Rapid Response: First Blood

One of my journalism teachers gave a peculiar example in class one day. He called the moment when an article (or a movie) comes out to explain to you just what your dealing with the “Col. Trautman Moment,” in honor of Rambo’s Vietnam War commander who tells Brian Dennehy just how much deep shit he’s in far too late after he’s made Rambo angry.

In journalism we call this a nut graf. It’s an essential ingredient in a good article, but some of the best writers can weave it in naturally without using a line like, “You don’t know what you’re dealing with soldier.”

“First Blood,” or the first of a kajillion Rambo films, is a notoriously dumb and meat-headed ’80s action movie that, despite it’s popularity somehow got away from me until recently because…well, who cares why?

It spawned so many sequels not because it’s the most campy and outrageous action movie you’ve seen from the period or because Sylvester Stallone was such a bankable star after “Rocky” (that fame came after this), but that “First Blood” is an anti-Vietnam War movie. It’s right-wing take on the war was that, it can do real damage to the people like Rambo who come out of it, but the real harm comes from the society that doesn’t respect that these people are doing important work overseas.

This is more or less the mentality today: hate the war, not the soldiers.

So in that way, “First Blood” spat in the face of “The Deer Hunter” and “Apocalypse Now” by making a war movie with a conflicted character but glorified, amped up action. It seems to advertise becoming a super soldier with lines like, “Those green berets are real badassess.”

But I’d be lying if I said the politics were the things that irritated me most about “First Blood.” In capturing Rambo, this small town has absolutely nothing at stake. Everyone here reacts like a hammy tough guy over the littlest bullshit gesture by the war vet. They’re all one-dimensional jerks who can so freely get killed off by the almost horror movie monster that is Rambo. After he escapes, he goes from low-key drifter to Bear Grylls in no time flat. And everything he does is diluted by this dark, ugly and occasionally incoherent film. It’s poorly written, agonizingly low-brow and redneck, and Stallone overacts the hell out of it.

So here’s my Col. Trautman Moment: “I don’t think you understand. This movie is terrible.”

Unforgiven (1991)

“Unforgiven” holds firm as an excellent, classical Western long after their heyday and a turning point in the legendary career of Clint Eastwood.

You have to hand it to the Coen Brothers for making 2010’s “True Grit” into such a well made and entertaining movie, because as far as I’m concerned, Clint Eastwood gave the Western genre its victorious last stand in “Unforgiven.”

“Unforgiven” is brilliant for being the last truly old fashioned Western and yet also a modern elegy of it. Eastwood starred in enough Westerns in his career to know how the genre ticked, and his characters in “Unforgiven” display unsuspected depth that expand on all the themes common to the genre without harming its integrity. It’s a film from the early ’90s but fits into the canon of Westerns as well as any.

Beyond that, “Unforgiven” is an important landmark in the career of a great actor and director. It’s an imperfect masterpiece; a human mark on the face of a titan.

Eastwood plays William Munny, a former killer in the West who has now grown old and tame as he started a family. Three years after the death of his wife, he’s a lonely and hopeless pig farmer. The new bounty hunter on the block is the Schofield Kid (Jaimz Woolvett), and he needs a partner. Will however hasn’t pointed a gun at a man in 10 years. The cowboys they aim to kill mutilated a prostitute, and the other girls in the brothel have put a $1000 price tag on the cowboys’ heads. But protecting the town from any bounty hunters is the corrupt and ruthless Sheriff Little Bill (Gene Hackman).

The world in “Unforgiven” is cold and dangerous, where even the law is heartless and scary. But the stunning horizons and bright blue skies paint a pastoral picture that is not “glamorous,” but still beautiful. Nobility remains in this world, however dated it may seem. Continue reading “Unforgiven (1991)”

Rapid Response: Peeping Tom

I spent nearly half of my college career studying a theory of communication that deals with looking through and looking at communication. It’s all about recognizing the fact that there’s a lens in front of you as you watch a movie, watch TV, look into a camera or even look out into the world with your own eyes and mind. The smarter of us understand that we are seeing someone’s perspective, and yet still we look, fascinated by the emotions before us.

Michael Powell’s “Peeping Tom” is a film about looking, being terrified at what we see, being unable to look away, and feeling tortured and gross for doing so.

It’s a psychological horror movie released just months before “Psycho” about a serial killer, Mark (Carl Boehm), who videotapes women as he’s killing them, all to capture their last moment of fear and rewatch it later. He’s horrified by his actions and his films, but Mark has the psychological disorder of voyeurism, making him consumed to invade a person’s genuine expressions of humanity, be they love or terror.

Mark’s films are all black and white and silent (which would likely be the only option for home video equipment in 1960), but Powell orchestrates them to eerie, silent movie ragtime, and “Peeping Tom’s” vibrant colors and careful framing create a disturbing, unreal effect. On aesthetics alone, we’re drawn into Powell’s cinematic flair, and we hate ourselves for it because of the nature of the story. His techniques seem to telegraph that through any form of movie magic, Powell can pull our strings and keep us transfixed and terrified no matter what he portrays. Continue reading “Rapid Response: Peeping Tom”

Safety Not Guaranteed

“WANTED: Someone to go back in time with me. This is not a joke. You’ll get paid after we get back. Must bring your own weapons. I have only done this once before. SAFETY NOT GUARANTEED.”

This real-life classified ad is the setup to the indie comedy “Safety Not Guaranteed,” but the important part is, “This is not a joke.”

The three magazine journalists who decide to report on the man behind this ad aren’t necessarily joking either, but they don’t entirely believe it, and that’s where the movie gets us. Derek Connolly’s screenplay in Colin Trevorrow’s film plays with our expectations by setting up a scenario that can’t and probably shouldn’t be true, and yet one that we kind of root for. Continue reading “Safety Not Guaranteed”

Rapid Response: Bob le Flambeur

“Bob le Flambeur” and Jean-Pierre Melville helped inspire the French New Wave.

Jean-Luc Godard was supposedly the first to travel down the streets of France with a camera hidden in the basket of a bicycle, but Daniel Cauchy claims Jean-Pierre Melville did it seven years earlier on “Bob le Flambeur.”

Melville and perhaps most specifically “Bob le Flambeur” were pivotal in inspiring directors like Godard and Francois Truffaut in the evolution of the French New Wave, films that valued directorial style, visual dynamism, gritty realism and numerous American influences.

“Bob le Flambeur,” along with Jules Dassin’s “Rififi,” mark the beginning of the modern heist film, and it’s got all the trimmings of a landmark movie in leading a cultural revolution in Europe.

Translated literally as “Bob The High Roller,” Bob (Roger Duchesne) is a compulsive gambler with a past as a bank robber. He has such an unhealthy obsession with gambling, he sits down at a table, buys only one chip and loses it instantly in the ante. But the biggest gamble of his life will be to rob a Montmartre casino on the night of the Grand Prix when it holds 800 million francs. He enlists a team full of specialists as well as his two proteges, Paolo (Cauchy) and Paolo’s lovely new fling Anne (Isabelle Corey), to perform the heist. He seems only to be taking the risk because it is his compulsion. It’s a dangerous game.

Bob Le Flambeur Anne

The film is rife with details and planning scenes that would become common place in films like the “Ocean’s” movies (not ironically, “Bob le Flambeur” also inspired the original “Ocean’s Eleven”), but Melville embeds so much life and vitality in all of these moments. Canted angles illuminate the surprisingly chic checkered walls of night clubs and casinos, wipe cuts and a jazzy soundtrack bounce the action forward in time, and steamy nude scenes are as revealing as anything put in a film up to that point. You can practically see the French New Wave leaping from this film.

Melville said in an interview in 1961 that he had made a list of 63 American directors he admired from before the war. To do so with European directors, he said, would be near impossible to even come up with 10. Melville relished American films and culture. He strove to make a movie like “Bob le Flambeur” without having money or actors who were willing to commit to a shooting schedule that ran over two years, all so that an American audience could admire them. He had a personal style that was both loved and loathed, and within a few years of this film, he would be one of the names you could add to that list of European masters.

The Amazing Spider-Man

What people really like about Spiderman isn’t the web slinging or the red-blue spandex or the zippy one-liners; its that beneath the mask there is a smart, witty, nerdy, likeable and relatable kid in Peter Parker.

Sam Raimi and Tobey Maguire knew that for their 2002 film “Spider-Man,” and Marc Webb and Andrew Garfield seem to know it here for “The Amazing Spider-Man,” which is essentially a remake of Raimi’s film. But Garfield’s Peter Parker doesn’t have the boyish charms of Maguire’s, and his mixed persona makes for a film that suffers from its other clichés and hokey gags.

I’m dating myself when I realize that “Spider-Man” is in fact 10 years old, and there are likely a new generation of 12-year-olds who will watch this version and appreciate it just fine. But everyone else may have fatigue at just how familiar this origin reboot is.

Peter Parker is left with his Aunt May and Uncle Ben (Sally Field and Martin Sheen) after his parents are forced to leave in a hurry, never to be seen again. Now as a bright high school teenager, he’s rediscovering his father’s past and tracks down an old colleague, Dr. Curt Connors (Rhys Ifans), who transforms into a monstrous lizard thanks to a genetic algorithm provided by Peter. It’s then Peter’s job to stop him after he’s bitten by a genetically mutated spider that gives him enhanced strength, reflexes and an ability to stick to walls.

What’s tiring is how boilerplate Peter’s backstory is. Of course he has to deal with the obnoxious bully in school, stumble through awkward conversations with the cute Gwen Stacy (Emma Stone) and rehash the boring pseudo-science that explains his mutation.

And while the original “Spider-Man” is no less guilty of these clichés, Director Marc Webb (“500 Days of Summer”) overdoes it. The high school drama consumes the entire first half of “The Amazing Spider-Man,” and for every visual gag, there’s an added cinematic punch line in case you forgot how to react, be it in a cheerleader’s bubble gum popping over her face or a Coldplay song cueing in to fill the gooey void.

Garfield handles all these moments with a peculiar attitude. On the streets in his costume, he’s notoriously smarmy and glib, and then at home or around his girlfriend, he shuts up into an awkward ball of angst. Garfield emanates so little chemistry with Stone that you wonder why Gwen is so drawn to him.

“The Amazing Spider-Man” also lacks a moment as instantly iconic as Spiderman kissing Mary Jane upside down in the rain, and Webb is not the visual technician that Raimi is, so a few shots from Spidey’s POV as he careens through the air look plain cartoonish.

Maybe it’s the 12-year-old me talking, but I was able to take the original “Spider-Man” somewhat seriously and still realize it was a goofy popcorn movie. It was as if Peter Parker never forgot how dopey he really is just by putting on that mask. “The Amazing Spider-Man” on the other hand is cornball all the time and thinks itself otherwise. It forgets who’s inside that spandex suit.

2.5 stars

Rapid Response: Broadway Danny Rose

In “Broadway Danny Rose,” Woody Allen cheekily riffs on the character he created in “Manhattan.”

Most of the characters Woody Allen plays are really just himself, but Danny Rose is the kind of character that riffs on the one he created in “Manhattan.”

“Broadway Danny Rose” has the black and white veneer of his early masterpiece set in New York, but it’s irreverent, light and notoriously silly. Continue reading “Rapid Response: Broadway Danny Rose”

Moonrise Kingdom

As “Moonrise Kingdom” begins, a boy is listening to a record of Benjamin Britton classical music compositions intended for children. A high-pitched, nonthreatening kid’s voice interrupts the song to explain the intricate layers of Britton’s piece, and the boy appreciates it all the more.

Wes Anderson’s seventh feature film is much like this record: an art house picture pieced together and slowly revealed to us like an elaborate opera. It has characters, themes and a silly tone that a child could embrace, and yet its presentation has complexity and maturity that may be beyond most adults. In this way, “Moonrise Kingdom” is one of the wackiest, most inventive, and most notably, the most heartfelt film Anderson ever made. Here then is a movie about growing up, independence, living above your age and loving the beauty of the more challenging and sophisticated pleasures of the world.

“Moonrise Kingdom” is the romance fairytale of Sam and Suzy (newcomers Jared Gilman and Kara Hayward), two preteens who escape their parental care to elope on a hidden cove on their small island home of New Penzance. Sam is a nerdy orphan, the most unpopular boy amongst his summer camp Khaki Scouts (by a significant margin), and yet a skilled mountaineer and adventurer. Suzy is the oldest child in a dysfunctional family, and she’s at an age where her needs cannot be met by her two unhappy parents. The couple is tracked by the lone island cop Captain Sharp (Bruce Willis), Sam’s camp counselor, Scout Master Ward (Edward Norton), and Suzy’s two parents, Walt and Laura Bishop (Bill Murray and Frances McDormand). Continue reading “Moonrise Kingdom”

Brave

The first big selling point of “Brave” was that it was the first Pixar film to feature a female lead. The second was that it was not “Cars 2.”

But “Brave” is sadly disappointing in both of those respects. It falls short of creating an original and authoritative female character that can go in the canon of Disney Princesses, and it is so madcap and silly that it becomes exhausting.

Princess Merida (Kelly Macdonald) is not the only movie princess who has been poised with the task of accepting an arranged marriage. She’s a plucky young tomboy with wild red hair and a sharp eye with her bow and arrow, and yet her mother, Queen Elinor (Emma Thompson), demands that she become prim and proper such that she can select a husband from the kingdom’s three clans.

All three princes are embarrassing dopes, so Merida defies her mother by besting the three of them at archery and then enlisting the help of a witch to change her mother’s mind about the necessity of marriage. This unfortunately, in the witch’s terms, means transforming Elinor into a bear.

Yes, a bear, and the bear gets awfully tiring when the bear starts doing things a bear cannot do, like pantomime or wear a tiara and clothes. Cartoon bears have been known to do things bears cannot do before, but less so in Pixar films. Usually when Pixar creates a maelstrom of action, they do so with the intent to provide beauty or enlightenment, as in the colorful bits in “Ratatouille” and “WALL-E” or even early on in “Brave” as Merida gallops through the forest doing target practice to the tune of an elegant song by Julie Fowlis.

Rather, much of the action in “Brave” is chaotic and clumsy, such as when a horde of Scottish soldiers chase a shadow through the halls of the castle. It goes on endlessly in the third act, as is customary of most films today for children or otherwise.

Merida is too safe and familiar to spark a revolution for women. The more interesting is Elinor, who is full of resolve and conviction as well as motherly tradition, but she doesn’t get to do much talking when she becomes the aforementioned bear. That silence on her part paves the way for more comic relief bombast from the men, who are all one-dimensional. The King in particular is so cartoonishly massive that it’s impossible to take him seriously.

Granted, “Brave” is plain gorgeous. Pixar has never rendered landscapes this beautiful before, or with as much detail. The detail and realism of Merida’s red curls alone must’ve cost a fortune in CGI development.

But just as pretty is “La Luna,” the Oscar nominated Pixar short just before “Brave,” which gives a lesson of individuality through a lovely and original story about a boy, his father and his grandfather doing an odd job on the moon. It does so without words or action and leaves a warm, gooey feeling that comes as a welcome surprise to the noisy action of “Brave.”

So I guess to use a silly analogy, as Pixar aimed their bow and arrow, they hit the close target with the safe and formulaic film that is “Brave.” They should’ve however shot for the moon.

2 1/2 stars

Rapid Response: Ace in the Hole

There’s one thing today’s journalists can’t do with a computer, and that’s light a match as a typewriter slides back into place. It’s the way Chuck Tatum does it in “Ace in the Hole,” a terrific, Old Hollywood critique of the press in a grizzly, bitter noir.

Kirk Douglas plays Tatum as a smarmy, cutthroat reporter with attitude and condescending wit to his editor at the small Albuquerque newspaper, despite coming to him after being fired by a dozen newspapers on the other side of the Mississippi. Tatum craves a vicious cycle of “if it bleeds, it leads” journalism, and his belief is that one big story will break him out of New Mexico and back onto the East Coast.

He finally catches his break when a man gets trapped in a cave-in just outside a small Native American town. Tatum finds the man deep inside the cave. He says his name is Leo Minosa (Richard Benedict), and he’s thrilled that not only is someone going to rescue him, he’s going to be in the paper too. Tatum plays up the angle that Minosa is trapped in an Indian burial ground, he bribes the local authorities for exclusive access, he forces Minosa’s wife Lorraine (Jan Sterling) to stay and lap up the luxury that’s about to come in the media firestorm, and he even persuades the foreman to use an elaborate, slow and inefficient way to dig out Minosa. Continue reading “Rapid Response: Ace in the Hole”