Thursday, February 28, 2008

Escape From New York


.

After the disappointment of Death Proof, I wanted to watch some vintage Kurt Russell, so I rented Escape From New York. This is what a "B" movie should be.

Escape From New York isn't the greatest film ever made, but it is a hugely entertaining bit of escapism (haha). You probably know the plot, so I won't reiterate it or spoil it for those of you who haven't seen it before.

Where
Escape From New York succeeds is in creating a world that works. We get a glimpse of a dying culture, one that has had to sacrifice it's greatest city. The idea that a city has been turned into a giant prison works for the most part due to the director's ability to make us believe. John Carpenter is not one of my favorite directors, but he does a great job with a small budget in this movie. It of course helps that for most Americans, New York is not much different in reality than in the movie.

Kurt Russell is very good as Snake Plissken. In this role, he channels Clint Eastwood mixed with John Wayne and a dash of Erroll Flynn. In some ways, I think Carpenter was trying to make a sort of modern version of the "Spaghetti Western" genre. Plissken is the stoic gunfighter, a la Eastwood and the city has replaced the open plains. Other characters fill out some of the usual roles, like Harry Dean Stanton's "Brain" and of course we have a nod to the genre with the inclusion of Lee Van Cleef in a pivotal role.

The only character that felt wrong to me was Cabbie, played by the terribly miscast Ernest Borgnine. Borgnine hits wrong notes throughout, playing it more as comedy than serious. This is not a movie that plays it loose with the self-aware mockery that has become a staple of some "B" movies. It's dark, violent, sadistic, and depressing. For the most part, everyone else is fine, including Adrienne Barbeau. She is little more than eye-candy, but so what - she is showing generous amounts of cleavage in every scene she's in, and on top of that, she gets the tone right.

I like this movie even though it hasn't aged well. The low budget certainly hurt this movie, but the story is the thing, and that is what makes
Escape From New York so much fun. It's a tight film, without needless scenes. We get the set-up and off it goes, for a fast-paced ride that keeps you entertained and never makes you laugh at it.


Wednesday, February 13, 2008

Dressed to Kill


.
I've seen this movie several times over the years. Last night I watched it again for the first time in about 12 years. It's funny how some movies don't age well, and this is a perfect example.

I wanted to watch this after I saw Death Proof a night earlier and got to thinking about the influence of De Palma's movie on Tarantino. Watching them back-to-back was interesting. I'll get to this again later, but first I'll review Dressed to Kill on it's own.

This is a strange film. It starts out as a film about Angie Dickinson's character, and her extra-marital exploits. The pacing is deliberate and dialog is used sparingly (Tarantino, pay attention). The cinematography is lurid and effective, although it seems very badly dated even just 28 years later - hey, that sounds like a name for an upcoming sequel to a zombie movie...back to the review - There's a very "80's" feel to the movie, but it is not cool. It just feels like a weird moment, unlike some classics from the past that remain timeless, like Psycho. Of course, De Palma owes everything to Hitchcock and Dressed to Kill is an homage to Psycho, but unlike its source it doesn't hold up well over the years.

Much has been written about the influence of Hitchcock on De Palma, so there's no need for me to comment further on that. I can't add anything new to that. Where Dressed to Kill fails is a complicated issue. At first glance that acting stands out as atrociously inept. After thinking about it, I began to think that maybe it was intentional. The acting (especially Nancy Allen's) is just so amatuerish that it doesn't seem possible in a big budget movie. Dennis Franz plays a cop, and his portrayal veers way beyond characature and into almost farce. It's bad, from every jabbing inflection to the terrible forced accent to the halloween-costume wardrobe choices. Simply bad. Even Michael Caine, who's never been accused of being a great actor, seems to have played his role with a campish frenzy. At times he's so laid back it seems like he's not interested and a moment later he's cartoonishly animated in his emoting. Weird. The only actor who plays it well is the youngest, Keith Gordon. This may have been considered good acting in 1980, but it really sucks now.

Another aspect of the movie that gets a lot of attention is the famous museum scene. Again, this may have been fascinating to the general public in 1980, but now it looks very contrived and indulgent. It doesn't fit at all with anything else in the movie and it takes far too much time to develop. The rest of the movie is fairly tight, with scenes that are taut and focused. The museum scene, for all its notoriety, is quite heavy-handed, especially the overly dramatic music. I found it unintentionally funny, and disruptive whenever De Palma used those stupid split screens. The use of that in the museum was lazy. I think the split screen technique in general is a lazy one, but for a director like De Palma who puts so much stock in style, it seems particularly trite.

Despite my general feelings towards Dressed to Kill, there are some scenes that I think are quite well done. In particular, the scene in the elevator when Nancy Allen is reaching out towards the dying Dickinson, unaware of the killer inside the doorway. There are some great shots on that scene. Allen's awful acting detracts from the potential, but visually it's extremely tight. Another scene that I liked a lot is at the end, in the asylum. After the nurse is killed, there's a long, slow pan up and away that reveals the hooting inmates staring down on her body. The angles, the lighting and the music all work greatly with the surrealism of that scene. That to me is the defining imagery of the movie, not the pointless museum scene.

The other big problem I had with Dressed to Kill is the uneven direction. Is it a surreal piece on urban horror, is it an erotic bit of voyeurism, or is it a police procedural? At times it's all of these, but it never maintains focus. The first half of the movie is voyeuristic softcore porn, and then it changes completely and becomes a slasher film. Then it becomes a cop drama with car chases and stalking. Intertwined are these surreal bits that are without doubt the most interesting elements, but there should have been more of this and less of the typical Hollywood crime stuff. It's almost like De Palma was trying to make something unique, but kept having to restrain himself because of the studios.

Brian De Palma has earned a reputation as an influential director, for good or bad. After seeing these two movies, it's clear to me that De Palma influenced Tarantino in some bad ways. I'm not going to pretend that I'm some sort of expert on cinema - there are many people far more knowledgeable and educated on the medium than I. However, I am a movie enthusiast so my thoughts on the subject are worth something. The influence on Tarantino seems to be purely stylish, but in a very superficial way. Both directors use a saturated palette, which tends to give the movies a surreal quality. I like that about both of their styles. De Palma has a heavy hand with lighting, reflections, and angles - there's not much subtlety, and this seems to be an influence on Tarantino as well.

I wanted to like Dressed to Kill more than I do. There are some really great moments, but overall it's too unfocused. It would be interesting to see what De Palma would do if he were making this movie now, in an era with less restrictions on the director. For all the fuss that was made over this movie when it came out, it's now tame compared to your average TV cop show which really says a lot about how outdated the movie feels.

Tuesday, February 12, 2008

Death Proof


.
Death Proof by Quentin Tarantino was something I'd been looking forward to viewing. I like some of his other movies a lot. Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction were great, while I liked Jackie Brown a bit less. Those were his best, and without a doubt Death Proof is his worst. Actually, Deathproof might be one of the worst movies anyone's made.

I know it's supposed to be a shitty movie, but it was supposed to be bad in a cool fun way - an homage to the shitty drive-in films of the 1960's and 1970's. It missed the cool fun part of the equation and totally nailed bad. So I guess in a way Tarantino succeeded in making the movie he'd hoped.

What made this so bad was that somehow the movie completely misses the mark on nearly all points. A major point Tarantino tries to make is how great some of the 1970's "car" movies were. Vanishing Point is mentioned many times, as is Dirty Mary Crazy Larry. Both of those movies are superior to Death Proof, just from the driving standpoint. Tarantino brought nothing new to the genre, in fact his work is a pale imitation.

The movie has no pace to it. It starts out slowly, and stays slow for seemingly forever. When we finally do get to the car scenes, it's a real letdown. Two minutes of screeching tires and a car wreck offset the lethargy, but sadly the movie goes right back to boredom for another extended period of time.

The boredom is from an overindulgence in dialog. Tarantino had a flair for interesting dialog, most notably in Pulp Fiction. Unfortunately, what he doesn't understand is that what works in small doses becomes tedious when that's all there is. Quentin, meet "Less Is More." Someone told Tarantino that his dialog was sensational, and apparently he really believes that.

The dialog in Death Proof is not sensational. It's dull, and there's way too much of it. The characters are not engaging, and they all say things that come off as very scripted rather than natural. I hate this about many recent films, and I think Tarantino is responsible for this very annoying development.

In these movies, characters always have the perfect line for any situation, no matter how unrealistic it sounds. People don't talk like that in real life. It's annoying as hell in a movie when every character sounds like a character in a movie, rather than a real person. Not everyone is cool. But in movies, they are, and they always have a witty goddamn line no matter the scenario. I hate that. Give me characters that are real and I'll care about them when something happens to them.

In Death Proof, the characters that die are nothing more than crash test dummies. I didn't like or care about any of them. Then in the crash, which we are treated to multiple times so we can see each "dummy" meet her end, it's obvious how little Tarantino cares for them. He literally treats them like dummies. It's weird, because he spent so much time building these girls, and then there's no point to their deaths.

Another big problem with the movie is Kurt Russell's character. He's a totally remorseless psychopath in the first segment in which he crashes his death-proofed muscle car into another car at 100mph. He does this gleefully, with no regard for his safety as he knows he'll be OK. Fine, that was interesting and we saw what the guy was like. But then in the second segment, he gets wounded and suddenly becomes a sniveling, whining coward. It's not consistent with how he was portrayed earlier. We're shown this total badass, a guy who purposely crashes head on at 100mph for no apparent reason. What happened to that guy?

The characters in general are ridiculous. At the end, all of a sudden these girls who were being victimized turn into martial art experts and killers. It comes almost out of nowhere and makes no sense. There's no transition from hunted to hunter - it's like a switch is flipped and these girls all of sudden become ninjas.

What's become apparent to me is that Tarantino has come to rely totally on style over substance. Much like his fondness for ultra-dialog, he uses his inflated sense of musical choices in this movie. I suspect Quentin is the guy who used to give people his pretentious mixed tapes and liked to take over the stereo at other peoples parties. We get it, you like the greatest music and you're way cooler than anyone else, now please get over yourself - we just don't fucking care.

As an homage to the grindhouse movies it's supposed to be, Death Proof just doesn't work. It's not grindhouse-y enough. It's silly and self-conscious, as opposed to gritty, scary and raw. I'd like to see Tarantino get his muse back and make movies that are original and interesting again. He's been wallowing in self-indulgent masturbatory shit far too long now.