Reviews

Today the term "indie film" is a bloated cliché, misapplied to any movie with a budget under $50 million and not too much CGI, regardless of how conventional and hackneyed the film is. To see really independent cinema you have to go back to the 60s and 70s, when revolutions in the technology allowed eccentrics and visionaries, working totally outside the industry and with virtually no money, to make truly unique movies. Folks like Warhol and Waters and Anger in the US, Herzog in Germany, and the team of Brownlow and Mollo in the UK. All very different from one another (and everyone else), which is part of what makes them authentic independents. Starting when they were just 18, Brownlow and Mollo made two extraordinary history-based films. First they spent eight years (and something like 20,000 pounds, minuscule even in 1970s currency) making "It Happened Here," a what-if fantasy about England occupied by the Nazis during World War II that looks so realistic you could be fooled it's a documentary if you're history-challenged. Then, with an equally tiny budget and fierce attention to detail, they made the true-to-history "Winstanley," about the proto-democracy (and proto-Quaker, and proto-hippie) revolt of the Diggers, Levellers and Ranters in 17th-century England. Again it looks so real it's like a documentary somehow shot in the 1640s, but it's also beautiful, poetic and philosophical in a kind of Herzogian way. They're both remarkable little films, unlike anything else, that should be remedial must-see's for anyone who likes or is involved in what's called indie film nowadays.

Oh boy did I hate this movie. It's a disastrous, arrogant mess and waste of everyone's time, whose budget could have fed the starving children of several small impoverished nations for a year. Absolutely everything about it is wrong. The plot less screenplay is a hash of preening ain't I clever? Cliff's Notes references to the original materials, a travesty of Carroll and an insult to anyone who appreciates his work. The half-baked references to Wonderland and Underland and Frabjous Day and the Jabberwocky and all that are embarrassingly lame. By the time it all devolved into just another idiotic fight scene -- followed by an appalling break-dance scene! -- I was shouting at the screen. The girl who plays Alice is very pretty, but a dull, monotone, non-acting cipher about whom it is impossible to care. The stars surrounding her try their best, but except for Ann Hathaway in a light, deft humorously turn, they all fail. The billion dollars' worth of 3D CGI mostly looks awful -- dark, jumbled, ugly. And, at this point in Burton's career, really old hat. We've seen all this a dozen times before, going back as far as Beetlejuice. It's not Wonderland, it's just another sojourn in Burtonland. The whole exercise is a lugubrious, leaden, foolish, ill-conceived and exhausting slog. I left it as angry and disappointed as I did Terry Gilliam's similarly half-baked and overwrought mess Dr. Parnassus. I'm still a fan of Burton's earlier films, but the last decade or so he's made one wrong turn after another.

OK, maybe you have to be a Herzog fan to get this one. In its small and quiet way it's a classic Herzogian study of visionary madness and obsession, played out this time with mordant irony against the blandness of suburban San Diego. Brad, a brooding man-child who lives with his mom, gradually goes nuts, saying and doing increasingly unhinged (and funny) things to his clueless loved ones, played by goofy character actors like Udo Kier, Grace Zabriskie and Chloe Sevigny. Willem Dafoe plays the equally clueless detective called in when Brad, inevitably, explodes in a single (off-screen) act of violence. All the usual Herzog flourishes are here, though often played small: odd animals, oddball people, grimly threatening nature, useless bureaucratic procedures, civilization and its hapless inhabitants struggling to maintain order and etiquette in the face of the world's natural madness, violence and chaos. It's a wacky, Herzogian comedy of manners, very much in the tradition of many of his films from Dwarfs through Stroszek to Grizzly Man. If you like Herzog you'll probably like it; if not, maybe not.

It's almost impossible to imagine how a screenplay so inept, so preposterously phony and so failing in character development or a narrative pulse or any dramatic logic got produced as a "serious" film with a serious actor or two and serious money behind it. We are given absolutely no idea of who these people are, why they act as preposterously and yet boringly as they do, or what, besides being idle, rich, vain and vacuous, made them so crazy. Maybe they just had w-a- y too much time on their hands; the movie certainly crawls by one achingly dull second after another. Worse, none of those seconds is connected, logically or narratively or emotionally, to the ones before or after it. It's like they built the script by tearing random pages out of the book. Even the "scandalous" sex scenes and the "shocking" murder are boring, except when the sex is jaw-droppingly ridiculous and repulsive. The whole thing just goes pffft at the end. I didn't read the book, so maybe the actual Baekelands were the dull, pampered, superficial, empty-headed, pretentious and posturing ego-monsters they're portrayed as here. If so, why make the movie? Yet another foray into the depravities and wackiness of the idle rich? Yeah, now there's a novel idea. Bah.

What a great documentary. By turns hilarious, heartbreaking, warm, touching, head- scratching, and full of more edge of your seat suspense than any 10 Hollywood thrillers. It's been called the "real life Spinal Tap," and these metalheads surely do walk the fine line between genius and stupid, but it's got so much more heart and humanity than that. It reminded me more of "American Movie," another great documentary about the unstoppable creative urge and the do-it-yourself-or-die-trying spirit. Lips and Robbo, the two fiftysomething never-say-never-again rockers at the heart of the film, are such fascinating, lovable characters, half heroes, half putzes, partly delusional, yet partly triumphant too. They're good at what they do, they know it and love it and can't stop doing it, even though the music industry passed them over a long, long time ago. They caught all the bad breaks they possibly could, but they didn't let that stop them. As the movie follows them on an agonizing (and yet hilarious) European tour, their attempts to get anyone in the record industry interested in their 13th LP, and an out-of-nowhere gig in Japan, you root for them and fret for them more than any characters in any recent film. That's because, of course, this isn't a film about rock n roll, or about these two guys even -- it really is one of those films that's about all of us, our fears and dreams, our success and failures, our genius moments and our putzy ones. No kidding, not just one of the best docs I've seen in recent years, but one of the mot touching and affecting movies, period.

John Carpenter, George Miller, George Romero, and the whoevers responsible for the Resident Evil franchise should file a class action suit. Never has a movie ripped off so many other movies so blatantly and so poorly. The writing is retarded, the acting is sub-Arnold, the camera-work ugly, the editing chaotic, the gore pointless and superfluous. Clearly this was intentional. No movie could be this insultingly imbecilic by accident. The laws of chance dictate that something would go right somewhere along the line. But nothing does. It just keeps getting stupider and uglier and more ridiculous scene by bloody, derivative scene. No, a film could only be this bad if everyone involved made a pact to create the very very worst Z-grade action-gore post- apocalyptic sci-fi movie ever made. They succeeded. Ever see any of those no-budget Italian Star Wars ripoffs of the 70s? This makes them look like purest genius.

Sam Fuller made some fine, gritty studio pics, like the great "Pickup on South Street," but he really poured his heart and soul and all his neuroses into the writing and directing of his low- budget exploitation B's (and you cannot seriously contend they're anything BUT exploitation B movies) like this one and "Shock Corridor." The results are horribly fascinating, or fascinatingly horrible, or both. Anyway, your jaw is guaranteed to be on the floor through both of them, because they're a couple of the craziest, sleaziest flicks ever made by a guy who's considered an "auteur" and beloved by those silly French cinephiles.

Despite lunging and lurching toward social commentary, neither film has anything to do with the real world. They're both about characters, settings and situations that could only exist in the alternate universe that was Fuller's twisty mind. All his male characters are lugs and mugs, and he wrote female characters like he never met one in real life, only read about them in 50s men's magazines. They mouth some of the most excruciatingly baroque beyond-noir dialogue ever written, and Fuller tortures them with ham-fisted plot machinations that must be seen to be disbelieved. (Constance Towers was not the greatest actress in Hollywood, but she deserved a special Oscar for pluckiness just for starring in these two flicks. Boy, what Fuller put her through.)

And yet there's a mad, wacky genius to it all. These movies are SO cheesy, SO weird, SO crazy that yes, they absolutely epitomize the "so bad they're good" film. I'm not sure they're so bad they're great, the way Fuller's fan club thinks, but I wouldn't argue strongly against it.

Puh-leez. Another 60s French film that's w-a-a-y overrated by film school geeks, Le Samourai is proof that the French may have loved and named film noir, but they were terrible at imitating it. Really slow, really boring, with a REALLY predictable "surprise" climax, and everyone in it is so dumb and inept they'd be dead within the first 10 minutes of a real noir film. Alain Delon is completely unbelievable as a cold killer for hire. He looks and acts more like a male model for hire. If this is noir, so is Zoolander. You know the movie that took this theme and did it much MUCH better? Ghost Dog. I like the Citroen he steals early on. I like some of the (endless) Paris street scenes. But everything else about this movie is arty, pretentious film school noir, and there are at least 100 American noir films that are far better.

It's worth noting that this ultra-low-budget splicing-together of unmatched stock footage was mocked and panned even in its own day, so it should not be viewed seriously as an accurate document of Cold War paranoia. Even in the depths of the Red Scare, most Americans weren't stupid enough to be scared by crap like this. It was more like a super-cheapie public service announcement for the military-industrial complex. If you fast forward through most of the stock WW2 battle scenes, which are endless, and slow down for the "story" scenes, it's a mildly amusing exercise in what-if? science fiction -- doofy and utterly implausible, but good for some wry smiles. I mean, you gotta love that the hypnotist fortune teller is named Ohman. It's also kind of interesting that many, many more "serious," bigger-budget invasion and terrorist- plot films since this one have followed a pretty similar storyline, if more competently. Add the general atmosphere of paranoia post-9/11, and this thing is worth a look, with the FF button to the metal.

Absolutely the smartest, funniest, most faithful PKD adaptation yet. Only Blade Runner even comes within light-years. I'm a VERY old-time PKD fan--was buying his books as Ace Double paperbacks in junior high school in the 1960s, and have read pretty much every word the guy wrote. I consider him an authentic genius of American literature, up there with Melville and Poe and Zora Neale Hurston and William Burroughs and Harry Mathews et al. Hollywood has mostly trashed his novels. But this is a great adaptation. The acting is mostly spot-on, the rotoscoping makes perfect sense given the psychedelic story, the dialogue--which some dopey folks found boring and pretentious--is simultaneously tragic and hilarious and terribly authentic to the speed-freak paranoias Dick, and Linklater, depict. I guess if you're a Star Wars geek this is not for you. But if you like "sci-fi" that's smart and provocative and risks asking the Big Questions, this one is one of the great ones.

Wow. If you're a psychotronics lover you've probably seen this one, but if not, check it out. Where a lot of psychotronics is Bad Cinema in an aggressive, assaultive way that makes your face hurt after 10 minutes (eg, Diabolik, Manos the Hands of Fate, et al), this one is B-A-D in that adorably, lovably, absurdly silly way that just makes you smile and think, "Wow, adults made this." For an old duffer like me, who grew up watching Rocky Jones and Diver Dan and Fireball XL5 and finally Star Trek, this is manna. Everything about it--the cars, the buildings, the toy rockets, the toy space station, the queeny Z-grade Italian actors and the visible wires holding them up when they go "weightless in space"--is wonderful. Lots of hipsters have worked very hard to make sci-fi and monster movies this miraculously cheesy, and failed utterly, because this kind of stoopit genius cannot be faked or imitated. It must simply be appreciated.

Yes, the manga-inspired art direction is very fine. Too bad there's no plot, and it's paced slower than a Bergman film, and there's not a single actor in it who knows how to convey distress without shouting, whining and falling down. Literally, they spend most of the movie doing those three things, over and over and over, until you wonder why they don't all kill one another and drink one another's blood--not to survive, but just to shut everyone up. For a post- apocalyptic sci-fi type film, it's amazing how very little else happens in its very s- l-o-w two hours. And yet for all its ponderous and portentous stylings, it says nothing to us about survival or friendship or civilization or etc.--all the Big Issues this type of movie is supposed to have us ponder--that we don't get from airheaded Hollywood blockbusters like "Armageddon" and "War of the Worlds."

I have to join the dissenting side. "Spook" starts out like a satire of early-70s race relations, with all sorts of possibilities as the protagonist becomes the first black CIA agent. The first half-hour or so is great, funny, different. It had me thinking that "Spook" was going to turn into a kind of Watermelon Man Joins the CIA. There are all sorts of interesting ways the story could've developed from this wonderful set-up, but the writers lose heart and fall back on a very typical blaxploitation plot. For the last hour the movie trudges sluggishly through a bog of genre clichés and stereotypes, to a most unexciting and unsatisfying climax. It has its moments--the blackface-on-a-bicycle scene is very funny--but they're lost in all the so-so usual business you can find in most any other blaxploitation flick. "Spook" is probably the best *title* for a blaxploitation movie ever, but its cult reputation as "the greatest blaxploitation film ever" is highly exaggerated. It's good, but it coulda been so much better if it had been more adventurous and playful. Too bad Melvin Van Peebles didn't direct it. He woulda kicked it up a few hundred notches.

I admit I'm a sucker for both postwar noir and movies about heaven, hell, the Devil et al, from "Dante's Inferno" through "Petey Wheatstraw," so maybe I like this one more than you would. But I do like it a lot. Paul Muni is hilarious, mugging outrageously when he's not leaping through the air to rumble with devils or thugs.

Never been the biggest Claude Rains fan--his prissiness wears on me midway through any film he's in--but he makes a good, nasty Satan. The scenes in Hell, which looks like the boiler room on the Titanic, are priceless. Lots of good character actors playing brawny devils, lunkheaded mooks, tough dames, flustered Man Fridays and such. The plots a little more clever than you'd expect from this kind of film, with a very nice twist at the end. Definitely worth seeing if you're a fan of the oldies.

Hey, guess what? Low-budget Fifties sci-fi movies were

*really cheesy*! They're so bad they're *funny*! Who knew?

Somebody should spoof them!

Aaaaargh. I *hate* these terribly self-conscious "spoofs" made by

people who think they're they first on earth to notice something

that's common knowledge. Through the gorgeous opening credits

and about the first 2 minutes, this movie looks like it's going to be

a loving B movie recreation. Then the actors begin to speak the

hideously unfunny, achingly self-conscious dialogue, and you're

somewhere in that ring of Hell reserved for atrocious, amateurish

sketch comedy. Except for the score and some of the costumes,

nothing's right about it--especially the acting, which is way too arch

and wink-wink, and that godawful dialogue, which is ditto. There's

exactly one funny sight-gag, about midway through. Otherwise it's

alternately boring and annoying. An appallingly sub-MST3K

mistake.

Pretty typical of the all-black-cast Westerns of the 1930s and 40s, starring the leading black singing cowboy of the genre, Herb Jeffries. The only difference between these movies and the Saturday matinee cowboy pics made for white audiences is the black cast. Which in this case includes the great comedian Mantan Moreland, the equally fine Spencer Williams (who starred in and sometimes directed all-black movies of the era, and later made his mark with white audiences in the short-lived Amos n Andy TV show) and, in a cute role, "Stymie" of the Our Gang series. None of which is to say it's a good movie--even by the low-budget and often plot-deprived standards of 1930s "race" movies, this one's pretty dumb. Its pleasures, as with most movies of the genre, derive from seeing black actors who were always relegated to supporting shtick in mainstream films of the era given starring and somewhat less stereotyped roles.

Melvin Van Peebles' big Hollywood film is a very smart, funny, and in the end tragic satire of race relations in America c. 1970. Today, it doesn't get nearly the hoopla that "Sweet Sweetback" does, but in a lot of ways it's a better movie. Biting satire is often a better way to express righteous anger than simply getting all righteous, and this is an example: under the laughs, this is a deeply angry film.

Godfrey Cambridge is magnificent in his two-tone role, and the supporting cast (including a couple of routines by the great Mantan Moreland) is also very fine. The rage underpinning the whole story doesn't find full, overt expression until the very last scene, which presages Van Peebles' leap into more obviously black revolutionary politics in "Sweetback." A very good, very funny, important film that deserves to be much better known today than it is.

Movies aimed at black audiences in the 1940s often had white producers and directors, though the casts were black. But this one was directed by and co-stars the gifted Spencer Williams, who would in a few years become a national tv star as Andy on "Amos n Andy." Like other black-targeted films of the era, this one's super-low-budget (the sets look like cardboard), with a simplistic story (nice country girl with a good voice comes to NYC and falls in with city slickers), an almost surreally pieced-together musical score, and few professional actors besides Williams himself, who's very good as a kindly cabbie who looks after the girl. And, like a lot of black films from the era, it somehow triumphs over those shortcomings, and is a charmer. Sadly, the DVD version I've seen was made from a print badly mauled by time, with an audio track that's sometimes indecipherable.

Sorry, but this very French attempt to do a 'Mulholland Drive' deconstructed narrative just collapses into incomprehensible nonsense under the weight of its own pretension. It's really two half-films. The first half sets up a stylish, intriguing, sophisticated thriller about international corporate espionage, with the hypersexuality and hyperviolence of Japanese anime and manga as both plot device and metaphor. Then, just when they've got you really wondering how all the plotlines will be worked out, the filmmakers willfully smash it all to pieces and abandon plot in an effort to go all arty and postmodern and deconstructivist. Instead of referring to anime, the second half plays like disjointed clips of live-action anime, all cartoony blood n guts n pubes, with no point and no narrative momentum and very little interest for the viewer. It just pratfalls into ruins in its attempt to make some very dated point about life in the Internet Age. Please. It's just silly, not surreal, and it makes all the good work in the first half feel like a vicious tease. Good cast, handsome art direction, brought down by stupid, faux-clever writing.