The Factual Opinion

Even Cowgirls Get The Blues

1983
Written and Directed by Gus Van Sant
Based on a novel by Tom Robbins
Starring Uma Thurman, John Hurt, Rain Phoenix, Lorraine Bracco, Keanu Reeves, Crispin Glover, "Pat" Morita, Udo Kier and Roseanne Barr

There's a difference between bad movies: some are just bad, while some are so offensively terrible that they inspire a near physical revulsion in the viewer.  It's unfair to even place movies that are merely gross in the second category.  For example, just because you're grossed out by the eight minute rape scene in Irreversible, you can't categorize the movie alongside something like Cowgirls.  They aren't the same type of bad.  Bad is 16 Blocks, or the Assault on Precinct 13 remake.  Even Cowgirls Get The Blues is somewhere beyond those movies--or, to be more technically accurate, somewhere beneath them.  Similar to the common cliche that you can't really hate something if you've never had any liking for it, Cowgirls is one of those astonishing failures made almost completely out of objects that had worked, and would work again--yet when those objects came together in Cowgirls, they annihilated one each others respective goodness and laid bare a movie that, had films any power to damage the world they are viewed in, would have broken our planet in half.

It should be noted that, regardless of what the world may think, the offices of the Factual firmly hold the belief that all of Tom Robbins literary output belongs solely under the purview of a toilet bowl; less histrionically put, the man writes books of shit.  It's not only unlikely that a good version of a book of his could be made into a film, it's also true that any accurate representation of his works would result in a film that wouldn't be even remotely entertaining.  Considering that Gus Van Sant's version of the Cowgirls novel is oft-derided by Kool Aid slurping ex-hippies as not being faithful enough to Robbins new age horseshit, this viewer wishes that the Van Sant has just gone ahead and filmed the damn book in it's entirety.  The resulting film would have still been horrible, but at least all the blame could have rested on Robbins shoulders--as it is, the mess Mr. Portland brought to the screen is, in some aspect, partly his fault.  As a side-note, Rain Phoenix is, without any shade of doubt, completely his fault.  There's not a single director on earth that would have been foolhardy enough to give this young lady such a healthy part.  While we're all sure that she's a real sweetheart, she can barely form cogent sentences, much less act.  She's got the type of charisma that makes people fall asleep at documentaries--she's just that boring.  Watching her drop her pants and threaten a homosexual John Hurt with her "stinky, tuna fish-smelling, unwashed" genitalia doesn't help.  Honestly, Judi Dench and Glenn Close probably couldn't make that hideous scene work, but Ms. Phoenix is particularly unsuited for it.  We were all real upset about River too, Mr. Van Sant, but it doesn't mean i asked Joaquin if he wanted to clean my teeth.  I asked my dad, because he's a dentist.  Having a dead brother doesn't make anybody a great actor.

Rain may have have the excuse that she doesn't have a clue how to speak, but the rest of the cast doesn't.  All of these people, even the abominable Lorraine Bracco, have been good before.  (Well, Roseanne was only good on her sitcom, and Mr. Miyagi's career is made up of extended riffs on racial stereotypes, but still, both know how to work with a bad script.)  It's easy to single out certain performers for abuse--John Hurt has been a genius in some awful stuff, and his one-note performance here, in a role that screams for far more exploitation than he's willing to give, speaks to a lack of courage that is totally incongruent with the performer we know he can be.  His omnipresent narrator in Von Trier's Dogville is far more fascinating in one-minute sound bites than the irritating and neutered Countess he appears as in Cowgirls.  Uma Thurman learned how to make the bizarro work by the time her career took her to the Kill Bill films, and she's able to skate by here solely by using bland facial expressions, but the movie never attempts to explore what type of story can be told when it's protagonist is a numbed out cypher of a human being.  In all, only two of this films performers actually move into the realm of good, unsurprisingly enough, it's Udo Kier and Crispin Glover--two men who have the most pumped up charisma of any human beings on the planet.  (In all seriousness, isn't it about time to clone whatever is running through Udo Kier's veins?  The man made Johnny Pneumonic entertaining.  He's clearly a god.)

There's not much to say about the actual plot of the movie, which is why it hasn't been mentioned until now: because there isn't one.  There's a fight over the ownership of a ranch, settled by having a bunch of lesbian feminist cowgirls drop trough to unleash their "stinky pussies."  (Hey, if that offends you, don't blame me.  It offended me too, and I'm about as ambivalent to sexism as you can be before people start calling you a misogynist.)  Of course, then the cowgirls drug a bunch of whooping cranes with peyote, thereby cooling out "their bad vibes."  (Only in a Tom Robbins book could an endangered species be saved by this kind of pointless idiocy.)  Unexplored subplots abound, none of which are missed when abandoned.  If that isn't enough, Uma spends the majority of the film with massive fake thumbs, neither of which look very real--yet are still capable of being completely repulsive.

There's absolutely no good reason to watch this movie.  The only acceptable one that this viewer came up with is that it cemented forever the truism that Gus Van Sant's what-the-fuck remake of Psycho wasn't really that bad.  It's boring, sure.  But it's no Cowgirls Get The Blues.

Kill!

1968
Written and Directed by Kihachi Okamoto
Starring Tatsuya Nakadai and Etsushi Takahashi

It's been argued in these pages before, and probably will be again, that the Japanese samurai films from the 1960's are a horrifically neglected piece of modern cinema: with that in mind, here's another one that's relentlessly entertaining, hellishly clever and ten times prettier than the last fifteen non-Chris Doyle movies anybody has seen.  As was the trend in those astonishingly creative times, it's got a Machiavellean plot, about thirty-six more subplots than it really needs, a group of actors flipping their own typecasting up in the air and swords, death and dismemberment galore.

Only two years earlier, Okamoto had dipped into the world of samurai's with the irreverent Sword of Doom, a bitter, hardened look at what becomes of these film characters when they actually bear moral consequence for the nonstop bloodshed they bring about.  As in that film, Okamoto's star in Kill! is the incredible Tatsuya Nakadai--and it's his willingness to be so incredibly unattractive that makes for such a great movie.  See, Kill!, while following one of the eleven standard plots of a samurai film (this being #9, wherein nice revolutionaries are betrayed by an evil superior) chooses to beef up every single characters role for the purposes of, surprisingly, making them realistic human beings.  It's the style most commonly used for the purposes of drama: a coming of age story for one, a love story for another, and a redemption story for our lead.  Watching Okamoto try to balance all of their characters arcs in two hours isn't just enjoying, but instructive as well: one could only wish that the recent spate of ensemble filmmakers had paid more attention to this simple gem.  Without any sense of confusion, the movie leaps from room to room, field to sandstorm, showcasing a group of the finest actors at their best as they utilize a simple genre piece to examine nearly every aspect of adult life in a twisted time period, a time when the cultured violence of a sword was replaced by the faceless cruelty of the gun.

As it's so cynically put near the end of the film, when the cultured demon of the villain looks upon the bruised, filthy beggar who has destroyed his flawless plan, "You couldn't have done all of this."--but oh yes, that's Okamoto's point.  Anybody can kill somebody, and dressing them up in robes and topknots doesn't make it any cleaner.  Okamoto had survived being a member of "the generation where most of them got killed," the group of young Japanese men drafted late in World War II, and all of his films have always given far more weight to the mortality of slaughter--and Kill! is no different.  While it's certainly one of the more demanding works of the genre, it's also one of it's classics.

This time, we at the Factual are sad to say it:  They don't make 'em like this anymore.

-Tucker Stone, 2006

The Departed

2006
Directed by Martin Scorsese
Script by William Monahan
Based on Infernal Affairs
Starring Leonardo Dicaprio, Matt Damon and Jack Nicholson
With Martin Sheen, Alec Baldwin, Mark Wahlberg and Ray Winstone

It's one hell of a cast, with one hell of a director.  On top of that, it's based on one of the few recent Honk Kong crime dramas that didn't suck.  If one based their enjoyment of film solely on pedigree, than that sad individual must have been waiting for The Departed all year.  Taking into consideration that The Departed has been near-universally embraced by both sides of the critical field (art v. entertainment,) one begins to have trouble imagining who it is that doesn't actually want to see this movie.

You're probably out there, and if we cared, The Factual would feel sorry for you.  But we don't--because you're a fool.

Irreverent, filthy and soaked in brilliance from minute one, The Departed is the sort of movie that is so increasingly rare that it's almost impossible to believe they ever existed: smart, funny works of art that are as entertaining as they are intelligent.  Looking at it another way, Scorsese has clearly thrown out his hand in a way not seen since Taxi Driver and made a movie that, while fun for kids, is refreshingly adult.  At the same time, the A-list cast gives some of the best performances of their careers--Leonardo Dicaprio has never, ever been better (and if the adjoining Blood Diamond preview is any indication, will never be this good again,) Matt Damon turns in yet another somber, masculine performance that stands alongside his work in Gerry as another reason why he's the best American actor working today, Mark Wahlberg shows off the type of charismatic magic he hasn't explored since Boogie Nights, Alec Baldwin blusters through the type of filth-laden sweathog role that's become his stock-in-trade, and underrated powerhouses like Anthony Anderson and Ray Winstone continue a long string of stealing scenes.  Although every preview had led worriers to think that we'd have to suffer through another hideous performance by Nicholson, to go alongside his previous decade of embarrasing himself, he's so ridiculously well-cast here that every minute he's on-screen, we forgive him for Anger Management, Something's Got To Give and Wolf. 

Did we mention forgiveness? What about Scorsese?  Excised from his last few missteps, he's recovered the magic that hasn't graced his work since Goodfellas, exploded the myths of the Michael Mann world of crime (where emotion never impacted the job, a gorgeous idea that has become so widespread as to be the current rule) and recreated a filthy world of dark sociopaths propelled by desire that hasn't been this entertaining since the Godfather Part II.  The Departed isn't just a great movie, it's one of the best crime movies in a long time. 

Takeshis'

2005
Written, Directed, Edited and Starring Takeshi Kitano

At this point, Takeshis' is a film seen by very few.  Although it's appeared at a few film festivals, it's yet to see an American release and few reviews are available.  Kitano's work, as his been discussed in these pages before, has suffered critical blows in the last few years, both in this country and his homeland in Japan.  While his last film, Zaitoichi, was his most commercially successful, Kitano's love for creative exploration was no longer being as widely embraced as it was in the late 90's.  His last few films prior to Zaitoichi, the sedate Brother and the artistic triptych Dolls were commercial failures and mauled by critics, American and Japanese alike.  Unsurprisingly, Kitano response to the success of Zatoichi was totally unpredicatable.  Instead of returning to the screen with another tried and true commercial property (the Zatoichi series is legendary in Japan) Kitano has turned out his most incomprehensible art film ever: Takeshis'.

The subject of Takeshi's is, at its clearest moments, Takeshi Kitano himself.  While this doesn't become an exercise in arrogance, sans a few extended shootouts that make little sense, the film is still clearly one that will only makes total sense to one person: it's writer, director, editor and star.  Like all of Kitano's films, it's simply shot, brilliantly minimalist in setting and style; unlike his films, it makes almost no sense whatsoever, and is so raptuous about not making sense that the film is near impossible to hate.  However, it is very easy to dislike--after all, the film seems totally uninterested in going anywhere or doing anything whatsoever.  While a whole lot of things happen in the film, from a bizarre dance sequence set to DJ music that involves a caterpillar and a terrible breakdancer, to the copious amount of slow-motion shoot-outs, or the overly extended and tiresome satire of Seinfeld's "Soup Nazi" character, there are few moments of the film that aren't at least full of something--the problem is that the something is just that.  It's a movie about a guy dreaming about things, sometimes doing them, and never attempting to explain them.  In any other hands, it would be a tiresome exercise in creative masturbation, something like a Simpsons episode devoted to a Simpsons writers brainstorming session.  In Kitano's hands, the film is still as tiresome, and it's still masturbatory, but at least you don't find yourself hating the filmmaker by the end, a trick that many American filmmakers should try to learn, from Spielberg to Lynch.

Erin Brockovich

2000
Directed by Steven Soderbergh
Written by Susannah Grant
Starring Julia Roberts
With Aaron Eckhart, Albert Finney and Marg Helgenberger

Some movies age well--others beg the question, "Why was this successful?"  Erin Brockovich rests in the latter category.  Feel-good movies are a tough genre to begin with, ones based on real-world situations are even more difficult.  The sentimentality and satisfying conclusion required often turn feel-good movies into exercises in false endings; one is to believe that depressing and sad circumstances can be resolved by the final 15 minutes, usually accompanied by swelling music and tables-turning justice.  David has to beat Goliath for these films to work--putting these films into the context of reality makes this an even more difficult task, as Goliath (in the films case, a giant corporation) is what continues to succeed in the real world.  So, of course, Erin Brockovich takes liberty with the real world situation it portrays: the real Erin is a rather toxic woman, the real victims portrayed in the film aren't as grateful in the real world, and corporations continue to poison local towns, regardless of the extensive payouts at the close of the movie.  All this aside, the film is a vehicle for a star who learned a long time ago that no one enjoys watching her act like anything other than the goofy smiling quirky beauty.  (Witness Mary Reilly to see the last time Julia Roberts attempted being "unpredictable" or "creative.") That's not a nasty criticism, plenty of today's film celebrities aren't welcomed by American viewers when they perform outside of their comfort zone.  A big reason for Julia Roberts Academy win for Erin most likely comes about for her copious use of cursing in the film--watching the Pretty Woman star throw out four letter words is as exciting as when Tom Cruise later did the same in Magnolia, as if no one anticipated that these people could perform unlikeable characters so well--of course, in their case, unlikeable means "still pretty likable." After six years though, Roberts, like Cruise, have so far reverted to their former genre performances that Brockovich seems less like a risky turn, and more like a woman showcasing her now complete unwillingness to explore the world of acting.  In Steven Soderbergh's case, Erin Brockovich came so close on the heels of the brilliant Traffic that, at the time, this sudsy turn into melodramatic Lifetime style story seemed acceptable; he had, after all, made one of the most darkly experimental and cynical American films in recent memory, if anybody was allowed a vacation from work, it was him.  Taking Erin Brockovich out of context of the time in which it was released, it seems like a waste of a filmmaker--although it contains brilliant touches of dusty cinematography, Erin Brockovich is such a knee-jerk portrayal of un-realistic "American values" that the film could've been directed by any of the hacks who handled the filming of the NBC's former TGIF lineup.  Of course, then the film would've been forgotten by now, relegated alongside K-Pax, A Civil Action, and My Stepmom's Best Friends Wedding as "one of those feel-good pieces of garbage that my girlfriend made me watch." 

Sonatine

1993
Written, Directed, Edited and Starring Takeshi "Beat" Kitano

When considering whether or not to watch Sonatine, disregard the fact that the American DVD release is produced by Rolling Thunder, the production house created by Quentin Tarantino for the purposes of releasing movies that he feels you should watch.  Like Chunking Express, another Rolling Thunder release, Sonatine isn't one of the movies that Quent has plagiarized (or "referenced") when creating his schlock-art masterpieces.  Kitano was already, and remains, a Japanese superstar when he released Sonatine, but the success of the movie both at home and abroad took his career to a whole new level.  Up until Sonatine, he'd written and directed multiple films that stayed loosely within their own genre--Getting Any? was a pretty straight forward Airplane style comedy, Violent Cop and Boiling Point were hyper-violent moody crime thrillers, and Scene by the Sea was a goof on the arty romance piece.  Sonatine refused those categories--it contains much of Cop's violence and pace, but the off the wall humor and absurdist set-pieces of Getting Any? appear as well.  While the film is one that is most often treated as a slighter version of his later masterwork Fireworks, that's a mistake as well.  Sonatine is a singular triumph--a film that thoroughly exhausts every mainstay of the yakuza (and for that matter, American mafia) library, but it places them among some of the most riveting comedy ever done.  From the gorgeous nighttime roman candle battle to the human beings as paper dolls sumo fight, the movie is so overstuffed with absurdly hilarious moments that, despite the high body count, it's most remembered for the laughter it produces.  With Sonatine, Kitano finally made good on the promise of his earlier "entertainment" films and showed that he was capable not only of creating art, but that he was extraordinarily good at it as well.  In a film climate that either slaughters its auteurs or shuffles them into niche genres, Kitano has shown himself courageous with his willingness to experiment as far as a camera is willing to take him, and unlike Woody Allen and David Gordon Greene, he's excited to have an audience alongside him. 

K Street

2003
Directed by Steven Soderbergh
Written by Henry Bean
Starring James Carville, Mary Matalin, Mary McCormack, John Slattery and Roger Guenveur Smith

If you end up watching the final episode of the ten available for the now-defunct K-Street, you're likely to find yourself in a state of furious depression.  Not due to the subject matter or the particular events of that episode, but because if you've made it to number ten, that means you've gotten hooked--and like one of the calculating dealers on HBO's sister show The Wire, you've been cut off cold.  Sure, some of the series plots are resolved, in the same quiet fashion that most of the show's resolutions hold, but when the blank black screens start rolling with the "Appearing as themselves" listings, it will make for one of the worst crimes against a quality television show since, well, Misfits of Science.  Because here's the sad truth: K Street wasn't just good--it was incredible.  There's no show in the history of television that so successfully done what K Street accomplished, blending real people into a fictionalized situations, with as few actors as possible, and then surrounded that small unit with real people--people like Howard Dean, Tucker Carlson, Paul Begala, Orrin Hatch, Barbara Boxer and any other senator, congressman or lobbyist who happened by.  There's no show that even tried.  On top of that, each and every episode is directed, shot, and edited by Soderbergh on a herculean five day schedule.  Even if K Street was merely watchable it would still be an inspiring feat of creation--and it's far more than "merely watchable." 

Trying to explain the dynamic of K Street is a disservice to the delicate nature of the show, so instead we'll put it this way: television lost one of it's finest experiements when it lost K Street.  Now that it's so cheaply available on DVD, one shouldn't miss the opportunity to see how special it really was--an intelligent, balanced look at the nature of politics, business and human relationships. Enjoy.

Miami Vice

2006
Written and Directed By Michael Mann
Starring Colin Ferrell and Jamie Foxx
With Li Gong and Justin Theroux

Oh Michael, where did you go?  Miami Vice has nearly played itself out of the top ten, and unless DV filming accounts for a much smaller gross, it looks like Mr. Mann will be posting his least profitable film since The Keep.  The difference now is that when The Keep came and went no one knew who Mann was, or what he could accomplish.  One dose of Heat and a slice of The Insider later, there's no chance that something as disappointing as Miami Vice can go unremarked upon.  Of course, the failure that is Vice is not totally his fault-after all, it's incredibly gorgeous, the violence is fascinating and Jamie Foxx's abs are above reproach--in fact, a good portion of the blame for the sheer mundane stupidity has to rest in and on the hands and muttonchops of Colin Ferrell.  Mr. Ferrell so completely sleepwalks and shambles through his performance that merely watching him for five minutes creates an entirely new genre of fun: come on, theater-goer, join us: "When was Colin actually good, in anything?" and if you mention New World again, than i'm gonna...

But as horrible as Colin is, eventually, as Descartes proposed, we circle back to Mr. Mann.  After all, he did write the script--and one doubts it took him very long.  Even if it did, what he ended up with is so completely full of cliched garbage that it comes across like Dick Tracy on angel dust and by the time one finally reaches the film's requisite attempt at re-creating the magic of the bank heist in Heat, one is desperately trying to focus memory solely on bloodshed if only to get the horror the English language has just endured out of one's mind; the script (if it could be said to have one) seems like something that Mann might have come up with while junked out on blow and watching old episodes of Vice itself, but with the sound turned off--did Tubbs just say "Skillset?"  It's an easy claim, and it's been made multiple times in the last few weeks, that "a bad movie by Michael Mann is still better than a good movie by Todd Haynes," and while that may be true, especially if you compared Vice to Velvet Goldmine, this time there's really no honest arguement for why looking at jpg files from Miami Vice in an air-conditioned office wouldn't be far preferable than sitting through such a meandering piece of tripe.  Just saying how great it looks isn't going to be enough this time. 

Although we here at The Factual are loath to attempt to answer the question "why" in most circumstances, we will do so--after all, the editors have all agreed on one consensus: there's just no plausible reason why this movie was made in the first place.  If Mr. Mann would've just liked to return to the cops and crooks genre after vacationing in the sunny lands of bio-pics (Ali, The Insider) and character studies (Collateral), than he should have done so with a more sure footing.  Incorporating in the moronic ideals of a long-cancelled television show that barely survives in re-runs probably crippled him from the outset.  Poor choices in casting are to blame, sure, but if Joel Shumacher has taught us anything, it's that you can make Colin seem intelligent. (Tigerland)  Michael Mann is one of the few directors who is able to capitalize on an actors weakness (Al Pacino for one) and tame a lunatic actors wild choices (Russell Crowe and Val Kilmer for another.)  Mann surely could have done it again, despite Li Gong's incomprehensible speech pattern, if he'd gone into making a film with the same level of courage he took to dismantling Last of the Mohicans or Manhunter.  Instead, he sold off his courage, intelligence and integrity and made the second worst film of his career.  (Look, The Keep is really, really bad.)