If there is one thing I have learned about doing movie-watching challenges – these crop up on the Letterboxd social site – it’s that a month of watching a movie a night and then writing it up causes my mental gears to start smoking alarmingly as the month comes to an end, and I wind up taking a break. This one was lengthier than the last, I admit. I was engaging my brain in other activities, like reading (Warren Ellis’s Gun Machine) and giving Facebook casual gaming another go. The gaming was numbing, the reading wasn’t: perfect combo.
But I did still watch the occasional movie. “Occasional” has ballooned to an unwieldy number, so it’s time to start cleaning out that bin.
The Shootist was on The List, and it seemed a good cornerstone to merge the quality of the Ebert Great Movies with the stream of movies I usually watch: good quality intersecting with pop culture. The Shootist came out in 1976, the year I entered college, when movie watching took a back seat to education and mere survival. I recall I had a shot at seeing it at the student cinema for 50 cents or a dollar, but I probably had rehearsal that night. Such is the life of a theater arts major. So I went for decades without seeing it.
The Shootist features John Wayne as J.B. Books, an aging gunslinger who moseys into town at the cusp of the 20th century, visiting an old doctor friend to get a second opinion, and the news isn’t good. Books has advanced prostate cancer (apparently distressingly common among men who rode horses all day long), and is given less than a month to live. Books checks into a nearby boarding house and sets to preparing to die, knowing that a man of his notoriety will not be allowed an anonymous death. He grows close to the widow running the boarding house (Lauren Bacall) and her troublesome son (Ron Howard). He finally elects to not die a prolonged, painful death, but sets to cleaning out some accounts with a final, arranged four-way gunfight.
Based on Glendon Swarthout’s novel of the same name, The Shootist was nearly not as awesome a movie as it eventually became. During pre-production, it was generally felt that John Wayne was the logical choice to star, but was too ill to actually make the movie. He had been cancer-free since 1969 – at the cost of a lung and several ribs – but his 70th birthday was staring him in the face, and time takes its toll, no matter the spirit of the man. George C. Scott was preparing to play the role, and he would have been predictably amazing, but when the Duke caught wind of the project – well, everything just fell in line. I love Scott, but Wayne brings with him the weight of an entire career, as we see flashbacks of a younger Wayne in older movies. The degree to which this movie is enriched by that true fictional past cannot be underestimated.
Wayne’s casting had the effect of attracting a phenomenal cast – we’ve already mentioned Lauren Bacall, but also Jimmy Stewart, Richard Boone, and Hugh O’Brian, who reportedly offered to do the movie for free just so he could be in it. This high caliber of personnel also extends to the other side of the camera, including absolutely the best director for the project, Don Siegel. Siegel was never a terribly flashy director but he was always a rock solid, engaging storyteller, the perfect choice for a character-driven Western.
So yeah, I liked it. Kind of surprised it wasn’t on Ebert’s list; it’s rare to see such a perfect coda to an actor’s career. Maybe he just hadn’t gotten around to writing it up.
I watched Star Trek Into Darkness, as required by Nerd Law. I was entertained while it was running, but had some burning questions afterward. That link takes you to those questions on another site, sort of the ultimate spoiler space.
Earlier in the year, I had taken in Mark Cousins’ multi-part Story of Film on Netflix, and one of the movies that was excerpted, which I had heard only vague things about and was immediately inspired to put on the watchlist was Aleksandr Sokurov’s Russian Ark. Ark follows a strangely timelost narrator (our subjective camera) and a disagreeable French diplomat from the 19th century, as they wander about the Russian State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg and meet historical figures like Catherine the Great and Czar Nicholas (and Alexandra and a young Anastasia) as well as some contemporary Russians. Even the constantly bitching Frenchman is an historic figure, the Marquis de Custine. There are some astonishing setpieces and astounding costumes on display.
What makes the entire thing remarkable is that it is shot as one take – 96 minutes long! – as the Steadicam glides through its various vignettes. That is a feat which required months of rehearsal, but sadly only pays off occasionally. Much of the time it seems like a taped museum tour (but what a museum!), though the final half-hour, recreating a grand ball just before the Bolshevik revolution, is simply incredible, especially when the camera leaves with the richly costumed partygoers and goes down a massive staircase, finding itself confronted by hundreds of people in perfect period costume. It is jaw-dropping, and well worth the effort to see.
Pretty sure Tillman Buttner, the DP who was operating the Steadicam, and his poor boom operator were exhausted afterwards. Especially since I recall reading they did two takes.
One weekend I went to pal Dave’s because he had not yet seen Django Unchained and that needed to be remedied. But we also caught up on Wreck-It Ralph – yes, it was a sublime, bizarre double feature – and I loved it unreservedly. I’m not sure I would have loved it as much if I hadn’t been able to identify all the Roger Rabbit-style video game cameos, but that becomes a minor cavil when you consider the well-constructed story, full of heart and great characters. Disney has learned well from Pixar, and Wreck-It Ralph is the result.
I went back to The List for the next weekend and Around the World in 80 Days, not the Disney-fied 2004 Jackie Chan vehicle but the 1956 David Niven/Cantinflas road show monster. It’s a movie of parts rather than a whole, which rather echoes Jules Verne’s adventure novel, which was also episodic as hell. In case you don’t have a rudimentary education: David Niven is Phileas Fogg, a wealthy punctilious Englishman who makes a wager at his gentlemen’s club that he can, as the Daily Telegraph claims, travel around the world in a mere 80 days. He sets out on this the same day with his new valet, Passpartout (Cantinfas) and a carpet bag full of money. Adventure ensues.
Around the World was largely conceived as a delivery vehicle for producer Michael Todd’s Todd-AO Vision, a process that delivered Cinerama-width spectacle while using only one camera (the previous year’s Oklahoma! was the process’ debut). The movie is rife with splendid sunsets and some instances of things-rushing-at-the-camera that bring to mind the roller coaster in This Is Cinerama, and some grand landscapes… though spoilsport literalists will point out that most of the movie was shot on backlots, not on location around the world, as the producer would prefer us to think.
This is the movie that coined the term “cameo role”, and there are a ton of them, especially once the movie hits San Francisco, the center of a cluster of them: Marlene Dietrich, George Raft, Red Skelton, Frank Sinatra, John Carradine and Buster Keaton in the space of ten minutes. But Todd’s real coup was Cantinflas, at the time the wealthiest, most beloved actor in Mexico. Known as the Mexican Chaplin, the comedian had never made an English language movie, his success was such that he probably didn’t feel the need – yet somehow Todd prevailed upon him.
Watching Around The World unfold, you start suspecting how Todd managed it; though Fogg is supposedly the hero, all the movie’s action devolves onto Passpartout. There is an entire segment in Spain that does not occur in the novel, involving Passpartout in a bullfight. That is strictly there for Cantinflas, who had no small amount of bullfighting experience himself. Passpartout is the agent for change throughout the movie, while Niven is generally playing whist or dallying with young Shirley MacLaine, oddly cast as an Indian princess. Cantinflas did finally attempt another English language movie in 1960, Pepe, which sadly flopped at the box office, despite having almost as many star cameos as Around the World.
I’ll just mention that the scene between Cantinflas and Red Skelton in San Francisco was obviously cut short, which is a shame. Two great comic talents playing off each other, and it could have gone on much longer.
Around the World in 80 Days is interesting primarily as a relic of that bygone practice, the Road Show Engagement. Its value as entertainment is going to depend on the level of your yearning for such fare, gently satiric (S.J. Perelman gets a screenwriting credit), with adventure scenes that are rarely as pulse-pounding as they seem to wish to be.
Though I was left with a yearning to see The Great Race again… Hm.
Okay, one more, and we will be halfway done.
Lady Terminator has been in my possession for ages, and I finally put it on The List to force the issue of seeing it. This is an Indonesian movie by H. Tjut Djalil, the director of Mystics in Bali, perhaps the finest penanggalan movie ever made. That was in 81, by 1989 Djalil had a larger budget, better equipment, and the ability to show naked breasts. These are all ingredients for a grindhouse hit.
As with Mystics, Djalil capitalizes on an Indonesian legend, the South Sea Queen, who lives in a palace at the bottom of the ocean and keeps killing her male consorts during sex. Finally, one heroic fellow satisfies her, but literally pulls a snake out of her lady zone, which she screeches is her “inner essence”. The snake turns into a dagger, and when our curiously anglo fellow declares he will not give it back, and her murdering days are over, the Queen proclaims she will avenge herself on his great-granddaughter, and vanishes in a puff of smoke.
In the present day, a beautiful anthropologist gets too nosey while scuba diving and gets possessed by the Queen, turning her into an unkillable leather-clad aerobics instructor with a taste for automatic weapons and, yes, killing guys during sex, apparently by biting off guys’ junk with her hoohah. (The lady is serious about her kegels).
Lady Terminator is serious about its title, reproducing two and a half scenes from The Terminator, even that eyeball surgery scene, although it makes little to no sense. LT is determined to kill the granddaughter, a rising pop star, and she has no time-traveling soldier to protect her, so she has to make do with the only Caucasian cop on the Indonesian police force. I’m reduced to bullet points here to detail the awesomeness:
- Indonesian security guards carry Uzi pistols.
- We establish early on that bullets have literally no effect on LT, yet the cops will continue to use them for the next hour or so.
- Due to this, by the end of the movie, our Caucasian is apparently the only cop left alive in the entire country.
- If you’re the Caucasian’s Rambo-esque American pals, called in to help on short notice, you can bring all sorts of ordnance into the country, no problem.
- Yes, the granddaughter has the dagger, and could have saved hundreds of lives by just stabbing the bitch, but then we wouldn’t have a movie.
Indonesian movies have a very high fun content. There is just a whole lot of determination to simply entertain, and if the action gets repetitious, it makes the completely over-the-top climax even more welcome. This is eventually going to make it as a Crapfest entry, and I don’t know what higher accolade I can give it.
