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.

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.

The 10 "Best" Anti-Heroes, part 2

So after a week off to discuss the fairly shitting nature of The Book of Eli, it's time to get back to my series of posts on Anti-Heroes, which wasn't really a series since there was just the one post before now, but let's not be dicks about this, shall we?

Anyhow, by way of recap:

1. I dig Anti-Heroes.

2. Therefore, Anti-Heroes are cool.

3. An Anti-Hero is a character that despite being an asshole, douchebag or even evil most of the time, manages by the end of the movie to perform a truly heroic act, either because they've changed their character, or more likely, because a kink in that character followed it's logical way toward an act of heroism.

4. This definition is not like everyone else's, but this is my blog, so they can suck it.

5. Larry Flynt and Barry Lyndon are Anti-Heroes.

6. Larry Flynt likes boobies.

So now that that's out of the way, allow me to present, with no further ado....

Anti-Hero #8: Walt Kowolski from Gran Torino

Get off my plane, err... lawn!

ANTI: Racist, violent and bitter, Korean War veteran Walt Kowalski chugs Pabst Blue Ribbon and stalks his front porch, shotgun never far away, hurling insults at anyone -- priests, family, neighbors -- who comes near.

As the movie starts, Walt's wife has just died. No one in his family respects him, and he hates all of them. His granddaughter waits for his death, hoping to inherit his 1972 Grand Torino and a couch he keeps in the basement. One of his sons and his wife ask him whether he's ready to move, so eager are they to sell his house. In this way the movie invites us to sympathize with Walt. Sure, he's a racist asshole, the movie says, but everyone around him is just as a bad.

And he is bad. Every non-white person he meets is a "gook," "zipperhead," "spook" or the like. Any sign of disrespect he seems to consider an offense worthy of execution. When given the chance to tell a joke, he says:

"A Mexican, a Jew and a colored guy go into a bar. The bartender looks up and says, 'Get the fuck out of here.'"

Later, he tells a gang member, "I'll blow your head off, go inside and sleep like a baby."

Deleted scene.

HERO: But Walt's heart is eventually melted by a family of Hmongs (Asians) who live next door. Well, not really the whole family, just a kid (Thao, who Walt calls "Toad") and his sister, Sue (who Walt calls "Dragon Lady").

Sue he admires for her strength in facing down three black hoods (Walt comes to her rescue in what's probably the best scene in the movie), and she ends up inviting him to a party and introducing him to the family.

His relationship with Thao is more problematic. Young and aimless, Thao's pursued by a local Hmong gang who want to make him a member. His initiation: stealing Walt's Gran Torino. But when Walt catches him in the act, Thao only barely gets away with his life. Later, his mother and Sue come back to Walt with a request: let Thao work off the debt.

Well, those of you who haven't seen the movie can guess where this is going. Walt and Thao become friends (to the point of Walt getting Thao a job), the gang intimidates Thao, Walt fights back, the gang rapes Sue (so maybe you didn't guess that part) and Walt, though haunted by memories of Korea, knows he must respond.

But how? How does one foul-mouthed septugenarian take on a six or seven gang members without ending up like, well....

This.

The answer is (uh, Spoiler Alert): he doesn't. Walt chooses to sacrifice himself by walking onto the gang's front lawn, threatening them and then pretending to pull a gun out of his jacket. When the gang mows him down in the presence of neighborhood full of witnesses, the cops are called, who promptly haul the gang off in chains.

For Walt, who the movie implies is about die from lung cancer anyway, they bring the meat wagon.

Now I personally have some problems with the logic of Walt's plan. If the gang has truly been terrorizing everyone as much as the movie implies, why would shooting someone on their front lawn be the thing that suddenly makes the neighborhood decide to stand up to them? And even if you're Walt and you assume there's a reasonable chance of this (which given that he is still a racist and despises most of the Hmongs shouldn't be something he assumes), it's pretty hard to gamble your life on just a reasonable chance. I'd have to be sure. Especially since if you die and the gang gets away with it, there's nothing to stop them from terrorizing Thao and Sue without end.

But despite those nagging problems, Walt's choice cannot be called anything but heroic. His revenge is total without being bloody. By sacrificing his own life, he gives his Hmong neighbors (by this time, his surrogate family) the freedom to live theirs in peace.

Anti-Hero #7: Tony le Stephanois from Rififi

Portrayed by Jean Servais

I've already written a bit about the great movie Rififi, so hopefully this will be somewhat shorter than the fucking opus the above turned out to be.

ANTI: A career criminal and ice-cold killer, Tony is simply not to be fucked with. Aging, just released from prison after five years for a jewel heist and stricken with tuberculosis, a friend finds him playing poker in a smoke-filled room in the early hours of the morning. This friend is Jo the Swede, genial and loyal protege of Tony's, who has a son Tony dotes on.

Tony asks about his old girlfriend, Mado. Jo tells him she's taken up with a rival -- scumbag nightclub owner Pierre Grutter. Tony goes to the nightclub and finds Mado a kept woman, dressed in expensive clothes and glittering with jewelery. Tony invites her back to his run down apartment, where he forces her to strip and then savagely beats her.

Tony, Jo and two other men plan an elaborate jewel heist, the 30 minute execution of which has become the inspiration for countless other heist sequences, and which originally got the film banned in some countries for being too realistic. Anyhow, the heist goes perfectly, except for one thing -- one of the men, a safecracker named Cesar Macaroni, has fallen in love with a singer involved with Grutter -- and when he gives her a jewel from the heist, Grutter figures out what happened, captures Cesar and learns everything.

Now in pursuit of Grutter and his men, Tony finds the Cesar tied up alone backstage at Grutter's club. Tony walks up, squints and coldly pulls out his gun.

"I liked you, Macaroni," Tony says. "But you know the rules."

Wrong kind of "rules," dickhead.

HERO: Jo the Swede knows where the jewels are, and when Grutter finds out, he conspires to steal them for himself. His plan? Kidnap Jo's son.

This springs Tony, coughing but still deadly, into action, as he begins a desperate search for the boy before Jo inevitably gives in to Grutter's demands. His search leads him first to find Cesar, who he kills in cold blood, and then out to a house on the outskirts of town where Grutter and his men are hiding.

Knowing that Grutter will simply kill Jo and his son once he has the jewels, Tony launches a one man assault on the house, killing each man in turn before (Spoiler Alert) being fatally wounded himself.

But he grabs Jo's son, and instead of rushing to a hospital, he drives at breakneck speed back into town, dying as soon as he's delivered the boy. Like Walt Kowalski, he sacrifices himself for an innocent, and despite being a violent sociopath and hardened criminal, achieves a moment of heroism.

A few words about The Book of Eli

I'll get back to my Award Winning series on anti-heroes for my next post, but right now I'd like to talk a bit about The Book of Eli, a kodachrome-colored post apocalyptic mess starring Denzel Washington, Gary Oldman and Mila Kunis.

It's a bird! It's a plane! It's a stupid plot and cliched characters!

Now a few words about the circumstances under which I watched this movie. First of all, it was the first night of my week long trip to Dallas, which just ended -- visiting my good friend/wildabeast Matt Hickman.

Second of all: we'd... uh, been drinking.

We started at a Mexican restaurant, which are of course pretty rare in Texas, but not before we'd hit a liquor store and a Wal-Mart (and I know what you're thinking -- in Texas that's not neccessarily the same thing) to buy cheap horrible whiskey and flasks.

As Bill Cosby once joked about the huge needles they use to numb your jaw during dental surgery: "this will deaden the pain."

Well, this whiskey, ironically titled Ancient Age (since your chances of become old, much less ancient, decrease every time you drink it), was poured into flasks in the parking lot of the Mexican restaurant, after which we drove to a fancy part of Dallas where the movie theater was, found a nearby bar, and began to... well, you know.

We saved the flasks for the movie. And boy did we need 'em, because The Book of Eli, let's just say, proved that if you fool me once (Avatar), shame on you; if you fool me twice (Sherlock Holmes) shame on me... and well, if you fool me a third fucking time, I guess it's time for my nuts to be ripped off and thrown down a well.

Though for the record, it wasn't my idea to see any of these movies. Thanks, friends!

Anyhow, now that I've rambled on enough about what it was like to sit there and down Ancient Age/Coke in a packed Dallas movie theater with Matt, my brother and three girls I'd just met that night, I suppose it's time to talk about the plot.

So okay. We begin with a slow tracking shot of a forest that seems to be raining human skin, where a diseased cat has discovered a dead human body (missed soundtrack opportunity: the Benny Hill theme). The cat comes up, sniffs the body. It looks hungry, ready to feed, only it doesn't realize that closeby a hunter (Denzel Washington, at least we assume, it's never made clear), is waiting to kill him with a comically huge bow and arrow.

Actual screenshot.

After the arrow hits and the opening credits roll, we're greeted with an image that will become mind numbingly repetitive as the movie drags on:

Denzel Washington. Walking.

And walking.

And walking some more.

If nothing else, The Book of Eli proves the wisdom George Miller had to at least give Mad Max a car. Walking, The Book of Eli helpfully teaches us, is incredibly boring.

So anyhow, Denzel has been walking for 30 years. This means that even if you give him the benefit of the doubt and assume he started in Maine, it's taken him 10,950 days to go the 3,300 miles to San Francisco, which means that buff, badass Denzel has been averaging just (uh, wait, just a second, checking my math) 500 yards a day.

Forrest Gump laughs at you, Denzel. He laughs hard.

So anyhow, Denzel rests for the night, "showers" with a handi-wipe, eats his cat, and listens to his iPod. Yes, an iPod, which he's somehow kept recharged and working for 30 fucking years (iPod battery lifespan: 500 charges. Warranty: one year).

Despite the obvious difficulties in maintaing his iPod, Denzel falls asleep with it on and drains the battery, proving once again my theory: people who would survive in a post apocalyptic world for 30 years are incredibly careless.

So on his search for a charger for his battery, and also some water, Denzel begins to encounter bad guys, who he either a) avoids as they rape a woman, or b) murders. Eventually he comes up on a town run by Oldman.

Oldman's character is your basic crime lord -- complete with a bald henchman -- who's been sending roving, illiterate gangs out to look for a very special book (a spoiler I will reveal later on). Apparently all of the "books" of this kind were destroyed in the apocalpyse (a move that, once you know what the book is, seems even more baffling).

So yeah, no prizes for guessing who has the last of the books (Denzel, you idiot), and what happens next (Oldman wants it and Denzel won't let him have it, you idiot).

While in town, Denzel meets the proverbial hooker with a heart of gold (played by Mila Kunis), who's sent up to his room to seduce him and tries to get a look at the "book."

Denzel turns her down. Proving once again my other theory: a man who's been alone for 30 years would definitely pass up a chance at Mila Kunis.

It's about this time that the filmmakers let you very subtly onto the fact that the "book" everyone keeps talking about is, yes, ugh... a Bible (this is achieved with the very subtle visual device of a foot-long cross painted on it's cover). Oldman wants it because he feels he'll be better at controlling the town once he has a hold of it's spiritual vocabulary or something (his point is never made very clear on this, which is probably a good thing since it's moronic).

Anyhow, after a few close calls and a few vaguely stupid action sequences, Denzel manages to get away from the town. After they realize he's gone, Oldman's men try to follow him in a convoy of trucks, only they can't catch up to him.

Remember when I said Denzel averaged 500 yards a day? Even if you're only going 5 miles an hour, that only takes 4 minutes to drive. I mean, even if we're saying he walked 20 miles (which he certainly doesn't, because at one point he has to stop to kill people), the filmmakers expect you believe he got away from them on foot without explaining, you know, how the fuck that happened.

So anyhow, Denzel and Kunis hide out for the night in what looks like an old nuclear silo and manage by the next day to get to a house where a couple of fine old cannibals live. Oldman finally shows up and a huge shoot out ensues where, after a standoff, Denzel is forced to give Oldman the book in exchange for Kunis' life. Oldman then shoots him in the stomach and drives off.

So now, finally possessing the book he has sought for years -- the key to his continuing rule of his shitty border town -- does Oldman actually look inside of it? No. And why? Because that would ruin a stupid surprise the movie leaves for the end (the Bible is in Braille. Gasp! Does that mean Denzel has been blind all this time? Frankly, I dare you to give a shit).

As Kunis drives away with Oldman's men, she decides she doesn't want to be with them anymore, so she makes both trucks crash horribly, though she's miraculously okay, and drives back to be with Denzel....

Who is still. Fucking. Walking. Despite the fact that he should be bleeding to death from a massively infected wound in a stomach he hasn't cleaned for 30 years. I mean, am I wrong about this? How far can the average person who's been shot in the stomach walk? Five hundred yards, maybe?

Anyhow, Kunis comes back to pick Denzel up, and she drives him into San Francisco and toward -- where else? -- Alcatraz. Once they find a boat, Denzel -- gut shot, bleeding -- starts rowing, instead of Kunis, leaving us to imagine what must have been the following conversation:

"I mean, jeez, Denzel. You're bleeding to death. I should really row."

"No way. I'm the hero. I'll row until I pass out, then you row."

"But why don't I just row now? I mean, if you're just going to pass out."

"You ever hear of foreshadowing, bitch? Plus, it turns out I might be blind."

"What? You're blind? But I watched you fire a gun. And beat up some guys. And look at my rack. How have you been doing all of..."

"Don't ask questions. I'm the hero. You ever seen Batman? That's me. I've got Spidey sense, too. And the Force."

So once Denzel passes out, Kunis starts rowing. And fuck if I'm tired of typing out this stupid plot, but, well... a curator (Malcolm McDowell) of things from before the apocalypse on the island takes Denzel and Kunis in, Denzel recites the entire fucking Bible from memory (!) and then of course dies from his stomach wound.

Average time of death from a gunshot wound to the stomach? Fifteen minutes.

Time it takes to recite the Bible? 77 hours, 22 minutes.

The End.

Final thoughts: Despite the clumsy spiritual mumbo jumbo and occassional that-was-fucking-stupid moments, the main failing of the movie is really none of those things, or even the movie's glacial pace (though none of those things help). It's the fact that there's nothing interesting or clever about Denzel's character. These kinds of movies and characters have been done many times before -- The Omega Man, Solyent Green, Jeremiah Johnson, even Tom Hanks' character from the middle section of Cast Away. They're men of action, using their wits and experience to survive in a hostile and dangerous world. Denzel's character does none of that. Besides showering with handi-wipes and looking for water and new boots, we get no sense of the mechanics of his world and how he survives it. I mean, even a comedy like Zombieland (a much better movie, by the way) shows more of an interest in post-disaster rules and ethics. As much as anything, it's this lack of creativity that dooms The Book of Eli to occilate between the boring and the preposterous.

The 10 "Best" Anti-Heroes, part 1

So the last time I did a list-based series of posts, things turned out pretty well. Part of that, I think, was due to the fact that the subject matter -- movies about the movies -- is fairly modest in size and scope. There just aren't that many movies to cover, so the chance of missing something or just generally coming off like a douchebag is not really that much higher than normal (granted, this is not saying much).

This series of posts will be nothing like that. The subject of anti-heroes in the movies is, well, huge. A simple Google search for "movies" and "anti-hero" provides more lists than you can shake a wiener at.

As a result, I'm fairly sure I'm a moron for tackling it, a fact I'm sure at least a few of you fine people will remind me of.

Not an anti-hero.

So it will happen this way. Keeping with the human fascination with lists that are divisible by five (for example: five things), this list will cover 10 of the best anti-hero characters in movie history, with the first four entries covering two characters each, and the last two getting their own entries.

At least, that's the plan. Even with just five entries last time, I still managed to fuck things up.

Now a few words on the term anti-hero. It seems that everyone has their own definition of it, so for reference here's mine -- an anti-hero is a character who, despite being immoral, selfish, a killer or whatever, manages to accomplish the chief heroic act in (this case) the movie.

This definition helps separate out a lot of sundry characters we just end up rooting for because they're clever, or put upon, or think they're doing the right thing -- from characters who are mediocre or even bad human beings but who manage in the world of the story to rise at least for a moment to the level of a hero (for whatever reason).

This distinguishes them from characters like Alex DeLarge in A Clockwork Orange or Blondie from The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, who despite the fact that we root for them can not be called anything but, you know, protagonists. Which is of course different from a hero.

So now that's all been covered, let's get into it.

#10 -- Larry Flynt

As seen in: The People vs. Larry Flynt

ANTI: In the movie (as in real life), Larry Flynt is a mostly uneducated, philandering smut peddler. Facing a run of bad luck running a strip club in Cincinnati, he publishes the first Hustler magazine with pictorials of the women who dance in his club.

He becomes involved with Althea Leasure, a runaway turned stripper played by Courtney Love, publishes nude photos of Jackie Kennedy Onassis, and generally goes out of his way to offend every measure of taste and decorum possible, including, famously, publishing a cartoon that implies conservative icon Jerry Falwell lost his virginity to his own mother in an outhouse.

In court repeatedly on obscenity charges, Flynt is a disaster. He yells repeatedly, fires his own lawyer, wears diapers and at one point throws an orange at a judge.

HERO: But -- beyond the fact that he's portrayed, and by all accounts is in real life, as a completely classless asshole -- Flynt is right. The obscenity laws of the United States are ludicrous. As Flynt at one point says, you can get a Pulitzer for printing a picture of a murder, which is illegal, but go to jail for printing a picture of a sex act, which is legal.

This is madness, and by railing against it, even in his cartoonishly immature circus act fashion, Flynt does a public good.

Though he loses most of his obscenity trials, by the end of the movie Flynt has triumphed in the Supreme Court over the legality of his Falwell ad, solidifying a relaxed standard for satirizing public figures that still influences public satire today, enabling everyone from SNL to stand up comedians to do what they do.

Though he remains someone you'd probably never want to meet, by paying the price both in jail time and lawyers fees, Flynt proves himself a hero. Not just to people who want to look at fake and/or skanky boobs, but to anyone who thinks it's important to make that choice for themselves.

"If they'll protect a scumbag like me," Flynt says. "They'll protect anyone."

#9 -- Barry Lyndon

ANTI: A boobish, naive teenager turned ruthless gambler and profiteer, the story of Barry Lyndon is often described as the odyssey of an opportunist, tracing his humble beginnings in Ireland -- a lost love, a duel, and an escape from the law -- to his eventual profession as a gambler and his cold-hearted seduction of a widow.

As directed by Stanley Kubrick and portrayed by Ryan O'Neal, Barry is anything but sympathetic. Forced to join the Army to survive after being robbed while on his way to Dublin to escape a murder he didn't actually commit (I know, it's complicated), Barry deserts at the first opportunity, stealing the costume and papers of a messenger.

When a Prussian officer discovers Barry's lies, he's forced to join the Prussian army, which is even worse than the British one. Eventually he's brought back to Prussia and told to spy on a chevalier (whatever that is), who the Prussians think is an Irish spy. Instead, he and the chevalier join forces as a gambling team, cheating rich nobles at cards all over Europe (and fighting duels to collect when necessary).

By this point, as the Narrator puts it:

"Five years in the army, and some considerable experience in the world, had by now dispelled any of those romantic notions regarding love with which Barry commenced life. And he began to have it in mind, as so many gentlemen had done before him, to marry a woman of fortune and condition."

Stripped of his innocence, Barry seduces the widow Lady Lyndon, who falls hard (and stupidly) for him. Once they're married, and he has charge of their finances, Barry essentially throws her away, engendering the undying hatred of his adopted son, Lord Bullingdon.

After Bullingdon -- now a teenager -- insults Barry one too many times in front of a party of guests, Barry beats him mercilessly, rendering Barry a social outcast among the upper crust he's been trying so hard and so expensively to join.

HERO: The only good thing in Barry's life, other than money, is the son he and Lady Lyndon have, an annoyingly precocious kid named Bryan, who softens Barry's cool facade.

When Bryan dies in an accident, Barry falls into a prolonged drunken stupor, giving Bullingdon an opportunity to challenge Barry to a duel over mastery of the Lyndon estate.

The duel scene -- justifiably famous -- proves to be both Barry's undoing and his greatest triumph as a human.

Despite having both reason and opportunity to kill Bullingdon, and a lifetime of war, gambling and murder to harden him to the idea, he chooses not to. Bullingdon accidentally fires into the ground, so Barry -- weary and aging -- does as well. After trying to buy his way into the title and style of a gentleman and failing horribly, Barry finally finds a measure of grace and nobility in his mercy toward Bullingdon.

Bullingdon, though he has the bloodlines of a Lord, fails the moral test. Though in a twist that's very Kubrick, his very act of failing a moral test leads to the passing of a social one, since Barry's resulting injury allows Bullingdon to take control of the Lyndon estate and banish Barry to Europe.

But even though he loses the duel, Barry rises for that brief moment into heroism, showing mercy on a young kid who is clearly shitting his pants. The cold world of the movie punishes him immediately for this act, but still, after a lifetime of being a heel, Barry finally rises above.

More secrets of Avatar revealed!

Thanks to my buddy Ryan for sending me this...

Sherlock Holmes: Brilliant detective -- dumb movie

No, not that one.

I'll admit, right up top, that part of my problem with Guy Ritchie's version of Sherlock Holmes is irrational. After all, as someone somewhere has certainly said, "this isn't your father's Holmes." Which of course can be translated as, "yeah, we changed, uh... everything. All we left is the name because, you know, that's good for marketing."

So my problem is with that general idea, which I despise. But strictly in terms of the Holmes character, I shouldn't really care, since I've never read a Holmes book or seen a Holmes movie.

But at the end of the day, a reboot like this isn't as much about how much is changed (The Mask of Zorro changed a lot about Zorro and was still pretty good), but whether the movie itself is, you know, a piece of shit.

Fortunately for everyone involved, Sherlock Holmes is not (at least completely) a piece of shit. But all things considered, it's a pretty lousy movie that gets even worse the more you think about it and the more you compare it to the movies it's trying to be.

For instance:

Plot Point: Holmes and Watson's partnership is coming to an end because Watson is getting married. Holmes uses every opportunity to sabotage Watson's plan to leave.

Done better in: Zero Effect

Starring Bill Pullman and Ben Stiller in a modern takeoff of the Holmes/Watson dynamic (of which, of course, there are many), Zero Effect probes this same assistant-leaving situation in a much more satisfying and motivated way. Pullman's Darryl Zero, for one, is a much weirder and worse boss to Stiller's character than Downey's Holmes is to Watson. Also, Stiller's character is a lawyer and has a fiance who doesn't like Zero.

The point is: he clearly has a future without Zero, making his reluctance to leave him (Zero is helpless without him, and Stiller digs that) an interesting character point to explore.

Jude Law's Watson isn't given anything like this to play. We're simply told he's leaving Holmes' employ for reasons like he's messy and a bad roommate. Why the lack of a real reason? Because it's only there to add some tension and give them something to talk about. Beyond that, the movie can't be bothered to answer.

Plot Point: Holmes is a drug addict of some kind. At one point he's high on something used for "eye surgery," leading to the obvious question, was there really eye surgery in Victorian England?

This will hurt, and then you'll die.

Done better in: House, among other places.

Wikipedia helpfully informs me that Holmes' drug of choice in the original stories was cocaine (then legal in England), injected in a seven percent solution as a way to alleviate his boredom when he wasn't working.

In Sherlock Holmes, he drinks and does (mostly unnamed) drugs, simultaneously flailing about and inventing things, as in one particularly useless scene, where he observes he can get flies to fly in semicircles when he plays discordant notes on his violin.

Unfortunately, the "brilliant man who's also an addict but can somehow keep it together" has been done so many times before that it's hard to do anything new with it, and Sherlock Holmes proves over and over again it's not up to doing anything hard.

In the TV show House (which is based in many ways on the Holmes character), his addiction to painkillers is a direct result of a medical misdiagnosis of an infarction of the leg, making his limp, and his addiction, a constant reminder of the importance of getting the right answer. This is obviously more interesting than a brilliant guy who abuses drugs because he's bored (and when he's not bored, can instantly snap out of it).

At the root of all this is simply a problem of the movie being dumb. Holmes and Watson are supposed to be brilliant and innovative, but instead of gathering clues and deducing things logically, they mostly seem to arrive at a place and say a few things that don't make sense until the bad guys show up, at which point a big fight starts that lasts long enough for the screenwriters to go, "whew, that was close. We almost had to write something clever there."

This is in stark contrast to the best kind of mystery fiction, where the clues are laid at least partially in view, drawing the audience in in their attempt to solve the mystery for themselves. Sherlock Holmes can't be bothered (or the filmmakers simply weren't talented enough) to do that, so the movie decides leaves you in the fucking dark about everything.

For instance (and this is a spoiler), at one point a character is revealed to have not been dead because (you didn't guess it) he had ingested a suppressant derived from a rhododendron plant.

Uh, what? Was there any way for me to know that (they do show a leaf to a rhododendron plant at one point. Or at least, I thought it was a rhododendron plant. It just looked like a leaf to me)? I mean, is such a thing even possible to extract from a rhododendron?

Apparently not.

The whole end of the movie is like that, where in one long, breathless speech, Holmes tries to explain the totally confusing things we've been watching in ways that are either totally implausible or just goddamn made up.

No, we're told. A character didn't spontaneously combust. An odorless, colorless flammable liquid was dropped on him by some kind of Victorian-era rain machine, and his gun was rigged to spark so that he exploded into flames. No, this didn't also ignite the long stream of droplets he left behind him on his way in here. What makes you say that?

You get the idea. As my brother said, "Don't bother to explain it if you're going to do it with bullshit like that. I didn't really need to know."

I'll take it a step further.

I didn't need to see the movie at all.

One and a half stars out of five.

Postscript: it also bears serious noting that in getting the great Robert Downey, Jr. to play Holmes and the also pretty great Jude Law to play Watson, they really had the chance to do something interesting with the material. Having those two actors eschew interesting dialogue in favor of what it by my count at least three fight scenes is a crime to celluloid that someone should be punished for.

A Christopher Walken bedtime story

This really has nothing to do with Christmas (or any holiday for that matter), but somehow it seems appropriate to post.

Here's Christopher Walken (in an absolutely crazy sweater) reading "The Three Little Pigs."

Enjoy.

A few words about Avatar

Note: contains spoilers. Namely, that Avatar is pretty much a hunk of shit. But seriously, I'm going to reveal a few plot points. Especially any that I can make fun of. Which would be most of them.

As I write this, Avatar has an 83% positive rating on Rotten Tomato's famed Tomatometer. A few days ago, it was 95% (the ratings from the "Cream of the Crop" reviewers is still 94%). For the past two weeks, every guest on The Tonight Show (whether they were in the movie or not) has raved about it. Everywhere you go, magazine articles, TV reports and the general buzz have told you this movie is so fucking amazing it will revolutionize the way we watch movies. To call it a quantum leap, indeed, would be to diminish it.

Perhaps not surprisingly, none of these things ever get around to mentioning what the movie's actually about. All the trailers indicate is that there's lot of explosions. And, uh, blue people. Oh, and that this movie is so fucking amazing it will revolutionize the way we watch movies. To call it a quantum leap would be to blah blah blah.

Sitting at home, we absorb all of these stray pieces of information (James Cameron hasn't directed a movie for a while because he's been doing this) and that makes our brain go, "hey, this thing might be a work of genius." And of course we take this into the movie and it makes us more likely to like it. It's been a truly brilliant marketing campaign, executed at the level of the best political campaigns, and someone somewhere should get a medal for it (or a punch in the face... either way).

So okay. With all that out of the way I'll say right here at the top that as spectacle -- in terms of the effects -- it's a very good movie. Top quality effects. Movie changing or even mind blowing? No. We've seen it all before. Imagine a bunch of Golems from the Lord of the Rings movies -- only blue and tall and heroic -- and that's what it is. They haven't crossed that threshold toward making it look actually real, but there's a reasonable chance they never will, so who cares?

Either way, that's not what I'm going to talk about. My issues were with the story.

We start on a spaceship that has traveled 4.3 light years to Alpha Centauri in the year 2154. Nevermind how it got there going the speed of light looking, well, like something that can't go anywhere close to the speed of light.

Does it at least come with a supercharger?

Anyway, once we arrive at Pandora, it's time for the Incredibly Obvious Metaphors to start flying around. Pandora is populated by the Na'vi (Native Americans), who use bows and arrows (um), engage in mysticism (yeah), and at one with their environment (yep).

Sadly, Pandora is rich in the hilariously named fake element unobtanium (standing in for oil), which is necessary toward solving the economic and energy crisis on Earth (a crisis you would imagine might be somewhat less severe if we hadn't spent all that cash to built spaceships that can fly at the speed of light to Alpha Centauri and hold what seems to be an almost limitless supply of helicopters, gunships and men, though of course no one asks me about these things).

Anyhow, the most concentrated source of unobtanium on the entire planet happens to be right under the home tree of the Omaticaya Clan of the Na'vi (and no, I can't believe I just typed that). Obviously, they'll have to be moved.

Or won't they? I mean, you just flew a spaceship at the speed of light part way across the galaxy, and you have the technology to establish a perfect telekenetic link with a Na'vi whose DNA has been combined with that of a human and then grown in a test tube. You can do all that, and I'm supposed to believe that you still have to strip mine this ore out of the ground like we're back in West Virginia (strip mining here standing in for strip mining)?

At the center of all this is a disabled marine named Jake Scully, whose identical twin brother was a scientist specializing in the Na'vi and who managed to get killed just before the mission (and this is really only a minor quibble, but is it really all that common for one identical twin to end up as a marine and the other identical twin to end up as a scientist who, if I remember right from the flaccid dialogue, had a few Ph. Ds?).

Anyhow, Jake's brother's specially grown Na'vi just can't go to waste, so they let Jake use it, and of course the first thing that happens on a mission after he plugs in telekenetically (and it really bears pointing out just how ludicrous the whole idea of that is), is that he gets separated from the group.

Of course he meets a Na'vi woman, of course she hates him (but not for long!), and of course he'll have a rocky introduction to Na'vi culture, but of course eventually he'll get the hang of it, and of course he'll eventually get everyone's respect and pass a ritual and marry the Na'vi woman and become part of the tribe and begin to hate his original employers and fight on their side of what's right against the imperialist blah blah blah.

I mean honestly. This movie is supposed to be so fucking amazing it will revolutionize the way we watch movies. To call it a quantum leap, indeed, would be to diminish it.

And it can't do any better than to completely rape the plot of Dances with Wolves, The Last Samurai and like, 50 other movies? Give me a break. The plot, the motivations, the villains and the resolution are all totally obvious from, well... from 4.3 light years away (25 trillion miles or so). I mean, the main villain even has a bunch of scars on his head. How much more un-revolutionary can you get that to copy just about every Bond villain ever created? Did Cameron have to be physically restrained from putting an eyepatch on him, too?

Here's another example of what I mean. Late in the movie, Sigourney Weaver's character is wounded. The Na'vi tell Jake they might be able to transfer her consciousness into a Na'vi body, making her a Na'vi permanently. Only, it doesn't work. She was too wounded (big shock). Can anyone guess what will happen to Jake at the end of the movie? Will he become a Na'vi permanently?

And can anyone guess what will happen when one character says a huge flying beast has only been mastered by five Na'vi since recorded Na'vi time began? Yup, here comes Jake Scully. He's been a Na'vi for a few months. Clearly he's the best guy we have. If anyone can master the un-masterable beast, it's the guy with the funny accent who just got here a little while ago.

And you know what makes it that much worse is that there are actually serious issues at play in Avatar. Gross over-miliarization, deforestation, the Iraq war and the destruction of native peoples are real things. Many of the indigenous people of the Earth have been systematically wiped out by people in need of land and resources who were greedy enough, as one character says in the movie, to make anyone who stands in their way an enemy, and thus justifiably wiped out.

That's a real truth of history, and a hard one. And the destruction of the natural world, even for someone like me, who's far from an ecologist, is a tragic thing.

But by sticking to the most cliched of plots, the movie cheapens the issues to the point of demeaning their seriousness, rendering it, say, an open letter for peace and conservation written in crayon and filled with internet slang.

And about those robots...

1.) Was I the only one who laughed out loud at the bi-pedal robot, controlled by a human, who was carrying what looked like a huge machine gun? Carrying it in it's arms, like a human would, rather than having it as part of the design? What kind of bumblefuck would expect us to believe that?

Oh.

2.) And as bad as that was, they managed to top it by having the robot pull out a fucking knife and engage in hand-to-hand combat! I mean, a knife! Who designed this goddamn robot? Who looked at the plans and said, "yeah, this is a pretty cool robot.... but, it's missing something. Hmm. Oh, I know! It needs a two foot bowie knife and a knife sheath! Why? Because at some point, I envision this robot getting into a situation where the gun will be knocked out of it's 'hands' and it's 'hands', which are apparently just 'hands' and don't do anything, will really need to grab a knife and start stabbing something. No no, don't make the knife just come out of their hands, like Fulgore. Are you an idiot? Make it have to hold the knife, like we do. Waaaaay cooler that way!"

Netflix cont'd cont'd (and also cont'd)

So even though the erstwhile (whatever that means) topic of this blog is the fact that, you know, one of these days I hope to be a Hollywood screenwriter so rich and fabulously successful I could, as Lewis Black once dreamed, hire someone just to wash my balls, I haven't really talked much about what I'm actually working on.

And I know what you're thinking about that. So yeah, you're welcome. After all, who (besides me, presumably) gives a shit? This blogging crap is self involved enough as it is.

But for the purposes of this entry, I'll say that the totally original, totally plausible, totally commercial but totally artistic project of mine has something (though not totally) to do with gangsters and the underworld.

And it should. I'm a huge fan of gangster/crime movies and always have been, so I can think of no better place for a bumblefuck like me to start.

With this in mind, I've been using most of my Netflix queue to rent and watch gangster/crime movies. Mostly foreign ones, as I've seen many of the American ones already. A few of these, like Rififi and Shoot the Piano Player, I've written about already. Here are a few more:

Bob le Flambeur (1956)

Longest. Trailer. Ever.

Translated as "Bob the Gambler" or "Bob the High Roller" (rather than, I dunno, "Bob the Flammable"), Jean-Pierre Melville's noir story centers on the eponymous Bob, an ex-con and compulsive gambler who, after years away from crime, plans a casino heist.

Bob has hit a bad run of luck but can't stop gambling. Even the slot machine in his apartment won't pay out. As his money ebbs to nearly nothing, an old friend who works for the police begins to get suspicious. Don't do it, Bob. Bob takes the rest of his money and goes to the track to bet on horses. He loses it all. Then, at his absolute ebb, he hears about the safe at the Deauville Casino, which holds a fortune, and suddenly, forgetting everything, he decides to gamble the one thing he has left: his freedom.

Surrounding Bob is a young man -- Bob's protege -- who desperately wants to be like the smooth, cool Bob, a young girl who's bored by everything, including sex, a longtime fixer and friend of Bob's, and a whole galaxy of safecrackers, con men and street criminals, all of whom Bob orchestrates in a plan so detailed that, in a famous scene, he draws out the floor plan of the casino in a field to practice.

But all is not destined to go well. The wife of the inside man at the casino wants more money for her husband's part in the crime, and in the best tradition of film noirs, he is weak and she is greedy, and will try to sabotage everything if she can't get her way. The girl Bob's protege is sleeping with thinks they're all just pretending and tells a rival mobster who's in debt to the police for information about the plan. The policeman who's been friends with Bob ever since Bob saved his life is heartbroken and tries to warn him, but Bob can't be reached.

The director, Melville, loved everything American. He wore Ray Bans and listened to American radio and drove a big American car. But especially, he loved American movies, and even more especially film noir (a term invented by the French to describe the gritty American crime dramas that came out of Hollywood -- mostly Warner Brothers -- in the 40s and early 50s). He shot Bob le Flambeur sporadically over two years, working a few days at a time whenever he had the money to film.

His innovation was to combine the basic plot of American film noir and combine it with the free-wheeling camera, on-location shooting and naturalistic acting style of French and Italian neorealist movies of the time. The result was what most people consider the first film of the French New Wave, a group of movies directed mostly by French film critics -- Godard, Rohmer, Truffaut -- all of whom loved American crime movies and strove on meager budgets to make their own versions.

The movies they made eventually found a way back over the Atlantic, sparking a mini-movie revolution known as the New Hollywood of art-house American movies in the late 60s and early 70s (Bonnie and Clyde being one particularly notable example).

But that history aside, Bob le Flambeur really is a fine movie. Watching it, I was struck by how much P.T. Anderson had borrowed from it for his first movie Hard Eight, also a story about a world weary professional gambler and the protege who wants to be just like him (and the woman the protege gets involved in that puts everything at risk).

Roger Duchesne, with his dome of silver hair, perfectly projects Bob's world weary cool. Though he's a hopeless gambling addict, he really seems cares about people, especially his eager protege. When a violent pimp comes into the restaurant he's in with a new girl, Bob confronts him and forces him to leave. Bob has already done prison time for trying to rob a bank, we learn. Bob's just a gambler now. Everybody likes Bob. But Bob's cool, we sense, and his distaste for carelessness and danger has been slowly eroded by his run of bad luck and his inability to stop gambling (not that he even entertains the idea).

The final sequence -- the attempt at the casino -- takes on the style of a Greek tragedy, in which Bob, assigned to watch the casino from the high roller's room, can't help himself but sit down for a hand, and when he does, finally hit a run of luck so huge he loses all track of time and his role in the robbery.

Very good movie.

4 out of 5 stars

Drunken Angel (1948)

A different kind of crime movie, this one from Japan, directed by Akira Kurosawa, probably best known to the West for his Seven Samurai (1954), which was later remade as The Magnificent Seven.

Anyhow, Drunken Angel centers on a House-like asshole doctor played by Takashi Shimura, whose practice is in a slum on the edge of a poisonous scum pond. Shimura's doctor drinks too much and yells at anyone he thinks is being stupid or careless -- which is everyone -- especially a young yakuza (Toshiro Mifune) who comes in for treatment for a wound in his hand.

The hood tries to pretend he hurt his hand innocently, but Shimura wearily pulls out a bullet, and after the hood, looking pale and sickly, starts to cough, Shimura pulls out a stethescope, listens to his chest and crudely tells him he probably has tuberculosis, and with the way he lives his life, that means he's dead man walking. Mifune's hood is mortified, beats the shit out of the doctor and leaves, but a few days later he comes back. Shimura tells him to go get X-Rays to confirm the diagnosis and to clean up his sorry-ass. Mifune beats the shit out of him again and leaves.

But a few days later Mifune comes back, drunk as hell, but with the X-Rays, which confirm the tuberculosis. He wants to live. He wants the doctor's help.

And it's really at this point where things begin to get interesting. Mifune's amoral murderering mob boss has just been released from prison. He has a history with a nurse who works for Shimura and comes looking for her.

But when he shows up, Shimura basically tells him to fuck off -- you were terrible to her and you're a shithead yakuza -- a move that will almost surely get him killed. Mifune, now an outcast with the organization due to his illness and with a sort of grudging respect and gratitude for the doctor, decides he must intervene. He goes to a meeting of his bosses to beg for the life of the doctor, but all they do is throw money at his feet and kick him out.

What Mifune does after that, which I won't reveal, says a lot about what Kurosawa thought about the immediate post-war and American occupied Japan during which the movie was made.

"The Japanese love to sacrifice themselves for stupid things," the doctor says at one point. And Kurosawa's portrayal of the yakuza as a bunch of hedonistic murderers who care a lot more about getting drunk and screwing dance hall girls than rebuilding their bombed-out shithole of a city. They profess to have a code of loyalty, but when Mifune gets sick they throw him out. His girlfriend leaves him for his boss. He's nothing.

All that's left is the doctor, with his rudeness, his over drinking and his rigid honesty, which at first repels and then slowly begins to make us admire him, even though it takes someone else's sacrifice -- this time, not for something stupid -- to keep him alive.

3.5 out of 5 stars

Note: sorry about the long delay between posts. I wish I had a better excuse than I have (which would be none). Anyhow, I'll be back in a few short days to talk about a few noirs that were, uh, not so good.

The Underused Actors Club: Christopher McDonald

The noted philosopher Tommy Lasorda once said: "the difference between the impossible and the possible lies in a person's determination."

And here I thought it was impossible for an old fat guy to flip that way.

Anyhow, it's not just ol' Tommy. This quote (or others like it) have entered the common usage to the degree that we just take them as an article of faith.

Fortune favors the bold. Winners make their own luck. Success is one percent inspiration and 99 percent copying off people smarter than you.

Or something like that.

Anyhow, these quotes are crap. And the reason they're crap is because they don't recognize what is almost certainly the most important part of success: luck. Sometimes blind, sometimes stupid, sometimes out of the blue, but always luck. Without it, even the most phenomenally talented piano player to have ever been born couldn't transcend, you know, being born on a reed island on Lake Titicaca.

Or how about this. You, you out there reading this. You could be the most talented person who's ever walked the face of this Earth at, uh, playing the harmonica. Your harmonica playing could revolutionize the world of music (which would be quite a feat, considering the harmonica). You could be celebrated throughout the harmonica playing world as a goddamn DiVinci of the harmonica.

Only, you've never played the harmonica, have you? Too bad. If only you'd grown up next door to a guy who played one. He might have showed you how and encouraged you.

And just in case I haven't made my point, try this sometime for fun: go up to the next paralyzed person you see and ask them why they don't have the determination to just get up and run a marathon.

Yeah, not so much. The truth is that in any profession, in any walk of life, to have the good fortune to be in the right place at the right time is at least as important as having the right skills, and it's only when all of those things come together that you have success.

So what does all of that have to do with Hollywood?

Well, a lot. And it's in that spirit that I'd like to start a new series here on the ol' HH: The Underused Actors Club, a tribute to actors whose luck has (so far) not truly matched up with their talent.

First up?

-Christopher McDonald-

Where you (might) know him: Dirty Work, Happy Gilmore, Requiem for a Dream, Spy Kids, Star Trek: TNG, The Faculty, Quiz Show.

Oh, that guy!

Yes, that guy.

A character actor with a career spanning 30 years (his first role was in a 1978 TV movie as an usher), McDonald has become mostly known for playing douche bags in movies made by guys who were on SNL (this is just a long way of saying he was the bad guy in Happy Gilmore and Dirty Work).

Awesome.

These movies and those roles are harder than they look. Compare McDonald to, say, Bradley Whitford's performance as the bad guy in Billy Madison. Whitford -- a fine actor, as his work on The West Wing proves -- falls into the hammy minefield of broad comedy and in my opinion ends up sort of looking like an idiot.

I mean, we all remember Shooter McGavin, right? But can anyone name Whitford's character? I thought so.

So while McDonald was pretty great in those movies, he's also done a few other things (for instance, those above things).

But for every role in a really good movie like Quiz Show (playing vapid game show host Jack Barry) or The Faculty (playing Elijah Wood's dad) he's slogged out in the shitty bog of Hollywood tripe, appearing in such stinkers as Fair Game, The House Bunny and American Pie presents Beta House (as Mr. Stifler).

Sigh.

Only now and again has he been able to show that he could do more than this crap. Take for instance his role in Requiem for a Dream, where, in a mostly improvised performance, he plays TV pitchman Tappy Tibbons, whose "Month of Fury" secret to losing weight is abstaining from red meat (yeah), processed sugar (uh huh) and orgasms (uh, what?!).

So okay, then. What kinds of roles should he be doing?

Well, how about a real person, for starters? The only time McDonald seems to get a part of any size is either as the villain in a broad comedy or as some kind of television personality, where his bland good looks and smooth voice are put to effective use. As good as he is in Requiem for a Dream, he's still playing a TV pitchman, it's just a twist on the role. Darren Aronofsky (who directed), uses his casting as a kind of shortcut, expecting us to believe him as the pitchman because that's the role we usually see him in.

But me? I see him maybe as the adulterer sidekick in a Woody Allen film. Say, Michael Murphy in Manhattan. If he were somewhat younger, I think he could have played Aaron Eckhart's role in Thank You for Smoking, that of an amoral cigarette company pitchman.

But while McDonald has a very effective lying smile that's he's combined with a jackass attitude, you know, a lot, I really think he could also play a genuinely good guy (by all appearances, he's one in real life, which helps). He guest starred on the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "Yesterday's Enterprise," believably portraying a heroic junior officer and love interest (McDonald had been a finalist for the role of Riker three years before), and he's been used many times for voiceover work, notably as Jor-el (Superman's father) in Superman: The Animated Series and Justice League Unlimited.

But, you know, what do I know? I'm neither a casting agent, a director or a studio head, and unless these people are a lot more interested in Hollywood blogs than I think they are, this is probably falling on deaf ears.

But it shouldn't. Look at Robert Forster, whose career had gone completely to the shithouse before Quentin Tarantino put him in Jackie Brown (he's great in the movie, by the way). And how about Gloria Swanson, a second rate Golden Age of Hollywood actress who made it in the business 70 years before she won an Oscar for Titanic.

That's all I'm saying. Give McDonald a chance, people.