≤br>by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
After the Watergate special on CBS I changed the channel to KPBS in hopes there’d be a Live at the Belly Up program. There was, but it was a major disappointment in two respects. First, it was yet another rerun from 2017 instead of a new show from 2022, when like a lot of other live performance venues the Belly Up has responded to the perceived end of the COVID-19 pandemic by reopening. Second, it was a show rooted in kinds of music I really don’t care for. It featured a New Orleans-based band called the Soul Rebels, with a guest rapper named Talib Kwali featured on four songs. The first six songs by the Soul Rebels alone were either instrumentals or songs with just bits of quickly barked-out vocals. I missed one of the chyrons that were there to tell me what the songs were called (a service to viewers I wish live music programs more prestigious than Live at the Belly Up, like Austin City Limits, would follow),and the band performed their pieces with seamless transitions in between, sort of like a D.J. mix. But the five I did get titles for were “Rebelosis,” “Rebel Rock,” Can You Feel the Beat?,” “Get Freaky” and “Turn It Up,” which gives you a pretty good idea of both their contents and what the band wanted you to do to them, which was dance.
I liked the band at first – especially the tight discipline with which the horn players stayed together and the percussionists drove them – but as the show wore on each song started to sound an awful lot like its predecessor. The whole set was uptempo dance music, and while it might have been a fun night if you were actually at the Belly Up dancing as ordered to the music, at home on a late-night TV program it just started to wear me down. Things didn’t improve much when Talib Kwali entered and was introduced as a former partner of Mos Def (and even someone with as little interest or love for rap – or “hip-hop,” to use the euphemism for rap used by people whu actually like it – as I have heard of Mos Def). He did four rap numbers with the Soul Rebels backing him up – “Push Thru,” “The Blast,” “I Try” and “Get By” – and then the Rebels played two rap songs of their own, with different people rapping – “Show Me What You Got” and one that was identified in the chyron just as “Get Up” but I thought it sounded more like “Get It Up.” Most of the rapping was so unintelligible I couldn’t make out what the songs were supposed to be about: as I’ve said before, one of my ongoing complaints about rap is if you’re going to eliminate melody and harmony and reduce music to just rhythm and lyrics, the least you can do ls actually give us a fighting chance to understand what you’re saying. To me this show emphasized the almost fascistic aspect of a lot of modern-day dance music; one of the things I liked about ABBA is they wrote songs that were genuinely infectious and made you feel like you wanted to dance instead of like you were being ordered to!
Saturday, June 18, 2022
Friday, June 17, 2022
China 9, Liberty 37 (Aspa Productions, Compagnia Europea Cinematografica, Allied Artists, 1978)
≤br>by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night I watched a rather interesting film on Turner Classic Movies, a Western from 1978 called China 9, Liberty 37, a co-production between Spain’s Asta Productions and Italy’s Compagnia Europea Cinematografica, which makes this both a “spaghetti Western” and a “paella Western.” It was directed by Monte Hellman, an enigmatic filmmaker who lived until 2021, when he died at the age of 91, but he was absent from film work for long periods of time. He was a protegé of Roger Corman – who had Hellman shoot the long takes of Monterey sonsets he used to fill out The Terror, a 1963 film Corman concicted out of whole cloth when he realized that because he had finished their previous film, The Raven, two days ahead of schedule his stars, Boris Karloff and Jack Nicholson, still owed him two days’ worth of work. Hellman’s career didn’t soar to the heights of Corman’s most famous protege of the period, Francis Ford Coppola, and the only film of his I’d previously seen was one I hated, Two-Lane Blacktop from 1971, which co-starred singers James Taylor and Beach Boy Dennis Wilson as road bums traveling with a woman played by Laurie Bird, whom Hellman married in 1974 and divorced in 1975. (I remember her as utterly untalented and it’s no surprise Hellman and Bird were personally involved.)
When Hellman was offered the chance to direct China 9, Liberty 37 – the title is a crossroads in the middle of the Old West and it’s actually shown on a crossroads sign in the opening credits (back when films still had opening credits) – he hadn’t made a Western in a dozen years and hadn’t made a film at all in four years, so he jumped at the chance. China 9, Liberty 37 was based on a script by Jerry Harvey and Nicholas Venturelli, based on a story by Emilio de Concini with him and Don Vicente Escriva (since the last name is Spanish for “writer,” I thought this might be a pseudonym, but no-o-o-o-o, “Escriva” was his birth last name) credited with “collaboration” and Alberto Liberati with “dialogue.” The opening scene shows Clayton (Fabio Testi, easily the sexiest and most drop-dead gorgeous male in the cast) about to be hanged when an agent for the Great Southern Railway grants him a pardon and offers him $1,500 – $500 in advance and the rest when the job is done – to kill Matthew (Warren Oates, a ling-time favorite actor of Hellman’s). Clayton protests that killing Matthew isn’t worth the risk to his own life, but the money acts as sweetener and he agrees to the deal – only when Clayton arrives at Matthew’s property it turns out Matthew knows precisely why Clayton is there and ends up holding a gun on him.
Clayton also comes upon Matthew’s wife Catherine (Jenny Agutter, a British actress whose most famous credit is as Michael York’s leading lady in the 1976 science-fiction film Logan’s Run, though she’s not only still alive, she’s still active) while she’s skinny-dipping – skinny-dipping scenes are a favorite of Hellman’s – and the two of them end up having sex, first ini the water, then on land. Alas, Matthew catches them and threatens to kill Clayton for having cuckolded him – and just then Matthew’s relatives come over for a visit, during which they have a camp-fire singalong on “Red River Valley” and other songs of similar vintage. (Did Hellman include “Red River Valley” as a back-handed homage to John Ford, who used the song instrumentally in a lot of his Westerns even though, to the best of my knowledge, he didn’t actually show anybody singing it?) Later, after Hattmew has responhded to his wife’s extra-relational activity by beating the shit out of her and she’s stabbed him and left him for dead, though unbeknownst to her he recovers – Clayton and Catherine flee Matthew – their plan is to go to Liberty (ya remember Liberty? The town that’s only 37 miles away?) where Catherine can take a stagecoach and get herself out of the West altogether, only along the way they run into a little person and offer him a ride back to his circus, where he’s part of a whole show of acrobatic freaks. The movie comes to a dead stop so we can watch a lot of little people on trapezes.
Later on Clayton and Catherine go to a local inn, where the proprietress has worked out an elaborate scheme for separating them from their money – first she tells them the rate for the room, then the bath, then dinner, then breakfast, and so on – and Clayton and Catherine have a great soft-core porn scene together during which we hear a song on the soundtrack identified on the film’s imdb.com page only as “China 9 Love Ballad” and sung by a woman whose voice I’m somewhat embarrassed to say I didn’t recognize. It’s the great Ronee Blakely, who did a magnificent acting job as the tortured country singer “Barbara Jean” (i.e., Loretta Lynn) in Robert Altman’s 1975 film Nashville – a performance that should have made her a star, only for some reason just as this film was being released she accepted an offer from Bob Dylan to go on tour as one of his backup singers, and her career never recovered its momentum. Alas, while at the inn Clayton and Catherine are caught by a raiding party led by Matthew’s brothers Duke (Carlos Bravo) and Johnny (Gianrico Tordinelli, a hunky blond who’s Fabio Testi’s principal rival in the male pulchritude department). Duke tries to ambush Clayton in bed, but after futilely trying to talk Duke out of it, telling him he has a wife and child and he shouldn’t get himself killed fighting Matthew’s battles, Duke attacks him and Clayton shoots him dead.
Johnny rapes Catherine, and when Matthew catches them, at first he seems to approve – “That’s what you do with whores,” he snarls – but later on he beats up Johnny and says, “She’s still my wife.” There’s also a scene at a saloon in which Clayton gets an offer to become the Buffalo Bill-style hero of a series of fanciful “Western” novels by an author who’s played by director Sam Peckinpah, whose appearance remained obscure even though it was ballyhooed as “Introducing Sam Peckinpah” (which it was, at least as an actor – the only previous appearance by Peckinpah on screen is a walk-on as a meter-reader in Don Siegel’s 1956 Invasion of the Body Snatchers). Instead Clayton beats a hasty retreat to the nearest whorehouse, though as the film ends he has one last confrontation with Matthew and I was really hoping he’d kill Matthew, collect the $1,500 the railroad had offered him to kill Matthew (ya remember the railroad?), and Catherine would run off with him – but instead Clayton is the one who does the proverbial ride into the sunset alone and Catherine stays with her abusive S.O.B. of a husband – not my idea of a happy ending.
China 9, Liberty 37 was hailed at the time of its release as one of a cycle of “revisionist Westerns,” which basically upped the violence quotient of traditional Westerns and also were a lot more frank sexually – though one could make a case for John Ford’s little-regarded 1926 masterpiece Three Bad Men as the first “revisionist Western,” the first to present genuinely multidimensional characters instead of stick-figure heroes and villains. Three Bad Men was the ancestor of all the “psychological Westerns” like High Noon that became all the rage in the early 1950’s, and China 9, Liberty 37 is very much a film of its time, scored with soft-rock ballads by Pino Donaggio and John Rubenstein in which the dominant instrument is solo acoustic guitar. It’s an intriguing curio that makes me want to see some of Hellman’s other films – maybe at this stage in my life I’d actually like Two-Lane Blacktop!
Last night I watched a rather interesting film on Turner Classic Movies, a Western from 1978 called China 9, Liberty 37, a co-production between Spain’s Asta Productions and Italy’s Compagnia Europea Cinematografica, which makes this both a “spaghetti Western” and a “paella Western.” It was directed by Monte Hellman, an enigmatic filmmaker who lived until 2021, when he died at the age of 91, but he was absent from film work for long periods of time. He was a protegé of Roger Corman – who had Hellman shoot the long takes of Monterey sonsets he used to fill out The Terror, a 1963 film Corman concicted out of whole cloth when he realized that because he had finished their previous film, The Raven, two days ahead of schedule his stars, Boris Karloff and Jack Nicholson, still owed him two days’ worth of work. Hellman’s career didn’t soar to the heights of Corman’s most famous protege of the period, Francis Ford Coppola, and the only film of his I’d previously seen was one I hated, Two-Lane Blacktop from 1971, which co-starred singers James Taylor and Beach Boy Dennis Wilson as road bums traveling with a woman played by Laurie Bird, whom Hellman married in 1974 and divorced in 1975. (I remember her as utterly untalented and it’s no surprise Hellman and Bird were personally involved.)
When Hellman was offered the chance to direct China 9, Liberty 37 – the title is a crossroads in the middle of the Old West and it’s actually shown on a crossroads sign in the opening credits (back when films still had opening credits) – he hadn’t made a Western in a dozen years and hadn’t made a film at all in four years, so he jumped at the chance. China 9, Liberty 37 was based on a script by Jerry Harvey and Nicholas Venturelli, based on a story by Emilio de Concini with him and Don Vicente Escriva (since the last name is Spanish for “writer,” I thought this might be a pseudonym, but no-o-o-o-o, “Escriva” was his birth last name) credited with “collaboration” and Alberto Liberati with “dialogue.” The opening scene shows Clayton (Fabio Testi, easily the sexiest and most drop-dead gorgeous male in the cast) about to be hanged when an agent for the Great Southern Railway grants him a pardon and offers him $1,500 – $500 in advance and the rest when the job is done – to kill Matthew (Warren Oates, a ling-time favorite actor of Hellman’s). Clayton protests that killing Matthew isn’t worth the risk to his own life, but the money acts as sweetener and he agrees to the deal – only when Clayton arrives at Matthew’s property it turns out Matthew knows precisely why Clayton is there and ends up holding a gun on him.
Clayton also comes upon Matthew’s wife Catherine (Jenny Agutter, a British actress whose most famous credit is as Michael York’s leading lady in the 1976 science-fiction film Logan’s Run, though she’s not only still alive, she’s still active) while she’s skinny-dipping – skinny-dipping scenes are a favorite of Hellman’s – and the two of them end up having sex, first ini the water, then on land. Alas, Matthew catches them and threatens to kill Clayton for having cuckolded him – and just then Matthew’s relatives come over for a visit, during which they have a camp-fire singalong on “Red River Valley” and other songs of similar vintage. (Did Hellman include “Red River Valley” as a back-handed homage to John Ford, who used the song instrumentally in a lot of his Westerns even though, to the best of my knowledge, he didn’t actually show anybody singing it?) Later, after Hattmew has responhded to his wife’s extra-relational activity by beating the shit out of her and she’s stabbed him and left him for dead, though unbeknownst to her he recovers – Clayton and Catherine flee Matthew – their plan is to go to Liberty (ya remember Liberty? The town that’s only 37 miles away?) where Catherine can take a stagecoach and get herself out of the West altogether, only along the way they run into a little person and offer him a ride back to his circus, where he’s part of a whole show of acrobatic freaks. The movie comes to a dead stop so we can watch a lot of little people on trapezes.
Later on Clayton and Catherine go to a local inn, where the proprietress has worked out an elaborate scheme for separating them from their money – first she tells them the rate for the room, then the bath, then dinner, then breakfast, and so on – and Clayton and Catherine have a great soft-core porn scene together during which we hear a song on the soundtrack identified on the film’s imdb.com page only as “China 9 Love Ballad” and sung by a woman whose voice I’m somewhat embarrassed to say I didn’t recognize. It’s the great Ronee Blakely, who did a magnificent acting job as the tortured country singer “Barbara Jean” (i.e., Loretta Lynn) in Robert Altman’s 1975 film Nashville – a performance that should have made her a star, only for some reason just as this film was being released she accepted an offer from Bob Dylan to go on tour as one of his backup singers, and her career never recovered its momentum. Alas, while at the inn Clayton and Catherine are caught by a raiding party led by Matthew’s brothers Duke (Carlos Bravo) and Johnny (Gianrico Tordinelli, a hunky blond who’s Fabio Testi’s principal rival in the male pulchritude department). Duke tries to ambush Clayton in bed, but after futilely trying to talk Duke out of it, telling him he has a wife and child and he shouldn’t get himself killed fighting Matthew’s battles, Duke attacks him and Clayton shoots him dead.
Johnny rapes Catherine, and when Matthew catches them, at first he seems to approve – “That’s what you do with whores,” he snarls – but later on he beats up Johnny and says, “She’s still my wife.” There’s also a scene at a saloon in which Clayton gets an offer to become the Buffalo Bill-style hero of a series of fanciful “Western” novels by an author who’s played by director Sam Peckinpah, whose appearance remained obscure even though it was ballyhooed as “Introducing Sam Peckinpah” (which it was, at least as an actor – the only previous appearance by Peckinpah on screen is a walk-on as a meter-reader in Don Siegel’s 1956 Invasion of the Body Snatchers). Instead Clayton beats a hasty retreat to the nearest whorehouse, though as the film ends he has one last confrontation with Matthew and I was really hoping he’d kill Matthew, collect the $1,500 the railroad had offered him to kill Matthew (ya remember the railroad?), and Catherine would run off with him – but instead Clayton is the one who does the proverbial ride into the sunset alone and Catherine stays with her abusive S.O.B. of a husband – not my idea of a happy ending.
China 9, Liberty 37 was hailed at the time of its release as one of a cycle of “revisionist Westerns,” which basically upped the violence quotient of traditional Westerns and also were a lot more frank sexually – though one could make a case for John Ford’s little-regarded 1926 masterpiece Three Bad Men as the first “revisionist Western,” the first to present genuinely multidimensional characters instead of stick-figure heroes and villains. Three Bad Men was the ancestor of all the “psychological Westerns” like High Noon that became all the rage in the early 1950’s, and China 9, Liberty 37 is very much a film of its time, scored with soft-rock ballads by Pino Donaggio and John Rubenstein in which the dominant instrument is solo acoustic guitar. It’s an intriguing curio that makes me want to see some of Hellman’s other films – maybe at this stage in my life I’d actually like Two-Lane Blacktop!
Midsomer Murders: "Crime and Punishment" (Bentley Productions, Independent Television, 2017)
≤br>by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
As China 9, Liberty 37 was wrapping up my husband Charles came home from work and the two of us watches a better-than-average episode of Midsomer Murders, the long-running British TV series about a fictional “Midsomer County” in central England and the two local police officials, Detective Chief Inspector John Barmaby (Neil Dudgeon) and his younger, decidedly cuter partner, here called “Jamie Winter” and played by Nick Hendrix. (Charles was sorry that we weren’t watching an episode with Barnaby’s previous partner, “Charlie Nelson,” since “Nelson” is my husband’s last name.) The story is called “Crime and Punishment” and deals with Bleakridge, which because of its remoteness used to be the hotbed of crime in Midsomer County until a local woman named Ingrid Lockston (Frances Barber), furious at the death of her husband at the hands of a hit-and-run driver two years earlier, sets up the Bleakridge Watch to patrol the streets. Alas, the members of the Bleakridge Watch perform their duties with such zeal they hand out their own parking tickets to people they feel have broken their rules regardless of whether what they’re doing is legal or not. They’ve also gone after the owner of the local inn, “The Hangman.” His name is Mitch McAllister (Neil Morrissey) and he’s barely hanging on because the leaders of the Bleakridge Watch have targeted him and his customers. He’s relying on his wife Lena Ferrara (Katy Cavanaugh) for the extra income she’s bringing in, ostensibly from a mobile beauty shop she runs out of her van.
Also, the Bleakridge Watch is in danger of losing its government funding when the local city council decides it’s completed its work and its money should be cut in haof – until a series of opportunistic burglaries starts occurring and the council is scared into keeping the Watch’s funding at its current level. When a local butcher named Corwin is found murdered – bashed in the head with a meat tenderizer and stuffed into his own freezer – Barnaby and Winter discover scars on his legs that indicate he’d been in bondage, not at the time of his murder but a month or two earlier. Later another Bleakridge Watch member, Azeem Meer (Emilio Doorgashingh), is also found murdered. The cops comb through the usual assortment of red herrings, including a scary-looking Bleakridge Watch member who stuffs tablecloths into the drains at the inn’s kitchen and thereby forces it to close,and two brothers with criminal records, one of whom is dating Corwin’s wife, until the police learn that Azeem had carefully preserved all the goods the mystery burglar had stolen in a locked closet in his home. It turns out that he and Ingrid had been in league with each other to start burglarizing the homes of local residents to scare them into continuing to fund the Bleakridge Watch.
It also turns out that Lena Ferrara’s true sideline is not running a mobile beauty service but hiring herself out as an S/M dominatrix, which she did as a living before she married Mitch and turned back to in order to make enough money to keep his inn in business≠ though when Mitch finds out (after the cops inadvertently raid one of her BDSM sessions and she protests that she’s not a prostitute and she hasn’t technically been unfaithful because her services don’t involve actual sex) he’s disgusted and walks out of their relationship. The killer turns out to be Barbara Walton (Vicki Pepperdine), wife of red-herring su suspect Duncan Walton (Philip Bird), who two years ago saw Frank Lockston drunk and weaving down the street on his way to go home and beat his wife Maxine (Sara Powell). While Ingrid has continued to lionize her brother and declare him the victim of a tragedy, Barbara says she ran him down and killed him deliberately to spare Maxine any further domestic abuse from him. Only she abandoned her car on the road and it was stolen by the two brothers, who drove it into an old barn – and two years later it was discovered by Corwin, who had been assigned by Ingrid to “investigate” the burglaries because she considered him too stupid to put two and two together and come up with the truth. So Barbara had to kill him and also kill Azeem, who had lent his camera to Corwin, which contained an image of the barn where the death car was hidden even though in the meantime Barbara had also turched the barn and thus hopefully destroyed the evidence. “Crime and Punishment” is a much grimmer taie than most of the Midsomer Murders episodes, and it takes a pretty dark view of human nature rather than the genteel air of most British mystery stories.
As China 9, Liberty 37 was wrapping up my husband Charles came home from work and the two of us watches a better-than-average episode of Midsomer Murders, the long-running British TV series about a fictional “Midsomer County” in central England and the two local police officials, Detective Chief Inspector John Barmaby (Neil Dudgeon) and his younger, decidedly cuter partner, here called “Jamie Winter” and played by Nick Hendrix. (Charles was sorry that we weren’t watching an episode with Barnaby’s previous partner, “Charlie Nelson,” since “Nelson” is my husband’s last name.) The story is called “Crime and Punishment” and deals with Bleakridge, which because of its remoteness used to be the hotbed of crime in Midsomer County until a local woman named Ingrid Lockston (Frances Barber), furious at the death of her husband at the hands of a hit-and-run driver two years earlier, sets up the Bleakridge Watch to patrol the streets. Alas, the members of the Bleakridge Watch perform their duties with such zeal they hand out their own parking tickets to people they feel have broken their rules regardless of whether what they’re doing is legal or not. They’ve also gone after the owner of the local inn, “The Hangman.” His name is Mitch McAllister (Neil Morrissey) and he’s barely hanging on because the leaders of the Bleakridge Watch have targeted him and his customers. He’s relying on his wife Lena Ferrara (Katy Cavanaugh) for the extra income she’s bringing in, ostensibly from a mobile beauty shop she runs out of her van.
Also, the Bleakridge Watch is in danger of losing its government funding when the local city council decides it’s completed its work and its money should be cut in haof – until a series of opportunistic burglaries starts occurring and the council is scared into keeping the Watch’s funding at its current level. When a local butcher named Corwin is found murdered – bashed in the head with a meat tenderizer and stuffed into his own freezer – Barnaby and Winter discover scars on his legs that indicate he’d been in bondage, not at the time of his murder but a month or two earlier. Later another Bleakridge Watch member, Azeem Meer (Emilio Doorgashingh), is also found murdered. The cops comb through the usual assortment of red herrings, including a scary-looking Bleakridge Watch member who stuffs tablecloths into the drains at the inn’s kitchen and thereby forces it to close,and two brothers with criminal records, one of whom is dating Corwin’s wife, until the police learn that Azeem had carefully preserved all the goods the mystery burglar had stolen in a locked closet in his home. It turns out that he and Ingrid had been in league with each other to start burglarizing the homes of local residents to scare them into continuing to fund the Bleakridge Watch.
It also turns out that Lena Ferrara’s true sideline is not running a mobile beauty service but hiring herself out as an S/M dominatrix, which she did as a living before she married Mitch and turned back to in order to make enough money to keep his inn in business≠ though when Mitch finds out (after the cops inadvertently raid one of her BDSM sessions and she protests that she’s not a prostitute and she hasn’t technically been unfaithful because her services don’t involve actual sex) he’s disgusted and walks out of their relationship. The killer turns out to be Barbara Walton (Vicki Pepperdine), wife of red-herring su suspect Duncan Walton (Philip Bird), who two years ago saw Frank Lockston drunk and weaving down the street on his way to go home and beat his wife Maxine (Sara Powell). While Ingrid has continued to lionize her brother and declare him the victim of a tragedy, Barbara says she ran him down and killed him deliberately to spare Maxine any further domestic abuse from him. Only she abandoned her car on the road and it was stolen by the two brothers, who drove it into an old barn – and two years later it was discovered by Corwin, who had been assigned by Ingrid to “investigate” the burglaries because she considered him too stupid to put two and two together and come up with the truth. So Barbara had to kill him and also kill Azeem, who had lent his camera to Corwin, which contained an image of the barn where the death car was hidden even though in the meantime Barbara had also turched the barn and thus hopefully destroyed the evidence. “Crime and Punishment” is a much grimmer taie than most of the Midsomer Murders episodes, and it takes a pretty dark view of human nature rather than the genteel air of most British mystery stories.
Thursday, June 16, 2022
The Batman (6th and Idaho Productions, DC Entertainment, Warner Bros., 2022)
≤br>by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night at 9 my husband Charles and I watched The Batman, latest in the Warner Bros. cycle of Bat-movies they’ve made since 1989, when Tim Burton’s masterpiece was loosed on the world featuring Michael Keaton as Batman and Jack Nicholson’s incandescent performance as the Joker. (Ironically, the two actors who’ve played the Joker since – Heath Ledger and Joaquin Phoenix – both won Academy Awards for doing so, but to my mind Nicholson out-classed them both.) There’d been other Batman movies before, including the 1943 Batman serial from Columbia with Lewis Wilson (still one of the best Caped Crusaders on screen); the 1948 sequel Batman and Robin, also from Columbia, with Robert Lowery; and the 1966 film with the TV cast, Adam West as Batman and Burt Ward as Robin, which followed the campy approach of the series. The first Tim Burton Batman kicked off a cycle of four, though only the first and second films were directed by Burton, and they featured Keaton as Batman in the first two, Val Kilmer in the third and George Clooney in the fourth. (Clooney has since said that making a Batman movie was the worst mistake of his career.) Then in the 2000’s came the three films in the “Dark Knight” sequence – Batman Begins ini 2005, The Dark Knight in 2008 and The Dark Knight Rises in 2012 – all of them directed by Christopher Nolan and starring Christian Bale as Batman. It was the second of these films, The Dark Knight, that featured Heath Ledger as the Joker, and though he won an Academy Award (for his last completed movie, though he started one more, The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus, which had to be finished by other actors after his untimely death at age 28) I still thought he was abysmally miscast. Ledger’s strong suit was playing tortured introverts, which he did superbly in Monster’s Ball and Brokeback Mountain, but he was as wrong for the Joker as Nicholson was right.
Then the Caped Crusader lay fallow for another decade until this film, which featured Robert Pattinson as Batman, Zoë Kravitz as Selina Kyle (true Bat-buffs will recognize that as the non-villain name of the Catwoman, but though there are hints in that direction in this movie, including her skin-tight leather attire and her multiple house cats, she’s not the Catwoman this time out) and Andy Serkis in Alan Napier’s and Michael Caine’s old role as Alfred Pennyworth, Bruce Wayne’s butler and the only person who knows Bruce Wayne is Batman. (It’s odd, to say the least, to see Serkis in his normal human appearance instead of tricked out with CGI and motion capture to play Gollum a.k.a. Smeagle in The Lord of the Rings cycle, Caesar the ape leader in the rebout of the Planet of the Apes franchise, and King Kong in Peter Jackson’s 190-minute remake.) The Batman was directed by Matt Reeves and co-written by him and Peter Craig, and it continued the trend set by the “Dark Knight” reboot first in the Batman comics and then in the Nolan films of making the entire movie both literally and figuratively dark. Indeed, watching The Batman is an oddly mephitic experience in which the physical darkness of the film – it’s not until the very last scene that we actually see an exterior scene set in daytime – becomes a metaphor for the spiritual darkness of the characters and the story. It’s one of those modern movies reflecting the Zeitgeist of the Trump era – and, let’s face it, we’re still very much living in Donald Trump’s America even though he’s been forced at least temporarily to relinquish the presidency in favor of Joe Biden – and though Charles saw some odd parallels between it and older movies like The Poseidon Adventure and The Blues Brothers, to me it was a throwback to even earlier films than that.
Through much of the first hour it reminded me of the films Fritz Lang made in Germany in the 1920’s, particularly the two Dr. Mabuse movies and the 1928 film Spies (which Alfred Hitchcock ripped off quite extensively in his early British career in the 1930’s), in which Lang caught both the moral corruption and economic convolutions of the Weimar Republic and the world-shattering evil of the Nazi regime to come. It also reminded me of the recent NBC-TV miniseries The Endgame, in which a Russian master criminal named Elena Fedorova (Morena Baccarin) devotes herself to exposing and either killing or disgracing people who have posed as moral exemplars but are deeply corrupt underneath – including the President of the United States, who Fedorova exposes as in the pocket of a super-corrupt Ukrainian crime boss for whom he has literally looted the U.S. gold reserve. Reeves’ and Craig’s script for The Batman follows the same idea: the “Gotham” of this film (the original locale of the Batman comics as well, though there it was called “Gotham City” and it was quite obviously supposed to be New York) is depicted as so hopelessly corrupt the city’s mayor, its police chief and its district attorney, along with just about the rest of the city government, are all owned outright by mobster Carmine Falcone (John Turturro – who else?).
The film also takes a page from classic noir novels like Dashiell Hammett’s The Glass Key and James M. Cain’s Love’s Lovely Counterfeit, both of which feature so-called “reform” tickets run for office in a deeply corrupted city who are actually just as corrupt as the establishment they are trying to unseat. (The Glass Key has been filmed twice, in 1935 with George Raft and in 1942 with Alan Ladd, but neither did justice to the depth and richness of Hammett’s original. Love’s Lovely Counterfeit was filmed in 1956 by producer Benedict Bogeaus and director Allan Dwan as Slightly Scarlet, and though it made some regrettable changes in Cain’s novel it’s remarkable for the skill of cinematographer John Alton for doing the classic noir look in color.) While The Endgame was going on I quoted Robert Penn Warren’s famous lines in his book All the King’s Men about the universality of human sin in which the villain, Willie Stark, tells the hero, Carter Burden, to get the goods on a seemingly honest judge: “Man is conceived in sin and born in corruption and he passeth from the stink of the didie to the stench of the shroud. There is always something.” This ultra-dark view of human nature seems to have inspired Matt Reeves and Peter Craig as well, though there’s one remarkable exception in which Batman (Robert Pattinson) and police lieutenant James Gordon (Jeffrey Wright) are in a room full of cops denouncing most of the police force as corrupt, and a lot of the cops in the room stand up to indicate, “No, we are not.”
The plot of the film deals with a master criminal called The Riddler – who briefly appeared in the comics as a super-villain psychologically forced to leave a riddle as a cloe to whatever crime he was about to commit, and who was played by impressionist Frank Gorshin on the first episode of the Batman TV series in 1966 and by Jim Carrey in the second Tim Burton Bat-movie, Batman Returns. Here he’s dressed not ini the familiar light-green one-piece emblazoned with question marks as he was in the comics and his previous film appearances, but in a Darth Vader-like hood that conceals his true identity as a nerdy young man played by Paul Dano. It’s a mystery why this actor, whose combination of cutish good looks and formidable acting chops, hasn’t had more of a star career than he has and has allowed himself to get stuck in one TV mini-series after another. He outright kills the mayor (who’s running for re-election against a Black woman activist in the opening scene, set on Hallowe’en, in which he’s at home watching a recording of their debate when the Riddler comes in from the skylight and offs him with a carpet-lifter) and police commissioner, then threatens the D.A. by kidnapping him, locking a bomb around his neck, and saying he’ll give him the combination to defuse the bomb if the man can answer all three of the Riddler’s riddles correctly. For a moment I was thinking Reeves and Craig were going in the Turandot direction and were going to have the Riddler’s own name be the last answer, but instead the Riddler demands the name of Carmine Falcone’s enforcer – and the D.A. knows the name but won’t give it because if he lets the Riddler’s bomb destroy him only he will die, while if he gives up the gangster’s name Falcone will have his wife and kids killed as well.
On one level I quite liked The Batman – I haven’t always cared for superhero movies that try to make Great Statements about the human condition, but this one pulls it off quite well even though the Great Statement this film makes is that humans are inherently corrupt and there’s nothing we can do about it – but it was a physically hard slog. Even the spectacular action scenes are set in such darkness and gloom they’re not much fun to watch – though I think the relentless darkness of this movie, both physically and thematically, is part of Reeves’ and Craig’s artistic intent. When the film came out, and even before that when there were leaks of its content, Reeves was criticized for having Batman commit murder, and he replied, “Batman kills people. Get used to it.” Actually in some ways the “Dark Knight” reboot of the Bat-franchise was a return to the very first Batman comics from 1937 to 1939, when he was an outright vigilante with moral ambiguity to spare. In one early strip he knocked off a villain named Dr. Karl Hellfern, nicknamed “Dr. Death,” by forcing him to breathe in his own poison. The mealy-mouthed moralism that got introduced into the Batman comics started in 1940, when Robin the Boy Wonder was introduced and Batman was softened and made an actual officer in the Gotham Police Department.
The Batman is a marvelously evocative movie, yet somehow I haven’t decided whether or not I like it; certainly Reeves and Craig deserve kudos for the relentlessness with which they present their ultra-dark vision of the world we live in, but she sheer weight of the carnage they unleash in the last reel, where The Riddler’s bombs desttoy the seawall that keeps the Atlantic Ocean frol flooding Manhattan, play quite differently in the post-Buffalo, post-Uvalde era than they must have when the film was in theatres (and remember that one of America’s most notorious mass shootings, in Aurora, Colorado in 2012, was committed at a showing of the film The Dark Knight Rises by a gunman dressed as the Joker – so it was clear the Batman mythos was part of his madness and he didn’t just pick that movie because it was obviously going to be a blockbuster so it would be a target-rich environment).
Last night at 9 my husband Charles and I watched The Batman, latest in the Warner Bros. cycle of Bat-movies they’ve made since 1989, when Tim Burton’s masterpiece was loosed on the world featuring Michael Keaton as Batman and Jack Nicholson’s incandescent performance as the Joker. (Ironically, the two actors who’ve played the Joker since – Heath Ledger and Joaquin Phoenix – both won Academy Awards for doing so, but to my mind Nicholson out-classed them both.) There’d been other Batman movies before, including the 1943 Batman serial from Columbia with Lewis Wilson (still one of the best Caped Crusaders on screen); the 1948 sequel Batman and Robin, also from Columbia, with Robert Lowery; and the 1966 film with the TV cast, Adam West as Batman and Burt Ward as Robin, which followed the campy approach of the series. The first Tim Burton Batman kicked off a cycle of four, though only the first and second films were directed by Burton, and they featured Keaton as Batman in the first two, Val Kilmer in the third and George Clooney in the fourth. (Clooney has since said that making a Batman movie was the worst mistake of his career.) Then in the 2000’s came the three films in the “Dark Knight” sequence – Batman Begins ini 2005, The Dark Knight in 2008 and The Dark Knight Rises in 2012 – all of them directed by Christopher Nolan and starring Christian Bale as Batman. It was the second of these films, The Dark Knight, that featured Heath Ledger as the Joker, and though he won an Academy Award (for his last completed movie, though he started one more, The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus, which had to be finished by other actors after his untimely death at age 28) I still thought he was abysmally miscast. Ledger’s strong suit was playing tortured introverts, which he did superbly in Monster’s Ball and Brokeback Mountain, but he was as wrong for the Joker as Nicholson was right.
Then the Caped Crusader lay fallow for another decade until this film, which featured Robert Pattinson as Batman, Zoë Kravitz as Selina Kyle (true Bat-buffs will recognize that as the non-villain name of the Catwoman, but though there are hints in that direction in this movie, including her skin-tight leather attire and her multiple house cats, she’s not the Catwoman this time out) and Andy Serkis in Alan Napier’s and Michael Caine’s old role as Alfred Pennyworth, Bruce Wayne’s butler and the only person who knows Bruce Wayne is Batman. (It’s odd, to say the least, to see Serkis in his normal human appearance instead of tricked out with CGI and motion capture to play Gollum a.k.a. Smeagle in The Lord of the Rings cycle, Caesar the ape leader in the rebout of the Planet of the Apes franchise, and King Kong in Peter Jackson’s 190-minute remake.) The Batman was directed by Matt Reeves and co-written by him and Peter Craig, and it continued the trend set by the “Dark Knight” reboot first in the Batman comics and then in the Nolan films of making the entire movie both literally and figuratively dark. Indeed, watching The Batman is an oddly mephitic experience in which the physical darkness of the film – it’s not until the very last scene that we actually see an exterior scene set in daytime – becomes a metaphor for the spiritual darkness of the characters and the story. It’s one of those modern movies reflecting the Zeitgeist of the Trump era – and, let’s face it, we’re still very much living in Donald Trump’s America even though he’s been forced at least temporarily to relinquish the presidency in favor of Joe Biden – and though Charles saw some odd parallels between it and older movies like The Poseidon Adventure and The Blues Brothers, to me it was a throwback to even earlier films than that.
Through much of the first hour it reminded me of the films Fritz Lang made in Germany in the 1920’s, particularly the two Dr. Mabuse movies and the 1928 film Spies (which Alfred Hitchcock ripped off quite extensively in his early British career in the 1930’s), in which Lang caught both the moral corruption and economic convolutions of the Weimar Republic and the world-shattering evil of the Nazi regime to come. It also reminded me of the recent NBC-TV miniseries The Endgame, in which a Russian master criminal named Elena Fedorova (Morena Baccarin) devotes herself to exposing and either killing or disgracing people who have posed as moral exemplars but are deeply corrupt underneath – including the President of the United States, who Fedorova exposes as in the pocket of a super-corrupt Ukrainian crime boss for whom he has literally looted the U.S. gold reserve. Reeves’ and Craig’s script for The Batman follows the same idea: the “Gotham” of this film (the original locale of the Batman comics as well, though there it was called “Gotham City” and it was quite obviously supposed to be New York) is depicted as so hopelessly corrupt the city’s mayor, its police chief and its district attorney, along with just about the rest of the city government, are all owned outright by mobster Carmine Falcone (John Turturro – who else?).
The film also takes a page from classic noir novels like Dashiell Hammett’s The Glass Key and James M. Cain’s Love’s Lovely Counterfeit, both of which feature so-called “reform” tickets run for office in a deeply corrupted city who are actually just as corrupt as the establishment they are trying to unseat. (The Glass Key has been filmed twice, in 1935 with George Raft and in 1942 with Alan Ladd, but neither did justice to the depth and richness of Hammett’s original. Love’s Lovely Counterfeit was filmed in 1956 by producer Benedict Bogeaus and director Allan Dwan as Slightly Scarlet, and though it made some regrettable changes in Cain’s novel it’s remarkable for the skill of cinematographer John Alton for doing the classic noir look in color.) While The Endgame was going on I quoted Robert Penn Warren’s famous lines in his book All the King’s Men about the universality of human sin in which the villain, Willie Stark, tells the hero, Carter Burden, to get the goods on a seemingly honest judge: “Man is conceived in sin and born in corruption and he passeth from the stink of the didie to the stench of the shroud. There is always something.” This ultra-dark view of human nature seems to have inspired Matt Reeves and Peter Craig as well, though there’s one remarkable exception in which Batman (Robert Pattinson) and police lieutenant James Gordon (Jeffrey Wright) are in a room full of cops denouncing most of the police force as corrupt, and a lot of the cops in the room stand up to indicate, “No, we are not.”
The plot of the film deals with a master criminal called The Riddler – who briefly appeared in the comics as a super-villain psychologically forced to leave a riddle as a cloe to whatever crime he was about to commit, and who was played by impressionist Frank Gorshin on the first episode of the Batman TV series in 1966 and by Jim Carrey in the second Tim Burton Bat-movie, Batman Returns. Here he’s dressed not ini the familiar light-green one-piece emblazoned with question marks as he was in the comics and his previous film appearances, but in a Darth Vader-like hood that conceals his true identity as a nerdy young man played by Paul Dano. It’s a mystery why this actor, whose combination of cutish good looks and formidable acting chops, hasn’t had more of a star career than he has and has allowed himself to get stuck in one TV mini-series after another. He outright kills the mayor (who’s running for re-election against a Black woman activist in the opening scene, set on Hallowe’en, in which he’s at home watching a recording of their debate when the Riddler comes in from the skylight and offs him with a carpet-lifter) and police commissioner, then threatens the D.A. by kidnapping him, locking a bomb around his neck, and saying he’ll give him the combination to defuse the bomb if the man can answer all three of the Riddler’s riddles correctly. For a moment I was thinking Reeves and Craig were going in the Turandot direction and were going to have the Riddler’s own name be the last answer, but instead the Riddler demands the name of Carmine Falcone’s enforcer – and the D.A. knows the name but won’t give it because if he lets the Riddler’s bomb destroy him only he will die, while if he gives up the gangster’s name Falcone will have his wife and kids killed as well.
On one level I quite liked The Batman – I haven’t always cared for superhero movies that try to make Great Statements about the human condition, but this one pulls it off quite well even though the Great Statement this film makes is that humans are inherently corrupt and there’s nothing we can do about it – but it was a physically hard slog. Even the spectacular action scenes are set in such darkness and gloom they’re not much fun to watch – though I think the relentless darkness of this movie, both physically and thematically, is part of Reeves’ and Craig’s artistic intent. When the film came out, and even before that when there were leaks of its content, Reeves was criticized for having Batman commit murder, and he replied, “Batman kills people. Get used to it.” Actually in some ways the “Dark Knight” reboot of the Bat-franchise was a return to the very first Batman comics from 1937 to 1939, when he was an outright vigilante with moral ambiguity to spare. In one early strip he knocked off a villain named Dr. Karl Hellfern, nicknamed “Dr. Death,” by forcing him to breathe in his own poison. The mealy-mouthed moralism that got introduced into the Batman comics started in 1940, when Robin the Boy Wonder was introduced and Batman was softened and made an actual officer in the Gotham Police Department.
The Batman is a marvelously evocative movie, yet somehow I haven’t decided whether or not I like it; certainly Reeves and Craig deserve kudos for the relentlessness with which they present their ultra-dark vision of the world we live in, but she sheer weight of the carnage they unleash in the last reel, where The Riddler’s bombs desttoy the seawall that keeps the Atlantic Ocean frol flooding Manhattan, play quite differently in the post-Buffalo, post-Uvalde era than they must have when the film was in theatres (and remember that one of America’s most notorious mass shootings, in Aurora, Colorado in 2012, was committed at a showing of the film The Dark Knight Rises by a gunman dressed as the Joker – so it was clear the Batman mythos was part of his madness and he didn’t just pick that movie because it was obviously going to be a blockbuster so it would be a target-rich environment).
Wednesday, June 15, 2022
Ghostbusters: Afterlife (BVRON Studios, Ghostcorps, Columbia, Sony, 2021)
br>by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night at 9 my husband Charles and I watched the 2021 movie Ghostbusters: Afterlife, third film in the original Ghostbusters cycle and a reasonably entertaining movie but also an odd one. The film takes place in modern-day Summerville, Oklahoma, where single mother Callie (Carrie Coon) has fled with her two teenage kids, son Trevor (Finn Wolfhard – that’s really his name) and daughter Phoebe (Mckenna Grace, who turns in by far the best, subtlest and most nuanced performance3 in the film) following her eviction from her previous home. Callie has received word that her father, a “dirt farmer” in Summerville, has just died and she needs to go there to collect her inheritance, but when she arrives she finds out that her dad died deeply in debt and the only thing he left her was a crumbling farmhouse. A few minutes early into the movie I joked to Charles, “It’s a perfectly O.K. movie but one wouldh’t think t his was a sequel to one of the funniest movies ever made.” And, despite some nice comic-relief wisecracks on the soundtrack – most notably when Callie and her hids are in the car driving to Summerville, she tries to assure them that “you’ll make some new friends there,” and Trevor snaps back, “Out of what?” – Ghostbusters: Afterlife remains an obstinate serious movie, too dark to be the kind of laff-riot the original was ande at the same time just a little too light to work as serious horror.
At one point Charles, no doubt referencing the amount of screen time given to the teenage kids and their problems (mostly typically adolescent stuff complicated by the fact that they’re in a small town in the middle of nowhere and just about all the townspeople couldn’t stand their grandfather), said, “This is the kind of Ghostbysters movie John Hughes would have directed.” I fired back, “And Stepken King would have written the screenplay.” King’s work is actually referenced here via a showing of clips from the film Cujo that a harried high-school teacher, Gary Grooberson (Paul Rudd, the closest thing this film has to an adult leading man; he,s O.K. on the eyes but more than a bit on the nerdy side and one would never guess from his appearance here that he’d win People magazine’s annual “Sexiest Man Alive” cover, which he did) puts on to distract his students and give them something to do, and there are a lot of shots of looming cornfields that couldn’t help but remind me of Children of the Corn.
It’s only half an hour into the movie that writers Jason Reitman (who also directed; he’s the son of Ivan Reitman, who directed the first two Ghostbusters movies and is credited as a producer on this one) and Gil Kenan, even bother to connect this story to the original Ghostbujsters from 1984 and its first sequel, Ghostbusters II, fromm 1989. It turns out that Callie’s father was Dr. Egon Spengler (Harold Ramis, who also co-wrote the original script with fellow Ghostbuster and Saturday Night Live alum Dan Aykroyd), one of the original Ghostbusters. Only he got a psychic emanation of a massive spiritual incursion in Summerville, Oklahoma and he accordingly packed up all the Ghostbusters gear, drove to Summerville in the iconic white Cadillac station wagon that was such an important element of the first film, and left his fellow Ghostbusters, Dr. Peter Venkman (Bill Murray) and Dr. Nathaniel Stanz (Dan Aykroyd), in the proverbial lurch. Murray, Aykroyd and Sigourney Weaver reappear in this film playing their original characters as they have naturally aged (and of the three, it’s Aykroyd to whom the years have been unkindest), but to the extent that this film has a plot, it’s Phoebe’s coming-of-age story as she discovers her heritage as a Ghostbuster and picks up the slack, including drafting her brother Trevor into driving the iconic ghost wagon even though he’s failed three driving tests and gets them busted for driving without a license by local Sheriff Domingo (Bokeem Woodbine), whose daughter Lucky (Celeste O’Connor) is attracted to Trevor – or ast least was until she discovers that he was only 15, not 17.
Also in the cast is a local boy called “Podcast” (Logan Kim) after the podcast he’s continually working on (and the long boom mile with a wind sock on it starts to look like yet another piece of ghostbusting equipment). Together the terrific teens manage to vanquish the Sumerian goddess who’s haunting the town courtesy of Ivo Shandor (J. K. Simmons), who built the town of Summerville in the first place to support his mine and after his death had himself buried in a glass coffin to preserve his body, sort of like Lenin. Of course he comes to life briefly in the climactic sequence, but all too little is done with that. It was interesting to watch Ghostbusters: Afterlife in this context, preceded by five trailers – mostly for serious adult superhero movies like Spider-Man: No Way Home, Venom and Morbius (the last is already out on video and is regarded as the biggest flop in the history of the Marvel Cinematic Universe) – and succeeded by a making-of reel in which the Reitmans, father and son, along with Gil Kenan and others involved in the production are interviewed and speak with a strange reverence for the original Ghostbusters and what it has meant to people over the years.
That gives me a major cloe at to what went wrong with this movie: the original 1984 Ghostbusters was superbly balanced between a dark, almost mephitic background uf urban decay in New York City and the hilarious gags they played against it. The first sequel, 1989’s Ghostbusters II, way overdid the comedy – it was half an hour into the film before it seemingly occurred to the writers that they actually needed a plot and couldn’t make an entire feature out of just a succession of gags (something Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton understood almost intuitively when they began making features in the 1920’s). Ghostbusters: Afterlife erred in the other direction: it took itself all too seriously. No one gets “slimed” in this version, and instead of a giant Stay-Puft marshmallow man as in the 1984 original we got hundreds of little Stay-Puft marshmallow men who come to life and break out of a cellophane bag in a supermarket – and it’s one of the film’s few genuinely funny scenes but still nothing like the hilarity of the original. The few clips we get from the first film – notably a reprise of the Ghostbusters’ commercial which the new generation of ghostbusters watch, natch, on YouTube – liven up the proceedings but also shows the great gulf in amusement level between that movie and this one.
Last night at 9 my husband Charles and I watched the 2021 movie Ghostbusters: Afterlife, third film in the original Ghostbusters cycle and a reasonably entertaining movie but also an odd one. The film takes place in modern-day Summerville, Oklahoma, where single mother Callie (Carrie Coon) has fled with her two teenage kids, son Trevor (Finn Wolfhard – that’s really his name) and daughter Phoebe (Mckenna Grace, who turns in by far the best, subtlest and most nuanced performance3 in the film) following her eviction from her previous home. Callie has received word that her father, a “dirt farmer” in Summerville, has just died and she needs to go there to collect her inheritance, but when she arrives she finds out that her dad died deeply in debt and the only thing he left her was a crumbling farmhouse. A few minutes early into the movie I joked to Charles, “It’s a perfectly O.K. movie but one wouldh’t think t his was a sequel to one of the funniest movies ever made.” And, despite some nice comic-relief wisecracks on the soundtrack – most notably when Callie and her hids are in the car driving to Summerville, she tries to assure them that “you’ll make some new friends there,” and Trevor snaps back, “Out of what?” – Ghostbusters: Afterlife remains an obstinate serious movie, too dark to be the kind of laff-riot the original was ande at the same time just a little too light to work as serious horror.
At one point Charles, no doubt referencing the amount of screen time given to the teenage kids and their problems (mostly typically adolescent stuff complicated by the fact that they’re in a small town in the middle of nowhere and just about all the townspeople couldn’t stand their grandfather), said, “This is the kind of Ghostbysters movie John Hughes would have directed.” I fired back, “And Stepken King would have written the screenplay.” King’s work is actually referenced here via a showing of clips from the film Cujo that a harried high-school teacher, Gary Grooberson (Paul Rudd, the closest thing this film has to an adult leading man; he,s O.K. on the eyes but more than a bit on the nerdy side and one would never guess from his appearance here that he’d win People magazine’s annual “Sexiest Man Alive” cover, which he did) puts on to distract his students and give them something to do, and there are a lot of shots of looming cornfields that couldn’t help but remind me of Children of the Corn.
It’s only half an hour into the movie that writers Jason Reitman (who also directed; he’s the son of Ivan Reitman, who directed the first two Ghostbusters movies and is credited as a producer on this one) and Gil Kenan, even bother to connect this story to the original Ghostbujsters from 1984 and its first sequel, Ghostbusters II, fromm 1989. It turns out that Callie’s father was Dr. Egon Spengler (Harold Ramis, who also co-wrote the original script with fellow Ghostbuster and Saturday Night Live alum Dan Aykroyd), one of the original Ghostbusters. Only he got a psychic emanation of a massive spiritual incursion in Summerville, Oklahoma and he accordingly packed up all the Ghostbusters gear, drove to Summerville in the iconic white Cadillac station wagon that was such an important element of the first film, and left his fellow Ghostbusters, Dr. Peter Venkman (Bill Murray) and Dr. Nathaniel Stanz (Dan Aykroyd), in the proverbial lurch. Murray, Aykroyd and Sigourney Weaver reappear in this film playing their original characters as they have naturally aged (and of the three, it’s Aykroyd to whom the years have been unkindest), but to the extent that this film has a plot, it’s Phoebe’s coming-of-age story as she discovers her heritage as a Ghostbuster and picks up the slack, including drafting her brother Trevor into driving the iconic ghost wagon even though he’s failed three driving tests and gets them busted for driving without a license by local Sheriff Domingo (Bokeem Woodbine), whose daughter Lucky (Celeste O’Connor) is attracted to Trevor – or ast least was until she discovers that he was only 15, not 17.
Also in the cast is a local boy called “Podcast” (Logan Kim) after the podcast he’s continually working on (and the long boom mile with a wind sock on it starts to look like yet another piece of ghostbusting equipment). Together the terrific teens manage to vanquish the Sumerian goddess who’s haunting the town courtesy of Ivo Shandor (J. K. Simmons), who built the town of Summerville in the first place to support his mine and after his death had himself buried in a glass coffin to preserve his body, sort of like Lenin. Of course he comes to life briefly in the climactic sequence, but all too little is done with that. It was interesting to watch Ghostbusters: Afterlife in this context, preceded by five trailers – mostly for serious adult superhero movies like Spider-Man: No Way Home, Venom and Morbius (the last is already out on video and is regarded as the biggest flop in the history of the Marvel Cinematic Universe) – and succeeded by a making-of reel in which the Reitmans, father and son, along with Gil Kenan and others involved in the production are interviewed and speak with a strange reverence for the original Ghostbusters and what it has meant to people over the years.
That gives me a major cloe at to what went wrong with this movie: the original 1984 Ghostbusters was superbly balanced between a dark, almost mephitic background uf urban decay in New York City and the hilarious gags they played against it. The first sequel, 1989’s Ghostbusters II, way overdid the comedy – it was half an hour into the film before it seemingly occurred to the writers that they actually needed a plot and couldn’t make an entire feature out of just a succession of gags (something Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton understood almost intuitively when they began making features in the 1920’s). Ghostbusters: Afterlife erred in the other direction: it took itself all too seriously. No one gets “slimed” in this version, and instead of a giant Stay-Puft marshmallow man as in the 1984 original we got hundreds of little Stay-Puft marshmallow men who come to life and break out of a cellophane bag in a supermarket – and it’s one of the film’s few genuinely funny scenes but still nothing like the hilarity of the original. The few clips we get from the first film – notably a reprise of the Ghostbusters’ commercial which the new generation of ghostbusters watch, natch, on YouTube – liven up the proceedings but also shows the great gulf in amusement level between that movie and this one.
Tuesday, June 14, 2022
The Animatrix (DNA Productions, Madhouse, Silver Pictures, Village Roadshow Pictures, Warner Bros., 2003)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Yesterday at 9 p.m. my husband Charles and I watched an oddball 2993 film called The Animatrix, a series of eight or nine shorts (the difference is whether you count the second and third items in the sequence, “The Second Renaissance,” as one short or two because it’s presented in two parts but tells a continuous story) based on or inspired by the fictional universe of The Matrix and its first two sequelae. Alas, Charles and I had to advance the DVD manually to play each short film in sequence because, though there was a “Play All” button, I missed it until we were already into the fourth or fifth film in the sequence and Charles took on the task of navigating the disc menu to watch the films in onder. The first was “Finao Flight of the Osiris,” which begins with a duel between a hunky Black guy (Kevin Michael Richardson) and a vaguely Asian-looking women (Pamela Adlon) in which each party successively cuts off bits of the clothing of the other as they fight with long swords. Charles joked that this seemed like a roundabout way to get undressed, and also, given my obsession with interracial porn, he joked when we saw Richardson’s animated avatar with no shirt, “All of a sudden, this became your favorite movie of all time!” I joked back, “Well, it would be if it were live-action.”
Then the film cuts to the interior of a starship under enemy attack, and it felt like we’d been wrenched into a fantasy world owing a lot more to Star Wars or Alien than The Matrix, as the ship sailed into a combat zone that used to be the Earth we know but has now become a graveyard for humans. The two people we saw dueling in the opening scene turn out to be Thadeus, the ship’s captain, and Jen, his first mate, and in the end Jen takes a risky downward dive to warn the city of Zion, the last stand of normal humanity in a world in which machines have taken over and are using humans as their energy source, that the all-powerful machines are coming to obliterate them. Midway through Jen’s death scene she admits that, though they were supposed to be fighting the duel blindfolded, Jen says, “I peeked,” and Thaddeus says, “I peeked,too.”
The next two films were parts one and two of “The Second Renaissance,” a sort of prequel to the entire Matrix cycle in which human beings develop ever more powerful machines, which as in Karel Capek’s pioneering 1920’s play R.U.R. (the initials stand for “Rossum’s Universal Robots” and it was for this play that Capek coined the term “robot” for an artificial human, from the Czech word robotnik, meaning “worker”) ultimately rebel and develop the ability to reproduce themselves, presumably sexually. Human beings become increasingly desperate in their attempts to stop the rebellion of the machines, including a last-gasp campaign called “Operation Dark Cloud,” in which they send up rockets to create a dense fog that will literally turn the sky black and cut off the machines from the sun that is their only source of energy. Alas, the machines, which because they are electromechanical are not subject to decay and eventual death the way we puny little humans are, manage to subjugate the human race after all by tapping into our own bodies as their energy source and setting up “The Matrix” as an elaborate human delusion in which we continue to live what we think are our normal lives even though we’re really nothing more than an energy source for the all-powerful machines we created and then they destroyed us.
The fourth film on the program is “Kid’s Story,” which incorporates Kenau Reeves and Carrie-Anne Moss from the original Matrix cycle (they’re the only actors who’ve been in all four of the Matrix movies) in a tale of a rebellious high-school student named Michael Karl Popper (Clayton Watson) whose cell phone rings in class, attracting the derision of his teacher. He turns off the phone but it rings anyway, and ultimately he takes the call and ends up fleeing for his life through the hallways of his high school until he discovers he has the power to defy gravity and survive a leap from a tall building. The fifth film is “Program,” in which a woman named Cis (Hedy Burress) and a man named Duo (Phil LaMarr) fight a duel to the death in an Asian-style setting and Duo is trying to persuade Cis to return to the Matrix and lead the illusion of a nurmal human life rather than stay outside the Matrix and risk annihilation by the machines. Later we learn that Duo is just a computer simulation (one of the most annoying things about the Matrix movies is how hard you have to listen to the dialogue to realize which characters are human and which are computer-simulated software) and Cis is being trained to be a warrior for the liberation of humanity – though in the end she’s so upset with the training she slaps one of the trainers across the face and the trainer says, “Aside from that last bit, I’d say she passed.”
Next up is “World Record,” which like “Program”: was written by Yoshiki Kawajin (one of the must peculiar aspects of this production is how many of the directors were Japanese while the grunt work of actually animating the film was done by Koreans – an ironic reflection of the decades in which Korea was a Japanese possession) but told a far more fascinating story of a track star, Dan (Victor Williams), whoi keeps pushing for a new world’s record that he thinks no one will ever be able to break, even as the people around him warn him he’s literally putting his life in danger – and he ends up collapsing at the finish of his race (in which he sets the world record) and ending up in a wheelchair, where supposedly he discovers the secret of the Matrix. Seventh in the sequence is “Beyond,” in which a young woman looking for her lost cat stumbles into a world beyond the one she normally lives in.
Eighth is the film “A Detective Story,” in which a burned-out private detective who thought the job would be like Sam Spade or Philip Marlowe (both of whom are name-checked in the dialogue) is hired by a mysterious voice on his phone to find the reclusive hacker Trinity (Carrie-Anne Moss again). He can’t say no because the mystery client has already deposited the fee for the job into the detective’s account, and he goes forth in search of Trinity (whom he assumes is a man even though we know she’s a woman) even though he knows that the previous detectives on the job have either committed suicide, died or gone crazy. The ninth segment is “Matriculated” and it appears to be about the training the Sentinels, the soldiers in the machines’ army who look like giant insects, go through to be ready for their job of spotting nay potential human resistance to the machine order and snuffing it out immediately.
The Animatrix is perched uneasily between American animation styles and Japanese animé – there’s even a bonus item on the disc, which we didn’t watch, on the history and traditions of animé – and the movie has an appealing mix of techniques ranging from the blocky computer-animation style of “Final Flight of the
Monday, June 13, 2022
75th Annual Tony Awards (White Cherry Productions,American Theatre Wing, CBS-TV, aired June 12, 2022)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Yesterday at 5 p.m. I watched the 2022 Tony Awards, the 75th annual event and the first one since 2019 that reflected a fully functioning Broadway free, at least at the moment, from pandemic restrictions. The awards show went on for three hours and four minutes – quickly enough that I was able to watch the Lifetime movie that aired immediately after it – and it featured some electrifying performances, including three numbers by the host, Ariana DeBose. She’s an African-American woman with long straight hair that she’s given blonde highlights without going completely Beyoncé on us, and she was dressed in a spangled white outfit of matching shirt and tights that showed off her excellent athletic dancer’s body. DeBose belted out three numbers, an opening song showcasing Tony award winners and nominees from years past, a closing song showcasing this year’s nominees, and in between a song called “In the Audience” that paid tribute to the people who attend Broadway shows and have resumed doing that in droves following the lifting of the pandemic restrictions.
The shut-down of Broadway theatres due to COVID-19 was the subject of some rather mordant jokes, including one from an actor who stated that he had been in both the fourth and fifth preview performance of his show – 17 months apart. I had already seen a PBS special on the revival of Stephen Sondheim’s 1970 musical Company by British director Marianne Elliott, who had the bright idea of changing the show’s lead character, Bobby/Bobbie, from a man to a woman, and also changing the marriage-sho Amy into Jamie, a Gay man who is debating whether to marry his partner Paul. Interestingly, I had assumed from the PBS special that the actors playing Paul and Jamie were a Gay couple in real life – but I was disabused of that notion early on when the Paul, Matt Doyle, winning the award for Best Performance by a Featured Actor in a Musical, thanked both his co-star for playing his husband on stage and then his reai husband. Company also won for Best Revival of a Musical and Best Director of a Musical for Marianne Elliott, as well as a predictable third Tony for the great Patti LuPonefor Best Featured Actress in a Musical.
The winner for Best Musical was something of a surprise – A Strange Loop, written by a heavy-set Black Queer writer named Michael R. Jackson and dealing with a heavy-set Black Queer writer working on a play about a heavy-set Black Queer writer working on a play. Since one of the shows it beat for the Best Musical award was M.J., a bio-musical about the late pop star, I couldn’t help but joke that Michael Jackson had beaten Michael Jackson. At least Myles Frost, who plays the “other” Michael Jackson in M.J., won the award for Best Actor in a Leading Role in a Musical (two other acctors of varioius ages play the younger Michael Jackson) and established that he deserved it by performing an uncanny reproduction of the original Michael Jackson video of “Smooth Criminal.” (It was an intriguing choice for a showcase because it’s one of the real M. J.’s most spectacular numbers even though it isn’t at the iconic level of “Beat It” or “Billie Jean.”)
Of course the most interesting parts of the Tony Awards are the performances of excerpts from the nominated musicals, things you’re unlikely to see unless you live in New York or catch the road companies of the big shows in the major cities, and to my mind by far the most powerful song rendition last night was Joaquina Kalukango’s breathtaking singing , with Ben Powerof “Let It Burn” from the musical Paradise Square. It’s set in 1863, at the height of the Civil War, and it tells an apparently true story of a dance hall that was open to both Black and white (mostly Irish) patrons who freely mixed racially, including having affairs with each other. When a gang of Irish thugs burned the place down, the survivors rallied and kept their pioneering experiment in breaking racial barriers going as long as they could. Though the song’s debt to “Let It Go” from the Walt Disney musical Frozen (also the subject of a stage adaptation that was a major Broadway hit and is now on tour) is pretty obvious, both the song itself and Kalukango’s powerful delivery of it were quite intense and moving – so much so that it’s easy to see why Kalukango won Best Lead Actress in a Musical.
The other most moving performance of a song last night was “Where I Go” from the original cast of Spring Awakening reunited for the show’s 15th anniversary; it’s based on an 1891 play by Frank Wedekind, a German playwright (I’ve often wondered why his first name was spelled “Frank” instead of “Franz” and it turns out from his Wikipedia page that his parents actually named him Benjamin Franklin Wedekind) called Frühlings Erwache (the English title is a literal translation of the German., except the German literally means Spring's Awakening, with the possessive) about adolescent rebels exploring their sexuality in ways their parents would not approve. One can see why American producers would think this would be a viable theme for a musical set today! Another especially moving performance was Billy Porter in drag singing "On the Street Where You Live" as part of the :In Memoriam" segment honoring the Broadway people who died in 2021, though he changed the last word of the title from this Lerner and Loewe classic from My Fair Lady to "On the Street Where You Lived" to express the memorial aspect of the segment.
As usual with the Tony Awards, the musician awards and perfrormances tended to outshine the ones for nonmusical productions, though the Best Play award went to something called The Lehman Trilogy by Italian playwright Stefano Massini, with Ben Power credited with the English-language “adaptation.” (According to Wikipedia, the play had its world premiere in French before it was ever staged in Massini’s Italian original.) It won for Best Play, Best Lead Actor in a Play for Simon Russell Beale, and Best Director of a Play for Sam Mendes – who seemed to have a major career as a filmmaker ahead of him when he directed the Best Picture Academy Award winner American Beauty, only his career was collateral damage from the “unpersonning” of that film’s star, Kevin Spacey, for alleged coming on sexually to 17-year-old boys. (Given that Spacey’s role in American Beauty is as a man who gets murdered over his unrequited crush on a teenage girl, that seems a bit like overkill.) The winner for Best Revival of a Play was Take Me Out, a 2003 play that not surprisingly given its title was about both baseball and homosexuality. It was inspired by the coming-out of Glenn Burke, who announced he was Gay after he retired from professional baseball after an eight-year career, and playwright Richard Greenberg imagined what it would be like if a professional athlete came out during his career.
Not surprisingly given the play’s subject matter, when Jesse Tyler Ferguson won Best Performance by a Featured Actor in a Play, he thanked his husband. In fact, the 75th annual Tony Awards began with a shout-out to diversity in general and gender-based diversity in particular, hailing the nominations of openly Transgender and non-binary performers (though given that the acting awards were still sex-segregated into “actor” and “actress,” I could see where this might cause problems down the road, especially if a gender non-binary person gets cast in a gender non-binary role and is so good the Tony voters want to give them an award). Given the long history of the theatre in general and Broadway in particular as a safe haven for Queer people – though the whole stereotype of Broadway as a home for Queer people in general and Gay men in particular comes from Lee Shubert, co-founder of the Shubert Organization (which still exists and largely controls Broadway theatres), who hired only Gays for the male cast and crew members of his plays because he didn’t want to have to compete with younger,hunkier straight guys for the affections of the chorus girls – it’s not surprising that the Tonys were well in front of other awards shows in acknowledging Queer sexuality, going as far back as 1983 when Harvey Fierstein’s openly Queer Torch Song Trilogy won Best Play and at least one of the producers, a man, thanked “my partner, Lawrence Lane.”
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