This week, Joe McCulloch watched Tropical Malady, Martin Brown checked in on Fletch Lives, Tucker went in for some A-Team and David Brothers took it to the school of Akira Kurosawa, watching Drunken Angel, High & Low, The Bad Sleep Well and Stray Dog.
The A-Team
They're Trying To Fly The Tank, 2010
Tucker Stone
"Overkill is underrated."
Liam Neeson waits until the film is past the 90 minute mark to spit that line out, but make no mistake: that's Joe Carnahan's thesis statement, his operating principle. (And even if they weren't Carnahan's words but one of the eleven other writers allegedly responsible for "the script", his finished product is one that consistently works towards championing that statement.) There's no scene in the film that goes untouched by that philosophy: the cornball romance, the action, the winking ridiculousness of the plans, the miniscule body count...hell, when it comes time for BA Baracus and Hannibal Smith to negotiate the ethics of murderous revenge, it's a Mahatma Gandhi quote war that indicates the importance level. Even the plot holes--who was piloting the drones? Where did Hannibal get his better-than-the-CIA satellite photos?--stand proudly alongside the film's ridiculous final minutes of shipping container apocalypse. It's tongue in cheek, but the cheek is yours, and the tongue belongs to a bunch of unnamed strangers.
It's funny when it's supposed to be. The mid-film scene where Patrick Wilson discusses the stupidity of his employees while musing over the execution of a prisoner could easily best any half-hour comedy, and it wouldn't be surprising if his hammy baby-carrots-inhalation performance results in a Paul Rudd type of this-guy-is-fucking-funny career change. Bradley Cooper--who apparently put between 10 to 15 pounds of muscle into his pectorals since the Hangover--doesn't come away with as perfect a record as Wilson, but he's a lot more pleasant to be around than Dirk Benedict, mostly because Cooper seems to get that "Faceman" should be played more like Foghorn Leghorn than that skunk who was always drugging the cat. Liam Neeson is sort of terrible, Rampage Jackson seem's confusingly obsessed with having pity for fools, and the guy who plays Murdock is hit-or-miss in a blooper reel kind of fashion. Despite showing up for supercop work in a miniskirt and two inch heels, Jessica Biel doesn't completely humiliate herself, and considering the A-Team's notoriously awful treatment of women, that's a kind of progress. And while the stupidity of the enterprise results in laughs that weren't intended--Major Dad in a horrible beard, any scene where Cooper tries to be sweet to Biel--the tally sheet for humor still ends in "we meant that one" favor.
But more than anything else, it's the truth of that overkill line that makes all the difference, that line that marks the choice: it isn't about choosing stupid over substance, it's about the substance of stupid, the truth of trash and the question of why: you're there, you're going, you're not-at-home. This is only the first of the many 80's Action Homages that this summer has to offer--the next two being Predators and The Expendables--and while it's more of a surprise! this actually is entertaining! way to spend one's time than it is the second coming of 1987, The A-Team steamcleans the stink of Iron Man 2 and Avatar right off the bone. The summer block has changed since Jaws, and the closest that action entertainment has gotten to the perfection of Predator, Aliens and Die Hard has been in the faux-art of The Bourne Supremacy or the trashmouth sleaze of Gamer: the game is long rigged, and shit-hearted comics movies and PG-13 bullshit clog it up immeasurably. Even then, having A-Team not suck is only half-pleasing--after all, Joe Carnahan is more music video than McTiernan. This probably isn't a start.
It's still a decent swerve.
Tropical Malady
Directed by Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2004
Joe McCulloch
This is the one where a guy wanders around the jungle and talks to animals for the concluding hour. Since there’s a big chunk of black space parked right at the midpoint and new opening titles after that, the traditional joke is to claim you didn’t care for the B feature. More and more people will laugh or slap you over that these days, since Weerasethakul truly seems to be entering his prime time. Just a few weeks ago he arrived at the Cannes Film Festival to debut his much-anticipated and delightfully-titled sixth feature, Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, which promptly won the Palm d’Or from a jury headed by Tim Burton.
Obviously the president of an awards jury doesn’t necessarily dictate the winners to everyone else -- and Weerasethakul had already racked up two prior Cannes prizes anyway, so his commendation wasn’t exactly out of nowhere -- but I wonder if Uncle Boonmee’s purported blend of fantasy and horror elements into relaxed familial comedy, including but no limited to a ghostly wife, a libidinous talking catfish and an estranged son who has literally become a monster, somehow struck a nerve with a guy who was once supposed to make a Batman sequel and instead turned in an operatic crying jag of paternally/romantically abandoned horny freaks living as superhuman animals in scattershot homage to genre pictures of the Silent Era.
Unlike Burton, Weerasethakul does not abide by genre formula or franchise dictates in wrangling fantastical elements, but he is rightly egalitarian in patching together images and places and personalities with old Thai adventure stories, movie creatures and comic books, using folkloric or adventuresome devices as curving light in a personal cosmology. Weerasethakul has described his cinema as one of memory, but it doesn’t bring to mind Resnais, who operated aesthetically and politically in tandem with the avant-garde in literature; rather, it evokes some recent “new action” comics -- Cold Heat, Ninja -- in reprocessing cherished images and devices in alternating relaxed and jarring narrative forms as a means of personalizing them, retaining the unobjective state as if still swimming inside the head. Weerasethakul’s features are most often love stories, with sometimes very little bizarre content at all, yet fantasy to him is a vital component of recollection, which is potentially achronological, biased, and tainted by adjoining narratives, be they witnessed or overheard. And several of his works refer to each other, placing the mostly ‘realistic’ Blissfully Yours and the heated Tropical Malady explicitly on the same existential plane.
Clearly I’m not exhausting the means of interfacing with Weerasethakul’s work here -- you’ll notice I’ve yet to even mention his various short films and extensive work in video installation -- but I think this is nonetheless a helpful way of approaching Tropical Malady, a movie with a damn reputation. Shit - it’s the one where a guy wanders around the jungle and talks to animals for the concluding hour. It’s a bit of an myth by itself, famously overcoming mixed reviews at its own Cannes debut to seize the Prix du Jury, after which jury head Quentin Tarantino declared: “It is wonderful, and I don’t understand it.”
The sentiment proved international, as indicated by an excellent Thai magazine article by Benedict Anderson translated and expanded for the 2009 FilmmuseumSynemaPublikationen release Apichatpong Weerasethakul, tracing the cultural, political and economic forces that have contributed to the director’s oft-noted lack of theatrical visibility in his homeland. Reference is made to a documentary by critic Alongkot Maiduang, surveying the opinions of assorted Bangkok prominents, all of whom affirm the picture’s greatness and difficulty, then honing in on a quartet of young village folk, none of whom have much difficulty grappling with the film’s allegedly abstract quality at all. Anderson means to demonstrate the unwillingness of Thailand’s urban bourgeoisie to approach the film’s class-charged mystic fable aspect -- and simultaneously address claims that Weerasethakul, an American-educated son of doctors, merely traffics in depoliticized soft nationalist exotica for the handclaps and grant monies of uncritical Westerners -- but it works just as well to show how the work can become daunting by just seeming it ought to be so, whether by reputation or through a marshalling of tropes and devices that seem so simple but register as elusive. Like memory.
So: we have the story of Keng and Tong. Keng is a soldier, of a type glimpsed in the film’s opening scene, happily gathering for a group photo around a corpse in a field. We then see Tong, a young village man, striding alone and nude through the brush. The pair meet up and begin a slow-building romance, burping through time as Tong dresses himself as a soldier to try and find work in the city, Keng accompanies him to the hospital to treat his cancer-stricken dog, and the two share musical dinners and fool around in a movie theater and enjoy a happy day at a mall and a gaudy, tourist-trappy religious cave that nevertheless promises some danger, which appeals to Tong, but not Keng. Ambient noise fills every scene, from the television chatter in the village to the bustle of the city - animals are domesticated (and very moral), violence is systemized in fatigues (except when glimpsed while driving by a street beating), and homosexuality seems compulsively acceptable in any social situation, an effect Weerasethakul attributes to his memory film deliberately omitting the bad parts, at which point you notice how Tong’s father (indeed, everyone in his family except his mother) conspicuously vanishes from the action as soon as his relationship is out in the open.
But he is no kitten. At the halfway mark, Keng asks to smell Tong’s hand after he finishes a quick piss, and Tong responds by licking Keng’s own hand ferociously, then vanishing with a smile into the darkness. Then Keng rides around town at night, joyfully, to pop music. Then Tong wakes up in bed, as if from a dream. Then Keng appears in his room when he’s gone, in full uniform. Off-screen voices tell us something has been slaughtering the village cattle. Then a long cut to black.
Then a new title: A Spirit’s Path, telling us via onscreen titles -- not too far from silent movie intertitles, though Christopher Walken doesn’t show up dressed as Rudolf Klein-Rogge -- of a shaman’s ghost that transforms into a mighty tiger. If I may evoke Tarantino again, this device tends to cause some Death Proof-esque confusion over whether two movies have somehow conjoined (oooh, maybe Tarantino did understand!), since the soldier that wanders into the jungle tracking the shape-shifting spirit is clearly Keng searching for Tong, whom it turns out is some kind of were-tiger. I prefer to interpret the titles (and the new Title) as a discreet unit, telling a separate story that just happens to align closely with the main plot, particularly in that the first half of the film is ripe with some specific tale-telling by characters (another huge Weerasethakul motif, dating back to his 2000 feature debut Mysterious Object at Noon, structured as an exquisite corpse assembled through interview subjects). And yes, Keng does indeed wander around the jungle for an hour, eventually becoming wounded in a fight with wild Tong and developing weird abilities, like hearing animals speak like humans, or seeing their ghosts rise from freshly-killed bodies.
It’s a very beautiful stretch - Weerasethakul shuts out all of the noise from the first half of the film, which refused to grant rural life too much quiet. In this way, his jungle becomes prehistoric, animistic and nearly pre-talkie. Watching the film a second time, I was stunned by how closely I could recall nearly every shot, as if seared into my head. But it’s also telling a rather old story: the passionate man who discovers his lover is really a supernatural creature, and must deal with it. If the English title Tropical Malady suggests a mad hallucination, something that can’t possibly make logical sense, the Thai title Sud Pralad, meaning “Strange Beast,” with a supernatural connotation, gets to the meat of it. The physical touch of Tong’s love beckons Keng into the dark mysteries of intimate love, where society cannot touch him, where nothing seems to exist but him and the tiger, which makes him vulnerable, but speaks to him. He can kill the tiger, we’re told, or join with it. In this way, Weerasethakul’s remembrance sinks deeper into some primal tar of introspection the closer it gets to physical love, or perhaps the anticipation of sex, the excitement of the new, excitement unto terror, an adventure, a real animal experience.
We can return again to fantasy, in fact one of the crucial fantastic works of latter 20th century English literature, Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories, no doubt perused by popular dark fantasist Tim Burton at some point. Among its many distillations and divinations and harassments and elaborations upon fairy stories and folk tales, oral tradition processed into popular entertainment, there are two romantic tales that are really one which breaks for a new title and starts over in the middle. The bejeweled, rapturous The Courtship of Mr. Lyon flatters our memories of Beauty and her Beast, only to immediately reprise itself as The Tiger’s Bride, a profoundly ominous saga of exploitation and frustration, the Beauty lost to a tiger to pay her father’s gambling debts, and the Strange Beast seething under a man-mask. But if the world is so terrible -- and it surely can be, as both artists demonstrate through the emphatic answers of their second halves -- the delirious fury of its sexuality is only more logical. The world is violent and wild, and so are animals, so Weerasethakul’s man and tiger join physically (bodily?) (culturally?) in the shimmering jungle black, while Carter’s tiger, but a room and a culture and a literature away in a shared universe of folkloric ardor, licks his bride’s skin and reveals, yes, the animal’s fur underneath.
Fletch Lives
Directed by the guy who made The Golden Child, 1989
Martin Brown
Fletch Lives wasn’t based on any of Gregory McDonald’s Fletch novels, so they could have done anything they wanted. What they wanted to do, apparently, was to have Fletch (Chevy Chase) inherit a plantation; daydream about enslaving his boss and lawyer; and sing “Zipidee Do Da” while being followed around by an animated hound-dog (truthfully, the hound dog was a nice touch.) Things only get more overtly racist from there, as Fletch discovers he’s inherited a house-boy along with his plantation, who, I swear to god, introduces himself like this: “How do you do? I be Calculus Entibee. You be Mr. and Mrs. Fletcher?” I have a feeling the producers thought that all the racist stuff would be okay because they cast Blazing Saddles’ Cleavon Little as Calculus, eventually reveal him as an undercover FBI agent in the end, and have Fletch outsmart the KKK at one point in the film (it’s the cross-cancelled theory: you’re allowed to be overtly racist if you show that white people sure are stupid too). It’s all just real racism parading as ironic racism. At one point, some of the locals invite Fletch on a “coon hunt” and he looks questionably at Calculus. At another, Fletch tells Calculus, no joke, “as soon as you get that trunk upstairs and have finished your nap I guess you could fix that step and jump down, turn around and pick a bale of cotton.” I’m guessing the producers probably would have called that “making use of Chase’s improvisation skills.”
Beyond the jaw-dropping racism, Fletch Lives matches its reputation exactly. It’s an unimaginative cash-grab that uses every opportunity to put the title character in a wacky new costume, because that worked so well in the first movie. Chevy Chase sleepwalks through the part, not even bothering to try to be funny most of the time. Hal Holbrook and R. Lee Ermey are fun, as always. They’re hired to play well-worn Southern stereotypes, but sometimes there’s nothing better than watching guys that have made careers out of playing Southern stereotypes do a project they could care less about. It’s like Phil Hoffman in Mission: Impossible 3: brilliant because he’s on autopilot. There’s a shot of Bruce Springsteen’s ex-wife in her bra, which is potentially horrifying, depending on your relationship with The Boss. Plus, there’s a potential drinking game to be played, if you take a shot every time the screenwriter writes a scene that can cheaply be shot at Universal Studios—aside from the plantation, there’s a theme park called “Bible Land” with a TV studio housed within it, and they even make use of the old set from “Flash Flood,” a studio-tour staple.
At the end of the day, the most notable thing about Fletch Lives (other than it being a franchise-killer), is all the intended racism—not even necessarily because it’s in there, but because of how easily it draws out the racist impulses of others. All of that Calculus dialogue from above is chillin’ in the “Memorable Quotes” section of imdb’s Fletch Lives page. And a handful of the top-rated Netflix reviews mention how funny the plantation scene is. Here’s just a selection: “MY favorite scene in Fletch Lives is near the opening, where Chevy and a cast of dozens sing "zippity doo-dah" while dressed in plantation garb;” “Funny, witty, sarcastic and just good old fashioned 80s fun;” and “If transvestite necrophiliacs, cross burnings, coon hunts and shady televangelists are your idea of comedy, then Fletch Lives is the movie for you. One of the most underrated movies of all-time, Fletch Lives is a terrific sequel to the original masterpiece.” That guy gives it five stars.
Drunken Angel
Directed by Akira Kurosawa, 1948
David Brothers
Drunken Angel was Kurosawa's first collaboration with Toshiro Mifune. Mifune plays a gaunt and emaciated yakuza who finds himself with a bad case of TB and a worse case of Nosy Doctor Syndrome. Takashi Shimura plays an abrasive, but respected and skilled, doctor. Every summary of the movie I've seen says that they become uneasy friends, but that doesn't actually happen in the movie. They barely tolerate each other, constantly biting and snapping at each other like crabs in a barrel.
Drunken Angel feels like a sign of the potential that further Kurosawa/Mifune collaborations would bring, but isn't quite up to the caliber of their later works. Mifune is totally believable as a mean-spirited yakuza, and Shimura plays the crabby doctor well. When Shimura ambushes Mifune at a night club about his tuberculosis, Mifune makes it a point to get "falling down, where am I, who are you, oh yeah, I remember now, I hate you, you stupid old quack" mad. He stumbles into Shimura's house after bedtime, angrily insisting that he burned his x-rays and who cares about you doctors anyway, what do you know? Except--the x-rays are in his jacket pocket, and he actually is worried, but he can't stop boozing and womanizing because he has a rep.
I felt like Drunken Angel pretended like it was going to go somewhere several times. Kurosawa marks the passage of time early in the film with a young man playing guitar. Shimura, ever the pessimist, says that the music attracts mosquitos and yells at his wife to put up a mosquito net. Later, a somewhat foreshadowed villain appears in the form of Mifune's boss, fresh out of jail and ready to paint the town red. Finally! A villain! No. He's just there to steal Mifune's girlfriend, revel in his outlaw nature, and then show how untrustworthy and disgusting the yakuza lifestyle really is.
At the end of the movie, you don't get a resolution, you don't get a happy ending, and really, you don't even get any questions you might have had answered. You see the end of a barely hinted at romance, you listen to Shimura's gruff and overbearing advice (living rationally is the only way to live, a clear indictment of both the yakuza lifestyle and overt sentimentality, suck it, Mifune and every woman in the movie), and then a little girl shows up and he goes to get her some candy. But really, there's worse ways to spend an hour and a half than watching Mifune pretend to be drunk, Shimura guzzle doctor's office liquor, and Shizuko Kasagi sing "Jungle Boogie", beating Shakira to the punch by like sixty years.
High and Low
Featuring Toshiro Mifune as a Sitcom Dad, 1963
David Brothers
Five things about this movie.
1) Mark Millar is a hack. He bit the idea of the wrong kid being kidnapped from High and Low for the beginning of his Wolverine: Enemy of the State. The problem is that if you're going to steal (or reference or homage or whatever) from something great, you better bring something new to it. You can't just Jay-Z it and roll on like you did something that was worth doing. If the best you can bring to a High and Low homage is that the kid dies in the end, guess what: you suck.
2) The first hour of this movie is set in one room and it's all about the acting. Toshiro Mifune, Tatsuya Nakadai, Kyoko Kagawa, and several other actors are just given room to breathe. Kurosawa keeps the camera mostly still, leading to uncomfortably long shots. When he switches angles or changes scenes, it's just briefly. He always comes back to that same room, like it's magnetic. The extent of the action in the first half is when the policemen quickly duck under a couch so that they won't be spotted by the kidnapper or when Mifune takes a break to scrub away the stresses of the day. The first half of High and Low feels more like a stage play than a movie. And it works.
3) The next quarter jettisons Mifune and Kagawa and is all police procedural. Nakadai and his police partners walking around town looking for clues, a room full of policemen comparing notes, and then discovering who was behind the kidnapping. It's a tremendous change from the first half, like Kurosawa picked up the needle and dropped it onto an entirely different record. Despite that, it still works. Nakadai is the kind of actor you want to watch. He's charming and amazingly easy-going for a cop.
4) That last quarter? That's where Kurosawa strips out most of the dialogue and just lets the camera work. We see the seediest parts of town up close and personal. We watch the kidnapper as he shows a complete lack of human emotion. Kurosawa keeps you interested and doesn't even really need the sparse dialogue. And then, that last five minutes? Back to acting. This guy knows how to make a movie.
5) It's a black and white movie, but there's a flash of color toward the middle of it, like Schindler's List or Sin City. In the theater I was watching this at, the film was dirty and scratchy, so much so that you could hear the microphones change and pop when the scenes change. The color came through as a sickly green with a strong red in the center. It was pretty shocking, but in a "Wait, did that just happen?" sort of way.
The Bad Sleep Well
Featuring Toshiro Mifune as Japanese Clark Kent, 1960
David Brothers
The Bad Sleep Well starts out kind of twisty. There's definitely a puzzle at the heart of it, though exactly what it is isn't clear from the beginning.
It opens on a wedding. The assistant of a businessman is marrying his boss's daughter. It's a very fancy wedding, the kind of boring wedding that you hate to go to because a) everyone's old and b) there are no girls to dance with. The son of bride's brother agrees, as he immediately gets sloshed on a full bottle of champagne.
The movie begins just as the wedding is being swarmed by reporters. There's a huge business scandal going on, and they are looking to see who's going to be arrested next. The reporters serve up a really entertaining version of exposition, as they sit and watch the wedding from afar and fill us in on our players and who has done what. Their presence scares several of the businessmen, causing one to turn a traditional wedding toast into a desperate claim that he didn't do it, nobody saw him do it, you can't prove anything, and also, what are we even talking about, prank caller, prank caller. Others simply glare at the reporters.
So, the puzzle! Is it about the scandal? Nope. It's about the bastard son of a former employee of the business in question avenging his father's death. And he isn't avenging his father's death through John Woo acrobatics or poisoned teacups. He's marrying into the family and gathering intelligence. He traded identities with another, an old friend, to get close to his targets.
He starts off subtle. At the wedding, when it's time to cut the wedding cake, another, larger cake is wheeled in. This cake is in the shape of the business's building, with a rose stuck in the window his father threw himself from. The cake is parked directly behind his boss's head. Then he just loses it or something, because he somehow fakes one guy's death, gets that guy to play ghost and torment another guy, and then locks the tormented guy into a bomb shelter to find out where the money is.
It goes from puzzle to something approaching a thriller, though from the villain's point of view, to a lecture on corporate greed and man's inhumanity to man, and then it just explodes into this whole other thing where everyone gets tricked into doing something and true love is revealed and then a guy is shot up with alcohol and put into the path of a train. The Bad Sleep Well starts off slow, but once it gets going, and granted that takes a while, it's like a freight train. It's loud and you can see the ending coming from a mile away, but Mifune is having so much fun screwing around with these people that you just keep watching.
It's worth it for the end, where the newly married bride is used as a prop in a speech and an old man confuses daytime for nighttime.
Stray Dog
There are two dance numbers, 1949
David Brothers
Hey, this one is a must-watch. Toshiro Mifune plays a rookie cop, Takashi Shimura plays a veteran cop, and they're both on the trail of Mifune's stolen gun. This leads directly to some pretty fantastic scenes, like when Mifune goes undercover in the slums or trails a pickpocket for an entire day.
This is one of those movies that's just one great scene after another. Shimura bonding with a prisoner over popsicles is a scene that's signify a corrupt cop nowadays, but instead he just knows how to get what he wants out of people. Mifune bonds with a pickpocket under the stars. He harasses a young girl until she can do nothing but change into an expensive dress and dance in hysterical circles. Mifune and Shimura talk to a sweaty assistant manager at a club.
There's not one minute of this movie that isn't delightful. Beyond that, there is a story with a point about the choices you make in life and integrity in the face of hardship, but all of that is a side story. The real story is the way Mifune and Shimura move through the city and the way their live their lives. Kurosawa hit a home run with Stray Dog.
-Joe McCulloch, David Brothers, Martin Brown & Tucker Stone, 2010
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