Wednesday, May 29, 2013
"My Rifle, My Pony and Me" (Rio Bravo tribute, Part II)
While Sheriff Chance took on a major task by arresting Joe Burdette and incarcerating him in his small Presidio County jail, with Stumpy left to guard the bad guy most of the time, he still bears the responsibility for maintaining the law elsewhere in his town, something he accomplishes through street patrols and his nights staying at The Hotel Alamo (of all the names to pick) run by Carlos Robante (Pedro Gonzalez Gonzalez) and his wife Consuela (Estelita Rodriguez). One night, a poker game piques his interest as two of the players (Angie Dickinson, Walter Barnes) fit the profile of two hustlers warned about on handbills. After a cursory investigation, Chance arrests the woman, who goes by the name Feathers. She declares her innocence and Chance fails to find the crooked cards on her after she's left the table following a huge winning streak. When he returns though, he does find the stacked deck on the man, who has raked it in since her departure and tells him to return his ill-gotten gains and be on the morning stagecoach. He suggests that Feathers do the same, but she decides to stick around.
That next day, the Burdettes arrive as expected, led by Joe's smooth brother Nathan (John Russell, the gaunt, veteran actor of mostly Westerns where he usually played the villain. His second-to-last film was as the cold-blooded killer in Clint Eastwood's Pale Rider). He asks Chance why the streets appear so full of people. Chance offers no explanation, but suggests that perhaps gawkers came to town, drawn to the possibility that the Burdettes planned to put on a show.
Chance makes his nightly trek to the Hotel Alamo. When he gets there, Spencer pulls him over for a drink. The wagon master has heard of the trouble Chance faces. "A game-legged old man and a drunk. That's all you got?" Spencer asks in disbelief. "That's what I got," Chance responds. Spencer offers himself and his men as help against the Burdettes, but the sheriff expresses reluctance to take responsibility for others. He does ask about the confident young gunman Colorado that Spencer has hired. If he is as good as he thinks he is and lacks the family ties of the older men, Chance would be willing to take him on if Colorado agrees. Spencer calls Colorado over, but the young man politely declines, earning Chance's respect for being smart enough to know when to sit out a fight. Not long afterward, while Feathers flirts again and Chance urges her to get on the morning stage, shots ring out on the street and Spencer falls dead. Later, Nathan Burdette makes his first visit to see his brother Joe, despite Stumpy's withering verbal assaults, at the jail. First, Nathan wants the sheriff to
explain why his brother looks so beat up. "He didn't take too kindly to being arrested for murder," Chance tells Nathan while Joe denies the shooting was murder. Nathan asks how Chance can be so certain or, at the very least, why Joe isn't being tried where the alleged murder occurred. Chance nixes that idea, content to let the U.S. marshal handle Joe Burdette and try him elsewhere. Nathan silkily makes no overt threats, but certainly implies that Joe might not remain in the Presidio County jail by the time that marshal shows up, especially if the sheriff relies on a drunk and an old man as his backup. Chance isn't in a mood to hide his cards. "You're a rich man, Burdette. Big ranch, pay a lot of people to do what you want 'em to do. And you got a brother. He's no good but he's your brother. He committed 20 murders you'd try and see he didn't hang for 'em," the sheriff spits out. "I don't like that kinda talk. Now you're practically accusing me," Nathan Burdette says, but Chance continues. "Let's get this straight. You don't like? I don't like a lot of things. I don't like your men sittin' on the road bottling up this town. I don't like your men watching us, trying to catch us with our backs turned. And I don't like it when a friend of mine offers to help and 20 minutes later he's dead! And i don't like you, Burdette, because you set it up." If war wasn't brewing before, it was now.
The murder of Spencer fully incorporates the last two major characters more fully into the film and the action. With his boss dead, Colorado at first finds himself content to take his pay from the slain wagon master's possessions and remains determined to mind his own business. Once he witnesses some more of the Burdette brutality, Colorado decides to join up and Chance deputizes him. Colorado becomes part of the team and helps Chance escape an ambush, an ambush for which the sheriff seems prepared to occur, quickly pumping off rounds from his rifle. "You always leave the carbine cocked?" Colorado asks. "Only when I carry it," Chance replies. Originally, Hawks opposed casting Ricky Nelson, though the director admits he probably boosted box office. He had sought someone popular with young viewers, but felt Nelson — who turned 18 during filming — lacked age and experience for the part. Hawks had chased Elvis Presley for the role, but as often was the case, Col. Tom Parker demanded too much money for his client and the Rio Bravo production had to take a pass. The pseudo love affair between Feathers and Chance also heats up, though Wayne's discomfort with the romantic scenes with Dickinson is readily apparent. Wayne felt uneasy about the 25-year age gap between him and Dickinson. On top of that, nervous studio bosses wanted no implication made that Chance and Feathers ever sleep together. Double entendres and innuendos abound, but truthfully more sparks fly in brief scenes between Martin and Dickinson and Nelson and Dickinson than ever produce friction in the Wayne-Dickinson scenes. What becomes most interesting about the relationship between Feathers and Chance is Feathers' transformation into the sheriff's protector, keeping watch over him as he sleeps to make sure that no Burdette makes a move on him.
You don't need to know how the rest of Rio Bravo unfolds. Besides, part of what makes the film so fascinating and more than your ordinary Western comes from the multiple tones Hawks balances. A viewer seeing Rio Bravo for the first time couldn't positively predict what mood shall prevail by the final reel: light-hearted, tragic, heroic, romantic, some combination of those elements. At any given moment, you might change your mind. Most of this uncertainty reflects the nature of the character Dude. With the possible exception of Feathers, almost every other character in the film stays on a static path. Dude captures our attention the most because of the dynamics within him. Will he maintain the upper hand in his battle with booze or will he fall off the wagon again and if he does, what consequences does that
have for the others? Even sober, he's prone to depression, low self-esteem and self-pity. Still, he can croon a song or be a crack shot. A part this multifaceted requires a talented actor and back when Rio Bravo was made, Dean Martin wouldn't be one of the first names to jump to your mind. However, in the years 1958 and 1959, soon after the end of his partnership with Jerry Lewis, Martin turned in two impressive performances (perhaps three, but I haven't seen 1958's The Young Lions). In 1958, he gave a great turn as a professional gambler Bama Dillert in Vincente Minnelli's adaptation of the James Jones novel Some Came Running starring Frank Sinatra and Shirley MacLaine. He followed that with his astoundingly good work in Rio Bravo. While Martin continue to make entertaining films, for some reason those two years stand out as an aberration and he never got roles as good as Bama Dillert or Dude again.Hawks' behind-the-scenes collaborators provided as much of the magic of Rio Bravo as its cast. From Russell Harlan's crisp and lush cinematography to Tiomkin's score that complements Hawks' leisurely pacing well. Tiomkin also teamed with lyricist Paul Francis West for the film's songs — "Cindy" and "My Rifle, My Pony and Me" in the extended musical interlude by Dude, Stumpy and
Colorado as well as the title song. Reportedly, Wayne joined the singing at one point until they decided it inappropriate for the sheriff to take part (and also because the Duke allegedly could not carry a tune). In another instance of borrowing from past work, at Wayne's suggestion, Tiomkin actually reworked the theme to Red River into the song "My Rifle, My Pony and Me." Tiomkin also composed "Degüello," aka "The Cutthroat Song," which the Burdettes play to psych out the good guys guarding Joe. The film claims the music comes from Mexico where Santa Anna's soldiers played it continuously to unnerve those holed up inside the Alamo. Wayne loved the music and the story so much, even though the tale wasn't true, he used it in his film The Alamo the following year. His screenwriting team of Jules Furthman and Leigh Brackett both had worked with Hawks as a team and separately before and after Rio Bravo. Previously, Furthman and Brackett co-wrote Hawks' classic 1946 take on The Big Sleep. Furthman also co-wrote Come and Get It and To Have and Have Not and did a solo turn on Only Angels Have Wings. The legendary Brackett, despite her extensive screenwriting work, made a name for herself as a novelist, largely in the male-dominated field of science fiction. In Schickel's commentary, he refers to Brackett as an example of a real life Hawksian woman. In fact, before her death, the last screenplay she co-wrote was The Empire Strikes Back. In another non-Hawks project, she returned to Philip Marlowe when she wrote the screenplay for Robert Altman's The Long Goodbye. In addition to the Hawks titles already mentioned for Brackett, she also wrote the screenplay for 1962's Hatari! and co-wrote 1970's Rio Lobo. The DVD commentary also includes director John Carpenter, who names Hawks as his favorite director, and paid tribute to Leigh Brackett by naming the sheriff in the original Halloween after her.Tweet
Labels: 50s, Altman, Angie Dickinson, Blog-a-thons, Dean Martin, Eastwood, Elvis, Hawks, Jerry Lewis, John Carpenter, MacLaine, Movie Tributes, Sinatra, Star Wars, W. Brennan, Wayne
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Saturday, September 10, 2011
Cliff Robertson 1923-2011
Ordinarily, when someone with as long and as illustrious a career as Cliff Robertson passes away, I would try to be as comprehensive as possible in my appreciation. Unfortunately, because I've been so underwater in projects, I didn't receive the news until much later than I should have and the due dates of the projects require that I can't take myself away from them for too long a stretch. Before I write my short look at the career of Mr. Robertson, who died Saturday one day after his 88th birthday, I'd like to express regret for not finding a better photo of him as the slimy and manipulative presidential candidate Ben Cantwell in the 1964 film adaptation of Gore Vidal's play The Best Man. His at-any-costs maneuvers to wrestle the nomination away from Henry Fonda's William Russell, for me at least, was the best work Robertson ever did on screen.
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Labels: Aldrich, Crawford, De Palma, DeVito, Fosse, H. Fonda, John Carpenter, Mailer, Mankiewicz, Obituary, Oscars, Raimi, Redford, Television, Tennessee Williams, Theater, Vidal, Walken, Walsh
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Sunday, July 10, 2011
The Next 60 Seconds Are All That Matter
By J.D.
John Carpenter is one of those rare filmmakers that entertains while also trying to say something about the society in which we live in. It is a tough balancing act that few can maintain but Carpenter's films make it look easy. From the special effects opus/remake drenched in paranoia of The Thing (1982) to the two-fisted diatribe against Reaganomics of They Live (1988), he hasn't been afraid to sandwich a thought-provoking message in between action sequences. In this respect, his films are much more than genre pictures; rather they critique the problems of contemporary society. And for its time, Escape From New York(1981) was no different. Carpenter's film examined the validity of the presidency and the increase of crime and disguised it as a slick, futuristic race against time that was very prescient, going on to influence similarly minded and looking films for years, including a fascinating subgenre of Italian rip-offs.
Escape From New York is set in 1997 (?!) and crime in the United States has grown so bad that Manhattan Island in New York has become a maximum security prison with one simple rule: "Once you go in, you don't come out." One night, the president's plane is taken over by terrorists who crash it into the prison. The president (Donald Pleasence) escapes but quickly becomes a prisoner of the inmates led by the Duke (Isaac Hayes). It seems that the president is carrying a vital piece of information that is to be delivered to a historical summit in Hartford. Enter Snake Plissken (Kurt Russell), an ex-soldier, now legendary fugitive who has been captured by the government and is scheduled to be transferred into the prison. Instead, Police Commissioner Bob Hauk (Lee Van Cleef) offers him a deal: go into the prison, find the president, and bring him and the information back in exchange for a full pardon. Sounds easy, right? There's a catch: Snake only has 22 hours to do all this because by then the conference will be over and the world will be thrown into chaos. As an incentive he has two explosive charges lodged in his neck to keep him focused on the task at hand. With this enticing opening, the film kicks into high gear as Snake enters the world's most dangerous prison to find the president and save the world.
Carpenter had just made Dark Star (1974) and no one wanted to hire him as a director so he shifted his focus to screenwriting. Inspired by the Charles Bronson film Death Wish (1974), Carpenter originally wrote the screenplay in 1974. He didn’t agree with the film’s philosophy but liked how it conveyed “the sense of New York as a kind of jungle, and I wanted to make an SF film along these lines. He was also influenced by the Watergate scandal. "The whole feeling of the nation was one of real cynicism about the president. I wrote the screenplay and no studio wanted to make it" because the general feeling was that “It was too violent, too scary, too weird.” And so the director went on to do other films with the intention of making Escape later. After the successes of Halloween (1978) and The Fog (1980), Carpenter was in a position to make a motion picture with a big budget. He decided to revive his Escape script, but something seemed to be missing. "This was basically a straight action film. And at one point I realized it really doesn't have this kind of crazy humor that people from New York would expect to see." So, he brought in Nick Castle, a friend from his film school days at University of Southern California. Castle invented the Cabbie (Ernest Borgnine) character and came up with the film's humorous conclusion that offset the bleak tone of the film with a skewed sense of satire.
The film's setting proved to be another potential problem for Carpenter. It is apocalyptic in tone: a decaying, semi-destroyed version of New York. How could Carpenter create this world on only a budget of $6 million (his biggest at the time)? As fate would have it, in 1977 there was a big fire in St. Louis that burned out several blocks of the downtown area. Carpenter and his crew convinced the city to shut off the electricity to these blocks at night and then proceeded to transform the remains into a New York of the future. They even found an exact replica of Grand Central Station that was deserted and unused. It was a tough, demanding shoot that Carpenter had never experienced before. "We'd finish shooting at about 6 a.m. and I'd just be going to sleep at 7 when the sun would be coming up. I'd wake up around 5 or 6 p.m., depending on whether or not we had dailies, and by the time I got going the sun would be setting. So for about two and a half months I never saw daylight, which was really strange." This approach paid off, creating a dark, foreboding atmosphere of a futuristic film noir.
In addition, Carpenter shot parts of the film in Los Angeles and New York. He and his film company were the first ones ever to be allowed to shoot on Liberty Island, at the Statue of Liberty at night. They let Carpenter have free run of the entire island. He remembers, “We were lucky. It wasn’t easy to get that initial permission. They’d had a bombing three months earlier, and were worried about trouble.” With Escape, the director created two distinct looks: “one is the police state, high tech, lots of neon, a United States dominated by underground computers. That was easy to shoot compared to the Manhattan Island prison sequences, which had few lights, mainly torch lights, like feudal England.”
The heart of Escape From New York lies in its main character: Snake Plissken. His cynical, world-weary attitude flies in the face of the earnest authorities who send him off to the save the world. Snake could care less. All that matters to him is "the next 60 seconds," as Kurt Russell commented in an interview. "Living for exactly that next minute is all there is." It is this kind of intensity that makes Snake such an interesting
character. He is the ideal antihero — intent on getting the job done and content on being left alone. Snake doesn't need anyone. Russell's performance clearly echoes Clint Eastwood's style of acting — the strong, silent type. Snake is a clever hybrid of The Man With No Name and Dirty Harry. It is an amusing riff on Eastwood's two most famous characters, which is only reinforced by the appearance of Lee Van Cleef (who appeared in a few films opposite Eastwood). It is to Russell's credit that he makes Snake a character you want to root for, that you want to see win at the end. There is something charismatic about Snake that makes you automatically want to like him. What is so great about the character is that Carpenter and co-screenwriter Nick Castle remain true to him throughout. They don’t saddle him with a love interest or dilute his intensity by having him crack the occasional joke. Snake remains an unrepentant badass, the proverbial fly in the ointment with a surly disregard for authority right up to the last shot of the film.
And to think that the studio did not want Carpenter to cast Russell in the role. Up until then the actor had done a string of Disney films as a youth and worked with Carpenter on a TV movie about Elvis Presley. The studio did not see Russell as a tough action hero. In fact, Charles Bronson expressed an interest in playing Snake (Tommy Lee Jones also was considered). However, by Carpenter’s own admission, “I was afraid of working with him. He was a big star and I was this little-shit nobody.” Fortunately, the filmmaker had faith in Russell and Escape From New York continued a long-standing relationship between the two men — both personal and professional — that continues to this day.
Escape From New York also features a strong supporting cast of character actors such as veteran thespian Harry Dean Stanton as Brain, the smartest man in the prison, and Ernest Borgnine as Cabbie, a hack who stayed in New York even after it changed into a prison. Let’s not forget Adrienne Barbeau as the Brain’s girlfriend Maggie and yet she is anything but that, as the talented actress plays her character as the tough-minded female equivalent of Snake. The film contains an eccentric assortment of characters each of who get their moment to shine and this only enhances the enjoyment of watching Escape. One of the best things about it is how these characters interact with Snake and how he views them. The supporting cast also fleshes out more of this fascinating world. They continually offer all sorts of tantalizing tidbits that allude to Snake's colorful past, to conditions in the prison and how the inmates have created their own world.
Escape from New York received mostly positive reviews when it was released. Newsweek magazine felt that Carpenter had a “deeply ingrained B-movie sensibility — which is both his strength and limitation. He does clean work, but settles for too little. He uses Russell well, however.” Time magazine’s Richard Corliss wrote, “John Carpenter is offering this summer's moviegoers a rare opportunity: to escape from the air-conditioned torpor of ordinary entertainment into the hothouse humidity of their own paranoia. It's a trip worth taking.” In his review for The New York Times, Vincent Canby wrote, "[The film] is not to be analyzed too solemnly, though. It's a toughly told, very tall tale, one of the best escape (and escapist) movies of the season." However, the Chicago Reader’s Dave Kehr felt that the film, “fails to satisfy — it gives us too little of too much.”
First and foremost Escape From New York is a fast-paced action film that is never dull to watch. However, the film also contains a dark, satirical edge that never falters, even right up to the film's conclusion. One the most frustrating problems of most films is how they end. No one seems to know how to end a film without relying on tried and true clichés. Carpenter's film does not fall into this trap. Escape may be an action film but it also makes some very interesting comments about crime in the United States that are still relevant even today. One could argue that Carpenter's film is almost intended to be a warning. That if things get any worse, the world that is depicted in this film isn't that far off. It is these sobering thoughts that make Escape From New York as powerful and entertaining today as it was when it first hit the screens in 1981.
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Labels: 80s, Borgnine, Eastwood, Elvis, John Carpenter, Kurt Russell, Movie Tributes, Pleasence, Tommy Lee Jones
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Saturday, July 02, 2011
It's All in the Reflexes
By VenetianBlond
Today we celebrate the 25th anniversary of Big Trouble in Little China, a movie that made little impact in theaters but now evokes a certain nostalgia in those of us who watched it repeatedly on VHS or on Sunday afternoon cable TV. Directed by John Carpenter and starring Kurt Russell, Kim Cattrall, and Dennis Dun, it’s an action-adventure-comedy-kung-fu-creature feature-romance set in San Francisco’s Chinatown.
Russell’s Jack Burton is a blowhard of a truck driver who gets entangled in a Chinese mystery when his best friend Wang’s (Dun) fiance Miao Yin is kidnapped just as she’s disembarking from her flight from China. It seems there’s a robust sex slave trade being combated by activist attorney Gracie Law (Cattrall). Burton, Wang, Cattrall, and eventually Egg Shen, the good-guy-sorcerer, go to the brothel where they think Miao Yin is being held. The rest of the film is an extended chase scene punctuated by kung-fu battles and magical set pieces. Lo Pan, a 2,000 year old cursed spirit, must marry a green-eyed girl to become flesh again, and both Miao Yin and Gracie have green eyes.
After being given a studio script that was completely overhauled from its original form as a Western, Carpenter knew he needed to bring in an actor with some box office heft to sell a virtually inexplicable film. He and Russell had worked together for 1982’s The Thing, although the studio hemmed and hawed on that casting. Once Clint Eastwood and Jack Nicholson (seriously?) proved unavailable, Russell was given the job. Unfortunately, Russell did not prove to be as much of a draw as was hoped, and the experience soured Carpenter on working on studio projects entirely so he returned to independent filmmaking.
Part of the problem is that the characters are actually characterizations. Burton is a John Wayne Lite who has a high opinion of himself and is just as likely to get conked on the head as he is to strike the fatal blow. Wang is channeling a 1940s motormouthed gangster, and Gracie is a breathless ingénue with nerves of steel in the Scarlett O’Hara mode. In addition, it was a martial-arts film before the big wave of popular martial-arts films hit the U.S. so mainstream audiences didn’t quite know what to make of it.
However, Carpenter’s filmmaking vocabulary was quite precise and he kept control of the pace and tone throughout. From visual jokes like Jack perpetually bringing a knife to gun fights to his heroic and completely phony line, “OK. You people sit tight, hold the fort and keep the home fires burning. And if we're not back by dawn…call the president,” the action is
punctuated by humor and self-awareness. It makes sense, because Jack Burton himself is completely self-aware. He does and says what he does to make himself look like the built-up ideal of himself in his mind. Carpenter also directs the action well, keeping a coherent through-line as well as identifying the good fighters, emphasizing different techniques, and generally keeping a sense of urgency throughout each fight. This is not to say he doesn’t also give the chopsocky style bulgy-eyed staredown its due, but even with the directorial winks, the stakes of each battle are clear.
Where Carpenter really excelled was in the effects and the monsters. Jack and Wang must swim through the “Hell of the Upside-Down Sinners” and the submerged and rotting corpses drift in front of our heroes and the camera just right. Toward the end, once the “big boss” is defeated, one of his minions puffs up and explodes. Literally. One of the creatures shows up in a fantastic little postscript at the end of the film but it’s not gratuitous. It’s Carpenter saying that there’s still crazy stuff out there, so you had better always be on your guard.
I generally like Kurt Russell’s acting, but I love his Jack Burton. There’s the level of player and blowhard, but he also shows how Burton is so completely out of his element. He manages to fire a round into a bad guy and is completely surprised that it worked. I don’t know whose idea it was, but after rescuing Gracie and laying a big kiss on her, he walks into the next battle with her lipstick smeared all over his mouth and teeth. The real hero is Wang, the apparent sidekick who has right and honor on his side as well as the mad kung-fu skills.
Big Trouble in Little China is entertainment, first and foremost, that manages to use action tropes while joking about them at the same time. I’d posit that few action films from the 80’s have aged as well, even given Kurt Russell’s acid wash jeans.
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Labels: 80s, Eastwood, John Carpenter, Kurt Russell, Movie Tributes, Nicholson, Wayne
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Thursday, June 23, 2011
We need Bob — now more than ever
By Edward Copeland
I miss Robert Altman. The cinematic world became less interesting when he left this universe. Not every film he made was a masterpiece (in fact some bordered on the unwatchable), but you knew that whatever he directed, the end product would not be a something that looked as if he were just going through the motions. I had no plans to write a piece like this but Friday marks the 40th anniversary of McCabe & Mrs. Miller, for which I will have a tribute. After re-watching the film, I listened to the DVD commentary by Altman and the film's co-producer David Foster, and it contained so many goodies, I knew I'd want to include them. Then again, Altman always recorded some of the best DVD commentaries around, this one recorded sometime after the release of Gosford Park. It gave so many great details not just about McCabe but about the business and, from Foster, Altman in general that I felt a separate post was required to prevent the movie tribute from becoming tremendously long. Besides, can there ever be too much written about Robert Altman?
Since this was a commentary on the making of 1971's McCabe & Mrs. Miller, much of what Altman and Foster had to say related to the making of the film and that in itself is fascinating. For Foster, who co-produced the movie with Mitchell Brower, it was the first film he ever produced — quite an auspicious beginning for a first-time producer to work with Altman, hot off the success of MASH on a film starring superstars and then off-screen lovers Warren Beatty and Julie Christie.
As for the movie itself, it provides plenty of interesting details for Altman and Foster to discuss. For starters, the Pacific Northwest mining town of Presbyterian Church that provides the setting of the film seems to grow as the film progresses and there is a very good reason for that: The production company built it from scratch. Under the supervision of production designer Leon Ericksen, who also worked with Altman on Images, Quintet and California Split, the crew built the various buildings of the town — McCabe's House of Fortune, the bathhouse, the ornate whorehouse — as the film was being made. It allowed the movie to be shot almost entirely in sequence. It also meant there were no extras in the film: the production crew (many of whom were Americans who fled to Vancouver to avoid the Vietnam draft) all dressed in period clothing so if any were caught on camera while they were building, they wouldn't look out of place. This black-and-white promotional shot by Warner Bros., of Presbyterian Church after the town was completed said that it stood for seven months during the filming of McCabe & Mrs. Miller but at the end of production, the entire set, which was used as housing for some of the cast and crew during filming, was destroyed. You can see at the center McCabe's gambling hall and in the distance the steeple of the church that gave the town its name.
When people discuss McCabe & Mrs. Miller, the one aspect that comes up most often, whether you love the film, hate it or have feelings that lie somewhere in between, is that magnificent look, conceived by renowned director of photography Vilmos Zsigmond, the great Hungarian-born cinematographer. Foster and Altman both explain in the commentary the process Zsigmond used to achieve the look. The d.p. used a process called "flashing the film." It's a risky procedure that calls for care and precision to pull off, but the results amaze when they work as they did in McCabe. As Foster explains it, Zsigmond would shoot the film and then expose the negative for a few minutes, just long enough for light to hit it. If done wrong, it can ruin the negative. When done right, as it was here, it produces that beautiful "antiquated, turn-of-the-century Daguerreotype look." As Altman elaborated, by doing it to the negative, it also prevented the studio from complaining or firing him since to do so would require re-shooting the whole thing. You gotta love the man. He always was thinking one step ahead of anyone who would try to screw up his vision. As Foster says about Altman:
"He is fun to be around. I just think he's a genius. He works outside the system. He's just too smart. He knows what he wants to do and how he gets them financed.…He's had a really great life doing what he wants to do. Living in London for a year, living in Paris for a year, living wherever he's shooting a movie."
Amazingly, Zsigmond did not receive an Oscar nomination for his cinematography, something Foster blames in the commentary on Zsigmond not being able to join the American Society of Cinematographers union yet. He eventually would get nominated, winning for Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and being nominated for The Deer Hunter, The River and Brian De Palma's The Black Dahlia, though some of his other best work went unrecognized such as Deliverance, Altman's The Long Goodbye, De Palma's Blow Out and Jack Nicholson's The Two Jakes. Even more astoundingly, the only Oscar nomination McCabe & Mrs. Miller received was for Christie as best actress.
While McCabe ostensibly is a Western, it's not your typical Western by any means and when he was talking with the studio about wardrobe, he told them specifically not to send him any of those big cowboy hats you usually see because they weren't historically accurate. The wardrobe woman argued they were, showing him photographic "proof." He asked her if she knew how much one of those plates cost back then. He told her that they were so expensive they only took photos of the unusual. These people were European immigrants who came here with the clothes off their back. He used that attitude in terms of accents as well.
"These people are all European. They didn't develop a Texas accent. They didn't destroy the English language as much as it is until George Bush came along. It took years for that."
When they did get the wardrobe, he told the cast to pick out what they wanted and how much they could take in terms of shirts, pants, etc. The more experienced actors, he says, jumped on more interesting, character-looking clothes. Of course, those garments usually were torn with holes and rips. Once they were dressed and assembled, Altman pointed out to them that the clothes they had picked out probably meant their character all died of pneumonia or other conditions during rough weathers in the tough climate and then pointed them to where they had put out patches and sewing kits and watched as the actors spent hours repairing the garments they had selected for their characters.
Altman always provides great attitudes and he offers one about another great director who is no longer here to provide us with if not always great at least challenging films that we could really use — Stanley Kubrick. It seems that after McCabe originally opened, Kubrick called Altman up, wondering how Zsigmond got a shot of Beatty lighting his cigar in the rain before he crosses a rope bridge. Altman told him that he actually filmed that shot himself because Zsigmond had to go back to L.A. that day and he only shot it once. Kubrick obsessed over how Altman knew that he had the shot, but Altman told him that he didn't know — he just assumed he did and moved on. The answer didn't really satisfy the meticulous Kubrick, Altman says.
When the movie gets to the part where the representatives for Harrison Shaughnessy, a mining company seeking to buy out McCabe's holdings in the town arrive in the form of Michael Murphy and Anthony Holland, Altman gives a particularly great comment that relates to many ways of life, but he was speaking to the process of filmmaking itself.
"The enemies wear different disguises but they're always the same persons. They're always the accountants and the bankers and the people who do this for money as opposed to…the people who do it because they really want to. The actors, all the artists involved like what they're doing. It's what they decided to do in their lives. It's a shame it's such an expensive process. You see the spirit of all this in theaters around the world."
Altman also expounds on how he always resisted musical scores for his films, preferring to go with indigenous music, and his original plan was just to have no music except for fiddles or other music that might be played in town. At some point though, years before he'd even thought about making McCabe & Mrs. Miller, he'd heard Leonard Cohen's debut album The Songs of Leonard Cohen and subconsciously, some of the songs
became stuck in his head. He was at a party during post-production when someone played the album and it clicked. He phoned his film Lou Lombardo and told him to place these songs in the film. Lombardo expressed skepticism since Cohen's album was released by Columbia and they were working for Warner Bros., that they'd be able to secure the rights. He phoned up Cohen and introduced himself and much to his surprise, Cohen expressed delight that Robert Altman was calling him. Altman assumed it was because of the success of MASH, but Cohen told him he didn't really like MASH but he loved Brewster McCloud. Cohen more than willingly agreed to let Altman use the three songs from the album — and at a reduced rate. As an additional part of the deal, Cohen even threw in that a certain percentage of any royalties from new sales of his album after the film came out would go to the movie. A letdown did come though. When Altman showed Cohen the completed film, Cohen didn't like it, but he kept his bargain, including recording a new guitar riff. Altman says it broke his heart. A couple of years later, he got a call from Cohen telling him that he doesn't know what was wrong with him that day, but he'd just watched McCabe again and he absolutely loved it. Altman counts it as one of his happiest moments.Even though McCabe & Mrs. Miller came early on in the process of the growing Altman legend as a great filmmaker and a critical darling, he already had embraced one of his trademarks: using 8-track recording of sound so you heard everything and dialogue often overlapped though, as Foster points out, he didn't invent overlapping dialogue — directors such as Howard Hawks had been using that since the 1930s and '40s. Altman's technique wasn't quite the same. He didn't just have people talking over one another he had other conversations going on simultaneously and background noises — you had to pay attention. As Foster says, "People perk up and strain to listen to try to hear." The subject gets Altman going passionately, not only for its truthfulness as a technique but about how little studios and exhibitors expect from audiences.
"You don't hear everything everybody says, but that's the way life is. The audiences have been spoiled…by television. A guy can…get up from a murder mystery…and come back (and ask)_'Did he kill her yet?' because he knows he won't miss anything because they are going to show it to him in closeup about three times. He can't miss anything because they just throw it in his face. The thing I like is to put them on warning very early that if you aren't going to pay attention, you're not gonna get it so you may just as well leave. It's like trying to attract the wrong audience. Many times, I go to a great extent to get an R rating that keeps the 14-year-olds out of the film. If the 14-year-olds come in, they don't like it.…It's very hard to get distributors to put their money up because that's their audience and they want the kids in. Well, I don't want the kids in, unless it's for kids."
While it's not uncommon for movies to begin filming without a finished script, with Altman it's because he viewed a screenplay, even if his name is on it, as something similar to a blueprint for a house. It gives you the idea, but the final product doesn't really look like that, Altman says, and that was the case with McCabe & Mrs. Miller, which was based on the novel McCabe by Edmund Naughton. Its "screenplay" is credited to Altman and Brian McKay. "I really don't care very much about the story," Altman says, admitting that most stories end
up being pretty much the same, so the viewer will know them going in. "I think of it more like a painting, then I can mess around in the corners with the details." Also on the commentary, Foster says about Altman, "He told me something I've never forgotten. He used to say, 'Whatever an audience expects in a scene or the next scene, go in the entire opposite way just to throw them off.'" Years ago, when I was on the film junket circuit, I was lucky enough to meet Altman. It's hard when you are there as a working journalist not to be in awe in the presence of one of your idols (even if the junket was for Ready to Wear). He said something that stuck with me as well. I imagine Altman had that effect on a lot of people. He said he thought it always was better seeing a movie for a second time, because then you relax and stop thinking about what's going to happen next and just concentrate on the details. Hey, seeing McCabe twice worked on Leonard Cohen. Altman summed it up again at another point in the commentary."It's not the words that are important. That's too related to theater where you are trying to advance plot by the words. When you have closeups of people and faces that you can push right up into the audience, it's just better that the word comes from the moment or from the actors themselves."
Foster admits that the lack of box office success for McCabe & Mrs. Miller still puzzles him, despite all its critical acclaim. He does admit that part of him now wonders what would happen if they re-released it today, but he also confesses that he'd take box office over acclaim now, which makes sense when you look at his post-McCabe resume. His next feature after McCabe was Sam Peckinpah's The Getaway, but after that: John Carpenter's The Thing, Short Circuit, Short Circuit 2, Running Scared, The Getaway remake, The River Wild, The Fog remake. In the planning stages, Foster plans to produce remakes of Short Circuit and The Thing (a remake of a remake) as well as T.J. Hooker: the Movie (I wish I were kidding).
The only thing Altman ever made that could be called a sequel was his Tanner on Tanner followup to Tanner '88. He never remade anything (and anyone leaping up to say The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial, that was the play he filmed for television, not a remake of the movie The Caine Mutiny.) There just aren't enough artists out there anymore who just don't give a rat's ass what anyone else thinks and make the films they want to make. I miss you Bob, I really do. Altman says in the commentary what he would say in almost every commentary or interview in some variation. In my interview, he said, "I find that all of these films are like your children and you tend to love your least successful children the most" and he says something similar on this DVD. He also says, "To me the most successful film isn't any better than the least successful."
At the end of her glowing review of McCabe & Mrs. Miller in the July 3, 1971, issue of The New Yorker, Pauline Kael wrote:
"Will a large enough American public accept American movies that are delicate and understated and searching — movies that don't resolve all the feelings they touch, that don't aim at leaving us satisfied, the way a three-ring circus satisfies? Or do we accept such movies only from abroad, and then only a small group of us — enough to make a foreign film a hit but not enough to make an American film, which costs more, a hit?…Nobody knows whether this is changing — whether we're doomed to more of those 'hard-hitting, ruthlessly honest' that are themselves illustrations of the crudeness they attack. The question is always asked, 'Why aren't there American Bergmans or Fellinis?' Here is an American artist who has made a beautiful film. The question now is 'Will enough people buy tickets?'"
Where are the new American Altmans? Is it possible to even have another one in this corporate-run and dominated America? Or have all the creative forces migrated to cable television, finding it the last oasis of artistic freedom that remains?
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Labels: Altman, De Palma, Hawks, John Carpenter, Julie Christie, Kael, Kubrick, Misc., Music, Nicholson, Oscars, Peckinpah, Remakes, Sequels, Spielberg, Television, W. Beatty
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Wednesday, June 15, 2011
The Ring Ain't The Thing, THE THING Is The Thing
By Squish
Para·noia
Etymology: New Latin, from Greek, madness, from paranous demented
1: a psychosis characterized by systematized delusions of persecution or grandeur usually without hallucinations;
2: a tendency on the part of an individual or group toward excessive or irrational auspiciousness and distrustfulness of others
And hell yes, if nothing else, 1982's The Thing provides its audience with a present and ever-growing sense of hopeless isolation, fear and, above all things, paranoia.
We begin with a happy little Husky, running in the snow as synth music plays, heading to the American research station in Antarctica, chased by a big mean helicopter with grenades. The friendly dog hops up on an American scientist only to be shot at by a crazed Norwegian. The Americans defend their base from the Antarctic invaders and wisely investigate the Norwegian camp for clues to the madness. There they find evidence, not only of mutated humans, but potentially an invasive alien race.
A simple teaser, but The Thing is an intense and incredible film for several reasons. First of all, for all you gore fans, the monsters are freaky gross, intensely original and if I may quote myself, "It's not CG, it's real effin' LATEX. For God's sake why can't the industry figure out that it's better!? Nearly 30 years later and CG can't compete with this!" Roger Ebert was quoted as saying that it was, "among the most elaborate, nauseating and horrifying sights yet achieved by Hollywood’s new generation of visual magicians." The horror effects, in short, truly are horrendous. Now for those of you who are more the queasy sort, or who don't put much stock in the visual stuff to give you your thrills, I'll quote my Armenian guest who saw this for the first time, "The latex aliens were cool, but they didn't have to be because it wasn't a movie that had to rely on special FX as a crutch. The aliens could've been anything, they were just background to how the humans interacted with each other."
The second reason The Thing is the thing is the completely immersing mood that is set from the first act until the final shot. The script is written in a very logical fashion, and the question of the nature of the creature they're dealing with, as well as the nature of the humans it might be inhabiting, churns in one's stomach in such a way as to make the suspense genuinely off-putting. What sets The Thing apart is is how it so perfectly captured the intense paranoia that comes from being able to trust absolutely no one.
Now for those of you who think that John Carpenter just isn't your cup of tea, well I can concur that Dark Star, Vampires, Ghosts Of Mars and maybe even Escape from New York might not put a casual viewer on a solid footing for this one. Carpenter's not my favorite director either, but I can put my stamp of approval on The Thing as being his best work to date with the Masters of Horror short film "Cigarette Burns" coming a close second.
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Labels: 80s, Ebert, John Carpenter, Remakes
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Monday, May 16, 2011
Twenty-Five Years and Still Climbing
On March 3, 1969 the United States Navy established an elite school for the top one percent of its pilots. Its purpose was to teach the lost art of aerial combat and to ensure that the handful of men who graduated were the best fighter pilots in the world.
They succeeded.
Today, the Navy calls it Fighter Weapons School.
The flyers call it:
TOP GUN
By le0pard13
If you were born during the 1980s (and a good number of you reading this were), congratulations. You entered this world when action movies really came into their own in Hollywood — I also have ties older than many of you, but that's besides the point. Apparently, actor Tom Cruise began his meteoric rise on screen at the same time. And pretty much both coalesced in one breakthrough film, for better or for worse. 1986's Top Gun, released 25 years ago today, was that development, and we've been living with its effects ever since.
If the 1970s offered up the rise of the antihero in cinema (The French Connection, Get Carter, Taxi Driver, etc.), then the '80s were the reflexive kickback. The Me Decade presented us with the last of the Vietnam War, Watergate and more than one oil crisis for good measure. A dim aftermath in people's lives was to be expected. Of course, film folk seized upon the lethargy and the economic repercussions with an unmatched creative gusto in that same period (still and all, let's just agree here and now to not discuss disco). Whatever doldrums and cynicism the '70s decade left behind, however, films of that subsequent period seemed to relish in jolting that out of moviegoers.
(web definition)
Action film is a film genre where one or more heroes is thrust into a series of challenges that require physical feats, extended fights and frenetic chases. Story and character development are generally secondary to explosions, fist fights, gunplay and car chases.
Top Gun is likely the slickest exercise in both '80s reverie and taking the action movie up a big notch. Who cares if they were empty calories? I mean, Reagan was president, tax cuts and military spending went way up and all was well in the world (even if we became more of a debtor nation during this time and the threat of the Cold War going hot still hung in a precarious balance). We were back, baby! Nothing was going to dispel that notion with this film, at least for two years until John Carpenter let the cat of the bag with They Live, but I digress. And the All-American producer tandem of Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer assembled a mighty force to deliver a film worthy of that unique period of time.
MAVERICK: I feel the need...
MAVERICK, GOOSE: ...the need for speed!
You may think the conglomeration of Tom Cruise, a young Tony Scott serving as director and a cast of the best groomed man flesh in Hollywood at the time achieved box office greatness by their mere presence on the set. I mean was there ever a handsomer lot than Tom, Val Kilmer, Anthony Edwards (with hair no less), Rick Rossovich (who offered the best beach pose ever in a movie), and young faced Adrian Pasdar, Tim Robbins and other magazine model wannabes sprinkled among the cast of movie aviators? You'd think all of that made it auspicious, but you'd be wrong. The single most important thing Don and Jerry ever did to make this film a success (and it was the top-grossing movie for 1986) was bringing the Department of Defense into the gig.
Without the DoD's involvement, none of the best parts in the film would have ever made it to celluloid. Period. Want to nest your camera operators on a aircraft carrier or have real Top Gun instructors execute wicked dog fights around Miramar Naval Air Station or perform split-S maneuvers with abandon in real aircraft before your cinematographer's lenses? Just ain't happening without the Pentagon's OK. I give credit to director Scott's commercial television experience in framing it slickly though (along with the film's wonderfully iconic '80s soundtrack matched across its scenes) but none of the following would be half as good without access to the real Naval hardware:
The story of Maverick (Cruise) and Goose (Edwards) making their way to Fighter Weapons School is not the best example of story or Hollywood screenwriting [*cough* stupid... my wife's mutter), but then again, audiences don't come to summer action movies for character development, yet there has to be some dialogue with a little snap ("You live your life between your legs, Mav."). Still, there were enough crowd-pleasing and predictable moments to keep scenes moving along till we got to the next F-14 aerial sequence. Though it should be noted, even with the beautiful Kelly McGillis and the cute-as-a-button Meg Ryan in the cast, the spotlight here is on the men throughout this film. The macho vibe in evidence is at a Spinal Tap eleven.
"The plaque for the alternates is down in the ladies room."
Additionally, Tony Scott imbued Top Gun with a MTV-like flash which naturally drew a younger audience into the mix. That, along with his penchant for saturated colors and neon lighting (but before his more frenetic camera style and editing extremes manifested themselves), countered the grim and grit of the previous decade's film fare. It was dazzling by comparison. Plus, he had at his disposal a young Tom Cruise cresting in popularity. Although, I can't say his on-screen chemistry with McGillis matched anything close to that of his chumming around with his Radar Intercept Officer Goose or sparking up against his nemesis aviator Ice Man (Kilmer).
For better or worse, Top Gun set a standard 25 years ago in the '80s for star power, action formula, and box office results, especially for those not named George Lucas or Steven Spielberg. Blockbuster thrillers such as Jaws and sci-fi fantasies (Star Wars) from the previous era would have another genre vying for summer movie glory from here on out (though it could be argued the debut of Raiders of the Lost Ark really heralded it all five years earlier). Yet Top Gun 's heavy-duty use of real military apparatus brought another distinct aspect all of those films lacked. From this point forward, because of Top Gun 's success, studios and the military got even more buddy-buddy. Each had something the other wanted.
Our armed forces didn't begin a liaison with Hollywood with this film (that goes back to World War I), but it did reach a new level. From this point, filmmakers who wanted greater access to the same toys Paramount got to use, and could boast of an authenticity they were selling to the movie public (who now had more of an appetite for such things since Vietnam was so "last decade"), did so. And in exchange for more influence in film production, the Pentagon (who received more favorable light during the Decade of Excess) got an indirect boost to recruiting efforts whenever they became more involved. According to the Navy, aviator recruitment went up 500% after Top Gun was released. You still see all of this in play today, in fact (the latest being Battle: Los Angeles).
Top Gun arrived at a perfect time and place that guaranteed success. It fed into the public's need to rebound from a decade most of that generation wanted to forget ever happened. And it did so in an escapist style that studios continue to emulate (hint: combat accuracy needn't apply, if you've got the hardware to back you up). It could be just me, but did I spot a Pete "Maverick" Mitchell-like swagger to Chris Pine's James T. Kirk (right down to the bike he rides) from the recent Star Trek reboot? Hmm... The film's jet wash is still making waves two and a half decades later. Of course, all of this context is mute, if you happen to believe Quentin Tarantino and Roger Avary's subversive take of Top Gun in the film Sleep With Me. Makes that last shot of those two F-14s flying off toward the sunset together something else entirely.
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Labels: 80s, Cruise, John Carpenter, Lucas, Meg Ryan, Movie Tributes, Spielberg, Star Wars, T. Scott, Tarantino, Tim Robbins, Val Kilmer
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Tuesday, December 21, 2010
Looks Great, Less Filling
By J.D.
It has been more than 25 years since Tron (1982) was released in theaters. Made on the cusp of the home computer revolution, the film was a simple good versus evil parable that saw a disgraced computer programmer hack into the network of the corporation that fired him only to be zapped into cyberspace where he got to see how the other half lived. Tron was a modest success at the box office and resoundly trashed by critics. It seemed destined to become merely a footnote in cinematic history as one of the earliest examples of computer graphics in a Hollywood film. Over the years, it developed a decent cult following who dreamed of a sequel some day. That day has finally come.
Hoping for a lucrative franchise that doesn’t involve pirates, Disney ponied up a considerable amount of money so that the filmmakers of Tron: Legacy (2010) were able to utilize the same kind of 3D digital cameras that were used to make Avatar (2009) and the CGI technology used to age Brad Pitt in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008). And, in keeping with the original filmmakers hiring cutting edge composer Wendy Carlos, Tron: Legacy features an atmospheric score by hip electronica music duo Daft Punk. The end result is a stunning assault on the senses.
In 1989, hotshot programmer and CEO of Encom Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges) disappeared, leaving his young son Sam with his grandparents and no indication as to why he left. Since the death of his wife four years before, Flynn’s behavior had become increasingly erratic and he had become obsessed about a brave new world, a digital frontier that he had experienced in Tron. Sam (Garrett Hedlund) grows up to become a rebellious chip off the old block as he breaks into Encom just so he can publicly embarrass the company’s current CEO. Since Flynn’s absence, Encom has returned to its old, soulless ways much to the chagrin of his longtime friend and current board member Alan Bradley (Bruce Boxleitner). He informs Sam that he got a page from his father at the office in his old arcade.
Long shuttered and collecting dust, it is a cemetery for classic arcade games. Sam uncovers his father’s personal computer and before he knows it, he’s zapped into the computer world. Flynn’s prized program Clu (also Bridges) has taken over and rules the computer world with a fascist, iron fist. Flynn has become a fugitive and it’s up to Sam, with the help of a program named Quorra (Olivia Wilde), to make things right again.
Rather fittingly, the real world footage is shot in 2D but once we enter cyberspace, the film comes vividly to life with cutting edge 3D technology. Much of the iconography from the first film is present — the disc battle, light cycles, etc. — but amped up with The Matrix-like action sequences and three-dimensionalized. If there was ever a film would that begged to be given the 3D treatment it is this one. The filmmakers have basically taken the imagery of Tron and cranked it up to 11 — pure, unadulterated eye candy with things like dialogue and characterization taking a backseat. The attention paid to production and art design is phenomenal with all kinds of neon-drenched landscapes full of ambient sounds that will keep architecture buffs busy for years. That being said, the CG to recreate a younger version of Jeff Bridges, circa 1982, is distracting with its waxy, stiff look and dead, lifeless eyes, which, I guess, is appropriate for what is basically an evil clone of the real deal within the film.
Say what you will about the original Tron and its flaws but at least it was anchored by a playful and charismatic performance by Jeff Bridges who acted as the audience surrogate into a strange, new world. This time around, Garrett Hedlund takes on that role with limited success. The uninspired screenplay doesn’t do him any favors and so he does the best with what he was to work with, which admittedly isn’t all that much. Bridges plays a grizzled, burnt out version of his original character and with his beard and long hair it almost seems like the Dude from The Big Lebowski (1998) was zapped into the computer world. As if sensing this, Bridges even lets out a few Dudeisms at certain key moments in the film, which at least livens up the forgettable script.
Noted British actor Michael Sheen even shows up channeling David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust persona as Castor, a preening, flamboyant host of a nightclub where Daft Punk have a cameo as DJs. Using these musicians to do the score for Tron: Legacy was a masterstroke and they seem like the logical evolutionary step from Wendy Carlos. However, those fans expecting them to recreate their trademark dance music maybe disappointed as they opt for a more orchestral score that at times is reminiscent of early 1980s John Carpenter, in particular Escape from New York (1981). Their finest moment comes during a battle at Castor’s club where Daft Punk gets to really show off their musical chops as they segue from ambient music to pulsating dance music to bombastic beats that accompany with the action. Along with Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’ score for The Social Network (2010), this may be the best soundtrack of the year.
Tron: Legacy replaces the “information just wants to be free” message of its predecessor with a “sins of the father” theme as Flynn attempts to stop Clu, his Frankensteinian creation, and repair the damage done between him and Sam. Tron: Legacy manages to make this world and its characters accessible to those not familiar with the first film by basically rehashing its plot, blow-by-blow, which may disappoint fans. However, it does feel like a continuation of the first film with all kinds of references to things that happened in it. There is also a rather nifty cameo by a notable character actor that hints at a possible villain for the next film, if this one makes enough money. Of course, there is the usual criticism that the dialogue is weak, the story is formulaic and there is a real lack of characterization — all issues critics had with the original film. Tron: Legacy certainly lacks in these areas also, but like the first film, the visuals are so impressive, so captivating in the way they immerse you in the computer world, that you tend to ignore the flaws, relax and enjoy the ride.
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Labels: 10s, Brad Pitt, Disney, Jeff Bridges, John Carpenter
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Wednesday, September 08, 2010
Trejo's Time to Shine (and Slice)
By J.D.
When he made his half of the Grindhouse double bill (2007), Robert Rodriguez also put together a trailer for a film he would like to see. And so, Machete (2010) was born — a Mexploitation action film about an ex-federale who is set-up, double-crossed and left for dead. However, the origins for this project go back even further to 1995 when Rodriguez made Desperado, the second film in his Mariachi trilogy. It would be the first time (but certainly not the last) he worked with veteran character actor and professional badass Danny Trejo. He’s someone you’ve probably not heard of but have definitely seen. If you need a tough-looking tattooed henchman, he’s your man. While working on Desperado, Rodriguez envisioned Trejo starring in a series of action films as Machete but at that time the director did not have the clout to get someone to bankroll a Latino action film that didn’t feature someone with movie star looks like Antonio Banderas.
Rodriguez never forgot about his pet project and over the years cast Trejo in several of his films. Even though the Grindhouse films were a commercial failure, audiences loved the faux trailer for Machete. Rodriguez managed to convince a Hollywood studio to finance it with a modest budget and used his connections to assemble an impressive cast that included the likes of Robert De Niro, Jessica Alba, Steven Seagal, and “introducing” Don Johnson. However, would what worked as a movie trailer be too much of a good thing as a feature film?
The prologue sets up everything we need to know about Machete (Danny Trejo) — he’s a badass Mexican federale set-up by his corrupt superior and left for dead by local druglord Torrez (Steven Seagal). It also sets just the right tone as we see Machete hacking and slashing his way through a house of bad guys with bloody abandon. Meanwhile, in the United States, a corrupt, ultra-conservative Texan senator named John McLaughlin (Robert De Niro), campaigns on a platform of preventing illegal immigrants from crossing the border. He even employs a border vigilante group, led by the brutal Von Jackson (Don Johnson), to enforce his policies.
Sartana Rivera (Jessica Alba) is an upstanding Immigrations enforcement officer investigating the problem through legal channels and ends up crossing paths with Luz (Michelle Rodriguez), a no-nonsense taco stand operator who moonlights as a revolutionary operating an underground railroad of sorts for her Mexican brothers and sisters. Machete, now a day laborer (or, at least that’s his cover), is hired by Michael Booth (Jeff Fahey), a local businessman, to kill the senator for $150,000. Machete is set up, shot and forced to go into hiding. With the help of Rivera and Luz, he plots revenge on the men that betrayed him.
It’s awesome to see Danny Trejo finally get to carry a film for once and play a character that doesn’t get killed off. He brings his customary intensity as the strong, silent man of action and in many respects the film is Rodriguez’s present to the actor as he has him take down tons of bad guys, look cool doing it, and hook up with many of the film’s lovely ladies, including Michelle Rodriguez, Jessica Alba and Lindsay Lohan! Robert De Niro is a lot of fun to watch playing a John McCain meets George W. Bush-esque xenophobic politician. It’s also great to see Steven Seagal as a powerful criminal and Machete’s arch-nemesis, not to mention appearing in a mainstream film that didn’t go straight-to-home video.
Michelle Rodriguez adds another tough chick role to her resume as she portrays the female Mexican equivalent of Che Guevara but with a dash of Snake Plissken from Escape from New York (1981). Another fun bit of casting is Lindsay Lohan playing the messed up celebutante child of Booth. She and Rodriguez have some fun riffing on her public persona and kudos to the director for not bowing to peer and public pressure about her party girl reputation and showing that regardless, she still has the acting chops. Rodriguez regulars Tom Savini and Cheech Marin show up in memorable bit parts as a deadly assassin and Machete’s ex-federale now-priest brother.
It’s no secret that Rodriguez is a filmmaker that wears his influences on his sleeve. For examples, Desperado was a homage to the Hong Kong action films of John Woo and From Dusk Till Dawn (1996) and Planet Terror (2007) evoked the films of John Carpenter and George Romero. Growing up in the 1980s, Machete is Rodriguez’s love letter to the films produced by Cannon Films during that decade. They were responsible for cranking out an endless stream of generic action films starring the likes of Charles Bronson, Chuck Norris and Michael Dudikoff. In these films, the action stars were often a one-man army capable of wiping out the fighting force of a small country seemingly single-handedly. The same goes for Machete who is an unstoppable killing machine bent on revenge.
Machete is full of outrageous, over-the-top violence and inventively staged action sequences, like one scene where Machete bungee-jumps from one floor of a hospital to another with the aid of an evil henchman’s large intestine. In this respect, the film has the same gonzo, go-for-broke action that Rodriguez orchestrated in the underrated Once Upon a Time in Mexico (2003). Living up to his namesake, Machete finds all sorts of ways to kill the bad guys with a vast assortment of sharp weapons. Machete is a lot of fun and never outstays its welcome as Rodriguez knows how to keep things moving so that things never get boring.
Machete not only features all kinds of wild action sequences but also has something on its mind, commenting on the rampant immigration problems that continue to plague the states along the United States/Mexico border. Along the way, Rodriguez plays up and makes fun of Latino stereotypes (they are all day laborers and love tricked out cars) only to twist them into a rallying cry, a call for revolution that takes full bloom by the film’s exciting conclusion in a way that has to be seen to be believed. Best of all, Rodriguez has created yet another awesome Latino action hero. Forget Sylvester Stallone’s The Expendables (2010), Machete is the real deal and a no holds barred love letter to ‘80s action films. As great as it was to see many of the beloved action stars from the ‘80s and 1990s, I felt that Stallone’s film never went far enough. Rodriguez’s film doesn’t have that problem as it gleefully goes all the way with its cartoonish violence. Let’s hope that he and Trejo get the chance to do more Machete films but the next one should be direct-to-video if they really want to get in the spirit of the kinds of film they are championing.
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Labels: 10s, Banderas, De Niro, John Carpenter, Rodriguez, Stallone, Woo
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Saturday, October 25, 2008
He came home 30 years ago today
By Edward Copeland
The credits perfectly set the mood. A black screen with just a creepy jack-o-lantern, lit by candle from inside, as the camera moves in tighter and tighter, accompanied by John Carpenter's brilliant and memorable score. Halloween turns 30 years old today and though it spawned countless awful imitators and its own terrible sequels, the original remains great and unsurpassed in the slasher genre.
Looking at Halloween again, it's amazing how little blood it displays. Only four murders occur on screen and one of those is in the 1963 prologue, with its shocking dénouement that reveals the slasher as a 6-year-old boy.
Carpenter's film follows fairly standard cinematic rules, emphasizing voyeurism much as Hitchcock and others did. He also creates suspense from the simplest things such as blowing laundry, ringing phones. For me, Donald Pleasence as Dr. Loomis separates Halloween and even most of its awful sequels from dreck such as the Friday the 13th series. That way you not only have the same bad guy in Michael Myers but the same person dedicated to trying to stop him. As Loomis tells the Haddonfield sheriff about Michael, he spent eight years trying to reach Myers and then the next seven trying to keep him locked up. Jamie Lee Curtis, with her fine genetic history as Janet Leigh's daughter, remains a solid presence as the principal baby sitter who becomes one of Myers' targets. Carpenter also includes bits of dry humor, such as the little girl who seems to do nothing but stare at the horror films on the TV. (Is she a Myers in the making?) Then we also get to see Loomis having perhaps a bit too much fun scaring kids away from Michael's old house.
One of my favorite oddball moments comes from the quizzical way Myers cocks his head back and forth like a dog after he impales a teen on a kitchen door. Of course, you still have to wonder why a killing machine wastes so much time setting up bodies so they can spring out and be discovered or why — after Myers hasn't died after about the third time Curtis thought he was dead — she didn't think to try to dismember him by hacking his head off with that butcher knife. Still, who cares? Halloween remains one of the best horror films ever made and did I mention that John Carpenter score?
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Labels: 70s, Hitchcock, John Carpenter, Movie Tributes, Pleasence
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