War (part 1)

Hi Aki,

A couple nights ago I watched War which stars Jason Statham and Jet Li. Statham basically plays a cop in San Francisco. Jet Li plays a professional assassin who is playing the Yakuza against the triads to start a war. And Statham is obsessed with this ‘Rogue’ assassin because ‘Rogue’ killed Statham’s partner (John Lone) 3 years ago.

Nobody has ever seen Rogue, there are no pictures of him.

He has had plastic surgery several times, changing his face.

He was trained by the CIA but years ago he rebelled against them and went to serve the Yakuza (one specific clan) as an assassin.

He is known only by the very particular bullets he uses (yeah, right!).

Statham is one of those tough cops who know it all, can speak Japanese at least, maybe Mandarin as well. He lives for his job, which caused his wife to divorce him years ago, shortly after his partner was killed, with all his family, by Rogue (after a raid they show as the movie prologue, Statham and Lone break into a smuggling operation where Rogue is killing people, a fact Statham and Lone learn when they find the special spent cartridges only Rogue uses, on the floor. Lone manages to shoot Rogue in the face, Rogue falls into the water of San Francisco bay, presumed drowned, though no body is found. A few days later, Statham is driving to Lone’s cabin in the hills for barbecue, when Rogue breaks into Lone’s house, shoots Lone in the face, and then shoots Lone’s wife and kid in front of him. By the time Statham arrives, the house is a burned down, smoking ruin, the police and fire department are there, only bones of the bodies – but Statham does find one of the special bullet cartridges there.

It’s suggested that this even tore up even Statham, leading to his wife divorcing him.

Now Rogue is back, and he seems to be playing Statham against the Yakuza, the Yakuza and triad against each other.

The climax comes when Rogue kills the triad boss, but lets his wife (improbably, a Latina!) and little girl go, contrary to the orders of the Yakuza leader. The Yakuza leader learns of this betrayal, and orders Rogue killed – but nobody can kill Jet Li. Even when the Yakuza boss wounds him horribly, Rogue has the upper hand, and is about to kill the Yakuza. ‘Why are you doing this? Why?’

Rogue answers, ‘Because 3 years ago, you ordered a hit.’

‘I order many hits!’

‘This one … was different!!!’

So flashback: we learn that after Rogue killed Lone’s wife and daughter, Lone got free, turned the tables, killed Rogue.

In the three years since, Lone has masqueraded as Rogue, having plastic surgery to look like what Rogue would have looked like (remember both of them have just been shot in the face). And all this time he has worked to create this war and lure the Yakuza boss to San Francisco (the clan boss of this Yakuza group has always stayed in Tokyo for some reason too complicated to get into. And for some reason Lone finds it easier to engineer this 3-year campaign to set triad against Yakuza instead of doing what you or I would do and buying a plane ticket to Tokyo!!!)

In response, the Yakuza guy tells Rogue/Lone: it was your partner. He was working for me. he’s the one who’s really responsible!

Cut to Statham in the park, looking mournful. He is not only the kind of cop who knows the underworld, he’s smart to boot: he has been asking, ‘Why would Rogue start a war between the triads and Yakuza?’ Now, it seems, he has his answer: it seems as though he knows who ‘Rogue’ really is.

The showdown is all set up, when…

…when the cable box changed channels! We have the recorder set to record a comedy show every Thursday night at 9.30.

So I didn’t see the end!!!

Now, how does it end? This is another puzzle like Gossip (remember that one?).

We know everything going up to the climax. It looks like the toughest cop is up against the toughest bad guy (who is not a bad guy after all, but who has done horrible things, though only to criminals, for revenge).

Who will win?

• Will both survive and make peace? (No – not in a violent movie like this!)
• Will both die? (maybe, but isn’t that a downer?)
• Will Statham defeat Jet Li /Lone and find some sort of redemption? Does he have some sort of explanation for what he did? Something that Lone/Jet Li might forgive? (I don’t know about this one. It really doesn’t look like anybody could beat Jet Li, but he’s had one arm just about hacked off by the Yakuza boss, so he’s not 100 percent here)
• Will Jet Li / Lone defeat and kill Statham? But then what’s left for Lone? This is the sort of character arc that ends only in death.

(This is how you tell about that: if along the path of vengeance the guy meets a girl, or a child, or an animal – something to save, something to give him a personal relationship, a reason to live – then he can live on after achieving vengeance. But if he finds nobody, then he will die, always, 100 percent of the time. The only people who fit this bill are the triad widow and child. But Jet Li has had no real relationship to them; he is his usual cold, distant self with the little girl.)

So I don’t see how Jet Li can live at the end of this.

I don’t see how Statham can survive either.

What’s your prediction, if you didn’t see it yet? I got to record the end tonight, and I’ll watch it first thing tomorrow morning.

I really don’t know what I predict. Statham has to pay for what he did. Lone has nothing to live for. And yet I don’t see them both dead and the audience looking at two corpses when the credits roll, do you?

Hey, I know your solution! They start kissing in the middle of fighting, and end up going to some state that allows gay marriage!

Haha!

I had another thought as I was walking home: here’s how I would do it.

Big fight between Statham and Jet Li. Reveal that Rogue is Lone.

Statham explains. Wife sick, kid with cancer – something that needed money and the family required he sell out.

Jet Li exacts revenge. But he leaves Statham alive – just maybe shoots him in the face.

Then a sniper Statham’s pal shoots Jet Li. Jet Li falls into the bay just like Rogue did (all this should happen on the scene of the prologue). They are sure Jet Li is dead, but no body is found.

Statham, wounded, leaves flowers on the grave of Lone/wife/child and walks, limps, away.

– this makes Statham pay, makes Jet Li pay, but leaves both men, potentially, alive so we can have War 2 sequel.

I will tell you what really happened when I hear your prediction.

(5 May 2009)

Payback Straight Up – Director’s Recut version

Hi Aki,

A couple of days ago I watched Payback: Straight Up the director Brian Helgeland’s recut version. (Helgeland had to deal with two studios, Paramount and Warners, in making the movie; Mel Gibson’s Icon Productions was also the producer of record. And even though everybody had read the script, when they saw the movie, which was just what the script had advertised, they didn’t like it. They wanted more fun, apparently, and two days after Helgeland won the Oscar for Best Direction of LA Confidential he was fired from Payback and they shot a new opening scene and scenes that replaced all the third act. Seven years later Helgeland got a chance to recut the picture closer to the script; this version is not quite the cut he and editor Kevin Stitt delivered to the studios, but it is closer to a fine cut, finessed version of that.)

The story is based on a Donald Westlake pulp-paperback crime novel which he wrote under his Richard Stark pen-name. The book was The Hunter about a guy name of Parker who was double-crossed in a heist and now, a few months later, comes back from the dead to get the money that was his share. He has to wade through about a dozen bodies and go up against the now-corporate crime organization ‘The Outfit’ to get it; but Parker gets it and goes on to feature in many other books. The 1961 or so book was made into the 1967 John Boorman film Point Blank starring Lee Marvin (as ‘Walker’ not ‘Parker’) which stressed the story’s more existentialist aspects and made other changes as well, and is at the top of most everybody’s lists as one of the greatest crime tough-guy movies of all time. So Helgeland did himself no favors when he tried for the remake here. Helgeland loves pulp and genre and he wanted to get closer to the Westlake novel. Mel Gibson was a perfect star for the project, and everything looked good at the start.

Story shows Mel Gibson’s ‘Hunter’ (not ‘Walker’ or ‘Parker’) walking back over a bridge into the city (in the story it was New York, but this version shot in Chicago and never named the city) just like in the book. He hasn’t a penny to his pocket and proceeds to rack up very easily a few thousand dollars by theft and fraud. (This establishes that Hunter doesn’t really need to go after the money he was cheated out of; indeed this is a violation of the original ‘Parker’s’ commandment of never getting tangled up with the big criminal organizations, but he does it in the book too.)

Next stop is his wife’s apartment. She (Deborah Kara Unger) stumbles home late at night, and he busts in on her. She’s alone and he’s disgusted by the needle marks on her arm. They get into a knock-down fight in the kitchen, and he carries her into the bedroom where he takes away her heroin and shooting works and locks her in. She has told him she’s getting a couple thousand bucks a month from Val Resnick as ‘payoff’ though it’s not yet explained just what has happened. Hunter showers and sleeps on the couch. When he wakes up in the morning he finds his wife dead in bed – she has gotten hold of another shooting works and has overdosed. (This convenient exit is the same in the book as I recall. It’s left unclear whether the OD was accidental or if she has deliberately suicided.)

Now Hunter lies alongside his wife’s corpse and recalls how he got into this mess. He hooked up with Val who put him onto a money-laundering operation by the Chows, a Chinese crime bunch. Every day around noon they drive off with a suitcase full of cash. Hunter arranges to hit them on Friday, and they get away with the money after a particularly brutal assault on the Chows (Helgeland talks in the commentary of liking stories and heroes with a certain ‘balls to brain ratio’ and seems to like Hunter having more balls than brains, but in the original story, and here too as you’ll see, the hero is quite resourceful). But in the split between Hunter, Val, and Hunter’s wife Lynn, there isn’t enough money for Val. He needs $130,000 to buy back into the good graces of the Outfit and get a job with them. And the Chow heist only brought in $140,000. Lynn shoots Hunter twice in the back, Val leaves a picture of Hunter with another girl which Val has used to play on Lynn’s jealousy, and the two drive off, leaving Hunter for dead. (But nothing kills Hunter!)

A messenger comes to the apartment on the appointed day with Lynn’s cash, and Hunter ambushes him and starts on a trail that leads him to Val, and Hunter’s $70,000 demands. But Val and everybody else have no intention of just giving Hunter the cash, even though to the Outfit such money is petty change. Instead Hunter has to kill Val, then Carter, one of the upper echelon, then ambush Fairfax, before Mrs Bronson, who’s a voice on the phone and seems to be as high up as anybody, agrees to send the money to the drop where Hunter tells them. Of course she double-crosses him and sends instead an army of killers, and he expects it. So Hunter (in the third act which is totally different from the 1999 theatrical studio version) kills or knocks down all the killers at the train station. But even as he puts his hands on the blue backpack with the money, he’s shot down by a woman assassin (Helgeland said he liked having Hunter’s weak spot be women, which is why he made Bronson a woman, and had the coup de grâce delivered by a woman.) He staggers down the steps to the street, where three more hit men are waiting; manages to kill them by skill and dumb accident before he collapses in the gutter and passes out, seeming to die. But the woman from the photograph (Maria Bello), a hooker Hunter used to drive and bodyguard (in a nod to Neil Jordan’s Mona Lisa apparently) appears – she’s been protecting Hunter and protected by him throughout the story – and slaps him back awake, revived from the dead again.

She drives him across the bridge he walked in on, and he lies there bleeding to death, the cash under his hand holding her hand. ‘Where to now?’ she asks and he answers, ‘Just drive, baby.’ (He’s mentioned a doctor who might save him, presumably the same one who saved him before, but Helgeland said he shaped this ending to be like that of Cool Hand Luke where Paul Newman’s Luke ends up dying, and smiling, in the car at the end – only we don’t see him die there, and here too Helgeland wants to leave us able to choose our own ending.)

The movie is very hard-edged with a dry, laconic sense of humor. There isn’t any humor in the original story, as I recall, and in Point Blank the only moment of humor is when Walker reacts to the corporate Outfit’s executives when they seem to belittle what he’s asking them for. The humor here adds a very nice touch. One point that embarrasses me to watch is Lucy Liu’s turn as a dominant tough-broad hooker who beats up Val and is beaten by him. The whole concept is a bit ridiculous, doesn’t give me any chuckles, and could only work as referring to Val’s lack of manhood. And yet Hunter himself is unmanned by his feelings for women and the only ones to hit him are his wife and the hitwoman in sneakers at the station. But I’m sure all the teen boys loved seeing Lucy Liu in leather chaps using the whip on Val.

Point Blank is one of my favorites, and I like the original pulp novel too. The idea of the guy who has one focus and doesn’t let anything stand in the way of getting it, appeals a lot to me. It also has something of the flavor of the later Don Siegel movie Charlie Varrick, Last of the Independents when all the other members of the criminal underworld are employed by, or trying to be employed by, the Outfit, which is nothing but a white-collar corporation now, far from the notions of Puzo’s The Godfather or the gangster gangs of the 1930s. The lone operator, surviving by balls and brains – but mostly by brains, because balls alone just won’t plausibly make a dent in the Outfit – it’s something of an American ideal, something out of Westerns and movies as diverse as Tucker An American Dream.

(25 April 2009)

3:10 to Yuma (2007)

Hi Aki,

Last night we watched 3:10 to Yuma the 2007 remake of the 1957 picture in a pan-and-scan version.

Story (briefly, this time) has poor rancher Dan Evans (Christian Bale) crossing paths with Ben Wade (Russell Crowe) when Wade robs the railroad payroll stage. Wade and his gang go on to town, have a drink, and depart for Nogales Mexico, but Wade himself stays behind to sleep with the pretty barmaid who is not at all unwilling.

Evans sends his sons back home but goes on to town himself to try to convince his banker to give him a break on what he owes on the ranch land, there’s a drought in Arizona and the banker seems to be doing everything he can to drive Evans off – including burning down Evans’s barn. The banker won’t listen to Evans’s plea because the railroad is coming through their town, and that land will be worth a lot more when the railroad is there.

In the bar, Wade sketches (his hobby) the nude barmaid in bed and when he goes downstairs, there’s Evans. Evans complains that Wade in using his cattle to rob the coach has cost him dead steers and time; Wade pays Evans for his cattle, his time, his son’s time. Evans asks for even more while the lawmen come in behind Wade and take him captive.

Evans then joins the deputies to take Wade to Contention, the railhead, so’s they can put him on the 3:10 to Yuma prison to be hanged. For this Evans is promised $200 if they put Wade on that train. $200 happens to be what Evans owes on the ranch land; it’s also what the Government paid him for losing his leg in the Civil War.

But it won’t be easy: Wade’s gang has got wind of his capture and are gathering to come rescue him.

The posse takes Wade to Evans’s ranch for the first night. There Wade romances Evans’s own wife (Gretchen Mol) and she seems a bit too interested in him, which angers Evans. More, Evans’s 14-year-old son William is impressed by the outlaw’s style and speed with a gun, and dismissive of his wimp dad.

This triangle, Evans and Wade sparring over the boy’s affection and admiration, is the main b-story here. Evans will stick to the deal to put Wade on the train even after he’s the last one, in part for the money, in part to prove to his boy that he’s not a wimp; in doing so Evans improbably earns the outlaw’s respect.

The second night the posse bed down in Apache territory – a shortcut they chose to beat Wade’s gang to Contention. But the Apaches fire on them, Wade manages to save them and kill the Apaches (winning Williams’ further admiration) and leaves with all the horses.

But the next day Wade finds himself forced through the tunnels the railroad is digging through the hills, and is taken by the railroad crew, and tortured. Evans and the posse catch up, but the railroad crew won’t hand Wade over alive, so there’s a shootout and the posse and Wade have to fight for their lives to escape. All that’s left of the posse now is the chief Pinkerton detective, Evans, and William.

(The chief implausibility of the movie is that nobody just kills Wade, even when he has a gun on them or is shooting at them. For some reason they do all they can to deliver him alive to the train so he can be killed at Yuma.)

In Contention, the gang catches up with the posse (holed up in the bridal suite of the hotel) and offer money to any citizen who’ll help them. Since the railroad seems unpopular with most of these folks, the whole town is now against them. The local marshall bows out, and the Pinkerton detective, reckoning the odds, also gives up. Only Evans is left. He makes a deal with the Pinkerton: if Evans will get Wade on the train, the Pinkerton will pay his wife $1000, and take William home. Deal.

Now Evans must fight his way through town to reach the rail station, and push Wade along before him. Halfway through their journey, Wade jumps Evans and has him at his mercy, but Evans explains that he wasn’t a hero in the war, and his son holds him in contempt, and implies he’s really doing all this to win his boy’s respect. At this Wade changes his tune, lets Evans up, and agrees to offer no more resistance but run with Evans to the station.

(This is the key moment in the story, and our acceptance of the end depends entirely on whether we accept this change in the outlaw. It did not convince me.)

Wade and Evans run, shoot, fight their way to the station. The train pulls in. Now they just have to get from the station to the rail car where there’s no cover – and the last members of the gang, including the Mexican sharpshooters, are waiting. But William has not left, and he looses the cattle from a nearby pen and drives them in between. Evans and Wade make it to the prison car, and Wade goes meekly into the cell on board.

But even as he has succeeded, Evans falls – shot in the back by Wade’s chief lieutenant, Charlie Prince. Wade comes out of the rail car and looks down on the dying man. William runs up and holds his father in his arms and congratulates him for having done it. It’s clear now that William respects his father and always will; he is now cleansed of outlaw-love and will lead his life, we presume, as a hard-working rancher supporting his mother and younger brother, and grow up to be a man like his father.

Meanwhile Charlie Prince gives Wade his special gun, the one with the black handle and golden crucifix. In a moment of stupefying non-suspension-of-disbelief, rather than ride off to Mexico with his gang, Wade shoots down Charlie Prince and the sharpshooters, the last members of the Wade gang, then goes back into the prison car. (He has already told Evans that he has escaped Yuma prison twice, and seems confident he can escape a third time.)

As the train pulls away, Wade settles in the cell on the prison car, but he does whistle. His well trained horse obediently gallops alongside the train, and we are left to imagine Wade will bust out of the rail car as soon as the train gets out of town.

This is based on an Elmore Leonard story back when he was still doing mostly Western tales; the original movie from 1957 sounds like a cross between Shane (the rancher is played by Van Heflin in both) and High Noon (Frankie Laine sings the title song for both as a recurring motif and both share the clock ticking down to when the train comes in to town).

I must give special credit to the DP here. All the lighting is beautiful (though night interiors are too yellow for my taste). They shot on location in winter when the sun would always be low in the sky and the local colors would be at their peak. It’s the best thing in the movie and I wish I’d seen it widescreen on a film print in all its glory.

There are two big implausible elements to the story the filmmakers have to convince us to overlook:

1. Poor rancher (and one-legged man!) risks his life – and succeeds – in bringing an outlaw to the train
2. Charismatic psychotic outlaw feels so much respect for the one-legged rancher that he will not only help in his own incarceration but murder his own men to avenge the rancher.

The film succeeds in convincing me of neither of these.

More, the theme of the movie lies in persuading us as well as William, that the honest, hard-working life is a better one to choose than the outlaw’s life of danger excitement sex and riches. And although William ends convinced, the final moments of laughter as we see how Wade will easily escape the train to steal and kiss another day, leave us in the audience admiring him more. After all, Evans may have saved his ranch, but he has lost his life; Wade has his life and soon will regain his freedom.

On the recurring notion of the ‘badass’ in today’s movies, I have to mention especially Ben Foster’s portrayal as Charlie Prince. The way he moves and is garbed, the way he wears his pistols backwards in the holster, the way his hat is too big for his head, all contribute to one of the finest portrayals of a young punk in my memory. At the same time the film shows Charlie Prince as deadly quick and accurate with his guns, and a cruel punk who is actually hiding behind his guns, and has no real strength of character or guts. His desperate efforts to rescue Wade seem to be another implausibility of the story, until we see that Charlie without Wade is nothing, and Charlie knows it. Russell Crowe plays Ben Wade on the other hand more as Mephistopheles than badass, though in truth he is a more dangerous man than Charlie. But Wade is charming with the ladies, and this carries over to a seductive appeal to young William as well, it seems, to Dan Evans himself. Wade is here the Tempter trying to win Evans away from the hard-working honest life. But Evans (again improbably) resists all temptation and sticks to his principles.

(20 April 2009)

How to Murder Your Wife

Hi Aki,

Another movie very different, though it too is a guy movie – How to Murder Your Wife from 1965. just about a perfect comedy. Absolutely flawless, at least from a man’s point of view; I suspect women would not find it entirely amusing, even though it pokes almost as much fun at men as it does at women.

The battle of the sexes waged in new york city in the mid-60s. Jack Lemmon plays Stanley Ford, a successful comic strip writer and illustrator whose strip, Bash Brannigan Secret Agent is famous because Ford never asks Bash to do anything Ford himself hasn’t already done. So for every caper Ford hires actors, props, and goes about the city engaging in make-believe spy antics while his faithful butler photographs everything; Ford then uses the pictures as the basis of the illustrations in the strip.

One more thing: Ford is a committed, philosophical bachelor. Marriage is the one thing to avoid, and his butler epitomizes the attitude and worships Ford as the embodiment of the ideal – until one night at a bachelor party Ford gets drunk and marries the girl who pops out of the cake.

This girl turns out to be italian, a contestant in the Miss Galaxy contest, and doesn’t speak a word of english. So arranging for an annulment or divorce is difficult. Moreover, as a good catholic, the new Mrs Ford will never, never agree to divorce.

Ford loses his butler and settles down to unhappy wedded life. He turns his comic strip into The Brannigans, the adventures of America’s Favorite Hen-Pecked Boob and fills the strips with all the comic misery of his own life. He puts on 20 pounds, is lethargic, and knows america is laughing at his strip – and at him.

Finally he snaps and decides to put the strip back to spy business; to do this, Bash Brannigan must murder Mrs Brannigan, and Ford concocts a fiendish scheme which he play-acts also, just like in the old days. He puts on a party, gets his wife drunk and high from ‘goofballs’ so she passes out; while the party still is in full swing, Ford takes a mannequin representing his wife out and buries it in the cement foundation of a building under construction next door.

When morning comes and Mrs Ford awakens, she finds the strips that Ford, asleep on the drawing board, has just finished. Upset, she takes off her ring, puts on only the clothes she came in, and leaves.

Ford reports her missing. But suspicions arise, when the strips are published, that he has killed her. Soon Ford finds himself in jail, charged with murder. And everybody knows he’s guilty.

The trial goes from bad to worse. Ford’s attorney, a hen-pecked boob himself, hardly tries to defend Ford, fearing the wrath of his own wife (these two are great in support – Eddie Mayehof as the lawyer, and Claire Trevor as his shrill and domineering wife). at last in desperation, Ford takes over his own defense and in a brilliant, and brilliantly-acted speech, convinces the jury (all men) to acquit him on ‘grounds of justifiable homicide.’ he ends up being carried out on their shoulder, the hero of all the hen-pecked boobs.

But though Ford now has his old life back again, he doesn’t embrace it, because in the end, he misses his wife. He loves her after all and when he and the butler get back to the townhouse, there is Mrs Ford, and Ford eagerly embraces her. Meanwhile in the butler’s quarters the butler (another perfect turn by Terry Thomas) finds Mrs Ford’s mother – and it’s love at first sight there, too…

George Axelrod wrote it, the direction is by David Quine, a name I don’t know. Richard Sylbert, top production designer, is on hand and does a great, great job; Neal Hefti’s music is catchy and funny at once.

Everybody in the production is on top of his game. It reminds me overall of a French farce of the late 19th century, when play mechanics were worked out to perfection, everything worked like clockwork, and the cast was perfect for their roles and knew just how to exaggerate their performances by just enough to get the laughs, but (outside a couple moments) never go over the top and overdo.

One point that is not from the 19th century, perhaps, and marks it as coming from the 1960s, is what passes for love between Ford and his never-named wife: it is less love, and more sheer sexual chemistry. For Mrs Ford they cast Virna Lisi, a blonde ‘sex bomb’ of the period, but luckily she could also pantomime and act and be sexy, touching when needed, and funny throughout.

I’ve seen this movie several times, and I almost have it memorized. Even as a kid I loved it, although it was obviously aimed at the WW2-generation of American men, then hitting mid-life crisis and maybe wondering what they’d missed by getting married and settling down. So I’d have to say it appeals to the boy in all men; it does indeed depict American men as boys at heart, impervious to maturing or growing up.

(15 April 2009)

Escape From Alcatraz

Hi Aki,

Tonight we watched Escape from Alcatraz. I liked it.

I must see it.  Those “old filmmakers” had different mentality and I kind of like it too.  He’s a master, but the “masters” who are dominating Hollywood at this moment lack some quality that those old masters had.  Maybe not only Hollywood people, but we got fat mentally.

Melville is a very different mentality. He directed Delon in Samourai and Le Cercle Rouge. This film, Army of Shadows was made in 1969 but never released in America till 3 years ago. Melville usually made gangster films. His gangster films were informed by his experience in the resistance…his resistance films were informed by his gangster films. The resistance fighters are like gangster, the gangsters are like resistance fighters.

Escape From Alcatraz is much the same. Tough guys against an oppressive authority. They win - maybe - but there is no rejoicing in victory. In both films the ending is truncated, incomplete. In Alcatraz for example, we see the three men swimming out into the water. Then day, discovery of escape, search…the men are never found. A mystery. Did they drown or reach land? The movie is based on a book, a fictionalized, I think, account of the only ‘successful’ escape from that prison. But the real case the book is based on is only a ‘successful’ escape because the bodies were not found. Nothing was heard of the men. To this day we don’t know what happened.

And the movie respects that. We get a clue that they reached another island in San Francisco Bay. Nothing else.

What is important in both films is a test of integrity, spirit, manhood. What counts is not to give in, not to give up, go on fighting. Doesn’t matter if you make it or not. Doesn’t matter if you defeat the Germans or not. Only that you try, and go on trying.

Both are existentialist works in this regard.

(21 January 2009)

Highlander: Endgame

Hi Aki,

Tonight I watched Highlander: Endgame. I have a fondness for the original Highlander – at least for the concept and a couple set-pieces, the rest of the movie was pretty bad. This entry to the series, which teams up the original Christopher Lambert with the actor who played Highlander in the TV series, is a mess.

Six, yes, six editors are given screen credit.

Every single one of the Highlander films I’ve watched has had a separate set of rules. I never saw the TV series, but some of the new rules here probably come from the series. All the same, the very first movie ended it all: Connor Macleod was the one, final, winner in the Game. In the second movie, it took place after Connor was the last one, and trying to save Earth from the break in the ozone layer, and it was revealed he and all the other immortals like him were aliens. They later recanted on this and tried to forget that movie was ever made.

Here Connor dies, actually is killed at his own request by his protégé, the TV-series star, so their combined strength can overcome the chief bad guy. But there are so many immortals running around, it made me wonder, ‘Who’s NOT immortal here?’

The action scenes are not impressive, unfortunately. The guy from the TV series is good looking and well trained, but his stuntwork is weak. Christopher Lambert still can bring some empathy and sadness to his role as an immortal who still grieves the death of his first wife several centuries ago.

(26 January 2009)

Charlie Varrick- the Last of the Independents

Hi Aki,

Tonight we watched a pan and scan version of Charlie Varrick. Directed by Don Siegel in the last years of his life, it’s a straight up gangster film, with the twist of having comic actor Walter Matthau as small time bank robber (and cropduster pilot) Charlie Varrick ‘the last of the independents.’

He robs a little bank in a little town in New Mexico. But it all goes wrong, and his wife who is driving the getaway car is shot and killed. Charlie is left with a half-crazy partner and a couple bags with more money than a bank like that ought to have. Charlie guesses correctly that the bank is just a front for the mob who uses it to drop money to launder it going in and out of the country. So now Charlie has the FBI after him as well as the mafia, and the mafia are worse. Mostly the movie details Charlie’s efforts to get away from the mafia with his life.

He does this by being clever, one step ahead of them. No violence on his part.

And he does succeed.

Siegel shot in Panavision, so I only saw half the frame at any one time. It’s in color, nicely shot but nothing special. Siegel was not a pictorial director, he liked shooting fast and dirty and liked to have his frame a little ragged and messy and more like life, so his sets and locations have a ‘just drove by and found this’ look to them. I’m sure a lot of work went into making the locations look like no work was done on them though.

Lalo Schiffrin did the score, and it’s annoying. Probably not so much back then, but right now it seems so utterly 70s – Schiffrin was incredibly prolific and he might be more responsible than anybody for creating that particular crappy tv-copshow, 70s score sound.

The biggest miscue in the movie comes with sex. Back then you had to have some violence and some sex. Your hero was no hero unless he bedded at least one woman. So we have the unfortunate scene of Charlie, who otherwise through the rest of the picture is all business, ‘no such thing as being too careful’ going to bed with the private secretary of the top mafia guy we see, who is herself portrayed through the rest of the movie as no-nonsense, all business, and somebody who knows what’s going on behind the scene at the ‘western bank’ – so it’s totally out of character for him to want to fool around when his wife got shot to death 3 days ago and he’s desperately trying to save his own life; it’s totally out of character for her to want to fuck this middle-aged, tired nobody who her boss has to order killed – him and everybody who might help him.

Other than that the story is clean and straight, and sometimes I was trying to see if Clint Eastwood could have delivered the lines and been Charlie, and he could, but at that time (just after Dirty Harry) Clint seemed too young. Clint would’ve been more believable bedding the secretary, but he wouldn’t be so believable as the old pilot who has turned to robbing banks only because there aren’t any other jobs to do. In fact Eastwood was plenty old enough to have done that, it’s just that he looked a lot younger and sexier than the part calls for.

Matthau is perfect as the clever, experienced, wiser, older Charlie. But it’s oddly lacking in passion, this film. Part of that is just the breezy way Siegel puts together films, he was never one to go deep into wallowing emotions. Thus we have a sort of fantasy, wish-fulfillment film, but Matthau is not the screen presence that invites us to want him to be our wish-fulfillment alter ego.

But ‘the last of the independents’ was no doubt the way Siegel liked to think of himself, so we can read a lot into Charlie’s fallen state as a mataphor for Siegel himself and other one-time independent directors who now can do the job better than any of the kids, but times have moved past them, and there’s nothing really worthy for them to do anymore.

(written around 4 March 2009)

The Harder They Fall

Hi Aki,

Tonight I watched The Harder They Fall, a mid-50s movie exposing boxing as a crooked sport. Starring humphrey Bogart and Rod Steiger.

Story concerns a once-proud sportswriter now roped in, for the money, into promoting an incompetent boxer for a gangster. The main line concerns getting the giant, helpless Toro Moreno a fight with the champ.

Climax/crisis comes when toro refuses to go through with the big fight. Bogart, our writer/promoter, must convince toro to fight.

Seq. Seven then is the fight. Toro gets butchered and must go to the hospital, but at least he has made a deal with Bogart that after this fight they will both quit and take their money. Bogart leaves the boxer at the hospital and goes up to collect.

Bogart meets with gangster rod steiger who’s celebrating. 2 twists come in this scene: steiger has sold toro’s contract to an evey scummier manager, who intends to have toro fight in every town cross country where he won fixed fights to build him up – but now he will have to take a fall in every fight. Not only that but twist 2 comes when Bogart insists on getting toro’s share of the million-dollar gate and learns it comes to forty-nine bucks and change. All legal, with receipts.

Sequence 8 consists of two movements, unless we want to call the second an epilogue. First movement has bogie going to the hospital and collecting toro. Steiger’s goons try to stop them but bogie is too smart for them. He and toro take a taxi to the airport where toro will fly back to argentina. Toro asks to hold his money, how much was it? Bogie squirms for a little, then hands over the envelope with his share – twenty-six grand. He puts toro on a pan-am flight and waves him off.

Second movement of seq 8 has bogie back at his apartment. Things are now patched up with his wife after he’s done the right thing, but he’s broke and needs her to hold onto her job while he scrounges up something. Steiger and his goons barge in looking for toro. They don’t believe that he’s gone, at first. Then steiger insists that bogie must pay him back for the seventy-five grand he’ll lose by not being able to sell toro’s contract. ‘And we’ll start with your twenty-six grand for first payment.’

Bogie says he gave it to toro, but he’ll pay steiger back every penny by making him famous, he’ll write a series of articles all about him. Steiger threatens but it’s no good.

Steiger and his goons leave and bogie sits at the typewriter and begins his first expose article, while wifey makes him coffee.

Script by Philip Yordan, a Hollywood vet, produced by Yordan, from a book by Bud Schulman, a sportswriter who wrote what’s called the finest boxing novel ever – can’t recall the name of that one.

Anyway that’s how I see the third act. Interesting that the actual fight is not part of the climax, that they didn’t coincide toro’s crisis of conscience in the middle of the prize fight.

Mark Robson directed, not too well. The performances seem flat. Maybe the script is at fault, it’s too heavy handed and preachy.

Bogart seems tired and he spits a lot when he talks. The scenes in general seem rushed somehow, and we don’t see enough of Bogart’s unease at the sort of racket he’s in. the problem is we see, and Bogart knows, that it’s a scam from the opening. He descends into more and more corruption, but just breezes into it. So long as the money is bigger, he’ll do worse, until finally the end when he turns. I found it hard to believe him taking the money all along, and I found it impossible to believe that after doing all that, he would give the fighter his money and end up with nothing. I suppose the big fight is supposed to change our opinions, it is shot to be bloody and horrible. Nothing like raging bull or the violence that they would do today, but it must have been pretty rough back in the mid fifties.

In general I find all of Bogart’s movies from the fifties to be weak. He seemed tired in all of them, and off his game as a performer. The best ones are those like Barefoot Contessa where he plays a weary soul anyway. In Sabrina it’s such a joke that he ends up with Audrey Hepburn.

(written around 15 February 2009)

Fight Club

Hi Aki,

We saw Fight Club tonight.

The first time I saw it I didn’t like it at all and didn’t even watch all the way.

Then I saw something that gave away the ending. I watched it again and really liked it.

My dad ordered it so I saw it for the third time – second time all the way. I liked it a lot still.

But you know, it’s funny – the film is really dated now. it’s basically a rejection of a world that is now passed. Such stories and ideas can’t survive the things they reject.

But positive stories and ideas that are a celebration of some ideal can live on long after the world they sprang out of has died. Even though these ideals are formed as the opposite of the world they are born in.

Fight Club is nihilistic in that all it can manage to offer malcontents is the pleasure of destroying the world that oppresses them. It doesn’t offer them any answers or any way forward past the destruction. As such maybe it actually helps the world continue: we destroy the world through the movie, through the book, so we feel better about our oppression, and we don’t move to actually destroy the world. We just watch a movie and rent the dvd and watch it again.

Now that world is destroyed, and we all have bigger and better things to think about than childish temper tantrums.

(written around 12 February 2009)