Hooray free time!Really, though, what else is there to say? I've been canned. At least from movie reviews. In this crap market, in this shit newspaper era, in this colon-reaming bout of dysentery we call an economy, what room do newspapers have for movie critics? The answer: none. And that's why critics across the country are getting pink slips, buyouts or, like me, restructured beat lists. Even Roger Ebert's long-running show was given the boot for something a third as intelligent, thus five times more sellable to a TV-watching America. If Ebert's not safe, and big-name critics at big-name papers in big-name cities aren't safe, then what hope does little Michael Clawson of the community weekly the West Valley View have? Apparently some, although that's now fading … for now. Frankly, I'm surprised I was allowed to write movie reviews through the summer.So here's the skinny: I was told that my movie reviews would no longer be needed until ad revenue increases and page counts go up. It sucks, but I'm just grateful I still have a job (I'm also a photog and I write Volume). The movies aren't gone completely, though: reviews of "big movies" are allowed. The logic of that single instruction should make most movie critics chuckle. Hmmm, big movies … Transformers is a big movie, but it's also one of the most mindless movies ever created, too. And No Country For Old Men is a classic, but clearly not a big movie, even if it did win the Best Picture Oscar. But I get what the bosses are saying: review the movies that most of America is going to show up to see. Why give space to a movie that, yes, will win Academy Awards and be on year-end Top 10 lists, but won't be seen by 97 percent of the movie-going public?I'm taking this news remarkably well: No anger. No hatred. No frustration. This time of year helps. The first review I didn't have to write was Death Race ... hallelujah! Had it been Wall•E or The Dark Knight I would have sobbed at my desk. How can I be mad, though? Yeah, it's miserable that the movie section I built up over eight years has been shelved, but if no movies is my sacrifice to my paper then so be it. I've read that when a person is submerged in freezing water their body senses the temperature change and, in a defensive move, begins shutting off circulation to expendable parts of the body. Heart rate slows, fingers and toes go numb, breathing slows, but the body is trying to right itself, or at least weather through the storm. I love movies to death, but I'm not afraid to admit that movie reviews are fingers and toes — expendable.America has too little film analysis and genuine critique, two things I've always strived for in my writing; reviews are too often random commentary about the stars' nip-slips and what they wore on the red carpet at the premier. There will be a time when I can once again offer film analysis in the West Valley View. My days aren't over. To quote Ahhnold: "I'll be back." In the meantime, as many reviews as I can do will be posted here. And look for other features as well. I'll weather this storm and when I'm back in print I'll be better than ever.
Captain Dale Dye has been to war. So when he speaks of authenticity and realism in war movies he’s not just referencing some petty idea that he’s morphed into grandiose film philosophy. No, to him authenticity and realism are the culmination of his entire war experience, the embodiment of a career living and breathing combat.
The retired Marine Corps captain, who saw plenty of real action in Vietnam, has taken the vast history of warfare and his own combat experience and used them to consult big-time Hollywood directors on war pictures, first with Oliver Stone’s semi-autobiographical Platoon and nearly every war movie filmed since then, from Brian De Palma’s Casualties of War to Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan and Band of Brothers. And because Captain Dye, with his distinguished silver hair and drill sergeant voice, still lives and breaths the military lifestyle, he’s often cast in the films he consults on — he memorably played Col. Robert F. Sink in HBO’s Band of Brothers and an assassination conspirator in JFK.
After Platoon, Dye formed Warriors Inc., a consulting firm that guides Hollywood productions as they undertake war, combat and military themes. Some of the pictures he’s consulted on haven’t really been war films: Alexander, Forrest Gump, JFK, Starship Troopers and Tropic Thunder, which is now in theaters and is a slight exaggeration, almost spoof, of the Captain's job. The company is mostly known for Dye — or officers below him in the ranks — taking actors like Sean Penn, Michael J. Fox and Tom Hanks to a pre-filming boot camp where they clean machine guns, rumble through pre-dawn runs, undergo daily calisthenics regimens and eat K-rations. Dye’s thoughts are this: An actor can’t be a soldier until he’s lived like a soldier.
Besides consulting on films, Captain Dye is an actor, a military historian and a sharp-witted author, whose prose takes military jargon and adds colorful new versions of swear words that only a Marine could invent. He has a new book about his Vietnam experiences due soon, and he regularly writes on his Warriors Inc. Web site, where he shares stories from films, including one where Tom Hanks hit him where it counts with a dummy hand grenade.
Captain Dye is currently in Australia filming the sister piece to Band of Brothers, The Pacific, for HBO. He corresponded via e-mail with Volume.
— Michael Clawson
Volume: A vast majority of people think of World War II as only the European front — us against the Nazis. Even major films (with a few notable exceptions) tend to focus on the struggle in Europe as opposed to the battle in the Pacific. Will this be a learning experience to viewers who may not understand what went on in the Pacific?
Dale Dye: Historic touchstones such as Pearl Harbor and Iwo Jima aside, much of today’s audience does think of World War II in terms of the struggle against Germany and her Axis partners in the European Theater of Operations. Do a little digging into the history of the period and that will be understandable. Not proper or appropriate, but understandable. When America entered the Second World War in 1941, there was a tacit agreement among the Allies that the primary focus would be on defeating Hitler and the Nazis. Imperial Japan would be dealt with in due course, but first the continent from which most American families originated had to be saved. Hence, press coverage and public attention was focused on that theater of war and Pacific operations were a sort of public after-thought. There’s another issue involved in this also: The war in Europe was relatively conventional, confined to familiar areas and waged against an enemy that looked like us and for the most part fought like us. It was an entirely different deal in the Pacific where war was waged in remote areas that most people had never heard of against an entirely unconventional enemy that most definitely did not fight like us. War in the Pacific was hard to understand, generally under-reported and brutal in the extreme. We are dealing with those issues in the new mini-series and I believe The Pacific will be a sobering — perhaps even shocking — look at Marine Corps operations during World War II. It’s as different from Band of Brothers as it can be but just as powerful and insightful.
Volume: With Germany’s Ost battalions (made up of captured Soviet soldiers), pockets of unmotivated fighters and soldiers who were sometimes too young or too old, the war in Europe could have been much deadlier for the Allies. The Japanese were formidable opponents, though, as deadly as we could imagine. Why do you think we won?
DD: We won against Japan because we were flexible and innovative where they were dogmatic and slow to adjust to rapidly changing battlefield realities. We won because we were able to apply the power of American industrial might against their more backward industrial techniques and lack of raw materials. We won because we could maintain and defend our logistical supply lines across vast ocean areas and they could not. We won because we were willing to bypass strong bastions in the Pacific and let the Japanese defenders wither on the vine while they insisted on trying to defend every square inch of conquered territory. We won because we believed that metal is cheaper than meat. We won because we fought smart with an eye to preserving life where they fought stubbornly but stupidly with little regard for preserving their combat power in desperate situations. We won because we fielded combat formations that contained a strong corps of enlisted leaders who could take over and continue the fight when officers became casualties and the Japanese military hierarchy had no such functional middle class.
Volume: For The Pacific did you take your actors through your famous boot camp training? If so, any highlights from the experience?
DD: No project of this scope and scale could be done without building a solid, functional military unit that can — and will — do anything required over a long, grueling shooting schedule. Well, I suppose you could do it, but not to our exacting and demanding standards. When we got word that HBO had agreed to do this series early in 2008, we immediately began to construct a training schedule that would turn our actors and special ability extras into a credible, capable reflection of World War II combat Marines. Along with the technical stuff about period weapons and tactics, we always include a heavy dose of physical training and that includes long distance runs during which we sing and chant some fairly bawdy lyrics. These runs usually happen early in the morning when sane people are still sleeping. During our two-week training period in the rain forests of Far North Queensland, Australia, we usually ran along a county road that passed near several pastures in which cattle were grazing. Apparently Australian cows get a little skittish when a unit of ninety or so Marines in training come tromping by screaming at the top of their heaving lungs. As a result, I was forced to spend many long nights in the field writing “bovine trauma reports” for the lawyers before I could carry on with night activities. I just may be getting a little old and cranky for that sort of stuff.
Volume: Going broader now, onto movies and projects in general: Have you seen all the major war movies? Now, I’m not asking you to bash other filmmakers’ works, but have you seen any movies, old or new, that could have greatly benefited from your work as a military consultant? I imagine that The Sands of Iwo Jima would have been a much better film under your consultation.
DD: I certainly haven’t seen them all but I’ve seen a fair portion of what’s been made. I make it my business to do that and I have always been a fan of war movies anyway, for obvious reasons given my background. Given what I know now, I think all of them that I’ve seen could have been improved — and not just with better movie-making technology or computer-generated imagery. There are so many that play fast and loose with reality, mainly because audiences didn’t demand a heightened level of realism and filmmakers didn’t believe anyone would know the difference anyway. That wasn’t true then and it isn’t true now. In the end it’s all a matter of supply and demand. What audiences demand is what Hollywood delivers. That changes with time and technology. And it has certainly changed since they began to listen to my advice.
Volume: Because you’ve served in Vietnam, a Vietnam film that is not authentic is probably borderline offensive. From your point of view, why is authenticity in war movies so important?
DD: Worldwide we have become a media-saturated society. The advent of constant news cycles in TV, live coverage of breaking events and dramatic advances in photography has made us much more aware of what things look like. We can’t expect people to watch a pitched battle live from Fallujah or Baghdad on the network news or CNN and then pay to enjoy a film about that fighting that doesn’t look like what they just saw on TV before they left home for the theater. Extend that concept to cable outlets such as The History Channel, or reflections of wars people have seen in magazines or books and you’ve compounded the problem. The short answer is that we know much more now about the reality of war than we ever have in the past. If what we see in films doesn’t reflect what we know from other media, there’s a disconnect that interferes with our enjoyment of the story.
Volume: As someone who’s been to war, you don’t seem opposed to working on films that may be viewed as anti-war, like Platoon or Saving Private Ryan, both of which show us the absurdity of war. How do you feel about films being used as a platform to speak out against war?
DD: I’m a firm believer in the adage that no one hates war worse than the people who have fought one. And I certainly don’t believe that I allow myself to be “used” as a conduit for generic anti-war messages. I understand, as do most rational and moderately well informed people, that wars are blight and a horrible waste of human lives. They are also the nature of our human beast and unlikely to ever disappear completely as long as societies differ politically and culturally with one side or another refusing to live and let live. Given that reality, a strong and capable military is a necessity for survival. I focus on the selfless people who fight wars when such events become necessary or advisable in the view of national leadership. When a film I help make or a story I’m involved in telling exposes political chicanery, failed diplomacy or just plain dumb-ass worldview, so be it. I believe in celebrating soldiers, not war.
Volume: Many of the movies that have come out about our current war in Iraq have been largely dramas that focus on the human element as opposed to the military element. When do you think we’ll see movies about the fighting itself? When is it appropriate to begin making those movies?
DD: With some notable recent exceptions that are primarily anti-administration political screeds, no recently made film has dealt on a battlefield level with the campaigns in Iraq or Afghanistan. That’s not going to hold for long but it will likely hold at least until there is some view of how those situations will resolve for better or worse. Studio money managers are conflicted about these conflicts. They don’t know whether or not to believe people will pay to see a story about a misunderstood or unpopular war. Are the guys and gals doing the fighting heroes? Or villains? It depends on your political point of view and that doesn’t provide much reassurance that an expensive movie project will draw big box office. Before too long, someone will be brave enough to fund a story that stays with a fighting unit, examines their life and times and doesn’t cross into political areas. There are some good scripts out there right now and I hope we can work on one of them in the near future. The modern military deserves such a spotlight and I hope we can help shine it on them.
Volume: When you begin working with actors, what is usually the first thing they must be broken of? I’m sure they don’t get to carry a cell phone during your boot camp, right?
DD: No cell phones and no contact with the world outside our training area whatsoever. It’s full immersion and that the only way it works. We put these people in an alternate reality and press it home — all the way and all the time — from the time we first meet them to the final scenes of the film. That’s our method. It ain’t broke so I’m not about to fix it. The first and most difficult chore working with actors is to get them to understand that in a military outfit they are not the center of the universe; the sun does not rise and set on them. This is tough because most actors are so understandably self-centered and concerned with themselves — it’s just the nature of their beast. We work to get them to see another reality. We teach them that they are simply a small cog in a very large military machine and that the performance of the unit is much more important than the performance of any individual.
Volume: I think when people say Platoon or Band of Brothers or Saving Private Ryan are masterpieces, yes they’re commenting on the scripts and the acting and the directing and everything else. But because they’re war movies, they’re also commenting on the authenticity, which is paramount to everything else. Don’t be modest: How important is what you do for films?
DD: I think what we do is crucial and our success seems to indicate that smart filmmakers also understand this. A good story and exciting film techniques are critical to success, but you can’t expect to tell that story or justify those techniques through people who don’t understand what they are portraying. Most directors we work with also understand the relationship between a sense of reality and dramatic storytelling and that makes us partners in synergy. If a producer or director doesn’t understand that or doesn’t care about it, they are unlikely to ask for our help.
Volume: You’ve done a number of films that weren’t necessarily war pictures. Is it nice to break away from the battlefield every now and again?
DD: I’m always anxious for a little break from a constant diet of military films. As an actor I’m always on the lookout for roles that will get me out of a uniform but they are few and far between. If there’s a firmly typecast actor in Hollywood, it’s got to be me. I also welcome films such as Roughriders, Starship Troopers or Alexander that let us get into history or science-fiction a bit and experiment with things we don’t normally do. Interestingly, we have also worked as advisers in video games, themed entertainment and music videos so we’re not very often bored.
Volume: Maybe you can settle a fun disagreement I’ve had with another movie critic here in Phoenix: I think the way Tom Hanks wore his helmet in Private Ryan, with his officer’s bars in front, is correct. A colleague of mine disagrees, saying that officers wore their helmets backward to hide the bars from German snipers. Who is correct?
DD: You both are. There is no definitive correct answer. We researched this heavily during the production and talked with a great number of D-Day veterans. The truth is that it depended entirely on the unit you belonged to during the landings and the subsequent fighting inland from the beaches. Some COs ordered their officers to wear rank conspicuously so that troops could find and rally on their leaders in the confusion. Some commanders wanted their leadership preserved, so they ordered officers to hide the rank. We made a decision to have Tom wear his rank insignia on his helmet because it was not wrong according to our research and because it helped to identify our star performer in the fog of battle.
Volume: I’ve always liked the story of the Bridge at Remagen and how the United States entered Germany. Are there any great untold stories from World War II; maybe you have a favorite.
DD: In my view there are about as many great-untold stories from WWII as there are veterans of that conflict. We’ll never hear them all much less be able to make films about them. I’m just happy to have been involved in a few that are representative and popular with audiences who don’t know much about that aspect of our history. I’d love to see a film made about the epic battle for Tarawa in the Pacific or about the capture of the Remagen Bridge over the Rhine in the ETO. Clint Eastwood’s recent efforts aside, I’m also convinced we should make a film about the capture of Iwo Jima that focuses on the battle and the Marines who fought it from the landings to the end or organized resistance.
Volume: Focusing in on Warriors Inc.: when the company gets a script or a project, what’s the first things that’s done? Do you right away read through the script and look for ways to increase realism without sacrificing the story?
DD: We approach each project carefully and cautiously because there are typically a lot of delicate egos involved. If it’s trash and can’t be saved or the producers and director don’t care about any sense of reality, we’ll simply pass and move on to something else. That’s not to say we won’t work on science fiction or comedy. We love that stuff, but if the script purports to be about real people or real events, we start making notes to see what we might change, add or subtract, to make it better entertainment without turning it into a documentary. Given our track record to date, we can usually make points with the right people and get things changed or modified.
Volume: What kinds of things do directors usually fight you on when it comes to showing military elements on film? Is there anything you’ve fought hard to preserve in a picture?
DD: What I’ve fought hardest to preserve on film is a fair and unflinching look at soldiers and the reality of combat. That’s been our stated goal since we began this thing some twenty-odd years ago. Directors fight me on all sorts of things such as not wanting their stars to get military haircuts and not wanting people in combat to maintain a proper interval so they can get more of them into a frame. It’s a constant surge of give and take for us. We pick our battles and fight them when appropriate. We always understand that we are not making documentaries and the director needs to have the latitude to take certain creative licenses. If we didn’t understand that we’d never be employed.
Volume: What is the future of war movies on film?
DD: Filmmakers will always return to the well and make war movies. Hemingway was right when he said war is man’s greatest adventure. It’s also a genre that can — and most often does — involve the entire range of human emotions, strengths and frailties. That makes for good drama, pathos, comedy and even romance. What’s the downside?
Volume: Do you enjoy what you do?
DD: At my age I certainly wouldn’t keep doing it if I didn’t enjoy it. I love the aspect of my work that provides me with an opportunity to celebrate the life and times of people who have gone in harm’s way and selflessly faced danger or death simply because they believe it’s the right thing to do. I understand that spirit from personal experience and I think it’s a bright, shining truth of the human drama. That’s worth contemplating and exposing to the world through popular media. As long as I can do it, I will. And when I’m gone, I hope the successors I’ve trained and coached in Warriors Inc. will carry it on for all of us.
***Parts of this interview originally ran in the West Valley View Aug. 19, 2008.***
Star Wars is dead. Give up the ghost, George.
What a pathetic career George Lucas has nowadays: leeching off his beloved franchise, sucking the energy and spirit from the worlds he created, and wasting our time with more, more, more Star Wars miscellanea. Bullfrog-looking Lucas, Star Wars’ founding father and sci-fi deity, seems to have committed the rest of his life to tinkering with his most successful creation. Maybe it’s his way of staying productive; then again maybe it’s a ruse, his way of telling us he’s plum out of original ideas.
When he concluded his Star Wars prequels in 2005 with Revenge of the Sith, he had come full circle, brilliantly completing a rather risky gamble that united films of different tones and themes with those of his beloved original trilogy. It all ended perfectly, with Anakin Skywalker rising from a haze of smoke as the villain he was destined to become — Darth Vader. That should have been the last Star Wars anything we ever saw again.
Yet here we are rehashing even more Star Wars mythology, this time in a prequel of a prequel called The Clone Wars, which picks up between Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith, which would make it Star Wars Episode 2.5. Oh, and this one is animated, but that’s not a headline because the last three Star Wars films were basically animated as well with Lucas abandoning everything but real actors (and in some cases even them) for computer trickery.
This entire movie comes from one of several pieces of throw-away dialogue from the original Star Wars from 1977. “General Kenobi, years ago, you served my father in the Clone Wars,” Princess Leia says in her holographic plea for help. That one disposable line gave Lucas enough room to backtrack 30 years to weave an entire story around. Indeed, that’s what he did with the entire prequel: he took meaningless nothings from the original trilogy and expanded them with histories, backstories and emotional arcs. See those extras in the background of this new movie? They’ll be star characters in Star Wars Episode XII.
Clone Wars picks up with Jedi warriors Obi-Wan Kenobi and Anakin Skywalker as they fight an intergalactic war alongside cloned storm troopers, who would later become villains in the 1977 original. They are fighting separatists, or maybe they are the separatists, or perhaps they’re the Imperial Empire, or perhaps not — the politics have grown too cumbersome and unwieldy to even attempt to follow.
Obi-Wan and Anakin, still all chummy before Anakin turns evil, are tasked with returning the kidnapped son of Jabba the Hutt so the Jedis can broker a deal with the Hutts to use their shipping lanes in space to uphold galaxy law. Jabba, if you recall, is such a wimp he’s choked out by a bikini-clad Leia in Return of the Jedi, yet here he’s portrayed as a great criminal figure. The infant Hutt is a slimy little slug that makes baby noises (including baby burps and farts) and provides jokes for the toddler audience — “Oh no, you woke the baby,” a character says as laser blasts streak across a ship’s hull.
As if the baby slug weren’t enough, Anakin is given a young Padawan (an apprentice), Ahsoka Tano, who sounds like she’s voiced by some kind of Miley Cyrus mutant. She gives the movie a kid-friendly cheerfulness that most Star Wars geeks will find abhorrent to an offensive degree. Besides having no interest or respect for the Jedi philosophy, she gives everyone adorable nicknames: Jabba’s son is Stinky, Anakin Skywalker is Sky-Guy, R2-D2 is R-Twoey. If you listen carefully you can almost hear Comic Book Guy from The Simpsons groaning, “Worst. Movie. Ever.” Indeed.
It’s frustrating that Lucas would have to tailor Star Wars to a younger audience, especially since the films were already appreciated by a young audience. The wonder of space travel, the bizarre creatures, the laser battles and light saber fights, the space-opera adventure … Star Wars came pre-packaged for everyone, yet here it’s unwrapped and re-formatted for a nose-picking Disney Channel audience. It’s insulting to the Star Wars legacy.
The cutesy kids stuff is my main gripe, but there are others as well: None of the cast is back providing voices (except Samuel L. Jackson and Christopher Lee in minor performances); even Yoda’s voice, forever done by Frank Oz, is replaced. Most of, if not all, the action consists of blankets of lasers shooting from one side of the screen to the other. It doesn’t expand the Jedi ethos, or even the Star Wars story, any further by introducing the Hutts. Finally, the animation of Clone Wars is exaggerated to a degree that it doesn’t look creepy and uncomfortable (this is good), but the faces have no softness and resemble slabs of cold granite.
It came as no surprise when I learned The Clone Wars is it’s own prequel of sorts, with another version of it coming to TV by the end of the year — that makes it a prequel of a prequel of a prequel. And knowing George Lucas, there will be even more after that.
***This is the fifth of five in-depth essays on great directors.***
Chinatown is an examination of genre. Many films have sampled from the film noir lexicon, movies like Body Heat, with its devious femme fatale. A movie like Dark City used some of film noir’s rules and dramatic lighting but used them in a science fiction universe of special effects and horrific imagery. Some, like Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye or the first Naked Gun film, have tried outright parody of film noir to a certain degree of success. L.A. Confidential did a blatant neo-noir exaggeration that effectively appealed to every film noir convention, from the hard-boiled detective to the labyrinthine corruption of power. But if there is any film that truly supports the original spirit of the golden age of film noir, it is Chinatown, Roman Polanski’s stubborn vindication of his talent and personal life inside a Hollywood that would turn against him.
More than any film outside the true film noir era — which ran roughly from 1940 to the mid 1950s — Chinatown adheres to what made the genre great, with only a few notable exceptions: it was shot in color using a subtle lighting scheme; the dialogue, while suggestive, is not nearly as titillating as any of the great film noirs; and it was shot after the abandonment of the Hays Code, which, as detrimental to films as it was, gave film noir its hidden edge. Everything else about Chinatown, though, is true-blue film noir in the greatest respect. Consider first the opening credits that reveal the entire cast and crew in an almost sepia-tinted simplicity. By 1974 movies had long ago stopped running complete credits this way at the beginning of the film, but Polanski adopts the technique to begin developing his film noir essay, by slowly transporting us back to another age. Consider next the character of J.J. Gittes, the hard-boiled detective who’s sent into a seething curiosity with each new lie — “You shortchanged me on the story,” he tells Evelyn Mulwray. Gittes could be a Sam Spade or a Philip Marlowe, a Bogart or a Mitchum, and not just because he’s a private detective, but because his quest for the truth is almost his undoing. “[Is this] business or obsession,” Evelyn asks. With Gittes it’s a little of both — business at the beginning, obsession at the end. Evelyn isn’t quite the femme fatale from most film noirs, but she assumes the role as best she can. She lies a great deal, manipulates the truth, endangers Gittes, but overall she’s not doing these things for selfish reasons like a Brigid O’Shaughnessy (The Maltese Falcon) or a Phyllis Dietrichson (Double Indemnity). In fact, her intentions could be almost understood as noble ignoring the implications of her previous relationship with her father. In the end, all she desires is to protect her daughter from a man who bears some right to her as a daughter and grand-daughter. Does she deserve a bullet to the eye? No, but it’s Chinatown and the rules are unforgiving.
Polanski dives deeper into film noir with his setting (Los Angeles), his plot (a murder mystery), his time period (1930s) and Gittes’ obsessive spiral into the water corruption case. We, like Gittes, learn the facts, or maybe the half truths, as they are presented to us. In a sense, the viewer is investigating the case as much as Gittes, who flies by the seat of his pants from one deadly encounter to the next. Even the title of the film is a nod to film noir. Consider The Long Goodbye and The Big Sleep, euphemisms for death; or Sunset Boulevard, a place where men go to die; Double Indemnity, a death clause written into an insurance policy; or Touch of Evil, which references the doomed path men take to the grave. These are classic titles that hint at the film’s narrow descent into darkness. It’s as if film noir’s main compositional work was the exploration of death and its many subterranean avenues. Chinatown is no different; the title refers to a place where law and order (i.e. death) are circumvented by the tragedy and corruption of life. Roman Polanski wasn’t creating just a mystery; he was bowing to the greatness in which mystery thrived — film noir.
But what is Chinatown? And is it coincidence that Gittes is sharing a joke about a “Chinaman” when he meets Mrs. Mulwray and then later is with her as she’s killed while fleeing from Chinatown? I don’t think it’s just coincidence, and Polanski — with Oscar-winning writer Robert Towne — was knowingly exemplifying Gittes’ fear of Chinatown long before we ever step foot there. And by exploring Gittes’ apprehension to returning to his old police beat — watch the slow zoom on his face when he’s told an address in Chinatown — we are aware of its power and aware that by going there we risk the death the title so convincingly tempts us with.
If Hell Ride were any more authentic to motorcycle gang culture the theater tickets would come with vials of meth and a shank in the ribs. This is the real deal … well, at least according to this movie critic, who drives a faded Sentra.
Credit every dirty nanosecond of it to Larry Bishop, the writer, star and director — and I bet if you asked the other actors, they’d admit he was tuning the bikes when the cameras weren’t rolling. Hell Ride is Bishop’s movie, every convoluted, incomprehensible twist of it. Yes, I was a little lost — hell, a lot lost — but I liked the places it took me and I liked the way it didn’t really care what I thought. “A nihilist’s dream come true,” one character says. No shit. Hell Ride revs up, peels out and doesn’t stop until it’s impaled on the handlebars.
Billed as an extension to Quentin Tarantino’s half of Grindhouse, Hell Ride acknowledges in its tone and style that it’s a midnight movie, a B-flick destined to be a cult classic in the same vein as The Wild One, Vanishing Point or maybe even that hokey Brian Bosworth biker movie, Stone Cold. Tarantino produces it, and in many ways it looks a lot like his Death Proof: low production value, gritty camera work, dialogue on the fly and meaningless, exploitive images of fuel-guzzling vehicles and women. I would write that the plot unravels, but that implies at one point it was raveled, which it wasn’t. All totaled up, it’s a mess of a movie, but it’s so legit to its subject that all is forgiven.
Larry Bishop — yes, Rat Pack member Joey Bishop’s son — is Pistolero, the prez of an outlaw biker gang called the Victors. Pistolero, looking like Satan himself but more pissed off, rides around on a motorcycle piping hot, ready to blow, drawing down on everyone he crosses. His friend, St. Louie was killed the night before by a rival gang, the Six-Six-Sixers; St. Louie was beaten, his throat was slit and then he was set on fire. So yeah, Pistolero has a reason to be steamed. He and his gang gather graveside, chug beers and toss bottles on the wooden casket. “This is not over,” he seethes.
As best I can tell the movie takes off to avenge St. Louie’s miserable death, but along the way it turns into something more as Pistolero eats some peyote buttons, hallucinates a time jump to make love to dead biker chick Cherokee (Julia Jones) and then takes an arrow in the chest from his current girlfriend, a foxy lady who straddles his face to pull out the arrow. At one point everyone starts hording keys that may go to a safety deposit box buried in the desert, but, due to the twisting construction of the movie, I wouldn’t call that a distinguishable plot, subplot or even a coherent tangent. There’s also a significant development with a young Victor biker, Comanche (Eric Balfour), who may be Cherokee’s son, or maybe her neighbor, or maybe Pistolero’s son. Who knows with this shifty sensation.
I don’t identify with biker culture enough to know if this is authentic or not, but it feels genuine in every way — the look, the lingo, the drugs, the bikes, the sounds, the insane little twinkle in Bishop’s beady little eyes. He reminded me a great deal of Hells Angel troublemaker, and Cave Creek resident, Sonny Barger, who was at Altamont in ’69, chilled with Hunter S. Thompson and spent four years in a federal pen on a conspiracy charge. Barger is an author now and I got a small chuckle when Pistolero produces his memoirs bound in scraps of leather. If the Hells Angels didn’t somehow influence Bishop’s magnum opus, then I’ll eat the script.
Hell Ride is spent almost entirely outside and on the road, where Victors stalk the highways looking for Six-Six-Sixers, including its new leader, Billy Wings (Vinnie Jones), who carries a paintball gun that shoots arrows like bullets. And don’t ask what the purple tattoo on his arm means. Billy’s gang is deadly, but they can’t seem to get ahead of Pistolero’s complex plan, part of which involves kidnapping the Sixers president (David Carradine) and then meeting at a Tucson bar where a final confrontation may lay the past to rest. At one point, amid countless betrayals and an uzi-hosing, Dennis Hopper, who hasn't been filmed on a bike like this since Easy Rider, turns up to extol his biker knowledge — "You got a joint, man."
By the time they all meet in Tucson, after a number of bloody double-crosses and two orgies in the desert, only Pistolero and two others are left. One is Comanche, tall and awkward on a motorcycle, and the other is The Gent (Michael Madsen), an existentialist who says trippy things like, “This must be the best dust I’ve ever seen.” The Gent rides around in half a tuxedo on a custom chopper that requires quite a reach. In a shootout he’s the first one inside and the first one with an empty gun, and when other gang members take the dead guys’ weapons, he takes their porn, which he rolls up and sticks in his waistband. Later he leads the group in the biker mantra: “Bikes, beer and booty.”
The Three Bs are rather stupid, especially the way they’re presented to us in goofy biker harmonies, but it touches on the film’s road-hardened theme: A strict biker code must be maintained to preserve the sanctity of the gang and its members. Pistolero embodies this code to such a degree it consumes him and turns him into a relentless madman until he can once again balance the dusty universe inhabited by gangs like the Victors or the Six-Six-Sixers. Bishop, a veteran to motorcycles, seems to understand this and accepts it. He may even live the code the movie adopts.
Hell Ride can be frustrating and slow, tedious even, but the chopper opera it creates is one tough monument to the American biker culture — not the weekend Harley riders, mind you, but the hardcore guys with skin as tough as their leathers and motorcycles that could be museum pieces. This is one rugged movie, too: the language is coarse, the sex and nudity are off the charts, the drugs are hard, the gunfights are violent and gruesome, and the men are misogynists and incapable of remorse. But it always feels real, like a movie the motorcycle gangs would make if given the opportunity.
And I think Sonny Barger, who has renounced violence, will enjoy it for what it’s worth — an ode to the biker code.
Pineapple Express is a true stoner comedy if only because you have to be fully baked out of your skull to enjoy it, which is perhaps why I was left a little confused by the whole thing.
Toasted or not, though, its premise is kind of ingenious: after witnessing a murder, a pothead and his dealer are tracked down because the pot they smoke is so rare — “It’s so rare I kinda feel guilty smoking it, like killing a unicorn” — that the murderers know exactly where score some more. If Step Brothers, last month’s Judd Apatow comedy, were set up with a story half as interesting as this I might have liked it more. Then again, if Pineapple Express were half as funny as Step Brothers, I might have liked it more, too. So maybe Mr. Apatow isn’t as sturdy as I’d like to think.
Seth Rogen plays Dale Denton, a process server who uses a variety of disguises in his trunk to say “you got served” (in a strictly non-urban way) to unsuspecting citizens of Los Angeles. One evening he tries to serve a well-connected drug dealer but ends up witnessing a drug hit that inexplicably takes place against a large, well-lit picture window that overlooks a busy street — not very smart, but then again they only deal pot. Of course, Dale was blazing up in his car, so before he leaves terrified he throws what’s left of his Spike Lee joint out the window. Later the murderer picks it up, takes a drag and recognizes the flavor — “Pineapple Express,” he snarls.
The only person who deals Pineapple Express, the choicest of herb, is Saul Silver (James Franco), a loser who samples way too much of his own product. He spends his days watching The Jeffersons in sweat pants and blasting through baggy after baggy of green stuff as he serves his customers, including Dale. Some customers linger unnecessarily after their purchases, which irks Saul, but then Dale shows up and Saul forces him to linger, and hey, let’s smoke this cross joint that requires three hands to light. Saul’s pad, besides featuring all kinds of hiding spots for his weed, is decorated with irony in mind, including a poster of “Footprints,” that religious poem, and then a train set on his bed — only in a pothead’s place.
Dale shows up and talks Saul into disappearing for bit while this murder thing blows over, but the two blunder their escape and end up careening from one dangerous encounter to the next as they unwittingly — as opposed to wittingly — start a drug feud with the murderers, who are also Saul’s supplier, and an Asian gang Saul can only call the Viet Cong. “They’ll track us with heat-seeking missiles, bloodhounds, foxes, barracudas,” Saul states proudly in a foggy high.
It all leads to a rather elaborate, and way too long, shootout at a drug barn, where Dale recognizes all the plants: “Purple Nurple, Northern Lights, Blue Oyster, Sticky Afghan … I’ve gone to heaven.” By this time Saul and Dale, who have bonded in an almost gay way, have to prove themselves to each other by fighting the drug dealers with guns, military tactics and interrogation techniques — all things way too complex for two stoners, which I guess is the comedy element.
The characters, albeit colorful, are one-trick ponies. The routine with them getting high and saying foolish things gets old pretty quick, but the average pothead will be tickled green to have smoke buddies to giggle with. Rogen’s humor, dulled by his drug of choice, isn’t as sharp or as inventive as it was in Knocked Up or Superbad. His Dale character is given a girlfriend still in high school, which provides some awkward moments when he goes to her house for dinner — although her dad, played by Ed Begley Jr., never questions the illegal romance.
Franco is funny if only because he’s been too serious in all his other movies, like Spider-Man where he moped around frustrated with himself. There’s a whole business with Saul trying a movie cliché by kicking out a windshield while he’s driving. The result is hilarious and Franco seems to be having fun. Most of all, though, the jokes just fall very flat. Yes, Dale and Saul are very high, but it’s not as funny as it would seem.
Yet again, though, one of the best performances is by Danny McBride, who has the potential to steal the show away from every movie he’s in, from The Heartbreak Kid to Drillbit Taylor to the upcoming Tropic Thunder. Here he plays a drug middleman who’s hopelessly stuck in the ’80s and shaves his armpits so he can be “aerodynamic in a fight.” He’s given one of the better lines of the movie: “Herpes is for life, bro.” I couldn’t tell you the context in which it’s said, but it’s great nevertheless.
What’s most shocking about Pineapple Express, besides its frank depiction of marijuana and Seth Rogen’s misfiring jokes, is that art-house director David Gordon Green is running the show. Green’s Undertow, All the Real Girls and George Washington set him up as one of America’s premier young filmmaking talents, whose works were introspective and poetic, and involved the viewer on explicit, almost personal, levels. Here he abandons all poetry and tokes up a mindless stoner rant that blows out the window. And in response to Roger Ebert’s question — “What would happen if a movie like this was made by a great director?” — the answer is this: an only semi-bad bad movie.
Here’s my biggest complaint: stoner comedies can be horrible, mindless movies, but because they’re about pot they’re somehow exempt from criticism because of the subject matter. Other critics are giving this sloppy kisses and half-heartedly acknowledging that, yes, this is a pretty good achievement for a stoner comedy. Agreed, but just because stoner comedies have low expectations doesn’t mean I should too.
And potheads are so not picky when it comes to entertainment. Why else would people buy into bands like Slightly Stoopid or Kottonmouth Kings or any of the last five or six Cypress Hill albums? Even Reefer Madness, which has found a revival in the stoner crowd, is pretty idiotic once you look past its historical film context. In a sense, pot-themed entertainment is its own genre if only because potheads are the only ones enjoying it.
***This is the fourth of five in-depth essays on great directors.***
Of all the films we have discussed here, Amores Perros is probably the most straightforward of them all. It’s not as linear as No Country For Old Men or A Clockwork Orange — although it’s about as chronologically sound as The Conformist — Amores Perros is still one of director Alejandro González Iñárritu’s more basic pictures. 21 Grams leapt through time to visit its characters at contrasting points in their story arcs, and Babel involved a larger cast (megastars no less) and a variety of languages in a number of different countries. Those films, sometimes mistaken as American films, were grander in scope and execution. Simple little Amores Perros — at a not-so-simple 150 minutes running time — follows three sets of lives in one city using one language across what may be about a month of film time. But don’t assume that Amores Perros, with its easier plot devices like its identifiable chapters and title cards, is any less important. If anything it might be Alejandro González Iñárritu’s finest work, especially if you consider that his later works are clones of a similar idea examined in this, his directorial debut.
Iñárritu, sometimes called the Mexican Altman because of the way he interweaves people’s lives together on film, has writers on his pictures, but I think he must fancy himself as a quasi-documentarian. His films deal with life, the way we glide (or maybe scrape) through it, and the way choices and actions never end with the person making them. If every cause has an effect, every action has a reaction, then Iñárritu has tasked himself with looking at both sides of that dynamic, but from two different perspectives. He does this using handheld cameras, minimal lighting, found (and very real) locations and an attention to detail that is almost journalistic in its honesty. What we see in Amores Perros, excluding the plot (although even that perhaps), is not unlike anything we might actually see in a major Mexican city. His characters do real things, the way real people would actually do them. I think that’s one of his major contributions to film — he can coax honest performances from his stars.
Speaking of honesty, let’s consider the tagline to Amores Perros: “Love. Betrayal. Death.” Those three little words represent the entire film, and the periods between indicate they’re separate sentences, or separate stories. “Love” belongs to Daniel and Valeria, who are one-third of the film’s bulk. Daniel has cheated on his wife with Valeria (and his wife, or possibly another girlfriend, calls and hangs up randomly); Valeria, a professional model, is injured in the car crash that serves as the film’s ground zero. The struggle with her leg, her failing career and her missing dog are compounded all at once as Daniel does his best offering care. Their love unites them when all else threatens to tear them apart. “Betrayal” belongs to Octavio and Susana, the brother and his sister-in-law who commiserate over their lots in life while Susana cares for a child (with another on the way) and Octavio fights his dog Cofi in vicious dog fights. Just when he’s ready to run away with her, she betrays him by stealing the money he’s raised fighting Cofi. Later she betrays him twice more: once when she vows to name her unnamed baby after her dead husband, thus not after Octavio, and again when she refuses to meet him at the bus stop. “Death” belongs to El Chivo, the homeless man with the mysterious past. Of course, El Chivo deals in death as a hired gun, but he also witnesses it firsthand when Cofi is brought into his home and slaughters his other dogs, pets he looked upon as family members. It’s ironic that he’s “Death” and that his daughter thinks her father is dead — it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy he’s involved himself in.
“Love. Betrayal. Death.” — those are the themes for their respective chapters, but also for every chapter. “Love” could count for Octavio, who loved his sister-in-law, and for El Chivo, who so truly loved his animals and his daughter yet gives them up to the cruelty of his world. “Betrayal” works for El Chivo, who is betrayed by the dog he saved, and for Daniel and Valeria, who betray another woman, Daniel’s wife, so they can be together. Alejandro González Iñárritu has crafted a labyrinth of intersecting lives and emotions. The fact that they so accurately represent each character and story goes to his credit. Besides, juggling all this at once can’t be easy to do as a director.
More than anything, though, Amores Perros is about how three sets of people react to a common problem that has been grafted into their lives. If ground zero is the crash, then all three chapters are altered by it, and the sum of the film’s importance is not the crash and everything prior to it, but the crash and everything after. Yes, the film explores how the crash happens and what people were doing before it, but only because it allows us to contrast the before with an after. The real purpose of the film is to examine what changes in these people’s lives after the crash. Octavio, the architect of the crash — although, not its aftermath — tries to cope with the betrayal of Susana, yet he still can forgive her when she turns up after her husband’s death. Watch how Octavio, who could not appropriately cope with the betrayal of his dog Cofi during the dog fight in the pool, forgives Susana long enough to be betrayed two more times. After the crash Daniel shows his compassion, even as his model girlfriend returns home disfigured and broken. Valeria just wants a companion, which is when her dog goes missing under the floorboards. By the time Daniel tears up the wooden slats on the floor, he’s saving more than a dog, but his relationship. Finally, El Chivo is affected the most. After adopting Cofi and after the dog kills the other pets, the homeless father can finally see what senseless killing is capable of doing on the greater landscape of a person’s life — it’s interesting that he learns of his humanity from a canine. Without this important lesson he would have killed the businessman and been the same miserable soul wandering the street. Instead, because of the accident and its various effects, he can have the courage to stop the cycle of death and make small contact with his daughter.
Iñárritu weaves all this together masterfully, involving us explicitly in the agony of life. Existentialists believe in a great contradiction examined profoundly by Jean-Paul Sartre: Mankind is bound by its freedoms, doomed by our ability to choose. Amores Perros definitely plays that up with every scenario it allows us to witness. I think it reaches its zenith with El Chivo, who drastically comes to realize he’s doomed to choose, but, by damn, he will choose what he views to be the right decision. When he walks off on that black landscape, scraped of all life and color, he acknowledges that his decisions are nothing but what we make them, and he has decided to fade into the tapestry of Mexico, of life, of Alejandro González Iñárritu.
The word “mummy” is said so frequently in the new Mummy movie it’s as if we have to be reminded what franchise we’re watching.
I hardly blame the writers, though: Mummies are most frequently Egyptian, wrapped in ancient toilet paper and entombed in gold sarcophagi. This mummy is Chinese and is buried in his dungarees inside a terracotta pot. Oh and he does kung fu, which may be a first among mummies. So yeah, we need to be reminded that this is a mummy movie by peppering every third syllable of dialogue with the word “mummy” — “I hate mummies,” “Mummies never play fair.” “I beat the same mummy … twice!” or “Sorry pal, there’s a mummy on the loose.”
The film is set in 1940s China, where young archeologist Alex (Luke Ford) is making his bones on a 2,000-year-old mummy excavation. Ignoring long-standing mummy curses, Alex unearths Emperor Han (Jet Li) and carts him off for show-and-tell. No word on how he gets the mummy’s elaborate shrine — a large clay carriage with four full-size clay horses — out of the tomb, or even across a vast desert of dunes, onto an airplane and then into a museum in a large city. Mummy freighters … maybe that can be the subject of the next movie.
Like the first two Mummy films, mummy sympathizers conspire to awaken the very stiff corpse, and like the other movies they’re successful to a certain degree. Once the mummy is awake and throwing his weight around inside a skin of breakable clay, Alex has to call on mummy and daddy to save the day. Alex of course is an O’Connell and his parents are Rick and Evelyn O’Connell, the famed tomb desecrators and mummy destroyers. Mummy-slayer Rick is again played by Brendan Fraser in a performance I would call wooden and flat if it weren’t a tremendous insult to all things wooden and flat. Mummy slayer’s wife, Evelyn, once played by Rachel Weisz, is now played by a very plucky Maria Bello (A History of Violence), who flubs a British accent like only a great actress in a horrible movie can.
If you’ve seen the other two Mummy movies — the first one was spectacular in a campy-fun way; the second was a sharp decline — then Tomb of the Dragon Emperor will feel like a rerun, but with worse computer animation. Here’s the formula: Mummy comes alive, mummy has super powers, mummy awakens his bad-mummy army, good guys awaken their good-mummy army, mummies fight. This one goes in at least one new, albeit ridiculous, direction when abominable snowmen are summoned from the snow to fight the mummy, which may provide another Mummy spin-off a la Scorpion King — Mummy-Fighting Yeti would be the title.
Like the other two films, there are an inordinate number of mummy rules, secret spells, hidden mummy chambers, rejuvenating potions and even a gold knife, the only weapon that can defeat a Chinese mummy. I have my own rule I can apply to these mummies: if a movie has more rules than a game of Monopoly then it’s a poorly written movie.
Mummy 3, filmed in China using some breathtaking scenery, wanders from China’s high deserts to snowy peaks and then back to the desert, where the mummy’s curse originated. The mummy has super powers over the elements (yet only uses fire and ice) and can morph into a three-headed dragon and giant troll, but much of the fighting involves either guns or kung fu. By the time kung fu artists Jet Li and Michelle Yeoh, who have never fought on a film before, do their mummy martial arts the movie has already fallen apart.
Great pains are made to pass the mummy legacy onto Rick’s son, but newcomer Ford never seems adequate as a mummy killer. Rick, although skilled at reburying mummies, is an old and awkward fighter and Fraser’s acting is atrocious to no end. Michelle Yeoh and a character played by Isabella Leong are interesting only because they add some grace and beauty to an otherwise stupid and clunky mummy movie. John Hannah, who plays Evelyn’s brother, returns as a sleazy mummy profiteer and he has the movie’s worst line: “You guy’s are like mummy magnets.”
If you’ve paid attention, or maybe just started feeling annoyed for no reason at all, then you might have noticed I used the word “mummy” in every sentence of this review including the next one. The wrappings have finally come off the Mummy franchise.
Hooray free time!
