2/20/14: Love Among the Leeches

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1950's films, Academy Award Nominee, Academy Award Winner, Africa, auteur theory, based on a book, battleship, Charlie Allnut, cinema, classic movies, Film auteurs, film reviews, films, gin, home-made torpedo, Humphrey Bogart, Jack Cardiff, James Agee, John Huston, Katherine Hepburn, leeches, missionaries, Movies, Rev. Samuel Sayer, riverboats, Robert Morley, romance, romantic films, Rosie Sayer, steamboat, The African Queen, the Louisa, war films, World War I

Any discussion of the greatest cinematic romances of all time must, invariably, include John Huston’s classic 1951 adventure The African Queen. In fact, short of classic film couples like Katherine Hepburn/Spencer Tracy or Clark Gable/Vivien Leigh, Humphrey Bogart and Hepburn’s romantic turn may be the first couple that film buffs normally think about in this regard. That being said, it’s interesting to note how far Huston tends to tilt the film in the direction of white-knuckle adventure vs “falling in love.”

By this point in film history, the plot of The African Queen (adapted for the screen by Pulitzer Prize-winning author James Agee, who also wrote the screenplay for Night of the Hunter) should be familiar to just about anyone. Rose Sayer (Hepburn) and her brother Samuel (the always excellent Robert Morley) are missionaries stationed in East Africa during the onset of World War I. Local riverboat captain Charlie Allnut (Bogart) drops by to inform that the Germans are on the move and that they should (probably) abandon their posts. Determined to stay, the Sayers soon realize that even good intentions and God can’t stand in the way of the rampaging Germans, particularly once they burn the village (and church) to the ground and beat poor Rev. Sayer.

After her brother dies, Rose goes with Charlie, ostensibly to relocate to safer territory. Instead, the headstrong Rose has determined that she and Charlie should single-handedly take on a nearly impenetrable German fortress and one completely badass German battleship named the Louisa. The Louisa, you see, is the key to the German control of East Africa and would be quite the fight for another battleship. Attacking a battleship with a rickety riverboat? Why, that’s just crazy talk! Rose, however, knows two things like the back of her hand: she’s too damn stubborn to ever admit defeat, regardless the odds, and she’s fallen head-over-heels in love with the slovenly, equally pig-headed Charlie. Will love and a boat full of explosives be enough to thwart the German troops? Will Charlie and Rosie ever stop arguing long enough to kiss?

As a youngster, The African Queen was (easily) one of my parents’ favorite films and something that they seemed to watch about as frequently as I watch my favorite films…which is to say, quite often enough to make neophytes sick and tired of the whole thing. I was never a big fan of The African Queen but I’ll freely admit that this had as much to do with me as the film: as an avowed Clint Eastwood/Charles Bronson fanatic, Huston’s modest little war pic was always going to have an uphill battle in the “Make Phillip’s blood boil” sweepstakes. Nonetheless, even though I wasn’t a huge fan of the film, there was still always one scene that got my complete and undivided attention: if you guessed anything besides the leech scene, you probably didn’t know pre-teen/teen me very well. As a kid into ooky, gooky and icky things of all sorts and sizes, particularly those that paraded across the big/small screen, things didn’t get much ickier than the bit where Charlie emerges from the river only to find himself covered in those slimy little bastards. I still get a chill every time I think about that scene, which certainly must say something as to the film’s staying power.

Re-watching The African Queen as an adult certainly reinforced one thing that my adolescent self managed to miss entirely: despite what I initially thought, there’s plenty of action to be found in Huston’s jungle journey. This isn’t to say that the film’s reputation as a romance is undeserving: there’s still plenty of lovin’ to go around. My initial memories, however, ended up being pretty unfairly weighted: between the numerous “over the rapids” scenes and the incredibly tense moment where the German fortress first catches sight of The African Queen and proceeds to bomb the living crap out of Rosie and Charlie, there isn’t much fat (if any) on the film.

In fact, if anything, I actually found the romantic angle to be a bit too comfortable and rather cliché: the scruffy bad-boy falls in love with the prim-and-proper good girl and changes his life for the better. Hepburn and Bogart spend so much time feinting and verbally sparring around each other that their inevitable falling in love seems more a fact of sheer exhaustion than any kind of aligning of the stars: they’re too tired to keep fighting, so they may as well smooch. Perhaps I’ve become numb to this type of character development since I’ve seen it so many times over the years but this aspect of the film definitely struck me as routine and “by-the-book.”

If I have trouble affording The African Queen the same amount of esteem that other critics do, however, I have absolutely no problem in extolling the films many (many) virtues. Bogart is pretty great, even though my favorite role of his will forever be Angels with Dirty Faces: he won the Best Actor Oscar for the performance, which ended up being his only win. Hepburn is absolutely perfect as the starched-stiff Rosie, although her transformation into a moony-eyed, swooning schoolgirl seems rather an odd fit.

The cinematography, by DP Jack Cardiff, is astounding and immediately impressive: some of the shots here are pretty enough to frame. There’s a real sense of grandeur to some scenes, such as the first glimpses of the mighty German fortress and the massive Louisa, which makes Charlies African Queen look like a wooden rowboat. Cardiff really makes the African locations pop and the various shots of local wildlife (such as the eye-popping scene where dozens of sunning crocodiles slide into the river) really set the scene and help blur the line between what was filmed in-studio and what was shot on location. Production-wise, my one complaint would be with the musical score, which often struck me as both too whimsical and too intrusive. It reminded me a bit too much of the overly leading scores in modern films, scores which seem to want to control ever audience reaction/emotion.

More than anything, I’m glad that my re-evaluation of a classic film has led to new appreciation for said film. While The African Queen will never be my favorite John Huston or Humphrey Bogart film (or Katherine Hepburn movie, for that matter), I still found myself thoroughly entertained and swept up in the action. If you’ve never seen The African Queen before, do yourself a favor and get acquainted: if your heartbeat doesn’t race at least a few times, you may already be dead.

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1/17/14: Big Trouble with Taboo Cheerleaders

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'80s action films, action-adventure, action-comedies, Africa, art films, arthouse film, B-movies, Big Trouble in Little China, But I'm a Cheerleader, cheerleaders, Chinatown, cinema, comedies, conversion therapy, drama, Escape From New York, F.W. Murnau, fantasy, Film auteurs, films, flashbacks, foreign films, gay and lesbian films, high school angst, Jamie Babbit, John Carpenter, John Waters, Kim Cattrall, Kurt Russell, Miguel Gomes, Mink Stole, Movies, Natasha Lyonne, Richard Moll, romance, Rupaul, social commentary, sorcerers, Tabu, They Live

My (seemingly) never-ending quest to catch my blog up with my viewing habits continue. We’re still in the past (last Friday, to be specific) but we’re getting closer all the time. Journey with me now as we get a little goofy, a little arty and a little funny.

Pound for pound, I don’t think that there’s been a more successful writer/director from the glory days of ’70s horror than John Carpenter. He’ll always exist in the minds of horror fans for his iconic Halloween (still one of the best films ever, in my little opinion, horror or not) but the rest of his filmography ain’t too shabby, either: The Thing, Assault on Precinct 13th, Escape From New York, They Live, The Fog and the horribly under-rated In the Mouth of Madness are all classics, any one of which a lesser filmmaker would be proud to stake their careers on. There have also, of course, been a few missteps along the way (Ghosts of Mars is a fascinating failure, a movie so tone-deaf that it almost achieves a kind of transcendence and Vampires and his remake of Village of the Damned are mostly gloss and no filler. Compare this ratio to someone like Tobe Hooper, Wes Craven or Sean Cunningham, however, and it’s pretty clear that Carpenter had the more consistent career.

While Carpenter’s name is synonymous with horror, thanks to the invincible Halloween, his films actually tend more towards pulpy, B-actioners, the kinds of films that feature sarcastic anti-heroes chewing gum and kicking ass. In fact, Assault on Precinct 13, Escape From New York, They Live, Escape From L.A., Vampires and Ghosts of Mars could almost be seen to take place in the same universe, relatively speaking, along with another Carpenter film: Big Trouble in Little China.

Like many people (I’m assuming), I was first drawn to BTILC thanks to the colorful box art. Just take a gander at that smiling, machine-pistol-bedecked Kurt Russell, looming over Chinatown like some kind of jolly ass-kicking giant, all manner of crazy shit going down in the background. That, ladies and gentlemen, was entertainment in the VHS age: hook us with some amazing artwork and see if the movie could keep up. They rarely could but BTILC almost does.

Russell plays a wisecracking (could there be any other kind?) truck-driver who must help his friend rescue his fiancée from the clutches of a wicked Chinatown sorcerer (the always esteemable James Hong). In the process, he’ll fight monsters, gangsters and lightning-wielding sorcerers. He might even get his truck back.

As a film, BTILC doesn’t always work and rarely makes much sense. Exposition (what little there is) is usually delivered in large data dumps that go something like: “Lo Pan? Let me tell you all about who he is, where he comes from and what he wants, in great detail.” The dialogue can be exceedingly clunky, even from Russell, which is kind of surprising. The numerous fight sequences have a tendency to keep piling on silly elements (in one over-the-top scene, a gunfight turns into a karate battle which turns into a fight with lightning-wielding warrior sorcerers that fly through the air like human dragonflies) and sometimes come across as no more than martial arts showcases: please stand there patiently while I demonstrate some moves in close proximity to your face, after which you may feel free to shoot me. Thank you.

But do all of these things make BTILC a bad film? Not in the slightest. This is certainly not a GOOD film, mind you, but it shares a pretty similar aesthetic to They Live, which is a good film. It’s always a pleasure watching Russell ham it up, especially during his golden age in the ’80s. Kim “Sex in the City” Cattrall is absolutely awful but this somehow works to her favor. Hong makes a great villain, even if he does get stuck behind a pound of eye-liner and foot-long fingernails: he even gets a pretty cool transformation scene where his skull glows from the inside-out. There’s a pretty decent shaggy monster-thing that Russell battles and an even decenter floating-eyeball-thingy that reminded me of something from my Dungeons & Dragons days. There’s also lots and lots (and lots) of ’80s lightning effects, which get old pretty quickly but are (briefly) rather charming.

In short, if you’re a fan of the more action-oriented side of Carpenter, Big Trouble in Little China should scratch that itch. It’s no Assault on Precinct 13 but it’s a helluva lot better than Vampire in Brooklyn.

I had originally intended to give Tabu its own separate post, since there’s a whole lot going on in this film. Due to my desire to keep us moving forward, however, I decided to see if we could fit this into the rest of that Friday’s viewings. Would it be possible to get any of this across in a shorter format? Let’s see if I’m up for the challenge.

First off, let’s address the elephant in the room: the title. Yes, that is a reference to F.W. Murnau’s final film, the Pacific-Island adventure Tabu. And yes, there’s actually more of a spiritual connection than just the obvious stylistic/plot connections would suggest. In the most obvious example, Murnau’s Tabu is separated into two chapters: Paradise and Paradise Lost. Miguel Gomes’ Tabu is also separated into two chapters: A Lost Paradise and Paradise. There are other, specific, similarities but I would daresay that the biggest connectors are more spiritual and thematic than anything. Suffice to say that you need not be familiar with the original Tabu, or even F.W. Murnau, for that matter, to enjoy this film.

In a nutshell, Tabu is about several acquaintances/friends and their interactions with each other. Pilar (ostensibly the film’s protagonist and moral center) lives next door to Aurora and her maid/assistant Santa in an apartment complex in Portugal. Aurora is just on the good side of senility, when the film starts, and is a bit of a handful: she routinely accuses poor Santa of witchcraft and sees conspiracies around every corner. She also gambles her money away one night after having a dream about a fortune-telling slot machine: she wakes up from the dream and just has to find out if its real. Spoiler alert: it’s not.

As Aurora’s health begins to decline, she asks Pilar to locate someone for her, a Mr. Ventura. This leads Pilar on a minorly epic journey about the city, as she finally tracks the elusive Mr. Ventura to a nursing home. His appearance in the film prompts a flashback to the past, explaining the lovely but tragic relationship that he shared with a young Aurora while they both lived in Africa. This leads to some of the film’s best moments, as the gorgeous black-and-white cinematography really comes alive on the African plains.

In certain ways, Tabu is the epitome and (perhaps) stereotype of independent art-house cinema. The film is shot in black-and-white, in a style that instantly calls to mind Italian neo-realism or Guy Maddin films. It’s slow and elegiac, although prone to bursts of strange whimsy, similar to a Jeunet film (one nonsensical subplot about a house-guest of Pilar’s that never shows up is a particular head-scratcher). Even the music reminded me of various foreign art films that I watched in college. That being said, there’s a lot of beauty in Tabu (especially in the wonderful, heartbreaking opening, which is almost a micro-short by itself) and I found myself genuinely caring about the characters. I won’t pretend that I understood everything (what the hell was the deal with the absent Polish house-guest?) but I was frequently fascinated and always ready for what might come around the corner.

Besides, how can you not like a black-and-white art film that features a garden-party scene where a rich, crazy old man fires a gun into the air, prompting his normal-looking but batshit crazy son to begin kick-boxing and punching invisible enemies? In any other film, that would be a centerpiece. In Tabu, it’s just another day at the office.

Sometimes, you don’t really appreciate a film when you first see it. This was certainly the case when I first saw But I’m a Cheerleader in the theater. I was (and am) a big Natasha Lyonne fan and was really excited to see what she would do after the previous year’s Slums of Beverly Hills. I remember enjoying But I’m a Cheerleader and laughing quite a bit but, ultimately, I never gave the movie much thought after that point.

Nastasha Lyonne plays Megan, a perfectly normal high school cheerleader who just might be, you know…gay. At least her parents, peers and teachers seem to think so, although poor Megan isn’t quite so sure. In order to “fix her,” Megan is shipped away to a conversion therapy program where she learns that sometimes, you’re just fine the way you are and the rest of the world just needs to learn to deal with it.

After re-watching the film, I find that my original impression still holds: I still enjoyed it and laughed quite a bit. This time around, however, I think I noticed a little more, particularly how sharp and cutting some of the dialogue and ideas are. I also noticed Rupaul, who I absolutely do not remember the first time around. Perhaps it’s because I’ve seen so many episodes of Drag Race but I found myself inordinately excited when he appeared, looking as masculine as possible, as a “pray the gay away” type camp counselor.

Stylistically (and thematically), But I’m a Cheerleader is like a less scuzzy, friendlier version of a John Waters film (or a slightly dirtier version of Pretty Baby, depending on your perspective) and even features Waters’ mainstays Bud Cort and Mink Stole in small roles. The production design is extremely bright and vibrant, tending towards lots of pinks, pastels and primary colors. There might be some notion that this is lazy symbolism but writer/director Jamie Babbit has a little more up her sleeve than that.

Looking at Babbit’s filmography, it becomes pretty apparent that she tends to focus on women, whether it be in her films (But I’m a Cheerleader, The Quiet, Itty Bitty Titty Committee, Breaking the Girls) or her TV work (Alias, Ugly Betty, Gilmour Girls, Gossip Girl, The L Word, United States of Tara, Girls), although it seems that her resume definitely leans more towards the small screen than the big one. Although there are some stereotypes floating around the film (especially once we get to the conversion therapy camp), there’s also a lot of genuine emotion and some nicely made points. By the time we get to the film’s point, that opening up your mind and accepting/loving everyone is the best way to live, it’s pretty hard to argue with it.  Here’s hoping that Babbit finds the time and/or support to bring something else to a theater near you sometime in the near future.