C'est Non Un Blog

(August 7)

——The Descent (2005)——

Great horror films are hard to come by. So rare that when you finally do find one, you want to shout it from the rooftops so that everyone else will see them. The Descent is one of those horror films. From the very beginning this British horror film outclasses all the competition. And in what is really a great sign, this movie is extremely terrifying BEFORE any of the supernatural stuff starts. If you are claustrophobic at all, this isn’t probably the best film for you to see on the big screen.

A group of adventure seeking Brit women meet in the Appalachia to go splunking in an out of the way cave on the side of a mountain. The backstory is that one of those women lost her daughter and husband in a freak auto accident the year before, and thus might not be entirely ready for this new adventure. They all go anyway. There is great writing for the women, sketching out all their personalities and relationships deftly and with precision so that we can get to the meat and potatoes of the film quicker. And oh, does it. This is one of those movies where the dread starts up almost immediately and just keep pouring it on you until the very end. The tunnel they are in caves in. Oh, and they aren’t in the charted cave their guide said they were in. This one is uncharted. Oh, and there just happen to be cannibal albino monster/men living in this particular cave. Oops. The hits just keep on coming.

I was knocked out and floored by The Descent. I know this movie is just destined to be remembered as a horror classic. If you like horror you better not hesitate to see this film.

(MUST SEE)

——Blackballed: The Bobby Dukes Story (2004)——

I had no expectations that this was going to be any good. I hadn’t heard of it anywhere before I saw that it was coming out on DVD and it didn’t get much of any press, which is never a good thing. All I knew was that it starred Rob Corddry of the Daily Show (sweet) and that it was a mockumentary of paintball. Paintball is filled with lots of comic potential, I thought, so this has got to be worth picking up. I just hope it doesn’t suck.

So you could say I was extremely surprised that Blackballed was a comic goldmine. Seriously folks, this movie is hilarious. If you are a fan of Christopher Guest movies and/or Anchorman/Talladega Nights then this is the movie that you need to put in your NetFlix queue right now. With a brilliantly hilarious, mostly improvised script, a funny cast, and some imaginative documentary-style camera work, Blackballed hits it out of the park.

Bobby Dukes (Corddry) was THE greatest paintball player that ever was. He was a legend, unstoppable. Then in one of the championship games it was caught wiping, AKA he got hit by a paintball and tried to wipe the paint off before the judge could see it and call him out. The judge caught him wiping though, and Bobby Dukes left the sport and his hometown in shame, never to be heard from for ten years time. [Side note: What is it about the name Bobby that is so funny? Between Bobby Dukes and Ricky Bobby you’ve got a bonanza of funny Bobby names. But moving on…] But Bobby Dukes does come back and he wants to get back into the sport that shunned him. Of course none of his old teammates, or anyone else for that matter, want to play with him, so coming up with a team is pretty tough. The oddball group he finally comes up with proves to be a comic goldmine.

There are some really funny bits in this movie. My favorite involves the entire sequence concerning their first qualifying match-up against some gangster wannabe Canadians. They start freestyling. It’s embarrassingly hilarious. Then, well, I’m not sure you can really call Canadian a race, but if you could, you are treated to the most racist rant against the Canadians that I have ever heard. Brilliant. Finally, there is the paintball match itself, which is absolutely the best recreation of Saving Private Ryan that I have seen in any film. I lost it, I was laughing so hard. Those looking for the next big comedy in a sea of unfunny crap need only look to Blackballed: The Bobby Dukes Story.

(MUST SEE)

——The War Game (1964)/Culloden (1963)——

The War Game and Culloden are two short experimental documentaries made for BBC television by director Peter Watkins, packaged on the same DVD.

Culloden is about the last major battle of the English pacification of the Highlanders on April 16, 1746, which also happened to be one of the biggest blunders and massacres in military history. The Scottish were so ineptly led that they walked an army day and night to a battlefield that easily gave advantage to the superiorly armed British. Once there the chain of communication was so broken down that the Scottish just stood there doing nothing under a constant barrage from British canons with no support for over a half hour, which effectively decimated most of their attack force. The survivors then made a blind charge into certain death with few weapons among them. To call it a disaster is a major understatement. Peter Watkins directs the film as if he were really there on the Culloden Moor shooting a real documentary, asking the participants questions about who they were, what they were thinking, and what they saw happen that day. All the while a voice over provides ancillary details to fill in the gaps and make sure we know what a tragedy it really was that day.

Culloden is great and a very effective anti-war statement at the start of the Vietnam conflict, but it pales in comparison to the controversial The War Game. The War Game, in a sense, is a preemptive documentary, showing the British people what would really happen if someone were to push the button and start a nuclear attack. MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction) is a very apt acronym for what would happen and the documentary is all about how woefully unprepared the British government would be for an attack, using their own words to do so, and about how catastrophic it would be the clueless British people. Using the town of Kent as an example, it goes step by step through what would happen if a nuclear war were to start and shows how easy it would be to get to that point. The images, although staged, are striking and powerful nonetheless. It’s frightening. Emotional. Graphic and horrifying. And the film will stay in the back of your mind long after you’ve finished the film. Culloden is take it or leave it, but The War Game is absolutely for anyone and everyone,

(MUST SEE)

(August 8)

——Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby (2006)——

Talladega Night was made by the same team that brought you Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy, and in essence is pretty much Anchorman remade with NASCAR the focus instead of broadcast news. While it would normally follow that because of that fact this movie is supposed to suck, lucky for us that is nowhere near the case here. Instead, Talladega Nights does for NASCAR what, well, Anchorman did for broadcast news. I’m the hugest fan of Anchorman, so it should then follow that I’m also a huge fan of this too.

Ricky Bobby (oh I love you, Will Ferrell) as a kid took a small piece of advice from his absentee father, “If you’re not first, you’re last” to heart, and later in life when given the chance to drive his own NASCAR car he shows himself to be a natural, winning all the races, marrying the hottest fan, and racking up all the sponsors. Of course this attitude also makes him into a giant prick. His kids grow up to be brats and he constantly screws over his best friend and teammate (John C. Reilly) so that he can be number one. His manager is so fed up with Ricky Bobby’s freewheeling that he hires a gay French Formula One race car driver (Sacha Baron Cohen, also genius) to beat Ricky Bobby. And then when he gets into a spectacular car crash, everything Ricky Bobby thought he had vanishes. Ricky Bobby has to do some self discovering, learn how to be a good person and learn how to speed again (using a cougar!) so that he can win the big race. The gags are constant and always hilarious, but what really makes it work is how much respect Ferrell and director Adam McKay have for the characters and the sport. By not playing it cheap they come out to be the big winners in this film. And thus, this movie kicks some major ass. See it!

(MUST SEE)

——The City of Lost Children (1995)——

Director’s Jean-Pierre Jeunet (Amelie) and Marc Caro pepper this film with some astounding visuals. That’s the main draw of seeing this, bar none. The actual City in the City of Lost Children is a stylized masterpiece, being a cross somewhere between a 19th Century Parisian city and a town out of one of the later Final Fantasy games (I’m thinking 7ish). It’s a magical place where magical coincidental things happen all the time, much like in Amelie or Delicatessen. Everything is curious and childlike. Which is fitting, since this is a movie about children’s dreams.

A genius inventor creates friends to keep him company, including several dopey clones, a lab partner, a wife and a brain in a jar. The lab partner has a problem though. He can’t dream. So he gets rid of his creator and uses the rest of them to trap children so that he may enter their dreams and finally know what dreaming feels like. He’s so scary though that each of the children’s dreams turns into a nightmare, ruining it for him. Thus, he needs to find a child who is not afraid of him. Meanwhile, a circus strongman’s younger adopted brother is kidnapped for their nefarious plot and therefore he has to go out and find him. That strongman is played by a wonderful Ron Perlman as not the brightest guy in the world, but definitely the one with the biggest heart. On his journey he falls in with an orphan street urchin who falls in love with him. Not in a sexual way though. She sees his dedication as a big brother and wishes to have the same thing with someone. He takes her under his wing as his little sister in a way that could have played a little disturbing, but instead is delicate and touching. Aside from the visuals, that’s the reason you watch this movie.

The City of Lost Children is a different, unique kind of movie, so if you are into that sort of thing then this movie is going to be right up your alley.

(SEE)

——Gwendoline (1984)——

What an odd movie. I’m not really sure what to make of it. It’s definitely not a good movie, that’s for sure. But it’s so weird that those into that sort of thing will have to check it out. Hell, if anything this movie makes for a great party movie, when you have a bunch of drunk friends looking for something juicy to go all Mystery Science Theater on.

The premise? This is an Indiana Jones-style 80’s fantasy adventure movie that just also happens to be based on a French bondage comic. Heavenly Tawny Kitaen is Gwendoline, who smuggles herself to China in order to search for her missing father, who’s gone missing after searching for a rare butterfly in the mystical land of Yik Yak. (Still with me?) After being saved from some Chinese gangsters by a Han Solo-esq tough guy, she cons him into helping her and her French maid (played by an actress named only: Zabou) find her father and the butterfly in Yik Yak. He bitches and moans and tries everything to ditch her. She, apparently having never seen a man before, falls hopelessly in love with him. Being the sort of movie that this is, he begrudgingly falls in love with her too, all while the maid lives vicariously through them in the background.

Ah, and then there is Yik Yak. A diamond mine designed by apparently the same dude that built Superman’s Fortress of Solitude, run by a sci-fi Amazons unearthing the rocks for apparent religious reasons. They are all scantily clad, often naked and prone to lots of violence and/or bondage. It’s not a spoiler to say that Gwendoline gets tied up and naked…a lot. Funniest yet there is a chariot race with Amazons in place of the horses. Have I mentioned yet that this movie is WEIRD?

This movie is not good at all in the least. That said, like I mentioned before it is so weird that it does have its own certain–how do I say?–usefulness when it comes to obscure cult films to pull out for your friends. Be warned. Alcohol is definitely recommended before consumption.

(MISS)

(August 9)

——The Fury (1978)——

I was recommended this film, told “it’s not great De Palma, but it’s worth seeing if just for the ending, which is crazy total batshit.” I may be paraphrasing just a little bit, but you get the idea. That recommendation turned out to be pretty accurate. The Fury is a curious film, interesting, but overall not particularly special. If you’ve seen a supernatural thriller from the late 70’s/early 80’s before, you’ve seen this movie. It’s similar even to Brian De Palma’s own Carrie. But then there is that closing shot. My first thought? My, that’s a little excessive. My second? Coooool.

The Fury is about a secret agent (Kirk Douglas, doing his best to not look old) who is attacked by terrorists in Israel (huh?) so that other secret agents may kidnap his “gifted” son. What he’s gifted with at first isn’t readily apparent. But we get lots of clues along the way, up until we meet another girl in Chicago who has the same “gift”, which just happens to be telepathy and telekinesis. The problem is that the gift is so powerful that when used it can cause people around her to start bleeding. She freaks out and goes to an institute for the paranormal, which also happens to just be a front for the government agent that has Douglas’ son. He enlists her help to find his son.

The plot is so-so, but the movie does have its fair share of unintentionally hilarious moments, all courtesy of Douglas himself. My favorite is when he tells one of the G-Men following him to ask head spy (John Cassavetes) what happened to his arm. What happened to his arm? “I killed it!” (Trust me, it’s hilarious.)

De Palma cultists will have to see this. No doubt about that. To those curious, I’d say see it. If I haven’t hooked you on it yet, then this one for you is a

(MISS)

(August 10)

——Tsotsi (2005)——

I don’t necessarily think this is a great movie and yet it moved me deeply nonetheless. Is it possible for a movie to do that? Must be, because that’s how I feel. Damn you, mushy crap.

Tsotsi is about a Johannesburg, ghetto born and raised in the open air, now wannabe gangster. He’s lived the hard life so long that things are just about survival. He doesn’t give a shit about anyone else, not even his friends, in the effort to appear badass. Then he goes into a rich neighborhood to steal a car. He waits until a woman gets out of her car, runs up, shoots her, and drives off (poorly. He doesn’t know how to drive). Once he gets off onto the main road he makes a startling discovery. The woman had a baby in the car. What to do with it?

Tsotsi is not exactly who’d you’d be first to call if you needed a sitter. He feeds the baby canned milk, leaves and comes back only to find the baby covered in ants. Smooth. But something about the baby strikes a nerve in him. He’s reminded of his early days struggling with the other orphans on the outskirts of the ghetto. He takes pity on the child. He wants to take care of it. But almost like a child, he has no idea how to take care of one. He sees another woman with a baby and he forces her at gunpoint to feed his baby. The baby softens him though. He finally learns how to be a human being again.

It’s not exactly anything groundbreaking. But like any good movie, it doesn’t have to be groundbreaking if it just does its job well. And Tsotsi definitely does that. The final scene is a heartbreaker. Powerful stuff. And the director is smart enough to draw the scene out as much as possible. All and all, I’d say this is a very solid, worth seeing flick.

(SEE)

(August 11)

——Roman Holiday (1953)——

I dare you to find a more attractive on-screen couple in film history than Gregory Peck and Audrey Hepburn in Roman Holiday. Don’t believe me? Go to the scene where they tentatively kiss in the Roman rain and then you just try and convince me otherwise. When God created Man and Woman, this was probably the mold he used.

The movie itself is a fine piece of heartbreaking genius. It’s sweet, funny, romantic and at times very sad. It’s one of those romantic comedies that earns its emotions by not hiding from reality. The ending is a bit of a shocker, considering how often we’ve been preprogrammed by Hollywood schlock, but at the same time it seems surprisingly right and poignant. Roman Holiday is just one of those classic Hollywood romances, where Audrey Hepburn is a princess whose run away to relax and see the real world as the rest of us do, and Gregory Peck is the American reporter who runs into the incognito princess and strings her along for the story of the century, only to fall in love with her and have doubts about exploiting her trust for his own gain. I mean, we’re talking grade-A girlfriend movie material here, guys.

I love this movie. I’m really a sap at heart and Roman Holiday hits all of the right notes for me. Peck and Hepburn (in her first starring role, an Oscar winner!) have amazing chemistry. Instead of creating fake big moments the script focuses on the small moments and makes them big. Is it any surprise that the best scene in the picture then is that aforementioned kiss in the rain? You’ve got to be one stone cold sonofabitch to not have your heart melt a little bit when you see that. This movie gets one of my highest recommendations.

(MUST SEE)

(August 12)

——The Black Swan (1942)——

Those looking for a good pirate movie nowadays are a little limited in their choices. You could see one of the Pirates of the Caribbean movies, the porno big budget knockoff, or…uh. Well, before PotC there was quite the draught in good pirate movies. You have to go back to the pirate glory days. I’m very partial to Errol Flynn’s pirate films, Captain Blood and especially the Sea Hawks. If you can’t get your hands on one of those, then Tyrone Power’s The Black Swan is the next best thing.

Pirate Jamie Boy reforms (boo!) when his mentor, Captain Morgan, is made governor of Jamaica by the King in the hopes that a pirate knows best how to catch a pirate. Lucky for us, Jamie Boy doesn’t reform too much. One gets the impression that he only reforms just enough so that he can attract the attentions of Lady Margaret (Maureen O’Hara), who hates him merely because he’s a pirate. Meanwhile the former governor, obviously horrified that the pirate he’s hunted now has his job, does a little pirating of his own, taking information he’s received from Captain Morgan and giving it to other pirates so that they always seem to be one step ahead of the good guys. Jamie Boy, through some ingenuity and lots of swashbuckling uncovers the plot, saves the day, and gets the girl. What more do you need in a movie?

Power is no Flynn, but he does a good enough job filling in his shoes, bringing a great energy to his flirtations with O’Hara. It’s a real battle of the sexes, where he finally wears her down only by really showing that he was actually telling her the truth and that her father and fiance were both tools. Eh. It’s lots of fun anyway. The Technicolor looks great on this DVD, bringing a real life to the events with lots of vivid colors. Those looking for a good pirate adventure won’t be disappointed.

(SEE)

——Broken Lance (1954)——

I guess the easiest way to sum up the plot of Broken Lance would be to say that this is the King Lear of Westerns. Spencer Tracy is Lear, a tough but successful rancher/cattle baron that seems to be too hard on his three oldest sons. The youngest, Joe, is a half-Indian by a different mother, who definitely seems to be the apple of his father’s eye. He seems sure to inherit a big piece of the ranch. The older brothers want to run it a different way, but turn bad seed, even resorting to cattle rustling their own family’s steers. After a big altercation with a mine that has been dumping poisonous chemicals into the river, a good old-fashioned rumble breaks out. Joe takes responsibility for it. The rest of the family thinks that the older brothers will use their share of the ranch to pay compensation to the mine, but they never do and Joe has to go to prison for three years. The father has made all the wrong choices, and starts to pay for them.

It’s not your typical Western, more of a family drama dropped into a Western setting, and thus it is quite interesting and engaging in its uniqueness. I liked it quite a bit. Spencer Tracy chews scenery like a pro. It’s very well written and makes real good use of Cinemascope. Fans of Westerns will want to check this one out.

(SEE)

(August 13)

——Troy (2004)——

Watching Wolfgang Peterson’s Greek epic again, this isn’t the bad film I thought it was when I originally saw it in the theater. Of course, it’s not a great film either. It’s a film with a lot of missed potential. It’s one of those films that by the end of it your review has to be, “eh.”

I kind of liked most of it. What I didn’t like was how condensed the rich Greek mythology was. The entire Trojan War in the film seems to take place over a mere few days. In reality (or at least according to Homer) it took place over ten years. A little detail like that is just filled with potential to make the enormity of the War seem greater than it does. I mean, it’s the Trojan-fucking-War, not the Trojan light skirmish. Where’s the epic part? Instead it does a better job focusing on the characters: Eric Bana’s noble Hector, Brad Pitt’s childish warrior/God Achilles, Brian Cox’s arrogant Agemmenon, Peter O’Toole’s flawed but royal Priam. The smaller moments are really the bigger moments in this film. One things that kind of pissed me off was the depiction of Orlando Bloom’s Paris. For three/fourths of the film he is just this pretty-boy selfish pansy, and it is never mentioned what a spectacular archer he is. All the sudden he breaks out the bow at the end and he’s a man. What’s that all about? I knew what was going on, but anyone who didn’t know the myth would be royally pissed at that.

And that’s basically the problem with this film. It doesn’t capitalize on the big moments like it should. This story should have been multi-layered. Instead, we have to be content to see Hector go up against Achilles. Fun, but not 162 minutes, fun.

(MISS)

(August 28)

——Kicking and Screaming (1995)——

For anyone who has ever graduated from college and then wondered: “What’s next?” this is totally the movie for you. Writer-director Noah Baumbach made one of my favorite movies of last year, The Squid and the Whale, but this was the movie that started his career. And it’s brilliant. I just love this movie.

Kicking and Screaming is insanely quotable, like any great cult film is, about four college friends who all talk the same way and enter a state of arrested development around the college campus for the first semester of school after they graduate. The movie is all dialogue, and amazing dialogue–punchy, sarcastic and bitingly funny. One friend is afraid to go to grad school because it is in a different time zone. Another re-enlists in college to learn all of the stuff he missed out on the first time around because of partying, only to miss it the second time around because of all of the partying. One is just bitter and caustic, until a little love teaches him to lighten up. And the main character pines over his girlfriend who left to take classes in Prague. All of them are afraid of making big decisions and jumping into life.

This movie is soooo funny. Never has a movie about a group of people just sitting around and talking about bullshit been so incisive and yet meaningless. If you loved The Squid and the Whale like I did, here’s another movie for you.

(DIAMOND IN THE ROUGH)

——Divorce Italian Style (1962)——

Marcello Mastroianni is such a great actor. Every time I see a movie with him in it, I end up loving it, if just for him alone. Divorce Italian Style is a fun movie for him. He plays a Sicilian Baron with nothing to do, a boring life, and a homely wife he can’t stand hovering around him. He’s fallen in love with his cousin instead and wants to be with her. One problem though. In Sicily it’s illegal to get a divorce. How to get rid of his wife then?

The solution is to drive his wife into the arms of another man. Then, if made a cuckold, he can kill his wife in a fit of jealousy to defend his honor, and the Italian legal system will go very easy on him for his “momentary” lack of sanity. What’s great about this movie is that while the Baron is plotting a murder he’s also completely sympathetic to the audience. The subject of the satire here is the Sicilian society that encourages this kind of behavior, not the one man. This is definitely a black comedy. The Baron always looks quite exhausted, the stifling behavior of his wife personified by the stifling effect of the hot Sicilian weather. He’s always overwhelmed by it all. He also seems to take the love affair of his wife quite well. While being a cuckold in society would normally be a very shameful thing it is exactly what he wants in order to get what he wants. Life just isn’t that perfect though…

(SEE)

——The Toolbox Murders (1977)——

It took me more than a month to see it, but finally! I finished The Toolbox Murders. My first DVD was somehow defective, in that it just stopped playing about 30 minutes into the movie. I got it to work again by putting it into my laptop, but even then it stopped again just before I saw how it ended. That really pissed me off. So I had to send it in and wait for a new copy to see how it all ended.

The movie is…not bad. It pretty much has a great beginning and ending, with a bunch of crap filler in the middle to pad out the running time. The first thirty minutes are pure horror genius. One naughty girl after another is killed with various tools and not a shred of plot is to be seen. This long chain of violence is finally broken when a good girl is kidnapped by the killer. Then the boring crap starts. Basically the brother and the cops try to figure out who did the killing and where the girl went. None of this is very interesting. It doesn’t get good again until we actually find out where the girl went. The killer is a father who lost his daughter in a car accident. He thinks the good girl is the reincarnation of his daughter. There are a lot of really good monologues with the father, and he is very creepy explaining himself to the tied up and terrified girl. Surprisingly good acting there. Even better is the twist that crazy might run in the family…

A title card tells us at the end that apparently this was based on a true story, which only makes the documentary-like drawn-out killings and the painfully unflinching monologues at the end that much more potent. This isn’t a great movie, but fans of the slasher genre will get a real kick out of this one.

(SEE)

——City of God (2002)——

I really do love this movie. It was one of the films on my short list of great movies that I wanted to rewatch. As Roger Ebert is quoted as saying right on the cover of the box, it is “one of the best films you’ll ever see.” I don’t tend to argue with him on this point. City of God is an amazing film, filled with stunning visuals, a great script, fantastic acting from the mostly non-professional cast, and one of the best editing jobs in the history of cinema. I just love the editing in this movie.

The narrator of the story, an amateur photographer that grew up in the City of God, tells the story of how drugs (aka Cocaine) transformed a ghetto outside of Rio de Janeiro into one of the most violent non-warring places on earth. He tells the story in a fairly unconventional way. The narrative becomes fractured because as he is telling the story, whenever a new important character or situation becomes important the story backtracks to tell this new back-story before moving on with the rest of it. It reminds me a lot of a structure Quentin Tarantino might employ in one of his movies (not surprisingly, he’s a big fan). Gang leaders rise and fall, and throughout it the theme remains how the violence and corruption in the City of God just beget more violence and corruption. The movie can be shockingly violent at times, especially as we see Little Zee’s rise to power. He’s an ugly kid that no one wanted to have around as a gangster, so he goes out of his way to become the biggest most badass gangster ever, killing who ever and whom ever with no remorse. Actions have a way of coming back to haunt you though in the City of God.

This movie is unbelievable and should definitely be on your short list of movies to see if you haven’t already seen it.

(MUST SEE)

(August 29)

——Beerfest (2006)——

Ross wanted to take me to go see a movie for my birthday. Since I had already seen everything worth seeing out at the time, I saw this again. It still made me laugh. Good sign. It’s infantile, but good infantile. See my review of it last week for more info.

(MUST SEE)

(September 1)

——The Gumball Rally (1976)——

Like a gumball, this movie is pure sugar filled fun. You chew it around until it loses its taste, and then you move on to something else. I like the premise of this film though. It’s ripe for potential as a remake. Basically, an eccentric millionaire has started an unofficial race called the Gumball Rally. It’s a very illegal race from NYC to LA as fast as you can possibly drive for the reward of a Gumball machine trophy, that the proprietor of the race seems to win every time. The real fun of the race seems to just be driving it though. Basically you get a phone call or telegram that consists of just one word: Gumball. When you hear that you drop everything and rush to NYC to start the race. It’s silly and very fun.

This is a light comedy with lots of great thrills as cars drive in excess of 150 mph. There is the millionaire’s competitor that wants to win more than anything, so he hires an Italian Grand Prix champ (Raul Julia) to be his driver, with the one problem being that he’s an extreme womanizer. There’s also the police chief who wants to shut down the race once and for all, but seems to be the only policeman in the entire United States with any interest in catching these extreme speeders. It’s not a classic, but it’s very entertaining, and worth watching for any and all car chase fans out there.

(SEE)

——This Island Earth (1955)——

I didn’t realize it at first, but I had seen this movie before. Not exactly this movie, but the Mystery Science Theater movie, which riffs on this film. I just assumed this was a sci-fi classic. But aside from a few impressive (for 1955) special effects, this movie is actually kind of a hunk of crap, making it ripe for Mystery Science Theater spoofing.

First there is the fact that almost nothing actually makes any sense. I’m no nuclear scientist, but even I knew that I lot of this science was made up or just plain wrong. The story is basically about a hot-shot nuclear scientist who successfully builds a mysterious, hulking piece of shit two-way communicator sent to him by an alien race looking for smarty pants scientists to help them solve their current energy crisis. After a bunch of hooey techno-babble he heads off in an alien plane to…a farm in Georgia, where he meets a female scientist he used to know (but who at first pretends not to know him) and the alien leader, who is basically running a cult for limitless nuclear energy. After learning that the aliens have less than noble intentions for them they try to escape. The aliens then try to fry them with some sort of laser (don’t they want these scientists to help them?) and then kidnap them again to take them back to the alien world, under attack by…somebody. I have no idea who. I thought it was the crazy bug-eyed aliens on the cover, but no, they are just the slaves of these people. They get to the alien world with just enough time left to see that they can’t really do anything to help and so that a bug-eyed alien can attack the woman. They then go back home. The moral of the story? Well, I don’t actually know what the moral is. I’m not sure there even is one.

The main character is a prick. The woman, even though she is supposed to be one of the Earth’s top scientists, is there mainly for her breasts and for insulting remarks. Granted, she’s got a nice rack, but couldn’t they think of any other reason for having her in this movie? The best part of the movie is when the jock main character beats the bug-eyed alien with a pipe. It’s pretty hilarious. Actually, pretty much any good part in this movie is good because it is unintentionally hilarious. Unless you are up for some craptastic 50’s sci-fi, this one is mainly an

(AVOID)

(September 2)

——Vanishing Point (1971)——

[Note: This is a review of the longer UK version of the film. I haven’t seen the US version, but both are included on the DVD.]

Now this is a crazy, different car chase movie. A driver known only as Kowalski decides to drive from Denver to San Francisco in less than 15 hours, with only a handful of speed to keep him going. No other real motivation is given. It’s hinted at, but I think his reasonings have more to do with higher symbolic meanings than anything else. I think it is really a movie of its time, a hippie movie for the 70’s, after the disillusionment had kicked into full force. Kowalski becomes a cult hero as word of his exploits make it to the masses through a blind pirate radio DJ. Everyone wants to see him stick it to the man and make it to San Fran. But he’s also a tragic character. No one actually expects him to make it, but then that’s why they want him to do it. He’s a hero pushing it to the limits as he sticks it to the Man. Speed is his only God. He’s someone the counter-culture can get behind.

Along the way he meets some colorful folks, from an old prospector/snake catcher, to some snake worshipers turned hippie Christian rock band, to a nude woman on a motorcycle. You could say he’s on a spiritual quest through the purifying desert. He’s tested, and it is only when he gives into temptation that he falls into disaster. But it is more a Christ-like sacrifice than anything else. Let me just reiterate: This is not your typical car chase movie. But because of that this film is insanely interesting. And it doesn’t hurt that the chase sequences with the Dodge Challenger are completely kick ass.

(MUST SEE)

(September 3)

——Paris, Texas (1984)——

If watching every movie were as enjoyable and pure a cinematic experience as watching Paris, Texas, then I don’t think I’d ever do anything else. Oh wait, I don’t do anything else. But you get the picture. Director Wim Wenders (Wings of Desire) crafts a rare film in which emotions are real and earned, unlike the normal Hollywood sentiment that is steam shoveled down our throats. It’s rare to find a movie out there in which the characters seem so real that you forget that you are watching a fictional film.

Paris, Texas starts out with Travis (Harry Dean Stanton) wandering out of the desert like some mythical figure. He stumbles into a rest stop looking for water and faints. Later the local doctor finds him mute and with amnesia, and calls his brother in California to come pick him up. For the first 25 minutes of the film Travis doesn’t say a word. He just wants to go off to…something, out in the distance and keeps trying to ditch his brother until his brother finally gets to him. They drive back to California.

Something happened to Travis, four years ago. He left his wife and child and was never heard from again. His wife (Nastassja Kinski) disappeared too, leaving his son with his brother and sister-in-law. The son has grown up thinking that his aunt and uncle were really his mother and father. As Travis starts to come around he slowly starts to build a relationship with his son until they both decide that they want to go out and find his mother.

There are a lot of long monologues in this film, brilliantly written, directed and acted in long takes. Stanton especially does a stellar job, saying more without saying anything than most actors could ever hope to in their entire careers. He’s a revelation, and if you don’t think he is one of the greatest American actors after seeing this film then you’ve been smoking something. This movie is so engrossing from beginning to end. I definitely recommend you all see this.

(DIAMOND IN THE ROUGH)