Hey kids, take your DVDs, break them up on your neighbour’s tree stump and SHOVE THE SHARDS INTO YOUR NECK IN A DESPERATE ATTEMPT TO BLEED THE LAST DROPS OF CULTURE FROM THEM. Nothing’s real, you can’t cradle the latest Nicole Kidman vehicle in your arms as it cries itself to death anymore and you’ve got to pluck the movies from the air around us with a pair of big red £6.99 a month gloves that you’ll wear and damn well be happy with. They’re called Netflix, and they’re the supposed future of film distribution, as long as you’re not a thief or a Betamax Luddite or one of those pirates who had an adventure with scientists. Netflix has recently started streaming on Xbox Live, Microsoft’s premier service for teenage swearing and dishonestly-priced digital code, so here’s some of the chuff you can wring out of their 30 day free trial; BASEketball was on there too, but that would have made seven films, which would have ruined the very clever and charming Netflix Pick n Mix Six thing that’s going on here. It does have lactation though, which is more than you can say for…
FIGHTING
Starring Channing Tatum
M
Durr durrr punch punching funk soundtrack wallop. Poor Terrence Howard thinks he’s in an Oscar contender, he’s weaving and dodging with the best of them, underplaying and whispering his lines and generally being better than the crudstacks around him. Aside from the moustache man acting everyone else out of the ring it’s an admirable attempt at keeping it real, at least until the initially-measured plot start to spiral out of control in a back-story of fist-loving absent fathers and deranged rivals with only three whisps of motivation. Worse, for something that tries to veer on the side of reality, it never attempts to apologise for its fixation on smacking people, presenting every antagonist as a personality-void Virtua Fighter character who’s purely there to be pummelled to death by Channing Tatum’s corn-fed fuckwad decent-guy-on-a-mean-street. This isn’t a sensitive insight into a world of violence. There’s a bit where he prangs a man’s head into a porcelain water fountain! He’s horrible!
Better to think of it as an above-average Streets of Rage adaptation than a real film with real depths; sunk to the level of pure action-fodder it fails, with a disappointing fight-to-mooning-about ratio and the most annoying old-woman character this side of Liza in Hook. But as a tank-top bulging try-hard attempt at updating the timeless side-scrolling Mega Drive pixel-a-thon it actually becomes fairly quality, rising above the more dumb-ass entries in its genre with attempts at character and realism that most barely bother with. Admittedly the main guy never eats a chicken in one gulp or repeatedly beats the same man to death with an iron pipe two hundred and sixteen times, but it does feature a fat guy who looks like those bosses that breath fire and a final confrontation on a rooftop so brutal that it should really come equipped with a ninja henchman and a slicked-back tommy-gun enthusiast, both of which probably feature in a Jean Claude Van Damme flick at some point. The sad fact remains:Fighting could have been a contender by punching a little below its weight and embracing the stoopid.
CON AIR
Starring Nicholas Cage
Y
Steve Buscemi is the greatest rat-faced lizard man who ever lived, a goofy-toothed forehead-nightmare who’s lit up every film he’s been in since the eighties whilst single-handedly rescuing Martin Scorsese’s bloated, increasingly-egotistical career with his turn as a man called ‘Nucky’ in Boardwalk Empire last year. But what the fuck is he doing in Con Air? No really, what is he doing? Not in the sense that he’s too good for it – the goggle-eyed beauty-phobe’s shown up in plenty of schlock-crap over the years, from Robert Rodriquez’s Spy Kids 2: A Grown Man’s Cry for Help, to pitching in on whatever bollocks John Turturro felt like spewing out when he was tired of tugging off the Coens for that week in 1999. What’s tough to understand is what’s happening here in his role as ‘Garland Greene’, the man who ‘makes the Manson family look like the Partridge Family’. That’s a line from the film. It’s not the worst.
By and large Con Air’s a fairly non-stop steel carnival of fire, casual homophobia and Cage-hair, a pre-CGI thrill ride that’s generally thrilling and even better for the slim chance that it might be a conceptual prequel to Being John Malkovich. It slices, it dices, it’s chock with delirious accents and stupidity piled upon fifty foot piles of stupidity, but also brilliant and fun and bone-crushingly enjoyable. Then halfway through Steve Buscemi turns up in a straitjacket and gimp-mask, the rest of the hardened criminals wet themselves and everybody spends the rest of their time whispering his name through teeth gritted in perpetual, soul-shuddering fear.
He doesn’t do anything for the rest of the film. Amid the carnage and explosion-chains he’s allowed to spit a couple of vaguely thought provoking dumbalogues in a clear but failed attempt at creating a memorable character, but he never touches the plot. Later he gets a literal moment in the sun chatting to a girl who inexplicably lives in the middle of a swimming pool in the desert; he stares at her like a paedo, he looks like he’s about to eat her, sick her up and eat her again, and then he doesn’t. He lets her go. The film treats this as some sort of Christ-a-like redemption by having the guy walk free at the end into the wilds of Las Vegas to presumably win his fortune and retire to a mansion made of human skin.
What’s odd here is how the character is at odds with the rest of the film; the whole idea is explosions, but the vague spine behind that is of good-criminals (Marines, friendly black people) battling bad-criminals (rapists, Malkovich, annoying black people) for control of the sky. ‘Garland Greene’ is set up as the ultimate extension of this, the vilest bastard in a scum laden sea, then nothing happens, nobody fights him and he gets off scot-free after a short-lived sub-plot that had nothing else to do with the rest of the film. It’s a bizarre detour in an otherwise near-perfect post-Die-Hard plane-gasm, and the annoying niggling of Buscemi’s presence near the top of the bill can only be explained in one of three sad, overly-thought-out ways:
1. There was meant to be a sequel. Child-Touch-Railroad? Buck-Toothed Sea? Crime Ditch? We’ll never know.
2. Jerry Bruckenheimer is a terrible, terrible man, getting away with his own secret crimes and laughing at the world by inserting an inconsequential subplot as a form of confession. Get an FBI warning out before he announces the next Pirates aborto-fest.
2. Jerry Bruckenheimer is a terrible, terrible man, getting away with his own secret crimes and laughing at the world by inserting an inconsequential subplot as a form of confession. Get an FBI warning out before he announces the next Pirates aborto-fest.
3. It was planted there as the ultimate critic-pounding dick-move, anticipating a world of infinite film blogs where everyone has to scramble for something new to write about from the past hundred years of celluloid wonder. And this one’s fallen straight into the trap of tapping nearly seven hundred words of analysis on Garland Fucking Greene from Con Air. This isn’t over, Con Air! THIS ISN’T OVER!
Though it almost definitely should be.
THE PRINCESS BRIDE
Starring Cary Elwes
M
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HOBO WITH A SHOTGUN
Starring Rutger Hauer
M
A gigantic kiddie pool filled with blood and amateur acting, starring a valiant Rutger Hauer flailing about just above the surface, desperately trying to suck dignity from the air around him: Grindhouse has a lot to atone for. Despite Tarantino and Rodriguez’s ’07 B-Movie piss-up flailing and burning at the multiplexes, the film nonetheless spawned a resurgence in semi-ironic craptitude pictures being rush released with half-decent budgets, a couple of them actually being spawned from the spoof trailers that propped up their grossly extended retro fun-fest. Hobo With a Shotgun is the second but hopefully not last, a brutal love letter to cheap violence and anorexic plotting that suffers from the same problems as Machete, and, to an extent, Tarantino’s work before it, a niggle that’s never wandered the mind of Brett Ratner: it knows too much.
The ‘best’ B-Movies work because they’re trying to be something better, but they’re failing miserably and adorably. Take the late Donald G. Jackson’s exemplary ape-shit apocalypse marathon Frogtown series, a moth-budget nightmare who’s biggest star was Rowdy Roddy Piper beating up a group of passing drunks in frog-masks moulded with plastic so cheap it probably gave them cancer. It’s incredible, but for entirely different reasons than if it had been made by Christopher Nolan, given the money of an African nation, and charged with being the thinking blockbuster’s metaphor for corporate greed, or poor library funding or whatever he’d read about in the Guardian that morning. It’s got long hair, rotting sets, ugly nudity and costumes whose creepy Halloween store cheapness makes you feel sick rather than any sort of clever design or genuine quality. But it couldn’t be any better; this is all they could do, and that’s where the charm sits, in a camping chair, confused with the notion of irony.
Hobo With a Shotgun, like others of its ilk, is a fake, a pastiche that sucks the soul out of a beloved movie subset by never trying to outdo itself. Like the current spate of advertisers copying bad adverts, the result is an empty skin bag parading as something intentionally awful, and perversely, that’s awful in a whole different way. When someone like Tim and Eric does this it’s genius, because it’s fast and deformed and stuffed full of Richard Dunn, but here it just comes across as Ben Kingsley levels of lazy, and Christ knows there are fifty-eight thousand three hundred and seventy four better B’s out there desperate for your time and money, most of which are probably a damn sight more entertaining and don’t come with the unending feeling that its making-of documentary consists of the filmmakers snickering to themselves. If you really must do another ironically crap movie, at least be a clever-dick like Tarantino, or insanely lucky and prone to deranged spates of child-naming like Robert Rodriguez.
In short, a huge waste of time for everyone involved, but the prostitute girl-persondoes look like Jemina Pearl from Be Your Own Pet, which is TOTALLY RAD.
THE SEVENTH SEAL
Starring Max Von Sydnow
Y
Nowhere near as sombre and maudlin as legend suggests, it’s surprising at how much Hollywood’s packed in here to offset the stench of death; there’s the common bog-standard bond of a group of archetypes ganging up to travel, as well as an agreeably stubbly turn from Gunnar Bjornstrand as a stereotypical bad-ass, able to sort out everyone else with a couple of gruff words and a glare from his forehead scar. There’s even bizarre comedy half-way through, a weird mid-film crisis that becomes a Shakespearian farce of arses, tree climbing and fake stabbings, all of which make the film far more accessible than a quick glance at its Google images would suggest.
Ultimately though, easy to dip in as it is and beautiful as the imagery and cinematography are, the piece earns its place by jousting and jostling with the depths of human understanding. The theme of faith sears through every frame and loaded line of dialogue, from errant knight Antonius Block’s constant searching for a light beyond the darkness to the problem of perception, how he can’t see the demons that plague a condemned girl just as his companions can’t see the creepy monk that follows his every move. Bergman’s playing with images of the unknown here; an early preoccupation with painting, costumes and statues instils the problem of portraying something taken on faith, how the spastic flailings of the loveable actor troupe are no less informed than the supposed piousness of the flagellant parade, an assault on organised religion that shines through the obliqueness of the rest of the plot. At times the use of imagery is almost playful, from the childlike daubing in the pictureman’s house to Scat’s gurning skull mask, to the shit-eating grin spreading across Block’s face as he meets the ultimate end of the universe for the first time. As a celebration of life the scenes between the chess pieces are alternately charming and heart-breaking, specifically the beauty of a mother and son and the realization that a group of people who have death literally stalking them all the time are probably not all going to make it to the end credits.
Visually lyrical, astoundingly acted with a script that drips with symbolism and depth, it’s a fascinating study of human love and spiritual emptiness, the warmth of the characters battling desperately against the coldness of the landscape. And it’s responsible for a large swathe of Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey, and thus the film that’s given the most back to the world.
NETWORK
Starring Faye Dunaway and Peter Finch
D
The Doomsayer, the prophet, the truth no one wants to hear, which goes some way towards explaining its £3.49 asking price on Play.com. Screenwriter Paddy Chevesky woke up one morning, combed the pop tarts out of his beard and saw the future, a terrifying mass of wires running through our minds and looping our wrists, connecting everyone on the planet not with love, or trust or even beauty but money, money and profit and the vast pyramid that squats over our planet funnelling everything upward like some rubbish grey CGI thing from Battle Los Angeles. The Seventh Seal is an unsettling film because it deals with death and the unknown, it contains a mysterious undercurrent that disturbs and delights in equal measure; Network is the greater horror, because it reveals the truth that we know in the back of our heads; it doesn’t deal in death, but with the meticulous machine hell that our earth has become, in the boardrooms, the numbers and now the very air around us.
It has to be a good movie though; otherwise this blog would look mental. Chevesky’s lines vary from pin-point Mad Men-style period spitting to large tracts of quasi-Shakespearean rants, giving every actor a chance to shine, particularly Robert Duvall as a shouty shouty bald man who you just want to smack into a desk and Faye Dunaway being incredible as the blank, unknowing face of the monstrous revolution. Satire of the highest order, it begins funny, starting with a joke and as a joke, the last human interaction of Howard Beale on a New York sidewalk before he jumps off the deep end of sanity and finds the rest of the world already there with him. From this point on it escalates, from the excellent William Holden’s drunken pitching for blood-drenched programming to the last declarations of humanity in a world of lists and figures, via the most terrifying boardroom scene in modern cinema as every suspicion you’ve had about money comes true.
The power lies in the slightly nudged-reality; like a lot of great satire it presents something entirely plausible, if in this case terrifying, whilst time has been kind to it and raised its stature by systematically making all its fears a reality. Think about what you knew of the film before you saw it; just clips of a feral man ranting, his eyes bulging out above his trench coat as he spills doom all over the floor. There’s Howard Beale t-shirts now, and his story has been broken down into easily gulped YouTube chunks, pockets of emotion to take in at lunch breaks. When the film juddered to its other level climax, as the studio lights fell down and the credits rolled, the Netflix pop-up window appeared, cramming the film’s makers into a small cube and suggesting four other films that I might enjoy watching. They’d been given some stars to rate them, tailored to suit my wants and needs and interests, so I turned the Xbox off and realised I’d have to give an unquestionable masterpiece a small letter in the top corner of my blog post. We’re a new species now, and it’s not exactly what you used to call human.
Netflix is nearly rubbish. It’s not worth selling your hands to pay the £6.99 a month, the service is largely soulless and there might be a copy of Kangaroo Jack in there somewhere, jumping around the foreign films section and generally pissing over Jerry O’Connell’s career. Still, nothing a month? I think we can swing that, and for 30 days at least you can cram as much bargain-bin shit/genuine wonder down your throat as you can stomach, just like Jesus did back in the desert. Network’s the essential order, but if you prefer something more beautiful, timeless and grey then head straight for
