Ten Short Film Reviews 9

Happy New Year Y'all.

Well, one year blogging (on Blogger since April) and a total of 69 posts. I'd like to be as prolific next year, hopefully I'll manage at least one post a week. Here's to 2011...

My Name Is Bruce - 2007, Bruce Campbell
Fast forward through the god-awful first five minutes until you see Bruce appear and then the rest of this Bruce Campbell-athon isn't bad if you take it for what it is; an homage to all things BC. I've watched and enjoyed The Evil Dead films and had assumed that Bruce wasn't capable of much more than the Heroic Lead Spoof that he made his own. He's also good in Bubba Ho Tep, but he's still just doing a comedy Elvis impersonation. This thing about My Name Is Bruce is that it's one of those 'Self conscious B movies made in the spirit of a B movie' that have become popular with the advent of straight-to-DVD. These films tend to be fun, but lack the spark that made the Evil Dead films (and a few other gems) so good. They often have a lead actor (sometimes an entire cast) trying to be Bruce Campbell and failing. So in My Name Is Bruce, the big man himself proves that he actually is the greatest modern B movie actor around, and as easy as he makes it look, it's impossible to imitate.

Red Scoprion - 1989, Joseph Zito
On the back of Ivan Drago, Dolph Lundgren played another monotone Russian badass, this time he got to fire large weapons Rambo style. Dolph plays a Spetsnaz soldier send into an unnamed African country to help fight off a native rebellion against the oppressive and generic Communist foreign power. Lots of 80's action film themes are present: anti-communism, anti-apartheid, helicopter gunship, ultimate killing machine goes native, Little Richard (the very same Little Richard song 'Long Tall Sally' used in Predator) and angry Americans who know what's really going on. It's all very generic but there are some almost touching scenes where Dolph walks though the desert with a bushman. It's strange but compelling to watch a huge hulking young Nordic dude walking around with a tiny, shrivelled old African fellow.

Dolph had some kind of 'celebrity' boxing match with the Russian guy from Predators.

Inferno - 1999, John G. Avildsen
Probably Jean-Claude Van Damme's most charming straight to DVD. After an embarrassing opening scene (the old ‘Ride Out Into The Desert To End It All With A Gun And a Bottle Of Jack’ routine) Danny Trejo gives JCVD a foot massage and sings to him (seriously). And then when they've finished bonding, Jean-Claude rides into town to kick ass, reveal his own ass, then kick some more ass. As is often the case it's the ensemble cast that lifts this above most crappy action films.

Screamers - 1995, Christian Duguay
Sci Fi B movie loosely based on the Phillip K. Dick novel 'The Second Variety' and starring Robocop himself Peter Weller. Some nice pre digital creature effects along with some early CGI which of course looks very quaint now. They clearly had some money to spend, although it still looks kind of cheap, mainly due to the small cast and some lousy sets. Slightly better than 'Soldier', the other film supposedly set in the Blade Runner universe.

Young Americans - 1993, Danny Cannon
Danny Cannon's debut doesn't quite live up to the exiting synopsis: Harvey Keitel plays an American cop who travels to London to apprehend a gangster (Viggo Mortensen) who has formed a new gang of sociopath teenagers trying to imitate American culture. Harvey and Viggo are good, as is a very young Thandie Newton, but it's nothing special.

Paprika – 2006, Satoshi Kon
Take a pinch each of Ghost in the Shell, Akira, Spirited Away, Princess Mononoke and Metropolis (not the Fitz version) and mix it all in with an impenetrable plot and you wind up with what might seem like a cynical attempt to make an internationally successful Japanese animated film. If you’ve seen any of the above you’ll know that the plot isn’t what’s important in these films, it’s the concept, the philosophy, the feeling. But this one is so poorly explained and so unoriginal that the climactic spectacle fails to have any resonance.
Basically it’s about dreams. Controlling dreams, interacting with them, living them, and then watching them back on screen. I’m not certain but either this film or the novel it’s based on must have had some influence on Christopher Nolan when he came up with the idea for Inception, the similarities are too great for it not too be the case. So Paprika, as an almost incomprehensible film about films and dreams, serves as a testament to how good a film Inception is.

The Hurt Locker - 2008, Kathryn Bigelow
Six Oscars! It's good, but it's no better that all the other post-Iraq Invasion films. The Green Zone is an unhealthy fantasy, The Kingdom goes all Rambo at the end, Siriana isn't as clever as it thinks it is, neither is Body Of Lies. Hurt Locker is just as good (average?) and equally unremarkable.

Déjà vu - 2006, Tony Scott
Not quite as good as Tony and Denzel's previous collaboration Man On Fire but still better than I expected. It's a bit like Surrogates in that once you accept the main concept, it's an exiting if predictable thriller. It features the best car chase I've seen in a while as well.

Last Action Hero - 1993, John McTiernan
As regular readers of It's Been A Long Time General will know, I'm a big fan of John McTiernan, particularly his second work as a director, Predator. After Predator and Die Hard and Hunt For The Red October, McTeirnen took on Last Action Hero. Other than perhaps Walter Hill there was no other director more suited to spoof the Action genre. McTiernan, who spent his pre cinema days directing theatre productions, never took himself too seriously when it came to the macho films that became his forte. This may be the reason he did such a good job, he wasn’t trying to impress anyone. LAH was a bit of a dud financially and critically and so almost inevitably has become a ‘cult classic’. As a ‘spoof’ it shouldn’t be compared to Airplane, The Naked Gun or Hot Shots. Those films were written by seasoned comedy writers and excellent as they are, stuck to a blueprint laid out by the The Kentucky Fried Movie: absolute deadpan, always. LAH is far more daring. Schwarzenegger, the biggest movie star in the world at the time (of all time?) played himself and spoofed his own on screen image. Shane Black who wrote Lethal Weapon had a hand in writing it, spoofing his own work just like McTiernen. In a sense LAH is too similar to the films it parodies; clever premise, good first couple of acts, disappointing climax. It’s a wonder this film wasn’t a lesson to Hollywood to stop making this mistake again and again (Hancock anyone?)

Zombieland – 2009, Ruben Fleischer
Is Zombieland the best zombie film ever? Maybe. I suppose that George’s original Dawn of The Dead is the best. Not only did it start off the whole ‘zombies take over the world’ genre which struck a chord with so many cinema goers, but it’s a zombie film with far more intelligence than almost any that has come since. So that makes Zombieland the best zombie film since, by a mile. Even though it’s a comedy it gets all the things about the zombie apocalypse right that almost every other zombie film gets wrong; useless wankers will not make it. There are only four characters in Zombieland (if we choose not to include Bill Murray, which is almost unforgivable but bare with me), only four because almost everyone else is dead. As the film’s main protagonist and narrator explains, the only people who survive the Zom-pocalypse are those who are very very careful (scared), and those who are very very good at taking out Zombies. There are no idiots like those found in other Zombie films; wandering around dark, empty houses calling out ‘is there anybody there’ or any other such annoying wankers. The next series of The Walking Dead could benefit greatly from heeding such lessons.

Predator

Predator - 1987, John McTeirnan

When people ask me to name my favourite film, I often pause before saying ‘The Big Lebowski’, when the honest answer is really ‘Predator and The Big Lebowski equally’.

Lots of people turns their nose up at Predator, but pointing out that it was directed by John ‘Die Hard’ McTeirnan is enough to bring most of them round.

Predator can be appreciated for the same reasons as Die Hard, but it generally isn’t. Schwarzenegger and all the other meatheads in Predator put the discerning viewer off. Arnie takes his shirt off and fights an alien in the jungle. It’s far less embarrassing to watch Bruce Willis take his shoes off and fight Alan Rickman in a skyscraper. The problem is that watching a lot of crap action films is a prerequisite to appreciating Predator, and who the hell can be arsed to do that (apart from me)?

Predator gets right all the things that can go unnoticed in a film; pacing, structure, casting and cinematography. Predator, like most action films, sticks rigidly to conventional three act structure:

Act I: 33 minutes. Ends with 10 minute action set piece where they attack the enemy base.

Act II: 44 minutes. Concludes with 18 minute sequence that begins with the team setting traps for the Predator and ends with Arnold getting covered in mud and becoming invisible to the Predator.

Act III: 22 minutes. Schwarzenegger vs Predator.

Predator was only McTeirnan’s second film so he wasn’t going to try anything radical, and the studio would have never let him try to be too clever anyway, but few other films have pacing as good as Predator. A lot of the first two acts are taken up by Schwarzenegger and his team trekking through the jungle, which could easily become boring, but there is a high enough frequency of events to keep it interesting. This is helped by the cast, who hold the audience’s attention just by the way they creep through the leaves. Bill Duke, Jesse Ventura, Sonny Landham, Carl Weathers. All bad mothers. That guy who wrote Lethal Weapon ain’t such a badass, but he tells a couple of pussy jokes to lighten the mood, and the short guy was a genuine Vietnam vet, so there.

The cinematography of Predator is vastly underrated. When people think of good cinematography they thing of epic films featuring incredible landscapes. Films that appear claustrophobic aren’t impressive. It’s difficult to make a film shot in a jungle look good. In Predator the horizon often ends a few feet away from the camera, other than the actors, all that is in each shot are leaves, yet it still looks exciting and it fits the story perfectly. The Predator spends the first two thirds of the film as a camouflaged blur in the jungle, but then, everything is camouflaged. The entire pallet of the film is green and brown, but green and brown have never looked better on film.

Equally impressive are the visual effects. They may look dated now, but I think they still stand up to a lot of modern efforts. What you have bear in mind is that they are pre-digital. Every shot of the Predator in camouflage or of its heat vision was laboriously created by shooting on film with a beam splitter and a thermal camera, then creating the effect using traditional editing techniques.

On the surface, it’s a film about Schwarzenegger and his huge guns wandering around a forest flexing and looking greasy, but there is so much more depth than that. If another actor had played the lead, and the ending had been a bit cleverer, Predator may have been given the respect that the first two Alien films were given. Then again, without Schwarzenegger it would never have been made. Arnold was the second choice to play the Terminator, but only he can take on the Predator single handily and win.