A posting on the recent films.

Death Proof

This film is Quentin Tarantino’s primary contribution to the recent stratosphere-kissing blockbuster smash Grindhouse, although it now seems it might be known in the future as its own little thing, certainly in European nations and likely on dvd. I think it’s therefore worthwhile to discuss it as its own movie, though I’ll readily admit that’s partially because I saw Grindhouse over a week ago and I can already barely recall anything about the rest of the program.

Well, ok, there’s two major things I remember. The first is that Rob Zombie’s fake trailer (amidst a bevy of fake trailers by various directors) was flat-out terrible, and I mean ‘Saturday Night Live lunging toward 1:00 AM oh look at the celebrity guest host mugging’ terrible, which kind of surprised me considering how knowledgeable Zombie seems to be about the broad source material. But it’s far too overtly, artificially parodic, while the rest of the contributions divine much of their humor from emphasizing recognizable characteristics from their chosen subjects so that the humor can ‘naturally’ flow from homage.

I actually thought it was sort of interesting how Eli Roth (and god, I recall when that fellow was doing stuff like a tongue-in-cheek audio commentary for the early Troma dvd release of Bloodsucking Freaks) focused on tropes from a genre of films, while Edgar Wright looked to characteristics of a genus of trailers. It’s a very wide net the ‘grindhouse’ label casts, especially when you mentally associate it with ‘drive-in’ movies; I blame Something Weird Video for putting out those Drive-In Double Feature dvds back in the day, which were pretty much exactly the same thing as Grindhouse (two features, trailers, vintage advertisements) only slightly more extensive and all-authentic. Then again, the whole idea for this thing allegedly came from Tarantino showing people movies at his house anyway.

The second major thing I remember about the non-Death Proof portions of Grindhouse is Bruce Willis. All throughout Robert Rodriguez’s Planet Terror feature, I was inordinately distracted by the way Willis was shot. I don’t believe he ever interacts with any of the other main characters on a face-to-face basis, in that he and someone else are in the frame at once. Really, anyone who appears on screen with Willis could easily be portrayed by someone who just happened to be standing in the room at the time of shooting, if my memory serves correctly.

At first, I thought this was a clever means of positioning Willis conceptually as a sort of special Hollywood guest star who presumably knocked off all his scenes in one day and got carefully edited into the actual picture. But then I realized that’s probably what Rodriguez actually had to do, regardless of what he’s paying homage to, and that made me think about the fuzzy line that can be drawn between gleeful ‘fake’ badness and actual economic/creative compromise on films of this sort. Regardless, if this was a real grindhouse feature, Willis’ name would be plastered absolutely everywhere. Here, I do believe he’s actually uncredited, though his image appears in the newspaper advertisements.

And need I even mention the greatest failure of Grindhouse in remaining true to its sources? The ads are everything in a low-down feature, so much that you could probably make the argument that the essence of the film extends well out of the screen itself and into the marketing, to the point where The Last House on the Left (let’s say) is incarnated as much in its legendary trailer as its actual being. That was necessary, without $50 million+ in production budget alone behind a film. But I can't even remember the fucking ads for Grindhouse, and that's a real shame.

(granted, the contemporary mega-advertised ‘blockbuster’ film is a sort-of child of vintage exploitation or ‘trash’ films anyway, Jaws having been conceived as a classically exploitable thriller complete with shark effects so shitty that the director was famously forced to conceptualize tighter, and Star Wars acting as an elaborate homage to disposable Saturday serialized juvenilia - in this way, the path of ‘accepted’ film history and the shadow history of exploitation are not entirely separate)

Death Proof, however, does something a bit different.

There’s been a lot of debate on this film already. Some of it’s classic ‘what did they have in the briefcase?’ fan speculation without a lot of support in the film itself (the reels are in the wrong order! it’s two different films with the same star fused into one!). Some of it’s more direct ‘God Tarantino, stop being so boring with the dialogue’ stuff. I guess I’ll get this out of the way right now - not only did I not find the dialogue particularly boring, I also didn’t think it was particularly more bountiful than in, say, Kill Bill: Vol. 2. Really, I thought Death Proof sort of won the entertainment contest all around, if only because it boasted (a) the film’s best (and as luck would have it, final) action scene and (b) hands-down the film’s best performance, courtesy of Kurt Russell.

But I have to admit that Death Proof does have two things working against it on the pure entertainment front: it follows Rodriguez’s hyperactive feature, which is coming from a completely different direction in its homage, and it’s extremely mannered in its structure, so much that it draws attention to its own construction.

I will explain with a plot synopsis. Spoilers, obviously.

Death Proof initially concerns a quartet of women, some with connections to the entertainment industry, out looking for good times. They chat about random things, one of them has a trick played on her, and general amusement is had. They eventually encounter an old-school macho guy called Stuntman Mike, who embodies many traditional slow-burning masculine values. But Stuntman Mike is also a crazed killer, with a death-proofed stunt car that’ll kill anyone in or out of it, save for him. He picks up a woman, and kills her by smushing her to death in the passenger’s compartment with his slick driving moves. Then, he rams the quartet’s vehicle head on and kills them all. Stuntman Mike survives, as we’re told (Psycho-style) about his sexual connection to vehicular collision.

The movie then, for all intents and purposes, starts again. We follow another quarter of women, some with connections to the entertainment industry, out looking for good times. They chat about random things, one of them has a trick played on her, and general amusement is had. But these girls are a bit different; like Stuntman Mike, they also have an affinity for fast driving, vehicular mayhem, and yes - killing. As becomes increasingly clear, this quartet -- or at least two of them, with an additional one eager to be accepted as part of the group -- act as a sort of girl gang, like something out of Russ Meyer. Stuntman Mike attempts to kill them, but their nerve and driving skills are too much for him.

They proceed into a campaign of emasculation, ruining Stuntman Mike’s car, forcing him to drink like a fish, destroying his driving skills, making him cry and moan, and ultimately forcing him into a nasty crash, after which he is dragged out of the car (which, truth in advertising, has not killed him), and beaten to death on the street. The final blow is delivered by the aforementioned young and eager one, Stuntman Mike’s face crushed under her boot - there’s no doubt she’s proven her mettle to the other girls, the Stuntman is killed in a manner ironically similar to his passenger from earlier in the movie, and Quentin Tarantino’s foot fetish reaches an unimaginable extreme.

Hey, I found it entertaining. The final chase scene (as lengthy as the initial vehicular killing is short) is pretty excellent, and in possession of a real enthusiasm about shooting long, unbroken takes of people authentically clinging to hoods at absurd speeds. Tarantino supposedly shot the entire chase scene himself (he served as his own DP for the whole movie, yes, but I mean he didn’t use 2nd unit either), only using computer effects to remove a few wires from the frame, and there is a genuine air of authenticity to everything, of people shooting chases because they love the sensation of chases, and want to preserve it as naturally as possible.

But I think Death Proof is more interesting as a work of criticism than anything else. For its first half, boy - it damn near comes close to being Quentin Tarantino’s Funny Games, complete with gleeful acknowledgement of the audience’s complicit nature in enjoying murder movie mayhem. Just look at Russell’s smirk at the audience right before the killing begins - it’s as if he’s saying “don’t worry folks, the chit-chat’s over, I’ll start killing some women now.” And then, when the murder happens, Tarantino backs the movie up no less than three separate times, so we can gaze upon the grotesque mutilations done to each and every one of the quartet with maximum clarity.

The trick is, I don’t think Tarantino has much of a sweeping statement to make about society or violence or whatnot. I’m not even entirely sure he wants to say anything, or if he’s even particularly equipped as an artist - he just doesn’t strike me as being the type of filmmaker with the detachment or the relative humorlessness of a Michael Haneke. But I do think Tarantino has an interest in experimenting with genre tropes, acknowledging their social implications and smashing seemingly disparate elements together and seeing what happens.

So, we’ve got two groups of women, both of whom act out their own somewhat similar storylines. Some criticisms of the film I’ve read seem to take the first half of the film as ‘punishment’ against the type of woman Tarantino doesn’t favor, as opposed to cool, tough chicks who like good movies and fast cars. My problem with that interpretation is that I never once got the feeling that Tarantino ‘hated’ the first quartet of women. Indeed, they obviously share the director’s taste in music, they’re given sweet little dramas that unfold on the sidelines, and they rarely do anything particularly unsympathetic. Meanwhile, though it’s evident that the second quartet loves action and namedropping influential films, they’re also arguably thieves, they clearly injure at least one innocent person during their pursuit of revenge, and they play an utterly reckless, dangerous prank on one of their friends - compare that to the innocuous joke played by the first quartet.

But in the end, Tarantino treats all of these characters, even the evil ones, as particularly vivid, rounded archetypes. The first quartet are doomed, not because they’re sexually promiscuous or vapid or anything, but because that is their role to play as characters in a slasher film. Yet Tarantino doesn’t give us a ‘last girl.’ He kills them all, and replaces them with new women, absolutely none of whom manage to be killed by Stuntman Mike.

The stuntman himself embodies dual masculine power types, both invincible slasher and fast-driving macho man. Death Proof turns into a chase movie (the print even cleaning itself of scratches in the process), and the Stuntman is delighted to participate; he always sees himself on camera (again, note his grin to the viewer), and finally gets to act in the old-school chase scene of his dreams! I can’t imagine Mickey Rourke (who was initially cast in the role but quickly discharged) playing the character - he’s far too prone to sleaze and sinister looks, while Russell has just enough twinkle in his eye to sell the dreamer in the killer. It’s sex to him, and apparently sex to the girls too, as evidenced by Tarantino’s loving shots of Zoe Bell grinning ecstatically, legs spread on a car hood, shirt gradually hiking itself further and further up her belly. I’m pretty sure at one point Tarantino even juxtaposes this against Stuntman Mike’s phallic hood ornament. Also, he has one of the girls scream “I’m gonna tap that ass!” about three or four billion times during the final movement of the chase, in case anyone was having difficulty.

Ah, that’s the irony for poor Suntman Mike. He wanted to be in a mighty chase film, but had to settle for being a slasher. And then he got his wish, only to wind up powerless against the type of women who might populate Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!, Tarantino beautifully evoking a real camaraderie among them, so bloodthirsty. The Stuntman’s traditionally masculine traits are useless against women who share the same, and have no time for rugged manly consideration. These girls may love Vanishing Point (and I wonder what they’d make of Monte Hellman’s Two-Lane Blacktop?), but their actions tell us that the power-drunk flailing of Stuntman Mike needs not be exclusively male, not in movies with less strict formula - if Tarantino has any statement to make, it’s that ramming different low-down genres together can create a dizzy upsetting of expectations on the level of what we expect from our garbage.

One last thing - the argument can be made, it occurs to me, that Tarantino is only reinforcing a patriarchic viewpoint by soaking his finale in violent aggression, characterizing his final girls’ victory through traditionally masculine means. Fighting, pummeling, killing. It provides an illusory, even dangerously fraudulent view of ‘empowerment’ while supplicating the very notion of feminine victory before the male gaze, the type of chest-beating ‘win’ that merely reinforces the dominant paradigm of feminine subordination. To this, I can only remind you that the film is titled Grindhouse. And even when it is not titled Grindhouse, it responds to films that are soaked in aggressive activity. But never is Tarantino’s view of things about how a film of this sort concerns men and woman, no.

It need not know gender. It need only know genre.

And even then, why choose just one?

Don't Wait Too Long

*Ah, just a few short hours until Monday's post goes up.

*I think the highlight of my day was probably (finally!) getting to see the terribly famous 1962 short film La Jetée, from writer/director Chris Marker. It's coming out on Criterion dvd this June as a double-feature with Marker's 1983 oddball philosophic/poetic documentary Sans Soleil, but I figured I'd already waited long enough to see it.

And on the whole I was impressed by how the film chooses to derive all of its power from the nitty-gritty of filmmaking modes - if there's anything everyone knows about this film, it's that the whole film is composed of still images, held in place and expertly weaved into a whole, with narration and music set over it. That's all the visual cinema really is, at its bottom - still images passed before the eye in a certain succession -- and Marker is keen enough to exploit those properties as the most effective means of conveying his story, which probably wouldn't have stood a chance if it had been presented in a more traditional manner.

Oh yes, the other thing everyone knows about this film is that it inspired the Terry Gilliam picture Twelve Monkeys, and it's telling that Gilliam took only that basic plot and stretched it out for himself to his own ends. They say the Gilliam film is not a 'remake' - I say it couldn't be, because the whole effect of La Jetée is totally hedged on its unique manner of presentation, a conceptual vision to individual that to adopt it would be futile and to discard it and 'remake' the meat would be disaster. The surface 'plot' of La Jetée is basic, obvious, knowingly absurd, in possession of a concluding twist so screamingly obvious I cannot bring myself to believe that Marker did not intentionally telegraph its arrival, and wholly dependant on Marker's grasp of metaphor to bring it to life. Cinematic metaphor - the procession of sealed moments, still pictures, in illustration of the story of a man forced to travel time by remembering things in tiny blocks. To remake this properly, you would have to create something new, which is what happened, which means it's not a remake. You dig?

Ah, there's a lot of stunning little bits in here. Sure, there's one stretch where the time-traveling fellow and a lady he's pursuing are walking through a museum for about 340 or so minutes, but many of Marker's soothing past-tense reveries successfully implant their iconic selves upon your brain - you will truly believe that you're reliving fragments of some primal experience, and living through flashes of of the future. It's Marker's made-up 'memories' he's giving us, and celluloid is his time machine as sure as that wacky contraption Our Hero gets hooked up to by the strange men. You can't relive any of your life, but it can be presented to others as simulation, and Marker does what he says!

No comics today...

*Because I'm still trying to compose things. And it's almost the stroke of midnight, and the Saturday post isn't up.

*Oh, I did manage to see a real live films in a real theater recently! It was the recent Peter O'Toole award vehicle Venus, which did indeed result in its star netting his eighth Oscar loss, to Forest Whitaker of The Last King of Scotland. Appropriately enough, the trailer for that very film was played before Venus, and holy smoking Jesus Christ was it terrible; from what I had to go by, it appears that Mr. Whitaker captured the gold by screaming nearly every single one of his lines at the top of his lungs in a crisp accent. Not that I doubt the Academy would laud such a thing, but I presume there is more depth to be had in the actual film than the preview elected to present.

Anyhow - Venus. O'Toole is one of my favorite actors ever, so clearly I was going to see it no matter what. I mean, I've plucked a dvd copy of The Seventh Coin off of a Wal-Mart $1 bin and beamed with delight, so I'm well past the point of no return (and yet, I've never seen The Lion in Winter). There are three very nice scenes, which I think was Gene Siskel's rule for deciding if a movie was good or not. In no order:

1. Peter O'Toole and a young woman are being chauffeured around in luxury vehicle. The young woman stands up to stick her head out the sunroof, and Peter O'Toole leers directly at her rump, giggling, as the hit Corinne Bailey single Girl Put Your Records On plays loudly.

2. Peter O'Toole and the same young woman are sitting at a table. The woman decides to give Peter O'Toole a 'treat,' so she puts her fingers into her vagina and offers them to Peter O'Toole to sniff. He then tries to lick her fingers, so she moves to swat him in the head, but Peter O'Toole performs some sort of judo block to deflect the blow with the speed of puma. This is all the more impressive considering that Peter O'Toole is 9,000 years old and no computer effects appear to have been used.

3. Peter O'Toole is kicked out of his home by the young woman, who wants to use it to have sex with her virile boyfriend. Peter O'Toole wanders around aimlessly, until he happens upon a highly symbolic outdoor stage of some sort, at which point the soundtrack switches to a sonic collage of old, actorly performances, presumably authentic Peter O'Toole lines, though it's hard to tell. He then goes back to his home and has a fight scene with the virile boyfriend, who kicks poor old Peter O'Toole's wrinkled ass. Wait, that's more than one scene.

I realize this probably makes the film seem a bit more interesting than it actually is - for all its gestures toward grit and bodily urges, Venus is actually pretty pat, even formulaic in its procession of 'inspirational' end-of-life movie tropes. O'Toole plays an aged actor confronting the inevitability of death while lusting after a buddy's rude great-niece, with whom he develops a mutually exploitive quasi-relationship, although before too long it's one of those soulful movie relationships where everyone eventually learns something vital about themselves and familial bonds are reinforced and O'Toole makes amends with Special Guest Star Vanessa Redgrave (as: a woman from his past) and I guess we all cry in our seats and then the Oscar is handed to somebody else.

It's decent enough for what it is, though. O'Toole does deliver a rather nice performance, even if it seems a bit deliberately poised to evoke past roles - there's a film-within-a-film bit where O'Toole gets to do some costumed drama, there's moments of physical slapstick, there's a few top-of-the-lungs bellows thrown in. He can still roar with the best of them, but the whole thing struck me as more of a valedictory address than anything, a vessel for nostalgia primed to remind us all how good Peter O'Toole can be, rather than something terribly interested in providing insight or whatnot. Then again, the whole film's winking 'old, great actor who has led a fullt life playing an old, great actor who has led a full life' concept is about as sympathetic an environment as one can imagine for that brand of performance.

Still: I liked it. It's pretty low on the big list of O'Toole Oscar Performances. We're not talking The Ruling Class or The Stunt Man or Supergirl or anything. Wait, that last one is wrong... I think it was Caligula. Or was it Helen Mirren that got the nomination for that?? Give me a minute...

My longer post got eaten and I didn't save, so...

*I guess I just have to be really quick in recommending Rick Prelinger's new book, The Field Guide to Sponsored Films, from the National Film Preservation Foundation, which can be downloaded for free or ordered in printed form for $8.50. It's a nice, compact guide to 452 'sponsored' films, short and (occasionally) feature-length movies produced for the purposes of corporate or institutional communications, often to promote a product or ideology. Perfect for sitting on your lap as you browse the internet looking for things, particularly things nestled away in the Prelinger Archives. Examples (stream 'em all from the panel on the left):

heavy equipment is here to kill you (Shake Hands With Danger, 1975)

the director and cast of Blood Feast are here to teach you about cutting meat (Carving Magic, 1959

this is the future I ought to live in (Design for Dreaming, 1956)

old cars, olds cartoons, old songs, and sexual innuendo - together at last (In My Merry Oldsmobile, 1931)

if you need to learn how to use a jazz era telephone toot sweet, this is the link for you (Now You're Talking, 1927)

also: telephones are the key to love and beauty (Once Upon a Honeymoon, 1956)

Jimmy Stewart presents the greatest school of them all (Tomorrow's Drivers, 1954)

And there's so much more - nothing quite like reading about anti-union films and the 'response' films that unions would release to counter them. Lots of stuff well worth eroding America's productivity over.

Plus, be on notice that the NFPF is busily prepping the third and fourth entries in their line of dvd box sets, following Treasures from American Film Archives and More Treasures from American Film Archives, both of which are awesome. Treasures III: Social Issues in American Film, 1900 - 1934 will cover exactly what it says it does over four discs in the fall of this year, and Treasures IV: The American Avant-Garde Film, 1945-1985 will appear in the fall of 2008 with two discs chock full of water studies and moving dots and things. And I can't wait!

Wow! Multimedia special!

Golgo 13 Vol. 7 (of 13): Eye of God

Volume 7 is book of changes for the current Golgo 13 series. Unless I’m grievously mistaken (EDIT: which I am - see here), it marks both the last of creator Takao Saito’s 13 favorite stories and the first of a group of 13 Japanese fan-selected stories. I’ve heard that the fan-favorites gravitate less toward the studied quasi-history of Saito’s predilection, and more in the direction of sex and violence and giant eagle wrestling and the like, so we should be in for some fun.

This volume also sees a shift in the bonus material, as suddenly File 13 entirely drops its treatment of super-assassin Duke Togo as a ‘real’ person, and English editor Carl Gustav Horn addresses the reader as himself to impart some English-specific information on the live-action Golgo 13 films. You know, all two of them. A bit more space is devoted to the earlier, 1973 film (titled simply Golgo 13), directed by Junya Sato and starring Ken Takakura, probably because few English-speaking people have actually seen it - it’s never been released on dvd, even in Japan, though Japanese vhs copies are apparently floating around. Horn has seen it though, and imparts some great historical information on the picture’s Iranian setting, a would-be swinging scene friendly to both the Japanese and film production, and home to some sexy domestic stars that would find themselves squelched by the Islamic Revolution of just over half a decade later.

The later, 1977 film (Golgo 13: Kowloon Assignment, although it's also sometimes called simply "Golgo 13"), directed by Yukio Noda and starring Sonny Chiba, is readily available in the US on vhs and dvd, and Horn’s coverage is far lighter and picture-adorned. There is a minor factual error, possibly due to deadline issues, which it is nevertheless my duty as a nerd to correct - in addition to the dub-only 2004 Kill Chiba box set that Horn identifies as the film’s sole US dvd release, there is also the more recent 2006 Sonny Chiba Action Pack, which actually presents the film in its original Japanese with English subtitles, an English dub optional.

(on a side note, be aware that both of the aforementioned Chiba packs also contain the 1975 Sato-directed feature Bullet Train, which actually teams both Takakura and Chiba in an action/disaster story that supposedly inspired the 1994 film Speed - the Chiba Action Pack contains as its third film the 1980 Kinji Fukasaku medical sci-fi epic Virus, which the title star has little more than a cameo in, while Kill Chiba sports 1974's The Executioner, a Terou Ishii-directed thing with Chiba killing the shit out of folks)

Ok, so how about those comics? Despite this volume’s two stores being (apparently) culled from two separate lists of favorites, there’s actually a single, unifying theme running between them: no man can make Golgo 13 their puppet.

The better of the two is the second, 1977’s Far from an Era (Story #126), which sees Duke hired by a wealthy California businessman for a curious assignment: he must deliberately miss a shot at the man’s wife, a pretty young thing with secret, scandalous ties to the Weather Underground, putting some fear of god into her by merely nicking off her tiny left earring, thus hopefully convincing her to sever those radical connections. But everything goes horribly wrong when a mysterious second assassin actually kills the woman at the moment of Duke’s shot, leaving the irate client to summon the police after our off-guard anti-hero.

In many ways, this is as basic a Golgo 13 story as you can find: an assassination, complications, a mystery, a little historical flavor, Duke standing triumphant as his foe sputters that he… he couldn’t possibly have made that shot… not in this wind… on a boat! There’s even a gratuitous sex scene with a lonely woman whom Duke shacks up with while on the run from the police, though I guess you can call it an extension of the story’s ‘trust vs. distrust’ theme, if you really feel like it. The story’s main pleasure comes from its sleek propulsion, its wonderfully tense finale, and its ultimately hilarious look at Duke’s superhuman vanity. It’s not that he’s particularly pissed that the police are after him, or even that he’s clearly been set up by outside forces - what’s really got him mad is that he’s been made to look like he’s missed a shot, and that little misapprehension will have to be corrected no matter what.

Also on tap is 1993’s Eye of God (Story #319), a surprisingly dense little package of cheeseball metaphors that doubles as a covert surveillance saga with the Israel/Palestine conflict as its backdrop. The real lead character is Augustus James Belmeyer, a brilliant satellite data interpreter and lecherous voyeur, a man who’s vital to US national security because of his preternatural aptitude for picking up tiny nuances and subtle suggestions in spy satellite footage, and then heads home to greet his library of nudie pin-up art with a hearty “I’m home, everyone!” before settling down to snap secret photos of the showering ladies in nearby buildings.

He’s also gone a bit mad, and is orchestrating a plot to gain total control over the US’s shiny orbital KH-13 spy satellite (note the number, ho ho) and become the world’s undisputed master of surveillance, a man with the eye of god. There’s another man with the eye of god out there, of course, and Belmeyer decides to manipulate G-13 into a position of powerlessness, exposing even the greatest covert assassin as merely a man who can be watched, for no apparent reason other than to prove his crazed superiority.

In contrast to the other story’s ‘Duke as vain superhuman’ motif, this one sets Our Hero firmly in ‘angry god’ mode, another of his default characterizations. Amusingly, Saito and his anonymous Saito Production workers set both random Act of God weather occurrences and Golgo 13 against Belmeyer, as if the man has pissed off every god that might be in the immediate area, and fully deserves what’s coming in the Grand Guignol ending. If there’s any real problem with this story, it’s that a sense of inevitability sets in a little too far from the actual ending; better stories, like Far from an Era, don’t clue us in to the exact means of Duke’s triumph until we’re nearly out of space.

But as always, there’s great moments, like the recurring image of Golgo 13 staring into the sky, one god gazing directly at another, and neither eager to budge from their superiority. Even when we know which one has to win, it's still compelling as all hell.