Excalibur

Excalibur

"Merlin lives in our dreams now.
He speaks to us from there."
- King Arthur in Excalibur

King Arthur, one of the most enduring heroes of literature had not fared so well on the big screen. It wasn't even until Knights of the Round Table (1953) more than a half century after the birth of cinema that any serious attempt was made to tell his story.

In one of the latest takes, director Guy Ritchie brings his cockney gangster aesthetic to the Arthur legend in King Arthur: The Legend of the Sword. The film has been nearly universally panned by critics with the editing and lack of narrative flow being the most frequent complaints: "sloppily edited" (Salon.com), "fast cuts and jagged pacing... a brutal, bleedin' mess" (Rolling Stone), "narrative logic has no purchase" Slate "scattershot edits and on-the-fly plot descriptions" (Toronto Star).
While there have been some successful comedic takes (notably A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, and Monty Python and the Holy Grail), only one serious film truly stands out - director John Boorman's 1981 film Excalibur.

Excalibur co-written by Boorman and Rospo Pallenberg draws inspiration from Thomas Malory's 15th Century version of the tales, Le Morte d'Arthur. The film is a lavish production featuring the full contingent of knights always clad in exquisite plate mail armor, and outstanding location photography in Ireland. All set to a soundtrack of Wagnerian opera and other classical greats. It's almost impossible to sit still when Arthur rides into battle for the first time, to the rousing strains of Orff's O, Fortuna.

The entire cast is top notch, including Nigel Terry as Arthur, Nicholas Clay as Lancelot, and Cherie Lunghi as Guenevere, but the real show-stealer is Nicol Williamson who gives a uniquely charming take on the old wizard Merlin. The supporting cast is a phenomenal who's-who of then-unknown actors like Helen Mirren, Liam Neeson, Patrick Stewart, and Gabriel Byrne!

Surprisingly, reviews were very mixed at the time. Roger Ebert called it, "a mess", and "a record of the comings and goings of arbitrary, inconsistent, shadowy figures". The New York Times called it pretentious, and legendary film critic Pauline Kael called the dialogue "near-atrocious" and said, "Excalibur is all images flashing by... We miss the dramatic intensity that we expect the stories to have". In other words, editing and narrative flow were among the biggest complaints.

But what a difference time has made. Today Excalibur is widely regarded as a classic, and the definitive screen rendition of Arthurian myth. Review aggregating site Rotten Tomatoes give it an 82% "fresh" (favorable) rating. Compare that to fellow British director Guy Ritchie's King Arthur: The Legend of the Sword which has a mere 28% (A.K.A. "rotten") rating. Maybe one day, decades hence, King Arthur: The Legend of the Sword will be seen as a classic too, but somehow I doubt it.

Hostel

Hostel

Hostel delivers what fans of the sub-genre want

It's often possible to get an inkling of what Quentin Tarantino's next film is going to be about based on the films he produces, distributes, or is in some other way associated with: neo-noir and blaxsploitation before Jackie Brown, kung-fu before Kill Bill, and grindhouse cinema prior to Grindhouse. In the latter case he produced the wildly successful film Hostel.

In the mid 2000s, the grindhouse horror sub-genre was making a second comeback in the U.S. (the first was the slasher films of the 1980s), in the form of what is now often derisively)called, "torture porn" due to its almost lascivious fascination with showing violence with suspense subordinate to explicit gore.

On that count, Hostel delivers the goods. It's not for the squeamish, but fans of the sub-genre will be pleased. But Hostel is more than that. I will sit through almost any amount of gut-wrenching gore - provided it has a point. Hostel could have easily done what so many B-movies do and just left the killer as a generic killer whose motivation remains unknown. Such movies become little more than pointless exercises in makeup effects. No doubt, those who aren't fans of the genre, or those who mentally tune-out before the final act, would and have criticized Hostel for being just that. But even though mystery and suspense are not the prime drivers of this kind of horror film, there is enough of it here to make it all worthwhile.

Bedazzled

Bedazzled

A Swinging 60s take on Faust.

Dudley Moore was a little like a British Woody Allen, a comedic actor who played sexually repressed intellectual characters and wrote and performed jazz music on the side. While he never reached some of the deeper philosophical depths that Allen did, he did swim the same waters as evidenced by Bedazzled.

Bedazzled, written by Moore and his partner Peter Cook, is a retelling of Faust, with Stanley (Moore) a lovelorn fry cook who makes a deal with the Devil (Cook), pledging his soul in exchange for seven wishes that he hopes will help him land the girl of his dreams.

The film has an interesting take on the Devil, though a lot of the tropes have since been swiped by other movies. It also boasts a great musical score by Moore, not to mention more than one scene of Raquel Welch as the demon Lust in skimpy outfits.

On the other hand, the film has not aged well. It definitely comes off as a relic of the psychedelic era, so much so that it seems to be a greater inspiration for the Austin Powers movies than any James Bond film ever was. The whole affair seems twice as long (or half as funny) as it could have been had they stuck to just three or four wishes.

Still its lightweight comedy fare that touches on some deep philosophical questions and doesn't insult your intelligence, which is more than can be said about a lot of modern comedies. Speaking of which, like so many other films, this one was remade in the 2000s, and by all accounts that version (starring Brendan Fraser) is wholly inferior.

Boys Don't Cry

Boys Don't Cry

Even if it were nothing else, Boys Don't is evidence that Hilary Swank is one of the best actresses in Hollywood.

Because the film was based on a fairly well known true story, there may be inherent SPOILERS ahead.

 

Let's face it, Hilary Swank is not exactly a conventional beauty. In fact she looks like a hard woman that could kick your ass. Which is why she was cast as The Next Karate Kid, and the Million Dollar Baby, and more recently as a frontierswoman in The Homesman. 

But she also showed incredible vulnerability in all those roles as well. And it's her ability to believably pull off tough and vulnerable that makes Boys Don't Cry perhaps her greatest role.

Based on the true story of trans man Brandon Teena who was raped and murdered in Humboldt, NE in the early 1990s. But the film is so much more than a true crime dramatization. As depicted in the film, Brandon was a young man still transitioning not only in gender, but from boy to man. The rural plains States were also a place of transition in the early 90s with dwindling populations, foreclosed farms and lingering recession, as the information age started to drive economics in other parts of the country.

Even before the recession of the early 1990s, though, Nebraska was 95% white, 90% Christian, and provincialism was a way of life. Anyone who dares to dream of anything outside Nebraska is mocked and ridiculed, even by the "broad minded" Lincoln natives like Brandon's ousin Lonny.

The term "toxic masculinity" has been bandied about intellectual circles frequently lately for things like reluctance to seek cancer screenings, but to truly understand the meaning one needs to consider a place like southern Nebraska in the early 90s, and that's a place Director Kimberly Pierce wasn't afraid to shine a light on, and thanks to the acting chops of Hilary Swank, it's a harrowing experience, but one worth visiting, especially given the other strong performance of Chloe Sevigny as Lana, the one ray of hope.

My Father is a Hero (Jet Li's The Enforcer)

My Father is a Hero (Jet Li's The Enforcer)

Jet Li re-teams with Xie Miao

By 1995, the Golden Age of Hong Kong cinema was coming to an end. While Jackie Chan was already making plans to crossover to Hollywood, Jet Li tried to modernize his image by largely discarding the historical epics that made him famous in exchange for modern thriller/action hero roles. 

 

My Father is a Hero was released in the United States by the Weinstein Company's "Dragon Dynasty" imprint as "The Enforcer". Leave it to an art house oriented studio like The Weinstein Company to change the accurate, descriptive title to avoid confusion with some artsy-fartsy French film no one ever saw, yet saddle it with a generic monicker that's actually already in use by an American action film in the Dirty Harry series, which is far more likely to cause confusion.

The film reunites Li with child kung-fu champion Xie Miao (the two previously starred together in the New Legend of Shaolin) as father and son martial artists. Li's character, Wei, is is a Mainland Chinese police officer who's undercover work takes him to Hong Kong, away from his sick wife and son. Meanwhile the beautiful Hong Kong police Inspector Wong becomes suspicious of him and tracks his family down in Beijing. Things escalate from there as Wong learns and reports back to Hong Kong, Wei's cover gets more difficult to conceal, though his superiors refuse to bring him home.

As with previous Jet Li pictures, the actor plays it straight with both acting and kung-fu until the big final battle where things inevitably go over the top (à la the clownish antics of Jackie Chan), which somehow seems even more out of place in modern setting films like this one and The Bodyguard from Beijing than historical pieces like The New Legend of Shaolin.Still, for most Western audiences, this film is probably the most accessible starting place to become acquainted with Jet Li's on-camera work.

Winchester '73

Winchester '73

Independence Day 1876, the nation's Centennial, is the setting for a groundbreaking Western film that would take the genre in a new direction on screen.

The film's poster makes it look like a standard western.

By the end of the 1940s Director Anthony Mann was looking to break out from the Film Noir crime thrillers he'd been making. As luck would have it, Jimmy Stewart was looking for a change in his career after a decade of playing aw-shucks nice guys. So in 1950 the two teamed up to make Winchester '73, a film that breathed new life into the Western genre. Mann brought the dark atmospheric Film Noir sensibilities to the Western (how many Westerns had scenes at night before this?), and Stewart was cast against type as an anti-hero; still an everyman, but one out for revenge. The result was gold, and led to a series of Western collaborations between the two.

Winchester '73's uniqueness doesn't end there, though. The script was a complete novelty for the time. Though Stewart's Lin McAdam is the star, the real protagonist of the story is the titular rifle, the rare, "one in a thousand" perfect Winchester repeating rifle. It was rumored that the Sioux's use of repeating rifles contributed to their victory over Custer at the Battle of Little Big Horn, and the news was spreading. The Winchester 1873 model was the Cadillac of rifles at the time, and so the gun is like a character, and the narrative follows the gun, which frequently crosses paths with McAdam, but follows its own storyline. Thus we actually see different characters come and go as the rifle changes hands. This technique is quite common today, especially in television dramas that follow multiple characters over a long period of time, but for Hollywood of the 1950s, used to a single narrative arc, at most maybe cutting away for parallel action, it was a bold new direction.

If you only see one Jimmy Stewart Western, this is the one to see.

Achorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy

A look at how the 2004 film Anchorman highlights Hollywood's problem with comedy.

Let's face it, most Hollywood "comedies" aren't very funny. This is especially true if they star a former Saturday Night Live alumnus. Long gone are the days when SNL cast members on the big screen might mean a movies like The Blues Brothers, Beverly Hills Cop, or Ghostbusters. Replaced by the likes of The Love Guru, The Waterboy, or Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo. Even worse if it's the full two hour treatment of an actual SNL sketch that wasn't funny enough to sustain five minutes on TV (for example It's Pat the Movie, or Stuart Saves His Family).

And so we come to the tragedy that is Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy - the trouble here is not that it can be listed among the least funny Hollywood comedies of the past twenty years, but that it can be listed among the most funny ones. Aside from the rare oddball like Office Space or The Big Lebowski, laugh out loud studio films are hard to come by. Hollywood seldom makes comedies as funny as Anchorman, and that's the rub because Anchorman just isn't that funny; it has perhaps a chuckle here and there, but chances are all but the most indiscriminate of viewers will be rolling their eyes rather than rolling in the aisles.

It's not worth recapping the plot here - it's actually a time-tested concept. Huge ego male anchorman in the male-dominated world of nightly news must get used to new female reporter. True, the material has been mined to death from The Mary Tyler Moore Show to Murphy Brown,  but are there really ever any dead horses when it comes to comedy?

And don't believe the "Unrated, Uncut, & Uncalled For!" label on the DVD version either. Despite that, and the warning of nudity at the beginning, there really isn't any aside from Christina Applegate's side boob when she's wearing an apron. Like everything else about this movie there's a lot of hype, but not a lot to justify it.

Requiem for a Heavyweight

Requiem for a Heavyweight

The legacy of Rod Serling still packs a punch

Rod Serling is best remembered as creator of The Twilight Zone. And if that were his only achievement in the industry, it would still be a stunner. Arguably the best television show in history. But his legacy didn't end there. He followed The The Twilight Zone with another anthology series, Night Gallery, which, among other things, introduced the young director Stephen Spielberg to the world. He wrote the screenplay for the original Planet of the Apes. And, he had already preceded The Twilight Zone with work on Playhouse 90, most notably "Requiem for a Heavyweight", the story of a punch-drunk ex heavyweight contender, trying to adjust to life outside the ring. It won a special Peabody Award, as well as an Emmy, and was Serling's proudest work.

Several years later Requiem for a Heavyweight was adapted for the big screen with Anthony Quinn in the lead role. Though not directed by Serling, it has his fingerprints all over it. And, like much of his work, all these years later it still packs a punch (so to speak).

It's amazing that with all the sports out there, boxing seems to be the one with all the best movies, and yet Requiem for a Heavyweight still stands out thanks to the authentic feel of Serling's writing (he was himself a former boxer). And if that's not enough, cameos by Jack Dempsey and Cassius "Muhammad Ali" Clay just add more cred.

American Hustle

What Took So Long?

One of the first news stories I remember ever paying attention to was the ABSCAM scandal circa 1980. Many times over the intervening decades I wondered why a story so fruit for adaptation never made it to the big or small screen: the FBI, so the story goes, enlisted the help of a small time con man to entrap members of Congress in a fake bribery-for-political-influence scam.

Evidently there was a film planned soon after the story broke which was to star the dream team of John Belushi as the con man, and Dan Aykroyd as the FBI Agent in charge, but it was derailed by Belushi's demise.

By the time that American Hustle hit theaters,  over thirty years had passed since ABSCAM was in the headlines, the Middle East is a very different place, and the idea that big money buys political influence is hardly considered revelatory. And, American Hustle merely proclaims "Some of This Actually Happened" in the opening, despite being closer to actual events than most films that claim to be "Based on a True Story".

Director David O, Russel is at the top of his game here, and the ensemble cast of Amy Adams, Christian Bale, Bradley Cooper, Jeremy Renner, and Jennifer Lawrence show that with good performances - excellent ones in fact - you can breath life into a story that to all appearances had gone stale. Even the soundtrack seems fresh, avoiding the most cliche disco hits in favor of less often, but no less period evocative cuts.

Breaking the Waves

Breaking the Waves

Lars von Trier is kind of like the polar opposite of Woody Allen. While both work outside of Hollywood, telling stories about the lives of every day people, Allen's films tend to depict the world as a place where people live lives of quiet desperation, and though unfortunate things happen overall, life is joyful in spite of them, largely due to social interaction. Von Trier films, on the other hand, feature people who live lives of quiet desperation, and unfortunate events are things that people suffer through, and despite their perseverance, the world remains a cruel and inhospitable place mostly because of other people. Allen's films leave the viewer to extrapolate the theme, while Von Trier's are unambiguous, even heavy-handed at times.

Any von Trier film is guaranteed to be a long and dreary affair, and Breaking the Waves is one of his longest (exceeded only by the two volume, 5+ hour Nymphomaniac), and dreariest (exceeded only by Dancer in the Dark) films. But that's part of the reason to watch his films, they give a wholly different experience from mainstream Hollywood drama. And Breaking the Waves is the film that catapulted him to International recognition.

Set in a remote Scottish seaside village (presumably in the 1970s based on the glam rock soundtrack), Breaking the Waves tells the story of Bess, a young woman raised in the strict Christian traditions of the insular community. The only light in her life is her husband Jan, an oil rig worker. When Jan is paralyzed in an accident, Bess seeks guidance from God (whom she talks to and who seems to talk through her), and Jan, who encourages her to take lovers against her strong objections.

The film ultimately is a condemnation of Christian fundamentalism with the church community being the judgmental and un-Christian at every step of the way, and Bess, almost a living embodiment of Christ, honoring God and her husband though she is (literally) stoned for it. It's more than just a metaphor as the ending reveals. For those that dare to seek out the less pretty side of life, Breaking the Waves is here to show it.

Troma's War

"Bad" movies come in three basic varieties:

1. movies that aren't great but are fun (A.K.A. guilty pleasures)
2. movies that are so bad they're good (A.K.A. the "Plan 9" type)
3. movies that are just a waste of time (A.K.A. boring).

Over the years Troma Entertainment has been responsible for movies of all three types, making it hard to know just which Troma films are worth the investment.

Troma's War (also known as 1,000 Ways to Die) falls into all three of those categories, depending on which version you end up seeing. The film was made when Troma was at it's creative and financial height - the mid to late 1980s, following two of Troma's best films, The Toxic Avenger, and Class of Nuke 'em High. Unfortunately, the original cut of the film was considered too graphic to receive an 'R' rating by the MPAA, and the film was heavily edited. The edited cut was again rejected, and the film was finally released in a version so heavily edited as to drop it into the "waste of time" category. Predictably it flopped and nearly sunk Troma with it.

The film is a parody of 80s action films, and the undercurrent of biting social commentary is definitely there. The plot involves an airline crash on a Caribbean island which is inhabited by a group of terrorists are planning to launch an attack on the U.S. The crash survivors soon run afoul of the terrorists, and eventually after learning of their plans, lead guerilla attacks to take them down.

Despite being one of Troma's best films, it was treated like a red-headed stepchild, one of Troma's more obscure titles for decades, difficult to find in video stores or big box bargain bins. Fortunately it lives on today and can be found for streaming on numerous sites - for free! The best version, however is probably the one available through Troma's own YouTube channel, as it is the best print and avoids pan-and-scan aspect ratio cropping, and some seriously bad sound issues and technical glitches some of the other versions have.