Adventures In Netflix #8-Gabriel Ricard
May 5, 2008
Adventures in Netflix #8
By Gabriel Ricard
Hello, I’m Gabriel Ricard, and you’re not.
I know.
Thank-God for small favors, right?
Right.
It doesn’t seem like there’s too much to get into this month. Between last month’s column and this one the great stories have been few and fairly non-existent in between. A few of the old-timers went. Most notably, Charlton Heston. But that one was in the neighborhood of a long time coming. I don’t think it really qualifies as any great surprise. I was never a big fan of Chuck outside of his work in such science-fiction classics as Planet of The Apes (I’m purposely neglecting the sequel he appeared in)¸ The Omega Man and Soylent Green (hint: It’s not chicken). Nothing against the guy. He was just a small part of Old Hollywood that I couldn’t get into
But it did make me think.
Which I do from time to time.
It reminded me of this transition we seem to be in right now. I suppose you could say film is always in a state of change, but somehow, it seems more obvious than usual at this moment in time.
The way it is right now there’s very few names from Heston’s era left. Most of them have either died (Heston) or gone into retirement (Sean Connery and Paul Newman). As much as I’d like to imagine otherwise, Christopher Lee and Ernest Borgnine are probably not going to be doing movies in 2018. And then you go on to the ones who were at the top when I really started paying attention to film in the early 90’s. Al Pacino, Jack Nicholson, Harrison Ford, Bruce Willis, Robert De Niro, Meryl Streep, Bill Murray, Morgan Freeman and so on. Everyone I just mentioned is at either close-to or well past sixty. Don’t get me wrong though. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that. Nothing at all. Age has never been nor will ever be an indication of talent. Every last name I mentioned is still doing some great stuff out there. And there’s no reason to believe they won’t continue to do so. But when I stop and think about it, I realize that most of them will probably not be working a whole lot (if at all) by the time I turn thirty.
And I guess it’s weird to imagine that there will soon be a time when so many of my favorites will be regulated to whatever history decides to do with them.
Not that there aren’t any young talents I’m paying attention to. That’s the upside. Even when the movies themselves aren’t measuring up, there never seems to be a shortage of actors and actresses doing great work and making plans for the future.
I still like to go back to my long-time favorites. I relive their past glories and keep an eye out for what they’ve got lined up next. I remind myself to enjoy them while they’re still around. The great thing about acting is that theoretically your best work is almost never permanently behind you. As long as you’re still alive. Peter O’Toole in Venus is a good example. And all those guys I mentioned are indeed still alive and still working. They may not have as much mileage left as they did thirty years ago, but that doesn’t change what they’ve done so far. And it certainly doesn’t change what they’re doing right now.
It’s the same deal with directors.
But that’s a whole other rant for a whole other column.
We’re better off getting into this month’s reviews.
So, let’s give it a shot, shall we?
The Darjeeling Limited (2007)
Directed by: Wes Anderson
Written by: Wes Anderson, Roman Coppola, Jason Schwartzman
Starring: Owen Wilson, Adrien Brody, Jason Schwartzman
Sticking to a particular style is obviously no real sin in filmmaking. The great directors of this or any other generation all have their trademarks in terms of casting, visuals, music and so on. It’s not this bit of common sense alone that makes them great, but rather being able to balance these things to create a memorable or even classic film.
Starting with the critically acclaimed Rushmore, writer/director Wes Anderson established an early reputation for deftly blending all of these elements to create films who were constantly gaining ground and respectability for their unique take on common film themes like dysfunctional relationships (especially those dealing with family) and seeking redemption in the face of increasingly strange circumstances. The only problem with setting the bar so high so early is that sooner or later it’s going to be hard to top the last thing. It started with 2005’s The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (which I personally consider to be a great movie) and continues with his latest film, The Darjeeling Limited.
As you’d probably expect, all the pieces of what’s now considered the standard Wes Anderson film are there. Starting with Anderson-regular Owen Wilson trying to pick up the pieces of his broken family by bringing his brothers together (Jason Schwartzman and Adrien Brody) for a spiritual trip through India and on to a church where their mother (Angelica Huston) now lives as a nun. Anderson’s covered the dysfunctional family trail before in most of his films. It’s a territory he’s done some great work in by crafting characters that are at once quirky and believable. Memorable and absorbing all on their own. He goes for the same effect here. All of the brothers are a little off the mark in some way or another. But somehow, in spite of strong performances from all three leads (especially Adrien Brody), the end-result Anderson is seemingly striving for here doesn’t quite make it the way it did in The Royal Tenenbaums or The Life Aquatic.
The idea he’s always appeared to go for is that family will eventually endure in spite of awkward silence and past regrets. It just doesn’t hit the mark this time around. The problem has a lot to do with the story itself. Anderson’s been down this road so many times now that it’s starting to get easy to predict exactly where he’s going to take us next. It generally doesn’t bode well for a film’s plot when you can see the dramatic punches coming a mile away. It undermines the great work from the cast. Even worse is that it makes it hard to care about what they’re going through and whether or not they’re going to get where they need to be as people.
And maybe, it’s possible that some blame does belong to the main cast. There’s not a single bad performance in The Darjeeling Limited. The chemistry between Wilson, Brody and Schwartzman is mostly dead-on. You’re not going to experience much of a strain buying the three of them as brothers struggling in their own separate ways to re-establish the connections that were nearly destroyed by their death of their father one year prior. The movie loses some of its strength though when you begin to dig a little deeper. The script moves at such a fast pace and makes so much effort to try and pack in everything Anderson wanted to do that something along the lines of character depth got lost along the way. This is undoubtedly the main thing that inevitably makes Darjeeling something of a misfire and a disappointment. Yeah, there’s some growth and change to be found between the moment Brody’s character first boards the train and the last time Wilson suggests they go for a drink and a cigarette (one of the film’s runners). But the transition and nature of the relationship between the three brothers changes so suddenly that you’re probably going to wonder if you just missed something. Don’t worry. You didn’t. Look all you want. The build-up necessary to make us care just doesn’t exist. Instead, the movie spends ninety minutes wandering. Wandering through some truly beautiful cinematography of India’s incredible landscapes and cities. Through an excellent score combining Anderson’s usual music tastes (indie folk combined with classic rock and pop) with a gorgeous score that borrows completely from a number of Indian cinema classics. Through the expected offbeat dialogue and odd characters. Through moments of tragedy turning to deadpan comedy and vice-versa. All of those things manage to more or less come together the same way they did in his other movies.
Only it’s not enough this time. Without a strong story or particularly sympathetic characters to back it up, it’s all just a lot of really nice window dressing that doesn’t have the force necessary to stay with you when it’s over. Even the short film, The Hotel Chevalier, which features Schwartzman and Natalie Portman (who briefly appears in the main film) fails to be much more than a lengthy prologue that doesn’t add anything significant to the final product. This is not a bad film in any sense of the word. Just a flawed one whose good points can’t outweigh the bad ones like they did in The Life Aquatic.
It may not be fair to compare Darjeeling to what Anderson’s done before. The hope for most directors is to have each of their films stand alone and on the strength of its own merits. But when the cracks of a director relying on the same bag of tricks from movie to the movie begin to show, it’s hard not to compare and contrast. The Darjeeling Limited has enough to make it worth a watch. Whether it’s going to hold up and deserve repeated viewings is another thing altogether.
Japanese Hell (1999)
Directed by: Teruo Ishii
Written by: Teruo Ishii
Starring: Mutsumi Fujita, Hisayoshi Hirayama, Miki Sato
The name Teruo Ishii probably doesn’t ring a bell. When you run down the list of great all-time Japanese directors, his name isn’t likely to show up. But in the world of what-the-hell-was-that horror and psychotic B-movie abandon with a certain kind of charm severely lacking in most of its brethren, Ishii deserves not only your attention but quite possibly your respect. In a career spanning almost fifty years, Ishii directed some eighty-eight feature-length films. At times, with a budget that would have made Ed Wood look like Peter Jackson on another hobbit binge. Some of his films are brilliant. Most of them are very strange and occasionally troubling. Virtually none of them were made with the average cinema fan’s tastes in mind. But that still shouldn’t excuse you from looking him up. The only trouble with that is that in those eighty-eight films very of them have been legitimately brought over to the United States. Looking any further than the likes of Mediablasters or a similar company will probably take you to those creepy DVD stores in your local Chinatown.
There are a few films to work with though. Ishii’s Japanese Hell might not be the best one to start on, but it’s not the worst place either. Very loosely based (in spirit more than anything else) on Nobuo Nakagawa’s iconic horror-classic Jigoku, Japanese Hell was a combination of two separate films Ishii was working on in the twilight of his long career. The films eventually had to be combined due to budgetary limitations. The result from that is a piece of Asian horror strangeness that’s probably not going to be run through The Hollywood Remake Machine anytime soon. It won’t take more than twenty minutes of this to see why.
The big thing that’s important to remember with Japanese Hell is that in the strictest sense of the word it is not what you would call a good movie. The absurd plot is the least of it. A young girl (Mutsumi Fujita) named Rika is forced to bear witness to the stories and subsequent damnations of a child molester (the excellent Hisayoshi Hirayama) and the cult leader (Tetsuro Tamba) responsible for the infamous real-life Sarin gas attacks on a Tokyo subway in 1995. The only thing those two people have in common is that they’re both surely going to wind up in hell before it’s all said and done. Not to mention that it’s pretty much a guarantee that you’re not going to care about Rika’s involvement in the plot on even a basic level. Other than that, there’s nothing to take from the story except that it drags entirely too much. The child molester part of the story runs about ten minutes. The cult leader part runs for roughly the rest of the movie. This is where things slow down to a bizarre, endless crawl. We watch Tamba perpetrate one brutality after another (brainwashing, rape) and wait for his inevitable death and one-way elevator ride to hell.
The only thing about this part of the film that comes close to holding everything up is the sheer loathing that Ishii clearly has for his subjects. Especially where it concerns our faithful cult leader. And perhaps the reason why we were battered with images of cruelty and mass murder over and over again is because Ishii wants us to feel that way as well. Despite some pretty awful acting across the board, he does succeed on a certain gut level. The way anyone will if they bash you over the idea with a singular idea or image long enough and in just the right way. Ishii does this in spite of the movie’s many gaping flaws and you can almost feel the tension in his direction rising as the movie moves achingly slow towards the part we’ve all been waiting to see. Even if torture films aren’t necessarily your bag, you’ll be hard-pressed to feel anything for either Hirayama or Tamba when each of them wind up in hell for their unforgivable crimes.
Those are the parts where Ishii begins to have a little more fun. Or rather, what appears to be his definition of the word. The ridiculous costumes and staggeringly over-the-top violence of the hell-based torture sequences make up for the biggest reason why this might be worth checking out. On top of the way Ishii seems to change gears completely to an gleeful free-for-all of carnage and weirdness that moves so briskly you’re likely to sit back and go over what you had to eat that day. Just to make sure you’re witnessing is indeed part of the film and not the result of a bad double cheeseburger. Japanese Hell contains what is probably some of the most brutal cartoon violence you’re ever going to endure.
This is one of Ishii’s specialties. Strange doses of comedy between moments of gore that make Grindhouse look like a message of family-friendly hope brought to you by The 700 Club. This is the part that plays like a Power Rangers episode on LSD. Guilty-pleasure fun doesn’t even begin to describe the proceedings. It bears mentioning again that this is not the sort of trip intended for everybody. But anyone looking for something a little different in their horror diet would do well to at least look into this. And if you make it through to the truly bizarre ending, which acts as a sort of dot on the disbelief exclamation point, then you’re ready to delve further into the world of Teruo Ishii. It’s not the most technically well-made world out there, but it sure as hell promises to be anything but boring.
Save The Tiger (1973)
Directed by: John G. Avildsen
Written by: Steve Shagan
Starring: Jack Lemmon, Jack Gilford, Laurie Heineman
Lemmon scored his second Oscar win in 1974 for this harrowing portrayal of a man pushed to the edge of everything he has ever been able to understand. Aging, his business, his family, and even the nature and scope of the city he has made his home in. Twenty minutes in, you’re going to see why he won. Directed by John G. Avildsen (Rocky, Rocky V and the three Karate Kid films), Save The Tiger is another of Lemmon’s great dramatic roles. This column has covered this aspect of his career before (see The Days of Wine and Roses from issue five) and it’s worth getting into again. Especially when Lemmon these is primarily remembered for his late-career comedy comeback with Grumpy Old Men and the other senior citizen buddy films he made with real-life best friend Walter Mathau. There’s nothing wrong with those films, but if you really want to get a sense of what Lemmon could do as an actor, you would do well to check this one out.
As I’ve said before, Lemmon would play the desperation card a few times in his career. So much that The Simpsons based a character on him (Gil). Save The Tiger probably gives him the most room to run with this kind of character than any other film he did. It’s a good thing he went with it. Because he’s nothing short of brilliant as Harry Stoner, an embittered World War II veteran who runs an apparel company in Los Angeles. Harry is pushing fifty, stuck in a bad marriage, stuck with a company that’s sinking fast, and stuck realizing that the world had passed him by at some point where he wasn’t paying quite enough attention. The state of his company is where most of the film draws from. Harry knows he’ll be lucky if they make it through one more season. The same way he knows he’ll do anything, including hiring prostitutes (a great performance from Lara Parker) for his major clients. And an arsonist (some memorable sleaze from Thayer David) to torch one of his plants and get enough money from the insurance to pay off some of those debts that are eating his company from the knees up. A company that comes to represent everything he has left.
The beautiful thing about this powerhouse character study by screenwriter Steve Shagan is the way it makes a clear distinction between what Stoner loves and what he needs. It’s not that Stoner feels any great affection for his company. It just happens to be all he has to call his own. Right down to the people who rely on him for a job. We see early on that the war clearly had an effect on him. One he never quite understood himself or was able to properly recover from. And as things get closer to oblivion, as the situation gets more frantic and desperate, that effect begins to take hold. Screaming into a full-blown meltdown that stood then and will stand now as one of Lemmon’s finest moments as an actor. The tragedy of his character is that in the end even he isn’t sure what he stands for anymore. What it is that gets him out of bed every morning and compels him to go forward. A survival instinct is what the story seems to suggest. It’s the same one that barely got him through that war. The only trouble comes out of the realization that even Harry doesn’t know what he’s fighting for anymore. And it’s a weakness that can’t do anything but catch up with him a pretty vicious way.
Avildsen was smart to be as unobtrusive as possible when it came to how this thing is handled in terms of pacing and cinematography. When the camera knows to match the isolation and claustrophobia Harry feels in a city of millions and when to just keep to the background and let him go on his own. He knows where the movie is going to draw its fire from, and for the most part, he simply follows the pace of the script and of Lemmon’s performance. Which a strong supporting cast enhances even further. Jack Gilford didn’t win an Academy Award for playing Phil Green, Stoner’s emotionally exhausted and terminally nervous second-in-command. He had to settle for just being nominated. But Gilford as one of the all-time great character actors plays flawlessly off of Lemmon. The chemistry between the two is unmistakable and gives each character further depth as they futilely try to navigate through the first day of the rest of their lives together. Credit should also go to Laurie Heineman as a young twenty-something Lemmon meets early on in the film. And runs into again later on when everything has officially moved half-a-step past the breaking point. In Heineman, Stoner sees a chance to find the thing he lost between coming back from the war and the start of the day the movie takes place in.
Whether he finally finds what he’s looking for is up in the air, but it’s just one more aspect of Save The Tiger that makes Shagan’s script that much sharper and Lemmon’s performance that much richer. The end-result message of the film seems to be the idea that nothing is what it seems and that time will go on whether you’re ready for the kicking and screaming reaction or not. Lemmon puts everything he has into summing this up in his character.
The result is a brilliant performance of a man who manages to have everything to lose in the same breath of knowing he has nothing to lose at the exact same time. The similarities between war and everyday life become more blurred as the movie marches on. The question the film poses is whether Stoner will realize this in time to save himself.
SCTV: Volume One: Network 90 (1981)
Directed by: John Blanchard, Jim Drake, John Bell
Written by: Eugene Levy, Dick Blasucci, John Candy
Starring: Eugene Levy, Dave Thomas, Catherine O’Hara
In the end, many of the roads that today lead to good comedy as we know it start here. Created in 1976 by a group of comedians based out of the Chicago and Toronto-based Second City troupe, SCTV would spend three years on Canadian television and in syndication across various American stations. By the time the show was picked up by NBC in 1981, the show, its characters and its concept had developed a tremendous cult following. A following that included such current names as Ben Stiller, Matt Groening, Judd Apatow and Conan O’Brien. The show would run for two seasons on NBC and one final season on HBO. In that time, the series managed to further its reputation as that of a future comedy classic in the making while in the same space launching a number of film careers. Many of which continue to be successful to this day.
The series had to go to hell and back to make it to DVD in 2004. Mostly, due to music rights. But it finally did. If you haven’t had a chance to give this series a moment of your time, you’re missing out on some of the most essential comedy ever committed to DVD or otherwise. Collecting the first nine episodes, Volume One details the initial moments in the spotlight for a group of writers and comedians who have now gone on to be known as some of the most talented and important names in modern comedy. It reads today like a who’s who list of talent. Harold Ramis (who had been involved in the show’s original Canadian thirty minute series but left shortly after the beginning of the NBC run), Eugene Levy, Rick Moranis, John Candy, Catherine O’Hara, Dave Thomas (not the Wendy’s guy), Joe Flaherty and Andrea Martin comprised the writing and acting of these first nine episodes. Which continued the trend SCTV had established of not only satirizing popular culture (Thomas’ Bob Hope impersonation remains one of the all-time great moments in comedy history) but also the concept of television itself. SCTV distanced itself from its cousin Saturday Night Live (whose original cast consisted of many former Second-City members) by creating an entire world for its characters to exist in. SCTV wasn’t just the name of the show. It was the name of the fictional network in which the characters worked and lived. Because not only did the show create countless memorable impersonations on the strength of its immensely gifted cast, it also built its universe on an entire host of original creations. From the legendary Canadian stereotypes Doug and Bob McKenzie (Rick Moranis and Dave Thomas) to SCTV station owner and President Guy Cabellero (Joe Flaherty) who used a wheelchair for “respect” purposes only. To Andrea Martin’s station manager Edith Prickley to John Candy’s walking pile of pretentious filmmaking in Johnny LaRue. Going from there to Catherine O’Hara as the drugs and booze riddled entertainer Lola Heatherton laughing through one nervous breakdown after another and greeting everyone she met by begging to bear their children. It gets even better with Eugene Levy as the smarmy Vegas-style comedian Bobby Bittman and Rick Moranis as the eerily accurate (MTV was still a little ways off) music video host Gerry Todd.
Those are just a few. The ones people still remember almost thirty years after they first appeared. To watch it now and put it against everything it later inspired is pretty impressive even on paper. It’s a concept that Matt Groening would later admit played heavily into his inspiration for Springfield. There’s a lot of comedy history in SCTV and indeed in this first volume of episodes. But unlike a lot of history, this has effortlessly managed to retain the same razor-sharp wit and relentless madness it threw down from its first moment going straight into its last. These early episodes do suffer a little from the cast obviously struggling to adjust to a much longer format. A lot of the material in the first few episodes was a combination of earlier sketches sandwiched into new bits. But as an introduction to this incredible universe and its wonderful characters that are still as hilarious today as they were in 1981, it’s still a hell of a great introduction. The episode in which SCTV tries to maintain a disintegrating relationship with its demanding sponsors alone is a treasure demanding to be seen by anyone who even pretends they know what’s both funny and wickedly smart at the same time.
Granted, some of the musical guests relevancy hasn’t held up quite as strong, but who cares? You didn’t come for the musical guests. You came to laugh your ass off. Don’t worry. It’s pretty much a sure-bet here.
Harold and Maude (1971)
Directed by: Hal Ashby
Written by: Colin Higgins
Starring: Ruth Gordon, Bud Cort, Vivian Pickles
Romantic comedies are not generally well known for their staying power. A few manage to hold on from one decade to the next. But by and large, it’s a mostly disposable genre. Haroldand Maude is one of the exceptions. A film that has retained its following and appeal almost forty years from when it was first released to poor critical reception and meager box-office returns. In fact, to many it’s known today as one of the greatest cult films of all time. Which isn’t something you can say for a lot of romantic comedies.
So, what’s the secret? It might have something to do with the plot. Harold (the excellent and vastly underrated Bud Cort) is your standard disenfranchised young man going nowhere fast and being well aware of that at the same time. A Goth several years before the term or culture ever came into being. We open with Harold spending the bulk of his time enjoying his many hobbies. Namely, faking suicides, attending funerals for people he’s never met, and driving around in a hearse while his mother (wonderfully played by Vivian Pickles) tries to set him up with a good woman and his deranged military uncle (Charles Tyner) hopes to have him in basic training as soon as possible. It’s during one of Harold’s funeral field trips that he meets Maude. The legendary Ruth Gordon in a performance far and away superior to her Oscar-winning role in Rosemary’s Baby. The story already has a touch of the odd going for it. Harold’s obsession with death and boredom with life in general are not the standard makings of a romantic lead.
Nor is Gordon as an octogenarian who takes the opposite approach to Harold’s view on life and death. The two things are constant and inevitable to her. And because of that, she chooses to make each moment the most important one in her life. It doesn’t take long for Harold to find drawn into Maude’s world of stealing cars at random (which is how the two meet in the first place) and rescuing trees from the city to be returned to their natural environment in the forest. The two fall in love, which doesn’t go over very well with the almost zombie-like inhabitants of Harold’s upper-class world (the scene in which Harold is forced to see a priest, a scene that was repeated verbatim on Family Guy, is quite possibly the funniest scene in the entire film). But Harold has made a life so far out of going against the expectations of his mother, his uncle, his shrink and the others who fail to understand what slowly begins to dawn on Harold as he spends more and more time with Maude. When he realizes what it is that drives Maude to embrace life the way she does.
Take away the element of the two being some sixty-years apart in age, and what you’re pretty much left with is a standard love story between two people from two different worlds. And when it’s down to that, only a great cast, assured direction that knows how to maintain the balance between drama, comedy and romance, and a script that holds it all together and remains sweet and touching without ever going into tooth-decay territory. Harold and Maude has continued to live long pas its initial failure by having all these things. Cort and Gordon make for two of the most believable lovers you’re ever going to see in any film. Two great actors who understand completely just how well-rounded the characters have to be for a story like this to work as more than just a one-liner about a young man and a woman old enough to be his grandmother. Hal Ashby’s direction and the script by Colin Higgins give them everything they could possibly need to carve out a relationship that’s as real and touching as anything you could find in film and any so-called “normal relationship”. The soundtrack by Cat Stevens only adds to it. Even if you’re not a fan (which I’m not), you’ll be hard pressed to think of any music more appropriate.
A million things could have gone wrong in a film like this. And other movies that have tried to do something different with the familiar romantic comedy formula have fallen into those traps. Harold and Maude avoids every last one of them. It sets its unique tone early and maintains all the way through. Leaving behind a message that life is what you make of it.
Not once does it come off as preachy in conveying that through the motions of its unforgettable characters.
That should just about do it for another edition of Adventures in Netflix.
Next month, I’ll explain why There Will Be Blood would have been a lot better if they had gotten The Rock instead Daniel Day-Lewis
Thanks for reading.
“I’d kill for diarrhea.”
-Edith Prickley (Andrea Martin) in one of her many commentaries to the viewers of SCTV.
Copyright C. 2008 Gabriel Ricard
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