers think *other* people are like.

And that, far more than decreasing budgets or continuity errors, explains the inferiority of the APES sequels to the original.

Great satire--indeed, great art--is always an examination of *us*, of what *we* are like. This is what the original film did so well and why it is still remembered so fondly. By this point in the series, however, the filmmakers were simply sneering at "them," defined as all those people who didn't attend film school or vote for McGovern. It's a nasty, bigoted little piece of hackwork which tries to pass itself off as clever satire.

OK, this film wants us to sympathize with southerners who took to banditry after the Civil War. So what evil and disgusting Yankee devilry do they show us? A check-suited carpetbagger telling black people they can--gasp!--walk on the sidewalk and sit on the front porch, and a lot of happy black folks celebrating their new freedom.

Oh, well, you can understand, then. Blacks on the sidewalks?! God help us! Keep your powder dry, boys! I normally deprecate the simple-minded practice of holding the art of other eras responsible to our standards of political correctness, but I don't care--that's just plain foul.

Of course, it's not completely racist; there are decent black folks in evidence, too: they are the ones who sympathize with their oppressors and help them fight those lousy carpetbaggers who want to let them sit right on the front porch where anybody can see them!

It's been a few years since I saw *Gone With the Wind*: was it this hamhandedly bigoted in its treatment of blacks?

It's s shame, because one you get past the overt racism, this is actually a pretty good movie, with one of Randolph Scott's better performances.

Imagine a bunch of Nazi sympathizers making a self-righteous movie whining about American Nazis having--gasp!--lost their lucrative jobs! Merely because they were Nazis! Can't imagine such a movie? Well, watch *The Front*, and every time someone says "Communist," mentally substitute the word "Nazi." It's easy, because the gutless wonders who made this film were too cowardly to delve into Communist ideology or the crimes committed by its believers.

Perhaps the worst thing about this movie is that it is impossible for anyone who knows what Communism was to truly appreciate the undeniably brilliant performance of Zero Mostel.

It might have worked, had the filmmakers focused upon people (such as Mostel's character) who were *wrongly* caught up in the blacklist, rather than try to engage the audience's sympathy on behalf of people who knowingly supported a filthy and inhuman ideology which was responsible for far more murders than Nazism.

Or maybe it wouldn't have worked. Basically, this film is an adolescent fantasy about standing up to Daddy; perhaps nothing could have turned it into anything else.

Imagine that one day, people just start singing at you -- not singing songs or hymns or arias, but just pointlessly warbling everything they have to say, from "Good morning" to "You want fries with that?" How long do you think it would take before you slapped someone across the face and screamed, "STOP SINGING! Talk like a normal human being!" For me, it would take about twenty minutes. And that's what I learned from *The Umbrellas of Cherbourg*.

The music seems primarily to serve the purpose of stretching a fairly thin plot across ninety minutes of screen time. In a real musical, with good songs and dancing, this can actually work (see, e.g., *Singin' in the Rain* and *On the Town*). But this isn't a real musical, more's the pity.

Apart from the cinematography (and even that gets cloying by the end) and the opening title sequence (which is truly wonderful), I honestly can't see what so many people see in this film.

I am by no means anti-Shyamalan. I loved THE SIXTH SENSE, liked SIGNS a lot, and even kind of liked THE VILLAGE (though the twist was so telegraphed that I figured it out the first time I heard the movie's premise).

I hated UNBREAKABLE, but that may be partly because I'm an old curmudgeon who thinks that adults who read comic books are some kind of damned subversives. Also, it was just silly.

Shyamalan is a remarkably talented filmmaker. Even here, his ability to use cinematic techniques to achieve the effects he wants is notable.

Sadly, all this talent is wasted in the service of a muddled and mindless story of a pathetic naked chick named Barf who lives in a swimming pool, some pig-dogs with grass for fur, and big monkeys made out of turmeric. Or something.

I've read several reviews that say that it seemed like they were making it up as they went along. Those reviews are accurate. That is precisely what it seemed like. The story proceeds with no rhyme or reason. Shyamalan did not bother to create a coherent world or set of rules. He clearly just made it up as he went along, inventing whatever he needed to make the plot go a certain way.

Giamatti and Balaban give good performances, and as I say, Shyamalan's talent manages to shine through in places, in spite of the utter stupidity of the film. Nothing else here deserves praise, though I would like to single out Bryce Dallas Howard's insipid performance for special condemnation (to be fair, this is at least as much Shyamalan's fault as Howard's). To be perfectly honest, I was hoping the big grass pig-dog would rip her to shreds.

And then I was hoping it would go after Shyamalan's own character, a pseudo-Messiah whose ideas will form the basis for a total reconstruction of society. You know, like Marx. Or Hitler.

I think that politically, Shyamalan is perhaps, shall we say, a bit naive. No, let's say "stupid"; it's less tactful, but more accurate.

Hopefully Shyamalan will pull himself together after the deserved critical pasting this film took. Maybe, for example, he should stop writing his own screenplays, or at least get some collaborators to keep him from going off the rails to the extent he does here.

Let me count the ways:

1. Better casting.

Malkovich and Ngor are terrific, but surely they could have found a more compelling (not necessarily better, just more compelling) actor than Waterson to play the lead.

2. Better score.

What the %$&# was that? You know, I think "Tubular Bells" works well in *The Exorcist*, but they never should have let this guy score a whole movie. It's ugly and overwrought, and I swear to God that in places, it's over-explanatory character almost crosses the line into "Mickey Mousing."

3. Better closing song.

"Imagine"? "I"-freaking-"MAGINE"?! The killing fields of Cambodia represent Lennon's idiotic totalitarian fantasies taken to their logical conclusion. This is what happens when you try to reshape human nature to fit an ideological mold. You can't do it, so you just end up killing everyone. The use of this song demonstrates that the filmmakers had no idea what the hell they were making a film about.

4. More honesty.

It might have behooved the filmmakers, when they were giving Sidney Schanberg (in the person of Waterston) free rein to spew his puerile blame-America-first leftism, to have acknowledged that Schanberg wrote pro-Khmer Rouge propaganda intended to convince the American people that a Communist takeover of Cambodia would be a very fine thing indeed (including, mere days before the Communist victory, a piece headline "Indochina Without Americans: For Most, a Better Life").

5. Less racism.

OK, Dith Pran wants to stay in Cambodia because he's a reporter and it's his job. But it's Schanberg's fault that Pran stays because...well, apparently because Pran's just an Asian who shouldn't be allowed to make his own decisions. I can't see any other reason why it's Schanberg's responsibility. Pran is a grown man.

And I touched above on the film's blaming America for the Khmer Rouge atrocities. Apparently Asians can't be expected to know how to behave. If they kill millions of people, it can only be because of something Great White Father did.

But for all that, I still recommend the film as a depiction of what Communism is in its essence--even if the filmmakers don't quite seem to have grasped it themselves.

And, sadly, it's a *typical* Golan-Globus production.

Cannon Films, under it's owner-producers Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus, was the '80s equivalent of the old Poverty Row studios. Mostly, they churned out cheap, stupid action flicks. This is one of them.

The acting is horrid (no one here is less than embarrassing; Voight and Roberts seem to have been involved in a "stupidest accent" competition), the dialogue is risible, and the plot consists of a succession of events which simply could not ever happen in the real world. In particular, the efforts to make the warden look like a serious villain merely make the filmmakers look like serious morons.

Presumably Kurosawa, being a genius, would have made a much better film than this, but still, I think we all have to be grateful to Serge Silberman, who backed Kurosawa's pet project *Ran*, the last of Kurosawa's major films (and presumably the one that made him drop "Runaway Train*).

(Update: I just read somewhere that Kurosawa was planning to make this back in the late '60s; if so, my assumption about *Ran* would be untrue. But I'm still grateful to Serge Silberman.)

It's a bit melodramatic, but up until Irene's final conversation with Cassatti the Commie, *Europa '51* is a very interesting film, first about a pampered rich woman's reaction to her son's death, then about the difference between windy Marxist propaganda and real compassion.

However, at that point, Rossellini's original idea takes over: He wanted to make a film about what would happen if a truly saintly person ever showed up in the modern world. And he had a very good idea of what would happen--or at least a very insistent one. The people here obviously behave the way they do solely to make the point Rossellini wants to make, even when their behavior doesn't seem very plausible. In defter hands, such manipulation can work. Here, though, you can see the tracks Rossellini has rather clumsily laid down to move the story where he wants it to go.

I rented this movie in spite of Fukasaku's name, so I'm perhaps not the most objective judge. In fact, it turned out not to be as bad as I expected, particularly after the completely inappropriate 70s cop-movie theme music. (I kept expecting one of the investigators to slam Asano up against the wall and ask him if he'd ever picked his feet in Kamakura.) But it's still basically a Fukasaku movie. Where it's a straight retelling of the 47 Ronin story, it's OK. Where Fukasaku inserts his own special brand of action melodrama, it's not; I defy anyone to sit through the murder-suicide scene without laughing.

The climax is considerably more Sonny Chiba than Chushingura, and I don't mean that as a compliment.

And how much did Toei Studios have to shell out to get Toshiro Mifune for a role that could easily have been played by a bit player who would have been glad to do it for scale? It's not that his presence makes the movie worse, exactly, it's just that...why is he there?

I defy anyone to watch this film on its own terms. You sit down in front of the TV with the best will in the world, and then Crazylegs Hirsch asks the little boy if he's ever been in a cockpit before, and suddenly you're rolling on the floor.

What's amazing is how many of the jokes in *Airplane* work even though they parody specific moments in this movie (which fairly few people had seen).

"How about some coffee, Johnny?" "Looks like I picked the wrong week to quit smoking." "He's a menace to himself and everything else in the air!" "Stewardess? I think the man sitting next to me is a doctor." "It's a different kind of flying altogether."

I do wonder why they dropped the Jerry Paris character, who seems like he would have been a rich subject for parody.

...after the brilliance of De Sica's masterpiece, THE BICYCLE THIEF.

While in TBT, De Sica presents us with a slice of life, here he offers up melodrama and manipulation. The landlady (whose greatest crime is that she wants her tenants to pay their rent) might as well have a top hat and a waxed mustache to twirl.

This manipulation makes the old man's plight seem much less real than the poster-hanger's from TBT.

Not that it's a bad film, except by comparison; it does have its moments, the best by far being the shot toward the end with the rushing train.

I had seen LIBERTY VALANCE a couple of times before. I quite enjoyed it and rated it a 9.

What the hell was I thinking? Watching it again this evening, I realized that it was one of the finest films I had ever seen, quite worthy of the 10 I had given RED RIVER, SHANE, and THE SEARCHERS.

Like SHANE, it exemplifies the theme of the whole Western genre. Like Shane, Tom Doniphon is one of those good but violent men who just can't fit into the new, civilized West they've done more than anyone to create. This is the essence of the Western.

Is that the way the Old West really was? Who really knows? But when the legend becomes fact....

And it's got Lee Marvin, Lee Van Cleef, and Strother Martin as the bad guys. I mean, how cool is that?

RHAPSODY IN AUGUST is not an anti-American film. Although some of the characters express anti-American sentiments, the film rejects them. And Richard Gere's character does not apologize for the atomic bombing (which would have been unforgivably presumptuous of Kurosawa). He apologizes for his family's ignorance of the fate of his uncle.

But that's not to say that this is a good film. Kurosawa hectors the audience, which is a thing he hardly ever does. And surely Kurosawa could have found a more interesting American actor than Richard Gere to play Clark. And it is true that Kurosawa, while eschewing an anti-American stance, does try to pin the blame on "war," meaning that he tries to parcel the blame out equally. But of course, the blame for WWII isn't shared equally. Perhaps having Clark mention that his mother's brother died at Pearl Harbor, or making his wife a Chinese-American whose parents were murdered at Nanking, might have served as a prophylactic against this moral failing. Of course, this might have meant that Kurosawa would have had to come to terms with his own past as a wartime propagandist for the government which committed those crimes.

Perhaps the silliest aspect of the film is its indignant insistence that Americans don't want to discuss the bombings.

Please. We discuss it all the time. We debate, and we agonize, and we yammer endlessly about what might have happened, and what did Truman think might have happened, and what if this and what if that. We also talk about the firebombings of Tokyo and Dresden, the sellout to Stalin at Yalta, and all the other things we did which are at least morally questionable if not criminal.

And to have this point of view put forth in a film which studiously avoids mention of Pearl Harbor, Nanking, the Philippines, Bataan, the atrocities in the POW camps, or any other undoubted crimes committed by the Japanese government is particularly galling.

All in all, the poorest of the 22 Kurosawa films which I have seen. The only thing here to which I can give unqualified praise is the remarkable performance of Sachiko Murase as Kane.

A film becomes dated not merely because it is a product of its time (by that standard, all movies are dated). A dated movie is one that comes off as a parody of its time.

A filmmaker who set out to make a parody of a pretentious early-60s art-house film would end up with something very like 8 1/2.

Watching this film, I found myself confirmed in my long-standing belief that artists are among the least interesting people in the world.

I do, however, understand why filmmakers and film students love this movie so much: It confirms them in their belief that no matter how rich, famous, and oversexed they get, people will still want to hear them whine about their little problems.

The direction, the cinematography, and the performances were adequate, but no more. The music was poor.

Occasionally, almost in spite of himself, Fellini will give us something which verges on the interesting, such as the scene where Luisa confronts Guido with the presence of his mistress. But he never sticks with it, preferring to sink back into his dreary little fantasies.

This is the only Fellini film I've seen so far (I've seen it twice; my opinion did not improve on second viewing), but LA DOLCE VITA's coming on TV next month. Maybe I'll give that one a try before I write Fellini off as an overrated hack.

(Update: I watched LA DOLCE VITA, and frankly, I not only think that he's overrated, but I don't think that Fellini has any particular talent for film-making. Again, there is that touch of interest {in this case, the paparazzi} which Fellini abandons).

Based on reviews I had read, I was expecting either a facile ban-the-bomb message film, or a story about greedy relatives trying to have an old man committed so they can get his money.

I should have known better. Part of Kurosawa's genius in his great middle period (1950-1965) is that he refuses to insist on anything. He fairly presents a series of events and invites us to decide what, if anything, they mean.

Everyone in this film has a point. No one here is really a villain. Even those who are jerks (notably the second son, Jiro) are really trying to do the right thing. And the film reminds me a little of THE CAINE MUTINY in that it very artfully moves our sympathies in one direction for most of the film before presenting us with events that make us wonder if we were wrong.

Toshiro Mifune gives a fine performance as Nakajima, but to tell the truth, I wish Kurosawa had given the role to Takashi Shimura, not only because I think Shimura would have played the role even better, but because it would have given him one more tour-de-force leading role in a Kurosawa film, coming directly after IKIRU and SEVEN SAMURAI. Granted, though, that such a move probably would have caused problems with both Toho and Mifune.

Kurosawa is my favorite director, but based on what I had heard about this film, I expected it to be a piece of silly, self-indulgent tripe.

Well, it is self-indulgent--given its nature, it could hardly help being that. And it is sometimes silly--but dreams are sometimes silly. And Kurosawa's views are sometimes ignorant, hysterical, and even childish--but would the dreams of a well-informed and sensible person have been more interesting? The trick with DREAMS is to understand that it is the least conventional of Kurosawa's films. One should not watch DREAMS like a movie, waiting to see "what happens next," but experience it like a painting, reveling in what is on the screen.

That's not to say that DREAMS is a great film; in fact, of the 16 Kurosawa films I've seen, it is my least favorite (update: I've now seen 22, and RHAPSODY IN AUGUST is my least favorite; DREAMS is my second least favorite). The music, which was never Kurosawa's strong suit (remember the "Bolero" knockoff in RASHOMON?) is probably the worst I've heard in any Kurosawa film. And Martin Scorsese as Vincent van Gogh is possibly the worst piece of miscasting since Evel Knievel played himself (unless the point of that dream is the horror of finding out that Van Gogh is an Noo-Yawk-accented Italian-American who can't act very well).

But for all that, it's still a good movie...and it's a Kurosawa movie, even if it's not the best of them.

Muddled and extremely silly samurai film marred by artsy flourishes, goofy ninja outfits, martial-arts fantasy nonsense, and a stupid ending.

On the plus side, Shinoda has a good eye for composition, the production values are quite good, and it's got a meaty role for Seiji Miyaguchi (Kyuzo from SEVEN SAMURAI).

The most potentially interesting thing about the film is its treatment of the persecution of Christians in Tokugawa Japan. Unfortunately, it treats this aspect with the same superficiality that it treats the conflict between the Tokugawa Shogunate and the Toyotomi clan (and the film starts with a basic historical error: the Toyotomi clan did not lose at Sekigahara; they didn't even fight there, although the battle did result in the end of Toyotomi hegemony over Japan).

While Kobayashi's wonderful *Harakiri* (which is the only non-Kurosawa Japanese film I've ever given 10/10) is a flat-out condemnation of the "samurai code," *Samurai Rebellion* is not quite that.

In *Harakiri*, it's clear that the "code" is entirely on the side of the Iyi clan, even when it leads them to do incredibly cruel and appalling things.

Here, even those who obey the lord's orders sympathize personally with the Sasahara family, and it is made clear several times throughout the film that the lord is himself violating the "code," and that if the other daimyo and the Shogunate were to hear of it, it could lead to the destruction of the Aizu clan.

Also, we have more of a dilemma here. In *Harakiri*, Hanshiro Tsugumo's actions affect only himself, but the decisions made in *Samurai Rebellion* affect a whole family and several related families. Indeed, it could be said that the Sasahara men and Lady Ichi are behaving selfishly by gratifying their own desires at the expense of the family.

It could be said that this marks a greater maturity in Kobayashi's outlook. Although the lord is clearly in the wrong, Kobayashi offers up the arguments for obeying him anyway.

In *Harakiri*, there are no such complications.

However, I consider *Harakiri* a better film (though *Samurai Rebellion* is quite good). Partly, it's Nakadai's amazing performance in the earlier film, but also, there's something to be said for a straightforward condemnation. Nuance may be more mature--and in judging Tokugawa Japan, even more intellectually honest--but it doesn't have the impact of crying "J'Accuse!"