I have just seen one of the finest adult animated films ever made. It is also one of the best films of 1999. Perfect Blue is the name of the film, which opens around the country between now and December and is about fame, celebrity, stalkers and all the manifestations of pop culture in our present days. It is also one very unnerving and scary film. Continue reading
How Now Brown Cow?
Well, not so good, if you’re a dedicated fan of the Avengers TV series. Watching it on television 30 years ago, we all had the benefit of discovering a show that’s main virtue was charm, wrapped up stylishly in a by-then familiar spy series costume.
This big budget American version – though more respectful to its source – has the same faults as this year’s Godzilla remake: it’s been overproduced and pre-fab packaged for spoon-fed Yankee consumption. Heroic agents John Steed and Emma Peel were generally calm and cool no matter how dangerous the situation, so the ’90s Steed and Peel (Ralph Fiennes and Uma Thurman) are played even more calm and cool – so much so that they frequently appear unconscious. I sometimes wondered if they were there at all, behind the gorgeous apparel.
Like Warner’s recent Batman movies, they’ve gone for style over substance to the point that only a shorthand, sound bite version of the original’s strengths remain. An early scene tells the tale: John Steed is introduced taking a stroll through an English village that becomes a gauntlet of assassins. Everyone he meets is actually a fellow agent out to test him, and the entire village is only a hollow backdrop. This was meant to be clever, but it turns out to be ironic. I understand that the film takes place in a fantasy world where the ’60s continued into the ’90s, but there’s no reason it shouldn’t be an engaging place to visit.
And as long as we’re in a fantasy world, why not one where Steed and Peel can square off against agents of “the other side”? Somewhere in its journey through development, somebody thought it was a good idea to make this a disaster movie, too. So we get villain Sean Connery (ala Vincent Price) taking over newly-created (in part by Dr. Emma Peel) weather control technology, huffing and puffing at the vacant streets of a miniature London.
Above all, why not use more than a bit of Laurie Johnson’s excellent original theme music? Nothing set the stage for the series’ breezy atmosphere better and Joel McNeely’s moody work doesn’t fill the bill.
Okay, so the movie’s a sham. But once I get beyond it’s weaknesses, this may turn out to be a guilty pleasure, as there’s plenty to be enjoyed. For starters, there’s an outstanding title sequence. It has little to do with The Avengers, but it’s plenty cool. Everything in the film is wonderfully designed and executed, down to the smallest visual detail.
Most impressively, it’s been a long while since I’ve seen such an expensive film that was so willfully goofy. Case in point: when our heroes need to infiltrate our villains’ island hideout in the middle of the Thames, what do they do? No, they don’t jump in a boat or even a helicopter – they calmly walk across the river in big plastic bubbles. Now how did they think of that?
This 1996 follow-up to one of the most harrowing horror films of the past 20 years is getting a belated (but limited) theatrical release in some cities, though it’s supposed to be making its way to home video soon. Though not mentioned on screen, advertising material uses a further title tagline: “Mask of Sanity”. Continue reading
Sequels to John Carpenter’s Halloween resemble cover versions of a classic hit tune churned out as misguided “tributes”. Any amount of stylistic innovation or fresh viewpoints are foredoomed to be taken as sacrilege. And sticking to the formula that Joe Bob Briggs has held up as the perfect design for any sequel (“The same movie made all over again”), will be received as a dull lack of imagination infected with shallow opportunism. Continue reading
Anthony Hopkins as Zorro? They’re not kidding, and the versatile star of such films as Silence of the Lambs and Howard’s End acquits himself surprisingly well as the Robin Hood of Old California. Wearing a thick layer of bronzer to hide his British pallor – but barely making any effort to hide his British accent – Hopkins swashbuckles with the best of them. At least, he and his stuntmen give a faint approximation of the deeds of a now-aging vigilante.
But this is a feature with not one Zorro, but two! After old Senor Z escapes from prison (and a lengthy prologue), he searches for a likely replacement on the way to avenging himself on his sworn enemy Don Rafael Montero (Stuart Wilson). He quickly adopts bandito Antonio Banderas – who saved Zorro’s bacon as a child – to be his Zorro-in-training. Continue reading
Well, the pattern repeats itself. In the same year we have a serious flick with a high concept plot – in this case Deep Impact – followed by a much goofier version of the same story.
Jerry Bruckheimer has earned something that’s a rarity for producers, an artistic style. He has taken the modern big-budget action thriller and pumped it up to the point of cartoonish self-parody. Here he reteams with director Michael Bay (The Rock), to create an even wilder ride – so wild, in fact, that I got fed up with it.
Bruce Willis plays a rough, tough oil driller who is asked by NASA to take his crew of rough, tough oilmen into outer space to blow up a giant asteroid that’s headed for Earth – your basic save-the-world situation that calls for mucho praise for macho working class heroes while providing plenty opportunity for your basic awesome ’90s special effects.
The set-up is plenty of fun, with fave character thespian Steve (Mister Shhh, or do you prefer Mr. Pink) Buscemi providing most of the laughs as a cynical genius, while Ben Affleck and Liv Tyler provide the romance (much of the time while Liv’s dad and Aerosmith groan away on the soundtrack). But once our motley group of heroes arrive on the asteroid, the movie loses its grip, mostly due to Bay’s poor choices behind the camera. The last 40 minutes or so consist of extreme close-ups of one character or another shouting an overwrought line or two interspersed with quick, noisy cuts of f/x mayhem. It’s MTv music video rapid-fire cutting at its worst, and since most of the action presented is about digging a hole, you can’t blame me for getting plenty tired of it.
The Sound of Horror
If I was asked to give some kind of advice to young filmmakers – I haven’t been, but if I was – I’d start with this: The audience may forgive poor acting, direction, out of focus shots, and even a completely stupid story, but one thing that will turn off an audience every time is BAD SOUND. If you can’t afford anything else, at least be sure that your sound recording is acceptable so at least your actors can be heard and every scene isn’t drowned in fuzz and static.
Other than missing this important point, writer/director Dave Lawler has created an interesting film here. Despite a title that recalls vintage Charles Bronson, it’s a down-to-earth tale about a computer programmer named Kelly (tall, blonde, accented Rika Daniel) who is suffering a bout of general ennui. She dislikes her job, wants to get a new apartment, has a crush on a guy she sees in the park – and she also feels some sort of weird affinity for the mass murderer she sees on the TV news. Though she seems to be making progress to solve some of these issues, she feels trapped. Things get weirder, as she (and other characters) begin having blackout episodes, spacing out in the middle of conversations. She even begins to exhibit a bit of telekinesis. Is she losing her mind? Can her actress best friend help her? Is there some connection between her exterminator boyfriend and the “Angel of Death” the killer says directed his crime?
The answers aren’t clear, at least as far as I could tell. Though the performances are very good (especially by Daniel and Monique Taylor, who plays her best friend) it’s difficult to make out what is being said. Though Lawler displays a great deal of talent with the camera, achieving some sophisticated effects and nice compositions, at 117 minutes the film is way too long. It could lose 40 minutes and be stronger for it, but even that would be too long to suffer through the bad sound. I apologize if I just got a bad screener tape, but I can only say I might have enjoyed this film if it hadn’t given me a headache.
A few short years ago, Disney ripped off Japanese animation god Osamu Tezuka’s character Leo (Kimba) the White Lion for their biggest hit ever, The Lion King. For their new animated feature, they mine Tezuka territory again, this time basing their story on the same Chinese folk story that inspired Tezuka’s Princess Knight (aka Knight of the Ribbon). Continue reading
You might think from the title of this Hong Kong action item that you’d found a new episode in the Jade Leung Black Cat series, but such is not the case. Continue reading
Army of Darkness DVD
Disc of Spaghetti
Sam Raimi and his pals disappointed a lot of folks with this feature when it was first released. For one thing, the studio wouldn’t let them name this sequel Evil Dead 3 — or even Raimi’s even better title MidEvil Dead. For another, since the original Evil Dead was “the ultimate in gut-wrenching horror”, a lot of fans were put off by the sequel’s overall comic slapstick tone. But Army of Darkness has aged well, and now it’s considered a classic fantasy film.
This DVD pays tribute to that growth in stature. The disc contains the theatrical cut of the film, widescreen and looking gorgeous. There are also some extras on the disc: the trailer, a very entertaining documentary detailing the special effects work done by KNB (who claim Raimi and producer Robert Tappert tortured them during the shoot), and the original ending, which was shown all around the world but not in the USA. A deluxe two-disc set is available as well. The second disc has the original director’s cut of the film, which is a good 15 minutes longer and has a bleaker ending. The print is too dark on this disc, but Raimi, star/producer Bruce Campbell, and co-writer Ivan Raimi make up for it by providing a funny and informative commentary track (or “commentrak” as I like to call them). I really can’t decide which version I like the best, so I guess I’ll just alternate each time I revisit the Deadites.