Volume archive hits Web

My professional career has been spent doing a variety of things. When I started as a journalist I was doing obituaries and compiling religion events for a church calendar. It didn’t stop there: cop logs, hard news, fluffy features, military news, a city beat, several school beats, part-time photographer, full-time photographer … at one point, as a joke by an editor who knew I was single at the time, I was designated the “cheerleader reporter” after covering a local Arizona Cardinal dancer. By default I still retain that title.

Anyway, I have done a lot. But only after I started writing about movies, music and pop culture did I truly find a home. For a long time I only had my movie reviews, then slowly I began writing about music (in SPIN magazine even), and later still I would slip in some culture-type stories (in one of my first I proclaimed the iPod to be the best thing to happen to music since the electric guitar). Eventually I combined all three things into my own section in the newspaper — I called it Volume. The early forms of the full-page section were crude and boring; now they’re the best designed paper in the West Valley View. Until recently, they’ve only been available in print in the newspaper. Now, for the first time ever, they’re available on the Web. And not just the current issues, either; even some of the back issues are available going back to last summer. Production genius Jonathan Barnes, who has designed and built Volume from the very beginning, has built a spiffy new site where you can check out our different pages. Also on the site is an e-mail contact for myself and my editor. Please, please, please write in and comment on the pages or tell us what you’d like to see in Volume. Here are the links:

VOLUME

WEST VALLEY VIEW

And if you want to see some of my photography: SMUGMUG

Another IMDb mention

So, Pick-Up Flix landed another mention on IMDb's Hit List about a week ago. The first one generated about a dozen responses; the most recent one about double that. I'm going to keep trying to get on there and hopefully (cross my fingers, laces don't count) readership will go up and up and up. It's been about a week since I've posted last ... my apologies on taking so long. It's been a busy week. First there was Independence Day, then the Warped Tour (see my pictures here) and then just this week I was without a Internet because I was getting a high-speed connection on my computer (feel free to welcome me to the 21st Century). But fret not, new posts are coming. And I have a bunch too, including one on the life and times of actor Brad Renfro and another on the colorful language in True Grit, a terrific John Wayne movie always overshadowed by the much-overrated The Searchers. Until then, pilgrims.

A Small History of Ratings Flip-Flops

Die Hard switched ratings. That constitutes a betrayal in my book. That’s the way a staunch Democrat would look at it if his candidate switched mid-stream to the Republican side, or vice versa. In the Die Hard series, Bruce Willis plays John McClane. In the fourth entry in the series, Live Free or Die Hard, just call him Benedict Arnold.

Die Hard 1, 2 and 3 were all rated R, and rightfully so. In 1, McClane blows a guy’s kneecaps out as raspberry jelly shoots from the wounds. In 2, scaffolding crushes a man’s head like a grape, and later a man is sucked into a jet engine. In 3, McClane paints the interior of an elevator a nice shade of red, and later a man is ripped in two by a stray crane cable. In all of them we are given a great movie line upon the disposal of a bad guy: “Yippee-ki-yay …” you can imagine the rest. Pretty classic action-movie stuff.

Fast forward. Present day. Live Free or Die Hard. Gunshot wounds no longer bleed. Heads no longer come off or pop or crush or split. Bad guy’s no longer curse or execute innocent people (poor Joe Takagi) to prove a point. And John McClane no longer says his famous catch phrase. Sure, he says 75 percent of it, but a gunshot cracks over the important parts, those four deliciously vile syllables.

The reason for the shift in ratings — Live Free or Die Hard is PG-13 — can only be attributed to money. Studio bosses saw a chance to bring in X amount of people with an R-rated movie, and X² with a PG-13-rated movie, which doesn’t require a parent or guardian buying the ticket. So, although McClane is an adult’s action hero, he’s written here for a teen crowd. It would be better if the character were just killed off rather than be censored and removed of his powers. And yes, the F-word and the ability to explode heads is a power in movies. Don't blame the Motion Picture Association of America ratings board. They just rated what they were given, and Die Hard's makers decided to give them PG-13 material. Shame on you the keepers of John McClane's legacy.

Here is a brief look at some other franchises that have switched ratings mid-series:

• Mad Max — Mel Gibson’s Max Rockatansky character went from violent (Mad Max) to really violent (Road Warrior) to totally wimpy (Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome). The whisper of a kitten was mightier, not to mention more interesting. The R-rated franchise decided to geek itself out of the picture with an overproduced costume picture with one cool set (the Thunderdome) that suddenly prescribed to PG-13 values. And it had Tina Turner; what’s she got to do with it?

• Crocodile Dundee — G’bye PG-13 rating. G’day PG. That’s what the series did with the third entry, Crocodile Dundee in Los Angeles, an abysmal second sequel 13 years after the first sequel. This time ol’ Mick Dundee takes his joey along. The addition of a kid meant the jokes were tamer and the action not nearly as intense. Remember in the first film when he ruined a guy’s coke and then grabbed a transsexual’s balls? Those days are long gone here, mate.

• Scary Movies — The Scary Movie franchise represents the extinction of the quality spoof. Its downfall: the series resorted to mocking individual films — Scream then Signs — rather than film movements or genres. (The last real spoof was Hot Shots! Part Deux) The first two movies were raunchy R-rated sex comedies; in the first one a man is impaled in the ear by a penis. The series then left the hands of the Wayans Brothers and plopped into David Zucker’s lap. Zucker, of course, directed Airplane! He toned down the sex and drug use and made a tame PG-13 comedy.

• Major League — Baseball needed a movie like Major League. Notice I said movie, singular, and not movies, plural. The R-rated first film was rude and crude, and I vaguely recall a slow reveal of a life-sized nude picture of the team’s owner. And remember Dennis Haysbert (24’s President Palmer) chastising Jobu, his locker idol? The two sequels that followed it were not nearly as funny, or offensive. By the time the third film came around in 1998 most of the original cast — Charlie Sheen, Rene Russo, Tom Berenger and coach James Gammon — had all been traded. The lower ratings of the second and third pictures — PG and PG-13 respectively — probably had no real effect on the overall popularity of the film. The real culprit: all the material had been mined in the first one.

• Harry Potter — The whole series is based on a children’s books, so you’d think it would all stay PG, but think again you dumb muggle (don’t worry, I’m one too). Instead Warner Bros. bumped the fourth and fifth movies — Goblet of Fire Order of the Phoenix — up to PG-13, proving that the stories were maturing with the audience. The new PG-13 rating didn’t provide any sex (although one kiss) or toilet humor, it did allow filmmakers to get a little creepier with the effects. For tiny children, the new rating was downright scary. If the rating arc were to continue, the last two films would have to be rated R. Unlikely.

• Star Wars Prequels — Episode I: The Phantom Menace and Episode II: Attack of the Clones had their fair share of action, mayhem and overall mischief, but still they landed a PG. Tear an arm off a robot and the ratings board doesn’t even whimper. Tear an arm off a Jedi and they’ll likely give you a PG-13, which is exactly what happened with Episode III: Revenge of the Sith. Besides some violent sequences with the Jedi’s untimely demise and Anakin’s transformation into Darth Vader, the film is largely a PG movie except for the gloomy cloud that strikes a dark cast over the entire story.

• Technicalities — Several films within a series have had their ratings altered only because of the invention of the PG-13 rating. For instance, Raiders of the Lost Ark was PG, but the later Indiana Jones films were PG-13 — Temple of Doom supposedly caused the introduction of the rating. Other film series with similar ratings changes include Rocky, Jaws and Poltergeist.

• True movies — I enjoy movies that stay true to what they are, be it G-rated or R-rated material. Rambo has never compromised his violence, nor has Vito Corleone with The Godfather. The taming of John McClane should go down in action-movie history as one of the genre’s lowest moments. The only thing sadder is Tony Soprano on A&E without an F-word to stand on.

An open letter to Mandy Moore

My dearest Mandy,

I like you. I like you a lot. Not in that perverted stalker-type way either. And not in that “what is she doing right now?” paparazzi way either. I just like you. I think of you as a wholesome Hollywood person, even though those two words are unlikely to find each other in the same sentence nowadays. I like your cutesy little bob haircut, those dark mysterious eyes, your rosy little cheeks. I like that I’ve never seen you whoring it up, and as much as I would love to have seen you naked in one of your films, I’m glad that I actually haven’t. I also admire how I hear about you in the entertainment world, but never in an annoying amount. If Lindsay Lohan is No. 1 and Paris Hilton No. 2, then you’re ranked somewhere in the thirties, above Elisha Cuthbert but below Natalie Portman. You have a great deal of talent, be it with singing or acting or just being an adorable person.

But what’s the deal with your movie selections? I’m hesitant on bringing it up, but seriously, what’s going on? Is everything OK? I would send a get well card if I knew where to send it, but I’m not even sure you’re sick. I just know that something is wrong. That’s the only reason anybody would take on an assignment like License to Wed, a bad movie built from a collection of bad frames reeled at 24 frames per second. It’s a symphony of badness. I liked John Krasinski in The Office too, but come on. And before that … Chasing Liberty, How to Deal, Try Seventeen; what happened there? If you’re not getting good scripts, maybe you should hire a new agent. I hear there are lots of agents in the Los Angeles area. Or here’s a suggestion: don’t work unless you’re acting in good movies. You’re probably not filthy rich, but I’m sure you can afford to just chill out and wait for the right script. I’m a journalist and movie critic, which means I make basically nothing compared to you or anyone else (for instance: Wal-Mart managers), and even I could think of clever ways to sustain myself while not working. Or maybe you can just alternate between good scripts and bad scripts, which are usually ones set in high schools or the White House. Even Peter O’Toole did some stinkers, but every now and again he did what he was born to do — serious acting.

Here’s a tip: stay away from any romantic films. Unless of course, you’re an alcoholic or on drugs or a hooker or there is some kind of problem for you to overcome. And drunks and druggies usually aren’t pretty, which would satisfy my second tip — don’t look pretty. Look beautiful on the red carpet at your movie’s premier, but not in the movie itself. Ugly or homely characters are usually written better than girls cut from Cosmo or Seventeen. Nicole Kidman and Charlize got ugly and won Oscars. Try it out. Then try a co-starring role. Be someone’s daughter, preferably Meryl Streep or Glenn Close, or even Kevin Costner (did you see The Upside of Anger?). Or try a fantasy picture or something whimsical and light; I see Natalie beat you to Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium.

Don’t get the wrong idea, Mandy, I think you’ve done some good work. Saved! was terrific. And your performance in A Walk to Remember made me sob like weepy fool. Even some of your music is pretty good, although I’ll admit that pop music isn’t really “my thing.” I see potential in your career, if only it can get out of this rut. I’m sure it’s frustrating to read all this, and from a complete stranger, too. It’s easy for me complain about your work, especially when you’re famous and I’m not. Feel free to offer constructive criticism to my work or to one-up even that and ignore me altogether.

Hang in there, kid. America still believes in you. One script at a time you can change how you will be remembered in the cinema. There’s something in you we haven’t seen yet and I’m positive it will blow us all away when we finally do see it on the silver screen.

Sincerely,

Michael

Big movie, tiny plot; Transformers are wimps

Some of the biggest movies ever created came out this summer, and in fact, are still coming out. 

The movies may be big, but the stories are small, small, small. Pirates of the Caribbean 3 sank. Shrek 3 was just boring. Spider-Man 3 was overproduced. I had reserved a shred of hope, though, for Transformers. Ten minutes into the big-budget popcorn flick and I realized hope is a deceptive belief to hang your expectations on when Michael Bay (Pearl Harbor, Armageddon) is calling the shots from a director’s chair.

Sure, Transformers is a nostalgia trip, an action vehicle, an effects-driven summer movie, but that doesn’t mean its story has an excuse to lay down for a nap, one from which it never wakes. What it all amounts to is a cruddy movie with a $200-million computer makeover. It’s amazing how a movie this big — the characters could share King Kong’s wardrobe — could drop into theaters with basically no real plot. Oh, I guess there’s a story: something about a cube, the Allspark, and an intergalactic war that spills into our world. But I shouldn’t have expected much; after all, the movie’s based on a line of Hasbro toys.

If you somehow skipped the ’80s the Transformers are giant alien robots that can morph (id est transform) into human creations like big rigs, helicopters, rescue vehicles, jets and even things as small as boomboxes and cell phones — although, since Transformers must first scan the device before becoming it, even they had to wait for the iPhone. The transformation process looks like the solution to one of those complex box puzzles: pieces turn and flip, appendages rotate out of the shapes, and parts fold onto themselves and around others to create robot abdomens and trunks. And voila, there stands a 25-foot robot where a Camaro was once parked.

This presents the first problem: the robots have no real form, just a jumble of pieces. So when two Transformers fight it’s hard to tell what’s going on. It’s would be like watching two masses of paperclips battling — all you see is paperclips rubbing together. Couple that with super-tight camera compositions and quick cutting and you get a rather hard-to-see picture. All I wanted was a good steady look of the Transformers so I could admire their forms. That moment came only several times.

Good Transformers are called Autobots and bad ones are called Decepticons. The movie begins in the Middle East, where the Decepticons have staged a battle to retrieve government secrets from a United State military base’s computer network. Proving yet again that action movies never top the opening scene, the attacker arrives in the form of a military helicopter, but quickly transforms into Robbie the Robot on PCP. One small platoon of soldiers escapes with their lives, but they’re marked for extermination by a giant scorpion robot.

The movie jumps around a lot, so don’t get too cozy with the characters yet. We then jump to a secret government program called Sector 7, which knows about the Transformers, and have even frozen Megatron, a vile Decepticons leader. From there, we jump to some flunky computer hackers, who are analyzing an alien answering machine message, and then to Sam Witwicky (Shia LaBeouf), whose great great grandfather encountered Megatron under the Arctic Circle. 

Poor LaBeouf, who was so good voicing a character in Surf’s Up (this summer’s true winner) and playing a deviant teen in Disturbia, finally caves in to overacting and cheap mugging to the camera. His Witwicky character is developed through his eBay account, which the Transformers have hacked looking for Grandpa Witwicky’s polar spectacles. Suddenly, a yellow Camaro shows up with a Herbie-like mind of its own — “It’s Satan’s Camaro,” Witwicky says — and the other Transformers aren’t far behind. Eventually, Witwicky and his girlfriend (the “evil jock concubine”) are stomping through Los Angeles and the Hoover Dam with Autobot leader Optimus Prime and several other Transformers who have learned English from the World Wide Web, which explains why one talks like a Brooklyn rapper. 

Everyone’s looking for the Allspark, but other than that it’s a free-for-all with action sequences popping up between pointless scenes with government agents and random scenes with one-off characters that neither further the plot nor give us something to enjoy. One exception: Bernie Mac plays a car dealer named Bobby Bolivia (“Like the country but without the runs”). I might as well abandon my no-plot diagnosis and concede that Transformers is all-action, all the time. That’s why it’s going to make a bzillion dollars at the box office this weekend.

Why try and convince you that it stinks when you’ve already booked time in your schedule for its screening? I hope you enjoy it. I found it dull and bothersome. I will say this, though: some of the computer effects are amazing. The opening battle sequence will get the blood pumping through your veins, as will the long-lasting finale, which punches holes through the Los Angeles skyline. Especially noteworthy are the slow motion effects, most of which are shot with long telephoto lenses using a technique (compression) that creates busy scenery and full backgrounds, and it puts Transformers and humans on the same film plane, even though in the movie’s world there are 50 yards between them. Transformers burst from the sand as humans scatter, rockets zip past enemies and over the heads of pedestrians and robots corkscrew into battles dodging bullets Matrix-style in super-slow-mo. Very cool! 

It’s just too bad $200 million doesn’t buy a better plot, one that makes sense at every angle. And what’s with the Transformers changing their abilities mid-way through the film? They have machine guns in their fingertips, rocket launchers in their forearms and pulse rays on their shoulders, but at the end they resort to hand-to-hand combat. Are we sure this is an advanced alien race? I expect shoddy filmmaking from Bay, but what’s Steven Spielberg’s excuse? Maybe he was just too busy watching this (toys) transform into this ($).
 

Duck, Sucker: A review 36 years in the making

And from the heavens fell a film. A great film. A Sergio Leone film. And the world was good.  


Many audiences have found and enjoyed Leone’s “lost” film Duck, You Sucker or, as it’s been widely known, A Fistful of Dynamite. But not until June, with the release of the Sergio Leone Anthology, did us silly ’Mericans get a good, long glimpse of the original edit of the quasi-western. Since its 1971 release, it’s been hacked up, gutted and pretty much devoured by a variety of editors, and even then it still never landed a wide-scale American release. Maybe movie enthusiasts didn’t make enough of a fuss about it in ’71 to make it a classic, or maybe moviegoers were still gushing about The Good, The Bad and The Ugly and Once Upon a Time in the West for Sucker to get its share of praise. Maybe, dare I say it, people didn’t like it … (gasp here). I wasn’t around, so I can’t speculate further. But I can recommend it now that it has an official release inside the Leone Anthology, which also features Clint Eastwood’s “Man With No Name” Spaghetti Westerns — A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More and The Good, The Bad and The Ugly.

Sucker stars James Coburn as John Mallory, an IRA explosives expert, who is drawn to Mexico as a hired demo-expert during a Mexican revolution (or maybe the Mexican Revolution). Rod Steiger — in the form of a smelly bare-footed peasant with the ferocity of a lion and the accent of Tony Montana off his medication — plays the sucker, Juan Miranda, a Mexican bandit pillaging under the skirt of a great frontier. The Irishman and the Mexican meet during a hold-up on a lonely road. Juan shoots out John’s motorcycle tire, so John returns the favor by blowing up Juan’s stagecoach. The explosion is preceded by the first of three references to the title: “Duck, you sucker,” John tells Juan as his various sons and fathers, all bandits as well, run for cover. In typical Leone style, this chance encounter makes up the entire first act of the movie, stretching to the absolute breaking point when Juan exhaustingly convinces the IRA thug to join in on a bank robbery.

Just as the movie saddles its burros (do burros even where saddles?) to head off for a bank heist, it drastically switches gears as John and Juan find political prisoners, not bags of gold coins, inside the bank’s vaults. Leone, with that sleight of hand worthy of a Vegas table, follows his cowboy opera Once Upon a Time in the West, a moving musical picture about railroads and redemption, with another movie about loftier goals than gold bars or bags of loot. In a way, it’s a buddy picture set against the Mexican Revolution, the same way Good/Bad/Ugly was a buddy flick amid the Civil War. Although it was lost in time and space somewhere between video stores and the Spanish frontiers where it was filmed — and after better pictures nonetheless — Sucker is the quintessential Leone picture: the music, of course by Ennio Morricone, is rich and layered deep within Sucker’s dirty skin; the plot is an allegory involving race and friendship, and the trust that binds them together; the tempo is methodical and intricate, not the kind of 158-minute movie you step into halfway through; and the cinematography is picturesque if “picturesque” can also describe dusty, blistering landscapes chock full of machine gun nests, pre-planted explosive packs and ambushing revolutionaries.

It should also be noted that the body count of Duck, You Sucka is high enough to get mentioned on a United Nations watch list. As soon as the two protagonists arrive in the bank’s keeper city, an Orwellian western town called Mesa Verde, armed patrols start executing political dissidents. And once they start, they don’t stop. Soldiers are mowed down with machine guns, revolutionaries (including children) are blasted mercilessly in a cave and a derailed train makes for a bloody turkey shoot. In one uninterrupted long take, the camera pans across several concrete corrals of political prisoners as soldiers rain hot lead down onto their heads in a genocidal rage. Before that John and Juan stage a firefight that ends with results so conclusive that it may be the only time in cinematic history an entire army is defeated in a fraction of a second. For comparisons to other films, I consulted Movie Body Counts, a morbidly fun site that counts the dead in action films. The top five body-count movies: two Lord of the Rings movies, where computer war sequences rack up nearly 1,200 dead; John Woo’s Hard Boiled, in which bad guys inexplicably shoot evacuating patients as they flee a hospital under siege; We Were Soldiers, with lots of dead American and North Vietnamese soldiers; and Equilibrium, with Christian Bale dispatching sci-fi cops with geometrical kung fu. Duck, You Sucka isn’t listed on the site … yet. If it were, I would put its body count well into the 500s, thus high in the top five list.

Body count aside, though, this sweltering hunk of a film is a wonderful addition to your Eastwood/Leone pictures. Don’t expect it to be like the Eastwood pictures, or even so much like its sister film, Once Upon a Time in the West; just expect a truly unique Leone experience. He brings it to you gift-wrapped from 1971.