An updated-in-2020 version of the following blog post can be found in If You Haven't Seen It, It's New to You: The Movies and TV Shows Some of Us Regretted Not Catching Until Later. The 2020 book was written and self-published by yours truly. Get the paperback edition of If You Haven't Seen It, It's New to You now!
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This is the 13th of 15 all-new blog posts that are being posted on a monthly basis until this blog's final post in December 2017. I know I said "monthly basis" all through 2017, and instead, there ended up being two posts this October and three back in August, but I guess I discovered that in August and now October, I found plenty of shit I wanted to write about before I call it quits. "I Can't Believe I've Never Seen It Till Now!" is a series of posts in which I reveal that I never watched a certain popular or really old movie until very recently, and that's largely because I'm Filipino, we're always late to the party and that's how we do.
Director Nobuhiko Obayashi's 1977 Japanese box-office hit House is the kind of film that, had it been made in 2017, would have ended up being the subject of various audience reaction videos by YouTubers who want to show how confused and bewildered the audience members look while trying to process the extremely weird shit they're watching. Not to be confused with the 1985 American horror comedy of the same name and the long-running Hugh Laurie vehicle of the same name, Obayashi's J-horror oddity was largely unknown in America until 2010, when Janus Films introduced the Toho Studios flick in theaters to American film geeks and the Criterion Collection released it on Blu-ray. Both a Phil Chung blog post for YOMYOMF (his post is basically "I don't know what the fuck I saw, but I loved it!") and a Trailers from Hell commentary track for the film's 1977 trailer made me want to see House.
House is definitely the most unconventional haunted-house movie I've ever seen. I was expecting a Riki-Oh: The Story of Ricky-type bloodbath with a bit of a Battle Royale-style attitude about not giving a fuck about brutally killing off so many innocent-looking Japanese teens.
What I got instead was something stranger than Riki-Oh. I believe I have a clip of myself reacting to every scene in House:
Mathilda May does her impression of me halfway through a Blu-ray of an '80s Cannon Films action movie in a scene from the big-budget 1985 Cannon flick Lifeforce.
This is the sixth of 12 or 13 all-new blog posts that are being posted on a monthly basis until this blog's final post in December 2017. It has taken me since January 2016 to finish writing this post about Cannon Films. I don't know why. Writer's block can really fuck you up sometimes. This is why I can't wait to leave this blog behind so that Accidental Star Trek Cosplay will become my only ongoing blog. After December, the only writer's block I'll have to worry about will be the block that keeps trying to prevent me from finishing my novel manuscript.
You've seen MacGruber, right? Now imagine if MacGruber wasn't a comedy. That's basically what an '80s Cannon Films action movie is like.
MacGruber is a Cannon movie played completely straight, except for a couple of big things: the profane update of MacGruber's old theme song (a tune from his days as an SNL character) and the intentionally offbeat dialogue that comes out of the mouths of Val Kilmer, Kristen Wiig and Will Forte, who weepingly delivers the least dignified and most sob-filled monologue in action movie history ("Just join my team. I'll suck your dick!"). Everyone else in MacGruber, whether the actor is Ryan Phillippe or the late Powers Boothe, is interestingly directed by Lonely Island troupe member Jorma Taccone to take the proceedings completely seriously, including even Maya Rudolph, aside from her silly sex noises while her dead character's ghost bangs MacGruber in a cemetary.
Phillippe and Boothe react to MacGruber's pantsless moment of desperation in the military office as if this were Michael Clayton or Spotlight instead of an Inspector Clouseau flick (or any other farce where everyone, including the straight man, gives a big and broad performance). Their underplayed seriousness actually increases the hilarity quotient of MacGruber's abnormal behavior.
Taccone's movie is a terrific parody of the schlocky Cannon house style, from the strange one-liners that sound like they were written by a 57-year-old Israeli movie producer ("Shut your butt!") to the ultraviolent heroes who, in real life, would be locked up in an insane asylum for their psychotic behavior (see MacGruber's "KFBR392" scene). If you took the dour and unintentionally funny 1986 Cannon movie Cobra, which I never watched until I rented it on YouTube a week ago, and you turned it into a comedy about how the behavior of matchstick-chewing supercop Marion Cobretti, the only person in the world who cuts pieces off his slices of pizza with a pair of scissors, actually looks to the world outside the narcissistic-at-the-time brain of Cobra star/screenwriter Sylvester Stallone, it would probably resemble MacGruber.
The first Deadpool flick makes a Cobra reference I wasn't aware of until Outlaw Vern pointed it out (it's the scene when Ryan Reynolds quips about the matchstick between Gina Carano's lips and wonders aloud if she's a Stallone fan). Taccone and Deadpool screenwriters Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick all clearly watched Cannon movies like Cobra when they were kids, just like how I was subjected to a few Cannon cheapies as an '80s kid.
One of those movies was 1987's Allan Quatermain and the Lost City of Gold, which was one of Cannon's two attempts to update the then-100-year-old Quatermain novels in the wake of Indiana Jones, and I still remember how dreadful the production values in Lost City of Gold were (it should have been called Lost City of Plastic). Currently streamable on Netflix, Electric Boogaloo: The Wild, Untold Story of Cannon Films, an Australian-made 2014 documentary directed by Aussie filmmaker Mark Hartley, is the highly entertaining story of why during the '80s and early '90s, a name like Cannon meant it had to be not-so-good. It's hard to dislike any documentary that devotes five minutes to the lambada movie war of 1990.
Cannon was, of course, embroiled in that vicious war over who could first rush into release a movie about a dirty dancing craze from Brazil that was barely sweeping the nation. Nobody won the war between Warner Bros./Cannon's Lambada and Columbia Pictures/21st Century Film Corporation's The Forbidden Dance. The only winners were quippy film critics who got a kick out of tearing apart terrible movies. For five silly minutes, Electric Boogaloo recounts how obsessed Menahem Golan (pronounced "muh-nawk-um go-lawn"), the aforementioned 50-something Israeli movie producer, was with trying to get The Forbidden Dance completed in time for its spring 1990 release date, while Yoram Globus, one of the producers of Lambada, and his collaborators toiled over their rival project. Golan and Globus were not just former business partners who ran Cannon (into the ground). They also happened to be cousins.
Every Throwback Thursday, I randomly pull out from my desk cabinet--with my eyes closed--a movie ticket I saved. Then I discuss the movie on the ticket and maybe a little bit of its score, which might be now streaming on AFOS.
Getaway drivers are like the bassplayers of heist-movie crews: nobody gives two shits about them. Adapted from the 2005 James Sallis novel of the same name by screenwriter Hossein Amini, director Nicolas Winding Refn's Drive is a heist flick that takes a different turn and gives getaway drivers their due by telling everything from the point of view of the wheelman. The film's two heist sequences literally leave out all the lock-picking bits and all the breaking-into-the-vault bits, and as a bit of a sly joke that's reminiscent of Andy Kaufman standing around on stage and waiting for his cue to lip-sync the "Here I come to save the day!" part of the Mighty Mouse theme, the heist sequences just show Ryan Gosling waiting in the car and considering his next move in case the heist goes wrong. Refn is so skilled at building tension in Drive that these sequences are still gripping even without ever setting foot inside the electronics warehouse that's broken into or the pawn shop that gets held up.
Drive is also Gosling and Refn's twisted version of a superhero movie (regarding the subject of superhero movies, Gosling joked, "All the good ones were taken, so I made up my own"). It's done not like a quippy Marvel Cinematic Universe blockbuster or a shouty Zack Snyder speed-ramp fest but in the nearly silent, actions-speak-louder-than-words style of older action flicks Refn and the Drive producers (and I) love, whether it's Michael Mann's Thief, Peter Yates' Bullitt, John Boorman's Point Blank or Walter Hill's The Driver (Hill's movie is the only one I haven't seen out of those four older actioners).
The superhero Gosling plays is a garage mechanic and Hollywood stunt driver who's never referred to by name in the movie, not even by Shannon (Bryan Cranston, who guest-starred in a standout 1998 X-Files episode that's also called "Drive"), his boss at the garage and father figure. The Gosling character is listed in the end credits as simply "Driver," a shout-out to the way Hill's movie identifies Ryan O'Neal's character as just "The Driver." The mechanic's superpower is his badass stunt driving skills, which he puts to use at night in his side gig as a getaway wheelman. In case we miss Refn's interpretation of Driver (no relation to Adam or Minnie?) as a superhero, the scorpion emblem on the back of Driver's white satin jacket is designed to look like Spider-Man's, and the theme music for the love story between Driver and his neighbor Irene (Carey Mulligan) is "A Real Hero" by the Toronto duo Electric Youth and French producer/remixer College.
There's one other superpower I almost forgot: Driver's prowess with a hammer or knife (or a gun, even though like O'Neal, he prefers not to carry one) whenever either his life is threatened--both Driver and Shannon frequently get into business with dangerous people--or the lives of Shannon, Irene and her six-year-old son Benicio (Kaden Leos) are threatened. You don't want to be on the other end of a fight with Driver whenever he's wielding a hammer or knife. And that's where the twisted part of this Refn take on a superhero movie comes in: Driver also happens to be a sociopath who's capable of terrifying, childlike and almost-got-slapped-with-an-NC-17-rating violence when you least expect it. Refn and cinematographer Newton Thomas Sigel, who regularly handles the cinematography for Bryan Singer's directorial efforts (like the bizarrely orange-hued pilot episode Singer directed for House), both shoot Driver's nighttime retribution against an L.A. crime boss named Nino (Ron Perlman) like a horror movie sequence, right down to the creepy, Michael Myers-style stuntman mask Driver chooses to don for his pursuit of Nino.
Amini and Refn also upend one other aspect of superhero movies: the romance (SPOILER). Many of them end with the superhero (unless he's a bizarre monkish type like the Tobey Maguire version of Peter Parker, who doesn't have time for sex even though Kirsten Dunst, Mageina Tovah, Elizabeth Banks and Bryce Dallas Howard all throw themselves at him) getting the girl, while Drive ends with Driver forcing himself to leave behind Irene and Benicio because it's the only way he can protect them from any remaining associates or underlings of Jewish gangster Bernie Rose (a cast-against-type and convincingly intimidating Albert Brooks). Driver's chaste romance with Irene--who's still on good terms with her husband and Benicio's father, Standard Gabriel (Oscar Isaac), an ex-con who happens to be returning home from prison right when Driver's starting to bond with Irene--is more interestingly played and more maturely handled than most romances in actual superhero movies. That's because it's depicted with minimal dialogue and expressed mainly through glances between Gosling and Mulligan.
"He sees her in a grocery store. Cut to the parking lot... Cut to them in the elevator. He's helping her carry her bags upstairs. Cut to them in her apartment. She's giving him some water, and an entire movie is happening between them, and we don't need to hear the fuckin' dialogue! It's all in their looks, it's all in the shots. It's just absolutely beautiful," said A History of Violence screenwriter Josh Olson during his Trailers from Hell discussion of Drive and its refreshing lack of unnecessary exposition.
The idea to discard most of the dialogue that was written for their scenes together came from both Gosling and Mulligan. It was a bold and terrific choice. Moviegoers who either giggled over Driver's laconicism (I'd hate to see them watch Steve McQueen in Bullitt because they'll probably end up fracturing a rib) as if they were watching that old and bizarre clip of Gosling singing some Jodeci on The Mickey Mouse Club or complained that "Gosling doesn't talk enough in this movie!" clearly want everything spoon-fed to them (Drive received a C- from moviegoers at CinemaScore in 2011). I know I keep quoting my favorite line from Road House, but it's very apt here: they're too stupid to have a good time.
Driver is so terse and so uninterested in talking about his past that the only line of dialogue about his past comes from Shannon when he recalls to Irene the day Driver came to his garage looking for work (whereas by the end of that great diner scene between James Caan and Tuesday Weld in Thief--which is full of exposition, but it's delivered naturally and realistically and in the manner of a typical diner conversation--we know every little bit of the Caan character's incarcerated past and what makes him tick). Both Driver's terseness and the lack of information about his past before the garage have caused Drive and its enigmatic main character to be open to interpretation, which is part of what makes this movie continue to be fascinating. Moviegoers like Olson believe Driver is somewhere on the autism spectrum, while an actual psychologist who preferred to remain anonymous and was asked by a movie blog in 2011 to profile Driver's behavior concluded that he's more like someone with obsessive compulsive personality disorder (which isn't the same as OCD) than an autistic savant. That psych profile also theorized that Driver was raised on a farm (!).
My interpretation of Driver is that he did time when he was younger, and Shannon took him in right after he got out of prison (I don't view him as someone who grew up on a farm). It's a backstory Gosling tells primarily through his eyes and body language, just like what Charlize Theron does with her character Furiosa in Mad Max: Fury Road. For instance, look at how Driver silently reacts to the presence of Standard, whose past decision-making hasn't exactly been the best and whose sizing-up of Driver when he first encounters him in their apartment building's hallway is fraught with unspoken hostility towards "Mom's new friend." Driver gives a look in that hallway scene (and in a later scene where Standard tells him he's into the mob for some money) that says, "Bad decision-makers like Standard were all over the yard."
I contemplated Olson's reading of Drive as a story about an autistic wheelman and thought it made some sense for a few weeks. But then after rewatching Drive in its entirety, I realized his reading doesn't quite fit, despite Driver's savant-style memorization of the streets and freeways of L.A. for his gig as a wheelman. I don't think Driver's on the spectrum. He's simply a criminal who, like Neil McCauley from Heat, taught himself not to waste his words and to keep himself as quiet and invisible as possible to avoid attracting the attention of either the prison guards, the cops or his enemies.
Even though Driver often looks like he'd rather be behind the wheel of a muscle car or under some vehicle's hood than face-to-face with any of the hotheaded crooks who enlist his services, he's able to maintain eye contact with people whose company he likes, and he can read social cues. He's capable of understanding or expressing humor, especially when he's around Benicio (who's like a less chatty version of the kid in Shane), but he approaches humor stoically, of course. His interactions with Benicio and the only two scenes in the movie where he shows fear in his voice--that would be the scene where he expresses to Irene his remorse for failing to protect Standard even though he tried his best to help him and the scene where he gets mad at Shannon for accidentally putting Irene in danger and pleads with him to leave L.A. to stay alive--all prove he's not on the spectrum. As for Léon, the Manhattan hitman who drinks nothing but milk, wears Urkel pants that are four sizes too short, relates to his houseplant better than he relates to other people and doesn't recommend to a 12-year-old girl who makes a pass at him that she ought to look for boys closer to her age...
Refn never mentioned Léon: The Professional, which I actually watched for the first time last week, as one of his influences during interviews about Drive, but I like to pretend Refn also viewed Drive as a variation on Léon that doesn't contain all that bothersome and creepy material about a 12-year-old girl's sexuality and chooses to split the Natalie Portman character into two different characters: a six-year-old kid and his mom, a more age-appropriate female for the lead to experience romantic tension with. Or maybe Refn just viewed Drive as a metaphor for Christianity's encroachment on the Norse religions, like action film reviewer Outlaw Vern once joked. Whatever the reading, Drive is one of those movies that will be subjected for years to many different interpretations/theories ("He has Asperger's!" "Nah, he's actually an alien from a planet that won't eat cereal!") or film studies essays about its efficient script or stylized visual approach (meanwhile, mainstream Hollywood has started imitating Drive: Jack Reacher has taken the Lee Child novel series and coated it in a Drive-like stylized sheen, while the vicious side of Driver clearly influenced Antoine Fuqua's remake of The Equalizer, which originally had Refn attached to it as director).
I wouldn't be surprised if Drive someday winds up as the subject of an essay for a film studies course about Jews on screen, due to a part of Drive that's not as open to interpretation as other parts of the movie. That would be the uneasy alliance between Bernie, whose line about his Hollywood past as a Golan-Globus-ish producer of '80s B-movies is straight out of The Limey ("One critic called them European. I thought they were shit"), and Nino, whose resentment over demanding respect from his anti-Semitic Italian superiors and never getting it brings about everyone's downfall, including Driver's. Their alliance reflects tensions within the Jewish community over how Jewish modern-day Jews prefer to be, with Nino being the self-hating Jew in this situation (what's the Yiddish name for "Tom"?). I particularly like how instead of on-the-nose, They Came Together-style exposition, food is used in one of their earlier scenes together to illustrate the contrasting ways Bernie and Nino view their Jewish heritage: Bernie's preference for Chinese food gives away that he's Jewish to the core, while Nino's choice of a pizzeria as a front for his business illustrates that he's a Jew who thinks he's Italian. At one point, Bernie says all we need to know about his disdain for Nino when he addresses him by his real name: Izzy.
Drive is also bound to be subjected to many experiments with its music, like last year's BBC Three rescoring of Drive, which was music-supervised by Radio 1's Zane Lowe. He got artists like Banks and Laura Mvula to record new original tracks for Drive, and the results were negatively received, although Refn gave the rescore his approval. I haven't watched the rescored version in its entirety, but after watching just two of the new songs get grafted onto the movie (one of them, "Get Away" by Chvrches, is actually pretty solid, but I would have placed it in a different scene, like one that's unscored and could use a source cue), it proves how irreplaceable both the pulsating and well-chosen existing songs and Cliff Martinez's perfectly realized original score are.
Fans of Gosling or Drive who went over the top on Twitter and tweeted angry reactions to the rescore, I'll let you in on a little secret: you can always go back to the original version of Drive. It's not as if Lowe destroyed all copies of the original version--like what George Lucas was rumored to have done to the negatives of the pre-Special Edition cuts of the first three Star Wars movies--and replaced them with his rescore. But the fans who posted melodramatic tweets in response to BBC Three's rescore acted as if that had happened. The Drive that you know and love isn't going away any time soon. Electric Youth will still be there, serenading a pleasant afternoon drive along the L.A. River with their ode to "a real human being and a real hero." And a real badass with a hammer.
Selections from the Drive score are in rotation during "AFOS Prime" on AFOS.
If you want to be taught the proper way to do a Sir Michael Caine impression, go stream: The Trip (2010)
The first time I took notice of Steve Coogan was on a Comedy Central stand-up show in 1991. The then-ponytailed comedian busted out dead-on impressions of Sean Connery leafing through a grocery list and Roger Moore attempting to be a Method actor.
On The Trip, the slightly melancholy, Louie-esque 2010 British show where Coogan and another impressionist, Rob Brydon, star as fictionalized versions of themselves who embark on a road trip where they review classy European restaurants, Coogan gets to revisit his impressions of the 007s. The show also features Coogan's Michael Caine impression, which collides with Brydon's Caine impression in a dining scene that became a viral sensation.
However, Brydon's Caine wins that round of dueling Caines. On The Trip to Italy, a TV sequel that, like The Trip, has been shortened into a feature film for theatrical release here in America and will hit art-house theaters on our shores this August after a run on the film festival circuit, Coogan and Brydon experience another round of dueling Caines, and this time, they throw in a little Bane. Their impressions of both Caine and Tom Hardy's performances in The Dark Knight Rises are, to borrow the words of Bane, "Mrwmf ovrff ffrwff szrrv."
If you think blindfolded sex is hot, go stream: Sex and Lucia
I despised the last few seasons of How I Met Your Mother, gave up on watching HIMYM right when the future wife of annoying-as-hell Ted finally appeared and was glad to have no longer been a HIMYM viewer when they did that racist episode where all the white cast members pretended to be Asian and put on yellowface. But I always loved Cobie Smulders on that show, because of her comedic skills and also because she looks like Sex and Lucia star Paz Vega. I like to think of Sex and Lucia as a special TV-MA-rated episode of HIMYM that was shot on location in Spain by Julio Medem, who hated everyone on the show except for Robin, and it took place during Robin's extra-horny, Enrique Iglesias-dating, sand-all-up-in-her-hair international tourist phase.
"Original Score by Hank Shocklee and the Bomb Squad" was something that didn't happen enough in the '90s.
If you want to see Tupac Shakur, who had no prior screen acting experience, soar in a role that Tupac's Digital Underground bandmate Money B (!) was initially considered for, go stream: Juice
"There was so much Tupac put into the Bishop role. It wasn't like he was stepping outside of his boundaries. He put all of his pain from growing up--moving state-to-state and seeing different environments. A lot of his family was getting killed or were on the run," recalled Juice co-star and Naughty by Nature frontman Treach in a 2012 Vibe oral history about Tupac's work in the 1992 film and other films as well. Treach's group contributed "Uptown Anthem" to Juice's Hank Shocklee-produced soundtrack, a terrific snapshot of hip-hop and R&B in the early '90s (when Shocklee and his Bomb Squad were in their prime as beatmakers). The album has aged remarkably well. For a few years, it even overshadowed the film itself.
But after Tupac's death put an end to a body of acting work that started to get interesting with his turn in Gridlock'd as a junkie musician who wants to get clean, Juice grew in stature as a film about inner-city violence and the anger that fuels the Bishops of the world. Tupac's performance as Bishop is on a par with the likes of James Cagney in White Heat and Michael K. Williams on The Wire, and like Cagney and Williams, he goes out in spectacular fashion in Juice. (Eric B. and Rakim's "Juice (Know the Ledge)," the equally spectacular crown jewel of the soundtrack, as well as the tune that kicks off the film, can be heard during "Beat Box" and "The Whitest Block Ever" on AFOS.)
If you like your SoCal private-eye heroes mumbly and disheveled, go stream: The Long Goodbye
Wonder Boys, the recent subject of an interesting Greg Proops Film Club episode, is my favorite Michael Douglas movie, as well as one of the most enjoyable movies ever made about the unsuccessful side of being an author. Critics loved Wonder Boys more than audiences did, as did Paramount, which released it twice in the same year and overhauled its marketing campaign, with the hopes that it would win over moviegoers like it did with critics, and it failed to do so either time. In 1973, The Long Goodbye, an equally enjoyable and smart film that, like Wonder Boys, is anchored by a rumpled protagonist whose delivery of dialogue is the definition of "stoner," received the same treatment as Wonder Boys later did. United Artists released the Robert Altman film twice and tried different kinds of marketing campaigns to make the film look more appealing to moviegoers, the East Coast press ended up adoring the film (much more than the West Coast press) during its re-release and yet it still didn't make much of an impact at the box office. Today, The Long Goodbye is a classic and one of Altman's most beloved works (hopefully, Wonder Boys will become as lovingly discussed and dissected as The Long Goodbye frequently is).
In The Long Goodbye, Elliott Gould trudges through L.A. like he just woke up from a long nap in his suit and tie. His Marlowe is as much of a wiseass as Humphrey Bogart's Marlowe in The Big Sleep, but Gould's hardly as suave or as prone to exposition as Bogie (if you're looking for long stretches of exposition from Gould's Marlowe to help you make sense of things like in The Big Sleep, say a long goodbye to that). John Williams' Long Goodbye score is equally off-kilter. Altman wanted the score to consist of nothing but different variations on the same melody. Wherever Marlowe goes, the Long Goodbye theme follows, whether it's as supermarket Muzak or as a doorbell ring. The score nicely reflects Marlowe's sense of displacement--he's a '40s guy in a '70s world. (The version of "The Long Goodbye" that was sung for the film by Jack Sheldon of Schoolhouse Rock fame--it's kind of weird not to hear Sheldon singing about words and phrases and clauses--can be heard during "AFOS Prime.")
Kenneth Lonergan's Margaret (Photo source: RogerEbert.com)
Because so many film critics have been in awe of it as if it's that secret Wu-Tang album with the guest feature by Cher, I recently borrowed from a library in San Francisco the three-hour extended cut of playwright/filmmaker Kenneth Lonergan's Margaret. It was filmed back in 2005--which is so long ago that John Gallagher Jr. (from Short Term 12 and HBO's The Newsroom) looks like an eight-year-old boy in the film--but it wasn't released until 2011 in a slightly shorter cut due to legal squabbling. As former RogerEbert.com editor Jim Emerson astutely noted in 2012, "Sure, [Margaret's] focus is entirely on a certain demographic slice of human beings--mostly middle- to upper-class, educated, New York-dwelling, Judeo-Christian-atheist white people--but these people are alive and ragged and messy in ways few movie characters are allowed to be."
The best performance in Margaret comes from neither the frequently shouty Anna Paquin nor her co-star J. Smith-Cameron, Lonergan's wife. It comes from Jeannie Berlin, who nicely underplays her role as the brash best friend of a pedestrian (Allison Janney) who was killed in a tragic Manhattan bus accident caused by the bus driver (Mark Ruffalo), because he was distracted by a high-schooler (Paquin) who was trying to ask him for directions while he was driving.
Aside from suffering from sore buttocks while watching it, most of the viewers who don't like Margaret can't stand Paquin's character Lisa because she's one of the most unlikable teenage lead characters in recent memory. But that's precisely what Paquin and Lonergan were shooting for: to make it difficult for viewers to root for or side with Lisa as she tries to process her guilt and pain over this pedestrian who died in her arms by launching a crusade that she manipulates to shift complete blame from her to the not-very-bright bus driver who ran over the pedestrian. (Plus anyone who remembers being a teen should be well aware that teens tend to react histrionically to anything, and Lonergan and the shouty Paquin capture this to a tee.)
The film isn't just about the PTSD of many post-9/11 New Yorkers. It's also about the mindset of a certain kind of teen or college student who claims to be taking some sort of stand like fighting against the oppression of people of color, but she's really making everything all about herself. And throughout Margaret, all I could think was "So this is what Suey Park must be like when she's not on Twitter."
Suey Park and her acolytes' #CancelColbert campaign against a fake racist was the dumbest-looking campaign against a fictional character since Dan Quayle's outrage over Murphy Brown. The ways that Park handled intelligent and rational criticisms of her anti-Colbert Report hashtag, as well as her decision to ally herself with Uncle Ruckus, a.k.a. Michelle Malkin, during #CancelColbert, tarnished all the admirable previous work this hashtag activist had done in addressing issues that are far more deserving of attention, like the treatment of Asian American women and sites like the Huffington Post that exploit writers by not paying them. (#CancelColbert is also yet another hashtag that's tarnished Twitter and helped kill the fun out of that site, proving once again that nuance is the enemy of Twitter, and Twitter is the enemy of nuance, to borrow thewords of Hari Kondabolu.)
Both the fact that #CancelColbert took attention away from the issue that The Colbert Report satirized on its March 26 show (the exploitation of Native Americans) and Park's immature and bizarre responses to any form of rational criticism showed a lot about Park's youth and inexperience. It's much like how the Paquin character's youth and lack of self-awareness of her privileged life (her divorced parents are a wealthy TV ad director who lives far away in California and a self-absorbed New York stage actress, portrayed respectively by Mr. and Mrs. Lonergan) play a huge part in how poorly she handles her crusade.
As part of this crusade, Lisa gets in touch with the deceased's best friend and talks her into pursuing a civil suit against the bus driver's employers to seek justice and get the driver fired. One reason why Berlin's performance as Emily is such a standout is because Emily, who gradually sees the manipulative and self-serving Lisa for what she really is, gets to give the extremely slappable Lisa the kind of verbal smackdown that most of the other female characters in the film are too timid to give her.
Maybe it's because I'm still amazed by the bone-dislocating prison yard fight scene in The Raid 2 and I wish that scene showed up in every movie, no matter what genre (think of all the unwatchable tearjerkers that could be improved by inserting that shot of Iko Uwais breaking the inmate's leg with his bare hands), but Margaret could have used at least one brutal slapping scene. Emily's terrific smackdown of Lisa to her tear-stained face ("This isn't an opera! And we are not all supporting characters to the drama of your amazing life!") is as close to a "Sidney Poitier slapping the white off the racist landowner during In the Heat of the Night"-style slap as the film gets. The middle-aged Berlin character's calm and snarky demeanor in the face of Lisa's adolescent histrionics is proof that if you want to win an ideological argument--or a freestyle rap battle--you should always be the calmer one.
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Margaret has made me want to see what other acting work Berlin has done. The daughter of legendary comedy writer Elaine May, Berlin hadn't acted on film in 15 years before Lonergan cast her in Margaret. I IMDb'd Berlin, and it turns out that her most notable role was an Oscar-nominated turn in a film her mother directed, The Heartbreak Kid--the original 1972 Charles Grodin/Cybill Shepherd version that Neil Simon adapted from a Bruce Jay Friedman short story, not the Farrelly Brothers remake with Ben Stiller in the Grodin role, Michelle Monaghan in the Shepherd role and Malin Akerman (R.I.P., Trophy Wife) in the Berlin role.
I've seen neither version of The Heartbreak Kid, but the trailer for the original looks amusing--up until the part where a Windows 98 typeface shows up at the end of a trailer that was apparently made in 1972.
Sure, Impact was created in 1965. But that ugly typeface you might be familiar with from either college flyers for some lame drum circle or open mic, countless Internet memes, trailers for terribly acted Web comedy shows or parodies of lousy furniture store ads during sketch comedy shows didn't become commonplace until Win 98. So it's extremely weird to see this very '90s, "I get knocked down, but I get up again"-ish typeface appearing in a '70s movie trailer during Ed Wood co-screenwriter Larry Karaszewski's Trailers from Hell audio commentary for the trailer.
The version of the Heartbreak Kid trailer that Trailers from Hell found and used for its Heartbreak Kid discussion was clearly remastered by whoever currently owns the rights to the film. Whoever those current rights owners hired to remaster the trailer had to redo and reinsert the typefaces but was in a rush to call it a day and head home. Way to make them look convincingly 1972, whoever remastered it.
I suspected that an older print of the Heartbreak Kid trailer must be on YouTube, and it probably doesn't contain Impact as a typeface, and lo and behold, I was right. There it was on YouTube, without ugly-ass Impact to depress my eyes.
Not a good change.
There are two typefaces that should never be used in a movie trailer: Comic Sans and Impact. It's like Fran Drescher narrating a TV spot for X-Men: Days of Future Past: it doesn't belong.
I'm kidding. Actually, I won't be posting stuff for a while (and haven't done so since February 28) because I'm busy working on not just one self-published print compilation of material from A Fistful of Soundtracks: The Blog but two.
When I allow myself some free time to surf the Web, one site I've been checking out lately is Trailers from Hell, which is run by one of my favorite underappreciated directors, Joe Dante (whose work for TV has been more interesting than his recent film work--I love Dante's anti-Bush Administration Masters of Horror episode "Homecoming"). At Trailers from Hell, Dante's filmmaker and screenwriter friends present trailers of their favorite films and discuss why those films are their favorites.
Trailers from Hell has been on fire lately with some nice commentary tracks about trailers for old films I like, so to keep this blog from looking like it's frozen in time, I've got Whole Wide World and Jolene director Dan Ireland's Trailers from Hell commentrak for the trailer for the 1969 advertising industry satire Putney Swope, which the site posted for Black History Month (the video also gives me an excuse to again post an Obamicon of Putney Swope that was made by me). Ireland's commentrak is followed by History of Violence film adaptation screenwriter Josh Olson's Trailers from Hell commentrak for the trailer for the late Peter Yates' entertaining 1972 adaptation of the Donald E. Westlake caper The Hot Rock. (The Putney Swope and Hot Rock trailers are particularly interesting because they don't contain voiceover narration, which makes them less like the voiceover-heavy and corny trailers of their era and more like the announcer-less and stylish trailers that are more common today and have influenced the CBS prime-time promo department to go announcer-less.)
Putney Swope is the story of an ad agency's token black employee (Arnold Johnson) who gains control of the business, revolutionizes the ad industry with frank and sexually explicit ads and winds up becoming as fatuous and corrupt as the stolid and whitebread Madison Avenue culture he initially fought against (he makes the mistake of getting high on his own supply: himself). Director Robert Downey's most famous flick appeals to my anti-authoritarian side, so I like it and will probably rewatch it when it turns up on cable again, even though the slo-mo titty-baring stewardess ad goes on way too long (it's nice to look at though), the film falls apart at the end and Downey's redubbing of his own lead actor sounds terrible. Johnson constantly bungled his lines, so Downey erased Johnson's voice from the soundtrack and inserted his own. He sounds less like an old black man and more like Cleavon Little when he pretended to take himself hostage and imitated a white thug in Blazing Saddles ("Hold it! Next man makes a move, the n----r gets it!"). The elder Downey's performance is an odd precursor to his actor son's portrayal of a movie star pretending to be black in Tropic Thunder.
I like to think of Putney Swope as a spinoff of Mad Men in which one of Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce's rival businesses gets taken over by the militant friends of Hollis the elevator operator. I agree with Hammer to Nail that the film is dead-on about how "people will be cruel and craven no matter what side of the power dynamic they occupy," which makes it as relevant now as it was in 1969.
Trailers from Hell also did an entry on The Hot Rock, which contains an enjoyable Quincy Jones score that Jones considers one of his favorites and was sampled by Eminem in "Like Toy Soldiers," as well as cameo appearances by a then-under-construction World Trade Center and a young Christopher Guest. Afghanistan banana stand.
