Found at Museum of Flight, late July, 2003.

yo ho yo ho
a pirate’s life for me

We just got back from seeing the fine piratical vehicle, Pirates of the Caribbean at the big-ol screened Cinerama, and lemme tells ya, arrr!

The number of minor flaws are three, IMHO:

1. Those are not Aztec carvings on the stone treasure chest, but rather Inca.

2. No Brit Commodore wilted from pursuit of pirates, matey, no matter how pure the reason.

3. <whine> In one scene I was disappointed with the CGI. </whine&gt

PLEASE NOTE, in relation to the REST of the CGI, I was not only NOT disappointed, I was as amazed as I wanted to be. The fighting scenes with the live actors and skeletal pirates blending and merging as the light plays on them were hard to comprehend in the success of the effect, of the physics.

The first sword fight in the film employs the choreographed ringing of steel on steel as direct, fully-scored chimes within the orchestral soundtrack itself, boldy proclaiming the level of detail in craft the film sought. It was an invitation to nitpick, to join the dance.

The bigger problem I had with the film was: it’s TOO GOOD. I’m afraid they’ll change the ride, which I regard as Walt Dinsey’s greatest work of art. It’s a dark masterpiece depicting the fears of middle-class America circa 1968, with hippies pirates running riot in the streets and flames licking at the facades of Detroit Port Royal.

The film lacks the dread of the ride, but it’s easily the best pirate flick I’ve seen that I can recall, and disproves the theory that pirate flicks are cursed.

It does go a bit unwarrantedly loopy about the inherent beauty and freedom in being a pirate. Heavy-handed use of the word as a positive description sounded very much like an invitation to unlicensed DVD duplicators of the film proper and file-sharing rogues of the bounding packet-switched networking schema everywhere.

yo ho yo ho
a pirate’s life for me

How’s that for a highfalutin’ title?

Go West and the Paleface were on the silver screen Monday night at the Paramount.

It would seem that local hero Bill Frisell had the foresight and good taste to compose and release his own soundtrack for Go West. While this was not the score that organist Dennis James played, I realy love Frisell’s moody, impressionistic playing. The titles Frisell uses give a reasonable facsimilie of the film’s plot.

I enjoyed both films, and Go West features one of Keaton’s traademarked oversize chase scenes as a closer. Dressed in a long-tailed, horned devil suit, he is chased through the streets of Los Angeles by one thousand head of cattle. The rushing stampede of the crowd anticipates the consternated mass of Tokyo’s terrified denizens in films that feature a giant lizard Best Not Named For Fear of Absurd Cease and Desistzillas.

Vivian and I ran a bunch of errands today, dropping off stuff at Goodwill, eating in the University District at Flowers, and ending the evening with the restored, extended version of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, in town on a one-week run at the Varsity on the Ave.

We stopped by my old friend Mike’s new store, Pitaya, on the Ave as well, and I chatted with him as Viv shopped.

We know we’re planning on hitting all three of the upcoming Silent Movie Mondays at the Paramount this month, which all feature Westerns:

July 7: Buster Keaton: Go West (1925), The Paleface (1921)

July 14: Riders of the Purple Sage (1925), starring Tom Mix
(with 1903’s The Great Train Robbery, the first sensation in film in the US)

July 21: Tumbleweeds, 1925, starring William S. Hart

(Digging the links above revealed the long feature “ The Silent Western as Mythmaker,” at Images which I heartily anticipate reading.)

At any rate, it was enjoyable to see Leone’s wonderfully misanthropic film. As usual, seeing a familiar film on the big screen brought some new elements into my awareness of the movie, notably the consistent, confrontational use of real amputees in supporting roles throughout the film, underlining the film’s anti-war stance. The other notable thing I thought about as I watched the show was the debt of Coppola’s Apocalypse Now to the film.

Eli Wallach’s hilarious, twitching, grimacing performance as the only Mexican bandit in history with a Jersey accent remains the heart of the film and it was even funnier than I remembered. It’s interesting that Eastwood’s taciturn-loner shtick even got noticed alongside Wallach’s scenery-chewing.

Finally, the film as we saw it used a center-rear-screen stereo soundtrack. I do not know if the wall speakers at the Varsity were out or if the film was restored with the audio designed for the front and center deployment, but it was quite odd at first. I can’t recall the last time I saw a film that used that audio design.

Wah! Well, I’m all scattered! I have TOO MUCH TO DO!

Suffice to note that I have some sort of new job, doing marketing copy and other things for once and future employer M-2K again – that starts Monday. Also, this past week, I did my first driving-in-traffic since I was 16 or so and it went well.

I also have to finish transcribing the Lasky-Stump interview, build screens for the house, do the dishes, laundry, and cooking, and frankly I forget what else.

The results are in from SIFF with the Golden Space Needle Awards, and guess what? Three of the films I caught were honored, and one I didn’t see but wrote about was too!

Milwaukee, Minnesota, the film noir I enjoyed but with which I was puzzled due to the strange performance choies made by the director and lead actor was honored both for Mr. Troy Garrity’s lead perfomance with a 2nd-place Best Actor award and also as the Winner of the New American Cinema Award.

Jamie Hook’s The Naked Proof won an honorable mention in the latter award as well.

Molly Parker’s performance in Marion Bridge won a 3rd-place runner-up for best actress, and Brock Morse won a 4th-place runner-up for Best Director for Westender, presumably an acknowledgement of the film’s desert sequences.

The big winner, though, was the just-about-in-wide release New Zealand-set film, Whale Rider, carrying Best Director, Best Film, and first runner-up for Best Actress, validating the possibility glimpsed in the trailer.

I was disappointed and puzzed to see that American Splendor was not honored – perhaps the award from Sundance and reception at Cannes made it ineligible for consideration. In my opinion, of the films I saw, it deserved best screeplay, director, and actor for both originality of vsion and execution.

Milwaukee, Minnesota
US, 2002. Dir. Allan Mindel
6/14 9:30p Pacific Place
6/15 1:45p Egyptian

Winter’s white blankets Wisconsin. A twenty-something idiot-savant (Troy Garrity) lives at home with his brow-beating mother, earning large sums as an ice-fishing champion. A grifter thinks she has him on the line, but first one, then another man claims to be the boy’s father in the wake of his mother’s death. Twists drift like snowbanks in this taut film noir.

I giggled with delight and tension throughout the film. It delivered everything I want from a film noir, despite its’ happy ending. The film’s knowledgeable play with the rules of the genre extends even to the final fade – to white, not black.

While Garrity’s Adam Sandler impression mystifies, I readily adapted to it. The film’s well-cast and acted, and the hypersaturated, slightly blown-out look of the film both uses apparent natural light in homage to 1970’s thrillers and presents an artificial, pulpy green and yellow palette, implying age.

—
Garrity, the lead actor, is the son of Jane Fonda and Tom Hayden. The best known actors in the film are Randy Quaid, portraying a wonderfully reptilian “traveling salesman” (sporting a rust turtleneck, a splotchy bottle tan, and a wide-lapeled reddish-tan belted car-coat) and Bruce Dern, as an unkempt older copy shop owner.

I loved the production design of the film.

I make reference to Garrity’s Adam Sandler impersonation. He plays the ice-angler, literally, as if Adam Sandler were doing an impression of Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man (Jim Flanagan take note). It’s weird, and what mystifies about it is why the actor would chose to adopt such a derivative seeming mode for the performance. I can’t imagine that it wasn’t considered and then accepted as an aspect of the film that would be discussed upon release. Perhaps the filmmakers simply decided it wouldn’t detract from the rest of the film.

If that’s the case, it was a good call from my perspective. While the film doesn’t top Red Rock West for contemporary noir, it’s close, and this is something of an accomplishment when one considers the extent to which Red Rock relied on action sequences to get the adrenaline pumping – Milwaukee, Minnesota eschews action nearly entirely, relying on plot and dialog to work one up into that pleasurable tizzy.

(I find it interesting to note that both this film and – just maybe – Gordon’s King of the Ants employ brain dysfunction as a character element. Memento sure had an impact in funding choices, looks like.)

King Of The Ants
US, 2003. Dir. Stuart Gordon (WORLD PREMIERE)
6/13 9:30p Egyptian
6/15 11:30a Cinerama

Sean Crawley (Chris McKenna) is a likeable, callow fool drawn into a murder-for-hire scheme. When he attempts to collect his blood money, he’s held captive and tortured in a graphic second act, into which hallucinations and fantasies are intercut. Escaping, he seeks out his murder victim’s wife as his lover, fulfilling one of his fantasies. When she discovers who Crawley is, he accidentally kills her. He then seeks out the thugs he originally killed for and systematically kills them in a climactic confrontation.

This film is better than my summary implies. Unfortunately, I found it less intelligent than it wanted to be. You’re supposed to like Crawley; I thought he was an idiot. The closing scene’s reliance on the vengeance-bound heroism of the self-made man was not appealing to me, not a big Charles Bronson fan. Despite this, there’s serious filmmaking here, delineating an amoral, misanthropic existentialism with an unflinching eye.

—

(originally posted June 10 on the Tablet SIFF Board)

I felt obligated to see and review this film after having seen Gordon’s fascinating, entertaining interview on the Onion A.V. Club web site. Gordon is the director of Re-Animator and other cult fare, as well as Honey, I Shrunk The Kids.

I went with a bit of trepidation, as I am not at all a gorehound or generically interested in horror or slasher flicks.

King of the Ants was adapted from the novel of the same name by Charlie Higson, a British TV comedy writer. Originally published in 1992, the few online encomiums for it I saw were uniformly celebratory; one suspects it belongs to the New British Novelists grouping around Trainspotting, but I found no direct link between them.

At any rate, the thrust of the narrative is similar: what happens if you take a poorly educated, callow young man and instead of thrusting him into the military, a job or family life, hook him up with thugs and torture him for several days? Higson’s answer: he grows an antisocial philosophical system. Fair enough. That’s the serious material the film grows from as well.

My disinterest in and discomfort with screen violence meant that I was was not entertained by the film. Again, that would appear to be a part of the film’s intent. So does the film succeed?

I don’t think it does. It’s brutal and in the end celebrates Crawley as a kind of Randian architect of house demolition. I personally have a bone to pick with Randian existentialism – it’s philosophy for adolescent idiots that seek isolation to confirm their egocentric fantasies of revenge and power – and this certainly colors my view of the film. What I’m uncertain of is whether the film intends to celebrate this worldview. The closing shot – Crawley strides purposefully toward the camera as the house explodes behind him – is such a cliche of the action film that it reads as both celebration and – just maybe – ironic commentary. If it’s supposed to be ironic, however, it’s overly dry and will not be noted as such by the great majority of viewers.

Westender
US, 2003, Dir. Brock Morse
6/13 – 9:30p Broadway
6/15 – 6:30p Broadway

Asbrey of Westender (Blake Stadel) is a medieval swordsman, trailing a crew of brigands in an attempt to reclaim his dead wife’s ring. Shot in verdant Oregon forests, the film’s first half is fairly pedestrian fantasy fare, dimwitted sidekick, flashing swords, rope-bound slave girls, and all. Stadel has an action-hero’s presence; however, a more judicious use of raging tantrums by the script might have been advisable.

The film veers off unexpectedly in the final 45 minutes to depict an arduous desert crossing by the troubled, angry warrior. The last section of the film is nearly wordless. The light and beauty of the landscape against which the character sheds his armor – literally and emotionally – were remarkable.

When at journey’s end, a climactic battle resolves the hero’s quests, the return to genre conventions is a letdown, reading as an appeal for consideration as a back-door pilot.

—

(posted to the Tablet SIFF Board on June 10)

In writing for Cinescape, I became aware of the large numbers of downright kooky independent genre films being produced. I don’t mean so much films that are created with even the least possibility of being distributed in the conventional manner – I mean works whoch are created by obsessed individuals and their extended social networks.

For whatever reason, many of these films are genre works, probably because genre works thrive in the context of marginalized subcultures. People that don’t believe they have access to the center of the culture seek smaller-scale arenas in which to define themselves and their work. From these isolated environments, great works can emerge, and any lover of punk rock or the science-fiction short story will immediately understand my interest in zero-budget indie genre filmmaking.

In the case of Westender, I was disappointed in my hopes for an avatar of this concept of film. It’s relentlessly commercial in production values and displays the common accidental misogyny of a certain style of pulp fantasy writing. This misogyny is most notable in the “mercy killing” of a dying woman, apparently a rape victim – probably intended to convey the idea that the warrior’s code includes mercy, it effectively reiterates the rape, which otherwise would have remained offscreen. Rather than feeling I’d learned something about the character, I felt I’d learned a bit about the age and judgement of the filmmakers.

Despite these flaws, the desert segment of the film was successful on its’ own terms. Inevitable comparisons to Lawrence of Arabia and Star Wars aside, the film’s most direct debt in this segment is to A Man Called Horse.

An argument for increased sensitivity in the proofing and decision-making process among dental advertisers in The Seattle Weekly. From mid-May, this was going to run here when my disk crash went down.

The Animatrix
5/31, the Egyptian, 9:30 pm, limited availabliity
7/10

Segment, Director (notes)
1. The Second Renaissance Part 1*, Mahiro Maeda (both segments, limited previous US release credits)
2. The Second Renaissance Part 2*
3. Program, Yoshiaki Kawajiri (a Vampire Hunter D film, Bloodlust)
4. Beyond, Kouji Morimoto (animator on Kiki’s Delivery Service)
5. World Record, Takeshi Koike
6. Kid’s Story*, Shinichiro Watanabe (Vampire Hunter D, more)
7. Matriculated, Peter Chung (Aeon Flux)
8. A Detective Story, Shinichiro Watanabe (Vampire Hunter D, more)
9. Final Flight of the Osiris*, Andy Jones (animation supervisor or contributor to Final Fantasy, Titanic)

*Written by Matrix creators Joel and Andy Wachowski

The May 31 screening of all nine Animatrix shorts at the Egyptian is likely to be one of the most coveted tickets at SIFF this year, coming four days prior to the release date of the Animatrix DVD on June 3. The print I saw at the press screening was on film, which surprised and pleased me. On the whole, the shorts will appeal most strongly to hard-core Matrix fans; but there are works of genuine merit as animated short films in the mix.

The Miyazaki-esque Beyond and the previously-released hyper-realist CG work, The Final Flight of The Osiris, benefited most from the large-screen showing. Osiris was presented in February with Dreamcatcher and looks very much like the CG animated film Final Fantasy. That’s no accident, as the director, Andy Jones, was the animation supervisor for Final Fantasy. We learn how the denizens of Zion gain knowledge of the robot army that menaces them in Matrix Reloaded. While the film succeeds, I was still annoyed by the CGI synthespians. Why not just use real actors, instead of failing with these digital dolls as we’ve seen repeatedly over the last few years?

The best film of the set is Beyond, in which a glitch in the Matrix’s rendering software creates a haunted house that is gleefully explored by some Japanese kids. Director Kouji Morimoto, who worked on Miyazaki’s Kiki’s Delivery Service, creates an affecting, beautifully imagined and visualized vignette of urban Japanese life.

With the good comes the mundane and the bad, and this set is no exception. It came as a surprise to me that the film that stood out as at least ill-advised and at worst lawsuit bait had been scripted by the Wachowskis. Kid’s Story directly equates teen suicide with joining the rebellion against the Matrix. I winced, and so will others, until one day we read about it in the paper. I have no idea what they were thinking.

I could go on, but SIFF has requested pre-release reviews remain capsules, so I’ll hold my peace for now. All in all, no surprises, and film snobs might have a better time elsewhere. Matrix geeks, however, won’t care what film snobs think, and so it ever shall be.

Originally written for and posted to the Tablet SIFF Reviews board.

(I’ll be writing a longer review of the films for Cinescape as well.)