I post about movies here. If anyone remembers the random movie posts I did on The Shinmaru Zone/myOtaku, these will essentially be the same thing. Hope you all enjoy them!
All posts will have minor spoilers, and I do not use spoiler tags in this world, so read with caution.
In a way, it makes sense that a great movie should be made about such a bad director.
Ed Wood, directed by Tim Burton, follows the career of Edward D. Wood, Jr. (Johnny Depp), often hailed as the "worst director of all time," from the creation of one of his earliest movies, Glen or Glenda, to the premiere of his "masterpiece," Plan 9 from Outer Space. Along the way, Wood fulfills his visions with shoestring budgets and one of the strangest acting troupes in movie history.
A big part of why the movie works is because it treats Wood with respect. The movies he makes are not good; however, the joy with which Wood approaches the moviemaking process is something truly special. He is a whirling ball of energy when he directs, a manic typist when he writes his scripts and as charming as anyone around when producing and promoting his movies. Wood lives simply to make movies and nothing more, and he approaches his life's work with an infectious enthusiasm.
The way Depp plays Wood makes him incredibly likable. He is an earnest, almost childlike young man with boundless ambition, who unfortunately does not have the talent to match. Although Wood must struggle to keep making movies while also dealing with some of life's rough realities, he is almost never down -- instead, he faces his problems head on and never stops believing in himself. This relentlessly positive attitude is sometimes in danger of bordering on annoying, but Wood's happiness is more inspiring than obnoxious.
What gives the happiness Wood feels depth is the sense of adventure the movie instills into his work. When Wood needs a monster for the climax of one of his movies, he gathers his crew for a movie studio heist, where they barely escape with a rubber, motorized giant squid. Who would not have fun making movies like that? To promote his movies, Wood attends strange parties, and when he is in desperate need of money, he courts groups as far fetched as the local Baptist ministry (which objects to the term "grave robbers" in the title of the movie they are financing). Wood is far outside the moviemaking mainstream -- he does not have to deal with bullying studio heads who are interested only in the bottom line. All he must do is scrape together enough cash to keep the fun going one movie at a time.
Wood's gonzo troupe of misfits and outsiders are almost as entertaining as the man himself. There is Bunny Breckinridge (Bill Murray), a man who is as hilariously camp offscreen as he is in Wood's movies; Tor Johnson (George "The Animal" Steele), a Swedish wrestler and a gentle giant who often plays a villain; and Vampira (Lisa Marie), whose look was an inspiration for Elvira, the Mistress of the Dark. None of them are particularly gifted actors, but they fit seamlessly into the surreal worlds Wood imagines.
Then there is the broken down, faded star Bela Lugosi (Martin Landau), who is first seen trying out coffins. Wood's relationship with Lugosi is the heart of the movie. When Wood happens upon Lugosi, Lugosi is a morphine addict who has not acted regularly in years. This does not matter to Wood -- he is starstruck. When he looks at Lugosi, he does not see a man who has been battered by life; he sees Count Dracula. Wood gives Lugosi big parts in his movies, and a tight friendship forms between the director and his star.
It is pretty amazing to watch Landau in this movie -- he is Lugosi, not just in the sound of his voice but in his actions, the way he carries himself like a star but always a hint of collapse just around the corner. But there is still something there in Lugosi. The scene where he delivers one of the most infamous speeches Wood ever wrote -- the "Atomic Supermen" speech in Bride of the Monster -- what is in reality a really goofy bit of dialogue is suddenly given power, because Lugosi is truly alive again. In his own way, Lugosi is just like Wood. He lives to act and make movies, but he is frequently denied this opportunity because nobody wants to see him anymore.
Ed Wood is a great movie about the fun and spirit of making movies. It does not matter much to Wood that nobody likes the movies he makes -- he is love with every shot he takes. The movie does end on a bit of a down note as it recounts the end of Wood's life, because he constantly struggled until the day he died, but the last shot of Ed Wood reinforces the theme of delirious happiness the movies bring to audiences and the people who make them. After all, the movies are first and foremost an entertainment experience. Wood lives by that from the opening seconds until the very end of the picture.
EDIT: The first of the retroactive scene additions! This scene from Ed Wood features Wood and his gang of crazies being baptized so that the baptist ministry will fund Plan 9 from Outer Space.
Comedy is funniest when the characters are trying their damnedest to not be funny. Roger Ebert writes, "A person who wears a funny hat isn't funny -- but a person who doesn't know he's wearing a funny hat? Ah, now that's funny." A Fish Called Wanda takes this to the extreme -- the characters can all see each other's funny hats, but they are unable to recognize their own gross, eccentric faults.
The story begins with a jewel heist that ends in betrayal. Wanda (Jamie Lee Curtis) and Otto (Kevin Kline) are lovers who pretend to be siblings so that they can swipe the jewels from stuttering Ken (Michael Palin) and George (Tom Georgeson), whom Otto and Wanda secretly ratted out to the police. George is defended in court by Archie Leach (John Cleese), a stuffy barrister whom Wanda resolves to seduce so that she can find out where George has hidden the jewels.
One of the funniest things the movie deals with is the stubbornness and hypocrisy of the principal players. For example, the imprisoned George orders Ken to kill an old lady who identified George after he almost ran her over while escaping from the heist. Ken does a poor job of killing the old woman -- in fact, there is some unfortunate collateral damage done that especially horrifies him. His scenes of mourning are hysterical, moreso when compared to a scene near the end of the movie with Ken and Otto.
Speaking of Otto, he provides some of the biggest laughs in the movie -- Kline didn't win that Best Supporting Actor Oscar for nothing. One of Otto's funniest attributes is how he constantly bemoans the pretentious, holier-than-thou attitude of the English while simultaneously quoting Nietzsche and warping Buddhist belief to the point where he uses meditation to channel his aggression so that he will have an easier time of killing people. Any time Otto tries to reconcile his "intellectual" bent with his tendency to fly off in the lowest, most vulgar temper tantrums, the scene is a winner.
Another thing that is great about the movie is how it plays with the stereotypes the Americans and the British have of each other, especially in Otto's interactions with Archie. Otto is a total stereotype -- he thinks he's clever, but he really isn't, and he's constantly whining about a perceived arrogance in the British. He also swears a lot. Archie, on the other hand, is insufferably introverted and perpetually mortified at everything going on around him. He has a withering comment ready for every situation, but he is dominated by his most shameful instincts. And, of course, these two interact a lot. Coarse Americans + refined Englishmen = hilarity.
One of the classic comedy devices is men who think they are in control at all times, until a woman comes along who wraps them around her finger. Curtis is amazingly sexy as Wanda, and that sexiness is used to its full advantage for hilarity. It's wonderful to see her immediately change from the innocent, wide-eyed persona she uses to charm Archie to her normal, tough and straightforward personality in front of Otto, because, dumb as he is, he can't see that she's been pulling the same act on him the entire time.
Of course, as a British character in a British comedy, Archie has absolutely no chance of escaping the most horrifying embarrassments imaginable, and the movie throws plenty at him. I won't spoil them because they deserve to be surprises; however, I will say that if you suspect there is no way Archie can not get caught canoodling with Wanda, then your suspicions are correct. Watching Archie try to worm his way out of the most disastrous situations is a joy to see.
Something that seems to be underrated in comedies, especially in recent years, is a good story. There are so many moviemakers who seem to believe that they can just throw whatever they feel like onscreen with the thinnest of plots to support it, and it will be a work of genius. It takes a hell of a comedy to survive with little to no plot to support it, and, sorry, but Epic Movie isn't it. A Fish Called Wanda supplies a genuinely interesting caper story filled with great double- and triple-crosses that strengthens the laughs while also not bogging down the movie with clumsy plotting. It successfully combines a great story with great laughs, which is definitely not easy to do.
If you like to laugh at all, then watch A Fish Called Wanda. That's all I can say.
EDIT: More retroactive scene additions! YouTube flags this as not being appropriate for minors, but personally I don't think it's objectionable at all because it's so damned silly. Anyway, in this scene from A Fish Called Wanda, Otto gets in a fight with Wanda and then gets her going by speaking Italian.
War is hell. This is nothing new to the movies. But in many antiwar movies, soldiers at least have their buddies and a good commanding officer or two to fall back upon. Paths of Glory shows what happens when war leaves one all alone.
The story is simple: It is 1916, two years into World War I, and the French and the Germans have been fighting bitterly, with thousands upon thousands of men dying for mere yards of advancement. French commanders want to take an important, strategic spot -- the Ant Hill -- and order Gen. Mireau (George Macready) to get it. Mireau commands Col. Dax (Kirk Douglas), who operates one of the bravest, most decorated groups in the French military, to run the attack.
Dax knows it is a suicide mission. His men are tired, battered and dying rapidly. But he follows orders, because he is a good soldier. The attack then fails miserably. To protect his reputation, Mireau demands to see soldiers from Dax's unit executed. Gen. Broulard (Adolphe Menjou) talks him down. In a compromise, three soldiers -- one from each of Dax's units -- will be shot dead for cowardice.
What makes Paths of Glory succeed is it is not just the cruelty of the violence that forms its argument against war. To the French commanders, the war is less about protecting France and more about bravado and macho pride. Broulard goads Mireau into taking on the deadly mission by not so subtly hinting that a promotion and medals will be in it for the general who successfully takes the Ant Hill. Mireau puts up a half-hearted fight -- "What are promotions against the lives of my men?" -- but the decision has already been made in his mind.
It is this bravado and macho pride that also leads to the greatest cruelty in the movie. Mireau cannot stand the wound his pride has sustained. He cannot look his superiors in the eye without knowing some form of justice has won out. He does not care who is killed; he is satisfied someone will die for the slap to his perfect reputation. Macready succeeds in fleshing out what a hateful bastard Mireau is. He slinks in the background, a smug and arrogant smirk perpetually plastered on his face, and always with a shawl perched upon his shoulders to make him look more like a war hero.
Douglas is his perfect opposite. He is cool and calm, knowing he has to be in command if he wants to inspire his soldiers and keep them alive, but one can see in his eyes how seethes at the injustice of what happens. Dax fights and fights for the lives of his men but cannot win; still, he keeps his cool because, for the sake of his men, he cannot afford to lose himself. Douglas brings the perfect combo of toughness and sincerity Dax needs to have.
The movie also easily separates the men at the top from the grunts at the bottom. Mireau and Broulard are almost always seen in an extravagant mansion, which is well-kept and orderly. In one particularly telling scene, the director, Stanley Kubrick, parallels the emotional horrors of the three soldiers who are awaiting their death in prison with a happy-go-lucky dance in which the generals cavort with beautiful women.
But just because there is a lot of focus on horrors outside the battlefield does not mean Kubrick flinches from showing the evils of war in action. The battle to take the Ant Hill is horrifying to watch in the very worst way. Bombs and mines go off in every direction. Bullets fly everywhere and find many targets. The terrain is tough and unforgiving. The only way to stay alive is to plunge oneself farther into the madness.
It is not as bloody and graphic as, say, Saving Private Ryan's opening scene, but it does not have to be. With a few simple techniques -- an unwieldy camera, jarring cuts and faraway angles -- the war becomes as terrible as anything a person could ever film. What adds to this is the sound of it all, which is liable to haunt a person's soul for hours after hearing it. The explosions, the zings of the bullets and shouts of men coalesce into a monotone drone that gives war the voice of a monster. Listening to that is like watching this army fight a creature out of a horror movie. It is frightening.
Paths of Glory tells its story straight and simple without pulling any punches. All the horror is there -- the cynicism of the generals, the hopelessness of survival and the heart-twisting realization of utter solitude. The only glimmer of hope in the movie, which is in itself a cry against blind patriotism, is immediately swallowed up by a simple sentence: "We have orders to move back to the front immediately."
EDIT: Once again, retroactive scene addition. In these bit from Paths of Glory, Col. Dax pleads with the corrupt military trial judges to show mercy on three soldiers they are railroading into taking blame for the failed charge on the Ant Hill.
David Lynch is a strange, strange man.
Lynch is famous for focusing on the very outskirts of humanity, on the horrors that make up our worst, most surreal nightmares. In fact, many of Lynch's movies are like a long nightmare. Mulholland Dr. is no different.
The plot, such as it is, begins with a dark-haired woman (Laura Elena Harring) who survives a car accident on the famous Mulholland Drive in Los Angeles. She sneaks into an apartment and is met by an aspiring actress named Betty Finn (Naomi Watts) who has come down to California from Deep River, Ontario. The dark-haired woman, who calls herself "Rita," has no memory of who she is and how she got where she is; Betty, being the kind-hearted soul she is, decides to help Rita piece together the shattered fragments of her memory.
Mulholland Dr. is a rarity -- a great movie where the story does not matter at all. The plot is incredibly confusing on first watch, with many random scenes that appear to have no direct correlation with what is supposed to be happening, and a sudden shift during the final half-hour that takes the movie in a completely different direction than how it began. I actually have a decent understanding of the plot, but that is not why I like the movie at all.
Lynch is perhaps the best crafter of mood in Hollywood today. He works best when his scenes inspire fear, dread and paranoia, and there is plenty of that in Mulholland Dr.. The movie unfolds like a faraway dream; it presents the audience with incoherent scenes filled with images of pure fright.
Take this scene in a diner that happens after Rita and Betty begin their detective work: A man is talking to another man, describing a nightmare he had where a horrible figure appeared behind the diner. The man's companion scoffs at the silliness of this, and he proposes they take a look behind the diner to ease the man's fears. From there, the scene unfolds slowly, with the camera essentially taking on the point of view of the man who had the nightmare -- it approaches the back of the diner slowly, knowing that is crazy to be afraid of something in a dream but frightened nonetheless. And, when the camera finally turns the corner, the man sees the figure of his nightmare -- a crazed, filthy old woman who is living behind the diner -- and faints.
This sounds amazingly silly, and, believe me, it was silly to write, but when you're watching it unfold onscreen, it's actually a superbly intense, well-crafted and scary scene. Mulholland Dr. is filled with scenes like that. While the movie follows around Rita and Betty as they get deeper into the mystery, Lynch is also content to throw in a scene where, say, a dwarf commands an army of Hollywood tough guys via cell phone.
These scenes don't make sense; in fact, they are not supposed to make sense. Lynch is not interested in creating a typical movie where the heroes move from point A to point B and everyone goes home happy. He would rather work the emotions -- burrow deep into the soul of the viewer and shake it up a bit. Lynch's technique is admittedly manipulative. He presents mystery where mystery may not even exist. He dangles hints of important plot points when there may not even be a plot. He gives the audience intriguing characters, and then changes them completely by the end of the movie.
But none of that matters. That manipulation is exactly what makes Mulholland Dr. worth watching. It's about letting oneself go and giving in to the dream. It's about letting the images wash over you and work their magic. It's about letting go of all logical analysis and feeling things on a purely primal level. That sense of feeling primal emotion deep in the gut is what makes Mulholland Dr. work so well.
It is not a movie for everyone, clearly. I would liken it to film noir, where the plots were intricate, confusing and folded in on themselves many times before the end of the picture. However, the plot was not the reason to watch film noir -- it was the style. It was the way the movies looked, and the way the characters spoke and carried themselves. It is the same with Mulholland Dr.. The only difference is you are not watching to see how people carry themselves; you are watching to see how a nightmare carries itself.
EDIT: Still going with the videos. In this scene from Mulholland Dr., the man describes his disturbing dream and confronts it.
Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Movie is a movie of paradoxes, simultaneously the show's most visually-appealing achievement and its most frustrating missed opportunity.
It all starts as normal. The movie begins with Dr. Clayton Forrester (Trace Beaulieu) informing the audience of the general premise behind MST3K -- he forces Mike Nelson (Michael J. Nelson) and his robot pals, Tom Servo (Kevin Murphy) and Crow T. Robot (also played by Beaulieu), to watch mind-numbingly awful movies to test the limits of the human psyche so that he can find the perfect bad movie with which to dominate the world. For this experiment, Forrester has Mike and the 'bots watch This Island Earth, which they gleefully tear apart to keep a hold on their tenuous sanity.
Perhaps the most striking thing about the movie is its length -- at 73 minutes, it is far shorter than the average MST3K episode (which usually hovers around 90-93 minutes). With the host segments taking up their requisite amount of time, that leaves less than an hour for movie riffing. This came about because Gramercy Pictures, the movie's distributor, noticed test audiences' patience with the movie's concept wavered around the 75-minute mark, so they requested Best Brains (MST3K's production studio) trim the movie to be consistent with audience attention spans.
So that is one big blow to the movie right there. It's a shame because the quality of riffing is generally quite high. Some people are more unforgiving toward the movie because the riffing is "dumbed down" (also at the request of Gramercy) so that general audiences will get the jokes. There aren't as many random Minnesota references or jokes about jingles from old dishwasher detergent commercials, but obscurity does not always make a joke automatically funny, so that was not such a bad compromise. Sucks if you are a super-elitist who thinks jokes are funny only if they reference soap commercials from 40 years ago.
The movie length really hurts the host segments, however. They, too, are abbreviated in comparison to the show's host segments, and it greatly affects their quality. The host segments are not bad (I actually think they are funnier the more I think about them), but they are not as bizarre and surprising as MST3K host segments tend to be. ("The Canada Song," anyone? Hockey hair? Grizzled Old Prospector Syndrome? And those are all from one episode!)
Fans of MST3K also noticed something off about the movie selection. Again due to orders from Gramercy, Best Brains was limited in the movies it could choose to riff on -- it had to be a Universal movie, it had to be in color and it could not be horrifyingly awful. (Interestingly, Best Brains actually agreed with the final demand -- it thought the movie riffed on should have a decent amount of action and quality so that audiences would remain interested.) This led to This Island Earth being chosen for the movie; it's definitely the best movie affiliated with MST3K (which isn't saying much), and it actually is not a terrible movie. Mainly the story is a bit dry and cliche, the acting is stuck in early 20th century super melodramatic mode and the effects are a bit dated (though far ahead of many science-fiction movies of the time). This Island Earth is not great, but it is certainly no Manos: The Hands of Fate or Monster A Go-Go.
One strange thing that has always rubbed me the wrong way is Gramercy's request that Best Brains sprinkle in more jokes with strong profanity and drug references so that the movie's rating would go up from G to PG. Its reasoning was that a G rating would be the "kiss of death" for a movie appealing to young adults. I can be as cynical as any other young'un, but the cynicism of that request disgusts me. It is easy to tell the Best Brains crew was not into that request, because most of the jokes with profanity and drug references are not funny (with one notable exception, which I unfortunately cannot repeat here, although I can say the joke is funny only because of the pure malice in Servo's voice when he says it). For the most part, these profane jokes are meaningless and add absolutely nothing to the movie -- swearing and drugs do not offend me in the least, but they do become offensive when they're used to prop up unfunny jokes, and especially when they are used in such a thoroughly cynical way.
If Gramercy was so concerned with appealing to MST3K's core audience (college-age geeks), then one would think it would have made the effort to make sure the movie's distribution was not so terrible. Having the movie appear mainly in college towns was the right idea; however, the movie would stay in these towns for a week or two at most, which was not enough time for word-of-mouth to spread that MST3K was in town. Trust me, MST3K fans are an obsessive bunch -- they would have watched the movie in theaters multiple times had it, say, been there more than one or two weeks.
MST3K: The Movie could have been so much more than it was. However, despite the negativity behind the scenes, it is an impressive accomplishment for Best Brains. The movie is definitely the most technically-advanced MST3K creation, and the movie in general looks great. It is also funny as hell -- MST3K's writers were good enough to get around all the limitations set upon them and make a hilarious movie.
It is just too bad that, in the words of Mike Nelson, production of the movie sucked the life out of the Best Brains crew.
EDIT: Choosing a specific scene for the MST3K movie is weird, so I'll just go with this montage of jokes.
