Overdue Movie Reviews #17 - The Quiet Man (1952)

Sean Thornton (John Wayne) has left America to return to the land of his birth, the Irish village of Innisfree. He intends to buy the home his late mother spoke so fondly of in his youth, and build a life there. A life he quickly decides he'd like Mary Kate Danaher (Maureen O'Hara) to be part of. But her brother, Will (Victor McLaglen), is a swaggering bully who has it in for Thornton for buying the land the house stood on when Danaher wanted it. There won't be any marriage without a lot of static and resistance from Will, and a lot of assistance from the locals, especially when it comes to Mary Kate's dowry. A dowry very important to her, but meaning nothing to Sean, to her frustration.

John Ford really wanted to make this movie about Ireland, set in Ireland. The story I've heard, probably on Turner Classic Movies, is the studio required him to direct 4 Westerns before they'd give him the green light. Those 4 made money, and then The Quiet Man won a bunch of awards.

Ford clearly wants to highlight the country itself as a place. So many shots of green, rolling hills. Just the green of everything in general, the shade Sean paints the door of his home or the train he takes to get there, leaping off the screen. The omnipresent rock walls, breaking things up, making getting from one place to another a challenge, mirroring all the roadblocks in the romance between Sean and Mary Kate. The quiet little village with its cobblestone streets that look wide enough they can only be considered crowded if the entire town gathers in one spot, such as when they put on a show of support for Reverend Playfair so the bishop won't transfer him. The blustery winds and idyllic pastures.

I did find the framing of Sean's arrival for the first night in his new home curious. It's framed as an ugly night, the house shrouded in darkness, the trees that have grown up around it waving violently in the wind. It's the kind of presentation you expect for the Scooby gang to investigate a mystery. A forbidding night for his big return to his childhood home. I guess the tempest outside is meant to mirror the tempest inside, once he finds Mary Kate there, tidying up the long-abandoned house in an act of Christian charity, and the sparks start flying. By sparks, I mean he kisses her without permission and she tries to wallop him. She needs to shorten up the arc of that haymaker, telegraphed way too obviously.

My coworker watched this for the first time last year. Came away from the experience horrified, utterly confused how it was so well-regarded. I can't entirely disagree. Even by the standards of John Wayne movies, the gender politics are terrible. Even making allowance for when the film came out, and when and where it was set, it's rough. Given my dad's fondness for Wayne and John Ford, it isn't a surprise I saw this when I was in my teens, maybe earlier than that. I love the climactic fistfight, it was at one time one of my favorite movie fights, but even then I recognized how bizarre everything leading up to it is. Sean dragging Mary Kate 5 miles, to the great enjoyment of seemingly every person in the county, judging by the enormous crowd following. The old woman giving Sean a stick to beat Mary Kate with, and this being played as funny. I may not have internalized how messed up it was, but it definitely registered as strange.

(But I've also never understood in Westerns when the whole town gathers to watch a man be executed by hanging. I get there's no radio, TV, or internet, and most of them probably couldn't read a newspaper if they had one, but damn, they got nothing better to do than watch a man die ugly?)

The friction I don't feel the film addresses is, not only does Sean not understand the cultural practices, he doesn't try to correct his ignorance. He doesn't want to follow the rules about the courting process. Why, in America, he'd just drive up to the girl's house and honk. What's all this chaperoning and observing the proprieties? Sure, it's annoying Mary Kate's loudmouth prick of a brother can block their relationship, purely out of spite, but Sean doesn't try to bargain or find a way to make things work. He acts like it's a stupid custom, and when that approach unsurprisingly fails to change things, starts sulking and riding his horse around the countryside angrily. It's the rest of the town that trick Danaher into changing his mind. Late in the proceedings Reverend Playfair tries to explain the importance of the dowry tradition. Sean gives no sign he's paying any attention.

Sean built the idea of life in Innisfree as a dream to make true. An escape from his guilt over how he made his money boxing. He never considers Mary Kate has her own dreams or worries. He doesn't get why she'd scold him over planting roses instead of vegetables. Well Sean, because she figures you're supposed to grow food to help feed your family. That's how it's done in Innisfree, that's how she understands things to be. He calls her 'mercenary' for wanting her furniture, for wanting the money she earned and inherited.

But those are part of her dream for married life. Mary Kate probably spent years escaping the drudgery of feeding her oaf of a brother and his employees by daydreaming how she would decorate her home, once she had one. How the money would be something she'd bring to the marriage, maybe make certain she wasn't totally subservient if the husband was a jerk. I'm not entirely clear on the importance of dowries myself, but I get that it mattered to her.

Sean looks at it as, what's the big deal? He has money, he can buy her new furniture. He never comes to understand it, he simply decides to play by their rules out of spite. Drags her - literally drags her, when she loses her footing and he just keeps marching - back to her brother and demands the dowry. Danaher refuses, so Sean throws Mary Kate at his feet like some truant kid that busted his window with a rock. 'It's your custom, not mine.' Does that make him the perfect example of the Ugly American? Come to a foreign country, throw a tantrum when they don't do things how he likes.

It works, of course. The fact he drew the line in the sand at all is apparently enough. She just wanted to see he would actually fight for something that mattered to her, even if it didn't matter to him. Ass-backwards way of doing it, humiliating Mary Kate versus just marching up and beating Will Danaher's ass until he forks up the dough. But if we allow that Sean's worried about punching another man to death, then I guess he didn't want to be the one who swung first.

And Danaher obliged. Actually, counting the scene at the wedding, he obliged twice. With a sucker punch attempt both times, no less. So Sean really should have just stepped in and thrown down.

I still love the fight, the whole messy ridiculous spectacle of it. The way it immediately turns into a free-for-all until Michaleen (Barry Fitzgerald) restores order. Danaher agreeing to Marquis of Queensbury rules, then kicking Sean in the face. The guys with the bucket splashing water on whoever gets knocked down. The old man leaping from his deathbed as the sounds of the fight reach him. All the religious figures looking on in delight rather than stepping in to stop the violence. The whole argument in the bar about who's paying.

McLaglen makes a great oaf, as always. This time it isn't tempered with any soft-heartedness he shows in a lot of Ford's other films. No sweetness around kids, no easily wounded heart when a sharp-tongued woman rebukes his polite greeting. He's an insecure jerk, making a show of having his lickspittle write names of those who offend him in a book and cross them out. Trusting money, or his size, will make people back down. He's got a great face for sneering, and there's always a derisive snort at the tip of his tongue. 'You can buy me a drink at your wake, and not before,' is a great line, delivered beautifully. And he makes for a good balloon to be punctured by Wayne's dry comebacks. 'Mind you, I'm fresh as a daisy! You look more like a black-eyed Susan.'

It's a mixed bag for O'Hara. I think she shows the conflicting impulses Mary Kate is caught between. She likes Sean, the tall, handsome American who isn't put off by her temper or sharp tongue. But there's a lot that's been drilled into her as proper or required, and she can't quite break free. 

I'm not sure she entirely wants to. She's ultimately on board when it comes to kissing Sean before they've finished the going out in public together section of the courting. Still, there's a lot of her culture and upbringing she wants to maintain, and the guy she fancies doesn't think much of any of it, or what her culture says is expected of him. To stand up for her and what she's earned or owed. So she gets frustrated, because she thinks he loves her, but if so, why won't he do this for her? And that brings out the temper and the sharp tongue. And after, the regrets, because she doesn't like hurting him.

At the end of the day though, she's playing the romantic interest in a John Wayne movie. He's going to get his way. By the end of the film she's fine with it. He's met the requirements. He fought her brother for the dowry, showed she mattered at least that much to him. She was already physically attracted to him. He goes to church. He provides financially. When he's not pissed off at her about things he finds unimportant, he seems doting enough. Still doesn't seem great to me, but I'm not an Irishwoman who did not appear to have a surplus of suitors, in a movie set in the first half of the 20th Century.

Most of the humor comes from the kinds of side characters Ford populates his movies with. The Catholic priest (Ward Bond) trying to catch that big fish, or being outraged at the notion of Mary Kate making Sean sleep in a sleeping bag. The guys at the train station, always running hours late because they can't stop arguing about some piece of Irish history. The reverend and his bishop making bets on the fistfight. That one older guy at the pub who's always sitting in one spot reading the paper and never moving. Michaleen Oge Flynn, with his drinking and wry comments, the oversized outrage at any number of things. 

Fitzgerald's character is almost the centerpiece, given the prominent role he plays. He always seems to pop up like magic. He's at the train station to give Sean a ride, though Sean clearly didn't call ahead for him. He acts as matchmaker for Sean and Mary Kate, but has a horse that knows enough to stop at the bar to give the couple some time alone. He's sitting on the bench beside Sean's front door in the morning, to tell him Mary Kate's decided to leave him. He left the pub to figure out which way Sean and Mary Kate were going, but he's right there at Danaher's for the fistfight, to bring some sense of order to it. While trying to make money off it, naturally. Michaleen seems like a guy who has a lot of fun watching other people's lives go off the rails.

Given that, I'm surprised Ford went with Bond's character as narrator. Maybe he thought Bond's deep voice had more gravitas than the gleeful tone Fitzgerald was using?

Overdue Movies Reviews #16 - Pitch Black (2000)

A transport ship passes through the tail of a comet in a deserted trinary star system and crash lands on a rocky hellscape of a moon, orbiting an enormous ringed gas giant. Only a handful of the 40 passengers survive, mostly due to the navigation officer refusing to let the first officer dump them in an attempt to make a better landing. (The captain was killed in his cryo-pod by some of the micro-meteorites that punctured the hull.)

But the nav officer didn't buckle his seatbelt, so he didn't survive. Which leaves First Officer Fry (Radha Mitchell), a couple of prospectors, an antiquities dealer, a teen traveling alone, a priest (Keith David) on a pilgrimage with his three sons, and a bounty hunter (Cole Hauser). Oh, and the bounty hunter's prisoner, one Richard B. Riddick (Vin Diesel). Murderer, escaped convict. Emphasis on "escaped," because he's on the loose.

Of course, the satellite they've landed on is pretty inhospitable. No visible water, no trees. No nightfall, as there's always either the red-orange pair or their blue third wheel in the sky, if not all three. There are skeletons of enormous creatures in a vast plain, but no sign of any living specimens, or any other life. Maybe just let Riddick stay escaped? An entire ashtray of a planet to himself.

They find a mining outpost, abandoned. This solves the water issue, and if they can get some power cells from their ship, there's a dropship that will at least get them off this rock. If they can get them before the planet's remaining inhabitants come out to feast.

Is this Vin Diesel's big break? Iron Giant was the year before, but it was an animated movie so his voice was in it, but necessarily him. Saving Private Ryan the year before that, but he's a supporting character. The birth of the legend that is Dom Toretto is still a year away. I don't think Boiler Room did much for him. Riddick as a character relies a lot on Diesel's physical presence. That he's a big guy, that he can glare intensely, or offer an unsettling smile. It fits with Riddick's initial monologue about how the only part of your brain still aware in cryo-sleep is the low, animal part, and that's why he's still awake.

Because Riddick is, or is playing at, an animal. The "shine-job" on his eyes, allowing him to see in the dark, that glow like those of an animal with tapetum lucidum. The way he gently encourages Fry to come closer, then lunges like a guard dog on a chain. The bit where he covertly cuts a lock of her hair and sniffs it. Dislocating both his shoulders to escape, like a fox chewing off its leg to escape a snare. He speaks with his body; you can't trust the voice because he's trying hard not to let anything slip that way. Everything is a growled accusation, or a smart-ass remark delivered with a sneer. When he tries to mockingly laugh at Fry's accusation that he's afraid, he can't even manage a convincing laugh (he also leans back a bit, like she jabbed at him with knife or something.)

All that works to Diesel's strengths. The few moments where he needs to emote a little more, not so much. OK, really it's just the scene when Fry dies and he tries for a distressed?, anguished? cry of 'Not for me!' Actually, the part right before that, when Fry is trying to stand him up and get him walking, is good, and it relies on body language. Riddick doesn't try to lean on Fry for support so much as collapse into her arms. Which could be exhaustion after dragging all those power cores, fighting Johns, killing some of the creatures. But he flings his arms around her, and with their relative positions, Fry has to do the same. They end up in an embrace. Not romantic, more like a comforting hug, something it doesn't sound like Riddick - 'found in a dumpster with an umbilical cord around my neck' - has gotten much of in his life.

I enjoy the look of the landscape, especially in the scenes when the blue star is shining. Everything washes out to this almost blinding white, like everyone is directly under an incredibly bright spotlight. It really makes the planet seem dry, like there's so much heat sweat would evaporate instantly. Along with the bleached skeletons they find, and those immense, termite mound-like, spires the creatures make, that look so formidable, but are easy to break through. Just dry as dust.

Some of the CGI isn't great, the green screens when the characters are in the foreground of shots with the planet or the stars are jarring. The creatures' hands always seem strange to me, though I guess they're meant to have evolved for grasping, so the teeth or tail can deliver a finishing blow. The biologist in me wonders about the creatures evolving wings on a planet with such thin air, but maybe the heat creates updrafts to keep them aloft.

Even after the eclipse begins, though? But it doesn't seem like that prison planet from the second Riddick movie, where one side is an inferno, the other an ice box, so there must be some normal heat retention. The creatures are very thin, though I don't think their bones are hollow like a bird's, given one was trying to headbutt its way through a skeletal backbone to get at Jack. As always, the biology and climatology of worlds in Riddick movies fascinates me.

The story revolves around the Fry/Johns/Riddick trio. Fry, who was prepared to make a ruthless decision to save, at best, 2 lives at the cost of 40, and is now struggling to save the survivors as a form of penance. Johns, the lawman who is ultimately self-serving and dishonorable. Riddick the criminal that has given up on things like trust or support because the world has never shown any to him.

Johns makes Riddick an offer, help them escape this planet, and he'll go free. An offer Johns has no intention of honoring. Riddick surely knows this, but is willing to play along. Fry is the one in the middle, the other two tugging her their way (even though their ways are the same.) Riddick mentions Johns' morphine habit, that he didn't offer any to let the nav officer die in peace. Johns mentions Riddick can pilot a ship like the one they plan to use, that's how he made his last escape, and the crew didn't survive.

It isn't so much Fry's decision is relevant to how things play out between Johns and Riddick themselves. The two meatheads were always going to settle that personally. It's more what decision she makes. Does she honor the deal with Riddick, because he's honored his side? Does she leave him to die, because she fears he'll kill her? Does she make the choice to save herself, and abandon the survivors alongside Riddick? Prioritize her own, higher, chance of survival, versus the lower possibility she can save the others?

She's already done that last one once, and had her unwitting, prospective victims thank her for saving them. It eats at her. Mitchell moves through the movie like someone carrying an invisible 50-kilo sack on her back. Constantly exhausted, hair stuck to her forehead in a way that has to be irritating. Leaning against things or away from people. The guilt eats at her more every time she's praised, and drives her to desperation to try and save people she quite likely doesn't even really care about, when she has only the vaguest idea what she's doing. Fry understands ships enough to know how they can get the one they find in the air. Everything else? She's winging it. That makes having all these people rely on her even worse, especially when unforeseen circumstances - the rain, Jack's monthly cycle - create complications.

Johns and Riddick are the only two (alive) that know the truth. Each of them use it, too, in different ways. Johns uses it to undercut Fry when she tries getting on her high horse. The charming, noble protector veneer Hauser gave Johns up to then falls away, and we see someone that fights to win, whatever it takes. Maybe he learned that from Riddick shanking him in the back, or maybe it's something he always had.

In contrast, Riddick is gentle. He tries to coax Fry onto the jump-ship, to forget about Jack and Imam, and leave with him. Maybe there's a hint of mockery in him to start, but as the conversation progresses, I think he comes to first pity, then resent, her. In the former, it's how broken she seems about her inner conflict. Wanting to survive, but not wanting to hate herself for abandoning people. So he encourages her to do what he would. Survive. Even offers her a hand, then steps out of the ship to guide her in.

Eventually though, the fact she won't leave them digs at him. It's a little like The Killing Joke, only instead of it being a "one bad day" thing, Riddick wants confirmation that given the choice, other people would make the same decision as him, and think only of themselves. If Fry does it, then Riddick is fine. It's not just him, the universe really is as selfish and terrible as he claims as he sees it when he and Imam discuss God. But when she keeps insisting on going back, that means maybe it's just him that's the asshole. You don't have to always distrust kindness and cloak yourself in cynicism. Instead of Riddick pulling her into his way of seeing things, she pulls him the other direction.

Overdue Movie Reviews #15 - Necessary Roughness (1991)

The Texas State Armadillos were national champions of college football. They were also cheating in a variety of ways, including steroid use, paying players under the table, and fixing grades so players could remain academically eligible. So their national championships were nullified - do you remember them winning the national championship? No you don't, according to the NCAA - scholarships revoked, and coaches fired. The program is dead.

The university president (Fred Thompson) decides to rehab the school's rep by hiring Ed "Straight Arrow" Gennero (Hector Elizondo), a retired coach known for not tolerating any sketchy stuff, even if it means kicking a star player off the team. That's why he's retired, boosters don't approve of principles. But this shattered husk of a program has no boosters, so Gennero gets to run the program as he sees fit. He brings in his old defensive coordinator, Wally Rig (Robert Loggia) to help turn a bunch of walk-on students into a football team.

Unfortunately, none of the walk-ons with good enough grades to survive the obnoxious dean's (Larry Miller) attempts to kill the team can play quarterback, so Wally recruits Paul Blake (Scott Bakula), who walked away from football 16 years ago to run the family cattle ranch, to play QB. As a 34-year-old freshman. Who smokes, a lot, and runs like a guy who smokes a lot and spent the last decade-and-a-half wrangling large, stubborn cattle.

Can Blake be the leader Gennero wants? Can he get this group of oddballs to play together and experience victory?

I did, technically, discuss this movie briefly in the opening paragraph of a comic review post back in 2009, but it wasn't really a proper review. Now, does this movie merit a proper review? Well, at least as much as any number of shitty movies I watched on Netflix over the years.

This movie is like Escape to Athena, where it's as much about what a bonkers cast it has as anything the movie itself actually does with that cast. Escape to Athena is better, having the advantage of being a suspenseful adventure set in World War 2. That's a stronger base for a story. Necessary Roughness is ultimately just a sports comedy, but it's full of people where I can stop and go, "Hey, That Guy!"

Besides the people listed above, you have early career Jason Bateman as the spoiled son of a major donor to the university. Sinbad plays a professor that walked away from college football to pursue chemistry. Blake convinces him to use his last year of eligibility to play offensive and defensive line. Rob Schneider is the team's radio announcer (we only ever see him in the broadcast booth, and he never directly interacts with anyone else, which is probably the best way to use Rob Schneider.) Desperate for a field goal kicker, Wally recruits Lucy (Kathy Ireland) from the girl's soccer team. Harley Jane Kozak plays an Intro to Journalism professor that had a crush on Blake when they went to rival high schools, and the two start up a relationship. While she's one of his teachers.

Which, look. In addition to Miller playing a snotty little tin dictator of a bureaucrat as he so often has, the dean is panting after Dr. Carter, and absolutely determined to crush the team by hook or crook. That said, I don't think he's wrong there are ethical concerns about a teacher dating a student, even if they're both in their 30s. Especially when the student's participation in an extra-curricular is contingent on his grades staying up, though the one example of Blake's work we hear in a class assignment demonstrates a thoughtfulness that suggests he's at least trying to be a good student.

(Also, Bakula is 37 when the movie came out, so he's at least close to 34, unlike all the movies and shows where a 28-year-old plays a high schooler.) 

The rest of the roster is filled with various broad characters. Manu, a big Samoan guy that plays center and initially annoys Blake by treating him as an elder to be respected. (Blake's response: 'I'm not that eld.') A bull-riding farm boy. A pair of twins that spend a lot of time fighting each other. An ROTC guy that's way too intense. A white boy really into martial arts that gets nicknamed "Samurai", and is the sole guy who only plays defense (Blake being the one who only plays offense.) A track star turned wideout who can't catch. An Aussie rugby player that doesn't want to wear pads or helmets. The Aussie gets knocked out in practice and Gennero admiringly observes he didn't drop the pass. Sure, only cost him a few thousand brain cells.

The movie has a lot going on. Probably too much. My dad said once it feels like a pilot for a TV show that got turned into a movie instead. Blake and Carter's relationship. Blake trying to figure out what, exactly Gennero is trying to get from him. Rig trying to get at little respect as a coach (his only offer prior to this was to coach football at a girl's school. In England.) Bateman's thing with his dad. The dean's attempts to cut the team off at the knees. Manu and Lucy strike up a relationship almost immediately, Manu trying very hard to be chivalrous. Not that I can blame him, hustling to make time with Kathy Ireland.

There probably could have been something about Lucy trying to prove herself to a team full of guys. When she's showing off her ability to kick (showing really terrible form, she's moving flat-footed), Sinbad opines this is what happened to pro wrestling, women taking over. Yeah, and once we got past the obnoxious bra-panty match shit (and Jerry Lawler's brain-dead drooling over same) it kicked ass. 

As it is, the team sucks so bad they can't afford to turn down any help they can get, though Gennero is still reluctant to even let her on the field to attempt a game-tying field goal. Because he's afraid she'll get hurt. Typically kickers don't get hit much. There are penalties for it and everything. 

There's the sole holdover from last year's team, a walk-on named Charlie Banks, who still can't get on the field for a team that's resorted to having 10 guys play both offense and defense. You think they'd at least try giving those guys the occasional breather, risk playing the few other players they have. Especially when they're losing games 40-6. Apparently Gennero's in the Tom Thibodeau school of coaching that says you aren't trying to win unless you grind your best players into dust by playing them constantly.

So some things get more run than others. Bateman's issues with his dad just buying his way through trouble crops up very briefly near the start of the final third of the movie, but there's really nothing to set it up beyond Gennero telling Rig that the dad's name is on buildings all over campus.

The Gennero and Blake issue surfaces periodically. I can't really figure out what Gennero is looking for any more than Blake can. (Carter at one point suggests simply asking Gennero. Blake responds that a coach can't speak to a player like he's human.) In their first game, Gennero calls the same running play three times in a row, the first two attempts being disasters. When the huddle groans on the third time, Blake changes the play to a deep pass to Featherstone, the track star. It would have been a touchdown, except Featherstone can't catch. Gennero benches Blake for the rest of the game. When Blake tries prostrating himself the next day, promising to just run whatever Gennero calls so long as he can play, promising it's Gennero's team, Gennero says it has to be Blake's team, but won't explain that.

Which I guess is not speaking to him like he's human, but more like some sage or hermit on a mountaintop, talking in riddles. I mean, Blake tried to make it his team, by calling a play that might actually work, and Gennero immediately punished him.

Blake tries joining the team at a bar after another loss, tries keeping them out of a fight with the star linebacker of the #1 team in the nation, the Texas Colts, until said linebacker - appropriately named Flattop - insults Manu. Blake sticks up for his center, by starting a brawl. That's no good either. When they manage a not-loss and Bateman's dad invites the team to a party with champagne and nice jackets, Gennero shows up screeching about boosters and not accepting gifts. Blake (already in a bad mood because the dean caught him making kissy face with Dr. Carter) tells him to back off, and Gennero gets on his ass again.

I think Gennero wants Blake to get the entire team rowing in the same direction, but none of his attempts are apparently acceptable until Blake gets Sinbad to help Bateman actually study to pass his midterms. Which are happening awfully late in the semester to be taking place ahead of their final game, against, naturally, the Texas Colts. This is also the conclusion of Bateman's character's arc. He refuses to give his dad the chance to bail him out, because it would hurt the team if one of the players got their grades paid for.

Loggia gets the best lines. Early on, it's sarcastic asides to things Gennero says. Featherstone drops a pass in practice and Gennero tells him to keep his eyes on the ball. Rig adds, 'Keep your hands on the ball, too.' When Gennero tells him to keep his nose out of Gennero's offense, Rig replies, 'You got a quarterback that can't throw the ball, we're gonna be playing a hell of a lot of defense.'

During the climactic game, where Rig has to be head coach, it's things he shouts. 'Don't throw it to Stone Hands!' is one my dad still quotes, but the best is probably Rig's halftime speech where he stops trying to act like the polite and intellectual coach he thinks people want and starts screaming about how you play winning football. 'You go out there and tear off their fucking heads and shit down their necks! *pause* Now let us pray.'

It's funny neither coach seems very good at the half of the ball they're in charge of. Gennero seems to favor an offense that runs the ball. Wins in the trenches, controls the clock. The team is not built for it. The offensive line can't handle it, and their running backs crash into each other a lot. Plus, for all Blake's limitations in mobility (he gets better as the season progresses), the dude's arm is legit. Bateman and the Australian rugby guy can at least catch the ball if Featherstone can't. So can Charlie Banks. Throw the fucking ball! Go West Coast Offense, short, timed passing game, with Blake zipping it into tight windows and the receivers using their shiftiness to gain additional yards after the catch.

Meanwhile, Rig is a defensive coordinator, but can't recognize what defensive coverage the Colts are using at one point, and has to ask Popke, the back-up QB who thought being asked to show off his arm meant flexing. Late in the game, it's Gennero who figures out what defense to call to stop a Colts' drive and get the Armadillos the ball back.

Like I said several paragraphs ago, it's a sports movie. The team is losing big in the climactic game, then turns it around after Rig's inspiring speech, with trick plays and some other big stuff. I do laugh when, prior to the final play, Manu promises Blake that they'll (meaning the Colts' defense) never touch him. Blake probably wishes you could have managed that any time in the previous 59 minutes and 59 seconds, because he's taking head shots on almost every play. By the end of that game, Blake probably had fewer brain cells left than the rubgy guy.

It doesn't reinvent the wheel in any particular way, and feels both overstuffed and undercooked, but there are some funny lines and it plays the usual beats well enough that I don't mind spending 100 minutes on it. 

Overdue Movie Reviews #14 - Mad Max (1979)

A lunatic calling himself the Nightrider - sorry, the Night. . .RIDER! - steals a police cruiser, then dies while being pursued by the Mobile Police Force. The rest of his biker gang aren't too pleased, but nothing much comes of it until a different member of their group, the drugged out, spineless Johnny the Baby (Tim Burns), gets arrested, then released because there's no witness who will testify. The arresting officer, who everyone calls Goose (Steve Bisley), punches Johnny repeatedly on the way out the door, and is ultimately killed.

Between this and Top Gun, not a great stretch of years for guys called "Goose."

Goose's being burned alive prompts his buddy Max Rockatansky (Mel Gibson) to retire to live in the countryside with his wife, Jessie (Joanne Samuel) and their baby. Obviously that's not going to last. The movie's called "Mad Max," not "Mellow Max."

Yes, I used a variation on that bit when I reviewed the Mad Max video game. It amuses me, I'm using it again.

I guess because it had been a couple of years, I had the details of the plot messed up. I thought Toecutter and his bunch declared war against the MPF for Nightrider's death, and Goose's death was part of a larger war of attrition. Max retired and they hunted him down.

That's probably the way most '80s American action movies would have done it, but that's not the way George Miller plays it here. Toecutter indulges Johnny's desire for revenge - in the stupidest, most overly complicated way this gang of intelligence-deficient biker trash could manage, we'll come back to that - on Goose, and Max leaves. Then Jessie just so happens to encounter Toecutter and the gang on the way to the family farm "up north," and doesn't take kindly to his being a creep. So they take revenge for the slight to their pride. There's no indication those likely radiation-addled crank jockeys have any clue they're up against the guy that killed their pal. Hell, I'm not sure they even know he's after them for killing his baby and running over his wife. I'm not sure they ever even saw Max up at the farm. Johnny doesn't recognize him at the end, since he's convinced Max is executing him for stealing a dead man's boots.

And while Goose's death is the impetus for Max's decision, according to Max, what he's afraid of isn't death, but going round the bend. Ending up just like Toecutter and his bunch, roaming the highways, leaving wreckage and ruin behind him, the only difference being he's got a badge to excuse it all. Got some bad news for you there. . .

Of course, maybe it makes sense the story doesn't work like an action flick. Miller shoots certain scenes more like a horror movie. The extreme close-ups on the bugged-out eyes of a character right before they pancake against the grill of a big rig, wouldn't have looked out of place in a few years in Evil Dead or something similar. The scene for Jessie in the woods, the voices coming from everywhere, the mutilated dog hanging from a chain. The blue lighting as Max slowly ventures into Goose's hospital room, where you can only see an arm outlined against the sheet over top of him. As the arm drops off the side of the bed into view and Max can only stare horrified, the image seems to waver, like he passed through a translucent curtain or veil.

A threshold's been passed, whether Max knew it or not. One way or the other, he wasn't a cop any longer. He tried to run away from it all, and when that fails, takes the V-8 Interceptor meant to be the shiny toy that kept him there. And he follows the captain's order to do whatever he likes on the road. But he's not worried about paperwork being clean, any more than he's worried about being the hero his captain thinks the people need. He's something else entirely now.

Then, in other ways, it very much is an action movie. The high speed chases with so many moving parts. The spectacular car wrecks, where vehicles go flying like they were punched by the Hulk in a comic drawn by Sal Buscema. (That one poor stuntman who wipes out on the bridge and his bike cracks him in the back of the helmet as they both skip across the pavement.) The camera shots from right in front of the bumper of a speeding car, or taken to suggest the viewer is barreling right towards something. A baby, an oncoming truck. Once Max sets out for revenge, he's apparently relentless, hounding Toecutter and his guys for days at a time, ignoring a bullet wound to the leg and his arm getting run over.

Which could be that horror vibe, Max becoming something different. Especially the bit where Toecutter leaves the mechanic's shop and finds the photos of Jessie and Goose in his helmet, with no sign of who left them. That's some vengeful spirit stuff right there, but action heroes tend to be almost superhuman, so there's not a huge divide from that to a supernatural terror, especially depending on whose point of view you're watching from.

OK, the revenge on Goose. The thing about the attack on Goose is not that they kept him busy with the cabaret singer so Johnny could tamper with his bike. It's that, having caused him to wreck in the middle of nowhere, all alone, they wait until the mechanic drives out and loans him his truck to haul his motorcycle back. Then they throw something through the windshield to cause him to wreck, then ignite the gas. That's more steps than was really necessary.

Was that for plausible deniability purposes? Because I can't see these guys caring about that, and even if they did, if you run him over on an isolated strip of road while he's all alone, you don't have to worry about plausible deniability then, either.

Maybe it was just to set up what Max does to Johnny at the end. Poetic justice, ironic punishment, that sort of thing. Which, I will admit I did appreciate. Of all the bikers, Johnny's the one I dislike the most. Nightrider's a loon, and I'm not sure his brain is even on the same planet as his body. Toecutter sees himself as some leader of a wayward flock, and makes a big show of himself, but also makes certain gestures that demonstrate he feels some loyalty to his guys. Presumably he made the arrangements to pick up Nightrider's body, and they give it an entire procession, carried in the back of the pick-up with Toecutter as he sits on his lawn chair throne.

Meanwhile, Johnny's just an annoying little shit. As soon as he's got someone to hide behind here comes the tough talk, but at any other point, he's a sniveling coward, full of excuses for why nothing that happens is his fault. Quite why Toecutter wastes time and energy on protecting him I don't know. I guess because he regards Johnny as one of "his", and therefore only he has the right to punish him.

The movie says it takes place 'a few years from now,' and civilization, though mostly recognizable, is clearly on a downward swing. All the towns we see look mostly deserted, the locals worn and weary. The kind of people you'd see in the beleaguered town of a spaghetti western, where they wear every year they've lived on their faces. The mechanic tells Jessie the ice cream shop will be glad for the business. Of two people, one of them a baby, buying at best one cone apiece. That's pretty dire. The roads are empty, save the cops, the bikers and the occasional fuel tanker.

MPF headquarters look like a building that ought to be condemned. Broken windows and rot in the walls. I've seen better maintained police buildings in movies where a zombie apocalypse is in full swing. A V-8 engine is treated as some rare treasure, a miracle anyone could find one and get it running. But the MPF patrol on the edge, where things fall apart first. It was once a frontier, and it's becoming one again. We never get a good look at a big city, the most populated place is either the cabaret or that roadside diner Goose is at, where the tow trucks are faster on the ball than he is. Their trucks are in pretty good shape, shinier and newer-looking than the MPF's cars. The only business still doing well is one dedicated to salvaging the remains of tragedies.

Overdue Movie Reviews #13 - Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (2005)

Fleeing from a botched robbery in toy store, Harry Lockhart (Robert Downey Jr.) stumbled into an audition to play a private investigator in a movie. Grief-stricken that his friend got shot by some lady determined to defend the sanctity of a toy store's Christmas product, he gave a bravura performance and won the role. Now he's in Los Angeles, getting tips from a real private investigator everyone calls Gay Perry (Val Kilmer), and running into Harmony (Michelle Monaghan), a childhood friend he had a huge crush on.

The case Harry accompanies Perry on ends up with a car in a lake, a dead body in the trunk. Harmony's sister turns up dead, an apparent suicide, though Harmony is convinced otherwise, given she was the one who hired Perry for the case with the body in the trunk. A body which soon turns up in Harry's hotel bathroom.

Harry reconnects with Harmony, fucks it up, tries to to fix it by lying, pisses off Perry, loses a finger, gets it back, sort of fixes things with Harmony, loses the finger again, fixes things with Perry, and ends up shooting a lot of people.

Harry is a creature of the moment. Part of that is he thinks he's clever, although this movie is full of people who think they're constantly making the wittiest comments imaginable. Sometimes they're even right. But he really just acts, in whatever way his emotions seem to dictate that moment. This is a guy who thought trying to rob a toy store to find a particular gift for a kid was a good idea, and when it went wrong, hid in an audition without knowing that's what he was doing.

He throws Perry's gun in the lake without stopping to check whether that's a good idea or not (it isn't.) He's got a lot of bitterness about women, and unleashes a spiel about how women who fuck a lot of guys all have fucked-up pasts, saying this to Harmony, who does, in fact, have a fucked-up past. He's impatient for answers, so he's tries the Russian Roulette interrogation technique on a hired killer, without being able to do basic math.

The, 'It was like an eight percent chance. Eight percent?! Who taught you math?!' exchange was one of those bits that I found as clever as the movie surely thought it was. Point is, Harry never really thinks before he does anything. The thinking comes after, when he has to reflect on how he's messed things up again. And maybe it works out. The final shootout, stationed on and under an overpass, involving a coffin, feels like a situation where Harry is simply reacting. He didn't really plan anything, because there was no time. He just did things, and it worked out. Maybe because it was actions and not words. He didn't have time to say something stupid that could ruin everything.

So it's a pretty good role for Robert Downey Jr. He can play a glib smartass in his sleep, but he's also good at the grief-stricken moments, and these moments of mostly impotent rage. Where's he mad, but he can't really do anything except spout more shit which is likely only going to make things worse. Or he has to backpedal instantly, as when he gets angry enough at Perry to snatch his sunglasses, but picks them off the ground and returns them the moment Perry tells him to.

Monaghan plays Harmony as simultaneously more grounded than Harry, but also more prone to getting blinders on. Harry tends to judge, quickly and harshly, off first impressions of what he thinks is happening. Harmony has actually lived in L.A. for a while, so she actually knows people and what they're like. There's a weary acceptance to her, except when it comes to something personal, like her sister. She has a dry wit, more controlled than Harry's. She picks her spots. She's not grief-stricken over her sister constantly, because she's angry, and she's also trying to decide what to do with Harry. The banter is easy between them, until Harry lets the wrong impulse control his mouth.

But she's also the one most likely to charge ahead without thinking. Harmony's the one that drives the plot, because she's the one convinced her sister was murdered. Harry plays along because he wants to stay close to her, presumably in the hopes he'll get out of the Friend Zone this time. His digging, done to impress Harmony, combines with the work she's doing, to drag Perry back in, largely against his will.

Kilmer's the alternately composed and frustrated center the other two whirl around like untrained puppies on leashes. He actually knows this work, knows how things usually work, knows what things a person should and shouldn't do, as well as what people are likely to do. Like, if they put a murder victim in your bathroom, they probably also phoned in a complaint to the cops. It makes him a bit of an exposition device at times - albeit one delivering exposition with biting commentary - but also keeps the plot moving forward at points the other two would hit dead ends.

It's a funny movie at times, but the plot's overly convoluted. You got daughters, fake daughters, assumed daughters. I didn't really even bother to try and keep track of everything. It's a film more about the style than the substance. There are multiple cases, they're connected. Everybody stands around saying clever lines, or trying to, and some people get shot. Harry's a little dazed the first time he kills someone, though that might be more about the person he let die just prior. By the end, he barely seems to notice how many people he shoots. They're just a body count.

Given that Harry narrates the story, I'd worry about an unreliable narrator, but he's so bad at it - forgetting to explain who people we see in flashbacks actually are - I don't think he could manage to embellish the truth if he wanted.

Overdue Movie Reviews #12 - Jaws (1975)

A large great white shark settles in off the coast of a New England beach town in the summer, as the townspeople are too concerned with losing tourist dollars to close the beaches in the hopes it'll move on to more favorable hunting grounds. After a handful - mouthful? - of people are eaten, the water-fearing police chief (Roy Scheider) sets out on a boat with a crazed shark hunter (Robert Shaw), and a cocky ichthyologist (Richard Dreyfuss) to kill the shark. The shark pretty quickly turns the tables and morale sinks faster than Quint's shitty boat.

Jaws ran all the time on cable when I was a kid/teenager, and I watched it almost every chance I got. When I was bored in various high school classes - which was often - I would make a list of my 20 favorite movies. The list was appalling (1995's Mel Brooks/Leslie Nielsen horror spoof Dracula: Dead and Loving It was usually somewhere around #18), owing to the limited amount of movies I'd seen, and my own, still-forming attitudes about what I liked, or what was good. That said, Jaws was usually either first or second, up against another of Spielberg's offerings this series will address one day.

The story that Spielberg only hinted at the shark for much of the film because the crew couldn't get the mechanical shark to work right is well known, but Spielberg does a lot with suggestion. We barely see the remains of Chrissie, the first victim. A sickly pale hand with a crab crawling over it in the sand, or Hooper picking up the arm, no longer attached to a body, during his autopsy.

Mostly though, we infer. From the panicked whistles that summon Brody, followed by the shot of the deputy turning away as he collapses in the sand, sobbing around his whistle. The way Chief Brody and the boy that was supposed to go swimming with Chrissie slow, and Brody makes the boy stay back. The tray presented to Hooper that contains all that's left of Chrissie is barely big enough for an infant.

Jaws owes some of its DNA to those '50s sci-fi horror flicks. Not just the ones where the populace are menaced by some everyday creature grown large by some method, but the presentation of the shark - again, out of technical necessity - reminds me of Forbidden Planet. The indentations in the soil that marked the Id Monster's footsteps. Tree being shoved aside, or brief bursts of ray gun fire lighting up a distant canyon, but getting steadily closer.

Here it's a tire with a roast hooked to it being taken away that tells of the presence of the monster, and half the dock going with it that speaks to its power. The yellow barrels Quint keeps harpooning into the shark, that never seem to actually wear it down. The tooth Hooper finds in a fishing boat that, like the Id Monster, vanishes before it can be presented to anyone as proof.

Once we do start to actually see the shark, it's blurred, partial views. Rolling onto its side beneath the water before it bites that one guy's leg off, the shark's body almost merges with the murky water around it. The dark eye is prominent, dull and black and lacking in anything we'd recognize as humanity or mercy, and the teeth it'll use to bite almost glow, but the rest is barely discernible. Like the ocean is annoyed by all these jabbering, splashing humans and concentrated part of itself into something to kill them.

I think years of watching Shark Week, seeing actual sharks, has somewhat dimmed the effectiveness of "Bruce" when he starts to reveal himself more often. Even for a stocky species like the great white, the body is stiff, the movement of the jaws awkward. It closes its mouth halfway, like it's chewing rapidly rather than biting great chunks from something, or it started to say one thing and then changed its mind. There's a sense of power, but not necessarily speed or force. Most of the time that's fine; the shark cruises with the confidence of a predator that knows there's nothing in the surrounding sea to challenge it.

It's the reactions of the people that help sell it. Brody's startled jerk when its head breaks the surface right in front of him, his dazed backwards shuffle into the cabin and murmured, 'You're gonna need a bigger boat.' I think the clearest sign of how dangerous it is comes after that, in two stages. First, when Hooper quietly asks Quint if he's ever had another shark act like this, and later, when Quint asks Hooper what he could do with his high-tech gear. These two have been at each other's throats since the moment they met. Quint sneering at Hooper's gear and college learning, Hooper rolling his eyes at Quint's sea tales and machismo. Now, each is scared enough to look to the other for an answer to the problem.

Dreyfuss and Shaw both play guys who are right, and wrong, and kind of arrogant jerks, albeit in different ways. Hooper is much chattier, ready with glib remarks about the mayor lining up to be a hot lunch, or muttered comments that the guys loading too many people into a boat are going to die. He's condescending, but Dreyfuss does it with a smile and a lighthearted tone that says he's amusing himself, that nasal cackle as he strides away after the mayor proves more concerned with a defaced billboard.

Quint doesn't say much, outside the monologue about the Indianapolis that Shaw apparently gave drunk, but most of it he says with a graveness to his tone expressing the person he's speaking to is a fool, or just not worth his time. He dismisses the island for having 'too many captains,' or his curt dismissal of Brody's suggestion that Hooper spend a while tossing chum with, 'Hooper drives the boat, Chief.' He doesn't dress it up, simply states the facts as he sees them. He's survived, he knows what's what, he doesn't care what you think.

Neither is really that concerned about the welfare of the people. Quint, certainly, wants to kill sharks and get paid for it. Revenge for what happened to his crewmates in WW2. Hooper sticks around because he wants to study sharks, and why go to Antarctica if there's a giant-ass great white shark right here? Consider that when the shark finally makes itself known to the trio aboard the Orca, Quint goes for his weapons, while Hooper goes for his camera. Quint's getting paid to kill the shark, no time like the present to start. Hooper wants to document evidence. He laughed at the mayor's insistence he wants to get himself in National Geographic, but he didn't deny it.

And in the middle is Brody. Scared of the water, no knowledge of seamanship. He can't help with the damaged engine, can't tie knots well enough to rig the barrels for Quint. When Quint hands him the fishing reel, Brody holds it like a first-time dad who's about to drop the baby. He can't even get in on the scar-comparing contest. He brought his service revolver, which might be helpful if a mermaid tries to mug them, but is useless against a 25-foot-long shark. Pretty much all he can do is chum bloody fish chunks into the water.

That's his penance, chief of police turned chore boy. He had the chance to cut this short, or at least try, and he let the mayor - never listen to a man who wears suits made of a Captain D's wallpaper - bully him out of closing the beaches until after a second fatality, and even then, only for a few days. He fears what will happen as a result of his cowardice enough to ask his son to take his new boat into the estuary, but he's not stopping anyone else from going into the ocean. He says he left New York City and came to Amity because, 'one man can make a difference,' but what we see of his usual day is he fields complaints from old men about their picket fence getting karate'd, or has guys pushing him to make the street in front of their house a "No Parking" zone. There hasn't been a mugging or a murder in decades, presumably spanning the tenures of multiple police chiefs and deputies. Are you really making a difference if anyone can do it?

He's a man afraid of water, living on an island because, 'it's only an island if you look at it from the water.' And you know he's going to have to go out there, and maybe he knows it, too, long before it happens. In the celebration of people thinking the tiger shark those goobers killed is the man-eater, the mother of the second victim arrives to slap Brody and blame him for her son's death, while the mayor stands off to one side, looking like he'd rather be anywhere else. After, as the crowd disperses, Brody walks down the pier, towards the ocean.

Of course, once they're on the Orca, Amity's no longer an island, it's invisible. There are lots of shots of just the boat, the sea, and the sky. I think, up through the first evening once they've found it, leading into Quint's story about the USS Indianapolis, the shots keep getting longer. The boat gets smaller, the sea and sky get larger. The shark could be anywhere in that vastness, the three men's isolation absolute given Quint's control (and eventual destruction) of the radio.

After that, once the shark takes it upon itself to smite these fools that challenged it, the camera starts moving back in. There's no place to go, the Orca is the only remotely safe harbor they have, and that's about like hiding in an outhouse during a hurricane. Everything around the boat, is controlled by the shark. The only thing the barrels accomplish is letting them see the shark's gaining on them as they run. Hooper climbs into his little shark cage and descends beneath the surface, the knight challenging the dragon in its lair, and his cage is destroyed in seconds. This is not his place, but he survives where Quint doesn't. Luck, or maybe because Quint wanted to die, the stubborn, contrary guy (love that as soon as Hooper tells him the engine can't handle high RPMs, Quint immediately pushes the throttle harder) that's been challenging sharks for 30 years, ever since 800 of his friends got eaten.

So it falls to Brody, with Quint's rifle and Hooper's compressed air tank, to kill the shark as the boat sinks around him. He's resting on the mast, but it's so low that it looks like he's actually floating or laying on the surface of the ocean. If part of the sea solidified into the monster to test him, test his fear of the ocean, his belief he can make a difference, another part of it has given him a bit of solid ground and said, "OK, let's see what you can do." 

Overdue Movie Reviews #11 - Identity (2003)

A prisoner is being transported for a last-second hearing that may save him from execution, if the psychologist (Alfred Molina) can make a convincing argument. At the same time a disparate group of people find themselves stranded at a shitty motel in a downpour. Among them, an ex-cop turned limo driver (John Cusack), a family of three (the father played by John C. McGinley), a pair of newlyweds, a sex worker planning to open an orchard (Amanda Peet). Oh yeah, and a cop transporting a prisoner (Ray Liotta and Jake Busey, respectively.)

Then people start dying.

This may be the shortest of these entries, but I did give my copy of this movie to Alex years ago, then accept it back on an impulse when he was about to get rid of all his DVDs, so maybe that's to be expected. The movie revolves around a twist. Possibly two twists, though the second builds off the first. Once you know the first twist, there's not much else going for it. The characters are broadly-sketched outlines - actress disconnected from reality, hooker with a heart of gold, creepy convict, burnout ex-cop, cherub-faced little kid, etc. - so it's hard to say I feel any investment in their attempts to survive. Especially knowing the first twist.

The attempts to find the killer isn't really the focus, because the movie is busy dropping hints and clues leading towards the twist. Busey escapes and thinks he found a place to hide in another building he spied in the distance. Once inside that building and looking out the window, he's back at the motel. Dun-dun-dunhhhhhhh! And how is he on the loose at the motel, but another prisoner shows up for the hearing? Why do they all have the same birthday?

In practice, Cusack and Liotta spend a lot of scenes walking past motel rooms as rain pours over the gutters, while Peet periodically gets fed up with the suspense and runs into the rain to scream at the guilty party, whoever they are.

The ending is second twist, in that you thought there was a happy resolution but, surprise! It's not! You know what? Fuck beating around the bush, the movie is 23 years old. I'm spoiling ALL the twists. The people at the motel are personalities within the mind of the prisoner on death's row, (mostly) unwittingly fighting it out to see if an innocent one can survive. You think Peet was the last one standing and is going to have her orchard (inside this serial killer's head, but whatever), but no, here's McGinley's cherub-cheeked little kid, not blown up as the others suspected. Because the prisoner was traumatized as a kid, so that's where the murderous rage is. The kid engineered all the deaths and he kills Peet. In the real world, he now has sole control of the body, kills Molina and the transport driver. End movie.

Except, he's a pre-pubescent kid and she's a grown woman. He is standing there, holding some sort of rake, looking menacing, so it's not like he struck from the shadows. Beat his ass with a sack of your oranges. Or the limes, whichever. Give him a wedgie and then jam him headfirst into your fertilizer pile until he suffocates. Run over his throat with a wheelbarrow. Fucking do something other than cower, goddamnit!

Overdue Movie Reviews #10 - High Plains Drifter (1973)

A stranger (Clint Eastwood) rides into the town of Lago, and within a matter of minutes, guns down 3 men who were hassling him, and rapes a woman. Curiously, rather than insisting on his arrest, the leaders of the town send the sheriff to offer the stranger a job: protect Lago from 3 other men, about to be released from prison, who swore revenge.

The stranger agrees, for a price. The price turns out to be the townspeople's dignity and self-respect as much as anything. He takes, and takes, and takes, and they bear it, because the alternative is to fight for themselves, or to simply take the revenge they've got coming.

My dad would say this is definitely a '70s Western, and he'd say it in the most scornful tone possible. Basically everyone is an amoral scumbag, constant betrayals, backstabbing and abuse. Promises are made with no intention of honoring them. There's no loyalty to anyone or anything, all that unites the townsfolk is the idea they can always put off the point when payment will come due. Two rapes, because I'm hesitant to define what happens between the stranger and Sarah Belding (Verna Bloom) late in the film as anything other than that. He not only takes over her bedroom, but drags her along with him, then kisses her when she tries to stab him with scissors, and things progress from there. The movie certainly frames it as Mrs. Belding being into it once they got started (and does the same with the first as well), but I'm not really prepared to make that allowance.

There's no real good guy. Mordecai (Billy Curtis) isn't an awful person, but once he figures out the stranger at least tolerates him (or finds him a useful prop to humiliate the townsfolk), he milks it for all he's worth, just like the stranger. Sarah seems to have a conscience, but she has, as her conniving lickspittle of a husband points out, kept quiet about it for a long time. She wasn't happy, she could have left Lago and that useless bastard anytime. He wasn't going to abandon his precious hotel to chase her.

The closest thing to a good person would be the marshal, who we only see in flashback (sort of), because he got whipped to death in the street by Stacey Bridges and the Carlin brothers while the entire town looked on over a year before the movie begins.

I'm curious why they decided on whipping him. It wasn't to terrify the townspeople, the townspeople hired them to do the killing, so he wouldn't blow the whistle about the town mine being on government land. Why not just shoot him?

I guess because whipping is more brutal, and the movie wants to be brutal. Wants to provide a reason for the stranger to whip one of the Carlin brothers to death. Because otherwise, there's no real difference. Shot or whipped, the marshal died because he was going to insist on following the law, and that would have hurt the townspeople's economic status, so he had to go. And it allows for one of the two moments where Eastwood isn't scowling or smirking, when he first arrives in Lago and whips around at a whipcrack.

(The other moment is when the stranger, having ordered all other guests out of the hotel, hears the preacher promise they'll find shelter in the homes of the townspeople - at regular hotel rates, of course. Eastwood does this surprised jerk, almost a spasm, as though even he can't believe they sink that low.)

Of course there's the supernatural element, the stranger riding out of the heat waves coming off the desert, giving the impression he materialized from the air, then departing the same way at the end. The creepy intro music, I'm guessing that's a theremin, really helps establish an odd atmosphere, along with the first 5+ minutes of the film having no dialogue. Like we've entered a land of the dead.

There's also the stranger's ability to seemingly cover a lot of ground quickly and without notice.  His brief attack on Bridges and the Carlins in the rockpile, where he seems able to move from one side to the other within seconds, but also when the men attempt to ambush him in his hotel room. The time between when Callie slips from the room to when the men charge in couldn't have been more than a few seconds, yet he got out the window with all his clothes, and had a stick of dynamite ready. Also, when Callie first tried to kill him herself, she fired 4 shots into a little metal tub where he was submerged, and somehow didn't even scratch him. Which doesn't seem possible, but it's almost like once he went under the water, he was gone until he chose to stick his head back out.

It's a little like Charles Bronson's Harmonica character in Once Upon a Time in the West constantly appearing by stepping from behind something (a door, a pillar, a train.) Suggesting that in their quest for vengeance, they've transcended human capabilities somehow.

It's, I wouldn't say a happy end to the movie. The stranger leaves, satisfied his work is done. The marshal is going to have an actual grave marker. Seems strange they wouldn't have done that already, if just for appearances' sake. Sarah Belding is indeed, getting the fuck out of Lago. Not that there's much left of Lago. Most of the town was burned down by Bridges, what's left is painted bright red. A bunch of townspeople are dead, at either the stranger's hands or Bridges', the remainder look like war wounded, watching the stranger leave with shell-shocked expressions.

Back in 2009, I wrote a post wondering if the stranger spent all that time prepping the townspeople to defend their town because he wanted to give them the chance to clean up their own mess for once, or if he knew they never had a chance and just wanted to humiliate them a little more. It's hard for me to picture him being satisfied with Bridges dying at their hands, so I suspect it was one more prank he pulled. There's never any indication the practice is having an effect; their aim is no better, they're still counting on him to take care of business. They're just going along with this because he insisted and they want to keep him happy and willing to solve their problems.

This isn't the kind of film where people confront their fears and triumph, it's one where they keep running until their fears trample them into the dirt.

Overdue Movie Reviews #9 - The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (1966)

Sure, I've written about this film before, but never what I'd consider a real review of the entire thing. And this might very well be my favorite movie of all time, so 1-2-3, let's jam.

A bandit (Eli Wallach) with a price on his head. A bounty hunter (Clint Eastwood) with a scheme to make some dough. A hired gun (Lee van Cleef) trying to track down a man who knows the location of $200,000 in gold coins. Tuco learns the name of the cemetery where the gold is hidden, Blondie, the name of the grave. And the race to the money is on.

In the barest bones of the plot, there's not a lot there, yet the movie is nearly 3 hours long. Leone takes his time, right from the start, the slow build of the three men marching towards each other down an empty street, only for all three to charge into a saloon and gunfire to erupt. It's 20 minutes before Eastwood shows up, around a half-hour before "the good" appears on screen beside him, in what is more than a little tongue-in-cheek, given he's in the middle of betraying Tuco and stranding him in the desert.

But Leone fills the film with smaller set pieces and odd characters. The scam Tuco and Blondie run, Tuco constructing himself a new pistol. Tuco's painful reunion with his brother the priest. The prisoner of war camp, although this does serve to bring Angel Eyes into the chase more directly. The drunken captain commanding the Union forces trying to take the bridge.

The build-up to violence is long, the violence itself brief. Nobody gets shot, only to stagger back to their feet and keep shooting. No running gunfights where characters dive for cover. People draw their guns, someone fires first, the other person dies. Even in the Civil War battle scene, there's Tuco and Blondie's conversation about their respective pieces of information while rigging explosives. Then the bridge explodes, and a few seconds of cannon fire, impactful as two kids hurling insults at each other, and it's done.

The exception would be Tuco's beating at Wallace's hands in the POW camp. But it's non-lethal violence, a rarity in the film. Plus, Leone seems to have some fascination with main character(s) getting the crap beat out of them, as he used it in A Fistful of Dollars and For a Few Dollars More, though those beatings are administered by a gang, not an individual. And this one seems more brutal, maybe because Leone focuses more on Tuco's increasing distress. The choking noises he makes, the futile attempts to grapple with the bigger man, while one arm is shackled to the chair. Fistful might show Eastwood's battered face after the fact, but during, it's him staggering about, getting punched by whoever is closest. Or maybe it's that, in the other movies, those administering the beating are having fun. They're usually laughing, but Wallace isn't. I imagine he enjoys it, but it's also work, and he's got a specific purpose in mind: hurt this man until he talks. 

It was Roger Ebert's entry on his Great Movies list that clued me in to one quirk Leone maintains in this film: If the audience can't see something (because it isn't in the shot), neither can the characters. Right from the first seconds of the film, when a long shot of a distant ridge seamlessly becomes a close-up when a bounty hunter Tuco steps into view from off-screen, that's how things work. The world outside the camera is invisible to those within.

This plays out repeatedly. Tuco and Blondie ride up on the massive Union encampment at the bridge - where two battles take place a day - without knowing it until they're surrounded. In the cemetery, as Tuco claws at the dirt on Arch Stanton's grave, Blondie catches him by surprise, only for them both to be surprised by the arrival of Angel Eyes. Blondie's first appearance in the movie is him somehow walking up on Tuco and 3 other bounty hunters without any of them noticing until he speaks. While Blondie's distracted in the hotel by the men Tuco brought, Tuco was clearly sitting on the windowsill for several moments before announcing his presence. It's a curious approach, though it allows Leone to have repeated dramatic reveals and arrivals, and it may speak to these men's blinkered approaches to life. They're locked in on their desires, and when they sense it close to fruition, become blind to everything else.

Tuco would be easy to reduce to a comic relief character. His grandiose expressions and threats, the bluster. Hands tied and still creaming threats at Blondie. But Leone takes the time to list Tuco's crimes at both occasions of his hanging, many of which imply not just cruelty, but a level of planning, notably the one about getting paid in advance to lead a wagon train, then abandoning said wagon train on the Sioux hunting grounds. (Also, he's charged specifically with arson in a prison, which makes me wonder if it was part of an escape plan, or he just did it for kicks.)

And Eli Wallach gives Tuco enough cunning and sheer determination that he remains a threat. Sure, it seems unwise for Tuco to keep running his yap at Wallace, but he eventually gets the man's guard down and throws him off a train, then bashes his head against a rock to make sure he's dead. Tuco keeps his gun on him when he bathes, keeps it hidden until needed.

Tuco may appear the butt of the joke in the final showdown, unaware Blondie emptied his gun, but it speaks to how much of a threat Blondie considers Tuco. Initially, he had so little regard for Tuco he figured it was enough to leave him in the desert and ride off with the money. After only escaping death in the hotel via dumb luck, and nearly dying in the desert because Tuco wouldn't stop hunting him, Blondie knows better. He surely knows, as they near the cemetery, that Angel Eyes is out there, somewhere.

I doubt Blondie had the whole thing with the name on the rock planned, since the most planning we see from him is the scam he ran with Tuco, then "Shorty," but he must have figured there was a point it would come to shooting. And while Blondie seems confident he can handle Angel Eyes, he does not want Tuco in the mix. Whether because he can't trust Tuco choosing him over Angel Eyes, or he just isn't certain he can kill both of them, Blondie hedges his bets.

(He also decides Tuco's presence evens things enough he can go against Angel Eyes and his gang in the town being shelled. 6-on-1 was a no-go, but 6-on-2, where the 2 are Blondie and Tuco? Those are odds Blondie likes.)

And Tuco is the one who drives the story. It's his bounty that brings he and Blondie together, that leads to the betrayal, and ultimately the death-march. Which is how they meet "Bill Carson" in the desert and learn about the money. Minus Tuco, Blondie would have continued with his penny-ante scam of turning in criminals, then freeing them. Angel Eyes' plan to join the Union Army and scour prisoner of war camps would come to nothing, because Carson and everyone else who knew about the gold was a corpse in the desert. Tuco's also the only of the three we get any backstory for. He had wives - more than one if his remark to his brother is to be believed - and a brother, and two parents.

(Leone creates this trio, but tends to focus on duos. Tuco and Blondie as allies, then enemies, then allies again. Tuco and Angel Eyes briefly in the POW camp. Angel Eyes and Blondie as uneasy partners. When it looks as though it'll be Tuco and Blondie vs. Angel Eyes, the latter withdraws, leaving it a duo. And in the final gunfight, Tuco being unarmed means it's really just Blondie vs. Angel Eyes.)

One of my dad's complaints about Leone's films is there's no one who's good. Everyone is a scumbag, he says. While applying "the good" to Blondie seems sarcastic, and there's definitely a joke to the heavenly choir music that plays when Angel Eyes spots him at Tuco's second hanging and opines that a 'golden-haired angel' watches over Tuco, there are hints that Blondie has humanity or capacity for empathy the other two lack. The comfort he offers to the dying soldier in the burned out church, just prior to the final showdown. Covering the boy with his coat and offering a cigarette isn't much, but at least the kid doesn't die alone. The fact he asks Tuco whether he can save Shorty from being hanged, and apologizes softly to Shorty when Tuco says no.

Heck, it would have been simpler for Blondie to let Tuco hang, if he really thought their partnership had reached its logical endpoint. But he saved him, though we can question how seriously he meant it when he said he thought Tuco could make the 70-mile hike back to town. And he did leave Tuco half the gold, which Angel Eyes certainly wouldn't have (and I have my doubts about Tuco doing the same for Blondie, were their circumstances reversed.)

Leone sets the movie in the Civil War, yet the war is, at best, an impediment. None of the three characters have any investment in the outcome. Blondie regards it as a waste of lives. Angel Eyes uses it as cover to search for Carson, while lining his pockets by robbing the prisoners. Tuco puts on Carson's uniform because it makes it easier to demand treatment for Blondie. If he had recognized the soldiers riding towards them as dusty Union soldiers, he'd have thrown the Confederate uniforms away in a second, because their only use is as something to clear paths. They blow up the bridge simply so both sides won't have it to fight over, and will get out of their way. That those soldiers will be sent to fight and die elsewhere is not their problem. They don't notice the Union Army until they're captured because it wasn't in the shot with them, and it wasn't in the shot with them because they weren't giving any thought to it. All that mattered was crossing the river to get closer to the gold. 

It's not clear anyone else cares either. Carson enlisted to try and hide until it was safe to dig up the gold. Carson's the girlfriend, the 'fresh young whore,' as she's described by the legless soldier, is introduced as a wagon of drunk soldiers throw her into the street after having their fun. The hotel manager shouts support for Dixie, while muttering under his breath about the Confederates being cowards, and how he can't wait until they leave, so he can make money off the Yankees. Wallace is a goon, lording his strength over prisoners who can't fight back, rather than actual combat. Ditto for the Union guard who makes the prisoners play music while Tuco is beaten. The soldier Tuco taunts, who probably didn't get a penny for the arm he lost. The half-soldier sells any information he can, even if it relates to someone ostensibly on the same side as him. The captain of the Union forces at the bridge is a drunken wreck, hating his orders but unwilling to defy them. Just waiting for death, or someone who will do what he can only dream of.

The one guy who seems like a believer is the commandant of the prisoner camp, who believes prisoners should be treated with respect, and hopes to get Angel Eyes court-martialed. But he's dying of gangrene, making these vows sprawled on his back, while Angel Eyes smirks at him in unconcealed contempt. He knows he'll be long gone before this man could ever hope to prove anything. Of course, Angel Eyes expects to be rich, and instead ends up in Hell.

You really can't discuss The Good, the Bad and the Ugly without talking about Ennio Morricone's score. Unfortunately I'm not much good at discussing music, but the music is indelibly linked with the film in my head. (Also, fortunately, this Youtube video knows how to discuss music.) Morricone had some of the pieces ready before filming even began, and it's neat to watch how the music and the shots are interwoven. Tuco running among the graves, the names blurring as the music accelerates to match his pace, more instruments joining in as he darts from one row to another. The music is hopeful, Tuco thinking he's on the precipice of everything he wants, but also chaotic, the sheer enormity of the task of finding one grave among 5000.

And then the final showdown, with the guitar strumming signaling the beginning as Blondie sets down the rock. The castanets, and then the trumpets as the three slowly take their places in a long shot. A few shots of ambient noise before the music begins again, and Leone starts moving the camera closer, focusing on the expressions and twitches. Blondie giving Tuco a small smile and a nod, camera cutting between them like a signal. 'Hey, the two of us are a team, right?' Followed by a shot of Angel Eyes glance darting towards Tuco, reassessing his situation. The way Angel Eyes' hand starts towards his gun, then withdraws at a glance from Blondie. Tuco's fingers twitching, and Blondie's hand, perfectly still the whole time, even when everything else is speeding up. The cuts are coming faster, the music is building up, everyone's hands are starting to move, eyes are widening. But Blondie's impassive, just waiting for a conclusion that's foregone. 

Overdue Movie Reviews #8 - The Fifth Element (1997)

There's a great evil headed for Earth. To stop it requires four stones, and a person, the "fifth element." But the ship bringing them to Earth is ambushed. The stones are missing, and the fifth element is a naive young woman (Milla Jovovich), whose only assistance is an elderly, overwhelmed priest (Ian Holm), and a weary, embittered ex-soldier turned cab driver (Bruce Willis.)

I like the way the different threads overlap and tangle. It's not quite a Guy Ritchie movie, where you have multiple plotlines that may ultimately intersect by complete chance or a fluke: Not quite one guy trying to make a getaway from someone he owes money and crashes into this other dangerous guy, which results in some other person avoiding a beating they were going to get from said other dangerous guy.

In my head, I sort of picture it more like the bits in Scooby-Doo where all the characters are in a hallway full of doors and they sometimes meet or end up running through the same door. Zorg unwittingly firing Korben right as the military is going to tag Korben for this mission. By rigging the contest in his favor, the military's actions bring Cornelius and Leeloo to Korben's door, looking to steal the tickets. Which saves him when the cops show up to arrest him on the charges of uranium smuggling Zorg's guy arranged to take Korben off the board. Which then leads to the parade of Korben Dallases - none of them looking a bit alike - at the ticket booth in the spaceport.

It's farcical, but in a way that highlights the different aspects of humanity (even in the alien characters.) Korben doesn't want the mission, but he's pissed off enough (and infatuated enough with Leeloo) to end up going and trying to make it work. Cornelius is certainly a believer in his duty to help the "supreme being", but it's all been theoretical up to now. He's woefully out of his depth in the field, but trying anyway. The Mangalores may, as Zorg says, fight for hopeless causes, like honor, or revenge, but that's enough to make them try to take the stones to get Zorg over a barrel. And Zorg? This idiot's trying to make a profit off the end of the world, either unconcerned (possible) or unaware (almost certainly) that he won't survive it.

I've read Gary Oldman doesn't think much of this movie, but he really did do an excellent job. Zorg throws on this false, folksy charm when talking to the Mangalores or Cornelius, but switches to fury and tantrums in an instant. He's callous, and thinks that makes him clever, but ultimately he's a dumbass. An incompetent version of Mom from Futurama. His big spiel about his role in "the chain of life" ends with him almost choking on a cherry like a goober, and the Mangalores get the last laugh when he deactivates his bomb.

Korben Dallas is pretty typical Bruce Willis. Tired, cynical, sarcastic. Personal life in tatters, and shows no particular interest in mending it. Most of the time, he looks barely capable of managing more than a smirk. I wouldn't say he lights up around Leeloo exactly. Softens, maybe. The impatience and growling he throws at Cornelius or Ruby Rhod are absent with her. Anyway, it's fine with me. I generally like typical Bruce Willis.

It only occurred to me on this re-watch, Zorg and Korben never meet. I'm not sure either even gets a glimpse of the other. Zorg has Cornelius brought to him, and has a brief confrontation with Leeloo, but not Korben. But it makes sense if we figure Leeloo and "Mr. Shadow" are the true conflict, with Cornelius and Zorg as their respective acolytes/seconds. That makes Korben sort of a wild card, not supposed to be there. But he is. Because he wants to help someone he perceives as needing it. He can be cynical, curt, sarcastic, prone to idealizing people - I wonder if Korben had a particular idea of who his wife was she couldn't live up to, and he couldn't see past, and that's why she ran off with his lawyer - but he still chose to help someone he could barely understand, even when it put him in danger.

Jovovich has to tread a narrow line. The movie wants Leeloo to be naive or unaccustomed to this world in certain ways. So she has to play a cheerful or unassuming sort. Childlike, when she's proclaiming, "Chicken good," or, "Leeloo Dallas Multipass." But she also has to have a certain level of wisdom or awareness to her, at least of the responsibility she carries. I'm not sure we see as much of that; maybe the conversation with Korben on the spaceship, before the sleep regulator knocks him out. Quietly seeking out the diva once reaching Fhloston. She stays out of sight until the Mangalores make their move, rather than rush up to the diva in front of everyone like you might expect from a kid that doesn't grasp the stakes.

(Though I'm unclear on how old Leeloo is, even setting aside the part where her current body was rebuilt from a hand that "survived" the crash. Cornelius says he's too old to play at being her husband, but I'm guessing that was her inside the sarcophagus-looking thing the Mondoshawans take with them at the beginning of the movie. So she's centuries old, but she spends a lot of that time in suspended animation? Or is being the fifth element handed down to different people over time?) 

Holm and Chris Tucker mostly end up as comic relief. Tucker in particular, since Ruby is someone pulled into this whole mess entirely against his will. Cornelius is trying to save the world, and can act as Exposition Fountain. Ruby doesn't know why anyone is shooting at him, or why Korben is jamming his hand into the diva's torso. But Tucker goes for it. In the early going, when he's on the air, or interrogating his assistant about what they thought, he is absolute confidence. He owns his look, his walk (strut?), everything he says. Even after Korben threatens to choke him out, Ruby is back to that the next night at the diva's performance. If he doesn't try to pull witty or enthusiastic responses from Korben, he can fill that void all by himself.

And once the shooting starts, Ruby provides clear enough commentary the President and his military advisors know what's going on (generally.) If it were me, they'd have just heard, "Shit, shit shit!" and a lot of footsteps.

It's funny in a lot places, there are some good action sequences. Lotta quotes I still use. "Smoke you!" "I only speak 2 languages: English and bad English." "Super-green." Love the music. The diva's performance, where it keeps cutting to Leeloo as she flashes back to the Mangalores' attack, then shifts in pace and tone entirely when Leeloo gets to ass-kicking. Or the music during Korben and Leeloo's escape from the cops. There aren't any other settings that feel as fleshed out, but the city with its dense, tiered set-up that gets more crowded and dirtier the lower you go, it was memorable. Korben's apartment is part of that. The way it's both cluttered and kind of spartan. A few shelves with crap strewn over them that speaks to his old life, but not much else beyond the minimum requirements for living. Including his cigarettes that are more filter than anything else. I really like this movie.

Overdue Movie Reviews #7 - El Dorado (1966)

Cole Thornton (John Wayne) is a hired gun with an offer to get involved in a range war. The local sheriff, J.P. Harrah (Robert Mitchum), is an old friend, so Thornton declines the job, but not before word that he's around reaches the other family in the war. Through a series of unfortunate events, the MacDonald family ends up with one dead son, and Thornton ends up with a bullet against his spine.

The local sawbones can't remove the bullet, so, ignoring advice to find a more skilled doctor, Thornton rides off to another job. When that concludes some months later, he runs into another gunfighter, Nelse McLeod (Christopher George), who plans to take the job Thornton turned down. McLeod figures now is the time to strike, as Harrah's become a drunk after getting dumped. So Thornton, with a switchblade-chucking, fast-talking kid everyone calls Mississippi (James Caan) hustles back to save his friend's neck, and maybe settle this range war in the process.

At least when talking to my dad, this movie gets grouped with Rio Bravo (which we'll get to one day) and Rio Lobo (which we probably won't) as an unofficial trilogy of Westerns director Howard Hawks did with John Wayne, due to certain similarities in plot, characters, and structure.

I don't remember Rio Lobo well enough to compare, but between this movie and Rio Bravo, both feature a friend of Wayne's character that's become a drunk off-screen over a woman, there's a quirky deputy (Arthur Hunnicut here, playing I guess an old cavalry scout who's always talking about bad feelings he got when there was gonna be Injun trouble), and a hotshot kid who has no connection with the mess but deals himself in anyway. The bad guy is a big rancher with a lot of money to hire guns to do his fighting for him (Ed Asner here.) There's a part where the good guys adopt a siege mentality, trying to hunker down in the jail with their prisoner until a federal marshal arrives, a part where the drunk gets to confront and show up the guys who scoffed at him, and a romantic subplot.

Of course, there's a lot of ways you can go with all that. El Dorado is a more diffuse movie than Rio Bravo, as it takes nearly half the running time for Thornton and Mississippi to return to the town of El Dorado and see what's become of Harrah (as Thornton puts it, 'a tin star, with a drunk pinned on it'.) The heroes' attempt to hunker down falls apart quickly here, mostly because they don't stay in jail, and they actually lose their prisoner in the process. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.

The romance subplot is perfunctory, and split between Thornton and a local saloonkeeper (played by Charlene Holt), and the beginning of something between Mississippi and the youngest daughter of the MacDonalds (played by Michele Carey), who is also the one who shot Thornton in the back. Hawks reuses a line from Rio Bravo - 'I always make you mad, don't I?', but gives it to Caan rather than Wayne's love interest. The bad guys actually have, in McLeod, a guy played as a credible threat, especially with Harrah still drying out and Thornton erratically losing feeling in the right side of his body. I was not clear why a bullet against the left side of his spine was fucking up his right side, but it does.

The benefit of the more diffuse nature is it allows a greater sense of stakes. Thornton isn't just there to save his friend, he also feels a debt for what happened with the MacDonald's son, and knows McLeod's presence will tip things decisively in Bart Jason's favor unless there's someone to counter him, i.e., Thornton. McLeod, beyond being there for the money, has an urge to see who's faster between he and Thornton. Harrah doesn't just have to prove to himself and his friends he's worth something, he has to prove it to the town. When he arrives on the scene after another of the MacDonalds is wounded, the father is incredulous at the idea the sheriff is going to do anything. No one speaks against that notion in Harrah's defense, because he hasn't shown he's worth it.

The climax is a surprise, mostly because McLeod gives Thornton the chance to step down from the wagon he's driving to try and prove he can outdraw McLeod with a useless gun arm. The rest of the heroes use this distraction to sneak in and free a hostage, then Thornton dives off the wagon and shoots from the ground, behind the horses. It feels like a dirty trick the antagonist would pull, but it's John Wayne doing it, to a guy who was willing to give him the chance to settle things man-to-man. Granted, we don't know if McLeod would have been so sporting if Thornton were fully healthy, but he ignored Bart Jason's orders to just kill the man right off, so I think he would have. He wanted to know if he could win, but there were higher stakes than either man's ego, so good sportsmanship is sacrificed.

Caan's character is mostly there for comic relief. He gets a decent introduction, as one of McLeod's guys is the last man responsible for killing Mississippi's father figure, and Mississippi kills the guy with a switchblade hidden in his collar. (I thought, when they were sneaking in, he might show off the knife throwing again to silently take out a guard, but no.) After that, it's all jokes about how he can't shoot worth a shit, even with an extremely-sawed-off shotgun, or about his hat, or how no one can remember his real name. He has to introduce himself to Harrah three times, as the man's brain is so pickled he's lost the capacity to remember faces or voices.

Mitchum is plays a sour-faced, ill-tempered wreck, but he sells it. The man really looks like he's been living without a care for himself. Big bags under the eyes, greasy hair, walking around in his raggedy, ill-fitting undershirt. John Wayne is pretty much your standard "John Wayne in a Western" performance. The biggest presence in the room, gruff and frequently annoyed with the foolishness around him, but able to smile occasionally.

Overdue Movie Reviews #6 - Dark City (1998)

A man (Rufus Sewell) wakes up in a bathtub, with no idea who he is and a rivulet of blood trickling from his forehead. He finds clothes, but also a corpse, a woman with bloody spirals carved in her body. The clerk in the hotel lobby calls him "Mr. Murdoch," and advises him to go to the automat to collect his wallet, because his room is no longer paid up.

Soon he knows his name is John Murdoch, but it means nothing to him. The police are hunting him as a serial killer of prostitutes, led by Detective Bumstead (William Hurt.) John's wife, Emma (Jennifer Connelly), alternately helps Bumstead search, and protects John from him. But that's all of no importance, the real threat the mysterious figures in black trenchcoats and hats, skin unearthly pale, that are pursuing John with strange powers. Powers he seems to have as well, which only a Dr. Schreber (Kiefer Sutherland) may understand.

Dark City offers a strong clue about itself early on, when Emma visits Dr. Schreber, who was supposedly treating John. After she enters his office - itself peculiarly arranged, as the door with his name on it opens onto another long hallway before reaching his lab - she finds Schreber studying a giant, circular rat maze. It's not apparent at first, but as the scene ends, you see there's no exit. The maze's outer walls are solid, the rats are placed inside by Schreber lowering them in, and simply stuck until he chooses to remove them. Nor is there any sort of prize in the middle of the maze, or anywhere else.

(I'm not sure what Schreber was purporting to study with that. What rats do in the face of futility? Do they recognize futility? Is that the equivalent of what Mr. Book and the rest of the "strangers" are seeking in humanity?)

Because that's what this city that John, Emma, Bumstead, everyone inhabit really is. A giant maze. Director Alex Proyas makes the city reflect this. The layout, where the buildings tower over the characters, penning them into narrow, dark alleys, or all the staircases that wind around and around in spirals. (In one scene as he tries to traverse the city, John climbs one flight of stairs, only to reach the top and the next flight take him down. Moving, but getting nowhere.)

But also the way places are framed in shots creates a feeling of artificiality. The room Bumstead's former coworker, Walenski (who has learned the truth on his own), shut himself in looks ordinary enough when we're standing outside with Bumstead and Walenski's wife. Once we follow Bumstead inside, we see his head nearly touches the ceiling. Like he stepped into a dollhouse without realizing it. On the other end of things, when John visits his Uncle Karl and is shown to his childhood room, the initial shot makes him look tiny as he stands in the doorway, the ceiling towering over him. The camera is positioned in the opposite corner from the door, and we feel impossibly far away from John, for what is supposed to be a child's room. Nothing fits, because it's all surface level manipulation by beings tinkering with things to see what happens.

(Later, when John is going through his childhood possession, looking for something that will spark recognition, the shot is framed so that he fills most of it, standing over his old desk, only a little of the room visible behind him. His surroundings seemingly have adjusted to him, or he's adjusted his surroundings, in the same way he unconsciously fills the childhood scrapbook of his time at Shell Beach.)

Not necessarily relevant to the design of the city, the design of the machine the strangers use to amplify their abilities is very cool. The giant metal face that opens down the middle to reveal a giant clock that stops at 12 when they begin their work.

There's a nice contrast between the human characters - John, Emma, Bumstead, even Schreber - and the strangers. The strangers always move with a deliberate stride, never hurried (it feels like Proyas shoots those scenes in slow-motion, maybe.) They fly, but in a singularly undynamic way, looking like they're standing on an invisible conveyor belt. Even when Mr. Hand has himself injected with the life Murdoch was supposed to get, he still moves the same, still speaks in his same deliberate cadence. He has these memories, but that doesn't mean he understands them, why they were meant to possibly motivate John to kill. The same way they seem to have given themselves names, but it's just, objects. Mr. Hand, Mr. Wall, Mr. Book. Occasionally an adjective (Mr. Quick, unless it's for "cut to the quick")

Because there's no apparent significance to the names to them. All their memories and experiences are shared, there's no real individuality. Their body is whatever corpse of one of their subjects they happen to inhabit. Schreber makes no effort to distinguish them, and they don't care about that, either. They may be trying to understand humans, but they haven't gotten anywhere. Mr. Book says it would take a human lifetimes to learn to "tune", i.e., alter reality with their mind, not considering that a) that's true for his species, not necessarily humans, and b) in a way, John Murdoch has already lived innumerable lifetimes. Each time he got another set of memories imprinted on him, it's another life.

Whereas John is scrambling around in a rumpled coat and clacks, wild-eyed as he tries to piece together what's happened to him, what's wrong with this city, why the sun never shines, why no one can tell him how to get to Shell Beach. When he really embraces his power for the climactic fight, Mr. Book stands ramrod straight, but John lowers his head like a bull about to charge. When he flies, he leans forward like he's about to do a Superman (one arm extended.) He shifts, he adjusts, his feelings factor into his actions, whether they drive him to smash through a wall, or surrender to protect Emma.

Schreber shuffles along, wheezing out sly lines a few words at a time. It's a very odd performance by Sutherland, I'm curious why he took that route. But Schreber is in a peculiar place. He's an accomplice to the strangers, but also a victim. As he explains, he was allowed to retain his expertise in the human mind, but made to erase everything else. He doesn't know the name he was born with any more than John or any of the others do.

Bumstead is, outwardly, the closest to the strangers. Tall and thin, a measured stride, initially unaffected by another killing. A man who focuses on details like untied shoelaces or goldfish spared a slow death by asphyxiation. It's clinical, just work, a puzzle to be solved, then set aside. Walenski's wild claims are something to dismiss. But the longer he's involved, the more he's drawn in. Hurt doesn't lose the stilted, slightly awkward manner, but gives Bumstead a willingness to question, a flexibility of mind the strangers lack. If Bumstead lacks the air of authority to make people halt when he tells them to, he at least seems able to get people to talk to him.

Connelly plays Emma as soft-spoken, but certain. She doesn't know what John's been doing since he "moved out", didn't know about his seeing a doctor, but she doesn't believe he's a killer. Even when they meet - their first meeting, really - in their apartment, and she can't understand what he's talking about, she doesn't hesitate to bar Bumstead's path so John can flee. The strangers would likely attribute that to the memories they've provided, though John and Emma would argue otherwise.

It was a little strange to me, that John could fall for Emma so quickly, minus the memories she has of their "relationship", when they had something like two brief conversations. But I imagine that's the point. Love isn't a matter of logic or rationality, something the strangers could have Schreber implant or remove at a whim. It's something that happens, sometimes in an instant, and can't be recreated if you simply put one of the two people in the same location with a different person spouting the same lines, like when Mr. Hand follows John's "memories" to his first meeting with Emma and finds her there. They have a pleasant enough chat, but there are no sparks, nothing forms between them.

(Also, John doesn't have the memories of Emma's infidelity he's supposed to, which lets him see her with a clear eye.)

The final showdown suffers a bit from the special effects limitations of the late '90s, so that you get John and Mr. Book throwing wobbly translucent waves from their foreheads. The times where they manipulate their surroundings, like Mr. Book making parts of the floor erupt into massive spikes around John, are better. If the big deal is the ability to manipulate to reality, then that's what the conflict should revolve around. And John does ultimately win by making that building with the water tower grow so it's in Mr. Book's path.

I read once that, at least in dreams, water is a symbol for reaching a truth. So the strangers being vulnerable to it is a nice touch, even beyond water being something humans need to function. John's pursuit of answers points to a beach, to crashing waves, the kind of thing that repels the strangers. And John is able to learn at least some of what he wanted to know, while the strangers never get what they were after. They purposefully keep at a distance from water, because it kills them and their notion that a person is strictly the sum of their experiences, and it's just a matter of making the right combination of experiences to produce the result you want.