Barb Wire (1997) is an exploitation movie starring Pamela
Anderson Lee, one of the Baywatch babes subsequently infamous for a sex tape that shows her impaled, apparently alive, on the Rock-and-Roller Tommy Lee's massive phallus. (I haven't seen this tape, by all accounts not much better than the more professionally mounted Barb Wire -- a piece of pornography damaged, I am told, by the heroine's dogged sincerity in her strenuous labors.) Dressed in dominatrix-black leather and studs, the protagonist, a woman warrior named Barb Wire, rampages across a dystopian landscape -- the United States in 2017, a nation embroiled in a nightmarish Civil War that seems to pit denizens of a Star Wars movie against the inhabitants of a Mad Max picture: soldiers in BDSM gear fight Jabba the Hut in a vast, burning junkyard. The film's title sequence delivers the goods -- that is, the heroine writhing in a spray of chilly, nipple-stiffening water and we get to see her formidable breasts, more or less, naked for a couple of minutes. After that sequence, ending, jauntily, with Ms. Anderson Lee, hurling a stiletto-heeled into a bad guy's forehead, the heroine covers herself up, cinches her corset about her waist, and doesn't show much other than cleavage for the duration of the movie. The first ten minutes of the movie promise trash heaven -- everything's luridly lit, people get tortured, and there are grotesque bad guys with faces that look like images from a Dick Tracy cartoon; the action scenes are expertly shot and edited and have a real kick. And, then, it's as if the entire rest of the movie were designed, shot, and cut by someone completely different. The movie isn't just sex and violence -- it turns out to have a complex, even labyrinthine plot, based (astonishingly enough) on the classic film, Casablanca. It's impossible to follow what is happening -- the story has something to do with evading identification by retinal fingerprinting through the use of contact lenses. The film's MacGuffin, the object of contention, is a stack of contraband contact lenses. The film takes itself seriously and seems interminable -- it is deeply, profoundly, and relentlessly boring. In the end, there are some gaudy explosions, a fist-fight atop a crane that's about 25 stories high, and some Hum-Vee chases. But, by this time, the audience has long since ceased caring. Pamela Anderson Lee is appealing enough in her iron-lady way -- she resembles Fox News' Valkyries -- Megyn Kelly and Gretchen Carlson -- but the movie lacks all charm; it doesn't even have the kinky appeal of a film so bad that it's good.
Friday, November 11, 2016
Thursday, November 10, 2016
Relatos Salvajes (Wild Tales)
Wild Tales (2014) is an omnibus feature-film directed by the Argentine TV and movie-maker, Damien Szifron. Szifron, who is presently 41, is well-known in Argentina for his work directing TV series including the highly successful Los Simuladores (2001-2003) -- a show about a group of grifters who use their criminal skills to extricate ordinary people from commonly experiences irritations and nuisances in life (overly nosy neighbors, too importunate lovers, etc.) Clearly, Szifron's work in TV has trained him in the art of punchy, efficient narrative-- particularly in short formats. Wild Tales seems an extension of Los Simuladores -- the movie is comprised of six episodes, each featuring some kind of revenge. (Aristotle called revenge "wild justice" and this concept motivates the vignettes that we see.) Some of the film is exceedingly funny and the entire picture has an unpredictable, scary edge -- it's story-telling at its purest with tales that seem variants on stories that date back to Chaucer and Boccaccio at least. The movie is shot in bright clear color, edited for clarity, and with actors who playing one-dimensional, cartoonish roles and it's all exceedingly entertaining.
In the opening episode, a group of travelers find themselves on a plane. After the plane has taken-off, the passengers find that they all have something in common -- they have all wronged a certain man, the man who seems to be flying the airplane. This is very funny and scary. The second vignette involves a gangster who makes the mistake of stopping at a lonely café where one of his victims works as a waitress. It's called "Rat Poison." The third episode is probably the strongest -- it's a variant on Spielberg's old made-for-TV movie Duel, a study of comically exaggerated road-rage on an empty stretch of desert and mountain highway. We see a well-to-do man tooling around in an expensive car on a remote stretch of highway -- the man insults a peasant driving an old, ratty-looking sedan. The opening shots are all cut to a soundtrack that rips-off the Eagles' Hotel California and the gliding tracking shots impart to the images a sense of menace. When the wealthy guy's car has a flat tire, he has to pull over next to a little bridge over a river flowing down from the barren Andes. Of course, the burly and aggrieved peasant shows-up and all sorts of ultra-violent mayhem, staged like a Laurel and Hardy two-reeler, as increasingly brutal tit-for-tat ensues. At one point, the two men are trapped in a car dangling down from a dirt cliff each pounding at the other's face with fists or tire-irons -- the two assailants are so cramped together that they can't really swing their weapons effectively and so they can merely bruise one another: it's a brilliant image of the futility of revenge and, perhaps, the futility of violence itself. Wild Tales slackens a little in its second half, but it's still entertaining. The fourth episode involves an unjustly towed automobile; unfortunately, for everyone involved, the victim of this bureaucratic SNAFU is a specialist in demolition using high-explosives. The fifth story is about a hit-and-run accident. A rich man tries to exculpate his son from responsibility by persuading a servant to take the blame for the crime. (This story reprises the plot line of Nuri Bilge Ceylan's film Three Monkeys). Everyone is corrupt and tries to bilk the rich man with the result that he reneges on the deal. (This episode seems only remotely connected the film's general theme and is, probably, the weakest of the six stories.) The last story involves a wedding that goes seriously awry when the bride realizes her husband has invited another woman with whom he has been sleeping. Wild Tales is shallow and doesn't exactly live up to the promise shown by its first half, but its wonderfully entertaining and effectively made. (Damien Szifron has been lured to Hollywood where he seems to be slated to direct a remake of the old TV show starring Lee Majors, The Six-Million Dollar Man -- a project well-suited to this director's pop sensibility. Adjusted for inflation, the cyborg hero is now called The Six Billion Dollar Man.)
In the opening episode, a group of travelers find themselves on a plane. After the plane has taken-off, the passengers find that they all have something in common -- they have all wronged a certain man, the man who seems to be flying the airplane. This is very funny and scary. The second vignette involves a gangster who makes the mistake of stopping at a lonely café where one of his victims works as a waitress. It's called "Rat Poison." The third episode is probably the strongest -- it's a variant on Spielberg's old made-for-TV movie Duel, a study of comically exaggerated road-rage on an empty stretch of desert and mountain highway. We see a well-to-do man tooling around in an expensive car on a remote stretch of highway -- the man insults a peasant driving an old, ratty-looking sedan. The opening shots are all cut to a soundtrack that rips-off the Eagles' Hotel California and the gliding tracking shots impart to the images a sense of menace. When the wealthy guy's car has a flat tire, he has to pull over next to a little bridge over a river flowing down from the barren Andes. Of course, the burly and aggrieved peasant shows-up and all sorts of ultra-violent mayhem, staged like a Laurel and Hardy two-reeler, as increasingly brutal tit-for-tat ensues. At one point, the two men are trapped in a car dangling down from a dirt cliff each pounding at the other's face with fists or tire-irons -- the two assailants are so cramped together that they can't really swing their weapons effectively and so they can merely bruise one another: it's a brilliant image of the futility of revenge and, perhaps, the futility of violence itself. Wild Tales slackens a little in its second half, but it's still entertaining. The fourth episode involves an unjustly towed automobile; unfortunately, for everyone involved, the victim of this bureaucratic SNAFU is a specialist in demolition using high-explosives. The fifth story is about a hit-and-run accident. A rich man tries to exculpate his son from responsibility by persuading a servant to take the blame for the crime. (This story reprises the plot line of Nuri Bilge Ceylan's film Three Monkeys). Everyone is corrupt and tries to bilk the rich man with the result that he reneges on the deal. (This episode seems only remotely connected the film's general theme and is, probably, the weakest of the six stories.) The last story involves a wedding that goes seriously awry when the bride realizes her husband has invited another woman with whom he has been sleeping. Wild Tales is shallow and doesn't exactly live up to the promise shown by its first half, but its wonderfully entertaining and effectively made. (Damien Szifron has been lured to Hollywood where he seems to be slated to direct a remake of the old TV show starring Lee Majors, The Six-Million Dollar Man -- a project well-suited to this director's pop sensibility. Adjusted for inflation, the cyborg hero is now called The Six Billion Dollar Man.)
Monday, November 7, 2016
Red, White, and Blue
Red, White, and Blue z (2010) is an ornately directed, pretentious horror film. Made by the British director, Simon Rumley, the picture is so grim as to suggest genuine tragedy until it veers into a contrived and derivative climax involving gory revenge. Rumley has studied the films of Robert Bresson and, often, invokes that director's austere and elliptical style. Until the horror film climax, almost no sequences are shown to their natural completion -- an action or event is suggested and, then, the film cuts away to a different scene. The picture involves two parallel plots that converge at the end and that initially seem to have next to nothing in common -- the way that the stories intersect is fairly interesting and there are many clever elements in the way that the picture is constructed. Crucial events of plot significance are entirely elided (or suggested by a single enigmatic image) and Rumley implies action by big close-ups of hands seizing items or feet walking in one direction or another. The characters in the film strongly suggest antecedents in Bresson movies: there are disaffected, if beautiful-looking youth, who comprise a punk rock band -- this element of the movie looks like Bresson's The Devil Probably; the doomed and sullen heroine is given a backstory sufficient to her self-destructive behavior and resembles the young woman featured in the French film maker's Mouchette. The film's editing is intentionally problematic -- there are no establishing shots; encounters end before they are dramatically consummated in any way and the wayward figures that Rumley features in the film lead fragmented existences similar to the cubist approach used to represent them.
All of this highly stylish film technique is in service of a banal, if complex, triple revenge plot. A sexually abused young woman, infected with HIV, goes about having intercourse with as many men as possible -- she insists that the men not use condoms and it is clear that her intention is inflict as much disease on the male population of the city of Austin (Texas) as possible. This is revenge for being sexually abused as a child. She refuses to have sex with anyone that she regards as a friend, thus repelling a gaunt and disturbed young man said to have served in Iraq -- he wants to be emotionally involved with her, acts as her benefactor, but is obviously half- or wholly crazy. (He claims the CIA has offered him a job, presumably as some kind of covert torturer.) The young woman has sex with two members of a rock and roll band, thereby infecting them with HIV. The lead singer in the band is close to his mother who is dying of cancer and he has been donating blood for his mother's treatment. Presumably, the bad HIV-infected blood kills the rock and roller's mother. He figures out what has happened and, with his band mates, hunts down the girl. The rock and roller tortures the girl to death and, then, cuts up her body into several parts. Each of the members of the band gets a part to hide or destroy. (This seems singularly crazy and counter-productive.) The crazy wannabe CIA operative finds out that his standoffish girlfriend has been tortured to death and, then, quartered. This upsets him and he hunts down the band members and their girl friends and members of their families as well and tortures them all to death. The ex-soldier flees Austin and ends up in Big Bend National Park -- there are several nice shots of the landscape -- where he turns down a telephone offer made by the CIA to join the service. The film is pretty much a cheat in many ways -- for instance, the director cuts like Bresson, implying a fight by showing two men shouting, approaching one another, and, then, perhaps cutting to a bottle falling on the floor and breaking. But when it comes to gory torture and murder scenes, he aims the camera right at the action and films everything down to the last detail. The film is certainly depressing, shot in a sort of haze of misery and squalor -- its makes Austin, Texas look a little like wretched Xenia, Ohio in Harmony Korinne's Gummo: that is, weedy vacant lots, rotting crack houses, half-subterranean rock and roll clubs, dumpsters, and debris everywhere. It's fairly clever, adequately (if woodenly) acted -- also I think a hommage to Bresson -- and too remorselessly nasty to be any fun.
All of this highly stylish film technique is in service of a banal, if complex, triple revenge plot. A sexually abused young woman, infected with HIV, goes about having intercourse with as many men as possible -- she insists that the men not use condoms and it is clear that her intention is inflict as much disease on the male population of the city of Austin (Texas) as possible. This is revenge for being sexually abused as a child. She refuses to have sex with anyone that she regards as a friend, thus repelling a gaunt and disturbed young man said to have served in Iraq -- he wants to be emotionally involved with her, acts as her benefactor, but is obviously half- or wholly crazy. (He claims the CIA has offered him a job, presumably as some kind of covert torturer.) The young woman has sex with two members of a rock and roll band, thereby infecting them with HIV. The lead singer in the band is close to his mother who is dying of cancer and he has been donating blood for his mother's treatment. Presumably, the bad HIV-infected blood kills the rock and roller's mother. He figures out what has happened and, with his band mates, hunts down the girl. The rock and roller tortures the girl to death and, then, cuts up her body into several parts. Each of the members of the band gets a part to hide or destroy. (This seems singularly crazy and counter-productive.) The crazy wannabe CIA operative finds out that his standoffish girlfriend has been tortured to death and, then, quartered. This upsets him and he hunts down the band members and their girl friends and members of their families as well and tortures them all to death. The ex-soldier flees Austin and ends up in Big Bend National Park -- there are several nice shots of the landscape -- where he turns down a telephone offer made by the CIA to join the service. The film is pretty much a cheat in many ways -- for instance, the director cuts like Bresson, implying a fight by showing two men shouting, approaching one another, and, then, perhaps cutting to a bottle falling on the floor and breaking. But when it comes to gory torture and murder scenes, he aims the camera right at the action and films everything down to the last detail. The film is certainly depressing, shot in a sort of haze of misery and squalor -- its makes Austin, Texas look a little like wretched Xenia, Ohio in Harmony Korinne's Gummo: that is, weedy vacant lots, rotting crack houses, half-subterranean rock and roll clubs, dumpsters, and debris everywhere. It's fairly clever, adequately (if woodenly) acted -- also I think a hommage to Bresson -- and too remorselessly nasty to be any fun.
Sunday, November 6, 2016
The Battered Bastards of Baseball
The well-known actor, Kurt Russell, is the son of Bing Russell. The senior Russell was a minor TV and Hollywood actor, best-known for portraying Clem on TV's Bonanza. A swaggering virile-looking performer, Bing Russell retired from stage and screen when his handsome appearance coarsened a little with age and spread out. After knocking about a bit, he purchased a minor league baseball franchise (or an "independent" team) baseball team in Portland, Oregon. Russell held that property between 1973 and 1978 when the Major League, the business enterprise that has monopoly power over all commercial American baseball forced him to sell the successful enterprise. The Battered Bastards of Baseball (Champlian and Maclain Way) is a documentary made in 2014 about Russell's team, the Portland Mavericks. It is a curious, endearing story with such vast screen appeal that the documentary (and the tale it tells) were the subject of a bidding war between all the major American studios -- you may expect to see this story dramatized with Oscar-quality actors and actresses in the next couple years.
Bing Russell was an eccentric businessman, motivated primarily (as the story would have it) by love of the game. He had open recruiting for his team and auditioned over 300 would-be professional players -- scruffy dopers, ex-felons, exhausted major league veterans, people who hiked to the try-outs or rode their bicycles. From this material, Russell amassed a winning team that dominated the Pacific Northwest for five years. Everything went astonishingly well -- the documentary plays like a version of Robert Altman's MASH adapted to professional baseball. It's got a lazy, dope-fueled goofiness. The players all looked and acted unorthodox. Russell hired a 22 year old girl as general manager and gathered together a loveable multi-ethnic cadre of publicists and support staff. Of course, there was a serpent in this utopian garden Russell created -- that is, Major League baseball. The documentary constructs a story that Major League baseball was jealous of Russell's free-and-easy and unconventional (if winning) ways. Accordingly, the League cancels the franchise by forcing Russell to sell to a successor team. Even this aspect of the film, however, has a happy ending -- Russell holds out for a high price as the value of this franchise and, in the end, wins an unprecedentedly high arbitration award to reward him for his virtue and good deeds.
The story is so intrinsically screenworthy, so replete with unique characters and situations, that it seems to be somehow false. But, so far as I can ascertain, this improbable story with its crowds of wacky characters is true. The documentary is wholly charming although lacking in much visual interest -- it has to rely heavily upon a two-hour special featuring Joe Garagiola and talk show interviews with people like Jim Bouten, the famous player who returned to the major leagues via Portland after being disgraced and blackballed as a result of his book Ball Four. There is precious little imagery of the Mavericks actually playing and not much contemporaneous footage of their triumphs. Lots of half-intelligible headlines and newspaper articles scroll across the screen. Several of the players provide interviews among them the prominent American film director and actor Tom Field who served as a bat-boy for the team. Kurt Russell lends his rugged handsomeness to the show and there are lots of talking heads who recall the good old days eloquently and with much grace. It's trivia, but good-hearted trivia that stirs the soul and makes audiences happy -- a nostalgic lament for the good old days that we know never really happened.
Bing Russell was an eccentric businessman, motivated primarily (as the story would have it) by love of the game. He had open recruiting for his team and auditioned over 300 would-be professional players -- scruffy dopers, ex-felons, exhausted major league veterans, people who hiked to the try-outs or rode their bicycles. From this material, Russell amassed a winning team that dominated the Pacific Northwest for five years. Everything went astonishingly well -- the documentary plays like a version of Robert Altman's MASH adapted to professional baseball. It's got a lazy, dope-fueled goofiness. The players all looked and acted unorthodox. Russell hired a 22 year old girl as general manager and gathered together a loveable multi-ethnic cadre of publicists and support staff. Of course, there was a serpent in this utopian garden Russell created -- that is, Major League baseball. The documentary constructs a story that Major League baseball was jealous of Russell's free-and-easy and unconventional (if winning) ways. Accordingly, the League cancels the franchise by forcing Russell to sell to a successor team. Even this aspect of the film, however, has a happy ending -- Russell holds out for a high price as the value of this franchise and, in the end, wins an unprecedentedly high arbitration award to reward him for his virtue and good deeds.
The story is so intrinsically screenworthy, so replete with unique characters and situations, that it seems to be somehow false. But, so far as I can ascertain, this improbable story with its crowds of wacky characters is true. The documentary is wholly charming although lacking in much visual interest -- it has to rely heavily upon a two-hour special featuring Joe Garagiola and talk show interviews with people like Jim Bouten, the famous player who returned to the major leagues via Portland after being disgraced and blackballed as a result of his book Ball Four. There is precious little imagery of the Mavericks actually playing and not much contemporaneous footage of their triumphs. Lots of half-intelligible headlines and newspaper articles scroll across the screen. Several of the players provide interviews among them the prominent American film director and actor Tom Field who served as a bat-boy for the team. Kurt Russell lends his rugged handsomeness to the show and there are lots of talking heads who recall the good old days eloquently and with much grace. It's trivia, but good-hearted trivia that stirs the soul and makes audiences happy -- a nostalgic lament for the good old days that we know never really happened.
Green Room
In Green Room, a punk band is down on its luck. The four member ensemble has been stiffed at a show for which it traveled cross-country to Eugene, Oregon. A kid with an aggressive Mohawk says that he has a cousin, a friend of friend, who owns a bar about 80 miles away, apparently in the middle of nowhere. Some kind of White Supremacist festival is under way for which skinhead bands are providing the musical soundtrack.. The punk band is offered $350 to play a gig for the neo-Nazis -- it's enough money for them to buy gas to get back home and, so, they travel to the bar, a compound of ramshackle huts and bunkers in the wilderness. The band plays a gig intentionally provocative to the mob of surly-looking, all male reprobates gathered for the show -- for instance, they do a cover of "Nazi Punks Fuck Off" by the Dead Kennedy's. After their show, the band withdraws to the titular green room where they discover that a girl is lying dead on the floor with an ice-pick stuck in her temple. A big heavily tattooed bouncer seems to have killed her for reasons that are unclear. The band members are frightened and demand that the police be called. Sure enough, the cops arrive to deal with a stabbing. But when they get to the compound, the bad guys have arranged for two skin-head junkies to stab themselves. The cops leave with the slightly wounded skinheads and, then, the bar owner, played against type by a thuggish Patrick Stewart, sets to work hunting down and eliminating the members of the band. Crowds of skin-heads attack the band members, sometimes siccing mean German shepherds on them. People get arms and legs broken so that bones protrude through their flesh and there are various knifing, hackings with machetes, beatings with baseball bats, shootings, and the like. After a suspenseful stand-off, most of the band members are killed, but the plucky lead singer recruits some disenfranchised punk-rockers from the audience, arms them, and, after a couple dozen additional homicides, all ends well. One of the band members is still alive, although his hideous gash wounds have been repaired by duct-tape, and will probably require some extensive reconstructive surgery. A bunch of pit bulls and German shepherds have been slaughtered. And a tough Goth girl is also still around to tell the story.
Green Room is reasonably well acted and has some appealing characters. Someone named Anton Yelcher who recently died in a humiliating park-to-reverse car accident plays the hero -- he's engaging in a gloomy, nihilistic sort of way. The movie has a dusk-to-dawn ambience and is shot in nauseating green gloom -- this means that most of the action sequence are just frenetically editing squabbles among vaguely glimpsed shadows. The director Jeremy Saulnier is good at despair and hopelessness but not too effective with anything else. His villains are a featureless mob of disposable skinheads led by the incomprehensibly articulate and charismatic Patrick Stewart -- what he's doing with surly mob of tattoo-covered neo-Nazis is never established. The scenes involving attack dogs are particularly idiotic -- Saulnier has no idea how to stage these shots and so he simply cuts together all sorts of writhing in almost pitch-dark with close-ups of a dog's nose and muzzle. (The two dogs look mostly cheerful and avuncular -- they are Brownie and Grimm.) The movie is relentlessly pure -- it cleaves close to its violent premise without digression. But it's not really exciting and doesn't have the snap of similar enterprises directed many years ago by Walter Hill. I'm thinking of Hill's pictures like Trespass (1992) and Southern Comfort. Saulnier has some sense for genre film making but he amps up the violence too high and, then, doesn't know how to stage fight scenes. The gore is realistic but weirdly disengaged.
Green Room is reasonably well acted and has some appealing characters. Someone named Anton Yelcher who recently died in a humiliating park-to-reverse car accident plays the hero -- he's engaging in a gloomy, nihilistic sort of way. The movie has a dusk-to-dawn ambience and is shot in nauseating green gloom -- this means that most of the action sequence are just frenetically editing squabbles among vaguely glimpsed shadows. The director Jeremy Saulnier is good at despair and hopelessness but not too effective with anything else. His villains are a featureless mob of disposable skinheads led by the incomprehensibly articulate and charismatic Patrick Stewart -- what he's doing with surly mob of tattoo-covered neo-Nazis is never established. The scenes involving attack dogs are particularly idiotic -- Saulnier has no idea how to stage these shots and so he simply cuts together all sorts of writhing in almost pitch-dark with close-ups of a dog's nose and muzzle. (The two dogs look mostly cheerful and avuncular -- they are Brownie and Grimm.) The movie is relentlessly pure -- it cleaves close to its violent premise without digression. But it's not really exciting and doesn't have the snap of similar enterprises directed many years ago by Walter Hill. I'm thinking of Hill's pictures like Trespass (1992) and Southern Comfort. Saulnier has some sense for genre film making but he amps up the violence too high and, then, doesn't know how to stage fight scenes. The gore is realistic but weirdly disengaged.
The Woman
The Woman is a torture-porn film directed by someone named Lucky McGee. The people who make these kinds of picture, often, have aspirations toward working in the legit film industry and, so, movies of this kind are elaborately calculated -- the director wants to establish his credentials as an inventive legitimate film maker, but, also, of course, has to deliver the sex and violence required in a exploitation film. Furthermore, images of extreme violence against women can sometimes be justified, albeit in bad faith, as some sort of critique of the phallocracy. The Woman is annoyingly artsy and, adding insult to injury, anxious to be perceived as critical of male domination over women. But, at its heart, the film is trash -- torture porn dressed up with quasi-feminist trappings.
The villain in The Woman is a right-wing real estate lawyer, a good-lucking man who knows that he is trim and handsome; the bad guy has some of the vapid good looks of Mitt Romney -- he's got the square jaw and rugged features of a Mormon cowboy. The bad guy has a submissive wife, two daughters, and a sadistic teenage son. The villain rules the roost with an iron fist, justifying his misconduct by a noxious mix of ideological ranting and bullying intimidation. (We see him in the workplace obnoxiously flirting with his pretty secretary -- it's clear that the bad guy is supposed to be monstrous in all respects.) Of course, he's got problems at home -- he's captured a feral woman, a shapely bedraggled damsel who was apparently raised by wolves. He's got her chained up in a shed with a smaller side-kick, a mutilated feral girl who acts like a vicious dog. The bad guy's teenage daughter is moping around because she is pregnant as a result of rape by her father. The teenage boy spends his afternoons imitating daddy -- that is, sexually assaulting and torturing the feral woman. When the daughter's teacher, a comely young woman, comes for a visit to the family home, all hell breaks loose. The teacher gets knocked-out and, then, fed to the feral dog-girl. The wife ends up with internal injuries after being repeatedly punched in the belly, but, before she drops dead, she released the feral woman. The feral woman is not happy with the way she's been treated since her capture and, so, needless to say, she avenges herself by ripping the villain and his son to pieces. Then, having affirmed the power of sisterhood, the feral woman, the dog-girl, and the pregnant teenager light out for the territories.
This is dank, morbid stuff only fitfully interesting, shot in grim mildewed shacks that are mostly very dark. The actions scenes are botched and the feral dog-girl, instrumental in eating the teacher, isn't introduced until about five minutes before the end of the movie. Where was she hiding the rest of the time? The State of Massachusetts provided tax credits for the video nasty and, proudly, takes credit for it. There is a loud overly intrusive folk-rock soundtrack sometimes played over tortures scenes or concealing the banal dialogue -- it's as if someone owed a favor to the musician whose name is, I kid you not, Sean Spillane. The acting is fairly good and the villain is evil enough that we enjoy his dismemberment at the film's climax.
The villain in The Woman is a right-wing real estate lawyer, a good-lucking man who knows that he is trim and handsome; the bad guy has some of the vapid good looks of Mitt Romney -- he's got the square jaw and rugged features of a Mormon cowboy. The bad guy has a submissive wife, two daughters, and a sadistic teenage son. The villain rules the roost with an iron fist, justifying his misconduct by a noxious mix of ideological ranting and bullying intimidation. (We see him in the workplace obnoxiously flirting with his pretty secretary -- it's clear that the bad guy is supposed to be monstrous in all respects.) Of course, he's got problems at home -- he's captured a feral woman, a shapely bedraggled damsel who was apparently raised by wolves. He's got her chained up in a shed with a smaller side-kick, a mutilated feral girl who acts like a vicious dog. The bad guy's teenage daughter is moping around because she is pregnant as a result of rape by her father. The teenage boy spends his afternoons imitating daddy -- that is, sexually assaulting and torturing the feral woman. When the daughter's teacher, a comely young woman, comes for a visit to the family home, all hell breaks loose. The teacher gets knocked-out and, then, fed to the feral dog-girl. The wife ends up with internal injuries after being repeatedly punched in the belly, but, before she drops dead, she released the feral woman. The feral woman is not happy with the way she's been treated since her capture and, so, needless to say, she avenges herself by ripping the villain and his son to pieces. Then, having affirmed the power of sisterhood, the feral woman, the dog-girl, and the pregnant teenager light out for the territories.
This is dank, morbid stuff only fitfully interesting, shot in grim mildewed shacks that are mostly very dark. The actions scenes are botched and the feral dog-girl, instrumental in eating the teacher, isn't introduced until about five minutes before the end of the movie. Where was she hiding the rest of the time? The State of Massachusetts provided tax credits for the video nasty and, proudly, takes credit for it. There is a loud overly intrusive folk-rock soundtrack sometimes played over tortures scenes or concealing the banal dialogue -- it's as if someone owed a favor to the musician whose name is, I kid you not, Sean Spillane. The acting is fairly good and the villain is evil enough that we enjoy his dismemberment at the film's climax.
Thursday, November 3, 2016
Mascots
Mascots is a Christopher Guest film, similar to the director's Best in Show, both simulated documentaries about a competition involving a wacky subculture. Best in Show, as readers will recall, involved competitors in an elite dog show. Mascots is about a competition staged between mascot-figures associated with team-sports. In some ways, Mascots reprises Best in Show with startling, and, perhaps, indefensible, exactitude. Best in Show began with a consultation with a dog therapist involving a psychologically traumatized hound; Mascots begins with an image of an x-rayed knee-joint and a consultation with an orthopedic specialist. Unfortunately, the close resemblance between the two films does not redound to Mascots' benefit. Although the comedy is intermittently funny, Best in Show is by far the better film. There are several reasons for this: first, dog shows are real and everyone has probably idled away a few hours watching them. Accordingly, there is a real competition that can be parodied. So far as I know, there has never been a competition against team-sports mascots and, indeed, the idea doesn't really make much sense. Here is why: the dog show exists as an end in itself -- it's the natural culmination of the aspirations of the participants. But team-sports mascots don't devise their routines for judges or abstract audiences -- rather, their efforts are directed at rousing the crowd at sporting events. Mascots is shot on a limited budget -- it is apparently a Netflix production -- and so the film doesn't try to stage a series of sporting events to show us the mascots in actual performance. Rather, we see their performances in competition, stripped from the natural context in which such figures appear. The routines comprising the climactic competition, accordingly, seem unnatural, out of place, and weirdly inapposite to a team sports setting. Some of these competitive routines might be effective and, even, very funny if shown as baffling to the fans assembled for a hockey or soccer game. But, in the context of the abstract and unnatural fictional competition, the routines don't make much sense and come across as contrived and lame. (The competition scenario allows the director to import some additional and bizarre characters into the film -- the judges, themselves, are supposed to be funny and their quirks are part of the humor. But, in Mascots, the three-judge panel comes across as mostly grotesque and delusional.) The fact is that in an actual sporting event, people pay only marginal attention to the mascot figures cavorting on the side-line -- ultimately, the mascots are too slender a reed upon which to base an entire movie.
The format of Mascots will be familiar to viewers who have seen other Guest films. The picture begins with interviews of the contestants. The picture is shot documentary style and all speeches are improvised -- some of this is fairly funny; other scenes are cringe-inducing. We see the competitors scheming against one another and rehearsing their skits. Then, Guest stages the competition itself with the judges' commentary. Finally, there is a short coda ostensibly shot a year later following the fortunes of some of the competitors. The characters involved in the competition are presented as naïve figures inexplicably obsessed with sports mascots --there is a bickering couple, two southern sisters who perform something like modern dance (they impersonate armadillos), Ed the Plumber and his dancing turd, and an Englishman who is a soccer mascot and the heir to a long, proud, and oppressive family tradition. Chris O'Dowd is very funny as a Canadian hockey mascot, a huge animated fist that smashes things up, beats up or rapes opposing players, and that ultimately hurls the floppy corpse of a referee onto the judge's table as a kind of human sacrifice. Parker Posey is incredibly agile and yoga-flexible in her role as the artistic mascot, performing the part of an armadillo as if she were dancing Swan Lake. It's all mildly amusing but doesn't really add up to much.
Netflix is an important outlet for films by quirky directors like Guest and Werner Herzog that would probably not be commercially viable in movie theaters. As such the network is a significant resource and worthy of applause for venturing to produce films of this sort.
The format of Mascots will be familiar to viewers who have seen other Guest films. The picture begins with interviews of the contestants. The picture is shot documentary style and all speeches are improvised -- some of this is fairly funny; other scenes are cringe-inducing. We see the competitors scheming against one another and rehearsing their skits. Then, Guest stages the competition itself with the judges' commentary. Finally, there is a short coda ostensibly shot a year later following the fortunes of some of the competitors. The characters involved in the competition are presented as naïve figures inexplicably obsessed with sports mascots --there is a bickering couple, two southern sisters who perform something like modern dance (they impersonate armadillos), Ed the Plumber and his dancing turd, and an Englishman who is a soccer mascot and the heir to a long, proud, and oppressive family tradition. Chris O'Dowd is very funny as a Canadian hockey mascot, a huge animated fist that smashes things up, beats up or rapes opposing players, and that ultimately hurls the floppy corpse of a referee onto the judge's table as a kind of human sacrifice. Parker Posey is incredibly agile and yoga-flexible in her role as the artistic mascot, performing the part of an armadillo as if she were dancing Swan Lake. It's all mildly amusing but doesn't really add up to much.
Netflix is an important outlet for films by quirky directors like Guest and Werner Herzog that would probably not be commercially viable in movie theaters. As such the network is a significant resource and worthy of applause for venturing to produce films of this sort.
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