Read The Book First

For all the visceral horror films I subject myself to, sometimes something quieter is in order, and often all the more disturbing. See The (original) Haunting or The Last Wave.

Months and months ago, I read Kazuo Ishiguro's dystopian fable Never Let Me Go. It was an incredibly good read. In the writing of this blog entry I'm going to be really vague, because the growing horror of the premise is a key part of the book. Ishiguro writes stories of longing and loss, sedate and melancholic. Never Let Me Go doesn't break with tradition. BUT. There are additional threads of mystery (at first) and then genuine horror (later) that I found gripping even long after I'd turned the last page.

A very English setting (and how the English love their messed-up-government-run-future-society stories) seen through a Japanese lens of melacholy pretty much sums up the aesthetic of the novel and British/Japanese Ishiguro himself.

The movie does a pretty good, though inferior, job of presenting the story. The settings look correct, the actors are all great, and the soundtrack, atmosphere and act cards all 'feel' like the book. But the film makes the INCREDIBLE misstep of revealing the mystery from the get-go. Having seen the film all the way through and digested it, I can understand why it was done this way... the first act is much shorter and less detailed in the film because the filmmakers want to spend more of the film's standard running time in the other acts. That was THEIR emphasis and I get it. I just think it was a huge mistake. And more than one reviewer agreed with me.

So, here's the deal. READ THE BOOK FIRST. Do not look up any summaries on the internet. Do not read any reviews of book or movie. Do not read the blurb on the back of the novel. Do not allow yourself the chance to have anything given away. The mystery is NOT the only aspect with teeth in the story, but it adds GREATLY to the atmosphere (and the book and movie are big on the atmosphere) if you go in ignorant. Here's all you need to know:

Alternate late-20th century history, so don't find seemingly glaring differences from our reality all that strange. English boarding school/drawing room type drama (like Ishiguro's Remains of the Day). Slow, melancholic pace, but atmosphere of foreboding and menace builds like a J-horror film. Coming of age story in some ways, though nominally science fiction.

If any of that sounds interesting at all do yourself a huge favor and read the novel first. I CAN recommend the movie... but the film loses little of its mystery if you've read the book because it is just going to tip its hand in the first quarter hour anyway.

Nolan's Mind Games

I'm a real latecomer to the herd of people who've seen Christopher Nolan's epic mind-bender Inception. I thought it'd be beneficial to take in Memento right before that too, since for some reason THAT film eluded me on release as well.

Both of these films have been hyped to heaven by my friends and people online. While I think both films were fine compelling experiences, I don't think they deserve all the accolades, in particular Inception which I have on friendly authority is 'the best film ever made'.

Nolan's direction in both movies is fine. I think he strikes a great balance between confusing viewers and leading you to formulating your own conclusions, important particularly in Memento where the protagonist is just as unknowing as the viewer.

Also in Memento he twist ending isn't shocking because you come into it almost gradually (which Nolan intended) and many probably guessed most of what the climax contained before then. The mind-bending part is how the movie conveys memory and context and keeping you watching on two levels the whole time. I found some aspects rather unbelievable (the tatooing, that he'd have time to reacqauint with the notes every day, etc), but this is the kinda shit more considered in hindsight than jerking me out of the movie while I was watching it. I don't know enough about the real-life memory disorder to have been analysing it at the time. But here's the thing: this movie was hyped to death. If I'd just watched it on its own it'd have been an above average movie with a remarkable way of conveying chronology-- only Irreversible really comes to mind as similar. But everyone was 'oh you gotta see it, the ending is just unbelievable!' or 'you'll be blown away by the twists and turns'. Well, I wasn't. I guess maybe my imagination went the wrong way when I heard 'unbelievable ending' and 'twists' to where I was expecting a film as wrenching as Se7en.

Then Inception. Again with the hype only on a monumental scale culminating in eight Oscar nominations. With this movie, Nolan also does nothing really wrong, but it just doesn't go anywhere particularly affecting for me. Like Memento, you are challenged to keep track of what's what (this time perception as opposed to memory), and I think it is great that a film, especially a mega-budget one challenges the audience to do more than just sit there and take it in. But again, it's a thinker that after it is over didn't leave me pondering it. Not even the fabled spinning top at the end. Nolan says he's had so many people ask him about this, but for me, I saw it, noted the ambiguity, made my decision about what it meant right then and there, and moved on. I guess it wasn't ambiguous to me REALLY at all. In the case of Inception I think all the hype led me to believe it was 2010's The Matrix. For me, it wasn't. The Matrix had a 'twist' that was affecting (and thank heavens I saw it opening night). When Lawrence Fishburne finally holds that battery up to Keanu Reeves, that one scene was stronger to me than anything in the entirety of Inception. I think Inception is tighter and 'smarter' in a lot of ways than The Matrix is... but that wasn't enough. Not for all the 'best thing ever' shit I've been hearing about it. Like some reviewers I really wish the dream sequences had been a bit more 'out there'. I realise remembering dreams is tricky, but it is pretty well established that logic in dreams is different or non-existent. The dreams in Inception are incredibly consistent and well-ordered, however much common physical laws seem to bend at times. I think more 'insanity' was probably in order.

Neither film has anything really incompetent about it. Nolan's done good. These movies are just victims, to me, of the hype machine. But if I'd seen them when they first came out (and I think seeing Inception on the small screen for the first time really did it a disservice) I think I would've been dismayed by all the hype to come out subsequently.

Faded Old Biker

Even if you’re a biker film fan from way back, I’d recommend staying away from Larry Bishop’s Hell Ride.

The story is that Quentin Tarantino, director and frother for all things in genre cinema, was introduced to Larry Bishop by an actress of mutual acquaintance. Larry is the son of comedian Joey Bishop and has an acting history prominent in biker gang films during their heyday, later appearing in other films as a character actor, and directing a mob film that is considered one of the worst ever made.

But Tarantino loves him for his biker filmography, particularly Savage 7. So after a home screening, he tells Larry that he (Larry Bishop) is destined to make the ‘greatest biker film of all time!’. So Larry rounds up some actors he likes, gets a few of Tarantino’s regulars, and some wannabe porn actresses and cranks out a film with himself as the star.

I think it has fallen well short of that ‘greatest’ thing.

Biker films are one of the few ‘genre film’ genres that I have almost no real experience with. I’ve seen Easy Rider and Hell’s Angels On Wheels, so I’ve had my brush with the royal triumvirate Hopper/Fonda/Nicholson, but that was a long time ago.

And the whole biker gang ethos (uh, actually the cinematic version of it, I guess) never really grabbed me. I just can’t identify with it, even though metalhead fashion (and therefore MY dress sense) is influenced heavily by biker culture. I don’t really know how authentic or relevant those old films were, I just knew when I saw them that they were a product of their times and I got reasonable enjoyment from the nihilistic attitudes and scenery-chewing on display.

Hell Ride has nihilism with a weird sense of honor in the protagonist, and just plain boring bad acting in place of scenery-chewing. Dennis Hopper and David Carradine are both in the film and are probably the best part about it, though neither is brilliant… Carradine only getting about two minutes of screen time. Dennis actually gets some of the best lines in the movie, but he is basically playing himself… so there you go. He’s just as funny in the DVD extras.

Director Bishop is probably trying to tap into some of… whatever it was that Tarantino liked so much in Savage 7, but he just didn’t do it for me. Scratchy voice, fake tan, weird sideburns. It is a fair difference from the real Bishop, who you can see in the extras, but I wouldn’t call any of his performance good.

Tarantino regular Michael Madsen is in the film and was probably my main draw for ordering it up on my NetFlix queue. The reality having watched the film is decidedly mixed.

I think Madsen CAN be really good, but he requires direction. From an ‘real director’. So you get these cool things from him in Tarantino movies or Tony Scott’s True Romance (dialogue by Tarantino). The film is also thick with speech that tries to emulate Quentin’s wordy cleverness, but fails miserably most of the time… and the few times it does work it's typically Hopper or Madsen delivering. But Madsen is really inconsistent. I was alternating between ‘cool’ and ‘yeesh’ practically every other line he uttered. Quentin’s dialogue in movies is usually hip upon a film’s release, but kind of ages badly upon subsequent viewings. The lines in this movie have that spent hipness from the onset. Like your listening to shit that would’ve been clever 20 years ago.

That might be the problem with a lot of the movie. On the one hand it is trying to tap into an attitude and an ethos from the past. On the other it is trying to marry them to present-day trappings and sensibilities. The movie is set in 2008, though you don’t see cell phones, computers, or soap-shaped automobiles. All this is mushed together with some artistic choices taken from the grindhouse cinema of the 70s. I don’t really know if biker films were a staple in grindhouses. You’d think it’d be a great fit.

But in Bishop’s hands it is just awkward. Not nearly as enjoyable as similar excursions Death Proof (Tarantino) or Machete (Robert Rodriquez). In the Special Features section Bishop talks about how he could and did take the movie to extreme places that a release in the 60s could never go, but the violence and sex aren’t particularly graphic or shocking even for a grindhouse feature from the following decade. The only thing I noticed was all that extreme compared to its inspirations was the number of times the f-bomb was dropped.

Grindhouse cinema attracted moviegoers because the audience thought they’d be seeing something you couldn’t see in films shown in mainstream theaters. Being so low budget you weren’t going to get exotic settings, great actors, or eye-popping special effects.

Usually it was exploitative subject matter, frequently coupled with bouncing nudity. If you were particularly lucky there might actually be an act of graphic violence shown that no big budget picture would stomach. Getting all of that together (untouchable subject, nudity, uber-violence) as in I Spit On Your Grave, you basically got the trifecta of grindhouse and would probably leave the theater genuinely shocked or affected.

When Robert Rodriquez made Planet Terror a few years ago, he knew that audiences were going to want an experience that made them feel like an audience felt in the grindhouse era, but that the ACTUAL grindhouse material would not be enough. There’s material on broadcast television now that is sleazier and a bigger train wreck than 90% of what appeared corner theaters. All the tropes, stereotypes, film tricks, etc from seedy grindhouses can be in place but if you don’t take into account all the sensory and information overload that has taken place since then… your film will be dull and underwhelming.

And that’s basically what happened with Hell Ride. It is kind of struggling to catch up and BE a shocking, impactful picture. There are a few good moments in it. Hell, I’ll even say making a biker gang movie that isn’t a period picture is probably pretty daring. I’m not even sure the characters in the movie have real-world equivalents on any level. I’ve seen bikers, but are there still ‘gangs’? Do they still carry on their anarchic criminal pursuits? I dunno!

If the movie was entertaining or even shocking in any way, I might want to Google around and find out. But it wasn’t and I don’t.

RIP David Carradine and Dennis Hopper.