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Another sci-fi time-travel political-conspiracy comedy from 1970’s Czechoslovakia. How many could there be? Unsurprisingly, this shares its writers (and some actors) with Tomorrow I’ll Wake Up and Scald Myself With Tea.

In the future year of 1999, a group of terrorist physicists drop “G-bombs” that make all women grow beards and become infertile. Instead of falling into chaos like the stupid civilization in Children of Men, they do what any reasonable person would do – invent a time machine to travel to 1911 and kill Einstein before he can invent the bomb. A historian tells them Einstein will be at a party where a chandelier will fall and narrowly miss him, so they plot to see that his chair is underneath it when it falls. This from scientists who have guns that can kill, work as jetpacks, tie someone up in toilet paper, nullify gravity and make nifty ‘ptoo ptoo’ sound effects – they’re gonna use a chandelier. One guy meets his own father (aged 10-ish) in the past. There are hijinks (film is sped up, slapstick is achieved) and the kid is killed by mistake.

Back in 1999 they explain what happened and try again – but this time things get stupid complicated because at least one other group (incl. the terrorist physicists) go back in time as well. Lots of people are tied up and some cops are confused. Things happen in the dark that I could not make out. Einstein is shot and our guys return home happy – but the historian has fallen in love with Einstein, so she had him fake his death, and she convinces him to follow his other passion and be a violinist instead of a physicist.

Problem solved – the bomb never existed – but back in 1999, a group of terrorist chemists has caused all the men to become effeminate and afraid of women, so the future of the human race is still at risk! Luckily, our hero who invented the time machine now “invents” the atomic bomb and they blow the evil chemists to bits. Einstein (who would be 120 years old in ’99 – I’m guessing they did their plot calculations from 1970 and only added the year 1999 at the last minute) shows up with the historian to play violin.

It’s hardly a hilarious movie, but entertaining enough – and nice widescreen picture. I’m glad someone is out there taking good care of cult Czech films. 25 years later, the guy who played Einstein would star in Svankmajer’s Faust. Lipsky followed up with a kids movie called Six Bears and a Clown, which actually played on CBS.

by ·Comments Off on House of the Dead (2003, Uwe Boll)

“I think something bad’s happened here.”

Danger signs in the first minute: a Prodigy song (in 2003), and Clint Howard top-billed.

The line was probably written “Anyone have a cellphone?” but the cop reads it “Anyone? Have a cellphone.”

Man, love stories do not belong wedged into the middle of House of the Dead.

Ouch, it wasn’t even the Prodigy, just a soundalike no-name group.

Anyway, as this has a reputation for being one of the very worst movies of the decade and the worst video game adaptation ever (quite a competitive field), I thought I’d put it on for fun while catching up on the ol’ movie blog. It’d be counter-productive to write too much about it, or even to pay too much attention, but hey it’s definitely extremely crappy.

Althought I did liked the girls with boobies and all the guns. The zombys were good but not so good as classics like day of the dead by George Romeo thats one of my favorites I like how the doctor dies at the end. The music was fucking hot and I liked how there were scnes from the video game in the movie but they were so quick I couldnt tell what parts they were from excerpt sometimes. The extra featuers on the dvd are way funner than the movie.

by ·Comments Off on The Bird People In China (1998, Takashi Miike)

Almost seven years passed between when I rented this and when I finally watched it (not counting the time I fell asleep a few years back)

Banker-type Wada (Masahiro Motoki, starred in Tsukamoto’s Gemini and the recent Departures) is sent to a rural town in China called yun nan to look at a vein of jade for his employer. An uber-tattooed gangster (Renji Ishibashi of Gozu, Graveyard of Honor, Dead or Alive) tags along since Wada’s boss owes him money. Things get weird, but in a casual, slow, satisfying manner – not all The Great Yokai War weird.

There’s style a-plenty (narrated back story shown in fast motion), some poor late-90’s digital effects, mystic business about the origins of Japanese culture, and trained swimming turtle chauffeurs. The gangster freaks out at the end, not because he’s sick of the place and wants to go home but because he’s afraid the mineral exploitation will corrupt this perfect place, so he shoots the homing turtles. Our hero spends his time talking with the girl who teaches ancient traditions of human flight (as translated by her grandfather, a british pilot who crashed in the area to local children. It’s all quite lovely.

by ·Comments Off on Public Enemies (2009, Michael Mann)

Michael Mann switches between scenes of a master criminal and the cop assigned to catch him, until the criminal is caught because he came back for his girl… but enough about HEAT, here’s Public Enemies.

Johnny Depp is bank robber John Dillinger – previously played by Martin Sheen, Robert Conrad and Warren Oates – and Christian Bale is devoted cop Melvin Purvis – previously played by Will Patton and Dan Cortese. I also recognized appearances by Leelee Sobieski (girl Johnny takes to the movies when he’s killed at the end) and Giovanni Ribisi (wannabe train robber), but failed to recognize Stephen Dorff (my The Gate fan club membership is in peril) and Billy Crudup (as an amusing J. Edgar Hoover). Also apparently the paranoid guy from A Scanner Darkly played an FBI agent and Duke in the G.I. Joe movie played Pretty Boy Floyd.

Sometimes the digital camerawork yielded interesting perspective and depth of field effects, but sometimes in the indoor scenes it just looked like a made-for-TV movie. It’s weird that a low-light movie like Collateral looked less video-like than this one.

K. Phipps:

Mann fills the background with a lot of fascinating detail but often has a hard time keeping the foreground in focus. Sometimes literally: Mann and cinematographer Dante Spinotti opt for hard, handheld digital-video images. These lend a sense of excitement to some of the action scenes—particularly a thrilling nighttime chase through the Wisconsin woods—but often give the film an unpleasantly unfinished look. That unfortunately matches an unfinished feel. Neither Depp nor Bale get a chance to get beneath the surface of their characters, supporting characters bleed together, and a love story between Depp and his moll (Marion Cotillard) never finds a heartbeat.

Mann, as ever, remains a master of methodical pursuit, but as the film inches toward Dillinger’s fateful night at Chicago’s Biograph Theater, he doesn’t offer much beyond methodical pursuit. Depp goes about the business of not getting caught; Bale goes about the business of catching him. In the end it doesn’t really come to mean all that much.

I wasn’t sure what to think about this – it felt flat and over-long, a procedural thriller without the procedure or the thrills, a character bio-drama without much character, and a digital look that called too much attention to itself for reasons unknown. I’d been looking forward to it so much, then it wasn’t even that I didn’t like it; I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to like.

But that was before reading a convincing article by M.Z. Seitz for IFC, which makes the movie seem like a good case to study, if not a killer fun time at the theater. Maybe I’ll appreciate it more next time, focusing on the digital video’s sense of immediacy and reality, and the “moment-to-moment shifts in emotion,” instead of trying to enjoy the story and the acting. God, I’m such a failure as an auteurist… speaking of which, a whole bunch of articles in The Auteurs this month should help me feel worse about not understanding Michael Mann (and there’s an epic article/video series at Moving Image Source).

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You ask me to believe that in the future, 70% of the earth’s energy comes from a mineral harvested on the moon – fine. And that the harvesting station is manned by only one astronaut, Sam Rockwell – fine. And that to cut training costs, they actually have a hundred clones of Sam Rockwell with memory implants and they wake one up every three years – fine. But then you tell me these moon-harvesting Sam Rockwell-cloning men of the future can’t spell “satellite” correctly on their satellite receiver, that’s where I have trouble suspending disbelief.

Sam is great as the only actor in the movie (people on video screens don’t count) playing clone #5 whose term is almost up and also clone #6 who was awakened prematurely when the computers thought Sam 5 had died. Interesting how the computers don’t have any biometrics on Sam, requiring him to talk to the friendly (anti-HAL, sabotaging the company to assist Sam) Kevin Spacey-voiced computer played by a ceiling-mounted roving smiley-face machine with a cupholder in front and a “kick me” sign on back. Funny also how the company’s way of disabling Sam’s live communications with Earth is to install massive radio-jamming towers around his base instead of, say, just sending an error message whenever he calls. My way would be cheaper.

But it isn’t our job to poke holes in the sci-fi movies – we’re here to enjoy them. And it’s enjoyable for sure. Sam 6 flies to earth in a jet tube meant for a can of minerals and brings legal action against Original Sam and the company in the cough-and-you’ll-miss-it audio finale. The whole thing seems vaguely anticlimactic since Sam 6 appears early in the movie. Once you’ve seen two Sams in the same room, learning about the motivation behind the clone thing is no big deal. But it’s an amusing flick to be sure.

by ·Comments Off on If…. (1968, Lindsay Anderson)

“Racism was rife in the public school system then, as were silly uniforms”

Rented this back when it came out – so about two years ago. More intense than I’d thought. Sets up a miserable, oppressive hierarchical school system, a couple rebel friends in the middle of it, and ends with them on the rooftop merrily blowing everybody away.

Malcolm’s conspicuous entrance, three years before A Clockwork Orange:
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Divided into numbered and titled sections, each with one or two scenes in black and white for reasons I never figured out. Turns out cinematographer Miroslav Ondricek (who worked with Milos Forman a bunch of times, earning oscar nominations in the 80’s) used it for budget and simplicity in one scene, then Anderson would request that other scenes at random be shot b/w as well. Gave critics something to talk about, anyway.
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D. Ehrenstein:

When it was first released, it was impossible to look at If…. without thinking of Zero for Conduct, Jean Vigo’s classic 1932 featurette about a schoolboy revolt. But Vigo’s rebels pelted their hated teachers with vegetables. Anderson’s are armed with bullets. And more than teachers and school officials, it is their fellow students—the senior classmates who truly rule their lives, treating them not as equals but as prison inmates they’re guarding—who are the real targets. Consequently, it is impossible to look at If…. today without thinking of the Columbine massacre of 1991 … Still, that was real, and Anderson’s slaughter is clearly meant to be metaphoric. Why else end the film with McDowell firing straight into the camera like the nameless bandit in Edwin S. Porter’s The Great Train Robbery (1903)? By doing so, If…., like so much else of sixties culture, poses a challenging question rather than offers a glib and easy answer.

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by ·Comments Off on Exiled (2006, Johnnie To)

Rented this just a couple weeks ago on a night I knew damn well I wouldn’t have time to watch it. It’s just as good a few weeks later.

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During the first half I wasn’t enjoying it so much because I was looking for the wrong things. The characters seemed to have no names or individual traits – just a group of guys who are always in the same scenes together, defined by their commitment to friendship (the backstory consists of one old photo of them together as kids) over loyalty to their mob boss (and therefore their personal safety). I didn’t know the actors (recognized a couple as Chi Wai’s multiple personalities from Mad Detective) and was waiting for the story/character scenes to kick in. But they never do, and now I can appreciate that. The photo is the backstory: these guys are friends… what more do we need for an action flick?

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So without character development, we’re left with dark, shadowy cinematography on awesomely-staged action sequences. The one below is a favorite. The fifth friend, whom the other four were supposed to kill on orders from their boss which led them all to revolt, is wounded and being treated by the gang’s private doctor, when the boss himself, also wounded, shows up. He’s being treated, surrounded by bodyguards, while the friends hide behind curtains and furniture, the lead-up to the shoot-out being deliciously more thrilling than the shoot-out itself.

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The fifth guy dies, and his wife goes on a shooting rampage against our heroes. They fail to kill their boss, who is now hunting them. They’re on the run and it looks like the movie is gonna break out an existential loneliness dialogue when they stumble upon a heist, a truck full of gold being defended by a cigarette-smoking super-soldier. The movie wasn’t what I’d call realistic to this point, but now it flies off the rails, and they join up with this guy to steal the gold. But narratively it’s not gonna work for the four remaining gunmen to live rich in hiding while their former boss stays in power and their dead friend’s wife raises her new baby alone, so they go back for one more suicidal fight, leaving the gold to the wife and the soldier.

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You have to think that guys wearing sunglasses and shooting guns in slow-motion is cool to properly enjoy the movie, and I do, so I loved it by the end. Set in Macau, a former Portuguese colony now in the same political situation as Hong Kong. Nice comic touch: a cop with only a couple days left on the force keeps driving by, getting shot at, and running off unharmed… he lives to see retirement.

by ·Comments Off on Joe vs. the Volcano (1990, John Patrick Shanley)

July is “Movies I Rented & Copied But Never Watched” Month. I figure there are about 75 of those, and tragically only 31 days in the month.

Dan Hedaya + prosthetic arm:
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Rented this for our Florida trip. Made it halfway through with Katy but she didn’t seem interested in the second half. I gotta agree that for a cult comedy it’s awfully slow and talky, and the second half is slower if anything, but I still think it’s great. A crazy movie. There are big, loud, blues-song music-video segments, a slow two-minute pull-away shot of Tom leaving the doctor’s office and petting a dog, a puppet of a hammerhead shark, and Meg Ryan in three roles, two of which are impersonations. I’d at least admire the movie for all that even if I didn’t find it hilarious and wonderful.

In Ossie Davis’s follow-up to Do The Right Thing, the movie that took on Driving Miss Daisy’s view of race in America, he plays chauffeur to a white man.

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Abe Vigoda plays the village leader like the Three Stooges in tribal makeup:

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The great Robert Stack (House of Bamboo, Written on the Wind) is the doctor who gives Tom his fatal “brain cloud” diagnosis:

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The great Lloyd Bridges is the rich man who pulls the strings, including Stack’s:

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Meg Ryan is kinda awful as Hanks’ coworker at the rectal probe and artificial testicles factory with a Little Shop of Horrors New York accent, and worse as Lloyd Bridges’ daughter, doing an over-the-top Katharine Hepburn impression, but she’s kinda good as that girl’s un-accented half-sister who captains the boat to the island.

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by ·Comments Off on Ultraviolet (2006, Kurt Wimmer)

Opens with a long boring backstory evoking global terrorism, virus pandemics, holocaust death camps and vampires. Ugly. This is the second Milla Jovovich movie I’ve seen where the ultimate weapon to save mankind turns out to be a person.

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Skin looks like plastic, or a video game cutscene, for some reason.

Yay, guy from Alien is her weapons supplier. Oh wait, no he’s the guy from Contact. Remember Contact?

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Yeah it’s cool looking, but they allow the comic-book sci-fi aspect to justify the stupidest shit, as if there’s no need to do anything sensible anymore. I’m not saying the Spiderman movies make total sense, but at least there are recognizable character motivations and straightforward plots in those.

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Everything is explained in mumble-jumble terms by the voice of the Spaceballs ship. Tons of ultraviolence but little blood since it’s all PG-13. How come she has better guns than anyone in the entire future – and a flying motorcycle and anti-gravity devices? Did William Fichtner invent those things? All the bad guys have are tons of faceless, undertrained cannon fodder guards lined up in perfect fascist rows.

It’s actually a cool movie whenever there is no plot at all. When the kid is involved (oh btw, there’s a kid) or Dax (bad guy, dude from Con Air) or William are explaining something or we hear backstory or there’s an emotional moment, it’s a big bunch of crap.