Category: Rapid Response

Rapid Response: Young Mr. Lincoln

Henry Fonda plays Abraham Lincoln as a young lawyer in Springfield in John Ford’s 1939 classic.

220px-Youngmrlincoln“You’re crazy! I can’t play Lincoln. That’s like playing God, to me.” Henry Fonda said in a 1975 interview that he only played Abraham Lincoln because John Ford (who else) “shamed” him into doing it. “You think it’s The Great Emancipator huh? He’s a young, jack-legged lawyer from Springfield for Christ sake!”

We certainly do have this revered image of our 16th President, and yet the two biggest actors who have played him, Fonda and more recently Daniel Day Lewis, both played Lincoln with a sort of laid back aplomb. In their performances they made Lincoln into a great man by separating him from the esteem and the myth.

In “Young Mr. Lincoln,” which Ford cranked out in his seminal year of 1939 alongside “Stagecoach” and “Drums Along the Mohawk,” it’s immediately apparent that the image of Lincoln that Ford is going for differs from that of the stuffy politicians and bourgeois speaking in grand statements. He’s a proletariat homeboy who spoke calmly and plainly and won over the nation through his clear, honest demeanor and homespun wisdom.

Much of that credit certainly belongs to Fonda. Instantly he gives Lincoln a humble, trustworthy presence. It’s all in his tall and lanky body language. He leans on doorways and railings not unlike the iconic stooped perch he musters in Ford’s “My Darling Clementine, his poise and shoulders are lax, casual and he never has the need to truly boast or raise his voice. Look at one scene in which Lincoln, practicing as a young lawyer in Springfield, convinces two men who both want damages from the other to settle their case. He acts as though he’s telling them a story and lesson before revealing that he’s good at cracking heads, his eyes turning into icy spears as he does.

All the while Ford shoots Fonda at congenial, reassuring angles. Our first great look at Lincoln is a centered shot from chest height, just slightly glancing up at his sheepish face. Unlike the politician who spoke before him, Ford doesn’t frame Lincoln as some towering figure, but a relatable one. Lincoln’s words reached people on their level, and so does Ford’s film.

The story itself is a fictionalized version of one of Lincoln’s first court cases when he was a young man, not a president. Some out-of-towners get into a fight with a local brute, and when the man ends up dead, the town wants to lynch the two outsiders. Lincoln single-handedly stops the mob and agrees to defend the boys in a rousing and amusing courtroom drama. It’s complete with a few teases to his eventual wife Mary Todd and to his rival Stephen Douglas (a scene with John Wilkes Booth was cut from the film), but the film’s real charms lie in how Ford can capture the pulse of a community from this period.

“Young Mr. Lincoln” acts as a call for a more relatable leader, one who can subdue the fire of an angry crowd just through his words, but also one who will eat pies, split rails and cheat at tug of war, an average person who is in actuality extraordinary.

Rapid Response: Planet of the Apes (1968)

PlanetoftheApesPosterWatching “Planet of the Apes” today is like trying to sway a climate change denier or a Creationist: it’s not going anywhere and after a while it gets pretty tiring.

Franklin J. Schaffner’s film came out in a period of civil and racial unrest in 1968. Martin Luther King Jr. was even shot and killed the next day after receiving its wide release. It speaks directly to racial fears and the hatefulness that leads to ignorance and abuse. By flipping the script of racial politics into one of man vs. ape, it packs big ideas into a flashy, fun genre film of the Old Hollywood tradition. Except just before its famous ending it almost asserts the superiority of man, with Charlton Heston standing as its virile leader. The cynical ending in front of the Statue of Liberty proves that man is ultimately no better than beasts, responsible for their own demise through their vices of lust and greed that the ape culture has rejected. But there’s a degree to which the damage has already been done, suggesting that the future of a different breed being superior to the white males is a scary one.

“Planet of the Apes” perhaps isn’t as explicit about race or animal rights as it could be, opting more broadly to be about human nature. But whereas the newer sequels “Rise of the Planet of the Apes” and “Dawn of the Planet of the Apes” have tied the series more to environmental concerns than racial ones, sitting through the original can be awfully frustrating when dealing with characters so obviously stubborn and hateful.

The scene that comes to mind places Heston’s astronaut George Taylor at the center of a trail. He and his friendly ape protectors Cornelius and Zira are accused of heresy against ape law and religion. The judges, including the protector of the faith Dr. Zaius (Maurice Evans), immediately write off and overlook anything Taylor does as a hoax. He can talk, he can understand ape language (conveniently, English, even over 2000 years in the future), he can write, but you know no matter what he does they’re not going to budge, so why bother? The film’s more interesting moments happen before the men come across any apes, with Heston smugly challenging his travel companion’s existential views on trying to achieve fame and immortality. Now over 2000 years old, Heston says, “You got what you wanted. How does it taste,” before cackling maniacally as he plants an American flag, a symbol that has long lost its meaning.

Surely such discussion was highly thought provoking back in 1968. Or maybe not. Cliche idioms like “Man see, man do,” or “to apes, all men look alike,” were as cheesy then as now, if not more so. But today the subject has grown tired and has evolved beyond such obvious racial distinctions. I can still turn on cable news today and find people just as resistant to change, but “Planet of the Apes’s” antiquated views beg for something more sophisticated in today’s political climate.

Of course, “Planet of the Apes” has aged really poorly when you consider it came out the same year as “2001: A Space Odyssey.” It would be really hard to argue that the makeup effects still look “good,” but they’re certainly not distracting. More distracting is Heston; he has remarkable charisma and screen presence but was one of the hammiest actors of his generation. Here he’s embracing his more primal nature in his performance, practically beating his chest and howling as he’s being sprayed by a hose or chasing through the streets. But even when his character is supposed to be sincere, holding up a man’s old glasses, false teeth and heart valve, Heston still feels cocky and diminutive to the weakness of humans other than him.

Rapid Response: Suddenly

Frank Sinatra plays a man trying to assassinate the President in this 1954 thriller.

SuddenlyPosterI found myself this Friday caught in a wormhole of reading articles about gun control. The San Bernardino shooting happened an hour from downtown LA where I now live, and it has stirred up a lot of opinions and emotions.

So you can imagine my frustration when the movie I pick for the evening, “Suddenly”, turns out to be a pro-gun movie!

I’ve been pouring through Frank Sinatra’s films for a piece on his centennial, and this one was recommended as a surprising example of Sinatra’s hard-boiled side. Sinatra plays John Baron, a Silver Star winning ex-pat who killed 27 people in the war, but as something of an extension of his PTSD, has now taken a job to assassinate the President of the United States. In the small town of Suddenly, Baron takes a family hostage in order to gain a good vantage point when the President passes through town.

Rumor has it that Lee Harvey Oswald watched the film shortly before killing Kennedy, prompting Sinatra to bury the film for years.

But “Suddenly” has an unfortunate MO that has aged it horribly. The little boy among the family of hostages is Pidge, and he gets the local Sheriff Tod Shaw (Sterling Hayden) to buy him a toy cap gun. His mother Ellen (Nancy Gates) is strongly opposed, but even she’ll come around when the gun factors strongly into foiling Baron, not to mention that even she gets a shot or two off. Director Lewis Allen even gives Baron a cathartic feeling of self-esteem as he waxes on about the beauty and power of gun ownership saying, “When you have the gun, you are a kind of God.”

“Suddenly” often plays like a cheesy ’50s workplace PSA with a story shoehorned in around the war politics. Sinatra’s presence at the beginning of the movie is sorely missed, with the film’s flimsy supporting characters getting developed before we even know what the movie is about, not to mention that all the actors around him are atrocious.

But even Sinatra isn’t much better. Not once, but twice Sinatra plays directly to the camera, wide-eyed and scary in trying to amplify his past demons, but otherwise scowling and grimacing in his typical Sinatra persona and swagger.

“Suddenly” may try to avoid the politics of the time, or the political ramifications of killing the President (Baron at one point mentions the futility of his actions, knowing that as soon as the President is killed a new one will take his place), but with the gun argument front and center, this film is hardly a-political.

Rapid Response: Double Indemnity

Billy Wilder’s “Double Indemnity” is one of the finest, earliest examples of American noir films.

Double Indemnity PosterWe’ve grown used to the darkness. We’ve come to expect films to not have everything plainly visible and bright on camera, to see shadows and shades of color and light in the way we experience the world naturally. We’ve also come to see our heroes and our stars to make themselves look ugly, to hide in the shadows, to transform themselves, and to help make our viewing experience something other than natural, something disturbing and unusual.

I’m currently taking a course on Neo-Noir films, and our professor Drew Casper showed us clips of “Double Indemnity”, howling at the film’s introductory shots as he did at how dark they were, how many shadows could be seen on screen, how detailed and rich the sets were, and how much it looked like a film of the German Expressionist period. “This is a Hollywood film,” he screamed. “That’s the star! And his back is to the camera!”

Is it that hard to distance ourselves from the time and era in which we’re watching a movie? Can you imagine anyone watching the opening of “Nightcrawler” (the first week’s screening) and being SHOCKED that when we first see Jake Gyllenhaal’s Louis Bloom his back is to the camera, or that his face is partially darkened in the light?

Old Hollywood though really did have a fetish for making things look gorgeous. Everything was well lit and made to look stunning, even if that meant light came from unnatural places, or even if the scene was dramatic and grim. It took a foreigner like Wilder to break everyone out of the habit. Wilder was hardly the only or the first, and “Double Indemnity” is only a seminal work because it’s one of the finest, earliest examples of the form in American cinema. It holds up wonderfully today, even if its innovations don’t leap out and grab you in the way they once did.

Roger Ebert wrote very plainly in his Great Movies review of “Double Indemnity” that “the enigma that keeps it new, is what these two people really think of one another. They strut through the routine of a noir murder plot, with the tough talk and the cold sex play. But they never seem to really like each other all that much, and they don’t seem that crazy about the money, either. What are they after?”

Barbara Stanwyck

The truth is “Double Indemnity” is a movie about greed, not about love and especially not about the perfect murder or the thrill of the pursuit. And Walter Neff and Phyllis Dietrichson (Fred MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck each at their absolute best) find that greed through sex, wordplay and their own desire for one another, if for no reason other than they’re present. Some of my favorite dialogue turns up as soon as Neff enters the Dietrichson home and catches Phyllis after sunbathing. “It’s two F’s, like in Philadelphia… You know the story. ‘The Philadelphia Story'”.

They’re hopeless and obvious flirts, with Neff in particular going cocky and rogue without hesitation. What’s more, he’s the one who rigs their scheme to the point that it gets them caught. He demands they play it straight, but then he goes for broke by arranging for “Double Indemnity”, not just to dump the body but get double the payment by doing it on a train.

Part of what makes “Double Indemnity” such an effective noir is that the tension is not in the murder itself. We have a lot of movie left once Mr. Dietrichson is dumped on the train tracks. The dogged suspicion of the claims manager Barton Keyes (Edward G. Robinson) is intense. He blows the movie wide open with a series of reversals that seal the couple’s fate. They don’t crumble under guilt or slip up out of a love for one another. Their greed just gets paid back big time…and double.

Rapid Response: Sergeant York

‘Sergeant York’ helped inspire Americans to enter into World War II and was a box office smash.

Sergeant York PosterIt’s a long-running debate as to whether movies can actually have an influence over people to the point that it gets them to act. Movies inspire people, but do they get people to get out of their chairs and vote, or change the world, or convince them to be a better person?

Mark Harris’s book “Five Came Back” strongly suggests that “Sergeant York” directly spurned support for America entering World War II (Pearl Harbor might’ve also had something to do with it). He spends the early chapters of his book examining the mix of opinions among Hollywood studio heads regarding isolationism or conflict. Some had Jewish heads who embedded political commentary and calls to action into their films, while others remained staunchly neutral and avoided any content that could be considered as taking a stance, much to the chagrin of some of the more politically inclined directors. In fact the government held hearings and injunctions accusing Hollywood executives of propaganda by ways of their films, sparking a debate about the purpose of entertainment and art in the movie business.

“Sergeant York” was such a massive box office smash, raking in $16 million at the box office in 1941 (adjusted that’s over $400 million domestically, placing at #107 on the all time box office list) that it seemed as though the public attitude toward the war changed overnight. But at the very least, it shook Hollywood from its preconceived notion that war films couldn’t make money. Hollywood developed a voracious appetite for war films following “Sergeant York”, and the film is so shamelessly inspirational and humble in its folk roots that it’s no wonder why it was such a success.

Howard Hawks’s film is set at the onset of World War I breaking out in Europe. The people of a small country farm town in Tennessee are not only unaware of the crisis overseas, but even “‘a feared” of it making its way into their humble community. They start to get defensive around a traveling salesman who brings up the news, but Hawks intends it as a critique against isolationism.

That’s because the people of Hawks’s Tennessee are such old-timey yokels to the point that they are practically incomprehensible at times. I watched “Song of the South” recently, and “Sergeant York’s” sing-songy, thick, in-bred hick dialogue is about the worst I’ve seen. The pastor talks of the birds, the bees, the squirrels and the most hackneyed axiom about a tree’s deep roots, while Mama York speaks to the Lord with the prayer at dinner, “Bless these bittens we dun got.”

The local color is especially grating because it takes a solid 20 minutes before Gary Cooper even shows up. The real Alvin York was probably late ’20s when this movie begins and early ’30s when he enters the war, but Cooper is straight-up 40, still living at home, working with his teenage brother and marrying the young Gracie Williams, played by the then 16-year-old(!) Joan Leslie.

I’ve also never quite liked Cooper as an actor. He’s square, feels old, and is so one-note. Given his other work as the honorable Lou Gehrig or the timid and aging Will Kane in “High Noon“, it makes perfect sense that he’d be the humble country boy Alvin York. And Hawks does all he can to paint York as an upstanding, working American, showing him plowing fields and lifting boulders in front of stupidly gorgeous black and white shots that borrow “Gone With the Wind’s” horizon.

“Sergeant York” is also frustrating because as a war movie it doesn’t get to France until its final half hour. The two halves of the movie are almost entirely different screenplays, the first building York up as a folk hero on par with Daniel Boone, the second building him up as a war hero. That last half hour though is stellar, not unlike how moving and iconic his closing speech is in “The Pride of the Yankees“.

But the first hour plus is a movie about how he’s a rambunctious man with no direction and with “Satan grabbing you by the shirt tails.” The local pastor (Walter Brennan) tells him religion will find him like a bolt of lightning, and then it quite literally does. York is in an angry rage during a storm when lightning knocks him off his horse into the mud. He goes down a hill and finds the church, and he’s a changed man. The film charts his inner need as a character and wraps up that story an hour too soon, but it finds a way to start fresh once he’s drafted for the army.

While other elements of “Sergeant York” are largely dated, this mid-portion may actually play well to a modern, Conservative audience. York files an exemption to drafting in the military based on his religion. It’s a sin to kill, but the law requires everyone to enlist. “What kind of law is it that tells you to go against the Good Book and it’s teachings,” York asks. Later the words “God” and “Country” are literally battling for space in his head, with the words echoing in a voiceover as he sits and ponders while looking out over his home valley (another remarkable Old Hollywood shot). In fact the army officers are instructed to keep an eye on him as a “conscientious objector”, and you could argue he’s genuinely being persecuted for his faith.

But finally an hour and a half in we get one stunning war sequence. It’s rapid cross cutting action, dual perspectives between the Americans and Germans, Hawks quickly disposes of the rousing American march music as soldiers start to get shot and killed, and everything is brightly lit and clear in a way Old Hollywood was best at. York’s claim to fame as a war hero involved him disarming 32 German machine guns, killing 20 German soldiers, and capturing 132 more Germans, including several high ranking officers, virtually single-handedly.

Hawks makes it a sight to be seen, and Cooper turns into a ruthless, kick-ass machine. It’s quite amazing how he transforms in the moment. There’s an early scene where he sets six bullets on a table in a row and asks his fellow soldiers, “If they were a flock of turkeys, which one do you shoot first?” The answer is the one at the end of the line. Shoot the leader, and the others see him drop and scatter. Take off the straggler first, and you can bag the whole flock. So it is with Germans apparently; the scene is absolutely thrilling, if not a little hilarious as well.

Much of “Sergeant York”, including his famous act of heroism during the war, is actually true to life and how the real Alvin York was perceived. Here’s how a journalist in the Saturday Evening Post described York: “the mountaineer, his religious faith and skill with firearms, patriotic, plainspoken and unsophisticated, an uneducated man who “seems to do everything correctly by intuition.” That’s Gary Cooper if it’s anyone, but the film, perhaps not unlike “American Sniper“, another shamelessly patriotic war film with some truly remarkable moments, is only interested in that one-dimension of York, and of the war. At one point Mama York flatly announces she has no clue why the US is fighting overseas as though to write off any serious politics outright, although Hawks may be aiming to capture the actual pulse and attitude of the country at the time. Most interesting though is how this movie came to be made at all, with York finally giving in to requests to adapt his life story because he was in need of money as he had grown older, overweight and diabetic. Still however, York was largely a philanthropic figure, despite how his reputation as an American hero had diminished prior to the movie.

“Sergeant York” won two Oscars, including one for Cooper, and was nominated for 11 in all. So can a movie inspire people? Like York during World War I, did Hawks’s film get America into World War II single-handedly? It’s hard to imagine any other movie with as good of a chance as this one.

Rapid Response: A Nightmare on Elm Street

Upon Wes Craven’s passing, ‘A Nightmare on Elm Street’ how learned an auteur the director was.

NightmareonElmStreetPosterIt’s regrettable that it often takes an actor or director dying before I decide to catch up on some of their movies. This week’s culprit was Wes Craven, and I concede that both horror films and ’80s films make up a particularly weak area in my film lexicon, so it’s no wonder that his classic “A Nightmare On Elm Street” was an unfortunate blind spot.

The film is no doubt an ’80s classic, filled with horror, gothic and literary references and the inspiration for many others for years and decades to come. While “Elm Street” is not as self-aware as Craven’s later “Scream” films, it is so plugged in and conscious of all the themes it borrows from, and Craven is nothing if not a learned auteur. Tina crawling on the wall and being hurled around like a doll recalls “The Exorcist.” That the film switches protagonists from Tina to Nancy part way through is a big nod to “Psycho”. And the sheer buckets of fake blood are purely a staple of ’70s and ’80s slasher movies and B pictures.

The film works gangbusters for a number of reasons. Firstly the idea that we’re not safe even in our dreams, even under the covers of our bed, in our sleep or in our own minds, where we so often escape for solace, is terrifically scary. The film completely overlooks the science of dreams and sleep as well, to the point that Freddy feels omnipotent and their attempts of avoiding sleep entirely feel hopeless. Second it has a perfectly simple, iconic score that so many films, horror or otherwise, overlook today. Third, Freddy Krueger is a wonderful villain. He’s got physical features, from his fingernails like knives, to his pork belly hat, to his dirty striped sweater, that when the characters describe him it makes him instantly recognizable to other teens experiencing the nightmares and to the parents who were responsible for killing him. Better yet, he’s taunting, sadistic and even teasing, going as far as to reveal his true, monstrous form to Nancy and Tina. Finally, it uses sexuality as a catalyst for horror in more ways than one and in more sophisticated ways than many teen slasher films do. There are probably thousands of pages of think pieces or academic papers dedicated to the one shot in this movie where Freddy’s claws reach up from in between Nancy’s legs while she’s sleeping in the bath.

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But those have been areas that have been well-tread. What most interests me is how filmmakers dream. “A Nightmare on Elm Street” is all about dreams, but dreams of course are never the same between two people. We experience dreams in different ways and they provide different sensations for us depending on who’s dreaming. In “Elm Street”, Nancy and Tina wake up in their own worlds. Craven plays tricks on his audience to hide whether we can tell if we’re actually dreaming. When Nancy falls asleep in school, it looks as though her eyes have simply flickered shut for a moment. There’s no change in setting or in visuals that would indicate immediately that this is a dream, but before long we see something that’s out of place. The only problem is that it feels real.

We also know that getting hurt or killed in the dream world can hurt us in the real world, and that Nancy can bring back objects like Krueger’s hat into reality. And for the most part the laws of the dream world behave as they do in the real world. Only occasionally does the geography change, like when a curtain seals a boiler room wall behind Nancy, or when she hustles up the stairs only to get caught in quicksand sludge on each step.

Compare all this to something like “Inception”, in which Nolan’s dreams are transportive. They feel real, and we forget how we arrived there, but suddenly we can be in Paris, and suddenly we can be skiing in the Alps. Or what about “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind”, where there are no physical laws within dreams, where things are malleable and fantastical.

I’d like to believe that each filmmaker dreams differently, and how they convey dreams in their films says something more about them as filmmakers. It’s a project I hope to explore in more detail sometime down the line, but until then, having watched “A Nightmare on Elm Street” finally, I’m having trouble getting sleep of my own.

Rapid Response: High Noon

The Anti-Western classic starring Gary Cooper has not aged well.

HIghNoonPosterGary Cooper’s Will Kane wears a black cowboy hat throughout “High Noon”. The fashion choice is by design. He’s a hero, but by the end his victory is hollow. The town’s people he has sworn to protect have all left him for dead, for various reasons, and when he’s finally fulfilled his duty, he retires out of disgust, not achievement. In the film’s final moments Cooper wordlessly casts his “tin star” to the ground and rides off on a cart with his newlywed wife Amy (Grace Kelly in her first role). For a movie about a man who nobly puts loyalty to his job ahead of loyalty to his family, it’s more bitter and callous than inspirational.

That end is enough to earn “High Noon” the title of an anti-Western, and with it a reputation as one of the best American Westerns ever made (it currently sits at #221 on the IMDB Top 250). Its hero Will Kane is full of fear and uncertainty, and he’s without confidence, support or even a strong sense of logic or values toward why he’s risking his life for this town. The cynical end following the climatic shootout is further one that calls out the McCarthy era fear-mongering and politics circa 1952, when the film was nominated for seven Academy Awards and took home four, including one for Cooper for Best Actor. Fred Zinnemann’s (“From Here to Eternity”) film in a script by Carl Foreman (“The Bridge on the River Kwai”) casts scorn on the townspeople who are all too cowardly, greedy, spiteful or all three to help Kane kill the vengeance driven Frank Miller and his posse, who aim to gun down Kane once Miller arrives pardoned from prison on the noon train.

But so many of the best Westerns are already anti-Westerns. “The Searchers” grapples with vicious racism and hatred toward Native Americans in John Wayne’s hero. “Johnny Guitar” is a wild, feminist, damn near exploitation film. Later entries in the genre like “Unforgiven” remove some of the romanticism of the old West by focusing on an aging gunslinger. “High Noon” may have been one of the earliest anti-Westerns of its kind, but its innovations stop there.

Working in its favor is the real-time element, with characters constantly checking the clock and building up the myth of the demon set to arrive on that High Noon train, Frank Miller. It leads to a wonderfully effective use of sound, in which Zinnemann cycles through the town people in stark close-ups, only to be abruptly cut off by the sound of the train arriving at the strike of noon.

Equally effective is how every character in the small town of Hadleyville, no matter how cowardly, weaselly or vindictive they are, their personality is tied to the arrival of Miller on that train. One of Foreman’s more powerful twists is in revealing to us that Kane’s presence, despite his ability to clean up the town and run Miller out, has not been entirely welcome. Business at the hotel has dried up, more people had work as deputies, and many even called Miller their friend. It’s not just that Kane is a man without a country, but that even those who care most for him feel its in their best interest to see him leave town or fail.

“High Noon” however has aged horribly. It’s a prime example of an effective, Old Hollywood screenplay in which the dialogue is earnest, but thick and bluntly ineloquent. The characters have clearly drawn motivations and back stories, but everything is telegraphed. So much of the film is without action or personality coloring that the constant, Stanley Kramer led ideology can get weary. Whether its the simplistic views of what it will take Lloyd Bridges’s character Harvey Pell to become a man, or the recurring “High Noon” theme preaching “don’t forsake me oh my darling” whenever Kane ambles through town, Zinnemann’s hammy execution just doesn’t hold up as well as the edgy bent of Westerns by John Ford or Howard Hawks.

That changes slightly in the film’s famous shootout, in which Kane is resourceful and human more than just a slick quick draw. Zinnemann strips virtually all the dialogue in this sequence and even finds quick catharsis for Kane and his wife Amy.

“High Noon” has a lot going for it, and it’s likely a good entry point into Westerns, but a real classic it is not.

Rapid Response: Wet Hot American Summer

David Wain’s summertime parody was far ahead of its time, even in the early 2000s.

WetHotAmericanSummer14 years is an awful long time in the 21st Century. In 2001, the first iPod would just be released, and the memes, texts, emojis and general sense of irony we now freely use as communication were hardly even a concept. “Wet Hot American Summer”, David Wain’s cult comedy debut from 2001, may have been released in the new millennium, but its reception was pure ’90s, practically unprepared for the style of irreverence Wain brought to the table. Roger Ebert turned his review into a cheap rendition of “Camp Granada”, while others simply found it profoundly unfunny, if not disturbing.

Thankfully, Wain’s film has aged better than anyone could have anticipated, to the point that just this month an extended TV series set on the first day at Camp Firewood rather than the last day, was released on Netflix. It’s an incredible feat namely because of how the massive ensemble cast has ballooned in fame and popularity in those 14 years: Janeane Garofolo, Amy Poehler, Paul Rudd, Michael Ian Black, Michael Showalter, Christopher Meloni, David Hyde Pierce, Molly Shannon, Elizabeth Banks, Bradley Cooper (are you kidding me?)! I haven’t even begun to scratch the surface.

But “Wet Hot American Summer” is random, meta and absurd in a way that never fit the template of the times and could only exist in an Internet age. It’s an assortment of characters, vignettes and broad set pieces that don’t add up to a complete plot, but it doesn’t play like a sketch movie in the slightest. It doesn’t play like a “Family Guy” half hour of cutaways, one-liners and non-sequiturs. And it isn’t even pure anarchy (well, for most of the run time).

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One of the most revealing scenes in all of Wain’s film takes place on a trip into town away from camp. An ’80s rock song plays over a montage as the counselors and teens tag along in the back of a pick-up. It’s a fun, shooting the breeze diversion from the rest of the film, with a few quick glimpses of everyone dancing and eating burgers and smoking weed. Without a moment’s change in tone, the image on screen devolves into chaos. The kids are buying cocaine, then have transformed into skinny, lifeless junkies shooting up heroin in a random shambles of an apartment. The song ends, and so does the scene. Things return to normal, and no one bothers to comment on what we’ve just seen.

Throughout “Wet Hot American Summer”, Wain realizes he can play with genre and tone with no consequences. As long as the flow and the spirit of this otherwise wholesome movie never wavers, he can show whatever he wants, whether it’s a gay sex scene between Cooper and Showalter, or a “Rocky” training montage between Meloni and Showalter. Shannon’s character seems divorced from the movie entirely, with her classroom of arts and crafts students coaching her on the verge of a nervous breakdown over the behavior of her husband.

There’s a rule in improv that you must never say “no”, or the scene stops. “Wet Hot American Summer” seems to say “yes” and “no” simultaneously. The movie can do whatever it wants, and the character personalities and expectations don’t necessarily matter 30 minutes after they’re introduced. But the film never seems erratic. It makes a point to stay constant to what Camp Firewood is, and to the moment in the ’80s the film is sending up.

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Granted, the film has plenty of other less cerebral pleasures. Poehler and Cooper are damn near incredible, so passionate, involved and overly dramatic. Poehler has become the winning and cheerful Leslie Knope but this film is a reminder of her more cutting side while still being endearingly lovable (“Am I watching the Cleveland Playhouse?”). Meloni’s Gene is outrageous, so committed to his midriff, scruffy facial hair and trademark bandana that he can get away with the lunacy that is talking about dick cream, chatting with a can of vegetables (H. Jon Benjamin, no less) and best of all, humping a fridge.

It’s material so silly and often so clueless and offensive (the first time Paul Rudd threw a kid out of his moving van, it seemed despicable. The second time, I howled) that it’s easy to see how the film can be so misunderstood. What’s more, Wain hasn’t necessarily struck lightning a second time since, despite never truly breaking his own rules. But while this film aimed to capture the ’80s, it captured the pulse of 2015, and today feels timeless.

Rapid Response: The Harder They Fall

Humphrey Bogart stars in his last role alongside Rod Steiger in this cynical boxing drama and film noir.

TheHarderTheyFallPosterBoxing movies looked like this back in the day. To think that someone finally decided to throw the camera into the ring with the fighters made all the difference in the world. And while “The Harder They Fall” isn’t exactly “Raging Bull” in the violence or pathos departments, Mark Robson’s film combined with Burnett Guffey’s Oscar nominated cinematography has more than a few unsettling gut punches both inside and out of the ring, especially for 1956.

“The Harder They Fall” is a strange hybrid of sport and noir, in which the nature of the boxing game is convoluted deal-making and conspiracy worthy of gangster pictures, and where the double crossing managers are not just amoral or hypocritical but so passionately cruel and adamant in their defense of their shady business and spiteful of the athletes they’re responsible for. Granted, the story on the whole doesn’t make a whole bunch of sense, and while the novel on which “The Harder They Fall” is based was something of a muckraker expose, the movie was hardly an accurate depiction of the boxing industry in 1956 and feels even more farfetched today.

Humphrey Bogart stars in what would be his last role before his death as Eddie Willis, a former sports columnist too full of pride to return to a lower desk job at a newspaper. He’s brought in by the crooked fight promoter Nick Benko (Rod Steiger) to act as a press agent for his latest fighting sensation, the Argentinian giant Toro Moreno (Mike Lane). He’s a staggering gargantuan but can hardly take a punch, let alone throw one. He’s “Green as a cucumber”, as Eddie says. And yet Nick knows Toro can be a money making star if Eddie lies through his teeth to the press and fixes every fighter he faces up until the title match. The opening of the movie is all about myth making and hype building, and Bogie’s performance is so casually underscored and cool, like all his best work, that you would believe anything he told you.

But the film escapes some of its implausible stretches, including a Native American fighter who somehow maintains his pride by putting chicken wire in his mouth, or a priest who agrees to a donation of $25 grand of dirty money with barely no convincing at all, and becomes a story of abuse. The boxers in the sport of “The Harder They Fall’s” world aren’t athletes but bums who don’t want to do anything else, and Eddie and Nick and company feel more than fine fleecing them for all their health and money, only to leave them damn near crippled at the end of their career. There’s a startling moment when one of Eddie’s journalist buddies shows him a documentary of a former prize fighter suffering from brain damage now living on the street. It’s an unexpected real world turn from the previous noir build-up, and it’s one that over time makes us increasingly question why we’re putting up with this punishment.

During one beautifully lensed match, in which the blood flows and the lights flicker with startling speed, a fighter who suffered a brain hemorrhage in a previous fight and can hardly stand in the ring against Toro eventually collapses and is later ruled dead. Meanwhile, Toro and his promoters celebrate not just their victory but their new status as a killer in the press. Part of this is so uneasy because Toro is plain clueless at the nature of his success. So while the plot of how pointlessly cruel this system is for boxers doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, “The Harder They Fall” has a heavy weight hanging over it.

In the end, Bogie ended his career much as he did near the start of his rise to Hollywood elite: as in “Casablanca,” sending away a person he loves on a plane home. Bogart was diagnosed with esophagus cancer shortly after filming this project and died nine months after the film was released. His death came at an interesting time, as “The Harder They Fall” combined the two styles of acting during that point of time, Bogie’s old school line-reading and Steiger’s lived-in method performance. Bogart hated Steiger’s style of acting but you wouldn’t know it on screen, as Steiger was certainly the fiery showman here. Bosley Crowther back in 1956 described Steiger’s character as having “the charm of a knife-nicked grizzly bear”.

As a note, depending on how you watch the film, “The Harder They Fall” has either a cynical ending, or a really cynical ending. In the version I watched, Bogart begins writing a piece designed to expose Nick’s crooked dealings, and in another, he suggests the sport of boxing be banned altogether. It’s the rare sports movie that ends with such a gut punch.

Rapid Response: Strange Days

“Strange Days,” Kathryn Bigelow’s 1995 film, from a story by Jay Cocks and her then husband James Cameron, imagines through a sci-fi lens what 1999 Los Angeles might resemble had race riots never stopped and perpetuated into a dystopian police state.

StrangeDaysPosterOne might assume that a film set at the dawn of the new millennium and about the fear of Y2K might feel a hair dated. But while that aspect does, “Strange Days” touches on a subject that’s been more than prevalent in 2015.

Kathryn Bigelow’s 1995 film, from a story by Jay Cocks and her then husband James Cameron, imagines through a sci-fi lens what near-future Los Angeles and Hollywood might resemble had race riots never stopped and perpetuated into a mildly dystopian police state. It was released just four years after the Rodney King beating, and it uses the death of an iconic rapper named Jeriko One to act as a martyr and catalyst for all the unrest. Back when the film was released, Tupac Shakur and his eventual death in 1996 came to mind. Today, any of the black men wrongly killed and captured on video will do.

The reason though “Strange Days’s” concept of race feels so poignant has all to do with its sci-fi parameters. In the near future, the police have introduced a tool called a “Squid” that can capture a person’s live experience, from their point of view, as they’re living and experiencing it. People can then enter into “playbacks” that allow you to relive and feel what that person felt.

Now the technology is used on the black market, and Ralph Fiennes plays Lenny Nero, the “Santa Claus of the Subconscious” who sells sexual and thrill seeking experiences like it’s a drug. At the start of the film, we witness a crew robbing a restaurant and then falling to his death as he escapes from the cops. Bigelow shoots in a shaky-cam, first person POV that pre-dates found footage films and makes for some gripping action. Lenny himself is an addict for “jacking in”, or “wire tripping”, as Lenny says, as he obsesses over old memories of him with his former girlfriend Faith (Juliette Lewis). But when someone starts leaving threatening videos for him to watch, Lenny and his tough friend Mace (Angela Bassett) are on the run from both a madman and a pair of renegade cops.

The plot twist for what’s causing Lenny to be on the run is captured in a video involving the death of Jeriko, and it inherently brings to mind the cell phone videos that have sparked protests today. But after the events of the past year, one has to wonder if the outrage, animosity and eventual justice seen here is just another part of “Strange Days’s” fantasy.

Part of the problem with “Strange Days” is that the race riots are hardly even the main focus of the film. Made for $42 million back in the ’90s, the film was a giant flop that raked in only $7 million. One of the film’s trailers touches on just how all over the place “Strange Days” is, with a heavy focus on the sci-fi, a conspiracy mystery and the fear of what’s to come on New Year’s Eve 1999.

That’s not to say Cameron and Cocks’s story is bad or unfocused, but it drags to over two and half hours and feels like it has two endings, one to confront the sadistic madman threatening Lenny and Faith, and the other to confront the cops who want the tape Lenny is hiding. And the thread connecting these two plot strands is tenuous at best.

But you wish Bigelow did take a bigger interest in the unique sci-fi angle of the story. “Strange Days” becomes strictly procedural in its last hour or so, whereas other sci-fis that take us inside people’s minds, like “Minority Report,” “A.I.,” “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” and “Being John Malkovich”, to name just a few, go deep into psychological implications; “Strange Days” only considers these brain-teasing pleasures and consequences superficially.

Bigelow does however put the POV perspective to powerful, action heavy use, implicating the viewer in some of the film’s more depraved moments. If you thought Bigelow was advocating for torture in “Zero Dark Thirty” and that those scenes were rough, try on the rape scene in “Strange Days”. A masked intruder sneaks into a woman’s hotel room and begins to rape and strangle her, but before he finishes, he places a viewing device on her head, forcing her to watch herself die from the eyes of her killer. Lovely.

That scene could be debated for days. More simply however, while Angela Bassett kicks ass and dominates the screen in Bigelow’s stylish fights, and Juliette Lewis commands a a handful of grungy rock performances, Ralph Fiennes seems strangely miscast. Only his fifth film role at the time, it’s hard to imagine him as the steamy count in “The English Patient” or the sinister Amon Goethe in “Schindler’s List”, let alone any of his more recent iconic roles. He has the sleazy, slick, fast-talking demeanor of James Woods and the ’90s haircut of Nicolas Cage. He’s not the action star, but audiences should appreciate the depth he and the cast bring to “Strange Days’s” more melodramatic moments.

If anything, the interesting foibles of “Strange Days” demonstrate that Bigelow was well on her way to becoming a master. It’s just hard to “jack in” to that frame of mind.