The Factual Opinion

Snakes on a Plane

2006
Directed by David Ellis
Starring Samuel L Jackson

Much like abortion, or even more boringly, presidential candidates, Snakes on a Plane has divided this great country into two camps: people who are definitely going to see it (and probably already have) and people who wouldn't be caught dead near the movie.

The truth is that neither of these people have taken the time to watch the brilliant work of Jean-Pierre Melville, listen to Albert Ayler, and when's the last time you read Murphy?  It's a safe assumption that most of the backlash and derision thrown towards an absolutely harmless movie like Snakes happen to be coming from a camp of people who, for the most part, don't actually have a critical leg to stand on. 

At the offices of The Factual, we've noticed a trend in this summer's popcorn flicks, one that boils down to a simple, and Factual, statement: All these movies sucked. 

Superman, Mission Impossible, X-Men 3, Pirates of the Something-Something--blah, blah blah.  Across the board, the only movies of any substance this year have been an Australian cowboy movie and a steadicam emo-core rendition of a plane crash.  The grosses have born this out--slumping, pathetic, barely turning profits while studios hemmorhage employees.  The problem is that all the people getting fired aren't, one has to assume, the ones responsible for all the crap--since the future looks like more of the same, or at least, the previews do.  Meanwhile, a whole lot of people who, honestly, should have better things to do are busy backlashing against a little movie called Snakes on a Plane.  While Snakes is really only guilty of being neither as innovative or as funny as it's title, it's been both embraced and demonized by nearly everyone who knows of it's existence (in the 18-34 advertisting bracket at least) as the second coming of the Schlock Movie Messiah. 

It's, of course, not.  (That train came and went with "head-like-a-shark-fin" Deep Blue Sea, also starring Sam Jack, and the second coming of that train will be in about a month, courtesy of Sea's director, Renny Harlin with the uber-homoerotic Undressed-meets-The Prophecy: The Covenant. Now that, dear reader, is going to be One Bad Movie.)  But Snakes, in it's complete reverance towards it's own existence, is an enjoyable movie, and it's not enjoyable in a shame-producing fashion.  Whereas anyone with morals felt a little embarrassed to admit finding various sections of X-Men 3 exciting, Snakes is so eager to please that disliking it is akin to kicking a laughing baby in the face.  (Although that's funny too, one has absolutely no business doing it.)  The truth that Snakes on a Plane didn't rip the head off America and re-define fun at the pictures doesn't come as much of a surprise, and the fact that most of America needs to recognize that they lost all right to critical arrogance when they gave Forrest Gump an Oscar is, at this point, a sad observation on most people's inability to tell the difference between where they eat and where they defecate: Not The Same Place, Asshole. 

The Up Series

Directed by Paul Almond and Michael Apted

Almond is listed for pure accuracy reasons, after all, he did direct the first film contained in this five DVD set, Seven Up.  But this is Michael Apted's baby, through and through.  After Almond, Apted went on to direct, edit and produce the other five films, including the upcoming 2006 American release of 49 Up.  For the uninitiated, The Up Series is a documentary series that started in 1964, focusing on 14 British seven year olds.  Without the intention of returning, Seven Up is a mildly intriguing documentary, short and cheap.  What it's become is the first chapter in one of the most amazing pieces of filmmaking ever captured.  Michael Apted, a researcher on Seven Up, continued to stay in touch with the fourteen children, and went on to return every seven years to catch them as they grew into adulthood.  The DVD set collects all of the films available at the time (it was released to capitalize on the British release of 49 Up last year.)  Although all of the children did not choose to participate in all of the films, due in no small part to the impact the films have had on their personal lives, those are the exception, not the rule. 

Upon reflection, The Factual Opinion will not be revealing some of the more surprising details about the individuals in the film (this information can easily be found on the wikipedia entry) as it did this viewer no reward to have certain events spoiled by said wikipedia entry.  However, one would be sorely mistaken to anticipate some sort of excitement and sentimentalism in the films--no, the surprise of The Up Series is how relentlessly compelling they are in a totally honest depiction of real life.  None of the men and women in the film are the type of extraordinary individuals or drug-addled celebrities so often showcased in documentaries.  They are, quite simply, just like us.  An obnoxious moron once said that "the woman who lives next door is probably way nicer and more interesting than any of the rock stars in the gossip tabloids."  The Up Series, with it's heroic committment to honesty proves this statement true, regardless of it's delivery system.  It's one of the most important and rewarding uses of the film as a method towards better human understanding in our history: it's also one of the best movies ever made.

Fighting Elegy

1966
Directed by Seijun Suzuki
Written by Kaneto Shindo and Takeshi Suzuki
Starring Hideki Takahashi

On the Criterion Collection's release of Godard's Band of Outsiders, there is a special feature that makes it possible for the viewer to watch only those portions of the film that directly reference other films.  The probable intent seems to be that of a joke--after all, the running time of the special feature is actually very close to the running time of the regular film, pointing out in explicit fashion how sincere Godard was when he referred to the film as a "love letter to the cinema." 

Fighting Elegy is cut from the same romantic cloth.  Underneath the brutally cynical satire of militant Japan, Seijun Suzuki's film has an anarchic warmth to it, a sentimental attachment to his countries foray into the film world.  Whether it's a fire-stand that his main character climbs much like Toshiro Mifune does in Kurosawa's Yojimbo, or a obsessive kung-fu master hiding in the same woods from Rashomon, Fighting Elegy is a non-stop reference library.  Beyond that, it keeps the seat warm for the much later American masterpiece of testosterone satire, Fight Club.  Weird, absurd and startlingly violent, Fighting Elegy is a film that combines aspects of every section of film culture and style, blends it into a simple coming-of-age story and then proceeds to showcase it in the most bizarre fashion possible.  Whether it's a character using a sinful erection to play the piano (and play it better than he can with his hands) or the humiliation of a middle school teacher by a group of 30 year old actors pretending to be pre-teens, Fighting Elegy is a film that is as close to uncategorizable as is possible outside of the work of Stan Brakhage. 

The Descent

2005
Written and Directed by Neil Marshall
Starring Shauna MacDonald and Natalie Mendoza

There does not seem to be a regular schedule for horror movies anymore.  Apparently as long as they turn profits, minor or otherwise, horror films will regularly turn up on a continuous basis, regardless of quality.  (Thanks to the public embrace of total garbage, Saw 3 will be in theaters soon.)  It is not exactly a surprise why--horror movies do not require much of a script, much of a set, and for the most part, not much of a cast.  The formula is pretty standard--take a group of young and attractive individuals, put them in an unlit situation and spend the last hour of the movie eliminating them in a constant scaling up of gruesomeness.  The Descent may be a British import from last year, featuring only one actress American's have possibly seen (the scrappy Shauna MacDonald, cast member of the mildly popular Spooks, shown on the A & E network as MI-5), but The Descent hews closely enough to the American formula to make it indistinguishable from it's Yankee counterparts.  Except for those accents, but by the end of the first 30 minutes, the only conversations are whispers and screams, and those don't really have a British or American connotation.  The Descent is pretty standard fare, but it's a decent take on standard fare.  As soon as the requisite night of drinking introduces our six plucky heroines, they dive right into the barely lit cave and proceed about the business of scaring the hell out of the audience.  Never dull, The Descent is an excellent exercise in the incredibly banal genre of thriller/horror films.  It's a sharp, incisive story, with surprisingly complex characters in a grindhouse format (the film, while not in 24 style "real time" covers a very short period of time in it's 99 minutes) that succeeds in re-using the old stables (cheap make-up, over the top slaughter and out-of-nowhere shocks) and still making them seem fresh and exciting.  Although The Descent will not be winning any awards for innovative storytelling, it's one of the most satisfying American films in a summer full of overly expensive disappointments.  (Which, considering it's a British movie from 2005 makes one depressed to go to the movies again until December.)

Fell #6

Written by Warren Ellis
Art by Ben Templesmith
Published by Image Comics

Fell has won the comic of the week award more than any other title in our short history.  Not only that, but it shows no signs of flagging quality and is, in fact, getting better.  The dialogue could not be sharper, the plots could not be more compelling and the art--oh, the art.  Although both Mr. Ellis and Mr. Templesmith have made the claim, in the back pages of this issue no less, that they plan to be with this book "for at least a few years" one wonders how long before the offers Templesmith seems to be ignoring become too attractive to pass us.

Fell, in the most basic terms, is a crime comic.  Crime comics do not carry one of the more storied legacies in comics--after all, during the heyday of comics publishing, pulp crime books were readily available, and these filled the niche for anyone who wanted more beyond what EC Comics was publishing.  These last few years have seen a resurgence in the genre, mostly led by writers and artists who crave using the serialized comics medium to tell stories that do not include Green Arrow or Hawkeye.  Some of these new school efforts, like David Lapham's Stray Bullets or fellow COW winner 100 Bullets have done more to revitalize mainstream interest in the "comics as art" arguement than anything super-hero related in the last 20 years.  Fell not only continues the trend, but has gone to war with the high prices comic books now carry as well.  What has, luckily, not gone ignored is how incredibly good the book happens to be.  It is a rare pleasure to see a really good comic that also sells well.  With a sort of macabre take on the "ripped from the headlines" genre popularized by Law and Order, Ellis takes each issue of Fell, mixes his Detective Fell character with bits of reality and the weird and then Templesmith frames the story in short, clean panels, often finishing the book in less than 20 pages.  Whether it's a demented father who shoots up his diabetic daughter with his own feces or a woman who murders her alcoholic husband with a brandy enema (both scenarios which depressingly come from actual cases; actual cases which, even more depressingly, were far worse than the comic version) the reader is squarely in the passenger seat with Fell as he tries to find some semblance of justice for victims while at the same time build respect for the law in a town which barely maintains a grip on civility.  Hardboiled detective characters are a dime a dozen, especially if you go to the Strand, but Fell is growing into something far more interesting: a sensitive, funny man who maintains only the loosest persona of violence, and even then, only when it's demanded.  Unlike the Vic Mackies and Jack Bauers of the world, or for that matter, any other character Warren Ellis writes, Detective Fell is most comfortable in a complicated situation, and Fell, for all it's brevity, never attempts to paint a black and white, good and evil veneer over the horrors it uncovers.  At some point, Fell will be published in a trade paperback, and it will sell incredibly well for a long time.  But for those who wish to read it in it's preferred format, with the flimsy pages all beat up and coffee spills on the corner, they are certainly going to be the lucky ones--because this is a comic book, through and through, and it's worth going to a dingy store to pick it up, once a month.

Krazy and Ignatz 1937-1938

Shifting Sands Dusts It's Cheeks In Powdered Beauty
2006
120 pgs.
Written and Drawn by George Herriman
Edited by Bill Blackbeard
Designed by Chris Ware
Published by Fantagraphics

Fantagraphics continues it's paperback collection with the seventh overall book of Krazy Kat cartoons.  Crossing the 1935 line brought these books into the color years of Herriman's classic work--they also depressingly bring the reader 3 books away from the year of Herriman's untimely demise.  Still, there's a morbid gratitude in the small output that George Herriman had--when someone's work was perfect everytime, it can be easier to deal with when there isn't too much of it.  In an apt comparison, Herriman's Krazy Kat is similar to Cervantes literary output: not having any more means that one has more time for Quixote.  The impulse that strikes one as the pages get turned in Krazy Kat isn't just "how much better can this possibly get?" but also "When will i find the time to read this again?" As we near the seventy-fifth anniversaries of both the creation and end of Krazy Kat, the amount of impact this brief cartoon continues to make itself felt in animation, newspaper strips and the written word.  What was once a strange cartoon taking up space in all of William Randolph Hearst has, years later, become one of the strongest libraries of poetry and art that any American can claim.  The likelihood that George Herriman was a black man "posing" lends an even more fascinating aspect to an already near-perfect piece of history. 

Mating

By Norman Rush
1991
496 pgs.
Published by Vintage International
#14 on the NY Times "Best American Works of the Last 25 Years."

Mating is the sort of writing that is an incredible chore to get through--heavy, leaden prose with a ridiculously extravagent vocabulary describing the exploits and adventures of intensely unlikeable people.  Reading Mating should really only be done in the company of individuals who understand the nature of compulsive reading: i.e., not around people who say things like, "Why don't you just stop if you hate it so much?"  After all, those people are right--no awards or parties will be thrown for someone who makes it to the outrageously unsatisfying final pages of Mating, and the book is too unpopular and unwieldy to ever form much of a talking point in the fabled literary discussion circles that do not exist anyway. To put it bluntly, Mating is a waste of time for anyone.  At the close of the book, The Factual Opinion found its early theory proven true--that this was a book about arrogant jerks falling in love--and instead of feeling rewarded, we here at TFO had to ask why the author felt the need to tell that story, and why he felt the need to go about telling it in such an obtuse fashion.  Unfortunately, Mr. Rush was not available to give us a response, and in closing, we here at The Opinion cannot, in good conscience, be expected to defend in any way what has proven to be one of the worst literary experiences of our lives.

Carl Th. Dreyer, My Metier

1995
Directed by Torben Jensen

As is the Criterion Collection's wont, this film is sold exclusively in the Dreyer box set that contains the films Ordet, Day of Wrath and Gertrud.  Because it's Criterion, you can be guaranteed that regardless of what the DVD contains, the physical DVD itself looks great and contains far more information than provided by Imdb.com or Wikipedia.  Unfortunately, Metier is a disappointing addition to the collection: it may be better than  Armageddon, but that's due to will alone.  Dreyer is an elusive filmmaker, and there isn't a lot of information readily available outside of film-school circles about the man himself.  Anecdotal stories of his perfectionism and despotism pop up in other director's interviews, so going into Metier one expects to see more of the same.  Depressingly enough, this is not the case.  The documentary is composed like a bad History channel review--the expected focus on the four major films in Dreyer's canon with respective outtakes and talking head interviews with many of the major players.  Either due to Jensen's fear of insulting Dreyer's memory or just due to a complete lack of interviewing skills, Metier is a poor attempt to canonize the man without ever really examining who the man was, or even explaining what the impact his films had beyond a personal level with the individuals involved.  By the time the film ends, with nothing more than a vague mention of how Dreyer spent the multiple decades in between the creation of his great works, the viewer has no more knowledge of his legacy than a chronological knowledge of when the films were made.  Hopefully, some of Dreyer's fans will eventually remedy this miserable examination of his work.  If any director deserves it, Dreyer does.