Film Studies

Aug232012

Raiders in IMAX

If you haven’t heard the news yet, the 1981 film classic that forever set a dress code for adventurers in the minds of the general public is coming back to the big screen — actually, to the biggest screens, i.e., IMAX theaters — starting September 7th, for one week only. As with other recent “event screenings” of the landmark motion pictures Jaws and Casablanca, this is basically a promotional stunt keyed around the upcoming drop of the complete Indiana Jones series on BluRay. But that’s okay… any excuse to experience one of my all-time favorites in the theater is fine by me. Here’s the poster for the re-release:

It looks like the work of Drew Struzan, whose signature style seems to have become the default for both the Indy movies and the Star Wars saga, but my understanding is that he didn’t actually paint this one. (Struzan retired from film-poster work following Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull in 2008, but I briefly thought he might have been lured back for this one-off project. Guess not.) Of course, I do have a quibble with the inclusion of “Indiana Jones and the” in the title. It’s unwieldy and unnecessary, as I’m pretty sure everybody knows this is an Indiana Jones movie. And I resent the fact that after 30 years of knowing it under one title, we’re now expected to start thinking of this flick by a different name. Um, no. Just as the original Star Wars will never be “A New Hope” for me, this movie is called Raiders of the Lost Ark. Period. Always was, always will be. Lucasian revisionism aside, though, this is a really nice poster. I especially like the reference to the warehouse scene in the upper right, and Indy silhouetted against the Egyptian sunset on the left, both of which are iconic cinematic images that, as far as I’m aware, have never been referenced in any previous advertising art. I wouldn’t mind having one of these in my collection, if anyone out there wants to get me a present. My birthday is coming up in only a couple of weeks, you know.

Incidentally, if you’re concerned that the title or anything else may have been changed within the film itself, rest easy. Senor Spielbergo himself assures us it ain’t so… and also says he won’t be doing any more tinkering with his old films because he “learned from the fans” following the E.T. debacle. Interestingly, he says that while he’s done with digital revisionism, he intends going forward to keep both versions of that film available for those who have a preference. If only his best friend could be convinced of the wisdom of that position…

May202012

Sunday Morning Movie Review: Stay Hungry

With the DVD format now in its final death spiral leading out of the marketplace, I find I’m buying more of them than ever. What’s happening is that retailers and budget stores that specialize in closeout merchandise are dumping old inventory at ridiculously low prices, in some cases lower than it would cost to rent them, assuming there were still any rental stores around. But of course browsing a video store for back-catalog stuff I haven’t seen is no longer an option, and Netflix’s recommendation algorithms just never seem to generate the same level of serendipity I used to experience as I wandered up and down aisles of actual, physical media. So I’ve taken to rolling the dice and buying el-cheapo DVDs at Big Lots sight-unseen on the off chance they may be something I’ll like. I admit I’ve ended up feeling like I wasted my money more than once. But I’ve also gotten lucky with a few titles that turned out to be really good. Or at least really interesting for some reason. Case in point: a 1976 film called Stay Hungry.

Directed by Bob Rafelson, who’s best known for the Jack Nicholson vehicle Five Easy Pieces — that’s the one with the famous scene of Jack dealing with an unpleasant waitress in his own inimitable fashion — Stay Hungry stars an achingly young Jeff Bridges as the only son of a wealthy Southern family who’s trying to find his place in the world following the death of his parents. Having fallen in with a group of real-estate developers who want to build a high-rise office tower, Bridges is given the assignment of acquiring the last hold-out property on the block, a broken-down old gymnasium. But the situation becomes complicated when Bridges finds himself drawn to the eccentric family of characters who inhabit the place, notably a perky receptionist and a charismatic bodybuilder named Joe Santo, who is in training for the upcoming Mr. Universe contest.

Stay Hungry is pretty typical of early-70s mainstream cinema, an uneasy blend of comedy and drama with a loosey-goosey plotline that sometimes feels aggravatingly aimless, as well as a tone that veers from whimsical to discomforting to downright horrifying, before veering into straight-out farce at the story’s climax. To be honest, I wasn’t sure I was even liking the film until it was over — for the record, I’ve since decided that, yes, I did like it — but the one element that kept me going through my uncertainty was the cast. Jeff Bridges wasn’t yet the national treasure he has since become; in certain scenes, he comes off as trying too hard. But in others he was so perfectly naturalistic and utterly inhabiting the character, it’s easy to forget who you’re watching. And of course he’s always been an amiable presence, even in films where he’s played more unsympathetic characters.

The adorable Sally Field made her feature-film debut in Stay Hungry, successfully transitioning away from child-star television roles in Gidget and The Flying Nun, in part by baring her behind in a post-lovemaking scene. But even without that bonus attraction, she turns in a professional, layered performance and it’s very easy to believe Bridges would fall for her hard enough to change his entire life. (Full disclosure: I’ve always had a bit of a thing for Miss Frog.)

The supporting cast includes several familiar faces that are fun to see so much younger than we’re accustomed to, including Scatman Crothers as Bridges’ family butler, a pre-Freddy Krueger Robert Englund, Ed Begley Jr., and Roger C. Mosley, a.k.a. TC the chopper pilot on Magnum P.I.

But the really fascinating presence in this film is the guy playing Joe Santo, a real-life bodybuilder named… Arnold Schwarzenegger. Although Stay Hungry was technically his third film following Hercules in New York and Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye, this was the first time audiences had heard his true voice and his distinctive Austrian accent (he was dubbed in Hercules, and menacingly silent in the Altman film), so his credit in Stay Hungry justifiably reads “Introducing…” Arnie was at the height of his Mr. Universe days here — Joe Santo’s story is a thinly disguised version of his own biography — and his body is simply a wonder to behold, especially in the film’s conclusion when we see him in competition, flexing and posing alongside a man who is his equal in size, but lacks Arnold’s definition and — just as importantly — his showmanship. He truly was astounding. But far more captivating than his physique in this film is the character he played, so completely unlike the familiar wisecracking action-figure persona he adopted later on in the ’80s. Joe Santo is inhumanly focused on his workouts, yes, but other than that he’s… nice. He’s friendly and supportive of his friends and self-effacing and sympathetic. After a lifetime of “I’ll be back”-style quips, it’s downright startling to see Arnold playing just a guy. And even though I doubt he ever would have become a great actor, certainly not someone on the level of his Stay Hungry costar Jeff Bridges, I find myself a little sad that he didn’t play more regular guys in his acting career.

Anyhow, even with the caveat that this film is somewhat dated and something of a rambling shaggy-dog story, I recommend Stay Hungry purely on the strength of the cast, and especially on the unusual and refreshing performance by a very young Arnold. It turned out to be one of my better Big Lots gambles. If nothing else, it’s worth seeing for the scene in which The Terminator plays fiddle with a bunch of backwoods good old boys:

May182012

The Problem with Remakes

But the point is that when a movie remake is launched, the property already possesses a history, a context, a vibe, and a perception by the culture-at-large. The critical task of the remake-r is to interpret those pre-existing characteristics and determine the “why” behind the initial and residual success.

But that “why” isn’t always easy to understand, and it is even more difficult to replicate.

The message … is that you can’t go home again.

— John Kenneth Muir, with whom I tend to agree an uncanny amount of the time

May172012

True Geek Confessions

Michael May of AdventureBlog fame has recently been taking writing assignments from a shadowy online cabal known as the League of Extraordinary Bloggers, and when I saw the current one, I knew I just had to have a piece of that action:

What is something you absolutely hate or love or just don’t get, or maybe it’s something you have never even seen or read. What is your deepest, darkest geek confession?

Like Michael, I’ve elected to go for a straight flush and provide an answer for each proposed category. So, briefly but most likely provocatively:

Something I Hate That Everyone Else Loves: The “reimagined” version of Battlestar Galactica. I’ll admit, I was probably biased against this one from the start because of my affection for the original Galactica, but I gave the new series an honest chance to win me over, I really did. I watched the pilot film and the first half-dozen or so regular production episodes, and… it just didn’t do anything for me. While there were some interesting storylines (the one where the Cylons were harassing the fleet every 30 minutes or whatever was good, as was the one about replenishing the Galactica‘s water supply, an issue the original never touched on), I didn’t like what I saw as unnecessary changes in the show’s basic premise (the Cylons created by humanity instead of an alien race, the Twelve Colonies all existing on a single world instead of 12 separate planets), I didn’t like the shaky-cam cinematography, I didn’t like people from the other side of the galaxy wearing perfectly ordinary 20th-century business suits and having perfectly normal North American/European names… and worst of all, I just didn’t like the characters. Not one of them. I recognize that modern audiences have different expectations of their fictional characters now than they did in the ’70s, but everybody on this show was conflicted, bitchy, morally compromised, untrustworthy, and totally unsympathetic. By the sixth episode, I found I didn’t give a damn if the Cylons did wipe them all out, and that’s not a series I care to keep watching. Sorry.
Something I Love That Everyone Else Hates: As you might imagine from the above, the original Battlestar Galactica. Seems nobody can even mention this one anymore without sneering, or at least applying a qualifier like “guilty pleasure,” but I maintain it was not as bad as people think it was (at least not when you consider the context in which it was made, i.e., late 1970s broadcast television) and I personally far prefer its themes of friendship and family to the complete dysfunction I saw on the remake. I prefer my heroes with some innate nobility and joi di vivre — even in the face of total catastrophe — to unrelenting nihilism. And even though its dialog was notoriously clumsy with weird made-up jargon and its writers ignorant of actual astronomy (they seemed to think the terms “galaxy” and “star system” were interchangeable), the show conveyed a genuine sense of wonder about the universe that frankly no modern sci-fi movie or series seems able to capture anymore, not even the various latter-day Star Treks.
Something I Don’t Get That Everyone Else Seems To: The Christopher Nolan/Christian Bale Batman movies. They’re undeniably well made, but I don’t find them especially thrilling or inspiring or fascinating, or even all that much fun. I’ve only seen Batman Begins and The Dark Knight one time each, and never especially wanted to see them again, nor do I really remember much of what happened in either of them. These films seemed to slide right across the surface of my consciousness without leaving a mark. Part of this is probably due to the fact that I have a very hard time seeing Christian Bale as anything but a pretentious, self-absorbed dick, so I don’t really care what happens to his Bruce Wayne/Batman. And partly, I dislike the unrelentingly downbeat tone of these movies. Like Neo-Galactica, it’s ultimately about unsympathetic characters and nihilism for me… But then I’m already hearing talk about rebooting this series after the third chapter comes out this summer, so there’s always the next version. (Really? A reboot already? You can’t give it a rest for a decade, guys? Sheesh…)
Something I’ve Never Seen That Everyone Else Has: Finally, this one isn’t really a “geek” thing, but it is a pretty major landmark that is constantly referenced, at least by people of a certain age, and I just have to nod my head like I know what they’re talking about because I’ve never seen… Rocky. That’s right, one of the watershed blockbusters of the ’70s and I’ve not seen it, or any of its sequels. Not do I really care. Not a big Stallone fan, you see…

May152012

Tom Wilson’s Back to the Future FAQ

Spotted something interesting and/or amusing over on Boing Boing yesterday: It’s an image of the card that actor and stand-up comedian Tom Wilson, who played the lunkheaded bully Biff Tanner in the classic Back to the Future movie trilogy, reportedly hands out when he’s approached by BTTF fans, rather than waste time answering questions he’s responded to a million times already:

At first glance, this seems kind of dickish, and that’s apparently how Cory Doctorow at Boing Boing interpreted it (Cory’s comment was “I wonder, though, how many of the fans who approach him with these questions ask them because they really care about the answer, and how many are using the questions as a conversational gambit, and really just want to speak briefly with him because they admire his work?”). However, having talked to a few actors associated with cult and/or genre films in my time, I really can’t condemn Wilson for taking this approach. It’s got to become very tiresome for these people to constantly hear the same old inquiries, especially when they’re all related to a movie they made 25 years ago, and especially when many of the questions aren’t even about them, their roles, or their performances, but instead pertain to bigger stars than themselves or the technical matters of movie-making. But then, my reaction to this may be skewing more sympathetic because I have an idea of the tone Wilson probably intends. Here’s something I first saw a year or two ago but never got around to blogging about, in which Wilson addresses these same questions in a somewhat different format:

May092012

It’s Going to Be a Busy Summer…

The Tower Theatre, Salt Lake’s local art cinema and the closest thing to a revival house we have in these parts, has just released the schedule for this year’s “Summer of 35mm,” its annual program of cult favorites and Hollywood classics, and it’s a hell of a line-up this year:

I’ve seen all of this year’s selections before, but there are only a couple of these I wouldn’t want to see again (Clue, which I didn’t care much for, and The Royal Tenenbaums — I just don’t get Wes Anderson’s precious little yuppy autobiographies), and there are several here I’ve never before seen on the big screen, notably Chinatown. The new releases this summer may not be doing much for me, but that doesn’t mean I won’t be spending plenty of time at the movies… I hope!

May052012

A Tale of Two Pitts

How about we discuss something a little less dire now, okay?

I started thinking this morning about something I said a while back in that long entry about my personal history with the Titanic story. Specifically, I opined that the late actor Richard Jordan made a better Dirk Pitt in the 1980 movie Raise the Titanic than Matthew McConnaughey did in his 2005 film, Sahara. Dirk Pitt, to refresh everyone’s memories, is the fictional hero of a long-running series of adventure novels by a guy named Clive Cussler. While I doubt even the hardest-core Cussler enthusiast would ever argue (at least not with a serious face) that the Pitt novels are anything resembling “good” literature, I’ve always found them to be reliably entertaining summertime/airport reads, in large part because the central character is so vividly drawn by the author. Readers of these books know Dirk Pitt.

Now, neither Jordan nor McConnaughey resembles Pitt as Cussler describes him: craggy features, thick black hair, and deep green eyes. In fact, the only actor that I can think of who remotely fits that description is Tom Selleck in his Magnum P.I. heyday. But no matter; oftentimes it’s more important for an actor in a film adaptation to convey a character’s spirit than to literally look the way the author visualized him. So, what do we know about Pitt’s spirit?

Well, he’s a romantic with a deep respect for history and its artifacts, as well as for the sea. He’s a defender of justice, the sort of hero who stumbles into situations in which people are being mistreated and he won’t rest until he’s corrected the problem. He has a kind heart that endears him to women, but he can be single-minded and absolutely ruthless when he needs to be. He’s frequently brash when the action is underway, but he’s also methodical when he’s trying to unravel a mystery or searching for a treasure. He’s a rough-and-tumble man’s man who enjoys a burrito with his pals, but given his background as the wealthy son of a U.S. senator (and occasional lover of another), he’s equally comfortable rubbing elbows with the upper crust and enjoying the finer things.

Little of this is depicted in the two movies, which are both pretty light on the background character details. But again, we’re looking for a sense of the character, if not the specifics. So, given all that, which one of these guys do you think looks more like like he has an explorer’s heart and a gourmand’s taste, who can gallantly offer his arm to a little old lady before cold-bloodedly shooting an assassin between the eyes? Is it this guy?

Or this one?

I suppose it’s all a matter of personal taste, but to me, McConnaughey’s Pitt looks more likely to scarf a bag of Cheetos and a six of Bud Light than sip a flute of Veuve Clicquot, and I just don’t buy him as a rugged sea-faring man with a passion for history. Maybe it was Jordan’s beard. Or the fact that he was my first exposure to the character. Or maybe it’s just that the only thing I’ve ever really liked McConnaughey in was Dazed and Confused, and I can’t see him as anything other than a laid-back goofball.

Not that any of this matters, of course. Neither film exactly set the world on fire, and as far as I know, there are no Pitt fanboys out there clamoring for another one. In addition, Cussler has made no secret of how badly he feels Hollywood mistreated him and his creation — he even sued the producers of Sahara, although I no longer remember exactly why — so he’s not likely going to be too willing to option out another of his books. Besides, it also seems to me that the books are not as popular as they once were. They’re still coming out, but Cussler himself has retired in all but name, and they’re now being written by his son, Dirk Cussler (yes, Dirk Pitt was named for Cussler’s own son). All of which means, it’s pretty unlikely there will ever be another Pitt movie starring… anybody. But the way I see it, Tom Clancy fans like to debate which actor best embodied their boy Jack Ryan, and of course the question of who is the definitive James Bond has been an evergreen movie-nerd topic for decades. So why not quibble over our favorite Dirk Pitt as well?

(Incidentally, my opinions on the other two subjects are Alec Baldwin in Red October, and Sean Connery as Bond, as good as the Daniel Craig reboots have so far been…)

Apr192012

Don’t Mind Me…

Just jotting down a few notes about upcoming movies of interest…

The Raven (April 27) — John Cusack plays Edgar Allan Poe trying to stop a serial killer who’s using Poe’s own stories as inspiration. In what universe does that not sound cool?
The Pirates! Band of Misfits (April 27) — Animated flick from Aardman Studios, the people behind Chicken Run and the Wallace and Gromit shorts. I love their stuff, and this one looks like more of the same old fun.
The Avengers (May 4) — This ambitious multi-film/franchise crossover event had my box-office dollars from the moment Samuel L. Jackson appeared as Nick Fury in Iron Man. The fact that it’s starting to look as if it’s actually good is just icing on the cake.
Dark Shadows (May 11) — Lots of folks seem to be down on Tim Burton these days, but I usually enjoy his films at least on the first viewing, and this reboot of the old supernatural soap opera of the 1970s looks really funny to me.
Men in Black 3 (May 25) — The trailer looks like more of the same old MiB schtick we saw in the first two, but I liked them a lot, so that’s not necessarily a bad thing. And Josh Brolin’s impersonation of Tommy Lee Jones looks to be uncanny, and worth the price of admission itself.
Prometheus (June 8) — Director Ridley Scott swears up and down this film is not a prequel to Alien, but I ain’t buying it, and so I’m pretty ambivalent about this one. Alien is one of my all-time favorite movies, in large part because so much of what happens in it remains a mystery at the end, and frankly I don’t want that to be ruined with unsatisfying (and unrequested) explanations. I don’t want to know where the aliens come from, or really anything at all about the wrecked spaceship that the good crew of the Nostromo will investigate someday. As far as I’m concerned, those things don’t matter. Nevertheless, there’s so much buzz growing around Prometheus, I imagine I’ll probably give in and see it anyhow. I suppose if anyone could return to the Alien universe and make anything worth watching, it’d be the guy who first took us there. (Of course, it would help if the late screenwriter Dan O’Bannon were involved, too…)
Rock of Ages (June 15) — The Girlfriend loves musicals and has been trying for years to find one I’ll love too. Between Alec Baldwin as a sleazy nightclub owner, Catherine Zeta-Jones as, well, anything as long as she’s in it, and a soundtrack featuring all the lame old ’80s hard-rock music I love, this just may be the one she’s been looking for. I’m totally stoked for this one and I won’t apologize for it.
Brave (June 22) — The latest animated film from Pixar, set in the 10th century Scottish Highlands. ‘Nuff said.
The Dark Knight Rises (July 20) — Meh. I’ve decided I really don’t care for Christian Bale and Christopher Nolan’s take on Batman, but there’s a trilogy to be squared, and I know some of this one was shot just outside my friend Cranky Robert’s office in Pittsburgh, so I imagine I’ll see it eventually just out of curiosity.
Total Recall (August 3) — I know, I know, it’s a remake, and I’m the dude who loathes remakes. But this looks like a somewhat different take on the original source material (a short story by Philip K. Dick) rather than a direct rip of the ’91 Schwarzenegger film, so with luck it’ll turn out like John Carpenter’s The Thing vs. Howard Hawks’ The Thing from Another World — both good films based on the same source, but not really very much like each other. Maybe I’m rationalizing because the trailer looked better than I expected.
Looper (September 28) — A time-travel action thriller starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt — yes, that’s the kid from the TV sitcom Third Rock from the Sun, now all grown up and playing a mob enforcer — and Bruce Willis as Gordon-Levitt’s future self. I hadn’t even heard of this until a couple weeks ago when a buddy sent me the trailer. It looks good!
The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (December 14) — It could be a disaster, I know, trying to integrate a children’s book with the much darker and more sophisticated Lord of the Rings saga, and also splitting that relatively short volume across two movies… but what the hell. At the very least, it’ll be nice to see Ian McKellen as Gandalf again.

Apr112012

Proof of the Obvious

So, The Girlfriend went to her hair stylist last night for the usual maintenance work, and she later told me that while she was in the chair, the smalltalk turned, as I imagine it often does, to recent movies. Anne mentioned to her stylist that she and I quite liked John Carter, only to have the stylist remark that she wasn’t interested in that one because she couldn’t really tell what it was about from the TV ads. So Anne — who I think is on the verge of becoming a genuine Edgar Rice Burroughs fan, thanks to our nightly readings from the Barsoom series (we’re about two-thirds of the way through book two, The Gods of Mars, right now) — proceeded to explain what the movie’s marketing did not: that it was a swashbuckling adventure based on a seminal century-old sci-fi/fantasy pulp novel by the same author who created Tarzan… at which point, her stylist said something to the effect of, “Really? It’s based on a book? By the guy behind Tarzan? I totally would’ve seen it if I had known that!”

You see how easy it would’ve been, Disney marketing people? Bunch of schmucks…

Mar272012

Sometimes We Move Backwards

This morning, Boing Boing linked to an article I found interesting, on the way science-fiction stories often feature apparent “gaps” or imbalances in the technology of their imaginary worlds, and why those gaps are not necessarily a failure on the writer’s part. The starting point for the article was the current phenom movie The Hunger Games and the books from which it is adapted. I haven’t read or seen The Hunger Games myself, but apparently the story has drawn a certain amount of criticism because the futuristic dystopia in which it is set (supposedly descended from our own United States of America following some kind of apocalypse) includes such high-tech flourishes as hovercraft, force fields, and genetically engineered animals, but it still relies on coal-fired powerplants for electricity and has nothing resembling the Internet. Some readers/viewers question the idea of a society that’s so advanced in some ways but not in others. The article goes on to make the argument that real societies choose to adopt or abandon technologies for all sorts of reasons — political, economic, and/or cultural — and the seeming flaws of imagination in this story can be explained quite logically, given the assumptions of the society in question. The whole thing reminded me of what I said a couple weeks ago regarding the usage of swords in so much of the “planetary romance” sub-genre of science fiction, i.e., that it’s not at all unreasonable for John Carter or Flash Gordon to fight the bad guys with a sword while anti-gravity airships hang overhead, because Barsoom and Mongo have societies that, for whatever reason, still value prowess with a blade, even though firearms are available. Because, you know, swordfighting is cool. Especially in stories, which are all this stuff really is, after all.

And just in case you still don’t buy the notion that a society really might choose to go deliberately retro or turn its back on certain technologies, consider the somewhat depressing final line from that Boing Boing post:

A decade ago, you could fly London to New York in a couple of hours. A year ago, America had a reusable spacecraft.

But not now. Because we decided those things were no longer economical. Or necessary.