Piranha 3D
Richard Dreyfuss dies before the titles, 2010
Joe McCulloch
It was about when Riley Steele bent over naked, back to the camera, in that classic porno maneuver that
firms up the butt and sneaks out just a bit of extra footage below, that I well and truly felt the recurrence
of history. “My god,” I thought, having never witnessed such a thing in a ‘mainstream’ theatrical feature,
even if just in longshot, “they’re playing by nudie cutie rules!” The nudie cuties, you see, were a movie
smut sub-genre of the late 1950s and early 1960’s, an outgrowth of ‘nudist’ films that sought to evade
obscenity prosecution by presenting documentary footage of people living the (non-sexual) nudist lifestyle,
often with some nominal plotline tacked on. The nudie cuties -- commonly accepted as innovated by the
great Russ Meyer with 1959’s The Immoral Mr. Teas -- invented alternate means of presenting naked
woman, but within certain boundaries: no frontal nudity, and no contact between the naked women and
really anything beyond a well-positioned beach ball.
Hardcore porn exited too, as it had since practically the invention of cinema -- and I’m using the classical definition of ‘hardcore,’ i.e. in display of anatomically-based evidence that the sexual acts depicted onscreen are authentic -- but remained a thing of stag clubs and peep shows, being plainly illegal. Ms. Steele hails from the cast of Pirates II: Stagnetti’s Revenge, assuring us that we are, in some ways, a long way from x-ray specs stripping passerby down to a saucy card deck’s code of attire, YET - it’s going to be tricky making a $24 million production budget back playing unrated, so the not inconsiderable female nudity of Piranha 3D is restricted to ladies frolicking underwater or getting murdered. It’s a deadly-fish- among-tourists plot, mixing confused teens in with a Joe Francis-styled semi-amateur porn impresario in the area to shoot hot young things on spring break; I’ll be generous and presume everyone involved in the production was aware of the real Francis’ pre-Girls Gone Wild endeavors in the Banned From Television line of gross newscast compilations, a ‘90s continuation-in-spirit of the venerable horror vérité franchise Faces of Death (itself was evolved from the Italian-born ‘mondo’ documentary genre, but let’s not go too far back). The original FoD was released in ‘78, the same year as Joe Dante’s very first Piranha.
Both of them were familiar horror mutations - Piranha was a spoof, and you believed everything in Faces of Death was real, well, you probably think they don’t retain ringers in GGW productions. Likewise, much of the serious nudity in Piranha 3D is performed by experts, although some boozy body-licking even involves the picture’s 25-year old teenage protagonists - fully clothed, of course! Male nudity is relegated exclusively to scenes of violence, as you might expect - a major post-conversion 3D effect sees the Francis stand-in’s severed appendage float out above the audience, only to be torn to bits by hungry computer graphics. I’d like to say something insightful about that, but really it’s just business as usual - not the boundaries of legality anymore, but MPAA guesswork, which is about as reliable as puzzling out what’s obscene and assures the erection of similar content guidelines.
Yet there’s some odd social politics at work in this film, something about pornography pervading youth society. Put simply, the film is oddly laissez-faire about the Joe Francis character and his extended entourage - and believe me, there’s plenty to poke at with him! I mean sure, eventually a fish bites his dick off, but his coke-powered quest to drag young Steven R. McQueen and Gossip Girl’s Jessica Szohr into a sizzling lake-bound fuck fest is played more as an eccentric means of clouding idealized local boy ‘n girl romance then any especial moral threat. Why, several of the porno people we meet are very nice! Of course, they all die, just as surely as the main cast’s tongue play will not end in *gasp* a kiss but rather Ms. Szohr vomiting directly into the camera in glorious added ticket charge post-conversion three dimensions, but it does seem that Haute Tension auteur Alexandre Aja is keenly aware of the semantics at play - a shot of nubile ladies bounding under a boat’s glass floor is matched with a shot of the movie’s pornographers shooting exactly what we’ve just seen. With this much sympathy for the devil, it’s hard to think of him as particularly diabolical.
Anyway, Piranha 3D is mostly unsuccessful as a gore comedy; it’s horribly structured, ambling around for nearly an hour before cramming nearly all of the big make-up effects into a ten-or-so-minute Omaha- Beach-by-Spielberg assault, and then spending the last two reels attempting to draw out enclosed- space suspense among skeletal characters, culminating in an awkward, over-elaborate success plan that exists solely to inject the action with some sense of beat-the-monster ‘stakes’ that absolutely none of the characters involved should logically care about at that point. Of course, this too is kind of a joke (and certainly a better one than provided by ostensible comedy lead Adam Scott, cast as a serious nerd diver and man of action, which I guess was presumed to be funny on its own somewhere along the line) - the denouement suggests that even the non-promiscuous characters who stand for Pure Love and Heroic Kisses and Family are probably doomed to die.
No, what really bothers me is the rank failure of aesthetic. I mean, all that naked flesh isn’t just around for ogling, and the licking isn’t sheer titillation: it’s a suspense mechanism, teasing the audience with the loveliness of skin, fated to be shredded by hungry lil’ creatures. It’s sex to you, but all those underwater shots of legs and butts is suppertime to the picture’s real cast! That’s the irony of the whole smut concept. But Aja doesn’t even begin to follow through - save for the big massacre set piece, the actual violent bits are almost entirely CG, unconvincingly mounted in blurry, murky underwater settings dimmed further by the 3D process. There’s some great makeup on display, sure, but it’s always Shot A of performers bobbing around in the water, Shot B of computer cartoon fish chomping at digital scraps of flesh, and Shot C of performers emerging from the water dressed up by the fx team.
This creates a weird disconnect in the viewing experience, like frames are missing - like the horror is firmly ‘in quotes,’ and the quotation is meant to be much of the comedy. Ha, it’s funny because you’re watching Piranha 3D! Not as funny as writing 1000 words on it, though. Oh well, that probably helped with the R rating too, allowing for more frames of carefully modulated non-anti-porn before all the involved parties vanish into red computer mist and the rest of the crew is obliterated by floating closing credits you can almost reach out and touch.
Pygmalion
The Shaolin Master Phoneticist, 1938
Tucker Stone
While Pygmalion isn't a screwball comedy by any stretch of the definition, Leslie Howard plays a pretty good game of touch football with the classic speed-insult technique, making this one worth the time, if you're asking. The story itself--the speech teacher who grabs a gutter-class flower seller and fools the rich into believing she's "one of them"--is more frequently dealt with under the My Fair Lady shingle, where it's probably "better", despite being laced with songs. Of course, if you're really going to play the authenticity card, you'll want to track the community theater listings (or skulk a high school parking lot) to see Bernie Shaw's original.
But why dick around? Howard's an unlimited source of pleasure, delivering insult after insult at a pace that never lets up, and he's got a perfect foil in Wendy Hiller, a woman whose performance serves as a devious plotted ride towards salty, spot-on scene closing lines that retroactively make entire scenes seem like punchline machines. The film's as unnecessarily sexist as the play, but considering that Shaw's stated goal was to ridicule the idiocy of believing in intrinsic class distinction, one would fundamentally miss the point if they spent their time decrying the nastiness with which Howard treats his charge.
Alice In The Cities
Wim Wenders Is Responsible For Post Rock, 1974
Part of the "Emotional Sloppy Manic Cinema: Films Directed and Selected by Benny and Josh Safdie" Series
Tucker Stone
Alice In The Cities isn't a plot heavy movie, my limited experience with Wenders makes me wonder how many of his films are, but it's engrossing all the same. The story of a (seemingly) miserable German journalist who ends up traveling around a couple of European cities with a little girl in the crazy, childish hope that the two might find a grandmother she can barely remember, the film spends a good bit of screen time framing the two characters as they stare at each other. It's not a whimsical comedy about the preciousness of children, the film doesn't end with the two of them "learning" anything about themselves, and at one point, our grown-up adult gleefully abandons little Alice to run off and see Chuck Berry, a singer that Wenders apparently didn't like enough to depict him as being the slightest bit different from a painted skeleton. Of course, the two end up together again, glumly staring at one another over the cheapest food that our hero can afford, rambling around some of the least photogenic parts of a German countryside with nothing but an old photograph and toddler memories to work off of.
It's more than enough, but not a lot. The trick seems to be that Wenders never forces the audience's perception of his characters along. Phil, the journalist, is never clearly delineated as being unhappy, (although I thought he was), and Alice spends entire scenes of the movie holding back from expressing any emotion at all, choosing instead to quietly ingest her surroundings with what, at first, reads like the cliched "wise beyond her years" nonsense they always put on top of little blonde girls when they show up in a movie. But by keeping her from spitting out any sort of judgment, she comes across more as mystery than she does the cute little sage. During one scene, Wenders continually cuts over to a little boy, mumbling the lyrics to a lousy pop song. It's clear that Alice is watching him, possibly obsessing over him, but you wait, and wait, and wait--and she never says a word. Instead, she watches, unseen by Phil, unacknowledged by the boy, caught out only by the viewer. It's a weird, private moment in a movie carved almost wholly out of them. Earlier, a conversation between Phil and his ex--whose "you can't stay here" basically creates the circumstances that result in the rest of the film--pretends to nail much of Phil's personality to the wall, showing him as a man who seems blissfully ignorant of how to carry on a conversation. But it's a red herring, a feint--he can talk and listen to people just fine, he just can't do it very well with an ex-girlfriend. (Who could? Better yet, who should?)
There's a lot of value in watching movies like this--quiet, wistful-glances movies--in a movie theater. On the small screen, be it a television or computer display, the scope of the thing gets reduced down in a way that makes the thing more relatable, less separate from the audience--and this is even before you incorporate the "breaks" that self-controlled viewing allows for. Movies geared mostly towards entertainment and escape don't seem to suffer as much as a film like Alice In the Cities does. It seems ridiculous to pretend that "because they're better" is a real argument anymore--atomising film culture, no matter the genre, has done more to produce wet brained fools than any one action movie ever could--but most could agree (without rancor) that you can't ruin a Jim Carrey movie by pausing it to pay for Chinese food. On television, Alice can be a bit of a slog, one of those films where the viewer subtly checks to see how much longer it might last. But on a theater screen, the rhythm of the film's never-flagging forward momentum becomes obvious. The editing still seems amatuerish (and probably was), the "holy shit, this guitar score sounds exactly like Explosions In The Sky" soundtrack is as irritatingly out of place as ever, but as long as those aren't dealbreakers--god help you if they are!--Alice In the Cities could be one of the most satisfying "boring" movies you'll ever see.
-Joe McCulloch, Tucker Stone, 2010
Piranha was a mess-- they ran out of money so you never see at least one of the key characters die...? An occasionally likable mess, so I get the reviews. I just felt like it really over-invested comedy-wise in Jerry O'Connell-- that guy just kinds of creeps me out; I'm not sure why; that lousy superhero show he did where he used hairspray bottles to fly around probably didn't help; what a creepy guy.
Plus: there is nothing I don't hate about 3-d.
But that said, "Omaha Beach" was pretty good by me, good kills in it, the non-Piranha kills especially, and there were... at least two good kills outside of that scene that I can think of. Plus: I'm really glad they cast Eli Roth-- I feel like he needed to be there. I'd really have rather seen a detailed making-of documentary, Hearts of Darkness style, more than the movie itself, but I'd say that about a lot of movies, probably...
Also: I hope they get Michael Clarke Duncan for the sequel. I would like to see that guy get eaten by CGI piranha. I would like that. They're talking about Thailand for the sequel-- I'd rather see some snooty snob resort, like I don't now if there's anywhere in the Hamptons where piranha could eat people, but someplace like that... like a snobs versus slobs thing, but instead of Rodney Dangerfield, flesh-devouring piranha.
Posted by: Abhay | 2010.08.24 at 19:45
Eli Roth's death was pretty Troma, I'd say... or maybe... my introduction to him was through a joke audio commentary he did on their 1998 Bloodsucking Freaks dvd; I don't even know if he ever worked for them formally, or if he just knew people there who liked him, but... his evolution into a semi-iconic horror/violence figure is just really, really, really surreal to me, entirely because of that.
Posted by: Jog | 2010.08.24 at 20:28