Thoughts of Stream

Who's That Knocking at My Door (1967) with Bonus Scorsese: Amazing Stories, Season 1, Episode 19: Mirror, Mirror (1986)

2010-02-22T06:30:00.000-08:00

Who's That Knocking at My Door, Martin Scorsese's 1967 debut feature, marked the beginning of Scorsese's most lucrative partnership. It would be a few years before he'd hook up with Robert De Niro for Mean Streets (and, of course, a few decades until his current muse, Leonardo DiCaprio), and while Harvey Keitel, another Scorsese regular, makes his feature film debut here, all of these collaborations pale in comparison to the work editor Thelma Schoonmaker has done to bring Scorsese's unique vision to the screen. Granted, after Who's That Knocking at My Door and the editorial input they provided for Woodstock, the two never worked together during Scorsese's king-making days of the 1970s, but Schoonmaker returned for Raging Bull, whose boxing sequences in particular are some of the most stunning pieces of editing ever committed to the screen, and the two haven't parted since. (Well, for narrative features, at least. We'll get to one exception later.)

One of Scorsese's greatest strengths as a filmmaker is his ability to achieve a thrilling level of energy. This is not just in the high intensity of his action-based sequences, but his films have the rare ability to infuse life and motion into inanimate objects and still bodies. Schoonmaker is integral in this accomplishment. Her flair is particularly evident in one series of sequences that, while employing such flourishes as Godardian inserts and an extended fantasy sequence, always carries a sense of forward momentum. Schoonmaker connects these sequences through sound, graphic and thematic matches that suggest a stream-of-consciousness approach to the film's unfolding. After a seemingly random act of violence ends in gunshots, the sound carries over, with the gunshots punctuating a series of still images from classic westerns that give way to Keitel and his girlfriend leaving a movie theater showing Rio Bravo. The two discuss the film and when the conversation turns to a female character, Keitel describes her as a broad, defining the term with a sexually explicit fantasy sequence before jumping back into the conversation. Their strolls ends on Keitel and his girlfriend hailing a taxi, and the concluding close-up on the cab's door handle serves as a graphic match for the cut to the next scene, with Keitel and his friends driving upstate.

This series of sequences is typical of the film's narrative structure, and early Scorsese in general, where the development of a plot is of almost no importance compared to fleshing out characters and their surroundings. For his debut, Scorsese followed the “write what you know” mantra, with Keitel portraying a clear Scorsese avatar in J.R., a young, movie-obsessed Italian-American Catholic living in New York City. The film depicts J.R. and his friends as they pass the time either by hanging out in their usual dive, a dingy bar whose sparsely-decorated walls consist only of Playboy pin-ups and a picture of JFK, or venturing out into the streets and each others' apartments, where the activities generally turn to violence. When apart from this group, J.R. courts a girl he met while waiting for the Staten Island Ferry, and his wooing mainly involves conversations about movies, particularly John Wayne westerns. As the relationship grows deeper, J.R. wrestles with his Catholic upbringing, becoming unsure of how far he's willing to take the relationship. After the girl reveals that she was once raped, he also questions her purity.

Depicted in flashback, the girl's description of her rape is by far the film's most harrowing sequence. Adding to the unnerving action onscreen is Scorsese's already highly-developed skills at incorporating pop music into his films. Played normally, using an innocent pop song to score the scene would make for an effectively disturbing, if somewhat crass, juxtaposition, but the song itself is turned unsettling by being played over itself at a slight delay. It's a bold move, but an effective one, an assessment that applies to the rest of the film's pop soundtrack as well. The Doors' “The End,” scores J.R.'s sex fantasy, using the film's darkest song for a sequence of pleasure, while Mitch Ryder and The Detroit Wheels' “Jenny Take a Ride,” an exuberant rocker, plays over an early scene of street violence. With both of these sequences meticulously edited to match the music, it becomes very apparent why Scorsese and Schoonmaker were enlisted for the editing team on Woodstock.

Along with the pop soundtrack, many of Scorsese's recurring techniques and themes appear in the film. Just as Joe Pesci's character in Goodfellas was able to shift from jovial to menacing and vice versa at the drop of a hat, many of J.R.'s friends also fit that mold. During one sequence, shot entirely in slow motion and featuring only playful music on the soundtrack, J.R. and his friends are together laughing at a party. Eventually, one man begins to rough-house another and soon pulls a gun on him, with the rest of the party still laughing away. The slow-motion and lack of diegetic sound remove any context from the scene, giving the entire sequence an overarching sense of unease, a mood similarly struck during many sequences in Goodfellas. Also very prominent in the film, particularly in its final moments, is the theme of Catholic guilt, which Scorsese would further explore in Mean Streets and throughout his filmography.

Who's That Knocking at My Door is certainly not without its flaws. While Keitel was certainly a find, the actors portraying his friends aren't as convincing, and the dialogue usually plays like a novice screenwriter's attempt at realism instead of actual realism. Being a very low budget straight-out-of-film-school debut feature, that's to be expected. Fortunately, it does happen to be a very low budget straight-out-of-film-school debut feature from Martin Scorsese, so there's also a wealth of bold and vibrant filmmaking to make up for its flaws.

Rating: **** (out of five)

Obviously, I chose Who's That Knocking at My Door in recognition of Scorsese's Shutter Island (a film I thoroughly enjoyed and would gladly engage in a spoiler-vague discussion about in the comment section) being released this past weekend. To go along with Scorsese's foray into horror filmmaking, I decided to check out a previous exercise in the genre that Scorsese directed for TV, the episode “Mirror, Mirror” of the Steven Spielberg-produced program, Amazing Stories. Unfortunately, in more ways than one, Scorsese feels very out of his element. As I parenthetically alluded to above, Schoonmaker is absent for this. I imagine this is due to the show having its own established crew and rules regarding its style, but the whole thing feels inert. The episode stars Sam Waterston as a rich horror fiction writer whose privacy is disrupted first by a stalkerish fan that Waterston quickly shoos away and then by a ghoulish figure that lurches toward him from behind him whenever he looks into a mirror. Not much is done with this premise beyond having Waterston look into a lot of various mirrors and look away just in time to avoid getting attacked, and the episode lacks any sense of danger or atmosphere that could at least provide a false sense of danger. It might be trying to say something about the suffocating lack of privacy that comes with fame, but that's a subject Scorsese had already explored to much greater effect in the considerably more disturbing gem, The King of Comedy. All I took away from these 24 minutes was one decent aerial shot and the amusing period detail of an answering machine costing $200.

Pandora's Box (1929)

2010-02-18T06:06:00.000-08:00

This post is part of the Film Preservation Blogathon, a wonderful project that has already yielded a great number of fascinating and passionate articles on film preservation from some of the web's best film bloggers. The Blogathon is being headed by The Self-Styled Siren and Ferdy on Films, and the master list of contributed articles can be found on both sites. This week-long endeavor is in support of the National Film Preservation Foundation, a nonprofit organization devoted to a very important cause, and I highly encourage everyone to offer a donation here. As they put it:

The National Film Preservation Foundation is the independent, nonprofit organization created by the U.S. Congress to help save America’s film heritage. They work directly with archives to rescue endangered films that will not survive without public support.

The NFPF will give away 4 DVD sets as thank-you gifts to blogathon donors chosen in a random drawing: Treasures III: Social Issues in American Film, 1900-1934 and Treasures IV: American Avant Garde Film, 1947-1986.

Considering this blog is strictly film reviews, I probably shouldn't spend too much time getting anecdotal about film preservation and engaging in hero worship about someone who had no creative ties to the film in question, but screw it. Film preservation is too important a cause to rush through, and without the work of James Card and like-minded film archivists, I would not be able to write about G.W. Pabst's 1929 silent masterpiece starring Louise Brooks today.

When I mentioned “like-minded film archivists” above, it was mainly in reference to Henri Langlois, whose Cinémathèque Française was tirelessly devoted to film preservation and whose screening of Louise Brooks films in the 1950s helped spark renewed interest in her career in France. A lot has been written about Langlois, especially in terms of his relation to French New Wave filmmakers, and he certainly deserves the many gushings of praise that have been placed alongside his name, but he'll have to settle for a simple hat tip here as I shift my attention to James Card, the first curator of the George Eastman House's film collection, one of Langlois' contemporaries and a personal hero of mine.

One of the best books I've ever read is James Card's Seductive Cinema: The Art of Silent Film. It's a completely absorbing work that functions as both a vivid memoir about Card's life spent devoted to collecting and preserving the silent films of his youth and a very passionate history and appreciation of the silent film medium. It's a great read for anyone interested in film history and archiving, filled with insightful and often bluntly hilarious opinions on silent films and insightful and often bluntly depressing facts about the dire need for their preservation. And for anyone who has lived in Rochester, it's a fascinating piece of local history.

Having spent most of life in the Rochester area, the George Eastman House's Dryden Theater, has long been my favorite movie theater. Established by Card in 1949, it still upholds his mission to offer a wide, enriching selection of films from all eras to its audience. I had an opportunity to work closely with the George Eastman House during my senior year at the University of Rochester, with some of their personnel training me in the inspection, repair, and projection of 16mm film. They are all wonderful, passionate individuals cut from the same cloth as Card and with a clear admiration for the man. During one of my training sessions, they were very excited to stumble upon some James Card letterhead, pictured above, and graciously offered me a copy. After my training, I had the chance to become even further connected to Card's life work, getting assigned to U of R's 16mm film collection, which included many films in red cases that designated the Card collection, a glorious assemblage of such widely-regarded classics as Grand Illusion and La Bete Humaine and films I had never heard of and, sadly, will probably never hear of again, such as 1910's L'aventurière (The Adventuress) and 1946's Les Gueux aus Paradis (Hoboes in Paradise).

Even though the Card films I had access to probably amounted to less than 1% of his total collection, the number of 16mm films in the department was so large and the time I had with them was so limited that there was no possible way I could work on all the films I wanted to see. While in these days of instant gratification, it can be frustrating just to look for a movie on Netflix and find that it's not available to stream, it's even more frustrating to think about how difficult it is to see so many of the films that aren't readily available to the public, and nowhere near the frustration that comes from knowing about the countless number of films believed to be lost for good. That's why we need devoted film preservationists like James Card, who not only had the drive to seek out undiscovered films, but also the love of sharing them with the public.

In the case of Louise Brooks, Card didn't just spark a public rediscovery of Brooks' films; he also got Brooks to rediscover herself. It is a story Card seemed to recount often, in Seductive Cinema, as well as this interview given in promotion of his book and in this Sight and Sound article. Though Brooks quickly made a name for herself (and her iconic eponymous haircut) on the silent screen, her years in Hollywood were brief and unfulfilled, leading to a move to Germany to work with director G.W. Pabst, a collaboration that yielded her best-known and most widely-regarded film, Pandora's Box, which I promise I will discuss in this article eventually. After this short but lucrative partnership, Brooks went back to the States, but her career never got back off the ground. By the 1950s, when her silent films were being screened to great acclaim in Europe, Brooks had turned to alcoholism in a solitary New York apartment where, Card recalls, “she spent roughly eighty percent of her time” in bed. The revivals in Europe and Card's own longtime appreciation of Brooks prompted him to contact the actress, informing her of the renewed interest in her work. She responded that this news was “the first joy I ever tasted from my movie career.” Later, she would straighten herself out and move to Rochester, where Card screened all sorts of films from his personal collection for her, and she wrote extensively about her newfound passion for film, garnering her even more respect in the critical community. It's no wonder Card told this story often. Not only did film preservation help keep Brooks' image alive onscreen, it also saved Brooks' life.

Watching Pandora's Box, it becomes abundantly clear that James Card, Henri Langlois, and everyone else who hailed Louise Brooks as an unmatched silent screen presence were onto something. Silent film acting often called for exaggerated facial expressions and abnormally slow gestures, particularly in the expressionist German films of that era. When done well, it still feels artificial, but it can result in some powerful close-ups and scenes with serious dramatic weight. When not done well, however, it can result in unintentional laughter or a quest to determine whether or not I'm watching the movie at the correct frame rate, a very real problem with many silent films. As Dr. Schön in this film, Fritz Kortner is a prime example of this method of acting, and in direct contrast to that style is Brooks, alive with sexuality as the temptress Lulu. It is a rare dramatic silent film performance that feels completely natural. I responded to every playful glance, steely-eyed glare, and devilish glint as if she was staring them straight into my eyes, and whenever she goes into one of her free-spirited dances, and the film affords her many, any question of improper frame rate is put to rest.

Separated into eight acts and spanning over two hours, the film is quite densely packed, and Brooks effortlessly commands every scene. Brooks' Lulu is introduced living in a lavish apartment owned by her lover, newspaper editor Dr. Schön. He informs her that he intends to marry another woman and their current arrangement would damage his reputation. To this, she responds, “You'll have to kill me to get rid of me.” While Dr. Schön manages to avoid Lulu during this time, she remains in close contact with his son, Alwa, who lands her a role in an elaborate musical revue. Pabst barely shows the revue as performed onstage, instead spending considerable time on the chaos and camaraderie that occurs backstage in one of the film's liveliest sequences. The backstage drama culminates in a visit from Dr. Schön and his fiancée, who goes elsewhere just long enough for Lulu to seduce Schön into a passionate kiss, which Schön's fiancée witnesses. Despite his earlier assertion that marrying a woman like Lulu “would be suicide,” Schön now chooses to marry Lulu to save his reputation. Those words ring a bit too prophetic, with Schön reacting to Lulu's seduction of Alwa in such a way that puts Lulu on trial for murder.

In a gorgeously flowing widow's veil, Lulu stands trial, eying the opposing counselor flirtatiously as he makes a damning comparison between Lulu's seduction of men to their doom and the legend of Pandora's box unleashing evil. With the help of some longstanding friends, Lulu escapes the trial and spends the rest of the film on the run from the law with Alwa. Through it all, the character of Lulu is quite static. She remains a harbinger of doom for the many men who fall under her spell throughout the film, never renouncing her ways. Her behavior only ceases when she encounters a man with an even more destructive influence on women.

As unchanging as her character's methods and motivations are, Brooks runs an impressive gamut of emotions. Framed by her sleek black shell of a haircut, Brooks' every look and facial expression is accented by the film's gorgeous chiaroscuro lighting, often capturing a perfect glisten in her eyes. The impressive lighting of Pandora's Box is characteristic of the extremely high level of craft that went into German films of the era, and with its similarly stunning sets and camerawork, Pabst's film stands alongside the silent masterpieces of such contemporaries as Fritz Lang and F.W. Murnau as a high point in the medium. As strong as those technical elements are, though, the film belongs to Brooks, and dear lord, does she own it well.

Rating: ***** (out of five)

Valentine's Day Double Feature: Wings of Desire (1987) and City of Angels (1998)

2010-02-14T16:35:00.000-08:00

As a child, I had a strong belief in guardian angels. This became especially prominent after one night when I thought I saw a ghost sitting next to my bed. The description I gave to my parents vaguely aligned with that of my dad's brother, Stephen, who died at the age of eight. My dad floated two possibilities about the sighting: (1) I was having a dream and thought it was real, or (2) Stephen was watching over me. I believe the former now, but the latter gave me great comfort. This childhood belief and sense of comfort reemerged while watching Wim Wenders' West German celestial romance Wings of Desire. While my response to the film was immensely personal, the film's highly revered place in the cinematic canon affirms that it's a pretty universally engrossing and thought-provoking experience.

The film's greatest strength is its patience. It is a romance, but it takes its time before introducing the love story and only revisits it sporadically throughout, with the two central lovers sharing very little screentime together. It is a color film eventually, but apart from a few brief snatches of color, the first hour and a half are shot in gorgeous black and white by veteran cinematographer Henri Alekan. All the necessary information about how angels interact with the human world and vice versa is revealed, but it is always revealed organically, never with rushed exposition. While much of the action revolves around angel Damiel (played by Bruno Ganz, probably best known for his turn as Hitler in Downfall and the great many YouTube clips the performance spawned), the central role of the film belongs to West Berlin, as Wenders lets the camera float freely around the city, capturing its diverse inhabitants in the midst of their daily lives. One bit of information revealed early on is that these peoples' thoughts can be heard by angels nearby, and the angels may offer a comforting hand on their shoulder. Wenders revels in this connection between and angels and humans, devoting many scenes, including this bravura sequence in a library, to simply capturing it in passing. The film also intermittently follows Peter Falk playing himself during a film shoot in Berlin and the sideplot pays off tremendously in a touching and hilarious scene.

I don't want to say too much about the romance because it would verge into spoiler territory for a film so rewarding in its delay of information, but this is a Valentine's Day article and it's a crucial point of comparison between Wings of Desire and its Hollywood remake, City of Angels. During one of Damiel's excursions around Berlin, he encounters trapeze artist Marion and is instantly smitten, and hearing her thoughts, responds deeply to her sadness. They share a clear connection, with Marion even conjuring Damiel in a dream. While the film otherwise seems to champion humanity's free will, with Damiel and Marion's connection it throws in a bit of destiny as well (and, in the scene preceding it, an incendiary performance from Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds).

For City of Angels, the American remake of Wings of Desire, this romance is made the central focus of the film and despite the title, its Los Angeles setting barely matters. Some of the initial scenes present Nicolas Cage and Andre Braugher as angels overlooking a typical L.A. traffic jam and overhearing the thoughts of the drivers. However, once the romance plot sets in quite early on, most of the action takes place in the hospital as it follows Dr. Maggie Rice, a surgeon played by Meg Ryan, through her workday, with some extra scenes in Rice's house and eventually Lake Tahoe. In an homage to the original film, there are a library scenes, but they barely spend a minute focusing on its inhabitants and it instead becomes another place where Cage and Ryan can have dull conversations.

I realize it's somewhat unfair to be so hard on City of Angels because of an unfaithfulness to the original film, especially since a remake being too faithful to its source is a near-certain recipe for disaster, or at best, pointlessness. To its credit, the film does take a step in the right direction in its survey of the city-dwellers' thoughts. The fact that everyone, even babies, thought so philosophically or experienced such profound sadness certainly added to the other-worldly beauty of Wings of Desire, but City of Angels smartly suggests that there'd be a lot more people thinking about sex or trying to get commercial jingles out of their head. This is only a small portion of the film, though, as its main goal is to take the concept of angels that were established in Wings of Desire and apply those to a Kleenex-ready Hollywood romance. Because of this, City of Angels forgoes the atmosphere of the original and instead lays down its rules of angeldom through exposition-heavy exchanges of dialogue. This would be forgivable if the film managed to deliver on the romance front, but unfortunately, it comes up short.

The main flaw of the romance is the decision to have Seth, the angel played by Nicolas Cage, make himself visible to Rice after he falls in love with her. Instead of a spiritual connection, the relationship plays out like a standard courtship. The angel aspect certainly put things on a different level, with Seth unable to touch Rice, but able to hear whenever she thinks about how cute he is. Beyond that, though, the film does little to shake up romantic convention, even throwing in the obstacle boyfriend that must be dropped, who without even knowing about Rice's celestial suitor offers the sound argument, “We belong together. We're the same species.” The way that character is so poorly developed, that's also his biggest selling point. Unfortunately, as an angel, Cage does not have much to show in the personality department either, delivering quite possibly his dullest performance. The magnetic strangeness that usually shows through in his films does pop up near the end, but by that point, it's too little, too late.

The ending of the film is perhaps the most frustrating aspect of City of Angels. Had the film allowed itself more room to breathe instead of adopting a narrow focus on its central romance, the ending could have been life-affirming. Before its conclusion, the film fails to highlight the diverse joys and sensations of living, save for the opportunity to satisfy Cage's raging angel boner, so the end comes off as more of a cosmic joke. It's a far cry from the transcendent sense of romantic destiny that Wings of Desire provides.

Wings of Desire Rating: ***** (out of 5)
City of Angels Rating: ** (out of 5)

Adventures of Don Juan (1948)

2010-02-10T03:57:00.000-08:00

The information on any IMDB trivia page can be pretty questionable, especially when dealing with the salacious backstage lives of actors, and Errol Flynn's page is no exception. Fitting for the man who inspired the phrase “In like Flynn” and whose actual autobiography was entitled My Wicked, Wicked Ways, the whole thing is pretty wild. One item reads: “He met his second wife while she was working at a snack counter in a courthouse during one of his rape trials.” That's one of those sentences that requires a few glances to fully process and brings to the imagination one very bizarre conversation. Another tidbit:

As a young man in Papua, New Guinea, he had many adventurous jobs as a gold prospector, slave recruiter, a diamond smuggler, and a manager of coconut and tobacco plantations, just to name a few. [...] It has been a matter of dispute as to whether all his stories of adventure were true, but many have concluded that even if only 25% percent were true, he certainly had an amazing life.

That one gets me because of its phrasing. Who are these “many,” and how did they come to an agreement that twenty-five percent of those exploits is the magic number to scientifically conclude an “amazing life”? Based on all the information in his trivia page, it's pretty clear that in real life, Flynn was at best a total asshole and at worst a slavery profiteering rapist. While it's hard not to think of Flynn's womanizing whenever he's onscreen, his films manage to filter out all the unsavory elements of his personal life and instead portray him as a hero exuding nothing but charisma and charm. In The Adventures of Don Juan, that approach is a hell of a lot of fun.

Unfaithful to its period setting and most other versions of the Don Juan tale, Errol Flynn plays a charming and courageous swashbuckler known throughout Europe as the “World's Greatest Lover.” This is by no means a stretch, as the old Hollywood studio system was well known for finding roles that would fit their stars' carefully-crafted persona, and it's hard to think of a better example of this practice than Flynn. What's fascinating about Flynn's filmography is how many period pieces he made with a screen persona that always feels modern. Here, Flynn never makes any attempts to replicate old time language or cop an accent befitting its Spanish setting. It's just his usual quick delivery of tossed-off witticisms and asides. Even working with the florid line, “Love is not measured in time, only in ecstasy,” Flynn delivers it with such a self-awareness that it feels like he could turn and wink at the camera at any moment. When he does speak Spanish, which is rare, it's usually just one familiar word. Flynn ending a conversation with “Adios” comes off more hip than culturally accurate. Sticking the modern stylings of Flynn into settings so often associated with prestige films gives his movies a certain sense of anarchy. Having Flynn play lead in Adventures of Don Juan results in a movie closer in spirit to what Bob Hope would do with the material than Laurence Olivier. Granted, Flynn's a lot more naturally confident in the role than Hope would be.

The film sets its tone almost immediately, introducing Flynn's Don Juan through a visual pun that pairs its picture-book introduction recounting mankind's upward progression during the Renaissance with the image of Flynn climbing up a tree to a lover's window. This opening scene sets the breezy tone for the film's first half hour, with Flynn gallivanting around London, romancing a bevy of dark-haired beauties, getting caught, and fending off jilted husbands in a sword fight. One such conquest involves impersonating royalty, and the resulting public embarrassment gets him sent back to Spain. The Spanish ambassador hopes that while there, Flynn can keep the ambitions of the kingdom's conniving Duke (Robert Douglas) in check. The Duke is the film's primary villain and, in keeping with the oft-Jingoist nature of Flynn's films, the only one to speak with a pronounced Spanish accent. He uses the King (Romney Brent) as a puppet to expand his kingdom and eventually take over the throne, and based on his first few scenes, the King seems pretty content with that plan. A short man with a lisp, the King is introduced straddling a wooden horse in a cutaway following the line, “The King does not work at all.” Later in the scene, he mentions how he always feels small around the Queen (Viveca Lindfors), but never around the Duke. Now, after four years of film school, lord knows applied my fair share of bullshit phallocentric readings to films, but they're definitely implying something about the King, be it homosexuality or impotence or both. It certainly makes Flynn's next conquest all the more obvious, and those sparks fly the moment he is introduced to Lindfors and she appoints him the court's fencing instructor.

Naturally, this all leads to Flynn foiling Douglas' plans with a climactic sword fight, with a few scenes of mutual attraction between Flynn and Lindfors thrown in along the way. It's certainly a familiar progression for anyone who's seen any of Flynn's other swashbucklers, but even ten years after his iconic portrayal of Robin Hood, he's still got charisma and agility to spare. Unfortunately, in those ten years, Flynn also pissed off a lot of people and lost a lot of clout, so the rest of the cast and crew isn't as A-list as his Robin Hood team (save Alan Hale as the plucky sidekick). Behind the camera, director Vincent Sherman lacks the distinct visual style that Michael Curtiz brought to The Adventures of Robin Hood. (In particular, Curtiz's expressive use of shadows is sorely missed here.) On that same front, while Lindfors, Douglas, and Brent do just fine as Flynn's love interest, nemesis, and effete royal authority, respectively, they're no match for Olivia de Havilland, Basil Rathbone, and Claude Rains filling those same shoes in The Adventures of Robin Hood.

Considering the film's strict adherence to the formula established by The Adventures of Robin Hood, it wouldn't be off-base to call Adventures of Don Juan a low-rent rehash, right down to the construction of its title. As low-rent rehashes go, though, this one certainly has a lot going for it, showing off some well-choreographed action sequences, vibrant costumes and beautiful sets, all shot in glorious Technicolor. Above all, Flynn is still as dashing and exuberant as ever, and that alone conquers any gripes about its lack of originality.

Rating: **** (out of 5)

Up the Academy (1980)

2010-02-07T02:59:00.000-08:00

“You really shouldn't go the extra mile when you have a specific destination.” - Alfred E. Neuman

That quote wasn't used in Up the Academy, Mad Magazine's first and only attempt at a feature film, but the main reason I use it here is simple: I wrote it. During my stint as an intern at Mad, I was asked to come up with some potential Alfred E. Neumanisms and that one made it in. Needless to say, I'm quite proud of it. I also included the quote because when applied to creative endeavors, it's terrible advice. Up the Academy is an unfortunate example of what happens when you follow it.

Mad Magazine's specific destination was to achieve the same crossover success into film that National Lampoon had with Animal House, but their contributions were minimal. They simply put their name over the title and featured a creepy masked actor as Alfred E. Neuman in the opening and closing credits. The writers commissioned for the film used Animal House as a guide as well, but added nothing new to its raunchy anti-authority formula. Mad, however, did make sure to go that extra mile when distancing themselves from the film, printing a particularly vicious take-down of the film and shelling out $30,000 to have the publication's ties to the film cut for cable airings. In a similar admission of embarrassment, actor Ron Leibman had his name removed from the credits despite a rather sizable role.

Even with all these dispiriting signs, the credits do sport one particularly promising name in director Robert Downey Sr., whose wild independent films of the '60s and '70s remain cult classics to this day. Putney Swope especially shares the same anarchic spirit of Mad Magazine in its heyday, but Up the Academy only captures that feeling in small bursts. It shows its best hand during its opening sequence, establishing its four central characters as their parents ship them off to Weinberg Military Academy. Chooch (Ralph Macchio, in his film debut) is an Italian mafioso's son who doesn't want to join the family business. Eisenhower is a black preacher's son who formed too special a bond with his stepmother. Hash is a millionaire Arabian sheik's son with a penchant for petty theft. Oliver is an entitled midwestern mayor's son who got his underage girlfriend pregnant too close to an election. These characters are all painted in broad strokes, but in less than four minutes the film establishes a tone where no race or religion is off-limits and caps the sequence off with a tossed-off abortion gag. Not all of it works and much of it winds up being more offensive than funny, but it packs about two solid laughs in less than four minutes and promises a madcap no-holds-barred approach that the rest of the film fails to deliver.

Introducing Weinberg Academy through a parody of the Patton's opening speech, the film's post-credits sequence gives a better hint at what's in store, relying on two well-worn comedy tropes still as common today as they are unfunny: old people swearing and gratuitous fart jokes. The old man making this speech will appear sporadically throughout the film, always accompanied by a fart noise. Weinberg's other faculty members are similarly one-dimensional, among them a flamboyantly gay dance teacher played by Tom Poston and a buxom weaponry instructor played by Bond girl (and Mrs. Ringo Starr) Barbara Bach, introduced through a close-up of her cleavage that is almost certainly the film's longest take.

The film's main authority figure is Major Liceman, played by the uncredited Ron Leibman, but he falls short as both an imposing force and as a comic creation. The threats he spouts to the students are written too blandly to be funny and delivered too clownishly to be intimidating. As the film progresses, any sense of menace he may have, mostly due to a mysterious wind and The Stooges' “Gimme Danger” playing during his entrances, is undermined by his own goofiness. Midway through the film, Liceman is revealed to have a penchant for S&M and other fetishistic sex. It's a one-joke trait that comes out of nowhere, but becomes a driving force for the narrative as the kids concoct a blackmail scheme that revolves around getting Oliver's girlfriend to seduce Liceman into a compromising situation. This is all to prevent Liceman from publicizing photos of Oliver's rendezvous with his girlfriend that would risk his father's reelection. Oliver's dad is painted as a hypocritical politician and doesn't seem to have a great relationship with his son, but Oliver was promised a new car if he doesn't screw anything up, so that's the primary motivation.

The fact that so much of the third act revolves around a spoiled rich kid getting his parents to buy him a car makes the film hard to classify as a snob-vs.-slobs comedy, but the film still cops so many of that subgenre's standard beats. (Hell, part of me wants to believe that Oliver's motivation is a sophisticated commentary on the manipulation of audience sympathies, but there's little doubt that it's just there to drive the plot forward.) Not only is the film often a love letter to labored plot devices, but quite frequently, the scenes meant to introduce the plot or push it forward are often jokeless duds. When Liceman announces early in the film that the student soccer team will be pitted against the faculty during Parents Weekend, there is no joke in the speech and no gag surrounding it; it's just a way to point the audience directly to the setting and circumstances of the film's climax. While Liceman's speeches are a routine offender, many other scenes also wind up completely lacking a joke. Long stretches of the film simply fall flat. This is a serious problem for a film intended to capture the manic energy of a magazine so stuffed with jokes that it even includes tiny cartoons in the margins. It's a strange fate that less than a month after Up the Academy appeared in theaters, Paramount would release Airplane!, a film whose deft pop culture satire and verbal and visual puns owe a clear debt to Mad Magazine in a way that does its influence proud.

One thing Up the Academy does have going for it is its soundtrack. Without a doubt, the songs are used in the most obvious ways, but I'm fine with even the flimsiest excuse to use any of them. Along with the aforementioned “Gimme Danger” denoting danger, The Modern Lovers' “Road Runner” plays over a joyriding scene, Cheap Trick's “Surrender” plays at the start of Parents Weekend, and The Kinks' “Yes Sir, No Sir” plays when the faculty addresses the students. Adding in Eddie and the Hot Rods' “Do Anything You Wanna Do,” Lou Reed's “Street Hassle,” and many other choice punk and new wave cuts sure made those scenes where the dialogue dragged a lot more bearable.

Rating: ** (out of five)

Food, Inc. (2008)

2010-02-04T00:05:00.000-08:00

Of the many films that made their way to the theaters last year, there were only two that I was afraid I would be unable to handle. One was Antichrist, which earned that slot thanks to my strange aversion to violent genital mutilation. The other was Food, Inc. My trepidations going into this expository documentary about food production stemmed from my longstanding germophobia. In order for me to swallow food without panic, my hands and anyone else's around me cannot touch the food. It's an obsessive-compulsive trait that is as irrational as it is overwhelming, and the mental gymnastics required by my eating process involves a strict policy of “ignorance is bliss” regarding the food's journey to its package or my plate. A film documenting that process, especially one meant in large part to expose its unsafe practices, could result in my voluntary starvation, or more likely, a psychosomatic stomachache that lasts a couple days.

My only solace going into Food, Inc. was the expectation that its main targets would be red meat and chicken, two foods my germophobia has kept me away from for years. Sure enough, much of the film's most damning footage takes place in slaughterhouses and chicken farms. Director Robert Kenner doesn't shy away from presenting images of the slaughter, and while those moments are tough to watch, in some ways the footage of these animals in their living environment is more harrowing. The only industrial chicken farm the filmmakers were granted access to was a squalid mess of feathers and feces, and even if the birds had room to walk, they would be unable to, as years of genetic engineering has yielded chickens whose slow bone growth is unable to support their unnaturally massive body weight.

Though the sequence above and quite a few others could probably turn some people vegetarian, the film is hardly an animal rights film. The focus here is on people, with the farmers, factory workers and the consumer all depicted as victims of a gigantic industry that sacrifices well-being for profit and a regulation system too intertwined with the industry to achieve its stated goal. To illustrate that last argument, the film follows Barbara Kowalcyk, a food safety advocate who took up the cause after her two year old son died from E. Coli-tainted hamburgers. She notes that the burger recall came 16 days after her son's death and now fights for the passage of Kevin's Law. The law would give the USDA authority to shut down contaminated plants, an unpopular move for the food industry, which Kowalcyk remarks was more protected than her son.

Kowalcyk's story, especially when accompanied by home video footage of her son, is heart-wrenching, but her interview and the other talking heads never get bogged down with a sense of emotional manipulation. Instead, Kenner seeks out interview subjects that are able to elucidate the complexities of the food industry, Fast Food Nation author Eric Schlosser and The Omnivore's Dilemma author Michael Pollan among them, and the film succeeds in that regard. Trying to cover one of the nation's largest industries in just over 90 minutes is a tough job, so the scope of issues it tackles and the conciseness and clarity of the information is admirable, venturing into issues of illegal immigration, intellectual property, and libel laws.

As to be expected of a social issue documentary such as this, it is very clearly one-sided. A recurring caption noting that a food company refused to be interviewed for the film is often included to paint the company in a bad light. Because of this strategy, Wal-Mart manages to come across as the good guys simply by virtue of granting an interview, and one segment of the film makes a great advertisement for the organic dairy products of Stonyfield Farms. While the interview covers how Stonyfield handled getting in bed with large corporations, the film does come short in expanding that issue to look at other companies. The question of whether or not organic food businesses are able to keep their soul once they get bought by a larger corporation is asked, but never clearly answered.

Despite some lingering questions, Food, Inc. packs a lot of facts and figures into its runtime. This is not the sort of movie to seek out for entertainment, though it tries pretty hard to spruce things up with jaunty graphics and a sometimes-overwrought score. It is, however, very well-constructed and delivers reasonably argued information that will likely change the way you think about food. For a topic so important to our daily lives, that's worth the stomachache.

Rating: ***1/2 (out of five)

Welcome to Thoughts of Stream

2010-02-03T02:48:00.000-08:00

This is a blog devoted to films available to stream instantly on Netflix. Because Netflix constantly makes additions to this option, by no means will this ever be comprehensive or even come close to highlighting the selection, but I do intend to be as diverse as possible with my film choices. Little-seen indies, familiar Hollywood titles, foreign gems, foreign trash, documentaries, silent films, horror movies, romantic comedies, direct-to-DVD teen raunchfests, tender coming-of-age dramas, anything from any era. As long as it has that blue "Play" option, I'll click it and write about it here. Ideally, these reviews will serve as a helpful guide and companion piece for anyone who logs onto Netflix with time to spare but no idea what to watch.

That's about the best introduction to this project that I can give at this point. I'm still mulling over certain details like a rating system (for now, I'll probably do the out-of-five stars method) and the frequency, length, and format of my posts, and chances are they'll change over time. (And just to clear the air, I am in no way affiliated with Netflix. Hell, I don't even have an account, just a close friend who trusts me with access to his account. Of course, this means that depending on my friend's whims, this grand experiment could end abruptly at any point.) I do plan on making film selections that are in some way timely, perhaps coinciding with a film release or other events that would be of interest. Considering the Academy Award nominations were announced this week, I figured spotlighting one of the nominated films would be fitting, so my inaugural post will be on the Best Documentary Feature nominee, Food, Inc.