Friday, September 28, 2018

Willow



 
Willow (1988)
Dir. by Ron Howard

Starring Warwick Davis, Val Kilmer, Joanne Whalley and Jean Marsh

[content warning: body horror, brief discussion of romantic consent issues]

Synopsis:

Willow is a farmer and amateur stage magician from a small village of hobbit-like Nelwyn.  One day, his children find a human baby in the river.  When soldiers attack the village looking for the baby, Willow must leave on a journey to protect the infant – who has been prophesized to bring about the destruction of the evil sorceress terrorizing the human nations.  Along the way, he picks up allies in the form of a human knight-turned-thief, two mischievous brownies, and a sorceress trapped in the body of a possum*.


Nostalgia:

I don’t remember seeing this movie in theaters, but I know that my parents took me to see it.  I do distinctly remember the cardboard box to the Wendy’s kid’s meal promoting the movie, since it had magic tricks printed on it, and it came with a plastic reproduction of Willow’s log trick.  It’s almost certainly the first live-action fantasy movie I ever saw in theaters.  It’s still one of my favorites, even if it’s been left behind by the post-LotR/Harry Potter fantasy movie renaissance.

Review:

If you’d asked me what my favorite fantasy movie was my freshman year of college, Willow probably would have been my answer.  While The Princess Bride definitely falls into the fantasy genre, in my mind I’ve always associated it more with Robin Hood and other swashbucklers instead of more “traditional” fantasy.  Of course, my sophomore year Fellowship of the Ring would come out and blow that all away, but for a time in the 1990s Willow was definitely top-tier fantasy filmmaking.

While the aforementioned LotR films have surpassed this movie in pretty much every category, it’s still not without its charms.  Willow, at first blush, shares a lot of similarity with other fantasy movies of the 1980s, such as Dragonslayer, Legend and the Conan films (though without the latter films’ heavy bloodshed and nudity).  It consists of a lot of stock fantasy conventions (wicked queens, prophecies, faeries, D&D-style taverns, etc.), and the Nelwyn village entirely populated by short human-like people immediately conjures Tolkien comparisons.  So far, so derivative.  However, in my opinion Willow manages to transcend its origins and become something enjoyable, and even memorable at times.

One of the best things this movie has going for it is its casting, especially its lead.  Warwick Davis is probably best known today for playing Professor Flitwick in the Harry Potter movies.  However, his first role came at the age of twelve, when he was cast as one of the background Ewoks in Return of the Jedi.  Kenny Baker (R2-D2) was originally slated to play the lead Ewok character of Wicket, but he got sick and Davis found himself promoted into the role.  George Lucas was so impressed by him that he promised to come up with a movie specifically for him to play the lead.  Five years later, Willow became his first starring role, and his first movie out of a creature costume.  Despite only being seventeen when it was filmed, Davis is able to carry the entire movie, showing why he would become the most prominent short actor of the late 20th century (and probably the 2000s up until Game of Thrones thrust Peter Dinklage into the spotlight).  Val Kilmer, as the cocky swordsman Madmartigan, delivers my favorite performance of his career, and Joanne Whalley is badass as the armor-clad daughter of the evil queen (a character who is never once challenged for being a female warrior, something that is unfortunately still all too rare).



Another notable thing about the movie are the effects, which had a major part in film history.  This movie finds Hollywood at a crossroads, effect-wise.  It had been four years since The Last Starfighter became the first movie with all-digital effects, and ILM itself had already used CG in Young Sherlock Holmes and two Star Trek movies.  However, this movie, and one scene in particular, was a critical breakthrough for CG.  Near the end of the film, Willow must use a wand given to him by the queen of the faeries to free the good sorceress Fin Raziel from the animal form that she has been trapped in.  In a single sustained shot, she transforms from a goat to an ostrich, a peacock, a tortoise and a tiger, before finally becoming human again.  To achieve this, ILM decided to eschew the usual Hollywood techniques of stop-motion or lap dissolves from one shot to another, Wolfman-style, and instead went with an untested computer method.  In doing so, they pretty much invented digital morphing from scratch, paving the way for the T-1000, Odo, and hundreds of other CG characters.



Of course, singling out this one 20 second scene isn’t to say that the rest of the effects are bad, per se.  Okay, sure, they’re pretty crummy by modern standards.  The blue screen matting is extremely obvious, and at least one major action sequence, involving a fight against a two-headed dragon-like creature, is clearly against a stop-motion puppet, albeit one with a Star Wars-worthy design.  But they were of at least average quality for the late 80s, and I for one kind of enjoy them that way.  A lot of the stuntwork is also superb, especially in a wild downhill slide down a snow-covered mountain that ends in the only time I’ve ever seen a Warner Bros. cartoon-style “person rolling in snow becomes a giant snowball” gag pulled off effectively in live-action.  And I can’t go without mentioning the other transformation sequence.  Immediately prior to the CG transformation discussed earlier is one of the most impressive practical effect transformation sequences ever committed to film, in which the evil queen transforms an entire army into pigs. I'm surprised it didn't get a Best Makeup Oscar nomination, considering the category was actually created in the first place to honor movies like An American Werewolf in London.

Is Willow a perfect film?  Of course not.  Aside from the aforementioned blue-screen failures, the movie is also very white (though I did appreciate the fact that the most skilled Nelwyn warrior in the village was a PoC more this time than any prior viewing), and it’s got a romantic subplot with some major consent issues (basically, Madmartigan gets love-potioned, and is very aggressive in his unwanted advances towards someone he’d previously hated.  The two continue to show interest in each other once it wears off, and eventually become a couple by movie’s end).  But it’s also got significant anti-bigotry themes, and it passes the Bechdel test in the first thirty seconds.  Willow is a film that’s been consigned to minor cult status in the wake of the 2000s fantasy film boom, and I think it could definitely stand to be rediscovered somewhat.

Nostalgia: A
Rewatch: B+

Stray Thoughts:

-The leader of Queen Bavmorda’s armies, General Kael, is actually named after film critic Pauline Kael, a fact that didn’t escape her notice when she reviewed the movie.  The two-headed dragon was also named for Siskel & Ebert.

-Airk, Madmartigan’s friend who leads the good guy army, wields an unusual sword that’s actually a long blade attached to an enclosed gauntlet.  It’s a real weapon, called a pata, and is originally from India.  They were actually typically used either in a pair or with a shield, so it’s interesting that when Madmartigan tries to use it on its own to defeat Kael, he gets his ass kicked until he picks up another sword and starts dual-wielding. 


*In before anyone else says anything.  That’s “possum” as in the Australian marsupial, not the American playing-dead possum.  A lot of the exteriors were filmed in New Zealand.


Wednesday, September 26, 2018

Big Trouble in Little China



They just don’t make posters like this anymore.
God bless Drew Struzan 


Big Trouble in Little China (1986)
Dir. by John Carpenter

Starring Kurt Russell, Dennis Dun, Kim Cattrall, James Hong and Victor Wong

[content warning: discussion of racial stereotyping/Yellow Peril movies]

Synopsis:

After a night of drinking and gambling, trucker driver Jack Burton accompanies his friend Wang Chi, a San Francisco Chinatown restauranteur, to the airport to pick up his fiancée.  When she is abducted by a street gang, the two mount a rescue attempt, only to become involved in the evil plans of a two-thousand-year-old Chinese sorcerer, who intends to use her to break the curse that is imprisoning him.

Nostalgia:

I first remember seeing the poster for this movie as a VHS box cover some time in the late 80s.  It was in one of those old-school video stores where you had to bring up a key on a hook with the movie’s number on it to the clerk, who would then retrieve the movie from a storeroom.  I’m pretty sure I didn’t see the movie itself until I was quite a bit older, closer to high school age, though I can’t remember the first time I watched it.  It’s just always been there, a cult guilty pleasure that I’ve had fun introducing to various people over the years.

Rewatch:

Like Sneakers, this is one of my favorite movies of all time.  Therefore, this won’t really be a reevaluation of the movie like earlier reviews have been, since I’m not all that capable of being truly objective about it.  However, I can definitely explain why I like it so much, and why I think it was vastly misunderstood by critics of the time and has come to be a cult classic now.

The premise for this movie, at first blush, looks like it’s going to be both generic and offensive.  The white guy hero helps the goofy Asian sidekick rescue his fiancée from a bunch of stock character stereotypes.  However, that’s the genius of the movie: Jack Burton is the goofy sidekick.  He only thinks that he’s the hero, and we’re seeing the entire movie from his point of view.  In reality, Wang Chi is the real hero of the movie, and Jack Burton pretty much fails at everything he attempts for the majority of the film. 

One of the people here doesn’t really belong. Wonder which one. 

I mentioned in my review for Romancing the Stone how I admired that movie for being a satire of a genre while also being a top-notch entry in that genre.  Big Trouble in Little China does much the same thing for the “kung fu fantasy” genre (I hesitate to call it wuxia, as the focus really isn’t on the martial arts.  Would anyone know the proper term for it?).  Now, the movie never (overtly) pokes fun at Burton in the way of a parody, and it’s not really a comedy at all, though there definitely is a strain of humor running through the film.  It does, however, take pains to subvert his self-styled awesomeness at every turn, showing how much of his John Wayne bravado is simply overcompensation for having absolutely no idea what’s going on.

For example, one of my favorite moments in the film comes in the climactic fight.  The good and evil forces are squared off in a room, and both sides let out battle cries before charging each other.  Caught up in the moment, Burton screams along with them, firing his gun into the air.  Reality ensues, however, when the low plaster ceiling he just fired into collapses and hits him in the head, knocking him out of the first part of the battle.  Later in the same fight, he’s picking himself off the floor when he’s cornered by a large warrior in imposing armor.  Still on his back, Burton slips a knife out of his boot and stabs him, killing him.  This moment of badassness soon turns ridiculous, however, as the armored warrior collapses on top of him, and he has great difficulty extricating himself from underneath.

This is not the hero you’re looking for

Critics at the time failed to pick up on any of this, and savaged the movie for having an ineffectual hero.  Several critics, Roger Ebert among them, also compared the film to overly racist caricatures like Charlie Chan and Fu Manchu.  However, I feel like there’s way more going on here than they’re giving the movie credit for.  First, the movie is told from Burton’s point of view.  He is a complete outsider to this culture, gets all of his information second-hand, and spends most of the movie running from one supernatural encounter to another without any clue what’s actually going on.  He should be seen as an unreliable narrator. 

Second, to satirize a genre, you do have to utilize the tropes of the genre.  Since a lot of the critics missed on the satire, I think that they assumed that the tropes were all being played straight.  If that were the case, then they’d have a point.  I don’t believe that they’re right, however.  I also think that there’s no attempt to claim that any of this is reflective of actual Chinese legends or culture.  Quite the opposite, in fact.  There’s a line of dialogue halfway through the film that I find very telling in this regard.  Egg Shen, the sorcerer on the good guy side, comments about all of the different conflicting religions and magical traditions in China by saying “We take what we want and leave the rest, just like your salad bar.”  So too, I think, does this movie.

In the end, Jack Burton may be the one who deals the final blow to the evil sorcerer Lo Pan.  However, Wang Chi and Egg Shen are the real heroes of this movie.  Not the clueless white guy.  And coming in the middle of all of the mid-80s Stallone/Schwarzenegger action movies with Middle Eastern/Asian/South American villains, that’s something that I can really appreciate.

Stray Thoughts

-I didn’t mention it above, but I find this movie as equally quotable as Sneakers.

-The reporter character is literally only in this movie to provide exposition, and very clunky exposition at that.  However, there’s this wonderful little moment when she rattles off like a paragraph of exposition that everyone (other than Burton and the audience) would already know, and everyone else just turns and stares at her.

-There was this stuntman named Al Leong, who was in pretty much every major action movie of the 80s (he was the terrorist who steals the candy bar in Die Hard, for example).  I think this is the most screentime he ever gets in one movie, as the extremely badass cleaver-wielding leader of Lo Pan’s army of soldiers.

-This movie was apparently one of the major influences on the original Mortal Kombat game, specifically for the characters of Raiden and Shang Tsung.  We'll get to the other main influence, Bloodsport, further down the line.


-The scene where one of the main henchmen kills himself by deliberately inflating until he explodes has to be one of the most memorable death scenes in movie history.





Monday, September 24, 2018

Sneakers



Sneakers (1992)
Dir. by Phil Alden Robinson

Starring Robert Redford, Sidney Poitier, Dan Aykroyd, David Strathairn and Mary McDonnell

Plot:

In the late 60s, two college students are caught using early computer modems to hack into bank accounts.  One is sent to prison, while the other flees to Canada.  Twenty years later, that man, under the assumed name of Martin Bishop, is running a security firm in San Francisco, specializing in performing staged break-ins to test companies’ security procedures.  His group is approached by the NSA, who use his criminal background to blackmail him into stealing a device that can break any encryption code.

Nostalgia:

It took forever for my parents to get me to watch this.  They must have rented it from the video store three or four times, and for whatever reason (I don’t remember any more), I was never interested in watching it.  Once I did, however, it quickly shot up my list of favorite movies of all time.  It’s still among my top twenty or so most-watched movies.

Rewatch:

Okay, I’m trying something new here.  I can’t even pretend that this is a nostalgic movie that I’m watching for the first time in forever.  This one is one of my favorite movies, and I’ve watched it over and over.  So it’s not one that I can really evaluate honestly as to whether it holds up or not.  For me, the answer is undeniably yes (especially when compared to other computer-based movies of the era).

However, what I can do is talk about why I think the movie holds up.  For me, it’s down to two big things: the cast and the screenplay.  This is pretty much an early 90s dream-team of a cast, and is one that you’d never be able to assemble today, not for the budget this movie had anyway.  It’s got Robert Redford, Dan Aykroyd, David Strathairn, Sidney Poitier, River Phoenix and Mary McDonnell as the main team, with Ben Kingsley, James Earl Jones, Timothy Busfield and (much to my surprise when I found out), a very young Donal Logue in his first film role as supporting players.  Not to mention Stephen Tobolowsky, in one of my favorite performances of his ever.  Special mention has to go to David Strathairn as Whistler, the blind phone phreaker on the team (probably based off of real-life blind phone phreaker Josef “Joybubbles” Engressia), who is introduced reading a braille Playboy, and is instrumental to almost all of my favorite scenes.

Yes, that's Donal Logue from Gotham

I have a Bachelor’s degree in computer science, and while I haven’t used it much (I’m a librarian now) I still know my way around computers for the most part.  In most movies that Hollywood puts out about “hacking”, especially ones from the 80s and 90s, it’s painfully obvious that they’ve been written by someone with absolutely no idea how a computer actually works.  Just try watching Hackers some time with someone who has a knowledge of coding and IT.  The script for Sneakers, on the other hand, is one of the few movies from that time period to actually treat computer hacking seriously, and to do a little research first.  This movie’s version of hacking is, rightly, just as much social engineering as it is actual code-breaking.  They bluff security guards into thinking they’re the fire station responding to an alarm, set up a programmer on a fake date to record him saying his password, and use distraction cons and sleight of hand to break into an office building.  When they do obtain the device that they were hired to steal, there is no big red “hack it” button or anything.  They have to manually check the chip one sector at a time to find out what’s on it, and use trial and error to figure out how to use it.

Three sequences in particular stand out to me.  First, the aforementioned experimenting with the “little black box”, which is intercut with the other half of the team using Scrabble tiles to unscramble the name of the project that produced the box (it turns out to be an anagram for “Too Many Secrets”).  Second, a chase sequence done entirely through audio, as Bishop reconstructs the route he took while tied up in the trunk of a car by describing the sounds of the highway to Whistler.  And finally, the climax of the film, in which Whistler is the only member of the team available to drive the getaway car, and has to be talked through how to operate the vehicle and negotiate a parking lot.  I could probably pick half a dozen more, but I’ll stop there.

I’ll just leave this here without further comment

I love caper movies, and this is one of my all-time favorites.  Anyone here who hasn’t seen it definitely needs to check it out, especially if you were a fan of [original re-watch host Mark Does Stuff]’s Leverage coverage.

Nostalgia: A
Rewatch: A

Stray Thoughts

-Whoever cast this movie deserves a bonus for the opening sequence alone.  Set twenty years before the rest of the movie, it features two different actors as the young Redford and Kingsley.  They look so much like their counterparts that I initially thought they were them in some sort of “young age” makeup.

-My favorite stage musical has long been Sweeney Todd, and my favorite version has always been the early 80s TV special version starring George Hearn.  Sneakers is also one of my favorite movies.  So why then did I never, ever put together that George Hearn played the Russian spy until just now? 

-“Hello, my name is Werner Brandes.  My voice is my passport, verify…me?”



Friday, September 21, 2018

Romancing the Stone



Romancing the Stone (1984)
Dir. by Robert Zemeckis

Starring Kathleen Turner, Michael Douglas, Danny DeVito and Manuel Ojeda

[content warning: brief discussion of exoticism/cultural stereotyping]

Plot:

After her sister is kidnapped, successful yet timid romance author Joan Wilder must travel to Columbia with the ransom demand, a treasure map formerly belonging to her brother-in-law.  However, multiple factions are all vying for the map, and Wilder finds herself in a romantic adventure of her own when a mysterious stranger convinces her to go after the treasure herself.

Nostalgia:

This one was one of my favorites as a teenager.  I don’t recall the first time I saw it, but I watched it a bunch of times in high school and college.  I’ve only seen it a couple times in the last decade, however, so it still qualifies for this project.

Rewatch:

Much like with The Beastmaster, Romancing the Stone is a derivative work.  In 1981, a little movie called Raiders of the Lost Ark came out, and kicked off a wave of copycat adventure films set in exotic locales – including this one.  However, I see the movie as actually belonging to a different genre, that of the pastiche.  It’s a parody, though not in the modern sense of things like the Scary Movie franchise, which just throws up references to other movies at random and calls it a day.  Instead, like many of the works of Edgar Wright, Romancing the Stone manages to both poke fun at a genre while being a top-notch entry in that genre.  That’s probably why this movie has stood the test of time while other 80s adventure movies of its ilk have barely gotten a DVD release at all (Nate & Hayes, anyone?).

It helps that this movie kicked off the film careers of not one, but three of its stars.  Yes, Kathleen Turner, Michael Douglas and Danny DeVito had all been in movies before, and the latter two had both starred in successful TV shows.  But this is the movie that moved Douglas and Turner into superstar lead status, and proved that DeVito could make the transition from television to film comedian.  Turner in particular is excellent here, believably selling the transition from meek writer, who can barely talk her way out of buying a toy from an aggressive street vendor, into a woman of action who jumps off waterfalls, swings across canyons and gets into knife fights with villains.

Just another day in the life of a romance author

The majority of the film is set in Colombia, and features many of the standard south-of-the-border adventure stereotypes: small villages run by drug dealers, rogue military commanders in kepi hats, crowded public transit filled with livestock, etc.  However, this never bothered me like I thought it might.  It helps that 1) many of these tropes are common to fish-out-of-water romance stories, as if Wilder had stepped right into the pages of one of her own novels, and 2) these tropes get repeatedly subverted.  The drug kingpin running the small town turns out to be an affable romance novel fan, and the random hotel that they wander into upon emerging from the jungle has a modern-by-80s-standards set of office equipment and staff that speaks English (much to Douglas’s surprise).  Most of the jokes in the film are at Turner’s expense, not the locals, as Joan Wilder is clearly a woman completely unprepared for any sort of travel at all, no matter what country she ended up in.  On the whole, the only real unsympathetic characters are the two white kidnappers from Queens, and the military commander villain, who’s really there to be the replacement for the Nazis in this Raiders pastiche.  At least he’s played by an actual Mexican actor (Manuel Ojeda), and not some white guy yet again.

On a technical level, while not quite up to Spielberg levels, Zemeckis here gives a preview of the sort of energy he would bring to Back to the Future a year later.  There are multiple exciting chase and escape sequences, with plenty of real stunts performed live.  Most notably among them are a swing across a canyon on vines, and a Jeep jumping a river during a chase scene using a radio-controlled ramp.  Douglas’s costume manages to evoke the iconic look of Indiana Jones without being too much of a rip-off of it, and Danny DeVito’s does the same for Paul Freeman’s Belloq (a connection I never actually made until this most recent rewatch). 


Seriously, why did I never see this before?


This review’s a little shorter than my other ones, but that’s because I found much less to complain about at-length.  It might technically be a rip-off of Raiders, but it’s one of the few movies to actually earn that comparison.  And it actually manages to one-up Raiders in one crucial category.  For all of her whiskey-chugging brashness, Marion Ravenwood has to be rescued by Indy again and again.  Joan Wilder actually manages to save Jack Colton multiple times, and is the one to defeat the bad guy in the end.  Not bad for a romance novelist.

Nostalgia: A-
Rewatch: A-

Stray thoughts

-Yes, there is a sequel to this movie, called Jewel of the Nile.  No, pretty much nothing I’ve said about this film also applies to that one.  I’ve only seen it once, when I was in 6th grade, and I’m pretty sure I thought it sucked even then.

-The movie opens with a scene from one of Wilder’s western-set romance novels, and for years I knew the music as “the music from Romancing the Stone”, not as “the theme to How the West Was Won.”



Wednesday, September 19, 2018

Remo Williams


 

Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins (1985)
Dir. by Guy Hamilton

Starring Fred Ward, Wilford Brimley, Joel Grey and Kate Mulgrew

[content warning: discussion of yellowface, sexism]

Plot:

A New York cop is recruited against his will for the secret spy organization CURE.  His death having been faked, he is given the new identity of “Remo Williams,” and is sent to train with a Korean martial arts expert so that he can become an assassin for the government.  However, his training is cut short when the schemes of a corrupt arms manufacturer threaten to reveal CURE's existence.

Nostalgia

This is another of the movies (we had a good hundred or so) that my parents had taped off of TV sometime in the late 80s/early 90s.  I remember watching it many times, and enjoying the action and the humorous character of Chiun.  It was unavailable on DVD for forever, so I probably hadn’t seen it in at least a decade, though I know we had that VHS tape up until we got rid of our VHS collection in the late 2000s. 

Rewatch

Remo Williams really wants to be an American James Bond movie.  It was directed by Guy Hamilton, who’d helmed four of the Bond films (including Goldfinger), and was based on a popular series of pulp spy novels, much like Ian Fleming’s.  It features fistfights, shootouts, martial arts, infiltrations into secure facilities, and other Bond-like shenanigans.  It also features some of the casual sexism and racism that were hallmarks of the 60s and 70s Bond films (more on both of these later).  However, despite all of this, it doesn’t quite come together as the exciting adventure film that it clearly was trying to be. 

For the most part, I’m going to have to fault Hamilton.  The film is shot and edited like the early 70s Bond films that he’d worked on previously, and it’s clearly behind the times.  This movie came out four years after Raiders of the Lost Ark and only two years before Lethal Weapon, and yet its style seems antiquated compared to both of those movies.  Fred Ward, though a good actor (I still love him in Tremors, which we'll get to eventually), can’t quite pull off the action scenes convincingly.  It probably doesn’t help matters that he looks a lot like my childhood Tae Kwon Do instructor, former professional kickboxer Kerry Roop, and clearly can’t do moves like he could.  And most of the big set pieces, with one exception, end rather anti-climactically. 

Not quite Sean Connery

That exception is the one really good sequence from the movie, the fight between Williams and a trio of construction workers on the Statue of Liberty.  During the mid-80s, the statue underwent a two-year restoration project, and was covered with scaffolding.  While nowhere near the level of, say, Jackie Chan, this scaffolding was effectively used for a precarious fight in and around the statue.  However, even this scene is undercut slightly by having his opponents be a bunch of blue collar guys who’d been paid off to stage an “accident”, and who clearly have no combat background.  If the movie wants us to take Williams seriously as an assassin, it needs to give us credible threats against him.

The movie also isn’t quite sure what to do with its Bond Girl, an Army officer played by a very young Kate Mulgrew of Voyager fame.  First, she’s only in the movie for maybe twenty minutes tops, disappearing for almost an hour after she’s first introduced.  Second, it can’t decide what sort of character it wants her to be.  Her first two scenes have her verbally shooting down two male officers who are sexist and condescending to her with remarkable speed and wit.  Later, however, she blunders right into an obvious trap, only surviving because of Williams’s intervention, and ends up tagging along with him for the rest of the movie without providing much in the way of value besides commenting on his and his mentor’s shared sexism towards her.

Speaking of his mentor, why do I keep picking movies with extremely glaring whitewashing?  Once again we have a white actor playing an Asian character in yellowface.  At least this time it’s the Oscar-winning actor Joel Grey instead of an acting newbie (though you could also argue that he should have known better).  His character of Chiun is a walking bundle of Asian martial artist clichés, down to the terrible accent and fortune-cookie wisdom – something that Williams even calls him out on in a rare moment of lampshade hanging for the film.  Granted, it IS fun watching the arrogant, openly racist Williams get his ass handed to him in their first meeting, and then repeatedly throughout their training.  I also can’t tell how much of their interactions are meant to be serious teachings, and how much of it is simply Chiun trolling his trainee (something that he openly and admittedly engages in at numerous times over the course of the movie).  Grey was actually nominated for a Golden Globe for his performance, something that I have to chalk up to afterglow from the previous year’s Globe and Oscar nominations for Pat Morita in his similar role as Mr. Miyagi.

Seriously, Hollywood, stop doing this!

Now, all of that being said, I think that the core idea of this movie does have something there.  If done better, it probably could have ended up as something similar to the first Kingsman movie, which made my Top 10 when it came out a couple of years ago.  There’s supposed to be a Shane Black-helmed reboot in the works, and I would love to see someone like Donnie Yen take on the role of Chiun.  Until then, however, I don’t really feel the need to revisit this one again. 

Nostalgia: A-

Rewatch: C-


Stray thoughts

-While the scenes surrounding them weren’t all that great, there were two moments from the setpieces that I’d like to single out.  First, the incredulous reaction that Williams has when the guard dogs chasing him during his break-in at Grove Industries team up to lower a metal fire escape so they can continue following him.

-Second, the only moment that really felt like the inventiveness of the Bond franchise, when he escapes from a trap in a military gasmask-testing chamber by using the henchman’s diamond tooth stud as a glass cutter to break the bullet-proof observation window.




Monday, September 17, 2018

The Beastmaster




The movie's not this awesome

The Beastmaster (1982)
Dir. by Don Coscarelli

Starring Marc Singer, Tanya Roberts, Rip Torn and John Amos

[content warning: sexual assault, animal cruelty]

The Plot:

A prophecy states that the son of the king of the Bronze Age kingdom of Aruk will kill the evil high priest Maax (pronounced MAY-AXE).  To prevent this, the priest’s witches use magic to transport the unborn child from his mother’s womb to that of an ox, with the intent to sacrifice it at birth.  The infant is saved by a farmer from a small village, and the boy, Dar, grows up with the ability to communicate with and control animals.  When his adoptive father and the rest of his village is killed by a barbarian attack, Dar strikes out on his own, to head to Aruk and discover his destiny.

Nostalgia:

When I was a pre-teen, live-action fantasy for me consisted of three films: Willow, The Princess Bride, and The Beastmaster.  I must have seen this movie thirty times or more before I was a teenager.  I was helped by the fact that it was played on the basic cable channel TBS so often that comedians joked that TBS stood for “The Beastmaster Station.”  And come on.  What twelve-year-old WOULDN’T want a pet tiger (cat allergies nonwithstanding)?  I’ve seen this one quite a bit more than the other movies I’ve covered, enough to be able to write out a decent plot outline of the whole thing pre-rewatch.  But there’s definitely things that I didn’t recall (or were edited out of those TBS broadcasts).

The Re-Watch:

In the spring of 1982, a little movie called Conan the Barbarian came out, and was an unexpected box office smash, kicking off a brief sword-and-sorcery boom.  Don Coscarelli was busy with pre-production for what was expected to be an independently-produced fantasy movie at the time, and it was quickly snapped up by MGM and put into an accelerated production.  It managed to come out less than six months after Conan's premiere, making it the first of many Conan ripoffs out of the gate.  It’s probably the best of them, but it’s still clearly in the “Blood and Thunder” tradition of Robert E. Howard and other pulp authors.  Lord of the Rings this is not. 

The plot is definitely a disjointed mess.  After Dar is rescued from being sacrificed as a baby, there are a couple of brief scenes of him growing up and learning about his ability to communicate with animals.  Then barbarians attack, kill everyone else, and Dar decides to stop wearing shirts and start wandering around Spain...er, the ancient wilderness. At this point, the movie becomes a series of unconnected events for almost half of its run-time.  Even after Maax (whose name still sounds like a brand of laxative to me) re-enters the movie, there’s really no sense of any sort of goal for him beyond sacrificing babies and chewing scenery.  At least Rip Torn is clearly having fun as the evil priest.  Marc Singer just kind of squints his way through the movie like a low-rent Clint Eastwood, always with the same expression and tone of voice.  I will say, though, that I actually prefer Rip Torn’s performance here to James Earl Jones’s in Conan.  Thulsa Doom never really left that much of an impression with me, whereas Maax is the sort of larger-than-life villain that I associate with the pulps.

Conan + Dar = He-Man?

Also in keeping with the pulp origins of this story*, there’s a whole lot of gratuitous nudity.  I, of course, didn’t notice it during any of those pre-teen viewings, because I was watching a copy taped off the aforementioned TBS, with commercial breaks and content editing.  Viewed now, the movie almost certainly would have gotten an R if it had come out today (it’s PG, but there was no PG-13 rating at the time).  Most egregious is a scene where Dar is first introduced to his love interest for the film, a slave girl named Kiri (played by Tanya Roberts).  In a scene straight from the early 80s sex-comedy playbook, Dar spies Kiri bathing in a river, and has his ferrets steal her clothing.  When she chases after them, topless, his tiger corners her, and Dar steps in to “bravely” fight off the beast and “rescue” her.  Not content to have our hero grossly manipulate a woman during a moment of vulnerability, the script actually doubles down by having him forcibly take a kiss as “payment.”  Granted, I realize that the movie is now 35 years old, and is following a literary tradition that dates back to the much-less-enlightened 1920s and 30s.  But even Arnold’s Conan (released the same year) actually displayed some concern and affection for the women that his slave-masters forced into his cell.  This was a straight up assault, and left a bad taste in my mouth every time she displayed interest or affection for him for the remainder of the film.

On another “still very 80s” front, the movie is very very white, despite being set in an ancient culture with architecture that strongly suggests ancient Sumeria or Assur.  At least the token actor of color, John Amos, is probably the second-most-badass person in the film after the lead, and his skin color is just accepted by everyone and never remarked upon negatively.  Amos is actually really good in the role of the former captain of the guard, now a wandering protector for the disenfranchised prince of Aruk (and, unknown to him, Dar’s younger brother).  It’s a shame that his character pretty much devolves into the “listen to Dar, he knows what to do” guy by the 2/3rds mark.

Now, I’ve spent a lot of time being negative about the movie, and I’d say that on the whole it doesn’t hold up nearly as well as I’d remembered it.  However, there are definitely some parts of it that I really still enjoyed.  Most notably among them is this out-of-left-field, completely incongruous horror sequence that feels like it was borrowed from Robert Howard’s colleague H. P. Lovecraft.  While wandering, Dar investigates weird lights at the top of a ridge.  He finds strange glowing pods hanging from a tree, and a man in a cage.  He frees the man, who is immediately grabbed by a strange bat-winged, no-mouthed creature, which digests him while holding him in his arms and throws out the bones onto the ground.  Dar himself is only saved by the arrival of his eagle, an animal that the bat-things worship.  No explanation for them is ever given, and I for one don’t care.  They’re the most memorable thing about the movie.

Seriously, WTF?

Also, ferrets are cute.  Especially ferrets that rescue our hero from quicksand and lead rampaging spike-studded killers on chases through evil temples (you know it’s evil because it’s got a giant Styrofoam skull blocking the exit passage).  Can we have a movie just about them?


Nostalgia: A

Re-Watch: C- 


Stray thoughts

-I ragged on the movie for its sexism and gratuitous female nudity, and it’s criticism that is well-deserved.  However, almost all of the major male characters go around bare-chested with loincloths, so it’s not like they’re fully armored and the women are from a Boris Vallejo painting.  And Marc Singer IS ripped in the movie.  There’s like a two minute sequence of him flexing and swinging his sword on a mountain-top that I distinctly remembered before my re-watch.

-The director apparently wanted to cast Demi Moore as Kiri, but the producers overruled him. 

-Some of the production design and cinematography decisions are really bizarre.  For example, Dar’s childhood village is entirely build on tall posts, with the buildings themselves suspended twenty feet in the air.  They’re not in a swamp or right next to a river or anything that I recall, so I can’t really see any reason for this.

-Dar’s tiger, Ruh, was painted black because the director had originally wanted a black leopard but couldn’t get a good camera-trained one.  I’ve read unconfirmed reports that the dye used was toxic and gave the tiger involved fatal cancer.  The animal handler was fired halfway through production, but that really doesn’t make up for it if that’s true.

-The score, especially the main theme, is actually quite good, and is way above the movie’s pay grade.  I wonder why I’ve never really heard it in fantasy score compilations or anything.

*Technically, this was based off of a 1950s Andre Norton novel, but literally the only things they kept were the concept of a man who talks to animals, and the species makeup of his animal team.  The film’s DNA very much belongs in the 1930s.

Friday, September 14, 2018

Adventures in Babysitting


 
Adventures in Babysitting (1987)
Dir. by Chris Columbus (His first movie)

Starring Elisabeth Shue, Keith Coogan, Anthony Rapp and Maia Brewton

[content warning: brief discussion of sexism and homophobic humor]

Plot:

A high school senior is stuck babysitting on a Friday night after getting dumped by her boyfriend.  When her best friend calls her for help, stranded at the downtown Chicago bus terminal, she drags her three babysitees along for the ride.  Things get quickly out of hand, with the quartet encountering mobsters, gang fights, and impromptu blues concerts, among other trials.

Nostalgia:

 I’m almost positive that I haven’t seen this movie since the 1990s.  However, I watched it enough that I remember multiple scenes quite clearly, if not how they got themselves into those situations. 

Re-Watch:

 If there is a movie for which the phrase “wacky hijinks ensue” fits better…well, it’s probably Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.  But that movie and this one would make a good double feature, as they’re both cut out of the same cloth.  In each, a group of teens irresponsibly takes a parent’s car into downtown Chicago for a series of episodic shenanigans, before racing said parents back home so that they won’t know they’ve been gone. 

However, there’s definitely a reason that Ferris Bueller is widely acknowledged as a classic 80s movie, and Adventures in Babysitting, if it’s remembered at all, is known primarily for starting the careers of Elizabeth Shue and director Chris Columbus, of early Harry Potter movie fame.  While the former shows all of the fun things that unaccompanied teens can get up to in Chicago, AiB definitely chooses to focus on how scary and intense it can be to be stranded in the big city, especially in the days before cell phones.  Pretty much everything that could imaginably happen to a group of white middle-class kids from the suburbs happens over the course of one evening, with so much piled on that it starts to cause adventure fatigue.

It doesn’t help that the person that they are ostensibly supposed to be rescuing, whose main defining trait seems to be that she’s visually impaired without her glasses, is very much the comic relief of the movie.  Her initial scene at the station is actually quite fraught with peril: she’s already seen multiple fights and a naked person on the concourse, and a man in a trenchcoat flashes a gun at her while she’s on the pay phone (remember pay phones?).  However, every time we cut back to her she becomes the victim of another humiliating joke at her expense.  It’s all too silly to be believable, like a bad SNL sketch of an inner-city bus station.  Now, for all I know that’s an accurate depiction of what such stations were like in the 80s.  I just know that it rang false for me.

A lot of the other humor is also fairly casually sexist.  There’s a running gag throughout the movie that Shue’s character (who’s still a teen, mind you) resembles that month’s Playboy Playmate. An issue stolen from mobsters is actually, believe it or not, the main MacGuffin that the kids are being chased for, so it keeps coming up over and over.  Brad, the older brother of the girl that Shue’s babysitting, has an obvious, unrequited crush on her. And his best friend, who tags along for the ride, is sex-obsessed to the point that Brad has to stop him from committing a sexual assault on a sleeping girl – in a throwaway gag.  There’s also a small current of homophobia as well.  Brad makes fun of his sister because her hero, Marvel’s Thor, looks too “gay”, though at least that scene does have a good payoff to it.  One only wonders what he’d make of Chris Hemsworth.

Now, I don’t want to give the impression that I hated this movie or anything.  I actually enjoyed good parts of it, though I’ll admit that I’d kind of tuned it out a bit by the end.  A scene set in a blues club, in which they try to hide from the mobsters but end up on-stage during open mic night instead and are forced to sing, is very memorable and quite entertaining.  However, I couldn’t help but think of the possible racial connotations to a group of white kids being forced to sing by an all-black crowd that clearly expected to humiliate them.  Then again, at least this movie remembers that there are non-white people in Chicago, something that Ferris Bueller pretty much fails at.




This movie was very much a mixed bag.  Considering that the plot was literally them careening from one disaster to another, it probably could have had about fifteen minutes trimmed out without much difficulty.  However, the acting is good overall, especially from Shue and the little girl in her care, played by Maia Brewton as a budding superhero nerd who’s clearly loving every minute of the danger that they’re in.  You can probably draw a direct line from her to Kevin McCallister in Home Alone, another movie that Columbus would direct only a couple of years later.  It might be worth a Netflix spin, fast forwarding through some of the cringier bits, but I probably wouldn’t shell out for the Blu-Ray on this one.


Nostalgia: vaguely B-ish


Rewatch: C 

Stray Thoughts: 

I’m going to start using this section for bullet-pointed ideas and observations that don’t fit in the full review.

*Holy Crap Moment #1 – Brad’s horny teen friend is played by none other than Mike Cohen himself (and Star Trek: Discovery cast member) Anthony Rapp.  I literally had no idea.

*Holy Crap Moment #2 – In one of the scenes I remembered the most, they have to get their car back from a mechanic who bears a very strong resemblance to Sara’s hero, Thor.  I remember her fan-girling all over the very confused mechanic, but I didn’t recall that he was actually played by a young Vincent D’Onofrio!



*The opening credits, with Shue dancing and lip-synching to the Crystals’ “And Then He Kissed Me,” is very memorable, and another of the scenes that I’d remembered quite vividly.  I know that this song has actually been used to open quite a few movies, but this had to have been first time I’d seen it used like that.

*Another “before he was famous” star, Bradley Whitford, plays Shue’s sleazy, soon-to-be ex-boyfriend.  Has that guy ever played a character who wasn’t an asshole?