Eight years after Jason Voorhees went to the hell of middling box office returns, New Line Cinema (who snatched up the rights to the character after Paramount squandered the Friday the 13th property into a tired series of faceless slasher sequels) launched their psychotic goalie into that far, far away galaxy where franchises like Critters and Leprechaun had already gone to die — IN SPACE!!! The last-second climax of Jason Goes To Hell promised an ultimate fighting showdown between New Line’s other favorite son, Freddy Krueger, but the studio had to put that dream on hold while Wes Craven completed his final statement with New Nightmare. Desperate to keep his franchise alive while the promise of Freddy Vs. Jason tried to free itself from the muck of development hell, original creator Sean S. Cunningham passed the producing credits down to his son Noel, and the decision to fling Jason into the far off future of 2455 was made to avoid any narrative confusion for the inevitable TBD grudge match.
Jason X was never meant to be anything more than a placeholder for something better, or at least, more interesting…and it sure looks it. Shot by television journeyman Derick Underschultz, and directed by one of David Cronenberg’s creature technician’s Jim Isaac, the far flung tenth onslaught for the most feared resident at Camp Crystal Lake appears like it belongs on the Syfy Channel. The sets are empty, the cg is flat, and most of the performances are desperate to please. It’s an ugly looking movie, made on the cheap, barely acknowledged by its financiers, and regularly mocked by the fan community. Jason X is also a damn weird movie, and as such, it at least succeeds in standing apart from the monotony of the rest.
Sending your franchise to space may seem like the last resort of an exhausted/bankrupt creative machine, but what worked for Abbott & Costello, James Bond, Hellraiser, Air Bud, and Ice Age should work damn well for Jason Voorhees. And probably The Fast and The Furious flicks after Dom obliterates his way through the rest of our world’s landmarks. Seriously, Toretto needs to plant that #FX flag on the moon! Screenwriter Todd Farmer (My Bloody Valentine 3D, Drive Angry) takes the opportunity to cram in the usual Aliens references, and maybe a Star Trek nod here or there, but Jason X triumphs when it just shrugs its shoulders and gets silly.
When Paramount pledged to have Jason take Manhattan in Friday the 13th Part VIII, the result was a brief rampage through the subway while the majority of the film meandered through a dull sea cruise full of interchangeable Lakeview High students. At least Jason X delivers on its whacky science fiction wish fulfillment. Cryogenic freezing chamber? Check. Lunar real estate? Check. VR paintball? Check. Nanotech med bay? Check. Earth 2 environmental preaching? Check. Cyborg sex commando with magnetic nipples? Um…check? Jason X may have very few new ideas, but Farmer packs his story with all the expected tropes.
Lexa Doig as Dr. Rowan LaFontaine is the Ripley of this mission. A woman out of time who is frozen in carbonite (or whatever) after a governmental science experiment falls under the machete of Jason. Trapped together by some pseudo science gasses, Rowan and Jason are resurrected four hundred years later when a group of students visit Earth 1 on a field trip. Don’t worry, time may have passed, but the teenagers of the future are just as dumb and oversexed as the classical variety. In another constant, the name Voorhees retains its infamy, and when their teacher eagerly sells the rights to Jason’s corpse to a collector on the outer rim, his get-rich-quick scheme perpetuates the never-ending cycle of bloodshed.
As a walking slab of beef, Kane Hodder will always be my Jason. He is not a titan of height, but he is the thick, lumbering hulk that fills the width of any doorframe he deems worthy. The manner in which he grips his machete, the mechanized tightness of his knuckles grinding around the hilt, is the only glimpse of pleasure this beast seems capable of emoting. Hodder’s Jason enjoys his work; he’s a mannered murderer that slows his kills into a humble brag showcase. Jason’s first order of business after awakening from the deep sleep is to grab his wannabe mortician by the face, and plunge her screaming skull into a vat of liquid nitrogen. Possibly one of the most entertaining kills of the franchise, Krista Angus’ frozen face of fear is brought into camera in a brief moment for Jason and the audience to admire before he smashes her visage on the table. Blood cubes scatter in practical delight.
Meanwhile, Todd Farmer’s favorite space marines are quick work for Jason. They’re a rather lame collection of goofballs that barely register more than stand-ins for Hicks and Hudson, but their fodder is necessary, and a few of them even get some good lines in before their impalement: “It’s gonna take more than a poke in the ribs to put down this old dog.” *STAB* “Yep, that will do it.” Did I say they were “good” lines? Well, eye-rollingly silly and utterly essential to this sort of horror hogwash.
With the marketing around Jason X relying on the tagline that for this “Perfect Ten in Terror…Evil Gets an Upgrade,” similar to Friday the 13th Part VIII’s Manhattan tease, the audience spends the majority of the film waiting for The Uber-Jason to arise. Lisa Ryder’s Kay-Em 14 robo dominatrix cheeses her way through some iffy wire-fu gladiatorial combat, but she eventually pops Jason’s dome with a confident blast from her future shotgun (you can tell it’s from the future because it’s got a giant honking flashlight built into its barrel — Fancy!). In the med bay, Harry Manfredini’s Frankenstein score erupts as nanobots piece the ultimate mama’s boy back together again. Polished like a Cenobite fresh from the carwash, The Uber-Jason strikes a memorable pose. Besides trading droopy eyes for rad blood shot contacts, and a traditional machete for a futuristic hunk of scimitar, The Uber-Jason does not appear to come with any particular enhancements. He’s still a lumbering oaf, and a slow prideful stalker. Yet, so shiny, so chrome.
Jason X is not the type of movie we often celebrate. It’s a nail in the coffin kinda flick, and the lowest earner in the series. Released a year later, Freddy Vs. Jason racked in more money worldwide than any of the previous Friday or Nightmare films. The epic wait we endured for this clash paid off more often than not; the executives were right to salivate.
I know there are some fellow Jason X die-hards out there. After all, the film spawned four spin-off novels, a line of comic books, and a McFarlane Toys action figure. We’d follow Kane Hodder into space, the hood, or the NASCAR circuit (BTW, that was an actual idea that was floating around the studio at one point — I’m sure Jason would drive for Mellow Yellow). 22 years is a long time for a silent maniac to stalk around the same lake, at some point he had to fly to coop. Jason X may have overreached, but I’d rather watch a film commit to insanity than remake itself into the grave. That’s a true death that Jason Voorhees seems condemned to in the very present day of 2017.
They say you can’t intentionally make a cult film, but you can certainly try. The Greasy Strangler tries very, very hard, and the result is a film that’s as unique as it is odd. We’ll have to wait a decade or so to see if the film is remembered as a cult favorite, but for now we can probably all agree that it’s a ridiculously absurd genre-bender guaranteed to have both fierce advocates and absolute detractors.
Keep reading to see what I heard on the commentary track for…
The Greasy Strangler (2016)
Commentators: Jim Hosking (director/co-writer), Michael St. Michaels (actor), Sky Elobar (actor)
1. The house was actually every bit as disgusting and smelly as it looks. “It’s a shame we don’t have a good shot of the black mold,” says Michaels.
2. Elobar says he gained roughly fifteen pounds for the role “on that belly there.”
3. Big Ronnie’s (Michaels) member beneath the sheets is actually a broken pool cue. He spends the rest of the film saying the bulges are all him.
4. Composer Andrew Hung is a member of the band Fuck Buttons.
5. Michaels thinks the shot of him mooning the tourists is held too long. “Well it’s deliberately long,” says Hosking.
6. Hosking acknowledges that most people find the food shots disgusting, but he for one thinks that sausage looks delicious.
7. Sam Dissanayake is unintentionally wearing his boxers backwards during the scene at the vending machine. “But that’s the way Indian people do it,” says Elobar before Hosking adds “I really wouldn’t encourage that kind of generalization.”
8. The “potato” misunderstanding was inspired from a real incident Hosking encountered in an Indian restaurant in London. He couldn’t understand the waiter’s pronunciation of “potato.”
9. “This is the only scene that I actually had some reservations about,” says Michaels regarding the bit where he rolls backwards and farts towards his son Big Braydon (Elobar). “I just envisioned a close-up of my asshole, and I wasn’t really happy with that.”
10. An early reader of the script was excited to learn the various disco-related details covered on Ronnie and Braydon’s tours. “Except it’s all bullshit,” says Hosking.
11. A woman was actually visible in the booth beside Braydon and Janet (Elizabeth De Razzo) during the restaurant scene, but Hosking removed her digitally so that Janet would be the only woman in the movie surrounded by “sad men.”
12. The hot dog vendor is played by Mel Kohl, and while Hosking loves that his nose looks like a penis the film’s producers wanted to cut him out “because they couldn’t stand his acting.”
13. The original cut was over two hours and ten minutes long.
14. The RV belonged to the film’s DP who sold it after production was finished. Michaels wishes he had known that in advance, but Elobar adds that he was going to buy it “but I called my friend who’s an RV specialist, and he said don’t buy it.”
15. Hosking removed the sounds of Janet’s moans during the sex scene so we would only hear Braydon asking repeatedly “Is this right?”
16. The park bench sequence between Ronnie and Janet required some genital arranging to take full advantage of Ronnie’s special disco outfit. Hosking apparently spent a couple minutes positioning the fake penis before realizing he had been fondling Michaels’ real one. “I loved the attention,” adds Michaels.
17. Hosking’s favorite sequence is the bit where Ronnie is walking and begins dancing when the spotlight hits him. “It’s like Singing in the Rain,” says Michaels. “Gene Kelly on crack,” adds Elobar.
18. Hosking received producer notes suggesting there were “one too many farts in the film.”
19. The most “uncomfortable” scene to shoot in the film, per Hosking, was the sex scene between Ronnie and Janet.
20. Hosking found Janet’s merkin to be too excessively large at first, “but the more I watch it the more I like how it’s thick and luxurious.”
21. That’s an ass double for the scene where Janet sings “Hootie tootie disco cutie!” and parts her butt cheeks. “It’s someone I never even said hello too because I felt too embarrassed.”
22. One of the three old men in the firing squad at the end is sporting “a tiny erection.”
Best in Context-Free Commentary
“I have a D-cup in this movie.”
“These outfits were really comfortable.”
“That’s one of the few takes where your teeth didn’t fall out Michael.”
“Some people aren’t very convincing when they’re just being themselves.”
“We experimented with the sound of Janet’s urination.”
There’s no getting around the film’s intentionally offensive and off-putting nature as it’s a badge it wears proudly from beginning to end. Some scenes feel a bit forced and stretched-out in their weirdness, but it never pretends to be anything beyond what it is. The commentary offers some fun anecdotes and insights, and aside from a few questionable jokes — that Hosking quickly shuts down — the trio stay on point in their thoughts on the production.
The Blu-ray available via Amazon (linked above) is a BD-R, so be aware that while it does include the commentary and interviews it’s a manufactured-on-demand disc.
There are eight on-set interviews collected on the disc including the three leads and a few other members of the cast and crew. They’re all worthwhile for fans of the film (despite some rough audio at times), but the highlights are definitely Michaels for his character, De Razzo for her honesty, and Alamo Drafthouse alum Zack Carlson for his laughs and insight.
The new JB Hi-Fi “Greasy Down Under Deluxe Edition” from Monster Pictures (linked below) adds a second disc of special features to the mix including additional interviews, featurettes, and marketing materials.
Bullshit Artist [15:50] — Co-writer/director Jim Hoskins talks about the film’s origin and production.
I’m a Cheesy Cornball [7:54] — Sky Elobar, looking about forty pounds lighter, discusses the experience of working on the film and wearing those outfits.
Hootie Tootie Disco Cutie [13:02] — Elizabeth De Razzo describes her character as “slutty Velma from Scooby Doo meets Orphan Annie but perved up.”
The Greasy Trap [3:35] — Cast and crew share the horror or working in that nasty house.
The Greasy Effect [3:48] — Hoskins talks about the film’s special effects.
Greasy Down Under Cuisine [26:15] — Elobar and De Razzo sample some Australian culinary delights.
Greasy Down Under Road Trip [2:14] — Footage from a mini road trip with fans.
Monster Fest 2016 Q&A [27:34] — Elobar and De Razzo take part in a Q&A after a recent Australian festival screening.
Straight outta Hollywood, some advice on how to make it there.
F. Gary Gray on the set of ‘Law Abiding Citizen’
F. Gary Gray is a journeyman, a prolific and diverse director who has given us all kinds of movies, from his comedic 1995 debut, Friday, to the recent smash-hit biopic Straight Outta Compton.
He wasn’t one of those guys who always knew he’d be a filmmaker; he didn’t make amateur movies as a kid. He didn’t go into the business any kind of expert on cinema or moviemaking. Instead, he’s become one along the way.
And he’s still learning. And you can learn from him vicariously and through advice imparted from more than 20 years on the job, since his days helming music videos through his newest feature, The Fate of the Furious.
Here are six tips we’ve compiled from interviews spanning his career:
1. Get Into Your Lane
Kicking off with something that sounds appropriate for his new movie, Gray uses a traffic metaphor to talk about getting started. This advice on finding your own groove as a filmmaker comes via an interview for Complex in 2015:
Just step into your lane. Everybody comes to film differently; everybody has different backgrounds. Just find whatever your lane is naturally. Don’t try to force yourself into someone else’s vision or try to tell a story that you’re not passionate about. Hopefully you learn a little bit from my experiences and you try your best to enjoy it but also understand the business aspect of creating because that’s really hard. It’s hard being creative and also trying to manage some of the politics in this industry, so if I can impart some of my experience and maybe learn a little bit then it’s a success.
And be sure to “stay in your lane,” as he recommended during a Sprite-sponsored event also associated with Complex around the same time.
Gray directs Vin Diesel on the set of ‘A Man Apart’
2. Shoot On Your Block
That lane can be anywhere, even on your own street. Gray shot Friday in his old neighborhood in South Central Los Angeles, and that was a great place to begin his journey, physically and mentally, for its ease and familiarity.
Shoot it on your block. It cuts down on the research and development. (laughs) I’m glad [‘Friday’ writer/star Ice Cube] didn’t come to me with a project about the moon or something, because I probably wouldn’t be standing here today if that was the case.
Gray also says, in the video below from the Sprite event for Complex, “No matter where you come from, you can be inspired.” Specifically inspired by Compton, he’s saying, but even out of context it’s a relevant tip.
3. Drift Through the Rooms of Your Mansion
No, you don’t need to live in a literal mansion to be a filmmaker, but you should acknowledge the mansion-size space in your mind and the creative potential residing there.
Yes, Gray is using metaphor again, this time in Vibe magazine back in 1996, and when you think of the variety of his filmography, you know he’s really been taking advantage of every room in that house.
Sometimes I get slowed down by writer’s block or visual block where I can’t find the shot. But I don’t worry. Creativity is a mansion. If you’re empty in one room, all you have to do is go out into the hallway and enter another room that’s full.
Gray on the set of ‘Straight Outta Compton’
4. Always Go in Deep
We know from the second tip that it’s good to start with what and where you know, but Gray also thinks you need to go above and beyond that safety net. Regarding his research for Compton, he told the LA Times in 2015:
It’s easy to say, “I know it because it’s part of my life.” I grew up a few miles away from Cube. The culture was the same. Our trajectory was somewhat the same — he was in music, I was in film. But I had to make sure I approached it the same way I would approach something I didn’t know. That means go in deep, dig for details. If I were to do a movie about Apollo 13, I’d be at NASA studying what it took to go into space. It’s part of your job to go deep, to interview the right people.
Compton may have been his biggest triumph as a filmmaker, but he’s been recognized for his talents for a while. Check out a 2008 DGA tribute to the filmmaker:
5. Take an Exit if You Need To
You need to stay in your lane, as Gray says, but in making a movie you share that lane with other drivers and that means sometimes stopping and going at their speed and following them in their path.
But if all that traffic is keeping you at a standstill creatively, you may want to take an out. Here’s a lesson he shares in a 2015 Deadline interview:
DEADLINE: You have been on a similar journey. What of your previous movies taught you the most valuable lessons? GRAY: The movies I suffered the most on. A Man Apart wasn’t well received. I didn’t finish that movie. The last five minutes were directed by somebody else because I was off doing The Italian Job. That was a really rough experience. With Be Cool, I made some assumptions in thinking that movie was going to work. I’d just made a successful PG-13 movie, and when I walked into Be Cool, it was rated R and then at the last minute in preproduction I was told, “Well, you have to make this PG-13.” I should have walked off the film. This was a movie about shylocks and gangsta rappers and if you can’t make that world edgy, you probably shouldn’t do it. I walked in thinking I was going to make one movie and then it changed. Maybe it was arrogant of me to think because I had success in this realm of PG-13 I could make that work.
DEADLINE: What did you lose in making that movie PG-13 instead of R? GRAY: The edge. All the edge. Chili Palmer said the word f*ck 54 times in Get Shorty. To be able to say it once in the sequel? It robbed authenticity. He was a shylock and this was about gangsta rappers. That was an edgy, grimy world. When you try to build a world and you want people to buy into, it has to feel real. I arrogantly thought, “I can handle this curveball you’ve thrown me with the rating. I’ll figure it out.” I was sadly mistaken. There are people who enjoyed that movie, but you know what? We missed the mark with Be Cool. I suffered because of that, as an artist. I also learned a lot. You can’t assume something is going to be good, just because. There are things you should compromise on in a collaborative effort. But there are things you should stand up for and not compromise on.
DEADLINE: Were you concerned with the baggage that comes with bailing at the last minute? GRAY: Of course. You get this reputation and people even said if I bailed on this movie two weeks before shooting, I’d have a hard time working. I was riding the success of another PG-13 movie, The Italian Job, and I made the wrong choice in not standing my ground. Don’t get me wrong; I don’t regret doing Be Cool because I learned a lot, making it. But I also learned how important it is to go with your gut. There are so many ways you can get this sh*t wrong.
Watch Gray at work on his latest movie:
6. Love It or Leave It
In general, you may just want to get off the road altogether if you’re not into driving — er, filmmaking. Directing is not a job for lazy people, and it’s not a good job for anyone looking to wind up comfortably in cruise control.
In a new Variety interview, Gray complains about his passionless peers:
You’re raw when you start off. And I’ve become hyper-aware of artists who start off pretty good and then they lose it because they get fat and rich and kind of stop giving a shit. I try to make sure I don’t fall into the trap of becoming comfortable, and make sure every project I take is an opportunity to learn something.
He didn’t just learn this lesson, though. Here’s a quote from a 1996 Detour magazine interview reprinted in the book “Black Directors in Hollywood”:
Directing is a love it or leave it job. There’s no in between. You have to give up a big chunk of your freedom to do it, so you’d better love it. … You have to deal with attitudes and egos, you have to convince people to do things they wouldn’t normally do, you have to convince performers to be people that they’re not — and be convincing…Sometimes you think, am I out of my mind for doing this? But then you sit back…take a really deep breath and you say, “It was ALL worth it.”
Gray directs Charlize Theron on the set of ‘The Italian Job’
What We’ve Learned
It sounds like after more than 20 years in the business, Gray is all about things being his way or the highway. He recommends making movies you’re passionate about and only because you’re passionate about making movies.
And if you realize you’re not right for a particular project, or vice versa, then you should get out of that vehicle. Be comfortable as far as working with material you’re suited for, but not so much that it’s not a challenge.
Start local if you need to, but eventually try out different roads and go the distance. Eventually you may even wind up directing a Fast and Furious movie, because that franchise is never going to end.
In parting, here’s a documentary celebrating Gray from six years ago:
Of the many cryptic quotes uttered by the Man From Another Place in David Lynch and Mark Frost’s Twin Peaks, one of the more famous is the following:
“Where I come from the birds sing a pretty song and there’s always music in the air.”
This is meant to be a vague description of the otherworldly realm in which the Man dwells, but it’s equally as apt a description of the town of Twin Peaks, where between all the murdering, dimension hopping, and coffee consumption, there’s a fair amount of singing. Leland alone belts out “Get Happy,” “The Surrey with the Fringe on Top,” “Getting to Know You,” and “Mairzy Doats” over the course of the series, and who could forget the honey-dripping, high-note doo-wop of James, Donna and Maddy recording the original “Just You?” or Julee Cruise and the band down at The Road House?
If some of these tracks are eluding your memory, never fear, because our dear friend Dominick Nero has made the following video for our other dear friends over at Fandor entitled “Songs in the Key of Lynch,” and as that title and this intro should tell you, it collects all the weird, wonderful, meaningful and meaningless little ditties sung by characters in Twin Peaks.
Music is of the utmost importance to Twin Peaks, but too often people only discuss the (outstanding) score by Angelo Badalamenti. But these other songs and the characters who are given them to sing are every bit as vital, integral, and revelatory as the orchestral score, and separated here by Nero they get the chance to take center stage.
Kathryn Hahn finally has a leading role in Jill Soloway’s new Amazon series, but will the intimacy of the novel translate to the screen?
In voiceover, Kathryn Hahn’s Chris reads a letter to the titular Dick, played by Kevin Bacon, in the new trailer for Jill Soloway’s latest Amazon series I Love Dick. “Dear Dick,” she says, with an image of a deer, a sharpie and a letter appearing within the first two seconds of the trailer, “this is about obsession.” It’s a simple line — as emphasized through the minimal white-text-on-red-background as Hahn’s line is spoken — but it conveys both what makes Chris Kraus’ original novel worthy of being deemed “one of the most important books about being a woman” as well as the difficulty in translating confessional literature onto the screen.
The events of Kraus’ novel of the same name are split into two parts. The first, “Part 1: Scenes from a Marriage,” tells the reader of Chris’ infatuation with Dick through the third person, broken into the first person by the character’s letters to him. The second, “Every Letter Is a Love Letter” moves into first person, told through a series of confessional letters. Since the novel’s intimacy is largely created through the fact its readers are holding Chris’ diaries and letters in their hands, it’ll be interesting to see how Soloway manages to recreate this world of obsession, secrecy and blurred boundaries between lust and love onto screen.
The trailer sees Hahn and Bacon’s characters stare directly to the camera, placing the viewer in the center of this story of infatuation; a story of when love goes one way, and how this can be good for the person projecting themselves onto another. As Hahn reads aloud the letters in her mind, her voiceover controls the editing of the trailer, with the frame often pausing as Hahn begins another letter. When Hahn and Bacon’s hands touch after Hahn begins another letter, the moving images turn still, portraying the analysis Hahn’s character’s mind goes through both when she is with Dick and when writing letters to him (but notably not for him). From the trailer alone, it’s clear that both Soloway and Hahn have approached I Love Dick in a way that renews the novel for the screen whilst still respecting the importance of the source material and the solace women around the world found with it.
With I Love Dick premiering on Amazon’s streaming service on May 12, the show has found its best platform for its viewers. The problem in translating the physical intimacy of the novel is removed when considering this form of streaming allows viewers to watch the whole show in one day, much like Kraus’ novel has been consumed in one sitting. What’s more, as our Andrew Karpan reported, Elena Ferrante’s cult-status Neapolitan novels are also being adapted to screen. Like Kraus, Ferrante is a cult author who explores the relationships between women, making it clear that there’s confidence in adapting these beloved novels.
On this week’s Shot by Shot Podcast, Ryan Gosling finds new uses for your average hammer.
For the latest episode of Shot by Shot, the official cinematography podcast of One Perfect Shot and Film School Rejects, myself and Geoff Todd have selected hands-down one of the coolest films of all-time, Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive, which was shot by cinematography Newton Thomas Sigel.
If this is your first listen to the show, the format’s simple: each week Geoff and I each pick a few shots from a certain film and discuss their effect and significance. Already we’ve done episodes on 2001: A Space Odyssey, Mad Max: Fury Road, and Silenceand next week we’re talking Edgar Wright’s Shaun of the Dead, so there’s never been a better time to start following, which you can do on Twitter @OnePerfectPod and Facebook at facebook.com/oneperfectshot, and the two of us on Twitter: @TheGeoffTodd and @HPerryHorton. And if you like what you hear — spoiler alert: you’re going to — be sure to subscribe in iTunes, Stitcher, TuneIn, or wherever you get your podcasts so you don’t miss a single episode of us or any of the other shows in our family of OnePerfectPodcasts.
Check out the podcast at the link below, along with a gallery of the shots we’re discussing, and a bonus video I made of the infamous elevator fight scene, which causes The Driver to completely unravel in just two dozen shots and three-and-a-half-minutes.
All Dan wanted was to go to space camp. But space camp rejected him, so instead he’s stuck at home being forced to hang out with his weird cousin Noel and Noel’s friend, both of whom are up to some pretty strange things in the backyard. Dan tries to steer clear of the obvious danger in what they’re doing, but what kind of film would this be if he was able to?
Serf’s Up comes from writer-director-editor Will Kempner and uses the above scenario as a launchpad for a raucous comedy that feels equally at home in our present day or in the movie theaters of 1987. It’s a silly, fun film that seems to relish in its artifice while still managing to be deftly made, and the performances by Matt Kempner, Simon Johnston, and Dan Lynch are lively, intentionally off-key, and make this farcical film absurdly entertaining.
We found Serf’s Up over at NoBudge.com, where it had its Online Premiere last October.
James Franco has done a lot of things, we’ve heard. Following a successful turn on Judd Apatow’s Freaks and Geeks and a well-received starring spot on a TNT biopic on James Dean, he turned immediately to a litany of pursuits: from playwriting and English degrees to painting and directing no less than ten feature-lengths. The latter project interested me. Were they any good? In Franco’s Rolling Stone profile last year, Jonah Weiner ran around a thesaurus of words like “dizzying,” “indefatigable“ and, wait for it, “multihyphenate” to describe his subject but none of those words mean very much. Paul Klee painted over a thousand paintings in the penultimate last year of his life. So could I. So what?
“What did we do to deserve James Franco?,” asked Rex Reed in a slightly different era. Back then, even the The Guardian agreed with Jared Kushner’s cultural mouthpiece, titling an op-ed: “It’s time to bring James Franco’s reign of half-assed artistry to an end.” But while the era of snark gave way to the current self-conscious language of emphatic sincerity and narrations of Franco’s feats have turned from malicious to maximalist, the work, itself, remains ruthlessly unscrutinized as a whole. Unlike other prolific actor-turned-auteurs — someone like John Cassavetes comes to mind — Franco’s work is understood as an odd outlier of his career. This reading is wrong. Franco’s films present a coherent essay on artistry and the pursuit of storytelling for its own sake, an attempt to take a hifalutin library of signifiers and organize them into the language of everyday human drama. They are works that are unafraid of trying very hard and when they succeed, they succeed. (But don’t get me wrong, emphatic sincerity is great; Rich Juzwiak’s milking of his own sorrow to sell his interview with Anne Hathaway is great.)
A scene from the opening of ‘The Ape’
It begins roughly in the early 2000s. A company called Rabbit Bandini Productions is formed by Franco and Vincent Jolivette, an actor Franco meets when struggling in LA. But Franco is cast as the stoner heartthrob in Freaks and Geeks and Jolivette is cast as “Customer In Store” in Auggie Rose. Jolivette decides he wants to be a producer and they form a company with that legitimately ridiculous name, after the titular hero of John Updike’s Rabbit tetralogy and the hero of John Fante’s Ask the Dust, Arturo Bandini. It will produce all of Franco’s projects along with a certain number of projects Franco considers personally important. At the same time Franco, was working on a number of plays with Merriwether Williams, former head writer on Spongebob Squarepants, that were being produced at an acting school Franco used to attend. Shortly after Sam Raimi’s Spiderman 2 hit theaters, the next project to bear Franco’s name would be an adaptation of one of his plays, his directorial debut, The Ape.
In the final scene of Spiderman 2, Franco’s Harry Osborn looks moodily at his father’s Green Goblin-mask, nodding politely to the overstuffed film that would follow. In The Ape, Franco plays opposite a guy (Brian Lally, the first of many actors whose primary IMDB credits would be in Franco’s other movies) in an ape mask. A handful of curious connections to Spiderman 2 follow; Franco’s character is named Harry Walker, most of the movie takes place in a prominently bricked New York loft that brings to mind Peter Parker’s vaguely unrealistic everyman digs. Franco’s claustrophobic directing style, where something is always happening in the shadow of whoever is speaking, recalls Raimi’s first two Evil Dead movies. Per Nathan Rabin, Franco also misidentifies his protagonist as “Harry Osborn” in The Ape’s DVD commentary, so there’s that.
Franco would make one other movie in this early style and co-written with Williams, Good Time Max, and it’s hard not to conclude that both are terrible. (Franco made another title, Fool’s Gold, in between those, but most traces of it have vanished from the internet and, consequently, refer to other movies also titled Fool’s Gold. Maybe he just really didn’t like it.) Both self-consciously toyed with archetypal narratives: The Ape is a comedy about a male writer grappling with his ego, vis-à-vis a large imaginary ape, and Good Time Max is an addiction drama that takes the trope’s there-by-the-grace-of-god staging literally — featuring two brothers who ‘grow up and grow apart’ as one (Franco) gets lost in the proverbial sauce and the other (unsuccessful actor Jolivette, the only starring role of his career) is some kind of successful surgeon. We know that the kids are geniuses because, on a car trip, they play a game of adding large numbers without a calculator and then pointing to their heads.
Despite Franco’s household name fame, discussion of either movie is sparse on the internet; neither has been reviewed enough to even merit a Rotten Tomatoes score. Kate Erbland called The Ape“the weirdest part of Franco’s already deeply weird career,” back when she wrote for Film School Rejects, and considered it “a shockingly inept” rip-off of Harvey, a Henry Koster movie that starred Jimmy Stewart. An abandoned blog called Why Does It Exist? provided more extensive commentary, writing that The Ape was part of Franco’s dabbling “in the low-brow” and compared it to Franco’s work in movies like Your Highness. Good Time Max would disappear quickly, with little notice, after its Tribeca debut. It’s unceremoniously on Hulu now. But as a pair, both movies become more interesting. The writing on the latter is somewhat atrocious but it also isn’t; it’s a meth-fueled Leaving Las Vegas co-written with a guy who wrote thirty-nine episodes of SpongeBob. It opens with Franco’s character selling coke to a menacing dealer (Jarrod Bunch); jaw agape in a version of his slacker smirk, Franco repeatedly tells him that the bad coke Franco is unloading is “pure as your girl.” A few minutes later, we cut to a scene of Franco fucking the dealer’s aforementioned girl. In another setpiece, Franco takes a job at a computer company and quickly turns the office into a Wolf of Silicon Valley-meth party.
Franco’s early films are unapologetic in flaunting their creator’s sex appeal; taking place in the office life that Franco was born into — his father was a business world math-whiz — they explode Office Space-tedium into a lush buzz of cartoonish sex and drugs. They were insincere with their premises but never in a way that never felt untrue: they were the work of a man who had seen the insides of hundreds of scripts and was exhausted of their traps while trying to duplicate one. Coincidentally, they would be the last original stories that Franco would try to tell as a director. Their portraits of struggling genius were intensely aware of their own failings, a large photo of Dostoevsky hangs over The Ape’s set and the people of Good Time Max are so unbearable that the movie’s obsession with drugs feel like an obvious relief. “I’ve been involved in the biggest commercial movies, movies that broke box-office records. I’ve been in movies that won Academy Awards,” Franco later told Indiewire, “To me, neither of those things were goals.”
Moods explored in Franco’s directorial filmography: unsure (The Ape), adrift (Good Time Max), contemplative (The Broken Tower) and wary (In Dubious Battle)
Franco’s work that followed would hew closer to the real world, if a past version of it. The early slew of bi0pics would, by some, be read as autobiographical; “It’s likely that Franco…sees a kindred spirit in his subject,” Ben Kenigsberg wrote about Sal, Franco’s exploration of the last day of Sal Mineo, the actor who starred opposite James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause. Mineo — like modernist poet Hart Crane, the subject of Franco’s other biopic, The Broken Tower —was also gay. Around this time, rumors of Franco’s homosexuality were running around the internet, namely on Gawker — who engaged in what The Daily Beastwould later call a “years-long crusade to out James Franco.” Franco would later toyfully reference all this when he wrote a somewhat infamous interview of himself as “Gay James” along with a book of poetry titled Straight James/Gay James. His ‘gay’ movies, on the other hand, the ones he made and not the ones he starred in, were curiously unfocused efforts, his camera, fresh out of film school, waiting for something but unsure of how to fill that space. The literary reverence of The Broken Tower could almost be seen as a precursor to his later novel adaptations; in it, Franco delivers a riposte to his populist version of poetry in Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman Howl, where Franco played Allen Ginsberg. In much of The Broken Tower, Franco’s Crane similarly reads his poetry to a smaller crowd and it is obtuse stuff, as Crane’s work is, and the reaction of the crowd is a shrug. In Franco’s own work, he is hardly the populist ragamuffin he is known as nor a likable loser. Franco’s space is between the two, teasing his legendary smile out in only the smallest of portions.
Many are aware of Franco’s first in a series of ‘prestige’ book adaptations: William Faulkner’s As I Lay Lying, a movie that Franco had finally become famous enough to ensure that critics would, briefly, watch. They mostly dismissed it. Even A.O. Scott, whose write-up was vaguely positive, diligently bracketed his discussion with a comparison of Franco’s decision to adapt Faulkner’s novel to the absurd quest of Faulkner’s characters. But why, outside of outsized reverence to books most Americans haven’t read, should this be? Most directors, it is true, when turning to the ‘classics’ make some effort of grappling with them. All the noise in Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby comes to mind. The campy, yet easy to ignore, theatrical staging of Joe Wright’s version of Anna Karenina. These are popular stories and the quest to adapt them is necessarily craven. Franco’s choices have decidedly been novelists whose popularity is less everyday; names like Faulkner and Cormac McCarthy are revered but mainly in the bookstore. While directors like Luhrmann or Wright are forced to supplement or guess at authorial voice in order to fill seats with the sophistication that brands like Fitzgerald or Tolstoy demand, Franco is allowed to have fun with it. They have, generally, been low-budget events and Franco claims to care little if they are seen.
His approach is, consequently, different. His adaptations are more interested in filleting the texts they interpret than in trying, vainly, to match the power of another medium. His staging is, as many have begrudgingly noted, intensely reverent. But his direction mostly avoids the ambling voices of their authors — one imagines a more true adaptation of Faulkner would be a plucky Malick knockoff. Instead, Franco chases the territory of the text like a reader does, looking for places of interest: where the wheels of small plots run privately in a reader’s head. The homeric elements of Faulkner’s work are relaxingly dormant, Franco’s treatment recalls the Coen Brothers’ O Brother, Where Art Thou? — a movie that similarly cast Tim Blake Nelson to similar effect. With the comic talent at Franco’s disposal (Danny McBride also phones it in as Faulkner’s Vernon) and its interest in the adventure underneath the novel’s journey, Franco’s As I Lay Dying ceases to be about death.
The journey to Jefferson, Mississippi is rendered like a fraught tale in the jungle on Lost: everyone has their own little reasons and we tensely wait for their brewing conflicts to clash. The secret pregnancy of Dewey Dell (previously a “Girl Jumping on Bed” in Good Time Max) is run like that of a teenage drama heroine and not like Faulkner’s owner of certain questions of faith and purity. Elsewhere, Franco runs some of the novel’s interior monologues like conversations with the camera in The Office. Franco’s use of a split-screen narrative device is, perhaps, the movie’s only overly portentous element, but even that could be shrugged aside as an experimental holdover from movies like Good Time Max that wanted to contain so many things that they needed two screens to do it. Franco would cast away the remaining experimental infrastructure in the films that followed and his movies would slowly morph into grandiose constructions of glowing cinematic architecture.
Abandoning that jumble of low-budget influences — low-budget horror especially plays a smooth part in both As I Lay Dying and his next project, an adaptation of McCarthy’s Child of God — would turn his next Faulkner adaptation, The Sound and the Fury, into a kind of Masterpiece Theater with extended zooming. His version of the mentally disabled Benji, who Fracno himself plays, in The Sound and the Fury is remarkable, making himself viciously unsexy but the whole thing is played off as a buddy comedy involving lots of whispering and narrating straight from Faulkner. There, too, the predominant use of comic actors — Nelson is reprised, Seth Rogan gives a smart cameo — fesls like an autobiographical rebuff directed at the seriousness that fiction is so often read today. The holiness of a name like Faulkner lost in the surf of screenplay after screenplay. Faulkner becomes just the owner of a nothing more than a story, the kind of thing you tell around a fireplace, but one that keenly possesses far more energy than Your Highness or This is the End. Franco’s turn to John Steinbeck to make In Dubious Battle was a turn toward a more easily filmable storyteller, but Franco, remarkably, did little to make a tale of morally duplicitous Communists inciting a strike into something contemporary. He rendered it as it was: Steinbeck’s ’30s novels were mostly melodramatic propaganda and In Dubious Battle carries that heaviness in every pause between Selena Gomez’s working class drawl. More compelling was Child of God — Franco’s directorial masterpiece and one that creates a coherent narrative behind his work as a whole.
Like his take on The Sound and the Fury, Franco makes a series of overt gestures at the original text: it flashes on the screen and there’s an opening narration. A banjo-laden score is laid adrift the mountains of Appalachia. But Franco lets you forget about all that, never letting Lester Ballard (Scott Haze, one of the only actors who can say they broke out in a James Franco-directed film) get out of our sight. The most obvious influence is something like Danny Boyle’s 127 Hours, which also took place in barren mountains and focused on the personal journey of one man, played by Franco, abandoned in the wild. But Ballard is a destitute piece of the kind of quality white trash that McCarthy loved milling out before he realized he wanted a Nobel Prize; Haze’s Ballard slowly descends into murderous and brilliantly-shot necrophilia. If anything, Franco’s Child of God reads immediately like anemotionally honest version of Craig Gillespie’s PG-13 farce, Lars and the Real Girl. Where Ryan Gosling’s discontent is carried around like a sour punchline and the subversiveness of a sex doll is watered down into twee nonsense, Franco chooses to film a devastatingly lonely Haze earnestly fuck a corpse while watched by stuffed animals he acquired from a fair. It’s a joke, you laugh a little. Then he starts killing people and loading them in a cave. The descent is what Franco is interested in: like Walter White or Tony Soprano, Ballard does horrible things and we are urged to watch because he comes about them through humane frustration. “The necrophilia is of course extreme and shocking, but it’s really getting at something more universal, which is intimacy and desire,” he said on the movie’s press junket.
The word “trash” showed up in a lot of reviews for Child of God and many saw Franco’s use of the novel as a needless act of provocation from a man without an overt agenda, the one assigned to him was self-aggrandizement. (A narrative not unlike Harmony Korine’s reputation with critics; coincidentally, Franco would go on to do his most celebrated acting work in Korine’s Spring Breakers.) But like Franco’s interest in homosexuality or in novels, his interest in Appalachian poverty, serial killing and necrophilia is purely narrative. They make great stories, which Franco makes. If anything, the sole provocation of Franco’s work is its earnest desire to upend the notion that art can provide any measure of self-assured depth. Which is really Sartre’s notion; you gotta do that work yourself.
“The necrophilia is of course extreme and shocking, but it’s really getting at something more universal”
Franco’s latest project, which debuted earlier this year at SXSW, is also a book adaptation, but one by an author slightly less revered by old people who review movies: Greg Sestero and Tom Bissell’s The Disaster Artist. It’s an account of the production of Tommy Wiseau’s The Room, and Franco plays Wiseau.Like Franco’s hero in Child of God, Wiseau is considered somewhat unhinged and is very much an outcast in his world. Personally curious, I went to a movie theater this weekend to witness the spectacle of Wiseau’s movie. People yelled out boring jokes and threw things at the screen because the low critical esteem the movie is held in gave them permission by management. Had they come here just to do that, I wondered. Couldn’t they yell at their own screens, at home? While the crimes that Haze’s character commits are vicious, no scene in Child of God is shot more viciously than the lynch mob that accosts Franco’s anti-hero. In fact, Franco casts himself as their ringleader, he flashes that trademark smile.
I could see the appeal of the The Room, and the uproarious contempt that Franco’s creative pursuits have faced mimic, somewhat, that of Wiseau. I wonder if it will be his attempt to relish in it, to play the artist who cares what people think, whose personal failures are popular jokes, the person we imagined Franco was, doing all of that art. There is a line in Palo Alto, the short story collection that Franco wrote and was turned into Gia Coppola’s debut feature, that I think of sometimes: “It was also a little sad to draw so much because I could see everything that was inside of me.” Franco’s pursuit of story for the sake of itself was something that opposed bald introspection. It’s remains about something else, something more sincere than that. Maybe The Disaster Artist will tell us what.
The most populous city in Canada has appeared on-screen in many different ways over the years.
Enemy (2013)
There are many ways in which cities are portrayed in cinema. Sometimes cities are anonymous and nameless, and sometimes cities become characters in the films they are portrayed in. Cities can be merely incidental settings, or the specific locations within a city can be incredibly important both narratively and visually. The people within a city tend to represent the place itself: how they act, how they dress, where they work, how they speak, and what they eat. All of these things can be related to the place they live. Cities are home to an infinite multitude of experiences — people from different places, with different families, different wants and desires and identities.
There are cities that are frequently remembered as being iconic within the world of cinema. Paris, Rome, New York, Venice, Chicago, and London have all received loving portraits in films such as Woody Allen’s Manhattan and Midnight in Paris, Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless, Nicholas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now, and Michelangelo Anotonioni’s Blow-Up. However, Canadian cities — specifically Toronto — are often disguised to look like other cities, rather than being portrayed for what they really are. Oftentimes, Toronto acts as a stand-in for other cities such as New York (or Midway City in the case of Suicide Squad), and in the process, its cultural and geographical specificities are ignored. The writers at NOW Toronto wrote that Toronto has a sense of “placelessness” that allows it to pass for other places. Of course, there is a treasure trove of hidden gems which explicitly take place in Toronto, and deal with Torontonian life, culture, and locations.
The Toronto-based website Torontoist publishes a series of articles called Reel Toronto, in which writer David Fleischer outlines each shooting location for films and television series set in Toronto. Toronto is an underappreciated cinematic city: it is filled with beautiful and interesting shooting locations, and its architecture is visually stunning. Toronto is a city full of music, food, cinema, art, literature, sports, and a huge variety of people with different cultural experiences. These different elements come together to make Toronto a rich city to explore through the lens of a camera. In this article, I will outline just a few of the many films which lovingly tell stories set inside The Six.
Enemy (2013), dir. Denis Villeneuve
At TIFF 2013, Denis Villeneuve premiered two films: Prisoners and Enemy, both starring Jake Gyllenhaal. While Prisoners received a wide theatrical release, Enemy got pushed aside and was not as widely seen. However, Enemy is a brilliant psychological tale about doubles, and the scarily supernatural things that can happen when one encounters their doppelgänger. The film is perfectly constructed, and features two brilliant performances from Jake Gyllenhaal as well as the eerie presences of Sarah Gadon, Isabella Rossellini, and Melanie Laurent. The film takes place in Toronto (and Mississauga), and while it is not explicitly mentioned by name, its presence is deeply felt. One of the most creepy and powerful shots of the film is a wide shot of the Toronto skyline (including the CN Tower) with a giant spider slowly moving across the city, its body looming over the skyscrapers around it. The film is a nightmarish version of Toronto where everything looks golden yellow and hazy. Villeneuve frames the streetcar wires as though they are part of the spider’s web. Enemy is one of the more dizzying and mysterious portrayals of Toronto in cinema.
Videodrome (1983), dir. David Cronenberg
In 2009, the Cinematheque Ontario (now known as TIFF Cinematheque) celebrated Toronto’s 175th birthday by hosting a series called Toronto on Film. Videodrome was the only David Cronenberg film included in the series, despite many of his films being shot in the city — such as The Fly, Dead Ringers, and Crash. Videodrome captures the strangeness and alienation of the city, while also making reference to CityTV, Toronto’s most prominent television news station. The NOW Toronto writers point out that the film uses the city as a stage for its action, capturing what it looks like while on the brink of social upheaval over graphic pornography being introduced onto the airwaves. In the film, the station is named CIVIC-TV, but refers to Moses Znaimer, the founder of CityTV, who at one point aired softcore “Baby Blue Movies” late at night on the station. Cronenberg takes it further with graphic violence and pornography which elicit intense visceral reactions in those who see it on the television, giving birth to the “New Flesh.” James Woods and Debbie Harry represent the cool, hip, innovative style of CityTV in the 1980s, with a violent Cronenberg touch. Cronenberg brilliantly uses the locations and the climate of the city to reference what were at the time recent and famous Toronto events.
Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (2010), dir. Edgar Wright
Pizza Pizza and Honest Ed’s (and some romance in the middle).
Edgar Wright’s 2010 adaptation of Bryan Lee O’Malley’s comic book series is one of the most adorable and innovative portrayals of Toronto onscreen. Wright visited Toronto multiple times before he read O’Malley’s graphic novels, and lived in Toronto for a year before he shot the film, so he was familiar with all the locations O’Malley had drawn, and all of the shooting locations. Fleischer writes that this is not merely a Hollywood movie set in Toronto, but it recreates the comics exactly, even shooting in the most banal Toronto locations which O’Malley included in his novels. There is even a Google Maps page which lists all of the locations featured in the film. Wright notes that “…the apartments feel lived in, the neighbourhoods they’re living in feel appropriate to the characters…”
Sidenote: I bought all my David Bowie albums here.
Wright’s vision of Toronto is of an energetic, youthful place where young people fall in love and express themselves and have their hearts broken. NOW Toronto notes that the locations are vibrant and colorful, representing the energy of the characters. This is also exacerbated by the videogame and comic book aesthetics and sound effects that Wright brilliantly incorporates. Ramona Flowers (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) lives in Cabbagetown, on Carlton Street, Scott (Michael Cera) and Knives Chau (Ellen Wong) visit the old location of Sonic Boom records in the Bloor/Bathurst area and eat at the Pizza Pizza across from Honest Ed’s. The characters spend time in the Annex and at Polson Pier, and Wright captures the old mural outside of Lee’s Palace. At one point, the characters encounter a Hollywood crew filming an action picture at Casa Loma — a meta-cinematic moment, referencing the fact that lots of Hollywood films use Casa Loma as a shooting location (for example, The Pacifier), and sometimes when walking through Toronto (or fighting your new girlfriend’s evil exes), you will encounter film crews.
Lie with Me (2005), dir. Clément Virgo
Virgo’s 2005 feature portrays Toronto as a hot, sticky city where people struggle to connect with one another, both physically and emotionally. Leila (Lauren Lee Smith) begins a sexual relationship with David (Six Feet Under’s Eric Balfour), but the two often have trouble communicating their emotions to one another. They both care deeply about one another, but as Leila states at one point in the film — “I didn’t know how to love him.” This film is primarily shot in The Annex, specifically around Bloor Street. Leslie Felperin at Variety notes that “Barry Stone’s lensing, favoring a soft, Northern-climes afternoon light for the sex scenes in particular, looks dreamy throughout.” The way Lie with Me visually portrays Toronto is unique from the way it is typically shown on-screen. Felperin perfectly articulates how the film displays Toronto as a warm, dreamy place, rather than cold and alienating in the way Cronenberg usually shoots it. This is a movie about physical connection, and how a particularly intense sexual relationship can affect one’s life in strange and startling ways. It does focus on the common Torontonian themes of isolation and failure to communicate, but is filled with pleasure, sunshine, and soft breezes.
Take This Waltz (2011), dir. Sarah Polley
Similar to Lie with Me, Sarah Polley’s Take This Waltz provides a warm and romantic vision of Toronto. The film is named after a song by iconic Canadian musician Leonard Cohen, and takes place in beautiful Torontonian locations from start to finish. Margot (Michelle Williams) and her husband Lou (Seth Rogen) live on a sunny street in Toronto’s Little Portugal neighborhood, she rides her bike to the Royal Cinema, walks through Kensington Market, rides the ferry and the scrambler at Centre Island, and has coffee with Daniel (Luke Kirby) at the Lakeview restaurant on Dundas and Ossington. Polley told NOW Toronto that:
“I wanted to make the most romantic sort of version of Toronto I could possibly think of… which meant playing with reality a little bit, right? Toronto’s not a perfect city, and it’s not always a beautiful city. There’s huge problems with it — and a lot of that is omitted from the film, for better or for worse. I wanted to fantasize about what the most idyllic Toronto would be, and represent how Toronto actually feels to me”
Summer dresses and Quebecois cinema! (Oh, and Seth Rogen)
Polley’s film is a love letter to Toronto, with each place lovingly framed as the backdrop for Margot’s tumultuous life. Polley casts everything in a bright orange glow, capturing the warmth of the summer in Toronto. As she points out, Toronto is not a perfect city — there is poverty, systemic racism, and gentrification, to name a few of its faults — but the medium of cinema allows her to shapeshift the city into what she wants it to be, and what it feels like to be there.
Sabah (2005), dir. Ruba Nadda
Sabah is an underseen gem from 2005. It tells the story of a Muslim woman from Syria and her family’s experience of living in Toronto. Specifically, Sabah (Arsinée Khanjian) falls in love with a non-Muslim white man, Stephen (Shawn Doyle), and spends most of the film living in fear of what her family will think. Muslim families make up about 3% of Toronto’s population, and approximately 46% of Toronto’s population is made up of immigrants. Sabah and her family are quite traditional, but her niece Souhaire (Fadia Nadda) encourages Sabah to express herself in any way she wants. Souhaire encourages Sabah to dance, to wear dresses and makeup, and to pursue a relationship with Stephen. Sabah’s family eventually have an honest conversation about how they feel about Stephen, and in the end they accept his relationship with Sabah. While it deals with serious familial issues, the film is quite lighthearted and sweet. Nadda’s film reflects experiences that are likely familiar to many Toronto residents. Toronto is a place where people strive to understand one another, even if it is difficult and doesn’t always work. Stephen cannot really understand Sabah’s experience as a Muslim woman, but he tries to connect with her and her family in the best way he can. Nadda beautifully frames both interiors and exteriors of the city, capturing the beauty of the city lights at night and the tranquility of a city swimming pool. Sabah is one of the most low key romantic films set in Toronto.
I have only outlined a few of the many films set in Toronto. There are so many forgotten masterworks set and shot in The Six which play an important role in Canadian cinema. Toronto (and Canada as a whole) is home to film directors from all different backgrounds and experiences, and their cinematic works reflect these varied experiences. Many directors reflect on issues and themes that are specific to Toronto (ie. Cronenberg’s CityTV references in Videodrome, Scott Pilgrim coming across a film crew at Casa Loma). The definitive text on Torontonian cinema is Toronto on Film, written by Geoff Pevere, Piers Handling, Matthew Hays, Wyndham Wise, Brenda Longfellow, Steve Gravestock, and Justin D. Edwards. The authors write in detail about Toronto’s cinematic history, common onscreen themes, and shooting locations and styles. Toronto is a perfect cinematic city in that it is filled with beautiful shooting locations, interesting people, rich history, and so many talented filmmakers.
It’s been four excruciatingly long years since The World’s End, the last film from Edgar Wright, which in Edgar-Wright-fan years is like a century. He was set up to direct Ant-Man, but we all know how that turned out. And while you might think Wright spent some of his time post-Marvel licking that particular wound, you’d be wrong, because Edgar Wright knows that living well is the best revenge, so in the last few years he’s been busy gearing up for not one but two films. Immediately after Ant-Man Wright started developing Baby Driver, which is at long last completed, set for a June 28 release, and so far is garnering the best reviews of the director’s career. At the same time he was starting Baby Driver back in 2014, though, there was another project the director was kicking around, an adaptation of the novel Grasshopper Jungle, and we’ve learned this week from THR that not only it GJ going to be Wright’s Baby Driver follow-up, it’s already found a distributor in New Regency, who outbid a host of candidates for the rights, including Netflix. Wright and his producing partner Nira Park are producing, along with Scott Rosenberg and Matt Tolmach, the team behind upcoming tentpoles Jumanji and Venom.
The novel, by Andrew Smith, is a YA apocalypse novel with giant bugs. Really. Dig the synopsis:
Simmering within Ealing, Iowa, is a deadly genetically engineered plague capable of unleashing unstoppable soldiers — six-foot-tall praying mantises with insatiable appetites for food and sex. No one knows it, of course, until Austin and his best friend Robby accidentally release it on the world. An ever-growing plague of giant, flesh-hungry insects is bad enough, but Austin is also up to his eyeballs in sexual confusion — is he in love with Robby or his girlfriend, Shann? Both of them make him horny, but most things do. In an admittedly futile attempt to capture the truth of his history, painfully honest Austin narrates the events of the apocalypse intermingled with a detailed account of the “connections that spiderweb through time and place,” leading from his great-great-great-grandfather Andrzej in Poland to Shann’s lucky discovery of an apocalypse-proof bunker in her new backyard.
Excited yet? Sounds like The Dreamers meets Attack the Block, an off-kilter combination I for one am all in favor of. There’s no timeline in place as yet, but considering the business-end of things is taken care of, hopefully we’ll see this one by the end of 2018.
A new video posits both films happened the same night, and we believe it.
Perry’s Note: Today I’m handing over one of my time slots toDutch filmmaker and all-round creative animal Peet Gelderblom, who in his latest video essay argues that Martin Scorsese’s cult classic After Hours and John Landis’ little-seen gem Into The Night are East Coast and West Coast chronicles of the very same night in 1985. Sounds off the wall? Well, off the wall is just another day at the office for Gelderblom, who earlier pitted Hitchcock against De Palma in a Split Screen Bloodbath; who put God in the same room with Satan in a mammoth mash-up compiled from two dozen movies; who made Kermit cry and Werner Herzog talk funny and whose fan edit of Raising Cain became a De Palma approved Director’s Cut.
Check out the video here, and Gelderblom’s written intro below:
In 1985, two famous American filmmakers released jet black comedies about white-collar workers breaking away from their tedious day jobs to experience the worst night of their lives. On the East Coast, Martin Scorsese directed the cult classic After Hours, set in New York City. On the West Coast, John Landis directed his little-seen gem Into The Night, set in Los Angeles.
These films performed poorly at the box office and remain highly underrated today. I believe they deserve better, just like I believe both stories took place on the very same night…
After Hours and Into The Night belong to the subgenre screwball noir; an interesting fusion of two diametrically opposed types of movies: the screwball comedy and film noir. Both movies feature mysterious blondes dragging their clueless leading men into a long series of increasingly outlandish misadventures. Both movies feature taxi rides from hell, casual nudity, ridiculous director cameos, doors with attitude, menacing statues, running from angry mobs, unexpected corpses, impertinent waitresses, awkward silences, surreal encounters and a whole string of quirky side-characters.
To counter-balance the madness, Scorsese and Landis rely on finely calibrated central performances by Griffin Dunne and Jeff Goldblum respectively. As average Joe’s Paul Hackett and Ed Okin, they telegraph their thoughts, questions and doubts with pin-point accuracy and make us empathize each step of the way, while the world around them couldn’t care less.
In spite of the similarities, it’s intriguing to notice how different the movies play. The tone of After Hours could be described as tense, paranoid and agitated. Into The Night is by comparison dreamy, laid-back and inquisitive. Scorsese’s brand of humor leans towards farce with events becoming progressively hysterical, while Landis opts for a playful blend of dead-pan comedy with slapstick elements. Scorsese teases the viewer with an erratic story line capped by a surprisingly bleak ending, whereas Landis keeps his audience at the edge of their seats by merging a classic Hollywood caper feel with sharp satire and shocking bursts of realistic violence.
Paul Hackett starts out wanting to get laid and ends up just wanting to go home. Ed Okin starts out as an insomniac trapped in a loveless marriage, who ends up falling in love and falling asleep. Before the closing credits roll, After Hours has turned deeply noir, while Into The Night emerges proudly screwball.
Containing multitudes is a time-honored cinematic tradition.
Sure, featuring a single actor as more than one character in your movie smells a bit like a gimmick—but at the end of the day, it’s an efficient and often effective means of showcasing the versatility of a performer. And that can hardly be faulted. We caught a whiff of it with Split this year, though McAvoy might be disqualified for being a Legion of One rather than a cast with a shared face. Personally, I had no idea the trend cast such a wide-reaching historical net — I’d stupidly assumed it was something made possible by the advent of modern makeup and digital tech. Again, stupidly.
Be it gimmick or something more nuanced (or both!) — it’s particularly fascinating that it has such a long standing history as a marketing device. Film quality aside, the main draw is often the performative tour-de-force itself. Some things never change. And so, without further ado:
Sixty Years a Queen (1913)
In which Rolf Leslie plays 27 different monarchists.
Based off a 1897 work of nonfiction of the same name, Sixty Years a Queen lavishly depicts the reign of Queen Victoria, the era she lived in, and the intriguing British figureheads she interacted with over the course of her lengthy rule. It took a then unprecedented financial investment on the part of silent film pioneers WG Barker (of Ealing Studios) and GB Samuelson to realize the picture. A worthwhile risk, as by all accounts the film’s optimistic pre-War nationalism proved extremely popular. What makes Sixty Years a Queen so, so much more than your run-of-the-mill big budget historical docudrama is this: for some inscrutable reason, character actor Rolf Leslie plays 27 different roles. There are many questions: who exactly are these unspecified “27 Characters?”; did recycling Leslie serve a narrative purpose?; an economic one? Unfortunately, these questions will have to remain a mystery. Apart from a small fragment and a souvenir book containing production stills, which feature Leslie, the film is lost. All we can say for certain is that fresh out of the gate, way waaaaay way back in 1913, Leslie set the bar unreasonably high for future multiple-role performances.
The Play House (1921)
In which Buster Keaton is literally a one man band
Hey there. I have cropped out some egregious blackface for formatting purposes. You can learn more about the racism of minstrel shows here.
Early in The Play HouseBuster Keaton looks up from a playbill (in which all the credits read: KEATON) and remarks to himself, quite literally: “This fellow Keaton seems to be the whole show.” And he is! ThePlay House’s opening sequence takes the shape of a variety show, and Keaton plays not only the audience but the band and the vaudeville act. Through pretty striking trick-photography, Keaton is shown snarkily watching himself conduct an orchestra (of Keatons), and later, a Keaton-exclusive minstrel act. This feat was accomplished by cameraman Elgin Lessley through the use of a special matte box, placed in front of the camera, comprised of nine independently mobile shutters. After shooting a sequence, Lessley then rewound the film (by fucking hand), opened the next segment, re-filmed the sequence, and repeated this process. Georges Méliès attempted something similar in The Melomaniac(1903), but it’d never been pulled off so seamlessly. Keaton, as quoted by Rudi Belsh, had this to say on Lessley: “If he were off the slightest fraction, no matter how carefully I timed my movements, the composite action could not have been synchronized. But Elgin was outstanding among all the studios. He was a human metronome.” Keaton wouldn’t divulge Lessley’s methods until decades after the film’s premiere, so perhaps it’s no surprise that the multiplicity of Keatons wasn’t advertised at the time. But had Keaton been anything short of a self-aware class act — I have no doubt that posters would be plastered with a Keaton-Kaleidoscope.
Seven Faces (1929)
In which Paul Muni *is* the ‘Night at the Museum’
Fox Film Corporation (later 20th C. Pictures) — also, hi super heinous full-body blackface!
Directed by Berthold Viertel, Seven Faces stars old man ScarfacePaul Muni as — don’t hold your breath — seven faces. More specifically, Muni plays six wax figures of historical persons and their elderly caretaker Papa Chibou. While the central premise revolves around the tried and true “lovers have a misunderstanding but it works out” arc (no joke, the original title was “Lover Come Back,”) we’re all really here for Muni. Enacting a kind of one-man Plato’s Symposium, Papa Chibou imagines the various waxwork figures offering their individual diatribes on love and courtship — which by all accounts was a veritable showcase of Muni’s talent. By looking at reviews and adverts, it’s clear that Muni’s performances were the backbone of the film’s media strategy: in one review images of Muni and text that reads “PAUL MUNI WHO PLAYS 7 CHARACTERS” eclipse the other actors’ credits and even the film’s title. Another boasts: “The miracle man of the talkies plays seven roles in this feature! The most unusual picture ever shown!” Unfortunately, like Sixty Years a Queen, Seven Faces is super lost. Check your grandma’s attic. Please.
Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949)
In which Alec Guinness plays both murderer and murderee(s)
From ‘Focus On Film’ — Autumn 1972
In 2014, I had the immense pleasure of seeing A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder, which won the Tony for Best Musical that same year. The show concerns the recently orphaned Monty, who upon learning he’s actually the member of the inordinately aristocratic (and wealthy) D’Ysquith family, resolves to murder everyone ahead of him in the line of succession. It’s phenomenal — least of all because of Jefferson Mays, who, through the dark art of quick-changes, plays the entire D’Ysquith family (imagine my delight when he popped up in Inherent Vice!). Why am I bringing this up? Because about one minute into Kind Hearts and Coronets I realized it was the same fucking story as that delightful musical I’d been raving about for four years. Turns out both are based off Roy Horniman’s 1907 novel Israel Rank: The Autobiography of a Criminal. In Kind HeartsDennis Price’s kind and sinister Louis (Monty in the musical), sets about bumping off all of the surviving members of the aristocratic (and wealthy) D’Ascoyne family, each portrayed hilariously by veritable dynamo Alec Guinness. Seeing Guinness slip between genders, ages, and accents is a riot — his portrayal of the dawdling and charming Parson is particularly humorous. As with Seven Faces, the film capitalizes on Guinness’ multiplicitous performance in both the art and language of its marketing — highlighting his presence(s) and talent.
It’s a damnable party foul to exclude Peter Sellers from a “1 actor, many characters” list — so I won’t. Based on Leonard Wibberley’s satirical Cold War novel of the same name, Jack Arnold’s The Mouse That Roared tells of the teeny-tiny (and imaginary) European duchy of Grand Fenwick. When Fenwick is bankrupted by an American imitation of their sole export, “Pinot Grand Fenwick,” the duchy attempts to rectify its bankruptcy by declaring war on the United States — and losing. Effectively: The Producers but with international politics. Sellers plays three roles: Fenwick’s aloof and doting monarch the Duchess Gloriana XII; its crafty prime minister Count Rupert Mountjoy; and Tully Bascombe, Fenwick’s overwhelmed and massively endearing field marshal/forest ranger. Naturally, satire-qua-satire, Fenwick defeats the U.S. through a series of hilariously improbable (and nuclear) circumstances. But again, at the crux of the film’s marketing is the versatility and skill of its chimeric lead. The trailer, which is primarily an introduction of each of Sellers’ “many parts,” beings: “a hilarious new personality: Peter Sellars in three gloriously funny roles.” The visual advertisements echo this, featuring Sellers in his three garbs, usually making fun of him being in drag. Proving prophetic of Sellers’ reception in Dr. Strangelove, his mutability and skill are at the foreground.
FUN FACT: Sellers took on the role(s) to emulate his hero, the aforementioned Alec Guinness.
Additional oldie films that fit the bill:
The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943), in which Deborah Kerr plays 3 roles!
Gildersleeve’s Ghost (1944), in which Harold Peary plays 3 roles!
Sprawa do Zalatwienia (1953), in which Adolf Dymsza plays 10 roles!
The Sheep Has Five Legs (1954), in which Fernandel plays 5 roles!
Our internship program continues anew this summer.
Here at Film School Rejects, we have a lot on our plates. Our editorial team spends its days wrangling freelance columnists and delivering daily content we hope is worthy of our platform and audience. Don’t get us wrong, it’s the best job in the world, but it’s also a lot of hard work. But that won’t stop us from finding time and energy to bring a new generation of writers into the fold and help them hone the skills necessary to make it in this world of cultural commentary.
Over the years, FSR has been fertile ground for up and coming writers. We’ve had bloggers, columnists, and editors go on to bigger and better things, writing for such publications as The New York Times, CNN, Vanity Fair, The Atlantic, The A.V. Club, IndieWire, MTV, and many others. While we wouldn’t dare try to take credit for their success, we do have a proven track record for being the right publication for the right moment in a writer’s career. It’s something we’re very proud of.
With this in mind, we’re opening up a new round of internships for Summer/Fall. We’d like to offer young writers the opportunity to find their voices and begin to find their audiences. Here are some of the benefits of interning with us:
Experience: Interns at FSR have an opportunity to write daily, to sharpen their saws, and to learn of the different methods of providing cultural criticism. There are very few “film critic” jobs left these days. The world of entertainment journalism and cultural criticism requires a different skill set. This is something we can help you develop.
Access: Our interns have the opportunity to learn from a team with decades worth of experience. Learn how a digital publication works, how to work well with a remote team, how to handle the digital publishing cycle and meet deadlines, and what it’s like to work with a team of editors.
Build Your Resume: The best thing you can do if you want to be a writer is to get out there and write. We can give you this opportunity.
A Manageable Commitment: Some publications will take on intern-level writers and work them to the bone. We want you to have the space and time to learn. The commitment is relatively light (5–10 hours per week). We also aren’t going to string you along forever. Internships begin in June and run until the end of November 2017.
This is a remote, unpaid position that requires a dependable internet connection. Internships have the potential to turn into more permanent, paid assignments — such daily, weekly, or monthly columns — others will turn out to simply be good experience. You can also request course credit. Either way, you’ll be part of the FSR family. Which is no small thing.
If you are interested in applying to become an intern,please visit and fill out this form. If you have questions that aren’t answered by our application form, please email neil@filmschoolrejects.com.
Scream Factory brings an under-appreciated horror anthology to Collector’s Edition Blu-ray.
Great horror anthologies are hard to come by these days, but luckily there are still plenty to be rediscovered thanks to home video labels like Scream Factory. 1995’s Tales from the Hood is a highly entertaining blend of horror and social commentary from director Rusty Cundieff (who co-wrote alongside Darin Scott who also co-wrote an earlier horror anthology From a Whisper to a Scream), and it’s now found a new home on Blu-ray. Keep reading as we take a look at the film and new Collector’s Edition Blu-ray.
As with all the best anthology films Tales from the Hood features a wraparound tale (“Welcome to My Mortuary”) from which the individual stories are born, and the script couldn’t have chosen a better setting. Three gang-bangers come to a mortuary to pick up a shipment of drugs, and while they’re creeped out by the place and the mortician, Mr. Simms (Clarence Williams III), the lure of a drug haul is too powerful to resist. Before handing over the goods he brings the young men on a tour and shares a handful of stories he claims explain the various corpses.
First up is a tale (“Rogue Cop Revelation”) of three white cops (including Wings Hauser) who pull over, beat, and kill a black politician who’s been leading the charge against police corruption. One year later they find themselves at the man’s grave site only to discover too late that the man they murdered is hungry for revenge. The story is visibly influenced by the reality of Rodney King (which occurred four years prior) with scenes of police brutality set to Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit.” It’s a straight forward tale of revenge from beyond the grave, but solid stunt work and a fun mix of special effects elevate its message of accountability and responsibility in entertaining ways.
Next up is a story (“Boys Do Get Bruised”) about a little boy who’s being bullied at school and abused at home. He claims the latter is being committed by a monster, but while his teacher tries to discover the truth the boy finds his own way of dealing with the problem. The highlight here is seeing David Alan Grier play a violent asshole — and seeing what becomes of him — but it’s ultimately a slight and obvious slice of wish fulfillment.
Story three (“KKK Comeuppance”) features a racist politician (Corbin Bernsen) who takes up residence in an old plantation while running for higher office. He’s ex KKK, but he still holds on to all of his racist ideals, and while the locals picketing outside can’t bring him down the ghosts of slaves who suffered in and around the house would like a word. This is a fun little tale of just desserts that reminds favorably of shorts from Night Gallery, Trilogy of Terror, and Stephen King’s “Battleground.”
The fourth and final tale (“Hard Core Convert”) follows a gang member whose life sentence after being caught up in a massive shoot-out is commuted for scientific experimentation. He finds himself in the custody of a female Dr. Frankenstein (Rosalind Cash) who subjects him to A Clockwork Orange-inspired sensory overload coupling images of America’s racist past — whites killing blacks — with his own present — blacks killing blacks. There’s a genre element at play here, but in a film filled with social commentary on race in America this is the most brutal and powerful in its charge against the futility of black on black violence in a world already stacked against them.
Tales from the Hood holds up extremely well in its stories, presentation, and themes. Some of the effects are dated, but there’s an undeniable charm in the way they balance the film’s heavier aspects and ideas. The movie’s marketing sold it as a comedic spoof of sorts, but while there are laughs here it’s a far more relevant and accomplished film than the trailers would have you believe.
Scream Factory gives Tales from the Hood a high definition transfer and includes a handful of recycled special features alongside a brand new, hour long making-of.
Commentary with director/co-writer Rusty Cundieff and co-writer Darin Scott
*NEW* Making of Tales from the Hood [56:13] — Entertaining in its own right, this is a pretty detailed look at the film’s production featuring new interviews with Cundieff, Scott, and a handful of other members of the cast and crew including a very funny Bernsen and the Chiodo Brothers (Killer Klowns from Outer Space).
One of the biggest hot-button issues in contemporary filmmaking is the film versus digital debate. Each side has its advocates and detractors, with those in favor of film citing its timeless qualities and those in favor of digital citing its ease of use and lower cost. Me personally, I’m a film guy, digital makes me feel like I’m watching a soap opera or a home movie, it brings me closer to the world of the film — which is part of its design, to increase verisimilitude — but I don’t want to be that close, I like the remove of filmstock and I’ll take the epic-ness it conjures over the reality of digital eight days a week.
Seems the folks over at The Royal Ocean Film Society agree with me, because their latest video is all about loving 16mm. Their argument hinges on three key traits of filmstock: the grainy look of it, the implied artistry and technical proficiency inherent in working with film over digital, and a frank cost analysis that reveals the gulf between the formats isn’t as wide as you might think.
Wherever you land in this debate, you can’t deny that it’s the grandiose, larger-than-life artificiality of film — the product — that made you fall in love with film — the artform. This insightful, intelligently nostalgic video is the perfect tribute to that, as well as being the perfect rallying cry for the continued use of film in film.
In Praise of 16mm was originally published in Film School Rejects on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
‘Tokyo Drift’ Saunters Out Of Old Mexico Into Neon Glory
Justin Lin’s debut embodies the best of the Fast and Furious franchise.
“You know those old Westerns where the cowboys make a run for the border? This is my Mexico. … Look at all those people down there. They follow the rules for what? They’re letting fear lead them. … Life’s simple. You make choices and you don’t look back.” — Han Seoul-Oh
The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift is the best Fast and Furious movie. I hold this truth to be self-evident. And that’s my piece for this week. Thanks for coming out. I kid! Just give me about twelve miles of runway to make my case.
Justin Lin crosses into a world of intoxicating coolness. Without that atmosphere, it’s impossible to understand why anyone would get involved with the Yakuza. The neon revelry in Tokyo is painfully lush. I want to be out of control. I want to go fast. I want to be untouchable. Give it all to me. I want to live deliciously. That hard sell made easy is why Lin’s entry makes for the best of the franchise. The racing scenes and action sequences are the best shot and most grounded. The relationships and character motivations are the most consistent and easy to understand. And the story is the most tightly, sensibly constructed. It is elegantly simple.
I know there’s an uphill battle. It doesn’t have the worst Rotten Tomatoes fan score (that belongs to 2 Fast 2 Furious) or the worst RT Critics score (which belongs to Fast & Furious). But, it’s closer to the bottom than the top on both counts. It’s got the lowest box office performance. And, aside from myself and a few other die hards, it seems to be mostly thought of as an addendum to the franchise.
A chopper with NOS: the embodiment of cool to excess.
The FF is a thematically varied franchise and, honestly, totally ridiculous when taken as a whole. Settle down, I love it to pieces. But, let’s also be a bit real here. The Fast and the Furious is Romeo and Juliet in cars. 2 Fast 2 Furious is Bad Boys in cars. Fast & Furious is Traffic in cars. Fast Five is Ocean’s 11 in cars. Fast & Furious 6 is The Avengers in cars. Furious 7 is Mission: Impossible in cars. Tokyo Drift is the only one actually about racing.
Without Tokyo Drift, there would not be a franchise. 2 Fast 2 Furious is a mess. Delightful, but still a mess. It had two returning characters and offered no continuation or development of the bromance between Dom and Brian. Essentially, it orphaned the original wunderkind with a soft reboot. And while there may have been style, there wasn’t a lot of substance. Lin’s first entry whet the appetite for stylistic car mayhem and enduring friendships. It’s the Justin Timberlake of the FF franchise. It brought sexy back. From there, your original stars get hungry. And once the fourth film is made, they can forge ahead with the moment of brilliance, the Ocean’s 11 of cars, Fast Five. That’s when it becomes a franchise.
Tokyo Drift makes that possible. And for the next three films, every brilliant moment, shot, and quip is mined for reference to the newer, larger audience. All the while, Lin is wrestling the storylines of these characters into something that, in retrospect, looks like a well-executed plan. In terms of individual contributions to the enduring, profitable nature of franchises, Lin’s stamp on the Fast and Furious is amongst the most impressive.
Everything is fine.
From the opening, Tokyo Drift has the racing turned to 11. Sean’s (Lucas Black) devil-may-care engagement in his ’71 Chevy Monte Carlo with the local jock in his Dodge Viper makes for a thrilling race through a neighborhood under construction. When Sean realizes he has to drive through houses to win his race, he laconically declares ‘Oh well’ and smashes that potential future to pieces. Y’all, they wreck a neighborhood and a future at the same time. And they do it with the most American of muscle cars.
I don’t want to get too philosophical today, but, like, you guys, I kind of do. The setting of the opening race is not without meaning. A rebel without a cause racing Ken and Barbie through a literalized version of the building of the American Dream? Both parties in character defining, quintessential American cars? Uh, yes please. Lin is the perfect director to grapple with the malaise surrounding the saccharine pursuit of the Dream. Check his first solo directorial effort with Better Luck Tomorrow. He takes the themes he worked with there and wraps them up here in racing scenes for your viewing pleasure.
DK schooling Sean in the art of the drift.
When Sean challenges DK (Brian Tee), out of sheer cockiness, he barrels forward into a competition he literally does not understand. Han (Sung Kang) loans him a car to see what he’s got. And what he’s got is brashness to infinity and beyond. But, I’ve never enjoyed watching somebody fail so much. The hard turns of the drifting circuit require finesse. Sean is hard charging, but he has no way to moderate his aggression towards the world. He slams into every single turn, ultimately finishing in a car whose surface beauty has been destroyed.
Every single race progresses or realizes some character development for Sean. To include the moment he learns to talk to Neela (Nathalie Kelley) and they drift beautifully down a mountain side. If you’re a fan of the franchise, you have to watch this movie with an eye towards what Lin is accomplishing with each of the races. There are no racing moments just to have a wild or gorgeous drift sequence. This movie is a lean story-telling machine. And it is here for both your thinking and viewing pleasure.
Power slide to sexy victory pose.
What is Tokyo Drift about? It’s a movie entirely about learning to live by pushing against the boundaries of what’s possible and what’s understood. Push so hard, you start to lose control. That’s the moment you live in. You can’t win in drift racing by hurling yourself full speed at a problem. You have to go fast, but you have to yield some control. The art is in knowing where to yield. If you aren’t flirting with that boundary, you aren’t really in it. And, I mean, god damn, it doesn’t get more Dylan Thomas than that. Do not go gentle into that good night. You’ve got to rage against the dying of the light. “And you, my father, there on the sad height, Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.”
This movie breathes Thomas and shoots burning rubber into the dying of the light, and I can’t hardly take it. The franchise is The Fast and The Furious, and Justin Lin makes his entry via a racing metaphor for Dylan Thomas and how to live without regret. I mean, I’ve got a primal scream trying to make it’s way out here. Do you feel me? Do you? Rage, you bastards. Live! Live your lives!
Han’s still alive, right? Right? He is.
Through this framework, he gives us Han, the best character of the franchise. Han is a man struggling with the outcome of his life. He refers to Tokyo as his Mexico. This movie, about Dylan Thomas and regret, is also a stealth Western about a retired gunfighter who played big, won big, and lost the only thing that mattered. It’s pushing all my buttons.
Han is the soul of cool. He’s such a complex character to talk about in release order of the films. If you haven’t, I recommend a timeline watch of the movies. Tokyo Drift plays so strong in between 6 and 7. But, even what you get in this movie is impressive. The way he describes himself as the gunfighter, retired to old Mexico goes to work on me. There’s so much regret in those retirements. If Han wasn’t better about keeping the right people around him, you could easily see him in a Peckinpah film, talking to a decapitated head riding shotgun in his car on the way to his own ignominious end. But, that isn’t him. Regardless, his palpable sense of something lost in Tokyo Drift clearly has him struggling for control.
Everything is fine. Han is totally happy.
Sean’s zest for life is appealing to Han. It would be to you, too. Imagine creating this escape route from a life consumed by violence and chaos, but designed for you and a partner. Only, your partner doesn’t make it. Heaven without the company you planned for sounds an awful lot like hell to me. Han sees a kindred spirit and wants to bring him into his life. He sees somebody he can mentor and someone to relate to. Han sells the heart of this movie. Without him, Sean is a teenage hothead who unbelievably winds up murdered by a wanna-be gangster. With him, Sean finds direction and purpose. It’s beautiful storytelling.
Tokyo Drift ain’t the Citizen Kane of Teenaged Wasteland movies. But, it’s aiming for something like it. I know it’s been publically lambasted as a lackluster story, but that’s just plain wrong. It’s a simple story. But, not one without purpose or meaning. It’s a rock-and-roll riff on some heavy themes, with roaring cars and the perspective of a young man yearning to live but with no idea how to do it. It doesn’t take 140 minutes of pumped action to get there either. And yet, this movie spends practically half it’s time in a car. It’s action scenes hold the proof of what Lin would get up to later in the franchise. Story to story, action sequence to action sequence, shot to shot, soundtrack to mother flipping soundtrack, Tokyo Drift comes out ahead. Not by much. But, winning is winning. Any real racer will tell you, it’s not how much you win by that matters.
Live-action meets Lego animation in this delightfully absurd short.
Who doesn’t love Legos? No one I associate with, that’s for sure. Today kids got all these elaborate playsets that tie in to movie or comic book franchises, but there’s still something to be said for a big ole bucket of random pieces and the way it can engage the imagination of a child. Legos bring out the inventor in all of us, they cause us to examine the structure and makeup of things, and not just the finished result. How many architects, construction foremen, city planners, engineers all sorts and other such professional creators were born of a pile of Legos? A bunch, I’d bet.
This idea of Legos as an instigator of great ideas is at the heart of Click, a short film from director Leigh Marling for Bluesource that combines live-action stop-motion with Lego animation into a lively and succinct short tracing the impact of invention on one curly-mustachioed man.
This short has the look and feel of something that would have played as a standalone skit during Pee-Wee’s Playhouse, and I mean that as a big, fat compliment. Marling and crew have made a film every bit as wackily inspiring as its subject, and one that deserves to be seen by children and adults alike. Enjoy.
As The Fate of The Furious enters theaters, a ranking of its 1st Assistant Director’s oeuvre.
Friday brings us the release of The Fate of the Furious, the eighth film in The Fast & The Furious series. Thus, there could be no better time to look back and rank the previous works of one of the films most notable craftsmen, a man whose name is legendary. I speak of course of First Assistant Director Frank Capra III.
Capra III is the grandson of director Frank Capra, a Hollywood legend whose work includes It Happened One Night, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, and It’s a Wonderful Life. How did that pedigree fare two generations removed? This exhaustive look at Mr. Capra III’s 1st AD career will tell the tale.
While the film’s director often gets the lion’s share of the credit, the First AD is one of the most critical positions on set. In fact, it’s the most important person “below the line.” (In other words, the most important of the people who aren’t “important.”) He or she is the one who keeps the trains running on time, the taskmaster who sets the schedule and then keeps everyone on it. They oversee the entire crew and essentially do all the hard work so the director can focus on the minutiae of their job. A true student of film can probably stop the distinctive work of an AD everywhere without even checking the credits.
21. Oscar (1991) — Mr. Capra the Third’s maiden voyage as 1st AD was the rather unremarkable mob comedy from Stallone’s brief foray into lighter fare such as this and Stop or My Mom Will Shoot! Capra’s background directing seems stranded in the stagy production design.
20. North (1994) — This film began life as one of the notoriously great unmade scripts. It ended as a dog so bad that Roger Ebert’s legendary negative review is more historically relevant than the film itself. It’s also the first Rob Reiner film that is worse than “very good,” making for an epic plunge rarely seen. Most directors favor the slow decline.
19. The Adventures of Pluto Nash (2002) — I swear this filmography won’t read like an index of Ebert’s most aggressively negative reviews.
18. Honey, I Blew Up The Kid (1992) — After a lot of relatively grounded films, Capra gets to mix things up with some VFX and forced-perspective work. At the time, it seemed like it might signal a shift in his style, but the majority of his resume after this remained grounded and realistic. It’s an odd fit with most of the next decade of his work.
17. Murder By Numbers (2002) — In making this list, I realized I confused this film with Murder in the First, and I think we were all better off for that mistake.
16. Flipped (2010) — Loyalty to Mr. Reiner isn’t worth much when it gets one’s name attached to this little-seen flop from 2010. Capra may have felt that was, as this was their last collaboration after he worked as 1st AD on every Reiner film since A Few Good Men.
15. The Deep End of the Ocean (1999) — Capra took a producing credit on this film, which was roundly panned for everything except the performances from the lead actors. It’s not one of Capra’s better efforts at running a set.
14. Alex & Emma (2003) — Another of Reiner’s efforts at telling a film with multiple perspectives and different levels of reality. It tries hard, very hard, but I don’t think any of the blame lies with the professionalism Capra’s craft shows here.
13. I.Q. (1994) — Some fine production work and excellent period atmosphere is let down by some leaden attempts at comedy and a ridiculous-looking Walter Matthau as Albert Einstein. Capra is blameless, though as the only thing that might have saved this was setting fire to a few of his background players.
12. Jack Frost (1998) — Fake snow is hard to direct, but coming from the grandson of the man who made one of the greatest Christmas movies ever, not to mention the man who himself was 2nd AD on a modern Christmas classic (National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation), this should have been more of a slam dunk. After a couple films without Rob Reiner, this possibly landed Capra in Assistant Director Jail, until their next collaboration.
11. Eraser (1996) — It’s the mid-90s. It’s an Arnold Schwarzenegger film produced by Arnold Kopelson and Anne Kopelson. John Millius, Frank Darabount and Bill Wisher all took uncredited turns at the script, and the film was directed by the only man to make a great Nightmare on Elm Street film other than Wes Craven. And it sucks. So where are you gonna put the blame?
10. The Story of Us (1999) — I guarantee you’ve clicked past this film on cable and you can’t remember anything to say about it either.
9. Rumor Has It (2005) — It’s a premise that doesn’t really work (Jennifer Aniston learns her mother and grandmother might have been the inspiration for The Graduate.) Reiner at this point was still big enough that people couldn’t tell him “no,” but I bet Capra had enough candor with him that he could have offered counsel, had Reiner asked.
8. The Distinguished Gentleman (1992) — An underrated entry in the Eddie Murphy canon, that surely owes a great deal of its success to Capra’s management of the schedule that includes several cameos from veteran character actors like Kevin McCarthy, Noble Willingham and star James Garner. The location work feels real, surely the result of Capra’s steady hand. It starts off feeling like a cynical rebuke of Capra’s grandfather’s Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, but by the end, that edge has been dulled away to expose how authentic that sentimentality would be in a post-Watergate climate.
7. The Bucket List (2007) — It’s… okay, but everyone here is coasting, and having been on a set, that’s what happens when things are running TOO smoothly. The artistry of the 1st AD is to allow just enough chaos into the workplace to shake people out of their complacency, particularly when everyone else on set is a total professional. If there’s a case of someone being too good at their job to the detriment of the film, it’s probably this.
6. The Ghosts of Mississippi (1996) — Sure, it’s Oscar bait, but it’s got an all-star cast that includes Alec Baldwin, Whoopi Goldberg and a nearly unrecognizable James Woods as a murderous southern racist on trial for killing civil rights leader Medgar Evars. By this point, there’s little in the courtroom work to challenge either Capra or director Reiner, but hey, if you were making a movie about dinosaurs in the present, you’d probably call Spielberg first, so I’m disinclined to knock Reiner and team for playing too much to their strengths.
5. My Cousin Vinny (1992) — The comedic timing is never interrupted by Capra’s background artistry, and it’s that nearly-invisible work that earned Marisa Tomei an Oscar. One of the most rewatchable in the canon.
4. A Few Good Men (1992) — one of the best film’s in Capra’s canon, it would rank higher if more than half of it didn’t take place in a courtroom with few extras to direct and even less background action to coordinate. Still, it is a highlight of Capra’s numerous collaborations with Rob Reiner and the first time he’d run the set for Reiner. That this first collaboration was the last in Reiner’s incredible seven-film streak that began with This is Spinal Tap is probably a coincidence.
3. The American President (1996) — It’s the perfect marriage of the Washington insider knowledge Capra inherited and then later honed on The Distinguished Gentleman and the smooth working relationship Capra enjoyed with director Reiner. Borrowing that sweet D.C. mojo from Capra, Reiner gets some of his groove back, managing a brief recovery from North.
2. Bulworth (1998) — As good as The American President is, Bulworth is even better, and Capra didn’t even need Reiner on this one. Today this one feels far less like satire and would probably play as tame and toothless in our current political climate. At the time, Capra was ahead of the curve and firing on all cylinders.
1. Drive (2011) — Credit for the action scenes can’t entirely go to Capra, as the second unit likely handled a lot of that work, but working with the challenge of a low budget and tight schedule likely tested Capra’s ability to accurately guess how many pages could be shot a day, and work out the logistics of the memorable car chases.
I hope you like 80s set sitcoms and boyband reality shows.
The Goldbergs
Some networks like murder, others love reality drama, and some want to make you wax poetic about the good old days. Pop — formerly the TV Guide Channel — is capitalizing on the latter. Namely, your fond memories of the past. First, they focused on your love of boy bands through the unscripted series Rock This Boat: New Kids on the Block. Then, they remembered how much you loved Catherine O’Hara and Eugene Levy in Best in Show and teamed them up for the Arrested Development-like Schitt’s Creek. Now, they are bringing the third highest rated comedy series, itself an exploration in 80s nostalgia, The Goldbergs to their lineup.
Pop Network grew its audience through reruns of classic 90s television. As Schwartz described their target audience:
“We target this audience, modern grown-ups, people who grew up in the 1990s, so the acquisition strategy to date has been to get a lot of those classics that our audience grew up with, including Beverly Hills, 90210, Melrose Place, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, The OC, That ’70s Show, Dawson’s Creek, and it’s been doing really, really well for us.”
Have you ever read a word pair more playful and millennial as “modern grown-up”? It’s amusing that somehow being a “modern grown-up” means never having to grow up. If it sounds like I’m judging Schwartz and Pop, I’m not. In fact, I respect his decision because I enjoy watching Buffy and Beverly Hills, 90210 reruns. Schwartz gives people exactly what they want and I won’t judge him for doing so.
The Goldbergs spent a whole episode in Spencer’s gifts.
Millennials — “modern grown ups” — are wistful for childhood. Schwartz should make money off nostalgia because to do so he’ll be giving us what we want. The generational love of longing for the past created a cultural trend but it can’t just be millennials. Especially if presidential elections, box office numbers, and television networks are structuring their entire message around a return to the past.
Nostalgia is a big cultural daydream at this point. We see it come up in presidential campaign slogans where we’re always trying to make something how it used to be. We see it with clothing trends. Like the sudden return of the overall — though I blame hipsters. Even film has gotten in on the game — Power Rangers anyone? Additionally, Warner Brothers is bringing the Young Pope himself, Jude Law, in to play young Dumbledore in the Fantastic Beasts sequel. Fantastic Beasts is just another off shoot of a 90s childhood favorite, Harry Potter. Labyrinth is getting a universe expanding sequel too. Sentimentality is so hot right now.
Three things encourage nostalgia: a current unappealing present, a fond memory of things past, and a feeling of hopelessness. Together, they create a need for comfort. Stability and safety always seemed available in the past. A desire to return to the past is a bias against the present. If you perceive things as the worst they’ve ever been you’re less likely to think the current circumstances can be better. Further, you’re more likely to roll over and quit. This penchant for quitting is why nostalgia can be toxic in large doses. So as with every indulgence moderation and balance is key. Therefore, the goal should not be just to stop rebooting, following up, or retooling. These things are inevitable. Rather, the motto should be caveat emptor — or if Max Fisher didn’t save your Latin class — buyer beware.
Check your local listings for Pop especially if you’re a fan of Beverly Hills, 90210, ER, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The Goldbergs air on ABC Wednesdays 8/9 central time.
Summer movie season begins this week. One Perfect Pod digs in with a Fast and Furious summer movie preview.
Look out your window. Does it look like summer? It might. It might not. Weather is weird these days. But while we can’t predict where climate change will take our outdoor plans next, we do know that Summer Movie Season is here and ready to rev up its engine with the release of The Fate of the Furious.
With Summer Movie Season coming in hot (and early) this weekend, we’re taking the long view on One Perfect Pod, going through the most exciting, interesting, and potentially disastrous summer movies. First, we talk to /Film boss Peter Sciretta about CinemaCon, summer box office, and the big blockbusters that await us this year. Then we turn to Film School Rejects contributor Jamie Righetti to talk about the smaller, more serious counter-programming that will also be hitting theaters.
Get ready, because summer is here…
Be sure to follow us on Twitter (@OnePerfectPod) and Facebook (facebook.com/oneperfectshot). Subscribe in iTunes, Stitcher, on TuneIn, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also follow host Neil Miller (@rejects) and guests Peter Sciretta (@slashfilm) and Jamie Righetti (@jamierighetti). This week’s closing music is Weezer’s “Feels Like Summer,” remixed by Sirr_Geoff on Soundcloud.
We’d very much appreciate your feedback, as well. Leave us a review on iTunes or email us: pod@filmschoolrejects.com.
