Captain America: Random Subtitle is the story of how superheroes are great to have around unless you make the fatal mistake of attempting to bring one of their friends to justice.
Now let me start by saying I'm not exactly a fan of Marvel, or of comic books in general. My teenage boy phase of comic collecting ended around age 15 and I haven't given two shits about comic books since then. After that, I watched the occasional comic book film, and they were kind of decent. I liked the first X-Men film alright (from waaay back in 2000), and I watched Iron Man on the airplane and found it to be a movie. But basically, once I saw Spider-Man II and The Dark Knight (the latter about 3 years after it came out), I was just kind of done with superhero films. So I haven't seen The Avengers or the other Captain America: Random Subtitle movies or any of those Hulk things or any of the X-Men or Wolverine movies that came after X-Men: The One Where Everybody Dies. I've seen both of the Fantastic Four movies that have the CGI character playing the Invisible Woman and both of the hysterically silly Ghost Rider movies, and the bottomlessly shitty Daredevil and its even more shitty spin-off? sequel? funeral march? Elecktra, but those I sought out because they're crap. The other Marvel movies, to judge by Iron Man: The Iron Man, seem to be a generic, bland paste that don't really stand out enough to be either good or bad. They're just there.
I mean, for action sequences and super-powered beings punching each other, Spider-Man II seemed to be the best there ever was or will be. And The Dark Knight is the best comic book film in every respect but that of action sequences and super-powered beings punching each other. So I didn't see much point in watching any more such movies. What were they going to do that hadn't already been done better by those two films?
To judge by Captain America: Whatever, the answer is absolutely fucking nothing.
This movie was pretty bad, in ways I wasn't expecting. I thought it would just be another Iron Man: The Iron Man that I could put on to help me sleep on the plane while Iron Man punched Captain America and Captain America punched Iron Man and Scarlett Johansson struggled to speak in a remotely human fashion. Instead, I was confronted by a morally reprehensible mess, in which Captain America (and the movie is positively loath to address him as such) critically injures numerous police officers, betrays all his friends, and causes the deaths of dozens of people solely to keep his terrorist murderer friend from being arrested by the proper authorities. (To be completely fair, Cap and Iron Man do punch each other, and Scarlett Johansson remains as robotic and unnaturally stiff as ever.)
Now I never liked Captain America. I didn't dislike him, either. I just didn't care about him one way or the other, because he's basically Marvel's version of Superman. Not in the powers department (Supes is essentially Christ himself descended, while Cap is more the pushing of human physiology to its absolute limit), but in the morality/leadership department. If Superman is the Last Boy Scout of Krypton, Cap is George Washington with Arnold Schwarzenegger's physique. When I was in my comics phase, I was much more interested in the antihero asskickers who gave the bad guys what they deserved and did it with a whole lot of attitude, guys like Wolverine and the Ghost Rider. (Okay, Ghostie didn't really have attitude, but he had a flaming skull for a head. That's like 1000 cool points right there.) I didn't have any patience for namby-pamby do-gooders like Cap and Supes who tried to bring their enemies in alive instead of bringing the rain to wash the scum from the streets.
Now of course, I'm a bit older and so would probably be moar interested in the moral dilemmas of the goody-two-shoes types, if I wasn't also old enough to not give a shit about comic books any more. But what I don't understand is why people who are fans of Captain America aren't pitching a fit over this lousy movie. I don't know that much about Cap's character, but what little I do know is completely pissed on by the makers of Captain America: Does It Matter, Really?. And Jesus, how bad do you have to fuck up to be the worse half of a double-header in which the other film is Batman v. Superman? That's right, people I've never heard of who made Captain America, I watched your film back-to-back with a fucking Hack Snyder film, and you lost. When your story is less interesting than that of the man who gave us 300, you need to hang up your movie cameras and go home. I can't fucking believe I watched the two biggest superhero movies of this year and the only thing I enjoyed at all was Ben Affleck in a batsuit. If you spent a million jillion dollars on a movie and Ben "Gigli" Affleck was the best thing about it, stop making movies!
The plot, I guess. The Avengers are split in two over a proposal to actually subject them to oversight. That is, the United Nations wants to have power over the Avengers' going somewhere to deal with a problem, as opposed to their current M.O. of brazenly violating the sovereignty of any nation they please in order to handle whichever situations they see fit, without asking anybody's permission or having any kind of accountability. This is primarily because the Avengers have, according to this movie, a pretty bad track record of getting innocent bystanders killed when they perform their feats of heroic derring-do. Let me say again, the movie says the Avengers' actions have gotten an untold number of civilians killed. (Though as Cap explains to some girl who's so powerful she seems to eliminate the need to even have the rest of the team, she isn't responsible for all those people's deaths because, you know, the bad guys started it. Yes, it's the felony-murder doctrine, applied to people who can level entire cities with a thought.)
So the Avengers split, with Iron Man leading the "we gotta stop being vigilantes" side and Cap leading the "fuck the normies, we handle shit our own way" side. Wait, what? Yes, you read that right: Captain America, the conscious of the Marvel Universe, says screw the United Nations and people who don't have superpowers. We don't answer to them. We go where we want when we want, because the UN might, like, investigate a problem to see if it warrants sending in a super-powered Scarlett Johansson, and we'll have none of that, mister. I just want to make sure it's clear that Captain fucking America is taking the position that super-powered beings--or at least the ones on his team--should remain laws unto themselves, answerable and accountable to no one. That's right, Captain America, who in his last movie was in S.H.I.E.L.D., an organization of superheroes...answerable to the United Nations. This leads to an incredibly boring and silly fight as the Avengers fight each other in truly the saddest "Who would win in a fight between Superman and the Hulk?" that little boys have argued about since time immemorial. ("No way, Xenophane! Apollo would totally kick Hermes's ass if they wrestled!") It's embarrassing to the human race that the biggest movie of 2016 has all the dramatic tension of two 9 year olds arguing on the playground.
I remember being confused when I first heard about the titular "civil war". Surely, I thought, I'd misheard. Cap should be calling for an agreement to work with the governments of the world and not running around the world as uncontrollable vigilantes, and Tony Stark should be telling the world to kiss his ass, determined to do things his way. Am I the voice crying in the wilderness, here? But upon seeing the film, it's even worse than that, since Cap doesn't even stand against the agreement on principle. No, he opposes it mostly because those governments are trying to arrest his buddy Bucky, since they (and Cap) have very good reason to think the Buckster planted a bomb at a UN meeting that killed like 60 people.
I'd like to mention that again: Cap also has good reason to think Bucky committed this terrorist act, as he sees the evidence himself. In fact, at no point does Cap suggest Bucky is not guilty of this crime. (Of course he isn't guilty, because that might have been interesting, but for most of the film Cap doesn't know that.) He simply assaults dozens of police officers, causes a fight that paralyzes Don Cheadle from the waist down (the Black Guy Always Gets Crippled First), and breaks his fellow rebelling Avengers out of prison (where, need I even say, they absolutely belong as they have knowingly and willfully and repeatedly violated the law). And the movie ends, by God, the movie ends with Tony Stark admitting Cap is right and grovelling in front of him. Yes, the man who made the difficult yet absolutely morally correct decision is forced to kowtow to the very asshole who betrayed his comrades and willfully became a criminal so he could protect Timothy fucking McVeigh. And we're expected to cheer this moment! God, I want to punch this movie.
In the last 4 minutes, I just sketched out in my head the outline for what might have been a decent Captain America film with the same general plot. Of course this time, Cap will be on the right side, that of law and order and oversight and not being a fucking answers-to-nobody mete-out-God's-own-justice vigilante. Being presented with evidence of Bucky's guilt, Cap reluctantly does the right thing and agrees to work with law enforcement to bring him in, while Tony Stark castigates him for selling out his friend to the normies and vowing that the Avengers will handle the situation in-house, apprehending Bucky themselves and handing him over to the authorities only if they determine him guilty. The film would have Cap slowly realizing that some of the people's he's working with are less than committed to bringing Bucky in alive and actually giving him a fair trial and are more interested in Osama bin Laden-ing him in revenge for the terrorist attack. At the same time, Stark is dropping hints that Bucky is being framed, testing Cap's resolve for sticking with doing things the right way. The writers could take it from there. We'd still get our fanservice "Avengers fight each other" scene, but at least this time it might have some weight since it has Cap doing the right thing for the right reasons (putting aside personal feelings to follow the rule of law) and Stark doing the wrong thing but still for the right reasons (trying to save a possibly innocent man from a system that isn't giving him a fair shake). We might even get some *gaspshockhorror* tension. Can Cap bring Bucky in alive while still working with the corrupt law enforcement that's trying to take him out?
Not only would this scenario be more in keeping with each character's established, er, character (and let me stress again that I've never cared one whit about either Iron Man or Captain America, but I hate it when characters act completely out of character), but it would be a Captain America film that centers on, oh I don't know, fucking Captain America instead of being a half-assed Avengers 3.
Captain America: Avengers 2 1/2 is a morally repugnant character assassination of a character I never gave a shit about anyway. The people who made this movie need to get their fuckin' heads checked after getting their asses handed to them by Ben Affleck and Hack Snyder in the storytelling and character departments, something I didn't think was possible under the physical laws governing this universe.
Oh well. At least the, what, 3rd incarnation of Spider-Man in the last 9 years was pretty nifty. I'm glad somebody was behaving in character around here.
Showing posts with label offensive. Show all posts
Showing posts with label offensive. Show all posts
August 24, 2016
September 7, 2015
The Cold Equations
The Cold Equations is the greatest movie ever, if only because it features the gruesome death of possibly the most slap-worthy character in the history of cinema.
The Cold Equations was produced by the Sci-Fi Channel back when it had a dignified name and tried to create actual content instead of Sharknado. It's a fairly straightforward re-telling of the classic '50s short story on which it's based, with everything you'd expect from a '90s sci-fi cheapie: uneven acting that ranges from bland to atrocious, shockingly cheap sets and costumes, even cheaper special effects that manage to be embarrassing despite appearing for upwards of 1 minute total of the 93-minute running time, and an evil corporation doing evil things for money, and also to be evil. All very routine, except for that character I mentioned. We'll get to that.
The short story is an effective little yarn, written by a fellow named Tom Godwin in 1954, very short and very direct. A man is delivering a supply of desperately needed medical supplies to an off-world colony in a spaceship carrying precisely the amount of fuel it needs to reach its destination. He discovers a girl named Marilyn who stowed away in an attempt to visit her brother in the colony. Stowing away is illegal because of the whole no-spare-fuel thing and, since carrying extra weight means death for all aboard, the penalty is ejection into space (though the government neglected to explain that last part, meaning the poor girl thinks she's only in for a fine or a brief stint in jail). So our man Barton is ordered to dump the bitch toot-sweet, not just to save his own hide but also to save the millions of colonists soon to die of whatever disease it is they have. Once she recognizes the gravity of her situation, Marilyn is permitted to speak briefly with her brother on the wireless and then willingly enters the airlock.
Now, some people hate the story because of how contrived the situation is. It's bad engineering not to have any margin for error, and it's pretty ridiculous that the government wouldn't make it clear that the punishment for stowing away is death. But these kinds of criticisms miss the point; the plots of a lot of short stories, if you take a few moments to think about them, don't really hold up. Generally short stories quickly limn a set-up and then deliver some sort of emotionally shocking conclusion. The gut impact is the important part. Think of "A priest and a rabbi walk into a bar..." type jokes. Why are they there? Who cares. The set-up is just there to get you to the punchline.
Viewed that way, "The Cold Equations" can work on a number of levels. You could see it as a meditation on the futility of human action, its downbeat conclusion a rejection of the old "Damn it, we'll find a way!" kind of story that always has the main characters finding a solution just in time. You could look at it as a rebuttal to the notion that technology will inevitably overcome any problem nature throws at us *coughclimatechangecough*. Or maybe it's a comment on how people (Barton and Marilyn), no matter how competent, are at the mercy of others' incompetence (the engineers who designed and built the spacecraft) or bureaucratic corruption and negligence (the decision-maker who okay'd the ship's minimalist design). Or perhaps it's a story of human morality--one person sacrificing herself to save countless others. Or of responsibility--that your actions may have unintended consequences, and you just have to deal. Or a number of other interpretations I haven't thought of.
What it wasn't was the story of a horrible selfish bitch who keeps your eyes glued to the screen in hopes of relishing her slow and painful death.
As noted, the movie follows the story, though they have to stretch it to feature length by adding in a movie dystopia (somehow spaceship travel runs entirely on the backs of a vague exploited underclass, and the smallest violation of any law for any reason is harshly punished), a corporate greed subplot (it turns out the medical supplies are in fact a vaccine to prevent a disease the colonists haven't got yet), and, yes, a goddamn love story. Apparently if a film doesn't feature somewhat attractive people sucking face and declaring their love and willingness to die for each other--despite the fact that they've known each other for a grand total of about two hours--then we cretinous imbeciles in the audience will scratch our thick monkey craniums and change the channel. All this I expected (like the love story), or at least wasn't surprised to find (once it became clear the government/corporation was eeeevil, I suspected the medical supplies would turn out to be bogus). What really torpedoes the movie is the character of the girl, inexplicably named Lee in the movie.
Upon being told that her actions have doomed not only Barton but the colonists (including her own brother, let's not forget), Lee's response is to flatly refuse to leave and to berate Barton for wanting to murder her. Now, this might be an understandable initial response, but here's the thing: She does this for the entire movie. She demands that Barton instead lighten the ship's load enough to make up for her 108 extra pounds. (You weigh a little more than a 108.) Barton makes clear that The Company built the ship without any unnecessary weight to save on cost, since it's a disposable vehicle for a one-way trip, so there's nothing to jettison. (Why the company would care about costs, given that it has no competitors and also serves as a totalitarian government, is naturally left unexplained.) In fact, in the pre-flight checkout, Barton was 2 pounds over weight because he was carrying a portable music player, which he was required to leave behind. Lee then suggests ditching his cargo, prompting Barton to tell her what he's carrying. Once she understands the cargo is medical supplies that must be delivered in order to save an entire colony of people (again, including her brother), Lee attacks Barton and attempts to jettison the supplies to save her own ass.
Now, I was already totally fine with spacing this bitch in the first place because she's so goddamned annoying, but really, we're now beyond the pale. What the makers of this film don't seem to understand (and neither do the morons on the IMDb, who gave this piece of shit decent reviews and particularly loved the pluckiness of the female lead and the "romance" of it all) is that Lee is the villain here. In any decent action movie, science fiction or no, the person fucking over the innocent to save his own hide is the bad guy, and the hero fights against that person. Remember in Aliens when Burke locks himself in another room and refuses to let the other characters in just to save himself? Remember what happens? Burke escapes LV-426 while the other characters die horribly, right? He flies home sipping caviar while the credits roll?
Oh that's right, he gets an alien proboscis through the fucking face because that movie didn't suck.
This movie, on the other hand, continually tries to get us to sympathize with Lee. She's plucky, you see, so she starts tearing the ship apart to find extra weight to throw out, while Barton stands there and doesn't grease her stupid ass. Turns out there's a shit-ton of extra weight that can safely be thrown out of this ship built without any unnecessary parts in order to minimize weight and cost for its one-way trip. This includes a first-aid kit the size of a goddamn suitcase and the insulation that keeps the occupant of the ship warm. The latter is torn off of every wall and thrown out with absolutely no adverse effects. Okay, I'm being totally unfair. Lee at one point does say she feels a bit chilly and rubs her arms a little. Why yes, she is dressed solely in a "sexy" tank top while Barton's in a full-body space suit, so I guess the corporation that built this ship without any unnecessary parts in order to minimize weight and cost for its one-way trip wanted to make sure under-dressed "hot" female stowaways would be nice and warm in the few minutes they're on the ship before they get blasted out of the fucking airlock for breaking the law. Those corporate bastards, always concerned about the bottom line.
There's also enough food for two people, even though the trip takes three hours tops. You don't get fucking peanuts on a budget airline for a three-hour trip, yet this one-person spacecraft built without any unnecessary parts in order to minimize weight and cost for its one-way trip has full meals! For two! And there's a functioning space toilet. For a trip lasting upwards of 180 minutes. I guess the Department of Defense contracted this thing.
Lee finds enough stuff to toss to offset half of her weight (good thing she knows moar about the ship than Barton, who said there was nothing they could afford to lose--what a dope!). Man, Barton ought to be pissed that he wasn't allowed to bring his two-pound music player earlier. But now they're really out of stuff to drop (yes, really for reals this time), after Barton again rejects her demand that he dump the supplies. About this point I started to fantasize about Laura Roslin showing up on the ship, whispering sweetly to Lee that everything will be okay, and then airlocking the bitch without a second thought. Alas, Mary McDonnell didn't feel moved to descend from Mount Olympus and save this poor sinner, and I began to panic at the thought of there being 45 more minutes of this crap left to go. Our two zeroes have a heart to heart, where she tries to go all I'm a member of the exploited underclass, this is your fault (lolwut), why don't you buck the system and defy your orders (and thereby ensure both our deaths, though she doesn't say that part), yadda yadda. Then she tries to choke him to death with her bootlace.
You know, nothing makes me fall in love with a woman faster than having her attempt to strangle me from behind with an old shoelace. "At the moment my vision began to fade out and I felt my major organs shutting down, that's what I knew she was the one for me. Ah, the memories."
Barton turns the tables on her and carries her unconscious to the airlock as I cheered at the screen and made some popcorn. At the last moment she wakes up and begs him not to do it, even as he's stuffing her in and sealing the door behind her. But he hesitates, and I shout profanities at the screen; there are 30 minutes of this movie left and I realize this Sci-Fi channel shitfest doesn't have the balls to space the bitch. No, I'll be forced to watch some contrived scenario that allows one of the most truly loathsome characters I've ever endured to survive the movie.
Blah blah they figure out the medical supplies are bogus, so they dump them. Then they fuck so we know they love each other, with all the passion they've built up over the last two hours of shouting, punching and elbowing, beating into unconsciousness, and choking with shoelaces. Once they dump the supplies, the ship is under the required weight, but oh noez! That was the calculation from 2 hours ago, but now they've traveled those 2 hours overweight, so now they need to lose another 100 pounds to make it! Nobody could've seen that coming, certainly not the highly-trained spaceship pilot! Well, and me, and about 20 minutes into the movie. You know a sci-fi film is shit when its grasp of actual science is worse than mine.
So we get the scene whereMarilyn Lee talks by wireless with her brother (whose performance blows the doors off the two leads', though that's not saying all that much), and then....YES! FUCKIN' A! WOOOOOO! DIE BITCH DIE!* etc. etc. as she finally, finally gets airlocked. I can honestly say I've never been so happy to be proven wrong by a film, nor so happy to see someone die. Nor am I likely to be ever again, at least until Roose Bolton gets a knife to the dick and wears his balls as a hat. The North remembers.
Time to get to the end of this crap. There's a framing story I haven't mentioned before because it's only (kind of) relevant now. The corporation has been investigating the loss of the medical supplies, interviewing characters in the movie, and now they're finally bringing in Barton to pronounce sentence upon him. This dastardly dictatorship, prepared to send miners into an area where a deadly fungus grew just for profit...okay, only after they had a vaccine to inoculate them first. Which they provided free of charge. That presumably cost a great deal to develop, mass-produce, and deliver to the colony--look, shut up! They're evil, alright? The Party or the Corporation or whatever Evil Gubmint it is punishes this brazen act of defiance with...
...
...wait for it...
...
...fifteen years in prison! Oh the horror, the horror!
Look, I'm not saying 15 years in prison--or any time in prison--is a cakewalk, but really, I expect more from my humanity-controlling greedy totalitarian dystopia corpo-governments. At least make him love Big Brother and then kack him, or something. Sheesh! You guys really suck at brutal totalitarian dictatorship. Mao Zedong would've executed Barton, his family, his dogs and cats, his goldfish, his neighbors, anybody who met him or wanted to meet him or saw a picture of him one time or thought maybe they might've seen him somewhere 'cause he's got that kind of face that just seems so familiar...and you give the guy a lousy nickel-and-dime in minimum security white-collar resort prison?
And of course, it's implied that this small act of defiance in the name ofgetting laid freedom will somehow inspire others to bring the corporation down and awaken liberty throughout the universe. Sure.
Fuck this movie with a chainsaw-shaped dildo.
=================================================
*Actual things I shouted at the screen in glee, probably confusing, not to mention annoying, my neighbors.
The Cold Equations was produced by the Sci-Fi Channel back when it had a dignified name and tried to create actual content instead of Sharknado. It's a fairly straightforward re-telling of the classic '50s short story on which it's based, with everything you'd expect from a '90s sci-fi cheapie: uneven acting that ranges from bland to atrocious, shockingly cheap sets and costumes, even cheaper special effects that manage to be embarrassing despite appearing for upwards of 1 minute total of the 93-minute running time, and an evil corporation doing evil things for money, and also to be evil. All very routine, except for that character I mentioned. We'll get to that.
The short story is an effective little yarn, written by a fellow named Tom Godwin in 1954, very short and very direct. A man is delivering a supply of desperately needed medical supplies to an off-world colony in a spaceship carrying precisely the amount of fuel it needs to reach its destination. He discovers a girl named Marilyn who stowed away in an attempt to visit her brother in the colony. Stowing away is illegal because of the whole no-spare-fuel thing and, since carrying extra weight means death for all aboard, the penalty is ejection into space (though the government neglected to explain that last part, meaning the poor girl thinks she's only in for a fine or a brief stint in jail). So our man Barton is ordered to dump the bitch toot-sweet, not just to save his own hide but also to save the millions of colonists soon to die of whatever disease it is they have. Once she recognizes the gravity of her situation, Marilyn is permitted to speak briefly with her brother on the wireless and then willingly enters the airlock.
Now, some people hate the story because of how contrived the situation is. It's bad engineering not to have any margin for error, and it's pretty ridiculous that the government wouldn't make it clear that the punishment for stowing away is death. But these kinds of criticisms miss the point; the plots of a lot of short stories, if you take a few moments to think about them, don't really hold up. Generally short stories quickly limn a set-up and then deliver some sort of emotionally shocking conclusion. The gut impact is the important part. Think of "A priest and a rabbi walk into a bar..." type jokes. Why are they there? Who cares. The set-up is just there to get you to the punchline.
Viewed that way, "The Cold Equations" can work on a number of levels. You could see it as a meditation on the futility of human action, its downbeat conclusion a rejection of the old "Damn it, we'll find a way!" kind of story that always has the main characters finding a solution just in time. You could look at it as a rebuttal to the notion that technology will inevitably overcome any problem nature throws at us *coughclimatechangecough*. Or maybe it's a comment on how people (Barton and Marilyn), no matter how competent, are at the mercy of others' incompetence (the engineers who designed and built the spacecraft) or bureaucratic corruption and negligence (the decision-maker who okay'd the ship's minimalist design). Or perhaps it's a story of human morality--one person sacrificing herself to save countless others. Or of responsibility--that your actions may have unintended consequences, and you just have to deal. Or a number of other interpretations I haven't thought of.
What it wasn't was the story of a horrible selfish bitch who keeps your eyes glued to the screen in hopes of relishing her slow and painful death.
As noted, the movie follows the story, though they have to stretch it to feature length by adding in a movie dystopia (somehow spaceship travel runs entirely on the backs of a vague exploited underclass, and the smallest violation of any law for any reason is harshly punished), a corporate greed subplot (it turns out the medical supplies are in fact a vaccine to prevent a disease the colonists haven't got yet), and, yes, a goddamn love story. Apparently if a film doesn't feature somewhat attractive people sucking face and declaring their love and willingness to die for each other--despite the fact that they've known each other for a grand total of about two hours--then we cretinous imbeciles in the audience will scratch our thick monkey craniums and change the channel. All this I expected (like the love story), or at least wasn't surprised to find (once it became clear the government/corporation was eeeevil, I suspected the medical supplies would turn out to be bogus). What really torpedoes the movie is the character of the girl, inexplicably named Lee in the movie.
Upon being told that her actions have doomed not only Barton but the colonists (including her own brother, let's not forget), Lee's response is to flatly refuse to leave and to berate Barton for wanting to murder her. Now, this might be an understandable initial response, but here's the thing: She does this for the entire movie. She demands that Barton instead lighten the ship's load enough to make up for her 108 extra pounds. (You weigh a little more than a 108.) Barton makes clear that The Company built the ship without any unnecessary weight to save on cost, since it's a disposable vehicle for a one-way trip, so there's nothing to jettison. (Why the company would care about costs, given that it has no competitors and also serves as a totalitarian government, is naturally left unexplained.) In fact, in the pre-flight checkout, Barton was 2 pounds over weight because he was carrying a portable music player, which he was required to leave behind. Lee then suggests ditching his cargo, prompting Barton to tell her what he's carrying. Once she understands the cargo is medical supplies that must be delivered in order to save an entire colony of people (again, including her brother), Lee attacks Barton and attempts to jettison the supplies to save her own ass.
Now, I was already totally fine with spacing this bitch in the first place because she's so goddamned annoying, but really, we're now beyond the pale. What the makers of this film don't seem to understand (and neither do the morons on the IMDb, who gave this piece of shit decent reviews and particularly loved the pluckiness of the female lead and the "romance" of it all) is that Lee is the villain here. In any decent action movie, science fiction or no, the person fucking over the innocent to save his own hide is the bad guy, and the hero fights against that person. Remember in Aliens when Burke locks himself in another room and refuses to let the other characters in just to save himself? Remember what happens? Burke escapes LV-426 while the other characters die horribly, right? He flies home sipping caviar while the credits roll?
Oh that's right, he gets an alien proboscis through the fucking face because that movie didn't suck.
This movie, on the other hand, continually tries to get us to sympathize with Lee. She's plucky, you see, so she starts tearing the ship apart to find extra weight to throw out, while Barton stands there and doesn't grease her stupid ass. Turns out there's a shit-ton of extra weight that can safely be thrown out of this ship built without any unnecessary parts in order to minimize weight and cost for its one-way trip. This includes a first-aid kit the size of a goddamn suitcase and the insulation that keeps the occupant of the ship warm. The latter is torn off of every wall and thrown out with absolutely no adverse effects. Okay, I'm being totally unfair. Lee at one point does say she feels a bit chilly and rubs her arms a little. Why yes, she is dressed solely in a "sexy" tank top while Barton's in a full-body space suit, so I guess the corporation that built this ship without any unnecessary parts in order to minimize weight and cost for its one-way trip wanted to make sure under-dressed "hot" female stowaways would be nice and warm in the few minutes they're on the ship before they get blasted out of the fucking airlock for breaking the law. Those corporate bastards, always concerned about the bottom line.
There's also enough food for two people, even though the trip takes three hours tops. You don't get fucking peanuts on a budget airline for a three-hour trip, yet this one-person spacecraft built without any unnecessary parts in order to minimize weight and cost for its one-way trip has full meals! For two! And there's a functioning space toilet. For a trip lasting upwards of 180 minutes. I guess the Department of Defense contracted this thing.
Lee finds enough stuff to toss to offset half of her weight (good thing she knows moar about the ship than Barton, who said there was nothing they could afford to lose--what a dope!). Man, Barton ought to be pissed that he wasn't allowed to bring his two-pound music player earlier. But now they're really out of stuff to drop (yes, really for reals this time), after Barton again rejects her demand that he dump the supplies. About this point I started to fantasize about Laura Roslin showing up on the ship, whispering sweetly to Lee that everything will be okay, and then airlocking the bitch without a second thought. Alas, Mary McDonnell didn't feel moved to descend from Mount Olympus and save this poor sinner, and I began to panic at the thought of there being 45 more minutes of this crap left to go. Our two zeroes have a heart to heart, where she tries to go all I'm a member of the exploited underclass, this is your fault (lolwut), why don't you buck the system and defy your orders (and thereby ensure both our deaths, though she doesn't say that part), yadda yadda. Then she tries to choke him to death with her bootlace.
You know, nothing makes me fall in love with a woman faster than having her attempt to strangle me from behind with an old shoelace. "At the moment my vision began to fade out and I felt my major organs shutting down, that's what I knew she was the one for me. Ah, the memories."
Barton turns the tables on her and carries her unconscious to the airlock as I cheered at the screen and made some popcorn. At the last moment she wakes up and begs him not to do it, even as he's stuffing her in and sealing the door behind her. But he hesitates, and I shout profanities at the screen; there are 30 minutes of this movie left and I realize this Sci-Fi channel shitfest doesn't have the balls to space the bitch. No, I'll be forced to watch some contrived scenario that allows one of the most truly loathsome characters I've ever endured to survive the movie.
Blah blah they figure out the medical supplies are bogus, so they dump them. Then they fuck so we know they love each other, with all the passion they've built up over the last two hours of shouting, punching and elbowing, beating into unconsciousness, and choking with shoelaces. Once they dump the supplies, the ship is under the required weight, but oh noez! That was the calculation from 2 hours ago, but now they've traveled those 2 hours overweight, so now they need to lose another 100 pounds to make it! Nobody could've seen that coming, certainly not the highly-trained spaceship pilot! Well, and me, and about 20 minutes into the movie. You know a sci-fi film is shit when its grasp of actual science is worse than mine.
So we get the scene where
Time to get to the end of this crap. There's a framing story I haven't mentioned before because it's only (kind of) relevant now. The corporation has been investigating the loss of the medical supplies, interviewing characters in the movie, and now they're finally bringing in Barton to pronounce sentence upon him. This dastardly dictatorship, prepared to send miners into an area where a deadly fungus grew just for profit...okay, only after they had a vaccine to inoculate them first. Which they provided free of charge. That presumably cost a great deal to develop, mass-produce, and deliver to the colony--look, shut up! They're evil, alright? The Party or the Corporation or whatever Evil Gubmint it is punishes this brazen act of defiance with...
...
...wait for it...
...
...fifteen years in prison! Oh the horror, the horror!
Look, I'm not saying 15 years in prison--or any time in prison--is a cakewalk, but really, I expect more from my humanity-controlling greedy totalitarian dystopia corpo-governments. At least make him love Big Brother and then kack him, or something. Sheesh! You guys really suck at brutal totalitarian dictatorship. Mao Zedong would've executed Barton, his family, his dogs and cats, his goldfish, his neighbors, anybody who met him or wanted to meet him or saw a picture of him one time or thought maybe they might've seen him somewhere 'cause he's got that kind of face that just seems so familiar...and you give the guy a lousy nickel-and-dime in minimum security white-collar resort prison?
And of course, it's implied that this small act of defiance in the name of
Fuck this movie with a chainsaw-shaped dildo.
=================================================
*Actual things I shouted at the screen in glee, probably confusing, not to mention annoying, my neighbors.
January 9, 2013
The Boondock Saints
Quentin Tarantino. The very name conjures up boundless admiration in some, unbridled vitriol in others. Those of us in the middle are rather taken aback by either reaction. I liked Reservoir Dogs--surprisingly, I like it more each time I see it--and loved Pulp Fiction, but I've never been much motivated to go out and find more of his stuff. Django Unchained has shown that Tarantino remains a critical darling, but then again, critics raved about Kill Bill, one of the more depressing and unpleasant cinema experiences I've had. I freely admit that his films aren't really about anything, that they're the ultimate triumph of style over substance. But that's okay, I don't mind occasionally taking in such works, as long as it's well-done style. And there's no denying Tarantino is a talented filmmaker, though as I've said, his talent lies more in his screenwriting than in his directing.
The worst thing about Tarantino--other than the fact that he comes off as needy, haughty jerk--is the imitators he inspired. I've already written about people still ripping off Pulp Fiction after 20 years, but it deserves another mention. I can think of nothing better than to quote Ken Begg of Jabootu, in his review of the Christian Slater Pulp Fiction wannabe Hard Cash:
"Tarantino’s work seemed to revolve around easily replicated elements: Casts of faded, formerly ‘cool’ stars; hipster dude haircuts and suits; discursive conversations full of pop culture references, constant profanity and casual racial invective; overwrought stylistic elements, including the heavy use of slo-mo; sudden bursts of horrific violence, portrayed with baroque visual flair, and lots of ‘70s pop music on the soundtrack.
...
The thing that those who seek to imitate Tarantino don’t get is that he’s not primarily a director....He’s a screenwriter. And while he has his characteristic stylistic tics, as enumerated above, he brings a lot more to the table than that. And so his apers copy the profanity but miss the poetry of his dialog. They include the abrupt violence but miss the intense characterizations that motivate it. They include the snarky pop culture references but forgo the fierce and playful intelligence behind Tarantino’s use of them."
Now, some people are good at imitating Tarantino. Guy Ritchie, before he went insane and married Madonna (not necessarily in that order), was one of these. Other people, like Troy Duffy, are not.
Who's Troy Duffy? He's the egregious shit-bag who incubated The Boondock Saints in his womb of bad ideas and then huffed and puffed and squeezed out its bloody, pulsing stillborn corpse into the...bedpan of the...the hospital room, where--okay, I lost my metaphor there. Anyhow, Duffy's hatred of women would make Kim Ki-duk suggest he tone it down a little. In fact, Duffy's film hates you, hates filmmaking, hates everything in the world. It's truly one of the most morally bankrupt, ludicrous, and godawful pieces of cinematic crap you've never seen, and you will truly be a sadder, angrier person for the rest of your life if you make the soul-crushing mistake of seeing it. Plus, it wastes a pretty decent Willem Dafoe performance, which makes me think of Body of Evidence. That alone is enough to consign Duffy to whatever Hell awaits shitty hack filmmakers who force their lead actors to talk like Lucky the Leprechaun.
Remember True Lies, when Jamie Lee Curtis asks the Governator if he's ever killed anyone and he replies, "Yeah, but they were all bad"? That's this movie, minus the wit, charm, comic timing, and desire to continue living under the same sky as the people who made it. The Boondock Saints takes place in a hellish, dystopian Boston that all women have left to move to a real city or have died or are hiding just off-camera. Okay, that's not true, but it is true that there are hardly any women in the movie. The two leads talk about their father but never mention their mother, they don't have girlfriends and sleep shirtless next to each other, none of the cops in the city of Boston is female...it's just weird the way women are almost completely absent from the movie. And sister, when they do appear...but we'll get to that.
The film tells the story of the titular Saints, two Irish-American brothers whose names I never caught. Yes, I've seen this film twice and neither time did I get the names of the two leads. This is partly because their performances are the worst in the film--at least until Ron Jeremy(!) shows up--and partly because Troy Duffy is a terrible filmmaker. Wikipedia says they are "Connor" (Sean Patrick Flanery) and "Murphy" (Norman Reedus), apparently chosen by Duffy to be the most stereotypically "Irish" names possible, and that's good enough for me. We are introduced to the Brothers McManus in a cathedral(!) during a Mass(!!) while jaunty "Irish" bagpipe music plays(!!!). While the priest is sermonizing, the brothers get up, blow right past him, go up onto the altar, kiss Jesus's feet, and walk out. Now I'm not a Catholic, but I'm pretty sure you can't approach the altar if you aren't ordained, especially with the Eucharist laid out upon it. The priest is talking about Kitty Genovese, and Troy Duffy knows as much about her case as he does about Catholicism, which is jack shit. Everything the priest--and therefore, Duffy--says about the Genovese case is wrong.
--Genovese did not cry out "time and time again", but probably only once.
--Several people in fact did "so much as call the police" shortly after the initial attack.
--No one simply "watched". A few people saw what happened in the first attack but, since it was dark and Genovese didn't scream until after she was stabbed, only one of them happened to be in a position to see the stabbing.
--No one saw Genovese "being stabbed to death". She didn't die until the second attack, which no one saw.
--The attacks occurred at night, not "broad daylight".
--No one saw her assailant at all after the initial stabbing. The killer was in fact arrested on an entirely separate charge and confessed to the Genovese murder.
Duffy, if you're going to steal from a real life tragedy to bolster your shitty Tarantino-knockoff exploitation flick, at least get it right.
While relaxing at their favorite pub (which also has no women in it), they get into a brawl with a Russian mob soldier...for some reason...and the mobster tracks them the next day to their pad, intending to kill one brother and (I guess) leave the other alive to live with it. The brothers make out like the mobster is all butthurt because he and his boys got whomped by a few drunks in a dive bar, so I guess they were too drunk to remember that after they won the fight they strapped the mobster to the bar and set his ass on fire! Who could've possibly guessed a mobster would seek revenge for an insult like that? (That is if getting beat up by a bunch of drunks in a pub isn't enough for him to come after them, which it is.) One brother drops their toilet from the roof of their building onto the mobster (don't ask), allowing the second brother to use the toilet lid to beat the mobster's buddy to death. Then they rob the two corpses (our heroes!) and go to the hospital to deal with their wounds.
Actually, we don't see most of that yet. We see the mobster acting tough just before the brawl breaks out, and then we cut to the police examining the mobster's body. Why? Because, well, Quentin Tarantino jumps around in time and jumps forward to the aftermath of a chaotic scene before revealing what happened in bits of flashback, so that's what Duffy's trying to do. Only he sucks at it, so instead of what happened slowly revealed to us in fragments, we just get the whole scene later (the barfight, the ass-burning, and the mobster's revenge-gone-awry all together), making you just wish Duffy had shown it in order. Actually, you just wish he hadn't shown it at all.
In the meantime, we get to watch the only thing actually enjoyable in this movie: FBI Special Agent Paul Smecker (Dafoe), who takes over the homicide investigation from the Boston cops because it involves a mobster. This gent arrives on the scene and immediately shows up the detective who thought he'd figured out what happened so that we "get" Smecker is a crime-solving genius, and he does this all the while listening to opera through headphones (Tarantino quirkiness!). It's a scene so cliche I could predict the dialogue as if I'd written it myself, but Dafoe, as he always does no matter how good (Shadow of the Vampire) or bad (Spider-Man) the material, throws himself into the role, and his casual disdain for the lesser intellects around him makes the scene more entertaining than it has any right to be.
Smecker figures out that it wasn't a mob hit and orders one cop to search for two shell casings and another to go to the nearby building to question potential witnesses. Maybe 20 seconds later, the first cop is complaining he's only found one of the casings. Well, you're in a dingy city alley full of filth and trash there, smart guy. I think it'll take more than glancing around your immediate area to find two tiny spent shell casings. Then the second cop returns and says he found a witness on the fourth floor. So this guy went all the way to the fourth floor, found somebody there, had an entire conversation with her in which he learned what Smecker asked him to learn, and came all the way back down in less than a minute? Either this guy is the fucking Flash, or Troy Duffy hired an editor that is fully his equal as director and screenwriter.
The brothers turn themselves in and are left alone in the interrogation room, and then Smecker comes in and questions them together. Okay, so first you have the FBI taking over a homicide case from city police just because it involves a mobster, and now you have a detective leaving suspects alone to cook up a story, even letting them whisper to each other before answering his questions. Christ, anyone who's seen a single episode of Law & Order knows more about police work than Duffy. The brothers reveal they speak several languages, even though they will never use any of them in any of the coming scenes.
It turns out Smecker already knew...somehow...that it was self-defense, so he's not going to charge them. (Then why did he have them arrested in the first place? Um...right.) This immediately makes front page news--yes, the release of two suspects in the death of a Russian mob soldier makes the front page in Boston--and the brothers are community heroes. I guess Smecker didn't ask about how they robbed the dead men, or maybe Bostonians figure that if you kill a guy in a fight, you're entitled to his stuff. They spend the night shirtless in jail to avoid a media circus, and during the night God tells them to kill bad people, so they decide they will. They go to a room full of guns during which, I shit you not, romantic music plays, as they lovingly caress the instruments of power by which they will wash all the scum from the streets. They decide to off the Russian mob boss, and despite completely screwing up their entry so that they end up hanging from the ceiling by a rope entangling their feet, they somehow take out eight armed men and then brutally execute the unarmed boss. Hilariously, they take a moment to attach silencers to their pistols before they kill him, even though they just shot the room to pieces with unsilenced weapons. Then the brothers' best friend the Funny Man (David Della Rocco) shows up.
I haven't mentioned "the Funny Man" yet, an errand boy for the Italian mob. He has a name, but names aren't this movie's specialty, so I'm going with "the Funny Man", even though he has an excruciating "comedy" scene with the Italian mob boss that had me begging my TV to blow a fuse and shut down. Actor Rocco gives the most enjoyable performance apart from Dafoe, since he at least has some energy and screen presence, but the guy playing the mob boss--who somehow runs a Mafia family despite being called "Papa Joe"--is fucking awful. After putting their masks back on and making Funny think they're going to kill him, the brothers reveal they're just kidding and help Funny figure out that the mission Papa Joe gave him to kill the Russians was a suicide job to get Funny killed. Funny decides he wants in on the bad guy slaying, and he and the brothers declare they will wipe out "evil men" like pimps and drug dealers. So running prostitutes and selling drugs are crimes worthy of death? I'm not saying pimps and drug dealers are good wholesome folks, but I can think of people much more worthy of summary execution, like Nancy Grace and Bono.
The Saints take out Papa Joe's underboss (Ron Jeremy, so not a moment too soon), so Joe calls in Il Duce. Imagine my disappointment when we cut not to the corpse of Mussolini reanimated by the nether powers of Sicilian magic and toting a submachine gun but to some old guy in a beard from a cheap Gandalf costume. This guy is "The Duke", which isn't what "Il Duce" means in modern Italian. (God, you'd think by chance Duffy could get something right.) The Duke is supposedly so fierce that the mob only calls on him when they're in really deep shit, so what does he do when he confronts the Saints despite having absolutely no way of knowing their location? Why, he stands in plain sight in broad daylight firing off endless rounds of ammunition from his dual pistols, failing to hit them just as they fail to hit him. Yeah, I can see why you needed this tactical wizard, who apparently shops at the same store Neo bought his "vest that has a bijillion holsters" at, allowing him to drop his guns when they're empty and immediately draw two more loaded ones.
Actually The Duke does hit each of them, though naturally this will in no way affect their ability to mow down baddies, but then he gets bored and leaves. The Saints retreat and tend to their wounds, while Smecker gets drunk and goes to confession. He's figured out, you see, who the Saints are and what they're doing, but after some spiritual soul-purifying talk in the confessional booth, he decides--and I hope you're sitting down--not to turn them in. Funny Man wants to take Smecker out because he could always change his mind, but the Brothers McManus put the kibosh on that because Smecker is a good man and they don't kill good men. The next day Smecker meets up with a retired mobster, who tells him Papa Joe brought in The Duke to take out the brothers, and Smecker gets a panicked look and leaves in a hurry. Then, and I swear to God this happens, we cut to the Saints in Joe's house, tied to chairs and being interrogated.
Um...is there a reel missing? How the hell were they found? When? Who found them? How were they captured? You might think we're getting another of Duffy's flashbacks, but no. It's never explained how, when, where, or by whom they were captured. Stupid movie.
This scene almost reaches of the level of something you might find in a real, honest-to-God, actual movie, as the brothers seem poised to meet the fate that a couple of untrained nobodies who pick up some guns and think they're going to take down organized crime would undoubtedly meet. But no, after Funny Man bites it for some pathos (oh, please), the brothers are rescued when The Duke shows up and...reveals that he's their long-lost father. No. That's not true! That's impossible!
The film ends with the Saints and Darth Duke storming a courthouse--whose metal detectors apparently work on the honor system, since there's no one manning them to ensure people actually walk through them--and brutally executing Papa Joe before he gets away with his crimes due to lack of evidence. This time they don't even bother with the masks, so I guess Bostonians are totally with Smecker on the whole "let the vigilantes murder whomever they deem evil" thing. Tough town, Boston.
Yes, Troy Duffy's solution to crime: Let a couple of Irish knuckleheads appoint themselves judge, jury, and executioner and allow them free rein in your city. I'm sure the NRA would be on board.
Now, let's talk about how Troy Duffy is a gay man who views women as sex objects. Simmer down there, Sandra Dee. Don't blow a headgasket! Let me explain.
The male gaze. For those of you who aren't familiar, it's the claim that images--film, television, advertisements--are generally presented to the viewer as if he is a straight male. Take your typical piece of misogynist tripe that passes for a modern comedy: Female nudity is sexy and appealing, while male nudity is either absent or presented for comedic effect. I remember a positive experience I had watching a New Kids on the Block performance the other week. (Wait for the explanation. Wait for it.) Now, the New Kids were clumsy and awkward, but what struck me was how often they took off their shirts to show off their ripped bods. (For those of you unfortunate enough to have seen a Twilight film, substitute Taylor Lautner taking his shirt off.) By the fourth time it happened, I was all "Enough, already!", and it occurred to me that this must be what it's like to be a straight woman watching your typical Hollywood action film. "Okay, breasts...can we move on, please?" It was healthy for me to be placed, if only momentarily, in that position. Some people wonder what feminists are so angry about. Having various New Kids' smooth, oiled torsos constantly (and gratuitously) shoved in my face for four minutes, I wondered why they aren't angrier.
Why am I talking about the male gaze? Well, the assumption of straight maleness is so prevalent that even feminists often fall victim to it. For example, when talking about viewing women as sexual objects, the unspoken assumption is often a straight man viewing a woman as a sexual object and evaluating her solely according to this criterion rather than seeing her an actual person, classifying her as either a bitch (not fuckable) or a ho (fuckable). But straight men aren't the only ones who view women as sex objects. For every gay best friend with whom a straight woman can go shopping, exchange fashion tips, and cry about boys, there's a gay man who sees her only as a sex object. The difference is that, in his case, she is a sex object in which he has no interest. So if he makes a film, women are largely absent from it, since they don't enter his world unless they're either connected to a man or barge in, unwelcome, on their own. David DeCoteau is an example of this sort of filmmaker. Based solely on the evidence of The Boondock Saints, I think Troy Duffy is also a gay man who views women entirely as sex objects.
I've already mentioned the continual shirtlessness of the leads, including the jail scene in which water is dripped on them so that their muscled torsos glisten in the moonlight. Smecker is gay, and this is presented matter-of-factly when he answers the phone in bed, with the camera zooming out to reveal a man in bed with him. In another film, it would've been a nice moment of homosexuality being the non-issue it ought to be, but of course, Duffy's inner hack can't leave it at that, so he has to include a joke with Smecker disdainfully calling the guy a fag. But I've known gay men who do this, and it fits with Smecker's character, so it didn't bother me. What I kept waiting for was the scene with Smecker being emasculated or trumped because of his sexuality, but it never came. All of this, and then there's the odd lack of women in the movie overall. But what about when they do appear? Well, let's have a look.
The first woman we see is an offensive bull dyke caricature (is there any other kind?). You know, fat, piercings, short hair, mannish stance and voice--the whole bit. This lovely lady shows contempt for our leads from the beginning, and then when one of them utters the phrase "rule of thumb", she goes on a "feminist" rant about husbands beating wives and then kicks him in the balls. Now, in my time I've talked to a number of feminists, and lesbians, and feminist lesbians, and I've even outright disagreed with them, and I've yet to get a jackboot to the daddy marbles for my trouble, yet Connor (or Murphy, whichever) utters the phrase "rule of thumb" and takes one to the jimmy. Tough town, Boston. The other brother lays out Offensive Bull Dyke Caricature with a haymaker as the "Irish" music swells to a crescendo. Ah, good times.
Okay, let's see....there's the stripper who is onscreen for all of three seconds, during which time she never speaks while the Saints threaten her at gunpoint and then Funny Man gropes her breast while she's unconscious. Why yes, this sexual assault is played for laughs! Oh, and then there's Funny Man's drug-addict girlfriend and her drug-addict galpal that he threatens at gunpoint. Oh, and the one guy's wife we see for maybe five seconds while the Saints threaten her at gunpoint. Oh, and the woman whose back we see for one second before she's executed at gunpoint.
You know, I think there might be some kind of pattern here....
I've gone on for long enough about what is a thoroughly loathsome, hateful, and shoddily made piece of hokum that appeals to the basest instincts of caveman mentality. I haven't even mentioned the scene of Willem Dafoe in drag making out with a guy so as to gain entry to the mob boss's house in a failed attempt to rescue the Saints, and trust me, we're all the better for it.
The worst thing about Tarantino--other than the fact that he comes off as needy, haughty jerk--is the imitators he inspired. I've already written about people still ripping off Pulp Fiction after 20 years, but it deserves another mention. I can think of nothing better than to quote Ken Begg of Jabootu, in his review of the Christian Slater Pulp Fiction wannabe Hard Cash:
"Tarantino’s work seemed to revolve around easily replicated elements: Casts of faded, formerly ‘cool’ stars; hipster dude haircuts and suits; discursive conversations full of pop culture references, constant profanity and casual racial invective; overwrought stylistic elements, including the heavy use of slo-mo; sudden bursts of horrific violence, portrayed with baroque visual flair, and lots of ‘70s pop music on the soundtrack.
...
The thing that those who seek to imitate Tarantino don’t get is that he’s not primarily a director....He’s a screenwriter. And while he has his characteristic stylistic tics, as enumerated above, he brings a lot more to the table than that. And so his apers copy the profanity but miss the poetry of his dialog. They include the abrupt violence but miss the intense characterizations that motivate it. They include the snarky pop culture references but forgo the fierce and playful intelligence behind Tarantino’s use of them."
Now, some people are good at imitating Tarantino. Guy Ritchie, before he went insane and married Madonna (not necessarily in that order), was one of these. Other people, like Troy Duffy, are not.
Who's Troy Duffy? He's the egregious shit-bag who incubated The Boondock Saints in his womb of bad ideas and then huffed and puffed and squeezed out its bloody, pulsing stillborn corpse into the...bedpan of the...the hospital room, where--okay, I lost my metaphor there. Anyhow, Duffy's hatred of women would make Kim Ki-duk suggest he tone it down a little. In fact, Duffy's film hates you, hates filmmaking, hates everything in the world. It's truly one of the most morally bankrupt, ludicrous, and godawful pieces of cinematic crap you've never seen, and you will truly be a sadder, angrier person for the rest of your life if you make the soul-crushing mistake of seeing it. Plus, it wastes a pretty decent Willem Dafoe performance, which makes me think of Body of Evidence. That alone is enough to consign Duffy to whatever Hell awaits shitty hack filmmakers who force their lead actors to talk like Lucky the Leprechaun.
Remember True Lies, when Jamie Lee Curtis asks the Governator if he's ever killed anyone and he replies, "Yeah, but they were all bad"? That's this movie, minus the wit, charm, comic timing, and desire to continue living under the same sky as the people who made it. The Boondock Saints takes place in a hellish, dystopian Boston that all women have left to move to a real city or have died or are hiding just off-camera. Okay, that's not true, but it is true that there are hardly any women in the movie. The two leads talk about their father but never mention their mother, they don't have girlfriends and sleep shirtless next to each other, none of the cops in the city of Boston is female...it's just weird the way women are almost completely absent from the movie. And sister, when they do appear...but we'll get to that.
The film tells the story of the titular Saints, two Irish-American brothers whose names I never caught. Yes, I've seen this film twice and neither time did I get the names of the two leads. This is partly because their performances are the worst in the film--at least until Ron Jeremy(!) shows up--and partly because Troy Duffy is a terrible filmmaker. Wikipedia says they are "Connor" (Sean Patrick Flanery) and "Murphy" (Norman Reedus), apparently chosen by Duffy to be the most stereotypically "Irish" names possible, and that's good enough for me. We are introduced to the Brothers McManus in a cathedral(!) during a Mass(!!) while jaunty "Irish" bagpipe music plays(!!!). While the priest is sermonizing, the brothers get up, blow right past him, go up onto the altar, kiss Jesus's feet, and walk out. Now I'm not a Catholic, but I'm pretty sure you can't approach the altar if you aren't ordained, especially with the Eucharist laid out upon it. The priest is talking about Kitty Genovese, and Troy Duffy knows as much about her case as he does about Catholicism, which is jack shit. Everything the priest--and therefore, Duffy--says about the Genovese case is wrong.
--Genovese did not cry out "time and time again", but probably only once.
--Several people in fact did "so much as call the police" shortly after the initial attack.
--No one simply "watched". A few people saw what happened in the first attack but, since it was dark and Genovese didn't scream until after she was stabbed, only one of them happened to be in a position to see the stabbing.
--No one saw Genovese "being stabbed to death". She didn't die until the second attack, which no one saw.
--The attacks occurred at night, not "broad daylight".
--No one saw her assailant at all after the initial stabbing. The killer was in fact arrested on an entirely separate charge and confessed to the Genovese murder.
Duffy, if you're going to steal from a real life tragedy to bolster your shitty Tarantino-knockoff exploitation flick, at least get it right.
While relaxing at their favorite pub (which also has no women in it), they get into a brawl with a Russian mob soldier...for some reason...and the mobster tracks them the next day to their pad, intending to kill one brother and (I guess) leave the other alive to live with it. The brothers make out like the mobster is all butthurt because he and his boys got whomped by a few drunks in a dive bar, so I guess they were too drunk to remember that after they won the fight they strapped the mobster to the bar and set his ass on fire! Who could've possibly guessed a mobster would seek revenge for an insult like that? (That is if getting beat up by a bunch of drunks in a pub isn't enough for him to come after them, which it is.) One brother drops their toilet from the roof of their building onto the mobster (don't ask), allowing the second brother to use the toilet lid to beat the mobster's buddy to death. Then they rob the two corpses (our heroes!) and go to the hospital to deal with their wounds.
Actually, we don't see most of that yet. We see the mobster acting tough just before the brawl breaks out, and then we cut to the police examining the mobster's body. Why? Because, well, Quentin Tarantino jumps around in time and jumps forward to the aftermath of a chaotic scene before revealing what happened in bits of flashback, so that's what Duffy's trying to do. Only he sucks at it, so instead of what happened slowly revealed to us in fragments, we just get the whole scene later (the barfight, the ass-burning, and the mobster's revenge-gone-awry all together), making you just wish Duffy had shown it in order. Actually, you just wish he hadn't shown it at all.
In the meantime, we get to watch the only thing actually enjoyable in this movie: FBI Special Agent Paul Smecker (Dafoe), who takes over the homicide investigation from the Boston cops because it involves a mobster. This gent arrives on the scene and immediately shows up the detective who thought he'd figured out what happened so that we "get" Smecker is a crime-solving genius, and he does this all the while listening to opera through headphones (Tarantino quirkiness!). It's a scene so cliche I could predict the dialogue as if I'd written it myself, but Dafoe, as he always does no matter how good (Shadow of the Vampire) or bad (Spider-Man) the material, throws himself into the role, and his casual disdain for the lesser intellects around him makes the scene more entertaining than it has any right to be.
Smecker figures out that it wasn't a mob hit and orders one cop to search for two shell casings and another to go to the nearby building to question potential witnesses. Maybe 20 seconds later, the first cop is complaining he's only found one of the casings. Well, you're in a dingy city alley full of filth and trash there, smart guy. I think it'll take more than glancing around your immediate area to find two tiny spent shell casings. Then the second cop returns and says he found a witness on the fourth floor. So this guy went all the way to the fourth floor, found somebody there, had an entire conversation with her in which he learned what Smecker asked him to learn, and came all the way back down in less than a minute? Either this guy is the fucking Flash, or Troy Duffy hired an editor that is fully his equal as director and screenwriter.
The brothers turn themselves in and are left alone in the interrogation room, and then Smecker comes in and questions them together. Okay, so first you have the FBI taking over a homicide case from city police just because it involves a mobster, and now you have a detective leaving suspects alone to cook up a story, even letting them whisper to each other before answering his questions. Christ, anyone who's seen a single episode of Law & Order knows more about police work than Duffy. The brothers reveal they speak several languages, even though they will never use any of them in any of the coming scenes.
It turns out Smecker already knew...somehow...that it was self-defense, so he's not going to charge them. (Then why did he have them arrested in the first place? Um...right.) This immediately makes front page news--yes, the release of two suspects in the death of a Russian mob soldier makes the front page in Boston--and the brothers are community heroes. I guess Smecker didn't ask about how they robbed the dead men, or maybe Bostonians figure that if you kill a guy in a fight, you're entitled to his stuff. They spend the night shirtless in jail to avoid a media circus, and during the night God tells them to kill bad people, so they decide they will. They go to a room full of guns during which, I shit you not, romantic music plays, as they lovingly caress the instruments of power by which they will wash all the scum from the streets. They decide to off the Russian mob boss, and despite completely screwing up their entry so that they end up hanging from the ceiling by a rope entangling their feet, they somehow take out eight armed men and then brutally execute the unarmed boss. Hilariously, they take a moment to attach silencers to their pistols before they kill him, even though they just shot the room to pieces with unsilenced weapons. Then the brothers' best friend the Funny Man (David Della Rocco) shows up.
I haven't mentioned "the Funny Man" yet, an errand boy for the Italian mob. He has a name, but names aren't this movie's specialty, so I'm going with "the Funny Man", even though he has an excruciating "comedy" scene with the Italian mob boss that had me begging my TV to blow a fuse and shut down. Actor Rocco gives the most enjoyable performance apart from Dafoe, since he at least has some energy and screen presence, but the guy playing the mob boss--who somehow runs a Mafia family despite being called "Papa Joe"--is fucking awful. After putting their masks back on and making Funny think they're going to kill him, the brothers reveal they're just kidding and help Funny figure out that the mission Papa Joe gave him to kill the Russians was a suicide job to get Funny killed. Funny decides he wants in on the bad guy slaying, and he and the brothers declare they will wipe out "evil men" like pimps and drug dealers. So running prostitutes and selling drugs are crimes worthy of death? I'm not saying pimps and drug dealers are good wholesome folks, but I can think of people much more worthy of summary execution, like Nancy Grace and Bono.
The Saints take out Papa Joe's underboss (Ron Jeremy, so not a moment too soon), so Joe calls in Il Duce. Imagine my disappointment when we cut not to the corpse of Mussolini reanimated by the nether powers of Sicilian magic and toting a submachine gun but to some old guy in a beard from a cheap Gandalf costume. This guy is "The Duke", which isn't what "Il Duce" means in modern Italian. (God, you'd think by chance Duffy could get something right.) The Duke is supposedly so fierce that the mob only calls on him when they're in really deep shit, so what does he do when he confronts the Saints despite having absolutely no way of knowing their location? Why, he stands in plain sight in broad daylight firing off endless rounds of ammunition from his dual pistols, failing to hit them just as they fail to hit him. Yeah, I can see why you needed this tactical wizard, who apparently shops at the same store Neo bought his "vest that has a bijillion holsters" at, allowing him to drop his guns when they're empty and immediately draw two more loaded ones.
Actually The Duke does hit each of them, though naturally this will in no way affect their ability to mow down baddies, but then he gets bored and leaves. The Saints retreat and tend to their wounds, while Smecker gets drunk and goes to confession. He's figured out, you see, who the Saints are and what they're doing, but after some spiritual soul-purifying talk in the confessional booth, he decides--and I hope you're sitting down--not to turn them in. Funny Man wants to take Smecker out because he could always change his mind, but the Brothers McManus put the kibosh on that because Smecker is a good man and they don't kill good men. The next day Smecker meets up with a retired mobster, who tells him Papa Joe brought in The Duke to take out the brothers, and Smecker gets a panicked look and leaves in a hurry. Then, and I swear to God this happens, we cut to the Saints in Joe's house, tied to chairs and being interrogated.
Um...is there a reel missing? How the hell were they found? When? Who found them? How were they captured? You might think we're getting another of Duffy's flashbacks, but no. It's never explained how, when, where, or by whom they were captured. Stupid movie.
This scene almost reaches of the level of something you might find in a real, honest-to-God, actual movie, as the brothers seem poised to meet the fate that a couple of untrained nobodies who pick up some guns and think they're going to take down organized crime would undoubtedly meet. But no, after Funny Man bites it for some pathos (oh, please), the brothers are rescued when The Duke shows up and...reveals that he's their long-lost father. No. That's not true! That's impossible!
The film ends with the Saints and Darth Duke storming a courthouse--whose metal detectors apparently work on the honor system, since there's no one manning them to ensure people actually walk through them--and brutally executing Papa Joe before he gets away with his crimes due to lack of evidence. This time they don't even bother with the masks, so I guess Bostonians are totally with Smecker on the whole "let the vigilantes murder whomever they deem evil" thing. Tough town, Boston.
Yes, Troy Duffy's solution to crime: Let a couple of Irish knuckleheads appoint themselves judge, jury, and executioner and allow them free rein in your city. I'm sure the NRA would be on board.
Now, let's talk about how Troy Duffy is a gay man who views women as sex objects. Simmer down there, Sandra Dee. Don't blow a headgasket! Let me explain.
The male gaze. For those of you who aren't familiar, it's the claim that images--film, television, advertisements--are generally presented to the viewer as if he is a straight male. Take your typical piece of misogynist tripe that passes for a modern comedy: Female nudity is sexy and appealing, while male nudity is either absent or presented for comedic effect. I remember a positive experience I had watching a New Kids on the Block performance the other week. (Wait for the explanation. Wait for it.) Now, the New Kids were clumsy and awkward, but what struck me was how often they took off their shirts to show off their ripped bods. (For those of you unfortunate enough to have seen a Twilight film, substitute Taylor Lautner taking his shirt off.) By the fourth time it happened, I was all "Enough, already!", and it occurred to me that this must be what it's like to be a straight woman watching your typical Hollywood action film. "Okay, breasts...can we move on, please?" It was healthy for me to be placed, if only momentarily, in that position. Some people wonder what feminists are so angry about. Having various New Kids' smooth, oiled torsos constantly (and gratuitously) shoved in my face for four minutes, I wondered why they aren't angrier.
Why am I talking about the male gaze? Well, the assumption of straight maleness is so prevalent that even feminists often fall victim to it. For example, when talking about viewing women as sexual objects, the unspoken assumption is often a straight man viewing a woman as a sexual object and evaluating her solely according to this criterion rather than seeing her an actual person, classifying her as either a bitch (not fuckable) or a ho (fuckable). But straight men aren't the only ones who view women as sex objects. For every gay best friend with whom a straight woman can go shopping, exchange fashion tips, and cry about boys, there's a gay man who sees her only as a sex object. The difference is that, in his case, she is a sex object in which he has no interest. So if he makes a film, women are largely absent from it, since they don't enter his world unless they're either connected to a man or barge in, unwelcome, on their own. David DeCoteau is an example of this sort of filmmaker. Based solely on the evidence of The Boondock Saints, I think Troy Duffy is also a gay man who views women entirely as sex objects.
I've already mentioned the continual shirtlessness of the leads, including the jail scene in which water is dripped on them so that their muscled torsos glisten in the moonlight. Smecker is gay, and this is presented matter-of-factly when he answers the phone in bed, with the camera zooming out to reveal a man in bed with him. In another film, it would've been a nice moment of homosexuality being the non-issue it ought to be, but of course, Duffy's inner hack can't leave it at that, so he has to include a joke with Smecker disdainfully calling the guy a fag. But I've known gay men who do this, and it fits with Smecker's character, so it didn't bother me. What I kept waiting for was the scene with Smecker being emasculated or trumped because of his sexuality, but it never came. All of this, and then there's the odd lack of women in the movie overall. But what about when they do appear? Well, let's have a look.
The first woman we see is an offensive bull dyke caricature (is there any other kind?). You know, fat, piercings, short hair, mannish stance and voice--the whole bit. This lovely lady shows contempt for our leads from the beginning, and then when one of them utters the phrase "rule of thumb", she goes on a "feminist" rant about husbands beating wives and then kicks him in the balls. Now, in my time I've talked to a number of feminists, and lesbians, and feminist lesbians, and I've even outright disagreed with them, and I've yet to get a jackboot to the daddy marbles for my trouble, yet Connor (or Murphy, whichever) utters the phrase "rule of thumb" and takes one to the jimmy. Tough town, Boston. The other brother lays out Offensive Bull Dyke Caricature with a haymaker as the "Irish" music swells to a crescendo. Ah, good times.
Okay, let's see....there's the stripper who is onscreen for all of three seconds, during which time she never speaks while the Saints threaten her at gunpoint and then Funny Man gropes her breast while she's unconscious. Why yes, this sexual assault is played for laughs! Oh, and then there's Funny Man's drug-addict girlfriend and her drug-addict galpal that he threatens at gunpoint. Oh, and the one guy's wife we see for maybe five seconds while the Saints threaten her at gunpoint. Oh, and the woman whose back we see for one second before she's executed at gunpoint.
You know, I think there might be some kind of pattern here....
I've gone on for long enough about what is a thoroughly loathsome, hateful, and shoddily made piece of hokum that appeals to the basest instincts of caveman mentality. I haven't even mentioned the scene of Willem Dafoe in drag making out with a guy so as to gain entry to the mob boss's house in a failed attempt to rescue the Saints, and trust me, we're all the better for it.
August 22, 2012
EJO Review: Wolfen
Next up on our Edward James Olmos series is a real disappointment. There aren't many good werewolf films outside of Universal's Wolfman series, and Wolfen (1981) was supposed to be one of good ones. Sadly, not only does it not rank with An American Werewolf in London or The Howling, or even Wolf (werewolf Jack Nicholson!), but it's actually rather terrible. And it's not even a werewolf movie!
The film opens with a monster attack sequence that the makers of Predator clearly saw. The wolfen-point-of-view shots were undoubtedly the inspiration for the Predator's infrared vision. Since I plan to rip this movie pretty hard, it's nice to start off with something good, and the film deserves credit for its pioneering monster POV. Thank you, Wolfen; Predator would've been slightly less awesome without you, so you weren't a complete waste of celluloid. The shots of run-down New York City are also effective, atmospheric, and creepy. I miss the New York that gave us films like this and Escape from New York. Where can we find a rotting cesspool of crime and decay to film now? Thank God there's still Detroit.
Anywho, after taking way too long stalking people (and getting so close to them that you can't believe it wouldn't be seen, or heard, or smelled, a recurring problem with the stalking sequences), the wolfen kills a rich, important muckety-muck and his wife, though not before killing their chauffeur, because the black guy always has to die first. Solving this murder is so important to the city of New York that they bring in a fat, lazy drunk specially to handle the case. Said fat, lazy drunk is played by Emmy-award winner Albert Finney, who does an excellent job playing a fat, lazy drunk, and not just because he's English. In fact, despite occasionally missing with his American accent, Finney gives the film's best performance (apart from God's own, natch), and I'm thankful he was chosen for this role rather than America's home-grown go-to guy for the role of fat, lazy drunk in the late '70s and early '80s, Joe Don Baker. The other performances range from adequate (Gregory Hines(!) as Finney's coroner pal, Tom Noonan as a zoologist whose obsession with wolves even I find unhealthy) to jaw-droppingly awful (Diane Venora as a psychologist assigned to assist Finney, though her assistance consists entirely of sleeping with him for no reason other than they're the two leads in the film). This is also the film debut of Reginald VelJohnson, notable because it's possibly his only appearance in front of a camera not playing a cop.
Edward James Olmos is cast in this film according to the Hollywood Ethnic Actor Rule as an American Indian(!), despite the fact that he doesn't look Indian at all. You'll remember from last week that this rule allows actors in the "not WASP or black" category to freely play any ethnicity in that category, since American audiences won't know any better. He plays Eddie Holt,* a militant Indian put away by Finney's Dewey Wilson (yes, really) for killing an apple. No, I don't mean he went to prison for wanton slaughter of innocent fruit. "Apple" is apparently the American Indian version of Uncle Tom (or, to the primary audience of this blog, "banana"), that is, a ethnic minority who's sold out to the Man. Holt is so obviously set up as the werewolf that you instantly know he's not the werewolf, though it takes Olmos running naked on the beach for Dewey to figure this out. Frankly, I would've preferred that Dewey make this determination without my having to see the little Eddie. The scene has Dewey, thinking Holt is going to turn into a werewolf (it's complicated), following him to the beach where he strips naked, licks up water from a puddle in the sand (wolves drink seawater?), and runs around making growling and howling noises. While all this is going on, to absolutely no one's surprise, someone is killed by the wolfen in another part of the city, sending Dewey back to the drawing board for suspects. I admired Olmos's dedication to his art in this scene, as it must have taken serious cajones to go on camera and do the scene rather than just punching the director in the face or smiting him with a thunderbolt, and it reminds me just how prudish our society has become over the lifetime of yours truly. Still, a grown man running around pretending to be a wolf just looks silly, no matter how much gravitas the actor has or how scary the music is. It's a goofy moment played straight but impossible to take seriously, like something out of The Exorcist. Actually, "goofy moment played straight but impossible to take seriously" describes the whole of The Exorcist.
As with the previous projects, I can see why Olmos took this role. Wolfen is firmly in the vein of 1970s Western-civilization-in-decline films that portray victims of European colonization and oppression as morally superior to their conquerors. The film sets up a dichotomy between the Noble Savages (guess who they are) and the White Man Dependent on, Like, Capitalism, Man, and comes down clearly on the side of the white liberal guilt. I mean, Indians. And this is the single biggest problem with the film. It is, in fact, the reason it's a truly bad film rather than a serviceable low-key, low-FX monster flick. There is essentially only one Indian character (Holt), and more than once he gets to wax morally superior to Dewey by ponderously speechifying about how corrupt White Society is. To give you an idea of how well the Indians emerge as characters, the only other Indian has any screentime at all is credited as "Old Indian". No name, just Old Indian. We don't even find out what tribe these Indians are a part of, or even if they're from the same tribe! They're just Indians, and Indians love nature and marijuana and hate capitalism and Whitey. And the ones who don't aren't real Indians ("apples") and deserve to be murdered. The filmmakers would undoubtedly be appalled to hear that this is the subtext of their film, as I'm sure they didn't intend to treat their Indian characters as shabbily as 1960s Westerns that portrayed them as a faceless horde of identical backward savages to be mowed down by heroic white cowboys. But to quote Ken Begg, "well, you can’t not see it. I’m absolutely sure that it’s unintentional, but still, it’s kind of there anyway."
The worst example of the one-dimensional nature of the Indian characters in this film is the excruciating exposition scene near the end, in which Dewey, rather than discovering the secret of the wolfen through the White Man's Science of his detective work, has the wolfen explained to him by the Indians (again, mostly by Olmos looking righteously angry). Dewey goes to a bar full of Indians, imaginatively named the Wigwam Bar (really?), and there the Indians painstakingly explain to him what the wolfen are, why they've done what they've done, and why the White Man deserves to have it done to him. (That the wolfen have killed a number of black characters at this point goes unaddressed. I guess they're collateral damage from the wolfen's carpet bombs of justice.) Why yes, the Indians are smoking peace pipes while generic Indian chanting plays on the soundtrack.** I'm so glad you asked!
Wolfen's pacing is slow, its acting is hit (Finney, Olmos)-or-miss (Venora, the non-Finney cops and investigators), its story is a little scattershot, its kills are telegraphed (maybe they were slightly more surprising in 1981, but I doubt it), and its central monster not being a werewolf is a cheat. But all of these things could be forgiven if not for the ham-handed "message" of the film and its treatment of Indian characters as positive stereotypes every bit as offensive as the negative stereotypes it's reacting against. And then there's the ending. And I said, you find out what the wolfen are and why they're doing what they're doing, and the film clearly agrees that they have some justification. But the ending torpedoes any final hope the film had. Not because it has the wolfen offscreen teleporting from ground level to the penthouse balcony of a skyscraper, but because Dewey realises that the wise Indians are wise and that the wolfen are morally correct, and he decides they should be left to continue to murder people as they see fit. I'm serious, that's really the implication of the ending. Dewey agrees that the wolfen are right to eat the people they've chosen to eat. I can't explain to you how little sense this makes in the context of the film. It's bad enough that the makers of the film thought this, given the situation they've set up, but why does Dewey accept it? There's nothing about the character, either before or after his experiences with the wolfen, that in any way suggests he'd be okay with this. The wolfen even eat one of his friends in the movie! Dewey must've smoked some of whatever they put in those peace pipes to just accept that the wolfen have killed (including, again, a good friend of his) and will continue to kill. That, or the filmmakers allowed their own belief that the wolfen are right to impose itself on their character, regardless of whether or not the character and his experiences support that view. I'm betting on the latter.
I haven't mentioned the subplot of another entire group of investigators trying to link the murder of the rich muckety-muck to a vague, ill-defined "terrorist" group, using some kind of truth-machine that looks like whatever Egon was imaging Dana's face with in the original Ghostbusters. But that's okay, because this storyline has impact on exactly nothing, and I can't for the life of me figure out why it was included. But as I've noted, it's the film's moral failings that truly made me angry and frustrated with it. Like The Constant Gardener, the film makes its creators appears to be of the "if your cause is just, anything you do in furtherance of that cause is just" school of evil. Ends alone do not justify any and all means.
Unless the goal is to make sure there are no more Adam Sandler movies. In that case, use any means necessary.
====================================================
* How they resisted naming the character Eddie Two-Bears or something equally "Indian" I'll never know, but kudos to the filmmakers for at least avoiding this stereotype.
** Actually, the Indians give two completely different explanations for why the wolfen are killing people, but nobody ever seems to notice this.
The film opens with a monster attack sequence that the makers of Predator clearly saw. The wolfen-point-of-view shots were undoubtedly the inspiration for the Predator's infrared vision. Since I plan to rip this movie pretty hard, it's nice to start off with something good, and the film deserves credit for its pioneering monster POV. Thank you, Wolfen; Predator would've been slightly less awesome without you, so you weren't a complete waste of celluloid. The shots of run-down New York City are also effective, atmospheric, and creepy. I miss the New York that gave us films like this and Escape from New York. Where can we find a rotting cesspool of crime and decay to film now? Thank God there's still Detroit.
Anywho, after taking way too long stalking people (and getting so close to them that you can't believe it wouldn't be seen, or heard, or smelled, a recurring problem with the stalking sequences), the wolfen kills a rich, important muckety-muck and his wife, though not before killing their chauffeur, because the black guy always has to die first. Solving this murder is so important to the city of New York that they bring in a fat, lazy drunk specially to handle the case. Said fat, lazy drunk is played by Emmy-award winner Albert Finney, who does an excellent job playing a fat, lazy drunk, and not just because he's English. In fact, despite occasionally missing with his American accent, Finney gives the film's best performance (apart from God's own, natch), and I'm thankful he was chosen for this role rather than America's home-grown go-to guy for the role of fat, lazy drunk in the late '70s and early '80s, Joe Don Baker. The other performances range from adequate (Gregory Hines(!) as Finney's coroner pal, Tom Noonan as a zoologist whose obsession with wolves even I find unhealthy) to jaw-droppingly awful (Diane Venora as a psychologist assigned to assist Finney, though her assistance consists entirely of sleeping with him for no reason other than they're the two leads in the film). This is also the film debut of Reginald VelJohnson, notable because it's possibly his only appearance in front of a camera not playing a cop.
Edward James Olmos is cast in this film according to the Hollywood Ethnic Actor Rule as an American Indian(!), despite the fact that he doesn't look Indian at all. You'll remember from last week that this rule allows actors in the "not WASP or black" category to freely play any ethnicity in that category, since American audiences won't know any better. He plays Eddie Holt,* a militant Indian put away by Finney's Dewey Wilson (yes, really) for killing an apple. No, I don't mean he went to prison for wanton slaughter of innocent fruit. "Apple" is apparently the American Indian version of Uncle Tom (or, to the primary audience of this blog, "banana"), that is, a ethnic minority who's sold out to the Man. Holt is so obviously set up as the werewolf that you instantly know he's not the werewolf, though it takes Olmos running naked on the beach for Dewey to figure this out. Frankly, I would've preferred that Dewey make this determination without my having to see the little Eddie. The scene has Dewey, thinking Holt is going to turn into a werewolf (it's complicated), following him to the beach where he strips naked, licks up water from a puddle in the sand (wolves drink seawater?), and runs around making growling and howling noises. While all this is going on, to absolutely no one's surprise, someone is killed by the wolfen in another part of the city, sending Dewey back to the drawing board for suspects. I admired Olmos's dedication to his art in this scene, as it must have taken serious cajones to go on camera and do the scene rather than just punching the director in the face or smiting him with a thunderbolt, and it reminds me just how prudish our society has become over the lifetime of yours truly. Still, a grown man running around pretending to be a wolf just looks silly, no matter how much gravitas the actor has or how scary the music is. It's a goofy moment played straight but impossible to take seriously, like something out of The Exorcist. Actually, "goofy moment played straight but impossible to take seriously" describes the whole of The Exorcist.
As with the previous projects, I can see why Olmos took this role. Wolfen is firmly in the vein of 1970s Western-civilization-in-decline films that portray victims of European colonization and oppression as morally superior to their conquerors. The film sets up a dichotomy between the Noble Savages (guess who they are) and the White Man Dependent on, Like, Capitalism, Man, and comes down clearly on the side of the white liberal guilt. I mean, Indians. And this is the single biggest problem with the film. It is, in fact, the reason it's a truly bad film rather than a serviceable low-key, low-FX monster flick. There is essentially only one Indian character (Holt), and more than once he gets to wax morally superior to Dewey by ponderously speechifying about how corrupt White Society is. To give you an idea of how well the Indians emerge as characters, the only other Indian has any screentime at all is credited as "Old Indian". No name, just Old Indian. We don't even find out what tribe these Indians are a part of, or even if they're from the same tribe! They're just Indians, and Indians love nature and marijuana and hate capitalism and Whitey. And the ones who don't aren't real Indians ("apples") and deserve to be murdered. The filmmakers would undoubtedly be appalled to hear that this is the subtext of their film, as I'm sure they didn't intend to treat their Indian characters as shabbily as 1960s Westerns that portrayed them as a faceless horde of identical backward savages to be mowed down by heroic white cowboys. But to quote Ken Begg, "well, you can’t not see it. I’m absolutely sure that it’s unintentional, but still, it’s kind of there anyway."
The worst example of the one-dimensional nature of the Indian characters in this film is the excruciating exposition scene near the end, in which Dewey, rather than discovering the secret of the wolfen through the White Man's Science of his detective work, has the wolfen explained to him by the Indians (again, mostly by Olmos looking righteously angry). Dewey goes to a bar full of Indians, imaginatively named the Wigwam Bar (really?), and there the Indians painstakingly explain to him what the wolfen are, why they've done what they've done, and why the White Man deserves to have it done to him. (That the wolfen have killed a number of black characters at this point goes unaddressed. I guess they're collateral damage from the wolfen's carpet bombs of justice.) Why yes, the Indians are smoking peace pipes while generic Indian chanting plays on the soundtrack.** I'm so glad you asked!
Wolfen's pacing is slow, its acting is hit (Finney, Olmos)-or-miss (Venora, the non-Finney cops and investigators), its story is a little scattershot, its kills are telegraphed (maybe they were slightly more surprising in 1981, but I doubt it), and its central monster not being a werewolf is a cheat. But all of these things could be forgiven if not for the ham-handed "message" of the film and its treatment of Indian characters as positive stereotypes every bit as offensive as the negative stereotypes it's reacting against. And then there's the ending. And I said, you find out what the wolfen are and why they're doing what they're doing, and the film clearly agrees that they have some justification. But the ending torpedoes any final hope the film had. Not because it has the wolfen offscreen teleporting from ground level to the penthouse balcony of a skyscraper, but because Dewey realises that the wise Indians are wise and that the wolfen are morally correct, and he decides they should be left to continue to murder people as they see fit. I'm serious, that's really the implication of the ending. Dewey agrees that the wolfen are right to eat the people they've chosen to eat. I can't explain to you how little sense this makes in the context of the film. It's bad enough that the makers of the film thought this, given the situation they've set up, but why does Dewey accept it? There's nothing about the character, either before or after his experiences with the wolfen, that in any way suggests he'd be okay with this. The wolfen even eat one of his friends in the movie! Dewey must've smoked some of whatever they put in those peace pipes to just accept that the wolfen have killed (including, again, a good friend of his) and will continue to kill. That, or the filmmakers allowed their own belief that the wolfen are right to impose itself on their character, regardless of whether or not the character and his experiences support that view. I'm betting on the latter.
I haven't mentioned the subplot of another entire group of investigators trying to link the murder of the rich muckety-muck to a vague, ill-defined "terrorist" group, using some kind of truth-machine that looks like whatever Egon was imaging Dana's face with in the original Ghostbusters. But that's okay, because this storyline has impact on exactly nothing, and I can't for the life of me figure out why it was included. But as I've noted, it's the film's moral failings that truly made me angry and frustrated with it. Like The Constant Gardener, the film makes its creators appears to be of the "if your cause is just, anything you do in furtherance of that cause is just" school of evil. Ends alone do not justify any and all means.
Unless the goal is to make sure there are no more Adam Sandler movies. In that case, use any means necessary.
====================================================
* How they resisted naming the character Eddie Two-Bears or something equally "Indian" I'll never know, but kudos to the filmmakers for at least avoiding this stereotype.
** Actually, the Indians give two completely different explanations for why the wolfen are killing people, but nobody ever seems to notice this.
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