Saturday, February 20, 2010

A few words about Roger Ebert


I'll get back to my Ansari X-Prize Winning series on Anti-Heroes in my next post, but for now I thought I'd bring whatever small attention this blog brings to things by posting a link to the Esquire profile on Roger Ebert that's been making the rounds.


As many of you probably know, or perhaps you do not, Ebert has been suffering from major health problems over the last few years, one after the other, leading eventually to the permanent removal of his jaw and his complete inability to eat, drink or speak.

But, as the story shows, where his mouth has stopped his fingers have come alive, as the always prolific Ebert has thrown himself into his new and different life with boundless energy and vigor.

It's a pretty bittersweet thing to read, especially for a long time fan of Ebert like myself. Though he's derided by some as just a TV critic, I've always found him to have a true passion for the movies. His Website is a particularly valuable resource for archived reviews (he began in 1967), and his Great Movies series has not only been a guide for me of how to just come right out there and say you love a movie -- snickering be damned -- but also helped me discover all time favorites like Being There, Nashville, and La Dolce Vita.

You know, being a critic of any kind is really a funny enterprise, because the truth is that for the vast majority of people, criticism is irrelevant. There have been times I've implored some of my very best friends to watch a movie, and still, you know, they don't. Why should I or anyone else assume you wonderful people out there in the dark are going to be moved to change your opinion or go see a movie just because some cheesedick in a magazine or a newspaper or in the vast Chum Sea of the internet said so?

And that's sort of the thing you learn. Don't think of it that way. Think of it for what it really is: a conversation. When Ebert writes a review of a movie I've seen, I read it, think about it. Consider his argument. About 70% of the time (higher for drama, lower for comedies), I'll agree with it. But if I don't, I still respect his opinion. I let it dwell in there.

Sometimes he hates an ending and I think it works. Sometimes he loves the casting and I hate it. And sometimes we can both just sit there in the aftermath of a great movie and simply bathe in the glow of it. Either way, we have a conversation, and no matter how much we disagree, we still walk away as friends.

Roger Ebert is my friend.

The funny part about all this is that his fans have actually sort of benefitted from his illness, as he's filled in the gaps of his life with a huge outpouring of written material. He retreats there, where his voice can still be heard, same as always. It's his personal friends who never get to speak to him again. Never get to hear his voice. His wife never gets to hear him say, "I love you" again. Though when you read the story, you realize how little the sound matters when compared to the reality of it.

It's us out here in cyberspace who reap the rewards, but the truth is that we all still sort of grieve and hurt for what he's going through, no matter how little he says we should.

After all, he's our friend.

Tuesday, February 16, 2010

The Worst Movies... Ever -- Wax and the Discovery of Television Among the Bees


I suppose it is inevitable that there have been many more bad movies made in the not-so long history of cinema than good ones. After all, being good at something takes time, dedication, skill and luck. Not too many people have those things, and even the very best fuck up every once in a while.

Making a piece of shit, though, is easy. I should know. I mean, look at this blog.

So I suppose the point is that I will probably never run of out movies to write about for this series. And even if I managed to write about every shitty movie that has ever been made (which of course is impossible), they're still cranking out new ones every week.


So far I've tried to be selective, to weed out those well-meaning hacks whose only sin was to get caught in the buzz saw of their own inescapable hackitude. After all, who but a bastard enjoys kicking an old, sagging dog in the balls?

What I've tried to focus on, rather, is people who either had some sort of really fucking evil/stupid intent, or were just trying to make an easy, exploitative buck, or who managed to fail on such a grand scale of every level of moviemaking it makes you wonder if they'd ever watched a movie in their life... and if they have, whether they've had poisoned dog shit injected into their brain stem since then.

Today's movie is like that. And man oh man, is it a doozy.


Wax or the Discovery of Television Among the Bees (1991)


Go ahead, read that title again. I'll wait.

Doesn't help, does it? Believe me, I can sympathize. I watched this movie in college for a class called Writing Through Media, one of those classes that's supposed to be easy but ends up, in my case, being taught by a 95-pound grad student who I'm sure went home every night and smashed his shriveled nuts between biographies of Ingmar Bergman.

So anyhow, he sat us down at made us watch Wax, and I'll be damned if it wasn't one of the most befuddling experiences of my life.

This is the first image that comes up when you do a Google search for "befuddling."

Anyhow, the movie starts with James Maker, a member of the Supernatural Film Society (motto: fuck you, audience!), whose goal is to film the spirits of the dead walking among the living.

Because clearly this isn't a subject that's been covered before.

Suddenly we cut away from James Maker and are introduced to his grandson, Jacob, a flight simulator programmer who also moonlights as a beekeeper of Mesopotamian bees he inherited from his grandfather.

With me so far? At least sort of? Good, because this is where things sort of go sideways.

One day, Jacob's bees decide to drill a hole in his head and insert a television.

Seriously.

The bees start using the television to show Jacob various things (though I'm willing to wager it isn't things freakier than this movie). For instance, Maker has a statue of Cain and Able on his front lawn. The bees show the Cain statue murdering the Able statue and then being branded with an X, forcing you to wonder: what really counts as dead for a statue?

This next part I'll just quote directly from a summary of the movie I found:

"Then at work, Jacob wonders why his co-workers never wonder what happens to the missiles they launch that don't come back (never mind that a programmer probably doesn't deal with missile launches), and he realizes that they turn into flying saucers which fly to the moon where the dead live."


At about this point, sitting there, wondering what the fuck is going on, realizing I'm going to have to write about this thing and get a grade, I began to wonder whether someone was going to burst in and tell me I was on Candid Camera.

Sadly, this didn't happen. And by "sadly" I mean, on Candid Camera they usually stop whatever shitty thing is going on.

Wax just went on and on. And on and on, and into (if you can believe this) ever weirder areas. The bees start showing Maker what are supposed to be very strange images, but what are actually just piece-of-shit computer effects that look as though they were rendered in CorelDraw. These are then crossed with stock footage of bombs crossed with stock footage of bees crossed with stock footage of audiences burning themselves to death rather than continuing to watch the movie.

At some point, Maker decides to make a pilgrimage to the Garden of Eden Cave. And by pilgramage I mean like really long, totally inexplicable shots of Maker walking across the desert. In his beekeeper's uniform.


Back to the summary, whose matter-of-factness betrays the sheer insanity of the movie better than anything else possibly could:

"When arriving at the cave, Jacob learns that the cave is actually the entrance to a planet inside of our planet where the bees live. There, he dies and goes to join the world of the dead. For a while, he becomes the X symbol. Then he becomes a poem in the language of Cain. Then he travels to some other planet, including the Planet of Television. Next he decides it's time to fulfill his destiny, which is to kill someone. So, he becomes a bomb and blows up two Iraqi soldiers in a tank. Then he becomes the X symbol with himself, his grandfather's arch enemy, and the two soldiers he blew up."

I've discussed/made fun this movie so many times with friends it's been at different points suggested to me that the movie must have some sort merit to be have been at least so memorable.

These people are wrong.

I mean, I'm sure the director, David Blair -- who spent six years making this filmic equivalent of dead babies -- was trying to make some really serious, deeply felt points about missile launchers, the after-life, and, you know, beekeeping.

But seriously, the thing makes absolutely no sense at all. Watching it, you realize the magnificence of it's ineptitude can only be topped by those rare, majestic turds that rise ever so gracefully out of shitty toilet water.

I wish I could find the essay I wrote that night about the movie. The only thing I remember was that I wrote it in this very Baroque English style, like Dickens, and was bursting at the seams to control myself from what I've been doing right now, and then went downstairs and got drunk with my chums.

Other than that, I don't have the slightest clue what we did that night, but of this I'm sure: a movie about it would have been a lot better than Wax.

Monday, February 8, 2010

The 10 "Best" Anti-Heroes, part 3


Boy, that was some Superbowl, eh? A game so good my brother vomited all day Monday, though it probably had more to do with undercooked buffalo hot dogs than the game.

Anyhow, back to the matter at hand: anti-heroes. Specifically, these two anti-heroes.

I have sort of paused here at my keyboard a minute wondering whether I really have to repeat my definition of what an anti-hero is. As this is my third entry, I've already written it twice. And since I have four more to go, that would probably get even more tiring for me than it would be for you.

So can I trust you to go back and look at what I wrote before/remember it? Good.

I'm glad we're friends.

Anti-Hero #6: Travis Bickle, from Taxi Driver

Yes, I'm talking to you. Now stop looking at me like that.

I hemmed and hawed and thought and wondered more about including Travis Bickle on this list than anyone who made it or didn't. I put him on, I took him off. I stared at the wall. I punched myself in the head. At the end of the day, I decided my indecision reflected a virtue in the movie itself. More on this below.

ANTI: I sort of have to laugh at the start of a paragraph about why Travis Bickle is unlikable, since he is, in my view, one of the least likable characters in the history of cinema.

We get no real sense of Bickle's uprbringing as the movie begins. He tells people he was in Vietnam, but nothing about what happened. Now he's a taxi driver. We don't know for how long (too long, apparently). He is alone. He tells us he's been alone most of his life. What he doesn't tell us -- but we sense anyway -- is that something is very wrong with him.

Has Bickle separated himself from society or it from him? It's almost certainly both. When he's not out patrolling the streets as a taxi driver -- a job completely unsuited for the sociopath he is -- he stays in his room. He exercises. He schemes. Now and then he goes to the movies... always muttering about the scum on the streets.

Bickle: I think someone should just take this city and just... just flush it down the fuckin' toilet.

Bickle has retreated so far into himself he's lost all sense of society and it's rules. At one point Bickle meets a blonde in white (Cybil Shepard) who works for a politician. He comes in and makes bold conversation. When she agrees to a date, he takes her to a theater showing a porno. Why does he do this? Her objections totally confuse him. He tries to call her, but she's through with him. Later, he attempts to kill her boss.

When his mind finally snaps, it retreats into the rules of the movies: bad people deserve to die, and good people are justified in taking the law into their own hands to kill them. Bickle thinks of himself as a good person. An avenger. But is he?

Either way, he's better than these two assholes.

HERO: Now here's where the interesting part begins, and why actually watching the movie is so important, because on paper, Travis Bickle is without a doubt absolutely the hero of the movie.

I mean, he meets a 12-year-old girl who's working as a prostitute (Jodie Foster).

A 12-year-old. As a prostitute.

Even Bickle is appalled. She jumps into his cab for a moment, saying she wants to be taken away. But she just as quickly jumps out, and when he tracks her down she brushes it off as just having been strung out. Bickle wants to take her away, take her back to her parents. No, she says. She's happy with her life, though how could she be? Bickle persists. He goes to meet her pimp, a freak named Sport played by Harvey Keitel.

Bickle asks about Foster's character, who's also Sport's "steady" girl, and Sport replies with, for my money, one of the most shocking speeches in the movies.

Sport: Well, take it or leave it. If you want to save yourself some money, don't fuck her. Cause you'll be back here every night for some more. Man, she's twelve and a half years old. You never had no pussy like that. You can do anything you want with her. You can cum on her, fuck her in the mouth, fuck her in the ass, cum on her face, man. She'll get your cock so hard she'll make it explode. But no rough stuff, all right?

Jesus.

Later, after his mind has broken completely, Bickle buys what seems like 10 guns and storms Sport's place High Noon-style, killing Sport, Foster's client and another man in an attempt to set Foster free. In the process, Bickle is (seemingly) mortally wounded himself, leading to the famous shot of him sticking a bloody finger to his temple and pretending to blow his brains out.

We then cut to the the movie's intriguing last scene, where Bickle has survived his injuries and been declared a hero, receiving the commendation of the city and the return of Foster to her parents.

Is this real, or just a fantasy of Bickle's... his last thoughts before death? I'm inclined to think the latter, even though the movie doesn't say. Presumably it wants us to think about it.

When you get down to it, the question of Taxi Driver is really one of context. In objective terms, is it morally justified to kill three men in order to free a 12-year-old from the bonds of prostitution?

Killing three men for pie is harder to justify, unless, of course, it is really good pie.

In High Noon, to use an example, Sheriff Will Kane (Gary Cooper) systematically tracks and kills three men. In the movie named after him, Nevada Smith (Steve McQueen) hunts down the three men who killed his father and raped, skinned and murdered his mother. And war movies... sheesh. Bodies pile up by the thousands. The guy who wipes out an enemy platoon by himself gets a picture with the president.

The trick, of course, is in the above examples we're never unsure who the good and bad guys are. The point is clear and in bold. Will Kane tries to get help from everyone to face down the gang, but he's ignored. Killing those men is an act of sheer courage. Nevada Smith learns to act like a bad guy and even causes the death of a woman, but his need to avenge the death of his parents is as old as literature. And besides, he even spares one of them (to ride off to the swell of heroic music).

The fact that Bickle is a crazy, racist sociopath short circuits our perception of the moral force of his actions. In effect, the movie asks us to consider what's really important -- the deed, or the man? Bickle believes completely that his actions are morally justified. His failure is that he doesn't see himself as we see him. Otherwise, he would doubt as we do.

At the end of the day, I didn't put Bickle on the list because I'm sure he's a hero. I don't really think the question can be answered, or is intended to be (though if you put me on the spot, I'd probably say no). Bickle goes on the list because I respect the ability of director Martin Scorsese and screenwriter Paul Schrader to ask the question in a way that is endlessly and brilliantly fascinating.

Anti-Hero #5: Sam Spade, from The Maltese Falcon

Adam Savage from Mythbusters loves that falcon prop so much he made his own. Clink that link, by the way. Savage is batshit crazy.

When I first started thinking about the possibilities for this list, one actor jumped immediately into my mind -- Humphrey Bogart. But the longer I thought about Bogart's career, the more I realized he tended to play either certified assholes (The Petrified Forest, The Caine Mutiny, Treasure of the Sierra Madre), or, if not genuinely good guys, then certainly not bad guys (The African Queen, To Have and Have Not).

Only a few movies seemed to break the mold. Casablanca, where his words speak a callousness his actions betray. In a Lonely Place, where his abusive, alcoholic character is proven not to have committed a murder, but he's such a dick that whatever, he might as well have. And then this one -- The Maltese Falcon -- for my money, Bogart's greatest role (with a nod to his turn as Captain Queeg in the aformentioned The Caine Mutiny).

ANTI: In his review of The Maltese Falcon for his "Great Movies" Roger Ebert put the dark character of Spade as well as it can be put:

"Spade is cold and hard, like his name. When he gets the news that his partner has been murdered, he doesn't blink an eye. Didn't like the guy. Kisses his widow the moment they're alone together. Beats up Joel Cairo (Peter Lorre), not just because he has to, but because he carries a perfumed handkerchief, and you know what that meant in a 1941 movie. Turns the rough stuff on and off. Loses patience with Greenstreet, throws his cigar into the fire, smashes his glass, barks out a threat, slams the door and then grins to himself in the hallway, amused by his own act."

The movie's plot centers on a long lost falcon (from Malta), covered in jewels, being pursued by a number of lowlifes and criminals. Once Spade is involved, he dives in like Kirstie Alley into a doughnut ocean, playing the angles and dividing the criminals against each other.

Meanwhile, the police are still investigating his partner's murder. They wonder if Spade did it. We don't blame them. When Spade gets control of the falcon, we wonder if he'll decide to keep it and screw over the others.

HERO: But he doesn't. And moreover, he finds out who killed his partner, in a last act that shows Spade's charade for what it is: a means to an end.

The Sam Spade character is perhaps the ultimate example of the film noir anti-hero: cutthroat, intelligent, sometimes cruel, sometimes murderous, but ultimately redeemed in the eyes of the audience by a code of conduct he holds to that the "villains" don't.

In Rififi, Tony le Stephanois was a thief who cruelly beat his ex-girlfriend for taking up with a rival. But he believed in honor among thieves and was willing to both kill and die for that honor.

Sam Spade doesn't have to kill or die for honor. But he believes, as he says to his secretary, that "when a man's partner is killed, he's supposed to do something about it." And he does, wading neck deep into a band of criminals willing to do anything to find the invaluable falcon and using their desperation against them, even though this puts him at grave risk.

At the end of the movie, when he finds out the killer is one of the criminals after the falcon -- a woman he's sort of fallen in love with -- he turns her over to the police anyway.

"I hope they don't hang you, precious, by that sweet neck," he says. "The chances are you'll get off with life. That means if you're a good girl, you'll be out in 20 years. I'll be waiting for you. If they hang you, I'll always remember you."

Cold, sure. But Spade makes sure his partner gets justice for his murder. He even turns over the money he was paid by the criminals as evidence. He may be untrusting and manipulative, willing to screw another man's wife even after he's been murdered, but he has a code, and that's enough. In the dark world in which he travels, it's even heroic.

Saturday, February 6, 2010

Merry... Superbowl?


So as you all know, or by now have figured out, normally I like to keep to a sort of once a week policy around here. Back in the good ol' days of the blog, I updated much more regularly -- say, every other day. But as this thing has evolved I've moved to longer and longer (and better) posts, which obviously take a lot longer to write.

So right, boo hoo. I get it. The point is: yesterday was my day to do it and well, I managed to get sick and suffer through a fairly serious phlegm exodus and decided instead to watch an excellent documentary about the making of Apocalypse Now called Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse.

Seriously, if you're an Apocalypse Now fan, go watch it. They went crazy-go-nuts making that movie.

Anyhow, this would normally leave today as my day to write about Anti-Heroes, but since tomorrow is the Superbowl -- and that to me is a far better thing than Christmas, the Kentucky Derby and the Lower Oakland Roller Derby Finals all rolled into one -- who would seriously be reading?

I mean, I know I won't. I have a full day planned. The refrigerator is stocked with beer and my head is stocked with plans to drink it.

So allow to me to violate my own rules and wait until Monday finish/work on my next crackerjack update, okay? Thank you. I won't let you down (at least, probably).

In the meantime, via Life on the Bubble, where I first saw this, a clip from what looks to be an excellent documentary on screenwriting -- Tales from the Script.

And yeah, I know, this blog is like 98% about movies and only 2% about screenwriting.

But there's a funny story about a vagina in here, so that makes it okay.

Prediction totally unrelated to this: Saints 31, Colts 28.